skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I believe that the comment was referring specifically to "Americans [that] allow this sort of thing then say they are a world leader in personal liberty", and I'm not sure how saying that there are other people in America is a relevant response.

The practice of civil forfeiture is being "allowed" by not doing anything about it or by giving it legitimacy by accepting it as something that should be reformed politically rather than treating it as a criminal violation of constitutional rights. Just because you get worked up about it for 15 minutes when reading an article about the injustice it causes doesn't mean that you aren't allowing it. Most people will unfortunately not even have a strong opinion about it until it happens to them or someone close to them.
Mass-Scale Abuse of Poorly Configured SOHO Routers
Fuck that. Even criminals deserve fair legal council. And to not be treated like filthy animals.

Shame on you.

Edit: downvotes deserved. I read it several times and still interpreted the first paragraph to be in support of taking money because it denied full legal access. My brain flipped a word into "good". Despite being a public defender no less! Leaving comment anyways because that seems like the honest thing to do. Sorry.
No. VCs always get preemption rights, and always refuse to give up their board seats once they get them.

Replying to the OP a few threads up:

> I assume events (key hires, acquisitions, investments) are brought to the board for a vote, and need to pass with a majority.

There's an extremely common founder misconception that board seats are required for investors to be able to have a say in whether acquisitions and investments happen. But it's not true!

The normal pre-emption rights that every investor gets are what's used for these cases. Board seats are not required for this and unrelated to this.
The banker or politician will never be affected by this, why would they try to upset the police unions?
You are conflating two different things. Stoical calm isn't just silence, it's silence when the situation calls for such, when making your voice known cannot improve things. Engagement in communication is encouraged if it is believed to lead to good outcomes(although how "good" is defined is left more ambiguous). Stoic silence works best when it's used to be a good listener.

In comparison, masculine silence of the "strong silent" form, which occurs frequently in my family, and even myself, acts to reinforce existing privileges - it leads to excessive maintenance of a self-assured, unflappable image, not betraying weakness or answering to anyone, even when you need to ask questions, share responsibility for a problem, or should collaborate and submit to a group policy on behavior. It's ultimately built on the kind of anxiety over one's role described in the article, and it's a major penalty to healthy communication within the family, because it creates a stagnant bubble of "shall-not-be-challenged" behavior and outlook.

I'm actively working to disentangle the two within my own life. I've had the listening part down pretty well for a while. I had to learn when my responses were turning into image-asserting judgments, explanations that were unasked for, and other communication-blockers. I still have some trouble asking for things. I still have plenty to learn about when to become more engaged and active.
Awesome post! A minor typo in the first paragraph: change Each to Every.
The users have spoken and the vast majority don't care about DRM on streaming media.

{{citation-needed}}

They just want to watch YouTube, Vimeo, Netflix, etc in their browser and have it work.

YouTube works fine now. Netflix is a temporary aberration most of the world has never heard of or used. It's not the browser's job to support broken, predatory businesses. We spent 15+ years waiting and just achieved flashless and open video... let's use it.

Google, Apple et al put their full weight behind DRM and patent-encumbered formats, so Mozilla has to go along with it to stay relevant.

{{citation-needed}}

Edit (out of posts): Yes, pay per view is a broken model. You are correct that Mozilla sticking to its guns risks a reduced user base. However, Mozilla blindly following other browser vendors removes its fundamental value and USP. The reality is that the internet wants not just 'open', but also meaningful choice. Many of us believe that Mozilla has, in this case, missed the boat.
I replayed Deus Ex recently, and was surprised at how bad it looked, especially the character models. It was so bad that it was ruining my immersion.

However, my brain eventually forgot about this and I could continue play, and eventually I stopped seeing crude low-poly models and instead saw just "people".
That's exactly how mortgage underwriting works. It's not 100% accurate, but there is an appeals process to address inequities.

This is pretty much the answer. Everyone who argues that it's impossible to figure out a fair value for the property without a change in ownership has to face the fact that lenders do it on demand and (admittedly only theoretically at certain points in recent history) are incentivized to get it right because that's the final method available to them to get their money back if a loan goes south.
I don't agree with mreiland. I didn't dismiss you donizx, your first comment was a smart POV.

mreiland is just being rude, he probably had a bad day or was recently frustrated with some discussion gone eerie with a climate change denier and he's taking it out on you.
And he's worried about climate change, that's understandable, cut him some slack.
You're about people not claiming it in some some situations - for example, if cops burst into a warehouse and find a briefcase full of cocaine and a briefcase full of cash, it's reasonable to guess that one was being traded for the other. In this case it's also appropriate that the cash be charged, as in 'US vs $1 million dollars,' because the erstwhile traders haven't stuck around to be arrested.

