skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I see this come up again and again on HN and this kind of logic keeps getting voted up:

"You're complaining about [lesser evil] when there is [bigger unrelated evil]. Therefore what you say is irrelevant."

Sometimes it takes on this flavor:

"You're worried about the well-being of [one person] when millions are starving every day. Therefore what you say is irrelevant."

Is there some sort of fallacy name for this? This kind of argument says nothing.
I once read a plan for the revitalising of Detroit rather than the demolition. The plan involved turning Detroit into a free trade zone, along the lines of Hong Kong. There would be a low flat tax rate of 15% on company and personal earnings, no import/export duties, no welfare programs or government assistance, including being exempt from all Federal taxes, interventions and benefits. Basically set up a border around the city and let people do whatever they want. The idea was that within 10 years, it would again be a growing and dynamic economy as people would be attracted to the region to escape growing Federal intervention.

While I don't think the idea would ever fly, and I'm not sure it could work, it's definitely an idea to make you think - perhaps the answer is less intervention, not more.
Not of an entire nation. Of the whole world!

It's one thing to be spiteful in public, but quite another to be spiteful in a medium that publishes immediately to the whole planet.
we used to have Thuraya phones in Afghanistan for emergencies (http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090421134111AA...) - if they satellite you are trying to upload to DOESN'T point to the horizon, you could have your satellite pointing to the sky on the roof and people would be none the wiser.
I didn't say it wasn't productive. I said "more productive".

The difference is setup overhead. If you discount the effort to get your environment dialed-in, then of course emacs will be the best choice. On the other hand I encourage you to consider that Emacs Lisp may not in fact be the best tool for all jobs.

I'm not sure why you put "productivity" and "usability" in quotes, or why you mention "beginners" and "want to just click a few things". We're talking about programmer tools here, so suggesting that a non-programmer couldn't use emacs is not really apropos.
exactly. you can actually set-up a dial-down (callback service) to setup an internet connection.
Just curious, are there any surveys or studies to back the 1% of 15-18 year olds are looking to start businesses? I can see it as plausible, but I wasn't that ambitious in high school :)
I don't see that many textmate users dropping it for emacs any time in the near future. Yes, textmate was inspired by emacs, but it tends to appeal to a different crowd.
At a previous employer (which will remain unnamed to protect the guilty), my team once discovered that we didn't have the source code for one of our production systems. Well, we had a version of the source code, but it wouldn't build. The version running in production? It was built on the workstation of a since-departed teammate, and apparently never checked into source control.

Fortunately, the replacement for this system was already in development. Unfortunately, we had to patch the system on two occasions before its replacement was ready. Fortunately we were able to make both fixes by patching the binary - once to change a hard-coded encryption key that was linked in to the executable, and once to change a printf format string that was causing a critical bug in production.

The day we finally launched the replacement system and retired the un-buildable codebase was the biggest relief of my career. (Not least because only the team and our immediate manager were ever told about the problem.)
I agree. I think starting something first with ning would be a great way to build a community with zero investment. See how your target audience takes to the idea and then decide if it makes sense to transition over to something more custom.
I used the study of grammar to help make sense of the phases and dialog I was practicing. It was explanatory, rather than prescriptive, and gave my analytic brain something to chew on while my non-analytical brain was busy digesting the language.

For example, Chinese sentence structure is Topic-Comment rather than Subject-Predicate. This little insight helped make sense of the sometimes odd phrasing that my mind had tried to cast as Subject-Predicate.

About the rest, though, I think you are trying to force good data into a broken framework. Krashen seems interested in the teaching of foreign languages. Thus the focus on student relaxation, comfort and interest--how do you ameliorate the school environment?

I'm interested in the study of foreign languages, which already assumes an interested student. Sounddust was determined to learn French. Play and safety seem beside the point.

This is the process of making a foreign language "real". It starts off like a chore and then becomes a meditation. I could have spent 3 hours per session once I got into the groove. I would have to stop myself after 60 minutes, because extra practice w/out sleep would do me no good.

I don't know how I would apply these methods to the classroom. I did TA a Chinese class once, and no I didn't try to apply the methods. Clock in, clock out. I would tell students about them, but who knows if anyone listened. It all sounded like black magic, and I sounded like a raving fool.
Probably because they're pretty busy treating people who do have illnesses.
Misleading headline. It definitely isn't "in" HTML5, and it doesn't even seem to have been discussed on either the W3C or WHATWG mailing lists. Someone just filed a bug on the W3C bug tracker.
About half of my electrical engineering class is employed now. The ones who aren't don't have any leads and are now looking for anything at all. I had been planning to go to grad school before the economy sank anyways, so I'm "safe" thus far...

Luckily for them, they're in Canada and can be eligible for EI.
The Death of Twitter is a Myth
Getting overwhelmed with SMS or IMs from your Twitter list? Annoyed by random friend requests? Tried Twitter at SxSW and now you think it's about ...
This is going to be a huge help in the day job - thanks.

