skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you want to distribute your wealth, go ahead, but don't force me to distribute mine...

How about creating markets so that the 3rd world farmers could sell their products? So much gospel on free markets and the U.S. and E.U. are still protectionist when it comes to agricultural commodities...
At first I thought it was american billionaires not wanting more billionaires to share the status with.
I don't get why this is on HN.

We have methods to kill Paula Beans in their tracks. Liberal arts does not.

Is this anything new?
> Offer free, unhindered family planning services.

Seems to have little/no effect.

> Curb the rampant influence of organized religion on private matters.

Good luck doing that without coercion, substituting a different organization's influence on private matters.

> Empower women and give them equal employment so they have more time to reach for their dreams and less time popping out kids to latch onto a single source of income personified as a male patriarch.

Nice theory, but there's plenty of "overbreeding" in societies where women work as much as/more than men.

"X is bad" and "Y is bad" does not imply that X and Y have anything to do with one another.

> Develop family farms and agriculture and introduce automation to the process, so farmers don't depend on their offspring for labor.

Wrong. Automation doesn't make kids useless. It actually makes them more useful. A ten-year-old girl without automation can't do nearly as much as a 17 year-old boy. The more automation, the closer they are in productivity. (Having actually worked on farms, I'm often amazed by what people say about working on farms.)

If you want to keep farmers from breeding, don't have family farms.
[Edit: I don't feel bad about hijacking the thread as the article turned out to be a little less trivial than fluff.]

Offtopic:

Distributing computing gurus, what is the state of the art of distributed GC? is there more to it than reference counting? what are some sexy systems I can look at, well, other than EJB?

What is the verdict on distributed shared memory? Are systems like mosix now a history and the future entirely message passing? (I know of the layered architectures that implement a virtual system over message passing)

Also, what are good forums for the layman where I can keep an eye?

Sorry, but this thread is the closest I will get to GC for the non-uniprocessor on HN, I think (sorry Wilson ;-)
True, but literacy is literacy. You proposed going against the religious establishment... and I am all for that, but it's fighting a battle uphill. Mentalities change very slowly. Mankind has huge mental inertia.
Isn't that the same thing? What's the difference between wanting something and believing you want it? Doesn't one imply the other?

(Note: we're talking about wants here, not needs. It's quite possible to believe you need something and be mistaken. But wants are subjective beliefs, so almost by definition, wouldn't believing you want something mean that you do want it?)
That was less true when Gates took it than it is now. Now, scores are "recentered", so you can get a couple questions wrong and still get a perfect 800. This wasn't true when Gates took it - perfect meant perfect then.

At my undergrad, something like 1 in 10 incoming freshmen had perfect SAT scores, and I know a couple of folks at Google with perfect scores as well.
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I'm really surprised that a company as PR-smart as Apple isn't concerned with all the FUD and grumbling regarding the app store approval process. Looking at their ads, it seems someone in there has realized that third-party apps are the next big value adders for users, but the people in charge of dealing with developers sure don't seem to have...
> Right, but what incentive do people actually need? People contribute to Open Source Software.

While I like software more than most people, I don't think that what works in software tells us anything useful about what works elsewhere.

Which reminds me. Suppose that I figure out a great way to handle NP complete problems. Assuming that you believe that it would be good for me to disclose said "great way", do you really believe that not-patent reasons are adequate motivation?

Then again, I have a patent for a method of branch prediction. Since I'm not an academic, not working at a processor company, and have no interest in starting one, why should I disclose said method?
"...there are many mediums that do give you just the facts and then shut up when they have no more facts to report."

Edgar et al. was not what I had in mind. More like a cross between them and today's news. The difference between data and information. Would it be too much to ask for more information and less interpretation? I don't know possible solutions either, perhaps a Wolfram Alpha type interface is already the friendliest interface to data possible, but then again it's not (yet) connected to "news events". One has to actively go and ask specific questions.
Allow me to answer your suspicion about availability of family planning service and its effect on reducing population growth. You probably have the West, specially U.S. in mind when you say it has no effect. I think you're forgetting the welfare-check incentive in baby-popping.

