skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I definitely hear that. In fact, Krugman wrote a piece along these lines, arguing that many journalists are very uncomfortable dealing with data. Instead of looking at lots of data and trying to draw conclusions, they want some magical insider to tell them what's really happening.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/30/scoop-dupes/
I love this, have you tested it on any "old people"?
I agree with this article's conclusion in Silver's case, but I think for different reasons. I think the journalistic epistemology it dismisses is actually a good one, but is not being demonstrated in the attacks on Nate Silver. Long-form, long-lead-time investigative journalism is perhaps where it's best demonstrated, and in that case blends somewhat into the epistemology used by anthropologists, sociologists, and ethnographers: the idea that to understand a situation or culture you need to spend considerable time with it, observing how it works, how the people there think and act, etc., even being yourself embedded in it for a time. But you have to actually do it, which takes considerable work and usually long periods of time, and TV pundits are not. And it's better for some things than others: ethnographers rarely claim that their expertise is in predicting the outcome of elections. If you want to predict something, especially something numerical, an ethnographer would generally say that you're asking the wrong person for that prediction, and should go ask a statistician. That might be one difference with journalists: journalists have less humility about the conclusions they can draw.

I don't think that can always be replaced by just data-crunching, in part because you just move the same problem to the 2nd-order problem of interpretive frames for data, which requires the same in-depth ethnographic field work to get right. The proper balance is a big debate in qualitative vs. quantitative sociology, though.

I do think that when it comes to predicting the outcome of elections, on the other hand, the decision is not hard, because it's almost a best case of a prediction that can be quantified based on available data. So I'd say this is more an issue of punditry vs. careful methodology (of any kind), rather than qualitative vs. quantitative epistemologies. In this specific case, it's mainly just partisanship: some people don't like that Silver's data shows Obama with an ~80% chance of winning, so plug their ears.
World War II Pigeon’s Message a Mystery
How to stop illegal downloads
No, even that’s TL;DR: When journalistic objectivity is confronted with scientific objectivity, its circuits are fried.

-- <social science> != Science
also, I don't think fairness would be a winning evolutionary strategy.
It's another symptom of poisoned politics here in the US. As far as I've seen, the people who are attacking Nate Silver are Republicans who simply don't like what Silver's stats are pointing to. They're the same people who claimed last month's unemployment figures were somehow manipulated because it showed a downward trend in unemployment.

It's also an insight into the state of journalism and the press in this country. It's pretty hard to find objective reporting these days, sources of 'news' seems to be full of highly opinionated punditry rather than unbiased reporting.
Consider limiting your use of tools like this (in Letterpress or any other word game) to games you play with friends where both parties agree to a no-holds-barred cheatfest. It makes the game entirely different, as well as giving you a fun way to deploy cheat-tools without actually cheating.

An example from Andy Baio: https://twitter.com/waxpancake/status/261990545570799616
Well, I certainly hope pg isn't putting the non-needles into an incinerator like Jamie...
Cross-platform emoji solution
One effect - economic conservatism may make a comeback.

NY, CA and several other liberal states tend to have people who call themselves "conservatives" (folks like me). We tend to be libertarian leaning economic conservatives who don't identify with religious culture war stuff (war on christmas, the gays are gonna get you).

We get ignored since our vote doesn't matter. This leads to national candidates who are basically Democrats with a little bit of Jesus thrown in (e.g. Bush, Romney), albeit answering to different special interest groups.
Completely agree on Samsung's proven incompetence in platform software. But that doesn't mean they won't try again.
It is going to be on Hackernews, Reddit etc. anyway unless the notice is the only thing on web page and reads - "we are evil and we beg the forgiveness of Samsung and anybody who comments on any web forum" :-)
I agree, it just beach-balled Safari here.
BTW, I wasn't referring to or including this article when I said fluff. This article wasn't bad at all, but it does remind me of the 'get 6-pack abs' story I see on the cover of every men's magazine, Every. Single. Month.

