skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And asking a random group of people to select a problem from an infinite set of issues that might be addressed and then draft a majority-approved solution (which is what representative democratic governments actually do) is asking a lot more from them than simply based only on what you have been provided in a controlled environment, are you completely certain that $RandomStranger is guilty?

Whilst theoretically not having any inclination towards achieving a particular outcome is a distinct advantage in the latter situation, I can't see how that's the case when it comes to actually governing.
No, this is what confidentiality agreements are for. Which the defendant allegedly signed.

Non-compete clauses prevent you from competing and are largely unenforceable, particularly in California.
This. At least in a representative democracy the ideologues with the huge media reach are generally not the same people who are actually making the laws.
This might be my favourite dismissal of privacy concerns right after If You Are Not A Criminal You Have Nothing To Worry About.
The innocent until proven guilty approach to traffic violations is already a farce. If you have a job, it costs more to dispute a ticket than to pay it.

Yes, it is, and that situation is a real problem for some people, such as someone whose car registration has been cloned, resulting in a whole series of tickets about something like the London Congestion Charge even though they live in the north and haven't been as far south as London in years.

That is why I am personally in favour of courts defaulting to awarding realistic compensation to successful defendants in all prosecutions, combined with the abolition of automated fixed penalty notices generated by any sort of machine.

Basically, if something is serious enough to merit a criminal prosecution, I think the authorities should show up with real evidence and if necessary real police officers as witnesses, make a proper case in court, and suck it up if they bring too many cases that fail and it costs them a lot in compensation. I think there is considerable merit in the argument that anything where you don't feel such a comprehensive response is justified and instead resort to some sort of automated penalty regime and mass punishments shouldn't be dealt with through criminal proceedings at all. (Edit: The flip side of this is that if a police officer pulls you over and in court you really are then found guilty of, say, driving at dangerous speeds, don't expect to get away with 3 points on your licence and a token fine. Only prosecuting serious offences cuts both ways.)
"Given that, you might get better performance writing a software rasterizer that puts the whole image into a single rectangle and put that on a single div without 3d transforms."

Is it slow for you? It's totally smooth for me, rendering full screen on a big retina display. I not sure I can imagine there's any way you could write a software renderer in JS to do that.
Link to complaint: http://www.scribd.com/doc/245665642/Lyft-Sues-Former-COO

It's pretty damning if it is proven. Be on the lookout for a confidential settlement.
The confidence game here is the same as any other.

1> Google is a legit, law abiding, legal accountable entity

2> Because of (1), the download likely has the attributes associated with google, not more commonly with "bad guys"

3> The probability of google being spoofed is low enough to not empirically validate the premise or conclusion of (1)

4> Smart people therefore do dumb things as a result of (3)

5> Smart people doing dunmb things is a lucrative proposition, because smart people have money/wealth
It does not seems as AdWords scam as you let your ads gone to these regions.
But I have another theory:

1. If you hired a company/person to help you conversion (growth hacker, marketing,etc)...
---> well that worked...but not the way you wanted..

There is a implicit theory here. already seen that in real life. (conversions, facebook likes, etc)
> who would never be interested

Rephrasing Hanlon's razor, there's no need for malice where a simple fuck-up would suffice ;)

They don't need to be interested in leaking personal data, they just have to make a mistake that would allow such leak. And introducing bugs isn't not something unheard of, even for pros.
Buttercoin Bids to Take US Business from Global Bitcoin Exchanges
Bad Idea #1 : can be prevented easily with `controllerAs` syntax — this is pretty widely accepted to be best-practice, so the approach that he points out should never be used to begin with

Bad Idea #2: can be avoided using gulp. If you are minifying, you should be using gulp anyway, so it’s just a matter of adding a plugin to take care of that

Bad Idea #3: this is true, and you have to take care of it for large-scale applications to prevent performance breakdowns. Since angular 1.3 there are one-time bindings as well.

