skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the only reasonable solution is to stimulate regional economies by limiting trade with cheaper outside areas. The only people that really benefit from importing everything from cheap countries are the people with money in the first place. The working class gets put out of work and the middle class become the new serfs.
Papervision
We spend a lot of money subsidizing expensive housing in coastal cities? How do I get in on these subsidies?
While I happen to agree with you, I think that andrewf was pointing out that while modafinil is known not to be an acute toxin, that says little as to whether it is a chronic toxin, since its mechanism is poorly understood and may have undesirable long-term side effects.

A good example might be fructose, which you'd have to try very hard indeed to overdose on, but seems to be a long-term chronic toxin with many unpleasant effects, the high LD50 and the advisability of taking it at all being quite unrelated, indeed opposing.
IMHO one of the greatest, and most misguided straw men we have as a society is the boogeyman that is the lazy, stupid citizen. I've recently started working with the homeless, and had the opportunity to live in an industrial, working-class slum in Canada... what I see in those places is not maliciousness, nor laziness.

Have I met the lazy, good-for-nothing freeloaders living in a shack in the slums? Sure - but that guy is really not as common as people seem to think. It's a critical mistake that betrays the arrogance of the monied in this country to assume that these people are anything but a minority in homeless and poor population.

It's so easy to try and take full credit for your success, and try to push all blame for failure to the individual. It's far too easy to judge people you have never met using assumptions you have never truly tested. For everyone railing against the poor, I'd highly recommend volunteering some time with your local non-profit that handles these issues. Meet these people, put a face and name to your wild accusations, and you will find it much harder to scream about lazy, freeloading Americans - because they're actually kind of hard to find.

Instead of being monied and ignorant, be monied and informed.
"This marked an beginning of an entirely
new strategy and the dawn of the multi-core era [81]." (page 13) error in grammar
Don't miss the reply from Devil Mountain Software in the comments:

http://talkback.zdnet.com/5208-10532-0.html?forumID=1&th...
filter and map can be done with list comprehensions, and they usually come out clearer.
If we give money to people with a track record of bad judgment about issues like whether they should save enough money to be able to move apartments, whether they will be able to find a new job soon or not, and how to live cheaply while unemployed, what do you think is going to happen to that money? It will make them into wiser people?
His argumentation is weak. He says it [is] of outmost importance that the platform that grows to be the dominant one for native applications is an open one

And why do he think this so important? Is it because On the Internet it's (somewhat) safe to say that the philosophy of open is winning or is it the rhetorical question do we want this to be an open world or a closed one controlled by one company.

He never considers that a completely open platform will be very open to trojans and other malware. There are so many (Windows) users that happily download trojans from web sites, that it is no fun at all. A fully open platform might not be the best for phones to most users. The optimal system might be only be semi-open, where all apps are sandboxed and vetted by some party.

Just like cars: the government make restrictions on the cars (e.g. requires seat belts, ability to brake, strength when crashing) and can take cars off the street if the government deems them unsuitable. The government has solid institutions for this: Department of Transportation, NHTSA, etc.

Apple's vetting is far from perfect, but some kind of vetting is probably required to avoid ending in the situation we would have if cars were not vetted at all.

So, if we find Apple's vetting bad, then let's discuss how the vetting process can be improved instead of throwing the baby out with the bath water.

(please fix the headline).
I'm not sure I'm following the tortured logic here. Are you saying people will "like sex less and less as time goes on" because they're less likely to have an unintentional pregnancy? That makes no sense at all!

It seems to me that the article linked to in the post makes a fairly compelling economic case that sexual promiscuity will continue to increase in the future. IMHO, that's a good thing. :-)
I really think it's just stigma. The joke goes:

Knock knock!

Who's there?

...

...

Java!

Of course today the performance of Java is fine, even comparable to C/C++ in some cases. Java2D is accelerated, the JDK comes with OpenGL/OpenAL, and there are all sorts of other libs like LWJGL and Slick. It might even be up there with XNA for desktop game development now, but I haven't done anything in-depth.
Agreed. As far as I know my password has been "stolen" once in my life -- and that was due to a compromised shell at my ISP. And that's the kicker: _as far as I know_. All the other times (should there be any) I just wouldn't know because I didn't care.

And now that I read back my comment, it kind of looks as if I was just trying to take a cheap stab at your comment. It wasn't the case. I genuinely spent a moment to think about whether there would be a viable solution to the problem at this level. :) Now, getting rid of passwords altogether...

(I dislike people who say you can't solve this -- and here I go doing it myself!)
In other words, you've met countless people who could easily live on $1595 per month? Cool. I have no doubt they exist. And that they could have handled the situation from the article better. Why can't welfare policy focus on helping those people? Competent slum people are more effective to help, and much more sympathetic, than incompetent people getting a monthly check for more than full time minimum wage work.
Just a few years ago, weren't we all up in arms about Microsoft's misrepresentation of the virality of the GPL and their attempts to frighten people away from using GPL'ed software? Looks like GPL zealots are doing their job for them now.

