skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This argument is so common that it appears on the "Derailing for Dummies" guide: http://derailingfordummies.com/#butbut (Note that they include as an example your false equivalence between circumcision and female genital mutilation.)

This is really incredible, "Because the removal of a tiny flap of skin is entirely comparable to the crippling mutilation many young girls are subjected to.." Seriously? Why is the removal of a "tiny flap of skin" from a vulva a crippling mutilation, whereas the removal of the foreskin, which has over 2.5 times the number of nerve endings, no big deal? And also, it's not a false equivalency since I did not bring up FGM since it is irrelevant to a discussion that is not centered around third world issues, whereas male genital mutilation is, seeing as how over 50% of males born in the US are still altered. Or are you actually suggesting that any discussion of male genital mutilation is irrelevant because males are not important, or at least not as important as females? Or perhaps that female genital mutilation is so much more important that it is unthinkable to address male genital mutilation at all so long as it is happening to a female somewhere on earth?

And I actually fully believe that the female variant is worse (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3364906), but this language is incredibly inflammatory.
Stop SOPA by contacting your news stations.
Making it illegal suggests indispensability. Why make a law for something for which there is no demand or supply?

You suggest exterminating pornography would have a minor effect. If so many people want to exterminate it that they make it illegal (I suspect without checking that at times illegal under draconian punishment) but it still hasn't been exterminated, that seems another argument for indispensability.

But these points are irrelevant to my original question. Why specify Western culture?

Even if pornography were dispensable in some Islamic cultures (whether we label them as Western or not), that doesn't say it isn't also indispensable in non-Western cultures or dispensable in some Western cultures or both.
Groupon Founders Back Obaz Deal Site
I also liked "much of the energy delivered by sunlight comes in the form of “hot” electrons"
You could also use http://www.githire.com to find people.
Naive Bayes: the "good enough" classifier.
I watched this for several hours today, cool stuff watching him. His reactions when the code misbehaves are funny. How he remembers which sections of code do what and is not afraid to cut out whole sections to achieve the effect he wants is cool.
Bye-Bye, Firefox
If you ignore all the distributed "stuff", and the workflow enhancements it permits, and assume everybody is always connected to the server and attached via a LAN, you can just concentrate on doing a reasonably good job of handling very large quantities of data, including very large binary files. (Apologies for not trying to reproduce the breathless style of headline.) As is common, the article presupposes that decentralization is unambiguously progress, but that isn't true in all respects.

People often complain about the idea of using version control for large binary files, as if it is unreasonable to want such a thing, and that as a point of principle version control systems should contain only text files, and the fact that many version control systems support this poorly is proof that you don't want it anyway. But there are actually people who create, with their own hands, large binary files, often of the completely-unmergeable variety, and they deserve version control just as much as the programmers do.

(And then once you have a system that works well for them, you can then use it to solve all manner of problems that might previously have involved storing files in public folders, mailing them round, or maybe just waiting for them to compile again. No need for any of that crap any more - just check the files in, they're there forever, and you can get them back quickly.)
Space Planes, Psyops, Secret Prisons: 9 Secret Military Programs
The next phone is going to have a completely rebuilt OS. Are you already writing it off as non competing? How?
I checked some random videos on justin.tv and could not find an option to download the files. Is that indeed possible?
I tried Kubuntu about a year and a half ago, so it might have changed in the meantime. What I remember is just a lot of little annoyances and things not working; however, since this was my first Linux box, I didn't really know what I was doing. I also remember that KDE distinctly felt like a second-class citizen.

For a while, I used OpenSUSE, which has great support for KDE--I was very happy with it but decided to try something new on my newest laptop.

Now I use the Fedora KDE spin and it's awesome--almost everything works exactly how I want it, and everything else is configurable. I've also had no stability issues with Fedora 16--I had some graphics problems and small annoyances with 15, and they all seem to be fixed.

As far as packages go, I've missed nothing on Fedora--they even have a decently recent version of the Haskell problem in their repos. Emacs mysteriously came without Tetris, but that's an issue I can live with :) I would definitely recommend Fedora over Kubuntu for KDE.

Also, the newest version of KDE--regardless of distro, I think--is a nice improvement over older versions. One think I suggest is switching out the default menu for Lancelot, which I find much nicer.
One thing that hits me as silly is cellphone jamming technology to prevent remotely detonated bombs. In such an arms race, I would just put in a cron job to set off the detonator if the cell network became unexpectedly unavailable.
5 Most Influential Indian Web Entrepreneurs
The issue isn't so much with the Foundation as with "Free Software" in general. It wouldn't make sense to call Firefox a "Software Freedom" project, but calling it "Free Software" does makes sense (just in too many ways at the same time).
I really like your definition and after reading this, I can't help but think I might have been that person who argued about your definition. If I am, I am very flattered that something I said got you thinking along those lines.

