skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's often a disconnect between the "catholic viewpoint" and the tones and reality that the theological doctrine is actually preached. Historically, Catholicism has not had a very positive outlook on human sexuality. Sex is great, but only if it is used exclusively for procreation. Anything that deviates from that, or sex for any purpose other than procreation, is seen as immoral. I think it's hard to argue for a positive view of human sexuality if you think masturbation is a sin.

Just take a look at the Catechism:
"2352 By masturbation is to be understood the deliberate stimulation of the genital organs in order to derive sexual pleasure. "Both the Magisterium of the Church, in the course of a constant tradition, and the moral sense of the faithful have been in no doubt and have firmly maintained that masturbation is an intrinsically and gravely disordered action."137 "The deliberate use of the sexual faculty, for whatever reason, outside of marriage is essentially contrary to its purpose." For here sexual pleasure is sought outside of "the sexual relationship which is demanded by the moral order and in which the total meaning of mutual self-giving and human procreation in the context of true love is achieved."138 "

Source: http://www.vatican.va/archive/catechism/p3s2c2a6.htm
Thanks for calling my post interesting. If it weren't for me having to deal with PHP at work, I wouldn't have even considered looking at PHP 5.3, but since I do, this represents a way for me to use PHP which is at least a little more consistent with the way I reason about programming in other languages such as Scheme (and in some ways Python, though map, and filter aren't 'Pythonic' anymore).
Cheat sheets are great and all, but they don't teach you version control. I think that what we have here is a very difficult topic to grasp for most people, and countless cheat sheets don't make people understand them.

For example, look at how they are telling you to resolve conflicts.

5.) Resolve Conflicts (Merge Others’ Changes):

$svn update
$svn resolved

Resolving conflicts is almost never that easy, unless it's some white space. Even then you still want to peruse a diff to see what is going on. I know cheat sheets aren't meant as tutorials, but glossing over important stuff like resolving conflicts doesn't really help anybody.
They've been bio-engineered, not evolved. The bio-engineers presumably cared more about maintaining human morality than about fitness-maximizing. So they kept the "human morality applies beyond humans" value.
I use jQuery all the time, I purposefully left it out of this example to reduce the number of variables causing the IE performance quirk.

I've found that jQuery UI plugins are bloated and slow, to be honest. There focus is on providing a dead simple interface to the developer, who might not even know how to code. I believe this leads to bloating the code and degrading performance, since the code now has to check for and include tons of these little edge cases, which can even compound themselves when they're used at the same time. In the "draggable" demos, anything being dragged is quite laggy and choppy, at least in FF, when it definitely shouldn't be.

jQuery already makes it easy enough to build whatever functionality I want, including drag and drop... and since it's not generalized (as in the case of jUI) it's fast. For drag and drop, 50 lines was all it took to pretty much copy the entire functionality of jQuery draggables... assuming the developer can code a tiny bit of functionality himself. Rather than cram all sorts of microfeatures, like "vertical-only" and "hortizontal-only", I abstract the problem out so that it puts more control in the developer's hands, but still is dead simple.

In my case, the developer defines the "init" function (triggered after it's dragged for a given length or time), the "move" function (which is passed deltaX and deltaY) and the "end" function, all of which are passed events as well. If he can't use this information to make something resize (which is just adding deltaX to originalWidth), for example, then that's too bad, he will have to use 42kb of jUI code to do it.

Another example of bloat and poor performance... if you wanted to create a Dialog, it requires Draggable, and Sortable, and comes to a total of 84kb (uncompressed). It's so laggy then when you're moving it around the shadow appears to be chasing the dialog... and resizing it lags half upwards of half a second. With jQuery, I've made draggable, resizable, shadowed dialogs in like 200 lines.
I guess the point was to remind us that Microsoft was important back in the nineties.
From the article they mention that if the software on the device can be modified then GPS data can be transmitted to a 3rd party. I don't see how that can be contentious.
I'm obviously not going to argue with you over the history of digg, of course you're intimately familiar with that, but I felt like I got there pretty early, and I only personally got a couple of month's worth out of it before I felt it was overrun.

And I didn't mean to imply that he was actually famous, but he was certainly well-enough known among the target audience that having his name attached made a significant difference.
Excellent dissection of my analogy.

I think where we differ is that I'd argue to the theoretical friend that she should not commit suicide, and I wouldn't try the 'in the alternative, if you do decide to kill yourself at least don't kill anyone else' reasoning, if only because I would feel that it would undermine my main point of fervently trying to dissuade her from committing suicide.
Oh, follow the link. He hacked a video depiction of how the accident happened.

Its quite hilarious how the big bus dodges on green and throws him on the pavement. Happens only in Bangalore.
Does anyone really believe it's wise to copy anyone? Copying leaves no room for understanding. Understanding is how you get better.

