skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I found your quote, said book is on Google Books:

http://books.google.com.uy/books?id=9nH0kSUMwGIC&lpg=PA3...

However, in the same paragraph it cites Gary Kleck on the use of guns, and it says that potential victims should be encouraged to fight back, and that resistance with a gun is significantly better than the other forms of resistance (and a conclusion that it is better to fight than to flee).

It's a surprising conclusion for me (I'm mostly anti-guns, though I'd prefer some other option like, say, tasers, to be available for self-defense)
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Temperature & RTD Sensor | Thermocouple & Thermowell
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VCs Push StartUp Visa Act
generally , peoples who fight to get everything done in life are more successfull than the rest, they learn really early, that life's hard, and you have to fight for everything, so meeting difficulties is just an everyday business, at the other side, peoples who always have access to everything will struggle when the first problems show up, and they just tend to give up.
When is a 9 inch pizza tha same size as a 12 inch?
That's great. I can imagine the language must take time to get used to. Good luck with TweetingMachine, I just signed up for the free version. Looking forward to being asked to upgrade :-P
This is why I'm an embedded engineer. I don't want to muddle through all of the 'bajillion' different frameworks, languages, etc. Need a window manager? Wrote one. Need a function not implemented in our custom graphics driver? Implemented it. Want to toy around with speeding up software bitblt? Go for it, and good luck.

Though that doesn't mean we don't use third party libraries, I just think we have far more flexibility in not using them.
Your "new version"-concern is addressed in the third paragraph: Assev said the swell of downloads was above and beyond the increase caused by the final release of Opera 10.5 for Windows yesterday. "We compared the downloads against previous launches, such as Opera 10.0, 10.10 and 9.5, and the tripling is above what we would normally expect with a new version launch," he said.
What Happens to your Twitter when you Die?
Groupon responds to class action lawsuit with own class action effort
No phone, no net: why rural children are leaving
I appreciate #30-34, on file names, which opens up with

30. If you have three pet dogs, give them names. If you have 10,000 head of cattle, don't bother.

The count of "eight possibilities" on #34 puzzles me a bit.

I also sympathize with the (time) streams idea further down. Archeological strata are a very efficient concept for storage, and not the worst possible one for retrieval ...
Is online security hindered by computer jargon?
That's why when I order a pizza I ask them to cut it into only 4 slices. I can't eat 6.
Sorry, I should have clarified that. I almost mentioned trademark law to compare and contrast. No, you don't lose the patent by not enforcing it. But you can lose the value of the patent both at the negotiating table and in the courts if there's a belief you won't enforce it or a belief you suspect it's unenforceable (e.g., if you seem to worry by using it aggressively, you could have it challenged, and lose it).

First, as alluded to in the article, note the word "need":

> "Perhaps it’s a by-product of the suit Apple is engaged in against (and initiated by) Nokia. Apple’s counter-suit against Nokia involves some of the same patents at play here, and perhaps Apple’s lawyers have concluded that they need to enforce them against someone like HTC in order to use them in their counter-suit against Nokia."

Second, to quote a non-neutral party, note the phrase "lax attitude":

> "But neglecting stick licensing has two problems. First, it results in a loss of potential royalty and damages revenues from infringed patents. Second, it undermines carrot licensing of both infringed and noninfringed patents. If an industry perceives a lax attitude on the part of a university in enforcing its patents, it will think it can infringe with impunity. Under these circumstances, taking a license would be tantamount to making a charitable gift, which few in this economic climate are inclined to do." -- Alexander Poltorak of General Patent Corporation in http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Thars+gold+in+Tham+thar+patent...
Aside from the point of taxes being predictable expenditure, socialised healthcare schemes actually save the people most at risk of becoming bankrupt money: they're funded by taxation, and taxes are generally progressive. This means that the poor will end up spending substantially less on their healthcare.

This holds for a lot of other expenditures: roads, for example. If the super-poor had to pay an equal share of road upkeep, they wouldn't be able to drive. In general, taxes save the poor money.

I suppose one might argue that the poor could just do without healthcare and save even more cash, but that has too much of a whiff of 'let them eat cake' about it for me.
P( fight | takes wallet ) = 50%.

P( no injury | fight ) = 95%.

P( injury | hand over wallet ) = P(injury | fight) P(fight | hand over wallet) = 0.05 x 0.5 = 0.025

So P(no injury | hand over wallet) = 97.5%.
Muslim Group Moves to Ban Burka
pg recently said that one of the biggest changes in his thinking since starting yc is that he no longer believes that coming from a good school is an indicator of success in a startup and that this was an unquestioned assumption of his when he started out. at the same time, it helps to have smart people around and quora definitely seems to have a few.
A watched progress bar never reaches 100%.
I might be mistaken but I think davidw was referring to earlier attempts to delete the article on Wikipedia, not Hacker News.
I don't know the full story from a direct source, but I heard that thieves saw him withdrawing money from the bank, and they were waiting for him in his hotel room when he arrived. And they killed him in the process of taking the money. Who knows what happened in there? Maybe he fought, maybe not.
Kleck's advice is for rape victims, not robbery victims.

