skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Whenever I read Americans complaining about their carrier, there's lots of people saying that they can't switch because only their current carrier has the coverage they need. With good coverage I mean at least 95% of the population being covered by a particular carrier, so the people who can choose between all three are 0.95^3 ~= 86% of the population. In Switzerland all three have >99% coverage of population. Granted, that's much easier than doing it for all of the US, but how about similarly dense areas? In the US there are three metros with more people than Switzerland: New York, LA and Chicago. Note that this comparison is going easy on American carriers, since Switzerland does not have the density of a metropolitan area, and is geographically much more difficult. Do you get a choice of at least three carriers with >99% there?
Sure. Any statement like that has to be read based on the averages, though. 4.7 per 100k Americans are intentionally murdered every year, and there's about 780k police officers, so you'd expect just from that background number ~37 homicides of cops every year.
At the absolute least, there should be a trial if the accused is known to have committed the homicide like the cases mentioned in the article. In one case, it was caught on tape, and in cases of a shooting ballistics can easily prove this. I don't think any of the officers mentioned in the article would deny that they had committed homicide, only that it wasn't murder. When there has been a homicide like that and the killer is known, there should never be a case without a trial.

That goes doubly when the killer is a law enforcement officer. If we want to fix the current problems with policing in America, the only way to do that is to hold LEOs to higher standards than everyone else (and ideally stiffer penalties).
If Sony Pictures was going to be destroyed, I think there would be a bigger hit to their stock price.
Computation Intelligence Car Evolution Using Box2D Physics
In 1993-94, years where the per-capita murder rate in the U.S. was 9x higher than in the U.K.,

It's important to keep in mind that murder rates are pretty low in general (save for a handful of countries). It's only when you compare countries to each other that the differences seem large.

In 1993-1994 Canada's murder rate was double that of the UKs. I wouldn't, by an stretch of the imagination say that Canada had a murder problem then.
the 70k number is interesting, would it be possible for you to give a rough value in comparison to the Play Store?
In other words, you're an asshole. It's a shame they gave you back your car at all.
This is an excellent example of using a parser as a language. Whether it has any legs depends on whether it beats existing tools on some front (sed, perl, ruby, etc). The concurrent angle is interesting, but I have found a multi-process approach to stream data to be more efficient than most concurrent single-process implementations. For example, with DAP (https://github.com/rapid7/dap), we found that GNU Parallel + Ruby MRI was more effective than a concurrent language such as Go.
Do you get accurate results with voice control? My success rate with attempted voice commands is something less than 50%. I wouldn't like that to be my primary mechanism for dealing with locks and climate.
I suspect this is a significant underestimate: glibc heavily relies on generated assembly (they have a set of scripts to generate boilerplate asm functions for system calls) and inline assembly (which gets defined once, probably counted as C by github, and used many times.)
So you don't like cops because you break the law and they go after you for it?
Aggregated statistics on grand juries are hard to come by, but let's use a random county for example: http://www.star-telegram.com/news/special-reports/article396.... Grand juries in Tarrant County, Texas declined to indict 11% of felony cases. Floating around the internet, you can find numbers ranging from 3-4% in New York counties to 5% in Texas as a whole.

The high rate of indictments, of course, doesn't prove that the grand jury system doesn't act as a check on prosecutorial discretion. An AMA study found that the largest health insurers reject 2.7-6.8% of all claims: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/sep/.... Does the low rate of denials indicate that insurers' claim processes are an inadequate check on fraudulent claims? By your reasoning, it does.
Spotify for journalism? This app wants to tackle the fragmented news market
A Working TPB Mirror from the Czech Pirate Party
If I recall correctly 80-90% of people with T2 diabetes are obese. I'm not saying this was the case with your illness, but lifestyle choices are overwhelmingly the cause of both of these problems.

There are giant social costs stemming from obesity and T2 diabetes.

The above facts cause frustration for those of us not facing these issues.

For example, if my health insurance rate was based on my specific level of risk, I would likely pay 10% of my current premium. Yet, someone 150lbs heavier than me, same age, sex, etc. is much more likely to have health problems yet pays the same premium.

In other words, there is the perception that those who chose to create these problems aren't bearing the cost themselves, all of us are being forced to foot the bill.
Taxes.

You can do a lot of things to the government and get away with it, but the second you take their money all hell breaks loose.
If you need proof that police in America are out-of-control thugs you only need to look at this shocking photo from Oakland last night: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Undercover-cops-outed-...

