skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wish you would just make the libertarian argument that people should be allowed to do whatever damage they want to themselves, as long as they don't damage others, and be done with it. I can understand that argument, because it appeals to the idea that government action intended to stop one bad thing can lead to something much worse.

But you seem to be actively defending the idea that there is nothing immoral in a vocation that will inevitably destroy the lives of many people. You point out that the people being destroyed are complicit in their destruction, but I do not see that as a fully qualifying factor. If someone was contemplating suicide, and someone else happily persuades them to go through with it instead of trying to talk them out of it, that's a morally neutral choice?

You also seem to be equating bad camera work and writing with drug dealing, which I will assume is not what you meant because that would be pretty silly. Now, if you are just re-iterating the point that you do not want to incriminate drug dealers, that position can be defended. But if you honestly believe that there is nothing morally wrong with intentionally and actively enabling people into addiction, I doubt that the gap between our views on morality can be bridged.

I suspect there is some misunderstanding about where you are arguing for not criminalizing activities versus defending their morality. If so, could you clarify?
Just to play devil's advocate, I'd punt as much as you can on the design aside from a few tweaks here or there. You'll always have people saying they don't like this or that about the design, but at the end of the day if that's all they are complaining about you are doing the right thing. If not, prioritze other complaints first. Content is still king.

The main goal of the site should be to get good content in the door and get it distributed to the users. Additionally, before you make any user interface changes from feedback such as the OP, definitely do a few ad-hoc user tests with friends or random people off the street as a sanity check. It's cheap and really helpful.
"About China, includes even a history lesson for you: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=14...

Read your source again. Maybe go beyond the title this time. Here is a nice excerpt: "The lifetime prevalence rates of illicit drug use among residents age 15 years or older in high-prevalence Chinese cities increased from 1.1% in 1993 to 1.6% in 1996, and the 1-year prevalence rate increased from 0.9% to 1.2% during this period [10,11]."

Now go read that again and notice that in high-prevalence regions, use is ~1-2%. Wonder what it is in the low-prevalence regions... If the US had that kind of usage statistics, every anti-drug activist in the US and I would be very happy. Even happier if use went lower.

"Last time I checked there was no data from Singapore because their government is not particularly interested in allowing independent studies to be made. There is data about their execution rate (death penalty), though. Amnesty international considers it to be amongst the highest worldwide."

First point: Singapore gives the death penalty for quite a few crimes. By itself, it is not a useful statistic. Furthermore, AI is far from a "neutral observer" on these issues. Lastly, what exactly is the problem with a high execution rate? The lack of crime?

Second point: from the CIA Factbook on Singapore: "drug abuse limited because of aggressive law enforcement efforts"
China is not drug free. Various opiates are making a strong comeback. Ecstase use has been growing unchecked for quite a while as well.
Is it drug use per se we care about, or the negative consequences of drug use? What if more people used drugs but there were fewer drug-related crimes and accidents?
Your original argument failed to define "worst-ness", but your followup implies a definition: Your opinion of the relative difficulty of comprehension.

The C methodology you have presented ("... malloc() and its eventual free() are both in the same function") constrains ownership knowledge to a single function by simply disallowing more complex constructs (such as shared references held by container classes). This results in your C methodology providing significantly less functionality as compared to reference counting.

Moreover, Objective-C's reference counting rules are logical, consistent, and short.

- All objects are allocated with a reference count of 1.

- All objects will be deallocated when their reference count reaches 0.

- If you receive an object reference that you did not allocate, and you wish to maintain a reference to that object beyond the current scope, you must increment the reference count. Doing so will ensure that should the object's reference count be decremented elsewhere, the object will remain valid.

- If you allocate an object or increment an object's reference count, it will not be deallocated until you decrement the reference count.

Those rules -- coupled with utilities such as NSAutoreleasePool -- permit simple, language-wide ownership invariants. This is something that can not be achieved with "malloc/free".

Lastly, most "newbie" programmers of any persuasion will necessarily have difficulty with basic language constructs, and will be considerably worse off if they have not have spent sufficient time studying the basic language documentation:

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/Me...
Very nice. I don't presently have any suggestions that haven't already been made, but this is one of the most impressive developer tools I've seen recently. Thank you for your service.
Fixed the typo, thank you very much. We'll put the forms through a major redesign - after the green for votes, that seems to be the second main complaint.
Quicktime doesn't seem to want to play it. What's the standard way to play an avi file on a Mac?
"Good people find good markets."

Such an important point, and one with few resources for learning about.
I agree with your solution for pot at least, but having that position doesn't condone continual usage while it's still illegal, you know?
Paging - We just launched two hours ago, so just a few questions. Content will of course be our Achilles heel, but we're thinking of ways around this right now.

