skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"War on drugs" is a terrible world affliction. Prohibition neither works nor is conducive to a better society. Governments should just tax and sell the drugs to the general public. Alcohol is considered to be the most harmful drug but is legal because it can be taxed, controlled, and makes money. (http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2010/11/drugs_caus...)

Governments should also support people that want drugs to come off those drugs and while we're at it, release all prisoners who are specifically in for possession/dealing/trafficking.

We really need to give up on this idea of a drug free world.

I think we need to look to Portugal for an example of what can be done and also as a starting point for possibly developing a better model http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/evaluating-drug-d...
Scotland also has similar "right to roam" legislation (as listed on that page you linked to) - which given the ways that large landowners often acquired land here seems rather just to me.
I believe its really telling that, rather than take the tactic of fully promoting open society, the inclination is towards more and more secrecy. Like, dire, utter secrecy. Kill someone-style, secrecy.

Imagine the other end of the scale - where in fact every detail about everyones lives is wide open and available for everyone and anyone to access. Willingly. Freely. A new order of celebrity: total telepathy.

Do you think we'd be dealing with terrorism, then? Would there be the idealist, killing souls, for a little private time?
Books and academic publishing are related, if not identical, activities. I'd expect there'd be some correlation. And the data for academic publishing happened to be handy.

I suppose its probably possible to extract data from other sources -- ibiblio, perhaps -- for books, but that would involve work.

There's also the matter that the xkcd infographic shows long-term trends. It's entirely possible that there've been changes in recent years. Though that would also be pretty remarkable.

The huge increase in online access to content and information has a bigger effect though. I was purchasing a large number of books through the mid 2000s, far fewer since. The fact that numerous physical bookstores I could head to and shelf-browse have closed doesn't much help matters (I hate buying anything online, books included, especially via Amazon).
> In their case, it seems like most of the business is "coaches" to help SMBs with their content/inbound marketing. The amount of software/technology behind it is questionable.

This is absolutely spot on. Lots of webinars, on-boarding, weekly training, more training than software oriented.

Source: someone who was trained up on Hubspot software in a startup.
Extensive discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8204412

Also:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8206208

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8215212
I've had this idea as well. It would really scratch my own itch so I definitely hope someone makes it!

Focusing on live coding would open up a lot of possibilities as well. How about hooking up the source code next to the stream in real time? The ability to paste snippets to the audience etc etc.
Those photos are eight to thirty second exposures at f/2.8 and ISO >10k - there's a lot more light in the pictures than a human eye can ever gather. I'm sure the sky would still look pretty epic to a completely dark-adjusted eye, though.
Garbage Collection in a Box
Just back from Boom Festival in Portugal, where personal drug use is decriminalized.

There was almost no police/security at the gates or inside the festival, although selling drugs was not tolerated (eg. people selling on the festival grounds were kindly asked to leave). There were 42.000 people from 152 countries and most of them used some kind of substance or plant there (marijuana being the most abundantly and openly used). As a consequence (or despite this?), this was one of the safest and warmest places I have ever seen.

Instead of police watching everyone, there were a number of premises: there was a drug info stand, were one could go and test their drugs. The queue was quite long there, people stood 2+ hours in the queue to test their substances.

Then there was the Kosmic Care, a place were 20+ psychologists, doctors and shamans would bring people having 'bad' trips back to earth. They had 70 'bad' trippers in the first night alone and they were expecting a lot more on the full moon night.
I've spoken to the psychologists there (out of curiosity, not because of a bad trip :) ) and they told me that that the majority of bad trips were caused by people taking 'fake' LSD. In fact, she said, 50% of the LSD people tested was not actually LSD but some designer substance with unknown consequences and effects.
Other reasons for bad trips - was people mixing substances or taknig too much (usually young, unexperienced people) and people having prior mental illness.

I asked a guy there, how can one prevent people from having a bad trip again and the answer was 'well, after such an experience, most people grow up pretty quickly and it's unlikely they would take these substances lightly the next time'.

In most countries, these young people would end up in a hospital and then get arrested and possibly spend time in jail.

The war on drugs has caused a lot of suffering and has done very little to reduce drug use or addiction, yet it costs billions every year.

Protugal's approach to drugs is a great example of how the negative effects of drug use can be handled with minimal costs and lead to positive outcomes in drug users.
All it takes is a bit of acceptance and common sense.
Thank you for your work and please, please keep working on Dylan.

A couple of years back I wanted to learn Dylan, but it really looked rather old and unfriendly. I read about Dylan module system and object system and thought it's really interesting. My first impression was that it's somewhat similar to Racket units system and to CLOS.

I hoped for Dylan to be modernized enough to make it easier for me to learn it. I forgot about it as I learned a dozen or so new (or old) exciting languages in the meantime, but seeing improvements in Dylan - especially in the docs - makes me interested in it once again.

