skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The country already entered a giant shit hole, decades ago, thanks to the war on drugs.

Only Stalin's gulags held more in prison than the US has under the war on drugs. It's easily arguable that over the span of the program, we've outdone Stalin.

Poverty, crime, cartels, destroyed families, destroyed lives, millions in prison: hundreds of billions of dollars spent without solving a single thing, without fixing anything, without ever reducing addiction or stopping drug use. America's cities became war zones when the war on drugs began.

Tell Mexico's tens of thousands of innocent victims that have been slaughtered by our war, that it's all working out just swell.
If Only For a Second
The Power and Danger of Abstraction
Tell HN: Nest Software Update Failed and Now We're Freezing
I have a Nest learning thermostat and a house with two infants. We're on the east coast and the outside temperature is 26 degrees with seven inches of snow on the ground. Several hours ago, this evening, our Nest began cycling "software updates" that turned off our heatpump. Nest support is overwhelmed-- apparently this is a system-wide problem related to an OS update that failed. We're freezing and are getting ready to go to a hotel.

The "Internet of Things" needs different standards than some Internet app-- this software failure is disrupting lives.
The fact that so many people mess themselves up on legal amphetamines and opiates is unfortunately why there is so much opposition to legalizing drugs.

I don't care what you put in your body (legal or otherwise), its your body and your life and you are compelled to do so for reasons I might not understand, but if I found a loved one was taking a cocktail of amphetamines and opiates I would do everything in my power to see they got the help and support they needed to get off it.

Legalizing amphetamines would trigger major societal problems. What percentage of HN would feel the need to consume it in order to compete at school, the office or the market.

Nanny state? You make it sound so simple. Drugs are just chemicals. Why not say all chemicals should be legalized. What about RDX (a military-grade explosive)? Is the nanny state getting in the way of me having a good time on private property blowing stuff up? I can safely use military weapons, so why can't I purchase them privately?
I don't understand this terribly well, but shouldn't then market forces, the decreased price of power and water in places due to decreased demand cause it to be an attractive place to build a data center regardless? Why then do we need to be subsidizing it?
That's also not true. The vast majority of UN treaties which the US is a signatory to are enforced by the US* on US citizens. If your claim is that we only enforce the ones we lead on then that is an impossible claim to prove - by design. 99% of UN treaties no one will ever know of, things related to fisheries, wildlife preservation, telecommunications, arms control etc... check it out for yourself on their database [1]

There are of course major examples of unilateral actions on the part of the US to be sure, but those are outliers albeit extreme ones.

[1] http://treaties.un.org/pages/ParticipationStatus.aspx
Does anyone know if QEMU can do virtualization on hosts other than Linux (via KVM)?
I'd love to ditch Virtualbox for it.
As unpopular as this comment is, it needs to be said. Privileged, white, upper class libertarians simply don't care how drugs affect poor communities. The free market will sort everything out.
So, are you saying that through this - NSA can see exactly which tab you are viewing at which time?
I use Ghostery/Adblock, but I have found that it breaks some web sites (whose javascript expects the tracking code to be loaded).

BTW, if you're using Chrome, you might also want to look into the "Users" section of preferences. You can create multiple user profiles with separate history, cookies, cache, etc. You can have a different user profile per window at the same time. (After you create a second user, there will be an icon in the top right corner of the window to open a window as another user.)

I like to use this to protect against CSRF. (I do financial stuff as another profile and facebook as another profile.) It's also useful for QA if you need to be logged in as multiple people at the same time.
Counterpoint from David Frum, a guy I disagree with on many issues but nonetheless respect immensely:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/02/06/charles-mur...
Indeed. And middle-class consumer demand not only drives significant parts of the economy directly, it has major spin-off effects that impact the health as the economy as a whole and the potential healthy growth rate of the economy.

For anyone who depends on a healthy, growing economy for their livelihood and/or wealth, there's a pretty good case to be made that it is in your enlightened self-interest to do anything within reason to promote a large, prosperous middle class with the surplus purchasing power to drive future economic growth.
I don't see how legalizing drugs would cause the country to enter a shit hole? The people who buy drugs now can already do it via SR or other marketplaces, but legalizing it would significantly reduce crime. There are other countries that have legalization that don't have our crime problems.
My approach is similar to yours. I also take the step of using services I'm persistently logged into in different browsers than the one I do my general browsing in.

I also share your concern that my (lack of a) footprint makes me an outlier, and thus inherently more interesting to an adversary with the power and reach of No Such Agency. There's precisely zero I can do about that, without compromising my local objective of not being followed by every damned website, though, so I just carry on.
Right, because prohibition has worked out so well hasn't it? We're really helping people by giving them criminal records for non-violent drug-related offenses.

