skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lets see if I got this straight: there is a comment in a thread regarding the "Israelification" of the United States of America (God help us all) and you think that the possibility of a "political" aspect to the OP's post belongs to "reddit"?

There is clearly a very important political aspect to the changes forced on this nation by the governing class under the guise of "security" and frankly for those of us who came to United States precisely because of the fact that its foundational and historic political basis and ideals was unlike any other country (which is why even to this day people flock to United States and not Israel) do have legitimate "political" concerns regarding the direction this country has taken. (And I can only hope that the native citizens share this concern.)

So, the OP's post is quite on track and appropriate as a timely 'fyi' for any US citizen who is reading this thread as to the possible end-state socio-political regime that the "Isrealification" avenue will culminate.
I agree it's an exaggerating claim. I'm interested in any HN discussion about the piece, though.
Ad hominem argumentation can draw attention, sure. If that, or entertaining your readers with drama, is the goal, it works -- and that's why it's so often used.

But if your goal is discovering the truth through iterative discussion, or achieving mutual respect, ad hominem is poison.
Reversed Dvorak? Awesome. I greatly respect Dvorak, I just could never muster the patience of getting my speed in it up to the 80-100 I range in qwerty. Going back to 5-10 wpm isn't fun.
I found it an amusing mistake, and I too love vim and I wish the hjkl standard was everywhere.
I found it an amusing quote, and I'm a strong believer in using the right tool for the right task. :)
They could still cut in on top. Which they can't on e-readers. Kindle is already pushing the technology to its present day limits.
Somebody's a Machiavelli fan.
Unix Resolutions for 2010
I'm extremely worried about China's real estate bubble. Chinese labourers are working their asses off, while factory owners crop most of the profit. These money is pours into real estate market. Today an apartment is worth 30X anual income of an average worker(my estimation). Hope when I finish grad school in US and go back, I don't have to pay this much.
Isn't that defeating the purpose of MondoDB? We're considering switching to it precisely because we're sick of two-tiered approach (MySQL+memcached) and MongoDB promises a built-in near-realtime caching.

Why would I want to lose the power of SQL if I'm not getting anything in return? I thought that "built-in memcached" was what I'd be getting. No?
How to Write a Client Proposal
you should get your own domain name if you want people to take you seriously.
Not until China relaxes its exchange controls. As long as the RMB can't get out of the country to investments offering higher return, there's nowhere else for it to go.
> The publishing industry needs to change, and it should take Steam as its example.

Err, you seem to have missed the entire point of the linked post. The linked post is noting that the publishing industry is changing, and that it is adopting Steam as a model, and the post is railing against that change. You don't own games purchased from Steam. You can't sell them, you can't will them to your offspring upon your demise, you can't loan them, you can't rent them. Indeed, a Steam purchase should be characterized as a brief, limited, rental agreement and it should be unlawful for Steam to use the word "purchase" anywhere in their descriptive text.
The Lisa, the Apple III, ...
"Yes, I am drunk. But you are ugly. And in the morning, I will be sober."
Considering the outer limits of organ bioprinting
That's the point of reinforcing the doors. Attackers can't just burst in. The firearms are just a last line of defense if someone manages to get through them somehow.
Particularly if it comes with a charging stand that holds it in an approximately upright, forward facing position.
Can't agree more. A very clear and well formed approach.
My only question at this point is - why bingo cards?

You have a marketing and SEO platform that's clearly optimized to heck at this point, yet it's returning $30k/yr on $45k. There are content businesses I have personal contact with turning over $45k/day based on SEO.

So, why stick with bingo cards? Are you just comfortable with it? Is the software not easy to expand outwards to other niches? Do you not know of any other niches to hit? Do you think you haven't reached diminishing returns in the bingo card market?

/devils-advocate
I think the author of that article sucks. He got himself in trouble with me by saying his first complaint was XML doesn't handle binary data. wtf? Must be the amateur hour tonight.
Good to hear your company is taking off, congrats.