At the time, various FOSS luminaries (including rms) signed this -

http://perens.com/Articles/StandTogether.html

Quote:

If you do choose to incorporate GPL code into a program, you will be required to make the entire program Free Software. This is a fair exchange of our code for yours, and one that will continue as you reap the benefit of improvements contributed by the community. However, the legal requirements of the GPL apply only to programs which incorporate some of the GPL-covered code - not to other programs on the same system, and not to the data files that the programs operate upon.

That doesn't sound like 'A GPL'ed program loads your template, making the templated GPL'ed' at all.
Presumably, he's annoyed that he distributed a piece of software under the terms of the GPL, and others extended it and sold those extensions under proprietary terms. If this was ffmpeg, we wouldn't even have to wonder about it.
This is something that has bothered me a lot in the past. Other engineers build bridges and towers and monuments that stand for years and years. The beautiful code written by a good programmer might be replaced 8 months later by a junior who doesn't understand it.

I suppose in our profession we are able to perpetuate ourselves by communicating our ideas into the world. Our influence is felt in posterity through the inspiration of thought in our successors. The kernel may evolve over time, but its evolution may be guided by the initial conditions of its initial code base (and subsequent changes).

A civil engineer may be directly remembered by the the bridge that bears his or her name; a software engineer may be indirectly remembered by the smart code he or she has written.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_8_(housing)

EDIT: Since I'm getting downmodded, maybe I wasn't clear. We spend a lot of money subsidizing housing for people with low incomes in coastal cities. It would cost less money to provide similar housing in other cities, and since some of those cities have better job markets, they might not need those subsidies at all. Since they currently get subsidies, there is little incentive to move. Subsidizing moving to areas with better economies as well as subsidizing housing would be a better approach.
I think it says more about the legal system in general than the GPL specifically. :-(
I originally just posted the text and asked for a translation. But, even though I said "no machine translations" I still would get tons.

This ad has been the most effective for me:

Translate a bit of English text into another language.

Please email me at andrew@gaiagps.com to tell me what language you want to translate to, and I will email you the text to translate. The potential languages are Spanish, Portuguese, German, Dutch, Swedish, Italian, French, Russian, Japanese, and Korean. No other languages are needed.

Do not use an automatic translator. I have checked all of them. You shouldn't email me unless you are a native speaker. If you do not have Chinese relatives or a degree in Chinese from a university, then you cannot do the Chinese translation. The same goes for all the other languages.

I have gotten hundreds of responses, mostly from Indians who claim to do the translation, but they use an online translator. If you are one of these, don't bother - you are just wasting your time. If you are a special guy in India who knows Russian or some other language, then send me a really convincing email, or I'm just going to delete it with all the spam.
I don't know if it counts exactly as a subsidy, but in some big cities, growth is artificially constrained by "Urban Growth Boundaries". These ordinances reduce the amount of available land for building, and hence inflate real estate prices above what they "should" be by artificially reducing supply. Check out Portland for an example of this. Note that I'm not necessarily arguing against UGB's - I don't think anyone has developed an alternative besides endless suburban sprawl, or naturally restricted land area, as in San Francisco or Manhattan.
again, i am shocked at what passes for historical fact.

It was only after the war that the American public learned about Japan's efforts to bring the conflict to an end. Chicago Tribune reporter Walter Trohan, for example, was obliged by wartime censorship to withhold for seven months one of the most important stories of the war.

In an article that finally appeared August 19, 1945, on the front pages of the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Times-Herald, Trohan revealed that on January 20, 1945, two days prior to his departure for the Yalta meeting with Stalin and Churchill, President Roosevelt received a 40-page memorandum from General Douglas MacArthur outlining five separate surrender overtures from high-level Japanese officials. (The complete text of Trohan's article is in the Winter 1985-86 Journal, pp. 508-512.)

This memo showed that the Japanese were offering surrender terms virtually identical to the ones ultimately accepted by the Americans at the formal surrender ceremony on September 2 -- that is, complete surrender of everything but the person of the Emperor. Specifically, the terms of these peace overtures included:

* Complete surrender of all Japanese forces and arms, at home, on island possessions, and in occupied countries.
* Occupation of Japan and its possessions by Allied troops under American direction.
* Japanese relinquishment of all territory seized during the war, as well as Manchuria, Korea and Taiwan.
* Regulation of Japanese industry to halt production of any weapons and other tools of war.
* Release of all prisoners of war and internees.
* Surrender of designated war criminals.

