skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
'Sexist' is thrown about too much, imho.

To some circles, you're sexist if you believe men and women are different at all. I call bs, we are inherently different in some ways. call me sexist if you like.

To the rest of the circles, you're sexist if you put any stock in any of what are usually considered negative stereotypes about women. (the key being for example if you believe women are more kind than men, that is not branded sexist!) This is ridiculous as well, imho. It's like the stereotypes about blacks and guns. Some rapper was arrested a few years ago for having a bunch of guns in his car, and he screams 'you racists'. Dude. You had guns in the car, if anything you're literally living up to the stereotype you're complaining about. You can't complain about being profiled in regards to 'riding dirty' if you were in fact 'riding dirty', imho.

I'm usually pretty bad at illustrating this half of the argument, but as unpopular as it may make me I believe many stereotypes are based on a truth. To apply them to ALL MEMBERS of the group is folly, but the inverse is also true- to assume that it applies to NO MEMBERS of the group, or even ALMOST NO MEMBERS of the group, is folly as well.

I should perhaps start constructing a counter-offense argument... after all, have you considered that the belief that women as a rule do NOT like being a little bit exhibitionist could also be considered sexist?
If you're going to take the point that doctors are dishonest than pretty much anything goes so I don't see your point as being valid. But assuming doctors are professionals with a degree of integrity the only reason they'd over treat is if they felt they could lose their practice for not doing so (and if they knew other doctors felt the same way and would over treat in the same way)

As for your last point i can't really refute it because you didn't really back it up and if it were obviously true than the health debate would be settled already.
I'm no fan of Objectivism by a long stretch, but I think that's being unfair because there's more to the (academic) philosophy than just whining about parasites. What is fair to say, is that the emotional appeal of Objectivism is similar to the emotional appeal of Marxism. "You're important because you're the only one getting any work done around here, and you should kick out those leeches who suckle on the sweat of your brow" summarizes both the Communist Manifesto and the Fountainhead. However, the ideal society that Ayn Rand would erect after the revolution is noticeably different than the one that Marx would erect. Nonetheless, the similarity of the surface appeal does bear discussion.

tl;dr I broadly agree with the main point, but I don't want to cheapen it by letting stand the fact that it is an exaggeration.
i think the real story is "TSA employee allowed system access for two weeks after termination notice"

that's unadvisable in any context and grossly irresponsible in this one.
> Those who (like me) oppose ObamaCare, need to understand (also like me, unfortunately) what it’s like to be serially rejected by insurance companies even though you’re perfectly healthy.

So he opposes "ObamaCare" but loves the French system (no surprise, the French system is clearly one of the best in the world) which he has access to by virtue of marrying a Frenchwoman.

New Reason health care plan: marry a European!
Mark Zuckerberg's 2004 Email Break-In Could Be A Felony
Agreed, though the NAP is actually pretty good if you consider it more of a strategy, with consensuality being the thing you're trying to optimize for in human interactions.
Ethics? Deliberate life-long selfishness isn't ethical.

Regardless of the window dressing. Every villain in history has had moral window dressing that claimed they were really good guys.
In the article I linked to (sorry it wasn't there when you replied), it showed in that Health Care spending as a proportion to GDP France is not that far ahead of the US (16% Vs. 11%). They have all of the problems we have, they have just tweaked their laws to allow for (according to the author of the original article) prescriptions without a doctors visit.

France doesn't solve the cost problem, they just spend their tax dollars on healthcare instead of Defense, Social Security, and Medicare.

Oh, and they have the MHRA - Which is equiv to FDA
May I add, this is one of the most precise uses of the word "amoral" that I have ever read.
2-second video causes headache for ABC News
Am I right in thinking it would work something like Wikipedia news articles but with discussions, etc. added on ?
Yes. Pornography is deeply addictive. Many are drawn to pornography with woefully little warning or information on its dangers. Pornography is "false love". It is a counterfeit. It can destroy real love and hurt many innocent people.

Its producers exploit the human tendency toward it to make a lot of money while simultaneously victimizing and addicting their consumers. Pornography dealers are hard drug dealers.
I just mean you should respect how their decision affects themselves. Respect that they're looking out for themselves, they're more likely to know what's best for them than you are, and that their goals aren't necessarily in line with yours.

So yes, you should complain about them, but you shouldn't complain that they're being "stupid" (ie, not doing the best for themselves), you should worry about yourself and complain that you're not getting what you want, and you should put pressure on them. Let them figure out how and whether to give it to you.

To me, the alternative is people feeling like they should micromanage each other, which I think is bad for various reasons.
Not even close. You sound like one of the millions of other critics whose reading of Ayn Rand consists of one Bob The Angry Flower comic. (This one: http://www.angryflower.com/atlass.gif )
"The reality is these systems are bankrupting themselves in almost every country that has them"

All those countries with exception of greece and the uk are less "bankrupt" then america. None of them spend even 10 percent of their economy on healthcare.