In which an out-of-uniform CHP officer is brandishing a gun in the face of a photographer while another plain-dressed CHP officers wearing a bandana over his face tackles a protester. These cops had no reason to be in this situation, no reason to draw their weapons, certainly no reason to threaten members of the press with lethal force. No reason to hold their weapon sideways like an ignorant thug. These are the kinds of people who would certainly be removed from duty, probably prosecuted in more civilized countries.
I have shared custody of my 7 year old daughter in an area (Amarillo, TX) that is geographically distant from metros w/ developer jobs, and Amarillo has little IT presence.

I've reached the pinnacle of technical jobs in my area (lead developer). The job is easy, I do pretty much what I want when I want, work 40 hours or less a week, the commute from home to office is 5 minutes - I can bike it in 10, and eat lunch at home each day. My quality of life is hard to beat. My job also allows me to experiment with many new technologies, so it can be somewhat challenging.

Beyond that, I make a decent salary for the area and combined with my wife's income and low cost of living, we are able to save A LOT.

I'd like to have a remote position, but the above reasons + imposter syndrome keep me from even applying.
The idea that theft can only happen to physical stuff is part semantics and part myth. Things like theft of service don't include physical goods.

Stealing: to take another person's property without permission or legal right

Intellectual property is property in every sense of the word.

The argument, "BUT I'm copying not taking!" is treating the property as the digital file, but that file merely represents the intellectual property.

So is the argument that the person isn't harmed because its merely a copy. First, stealing doesn't have to the mean the person suffered real harm. You can steal something I forgot I own, it won't hurt me but it is theft. But the major issue is that copyright infringement does in the aggregate hurt content creators.

Shoplifting and copyright infringement are essentially the same level of harm to businesses.
Strangely not illegal: making and marketing a toxic product that has killed literally tens of millions of people.
I am curious to know the city which has such good facilities and reasonably priced to live.
I wonder if you were experiencing the related, but different phenomenon of frisson.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisson
Yeah, if you agree entirely with someone's point, then a comment saying so is not typically very worthwhile. That's what the upvote is for!

(And yes, I'm aware of the irony in making a comment agreeing with someone that just agreeing with someone is typically not worth a comment.)
Of course comments are going to be mostly negative. Including this one.

HN doesn't really have a problem with vacuous comments like "this is great" or "this is shit" which are equally as bad as each other since they add nothing of value. Those get downvoted. Commenters shouldn't be putting people down without saying anything constructive, but it's not our job to bolster anyone's ego with boundless support and positivity either.

The main purpose of comments is to provide criticism, or point out things that are similar that others might be interested in as a follow-up on a good article.

As a result that's going to come across as either negative (picking holes, focusing on what's wrong - since that's what criticism mainly consists of), or derisory (this isn't new, here's a bunch of similar stuff). In both cases there may not be any intention of malice or even a negative tone to the comment, but unless the author sugar-coats everything by adding weasel phrases like "this is awesome but...", it's going to come across as negative by default.

Comments can also contain questions, which can often read as criticism/negativity. E.g. "why does this exist when there is already Foo?". How one chooses to interpret comments like these is up to the reader. I find it's best to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to poor communication.

It's always nice to see or be able to comment along the lines of "this is awesome and here's why it's awesome" in a way that the explanation adds some value. But usually it's just redundant fluff and more ego stroking.

The reason these comments are less common isn't because western culture is broken, the education system is broken, or because the illuminati wants to oppress us by keeping us all demotivated. It's just because the opportunity for insightful, positive comments is much rarer than the opportunity for insightful, negative comments.

Positivity is nice and all, but I'd rather have zero comments than waste my time reading dozens of "this is great" me-too comments. Insightfulness is a million times more important than positivity.

It's not about people showing off how clever they are, it's about commenters doing what commenters are supposed to do: provide commentary and criticism that adds value. If you want to immerse yourself in positive comments, there are plenty of Reddit circlejerks that do just that. HN is not that. If you think HN is negative, try reading Slashdot for a month instead. You'll appreciate just how good HN comments really are when you come back.

The system works. Mostly.
There's no risk. You still have to find APKs to install, if you download from official sources there's no higher risk than downloading from app stores.

Amazon's been recommending + allowing it for years, along with every operating system for decades.
Getting eyeballs is one thing - keeping them is another.
Grahamtown.
Startup offering gigabit Internet in NYC
the alternative to grand juries doesn't give prosecutors more power...[grand juries] establishes probable cause and allows the case to continue

I don't think I understand the two. Grand juries can tell prosecutors "no", but if you remove them it gives prosecutors less power?
> Imagine a YC for politics.

I can: it's the rest of the web. (edit: well, HN for politics, anyway)

Of the couple hundred people I follow on Twitter, many of them I followed hoping to see insightful tech tweets, but lately the tech has been drowned out in constant twittering about politics and other activism. This is really tiring even when I agree completely with the sentiments involved; I don't want to have my blood pressure raised pointlessly every time I check my twitter feed.