Family benefits as they're in the U.S. seem to be optimized for the maximum yield of babies, and reduction of intact, 2-parent households. Single women simply get more buck for their bang (sorry!) here. And the fact that said benefits demand the removal of the father from the house, what you're left with are women raising children by themselves, and children of single moms becoming single parents themselves and going back to the system. Where generations ago they might have gone to the family farm or shop, now they're going to the family social worker to collect their own welfare checks.
I would like to see more facts in news reporting, but I don't think you can divorce this from interpretation. Facts by themselves are boring. You won't even remember them unless you're given some conceptual framework to fit them in with what you know.
I do want to add a few points to his data:

1) The average "Social Networking" price of the top 50 in the UK store is (in US tiers) $2.72, not $0.99. Similarly, the median is $1.99. Only 22 / 50 apps are priced $0.99.

2) The #1 "Social Networking" app has position #34 in the overall top 50 list. Clearly, social networking has a lot less market share than Entertainment or Games.

3) You shouldn't look at just the US store. Rankings can differ a lot between countries. Your app might be #34 in the US, but might not even be in the top 100 in other countries
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The Science of Voodoo: When Mind Attacks Body
Apple's actually not got very good PR at all. Not in this sense of direct interaction.

When they're distant from the user they can polish up something fierce. They craft excellent commercials, help guides, online tutorials, keynote speeches, etc. It doesn't hurt that advertising an Apple product usually consists of just showing what it can do, no hype necessary. So they also have fanatic fans who love their work and spread Mac love by word of mouth.

Apple has always fallen apart in their direct user-to-staff interactions. Excepting the Genius Bar, which I've always seen as a sort of way of focusing Mac lovers in a place and paying them, they don't work well with people outside their own company. They've spent so much time cultivating their aloof status - no blogs, no public emails save Jobs's famously snippy one-sentence replies, very poor forum - that on the few occasions they need to interact directly, usually things go very wrong. The App Store is the biggest case yet, and I'd bet that Apple's solution won't be making the system more friendly, it'll be changing the system so that Apple no longer has to deal directly with developers who might get angry with them.
What Would You Do with a $40 Computer?
I am 28 and I just did that. If you are reading hacker news and can grok it, you have to be your own boss. I remember Jon Aizen from http://dapper.net doing that. Although he has been a serial entrepreneur.
This product line has a good feeling about it. However, I do have an awkward feeling about the new Legos these days.

While delighted about Lego's new success I'm more afraid that Lego seems to have begun to productize their pieces too much since my childhood in the 80's. These days I have kids myself and the Legos I've bought them have more special parts designed to fit one particular model, and to merely make them look cool.

It was different back then when I was playing with Legos. The model you bought (well, or more likely were given as a present...) was merely a single example of what you could do with the given pieces. The gist was to build and scrap the model and then combine the new, cool bricks and gears and mechanisms with everything else that you got before.

You basically bought new models to get new parts and more parts. The new parts were all very generic which was the whole point: they didn't look as realistic as now but you could make anything from them. You could use all parts in a helicopter model to build the greatest Jeep ever.

My kids Legos have large, special pieces like an automotive chassis, that are only useful for that particular model. In the 80's you built the damn chassis yourself, and you could invent a hundred different ones yourself. This was so even in the sets designed for 5-6 year old kids, and totally so for those designed for teenagers.

Ok, my kids are young enough to not have the large Technics sets yet but what I've seen doesn't look promising. The Technics sets also seem to have specially curved / formed pieces to make the model good look but that are rather useless elsewhere. I haven't even found Technics supplementary packs like in the 80's where you could buy packs of girders, gears, axles, electrict equipment, motors etc. as a separate expansion pack.

Now everything seems to be about the models and themes themselves: the Technics sets I've reviewed also contain many special parts that aren't generally useful. It feels like the mindset now is to have the kid build that one model and play with it -- which is exactly the most boring thing ever about Legos! Why build something that's pre-designed when you can build anything you can come up with?!

Granted, Legos are so good that you can still build other things from basic Legos and Technics these days. And there's the programmable MindStorm thing, too. Still the percentage of generic parts seems to be lower. But what is more alarming that the mindset seems to be toward predesigned models only.

I hope I'm wrong.
I don't know if I could call my work start-ups. I make web sites. Sometimes people like them and communities form. Start-up to me implies something more.
It's sad to think that some people derive their hope entirely from the lottery. I wish there was more of a fervent drive to discover how to make money rather than just win it.
What about bigger creatures, like dinosaurs? Is there any evidence of cancer among them? (I'm totally profane on the subject, just wondering).
McDonalds earned 4.3 billion in net income last year. Their net profit margin is more than 18%
Well, I'd never read it before, so it was new to me. And it was an interesting story, and I expect there to be conversation about the value of metrics when any metric can be faked. The first thought I had after reading this was "What matters at all statistically speaking if none of the facts can be trusted?" How do we know that pagerank or daily hits means anything when they can be as effectively bullshitted?

