skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ad hominem isn't that complex. You attack the arguer not the argument.

"Denninger ran an ISP in Chicago in the mid-90s and is an infamous curmudgeon. He sold the ISP in the late '90s and, as I understand it, retired to Florida to curmudge professionally." Author attack

"I have no idea why his thoughts on Bitcoin would be worth spreading on HN. He has no particular authority regarding economics" Author attack.

"I really dislike Bitcoin, but can think of much better devil's advocates than Denninger." Author attack

Notice the pattern? not a single rebuttal of the content provided in this article All comments directed at the author. That's an Ad hominem attack.
For those who prefer learning by example:
http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonDecoratorLibrary
Why not just use the Server version?
Tenniel illustrations are in the public domain. The original work is about 150 years old. As you say, very a clear-cut copyright issue with Disney lifting the design. I'll be interested to hear the outcome of this.
There are a lot of alternative currencies: litecoin, ppcoin, terracoin and so on. You can easily mine your own, but it trades at 1/100 of BTC usually.

"Mine your own new currency" -- pre-mining coins before releasing your coin to general public is considered very improper act.
I haven't done design-by-contract since I was in my bs.cis program...it seems like a useful construct, but it's always been stuck in one-off languages like eiffel...and now ada...it would be more interesting to see it imlemented in a language that is widely used.
Announcing Firepad — Our Open Source Collaborative Text Editor
the whole point of privacy is that society is sometimes
wrong.

Sorry, that does seem to be the "hiding" - that I should be able to do in my bedroom something that the rest of society deems "wrong" and no one can find out.

I cannot agree or support that - you are asking for secrecy.

Privacy is not that society does not know, privacy is society does not care. A society that cares if you are gay (and presumably cares so it can stop you, cure you etc etc) is wrong I agree - but hiding your sexuality in secret so society never punishes you is not IMO the solution.

Now we are in a position that many people care if you are gay, simply because you are their target market, not the target of their hatred. To minimise the impact of this, should be our goal for new privacy laws - I suggest a requirement to publicise who we are tracking.
Does anybody have a vagrant box with this setup?
MISSING LINK between HUMANS and MONKEYS FOUND
If the market went down by 50% however, and then stayed low for an extended period (maybe two days), then a flood of sell orders will definitely appear.

It works in both directions, people who are speculating on Bitcoin will be easily spooked by a medium-term crash.
If people are up for it im sure it can keep going for a few months.
Microsoft escalates advertising assault on Google
The increased demand only matters if it lasts.

I suspect pump & dump. Just wait, it will plummet soon when the puppet masters sell their bitcoins.
It's a subtle difference, but one probably based on opinion. tptacek doesn't make any claims on the arguments themselves, but rather the placement on HN. So it's not ad hominem, but it is censorship. His claim is more along the lines that only "pre-approved" sources should be worthy of attention, not people with low credibility. But he's not challenging the arguments themselves. So, no logical fallacy, but maybe elitism or something.

I would further argue that the HN voting system can be relied on to determine what is interesting instead of credibility. Certainly, I believe just because 37Signals or Dustin Caldwell posts something doesn't make it interesting, but the voting seems to disagree with me. At any rate, we have an existing system to determine what should be relevant comment, so there's no need to invoke credibility here.
Actually, Derrick Jensen has proposed a very specific solution. The book "Deep Green Resistance" explains it. Some of it's online:
http://www.deepgreenresistance.org/dew/
The Fastest Way to Learn Something New
Ask HN: A Plea for Public Bug Trackers
In the "old days", when I submitted a email to support@example.com, I usually got a reply email with a ticket ID# and a "Your request has been processed and will be answered shortly", followed by a reply of a CS rep a couple of days later.

But a worrying habit these days, as more and more software gets sold/distributed through app stores and "integrated" solutions like Steam is that a majority of the feedback comes through the "rating" system only, no way of contacting a real human.

So, when I have a problem with a software, I'm usually lost with searching on Google, where for most of queries crap sites like Quora appear where the content is visible only after a registration, or when it's driver/DLL related, a bunch of scammer sites are the first three Google pages and only then a blog entry written three years ago comes up where someone encountered the same DLL-problem with the software I use and posts a solution.

With public open-source software, the bugtrackers are mostly without single-sign-on (when a platform exists which provides SSO for the service, like a game account or in case of Wikimedia's Mediawiki, the Wikimedia SSO) - why?! WHY DO I HAVE TO GO THE EXTRA STEP AND REGISTER AN ACCOUNT TO REPORT SOMETHING YOU F..D UP?!

Or, on bugtrackers where there's no backend SSO architecture, there's no way to sign in using FB, Twitter or any other OAuth provider. WHY?

