skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually... quite close, for purposes of nutshell descriptions.

A lot of other philosophies fit too, too, but I like using Marxism as the example because (since in theory Objectivism is diametrically opposed to it) it has the largest "wait, what?" effect, hopefully followed by some deeper and more thorough thinking about the philosophies. The comic you linked is trying to do the same thing: make people step back and think for a minute about what they're really saying (my preferred approach was always just to ask who cleans the toilets in the Gulch).

As to me being just like "the millions of other critics" (nice strawman, by the way), well... probably not. I do have an intense dislike for Objectivism, but mostly because -- in the course of earning my degree in philosophy -- I did enough reading to see how weak Rand's system really is. To paraphrase a famous bit of literary criticism: there are parts in it which are good, and there are parts in it which are original. But the parts which are good are not original, and the parts which are original are not good.
1) The founding fathers thought rights were recognized, not granted, by humans. They were granted by God. If you think humans grant them, you must think they can take them away, and it's just a matter of who is strongest.

2) State-recognized marriage is not a right. Like copyright, it is the granting of certain privileges, at the expense of the state, with the expectation that the state will benefit. You have a human right to write books and songs, and you have a human right to choose a partner. Separately, the state may have laws to encourage those things. A law recognizing gay marriage is not saying "you're equal with everyone, you can drink from the same water fountains." It's saying "we encourage gay marriage. We want to incentivize it." What is the case for that? Seems like it should be a sociological, economic one.
I actually guessed half right? Nice!
That didn't really seem to be what the article was getting at. Windows Mobile was a serious push to try and establish itself in that area. It just turned out to be a flawed one, and the main thrust of the article was that at least some people recognized it at the time but were shot down by the head of the company.
FYI, your email address is going to get indexed.
So if I made a computer with built-in GPS, accelerometer, 3G Internet, AND a CD drive, would that be "revolutionary" too?

Actually, yes, possibly. But that doesn't necessarily mean it would be commercially successful.

The Internet is a much bigger and better app store.

Define "better." I feel a lot safer on the App Store. But I note I can do a heck of a lot more with my jailbroken iPhone thanks to a few select apps not available there.

The valuable realization here is that one should be able to have the cake and eat it too.
Nice extension. I wish the sidebar-slider was smaller, though; the "Y" logo would suffice.
For those who like leo/literate programming, have a look at code-browser:

http://tibleiz.net/code-browser/

More powerful overall. It implements elastic tabstops too!
Little unknown gem. good for outlining a book/paper also.
Charlie Brooker 'newswipe' is fantastic. Like Jeremy he's a refreshing voice of reason in a scaremongering political correctness gone mad world.

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=6DD223447015D017&...
That would be a real pity, let me try to put in to words why I think that's the case.

Computers as 'property' and in 'peer-to-peer' mode are a democratic institution. Even if they have their shortcomings, as you rightly observe, they are a powerful tool for information processing in the hands of the masses.

If you take all that power and move it to the other side of a network cable in the hands of a relatively small number of corporations then the knowledge on how to program and operate those machines 'under the hood' will probably become part of some kind of new priesthood.

I think that a real information revolution should not come from locking things up and walling them off but from tools that allow a large majority of the people to enter in to a dialogue with their own computers, where they are in control of their own information and can retrieve at will from large repositories of information.
Well, if your company makes a product that mangles children's toes, and the media creates a video that shows your product burning children's legs off, you might want to complain.

(I am not proud of that analogy, but it's been a long day.)
It is difficult, especially for politicians, to talk about injustice, accidents, the death of children and innocents, in terms of acceptable loss. It sounds callous. One wants to do better. But if we are to live in a society with basic freedoms, it is exactly what is needed.

Intuitively we know this. Setting speed limits to a universal 5 MPH and rigidly enforcing the rule is close to what would be needed to reduce traffic fatalities to zero. But most people love their freedom and mobility. They look at the risk of a fatal accident with the rules as they are and say it's acceptable. And when someone beats the odds and has one, we don't generally blame the laws. We say it's a tragic accident, which is a way of saying an acceptable risk has been realized for someone.

We should think the same way about a great many things. Things like aircraft bombing or child abduction are horrific, but low risk. The horror makes us incorrectly disregard the fact that the risk is low--possibly low enough, even, to be acceptable.

The problem is compounded by the political and human need to do something. Even if the risk is acceptably low and cannot be meaningfully reduced without draconian measures, people feel the need to bring it down by one means or another. So they do things that don't help. For show. For comfort. Out of confusion.