The first citations I can find in google scholar indicate that the odds of being killed during/after rape is roughly two orders of magnitude higher than the odds of being killed during/after a "cooperative" robbery, thus the differing calculus.
> Disarming a knife holder is NOT easy.

It is. I have been trained in unarmed combat and it is relatively easy with a little training. I personally would be confident of disarming, with minimal or no injury, someone unfamiliar in handling a knife.

The first thing to remember is that if you take and maintain control of their wrist it is very hard for them to attack you - and harder to actually do serious damage. Usually they then focus on trying to regain control of the knife - at which point you either reach over with a spare hand and pressure point them into releasing the knife or you hit the solar plexus or whatever is within easy reach - really hard.
EDIT: personally I would drive the heel of your hand into their jaw. It's an easy hit, hard to dodge (as you have their wrist) and big impact.

> There is a lot of bullshit in martial arts claims. Being able to dodge bullets, is obviously one of them.

Agreed. I think the Hunter story is probably a parable - but Morehei Ueshiba did dodge bullets according to historical accounts [1]. Note that dodging bullets here means he read their body signals and moved out of the path he knew the bullets were going to travel. Still good timing though. Body signal reading is one of the basics of Aikido.

> But if you become so cocky you decide to drop your hands and rely on your reflexes, you will be caught by even the worst fighters.

Ah... boxing. No disrespect intended here but boxers do get so cocky :D And your right that's where it fails.

Martial arts is about discipline. It also trains you not to use reflexes. ever That will get you killed.

This comes back to where I mentioned above that waiting to be attacked is the worst move: because you do then have to rely on reflexes to respond. If your attacking your always ahead of your opponent (unless they are also skilled)

My personal survival training highlighted one thing: the mantra in a situation where your going to have to fight is - Be first, Be sudden, Be brutal.

1.http://martialarts.jameshom.com/library/weekly/aa043000.htm
The thing that has always amazed/disgusted me is how our education system trains people to be passive consumers, and to leave school "looking for a job", as if jobs somehow grew on trees and would eventually fall when ripe.

Until people learn from the cradle that they're not owed a job by anyone, but have to create value of some sort, either for someone else, or for themselves, we'll have this same sad situation.

Someone "stuck at home" is in the perfect situation to start creating value that other people are willing to pay for: mowing lawns, baking bread, making furniture/simple machines in their home workshop, using whatever raw materials and machinery their forebears have amassed and are freely available, but, most of all, using their brains and their willpower.
My bad. The pdf was linked to from a different article. I've upvoted your post with the original article.
Just-as-good Medicine
Actually, I thought the cattle analogy missed the point - surely the reason we don't give names to each of our 10,000 cattle is that we don't care which one is which? I don't find that to be true of data. Also, file names are often used to describe the data to which they relate; in that sense, we actually do give names to each of our 10,000 cattle - we call them 'cows' - it just happens that we use the same name for each individual because they are identical at the abstraction level we care about.

Or maybe it's me who missed the point? :-)
Not good advice. It will get you killed in many places. Throw the wallet and back out slowly.

EDIT: but a good anecdote :) he sounds like a fun person to know.
OCRopus preparing for next release; falls short of beta
This is going to stay popular for a while...

"I have a high IQ" click
You're falling in the same trap all other tweet scheduling services are falling into: I have to explicitly state when I want each tweet to be sent. Here's my dream tweet app (running from the command line):

username:~ machine$ schedule_tweets textfile_with_tweets_one_per_line X

X is the time interval at which I want the tweets to run.

Basically what I want is a service where I can add tweets to a queue, set it to 'post one tweet per hour' and let it run ...
Free Download Games-Hidden Identity: Chicago Blackout
Although you're being funny - I have to say that when I see things like this programming language that are so outside the box for me, it really does feel like there is some drug induced transcendence going on. I love this stuff, it makes me think - what if we used color as meta information in C what would that look like? The program flow is 2d now instead of just down the screen, what about adding dimensions or layers like in Photoshop. So yeah, for me, mind blown, point taken.
It used to be really easy to junk a Debian system by installing random apps to try them and then uninstalling them. Even with more modern Debian-based systems like Ubuntu, installing and then uninstalling something (say, kubuntu-desktop, to pick an example that happened to me recently) does not leave your system in the same state it was before you started. Instead, you get (to a GUI user) bizarre random configuration changes, and programs that worked may now not work (or vice versa!).

