skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When you run SHPAML through the preprocessor, it produces HTML that you can share with other people. So it's not that big an issue. Your greater point is well taken, though--using SHPAML is particularly suited to small teams.
I know some people have some concerns with Jimmy Wales, but he's done a good job as far as I can tell, and none of the complaints about him really seem that important. For example, so what if he claims to be the "sole founder"; only he and Sanger know that first hand, but it's not necessarily an important issue anyway. So what if he tried to edit his own biography; it's not like he thought people wouldn't notice, so he must have assumed it wasn't a big deal. So what if he slept with somebody who has an article on Wikipedia; that was practically inevitable. There just don't seem to be any really solid examples that show that Jimbo actually is "shady".

The writing style on the sight you linked me to is, to say the least, highly "editorialized". The site whines about a bunch of things which one could legitimately assume were done in good faith. In browsing through it, whatever is actually so bad about Wikipedia certainly doesn't pop out at you; maybe I could find it if I looked hard enough. My point here is that the authors of that site could do a much better job of pointing out problems with Wikipedia if they focus on the really big/obvious problems rather than whining about things that don't matter or aren't necessarily unethical.

I think your first idea is, potentially, a great idea, but I'm not enough of a wikipedia insider to say.

I don't agree with "expert certification," because how do you determine who the experts are? Certainly "experts" disagree on lots of things. And the people who hate wikipedia would claim that expert selection is biased (as well as people who don't hate wikipedia but actually think it is biased).

Can't disagree with the statement that rules should be enforced.

You have a lot of complaints and they are probably valid to a certain degree, but as a casual wikipedia user who sometimes edits articles, I have had an almost flawless experience. I don't run into these issues, personally.
Zynga goes after hobbyist bot programmers
True but most foreigners view the H1B as the first step to getting a green card - something highly highly desirable among the scores of white collar foreigners working in the US.

From my experiences, I know quite a few who after getting their H1B feel "locked" down with the company that hired them. This in turn allows the company to abuse the shit out of them because they know that the only option for most of these people, especially in the current economic climate, is to stfu and keep on taking the abuse lest they want to return back to sweatshop call centers with 1/10th the pay.

Then these guys get further screwed when it comes to the annual review & promotion process when their american counterparts (i.e. white males w/o fobby accents) get bumped ahead of them.

A blanket statement for sure; I realize there are more nuances to this but Ive seen it happen ALL-THE-TIME.
IANAL, and libel laws vary from state to state, but in the United States if something is true, it's not libel. However, not being true isn't necessarily the same as being false. Or, more specifically, not being provably true is not the same as being provably not true.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_defamation_law
"...the truth should be an absolute defense against libel charges."
"Also, the truth of the allegedly defamatory statement will always negate the claim (whether because the plaintiff fails to meet his/her burden of proving falsity or because the defendant proves the statement to be true)."
The second quote implies a burden of proof upon the plaintiff to prove the statements false, although the main wikipedia article on defamation also mentions publishing with reckless disregard for verifying the veracity. Dunno if that second category applies in the US.
The movitation behind SHPAML isn't necessarily just to make the markup easier to write; it also tries to make it easier to read.
> There's a nice balance in there where the free market weeds out most problems, the government mops up mistakes that get by and regulation prevents those mistakes from growing into systemic risks.

You missed the largest problem - the Federal Reserve set the price of borrowing money artificially low, almost to the point of being free. Whenever you set the price of borrowing money (interest and fees) lower than the rate of inflation, you're going to get some sort of massive financial problem. It's in everyone's rational interest under that scenario to borrow as much as they can. Of course, that leads to catastrophe.
The circle of fifths is a by-product of the more generalized lattice theory:

http://x31eq.com/lattice.htm

As the Wikipedia article explains the Pythagorean Comma, there are actually many possible commas caused by equal temperament when traversing the lattice in various ways. Most traditional harmonic theory exploits our psychological response to these gaps caused by equal temperament. Music theory based on the circle of fifths is a small subset of that.
More specifically, Kolmogorov randomness which is closely linked to compressibility. A sufficiently long string which has a generating program longer than itself is random.

Since "4..." is highly compressible --- its unpredictable error is zero --- it is unlikely to be governed by a random process. The longer the series is, the less likely.
That's a silly assertion. Between the Freedom of Information Act and various federal, state and local procurement rules, the government never spends any money without making much more information available than Sarbox requires. That's part of why it's inefficient.

"Blah government is stupid" is not a sufficient answer to most questions.
"It ain't necessarily so" is a common turn of phrase (also a song), which the author was playing off.
I guess Nokia are really desperate to cross-license some touch screen UI patents from Apple.

