skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a super valid point. We are not claiming all decisions should be taken this way. But we can imagine a system where a large chunk of decisions can be devolved to the citizens. The constitution and the bill or rights provide a framework in the same way congress today can't legislate (or shouldn't I would say) agains our rights.
We want to figure out the right combination of rules so we can get the best out of the collective intelligence of society.

Like Wikipedia: we believe this is an idea that works better in practice than in theory.

Democracy is always a "Work in progress", its never a complete idea because otherwise it would be an absolutist totalitarian ideology. It's the exception to all ideologies.

And adapting it to software is our biggest mission.
Think the chaps at Sourcegraph are already on it. Here's an example:

https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/golang/go@ac452349e4f40c3...
Daniel Norris of the Toronto Bluejays has a similar mindset: http://espn.go.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/12420393/top-blue...

“On the morning in 2011 when his $2 million signing bonus finally cleared, Norris was in Florida with the rest of the Blue Jays' new signees. All of their bonuses had been deposited on the same day, and one of the players suggested they drive to a Tampa mall. They shopped for three hours, and by the time the spree finally ended they could barely fit their haul back into the car. Most players had spent $10,000 or more on laptops, jewelry and headphones. Norris returned with only a henley T-shirt from Converse, bought on sale for $14. It's been a fixture of his wardrobe ever since.”
"If we invest in tools to defeat ISIS, we'll get crushed by peer enemies"

As I see it, the only peer enemies of the US are Russia and China. As both of these countries are nuclear powers, war between any of them risks terrible escalation. FWIW, the A-10 was designed to fight Soviet tanks in Europe, and I doubt the top armour of tanks has thickened that much since then. And there's lots of APC's and other semi-hard targets that would be killed just fine.

Better 10-100 A-10's than 5-10 F-35's. For pretty much any conflict without nuclear overtones the loiter time, inherent survivability and weapon delivery systems on the "old, boring" A-10 is the way to go.
Open Source / Open Society / work too.
Sometimes - on the phone, it can be easier to click the comments link first.
If you're interested in trying it out but don't know where to start then you might want to take a look at http://calm.com (I work there), or our mobile apps on android and ios (both called "calm").
I had an interviewer tell me that I was wrong that DNS ran over UDP. Not sure if the interviewer was trying to run some psychological test or if he was just wrong.
This is exactly the type of conversation we want to have. What institutions can we design for the internet society?
Well that awesome then! Carry on.
The main platform for Marine STOVLs is pocket carriers; littoral assault carriers that lack cats and traps. Quite often they also carry amphibious landing craft as well.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amphibious_assault_ship
Barack Obama on David Letterman (2014)
I prefer "After Action Report", or AAR, which is what my unit used in the Air Force.
This is amazing. I have dreamt of a system like this and armchair-proposed it to friends countless times. I am always faced with derision in such conversations[1] - but I believe that a secure implementation of such an idea could be the future of democracy.

Or rather, its past. Ancient Greek democracy wasn't perfect (slavery; not everyone was citizen) but it was much better than our current system of professional politicians and uber-powerful political parties and lobbies.

The small, first struggle will be to implement it as securely as possible - for this you'll likely need to distribute specific hardware[2]. The second and largest struggle would be to actually change constitutions and take power away from the organizations that have hoarded it for decades[3].

There is a lot of scepticism in these comments. My infosec and analytical side is obviously going to go into full-attack mode when there is something solid to take apart - BUT for the time being I'd like to say a huge "bravo" to both this team and YC for backing them.

I hope you change the world.

[1] how would it work; why would people care to get involved; execution/implementation issues; fraud; ...

[2] something between RSA tokens and dedicated mobile voting machines

[3] probably centuries
A metaphor is a type of analogy, just so you know. Also, could you elaborate on what is so infuriating?
means both things :)
No, it's a waste or time
You could quote Epictetus instead. He talks quite a bit about that http://classics.mit.edu/Epictetus/epicench.html
That's a great way to get your IP flagged for entering CAPTCHAs every time you want to google anything :\
> I don't believe that technical interviews are broken and need fixing

I think one of the reasons so many developers feel the process is "broken" is because it's all they know (i.e. most developers didn't have a previous profession).

For most jobs it's not practical or possible to get any insight into how a person will do that job prior to hiring them. Whiteboarding isn't intended to perfectly mirror "real life coding" - it's intended to give some insight into one's ability to write software to solve a problem. It's not perfect (and it can certainly be done extremely poorly!), but it shouldn't be dismissed as broken or useless any more than one should suggest actors shouldn't have to audition for roles.
We are asking for funding so we can develop a blockchain-compatibility module for our app here: https://www.newschallenge.org/challenge/elections/entries/bl...

The work on security is very challenging but this MUST be a large open source effort.

