skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Asking me if not-extortion is extortion doesn't make much of a point."

Reread the comment. I asked rhetorically if it was extortion, to raise the point of why it was not extortion, which I got at in the very next sentence.

'Yeah, the issue of rights is just as complicated as you want to make it. Or you can just reject any notion of rights altogether, if you want to completely filibuster a conversation.

But it's important to realize that reasoning helps us find the "truth" about things. Sure, next, you could go into metaphysics and claim we can't even know if the idea of "truth" makes any sense. But you have to draw the line somewhere, because otherwise you'll never reach a conclusion about anything.'

This really couldn't be more handwavy. I'm not going anywhere abstract - I want the society that works out the best for every individual in the short, medium, and long term, as best we can approach that. If that's where we get by treating the particular things you've labelled "rights" and respecting them with a deontological rigidness, then that's what I want to do. If that's where we get by stepping all over your "rights" then that's what I want to do. I think that it's clear from history that respecting certain rights is very important for medium- and long-term well-being of individuals in society. I also think it's clear that an ability to solve collective action problems is necessary and that massive concentration of power is a problem. My philosophy may not fit on a postage stamp, but that only a marketing problem, and reflects the fact that the world is complex.

"A monopoly on violence that enslaves hundreds of millions of people is not necessary for solving a dispute between two people."

Again, your language is absurd. Establish that hundreds of millions are enslaved - as normal people would use the word, not something you can technically force into place by ignoring important aspects of what people usually mean when they say enslavement - or gtfo.

A monopoly on legitimate initiation of violence is a great thing. Read some Hobbes and look at the violence we see in (for instance) drug turf wars, when recourse to the state is denied. We need to be vigilant to keep the leviathan in check and that initiation of violence to a minimum, but monopoly is tremendously better than allowing competitive violence - monopolies under-produce.

"Even the two people involved can reach an agreement, but if that doesn't work out, they could let some kind of arbiter/court settle it."

How do they pick which arbiter to turn to, if they haven't had dealings with each other before? If it's always a certain arbiter in a certain area, that's just the existing court system.
Ask HN: I'm a developer. What can I do to change the world?
I'm a pretty good developer with a preference for front end. I have access to other like minded devs, and between us assume we can cover the full stack.

What is one thing I, regardless of scope (10 minutes to 10 years), that I can do to have a net positive impact on a global scale?

I used to work at the US State Department (took a funny path), and the most impactful programs I was ever a part of were the scalpels. They targeted one extremely specific facet of...whatever...and then executed.

Where do I go from here?
You need to qualify your statements with "in the US", because regulation has been effective elsewhere.
With the ,1 you could do fancy stuff like loading your program and executing it with one command. No need for another run command.
Tell HN: PG is speaking in San Francisco today at 1:30PM
Just wanted to let everyone know that PG is speaking at the LAUNCH Festival today at 1:30PM at the Design Center Concourse for the LAUNCH Festival. It's a pretty cool 3 day event, but if you're just going to see PG, the $49 ticket is probably a bit much.

events.launch.co/festival

Just got the agenda so I thought I'd let everyone know!
:(

Feel bad for suggesting there was dog shit on the path of enlightenment! But he fixed the ruby koans package, so we continue to learn!
For starters, Hemlis is not open source. That should stop you in your track right there. If it doesn't, maybe the fact that they actually had to switch to another crypto system for Hemlis after much negative feedback from the community, should tell you more about their experience in this. But even that new one doesn't offer anything resembling forward secrecy. I think Hemlis will be more of a Threema clone, which also isn't open source.

1 - https://missingm.co/2014/02/fighting-dishfire-the-state-of-m...
This is... beautiful.

( the past inside the present: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7bKe_Zgk4o )
The problem is that instead, Firm B could just follow the lead and also charge $1/month for Netflix, leaving the consumer with no choice. Or they could charge $1/month for other streaming services and leave Netflix alone, so the consumer gets to choose between slow Netflix or slow Hulu & Amazon, with no chance to 'vote' with their wallets for fast everything.

