jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
This decision, in and of itself, doesn't seem particularly unprecedented or untoward to me. Every store, including the Google Play Store, has a right to choose what products it wants to carry, for pretty much any reason whatsoever, including for political reasons. It's probably pretty difficult to find copies of The Turner Diaries in your local Barnes and Noble, and I'd be even more surprised to find a copy of The Vagina Monologues in a Lifeway.

What makes this scary is not that stores are choosing what products to sell. What makes it scary is that, at least in this segment of the economy, there are exactly two stores, and picking at least one of them to shop at is very nearly a precondition for participating in modern society. This gives Google and Apple a degree of influence over peoples' lives that one could quite reasonably recognize as quasi-governmental, and that is worrisome.
This is only possible because phone service is considered a utility and a number is like an address. These same rules prevent the phone company from doing things like declining your business and censoring your calls.

The fact that these social media companies are not utilities is the entire reason that they need Section 230 protection.

It sounds to me like the argument that you're making is that access to the internet _and_ identity on the internet are utilities that Americans cannot legally be deprived of. But that would make it so that Twitter could not ban people in the first place.
I don't know much about parler, but Reddit just removed r/donaldtrump and banned the most egregious mod of r/conspiracy. It's also a much bigger site, so there are going to be more people talking on it, but they are at least taking steps to prevent this kind of content.
Certification already exists for a lot of stuff, and it's proven that it's not a sure shot. Whether it's sysadmins, project managers, scrum masters, accountants, lawyers, or anything else, there will always be incompetent people, more than you'd expect. University degrees are an even lower standard these days with grade inflation.

Certification does well to help mitigate the problem, but it also has a similar effect as standardized tests: students study to pass the exam, not to learn and apply what they've learned. And this goes the same for certifications that require experience and practicums. Bell curves for performance will exist in anything and everything, and the spread is always a lot wider than one would hope.
Link: http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/14...
It's not a big filter but not mentioning specifics filters out some who lack a sense of curiosity and adventure.
I remember when I switched to Google. For me, the lack of popups was another big win.
It's not just Israel. Egypt has also denied this to the palestinians in the past (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_Strip).

I'm not saying one is good/bad/ugly. Just pointing out that it's not just Israel.
"Well, thinking about the interface and implementing the programming logic was actually fun. And it took 10% of the time. The other 90% was spent fighting with browsers' quirkiness and with Google App Engine"

Yes, you characterize web development correctly. "The web" is a great idea, but web programming the way is currently is, is an enormous pain in the neck (and I'm putting it mildly). I don't foresee this becoming any better in the near future, because instead of reinventing the browser and the outdated models that come with it, we keep tacking things on to it.

So if your goal is to be "not bored", my advice is to look elsewhere. Well, you may not be bored doing web programming, but you will definitely tear out your hair in frustration, as you already found out. It won't really get any better as you learn more; just more complicated.

(That said, I do have great respect for people who do this for a living. I'm not sure if I would be able to do it for any extended period of time.)

Tablets are a different story, development-wise. It isn't necessarily easier, but it's different, and it's more like "real" programming, rather than figuring out what breaks in which browser and how to fix it, or wasting hours tweaking your CSS. There are drawbacks, however. For starters, your audience is limited. If you want to develop for iOS, you'll have to pay the Apple tax, and go through their approval system if you want your app to show up in the app store. Android imposes fewer restrictions, but it's more in flux, and good tablets that run it are pretty hard to find. All these are things to take into consideration.

Personally I am heading into the direction of tablet programming, although the field isn't very mature yet.
Interesting. So the Starcraft 2 system is actually less accurate than TrueSkill to motivate beginners with bonus points.
A lot of businesses operate at the border of legality. Ryanair is a good example, as you have pointed out on IRC (see http://www.rte.ie/news/2005/0302/ryanair.html).

I'm not making a judgement as to whether you personally should build a business that uses dark patterns, my point is that in some lines of business, dark patterns are a critical survival factor, and if you try to be too "good" in those types of business you will get trampled by someone who's willing to squeeze every penny.
Excerpt:

Pornography has several values beyond serving as a test-driver for new media. As suggested above in the Betamax-VHS battle, porn, with little cash to spare and its nose to the ground, is often first to sniff out the practical uses of new media, leading the way for profitable investment by the mainstream.

