skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems to me that the logical fallacies aren't really at fault here. If you're the one who wants to change someone's mind, then you're the one who has to engage on grounds they're going to find persuasive. The buyer; the person who wants something; pays - in discussion as much as in any other area of life. What are you shared objectives? What do you stand to lose if you don't change your mind? What do you stand to gain if you do?

Complaining about the standard of dialogue seems likely to be unproductive. Sceptics have been doing that with regard to Christians for years and it doesn't really seem to have gotten them anywhere - there's little incentive.

So, that in mind, it seems that you'd do better working the argument in the author's piece in reverse:
Someone tries to appeal to emotion, gets a logical fallacy claim back in return. If you assume that there are many different types of speech, and that you're not really in a logical argument, then what does that tell you about them?

Well, the first thing it tells you is that that person cares very strongly about a consistency principle - or at least the outward appearance of one - that they probably want to appear reasonable. What can you think of that's likely to be in their personal life that they're going to feel the same way as you do that a consistency principle is going to work in favour of?

What's the obvious pickup with a lot of sexism? 'Would you want someone talking like that to your mother or sister?'

Of course, that sort of pattern - consistency response to an emotional appeal - is going to come up in areas where people just don't care about very much other than appearing reasonable fairly frequently. I seem to recall one description of debating with Christians that went something along the line of 'Making fun of born-again Christians is like hunting dairy-cows with high-powered sniper rifles.'

We all get a cheap laugh from it, probably, but is hunting dairy cows really a productive activity for a smart person? IME people with stuff to do don't spend a lot of time on such things - it seems unlikely that scepticism would be a large part of their identity.

#

However, If you're getting that response a lot wherever you go, maybe the problem's you.

#

A good example of this is, in fact, that piece above. What's the actual prevalence of people being unreasonably called out on logical fallacies? I've not seen it a lot. That may just be because I'm one of the people who does it and most of us seem to tend to appear reasonable from the inside. But equally it may be because the prevalence is actually low. So, the basic premise on which the author is attempting to appeal, the supposed shared experience? I'm not going to find that convincing on an emotional level or a consistency based one.
Hey - I didn't have to provide anything but a CC number and I'm based in Europe. We don't have a huge account, how many boxes did you order?
I think their is a high placed mole. It might even be that Obama is the source of the leaks, and he's a good guy after all. Jury is still out on that one.
The Verge is just summarizing the Washingon Post; they don't know any more than you would after having read the Post's scoop.
This coincides with what rayiner and tokenadult have posted regarding basis of knowledge.
"...switching on the microphones and cameras on webcams and cellphones."

http://news.cnet.com/2100-1029-6140191.html

They've been doing it with cell phone microphones for years apparently.
I think jQuery should be on the list...it has had a big impact on front-end programming, and it powers over half of the top 10000 sites.
People keep throwing McDonald's around as if it's some kind of horrible, dead-end place to work. The truth is that McDonald's will not only pay you, but will teach you a ton about customer service, food safety, work ethic, and team building. Does it really make sense to work for free getting coffee for devs and scheduling conferences when you could be making money and gaining experience by working on your own side project? Hell, work part time at Mickey D's and you're still better off.
"People need to take their entitlement and/or handholding attitude and stuff it."

Wait, you're making this quote about the fact that people think they should be paid for doing work? Holy fuck. Man, people really need to try an ounce of self awareness with the words they say.
Check out the geography of MB: http://goo.gl/maps/9KVDG

If money is no object stay at the Hyatt Regency in Maui.
This is interesting. Rails does "work" on windows but the problem is that an extensive amount of gems do not. So for any large/mid-sized project that depends on a lot of other gems like rmagick, postgreSQL, solr, etc, you can basically forget getting it to work under windows, which is really annoying when your trying to test your app on old IE browsers, it would be nice to be able pull your project on windows and directly edit the source and view log files while testing in IE without the hassle of VM's etc.
@adamnemecek is right. I flipped around C and C++.
Yes, I've watched that multiple times and it's great.
Don't worry - you already are.
Yes please, ekpyrotic [at] gmail [dot] com.
I wonder how the Obama administration will repond to this other than the usual "Terrorism is bad and you need to trust us that we do all this for your own safety"
The problem is that these companies are not bringing in scrappy 17-year-olds with a hoop dreams, they're bringing college-educated professionals, and then refusing to actually pay them in exchange for producing valuable work. This is creating yet another barrier to professional entry for people who weren't born rich. In addition to the (skyrocketing) expense of college, they now have to endure an indefinite amount of indentured servitude in exchange for possibly eventually getting paid? Do we now expect new grads to work a two jobs once they graduate? One for what they went to college for, and a second job pumping gas or waiting tables to support them while they are working their primary job? And that sounds good to you?
Exactly right. We like to be able to do something like:

var gtThreshold = gt(100);

And then:

filter(gtThreshold, array);

This is nicely fluent I would say.
Question: At what point does the average statist admit that the libertarians (s)he has been belittling for so many years as tin-foil hat crackpots were far more savvy about the nature of the state than they were?

