skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your point is excellent. It's not that this process is created in error. The process is created to 'diffuse the damage to an organizational level - which cannot be held accountable.'

Still I think that aside from gross incompetence or negligence, as a society we understand that people make mistakes such as prosecutorial error, and we have systems in place to deal with them (more or less).

And yes, the problem is that here, as with problems in the criminal justice system, it's not only creepy as hell, but it also undermines the optimal functioning of a system. Resources get mis-allocated, contributing members of society get impeded, justice is denied, power differentials are exacerbated, etc.

Transparency, equitability, justice those are all essential components to a great society, both in terms of functioning and in terms of ethics - and we should be doing the work to make it happen. Here's another opportunity to do so.

Great point though.
New gene discovered that stops the spread of deadly cancer
Yes I have one that "works" in Linux, but it only ever connects at a glacial speed. In Windows it works at full speed as expected.

("Submit a bug", "Have you tried...", "What does [some command] say?", "It's the fault of the manufacturers" etc.)
On the large majority of laptops I've installed Ubuntu on recently, sound has just worked out of the box, so here's to hoping my lucky streak continues!
The OwnClous website has a nice marketing blurb - [0]

[0] - http://owncloud.org/seven/
http://blog.docker.com/2014/07/welcoming-the-orchard-and-fig... features links to Orchard and Fig in the first sentence.
Electric skateboard designer George Schnakenberg III dies while riding in SF
>But then you could say everyone is using open source to make money, which I think misses the point the article is trying to make.

Which is that you can't make money by selling open source software? That's pretty obvious. I think the point of the article is to discuss possible ways (or whether it is ultimately impossible) to make money for a company that produces open source software, which is not something everyone can claim to be doing.
The APIs are pretty simple. You could most likely write the orchestration you wanted in a shell script full of calls to curl, or do the same in a nicer scripting language with a decent JSON and http library. I'm working on a very simple orchestrator along the lines for my own needs, as well as a Sinatra application that serves nginx configs to load-balance all the containers running a particular image on a set of hosts.

There are many tools in this space, but it's also not hard to write your own - you're just wiring together some REST APIs.
Most of these problems are due to employees looking out for themselves and their own career. Almost all employees stand to gain nothing from a large company they work for, doing well. Even if the company does badly, any work they've done on their career whilst there will help them get a new job (salary, seniority, achivements etc.)
Misspelled information (informaiton) twice?
So:

- wireless chips are obscure and buggy
- audio chips are obscure and buggy

I wish for some organized effort to bring a few set of open hardware chips to replace proprietary ones that seem to only work easily on proprietary OSes.

That would complement the work of guys like bunnie huang (novena laptop) and would let the linux world enjoy sound hardware for (allegedly) sound software.

Maybe that's just a pipe dream and the complexity emerge whether or not it's open.
Technically, it's more like 167 terrorists per million. The TSDB is a global database that is a subset of TIDE plus domestic names. TIDE is probably about 1/3 again larger than TSDB, with news reports pegging TIDE's size at about 875,000 names. If we assume that terrorists (or, as the source document likes to term them, "TERRORISTS") are confined to persons over the age of 15 (only true in the general case, I'm sad to say), then the database contains .017% of the targeted world population.

An interesting question is whether TSDB and TIDE can even actually track the majority of militants worldwide -- for example, your average ISIS fighter or Donetsk militiaman, as opposed to terrorists seeking to carry out attacks in non-combat areas. The idea that there are 875K al-Qa'ida-style terrorists working worldwide wouldn't pass the laugh test with most analysts. Consider that ISIS, which is either a very large terrorist group or a very small conventional army, has a personnel list somewhere between 10K and 20K, and the Pakistani Taliban is thought to have between 5K-10K fighters. The size of the TSDB, even if it were a strict superset of all actively anti-American terrorists and militants in the world, is likely an order of magnitude too large.
Very cool, and applicable to engineers of all stripes on teams of all sizes. Learning to communicate and build consensus among your colleagues is as much a life-long learning endeavor as becoming a master engineer.
TL;DR It's not what you know but who you know.

I've been slowly coming to a very different conclusion. Either go to community college for a decent education or pay up to get into an ivy league college to build your network.

For the vast majority of people I have worked with there doesn't seem to be any major differentiators with regard to intelligence, smartness, work ethic, etc. between those that graduated from MIT/Stanford/etc or some other school.

What I do see are the connections that these folks have to other fellow alumni. MIT folks somehow know a lot of other MIT folks. I'm not sure if it's because they share a common thread, knew each other while in college or some other reason.

