skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The challenge I gave you was to find any specific statement I made about painting that he has shown to be false. It's a disingenous trick to claim that the thesis of the essay is implicitly a statement about painting. Not that he has even refuted that. But put that point aside for the time being, and let's return to my original challenge, which I hope is clear now. Find one specific sentence or series of sentences I wrote about painting that he has shown to be false.

If my understanding of painting is "superficial," I should have made lots of mistakes, right? So let's have one.
Comments on 'Ask HN' (self) submissions that are directed to your question now show up on your reply feed.
Right. We all know that Carl Sagan, as well as most musicians, have horrible memories and suck at learning because drug use fried their brain. Marijuana doesn't impair learning. Stupidity (like this study) impairs learning.

Marijuana modulates the way your short term memory works. It does not impair long term memory or recall. The effects of marijuana on short term memory may contribute to creativity by breaking down cognitive structures and creating a space for new concepts to plug into parts of the dissolving short term memories.

If drugs are so harmful, why are they winning the drug war?
The 15 Most Influential Social Media Websites (Mathematically Ranked)
So my opinion is not one that many people necessarily agree with.

Good. China needs to be knocked back a couple of pegs. We have been looking at nearly 1/6th of the population of the world controlled by an incredibly repressive regime and most of their citizens aren't even aware of how restricted they are.

I also look at this from the perspective of an engineer. How in the history of the world did we ever get to a point where it was cheaper to ship parts from the U.S. to China for assembly and then back to the U.S. than to do all of the manufacture here at home? The shear amount of energy that has been expended has been ridiculous.

All of the cheap cash inflow into China has fueled the massive growth of very inefficient coal plants throughout the country by the thousands. The people in China have energy needs, but because of the disregard and corruption of the government they have been polluting themselves in the headlong rush to catch up to the Western world.

The system of global trade that has emerged over the last 20-30 years is an extremely inefficient system that needs to undergo some serious refactoring. This will result in some major temporary economic disruption across the world, but we'll all be better for it in the end.
ELua - boot directly into Lua
Ubuntu server team seeks advice on supporting rails in their next release
Coincidentally I'm also a scientist who was brought up in Australia and has spent the last two and a half years in the US, so I can see we're coming at it from similar perspectives.

And actually I don't think that fearmongering (especially about pedophilia) is any more prominent in the US than in Australia, though I can't commend on Holland, where I wouldn't be surprised if it's less (since it's over-the-top in both Australia and the US).

You're right, if we distinguish between interaction and friendship there's nothing creepy about a 14-year-old interacting with a grown scientist. I may have misinterpreted your original comment.
It worked, no? That's not their main point, but it never hurts to market a bit. Sneaky little bastards.
A couple years ago my wife thought she'd do an April Fool's joke for her wedding wiki. I convinced her to work in the word "Mesothelioma" just to see what Google Adsense did (please don't click on the ads! seriously.):

http://www.applebride.com/pages/Potentially_dangerous_guests
Non-software solution: Try proofreading backwards.
In my opinion, the writing style used to pad papers about college football are used by a majority of bloggers. That is my opinion.
or e) the drivel in this study is an example of winning at propaganda by getting people sucked into superficial debates over the wrong questions, which are formulated to stick in peoples heads on repeated hearing.

Get them asking the wrong questions and the answers don't matter. The assumption coded into the question matters. "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?" "Does your drunk driving put your two kids at equal risk?"
Agreed. BTW, multiple desktops were around since before Linux. Unix workstations had them since the late '80s or so.
Indeed, there's a real tension there between treating test as "real" code and letting them be separate. You end up getting bitten both ways, and we've gotten hit by all of them. Things can't all work the same, since if TestA and TestB share a common setup routine or helper and TestC comes along and needs to tweak that, you don't want it to hose TestA and TestB. On the other hand, if you have 1 production implementation of some interface and 50 different test mocks, you're in huge trouble if you need to change that interface, and life will be better if the tests either use the real implementation or all share a single mock (though even then there's a danger in the mock diverging from the main interface).

There's a similar problem with tests using their own code paths to set things up instead of the normal system path. For example, suppose you're testing a method that takes a User object. In your production system, users might only be created in a certain way, they might have certain fields required, they might have sub-objects attached to them, the database might enforce nullability or fk constraints, there might be insert callbacks in the code or in the DB, etc. If you try to just hack up a User in memory and pass it to the test method outside of the normal creation path, your test User object might differ in important ways from your actual User objects in production. So changes in the production code, for example assuming a field isn't null or relying on a default value, might cause the tests to break erroneously even though the app is fine. Then you have to find all the places you create Users in tests and fix them, or try to centralize things so you only have to fix them in one place.

