skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Racism and other bigotry goes away the more free and open an economy is.

That was not true in the racist southern society where the majority of the population was born into a tradition of racism. In a racist society a business will be much more successful by catering to the desire of its customers for white-only water fountains, etc. A business that tries to integrate will suffer a loss of the majority of its customers and that majority is also the wealthier portion. So in such a society a free economy will tend to reinforce existing racism. We needed authoritarian civil rights laws and the threat of force to begin reversing that racism.
Nice work. Google also reimplemented jsmin as jsmin.py here: https://github.com/v8/v8/blob/master/tools/jsmin.py

Now we just need an evil-friendly reimplementation of jslint.
Very nice! I built a demo of simple, pay-by-the-hour minecraft servers about a year ago but never launched. Lately I've been thinking about resurrecting that project. I guess now there's some competition.

Its pretty clear that previous solutions weren't simple enough for casual users. There are plenty of people who have no idea what RAM is but who would love to have their own worlds that their friends can join. I think the world sharing aspect is a big part of this and you guys have hit the nail on the head. Well done and good luck!
You’re in good company. The rising tone at the end of a sentence used in a non-interrogative context is called uptalk or a high rising terminal [1]. Its increased use has been a far-reaching dialect shift that has been ongoing for a couple of decades now. The New York Times published an article on it in 1993 [2] and just recently another [3] with a good overview of how its use has mostly spread into every corner of the American populace. Perhaps my favorite discussion of uptalk is an analysis of some of George W. Bush’s speeches in which he extensively employs it [4].

###

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_rising_terminal

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/1993/08/15/magazine/on-language-like-...

[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/28/science/young-women-often-...

[4] http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002708.h...
Full Complaint of Yahoo's Suit Against Facebook
Pauses are widely viewed as the ideal replacement to umm/uhh.

I took public speaking in college, attended Toastmasters for a while, and also attended an in-office public speaking class when was working in a corporate setting. All of these groups offered the advice to remove umm/err/uhh from your vocabulary.

They're noises that make the speaker seem less comfortable and competent, and that don't add value.

As a startup CEO, I routinely visit clients and potential clients, and often find myself facing a room with 10 or 20 people. I find that I perform much better than my CTO, in large part because my speaking skills give me a higher level of initial perceived credibility, allowing the rest of my words to be viewed through a more positive lens.
You can't enslave people and make them act against their nature without a central government

Uh, of course you can. Slave owners of yore relied on paid guards and bounty hunters to keep their slaves. Sure, they were legally protected by the state, but they didn't need its actual interference. In fact, even after the importation of slaves from Africa was illegalized in the US, thousands continued to be imported just because the ban wasn't enforced.

Even in modern times and in countries were slavery was abolished, this is still true. For example, the Brazilian government had to free 4500 slaves just in 2008: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/03/brazil-slavery-p...

There's also the hundreds or thousands of women who are forced to marry in their teens by their own parents and husbands-to-be, without the government doing anything except letting it be. It's a major problem in India, Pakistan and even in Britain.
Well, thanks for educating us as to how it should be done.
I really think my answer here on Quora about Peter Thiel explains the main part of this: http://www.quora.com/Peter-Thiel/How-is-Peter-Thiel-so-amazi...

I don't think it's nerves as much as it's a mismatch between someone's internal intelligence/thinking speed and their ability to translate that into speech on the spot.
Practice. Practice. Practice. I've become a pretty good public speaker because of simply that. I absolutely adore this concept. No slides. Just a jam about something you love.
Imagine your server based app suddenly become instantly copyable and deployable by anyone visiting your site, at no charge to them or you. You launch your latest startup and within 6 hours there are thousands of clones around the world competing with you. This new reality applies to any new web or mobile app you build. That would terrify me.

A technology that could instantly clone any software service would have to be magical enough that I think its benefits would outweigh the drawback of killing a business model.
Also from wikipedia:
>Socialism /ˈsoʊʃəlɪzəm/ is an economic system characterized by social ownership and control of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy

There seems to be a myth that socialism means anti-capitalism. This is not true. You can have private, but managed private companies working in a socialist countries. You have have a fully capitalist country but with socialised essential state assets.
>I'm doing my best to ensure he knows to "do nothing" a bit each day. //

Could you expand on this and be specific please?
If they had set 1 px = 1 pixel, almost all Web pages would be unreadably small. AFAIK, Web designers don't use pt.
Where exactly are you moving your mouse that you need to take your eyes off the screen in order to find it?

