skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here is a n=1 for you: I just forcefully argued against male circumcision on Reddit. Check it out if you like.
I'm not the guy you're replying to, but I've seen a lot of misconceptions that make them seem much worse than they are (although they are still quite terrible).

Common myth: any nuclear explosion causes total destruction for miles in every direction. Because of this, old drills like "duck and cover" were foolishness at best and cold-blooded ways to placate the populace at worse.

Fact: the area of total destruction is fairly small. Most injuries and deaths by most bombs would be caused by flying debris. Duck and cover is a great way to increase people's chances of survival. If you're right at ground zero then you're still screwed, but there are potentially millions of people living at distances where structures would overall survive but taking cover would greatly help their chances of survival. I blame this on pictures of Hiroshima from after the bombing there, where nearly everything is just wiped clean. People don't realize that this is because most of the buildings in the city were practically built out of paper.

Common myth: following a nuclear explosion, the area will be too contaminated to live in for centuries or millennia.

Fact: the really nasty stuff decays in days or weeks. It may not be the healthiest place to be long-term, but months or years after the event, it's not generally going to be a big deal. Witness the distinct lack of widespread contamination and abandonment in modern-day Hiroshima and Nagasaki for example.

Common myth: a full-scale nuclear war would destroy all life on the planet. OK, all complex life. Well, all human life.

Fact: while it would be an event without precedent in both its size and speed, lots of people would still survive. It would pretty thoroughly wreck civilization and easily kill hundreds of millions or even billions of people, but life would, overall, go on. Many countries would escape the devastation and, while their economics would have extreme trouble due to the devastation of global trade, they would not revert to a pre-industrial state or anything like it. Expect a future with technological advances slowed down greatly and dominated by Brazil, sub-Saharan Africa, and possibly Australia, not a future filled with radioactive wastelands and handfuls of survivors waiting for death in underground bunkers.

Common myth: the electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear explosion will wipe out electronics in the region.

Fact: most nuclear explosions don't produce EMP. You only get it when they're set off in the upper atmosphere, as the EMP comes from the interaction of gamma rays with sparse gasses and the Earth's magnetic field. An attacker with the capability would be wise to set such a thing off over the US, but, for example, a terrorist nuke in New Jersey isn't going to wipe the computers on Wall Street.

Common myth: despite all of the above misconceptions, nuclear weapons are still tremendously frightening and we're all extremely lucky that the Cold War never went hot.

Fact: no, this one is definitely right.
The full title is more than 80 characters, so I had to shorten it.
CSS 3 Animations and its Mathematics
At least in the US, software development is far , far from "the bottom of the totem pole" socially. I actually have no idea how anybody could think that. No, it's not the same socially as being, say, a heart surgeon or a senator, but it's a better career than virtually all others accessible with just a bachelor's degree, on par with chemical engineering.
You don't know how to type English text.
> an indicator that the founders intended

This is exactly the mistake I'm trying to point out. "The founders intended" isn't a valid line of argument. "Why do we eat bananas?" "Because the founders intended it." "Why aren't you eating a banana?" "Because the founders didn't intend for me to eat bananas."

> they wanted less laws than more

This works for you because you want less laws than more.

I think that the amendment process is difficult because there are a fuckton of Americans and because the founders didn't trust the states. (Which is also why they had a House of Representatives.) They couldn't foresee the consolidation of federal power that came later, which may have justified an easier process to them.
:) What's your email? Remember that the email in your HN profile isn't visible to others.
I'd be curious know how you'll revisit your opinion of "weapons of peace" when a nuclear nation is on the receiving end of a nuclear storm sent by some religious nut job.
Your parent made the point that without the government Google and others may not have launched in the first place.

This modern world has already invented the cheesegrater, what remains to be invented really is -for most part- too complex to be conceived from thin air with a stroke of inspiration.

I would have to study for a decade to have a chance at success in quantum physics, and I'd be relying on an enormous amount of gathered knowledge in doing so, much of it coming from state-sponsored work. That would be a tremendous effort on my part, but it pales to the effort of the society as a whole in making my future available to me. In such a light I have a hard time seeing how wealth distribution currently is "fair".
Gallium is pretty nasty stuff and is much harder to clean than Mercury. Try getting a Ga droplet on your clothes; it will literally never come out. It is also a heavy metal, so it is not something you want to play around with outside of a closed jar. Its not THAT dangerous, but in the short run neither is Hg, but they are both not great long term.
I have to agree with you. The beauty of anonymity is that people speak their minds, unrestrained from social impetus. Although anonymity is a double edged sword, I believe that the blunt, raw truth is much more valuable than a veiled, politically correct, socially acceptable response. This is one of the reasons why 4chan is such a popular place, everyone speaks their mind without having to worry about karma/internet points or how their opinions will impact their real lives from doxxing and such.