I keep thinking about trimming people from my feed, but in practice I just check my twitter feed less.
Update: I contacted ioxtools.com. They replied dbappx.com belongs to them.
True. Gun control generally is something a lot of Brits just default to thinking is a necessary thing, while not actually having considered it in much depth. (This is largely a reflex to the Dunblane incident, and they can't understand why anyone would disagree with the resulting course of action).

The thing is both sides are kind of wrong. London has far more gun crime than much of the US does (personally I ran into three firearms incidents without trying) which really should provoke much more soul searching in the UK than it does (they delude themselves into thinking the whole US is uniformly dangerous), however, British cops, while by no means perfect, are enormously less likely to be in aggressive by default mode. Obviously it does happen quite a bit, but nothing like the same antagonism that you have in North America.
For individuals, negative comments might be ego-boosting to write and heart-breaking to read. We cannot deny that many people write negative comments for less than healthy reasons, and that many others suffer psychologically as a result of such comments.

As a society, on the other hand, negative comments are indispensible for maintaining a balanced conversation, protecting human rights, and generally improving the state of our civilization.

> Western culture trains us to disagree as part of learning to be critical thinkers.

And that's one of the most important reasons why liberal democracy has such a hard time taking root in other cultures.

In (idealized) Western courtrooms, it's the job of each attorney to try to tear apart every single thing that the other attorney says. It's unpleasant, of course. It often wastes time and resources. But it's the only way we've found so far to make sure that the process as a whole reaches a balanced conclusion. It's our worst solution except all the others.

Like the market economy, the power of this process comes from the fact that it harnesses the power of human selfishness for the greater good. Really, it's genius. The system is not only fault-tolerant (where "fault" means moral fault), it actually thrives on the faults of its participants.

A society that treats negative comments as a taboo will stagnate and go corrupt. Because you can't eliminate selfishness, cynicism, and blind spots from human nature. To pretend that such traits don't exist, or even worse, to try to suppress them, is bound to fail. (Yeah, we tried that with human sexuality.) The only solution is to acknowledge that we are often selfish, cynical, and partially blind, and to channel that energy into productive use.

> writing negative comments feels good: It exercises our critical thinking skills without challenging anything we hold dear ... pointing out all the places other people are wrong rarely teaches us anything.

Exactly. And when I do that, it's YOUR job to challenge what I hold dear by exercising your critical thinking skills. At the end of the day, we can both learn! The more we do this to one another, the better it will be for all of us. Learning by criticism is not an individual task, it's a social project.

Of course, some people can't handle this. Ever been to DeviantArt? Everybody there praises everyone else's work all the time, no matter how shitty it is. Given the delicate sensibilities of a certain demographic that frequents DeviantArt, this policy probably saves lives. But should we all act like emo teenagers just because some of us behave like emo teenagers?
For people interested, you can do something like this in Ruby right now that has nearly the same syntax:

http://pragdave.me/blog/2007/12/30/pipelines-using-fibers-in...
There are lots of states without grand jury systems.
>Here’s a theory for why there are so many negative comments on the Internet: We train people to write them.

I agree.

>Indeed, Western culture trains us to disagree as part of learning to be critical thinkers.

I disagree.

I don't think Western culture teaches critical thinking at all. My wife just took a Critical Thinking course at college. I never took such a thing in all my years of schooling. The key to Critical Thinking, if anything, is to develop in oneself the ability to not react automatically, and to start from a position of no-bias.

On the other hand, any child who has ever sat in a Western class room knows that many teachers (for some children, all their teachers) "teach" by asking students a question and then telling them they are wrong.

I think the fundamental problem, however, is fantasy vs reality. I find I do this with my development team: I have this idea in my head of what the product should look like; I ineffectively deliver this vision to my team; the team delivers (well) on this ineffective vision; I berate them for what is wrong with it. I, in my role as teacher, perpetuate the awful process, by teaching it to my team as I learned it from my teachers.

It is hard to turn fantasies into reality through communication. We have learned to solve this through "trial and error", with an emphasis on "error".

Perhaps changing the conversation from, "This sucks! This isn't at all what I wanted!" to "This is great! Now how about if it does this...!"
They're not agnostic -- they tie the probability of proper representation directly to capital capacity.
If only. All of the actions recommended in this article are moderate, common sense changes that benefit the populous as a whole and will never happen. The police have no interest in changing practices that benefit them, and any politician that tries to oppose their will is going to get called "soft on crime", a nonsense attack that somehow still persists in our political dialog.
That logic is presuming the attackers are randomly trolling, and that your company is not doing anything to attract a specific vendetta.

