skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>While this is far from the only factor in American economic success during the 20th century, it's nonetheless a rather significant one

I believe we differ on fundamentals, and certainly on the notion of "success". A nation is more than place to make money, rather it is a home for an extended family. Economic arguments quantify away the essence of a nation: a living space set aside for the well being of progeny. Either a people is in control of its inheritance, or, its inheritance is being subsumed by another tribe. When viewed in these terms, rather than flourishing since the second World War, the United States has in fact been on a path to dissolution. And one can do better than a URL for proof of this; go to Southern California, open your eyes, and be honest. There is a reason Southern California's Anglo middle class paradise of 1880-1970 is now a squalid Latin American sweatshop; demographics is destiny. Calcutta is Calcutta because Calcuttans live there. Detroit is Detroit because Southern Blacks now live there. Etc.

If this does not ring true to you, feel free to disagree with me, but please, try the alleged benefits of demographic substitution somewhere where economists will feel the pinch themselves. Given the large number of Jewish economists I've read over the years, Israel would be a prime testbed (if the nation wasn't currently sterilizing and exiling their Black Ethiopian populace). Middle class gentile globalists could start by opening the floodgates to their own gated communities and HOAs before gleefully replacing their "unwilling worker" blue-collar cousins.

>If we're going to talk about demographics, you should also consider the fact that the US is facing a shortage of younger workers relative to retirees

This thinking is completely backward, IMHO. The economy serves the people, the people do not serve the economy. The means is not the ends. If a people cannot afford to have sufficient numbers of children, the problem is not with the people, its with the (usurious) economy. The economy needs to be replaced, not the people.
to me this seems an odd way to get people to purchase a license, I wonder if it actually works to any great extent..
Dan, I'll chime in. I don't know your circumstances, but when I read a critique like this my first question is always "where has the person travelled?". It's very difficult to spend time in places devoid of capitalism and not notice the differences. Due to my past work, I travelled all over the globe to both established and emerging markets -- and work simply can't explain the levels of disparity. What repeatedly made a difference was ownership. For example, the poverty in Addis Ababa is overwhelming. Once you get past that, the second thing you'll likely notice is that the government has a tight grip over business there. There are no McDonalds, Starbucks, or any recognizable brands there. This is for the "benefit of the people", but really is just there to protect government interests (the coffee place nearly has the exact same Starbucks logo). In one area where there were nice homes, a single individual owned the entire lot of them. Unlike the US where you might be able to acquire property or make free choices about a new business, your choices are restricted there. There is much talk in the US about the top 1%, but this defines the "99%" by limiting the sample size to only those living within capitalism. On a global scale, the top 1% is anyone making over $34k a year.
I don't understand the point of your argument. You're talking about absolutes. Politics is all relative. Relative to the GOP, the Dems are Left.

Statements along the lines of "well, you don't know what Left is if you think the Democrats are Left" don't apply. I don't even get what the point of that line is. Are we in the States supposed to look at entitlement expansion in the US and suddenly say "gee, I guess that is OK because it isn't as much as Europe"?. Is there an objective you're trying to get to? I could just as easily say "Oh no, you don't get it: what you call the Left is actually the FAR LEFT" and put you in the same position.

The whole meme that "Democrats are moderates and Republicans are extremists" is just an attempt at pushing populism into the mainstream.
Come annexe Northumberland, when you do.
I'm having a hard time parsing this comment in light of Apple and Google, which essentially do the same thing. The article mentions the extensions are similar to Chrome, so it's possible that someone will build a translation layer that will take underlying code and build the application specific bindings.

Thanks to Xamarin, you can build an application for any platform using C#, and even more, .NET is running pretty much everywhere now. So, I'm confused as to what technology you are referring to?
What are you talking about? How can abuse ever be countered with economic boycott?

The government should decide because that's what the government is for. If the government doesn't get it right, then the people should hold the government accountable.

In my opinion, Western governments lack sufficient accountability, but I still trust them to decide more than I trust an all-or-nothing anti-philosophical principle.
Hmm. Are you suggesting that this is a hit back at ISI who may have fingers in Axact for the revelation about ISI agent's role in Bin Laden killing? Very interesting!
Without a government to enforce that you stop lying, through fines or even prison time, how do you stop someone more socially powerful than you? You can call someone out and be right, but if they're more charismatic, more popular, or better at marketing their point than you, you still suffer.
Show HN: Twitter: PageRank algo and, KMeans to cluster, discover 'who_to_follow'
I never used the words child porn.

I used the words child abuse images.

This may have been a hint that I was talking about images of actual child abuse rather than selfies taken by teenagers.

We are in a discussion about an ideal world. Let's imagine that if we were really in a position that governments were legislating about absolute freedom of speech they could also draw up some non stupid laws to protect victims of child abuse?
Why would anyone downvote "jump in and ask questions :-)"? What is there to disagree about there?