Furthermore, porn draws curiosity seekers, who stay to see what else the new media can do. There is a convenient dovetailing in the audience for computers and pornography: young, white males dominate both markets. Gadget-playing, girl-crazy young men will stay longer at a terminal that supplies both girls and gadgets.(48) Finally, several studies have suggested that, far from creating sexist, violent feelings in young men, pornography has a calming, cathartic effect, easing adolescent cares with a dose of mild erotica.(49)

Other values of pornography have been suggested. For one thing, the very fear that pornography arouses in parents may redound to society's advantage. In order to keep indecent messages from reaching their computer-literate children, parents themselves must become computer-literate and learn to use blocking and screening devices. If Congress is allowed to assume the parental role, parents will have less incentive to learn what their children already know.(50) Furthermore, far from fearing what computer sex may be teaching, parents can use the computer as an opportunity to discuss sex in a meaningful way with their children.(51)

Finally, sex on the computer is far better for children than another kind of sex that is drawing Congressional fire, that is, sex on television.(52) While sex and violence on television shoulder the blame for sex and violence in society, several studies have suggested that something else about television is the real culprit. That is, the passive, solitary nature of television-watching is an anti-social activity, which steals children's time away from more active, engaging kinds of play. Thus, when children erupt in violence after watching television, it is not because they have been watching too much sex or violence but because they have been watching too much television.(53) Computers, by contrast, are interactive and socializing, feeding the very skills that TV starves. Therefore, anything, including the risque, that entices children from the TV to the computer is a good thing.(54)

I will add that porn has educational value in its own right. People who are all uptight and judgmental about porn are typically also all uptight and judgmental about sex generally. For many youth, these illicit forms of sexual materials are the best education they can pursue on a topic that is pretty vital to quality of life (for a variety of reasons). Asking uptight adults isn't going to get them useful, meaningful feedback (and may result in disinformation -- or even punishment) and asking other people their own age is likely to get them little or no information, mixed up with a lot of misinformation. Porn has the additional advantage that while it transmits information, it doesn't transmit disease or cause pregnancy.
I'm sorry, but this notion that a company can be made by a leveraged media event is stupid. Companies are made by having great products. If you have a great product, it doesn't matter when you show it off because there will always be an opportunity for getting new users.

This goes for hiring new employees too. Even if your beta version sucks and you aren't ready to show it off, yet its a product that works and fixes problems, job candidates will find a way to apply.
This is just the normal transition every successful street gang makes to a more sophisticated organized crime like you see in big East Coast cities. "Gangs" like MS-13 are huge, with more than 100k members in the US and a half dozen other countries. The Crips and Bloods can't stand up to that kind of organization - they either get coopted or destroyed.

When a handful of guys in Guadalajara have a piece of every drug transaction in Southern California it's all going to look pretty peaceful unless you cross them.
169 out of 10,000.
For some reason, this number sounds more scary than the percentage.
Russia invaded Crimea some months ago. Only a nuclear power could have done that without retaliation.
You're trying to pin down a value judgement I'm not making. Stipulate that the government played a major role in creating this problem. Now what? I'm pretty sure my point still stands: there's no free market for private health care to fall back on, no matter how efficiently you consume health services.
The article kind of contradicts itself:

Earlier:
"Of course, this doesn’t mean put up false testimonials... create fake real-time activity"

Later on advocating:
"[REDACTED] takes their real-time user numbers and multiplies them by a randomly generated number. Whereas before, it would say “6 users online,” it would say “68 users online.”

That it is pure lying and it is bad.
His explanation of bimodal distributions isn't satisfactory. Bimodal distributions can occur naturally in nature--they don't require external force.

With that being said, DAMN that graph skews right. Almost everyone got a B or above.
This is more or less what I did with my site, Scribophile. The site is based on writers critiquing the writing of others, with a point system to make sure everyone gets critiques. When I just started, it was kind of a chicken-and-egg problem: without existing work to critique, nobody could earn points to post their own writing; but without points, nobody could post their own work for critique. And worst of all, without an existing user base, there would be nobody around to critique writing that was posted.

I solved this problem by basically faking it. When the site just started, I let people post writing without spending points. I would then personally critique that writing myself through several fake accounts. These critiques not only made new members feel as if there was already a community in place (thus encouraging them to stay), but they also made sure that people felt as if the site was useful, and made them want to contribute with critiques of their own. I don't write for pleasure, but I posted some works I had written just for the occasion. I didn't care about the critiques they received; the important part was making people think there was a community already there. I also recruited some friends who weren't really writers to participate on the site at the beginning to solidify the illusion of an existing community.

I also had a general "company" user account that I used to interact with everyone on a site-support level. This gave the illusion that there was more than one person behind the scenes. At the time I felt that having a web site that seemed to be run by a proper company instead of a guy in his basement went a long way for credibility. I never gave away the fact that it was just me. I would sign all support requests with "Scribophile Support" instead of "Alex."

