skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yea, they have an entire army dedicated to nothing but trolling the brave enemies of the state who converge at places like www.abovetopsecret.com and dailypail.com. FFS. Those places are a pit of back stabbing, turf wars, elaborated socket puppetry and so on because they attract a crowd that is borderline crazy, and a few trolls preying on them.

If you build a place for destructive and often psychotic people, you would need a dedicated three letter agency to prevent them from going on each others throat.
If you like Speyside scotches, there are almost definitely a bunch of Bourbons you like too. Mild Speysides are as close as Scotland comes to Makers Mark.

Jack Daniels is distilled in Lynchburgh, TN. You can visit them.

I doubt Jack Daniels is going to blow you away. I don't even mix with it. But it's thoroughly drinkable, in the same way that a Coke on ice on a hot day is drinkable even though its origins are dubious (way more so than Jack Daniels).

Also: just because something is easy to find doesn't mean its integrity is compromised. You can get Three Floyds Alpha King in most supermarkets in Chicago. Three Floyds is still a very, very serious brewery, and Alpha King is a serious beer.
Batik Sarimbit C5
It's also worth to note that the EU is checking into Windows 8 RT concerning no JIT access for other browsers as an extension of their Windows 7 agreement [1].

Considering Windows RT will be a minority player in the marketplace, with Apple the dominant player, one would think that Apple would face equal attention from the EU.

[1]http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2407324,00.asp
USA Hip Market Category
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It's really hard at least in Berlin.
> Sparrow is never independent OK? They depend on GMail.

False. Sparrow works with any IMAP mail server.
This is the wrong attitude as well. Civics does not end at the ballot box. The most visible example in the past year is all the online protests against SOPA and PIPA that resulted in both pieces of proposed legislation being shelved. If anything, that should give you hope that we can still effect change if we work hard to do it.

Our Constitution codifies how we will give consent to the system to rule over us and how that system will rule. The Bill of Rights gives us the right to complain about anything that anyone does.
Let me tell you my story:

I got two years of college under mt belt and had to leave school for many reasons. Went to another university a year later to try and finish and got caught up in the building Internet boom/bust. The experience I gained was VERY valuable and it was definitely the right decision to leave school to pursue my career, but I had the nagging sense that I was missing out on some jobs because I didn't have that degree.

So I found a company that would help me pay for part of my education via tuition assistance and had relatively regular hours and went to it. When I finished the degree, I changed jobs and got a 60% pay raise.

Mind you, I already had a six-figure income BEFORE the degree.

Since then, I've changed jobs twice and each job has been more rewarding and better paying that the last. I definitely feel like my program (which was from a well-known school) helps to open doors. I feel like the degree added a multiplier to my efforts that helps me to earn credibility and break through barriers.

Like it or not, the lack of that degree will subject you to prejudice you wont be fully aware of until you're freed from it. You can certainly be successful without the degree, but having it makes enough of a difference that I'd be hard pressed to recommend someone go without it unless they were clearly an exceptional individual with a clear goal for what they wanted to do in their lives.
This is a cool list, but I'd just remark that most of the distilleries on it are small indie brands with regional (or no) distribution. When you get down to the distilleries on this list with 10 or 20 brands, you're often looking at some of the best regarded whiskeys in the US.

If you read whiskey nerd blogs, you'll sometimes even pick up a backlash against bespoke indie distilleries; whiskey being much easier to do than to do well.

topics_i_am_insufferable_about.push(this_one)
Am I the only one who thinks it's humorous how many people think that body armor means bullets just ricochet to the ground harmlessly?

Vests are simply for preventing shots from penetrating vital organs, not turning the wearer into Iron Man. Best case scenario, it'll feel like you just got hit with a golf drive. If your ribs aren't broken, they'll be badly bruised. The weapon is negligible since it's not a firefight, if anything, armed people in the theater would have the upper hand because these killers are never expecting people to shoot back at them. Really, anybody who's ever shot a gun could have likely killed him, if not debilitated him enough such that people could escape.

There are strong arguments to both sides of gun control but alluding that handguns are insufficient protection is not one of them, that's just ignorance.
Considering how much AT&T makes, $8.2million is drop in a bucket. With potential backlash from privacy groups and customers, I'm sure the carrier would be happy to forgo that particular source of revenue if they weren't legally compelled to do so.
It's a terrible way to compare the two things, since you're fundamentally measuring something completely different.

