skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> “If you want the car, and you really want to put it in your fleet, let me know — I’ll fight for it,” Mr. McMurtry said, addressing law enforcement officials on the video. “If you don’t let me know that, I’ll try and resolve it real quick through a settlement and get cash for the car, get the tow fee paid off, get some money for it.”

> In an interview, Mr. McMurtry acknowledged that he exercises a great deal of discretion. “The first offense, if it’s not anything too serious, we’ll come up with a dollar amount, depending on the value of the car and the seriousness of the offense,” he said. “I try to come up with a dollar amount that’s not so high that they can’t afford it, but not so low that it doesn’t have an impact. If it’s a second offense, they don’t get it back.”

What a fucking asshole. That guy is a thug stealing from the public, and he doesn't even try to hide it. He even admits that he's using the practice to impose fines without due process, in direct violation of the constitution.

He's a criminal, and should be treated as such.

> Prosecutors estimated that between 50 to 80 percent of the cars seized were driven by someone other than the owner, which sometimes means a parent or grandparent loses their car.

They're even aware that they're stealing from innocent people, and that they'd likely never get any sort of seizure upheld through having to actually file charges.

Criminals, all of them.
I made a video on how to "win" at Automata with minimalist moves:

http://youtu.be/hQhXFHmXDaA
Not "could", more like "probably is". There are myriad researchers and enthusiasts who crawl hidden services. You can find a bunch on Twitter and reddit.

This is very likely not related to Op Onymous.
“Beating” Automata, with Minimalist Moves [video]
I wonder if ratemyvc.com is taken?
Didn't "we" decide that solar panels as a paving surface was a terrible idea?
John Oliver's show had a segment on this very topic not that long ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kEpZWGgJks
Is there something like a 'civil forfeiture' law which actually allow them to do this? Here in Australia we have something called 'Anti-hoon laws' which states after three major traffic infringements, your car can be seized (and destroyed/crushed in some cases).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoon#Anti-hoon_legislation_in_A...
Right, it may have just changed the state of the system to mask the problem, or it may have just swept it under the rug. But you also may have just avoided a complex, long debugging session which would not result in reusable knowledge.

Debugging something that ultimately ends up being a 24-hour one-time glitch in AWS is a waste of time unless you learn something useful in the process or have sufficient reason to believe you altered the speed with which it was fixed, no matter how fun the journey. Sure, if it results in you deciding you need to be resilient under AWS failures more, that's great. But often times you just burned man hours and lost the opportunity to work on something else. I don't think it's reasonable to say that all debugging results in useful learning. (I'd probably argue the contrary, given the number of times I end up grokking incidental implementation details of some third party software or system during debugging that in just a few short months later becomes useless as that code or service is paved over.)

Trying to tilt the odds in your favor so you make educated guesses around when this will be the case is part of the skill. Part of this skill is also being able to recognize when a bug you thought had been routed around was simply swept under the rug, and changing course to understand it properly instead of sweeping it under the rug again. ("Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice... you can't get fooled again.") I find these are the exception not the rule, and are probably worth the cost. The joys of shipping outweigh the joys of understanding every facet of a misbehaving system, at least for me.
Note that the author partly justifies it by the writing she produced later, which wouldn't have happened without her "unproductive" time.

Applied to programming, it seems to me the author is against measuring lines of code per day, and in favor of going for long walks and letting solutions pop into your head that don't require so much code. Or longer walks that cause you to realize the whole program is bunk and you ought to be building something different. It's pretty difficult to measure the productivity of this sort of thing (except perhaps after a lot of hindsight), but it can have a huge effect on your long-term results.

Richard Feynmann wrote about this. He got burned out trying to be scientifically productive, started screwing around, got curious about the physics of something trivial, and ended up figuring out something important.
IANAL, but I'm at least curious whether they'd be willing to take someone to court when the discovery process would likely involve documenting claims of false advertising. Whistleblower laws might also apply. Will be fascinating to watch.
Child porn prohibition is not about consumers. It is about increasing the risk on (and taking the market away from) producers, who are necessarily actually abusing real children (who are not the producers themselves) in the real world in an unambiguously horrific way, with the end result that less child abuse happens.

You will have to try pretty hard to spin that into being the same thing as drug prohibition.

Arguments are, of course, less strong for convicting 16/17-year-olds of child porn for sexting, and even for removing images that were produced long ago.
Yeah, this got discussed recently:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8546947

This article doesn't seem to say anything more than the BBC article from that discussion.
Only because border control falls under the purview of DHS. If they did find something illegal, as far as I know all they could do is either deny her entry or hand her and the evidence they collected over to the FBI and see if the DOJ wants to bring charges.