If you look at college as a financial investment into your future then my hunch is that connections can be as valuable (if not much more valuable) than what you learn. For that reason I'm starting to think you simply want to surround yourself with others who are most likely to overachieve. I imagine Ivy league schools house a disproportionate amount of overachievers.
The APIs are pretty simple. You could most likely write the orchestration you wanted in a shell script full of calls to curl, or do the same in a nicer scripting language with a decent JSON and http library. I'm working on a very simple orchestrator along those lines for my own needs (which I will open-source), as well as a Sinatra application that serves nginx configs to load-balance all the containers running a particular image on a set of hosts.

There are many tools in this space, but it's also not hard to write your own - you're just wiring together some REST APIs.
For those that haven't read it, The Disadvantages of an Elite Education is a great essay by this author.

http://theamericanscholar.org/the-disadvantages-of-an-elite-...
This doesn't solve the problem, it just makes it invisible.
When you buy something complex from other company, time spend communicating is not seen as bureaucracy, but productive work - on your company's end, communication may well be as efficient as possible.
The same can be true at other company.
When you sum the time/money spent on both sides, it's often worse than 'inefficient bureaucracy' at large company (which does both things internally). It may seem more inefficient just because people are able to see the entire process.

If small companies really were more efficient, they wouldn't be able to grow too much, as they would be outcompeted by already existing small companies. The reverse actually happens.
Denny Crane? Denny Crane!
Oh shit, now you've got the angry twitter feminists on you. It's _on_.

Expect them to rally their fellow feminists and drop a lot of f-bombs on you (it makes them seem more passionate/angry/edgy).
Huge fan of Wakatime here as well -- I usually work on more than one project simultaneously and it helps greatly that Wakatime tells me exactly how I've split my time between each repo.
I am confused how what you wrote is "a very different conclusion" from your TL;DR.
The Group of Bloggers Unearthing MH17 Intel Quicker Than U.S. Spies
This is exactly the sort of problem that often occurs in businesses and organizations, large and small. Startups should take note!

This is what you get when you have ambiguous specifications or requirements, and delegate the implementation to a committee. The authors make this point clear:

Obama hoped that his response to the “underwear bomber” would be a turning
point. In 2010, he gave increased powers and responsibilities to the
agencies that nominate individuals to the lists, placing pressure on them to
add names.

Individuals had perverse incentives to meet the highest possible expectations, incredible pressure to err on the side of the safety of the organization, and the comfort of never having to answer to the public because everything is secret. Am I talking about GitHub's human resources failure in dealing with harassment, or the federal government delegating producing names for a watchlist out to 19 separate organizations?

The answer: both. Every organization can fall prey to people internalizing the value of the organization's insiders over everyone else. "Us vs them" attitudes pervade society and our social fabric, and bureaucracy and poor management exacerbate the issue. For the government, that means there are a hundred thousand terrorists living among us; and for your startup, it means you might be inculcating a dangerous culture that can come back to bite you. At least the government doesn't have to worry about its revenue stream drying up from bad publicity.
حظك اليوم الخميس مع ميشال حايك 24 يوليو 2014
Good counter point. I assumed all KSTs were US citizens. As far as I'm aware, that probability isn't divulged.
Because the 3 launches are densely packed for August-September, and delay in one means delay of following ones, and delays almost always happen. Then there is a big hole and next launch is for late November. That alone is enough to move the 4th launch after the most recent one into 2015. So nah, we will not see attempt of land recovery this year.

I am not a naysayer. I am very enthusiastic about what SpaceX does. Especially the reusability. But i just want to remind that they never stick to their schedule (that's generally hard to do in the rocket business), and their current schedule for the rest of 2014 looks in a way it will be almost certainly broken even if slightest issues arise.
It probably hasn't been penalized - there's probably just a lack of interest. An article with 21 points usually doesn't stick around on the front page very long, and it depends a lot on how quickly other articles are being upvoted. If you want to contact a moderator, the address is hn@ycombinator.com.
I'm Ira Glass, Host of This American Life, and This Is How I Work
Some comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8076547

Alternate submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8076495
What color space would be better than HSV? HSV- and HSL-based color pickers are intuitive, predictable and used by the majority of the designer-oriented apps: https://community.kde.org/Krita/Community_Mockups_and_Wishli...
Hearts for iOS – Send hearts to say "I'm thinking of you"
For those of you who confused like I was, this site/app used to be Color Scheme Designer 3 [1]. Same people, new name apparently.

[1] http://colorschemedesigner.com/csd-3.5/
Correct. A pop star needs a few ingredients:

* Have at least some baseline modicum of talent
* Have access to talented songwriters
* Have access to talented producers
* Be attractive, or at least interesting to look at
* Have a stage presence

Bonus points for:
* Ability to dance
* A salacious or intriguing "private" life

Many pop stars have singing talent in spades (Beyonce, Adele, Whitney Houston), but many others have proven that extraordinary singing talent is not a pre-requisite for enormous success (Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez, Miley Cyrus, perhaps Madonna).

