skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why don't you crawl back to your cave and offer a meaningful argument?
The Mozilla Foundation's stance is perfectly logical: Flash is not bundled with Firefox. H.264 cannot be bundled with Firefox and still be considered Free Software. Mozilla shouldn't have to spend a dime to support a nonfree encoder.
Substitute the obvious character for $%^& below -- I couldn't figure out how to convince HN that I wasn't just delimiting italics.

What was the historical reason for using the $%^& operator for both things?

I think the argument was that it allows you to say "foo is a pointer to an integer" == (int $%^&) foo == int ($%^& foo) == "that which is pointed to by foo, is an integer".
I have visited a number of homes in Japan where the peel-off plastic to protect displays from shipping is still installed. It even says, in Japanese, "REMOVE". The consensus seems to be that it won't be eligible for warranty repair if you remove that. (I doubt the truth of this statement.)

So anyway, people are weird. That's why they don't remove pins from monitors, or film on displays to protect them during packing and shipping.
UK to Create Institute of Web Science, Headed by Tim Berners-Lee
Vector clocks and conflict resolution
If we all had iPhones car traffic would flow better
I got a Samsung monitor at work the other day. It had this pin, which is not something I was aware of before (my Dell 24" monitor didn't have one). Anyway, it had a big huge sticky-tape note on it, and one on the front asking you to remove it before use. It was so effective that I didn't even think about it.
After reading about the problem, and the quite obvious proposed solutions I came to the same conclusion as you (really?).

Sometimes engineers try to out-think problems that can easily be solved by putting a big giant sign/sticker/label on it and calling it a day (beer anyone?).
Yes, weak critical thinking does seem to be a problem here. Let me collapse the three simple implications for you down to "All of Mozilla's money comes from a known h264 supporter." If you're going to make some sort of bizarre conspiracy theory about money making Mozilla hypocrites, then following that up with "And therefore Mozilla is not going to support h264" just doesn't make any sense whatsoever. If they were slaves of their money, they would be supporting h264 loudly; this is sticking a finger in the eye of their money source, not kowtowing to them.
For someone who has spent the better part of his life studying ethics, I'd expect you to come up with a better example to refute someone who has also spent a great deal of time studying ethics and written books on the subject.

I think your condescension is misdirected.
Not really. It's just an effective way to bring people's attention to something that they need to do, but might not know that they need to do. Yeah, a base that doesn't need the pin might solve the problem... but do you want to pay $10 extra per monitor because an orange pin is inelegant? I don't.
Milner, Robin (1978), "A Theory of Type Polymorphism in Programming", Jcss 17: 348–375

I don't know if there's a free copy online anywhere.

The Damas-Milner paper is the sequel; it presents an alternate algorithm for type inference.

Benjamin Pierce's "Orange Book" is one of the best references now.
I agree, I think it is adding a layer that might be another layer that needs tools to even use. REST is the way now. They are just trying to describe the content in the REST transport. But I think we have that already with JSON, JSONSchema, ATOM and others. Trying to write wrappers and descriptions too specific or globally acceptable is what got us in trouble with Web Services built on SOAP and bloated XML. This looks like it is more ontology focused (OWL) but probably overkill.
There's more to "communicating to the customer" than just putting it out there. Maybe a wall of text is just as bad as traditional "fine-print".

If you think you made the conditions clear but you get unhappy customers anyway, you've failed to communicate.
Problem is, people expect things to be free. By restricting yourself only to people willing to pay money, you've cut out most of the internet population. You might be restricting yourself to a small business.

There's also a heap of other reasons... for example, if you create X, and sell it to users, you're only selling one thing. By advertising other peoples products, you can be selling 1,000 different things. The chances of success are vastly increased. Also, if you sell directly, your users are likely only to purchase once from you. If you run advertising, they are more likely to generate continuous revenue for you, from multiple products.
Could be fixed by using an &mdash;
You can't sue FOSS authors for infringing patents (source code) -- you can only sue the distributors of executable implementations (binaries)

The text of an ideal software patent is (or has a direct mapping to) the source code of an implementation, just as an ideal steam engine patent would be blueprints and schematics. The text of patents must always be publicly available to be enforceable -- it's the whole point, absolutely central to "the promotion of the useful arts and sciences".