Check our code here: github.com/democracyos/app
Release alerts for 8,000 inmates accidentally sent out in Oregon
Maybe they should. Studies have found that ratings of a surgeon skill based on a video recordings of surgery, are predictive of patient outcomes[0]. The problem with associating prestige and respect with not stooping to being tested, is that testing can be useful and necessary.

http://psnet.ahrq.gov/resource.aspx?resourceID=26950
Exactly why is it that you would making a screening decision based on version control practices? Of the many things you'll need to ramp candidates up on, this seems like one of the very easiest. Not only that, but because most firms do release management a little differently from each other, there's some VC ramp-up effort you'll need even with people who have mastered your VC tool.

I feel like dev interviews are full of questions like this, things that require some expertise and experience to answer, but do virtually nothing to predict on-the-job performance.

When you ask an interview question, you are pricing candidates. That's obvious when you think about it: you're screening, and so your questions alter the supply of candidates that will hit the bottom of your screening processes. Fewer selectees -> poorer employer BATNA -> higher prices.

Do you really want to price candidates based on how they use version control tools? How much are you willing to pay extra for people who have a lot of experience with different VC methodologies? Are you sure the weight of your questions about VC match up with the (hopefully minimal) premium you're hoping to pay for VC expertise?
Sorry, my remark wasn't referring to you exclusively, just noting a frequent trend. Fair enough.
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For those considering trying meditation, yes it's great for stress reduction but there are also benefits that are not obvious until you try it:

- If you sit long enough you'll not just be relaxed, but also feel another mode of consciousness as the waves of your thinking quiet down. It's nothing mystical but it's pretty unique to meditation. For me it takes about 15 minutes to get that point.

- Just like regular excercise actual changes your body, regular meditation actually changes your mind over time. So there are really two levels of benefit. Extending the analogy, If someone starts jogging for a week they might say "I already feel great", which is true but is actually only the start of the benefits that come with months more of training. It sounds strange but it's pretty easy to try and find out.
Check out Sourcegraph: https://sourcegraph.com. It semantically analyzes code, makes it searchable, and lets you find usage examples of how others use it. One of the features we're planning to ship soon is commenting on pieces of code.

Because Sourcegraph understands the code at a semantic level, we can tie comments to a specific function/class/module and show the discussion history even as the specific lines of code change over time. Right now, we do comments for code reviews, but want to add this for any existing version of the code. I'm one of the creators of Sourcegraph and would love to hear any feedback/suggestions the HN community has to offer!
We are working to validate democracyOS votes with the blockchain. Happy to listen to any other suggestions
Thanks. Doesn't that seems like a tiny sample, and aren't those far inferior foes?
You can always follow me on Twitter: @santisiri

And of course, @DemocracyOS
Naked ambition: the body in Greek art
I think what we really need is ConstitutionalRepublicOS which would be a bit more complicated. But by defining strong constitutional invariants with regard to individual rights perhaps we could pre-strikedown unconstitutional laws before they are enacted. That would require a more precise legal language that let's you run some kind of static analysis against against the laws however.
Thank you. That was far more than I expected as reaction. Appreciated.
This thread has revealed that when you give an analogy invokes cognitive dissonance, people will point out the ways the analogy is wrong, instead of the ways it is right, in order to make themselves feel better.
I usually decide whether or not to read the link by reading the discussion it generates first.
Why? It's easy to look at rosy predictions but is there any reason to think that this project would have avoided the same systemic problems which have been endemic for the F-35? A quick glance at the Wikipedia page shows several questionable elements of the design, all of which seem to be due to the same problem of requiring one design to fill too many roles.
> the A-10 was designed to fight Soviet tanks in Europe, and I doubt the top armour of tanks has thickened that much since then. And there's lots of APC's and other semi-hard targets that would be killed just fine.

From what I understand, the A-10 was designed for that role as it was envisioned in the 1970s, 40 years ago. The air defenses have greatly improved since then and planes like the A-10 won't get near the battlefield.
Interesting quote—I like it.

The 'Second Thoughts' definition is useful because it is the exact opposite of what you do in meditation.

I think it would be valid to say that meditation is training in understanding what it really means to 'do nothing,' and that when you area REALLY doing nothing—everything is great.

I see it like this: verbal/rational thought (typically involving the concept of yourself) arises in order to figure out how to change some aspect of your situation; with meditation you learn to understand "everything is okay, at least for the next 20 minutes," and thoughts melt away, you smell things and hear things and temperature becomes present, etc. Movies, books, people, food—you name it, can all be super rich and interesting when you are just doing this non-thinking, understanding there's nothing to do, letting life speak instead of talking over it.

I think of it as training in discerning when you are 'talking over' your experience versus JUST experiencing.

