skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
His point about how ridiculously unfair the current system can be is well taken, and it's very frustrating. But, the paternalistic state exists because people cry out for it. There are efforts to ban completely ridiculous offenses, like your pants (url, http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/09/17/baggy.pants.ap/index.html )"There should be a law preventing that." When it comes to things like medicine, the current overbearing system seems necessary because people at large seem nearly incapable of rejecting obviously false medical treatments ("smart" water, echinacea, magnet therapy, colon cleansing, Kinoki foot pads).

And the other problem... Having faith that people will do "the right thing?" People often don't, especially when it comes to even slightly complex things. Homeopathic remedies are a massive industry, but they've been definitively shown over and over to have no discernible effect. Religious cults still flourish in every civilized nation, despite their policy of taking everything from their members and leaving them as broken, one-dimensional caricatures. Chemical and drug abuse (as opposed to recreational use) is rampant, and our laws cannot differentiate between the two. People even deny proven science because they don't like the implications, stifling scientific progress that could help sick and dying people.

It's not a new dilemma, but it's getting more complex and urgent as our population grows. On the one hand, some people make the world better. On the other? Some people make it worse, sometimes simply through their ignorance. Distinguishing between them and giving the helpers the latitude to improve without giving the destructive forces latitude to destroy is the fundamental dilemma of any society.
Err, post VC funding of Series A. VCs take 50% of the company, so you are talking 25% of the rest?
When I was recovering from elective gum surgery, I could only safely chew with the teeth on one side of my mouth. And for the first time, I had to chew and eat slow. It's harder now that I no longer need to do that but chewing using one side of your mouth can dramatically slow your intake rate.
this is not true is it?
there must be a way to make this shorter, otherways that is completely ridiculous.

""""
The equivalent code in Java, as reasonably compressed as I could make it, is:

import java.util.;

public class Fugger {
public static void main ( String[] args ) {

List numbers = new ArrayList();
for ( int i = 0; i < 5; i++ ) {
numbers.add ( new Integer(i) );
}

List squares = new ArrayList();
Iterator it = numbers.iterator();
while ( it.hasNext() ) {
int i = ((Integer)it.next()).intValue();
squares.add ( new Integer(i * i) );
}

Iterator i2 = squares.iterator();
while ( i2.hasNext() ) {
int i = ((Integer)i2.next()).intValue();
System.out.print ( i );
if ( i2.hasNext() ) {
System.out.print ( " " );
}
}

System.out.println();
}

}
""""

and his example in python:
' '.join([`x x` for x in range(1, 6)])

rofl...
here's a pic and a video:
http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/pictures-2500...

Not bad - nice industrial design
http://www.typepad.com/pricing/

You can actually start at $89.50 per year instead of $149.50. The ability to have your own URL is important.
If you'd like to learn more about the issues in this essay, I recommend The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. Pollan spends a good chunk of the book using Salatin's Polyface Farm as an example of sustainable agriculture.

Disclaimer: I've just joined the Arlington buyer's club for Polyface Farm and have been very happy with their meat and eggs.
That's why I started out saying "working at love" - make sure to tell kids that things don't magically turn out happily ever after. Tell them that lots of marriages end because of things like money, selfishness, infidelity, and boredom.

There are a lot of things about my marriage that are worse than when I was single, but there are a lot of things that are a whole lot better. On balance I'm way ahead, but we both work at it every day. It's worth working at because of how great it is. And that's a truth worth telling.
Deutschlands grosses Dienstleistungs Bewertungs Portal
Emotions, Moral Choice Linked in Study Watching Brain Activity
Arbitrary customs and religion [PDF]
Wanna learn JavaScript? Here are 15 video lectures (with key ideas written out)
Because the alternative leads to exploitation - both of the consumer and the worker.

Companies will cut costs any legal way they can. If you make it legal for them to be unsafe, they will be. The counter argument are market forces, but I don't think that works here. It assumes a completely rational consumer who understands the risk they are taking. We're not that rational, and generally don't understand the risks.

