skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The fact that you have Potassium Chloride in your list only highlights your ignorance.

It's used in "pet friendly" road salt, and sometimes even as a substitute for table salt. Sure in large doses it's lethal, but so is regular salt.
believe with religious fervour

Did you see the reports that the panel got heckled by some women when they announced their conclusions on Wakefield?

They were told of the proof that this man compromised the herd immunity of a nation and unethically experimented on children for no good reason and yet they still cheer him on.

We're not in rational-land any more, Toto.
Design for March Madness, Win a Canon Rebel
Design anything that you want that represents March Madness to you.We don't care if you want to send in t-shirt ideas, March Madness comics or even new outfits for the band. The winner will get to choose between two awesome Prizes:
Prize 1: Canon EOS Rebel T1i Digital SLR Camera
Prize 2: Wacom Intuos 4 Design Tablet
> redefine the current situation as normal

I think the point is that the current situation is normal.
Who Owns Scotland and the Ordnance Survey
You posted an essay on the internet about a new Apple product and how it relates to the hacker mentality.

It includes such tidbits as "...people won’t be able to satisfy their computer curiosities. To which I again say: Good! Then they’ll have to satisfy their curiosities about emotional maturity and social interaction..." and that paragraph I cited above about obsessive-compulsive tendencies and an anti-social attitude.

It attacks the stereotypical perception of the nerd (especially the "hacker" type) while discussing the future of open versus closed computer systems. Who did you think your audience was? Furthermore, you end it with, "Only our chance to pontificate endlessly, to people who don’t think you’re as smart as your derogatory t-shirt claims." That's aimed pretty squarely at the group you're criticizing.

I really did enjoy reading it, and it was insightful and interesting. Whether or not it was aimed at the programmer audience, it's on a topic that's of interest largely to that audience, and it certainly seems as though it's designed to elicit a negative reaction. Calling it trolling might be an overstatement, but it makes many of its points through attacking a large portion of the people that are likely to read it.
I simply respond to these arguments with this:

Consider that every crackpot thing the wingnuts say about vaccines is true. They cause autism in some children, allow government mind control, make the windshield wipers on your car to fly off, and cause family pets to lose all their hair. You job isn't actually to prove that vaccines may cause these things, your job is to prove that these things are worse for your kids than a polio epidemic.

Nothing at all is safe. Everything is potentially dangerous. Only a good understanding of statistics can tell you how dangerous. Only a rational grasp of reality can tell you how to behave with the knowledge those statistics impart.
Critique Steve what you will. Point out iPad's lacking features what you will... The point to learn from decades of digital naysayers who proved clueless is:

Predicting how people will use (and how many will buy) is not as easy as it looks. No where as easy as Monday morning quarterbacking. And Apple/Steve certainly have no 100% track record. But they have batted >.500 - in a ballgame (CE & PCs) where batting >.300 is impressive.
One interesting thing about doing educational videos, you can pre-produce a "lecture" and then have the teacher around for Q&A (during - just switch to the live camera/ after).
The immune system is not limitless. You only throw so many things at it at a time because that's all that works to A) provides the immunization coverage you need and B) not have a severe effect on the life of the individual. The point isn't to battle the vaccine, it's to prime the pump (so to speak). If you introduce too much at a time you risk weakening the overall effect. This isn't intuition.

My point is that vaccines are spread out for good reason and the distribution has been widely studied and that changing the mix needs to handled carefully.

> everyone should be at risk of getting it?

I'm quite aware of shingles... it's horrible and I'd wish it on no one. Any adult that hasn't already had chickenpox should definitely get the vaccination.

My hesitation was that I'm not sure how the immunity conferred by the vaccine differs from that conferred by the live virus. It is probably just as good, but what if it isn't? That's my question. Since chickenpox itself is not that dangerous to a large percentage of the child population, I wonder if it would be better to have them acquire the resistance naturally (get the disease). This is the original form of vaccination remember...

Bear in mind this is all from the point of view of the individual. From the point of view of population / herd immunity it's probably far better to just have everyone vaccinated so it's over and done with. I mean, a kid at my son's daycare recently got chickenpox. I wouldn't like dealing with a toddler that has the chickenpox, so all in all, I'm happy with the decision to get him vaccinated for it, regardless of my initial hesitation.
By decreasing the amount of wealth that is necessary for a human person to remain alive - for example by introducing a new vaccine that allows a large (5+) family in unsanitary conditions to have all of their children reach adulthood - these sorts of programs in undeveloped countries actually create more poverty then they solve.

Stated more simply: It is good that children in poor countries are dying because if they had lived then they would have created more poverty.

How is this getting any upvotes? marciovm, Gates isn't spending this money to play up his image to the American public and to tug at America's heart strings. He's doing this because it's right. Giving people vaccines to live is right. Letting them die because it might create less poverty isn't - it's missing the point that all lives are important.

