skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you murdered someone, that would be a simple act; the legal process, though, would be complicated. I'm sure there are aspects of the legal process in terms of repatriating the inmates, for example, that are complicated. What is not complicated is the violation of human rights they suffered.

I apologize for the "Nazi thing". I lost my temper; I'm sorry. But that brings up an interesting point: the holocaust was legal. Some did "not like it," but it was legal. So in 1948, the entire world came up with a set of guidelines called the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights that gave everyone -- Jews, Blacks, Muslims, everyone -- basic rights, regardless of what a country currently wants to make legal to "expedite its security".

You talk about propaganda, so let's talk about facts that no one disputes: More than 90% of the inmates in Guantanamo Bay were sold into captivity, most were never even charged with any crime let alone given a trial, and they were tortured. For eight years. Don't you see? If that's legal in any way, it can't be. The minute we make an exception for a dark-skinned Afghani, we send ourselves back to the time when exceptions were made for Jews and Gypsies, and we undo all the good work that was accomplished in the shadow of our shame.
Putting Man Before Descartes
NYC VCs Can't Do Math
Ask HN: Submit via /submit, or via bookmarklet?
Just curious how people submit article. Other than an "Ask HN:" type of post (like this one), everything I submit is done via the bookmarklet.

The backthought to my question is that if bookmarklet use is predominant, a way to cut down on spam/junk submissions would be to not allow submissions with links to be posted any other way.
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I think TC would be making a lot more fuss if they had a hand in making it.

3rd party docking probably comes down to product lifetime. Netbooks seem to disappear from the market within months of release, so the aftermarket isn't going to specialise under those conditions. It's promising that the hardware for this is open, which at least means there's a chance we'll see something interesting. I'll certainly keep an eye on this - Netbooks haven't done it for me yet, but something more portable may well be for me.
> The two big variables are the skill of the architect, and their understanding of the real problem.

I read the article as discussing when to throw your own code away and start over. Under those circumstances, aren't you more skilled today than you were when you wrote the original? Is your understanding of the problem better or worse?

For that matter, is it even the same problem, or has the problem itself changed since you first wrote the code?
The Impressionist - Painting with Java
Stop whining about economy, says Schwarzenegger
Liked the Show? Maybe It Was the Commercials
True, but wouldn't something like a version control system + magic scripts solve the issue ?
Nintendo Wii Price
Discover how to find the best Nintendo Wii Price
What subject areas are you interested in the most?
Agreed. You will have sales cycles of > 1 year, with references, demonstrations, visits, proof of concept delivery, tenders etc etc..

It's hell.
Midphase
www.midphasereview.org is Midphase Review & Midphase Coupon $24 website. Midphase review hosted with midphase.com web hosting
Tech startups start with a question. What's yours?
I liked it, and things were pretty straight forward, though i think that the bits that are not story or quote don't really seem to add all that much to the point you are making.

Also, minor points,
"(user experience is the job --- people writing IDE’s and text editors) needs an "of" or an "of the" (unless of course you were writing about people with jobs writing them...)

and "even if there was no chance you could possibly want to do it." seemed a little awkward when i was reading through.

I'll try to write something specific about the actual programming content itself later, when i am not so tired.
I do think that the necessity of what the article talks about varies from project to project - but it strikes close to home in reference to my current project.

I'm working for a client doing something like centralizing a whole lot of decentralized data for use within an industry - the project has been attempted by other people in the industry before, and failed horribly - I suspect because few businessmen understand the problem they're trying to solve (and "enterprise-ready code-monkeys" are a dime a dozen).

I'm lucky enough to have a client that understood that the first functional version of what we were developing was more or less a throwaway version. It helped us get a handle on the exact details of the problem, but couldn't last. I'm currently working on the third iteration of the application as a whole, and (not to toot my own horn but) we have a pretty impressive, stable app now.

