skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Another term that is overused is the "straw man argument" comeback. It's not Latin, but people still viciously cling to it.

Wherever there is a misunderstanding between two different sides, the defensive cry "straw man!" is heard either to compensate for a lack of ability (or motivation) to explain a point of view or to willfully ignore obvious implications of an argument.

If you look hard enough, you can find a straw man in almost every argument. Although it's important to find these misinterpretations and correct them, it usually does no good to yell "straw man!" at the other guy as part of your rebuttal.

There are some cases where a straw man argument is purposely used, usually to attack someone else's beliefs or philosophy, and therefore I think it's appropriate to bring up that term (if you're up to feeding trolls).

Next time you feel like reaching for your "straw man" defense, try to understand how and why you may have been misinterpreted, and take the opportunity to explain yourself better.
Where do all those used computers go?
It is really interesting that they're applying this to FPGA's. Reconfigurable computing would be great, if it was a) easy to program for and b) cheaper. This could solve the cheaper part, and make it even more powerful at the same time. However, I don't know how hard it is to program reconfigurable computers.

FYI: Reconfigurable computing is like parallel computing, but instead of running all of the threads on commodity hardware, they are each dynamically implemented on a FPGA. This makes a super computer with thousands of simultaneous processes much cheaper, and take far less space, if you can program the system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconfigurable_computing

Wikipedia says that reconfigurable computing systems commonly increase speed 4 orders of magnitude and decrease power consumption by one order of magnitude. (that's right, order of magnitude) However, this is in spite of the fact that FPGAs are behind commodity hardware by almost the same amount. If memristors make a decent dent in the hardware disparities, then reconfigurable computing could be huge.
What's really needed is an open source version of this so that websites can integrate custom fitness functions.
Obviuously for something as easy as "clicks" this is trivial, but the real money will be made when you can integrate it into payment systems. The problem is that it's so easy to write your own that I doubt an open source one would get much traction.
I guess that makes sense.. I wasn't thinking from the perspective of a non-developer or someone not as well connected, in which case I could see them wanting a generic service that offers feedback.
Not downloading and installing crap would significantly improve your experience of using the computer.
Pascal's wager only applies if you simultaneously discount the benefits of having contributors and play up the risks of clones. This seems backwards to me; it would take much less effort for someone to contribute to your project than to fork a new one. As such, you should get more contributors than competition.
Sun is the General Motors of the computer industry. They used to do tons of stuff for everyone because their products and expertise were unrivaled. As the demand for big machines picked up in the 90s, they did well and sold a lot of stuff to a rapidly expanding market. But now that we've all figured out that smaller, cheaper machines are just as good, nobody can quite imagine how they'll regain their past glory.

And that's the problem with recovery plans like this one: they're full of fine ideas, and you could imagine the company picking a few and doing well at them. But could they even match the efficiency and hard work of their scrappy Asian competitors? They're gonna need some major inspiration to flip around a multi-year trajectory of slow failure. The bus just doesn't have that kind of turning radius, I'm afraid.
Those are actually really good points... Hiring people is more expensive than saying, "Sure-- come on aboard. We'll see how you do!".

That being said, I'm still not convinced that 10 hours of interviewing is any better than 2 hours of interviewing in terms of predicting success/fit in an organization.
The app store seems like a good idea. However, I don't understand the purpose of a virtualization layer on top of Windows.
Tim Bray is an amazing engineer. I used to work with him at Sun and I was always impressed by him. He played a major part in the evolution of XML.
Yeah, I get it. It's an article about ad hominem, so the joking insults come out.

The first may not actually be ad hominem. If A actually doesn't have a good grasp of logic, then there is no attack just a statement of fact. And he actually says the opposite earlier, but with the statements reversed (This can't be true, you don't have a good grasp of logic.).

And the second is argument from authority, not ad hominem.

