skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Could the HN model help cause an informed citizenry regarding politics?
It's 4th of July and as I write this it looks like Lessig's MayDay PAC[0] is going to fly. This is an exciting time that has me hopeful for the future of political participation by broader masses, and has me thinking even I could be more engaged than my usual generally voting along party lines for lack of familiarity with candidates (who can be bothered to research them all, right?).

Like I imagine for other regulars here, HN has done wonders for connecting me to so much of what's going on in the world, at least in the topics carried. I'm wondering if some take on the model of crowd-sourced consensus of what's true/interesting/important plus community discussion could cause a genuinely informed (and even engaged) citizenry in politics, just like HN does for tech.

A thorough understanding of politics (including a wide range issues, back stories, pro-and-con arguments, voting records, who's funded by who, and so on) requires so much sifting and winnowing, and it seems like the views you have are so largely determined by which sources you draw from (for example, I as a Daily Show fan see things way differently from the Fox News watching members of my family). This makes giving a shit hard, reduces it for many (myself included) to "too much work, can't be bothered".

In an age where well-funded PR campaigns can obscure, distort or outright bury the truth, I get excited to think of a source in which truth, thoughtful essays, and important stories bubble up to prominence in the very democratized[1] manner in which they do here on HN. Doubly so as we enter a mid-term election cycle: to tune into what matters as crowd-chosen by a mindful community who dukes it out in the comment section seems like a much better way to keep informed and play a part.

Does anyone feel the same? Does such a thing exist? Anyone wanna build it if not? :)

[0] https://mayday.us/
[1] Read: hard to hijack.
On a theorical point of view I agree with you. In practice there's a world of difference in presentation if you use the semantics for a select box or roll your own solution.

In a way I am very intersted in what Google is doing with the material UI. They seem to be ditching native components to reimplement everything.

Basic css is simple and fun. It gets hairy when you try anything mildly complex, and you start to learn magic spells when playing the "I made this screen in Photoshop, make it pixel with pixel perfect fidelity in HTML" game.
I think maybe you misunderstood the statement. Not funded as in "my startup just got funded." More like, "we are funded by US government grants that preclude us from hiring aliens." Just my guess.
Is there an EPUB version?
Wasn't this stolen from a dealership? Surprised they wouldn't have it turned on before they sold the car.
Stolen Tesla Torn in Two
Moai is opensource and the html host has been merged. http://github.com/moai/moai-dev , (moaifiddle is also opensource but doesn't actually build the moaijs.js file (it just uses a prebuilt one. http://github.com/halfnelson/moaifiddle)

Third party dependencies are all statically linked and compiled by emscripten too, so the moaijs.js includes box2d, lua, libpng, libjpg, tinyxml all compiled in from their sources.

Best of luck!
Because the media uses lossy compression, the uncompressed version of the compressed file still contains artifacts of compression. If you the re-compress the file, so add even more artifacts.

A good example of this is the guy who re-uploaded the same video to YouTube many times.

http://mashable.com/2010/06/03/youtube-i-am-sitting/
> Do you expect me to answer 'no'?

Only if you know anything about the history of campaign finance regulation and First Amendment jurisprudence in the U.S., which I guess you do not.
MIT Lincoln Labs is funded by the department of defense. They do a lot of classified work, and may have large areas that are off-limits to non-US citizens. I had a Summer internship at a similar institution, where my work wasn't classified, but was sensitive enough and close enough to classified work that only US citizens were allowed past the keypad lock to my desk area.
oh great, so glad I bought that Tesla.
Alan Kay shows the Rand tablet
upload a screenshot of a webpage?
Right. Money is not the only source of power.
Blinked.ca, A bitmessage web client with in browser encryption
Parking Sign Redesign: A more visual, timechart-based street parking sign
This makes as much sense as saying the first robots capable of swimming will be human-form-factor pack mules designed to take small waterproof packs from China, swim over the Pacific, and deposit them in America. Container ships make a heck of a lot more sense, right? Why optimize for pattern-matches-with-a-human on a task that humans inherently suck at?