If we wouldn't have done some major re-writing from the early versions, the app would be utter fucking hell to maintain or develop at this point. Since we did, the codebase is understandable, the architecture is correct for what we're trying to do, and maintenance is not much of a pain.
Globalization sounds rational only when Wage Slavery is prevented in developing nations.
Preliminary experiments, but there's something some people are called the Obama Effect. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/23/education/23gap.html?_r=1&...

I heard about it on a podcast..I think it's either "How stuff works--stuff you should know" or "RadioLab", and they cited a study where they had a golf test for blacks and whites. The only variable was in telling them what it measured. When the experimenters told them it measured athletic intelligence, the blacks did worse, and the whites did better. When the experimenters told them it measured natural talent, then the vice versa happened.
Microsoft layoffs to be offset by more R&D spending, hiring
You'd think they would give a little more weight to the group, considering that the users of TPB are a good chunk of the internet-using population of the world.
Xen Cluster Management With Ganeti On Debian Lenny
i-banking is the only place we make money both on buy and sell side.
I’m Investing - Now What?
You registered less than an hour ago. Why should we pay any attention to your recommendation?
Could just be cognitive dissonance: the more we pay for something, the better we have to think it is, so that we don't feel stupid. Watching commercials is like paying for watching a TV show, so we have to deceive ourselves into liking it more ("it was worth the commercials"). Since in the experiment the researcher only asked for individual estimates of happyness, it seems to me cognitive dissonance could explain it.

For the TV show - the massage example sounds more interesting, but not enough details about the setup are given (ie what kind of interruptions).
Readability : Making reading pleasant
The spammers would switch to submitting via the bookmarklet, surely? (If they don't already.)
Since when the solution to all problems is a government bailout? A bailout is the kind of "temporary" measure that Ayn Rand mocked so heavily in her now famous book.
You might wonder why we use PRNGs at all; why not use a truly random source for every number? Unfortunately, a computer's pool of truly random numbers is very limited; it has to build up by measuring minute temperature changes or internal timing variations. NetHack, especially being played by fifty people on a public server, would keep that pool empty and harm the game's playability.

Surely there's a more practical solution right here: Seed based on a variable that's a component of the actions of all the users of the server in the last 24 hours. Then, in order to correctly guess the new seed, the hacker would have to be the only person the server for the whole day.

Obviously, alter "24 hours" to be whatever period is long enough to ensure that there will be more than one user on active the server during that period.

That would still not make it leakproof, but would render it considerably harder to hack the PRNG. For many practical situations, making something uncrackable is not necessary. It is enough to make cracking it an insanely difficult proposition. Until we find ourselves faced with science-fiction-like super-intelligences (such as this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep ) willing to use infinite intellectual resources to break into the system, making something really, really hard to crack is enough.
Also measuring US Patents is obviously going to skew it towards US hubs, not to mention many things are patentable in the US (software, business methods) which aren't patentable elsewhere.
I think eli was replying to the parent comment, not commenting on the article.

Also, 40% of 2/3 is about 26% of the whole, which I wouldn't call "wildly off base" even for your site.
Again, I would say the same thing-- A "bad" usability website underlines the importance of "good" design, and promotes dialog in the process.
Entrepreneurs Who Rose From The Ashes
Hands-on: Roku's $100 Internet video box now offers Amazon Video on Demand
Who Should You Approach To Look For Business and Joint Ventures
When launching a business one of the biggest questions small business owners have is: Who should I approach first? Of course they are doing all of the cute social media stuff and online marketing. But they want to know who- in my area can I approach?
Boost the productivity of Microsoft Windows Server 
Microsoft Servers is a term referred to a complete array of Microsoft server products. Windows Server 2000 and Windows Server 2003 is a server operating system produced by Microsoft. They are believed to be the most scalable and deliver better performance than their predecessor server 2000.
They are politicians, and politicians are at the mercy of their voters which happen to consist of a large chunk of filesharers.

When the Pirate Bay's servers were raided a few years ago it turned into a political scandal, and (if I remember correctly) a minister was fired.

