skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A more likely phase two, I think, would be violent chaos amidst a grab for land and resources, unless some sort of alternate leadership emerges (and if that alternate leadership were broadly popular, why couldn't it just take over the existing government?). The primary immediate effect of a loss of government authority would be the dissolution of government-enforced contract and property rights.

For the general concept of what it would mean for citizens to opt out of a government in the American context, though, Thoreau wrote quite a bit on the subject: http://thoreau.eserver.org/civil.html

Anti-war groups have typically also debated some version of "how can I opt out?", though I'd say with with mixed success. They can generally find ways to avoid actually serving in the military, but avoiding paying for it or having wars be waged in your name is a lot harder.
"the bible says that you cannot take anything that alters your behavior or your body"

I think most people wouldn't take such an interpretation of the Bible, but even if you did, your explanation doesn't line up with current societal mores.

There are many mind and body altering substances that are not only tolerated, but celebrated. Almost all of modern Western medicine is based on introducing substances or therapies to the body that alter the mind or body. Everything from cold medicine to antibiotics alters the body. There are also numerous mind-altering substances used, such as narcotics, anesthetics, anti-psychotics, and anti-depressants. All of these are fully embraced by the vast majority of people, as well as the medical establishment.

But even if we stay away from medicine, there are plenty of examples of accepted mind-altering recreational substances. Nicotine, caffeine, and alcohol are the most obvious, but there are many other less severe substances (look at the ingredients on some energy drinks). By and large, the use of all of these substances is accepted.

If it were simply the case that cultural history prevented society from accepting mind-altering substances, none of the above would be accepted. The explanation must be more complicated.
Hmm, I was unaware that Ruby worked that way. I'm not one to say that this is "bad" or "good" -- since I haven't used Ruby much -- but it seems unnecessarily confusing, even if it is consistent.
As a former investment banker who has worked on numerous IPOs and follow-on offerings, there is only one thing you need to have a successful IPO:

Institutional buyers who want to buy the stock at a price acceptable to the company.

Back in 1999, they'd buy anything with .com in the name; nowadays, they want to see a pretty clear path to sustainable profitability. That doesn't mean you actually have to be wildly profitable; just that you're of a sufficient size and have implemented a clear business model. Facebook, LinkedIn, Zynga, and countless others could IPO tomorrow if they wanted. Twitter's issue isn't profitability; it's size. $25 million in revenue just isn't big enough to get out just yet.

If you're looking for precedents, the best one (due to its recency and characteristics) is OpenTable's recent follow-on offering. The prospectus is worth a read: http://edgar.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1125914/00010474690... Here's their IPO prospectus from earlier in 2009: http://edgar.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1125914/00010474690...
Writing up details and actions after an outage like this is a good practice for improving the perception of a service. The compliment to taking re-active action like this (e.g. informing users and make underlying tech improvements) is to try show uptime in a passive way that the users register. My old boss - before I had a startup - would often use the analogy of the London Underground, which for a long time was perceived as a poor service, until they introduced regular status updates on all lines in each station. This made people register all the times that the service was working for them (and many others, by showing the status of all lines), so that when there was a problem they saw it in context as a small proportion compared to 'uptime'. Not sure how you could apply that in this example, but it might resonate with more 'infrastructure' like services like web hosts.
I already see it when trying to hire programmers and designers.

Because a programmer knows a mish-mash of PHP, Java and a little Javascript, they think that they are immediately qualified to write a scaleable web app.

Designers are even worse. Just because they know photoshop or dreamweaver, they think they are a designer.

I find that my programming candidates from the open-source world, though, tend to be better then those using the latest and greatest editor with some kind of intellisense on Windows.
And how is a mouse pointer different to your finger pointing at something? You know, there are even Operating Systems where the mouse pointer is a hand which you use to point the virtual index finger at things. Now, i can use my real finger to point at things, it is indeed the same f*ing thing.
Compiling HipHop-PHP on Ubuntu 9.10
I work on semantic web search and the issues he mentions are still mostly relevant.
Notes From the Field: I have seen the future of healthcare
Please create an iphone app instead where old interviews can be accessed simply and charge for the app.

EDIT: simple->simply
I am sympathetic to the overall thrust of this, but posted on my blog (which vanishingly few customers read) rather than my main site for a reason. If your toaster can't toast, you don't want to hear why your toaster can't toast, you just want it to toast toast. This describes the relationship of almost of my users with their computers, the Internet, and Bingo Card Creator.