We didn't always have safety regulations. Bad things happened.
Developers say OpenSocial now "sucks less," killing Facebook's app buzz
Deutschlands grosse Dienstleistungs Bewertungs Website
You're assuming the completely rational consumer, which does not exist.
So, food safety is so important that the only way to assure it is to leave it up to a gigantic monopoly with no responsibility or accountability or incentive to pursue any goal other than it's own growth?

People act as if just saying that something must be done well is tantamount to agreeing that the government should do it -- but when I look at the Fed's record, I have to argue that if something is really important to you, you should do everything in your power to keep the government as far away as possible.
+1 for the recommendation of The Omnivore's Dilemma. It's one of the best books about food and nutrition that I've ever read.
I get this comment at least once if not three times a week. It is a problem but it is a one-time problem and it does have the side benefit that no one would ever forget the brand. Being mildly controversial is actually a feature for a startup.

On the other hand, I have done three different startups in the past. My first one was a component startup and the key to success was in creating a unique socket. My second startup was a system startup and the key was in creating a permanent footprint in the network. This one is online media and I believe the key of success is in creating a unique genre.

In other words, National Enquiry was the first of a new genre (gossip in prints) and so was the movie Matrix (gung fu fighting in blacks). My hope is that LoveMyTool will be a new genre as well which is what I call "Advocacy Marketing". It is about customers and industry experts giving advice and testimonials on TOOLs that they LOVE. And it is slowly catching on.

By the way, (American) English is a very flexible and tolerate language and in some way, I am fortunate that I am not a native speaker because I don't see words and sentences, I see a canvas.
Deutschlands One World Star Alliance
Me too.

I use to like PG essays, I don't like this.

I don't remember being lied by my parent's. I used to ask my father a lot, and he as a scientist replied. Then I started reading books. They didn't hide anything.
I think either I missed the point of this post or pretty much everyone else did. A post titled "The Narcissism of Small Code Differences" can't possibly be about what the proper way to write something is, about comments, or testing and build servers.

If I read it correctly the story is supposed to illustrate the problems that can arise when developers are tempted to rewrite something just for the sake of writing it differently. This should normally get people to think about what causes said urge, but I'm guessing nobody followed that train of thought. Then in your update you brilliantly stated

"it’s about the dynamic of programmers eager to rewrite code in their own image, and the hypothesis that our [...] motivation for doing so is to emphasize the small differences between ourselves and others."

Since this is something I'm guilty of myself I would have liked to see more comments on your hypothesis and other possible reasons for this interesting phenomenon. I still don't know if I have anything intelligent to say on the topic, I'll have to give this some thought and if I get any insights I'll probably reply on my blog.
Unless, of course, he periodically changed his mind.
The Zero-Emissions One-Wheeled Motorcycle
The Uno accelerates with a simple lean and turns like a street bike on side-by-side wheels
I always leave the office for lunch, just to get away. And I bring a book.
Did you ever buy vegetables from a roadside stand or a neighbor's tomatoes? Did you rely on the existence of a government agency to ensure that they were safe to eat?

I can buy $5/lb tomatoes at Whole Foods or $2/lb tomatoes at Stop & Shop. Apparently Whole Foods perceives a market for food which isn't the lowest price possible. People will differentiate based on quality just as they do for safety. They don't need to be completely rational - they need to be minimally rational.

The point of the original article is that regulations lead to more problems - they are not just a response to, but also encourage the centralization of factory food production just like you read about in Fast Food Nation.
Not completely rational - minimally rational. And you're assuming the rational, non-corrupt government bureaucrat.
I certainly haven't been able to overcome it. If I know I have more time than necessary to complete a task I will most likely put it off and find something else to do first. The workaround for me is to either work on things with unrealistically short deadlines that leave no room for procrastination, or to work on something extremely interesting (at the expense of the third category of important but not interesting or urgent).
You're creating a false dichotomy.