Answer: never
Yup, agreed. Although I bet there's a less intrusive means of aggregating citizen data germane to things like road maintenance than capturing our web browsing history, emails, and phone calls. IBM's Smart Cities initiative is essentially all about that -- distributing sensors throughout infrastructure for the purpose of gathering just that sort of data. That seems like a much more worthy investment in technology than massive data centers that suck up our chatter -- chatter which we have a reasonable expectation of privacy over, by the way.
People would only be fired if this program is scandalous to the American public.

All the evidence suggests that the American public doesn't mind privacy violations as long you say "child pornographer" and "terrorist" a lot when you talk about them.
They're just following the financial jobs!

I wasn't much of an outdoors person before moving to Utah and really, really like that stuff now too.
From the article:

"The defense of this practice offered by Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, who as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee is supposed to be preventing this sort of overreaching, was absurd. She said today that the authorities need this information in case someone might become a terrorist in the future."

That second sentence is the one that really caught my eye:

She said today that the authorities need this information in case someone might become a terrorist in the future.

Wow. Just wow.
Leave to the smaller country. Like Saint Lucie, for example. Any smaller in size and as result less economically/technologically developed country where technology is in bare use, not to mention in broad use by country's government. Ultimately, there won't be a rock or an inch of earth left without some satellite taking high-res 60 stills per second and some sort of sonic device taking 3-d snapshots of a sound-field. But before then, hopefully our generation will be dead.

Earth is truly become Orwellian's nightmare. Now I understand why Musk said we need to go to Mars; otherwise we extinct.
UK reporter can't be subpoenaed?

edit: nevermind, guess the reporter is an American...
According to https://www.dropbox.com/help/7/en they're still on S3.
Reports: U.S. spy agencies mined Internet data
I think it's interesting to ask why these programs are so widely hated.

These are national security assets: evidence gathered here will never be used in a drug case, or a tax evasion case. Why not? These tools exist for the bigger fish: the dozens of Soviet-era nuclear weapons believed to be missing, or the small amounts of dangerous pathogens that periodically vanish from research labs. These are what the government is worried about, and they're not going to risk revealing their methods for something lesser.

Warren Buffet has predicted a major nuclear terrorist attack on an American city to be a "virtual certainty" given enough time.

Ok, but no one here is going to argue that stopping terrorism is bad: the problem is in how we define terrorism. What happens when the definition becomes progressively wider? What counts as "terrorism" is political, after all.

It's important to remember that we still have a functioning democracy. If you -- Hacker News reader -- decided to run for congress tomorrow, you might not win, but you won't be killed, sabotaged, or secretly blocked. While some individual politicans may be corrupt, the system broadly is not. These programs are enforcement mechanisms; the laws themselves are still made by the people, and maybe corporations. While we as a population may argue about social issues like gay marriage and abortion, our government is not fascist.

Further, I take these programs as a great example that security is much harder to create than it is to destroy. Extreme efforts such as these may still be insufficient to prevent New York from being destroyed by terrorists. In that case, the acts of a few crazy people still overcame a monumental effort by the entire intelligence apparatus. What does that say about the time Hacker News is so afraid of, when it's more than only a few crazy people that the government is "worried about"?

Should these programs exist? I don't know. I'm as worried as anyone about the scope creep. I'm willing to accept a level of inherent danger with living in a free society. However, do not forget that we can't see NSA success stories. I might be willing to accept a risk of periodic car bombs, which while tragic are not statistically significant; however, if PRISM is actually effective at tracing and intercepting Soviet nuclear weapons, I can see multiple sides of this issue.

We have rights to privacy and protection from unreasonable search and seizure. Those rights were created to prevent unfair loss of life, liberty, and property. These programs, hidden in the background, don't inconvenience you, or lead to loss of freedom or property. Is privacy good? Of course. But the incentives the intelligence apparatus have to not use any data collected here against anyone for reasons less than "real" terrorism are strong enough, that I think it's not open-and-shut.
Day One does this.

It's a journal app, but it has the same features as Vesper, but with sync, a desktop app, and a calendar view of your posts. In my eyes it also has a very similar interface.
Someone has already addressed the maybeGT case, but you were right about the double problem. I had originally made it a squaring function, but for some dumb reason decided to make it a doubler instead just before submitting. There is a lesson in there about last moment changes. ;-)
And when I have a customer service complaint, I can reach them at their e-mail address: anything
I really think of Obama government as populism (disclaimer: I live in another country with a lot of populism). The IRS scandal is part of that. He plays nice cards in public but in secret he has another agenda. At one point you connect the dots when he plays the same tricks.
So in many applications, you can strech the entire raster image by changing the image size.