If the company is a "good citizen", then an approach like that may be justifiable. If you are BP, maybe not so much...
The Internet Archive Telethon and Power Resumption
Not that I spend a lot of time on couches, mine or others, but even if there is a "usable" surface nearby (I have no surfaces near my couch) it's usually a coffee table with terrible ergonomics for use as a controller plane.

But this doesn't seem like a major issue, since it really seems a tablet (or just your phone) solves the problem.
I'm always saying that the best thing the police can do is get out of their cars. If it makes them safer, even better.
They're low in the sense that any given person is unlikely to be personally murdered. They're not low in the sense that the impact of the crime on the community can't be felt.

I used to live in Wilmington, DE, where 0.038% of people in the city get murdered each year. Vanishingly small odds, to be sure, but high enough where in the year I lived there several scary incidents "hit close to home." There was someone gunned down a block away from my wife's office (in the business district of downtown). There was another person killed on a street corner a few blocks from our house, which we used to pass regularly on the way to our favorite Indian restaurant. That sort of thing weighs on a community's psyche. I have to admit, the hair on the back of my neck would stand up when I was walking around Wilmington at night.

Also, it's reasonable to believe that murder rates are a proxy for violent crime in general. The former is a more reliable statistic, because different jurisdictions' definitions of violent crime differ dramatically.
That's how Amazon Web Services got started; Amazon made something for internal use, figured they could market it to external clients and now AWS is massive.

This is a different situation in the way it scales, but still the same core idea.
German police will often (successfully!) shoot to disable, not to kill, even when confronted by someone armed with a knife.

From what I've read very few police officers have the time to selectively shoot someone. If deadly force is called for, you aim for the center of the person.

Also, shooting to injure rather than kill is not exactly easy. If you take a bullet in a major artery in a leg or an arm, you can bleed out just as quickly as a bullet to the chest.
> It really makes me wonder, you look at companies like Uber with $xx billion valuations, what's left for someone who joins now as an employee or investor?

That's always been the case. The opportunity for outsized gains in any risky venture is at the beginning where the risk is the greatest. Where there's no risk, there's no opportunity.
Amazon is much, much smaller (just 10s of millions of us+uk people I think) but keyword optimization alone can get you started whereas play is much harder to get any traffic on, especially for free.
Of the people that need this service how many are willing to pay money for it?
This is unfortunate, as it does signal less competition which is never good.

QNX is excellent and has been the clear dominant player in the auto world for decades. However I think is unlikely Ford will go with QNX for the major in-vehicle display in a wider capacity, Intel/Apple/Microsoft will throw cash at the pie to make it worth using their suite of technologies. Also don't forget Ford would have already used QNX already, its in embedded system everywhere! QNX just needs a better good IoT pitch yet for it to become better known or popular in the mainstream software world.
Intersecting a set of observed identifiers against another set is an issue Moxie dealt with on the TextSecures blog[0] (for phone numbers at that). He evaluated some ZKP algorithms and basically concluded this problem is hard or impractical today. I imagine an ad/referral network has many of the same real time constraints and scalability issues.

[0] https://whispersystems.org/blog/contact-discovery/
Show HN: BuckMeUp - "CrowdPriced" freelance services
Trillion dollar IT trade deal on a knife-edge at the WTO
> It's unfortunate that keeping one's privacy requires a lot of knowledge and work.

I wonder if the more vexing problem is that the market for privacy solutions seems largely unproven at scale. While people seem to value privacy when polled individually, they seem to vote the other way as an aggregate body.

Smart privacy products could take the knowledge and work out of it, but will the market support them?
I agree. When looking at stats like these, they hide the fact that homicides are not distributed equally across a country.

The US has a high murder rate, but it is very localized not only in certain cities, but certain parts of cities. Outside of those areas the homicide rate is vanishingly low.
As a writer of critical comments of "hacker" school, I think this is typical of the times. If you call out somebody you are dismissed as a debbie-downer, cynical asshat, or other things like that. This comes from a culture now dominated by PR/marketing/sales, getting crazier by the growing viral marketing and astroturfing craze.

I strongly recommend you to watch Smile or Die, a talk by Barbara Ehrenreich.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5um8QWWRvo

The parallel with that is a delusion SOLD to the community. In the case of "hacker" school I criticize it as I did with the "MBA" program by Seth Godin. And I consider that I might be _completely_ wrong in both cases, but what is telling is how aggressive people got with me for speaking up my opinion.
I once told a friend who was single at the time: "You are way too happy. We need to get you a woman!"