As for my self, 2009 is the first year out of college and I dived in head first in to world of startups. The first two ventures ended without a bang, but the third one I am focusing now is looking much brighter. Either way, the best leaning experience and year I've ever had. Good times, good times.
Apple hears what it wants in iPod hearing damage suit
There's one case where I like XML. Interoperating with someone who, starting with a clean sheet, would have concocted something worse than XML (EDI is a popular example).

That said, I really don't see the value of whitespace and comments in our RPC traffic. I wish the industry were mature enough to successfully use ASN.1 for this stuff.
Don't ask what you can do for LuaTeX, but what LuaTeX can do for you.
Apple TV is indeed like Google Wave in that everybody talked about it but noone cared.

Tapplet on the other hand is the (hypothetical) product that everyone is talking about and many people care. If Apple fails to meet expectations on this one it will be an epic FAIL.

(my personal opinion is that they're indeed bound to disappoint, as almost everyone have had so many differing expectations about this device that meeting those is impossible, and most probably it will just turn out to be iPhone/iPod touch with a bigger screen - zero novelty)
eh. i'm calling this a specious argument.

it's like saying: i tried to get a job, but the best i could do was mcdonald's. forget that, from now on i'm going to steal.
Doubt thats the investment focus though
http://thingsjohngruberiswrongabout.tumblr.com
Yep. If it happens, it won't be the first time, won't be the last time, won't be Apple's death knell, won't be a sign of decline.
Errata?
"Recently Paul Graham wrote an article about the merits of logical argument."
Is March of 2008 recently?

Shouldn't it be:
"In 2008 Paul Graham wrote an article about the merits of logical argument."
Closest example I can think of is Amazon's "did you find this review useful" button. You can suss out — somewhat — how helpful a review is.
I disagree. The iPhone is a great example. It really did disappoint on a lot of levels: AT&T only, no multitasking, the draconian app approval process, still no multimedia SMS (this one boggles my mind), etc. But overall, it's been a huge success and threw the entire industry for a loop. I'm thinking the maclet will do about the same thing.
I wrote a couple of blog posts on this, but here's the summary:

My secret hope is that it has an eInk screen that slides down to reveal an LCD, at which point the eInk acts as a reconfigurable keyboard for netbook-style interaction.

I'm also wondering if it might instead have a couple of 7" screens arranged Nintendo DS-style (that would add up to 10"). You could, in a pinch, run unmodified iPhone apps on one screen with a keyboard and/or dock on the lower screen. And it would make a great two-page-at-a-time eBook reader.

I also think mobile videoconferencing might be a feature that's given a major push, since MacBooks don't have built-in mobile data connections and iPhones don't have user-facing cameras.
"Ex-"? If the CIA or FBI want someone who's even presently serving, they can get them. Of course, that happens most frequently when your life story begins with something like "born to Christian missionaries living in China".
Yikes! The reeducation camps must continue!

I am telling you this not because I want you to feel sorry for me, but because I want you to understand the danger of writing a well reasoned, logical argument. If you aren't willing to insult and cheat, nobody will ever read what you have to say.

Okay, let's not confuse a bunch of topics.

Topic 1: Rants sell -- just take a look at cable news. People like to watch other people get angry. It's easier than having actual feelings yourself, and there's always the angry-mob "hell yeah!" post you can make at the end.

Topic 2: Insults are spicy. I've found when dealing with the HN news crowd over the years to say "bullshit" instead of "crap" and "hell" instead of "heck". As a former marine, I can curse the chrome off a trailer hitch but learned in my 30s to tone down my language. But, base words sell more than safer words. People love to hear me call you an asshole, even if they like you! But if I respect who you are and ask for clarification of your point? Not so amusing. Better to watch fireworks than not.

