skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You didn't actually contradict the portion of my text that you quoted. People really do believe the alternative to having governments is the Hobbsian state of nature, or something close to it. I did not comment on how people arrive at that belief.

It's not totally crazy to think that Hobbes being the foundation of western political philosophy might have something to do with it, so there's your "indoctrination," I guess.
Your focus on the benefit of experience is almost exclusively technical in concern- I think that is the not the primary classifier or motivator.

The technically adventurous are usually right, usually have what most could find ways to agree is technically a better plan, or has elements of it (elements that could stand to improve the technical nature of the product).

But technical superiority rarely has returns. And usually, for most companies, the returns aren't good, not good at all, and those tiny returns are not transferred to the pocketbooks of the workforce that can either hammer out the same old shift as everyone else, or who can go adventuring on genuinely good stuff that genuinely will operate far better. Good stuff, but which will ask much more of the workforce.

The thing with experienced people is, they're done making new experiences. And the thing with businesses is, they don't know how or haven't found grounds to promote exploration of advantageous technical work. This is an industry of get it done, make it work, and finesse and excellence are mired to fuck like every other industry everywhere and not a one of us has any idea how to unobstruct good work, nor do we have a workforce responsive to the call to action even when the possibility is striking them in the face.

There are definitely cases where the green-horns get uppity, absolutely a fact diving in beyond what they can back up in a discussion or technical proving. But classist discontent from those wanting to shake things up, finding a system of work where even those with marginal enthusiasm can participate in a high stakes game without being compelled to shit up the rest of their lives- that's far closer to the root, and it's disgraceful to me that we'd just pick on the enthused widely-read young ones as unexperienced and needing to be curbed, when usually in the work place there's not even a forum for that curbing to happen- the greenhorns are simply denigrated. Often by people who lack exposure to begin to state why. I'd caution that cautioning others that young-guns are dangerous and incompetent further reinforces excuses for this all too apparent denigration.

Thank you my employers all, who have been most kind in cooperating with me in sounding out a middle path between High Tech good ideas and practical and practiced. I think we've done great, and appreciate that we could dialog and discuss the paths without it coming down to the negative experience of the original post or slander of my ranks.
I've never claimed or believed otherwise. The absence of coercion would be Utopian.

Also, you left out a key word: legitimized. It's important and absolutely essential to my point.
You just got me REALLY interested in the Fast Fourier Transform.
It already affects us a bit, because some of the companies we fund have raised money through these services. But I have no idea what long term effect it might have.
It depends on what you want to do. If you want to stay on the bleeding edge of things, building awesome products and generally having a good time, then sure, always keep learning and switching toolsets and all that. But there are niches (e.g. driver development, reverse-engineering, compiler dev (just taking some niches I personally work in and know well)) where your toolset may not change substantially for a decade or more. This isn't necessarily the most fun work in the world, but that's why it remains highly paying, and will for a very long time to come. You don't see many people coming out of college and saying "you know what? I want to write kernel drivers for webcams!", versus "I'm going to build the next Facebook!"
well said. The fault lies in assuming that the rest of the world works like the way we (hackers) do. The fact is that they do not. Further, many of end users actually do like some of those animations that we find shitty.

JS makes the web feel responsive and interactive. I helps keep the user engaged with you site if used in the correct manner. Removing the option that easily disables it for a majority of users if the right step. Hackers will always find a way around it.
Being the best at a few things is better than being okay at everything. This is not limited to programming languages.
Sure, blame the 'checkboxes' and not your own failure to handle disabled js gracefully.

I'd be mad about this, except I haven't used firefox in years. One less reason to go back I guess.
Venuetastic (YC W11) closed?
I don't think we know enough about schizophrenia or LSD to say they are the same thing.

Most of the lsd-eaters I've talked with have talked about a visual effect called "tracers", but the handful of schizophrenics I've talked to don't talk about tracers, but they do talk about hallucinatory voices, depression, paranoia and confusion.

That said, I think that your current brain chemistry definitely affects your drug experience. If you have mental health issues, stay away from hallucinogens.

Like I said in another post, I have used psilocybin. The effects I had were not typical of what most other people described. I had a whole other set of "special effects" I experienced, consistently. After talking with many people, I found that a few other people shared virtually the same hallucinatory effects, and they seemed to have ADHD or some kind of OCD or were very tech-geeky. (And, I haven't been diagnosed, but I bite my nails and have a mild hoarding problem. That's a sign of possible OCD.)