Tell you what, why don't you go ask the "folks in Michigan" if we need to bring back alcohol prohibition as well, since alcohol continues to be the most destructive by far.
"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."

That is assumption somewhat based on the current marginal tax brackets. There would be no reason that a progressive tax could not be designed so that moderately wealthy individuals would pay
a similar effective tax rates compared to the "middle class", and then require the to X% pay significantly more (those earning more than say 10 million, for example).

Or better yet, do as Warren Buffet himself proposes, which is harmonizing the capital gains and marginal tax brackets such there is a flat effective tax for all income levels. Buffet generally argues that he and his secretary should be paying the same effective tax rate, not that high-income individuals should be coercively taxed. (funnily enough, President Reagan made an identical argument comparing a secretary's tax rate to their boss).

A flat tax could potentially be lower for most or all taxpayers, there's nothing in it that requires it to increase the tax burden.
Ask those folks in Michigan on the other side of the 8 Mile if they feel drugs need to be legalized. If they feel that drugs didn't destroy their town and community.

I don't have any sources at the moment, but from what I've read, the problems associated with drugs are actually due to poverty and the fact that drugs are illegal, making those who use and sell them criminals. There is an important distinction between harm due to the criminalization of drugs, and harm due to drugs per se.

There are a few real world examples of states that have decriminalized all drugs, such as Portugal:

The resulting effect: a drastic reduction in addicts, with Portuguese officials and reports highlighting that this number, at 100,000 before the new policy was enacted, has been halved in the following ten years. Portugal's drug usage rates are now among the lowest of EU member states, according to the same report.

One more outcome: a lot less sick people. Drug related diseases including STDs and overdoses have been reduced even more than usage rates, which experts believe is the result of the government offering treatment with no threat of legal ramifications to addicts.

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/portugal-drug-policy-decrimin...
Lean News - A Live blog from the Lean Startup Conference
HN is for things hackers find interesting. I, for one, find ruminations on the deepest problems facing society to be more interesting than SnapCrush's Series B or the latest Javascript that isn't Javascript.
He's not supporting the drug war. He's saying that "legalize everything" is not a solution to what is a complicated problem that involves intersectionality.
Please clarify this for me, How do you know the fluctuations in Discourse benchmark is due to rails and their own optimizations? You would think it has more to do with their own optimization than changes to rails builds?
You're talking about entropy pools as if they just XOR'd their inputs, which is demonstrably false.
World Bank report 2012[1]: For the first time since this monitoring task began, the data indicate a decline in both the poverty rate and the number of poor in all six regions of the developing world

Kings College 2013[2]: In this paper we explore who have been the winners and losers from global growth since 1990

Economist Special Section 2012[3] - More nuanced and could offer a slightly alternative if generally positive example

[1] http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTPOVCALNET/Resources/Gl...

[2] http://www.kcl.ac.uk/aboutkings/worldwide/initiatives/global...

[3] http://www.economist.com/node/21564414
We already have checkpoints and road-blocks. I got stopped in one on my way home from work last year:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_checkpoint#Sobriety_chec...
And other folks don't appear to care how criminal records for minor non-violent drug offenses (like simple possession) affect poor communities.
FreeBSD donation drive, still needs $524k - only 20 days left.
Ending prohibition is not "the solution", it is an essential part of the solution.
Here's a great place to start:

https://www.schneier.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-search.cgi?tag=stegan...

One must be careful with it. IIRC, Anna Chapman was a pro among Russian spies, but at one point she got so confused by the steganography software on her laptop that she asked another known spy for help in using it ... before she realized she was talking to a CIA agent trying to figure her out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Chapman

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20009101-38.html

Bruce Schneier's articles -- and his readers' comments -- provide fascinating details and analysis of these topics.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/07/cryptography_...

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/07/protecting_e-...

al Qaeda is known to have used steganography within porn videos.

http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/05/steganography-how-al...
This makes me wonder if any startups have been responsible yet for the death or injury of people who use their software.

Personally I think it's only a matter of time.
Donating Bitcoins to John Resig
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."

Hence my previous statement:

There is always the unilateral option but the US wouldn't do that in this case because it would open the gates for every other country and the political interests are way too strong.
Oops, I somehow commented on the wrong thread.
Idea: A service to allow people to anonymously "share" Google tracking cookies. Perhaps a local transparent proxy that MITMs all your cleartext Google requests, and re-writes the tracking codes on the fly, submitting the ones you've been given and retrieving other "real" ones from a service (probably a TOR hidden service?)
How come there is no way to manually override Nest and turn on the heatpump? Seems like a fairly obviously dumb design decisions from Nest. I wonder if this is way for them to "lock" in customers for to speak.
Excellent point. Consensus seems to come at the state level. Another example that seems to be happening lately is reforming of mandatory sentencing/3 strikes laws.
I took care not to misrepresent anyone, but if you feel I've been overly broad, I'm happy to be corrected.
The examples here are running the same exact benchmark on multiple versions of Ruby, the only moving part in those graphs is Ruby.

