skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Communists did not disappear inside the United States. They were treated unfairly (fired from jobs, ostracized) but legally, they had the same rights to habeas corpus. At the height of McCarthy hearing, ostracism and loss of a career was the worst that could happen to a communist. However, this is the same treatment that was accorded (just previously) to the Nazi sympathizers in the US. In fact, HUAC was created to go after Nazi sympathizers.

Of course communism had the appeal of being a non-racist ideology, so a lot more innocent (but extreme naive) people got tangled up when HUAC went after the communists. That being said, they're both totalitarian ideologies: I wouldn't want either Nazis or Communists holding public office in the United States, nor do I have any issues with private employers firing either (at least in employment-at-will states).

At that time China was going through Great Leap Forward (mass artificial starvation, with millions dying) and (in the 60s/70s, after HUAC has died down) cultural revolution. Again, a very blood period.

As for illegal detention, I am pretty squarely against it: either these people should be held as POWs or be tried as criminal defendants. Yet illegal detention that happens on the battlefield is much different from illegal detention of a political activist working within the system. If you want to compare apples to apples, I'd look at China's treatment of US prisoners during the Korean war or their treatment of their own Islamic extremists in Xianjing province (yes-- there are real Islamic extremists targeting civilians in China and no, they're not "freedom fighters").

That being said, it's a silly comparison to do irrespective: provided US was as flagrant about human rights as China, that doesn't justify China treating their citizens in the same fashion. Nor does China treating their citizens horribly justify human rights violations by the US. The original article did not claim anything along those lines. Arguing that "two wrongs make a right" is logically fallacious and morally bankrupt.
Easy Tips For Home Remedies For Arthritis
Some other great vim resources:

Vim tips wiki: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

The best collection of vim scripts: http://www.vim.org

#vim on freenode
But unfortunately, thanks to a succession of journalistic fakes and the constant tabloidisation of the press, that trust is gone.

This coming from Techcrunch. Pretty funny.

As we sat in Los Angeles, debating how to save what remains of professional journalism,

Too late.

Let’s not forget that the two most famous reporters of all time - Woodward and Bernstein

You mean the two most famous reporters of one time

Paul Carr is, by process of elimination, a writer.

That explains it.
I suppose the author is one of the people that argue that everything should be paid for by a direct transaction. If I walk to the corner store to get a beer, I should pay for the use of the sidewalk because "someone paid to put it there".

There are things that are better for everyone if the cost is borne by everyone. You could argue that because Linux or Emacs are free (as in beer), there's some sort of circumvention of capitalism going on that robs the economy. But how about the fact that thousands of people now can learn how to run a unix system and write program that would otherwise never have paid to do so? I believe there is a net benefit to society there, just like with publicly funded streets and publicly funded research. It induces activity which otherwise would not happen.

Only the most fundamentalist capitalists would argue that common investments are never good, and this strikes me like the same kind of rant. And I'm sorry, but that doesn't convince me one bit.
YC-Funded FanChatter Takes Social Media To The Ball Game
> Yet illegal detention that happens on the battlefield is much different from illegal detention of a political activist working within the system.

That's only a matter of degree if you declare the battlefield to be whatever suits you.
A surprisingly insightful article. It's interesting to note that the author publicly disagrees with Michael Arrington and still has the article published. That's a good sign.
This a a major leap. Once you understand that HTML is object code, a whole new world of architectural possibilities opens up to you.

Not exactly a new idea either. pg talked about this years ago...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50159
Further, the funding of a lot of free software has already taken place because a company needed to scratch its own itch. After that, the question is, "Does keeping this software closed source provide us a significant competitive advantage?" If the answer is "no," then there's really no point in not sharing the source. Anyone that thinks shrink-wrap sales of their pet Lisp dialect are going to make up the cornerstone of a viable business model is freaking deluded; these things are dime a dozen, and the market is next to non-existent.

Pretty much all of the open source stuff that comes out of Google comes out for this reason; they're not in the software sales biz, so if they develop something neat that helps them get things done but is not core to their business, they give it away. Economically speaking it's neutral to positive for them (helps PR quite a bit, and gets programmers invested in the Google ecosystem), and positive for everyone else.