This is the danger of oligopolies - even when they don't collude, their interests are in not competing 'too hard' to gain customers. If there are two firms, and each has roughly half of the customers, then the most money Firm A could get with no competition is 2x what they already have, so getting into a price war could easily result in lower total profits. For example, if they have a 50% profit margin, then lowering consumer prices by 25% (and thus cutting profits to only 25% margin) only breaks even if they are able to sign up every customer of their competition.

Free markets work best when there are many players and markets are easy to enter, as there is much more incentive to compete, which is not the structure of broadband markets.
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=ITER
I still boot into x64 from time to time to play old games. Games that are much more playable than flappy bird. Sometimes I also like to listen to sid music while working.
Well now it sounds like you're talking about not just spamming, but phishing.

I can believe that what you're describing has happened before, but it's certainly not endemic. I've never personally seen anything like it.
> the risk of your child dying from, say, polio is much much higher than the risk of him/her dying from the vaccine.

That isn't the case, assuming you're non-Amish in the US is it? The last naturally occurring case of polio in the United States was in 1979, and health officials consider the disease eliminated in the Western Hemisphere. So your risk of contracting wild polio is effectively 0.

If the death risk of the polio vaccine is 1:1,000,000, you would still have a higher risk of dying from the vaccine.

NB: I believe in vaccines, but I don't think it's wise to try and make arguments in the quoted way.
It would be great if all Linux distributions had SystemTap out-of-the-box like RHEL. Or something with a sufficient feature set to solve problems (which may become ktap, or perf_events, or lttng). However, most of the Linux performance issues I'm debugging are on Ubuntu systems. So the question remains: when will Linux-at-large get this capability?

Red Hat can certainly say that SystemTap is obviously a priority on their OS, and they can only make best effort for others. I said this in the talk. Indeed, a working SystemTap should be an incentive to run RHEL. It is a compelling argument -- the benefits of a working SystemTap are enormous (which I also explained in the talk). Sun made basically the same argument for switching to Solaris: a working DTrace.

Although, I'm not sure that using SystemTap is entirely safe for production yet, which I said was the most important priority. I notice that this related kernel panic is still not fixed:

http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=2725

Although some recent and promising progress has happened in the past few months, as noted by the bug! I only care about this bug because I sometimes trace large subsets of the kernel (eg, all functions in a module or driver), and I think I've hit the same related issue. I don't actually need to trace everything.

You said that DTrace can trace from userspace to kernel, which SystemTap can't. I'm not sure if there's a specific case you're referring to, but SystemTap nowadays can indeed trace userspace to kernel (via uprobes), and a lot of work has been happening to get SystemTap userspace tapsets to work.

As for setting up SystemTap being difficult on distros that don't support or maintain SystemTap. Well, almost all of my customers run Ubuntu. If they hit perf issues, do I convince them to switch to RHEL? (The approach that Sun made for DTrace.) Or is this a problem to be taking up with the other Linux distro maintainers? Which goes back to my original point: when will Linux get this? :-)
To catch a solar neutrino, search at night
Buckle up for a n00b query: is this going to be pushed as an update, or do i need to un-install/re-install?
"it's naive to think that anybody really cares about some objective notion of fairness."

It seems that Brazil cared, to the tune of $4.5B in lost sales from an American company due to our eavesdropping.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/18/brazil-jets-idUSL2...
I'm very excited to see this for iOS! I never really trusted iMessages but the most painful part of iMessages is the vendor lock-in. Now I don't have to worry about the type of device that my friends use.
Roslyn changes are starting to kick in - 2014/15 should be pretty exciting!

"This means that folks like the Mono team could look at this Reference Source and not have to gouge their eyes out afterwards. "

Very reassuring as well.
Will there eventually be support for using your email address as your identifier instead of a telephone number?

