skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ad hominem is not fallacious when a person is attempting to argue by authority. The wikipedia article gives this example:

Conflict of Interest: Where a source seeks to convince by a claim of authority or by personal observation, identification of conflicts of interest are not ad hominem...

Steve Sailer is not arguing from a authority, so in this case the ad hominem is a logical fallacy.

It's often useful to read more than the first paragraph of a wikipedia article.
Surely it’s the issue in software development. Everything else is a case or subproblem of “how do I use a computer to solve this imperfectly defined problem?”

I mean, it’s borderline tautological, isn’t it? Software development is the practice of translating natural-language requests into executables. That’s not just a recurring question – it’s definitional.

This is why I’m nervous when strongly antisocial people say they want to go into software. The point of this field is to figure out what people need (or want, or mean, or like). Of course you can do this creatively rather than responsively, and with more rather than less respect for your customers. But you don’t escape human tastes and concerns when your job is to explain them to a microprocessor.
>I understand people defending the practice, but this nonetheless offends me. For me, it isn't about the 555 owners getting a crippled product, but that the 595 owners are paying a huge markup.

The baseline in this discussion is $200 headphones.

Do you really want to talk huge markup?
There is a Forth-like programming language that can be programmed entirely in Japanese.

http://www.scripts-lab.co.jp/mind/ver7/v7unix_download.html

Example to add 4 and 5 (from http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind ):

4と　5を　加え　表示する。
My browser remembers the login anyway
Tell HN: GZIP for Hacker News
http://quickhn.appspot.com/

I got really tired of it taking forever to load HN when I was on EDGE so I took things into my own hands :-) Its just a simple proxy using google app engine, but it does gzip the pages. On a sample page with 103 comments the size went from 140.0K to 29.8K. All other features are functioning (submit new, upvoting, commenting).

The source is on github so feel free to deploy your own: https://github.com/matthusby/HN-Proxy
Borders to file for bankruptcy
Linux Fundamentals Part 1
Headline:

Nokia CEO: Co. to get billions from Microsoft

Fine print:

Nokia will be contributing its Ovi mapping service and
will be paying Microsoft royalties for the use of its
software, as other manufacturers do. It will save money
by not continuing development of its own software. The
net benefit is still in the billions, he said.

In other words, Nokia is saving billions by licensing WP7 and laying off most of its workforce.

So it's exactly as everyone first assumed. Nokia is not getting "huge payments from Microsoft". Nokia is merely licensing WP7.
Well, there's the second issue of doing it such that the machine can produce results efficiently. Which tends rather towards the mathy computer-science side of things - which is where I think the less social "I just want to write code" people would be much happier.
first comment.
What I like about this place is the various constructive points of view from the community on top of the conversation, information and URL provided.
The votes/points help in my digestion too.
How do i switch to a finance job???
From Quora's perspective, that puts them on the path to being the next Friendfeed -- not a good outcome for the investors who valued them at $86M last spring.
I've done this w/ my mustache implementation. Its compiled on the server side and sent down as a pure JS function.

https://github.com/josh/mustache-trimmer
There's nothing wrong with market segmentation, this is simply a poor implementation. Adding a piece of foam to cripple the sound makes the consumer feel ripped off.
indeed. Yahoo! Answers accomplishes this. So does Naver in South Korea. It's not rocket science.
I was fascinated by the out-of-box Wordpress installation. The author didn't even get rid of the "hello world" post or the tagline that says "just another wordpress blog". That's what made this article so eerie - it's a first blog post on 0% customized Wordpress blog.
If you agree that humanity is fundamentally a function of our minds

What about the ability to feel pleasure and pain ?