If it is bankrupting them, for arguments sake, what is the alternative? Let individuals bankrupt themselves over healtcare bills or die from nontreatment. There really is no "civilized" choice except universal care.
I guess the real question is, do you have to go to school for 10 years to be a generic MD who can read the output of a machine and tell me my white blood cell count is elevated so I probably have an infection.

Here is an antibiotic.

btw, I'm not saying that years of school aren't worth it for docs that are more specialized (aka surgery)
Trust me, unless you've got your asbestos longjohns on, this is not something you want to get into with Objectivists around. Especially so if you don't happen to be versed in Rand's particular redefinition of the word "selfish".
"The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word “selfishness” is not merely wrong: it represents a devastating intellectual “package-deal,” which is responsible, more than any other single factor, for the arrested moral development of mankind.

In popular usage, the word “selfishness” is a synonym of evil; the image it conjures is of a murderous brute who tramples over piles of corpses to achieve his own ends, who cares for no living being and pursues nothing but the gratification of the mindless whims of any immediate moment.

Yet the exact meaning and dictionary definition of the word “selfishness” is: concern with one’s own interests.

This concept does not include a moral evaluation; it does not tell us whether concern with one’s own interests is good or evil; nor does it tell us what constitutes man’s actual interests. It is the task of ethics to answer such questions."

"There is a fundamental moral difference between a man who sees his self-interest in production and a man who sees it in robbery. The evil of a robber does not lie in the fact that he pursues his own interests, but in what he regards as to his own interest; not in the fact that he pursues his values, but in what he chose to value; not in the fact that he wants to live, but in the fact that he wants to live on a subhuman level (see “The Objectivist Ethics”).

If it is true that what I mean by “selfishness” is not what is meant conventionally, then this is one of the worst indictments of altruism: it means that altruism permits no concept of a self-respecting, self-supporting man—a man who supports his life by his own effort and neither sacrifices himself nor others. It means that altruism permits no view of men except as sacrificial animals and profiteers-on-sacrifice, as victims and parasites—that it permits no concept of a benevolent co-existence among men—that it permits no concept of justice."
Eating the Tonido by Linux Basement
http://sputnik.googlelabs.com/compare

I'm surprised to see Opera 10.50 beat out Chrome and Firefox.
you are wrong. they are not reciprocals of the same dichotomy. marxists draw distinction between capital owners and laborers, libertarians draw a distinction between government and private industry.
No, the people who were disappointed by GL3 mostly wanted the early ideas of an object model to replace the bind-and-set model that OpenGL has been using. GL3 did introduce some extensions for direct state access (DSA), which is a decent compromise, but it wasn't in the core spec. It's still not in the core GL4 spec, but on the message boards it's starting to sound like GL5 may have DSA in the core. GL4 does add a ton of good new functionality, but not the huge change to the programming model that DSA will offer.
There's "material" to support every side of the argument. The only honest data you have are simple measures like life expectancy and costs as percentage of gdp. Universal healthcare clearly trumps any other system in those.

Of course the systems aren't perfect, but they're the best of the alternatives.
Multitouch on a tablet scale and full abstraction of system operations (i.e. file and process management) from the user.
From the cert page:

"the following malicious domains were identified"
New and Latest features added to Google Calendar
Maybe you could make just a small summary? Most of us don't have problems finding research or data if we're interested in something, but it often helps to give a brief synoptic paragraph, and that doesn't entail too much effort, I don't think.
They are smug, there is no reason we need to jump through hoops for routine things. But I don't think that's the problem. I think that if the market were truly free, consumer's opinion of the doctors' eliteness status would prevail.
Personally I use Perl for these tasks, outside of scripting in disk constrained environments, I have no use for either tool.
I don't actually have to be here for this argument with you, right? :)

Oh, Hell, I'll throw you a bone: what happens to comparative life expectancy numbers when you correct for differing definitions of live birth in the US and the UK?

Now, carry on.
I don't think he ever called for a "license-free" world he simply pointed out that skilled people who don't have them shouldn't be prohibited from working in a field if someone wants to hire them.

I don't endorse a world without licenses either but I'd point out that the world got by just fine without them for centuries using apprenticeships and if my doctor retired and told me "I trained this person and he's who I'd suggest you go to" I'd take that recommendation a lot more seriously than I'd take a medical license.
Presumably, people would bootstrap themselves into careers in pretty much the same way they do now. Of the top of my head ...

1) Working with (or interning with) someone reputable, and getting their public stamp of approval.

2) Certification agencies won't suddenly cease to exist; they just wouldn't have any force of law. Nothing would stop you from refusing to see a dentist who isn't certified by the ADA, just like nothing stops you today from buying a toaster that's not certified by Underwriters Labs.