> there are bite-sized pieces of work that could be done in a couple of hours/week that would lead to significant gains

How to get involved with it? Are there issues on Github, is there a mailing list? Free time is scarce, but if I finally decide to learn Dylan I can help with its development as well.

Again, please don't stop working on Dylan. It's only natural for such a language to have a small user base, it's nothing to be worried about. Just keep working on it and sooner or later it will become (more) popular. That's my experience with various niche languages to date, at least.
bup, the deduplicating backup software, uses the git pack format for storing its data (because the tree structure of git matches really well the tree structure of how bup operates). They have written their own implementation of pack writers and readers [0]; the writers are pure-git, the readers call the git binary.

[0] https://github.com/bup/bup/blob/master/lib/bup/git.py
To be fair, it's rare to use anything but int and float64 in most programs, and it's exceedingly rare to use anything more than a couple of different precision integer types (unless you're writing a binary codec or something).

I don't think you mean "simplicity" here. What's simpler than forcing the programmer to say what they mean? Perhaps you mean "convenience".
> Open source just means the source code is available.

It means what the definition says it means: the source code is available under a relatively liberal license that meets certain requirements:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software

A more accurate version of what you meant might be "I wonder if Oregon has permission to make the source code available for viewing" or something like that.
They simply don't care and probably wouldn't follow the link anyway.
Flying Submarine: Awesome Soviet Project Never Brought to Life
I was interested to learn that the kernel actually allows you to pass 15 million arguments via execve(), with each one allowed to be enormous.

It seems very much like asking for trouble - I can't offhand think of a good reason why this would be required.

I'm sure there are plenty of programs that have similar memory leaks with commandline args, as many authors might, not unreasonably, think that abuse would be prevented by the shell ARG_MAX, which is 2621440 bytes on many systems. Perhaps some sort of adjustable lower limit might be appropriate here.
>Wow. I hate how so many Windows applications are considerably uglier compared to Mac counterparts.

I lost you after this sentence. I thought you were about to use this program as a shining example of ugly windows software.
The syntax apparently borrows from Prolog, since the first version was built with Prolog, from what I've read.
While it's true that some basic styles remain over time, such as the Chuck Taylors or Doc Martens, it is also true that some things that used to be style aren't anymore and it's likely we'll never see it again. Take for example the fat hair of the 70s and 80s (yes, I'm that old) or the high cut jeans of the 80s and early 90s.

If you believe the classic blue jeans are unchanged since the 40s you just haven't looked close enough. The cut change slowly over time. Look at the seams from that old pair from the 40s and you'll see it's not even cut from the same parts! Check out the inseam and it's completely different. That's because technology change, the sourcing of materials change, and finally tastes change.

Neither a jacket nor a suit is an example of street fashion. Those trends works very differently. But even a suit is cut different today. If someone walked in in an 80s suit you'd notice straight away, I promise. That may be something you desire, especially if you have the slighest bit of an hipster inside, but it's not something you could base your company on.

I'm probably the last person to understand these things. My clothes keep me warm, basically. What I like or dislike is neither here nor there. I'm just saying it's not true that jeans haven't changed in 50 years, and it wouldn't make economic sense to sell things that people don't want to buy. That was my only point. I don't think you personally owe anyone anything.
Too metro for my tastes (or to be usable).
Not to nitpick but it seems like it's a doctoral thesis.
Didn't you get the metro^H^H^H^H^Hmemo? Features and options are bad as they will confuse and scare the user.
I'd like to know who are the perverts who downvoted me.
There was some hype about Erlang 6/7 years ago, too, but it didn't seem to be enough to give it much momentum:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=300485

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2386
Nah, they use white/blue lights - definitely not orange!
little bug: ireland flag is wrong, you used the flag of italy.
How about mid-oceanic methane flares lit by lightning? Would explain the initial flashes and the incandescent look of the lights.
I believe that the hosts history should not be visible by default. It also shows hosts while browsing in private mode.

Maybe only visible with an UAC auth.
If it makes you feel better, we used JIRA extensively at my previous employer and it didn't come close to painting an accurate picture either.
You are not incorrect about anything. The only exception to the challenge you are making could be in that assumption that the images were intentionally doctored with to disguise/obfuscate/alter reality. In face: They were intentionally doctored, there has been an editor on these files. The originals will no doubt provide further math.

EDIT: Note that JPC seems to be preparing for a naming-of-feature challenge, which in itself is an interesting aspect of the whole story! Go for it, I say!
>so they can provide an easy migration from MySQL to Oracle when your app outgrows MySQL.