Using a blog seems like a fair enough suggestion, but this should grow in a pretty unblog direction, so we're building it up right now.

We'll likely opensource this part in the near future as well.
There's a big difference between drugs and suicide. Suicide is final. Any damage drugs do are usually temporary. I think that people using drugs should talk to people as much as people thinking about killing themselves, because with drugs you can go too far, but that's not the same thing as thinking that the people using drugs are bad people. Similarly, if you're selling drugs, you should only be selling to the people who want drugs. There's nothing immoral about selling to people who want them.

My argument was that making crappy products is a harmful thing. I recently broke up with a girl who was as close to a soul mate as I've ever found because she was insistent that everybody was like Sex and the City characters, and that my personality type was incompatible with her character. People who write and produce crap damage people's minds, and I will always find that repugnant. In my mind, making bad things is just as bad as selling bad product, possibly even worse because you ought to know better. That said, I don't think it's fair to persecute people who make crappy things. The best solution is to make better things and lead by example.

I'm not a libertarian. I think that there ought to be solutions to the drug problem. I just think that such solutions should be enticing people to do something better with their lives rather than punishing them for using.
We'll, I've noticed that Ask HN often times comes across as "critique our design". Which is fine enough; we have tons to learn on that side.

And if being responsive means tweaking this minor things, it's no big deal. We're working on ways to build up the content - because you're right, that's going to top everything in the end.

Thanks for the encouragement by the way! :D
First Point: My problem with the death penalty - as a libertarian - is that I can't imagine anything more wrong for my government to do to me than to unjustly take my life away. And if you think wrongful execution doesn't happen, you're kidding yourself. It's just a matter-of-fact combination of no system being perfect, and the law of large numbers.

Second Point: That sounds like an opinion about cause and effect, rather than a fact. Which is okay, since the CIA always gets it right, like those WMDs they found right after we conquered Iraq!
My mindset - one that many other people share - is that you should worry less about the law and more about whether or not what you're doing is moral and good. I'll break the law if the law is bad, without feeling very guilty.
I was wondering if the one-block limit bothered anyone else. Maybe something like Haskell's where clause:

map(foo, pairs) where:
pairs = [(0,1), (20, 10), (30, 10)]
def foo(pair):
a = pair[1] * 2
b = pair[0] * a
return (b, a)

I'm not terribly familiar with Python's grammar, so it might be difficult to introduce a closing where-clause without ambiguity. In that case, it might be useful to use a do clause as well:

do:
<statements>
where:
<statements>

Another alternative would be to simply create a real function literal syntax (i.e., lambda that doesn't suck).
Pretty succinct piece of code to explain something that might take a lot of words to do the same. Good show.
EDIT: [You are right that medicine helped alot, but what I wanted to say is... death is something that will continue to happen regardless how much scientific progress we make, and you will still find kids at 5 or 6 yrs old die regardless of any "medical progress", simply because this is what's called "fate"!

And I am sure that you heard of kids who died at very young age]

You have a right to believe in God or not, or even make your "brain" as your own God, it's all up to you.

But it's NOT funny to make jokes about God, and I had to response to you, although I knew that it will lead to reduce my karma, but I had no choice anyway.
My opinion is that despite the extra options and control, the OP's site is much easier to use than mycoolbutton.com. Most of the options there are hidden by default, making piecing together their functionality pretty difficult. This is in addition to the clutter -- with my 'ad blinders' on, I can easily confuse some legitimate UI elements with ads.
So in other words, you're persecuting people not based on whether they've done good or not, but based on whether they're obeying drug laws that were often as not passed for political gain?

Isn't that a despicable reason to demand somebody's death?
Sure, but if I choose a competitor I either have to convince everyone I know to switch or be lonely. This isn't to say that this is Facebook's fault (well, I guess you could make the argument that they haven't tried to connect their network up with others, but that's not really their responsibility either), but it still is a huge pain.

(Similar is the problem with AIM; I don't like it, but few people I talk to use anything else.)
Easy: Today, zero percent.

But the more interesting question is "why is that?" And the answer is that you've used Google for so long that you've thoroughly internalized its capabilities that you think in Google and can't easily see outside of those capabilities.

In the programming language context, we call this the Blub paradox, but Blub happens everywhere, and is hardest to see when there is nothing to step up to.

If this works (a big if, IMHO, but I'm willing to give it a try), what might happen is that it might entirely recalibrate what queries you can conceive of. Until we see the system, though, it's hard to even begin to imagine what those queries might be.

How many queries in 1980 did people wish they could query Google for? Nearly none, not because people didn't have questions Google could answer, but because only a bare handful of visionaries could even conceive of Google.
It is a pain, but if it ever gets too much you can quit using it. So I don't hold it against him.