Topic 3: If I insult you enough, I don't have to listen to your argument. This is where we cross the line from "how to write for the mob" to "how to shut down reasonable debate". The problem here is that you have entertained us so much we are starting to miss valuable content. For examples of this also see cable news, and some talk radio. This is the Ad Hominem, not the insult. The Ad Hominem is when I am using insult as a tool to prevent you from being heard.

Topic 4: Sometimes it's the people you hate the most that have the most to add to a discussion. This is where you really start screwing over the rest of us. You've done a great job of writing a spicy, insult-laden rant. We're all smiling and nodding with vacant stares as we drool over the keyboard awaiting our Pavlovian response queue. Have we learned anything? Hell no! Have we considered any new points of view? Hell no! Have we done much of all except waste our time? Hell no!

Good writers present both sides of the discussion as fairly as they can and then proceed to make a case. They have a thesis and work towards proving it. And guess what? That's not easy to do in a way that people like. It takes thought, a good vocabulary, a perspicacious terseness.

I read your whole article and it sounded to me like this "I can't write very well, I'm not patient enough to build up a following, I'm frustrated at the capricious nature of HN, and I can't help but notice how much people like to read other people writing smack"

Sure! We can all just fling poo.

But count me out on the poo flinging, at least until I join the rest of the primates at the zoo.
Slides here: http://mazur-www.harvard.edu/sentFiles/MazurTalk_1516.pdf
I agree with that, but number one article for most of the day? It seems a bit exaggerated to me. This is macrumors material, in my opinion.
Random usually ends up being discrimination so I would go with a set of more stable rules that apply to everyone.
Tablets will be great for small children, who will interact with educational software using their right forefingers on the touchscreen.

Tablets will eventually be cheap, rugged and capable of being turned on quickly. (Perhaps a convergence with electronic paper will occur.) They can be left lying around in the play area. No chair/desk/keyboard arrangement will be required.

One upshot of this is that educational software will get much, much better than it is now.
Surprisingly, it sounds like some of the guesses aren't too far off from the Microsoft Courier concept. I have to say, some of the ideas in that concept of a persistent, everyday computing device sound compelling. Something half way between an interactive moleskin and a kindle.

http://gizmodo.com/5365299/courier-first-details-of-microsof...

I wouldn't be surprised to see apple co-opt some of the interactions of a physical notebook. It would fold up in fit in a small messenger bag pretty easily.
"Correlation does not equal causation"

Also, I really should learn to type better. This though got me googling. I found some discussion on the topic:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=952745
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=510087

Also, I seem to remember someone posting a webapp typing tutor. Does anyone remember the name?
I'm at one far end of the spectrum, but I was reading Stephen King in 5th/6th grade, read Anna Karenina (chosen myself) in 7th grade for a book report and had read nearly all of Tolstoy's works by the end of 9th grade. My parents never had a punishment for failure, only failures without effort. The idea was to set your goals so high that they cannot possibly be accomplished. It still holds to today for me...when I don't reach the goals I set for myself, I'm not disappointed, I look at how good I actually did do. The only time this is an issue is when coming up with those annual and semi-annual review goals that determine are used to measure if you're going to get a reasonable merit increase or not.
…and I thought Monty only misunderstood database transactions. I hope he enjoys as much success rolling-back this MySQL transaction as users have had rolling back their MySQL transactions :)
As far as I can remember, the industry's response to the iPhone was very favorable. They had basically sold thousands of units before they even announced the product. People were asking for the iPhone long before it was confirmed.

The only ones in denial were competitors. Users and bloggers loved it since day one, and by day one I mean the day Apple announced it, not the day Apple released it.
Apple tends to shy away from kludgy solutions. Which is why I don’t think you will ever see something like you described from Apple.

(Not to say that your imagined product wouldn’t be nice to have for at least some people. It’s just not in Apple’s DNA to do something like that. Just one example: The Nintendo DS is great product but also something you would never ever – ever! – see from Apple.)

