skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>much of the unrest in civilization is now caused by the differences in religious prescription rather than differences in morality.

[citation needed]

Most of the unrest in civilization has the same source it's always had: fighting over wealth and/or power. Often leaders of these fights will claim some religious reason but what you have to ask yourself is; if you took religion out of the equation would they stop fighting or would they come up with some other reason.

I presume what you had in mind was the US vs. Iraq/Afghanistan but given that we know there were no terrorists (nor WMDs) in Iraq what "religious" component was there exactly? There are some pretty obvious "power" components though.
Interesting point. I'd like to see that poll. I'd also like to see a poll "What sort of atheist/agnostic are you?". I'm sure there are lots of interesting different sorts of thinking to be discussed along the same lines as we've seen here.
Don't you get sick of all the "global $look_ahead;" cruft at the top of your functions?

Also, what happens when one of your new developers comes along and modifies the value of that in some unexpected way?
you're right, this is same in east asian, south asian and africa. There people want value for money to make buying decision and value = features ... more features means more value, i clearly remember that iPod was a super-flop product because it only played recorded music while other mp3 players played music, radio, had a voice recorder etc. so it was very difficult for apple to gain any grounds against other mp3 brands like sony, Lg, samsung etc. Apple product thus are for classes and not for masses (at least in that part of world where price against features plays a major role).
Good example from a very good book (I have been reading it the last two days): http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~jimmylin/book.html

Hadoop, Mahout, Pig, etc. are great tools - at least for my work, they are game changers because they provide an inexpensive way to run large problems. As I blogged about last night, I am also reading the in-progress work "Mahout in Action" - another good resource.
Jacques, thanks for sharing that link and I'm upvoting you. But you know what's funny? I have almost exactly the same set of premises of as that piece, but I come out to almost exactly the opposite position.

> The United Nations now and world Government eventually must serve one single goal the guarantee of the security, tranquillity, and the welfare of all mankind.

I think a world government would rapidly become filled with the most politicking, vicious, corrupt, oppressive people unless it was incredibly decentralized and powerless - I don't think you can have a large, powerful government wtih broad-sweeping powers and no opposition that is kind and benevolent. The only large governments/empires in history that were secure, tranquil, and with high levels of general welfare were decentralized.

Every powerful centralized government example I can think of committed all sorts of gross and widespread abuses - I think this is because once you create a mechanism for unchecked power, it inspires the most ruthlessly ambitious power-hungry people to attempt to control it. Those people eventually find themselves their way into high positions - democracy or not. Many brutal madmen believed they were doing the will of the people, and were sometimes legitimately elected. When you create a huge unchecked power structure, you're creating a bright light that attracts the most vicious sort of moth. Eventually one comes into power, and all hell breaks loose. Decentralization seems to be the only way in the long term, even with the equilibrium costs of a minimal defensive military force and coordination problems.
I had the exact same idea a long time ago. I just kept toying with it in my mind. It's so awesome to see someone actually make it.

You've made a very good first version. Just get lots of people to use it to write at least one line and then publish and popularise the finished stories on social networks. You will get to see if the stories are actually any good and also might get ideas on improving the app itself.
Might I suggest something like Config::get('look_ahead') rather than GlobalSingleton? The design pattern used to implement something is generally far less useful than the purpose of the thing in terms of a name.
Some person explained that HTML is a Chomsky type 2 grammar and regular expressions are a Chomsky type 3 grammar, and provided this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy

Can anyone here provide a link that makes the discussion of these typed grammars available to laymen?
A good musician should be able to earn a living (say 100k-200k/year) of it.

This can't be that difficult with gigs, but even if you couldn't do that, why not go look for a patron or two? Or even a thousand?

Surely you aren't a great musician if you can't get at least a thousand people who like you - or even ten thousand. Ten thousand fans (out of say 400 million Americans and Europeans who use the internet) means that they just have to buy $20 worth of merc a year (assuming half goes to cover the cost of selling the product).
> This is a great example of why governments should never, ever be involved in proscribing use of specific technologies.

I don't know about that. It's now a liability, but a decade ago it probably helped the meteoritic rise of broadband (and broadband-based services including secure ones) and internet usage in Korea. And was part of it anyway (the Korean government very heavily pushed broadband and internet usage in the 90s and early 00s)
No where in the mentioned by you speaks about batch upload pics to picass.
Just curious, no pun intended: Why is it so difficult to get a credit card in the U.S., the land of credit cards itself and, for what I've read, where credit card applications seem to virtually pour in all the time among junk mail?

Credit cards in Finland are the third payment option: debit cards and cash are the two most important ways to pay. But you can get a credit card quite easily, and you will definitely get one if you have regular income.

