skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Appealing to the Constitution isn't really a valid line of argument, though.

I disagree. Right or wrong, it is the document against which we supposedly make all laws. I'm not suggesting that we appeal to it as it is, rather, appeal to its defined measures for ensuring that it is kept current. Put simply, in football, they have a rule book. That rule book is what we consult on matters of the rules. Sometimes they get it right, sometimes they get it wrong, and sometimes the rules need updating -- but suggesting that we disregard the rule book while playing football seems naive. The rules are necessary.

The Constitution is that rule book. Either follow the rules or write new ones. Why is that so untenable?

> The Constitution isn't the Bible. It cannot, and should not, prescribe morality, which is what should drive law-making;

I disagree that law-making should be driven by morals. The Constitution, in theory at least, should work as a bulwark ensuring that minority opinions are upheld. Just as homosexuals are fighting for equal rights under the law because their moral values aren't shared by enough people, the Constitution is their prescriptive measure. They have equal rights because they are people, and deserving of equal rights, regardless of their or others' morals. We're still niggling over the details of it, but ultimately, I have hope and faith that gay rights will eventually achieve parity in law that the rest of us enjoy.

> nor should any part of it, including the Bill of Rights, be sacrosanct.

... until it is ratified, I disagree.

> The Constitution, and its derivates the US Code and state constitutions, are authoritative only to the point that they usefully represent their constituents' morality.

Perhaps I'm misinterpreting the statement, but by your argument, gays shouldn't have rights if the majority of constituents agree they shouldn't? I disagree here, and I would expect that every minority group should. It's very possible that I've misconstrued your intent though, so please feel free to correct me if I'm in error.
I think it should be noted that Charlotte Iserbyt's views tend to be towards the Alex Jones/New World Order spectrum, although that obviously doesn't mean she's wrong or that the educational system isn't seriously fucked up. I only point this out because those views can be a bit extreme, and sometimes flat-out wrong.

More info:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Charlotte_Thomson_Iserbyt

http://www.infowars.com/exclusive-charlotte-iserbyt-reveals-...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p94_Cfo7XD0

http://www.prisonplanet.com/america-on-the-road-to-total-des...

http://www.infowars.com/charlotte-iserbyt-the-miseducation-o...

http://www.newswithviews.com/iserbyt/iserbyt114.htm
> "it’s the same damn molecule with a few cosmetic changes" pretty much tells you everything you need to know about this article.

This is not like a small molecule where a little change makes a huge difference; Avastin is a giant antibody and Lucentis is a part if the same antibody. It's a hack of the FDA process to allow Genentech to sell an equivalent drug at a very different price.
If you enter a username that contains a period (and possibly other non-alphanum characters?), the profile 404s as well.
http://www.makeymakey.com/
Sure. But is the bigger problem that they are allowed to do it or is the bigger problem that it works?

It's not like the people criticizing them for it have been bashful or unqualified.

(I have a similar "Well, shit." reaction to all sorts of things, politics, etc.)
What's so hefty about a 15% tax? Just pay the city the 15% and pocket the rest. If you need to, raise the price a bit.

Assuming your rent is 500$/month, to give one room to some random person for a night you should charge them 20$/night to offset your entire rent for that day after deducing the city tax. The person in the article charges 500$/night. In that case you can even charge 50$/night and make money on top of having enough to pay rent.

In no case would you need to charge more than a hotel - you both pay 15% tax, but you don't need to pay a whole hotel's worth of workers for that room's upkeep.
[In typical US local jurisdictions]

The difference between AirBnB and YouTube is obvious. There are vast arrays of ways in which the average person can use YouTube without any question that such uses are legal.

Conversly, there are very few ways in which the average person - whether renter or rented, can use AirBnB in a way that is unquestionably legal. Few local jurisdictions allow the sort of transactions AirBnB is built upon facilitating, and even fewer allow such use without at least some minimal regulatory oversight such as business licenses and tax reporting.

The reason is the same as for other land use issues, adjoining and nearby properties are effected and real property cannot be moved. Transient lodging uses place unique stresses on a community, and their benefits tend not to accrue to nearby properties with orthogonal uses.

The better analogy would be Craigslist if Craigslist only advertised prostitution related material. Then we would stop pretending that there is wide spread legality and focus in on whether existing laws make sense, and striving to change them where they don't.
Unfortunately, it's probably more common than you think for CAs to delegate their authority to other organizations; some US commercial CAs have been caught selling this capability.

