skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The idea of "open source governance" is hardly new. I'd imagine such a system in the form of a web app would be swamped with irrelevant queries. Assuming an idealistic direct democracy where citizens draft new laws or modify existing ones, the feedback loop of constantly changing legal information to its application would be overwhelming. On the flip side, too much unaddressed issues and slow or wasteful processes would create apathy.

Personally I always thought the most attractive model for such an endeavor is to store laws in a markup format, and go through the old school route of mailing lists and patches. You'd be making use of highly tested infrastructure and actually require for participants to put a little effort in learning.
Come on, its 20 lines long.

Time and time again I see people arguing on HN as if they haven't read the article. Is it just bad reading comprehension or is it that people read the headline and jump the gun?
Super-valid concern. The truth is that very-politically-involved people aren't that big a percentage of the overall population (at least from the numbers I've seen - usually around 10%). So we're trying to find ways of making it easy for that other 90% to engage in civic participation. If we get to nail that, then even any 'arranged' participation would not account for a significant part of the votes for a given issue.

Also, from our experience with DemocracyOS, users actually participate in stuff they actually care about, and not equally on every sort of issue. So it's interesting to see how larger userbases would unfold with apps like DemocracyOS or similar.
Artfric
My friends and i are learning to program with Meteor. We decided to build a platform that showcases talented African artists. You design and functionality feedback will be much appreciated. Thanks a bunch.
I work in the medtech/health IT field at a startup doing a lot of clinical analytics. There's a very blunt and obvious explanation of what's wrong here, and it's the very unpolitical one.

Here's the deal. Physicians and nurses and administrators are overworked and untrained to handle a modern operational model. The hospitals tend to be based around politics rather than patient care, though the party line is invariably "help the patient". Doctors will, under the aegis of "help the patient", justify hoarding equipment, setting up alarm thresholds that screw up operations across the unit, block acquisitions, and in general just make everything terrible left to their own devices.

Nurses are overworked and are charged with increasingly important parts of patient care, and at the same time are treated as annoying appendages of the rest of the medical apparatus and not given the respect or authority that they require to perform well at their jobs.

Billing is handled through arcane back-and-forths between the care providers themselves, the hospitals, insurance companies, the government, and collections agencies. I've seen at least one local children's hospital (the economics of such institutions are quite fascinating) have banking and financing services occupying the same building as care (something you'd expect at a car lot, not a place where injured children are healed). Claims may take months or years to process, which is absurd.

The whole stinking mess should have been grist for the capitalist grinder decades ago. However, clever regulatory capture by hospitals and manufacturers and labor policies restricting the supply of new physicians has managed to prevent any of the normal efficiencies from being introduced.

When trying to introduce new technology, you have to fight the most conservative and risk-averse institutions you'll ever encounter. People that do not understand basic statistics or mathematics, or that flat out refuse to recognize the value of operational data research in making decisions because "they know better". You'll be turned away because you're not one of the chosen few, and ignored unless you can convince them that they get to put their name on the new shiny.

This is but the first level of the fractal of sadness and absurdity that is modern medicine in America.
It's crazy what's happening in Brazil these days, as a close neighbour(Argentinean) it pains me to see such upheaval. To your point, we could set up a protocol that the SaaS version of DemocracyOS can only be used inside the limits of a constitution, but we have no control over the Open Source version. It's like twitter it's a platform for expressing oneself and it's content moderation is v. limited. It's all our responsibility to make the best possible use of the tools we create.
To milk a goat she needs to have had kids. The female kids can be sold on to other people who want milking goats. The billy kids get sold on for meat. It's pretty tough giving up a few days old goat kid for slaughter.

(Two Anglo-Nubians, long dead now).
Yeah, it must be so hard. FWIW, I have a similar thing: I'm lucky enough to be doing a PhD by day, but I also wanted to stay involved with electronics. I've found it helped a lot to get involved in a community of people doing that stuff for fun.
It's my crude estimate based on the places I've worked over the years, and the people I've seen come in when my employers were interviewing.

If I was the boss and had a "toxic" employee, I'd just dump them rather than waiting. I've been forced to work with toxic people because I'm not the boss, and I've noticed that toxic people are really good at pretending to be brilliant.

Over the years, I've also worked with a couple of people who singlehandedly wrote all of the employer's key software. I also worked with several people who wrote a garbage system but conned everyone else into thinking it was brilliant.

If 90% of candidates are "good", then why waste time with a detailed technical screening at all? Just interview a couple and pick the ones you like the best.
The thinkpad support is mostly done by the free software part of the coreboot community, and they don't touch devices that come with a Management Engine (see http://me.bios.io/).