Some of those problems can be partially avoided by proper decomposition and decoupling of the code, though oftentimes you have to have the foresight to do that before the tests get out of hand (and having the tests get out of hand is a good canary in the coal mine that your code is in trouble).

We actually went all the way to one extreme whereby we run our tests in the production environment as much as we can and avoid mocks and stubs; we're a Java servlet app (kinda the only way to do enterprise software these days, unfortunately), so we start up a Jetty server, an H2 database in memory, and go through the normal server-startup sequence before running most unit tests, which at least eliminates the test setup problem and a lot of the test/production divergence. It comes at a huge cost in terms of local test execution times, unfortunately.
Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter.
Blogs are obscure compared to the NYT, though.
How Testing The VC Market Can Lead To An Investment: Beginning Due Diligence
One thing I've wondered: why aren't there more factories in Mexico? With low wages, high unemployment, semi-skilled workers, lax environmental laws and easy access to the world's largest market it would seem to be an ideal place to outsource manufacturing to. What does China have that Mexico doesn't?
there are already attacks on this system.

i have no insider knowledge of this site, other than i keep my "showdead" parameter turned on. we get quite a few spammy submissions and comments, most of which are killed within seconds. most of this must be automated, there's no way the editors can be patrolling the place 24 hours a day.
I like the concept. The AIR desktop version feels a little sluggish. Sometimes when I drag widgets onto the canvas, the app doesn't add them to the page. Don't care for the horizontally-scrolling widget browser too much - it's clunky. The widget search box helps mitigate this, but we shouldn't have to rely on it for lack of a better system. I like how easy it is to customize widget content.
ctor
try {
dostuff
} catch 1 {
blahblah
} catch 2 {
aoeuaoeuaoeu
} finally {
dtor
}
//why not put the dtor here and just leave off the finally block completely?
You should read a book called The Genesis of Artistic Creativity, by Michael Fitzgerald. The thing that you are talking about that many great hackers and painters have in common is a high functioning subtype of aspergers syndrome. The personality traits and drive to create you admire are manifestations of an "Autistic Superego" outlined by Fitzgerald in his book.

Thinking in images is a skill that relies on a mechanical-mathematical mind. In painters, they use this skill to paint, in hackers, they use it to architect complicated systems which they hold in their heads while they code. In both these cases, it's the same neurological mechanism underlying the ability you admire.

Your insight that painters and hackers is fundementally correct, and also deeper then 98% of what I have read about the hacker culture. If you want to explore it deeper, from a psychological and sociological point of view, reading Fitzgerald's book is the place to start.
Heh, I actually tried to look at the ads, but I couldn't figure out how to get Firefox to display them. I disabled AdBlock and NoScript and still nothing.

Anyway, I am amused that I no longer know how to see ads even if I want to see them.
How Reddit is Flirting With The Future of Social News
Sorry, Paul. I read your essay and his as essays, not as series of independent sentences to be reviewed like lines of C in a group code review. I therefore reject the premise that I am somehow obligated to find an individual statement in it that is provably false.

Next, since you wrote the essay and not me, you're clearly in a position to dictate what the essay "is about". Clearly, both me and your critic read it as being "about" the connection between hackers and painters. I muster as evidence the facts that:

* The essay was titled "Hackers and Painters"

* The essay said there was an interesting connection between hackers and painters in the topic sentence of the lead graf.

* Of the 89 grafs in the essay, 26 have as their topic the connection between programming and painting.

* Of the 17 sections in the essay, 10 of them have as their thesis statement either a specific connection between programming and painting, or an explanation of why that connection is important.

If you want to argue that your essay is "about" something other than painting, there's not much I can about that other than to complain about unfairness. I'd rather not.

As to whether your understanding of painting is superficial, I certainly wouldn't know. But your critic repeatedly and explicitly says it is, again with evidence. Which of his arguments ring false to you? You might start with his footnotes.
Twitter buys Summize -- or not?
And the sky is often blue. What's your point? You said "semi-obscure blog". bOING bOING is not an obscure blog.
Very useful look at the dynamics of the social news business. This sector had a lot of activity last year, but seems to have slowed down (in terms of new startups popping up). But, that could just be me.

By the way, if any YC hacker types are in the Cambridge, MA area and want to work on a cool social news app (reddit-like, but different), drop me a note. http://OnStartups.com
You should give it a shot. It does give you more power than a traditional IDE. The as-you-type search thing is genius usability for a tool like this and I'd expect to see it in Visio and the like as soon as they see how well it works.