All-things-Apple-Disclaimer: I could be horribly wrong.
This thread isn't about the "Israelification" of the US, it's about adapting El Al's security procedures to US airlines. What are you even on about?
Is anyone else depressed that this article is currently #3 on the front page, and yet his "good idea" (which I think is misguided, but at least is thought-provoking) got zero views? It's like the HN community has collectively proved his point.

Anyway, I'm going to respond to the technical article and not the meta-discussion (I guess these paragraphs would be meta-meta discussion then ;-)):

Lots of programming languages have run up against the problem of combining interfaces, with various solutions. In type theory, this is called "structural subtyping": inferring the type of an object from the methods it must support. Ocaml's object system supports it directly. C++ supports it through "concepts" and "models", which are the foundation of the STL. Python, Ruby, and JavaScript call it "duck typing". Go has it built into its interfaces. Dylan added explicit union and intersection types to the language.

I don't really like the proposed syntax, because it requires that you name all of your concepts. Also, the verbose intersection type-name needs to be carried down to all callers of foo() - so if you had a method bar() that called foo(), it would also need its parameter declared as ReversibleIterator & RemovableIterator. And if you had a method baz() that might call foo() or might do something with a RandomAccessIterator, its type signature would have to be RandomAccessIterator | ReversibleIterator & RemovableIterator. You can see where this is going.

I'd much rather stick to simple structural subtyping, where you can specify (ideally, it'd be compiler-inferred) that iterator must support the previous() and remove() methods, and any type that provides those may be passed in.
The New Homeless: Aspiring Web Developer Ends Up on San Francisco's Streets
I'm trying to figure out whether this comment is serious, or a quite funny joke about xml being verbose to the point that human readability is sacrificed.
I think he was misled by the fact that the essay was reposted to HN a day or two ago. Or, maybe he simply takes a longer view than the average internet poo slinger :-).
Also, it would be a throwback to how people worked before laptops. If you've ever been in a meeting where 20 people sit around a conference table and talk over their laptops, you'll recognize that as much value the laptop brings to the meeting; it's distracting having a physical object that's 11" tall blocking your body and attention.

I liked it better when people showed up to meetings with paper notebooks.
How Apple's Rumored Tablet Will Be a Full-Fledged Mac, Too.
I think the author's writing skills are top-notch. The article was entertaining to read from the beginning to the end and he looks like a smart guy with great ideas.

That said, I don't think his analysis is that great in this particular article, that's why I quoted the word analysis in my original post. Like I said, this feels like pure speculation backed by intuition on the author's part. His analysis doesn't use any sort of sales numbers or statistics to show where the market is heading and why Apply would take certain decisions.
As someone who is still relatively new here and doesn't recognize all the handles, the article sounds like insider gossip that only other insiders might care about, or can even follow. Kind of like the HN version of a rag that gives you the run down on who wore what, said what, and whom they showed up with at the latest gala Hollywood event.
"PSA"? Google suggest didn't have anything for "p security administration"

great comments btw, both your's and parent's (I have to post this b/c my upvotes aren't being counted).
I bet on average it's just a little bit past the end of the contract, for contracts that are > 6mos.

If it's the kind of company that people don't leave, they might not specify a long contract.

I also suspect it has to do with what kind of leadership the founders have after they are acquired. It's very, very tough to go from a founder that runs a company to being eight down from the acquiring CEO and having every decision triple-guessed by middle managers. (I'm increasingly a believer in that ribbonfarm article about corporate structures. Using his jargon: someone who was once a Sociopath has to report to a Clueless.)
I agree that increased parallelization of common computing tasks could increase performance, but I believe that performance is acceptable (by the consumers and management) for most applications.

Programming games is fringe programming. I believe that most PCs are used for: CRUD web apps, VB/C# apps, productivity apps, document editors, ecommerce clients, collaboration, and communication clients.

Sure, faster programs would be great! I want it as much as the next person. Sadly, I don't see it being the Next Big Thing. I hope I'm wrong! I do think that the present high-performance community is going to get nicer tooling for parallel programming, and some of that may find its way into your everyday consumer apps but that will be in forms like Grand Central Dispatch or other library adjuncts to existing platforms, and therefore not a technological leap but rather a step in the right direction.