My immediate response to the article: no shit, software takes time to write, even the most hardcore FOSS advocate wouldn't claim otherwise. But once those costs are funded (which they will be if you need the functionality yourself), if there's no money to be made by keeping the results a secret then you should be indifferent to opening it up. Yes, this means that FOSS is driven more by big companies than by basement programmers, because they generate a lot more code, but nobody ever claimed otherwise, except when constructing strawmen to knock down.

I was going to bring up the obvious point that most of the Internet runs on FOSS software (convenient not to mention Apache in a rant like this, arguably the producers of the most successful FOSS in existence), but upon checking, I can't call him out for hypocrisy - check out any non-existent url (for instance, http://www.lambdassociates.org/doesnotexist), at least he's actually drinking the Microsoft Kool-aid as he rails against the poor quality of open source.
I've used this to program a variation on the 'snake' game with my son (aged 15, going on 35) and it was quite a lot of fun.

We made it a two player game with all kinds of powerups and other tricks, it was as much fun testing and playing the game as it was programming it. He did all of the graphics using the gimp, I let him code until he got stuck, then 'unstuck' him, rinse, repeat.
Although SVD can be applied to images, it's not a particularly good compression method. It's fairly expensive to compute, and the Discrete Cosine Transform (JPEG) or Wavelet Transform (JPEG2000) provide similar quality at a fraction of the cost.

The fundamental problem is that SVD is a linear technique -- it finds the best linear approximation to a matrix. However, real-world images contain several non-linear effects which are very expensive to approximate linearly.

In recent years, however, various newer techniques have been developed which use SVD (actually, the closely related Principal Components Analysis (PCA)) as a building block for achieving good compression.

One such approach is "Clustered Blockwise PCA for Representing Visual Data" -- which applies PCA to different regions of an image and then another PCA on all of the resulting blocks. The intuition is that although the whole image is not linear, many regions within it are indeed linear and thus compress well, individually.

http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/CAVE/publications/pdfs/Nishino_P...
Being exact is precisely what we can't do, because no one knows exactly what's happening in the Chinese government. So we speculate and assume the worst.
Iranian Nuclear Accident?
This might be old news, but did anything more come of this?
But accurate - given the man's track record, the likelihood that anything he writes will have any useful information is vanishingly small.
Oh I'm all about eating meat, just not exclusively. Both of those links advocate grazing livestock, which I 100% support and think it also tastes better. Better than the grain-fed meat that is so cheap and plentiful in the US (I think that's where thras is.) But meat raised that way is more expensive, which makes it difficult to eat only meat and greens (the latter of which are likely to be trucked halfway across the country.) This is how he's "hacking" the food economy: taking advantage of agriculture subsidies that distort the price of meat.

Exclusively eating local produce, grass-fed beef, free-range chickens and their eggs is not only seriously expensive, but in many parts of the US (like where I am) nearly impossible.

Whole grains and legumes, however, are pretty healthful and easy to grow, AFAIK.
On a flight I once sat next to a Cuban-American man on his way back from a business trip to China. He told me about his company's work over there and how impressed he was with his Chinese counterparts. He had had a great time and looked forward to returning some day.

So when I asked him if, since he did business in China, he supported lifting the US embargo against Cuba, he emphatically said "no, that's completely different." I asked how, but he couldn't come up with a single thing and became pretty annoyed with me.

Whenever I hear stories of these kinds of abuses in China I can't help but to think of the utter hipocrisy of the USA's policy towards Cuba.
I think this makes good points about how we should be working with html these days, except those few of us who do static tables by hand.

One thing I am concerned about in the concept of doing all the work on the server is that CSS has the ability to let the client override some of the presentation issues, such as is the case for accessibility. I wonder if that can be done as effectively on the server.
Conan O'Brien Harvard Speech (2000) "Fall down, make a mess" [video]
EasySpeedy provide servers with unlimited bandwidth for reasonable prices, based in the Netherlands (so geographically close). There's also a german host whose name escapes me that's even cheaper...
Exactly. The real disgrace is all those technologies developed with taxpayer money and yet patented, closed or restricted.
This user joined HN and signed in to post their one and only comment ever on a thread that was already 10 days old? Shill much?
A coherent capitalist fanatic wouln't like intellectual property at all!
Apple adds queue time, contact info to iPhone developer pages
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html

John Baez's crackpot index:

5 points for each mention of "Einstien", "Hawkins" or "Feynmann"
That's a strawman argument.