What is it what keeps YOU or YOUR COMPANY from providing a public bug tracker? After all, you're likely to have an internal bug tracker for the dev team already, so why don't provide a "public" one linked to the internal one?

After all, if customers can help each other (or even you as the developer) you saved money on support and developer time...
Well, you can also acquire bitcoins through mining them, which substantially benefits the early adopters. 5 hours of human labor deposited into btc _is not_ equal to 5 hours in the future, because of btc's built-in inflation through increasing the difficulty of mining them. This is why Karl thinks that btc has the markings of a Ponzi scheme.

Also, he points out that btc has no method of deflation aside from actually destroying the coins. The section about seigniorage explains his views here and while it's not worded the most clearly I think that it's a reasonable critique.

If this were really a method that he felt was viable enough to escape the taxation of inflation through money printing, manipulation of the CPI, etc., then I'm sure Karl would be on board. He has been writing about these exact topics for more than five years now.
This post is the exact opposite of my primary mode of building software and yet I still love it. Why? Because it makes me think outside the box, which is my secondary mode of building software.

I've longed believed that addressing the hair-on-fire needs of real customers was the best way to stay on the critical path. But every once in a while, the world throws you a curve ball and things work out differently.

Just recently I needed to build a bunch of tools to help me build something a customer needed. I had no idea that the tools would turn out to be the better product. Who knew? An infinite number of monkeys, maybe.

Thanks OP for the enlightening thoughts. Now go build something someone wants.
Thanks, that's a great demonstration of confronting the argument head on, and well-explained to boot.

One comment I would make on what you have said is that I think Phillips does understand how chip music is made and you have misunderstood when you write "He says all you do is run some existing art through "a little bit of filtering", and like Instagram, there you have it". The phrase "a little bit of filtering" is right at the end of the article and I believe is a reference to what Baio did with the photograph rather than to the process of creating the music.

Vitriolic as it is, I think what Phillips writes in the first two paragraphs - I would draw your attention especially to the use of the word "re-performance" - shows that he does at least understand that chip music isn't simply an existing work put through a filter and is something created more or less from scratch. He just really really hates it, and says so, in a way I find hilarious. However, now having read the piece several times, and recontextualised by your and ANTSANTS comments here, I do think it's a bit undermining to the main point for him to piggyback that rant onto the front-end of the article.
Then explain to me why Bezos has no problem constantly cutting prices for his cloud services. Why Jobs priced the iPad at $499 for the base model when even he acknowledged the buzz was $999 -- and he might have even gotten that.

>>>It'd be stupid to put $1000 in an investment when the spending power of that money will only increase over time, and you'll never get your money back.

How do you know you'll never get it back? The entire point of investing is to make money faster than via labor or interest or prices artificially increasing (a bubble).
SWE 1 is for interns.

Slotting was abolished. Originally, software engineers were hired at mid-levels and "slotted" about a year in. Downslotting was more common (60-70%, IIRC) than upslotting. Some people even got double-down, which essentially ends your career.

Downslotting doesn't end your career (again, most people go down) but it does send a signal that you're considered to be part of "the rest" rather than "the best" and the scent of mediocrity will follow you.

It's a dishonest HR trick that enables Google to recruit people with the "Senior Engineer" title but then tell them, once they get in, that they're actually "SWE 3.5" who will be evaluated for SWE 3 vs. Senior at some later time.

So, in effect, you have to get a promotion in order to get the job title you were promised. That said, it's fairly harmless if you know about it, because HR will confirm your pre-downslotting title (and titles matter most of all externally in any environment). It's only evil if you go in with half-knowledge and think you're going to be 2/3 of a level higher than you actually are.

Slotting no longer applies, unless they've re-instituted it. It was abolished around March 2011. It was terrible for morale and HR eventually realized it was shitty idea.
At what point would an airplane be considered "heavy" enough to fly? Some people agree that when its about as heavy as other planes. </sarcasm>

Asking the wrong questions is silly. When bitcoins are used, that is when they'll be a serious currency. A bitcoin enthusiast should be looking at the number of bitcoin transactions and hoping it rises.

The price of bitcoin is irrelevant to its value to consumers. On the contrary, the more stable the price, the better.
Well, we sort of have that in the from of CDNs, but taking it any further than that sounds like a very sticky security situation.
What did not fit in the 2k character limit:

1) customers think that app store feedbacks are bug-report forms, too (the Android store is FULL of such "ratings")

2) app store ratings are uni-directional, there's no way (in most app stores) to contact a customer who reported a specific problem and help him to track it down.

3) as a user, I feel helpless because there's no real, easy way to contact the developer and submit a bug report. Some devs include e-mail addresses, but I can only textually describe the problem instead of attaching logcat output, stack traces etc.

