skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I debated this ~4 years ago on the Penn State University Parliamentary Debate team. During the practice session I tried to use this as an argument against the claimed moral high ground of the prohibitionists.

It failed; our coach and the rest of the team we're able to prove to me, with a more careful reading of the article (and checks from other primary source material) that there was never a "Federal Poisoning Program" and that most of the deaths resulted from a lack of communication with those looking to drink while alcohol was illegal.

On both of those points:

- 1) Only industrial alcohol was legal to produce during prohibition. Industrial alcohol contains methanol, a compound that can cause blindness and death. It takes a good amount of skill and refinement to remove all traces of methanol from alcohol to make it ready for human consumption - a step that the legal distillers had no reason at the time to take (and would have in fact had them closed down for bootlegging)

- 2) The Federal Government never added poison (methanol) to alcohol made by bootleggers - had they found the bootleggers, they would have destroyed their stills and jailed them, not poisoned their stock, brought it to market, and sold it. I believe[citation needed] only about 10% of the alcohol produced by the bootleggers was contaminated in any way, and even less caused 'permanent damage' beyond what you would expect from people drinking alcohol.

- 3) The order to add methanol to industrial alcohol is historically dubious... All of the citations I can find for it in the searchable web (read: Google) links back to the original Slate article. Supposedly, the article is based on this Article in Nature[1]. From the abstract, it is more likely that the mass of laws and policies that followed the ratification of the 18 amendment included an understanding that industrial alcohol should be exempt but rendered purposely undrinkable - which it already was.

I am personally against prohibition, and against the government attempting to mandate morality;
but I fear that this article is popular because of its anti-government attitudes - but you could only come to the conclusion that there was ever a "Federal Poisoning Program" if you give perfect foresight agency to every policy the government passes....

[1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v463/n7279/full/463299a...
I think that too, until I remember the piano concerto Bèla Bartók struggled to finish as he was dying, so he could provide transitional financial support to his young wife. I think that's a valid use of post-mortem copyright.
Meadowsweet or black birch would both be much more sensible than willow bark. I've heard it claimed that black birch is safer than aspirin, though I've never seen any evidence of this.
I think a fixed, short term might be better.

Considering two extreme cases:

Author A writes something incredibly popular and dies the moment he wrote the last word. His children end up in the poor house because they don't get any royalties from sales.

Author B writes something incredibly popular at the age of 15 and is still living large off his royalties at the ripe old age of 100.

If you just set it to, say, 20 years and it's done (or IMO better would be an exponentially increasing fee for renewal, $1 for the first year, $2 for the second, $4 for the third, etc.) then it seems to be more predictable and cleaner.
Deflationary systems tend to have no credit (because it's more profitable to hold money than to lend it), which slows economic growth.
It's in the Gov's best interest to praise LinkedIn for their investigation, because a) there is no reason NOT to (other than moral pontificating), and b) it creates goodwill for any future cooperation they need from LinkedIn.
What is misguided - rtti or type-based dispatch - and why?
A lot of people have tried this idea before, but they've never had the infrastructure or users to pull it off. Uber definitely has the infrastructure, but I suppose time will tell whether enough users sign up for it.

Imagined future scenario, though: UberPool Buses. At the right peak times it could work, but I wouldn't like to use it in New York.
Chrysler, Nissan Looking Into Claims Their Cars 'Most Hackable'
Report: Sprint abandons bid for T-Mobile because US would block merger
So far anybody found out the root cause of cancer.
Without knowing the root cause difficult to find a good bug fix.
I agree entirely. A fixed term, ideally with ongoing maintenance required to maintain, seems far fairer than tying it to a particular individual. You'd need a fixed term regardless to handle works for hire, so fairness would argue for using that same term universally.
An interesting analogy. However the victim in this case simply failed to take a precaution vs willfully went out the way to seek damage.

