skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A friend who considers himself a "progressive" and lumps both the Democrats and Republicans together under the label of "corporate shills" favors the estate tax because he fears a concentration of power. If those who inherited billions simply bought lots of houses, cars, and boats, he would have little issue. However, he's concerned that democracy requires a more even wealth distribution. I don't necessarily agree, but I thought his point that a concentration of power is what ought to be feared is worth consideration.

A few years ago, my wife and I toured the summer "cottages" of the Vanderbilts and others in Newport, RI. At the turn of the century, they spent millions constructing homes that they planned only to occupy for about three months of the year. Today, Anderson Cooper (son of Gloria Vanderbilt) is probably the richest of the heirs to this fortune -- hardly a great case for the estate tax. In the 70's, there was a Vanderbilt family reunion at Vanderbilt University. Of the 100 or so people who attended, none reported to even to be a millionaire. Perhaps a family tree with many siblings per branch divides wealth faster than it can multiply over time?

Until recently, a Rockefeller was the Governor of WV, but no one seemed to care that he was not a self-made man. Surely the majority of West Virgina residents would have little in common with his ancestry. Can anyone cite any cases of old money abusing power? One could point to the Bush family, but I argue that they aren't especially wealthy by current US standards. Didn't "W" claim only $8M in assets at election time? However, He is a third generation elected official. Perhaps power is more easily inherited than wealth?
But I get my cheese already in the hot dog...
This is almost funny enough to become a meme:

For those of you who insist on thinking that the truth always lies in between two accounts of a situation, I urge you to drop that misguided notion, especially for this situation.
You can save the file locally and change the timeout of setfunction from 100 to 1 and it fades in faster. But it doesn't work on Chrome for me either.
Two memorable discussions here in which I played a seminal part:

http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=359551

The link died, but it was a comparison between Rand and Gladwell, and provoked a lot of interesting conversation/drama. That's pretty old; I was actually still arguing in favor of Rand.

http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=499109

This one has some of the most elegant denunciations: This was one of the few arguments that wasn't overridden by one side or another.

But if you want a really terrific online discussion, I'm going to abandon ship and give you a link to MetaFilter instead, which starts with a series of critical articles and leads on to one of the most lucid, multifaceted discussions of Rand's many flaws I've ever seen. This was the discussion that severed the last of my connections to Rand and her philosophy.

http://www.metafilter.com/86325/She-screamed-You-have-reject...

rdtsc's link is thorough, but dry reading. I found it harder to digest than the community conversations.
I'm definitely not terrified to cook, my idea of fun is spending an hour or two in the kitchen making new exciting food. However, I picked up a can of this stuff the other day at the market and have been happy with it.

My mornings are usually rushed, it takes less effort, and makes less of a mess. It's pretty easy to make bad food decisions in our society, and pancakes in a can are one of them, however, every once in a while it's OK. Also, they don't taste amazing, but they taste solidly average, which is fine by me for a quick breakfast.

I don't see why people are getting so worked up about it. If there's anything people should be worked up about it's fast food breakfasts, that stuff makes these pancakes look like gourmet health food.
If I like the people I am working around then most of that stuff is nice but not necessary, except maybe for the back and the chair thing. I would add a quick commute in the first list and a work at home option.
The crappy thing about classical music in Pandora is that if your piece spans multiple tracks (a good 80% of classical music falls into this category - multiple movements) you never get to hear the entire piece at once.
I would have liked the article to go into more depth about
his rejections and if he used the rejection feedback to change
his marketing strategy. My guess is when things start heading downhill it all turns into personal problems so I would ignore that stuff in the analysis.
Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes. He starts with a takedown of the dietary fat-heart disease hypothesis, moves on to the dietary fat-obesity link. Finally he makes a convincing argument that neither eating less nor exercising more are good ways to lose weight.
Gandi are by far the best registrar I've ever used. 100% control, 100% decent support and 100% uptime on their free DNS. Couldn't ask for better.
The article doesn't in any way tell us how to train the aging brain.

Perhaps I should be buying the book in April to find out.
You can't get low latency and high throughput with HTTP overhead. The headers will be bigger than transactions for starters.
I'm in my 50s. I do some similar exercises: putting shoes on in reverse order, play a Wii sports game left handed instead of right handed, etc. Also, about 1/2 of my friends very much disagree with me on politics/economy (I have some very liberal and very conservative friends who, for example, don't like it when I slam, respectively, Obama or Bush). I spend a good 10+ hours a week learning new tech.

My Dad is a good example of the advantages of doing new things. He was a physicist (and a member of the National Academy of Science) and at 60 he became an oceanographer. Now, in his late 80s, he has a passion for computer animation and video editing. To say that he is still very sharp mentally is a great understatement.