So say it's 100x100 px, and you have a picture of an A on it

When you change it to 100x120 px, you will then have a stretched A

Change canvas size has a selection of 9 buttons specifying where to put the original image, then increases picture size, without stretching the image. So if you click the top middle button, you will then get your extra 20 pixels added to the bottom with no deformation of the art on the rest.

This is FANTASTIC in UI work when something is one or two pixels off, or you're decomposing one image into many.
Makes no sense. It's much cheaper on S3 or even GitHub Pages ($0).
Probably providing the option to create a btree or hash map would be nice.
How  to Get Effective Data Visualizations
I already presumed this was happening.
From the 2nd page of the article :

“Google cares deeply about the security of our users’ data,” a company spokesman said. “We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government ‘back door’ into our systems, but Google does not have a ‘back door’ for the government to access private user data.”
He's referring to the linked article, so your personal attack is misdirected.

'With a few clicks and an affirmation that the subject is believed to be engaged in terrorism, espionage or nuclear proliferation, an analyst obtains full access to Facebook’s “extensive search and surveillance capabilities against the variety of online social networking services.”'
Just making this clear but, when the government got a 400 Cassandra node cluster you guys didn't tilt ?
What a bad article. Instead of discussing the big ideas in depth it first starts with a caricature of what is referred to as a "C-hacker"...then delves into an logical analysis of Linus' sentence structure including the implication of his use of a comma.

It looks and feels exactly like the kind of defensive article you would expect from a insecure C++ programmer. Maybe he should have just tweeted "Everything Linus said is wrong! WRONG!" instead.
Maybe not... his point is that this premise causes internet arguers to play to the crowd, rather than to engage in meaningful discourse with the person they are arguing with.

There are alternatives to winning an argument. A very positive one would be coming to an understanding of why your opponent holds their view, but continuing to disagree because what you value is different.
"The Hellman guy, of course, had been explaining public key crypto-systems that heavily embarrassed the NSA and, really, essentially put it out of business for its stated mission, is smiling. As I recall, he had blond hair long, nearly to his waist. "

The Hellman guy was probably Whitfield Diffie.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitfield_Diffie
Can someone help me improve the number_of_circles formula?
I think it will be more like a new literacy. Everyone will learn to program quite a bit, and professional writers will be relatively rare.

Artisans always were tied into the production as well as the design. Mass writing ability however is more what you're seeing like the internet did to journalism. I anticipate something like THAT happening, not something related to artisans really.
It's not free, that's true. But it's very cheap, especially when paired with Amazon's 1-year free usage tier. But the main benefit is the added control over the web server.
I enjoy these type of comments. They mostly come from Americans who have never looked into the requirements to "leave" legally. It turns out the rest of the world has immigration laws that are just as strict or more strict than America's so unless you're young and you're filthy rich, in a very specialized field that country needs, or ridiculously good looking you're probably not welcome in country X.
A service that takes care of parking tickets, speeding tickets, etc. for me. I miss way too many deadlines.

And if you're dreaming big, please take care of my car registration, smog check, registering me to vote when I move, etc.

Oh, sorry, this was supposed to be for dev tools. Just noticed. Well, anyway.
It's entirely possible to have disliked Obama AND GWB.
I would probably structure the problem like this:

var ans = someCalculation(x,y);

if (truthy(ans) && !isNaN(ans))
//do something
else
//do something else

The point being I like to dispatch conditions on boolean results of certain properties of my results rather than the result directly. It helps me to keep my sanity.

Thanks for the kind words BTW. :-)
Said Jim Sensenbrenner, who introduced the Patriot Act:

“As the author of the Patriot Act, I am extremely troubled by the F.B.I.’s interpretation of this legislation,” he said in a statement. “While I believe the Patriot Act appropriately balanced national security concerns and civil rights, I have always worried about potential abuses.” He added: “Seizing phone records of millions of innocent people is excessive and un-American.”
Voluntaryist? :)
Git and Sparkleshare offer something that is IMO much close to dropbox than owncloud.
would you prefer this link instead? http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence...
Logical processes are pretty much ripe for exploiting via AI, but you're right. Lateral thinking processes - pretty much one of the hallmarks of humankind (that and absurdly good communication skills) - are going to be extremely hard to emulate. How does a computer go from examining pipes in houses, then make a parallel to half-pipes in skateboarding to understand better waterflow by the way boarders move through the pipe? Maybe through human guided modeling something like this could occur, but unforced, this is the holy grail.