I completely agree that empowering the economies of developing nations is a very high priority. Higher GDP's lead to longer life, lower infant mortality, more education, less children per mother (because the opportunity cost of having a child is higher once the mother gets a high salary), etc. However, researching vaccines is just as important and necessary for developing countries that are crippled by HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis.
By decreasing the amount of wealth that is necessary for a human person to remain alive - for example by introducing a new vaccine that allows a large (5+) family in unsanitary conditions to have all of their children reach adulthood - these sorts of programs in undeveloped countries actually create more poverty then they solve. There is not a cheap-manual labor shortage in these countries. There is however an acute shortage of well-paying jobs that don't involve corruption. By allowing the supply of just-surviving people to increase, you are putting even more downward pressure on the wages of unskilled labor (they are caught in the Iron Law of wages).

I refuse to believe that the loss of life is perferable than the preservation of life. And quite frankly, arguments from classical economics seem rather cold given the subject matter.

The heart of your argument suggests that the political issues in these countries are the root of the problem. This is correct. However, history shows us that the amount of money spent on politically bankrupt states has little or no impact on making them politically sound. Gates money is useless on the third world political playing field; instead, Gates is choosing to spend it in an area which he can actually have an impact.

As far as domestic politics go, the positions you suggest that Gates take on "farm subsidies, fossil fuel subsidies, and the recreational diamond market" are all politically untenable at the moment. It's not clear Gates could have an impact there either.
I love tinkering and don't think it's at all useless. What I hate is that the same things that make computers so tinkerable are what make them so frustrating for all the people that don't want to tinker. The iPad removes all those frustrations, and in the process closes itself to tinkering, and I think that's an acceptable switch.

Other machines will exist to tinker on. Moreover, the iPad itself is opening to tinkering. If I'm a young kid who finds out online I can download a jailbreaker and completely hack up my iPad, that's exciting for me! That gives me an opening into the world of tinkering and fiddling that you have with these computers by default. Or, if I have an idea for how to excite people into learning how to fiddle with computers, I make an iPad app or a webapp that teaches them all those things. As I said in the article: If nobody else decides that would be an awesome thing to do, chances are I'll make one myself, for my own sake as much as for others'.

I understand the criticism that the iPad's getting for being closed. I've been a member here for however long. And to some degree, I sympathize with it. But people here are fucking ridiculous. (Not just here; Reddit and MetaFilter are just as bad.) They jump from "I wish it was open" to "The fact that Apple's closed the system is killing computing forever and plunging us into the dark ages."

I wrote this to Alex Payne in a rougher, impromptu format. I just wanted to explain to him why I didn't think it was totally bad that the iPad was closed. When I finished writing it, I liked it, so I rewrote it for my blog readers and added that little smug "Programmers aren't permitted to feel my breath on their skin" character because I thought it was really fun and because I have readers who enjoy irony and tongue-in-cheek. Then it got out to a wider public, including certain venues where people didn't know my name or my writing style, and now we have this discussion going on.

I hope this will stop certain of the people here from jackassing themselves about. (Not you, fnid; your comment was a great response to an attitude I don't hold.)
Are the Gell-Mann matrices extremal?
I do think that the problems with higher education are directly related to the drop in standards of our high school system. I get the feeling a revolution in the high school system will go a long way to fixing the focus and need for higher education.
Criticism is always warranted.

The pitfall though, is that most geeks criticize the spec sheet. And in the case of the iPod and iPhone, the spec-list criticism --though still absolutely valid-- was wholly irrelevant.

It seems if Apple had held no event and released no videos, simply mailed out a PDF of specs and photos, 90% of the reaction to this device would be identical.

And it would be just as useful in determining whether users ultimately adopted the device or not.
They did not sue Woolworths for that logo. They filed an objection with the Australian IP authority during the provisional period in which such objections are specifically called for by interested parties (i.e. "speak now or forever hold your peace").
I recently started thinking about this after reading Garrett Hardin's The Tragedy of the Commons essay from 1968 about the "population problem". After reading the essay I started on his 1993 book Living Within Limits: Ecology, Economics, and Population Taboos. I just passed the halfway mark in it, but I highly recommend it if you like his essay and the way he presents ideas. The book really does a good job of covering the evolution of the ideas of population control from Malthus onwards.

The essay Lifeboat Ethics: the Case Against Helping the Poor from 1974 is probably the essay available online that is more applicable to the current discussion.

I do not yet have a well-formed opinion on this one way or the other, I simply find Garrett Hardin's arguments to be thought-provoking. Saving millions of lives will mean that those millions of lives need to be sustained in some way. The resources to do this have to come from somewhere. By saving those millions of lives is that going to lower the quality of life of millions of others? It is a tough problem with, as Hardin mentions, "no technical solution".

