skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure this phrase is actually worth using in any guise, especially given that the people using the "correct" meaning are often not using the even more pedantic correct meaning. Many logic books today use "beg the question" as synonymous with "circular reasoning" (some equate them explicitly), but there traditionally were subtle differences. Aristotle and medieval logicians considered circular reasoning to be a formal fallacy, presenting what appears to be a syllogism but is actually not a valid one. But they considered begging the question to be more of an informal fallacy, where an arguer has relied on assumptions that would be unreasonably large to grant, or are too similar to the conclusions, for the argument as a whole to be considered a legitimate or interesting demonstration of the point.

In medieval debating, it was sort of an out-of-bounds request more than a fallacy. The difference between on the one hand, putting forth a chain of reasoning that is explicitly circular (and thus fallacious), and on the other hand, asking your opponent to concede a point that, perhaps non-obviously, turns out to be equivalent to what you were arguing for, or at least, more subjectively, concedes too much of the way to your goal. That's not fallacious, because if they concede the point directly, or concede something that amounts to 80% of your point, your conclusion might correctly follow from it, and you have a proper syllogism, where you start with assumptions that all sides agreed on, and through valid reasoning arrive at your result. But it's in some sense cheating at debate, because you've tricked them into conceding the point, rather than having demonstrated the point.

(One reason it's subjective and informal is that you're effectively saying that demonstrating B from A is unreasonable, because A already contains too much of B, such that anyone who granted assumption A would in effect have already granted conclusion B, making the argument pointless. But in a strict sense, that's always true with any argument: anyone who grants any set of assumptions is always implicitly granting all conclusions that follow from those assumptions. So what counts as an unreasonable assumption that gives away too much of the conclusion is an outside-of-logic issue.)

For any of these meanings, I personally avoid the phrase. If you want the formal circular-reasoning fallacy, you can just say "circular reasoning", and if you want "raises the question", you can say that, or something similar. If you want the meaning I've described above, it's a bit trickier, but you probably will have to explain it anyway using more words, since it's the least common of the three meanings today (but maybe "circular reasoning" will work for that meaning too, in an informal sense of not being strictly circular, but maybe morally equivalent to a circular argument).
> the business generates around 2 million a year (CAD) in profits,

Are you serious? In Canada? Why in god's name would you sell this? Hire someone to do the dirty work for 50K and live off the rest until you grow old and gray.

Why would you even think otherwise?
Ross had already left EDS before I started there, and I started there a lifetime ago, though I've met both Ross Sr. & Jr. through my father's work at Perot Systems (now part of Dell). When I was a 14 year old kid interning there, I didn't quite understand why people paid EDS $500/hour to do IT work. Now that I'm a 31 year old entrepreneur, I now understand why people pay EDS $500/hour to do IT work. In the truest sense of the term, it's ignorance.
A few years ago I was on a school trip, and we were flying back to the US from London. The security at the airport asked me if I minded going through a new type of scanner with a shorter line. The airport was doing a test run of the same kind of backscatter machine. Everyone likes short lines, so I agreed. After the scan was over, the security showed me the scan of my backside. It was literally an inverted naked picture of my ass. They looked at the scan of the frontside, but didn't show it to me. I wasn't expecting anything like this, because the technology was so new and it hadn't been widely publicized. It was really embarrassing to think that I had just been practically strip searched.

That image is a fake, but it's not very far from the truth.
Speaking of tattoos – Interview with Micah Baldwin
"The more poor, the more financial aid is available".
Why isn't everyone able to go to an ivy league school then? Your statement implies that by being poor, you get lots of free money, which is basically saying there's nothing below the middle class. I think _that_ is not how it works.

Also, what if you don't want just "the new replacement for a high school degree"? My point exactly: why should you have to shoot for a lower degree because you're poor?
You've ideally got two independent flows occurring. Aim them in the same place... preferably not in your pants.
I count myself lucky to know Micah. He is a genuinely inspirational guy, and his blog learntoduck.com is great too.
I haven't sat on a toilet in years. I spend less time in the rest room and I've also got some good quad muscles to show for it.
Ask HN: Looking for Iphone play-testers
Hi guy's,
I'm wrapping up the beta of my first commercial Iphone game, and I'm looking for good play-testers.

It's a deceitful little game - where you're asked to try and memorize the details of a beautiful photo while being interrupted by having to solve simple puzzles that are thrown at your face, thus making you forget what you just memorized in the first place.