Punishing people with deadly force for not taking precautions is unauthorized by my calculations. The manufacturer of the air bag would be liable for all damage taken.
For this exact reason, one may predict that Stripe will not allow people to buy stellars with credit cards. Stripe may issue (revocable) USD credit over Stellar, though.
Police state mentality in action.
ZipCar is $7-10 per hour on the low end of prices. Compared to Uber, that's extremely cheap.
I find that to be completely true-- the area around my office is completely void of Car2Go cars from around 4 PM later. I had to walk ~1/5 of a mile to get to the nearest one. Of course, I'm sure at 1 AM that you'd be able to find a parked car pretty close to you, provided you're not by a bunch of offices which have had the cars driven away to residential areas by people at their jobs.
I've heard people in my lab make similar claims about regular distilled water -_-. Even when I drink it in front of them they still have doubts.
A few years ago I remember reading a discussion about the possibility of "hacking a plane" and someone who worked in the industry said that the avionics were immune to this since the communication only goes one way. On the other hand, I don't doubt at all that the IFE/passenger displays could be hacked, since apparently things like this happen rather frequently:

http://img.thedailywtf.com/images/13/q2/e67/Pic-2.jpg

http://img.thedailywtf.com/images/13/q3/e74/Pic-4.jpg

http://img.thedailywtf.com/images/200905/errord/DSC_0001.JPG

http://img.thedailywtf.com/images/14/q2/e117/Pic-5.jpg
I don't see any reason you couldn't have the greater of: a fixed term (say 20 years) or when the author dies (I don't have any problem at all with an author living off their own work for as long as they live).
Seems like what you are describing is already possible by using single sign-on providers like onelogin and okta.
The "all five manufacturers" in question are the manufacturers of satellite equipment. It sounds like he could access the satellite entertainment equipment as an administrator, but that's (one would hope) a far cry from being able to access anything important on the plane.
There's a type of office that often gets overlooked and IMO is the best of both worlds: The spacious cubicle[1]. I like having my own corner with lots of table space, my own drawer etc. in a semi-closed cubicle. Engaging with someone is still easy - stand up, look how engaged he is in his work (headphones on?) and decide whether it's a good time to talk to him. Nurture a calm environment (good isolating cubicle walls help a lot, put sales people into their own closed offices) and you IMO have the perfect environment for developers. Having nothing but a grey wall and two nice big displays in front of me (preferably metallic so I can put my current thoughts on paper and hang it up with magnets) is a zen-like experience and helps me concentrate a lot.

[1]http://images.wisegeek.com/cubicle.jpg
trusting namecoin implementation doesn't count?
The gov't still poisons alcohol. You can go to your local bardware store and buy denatured alcohol. Since you can't drink, it's not taxed.

I think this article is making this into something sinister when it wasn't.
Mental performance in men and women, improvements linked to national development
That is if you're planning on being the car for an hour, and depending on the service, whether you're starting and ending near a parking spot. As in my example, if you're going to a hardware store and need a full sized car, ZipCar would be much better than Uber or even Car2Go because it's so cheap per hour.
> we should ban talking to your passengers on a car too, right

You may be on to something. You've seen the number of people out there who actually turn to face their passengers full on while driving, right?

Actually it's pretty odd. I don't look at the passenger when I'm driving, though of course we'll converse. Even at stop lights, I spend more time checking the light and my rear view mirror than I do looking at my passenger. My responsibility as a driver requires me to do so when I'm driving, whether it's slow, fast or stopped.

This makes a lot of people noticeably uncomfortable.

I've taken to actually turning my face slightly towards people periodically, while keeping eyes ahead -- just to avoid creating a sense of awkwardness.
The abstract contradicts it; at least, while perhaps finding that those individuals suffering from internal bleeding from aspirin may not find it a net benefit, the abstract seems to primarily be concerned with the massive reduction in cancer risk as regular dosing of aspirin goes up.
Yes, I came here to post this. Uber could accrue some nice PR by reporting aggregate statistics in terms of Co2 saved, dollars saved, etc. They could also report those stats on an individual level.