Of course you have a right to the code if it's free (as in freedom) software - that's the point!. If it isn't you don't. The parent was pointing out that many people feel that they have a right to the source of closed source software because of FOSS. Which they don't.
SVDLIBC's fastest sparse matrix algorithm uses Lanczos, which is still not good enough for large data sets.

Of particular interest to web scale projects would be incremental SVD methods that enable online updates to the SVD.
http://www.merl.com/publications/TR2006-059/

There's also been research in academic circles regarding the use of the much more efficient (though nondeterministic) CUR decomposition in the areas of network analysis and collaborative filtering.
I did volunteer work for about 25 years. I've spent a lot of time in that realm and thought a lot about it. I don't mean to imply that what is currently being done must stop. But I agree with the author that his time has value, so if other people expect him to keep giving it away for free, it's basically a parasitic expectation. If he wants to give it away for free, that's his choice. But if he isn't independently wealthy, time put into a FOSS project competes for time he could spend making money or with family and friends, etc. Good projects generally require substantial time and effort. It is common for volunteer situations to result in shoddy work, people you can't count on because they feel no real obligation since they aren't being paid, and similar problems.

I was diagnosed late in life with a serious medical condition. Prior to my diagnosis, I was too ill to pursue a paid career. Many of the idealistic, talented and intelligent people I have known who routinely give away their work for free are also handicapped in some way. (Actually, I can't think of anyone who gives away substantial amounts of their time and skill on a regular basis who isn't seriously handicapped in some manner.) If you are handicapped, doing volunteer work has the easy terms that work for you. Moderating a forum, running a website part-time, and so on are things you can do when you feel up to it and no one can force you to be more consistent. And the quality of the work is generally consistent with the fact that you are unreliable, impaired, etc.

So while I still value some of the free resources made available by other people like me, now that I am well enough to work a full time job, I am somewhat less of a bleeding heart. I still think some things need to be "free" -- in terms of rights and also in terms of financial access -- but I think many of these resources would be of better quality than is currently available if the people running them were compensated in some manner. Non-profits don't operate without budgets. They still need money. That money is typically raised from the community based on the idea that the organization is offering something of value. They aren't "beggars". They are just doing work that has human value more than commercial value and therefore needs to be monetized without directly selling services.
In the Wikipedia article it's shown a little bit more formally. It's basically: if you have a block G with the properties that {P ∧ Q} G {P}, you can create a while-loop with the properties that {P ∧ Q} while Q do G end {P ∧ ¬Q}.

(In a C like language, if holds:

assert (P && Q);
G ();
assert (P);

then:

assert (P && Q);
while (Q) {
G ();
}
assert (P && !Q);

also holds.)

Your misunderstanding is based on forgetting the conditions set for G. In your example, you will have a block G for which holds that before its execution var_p == 1 and that the same holds after its execution. From there it's probably easy to see that the same holds for while Q do G end. Since G doesn't change var_p, and Q is just a predicate without side effects, and the while itself doesn't change variables, var_p must be unchanged.

I hope I explained it clearly. I've been ready for bed for the past three hours or so, just can't drag myself to it :-)
I, for one, welcome the demise of the shit media like the big papers, which have already reduced their value to toilet paper. Hopefully, the cable "news" stations will follow their lead to extinction.

Alternative media are far, far better. And yes, that includes blogs, the best of which publish original content by professional reporters.
Twitter DM email parsing (with source code)
I like plain-text emails, so I wrote an email parsing script to reformat Twitter's HTML emails into plaintext, and then allow me to reply to the email in order to reply to the DM. The source code for the script (PHP) is provided at the bottom of the post.
I originally started my angel fund as an incubator (The Hit Forge). I quickly moved away because of Adverse Selection - the best entrepreneurs are insanely committed to themselves and their ideas, and rationally or irrationally, don't want to diversify. Since then, I've invested in a lot of companies, including Twitter and Disqus and Heyzap, and am glad that I did so. The Incubator model works as a "search" model (MRL Ventures, Obvious Labs, Ooga) where the Incubator "finds" a company that the principals join, but not as an "investment" model where the incubator survives and keeps spinning out companies. This is true because you can't create or replace entrepreneurs - you can only discover them or be them, but you can't create them.

The other problem with this proposal is that the Internet is extremely competitive. You can't do anything great part-time over the long term. A funded team working full-time has a huge advantage on you.