I would say talent is less important now than ever. But this could be an illusion, as history is likely to forget pop stars who leave behind nothing memorable.
Lisp in QBASIC
I hate this system, which is why I have a MotoX on Republic Wireless. I paid $300 for the phone and $25 a month for unlimited everything.
In Firefox bug 988386, we started collecting telemetry on how often users see web content with JS versions. The hope is that we can remove some of non-standard language extensions like `for each`, old-style generators, and destructuring `for (var [k,v] in x)`. XUL is ignored for now because it defaults to JS 1.8.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=988386

So far, version telemetry shows that JS 1.7 and 1.8 content does exist on the web, but I'm not sure how or why people are using these language extensions. I hope to add telemetry for actual use of the extensions instead of just the <script> tag version. Maybe these <script> version strings were just cargo-cult copied code and the enclosed JS is actually not using the extensions. :)

http://telemetry.mozilla.org/#filter=nightly%2F33%2FJS_MINOR...
"Science would pretty much be ok."

Here the author takes a very limited view of science. Specifically, genetics, neuroscience, and parts of molecular biology are completely ignored in the discussion of statistics and medicine.

Sure there is a fine line between methods which are purely statistics-based and methods which have elements of analysis in common with statistics-based methods, but I think the bottom line is that much of 20th century science has depended on statistics.

Since the early days of genetics, methods used in statistics have been important to genetics basically going back as far as Mendel. Earlier neuroscience, especially in the 19th century, was not so much quantitative as it was qualitative, but in the past few decades we have seen an incredible surge in the usage of statistics in neuroscience. Statistics is also important in molecular biology, although not all the time and not always in an obvious way. Statistics techniques were important in learning about basic types of molecules in the early 20th century when it wasn't clear that DNA and RNA were the key components of genetic information storage and transmission; the events leading to the development of biostatistics basically paved the way to Watson and Crick's results on the structure of DNA. Likewise, such techniques have become commonplace in chemistry in an era of computational molecular modeling.

So a world without statistics would have a very different type of science (a world in which Karl Popper would probably not be so upbeat about the state of scientific knowledge...).
No, these things are just for improvement of stability when descending.

But it seems that answer is aerodynamic control by partially (and differentially) extending the LEGS. Which appears brilliantly smart and should work. Same hardware, zero additional weight or cost, additional function.
Resolving the hyperbole debate: asking a user "May I connect to some device?", then installing permanent remote access to the device, and never prompting the user again nor giving them further information, is a plain and simple backdoor.

The difference between this and malware is malware authors create web pages explaining to users to "Just click OK and don't ask what this is" before they deliver you a backdoored application.

If the prompt said "May we install remote access tools that allow us to remotely control and remove data from your device forever?", then it wouldn't be a backdoor. It would be a front door.
It's open source, we could do some Python 2 to 3 sprints on https://github.com/google/google-api-python-client.
I'm really excited to see Tiempo make waves. Time tracking has been a major pain that hasn't been adequately solved for a long time, so it's good to see some innovation here.

Any thoughts on integrating with other accounting software in the future, like Xero?
This isn't the internet we were given. This is the internet that we lost. Everything is locked down. Web pages with more style than content. ISP's capping upload speed, preventing me from running a small home server.
It makes no sense to say that this document is based upon preserving the rights of the individual, while actively stripping those rights.

The idea that you can be added to a watchlist, but you can know why, or by whom, or how to get yourself removed, because you are preserving an individuals right seems counter intuitive to what those rights should be.

Unless, I'm misunderstanding you.

There is also a huge difference between being a suspected criminal and being a suspected terrorists, by how those definitions are actively managed. Suspected criminals are not barred from boarding planes, nor are they barred from banking, or housing, or otherwise. They are simply surveilled in a different capacity, until they are no longer suspected, or a case is developed to charge them. The process does have public components to preserve the rights of the individual.

And as to my cursory reading - you are correct. I didn't see those standards as detailed. I will review them. But my point remains, why not publicize the specifics of those placed on the watchlist, just like we publicize the charges against those in criminal and civil proceedings. How is this different?
How is the file syncing these days, especially for large files? I know I tried it way back when (OwnCloud 4 I think?) and failures where frequent and conflicts kept popping up in files that hadn't been modified. I finally went with btsync for that purpose, but I'm tempted to give OwnCloud a go again since the Calendar, Contacts, and versioning are compelling features for me.
Well, they were in talks with Yahoo about being acquired.

Personally I'd like to see them add video hosting to their repertoire. They have a solid community that could allow them to compete in the video space.

As far as features go, I'm surprised they haven't added the ability to attach images to comments. That would allow for "friendly" 4chan like discussions (that is heavily image based).
> Here, you omitted the phrase 'known terrorist' from the middle of the sentence you quote on page 22. This totally changes the meaning of the quoted sentence.