Here is a related article I’ve found useful recently:
http://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/
Guide to CSS support in email clients (2008)
NYC Start-Up Seeks Technical Co-Founder
GoodCrush.com is a dating space start-up based in New York City that has been featured on the cover of the Trenton Times, PlayboyU.com, and the Princeton Alumni Weekly. GoodCrush was used by roughly 30% of Princeton in 24 hours two years in a row, then spread to 7700 students across 8 campuses this past Valentine's Day. Now, I'm hoping to find a technical co-founder to help GoodCrush become a nation-wide, year-long dating space business.

I am ideally looking for a developer with experience in Ruby, PHP, or Python, social networks (both development thereof and Facebook application design), e-commerce, and mobile/iPhone application development.

Sincerely,
Josh
josh@goodcrush.com
http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/

There's a section on imports.
What? I don't believe it without a citation and even then I'm quite skeptical. 10% - sure.
A recent submission [1] reminded me of this useful study.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=657602
Oh, but it absolutely should contain value judgements. There is nothing more semantic than value judgements, in fact. It's a tag that says "this content may be of questionable taste". How is that less semantic than <em>, saying "this content should be emphasized"?
Detroit is surrounded by some pretty nice places as well. Ann Arbor is a great town. And Lakes Michigan, Huron and Superior are really pretty in the summer. I guess what I'm trying to say is that we're not talking about some landlocked post-apocalyptic industrial wasteland.
Is this inaccurate?
Let's be realistic here. Just because you can technically view a rant on some blog somewhere from anywhere in the world doesn't mean it's going to be on the minds of millions of people. This whole "publish to the world" idea is a kind of delusion.
Dear CNN, Please Check Twitter for News About Iran
I like the concept of a tag to mark up the semantic meaning of "the author considers this content to be in poor taste". The name "NSFW" isn't a good choice, since the idea of some things being okay for home but not for work is a curiously hypocritical western idea. However, the concept that some things are in good taste and some are offensive but discussable is pretty universal (obviously, if it's so offensive nobody event wants to discuss it, they're not going to mark it up at all).

I like the concept, but not the name. Perhaps <offensive> or <inappropriate> or some variant could be used instead.
but it doesn't apply to his books?

You just read that post on his blog, where he gives away his knowledge for free every day. That he also sells books is irrelevant, because there is nothing stopping professors from selling books too. You seem to have the idea that the ideas of giving away and selling knowledge are mutually exclusive, even when the thing you're complaining about is evidience that they are not.
Google vs. Bing Battle Heating Up: Is Google Scared?
Ask HN: Best startup or business podcasts/interviews?
I was working out at the gym today and I realized just how much dead time I am wasting when I could be learning something. Instead of listening to music I can learn more about business and marketing.

So I wanted to know: what are your favorite sources for audio business knowledge? A series of podcasts? Interviews? Audio books?

Maybe we can all find something new to listen to during out free time.
A dollop of Lisp
On Windows, Zeus is alive and well - http://www.zeusedit.com
Slideshow of the house here:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123872378357585295.html#arti...

Quite nice, I think. And tasteful.
I've been a keen defender of the Chinese education system (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=482513) and once again I applause this arrangement; I do not, however, applaud the NYT for publishing this piece - great as it is - in the news section.
I don't know. It looks more realistic than your typical 3D render, but I know that they can do some really good things with modeling programs.

Theoretically, they could have just taped an accelerometer on to the back of a large, multi-touch monitor, but that doesn't seem to feasible, coming from its source.

As much as it hurts to admit, this has to be a fake. :(
Indeed. Many people might not realize that "who can I introduce you to?" at the end of a pitch is a common way investors say "I'll pass".
Why would this be inaccurate? If there were no copyright laws, anyone could print a popular textbook and hence the market would drive the price down to just above the cost of printing it. What's unlikely is that we'll eliminate copyright laws.
A huge number of people chasing after so few opportunities as their ultimate dream -- Wait, you are not talking about Silicon Valley?
There are certain places I won't go, not because I don't think it's safe. A few of the linked sites always have articles that end up being tl;dr.
The Federal Reserve could have added extra slack very easily just by increasing the reserve requirements. But that goes against what seems to be the Fed's standard inflationary policies.
I just wanted to say that this price-gouging is most egregious in the legal world, where the textbooks are full of case-law that is legally required to be freely available. The prof's add their notes at the end of each case and then sell the book for $200. They could simply give you a link to cases & a little pamphlet with their notes.

