skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think our politicians are any better, really. Local politicians make equally bone-headed moves, such as the UK's DNA retention schemes, or France's 3-strikes rule. In these cases, the EU has actually been the one opposing political idiocy.

It's also worth noting that most dumb ideas from the EU (including this one) come from the unelected European Commission. The EU parliament, whilst far from perfect, doesn't seem to be quite so stupid, and unlike the EC, the EU parliament is made up of elected MEPs.

I'd be in full favour of getting rid of the EC, but the EU has been a very powerful economic equalizer in Europe, which in the long term is probably a good thing for all European countries. It's also a force that discourages local politicians from being dumber than average, so schemes like punishing people outside the judicial system, or keeping the DNA of innocent people tend to be resisted by most MEPs.

At least, that's been my experience with the EU. Feel free to come up with counterexamples :)
Swine flu will dissapear soon!
I have pondered over this for a while. When we say human intelligence or "true intelligence" as you say it, the fact is, it is full of irrationality and errors. I believe that computational AI will go farther than we can imagine for the simple reason that we cannot process information the way a computer can; its relentless.
Sea levels in the Maldives appear to be stable or falling: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/19/despite-popular-opinio...
This looks like an easy one to protest. Just get a huge bunch of people to post the link: on personal websites, message boards, whatever.
I don't know what it is but edge's format has always been difficult for me to read.
Thing is publishers actually have a good chance of convincing schools to add textbooks to the tuition.
This won't be popular but how about; classes choose which textbooks they require, total cost per student is determined and added on to tuition, the university can now distribute copies in digital or paper format. Keeping it all electronic would lower costs all the way around and still get the authors paid.
For a brilliant linguist, he know little of economics.

This is true, but he doesn't claim to know much about economics. He pretty explicitly doesn't care about economics. He's the De Morgan dual of right-wingers who care only about productivity growth and don't care at all about distribution issues.

Given that, everything he says about the popular (mis-)understanding of Adam Smith is true.

EDIT: take for example this hacker news thread ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=489024 ) where:

1. a guy posits Adam Smith's labor theory of value

2. gets told he should read Adam Smith to correct his mistaken ideas

3. quotes Adam Smith to back up his previous statement

4. gets told he's misinterpreting something

It's crazy really.
I was 7 or 8, it was a Sharp machine that had a tape (as in cassette) drive and no screen (they were expensive). Using the manual, we used to boot up the machine from the tape, type commands on the keyboard in something like BASIC, and get a roll printer to print out-into two colors, black and red!- a car.

The second machine I got was an IBM XT clone, with DOS 2 or 3 and green CRT twice as deep as the desk we had it on.
I didn't understand what the rant was truly all about, but it was a hoot. Extra props for linking to suck.com's posting from 1998. Oh, and the photo of a Kitler.
Example of why copyright should not be bound to human expression
People sometimes hang a thick rope, a bit like a cat's scratching pole, off the side of the boat, so the cat can get back on if it falls in the water. Some people even put some catnip on it to make the cat used to climbing up and down it.

Only useful when in harbour, of course...
Being an owner of a Kinesis as well, I can attest it's one of the best $300 I've spent on anything related to my programming profession.
Helpful Directories for Building Inbound Link Value | TechJaws: Internet Security and SEO
Get the book: http://www.amazon.com/What-Believe-but-Cannot-Prove/dp/00608...
Ack, it seems to have gone down. Google cache here:

http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:VZ3UpIzqbUIJ:www.ventone...
Interesting article. The thing that stood out the most, though, is that the author is so focused on solving the RSI problem through changing his tools (hardware & software) that I could not find any mention of the single most effective change one can make: an intelligent incorporation of strategic stretching in one's daily routine.

In my case, certain muscles were so tight that my wrists would curl inward while I slept. To solve this, I slept while wearing a cheap pair of wrist-braces that I got at the local pharmacy. During the month or two that I did this, I also performed a half-dozen different stretches specific to the muscles involved.

