skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure. But you assume there's a permanent class of criminals whose only interest is crime. The principle interest in the drug game is money. It's a business.

What I'm saying is, there's not a "fixed amount of crime," which you imply; you basically say it's like squeezing a balloon. The amount of air doesn't change, it just gets displaced a little bit.

What we need is a sociologist (or someone who has otherwise done the reading) to come in with studies and numbers. I'm sort of working outward from my reference, Pinker's The Better Angels Of Our Nature, and suggesting that crime, too, overall crime, is dropping. And would drop even more if the laws were written correctly. In other words, there's not a fixed number of criminals, nor a fixed amount of crime.
Notice Afghanistan's highest-value export is opium.
Fair enough. I don't know much but you know when you've been through a startup yourself and banged your head against the wall for couple of years on every aspect of starting a business what kind of struggles he will face (that a Harvard business school class will not shed light on).

I am an optimist and want to see good in everything. My problem is he's doing a startup he has no real passion for and doing it because he thinks he can make some quick money after 1 or 2 years... The list of motivation to how he's going to find his starting team (as a non-technical founder) to his expectations on how seed round is actually raised as well as not understanding marketing funnel for his business really hurts his chances... let alone the value proposition being no better than a competitor that is well funded and already dominates in seo, sem.
I don't think the 'war on drugs' which happens in all sorts of countries, not just the US, is indicative or racism and corruption or police militarization or a prison system. Japan is very homogenous and they have very strict drug enforcement. Same goes for other Asian nations as well as European nations --many of the countries are quite homogenous compared to the US and yet they have strong policies. I think this would indicate that it's more a political issue. In China there is also an anti-imperial reason aspect, but I'd not say their policies are due to what you have described.
a) They're not a patent troll. Patent trolls don't create or sell anything and instead just sue people. This company has been around a while and has a real product with real paying customers.

b) Name calling ("Piece of Shit", "assholes") and baseless accusations ("the company seems to be failing...") don't help your cause.

If you don't believe you're infringing or it's an obvious patent that should be invalidated, say why or keep your mouth shut.
they don't get burned, they still make a return on their investment just not 10X or 100x or more that they would otherwise get for example in an IPO.
The behavior of (strndiff / strdiff) is different from strncmp or strcmp. strn?cmp does not return the offset. they are different functions.

and in order to ship this package to deb, deploy to different platform, use autotools to test C features is a requirement. (we used to build the project with cmake before we use autotools)
Yeah, it would have worked. But I am too lazy (among real disadvantages) to download all the libraries manually :)

Real disadvantages such as updating becomes so boring that you will probably never do that. And 'bower search <something>' followed by 'bower install <found it!>' is less distracting than googling and unzipping etc.

Being lazy pays off.
And to follow on, what was a specifically interesting:

Reports that the premium was less that 1/3 salary per FTE being offered by the "Acquirer".

That is, these so-called "M&A deals" were valued at <less than> a mass-head-hunting contract.

(That being said, the submitted article reads more like an OP-ED than a more mainstream piece of journalism.)
It sounds like you sort of know how to do it. Don't be negative. Ask questions. Help figure out solutions to hard problems. No one like naysayers who can actually be pretty dangerous. If the idea is truly awful it will be extremely difficult to raise money and recruit.
tl;dr Z grade "seed investor" doesn't have the network to make acqui-hires happen. Top tier investors have no such problem.
Patent holder ? Inventor ?

Honest question: Have you read their patent ? If so, why don't you think it has merit ?
Most people in liberal democracies other than the United States would disagree with your assertion about gun control. Given per capita gun deaths in the United States relative to other liberal democracies, it'd be hard to disagree with them.
The software is meant to generate content for an X11 viewer/presentation app using a simple text-based markup as input.

The HTML is an export. It's not what the software was really designed to produce.
That said, I don't know if the quality of the slides is really any better in the native viewer.
Devs getting paid well is nothing new. If you look at enterprise apps, we're making good money, but not more (or much more) than 10-15 years ago. Salaries have been pretty stagnant just like the rest of the middle class. The 21 yr old with 6 month experience making 100k. That is a newer development I think. Bubble.
a little bit curious. i'd think that is a correct assumption to be working with -> he accessed N documents, assume they're all compromised.
This is what scientific/rational beliefs are all about, open to new data and susceptible to change. Normally, when your long held beliefs somehow become part of your identity, it becomes harder to let go off them when contradicting data arrives. Being ambivalent is also seen as a negative trait since it signifies indecisive mind. There are shit loads of behaviors and expectations that evolution has invented which not only are not relevant today but also harm the society and individual in the long run.
Tell them only what is good about their idea.