There are worse offenders, and that's why Slashdot has been looking so good lately.
> Who's going to do that for a portable generator.

People that worry about becoming the path of least resistance to ground when they touch the equipment.
I don't think it is quite that easy.

Try modelling the twin paradox that way, for instance...
I completely agree and I do want to be a total pro but am too spread out. I need to start focusing on certain aspects...maybe learn the ins-and-outs of a complete framework?..like Rails while continually learning more and more in-depth HTML, CSS, and JS? I guess my aim is to be a full-stack developer but am struggling finding my footing on the server-side of things.
I'll just leave this right here:

http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt
> ... how horrible C is ...

C isn't horrible at all. I'm one of those guys who find beauty in simplicity, so I consider C a very beautiful language. It's simple, efficient and extremely powerful. It's easy to learn but hard to master. All in all it's really all I look for in a programming language.

What I find particularly great about writing C code is that it keeps reminding me that programming is really a craft. I'm exaggerating a bit, but it feels like putting together something step by step, taking care of all the details, much like a clockmaker would, to produce an end result that works really well. Sure, it is probably more demanding than more modern languages but to me it's more rewarding as well.
I hope that the rise of Nate Silver portends a day when journalism will not be practiced almost exclusively by people who are functionally illiterate when it comes to all things quantitative. When so much of our world is governed by relationships that are inherently quantitative, it's tragic that, of the people who make it their life's work to explain that world to us, so few are equipped to do the job.
Ubuntu PC Sales Skyrocket in 2011 - higher than Apple's in 2007
It's worth emphasizing the fact that Nate Silver's model != Nate Silver's prediction. He has explicitly said many times that if you were to ask him what he thought the outcome would be, he wouldn't go entirely by his model. Rather, he uses the model as the basis of his predictions. This confuses a lot of people because he generally doesn't make predictions publicly, but rather he analyzes what's happening based on the model.
Why not? It's classic game theory. Mostly fair plus a handful of assholes is very strong evolutionary strategy.
He's right. I have versions of "cat" in Java, Perl, Python, and C, all source. Reading from stdin and writing to stdout is the skeleton of a lot of tools, so starting from "cat" source is often the best way to get going on a new tool.
It was worse than a dead sshd. Looks like something kernel-ish died badly. There was one more cron message in the syslog after this, but then nothing until I rebooted. Console unresponsive, no ping answering.

Nov 2 21:29:33 gvdev kernel: [15115318.546376] fail[17150]:
segfault at 7fffe9cbc1e0 ip 00000000004006fe sp 00007fffe9cbb1d0
error 4 in fail[400000+1000]
Ruby/Rails has practically become the poster child for every (modern) web hosting company. EngineYard, Heroku, DotCloud, ShellyCloud, 6Sync, Webbynode, Linode, Brightbox, and the list goes on.

Let's not forget the advancement of JRuby (JVM Ruby), Rubinius (LLVM Ruby), MacRuby (For Native OSX Desktop Apps), RubyMotion (For Native iOS Apps), mRuby (For Embedded Apps).

Not to mention the truck load of conferences every year, the new and existing, accessible and easy-to-use open source projects that are being released and updated frequently.

"Is it just me or has the world moved on from Ruby?".sub("from", "to")

We're doing our best. :)
This is a rather biased view. Maybe check that top ten list again.
Apple is rather polarizing in this regard. For every one of these nightmare stories that you hear, there's always one about someone getting their 5-year-old laptop replaced for a brand new one for free. I guess the human element comes into play here more than anything else.
Innovative Immigrants
That sounds like a pretty dismal support experience. My own experience is that I've had good interactions with apple support, but mainly because I knew what I wanted and I was willing to push the "I'm not happy" button, which I understand is hard wired into all Apple Geniused at the factory in China, and automatically flicks them into "maximum helpfulness mode". But if you don't know about the magic button, it can be a bit tricky, I guess!...