Incidentally, in quite possibly the only time I've ever agreed with him, Noam Chomsky said that this sort of example makes debating whether a machine will ever "think" pointless, since you're debating the word "think" in English rather than any fact about material reality. We don't say that container ships count as a machine "swimming", but Russians do.
> Anyone that is against Super PACs and "getting money out of politics" is arguing that speech needs to be reduced.

No they're arguing Super PACs distort and limit healthy, democratic speech; that Super PACs are detrimental to speech.

The corollary to your assertion is that Super PACs increase speech. But this 'increased speech' can similarly be 'increased' by foreign political donations, which highlights the absurdity of these 'speech' claims to anyone interested in reclaiming a properly functioning democracy.
Sam Harris, whose PhD is in neuroscience, wrote a piece on drugs that elegantly lays out the potential benefits and pitfalls that come with the use of hallucinogens, and how there may be other routes, e.g. meditation, to similar experiences. http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/drugs-and-the-meaning-of-...
This presumes that downsampling in either bit depth or sample rate isn't happening somewhere (such as your audio drivers) between decompressing the audio and where you're capturing the audio.
Here in China? Perhaps.
Find another planet, or the moon.

Populate it.

There are jobs here, there will be jobs there.

A million will not be sufficient.
"Sec. 103(f) of the DMCA (17 U.S.C. § 1201 (f)) says that if you legally obtain a program that is protected, you are allowed to reverse-engineer and circumvent the protection to achieve the ability the interoperability of computer programs (i.e., the ability to exchange and make use of information)."

Though I wouldn't want to have to test that in court. IANAL.
I tend to agree with how using table to do layout got vilified for often very little reason. On the other hand, when dealing with responsive sites, or wanting to switch layouts in javascript for a reason or another, using css is the only sane way.

Hopefully, css tables are very usable, and playing with them is nice and smooth most of the time. Being able to cleanly redeine grids of content on the fly is one of the big advances that css brought to the table I think.
I didn't see where it said anything about being stolen from a Tesla Store. Tesla doesn't sell through dealerships.
I note that if you're using this for SaaS (paid subscription site, etc.), you need a premium license, which is 50X more expensive.

http://bootstrapbay.com/licenses

I think that's a consideration for a lot of people here. And this is not the case with wrapbootstrap.com.

(edit)
I originally said Themeforest had the same restrictions as BootstrapBay, but it appears they have changed their license description significantly and it only affects you if you're distributing it in a sold product. But don't take my word for it:

http://themeforest.net/licenses/regular
Here is a link to the actual research article, "Enhanced repertoire of brain dynamical states during the psychedelic experience."

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/enhanced/doi/10.1002/hbm.2256...
Last month, an American doctor who is working with Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières/MSF) wrote these really harrowing and sad letters home from the heart of the Ebola outbreak:

http://news.unchealthcare.org/news/2014/june/dispatch-from-g...
> Why do you pick Java again and again?

Well, first because of the JVM (excellent performance, great dynamic linking, great runtime monitoring/profiling/management), and among the JVM languages Java is simple, fast, well supported with a huge user-base, and very suitable for large-team development (other people's code is, for the most part, easy to understand and maintain). I consider Java's downsides (verbosity -- pretty much on par with Go) minor annoyances at most. I find advanced features offered by other languages (like more elaborate type systems) not worth their cost in complexity and maintainability (and in that respect Clojure is different: it doesn't add complexity, and it tackles really big problems rather than minor annoyances).
To Park or Not to Park: a parking sign redesign + urban intervention project
Boto (AWS Python SDK) goes green, top 19 libraries now support Python 3
(note: this comes mostly from a background in scientific/numerical programming in C)

You are certainly right if one takes "predictable" to mean something close to "deterministic"; on the other hand I think there are numerous almost-deterministic characteristics that can be evaluated without resorting to plain-ol' empiricism (particularly involving likelihood of hits in L1/L2/L3 and likelihood of being able to speculatively execute particular branches of code).