Bad Idea #4: This sounds like nitpicking from a JS purist

Bad Idea #5: I agree that this stuff is unnecessarily complicated

so yeah… there are many ways that you can break Angular :p learning curve is definitely steep.. and there are plenty of edge-cases that will bite you. Despite all that, it’s pretty powerful at what it does, once you get around it…
This sort of thing is why I'm a pedant. Crusading ideologues are their own worst enemies.
Thanks for sharing this! This incident led me to join the site in the first place.
That is completely different and pretty much entirely unrelated.
You have to understand that, seen from the perspective of non-technical users, the Googles do weird unpredictable things all the time.
I do have personality flaws.

>> If you were slave to your clients (working on your own startup), would those traits magically disappear?

No. But I can pick and choose people to complement my weakness. People who are reliable and are finishers.
You, sir, are a real hacker :)
Ask HN: How many email subs must you get to make writing a blog post worth it?
I've got a startup that solves the content dilemma: http://www.listhike.com

You spend hours writing and formatting a blog post but have no guarantee that'll generate traffic, email subscribers, & sales.

I created something that smartly promotes your post for you (without spamming) and guarantees you atleast 100 email subscribers per post.

Is 100 email subscribers enough for a blog post to be worth your time?
To paraphrase: "The device functioned as intended so now I hate It".

The developers of this product don't deserve this blog post, especial when the feature in question is a paid extra that requires setup.
1. Visit google.com

2. Search for [erase dropcam video]

3. Click first result
As someone who lives in a city that doesn't yet have either, it really frustrates me that they (but mostly Uber) keep pulling this shit, precisely because I'm stuck in the bad old days and I have tasted the new, but they're poisoning this well really severely right now.

Uber in particular is the most likely to make an entrance here (they're hosting driver registration right now, but the bylaw situation is murky at best) and I'm really worried that if they get shut out for some of the bullshit they pull it'll kill the regulatory framework for other entrants for a long time.
Yahoo BOSS search engine pricing
Why would Lyft agree to a confidential settlement? The bad publicity for Uber is more valuable than whatever money they can get from their former employee.
I think that you are simplifying the perspective of the bloggers here. They have been writing updates on workers struggles and other incidents of civil unrest in China over the last few decades, and I think that, from a libertarian communist perspective, the struggling workers would be seen as the most important agent of social change,the 'rise out of poverty' as you phrased it, in China over this period, rather than the states supposed embrace of free market capitalism (which itself is a complicated issue).
David Chaum has a recent paper on random-sample elections. http://rs-elections.com/Random-Sample%20Elections.pdf

(I thought I'd seen one from this year, but it didn't come up.)
Ask HN: Network of Successful Individuals
Hello fellow HN members, Summary: I have seemed to grasp hold of a viable startup, it has very minuscule traction & growth as of right now, after putting up the beta version I obtained 30 paying users without a dime spent on marketing. I built a subscription based model for the “pre-startup,” Anyways, I am positive the startup can grow & scale quickly but with some resources. The dilemma: I do not have any real mentors or access to successful individuals yet, & I feel like waiting for an incubator/accelerator is a waste of precious time. What do you recommend I do? Digressing, I believe the benefit of joining a reputable incubator such as YC or Techstars is actually not the money at all, it’s the mentorship & network of 24/7 grinders. I believe successful companies have access to high quality mentors, & can grow quickly with the advice provided. (Extra) I built the pre-startup by myself & do not have any friends that are interested or have any connections in building a startup. I also just graduated a university & have attempted to gain contacts but there was an absence of entrepreneurship. Before you answer please don’t tell me the following because, I have attempted these tasks & I concurred that they are a waste of time. -“Meetup Groups,Non-Ivy universities without a REAL entrepreneurial background, Co-Founders lab, SCORE… Etc… Thanks, Your fellow HN member.
I remember that from Google Wave at least.
thanks for the trip down memory lane...

i started my programming career in 1984 with C, and seeing all these explanations sure jogged memory cells i forgot i had.

i wish i would have had this primer back then...sheesh it took me a year to learn everything that's in this via books and manuals...great job.
Well, maybe for you expanding rights and removing rights is the same thing. For me, it's not. Actually, I remember there was such thing as a Constitution where some guys wrote that people have the rights and government should be restricted in curtailing these rights, and they seemed to think that people's rights are preferable and government restrictions can be made only in specific limited areas. But what do they know? They're long dead anyway.