The (small) good news is that these delegations aren't intended to compromise the TLS PKI (for instance, to enable dragnet surveillance). Instead, they're a part of the normal security regime within large IT departments. Network security teams want to be able to monitor comms in and out of their networks. Most large enterprise networks require users to navigate through a proxy to get to the Internet, and block direct access. The CA certificate delegation is simply an act of laziness: rather than push a custom certificate to all their endpoints, a big-enough organization might simply buy a CA certificate that will work by default.

The bad news, of course, is that this activity is extraordinarily dangerous to the rest of the Internet. If a delegated CA=YES cert is stolen, the thief can silently MITM connections across the world.

The fix for this problem is straightforward, and already in process. Chrome pins certificates: it hardcodes the relationships between certain sites and their place in the TLS PKI. When users at at networks with delegated ANSSI (or Trustwave or whoever) certs hit Google, the Chrome security team can detect the bullshit cert. This needs to (a) happen in all the browsers, not just Chrome, and (b) incur a CA death penalty in all but the most extraordinary circumstances.
I'm not intending to insult your intelligence. I simply disagree with your sentiment. Having the benefit of knowing exactly what life is like in less fortunate society than US, it's a matter of perspective.

Compare the state of law and law enforcement in US, say to Russia, and you will see that by this standard things aren't that bad here. No doubt they can be better, but at least I have some recourse under the law here, whereas bribes and political connections mean everything here.

Also, that is no anecdote, but very real personal experience and not in the "hood", but a relatively modest part of Los Angeles.
Agreed. I read it as defensive comments designed to appear more reasonable to a broad audience, since Marxism is such a dirty word here.

(I play a Marxist often, but really, I part ways with Hegel, so I can't really truly be a Marxist.)
The question - and only question - should be what David Simon asks: are we all in this together or are we not?

I think this question is frankly naïve. Humans have functional limitations on how much we can care about other people, aka Dunbar's number. This is not something you can improve (maybe by .0001%) or create policy around, it's a hard limit.

The fact that, at least in the United States, virtually everyone lives in a place with more than a few thousand people in it, ensures that there will be a conflict between the needs of the group of people around us and our own reactions to those needs.

Add on to that the reality of scarcity of both needs and desires and you have a clear answer: No we are not all in it together.
Already, there's deeply untrue parts of this: We don't really know why the US emerged on top after WWII. There wasn't an A/B test that proves it. An argument can easily be made that the US came out ahead because it was the largest country which hadn't been substantially bombed and/or invaded. It's not well founded to say it was because the US was a mix of capitalism and socialism. There's not enough evidence for that.
Gordon Versus The Androids
"and seems to actually cut a modern appeal within a society known to look more to the past than the future."

Spain look more to the past? Really?
That's an interesting coincidence since the "translator" Gary Gagliardi doesn't either. His theories of translation are quite unique.

From an interview ( http://www.sonshi.com/gagliardi.html ) that was done with him:

"Languages have always been my hobby and, at the time, I had spent about three years studying written Japanese, so I had some grounding in the Kanji character set that is shared with Chinese.

However, I discovered that ancient Chinese is a language unto itself, written more conceptually (or poetically, as some prefer) than any modern spoken language. Fortunately, I also have a bit of a background in mathematics and physics and I immediately saw the similarities between The Art of War and classical Greek mathematics, especially Euclid (I also study ancient Greek).

With my background in using Sun Tzu's concepts successfully in business competition with years of explaining these ideas to others, I was better positioned to interpret Sun Tzu's equations than someone who was a linguist alone. I started with the assumption that Sun Tzu didn't contradict himself so, if there was a contradiction in the translation, the problem was with the translation, not the original.

I also had the advantage of working from a complete compilation of Sun Tzu various textual traditions created by the University of Taipei, so I had a more complete source document that many other English translators and a number of Chinese dictionaries on the Internet for doing research and on-line versions of other texts from the period (such as the Tao Te Ching)."
Yeah, I also recommend a mechanical keyboard:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000LVJ9W8
"Much greatness in him and I wonder what he would have achieved if he had started off in California rather than Essex and Cambridge."

Maybe nothing great? Consider if Linus didn't have Finnish winters?
In computer science or math terms, the market economy is incredibly simple to understand:

1) People are encouraged to locally optimize -- i.e. optimize their own happiness. But as any psychologist would point out, lots of people have no idea how to do that. Kind of a problem.

2) Local optimization rarely achieves the global optimum.
I see a lot of people mention mechanical keyboards on here. What's the hype around them? What makes them preferable to another external keyboard?
That is just so low and slimy of you. Yikes.
Is it okay to supposedly protect the country at the expense of non-US citizens such as myself? It feels weird that some people think that indeed, it is.

