skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is free speech restricted in the United States?

Because we have had pretty lousy government the past 25 years or so. Culminating in the late financial system coup de grace.

My point is that the issue of free speech does not seem to be related to the probability of having poor governance. And this is coming from a person who was a pretty big believer in free speech being a guarantor of good governance.

On a related note, a story from Ningbo. This is a small place, about 2.5 million people south of Shanghai. If China has an Austin-Berkeley-Madison feel city, this is probably it. Anyway, the police chase down a guy for theft and the guy made a such a big stink about it that a crowd couldn't help but to watch. He protested, vehemently, that the police were brutalizing him. My Mandarin is good enough to understand that he also had some choice words about their collective character. Finally, he demanded to speak to his attorney. What struck me was this . . . the guy never said "there's about to be a gross miscarriage of justice!", or "You have the wrong man!", or "I didn't do it!" He said the police were brutal and he wanted his lawyer. That spoke volumes to me about the rights of the individual in China. It was my ah-hah! moment. I felt like the young Michael Corleone in the Godfather II. Realizing Fidel would win, after watching a confrontation in Havana between a group of rebels and Batista's army. The people of China will be fine. Maybe there are some wrinkles to iron out here or there, but if criminals feel free enough to cry "police brutality!" and "I want my lawyer!" when they get arrested, you're probably doing ok.
No Nonsense Hunting
When the driver of a race car has a terrible accident, it isn't a sign that someone with less experience would have successfully avoided the crash at that speed.
How do I help a treasured friend chat with me?
When a friend used to work at the same company with me, we had a great low-intensity chat stream that helped us both work productively and kept morale high. Now, she works at another company where they monitor browser usage, and probably some other kinds of internet usage.

I would love it if we could find a non-browser way for us to be able to continue to chat. Sure, all internet traffic is probably monitored, but if it were some kind of... command line encrypted jabber client, wouldn't that kind of operate under the radar? Or maybe we could SSH to a common server and use one of the *nix tools for talking on the same server?

Ethics professors: Yes I realize she could just respect her employer's policy but... zero chat?! You have GOT to be kidding me! Plus, I doubt getting caught doing some occasional chatting is going to get her fired, probably just a warning. She's a great employee otherwise. And, this is our quality of life we're talking about here!
Causes of emotional disturbance in children
Emotionally disturbed is a term that describes a number of children who have behavioral or emotional issues different from the other children that these behaviors seriously affect their ability to perform in school and relate with others in an acceptable manner. Emotionally disturbed children need special care, treatment and understanding.
There's always a STUPID comment made on every site, any given moment and at any given second of the day.. The prize goes to... "Confusion"... the name says it all..
eXtremeDB, the in-memory database system (IMDS) from McObject, may be a fit. Tagged, the social media site, chose the 64-bit edition of eXtremeDB for what sounds like a similar purpose, and others use it in that way as well. See:

http://www.mcobject.com/November10/2008
might be able to do some snooping around to see if the https gmail also encrypts the chat traffic. seems like that could be the most simple solution.
In this case though, the job to be done is one that noone has experience doing. Putting an operation like GM into receivership is unprecedented.

And expecting experience in the face of unprecedented events that require restructuring the old order is somewhat counterproductive. You do not want someone who is determined to save certain features of the old order merely because that is what they understand; what is needed is someone who is comfortable mediating the different forces at work and discovering workable approximations of the new order that minimise the damage overall.
Um, because the iPhone is cool? Also note he said it was more a concept, not what you would actually impliment.
I subscribed to iconfu.com the minute I saw it because not only it allowed me to edit the icons but it also laid tons of predesigned icon sets right in front of me (be it OS or Creative Commons licensed).

Digging for all those icon sets alone would take a considerable amount of my time. And community seems to be tagging all those icons so it's very easy to search. I'm not aware of any desktop app providing the help of community like this.