4) For non-app-store-apps, the lack of public bugtrackers makes me feel quite lost as a customer. Instead of having a searchable public database of bugs, workarounds and info, either I get nothing at all, or at best a crappy FAQ database whose contents are mostly copied from the payment processor and deal with payment problems.
Hack your copy - Copywriting for conversion
The point of my comment was the author.

This is another example of the ad hominem fallacy fallacy, wherein any assessment of a person making an argument is judged out-of-bounds because of the existence of the ad hominem fallacy. Here is an example of an actual ad hominem fallacy:

Arguer: "Bitcoin is doomed to fail because it lacks a central banking authority."

Opponent: "That's bullcrap because you're not a trained economist."

Here is an example of the ad hominem fallacy fallacy:

Arguer: "I looked up Karl Denninger and it says he's the founder of the Tea Party."

Opponent: "Also he's a professional curmudgeon who sold an ISP once and has no economics training."

Arguer: Ad hominem!

I am not too invested in this particular thread, but the ad hominem fallacy fallacy drives me up a wall a little bit.
Launching an App: Part 2 - How to Get Featured on Major Tech Blogs
Yes, a million times yes. I'd like to emphasize the following points:

(2), (3), (4) are all tied to the same idea: Your data will be parsed by a script, not by me. I'm not going to use excel to analyse your data. I'm gonna import them into R/Python/... and then extract the features I'm interested in. I've been a graduate student in statistics for almost 2 years now, and when the data are correctly packaged, I've never had to use excel.

(5) Come on, I know that nobody likes writing README's. Heck, I don't like it myself. But do you really expect me to guess what your two-letters variable name means? And please, make your readme searchable, and short. The cdc data comes with a 200 pages manual explaining what the data is, and finding what you're looking for is a nightmare..
Here's a link with a listing of companies, locations, deadlines, and some other information - https://www.hireart.com/edchallenge . I find it interesting that there isn't a work-from-home option.
The cloud images are like 200mb, too: http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/quantal/current/
Should I cash in my pizza money http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/this-pizza-is-worth-750000 or wait for BTC $400 ;) ?
Here is the start of some code. Wrote the core in 3 hours for a job interview. Python, GAE, Test Cases, UI and all of that. Have fun.

site - http://jjbshort.appspot.com/

source - https://github.com/joeblau/jjbshort

edit: I realize the URL's aren't short... the code just needs a short domain :)
There is no way in hell people can ever convince me inflation is a good thing.

I believe this sentence.

The big problem with Bitcoin's finite money supply is that it encourages people to sit out. If there are 1000 people and someone has WLOG 1/1000th of the wealth, if they sit things out and come back 100 years later, there's no reason to think they should still have 1/1000th of the society's wealth at that point. More people were born, more resources were mined, more buildings were built, more technologies were developed -- and that person had nothing to do with it. I can see why he would wish he could still claim 1/1000th of society's wealth, but what's the incentive for all the other people to agree to this? The hope that they can be the ones to sit things out and freeride next time?
6 Best Places to Find Free Commercial Use Fonts
Expressing an opinion on the legitimacy of an article is not "censorship".
In fact, I've often used nginx in front of haproxy as an easy ssl offloader (this was before stud was as stable and complete as it is now).

HAProxy also has a raw tcp mode, which is great when you have to balance non-http services.
Icon Fonts FTW (A comparison of Icon Fonts vs Sprites)
You could've just said don't buy drugs with bitcoin. I'm bitter I didn't get in but I don't write blog posts about it
How to approach iOS icon design
Personal peeve: There is still a name collision beetween the popular use of "real-time" to describe "live" updates (usually as the defining aspect being "without polling") versus the definition of "real-time", implying that events are delivered to the customer in a guaranteed period of time. Which is obviously not true.
>"The grants generally come with a lot of reporting and strings attached, and generally require very large investments to be worthwhile.
We can get R&D tax concessions"

I have a bit of experience with SRED in Ontario, and quite a bit with the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.

Grants are nicer for you (me), but tax credits are doing it right as far as the government is concerned. Canada wants you to create employment. If you have a business that is generating revenue and creating jobs, they'll "give back" money that equates to, sometimes, paying wages at 50 cents on the dollar.

Tax credits are an economically efficient way to distribute government funds.
This is anecdotal and not even carefully collected, but I feel like I tend to listen more attentively when I feel like I am being listened to myself. So being a better listener may automatically do a lot of good at getting people to listen to you.
Interesting concept, but the flaw at the heart is the presupposition that lack of progress right now means we are at the ultimate limit of what can be accomplished. Imagine if cavemen learning to paint on walls said, well we haven't improved in a few millennia, so this is probably the most complex thing that can be represented by drawings. Or what about math stopping with Euclid? It was thousands of years later that progress happened.

