skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The use of eminent domain in the realm of the digital space is interesting to be sure. My first thought about killing the botnet is to do it asap. But we easily start slipping into grey areas. If individuals do it, they are potentially breaking laws that otherwise normally provide protections to us against intrusion by corporate and government entities. If governments authorize it under the idea of public safety or eminent domain, that provides another legal gateway for governments to intrude on the privacy of your own data. For example, India has laws that give their police the power to "police" personal computers for pornography. We don't have that problem here in the US, but imagine that at some point in the future a conservative Congress allows the FCC to scan your computers and websites for porn like they regulate curse words and imagery on TV. It's all for the public good, is the argument. While most of us agree that botnets being run by criminals is bad, the traditional methods of police protecting us from gangs don't easily map to the internet and our personal data. We also run into problems because these botnets are worldwide. If the US government authorizes an entity to break up botnets, what about when some of the drone computers are property of foreign governments? If France decided to "fix" computers run by the DoD because the dumb desk jockey installed spyware on his work computer, there are a lot of people that would consider that a foreign attack on US government computers. I think the best way to handle this problem is via the OS vendors themselves. Because Microsoft/Apple make their operating systems, all users worldwide are basically agreeing to their EULAs when we turn the machines on. If the companies team up with these reseachers, then I believe they are perfectly within their rights to initiate this kind of operation. They are choosing to do security updates to their products. This then can work worldwide and not put us in danger of having government interference if our personal digital spaces and data.
There's a difference between pointing out a company that doesn't have a clear advantage and saying that given an idea, it's one worth investing months of effort in despite the fact that it doesn't have one. You need to remember that most ideas you execute on generally fail (and take time in the process of failing,) so you need to be chooosy when it comes time to dedicate yourself to one.

That said, being first is a small advantage, particularly in a new space, but not a great one. The real benefit of being first is making it possible for you to build a bigger one (like mindshare,) but there's a lot more luck involved than if you had just started out on a project where you had an incredibly larger advantage. You don't see the failed versions of Moo, now do you?
Not quite sure what this is doing on Hacker News.
I think there is a middle ground between Marx and Rand that is much better at explaining the current situation: serious economics.
Spontaneous optimism
I do have very bad posture. Good suggestions - especially the workout suggestions - my trainer recommended those to me a year ago and I stopped doing them but it was probably a mistake. Those are changes I can easily make to my workout. The rest I didn't know about at all. Thanks.
Tried it you may have, but for how long?

This sort of information should be included in your article, too. It's an obvious hole in your article and you should probably have thought of it when you were writing it.
You've obviously struggled with this a lot. A lot of ideas here to think about - some stuff I knew about but had forgotten - I have to keep churning this stuff over in my head and making different variations so it's good to think about what has worked for others. Thanks.
What does the author define mastery to be? In the information age, with new tools like WebMD, a product of capitalism and a profit-driven corporation, we have greater knowledge of health and medicine than certified doctors in the past ever could have dreamed of having.
Did you read what I said, or just assume I was disagreeing?

Part of my point is that mere abundance doesn't imply a need to do nothing but consume, and I don't. Blaming the abundance is blaming the wrong thing, and wishing for poverty because you can't handle wealth is really shortsighted. The correct solution is to learn to deal with it. On the grand scale of problems, this hardly rates a kvetching.

And I posted my contrary post because everybody seems to be just smiling and nodding... "yup, cultural wealth, sure does suck..." I don't care how fashionable that attitude is, it's stupid. Along with the wealth of conumption opportunities are opportunities to produce, and a programming website of all places to not make that connection is just lame. How many of us would still be programming if cost-of-entry was $100,000?
Yes. I'm constantly making adjustments but still have not hit on a comfortable setup. I think I need someone to monitor me while I'm working some day - or maybe videotape myself typing for a few hours.
This is a really dumb article. Guitar Hero is popular in large part because it is social. One person might want to learn a guitar. A whole room full of buzzed people do not.
I can think of few things less social than sitting in a room developing callouses while trying to nail barre chords.

My brother is a professional guitarist, and he's the one that brings (well, Rock Band) on the holidays.

What's the rest of the evidence that society is avoiding difficulty? Are fewer people becoming doctors or engineers?
Sure. It's not a huge deal, it's just that my immediate reaction was always to the room first, and the furniture second.
I like it in theory but I find it hard to put into practice. I have very poor awareness of my body so when others recommend changes I usually feel like I'm already doing it the way they suggest. It's the same reason I sucked when I tried to learn swing dancing.
If the call quality is good (read: way better than Apple/AT&T) and if the network access is good (read: way better than AT&T) and if they address some annoyances that Apple creates with its highly restrictive user experience control policies, then they will give Apple a real run for their money.

