skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This issue is bigger than just voting in new politicians. It's on the order of slavery, women's suffrage, the "trail of tears", prohibition, civil rights in the South, etc. In other words, to reign in surveillance will take enormous will on the part of the people to change deeply rooted systems of government and power that reach far beyond any single politician.

Unfortunately I don't think the people have the will to change this currently because the harm being done is so well hidden, even after Snowden's revelations.
This is the github link of the project: https://github.com/DemocracyOS/app

The initial implementation seems to be around discussing bills.

From the FAQ:
"citizens can present projects to be debated, and representative present for debate those bills currently in debate in Congress. DemocracyOS has three basic actions: "get informed," "join the conversation," and "vote.""

How can an identified user remain safe? How can anonymous users be trusted?
Ho! He is right.

Just the problem of redistribution is like a problem of multiple bath tubs pouring water in a bigger common bathtub (the wealth) and how it is recycled (the water flowing back to the top in no respect of any scientific analogy).

you could globally be happy that for all the bathtubs of the world to observe a ratio of wealth repartition that is less extreme.

but where does this wealth/water comes from?

the rich who are already experiencing a favorable bias toward tax paying or the active workers who are paying relatively more taxs comparing to their income?

Tax does not transform into wealth maybe?

No, but education does: a worker with an easier access to the education worths more for the economy. Health insurance makes a worker available in good conditions for more productive years. (No wonders that health insurance are almost forced for highly paid workers; the company should ensure its working forces are productive).

So if the richer don't pay as much taxes, taxes being more profitable for the richer it is de facto (just by the sheer disappearance of the resources indirectly provided by the states) a logical decrease of the «second order» resources.

Yes in the world globally situation increases positively in terms of repartition, but locally because mostly we have the same incentive all around the world, the situation decreases.

The inequality are globally more balanced, but locally tending towards more non linear repartition. With a nice sigmoid.

this will go on as long as there is no fiscal equity amongst all citizens, whatever the country, whatever the religion, or social/political/economical belief.

It all boils down to how retro action works. And the shape of the curves of taxes. Every single steps, every non linear progression you make, you introduce distinct clusters of citizens which interests will diverge with the rest.

Put a sigmoid in the way people pay taxes/get credit refound, and your society will have a sigmoid in its structure, thus creating the probability of some divergence of opinions on what is equity or egality.

Are the 2 extremum wishable? All persons living at the average, or a cast system with n distincts layers, or can their exists «harmonious» level of wealth in a society that could results in less frictions?

Mathematically I am pretty sure we could agree that when a curve have 2 extremum that are not optimums (casts system or uniform normative systems) we should find the rules for an optimum in the middle.

Now in real life, maybe it is time to see the inequality not as a philosophical problem, but rather as process that can be engineered for the greater good of every one: slackers, billionnaires, hobos, politicians all alike.

The first step at my opinion would be to forbid any rules in the form IF DISCRETE cond A then apply X else apply Y
in laws and tax formulation.
> question: Would net neutrality mean that my ISP could offer only one option on speed?

Even if your ISP made it one speed with one price, then you would shop around and find the best speed at the best price, which is why you would definitely want Net neutrality bc it leads to competition on the ISP's.
Ask HN: Do you use Code Search?
Do you use code searching tools like https://code.ohloh.net? Why or why not?
You'll have to start by convincing the electorate that collecting all the data "just in case" is a bad thing. "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" is a belief people actually hold about aggregation of private data.
Ask HN: Is Your Income above Your Country's Median Income?
I've seen a lot of submissions and comments to Hacker News recently about income inequality, which is perhaps not a core topic here but a topic a lot of people care about. It occurred to me that I might better understand where other participants are coming from on the income inequality issue if I can get a reality check on whether you are above or below your country's median level of income. My wild guess is that most Hacker News participants have incomes above the median levels in their countries, but please let me know so I understand this issue better.
As someone going through the US immigration process at the moment, the real issue as far as immigration reform goes should not be raising the H-1B cap, but rather fixing the insane greencard backlog. At the moment its pretty common for people to have to spend over a decade waiting in a legal limbo with an uncertain future.

In addition to this, requiring companies to sponsor greencards for all H1-B workers would go a long way toward stopping those who are simply looking for cheap captive labour and would leave the pool open to those companies who are legitimately looking for skilled workers in good faith.
"Restricting H1B visas will increase offshoring"

Actually something I have seen twice now and heard about being a common occurrence is H1-B people come here. Get sent home eventually after they are all trained up by the company.

Then they obtain an offshore contract with the company and any of there other contacts they made while they were here.