Still, these calculations could be pretty difficult. There are a lot of unknown variables. What was each customer's alternative mode of transport? Did the customer actually have a car before? Etc.

Re: your incentive point, I'm not sure how that would work with emissions since it would basically just be "who drives the most," but I could see Uber promoting some incentive programs to get people to sell their car. They could even buy cars from people, in exchange for cash and/or uber credits, then repurpose those cars as uber vehicles.
If I was there when they decided to poison the factory alcohol. I would have advised against it. You'll never hear the end of it. All the victims will blame you for the damage taken, because it was more than they expected.

I'd say ratchet up the poison in 1 percent increments once every two months. Then the people seeking damage would receive the expected amount of damage, and everyone gets exactly what they want.

1.Damage for the damage seeker, no big surprises.

2. Prohibition for the prohibition seeker, just takes a bit longer
I left Microsot recently. Going from desktop development to web development. One of my ex-coworkers told me web and mobile development was a fad. -_-
Explicit yielding of control is not concurrent programming, almost by definition. The execution order is entirely predictable precisely because it is serialized by the yield calls. The software specifically relies on these cooperative threads not being concurrent, such as "if I don't call anything which can yield, then nothing changes in a surprising way". Also, because it is not concurrency, it won't run on multiple processors.

(There can be a loose order in cooperative threading in not knowing which thread will be run next when yield is called. It's still not serialized.)
Last time a "cure cancer" article appeared on HN, someone posted a link to their site, which I found pretty entertaining:

http://kill-or-cure.herokuapp.com/
I don't think that's what ad hominem means.
I actually built something like this but realized a lot of enterprises don't need it since they probably grew something themselves.

If you want to talk about it my e-mail is in my profile.
Also known as Godwin's law of PHP.
Why robots are getting cuter
it is easy to assert you are hipaa compliant, but more work to actually demonstrate.

most requirements overlap with PCI (having built both banking and healthcare systems, PCI is much more demanding if still superficial)

the hardest part is paperwork and staff procedures

the most expensive part, amd i am not sure if this solution addresses this, is every single hospital customer i have insists on a totally independent 3rd part audit. what that entails is totally arbitrary but it costs ~25-50k per year. they would not, for example, take the internal audit of the vendor providng hipaa compliance as sufficient. however, if the vendor also provided an audit by an external party, i suspect that would work

be sure this or any other vendor is willing to sign a BAA with you specific to each customer
"Systems" are irrelevant to the discussion of crypto-currencies. No nation ever will have an economy based on BTC. The halfway argument (if a BTC-based economy would be bad, economies exposed to some BTC would be sort-of bad) doesn't work, either: the global economy has survived many other assets that appreciated in value.
Wow, so you're just a stuck up ignorant jack ass. Nice to know.

Why don't you go ask the top tech companies why they don't drug test. I promise it's not cause the tests are expensive.
No problem! Happy to help :)

ORMs get a lot of flak and while some of it is truly earned, the rest comes from the misuse/abuse of the tool. I always thought that using ORM functionality (where convenient) together with SQL (where necessary or convenient for different facet of the application) was the best from both worlds.

And then you can of course mix different ORMs in one project, so you can use EF in areas where performance does not really matter that much or if you're doing a lot of CRUD and Dapper (or something like Insight.Database if you like stored procedure-to-interface mapping) in hot paths or analytic-heavy piece.
ZipCar requires you to drop the car where you picked it up, right? So that $7-10/hour includes the time you spend on whatever non-driving activity you get up to at the destination.
(Note, speaking for myself, not Microsoft!)

Pretty good article, only some minor inaccuracies.

Things I noticed:

1) Private offices are nowhere near gone. Some teams have "gone team room" (TFS), some have not (Roslyn). I've worked in both and personally don't care either way, but there are a number of people who heavily favor one or the other.