In a world of IP connected devices, the need to tether your self to the telecom cartel for an identifier is outdated. It would be ideal if future versions of TextSecure let you log in with just your email and then you could run the app on your tablet, desktop or any other devices without a SIM.
Meet the NSA-Proof Blackphone: Everything you need to know
>> this business model severely discourages new development (witness the "No one wants gigabit" rationale)

It's not that I want/need gigabit, it's that the only thing I can get in some locations is unusable. I'm looking at you, 1.5mb/768k DSL lines. It's barely enough for web surfing and useless for streaming video or doing things like gaming, video conferencing....
You can probably use terminal control sequences for "graphics".
Wouldn't it be simpler just to use encryption?
I've got to imagine the availability of cheap and fast broadband influences property values in a given area. I've seen numbers like $5k thrown around; I'm tempted to think it's more like $10k-$30k.

When you multiply that amount by the number of homeowners in the country, that's a lot of potential influence. How could it be leveraged to improve broadband?
I am speaking language design here. Ruby is a surprisingly conservative language when it comes to changing syntax and semantics.

Sure, runtimes always evolve and cross-pollinate.

I don't care, but as stated in another comment, you often get that question from people joining over from the Java camp.
Thanks a lot (also: Hi, I regularly bugged you on prosody's muc I guess).

So in that case I'll stick with xmpp for my use case - self-hosting is just something that I wouldn't want to give up.
Left this in another thread, but here's the definitive profile of Ramis, by Tad Friend of The New Yorker. It examines the how and why Ramis's movies have stayed so funny for so many years. The author has unlocked it for the next 24 hours:

https://www.byliner.com/tad-friend/stories/comedy-first?AFID...
There are some links in the article. Granted you could've easily missed them since the color is some washed out grey. Moxie should consider making the links a more visible color.
Funny how those internal politics are internal only now that MS bought Nokia, isn't it?
Can anyone explain the benefits of a "compiler as a service"?
Watch the Samsung Unpacked event live
It is quite refreshing to see an article clearly stating the problem and the right solution. The barriers to competition needs to be broken, then the neutrality issue sorts itself out. We don't need to see entrenched cartels and monopolies 'fixed' through additional regulation imposing certain quality standards. That makes it hard for new players to enter the market and distinguish themselves, and more importantly it makes it hard for the dominant players to do the stupid things that will make their customers leave them faster for the competition.
ITT: pedantry
Samsung announces Galaxy S5
Pick one every _other_ project. This way you will at least skip the ones that will die in that period.
I think you missed the joke. The first paragraph clearly says it's "top secret" and "confidential", so even though it was published by the Spiegel, it's not public information. Got it?

I know, it only makes sense in NSA's distorted rhetoric but if this is disputed in a court, that is what you're going to hear (that the information is not public, as in, it should not be disclosed).
Ford Planning to Drop Microsoft for BlackBerry in Its Car Technology System
The inexplicable rise of open floor plans in tech companies
>> I don't have direct experience with the state of the internet in the U.S., but isn't it terrible in large, metropolitan cities as well?

It depends on where you are. Two different apartment buildings in DC or NYC could differn, one getting FIOS and the other on a congested cable network or low-speed phone company DSL circuit.

But don't get the idea that the internet is generally terrible in the USA. I'd imagine my situation is similar to most others - I live in a smaller town (population < 50,000) and about 90 miles from the nearest 'big' city (Detroit), but for $39.99 I get 30mb cable internet which I'm more than happy with. They offer 60mb and 100mb packages but I don't see the sense in spending any more.
>Many languages go without any kind of formatting tools.

Well, actually that's a moot point too. Lots of languages go without any kind of closures either, but I wouldn't much like a language that doesn't have them.

I'm not saying it's necessary -- I'm saying it's very nice to have.

And I don't think it's a moot point -- if with moot you mean "open for debate". In Go, nobody debates that gofmt is very beneficial (well, the few complaints are on the level of statistical noise).

>but I don't think it's time to spend on them when things like DateTime are still missing from language.

