skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"If you have evidence to support this claim, provide it. It might be interesting. If you don't, you're just resorting to name-calling so you can win a boring argument about politics. We don't like that sort of thing here."

I think the opinion of the parent falls under the heading of "arguments that do not require citation, because any educated citizen should be familiar with their content". Here's what I found in two seconds of Googling:

http://articles.latimes.com/2006/sep/17/business/fi-revoke17

http://select.nytimes.com/2006/09/22/opinion/22krugman.html?...

http://www.sickofbluecross.com/consumer_stories/

and here's a great podcst from last weekend on insurance companies and their rescission practices that I just happened to hear while making dinner (third story in; right around the 30 minute mark):

http://thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=386

...and that's just a taste of the information that's out there, available to anyone with even a passing inclination to look for it. Maybe the decisions documented in these articles don't constitute "evil", but I wouldn't characterize the them as "amoral", either. At the least, there's a strong argument to be made that the profit-seeking motive of American health insurance companies has gotten out of balance with its duty to protect the insured, and requires further regulation.
I can understand that a company, here Apple, will try by lawyers and other means to silence things but in the long run this is really bad and damaging to the image of a company.

I wonder why they didn't choose to just handle the matter gracefully? Would have avoided bad press, or am I missing something here?
At least in Maine, on commercial stations, I statistically find less moving new music than on, say, thesixtyone. But I tend to appreciate a song most after a few listens, on the album or a mix, and view the radio and (contemporary) web as mainly just a means of discovery.
And let's not forget the most effective way to get a job: contacts.

Sending out résumés is pretty weak, even if you have a degree or two.
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Of course. Out of my 6 or so jobs in 3 1/2 years I think the first one was the only one gotten that way. I think there was another one where the hiring manager found me on a job board, if that counts. The others - and everything that's happened since in the consulting world for me - are all predicated on relationships build in the course of working, as well as being socially involved in the discursive space of my profession.
I had a similar experience a while ago.

My PowerBook G4 Titanium overheated and melted. I called Apple support. They took my number and told me to wait for a call.

Ten minutes later, an executive in Cupertino called me and apologized for my "trouble." Then he made the a similar offer to the person in this story-- if I agreed to not talk about the incident, he would send me a fully loaded brand new PowerBook G4 (aluminum model at the time) worth almost $5k, an iPod, and an external hard drive.

I took the deal, of course, but refused to sign anything.

Here's a picture I sent to Apple HQ immediately after the incident: http://bit.ly/Gv93d
This one really does it for me...
http://epicponyz.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/presidenheadlam...

Sorry :)
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Decent, really? I thought it was a horrible article. It took seven points that have (for the most part) been overhashed on the internet in the past few days and summarized them in a single paragraph each, without bringing any new content or thoughts regarding any of the points to the table.
Clyde and Bonnie died for Nihilism
A good re-telling of the 'real' Bonnie & Clyde story, though I suspect some of the author's personal opinion on wider matters is revealed through excellent quotes like

"the legendary Penn movie that invented the New Bonnie and Clyde was such a ideological crock that it deserves placement in that list of other leftist crocks mistaken by gullible critics and film lovers as somehow great: Beatty’s own Reds, the appalling JFK, and the toxic oeuvre of Michael Moore and his tribe of screwball clones"
If you got Flickr Pro the originals always stay intact. If you want (don't think you can considering general upload speeds in internet cafe's) you can even upload the RAW's and Flickr will keep them available for your at all times.
‘I had a meeting in the bath’
This is similar to the accepted idiom in python as well: create a dictionary mapping choices to outcomes.

For the special case of sequential numerical choices, a list works as well.

For the special-special case of numerical choices for single-word string outcomes, I often use:

dir = 'north eash south west'.split()[n]
Explaining the many paradigms of PLT Scheme to a 16 year old
It is interesting for me to note -- as a purely anecdotal personal observation that is no way supported by any scientific or quantitative evidence from a credible source whatsoever:

The people that I consider the most intelligent and/or smart in various general and specific ways also seem to be the most given to not want children (and some go so far as to get operations that effect this biologically). Many others further down the distribution of "smart people" are inclined to have fewer children, and have them later.

In other words, in my personal life experience there is a very strong inverse correlation between the intelligence of people and the amount of children they have or will tend to have, and that's assuming they have children at all. The intelligent folks I have met seem to be the only group where a total rejection of childbearing exists to a statistically non-negligible degree, to put it mildly.

No, not politically correct at all, and, perhaps unsupported by bodies of evidence other than my own (mis?)perceptions.