If "security conscious" includes not having any unexplained binaries around, the Asus C201 Chromebook may actually be the best bet (maybe there will be devices with the same chipset but more laptop-like properties eg regarding storage), but it's less powerful than a contemporary Intel based device.
I had the same fear, and thus far I've had no problems. I think most of the injuries come from teachers being too ambitious with their adjustments and students being too ambitious with their practice. Just listen to your body. I only push myself to the point of discomfort and stop when I feel pain.
I think his attitude is refreshing too, but it's a curious comment sitting at the top of a thread on this forum.
I've been writing.designing reactive programming languages and frameworks for more than 10 years now, I started out with Superglue in my dissertation:

http://lampwww.epfl.ch/~mcdirmid/papers/mcdirmid06superglue....

Early on, I realized that pull was the only safe/sane solution, so in all my languages (barring early versions of Superglue), change propagation merely dirties execution that could have read the changed value, which is queued to be re-executed and will pull the new value if it still depends on it. That is the style that I use for Glitch, and it has turned out to be very robust.

Push is much harder. Actually, I'm not even sure how those systems even work properly; too many things to coordinate.
Sometimes. The comments are usually more interesting. Same for reddit.
There is no less productive form of interview than the "resume validation interview". Resumes are practically useless in the best case. Here, you seem to propose paying a premium for candidates who can properly estimate their facility with VCS systems and then cogently discuss that estimation in an interview. That can't possibly be a skill relevant to building software on your team!
I agree, we did a lot of research on a decent markup formar for law making (LML!). There are some efforts out there like (search for Akomantoso)

But the real challenge is getting TRACTION on a technology like this. It's not just the protocol (which I think it should be based on the Blockchain).. but also the product that makes citizens engaged with political participation.
In my own view, as a reform Jew, many of the Kosher for Passover items that even Orthodox consume are loopholes anyway, like Kosher for Passover cakes.

In the words of my friend - "OK, we eat Matzah because when we left Egypt we didn't have time to let the bread rise. But somehow we had time to beat the egg-whites stiff?"

For those that don't know, during Passover, the spirit of the law is that we don't eat leavened bread. But it's codified such that IIRC there are five restricted grains, with 18 mins to cook after coming in contact with water. Nowadays, companies make rabbi-approved products such as cookies, cakes, and even generic Cheerios, which are for all intents and purposes leavened, but 'within spec'.

* - If you're wondering, IMHO the Kosher for Passover cakes and imitation cheerios are still pretty horrible, more-so the texture than taste. Maybe they're intentionally left this way to remind us they're not the 'real thing'.
I lose about 20 points of IQ in a technical interview. It's nerve racking (I wear black shirts to hide the sweat) and it cost me a job working for a well known VR company. I passed the 'practical', which was a 2 hour coding test to generate a working game application, but the tech interview probably did me in. I've been programming games for almost 20 years, and as far as I know I'm one of the few who has done lead/senior level work on games that were both #1 and #2 simultaneous chart-topppers, but I still couldn't get the job. Their loss I guess, but it still sucks, as I was really enthused about what they were doing and could contribute significantly. I was about 10 years older than their typical engineer however, so maybe ageism played a part. I'll never know. I just wish companies would look at my past body of work, see that I'm friendly and un-abrasive, and bring me aboard.
I just about flipped a table when I glanced at that image and then started reading about a supposedly 13th century map. I find the use of that image at the top suspicious, perhaps akin to link-bait.
We know that the majority of companies want (and need) to use a hybrid infrastructure, private/public cloud. Moving workloads from private to public and viceversa is the main issue, for several reasons. Managing costs at scale, like you said, is a challenge for many companies that want to go back at some point.

How can you make it easy to move workloads from public to private and viceversa? What are the best providers today offering a complete hybrid platform with public cloud and hardware (dedicated servers or similar)?
I skim the comments. Then I read the article.

I always read the article before I comment. I try to read all the comments before I comment.
Global warming has become a religion so it's difficult talk about.

He also makes the point he's a sceptic on

"and that it will be catastrophic in the near future"

And even though I, also a sceptic, agree with him, it's not for the reasons he gives which I find a little crazy. (Plus I'm happy to say it's caused by humans)

So no, I and he wouldn't agree with the statement

> We have to figure out some way to stop it.

(Yet)
Dogfights are a thing of the past. Fighters don't joust at close distances anymore. I did a small part of my degree at a defence research place in the mid-90s. I remember someone showing me an experiment on how best to present range information about other planes to a fighter pilot, in terms of physical appearance. What was curious was the names for the ranges: 'safe', 'lethal', and 'very lethal'. 'Very lethal' was still several kilometers, and I asked about the guns and dogfighting - and got 'that doesn't happen anymore'.

More significant issues are speed, weather, and payload size. If you need fighter cover now, you don't want to hear "but it's raining". And speed is needed to increase operational range and response time.
While he might have said it, I don't believe he invented it: http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/01/10/watch-your-thoughts/

That said, I'm not sure it matters for the purpose :)
Correct, we kept the females for milk. Most of the males were sold.
I'm the OP and I've built maybe 45 apps with Ruby on Rails. I've played with Angular and Nodes.Js.