It's good to be exposed to a variety of perspectives and points of view, but you have make your own way forward. Take whatever you find useful and leave the rest behind. Fill in the gaps with your own ideas.

The worst thing you can do is stop thinking for yourself.
I think they have cause and effect backwards. Is Chinese Democracy bad because it took 10 years to make, or did it take 10 years to make because it's bad? It would probably take me 10 years to record an album, but it wouldn't be worse than my first take.
I personally have no interest in multiple inboxes. It's great that my gmail UX doesn't have to change for others to get this feature. Too often, products make everyone suffer in order to provide a feature that 10% of the users "must have". I only hope they can do the same thing to appease the people that "can't live" without folders.
This is becoming more and more the norm, at least on Windows. I recently installed Office for the first time on my windows machine. At the end of the installer there was a checkbox that said something like, "Make Live my default search engine and make IE my default browser." I wish I had taken a screenshot. Apple is just as guilty with their windows software. But it's funny how some things are acceptable on Windows and not acceptable on macs. It's like you expect people to pickpocket you in a bad neighborhood but not a good one.
How To Reach A Top Blogger
A list of ways to talk to the biggest tech bloggers around and hopefully to get a write up.
Whistling past the graveyard.
Keeping your skills up is necessary, but insufficient.
Over 50? Welcome to the top of the layoff list.
The baby boomers are getting kicked out of the workforce.
There has long been worry about what will happen
when the boomers retire in large numbers.
Well, it may be happening early.
Good luck to us all.
Hey, welcome aboard!

Reddit religion is sickening. As an avowed atheist I can't stand to read the atheism subreddit - it's far one shallow and one-sided than any similar religious bigotry, and that's really, really hard to achieve.

I'm really glad to be reading the debate here. Both sides are being calm and reasonable, which I love. It's proof that the Internet can be civil.
It started already some time ago and it's doing it also on Windows, not just on Macs:

Google Software Update sneaks its way onto computers

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=387759
I agree, I didn't even see this coming. I figured content creators would want their content on as many 'pipes' as possible. Turns out they're just as greedy as ISPs.

How many times can they sell the exact same product to us?
That is true. He was really lucky.

So many replays yet I cannot believe the way the bus dodges its way in busy traffic. But knowing that he is fine and doing some fun things it made me ROFL.
Sequoia: 20 Petaflops, 1.6 million cores, 1.6 Petabytes RAM
The church is against premarital sex at all, which has a hundred percent success rate. Even though I disagree with the Catholic church about premarital sex being necessarily bad, if you do listen to them it works out pretty well.

Luckily, I know a lot of people raised Catholic who know how condoms work, and as far as I know the church would probably rather they use condoms if they must have sex.
I have only one friend on Facebook, but I found her list interesting. I have known her for 20 years and most of the things on the list I didn't know.
Not forgetting this guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wearcompevolution.jpg

But the technology in the linked article is streets ahead.

Particularly interesting to me is that the MIT people have better ideas on what uses a wearable computer could be put to than I've ever heard of before. Assuming real life and today's technology, that is - I've heard cooler ideas in Sci-Fi.

Projecting a paint program? Useful, but not as ubiquitous as a piece of paper and a pen. Hooked up to a mobile so you could bluetooth the picture to someone else? Better. Projecting a live, dynamic map? Very ... social. Moreso than the eyeglasses wearable devices.
"Sex-Negative" is a term sociologist/anthropologists often use to describe different societies. I picked the term up from reading some of Helen Fisher's talks/papers about sex and romantic love (http://www.ted.com/index.php/speakers/helen_fisher.html).

Here is a really poor wiki definition of "sex negative" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex-negativity).

"Sex negativity" is more about a lack of tolerance of different forms and viewpoints of sexuality.

I don't think that upon reading the Catechism or looking at a history of the Catholic Church and it's view on sex/sexuality you come away with a very comfortable view of the actual sex act. Part of this may be due to the fact that those that wrote the doctrine were suppose to be chaste. It's interesting reading how the Catholic Church changed it's early viewpoint from allowing priests to marry early on, to outlawing it (in all but a few loopholes, such as getting the "calling" after you are married).

Most of the doctrine seems to view sex as some unfortunate necessity for procreation, not something to be celebrated by itself. It's never been that comfortable with sex for pleasure. This is in stark contrast to let's say the Greek/Roman societies before the rise of Christianity.