But I don't think I'm the only one who has noticed this.
How did you get the goodies without signing the NDA?
It's fun. I have played with it both times you have posted.
It looks good and works well.
Google Docs offers collaboration and revision control. native capability isn't much of a "feature" these days imo
Greetings from balmy and insipid Atlanta, GA, home of precious little of interest to the tech industry, especially compared to CA. But it's good for telecom - that's why I kick around.
I carefully suggested that I would go to the press.

Two days later, the stuff arrived on my doorstep.
I agree. I meant that it is not an effective reply to its parent.
Needs a pinch of salt. From Wikipedia: "The Institution has long been a place of scholarship for high-profile conservatives with government experience. A number of Hoover Institution fellows had connections to or held positions in the Bush administration and other Republican administrations".
whats the legal status if i translate it or use 1337speak?
Ok, for the sake of discussion, say newspapers are dead and gone in 5 years. What happens to places like gawker? Will they go out and do their own investigating? Certain blogs have some "real" sources, but they seem to rely more on traditional media for the base story.

As far as I know, the whole nature of blogs like them are to take an existing story and put their own spin on it. I enjoy various blogs (even some in the gawker stable), but if and when newspaper die off, what will they do for content?
There's absolutely nothing decent about this article. Android is "beautiful"? REALLY?
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Of course not, I want a manly name like for example some of the names used by the vehicles in the National Electric Drag Association.

Peruse this list of manly electric car names.
http://www.nedra.com/record_holders.html
National Electric Drag Racing Association.
Mountain View is boring. Strip mall architecture at its best (or worst). Nothing to do there except work, and I hope you like driving, b/c you are going to do a lot of it. At least in the biggest east coast areas (nyc/boston/w d.c.) you can get fine without a car, and public transportation gets you almost everywhere.

Sex life will suck ass (if you are a straight single guy). When you introduce yourself to girls, you are yet another engineer as the other 100 she met last month.

I guess there is a real reason that post card has a dude in front of the computer. That's how your life is going to be.

I there is really nothing romantic about Mountain View. I honestly think weather is the best asset of the area.
Thank you, very good post. Echoes my own thoughts.

It is a response that I have frequently entertained in my mind to entrepreneurial cheerleaders (and even sometimes PG's statements, insofar as they relate to solving truly niche commercial software problems, although I don't think he intentionally suggests that you can do it without the experience by any means).

But yes, I'm in telecom and I see outside consultants and vendors who are basically general IT in their orientation show up all the time and think that they can create better OSS/BSS (operational support/billing support systems) solutions, switch provisioning and monitoring software, and workflow/process management in the highly bureaucratised and rather regulated carrier space (i.e. Local Number Portability).

Then I see them get fired a few months later because they just haven't the foggiest earthly clue what minefield they stepped into. They would have benefitted from hiring at least one omnicurious person who has actually worked for a competitive carrier first.
There are a couple different things going on here.

First, the author makes some good points that without modern tools, some of the things we ask of modern farms would be impossible. There's a limit to the natural productivity of an acre of land.

Second, though, he doesn't address a) whether we're asking too much of one acre of land, or b) whether the things that farmers have to do in order to be productive enough to survive are things that are good to be doing to land, long-term.

The author is essentially saying, "If this is what you ask of me, don't complain about the things I have to do to deliver." And that's a fair point. But let's think more about what we should and shouldn't be asking of him and his land.

Additionally, the author makes a well-argued takedown of some of Michael Pollan's points from The Omnivore's Dilemma, but Joel Salatin — the man whose farming methods are the centerpiece of the book — is conspicuously absent from the critique. Salatin's farm is extremely productive, and sustainably so. That's accomplished by embracing technology (like electric fences that take ten minutes to set up), not by throwing it out and reverting to Depression-era methods.

Salatin's work is more hands-on than that of most farmers, and that's necessary for the type of farm he runs. But it's a model that we'd do well to see spread. (Again, though, it cannot spread widely without some significant changes in what farmers are and are not incentivized to do.)
The Power of Community
I'm not trying to hate on female progress or pretty Israeli women or anything - not by any means! But, really, what is significant about the fact that they are female here? At all?
I get this when I try to open the link -

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What is WebKnight?
AQTRONIX WebKnight is an application firewall for web servers and is released under the GNU General Public License. It is an ISAPI filter for securing web servers by blocking certain requests. If an alert is triggered WebKnight will take over and protect the web server.