But it makes absolutely no sense to apply those methods to cash confiscated from individuals not charged with a crime. Having cash isn't a criminal offense, even while black - although as a practical rather than a moral matter, this young man would have been smarter to open an account with a large national bank or get a cashier's check to open an account in LA rather than carrying the cash around.
Perhaps, we can still show compassion for those who will be here after we're gone.
Civil asset forfeitures are like those towns in BFE that operate on ticket revenue - the situation rarely gets dealt with because the number of people getting tickets is an insignificant proportion of the voting population.
I work at Mozilla on the EME team.

Neither Firefox nor the Adobe CDM install any kernel code. The Adobe CDM is, conceptually, the Flash Player's DRM code repackaged to work with Firefox's CDM API. And the Flash Player doesn't need to install new kernel drivers. Studios have different DRM requirements for video quality levels like HD, non-HD, "Studio HD", and "Ultra HD". For higher quality video, studios might require secure hardware path. Even this level, AFAIU, doesn't require new kernel drivers because Windows already has APIs for this.
sure, blaming things willy nilly when you have little substantiative proof can clearly produce some highly antagonistic and overly entrenched thinkers. I C what you did there.
They did let iSEC partners review their source code. So, it is not nothing.

But I agree that it would be far more trustable (and popular) if Bittorrent Sync were open source. And there is still a profit model with an open source BTSync: let people (who need it) get a tracker, relay server, and always-on (read-only encrypted) peer subscription.
Can't you just refuse? Or can the police/DEA forcibly search a random person's belongings without a warrant?
Another banker worry – criminal eavesdroppers benefitting from Moore’s Law
In old stories, yes. But just look at The Simpsons as a major and early example to the contrary.
I find it hard to believe that the US have anything like "presumption of innocence" in civil court.

Are you sure you're not mixing up civil and criminal proceedings?
I generally agree with you from a policy point of view, but I think you're oversimplifying:

The number of wealthy people looking for a pied-à-terre in SF is not a fixed quantity. It seems to me that that number has grown significantly compared to, say, 10 years ago. And that that's mostly due to the increased prestige of the city (as perceived by that wealthy set). That prestige comes from economic growth, but also from a sense of how friendly the city is to pied-à-terres for wealthy people. So building more of them might just end up increasing the demand for them.

Sure, the process won't go on literally forever until the city is nothing but vacant luxury condos, but the total demand after that compounding effect has gone on a while may be much more than it appeared at first.
Probably won't have much resolution for leaves. I've used ultrasonic transducers for a college class project almost 15 years ago. Ultrasound worked great for hard surfaces like walls, but softer materials like clothing reduced its range of detection. Snow covered trees, I think will have a similar signature that would be hard to detect except at close range. With a UAV, it could be done, but it'd have to be moving pretty slow I think. You'll probably have better luck with some sort of optical system.
"Every interaction in life is a transaction of some sort."

What about when a mother kisses her baby's head? What about when a friend offers a hug to someone who has just lost a loved one? What about when a kid gives a friendly smile to the kid who always gets bullied?

Are those transactions? Did those people get "good deals"?

Now I'm just some hyperbole-prone kid who isn't qualified to give advice to a Life Veteran like yourself, but I find myself wondering what you might learn if you stopped keeping score for awhile. In my experience, treating every interaction as a little game to maximize profit is a great way to scare away anyone who is interested in anything more worthwhile than profiting off of you.
Apparently YC has an internal "bad investor list", as well as a huge network of easily accessible founders who've dealt with the majority of the investors in the area before.

Presumably, us normal outsiders would have a tough time approaching this level of background checking. I wish something like this bad investor list could be done publicly too.

As for interviewing VCs as the primary method, that must be a joke. They're professional salesmen and always act like your best friend when you're signing. VCs mostly get to where they are for 2 reasons - great deal flow or great personal sales technique, mostly the later.
I think you missed my point. Real model flight enthusiasts will only fly their birds at RC clubs. Clubs impose structure, safety rules, etc.

In other words, even if you are flying total crap the probability of hurting anyone or causing property damage is greately reduced.

To anser the other part of your question. A $3K heli has significantly better electronics and mechanics when compared to something like a DJI quad. And, of course, there's the fact that it has excellent autorotation with full control on the way down.

Yet, again, the point is we don't fly over people, roads or buildings and we have far more experience flying than most drone buyers.
Then you['re not trying. Read a legal journal, you'll see plenty of legitimate uses documented in court reports. I have no problem with it when agents seize cash that's found along with a pile of drugs or illegal weapons (a common enough occurrence in any major port city), but those are cases where you have very obvious cause to suspect criminal activity even if the criminals have fled.
Sadly, this looks like one more step in the walled garden web direction, somewhat like AOL sites back in the day. I am amazed publishers are apparently going along with this. They must be very desperate for views if they are willing to relinquish this much control.
OP was a public defender.
I've stuck with btsync 1.3.94, the version with the beautiful workflow, just before it went off the rails.