Anyway, point & click scenarios can be argued. Click and drag scenarios are where touchscreens fail entirely in their current implementations. At least on my tablet, it requires me to long press, drag, long press again, and press copy. Minimum of 5 seconds with some practice to copy some text. With a mouse and a left hand on my home keys, I can copy text in under a second.
Several RISC chips for Lisp Machines were under development. Xerox, Symbolics (Sunstone), University of California (SPUR), had projects for that. The AI winter then killed it. The Lisp Machines then were ported as emulators to ALPHA (Symbolics), SPARC (Interlisp) and other processors.

"Also, note that the Sunstone project did address many of the competitive concerns, especially the continual mention of Sun in this analysis. The Sunstone project included a chip design for a platform meant to run Unix and C, as well as Lisp. It was a safe C exploiting the tagged architecture, for example, to allow checking of array bounds. And the Sunstone project was being produced on-time. But to back up the analysis of Symbolics’ priorities, it was cancelled as we were getting the first chips back from LSI Logic."
As I read about the moon and air and charging for smells, I couldn't help but think TANSTAAFL or rather TANSTAAFSOL. The music industry like the Moon is a harsh mistress and what makes a mistress a mistress is that it costs you to keep her.

There's plenty of free music, one can even make it one's self or have a friend make it for you. Ownership of a musical performance is no different from ownership of a book, except in so far as it is easier to share.

Nobody is pillorying Simon and Schuster because they charge for ebooks. Nor are they declaring Amazon to be an impediment to progress because they sell such books for far more than the cost of delivery. Come to think of it, nobody is holding Apple accountable for profiting as the principle conduit for the music industry's model.

That's not to say that the legislation put forward recently is good or that the draconian punishments of downloaders are appropriate.

But creative works should be controlled by their authors, and musicians and filmakers are not flocking en masse to copyleft schemes.
> You don't think "many people" build machines by shopping at retailers like TigerDirect? It might not be the vast minority, but it's still "many people".

No, I don't think that "many people" do this in the grand scheme of things. I'd bet less than 3% (possibly much less) of new PCs for home use are purchased this way. But I don't have any stats for this.

> The reason I believe that is because unless every keyboard has that key, then a major operating system that has traditionally been fine without it shouldn't suddenly expect it unless there is some major advantage to requiring it.

I understand your point, but I disagree. This means that there can be no progress. There have been keyboards in the past that didn't have the Alt key or the Escape key. There have been keyboards with Meta keys. Hardware can and should change, and software should change with it and not be trapped in the past. European keyboards often have an "AltGr" key that allows inserting characters that to my knowledge cannot be easily inserted from a standard US keyboard (Wikipedia says Ctrl+Alt does the same thing, but it doesn't on my system). I think it's perfectly reasonable to say that if you want this functionality, you get a keyboard that supports it.

FYI, the version of the keyboard you use was discontinued in 2009, and the replacement does indeed have the Windows key (but no trackpad). http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/product-and-parts/detail.pag...
Calling the ethics as described above "deontological" is risky and ill-advised because that term is commonly used to describe Kantianism and a use of the categorical imperative[1]. These two (if taken seriously) rule out a marketplace because participants treat each other solely as a means to an end. Deontology, as it is commonly referred to, and the NAP are incompatible systems of ethics.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontological_ethics#Kantianism
Of course; virtually all arguments are semantics. I was simply looking for clarification into nirvana's intended meaning. That that involved getting into the semantics of anarchism/socialism/libertarianism/what-have-you is the nature of this kind of discussion.

If I was concerned with finding the 'right' answer, or pushing my own political ideology (which happens not to be any of those currently under discussion), then I could see why we'd need to have a discussion about what 'anarchism' with or without adjectives really is.

I was, however, only concerned with the history of these ideologies (as a former student of precisely this topic). I had hoped to probe into that by bringing up the diverging uses of the category libertarian in the broader history of European politics and the divergence of U.S. political categories from those.

Certainly never meant to upset anyone.
This paragraph:

Most books on compiler are priced at more than $100 and are long and boring. My system, which contains a book (fun and to the point), exercises & solutions, three languages you can use however you want and a screencast, is only $39.99.
And I even give it to you for free if you're not happy.
Swimming against the trends and making something that's the best version of your own vision would qualify for a positive adjective like "brave".

Junking your existing stuff and making your users into involuntary recruits in your drive to hijack what the pundits say is the latest and great thing merits adjectives like "arrogant", "overweening" and "full of hubris".
Good stuff. Curious, did you use Noir?
that's a clever idea. i've been looking for something to do with "iamnotacriminal.com" - perhaps i'll have a simple site where you can pick an MPAA member (ie an executive at a MPAA member company) and send an "e-payment" of $150,000 scanned dollar bill images for each song you listen to... on the honor system for you to properly account for the songs for which you "owe". :)
And "like"
OS functions aren't discoverable without external reference materials, applications run in full-screen and offer limited integration with other applications, and multitasking is crippled.