I got my first credit card when I was maybe 20 or 21. The reason was that I was going to a vacation abroad and didn't want to carry loads of cash with me. I just walked into my bank and asked for one; as soon as I told them I was permanently employed and had regular income, it was no big deal. It didn't matter I had only started at this job a few months earlier and I had no existing credit record whatsoever (no loans, no credit cards, no other credit). I didn't have to proove it, just tell them my income and some other facts and sign below.

If I had been a Swedish citizen living in Finland, I think it wouldn't have been no different. You have income, a bank account and an address: that's probably it. I can easily understand if you had bad credit record but not having one at all being a showstopper really puzzles me. Most people pay their credit card bills anyway so any random newcomer to the business is probably a safe bet.
I know enough German for the idea of Jewish people talking about Mensch vs. Unmensch to make me feel uncomfortable; probably because while I do understand the language, I still lack the cultural references. Anyone care to enlighten me? I read the wikipedia entry, but that somehow isn't enough. I'd love to hear from people using this word in everyday life.
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad-hominem

"The argumentum ad hominem is not always fallacious, for in some instances questions of personal conduct, character, motives, etc., are legitimate and relevant to the issue."

Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick would be truly fascinated to learn that "the evidence that you gather is what matters, rather than who you are" in this field. As a bit of quality time searching the contents of http://www.eastangliaemails.com/ will demonstrate: http://www.google.com/search?as_oq=McIntyre+McKitrick+MM&...

Most especially: http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=419

From: Phil Jones <p.jones@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
To: "Michael E. Mann" <mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
Subject: HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL
Date: Thu Jul 8 16:30:16 2004

"[...] The other paper by MM is just garbage - as you knew.... I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !"
'Never-before-seen material' can store vast amounts of energy
Compare those centralized powerful governments with the not so powerful governments in large parts of Asia and Africa and tell me where you'd rather live.

Governments are wasteful by definition, but corruption is rampant in other places as well. The difference really becomes to pay backshees (sp?) vs paying taxes.

Longer term there may be a solution to some of this as we find (finally) a successor to democracy that improves on what we've got, but a democratic world government would be an improvement over the silly nation states that we have today (which, even in their most advanced forms are a holdover from a time when there were more kinds of people).

Corporate domination of politics is one of the hardest things that we need to take care of, this planet is not here for corporations, it is here for all of us, including other species. A late friend of mine had some pretty good ideas on that:

http://www.extent.nl/articles/entry/interview-with-eckart-wi...

His taxation scheme would be a very large step in the right direction.
Google and Penguin: Bookending a Revolution
It's fairly easy:

* Create a website, get affiliate links setup for
selling fishtanks etc
* Create cool content people will stay around for
* Setup mailing list to further monetize etc
* Start spending money on adwords etc to get people to join
* Start optimizing to make sure you make more money than
you spend

That's only one way, but it's pretty sure to work if you stay on the ball.
No, but he is right, they would just have to apply the natural advantages they have been given.
Yes, but you need extremes in order to sift through shades of grey.
Of all the Dawkins quotes, this one strikes me as weak.
Check for basics in an Example of Term Paper
An example of term paper can be very useful to students. However, when you select examples it has to be appropriate to the topic, style of writing and good format among other things. Only with the right example will you be able to write an effective term paper.
Ask HN: Why does VPS disk space cost so much?
My VPS provider (intrahost) charge £10 / month / 10GB of disk. Looking around this seems to be about average. Given that I can buy 1TB of commodity disk for £50, amortising this cost over a year (which is probably aggressive) means that my VPS disk space is 240 times more expensive!!

Even if priced against data centre-type hardware, it's still an insane mark-up.
"But I think the main reason is piracy. Windows has been so popular in China and Eastern Europe primarily because pirated copies of the OS could run on a variety of hardware"

Isn't the reason kind of irrelevant? I mean of course it is relevant, but to point out that "yeah, but it is because..." is just making excuses.
Given how notorious they are for not wanting to deal with people directly I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't....
What a disgusting response. I suppose what you contribute is so much more "worthy" of success?

Personally I find life a lot less stressful when I don't get worked up about if people are getting "what they deserve" or not (especially since I don't have any right to decide what they deserve).
yep - yay 919ers! I'll be at the PHP meetup group in Carrboro on July 14th, but I live near Wake Forest in north Raleigh :)
Thanks. The idea is fun, but getting people back is tough. Let alone getting them to share the link with their friends. I had fun building it and iterating it over the last few days.

I'm going to give it a couple more days and if I don't see much traction I'll probably let it pass away quietly.
Got to read that in a Cylon Hybrid or GLaDOS voice.
Prove it by doing it and blog about it.