You license the production of artifacts, not the spread of ideas.
It's very uncommon in anything labeled organic. In the US, organic foods can't be genetically modified, and nearly all the corn used to make HFCS is genetically modified. So HFCS tends to be avoided in favor of evaporated cane juice. Tasty!
The actual paper is at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi... (assuming that URL comes through), but unfortunately the abstract did not contain the numbers you were interested in, and the full article is $31.50.
Remember, I simply posted the duck duck go site and said this is my default search engine, why persuade you?

Research yourself, can't be bothered well, so be it. Try it for a week don't like it ... so be it.

Good luck mate

The internet has too many trolls - not that you are a troll
How We Teach Introductory Computer Science Is Wrong
Regular sugar is nearly as bad. Eat a lot of sugar, don't exercise a lot, and you will gain weight.

It's sad because sugar is so delicious.
It does compete with Java, as both are garbage collected. C, C++ and Fortran are in their own category because they don't have to deal with the indirection of boxed heap objects.

The mythical "sufficiently smart complier" can remove these indirections, but no current compiler can do it perfectly, as doing so requires generative the copious amounts of object code that C++ is so roundly criticized for (templates). GHC is pretty good at removing these indirections. I understand C# compilers are as well. I've not used Java much but isn't there some issue where you can't store primitive integers in a collection because they don't inherit from the base Object type and/or the JVM doesn't support unboxed objects?* This is the same kind of annoyance you have to deal with in Haskell to get fast-as-possible performance (i.e. using types which are not polymorphism-friendly thus decreasing code reuse and increasing verbosity) so in that way I think they are equal with regards to the performance/brevity trade-off.

* I'm sure this has probably been fixed in some recent version of Java but it's still illustrative of why garbage collection imposes a real performance impact that C and C++ just don't have to deal with.
Cool idea, a little shady though. I mean, why would you use jpg for a graphic like this? http://appbackr.com/images/step-ideas.jpg

</complaint>
Not voluntarily, but would I be out of place saying that I've actually used some of the information on the EX hits, and they have helped me? That's not to say I didn't wish the answers were on StackOverflow instead though.
He's only misstating it somewhat.

Firefox (at least on Windows) has a special Flash installer baked into it for several years -- if it can't find the plugin, it prompts you with an infobar, which then kicks off a streamlined installer that downloads a xpi package and installs it even without administrative privileges.

When they first implemented it, they got a special license to distribute the Flash xpi from addons.mozilla.org, and did so happily. Mozilla has absolutely distributed the Flash binaries themselves before, but I think the file is hosted by Adobe these days.

Fairly recently they baked in a special Flash updater too -- if your Flash plugin has known security vulnerabilities Firefox will prompt you to automatically update it: http://blog.mozilla.com/metrics/2009/09/16/helping-people-up...
FlashPunk - Animated Entities
The personality of the workaholic and the issue of "self"
oData is REST. It is a specific protocol for creating REST-based queries. I think what you see as overkill is really the ability to handle diverse scenarios.
Tell HN: Consider the implications of Google pulling google.cn
When google.cn was available but censored, anyone in the US could simply run the same query on both and make a list of the missing results in google.cn to tell what was being censored.

Such a list lent itself to easily gathering the censored documents and distributing them via other secure means to China.

Now, thanks to Google, that is impossible. Did this fact really escape the minds at Google?

Google.cn was a great window into what the Chinese government doesn't want the Chinese people to see... now it's gone.
That's one negative, and one CS degree. :)
I paid the $70/month and dumped it after a few months. I just wasn't using all the tools to make the cost worth it (an issue of time mostly). And to make matters worse a lot of the tools simply didn't apply to how I sell my services/do my business.