Welcome to DOS.
Yeap, it's really hard to create a succesfull startup when you're not your own client ;)
Rethinking map projections with project it yourself
Why TextPlus is betting on Windows Phone over BlackBerry
this is just ridiculous and dismissive of everyone who has ever tried to better themsleves
"The NAP is the principle, but the philosophy involves recognizing the economic effects of violating the NAP are always worse than respecting it."

Why are they always worse? A very contrived example: a company choosing to pay significantly lower wages for, say, black people does not violate NAP. They might not like it, but nobody forces them to work for that particular company, right? But is this a global economic benefit?

Free of regulations (most of which do violate NAP), entities with power will search for a local optimum, and the thing with local optima is that they can be surprisingly low, but impossible to get out of without external force.
Not the original commenter, but I'm guessing they meant two things:

1) You should technically only be editing /etc/sudoers through visudo.

2) You should also have an admin/root group. All you would need to do then is "sudo adduser <blah> admin/root". This group is the one you specified in /etc/sudoers to have root permissions.
Would you then say that identity constitutes intellectual property? After all, identity “theft” (really infringement) can also occur without the victim’s knowledge, and without perceptible loss. Does that make such crimes less serious? Do they not still undermine something of value?
You are assuming that it's possible to turn back the clock; I seriously doubt that.

Profiting from recording has become the norm. The industry is simply not going back to live performances as the primary means of enjoying music. People will not be dragged kicking and screaming from their iPods & iPhones.

Likewise, I suspect that attempting to make money solely from movie theaters would end up with a crippled industry. There's a reason that DVDs were the fastest growing recording media in history: when you can get all the benefits of a theater experience (many of us don't need a 100' screen to be happy) at home without any of the drawbacks, well, it's gonna be hard to keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Paree.
And this is the difference between a professional and a programmer.

A programmer program for the sake of technology, while a professional creates value (and weighing ROI)
Ask HN: Why does Hacker News Suck?
Let's discuss why this site sucks and why it is great.

It's sucks because it is slow as hell
It's great because it suggests some good articles

Ben Hall
ben@skrittle.com
This is a valid concern that hinges on the predictability and consistency of the data being used.

There are two approaches to visualiation:
exploratory - When you don't know what the data looks like, you use this to find out what's there.
expository - When you do know the data, you can use this approach, which is what the Twitter and Facebook infographics are. We designed the templates around the known scale and range of the data.

If these templates don't work for you, there's additional variety and customization to come that will abide by standards of analysis and visualization.. :)
Has anyone read both this and Knuth's Concrete Mathematics? http://www.amazon.com/Concrete-Mathematics-Foundation-Comput... How do they compare with each other?
I'm not sure the comparison to unions is proper. Let's see. Unions are about limiting freedom - limiting freedom of employees to work where the want and do what they want with they money (with unions, they can't work unless they join the union, they have to pay union duties and they have to abide by unions rules), and limiting the freedom on employers to hire (or cease to hire) anybody they want on conditions that are freely negotiated between them. Now, some may consider this limiting of freedoms beneficial and desirable, but it's limiting anyway.

Now, most of the people in free software movement are the exact opposite of that - they want to expand other people's choices and let them do more stuff, not less. However, some fraction of the movement (and I'm not going to name names, anybody is free to guess who they are) does want to limit choices of others in order to make them behave in ways they approve. They believe it is for the better of all, but however you take on that question is, you must recognize there's this agenda and the goal of it is to limit choices of other people in order to make them behave in a certain way. Of course, they do not go nearly as far as unions do - while unions may very well be able to deny you the use of your own property and work, these people would only at the worst deny you the use of the fruits of their work, not yours, which is completely different league.

So while for the most of the software movement comparison to unions is completely off base, there's some semblance of analogy between some parts of it and unions, but even there it's only hint of resemblance, far short of being in the same ballpark.
This is actually a great idea, many gamers I know who don't work in IT are dumbfounded by all the hoops they have to go through just to get a server up and running, let alone maintenance.
Jimmy Wales' Wikia surpasses IGN to become the largest gaming website
اجمل هدايا عيد الام 2012
Yahoo sues Facebook over 10 patents including methods for advertising on the Web
Weekend Project: Fielding's Original REST Dissertation, Abridged
Lawrence Lessig has a very interesting plan that would potentially have large effects on these types of situations. What if politicians were incentivized to be for the people instead of for the lobbyists? http://theanticorruptionpledge.org/
Try this spin: if you release a program as FOSS with the GNU license, why should anyone respect the licence?