I am being spied upon because of what I am not. I have no vote or political way to address this, I have no say about it. I must accept it, again, because of what I am not.

It is impossible to reason about this without relying on saying that "my rights are more important than yours", which of course, is about the same as arguing that "it is just the way it is. Tough cookies.".
TACK works without coordination between the 1/2-time TLS maintainer at a browser and the (elaborate) UX/UI team at that browser; it's something you can implement in the backend.

The UX for certificate trust on the Internet is dreadful and essentially hasn't evolved since the late 1990s. It is badly due for an overhaul. But we can get TACK working today; UX changes could take years.
Unlike YouTube, which has tons of legitimate uses for folks uploading their own content, Airbnb is basically built on the illegal uses in its major markets like NYC. The places in NYC on Airbnb that are illegal aren't some annoying minority. Every single offering on Airbnb that is for less than 30 days and is not operated by a licensed hotel is illegal. Every single one. Unlike YouTube which has significant legitimate uses in all markets based on original content (and is a majority of what YouTube is used for), Airbnb has no legal uses in NYC for sublets of less than 30 days.

If Airbnb wanted to operate legally and protect the rights of its legitimate customers while still preventing illegal activities (as you are suggesting they do), it would only permit rentals of 30 days or more unless the 'host' has a hotel license and the proper permits. The simple fact is that Airbnb knows its business in NYC is nearly entirely built on illegal rentals and doesn't care.
There's this nice dividing line - you don't spy on your own citizens which means you need warrants to gather information on them.
I still don't understand why Plantraco isn't getting any love in this story:

http://www.microflight.com/

You don't have to fund a startup to get some indoor flying happen.

So is this Kickstarter hype bubble?
It's an often repeated libertarian mantra that the 22.6% of the US economy under state control is responsible for ~100% of the inequity. Unfortunately, the network effect ensures that a "government node" in the economic graph is always nearby, and the coplexity inherent in the system makes it easy to form a plausible argument assigning blame to any node within distance 2 or 3 of a problem, making the mantra non-falsifiable.

It deserves mention that this game can be played in reverse just as easily.

The only way that I know to introduce an ounce of objectivity into the discussion is to pick a single topic and dive so deeply into it that you are no longer fooled by the false but plausible statements hurled around by either side. Unfortunately, this is a very difficult task. I don't know how to scale the approach.
> I do want to take money from the rich and give it to people who don't deserve it

And what give you the right to take what belongs to others?
No. It would be nice if backend TLS tools supported TACK, but they don't need to for TACK to be hugely valuable, both by increasing the security of browsers themselves and by drastically expanding the surveillance network we have to detect bogus certificates.
>> My point is this: the concept of a larger government is very murky, so we should be very careful when we're talking about it.

The US government is pretty fucking large right now, is it not? In fact, it's an Empire, and serves as a great warning example of what a minimal government can/will become.

>> One state may be better than the other, but it's still all pile of violence, configured in a different way.

Exactly. So how about no State then? They say that the difference between a Minarchist and an Anarchist is "about six months". The period of time in between is irrelevant. The point is that a lot of Libertarians end up going all the way once they start seeing reality for what it is.
airbnb is a bad actor? Come on. It's not nearly that simple.

The Helsinki Design Lab (HDL), a governmental agency originally created in 1968 to encourage design thinking in Finland, engaged in an interesting study. In Helsinki, there's an unofficial day where historically, citizens have essentially opened illegal restaurants for the day. They sell out of homes and apartments and open windows, or often just give it away for free. Obviously all of this is highly illegal, but it's an amazing cultural experience that is beloved.

HDL polled some of the people who created these pop-up restaurants, trying to figure out whether they had any interest in openning real restaurants. The answer was an overwhelming no.

So the lab set out to answer an interesting question: "Why is it that none of these people who open free restaurants for a day -- these entrepreneurs who clearly love the essence of serving and creating food -- why is it that they find it such a ridiculous proposition to open a business?"

It's a good question and worth asking.

Here was a result of that investigation (among other things, such as streamlining the bureaucracy around registering and managing the business):

http://www.helsinkidesignlab.org/dossiers/open-kitchen

You say AirBnb is a "bad actor" for breaking the law, and I say that that's incredibly unimaginative. Every single person on airbnb wants to open a hotel, but they frankly disengage from the formal process, likely for valid reasons. AirBnb is helping to identify that this is a problem that needs solving.
Very well put.
Mariana Mazzucato talks about this idea:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3r1IPsldbBg
and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPvG_fGPvQo
If the pharmaceutical industry didn't already turn me into a jaded person, I would still be feeling a bit of "so what" at what you're suggesting - and coming from an almost-biochem-but-CS major studying for the MCAT right now, I can probably appreciate what you are trying to say a bit more than the average layman.

