skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For the most part I agree with your arguments, except:

crime is reduced

I'm not so sure that is the case (well, apart from the fact that selling the drug would no longer be illegal :)).

It wouldn't reduce crime due to people taking the drug, technically that may increase - but I suspect (for weed) it's a low value anyway.

But would it reduce crime associated with drug dealers/drug gangs etc.? I'm not so sure; there are plenty of other illegal substances to sell so it seems unlikely dealers et al will just give up and go work in 7-Eleven :D
Why use the euphemism "I think it is interesting" instead of just saying that you think it's hypocritical?
I take it you're referring to Hackworth's chopsticks? That was the first thing I thought of when I read the article's title, too.

...it wasn't long before he came up with the idea of selling advertising space on the damn things, chopstick handles and Chinese columnar script being a perfect match. Before long he was presenting it to his superiors: eminently user-friendly bamboid chopsters with colorful advertising messages continuously scrolling up their handles in real time, like news headlines in Times Square.
"Take any advertisement or analytics system which continually polls the server for more data. This will kill your battery if left running."

How does this compare to some AJAX + a timer? Is it the network call itself that's an issue, or just how that is implemented in Flash?
Take an afternoon to learn RSpec. there is plenty of documentation, free tutorials online or you can pay $9 to peepcode to get a screencast. Being self-directed goes a long way.
CP24 (Toronto TV news station) was reporting a tenth death when I watched the news at lunch.

AFP is reporting an 11th death: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jWnjN18xP...
Also, the trolls will get bored after a few days and move on, but the site will still be there long after 4chan has forgotten about it. It's possible that a genuine community will show up to use the site in the way they intended.
Not all trolls are obvious.

I saw the site early yesterday and most of the submitted comments were sad and depressing (or complaining about having had a previous post deleted), not ridiculously stupid as the ones highlighted in this article. After Wonkette linked to it, I'm sure plenty of left-leaning people went and had some fun.
>If people actually used such a website in good faith

But they don't, which is the point of his comment.
vbhtfyhvcb
face book so like it
Yeah, I was definitely being a little whiny there. I did just pick up an RSpec book -- just wish TDD experience wasn't such a pre-req for getting a Ruby job.
It's a good question indeed. Obama's drug czar has stated on several occasions he's completely against legalization: http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/97101-obama...
The humor is not that a social site attracted trolls; the humor is that a major US political party used a social site to solicit help developing its political agenda. The trolls are just helping us see the violence^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hfoolishness inherent in the system.
He said that they've become so extreme and fundamentalist that Poe's law applied -- that their own honest statements have reached the point where they look like self-parody.

You can agree or disagree, but he definitely made an argument with the Poe's law citation.
Or, you know, they planned to charge from the start.
It's the normal difference between quantitative and qualitative research. This kind of study is of the exploratory kind, capturing what's going on while the users interact with in this case the iPad for a while.

This study is very useful to use as an UX designer, to see where the potential hazards and weak spots in your design is.
Sorry to nitpick, but:

Hanger: http://www.google.com/images?q=hanger

Hangar: http://www.google.com/images?q=hangar
...complex data in perl is much more effort than in say, python.

Accessing the first element of the first element of a nested array in Perl 5:

$aoa[0][0]

Accessing the first element of the first element of a nested list in Python:

lol[0][0]

Perl 5 references do sometimes produce uglier syntax, but your quibble here is over a sigil.
A downmod but no counterargument? Sad.
It's only $10/year in the US if you snag it off Amazon. $5/issue is nuts especially considering there are no printing or mailing costs.
Hrmm....that's interesting.

Maybe I can have two streams...the news version (with perhaps just me alone) and the interview version discussing what they are working on.

Sounds good.

Would you be interested?
Now if there was some sort of bioaccumulation of pot ever time that caused massive issues then that single issue could prevent legalization on its own.

I don't see a problem. Pot use can be detected, sometimes days (or weeks) after. The law in most of europe is simple: If you're tested positive while driving then your license is gone.

Seems fair enough.
Find a co-founder with technical expertise or hire someone are the two main options you have.

If you can't afford to hire someone yourself than raise money, if you've got a solid business model with clients lined up you might be able to find an angel willing to finance. Or alternatively see if you can get some of the industry leaders who are interested to provide financing.
> It wouldn't reduce crime due to people taking the drug, technically that may increase - but I suspect (for weed) it's a low value anyway.

That depends on what you mean by 'crime due to people taking the drug.' How much of the drug-user related crime is due to the users seeking to lie, cheat and steal their way to the next 'score?' If their 'next score' is that much cheaper it reduces the need to commit crimes just to feed the habit.

