skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So what, for you, distinguishes "opinions" from "facts"? Can you give some examples of opinion-easily-mistaken-for-fact in ordinary English and explain what makes them harder to express in E-prime than other sentences of ordinary English? (Or, if you think that misses the point, what makes their E-prime equivalents less likely to spring to the mind of someone writing in E-prime?)

People often express aesthetic judgements as factual statements, and perhaps they shouldn't; so let's take some examples and see how they go into E-prime.

"Bach is the greatest composer who ever lived" means much the same as "No other composer wrote such great music as Bach did". That didn't feel at all difficult, and the E-prime version contains just as much opinion, which looks just as much like fact, as the E-notprime version.

"The Mona Lisa is overrated" means much the same as "Most people rate the Mona Lisa's merits more highly than it really deserves". Again, expressing that sentiment in E-prime gives no difficulty, and the E-prime version has the same problems as the E-notprime version while using more words.

Perhaps we should look at politics rather than the arts?

"The Republicans are concerned only to feather their own and their benefactors' nests": this one requires scarcely any change, and I might very easily have happened to express it in E-prime without trying. "The Republicans want to feather their own and their benefactors' nests, and don't care about anything else."

"Barack Obama is a charlatan whose only real skill is persuasive oratory." Well, "is a charlatan" doesn't go easily into E-prime, but one can say "Barack Obama's success in politics results entirely from his persuasive oratory, despite the false impression to the contrary that he is careful to give", and as usual the translation gives little trouble and preserves the undesirable features of the original.

So, I dunno, but it doesn't seem to me as if writing in E-prime makes it easier for opinions to look like facts. Would you care to enlighten me?

Remark: all of the above (apart from examples in quotation marks) is in E-prime, unless I goofed, and by far the most difficult thing to say without the copula was the first sentence of the second paragraph; and in fact "perhaps they shouldn't" (which I would in fact regard as opinion-easily-mistaken-for-fact) was the best I could do to replace things like "arguably aesthetic judgements are matters of opinion rather than fact". This may of course just indicate that I'm not good at writing in E-prime, but I do find it interesting that the main effect of doing so was to introduce an opinion-as-fact problem.
You're right, those files would be useful.

But the point of the examples is that all sorts of actions can be attached to semantically marked up data. Those actions could just as easily export data to a vcal file, or do something less obvious, like list people you know who live near that location, or list people who are also planning to attend an event, etc.

I guess the demo does need quite a bit of work. Things should be more clear when multiple (as well as user-installable) smartlinks/actions will be supported on each semantically marked up item.
for the record I am not a conservative, nor was my account just created today (specifically just a few minutes ago like your account. Let me guess, your past yc news account was NSX2?).

I just feel that hacker news is a forum for posting a wide range of ideas. If you don't agree with an article you can do one of two things:

1) post a logical counter argument like some people already have.

2) ignore it.

I really hate posts that really have nothing to do with the general ideas that articles convey. it tends to become useless noise.

This isn't about conservatism vs liberalism. This is about US Social Security. Please stick with the subject.
Abstract concepts have trouble performing actions, because, well, they don't exist.

Exactly. But how many people have died because somebody truly believed their abstract concept literally existed?

http://www.nobeliefs.com/eprime.htm
Hey, what a coincidence. I run from Microsoft Office daily.
Choosing the right IT certification
We've only got two of them...
Unnecessary passive is hard to parse.
it would be generally inappropriate to bring a baby to a business meeting regardless of gender

Yes it would! That's precisely my point.
Seth's Blog: Teaching people a lesson
Gmail as Help Desk System
Serving an NSManagedObjectContext over an NSConnection
In a site populated by hackers and entrepreneurs, you're going to get people with a strong preference for individualism over collectivism - that's the nature of the beast here. People are going to be very free action-oriented, anti-paternalistic, and not too many of us are going to like the government. We've also got the smart people thing going on where we think politicians are numbskills that spend more time politicking than doing anything intelligent.

So you've got that. But past that, it's hard to find intelligent discussion on economics, government, and society, and a bit coming into HN is healthy for the discussion.

What I'm impressed about is that we get practically no political current events here - and that's pretty cool. Most of the ideas we talk about in terms of economics, society, and government are pretty broad, intellectual strokes instead of inflamed stuff. And for the record, I'm all up for talking about market failure, monopolozation, and unfair initial distribution of resources. And we can have some good discussion.

Edit: This was originally a reply to someone who said HN was being invaded by Conservative lobbyists getting free publicity or some such. byrneseyeview replied to the same guy quoting some of it before he deleted it if you're curious as to the gist of it.
My technique for speed reading is to read really fast. Doing so just comes naturally, or at least it feels that way. I was a very early reader as a child, which I bet correlates strongly with being a fast reader thereafter.