Lifeboat Ethics: the Case Against Helping the Poor essay:
http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/art_lifeboat_et...

Tragedy of the Commons essay: http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/art_tragedy_of_...
This kind of major undertaking is admirable, because it will reduce suffer and pain to the people who are not so fortunate.

The charity contribution I offer is limited and do the best I can through organizations like Kiva.org. I just wish that other well known and well off tech leaders e.g. Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs would be more active.
Maybe the Gates Foundation with their actions encourages them to do something on a bigger scale.
The reason we don't pay for online news
Americans still spend much more time with print newspapers than they do with news online -- one Nielsen study found that Internet users spent an average of 38 minutes total per month on newspaper sites. "What that says to me is that reading the news online is a worktime activity. ... Most people aren't paid to sit at a computer and read newspapers. They're snatching things throughout the day," Varian said.

People who click on a news article or a video at work as a distraction from other tasks aren't going to want to pay for it. People are willing to pay for newspapers not because they're used to paying, according to Varian, but because "It's a much nicer experience to sit there with a newspaper and a cup of coffee and have that be your leisure time activity."
Evolution of a Haskell programmer
Wait...

1. Copy/paste text from forums

2. Post to blog

3. Profit???
Dear government, legislate cloud security now
"political issues in these countries are the root of the problem"

well, it's political-economical-cultural, you can't really isolate one like that.

I'm not advocating Gates giving money to those governments, so they chose what to spend on. I agree that would be even worst - they would buy guns to strengthen their armies and luxury goods for themselves on their visits to Europe and Dubai.

10B can have quite a large impact on political realities in the US. Electing Obama cost a lot less then that.
The enterprise programmer one is pretty good too. Reminds me of EJB (shudder).
Is it really the case that the burden of proof is on someone who thinks that a system might be vulnerable? Should we believe by default in the security of new cryptosystems because they haven't been cracked yet?

I am neither asserting nor implying that there is malware anywhere in the iPhone ecosystem at any point. I meant merely that

1. the reviewers wouldn't, and couldn't be expected to, catch it, unless it were very clumsy (do you check the sources of all the software you run? Even if you do, do you think that the reviewer does? Now consider how many more apps a reviewer must vet daily than you run);

and

2. that there are much cleverer things to do with malware than loudly announce your presence, such as quietly funnelling out interesting personal data, so that it is very dangerous to confuse a lack of reports of malware with a lack of malware.

To the last point it may rightly be objected that arguing something on the basis of “If it were there you wouldn't see it, and you don't see it, so it's there” is indulging in a particularly base sort of logical fallacy (identification of a statement with its converse). I emphasise again that I am in no way claiming that there is malware; merely that the belief that there isn't, can't be, and won't be as long as we stick with the closed model seems to represent an indulgence in a peculiar sort of optimism.
I actually tried to write an explanation upthread a bit; hopefully that'll calm things down.

There's a lot of hyperbolic criticism about the iPad that I don't think is justified. This is a hyperbolic response. In some threads here and elsewhere I have tried to state my ideas rationally, but when you have hundreds of Greater Internet Fuckwads spouting things you run out of steam quickly. This is how I chose to unwind.

I have a beef with the Aspergers-aspiring model of the programmer. Not all computer people are like that. I'm a computer person and I'm not; my friends are computer people and they're not. But there are still some people who pride themselves in how lacking they are socially, in how incapable they are of relating with people, and they're sadly acclaimed by a lot of people. I think it's a damn shame.

Apple draws out the worst in those people, because Apple as a company exists almost to refute their ideas of how computers should work. They focus not on specs and feature sheets but on usability and elegance and things that make people who don't like computers more happy. And I love that! I think it's what's needed to make computers and computer people as mainstream as films and film people are. I'd like to be able to discuss Internet Topics with people without it instantly getting me pegged as one of those nasty Internet People in question.