I don't believe a deterministic machine will ever experience such subjective feelings (though it may behave as if it does). Computers may well become sapient but they (at least with current technology) will never be sentient.
It's been user tested for many months now and the results are a consistent stream of confused users and duplicate questions. The response: long-timers there moan about how stupid the new users are.
I rarely comment because I'm just a student, and I'm not even going to go in to start ups. I don't feel like I can add much useful here.
In the book Why Don't Students Like School ( http://www.amazon.com/Why-Dont-Students-Like-School/dp/04705...) Daniel Willingham argues that people need to have a good vocabulary of mechanics, basic concepts, and skills in order to be able to move on to higher order knowledge. Children should learn how to calculate not necessarily to do calculations instead of a computer, but to help their brains develop.

Besides, until kids hit puberty, their brains aren't ready for higher orders of thinking. What they are good at is memorization and mechanics. The more mechanics they learn and the more they memorize as little kids, the better equipped they will be for higher order thinking as teens and adults.
From the article: "I am no education expert and have no children ..."
Kingsgate Consolidated - Management Team
Inside the DNA of the Facebook Mafia
What is "pleasure" and "pain"? Ultimately, they're just electrical signals triggering the release of certain chemicals in the brain, with subsequent alterations to how the brain processes other stimuli.

"It doesn't really feel pain, it just looks like it does" is probably how many people justified atrocities against other humans they viewed as somehow "lesser".
The thing is, everybody takes something different from it. I mean, as a white boy / cracker like myself, I listen to gangsta rap, and I don't feel much - if any - compulsion to try to literally live out most elements of the lifestyle portrayed. But the attitude, the energy, the mentality, the aggression, those things - in the abstract - do connect with me, which is why my white arse has no problem saying I'm a big fan of Tupac, Dre, Eminem, Snoop, etc.

Same thing with metal, in a way... a lot of the metal I listen to glorifies violence, satanism, drug use, and all manners of excess related to sex, alcohol, etc. But while I like sex, alcohol and rock & roll as much as anybody, just listening to metal doesn't mean I'm going to start worshiping satan and go burn down a church.

That said, I don't disagree with your overall point, to the extent that I can understand it as a white person. It reminds me of what Richard Pryor said about how black youths screw themselves by refusing to speak proper English, study hard in school, etc. Unfortunately when a black man says something like that, he gets labeled "Uncle Tom" and what-not. :-(
That is so what I'm looking for.

I've been thinking of renting out an office just so I have somewhere to go to and work in a daily routine.

Working at home all the time is not as grand as some people might think it would be.
Ask HN: Startup advice for my friend who does not read HN
My friend is discussing starting a startup with a few other co-founders. He doesn't read HN, TC, or any of the other standard reading we all know and love.

How best can I help him learn the breadth of what he doesn't know?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVMPd0zl-_Y

This sums up the average computer user. If iOS can handle their email/office needs there isn't anything stopping them from using a blue tooth keyboard.
What a bitch, she really should have given up when she wanted to back off and only put in the standard work-week hours. She should have been a single purpose slave, toiling away long into the night, never ever enjoying the compensation she was given, nor had any human qualities beyond scientist. It's doubly atrocious that she thought somehow meritocracy meant having some recognition and lifestyle security come from proving that she could contribute.

Oh wait no...

What the hell is your problem douche? Do you seriously believe everyone should just work and do nothing else? I hope 2 things for when you die alone and forgotten: 1. that you were told by someone that your existence was futile because you wanted to work less than every waking moment, and 2. that you had the realization that there is more to life than constant work but that it came too late for you to change and you are weeping bitter tears of regret as you painfully draw your last useless breath.
I had to watch myself do it because I had never noticed the specifics. Turns out it varies. Sometimes I'm holding it over him, but the weight is being transferred through my forearm to the sofa beside my body through one or both elbows. Other times my hand is just balancing it and little Henry's diaper-padded posterior is propping it up. I have a cover on it that flips behind the tablet,like one would fold a magazine cover behind a magazine, and sometimes I hold the thing with my index finger extended horizontally into this hinge, with a moment of force being applied by the side of the device into the palm of my hand.