> But would it reduce crime associated with drug dealers/drug gangs etc.? I'm not so sure; there are plenty of other illegal substances to sell so it seems unlikely dealers et al will just give up and go work in 7-Eleven :D

True, but then it would no longer be 'pot-related crime' where people get all worked up over how 'pot is destroying our society' because it's 'causing all this crime.' You've just pointed out that people will commit crimes regardless, and if you take away one form of committing crimes for fun and profit, it will just be replaced by another.
To me, this is the #1. I would go so far as to place that 'first_time_ab.php' box directly at the top of the page. Kind of an 'enter your webpage and get started NOW' type call to action.

After seeing this link, it's totally clear to me and i will definitely sign up when we're ready.
It isn't, the change I made was from translated by human to rewritten by human, and the distinguishing bit of that change is human versus machine.

The parent was implying some kind of double standard where the "computing device" doing the change made a difference but shouldn't, and I was pointing out that the human isn't "mechanically translating", but "reinterpreting / rewriting". I just didn't write it out very clearly that the second one is the same. Will edit.
Tell HN: Please make this
I want a plugin to Gmail that will automatically re-send an email if no response is received after a few days. I would pay for this.

It seems nowadays that about half of people only respond to the second email you send them, so this would be a huge time-saver.
Right. An intern doing a "sanity/troll" moderating would make it a respectable effort.
And if anyone else was wondering, as I just was, why it's called a hangar, apparently it's from a word for "shed" in some dialect of French. The word itself is probably Germanic in origin.

And it has absolutely nothing to do with hanging, which makes sense because you don't hang things in a hangar anyway.
While this isn't exactly the same as modern slavery (aka indentured servitude), there are enough parallels to make me very angry at this contract. I will personally be avoiding your employer (infosys according to another comment) in the future, and would encourage others to do the same.

A friend pointed out a similar circumstance which is pretty common in the UK and the US, where a company pays for your formal education (perhaps a PhD), and as a result you work for the for some set length afterwards. This is much more acceptable - if you didn't work for them you would be paying back a modest sum which was used for your own education, not the "huge compensation" you describe.
Live Blog: Facebook Unveils New Privacy Controls
64 bit is supported on Linux http://code.google.com/p/v8/issues/detail?id=330#c7
I definitely agree that it can be used secularly (I probably should have phrased that last part better), but I still feel that it isn't a good phrase. Of course these type of things are currently beyond our understanding or control, that's why they're carefully being experimented on. Obviously scientists realize there are risks to these types of technologies. Too often, I see the phrase "playing God" followed by unrealistic, uninformed scaremongering. It promotes fear of those discoveries, rather than a healthy respect and caution for their possible risks. Rather than accusations "playing God", I'd prefer to see a truly balanced critique. It's easy to write an a hollow fearmongering article a scary phrase.
I've heard this argument before: It's OK as long as someone with nothing to offer except a jail cell gets a piece of the action.
I'm depressed to say that I knew most of these. Can I have those braincells back?
Democrat's new website not exactly what he hoped it would be:

"Today presently in our world you can notice a lot of instability in our Earth’s physic’s. Like now we are having a lot of Earthquakes, Tsunamis, we also have El nino on the equator and now something new like Iceland’s new erupting Volcano and this hasn’t happened since the 18 hundreds. I would also like to talk about how I thing we can possibly repair some of these major problems in a fairly simple way. In my Books Moon People 3, I developed something called the Ecliptic Satellite Tint Shield [...] Now the connection that I am getting at between the "Ecliptic Satellite Tint Shield" and the Earth’s current instability is you can use this satellite on Earth. We could park one right over the volcano in Iceland to where we could adjust the tint shield over the Volcano to eclipse it to cool it off."

"The entire Earth gets 70% of all of our Oxygen all over the world from Plankton. Could you imagine what it would be like on our Earth without our normal 70% oxygen in our atmosphere, if all of a sudden all of the plankton in the ocean died. It wouldn’t be pretty, this is prophisized in our Bible."

"I respectfully ask The clerics of Iran and the President of Iran to let NATO redo elections for the good of your country[...] I would just like to say one more thing before I go. MELCHIZEDEK'S name means "The KING of RIGHTEOUSNESS and JUSTICE" and the Heart of JUSTICE is FAIRNESS and MELCHILEDEK rules over a "KINGDOM called SALEM" which means PEACE!!!! "MELCHIZELDEK is The MESSIAH and is The CHRIST" and The CHRIST is the son of the Living GOD and his name is JESUS!!!Those who follow him will have ETERNAL LIFE!!!!! "

http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/blog/dalecourtney

(This is from the author of the "Moon People Trilogy", http://www2.xlibris.com/bookstore/bookdisplay.aspx?bookid=49... . Amusing side note: this guy is a "45 year old Single man who works at the local High school as a science teacher and astrology in the 12'th grade level." Our children are doomed. )
http://www.followup.cc/faq.php looks like it'll work, but not for in-browser use.