I do know that given the time and investment I could get good value out of the services but for now it's just too much to spend each month it goes under-utilized.
I think you're missing the point. As you say, there are better statements of utilitarianism, that more closely approximate how you feel. Other people feel otherwise. A fascist would reject your argument, and might well kill the children, because fascists think that the welfare of society trumps the suffering of individual humans.

The basic question of ethics is this: can we persuade reasonable fascists that they're wrong, or must we keep nuking them from orbit?
People won't be around to read your mile long page if the top part of it (don't say fold) isn't captivating. Let's not call it the fold, but the first 300-400 vertical pixels are more important than the bottom.
Google doesn't have to make this statement. I believe no one will be put in jail because of Google's leaving. And it's not a BIG issue as you think.

The Chinese people cares house, education and health care more. Most of them don't use Google at all.
Do you have FIOS in Manhattan?
Kasparov isn't all that far removed, time-wise, from when he was playing 2800+ chess. If he got back into training himself for competitive chess again, I am quite sure that he'd be a formidable player...but for how long, I am not sure.
Another way of saying this would be that you can create a mathematical model of morality and have it answer your questions of morality in particular situations. If you come from the viewpoint that there is a mathematical model of everything (waiting to be discovered) then this is pretty obvious.
Spoken with the false confidence of youth.

Here's a few examples of fairly revolutionary achievements post-30, even within the relatively narrow field of tech startups:

* Jimmy Wales was 36 when Wikipedia was founded. Larry Sanger was 34.

* Steve Jobs was 30 when he founded NeXT, 31 when he took over Pixar, 40 when Toy Story, their first major film was released, and 42 when he returned to Apple and led them to a major market turnaround, OS X, the iPod/iTunes, the iPhone/AppStore, etc.

* Jeff Bezos was 30 when he founded Amazon, 37 before it turned a profit.

* John McCarthy was 31 when he first designed LISP.

* Marc Benioff was 35 when he co-founded Salesforce.com (I don't know how old his cofounders were.)

* David Winer was 33 when he founded UserLand, 41 before they started offering web publishing software.

* Larry Ellison was 33 when he founded Oracle, 35 when they made their first sale, 40 when Oracle became an ACID-database.

* PG was 40 when YCombinator first launched.

That's just off the top of my head (I had to look up the dates) and I don't particularly pay attention to the age of tech company founders. I'm sure there are dozens of better examples.

For a more comprehensive survey, see http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1431263

I actually kinda hope you're trolling with this comment, you're way off base.
The * in the parentheses is part of type name and it indicates that the type being named is the sort of type to which it makes sense to apply the run-time * operator.
And the most valuable thing to be squashed by it:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1211947
Nootropics: their effects, their risks, and where to get them
The Ethical Dog
Google search now supports Haitian Kreyòl
Sorry, but you're wrong. The human body is not a machine. The human body is a collection of chemical processes. Chemical processes must obey the laws of thermodynamics. Among those is the second law, which dictates the tendency toward disorder. We, as humans, are allowed to "disobey" the second law because we represent far-from-equilibrium forms known as dissipative structures (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissipative_structures).

Now, you might say that any machine is a collection of chemical and physical processes. Fine. If you want to perpetuate a machine analogy, consider this: the camshaft in your car is subject to chemical wear through oxidation, etc. Eventually, the gear teeth will wear out, and it will need to be replaced wholesale. Fine, you say, we'll make replacement parts. But what about the brain? You can replace any arbitrarily large set of components in a car's engine and still call it the same engine, but do you think that holds true for humans as well? And even, say, we figure out how to preserve the human brain (or even, gasp upload it)...problem solved, right? Nope, sorry again. "You" are not your brain. "You" are an emergent property of your entire body. Your brain without your body is as much "you" as your body without your brain is...

Bottom line: study some biology. It's not as simple as the "easy A" course you took in high school or college led you to believe.
First cure thermodynamics. Then we can talk about aging.
An appeal to authority doesn't mean the claimed authority is wrong. It's just a weak (non-rigorous) form of argument.