A bit of mathematical clarity and a willingness to label things mere accidents would be helpful. Considering the many men willing to give their lives in wars throughout history to secure better lives for their descendants, it would be a shame if we threw it all away for fear of a few accidental deaths per year. Paraphrasing Milton Friedman, the difficult thing about preserving freedom is that one must be willing to accept some low level of evil without doing anything legal to stop it.
"According to the conservative media watchdog group Family Safe Media, the porn industry makes more money than the top technology companies combined, including Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Amazon."

No way. Let's keep things in perspective.

These four companies had combined revenues of almost $150 billion (2009).

All porn total revenue estimates are maximum in single digit billions.

Even the smallest company in Fortune 500 had at least $18.5 billion revenue.

Despite appearances, porn is niche.
Facebook f8 Conference Registration Now Open
10 years ago mobile phones where just microcontrollers with LCDs and Symbian OS on it. Users couldn't even install J2ME software on it. In terms of openness Google Android and Nokia Maemo are now the best mobile operating systems (albeit still not fully open yet). Talking about fataly wounded: iPhone is maybe the last phone which cannot run Java software in our days.
I'm impressed maxklein! You set out to write articles that would get attention and you're doing it repeatedly. I'm not sure you tap into the best part of us, but you definitely have good insight into what makes people tick. Upvoted.
> Targeting the general computer market with a console model.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Computer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computing (I guess this is called a "console model" nowadays)

> Using multi touch for a general computer not just a hand held device

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FingerWorks

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Touchsmart

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Surface

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wacom

These pass for revolutionary ... turing machines, the Internet, the GPL, Smalltalk, graphical UIs from Xerox Park (commercialized first by Apple), personal computing, CDMA/GSM networks, the web, Google's search engine.

The iPad may prove in the end to be revolutionary, but looking back at the advances made in recent history, using "revolutionary" to describe it leaves a pretty bad taste in my mouth.

You know, "revolutionary" comes from "revolution" which is more commonly used to describe "the overthrow of one government / replacement with another", whereas "evolutionary" usually means "gradually transforming something into a better form".

I think that's the word you're looking for.
We sold $6k in the first 48 hours of our self-published JavaScript performance book (http://jsrocks.com/). For the record.
$ and + are built-in functions being used with infix syntax.
Just listing the ways in which iPad is significantly different from everything else out there. Whether the differences turn out to be a big deal remains to be seen.

1) That's nitpicking. A video game shouldn't have access to your important files, and that's something Mac and PC get "wrong", and iPad gets "right".

2) Nope. If your computer breaks you have to reinstall it, and then reinstall Dropbox and then you get only files back from a single directory. We developers have solutions for every problem, but that's irrelevant for the public at large.

3) For some value of "better". Either way, it's still a big change from the status quo, hence revolutionary.

4) Fair enough.

5) If it's not revolutionary, what would you call it? If because of the iPad the future of personal computing is DRM-ed then I'd say that's a major, major revolution.

6) From a consumer perspective that's exactly what it means. If you can't see it, it ain't there.
The difference between rendering strings and numbers as HTML is not very clear, and could probably be improved (by using quotes around strings). A faded green 2 is a string ("2"). A bright green 2 is a number.

Also, "Strict JSON" is not very strict (it permits numeric keys and implicitly converts them to strings, which is not within the JSON spec). I'm not sure if there are any other problems with it, nor if this is really the fault of the app or some code it uses (I didn't bother to check any of the internals).
I'm also missing the ruthless part of the story. Professional relationships are temporary. People get promoted or goto another company and things change. That's just how business works. Maybe you can make some real long lasting friends in the process but it shouldn't be required or expected of your co-workers. I also don't think people should be offended or take it personally. Lots of people like to keep their professional and private lives separate.
You license the licensers. It's called accreditation.
A very respectable news anchor in the US aired some memos supposedly written by a presidential candidate's superior officer in the 1970s. Upon investigation, it was discovered the memos were written in Microsoft Word using the default settings, and probably run through a fax machine or copier a few times to make them look "old". They were most definitely not typed on a 1970s era typewriter.

Once this was pointed out, it took the aforementioned newsman a week before he was forced to conclude the memos were inauthentic. The exact statement used was "fake but accurate".

The "fake but accurate" standard for journalism is problematic. Either show us the real thing, or describe to us the real thing and explain why you can't show it. Trying to slide by with carefully staged shots ends up looking really bad, and costs the organizations a ton of credibility.
Ask HN: Space in the market for luxury public transit?
To begin, I hate cars. I live in cities to get away from the car lifestyle. Still I find public transit to be lacking. Perhaps it's the homeless people defecating on the floor 4 feet from me, or maybe it's the lack of customer service, the inconvenient stops, and the entitled bus drivers, but I wish there was something "more".

Quite a few people I know whose average profile is 20-40 something techie, upper middle class salary, etc drive even though they live in San Francisco. They seem to have less of a tolerance for the fist fights and the public urinals than I do.

