skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think your assessment is more or less accurate.

I see it this way:

What practices have resulted in things being the way they are now? These practices are largely attributable to businesses whose policies are endorsed and enacted through government. Government politics are a complete morass and you've done an excellent job of painting how various parties might try and solve the problem.

So if government is a morass, how do you approach the problem? Certainly a career in politics is out of the question based on this presupposition. One might consider simply adapting how they act in their daily interactions with others. Personally I think this idea is too small-scale.

In my opinion, one strategy would be through the business side. Create a business whose policies create the type of change necessary for closing the gap between the mega-rich and "middle" class. The argument has been made in this thread that in order to compete, it is impossible to instate these types of policies. However, I believe this to be a false assumption. Certainly companies, even large ones, fall into a spectrum of "good" and "bad" practices. There appears to be no bound to either side. I take the David Deutschian view that any problem can be solved with the right knowledge¹. So the question is, can we think creatively, critically, and intelligently enough to solve this problem in business?

I believe the answer is yes.

¹ EDIT: Any problem whose solution is not explicitly prohibited by the nature of reality.
I try to take 10-15,000 IU (of D3 in gel cap) two to three times a week. Yes, it really works in that my blood testing showed the difference. I have seen no side effects, but then I was really, really deficient.

One side benefit: No more symptoms associated with Seasonal Affective Disorder.

YMMV.
Woah... He beat me to it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6721221 Actually a lot of people did. I had an rough idea for this but never got around to working on it. I do have Carpoolians.com registered though.

I really hope apps like his become something everyone uses in 5 years. Generally, people might not think carpooling strangers together will work but, contrary to popular belief, it's already tried and true in the Washington, DC area. Slug lines, where strangers are picked up from park ride lots by drivers so they can all use the HOV lanes, have been operational for years without a murder or incident.
I wrote this little app (Address Booklet & Cards) because I wanted to print out a subset of my iOS contacts in a miniature paginated booklet to carry as a backup in my wallet:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/address-booklet-cards/id6832...
No FreeBSD JVM here:
https://java.com/en/download/manual.jsp

Windows/Mac/Linux/Solaris only.
Firefox + Third party cookies blocked + Ghostery + NoScript

Can be a little inconvenient at times but seems justified now.
Decriminalization != legalization.

It's a subtle, and admittedly pretty technical, point but still a rather important one in this context.
Android 4.4.2 Starts Rolling out
> nobody complained about this junk when it was nintendo and sega doing it, for a lot more.

I'm sure someone did, but they didn't have the internet to vent their frustrations.

> 1) people have this illogical apple hatred

I'd say there's valid reasons to dislike Apple's stance on many issues.

> 2) people buy into google's spiel about being open.

Every OS Google has is open-source - Chrome OS, and Android. Yes, we know they do have services that aren't, and some that require payment, but you can use, fork, and hack on Android or Chromium if you want to.

Is Google a 100% open source company? No. I would personally prefer Firefox OS and Ubuntu become the major smartphone players, but Google is better than Apple or MS.

> The app store, is a tradeoff. It's some inconvenience for developers in exchange for a trusted, safe marketplace for applications for consumers.

It's not about the app store. It's about restrictions on side-loading your own app onto a device you own. With an Android device, I can test my own apps without having to sign up for anything. I hear Firefox OS is just as open, and they make it very easy to test out your HTML5 apps (even without it being hosted on a website).
President Barack Obama takes selfie at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service
I don't understand why it has to be open at all. Why isn't there a company building a closed/polished corporate desktop experience on top of Linux? (Basically, doing with Linux what Apple did with BSD.) It's not like anything in Linux has switched to GPLv3, so there's nothing stopping this from happening.
Cold War hardliner logic must be part of the canon by now.
Funny, the US seems perfectly willing to ignore the UN when it wants to (for example, environmental agreements). Not sure why this would necessarily be any different.
". it is not a Linux, it is a Unix system;"

I've (often) wondered - what does this mean for practical purposes?
I made a post the other day, but it got pushed off 'new' in a few seconds. Anyway, I thought someone should setup a simple one or two page site that summarizes the importance of not tracking visitors. Then, it has a few 'this site respects your privacy' images in a variety of sizes that you can copy and paste into your own site, if you agree to respect those rules.

It would need to be a recognizable image and symbol. The image would link to the site above, that informs users how you respect their privacy and do not track them. Personally, I'd add it to my sites, because with all the recent concern about privacy, I think my users would appreciate this change, and it would provide some advantage over competing sites. I'd like to visit a site, see that image in the footer, and feel more confident using their service.