So I would agree that my a priori predictions may be a factor of 2-3x off; OTOH I often succeed in predicting that a particular tight loop will never have to leave L1, or that a low-entropy condition in the loop will be made essentially irrelevant by speculative execution.

With that proviso, I share your belief that JITs seem to be the best hope for top performance (and I am a heavy user of LuaJIT).
500 Startups’ newly released fundraising docs will keep you from getting screwed
Just like programming, a lot of time can be spent debugging. Also, just like programming, the more systematic your approach, the less time you will spend debugging.

The solution is to stay DRY by applying OOCSS/SMACSS/BEM concepts using Sass/Less.
Boom City, Photos of Firework Cross Sections That Reveal Their Colorful Contents
D Lang forums have probably never seen the amount of traffic that those places get, for one, so you haven't actually experienced it though.
You're right, if someone suggested Kallithea as an alternative to either of those, that would be a correct objection.

I have used hg-git quite a bit. The interoperability is pretty much flawless. There have been occasional hiccups when i updated a version of one component (hg, hg-git, git, dulwich) but not others, and everything broke, but it was usually quick to fix. The biggest problem was performance - for some reason, on large repositories, a push which would have taken a fraction of a second with git took tens of seconds with hg-git. And of course, you can't take advantage of all the powerful new features like changeset evolution.
An Explanation of the Science Behind Fireworks Shows
Google representative on the radio today indicated that the search result suppressed is for one of the thread's commenters and not for the bank executive's name which will still return the correct link.

Given this my comment is probably too harsh, there is no evidence that Google isn't properly assessing requests that I am aware of.
One of the strongest arguments against FEC limits on
speech is that many (very long-term) incumbent politicians
support it.

If I was a politician, I would attempt to capture both the benefits of big-money politics and the benefits of public opposition to big-money politics.

So, in my public speeches to voters I would claim I was 100% in favour of campaign finance reform - I'm concerned, just like you! I don't like these million-dollar donors, I got into politics to represent normal Americans like yourself! Unfortunately until the system changes I have to go along with it, obviously, so I will be taking some million-dollar donations. Once elected I'll get on that reform as soon as I can, honest! First I have to fix the economy/ensure national security/balance the budget/ban guns/fight terrorism/take on the banks/fix the college tuition bubble/deal with income inequality/reform patents/fix contraception access/educate more scientists/fix agricultural subsidies/reduce our dependence on foreign energy/reform immigration/fix the DHS/stand up to Putin/bring peace to the middle east/kiss this baby. As soon as those are done, campaign finance reform will be my top priority.

Hence, I'd get the money of the big donors without alienating regular voters by publicly supporting the current (messed up) state of campaign finance.
Show HN: I Wanna Be Thy Copy
i.e. ISHYGDDT
Google representative on the radio today indicated that the search result suppressed is the name of one of the thread's commenters and not for the bank executive's name which will still return the correct link.

Given this my comment is probably too harsh, there is no evidence that Google isn't properly assessing requests that I am aware of.
I think at some point, this will be impractical and you will have to either commit digital suicide, or accept it. This is really sad, but I see it as inevitable. Governments will always have the power to pull this stuff off without our consent. If they can't get these things their way, then they will (or maybe already have) localized EMP charges that can disable targets. With the police force that is becoming increasingly militarized, I can see a car chase ending differently in the future. I don't support it, and yes we should do something about it. But what? Do the people really need to wait until it's at the brink?
What OnStar did is disable the gas pedal. Brakes still worked, and steering still worked. Imagine if you had run out of gas.
The GP's question isn't if current re-encoders are capable of recovering the original compressed data, but rather if it's theoretically possible to write a decompressor that given the parameters to the psyco-acoustic model that's introducing most of the artifacts, is able to produce a compressed file that still has artifacts, but no new artifacts.