Also, The Pirate Party was very close to getting elected into parlaiment at the last election in Sweden.

If I was a Swedish politician or authority I would definitely care.
Oh hey, I remember you from last time. No, I'm a number of years past that age.

I am a little depressed to be arguing with people who think that calling names is a valid way to argue this sort of thing. The closest I've gotten to a real intellectual response is someone who claims that thinking you're Asian will make you better at math (alert the schools of this discovery!).

I thought that Hacker News was a place where intelligent people were willing to hold intelligent discussions. If you're going to talk about immigration (which HN wants to talk about a lot) you have to consider this sort of thing at least.

Instead, what I see is the view: "On this subject it's okay to turn off our reasoning facilities." Why? I guess because thinking about it would be wrong. You'd have to be a Nazi to know about the Hapmap data or brain genes that vary across population groups like ASPM and microcephalin. Ah well.

Maybe I should begin attacking people for being dirty culturists instead. Attacking African culture, claiming that it causes IQ drops, is a terrible slander against what are sometimes a very beautiful set of social systems. Only evil people could claim that.
If you want fluid and fixed columns you can use <a href="http://code.google.com/p/emastic/">Emastic CSS Framework </a> This article is all about Emastic because is fluid and em based.
I agree totally. We decided a while back that we wouldn't attempt to support IE6 - life is too short. We do support IE7, but still spend a lot of time on fixes and workarounds for minor incompatibilities. If our stuff works on Firefox, it generally works on Safari too, with no extra effort, but an oft-repeated phrase in our company is an exasperated "f*^&&ing IE!"
You say that now, but you'll be sorry when the martian invaders cheat on the nethack public server!
Is pooleverywhere.com in the operation profit?
I'm not sure how morality plays into the mistake. A lot of people deluded themselves into believing that housing prices would never go down. Some people did that because they worked for investment banks and wanted to earn large profits on bonds and some people did that because they wanted to live in California or Florida or Nevada. The only immorality that I have seen is people who lied about their finances on their mortgage applications and brokers who originated mortgages that were clearly unsuitable for the borrowers. There were plenty of people who did neither of these things who are just as much at fault in what happened because they made an honest mistake while trying to make a better life for themselves. What sort of moral rules should our economy follow to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future?
The book is a pretty good read as well: http://www.amazon.com/World-As-I-See/dp/1599868245/ref=sr_1_...
Only they don't, because when you measure it, you can predict 80% (studies differ on the exact number) of IQ from parent's IQ. The rest is mainly unshared environment (what we don't know how to fix).
I'm not surprise this is happening, I expect that it will happen more in future. Windows and IE may have only lost a few percentage points of market share over the past few years, but those few percentage points represent a generation of technology enthusiasts who will, I suspect, have a big impact on the way the internet evolves.

When someone who doesn't run Windows or IE builds a site for their peers who predominately don't run Windows or IE either, then finds that they have to jump through some hoops to support IE, is it any wonder they decide to pass?
no need to look to Japan for this.

"Roger & Me is a 1989 American documentary film directed by independent filmmaker/author Michael Moore. With sarcasm and irony, Moore illustrates the negative economic impact of the late General Motors CEO Roger Smith's summary action of closing several auto plants in Flint, Michigan, costing 30,000 people their jobs and economically devastating the city.

[...]

The most famous resident that appears in the film is Rhonda Britton, who sells rabbits for "Pets or Meat" (The scene many believe was the reason Roger & Me received an R-rating features Britton killing a rabbit by beating it with a lead pipe. The rabbit fights back before and during the early part of the beating.)"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_%26_Me
Take that advice from the guy who bankrupted california.
Can we stop with all the economy-related articles? I count 9 on the front page of HN at the moment. That seems excessive.
Juicer: Package your JavaScript and CSS
My favorite quote of his.