BUT, if they can unify Facebook apps with a mobile device, this could be the start of something really huge. If someone (or someones) manages to unify all of the social networks with a mobile device, this would clearly leapfrog Apple's iPhone. We can access Twitter, Facebook, our blog, and location-aware social networks on the iPhone, but this experience is currently somewhat fragmented, and that aspect definitely sucks. If something enabled by the Palm Pre manages to unify all of the above, then this would be a huge game-changing win.
Why We Put On The Crunchies
Kodu lets you design your own Xbox 360 game
one of the founders previously started an interior architecture/design firm; subject matter expertise is key to the implementation. personal fashion is a possible expansion, but home furnishings is a $100B+ market in the US alone, so we'll focus there for a while...
1) Plenty of other countries are having real estate bubbles bursting, for instance Ireland and Spain.

2) It has long been a goal of the government to increase home ownership and inflate the bubble. Regarding down payments, the government tried to help people unable to come up with downpayments to get a loan anyway.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/06/20020618-1.h...

(Scroll down past the "hunt down terrorists" part.)

http://www.hud.gov/offices/cpd/affordablehousing/programs/ho...

Our top free market politician warned us about the bubble-producing effects of this in 2002, and tried to put an end to it.

http://www.ronpaul.com/2008-09-26/ron-paul-on-the-housing-bu...

(Sorry for the paulspam, but it might be the one time it's relevant.)
You might want to indicate at first that you're focusing on certain genres (trance, it seems). The first several searches that I tried (for techno) returned nothing. Managing expectations there seems like it could be important.
Mayonnaise on fries is British. It's probably related but we'd have to market it differently.

(I've noted that the covers on the Harry Potter books in Britain seem to be drawn for intelligent people, whereas the books in the US are far more cartoony.)
we hear this from users - you can "force" style combinations now by choosing styles manually and then seeing the rooms that result, but we should probably make this function more obvious.
I had a philosophy professor my sophomore year that was so against consumerism, marketing, advertising, corporations, etc. that he wouldn't even wear branded clothing. He made a point during class to explain how he never watched commercials on TV to avoid being brainwashed by the evil corporations.

This professor was too naive to realize that these evil corporations he so despised were the ones paying his salary, giving him the opportunity to sit around and read philosophy all day.

All the students just thought he was weird and pretentious.

Instead of sheltering your kid, why don't you teach him how the world works instead? Educate him to make his own judgments when it comes to marketing and advertising.
Interesting to hear that a chiropractor was successful for you. I've heard a lot of skeptical feedback on using them. The Pascarelli book is good - my physical therapist recommended it to me and the exercises were helpful (unfortunately I overdid some of the stretches and had to stop as a result - but I should probably re-incorporate some of them). Thanks.
Ask HN:  What tools do you use for testing your web apps.
I've recently been using Selenium to do automated testing on my web app.

Any other testing tools you'd recommend? What do you like about them?
Agreed that charging developers is truly stupid and charging your basic user is close, but developing a subscription model for advanced services makes sense. For example, an all you can eat music service. If you view "be something else" as brand extension or premium services, then it makes sense. Not all of the suggestions are worthwhile, agreed. Online bank, no, but applications that directly leverage facebook itself, yes.
Every single set listed is eurotrance. Many even play the same tracks. Furthermore, they are all from established DJs. When does the 'upload set' feature make it in, and truly democratize techno music?
In a jurisdiction with Anglo-American legal principles, prosecutorial discretion could let someone do the cleanup, but it's hard to know in advance if prosecutorial discretion would be exercised that way. The continental legal tradition in Germany makes a cleanup from Germany more risky.
Quick tip to save a lot of memory on your iPhone
We have something similar in the US
http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
"I mean there was the whole mortgage deal (that only happened in the largely non-socialist US) that started screwing the economy up because the US doesn't have enough legal protections in place to stop people who physically don't have the money to pay a loan to get a loan in the first place."

Exactly backwards. And I mean exactly backwards.

There are, in fact, laws that forced banks to give out loans to those people. Laws which have not been repealed. Entire non-profit groups making sure those laws were enforced, and who have not learned anything from what happened.

How is "government overriding the good sense of the mortgage industry by government fiat" capitalism?

The mortgage industry was highly regulated. It couldn't hardly have been more regulated. The problem is that the "perfect government regulator" is a myth that lives only in our minds. Your argument, like almost everybody else, assumes that regulation always works, and thus, if something didn't work, it must not have been regulated. QED. A moment's clear thought will show that to be completely false. If you can handle the idea that a market made of people is imperfect, even must be imperfect, why do so many carry around the idea that a government made of people will somehow be immune? It's just people! Markets, governments, consumers, all just people.