Once the puzzles are completed, you will be asked a question regarding some detail you saw on the photo... answer correctly and you'll proceed to the next level.
Answer incorrectly, and you'll go back one level.
Two mistakes in a row equals being Puzzle Punished! (e.g back to level 1)

I doubt anyone will be able to complete this game though xD

Here is an image of the game:
http://createdbythelittleguy.com/puzzle_punish.jpg

To sign up - just send me your Unique Device ID (http://www.innerfence.com/howto/find-iphone-unique-device-identifier-udid) to

van.esca[at]hotmail[DOT]com
and you'll receive the beta by the end of this week in your mailBox, with your name in the credits.
Touch interface and CAD has been a powerful combination for a long time. When I work in simulation, Wacom tablets (while not traditional touch) where used extensively in both 2D and 3D work. I think the iPad is the huge motivator for the porting work. If they don't get there they could loose a whole market segment to an upstart.
I wonder if the US Gov funding model changed to one where the universities were given money to one where the students were given/loaned money to give to the university of their choice. The difference could be compared to inner-city school choice voucher programs.
+1 for monofur!
Thanks for the comment, good point actually. Market experience is exactly what I'm looking for. Plus some sales skills I guess. I cannot call potential customers and ask to try my product - it's not my best suit. Also I think that no one should start a business alone (especially his/her first business).

MBA itself does not give you the skills and most importantly experience.
Which is to say you haven't read The Pragmatic Programmer? I highly, highly recommend it. I bought my first copy about 8 years ago, and pull it off the shelf once a year or so to freshen up. I always learn something new every time I do.
The filed complaint:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/36371667/i2-v-palantir-080910

For those not in the know, i2 is the maker of what's essentially the Microsoft word of this particular industry. They're the defacto standard.

i2 is also well known for being insanely hard to work with both with customers as well as by system integrators. Palantir has been vacuuming up a lot of their business recently and they're really starting to get kicked out of some traditional spaces they normally have a safe monopoly in.

One way that's being done is through interoperability with i2's products. Folks in the community have long wondered how that was done since i2 generally safeguards their file specifications pretty tightly and is very careful about who they license to. The assumption was that Palantir, with the huge resources at their disposal simply put a team on it to reverse engineer it.

This suit is largely about this if I understand correctly and the claim is that Palantir didn't reverse engineer it, but instead used an illegally licensed SDK, purchased through a shell company setup by a Palantir employee in order to trick i2 into licensing their SDK to a competitor when they had no intention of doing so.

Actually, the whole scheme sounds like a great corporate espionage demo for both company's products.
My experience was similar. We tended to receive implementation directives that frequently contradicted the functional requirements, and when we requested clarification got no response. The government tended to make exceedingly expensive purchases based on politics (my guess is that there were kickbacks involved) that were entirely inappropriate for the project, yet we had to use them. And our advice rarely had any effect on decisions, as far as I could tell.

So far, I've only worked for one organization that was genuinely more convoluted, irrational, and technologically backward than the government... and that was amazon.
The great thing about OAuth is that you can revoke access after the fact. At least Greplin doesn't ask for your username and password when it's not necessary.
The Pundits are Quiet-Facebook Makes Money
Agreed with johng.

Further, don't think about scaling yet. Seriously. You should be able to scale to thousands of users without much thought, if you're using a reasonable shared provider.
I think Oracle is oriented toward selling to businesses that use technology the way tech startups use office furniture.

We don't want to take apart our office furniture and make it work more efficiently, or modify it and resell it to other businesses as part of a breakthrough interior decorating package. We want to sit on it and put our laptops on it and use it to get the other "real" work done.

So if you're in the road construction business and you need a HR system or a procurement system or whatever, you call some pricey consultants who call Oracle and you tell your accounting people to explain the problem and ask them how much its going to cost and you tell your IT department and accounting to spec it and do it and you fire them if it's not all done in six months and go back to your real work which is managing your highway building project out in Tallahassee.
Found the answer to my own question: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilets_in_Japan#Squat_toilet

Turns out, you only pull your pants down to your knees, so the area between your feet is unobstructed for peeing.
So you want to make a Command Line Interface
There was a story recently (don't remember which) that sparked a discussion about indexing all the sites I've ever visited. In other words, provide me with a browser history search that didn't suck, in that if I remember looking at some article a few months ago, I should be able to find it pretty easily.

I bring this up because I think this is a great concept, and would be a great tie-in service to (what I understand of) Greplin. That would make it "search for anything you're supposed to know, we'll find it", which to me sounds really cool.

Edit: So your tagline is "the search bar for your life", which fits what I was talking about above even better.

A note from a quick look at your site: the text under the second column ("Greplin works with nearly every computer, browser and mobile device in the market.") is badly aligned, and seems to "crash into" the text on the last column. Looks really bad and makes it hard to read, so you might want to fix it (I'm using Chrome).