This isn't meant to be a trick either. You should think really hard about what is good, and what works with their idea, and let them know what it is and why. They can use that to iterate and make something better. Many peoples' friends bad ideas end up solid products, but not because they were told what was shit, because they were told what was good and they optimized for it.
Seems like sour grapes to me. If the startup is only worth pennies on the dollar, why should the investors get more than fair market value? This seems an awful like new city bankers who are all in favor of unrestrained free market capitalism, until their ox gets gored, at which point they are first in line for a government handout.
it is one of those things that seem perfect on paper. and may even be good for the power user. but everyone knows that power user and consumer hardware are not a good match.

you are right about the apple patent. Apple bought fingerWorks in 2005 and killed ALL the loved product lines (of note, one keyboard that was in its entire area, a touchpad). apple sit on top of the company's IP assets and used it for nothing but suing people. ...and people still wonder why i avoid any apple product..

anyway, eventually the touch screen tech made it to the iphones. or so they say. but if you compare the fingerworks tech on the few shipped keyboards and the iphone resistive touchscreen, they have little in common. apple was just trolling everyone with the patents and killing innovation all around.

but since fingerworks was dead since 2005 thanks to apple, several other companies with employees that probably never even heard of finger works developed this idea... nokia as you mention. sony with psp. motorola with the backflip (which being one of the first AT&T exclusive android phones suffered of having the worst crap of custom android ROM that ever saw the light of day). And more recently the Oppo N1 already have the very same implementation idea mentioned in the article, and is in production. but you don't see anyone rushing to the stores.
Other features of the last 40 years, besides the drug war, include the virtual disappearance of urban rioting and the erasure of youth/minority political militancy.

I believe this is not a coincidence.

Arbitrary search and seizure, checkpoints, mass detention are common features of military counterinsurgency. They are also features of the drug war.

I'm not saying the drug war is consciously aimed at youth and minority citizens the way similar tactics were aimed at Communist guerrillas in the Malaya emergency, or Sunni insurgents in Iraq. But I am saying that the effect is about the same.

That's why it's probably a mistake to lean on rational utilitarian arguments against the drug war. The unspoken selling point is its unacknowledged side effects. Sure there are costs, but no more Watts, no more Black Panthers. The calculus of harm reduction is weak against dots that are never connected out loud.
There are a great deal of dangerous things that we don't stop citizens from doing, and some of those things seem entirely unproductive (or counterproductive -- a biological hazard), such as extreme sports.

We need a culture that stops people from doing dangerous drugs through cultural techniques, not through police and courts, and that's what the government did with cigarettes. The government realized that criminalizing cigarettes was probably outside of its power, and instead it waged a campaign against the culture of smoking. It painted cigarette smoking as biologically dirty and smokers as inconsiderate or reckless.

I think that cigarette use is no longer popular not because the police have been jailing cigarette smokers, but because it has become a mildly dirty activity. If you use the law to prohibit things, then people won't develop the oral or cultural methods to tell their kids to avoid certain dangers.
Hi! your implementation is inspiring to me. so I mixed some other ideas to implement this (for fun and experimentation).

this router library can be used for different purpose (outside of URL dispatching), although we don't gain so much performance from the point of view of each single request.
The jury is out and this is a lost cause. Unfortunately it is all about money. This is a massive business. The budget just keeps growing. 2015 drug budget:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/ondcp/about-co...

Of course they make it nearly impossible to figure out a real number of how much is going contractors but since the DEA is supposed to be about only drugs they had a $2,242M FY13 budget. Total contract actions in FY13: $513,659,660.69.

Largest recipient? A scandal plagued private security contractor. Meanwhile in an effort to curb spending House Republicans cut the syringe program in 2011. Needle sharing is 1/3 of all AIDS cases (354,000). Even if you don't want to change drug policy that is just simply a horrible idea.

Forbes article on the horror that happened in Portugal:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/07/05/ten-years-af...

As more State's legalize eventually Washington will need to do something. I have a feeling we will end up with decriminalization which is going to keep the murders, theft and other problems around.

In the meantime Michele Leonhart should be fired, arrested and charged. The NSA running around wild on the Internet is one thing but the DEA using that to build phony cases and investigations is an entirely different animal.
So explain like I'm five: is this an overly broad patent on an idea, e.g. they have a 'system and method for catching mice' and they're suing everyone who makes anything that catches mice? Or did they invent a particular type of mouse trap, and they're suing over someone who is selling the exact same implementation? I love a good angry mob as much as the next guy, and can fully get behind the name-calling if there's something truly nefarious, but help me understand exactly what's being litigated here and why AGIS is deserving of the 'piece of shit' label.
Are you serious? Many moved on to other criminal activity.
Religion can and does drive political agendas in the U.S., true, but the question is whether the WoDPUD (war on some politically unpopular drugs) is being driven primarily by religion.