Thanks to noodle for the heads up and kudos to the iconfu team.
Yes, I was referring to the fact that Moore's law is still applicable in terms of computer memory, but not microprocessors ... In any regard, I listened to talks four years ago that convincingly stated that it was no longer applicable, so it seems that we've already seen what happens once Moore's Law is no longer accurate.
iconfu - icon editor and library
Actually, 'most people' don't create their own icons. I have been in software industry for 10 years and I have yet to have a need to create an icon.

If you don't have .NET, then try this: http://icofx.ro/files/icofxsetup.exe
get the bugmenot firefox plugin.
Title is incomplete. It's "Understanding Engineers: Feasibility."

I do like how he framed out the difficulty of problems into categories.
Your company's IT department likely hasn't blocked Etherpad, which has a chat feature.
To be honest, I find the metacommentary a bit more interesting than the article.

The metacommentary is what shapes HN as a community. In that sense, at least, it has some value.

The article on the other hand: I've already read it a lot of times. First there were the articles that GM may declare bankruptcy, then there were the articles how GM is more likely to declare bankruptcy, then there were the articles how GM is one step closer to bankruptcy and now, finally, GM declares bankruptcy. All these articles were the same, apart from the headline, every one of those articles were published in a gazillion sources, none adding interesting commentary, and then all of it repeated because some European/local car maker depends on GM and needed to be sold. I've read one of those articles and I've read them all.

I think in that sense the "if it was on TV, it shouldn't be here"-thing is quite valid: You'll encounter it everywhere and there's no value in discussing it here, because it has been discussed to death already.

Now, I don't really like the metacommentary either, even though I'm participating in it, but I do think the article gets undue credit. It's not really that valuable.
It does. Settings > "Always use https"

But from that post, it looks like her company is blocking gmail also.
Conveniently, the Internet allows us to enforce that rather easily: http://www.morewords.com/contains/np/

Just keep an eye out for an article on moonports or vanpools.
REWARDS PROGRAM - Other Business Issues - Community Home
90 mins.

What is your secret? Because I can't get one up in 90 minutes even starting with the theme pre-written and automating the deployment as much as I can -- the amount of manual settings for plugins, sidebar widgets, and the like always eats my time.
D.J.Bernstein's 'Internet Mail 2000'
Thanks for the helpful response, I haven't worked with ASP.net, and wasn't aware of this!
perhaps. if they're that restrictive, though, they would probably also be wary of SSH open to a remote server for long periods.
Thanks for pointing me to this plugin.
"While far more prominent members of the administration are making the big decisions about Detroit,"

The part of this sentence you left out is "...it is Mr. Deese who is often narrowing their options."

With this information in mind, a case could be made that the headline is accurate. Secretaries and gatekeepers make and break businesses every day.
I hope the server can be run in house. God, I would love to get off sharepoint.
Why not? (It sounds like one to me.)
If you want to test Bing in Safari, try:

$ curl collison.ie/code/bing-safari-patch.rb | ruby

It'll replace Google with Bing in Safari's search box in the top right.

(Of course, you should read the code before running it.)
i make a handful of favicons a year for sites and apps. most of the available software options are either clunky or too much for a small job. i know i'm not alone, as i've talked to others about this -- i would use an online editor and maybe pay a few bucks for it.

i think its interesting that you admit to having not made an icon ever, but you're trying to convince me that i'm wrong about my (admitted limited and not professional-grade, but valid nonetheless) experiences based on a blog post you read.

/shrug
These are for clients who typically only use a couple plugins, usually Akismet and a contact form. So other than the theme stuff, which probably takes about an hour, I'm usually just installing WP, which takes about 3 mins (they're usually using a host that has one-click installation), then I upload the plugins that I use on everything and enable them, which takes another 2-3 mins, then I configure things, which usually means turning on permalinks, changing admin password, and setting up the contact form. Create a "contact us" page, edit the about us page, and I'm pretty much done. The non-theme stuff takes about 30 mins. But these are sites for authors, many of which are new to the idea of blogging, so a lot of complicated plugins and widgets to deal with is too much for them.
Peter Coles has been applying Bayesian statistics to cosmology for at least fifteen years. In the following blog note he explains how Bayesian probability really is only a tradeoff by using Doomsday Argument as a pedagogical exapmle.

http://telescoper.wordpress.com/category/bad-statistics/
This is nicer: http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwell/george/o79e/part42.ht...