But let me ask you this: if for you it's the same, what problem you have with Jim Crow? After all, Jim Crow laws were approved by many courts and were considered very constitutional for a long time. So for you there was no problem with them? I know why I'd have problem with that - because they remove people's rights, and for only reason that they are of a "wrong" race. For me it's bad. But if for you there's no difference between people's right and government restrictions and one is not preferable to the other, what exactly is the problem there for you?
thx I'll check into it!
Yep there's zero chance direct communication will "just work". But with training, it seems possible. In the future primary schools will still teach standard reading and writing, but they will also teach standard thinking as a way to interface thoughts with computers in agreed-upon forms (words, voices, and images). Standard thinking will be different than everyday thinking, but it will still be as natural as speaking a thought.
Great article, fascinating.

The author mentions that his system doesn't handle rich text, which is fine, but I'd just like to comment on how difficult of a problem handling rich text is. If anyone is interested in having a personal text-only replay editor, check out http://sharejs.org/ by an ex-Google Wave engineer.

As far as handling rich text, I've talked to the original co-founders of Writely (which became Google Docs), and I've also spent a good 8+ months on it as well. There are lots of tradeoffs involved, that diff-patch-match (as mentioned in the article) won't work on. Doc's ultimately expresses styles as applied ranges, rather than actual markup.

Point being, Google keeping every keystroke you've made is absolutely necessary for realtime collaborative writing.
I think the problem is with the Australian case (I am Australian FWIW) is that typically these consumer laws apply to physical goods, and it works quite well in that domain.

If your fridge breaks in a short amount of time, say 6 months after you bought it, you are entitled to receive a refund or replacement, as long as you can prove your purchase (this doesn't necessarily require a receipt). There is an acceptable amount of time that a product should last that is covered.

This is much harder to assess with non-physical items, because they may be released broken, later broken by the devs, or in perfectly working condition, and depending on the situation it is essentially impossible for the vendor to assess whether it's the fault of the dev, the customer's hardware, or the customer just wants their money back because they finished the title.

FWIW I love the Australian consumer laws, I think they are extremely beneficial to the general public and they put the onus on companies to produce and stock well-produced goods and services. I'm just not sure how to appropriately apply this to the non-physical goods market.
Agreed. As described, it has the worst aspects of both systems; all the coordination problems of direct democracy, because anyone that feels inclined to vote on any particular issue has the right to do so, and most of the problems with representative democracy because a huge proportion of people will feel inclined to delegate [most of] their voting to well-funded and persuasive people or groups that may or may not be sincere about what they actually represent.

If those casting the delegated votes get secret ballots too, you can throw in a new problem: undetectable and potentially indefinite subterfuge...
Thanks for the response. But yeah, none of that sounds like things I'd want. Especially X-style copy/paste, I'm really glad Terminal.app doesn't do that (although interestingly, middle-click actually does paste the OS clipboard, but there's no auto-copy of selected text).
This Note-Taking App Is the First iOS Widget That's Actually Useful
I've heard stories of break ins where the crooks destroyed all the local hard drives. Cloud is the only way to avoid that, but a solution is to encrypt before uploading.
The principle of the matter and all, I know, but you've got to love his response here: "now there's a web-accessible picture of me naked! Here, it's this picture: <insert web-accessible image>"
Thanks for the perspective. The most likely thing that can happen will usually happen, I guess.