Plus, pre-2.0 shares had a killer feature: read-only encrypted peers. These were peers that would only retrieve the encrypted data in read-only form.

Using read-only encrypted peers, you can have an always-on node in the cloud, with the security of end-to-end (client-side) encryption.

I hope they will bring this back in Sync 2, but it seems much harder now that they switched to the identity model.
Honestly we're really lucky to have these asset forfeiture programs in place; money has been given a free reign for far too long.

The DEA is looking out for our safety by implementing this well-intentioned protocol... If the government didn't, who would hold our money accountable for the criminal behavior it's been involved in? Just look at the facts... almost 80% of bills have touched drugs! Appalling!

And they're transparent about the process--they put that filthy money on trial even though it keeps refusing to talk. Enough 'shock and awe' from our DA's and I know we'll get there eventually... We need harsher sentencing guidelines!!

[United States vs. $1,058.00 of U.S. Currency](https://casetext.com/case/united-states-v-105800-in-us-curre...)

I certainly sleep better at night knowing that the currency loitering in my pocket doesn't get a pass on its delinquent past just because it's an inanimate object...
> The US is less corrupt than France for example

Careful there. The Transparency International page you link to is the perception index.

It measures what a set of people perceives corruption to be like in each country, and composits results from a number of different surveys in a way that as far as I know is not benchmarked against other data to verify if survey results actually matches reality.

You can not use it as a measure of how corrupt a country actually is. It's likely that it's an indicator when the numbers are very far apart, or that it can be used to spot trends in a country over time, but the relatively small difference between France and the US seems unlikely to be sufficient to draw any conclusions.
Perhaps. If a third party candidate gets 5% of the vote, they're eligible to draw public money from the Presidential Election Campaign Fund. That could be huge.

And aside from that, numbers build legitimacy. If a third party is obviously not going to win, but gets 10% of the vote, we start taking it seriously, and it can build on that success over multiple elections, just like individual candidates do.

The 'wasted vote' trope assumes that the sole point of a vote is to elect a candidate. Your vote is also an act of free speech - it can send a message to your fellow citizens and your government. Even in our stupid two-party system, politicians watch which way the wind is blowing.
Google seems to be running JavaScript for a while now:

I.e.: http://searchengineland.com/tested-googlebot-crawls-javascri...
It would seem you might want to read the comment you replied to again.
Pleasee see here http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~fwood/anglican/examples/index.ht... for some very cool examples using Gorilla REPL.
I agree. I mean, on day one, I am free to do as I wish in my home; but on day two, just because I invited this guy into MY house (and nobody else's, mind!), I can't kill him if I want? Why this sudden flip?

/sarc
People all over the country are routinely treated with heroin (diamorphine) in a clinical setting. It is a very useful narcotic. If you've had nose surgery, even a simple corrective procedure, you've been treated with cocaine. None of these people leave the hospital craving drugs and looking to score. They do not become addicted.

Addiction does not follow from treatment with narcotics. What you think of as harmful addiction follows from the junkie subculture created by criminalization

The harmful effects of drug addiction are in fact a result of severe criminalization of narcotics. If you suffer from debilitating pain, you will go out of your way to suppress it. If no one will sell you pain killers legally, you will get them illegally.

Indeed, if doctors could legally prescribe opiates for chronic pain sufferers, most of the illegal market would disappear. There would indeed be no crime. People in pain would get their medication for a few dollars and go on having normal lives. Calling these people addicts really is a way of ostracizing them, which only hurts people. True, they might be addicted to their medication. Their pain is now manageable too, really a fair trade off I think. Even more so when a daily dose costs just pennies.
Yeah, I meant criminal. It's fixed.
Or the OS went too short, so to say. There are two problems here.

1) Windows' limit of 260 characters per path name is incredibly small for a modern OS and that was true many years ago as well.

2) Npm approach relied on well behaved OSes and file systems allowing long path names. It's not future proof because you don't know on which OS and file system you'll need to run, maybe some limited embedded device.

Ruby's rvm solved that problem with a single directory level and a gem@version naming scheme.
Because what's right and what's sensible are two different things. Bear in mind that you could also get robbed the old-fashioned way - if you reach into your envelope full of money to withdraw any cash there's a small but non-zero possibility that someone will notice and get the idea to take it for themselves.

This is why people used to carry traveler's checks before plastic became ubiquitous - people know that carrying a bunch of cash as a tourist in an unfamiliar place is unwise.
> Technical and human pluralism enriches the world. Monocultures do not.

Unlike human culture, tech cultures can't communicate to enrich one-another. (The people in them can, but this is a different thing.)