While I want to apologize to users who got delayed from getting back to their lives because their toaster was on the fritz, I don't want to tell anybody else that toasters sometimes can't toast toast. It needlessly complicates their relationship with their toaster: they have no relationship with their toaster, and that is how they bloody like it.
Only thing is cheap programmers generally -- not exclusively -- but generally suck.
Swimming with the dolphins (for about 15-20 minutes in an amusement park) has been one of the most awe-inspiring and cherished experiences in my life. I always knew dolphins are mammals, but the experience of seeing their features up close was still fascinating. They have eye lashes, and their eyes look very close to dog/human eyes and seem to have a spark of intelligence in them. In retrospect this is pretty obvious, but I still remember how amazed I was to see it up close.

One of the dolphins was a new mother - her newborn was confined to a small area in the corner of the pool. Every few minutes the mother would turn around to briefly glance if her newborn is ok.

They seem to really enjoy playing with people - they'd do tricks like swim up to you from the back and poke you in the butt to surprise you. Then they'd turn on their backs to let you rub their belly and after a while they'd rise above the water surface and touch your face with their nose. I asked the guide if they were taught to do this and she said one of the dolphins came up with the 'poking' trick and the other dolphins picked it up.

These are really fascinating creatures. I have no idea whether holding them in captivity should be considered unethical, but the idea of killing them for a commercial purpose (or even research) makes me feel extremely uneasy.

If you get the chance to swim with them, do take take the opportunity. It's worth the money many times over and will almost certainly change the way you think about these amazing creatures.
I strongly disagree with the developers article. He fails to explain the simplest solution (holding the finger). This is indeed the same as moving the mouse cursor on a touchpad, so wtf..

But what i really dislike is the notion of "it is not possible, never ever, it just won't work" without objective proof why something wouldn't work.. just stating that a problem is there and based on that "fact" he goes on and on.. How many websites would be unusable with a touchpad like interace? None.

It makes me sad that this guy obviously tries to make sense of steve jobs most stupid decission of the last years, because it is clear that Apple doesn't want flash/air on the iphone not because of the interface (clearly apple would be probably the best company to resolve this issue!) but because of the threat of mobile apps and games to the appstore. First it will be games, but if i can develop my apps for adobe air for all major operating systems and smartphones.. this is bigger than most people think.

I still hope that the apple community will eventually start to revolt when flash and air applications are available for all other platforms instead of just following apples stupid business decisions with such excuses.
There is nothing wrong with chit-chat :) Actually I do love chit-chat.

I didn't mean bad, what I meant they are conversational interviews, they are not focused on teaching you something. The very nature of these interviews is the reason that I wouldn't pay money for them.

I'd pay for MIT Startup Bootcamp videos because they are solely focus on something which directly potentially almost instantly will effect my business (if the topic is relevant). In these interview I'm lucky if I can pick up 2-3 things by pure luck.

So again I don't mean bad, I think they are really nice, but it's like renting a video from a video store. Not great for business but great to watch and have a good time.

However if I'm going to pay I expect the get some more actionable outcome from it.
Just videos = not worth $25 a month in my humble opinion - especially when the transcripts are not behind the pay wall.

But if he adds a forum - he can create a good membership site out of mixergy. And $25 per month for it is doable.

(I personally think its just an experiment to control high bandwidth costs...)
Thats what video compositing is for I am not a QTKit expert but just quick glance over the documentation they offer QTMovieLayer which allows you to have multiple layers of media which will be composited later ( i.e. one for video, one for the media controls, etc )
I don't agree that these interviews are just chit-chat and feel that I have learned a lot from these interviews. I have subscribed on these nice (free) interviews for 9 months now and listen to them many times a week. Paying the subscription fee is a great way to pay Andrew back for all the hard work he has put into these interviews.
Weekly round-up
When I found out about this I emailed Andrew. This is what i wrote:

I noticed recently that you've started charging for your older interviews. Good on you, I hope you do good business.

I have one idea you might want to consider: Sell short edited versions of the interviews. This is the opposite of what most online ebook and tutorial video sellers do. They show some short teasers for free, but ask you to pay for the "full program". In your case, the full program is the teaser - it's a treasure hunt to find the golden nuggets of business wisdom interspersed in 60 minutes of internet video chat. I bet you lose out on a lot of viewers simply because they don't have the time to sit through hour-long interviews. I think you could sell edited, 15-minute versions to those people. Cheapskates like me will continue to watch for free, but people with less time will pay for condensed honey drops of entrepreneurship gyaan. Actually, I might pay too as I get busier with my business.