If you really want to compare it to something, why not compare it to the public debt the US holds, which the suggested number would do more than fill (current public debt is somewhere a bit north of 15T); especially since the argument is made by the people who instigated the study that taxing this figure could balance the books (it probably couldn't; since only a fraction of that is actually subject to US taxes, and most of it would probably only end up being due for capital gains taxes anyway -- not that it wouldn't go a long way).
That sort of mob vigilantism is loosely coupled with actual guilt. It's more about tossing out a name and some kind of accusation, with people only sometimes checking if it's true before acting. Naming people at all is a problem, the additional factor of guilt is far less of one.
Nope: http://www.theverge.com/2012/7/21/3174803/sparrow-for-window...
The problem with this is that it assumes that the only (or main) source of disinformation, propaganda and manipulation is the government. These techniques are used on a daily basis by people on all sides of every issue. Is it possible that some of them are paid government "spies"? Sure. However, it's likely that the vast majority of them are just independent trolls, skillful manipulators or bad arguers who've discovered that the techniques in question are an easy way to manipulate the discussion so that they can get the validation that they crave.

I think that the document itself merits some analysis when it comes to manipulation and disinformation. If you take the document at face value, the author's intention is to give information to other activists so that they can protect their communities from government manipulation. However, I think it's also possible that the list of behaviors is meant to be used by leaders to purge communities for (internal) political or personal reasons. Given a long enough posting history, you could use this list to accuse almost anyone of being a spy. I suspect that whatever the author's original intentions, the latter interpretation is going to end up being much more common. It's already easy enough to dismiss people who disagree with you as "government shills", and this will simply make it even easier to justify.
In the paragraph immediately after that, she notes that retirement planning requires not merely competence, but prescience: You need to know when you'll retire, and when you'll die. You need to know when you'll get fired, get sick, have a child. You need to make investments that will consistently beat inflation over the course of decades.

Now, we could debate to what extent it's possible to guesstimate these things, and to what extent it's reasonable to expect people to do that themselves, but I think that may be missing the main point, which is: Why? Why should we want to require every individual to perform these calculations for themselves, knowing that many will get it wrong and become a tragic drain on our last-resort emergency support system?

Why, when it would be so easy (and so much cheaper) for us to assume some collective responsibility as a massively productive society to take care of our individuals who are no longer productive, and let no one have to die in poverty?
Here's a great rule-of-thumb that I've gotten by with: Never ever compare the cost of your standard of living to someone else's. You just don't have enough information to do an accurate comparison.

My in-laws buy a lot of stupid stuff (IMHO) that saps their spending money. Do you think they're going to stop buying stupid little knick-knacks when they're retired? Probably not. Should they? Probably. But humans have a hard time changing their behavior.

So what this woman is proposing is to work with and solve the problems we have, not try to magically wish them away or pretend that we can easily change the behavior of the 400mil Americans overnight, and I tend to agree with her that it's a good idea.
The primary difference is Apple does not have a monopoly in either the smartphone or tablet markets. They only sell something like 9% of smartphones on the market.

The way out is to convince everyone who owns an iOS device to jailbreak it. And then, the development community needs to band together and convince Google, Opera, and Mozilla to port to iOS their full web browsers, including their render and JS engines, and distribute these browsers on Cydia. This would go a long way to loosening Apple's force grip on their platform and their customers.
I had problems reading all of this because the tin foil hat I'm wearing kept slipping down over my eyes.

Seriously, guys, simply because you can describe something does not mean it exists. There are a LOT of ungrounded premises here. As an example, simply because somebody begins an argument with a weak premise doesn't mean that there's an organized effort at "consensus cracking". Sometimes people just make weak arguments.

There is a danger here, and it's the same exact danger as folks face that get caught up in lists of logical fallacies. The danger is that they believe that human conversations should follow a strict set of almost mathematical rules towards a logical and inescapable conclusion.

Got news for you: people are not robots. Conversations among people are messy, emotional, many times fruitless, and non-linear. Most every topic involves incomplete information, and the soul of rhetoric is emotive persuasion. The purpose of learning things like fallacies is to prevent them from being used in a careless, overt manner such as to shut down communication. It has nothing to do with eliminating them from speech or somehow perfecting the discussion. Intelligent people just make more subtle and persuasive fallacies, which makes sense when you realize decisions must be made on incomplete data. In the same manner effects such as these should be seen on all sorts of forums -- whether or not somebody is employing a tactic or not. The author is looking at this backwards.

That doesn't mean that such techniques aren't being used or wouldn't work -- although I have my doubts that you could constantly "own" a board through using them. Seems to me you'd just end up being cast as a manipulative asshole.

This article was just a little too much on the paranoid side for me. I'm not sure it belongs on HN, or that it contains any useful information at all. The problem is that these "principles" are presented more or less as simple supposition. It would be like reading a list of "wonderful" ideas for a startup. The only value some article like this would have is if it were somehow presented with empirical data of value provided. Of course, how you could actually produce value in taking a conversation off the rails is beyond me -- how do you know that by using one of these techniques you're not actually assisting somebody in understanding a topic or gaining value from the forum? From what do you measure?