Polling files for modification is an example of not taking advantage of platform capability, where existing performance is "good enough." Most platforms now have filesystem hooks for modification, and if you want to improve the speed of gedit you can register an event handler.
Bump folks! I hope you are listening to this!

Though for all I know your iPhone software already does Paul B's photosharing trick... I'm the world's laziest beta user so I don't know.
But on the other hand you do get some advantages in return for that sacrifice of your 'reseller' right. For example, the ability to use your game wherever you want, however many times you reinstall or whatever.

Theres a real risk Valve or any company that controls your software could go bust - and then you'd be in trouble, but in my opinion Valve is more trustworthy than, for example, EA - since you can at least redownload your software and use it more than some fixed number of times.
El Al Spends $100M securing 37 Aircraft

That assumes costs scale linearly with aircraft. Do they?

The major vulnerability of the El Al security system is that anybody that isn't considered part of the "Risk Profile" (I.E. Muslim) - can walk right through the security system.

I doubt this. Muslims are probably subject to higher scrutiny, but that doesn't preclude others from being subject to the same, Jews included.

How many aircraft per day, or per month, heck _per year_ are being blown out of the American Aviation sky under the current regime?

None. 2 attempts (shoe and underwear bomber). Both aborted not b/c of TSA methods, but because passengers took the initiative. If current methods were working, neither bomber would've been able to bring fire onto the plane.

Let me ask you - how many person-hours and dollars have been wasted due to unnecessary delays and tossed liquids.

"Relying on passengers to fix flaws" - Nobody is allowed to bring on guns, knives, or even large amounts of volatile liquids

If you want to bring on large amounts of volatile liquids, put them in a contact lens bottle. You're allowed to carry one on that's larger than 3oz (http://www.tsa.gov/travelers/airtravel/specialneeds/editoria...). Mine is a 16oz bottle, which I've brought on all the time. It has obviously always been contact lens solution, but it's never been verified other than by visually inspecting the label.

The system is designed to allow passengers to subdue any hostilities on the plane. I think that's an excellent part of the current system.

Nobody "designed" this. That's an artifact of how planes were used in 9/11. Prior to that, pax sat quietly in hopes that hijackers wouldn't blow up their plane. This is the last line of defense that works in spite of failures that allowed PETN and matches onto planes.

So, every single person was having their luggage checked AND being patted down - the net result of this "Chaos" - my normally 20 minute wait took 90 minutes.

I'd say a 450% increase in wait times is significant. But it sounds like you were one of the lucky ones:
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/toronto/story/2009/12/27/tor-airpor...

Seems like giving every pax significant attention (pat downs or interviews) may actually be scalable. I'm happy to wait 90m to get on a flight and feel like it's safe.

But, the most important element to be aware of - the Israel Security systems works based on Racial Profiling - it's that simple. The United States has decided they don't want to go down that path, so, even if the El Al system would scale from 37 to 8,000+ Aircraft, it's not politically tenable.

Even if the racial profiling bit is true - and based on personal experience as well as anecdotes from non-muslim HN posters and friends I'm not sure it is - I'm less interested in what's politically tenable than what's best. Over time, politicians have a way of supporting the right course of action.
Perhaps my line of reasoning was too sideways to be seen clearly as a response to this post. And you also may have misinterpreted my citation of Steam.

In my view DRM exists because a dying industry is trying to hang on. Refer to the last paragraph. My argument is that DRM is wasteful, ineffective, and the result of an industry that isn't changing.

Steam is an example not because of its DRM, but because of its convenience. Steam would be even better without DRM, of course. And I think if there were a competitor to Steam that offered the same service and prices without DRM, people would choose that competitor. I state very clearly that I think DRM is caused by this kind of stagnation, where competitors that could win market share by not being dicks to their customers don't exist.

I hope that clarified my point of view.