Technology comes in fits and starts. A lot of new things happened in the 50s and 60s, we are still trying to figure out ways to use and apply them. Just because someone thought about and prototyped something then doesn't mean it's not new when that feature goes mainstream (e.g. garbage collection in Java, channels for concurrency in Go, etc).

For a long time we couldn't break the sound barrier, which is a limit, but not the speed of light limit. Because progress is stalled now doesn't mean there will never be progress in the future.
It's just as likely, and in fact far more likely as the economy would radically slow as the velocity of money slows. As a consequence, unemployment would increase, fewer taxes would be paid (shrinking safety net, crumbling infrastructure, etc) and people would run out of cash, thereby increasing the likelihood of being unable to meet current expenses.

Slight inflation is good and keeps the economy healthy.
Also: the tech industry needs to grow up out of the prevalent libertarian attitude[1]. There's a lot of knee-jerk reaction against government action but because that's a fantasy, it usually becomes an excuse for doing nothing at all. As a community we spend far too much time protesting inevitable tends when we should be calling for reasonable, workable regulation – e.g. we're never going to have a world without your personal information being collected in various places (this is the tech-libertarian equivalent of the belief record company executives have about DRM) but as a community we could make significant improvements for security, independent oversight, liability for loss & errors, etc.

1. I would suggest the term “glibertarian” because a significant majority of people who talk about libertarianism do so without demonstrating awareness of how much government support their current lifestyle and success requires.
Can you point to some evidence of the accuracy of his predictions? It would be interesting to see if they're of the "stopped clock" kind, or of the "shotgun blast" sort, or if he really is canny about predicting monetary events.

There is another side, as there always is with everyone, to this assessment of Karl Denninger. I ran (tech operations for) a popular ISP in Chicago too (mine was EnterAct), and my experience with Denninger --- which I feel was relatively extensive --- did not leave me looking to him for advice about world affairs.

As I wrote elsewhere in the thread, the points in this blog post that seem valid are also well-worn --- the lack of direct anonymity in Bitcoin, the fact that Bitcoin is deflationary and lacks a central bank, the theoretical possibility of double-spending --- and are also overwrought, written in jargon that makes the points seem fresher than they are. The rest is a jumble of idiosyncratic first-principles stuff, like the "entropy" of Bitcoin relative to gold doubloons.
A case for recursion
There is no SWE 1. Google doesn't believe anyone they hire is below a SWE 2.
The word you're looking for is "deflation." Inflation is when currency becomes less valuable.
Good point. A quick Google search doesn't seem to bring up any laws that prevent employers from using polygraph results in determining whether to hire or fire someone.
Judging by the pictures (well the text also) he is using the server version
The intoxication thing is another real issue with the stats.

Deaths get labeled as "alcohol related" and double counted all of the time. If I'm walking down the street drunk or riding in a cab drunk, that is tallied as an "alcohol related" crash.
You can't realistically look at the history of BTC and determine if it came through a mixer or not. They could have been legitimate transactions.

>I certainly won't get to keep that car.

No. But what if you sold a car and it turned out to have been paid for with stolen cash? And what if the cash was obtained by the buyer legitimately, but his source had stolen it? How about the same situation but three times removed?

You might be interested in this proposal: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=988 ("Shitcoin is to be a distributed network for attaching “dirt” to particular bitcoins...")
Hey, nice catch! I've updated the code for 0.6.0. I'll update the readme later, as meteor now includes better package management.
I was going to submit this. Then I read it and realized it said nothing. And in a confusing way.
Automating Your Way out of the Dark Ages With (And Without) PhoneGap Build
A very interesting story OP, a pity it didn't make the front page. Thanks for sharing though, it is much appreciated.
Simple.

To be ultra useful, add a "copy to clipboard" link, more spacing between the generated url and the search box, maybe wrap the generated url in a textbox, bigger font and more centered.
Shutting Down Secondhand Feedback
When you spend money on some good or service it is because you expect to receive some benefit from the use of that good or service, and you value more that benefit than the money you spent on it. If you delay buying some good or service, because you expect it to become cheaper later on, then you are also depriving yourself of the benefit you expect from it. So, in a deflationary environment, you'll only delay buying something if you think that the money that you save is worth more than what you're losing from not enjoying the benefits of that product for that amount of time.

You need to eat to stay alive, and staying alive is more important to you than saving money, so food purchases won't be delayed very long. You don't need to play video games to stay alive, so you can wait for a couple of years to buy a video game when it becomes cheaper; some people do it to save money while other people decide that they prefer to pay more and be able to play that new video game right away (some even pay a premium if it is sold out, even though they know they could pay regular price by waiting a few days).
Ron Johnson out as J.C. Penney CEO
Day 105/106: Product Page Content & Design