skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You said "What if a population was not systematically enslaved and disenfranchised for, oh, say, 2000 years". You used the terms "systematically enslaved" and "They were property". Those are terms applied to serfs. They do not apply to all peasants.

You therefore cannot be referring to Sweden's relatively recent and short period of absolute monarchy when you talk about 1000+ years of time. See for example https://www.quora.com/Sweden/In-Swedish-history-why-did-most... "In Swedish history, why did most of the peasants own land, and why did they ally with the king against the nobility? This is substantially different from the rest of Europe, and I wonder why it developed this way?" Quoting from it:

> The Swedes retained that almost primordial, archaic concept of individual liberties and rights when other Germanic tribes had been subsumed into other legal or property concepts, such as what happened in the Holy Roman Empire.

You second link, for Finland after it was conquered by Sweden, says:

> In contrast to serfdom in Germany and Russia, the Finnish peasant was typically a freeholder who owned and controlled his small plot of land. There was no serfdom in which peasants were permanently attached to specific lands, and were ruled by the owners of that land. In Finland (and Sweden) the peasants formed one of the four estates and were represented in the parliament.

These are not "systematically enslaved and disenfranchised" peasants who were "property".

As your third link says, the "Norwegian serfdom" social system for Norwegian lower class farmers 1) started in 1750, so well after slavery was firmly established in the American colonies, and ended in 1860, that is, before the US abolished slavery, and 2) was "not actually in serfdom by European standards". This isn't the 2000 years or even 200 years you alluded to.
It's not apolitical. But it's also not necessarily political. Sure there can be different opinions about an API and some of those might have a political motivation (for a very broad definition of the word political). But this does not mean that APIs are primarily about politics. And there is certainly a huge leap to such concepts like power and money.
Define dependencies. Autoconf checks for api 'usability' such as 'hey in 1981 some unused api since 1982 had a bug in foobar do we have that bug?'. It also just spits out shell scripts in the end but that are bloated beyond belief.
3D+Printed+Smart+Containers+Detect+Spoiled+Food
Wrong comparison. Separating client funds is like having a safe deposit box in a bank, rather than having an account...
Because you think that if I lived in Switzerland (I live just next to it actually) I'd obviously have the same ideological orientation as you?
>>> There are more people enjoying work-life balance in America than alive in Switzerland.

How is this even remotely relevant to the discussion?
I am currently studying in the US on a visa. I WAS considering trying the H1B route. However, the longer I am here the more I see what the "real" America is like. Due to my European citizenship I can work in most (if not all) European countries without the hassle I'd have here (visa application). Yes, the pay might be lower, and yes I might not be in the start up mecca, but I never cared about start ups.
Court Tells US Government Get a Warrant If It Wants Mobile Phone Location Info
previous submission:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9984142
I don't understand. What is the problem and what is the proposed solution?

An API definition is just "here's the functionality/interface I decided to expose to the outside world." There are an infinite number of APIs that can be defined, such that when designing one you have to make a lot of arbitrary choices, sometimes "political" ones. Different groups take different approaches here, and respond differently to feedback, but I'm not aware of an endemic over-politicization problem.
You don't have to live in the polar circle to enjoy Scandinavian laws...
> The entire codebase was stored in a database

Even if this didn't happen at Mt. Gox I'm sure it's happened in other places. I've heard of people storing the queries that they were going to send to the database in a database row.
There is a big difference between the wealth of individual norwegians, and the wealth of Norway the state and the gdp/capita of Norway.

Each norwegian citizen is like Warren Buffett, they sit on a shitload of money but you can't tell.
Ok, that makes sense. I think I misread your original comment as referring to commingling personal funds with the corporate funds - which on rereading your OP is not what you said at all.
Eh, outside of the U.S. just watch the first 1/2 season of breaking bad. It's fiction, of course, but deciding to cook crystal meth to pay for cancer treatment is an idea that would only make sense in the U.S.
Among the most notable of the tidbits I've seen: There was one bank account, shared by the CEO (personally) and MtGox itself.
That's one of the most pernicious things about the US tax system though. Because citizens get taxed by both the USA and the country they're in, it strongly disincentivises people from ever moving abroad (unless they revoke their US citizenship).

This leads to Americans never really discovering, en masse, what life in foreign countries can be like. They're just tourist destinations.
"American slaves were (at the time) a small minority of the country"

11% is a minority. It is not a small minority. Slaves were also a majority in Mississippi and South Carolina. http://thomaslegion.net/statesandslaverypercentagesintheunit... .