Edit: http://mail.google.com/mail/help/autopilot/index.html if only...

Edit2: this may be what exactly what you're looking for: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/create-an-automatic-email-respo...
http://www.mobydickthewhale.com/moby-dick/moby-dick-chapter-...

Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned ground that the whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me. This fundamental thing settled, the next point is, in what internal respect does the whale differ from other fish. Above, Linnaeus has given you those items. But in brief they are these: lungs and warm blood; whereas, all other fish are lungless and cold blooded.
COR Blimey Cross domain Ajax is really here
People aren't against stem-cell research because they think it's playing god, they are against it because they think that embryos have the moral worth of adults. Perhaps you are thinking about the arguments against cloning?

Incidently, stem-cell research has high potential but is also highly speculative. Similarly, gene therapy (using viruses to deliver gene fixes into the body of cells) was and is considered to have enormous potential with very similar hype to stem-cells. But after 35 years and billions of dollars of work, the the actual number of people who have been helped is very small.
To which the counter-argument is YAGNI (the different implementations). There are other ways to do the equivalent of mocking, though the interface / factory approach is popular at the cost of doubling the number of identifiers in play and probably having a geometric effect on complexity.
Interesting interpretation of people who are judging others. The Bible states that people are doing this in order to distract God from their own sins that they need to confess and repent of.
I noticed the same thing. Maybe its just a couple of days till googles webspam team catches on, but it's annoying none the less :(
Ok Nielsen did this test with 7 users

We have moved along way since the simplistic rule of thumb that 5 users is enough. A very good argument in why 10 is not enough is Woolrych and Cockton 2001. They point out an issue in Nielsen formula (1-(1-0.31)^5) in that he does not take into account the visibility of an issue. They show using only 5 users can significantly under count even significant usability issues.

The number of users you need is dependent on how many issues there are, the cultural variance of your user base, and the margin of error you are happy with. Five users or even 10 is not enough on a modern well designed web site.

For example if we assume that designers of a web site have been using good design principles and therefore an issue only effects 2.5% of users. Then 10 users in a test will only discover that issue 22% of the time. If your site attracts a 1 million visitors a year the issue will mean that 25,000 people will experience problems.

The easy way to think of a Usability Test is a treasure hunt. If the treasure is very obvious then you will need fewer people, if less obvious then you will need more people. If you increase the area of the hunt then you will need more people. Most of the advocates of only testing 5 to 10 users, experience comes from one country. Behaviour changes significantly country by country, even in Western Europe. See my blog post here :
First, I dispute saying that just because it's touch based, the iPad doesn't have a Graphical User Interface.

Second, another kind of device which got a no-holds-barred canvas to create beautiful and stylized interaction-based content was the DVD. The DVD menus for a LOT of titles are seriously crappy.

Even though Nielsen might err on the side of caution, he definitely has a point. People without guidelines have been producing pretty-but-non-functional GUIs before. Let's not keep the traditions alive.
Well, I did see one comment that said it had been removed due to flagging by the community. So it's likely that they are getting on top of this problem, and that the author of this article just happened to drop by just after a massive troll influx thanks to 4chan or democraticunderground.
Thanks for your feedback. We will definitely A/B test your suggestion. In fact, had been meaning to test the demo with the input box for a while now.

I'm trying to do a test, where one variation has this text box and nothing else (kind of like Google homepage). My only worry is that it may spook some less technically savvy people into thinking we have hacked their website!
I did Chat: (App Engine + django-nonrel) project
You should definitely, definitely, DEFINITELY find a developer. Designer can wait, but I personally believe (based on trying to do the same thing) that the time it takes to ramp up your development efforts will leave you so frustrated that by the time your idea comes to fruition, it will be 10% of what you want and take 300% longer than you expected.
Letout-outlet, clean solution for the computer's electrical outlets
I wonder if he was awake all night, as probably most of us are while working, or just slept longer.
Off topic: if you look at the kickstarter page for Diaspora http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/196017994/diaspora-the-p...

Notice how for anyone who donates more than $5 they need to send them a CD with Diaspora on it. $25 gets them a t-shirt etc.

For 6k donors, they're going to spend ~$50-100k of the $200k they raised just meeting their commitments. Not to mention a huge amount of time dealing with the logistics.

Edit: Jesus, if you account for the fact that they promised 1 year hosted service, and 1 year phone support for anyone who donated more than $350, these guys are already underwater.
I said "I think" and "most". However you can a history miner (CSS) to refine your demographics.
Don't run this, just put it in a .txt file and run a virus scanner on it:

X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!$H+H*

OK, it's actually harmless, but it's the only pure-ASCII executable I've ever seen, which is pretty cool.
It would seem this site is more in a losesome state
Even many of these seem a little naive. Take this one:

PROTECT THE CONSTITUTION: Require each bill to identify the specific provision of the Constitution that gives Congress the power to do what the bill does.