Sharon J. Butler's book "Conquering Carpal Tunnel Syndrome: And other Repetitive Strain Injuries" saved me. It is from this book that I pulled the stretches that I did. It is also this book that taught me proper stretching technique and what sensations to pay attention to while doing it.

After I learned these basic things, I discovered that my regular keyboard was just fine, and my addiction to emacs was just fine. I was afraid I would have to give up programming and playing the piano. Now all is right with the world.

Interesting aside: I did learn dvorak before I discovered the power of stretching, and I swear it helped a lot. YMMV.
"It is by logic we prove, it is by intuition that we invent." - Henri Poincaré
http://www.gap-system.org/~history/Biographies/Poincare.html
Without living in the UK myself, it is difficult for me to separate the exceptional cases from the general trend. What I can say is that in America, things that would have seemed exceptional ten and twenty years ago have become depressingly commonplace.

Also, from an epistemological perspective, you almost have to use the exceptional cases to spot the trend while they are still exceptional. Once they become commonplace, we stop noticing them. They are no longer new, so they are no longer news.
New HDMI-D Standard to Compete with Mini DisplayPort
popular culture is what keeps "women" out of science vocations. you grow up with "boys, music, fashion, and popularity" as your priorities, brought upon by social structuring and peer pressure, and your brain simply conforms to that. if you never take an interest in science as a kid, you're not going to grow up and become a physicist, chemist, or mathematician...

the early steering of gender based interests creates massive discrepancies in the demographics later on. you want to end it don't attack the institutions because the gender based barriers are relatively minor, fix the problem with culture
The govt could go after a software vendor that knowingly sold their "NO WARRANTY" software in a jurisdiction where a "WARRANTY IS MANDATORY".

Legislators don't like it when companies try to "undo" or "go around" their legislation.
Data, Not Design, Is King in the Age of Google
I know the creator of this. Same guy who built SocWall.com & YouGetSignal.com.

I think he's onto something cool here.
They're fuming because the rest of the word doesn't recognise that they're right.
I think the problem is one of market... You could sell the device but you wouldn't have a lot of content to sell with it (which is where the money is). Amazon also has wireless deals to make content even easier to access.

It would have a tough time being a sustainable business given the costs of prototyping, making deals with wireless providers, etc. and the alternative of just offering the device just doesn't seem worth the time.
you may be interested in this: http://www.foxitsoftware.com/ebook/
Of course it's not cross-browser, but if you're doing server-side JS it might be useful.
Indeed. Typing timers like xwrits (http://www.lcdf.org/xwrits/) and workrave (http://www.workrave.org/welcome/) help, but the thing that's most directly helped me is a series of wrist stretches I learned while studying Aikido (a martial art that involves a lot of wrist joint locks). The names differ from school to school, but searching for "aikido wrist stretches" on youtube etc. should be good enough.

(I use Dvorak, too. I think it helps, but the chorded keys in Emacs are probably the bigger issue.)
That the universe consists of matter, albeit strangely behaving matter, and that everything we see in the universe, no matter how wonderful, can be ultimately reduced to the interactions of this matter.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=600968 is the Chomsky link that prompted this poll. In case there are anybody besides me who would want to see the link before blessing or damning it.
This poll question is bogus. How is an Ann Coulter interview like a Noam Chomsky interview?
7 Useful Social Media Tools
A VIC-20 when I was 11. A box of wonders it was!
Rubyology interview with Heroku (Audio)
10 Ideas for more Powerful Negotiations
Do you really think people need Ted Kennedy, Barbara Boxer, or John Boehner to command them from on-high in Washington DC on how to morally conduct commerce?

Fraud is a crime. Cities have been dealing with it for a long time. People don't need bureaucrats in DC to tell them to not stick jellybeans up their nose.
What does he do with money?

Boil it?

NOOOOO I dont want your cash! It has cooties..
TI99/4A , probably one of the only ones on Cayman Islands in those days.
If it's being gamed to the top, then no. Otherwise, why not?