BTW, one great thing about developing software is that you get to be a quasi-expert at many different application domains as you work on different projects.
Add this capability into a phone, and you could have some very interesting augmented reality.
http://www.maryrobinettekowal.com/journal/my-very-bad-experi...

From the comments that pretty much sums up why he failed.

The quick synopsis: He gathered fundraiser money then just kept it and never returned it or dispersed it to the users. (Explains the police charges)
Having spoke with the press, I give him a lot of latitude on that one.

There are lots of explanations that come to my mind before I'd assume he's clueless.
Set bite-sized goals
You and I have different experiences then. I've seen people who comment everything and anything. And I know I'm not the only person who has seen this:

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/02/portrait-of-n00b.htm...
Yep, good place to start if you want to research the subject further, lots of avenues to take all in one spot.
Ruby introduced me to the ideas of first class functions, closures, and higher order functions and the design patterns that can be easily implemented using them. These same patterns can be implemented in Java, albeit with a much more verbose syntax. Most Java programmers are unaware of even these basic functional concepts and it shows because they end up copy-pasting a lot of code they don't have to and writing silly functions that can be easily implemented in terms of functions like map, filter, and reduce.

Yes, learning a new language can and does make you a better programmer if it introduces new concepts you can apply to other languages.
Zippy the Packaging Tape Dispenser
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22:20

"The other thing to note is that there is a confusion that people have, because the books and the press kind of work this way; We think about 'an idea'. We think about ideas for movies, ideas for products, and its usually thought of as some singular thing. The reality is these successful movies and these successful products have got thousands of ideas. There's all sorts of things necessary to make it and be successful and you have to get most of them right."

Pure gold.
The author suggests that you “bump up against people and ideas” that are different as a means to having a healthy brain. In my younger days we used to call it - keep an open mind and is good advice for young as well as older people. :)

In my case as I got older I noticed the following:

1) My capacity to absorb information has increased. I can read two/three books in a day (sort of semi-scanning it) and by the end of the day I would have absorbed the info although albeit not remember the nitty gritty. However, I would know where to look up the details.

2) I feel that my brain tends to process new information, now - whereas in my younger days it accepted as a fact and just stored.

3) I was and I am still bad with names, but I think it is a trait of a lot of people that are into maths/science/engineering etc.

4) I have become sometimes too logical. I view this as negative and I am trying to work around it.

5) Creativity definitely goes down with age.

Overall I believe that my brain is now better - in middle age - than during my youth. I have made an effort to keep fresh in my mind things that interest me. Once a year I spend one-two weeks refreshing maths. I also code a lot and read a lot, even though I am into management and need not do any of these.
Was going to suggest a feedback/comment section but I see you already have it. An excellent way of getting responses from the end user.
Agreed. If I want to encourage somebody to sit in a chair for 8-12 hours a day, it's reasonable for me to spend $1k on that chair.

Even if I said the chairs were getting replaced every three years, it'd be a pittance. The comfort would need to get me an average of $1 of additional productivity, per employee, per day, to pay for themselves.

If they save a few people back problems, they're more likely to get me, far, FAR more than that.

(Posted while sitting on a Steelcase Leap)
Tell HN: GirlInYourShirt looking for CES sponsors
Why do you think that Microsoft products are necessary to sell to large businesses? There might not be any large businesses that don't have any Microsoft products, but I've seen several successful sales to very large business by small companies without Microsoft products.
looks like this particular train wreck has made it to news.yc previously:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=856301
Cleanroom products
Pearce Stainless manufactures stainless steel clean room furnishings and equipment for controlled environments. Located in Ottawa, Canada, Pearce supplies a broad cross section of customers from both the electronic and pharmaceutical industries in Canada, the United States and worldwide.
The article was addressing the validity of the viewpoint that 'non-biological entities have more reasoning and processing power than biological entities...I think this is all going to happen in the next 40 years...' I tend to agree with you that there is no known quantitative measure to answer this question. Instead (because there is no known quantification method), I proposed the question - if a given learning problem can be solved most cost effectively using only computers, has it satisfied this requirement (of a non-biological entity achieving superior reasoning on a specific problem(s))?

You said 'no', due to the cost of R&D. However, computer-driver R&D, particularly in the form of generative hypothesis testing may one day be able to perform the job of 'understanding the strategies' more accurately and at a lower cost than a human.