So its a big win for the company because they get someone offshore that is trained in their ways and now that they are offshore they work for even less than when they were here.
Thanks! I'll relay on your words to those responsible.
For every storage drive I have two backup drives. One of them I store in my home (but not connected to my computer) and one of them is stored encrypted (FileVault full disk encryption) at my friends place.

I use this to backup:

rsync -vaxXES --delete --backup --backup-dir="/Volumes/backup/__rsync/$(date +"%Y-%m-%d_%H%M%S")/" --log-file="/Volumes/backup/__rsync/$(date +"%Y-%m-%d_%H%M%S").log" --exclude="__rsync/" --exclude=".Trash/" --exclude=".Trashes/" --exclude=".Spotlight-V100" --exclude=".fseventsd/" --exclude=".DocumentRevisions-V100/" --exclude=".TemporaryItems/" /Volumes/data/ /Volumes/backup/

Sometimes i delete stuff in the __rsync dir manually.

I've tried Crashplan and Backblaze, but they're crazy slow from Sweden.
> why shouldn't those developers be paid as much as brain surgeons?

Do they actually make that much? Should they get paid that much if they do?
Not an answer, but I just checked localhost.com to see what is there. 302 redirect to google.
You don't get it. The squatter has been in the home for 30 days. On that 30th day he has tenants rights and the owner has to go through the process. If the owner knew what she was doing or hired somebody competent to manage her property she wouldn't be in this situation. AirBNB isn't a property manager. If you don't know what you're doing you shouldn't be renting out your home as a business.
I can accept the article's premise that income inequality is falling when you look at incomes globally. However the fact that there are still stratified, separated markets makes his analysis a moot point.

Things may be getting better in Africa, but they aren't in the US. Since I currently live in the US I'm more concerned about how income inequality is rising here, which is something that his article brushes off as a non-concern simply because I live in a developed nation.

He goes on to argue that I shouldn't worry about how my real wages haven't been increasing because globalization has allowed the wealthy to profit from a bidding war between me and the rest of the world. I'm actually okay with other people being brought up to my standard of living. I'm not okay with people using that as an excuse as to why my own standard of living should be stagnant or declining.

He's arguing that I need to "reframe" my point of view. What that really means is that I shouldn't worry about my own problems, but rather be happy that the rest of the world is improving.
It's remarkable how many people in the NYT comments dismiss this as a distraction from the more important issue of within-country inequality. I guess it's more important to help out someone earning $15,000 a year who looks like us, than someone who earns $400 a year who doesn't. Global poverty is truly horrific, on a level that most people in the first world can't even comprehend, and its continued reduction is one of the really great (incomplete) triumphs of human history.

I suppose I'm being uncharitable here. I'd guess the more likely explanation is mood affiliation--people want a political revolution in response to real problems (inequality, global warming, poverty, war, surveillance) and are resistant to any news that does not fit into this narrative of decline.
Looks like it's updated. Thank you for the tip!
As far as I can tell, programming talent is distributed evenly all over the world. So why does the US have such a large software industry? Because a lot of the top talent worldwide wants to come here and work. Places like Silicon Valley have a far-outsized share of the top 5% of talent.

That's the single reason our industry can command high wages -- you can certainly hire overseas developers cheaper but it's hard to find the same kind of talent concentrations our tech centers have. Even though you need to pay way more to hire in the US (and remember, software is an industry where people are your big cost) companies still find it worthwhile to build things here.

For those of us who are US citizens, this is a bonanza. There is a huge, highly-compensated industry in our back yard. And we're already allowed to work anywhere we want in it, no years of paperwork needed. We're not even forced to move oceans away from our families or work in a second language.

The H1B/L1's etc that you would send home? Guess what -- they will be competing against you anyway, just sitting in a different country. There won't be any H1B rules requiring pay equity with US citizens, and many of those countries have lower costs overall. They will be providing more downward pressure on US wages, not less. Plus they won't even be paying US taxes any more.

The idea that by driving the world's top talent out of the country will mean that US programmers will be living like kings is a silly myth. All it would demonstrate is how mobile those jobs are. If you wanted to keep working in your field, maybe you'd have to become the emigrant.

But I know that ultimately I'm just wasting keystrokes here. The anti-H1B bias in our industry just seems to grow and grow. People think that Silicon Valley and similar places are some naturally occurring money geyser -- if only we just put a "natives-only" sign on it we'd keep it all for ourselves. (And it goes without saying that by "natives" they're perversely talking about people whose great-grandparents immigrated from Europe) I think the endgame is that the US tech industry will eventually die, and programming wages will mostly equalize with the third world. The tighter you grab it, the faster it runs through your fingers.