Why not ask yourself if it is intellectually stimulating rather than trying to decide whether N.C. or A.C. are categorically "worthy" of Hacker News front page?
Can I vote no if I think they are completely unrelated yet want to see neither of them?
I thought the interview in question was perfectly acceptable material for this site, and if it makes it to the top of the page, so be it.

As far as a general formula for interviews with Chomsky or Coulter, it really ought to depend on the content of interview, not the person being interviewed.
Interesting. I did find such a video on youtube, and the stretches appear to be similar to the ones I encountered in Butler's book.

The one video that I sampled, though, was entirely focused on the wrists. One interesting thing about the way muscular tension is networked throughout the body is that when one muscular group is compromised, another will compensate. This ultimately can cause a network of failures, so stretching all of the upper body, at the very least, is important in properly solving the RSI problem.

I'm sure an ancient art like Aikido addresses the whole body properly, but I thought it worth mentioning.
I'm tempted to flag this. Perhaps you meant to ask:

1. Do Michael Moore / Ann Coulter interviews belong on the top of HN?

or

2. Do Noam Chomsky / Steven Pinker interviews belong on the top of HN?

or

3. Do Noam Chomsky / Samuel Huntington interviews belong on the top of HN?

Personally I say yes to #2 and no to the others.

EDIT. I gave in to temptation. My first flag ever!
Insofar as the chomsky interview could have actually been the jumping off point for conversations about alternatives to current/past education norms and the technology/start ups which could facilitate that - yes I think it definitely could be hackernews material. But if it is going to digress into political nonsense and knee jerk commentary - then no.
I've been using Dvorak (Type 2 with some modifications such as mapping the various types of parens to alt gr + homerow) for the last few months and it's helped me a lot, too. More than I expected, actually. The last few weeks I've been working very long hours due to ending up double-booked with customer projects (one got delayed) without any trouble, which wouldn't have been possible previously. The amount of travel is drastically reduced.

It's not the only measure I'm using: I've been using an MS Natural Keyboard Pro for years, which certainly didn't solve the problem entirely.

I haven't noticed correlation with exercise, but I'm willing to believe that doing none at all is bad for you. (I exercise semi-regularly)
Once my mother was working on a big project for her work in word. So, she was pretty much done when she hit Ctrl-A + spacebar. She panicked. All that work wasted. My 4 year old self heard her yelling in the other room and I came in. She explained what happened and I just pressed Ctrl-Z. Everything was back. She thought I was magical.

My first computer was about when i was 3. Well, I always had computers around but I started using them and surfing the web at around 3(which pretty much amounted to silly little games). But I knew the ins and outs of Windows and how to get around and figure stuff out.

I got my own personal computer at around 10.

Now, I'm 14 and I'm just getting into programming and Linux.
That this comment will rightfully be voted down.
This is the way I'd like to see things move. You pay tuition, the university handles the licensing and distribution. Of course it would probably raise prices or reduce availability for those outside a school.
Here is an Ann Coulter link for comparison: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,301216,00.html

I think this question is absurd.
I'm so confused why this poll exists. HackerNews already has a system built in to ask this question. You can hit the little triangle next to "No" on this page as many times as you like, but as long as people keep hitting their triangle on the frontpage it's all moot.
That intelligence is nearly guaranteed to emerge from sufficiently complex systems.
Please do not compare Noam Chomsky to Ann Coulter. Coulter is an unabashed demagogue, Chomsky is an intellectual and academic who happens to have strong political opinions.
I was 7 and got a TI-99/4A. I rocked it out by saving and restoring programs to cassette tape. You read that right, cassette tape.
What makes him the world's foremost consultant?
I'm convinced that most people would be well served to care more about the keyboard they use.