Lets say your cost of learning is a function of the resource limitations the article laid out. ie, Cost of Learning = Cost of R&D + Cost of Data + Cost of Domain expertise. What I am suggesting is that if this Cost of Learning is lower for a computer alone than it is for a computer + human, than this is perhaps an adequate test to say 'In this problem area, a non-biological entity has achieved superior reasoning compared to a biological entity'.

btw, I tend to agree with your digression as well. This is a deep problem that is not really investor friendly, but needs sponsorship one way or another to advance the state of the art.
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MTS Mobile
MTS mobile is one of the new comers to Indian mobile market. They will have to put up a tough fight with compete with mobile market giants like Airtel, BSNL, etc. MTS mobile tries to reach their target audience through their attractive talk time packages. There are lots of criticisms against this new comer. MTS has announced daring 1 million free minutes of talk time between MTS to MTS. This launching offer is sure to attract customers.
Not as much a miss as you portray, considering that:
1. It is mandatory at least one Physical Education class in public high schools (at least in Florida), and if I remember right, middle school as well.

2. Not only do colleges and universities have complete gymnasiums, many of them have enormous staudiums and fields.

The one miss that I do agree with is "A man or woman unable to walk ten miles at a stretch will be regarded as a weakling."
> moving ssh to a non-standard port number

+1. If/when there's an sshd remote exploit/worm, it will probably only scan port 22.

"AllowUsers" is good too.

And, port knocking if you don't mind the hassle.
You do need "Mac laptops" but you don't need "Microsoft products"? I call fanboy bullshit. Strike "Mac" from the first list and I might be persuaded.
Am I missing something? The obvious explanation is that the other dev wanted him to fail so that the other dev would not have to finish his own part or account for it. There must be something missing from this story that the writer knows and we don't, otherwise I don't understand why he didn't deal with this possibility.
For non technical easy reads you might try:

River of America Books (History of specific Rivers)------
American Trails Series (History of specific Trails)------
Great Game - Peter Hopkirk------
Black Lamb & Gray Falcon - Rebecca West - About Yugoslavia----
Lyndon Johnson - Robert Caro - (3 books)
From TFA: And then some fool calling himself SoSerious posted _an article_ about how much he feels DC was an idiot.

From his link: Joshua Blankenship is a designer living in Anderson, SC.
The problem with that is that it becomes a method of buying residency. Why not just sell citizenship outright? A lot of people would find that distasteful, but I think it's worth thinking about.
This is precisely how data is stored in ranges within HBase/Hypertable. Your data is also sorted between mapping and reducing.
I would love to see the source code of the site.
Right. People don't realize it, but quotes are not "quotes", because most people do not naturally speak in flawlessly edited quotable soundbites.

It probably sounded like:

Interviewer: So what, uh, do you see as the big, you know, trends in the coming year? In the industry?

Interviewee: Well, I think, you know, there's something of a t-trend towards specialization.

Interviewer: You mean in programming lang--

Interviewee: Exactly. Languages, specialized techniques, you know, Rails, AJAX, all that jazz.
This guy is so cool. He's like world class, a pioneer, a revolutionary. And yet he's talking about all this stuff as if he was digging ditches... that he's really into. He cares about it for its own sake.

The way he describes that story-teller brain-trust at the start (trust, necessarily honest) I think also describes him.
No ball-and-chain of Windows compatibility holding you back.

No possibility of being lazy and using a traditional PC BIOS + ACPI etc. architecture. x86 doesn't even have mature alternatives: EFI doesn't really help anything, and OLPC's OpenFirmware approach was implemented poorly. With ARM there's already a bunch of well-implemented variant architectures from multiple vendors with full support in dozens of operating systems.
A spelling reform for the English language was probably the craziest prediction... :-)

Some languages, like Swedish and Finnish, had spelling reforms in the 19th century and are (more or less) trivial to pronounce from the spelling.

Today, it would be much, much harder to do a really big spelling reform even for Swedish which should be a fraction of the problem size for English. For a few generations you'd have to teach people to read/write both spelling standards. In the 19th century Sweden, most people only read a couple of religious books (they had to).

A spelling reform might be easy to do in a generation when the e-books have taken over. Just use automatic filters (not real translations -- grammar is the same) for English spelling standards in office programs, web browsers, etc.
It was informative still- I was surprised that the average lifespan was only 45. It does make some sense I suppose: penicillin was still thirty years away and there wasn't a single vaccine yet.
Good gravy this is sad-not to mention embarrassing for other Oregonian entrepeneurs like myself.

Connected people (usually) aren't born connected. It's simply a byproduct of past success. They work hard, network, execute, iterate, succeed and get people's attention.

If you can't figure that after 4 years, too bad for you.
The only comment I would add to this is pg's quote at the end of the article "I think this would have such a visible effect on the economy that it would make the legislator who introduced the bill famous," says Graham. "The only way to know for sure would be to try it, and that would cost practically nothing."

Unfortunately...that's not true. It might cost no money, but it could cost the congressmen and senators their job at the next mid-term elections. Immigration reform is a hot-button topic, so as much as it would be a great thing to do, it might be politically untenable right now.