However, I feel like the word itself is partly biased because it assumes that a "sex-negative" viewpoint is bad and a "sex-positive" viewpoint is good (similar to the atheists movement to call atheism "brights"... which makes it seem like everyone else is dims) instead of using more neutral definitions.
Well, any mobile phone can be located by knowing what cell towers it's nearest to or what Wifi access points it's connected to. GPS doesn't transmit anything.
I agree that in the case of monogamous couples using condoms, the analogy breaks down. The analogy holds, though, for non-monogamous sex, I think.
The problem with ad revenue as a business model is that you're beholden to something you can't control directly that is controlled by a third party. With products/subscriptions it's an A to B relationship without the extra C group of advertisers who actually pay the bills for you.

I disagree that people think it isn't really money though. I believe that people think it isn't really reliable.
Good point... Easy (for me) to forget large teams exist ;)
they imply that their advice is for everyone, and I am not sure it is...

I think it was Greenspun, but it might have been Strunk and White, who taught me this secret: Don't equivocate in print. Don't write like this:

"Here's some advice, which may not apply in your particular case: Do X."

or this (which you're more likely to see in actual writing):

"I think X."

Better to write:

"Do X."

or

"X."

Readers tend to understand that your writing comes from you, that it reflects a certain perspective and is unlikely to be universal truth. It's usually unnecessary to hammer this point home at the cost of cluttering up your sentences with clunky disclaimers that are always the same.

When you write, say what you think, straight out. [1] Don't settle for dull accuracy. If people get mad because something you say is wrong or overgeneralized, ask forgiveness, not permission.

37signals' work gets read and cited all the time because it is well written. One of the things that makes it so well written is that it's not larded up with apologies, disclaimers, and caveats. They assume that their readers are smart enough to figure out, without being told, that 37signals writes from a 37signals perspective and that your mileage may vary.

---

[1] Interestingly, speaking can be a different game. There's more room for artful equivocation. You can sell things with body language. You can vary the pace between telling it short and straight and telling it long and rambling. Novel-length writing is also different. We're talking about essays, here.
The 22-year old will also be willing to accept a lower salary; and be less able at the politics of the workplace and more willing to be abused.
Very clever type of DDOS attack, this "DNS Amplification."

Hacker's computers ping DNS servers with a small packet, like 17 bytes, and through spoofing, and some sort of Foobar protocol or glitch in the DNS server, get it to send a 500byte packet to the victim of their choice. The result is the computers the hackers control produce 25x the amount of traffic on the victim as they are sending out, and the traffic to the victim appears to be coming from legit DNS servers!
Five reasons why blogging is your best career move
Military Robots and the Laws of War
I'm 37, and I had a recent experience with this.

I went on a few interviews, and I didn't get either job. I passed a phone screening, long brutal technical quizzes, and a few hours with managers. These were for senior dev positions, but I suspect most of the candidates were younger, maybe late 20s early 30s.

I didn't feel any age-related discrimination at all, but I still felt something was wrong. I started asking myself, "why am I standing here, at a whiteboard, showing an interviewer how to recursively search a binary tree?" "Why am I creating the primal of the dual and proving that the min of one problem is the max of the other under optimal circumstances?" I solved the problems, but maybe they picked up on something from me that shows... maybe a slight irritation or exhaustion.

I realized that it's not ageism. I was irritated with myself. Sure, I "shouldn't" be doing this for the umpteenth time, but the shouldn't is directed at me, not them.

If you've been in the business for over a decade, yeah, maybe you "shouldn't" be taking technical quizzes, but that's because you "should" have a reputation to stand on, not because interviewers should see your grey hair and decide that it's a stand-in for testing your technical chops! (I got into programming late, so even though I'm 37, I've only been seriously programming for about 10 years).

I remember Joel Spolsky (a big proponent of having devs write code during interviews) still said (I'm paraphrasing here) "if you're an independent film maker and Uma Thurman is interested in your film, you don't ask her to audition, you try to sign her!"

The top celebrities in our world tend to be the leads on extremely successful open source projects. While very few devs can get this "celebrity" status, you can still a smaller useful network - and really, how many job offers do you really need?

Speaking at conferences, working on open source projects, working on side projects, writing interesting articles in a blog are all good ways to do this. On a much smaller level, just being very helpful and engaged in your job, and producing good software can help.

I'm on that smaller level, but I realized "why am I doing this?" I called up my network, discussed some jobs, and got a nice senior dev/architect position pretty quickly. No technical interview was needed, because these folks had already worked with me on code plenty of times.

It's not ageism to say that your career and approach to development needs to change as you get older. Another line I loved from a movie called "surfing for life" - "age is inevitable, it's the growth that's optional".
Mapping EPA air pollution data with Google Maps
Isn't he AGAINST malaria? If so, shouldn't he say, "There's no reason ANYONE should have the experience"?
From the 4th part of the same story

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/02/interlude-with-the-con...

"'Do you know there was a time when nonconsensual sex was illegal?' (...) 'The Prohibition, right? During the first century pre-Net? I expect everyone was glad to have that law taken off the books'."