Innovation often requires iteration and that's exactly what this is good at doing.
I'm a TDD fanatic, but I abandon unit tests when writing exploratory code. The whole point when exploring is just to try ideas and follow inspirations. Unit testing forces you to stop every couple of minutes to think things through carefully and lock in what you've got. It messes up the exploratory flow.
Twitter to buy Summize.com
Population density.
Is Microsoft spamming websites to boost its numbers?
I've seen quite a lot of evasions when I asked people to get specific, but this is definitely the longest.

I didn't ask you to find a passage that's provably false, just any specific statement I made that you feel he's refuted. It's a red herring to suggest that simply because I ask you for evidence, I'm somehow claiming that essays work like math.

You're not of course obligated to provide evidence, when asked for it, but most people on forums do so voluntarily in order to preserve their credibility.
Segway CTO Joins Apple: The Beginning Of The Jobs Transition?
Well, that settles it. Mesothelioma market, here I come!
By "messenger" I refer to myself (bringing the study to the attention of this thread's readers), it seems that I failed in communicating my point clearly - I'm quite sure you don't imply that I was paid to write this comment:)
I admit that it would be better to add 'according to this study' (although there are more, one of them is cited in the article in my link).
they are blocks of code
In rats. And nerve cells in a dish. And that's only the neural firing patterns.

There isn't any actual proof that this HAS a detrimental effect. Did they give THC to the rats and then ask them to memorize some information, then quiz them later?

Hell, do that to a few users of cannabis. Then, perhaps, real results will be forthcoming.

Neuroscience is still very new, and a lot of things are ascribed without true understanding, to various actions within the brain. Just take a look at the farce of fMRIs, for instance.
Knowing how to change directories isn't really evidence of "linux savvy", considering the command is the same in Linux, Unix, and Windows.

As for multiple-monitor support, your hardware vendor will often have a GUI configurator just like they provide for Windows. ATI's is called Catalyst Control.
China has enormous manufacturing "support system": they have (or have had) plenty of cheap electricity, cheap oil and other resources - they're right next to Russia with its vast supplies of everything. Add to that cheap transportation (railroad) reaching huge European market, while still serving Asian market as well.

Moreover, Chinese labor is still cheaper than anything in Latin America. Did I also mention that ecology constraints in China are close to non-existent?

Mexico doesn't have the scale of China nor Chinese location: it probably is better suited for US market but that's about it.
Your life sounds like it sucks because you did not use the consciousness altering properties of drugs to decide how to meet life on it's own terms and do your work here on earth. Doing drugs while you are young is a great way to avoid becoming this bitter later in life.

You remind me of a slightly more evolved version of those 90 year olds who hate anyone who isn't as repressed and miserable then they are. So you made choices according to the conventional wisdom of your time, your life sucks as a result, and you're getting more and more trapped in your shitty, repeating cycle as the time to get out gets smaller and smaller. You're going to die (tick tock, tick tock), and instead of doing all the unimagined cool stuff you would of dreamed up while using drugs responsibly, you're going to waste all of this beautiful gift that is our fleeting life doing stuff you hate. Each day, you feel it coming, and go through it anyway.

And, to top it off, when you die, you'll think your ascending into heaven, and God, a black woman, will meet you at the gate with dreads and a gold and green cap, and a blunt with 4 grams of hydro in a swisher sweet wrapper, and say "I put all those drugs all over the planet so you could use them to help you be creative enough to invent the future, and you failed to do your part because you were too distracted from the perpetual cycle of maintaining illusions. Fuck you, mon, I'm sending you back as a cockroach. You don't need more then a brainstem, because you never use it anyway. If living as a thoughtless drone in a hivemind was good enough for you this time, that's all you get the next time around." Then, the gates will slam shut, and you'll see God and Sagan and Erdos and Steve Jobs, all taking hits of that blunt, planning the evolution of humanity, and bumping some new Radiohead, while your consciousness gets shunted into the body of a cockroach so you can relive life in a more metaphoric expression of the way you chose to live in your human form.

Sounds less like a problem with people who use drugs and more like a problem with how your choices have sucked, and continue to suck at very deep levels of reality.
I believe it's very likely that Microsoft will announce a cloud platform this year that is similar to Google's App Engine. Sun may do the same. It would be easier for MS and Sun to support multiple programming languages because all applications would run on the JVM or the .NET framework.
Hypermiling Causes Road Rage? Lets keep things in perspective...
I've been surfing the 'net and reading the occasional pot-related article for years and this is the first time I've heard of that.
I could say we're doing 100% time in my company. We don't have offices or office hours, and no micro-management. Myself and the other coder/designer do what we do because we want to, and because we're damn proud of designing the best damn product (and making a good bit of money at it).