You can add DateTime at any time. Java only recently added a decent one. But if you don't come with a tool like fmt from 1.0 and force it down people's throats (like Go), nobody will adopt it later.
Really? USA is polio free.
5 people who would not get polio got it. From vaccine.
Are these facts?
Improve the AngularJS documentation.
As much as I appreciate their kind offer to compromise my key and hand it to the German authorities for forwarding to the NSA, I must politely decline. ;)
Dropbox tells SEC it raised $325 million
Take a minute, Talk to your ISP
Population density in NYC and SFO actually hurt new rollouts. That is why those places and Los Angeles will probably be dead last on a Google Fiber rollout (if ever).

The old NYC infrastructure and all of the physical work (and permits, contracts, everything else) means a huge overhaul would most likely not be worth doing in dense and already wired places like these.

Also rayiner pointed out in another thread that according to Akamai the US already is pretty high up in the list of overall bandwidth. Also I think the HN / Reddit / tech echo chamber overplays the demand for gigabit internet. Most of America has no need for this, nor the willingness to pay for a connection this fast. 10-25 Mb is fine for most people. Browse Facebook, surf the web, stream a couple of movies, play games.
I really like the way unbabel works and got quite curious since it's a portuguese startup. But the way it works for translators is a bit weird. When you request a task there's no way of knowing if it's going to be a paid one or a free one. And in the end it feels like you're being fooled into working for free.
Back when I tried it was a little, er, rusty, though that was around .3 or .4 time. Does it work properly now?

I think it also needs the "push it down people's throats a la Go" thing going to really benefit from it.
Kendra Leigh – Cup Song (When I'm Gone) Awesome Cover Music Video
Why I wrote my own UIKit and the end of the platform wars
Take Norway; here all the copper lines used for DSL used to be owned by the national phone company. Then competition was established by forcing the national phone company to sell access to the lines at a set rate to anyone that wanted to deliver internet access. A monthly "line rental" is charged to the end customer - so that the cost is transparent. "Line rental" is about $13/month and a 20Mb/1Mb ADSL is $50/month (Cheapest 100Mb/100Mb (fiber) is $80.)
There is a site for comparing prices (telepriser.no) run by the equivalent to the FCC, showing all the suppliers offerings.
It's kind-of funny to me see an article entitled "the future of javascript" anything that only talks about a ClojureScript framework.
Accidental developer preview: New org-based auth scopes on GitHub
See https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure/issues/127 for a detailed discussion why.

You can built it yourself.
> The number of people harmed by the vaccine is much lower than the number harmed by an infection.

This this this this this. This is the way vaccines should be presented. But in my experience as a new father vaccines seem to be presented as a magic cure that never does any harm. When's the last time your doctor/nurse discussed the potential side-effects with you?

If the number of folks hurt by vaccines was infinitesimally small, as some would have you believe, we wouldn't have the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. (http://www.hrsa.gov/vaccinecompensation/index.html)
Is there an country code for the internet?
Density is not something that can be described adequately in a single number. It is entirely possible to have high residential densities in cities with remarkably low average densities. Moscow is a great example of this...their plazas and parks drive down average density way beyond the density that the average person experiences.

Everybody talks about the last mile being the most expensive part of infrastructure, but if the last meter is 90% of the cost of the last mile (I don't know what the exact proportion is, but it is definitely close), then 100 houses in 10 sq km census block is going to be in a cost category that is orders of magnitude higher than 100 apartments in a tower with a 9.9 sq km park around it.
I would much rather like to be able to use an arbitrary identifier really.
so much great results they never open sourced that stuff... yeah ,like getting great results in HTML/JS is easy...
What if a relative was maimed by a vaccine?
Actually only ~38K of RAM plus the 4K section starting at address 49152.
Did you ever interact with CodeForAmerica? I know it's not really "the world" but it could be a good starting point.

Otherwise, I would aim my attention towards the humanitarian community, open data and community building projects. The key issue is that you have to be interested in the project, you have to have some passion and follow that.
You mean natural monopolies?
The credit should go to SQLite, which is extremely versatile. A while back I wrote Thredis (thredis.org), which lets you use SQL commands inside Redis (also using SQLite, of course).
It's highly unlikely that the FCC will accomplish much in the way of enforcing net nutrality given that the agency has basically been captured by special interest.