Based on personal experience, when databases hit that point, the logical next step is PostgreSQL if you're going to go through the pain of changing database engines. Or just do what $oldjob did and throw more and more resources at MySQL (256GB memory, anyone?).
Ask HN: Dealing with issues from upstream projects
I have a fairly active repo on GitHub I look after, it uses 3 different projects and use them together on my project.

I do get enhancement requests and bugs regarding these projects, I don't particularly know the codebases for them and at the moment I tell them to open an issue on the particular project and close the issue on my repo.

Is this the way I should be handling these or should I be doing it differently?
Nice comparison, though I hate it when graphics look like they were drawn to scale, but actually aren't. (The Google indexed pages bar would have to be more than 10 times larger.)

More on topic: Whether you can compare the index sizes or not mostly depends on their signal to noise ration. Given the number of Google search request per month and assuming and average of 5 viewed results, you can put a lower bound of 99% of pages that are never seen by anyone. As the search results should greatly overlap the actual number of relevant sites is probably orders of magnitude less than 1%.
There was an info-file with some release that described how to make your own Covox Speech Thing [1], but I do not remember what it was. I thought it was The Space Pigs Megademo, but the release at Pouet does not have any text files.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covox_Speech_Thing
The economics of mining are complicated, but there are some similarities to the startup/VC complex. A big part of developing mines is exploration. Finding minerals can be hard, especially in the north sea. The oceans are big. The difficulty is why there are still new deposits being discovered.

Exploration usually happens when the company doing it can hope to make money off of a successful discovery. They might even pay for the privilege. Imagine a scenario where a company finds a motherload of oil after a low probability exploration. Their exploration contracts (being signed before the deposits were known) guarantees them a huge profit. Unseemly, even. They are earning that because they took a risk. Now they get their 100X. Try explaining that in an election year.

New technologies are constantly being invented that improve exploration, surveying & mining. This means that there are new possibilities every year impacting which mine/well is profitable (minerals can be extracted at a profit. These all change underlying economic realities. A $1bn per year mine can only make a slim profit in years where commodity prices are high. It employs many people. The next year commodity prices change or some new mining or processing technique (fracking is a huge gamechanger) mean that some complicated contract is now worth a whole lot of money. The $1bn goes from a 2% margin ($20m) to a 30% margin ($300m) and everyone want a piece of it.

Meanwhile government departments, unions, armies, etc are salivating over the prospect of this wealth. The National University's long impoverished Oceanography faculty has their eye on a fleet of research vessels. Academics are starting companies offering to do (mandated) environmental impact studies. There is a lot of pressure for money now, from industry, politicians, constituents.

Politicians definitely don't want to be investing during their term for the benefit of politicians 10 years from now. The world can be cynical, but not always.

Norway has done well. I'm not sure if any one thing can be learned from them. Have smart people running things. Meanwhile Norway have their own political traditions, values, and probably pathologies.
Prolog Problems
I can see the use case, but I can't yet figure out how MakeDrive is different from a syncing solution (say, OwnCloud, SparkleShare, SeaCloud etc.) combined with a node.js service which allows to access local files.

What do I miss?
Build an Android Calling App with Sinch
That's not what a corporatocracy is, any more than a democracy means one person has absolute power to do what they want and not get punished for it.

The idea of corporatocracy is that a country is run by, and for the good of, corporations as a whole rather than individual citizens. People who believe this view will point to things like the huge lobbying power of corporate interests, the level of influence of the corporate media, the fact that an awful lot of lawmakers have very close links with companies in industries that they are drafting regulations about, or the the bailout of banks etc.

You may or may not agree with whether this is really happening in the US or elsewhere, or the level to which it undermines democracy, but it helps to talk about what the word actually means rather than a straw-man argument.
First Public Release of NDN Forwarding Daemon (NFD)
I'm not so sure, the world exists outside of Europe and the US. There are some seriously draconian drug laws in Asia for example
I've that aroglassy thingy disabled on Windows 7, looks about the same as XP without that ugly Luna (seriosly, who thought of that?).
Even better would be an EndMatch block.
StackOverflow to get runnable code snippets in questions/answers
Hearthstone card packs, "fulfillment by Amazon"?
Do you have it written down perhaps? What firewalls you tested and how they managed? I'd be interested.
Wouldn't the water 'absorb' the charge?
Probably one of the best examples of how natural resource wealth has been preserved and invested for the whole nation, instead of being lost to the pockets of few through privatisation, corruption or mismanagement of funds.

I think the magic ingredients (aside from being lucky with natural resources in the first place) are egalitarian society, high level of trust, very low level of corruption, a functioning democratic government and highly skilled fund managers.
This is great app. However, I am facing an issue.

I am not able to connect to a remote server. I don't know why!
This is what I am doing:
1- Allowing server access in Server tab in Settings on one computer.
2- Trying to connect from another machine using the credentials.