What bothers me most about this whole setup is it makes a legal education even more expensive than it already is for lower to mid-income students.
I forgot all about pushf. Anyway, the comments are working. I accidentally misconfigured my nginx to not log the antispam requests (and mistakenly not pass them to php either).
I'm in your target audience and at least at my school 1% seems high. (1 school is not much of a sample size though)
The best players play to win. http://www.sirlin.net/articles/playing-to-win-part-1.html
I think it's only 20% of the college graduates this year who applied for a job, have a job.

Source: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/06/graduate-sch...
> He accomplished this by gaming the weigh-in rules to compete in a division two below his actual weight, and gaming the scoring rules to win by pushing lighter opponents out of the ring.

Heh, someone has never played competitive sports with weight classes before.

I find this (very short) review comes off more or less that the author wasn't comfortable with Ferris himself and the manner he 'plays the game' so to speak, therefore making the book itself of little value.
"The problem is that economic growth in the US over the past several decades has largely been driven by urban development (for which read: suburban sprawl)"

Detroit is a nightmare, and I don't think there are many people who fully understand just how bad it is out here unless you live around here.

There are basically three pockets of Detroit that you can walk around on-foot. Take a ride on "The People Mover" (a very poorly thought out monorail) and you'll run through areas of Downtown that are good and areas of Downtown that look like they were used for bombing practice. Venture beyond Downtown, and you understand why some property in Detroit is selling for $1 and why that's highway robbery.

I used to do contract work for several companies. One of our companies was a charter school just on the edge of the border of Detroit. You'd take Mound Rd. to get there. Mound is a mile south of Van Dyke, which starts in the heart of Downtown and ends in farm country. The progression was clear...the closer you got to the edge of Detroit the more things started looking like a third world country.

It's subtle at first: recognizable brand names start to become very sparse. Then occupied buildings in places other than intersections vanish. The intersections are littered with Check Cashing Liqour/General stores. Those are replaced in kind by the same but with bars on the windows and graffiti everywhere and eventually even those are gone replaced by what was once a Liquor store but is now a square of abandoned cement.

My parents and my wife's parents all lived in Detroit when they were young, as did all of their friends. They got out when crime went up. With the plummeting price of housing, even those who were once way too poor to live outside The City are getting out. Crime has increased in the area I live, but violent crime is still rare. Those who can find a way out, get out.

The city's decline won't stop. The burbs have created "The City" experience with great restaurants, great entertainment venues, great shopping and safe living.

Most of Detroit's Mayors were of the quality of Kwame Kilpatrick (other than Dennis Archer). The people of the city resent the folks who left, and folks running for mayor or city counsel do best if they blame Detroit's problems on the suburbs.
If you’re not happy with your job, instead of re-organizing your life so you can be a vagabond, consider looking for a more interesting line of work.

Why? This statement makes the fallacy that happiness comes from the type and duration of labor, rather the overall fruits of any labor you choose to do. If being a "vagabond" (in the Tim Ferriss sense) results in more net happiness than that attained by someone who loves their "interesting line of work" then being a vagabond is still advantageous.

I also have grave doubts that there are that many business models out their that will support this sort of hands-off management.

The most popular business models clearly do. The majority of large and mid-sized companies - as well as many small ones - operate with "hands-off management" from the people who take most of the profits. Shareholders do little work for the corporations in which they hold shares but still, often, collect the largest profits. Even ignoring shareholders, well structured companies over a certain size are not reliant on obligatory day-to-day management by a single person. That's what tiers of management and boards are for. If Steve Ballmer chose to run away to Thailand for a few months to go kick boxing, Microsoft isn't going to stop producing a tubload of cash each month.

Among other things, the people doing the actual real work may become disgruntled at the absentee landlord. But hey, if it works for you...

Why? There's almost no precedent for this except in situations where the workers are being mistreated or underpaid. Larry Ellison spends lots of time on his yacht, flying planes, and whatever, but are Oracle employees generally "disgruntled" by this? If so, what rationale would they have unless they believed Ellison's permanent presence were to have a significant effect on their paychecks or job security?
See Also: http://github.com/jcoglan/heist/tree/master
Everything casino related should be considered spam, unless there is absolutely no mention of a real casino website.

They are masters of deception and even if the post is tech related it should be watched closely.

I know them for I've been inside the beast.
But what exactly is death?

What if it were a reward? What if we were all trying to avoid a beautiful reward?
> Vermeulen says the idea of Darwinian economic competition is wrong. Even Darwin wouldnt buy it.

Actually, V doesn't. Instead, he shows that what's wrong is the notion that economic survival/success is simple. Instead, it's complicated - fitness functions are unknown, context sensitive, and variable, just like life. And, whenever organisms interact, so do their fitness functions.

The only people who don't understand that are the ones thinking that they can buy silver bullets.
Though I'm really looking forward to Google Voice, I'd prefer for phone numbers to just go away and for phone companies to just become wired/wireless internet providers.

Let the internet decide how it wants to address people for voice communications. Area codes and phone numbers are a relic that should be done away with.
An interesting juxtaposition against the series being written at Coding the Wheel.