I maintain two identities on most social sites/chatrooms/hn; one that uses my online alias, and one that uses an abbreviation of my name (bsamuels). Whenever I feel like voicing an uncomfortable or controversial opinion, I use the online alias.
>> I mean all those that subscribe to the NAP: minarchists, 'right libertarians,' voluntaryists, and 'anarcho-capitalists.'

What exactly is your claim about them, then? I should stop guessing at ideas to refute and let you make a claim first.

>> This argument is pretty old and tired, and goes way beyond this thread.

Which argument? "Think about it" doesn't constitute one, so it seems you wanted to quote something other than what you were supposedly addressing. That's kind of weird.

>> There have been many criticisms of the NAP by anarchists. The actual, original strain of anarchists: 'left anarchism.'

Sure. It's certainly possible to complicate things to no end. But is it worthwhile? Moral rules are not absolutes, but that's alright. The point is to get close enough, and there are often several sensible ways to view ideas, such as "property" for example.

But bickering about the exact definitions of words your opponent happens to use is just a bullshit distraction, intentional or not. I've wasted way too much time on that road already. We both use and understand the English language just fine. There are no obstacles to our communication besides the ones intentionally put up.
No - it goes way beyond simple batches of operations. Basically you have to write your transaction as JavaScript program. So, you can do anything you could do on the client-side - with the exception of waiting for another source (i. e. user interaction). You could read a document from one collection, chose different actions based on the attribute. Change documents in multiple collections. I think the PHP driver uses some kind of abstraction to hide the JavaScript from the developer.
Don't forget Domain Knowledge! You were probably doing something up until you were 40. You know a loooot more about whatever it is than someone graduating from college. Play that to the hilt. It is often incredibly valuable.

Plus eigenrick's suggestions also specialize to your domain; for instance, if you were in construction (which I saw someone post a very similar question from once), not only do you know the construction world, you know how to speak their language, at both conscious and subconscious levels. You can comfort & reassure a construction buyer more than any random schmoe ever could. And so on.
It's really difficult to get hired (I'm 34 and can't get into the system). However freelancing and doing your own MobileApp/SAAS/CAAS (cognition-as-a-service) is a viable activity, it just takes a longer time to get to a decent income.
Rediscover your graph data using D3 & ArangoDB
availability.is HTTP 500 (Internal Server Error)
US Federal, State, and Local spending is nearly 40% of the US economy. (See: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/total_spending_2014USpn)

This number seems to shock my conservative and liberal friends alike.
In other words:

* If a minority assaults you, you must be to blame, and don't even try to argue otherwise.

* Don't learn from your own experience, learn from respected academics.
In theory that's how convention centers should work. In practice, the Javits Center is isolated by the surrounding railyards and few desirable amenities have sprung up in the area.

(This may finally change in a few years' time with the opening of the Hudson Yards redevelopment and the western extension of the 7 subway - so of course it's been proposed to tear down Javits and build a new convention center at the even more isolated Aqueduct Racetrack site. Ugh.)
My name is also highly generic (one notch below John Smith) to the point where good friends haven't been able to find me on facebook.
By the way, voluntarists and anarcho-capitalists are one and the same.
I guess you have a different idea of controversial than return0.
Curing Blindness the Cheap Way vs. the Very, Very Expensive Way
Seriously.... at 40+ a more mature goal should be to avoid getting hired and pursue more freedom through consulting or independent work online.
>>Because all of 310+ million are not in this together. We, as individuals, all have our own dreams, ambitions, interests, and goals.

And as a society you have roads, schools, hospitals, public safety, public health etc. Acknowledging common interests in public goods and following through on the implications of that acknowledgment is not the road to Stalinism that you seem to think it is. Life is not an XOR gate.
Be careful with Republic Wireless. They are completely anti-rooting, require customized proprietary software to use their service, and you're out of luck if you want to cancel the service after 30 days.
W3 Total Cache Vs Wp Super Cache: Which Do You Love? | Onenaija Blog
That is not a particularly controversial point; I think pretty much everyone agrees now that genital mutilation of babies is wrong.
There are 'less laws'. It just so happens one of those laws is "FDA has final say on drug stuffs"...

And then they decide on the real laws. After all, congress already gave them approval.

Yep. Real transparency.
> I blame this on pictures of Hiroshima from after the bombing there, where nearly everything is just wiped clean. People don't realize that this is because most of the buildings in the city were practically built out of paper.