This is certainly something Apple should look into. Their main customer base is the mass market of tech-unsavvy consumers, people like my parents, who don't know how to find that button and believe, rightly, that Apple stores are full of condescending youngsters who treat them like idiots and give them bad advice.
> I wonder what would Steve Jobs say about this quality of support.

Every time Apple does something that someone doesn't like, everyone has a bitch and a whine about how that'd never happen with Steve around.

Get over yourselves. Sure it would. Apple haven't all of a sudden decided "oh look Steve is dead, we can be as terrible as we like now."
Replacing the hard drive on an iMac is about as difficult as replacing the LCD panel on a laptop. Not impossible, but does require removing a large piece of glass with multiple suction cups, etc. I don't think self-repair would be a great choice in this case, at least as a standard option.
Can you quantify the value of an online community, really?
It appears that you must be a resident to have a domain like foo.com.io, but there are no restrictions on foo.io.

That is no extra restrictions. They do have this in their terms (most notably, for any purpose against the laws of any nation):

No .IO domain may be used, directly or indirectly, for any purpose that is sexual or pornographic or that is against the statutory laws of any Nation. In the event of NIC.IO being advised by any party that a specific site breaches this condition then NIC.IO reserves the right to immediately deactivate the offending registration. The applicant may seek the reinstatement of any suspended domain name by seeking a determination by an Arbitrator appointed by the World Intellectual Property organisation.
No, it wasn't made in jest. Obviously arriving at a systems that could work well would require intelligent discussion of all kinds of proposals point by point. I am more than prepared to accept that some aspects of what I rattled-off in five minutes of typing could be bad ideas. It's not like I spend every waking hour of my life thinking about this. It's almost exactly the opposite.

My point is that what we see today is an abomination. Perhaps the system put into place when this country was founded made sense at that time and for a number of years after that. I really think it makes no sense at all today.

The Obama and Romney spent TWO BILLION DOLLARS in their campaigns and who knows how much PAC's spent. This is obscene. Particularly at a time when so many people in our country are suffering.

Today you can't run for office unless you can raise a billion dollars. Period. That's what it takes. That means that there are a lot of truly intelligent people with great ideas that are financially banned from the process. Want to talk about the 1%. About wealth inequality? Let's talk about the 0.01%, the handful of people that can raise a billion dollars and, effectively, try to buy the presidency.

Sick.

Candidates ought to be restricted to presenting their platform and ideas. They should not be allowed to trash the other candidates with impunity and, yes, lie right and left. What we end-up with today is something I see in my house every day with my little ones: "Daddy, he broke the flower!"; "No, I didn't, she pushed me"; "Nooooo, he said a bad word". Oh, please, stop it!

I'll self-appoint as an intelligent voter. I think you might be one too. The problem is that not everyone is. And the system we have in place allows candidates with money to use drive-by media techniques to cause outrage and indignation on the average voter with the aim being to gain a vote and take it away from the competition. This is criminal.

There are other issues here. If you are not "cool", speak well and present well you have zero chances of getting elected. Before someone goes off thinking that I am attacking Obama, stop it! This is a general statement that is party and candidate agnostic. Steven Hawking --or someone like him-- could never become president. Never. That is wrong. Is being president about looking good and speaking well? Not at all. It shouldn't be, anyway. It should be, among other things, about their ideas, track record, experience and ability to make tough decisions.

I want to get down to an election system that removes all the five-year-old crap from the process and focuses on ideas and accountability. If you can't guarantee that you will come through with a promise, then don't promise it. State it as you idea and explain the challenges you might face making it happen.

Hugo Chavez? Please, stop it. We should be able to discuss an issue like the failings of the electoral college system without resorting to insults, right?
No. Absolutely, unconditionally, unarguably not. Down that road lies the work camps of the Stalinist Russia and the action T4 Euthanasia program of Nazi Germany and the research of the Cold Harbor laboritory.

