skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Having words for different things is useful. It makes language more efficient and reduces the need for clarification :)

Well that's my point precisely - the fact that you see gay marriage as being different to heterosexual marriage simply because of who is involved illustrates the flaw in your reasoning. If you think you would feel awkward entering into a conversation with someone who may or may not be gay, may I suggest you refer to their 'partner' or their 'other half' until it becomes clear what gender the person is that you're talking about? Or just be direct and say 'your... wife? husband?'. Most reasonable people really won't mind.

But let's be honest - your delicately-phrased attempt to pour logic onto the question does not disguise the fact that your concerns run beyond linguistic convenience. It's a very weak argument.

> Similarly, being able to tell the sex of the people involved in a union, is useful information. It means you don't have to ask for clarification, and reduces the chances of faux pas.

It's really not that useful - if you need to know, ask, but the chances are that you don't - and as I'm sure you realise, 'mere' language is a powerful tool for enforcing segregation and bigotry. It makes a real difference to the people actually involved, and, if you're honest with yourself, not a jot of difference to you. If you think about it, carving the world up based on sexual preference would be hilarious in its stupidity if it didn't cause so much pain. I mean, honestly, how does anyone's choice of lover alter your life? Millions of people are in happy homosexual relationships RIGHT NOW and I bet you hadn't noticed.

> To compare it to a persons colour is silly. Sex matters... That's why our language is full of words like son/daughter, waiter/waitress. Colour does not matter, which is why our language doesn't have specific words for say a black waiter. It's irrelevant.

Actually, likening the redefinition of 'marriage' to the redefinition of 'man', as you did in the parent comment, is silly. The parallel I was drawing was between predjudice that existed (and in places still does) based on racial differences and the predjudice that you are demonstrating, whether you realise it or not, against homosexuality.
Cool, thanks for the response. What kind of work do you and your friends do? And, now that we're nearby anyway, in which city/area? (I'm in Eindhoven)
So, teach them ARM9/Arduino/PIC/X86/other assembly? (I wonder how many people here as kids first learned to program by typing in assembly programs from magazines.)
This is a general problem with any attempt to behave morally. I don't lose much sleep over it, and as far as I can tell, neither do most people.
"... single-digit millionaires as the working class of Silicon Valley ..."
Fair enough. This was a comment to a short essay. I'll continue to hold my beliefs, and you'll continue to have yours, as these forums typically work.
why sad?
In Haskell all types are inhabited, so every proposition has a proof. This makes Haskell a pretty useless logic.
What does anyone at Facebook know about throughput? A lot(1).

(1) - http://gigaom.com/2009/12/16/facebook-dyno/
Yeah, it's odd that Apple didn't adopt WVGA in the first iPhone. Knowing of the Nokia devices made me do a double take when I heard 320x480, I thought it was a mistake and they really meant 800x480.
It's incredibly difficult. I read, downloaded apps

What apps?
Very true. The US prison system is on equal footings with the worst gulags of history.
Just because we used to do something does not mean it's the most effective way to do it.

The point here is to teach children (not just hacker wiz kids) some basic premises of programming without making it about programming.

It's pretty clever IMHO and it allow children to create exactly the world they want to create whether that is vampires or bunny land.
Except I hate bundled services because I feel like I'm getting ripped off. I don't have a subscription to Rdio because I think "wow, I can listen to my favorite bands and have access to all this other content". No. I have a subscription because the price I pay to listen to my favorite bands is cheaper than what I would have paid if I were to buy the album on ITunes and more convenient than pirating.

If all my favorite shows were available on ITunes, I'd kiss cable goodbye in an instant.
Not US but UK here. And yes, in my experience, yes you can do 20 hour weeks from freelance jobs. The people/companies who want you are simply those companies with more work than they can currently handle.

It's not hard to see why, in the UK especially, there's a severe shortage of good developers. I can safely say ( hopefully without coming across as arrogant) that I'm a better developer than any other I've met whilst freelancing thus far. Companies are willing to pay for that knowledge and experience, even if it's on a time limited basis.

It's well understood in programming circles that a good developer can be much more economically viable then several not so good developers working on the same problem. I think Joel Spolsky's sums up this point quite well here http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html.
"""Elites seem more likely to confront snobbish exclusion than they are to embrace it. """

Superficially...

"""By contrast, those who have exclusive tastes today — middle-class and poorer Americans — are subject to disdain. If the world is open and you don’t take advantage of it, then you’re simply limited and closed-minded. Perhaps it’s these attributes that explain your incapacity to succeed."""