Genentech have no problem at all whatsoever with most off-label uses of Avastin (e.g. ovarian cancer) and have subsequently added them to the label (and in some cases, like breast cancer, they had to be dropped from the label afterwards), but they actively refuse to do so for ophthalmic use presumably because it would chew into Lucentis profits which are practically an order of magnitude larger. Imagine if Avastin were wildly different from Lucentis - would this fingers-in-ears "lalalala" singing attitude (to be generous) to keeping the use off-label seem reasonable to you in the face of massive amounts of evidence supporting the idea that it is just fine? Literally their only excuse for doing so is that Lucentis exists, nothing else. Both drugs have a number of issues, both drugs could be used for a lot more than ophthalmic use, and both drugs are still kind of expensive ($50 vs $2000 in the US). Avastin is still a blockbuster for Genentech, don't forget - it is one of the best selling drugs in the US.

And yes, I appreciate that drug development is expensive and I know companies have to work for their stockholders, but it's really hard to watch patients trying to make a decision about Avastin vs Lucentis at the end of the day. Maybe I'm wanting to be a mediocre doctor that just wants to help people, haha. But my father has retina issues and I have spent way too much time in waiting rooms overhearing his specialist convincing other patients that he has had an excellent track record with Avastin use as well as Lucentis and he wants to prescribe whichever costs the least out of pocket first. When some of his patients decide not to go with either drug because off label use is too scary for them and they can't afford Lucentis even though he tries to reason with them - those are people giving up their fucking _sight_ and a practically miraculously effective treatment for want of money and a successful scare campaign. And he is a specialist that (I did my research before we went to him) has a good background in research and clinical practice, as well as participating in some studies for Avastin and Lucentis alike, so I hope he has appreciated your argument before doing what he does, too.

Perverse is an understatement here in my (not so honest) opinion.
> As a non-American, I see him as a hero but I am frankly more outraged by the revelations of how complicit European governments have been, and how unwilling the press have been to follow it up.

I agree, it's terribly depressing. There is this narrative of "the NSA is spying on us" when Europeans should wake up and realize that their domestic security service are doing exactly the same, either secretly (France, UK...) or openly (Sweden). But considering how both the moderate right and the moderate left have been perfectly accommodating about it, people, provided they are even aware of it, are left with little legal recourse.
I used to freak right wing libertarians out by following this like of thought with them when I was politically active. I had one in tears during a break in a debate because I was there representing a Marxist party, yet I agreed with him about most issues. He could not understand why, and he saw it as destroying his credibility.

I pointed out that to me, as a marxist (some would argue the term libertarian socialist, or left communist would be more descriptive), his arguments for individual freedom was the right starting point for evaluating most policy, but the only logical conclusion is to limit government recognition of property rights too, as a large portion of the laws to protect private property takes away more rights from the public at large than what it offers to the public as owners:

I may gain exclusive rights to a small area, but I lose access and even limited rights to most of the world.

And In fact most countries do recognize that property rights must be limited to various extents to safeguard the rights of the population as a whole, through things like guarantees of access to land areas held in common (or owned by the government) that will not be sold, or legal protections for access to beaches or wilderness that often extends to granting legally protected public access to privately owned land.

The question is not whether or not property rights must be limited, but where to draw the balance. Yet somehow right wing libertarians tends to want to want to tighten property rights, while at the same time they argue for reducing government intervention in pretty much everything else. The inconsistency is glaring to me.
Scale is where the comparison between those two will break down. The first is power-assertive on an small scale (usually individual). The second has no scale, because the driving motivation would be the questioning of any power structure (not necessarily destruction, as it's usually stereotyped). But I'm describing the textbook version here, not everyday interpretations.

(Edit: i was trying to keep this out of quick searches, but to be clear, lib-----ian vs a-----ism ;)
The illegal hotel use in my neighborhood was primarily offered on VRBO.
Check out "Basic Income". For me, this is one of the few things that give me hope.
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How to create an app like google trader
You're absolutely correct, the port is devel/checkbashisms. My mistake.

https://www.freshports.org/devel/checkbashisms/
would you have said the same about a speakeasy bartender during the prohibition era?