I predict Apple will drag this out for as long as it possibly can, and then finally settle out of court.
Thru it all playlist by Nataline Rostami
nicotine is a mood stabilizer in people with depression and bipolar disorder

Citations, please? I have the best regarded textbook on bipolar disorder

http://www.amazon.com/Manic-Depressive-Illness-Disorders-Rec...

at hand as I type this, and there is no recommendation of nicotine for any patient there. I'm quite sure that "mood stabilizer" is an incorrect characterization of the drug effect of nicotine. Nicotine has very harmful effects on the personalities of long-term users. I've seen too many examples in the previous generation to recommend it to anyone in my generation.

One study on harm of smoking:

Socioeconomic Status, Smoking, and Health: A Test of Competing Theories of Cumulative Advantage
# Fred C. Pampel and Richard G. Rogers
# Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Vol. 45, No. 3 (Sep., 2004), pp. 306-321

One study on personality factors interacting with nicotine use:

Nicotine dependence, psychological distress and personality traits as possible predictors of smoking cessation. Results of a double-blind study with nicotine patch

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi...
Being an entrepreneur is a tough business. My own experience is that it is even tougher if you have no co-Founders. It is really true that it takes two pieces of wood to sustain a fire and perhaps even a third to light the fire. One of my favorite scenes from my collection of Woody Allen movies is the one where after sex, his date compliments him on how great a lover he is. Allen smiled with confidence and uttered, "I practice a lot when I am alone." Very often, as entrepreneurs, we prefer to practice alone and to execute alone. We will do everything and anything possible to avoid confronting our worst nightmare which is to get in bed with the wrong people. Our excuse is that we are not ready. Our business plan is not ready. Our elevator pitch is not ready. Our prototype is not ready, etc. Having partners allow you to diversify your gene pool and having partners allow you to try different positions. It is true in love as in building companies. It is a scary world out there but you must take a leap and share your dream with someone. Good luck everyone.
That Graham guy you made me think of.. he did the reverse. He came up with the problem first and then solved it leveraging the power of the ultimate tool.
One reason to use this would be to get well indented HTML.

Finding the potentially missing closing </div> tag has been a common problem I have seen some people face.
That plus the large tax cuts aimed pretty much exclusively at the rich -- give all of the asset holders a bunch of extra liquidity and remove ordinary T-notes as an option by setting rates lower than inflation even while borrowing a ton of money..

You're gonna get a bubble somewhere -- that money has to go somewhere.
Is a car that doesn't run an automobile, or a lawn ornament? What we call it is just syntax. The remaining usefulness will be the same.
Girls are on top yet more boys are born even in stressful times? "Over the whole period 52.4% of births were of boys. In some months, though, that fell as low as 51.2%."
Java vs. Net: Web Frameworks
A humorous comparison.
Anybody else see a bit of irony in having Fake Steve Jobs interview Bezos about iSlate vs. Kindle?
Wow, you just saved me the headache of just stripping out the offending White on Black css using a devtool.

Thanks much!
You are absolutely right that companies have the opportunity to bring in the best in the world as well as the opportunity to bring in people whose expectations are lower. We agree that the problem arises with the ones who go after people whose expectations are lower. My further opinion, which you might not share, is that those abuses are both widespread and problematic. And therefore I was focusing on that part of the issue. But you're right that I shouldn't tar all employers who hire H-1B people with the same brush.

The solution I proposed is intended to address this by making resolving abuse cases resolvable by market pressures rather than government bureaucracy. Where the program works I absolutely want to see it continue. This country was built on immigrants, and I firmly believe that its ability to attract top talent worldwide is its greatest asset.
SHPAML is definitely targeted at Python users and people who like meaningful whitespace (and associated terseness).

Glad you like it! I have also been hand writing HTML for well over a decade too (as well as other means of producing HTML), so my goal in SHPAML was simply to relieve pain points for an everyday task. It has worked for me.
12 Hours, 2 Guys, 6 Cups of Coffee, 1 iPhone App
Nice! I think you got horizontal and vertical mixed up.
Don't let facts dilute a good populist and/or libertarian rant against "dumb" government.

Is nobody noticing this guy got on a plane in another country? Why the mindless hammering on the American TSA?
El Al is frequently tossed out as an example of great security, but, really, they aren't that impressive:

o They have a grand total of 37 airplanes in their fleet.

o They engage in aggressive racial profiling.

o Their passenger pattern typically consists of people flying to and from Israel. It's pretty straightforward to identify the aberration in that crowd.

o By simply using the filter of "You are likely among the racial/ethnic/cultural target-crowd that is likely to be a terrorist" and then applying selective screening, you pretty much eliminate a fairly major vector for attack.