Personally if I ran immigration policy it would be completely the opposite -- if you're a high-achieving STEM graduate with a US company dying to hire you I would hand you a passport before you had the chance to change your mind. It's so much better for the US when smart people are benefiting our economy, not competing against it.
gotta fill those exabytes somehow

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
I just wish I knew how to do that.
This would make sense for a website that actually has content people want. Traffic to example.com surely wouldn't be intentional or repeated, and certainly not the result of an end user typing "example.com" into the address bar.
the tenants knew what they were doing, they paid for 30 days.
"People don't like to be meddled with. We tell them what to do, what to think, don't run, don't walk. We're in their homes and in their heads and we haven't the right. We're meddlesome." -- River Tam
> This issue is bigger than just voting in new politicians.

If you kick out enough politicians in a Democracy, you get a completely new majority government. We need to kick out about 55% of Congress.
That first sentence is so poorly written.
sheesh. your comment isn't a pleasant place to spent time. someone needs some internet kitten love.
I currently use them and have no issues. I'm a validated customer and they take even the personal validations very seriously. They even check based on domain names, if you have financial in your domain name, be prepared to be questioned on why you are getting a free ssl certificate.
> Would net neutrality mean that my ISP could offer only one option on speed?

This is not what "net neutrality" is meant to cover.

> So, maybe my ISP would work with, say, Vimeo and give me good service when I was using Vimeo but not work with YouTube or Netflix and from them, then, give me poor service, largely independent of what option I am buying from my ISP.

This is exactly what net neutrality is intended to cover. Although often what is going on is this instead:

You buy internet from verizon (just picked them arbitrarily as an example) - they also sell you cable tv at an added cost - both sent over the same wires/fibers.

So, verzon is selling you two different services: internet access and cable tv.

But, via. your "internet access" service, you can also buy netflix, amazon prime tv, vimeo, hulu+, etc., all of which also see you "cable tv" (of varying different "degrees").

So, verizon actually has a conflict of interest here. On one hand, they are selling you a service (network traffic to the internet) that provides you an ability to buy "cable tv" from someone other than verizon. They (verizon) would naturally prefer you pay them for cable tv than pay someone else, because they receive more income that way. So they (verizon) have a profit incentive to artificially make netflix, amazon prime tv, vimeo, hulu+, etc., appear to be "less capable" or "lower quality" than their own cable tv package, in order to encourage you to buy from them instead of buying from the other guy.

That's usually where the "net neutrality" issue really comes up. If the ISP's were only network providers, there would be little incentive on their own part to artificially make one network endpoint look slower/faster/better/worse than another. But because of the consolidations they are no longer just ISP's, they are ISP's plus content providers (the cable tv sides). And that produces the conflicts of interest that result in the motives to prioritize one service over another. And often the incentive is to try to suggest to their customers that their internet pipe can't make a perfectly good cable tv delivery mechanism at the same time. Because if you the customer realize your fast internet pipe can double as a cable tv delivery means, then you also realize you don't need to pay 2x70/month but only need to pay 70/month (also picking 70 at random). So their income would collapse by half overnight if enough customers realized that fact.
I think there is a big craze with regard to ML. Most people just draw a black box call it ML/Brain/"hire data scientist" without realizing that for most nontrivial problems its not going to work like magic. Some of the things that I see people underestimating is; a) how hard it is to make the magic black box b) amount of data you need c) how clean the data needs to be d) at times, you need lots of human annotated data -- cost and time to collect it e) how much it's a art than a science. Moreover, people don't have a good understating of the technical challenges and cost when you need to scale to n (features) * m (customers) * p (products). Maybe Azure solves some of these challenges but quickly looking at the pricing -- it seems like its a bit too costly.
Search-and-rescue drone mission readies for takeoff after defeating FAA
No, I won't work for you full time.  But I'll do something better
A lot of demographers would say that the causation goes the other way around from what you said, in other words that countries with young populations tend to get involved in more wars and more domestic unrest.
I wrote about this exact situation and the legality's regarding it in 2012.

http://harknesslabs.com/post/32179239260/gaming-airbnb-in-sa...

The gist of it, is that San Francisco and California's rental and rent control laws will supersede any private contract you can write. No way around it. If there was a way around it, you can bet that landlords would simply be including clauses in all new leases they say "rent control not valid here".

What I wrote in the above article amazingly still stands today. You can even find a 1bedroom in Nob Hill for a affordable 2200 a month! https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/1605304?

There is so much education AirBnB should be doing for their hosts in CA and SF especially.