If you want some more, I wrote this very short story to exemplify how it is to be caught in the '2-dimensional plane' of believing that various forms of thought are your only possible 'actions,' while it's true that an utterly simple third dimension exists. https://medium.com/@westoncb/don-t-worry-631ce63934c1 That story describes less informed ways of getting oneself to stop thinking. It's sort of like you are waving your hands wildly all the time and you'd like to stop, so you keep trying different types of hand waving in order to stop it—whereas what you really want is to just not do it, but you have to figure that out!

If you're interested in trying it, and you've had any issues with mental health, and you're a complete beginner, I'd strongly recommend this book: http://www.amazon.com/Full-Catastrophe-Living-Wisdom-Illness...
"Omniref (YC W15) Is Rap Genius for Code":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8821117
Currently I'm loving the bondtech extruder and the E3D V6 hot end combination. Lots of control an very reliable in a wide variety of filament / control issues. Building that as a 'direct drive dual extruder' on this platform might be challenging given the available space but you could probably get it to work in a bowden configuration with the hot ends on the print head and the extruders attached to the back of the case next to the spools.

For electronics there is currently a big debate over the Replicape/Smoothieboard type tradeoffs. All serious folks have dumped the AVR/Arduino stuff in favor of either ARM Cortex-M stuff or the Beaglebone Black (like a RasPi but with more I/O). Most folks prefer the higher power 8825 stepper motor drivers over the older 4498 versions. There is a challenge there however, that if you're trying to run your motors that hot you are probably over driving your printer. I've currently got a CRAMPS board with a Beaglebone Black as a controller in my 'new' build, and I continue to print parts as needed on my Replicator Dual (which was the last fully opensource printer Makerbot made).
I entered the Navy in 1967 and went to IBM 029 school in San Jose sometime in 1968. And I also took a 1401 SPS/Autocoder course at UC Davis that year. A few years later I learned BAL on a 360 and they still had 026 keypunch machines. I assume they were leased machines, so the lease price came down fast towards EOL. Then they got spray painted and leased in Africa and So. America.
Guys, if you want to play with a secret version of DemocracyOS (the SaaS implementation), help us here: http://hub.democracyos.com
The only real solutions are client-side: IP-block trackers and encrypt your connection.

Even those actions have limited value as long as you have any other reasonably reliable signature as you navigate the Web. Anyone with a static IPv4 address for their home computers does. Anyone with a browser that will allow queries for a bunch of collectively-almost-unique properties of the host system does. Even certain standard web protocols inherently act in this way when used for their intended purpose.

That means almost the entire web-using population is carrying around at least triple signature information, and if too many people start to block ads and trackers served via third-party systems, the major networks providing those things will just move to a model where sites hosting their ads act as proxies and serve the content from their own domain, which if anything would be slightly worse for privacy.

This risk will remain until we get fixes for each issue I mentioned above. Leaving aside TOR and the like, we could move towards dynamic and rapidly rotating IPv6 addresses as points of origin with sufficient ISP support. Browsers could then close the other loopholes, but some of them will be difficult to fully eliminate and keep eliminated without compromising the user experience, because unfortunately some features that are useful for legitimate purposes are also inherently leaky.
Flappy Bird was not a joke as such, it was a proper game that just happened to be simple but very hard. Somehow Gears hit a sweet spot that was 'hard' but also 'addictive'.
A friend of mine I respect had been extolling the virtues of meditation for a while. When another friend started tai chi and taught me some of the basics, it just sort of clicked. I think the idea of slowly pushing thoughts out of my head is the key, I try the same for earworms with some success.

My mind often races and I usually use some sort of high BPM music to help focus. I find meditation helps bring down clutter of thoughts in my head and gives me more control over my thoughts.
Because the domain will be expensive?
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Very questionable people behind it (close second hand). All hype and self promotion. Zero experience. Shunned often in most online forums in Argentina, save TedX. I really don't get how YC decided to back this project.
Is there a law you're referring to here or is this part of CC processor contracts?
I know a guy that grew up in a rural US town but went to college and is quite successful now. He went back and visited his ex girlfriend from high school. She had a kid to support and was going nowhere. He said he was extremely lucky not to fall into that trap. An exact quote: "There were two things to do in Beaverton, and I didn't drink".
I also think it's actually a pretty good game. There's a surprising amount of stuff to do, and things to discover, and puzzles you need to solve, but you have to go look for them --- unless you're the type of person who likes poking into corners you're unlikely to find them (like that famous review from someone who said they'd finished all the content in an hour... uh huh).

Also, the MMORPG simulator is great.
If you think about how much carnage has been caused by the fact that we can in fact pass unconstitutional laws and then it takes decades of work to strike them down due to the bottleneck we have in our court system (supreme court). Would be much better to not pass the obviously unconstitutional laws and let the courts handle complicated exceptions that were not caught.
How self promotional of you.
This game really resonates with me, and so does the writeup.