One of my coworker quit to do a startup. Now all he is doing is sitting at home and updating Facebook all the time. That is a position I definitely don't want to be in.
Pick something, get good at it... then the passion will follow.

The follow your passion part, is starting to be shown as bad advice.

Refer to "So Good They Can't Ignore You" by Cal Newport.

He turns conventional advice on this topic on its head. Excellent book, in my opinion.
Three Predictions on the Future of Payments
I think there must be something wrong with your PDF viewer. It's rendering fine for me[1], using Sumatra PDF 2.3.2 [2]

[1] - http://picpaste.com/76610ba89c0650c0a80a48574c965aff.png

[2] - http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/free-pdf-read...
This is neat, so there's no chance it will happen.
(O_O) I am in awe. He lived a real life action movie. While I'm not quite sure about his morals, I have to admit he's got some giant balls of steel...
>Except that image isn't accessible to anyone except the owner, or MAYBE the NSA.

It is accessible to some google employees.
Immune activity linked to a predisposition to depressive behavior
Maybe he realized that the world is controlled by just a few wealthy people and that there's not much he can do to rise up against that.
Easier than trying to photograph phones, with all their reflective surfaces...
There other side of the coin is that transparency with elected officials makes them susceptible to concessions, bribes and coercion.

In the most benign way it creates a legislative environment of favors. "If you promise to allocate more funds to my district's naval base, I promise to vote on your education bill".
Why should we have to choose between low paid, dangerous, uninteresting/soul destroying work or unemployment and poverty?

The question about automation, for me, is one of how we can more sensibly organise the necessary work so that we can each share both the labour and its products?

I dream of a world where I can make machines to save work, and know I'm not putting somebody out of a job they need to feed themselves, but reducing the workload for the whole of society, giving us more free time (or more stuff).

"I shall hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, and quibble on HN after Dinner" Marl Karx
The blog post illustrates that applications of technology can have unforeseen, unintended consequences (even though it may appear obvious in hindsight). Regardless of whether the device works as intended, the non-technical but human question of whether it should function that way in the first place is a valid question to pose.
I am less concerned that it's possible to exploit the entertainment system from a phone, and far more worried that the it's possible to exploit the security-critical subsystems from the entertainment system. I realize that the screen is part of the entertainment system and it sometimes needs to display information about the car functioning, so it needs to have read access to very critical systems. But is there any reason for it to have write ability over any other subsystem at all? Couldn't it just get one-way status updates from the other subsystems and then simply chose how to display them?

I mean, sure, you can still write an evil car virus that gives the driver false speed information or hides the fact that the gas is running out. But a) that still seems less disturbing than an evil car virus that disables your breaks or pops out an airbag, b) you could always have emergency notification lights or beeping alarms not integrated with the infotainment system for really critical conditions (which for the most part, cars already do have).
Like other engines where the pistons rotate (e.g. Gnome) it does have the weight advantage of not needing a flywheel (since the engine is its own flywheel). Other than that, probably not much.
Apparently they're running on machines with 24 Xeon cores too

print(open('/proc/cpuinfo').read())

Seems to have network access... I git cloned a small repo from git hub.
It already has gcc installed.
Looks like they should lock it down a bit more.
I think that enemy has already been made...
Are You Seen as a Jerk at Work?
Employma: Like Match.com –But for Jobs.  Kickstarter
it might say "erase dropcam video" but it really means "erase indexing of dropcam video"
There's some stuff here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8507632

and here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8527230
Actually, I think when Tobacco and Pharmacy companies start to get a piece of the financial incentives in the states where it is legal, you will see their lobbying arm start to influence federal elections on the national level. It is assumed that Marlboro/Camel or whichever tobacco company, could expand their market tremendously with legalized marijuana federal legislation.