Nothing.

It was downvoted because it looked like a stranger telling someone what to do.
As someone who has refused to put money into shares for the last 18-24 months on the basis that this shit is artificially high and cannot last...

I feel like a fool :(
What if it's intended to indicate status? It's a $200 replacement for a sticky note on your door... Maybe it should be conspicuous, with a distinct style and a prominent logo. Like, you're not knocking on just anyone's door, your knocking on the door of someone with a Ring doorbell on their house and a Tesla charging port on the garage, etc. Maybe it's meant to appeal to that sort of person.
...and here in the US, a major party candidate for president just said "If I’m president of the United States and you’re thinking about joining al-Qaeda or ISIL [Islamic State], I’m not gonna call a judge, I’m gonna call a drone and we will kill you."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/05/18/w...

Hearing that made me sick to my stomach.
When everything you know about finalizers is wrong
Ask HN: Any good Swift training courses in London?
Hi UK people,

Work give us a training budget of around £500, it's a use it or lose it situation.

As an iOS developer I thought an advanced Swift course might get me out the office for a few days ;)

Does anyone know of any decent courses like that in London? Preferably in person, during weekdays and not too far in the future.

-
I'm open to other suggestions on how to spend the training money (no conferences though), user interface stuff could be quite interesting too.

Thanks!
Full disclosure, my experience is with a bit older version of both Overviewer and dynmap, but a quick glance at them suggests they haven't changed much.

Key differences:

Overviewer's web interface is much better. Smoother & faster. And the rendering quality is also superior to dynmap's.

Dynamp is, however, dynamic. Overviewer is an offline renderer, basically. You need to cron-job it or whatever, so there are delays in the map updating. Dynmap, on the other hand, is a plugin to the server itself, so it updates whenever a chunk in the game updates. This is how it also is able to have player locations and chat and stuff.

But this also requires plugin support to use dynmap. Overviewer can easily work with hosted solutions. You can pull down a copy of the world from your hosted minecraft instance and run overviewer on it nightly, so you don't have to take on hosting minecraft yourself.

However, if you are going the modded-minecraft route (FTB or whatever), dynamp is low-effort and since it uses the game engine itself to render has built-in support for all the crazy textures & blocks that mods add. Overviewer does not.

tl;dr: If you're running vanilla Minecraft, use Overviewer. If you're running modded Minecraft (FTB, Technic, etc...) use Dynmap.
Whovian here, I find some resemblances with Death in Heaven episode (http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Death_in_Heaven_%28TV_story%29) but for sure it is not what the OP refers to.
What of the reddit sub that hosts pictures of dead children? What of videos of adults being sexually abused (not staged, actual abuse)? What of videos/images of other crimes that could cause emotional damage to those victims if the content were to spread? What of the abuse of the current laws to punish teens for engaging in what is quickly becoming normal behavior? What of the potential for the government to create systems to catch this one exception we make that we then once again find being pushed to cover other areas? What of making drawings/computer generated images illegal?

I will say this one area is probably the harshest test of the viewpoint, especially giving current social norms and morals. And I will say that the view point isn't perfect, only the best of the limited choices available. As such, there are areas where the outcomes are less than ideal.

And of course, production of such material would still involve a horrific crime that would be met with extremely harsh punishment. It may even force authorities to focus on producers, which would increase the number of children rescued.
Your snark would be appropriate if humans were logically omniscient, but we're not. Reading and comprehending a spec does not imply grokking all of its consequences.
Mac Apps Product Revenue Snapshot
I really dislike this type of things, I prefer plain text on email, HTML adds bloat to an otherwise small email. The site, and end result, though, looks nice!

If your service becomes known at work (a university) I will have to block it; my users (faculty, that is) will swarm it like bees to a hive. :-)
Thanks for sharing. Giving up isn't an option. We've fully accepted the possibility that we may be supporting her for our lifetime, with the hope we can get her to the point of at least some level of personal independence.

I've read several articles related to autism and software testing. We aren't nearly at that level yet, but your son could be a candidate for those programs. Good luck to you as well.
Path Following in games with tension, bias, and continuity control
Hacking together apps using Twitter as a data store
More sad, surely, that the UK population (and I speak as one) are stupid and easily led. We are. We really are. I despise us.
Ehhhh... I don't really know where to start here. We have viewpoints and value systems that differ on the most basic level. I don't give a single fuck for the historical system. The historical system is a system of rich and poor, of serfs and lords, full of exploitation at every level. Forget about it.