Ah, damn. The "text" version of the page which I tried to read does not contain that phrase at all. Bad OCR, I guess. :/ In any case, I do not see how it significantly alters my indignation at it; if some 3-letter agency decides to wink, wink nudge, nudge and label an inconvenient person as a known terrorist as per the aforementioned broad definitions of the word, that person is likely screwed.

> Also, you chose not to include the following sentence which described how such a presumption could be overcome if the investigative body in question had credible information to the contrary.

That subsequent sentence adds absolutely nothing that is contrary to what I pointed out. It only says that the investigative agency has the power to judge someone as guilty, but also to later change it's mind if it finds evidence of non-guilt. It can blacklist me. It can remove me from the blacklist if it so chooses, but I don't care about that, I do care that it can blacklist me though. Therefore I do not see how not including that sentence changes the meaning in any way, let alone 'totally'.

> Finally, you overlooked the fact that 'nominators' in this context refers to other government agencies, relying on existing procedures for designation of someone as a 'known terrorist', and that said procedures form the due process in question.

Procedures, procedures, procedures...

My purpose was to highlight that nowhere in this thing that you call "due process" is a judge or the target kept in the loop. Just the existence of a "process" does not mean that it is due process

> Such designation is presumptively valid in that situation because the FBI itself is subject to law.

You seem to be assuming that if there is a process, it is due process. If an agency is officially subject to law, it will never act contrary to law.

> Essentially, you're demanding that trial precede investigation.

Not exactly... I'm demanding that they get a warrant. Getting a warrant != having a trial.
All models are wrong, but that doesn't mean they're not useful.

OP right in that individual firms are often quite inefficient, but the thought is that the market will take care of this in the long run: either a new competitor will arise and disrupt an existing market, or the shareholders will get rid of the management if the inefficiency is especially egregious.

The thing about macroeconomics is that you basically get to ignore the blips because on a long enough time scale, the irregularities start to smooth out. Scientific advances happen in other fields that may significantly disrupt another industry and vault progress forward, so even if for a while things were inefficient, the market catches up eventually.

Economics isn't about predicting the future with great accuracy; it's about gathering as much information as possible to be able to make decisions about what to do right now. You're playing the odds, and odds are, companies will be efficient. Sometimes they're not, which is the entire reason we have the stock market.
Show HN: Text-Stats - readability stats for Node.js
That's 468,749 people in the world, not in the United States. Why did you assume that that was relative to US population? So in the correct context of the global population, that's about 66 terrorists per million population.

The statistic in question originates on page 11 of this document, a response to a plaintiff's interrogatory in a civil suit: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1232171-91-3.html
No problem! :)

Transactions are in progress (https://balances.io/transactions). Definitely something we want for ourselves as well, and we'll get it released ASAP.
Kumo raises $50M for a-la-carte TV
It isn't torrenting all night long, how many packets does it even send?
It was. I already talked to Daniel (moderator) about it. It had 19 of the 21 points in the first 20 minutes.
The article's logic is flawed. It lists 19 inefficiencies but such a list is not as persuasive as the author thinks.

What we ultimately care about is the net efficiency of the firm. Does the elimination of internal transaction costs outweigh the other inefficiencies the author points out? Internal economic exchanges as explicit transaction costs don't exist within the firm (e.g. acct dept does not send an invoice to the CTO for CPA work relating to budgeting the capital purchases of rack servers. And IT does not charge acct dept for upgrading the desktops web browser from IE6 to IE9.)

To prove the author's idea, the comparison would be something like:

A firm of 100 employees with those 19 inefficiencies underperforms and is less profitable than a loose confederation of 100 freelancers with their particular inefficiencies. (The 100 freelancers would also have a unique list of inefficiencies -- because nothing is perfect.)

We could also itemize 20 "inefficiencies" of the biological family unit. E.g. the child learns the language of his parents -- maybe Portugese -- instead of learning the most marketable and global language such as Chinese or English. The child eats some meals from grandmother's recipes instead of eating a scientifically designed diet for peak growth. And so on. Does such a list of inefficiencies convince society that Plato's idea of taking all children from parents and assigning them government custody is a better idea? That's the type of logic I see in the article.
Fleeing gun mfg laws, Beretta takes 300 jobs, moves from Maryland to Tennessee
I pay $25 a month for actually unlimited data and text and talk. Republic Wireless can afford to do this because they are a wifi first provider meaning that when I make calls at home or at work it goes over wifi costing them nothing.
Stochasticity
This convention is even used in Knuth's MIX:

http://www.jklp.org/profession/books/mix/c06.html
I totally agree that the list itself should not be public.

However, in a criminal case, the accused has a sixth amendment right to know what they are charged with and to be confronted by the witnesses against them.

I don't see why this shouldn't be the case here.