The elites only believe in diversity because they have the tools to manage diversity.
This is something I talk all the time with students that are being taught all the programming classes in college. Most of them know how to program, or at least know the syntax of a language and know basics, but getting to that tipping point of having hacked something up is kinda hard for most people. After you've built that first thing, that isn't the obvious programming exercises found on textbooks, you've passed that tipping point and hacking will then come naturally to you.
There are a lot of users here complaining about Firefox memory usage who don't use it anymore.

Which is expected, because why would you stay if you were really bothered?

Comments from an active user, though... I've stuck with Firefox out of habit probably more than anything else, but now most of the things people (including me) were complaining about are already gone -- as of the last update, Firefox with -- sheesh, I guess I have about 100 tabs in 2 windows -- takes up under 500MB after using it all day, and in the morning it starts in a few seconds (they don't force-reload all your open tabs on startup anymore, just the active ones and I think text from the others is cached locally).

Chrome becomes unusable if I try to use it like a to-do list like this, for UI as well as memory reasons; not that I could say easily how much memory Chrome is using at the moment, with 20 tabs; the separate processes defeats seeing that easily, alas (there must a simple way to check, but I haven't tried).

It's quite stable, and even when it was still crashier (last year?) it's been years since I've actually lost my tabs after a crash; they've always been auto-recovered (and it has that nice prompt to let me close the ones I think may be causing trouble before relaunching).

Given different usage patterns, etc., I have no idea if people trying the actual, current FF will want to go back -- but for anyone who left more than a few months ago (especially if you left due to memory footprint) I'd suggest trying it again sometime.

[And I like the more frequent releases, personally -- I always hated the slow release cycle, and feel like they're starting to get into the swing of it now -- but I obviously don't speak for the crowd on this one...]
You're welcome! However, keep in mind that alot is still a pretty young project. I use it to read my mail (and use mutt to compose mail, ie. 'r' in alot spawns mutt), but there are still a lot of rough edges. The nice thing is that the codebase is very hackable (very readable Python, not much cruft yet) and that the lead developper (pazz) is actively working on it and very receptive to bug reports and pull requests. :-)
Are there any open source frameworks for it? I am aware of lots of academic work on algorithms to design circuits, but not anything open source.
Not exactly, the N900 was the first with a cell radio (except N810 wimax which short lived) so it was a 'bridge' between cell phones and the tablets.

Jolla could well outlive Nokia now, with the right manfuacturing partner. (HTC is getting dumped the same as they were with Microsoft, would love to see them embrace this with their QWERTY designs)
Haha. I agree. I always assumed that it had to do with Labor laws requiring greater involvement of the corporate board when a business got larger.
What I meant is that people usually pass things via a pointer (that needs to be explicitly dereferrenced) or via const references (where there is no mutation to worry about). Mutable references are rarer and usually they are function arguments and are relatively "obvious"
I just find it insane that SCOTUSblog does not have press privileges for the Supreme Court.

We have to find a middle way between any dude with a posterous account claiming that they are a journalist, and having what is essentially a premier online specialist news outlet treated like nobodies.

[PS. I love the OP - it is a really dramatic account that I hope does not get lost on HN because of its Sunday submission]
Thinking in Datomic
I don't know if "relaunched" is the right term, since WDC has been producing variations over the 6502 design ever since Bill Mensche (one of the original designers) left MOS (he had joint rights to the design).

From WDC's homepage:

"Annual volumes in the hundreds (100’s) of millions of units keep adding in a significant way to the estimated shipped volumes of five (5) to ten (10) billion units. "
There is, of course, one important different between MacRuby and Ruby Motion: the former is GPL compliant, and the latter is commercially licensed.

I think this is a shame, because I suspect lots of people would quite like to contribute back to the project, and that's currently not an option.
Car analogy aside, I thought the other two were very apt.

>In the financial world you are always buying products with risk attached.

Which is why investors use ratings agencies to help them gauge the risk. Good job none of those AAA rated tranches were cut with toxic assets... Oh, they were? Woops.

I don't think anyone is arguing that financial products don't carry inherent risk. What would be nice is if the banks and investment houses worked hard to mitigate this risk for their clients rather than throwing them to the lions (or in many cases simply out and out lying) and profiting regardless. If they aren't capable of doing this themselves, then they should be regulated in to compliance. I don't expect my accountant to fuck me and the same goes for my financial advisor.
Bridgewater Associates
Most people I know are in software development in the Noord Holland area. My freelance days where a long time ago after university; I freelanced all over NL in software development, my first gig was in Den Bosch. After that I just started companies and moved things to a bigger scale :) Currently we do projects for Dutch, UK and German companies and that's what I liked most. I never liked freelancing very much really; it's all too chaotic for me (unless you take a 2-year project which is not in my nature).
http://senseis.xmp.net/?GoPlayingPrograms
Oh! I am so glad you looked that up. Thank you!
I agree that the turtle is good but again remember Paperts point is to allow children to assimilate knew knowledge into their already existing library of models.