While I've yet to try a Kinesis keyboard, I can attest that TypeMatrix (http://typematrix.com/) keyboards are superb (~ $120). Once you try one, you immediately realize how utterly backwards staggered keys are in the modern world.
This sounds similar to the "music tax": you'll pay whatever the publishers want to charge you, they'll give you as little value as they feel like giving you, and the middleman will enforce it. Such a business model sounds like a recipe for stagnation, not innovation.
I mean TrueType fonts of course :P
Aikido is actually less than a hundred years old :)
Heh, I practiced aikido for a while, too. And judo. We used to do a lot of those wrist exercises in aikido, but not in judo. I had no idea they were good for RSI. Thanks!
Yeah, when I typed 'ancient' I thought someone would mention that. Can I be saved by assuming that it descended from older forms? ;-)
There's basically one manufacturer for all e-ink-esque screens (PVI). The consequence of that fact is that there's not a ton of room for price flexibility: everyone's using pretty much the same screens sold at pretty much the same price, and so there's not a ton of leeway to combine e-ink with a "cheap" device.

This may change over time, as other e-ink-alike technologies come online, but it is the current state of affairs, and it's why everything is in such a narrow price band.

Buying "open" e-ink reader devices isn't that hard: just about every but the kindle has .pdf compatibility, for example.

There is no "open" ebook format the way .mp3s are "open": all major publishers that sell ebooks sell in drm-ed formats, and only independents and small-timers and oddballs sell legit content in unprotected .pdf.

Edit: http://www.pvi.com.tw/en/index/index.php is PVI.
That's how I felt as well. There's a flag/ vote-up mechanism already in place. It was used and the result stands, making this poll irrelevant.

Second, Chomsky is an MIT professor and a venerated intellectual who has opinions that some find controversial. The article includes questions on John Dewey and Bertrand Russell regarding education. Ann Coulter has built a career on simply being controversial and has never added anything to discourse, let alone being able to enunciate Russel and Dewey on education. Yes, they are both controversial, but to mix them is so disingenuous that it immediately undermines any point you want to make.
Mu. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_(negative)
More Roles versus Duck Typing
Just find the book you want in PDF form, upload it to your Kindle over USB, and you’ve got a perfectly readable and convenient textbook.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that students are just going to skip the $500 kindle part of this plan.
Read step #2. The author is pitching the use of canvas as a rapid prototyping tool for common graphics requirements that come up in web design. There are a lot of interesting things you could do without having to do a lot of manual manipulation that would be required in a tool like Photoshop.
i think ann coulter is super hot and he can go wherever he wants
I was 6 and it was a Brazilian MSX: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotbit. Man, those were the days, using MS-BASIC and drowning on GOSUBs and SPRITEs ;)

It was a time where the knowledge was a lot harder to be obtained, you had to buy books and magazines to know the new programming tips. Hard times :P
I still cling to the notion that flags are for spam, rather than for even aggressive cases of the false dilemma, otherwise I would join you.
"Perhaps your ideal web stack is what you're using. (What're you using, btw?)"

He has stated in previous comments that he's using scala.

Interestingly, merb on jruby has reportedly reached 14000 rps on similar hardware to what he's refering to (8 cores, since he previously claimed to get 5000 rps on a 4 core machine).
And only :P

It's waaaaaaaay too complicated for mass-market!
This may be irrelevant, but maybe not. In addition to being the most significant linguist of the 20th century, Chomsky made many key contributions to mathematical linguistics, a field that is important to Computer Science. So in some sense, he is "one of us".
I've been using Ubuntu as my main development environment as a while (mostly Eclipse with Rails/Python and still a bit of Java), but having started using a Mac for my notebook again, I have to say that as a development machine it is pretty sweet. Everything is well integrated and you spend a lot less time keeping the environment running.

Now I know with Gnome/KDE that half the appeal IS that you have real control over the environment. But as a result you spend a lot of time futzing around setting it up the way you want, and a lot of time managing just keeping things running together.

I still haven't had time to figure out all the things that broke after moving to 9.0.4 (like Google Gadgets and Flash in Firefox for a start).