I do find that for material that's heavier going my retention is worse than I'd like it to be. I don't know whether that's just because I'm unrealistically optimistic about what ought to be achievable, or whether my reading speed is tuned for easier stuff because, e.g., in those formative childhood years most of what you read is relatively easy, syntactically at least. (For stuff that's conceptually difficult, the prescription is the same whatever your reading speed: put the book down and think/scribble/experiment, read multiple times, force yourself to express the key ideas in your own words, etc.)
Odd. I had a hotmail account several years ago and left it abandoned for about 8 months & when I finally checked it, it hadn't been deleted.
"Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote their own device drivers? Are you without a nice project and just dying to cut your teeth on a OS you can try to modify for your needs? Are you finding it frustrating when everything works on minix? No more all-
nighters to get a nifty program working? Then this post might be just for you :-)

As I mentioned a month(?) ago, I'm working on a free version of a minix-lookalike for AT-386 computers. It has finally reached the stage where it's even usable (though may not be depending on what you want), and I am willing to put out the sources for wider distribution..." - Linus Torvalds
"The present discounted value of the promises embedded in the Social Security law greatly exceeds the present discounted value of the expected proceeds from the payroll tax. The difference is an unfunded liability variously estimated at from $4 trillion to $11 trillion--or from slightly larger than the funded federal debt that is in the hands of the public to three times as large."

The mismatch between the promised benefits that many voters think they have "earned" by "saving" money in their personal "Social Security accounts" and the actual funding capacity of the Social Security system is why it looks like Mr. Ponzi was the designer of the system. The overall societal effect of Social Security as it is currently funded is a massive wealth transfer from the working young to the nonworking old, which is excellent politics but rather poor economics.
I don't think you can make the call on which knife you'd use till you had both. If you enjoy cooking or if you hate cooking but have to, the $100 knife will likely become your choice knife: preparing food becomes quicker and easier -- you're investment returns in time and peace of mind.

The $100 knife is also usually quite indestructible compared with the $10 counterpart. Even a $100 knife in the poorest care is salvageable with a professional sharpening.
I will give it a read, thanks for the suggestion.
Actually, in the 'Dark Ages', it was Islamic science that was at the forefront of the science - algebra, a new discipline, was invented by a Muslim from Persia. It was not until 1500's that European's made inroads into science and when Newton came along simply took science to the next level. I have no problem admitting to facts - but what gets my goat is when Europeans present science as something dynamic during the tmie of Greeks and then stagnant for some period and then the boom. At least acknowledge it a bit - may even help the world political situation !!
What about naked photos of your girlfriend?
Even if you never go through 10 $10 knives and "save money", you lose out in time and happiness (dull blades perform poorly, and every day you prepare food is wasted time with a poor knife, and a blow to your own mood, because dull blades are more apt to slip and cut you, mar your food, and generally put you in a fowl mood).

If you don't cook, though, no worries.
Make Magazine Debuts Their Own TV Show
"The scale of the disaster is so large that Obama being America's first black president will almost be a historical footnote."

Nope. Economic downturns will come and go. If this downturn tends back toward a bull market during Obama's term(s) in office, Obama will look like a genius. Anyway, there can only be one first black president, but there can be lots of presidents who enter office during an economic downturn. I'm not so sure that the American cultural shift is as profound as the article says, either. My family didn't buy a house (after returning to the United States from a stay in Taiwan) during the last several years precisely because we could easily see our local housing market was in a bubble. Plenty of Americans never used their houses as piggy banks or lived on credit cards, and plenty never will. There is cultural change at the margin, but there will always be debtors, always be speculators, and always be people who spend money conspicuously.
Obama Moves to Counter China With Pentagon-NASA Link
The Coming Desktop Revolution?
Middle market investment banking company
GulfStar Group is a leading middle market investment banking company assists in banking transactions including Financial Advisory, Investment, and Merchant Banking in Houston, Texas.
DeepEarth: Microsoft’s Open Source Mapping Control
Ask HN: Please review my new computer architecture I plan to sell as PaaS.
I plan on selling compute time on this architecture at about $0.75 cents more on an EC2 instance. The advantages to this architecture are.

- Easy nonlinear operation [it is a nondeterministic automaton}

- Theoretical Solution of intractable computing problems [All of NP probably some of P# etc...]