Admittedly, one of the reasons why profiling takes place at El Al, is that is because it works for that particular target. The United States, even if it were willing to engage in profiling, has a much broader set of attackers - you'd end up finding everyone included in your profile.

But, because the United States doesn't have the same straightforward problem of identifying who the _attackers_ are, they need to engage in "defense in depth" that El Al has the luxury of not requiring. Ergo - no large volumes of liquids (Note - the bottle size maximum is likely related to the highly oxygen reactive properties of the target liquids - you can't really combine them into one large bomb after the security checkpoint - and the small bottles aren't large enough to do _too_ much damage. A few people might be killed, or seriously injured - but it's unlikely you could bring a plane down within the restrictions of the TSA liquid size)

Shoes, likewise, with their metal inserts and large and easily concealed compartments, need to be scanned in the X-Ray machine.

Here are some simple steps that would dramatically increase security:

o Eliminate Carry On Luggage. This would be an issue on long flights for the work crowd though, as well as people carrying food/supplies for babies, anything valuable that they don't want to check, and people with medical requirements. Some Canadian Ports of entry were effectively doing that this week though.

o Full Body Scans with Back-Scatter/Millimeter Wave scans. This is way overdue, and the number one tactical failure of the TSA. Start your stopwatch - within 48 months 100% of inbound international passengers will be subject to some type of Full Body Scan or Pat Down. It will be interesting to see if the same thing will occur domestically.

o Full Pat-Down for all passengers - They actually did this at YVR a couple days ago. Slowed things down a little, but that's because they didn't have enough staff to do it quickly. They need to get over their tendency not to search sensitive areas if they want to ensure it's done with 100% effectivness.

o Bomb Sniffers/Dogs - I'm surprised nobody has automated this more effectively yet.

Note that any _one_ of these last three would have caught the Christmas Underwear Bomber - in fact, would likely have dissuaded him, and a large class of attackers, in the first place.
Why ought the TSA do anything? (or really, why ought we to have a TSA?)

There are scads of targets that ought to be attractive to terrorists: sports arenas, various tunnels and bridges, power generation and transmission, etc. None of these get anything like the security attention, despite their potential to cause far greater harm than the WTC attacks did.

I have the mental picture of a building with many doors. We're putting solid steel doors, deadbolts, triple padlocks, etc., on one door, while the other entries are nothing but screen doors. This is ridiculously ineffective in cost and freedom.
>> Are you sure about not stopping one bomb? Their service is like the electric company (and IT), you don't notice it until it stops working.

Are you kidding me! Utility companies don't try to place your gas line right next to a bad electrical circuit breaker "to keep you safe". Yes analogies always suck and this one is quite bad too, but it does illustrate the point. TSA's job should be contain and respond, not investigate and prevent. The latter should be left to investigative and intelligence agencies as that is their forte.

This was some time ago and I have not flown since so it might have changed, but things like:
- dumping all the contents of all passengers water bottle into one big trashcan is stupid. Of course mentioning binary explosives will only get me into a lot of trouble.
- spending 7m+ dollars on GE entry scans that make a ton of whooshing noises but are not really any better than plain ol' bulge under the shoulder check
- checking your shoes when you can mold semtex or c4 into your belt just as easily and detonate it with something that looks like a fountain pen
- turning on your laptop (what about the extra bay - how much explosive can you pack in there?)

Lets face it, unless we as consumers force the politicians to implement transparent, clear and measurable security policies and are willing to spend the time to think about it a bit, this sort of stuff will keep happening again and again and again.
I was wondering the same thing, flagged it.
2010's breakout star? Foursquare
I don't see anyone raising a fuss about the attempted attack itself. The fuss is all about the TSA's silly response to it.
I wrote the comment about Wikipedia only to illustrate that HTML, like any standard, is not perfect for every use case.

I find HTML expressive and generally easy to use. I wrote SHPAML in a way that I hope preserves the useful expressiveness of HTML, while eliminating some of the 1990s-style syntax.
Basically the decade involved a ridiculous penetration of cheap phones, cameras, and texting, along with vastly improved TV and monitor technology. Along with this came an extreme social change towards being plugged into a social and media network at all times, toward where this is now near its logical conclusion of the devaluation and death of individual thought.
Everything on a Mac is command+option+shift+fn+esc+tab+jump+button-A+something. If they couldn't handle dozens of simultaneous keypresses, half the OS X keyboard "shortcuts" would stop working.
That's right. However this varies by country. The extreme example being England, where the truth of the statement doesn't matter.