'Living on other peoples taxes' is total nonsense. It posits a world within which my work allows you to be lazy when that is not the case at all. You can be lazy regardless of whether or not I work in the vast majority of cases. Very few jobs are actually essential and even fewer are useful to the 'lazy' person (because they would not be wealthy enough to patronise restaurants, take luxury holidays, drive flash cars, etc.)

The UK has a ton of housing stock. It exists, it's there. We need a bit more, but generally, people work in order to pay a wealthy landlord; they don't work because the home needs any labour in order for it to persist.

We do need some level of labour in order for society to continue. But I argue that we don't need to force people by withholding (yes, withholding. not failing to present them - land ownership is a withholding of the commons) basics from them.

People will work anyway because they want more. The bottom level doesn't have to be serf status.

Money is a distraction. It is the current way of distributing resources. It doesn't have to be.

There is a distinction between giving people the opportunity to work and therefore increase their wealth; and forcing them to work by withholding things and renting it back to them. The former is great! The latter is evil.
This is the only reputable one I'm aware of but no doubt there are others: http://www.amsys.co.uk/course/beginning-swift-development/
World's Smartest Investment:Why Investing in Children's Books Is a Win-Win-Win
Shoudn't you store the initial fooPromise and use it instead?

var ensureFooEquivalent = getFoo();
That could be an interesting model if your web app is a single-page / static app served from Google Cloud Storage, with Javascript making AJAX calls to your backend and configured to gracefully handle transient errors as servers come and go.
Not the same, but related: a month ago there was a Reddit BestOf'd comment from a self-proclaimed autistic describing his early life and current situation. I found it fascinating.

http://np.reddit.com/r/science/comments/33czht/study_of_9500...
U.S. Navy abandons cloud and data center plans in favor of new strategy
Great idea :)

https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/90096/a-rapture-to...
Awesome... :)
It is rather shocking to me that people actually believe these systems to be secure. Flight control systems are old and outdated, and new stuff is bolted on with no regard to security what so ever.

Chris is a friend of mine, and I find it very disheartening how much the security community has taken the FBI's warrant at face value, and condemned Chris when he hasn't even had a chance to respond.

The security community itself knows how vulnerable all these other systems are, so why is it such a surprise that airplanes are also vulnerable?
"I get the impression that the key difference between ST and the usual State monad is (1) the ability to name state, and (2) the use of parametric polymorphism to prevent scope-extrusion of state."

The key difference between ST and the State monad is that the State monad is simply sugar for a function call of the form (s -> (a, s)), whereas ST allows for actual mutability. This is what changes the asymptotic complexity.

ST also does things to prevent references from leaking, and that's valuable and more useful in the context of ST, but that's irrelevant to our questions up-thread.

"Of course ML has scope-extrusion of state, and one of my questions/examples upthread was about the ability of Haskell's monadically controlled effects to implement such scope extrusion without 'tricks'."

That wasn't this thread.

I still think scope extrusion - without asking for it - would be a bug not a feature; particularly so in the case of a multithreaded, lazily evaluated language with inlining and CSE - where you really have little control over what gets executed when if you're ducking the features that guide what gets executed when.

This doesn't limit expressibility, because you do have the ability to ask for it, using those "tricks" that you keep excluding for no good reason. "How expressive is Haskell if it lacked those" is an interesting question, but not am immediately practical one, and you should be clear that that is the question you're asking.
The JavaScript Taboo: Extending Built-In Objects
What is the point of research / science if we dismiss it at the cost of generating money?

I find myself asking this question all the time. I feel that capitalism shouldn't be the end goal, with a profit motive. It got us to where we are today, but I do not think it is going to take us where we need to go now or in the future.
The Uber app for _passengers_ uses google maps. The Uber app for drivers uses Apple's turn-by-turn.
Unrelated, but you don't list contact info in your profile:

I love this quote of yours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9339307

I've added it to this page (a github project about awesome comments from HN): https://github.com/thomshutt/infinite-monkeys/pull/5

I also gave it to a reporter recently who asked why I hadn't started a business yet: http://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/money/business/201...
> Without a government to enforce that you stop lying, through fines or even prison time

Is libel not a civil offence? I.e. the court case is person vs person not state vs person. You confront the person lying in court and if on the balance of probabilities they can't demonstrate what they said to be true then they pay you compensation (plus costs). No one goes to jail, no fines are levied. The government's role is to provide a judge (and potential jury) and court room.
OMG, you got the username right.

Talk about getting a stomachache from stuff other people eat. But, whatever :-)
> Wow, this company must have to deal with this quite a bit in order for it to be covered like this during an interview setting.

Or, their hiring managers are very experienced and are basing this on decades of industry experience over many different managerial positions. They have learned the best practices for employee retention and dismissal over time, so they know to mention this now.
Well it's an asset at least. If the product fails, they can hopefully still sell the domain.
> What I still don't see is how this all applies to local transport. If I understand you correctly, you claim that local transport options in Europe and the US cannot be compared. Why is that?