As time went on and the site grew, I stopped critiquing by hand, thanked my non-writer friends for helping me and told them they didn't have to participate in the site any more, and eventually stopped using the "company" account in favor of my personal one. Everyone now knows that I'm the owner of the site and the guy behind the scenes. I sign support requests with my name instead of "Support."

I have no doubt that if I hadn't "faked it" in the beginning, the site would never have gotten the traction that it now has. It was essential for getting a community site bootstrapped with a $0 marketing budget and the chicken-and-egg problem that all community sites face.
At the risk of setting off a pointless semantics wrangling session, iwantsandy and dabbledb were/are both great products that never got the attention they deserved. I think it's hard to make the case that lists (while nice) are in the same ballpark - they fall under the 'tweak' category to me.
The carriers likely have the option to remove this feature/menu item entirely when they push their OTA out to phones.
Huh, it's just now defaulting back to white for me.
ah, I see.

> Emissions from a nearby CIPP job got indoors through cracks in the building’s foundation and irritated workers to the point that they evacuated

This is fascinating. I've always thought of dirt and concrete as being basically impenetrable to things like this, but apparently they're not!
Yep, same research setting, though a different network. I don't at the moment remember all the details of CryptoNets, but IIRC they were doing batch size 8192 evaluations (i.e. just using each slot as an independent value and evaluating the code as if on scalars), which allows you to get away without the fancy ciphertext encoding magic that's described in the blog post (at the cost of high latency of course).
This is not a meaningful or interesting article for Hacker News, and in the world of Philosophy this is not a slam dunk of a concept.
Your advice is spot on: I think it's uncontroversial to say that it's ideal to arrange your life such that you're meeting dating candidates all the time.

But you can also use Tinder alongside this. And if you can't meet anyone by nature of your job, then you're not left with many hours of daylight to meet people more organically. That's why dating apps are so helpful.

Somehow in these conversations though, people seem to reveal that they were under the impression that a dating app like Tinder was a completely replacement for a social life instead of a useful supplement. I think your advice is in this category.
It’s about time people start being more sensible on this topic. This was becoming bordeline stupid, with pretty much everything « caused by climate change ». i wonder what the next victim of media insanity will be..
> So some of the optimisations are by definition Intel-only.

The benefits of those optimizations may or may not be Intel-only, but the machine code emitted by the compiler is not Intel-only.
True. It comes from a zero-sum game view of the company. But there are true inefficiencies that may be solved by A that make B actually more likely. For instance, if A causes lower attrition and therefore training costs, it _may_ cause sufficient higher productivity across the board for every organization as a worker gets skilled and stays in his job for longer. And that increased productivity may manifest as better company performance. It is plausible that we could have A & B.

I didn't even consider the time-axis myself (implicitly assuming zero-sum) so that's a good objection.
All it seems to prove is that the hikes haven't caused problems yet. And we'd better all hope that they don't, because it actually is impossible to lower the minimum wage, no matter what.
Every single DMV does this. This data is sold to companies like Markit. It's then resold to hedge funds, market research firms, etc.

The data is extremely specific. It's a database of the majority of Americans:

* Name
* Age
* Address
* Some contact details
* Cars registered (and the relationship to individuals and households)
I used to love reading A List Apart in the 2000s and associate it with rise of Web 2.0 apps, so when I saw the domain, I wondered why I stopped reading.

After reading, I almost laughed out loud that the author apparently felt the need to relitigate the rise of SPAs, throw in a shoutout to SEO, dunk on Java developers, tug on our heartstrings thinking of the kids in Africa with iPhone 4s crying while Safari parses 100kB of JSON (in 2005, this would have been a story about grandmas surfing the web on IE5), and, as a special treat, throw out a recommendation for Ruby on Rails in 2021.

A List Apart appears to have pivoted to a sort of digital Renaissance fair, but for the year 2007.
There are a few "notes" of WSB on the app. Haven't seen the Becky index yet though!
You're probably right, there is nothing to fully replace it. But maybe we don't have to and build something new and better instead.
Given the strategic importance of semiconductors and how expensive new fabs are and how long they take to start production (if you start planning a new state of the art fab now it'll take ~5 years before it's ready to produce chips) it seems like perhaps we need to look a public-private partnerships here in the US. The Chinese government is funding fabs. While we tend to be squeamish about such things here in the US, it's likely we need to start looking at doing this. At the very least the US Gov could step in to capitalize two or three companies to start foundries similar to TSMC. When they get on their feet they would become fully private entities that would pay back any government loans as they become profitable. I'm not sure we have the time to wait to see if Intel will decide to go big into the foundry biz - they seem to vacillate on this pretty regularly.
And people scream at nvidia trying to segment the market a bit and/or price gouging. Meanwhile nowhere near all launch day orders (7 months ago) 3080 orders have been delivered, and at this rate I suspect there will be new gen out before all the outstanding 3080 orders have been fulfilled.
All these current sense coils come with 3.5mm so I think thats why they use them.
In that situation, you have a clear way of getting paid more: Keep working, same as everyone else did. You're not getting special treatment, but it's not like they're working against you either.
>> the Supreme Court is a political creature and tends not to stray too far from popular opinion.