It's never been something I had given much though to. The idea of craning my neck and reaching my arms to operate a laptop on the table beside me strikes my as uncomfortable, though.

To each their own, I guess.
I had already placed my contact info on my 'description' area in my profile.

Although, I do agree that it is easier to contact people, over active discussions etc when they have posted contact information on their profile.
Travel travel travel. Pick a date (soon, don't put it off), lock it in. Pick a destination and then book tickets. Your mindset is holding you back because you let it. Stop being scared and just do it.

Try travelling to China without a backpack/suitcase, only what you can fit in your pockets (toiletries left pocket, camera/passport/wallet right pocket). Buy other things when you get there, just liberate yourself from most things you would've taken with you.
Maybe they're just electrical signals in the brain but that's not how we experience them.

A CPU cannot experience the electrical signals that flow through it. Unless you believe rocks are sentient.

I could just as easily turn your argument around and argue that torturing you is perfectly OK because all I'd be doing is creating electrical signals in your brain.
I disagree. The lectures are aimed at a demographic that probably does not have the background that hacker news readers likely have.

He's given every child in the world with internet access an MIT-educated tutor who cares enough to make these videos available for free.
1. The fact that this was written a couple of years ago and that they have done just fine since that time adds weight to the article.

2. Taking this concept at its word suggests a simple startup strategy: look for the largest, most successful companies and enter their space. You know there is a huge paying market, and, if competition isn't a killer, then why not move in?
Actually, this is an article that'll make Steve Blank proud. His SuperMac cards were all the same, but tuned slower for the cheaper versions.
That's a much better interpretation. I was definitely playing fast and loose and saw IO so far out on the SO side.
Drink the milk, but this is one of these things where you'd have to drink like 2 gallons of milk per day to get an equivalent of one pill. Easier to just take the vitamin
Which startups were rejected several times by VCs before getting funded?
As for the mod itself. I just tried it on my 555 and I noticed only a subtle difference. As odd as it may be, I think I prefer the foam.

As for Sennheiser's strategy to cripple the product line to handle a different marketing segment; it reminded me of a Steve Blank's post.
http://steveblank.com/2009/04/16/supermac-war-story-7-buildi...
But that is how we experience them - though perhaps not with electrical signals, but chemical ones instead. e.g. dopamine. We're programmed to enjoy dopamine.
I was just thinking about that. You have to do it by hacking the infix syntactic sugar.

x |> f = f x

gives you lambda calculus, but it gets ugly, since you need to specify order of operations with parentheses.

(4 |> (5 |> (+))) |> (3 |> (*))

You can take it a step further with tuples, but you still need to be explicit about the number of arguments:

(x,y) |> f = f x y
((4,5) |> (+), 3) |> (*)

Maybe you could go almost all the way by telling it to create a List when passed two values, and telling it apply to the (nested) List when called with a List and an operator, but off hand, I can't think of a way to get it to type check, particularly not without killing currying.
"There is huge, unmet demand in the world for a phone that does nothing but make calls."

Correct.

I personally need something like that. I need a phone that has great connection quality, lightweight, has long battery life and has MP3 player.
I do not need touch screen and smart features.
Is anybody going to produce such phone for me?
If the disreputable source is the sole source for those claims, then, yes, one should hold the claims in less than high regard. But if that disreputable source points to a third party, then that party should be the one under condsideration.
I could just as easily turn your argument around and argue that torturing you is perfectly OK because all I'd be doing is creating electrical signals in your brain.

That's actually (almost) the point of my comment - if, in two logical steps you can get from your argument to "torture is alright", perhaps you should reconsider your argument.

Perhaps you should also consider why (a large part of) humanity considers torture to be a Bad Thing?
There is one area in which Samsung is lacking: software. Unlike Apple or RIM, they are entirely dependent on Android. [...] That, however, could change completely if Samsung dominates the Android market like I think it will.