Andrew replied saying he loves the idea and has has a vision along those lines; he just needs the time and resources for doing it. As he has stated in his own interviews before, he is trying to create an internet treasure which will have long lasting value. I'm sure he won't let us down.
The good thing is that the transcripts are still free. So I'll be reading more and hearing/watching less. Kinda like switching tv for a good novel, I'd think.
A thing that has helped me is, instead of starting to code or design, just starting a Word doc and putting all my ideas down. Sometimes you just need to get things out of your system, no matter if it's coding or writing. The advantage of writing a project outline is that it's easier to pick up later, since it's not a bunch of half-finished code. The second advantage is that it's easy to add on ideas spontaneously, since you just need to write them down instead of coding them. Third advantage is that if you ever have time to actually do a project, you have a clear outline and direction of what you need to do.

So try writing instead of coding.
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Vook, Maker of Multimedia E-Books, Raises $2.5 Million
Why talk about artificial limbs for athletes? There is a long list of banned substances, and there is no limit to the number of arguments you can find for and against the use of PEDs (Performance Enhancing Drugs) in sports.
What the article calls "ungovernable" is what the U.S. political founders called "checks and balances" - good or bad, the system has functioned as it has for a long time now and nothing has happened in recent times to call its viability into question.

As far back as the 1830s, de Tocqueville made a fascinating study of why a stable democracy had arisen in the wake of the American revolution of the 1770s while, in contrast, the French revolution of just a few years later had led to mass slaughter and the guillotine. In significant part, he found that the difference lay in the massing of power that in France had gone unchecked, leading the people to fall under the sway of their immediate, unchecked passions and causing disastrous results.

In politics, there are reasons to check unlimited power and the U.S. system of law and politics is fundamentally premised on this (that is why there are, among other things, three co-equal branches of government, a federal/state division of power, a bicameral legislature, and, ultimately, a constitution whose main function is to prevent the rise of an overweening central authority).

One can of course question this and advocate for a stronger central authority and for the abrogation of the various checks and balances (or even pure traditions, such as the filibuster) but it is a bit tendentious to say that a system has suddenly become "ungovernable" simply because you wish it did not stand in the way of your immediate agenda. It has, after all, been but a very few years since many of these same sources were touting the filibuster as the last, great bastion of liberty when it was being used by a then-minority party to block judicial appointments seen as unfavorable to their cause. One's arguments are always stronger if they are principled and not tied to the exigencies of the moment, as those advanced here appear to be.
I just signed up simply to support his work even though I watch all the interviews in the first week anyway. For me, the content is worth more than $25/month. I would also like to see a forum as added value.

I'm not sure that this is the best possible model, but if it's not then Andrew will figure it out once he has some data.
The original article wants to do exactly that, so it would profit from a better-designed "git push".

Also, Git was never designed for minimalism, but rather for feature-completeness. In contrast, Mercurial was designed with a minimalistic approach (as least in the beginning), so I find it especially strange that Mercurial provides a proper "push" but Git doesn't.
I believe that you will need to make a quantum leap in usability. As pedalpete mentioned, very few people have the skills to process meaningful datasets, even those working in industries where we might expect such skills to be commonplace. The people who do have the mathematical knowledge know how to use the existing software tools.

If this were my idea, I would be looking at smaller niches where I could offer a boneheadedly simple way of doing tasks that are commonplace in a particular industry. I'd focus on accepting the dirtiest, nastiest inputs - excel spreadsheets, tables copied from word documents, tabulated lists - and giving the user a big set of simple preset operations, organised by industry and job role. I'd look further down the food chain to people who might deal with data as part of their job, but have no mathematical background whatsoever.

This might be an odd analogy, but I'm reminded of software synthesisers. Nowadays it's relatively rare that musicians have the technical understanding of synthesis to create their own sounds, even with the most basic tools. Those that do understand synthesis have usually invested a lot of time in learning the interfaces of particular synthesisers and are loathe to discard that investment. Developers are focussing on the unskilled mass market with products that make it easy to access, tweak and combine a big library of preset sounds.
Luckily, with the exception of some Swiss cantons that put issues to a plebiscite once in a while, democracy usually is governance as usual with the chance for the public to intervene once in a while when things get really out of hand.
I was mildly surprised to learn that US banks don't participate in IBAN either.
I am tempted to start contacting some of his old interviewees and ask them what they think about it. I'll ask them to contact him if they are pissed by the fact that they were tricked into giving their free time. Many of them precisely said in those interviews that they were only doing it to give back to the community.
This is too good an idea to allow to be legal, along with a few other things which would take cracks at the guilds.