2) Visual Studio is technically a team, yes, but there are thousands of devs working on it. I think of my team as Managed Languages (Roslyn), not VS.

3) Development strategy is a continuous process and one we're still currently engaged in. We haven't just decided that this is the new process and we're not changing it again.

Oh, and some personal feelings: tooling isn't really mentioned in this article but it may be the most important. TFS and other teams have developed some quite good tools that help with the workflow considerably. If every dev is wasting time messing with bad tools, that's a huge amount of dev time wasted as an organization.
When I was first getting started, I just looked up every web design firm in town and called them. A lot of the local firms just had people building websites with Wordpress or Joomla on managed hosting services, so being able to say "I know a guy that writes custom code" was good for their business. In a bigger city, there's a lot more coders, but there's also a lot more businesses, so I would think this would work just about anywhere.

There's a business incubator nearby that I frequented, and I found companies there that were using technologies that I knew. If you run into a collective like this, it's a good idea to introduce yourself to administrators, because they're always looking to solve their member companies problems with a suggestion. I introduced myself and let them know my skill set. The companies always found themselves in a pinch eventually, and I built a reputation for going into the middle of a project and helping to put out fires.

I would take strategic walks through areas where I knew there were technology companies, and just walk in and introduce myself.

Events are even better. If you can find business speakers at a local college, or business networking groups, these are great to go and find out what types of problems people have. Then you can come up with solutions and go back and try to sell them. You shouldn't even try to code anything, just pitch them your solution and tell them you'll build it for $X, get a down payment and start coding.
Here's What I Hate About Being A Christian
I don't know about that...

I doubt that we would have gotten things like The Lord of The Rings Trilogy without protective copyrights.

That's really fantastic art, that adds to the collective culture in a meaningful way. Copyright should be there to protect things like that.
> That's a fairly bold claim.

I don't know seem true and practical to me. The industry (WhatsApp, Riak, CouchDB, RabbitMQ) and chances are, even your smart phones disagree with you. They are many other closed source applications in the industry that reliably handle concurrency using Erlang.

> I suspect you could emulate Erlang actors

No you can't unless you run in an isolated heap and add a many years battle tested VM system and libraries built for concurrency and fault tolerance.

Otherwise yes, anyone can make a thread work with thread-safe queue -- look Erlang! Nope. Not Erlang. It is a fork-join or just a plain thread+queue.

> It's not an all-around winner in concurrency.

Yes it is. The winner in concurrency is system that has most fault tolerance tooling built in. That is true secret. "Millions of concurrent" threads are useless if the crash of one brings down the rest.
Thanks EFF for fighting this.

>The government's attempt to change this history was unprecedented.

How does the EFF know this was unprecedented? If there had been a precedent, wouldn't it be hidden?

I would expect the EFF to avoid statements that seem naive, even while I appreciate what they do.
also be aware that some state privacy laws (I'm looking at you Texas!) are much more specific than hipaa

and Emr/ehr vendors fall into a different kettle of fish for becoming meaningful use certified which is orthogonal to hipaa. i suspect most consumer health apps can ignore that, though
> We could find no example of where a court had

Given the exorbitant fees the PACER system charges, I doubt anyone, even the EFF, could afford to find such a case out of all the federal court cases.
I think that would be decent. I don't particularly think a person should still be getting income from a copyrighted work they created the better part of a century ago just because they happen to still be alive, but I'm not strongly opposed to it either.
Because your sorry butt marches into our emergency room after you screw yourself up. Taking away extra nice things that could have been. And since we can't drop you off on a deserted island to get rid of you for damaging the rest of us, the next best thing is to try to influence your behavior so you don't damage yourself now.

Its the same thing you do when you find a skunk roaming the house, you either get a broom and shoo it away, or restrict its freedom so at least it doesn't spray anything. What the fuck gives you the right to put the skunk in a box? The right of the others to remain un-sprayed by twitchy tailed skunk.
It's particularly funny to have this article open along with the OPs side-by-side: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-205490/Asprin-link...
Samsung and Apple dropping legal disputes outside the US
I found this a fascinating simplification, and (hopefully) quite a helpful one. It doesn't quite lean me one way or the other between the two, actually.