Down that road lies death, destruction and our collective doom.
Sounds right, yes. Most elderly people I've met who still were mentally fit have been using their heads their entire life. Obviously this is anecdotal but I think it's just like a workout for your brain in order to keep in shape, just as being physically active keeps your body fit.
So, what we have here are:

a. Post #1 gives strawman/overly simplistic argument for why callbacks are hell and FRP is great, and obscures example by comparing crappy syntax to elegant syntax.

b. Post #2 gives straw man/overly simplistic argument for why callbacks are fine, and correctly points out the syntax issue.

My takeaway is that both posts have some merit, but what we really need are some examples that go Apples to Apples on syntax AND show when callbacks are fine and when they aren't. Along with some realistic discussion of the complexity inherent in things like aggregating callbacks.

Because, you know, we can only eliminate so much accidental complexity, and then we'll run into inherent complexity. And speaking as a fellow who appeals to authority by mentioning his experience writing a tool that did runtime analysis of multi-threaded applications... There is a lot of inherent complexity involved in writing truly asynchronous and parallel code when failure is expected.
Bitcoin Core Development Status Report #1
The Rose interview was really interesting. It seemed like Rose derailed Musk whenever he was on a roll, but a lot of interesting things were said regardless.
It's in the campaign's interests to paint is a tight race, because they don't want to promote political apathy. They want people to vote.

To put it another way if his model suggested, e.g., Obama has a 100% chance of winning, and everyone knew that, his supporters would be less inclined to vote and he could lose. So there's a chaotic element to these things that's just difficult to predict, and journalists are better placed to handle this chaotic element (another example: Hurricane Sandy). That said, given the abundance of polling data, I think his model stands to be a much better predictor than journalistic intuition.
Met deze tips komen je kippen gezond de winter door
I thought you perhaps meant something more than class objects.

Regarding DI: Jamis Buck infamously used DI for net/ssh and posted that he regretted doing so, because DI felt out of place in Ruby. I'm not spoiling for an argument about its virtues.

Regarding "experienced Rubyists" and reopening classes, I think you should have a look at activesupport/core_ext.
> [Silver's evaluation] involves judgment, too, but because it’s based in a scientific process, we can trace how he applied that judgment to reach his conclusions.

No, as far as I know the actual model and its parameters are not public. I understand why this is the case but without that information the basis for the conclusions are effectively as obscure as those produced by the conventional journalists decried in the article.
The beginning of the article describes how the author would pay much more than $6 for $6 worth of electricity. This is called consumer surplus, and is the principle that people usually pay less for something than the maximum price they are willing to pay, because they are paying the market price (to oversimplify slightly).

This principle is relevant to Hacker News, because I've often seen statements that the value of something is exactly what people are paying for it. Taking consumer surplus into account, what people pay is an upper bound since they may be getting much more value than they are paying. People won't pay more for something than it's worth to them, but they may be paying less. (As a startup-related aside, one reason to have different pricing tiers is to collect as much of the consumer surplus as possible, by charging more to people who will pay more. Coupons and discounts are another way.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_surplus
And <any kind of science or pseudoscience> != <scientific objectivity>. The idea of scientific objectivity is "forming conclusions based only on independently testable measurements." That seems applicable here.
Don't let the name fool you, "reality TV" has absolutely nothing to do with whatever reality is being videotaped.

Two decades of post-"Real World" experience have allowed producers to create whatever image they want in the minds of the viewers.
The opposite of "adamant about not losing" is not "adamant about losing," but rather "not adamant."
Help Annie help NYC
The Apple Stores in the Bay Area are great, in my experience, if you schedule an appointment, show up on time, and are pretty clearly competent -- "I've already backed up this machine, these are the specific symptoms, ...". "I'm a developer" also helps. The Geniuses have wide latitude in what they can do, so being friendly, polite, and easy for them to serve goes a long way -- I've gotten a MBP3,1 fully replaced, 3 replacements of my new iPhone 5 in the days after launch to solve a not-fully-understood-by-Apple WPA2+AES wifi problem, fixing machines where I'd replaced the HDD+ODD with SSD (but the problem was unrelated), etc.