It definitely wouldn't be a matter for the military police - since she isn't a member of the military she isn't subject to the UCMJ. The only reason they would have done anything in Iraq would be because Poitras was in a war zone outside US territory. They, again, would have had to hand her over to the DOJ for prosecution.
IANAL, but in Commonwealth countries this seems to be mitigated by the use of consolidated revenue funds[0].

It's explicit in s81[1] and 83[2] of the Australian Constitution that all revenues must be deposited into the CRF and you then need a law to appropriate the revenue elsewhere. Similarly, state law seems to point to revenue from civil seizure is paid into treasury.[3]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolidated_Fund
[1] http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/coaca430/s...
[2] http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/coaca430/s...
[3] http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/nsw/consol_act/cara199027...
What a terrible title/premise
It's a euphemism for "don't say anything" being the most important advice lawyers give their clients when a lawsuit is brewing.
Here's a link to the author's blog post: http://wingolog.org/archives/2014/11/09/ffconf-2014

I really got into this stuff a while ago, even fixing a few bugs in Continuum, an awesome (but fairly buggy) JS-in-JS implementation by Brandon Benvie: http://benvie.github.io/continuum/.

For those who like this kind of thing, I compiled a little list of JavaScript libraries for working with JavaScript: http://notes.richdougherty.com/2014/03/javascript-language-l.... Let me know if you have any more suggestions!
I'm not quite sure where you get that. A strongly consistent system requires other database peers to lock on writes, which isn't needed for eventual consistency.

See http://aphyr.com/posts/313-strong-consistency-models for some great descriptions of how it works, he is quite the expert at testing these things.
Back online now, hopefully some information will be forthcoming.
> I'm often baffled by why there's currently no place online to openly talk about investors and others' experiences with them.

Defamation laws are, depending on where you are, very powerful and very expensive to defend.
Personally, I thought the Ars Technica article was a little nicer in summing up the situation, but I can understand why you changed it. Thanks for keeping the site clean!
Jerry, would love to see your list. Have any links to your database work?
Virus that 'makes humans more stupid' discovered
The problem is that both of those have connotations that "Hey guys" doesn't.

There isn't a good mixed company informal term.
I'm not sure much strictly non-lapidary hoon exists, but for samples marginally less lapidary than the kernel, I would like to point you to a simple algorithm translation at https://gist.github.com/MichaelBlume/17a227cc839f52f68c97, and the twitter library /main/lib/twitter/core.hook in the standard distribution.
A recent article describing this issue pretty well: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/20/technology/dial-and-redial...
It's right there at the end of the article:

MEREDITH HATTAM is a web designer and writer based in New York, and an advisory-board member for the Model Alliance, a nonprofit labor group for models working in the American fashion industry.
No. In America, you can do a "write in" vote whereby you can vote for anyone you want. So the problem is with the voters. If you voted for Obama, then you're partly responsible for this. The problem is people who will only vote for parties that are expensively advertised.
YouTube Paid Channels: Hate Will Grow into Love
What is the likely outcome if a victim of civil forfeiture were to file a lawsuit against the law enforcement body for restitution, on constitutional grounds? Is that legally possible, or is there a precedent for this?

Seems like the ACLU would be all over funding such a suit and taking it as far as necessary.
Startup Event in Chicago This Thursday
The problem is this:

Does your Mac's copy of Arial Have the same character dimensions as the copy of Arial on your windows machine? Does your Linux install even HAVE Arial? What font will it render in for iOS? And Android?

Can you guarantee that the Arial font that renders your menu perfectly on Mac won't be broken when somebody on Windows loads it with their copy of Arial?

Can you guarantee from from desktop to tablet to phone the same text will break lines in The same place?

No matter what font you pull in via @fontface, what I was trying to say is that the days of 'wishlisting' a font and crossing your fingers is over. You can't compete with designers able to zero in and tweak letter spacing because their typesetting is bulletproof everywhere.

This is how I make a living, I get paid to go in and fix 'good enough' to turn it into 'profitable'. Of course you have to test your fonts on all systems, but even more so if you're wishlisting fonts instead of embedding them.

So what font displays on PS Vita when you ask for Arial? I don't know either, but I would bet you any money I could tell you precisely what font any of my sites will load with, on any system. Anything less certain than that is amateur.

Or, to put it in a different perspective: suppose Apple and Microsoft decided to ship jQuery with the OS (of some variety, perhaps a unique version not hosted anywhere else) and while writing sites you had the option of using the native system jQuery (or another similar library because that's close if that OS does have jQuery) and then build your site against that, or you have the option of including a specific version of jQuery in your site guaranteeing that the same code runs the same way everywhere... would most of the people in this thread freak out and insist that you always supply your own library so you can guarantee your code will work on every system, every time, or do you imagine HNers would say »hey all javascript libraries are the same, and version number matters little. JQuery is jQuery is jQuery so code on. Gosh think of all the testing you would have to do if you used the same library everywhere” That's the same decision just with a different type of resource.
Just the other day I overheard a group of teenage girls playing soccer, with one of them periodically referring to her teammates as "hey guys." It was odd enough to me that I took note of it.
De jure, isn't it possible to recover your effects if you're not actually convicted? The process might be too complicated, but it might be possible enough to not infringe on this.