In some cases it can be, but that's where the issues of density and context/surroundings really come into play. In order for a transit line to be viable, you have to a critical mass of people willing to use it. It's inefficient to run trains and busses with no passengers, so schedules are reduced, which makes things less convenient for users.

In my experience, there actually ARE local public transit systems in the US. Most of them use busses, but they exist. Most people don't use the public transit unless they have to, though, because cars are so much easier and more convenient. And while more investment into transit could make it more attractive, there are still issues and limits on how much it would actually be used due to the generally fewer number of people with access to any one transit line, as well as the destinations available from the pickup spot.
I always understood that potential revenue, to a certain extent, is baked into the value of the company. When things change in the market it doesn't necessarily effect the values of the companies, it's when something unexpected happens, because the market represents a perceived future value of the company.
> Indeed, I'm wondering why the quoted ratio is so low (1.10)

Not just that -- from the article:

>> To Smithers, the ratio’s doubling since 2009 to 1.10

Having "the economy" be "worth" only 55% of its scrap value seems crazy...
>I'm surprised it isn't working.

Certain very direct actions may not work, but the ability for this funding to slowly corrupt the science produced is still very much a risk and the ability for the rich to influence the very discoveries that science makes is still something to be feared.
We Need More Autopsies, to Help Save the Living
This is what I mean:

doSomething(function (err) {
doSomethingElse(function (err) {
doYetAnotherThing(function (err) {
throw new Error(
"I don't bubble up to the top of the stack, " +
"because there is no stack!");
});
});
});

BTW a great trick is to tick the little "Async" box in the Chrome Dev Tools, so you can get a full stacktrace showing exactly where you came from. It works for both callbacks and promises: http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/developertools/async-...
goodwill?
Btw thanks for writing this and clarifying that I was being miss-understood. I was genuinely worrying for a few moments that people voting on my comment were members of some type of child love association.
People in open plan offices aren't paralytically distracted by anxiety 75% of the time, or for any particular intervals of time. It's not nearly everyone, and what anxiety there is results from an accumulation of interactions and interruptions over time, much like how you shouldn't work in the same place you sleep.
Even by Republic standards, Lindsey Graham is on the crazy end of the spectrum. Luckily, there's almost zero chance anyone would put him anywhere near any power.
Who in their right mind would proudly proclaim their support for an organization that carries out bomb attacks on busy commuter streets during rush hour?

Quite a lot, as it happens: The ANC did that.

Who in their right mind would proudly proclaim their support for an organisation that tried to blow up the UK cabinet?

Well, quite a lot of people proclaimed support for the IRA.

Who in their right mind would proudly proclaim their support for an organisation that attacks a village and kills over a 100 civilians?

Quite a lot, given that a lot of people from Irgun (Deir Yassin massacre) have been central to the leadership of Israel.

The thing is, a lot of atrocities will seem necessary, or at least excusable, to those who see themselves as freedomfighters, whether or not the future will be kind to them.

I don't expect the future will be kind to IS, and the past is littered with terrorist groups - and freedomfighters - who are still hated and detested, and many of the ones "we" tend to see as freedom fighters today still have dirty hands and/or are seen as terrorists by others, so who knows...

I agree with the second part of your comment, though. It's played up because it's convenient to have enemies. Doesn't mean I don't think e.g. IS needs to be countered, but I don't think it'll get countered by snooping - on the contrary, it will fuel the paranoia of those that are intrigued by their cause.

To take a personal example: In my youth I was member of a marxist group. The knowledge that Norwegian intelligence services carried out extensive surveillance of the members of lots of left wing organizations (highly illegally, as it happens - but while the extent of their illegal surveillance was first "discovered" years later, everyone in the organisations in question knew about it; just that nobody believed them) did not deter me. On the contrary: It made me more certain my decision was correct: It was evidence of the oppression I was against.

The organisation in question was (and is) fully legal, participating in elections, and does not (and did not) advocate violence in any way, but I don't believe the overall principle is different: If someone is considering a cause opposed by government, then surveillance will not stop most of them, but spur them on and prove to them that they can not trust their own government.
I don't get it.
It's not that internet.org/facebook prevents anyone from doing something similar. So if you don't like it, make your own free internet.
I wish craigslist were more popular here (ottawa); I find kijiji's interface to be too noisy and does some crappy things (eg. Middle-clicking opens the ad in both the current tab and a new tab, totally useless). Also, while I understand the need to make a profit off the average user, kijiji seems to be taking the nickle-and-dime route which is annoying and annoying people into paying likely just incentivises them to try elsewhere first (haven't done the research on that but I'm pretty sure it applies to a statistically significant number of people).