Libel lawsuits in England are similar to patent lawsuits in Texas - you know that the venue was chosen mainly because the person filing the suit wanted the friendliest court possible.
There was this one guy, he had a gun and he'd hunt with it. One day, another guy came along and they started hunting together. Eventually, the guy with the gun shared the gun with the other guy who then shot the gun owner and took all the food.
Interesting. In our case, all the engineers wanted to play music, so the point is slightly moot. It'd be interesting to upload some silence mp3s and see if they get voted for.
Your last four points illustrate the real problem. We have the technology (scans) and the techniques (pat-downs and dogs) to make us safe. We do not have the will to implement them.

Either it costs too much or people don't want to give up their liberty (though really, the pat-down is the only one that should offend people).

Like too many things, this is a political problem and not a technical one.
Android gets the official Yammer App
In our office, most of the engineers vote for electronic or techno, (with the occasional rock/metal song), so that seems like it might be significant.
The Pages Through the Ages [Prezi]
Google announces press gathering on January 5th – Hello, Nexus One.
Yeah, same here :)

Patches welcome!
Note - the rule about people standing up wasn't done to prevent Mad Bombers from doing so. It was to quickly identify which people _might_ be a mad bomber to the Air Marshals and Airline Staff.

Remember this rule had to be put in place quickly (And also note, for a limited period of one week) - while we tried to figure out if another attack was imminent. Think about how stupid we'd all be feeling if someone else had run _the exact same attack_ - we may not be able to defend against the unknown. But at least we can avoid handing out the freebies.
You don't technically need to install python to use SHPAML. You can try it online:

http://shpaml.webfactional.com/tutorial/7

SHPAML is mostly targeted at Python users for now. If you are not using Python, but you like the idea of having a syntax layer on top of HTML, then you should consider other solutions like the markup generator or haml.
How could someone possibly run a pension like social security? How could they run a health insurance system like Medicare?

Seriously. Can you tell me how anyone could do what those entities do, release the same financial statements, and not a) be in jail, and b) deserve it?
Ok, so, we did the headphone thing for a while, but we like to all talk to each other, and waving vigorously to catch someone's attention gets old fast. Likewise, chatting in our IRC channel is not quite the same as talking directly.

Concentration-wise, we all seem to do OK - if someone needs to zone out for a while, they still can put on headphones, or possibly just use all 5 votes to queue up 5 long classical pieces.

Of course, every team is different, and interacts differently, so your milage may vary.
I think the TC headline (as usual?) is wrong. From the post: Worldwide TV revenues fell an estimated 10 percent to $101 billion, from $112 billion in 2008.
Currently, Apple only makes membrane keyboards. Even as membrane keyboards go, the best I can say about them (subjectively) is that they're not quite as awful as most of the competition.

A better comparison would be with old (early 90s) ADB models, such as the Apple Extended Keyboard II.
Do you mean the folks who are against global warming, or the folks who don't believe in global warming?
This really isn't the place for "TOP 10 AMAZING DROP SHADOWS!!!!!"
I stand corrected. Obviously, also IANAL.
This looks interesting but I wonder how long until amazon kills it "by accident" when they make their own widgets region-aware?

That is a point of concern yet I don't think Amazon.com will because as it is having no regional awareness allows them to make free money and avoid paying commissions.

The current fee is being adjusted while I determine what is required to make the service able to pay for itself. I am thinking of doing away with it and simply offering a paid account for say $1-$2 a month with more features.

The thing is customers still benefit since they are able to make money from the UK, and CA rather than just the US. So the idea is that customers still come out on top despite the Affiliate Script fee. The extra ads that they gain from regional awareness should more than make up for the 14% fee in any blog that has a sufficiently diverse global audience.

But like I said we are still adjusting it as we determine what makes the service profitable.
I don't think that your parable of the gun is quite analogous to sharing knowledge. Most knowledge is not zero-sum, and sharing the `background' thinking helps the sharer and the sharee both. At best, your analogy would have to be modified such that the gun was somehow replicated, giving them the ability to have a duel at least.
My problem with HTML is not its lack of simplicity; it is its verbosity. SHPAML solves the (fairly) trivial problem of making HTML less verbose. The abstraction pays off for me insofar as I expect to use SHPAML for the next decade or so, and it's easy to remember the syntax, easy to share the output, etc.
When the code needs additional functionality, then yes, I'd say that TDD indicates you should create a failing test case.

But if you are adding additional test cases to prove that edge cases work correctly (and no code changes need to happen), then I don't see why you'd need to have a failing test case, and I don't know how you could argue for it.
But bubbles in and of themselves don't lead to the systemic crisis we just went through.

There were plenty of policies I disagreed with and plenty more that fueled the bubble. But I was talking specifically about the problems that lead to the credit crisis, paralyzed markets and generally gummed things up above and beyond a popped bubble.