The liberal arts are just as good at stopping bullshit from coming through. That they rarely choose to do so demonstrates how cowed many people in the liberal arts are, and that's an entirely separate discussion. But there's a simple test in the liberal arts wherein when somebody doesn't make sense, you ask them to clarify, and repeat the process until they make sense or admit they were faking.
Five guys is somewhere between gourmet and fast food. Five guys is definitely better, but In-N-Out gives you a good cheeseburger plus fries for 3.74. Ask for a cup of water.
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Some of the items on that list are about sexuality, but most of them are about perceptions of competence. Is it really too much to ask that you separate "whoa she's hot" from "whoa she's smart"?

This is just my perspective as a guy, but I've noticed that in environments where females know that their competence is respected, they tend to let their guard down about sex issues.

Going 'PC' is indeed the breakdown of human communication. Writing up speech codes about how we're going to respect each other is organizational fail. So stop the fail at the source. Start respecting female or transgender co-workers.

I've worked on a few projects with female programmers, designers, and even welders and electronics designers. When there's just no question about competence, it's sex jokes all day long. Or maybe that's just us. ;) But seriously, I suggest trying it.
Wow,

This is powerful but somewhat perverse sounding piece.

I think that one can indeed ascribe mediocrity to the corporate world, one could also say that what exists is "organizational intelligence" or narrow thinking and a willingness to go along with prevailing approaches. Still, if it is not stupidity, it is something so similar, it takes an expert to tell the difference.

One further thing to think about is that tendencies toward mediocrity which Djikstra could point to in the corporate world can now found much more in academia as it is corporatized.
Yeah, I loved playing with Legos as a kid. I think having spent long hours playing with them significantly boosted my developing creative/intellectual abilities.

There are studies that demonstrate mice from environmentally-rich cages (lots of stimuli) become better capable of recovering from hippocampal damage.

P.S. "I hope I'm wrong" on its own, conclusive line. Nice.
Some music in Haskell
Also, I think one might even say that mediocrity is now simply more evenly spreadly through society than when Djikstra wrote his piece.

Corporations have learned the value of knowledge and flexibility and academia and government has become more like corporations.
When linking to a PDF: please put this in the title. I hate 'em.
Bending a language to your will
As a Canadian who will be moving soon to the US, can you give me some advice re: medical care? I'm looking into buying health insurance above and beyond what my employer is offering (which is quite honestly extremely poor).

I find the entire thought of the health care system being private to be completely unnerving, and as you put it, insane. Why a man has to worry about his bodily well-being to the extent that if he has to give up his life savings for an accidental injury is confusing to me. This hardly even seems civilized, much less wise.

It not only makes no sense individually, it is also insane as a whole - by not covering preventative care for everyone you are increasing the virulence of your disease outbreaks, and even in non-contagious diseases and conditions you're still spending much more money in the end than if you nipped the problem in the bud via regular checkups and whatnot.

I know most of HN is American, and you have to excuse me for saying this, but as someone who's never lived long-term in the US your health care situation seems like something out of a bad dream. I cannot imagine the fear that you guys live with - the fear that I'm about to face in a couple months time. Oy.
If I am not mistaken, it happened in Australia, and while they were not able to cover all the numbers, they did win (they had covered 90%+ of combinations).
Trying to understand the issue: I suppose text_pattern_ops is a special kind of index optimized for LIKE searches? Then why should other queries use that index? Serious question, since you call the design broken - but what would be the proper way to do it in your opinion?
How Useful is Tufte for Making Maps? (2007)
I think that in a healthy society the point of someone talking about things that make them feel uncomfortable is that you have an opportunity to spend some time thinking about how what they are saying applies to that society rather than telling them the one hundred ways how what they just said can't possibly be true.

If we don't take those opportunities to think about what makes someone else uncomfortable (maybe because it makes us uncomfortable ourselves?) then, over time, the people with the willingness to speak out about something which could be improved simply leave and an opportunity to improve that society vanishes with them.

Which is a great sadness because I think we've all got our own stories about things we don't like about the software biz and I think many of us feel a little bit hopeless about ever being able to change some of that...

...but discouraging folk willing to talk about things that can improve, even if it's not something we find important ourselves, means that it's a little less likely that any other conversation about improvement is going to get a hearing either.