I used to scoff at people who'd say "you can't understand X because you haven't lived it." I'd counter that a) I'm smart, and b) I have a good imagination. The thing is, as I've gained experience, I've realized that while I was correct in a very narrow sense, I was also missing something important.

If you're smart, and you can learn from experience, you're unlikely to think in 20 years as you do now, on a whole range of issues. It's a very interesting process to go through, if you're paying attention. The effect is real.
What Harris is arguing is that, regardless of what I feel or what your hypothetical fascist feels about this problem, there is a definite, objective answer to this question, not to be found by comparing opinions, but by empirically examining nature and human society.

I should have been more clear about this. In my previous post, I'm supposing that killing the children would be the wrong thing to do, as I strongly believe our current understanding of human psychology and sociology indicates. But I could be wrong, and whether I'm right or wrong about this moral decision is not a matter of opinion, but is fundamentally a scientific question. This, as I understand it, is Harris's point.
I plan on building it out quite a bit more and do some more customizable stuff.
What Kind of Business Are You Starting, Really?
The Lazy Programmer's Guide to Secure Computing
IT the Toyota way
What Does Health Care Reform Mean for Startups and VCs?
Beware of 'Imagine if...'
According to Wikipedia, most HFCS in use is 55/45 fructose-glucose, so it's slightly worse than sucrose (sugar) which is 50/50 fructose-glucose.

{update} I guess it's worth mentioning also that that YouTube video was already posted to HN in December sometime.
I've been interested in piracetam for a while.

Anybody with personal experience?

Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracetam
Weird, works for me with both chromium-daily & Chromium Dev channel, Ubuntu 9.10 x86_64.
JazzScheme a development system based on extending Scheme
In some industries this is unacceptable. e.g., the US FDA considers solving a problem by labeling to be an absolute last resort.

Even then, cultural differences can mean that different groups will respond in various ways to a label. So now you have to make a number of different labels for your overseas markets, and add in the logistics problems of making sure that the "wrong" label doesn't go to the wrong people.

Often, it's simpler to just design the product to avoid the problem in the first place!
You could argue that the source code is an implementation.

Anyway the point is rather irrelevent, you aren't going to sue anonymous contributer100. You are going to sue, or threaten to sue, companies who propose using opensource platforms for their new website rather than buying from one of your members.
Dynamic ivars: solving a fragile base class problem
Yes suffering is bad. But say you have a child who has been found torturing a small animal. Statistically that child has a 90% chance of turning into someone who does great harm to human beings. Given that would a society be morally justified in killing all children that are found torturing small animals? It would unquestionably save the world the most suffering the only cost would be killing one innocent kid for every 9 who would turn in to a monster. Is that an acceptable loss?

This sounds suspiciously like the "Your idea kills children" argument. I call strawman.

The problem with this scenario is that it vastly oversimplifies utilitarianism, presuming that only deaths matter and that a utilitarian model of ethics would demand the death of the child; an emotionally repugnant act.

In fact, the quantifiable harm from society intentionally killing a child due to its potential risk could be far greater than the eventual potential deaths from letting that child survive. It would require statistical modeling, and some notion of community-accepted confidence thresholds, to come to a conclusion in a full utilitarian framework.
For me, the more obvious benefit to reading on my Kindle isn't lack of eye strain (I stare at monitors all day too), but lack of glare. Even with full backlight, using my laptop outside on a sunny day ranges from being uncomfortable to completely unusable. With the e-ink screen, that's barely an issue.
EE pages are so annoying that people hit "Back" and think "what the hey, the real results are crap" before clicking on an ad. Without the EE pages, people would just think.. "ah, can't find an answer" and go away ;-)
Would be nice to see one dedicated to tech sites in general, e.g., http://www.python.org/download/ which has been blocked by the Firewall within China for the last 6 months.
Interviews with Average Programmers
Isometric 3D map of Czech republic
Most of them don't use Google at all.