So, I don't seek out this type of drug anymore.
Always reminds me of this: https://xkcd.com/610/
> ...the central point is that Siri is a search engine that doesn’t just go out onto the Internet and fetch a bunch of links and ads, but actually takes your “query” and executes your intended task. If you don’t see how that paradigm would be disruptive to Google Search, you might be a redneck.

Talk about hyperbole. Google in danger of being killed by Siri? Either the OP has never used Google's voice tools or he has a lot of stock in Apple...how else to explain his inability to contemplate how Google's data strength would make it easy to ape Siri's task specific functionality...I mean, wasn't this well demonstrated during the Maps fiasco?
'but everyone does it' is no excuse for amoral behaviour.

Besides, if a country positions itself as the beacon of -foo- for the world, then it should lead by example, not hide behind "but everyone does it".
"Most sites built on these frameworks will break is javascript is disabled"

You know, there is a solution: the noscript tag. You know, the tag that lets you retain some level of functionality for people who do not have Javascript enabled.

Why should I have to expose myself to various security and privacy problems just because some web development framework cannot keep an old version working? There are a lot of reasons why someone might not have Javascript enabled, and they should not be shut off from large parts of the web. Should vision-impaired users who use TTS systems be shut off because your framework of choice thought that Javascript should be used to replace functionality that is built into the browser?
Once I was hired as a senior developer only because I negotiated salary too high to fit in junior developer salary bracket.

Names, badges ... just smoke and mirrors.
Out of curiosity, are you using Postgres with SSL for an offsite or multi-DC replica? Would switching to a site-to-site VPN be more efficient here?
For urban dwellers blessed with proper public transportation and a good Walk Score, a car is a huge headache and drain on finances. They simply all need to go and be replaced with extremely efficient, clean and safe transit systems. Nobody enjoys sitting in traffic for hours a day commuting. Nobody enjoys wasting time on maintenance. Nobody enjoys the process of acquiring the vehicle.

At the very least, car sharing is a step in the right direction. Eventually as the Google car becomes reality, I hope that the # of cars on the roads is reduced to a bare minimum and we don't need to drive / pay people to drive any longer, and free up a lot of human talent to do something more productive.
A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on. Knight, seeing what the student was doing spoke sternly – “You can not fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.”

Knight turned the machine off and on.

The machine worked.
[http://planetvermont.com/v9n2/machine.html]
Yes, but for both good and ill.

The reformation's idea was that no authority or intercessor was needed to interpret or use the bible.

I'll skip the details, but this idea was an essential precursor for the idea of self-government, and the enlightenment in general.
Number 1 rule: If you're having a bad LSD trip head straight for the liquor; that'll kill your trip good and fast. What's your point?

Dont mean to be rude, but I'm calling out your schizophrenia association as wild-eyed bullshit, too.
Then all we'll need are astronaut diapers and, oh wait, things get weird when such diapers are involved http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/astronaut-love-triangle-attacke...
LinkedIn is so creepy, and I totally resent people pressuring me into it. Kool Aid.
Indeed, the real underlying problem isn't mass surveillance, the problem is the states ability to give themselves unlimited power through a seemingly legal process:

"The government has granted itself power it is not entitled to." - Edward Snowden

Which is quite possibly the predictable outcome of every government that hasn't had a revolution or major political upheaval for an extended periods of time. Self-interest is not just a function of markets.
New markets shouldn't be a problem for VCs. They're used to the idea of startups moving into markets that didn't have startups before. They have a bit of inertia, like anyone does, but on the whole they're probably more open to having their minds changed than most people, if only because any experienced VC has seen a bunch of apparently crazy ideas turn out to be good.
>and free up a lot of human talent to do something more productive.

Or starve, as the case may be.
Finding a mentor and accelerating learning
Non-technical users do not even know what a browser is, much less anything about HTML or JavaScript.
Firefox reveals New Firefox OS
> a government that solely exists to secure the rights of its citizens.

The problem with such governments is that they cannot be truly democratic, and I think that poses a moral problem.

In instituting government, we ask the people, every person, to give up the most fundamental freedom of action they possess in the state of nature: the use of violence. In sacrificing freedom of action, the people should be able to vote themselves the sort of government they collectively want, not the kind of minimal government, protecting some arbitrary set of "rights," some philosopher king believes they should have.