Want to be even more scared?

http://www.rasterman.com/index.php?page=News

:-)
I'll bet none of them could tell the difference between with foam and without foam, either.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/apple-to-buy-78-billion-in-...

From link "Apple Inc. (AAPL 356.85, +2.31, +0.65%) is expected to purchase components used for its handheld devices from Samsung Electronics Co. worth about $7.8 billion this year, the Korea Economic Daily reported Monday, citing industry sources.

The paper also said that Samsung will supply Apple with liquid crystal displays, mobile application processors and NAND flash memory chips used for the U.S. company's iPhones and iPads.

If the contract pushes through, Apple will become Samsung's largest customer, the paper added."
...Show him HN?
Wish I was in SF for this one. Eddy, I think you need to bring Scoble to sweet home Chicago. We can take him to that Chipotle rip off place near Beard Papas ;)
If I can log in using my facebook credentials, then why do I need to supply a password?

Also, why does my password need to be more than 7 letters long? I wouldn't consider my taggedback.com credentials to be of high sensitivity.

[edit: Ugh, AND I need to click the confirmation email link to activate my account? Can you run a conversion funnel analysis and see how many visitors you lose at each step you introduce into the signup process? Just let me in and let me poke around, and I'll fill out more information later if I like the service.]
1. Hear his pitch and reasoning for what he does, then objectively break any fallacy he may have that doesn't fit the norm of solid advice (which is subjective since even weird things can happen in wonderful ways). Link him to proof by people who have been successful and why his thinking might be wrong.

2. Tell him to get more involved with the startup community and in some sense, read up on things he doesn't understand. Few other cofounders sound like a bit more than necessary but since I don't know the background on this, I won't comment.

3. If he won't listen and continues doing what he wants to do, let him. He has to learn on his own. The biggest thing about any entrepreneur (the successful ones) is they must be teachable, adaptable, and constantly changing. If he is fixated in his ways, nothing you do will help.
The OP's argument rests on the notion that Samsung could somehow make phones so compelling that they take over 80% of the market. I don't think they can do that on price alone. Their price advantage over LG, HTC, etc could be what... 10%? They need more of an advantage than that to have Microsoft-level dominance.

And even though they have the price advantage over the other "premium" vendors, they are fighting a war on two fronts. The ultra cheap vendors can undercut even Samsung by doing things like using super cheap plastic, having batteries that stop working after 6 months, dead pixels, and a software team of like 2 people who just maintain a couple drivers and slap some shitty graphics and free apps on top of stock Android.

So Samsung's playground is a sizeable but bounded slice in the middle: people who don't care about having the BEST phone, and want it to be really cheap, but not cheap cheap. Cheap, but on-brand.

Microsoft had no real competition. No one else was really licensing an OS for commodity hardware. Apple, IBM, Sun et all were all selling their OS on their own hardware.

Samsung is beset on all sides by competition, and they only hold one of the Aces (supply chain).
There's no such thing as "scientific racism" since race is a social construct.
Hey, I'm an aspiring Ruby on Rails developer as well and just wrote a quick review on my thoughts of using Refinery - http://labs.thredup.com/refinery-cms-review
Sad they went the way of Hollywood Video and Blockbuster rather than pivot and adapt.
It is always great to revisit this archive. Here are two of my favorites:

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD11xx/EW...

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD13xx/EWD1305...

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD11xx/EW...

Perhaps others might also post their favorites here ?
If they didn't know about this, you could probably argue that they actually enjoyed paying a huge markup for little benefit. Considering most of them would probably not be able to tell the difference in a blind test between the two states of the cheaper headphone, the only possible difference is price and perceived value. They are paying more simply to pay more, not because they're actually getting better sound quality.
Re: Coke... They dong come anywhere near charging 2x as much for a 2x larger size.