- Ease of implementation and licensing [it is a piece of software]

- Ease of distributing over network or concurrency (the software has immutable data structures in matricies which can be implemented across multiple computers using map/reduce over a distributed hash table.)
The computer architecture is at http://arxiv.org/abs/0812.4009
NOTE: This is a Pre alpha spec I am still working on the specification. If you find bugs please post in comments.
A social safety net isn't "collectivism". "Collectivism" is an emotional button hard libertarians try to push. Agree or disagree with Social Security, but please don't tar "hackers and entrepreneurs" with a single political brush.
Middle-class China aims for the Ivy League
Comment from the author:

> chances are you're reading the post out of a larger context to what I've written about. Check out Why we chose Git, a rebuttal. ( http://unethicalblogger.com/posts/2008/11/why_we_chose_git_a... )
I built a 140-machine farm at Softlayer, ~6 months ago. Here are some observations (that may not mean much south of 10 boxes.)

a) AWS feature advantages (mostly instascale, in our case) fade with the high cost of every additional dedicated box.

b) It's nice to virtualize the map of services to boxen, but at some level of scale, each box has a single task and you want the ability to run it _flat out_. If so, you have to decide if Xen overhead is worth labor somewhere else, and alternately, if Xen source compatibility holds you back from new kernel features. (Pick your VM technology.)

c) We still wanted instascale with our own software distribution, so in something less than a week I hand-tooled a pxe-based provisioner that initialized from a live exemplar (gentoo, whee). It took some work to find the right propeller heads at Softlayer, but eventually we understood each other and the bootp listeners got turned off for our subnets. "Insta" became 2-hour hardware activation, which was ok for us. You might consider puppet in the same way (except for Gentoo's long from-scratch build time.)

d) Virtually all provider admin is automated and this still works and makes sense at scale. The SOAP API that backs it is not quite fully baked, but is very useful. Paired with box-level IPMI pokes, you can replicate AWS control over hardware.

e) Whatever AWS provides, at scale you still have a custom setup at some level of abstraction, so putting in place exactly the right hardware saves labor.

f) Substantial discounts can be had.
That's awesome. I bet Clint Eastwood would spit in their skinny cappucinos and call them spineless pussies too!
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Blogging keeps on being pronounced dead. It's actually the opposite this time.
Add reCAPTCHA widgets to Symfony forms
Build your own website thumbnail generator with Django
Fed has abandoned monetary policy, critic says
I do the same thing, but one additional step that I like to do is have a few daily habits that I try and do every day (in my case Mon-Fri) that are "connected" to my longer-term goals and ambitions. For example, one of my long-term goals is to learn how to play piano, so I have a daily habit of practicing for 25 mins. Another of my daily habits is to review my goal plan, just to keep it fresh in my mind.
"From time to time I like to ask how someone happens to know whatever it is they are claiming. It does not seem tot be a popular question, though."

Feel free to ask me that any time. I hope I notice your comments and upvote them when you do that.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=418478
I see you revised your title while I was attempting to comment at first. The article you've linked to is an interesting discussion of incentives on parents to prompt their children to apply to certain colleges.
Once every couple years, a "new" group of people gets all huffy about the fact that Social Security taxes "aren't really invested at all", but rather pay off current retirees. It's a false controversy. That's the intent of the system. The people collecting Social Security today paid for the previous generation's baseline defined benefit retirement.

Social security isn't an investment plan, and it isn't a welfare plan. It's not a sports car either. It's an easy, cheap, intellectually flimsy argument to snipe at it by saying it's bad at being something it isn't intended to be.
Pardon me, I didn't know it was a politically-loaded term these days. I meant it as a more general term the way people would make the broad statement that "Eastern societies are more collectivist, and Western societies are more individualist." More responsibility to the group, with the associated pros and cons of that.

I was making the point to the original poster who said HN has a conservative lean. My point was you're going to tend to see more individualistic people on the whole here, and more individualistic people tend to dislike the government having a larger role in their lives. That's true on the whole in my experience, but certainly not for everyone.

Anyway, thanks for pointing that out. I'm just here for good discussion and the free cookies, not to push any emotional buttons or tar people I respect with a single political brush :)
No, that is entirely incorrect. The government borrowing from SS is no different than them borrowing from the Chinese, either way it has to be repaid. At least this way the interest is going to Americans. Government borrowing itself may be a problem, but it's an entirely separate one.

The kicker is the first sentence. Today's workers pay today's retirees. The payments are designed to ensure a consistent, inflation adjusted standard of living for retirees. If the ratio of retirees to workers stayed the same, the payments would. But when there fewer retirees per worker, workers pay less, and when there are more, they pay more. It's the system's fatal flaw.

The problem now is that baby boomers paid much lower Social Security taxes than us, but they still need to receive the same standard of living that we will. You can see the historical rates here:

http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/Content/PDF/ssrate_h...

They paid a lower % with a much lower cap, even adjusted for inflation. They did so because the retiree to worker ratio was lower. If they paid the same percentage and cap that we do now, Social Security would be sitting on enough money to cover the shortfall in the future.