I don't buy it.

Those cards are dealt, that scheme might have worked 10 years ago but today it's a lot harder than that.

And make sure you log your time, so you can work out your hourly rate.
Nothing stops me from doing anything but I did none of those things prior to following Jesus. So the notion of the motivation behind works is important to understand. Also I typically give myself a B- to a C+ for what I do. I'm not always great at it.

Faith without works is dead. Works without faith is just work. Faith and works is a living faith supported by a living God. If you have faith but do nothing in response then you should work that out. If you have no faith and works Jesus says that you already got your reward and you're all set. He has nothing to give you. I pretty much summed up the book of James in the Bible.

As for the afterlife everyone who follows Jesus gets a pretty awesome deal and while there is some hinting at a bonus for doing well it's not really that interesting because level 1 heaven is pretty awesome. There is a law of diminishing marginal utility after all.

So to be clear works get you little and faith is the source of everything.
Well, I'm certainly biased to think it a fad, yes, thanks to Stevey's post!

But I do wish to contend that a methodology is not just a tool and inevitably has some sort of a dogma attached to it, well it seems that way to me anyway :-)
Idealist: Explain to the customer that nobody knows how long it'll take, and then sit down with them to work out a deal that balance both of your interests. Odds are they need some portion of the project done, so focus on how to deliver it incrementally to reduce risk.

Suit: Don't waste your time trying to work out what you expect the schedule to look like. Figure out what they can bear, and negotiate a deal that guarantees you get most of the money they can spend with the least risk to you. Your liability is in what you promise contractually, so hire a good lawyer to help you minimize your legal liability.

Me: Race to do the project before negotiations need to wrap up. Then write a beautifully detailed schedule with visible checkpoints, negotiate with confidence, and deliver checkpoints slightly a head of time on average. Use a little of your spare time to meet their mid-project change requests and build in a feature that tickles your interest and will delight them.

Coder: Negotiating a schedule is like negotiating how long it'll take to produce a baby. It'll be done when it's done, but if you get me a girlfriend I'll get it done faster.

Software Engineer: Charge your customer a standard hourly rate to record their requirements and break them down into function points. Estimate function point complexity and risk based upon your organizations prior prior projects function point productivity. Schedule a week with the customer 3 months from now to present your analysis and estimates including confidence intervals and costs in each scenario.
Robotic Lisp: M-TRAN III metamorphosis
Good idea. Especially since the most profitable businesses in the world are charities. Oh wait, they're not. In fact most donations happen because they're tax deductible.

If a person wasn't willing to pay $0.99 to download a song on iTunes what makes you think that person would be willing to donate a dollar?
> It's a morally difficult question...

Hardly, in my opinion.

Just use the rather common approach of the Golden Rule: 'Treat others like you want to be treated'. If you want others to keep their promises to you, you should keep your promise to others. Likewise, if you want others to fulfill the contracts they agreed to, you should fulfill the contracts you agreed to.

The author offered a contract: "Pay 4 dollars and promise not to copy and redistribute the media, and I promise to give you a copy". Nobody who accepted this contract, has the moral right to violate it. Otherwise, everybody would have the right to violate contracts, in general.

Everything else is just a matter of organization: If teenagers need sheet music for school production, their parents should pay for it. Or the parents can create a club, hire somebody to write music, and share the resulting work.
The article hasn't mentioned OS X or Macbooks anywhere. The article is talking about the limited success of the iPhone.

> that UI is designed to appeal to American and Western tastes and preferences

You know, even in the American and Western countries it took Windows 7 just one month to surpass OS X's marketshare, reaching 10% in only 4 months.

After the failure that was Vista, you could say that customers are fed up ... but apparently a lot of people prefer Windows. Over 90% of them, Chinese or not.
> Compare those centralized powerful governments with the not so powerful governments in large parts of Asia and Africa and tell me where you'd rather live.

I think that's a false dichotomy - but for the record, I was thinking USSR and Nazi Germany as powerful centralized governments, and thinking of Rome, Height of Britain, America before Spanish-American War/World War I/World War II as decentralized governments.

The last powerful centralized African government was Shaka Zulu's bloodbath. By contrast, the two most successful African Empires I'm aware of were much more decentralized - Cartage and Mali.

> Longer term there may be a solution to some of this as we find (finally) a successor to democracy that improves on what we've got, but a democratic world government would be an improvement over the silly nation states that we have today (which, even in their most advanced forms are a holdover from a time when there were more kinds of people).

This I agree with entirely, yes.

> Corporate domination of politics is one of the hardest things that we need to take care of, this planet is not here for corporations, it is here for all of us, including other species.