I think it would be a good way to encourage change from developers. Very few are going to pull Google Analytics on their own. However, if they get pressure from their users to follow a certain privacy standard, and by doing so they can drop an image on their site to illustrate the change and potentially increase trust and improve their reputation, we might see some improvements.
I suspect that nearly everyone here will be of the opinion that this is a good idea. If you are up for an alternative ( and yes I know, oh so unfashionable ) point of view, then I recommend watching this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36L0p2w_jtA

Its a fascinating and well put argument by Peter Hitchens that legalisation isn't beneficial to society. Yes imagine that.
You're assuming that individuals would have to be singled out for analysis in the first place. They wouldn't. With enough computing power, it'd be trivial to run this sort of analysis in near real-time for everyone. A few years down the line, this is even less of a concern: increased power, improved analysis tools, and greater efficiencies will all come together to empower just such a system at costs manageable by many local governments (particularly if they start working together to manage costs).

This means you've got a practical means of confidently predicting potential crime. Even better, the same mechanisms that help you predict potential criminal acts also help you close active cases more efficiently. That inevitably results in significant boosts to police productivity.

So armed, you now get to deploy your existing resources more effectively. Instead of parking a patrol car at a "pretty good spot" to nail violators for a few hours, you'll reposition yourself continuously to the location offering the greatest probability of an arrest/citation at that specific moment in time. Instead of passively waiting for violators to happen across your location, you're actively positioning yourself to nail them directly. The specific individual doesn't matter.

But you won't be dispatching patrollers in the current manner. Since you'll also be tracking your own patrol cars, you can correlate the two and dispatch each car to the highest probability incident nearest to them where they're likely to catch a potential perpetrator. By having everyone under effective surveillance, for every minute of every day, each of your resources will always be deployed in the most efficient manner possible.

Where it really gets wild is when you start to consider traffic enforcement automation along with the push for local government drone coverage. Along with the existing red light and speed cameras, you'll have mobile platforms capable of filling in for any holes in your patrol car coverage while also benefitting from the same efficiency gains described earlier. And they'll be gathering additional data (movements, facial recognition, automatic number plate recognition, etc.) to send back to base while they're doing it.

It won't be like The Machine from Person of Interest, but all things considered, it'll be closer to it than anything else to date.
The US hardly ever takes its cues from the UN. It's fairly obvious that if the US wants to take action that's not sanctioned by the UN, it will find a way to take that action or get the UN to follow along. The difficult part here is the US changing it's internal stance on drugs. Compared to that, dealing with the UN is a piece of cake.
That would solve most of the problems with meth. Quality control issues would be wiped out (and with them, many of the health and 'zoning' concerns). Stabilized price and availability would reduce many of the social concerns. The money formerly spent on pointless enforcement (lets face it, anybody who actually wants meth, has meth...) could instead be spent on actually helping people. With destigmatization, and eliminated potential consequences for not keeping a low profile, people who need help would be more inclined to seek help.
Is Uruguay not also under that Convention?
Mine is. It's a medical problem, so allow it to be treated that way instead of throwing people in prison to rot over and over.
I made an Android app, Unlock With WiFi, three years ago. It has brought in about 64K over that time. The app unlocks your phone when you're connected to your home wifi. I'm currently working on a complete rewrite that will support patterns and face lock for root users.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.benhirashi...
As opposed to all the other "democracies" instituting policies that their polities don't want?
Rocky Morphology
Drug abuse and addiction is a medical problem, not a criminal one. Let's try treating it like that, and see what happens.
Hey thanks for sharing that, I think it's a really interesting middle ground.
This hasn't reached a flame war, did this get flagged off the front page? Is it because Slate is perhaps a marked site? This doesn't seem right, this is like a "Show HN" and followup to a story lots of people on HN have been following for a while now.
Fitting models to data
Something puzzles me about the hologram analogy.

A hologram seems totally garbled, and is "played" by projecting it in a particular way so that we see an image of the original object.

In contrast, our 4-d world doesn't seem garbled to us at all, and there is no way to "play" it and see an image of a higher dimensional world.
I can't develop on the road without internet and performance is tied to a browser? No thanks, I've got stuff to get done.
that would be awesome.

Xiaomi sells their smartphone at cost and monetizes customers through add on services. I'm not quite sure what add on services they can add on Ubuntu.
I think the browser is supposed to load them by the order listed in the HTML.

<video>
<source src="foo.mp4">
<source src="foo.webm">
</video>

Unfortunately, I think there were bugs in older browsers, so they broke if mp4 was not listed first. So most websites list mp4 first.
Exposing security vulnerabilities in Happtique certified mobile health apps
In my experience, no. I've written three RoR 4 apps since turbolinks was released and I've disabled it in all of them. None of my 6 ruby coworkers use Turbolinks either.