And for Orwell's other essays:
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwell/george/o79e/
Our Story Board is Better Than Yours
Why not just have faith that others will likewise flag it and it will get killed? Do you write a comment every time you upvote something to encourage others to follow your lead?

I can see commenting as to why you voted a certain way if you have something insightful to point out like: "This is actually false, because blah blah", but otherwise, you just have to have faith that the rest of us are out here flagging things too. ;)
This may already be happening. I'll look into it.

EDIT: Apparently by virtue of asking the question, I'm now in charge of the video. I'll post it the following day.
New high, that comic is a hilarious idea.
So if free speech is not a universal human right, then which humans (if any) deserve this right? Only Americans?

I'm also curious if Chinese people living in America deserve this right. Could you lay out, in broad strokes, which groups of people deserve which packages of rights?
Ask HN: Flex or JavaScript.  Which way to go?
I am adding features to a large web based enterprise application shared by several companies. The sever is Jboss/Java/Spring/Hibernate. The client side is HTML/JavaScript with a small amount of AJAX. 400K lines total. The appearance is ugly as sin and performance is slowed by too much page loading and 200k of JavaScript libraries( fixable).

5-10% of the application has been converted to Flex and the client loves it. The interface is stylish, clean, and responsive. The client wants the new part done in Flex. Nothing in the Application uses any advanced features like video or animation.

My objections to Flex are several. The full conversion will take a year or two, because it needs to be rewritten. For that period there will be a Flex interface and a JS/HTML interface, right now in different windows. I think this will be awkward for the other companies participating. The HTML interface can be cleaned up using a little design and CSS and rewritten as needed.

In any event the client side needs to be rewritten.

I think, but have not verified, that there are a lot more third party JS widgets than Flex.

Flex and JS can talk to each other, but they use different DOM implementations. I wonder how easy it will be to keep a client side global state while loading different sub-pages.

And I dont know Flex. This is not insurmountable, but it will slow me down.

Thoughts?
Honestly, could you point me to any substantial documentation of Af-Americans putting in the same amount of work but running into barriers? I realize they are largely at the bottom of the rung, but it is my perception that it is largely because of a culture of refusing to "sell out", ie: learn to speak proper english, drop the attitude, delay gratification, etc.

Yes I fully realize this is a racist attitude, but I honestly haven't seen anything noteworthy to make me think otherwise.

(FWIW...I think a ridiculously large proportion of "whites" are incredibly unskilled and unintelligent as well....but it seems to me they don't put effort into it, they are just accidentally incompetent).
Dont forget rent control and other things cities did, and some still do that make housing difficult.
I'm not so sure. Don't forget that IE has larger market share than the rest put together. There's a lot of ways MS could leverage their existing monopolies to bind search in. Maybe context searching from MS Office documents, putting a Bing search box on the Windows 7 taskbar...

If Bing is "good enough", then Google could have a big problem.
Sure, but words mean things. I can't see the harm in knowing the most appropriate word for my meaning, even if most everyone is oblivious to the preference.

There are items I find questionable too ("Brokerage is what a stockbroking firm does, not what it is."), but most of it is good.

"Cassandra's predictions were correct but not believed."

"Beg the question means neither raise the question, invite the question nor evade the answer. To beg the question is to adopt an argument whose conclusion depends upon assuming the truth of the very conclusion the argument is designed to produce."

"Crescendo. This is not an acme, apogee, peak, summit or zenith but a passage of increasing loudness. You cannot therefore build to a crescendo."