Lastly, ad hominem doesn't always address the argument. In fact ad hominem is an abandonment of argument in favor of abuse. You start appealing to people's emotion by painting a negative image of the person.
Linkbait formula: Take something that web geeks like (like Ender's Game). Then, publicly kick it in the nuts on your blog. Watch the traffic roll in.
[SPOILERS and SHAKY HYPOTHESIS below]

I think that if you look at the claims in the essay through the lens of Card's Mormonism, a very different picture emerges.

Ender's celibacy until marriage is [ostensibly] normal in Mormon society, and the age at which he married then is just a number, which falls within the realm of coincidence.

You'll note that Ender killed the Buggers without knowledge of what he was doing, then became wracked with guilt.

This hints at Enders Game as a defense not for Hitler, but for Brigham Young, and his (disputed-whether-he-knew) role in the Mountain Meadows massacre.

This would explain Card's unseemly rage at the author of the Ender-as-Hitler essay: she had effectively Godwin'd a revered patriarch of Card's religion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brigham_Young

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Meadows_massacre
The biggest thing you are missing is that it potentially limits growth. Most entrepreneurs I know want to create wealth far and beyond what you can make with a small business. You are much less likely to do that with open source, as you either have to scale service (e.g. people, your costs increase linearly as revenue increases) or compete on price (as you get more popular, your margins decrease as the market becomes more competitive) while maintaining the product.

I'd like to hear from some people with a 10-50M sales revenue (not service) product per year who have made the switch, or considered it. Somehow I can't see it happening.
Read your Joseph Campbell before categorically dismissing half of all fiction in human history.
Song Around the World "Stand By Me" [video]
http://www.5ives.com/ for the masses.
Maybe they were innovative, but at the end of the day their service was frequently used to launder money.

They also violated the law about know your customer (banks must know who each of their customers are, no anonymous customers).

Sorry, but if you run a business you have to obey the law, not just ignore it.
Reading the title I thought that the Inventory the author was talking about would be unfinished work. In our startup we often have many half done tickets, because something else a lot more "urgent" comes along - or one of the founders (like me) comes along and changes the focus.

We've come to realize that the real waste in our inventory (or like the author states: bodies in the swamp) is this unfinished work. This points to inefficiencies in our process. So whenever we realize we have unfinished tickets that have been worked on and open for more than a month - we know we have a problem in our process. Finishing tickets completely (as far as the tests/specs go) keeps our code sane, branches clean and helps us integrate earlier.

A much better analogy for Kaizen principle of no inventory in software development is unfinished work.
Then, publicly kick it in the nuts on your blog

...by comparing it to porn. That was the brilliant part.
I really do like this and if it's good and there's good software available through it I would definitely recommend it to friends and family.

But, by making it safe, easy and quick to install desktop applications again one could argue that BaseShield is really the enemy of every web application in existence. It's going to have to die.
Isn't this how they ended up with Java? FAIL.

Wasn't Patrick Naughton asked what Sun should do when he resigned?

Seems to be the new black - winning the mind share, losing the battle.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.12/java.saga_pr.html
"Genre fiction writers... primary task is to comfort the reader, not to challenge or engage in dialogue with him"

By "comfort" if you mean "entertain," then yes, all (not just genre) fiction writers should tell a good story if you want a wide audience.

The attempt to boil down entire genres to a single fetish (belief system) gratification is extremely dismissive. Sure, you can find examples of formulaic, bad prose in genres, just as you can find excellent writing. A number of authors try to get their work classified away from science-fiction or another genre just because of this stigma.

The linked article claims Ender's game is "porn" but his definition of porn is not like mine. Porn has little narrative structure. There's almost no story. There's no 3D characterization or character development. There's no conflict.

If the definition of porn becomes any work with elements that gratify a reader's particular needs, then which successful works aren't porn? The most erudite, soul-searching work gratifies a philosophical fetish.