Supreme Court's role is to be a stabilizing factor, because majority can switch from Democrats to Republicans every four years. Supreme Court's partisan composition is basically a moving average of the last 5-6 presidential election's results, thus smoothing out temporary whims of the society.
Getting away from criticizing or praising Mr. Gladwell, many, many authors have noticed that an effective way to write multiple best-sellers is to find a formula that works and stick to it. Michael Crighton is said to have read many best sellers and made notes about their structure so that he could develop his own formula for writing a best-selling novel.
Those words aren't on the Google homepage.

Only after reading your post, I found a link labelled "Change Background Image" effectively camouflaged on the bottom left of the page, but this only allows me to select an alternative but equally obtrusive image.

There does not appear to be any immediate way to eliminate the background image entirely and revert to the clean, usable design that I expect from Google.
I tried several cross-platform tools and web toolkits. Appcelerator is too clunky, flaky and community support is virtually non-existent (this is not a blame, mind you, as their business model is built around paid support, and I totally understand the lack of answers on community forums). I'll take another look at them once they integrate with Aptana (IDE that they acquired).

jQuery mobile (boxed into PhoneGap or not) is dog slooow once your page sets or lists get too big, and like some mentioned, interaction just does not feel right sometimes.

One approach that I like is that of applitude (http://applitude.org/). It is DSL for description of view-based applications that is translated source-to-source to Objective C (It is iPhone only). Unfortunately this project looks like one man effort and is not under active development. But I wonder if this is the approach that some cross-platform toolkits should take.
Wow! Those are amazing by any standard. In fact, is selling an option?
>If I haven't solved every problem there is to solve, is my assertion less true?

Either that or you've discovered some property of 'complex' problems that precludes the use of LSD to solve them. Otherwise, yes, it is less true (i.e. baseless and false).
All major wifi chips now have open source drivers, so wifi will work out of the box for everybody as of 2.6.39: http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Kernel-comment-Perseve...

Current versions of Linux (Ubuntu 11.04 etc) use 2.6.37, though.

All integrated sound solutions have open source drivers.

The only problem spot is graphics drivers.

You're more likely to run into device driver problems upgrading to Vista/7 than you are upgrading to Linux. (although there the problems are older printers and other peripherals that significantly predate Vista).
Too many languages. Cut it down to 2 at most: 1 for learning the logic and basics, 1 for actually making a project.
I usually use this tool http://leftlogic.com/projects/entity-lookup/ when I need to look for special unicode character. You type your query like "arrow" and you get a display of what looks like an arrow. Really handy.
Part and parcel of "There are not enough programmers [willing to work long hours for low pay]!"
I wouldn't be surprised at all if, at some point, a lot of people routinely wear some sort of AR when out in public. It's possible there will be widespread social pushback (i.e. the Glasshole factor). But I wouldn't bet on it if such a thing were genuinely comfortable and useful.
Add to this list:

1. We allowed KIDS to use social media all day??
2. We allowed the climate & oceans to get this bad??

Hard to predict the list of things our descendants will not approve of but looking backwards there's a huge list for our ancestors
I've been a long-time reader of the Economist - probably started reading it around age 13 before they went full color (an event that made me think they would lose a bit of their sober reporting). Over the years I've picked up on their neoliberal stance on world affairs - they are not a neutral party by any means. They push some strong opinions and often venture into predictions on future political events that, more often than not in recent years, have turned out flat wrong.
I do miss Yahoo! Pipes. I don't believe I'll miss Yahoo! Answers though. The questions they are curating on the front page are still terrible ones.
So naming a virus after a particular country should be dished out as a form of punishment?
I never said land deprecated try reading my comment again: “if a company buys say land they can’t deduct anything” that’s an example of default behavior. Try rereading what I actually said where again you can deduct the purchase price at the time of sale not purchase.

As to depreciation being an exception that’s what it means when you change the baseline rules of a system with new rules. By default you take the deduction on sale, depreciation means you can take deduction early. It’s literally called “Modified Accelerated Cost Recovery System (MACRS)” the entire point of it is to speed things up rather than as you suggest slow anything down. Thus removing depreciation from the tax code and companies would need to wait years or even decades or deduct these costs from their profits. Thus as I said before it’s a hand out which happens to be built into the tax code.