"My political ideal is democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized. It is an irony of fate that I myself have been the recipient of excessive admiration and reverence from my fellow-beings, through no fault, and no merit, of my own. The cause of this may well be the desire, unattainable for many, to understand the few ideas to which I have with my feeble powers attained through ceaseless struggle."

No man should be idolized. Much of what we do today in our society...
Install MSN Messenger on Ubuntu Linux
Install MSN Messenger on Ubuntu Linux
Implementing SCRUM - story of a Seedcamp winner
How our team switched to SCRUM and why we believe it is important to have a development methodology when you are a startup.
Square Root Day: 3/3/09
Qt 4.5.0 released (Let the LGPL apps begin)
I don't disagree with you; but ccraigIW is a link spammer, so I don't know if this is the right place if you're aiming for results.
Well then he should be blocked.
60k is a lot of money, especially for the people who have the most to gain from a US citizenship (i.e. people from the 3rd world who are not independently wealthy).

A Swede will not pay 60k because the US is, for the most part, not that much (if at all) better than Sweden, and most Indians don't have that kind of money.
Social bookmarking sites you probably haven't seen
The Four Finns Who Pioneered the Graphical Browser
Vimeo Proves Quality Content Drives Traffic
Vimeo has been around since 2004 - before YouTube - but their focus on distributing high quality content may have led to their extremely long experimentation phase. The truth is that it wasn’t until YouTube’s success madated the need for a quality alternative.
Interesting read, didn't know google offered such a service.

Do they have Google Domains too?
The information about the Hanalei Surfboard House was the most interesting thing I've ever gotten out of TechCruch for years.
The Final Day of The Pirate Bay Trial
Www.Buxput.com - Earn Money In Seconds
Biggest drop ever expected for PC shipments
As someone who has been living in Vienna for the past 4 years (and whose German is his 3rd language), I can tell you that that was certainly not my experience- I could speak basic German at 6 months but it took much longer than that to become fluent.

On the other hand, I've heard from friends who spent some time in South America that Spanish is an exceptionally easy language to learn, and that they could speak half-way fluently within several months.

To bring in the other extreme, I know people who lived in Japan for years and have only learned fairly rudimentary Japanese.

It is very dependent on the person and the language.
Canviz - Graphviz in javascript
Base the randomness on the internet! That should make it hard enough to crack...
wow i have to say i'm a little astonished at the emotional (and largely negative) responses from people to Arrington simply announcing to his readers that he is back.

he wasn't trying to start a flame war. he simply let his readers know what he had done during his hiatus.

and yes this is noteworthy for the startup community. when the largest start-up related blogger (like it or not) comes back after being a month out of the game (7 months in newspaper years), it's kinda a big deal.

how is a "who the hell cares?!" comment worthy of 65 upvotes? it doesn't even pass the first 2 words in the comment guidelines (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
It is an especially good time to be a pragmatist. Communities can help us interpret the wake-up call but at some point the individual must do his own research, think hard and execute on a solid vision.
Square Root Day Math and celebrations
Apple announces refreshed iMac, Mac Pro and Mac Mini
Pyevolve on the PSP (genetic algorithms on PSP)
Well said! I wish there was a way to quantify that greater cost.
Why Middle Managers Make More Money Than Brilliant Engineers (And Deserve It)
Ok, thanks all. So it's basically not really doable.. :)
People profiling.. idea for google?
You seem to believe you have a monopole of knowing what all people like and don't like, on what is right or wrong, what is good or bad, what is the right understanding of things and such. These assumptions explain your poor judgment.

How condescending to write "State yourself clearly and I'll address the points you make". It matches well your narcissism. BTW, I had to laugh when I saw your email address : i.am@me.com !

Enough time (and points) waisted on this topic :)
It's amazing how we're willing to obscure the true meaning of something by doing this:

"'The World As I See It,' was shortened for our Web exhibit."