I am not an expert (anyone want to chime in?), however it seems right now, the industry does not seem to have any real monopolies and that individual dispensaries (which also have farms?) are making most of the money, rather than any corporations.
Dont click on that link, it might contain a virus!
Every company that supports employees using their personal devices (phones, tablets, etc) as work devices should read the complaint carefully.

If it's the companies phone, they can request it be returned. VanderZanden was using his personal phone while at Lyft. When he left, he just sold it. The problem is that it puts Lyft in an awkward position: they are requesting he turn over his personal device so that they can analyze it to confirm no confidential information remains.

"VanderZanden provided no explanation as to why he sold his phone.... it's an odd thing for a high-net worth individual to do..."

I'd probably tell them to stuff it too, it's my phone.

Also, I find it interesting that the complaint is also against one to ten "unnamed defendants". I didn't know you could do that.
I guess Randomized solutions seem very attractive for us. I have thought about it, but the problem I see is that once selected the citizens can be bribed and they may be uniformed about complex issues.

An alternative idea is to follow the jury duty model. At every district, you randomly select a small group of citizens(the electors). They are brought together and isolated. Every candidate presents their proposals, background, arguments, counter arguments, etc. The electors listen, and each of them casts a secret vote. You eliminate the candidate with the least number of votes and do another round. You do that until you have a winner. At that moment you have elected a member of congress and the electors are dismissed.

Edit:
The advantages:

- It is very inexpensive. Easy to set up.

- Campaigns are short and you don't need donors.

- Lesser-known candidates would have better odds of winning.

- Campaigns will not be based on simple slogans that can be said in less than 30 seconds.

- Democratic.

- Transparent. The process can be televised. Like a trial.

- The electors can choose their preferred candidate without throwing their votes away.

- It would make third parties viable.

The drawback is that people may feel like they are not participating.
Some napkin math - as of late 2013, GitHub's main Elasticsearch cluster had ~128 shards of ~120 GB [1]. Obviously they have more data now, and it's not clear whether the number of shards includes replicas, but at current EC2 on-demand prices[2]:

RAM: 63 r3.8xlarge @ $2.80/hr = $176.40/hr
SSD: 5 i2.4xlarge @ $3.41/hr = $ 17.05/hr
HDD: 1 hs1.8xlarge @ $4.60/hr = $ 4.60/hr

[1] http://www.elasticsearch.org/case-study/github/

[2] http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/
Stories like these make me never want to make a http webservice again. HTTP(S) is just way too complicated for me to ever be confident I've done everything right. It's getting to the point where webservices are like crypto: only experts should touch them.
What are comm vaults? The little that Google yields does not tell much.
Tried to order a unit - they won't ship to Canada. Frustrating.
Could you explain a bit more how this works?

I think the most important factor would be quality of the subscribers / how good a fit they are for what we're offering.

Also, I noticed this seems to be just about the "first 100"?

Or can this also be used when you already have a larger list?
> Non-compete clauses prevent you from competing and are largely unenforceable

Is this true? I'm not doubting, I'm just wondering why. I know a lot of people in the games industry who aren't allowed to work on mods for another company's game and are terrified to even do a little bit, so I always thought they were enforceable.
It's a tech demo; it'll be more locked down (no network access). The main thing is to tweak the host so the docker containers are routable to the proxy but no external network.

The 24 core Xeons are our (rackspace) OnMetal high memory boxes, you don't actually have 24 cores, docker just pulled that from the host, each container is limited.
There are absurd amounts of cotton subsidies in this country, to the extent that it's cheaper to ship American grown cotton to factories where it's made into shirts.

Typically the opposite happens, where we import crops (cocoa beans, etc) and make the products here to save money.
It's only malfunction is being poorly funded. The definition is not meaningless. Companies are pretty socialist.
>no one needs to be forced into economically inefficient make-work jobs

So you are saying that the jobs building the Lincoln Tunnel in Manhattan and the Triborough bridge (among many other things under the PWA) were "economically inefficient make work jobs".

Why?