3) Speaking of underwriting, insurance companies have an enormous incentive to only insure competent people.

etc.
"To Kodesh, Microsoft’s initiatives were driven by the dictates of the company’s technology, rather than the wishes of consumers."

That's the simplest summary, really. The bureaucracy problems feed into this, but you don't need much more.

When you're designing to please people who won't be using the system, at the expense of those who will, nothing else is going to matter. You will fail.
First, Playboy and other print pornography were available long before VHS and Betamax. Is the claim that video pornography is the key product which reduced sexual violence?

Second, what fraction of young men regularly viewed pornography on videotape from 1975-1990? It has to be much, much lower than the (near-ubiquitous) viewing of online pornography today. (Then again, maybe those most at risk to commit sexual violence were much more likely to purchase pornography on video.)
This is awesome, really cool tool, I would make the render link more obvious though, I entered some JSON and sat there wondering for a second what to do.
Yeah, and if you ever wake up, you'll realize that your own interests are enormously bound up with the interests of society at large.

You drove to work today on a public road or public transit, were kept safe by publicly funded police departments and most likely hold a knowledge-worker job that you're capable of doing in large part because of public education (probably).

But, yeah, you're a self-reliant rugged individualist. I get it.
He doesn't ignore it, he just points out that the slogans contradict the actual advice, which is pretty run-of-the-mill.
Are you capable of being ruthless to get ahead?
> Multitouch on a tablet scale

Like this ?:

http://www.engadget.com/2009/02/10/dell-latitude-xt2-multi-t...

> full abstraction of system operations (i.e. file and process management) from the user.

There have been plenty of attempts to do that in the past, the iphone does it as well.

Revolutionary is to me something that will literally change the face of computing as we know it, the world wide web was revolutionary, the personal computer was revolutionary.

The ipad is a nice gadget, it may be revolutionary but for that to be the case we will have to wait for the future to happen first, and it definitely isn't revolutionary in all possible futures.

edit: Interestingly enough, I'd peg the ipad's chances at being 'revolutionary' a lot higher if apple decided to make it a completely open platform. Just like the web and the PC succeeded because in essence they were open. The fact that the iphone is closed and is a success makes you wonder how big a success it could have been if it were more open. I think that it might have been a lot bigger still.

For some reason 'closed' is the new black and I really don't think that's the right direction, which probably shows from my feelings about all this.

Of course Steve Jobs is in a much better position than I am to say that he's right, but I can't shake the feeling.

btw, multi-touch has been around in one form or another since 1982...
One Thousand Dollar’s to Prove Electrosenstivity
Would you rather we called it mainframe computing or the internet? Wouldn't that be the wrong "jargon" to apply to amazon web services and their ilk.
In the absence of state licenses, how does one prevent license mills? Right now, there are "colleges" (Diploma/Degree Mills) that will hand you a B.A. or B.S. or Associate's degree based on "life experiences". You write them a nice letter about why you think you deserve the degree, wrap it around a $1000 check, and you get your diploma in 6-8 weeks. If we abandon state-run license boards for professions like doctors, lawyers, or architects, then within a few months anyone will be able to pay a few grand to hang up a "Joe Schmoe, Attorney at Law" shingle in front of his office. The end result will be a lot of confusion for consumers, because unless a consumer's able to do hours of research, determining which licensure boards have sufficiently rigorous standards will be an impossible task.
They should use this technique for the stack-peeking feature on the Nexus One gallery app: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1E1mSSBKEPU
Actually I think it moves away from philosophy at this point and becomes a question of practicality- at what point in a detailed copy is it "close enough to be you"? As humans (and with the rest of life) we're in that weird state between being totally static (like a frozen crystal) and being completely chaotic (like the center of the sun) - at the "edge of chaos" so to speak. Life is in that border-land where it's just stable enough and yet just chaotic enough. So when the temperature of the room changes there are atoms and systems that adjust within us in order that certain critical atomic structures stay in-tact. It's like a controlled slide into chaos- chunks being stable enough for just long enough to create other small islands of somewhat-stability.

If it turns out that the thing critical to our being is deep within our neurons, and that the computations that take place are similar to quantum computing and rely on sub-atomic processes, and that the rest of the body (among other things) keeps its environment stable enough to "keep state," then the machine needed to copy the mind would end up destroying the original. Or, if it doesn't read atomic information at that level of detail, the "copy" will have a similar infrastructure but will instantly be divergent from the original because the "current" thoughts of the original will not have copied.

I mean, putting aside philosophy and actually getting down to the brass tacks so we can start building this machine. (:
Hello PG, when you reply to a comment, can you put the focus onto the text box? that way you can start typing without having to click into the text box first? It would take about 2-3 lines of javascript to make this happen.
Most users don't need to type anything of significant length, and most are better off with a tightly controlled platform than with the ability to do whatever they want. I don't agree with either of those, but they are large changes.
I wonder if anyone actually thought they were looking at a tachometer in a Toyota with a jammed accelerator as the car and its occupants, convenient videographer and all, hurtled toward an uncertain fate... unlikely in my estimation.