Same with movies/music: before release, nobody has a copy. It is then released subject to terms you may or may not like; nonetheless, those are the terms and if you don't like them you have no right to disregard them & make a copy anyway.

It's not like smells. Software, be it programs or movies, does not diffuse by itself to random passers by. Copies are deliberate, and each is subject to contract law.
This is just a minor end-of-thought speaking affectation. I've never really been bothered by it. John Carmack has an even more characteristic "um" which comes out like the word "I'm". That honestly did bother me at first, but you get over it after a while.

Not a big deal unless you're really worried about your first impression. Once you're where John Carmack or Paul Graham is, that's not an issue.

I recently noticed that Chuck Klosterman's delivery sounds a lot like an excited Paul Graham. He's a good model for what Paul would sound like with more flow between individual thoughts:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yTwbga3lGM#t=39m10s
My understanding was that 'deontological' simply means (indeed, almost literally means) having been derived from rules. Deont being the Greek to refer to duty or rule.

Kantianism is probably the most famous from of all the deontological ethical systems. But structurally the NAP and the categorical imperative serve the same purposes in Kantianism and nirvana's libertarianism, respectively: they provide the principle by which all other actions are held to account.
can't edit link, so: http://hackerne.ws/item?id=3695360
Contests are interesting because it actually is a way of providing some (very small) value back to participants in exchange for contact information/viewing an advertisement/whatever.

Many companies would happily pay a nickel for an email address. Lots of people would probably be happy give out their email address for a nickel if it were 100% frictionless, but it just doesn't make sense to execute a transaction for that small of an amount. But give people a 1/10,000 chance at a $500 prize (actual value, $0.05), and you've eliminated the transaction overhead. It's actually rather win-win.

Almost makes me wonder if there isn't a business model somewhere out there that cuts out the middle-man of "content" in an advertising scenario entirely. If an advertiser is willing to pay, say, $0.25 for an impression of an ad, would users watch it willingly in exchange for a shot at a contest prize with an effective value of $0.25? You'd have to find a way to eliminate "farmers" or people outside the targeted demographic, but you could probably do that using Facebook or some other way to target specific groups of people.
Have to agree with you there. His premise is interesting, and he opened strong, but then it devolved into a series of terrible "I don't know what I'm talking about" moments.
can you elaborate on why you think he's failing?
CIRA Factbook - gTLD & ccTLD Stats
I'm not a web designer. Can you explain to me why it's important to be able to position/size something to exactly N pixels, rather than to exactly kN pixels (where k is some integer decided by the browser implementor)?
Bastiat would certainly loved such a question.

Even I can invent a lot similar questions, like: _Should married couples be taxed to subsidize night clubs?_
I have noticed that my annoyance at a speaker's 'um' goes way up when I don't like the speaker, or the subject matter is turning me off.

When the new division head announced that we'd been acquired because Sprint loved everything about us, and he was only introducing a few minor, very cosmetic, changes? All I could focus on was his 'um's.

That and my resume.

pg talking about why Hacker News has it's quirks? Loved it.

I guess the same thing happens with spouses. My second wife does things that I -know- should annoy me. They do when other people do them. But with her .. it's cute. Adorable. Another reason why I love her so much.

Been almost fifteen years since I got hitched - I guess it's true love.
> don't any other people here think 2-year-old kids shouldn't be playing iPad games at all?

I'd be surprised if there were (m)any people who think a 2 year-old should not use an iPad "at all".

I guess the jury is still out since my children are 6 and 22 months but so far the iPad seems like a spectacular device for them...certainly better than books. My son has been playing memory games, alphabet, numbers, spanish, songs, angry birds, plants v zombies, drawing, facetime, pattern matching, etc, etc, etc. I'm not sure how this is going to end up badly.
I believe its common for great thinkers/writers. If someone is able to speak something valuable faster without the need to feel pauses it means that he either super-fast thinker or he memorized/polished his speech, which is something, i guess, PG dont have time for.
Alas, it gets complicated to isolate variables when you consider the whole economic meltdown they're experiencing. Public policy is hard, let's go programming!
Unless the result was no more software services.
Yes, users have to be "told how" to do things, but what's more reasonable: a clickable menu or button that tells you what it does by having its function literally written on it, or an arcane gesture that you have to discover either by trial and error or by querying external documentation?
The Brute Force Bias
Works just fine for me. OSX Chrome 17.0.963.79