skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If the grandparent post is an adequate definition of "semantics," then I, personally, see no reason not to make an argument based upon it. What's wrong with "arguing semantics" such that it's become a derogatory phrase? I mean, it's nothing to base a logical or moral or legal argument upon, but it's interesting in its own right on an philosophical level (similar to how "grammar nazi-ism" is interesting to linguists.)

Taking it a bit further, this phrase, and many others like it, belie the difference between a traditional chronological conversation, and the multithreaded conversation possible on the web. When you can branch off in different directions at the same time, without losing focus on any individual branch, there's no longer a reason to keep "on message" or "to the argument at hand"--both statements on- and off-topic can be expressed with equal exposure, and without anyone being distracted from one by the other.
django, rails, codeigniter so far
Very interesting... I always thought that Techcrunch would bring a ton of traffic, but I guess it's moreso their blog than their elevator pitch page. It was a nice pitch, nonetheless.

StumbleUpon, eh? Is this just organic traffic or have you done something to instigate it? And keep an open mind about having children with a website... some day it'll be possible.
" Linux won because free trumps $500 per cpu, and it was really the same thing as Unix."

Linux won the hearts of many in mid and late 90's because it was VASTLY better than the mainstream OS back then. That Linux was the first many tried before other possible things (minix, bsd, plan9, etc.) most of all was because of the name.

Yes. The name. Linux sounds cooler than any of the other alternative OSs, and therefore it won them.
Me too. Was previously using Turbogears.
25 Ways to Celebrate the Mac's 25th Anniversary
Wait - I missed that in the original post. Where does it say that they stored unencrypted passwords? Maybe it does and I missed it (it is 4:00AM on a Saturday lol)
Semantic E-Mail Delivery
Agreed.

Also offtopic, are .biz and .info domains used for anything that isn't a scam? Anyone seen a legitimate website hosted at .biz/.info?

Is it just me that has a mental filter "Never click on .biz .info .name"
Probably because he implied that using a framework means that you're lazy and dont know how to code.

The main reason people use frameworks, is not because they're lazy or bad, it's because it lets them get more done, faster, and with less tedium.
Freed.in- FOSS Con happening at New Delhi, India
I think there's some info in here:

http://www.carbontradewatch.org/pubs/carbon_neutral_myth.pdf

It's been a while since I read it through but their basic point is that carbon credits are to the environment what indulgences were to the mediaeval church.
But what about all those in different time zones? Freezing the site for periods may make it tricky for people in some places to contribute at all.
When I lived in Beijing I actually contemplated blogging daily photos of the phlegm I coughed up every morning due to the smog, and try and correlate them with daily air quality index readings. No exaggeration, it was that bad.

Coming from small town rural western Canada, it was a huge awakening for me to physically experience results of our maltreatment of the environment.
Pylons when I use Python - magic sucks, very easy to customize, fast turnaround and not so gargantuan that it takes forever to wrap your head around.

CakePHP for PHP. Definitely the best PHP framework out there, in my opinion; fast, good installed base made out of all-star clients (Mozilla, Yale, others), not restrictive or cumbersome. Honestly, though, I try not to use PHP.
WRT your third paragraph, you seem to be lumping a whole load of very diverse opinions together then criticising them as a whole, when in fact many environmentalists don't want the measures which governments are advocating. Governments and politicians want them because (a) they don't want to take bold action, because that might backfire at the polls, and (b) if they get a chance to surreptitiously increase their power over other people, well, that's what politicians do, isn't it? There's also (c) the issue of corporate manipulation of the so-called "green agenda", to the point where profits are more important than environmental problems, however serious they might look.

Engineering solutions are, or are not, a solution depending on who you talk to. I'm worried that too many people want to cash in on the problem by offering snake-oil solutions which can't be tested in advance, like this one:

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/02/geoengineering.ht...

If you can't test it, don't kid yourself that a big roll of the dice is going to help in any way. (And remember, I live here too, so the fact that you like to gamble should take into account the fact that I don't :)

As an engineer, surely you can appreciate that making a change, any change, is relatively easy, but making the correct change can be very difficult. In damaging the environment, we've moved the dials on a very complex machine, and we could do something else and move them again. Maybe we'll even get lucky and set them back to where we started, but of course getting them back to where we started probably won't fix the problem.

Lovelock has always been a radical, and I've never taken his Gaia theory seriously. I think he was quoted a few years ago as saying that nuclear energy was the only viable immediate solution, but now he seems to have changed his mind. It doesn't matter; what matters is making sound decisions based around the scientific analysis, ignoring the personalities and the near-religious fanaticism of some campaigners. In the final analysis, I think there is a real problem because (although I'm not a scientist) I can't see why so many people who are would lie so deliberately, so persistently, and about such a serious issue.
Why a computer?