I guess the question is whether civil forfeiture meets the due process requirements.

In many civil rights cases, we get into the difficulty of processes (something might be de jure possible but de facto impossible/extremely hard to go through).

The main issue with trying to go after civil forfeiture in court is that the gov't could simply give you back your goods if you threaten to bring it to court, and you suddenly lose standing
If that store harms me in some way, then I can come back with the cops, serve it with a lawsuit, or complain in a public forum.

In any case, the store is "stuck" with its identity and the employees involved will not only be fully identified, they might even go to prison. Or, at the very least, customers will know not to shop there and the store will have a very hard/expensive time starting with a clean slate reputation.

Stores are semi-anonymous for employees, but their enclosing corporations have Registered Agent addresses on file to receive (enforceable) process.

I lose all consumer protection by using something OpenBazaar.
I agree with this. My strategy as of lately has been to just write "Libertarian" in the write-in box. I realize that it will have little impact as of now. But if enough people do it, news media will start reporting this. Potential liberty minded candidates may then see an opportunity.

The liberty movement is growing as demonstrated by the success of Ron Paul's campaign in 2008 vs 2012. It just takes time.
Neat. Vimeo has always had the jump on YouTube for crediting cast and crew.

Have you thought about adding an API?
The site is now a park, and there are some sculptures of the old city, and a version of the art linked at Spoon/Tamago.

See my pics! http://imgur.com/a/NO9xB
> it also comes with a vocalization model that makes it easy to say out loud.
> For instance, "=+", which more or less declares a variable, is "tislus." A lot of things like "=+" also start with "=", ie, "tis." You wind up learning about a hundred of these digraphs or "runes," which is a lot less than, say, Chinese.

Uh... you realize this isn't helping to convince anyone?

The project may well be brilliant rather than ridiculous, but if so I suspect you're gonna have to come up with a better pitch to get people interested enough to invest the time to see it.

Your made up language where every punctuation mark is a phoneme or something... it's not helping.

And I should hope any programming language would indeed be easier to learn than Chinese (or just about any natural language).
If a moderator thinks it's worthwhile, the article headline has changed to Chasing Relevancy at Any Cost, Even Free.
Well, I think some people are arguing that the market is a fair arbiter of wealth distribution. A lot of places have a more nuanced view. Janitors prevent the spread of disease and save lives. How many programmers can say that, I wonder.
i think in general, given this landscape, it's just safer to publish without 'naming names' as a way to also protect the company. The last thing all the investors would want would be for the company to get a bad name for leaking information to one bad investor- putting the fault on the founder for his or her mistake, which takes away from the product and team with a silly scandal.
We're currently using something like this for in-app help on my company's SASS offering.
Style guide violations can introduce bugs when moving from one system to another. At best, they slow down communication when someone can't easily understand your code.
Knowing how long it takes to sue the government... what do you want to do with 2008 Mercedes that is 17 years old??
I thought VM snapshotting facilities/copy-on-write made it almost trivial to start with a fresh virgin one every time. With enough RAM on the VM host the changes from one session wouldn't even need to be written to a physical disk.
The commit messages on that repo have me worried!
Fair enough if urxvt is exactly what you like. Not sure what you meant by the colour comment though, both urxvt and mintty support 256 colours... http://superuser.com/questions/736873/enable-256-colors-for-...
This comment made getting sucked into that article under a false guise much more worth while. Thanks!
Is there a good browserstack alternative?
The language issue you raise is in part solved by C# and Entity framework.

Because of the lazy way it works you can define a single select over a table, then apply extension methods, joins etc.. over the return of this select and you end up with a highly reusable clean easily tested data layer. Done right you get code like the following,

var url = _urlRepo.GetUrl().OrderByCreateDate().ByCreatedUser("boyter");
var url2 = _urlRepo.GetUrl().OrderByCreatedUser().ByDomain("geocities");

Or with joins,

var users = _userRepo.GetUser();
var locations = _locationRepo.GetLocation();

var result = from user in users
join location in locations on user.locationid equals location.id && location.name = "Parramatta"
select user;

I wrote about this a bit here http://www.boyter.org/2013/07/clean-repository-data-access-c... and it is to date the cleanest way I have come across in any language to deal with SQL. Compile time checked, reusable and testable.