When I look at jobs boards though, .net is everywhere!

Thanks for the feedback - upvoted
Canonical doesn't enforce signature checks for module loading (which is useful for DKMS based kernel modules, and is also a "freedom to tinker" matter). That may well lead to a revoked Secure Boot key at some point...
Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge OLED Display Technology Shoot-Out
That's not what I think is going on here. He's not asking "Tell me the commands that I have to type to do X, Y and Z in GIT, SVN and Mercurial", he's asking a higher level question about how one can utilise VCS (and DCVS) tools to work in different ways.

Depending on the experience of the candidates he's trying to acquire/interview, this may be appropriate to indicate that they have either experienced different ways of developing at different companies, or have an interest in software development practices wider than just "The way I've done it is the way I was told."

I'd consider it an 'indicator' question, indicating that the candidate has either experience or interest in software delivery and the way that different organisations work/operate. It's probably not a make-or-break question, but if a candidate had a good number of years under his belt and hasn't at least heard of some kinds of different practices then they might be the "do what I'm told but no more" coder that that organisation wants to avoid.
TIL: Ketchup originated from China
Couldn't it be, that God wants sin to exist, so that he can punish sinful people (come on, it's probably lots of fun for him ;-) )?
Do you enjoy developing in .net or it is slow and cumbersome?
Paper tape was also oily, so it lubricated the punch as it moved through it. It had a certain tendency to spontaneous combustion.
It's not solving difficult problems in algorithms, systems engineering, hardware, ML, AI, etc.

Nothing wrong with that. But using today's technology in web and mobile to build a highly-usable customer experience, is not what OP meant by hard technical problems.
Actually there is. Boeing's design was forward thinking, e.g. using carbon fiber before anyone else --now common place. They also figured out a way to use the main engine to provide vertical take-off and landing, instead of having a separate engine, which would have made a big difference in cost. I watched an excellent documentary on the whole project long ago, and it was clear that Boeing design was superior, but they got shafted b/c, as other have pointed out, it wasn't about the best product, it was about defense contractor dollars.
As someone who has sprained my ankle I now have expert authority on your mental condition.
> I work in the medtech/health IT field at a startup doing a lot of clinical analytics. There's a very blunt and obvious explanation of what's wrong here, and it's the very unpolitical one.

Actually, it's very political--it's the AMA--the American Medical Association.

The doctors are fighting the automation of their jobs tooth and nail because once we have data we can see that ... gee ... most of them suck. Nurses could do their job ... better.
This is so off base it is staggering. The single thread performance divide between intel chips and arm is enormous.
The more unlikely the title, the more I check the comments first.
Spot on. I still believe the beauty of the project is that it's open-sourced, so our community of developers would be able to make wiser choices for the country.

Infinitely better than corrupted politicians.
Things I've changed to be a better programmer.

1. I used to be up all night long working on my side projects, sometimes till 5am. Then go to work on two hours sleep.

Now I go to bed at 9pm and get up at 3am for three hours of very productive coding. Fully focused three hours of coding.

2. I would always be looking for new ideas, new tools, new workflows and say yeah Ill do that next week, never happened.

Now I have a todo.txt list that I document everything and follow it every morning.

I have a todo.txt list, weekly.txt of what I have completed and a blog.txt that is a personal journal of my monthly accomplishments.

3. Never work on your personal projects after doing CRUD applications all day.

When I get home from work I relax as much as possible before 9pm bedtime. I try to think about my personal projects and what Im going to do next to improve or refactor before moving onto the next feature.
I worked on the Intel integrated embedded RAM a couple years ago (before release)! It was tough getting the h/w bugs out. Are you using it in Windows or Linux?
Is there anything yet to prevent abuse? For example, in the case of Cloudinary, they allow signing of URLs[0] to prevent anyone from just using your account to serve arbitrary images.

[0] http://cloudinary.com/blog/on_the_fly_image_manipulations_se...
This game is awesome. Full stop.
I remember with horror one technical interview I had. I was asked to complete a fairly basic problem, which I had actually just practiced a few hours before (the fact you can practice for these interviews indicates how questionable they are). As soon as the question was asked, I proceeded to start typing the answer and explaining what I was doing when suddenly my mind went blank, I struggled for nearly ten minutes to regain my confidence but by that point it was too late. The interviewer quickly ended the interview and told me to apply again after I had more programming experience, since apparently he was able to conclude the extent of my knowledge based upon my answer to a single question made during stressful circumstances.
Pre-Alpha gameplay footage of SUPERVERSE game
Languages never really die. Microsoft frameworks tend to live well beyond what Microsoft wants (look at MFC). Enterprise in particular is invested in .NET (and Java and others) and won't be motivated to change quickly. However, also don't expect things to move in any one direction and there will continue to be lots of competing technologies.