Unreasonable regulations are a problem, yes. But there is a wide gulf between "let's ammend our regulations to be more reasonable" and "let's throw our regulations out entirely."
Digital Image Resources on the Deep Web
Gilligan's Web
Why would this be less than relevant to Hacker News? Put the metaphor in a context you care about.

Right now:
Are you allowed to hack code in your living room? Can your buddies come over and help you out? Can you host your business on a server in your garage? Can you use Lisp? Can you build a mashup and earn revenue from widgets other people produce?

What if government regulations told you this:
* All code must be written in government-certified office space.
* All code must be written by professional degreed programmers hired at a minimum government-defined wage.
* All code must be Java.
* Hosting must be done by government-certified shared hosting providers.
* Your application must support at least 100k simultaneous users.

Would you be happy with that sort of regulation? Would you bother with a startup? Would you accept it all on the premise that it keeps your children safe from evil unregulated websites?

Or do you prefer to have a choice?
Touchwall: Microsoft’s Inexpensive Wall-Based Multi-Touch Interface
Running Mac OS X on standard PCs
Hell, if this is the criteria for what constitutes relevant news, we may as well have articles that debate the relative merits of different world religions. After all, the debates would help shed light about how to think about our own religious wars within the hacker community.

Honestly, I have just as much of a laissez-faire libertarian philosophy as the next hacker, but there are plenty of other forums that are better suited to spreading the word. (cough reddit, cough digg)
Euroorg First German B2B Review Portal
>the problem is that no milk will be uncertified. There will be certain certifiers that will certify anything, and it will be extremely difficult for a buyer to tell the difference.

Interestingly enough, there is a substantial group of people that WANT to buy "uncertified" milk raw, straight from the cow. This is, unfortunately, illegal.
How to Focus in Life
What's Next for Data Portability & Why is Facebook Still Holding Back?
I have one personal wish which will propably be downmoded, but I try anyway. I wish the religions stuff be left in reddit and HN will remain clean from this.
For developers, the Facebook hype machine is slowing down
The Future of social networking: Mobile Phones
A work of fiction that is nonetheless far more credible than this sentence:

There was no truth to the health claims...

From the Wikipedia entry on The Jungle:

After much persuasion from Sinclair as to the seriousness of the situation, Roosevelt agreed to send two men to investigate Sinclair's claims. The men the president chose, Charles P. Neill and James B. Reynolds, had both done investigative work for Roosevelt before, and were thought trustworthy...

Even though the meat packers had forewarning and time to clean up, the conditions Neill and Reynolds observed were described as "revolting;" the only claim left unsubstantiated by the report was the sensational claim that workers who had fallen into the giant lard vats were left and sold as lard.

Obviously, Wikipedia isn't an unimpeachable source. But it's better than one guy's unsourced opinion.

I note for the record that, confronted with a historical example from last year, a contemporary work of nonfiction (Fast Food Nation), and a work of muckraking fiction from 1906, we've now become curiously focused on debunking a single famous legend from the 1906 work. Because, of course, if Sinclair stretched a fact here and there out of revolutionary fervor, adulterated cat food must be perfectly good for cats.
"and their love affair with XML."

You just gave me an idea for an excellent April's Fools prank.
Palmist: A Handy Tool for Finding and Fixing MySQL Bottlenecks in Rails
Google Widget factors current time (based on XKCD comic)
Desk Jockeys: Exercise!
Based on http://xkcd.com/247/
Thanks for the enlightenment. I never thought about that. I believe something that is deeply ingrained in our mind should have a reason.

Having felt in love when I wanted to work I can understand what you say. Love-sex actives some area in our mind, and nothing is more important in that moment.
great now you can "View content space-tially organized in a infinite canvas paradigm" also "move thru content in a orgranic fashion"

Great! now if only we could drop the bull shit terminology.

and don't forget their "envisioning team" (chow was doing this with the wii almost a year ago)
Yes, Steele is quite a character. I've been starting to get quite interested in Fortress as a language. I am thinking of becoming an active participant.
Call me pedantic, but doesn't it have two wheels?