Here's an interesting thought experiment for you - try replacing "corporations" with "organizations" in any corporate-bashing you read for the next week: You'll find all the statements pretty much hold true. Voting blocs, political parties, religious organizations, even nonprofits often do as much to corruptly impose their agenda on other people as for-profit corporations do.

I agree with you that organizations, coalitions, and other blocs of people shouldn't be able to trample individual's rights - but I think power should be primarily start at the level of individual people, and be reserved to them first and gradually upwards. So authority on decisionmaking goes first to individuals, then to communities, then to towns and city districts, then to large cities, then to states, then and only then to countries - from small to large. Large shouldn't be able to impose on small, whether it be Whole Foods Corporation, or the New York Yankees, or PETA, or the Conservative Party in England, or the Democrats in the USA, or labor unions, or General Motors, or anything. Individuals are the way.

> His taxation scheme would be a very large step in the right direction.

I like some of the ecological merits of it and I agree that taxing productive work is a stupidly bad idea. I bet there'd be some really nasty unanticipated secondary effects with that idea, though. Still would be an improvement over taxing people for doing productive work, which is just crazy on almost all levels.
Because they have you by the short and curlies and you can't solve it without going through them.

It's a typical trick of an 'unbundled' service where you find out long after the buy-in point (and when there are serious expenses involved in moving) that it is more expensive than you thought after all. That's why I still maintain that regular, dedicated hosting is unbeatable both for high storage and high bandwidth solutions. If you just want to play in the pool you might get a better deal using virtual servers but as soon as things get a bit more serious you will probably want to move. The same goes for 'the cloud'.

There are good use cases for this stuff but there are plenty of online concepts for which they are not a good match and way too expensive for what you get.
> Me: Race to do the project before negotiations need to wrap up. Then write a brilliant looking schedule and negotiate with confidence.

Then find that someone else has you beaten on the estimate (because they don't know how to estimate!) and gets the job.

That's happened to me once when I tried that trick, better make sure you're the only bidder :)
cats have four legs, but Gods has four letters. Sometimes a word is only a word and when a word isn't a pointer it is futile to discuss whether it dangles.
Surely the other point is that "wanting to be rich"
isn't a good start.

"wanting to be successful, create something useful and
have fun" is a far better mindset to have.

I don't disagree with you, but it's a pretty easy mentality for us in the west to adopt.

The author is in India, where a very significant portion of the population sleeps on the street and even the ones a notch above them live in abject poverty compared to even our lowest classes[1].

I suspect "being rich" for an Indian means something quite different than for us, and might very well mean a middle-class existence in our terms.

[1] GDP per capita in India is $1,124 a year.
Clay Shirky: 'Paywall will underperform – the numbers don't add up'
meta-robotics!
No problem - glad I could help shed some light on things. I've recently come to that conclusion about work - currently I'm best when I get to make strategic decisions, whether it's about which client work to take, code architecture, or just about anything really.

"Being given a list of specs and then coding to the specs is just not my kind of thing" I bet creating the architecture for how the problem will be solved in the first place is more your kind of thing. I used to think every programmer wanted to be an architect, then realized a few years ago that wasn't the case.

Hang in there, and keep working at it!
You describe this as a "shortcoming" of yours. I don't think it's a shortcoming, I think you got it exactly right. People who always have to get everything 100% right are the ones who need to change their ways.
+1.

Out-of-process handling is no silver bullet either. Careful programming is, but it's a skillfully handcrafted bullet, made from the most exotic materials in addition to its silvery base and that kills only the specific problem it was designed to kill.

Getting rid of the GIL would be like having a machine gun for mass-produced silver bullets.
Sorry yes, you are dead right. There is no moral obligation for Elanor to expect to get the music for free. Or feel she has a right to distribute music etc.

I mean't in the larger sense.
30 Useful Frameworks for Designers
You're entirely right. Which is why I really did hate myself a bit for posting it. I normally notice bad grammar (especially small errors like this), move on, and don't think again about it. Sometimes, though, the urge is too strong.

I do always notice, though. My mum is a former English teacher, and I have a history degree as well as a CS one. After you spend enough time editing text in your native language, it becomes second nature to notice errors and want to correct them. I accept it as the price for being able to write easily and clearly myself, without consciously worrying about grammar. In my opinion, this is a useful skill when you're a programmer. Plus I kind of like proof editing (when it's invited.)

The one thing that surprised me about your reply was the choice of 'money' as the metric that I can maximise by suppressing the habit. That has certainly never occurred to me. The thinking behind it seems interesting on a few levels.

(NB: The nature of this post, and the fact I had a few glasses of wine over dinner, mean that there is bound to be at least one grammatical error in this reply. Doh!)