Tom Wheeler, the new FCC Chairman, was a lobbyist and head of the NCTA for 5 years[1]. The idea that he will do anything to hurt the cable companies his old organization represents is ludicrous.

[1]http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/02/business/tom-wheeler-telec...
> it seems like it is invoking React's event loop more than I would expect ... Perhaps this difference is because of requestAnimationFrame?

I think so, yes. The performance difference is already negligible with Om, so I didn't see a real need to optimize it any further. Pete Hunt's react-raf-batching (mentioned already) could probably be dropped in to get that last bit of optimization, but I haven't tried.

As for what I mean by "application data policy", I think that if you work with your application's data in such a way that it batches modifications, renders entirely from the top down, and uses fast `shouldComponentUpdate` implementations, you'd achieve most of the improvement you see in the Om vs React+Backbone TodoMVC comparison. Lots of things could achieve that. Immutability isn't a hard requirement to get those features done. And if my React+_tree example is any indication, requestAnimationFrame isn't buying you that much performance either.

I haven't really analyzed what Om's Benchmark 2 was doing under the hood, so thank you for that. I assumed it was doing something, but with the ~4ms benchmark, I just assumed that particular something was wizardry.
To be fair, Three Gorges (like any large hydro) is comprised of many turbines, 32 700MW turbines in this case.

To counter, the biggest nuclear power plant, Kashiwazaki-Kariwa, has 7 generating units which are each above 1 GW. Two of those units are at ~1.3GW, nearly double a Three Gorges turbine.

For more perspective, the smallest nuke in the States is Fort Calhoun which has a single reactor at 502MW.
This is good network management. The NSA datacenters are too overloaded, let's divert the traffic to the GCHQ ones to load balance this thing.
No one knows iter’s true cost, which may be incalculable, but estimates have been rising steadily, and a conservative figure rests at twenty billion dollars—a sum that makes iter the most expensive scientific instrument on Earth.

And WhatsApp cost how much?
Does that killer app exist in Europe or Asia? Otherwise, why would they have a faster adoption rate than the US?
Wrong, Whisper Systems is Open Whisper Systems but whether they are still located in SF I don't know.
5 people getting maimed from poliovirus vacine (maybe) is just an anecdote?
And pry-bars and screwdrivers are both in the "levers that provide mechanical advantage" business.

One can be abused to fill the role of the other, and if you look at them both from 1000 feet and squint then both "for" the same thing, but the reality is that when you actually examine what each is designed to do and in which situations each is used, they really have little to do with each other.
Yeah, I can't see any reason to trust Hemlis.
Do you have a specific objection to anything I said?
>What would the U.S. do if it was found that Obama's lines were being listened to?

Given that the Russians or Chinese or Israelis have almost certainly at one point or another compromised the President's communications, we already know the answer.
seems like you could release it under 2 different names with same code. you should be able to check which domain someone logs in under and change images text.
Aww, that is a shame. I was imagining something like the XMPP server "cloud" where everyone can easily setup their own server, eg for a more private setup with their closer friends (who would then be motivated to use that server).
Any ideas on the valuation of Cloudant?
Correct. Programming is not intuitive, so you need something (like books) to help you. I suppose you could learn by pure trial and error, but that's really only helpful after you've picked up a lot of the basic syntax.
Good post but I wish it had a date on it -- hard to know if recent or 5 years ago. Am I just not seeing the date?
It's a simple update.
no, Lua is 1993...
Correct, but that is a failure of the carriers not supporting their customers. Cellular carriers should be supporting VOIP over data (3g,4g) and internet wifi. But since they are rent seeking, they won't disrupt their voice and sms traffic, enabling plays like WhatsApp.
He just described the _.debounce function in underscore.js

http://underscorejs.org/#debounce