In 20 years, that ratio will be much higher than today, meaning the workers of 2018 would have to pay far higher taxes still for the system to fund itself. This would, of course, be unbearable (it's already close) so the government will have to seek other solutions, such as borrowing money or printing.
Finally Here’s Plainview, a full screen browser for the Mac « TheNextWeb.com
Fighting Off A Depression
Digitisation - It's Not About 'Books'
As I said, I enjoy reading. I spent 4 years of my life getting an English degree, and it shows ;-). I can easily enjoy a book that I learn nothing from, if the writer shows a mastery of the English language. I think speed reading techniques treat the writer's style/voice as irrelevant, and that's my specific objection.
Ah, the 37 Signals model. Not many people can build a successful blog. Writing is hard for a lot of people, and takes a lot of work to get good at. Most people would be better off spending that time working at Wal-Mart and plowing their salary from that into AdWords.
"I really hate posts that really have nothing to do with the general ideas that articles convey."

Agreed. You gave us the courtesy of titling the thread in a way that made clear what the thread was about. Anyone commenting here can express one opinion about Social Security or another, preferably with evidence, and then we can all learn something. I just found a link from Harvard

http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/hjackson/UnfundedMandates...

mentioning that Congress has exempted Social Security from a law designed to identify programs that set up "unfunded mandates." That's food for thought.
This may be part of the problem. But thats not a ponzi scam. Its just mismanagement.
Keep them SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-boxed. http://www.topachievement.com/smart.html
As a long-time entrepreneur, I'm concerned most about a market: are there people able and willing to buy what I'm selling?

Social Security helps with the "able" part, by making sure that no American lives in abject poverty if they're old or crippled.

Before Social Security, this was a big problem. About a quarter of Americans lived in poverty, and about half of old people.

More people with more money to spend means a bigger market for whatever I'm selling. That's why Social Security is good. That's why markets are bigger in places with lots of Social Security-type programs (Europe, the U.S.) than in places without them (South America, Africa).

Social Security also helps make it possible for me to be an entrepreneur. I know that I can take risks and not plunge my family into abject poverty if I'm crippled and can't work.

Why did I write about Conservatism in relation to this article? Because when someone is attacking Social Security, it's almost always as part of a larger political agenda they're promoting: Conservatism.

This article was from the Hoover Institution, a politically Conservative organization that pushes to eliminate New Deal programs like Social Security (not just SS). They also push for unregulated markets, and flat or regressive taxes. So does the American Enterprise Institute. So does the Heritage Foundation.

These groups call themselves "think tanks," which implies objective research. Unfortunately, they aren't averse to pushing false information or abandoning their principles to promote their interests.

For example, For example, the Heritage Foundation sharply criticized Malaysia's government for years. After a consulting firm owned by Heritage's president began representing Malaysian business interests, Heritage assessments of Malaysia turned positive. (http://thinkprogress.org/2005/04/17/money-talks-at-heritage/)
There's also an interesting confusion in Spanish, where "luego" can be understood as either "therefore" or "after"/"next thing". I think it's the same ambivalence you'd have with "I think, then I exist."

I don't know whether the latin original had that ambiguity.
Love this blog (found it here). The idea is simple; in Ruby, you'd just be doing:

class CoreDataClient

def method_missing(meth, *args)

@socket.write(Marshal::dump[meth, args]))

l = @socket.read(4).unpack("N").first

Marshal::load(@socket.read(l))

end

end

You get the same effect in Cocoa by setting delegates.

We did used the same trick in our product to get the Subversion SWIG bindings out of our Rails processes and into a dedicated evented server we could cache in; we just replaced the SWIG interfaces with facades that turned method invocation into network messages. Huge win.
Ramaze site redesigned - beautiful
How does he know that the brain is limited?
I use Subversion, Netbeans, and Windows Vista. Some Rails users talk about being a rebel. I have lived it.
"Syntax-Free Programming" is as much an oxymoron as "Language-less language". It may be graphical; it may be less rigid (what they're talking about here), but it's there. I would recommend that they look into Simonyi's work on Intentional Programming.

I've spent a long time on this idea and came up with something that follows an MVC pattern, so that I can have Syntax X, and you Syntax Y, and your modifications are seen as in Syntax X to me, my modifications seen as Syntax Y to you. The language is the model and the syntax (graphical, textual, etc.) is just the view/controller. (But it was kind of a nightmare: to get it to work I had to create an OS from scratch using the principles, for example.)

Again, "syntax-free programming" is a really poor choice of words for what they're working on.
Every time people write sentences that start with "Hackers tend to" and involve "the government", I throw up a little in my mouth. You could use the same logic about "individualist hackers" to argue against gun control. But then you'd be Eric Raymond.

Hackers are people who like to build things. That's all. They don't all think like you. Some of our country's greatest entrepreneurs are also its strongest believers in the social safety net. You might consider starting with Warren Buffett.
You can get a decent knife for $10 and I've honestly never had a knife put me in a fowl[sic] mood.