WTF?
Interesting that Dr. Krauss chose to say IVF is "decidedly pro-life." Is a medical intervention pro-life if it results in the birth of one child but the death of four to engineer that birth?

Precisely. The Catholic Church does not hold that artificially conceived humans are less then human, or 'lack souls.' The problem is that the opposite is true, several human beings are made and killed for every child that is born, using IVF.

If you don't believe that a conceived embryo is yet a human person, that is one thing, but if you do, as the Catholic Church does, you can't help but oppose IVF.

Dr. Krauss clearly doesn't understand the position he's critiquing.
Major recessions are characterized by something novel
Golly looks like a neat little tool for playing around with this stuff. The other rule sets look fun too, check out this prime calculator using WireWorld:

http://golly.sourceforge.net/gtk-primes.png

The wikipedia page for Wireworld (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireworld
) has an animation for a similar counter (it's labeled as a prime calculator, but it seems to be just a regular counter).
I seriously hope this crashes and burns. Various industries are trying to encourage this particular business model, and it's undoubtedly terrible for the consumer as it limits choice.

It's also worth wondering if ISPs could be accused of anti-competitive practices by encouraging 'product tying'.
Watch Out, Kindle: Google Makes iPhone the New eBook Reader
They are not related but they are analogs to Facebook platform and Facebook Connect respectively.

[edit]
Ah I see why you wrote that. I was writing/thinking about two protocols at once and came out with an incoherent comment.
I agree that it would make a cool phone game. I played it for quite a bit.

I think you should consider the original numbrosia as a phone game also. I think if you had a collection of math-oriented games, you might put them all in one place or as one application, and market it that way.

A key component to getting a lot of players on these types of games is a global high-score list. There are ways you can do that by just adding a library to your application and using someone else's service, so you don't have to re-code the wheel:

http://highscores.marigoholdings.com/ (for iPhone)

http://scoreninja.appspot.com/ (for Android)

Of course the Android Market place is not allowing paid apps right now, so keep that in mind.
Why Microsoft, labels cling to music subscriptions
Thanks for sharing this. I'm going to enjoy spending my evening reading it :-)
I agree. I turned the feature on, but discovered I didn't really need it, and that it cluttered the screen.
It depends on whether the prohibition on condoms does indeed increase the spread of HIV in non-monogamous sex. If it does, then the combined monogamy+no comdoms policy causes more HIV infections than a simple monogamy policy. Therefore the no condoms policy is a cause of spreading HIV. This would be equivalent to the suffering caused by vegetarians demanding that animals farmed for food should be made to suffer. They can be praised for their vegetarianism, but should still be held accountable for the suffering they cause.
Researchers Find Earliest Evidence for Animal Life
Gartner: Telepresence will replace 2.1 million airline seats annually over next 3 years
So, that was exactly my point wasn't it. If they are going to do it anyway then make sure they do it in the best way possible, which is to use a condom. But the Catholic viewpoint as made public by the holy see on down is that you should not be using condoms, period. Whether or not that is pre- or extra- marital does not enter in to the question.

My take on that is because this is simply a way to offset the ratio of Catholics : non-Catholics, if you forbid the Catholics to use condoms then in the long term there will be more of them. I'm not sure how that tallies with being 'pro life', because if you really were 'pro life' then those lives at risk from infection would count just as much or more as those lives not yet conceived.
i probably will
I think it's because there are people who feel that ad-supported business models on the interwebs is unproven during recession. That sentiment may be overstated.
The key lies in the phrase "mutual self-giving."

Catholics see sex as a mutual gift of self between spouses. Through the language of their bodies, the husband tells the wife "I am yours," the wife tells the husband "I am yours."

As a gift, it is necessarily permanent. It's more than impolite to give a gift and then ask for it back. It's also exclusive -- you don't give someone a gift and then take it back and give it someone else -- the original recipient would rightly be aggrieved at such a turn of events ("Hey, you said that was mine!")

While all of marriage subsumes this gift of self, sex forms the act -- the sign -- signifying the gift. Sex is a physical expression, in the concrete language of the body, of the mutual self-gift that the husband and wife made to each other in marriage. The human reproductive organism consists of two persons: a man and a woman. Their union thus not only signifies their mutual gift of self to each other, but also serves as a creative act, a procreative act that generates life. Thus sex is both unitive and procreative, or in vernacular alliterative, both babies and bonding.

All that leads the Church to say that "the deliberate use of the sexual faculty, for whatever reason, outside of marriage is essentially contrary to its purpose."
IT Layoff Tracker
tl;dr version
I believe that when you boil everything down to its essence, creativity stems from the following trait: the ability to see connections between things that others do not.

I thought this was obvious. I figured it out quite young. dumb people think linearly, smart people think in spiderwebs.