Virgin America has been quite a wake-up call for the aviation industry. I fly to Seattle twice a month, which means I spend a lot on airfare. I would save $6k/year if I flew on Alaska instead, but the lack of service and comfort just isn't worth the savings to me.

Maybe there's a market for an urban transportation system which costs 2x-3x the rate of Muni, and doesn't have any subsidized rates, as a way to draw people out of their cars?
Should read:
"Are you capable of being a POLITICIAN to get ahead?"

Advancing the ladder not due to your abilities to be better than others but rather by your ability to _appear_ to be so.
I suppose everything you called is a special form. It should have occurred to me that the loop macro could do it. Is the Loop macro Turing complete?
Can't wait for fundies to decry this as science overturning the will of god.

The same fundies whose infertile wives undergo medical treatment to enable them to conceive.
It's not neccessarily sociopathy, but points to a lesson the be aware of who you hang around with.

I heard a stat last year that said that most people make within +-10% of their 5 closest friends salaries. It makes sense when you think about it. If you're hanging out with people who work dead end jobs and simply get blasted every weekend your most likely going to be doing similar things. Likewise, if you hang out with people are always coming with ideas for companies and following through you'll likely be doing same thing.
> Seeing him on HN actually makes me feel a bit queasy.

I'm with you. I hate this style of straw man argument, for example:

"We see the same sort of overreaction to paedophilia. Just because one man in your town likes to watch schoolgirls playing netball"

Well obviously if paedophilia was limited to men like watching schoolgirls play netball, and not to people employed in positions of trust to deal with other people's children abusing them horrifically, then yes, that would be an over-reaction.

This kind of cartoon argument also makes it hard to have a real debate on the issue. For example we can legitimately discuss the "pants bomber" case - does the fact that one man caught attempting something increase the chances of it being done in the future, or are we like generals always fighting the last war?

As to the dog argument I am rather astonished at the hysteria surrounding this pronouncement, given the very high rates of micro-chipping in the UK. And there are a whole number of reasons why dogs should be microchipped for their own welfare.
Facebook to Launch Location Features Next Month
I'm happy to admit that it's a rhetorical device designed to encourage further reflection and analysis; back during my philosophy days that was a big part of what I learned to do (and this is by no means the most outrageous position I've explained -- that crown probably goes to the day I argued for post-natal "70th-trimester" abortions as a critique of expansive parental/governmental rights over teenagers).

But the similarity is beguiling, and points not only to issues in the statement of Objectivism itself but also to the emotional influence Rand's youth had on her allegedly purely-rational theories. Both of these are common enough critiques in actual philosophic circles, but depressingly absent from "internet Objectivism" (a close cousin of internet libertarianism, another troubled philosophy).
Redesigned to what level? As for CMS, more than willing to do that myself.
If we continue the analogy of "losers", I'd claim that you become loser, as soon as you are told "congratulations, you are hired". The quickest way to get on the top of business/corporate ladder is to become a business owner.
John Resig Advanced jQuery Talk [video]
Thanks- sortfolio looks amazing. This was one of the things I was looking for. Also appreciate the tips.
Even $25 for the printed book is pretty impressive. I have a fair bunch of design books that cost me $80-200 each a number of years ago.
Except then you're talking about the damage your product does. Suppose you're selling guns (kills a comparable number of people to cars), and you have a PR problem because kids are shooting their toes off. Your gun has a lock, and you suspect that your customers aren't locking it properly, but the customers are claiming that the lock is magically becoming unlocked. ABC shows a video with a child shooting their whole leg off. Maybe it's not even a real child but a reenactment with a mannequin, because TV people are funny like that when it comes to shooting children.

You could talk about how that's not fair, because we're only supposed to be talking about kids shooting their toes off and the video didn't even use real toes, but then you're just drawing attention to the fact that kids are eliminating their extremities with your product.

Or you use your time in the spotlight to talk about how it's a bad idea to keep a loaded gun around where children can find it easily, whatever the make, and that simple steps like keeping the gun unloaded or putting it on a high shelf will eliminate the whole problem.
Got any tips for doing it right?
At least in NY state, the exact odds and payouts are published. So you can certainly assign a premium to the risk involved, and you can do so exactly.