Government may not be 100% responsible for what happened, but they are 100% responsible for creating the environment in which it occurred. Nobody else had the power to force bad loans but the government.

...

There is a great danger here. Months into this crisis and huge numbers of people still have no clue what happened. Forget ideology for a second; if you want to make good decisions, you need truth. The truth is complicated, and I can't lay it all out, but I can tell you that the idea that this was all caused by rampant laissez faire capitalism is an objective falsehood. Government was involved deeply and pervasively. What exactly that means, I don't know and I'm not trying to make a claim here. (I have elsewhere, but not here.) All I am saying here is that you need to know the truth before spouting off.

Even as a little-l libertarian, I would feel a lot more comfortable with calls for regulation if people didn't implicitly treat it as some sort of atomic entity, where you either have "more" or "less", but that's the only dimension. That's wrong and frankly stupid. There's also good regulation and bad regulation and it's not usually obvious which is which. If we frame the debate that way, I'd be a lot less scared, but nobody does! It's all "we need more" or "we need less" and nobody talks about what more or what less, just "more" and "less".

I'm "little l" because I'm not against all regulation, but I'm against bad regulation, and that is what got us here. Not "no" regulation. Bad regulation. It exists! ... so why does that common-sense declaration feel so subversive to say?
Don't choose a college. Choosing a college means you are choosing a particular brand of credentials.

http://www.paulgraham.com/credentials.html

Instead, the best thing to base your choice on is people. The next best thing is environment. Are there particular professors who you look up to who would want to mentor you? Is there a high potential for meeting the kind of people who will inspire you? Do you have good evidence that being in that environment will inculcate something valuable? (And starry-eyed reminisces of an alum are not good evidence. Lots of things can happen at an institution in a decade or so. Get current information.)

(Another way to put it -- the reputation of a school is marketing. Doesn't it seem wise to corroborate that with more direct measures of value?)
Ask HN: What programming language should I teach my little brother?
My brother is 13 and asked me to teach him "how to code". I really don't know what programming language would be the best to start at this age.

First I thought of C because it will also teach him how the Linux he runs was made. But… I hate C.
I personnally learned programming with OCaml and Pascal. I still love OCaml (pattern matching FTW), but it didn't really teach me anything about Unix…

I'm looking for a language that would be easy to learn, with a beautiful syntax, and that would gently introduce a 13 year old to the amazing world of Unix/Linux.

Any ideas?
Yeah I just can't do 2 thumb typing. iPhone one finger peck works for me... does the G1 also have an on screen keyboard?
Objectivism was still a cult, and one had to agree 100% with Rand, or be excommunicated. Objectivism ultimately became what is called "the unlikiest cult." Disagreeing with Rand was tantamount to heresy - much like disagreeing with L. Ron Hubbard is considered heresy in Scientology.

> The cultic flaw in Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism is not in the use of reason, or in the emphasis on individuality, or in the belief that humans are self motivated, or in the conviction that capitalism is the ideal system. The fallacy in Objectivism is the belief that absolute knowledge and final Truths are attainable through reason, and therefore there can be absolute right and wrong knowledge, and absolute moral and immoral thought and action. For Objectivists, once a principle has been discovered through reason to be True, that is the end of the discussion. If you disagree with the principle, then your reasoning is flawed. If your reasoning is flawed it can be corrected, but if it is not, you remain flawed and do not belong in the group. Excommunication is the final step for such unreformed heretics.

http://www.spiralnature.com/phil/objectivism/unlikelycult.ht...

> Ayn always insisted that her philosophy was an integrated whole, that it was entirely self-consistent, and that one could not reasonably pick elements of her philosophy and discard others. In effect, she declared, "It's all or nothing." Now this is a rather curious view, if you think about it. What she was saying, translated into simple English, is: Everything I have to say in the field of philosophy is true, absolutely true, and therefore any departure necessarily leads you into error. Don't try to mix your irrational fantasies with my immutable truths. This insistence turned Ayn Rand's philosophy, for all practical purposes, into dogmatic religion, and many of her followers chose that path.

http://rous.redbarn.org/objectivism/Writing/NathanielBranden...

Nathaniel Branden was Rand's lover (while Rand was cheating on her husband) and the #2 person in Objectivism, until he got caught cheating on Rand and then excommunicated. Any member of Objectivism that refused to shun Branden (including members of his family) were likewise excommunicated.

The book Why People Believe Weird Things has a chapter on Objectivism that is well worth reading.
http://www.amazon.com/People-Believe-Weird-Things-Pseudoscie...