Of course, giving up control sucks. "Valuation is temporary, control is forever." And a business controlled by VCs too early can't innovate easily. So, either raise money from angels, or learn how to negotiate with Venture capitalists. Check out Nivi and my writings (sorry, shameless plug) at http://www.venturehacks.com.

If you do have a good product with traction and are out raising VC money, ping me and I'd be happy to help you keep control (free!)
If I could source pig ears, I'd eat nothing but pig ears from now on.

You need to visit more Chinese food markets.
When Does a Depression or a Recession End?
Of course I was simply addressing the sustainability comment, not the economics involved.

Regarding economics, I suppose the unanswered question is how would a reallocation (or reduction, depending on your political bent) of government subsidies affect the feasibility/availability of grass-fed beef compared to the CAFO variety? What would happen if grass was subsidized instead of/in addition to grain?

Even now, it's possible to buy sustainable meat at comparable prices (http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2006/12/13/how-to-buy-a-si...) if you go in for a half or quarter cow. However, this involves quite a bit of work (if only it were as simple as logging into buymycow.com and ordering 200lbs to be vacuum sealed & delivered at your doorstep!).
You don't need access to the source. If you don't like how the software works, you have two options: (1) Don't buy the software, or (2) write new software.

What about option (3): fix it yourself (or hire someone who can) if it's important to you, which in practical terms means you do need the source.

My point was that many people feel they have a right to the source code. It's not a right at all, no matter what Stallman says.

That's odd. I believe the authors of the software I use on my FreeBSD server claim otherwise.
Most custom-built software is too tied to internal processes to be useful outside, because a generic solution always costs more (the consensus is 3x). Most successful OS projects that have this source solve a narrow, highly technical problem.
I think there are blind spots in this argument. The web will never be a stable environment. The technologies that have afforded its existence are notably fluid, and often leaky. These are characteristics that do not fit standard computer science.

To engineers who are accustomed to rigid runtimes, compilers, and so forth, this opinion that HTML is object code will resonate. However, it makes the assumption that by abstracting away the underlying HTML, you stand a better chance of delivering your program to the intended audience. I don't believe this is the case.

If you embrace the fact that HTML/JS/CSS will at best represent an approximation of the interface you intend to create, and leverage this accordingly, you will write code that will more easily adapt to best fit the environment in which it is run.

The power of web technologies is their resiliency. Programs written in compiled or runtime-based languages either run or they fail. Web code is much more dynamic. We should appreciate this characteristic, even when faced the frustrations of immature, misimplemented, and unsupported standards.
Ron Garret reads or has read HN, so its very possible he knew about that comment.
DIVINE Project - Create Websites From Photoshop To Wordpress
I didn't know about that particular comment, but I did know that this is not an idea that's original with me. It's completely obvious to anyone who has learned Lisp. The only reason I wrote it is that it's apparently not completely obvious to CSS advocates. I seemed to have garnered their attention for reasons passing my understanding, so I thought I'd try to take advantage of that to spread some enlightenment. I have found that sometimes merely stating the obvious somewhere that people can see it and link to it can be useful.
What are the blind spots to his argument? I read your comment but didn't see anything particularly in contrast with the post.

Edit: Oh actually I presume you're implying the ability to easily swap stylesheets, and that would be a valid point.
Defense Deparment turns to Defcon for new recruits
I'm also doing a low-carb diet, for a month and a half. No exercise of any kind. 6 kg lost, and counting.
You're confusing the cost to you with the cost to me.

You're correct that there was an opportunity cost for me to write the code. I spent a few hundred hours on it, when I might have been programming for money. Fair enough.

But when we talk about whether software is free, the question is either how much is costs to use it (i.e. is it free as in beer?) or what license it uses (i.e is it free as in freedom?).

In this case, the cost to you is $0-- free as in beer-- and the license is the GPL-- free as in freedom. (Perhaps we can omit the GPL vs. BSD argument here.)

A better counter-argument might talk about the opportunity cost for you to use free software.
The Death of Journalism: How Gawker Ripped Me Off
Funnily enough I was unware you were from Chicago when I wrote that. Through Jelly Chicago, I've come across several of these "lose band of entrepreneurs" type operations here in the city
iPhone and iPod touch need a way to tell you when they are about to fall.
Have you had an iphone or iPod touch in your shirt pocket and bent over to do something only to see your device fall?

This is avoidable by a warning alert that would occur when the device is in sleep mode yet its orientation changes in a way suggestive of an impending fall.