However I'd argue with you about Apple. Like you said, Apple didn't hit the time-frame requirement. Wouldn't you also agree that a true startup needs to have the requirements you listed but at the same time start from zero. Companies that just start out, have the growth you talk about in the time frame you talk about would definitely be startups. Companies that have been around for a while and suddenly have explosive growth and hit the other requirements only resemble startups. Google, Apple, and Facebook feel like startups but have certainly grown out of that phase. Being a startup in my opinion a one-time phase that you cannot go through again once you're established no matter how explosive your growth is.

In any case I like your definition and I think it's important that we have one. The word startup is easily overused in an attempt to attain that cool factor some companies have and to ride a trend instead of getting by on the companies real merits.
Do you have any better ideas? No other popular venue has the same kind of community upvote/downvote system to automatically filter out the "best" questions.

I mean it could be HN, but the system and UI have similar usability, right?
"It’s still early days, though – we are about to embark on the design process proper, and all we can say in terms of a release date is that our iPad and iPhone versions will be out some time in 2012."

So to be clear, a release is not imminent. Looking forward to seeing how this works out, though; Scrivener is a really different sort of writing environment for the Mac.
I do wish posters would stop adding their personal editorial comments to headlines. The linked headline does not have the words "...and will tax lower class to pay it off" and in fact, the article itself does not suggest or imply anything of the kind.

I've flagged it, not because it doesn't belong on Hacker News, but because it's been given a stupid spin by the poster.
Stallman's ideology is actually fundamentally libertarian. The core principle of libertarianism is, "Your rights end where mine begin." It doesn't matter if you're a state, a corporation or another individual. Your rights end where mine begin.

Amongst the rights granted to each individual is the right to modify the tools that they use. You restricting my freedom to modify is as wrong (according to Stallman) as you restricting my freedom to move about.
You say that I am blaming the victim, then in your link, the related story is as follows:

First of all, the obvious point is that women's intuition, while not entirely the stuff of myth, is not so powerful that it can automatically separate "good guys" from the bad. No woman can walk down the street and as she passes a man, know with certainty that he isn't a threat. Given the high incidence of rape and assault and harassment and other forms of mistreatment, a woman would be a fool to leave herself continually vulnerable. The old adage "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me" seems to apply here. When a simple smile is so frequently misunderstood and construed as a sexual invitation, American women generally do have to operate on the assumption that men are guilty until proven innocent.

Is this really an acceptable story that somehow illustrates your point? It seems like it could trivially be rewritten into something incredibly racist. If that is the case, than isn't this actually very sexist. But really, why would anyone expect random women to smile at them?

And how are women the victim? Because some products are not designed for them, but are instead designed to appeal to teenage boys? What if I feel bad because the quizzes in Seventeen magazine do not appeal to me, and instead give teenage girls ideas about the way men should be that I disagree with. Do you think this quiz (http://www.seventeen.com/fun/quizzes/celebrity/summer-movie-...) is sexist?
>I find ironic his insistence that I cannot control software I create -- because no one should be allowed to control software -- is, in and of itself, controlling.

Not really. Stallman is actually making a very libertarian point when he insists that users have the right to modify and redistribute software. He's saying, in essence, "Your rights end, where mine begin." To Stallman, every user has the right to modify and redistribute software, just like they have the right to modify and resell any other tool they use. As a software developer, you don't have the right to take away a user's software because they modify and resell it.
When you know ahead of time that the types don't need to be coerced:

http://jsperf.com/triple-equals-vs-twice-equals/4

There's even a negligible performance improvement, at least for me (iPad WebKit Safari).
Bp7.Net - Scene & P2P Releases
Bp7.Net - Scene & P2P Releases
And during that time, were Swedes productive and so on?

If so, that's evidence for the "Swedes can make any system work" theory.
The oddest thing about this legal argument of UMG is that, while they claim that this takedown mechanism is a purely private arrangement that is nothing to do with the DMCA, the mechanism was pretty explicitly added to fulfill the safe harbor clause of the act. Lawyer please: does the relationship between the takedown mechanism and the DMCA invalidate UMGs defense?
This is pretty much the same conclusion Ilya Grigorik (founder of postrank, which was recently bought by Google) came to: http://vimeo.com/22513786
Is there a change list anywhere? I can't seem to find any information about what's been updated on the site.
May I suggest markdown support for the profile descriptions? Being able to add links would be nice.
In general, the idea of not expecting other people to act ethically, and doing nothing when others are acting unethically, seems morally suspect. We regularly decry Facebook and Google for practices that compromise privacy--is this wrong? Privacy is not some magic right which everybody acknowledges is important; in fact, Zuckerburg believes he is helping the world by limit it.