But since everyone knows the odds, the lotto market is perfectly efficient and no one can win in the long run -- this is what makes it gambling.
Someone twittered "Did Scala influence Erlang?". Since Erlang development started 17 years before Scala appeared, this seems unlikely. The blog post was a deadpan attempt at a humorous response. My comment was hoping to generate more humorous responses on HN, but alas …
Thanks- I think I'll start digging around there to see if I can find anything.
Ask HN: How to determine what's turning people off about your service?
I have been an avid follower of the advice given by Jason over at A Smart Bear regarding how to encourage your users to complete surveys about your service. At our startup we have had no trouble getting people to tell us what they want out of our service and how to better improve it. The problem is that almost all of the criticism that we receive comes from interested users whom we have already sold on our product (or at least the idea). Logically, the most useful data for us as we grow would come from people who had chosen not to purchase, but collecting this data is proving very difficult.

We have tried various techniques none of which have been in any way successful. For instance, taking the advice of Jason, we offered to donate $5 and then $10 to Wikipedia in the name of the user if they would be willing to fill out a three question survey about why they did not purchase. We also tried offering users who did not purchase a little extra free time in exchange for filling out the same survey (we varied the amount of time we offered to make sure we weren't being too stingy).

We could continue trying to find services, sites, and products that people who do not purchase would be incentivized by, but before investing even more time I wanted to ask the knowledgeable HN community whether or not there were techniques we were totally overlooking.
Thanks for great article, but I'd also suggest s/cacophany/cacophony/

(If theophany is "an appearance of a deity to man", 'cacophany' sounds like "shit happens" ;-)
this is actually shaping up to be a good device. nvidia ion? new interface? local vid playback? lightweight OS, so the intel atom chip will do fine.
I've always been very impressed by how accurate the Economist's tech articles are. It gives me more confidence in their articles on topics I don't know enough about to catch errors in.
European Parliament Rips Global IP Accord
Hey makes perfect sense, why calculate for any point that is not visible.

I wonder if physics calculations play into this.
Sweet. I'll add that to my list and start doing the legwork.
Sandboxes as a concept aren't new, and so are not revolutionary.

You have a huge misconception here. Revolutionary tech takes decades to be fully absorbed by the culture. Or was the Internet not revolutionary because Minitel Videotext terminals were in front of the general public years before it was?
I'd do without eggs and provide common Python libraries that need compiling on the server (lxml, Crypto etc.). You'd then simply accept Python code over the live for deployments. You'd also want to handle rollback, schema migration, key-value services and a DB per instance, some sort of dumping/loading of data. If you stick with certain django conventions (namely settings-as-a-module and apps/libs on PYTHONPATH) you could get away with a really sweet and simple deployment procedure. A pretty smart client to handle all this is a lot of work too. Have a look at Silver Lining. Just got EC2 working on my fork ;)
The problem with your reasoning is that we have actually have lots of historical experience with what it is like when we don't license doctors. It was awful. I'm no fan of the AMA. But I like having doctors who know basic anatomy.

On all of your reputation issues, people's judgment of the quality of doctors is almost entirely a function of their bedside manner, and not their competence. If you just go off of reputation, and reputation is based on the decisions of lay people, the result is that competent doctors get bad reputations and confident charlatans get excellent ones. And health suffers accordingly.

A similar well-documented example are public health measures. My surface impressions of a restaurant are a bad guide for whether the cook washes his hands properly after going to the bathroom. And dysentery comes through infrequently enough that you won't discover this from your neighbor getting sick until far too late. But well-constructed licensing requirements solve this problem and save lives. (In fact there is good data suggesting that public health measures like these save more lives year in and year out than all of the advances of modern medicine.)

We also know what happens with public engineering. Before licensing requirements were created, the USA averaged one random bridge collapse per week. That's pretty bad. It gets rapidly worse if you get an earthquake. I live in an earthquake prone zone, and I am a very firm supporter of having the buildings I am around and in be built to standards created by qualified engineers, then inspected by properly licensed inspectors. California is among the few areas where significant earthquakes don't tend to come with massive loss of life, and I appreciate that fact.

I could multiply examples, but the flip side of the argument does not hold. The article is correct that there are a lot of stupid licensing requirements out there. The article is correct that the motivation is often restraint of trade. The article is correct that we're often all better off without those rules. But the article is dead wrong in concluding that we're better off removing all licensing requirements.
These are pretty major claims you're making, do you have any data to back them? A lot of factors "can destroy real love", e.g. kids, marriage, TV, etc.

On a different note, why do you think there's an inherent "human tendency toward" porn, if it is such a disgusting and dangerous thing.
We have to beware of things that "make sense," especially where cause and effect come in. To me it seems much more likely that people hang around more with people who are in similar circumstances. Since the people you spend the most time with become your best friends, it's no surprise that people will have similar incomes to their best friends.
See also: http://tlrobinson.net/projects/javascript-fun/jsondiff/
Saul "got ahead" only for an extremely limited and artificial definition of "ahead". Did he achieve anything worthwhile? Doesn't sound like it. And the way he was living is soul-destroying.