Is this memorandum authentic? It was supposedly leaked to Trohan by Admiral William D. Leahy, presidential Chief of Staff. (See: M. Rothbard in A. Goddard, ed., Harry Elmer Barnes: Learned Crusader [1968], pp. 327f.) Historian Harry Elmer Barnes has related (in "Hiroshima: Assault on a Beaten Foe," National Review, May 10, 1958):

The authenticity of the Trohan article was never challenged by the White House or the State Department, and for very good reason. After General MacArthur returned from Korea in 1951, his neighbor in the Waldorf Towers, former President Herbert Hoover, took the Trohan article to General MacArthur and the latter confirmed its accuracy in every detail and without qualification.*

and even if you choose to disregard that as conspiracy, you still have wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombings...
The Birth of Cheap Communication (and Junk Mail)
I think there's a very similar dynamic at work in politics, where people self-identify as a particular party or supporter of a particular ideology, an then take any criticism, however mild" of that party or ideology as a personal attack upon their very identity.
It is based on the time period, at least in the state that a friend has worked in. So if the time period is 2 weeks, then if you pay once a month, that will be a 2-week period where they were employed, and a 2-week period they were not. For individuals it is run on a cash basis, that is, if you cut them checks every 3 months, they would only lose benefits for 1 period each 3 month interval.
Conversely, the NYT's blogs are going to end up being "reader-walled" and "traffic-walled" too.
My wife worked in a school that was in a Slum in the US. All the kids parents were on welfare. The amount of graft we saw was unbelievable. One kid came to school in a taxi every morning because the mother would go out partying at night and not wake up in time to bring him to school. Another was in pain because his pants were so old and tight. He walked around with his pants undone, but his mom had the money for fancy manicures. Notices to parents went unread. She would hold parent teacher conferences days and nights so everyone would have a chance to come no matter their schedule, but in a class of 30 1 or 2 would show. Her stories in the staff room were not unique.

What is the alternative to this kind of behavior? We can't judge or criticize? I don't mean for sport or in spite, but how else can we evolve the laws?
Some programmers are like that and they are horribly annoying to work with. Zealots always are, regardless of the environment you're working in. You can't have a civilized discussion with them so don't even try.
No, this happened several months after the case:

http://clisp.cvs.sourceforge.net/*checkout*/clisp/clisp/doc/...

http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=1086785624507896...
Nobel for the internet
A PC in Every Power Cabinet - aaahhhh......No.
I live in the general vicinity of Nagoya. Tokushima is approximately 3.5 hours from Nagoya by the fastest available public transportation, on another island.
Music has the power to shape a child's mind
What in the world does that have to do with what I wrote? People can still play music themselves. There's absolutely nothing stopping them.
I'd say this is more continuations in practical applications than purely complicated.
To produce a song you need: a band. A recording engineer. (and possibly a song-writer). That will let you produce something on the scale of "Thriller" or :Like a Rolling Stone" or "Hey Jude".

To produce a game the scale of Halo you need significantly more people. Hundreds.

To produce a game like chess - you need 1 person with a good idea. Lets be honest - the difficult part of creating any boardgame is in the idea. A song (or a video game) has an awful lot to do with the implementation.

To promote each artform, you need similar skills - so I'm ignoring that process.
prevents -> presents?

(Normally I try not to nitpick, but in this case it might completely flip the meaning of what you're saying.)
Because those people, and those other people, are really not that widely separated. I currently work at two places that deal with the homeless - one focuses on work placement, the other focuses on immediate relief, and what I see is that the population between those two groups are really separated by sheer luck, and the amount of support they have been able to receive from non-profits, family, and community. The people who have been able to bootstrap themselves out of homelessness and into gainful employment all have done so with a gigantic effort from countless concerned citizens, many of whom (including myself) work entirely for free. The notion of a homeless person who through sheer determination and savvy pulls themselves up, without the understanding support of those around them, is a complete fabrication.

I find your argument as thus: I see some people who have been able to exit poverty and homelessness (conveniently ignoring the fact that the support programs that enable this are far less vindictive and judgmental than you seem to be), therefore anyone who can't is just unworthy of help. I have, in my brief time working with this issue, met many people far better than myself, who dedicate a ludicrous portion of their lives to enabling and improving lives... and none of them subscribe to the idea of the lazy, good-for-nothing poor.

If I may be so bold - our homeless/poor support systems, as overtaxed as they are, succeed in spite of attitudes like yours, not because.
So is "database toolkit" the trendy way to say "object-relational mapper" these days?

I guess what I'm getting at is why should I as a random HN reader care about Sequel as opposed to other ORMs like Hibernate, nHibernate, SQLAlchemy, Storm, Subsonic, or any other ORM in any language? What makes it neat?
I disagree. Although my blog is currently down (software issues that I have put off fixing for wayyy too long), I am going to continue to write about programming. Something that really annoys me is how many programmers don't know how to program. Sitting around on social news sites telling everyone how dumb they are doesn't fix the problem, but teaching people how to program does.