Your start date of 1776 is irrelevant. Colonial America also had a slave class, starting in the 1600s, which the US inherited.
The author claims she was double taxed by the Swiss and American governments. I doubt that she actually paid the U.S. taxes, as up to 100K earned abroad is exempt. It's called the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion, http://www.irs.gov/Individuals/International-Taxpayers/Forei...
Dolphin Progress Report: July 2015
Sorry, but the people opposed to the veils and the minarets are not opposed to them because they represent patriarcal culture, they're opposed to them because they're foreign.

In fact, patriarcal is more likely a good adjective to describe the anti-foreigner areas. For instance, one of the highest votes for a recent anti-immigration referendum[1] was in Appenzell Innerrhoden. That same (half)-canton only gave women the vote in 1990, and only because they were forced to by the Swiss Federal Court [2].

[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initiative_populaire_«_Contre_... (in French, but look for AI under "Par canton")
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage_in_Switzerl...
i pay 45% tax in the usa. time to move ;)
This is not correct, except to the extent that management appears to have routinely used Mt. Gox's corporate funds for purposes other than those reasonably required to run the corporation. Mizuho Bank, Shibuya Branch, No.1457705 was indeed registered in the name of Mt. Gox, as were several other accounts.
Ok, let's say I design and run a simple service that publishes stock market data and I expose the data using a REST API. If someone decides to use the service, you might argue there are multiple parties involved. But really, they are just using my service if they like it, otherwise they don't. There is not politics, power (I don't have any, except over a service I run on my own server) and money (The service is free) involved, if we want the terms to mean anything.

Sure, I get to make all the decisions, but if we now call every decision anyone ever takes political, the term looses all its meaning. Also note that those decisions are not limited to API at all: The implementation is just as political (e.g. availability, performance, privacy).

So it turns out that APIs and protocols (conflated in the article) and the implementation and - if it's a service - any other rule or practise affecting it can have political aspects, just like any other product or service or thing.
I think "Many enclaves are also exclaves" is backwards. By Wikipedia's definition, all enclaves are exclaves, but only some exclaves are enclaves.

The territories described in the article are enclaves, not just exclaves, because India and Bangladesh are the only two countries involved.

EDIT: Ah, never mind, I was only considering the case where a country is partitioned into multiple disconnected components.
Thanks for saving me the time of reading the essays.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3fe92x/im_ashley_b...

>The entire codebase was stored in a database, only accessible via a client Mark maintained, with no version control nor lock controls meaning if we both had a file open we could overwrite one another's files and undo work.

>>Like, PHP source stored in mysql tables?

>PHP, CSS, JavaScript, HTML. Errything.

>There was no pre-production environment. Meaning changes were supposedly deployed untested or made straight on production.

>I was told I could not touch the backend, although they were working on getting access to this via Mark.

WAT
One of my coworkers holds their M.S. IT Management. We work at a 3 year-old, ~150 person start-up in Mountain View. That's the only data point I can provide.

Edit: I should point out he already had many years of experience before he picked up that M.S.
In every way except rent, though. And given rents in San Francisco...
Examples? Try "every API ever created".

I think you're missing the point, which is unfortunately a very common problem among programmers. This can lead to bad situations where political decisions are being made de facto, without a real decision-making process.

Unfortunately, there are usually many opinions on which of the various possible solutions should be used to solve some problem. Often this involves trivial choices based on personal preference (e.g. snake_case vs camleCase). Sometimes the choice ends up affecting other important areas, such as your "burning real CPU" example. It may have far more important ramifications, too, about who has the responsibility for the long-term storage of a particular type of data and how that data can be accessed.

"Politics" is simply what we call the process by which we humans come to an agreement on this kind of question. The article's point (which I strongly agree with) is that choosing who has to pay those CPU or bandwidth costs is a political decision. Often, an API could be designed to make either side be the party that has to run their CPU. If you have a strong opinion about which side that should be, good! Engage in the political process and start negotiation.