(Zuckerberg recently said on Twitter that Facebook is opening itself up as much as possible this year, so hopefully everybody gets to be happy!)
The worst thing about drugs is drug-related violence. Cocaine and heroin are quite bad for the body, but most of the harm they do comes from their illegal status and the crime surrounding them.

Even addiction's not as terrible as it's made out to be. There are a number of drug addicts who've had productive lives. Drug addiction can be horrible, but most users don't become addicts, and not all addicts become useless, parasitic human beings. There's a wide spectrum.

Your "solution" is absurd: you're proposing that, in response to a small amount of violence, the government should respond with an absurd and unnecessary large amount of violence? I'm going to call "troll".
No, but he gave a pretty thorough demonstration, and took some requests for input.
I love that the government is making a concerted effort to make more of its data available. I wonder if they'll make anything available through APIs. If data is going to be centralized and all put on data.gov I would love to see a simple REST API to allow us citizens to put that data to work in new and exciting ways. The number of ways you could mashup or repurpose that kind of information is exciting. By developing an API the government could also receive a needed boost from developers who build new applications that use the information.
Yeah, I know it looks suspicious. I've been lurking around here for a while, but hadn't really been compelled to comment before. I'm happy to try and answer questions about what I saw, but it was a while ago, so I don't remember the details that well.
Or, using C with /dev/urandom: http://alan.dipert.org/post/84526522/random-strings-with-c
Thank you so much for making it clear to me what's wrong, and I will keep this in mind.
That rocks dude.
Honestly I think the whole reason for the "war on drugs" is to justify domestic surveillance and wire tapping.

You make a valid point that it also has become it's own end, but I also think it's much easier to have strong and assertive domestic law enforcement when you can justify it by claiming they are "fighting the war on drugs".
Now go read that again and notice that in high-prevalence regions, use is ~1-2%. Wonder what it is in the low-prevalence regions... If the US had that kind of usage statistics, every anti-drug activist in the US and I would be very happy. Even happier if use went lower.

Let me help you with a few quotes:

First:

In Chinese history, drug abuse and prostitution have been considered "social evils." The Chinese government typically takes "crackdown" measures and tries to eradicate these phenomena. China did achieve a success story in the 1950s. Illicit drug abuse and prostitution were eradicated through national anti-drug and anti-prostitution campaigns [3,34]. However, this success has not been repeated in the past two decades.

Second:

Illicit drug abuse and HIV/AIDS have increased rapidly in the past 10 to 20 years in China.

The study was a co-op between the University of Alabama and the Chinese Center for Disease Control. Which of them would you guess provided the absolute figures for citation?

Lastly, what exactly is the problem with a high execution rate? The lack of crime?

Well, the "killing people" part maybe?

from the CIA Factbook on Singapore: "drug abuse limited because of aggressive law enforcement efforts"

Hmm yes. Totally comprehensive.
Well, can't argue that, it's from the factbook after all.
That looks pretty good.
newt0311, you can read all the reports you like. Here's what I can tell you about my experiences in Shanghai over 9 years:

Illegal drug use is on the rise and very accessible. Drugs that are _very_ easy to get: marijuana/hashish, cocaine, ecstasy. Drugs you can get if you ask around: opiates/heroine, crystal meth, ketamine.

That list is just what I have seen with my own eyes. And I'm not into the "party scene". I'm a family man that needs to go to work in the mornings. But I have seen all of it and it is very accessible.

China is working hard to fight opiate/heroine use. My info is that they are currently losing the fight as the growth is happening at the bottom of the economic pyramid. China has a clear history of what opiates can do to their country. The other stuff takes a back seat as they fight other problems, like clean water.

As for Singapore. There are lots of things that Singapore does that do not scale well to other societies. Its a city-state, an island!. You may agree with Singapore's tactics and like their results, but that does not mean these tactics can be grafted onto the U.S.
Awesome point. It's also why any serious contender to Google won't really look like Google at all.

Because if it looks like Google, then users will interface with it like they're used to interfacing with Google, and then you really have to win by beating Google at its own game. Much better to pick your own place & time.
How did they become so popular, though? Word of mouth? IRC? what?
I enjoy Brad's posts usually but I just don't get it with this one. This post might be an inspiration to other potential investors (and maybe that's who this posts' target audience is) but what am I, the entrepreneur, to get from this? If you read beteween the lines, it's like, "If you have millions, you can fail a whole lot - even for years at a time - but, if you have enough money to stick around for 3-5 years, eventually you'll be successful." No offense but that's nothing like my life as an entrepreneur.

I'm certainy not preaching that it's okay to fail/succeed/whatever but it just feels weird for a multi-millionaire investor with a master's degree in "Management Science" to preach "Never quit" to entrepreneurs. If he was an entpreneur, I get it - but he isn't - and therefore I don't get it. I like Brad Feld's advice and topics usually but this one just is not for me.
Upvoted for "I will hold to my dying day that enjoying the Twilight book series is admitting your lack of will to live" :-)
The dew drops really do it for me.
I'm not sure on the pacing thing. I love the Clifford Stoll talk from TED and he's flying all over the place the whole talk. Admittedly its not actually pacing.