Yes, it sounds theoretically possible, but it may involve searching a huge search space and may be computationally infeasible.
> Yes, they've asked to arrest - ie, detain - him to question him. They haven't charged him with any crime.

He's been properly charged. The fact that this meme refuses to die is my whole point about tribalism, the meme's not merely misleading, it's false, and yet it continues to persist, and for no reason. After all, he might very well be found not guilty, especially if the evidence against him is so flimsy as his supporters claim, but Assange has prevented the trial from even reaching that point, and his supporters believe that this is proper because the situation pertains to His Wikiness and for no other reason.

The "questioning" they will be doing of Assange is to ensure that there are no mitigating facts that Assange would be able to bring to cause the prosecutor to rescind the charges based on the mounds of evidence already accumulated. Afterwards he will be immediately taken into custody (and somehow I doubt he will be released on bail given his current ongoing flight from justice).

Nor is this simply a rogue prosecutor in Sweden, Assange's case was heard by an appeals court in Sweden and in multiple appeals courts in the U.K., all of which determined that there was sufficient evidence shown to demonstrate that the trial could proceed.
About optimization: If you really want to, the JVM can be surprisingly unrestrictive. You'd be amazed at the slightly mad things for example HFTs do with it. Advanced techniques include object reuse so you never activate the GC and unsafe calling of native code. Then there's the weird things you can do with the JVM directly. I can't find anything right now, but I recall weird annotations and multiline JVM arguments more wizardlike than anything. Finally there's alternative JVMs for those who want that.
Spotify is a Swedish / UK company. Everything America is not.
> Maybe he did rape her, but she only came forward after seeing him in the media.

If the idea of an HN user saying that the charges are B.S. because a rape victim didn't file them until she found out he was a public figure doesn't fully demonstrate my point about misogyny, I can't imagine what would.

P.S. He was a public figure even before 2010, btw.
This is ancient stuff though, is this still relevant today?
Actually in Russian a ship 'goes' :)
It did not explode. The scattered batteries burned. There was no explosion.

Stop with the stupid sensationalism.
People still use MongoDB in 2014?
CSS is fundamentally broken -- it lacks a property which is pretty basic to all systems, namely abstraction. I think Paul Chiusano put it way better than I could: http://pchiusano.github.io/2014-07-02/css-is-unnecessary.htm...
Something with 'many wallets'. You know, just like the many eyes principle.
It is good to provide for research purposes - however, why not provide SURF as well if this (research comparison) is the case? SURF is equally popular and arguably more effective. Way more popular than "Tonality" and the other features at the tail end of the list... have my hater hat on here for a moment.
Thanks for the correction -- my memory is apparently failing me.
If you really need screen estate, get an external monitor. I've used a 15 inch MBP since 2008 and before today I couldn't have imagined downgrading. I bought a used 11 inch MBA off gumtree today and have surprisingly found it more than adequate for the job. In particular I'm enjoying the prospect of truly mobile computing.

Personally, I think the most ideal web development machine is the 13 inch Dell XPS Developer Edition with Ubuntu.
really, what's the point of that comment?
Great article! I'm already a huge fan of Sam Harris, but I hadn't read this one yet.

That being said though - I disagree with the notion that meditation can lead to similar experiences. Meditation can certainly create very powerful and "spiritual" experiences, but only for people who are both extremely skilled meditators (which is not realistic to expect even 1% of the users of psychedelics to accomplish) and only while meditating (with psychedelics you can see/hear/taste/feel/experience the environment around you, not just the environment of your mind like with meditation).

Psychedelics should certainly be handled with extreme care (yet there's the paradox that being overly anxious/nervous about the experience may cause a bad experience), no doubt about it.