To explain what I mean: you can't import a Ruby library into a Python program. You can import a C library in a Rust program, or vice-versa—but that's a special case. Even then, you can't write a patch for a C library in Rust, or vice-versa, because the original maintainers of the library you want to contribute to are only going to accept contributions in languages they understand and can maintain directly.

I really believe that fixing this—decoupling "runtime/platform" from "language semantics", and "language semantics" from "syntax"—is the single most important thing that will happen in software engineering in the next 20 years.

Imagine a program somewhat like go-fmt(1), that would run on checkout of a source repo, to transform a base-level AST into the syntactic representation of your choice, and pattern-match-decompile any low-level statements with high-level "shape" into the macro-statements in your chosen language that would generate them[1]. Imagine every library being not only available in every language, but able to be contributed to by programmers who know any language. Etc.

The result would be, in one sense, a "monoculture"—a single ecosystem of libraries, rather than 12 ecosystems between the CRT, the JVM, the CLR, the Erlang VM, etc. But it wouldn't disallow competition between versions of said libraries—just allow obvious winners to win once-and-for-all, instead of limiting their success to their technological "country of citizenship."

---

[1] Or, better yet, a FUSE server where an underlying directory of AST files gets mounted as syntaxified files. Much cleaner from the rest of the toolchain's perspective.
Cause DPR/SR didn't have coins seized and auctioned?
The Software Industry Is the Problem (2011)
1. Get a infinite number of monkeys into a room

2. Give it one of these problems.

3. Profit!, of course minus the cost of the bananas.
In principle this is not a problem in a peer to peer network as long as there are peers. You simply store the message encrypted on enough peers that are in the swarm.

It seems though that they store the message on the sender's device until the peer becomes available:

http://blog.bittorrent.com/2014/11/21/offline-messages-come-...

Edit: it is fully asynchronous now: http://blog.bittorrent.com/2014/12/22/bleep-now-supports-asy...
You don't make it out to anyone. A cashier's check is a bearer instrument issued by the bank against its own funds.
You may not be familiar with US history when it comes to that. It's actually far harder to legally bribe politicians today than it was eg 100 years ago. A century ago there were hardly any laws restricting such practices.

What has changed in that time, is now the government has vast economic controls at its disposal. If the government doesn't control the economy, you can't buy economic favors from them. When the US was still a very Capitalist nation at the start of the 20th century, in which the government had little control over the economy, political bribery would not get you very far when it comes to passing laws for your own profit.

To sum it up: political bribery is far more difficult today than it was 100 years ago, but now it can buy you a lot of things whereas before it could not, because of the substantial expansion of government control over the economy.

When it comes to the financial crisis, Western Europe committed many of the same financial 'crimes' you're referring to that, that the US did. The financial, banking and real estate boom and bust hit countries from Britain to France to Germany to Spain. What happened in the US was not unique to the US, the same things were going on in a lot of 'first world' nations.

The Fed stepped in and bailed out tons of European banks for example, the same as they did US banks.
It wouldn't have happened with a visa or mastercard either. Bitcoin has literally nothing to do with this.
In fact, some emulators have modes to emulate interlacing/scanlines/etc.
“I'm a Mac I'm a PC” AD
but rather, the city can benefit from the investment that follows

Offering tax abatements to attract "investment" in a community is like offering ballooning ARMs to attract long-term home ownership: the incentives are set up to cause exactly the opposite of the stated goal.
Thanks for sharing this. I would like to see a similar report on Asia from APNIC. China has amazing optical infrastructure (these days, fiber to the home is normal even in tiny towns) but almost nothing internationally they let people use. They neighbour with so many countries I wonder why they don't get in to the transit game. Russia would be a quicker and non-US route to Europe, for instance. Central Asian connectivity is probably Russia-dominated, but China could get in there. India, Pakistan, or Burma could provide shorter transits for Chinese traffic to much of the world. Of course, there's some pretty big mountains about, but after building the Beijing to Lhasa railway, what's a couple of cables?
First of all - suicide is not a crime.

Also - suicide isn't more common among criminals AFAIK.

Additionaly - equating it to murder makes about as much sense as equating masturbation to rape (BTW Catholic church did sth like this, at least in my language masturbation is called by priests a "self-rape").

So I don't think you can explain one by another.
"The time has come for software liability laws."
I would agree.
Only it would make software extraordinarily expensive.
I know this is a really old thread, but I have to ask what happens when the system itself (e.g. domestic surveillance) is the abuse?
We're fortunate it has become, essentially, a national government scandal at this point, with perpetually wider awareness. The national media has taken to aggressively writing about it lately.

In this case I'm confident we're going to see the forfeiture racket neutered in the next few years. It seems to have finally gotten large enough to draw serious Congressional and White House scrutiny to stop it.