It's just speculative unsubstantiated paranoid bullshit held together by an intelligent mind and cogent essay. I'm not flagging it because in some sense I guess you could call it hacker art. Very Hari Seldon.
Many people in private insurance claim that it is at least equally broken, with some saying it is worse. And some of those people I'm speaking about are MDs themselves.

It is broken by German / first-worlds standards, of course, with people not having access to something similar laughing about these claims, if it was remotely funny.
It's a little like the Apple approach versus the Microsoft approach. Udacity has so many amazing details like the camera fixed above the teacher's hand as s/he draws.

Coursera's algorithm course felt like every mediocre YouTube video. It has little to do with Salman Khan's idea of an online university. They seem to employ a quantitative approach compared to Udacity. You also hear a lot of announcements from Udacity about courses that didn't make the cut, because it fell below their own high standards.

At one point, Coursera will have to remove some of their courses from their website, because they are so poor, and it's going to be a mess. I like that Udacity are already very careful about what they put up. That way, they don't waste people's precious time either.
I think there's a categorical difference between what you think about software patents and what stronger opponents - possibly notch - do. You consider them a bad public policy. They (well, we) consider them morally wrong.

It's hard to give you an example without knowing you, so forgive me if I go with an extreme example. Let's say your company does a physical product, and you find a country where it's legal to employ children, which would reduce your labor costs by 30%.

It makes economical sense to do it, but would you?

Now, you may find it ridiculous to compare child labor with software patents - and I admitted my example is extreme - but the fact remains that Notch and others consider them inherently wrong and therefore believe that people who engage in such behavior are to be criticized.
Tawkon, app that measures radiation for Android
And how is that related to the question at hand? It isn't. As a matter of fact it isn't even in nearly the same industry.
Berlin is a FANTASTIC city to bootstrap your project ...

reasons: 1. cheap cost of living, 2. availability of relatively well paid contract work, 3. A very supportive startup / creative community who are willing to share info and resources, 4. A very smart and creative demographic, 5. wonderful bars, clubs, and restaurants, 6. German people are actually a decent bunch :)

disadvantages: 1. over-strict regulations in dealing with Banking and Regulatory bodies (whatever you do, do NOT sign up for a postbank a/c), 2. Less than ideal weather.

Overall a win I think, which is why I continue to call Berlin my home.
There are plenty of companies out there that will send a true nastygram for any sort of infringement, no matter how harmless.
To be fair, that would also be a near-perfect expat description of California.
Converting a Bicimal to a Fraction (Direct Method)
Anonymous Hackers not responsible for attack on Dahabshiil
Even so, it seems like a valuable collection of things that new and old forum posters should be aware of; similar to how HN's vigilance regarding logical fallacies raises the level of discourse.

To some extent this community already employs countermeasures against some of these attacks through reply cool-downs, pun down-voting, and hell-banning. However, until now I wasn't aware that a ontology of these attacks existed. Given a common vocabulary to describe these activities, we should be able to point them out as easily as we do ad hominem.
Whoah whoah taking this maybe a little bit too far; before we make Jack Daniels the Louis CK of bourbon (presumptive nerd favorite in exchange for one congenial gesture), maybe you should try some Evan Williams Black Label. It costs 2-3 cups of coffee, and is way better.
Not to mention cheap, quality education drawing Americans and other foreigners into Canada (it did for me and I stayed after my degree was finished).
Weird Al isn't parodying the artists he parodies? What?
This really makes me wish they would leave content up rather than following the cohort model -- there are a handful of classes I'd like to take, but their current model forces users to basically adhere to the university schedule (they have 4x more courses starting in september than any other month). Udacity made the switch after a couple months of trying the cohort model -- hope Coursera considers the same.
Cool! Always felt like sharing public files via Dropbox wasn't quite as quick as it should be. Seems similar to CloudApp's menu bar app: http://getcloudapp.com/
I was thinking perhaps there's a willfulness argument to be built on an infringer refusing to alter a design even when the trademark owner offered to subsidize the alteration.

Also, as pointed out cross-thread, when your argument is uncertain, it pays to be nice.
I hate the trite response, "We must do whatever it takes to make sure this kind of thing happens again."

These things are going to happen again, as they have happened throughout history. We can, however, do many things to try to minimize the number of incidents like this.

Unfortunately for the paranoid gun rights lobby, some form of gun control is a necessary but not sufficient part of the answer to this issue.
Because they're not a monopoly on smartphones/tablets. Android is doing pretty well, by most accounts. Blackberry still isn't dead (though not for lack of RIM's trying). The IE antitrust case against Microsoft was because they held a monopoly on desktop computers, and tried to use that to build a monopoly on Internet Browsers.