I actually liked turbolinks, makes the page feel much quicker, but just too many quirks to work around and I didn't really have time to dive into them.
This is true. Maximum entropy increases with the surface area of a space, not its volume. This is well explained by the holographic principle.
It means you get a POSIX interface without GNU- and Linux-specific extensions or the GPL.
Also, it's worth pointing out that the tracking isn't for search. It's for more profitable advertising.
> How much did 'they' pay you to say that? :D

I wish.

Seriously though, most modern languages have Lisp features. Even Java 8 will get Lambdas. Quite a few languages have macros. Many languages have eval and REPLs.

Right now I'm playing around quite a bit with Haxe. Cool language, static typing (w/ type inference), pattern matching, closures, macros, and compiles to half a dozen languages and nearly every platform known to mankind...
I'd suggest Semantic Versioning[1]: <major>.<minor>.<patch>

[1]: http://semver.org/

Major releases break the API, so programs that depend upon them may not work. Minor releases add or improve features while preserving existing functionality. Patches fix bugs.

This is exactly why having version numbers is important. Even if the number becomes arbitrary, it's existence is necessary to build dependency trees.

Aside: I'm not certain, but it seem as though Firefox does have a major.minor version scheme: my user-agent reads "Mozilla/5.0 ... Firefox/25.0"; Firefox 5.25 is probably the most correct.
Thanks, that was exactly what I was looking for!
uoou.info: the weirdest website you'll see this year
In a "Rainbow" Universe Time May Have No Beginning
For what it's worth, Android also uses a lot of BSD userspace code (see toolbox).
I do read his blog from time to time. He's a former L0pht member, so he does have some interesting insights.

If you read the FAQ, he used to run an information security news column called Hacker News Network (HNN) back in 1998. Archive here: http://www.spacerogue.net/hnn/091098.html
I don't know -- the concern seems more about political correctness than actually fixing a problem.

And as someone who has been here for a while (a throwaway became my main account), this is probably the most disheartening thread I've ever read here. Where's the hacker mentality of trying to make something better? Criticize if you absolutely must, but then you damn sure better have a better idea on hand than "it's a complex problem".
Player Piano (novel)
Or drone strikes against civilians?
There are many things in this world/levels of perspective that benefit from a non-mathematically rigorous analysis- up to and including the question "what is the benefit of rigorous mathematical analysis". That doesn't mean they don't have their own kind of rigor or that you should be able to understand them right away without any background knowledge. The attitude you have is shared by folks in the humanities who think that because they're experts in their field, they should be experts in everything, but luckily, human knowledge is broad and diverse, and there's no single master key.
Don't underestimate the need to data protection

Just look to this [1] example of hot trouble 37signals got themselves in 2 years ago.

[1] http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3078-trust-is-fragile#all_com...
I agree, but not for the reason you gave in your comment. The police wouldn't know they're going along with a despot. They would don riot gear, block streets, and set up checkpoints in the name of safety from terrorists and looters.
Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, and Charlie Munger call BTC "Rat Poison"
That treaty doesn't mean anything, it has no teeth. The US can choose to not abide by it (as it is already doing), or opt out of it at will (as it will do), and there will be no consequences under any circumstances, period.

As is the case with most things related to the UN as it applies to the US, the US can ignore it tomorrow morning, and there is absolutely nothing that will or can realistically be done about it. Who is going to do what, exactly? The US is by far the prime leader in the war on drugs, if we fold our cards, it's instantly game over, no matter what half-cocked treaties are outstanding.

Enforcement is purely optional at this point already, as has already been demonstrated in Washington and Colorado, and a lot more are going to follow.
>This is another example of caging the eyes to a nation when the network effects are global.

Nicely said.
Nevermind, I got it:
http://www.google.ca/trends/explore#q=lifeformed%2C%20dustfo...
Pixel Fireplace
A perfect reason to NOT let Google own all layers of the stack between you and the internet (or indeed the real world).

Search - Check (goog.com)

Mail - Check (Gmail)

Browser - Check (chrome)

Devices - Check (Android/Chrome books)

Websites - Check (Double click/AdMob, Unknown number of other companies)

Google Analytics - Check

Your DNA - Check (23&Me)

Cars - Check (self-driving cars)

I am probably missing large chunks of tracking even with this list.

Where do you draw the line so that organizations like Google do not handover (willingly or inadvertently) our life to NSA, GCHQ, ASIO, CSIS & whatever New Zealand's Intelligence spooks go by, on a platter?

Heterogeneity - Make the buggers at least have to work a little bit to invade your privacy.
I've got legal speed in my medicine cabinet that my doctor prescribed to me for ADHD. I also have legal opiates that my doctor prescribed for pain. I don't want or need your approval for what I put in my body.