On the other hand, purely technical decision usually doesn't need an API. The solution is usually obvious. We (hopefully) take the time to write up an API (or specification, or RFC, ...) for the things where there is not a single technical solution.
Perhaps the employee is talking of their time there at the beginning in 2012, not a later setup, they weren't there at the end in 2014.
my mistake

i can't edit the parent comment, but you're right.
few pleasures compare to productively working

There is something seriously wrong here. Many, many pleasures in life are as pleasurable, or more pleasurable, than productively working. For many people, productively working is actually not pleasurable.
Whatever you say old man
60% work time

Oh man, I've been asking for this at almost every company. "Hey, can I work 4 days a week for 80% of the salary?" "WHAT? NO! Think of all the synergy collaboration meeting time you'll miss you won't be able to communicate without being present all of the time what if someone needs to talk to you during the week you must have the same schedule to maximise the convergence serendipity" "Oh well... what about work hours?" "We have a flexible system. We have people coming in as early as 7 and ones arriving as late as 12, both are fine as long as you do 8 hours"

I didn't have the heart to tell them.
Or: The brazen partisanship involved in the selection of the examples amused me but didn't detract from the argument.
Well, as much as I believe 'cultural' production reflect the subconscious of a group, it's still a stretch to me.
Oh, man. This was pretty much the final straw for the couple of newsgroups that I loved dearly back in the day (rec.arts.books.tolkien and alt.fan.tolkien). The once-vibrant community was already atrophying (due largely to a lack of newcomers and the usual gradual attrition of old regulars), and then somewhere around 2006 or 2007 there was a massive sporge flood that got past spam filters and made the groups unusable for about half a year. Once that ended, very few people were left.
Show HN: Bloop – Declarative Modeling for DynamoDB
RE: car parking story, I see you have not been to Sweden before, we have mastered the art of passive-aggressive notes here.
> Switzerland immediately taxes dividends at a maximum of 35 percent [...]

This is not quite true. They do impose a 35% tax on all dividends and interest of bank accounts (if the amount is over 200 Swiss Francs) but you get that back when filing your tax return. However you will have to pay income tax on dividends and interest. The goal is to ensure people don't commit tax evasion by not declaring some of their wealth. [1]

[1]: https://www.admin.ch/opc/de/classified-compilation/19650189/... (in German)
> Sweden is also comparably small (same size as NYC proper)

You must be confusing it with something else. Sweden is slightly bigger than California (450295 vs 423970 km2).
Ask HN: Desperately bored mobile dev wants to get into machine learning
I've worked in mobile my entire career. In the past ten years I've helped build some of the most successful mobile games for EA, prototyped crypto apps for payments similar to Apple Pay and worked for Australia's largest mobile consultancy. Most Australians have an app I've worked on. I moved to the US a year ago to work for a large tech company in Seattle.

Right now I'm desperately bored. I'm maintaining an app at work that has been poorly written and I don't have the approval to refactor much of it. The culture of this team has no passion for the work they're doing. I'm stuck at this company for the next year and I need a challenge. I've decided to study machine learning.

Right now I'm reading Machine Learning by Jason Bell. It seems like it's a good introduction.
Other than reading and working through the examples in the book I'm not entirely sure how to get proficient at machine learning where I could consider working in it professionally.

I'm curious to hear other people's experiences studying machine learning outside of university. Was it worth it? How and what did you study? What side projects did you have?
About half of Irish (whole-Island) Protestants today are Presbyterians concentrated in the Ulster Plantation (Northern Ireland); those are absolutely the same ethnic group as the Scots-Irish, despite that label not being used in the UK.
Of course I disagree with the article. APIs are not the political problem, technology is. It's inherent in saying that you're going to "change the world," be "disruptive" or "revolutionary." When software dies, it goes unmaintained and unused in favor of something more popular. These are qualities of political platforms. The word "platform" is used in technology in a remarkably similar way. So it's not an API thing.
What type of restrictions?
He probably meant in terms of population (around 9M).
https://medium.com/@chanezon/good-post-on-using-docker-cloud... great post, but don't use maven:onbuild for Java projects
I suppose it depends on what you enjoy doing and what job you have.
BBC Radio Four has a programme "Inside the Ethics Committee". That takes real world cases and talks to people involved, and also a panel of ethicists. It's fascinating.

Recently they covered a case of a woman active in sports who suffered a knee injury, and several failed surgeries to repair the damage. That left her unable to participate in sport. She began to hate the leg and wanted an amputation. (Did she get it? I won't spoil the programme).

That particular episode is here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b061tfmp

The series' page is here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007xbtd

This kind of programming is excellent. It's something the BBC does very well. Other episodes cover equally tough cases, so be a bit careful. There are some episodes that ralk about suicide, for example.
> (Want to know why folks hero-worshipped Larry Wall before he wrote Perl? Because he wrote this thing called rn(1). Which had killfiles.)