Yes!
You've noticed that too? I spent six months confused, wondering why most of the so-called closures in Java examples were merely first-class functions.
Channel 4 is what broadcasting company exactly in your area? Here it's NBC4; I very much doubt NBC is in the business of name calling wrt government "expansion" as Fox would, not to mention that NBC is owned by GE who is in strong business with .gov:

http://www.cjr.org/resources/?c=ge
wow 50K for such an ugly kit car? And thats only an estimate, we all know how car companies stick to estimates, thing will probably cost 75K when everything is said and done.

And they are using a Diesel to power it? Why? Hardly something that I would call a car of my dreams. Also notice how high the center of gravity is. Thing will probably tip over at the first corner on the highway.

There is a reason Tesla's first vehicle was a sports car, because thats the one car segment where people aren't weary of spending a ton of money. And a company can prove itself in a competitive market.

If I were going to spend a ton of money on a kit car, I'd spend $28K on an Ultima GTR/Can-Am. Its a lot cheaper, and you get a lot more bang for your buck. And even if you don't know how to work on cars, it'll cost you like 10K to get it put together. So it'll still be cheaper than their estimated price
In the UK, there's a broadcasting company called "Channel 4". That's what he was referring to.

http://www.channel4.com/
Yes, much nicer.
I agree.

That said, "performant" is not, has never been, and will never be a word.

(This is not directed at you, parent poster, but I see that .. group of letters .. crop up all the time in HN stories and comments)
hello pg,

iconfu is my site. I work on it when I'm not busy with rainbow ...

what's your username? I'd be happy to upgrade your account for you so you can enjoy full 48x48 pixel bliss.
Were they presenting one? They seem to only be saying that it is not only a money-making enterprise. Not that it can’t or shouldn’t be one.
I do a lot of image editing and I am proficient with Photoshop. Based on my image editing experience, I can imagine how difficult icon editing can be.

And a buck or two for a web-based icon editing app? Are you willing to pay buck or two per use OR for perpetual use?
My biggest worry now is how big is it going to be? Standalone WP is already huge.
Flex is bastardized ActionScript with a buttload of XML. They finally improved the language on version 3; AS3 is very powerful compared to AS2, but at the same time they bastardized it with "decorator" type stuff, non-code code that goes into your code that does stuff at compile time.

For example, the officially blessed way of attaching graphic assets to your applet is via XML directives that get expanded to magic at compile time.

This might not be a problem for everyone, but I hate languages that become so attached to their environment that you can't compile the, allegedly, portable source with another compiler: you need to process the "manifest", the dependency files, compile resources, and generally end up shoe-horning an IDE work-flow into your editor-based hacking.
Use RescueTime instead of tracking by hand: http://bit.ly/itYfb
Make it a game: http://bit.ly/iGxMB
Pure functions are easier to think about than impure functions. It is easier to think about simpler things. Pure functions are simpler than impure functions because their result depends only on their parameters(complexity being correlated with the number of things on which a thing depends).

If purely functional programs in some language to accomplish some goal are harder to understand than stateful implementions, the appropriate response is not to criticize functional programming, but instead to try to find ways to make that language more understandable or more suitable for accomplishing that goal.

"And, if you don't understand that abstractions leak and that the real world (and machines) are stateful/not functional, you're in for it."

I think there are actually conceptual advantages to thinking of the universe functionally(as a tail-recursive function with all the "state" contained in the parameters), in case a method for time travel is ever developed. It seems as though it would be easier to reason about than it would be if the universe is treated as stateful.
Is this enough evidence that the public stock markets have become so over regulated as to make the costs of being a public company outweigh the benefits?

If not, what would be?
The problem with new search engines is not only how good they are, but that google is _the_ standard. Every website who wants to be visible is google-optimised, so it will be hard for a contender to be both original and successful.
That said, "performant" is not, has never been, and will never be a word.

Well, it's certainly Not A Duck.