And if your definition of value is tied to creating insight or facilitating discussion, then that's a clear difference between a work like Ender's Game and the serial romance books your mom reads.
"We did have a Gmail CSRF bug reported to us in September 2007 that we fixed worldwide within 24 hours of private disclosure of the bug details."

What about bugs that aren't disclosed?
> I don't understand the purpose of a virtualization layer on top of Windows.

To maintain the integrity of your computer in the face of potentially untrustworthy third party applications. You could compare BaseShield to a dating service (app store) that enforces the use of condoms (virtualization). Not that I'm recommending the BS'ers use that analogy though.
I like those. I wish we could get him on MakeFive as a celebrity list maker. :-)
Kaizen is a quality/continuous improvement methodology...kind of like Six Sigma, ISO 9000, etc. It has its benefits over those programs, is less formal, and is more realistic for small companies.
Went back and re-read his tribute to his brother/exhortation to move forward science again. It's like You and Your Research on steroids. If that essay doesn't motivate you, I don't know what will. Insanely brave.
I don't know about you, but I'm already better and more important than everyone else. :-P

But I think that Card needed that character for his story. I've read his original novella, and Ender's not quite as ridiculous in that one, and it doesn't work as well. Card needs a completely outstanding hero or his idea doesn't work.
The bad:

It seems to default to "Click to center" instead of "click to zoom, centered here". [Essentially] Nobody wants really precise centering of the Western Hemisphere -- they want to see their house.

It doesn't take advantage of my 1600x1200 LCD -- it's bannered to high hell and still fixed-width formatted to fit into a 1024x768(?) screen, and even then the map would be below the fold. If you're going to put a 400x300px banner higher than the map at least kill 75% of that huge brand banner at the top. The "Larger Map" button doesn't work. Grr.

The art is still cluttery -- the fonts aren't as nice as Google's and the antialiasing is still second class.

From TFA: There were two things going on prior to that time period that explain our low profile. There was considerable effort working on our new back-end technology. It is based on completely new platform technologies that was consuming a fair bit our effort. There was also a bit of miscalculation in that we didn’t do much that was visible to the user. In hindsight we should have been more visible but we knew we needed to get our house in order to do what we wanted to do. -- This is a fantastic example of Mr. Spolsky's "Things You Should Never Do, Part I" -- http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

Google Street View and MS Live Maps Bird's Eye View have both raised the bar on mapping sites. Hopefully Mapquest has something up their sleeve here.

The good:

Because they're rendering a single layer (by default) it's amazingly fast -- drags out of pre-downloaded range are coming up with only the faintest flicker, if flickering at all. Of course, when I constrain Google Maps to the same sized canvas it's really fast too. I guess Satellite view + Streets uses overlays. Still pretty fast.

I actually believe the VP's comments about their customer base being loyal and their ad clickthrough rates being higher than people think. Whereas Google has the Herculean challenge of figuring out how to monetize the proliferation of mashups and other users of their APIs, these guys target people more like my mom -- arguably less savvy but more likely to click on an ad.

The takeaway:

Because we are profitable... Excellent! It will be interesting to see how they compare going forward. I have a hard time believing the big three (G,M,Y) have profitable maps units.
This is not just strained, but wrong. From Emacs (read all the document into memory) to Linux (ignore pre-386 processors, majority at the time) to Java (drop C memory handling requirements) and of course any web app that runs on a dynamic language, successful designs choose simpler code supported by more powerful hardware rather than opposite.

There's a good reason for this: hardware consistently gets cheaper and more powerful, because it is something we understand how to engineer. Code, so far, doesn't really get easier to write, because it's more of a craft than a science.
Yeah. That part's very impressive. Although, frankly, I'd take Fake Steve Jobs over Locke and Demosthenes any day.