To do your own work, use your fingers.
Well, I'm working on something ambitious with the Arduino, and you may be interested in also working on the same project, but maybe as your second project. Anyone who is interested in getting into hardware hacking from a programmer perspective on something that I find pretty cool should send me an email at markessien at gmail com, and I'll send you a notification when I have the stuff online (3-4 weeks).
I actually was thinking of the same thing earlier today. It's not just tech; I'm also involved in a fashion start up (if you can call it that) and, while there are general fashion blogs just like there are general technology blogs, there are indeed only a very few sites that most know about and check back day to day.

TechCrunch et al have created their own media brands, not exactly mainstream (though MA and company are making more and more mainstream appearances) and not exactly small time blogs. The same applies to whatever fashion blogs exist for the bit that I mentioned earlier. It's not that others are not reporting on things...they are, we just don't hear them because we don't know they exist. That's why we have sites like Hacker News and Reddit, to allow anyone to post anything interesting or newsworthy, but the general public don't exactly know about their existence. For those of us lucky enough to have access to these sites, we are already finding a lot of stuff we might not normally find. What disappoints me sometimes is that I can't get to all the good stuff that gets posted to this site if a lot of posts come successively.

Feed readers don't really seem to be the answer, though, at least not for me. Perhaps what we need is a new model. I just have no idea what.
sorry, I'm not sure why I thought I'd write that comment. /headslap :)
Merge sort can be thought of as a kind of binary counting.
Your implicit assertions about the proposals of the "free culture" crowd are false; your terminology raises unnecessary confusion; and your economic analysis is incoherent.

You're confused about what the "free culture" crowd advocates. Let's restrict this discussion just to copyright. Lessig does not advocate the abolition of copyright (and neither do I). He advocates reasonable limitations on its scope, and that copyright owners should consider when they do and do not permit others to use their works without payment, rather than always requiring payment.

There's very little that can be said coherently about "intellectual property" in general; trademarks, trade secret protection, and copyright, to name just a few, are very, very different. Maybe you can say this: "Intellectual property" laws turn the ideas and tools needed to carry out intellectual work into property, where they weren't before. They also turn some of the results of that intellectual work into property.

This is a good deal for investors in intellectual ventures; if their employees can't quit and start a competing company, the company can charge its customers a higher price, and the employees can't demand higher wages. If intellectual ventures need investors, maybe that's worth the cost.

But many creative people (God, I hate the word "creatives") and intellectuals have pursued their art as a profession in the absence of any "intellectual property", and often in the absence of investors. Lawyers, doctors, professors, judges, consultants, investment managers, schoolteachers, stage actors, many engineers, scientists, and symphony musicians all perform intellectual work as a profession without any "intellectual property". Even the majority of programmers write software for which copyright licenses are never sold --- either because it's only used inside of one company, or because it's free software. So your implicit assertion that eliminating intellectual property would leave "creatives" and intellectuals bereft of the ability to make a profession of their interests is false, and historically and economically illiterate. Your name-calling ("quite literally ... retarded") and explicit appeals to hatred ("you're putting it into the hands of the very people many in this crowd hate") do not rescue your point from being a falsehood, completely out of touch with reality.
Agreed.

REVOLUTION TIEM NAO????
Source code:

http://code.google.com/p/wwwsqldesigner/
Data portability of my submissions and saved for easier slicing and dicing off-line.
Inferno plugin http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/pidoc/index.html . It is similar to NativeClient/Java
For anyone who wants to play with it, there appears to be a live CD:

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/download.html
I think you're missing the point - the reason why Arrington/TechCrunch became popular was because Michael worked his ass off to make sure that he broke tech news in his niche. He paid his dues and now he's reaping the rewards from it.

There are a lot of other bloggers who do "me too" reporting it seems, who essentially regurgitate everything they read off other sites.

I'm all for competition, I welcome the day when someone takes Arrington down a few notches - but unless people are prepared to spend the time to do the hard work, then they get absolutely no sympathy from me when they're not getting the audience that they would have liked.

You may not like the man, but you have to at least respect that he works harder than most, which is why he's at the top of the heap.

Thats my 2 cents.
An Introduction to Forex | Michael Mobley Investing
I think that my customers do not read TechCrunch and, accordingly, I don't think too much about them more than that.
I often considered creating such a directory, but there is a problem: what if a competitor tries to hurt a business by spamming in it's name? Therefore I think such a directory is not a good idea, or at least there would have to be mechanisms to prevent that issue.
The first rule of Fight Club is - you do not talk about Fight Club :)
didn't Zed Shaw have a step-by-step how-to on this at CUSEC 2008? :)
This is really cool... how long did it take to make this?
I like this one better: http://www.osalt.com/
Right. See, that's an insane volume (number of sets per body type) and a really high total number of reps. You're doing 125 reps per workout at a minimum! It should be noted that even advanced trainers only have a volume of about 4-6 sets per body part, whereas you're doing 15-20 on legs alone (press/calf-ext/leg-ext + squat).