Its the best ORM I have found so far across any language. I would dearly love to have it ported to other languages and frameworks.
> I am not a lawyer, but I do have to wonder, how is 'civil forfeiture' as a whole compatible with the U.S. constitution

IANAL: Last I heard, the logic was that you, the owner, are not accused of anything. Your property is accused of being used in a criminal act. Your property is guilty until proven innocent, because it is not a person protected by the bill of rights.

The idea was to seize the assets of organized crime without having to completely prove they were committing a crime (which is hard). The road to hell is paved with good intentions. (Also, if your plan is to use the bill of rights against a prosecutor, you need a better plan.)
HN doesn't have a "no doxing" rule; that's a Redditism. That doesn't make the now-dead comment you're referring to a good one. There's something especially and ironically cowardly about using a throwaway account to level a serious accusation at a real person based solely on a couple Google searches; even if the commenter is right, they're wrong to have done that. And we don't need a magic doxing rule to see it.
Thanks! Although I would like to disagree with some of your points:

- Sharding is only necessary for centralized systems, where there exists some "Single Source of Truth" of the record. GUN can and will store things in multiple places, so it behaves more like BitTorrent. This reduces the complexity and thus makes the database significantly easier to use and scale, however I had to solve some hard conflict resolution problems to get that to work.

- Yes, Merkle trees are awesome. But deletion is a very dangerous action in a database and should be avoided (as noted in the original article). It causes all sorts of potential data-corruption/divergence problems.

- All data syncs in realtime, cause GUN sports push notifications. However, if the there is a network partition, the data will sync (without problems) after it is restored. So yes, agreed, don't do things periodically - do them immediately!

- Disk access is slow, correct. That is why you should keep as much of the working set in memory. Doing so minimizes disk access, so the majority of your write/read ops are lightning fast.

Do you have any links to your stuff?
The question would be more about challenging the core of the law, not about getting your car back.
I was considering an edit to the effect that misogynistic might be too strong a word -- but on reflection I realized that many (most?) cultures have quite recently (from the perspective of evolving language) either burned women alive as witches, or stoned them to death. So I don't think such a qualification would be warranted. Even if what I might have had in mind might more aptly be described as being "merely" oppressive towards women, rather than woman-hating.
so true-insurance seems the biggest barrier to making this successful
It's also difficult because in a civil case you're not entitled to a state-funded attorney, so you're going to have to shell out a good chunk of change to challenge the case. Which, of course, you may not have as your assets were just seized. You're also facing the "preponderance of the evidence" civil burden rather than "beyond a reasonable doubt," which makes it more likely you'd lose in court.
It's great the media at least has woken up to this. So they crank out an article every month or so, basically saying the same thing over again. But even the media isn't willing to fully recognize how much the system has turned, how stacked the deck, how all-seeing, and highly discriminatory, lady justice has now become. "The practice of civil forfeiture has come under fire in recent months..." just comes off as a meek response to the truth on the ground.

Is the system so overrun by spineless pricks there's literally no one left to inject some sanity? No prosecutor who can't understand the irony of sizing up citizens like a thug on a smash-and-grab (go for the flat screens!) Not a soul left in the justice department with enough common decency to make a career out of killing this?

The legislators aren't willing to kill the goose which lays the golden eggs. Is it up to referendums? Who is organizing the offense, and what is the game plan? Where is the coordinated counter-attack? Because without one it's not going to curtail this. I don't think you can simply shame these departments (police and prosecutor) into taking the handcuffs off their belts and slapping them on their own wrists where they apparently belong.
RDBMS have completely dominated in a way that few other technologies have. Especially for anything that might be described as business data (which is the prime value market for databases). Everything else is relegated to share a small niche. If you count SQLite as an RDBMS, the domination is even more complete.

So, my question to you is: why?

It can't be some kind of vendor lock-in, because there is no one vendor; there are several commercial vendors and open source projects available to choose from (each individual vendor might lock in their users, but that doesn't explain why they are still all RDBMSs and not something "better"). It can't be legacy, because SQL is as popular as ever; perhaps more so, as it seems that using a normal filesystem to store data is not very common any more.

So you need to explain why they are so popular yet so wrong; otherwise it just sounds like a case of "everyone is dumb except me".
On the server side, while JS gets a lot of attention, it should be noted that Rails and Django are both alive and well, still have active communities, and are both being used to write real code.

There have been some statement to the effects that both communities are now even stronger because the people who are only interested in the hottest new thing are all gone, and what's left are people who just want to get work done well.
Haha, sorry about that. I'm in the middle of cleaning up the directory structure to make things more coherent.

Try out some of the examples and the readme tutorial and let me know your thoughts. It is MVP status, and I'm trying to add more docs and get things ready to be stable.
really awesome startup in oakland is doing something similar and they are AMAZING. check out http://josephine.com/
You validated the idea of getting paid to write software for other people?