Secondly, congrats! Always happy to hear about other Israelis succeeding. Is there any way I can get in touch with you? I'm applying to YC, and would appreciate any advice you have about dealing with visas/etc.
They seriously didn't have v4 in beta long enough. I got accepted to the beta a little while back and it had lots of issues even then with the broken axle and other errors. For a change that substantial, they really should have had a very long beta period where they slowly brought people in.

I was shocked when I heard it was going live because I knew from the beta that it wasn't even close to ready.
Apple to Provide Live Video Streaming of September 1 Event
Yes, and like kittens, there's no such thing as a free one ;)

I love the idea, I really wish we had the time to build something like that. I'd be a user too.
There is something else to through into the argument- flexibility.

The use of western toilets reduces our ability to reach the full squat position and some reckon this is why pulled hamstrings and achilles injuries are more common.

When western people squat, we tend to go up on our toes to reach full depth due to our inflexibility gained from using toilets.

This inflexibility changes the way we do things- when a western adult wants to pick up something from the floor they bend over at the hip. Watch a young child that has recently started to walk do it- they do a full squat with their heals on the ground!
It's an unfortunate side-effect. I wonder if Disqus could circumvent this by using a hashchange-type trick (referencing Ben Alman's BBQ jQuery addon).
Thanks! I'll incorporate
Open source is the answer to a different question.

The article is talking about configuring networks, providing hardware, providing computer management services, etc. The software involved in the services that are being discussed is pretty incidental, the way IBM's use of linux is pretty incidental to what IBM sells.

As one of the articles primary examples, the Navy does not have the network diagrams and configuration information for their network. Even if they used open source routers, they currently do not have the information they would need to configure those routers.
Check out Fever: http://feedafever.com/
This is more of a touchy-feely paranoia thing

I find it funny how feeling wary about giving out all your passwords to some startup company is considered "paranoia" nowadays.
Hga is right about the vast sums of financial aid being given to those with low family income by top schools. Everyone isn't going to an Ivy league school because (1) clearly there aren't enough spaces, and (2) everyone isn't admitted. We could discuss the structural features that contribute to 1 and 2 (mostly 2). But where I think we should be able to find agreement is that those who are admitted are cared for quite well. You might be surprised at how many of them did indeed qualify for, and receive, need-based aid.
You know, this is an idea I had too, and then sat on (much like the author describes). Not Oregato, but a hub for sharing ideas and generating new software projects; I have a tonne of things I'd like to implement, and nowhere near enough time to make them.

Some sort of centralised idea repository (a wiki is almost fit for purpose, but makes it hard to categorise, rank and index ideas) where anyone can throw their thoughts for others to comment on, and still others to pick up, would be awesome.
> reddit may not be profitable.

Considering they just had to beg for donations...
Can't you just lean forward on the toilet to achieve the same result?
Inside a toxic hellhole
I think you're selling yourself short if you believe you "can't sell it neither to customers nor to VC's".

I expect selling to VCs requires a certain amount of posturing and hubris but doing some Customer Development should be possible for anyone. Customer Development is not sales. You might find it difficult at first but when you realise you're offering something of value to someone it feels a lot better.

Unless you can reveal what market you're in, the advice you get here is going to be pretty generic. If we knew that you were interested in $FOO then a few folks might know about $FOO meetups or conferences that you could attend. Also, bear in mind that you will still need some sales skills to convince a someone to join you.
I remember really becoming excited about memristors after reading this post a while back on HN: http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/5/5/how-will-memristors...
For what it's worth, the Priority Inbox is supposed to be rolled out to Apps users at the same time as the general rollout in the next week.
Blackberry Legacy Series
* A large percentage of Twitter accounts are inactive, with about 25% of accounts having no followers and about 40% of accounts having never sent a single Tweet.
* About 80% of all Twitter users have tweeted fewer than ten times.
* Only about 17% of registered Twitter accounts sent a Tweet in December 2009, an all-time-low.
Innovation is what happens when you take the friction out of a community.
Tony Wright (webwright) on the Biggest Startup Lie
It's still used this way by contemporary philosophers, though oddly I've mostly seen it used in an adjectival form--"this argument is question-begging".

It's good practice in philosophy, because philosophers are trying to start from one (preferably obvious and uncontroversial) set of assumptions and derive their way to a (preferably astonishing and counterintuitive) conclusion. Starting from a cleverly worded re-statement of something your conclusion trivially follows from and ending up at your conclusion isn't very useful to philosophers.
> how the fuck did Jonathan Schwartz allow the selling of Sun to a company who's culture is so different?