For those who do want to get better at public speaking (including me), I'd highly recommend the book "Presentation Zen."
"The main goal of the site should be to get good content in the door and get it distributed to the users."

Part of getting good user content is removing friction.
I take it that this is referring to a (listening) bug detector?
You can already ask such questions on Google and get back answers in many cases in the web page snippets. Try this query for example: how many bones are there in the human body?

So if you don't normally issue queries of this sort on Google even though you would probably get back an answer in the web page snippets, then perhaps you would not find this new system all that useful.
Services are already doing some of this. TipJoy can do their own URL shortner, FriendFeed has ff.im, Posterous has post.ly, etc. This is getting pretty common.

If you're not going to make your own, and are obsessed with shortness, though, we just launched our own shrinker:

http://tinyarro.ws

http://➡.ws/퐐
Concerts: so if I understand correctly, paying for concerts is morally justified as opposed to paying for recorded music -- which apparently is wrong -- because... you're confronted with a threatening-looking bouncer if you attempt to jump a fence? Honestly, I admire the chutzpah in the finger-wagging at record labels when the proffered philosophical justification essentially runs: "I can get away with it. Ergo it's ok." That's deep, man!

Merchandise: SRV dolls, anyone? There's no question that money can be made through merchandising. But anyone who thinks this is going to work to the advantage of real acts consisting of real musicians who aren't photogenic and doll-able etc., as opposed to say your next class of X Factor, is living in la-la land. Or, for that matter, that merchandising can act as a substitute for the revenue streams that recorded music sales once provided.

Tipjoy: seriously though; you're kidding, right? Tipjoy is your answer to a 50% fall in revenue for recorded music in less than a decade?

Can I just suggest that all you armchair record execs put your money where your mouth is and create this awesome benevolent no-label label which only pushes, y'know, cool music, and makes lots of money doing it but doesn't do anything nasty like asking you to pay for it?

Is everyone here so arrogant as to think the entire music industry consists solely of fat buffoons who are simply lacking in vision or technical know-how to find these el dorado musicbiz 2.0 revenues?

Recorded music takes huge time and effort on the part of a wide range of individuals, all specialized on different aspects of the production. From songwriting through arranging, recording and mic placement and the myriad expertises that this requires, through mixing, mastering, etc.. You're telling me that all of this has no value? As a singer-songwriter in a band who loves music as much as programming let me just say: you, sir, are cheap.
Actually my mother is the one who introduced me to Ray Kurzweil's "The Age of Spiritual Machines" and she bought me the book for Christmas.

My mother is not a scientist -- she only graduated from High School. She is also very religious and spiritual.

So you might be inclined to stereotype or judge her (or other people's Mothers) and assume that you know their points of view on Ray Kurzweil, or science in general.

But you might be surprised, if you actually got to know some of these people.

I really credit my Mother with inspiring my interest in computers and science. When I was younger she used to read me "science books for kids" and then bought all the Time-Life Science books (including the one on the "Universe") she could get her hands on, for me to read.

She even signed me up for a subscription to "Discover-Magazine" and "Popular Science" when I was a teenager!

Not bad for a "stay at home Mom" who has serious Catholic views, and "just a high school diploma".
I guess I just don't see the end goal of what you're proposing. What is the merit of having a drug-free society if it comes at the cost of damaging or destroying productive, happy human lives? Do you think the world you are describing would be a better world to live in than the one we have today? Or one in which more drugs were legal?

As various other commenters have pointed out, between prescriptions, over-the-counter pills, vitamins, and additives in the foods we buy, we're all drug users. This whole argument seems to rest upon an absolutist view that all currently illegal drugs are absolutely destructive and have no merit.

Countries like Singapore and China have radically different ideological approaches to policy than most Western nations. They are comfortable enforcing absolutist positions that limit individual freedoms. Such a position is against America's founding principles. They may statistically report less drug use, but is their society actually any better off for it?
Have you ever gone 1 mph above the speed limit? Jaywalked? Loitered? Looked at pornography before you were old enough? Groped someone before you were of age? Had sex before you were of age? Drank underaged? Smoked underaged? Had a friend give you a few vicodin when you sprained an ankle? Given yourself a few dodgy deductibles when you filed your taxes?

All these things are fairly minor, but they are all CRIMES. Crimes that people perpetrate all the time. And we'd have to put nearly everyone in jail if we strictly followed 'reality'.
Also, what the fuck is the medical benefit of vodka?
Eco-Friendly Sony Ericsson Concept Phone