But then, you do realize that today's nukes are orders of magnitude stronger, right?
I did make a claim. The claim is that without specifically defining force and initiation, the NAP is useless. You re-asserted a particular definition, and said 'think about it.' I don't find that to be particularly convincing.
Thanks @Japhyr. Sales and Accounts is what I look into. I have some ideas for products but everything at a very early stage.
This mirrors the argument in Albert Jay Nock's book "Our Enemy: The State" (1935). He argues that expanding government crowds out non-governmental social activity, giving the example of hurricane response. In his time he already saw the shift in the public mind from treating a disaster as a problem for the entire community to something that the government should handle.

If Nock is correct, there is a darker thesis that follows. Over the generations, dependent thinking becomes ingrained. It becomes impossible to think otherwise, as the examples we have of civil society solving problems fade into the past. In short, we become domesticated humans.

It was also the thesis of Marx that for socialism to succeed, a new Socialist Man would have to be raised, that human nature would have to be changed. This began in America with the reign of FDR, which coincided with the birth of the third American Republic - the Bureaucratic Superstate.
Are you suggesting that I can't determine for myself if a particular school is providing a good long term education for my child? Or that I shouldn't be able to choose to take them to a different school?
The issue is when people will go on a witch hunt for something you say without being compassionate and helping you understand their or a different point of view - whether it is something you said in the present moment or well in the past.
I'm happy to use my real name, and if you are talking shit I am happy to tell you. I assume pretty much the same as you, but the other way around: If people use their real name and confront me I am a lot more likely to take on board what they are saying, than someone who uses a pseudonym. I assume they are just trying to be confrontational and start an argument.

Edit: Actually it depends on the community. I would not use my real name on 4chan, but here and Reddit I am happy to. I don't get involved with any communities where there is a risk of really pissing someone or law enforcement off however.
To me, I agree, but I've heard some of them draw a distinction I don't fully understand and I try to be respectful of identifying people in the way they choose to be identified.
Any good freelancer/contractor knows your availability is largely unimportant to the success of your own business. In other words, you don't normally lose money because you're unavailable, you lose it because you don't have work lined up.
> Since 1 million light years in 14 years is way faster than the speed of light, and relativity doesn't allow you to exceed the speed of light by acceleration, clearly this is something other than regular old F=ma "acceleration".

As the blog notes, the speed of light limit in relativity theory applies only to observers in free fall or observers measuring things passing right by them. The rocket's crew isn't in free fall and the thing they're measuring is distant.

> Additionally, the fact that we don't see things 14 light years away accelerating to a million light years away very quickly, despite being under a constant 1 gee acceleration, would seem to indicate that this is not what actually happens.

That's because our 1g field drops off quickly with distance. The rocket's crew has a uniform 1g field all the way to the beacon.

> I can use the standard d = 1/2at^2 equation to "demonstrate" that combining one apple and three tangerines produces 4.5 dandelions, and you would get the same result putting those numbers into the equation, but it doesn't mean the exercise makes any sense.

That's because you're using the equation illogically, by mixing labels. The blog uses the equations properly.

> But I understand enough to realize that it is very wrong, and point out some obvious flaws.

OK, I've been a student of the blog for years and can likely always show the flaw in your arguments.

> I can see no indication of this, even though it should be an easy exercise.

It wouldn't be easy. As the blog notes, it's not just the Earth's gravitational field, it's also the Milky Way's and more. When observing supernovae in distant galaxies we're talking about a much larger g-field than the Earth's.

> This is another major indication that this is all nonsense, if it is in fact the case that this analysis has not been done.

That's unscientific as hell, like saying Newton's Principia is crap because he didn't include a calculation that used his equations to weigh the Earth (which Cavendish "easily" did much later).
Thanks @dickler. Very valuable feedback. Appreciate it.
It's bad practice to require someone to identify themselves completely merely to participate.
I earned my Computer engineering Degree at age 36 and started at an entry level development job. I was a paid intern while finishing school. Now I joke that if I am looking for a job, folks looking at my resume assume I am in my mid thirties from my graduation date.
I try to stay continually grateful for having won the genetic and geographic lottery. All I need to do is show up and my needs are met.
Yes. A good team will recognize that your love for programming means you'll improve rapidly, especially in an environment with constructive feedback from tolerant team members. And if you have other professional experience you can bring to bear (knowing how to work in a team, process & planning, customer support) the find a team that needs someone with that experience as well as programming ability.

If you can't find anyone willing to hire you because of your lack of professional experience, find a team you like and offer to work for them for free for three months. If you show promise, and you get along with the team, they'll want to hire you when the three months are up. And if not, you'll get feedback on your skills and learn what kind of teams to look for in the future.
Turning up the voice of America
Stanford and MIT are both not Ivy League schools... But your point is noted.
I feel like the Internet has gotten the same treatment that hitchhiking has gotten - stories make it seem dangerous, but when measured, the danger is much lower than expected.
The minute you institute property rights, you're forcing everyone to recognize and play along with certain rules. Classic libertarians have no opposition to government intervention when it comes to violently preventing poor people from taking their property. They deem it perfectly legitimate to coerce someone with economic threats but not physical ones. Its wonderfully self-serving for an educated class that tends not to have much in the way of physical strength to force everyone to abide by these rules that devalue physical strength.