I hadn't thought of that before. I'll have to read over that chapter again and check that out.
Ask HN: How to donate $$$ to Ruby?
So enough bitching and moaning about MRI. If we want something better, and if we want it sooner rather than later, it's going to require sponsorship of some sort. EngineYard, Sun, and others are contributing to the projects of their choosing with actual man hours and associated costs. This is all well and good, but personally, I have no business being within 100 feet of core development and can't realistically contribute code there, even if I really wanted to.

Like many Rubyists, I've spent untold dollars on books and screencasts (we must be a very lucrative bunch on a per-user basis), and when it comes to Ruby, I've got money burning a hole in my pocket.

Now, the question is, will we Rubyists also contribute $$$ toward Ruby development? I think a great many of us would. Personally, I can donate $15 per month, and would be happy to do so. I would think that many profitable startups who are invested in Rails/Merb/Sinatra would be very interested as well. With enough of us, we could probably throw a lot more bright minds at the tough implementation problems Ruby faces.

I must admit I'm out of my depth when it comes to the brass tacks of starting foundations, but it seems to me that Ruby is ripe for one (python.org, anyone?). I'm feeling a bit frustrated that with all my love for Ruby, I can't even contribute my cash toward Ruby advocacy and development. And who doesn't want free cash? Am I alone in my thinking? Is there a website where this is already being done? If not, doesn't that signal a fundamental problem?

Let's put the market to work and kill this already!
This reminds me, in some small way, of the Peanut Butter Manifesto.

Except that Sun is (as far as I can tell) failing at everything they are spreading their peanut butter on.
agreed that sun needs to make some bold moves (besides changing the stock ticker from SUNW to JAVA) in order to get out of the mess they are in.

the changes that the writer suggests are bold and do require a new team and a lot of capital. looking at sun's balance sheet <http://finance.google.com/finance?q=java>, it doesn't look like they will be able to do much of anything. i think sun is sitting around and barely making do because they just really want someone else to come in and take over. they've been slowly cutting jobs for years in order to reduce OP EX.
I can get feedback from my website from a group of programmers any time I want to. They pretty much invariably say "Bah, who in their right mind would pay for that? I could reproduce its output in Excel in, like, five minutes." Thirty thousand dollars later my answer is "Gah, my customers pay for it. Could you concentrate on the things which are actually important here? Mistakes, usability issues, things that will interrupt conversions, etc?" and then they say "Oh, well, the page doesn't validate. Maybe it could use an RSS feed."

sigh I spend time answering emails describing the difference between "web site" and "application". No, my customers would not benefit from an RSS feed, thank you.

Asking my mother has its own problems: "It's wonderful, dear. It would be even more wonderful in teal."

Its at that point where I think "If I were hiring myself as a consultant to read this feedback and search it for actionable insights I would bill myself $100 and report 'Sorry, there is nothing useful here'." Which makes paying $7 and giving a somewhat more diverse set of people micro-tasks pretty darn appealing. I can give them actual tasks, they will perform them because I am paying for completion, and I can analyze the results.
What about a user on stumbleupon ... stumbling onto a nefarious website?

The community would curtail such a site after awhile, but those prior may have been hacked.
My thought process was as follows: You used the word "impervious," which made me think about both physical and mental susceptibility to those issues. If you died before those issues could kill you, then indeed you would be impervious. However, if you had children, then your concern for them could make you vulnerable to the effects of those issues.

That's why I don't really feel that my statement fits the definition of Bulverism. I had no intention of proving you wrong, nor did I assume you were wrong. After all, who knows how you felt about the subject better than you? Because of that, there was really no point in agreeing with you, unless I thought you were lying, and since I don't know you, I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt. =)

Doing further research, I found the following statement on Bulverism: "The Bulverist’s thought is that if a person’s convictions can be fully explained as a result of non-rational factors then we need not bother about those convictions." Now I consider both the childless and child-laden conclusions to be very rational, though you're probably right in that it's a platitude, I don't hang out with child-laden people often enough. =)
Oops, sorry, mixed up the titles. I meant to write PC where I wrote AC. If PC disavows AC, then I've failed to find the disavowal by looking up the pointers to AC in the index of PC. There's something nearer to a disavowal in "Secrets and Lies", but it still doesn't go further than (I paraphrase) "I focused on the algorithms, but actually other stuff matters more". (Both books mention that plenty of very bad systems have been built by people who read AC and thought they were therefore experts, but I don't think it's fair to blame that on AC.)