Thanks for posting the full text, the context and overall meaning is vastly different.
I don't think the investment banks will be back for a while because all of the action is moving to smaller firms. There will be a shakeout in the hedge fund industry, but there will continue to be successful firms that do very well. Believe it or not there is still a lot of money out there looking for investments. I already see what looks like a bull market in the creation of financial startups trading markets that are not related to fixed income. These people will not have the government looking over their shoulder on compensation so they will be able to attract the best young talent that is sick of the uncertainty over pay and firm performance at a big institution.
And somewhere in a quiet village half-way across the world, some kid is launching an app/website/thingy that will welcome these shunned IE users.

I think I'd rather be him.
Should you go to graduate school in a recession?
Apple revamps the iMac, Mac mini and Mac Pro with no fanfare
The new Apple Mac Mini
Experiments with Twitter
Lenovo's beastly ThinkPad W700ds mobile workstation is a laptop in name only
Looking For The Yawn
I guess my experience is a bit different, since I was a math major.

Even in my first job, which was pretty much just cranking out business logic 9-5 I've learned a lot about databases, OO programming, UNIX and software development in general.

At the beginning you have so much to learn that even if you don't work for Google or Microsoft (they actually do a lot of non-trivial R&D) you will still probably be learning a lot.
Well, I'm a solo developer, so I've only kept agile strategies at the edge of my radar, but they've certainly persuaded me to keep aware of the issues... for that hoped-for time when I need to be part of a team.
Reid Hoffman: Let Our Start-Ups Bail Us Out
The repackaging and reselling of worthless loans, creating money out of thin air, seems pretty immoral to me, and was arguably one of the triggers of the crisis.
I agree with you that the US has a lot of problems, but I do think you've overstated the case.

A "worse education system"? I'd be more inclined to say an "uneven" system. If you live in a well-to-do area, it can be absolutely excellent. California's inequalities really illustrate ths divide. If you grow up in a strong public education district, and follow it with an undergrad or grad degree at one of the University of California campuses.... I suspect that's one of the strongest public educational paths available on a massive scale (IIT and the Grande Ecoles may have higher numbers, but they are also much smaller). The US is also a great place to be a late bloomer - if you can do well in a community college and transfer to a UC, you have educational opportunities in your 30s, 40s and beyond that are typically closed off to you by that age in other countries.

And lastly, I do think the size and breadth of US Universities exceeds any other country. Not to say the US has a monopoly on this, but it's the overwhelming first.
Bravo, it's good to know I'm not the only one who knows the value of a cheap house and ikea futon (I still sleep on mine, and love it).

In fact, I have two kids who don't mind all the missing furniture, they still seem to be able to build just about anything out of their mattresses and a few sheets.
> And then this article where he complains about how that very bailout is hurting one of his businesses??

As someone has already pointed out, if you read the paragraph in the context of the letter, he wasn't so much 'complaining' as he was 'explaining a bad result for Clayton Homes'. And he is right, it's hard to compete with the government when it comes to borrowing costs. He is also right that it'll be hard to wean companies off this support. He states very clearly, however, that he still thinks the bailouts were both necessarily and the best course of action.

> Who is he trying to help?

Himself of course. Part of Buffett's appeal is that he usually doesn't do it by playing dirty.

> BRK.A is worth less today than it was in 1998.

No, it's priced today at what it was priced in 1998. Per share book value (value off assets per share) is still 89% higher than it was in 1998. In fact, price-to-book-value is less than 1 at the moment, meaning every dollar you pay for a share actually gets you slightly more than a dollar in assets.
Computer model of the Economy explains its instability
I have been rightly shamed.
Socialtext Adds Twitter-like “Signals” And a Desktop AIR App
Investor Deadpools Jooce. Not Sure They’re Aware
Sequoia Pumps More Funding Into Search Marketing Startup Kenshoo
I was reading recently that Mexico is effectively engaged in a civil war with narcotics traffickers, and it is not clear which side will win.

Do you think this is true, and considering returning to Mexico anyways, or is it just hyperbole?