It should be noted that all of the talk of "limited government" among the founders was directed at the nature of the federal government, which was to exist in addition to state governments which were not limited.
Plato's Cave.
In addition to traditional client-server webapps, what about making local-only apps that just happened to be written in HTML, JS, and CSS? Possibly with a package manager run by the browser?
Citibike in Austin?
In the absence of government, all violent becomes de facto legitimate, as it is in the state of nature. It is meaningless to call something "illegitimate" versus "legitimate" when you have no recourse to stop "illegitimate" actions.
No, not at any cost. I talked about that in my original post.

>> If you tweak it to give no increase in experience and happiness, and focus only on survivability, you'll have no incentive to survive (no reason to live, because we've defined the goal of life to increase experience and happiness).

I explain that "surviving at any cost" is not an optimal solution either, because we as humans would no longer have an incentive to survive.

The fact is our happiness and willingness to keep going is as much a factor of evolution as our physical survivability... so it's NOT wrong to base it on what evolution "settled on."

Perhaps we may not die from predators, but there are other things. Here's a thought experiment:

Consider an impending asteroid heading for Earth. Which nations or peoples do you think will have the highest chance of surviving? The technologically backwards but harmonious communists, the technologically advanced capitalists, the crack addicts, or the non-crack addicts?

You'll probably conclude that technology matters, not spending every waking moment appreciating the beauty in trees matter, and not feeling high all the time for no reason also matters. We need proper reward-response pathways in order to maximize our survival. Introducing artificially stimulating drugs disrupts it. It sends a false signal, which, according to Paul Graham, can be one of the most crippling things if we don't think it's bad.
http://www.paulgraham.com/selfindulgence.html

"The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work."

Getting the dopamine reward from a stimulant drug is like doing fake work, because you're being rewarded like if you actually did the work. Keep in mind, I'm talking about simulants, so LSD doesn't apply here, but there is probably a reason we weren't born fascinated with trees and every little thing.
I assume this will be free for the duration of the beta, and I assume you haven't decided (or aren't ready to publish) what pricing and resource quotas will be like?

Some friendly advice: From the homepage, it seems that the focus is on apps in development. This is well and good, but I think your marketing should also mention that you're great for hosting apps in production too. And if you're not great at that, yet, you should try to improve -- for the good and simple reason that, at the end of the day, it's products, not prototypes, that generate revenue for your developer-customers and allow them to pay you.
The only "bizarre" thing is the insistence on purity (or if you rather, binary logic instead of fuzzy logic), not the position itself.

Any decent politician can exploit this to derail the entire point of the ideologue, by tying the ideologue into supporting things that the majority oppose. Try to imagine an interview given to a Senate subcommittee where a hacktivist claims with a straight face that '...more people die in car accidents each day than in 9/11, so what's the big deal?'

Sometimes compromise is actually better for the people overall. Sometimes strategic retreat allows a political party to be in an advantageous position when the other side inevitably makes a misstep. On the other hand, stubbornly digging a line in the sand risks trapping the party position in a salient, only to later be "overcome by events".

It can be OK to say "Your idea is stupid, and I don't support it. But if it's implemented it should contain at least X, Y, Z to minimize the damage your stupid idea would cause". But tech activists don't generally ever get to that point, and should their objections be overcome the final result ends up being more damaging than it otherwise might have been.
Wealth redistribution could solve that problem.
As a student almost done with school something that I've noticed or watched is that a lot of CS students tend to get egos at a certain point about their work, myself included. I recall from my experience that I did group work with a good friend and pushed a lot of my ideas without really listening to all of his--because I was so confident in my ideas. After self inflection I realized that my doing this led to two problems: First it is just downright rude, and the second is that I limited my learning experience by not hearing other ideas and learning how to merge ideas to create a superior one. Even funnier is that in retrospect some of my ideas were downright stupid or would have been difficult to maintain.

My main takeaway from the experience was that every time my ego starts to inflate I should take a step back and breathe. I'm not some God coder, I have three years of experience. I realize that this doesn't quite parallel what the author was talking about, but I felt like sharing it because it was a hard lesson for me to learn.

Also, as an aside, my step dad has been developing for 25+ years. He's a really quiet guy, but when he gets talking I realize just how brilliant he is at this stuff. To those already in the field with careers just blossoming, watch out for those who are quietly smart, if he's anything like other developers sometimes they just don't feel the need to prove themselves to you.
From my observations the highest paid freelancers in the tech industry are super focused. They take a technology, language, or framework and master it. A good comparison would be a highly sought after designer or illustrator. They are targeted not because they can design anything but because they have a specific style, a singular approach that everyone wants.
One of my jobs, I applied for a junior position (it would be my first "serious" programming job in a big corporation), I went for the technical interview with the CTO, and was invited to get interviewed by the CEO other day.