So, yes, it was critical of people who wear insulting t-shirts. I don't apologize to people here who still do, because I honestly think they've got to mature themselves a bit. Most programmers aren't like that, and I don't have a beef with them, and if theirs were the voices leading this conversation I'd have written something less out-of-orbit.
And all of those states are in the the bottom half (I'd say third, but south carolina is a bit above that for standard of living) of states ranked by standard of living, education, and infant mortality. In fact, for infant mortality these 5 states hold the top 4 spots.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_tree would be an improvement.
How can there be an infinite number of licensees, when the number of people & corporations is finite, and licensing is only needed for a finite amount of time (until the patents expire)?
Creativity by Combination
14 Days of jQuery: jQuery 1.4.1 released, jQuery UI 1.8 RC, Meetup Site Launched
No, you're not callous. You are just damn ignorant. What you need is a little compassion and try to imagine if you are that poor person and that you mom now gets sick and now try to think should she die just because there's no cheap vaccine ,should she die so that she can sacrifice herself and you can be productive writing your damn programs because you don't need to take care of her. Think About it. Think about it in these people's shoes. They are human beings like you and me. Their sufferings are real. You're saying you can't feel this in your heart? just because you're born in a rich country and all the resources? Yeah, you need to get out of your little world and try to understand not everyone is as lucky as you. And they deserve EVERYTHING you deserve. They shouldn't just die.
Sigh... this reminds me of the old saying -- "Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts". Death, disease, despair, and enormous expense could be avoided if these pseudo scientists would be shut out by population.
That's a good point.

The paranoid in me wonders whether a malware writer might then work on infecting an app-store developer's machine, to get the code in via such indirection; but I agree that seems like an awful lot of work when so many unsecured machines are out there for easy and anonymous direct picking.
(One Of Many Reasons) Why Students Hate Algebra
That's your issue. You want to live in the bay area. Many cities have monthly passes for under $60.
Ah, that makes sense now. Thanks!
and here's a working link to the original "Evolution of a programmer":

http://www.lri.fr/~filliatr/evolution
Just because some people on a forum laughed at the iPod when it launched doesn't make the iPad awesome.
wow, that's pretty amazing stuff those guys are doing with web data.
Are workers being replaced by robots, or by workers in other countries who are willing/able to work for less money?
No less anecdotal, but the classic "Real Programmers Don't Eat Quiche" includes:

"Real Programmers don't play tennis, or any other sport which requires a change of clothes. Mountain Climbing is acceptable. Real Programmers wear climbing boots to work in case a mountain should suddenly spring up in the middle of the machine room."

http://www.lib.ru/ANEKDOTY/quiche.txt
I don't have the time to take a real look at it yet (at my plain ol desk job). I like the idea, site construction looks good. However, the first thing I noticed is that the "See Through the Darkness" paragraph on the right-hand side. The paragraph goes too low, into the whitespace (I'm using firefox 3). The rest of the front page looks so nice that it stands out.

I'll take a look at it some more later. Best of luck.
You're supposed to sit on the couch and share it with another person, showing them your vacation photos or cute kitty videos on YouTube or a movie or something. That's a lot more "social" than abstracting human contact behind text messages and webcams.
What about vaccines for the mind? Having harmful ideas infect the mind is often more devastating than most illnesses.

See: http://www.reddit.com/r/cogsci/comments/au7t7/why_not_provid...
It's a question of maximizing short term vs. long term good. If you took combine 10 billion with a little leverage you could build ~(20 GW) worth of electric power in a self sustaining fashion that would pay for its replacement when the time came. If you setup the right foundation that focused on growth you could probably replace all of the worlds coal power plants in ~150 years. Or you can spending that money now, and vaccinate a large number of people for a low cost per person and dramatically reduce a specific type of suffering for a reasonable amount of time.
It's not a tough problem. Think about it this way. Imagine you and your mom, your wife , your siblings are born and lived in a poor country. And they get sick. Will you want to save them because they deserve to be alive? Or will you want to let them die just because they could be a burden to the already poor society. Just let all loved one dies? How difficult it is to answer this question? Oh, that's because it's somebody else's moms so just let them die so that the society has enough resources for the rest?
Should kids be taught cursive writing in school?
"The vast majority of workers in poor countries are agriculture workers"

I think that's not true, and population trends are strongly against it, largely because of improved sanitation.

For example, Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa, urban population is about 50%. I'd bet their urban population is growing like crazy while the rural is shrinking.

"Job opportunities are important, but lowering mortality rates helps this."

Not always. That's a big assumption. Are there massive job opportunities around that require cheap labor? There are in China. They are getting to be rich by manufacturing. Not because Americans came in and solved all their health problems. Because Americans opened their markets and there was a government in place that enable the country to take advantage of that (a dictatorship with a bunch of problems, no doubt, but you can't say they haven't fueled economic growth).

"People dying young is inefficient, since it makes education and training more expensive"

Unskilled labor is by definition not educated or trained.

"eliminating Smallpox has made the world a worse place"

Well, it's highly subjective to say what makes a place better or worse. What are we trying to maximize? Human-life-years lived? Or human-life-years-lived without living under dictatorships, constant war and corruption?

Sure, research in medicine always has value. But making existing vaccines 10x cheaper the best alternative right now for our society to spend it's excess wealth in? Why does any of this matter if sea levels go up a few feet, and tens/hundreds of millions are forced to flee over national borders (and that leads to massive conflict)?
The Irony of Road Fear
My Take on the iPad