Similar benches can just change the versions of Rails. Just change the version of Discourse and so on.
Basically, America is separating into aristocrats and peasants.

There's one very, very important difference: aristocrats were generally in a heritable position that couldn't be taken from them, and peasants were generally in a heritable position from which they couldn't rise. In the U.S., at least, relatively wealthy / successful people can fall and relatively poor / unsuccessful people can rise. In classic feudal societies, this was basically impossible without revolutions.

To be honest, I have no idea what will do the trick. There is unlikely to be another WW2, another G.I. bill, another 50s-type broad-based economic boom.

This is really true, and it's arguably the most important part of this blog post, of Tyler Cowen's recent book Average is Over, and in many of the more honest discussions by people who are trying to get a handle of what's going on in the larger world.
How about unscrewing the thing from the wall and touching the furnace control wires together?
sync is amazing. just wanted to say thank you :)
Having had this happen with at least two plain ol' thermostats, my fix for those was to go down to Lowes, pick up a $10 thermostat until I'd gotten my more expensive models repaired.

I'm not personally familiar with the Nest, but is there some change to the architecture that precludes you from doing that as a stopgap?
Is there a mobile app wrapping this that allows clicking the codes within the app?
Worldwide inequality has been rising continuously since the 1820s
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient#World_income_G...
How is it not? Or are you saying there is some sort of nationality inferiority that should drive the attainment of non-Americans below that of all others?

Over the past half century, China has brought the most people out of poverty in world history. These are the forces at play.
Ah yes, the good old "If you legalize drugs, next we'll be legalizing plastic explosives!" slippery-slope argume... wait what? That is one hell of a new one. You guys are getting more creative every day...
I don't think decrim feeds crime syndicates. California has had decrim for cannabis for a long while now. Dealers can't really make money selling cannabis because it's already so cheap at dispensaries. Most of these dealers move to states where cannabis is still illegal. In a way, dealers are not monetizing "drugs" -- they are monetizing security.

Cannabis is extremely cheap to manufacture since anyone with a bag of soil can easily grow several thousand dollars worth of plant material. The real cost is in securing the product and transporting it to the customer. In states that have decrim, the police don't even bother arresting people with cannabis because catching people running stop signs actually yield more money for the police department. There's no money to be made transporting the goods because the risk is so low.
maybe tips per number of lines changed would be a fairer benchmark than tips per commit. I guess that would still cause a bunch of unnecessary line changes.

I really don't think this kind of financial incentives are good for open source projects.
At first read I actually thought he was arguing with himself ... Jeff Dunham, anyone?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntQkgeko_i8
Digital start-ups for the developing world
This isn't really security advice. It's advice on how much you should focus on security (instead of focusing on other things) if you want to build a successful company.
I am more interested in whether coinbase staff gets paid in bitcoin. It would only make sense if they do
I don't know who "we" is for you, but we will
I have more or less the same opinions as you. I wrote my browsing setup optimized for privacy here: http://rkrishnan.org/posts/2013-12-01-firefox-privacy.html

Comments and further improvements welcome.
How Sports Bloggers Get Media Passes for Journalism
Depends on your measure.

The Nigerian GDP is a hockey stick from 2000 to today while the GINI is mixed.

http://data.worldbank.org/country/nigeria
From your own link....

2002 0.71
2005 0.68
No. I prefer the scientific approach. At this point, I just reported what I observed. Maybe somebody will come up with a sensible hypothesis as to why a value changes so often. Google could just come forward and tell us the exact meaning of each field in its cookie. That would be a start.
Have you considered working with local pizza shops or recruiting a "virtual" sales force to do that for you?

Unlike Groupon it wouldn't be about big deals but simply more people calling the local indy than the big chain which pumps the coupons out.

So many food websites focus on big cities or daytime office deliveries, but there is a lot of delivery pizza business in the midwest and other more spread out places.

For me, knowing when they stop delivering at night at a glance would help too.
Thank you for this, I have to admit I've been quite confused about this for some time. Great explanation, it finally makes a lot more sense to me!
Al Jazeera English posted a really good interview with Uruguay's president, Jose Mujica. If you haven't seen it yet, I highly recommend it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nu12Dhoma0k
So Coin is like an unncessary version of google wallet credit card which is both free and come from a company with financial backing.