Both are very clear about the difficulties involved - my suspicion is they push the "eating glass" type analogies primarily so that they don't appear to be encouraging further development. After all, the challenges involved appear to be what motivates them (and many Hackers) in the first place.
Why not just use existing technologies and implement it yourself? It's already been done anyway: http://www.chrisfinke.com/addons/nsfw-detector/
Once you’ve agreed on a time period and a way to count the results, how can you be sure that the results weren’t a product of luck and variance instead of skill?

That should only matter if your motivation for developing a poker bot was to develop a program that could demonstrate "skill" rather than one that could produce the highest profits (such as if you were a computer scientist). If you wanted to produce the highest profits, then your metric for comparing implementations would be net profit over the long run.

It is okay to come up with some set of metrics to attempt to measure "skill" in the short term while developing your algorithm, perhaps, but that's when you're in "computer scientist" mode. Ultimately skill is irrelevant if your goal is to make a profit over time, and if it were not, I suspect you would not be working on such a project in the first place.
Hm, not sure about fullscreen, in firefox, but the w3c spec definitely says user agents can support it. Here's the HTML 5 video spec if you're curious: http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#video

Here's a note on the video element in Firefox 3.5: https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Using_audio_and_video_in_Fi...
That's why you should write automated tests for your corner cases (and of course not only the corner cases). If all corner cases you knew about are properly tested, your rewrite should function properly.
In Allan's defense, he's come up with the first real advance in text editing for decades (his whole syntax scanning and bundle subsystems), and he deserves a chance to show what he can do as a second act. I expect great things.
Being discussed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=657449
I think this stretches the definition of a rewrite a little beyond the point it should break.

OSX is more like a rebranded descendant of NextStep/OpenStep, just the same as a would-be Microsoft Windows 10 derived from FreeBSD code.
Wasn't RDFa created exactly for cases like this, so you could attach any kind of meaning to any block/element in your document? The NSFW tag (and MildlyNSFW and SFW and SARCASM and...) could then be something that's supported by, say, input fields for comments, but converted to RDFa when submitted.
I think the point was to look like the POV of a hacker having taken root on another box.
Writing what I should have written so many years ago
I've got at least 10 friends who use both, but what I've mainly found is that my old friends who used to IRC back in the 90's and have since left, enjoy twitter. They like it because it's like IRC, but you don't have to give it 100% of your attention to keep up with the conversation. We refer to it a slow version of IRC where the channel never closes.
Interesting. There's so many 'Ah-Ha!' moments for me that I still think about the novel over 25 years after I first read it.

I guess it's just a matter of life experience and perspective.

What's an example of a book that gave you an 'Ah-Ha' moment?
"Windows Vista and Winamp 3.0 come to mind."

Vista is not a rewrite of XP - its a new bunch of kernel code grafted on top of the XP kernel, which is more or less the same as the 2000 kernel, which is an improved NT 4 kernel, which is more or less 3.5 with some stuff moved from user space into kernel space, giving a whole lot of stability problems due to low-quality driver software. It seems no full rewrite occurred between 3.1 and 7. The only rewrite I heard of was the one between the PDC 2003 video when Microsoft realized they would not be able to finish what they promised (managed code throughout the OS, the eye candy from the Longhorn concept video), threw a=out what they were doing and went back through a less ambitious route.

As far as rewrites go, Win7 seems more or less a rewrite of the Vista cruft that was added on top of the XP kernel.
The article assumes that these institutions are truly too big to fail. But what would have happened if they had been allowed to go into traditional bankruptcy?

Alternately, what would have happened if they had been allowed to fail in a controlled way, something similar to an FDIC takeover rather than the "bailouts" that were done?

Are there any good resources or analysis on it? I would be highly interested.
What is the breakthrough in the syntax scanning?
99.999%? I'd totally take it.- if it was a real number, calculated by some trustworthy method, and not a bogus expert estimate.

Of course if you can do that, probability ~1 (i.e., proven theorem given that transistors obey stated axioms) is probably just as easy.
Yup, linked paper above is the canonical intro at this point.
If it's gonna be someone, he's not a bad candidate for it - his Calculus books are high-quality textbook that age nicely.
Ok I appreciate the helpful discussion, this will inform my future practice. To wrap up, I think the takeaways are:

a, use your head, don't let convention override reason
b, In general, keep module imports at the top of the file organized by type & package with the caveat that a large # of imports (say more than 10 or 20) may indicate the module is too ambitious and is a candidate for refactoring.
Red Herring: also called a "fallacy of relevance." This occurs when the speaker is trying to distract the audience by arguing some new topic, or just generally going off topic with an argument.
If you fail in Silicon Valley, you go back to a great paying middle class job. If you fail to get into a good Chinese university, you spend your life in poverty.