I know of no evidence for that proposition, and can offer counterexamples. One would be the Interfaith Drug Policy Initiative, made up of Protestant, Catholic and Jewish clergy, which supports drug law reform:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interfaith_Drug_Policy_Initiati...

You're correct that historically, "anti-vice" austerity linked to Protestantism was a powerful force in American society. But the Prohibition era began nearly a century ago, and society may have changed in one or two teeny tiny ways since then. Like the 1960s? Plus the easy availability of Internet porn should give the lie to the concept that "anti-vice" religious mores are dominant. :)
Ambivalence does have an upside: it reduces the propensity of a person to react. When reacting could lead to worse outcomes ambivalence can be the better strategy. I also don't think ambivalence and indecisiveness are the same thing. Ambivalence says "don't care" or "not interested", whereas indecisiveness says "not sure" or "confused".
Actually, they might. Street level people are pawns who make nothing.
> "Good faith comments made among colleagues should not require sources"

I think you misunderstand the purpose of the "source: XYZ" comment in this and many other HN discussions. It's not meant to create an undeserved air of authority. It's meant to help contextualize the information being given.

When I talk about math curriculum, I usually tell people I teach fourth grade math in an inner-city school. That helps people understand that I'm talking from that perspective, rather than the perspective of a parent or an administrator. It also helps people understand how closely my experience matches the specific situation being spoken of (same grade level? Same demographics?) and it suggests which lines of inquiry I'd be most helpful in addressing (ie, "what does it cost to purchase district-wide curriculum" is beyond my expertise, but "how do your students handle such-and-such concept" is a great question.) It doesn't prove I'm a world-class expert or that nobody can argue with me or otherwise unfairly imbue my comment with false authority.

I think this is actually normal in cocktail party type conversations. "I heard this thing about [topic]." "Oh, I'm actually a [job] and here's some additional detail about [thing and topic] based on my experience."
It's techcrunch, not journalism.
The analogy to me seems similar to that of programmers and compilers. I want to write programs to do xyz, but I don't particularly care to know the lower-level to machine level implementation. Instead, I know a roughly-english set of instructions to tell the compiler what I want to do, and it takes care of the rest for me.

Could it not be possible to take this even further, to the point where I say "I want to do ..." and all of the "code," be it high or low level is generated for me.

I realize making something capable of this level of abstraction would be incredibly difficult, but it would certainly be fun to try.
Do they really suck? If someone had pitched Instagram, Twitter, or even facebook to me, I would have probably said they suck..
They lost 90% of their investment. Not what people usually call "a return".
The proprietary app in this example, has no idea whether they are dynamic linking with a version of libss that has the dlopen functionality (which is the case in the version of libss distributed with e2fsprogs), but there is also the version of libss distributed with Solaris SEAM and the MIT Kerberos v5 distribution which does not dlopen readline.

This is the problem of whether the GPL infects across dynamic linking. Yes, it is possible for GPL and proprietary code to be in the same process address space, without any knowledge of the owner of the proprietary address space. It was the user who decided to use a particular version of libss, not Solaris.
You tell them, as a knowlegable person in industry X in order for your idea for be a success you'll need at least $10 mm in capital in order to provide funding for:

A $1mm
B $2mm
C $500K
D $6.5mm

It's business he'll understand that you've analyzed and identified the obstacles and put together the budget to overcome these issues, I used to work in mining, many projects that will become successful require funding far in excess of $10mm.

After you say that, if you feel confident in his abilities and like the idea, you may want to become part of the business having demonstrated your ability to consult and manage risk to the business.

PS. His idea doesn't suck, it simply requires an amount of capital that may or may not exceed what he has at his disposal.
Your work has more value than the janitor's because you could do the janitor's job more easily than he could do yours.

Some of it is arbitrary on some level, but much of it is not.
A: Those cities would develop more obvious/visible crime problems as the drug traffickers fought amoungst themselves unabated. The police forces would take a big hit due to the loss of seizure revenue, which means less overtime and poorer coverage.

I think the "war on drugs" is a joke, but local action isn't going to be very effective, because the locality will bear the brunt of the negative effects.
You can talk about studies and all that and that's fine but I think this is horribly naive. The world is not a pop sociology book.
via postcard
This Quadriplegic Racer Drives a Corvette by Tilting His Head
Author is not a TC staff-writer / employee
As far as I know, the karma lost through down-votes on a comment is
permanently lost rather than returned/refunded when the comment is
deleted. Even if I'm right, your point still stands, since deleting a
down-voted comment would put an end to further down-votes, so it's
possible that some may delete comments to save face/karma. Similar could
be said for editing.