Apple a monopoly on Apple devices, but that's fine. Saying that they have a "monopoly" here is like saying that Coke has a monopoly on the contents of Coke bottles, and they should be forced to fill some with Pepsi. Perhaps less glibly, that things like XBox should be forced to ship Mario, or that Microsoft must release Halo for the PS3. Just because we're used to anything with a CPU being "free for all developers to ship whatever they like onto" doesn't make it a right enforceable by law. If that's your preference, great - buy devices that support this. We do not want the government dictating policy in an area so young, and highly competitive.

If, in a few years, the iPad has become the tablet computer with 99% of the marketshare, there might be an argument for an antitrust case against App Store policies. But that looks very unlikely to be the case.
Honestly, I don't feel a need for AdBlock. I don't consciously see most ads (with the exception of Youtube ones, like I said). They don't even reach my mind. I instinctively know where they are, and my gaze just routes around them.

And in that, I think I'm not the only one. I would guess quite a lot of people have been "trained" the same way.
The majority of these tactics would not work in the wild without huge amounts of work. For example, "forum sliding" would be noticed on a forum slow enough that it's needed: on a forum large enough that it would go un-noticed doesn't need such behaviour. Any forum small enough for this to work is going to have active staff members that will notice a string of crappy posts.

If a forum is small enough (and has staff that don't care) for any of these techniques to be effective then the people that you're "converting" to your cause are going to be such a drop in the ocean that it's a complete waste of time. That might work on an issue with only 100 people that care about it, but global politics or anything that really matters it won't.
>He claims it's "ridiculous" to expect people to save responsibly. Yet it happens in east asia, and it happened historically in the west.

Ive worked in east asia. The retirement conditions are attrocious, and grand masses of old people get f... all, or have to work till they are 70+ to the worst McJobs.

Back to the west now:

It's not about "responsibillity" and saving and investing etc.

For one it's about inequality. A $100K a year programmer can think ahead and make "investent decisions" and "savings". A hand-to-mouth low wage worker cannot. This "be responsible" things, basically says "screw them". And no, its no less egotistical and silly when it comes from "I started poor but made it, others are just lazy etc" outliers.

Second, its about power. Again, the upper middle class can negotiate better wages, and better medical coverage or retirement / insurance packages. The poor, not so much. And even less have they the skills to evaluate invenstent options.

Third, a bad turn, a sudden costly illness, a fraud and there goes your retirement fund.

This general attitude reflects bad upon society. It basically amounts to "we're not a real society, we're a every-man-for-himself race, and screw those that couldn't make it". People that don't care if a 70 year old is working every day at a Walmart or begging for change, are not society material, in my European mind.
Germany, the completely authentic sub-Saharan information drought experience...

What's your sarcasm supposed to imply here? If the internet's not great, the internet's not great. Having recently gotten out of doing research in distributed systems I actually know the average German DSL rates. It's mixed. I'm sure that you would be on the low end if you lived in one of the older buildings with poor wiring.

Culture's about more than clubbing.

He didn't mention anything about culture, he was talking about nightlife. And if he cares mostly about clubbing, that's perfectly fine.

1 City vs. half a continent. Good comparison.

One city in Germany vs. a bunch of cities in Eastern Europe. It may be more useful if he gave an actual city to compare it with, like Budapest, but it's definitely a valid comparison.
Google halts new orders for 16GB Nexus 7, surprised by demand
iOS is not in a dominant position in the smartphone market. Android is bigger. iOS is rather dominant in the tablet market, but the market is arguably too nascent to be concerned yet - there's no reason to believe that Android tablets won't eventually become popular.

Fundamentally, monopoly regulation (like that which affected microsoft) is for monopolies. I really dislike Apple's lock-down-heavy policies, but as long as there are credible alternatives out there there's little reason to be concerned.
I was just about to pay for another month of CloudApp.
I'm still going to do that as the 'automatically upload screenshots' feature is just too killer to give up.
But if Droplings had that, I'd definitely pay for it.
The best single rule I have found, useful for academic disciplines as well as internet forums is "Everybody overstates the accuracy, applicability, universality, precision, or other some other aspects of claims they have made." Anybody who actually cares enough about something to go through the trouble of writing it up, unless they are being paid by the word (which has been noted elsewhere has its own problems), is going to be emotionally invested in their work and writings. So my best advice is to assume from the beginning that it is overstated, and consider a weaker version, or a charitable interpretation, of their claims.

Given the limited amount of information available in an online post, a charitable interpretation is even more warranted online than in a book.
This is the same old “correlation is not causation” thing that the press never seems to understand.

Move along; nothing to see here…