(I really should just do the $300 certification to become an AASP so I can fix my own stuff with Apple-provided parts, though.)

That said, their tier-1 phone support is horrible. Doing whatever is possible to get bumped to 2/3 as soon as possible is essential. (it's all contracted out, actually). I wish there were an easy way to pay a one-time or annual fee to get bumped automatically to tier 2/3.
BTW, a friend has a truck loading food and clothes for Staten Island tomorrow at 8AM near Columbia Univ.

If you know anyone nearby, please pass this on.

http://threads2.scripting.com/2012/november/helpAnnieHelpNyc

We're all connected in this one as long as you live near an ocean. :-)
What is a moral obligation, and what is it for?

I say that the purpose of morality is to guide your own life so that it is the best, longest life that it can be.

Properly, "society" is a nothing more (or less) than a concept formed by an individual mind to grasp that there are individuals that live in geographical and/or communicative proximity to one another and that deal with each other, somehow. (Everyone alive that meets that criteria, no matter what choices they've made in life, no matter what the impact of those choices is on you, qualifies.) That's it - a society doesn't think, feel, act, etc. It's not an actual entity with the capacity to do those things.

Your only true moral obligation is to your own life, and to the values that such a life requires. In terms of the original question about society, your moral obligation is to those individuals that, in your independent jugement, benefit your life and values.

If you do the difficult, rational work to figure out what are the things and people you truly care about, and pursue those values relentlessly, your actions will not conflict with what they would see is good for them if they did the same.
On a slightly related note, the hurricane really reinforced my understanding of the fact we do have a moral obligation to society, whether or not that requires us to pursue particular career paths.

Trains, water, and electricity being down in New Work had a staggering economic cost. We're talking about billions of dollars per day. As people couldn't get to work, it became painfully apparent how much the top of the pyramid depends on the bottom. Bankers making $5m a year couldn't get work done because support staff making $50k a year weren't there. The city is an organism. It's a machine. It's an engine for creating wealth, and like any structured thing it has differentiable pieces that are ultimately completely interdependent.

When I was younger, I used to have a moral and political framework based on the economic model of the farmer. A farmer who farms for his own subsistence has little moral obligation to society. He plants his seeds, he tends them, he reaps them. Society loosely protects him from other societies, but that's about his only link to his fellow man.

Yet, we're not a nation of farmers. Division of labor has allowed us to create tremendous wealth, but has also made it so nobody is useful without thousands of other people to do everything else. The subsistance farmer's productivity doesn't change at all if all the farms around him are flooded. A New York businessman's productivity goes to zero if the homes of his workers and customers are flooded. He is no more valuable, disconnected from the powerful economic engine that is New York City, than a peasant farmer in Bangladesh.

As I have gotten older, I have grappled with a moral philosophy that accepts our position as elements of these tremendous economic engines. I don't think such a moral philosophy requires eschewing individual liberty. Indeed, individual liberty becomes more important in the context of an industrial economy where everyone is forced to interact with each other. Yet I've become convinced that there is no moral philosophy that eschews an obligation to the other elements of the economic engine that is compatible with the realities of that economic structure. I think it's foolish to apply philosophies rooted in the idea of independent subsistence farmers to a world that looks nothing like that.
Just because Eric S. Raymond says that's how security bugs should be found doesn't mean that's how security bugs are actually found.
I don't get it - most old people I know would have no interest in any of those apps...

However, if you're going for a general idea of "big icons/minimal description" then I think you might have something cool to start with.
Are Enterprises so lazy to build an API around their data models?

I would like to see a detailed comparison of the framework API's(say in django, Tastypie) with 3rd party managed API's. Its a great read to see the pros and cons in this context.