Stallman is just doing the same thing as the people commenting on Facebook's practices, just against proprietary software rather than privacy abuses. I think that not only should we not blame him, but we should also commend him for maintaining and arguing for his principles.
Why I’m Taking a Principled Stand Against Badness In Publishing
I can't answer those questions but I would advise you not to buy into the hysteria surrounding SOPA. There's a lot of fear-momgerint going on and I'm willing to be many answers you get will be scary to you. Please try to look at things objectively and leave emotion out of it. Panic never helps anyone.

I would suggest you Google this stuff but I'm also interested in the answers so I also hope some people will get on here and answer. In any case, to answer as best I can, SOPA doesn't quite implement this but it does open the door to the possibility of the US having something similar to the Great Firewall of China. That's as much as I can say without showing total ignorance. Good luck.
Open Design Platform for Product Designers
trying
The headline is completely wrong and misleading. There are two major mistakes:

First, the linked article actually claims that the US will end up spending a total of $4 trillion over the next 50 years, with the costs heavily weighted to the far future. This is very different than claiming that it has already spent $4 trillion.

Second, the linked article does not make any claim as to how the expense will be paid for. The submitter speculates that it will be via taxes on the lower class, but the linked article does not say this and it is, frankly, unlikely. Keep in mind that the top 10% of income earners paid 70% of federal income tax in 2008; the top 50% paid 97.3% of all taxes. If you add in payroll taxes, the situation is much less progressive, but payroll taxes are slated to fund entitlements which are, themselves, highly underfunded; they are in no sense funding the cost of occupying Iraq in the year 2060. I'm sorry, but the US has 1) a high level if income inequality and 2) a highly progressive income tax structure. The combination of the two means that any expense like the Iraq war is going to be borne on the backs of the rich and the middle class. What taxes the "lower class" pay (however you wish to define it) is already spent.
The donations campaigns propel the growth of Wikimedia Foundation. Less than 50% is really directly dedicated to wikipedia website operation. Quite an overhead IMO. With 117 employees and $30 million budget, they can manage I think. They¡ll whine and do yet another campaign if they can't.
> defenses playing against teams who run no-huddle offenses usually have no time to call plays or change the defensive scheme, and thus allowing the defensive captain to update and change plays at the line could be a huge plus for teams that _wanted_ to do this but currently cannot.

Allowing such communication changes the tradeoffs of such a strategy. How are you concluding that one set of tradeoffs is "correct"?
Spirograph is a lie!
Most of the people I see using the Web now type the title of the site they want to access into Google. Getting them to type an actual address into a Web browser address bar is hard work.

Good luck over there. In the UK most things are allowed until they aren't (see the Police and Criminal Evidence Act and its updates).
For any open source project, the developer only has a final say on the name. If you disagree with what somebody is doing, you are always free to take the code and change what you like. If Linux is used in the government, the government has control: if they want they could, oh, write their own access control and security system for it. And then release it as open source. But that's patently ridiculous, right?

The whole point of Free Software is that you are not beholden to the developer--you are always free to modify the code yourself or hire somebody else to do it. The government could even maintain their own distro and do everything the way they want. With proprietary software, there are two issues: they are not allowed to modify it legally and it is not practical because you only have a binary.

In fact, the whole point of the GPL is to ensure that not only the original developer does not have absolute control over the source, but that other developers can't do so either.
Oh, I'm more than happy to concede that point now that we have cleared it up. The problem is that the skirt/pants idea doesn't make for much of an interesting discussion.

I think this comes down to two problems with your wording (and having English as my second language, I had to rely on taking your words by their default meaning): One, the use of dress vs. skirt that we have cleared up and Two, the difference between "message about sexual availability" and "have their sexuality judged".

That's why I initially thought you were making a joke (I found it quite funny, actually) - the difference between those two is simply too great to be making a point. Women in a skirt are judged for whether or not that dresses them to be attractive. Men in a skirt are judged for whether or not they are men at all. A man wearing pants may be judged for how attractive the specific pair of pants makes him, but a woman in pants is judged for that AND for how much it makes her appear to try to be "more manly".

To sum this up - I think you were wrong implying that women are not being judged, sexually, in pants. Furthermore, the man in a skirt point doesn't hold that much value and has only little to do with that and with what you were originally commenting on - the external judgment of sexual availability.

P.S.: As for the absurdity of a cleavage being essential for a dress - it may be debatable to what extend that point really carries, but it is a fact that a dress (again, very specific, check the wiki) is specifically cut to the female anatomy, allowing for unique features of a woman (narrower hips, cleavage). The same is simply not true for a pair of pants.
The title really should be 'Your hard drive is the bottleneck/too slow, spend money here for an SSD'

My work laptop came with a 5400rpm 750gb drive, however they provide a stipend for hardware/software I need. First thing I did, 120gb SSD, optibay (removed optical drive, put 750gb drive there), and 8gb of RAM (not near as important, especially with an SSD, but still cheap).
As a co-founder, you are a partial owner of the company and am well within your rights to see the books.