Unpopular opinions are always tough situation. Part of the problem stems
from "up" and "down" votes meaning different things in different
contexts. For example, up-voting a submission is a way to say "thanks"
for submitting it. This usage is problematic since the opposite of
"thanks" really doesn't exist. The typical negation "No Thanks" is not
strong enough, and "flag" is far too strong. For submissions, there is
no down-vote. In contrast, votes on comments are often used differently,
such as an up-vote being used to show "agreement", and a down-vote
being used to show "disagreement". The contrasting usage of votes
results in both user-centric context and submission/comment context
influencing what each vote means.
Usually there is a balance of power dynamic going on. The police know who the drug folks are, and basically let them be to some extent as long as they don't cross the line.

Chicago is a great example of why cops do this. The leadership of a few major gangs was taken out by the police, and the resulting power struggle basically ignited a street war with death counts similar to the war in Afghsnistan.
1. Maclean’s is a Canadian magazine, and it's a centre-right magazine (which would be centre-left in the U.S.).

2. The article mentioned anti-vaxxers as part of the overall anti-intellectual “movement” in the U.S.

This is someone else in the world observing how broken the U.S. has become over the last thirty years, and you contributing nothing to the discussion by saying it’s the “left ignoring its own problems”.
Also, I'm not sure how you got to this being about scientific / rational beliefs. I'd posit a persons emotion response to music is as irrational and unscientific as they come. Changing ones mind about music down the track (pun!) has nothing to do with an analysis of the data because, with regard to music, "good" is entirely subjective, as distinct from "quality" with regard to acuity.

I think this is the part of the 'science' that some people take issue with. The 'scientific method' isn't always an appropriate way to view everything.
That's exactly why it's so important to decriminalize (or outright legalize). Because the theory behind criminalization simply doesn't work. It is you who are naive, sir. Please see my other comments above. I explain this. I hope I explain this. What didn't I convey?
Lorimer Burst
Any tool that allows you to easily perform the antithesis of its function without making it abundantly clear what clicking the OK button will do is fundamentally broken.
Instead of accusing people of racism, why I don't you try actually answering the question? "OMG, he said crack rather than meth, therefore racism!" So, what did all the bootleggers do? I don't have any idea, so I'm probably a racist too... I do know alot of them became politicians, so I think the suggestion that they might turn to a different criminal enterprise is entirely on point.

According to Freakonomics, a lot of low-level drug dealers make less than minimum wage. So why do they take those jobs? Can they not find legal employment (ue to lack of opportunities, disqualification due to criminal record, insufficient education, etc. or are they rejecting legal employment for a job that's more exciting, more acceptable among their peers, has a higher maximum vale despite lower expected value, etc?

If they're rejecting legal employment it's entirely plausible they'll move on to a different (probably criminal) enterprise that has similar characteristics.
Why does it have to be on the back? Some old Android phones had a trackball (or an optical sensor like on a mouse) to be used as a sort of cursor. The Palm Pre had a small touch sensitive area below the screen that could be used for OS specific gestures (much better integrated than what Android used the trackball for IMHO).

All of these ideas are pointing to the issues in the use of a touchscreen as input (imprecise, blocks screen during use, etc), yet for some reason they keep getting used (and even taking over regular buttons).

I hope that this decision is being tested by the companies HCI departments, but I worry that marketing is deciding that changing the input would be too much of a risk (or cause fragmentation).
by sleeping with his girlfriend, then you don't have to listen to any of his future ideas! Problem solved.
I'm glad Sivers focused on the positive, but our preferences don't only change to like more things. It would have been interesting to hear what Sivers used to love that he now hates.

In fact, I think we end up enjoying fewer things as we get older. After all, 90% of everything is crap[1], and decades of experience make us better at discerning quality. Also, the more memories we have, the less likely any new one will compare favorably to our best ones.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law
Reading it again strdiff is the same as strspn, but your's doesn't actually handle c strings and reads past null. You can do feature tests yourself without pulling in the whole autotools mess: http://git.musl-libc.org/cgit/musl/tree/configure
Maybe VCs should be more selective about who they give their money to. I'll get downvoted for this, but it seems 90% of funded start-ups don't deserve the mass funding they deserve (a portion of it sure, but the hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions in VC $? no).
> The war on drugs has always been about racism, corruption, the militarization of police forces, civil forfeiture and the prison-industrial complex.

So, there's nothing about not liking the addicts who hassle people on the street?
ambivalence : "the state of having mixed feelings or contradictory ideas about something or someone"
Oh, no I'm not naive. You think some Pinker book shows that complete legalization would result in people involved in the drug becoming upstanding members of society. You talk of "criminals" as some kind of theoretical agent.