I remember one day going into the convienience store near my office and finding that all the coke prices were identical, 1.69 iirc. The small bottle, the widemouth litreish one, the two litre, all the same price.
Efficiency is implicit in most natual-language queries. Managing efficiency tradeoffs is a good example of something fuzzy yet important that you have to be able to figure out from natural-language queries and human interaction.

But yeah, if you really just want to work with numbers, you’ll probably be happier in CS academia.
i can use a debit card in stores and online without a pin, and take money out of the bank without a pin at the drive-thru. if all i need is a card that's one factor.
I know I belong in computer science, but sometimes I wonder.
Sennheiser is a company I've always tried to steer clear of because of this. There's a lot of companies that take advantage of their branding (i.e. M-Audio, Monster cable, etc) to jack up the prices on mediocre hardware.

Once stuff hits guitar center and best buy, you're probably going to be getting ripped off somewhere. You can buy better quality Mogami mic cable from a pro-audio supplier than you can from Guitar Center for half the cost. The audiophile world (along with the "guitar aficionado") is a very strange place.
Here's one such place (not sure if it is older or not, but it is under 1K and close to Google HQ): http://sfbay.craigslist.org/pen/apa/2204805441.html
Most of us would like to believe that the companies from which we purchase products have our best interests at heart when we buy their products. Apple, for instance, has benefited enormously from this brand perception. We'd like to believe that they built the best product at that price point which they could afford to, given their commitment to supporting excellent R&D, QA, etc. Intentionally crippling a product, particularly a physical product, means that resources were expended to produce an intentionally suboptimal product. What if auto manufacturers could intentionally reduce the fuel efficiency of their vehicles, say by manipulating the ignition control software, in order to differentiate their vehicles? Or produce were intentionally held in storage for a few extra days, at additional expense, in order to create a lower price category? What if life saving drugs where partially denatured by heating them to artificially reduce their effectiveness to provide lower price points for people who couldn't afford the premium medication? It feels wrong, perhaps because it is wrong. Companies should at least be up front about it, rather than concealing the practice, and acting huffy when they are called on it.
I've owned two pairs of the Sony MDR-150's over the span of the last 3 years now, and I must say, for $15 you really cant go wrong with them. I use them at work and I can't complain. I usually get ear pain after about an hour or so of use with any other headphones; Not these. The sound quality is pretty damn good for 15 bucks too.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000092YPR/ref=s9_simh_gw_p...
Yes.. and with this, Kevin Rose's descent into douchebaggery is complete. Welcome to the dark side.
I know exactly how you feel, I'm sort of embarrassed by the fact that I only (somewhat) recently signed up because of it.
I'm trying to change and start commenting more, so here I am.
Thought experiment:
If there was a human that suffered an injury that left them unable to feel pleasure, or pain - some form of nerve damage, perhaps - I wouldn't think any less of that human's mental function.
I wouldn't think they had lost any humanity, or argue they should be accorded any less human rights.
I think that they'd still have hopes, and fears, would be much more important than their ability to feel pain or pleasure.

Given this, how important is the ability to feel pleasure, or pain, really?

I think you are focusing on the wrong thing, and disagree with this way of assessing humanity.
That is awesome.

Now I know what language to learn once I finish reading "Real World Haskell". I was gonna go for Factor or Forth, but this absolutely wins.
I think it's interesting the author doesn't mention Bada http://www.bada.com , Samsung's new OS for mobile that's designed to be an "open" competitor to the other mobile OSes out there.

I tried signing up to be a developer about a year ago when they first announced it and I had a under-powered feature phone (Samsung Behold I), yet was discouraged by the fees and other associated things to even sign up...

After reading the Wikipedia page on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bada_%28operating_system%29#Cri...
...I'm glad I saw the light and bought an iPhone.
iOS developers making leap to the Mac, thanks to Mac App Store
I find this an interesting topic.

So you guys thing Huffington Post was successful despite their home page design? The big headline feature seemed like it was modeled after Drudge Report... or maybe that's another style I was just unaware of.

No one thinks the design was somehow contributory?