There's a reason why I put "arguably" in front of "definitive" :-). But the point is that what got Schneier famous was writing a big fat book, with lots of technical content, that a lot of people read and were impressed by. That may be less solid than writing a big book that deserves to impress everyone, but it's not at all the same thing as pure blogging bloviation.

(AC doesn't seem so very bad to me, aside from being out of date and being too much of an unassimilated algorithm-dump, but then I'm a generalist rather than a security professional.)
Well I guess there is still a long road ahead. They are a service+infrastructure provider. I would approach some ISVs to actually deploy via BaseShield and to also approach some IHVs to bundle BaseShield with new PCs perhaps.
I've pretty much dismissed all fiction for the reason that unalone mentions: fiction is designed to be interesting. And I don't like reading stuff that's interesting. I mean I do occasionally, but it rarely holds my attention.

edit: I have wanted to read Campbell for awhile though, maybe that will be my next book.
(For the avoidance of doubt, not that it particularly matters, the book I meant to call "arguably definitive" was Applied Cryptography, not Practical Cryptography. I agree that no one would think PC is definitive even though it's a wiser book than AC, simply because it's so much more selective.)
Paul McCartney: Why I experiment
If you look at "sleep"'s response:

Dear Sir, You have found the right person to do the job. I am a representative of a company that has recently completed a large enterprise commercial project related to the development of a HaltLib.NET library that is meant specifically to solve the problem of interest to you, and I am ready to share my experiences and code. Note that our library works for a wide variety of programming languages, including, but not limited to, HTML, XML, PNG, CSV, SQL, BNF, Regular Expressions and even "Field=Value" .property file formats. I guarantee you maximally efficient and clean code on this project.

You'll note that he doesn't list any Turing-complete languages. (The implementation will almost certainly look like yours). :P
I wonder if/when it's ever going to occur to them that it's easier to work on improving linux than it is to fight windows, mac AND linux by ... becoming more like linux.

I especially loved this point - "Will buyers accept a certain amount of lock-in, or will they insist on zero barriers to exit?" Sun acts like it still owns the market.
> And I don't like reading stuff that's interesting. I mean I do occasionally, but it rarely holds my attention.

I can totally relate: I hate food that tastes good, and breathing oxygen.
Anyone wanna do a package manager for Windows?
Imagine if you could sit down to a clean install of Windows and get all of your favorite programs installed as easily as if it were Ubuntu or OpenSUSE?

I'm thinking that you could easily tie it into an app-store where some money could be made by reselling commercial apps.

Thoughts? If you're interested, email me at wb.stow at the gmail.com

Thanks.
given what happened to the essay's author at a convention, your explanation makes the most sense. I just still find it strange that the sequel had Ender going to a Brazilian planet...
The main difference is BaseShield's secure virtualization. It's true that there are other platforms that make downloads convenient, but none of them can automatically enforce certain behavior for the applications.
I don't really see how you can claim it makes apps safe if you provide access to 3D hardware. Anyone who has done any 3D hardware programming will know that it's easy to crash/exploit through 3D APIs.

Having said that... nice one!

I see some code I wrote on there is being offered up! So can you please send me the source ;) You should provide any source for binaries you are distributing that require such things... including diffs to changes you've made (for software with those licenses).

There's lots of these types of app stores(portals) around... but I like how you've at least attempted to make it safe. I still think a process of review and trust will help just as much, so I hope you have those ideas mixed in.

Also, are you doing anything to try and stop piracy for paid apps?