(e.g. We have people with masters degrees who are, at this very moment, using scissors on construction paper to prepare for class. This is the tip of an iceberg of waste which would be alleviated... if we were willing to reduce non-trivial proportions of those very politically influential workers to the wages appropriate for someone who cuts construction paper with scissors.)
That, and he completely ignored coriolis forces, which apparently explain the divergence nicely.
Get to know about Random Essay Topics
he meaning of random essay topics is in the word itself. To be put into a crux, the word random means any. Here, it means the topics can be from any subject. There are no specifications that the topic should be from a particular subject or should be of a particular genre.
Wrong. Ruby code blocks can be Methods, Procs or Lambdas. Methods are the hard-coded blocks of code on a Class or a Module (or in the global space, which actually is in the Kernel module). A "block" is simply a contained/scoped bit of code.

Procs and Lambdas exist because they exhibit different scoping rules. If you want local scoping only, use a lamdba. If you want access to information outside the block, use a proc.

Of course, your rant sure sounds like you didn't actually read Katz's blog post, or you wouldn't be using terms like "callable types." The post explains exactly WHY Ruby doesn't have an equivalent __call__ structure...
I never understood why is it such an outrage to healthcare practicioners to ask fo any sort of "non-essential" electronic device to be implanted. Why is it that plastic surgery is widely accepted, but when a guy want's a magnet put into his fingertip he looked at like he was some kind of freak.
That a weird name, "vook". They are welcome to make me an offer on videobooks.com though :)
It isn't that hard to imagine. GOP presidential front runner launched "universal" health care in Massachusetts. The GOP likely would have come on board for solutions that gave money to state programs. At the national level there could have been consensus on coverage for pre-existing conditions, kicking patients out, etc. They probably would have gone even further if they got thrown a bone on malpractice cases. In the end the idea of creating a massive federal program in a time of financial uncertainty didn't sit well with a majority of Americans or a useful majority of senators.
As much as Jason Calacanis can be annoying, This Week in Startups is always a great show and he seems to have found a great monetization strategy for it - corporate sponsors of service providers to startup people.

I probably won't be paying for Mixergy on a monthly basis, but if he were to get a couple companies to sponsor the show for a couple hundred dollars an episode i would gladly sit through the intermittent plugs he would give throughout the broadcast.
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My personal tip: When working really well and high, stop, just take a break, spare your time, don't get tired, so you can easily pickup your work later and continue.
@bravura - it's about the distinction between how we represent our description of the data and how we represent the data itself.
While I agree with you, I can also see where the accusations come from. The system works fine for day to day politics, but it breaks down horribly when decisive action needs to be taken. It's up to debate, of course, but if you think health care in the US is a mess that needs to be cleared up decisively, all those checks and balances are making it extraordinarily difficult to achieve that.

It would be a lot easier to achieve in less balanced democratic systems such as the ones that exist in mainland Europe, where once a government is elected it can pretty much do what it wants to do without having to worry about partisan issues at least until the next elections come around.

Such a system can and does, of course, lead to legislation being enacted that most people don't actually want, but at least it's, usually, clear and workable, unlike the outcomes of the American political process which often (to me, as an outsider, at least) seem hopelessly convoluted and kludgy, which is a result of their having passed through a lengthy process of deliberation among wildly incompatible political interests.
Predominately, you're missing the same thing I missed at first, which is that SO MUCH of Flash works on mouseover -- but how do you have a mouseover event on a touch-only interface?
For example, usinging XHR model:

file = new File.Reader()
file.onReady = printfile
file.onError = showerror
file.onProgress = showprogress
file.read('myfile.txt')

Not restricted to callback and errback only, more events may be available according to the process being executed, keeping JS as natural as possible.

Hacks can be added on top to handle parallel or chainable process.

One last thing, make the process asynchronous by default and set a property to false to make it synchronous, no need to force a last parameter to a function.

file.async = false
file.read('myfile.txt')
I think something like this is inevitable in our country, no matter how much primary care doctors dread it. We simply will not have enough of them to care for everybody in even the very limited way they do now. We are all used to the hour long waits and 10 minute sessions with our swamped primary care doctors. That will only get worse when tens of millions of previously uninsured people enter the system. The amount of doctors produced by our medical schools has remained nearly constant for more than a decade, and new openings add only about 100 doctors per year (about 1 school per year). We need to either pay primary care doctors more money to draw doctors in from the specialties, add a lot more medical schools, or somehow use technology to make health care much more efficient. Since the first two have been available options for years without being implemented, I think we will fall back on the last one.
There is a lot to be said for skating to where the puck will be, rather than where it is right now. For example, at one point in time most games were published on 3.5 inch magnetic floppy disks. The publishing media changed over time and that is no longer the case.