Did you know that if someone rents a airbnb listing in SF for more than 30 days, they can stay there forever, so long as they keep paying rent? Yeah, no mention of that when you create a new listing on the site.
Whatever happened with "StartSSL, please revoke me"?
It seems that these problems would be better solved at the database level. It is just that the open source databases lack good implementations of materialized views and data replication to slaves. Instead you have this more fragile solution involving the Postgres, RabbitMQ, and Redis to accomplish nearly the same thing.
>When some corporation proposes increasing the H-1B quota, tell them that you agree with them but ask them to include the stipulations your outlined above.

This is a political non starter. They'll ignore you.
The disconnect here is that downvotes are considered OK when you simply disagree with something. The problem arises in that people can be made "dead" when this happens, and that individual posts become virtually unreadable because a few people disagreed with them.
What forces and how do you address them?
There's no content that could be ranked. https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aexample.com
"Sure, pay us $35."

I believe the exact quote during the Heartbleed incident was, "Dead serious." https://twitter.com/startssl/status/453631038883758080
Ask HN: What is the salary for a Software Engineering Manager?
Many other threads or polls focus on engineers or remote workers, but I'm interested in those who are in software engineering management positions.

Include base salary + bonuses / stock + job title + location
I had forgotten about the analogy with electron speed in wires - thank you! I remember my music teacher giving me a very funny look when I pointed it out, and then claiming that electrons must move through wires at the speed of light...when of course it is the electric field "wavefront" that does so.
Overcoming Imposter Syndrome (2013)
The name was confusing, expected to see something about an Operating System? Does OS stand for Online Space?
Un-Official Google Eclipse Plugin for Luna 4.4 Download
I will definitely consider your comments on "speech grandiosity"! They are good points. Thank you.
RelayRides?
JustShareIt?
Getaround?

etc.
I like the new title better, thanks.
Opening a PDF in browser is more convenient. That way the PDF behaves like another browser tab. Opening a PDF in an external viewer could be only one click and one alt+tab more, but it's less convenient and reduces usage. And it would leave one extra file in your downloads folder.
A very thoughtful article!
As someone working in the US on a H1B I am against raising the cap. Instead I think this visa should be replaced with one that can not be used by consulting companies and offers a short clear path to a green card.

The main problem is that the majority of people on this visa are being used as tools to drive down US wages. These are the people working for consulting shops in the middle of no where making below market wages while being forced to do mind numbing work.

It is very hard for someone in a situation like this to switch jobs. Their is also no incentive for their employers to sponsor them for a green card until they absolutely have to. It's not uncommon to find people spending close to a decade being one step away from being deported.

I want immigration reform not the perpetuation of a half baked visa that favors big companies and allows immigrants to be easily exploited. In summary I think talented people should be encouraged to work in the US but on an equal footing to everyone else. Raising the H1B cap is not immigration reform.
because it disturbs the visual perception and prevents people from glossing.
Germany and the United States: Unprecedented Breach
US terrorist database growing at rapid rate; currently at 1.5 million
You think it is remarkable that people prefer to help those who are within their local communities? That's practically in our biological makeup.

As much as utilitarianism looks good on paper, ignoring emotions in understanding human behavior strikes me as equally remarkable.
Lobbying against environmental or financial regulations is one thing. Taking on the national security state is something else entirely. I don't think it's loony or hyperbolic to say that the military/intelligence world really runs the U.S. at many levels. The U.S. has been a national security state at the highest levels since WWII transformed America from a civilian-centered economy to a military one and created what Eisenhower called the "military industrial complex." The whole topic makes for very interesting history... look into the national security act of 1947 for a starting point.

At lower levels you have a vestigial democracy and true "independent" free enterprise, but when you get to be a company the size of Apple you are too big to blend in with the ordinary civilian economy. Getting that large results in immediate audience before the king, which in America is the military/intelligence shadow state. I'd be very surprised if one can ascend to the billion-dollar stratum in America without some very interesting closed-door meetings with strict NDAs. I'm also sure that all kinds of next-level stuff kicks in when you start to become a major international corporation that does heavy business overseas, as Apple is.

There are endless forms of soft power that can be brought to bear against a large company, especially a publicly traded one. You've got the standard issue tax evasion practices of every major corporation for starters. Don't want to help us spy on users? How about a high-resolution IRS audit and some "offshore banking reform" specifically targeted at you? Then there's anti-trust, which is obviously selectively enforced. Does Apple have anything that could be called a monopoly or a monopolistic business practice?
That's usually because sales, engineering, etc are "profit" centers, while HR/Accounting/Reception are "cost" centers. One group produces while the other consumes. So, it's really comparing apples to oranges.
Apple can boot the device over USB using a custom image that doesn't require the passcode. Other people can't because it needs to be signed with Apple's key in order to run.
OS stands for operating system, I think, but euphemistically in the sense of "Our vision is that DemocracyOS will become the operating system of a more open and participatory government" as opposed to an actual OS.