I am not able to connect. Does anyone else face the same issue?
GL.iNet Openwrt router
Go Generate
I agree with you. I think the actual article lived up to the HN link title. I'm impressed by Frederick Hutson - he was sharp to the opportunities that he saw even in prison. Lesser mortals like myself would have been too devastated to even think straight, much less identify such an opportunity.
The Puzzle of Indian IQ: A Country of Gypsies and Jews
I think it's better if nobody benefits from there being scammers. Otherwise those under pay via mehanical turk may be tempted to pose as (or become) scammers themselves
RECAP recently found a new home with the Free Law Project, so hopefully things will improve.
http://freelawproject.org/2014/05/19/our-recap-partnership-w...
on the alerts page, it tells me that 2 alerts occurred, but it doesn't allow me to view those alerts?

that should probably be fixed, not much point in a idle mode if it just makes things more difficult to investigate

edit: also currently using 1.3GB of memory. what.
I don't see it anywhere on your site, but have you passed (or at least tried) Windows Logo test? That coupled with driver certification kit can show some warnings. It's costly to get signed driver and certified product, but you can just run the tests for free and see if everything is OK.
Glad Twitch has some clout now to fight big intimidating movie studios whenever needed.
> Languages don't matter.

Bullshit.

Languages DO matter. Language features matter, too. Even syntax matters, although not that much.

It's easy to get trapped in "languages don't matter" attitude if you know a couple languages. The perspective changes drastically with mastery - being able to use a language to its fullest, as opposed to just using it - and with dozens more of learned languages.

A language is your baseline, a starting point for building things. How you build API, how you interact with outside world, how you accomplish common tasks depends on a language and language features. And it gets even more important as you climb the abstraction ladder. For example, at language level Scheme offers call/cc. You may say it doesn't matter, as it's just a language feature. But take a look at Racket continuation-based web server - it's an impressive piece of work which solves a certain problem really well and is almost impossible to implement in some other languages (you don't need continuations specifically to implement this, there are other features which would enable it). At a language level Lua offers coroutines, which in itself is not very impressive. But take a look at OpenResty: you can write code which looks perfectly normal and synchronous (no callback etc.) while still fitting inside of async by nature Nginx.

Anyway, thing you mention, like APIs, do matter too, but language features are equally important. Don't dismiss them because you superficially know a few languages; rather learn some of them in depth and build real world things with them and I'm 97% sure you'll see how language features matter.
Early Bitcoin Users: Interviewed by Law Enforcement
> It seems to me that if the aim of prison is rehabilitate inmates and reduce crime

Some people think the aim of prison is primarily to punish wrongdoers.

(Are you European by some chance ? No offense intended to anyone.)
It was pretty obvious that's why they were doing it. The FISA Amendments Act is also much worse than the 215 section of the Patriot Act - or the Executive Order 12333, which is even less talked about.

That doesn't mean the call records issue wasn't important. After all, they pick their torture and drone assassination targets based on that alone, in many cases. But considering the Internet is such a big part of everyone's lives these days, I think NSA getting a firehose from the big carriers and cable providers is a bigger deal, yet I've heard very little talk about denying NSA access to the undersea cables.
Another Norwegian here. I think you are right. The high level of education also helps. But it was actually an Iraqian immigrant named Farouk al-Kasim that proposed the laws to protect Norways natural oil and gas resources.

Further reading: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/99680a04-92a0-11de-b63b-00144feabd...
This brings back memories of times long since past as this is pretty much how Delphi deals with constants.
Apparently http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1240000/1238850/a6-armstrong... , PLEX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLEX_(programming_language) .
Possibly, among other things.
It's an awesome right.

As a Finn I always find it really weird when visiting places outside Nordic Countries that for them most of the country is unaccessible.
Thanks for sharing this! I'm also having the similar problem despite having decent work-life balance. At this point I can only think of how to accept that this is how it works and keep doing side projects.
I'll second that. College football (through whatever means I can get over here - i.e. most likely espn player this year) and twitch makes up 90% of the TV-style media I use.
How Business Can Keep Customers Happy for Word-of-Mouth Marketing
You should always try to do games you want to play yourself, anyway :)
Improve IntelliJ IDEA and Eclipse Interop and Win a License
That's similar to the wikileaks ban. I don't understand this policy: If something is accessible virtually from everywhere, what do you gain by not allowing your employees to access the info?!

The only thing I can think of, is internal issues at political level (who said what lies to whom to achieve more funding about his work, etc.) which even that won't take long before the interested party eventually finds out.
Finnish, not Norwegian - I think you guys have done great.

Read the story of Farouk al-Kasim a few months ago, fascinating. It does seem like a stroke of luck that the right people were there in the beginning. His nationality is both ironic and sad considering where Iraq is today