Google's chinese marketshare disagrees with you: http://gs.statcounter.com/press
True, and one of the first things I did on ChatRoulette was prank people with it - http://youtu.be/DKTPLTZa6d4

But if people were paying good money to be in such a system (for, say, a live gig).. maybe such shenanigans would be mitigated.
Is your job title relevant? Mine is, I’m a software mechanic.
The article is actually worthy of discussion.
You can look at both American Chopper and Tiger Woods
as a Brand - vs - Privacy - vs - Entertainment trade off. Both parties maximized their value by Branding themselves. Good for your net worth but very bad on your Privacy and eventually as your career turns a entertainment factor kicks in as well. I would say that golfers like Arnold Palmer, Jack Nickolas, a Greg Norman chose different Branding strategies to market themselves with better and more stable results.
The usual statutory copyright notice is "Copyright © [year of first publication] [Owner's name]"

In your hypothetical example -- assuming CoolCorp LLC was indeed the copyright owner -- a statutory copyright notice would be "Copyright © 2010 CoolCorp LLC"; there'd be no need to include the URL or name of the site.

I _have_ seen notices that say something like, "NewSite Copyright © 2010 CoolCorp LLC"; I'm not aware that adding the NewSite name like that would cause any problems.

Same disclaimers apply - I'm not your lawyer, etc.
There's no "special Flash installer". I think you're talking about the Plugin Finder Service, which is generic and works with any plugin. PFS serves metadata that points the user to the vendor's plugin download page (possibly to a streamlined installer built by the plugin vendor): https://wiki.mozilla.org/PFS

The "special Flash updater" detects if the user has Flash installed and is out of date, and only if so, it points them to Adobe's website to download the latest version. This is likely to happen for all widely used plugins. Flash is the first because it's so widely installed. More details here: http://blog.mozilla.com/security/2009/09/04/helping-users-ke...

It's pretty easy to find this all out with a search engine, so I'm beginning to wonder if your "slightly incorrect" claims are deliberate misrepresentations. I'd question your agenda, but honestly I don't care. The facts are available for anybody with a search engine handy.
How one man got 3rd place in a World Rally Championship event, in a $500 car.
Ethics for Entrepreneurs
In all seriousness, producing a blog post/report/whatever on the perceived issues and then submitting it to HN would probably yield the best results. Controversial comments in deep places like this tend to do poorly with the karma points.
I downloaded the Mac .dmg and created a torrent for it. You can download at http://commentout.net/media/haskell-platform-2010.1.0.0-i386...
Definitely not. It's just a connection reset. People won't be put in jail because they have searched these.
(Mentally replace all ^s with asterisks in the following:)

I don't understand your C code. What is "(int foo^)" supposed to do? It looks almost like a cast, but "int foo" isn't a valid type in C. Maybe "(struct foo^)" or "(int^)"?
Perhaps the spreadsheet component of Google Docs is better than Baidu's.
> It won't be enough to demand an early hour for going to bed. If you ban the late evening Internet surfing, you will just swap a dose of evening education for an idle tossing and turning in bed.

You've just chosen to take this statement at face value. I don't believe it.

If you get enough exercise, don't drink caffeine in the evening, and don't over-stimulate yourself after 9pm, this doesn't happen, in general.

You may see the above restrictions as draconian, but actually, they're normal for a lot of people, and have been for a while.

You're attributing a lot to this biological clock, without supporting any of your claims, while these could equally be attributed to bad habits. Don't underestimate the power of training and habit.

Now, does society enable these bad habits? Yes! So maybe we should push-back on that, instead of changing school times.

It would be useful here to look at what happens in other cultures, with other schedules, although that would make it hard to control for the one change.

Your "rubs me the wrong way" argument is silly and immature. So what if it offends you? That doesn't make it wrong.

Finally, I say all this after having thought as you did, and getting bemused "why don't you go to bed earlier" responses from my parents. Guess what? When I finally did, I started to feel better in the morning. Duh.
I see something like Dropbox using it. Any other examples?