What do you mean when you say that you "got shutdown"? If by this you mean that your request was denied / not taken seriously, then you should have a serious conversation with your co-founder(s). It shouldn't be a "need to know" situation.
That's funny, but he may have meant you should not put off homework til the last possible day or minute, or just this kind of thing can come up and scuttle it. If the teacher literally assigned it at 3pm, due next day, then a few hours later you're electrocuted, that's understandable. But if it was assigned a week before, and it would have only done a few hours to do, it's much less so. Because stuff comes up. If it wasn't random electrocution it would be random something else. And keep in mind the same teacher probably hears lots of excuses, some real, some made-up, all the time. I imagine it gets frustrating for them, and their empathy wanes away. Cops have a similar effect.
Change log: http://hackage.haskell.org/platform/changelog.html
Explosion at the soccer field [GIF]
Opening Up Local Data with Prize-Inspired Apps
Stallman does not say that he wants to control what particular software you use - he has simply stated a condition necessary for software to be acceptable to him. Its acceptability or lack thereof is entirely dependent on that pre-stated condition being met, not on his further decision-making.

And if software meets that condition - free for modification and redistribution - then the user (e.g. a government agency) is free to deviate from the maintainer's direction and modify it for internal use.
Looking at the video, you could interpret his statement two ways. Either, the headline - “When you have enough data, sometimes, you don’t have to be too clever” OR the sort-of-opposite - "AI has made so little progress that we don't anything much better than naive Bayes"
The DCEVM is a patched version of JDK 7 that allows the code reloading mechanism in the JVM to swap nearly arbitrary changes. I'd highly recommend it if you're trying to do any dynamic reloading of Java code during development. http://java.net/projects/dcevm
The jobs argument is funny: I bet many of the same people who argue against open source software because it takes developer's jobs are the same who are completely happy with automation taking away menial factory jobs.

Maybe they only hired one developer instead of three. But this is a good thing--they were able to create the same value for a third the cost; this is a benefit to everybody.
I wonder, how long until we get the first completely automated fast food restaurant?

You walk in and download the menu over the wifi, pick what you want and pay with your card. You are then issued with a long unique code.

A machine prepares your meal and your phone prompts you to approach one of the vending areas. You then enter the code or scan an image and your food appears through a hole.

How many employees would be needed for serving > 100 per hour?
Not to take away from the accomplishment, but NYC Resistor did this 2 years ago: http://www.nycresistor.com/2009/02/27/sudo-make-me-a-sandwic...
(1985) Steve Jobs speaking at Lunds University, Sweden
Steve Jobs arriving in a helicopter to describe his future vision for Lunds University
Hah, I'm 19 and relate to this sentiment far too well, except just thinking back on the last 4-5 years.

I just spent the last 3 months away from the internet, and it was ridiculously mind-clearing. Burning Man turned into chasing a girl around the West Coast, turned into coming back to NYC and quitting my job so I can do more of what I want.

I still haven't really gotten back into Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook like I was before I left.

I'm not sure how I feel that mental clarity and this 'new idea ADD' are related. But I definitely feel more centered now. Reflection is key, and you're doing that. I think that's the first step toward doing what you want to do.

[edit] I think what I'm trying to say is, eliminate distractions, reflect, and follow your gut.
according to a rerun of the a speech by the australian climate change commissioner to the national press club i watched a bit of yesterday, depending on where you live the current cost curve of solar energy will place on par with brown coal in 2018.

technological development will only accelerate change.

think it was this speech http://www.npc.org.au/speakerarchive/tim-flannery.html... old media == no stream or even a transcript :\
Why would you need administrative privileges for that?
Thanks a lot for the advice guys!!

Yh I've been keeping an eye out for problems to solve and I keep telling myself to buy a notepad to jot down any ideas I come up with or a problem I discover. There are problems although big that's why I was ignoring them as they are way put of my league lol but I will listen to your advice and look into it, Thanks again! :)
Firstly, why would you assume you would never be able to buy it?

Secondly, it might not be directly relevant to people like you and I initially. If instead something like this could be cheap enough to bring to the massive billion(s) of people with no power or light at night -- that's huge. Once it's ready, and I'm nearly sure it eventually will be (solar in general), then it'll be ready for us to consume.
Just because Steve Jobs said it, it shouldn't scare you. Steve Jobs himself did his best work in his 40s and 50s. If it's true that it's rare that older people produce "less amazing stuff" (big if), then it's probably because they simply lose the desire to do it. Family, boredom or health issues get in the way.

I'm 42 and I'm as productive as I've ever been.