I also have a brother dead from a heroin overdose. It's illegal and it didn't stop him. Sanctimonious nanny staters like you think you're protecting people but you're just supporting organized crime, death and ruined lives by pushing this into the shadows.
>"the rest will cower"

This is one aspect of sort of complicity with power that's being discussed. Sometimes, people decide en masse that a certain way of life is worth dying for, so we know there are other responses to armed pacification.

Not that this is always a bad thing. It's pretty great that most of us obey the state's injunction to not wantonly kill each other.
> I believe the current builds run a (standard?) kernel, with a partial Android userland in an LXC container. I assume the point of this is to access some services that are implemented in Android.

Most mobile devices use an Android kernel since there's far more support for ARM SoCs, etc. with the Android kernel. Plus you can't really run an Android userland without running an Android kernel somewhere; they're intimately tied (see Binder).
Fundamental types in lisp
Quality rating? I don't see how that could possibly work in practice...
That part (value of `S`) changes everytime the tab loses focus:
pref=[...]:S=J3ITrb9DNMWLQBzc

What kind of "preferences" changes in that way each time the user browse away the page and how does it help "user experience"?
I don't know that it's a panacea, but at least pertaining to labor laws, Trader Joe's is fairly well regarded.

A couple of simple rules that would take you a very long way towards being the "right" kind of company:

- Pay better than minimum wage. Pay a lot better than minimum wage, in fact; even for the lowest employee.

- Pay your highest paid executives less than we're used to seeing. I don't know why, but people just absolutely hate it when CEO of such and such is making $x million dollars a year, while the cashiers of so and so are absolutely starving on minimum wage. Cap executive wages to some multiple of the lowest wage. If the CEO wants to make a $10 million a year, then the janitor would have to make $1 million a year; as an example.

- Don't cap employee position pay. Have starting wages, of course, and make them generous, but if a cashier has been with you for 172 years, she should have received raises (assuming they were merited) every year, or be let go, if she didn't merit them.

- Don't lobby Congress for personal / business gain. I've argued it extensively elsewhere on HN recently, so I won't go into it again now, but I think that people's problems with capitalism aren't actually complaints with capitalism, but a complaint with the crony capitalism that we have in America. IBM lobbies for increased patent protections, makes a billion dollars, pays the guy who thought of it $10 million, and now everybody hates IBM, and especially that guy. If the system were both fair and fairly applied, sure, the Fishtowners might complain, but there would be more in the way of income mobility for the motivated, which should elevate the lower class to a true middle class for those willing to earn it, which would act as a bulwark against unruliness.

When Warren Buffet complains that he's being taxed too little, the cynic in me thinks that he wants his less rich competitors to be taxed out of being able to truly compete, while he enjoys his largesse, knowing that no amount of taxation would really have any impact on his lifestyle. For as generous as progressive seems when taken away from the uber-rich, it actually is a penalty for those just on the cusp of wealthy, and keeps them stuck in middle class without an effective means of pushing past it.
Anyone using RHEL6's built-in virtualization technology is using KVM, it's just all wrapped up in libvirt stuff. Those tools were in early development 7 years ago.
If you're using Firefox, you might like a little add-on called "Cookie Monster", which lets you easily control which sites can set cookies (permanently or temporarily) and indicates whether the site you're on has attempted to set them.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-monste...
Why You Shouldn’t Raise Huge Rounds Before You Launch
I feel like freemium would be a good move in this case. Make it free with ads, with an option to make a $1 dev donation to remove the ads. People who have been digging this story can help Leo out, people who are just using the app because it's useful still get it for free.
Enough of the class warfare. But isn't the subtext that coding can save you or someone? Maybe but I doubt it. I haven't found that to be the case.

Writing phone apps is a pretty bad way to go about making a living. Getting a real coding job, much better, not a guarantee of anything though.
Your larger point might be true, but has nothing to do with the current revelation.

If every site switched from Google Analytics to, say, Mixpanel... nothing would change. The NSA would just target the equivalent mixpanel cookie. So long as their are popular third-party cookies, this will be a problem.
It is indeed quite plausible.
Minetest is a C++ based Minecraft-style simulation with a clean API for modding -- with a nice little ecosystem of mods.

(I am not affiliated with them. I just downloaded it a few months ago and have been tinkering with it.)

http://minetest.net/
There was a quote here from oppenhimer the other day, about when it comes to cool technical solutions, you shoot (solve) first and deal with the morality (ask questions) later. Pity that everyon seems to be "hacking" the hell out of pandora's box, though.
A side effect: the sale of the tasty "chivito al plato" will soar (look it up).
Let's also talk about the impact of global capitalism on Nigeria (as a counter-example)[0].

0. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/picture_gallery/04/afr...
9.2 was already released ... it is the latest production release.