To me, the only thing that needs to be said in this debate is that people, given the freedom to structure their society as they wish, have gravitated toward social democracy all over the West. They want everyone to be in it together not just when it comes to certain rights like property that libertarians like to pretend are handed down by God, but also when it comes to taking care of the poor, sick, and disabled and ensuring social mobility through education.

In my view, its immoral to create government to force everyone to follow certain rules, then deny people the right to decide for themselves what those rules should be. But that's the whole premise behind libertarian limited government.
> The majority of the population is ok with this stuff

Not according to polls since the Snowden leaks came out.

Also, I've yet to see real evidence of the mass surveillance over the past decade helping stop terrorist plots. They said it was 50 "terror events". They lied even about those. It was more like 1, and even that wasn't a big deal.
Inflation is a way to silently lower wages without pissing off workers.

See more: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/27/business/economy/in-fed-an...

Key quote: "Rising prices allows companies to increase profit margins quietly, by not raising wages"
>> The claim is that without specifically defining force and initiation, the NAP is useless

And I pointed out that you don't really need any specific definitions for "force" or "initiation" (and that bickering about the definitions for everyday words is a bullshit distraction).

But suppose "force" meant "violence or coercion", and "to initiate" meant "to start" (there's no real confusion about that, at least). With these definitions, what's your problem with the NAP?
> The Constitution, in theory at least, should work as a bulwark ensuring that minority opinions are upheld.

That's not what pluralism is. The key is in ensuring that minority opinions are heard and reasonably considered, not "upheld".

> They have equal rights because they are people, and deserving of equal rights, regardless of their or others' morals.

And yet, that's not actually what the Constitution says. Nothing in the Constitution actually says that people have equal rights. That's why, when they tried to write an amendment to ban gay marriage, they didn't have to include any deletions, because it would have contradicted nothing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Marriage_Amendment

This is the example you chose; it's not helping your case. :P

Edited to add:

> suggesting that we disregard the rule book while playing football seems naive

That's not what I'm doing at all. I'm saying that "because Constitution" is not the right reason to write law. Gays shouldn't have rights because the Constitution says they should; it doesn't. Gays should have rights because we say they should, and if the Constitution doesn't, then maybe it fucking should.

> Perhaps I'm misinterpreting the statement, but by your argument, gays shouldn't have rights if the majority of constituents agree they shouldn't? I disagree here, and I would expect that every minority group should. It's very possible that I've misconstrued your intent though, so please feel free to correct me if I'm in error.

Your error is that you think moral opinion is static.

If the majority is wrong, then we (1) act to protect the minority and (2) convince the majority that they are wrong. Not sure if you noticed, but the last several years have been full of "LOOK! GAY PEOPLE ARE NOT EVIL! ISNT THAT GREAT!". This is part of the process.
A few years ago I hired a guy that was already into his forty-something.

I can't remember who introduced him, he was fresh out of a nasty divorce, new in town, almost broke, had no experience and no skills, but he seemed so passionate about starting over that I gave him the recruiting test we used back then. The test consisted into reproducing complex patterns using HTML tables (most internship candidates fresh out college failed this one).

I explained how to merge cells and showed the desired output, after a few minutes he came with the right answers, without any previous knowledge of HTML. He was hired on internship wage and did very well.

Last time I heard, he was working for HP as a Java programmer.

The question is, do you want this hard enough?
Just as a fun polish, you should build really awesome "unavailable" pages for your 404s and 500s that points out the obvious semantic irony.
No actually, in my experience it is a red flag, and worse, it hides really nasty bugs like the conversion from int that I mentioned.

To elaborate, I do find misuse of casts to be a reliable shibboleth to determine competence in C and C++. If a programmer writes lots of pointer casts that don't make sense, that's usually reliable a signal that the programmer doesn't really understand the warnings from their compiler and is just trying to shut up the warnings (real or perceived) rather than fix actual problems. This approximation has played out well in my experience.

It's not meant to be judgmental, I too made the same mistakes when I was learning C. I remember in 2000 or so I made the "cast memcpy args to void pointer" mistake because the manpage said void pointer and I didn't know what that was yet. If nobody ever pointed that out to me, maybe I'd still be doing it today. This kind of "pedantry" you're accusing me of is how a lot of people get better.

By the way, the most popular compilers most people use today (llvm, gcc, MSVC) don't do what you're describing when the file ends in .c which it does here.