What advantages does this have over a standard bicycle? Is it solving a problem that doesn't exist?
One of the most useful diet-related facts I've learned is that it takes about 15 minutes for the "I'm full" signal to propagate from your stomach to your brain. Of course, I'm not so consistent at putting this knowledge into practice....
Sure, if you don't mind the smell from the nuclear-powered mercury reclamation plant that I'm putting up next door.

Sorry about the noise, BTW, but the lot on the other side of yours is the perfect location for our CEO's private helipad.

(Incidentally, if you were really asking me about a shed, and not merely trying to bait us onto some slippery slope to anarchy... I rather like small cottages and would like to put one up myself. So I'd be pretty sympathetic at your zoning board meeting.

Ultimately, I'm guessing that zoning boards exist only because people were historically unwilling to just ask their neighbors first and abide by their preferences. And zoning boards can still be overridden if enough of your neighbors agree. It's called a "variance".)
The real question is, has it really made life easier for a family of four on the streets? The one thing that the article doesn't mention is the fact that it most likely does not meet european (not indian) emission standards.

Not that they shouldn't be applauded for what they've achieved - but imagine a country of over a billion people with easy access to a car that adds to the already over-crowded roads and burns a bigger hole in the ozone layer. Not that great anymore.
Grosses Deutsches Soziales Dienstleistungs Bewertungs Portal
Dash.net Releases Public API
It's easy to forget how fortunate we are to be in an industry in which good working conditions are positively correlated with good results. What a sobering reminder.
Lisp is as good as you are good at programming language design. Otherwise Lisp will result in an incomprehensible code.
The fact is there are not so many good language designers.
You're also not buying, you're leasing your land from the government. If you fail to pay your lease fees, the government will evict you and lease the land to someone else.

Yes they call it "taxes and zoning rules" but in practice it simply operates as a landlord charging rent and telling the tenant what they are and are not allowed to do with the landlord's property. If it walks like a duck...
of course they're going to say it won't destroy the world because if it does, it's like a "get out of jail free" card. they can't be held accountable, so there is no downside! :-)
Is HTML a Humane Markup Language?
Perhaps. But the problem is that once reasonable regulations exist, they inevitably become unreasonable. No bureaucrat or agency wants to be the one who said no to the incremental regulation which would save just one more child despite the many who might benefit from doing nothing.
How To Pick A Good Domain Name
Chasing Ghosts
External Battery Adds up to 10 Hours to MacBook Air
I think its a little Ego-heavy for you to think companies should care about your .00000000001% of the internet traffic. Hitwise already gives ISP data about searches being conducted.

- just saying not a business, at least not in my mind.
Absolutely. Take it from Simon Willison, who doesn't get any more advanced when it comes to JavaScript:

http://simonwillison.net/2007/Aug/15/jquery/
"All I could think about was going back to my corporate job, where I did just about the same thing, day after day"

Many of us have had the same revelation: Is this the way I want to spend the one life that I have? Powerful incentive, indeed.
I don't expect people to do the 'right thing.' For starters, because we don't know what the 'right thing' is.

Look at it this way: 99% of everything men have ever know has been wrong. All scientific theories (except the current ones) have been proven wrong. And, at every point in history, men who thought the current theories were wrong were labeled heretics or morons. There were men who wouldn't let themselves be 'bled' 200 years ago and men who won't undergo chemo today. And that is their choice.

I think a lot of people make stupid choices, but if it only harms themselves, I say let them. Hell, I would have thought some of Bill Gates' decisions early in Microsoft's history were wrong, but that goes to show what I know.

Every person should be allowed to make their own decisions (and live with the consequences of thereof).

If someone believes in homeopathy or the new age panacea du jour over real medicine, let them. If they die because they made the wrong choice, it's a shame, but at least they died free men.
I honestly never feel that I was lied to about swearing.

When I was a very young kid, 3rd or 4th grade, my
Father told me that there was nothing wrong with
swearing...but that I shouldn't do it in front of my my Mother.

My grade school teacher caught me swearing and she
told me the same thing.