This does suggest to me, though, that it would have been nice if Stellar had used simple technology (just a distributed ledger, like bitcoin) to bring about the simple use-case (an exchange).

Perhaps that isn't possible, and Stellar truly is the best we could do. But I'm not convinced it is.
> In my experience the most accurate reporting is in science.

I agree with your general claim about journalism, but really, "the most accurate reporting is Science" ? There are so many fallacies embraced by journalists whenever they review Scientific results (the largest one being the lack of understanding of the differences between causation and correlation), that I can't even begin to fathom while that would be more accurate than the rest.
https://accumulo.apache.org/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Accumulo

spun out of NSA
Relevant discussion on LtU: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/678
No, I don't think we need free certificates, I think we need people who can carefully evaluate an untrusted certificate and make their own decision. The whole idea of a CA is pretty broken at current scale. Meanwhile, self-signed certificates are seen as a red flag. Should they be?
Aspirin has potential. It might also help with mood disorders if or when they are connected to low level chronic inflammation.

(big if, nothing conclusive, just interesting connection)

http://apt.rcpsych.org/content/14/4/248.full

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15867179

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3535180/
Aubrey de Grey, 'The Science of Ending Aging' | Talks at Google (2014)
The cheaper ones aren't scammy - quite frankly it is the expensive ones that are the scammy ones!

I have used cheapssl.com (now ssls.com) for a number of years, probably a total of 20 sites, without a single issue.

That being said, namecheap or gandi.net also both offer reasonable priced certs.

Just so you are aware, if you think the $1,000,000 insurance policy offered with the more expensive providers is worth _anything_, be sure to read the fine print first.

The only potential more expensive thing of value is buying an EV cert to get the green URL bar - not that it actually provides even a little bit more protection, it doesn't - but because users see them and have been conditioned to immediately associate it with trust.
> There is no valid reason for copyrights to last as long as they do; corporate greed aside.

I dunno about that. I think there should be a minimum term of, say, 15 years, so if the author conks right after her first book her family doesn't starve.
There is a reason that it's called "denatured alcohol". It's because something is added to it to make it unsuitable for consumption. The Volstead Act (establishing prohibition) makes repeated references to "bonded denaturing plants":

http://www2.potsdam.edu/alcohol/Controversies/Volstead-Act.h...

It also mentions 'Denatured alcohol or denatured rum produced and used as provided by laws and regulations now or hereafter in force.', so I'm sure there is some text somewhere describing the processes.

There is often methanol in fermented mash, but if you have a working still, the sophisticated method of getting rid of it is to discard the early fraction of the distillation. It probably isn't a large amount of methanol (but there's probably other assorted things not to drink).

Edit: Here's the IRS guidance issued in association with the 1906 law that created "industrial alcohol" by not taxing denatured alcohol:

http://books.google.com/books?id=AA7ZAAAAMAAJ&lpg=PA23&ots=B...

This page talks about adding methyl alcohol "in the presence and under the direction of an authorized Government officer":

http://books.google.com/books?id=AA7ZAAAAMAAJ&lpg=PA23&ots=B...

Apparently for use in cars, because it was cheaper than gasoline.
I wonder how well this would work in a less concentrated city than SF. Uber doesn't even go to my house (S of an interstate in DFW area) though I don't know why; maybe it's a volume problem which would make pooling even less likely.
Constitutional Lawyer doesn't mean protector. Knows how to haxor with the best of them. p3wnd
There is a car sharing service in France called Blah Blah. Passengers have rated "Blah" so you don't have to share ride with people who speak less or more than you usually.

http://www.blablacar.com/
How about premeditated subversion of the constitution? Can't they get jail time for attempts?