I'm sure the millions of dollars he got helped him make the decision.
There's a difference between "not profitable" and "not profitable enough."
six subjects had their rectums filled with a contrast solution and then released the fluid from a squatting or a sitting position while being filmed with X-ray video.

yikes.
It could be an option, if you scroll to the bottom its to gain credibility and to start something even bigger, nothing else really.
Gmail promo for Priority Inbox creeps out Chrome users
Only Tdot :)
It has been a while (decade?) since I went to OOW. But as I recall I had no trouble finding technical sessions, if not at a level to engage Tim Bray. Many were about making your database run faster & better; some about using Oracle's favored tools of the moment (BC4J, possibly still some client-server stuff).
>>Debuggers help you check your assumptions. They're a very useful tool for this - more so than many people who say "I prefer printf" realise.

A long time ago, I used debuggers and printf.

For years, I've instead added tests to checks my assumptions -- and I run the tests multiple times an hour.

(I still printf since it works well with the tests if I run a subset of them.)

(Edit: This was for when I write code, not working with others.)
Full SICP Course Lectures [video]
Haha, I was actually wondering about this. I assumed it was just a video that started playing in the background, but I wasn't able to find it. Nice to know what it actually was.
Their advertisement. It's an implicit promise.

Yes, some people go because they want to expand their horizons, learn more about the world, network, make friends. However most people go to be able to eventually get a job.
I was told once that in China, people squat a lot more than in the West. Both for toilet use, but also just for "sitting down" somewhere.

Example: I was told that upon seeing a bench, whereas westerners would normally sit on it, a Chinese person will squat on it. This supposedly also makes their legs much stronger.

Can anyone confirm this?
To the question of why it was sold to a company with such a vastly different culture.

Because it does not matter to the shareholders what kind of culture Oracle has. The only metric that mattered was how much money Oracle was willing to pay for Sun vs another bidder.

Using any other criteria would just launch a nasty shareholder lawsuit against Sun's soon to be departed management...
I don't doubt a lot of money goes into allowing some people into ivy league schools. But why should that counterbalance the fact that if you're born poor then chances are you won't go to college, especially a good one?
In the end, some especially gifted, smart or hard-working kids will make it, sure. But they'll be competing for the same financial aid. Why should those have to work any harder than the rest?
This is a little pedantic, but "begs the question" doesn't really mean "raises the question" even literally. It sounds weird to say that someone "begs a rebuke" when they really deserve a rebuke. Even more literally, you don't say that someone on the street "begs a dollar" -- they beg for a dollar. Just as you said, some situations beg for those questions to be asked (or perhaps they beg that they be asked); they don't simply beg them.
> What strikes me is ... how the fuck did Jonathan Schwartz allow the selling of Sun to a company who's culture is so different?

What makes you think he had a choice. The CEO isn't the only one, who gets to decide where a company is sold to. Infact his/her vote often counts for very little.
It does not beg but it does demand the question, Why should I care that much?

I've essentially given up on "problematic" and "actionable"...
PUMA Speed Cat 2.9
The market I'm going to is e-commerce. The application would create some certain benefits for e-commerce owners. So it's B2B.

I guess I could try doing everything on my own, but due to some circumstances I really need a partner. I'd rather not convince anybody to join me. Maybe it's naive, but I think if a person believes in the idea and the skills I have - he/she will want to join me without any persuasion.

I'm also OK to join somebody if he/she has an idea I would be interested to work on. I realize that my idea could be just a piece of crap and I did not realize it yet.
I'm still holding out for the Three Seashells toilet.
It is sadly quite possible to get things through the xray machine... all it takes is forgetfulness on your part when packing carry-on, and inattentiveness on the part of the operator. Now, I didn't count on it happening a second time on the same trip, and sent the offending item home by USPS, but uh, yeah.

I'm all for security in airports - and I'm not even particularly bothered by the idea of naked pictures floating around - but I am completely uninterested in a security blanket. If stuff slips through so easily by accident, how hard can it be for a determined person? :(
There have been many attempts to articulate the benefits of Lisp-based languages before, but most of these attempts seem to end in futility.

Really? I think someone even wrote a whole book that's mostly about macros, embedded languages and so on.

http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html
Experiences with SIP libraries?
I wish to do a little experimenting with VOIP connections to an SIP trunking service. A project called Opal looks promising. Does anybody have comments on experience with such tools?
This comic strip might be one of the most insightful contributions to the topic: http://ncomment.com/blog/
I'd argue that you really don't realize how harsh it is until you're one of those street people. Don't underestimate experience.
I appreciate the call to find the exact line of code that is causing the problem. I've done a fair number of code reviews where there was a bug, and it was "fixed", but no one knew why. The developer had simply kept changing things until the problem seemed to go away. That would mark the bug as closed, but it always seemed to show up again some months later in a new guise. These days I'm a terrible nuisance as I always want to know why the bug was happening. In my experience it's not enough to "fix" the bug you really do need to understand why it was happening in the first place, which is something that not all programmers do.