So, people really think that it will help to protect the Constitution to write "Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3" on every bill? The court has historically interpreted the commerce clause in such a way that everything is justified by it. The hard part is getting the court to stop doing that, not making Congresspeople write some extra stuff on the bill.
Not in this case: both open source and proprietary listings tend to notice + argue their cases, if they're flagged for deletion. It just seems that proprietary systems get a harder deal of it.

For example, check out the history of the PivotX listing mentioned in the article: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=PivotX&action=... - although it was flagged as 'non notable', it got away with staying on the list just by deleting the 'spam' flag and saying 'but we're not a blatant advert' (but not dealing with the notability argument at all). After that, nothing has been said.

Compare that with the attention that Ektron (a well known proprietary system) received: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion...
My point is if you get high and are only impaired for 8 hours then after 8 hours if you are not impared you should be able to drive. If you must wait 2 weeks after smoking to drive then it's not exactly legal for most people.

The bioaccumulation idea was a separate issue; if smoking pot for 30 years turned people into zombies with an uncontrollable desire to eat brains then it should be illegal regardless of other negatives. (I could not think of any issues like this so I made something up for the sake of argument.)

PS: You can probably detect pot in the blood of 75% of Americans if you set your threshold low enough. (Second hand smoke from 2 blocks away etc.) That does not mean it's impossible to separate smokers from non smokers just you need to set a reasonable threshold and accept you might miss the occasional smoker.
5 iPad Presentation Tips
Would be interesting to know why the reply link is the only one underlined on the whole page.
The Reason Robbie Back was fired
devsea was a new one for me, bigresource has been doing this for a while now and they just started framing all outbound links
I agree. When somebody uses this sort of second order percentage, it is confusing.

When a car's top speed increases from 105mph to 120mph, after you modified the engine, you say it increased 15mph ... or, perhaps you could say it increased 14.3%.

Using this paradigm, when a conversion rate increases from 14.5% to 18.6%, you would say it increased by 4.1% ... or, perhaps you could say it increased 28.28%

Woops! We have a problem. We just expressed the same increase, in the same units, using two very different numbers.

This is obviously a problem. The reader doesn't know what you're talking about.

It's perfectly valid to say the car increased by 15mph, so it must be perfectly valid to say the conversion rate increased by 4.1%. In fact, I think that when most people read something like this, this is what they assume, that the delta between the old conversion and the new conversion is that percentage. At first blush, saying the conversion rate increased by 28.28% should be OK, but it's not OK, because the whole point is to convey information, and you have failed to do so. Now you have to use context, to figure out what the hell they meant. This is unacceptable, especially when talking about mathematics, we should not need context to sort out what's going on.

What's the answer? I don't know. But there's definitely a problem here.
The sad part is they feel a website like this is necessary. They're professional politicians in a democratic country. They should already be in touch with their constituency. They should have a chain of advisement and direction built all the way from local caucuses at the precinct level.

And if they were serious about making the project more efficient by taking it online, they should have a registration-based website with registration tied to actual party membership and heavily moderated to allow only articulate arguments.
I'd buy it if I'm getting on a plane. Other than that, I just read their website.
with new and improved battery tech, how about a bottle of coke wrapped around with something like this, at least promo bottles? Of course, when it reaches a stage of cheap production.
They had to go to Microsoft to get this? Reddit is open source. But I'm guessing they see open source as anti-american.
what about rear seat iPad entertainment system?
Marijuana is a gateway drug to other illegal drugs because it itself is illegal. In order to get marijuana you need to go see a guy that is ALSO selling other drugs (the kind that are actually dangerous).

Legal marijuana makes it so that people don't start using more dangerous drugs on a whim. They are no longer presented with an easy opportunity.

If pot is on the same level as alcohol which do you think is more of a gateway drug? One that makes you introverted and cautious or one that makes you more confident while simultaneously impairing your judgement?
Lol, I was trying put into words how silly the man is for thinking that travelling to Washington is in any way talking-point worthy. You nailed it. Epic quest, lol.
Investing more time in a bad cofounder is pointless. You need to ask yourself, honestly, whether this guy can do the job you need him to do. If there are any maybes, ifs or doubts...if you aren't sure that he's the kind of person who will find a way no matter what...then there is no point putting any more time into this. You'll just be putting good money after bad.

If you feel real passion for your idea and if you see a lot of potential then you can probably arrange some kind of buyout or work something out with him. If he can see that you're real serious and he isn't, he should step aside (if he's a stand up guy). If he won't, then there's no point trying to turn him into someone that he isn't. Move on.