I try to do that through writing, and I'd like to think that I've been moderately successful. I sold a few copies of my programming-related book, and many people have met me at conferences and have told me how my blog helped them in some way. It's helped people get over the fears of learning Emacs Lisp, it's helped people start using object databases, it's helped people realize that library code is just like the code they write, and that they can just start contributing! These are all things that make me happy, and knowing that I am helping push other people in this direction makes me even happier. All this by just being instructional and mostly "unbiased"; not every piece of writing that influences someone has to be filled with argumentative rhetoric. (I found out early on that "my $foo is better because $bar" just makes people mad. So I try to write "here's how $foo works" and let people make their own decision. This results in a lot less hate, although I admit that I can't resist writing a good piece of flamebait now and again. It makes me feel good if only one person agrees, and it makes me feel good when someone who I've never met thinks its worth his time to tell me to "die in a fire". Who says I'm not mentally ill?)

Anyway, I think writing about programming is highly worthwhile -- both for the author, and the wider "programming community". I'm not going to stop, and I'm not going to miss Joel.
My logic is flawed? It seems to me that your definition of productive participation is flawed since a job by definition is productive contribution. Next time you claim somebody's logic is flawed you better check the axioms, i.e. how your terms are defined.
F_J_H, I would love to feel sorry for these people, but there is little to be sorry for. The worst scenario presented in this article is the Eisens with their $19,000/yr disability income. That is a large sum to live off of. I have no pity. As far as I care, they are living pretty damn good although very irresponsibly.

The next have prospects of $15/hour and the other was making $2500/month in child support and unemployment. That's pretty damn good!

The new poor are whiners, making plenty of money, but not enough for what they're used to. It's like my father who repeatedly tells me he wants to continue living the lifestyle he is accustomed to without paying it forward. Will I pay his dues? Sure will, but I don't really care for the Eisens. I don't care to supplement their income above minimum wage. Why does an honest worker get paid $7.25/hr and someone who does nothing makes more?
Farm Land on Facebook
It is only "certain that it does" if all libraries or users of libraries are derivative works, but they're not. The law review article I linked lays out the case law for this, and the precedents are that merely using a library does not create a derivative work of that library. Cases that specifically said that including interface code from a GPL'd library is not a derivative work unless the interface is sufficiently complex -- which "the_title", "the_content" etc. that WordPress exposes is not.
Automating the entire manufacturing industry will require workers to shift to something that isn't manufacturing.

That is very related to the point I was trying to make and why I used nails instead of clothes. Nail making had been important for a long time and required lots of people. Automation led to 10,000% or more increase in the number of nails per person. A handful of today's nailmakers can manufacture more nails then all the world's nailmakers a few centuries ago. It was effectively automating the entire industry.

The other way is vastly more difficult

Maybe. I'm not sure. I do think it's a fallacy however to think, as politicians seem to, of "number of unskilled workers" as some sort of constant that we can prod & shift slightly but essentially more of less the same.
It's worth noting that Spolsky writes about programmers, not programming. Everything he says is opinion, and as a result, it tends to spawn a lot of critical comments. ("Your employer hates you if you don't have an Aeron chair." Maybe, maybe not.)

Writing about programming -- techniques, thought processes, libraries, and code -- is highly valuable, at least in my opinion.
He is not king obama.

I wish he was, actually. Every four years, vote in a new king, with near-unlimited power to do practically anything they want, excepting the extension of their own power. Then he might actually get something done.
Building Clojure Projects with Leiningen
This fund, and Graham's Y-Combinator, both follow the advice that Nassim Taleb gives for investing in an "extremistan" world of fat tails - many small investments, instead of a few larger ones. He argues that the profit from the few very successful investments will swamp the losses from the unsuccessful ones.

See http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2007/04/taleb_on_black.html
Smoking fast Haskell code using GHC's new LLVM codegen
It doesn't matter what the GPL says if you're not bound by the GPL. You only become bound by the GPL by contract or, through the power of copyright, by creating a derivative work. If the law says you haven't created a derivative work, then nothing the GPL says matters to you, it has no power.
He didn't say it's not worthwhile, on the contrary, Marco laments the loss to programmers and tech writing. What he said is that for him it's not worth the risk of putting himself out there:

Some people claim that they don’t care and that they can ignore it. I don’t know if Joel can. I can’t, which is one of the reasons why I rarely write about programming: it’s just not worth the risk of putting myself out there on that subject because the risk of strongly negative feedback is higher than with most other content that I can produce. It’s much easier to share my breakfast than my easily argued, easily disproven, intellectually vulnerable thoughts on programming.
That would be the opposite of subsidies.