During my interview with the CEO, I was frank with him, I did not went to a CS school, and if you asked me a random CS question I probably would not know, I did not knew how to use properly version control, my skills in the languages they used were lacking, and my OOP skills were also lacking.
But we also ended chatting for about 2 hours actually, his early career resembled mine, and we had lots in common, and were likeminded, the CEO during our chat saw where my strenghts were, and hired me.

To my surprise, when I was to do some bureaucratic stuff, my title was NOT Junior, it was "Solutions Architect", that in that company was above Senior...

I wondered for a good while, why? The Juniors around me all knew more than me about basic CS...

I found out, when I could do lots of stuff they could not, they insisted in using whatever they learned at university, and anything that could not be fixed with their existing skills, they would fail to do...

The juniors once lectured me after seeing a "goto" on my C source code (I left it on the screen and went to lunch), yet when I asked them to make a better solution, noone could, all of them create incredibly complicated code, hard to maintain and confusing, and yet they were convinced their solution was better, because their teachers told them to not use goto.

After a while, it became clear, that my title was not for my knowledge, but my extensive experience (I started programming when I was 6 years old, most of the other company employees started during university), and my creativity, the fact I could always handle myself WITHOUT learning CS, meant that sometimes I would see solutions that everyone else would not see... Yet, the CS part I could learn, other employees (that were correctly always above my own title) would happily teach me.

It was back then that I learned how in a proper company with true meritocracy how titles work... Also, a company that actively avoided the problem I forgot the name (ie: the CEO for example told me he would never turn me into a bureaucratic manager, I was too valuable in the tech, to not be near the tech, likewise, there was junior programmers that he would promote to bureaucratic positions, because they were good for them, but lacking in decent coding skills, making them more valuable there)
IMO, the mood-swings and irrational, dangerous behavior that Alcohol tends to induce seem to me to be far more schizophrenic than the states brought on by LSD.
To be honest, I don't know anything at all about monetary policy. I've said before that valuations are high right now, but I don't know what if any effect monetary policy has had on them.
Low-voltage ‘troll’ zaps salt out of seawater
Tens of thousands of protestors gather in Tahrir Square
You really do not want to be explaining Javascript to my mom and pop, or most others

Sadly, my mom doesn't go clicking around in the options dialog, no matter how much I encourage her ^^ Hardly in my presence, not ever in my absence.

But even if it was otherwise; explaining that "this needs to stay on or many websites won't properly function" while pointing out the options she might want to change, would be enough? I mean, you don't even have to understand Javascript to code in it, much less to be aware of the toggle... ?

We have roads with cars on them. People can walk into those roads, but don't. For many reasons, but none of them a deep understanding of biology or physics. If we fenced in all roads, we would avoid some of such accidents that are still happening - but would also raise people who need the fence from then on, because they're used to "wherever I can walk, there is no danger of being run over".

And yes, this also means looking someone who lost their child who ran into the road in the eye, and saying "I'm sorry for that, but it's still worth it to not fence everything in." Are we too squeamish for that? Since when are coders so scared of user complaints based on ignorance or using the software wrong? Don't those come with the terroritory?
A Mathematician's Lament: one of the best critiques of K-12 math education
The end of car culture can't come soon enough.
This is so exceedingly stupid I can't believe it's honestly posted on TechCrunch. Not that there's a ton of rumor for my opinion of TC to fall further, but they'd do themselves a favor to pull this.

It's so obvious that the author has never used Google Now and/or has no idea what he's talking about in general. Painful; I honestly checked twice to make sure this wasn't a "post from the past" where we were jestfully mocking in hindsight the silly "OMG SIRI IS THE BEST THING EVER" attitude from two years ago.

Honestly I thought that was dead even before Google Now came out and sprinted laps around it...
Having graduated from RIT I can tell you that most grads going into junior or entry level positions experience the same thing. That one year of co-op and a campus that breathes tech makes all the difference.
New York, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia are towns with the best walk-score in America.

For various reasons, it is still much cheaper to live in the suburbs and commute into the city than to live in San Francisco. I wonder how the other walkable cities are fairing.

Perhaps when people buy homes, they tend to not buy a new car at the same time - prior to the housing crisis, many people bought lots of homes. Then the market collapsed and they lost their money, further reducing the number of new cars bought.

Oddly enough, some 2000-model-year used Hondas and Toyotas did not depreciate in value between 2010 and 2013 because the used car market heated up.