I don't see much special about Coin apart from their slick looking website
What GINI misses is that the floor is rising across the board. So while internal to a country it may be spreading, between nations is shrinking: meaning a higher quality of life at the mean. See my other comment for documentation.
How is it slimy for Academia.edu to operate under the assumption that its contributors retain the right to publish their own work on the site?

Company X is doing something bad.

Company Y is started, in part, to circumvent the bad stuff about Company X. They wage a big PR campaign and take in millions in private funding despite knowing that they have no legal right to circumvent the bad stuff about Company X.

Seems slimy to me, even though I agree Company X sucks.
Hooray, BeyondPod support!
How to raise venture capital (without losing your soul)
Doesn't that fulfill all your points: https://github.com/gorhill/httpswitchboard

Posted on HackerNews two days ago.
I've used Qemu on Windows and OpenBSD. I don't think either supports KVM acceleration though.
>>There's one very, very important difference: aristocrats were generally in a heritable position that couldn't be taken from them, and peasants were generally in a heritable position from which they couldn't rise. In the U.S., at least, relatively wealthy / successful people can fall and relatively poor / unsuccessful people can rise. In classic feudal societies, this was basically impossible without revolutions.

That's true for now. But the way things are heading; the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The barrier dividing the 2 gets a little harder to cross every year.
The Top Ten Websites that use Wordpress
Given that there has been a 8x growth in price, miners must still be profitable at this point? If I were an ASIC supplier, I would be delaying shipping and "alpha testing" those hardware in times like this
California's decriminalization has been accompanied by partial legalization. In absence of any sort of legalization, the only place to buy drugs is through the usual channels.

"Usual channels", while not limited to, includes gangs.
Your last sentence is one big bait-and-switch. Your simple possession of RDX is an entirely different matter from "blowing stuff up". I can blow stuff up just as easily with ammonium nitrate (used by the ton for fertilizing farmland) and diesel. Both of those are legal, but perhaps you'd rather they not be? You know, just in case...

The drug war has not criminalized harmful behavior caused by drugs. That would make far too much sense. The drug war criminalizes the mere possession of drugs, regardless of any actual harmful behavior. Then the nanny state corrects your behavior by giving you a criminal record.
"My own partial results from a research project I'm doing using Common Crawl estimates approximately 39.7% of the 535 million pages processed so far have GA on them"

This is interesting. I would have actually expected more. The last time I remember someone analyzing this, I believe the result was "<script ... ga.js>" was the most popular tag on the web by far.
This was, however, a few years ago.
Does everyone have their price?
Did you keep your old thermostat? The wires aren't too complicated to hook back up.
It doesn't justify it. The NSA should be barred from further operations like this. I can think it's wrong, while still not personally fearing the NSA looking at my personal data.
Bubonic plague is a common problem with wildlife in California, which has which has wild reservoirs. CDC isn't "losing their shit" because this is something they already manage.
Simulating the emergent behavior of ant colonies
Make Art Not Law
Many people now use the 'hn is for anything hackers find interesting' excuse to post whatever is hot on reddit.
By lifting min output for free transction does the bitcoin network become more vulnerable to DDOS?
take the long view...it is possible to cache data in the browser..performance is a temporal issue, there is already major performance improvements happening in the browser...don't be so quick to shoot down the browser:)
Functional DOM programming
Linear algebra class in one abbreviation: LAPACK.
As always, Randall Monroe had a pithy comic about such monitoring: xkcd 1223 "Dwarf Fortress"

http://xkcd.com/1223/
http://best.ly

It's a SaaS providing A/B testing for mobile apps that started out as a side project.
>What does it say that HN is becoming increasingly aware of these issues?

All it says is HN is more of a general social media site instead of one with a laser focus on startups.
It's not about "undesirables", though surely there are some places where residents view that as a knock-on benefit. It's about through traffic. Residential streets that have very little traffic are more livable than ones with regular traffic. This is a design pattern from Christopher Alexander's book, which is not exactly a font of suburban Americana.
I'm aware that programs can be disassembled and I have written x86 assembly myself. If closed source is not a significant barrier to completely understanding s_rand then I ask for one reference to someone who has completely audited the Windows 7/Windows 8 version of s_rand, and CryptGenRandom that s_rand calls.

If you look on the related Wikipedia page what you find that there was an audit done of the Windows 2000 version of CryptGenRandom (which s_rand uses), and it was discovered to be flawed in a number of ways. The follow up is that Microsoft said that the issues were fixed in Vista. It's more than a theory that s_rand vulnerabilities will be called "bugs". It already happened once.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CryptGenRandom
In Chrome, you can use Vanilla. It may not have as many options, but it works fairly well.