That may be a silly example but that's just one avenue (wordplay) of lateral thinking, a subset of creative thought and processes.
The end is near.
And/Or set up a tor node.
> So there are many people who would in theory be happy to do an unpaid internship but are unable to do so practically.

Indeed. However, there are yet others who would benefit and can do so practically. The fact that they exist and positions get filled means people are getting experience and making ends meet. By forcing the minimum wage on these internships, they don't reappear with a higher wage, most of them simply disappear. The opportunity is totally lost.
I'm sure many weak and cowardly people from the American Revolution said the same thing. It may seem hopeless but people (not just Americans) need to stand up put their governments in check. We live in a very unique time and have unique challenges that people in the past did not have to face, but that doesn't mean things are hopeless. Governments go through phases of corruption and abuse of power, it is up to citizens to put them back in balance.
Now everyone will be wishing these guys stayed busy banging interns or their mistresses because all these things are a lot worse.
I took away four things from this enjoyable, well-written, but overly long article:

1. The author's sister might not have been crazy to question the fairness of capitalism.

2. The average software engineer in the Bay Area innovates a lot less than the average "real" engineer.

3. Being a web developer in the startup world rocks.

4. Coffee Meets Bagels sounds like a great dating app.
Can't vote with your tax dollars unless you renounce your citizenship. And that feels like abdicating responsibility to me.
So I've got two functions, number_of_circles and number_of_circles_trig.

Neither are particularly accurate, and probably my misunderstanding of trigonometry in this case causes it to be so.

I was never formally taught trig in school, so it'd be nice if someone could find a better method and instruct me as to why it's more accurate than what I have.

Here are my two functions:

var number_of_circles = function(radius, radius2) {
return Math.PI*(radius2+radius)/radius;
};

// slightly more accurate
var number_of_circles_trig = function(radius, radius2) {
var rad = Math.atan(radius / (radius+radius2))*2;
var deg = rad * (180 / Math.PI);
return (360 / deg);
};
>> * Making markets more likely to have a major crash by forcing developers to use C++ to eek out a couple milliseconds over safer alternatives

Errr... what? Trading logic is trading logic regardless.

Maybe making the programs more prone to crashing (if badly written), but making markets prone to crash?
Fortunately, the government that would put them into prison is our government. If we don't want them to go to jail, it's up to us to ensure that their rights are upheld.
I don't code a line of C++ if I don't have to.

Apple uses C++ in their kernel in a nice way, they don't use virtual methods and templates.

I agree totally that C++ looks good and all, and that there might be bright sides to it. But to me, it is not as discernible as C at least. And I do enjoy programming in C, I need to feel I am in control, and C gives me that.
I write software. The work I do is difficult for "most people" (outside of this community, perhaps). If you're any good at it you have any number of well paid opportunities. If you're a recent graduate who's very green and looking for experience, you'll still find any number of paid opportunities.

At the previous company I worked for, I had managed quite a few paid interns. I love managing, but I've always turned down serious management positions out of fear that I'd fall behind from a technical standpoint. I have never turned down an opportunity to manage an intern and my company took the relationship seriously. Interns negotiated salary just like any other employee, however, they were treated as a short-term contract so as a manager I was not able to see salary specifics. Despite that, I've been confided in and they were doing quite. Minimum wage was nowhere to be found.

Purely for CS grads looking to land a career in software development (and I'm not in The Valley where things are arguably quite different): Don't take an unpaid internship. If the place is incredible and you really, really want to work there, ask yourself why they're not willing to pay you. My former company hired some of the greenest interns* from colleges you've likely never heard of. They were paid and they were all very good after a couple of months of apprenticeship. They also never worked a minute over 40 hours (by design, they were paid hourly as my former company had a fear of overtime).

I haven't had this opportunity at my current employer, but if offered a "free intern" to manage, I'd turn that option down. Anyone willing to take a job where I work (an aside: good job, good company, but not the sort of thing that a recent grad would consider exciting enough to skip the paycheck) is probably going to cost me more than just doing the "intern work" myself.

* I don't mean this condescendingly. We all start somewhere. I've have the privilege of managing incredibly intelligent people being an "intern manager" and every experience, thus far, has been rewarding for both of us. I keep in touch with them (some are likely reading this) and they all, currently, have well paying jobs as professional developers.
My suggestion: Simply ask for comments on the aspects that you want feedback for. Tell the readership, "I'm particularly interested in people's thoughts on X, Y, Z" If you don't value or want feedback on design or pricing tell the readership: "The design and pricing information are in flux, so don't waste too much time critiquing those"

If you post an app. I will spend my time critiquing the design and it would be annoying to do that, only to have my comments jettisoned out of hand.