It is a respect thing, a culture thing. You don't
swear in front of your mother for the same reason you
don't take your dick out in public: It's considered impolite.
It's not a startup. It has been made for fun, although it may evolve into something else.
They call 'em session beers for a reason.

(He says, surrounded by empty cans of Old Style ($5.99 the 12-pack) and the husks of half-written late-night defuns.)
I would argue that this is trolling/linkbait and not much more. And that's isn't coming out of ignorance of Philip's writings, I've read most (all) of his stuff and once bought extra copies of Philip and Alex's Guide to give away as gifts.
1. "has it really made life easier for a family of four on the streets?". It absolutely will, how can you have any doubt on that. Ask any family of 4 if they are better of riding a car than scrambling onto a scooter.

2. "According to Tata, the Nano complies with Bharat Stage-III and Euro-IV emission standards" (From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tata_Nano)

3. "The Nano will also replace many overloaded and worn-out two-stroke polluting vehicles, both two and three-wheeled." - again from the wikipedia.

However if the ozone is what you really care about, how about starting by dumping the SUV's for smaller cars in developed nations.
But many of these choices lead to things which are destructive to others. For example, lots of people are resisting vaccination despite overwhelming scientific evidence that there is no link between autism and vaccination. These people let their children rely on the herd immunity of the first world.

If everyone followed this strategy, many people would die as a consequence of even a relatively small segment of the population's choice. At some point, your freedom ends and another's begins. Drawing that line is really hard, especially when some people are frantically trying to give it up and others are frantically taking it for personal gain.

Of course, not all cases are equal.
Not a bad guide. I run Mac OS X 10.5.2 on my Dell XPS M1330 with (almost) no issues. It's my primary OS, and I use VMWare Fusion to boot Vista.
If you want further guides and a great OSx86 community, try the forums at insanelymac.com
I don't know anything about "Fast Food Nation." I do know a little about Upton Sinclair. I can only argue with what I know.

Edit: You are right, it does seem that Wikipedia with some of my claims, but backs up the my points about the real focus and Sinclair's novel and it's real impact.

Either way, I prefer transparency to regulation.
Agree that for small collections of data - but imagine the logs on TechCrunch? Or a site that is in between those two? That data is very unique and very qualified. The interesting part is less how relevant the data is - but more how it has never been available before...
NASA Announcement of "Success of Long Galactic Hunt": supernova remains
I believe the main point was the zero-emissions.
Marc Andreessen dings Google's Friend Connect
In Wisconsin there was a bit of a brouhaha over the practice of "time-sharing" dairy cows. You see, while it's illegal to sell unprocessed milk, the owner of a cow is permitted to drink the raw milk.

Aha, found a link:

http://www.realmilk.com/milk-direct-program.html

Straight from the horse's... er, cow's... mouth.
Advantages listed in the article are that they take up less space and are easier to maneuver which are good things for crowded cities.
The SaaS Approach to Web Site Vulnerability Management
Didn't know about #2 above - I completely agree, about dumping SUVs for mass transit, though.
Not true. Wouldn't people who chose to get vaccinated live, and those who don't would die?

That sounds like the tragedy of the commons.
Even not all startup solve a problem. They may be a value addition or for fun.
Workin' at the Internet Cafe: Laptop Dilemma
For me, I think the biggest part of her article that rang true was the "Fear" point. Fear of losing security (especially with a family, mortgage, etc.). The idealism over realism argument, which is probably false in today's economy, but affects those who are natural born worriers nonetheless.

But, I could totally change my mind tomorrow.
Depends on your market. If you ever get to the point where you need to scale your software significantly, you will have people throwing money at you, and you can hire good people. Till then, russian hackers do an excellent job at SQL optimisation.
I hate the city(living)too.I live in a eurpean suburb-village, PG talks about american suburbs. Every person I know from america tells me the same America lacks social spaces. Solution is not city center through.

Cities are unnatural,noise,too much people,stress. I like going into cities when I need, but not living.