Perl came into being in 1987, which is before September 1992, so his creation of rn must have had traction/worship before the "Eternal September." I'd hardly say that said event was the reason that people worshipped him for rn, especially since Perl was out for ~5 years at that point.
What's the point of earning even more money if you're too busy to spend it?

There is a law of diminishing returns when it comes to money, past a certain point it's not worth the time you gave up to get it.

Put it another way, when you reach retirement age, would you rather be a millionaire with health problems or a modestly rich person in great health?
While I agree with the her general message, I don't see how "The Swiss work hard, but they have a strong work-life balance." is demonstrated in the article.
Judging by the article you work half as much as an American an earn the more, which sound amazing, but hard?
I doubt the "produce" of an average worker in Switzerland is more then or even equal to that of an American.
(PS I am not an American)
I have to say I find this line of thinking somewhat incoherent. I'm thinking of cases where someone creates software and also offers an API to enable tooling, alternative interfaces and that sort of thing. Take Github or Microsoft TFS, for example: they offer an API that exposes functionality that they control but what is political about it?

Or say I offer a REST API at work to some business functionality locked up in a mainframe in order to expose it for reuse by other apps and workflows, and the consumers desperately want me to do it (or anyone who has the time to do so). What is political about that? Talking about the API is going to revolve around requirements that other apps have that could be satisfied by such an API. How is it useful to view that as a type of political border dispute?

API seems to be a fairly narrow concept to me that appears in various contexts, some of them political and others not.
Moving won't help you if you are a US citizen.
I think the times are a-changing. Upward mobility is on the decrease and inequality on the increase. Only a small subset of industries are currently seeing rags-to-riches stories and if one is ideological, the options may dwindle further.
Hardly. Country A is sovereign over land inside country B, which land is, itself, inside a part of country A, which is, itself within country B.

Yeah, that makes so much sense.
>choosing who has to pay those CPU or bandwidth costs is a political decision.

Well sure, if you put it that way, we could reframe almost anything as political decisions.

"costs" == "politics"

"adding server racks to service the API" == "politics"

etc, etc.

Should a coupling hosting a party at home ask their guests to bring potluck? Structuring the cost of food and deciding whether it's the host or the guests funding it is ultimately a "political decision".

I was reading author's essay while holding a narrower concept of "politics" in my head. I now get your expansive perspective on "politics" and while I understand where you're coming from, that larger framework is not helpful to me.

>"Politics" is simply what we call the process by which we humans come to an agreement on

Sometimes, the API is just "published" with no process for "agreement". It either exists, or it doesn't. It may have come into existence because it was an easy technical solution.
When you've got a hammer, everything looks like a nail...
This is what I was thinking and I must have been thinking about it a lot longer before hitting the reply button because I believe I said almost the same thing. I just wanted to mention that I wouldn't have posted my reply if yours was here when I started composing it.
First answer this question: Why are you running the service? Respect? Trying to establish a lock in?

Then aswer the second question: Are you getting it? Do people respect you? Or do they ignore your service? Does the lock in happen?

No?

Then there's something wrong with the service. So let's have look at what our users want. Oh, it seems they have agendas of their own. So maybe if we tweaked the API a bit...
Yes... there is something seriously wrong here. If you don't enjoy your work, quit! I work because I love it. The money is a nice side benefit.
So which country do you prefer?
The reason American's benefits are so stingy is because of racism. White people do not want any benefits going to blacks.
> Vacation time is also the lowest (2 weeks) compared to Europe which on average has 4 weeks of vacation time.

The EU mandates a minimum of 4 weeks, so 4 weeks could hardly be the average.
So do it. Do what makes you happy. If you aren't happy working or you don't get enough time off... change the situation. But don't spend a bunch of your life unsatisfied.
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_eng...

The activities associated with the governance of a country
or other area, especially the debate or conflict among
individuals or parties having or hoping to achieve power.

Politics is not just about nation-states and the type of work usually associated with governments. Politics is what we call the various ways we humans solve our disagreements.

And yes, this can be about power and money, though political decisions come in all sizes.
Another good way of thinking about API is a user interface. And by the way, yes, when your "helper function" is exposed publicly to the whole project, and every developer ended up using it in 10 different places, you can safely consider this function to be an API.
Thanks for reporting bugs!
I don't have a MotoX 2014, but will test it in emulator.
It looks your account is new. Much appreciated!