I own and have read almost every book published by Ayn Rand.
That may have been intentional.
its probably really hard for any of us to give good advice because there are so many personal factors and each of us has only attended one or maybe 2 colleges so we are all biased.

you should just make a list of pros/cons and trust your instincts
The Coming DTV Nightmare
Python is easy to learn.
Some advice by ESR : http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#skills1
Maybe they should learn how to host files themselves? Just an idea...
'11 errors prohibited this user from being saved'
and use pygame to teach him how to make games and get him excited about programming
Just for some perspective:
2.5million people downloading at a relatively slow 250KB/sec comes to about 4.8Tbps. Currently we push a mere 2.1Tbps across the Atlantic. So, the downloading from Microsoft might actually outpace the combined traffic from the Americas to Europe! No CDN can handle traffic like that.

And c'mon, how many times has a Linux distro come out just to download annoyingly slow for the first few days? This is a much bigger launch than a new Linux distro.
Zimbabwe introduces new $50 billion note
Here's a list, but don't take the order too seriously:

- Courses: Do they have courses that you're interested in taking, and is the department strong in those areas? What's the balance between theoretical and more immediately practical classes, and which do you care more about?

- Professors: How are the professors regarded as instructors by their own students? During undergrad, your professor's quality of instruction matters more than their quality of research.

- Rigor. Top colleges are pretty comparable, afaik.

- Class size.

- Affordability.

- Quality of environment.

No one criteria ever really "trumps" other criteria. You have to determine your personal weightings for each and decide which place offers the best balance. Also, you may find that your priorities change once you've been at college for a year or two, so unless you have a super good idea of what you want to do, you might prefer well roundedness to strength in only a few key areas.
"I honestly believe that those who think of it as inferior just haven't tried using it for a few days."

I just don't believe it. I've had an ipod touch for nearly a year and it's just not there. I am twice as fast on the blackberry keyboard. What's your wpm on iPhone? Do you think it would be faster typing with a standard computer keyboard or a touchscreen keyboard on a tablet?

If you type really slowly, they might be roughly equivalent. If you are fast on the blackberry, there's no way.
Someone at our last ruby meetup demo'd a project he was working on called watirloo http://github.com/marekj/watirloo/tree/master

It looks really cool

Also just plain watir is a good tool for setting up some unit tests
So a `DateTime = datetime' in the module would let newer code look more conventional?
Instead, the best thing to base your choice on is people.

That's a good concrete suggestion, followed up by specifics. I suppose this would be a criterion to apply during admitted student visits.
Here's a list, but don't take the order too seriously:

- Courses: Do they have courses that you're interested in taking, and is the department strong in those areas?

One great thing about the World Wide Web is that these days most course syllabuses for many universities are posted on the Web, so that a prospective student can make head-to-head comparisons among the "same" math class at different universities.
A lot of the tension I get seems to arise in the neck and upper back areas.

This reminds me of a third option that I'm surprised I didn't think of earlier: the Alexander Technique. Tension arising in the neck and upper back areas is practically their specialty. I got some amazing results working with a good Alexander teacher.

Incidentally, if your situation is anything like mine (and of course I don't know), you may need to make some changes in your life in order for the pain to go away. I'm not talking about techniques, I mean fundamental personal change. I had a headache for 9 years. No one ever explained it. But it eventually went away as I addressed some important issues in my life.
That math is wacky. The >25% number is assuming that people won't switch carriers for a really cool phone like the iPhone. So it's obviously wrong. The point he is trying make is that if it's the best Sprint phone, the best Verizon phone, and the best T-Mobile phone, it's going to get a lot of sales, even if it isn't the best AT&T phone.
I was fairly interested in the article. It was a little short on context but, from what I gathered, Horowitz et al. posit that college professors lean dramatically left and pressure their students to do so as well.

Based on my experience, this seems to hold pretty true, with a few notable exceptions (miron and pinker jump to mind) in most 'softer' departments (english/theology/psych/etc). In an english course I took last semester (ostensibly about democracy/law), papers I wrote that were critical of traditional liberal/socialist thought were critiqued more harshly than papers were more in line with the orthodoxy. Nothing flagrant enough to be improper (and I actually enjoyed the class), but the bias was definitely there.

Even in some of the harder sciences (chomsky and krugman, as two obvious examples) this seems to hold true.

Of course, professors should hold whatever political view they like, but I think the real question is if they are using their power to improperly/abusively coerce their students.

Personally, I haven't seen anything that rises to that level in college (but there was a horrible and grossly inappropriate bias at my high school), but I think that it is definitely worth investigating.

I don't want my professors preaching their politics any more than I want them preaching their religion.
great job guys. I like the minimalist and clean design approach. I took the quiz and got my wife to do it too as we have just redecorated, and the answers were quite accurate about our style inclinations. Good to see a quality start. I think the tough part now is to integrate this with multiple channels that could create the revenue. I would suggest to start by approaching fashion/interior designers as they would find immediate value to provide their clients with the use of this tool. Good luck.