Since you're preparing for a marathon it seems to make sense to focus on lower-body and mainstay complex exercises (squat/deadlift), but I am unfamiliar with that specific sort of training so I can only speculate.

As mentioned, you seem to have an exceedingly high volume, especially considering the narrow focus of your exercises (at least one day 1). Your rep count (5) suggests a focus on raw strength, but the set count (5) is more common for endurance.
Umm, the newspaper industry is designed to sell ads. The news (which is usually more accurately described as opinion) exists only to get your eyeballs in front of the ads.

Next you'll be telling me that Google is in the search business. Advertisers are Google's customers. You are Google's product.
Wow, they stole my resume, I guess I'm now at risk of more work?
The most interesting thing that has been lost to history, would properly be some of the works of Aristotle, as the western worlds understanding of science was bootstrapped from his works during the reformation.
But it has something to do with TWITTER!!!!
This is a different distinction than the one the other poster reported that Matz proposes, but it's not useful either. You can do it in C, even without using the preprocessor; see http://gist.github.com/51416, which does it with weak symbols. Worse, whether C is a "scripting language" or not depends only on the presence or absence of such trivial features.

Your distinction would make Java a "scripting language," because every class can have its own main function, and still leaves x86 assembly as a "scripting language", and now it makes GNU C a "scripting language" too; and given the nondeterministic invocation order of the constructors of static objects, it makes any particular C++ implementation a "scripting language" too.
And it's really, really... well, equal.

Unless you happen to live in les banlieu. France's disenfranchised underclass is a ticking timebomb that the CRS will only be able to contain for so long. The Americans had their Jim Crow laws, but that's nothing in comparison to what goes on in France.
Were they initially excited about the project? It sounds like they just don't care about what they are working on. Some causes of this (I speak as a programmer, not a manager):

* they aren't being involved in higher level decision making, like what features to implement
* the requirements keep being changed on them
* the project just isnt technically interesting
* they feel like theyre slaves
Erm, that's my opposite opinion, I guess. My (attempted) argument is that one should not write their own framework unless doing so as an exercise in learning. In any other case, using existing frameworks or using the "roll your own library mix tape" strategy is far more efficient.

Basically, I'm saying if you're using a language which has mature frameworks and/or mature libraries which could be forged into an ad-hoc framework (templating, serving, ORM, etc.) it is terrible advise to tell people "just write your own".

Only in the case that you've considered all existing (relevant) options and determined none of them meet your use case (and none can be minimally altered to do so) should you consider writing your own. Anything else is a waste of time and effort.
Honestly this might not be a popular opinion but if I’m being honest I have to say the "revolution bloggers tried to start" was always a croc. It dismissed the fact that big news sources got where they were for a reason. That reason was that they were, at least at one time, the best at delivering information that people want.

That’s how the world works. You don’t have people checking 1,000 blogs for their news. Eventually a few of those 1,000 establish themselves as the best and they become the center of things.

Now there is a natural turn over where big sites stop being the best source for news and new sites take their place. In that process blogging did make a difference by lowering the barrier to entry. Michael Arrington started out as one guy reporting on what he found interesting and became the "blog of record" which would never have been possible in old media.

But that doesn’t change the fact that there will always be a hierarchy and every hierarchy needs someone at the top.
Hey, I like the concept. Here are a few suggestions:

The landing should have some kind of description about what the page is about.

Reduce the space between the header and the main content.

Do not underline the Buy it and Originator links and align them to the right.

Reduce the space for the suggested links. What I mean is make the column of the product shown wider and the suggestions narrower.

Those are all minor things. You really should put a brief description about what you do. Other then that I like it.
I'm suspicious about the experiment. How did they verify the subjects exercised the proper amount? How can you tell that I'm giving something "my best effort?" Seems kind of impossible.

In my opinion they proved that random subjects cannot stick to an exercise regiment assigned to them by researchers...
I'm driving my squats through the heel, so it's much more of a posterior-chain exercise and doesn't really hit my quads or calves much. If I was training like a bodybuilder with a raised heel, I'd switch the leg extensions for leg curls.