I've found, in practice, that I do my best work when doing what I really want to do. So, being the project manager as well as a programmer, I've set up the management structure so that we commit to doing 6 user-visible items per week (split into 3 mini-iterations, times 2 people). Our business guy (who happens to be the CEO, sort of.. but we don't like titles) is happy, since he get (at least) six new things to show users and get feedback on each week. We're happy, since we get to spend our time working on the bits that we really care about, or that we feel need attention, whether visible or not.

In practice, I work extremely hard on this business, but not because of working hours. As an example, on Saturday I spent about half a day doing a fairly significant refactoring of a part of our Flex code. This morning I spent a few hours building a connection status monitor. All of these are tasks that could take forever if they were "official" tasks in a more structured environment, but because I want to do them they take comparatively little time, and are literally given birth to in a rush of caffeine and enthusiasm.

Anyway, boiling it down to a point: if you've done your hiring (for lack of a better word) right and motivated your team well, you can just set things up so they'll spend 100% of their time doing whatever the hell they want, and you'll get brilliant results. The minute you find yourself counting hours, you've failed miserably.
Ah, Thanks. That's not how I understood the OP, if that's the deal, and he still has full ad-control over his website and RSS..it's worth a second look at least.

I'd still want some sort of estimate of their expected timeframes..If they can't give you that, then you're an early adopter, and you should get better terms.
Good question- I would guess that it's due to Mexican government mismanagment. Factories need infrastructure to support them and Mexico hasn't been able to get that into place due primarily to corruption and inefficiency.

China has a culture of relatively efficient bureaucracy. This means that if a part of the country needs more water, electricity, rails, etc. to support factories, they get it.

I bet now that Mexico's institutions are becoming more modern and since they have less transportation expenses to the US this will change very quickly and Mexico will be a manufacturing hotspot.
As an occasional user who lives in just 2 hours driving distance from Amsterdam I will be happy to be convinced by what you say (I mean it). Any references?
I'm certain I've read this article before. Given all the anachronisms in the article, that really points to this being an old article. Google didn't turn up anything though :-/
Let's stop the piling on of edw, okay? Gee -- he just questioned the morality of pot as an aide in student studies.

I thought it was funny -- reminded me of a cranky old guy saying "Dang kids today! Toking up and killing brain cells"

Note I'm a libertarian and don't think that government has any business with what I choose to ingest. But heck, if you want to post an article on how good it is to toke up for your schoolwork, you gotta expect to hear some people who disagree for various reasons, right? What do you guys want, to be able to smoke it up and not have anybody say "what a waste -- can't you succeed without all the partying?" The reaction seems very mob-like.

There's all kinds of cool subtopics to this - the role of self-medication, the differences between pot and alcohol cutlures, the various moral implications of ingesting various substances, the stereotypical toked-up college liberal going to school for life, etc. Fun stuff to kick around, in my opinion.
The value chain for information
'Scrabble' on Facebook: Too little, too late
You said:

"Hacking and painting have a lot in common. In fact, of all the different types of people I've known, hackers and painters are among the most alike."

Your critic refuted that hacking and painting have much in common, and probably (but obviously speculatively) that hackers and painters are among the "most alike" of all the people you know.

And again, this appeared to me to be the central argument of your essay; it would not have been so widely noted had it argued instead that "hackers are like everyone who does constructive work", because by enlisting gardeners, grade school teachers, and psychologists, that argument reduces to "hackers are like many of the people you know". A barista at Intelligentsia Cafe downstairs from me invented an excellent drink --- horchata with a shot of espresso. Hackers are apparently also like him.

At this point, because you are calling me names instead of rebutting any point I make, I can only guess that you think none of these points are valid, and that hackers and painters share a unique bond, one that you feel your art education and work history allowed you to reveal in an essay (were it not so, the topic wouldn't merit the work you put into it). If you're seriously asking me the questions you're asking because you want to know the answer, and not because you want to win an argument, I'll say that when I read "Hackers and Painters" originally, I agreed with you. When I read your critic, I believe him more: there's there's little interesting to say about the relation between hacking and painting as practiced by modern professional artists.
MyYahoo 2.0 Goes Live for All
Do you need an MBA to start a successful startup?
Because of containerization it is super-cheap to ship things.

For example, the Emma Mærsk can ship 11,000+ containers and requires a crew of only 13 people. It is powered by a single diesel engine, and has special drag-reducing paint on it's hull. Once in port all of the cargo can be offloaded and on the move in under 24 hours - they don't sit in warehouses anymore. There is an army of things like this cruising the oceans, and that is why shipping is so inexpensive.

So in fact the global system of trade at has emerged in the post WWII era is ultra-efficient and ultra-competitive.