I had the fortune to work a high-tech job (in person) and also own a 20 acre farm for a number of years, where we attempted to produce some/most of the food we ate. (That's a really hard thing to do by the way.)

Of course we raised goats, for the meat as well as the milk.

For those of you who haven't interacted with goats, know this: there is a hilarity about them that is difficult to describe.

They have some sort of almost human, child-like curiosity and bravery that was always refreshing. Add to that their willingness/desire to climb on/stand on anything, and honestly, they were just a hoot to have around.

They roamed fence free on our property for a time. I'd go out in the morning to ride my motorcycle to work, and there's be a couple of goats standing on my wife's car, just standing there, chewing cud. Or there'd be a goat balanced calmly on my motorcycle.

Or a small goat standing on the back of a larger goat.

Or a couple of goats dancing joyfully. Or a few goats gloriously playing with a piece of fiberglass.

And many of them were really, really friendly to you. My (then toddler) son enjoyed playing with them enormously.

Goats are awesome. I do miss having them around.

I liked to say that you could add a goat to nearly any somber real-life situation and it would instantly become funny.

EDIT: 'add a joke' -> 'add a goat'. Ugh.
I actually know who owns democracy.com but still, democracy reminisces a 2000 year old system.. we need to update that.
At Clarify.io, we're making audio & video searchable. Unlike a general purpose ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) engine, we perform a bunch of automated analysis to tune the engine and optimize it for the particular language, accent, and a variety of other things. We've found that our accuracy is much higher than a general purpose one.

The founders went through Techstars London 2013 and moved to Austin right after. We raised 1.4M last fall from a mix of angels and VCs.
Expensive because they are classified as "luxury". More than 91.000 Kg of oysters produced each year in Europe exclusively for human food.
> Funny thing... MVC is a pattern for GUIs (Windows and Mac desktop applications).

Errm, it's a pattern often used for UI (CLI and GUI) programming that was first commercially introduced in Smalltalk-76 (in 1976). [This predates Windows and Mac by many years.]

MVC can be done -with varying degrees of difficulty- in any computer language. You don't even need a web development framework to implement it! ;-)
My understanding is that the arranged image was done by Lewis Lavoie. As for the 20 individual images I'm not sure.
Do a google images search and you will find many others.

A quick search gives me this [0] "Invented by Lewis Lavoie, Mural Mosaic is an artistic concept which brings together hundreds of artworks painted by various artists into one exceptional image."

I was curious so made a quick github search and found something [1] that looks to have results more interesting than the ones obtained by the author.

[0] http://avaxnews.net/pictures/42569

[1] https://github.com/s-ben/Fractal-Mosaics
I meditate, but only for 2 to 5 minutes at a time. When I do it much longer than that, vaguely-bad things happen. (It would take a long time to explain. Suffice to say that I am chronically ill, and if I were healthier, I could probably meditate longer without these vague negative consequences.)

Usually I set a timer (about which more below) for 2 minutes, then right after that, 2 minutes more. If I ever "flunk" a meditation session, I take that as a strong sign that my mind is not working as well as it should be, and I try to fix that. It is also a sign that more meditation is needed on that day.

"Flunking" a meditation session means I got distracted and forgot that I was supposed to be meditating. For example, recently, some of my neighbors were having an animated conversation in the courtyard of my apartment building, and I was feeling lonely, so I went out there to participate. When I returned to my computer (I meditate in front of my computer) there was a some text on my screen put there by my meditation timer (which I wrote, in Emacs Lisp) which is how I became aware that I had flunked a meditation session.

More detail: at the scheduled end of a meditation session, an Emacs timer inserts "Timer finished: meditation " into an Emacs buffer visiting a file that serves as a record of my meditation sessions. (Emacs also automatically inserts the time and duration of every session into this file.) Since at the end of a meditation session, I am in the habit of adding the letter "s" (for "success") to the text, the presence of an instance of "Timer finished: meditation " not followed by "s" was a sure sign that I had flunked the session.

I've been doing these short meditation sessions with my "timer" written in Emacs Lisp since Jan 2008. I do not do them regularly -- only when I remember to do so, which (a quick look at my files reveals) was on 7 of the last 30 days.

I do not have unequivocal evidence that meditation does me any good. The main reasons I keep at it is that so many other people report good effects and the my understanding of some studies on "mindfulness-based stress reduction" (which BTW found effects from very short meditation sessions).
It was a simple mistake, but the 1.1 support was added in 2011: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wget
Yes, meditation is great, but I urge you not to fall for the utter crap that is called "meditation apps" -- find a cushion, or a blanket, sit your ass down and simply breathe.