The power of the computer is that it can simulate virtually everything and thus allow for children (or anyone else) to build their knowledge by using models they already have an intuitive understanding about.
I just never see people sacrificing their mental comfort and beliefs to save human beings.
I do see people sacrificing human beings to save their mental comfort and beliefs. A lot.

That mismatch is a problem for me. So I want everybody have no mental comfort to preserve and no beliefs.
"Business is obviously not "random" in a true sense, but it's obviously not a pure-skill game because so many idiots get lucky and a lot of really talented people (like DMC) don't."

DMC had choices to make and his talent didn't extend to making the right choices.

Forgetting luck for a second which is obviously important, talent could be thought of as a collection of features that all come together to create success.

So simply saying that DMC has "talent" and that someone else who has made it has "inferior talent" ignores that you need varying degrees of talent and quality in many areas which also depends on what you are doing. Not a jack of all trades, master of none but a proper balance (just like you would want in a product). Stylish, good gas mileage and plenty of headroom say for a car.

In addition to luck then DMC was lacking talent in a few areas that would be required to be successful (to the degree he or anyone thinks is success).

As only one example consider the ability to have attention to detail and product quality. That might be super important when selling an expensive luxury product but an impediment if creating products for dollar stores.

Take any super successful person (by whatever definition) and put them in the wrong field. Do you think Bill Gates would be teacher of the year? Do you think pre-presidential Obama would be good running an incubator?
Thanks, I thought it was something he'd said as a one liner, maybe in a film!
Do it then, and save it so you don't have to work. Part of the glory is being able to decide for yourself.

When I was freelancing, I'd be putting in 50-60 hour weeks most of the time, because I felt like the hustle really paid off, but any time I got burnt out, boom, time off.
the "sinking skill ladder" concept is interesting
I thought of games and linear programming but didn't really count them as theoretical CS. The graphics and compilers groups don't really mix but I guess Graphics researchers are doing theoretical CS. But what's more, I didnt consider that there are people working on better algorithms for various integral transforms, on learning theory bounds and algorithms for various matrix operations and decompositions. Doh. For some reason I most strongly associate CS Theory to Languages. Which was silly in hindsight.
It's pretty unusual to use double-buffering on the C64 - wastes memory. You'll find a lot of code times screen updates to the raster interrupt to either do updates during virtual blank, or start updates after the portion of the screen in question was updated. Of course that assumes you can do the updates in one frame, so you will find exceptions.
I wonder if there are large differences based on usage patterns.

I just finished entering a comment above suggesting people should give it another try; I have 100 or so tabs open and 500MB footprint after using it all day, with version 13 (I just stick with the release update channel) in win7.

In my experience they've very clearly fixed whatever the main memory issue was that affected my experience -- but not yours. Though -- the windows versions may get a bit more testing....
There is a difference between something being a technical achievement and a product.
Bad repos might have been the source of your 'dependency' problems, Nokia was the only mobile device user to embrace apt and had a much better product than the CE devices that used 'reflashing' as in wiping the universe and starting over.

N770 was understood and loved by the hackers, but not by the general public, and was a commercial failure. It was also more powerful than most of the other devices out there and ran more general purpose software than the popular PDAs and smart phones. (WM could run CE apps but not Windows apps, N770 could run any X application with recompilation.)

It wasn't until the iPhone that a Unix device was accepted by the general public, and only because Apple did a better job of hiding that from the public. (And other things as well
I found the link raganwald gave. Of those, I found SmartGo Kifu to be excellent, in that it has a tutorial that walks you through many basic concepts in Go. That I have not become proficient is not their fault.
Is Jolla the Ubuntu of mobile linux?
And of course it is fun to think about total functions that are "effectively" bottom...

id :: a -> a
id a = case (a,ack 4 3) of
(x,0) -> x
(x,_) -> x
where
ack 0 n = n+1
ack m 0 = ack (m-1) 1
ack m n = ack (m-1) (ack m (n-1))
I was coming here to say this; there are meet-ups, business breakfasts (VERY early but very nice to find clients), etc. A friend of mine from an underdeveloped part of the EU thought he could make no money there; he went to a few business breakfasts there after finding out they actually were held there. Few months later he has ONLY work from his region and more than enough to say he cannot take new work till beginning of 2013. It really works...
I want to thank the European Parliament and its constituents for giving me back some faith that the state of the government of the world isn't monotonically degenerating into a corporate oligarchy, and ArsTechnica for consistently raising the bar on technical and technical/political reporting in a sea of mostly superficial blog reporting. What's the best way to throw money at Ars?

Edit: RE Money Throwing, never mind, there's a big orange Subscribe Now in Ars' nav.
Author of the post here. Thank you for your comments.