Don't get me wrong cause none of that is hard and I love playing with that stuff as much as the next guy. But there is no question that you spend a lot less time worrying about those things (because you like it or not) coding on a Mac.
There's a flag/ vote-up mechanism already in place

That's right; the point of this poll is to challenge that mechanism. Check out the results above; it's currently running more than 3-to-1 against the idea that the existing system is adequate.
13 years old my ZX Spectrum, bloody marvellous it was too
Especially all those guys from Apple :)
Probably 8 or 9 - had a ZX80 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX80) and bought a book on BASIC so I could learn to write games. I learned GOTO and thought it was just the absolute sickest thing EVAR!
Perpetual Satori. Trying to prove it only proves I'm not yet allowing myself to understand it. Therein, as the saying goes, lies the rub.
Do controversial statements that Noam Chomsky and Ann Coulter are roughly equivalent in some way belong on the top of HN?
Insisting that computer intelligence resemble human intelligence is probably the characteristic that the future will mock the most, like the way we mock primitive overdecorated Victorian machines.
Ditto, the family bought Sharp MZ-700 when I was 7 (c.1985), and only I became interested in it.

I upgraded to a Commodore 64 in about 1988, after my aunt didn't want it, and then a disk drive 2 years later with freezer cartridge. I had a lot of fun. The 16-bit machines (I had an Amiga/Atari ST) were fun, but it took until I got a 486 PC with 16mb RAM (1996) to actually make good use of a computer. Mainly web design work and email.
The presentation was great... this reaction, not so much. I appreciate the link to the presentation though!
Please do not post Chomsky advocacy in a thread about whether such things should be even allowed on HN at all. It is off topic here of all places!
I don't think so. You've been able to get PDF versions of many books (both textbooks and novels) for a few years. I've never met anyone who actually printed one out or read an entire book from their computer, save for maybe a leaked Harry Potter book.
But really... There are other ebook readers besides the kindle..

iRex let you use open formats, and the software is also opensource and in continuous development: http://www.irextechnologies.com/
HN also has a policy of sometimes overruling mass upvotes. Haven't you ever seen a high scoring story killed?
Wow, I'm surprised!! I am Brazilian too, though my very first computer was a TK-85 (aka Sinclair ZX81), when I was 13... At the time Brazil was under a "market block-out" that blocked all imported computers, so we were forced to use the crappy Brazilian knock-offs!

A few years later I got an Expert (MSX) and in fact I ended up writing the first anti-virus for MSX computers (Viru-Boot, not sure if you ever seen it, it was featured in the magazines at the time)

Are you from Sao Paulo? In Sao Paulo the default hang-out was either Paulisoft or Disprosoft, the best places to get pirate software.

The good-old-days!!
How to choose a good OpenSim host
I've only seen it happen on more clearly cut cases.
Too many! But I like the second one's (STANISLAS DEHAENE) idea that we can mobilize our old areas [of the brain] in novel ways.

I think so too. It reminds me of a study that showed that when we use tools (eg drive a car), we use the same brain areas as when we move are bodies. We literally use tools as an extension of the body. That's deep sensory and motor flexibility, that seemingly could exist without intelligence.
Me too. I loved playing parsec on that bad boy.
Being a political ally would work as well. Seek out the controlling faction, show up at their social and political events, and offer to help on campaigns. Of course, when you find that doing that works to your benefit, you might feel dirty enough about yourself that you'll decide to go find one of the many businesses that have equally bad systems and are willing to simply pay you for your work because you can solve their problem and save them money.
This is hand-curated data. It goes against Google's core philosophy of improving the algorithm instead of just the data.
Amusingly:
Selected Nuclear Materials and Engineering Systems (Part 4) (Kindle Edition)

What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?

20% buy The Holy Bible English Standard Version (ESV) 3.6 out of 5 stars (24)
That is not her average interview. You should post a representative comparison link. And the host kept yelling at her and being offended which didn't help.
You have trouble imagining that some people find Noam Chomsky to be a clearly cut case?
As a student, I can say that the point isn't always to read the whole book: the kind of textbook you'd want in a PDF form tends to be large reference books which you can search quickly in a PDF reader. But I'm used to working and reading whole books on the screen, and believe it or not there are quite a few legal ones: for example I work with a few art books whose copyright has expired a long time ago, and I read a lot of research papers in PDF.
8 years old, Windows 98 on an IBM PC with a CRT.

1998.