It's pronounceable, it has a widely accepted spelling and definition… Seems like a word to me. Time to get over it, I think.
I briefly flirted with Flex and it reminded me of the era when I waited on a corporate custodian to release features that I needed yesterday. Flex might be open source but the culture is really hard to stomach; Adobe runs the show every step of the way, and nothing gets done without their blessing.

JavaScript improves at the pace of your users; i.e. you can roll out next-generation features by edict :-) it's free, portable, well-established, pleasant to work, and it's ours.
Facebook's slick new workspace
It is not unprecedented - worldcom comes to mind, I'm sure there are others. Don't forget GM isn't monolithic, there are lots of sub companies.
You Are The Controller in Microsoft's new 'Project Natal'
Microsoft Makes You The Motion Controller With Project Natal
You're not alone. It's not for lack of options, but like many parts of Drupal, the automated install process hasn't "stayed still" for more than a version for the best practices to really evolve. The most famous way is something called Install Profile. The definition and underpinnings of this module have changed drastically from version to version, and it is not that well documented.

A more recent entrant is a system called Aegir which is a set of multiple modules. There is also a Drupal shell called Drush that can automate some things, but obviously it itself needs to be present and installed to be utilitzed :D.

Myself? I've written an ugly bash script that basically downloads and moves all the modules into place, and talks to mysql to enable them. I would never advise anybody else to use this method, or at least not use my script ;D

In a recent Lullabot podcast (probably the most well-known, and definitely most helpful Drupal-based business I know of), they referred to a database-centric way of automating installs that sounded like it could also be just a db script. They promised a blog post, which I am eagerly anticipating.

Anyway, your main point about Drupal setup being cumbersome, is true. Most people whose work is all Drupal have ways to deal with this, but if Drupal is only a small part of your computing life, it's not obvious what the best practice is.
Flash player runs the ActionScript code embedded in SWF. Browsers run the Javascript code embedded in web pages. If there are security vulnerabilities in either of these runtimes, malicious code can take advantage of them. The same arguments you're using against Flash and ActionScript can be used against HTML5 with Javascript.
I like the pimples on the troll. Subtle, very subtle.
I agree.

I just wish wish wish there was some alternative that had the plugin/theme support and somewhat of a community.

With Rails deployment being so easy now (via Passenger or Heroku), I really would love to see a full-featured WordPress alternative in Rails. Maybe Mephisto or Typo, I don't know ...
i have never, ever, in my short life, worked with worse code than anything done with drupal. some of what i've seen is downright tragic -- completely illegible, inconsistent, goldbergian in design, and (strong words) just plain dumb. and thats being generous.
Probably unrelated, but I could whip up a design comp for you quickly, minus the coding (I'm REALLY busy at the moment). Nothing in return, I just like to help :)
Indeed, but considering the social impact of business has traditionally required additional overhead. It even prevents entire business models and even sectors (eg, the debt industry) without a series of mental leaps to justify it as socially responsible. Fortunately, the perspective is shifting toward frameworks where social responsibility can be a part of company culture in a way that actually helps operations, like cost savings due to waste reduction.
Why wasn't Live Search able to take advantage of the same affiliation?
Deciphering Science from Compact Accelerator Simulations
And for printing, you might find http://www.utdallas.edu/~aria/research/resources/orwell.pdf preferable.
Speeding Up Science Data Transfers Between Department of Energy Facilities
That doesn't necessarily mean they are good research papers :) See the advice of Shivers:

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/shivers/diss-advice.html
Does Apple want to double charge you for apps?
NERSC Delivers 59.9 Petabytes of Storage with Cutting-Edge Technology
The Next Big Feature Of Xbox Live: Twitter
a reasonable, usable favicon is a lot easier than i think you think it is. i don't think that pg poured hours into this:
http://ycombinator.com/favicon.ico

buck or two for some sort of perpetual usage.
Software Bundles Don’t Have to be Evil (Just Profitable)
Profits normally (an economist would say always, but they often forget monopoly and rent seeking via government) move out of commodized services and into noncommodities. Hence you should expect to see such behavior.