Basically, as someone who switched back to Linux from Mac recently, Synaptic and the Software Center (and why there are two tools that show different-but-overlapping package sets is another WTF) are full of surprises and why-did-THAT-change?! moments.
I disagree that this is a bad idea. I think it's a good idea that hasn't been done well and it remains to be seen whether quora is up to the challenge. (btw, if anyone has an invite, i'd love to check out the site: padlane@gmail.com).
I didn't think it was crazy. Although for complex applications Piet needs bigger and bigger images... but then most things start that way.
In Favor of Software Patents
You would think so, but in fact the unemployment "insurance" agencies of some (many?) states are overtly hostile to using your time to build a startup rather than unsuccessfully seeking a position as an employee.

In Connecticut, for example, the statutes say revenue from self-employment should offset unemployment benefits, but the state agency has chosen the highly creative interpretation of "revenue" to include potential capital gains your efforts represent, and the notional amount of salary you should be paying yourself for the work you do for your startup, including, say, writing a business plan.

It does seem like they are shooting themselves in the foot, but the unemployment "insurance" fund in CT is already living on debt.
Macsyma: A Personal History
Pivot3 Raises $25 Million
Yes - "above and beyond" but still affected by the new release which means that the ballot didn't cause downloads to triple - to increase, but not to the extent that the headline makes it seem. They don't even try to explain what kind of increase above what they would expect they are getting. maybe its double what they expected, maybe its 5%. The fact that they don't really go into it makes me a bit suspicious.
Thanks for posting the story.

Based on that, if people were waiting in his hotel room to rob him, it sounds like he didn't have a choice but to fight back.
I agreed with this, but then I thought of the scene in Indiana Jones with the sword expert...

Seriously though, while I think the metaphor is a little weak, the article makes some good points.
I actually noticed signs (at IND) a few days ago saying that the scanners were optional. If you chose not to be scanned, you would get a pat-down instead.
When you have a Ph.D. in Astrophysics who spends his time writing loads of web comics, I'm pretty sure you can write as many fantastical programming languages as you like without having to have smoked anything :)

My favourite is "ZOMBIE - a language designed for evil necromancers."
marshallp has a point. There is a limit to the demand for food; after a while, you are full. There is no hard limit to the demand for technology, because the value that technology adds is the ingenious solving of problems, and it seems that everyone always has problems.
good point :) However it makes a slight assumption that you still have 95% chance of winning if you hand over the wallet and are then attacked.

This is probably not the case as the attacker gains a reasonable advantage by being first (maybe only 2 or 3% in this case)

I also assumed the 50% was referring to the percentage chance of being actually harmed rather than having to fight. In which case your stats do break down.
It's true that currently, some intelligent people can fail to develop a work ethic because they've found things easy.

However, this is not an inherent problem of intelligence; this is an inherent problem with one-size-fits-all schooling.

They found things easy because the difficulty level of their challenges were well below them, but that's hypothetically easy to fix; you make their challenges a little above their current level. Practically, though, it's more of problem.
Tell HN: I wrote a Ruby lib to access Hacker News.
Not sure how unique this is (there are probably dozens of these), but it was fun for learning to deal with submitting forms and handling session cookies.

Feedback welcome.

Edit: I should say, the reason I wrote this -- I wanted to track my upward progression of karma (and hopefully, average karma) over time. I have a script that runs daily and stores those two values in a CSV file.
Using an e-mail address as your identifier kind of defeats the purpose.

Google's webfinger takes this approach, using TXT records to map your email address to an XRD document. But this adds a lot more complexity and means doing an extra HTTP request - so now it's much slower than a single DNS query and there's probably a SPoF.

Simplicity wins.
IPhone or Android for new game development?
So here's my dilemma: I have a great idea for a new mobile game that could go on either platform. I don't think it'll be easy to share code between the platforms despite both using OpenGL ES. I personally have access to a Droid and Droid Eris, and would have to purchase an iPod Touch to playtest. It seems like the audience for iPhone would be larger, but I'm more partial to Android. Any ideas on which I should choose?
Like I said, you can train all you want and have the best training in the world. It still doesn't make it a smart decision to try and engage a robber with a knife.

My boxing point was: you pay for your mistakes. The penalty for your mistakes in boxing is a punch. In a knife fight, the penalty is severely amplified. And thats a risk you could totally avoid by NOT pushing the confrontation.

So full circle: just because you're trained and think you can take on a knife wielding robber, doesn't mean you should.
Anyone with unarmed experience / experience in disarming knife fighters care to comment?

Unfortunately AFAIK everything I have posted is accurate (well, so far as I have been trained)
My original article was 6 pages long, this is an abridged version. So I was not able to convey all the concepts I would have liked to as clearly as possible. That said, let me throw myself into the fray.

It's not about "being lazy". I know people who come in by 7:30 and leave by 9pm. They are not lazy. They work really hard. But they will never be CEO of the company.