I'd like to address the main criticism that I see in the comments, which is that I did not specify what it is that I mean by morality, and what moral system I'm using to make my judgement.

The post is not meant to be a complete essay, rather it is a short outline of an idea, much like the rest of the stuff I publish on my blog, most of those posts building on each other like bricks rather than standing alone as a finished structure. That's absolutely my fault and it doesn't help with public consumption, and this is something I need to work on. I am, and will be, writing more thoughts on the subject as the post in this submission hardly covers much ground, but nevertheless, I do stand by the idea presented there.

To address the actual point: I do not prescribe a specific moral framework, only that there be one. Morals can come from religion or philosophy (or both), and they should be used to guide design decisions rather than those design decisions being made in isolation. Design decisions made without a moral foundation focus on effectiveness alone, which is not a useful indicator for the good's true worth (again, assuming your life is not amoral, in which case none of that would matter), and what I mean by "true worth" is how that good benefits society and man in light of your moral framework.
Definitely expensive..but compared to what exists now, probably worth it. How else will people be able to upload vacation photos to instagram!
There is some spin in that FAQ. Government is, of course, involved; this thing needs permission to become road- and airworthy. The (meanwhile ex; the video must be from before October 2010) minister of transport also said it could be an option in some markets, and he said that, if these things become used widely, municipailites would have to decide on building such airstrips. He did not say the government was researching that possibility, though. So, all it was was a polite way to say "interesting; we will see whether it will fly (sorry, could not think of a way to make this pun-free. 'will take off' was the alternative I could think of)
"Just because we used to do something does not mean it's the most effective way to do it."

True, but the fact that we used to do it also doesn't mean that it must be broken. I doubt many of would be better programmers if we had a more child-friendly programming language to learn when we were young.
Many won't get/grok the following statement and I suspect those who don't will have a hard time with go.

You cant learn go, you need to feel go.

It's not a coincidence that some eastern philosophy Tao, Zen, others have similar concepts at their core. You can't learn enlightenment. You shed the unenlighted until you are. Approach go with an empty mind. Think not of moves. Look for flows, patterns, feelings. The OA had some of this, "her position looked strong, mine weak an isolated". Seeing that is go. Attempting to formalize why you feel that is not go, at least not until you are a master.

Many hackers are optimizes. They want to learn all the parameters and rationally arrive at the optimal solution. Go is highly resistant to this.

Go is indeed like functional programming in that it's a paradigm shift. It will teach you a new way of thinking, a new way to see and understand the world. I highly recommend playing go. Just don't try to learn it.
I'm surprised nobody said a word about stumpwm yet (http://stumpwm.org). It's a lisp window manager built with the mentality of rat poison.

The great thing about it is how it integrate with emacs/slime. For instance, let's say you want to close all the windows from the second/third workspace, you write the code in emacs and evaluate it in the context of stumpwm.
Don't 'wish'. Donate: https://supporters.eff.org/donate
I agree that "is of value" doesn't flow from "can be of value".

However, the idea that a company can force you to pay for things with zero value is bunk. If you value ESPN at $10 and History channel at $0, then they should charge you $10 regardless of bundling, because that is the profit maximizing price.
If anybody deserves to lose big, it's the MPAA/RIAA.
I was thinking about this the other day. 99% of people don't even realize you can start a software company. 99% of the people that do know you can don't even try. 99% of the people that do try give up to early, change their mind, don't get committed etc.

Just being in that final 1% is no guarantee of success, but it sure as hell is ahead of the other guys.
Screenshot here:
http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Google-closure-frees-...

article here:
http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Google-closure-frees-...
>  And having them be all three letters meant assemblers could pack the text into memory in fixed-length records; every byte mattered.

As much as I agree with using the mnemonics, this is a bogus argument. Even C64 BASIC tokenized stuff before storing it, because there's no reason to store the name at all. In fact, if you prefer, the 6502 instruction set is small enough to represent it in the assemblers editor as a single byte index into an array. Or you could just use the opcode itself.
I'm not sure why this man's investigation is being treated the way he says it is. Catholicism is not only open to having purported miracles investigated; it's, in fact, a requirement. Every year, many such investigations are conducted, and the vast majority find that nothing miraculous has occurred. The Church is fine with that; it's just as happy to weed out "imposters" as anyone else.

For instance, here's a story about a U.S. archdiocese declaring a "bleeding" consecrated host to be nonmiraculous: http://www.startribune.com/local/blogs/135600233.html

And here's the quote that sums up the Church's position: "While the Catholic Church fully recognizes the possibility of miracles and remains open to their possibility, it does so with extreme scrutiny, investigation and care. This incident was the result of natural biological causes and should not be considered in any other way."

So I'm surprised that some in the the Catholic community in Mumbai are resistant to this finding.