I always assume that the junk I see on TV is either staged or a representative example.
> So as you can see, the Cylons have many hurdles to overcome in order to take over ZumoDrive and your data.

Isnt that essentially wrong? The cycolns have to overcome exactly ONE hurdle to steal the data. (Not a security guy by any strech of definition.)
The argument you're basically making is "Our system doesn't work but your system works less so use our system". The problem with that argument is it doesn't change the fact that your system doesn't work.

As for a solution my personal preference is for a baseline supported free market. I face the reality that no society will ever let people die on the street (most single payer advocates ignore the fact that it's illegal for a U.S. hospital to turn away a sick person regardless of whether they can pay). So I have no problem with the Government providing health care for debilitated people.

I also have no problem with free preventative care because it's in society's best interest (being we'll have to provide for the person if they become debilitated).

But I'm for the free market providing those services to the Government. Beyond that I endorse a free market system for individuals in regards to the in-between stuff (broken legs, cosmetic surgery, etc...)
I don't think there's enough that goes on in tech (at that low level of detail) to create an economist like magazine.
Engineering is mostly critical because it is optimized for cost.

If cost wouldn't be such a major factor in construction then 'rule of thumb' and 'overkill' would be valid ways to get around having the knowledge to get an exact answer.

In olden times it was customary for the designer of an arch to stand under the arch when the construction scaffolding was removed. This quickly eliminated those that were not capable of constructing stuff that held up, even if it led to some constructions that were probably more solid than they had to be for their designed use.

On the other hand, that's why we can still marvel at some of this stuff today.
I wasn't familiar with the "follow the moon" approach of having tasks move around the planet to be in places where demand is low, cooling cheap, and electricity cheap (if they use time-of-use rates).

It makes perfect sense now that I think of it..

Anybody knows of companies/organisations that do that? What kind of tasks is this useful for?
Rarity and severity are two different things. I can't tell which you mean.

I would guess the UK system would bias against rarity since if you make spending decisions centrally you can get more bang for buck, the more people get the disease.
Targeting the general computer market with a console model. PS3's might have had the option to run Linux but the target was clearly the gamer market.

Using multi touch for a general computer not just a hand held device. Might not seem that big a deal, but there is a reason tablets have failed in the past.
Fancy typeface. Grid layout. Purple. Bunch of stats and info about the contents. It's not that bland. And seems to be their aesthetic: minimalist.
RE2: robust regexp library by Google
The observation that boundaries of things are arbitrary is also important to materialist dialectics. Quote Leon Trotsky: "In reality a pound of sugar is never equal to a pound of sugar—a more delicate scale always discloses a difference. Again one can object: but a pound of sugar is equal to itself. Neither is this true—all bodies change uninterruptedly in size, weight, colour, etc. They are never equal to themselves."
"The problem is American doctors are smug elitist's who believe they're worth half a million dollars a year and american society believes they're worth it too (possibly through watching too much medical dramas on television).

Every other country in the world treats theur doctor's as humanitarians who deserve an above average but honest wage."

After at least 10 years of schooling (plus the debt), grueling work, and 12+ hour work days for many years, doctor's deserve the high wage. When you first start out as a doctor, you don't get that much. It only happens after specialization.

Other countries also pay developers $5/hour and you forget to mention that the cost of living in many "other countries" is significantly lower.
It's not a matter of effort, it's the getting into arguments with people like marshallp and jmackinn. I could say the US system involves doctors eating babies, while the UK engages in Druidic blood-sacrifice of virgins, and they'd pop up to say that the NHS still handles blood-sacrifice better, more equitably, and more cheaply than the US system HAHA!.

If you're looking for general pointers, you might try the "Criticism" sections of Wikipedia articles on the NHS of England, articles on the subject by organizations like Cato, and that sort of thing.
I share your reaction on Gates' response. I also think it sounds typical Bill Gates.

They did not only start over with Zune, they've been going right and left, what with constant name changes, the Danger acquisition which was a huge failure, the Pink project, to arrive at WinMo 7 which is still dangerously close to vaporware, and it's now March, 2010.

BilL Gates dropping the ball on handhelds/cellphones is in the neighborhood of him and MS almost missing out on the Web in the 90s.
It depends in part on how you count things; but yes, ZumoDrive is more weakness-in-width than defence-in-depth.
Very interesting story although I wonder how effective this would be outside of a large corporation. The author never said what Saul actually did or produced.
Well if you don't want to get into a debate about someone else's healthcare system, of which you have provided no information of, then maybe you shouldn't tell them it sucks.