For the record, I'd like to see more women and other types of human than white&male&alpha in software myself because over fifteen years of doing this I have found that the most toxic development environments (high levels of stress, distrust, dishonesty, coercion etc.) have also been the environments with the lowest human diversity.

It is not difficult to scare away people who are different from you or people who you expect to silently put up with problems caused by your point of view.

But the problem is, as that happens, without differences your society slowly stops having anything to communicate about and without communication it becomes dumber and without intelligence it eventually becomes a target for attack and takeover by some other failed community with an eye to your resources. (Sun / Oracle anyone ? ;-D)
Um, that's why the Scribd link is automagically generated.
Paid Conversations, Credibility & The FTC
I wish you luck getting anywhere on the Internet without the help of a major company, Google in particular. It may not be Microsoft or IBM, but there are still clear powers.
It's really not. You have to cater to your dumbest user, not your smartest.
I disagree - I feel that in software if anything there's a huge amount of room for niche products.

My favourite story here is someone I know who runs an online drag-racing simulator game sort of thing. Lots of social interaction, trading parts, earning in-game money, etc, all subscription-based.

He doesn't have a huge number of players - but he's found enough die-hard supporters that he enjoys a very comfortable standard of living (certainly makes more than your average software engineer).

You don't need to make $0.01 from a million people if you can make $10 from 1000 people.

Oh, and there's more to software than the web - this is something that I think people are forgetting in the day and age of Google and Twitter.
The BW story reads like an unsourced reduction of the freeenterpriseland article.

The author of the FEL article sells an ebook made up of similar stories, which you can read a lot of on the site homepage. The ebook costs $5. http://www.freeenterpriseland.com/MAG.html

It's an interesting technique for writing and selling an ebook, but with no links to sources it is worse than the linkjack, it is plagiarism.
Interestingly enough, the maintainer of the checklist (me) is a man who went to Wellesley.
I'm a guy.
Coming soon: First pictures of a black hole
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The article is hardly about "bending a language to your will", and more about "why doesn't the sole vendor of my language implement features suggested by the greatest living language designer".

Alright, now that we have paid lip service to GLS, let's ask a question:

The author speaks of the lack of operator overloading in java, and my question is: why not use a language that allows you to add your own operators, better yet, one with no concept of officially sanctioned operators? Remember, operators are just functions with syntatic-sugar (i.e. they're usually allowed to be infix instead of prefix.) why not work with a rich, expressive language that treats your "extensions" as first-class citizens?

It seems like the gripes of mainstream programmers about their tools boil down to two things: 1) lack of vendor responsiveness in implementing much needed features (which varies from one programmer to another, whence the lack of vendor response ;-) and 2) demand for solutions to augment, or make-palatable, a brain-dead design.

Don't worry about making the language "succeed" or "win" against the competition. If you're struggling with your tools, don't hesitate to look for better options.

Your tools should be so efficient that you no longer think of them consciously, much less inspire a long gripe in prose.
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Some discussion already at
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=623561
In my view, there are some aspects that go beyond the traditional ideological boundaries in this debate. Regardless of what minimum wages do to unemployment, there's also the question of what they do to innovation.

If a business has a large supply of cheap labour, what is the incentive to use technology to reduce dumb work? There's undoubtedly less incentive and therefore I think a case could be made for high minimum wages in order to foster innovation.

At the end of the day, I believe that high tech societies have less unemployment, and apart from that reducing dumb work is what I consider progress for humanity.

On the other hand, high minimum wages are a disincentive for some people who do dumb work to learn something and become innovative themselves. So this is a counter argument to some degree. However, there are a lot of people who will never become educated or innovative or entrepreneural and pushing them into abject poverty violates my sense of human dignity.

Human dignity is the answer to your question of why not $50 minimum wage. It's subjective, I agree, but people living in a card board box violates my sense of human dignity as does watching people die from treatable diseases. Not being able to buy each new edition of the iPhone does not violate my sense of human dignity, nor does living in a run down neighbourhood.

One question that opponents of minimum wages never answer is what about the next generation? You can take the position that people who do nothing to help themselves deserve to live in poverty. But poverty is passed on to the next generation. Some admirable individuals are able to break that viscious cycle but most are not. It's very difficult to help the kids of poor people gain access to equal opportunities without to some degree helping their parents.

I'm afraid there's no way around spreading the wealth around a bit to people who may not deserve it if you want equal opportunities for the next generation.
Do Users Really Even Exist?