One of the cardinal rules of psychedelic use is to never do it alone though, his near-death experience in Nepal was due to breaking that rule. Being together with someone else isn't a guarantee of not having a bad trip/experience, but it's a good way to prevent putting yourself in dangerous situations like he did.
The only unclaimed territory on the planet
Frankly, both papers you linked give no justification for using the mel filterbank instead of any other filtering/frequency reduction before doing the IDCT to get the cepstrum. This is what I mean! Why take a filterbank designed for audio and apply it to images except to use the buzzwords? In any case, at least I know it is used by researchers (even if I don't agree with the why). Thanks!
At the very least it makes a good demo for a technique that could be applied in other situations. Or even just the hack value (see the jargon file). Many things have value in some indirect way.
Lessig's Mayday PAC Scrambling To Cross Crowd Funding Finish Line
I do a lot of CSS at work, yes.

> it isn't going to bother you if something takes an hour -- that's a perfectly good, billable hour.

I don't particularly care for the implication that I find working slowly to be acceptable. My company rewards developers well for finishing fixed-bid (i.e. almost all) projects early, since it directly results in more revenue for the company - thus, it's in my direct best interest to get any work done (styling or otherwise) as quickly as possible. Plus, I like anything that makes me more efficient / makes things easier for me.

> I'm not sure how you could possibly know whether or not CSS is good enough without knowing what else may be possible.

You've made an error in your reasoning. It would not be possible for me to know that CSS is the best, but it's certainly possible to know that CSS is good enough. There's a certain, explicit bar for "good enough" and that is being able to complete a project in a number of hours that is less than or equal to the amount we quoted our client. I'm able to meet or exceed that bar with regularity - thus, I can conclude that my toolchain as a whole is "good enough".

> Supposedly, people in the past did not know that horses are slow.

My mind is definitely open to a better alternative - however, I feel entitled to a healthy degree of skepticism, given that I'm already doing better than "good enough".
That is the point - if SIFT is patented (though it is free for research it is not clear that Yahoo got commercial licensing) it is prohibited to generate their keypoints, even if it is to compare to your own! Just because they don't prosecute, doesn't mean it is OK. I guess in this case, Yahoo might have taken the heat for you. Hopefully they got a proper license agreement, as that would be great for everyone.
Games with in-app purchases are the single mobile app category making the most money. Why would you think Dungeon Keeper is doing badly? If it is, it's probably because it's to complex to play on the bus or something.
There are browser plugins such as Spectrum [1] that might be more useful.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/spectrum/ofclemegk...
Yes, there are still problems with the election protocol, e.g. [1]. The right kind of network partitions can cause multiple primaries to stay up indefinitely, accepting writes on both sides of the partition, which will eventually be rolled back. There is another problem with the election protocol that allows writes acknowledged by a majority of machines to be rolled back after an election.

Both of these problems can be fixed by using something like Raft[2] or Paxos for elections, rather than the ad hoc mechanisms used today.

In TokuMX[3], we're currently working on replacing the election algorithm with something similar to Raft, that will eliminate these sources of data loss. We've heard that MongoDB is also working on fixing replication, but we don't know what their exact plans are (they have a bigger challenge since they need to stay compatible with their existing replication algorithms, which use timestamps as transaction identifiers) or whether these fixes will end up in 2.8 or in a later version.

[1]: https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-9848

[2]: https://ramcloud.stanford.edu/wiki/download/attachments/1137...

[3]: http://docs.tokutek.com/tokumx
Interesting. We have lots of area designated as neighborhood residents only if you're staying longer than 2 hours. But I don't think there's any place where a neighborhood sticker gets out out of the fees. Might be a good approach.
How to know when to stop dating and get married:

1) n = number of people you could date in your lifetime

2) Date n/e people without stopping.

3) After dating n/e people, marry the first person who is better than everyone you've dated previously.

This method selects the best candidate about 37% of the time, which sounds bad but is superior to other systematic methods.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_stopping

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem