skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, introducing rape in that way is a bit of a straw man I'd say.

As I said, the bulk of individuals suffering from mental health issues severe enough to provoke possible medical incarceration are primarily dangerous to themselves, not others; their restriction is in their own clear long-term best interests.

Nonetheless, for the few who are more likely to be dangerous to others or who, as a result or side-effect of their difficulties either have committed crime or are demonstrably threatening to do so, it is in no-one's best interests for them to be treated as if they are either a rational individual at liberty or a prisoner with no particular needs (depending on the stage). We have laws against conspiring or attempting to commit crime - how is it different to incarcerate (for purposes of treatment) the disturbed individual who makes a clear and credible threat of criminal behaviour for purposes of treatment? Or to link an individual's release from criminal incarceration to a treatment program for the condition that contributed to their offending behaviour?

The example of Alan Turing might be valid had his prosection not happened 59 years ago and the offence for which he was prosecuted repealed 44 years ago. If there's a comparable contemporary offence and case of the state so demonstrably working against the interests of its citizens, let's have it out - otherwise, I don't see the case has been made.
Ouch. My parents pay $45/month for 2Mbps. But they live in a rural mountain town where there's only one provider (plus satellite, which is even more expensive with interminable latency).
If people don't get enough from employers, who pays ? The welfare system, i.e. the rest of us.

If a potential employer chooses not to employ someone, who pays? The welfare system.

For either low pay or no pay, low value workers will require welfare. I don't see how this is a valid argument for a minimum wage.
Also, randomly: I started putting bug bounties on my code on CPAN:

http://search.cpan.org/~sargie/Data-Google-Visualization-Dat...

This made me more conscientious about what I release ;-)
The University of Buffalo publishes a list of books called "unrequired reading". The idea is to encourage an undergraduate student to read one book a month for the duration of the (assumed 4-year) course, totaling 48 books.
I first came across this list in 1993. It is still being maintained; definitely worth checking out: http://library.buffalo.edu/48goodbooks/books/
You could also try posting this on reddit/programming ?
An Open Letter To Jeff Bezos On Terminating The Amazon Affiliate Program in CA
Join #kohana on Freenode and message jtreminio - I'll send you an invite.
It works on four models of phone.
I don't think they have copied Diaspora's model.

If you try to solve group communication problems, you by definition need to create some model of groups, be it Circles, Diaspora aspects, Facebook groups, IRC channels, email recipient lists, whatever.

Because both Diaspora and Google+ are clearly inspired by semi-public sharing model of Facebook, it's quite natural that their group model will resemble each other, even be almost identical. If, on the otherhand, a service is focused around group conversation instead of sharing, it's group model might be one where groups are shared among participants, instead of being private aliases.

However, what's much more interesting to me is how a service tries to bootstrap "the group management".

In the beginning you don't have Circles and you don't have strong incentive to group people to Circles when you don't know are you going to use the service and how are you going to use it. Google clearly tried to make it more enjoyable by providing fun visual UI. But it still feels a chore, because benefits are unclear.

I would have emphasized it differently: start from a sharing experience instead of group management. Use email-like recipient list as the basic model and introduce the fun way to make group aliases after you have shared a few items. It's more utilitarian model, which doesn't have as strong virality factor as Google's approach. In Google+ you get something akin to invite when somebody adds you to his Circle.
MIT Students' SookBox Aims to Sync All of Your Media, brings Cloud into the Home
Way more than 50 different tax codes (Amazon could probably deal with that), many counties and municipalities have their own laws regarding sales tax too.
For those of you who get a database error, I think it is the huge amount of traffic I'm getting at the moment which causes this (>1000 visits last hour). I'm using shared hosting, which might have problems with this, so in one way, you are DDOSing my site ;-). I don't know if it is safe to tell you to just wait and reload the page, but do that, BUT NOT TOO FAST!
Did you try remote work?
I haven't used Sparks, but I can say this: my primary use for a social network isn't discovering new content. There are already so many awesome ways of doing that. Google Reader or StumbleUpon or Reddit or Delicious seem like better ways of discovering new and interesting content about a certain topic. But maybe Sparks will succeed because it will be a lot simpler to use than these other options and it will be built into some people's primary social network.

Here's a quote about Sparks from the Wired article on Google+:
The signals that Google looks for in determining Sparks content is freshness, a visual component (videos will rank highly), and the degree to which the content is virally spreading on the net.
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/06/inside-google-plus-so...
Argh, no! How many people would actually bother to visually verify their address? A typo here is actually more problematic than in your password -- if you typo that, you'll be instantly aware of it and can do an e-mail reset.

If there's a typo in the e-mail field, you won't be aware of it until you forget your password and try to do a reset -- and for the majority of services, that means you are now completely locked out of your account.
The one of many ways I chose was to use different accounts to switch between desktops & browsers. Sharing data between different logins takes a bit of work to setup, but once this is done I have found it pleasing to switch between "work mode" and "nonwork mode".

An ineradicatable nuisance about doing things this way: one thing you can't share is your clipboard, at least not with OSX or X windows.
- Ctrl Alt I

- Type:

console.log('hello world');

- install node on your ubuntu box. Then type

node

Which starts node's interactive console. Then type:

console.log('hello world');

again.

Congratulations, you're now a javascript programmer, client and server. Go look up Rebecca Murphey's JQuery guide (it's a good Javascript book too) and continue learning.
Kendinizievinizdehissetmeyeceksinizşahinnparadiseseoyarışması
Kendinizievinizdehissetmeyeceksinizşahinnparadiseseoyarışması muhafazakar tatil anahtarı .
Your argument applies equally well to any screening procedure - e.g., college degrees.

Do you believe that requiring/favoring people with college is also a bad precedent that needs to be stamped out?
It's a shame I paid for all that college and knowing this would have greatly expanded my understanding of a lot of what I learned in my math classes.

EDIT: I guess I learned it in high school though, and the math teacher probably didn't know this either.

Point being, everyone should come across this at some point. It would be beneficial to many math students.
INFO: Install Angry Birds on Chrome Browser
Well, the employer gets cheap (or even free) labour - and therefore higher profits - paid for by the taxpayer. In essence, the employer is exploiting the system as much as any "welfare queen".

Sure, workers on minimum wage may receive benefits - but they would require less benefits than if there was no minimum wage.
Depends which buddies!

(Aussie expat in Japan)
I often go read code to figure out how somebody else does something I want to do. Usually, somebody has solved your problem better than you have.
Creative Google Adwords Ad Contest
Creative Google Adwords Ad Contest See: http://www.aims.co.il/blog/creative-google-adwords-ad-contest/ Contest ends on August 1, 2011. Win a $100 gift certificate to Amazon.
Google+ Circles, hard and soft
A brief post about social boundaries, Google+ Circles, and issues in assigning people to groups.
>If your labour has value then you can find work that pays you a rate for it (except for minimum wage - more about this shortly). You have the opportunity to expose yourself to experience by doing internships. If you don't have anything better to be doing, then it's a win-win situation for you and the person you're doing internship.

That only works in an absolutely frictionless labor market. Meanwhile, in the real world, there are many sources of friction - location being the most prominent. If you have valuable skills, in say, graphic design and the one print shop in your town shuts down, then it doesn't matter how good you are as a designer - you're not going to get a job. Through the '90s, it didn't matter how good a machinist you were - if you lived in the Detroit area, your employment prospects were poor, just because of the glut caused by hemorrhaging auto industry.

>There is an argument in favour of minimum wage, and it's this: some people are too incompetent to be capable of standing up for themselves, and these people would be easy to take advantage of for malicious bosses, of which there are no shortage. The minimum wage is a blunt force mechanism that aims (and fails) to protect this set of people. The reason it fails is that in protecting low-wage employed people, it locks out people who are in a worse situation - unemployed.

Nice job with that straw-man. Unfortunately, the argument you cite bears no resemblance to the actual reason we have a minimum wage. The reason we have a minimum wage is that historically, its the lack of a minimum wage that has created an underclass of people in poverty that don't have the resources to increase their station in life. All throughout the 1800s and early 1900s the US tried to be your minimum-wage free utopia. The results were horrific. We had a permanent underclass of (usually immigrant) tenants living in squalid conditions. If you want to regress to 1890s-era working conditions, then yes, by all means repeal the minimum wage.

Lacking a minimum wage also hurts the economy. Without a minimum wage, the number of consumers for any good beyond basic food, clothing and shelter products would be drastically cut. History has shown that without outside incentives, employers will pay only the minimum needed to keep their workers alive (and sometimes not even that). A minimum wage ensures that there is a bottom in the race to the bottom for wages.

>The minimum wage system is a mechanism designed by the elite to allow that elite to paper over things and sleep at night pretending they're doing the right thing. It hurts the people it claims to protect.

If that's the case, then why do the elites always protest vociferously every time the minimum wage is raised? There are massive lobbying efforts by big business every time the minimum wage issue comes up for debate, despite the fact that there is no economic evidence whatsoever that the presence of a $7.25 minimum wage has had a measurable impact on employment.
are there any products that don't take features from other products?
Aren't the wear-out numbers for flash understated? I seem to remember that the flash I've worked with is in the tens to hundred thousand cycles already but maybe that's not what's in consumer products?

Also would be interesting hear about power consumption for read and write.
I'd be a little bit concerned if I were building a web content recommendation system, and my competitor is the world's largest and best index of web content.
The icon definitely does not make me think IM client, but MUA.
The biggest problem that I have with skype is that there is not an easy way to know who else has it. If google can fix that small issue, it will be able to render skype useless for me.
I found a doc bug :-) "This module is attempts to hide the gory details". The "is" isn't English grammar.

(No, doesn't count as a bug, really)
When Policies Get in the Way of Progress (or) Experience vs. Pedigree
Wow, how can I move there?
So around 23% of viewers will not only "abandon a site after three seconds" but then go on to "tell others about their negative experience"? That seems...dubious. The only times I've ever complained about site loading speed to others, or had others complain about it to me, is when it's a site that we visit repeatedly, either because it has compelling content, or because we're forced to use it (job requirement, your bank, some government agency you have to deal with, etc.). Anecdotal, I know, but I hang around with people who use the web a lot.

Have others had a different experience?
Google was kicking around the idea of circles long before Diaspora. If anything it was the other way around.
Amazon happily collect Sales tax (we call it VAT or TVA) in Europe. They also manage the complexities of exports to non-EU countries and the differences between rates in different EU countries. Example: While I lived in France I paid French TAV on purchases from Amazon.co.uk when goods were delivered to me in France but UK VAT on purchases I made on the same site that were delivered to friends in the UK.

So - this is not something they do not know how to do or something with prohibitive costs.
Then I can highly recommend "Higher Order Perl" by M.J. Dominus (ebook for free on http://hop.perl.plover.com/book/ but the printed edition is well worth paying for too).

It essentially teaches you functional programming in Perl.
I've been sent an invite, thanks to whoever sent that, but it turns out I can't use the damn thing because I have a google apps account set up for my domain, just like everyone else here probably does.

Plus requires a google profile in order to use it, and Apps accounts can't have profiles. Apparently someone from google has said this will be coming "soon."

WTF google? Hasn't it occurred to you that the set of power users/evangelists/early adopters and the set of people who have their own apps account on their domain might overlap a bit?

This isn't so much dropping the ball, it's bordering on an own goal.

Any googlers reading this: sort it out. Or go and bother the nearest person responsible for sorting it out, lest my disappointment spill over into murderous rage.
Textual configuration has comments, GUIs don't.
you fail to understand that javascript was meant to run inside a browser. inside any html page just add script tags and execute your script. you don't need a webserver to run javascript.
I got a "Database Connection Error" (I am sure your server got hit hard with being top 5 on HN). :) The irony makes me giddy.
That overhead you're speaking of is present with bringing anyone onto a project, not just interns.

I actually went to a school that required every student in my program to do a minimum of 1 year of paid internships (split into 3 and 6 month blocks). Judging by how abundant and competitive the companies looking for interns were I'd say they found it very much worth the overhead.
I thought I'd add some additional clarification. For people you've added there are two sharing concepts: Who you're sharing with and what you're sharing. For who you're sharing with there are 3 options: no one, everyone on the web, only the people in your circles. For what you're sharing there is the ability to pick and choose what circles are visible. It might be confusing to think about, but suppose I have the following circles: "Family", "Friends", "Coworkers", "Poker Buddies". I can choose to share the friends in these circles to everyone on the web, but opt to exclude "Poker Buddies" so they don't show up on my profile.

For people who've added YOU to their circles, there are only two options. Show them on your profile or don't show them.
Show HN: Give gifts with a twist
Ask HN: Discussion of books/TV that prevents spoilers?
For those of us who watch shows long after their original airing, it often is a solitary experience.

Waching <i>Lost</i>, for example, as it aired allowed for fun speculation, but if you're getting into it now, it's prohibitively difficult to find analysis or discussion that is limited to what's known at a given point in the series.

It'd be great to have a discussion site with a slider to mark your progress in a given text/show and that auto-hides discussions tagged with info only known later.

I don't think there's enough there for a new site, but does anyone else think it would be a worthy feature for some forum to bolt on?
The article's actual title is clearer and not as likely to be flamebait: "Algorithm developed by Israeli scholars sheds light on the Bible's authorship".

The point of the algorithm is not to figure out if Moses or whoever wrote the bible. The point is to track down strands of a multi-author book:

The new software analyzes style and word choices to distinguish parts of a single text written by different authors, and when applied to the Bible its algorithm teased out distinct writerly voices in the holy book.

The program, part of a sub-field of artificial intelligence studies known as authorship attribution, has a range of potential applications — from helping law enforcement to developing new computer programs for writers. But the Bible provided a tempting test case for the algorithm's creators.

I studied this sort of thing a little from the Humanities side in graduate school, and it can be fascinating. But a lot of room is still left for interpretation and other factors. One example: Caesar's war diaries in Gaul show significant shifts in vocabulary, word order, sentence structure and narrative style between the early and later books. In that case though, multiple authorship is much less likely than one author changing over time. This sort of thing would probably make it harder to solve the Shakespeare problem using this software (which someone mentions as a use case in the article).
I think Microsoft will kill Skype before Google+ Hangout does
An Android version of this would be nice. I have only found instant messaging apps for Android that has a centralized model. I give all my passwords (Jabber, Facebook, Live Messenger, ICQ, AIM) to a third party that acts as gateway. I'm not comfortable with that.
Reductio ad Hitlerum: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law
Dear mods:

The OP's title and some of its text has a typo: The word "Quite" ought to be "Quit." I suggest it would be appropriate to fix the title here on HN whether the author fixes it on the blog post or not.
No, this is the end result of a government spending more money than its citizens are willing to pay for. California needs to seriously get its spending under control including the unfunded liabilities (e.g. public employee pensions).

Of course they will threaten to cut fire and police to force the issue, when they have plenty of other budget expenses that can be cut first. Using fear to keep their donors in cash seems to be the current state tactic.

At some point, states needs to their expense, assign use tax (e.g. gas tax) to repair the infrastructure it is fixing and increase those taxes if they don't cover the infrastructure (or quit raiding them if they have a surplus).

PS: Depending on what the sales tax is actually taxing - it is not that bad on the poor. Going with that, "progressive" taxes aren't fair either.

PPS: I still want to know why sales tax doesn't apply from the state the item is being sold from.
11. Rewrite something that desperately needs to be rewritten.

So many times I've encountered something and thought, "I can't believe that people are actually expected to use this software."

It was bad from a user perspective: difficult to use, slow, tedious to do what you actually needed to do, unable to "get there from here".

Then once I looked under the hood, it was often worse: built upon a horribly designed data structure, inflexible with constants where there should have been parameters, no apparent thought put into its use, too many violations of acceptable practice to mention, looking as if it evolved haphazardly (which it probably did).

It's easy to bitch about stuff like this, but you often have to go to the next level to do something about it. It's amazing how much rethinking you have to do and how many tools you have to build to turn horrible software into what should have "obviously" been done in the first place.

Easier said than done. And often, some of my best learning experiences.
Along these lines, it doesn't fit to equate unpaid internships to serfdom. Serfdom involves effectively permanent, near total servitude to a landowner for most aspects of life.

Uh, wage slavery? How much of a person's salary is spent just on the basics such as food and clothing and gas and education?

The minimum wage is a horrible stain on a free society. It traps people with low skills out of work and cements them into an underclass that's much more difficult to break out of. It prevents business that are operating on the edge from continuing to operate. It's a classic example of do-gooders riding in and creating damage.

This is how the system is structured; there is a permanent underclass that will accept any wages. Even more educated people will lower their wage expectations when the economy appears bad. This means that companies can get cheaper labour at any time to pick up slack or as replacements if their current workers get too uppity and demand a living wage.

it locks out people who are in a worse situation - unempployed.

Unemployed is only bad if it means starvation or homelessness. In a socialist, communist, or anarchist society unemployment would be okay. Unemployed workers wouldn't starve, they would still be allowed to live, and they could take part-time jobs/unpaid internships and learn new skills without worrying about making ends meet.

There are much better avenues that would be cheaper and have more positive effect on people: basic risk, valuation and business skills being taught in early high-school, television campaigns that encourage people to think about how their labour is used, what they could do to make themselves marketable. Mechanisms to get people speaking English more effectively. Lower taxation. Effective technical colleges.

So your solution is to train people to become effective human resources for businesses to consume? That doesn't help. We already do that.

You're saying that workers need to learn how to be better workers so that they can prosper. You're saying that they should make themselves as appealing to businesses as possible and somehow, you're assuming that this will give them higher wages. The only reason people get higher wages is because they demand them either through a union or through an informal agreement with other workers that they won't work for less. This is true in the IT industry and is one of the reasons why IT workers don't see a need for a union. We all have agreed never to work for a shitty wage. We know that we can just take our skills elsewhere or start our own company or whatever because we stand up for ourselves.
Any "feedback" widgets that mimic Google+ Highlight/Blackout?
I am pretty impressed with the blackout/highlight screen grab part of the "submit feedback" button in the lower right corner of Google+. Does anyone know if there is any open source or commercial product out there already that does this?
I applaud his effort (and this certainly isn't an easy project, he's a smart guy, etc.), but felt progressively more and more queasy reading this. I thought I could keep going even once I had realized the necessary lack of a runtime lambda or first class closure. When I got to the refcounting part, I mashed the back button in horror. Am I spoiled or what?