Note: I am a foreigner, that would definitely want to take advantage of this program if the bill is passed and it is implemented. Just commenting on the quote :)
Daily Kos: 90 Accomplishments of Pres. Obama Which The Media Fails to Report....
The point system is for the various classes of permanent residency applications so it's not really apple's 2 apple's. There are also sponsored visa programs that come with employer, industry or geography restrictions from the family of US H1B visas.

I'm currently in application in Australia, knee deep. Australia's system has it's own problems with it's own unintended consequences.

It's very complicated. There are many similar visa classes each with their own rules that get tweaked constantly. That is by design. The system is intended to respond to a need for electrical engineers or plumbers as they come up.

There is preference for local graduates of 2 year certification courses (nursing, social work, IT, welding, etc, etc.). This means that private TAFEs have agents going around India, China & Malaysia selling Permanent Residency courses that can be easily funded by "earning while you learn," virtually impossible for most people. There are stories of people expecting crazed recruiters for cushy jobs waiting at the airports while not actually having any idea what their course is about (nothing gets called what it is any more & the official descriptions are often completely meaningless). The low end of 2 year training courses are a boom business.

All sorts of abuse, corruption & mess.

I agree with you about preserving the rights of the immigrant. I don't think it's possible to do this though whil immigration is this restricted in the world.
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That's not the sense I got out of Iran during the summer uprisings. These are the same people who overthrew the Shah in 1979 because their religious doctrine is intolerant of tyranny. The justification for the uprising--and the sense that many people are turning against even the Ayotollahs--is that no man, not even an Ayotollah, is immune from the duty to govern justly. I'm not saying Iran is going to legalize gay marriage anytime soon, but they're liberal enough to get outraged over a stolen election or a peaceful protestor shot dead in the streets.
This is a great study of "what does an average gamer have?", for "what does an average casual game player have?" the unity hardware study is great http://unity3d.com/webplayer/hwstats/

Of note, a around 35-40% of unity users have Intel graphics hardware and have dramatically lower resolution screens.
Haven't quite finished it yet, but Robin Buss' modern, unabridged translation of Alexander Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo.
>Was I bragging about my knowledge, or questioning the amount of specific relevant experience of the other poster?

Yes. I suppose bragging is a matter of interpretation, but you were certainly questioning his experience. E.g. you said:

> From the assumptions you carry around, it seems likely you just lack the same kind of experience.

Implying that the OP held mistaken views on commenting due to his lack of experience with Smalltalk debuggers.

>Now, what was your point again?

I was really asking a question rather than making a point. (I would say something about reading comprehension, but ...)
The hilarity continues at PDXCell.com
Check out the section entitled: "A response to this page".
Shoulda known he was an Apple fanboy.
Legalize Colorado Pot
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Your original function name is pretty terrible and your alternative is an artificially bad example. If Lvalue implies variable (and possibly variable implies lvalue) then both are not necessary in the name. Var will be universally understood but Glo and Lv would stump anyone not familiar with your personal shorthand. The word lookup is unnecessary. You can still get something quite self-documenting and not all that verbose or long:

def getGlobalVar(self, varName):
def getGlobalLvalue(self, varName):
def varLookupGlobal(self, varName):
def lookupGlobalLvalue(self, varName):
def globalLvalue(self, varName):
...

Nobody says you need to go all Java and make your variable names stupidly long. But small measures towards readability can go a long way to making code self-documenting and easier to understand.
Sometimes that "Incorrect conclusion from careless partial reading" is actually "Incorrect conclusion from reading ambiguous text." You can argue everything you say is always crystal clear, but...well...I'll leave it at that.

And if that careless partial reading comment is directed at me, which it is fair for me to assume so seeing as this conversation started from a retort to my comment, I didn't only read a piece of the post. Before I comment I read the entire post and sometimes (usually on forums) I break the post apart like you've done and respond to pieces at a time.

Anyways. I find it very amusing that you disregarded such high praise; however, it would have been odd not to do so seeing as the poster seemed to make the mistake you seem to dislike.
He doesn't strike me as the sort that's going to be able to make Portland work with him. Collaboration needs some cooperation; which, well, not his strong suit obviously.
Same here, tasted like cardboard and had an awful consistency. I also threw the rest of the can away.
Wait, I missed this. Health care plans, but no dental?
As far as I understand it, the estate tax is meant as a counter to the idle rich. It's also only applied to very large amounts of money and, perhaps more relevantly, to the transfer of that wealth.

I remember reading an article on the Economist a while ago about this issue and they noted that people who inherited large amounts of money entered the labor market less often.

Edit: I can give you the link, but I can't get you behind the paywall, unfortunately. http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1...