That said, what is it that you want to do?

Video games, high performance, and real time applications, and emerging technologies tied to hardware (e.g. VR, wearables), you'll be better served going into lower level languages and having a much deeper understanding of how hardware works.

The web is dominated by JavaScript. Anything client side in the browser, and you are going to be better served there.

Application client side programing, every vendor has their own thing and if you want to do well, you'll want to learn the native stuff to some extent. (Apple/Cocoa, Android, Microsoft might be .NET but they keep changing what they push like C++CX/WinRT).

Server backends are harder to predict. Lots of competition here. Lots of trade offs from a electricity and heat and hardware cost standpoint, to being able to pull high level frameworks off the shelf to put something together easily, to social engineering challenges of what people in your organization want to do (e.g. standardize on one language for everything).

But ultimately from a career decision, true understanding of how things work and being able to solve new problems is more important than learning a framework. Being able to intelligently pick the best tools/tradeoffs and knowing when they are inappropriate will set you apart, otherwise you are just another religious zealot blindly pushing the same technology for everything no matter how appropriate or inappropriate.
There are several startups attempting practical nuclear fusion, including:

Helion - has investment from ycombinator, attempting D-D/D-He3 fusion, which would produce only 6% of its energy as neutron radiation.

General Fusion - D-T fusion, but with a clever design that pretty much solves material issues caused by hard neutron radiation. Fusion happens in a spinning vat of molten lead, compressing plasmas with acoustic shock waves from steam-driven pistons. Jeff Bezos is an investor.

Tri-Alpha - the biggest of the fusion startups, quite secretive, with about 30 Ph.Ds, 150 employees, and over $150 million invested. Investors include Goldman Sachs and Paul Allen. Attempting boron fusion, which would produce less than 1% of its energy as neutron radiation.

LPP - the smallest, only about $4 million invested, but might not need more to complete its experiments. Also attempting boron fusion, from a reactor that fits in a small room. About to start a new round of experiments using a reactor core carved from solid tungsten, which they think will boost output dramatically by removing plasma impurities.

Those are the ones that I know have funding. EMC2, the polywell company, is looking for investors now that Navy funding has ended. Non-startups working on alternative fusion include:

Lockheed - this has gotten a lot of press

Sandia - repurposing the Z-machine to attempt net-gain fusion, after simulations showed they could hit breakeven with their existing machine, and 100x to 1000x gain with a 2-3x increase in input power. Very cheap since the Z-machine already existed, and things were going well last I heard.

UW's dynomak project - the most conventional of all these, similar to tokamak but does away with big external superconductors, which makes the reactor ten times smaller and cheaper. Needs $10 million to test whether the idea will scale.
Time spent reading the article (attentively, or at all) detracts from potential arguing time.
Fantastic concept and founding team behind the app.
How about this: The Egyptians invented yeast and leavened bread, and worshipped sheep. So how did Jews celebrate Passover, and the exodus from Egypt? By sacrificing a sheep, and refraining from eating anything made with yeast.

When the Temple was destroyed in Jerusalem, the sacrifice disappeared. Only the eating restrictions (beyond regular holiday restrictions) remained.

Over the years, different communities decided that other foods looked like grains, or acted like grains, or could be confused with grains. So they (e.g., corn, rice, and lentils) were restricted, as well, as part of this "spirit."

In Israel, I'm happy to say that you can get anything you want on Passover, except for things made with the original five grains and allowed to leaven (yes, for 18 minutes). You can have just about anything you want. Which is just fine with me; the point of Passover isn't to suffer, but rather to go without leavened bread for a week.

There's nothing inherently wrong with having kosher for Passover cakes. But once you have one, you'll avoid ever doing so again, I promise. (The kosher-for-Passover "rolls" are even worse!) I don't see having such cakes as a loophole, or even contrary to the spirit of the holiday, because the spirit of the holiday is to avoid leavened and bread products.
I do think some of the divisive issues that are taken up often end up cloaking other matters that should be focused upon. Perhaps with strong enough invariants and a pre enactment filter it would much harder to use divisive social issues politically. Maybe we could replace polls with votes on some things and have better recall mechanics too. I think a lot of the dysfunction is due to the fact we can and have passed radically unconstitutional laws in the past to great detriment to the entire population.
Yes, it can. And he may also similarly punish people who use loopholes.
For sure! Being Open Source it's fundamental to the spirit and vision of DemocracyOS.
Just pointing out some things use Mono, like Unity3D, the game engine.
http://www.mono-project.com/
I have an old project that does a similar thing: https://github.com/kristopolous/apophnia ... enjoy
My grandfather's favorite joke about goats:

Q. Do you know how to keep goats from jumping the fence?

A. Build a little ramp for them so they can walk over.