My objective right now is to improve core strength and relative strength, then in the 3 months leading up to the Marathon to shift a bit more towards power-endurance (e.g. Tabata, Fartlek, weekly long run). Previously on half-marathons I've really lost my form towards the end, that's just wasting energy needlessly, especially on cross-country. This time I'm going to keep it tight all the way.
Gas in Germany is as expensive.
Yes, but its awesome so your point is moot.
We have such a law in Germany. We ignore it.
OK - thanks for the info.
"Still, it can be worth it because there are a few mitigating factors. For one, their interest and yours are usually at least somewhat aligned. Facebook’s success is in no small part due to their platform."

I'm not sure that I'd put Facebook and Twitter (the reason the original post that Matt is responding to was written) in the same group when it comes to figuring out which star to hitch your wagon to. I agree, you can be reasonably confident of your assessment of Facebook's goals and success being aligned with yours. Facebook is also large enough that any one developer or group of developers are an extremely minor nuisance to them, in terms of the size of their total user base and the kinds of things they need to deal with on a day to day basis. As Facebook grows their user base, your app can grow. Twitter has a history of user base growth that correlates with an increase in performance problems (either downtime or seemingly arbitrary limits, aka bad scalability); does Facebook? Twitter has a lot of users, but it's barely comparable to the size of Facebook. With Facebook, you are also more dependent on their platform, integrated extremely close to it. With Twitter, your app runs on your own domain because twitter doesn't provide any significant kind of UI integration -- because of this, twitter the platform is more at risk of _losing_ users (as they visit other domains) because of your app. In order to use Facebook apps, you have to be on Facebook. Additionally, most third-party twitter apps are _extensions_ of twitter, that make up for lack of features or otherwise serious deficiencies of twitter (this is especially the case because twitter has a record of _removing_ features as their method of dealing with scaling).

Facebook is much closer to being a company and service that provides infrastructure, even though the actual things that you can build on that infrastructure are relatively limited (due to things like their TOS and privacy policy). Facebook seems to have a vested interest in ensuring that your third-party service continues to work on their platform, because _your_ app potentially keeps people coming to the site. This is not necessarily the case with twitter. You can't tell what twitter is going to change that limits you and your project in terms of growth or success. Facebook seems to make decisions in the context of what their users want (especially after beacon), twitter seems to be shooting in the dark.

And everything I've said above about Facebook applies equally well to the iPhone. Facebook and the iPhone become more popular when people create and use third-party extensions. Third-party extensions seem to threaten twitter. And a threatened entity is one that strikes with force, not one that nurtures.

Really the message is
* be cautious when deciding which platforms to use
* don't try to do everything yourself, but don't be entirely dependent either
* Diversify, man can not surive on one platform alone; this also increases your reach
* Be aware of the non-technical influences on the platform's continued success and existence
Good guys finish...
> And when management asks that you work 10 extra hours a week for the same amount of pay?

What? I completely fail too see what your point is here. Why would my management ask me to work 10 extra hours a week? What does that have to do with deflation?

> Well they're certainly avoiding the whole "pushing up" part.

How come rates go up then? What evidence do you have that they're 'avoiding' the pushing up of rates? Where is all the consumer inflation that they are allegedly creating?

> If they were smoothing the cycles out in a sustainable manner, we wouldn't be talking about negative interest rates.

Yes they would, because we are entering a potential depression. Smoothing out means cutting when things are bad and increasing when things are good. You have to act at both ends to achieve stable prices.

> Instead, they lower interest rates and keep them there because economic reality is politically inconvenient.

You are very good at making outlandish claims and not so good at backing them up. What evidence do you have that central banks have departed from their mandated inflation targeting regime?

> How much of this can be attributed to natural technological progress

Almost all of it, but technological progress cannot happen without a stable economy. People don't build factories unless they believe they can realise a steady income.

> And what percentage of the excess wealth (compared to an undriven economy) has been actually used to raise people out of poverty?

We do not live in a driven economy. We live in an economy where the value of money is kept stable in order to counteract the economy's natural tendency towards boom and bust. What do you mean when you say the economy is 'driven'? Give an actual economic definition of this term.

> It's not sustainable progress to get the masses out of poverty if you've used up most of the natural resources in the process.

Sustainability is entirely orthogonal to monetary policy. Neither have any affect on each other,

> The person who borrowed is the second recipient, the bank takes the first cut through fees and increased interest

No, they are the first recipient. Why do you say they are the second? They get the money first, therefore they are the first recipient. The bank gets interest, but interest accrues after the loan has been made. Your claim makes no sense.

> The government gets to tap into the supply through perpetual deficit spending.

So once again, it appears that the borrowers are the first recipient!

Your last part shows you don't understand the economic laws of nominal pricing. There's no point me discussing this, as you could go and look up the theory yourself.

> why do they violently shut down competition?

They don't. Very few countries have laws restricting what currency you can use. Many people have created alternative currency systems. But very few people use them precisely because national currencies win in the market.