It's about challenging yourself. Becoming better. Training. When you can do stuff good, then you have to find stuff you can't do as well that is even harder.

If I am a Django programmer, after 6 months the challenge in Django is minimal. I can work 10 hours a day on Django and it's not really a challenge anymore.

So it's not about laziness really. It's about not being complacent in your current abilities.
I'm on the verge of adding a similar service: enter as many tweets as you fancy, and then select the interval between each tweet. Would that be something you'd be interested in? For that matter, it wouldn't be a pain to offer a CSV-style upload option either.
It's high time for a more pervasive use of e-mail encryption and signatures.
Invite sent.
Graphic: An Explosion of Mobile Patent Lawsuits - NYTimes
As mobile devices become the next wave of computing, Apple, Nokia, Kodak, and many more are suing each other over mobile phone related patents.
He hasn't been at it long enough to really know. Live and work in the same place for long enough and it will feel like a cage.
sqrt(-1) doesn't exist
and i isn't a number, is it?
On a clear day.... Nasa reveals mesmerising 'blue marble' images of Earth
On further inspection I was wrong - the PDF is from an older article on that blog, before he got the automatic SQL conversion to work.
I started the Cape Town edition of the digest (we have the record for biggest launch audience :D) and the feedback thus far has been great. The community likes it. A simple non-spammy weekly email profiling startup related events around the city- what's not to like?

We don't make money - I'm a startup CEO and I do this for free... takes about 1 hour of my time per week and it feels good to do something for the community.

Regarding having an informative digest, I'm sure it helps if the entrepreneur curating it is well connected in the local startup scene. My advice is to sign up and tell your friends because they're likely to appreciate the recommendation.
When Nokia says Apple can't use GSM, or Kodak says Apple can't use picture previews, you just want them to withdraw those too? When they don't withdraw, will you just set your Mac and iPhone on a shelf till their patents expire, or would you rather have Apple jack up the price to cover licensing, or would you rather have Apple defend the products you've paid for?

I don't see this as Apple's "first strike since Apple v. Microsoft". The handheld market went nuts and Apple's been dragged into an existing fray. Cross licensing among competitors has become a kind of CC hedging. Notice that the cross licensing spats involve companies with devices not software, explaining HTC and not Google.

This handheld food fight has been going on a while. Apple got a few mashed potato splats to the face. It finally stood up and popped a tomato at HTC, and the rest of the kids realize it's standing there, now just a little ticked off, tossing a plump juicy red Roma in its throwing hand, with a whole pile more on the table.
Typical Windows user patches every 5 days
> In a knife fight, the penalty is severely amplified.

Unlilkely. This is another point: doing serious damage with a knife is tough (and by serious I mean life threatening). Even if you screw up and take a hit it is unlikely to be serious (or lose you the fight).

And if your going to take a more serious hit you shouldn't be trying it :)

> just because you're trained and think you can take on a knife wielding robber, doesn't mean you should.

It means you should judge the situation and you have the serious option.
boo hoo, the wild west days of roll your own everything are gone. except they aren't, you just have to be good enough that companies working on the forefront of non-standard (yet) hardware will hire you.
I think you parsed that incorectly,

Normal = X
Normal after realease = X * Y
What they saw = (X * Y) * 3

PS: The browser choice is on a per country basis, so they can easly seperate the effect.
"How are you giving power to a robber?"

By rewarding them with confidence and money, two of the most powerful factors in behavioral conditioning.

"I'm not sure why you're trying to link this situation to the political one in Somalia, they're quite different."

They are the same. Coastal Somalia's de facto government is barbarian raiders, funded entirely by people who choose to pay millions for appeasement but not one penny for defense. Hopefully the problem can be solved by arming the merchant fleets with modern weapons (now being tried), otherwise the standard solution will be needed: plow the coastal towns under as fertilizer.
Unfortunately everything I have posted is accurate (well, so far as I have been trained)

Were you trained to believe that people who rob others at knifepoint are generally inexperienced with knife-handling and self-defense?

Because your entire post is predicated on that seemingly baseless and extremely risky assumption.
I'm having a heated argument with a person who refuses to read past point 30, because he understands files and hierarchies and thinks that anybody that can't organize their computer files is just hopeless and shouldn't bother. He's the kind of person keeping this whole thing back.

The future of user interfaces is one without named files and directories, I'm 100% positive about that. Real-life hierarchies of information are more organic than named things belonging to one category. Ideas are not grouped so rigidly, and neither should last year's tax return (it's financial, and it's personal, and it's governmental, and it's a form, you created it about a year ago, etc. etc. etc.).

Pieces of information should be known for what they are, not what they are named. Naming them is tedious.
The problem, you see, is their length. Seventeen years of monopoly is an eternity in Internet time. Instead, software patents should only be valid for seven years.

I'd argue even seven years is an eternity in Internet time.