For more information on WebKnight: http://www.aqtronix.com/WebKnight/

AQTRONIX WebKnight
Sings of Google becoming more like Microsoft.
Naw, it's fine, as long as the article gets read.
The entrants are between the ages of 18 and 24 because this competition is targeted toward college age students.
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Easy Bookmark of Hacker News Links
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It's amazing to me that these devices don't fail more often. The chemistry behind a Li-Ion reaction is much more volatile than most people realize. It's a bit unnerving to think that I'll probably have one in my pocket for the next decade.
Well, the newspaper has been in trouble for a lot longer than the internet has been mainstream. There was a huge wave of consolidation in the 70s and 80s, remember. Also remember that most newspaper revenue used to come from classifieds. More importantly, most of the readers came for things other than hard news: sports, stock tickers, astrology, comics, etc.

It real sucks to say this so bluntly, as my wife and many friends are journalists, but "real" journalism is, and always has been, a kind of prestige side-show -- like Honda's racing team or Microsoft Research.
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You're absolutely right. I'd much prefer something more manly, like ... the Canyonero. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCzCXyQ-bv0
I think the pricing is more of an issue than the tech. If AP were asking for 12 cents rather than $12.50 for 5 words the reaction might be different. What are the pricing models of these other companies that you suggest are equally at fault?
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So? Programmers aren't the target market, regular office workers who use MS Office are the targets. It's easier to sell a manager on the idea of using Google Docs when you have a list of features rather than just a brand-name.

"Go Google" is a good slogan I think, and the list of features will start to become associated with it. People still think that Google is a search engine company. I think they're trying to re-brand themselves, at least for one target market.
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Puppet is written in Ruby too.

I've yet to see a compelling reason to use Chef rather than Puppet, but maybe I've just not been looking hard enough. Puppet is great, and we're a Python shop..
That's a pretty interesting position. So basically you are saying someone can take the best of all the articles on the web, without any payment (or even a link), put ads all over it, and the person who wrote the article doesn't get anything, just because they are not as good at you at seo?

I know that's the status quo, but I don't think it's fair or sustainable.

The only person who is gaining value from this in my opinion is the aggregator. Someone like digg which links to the original article is fine imho; but if they link to another non-primary source without original content/discussion then it's pretty murky waters.
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And I don't think it even nearly qualifies for the title, "a major offensive".
Certainly no better recommendation, but I know for certain that governments tend to manipulate instances of mass-spread fear, either to gain advantage over the public, or to cover up their incompetence.

Ductape wont save me from a suicide bomber, just as a piece of napkin with a rubber strap wont stand between me and a mass epidemic.
I remember seeing a google docs python backup tool. I think it'd be pretty awesome if there was some sort of two-way bridge for this sort of thing.

(Hm. Let me go check out that google docs api...)
Yeah I worry about the fact that this discussion became an emotional discussion in regards programming languages. There is a lot of evidence that students learn Java, because of the job market. I've worked in a school as Physics Teaching Assistant for a year (while at grad school) and the huge problem in Ireland, the UK and the USA is that people assume that students know best about choice etc. The fact is students are rubbish at telling what they'll enjoy, and most students will shirk away from thp the harder sciences etc. But the responsibility is to keep up the standards of academic rigor. Some wise young Cambridge scholar said to me recently 'When u audit something you change the standards, and the aims of it. League tables made schools focus on results, modularization make students focus on results, the job market makes people look for certain skills' and that is true. My most useful course in Philosophy at University, was a course I despised at the time. Perhaps we need to just let professors set the courses, or we get to the scenario that scares me the most when I get Physics graduates who don't understand what a Partial Derivative is.
A CS graduate who doesn't know what the Lambda calculus is, is perhaps the same?
It's apparently what people want to read.

The key to being a successful author is to write stuff that people want to read.
The article was nice and informative but I immediately stopped reading when I encountered this statement: "You weren’t even worth enough of our time to have one of our $6 an hour Indian callcenter employees sign her name to this."

I think this generalization was unneccessary and was actually insulting. As an Indian myself, I feel bad for this widespread attitude.
So what would happen if a user posted a comment with an excerpt or submitted it to Digg?

Would AP force the sites to take the comment down or Digg to remove the story?
Well, it seems like you won. You get to keep your hush money and still get to speak out.
I mostly get that feeling from the headlights and front.
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"Kannada has a rep of being one of the hardest languages in India."

This isn't really true. Kannada has a (relatively) regular structure.

Starting from scratch the most "difficult" of the four South Indian languages is probably Malayalam - the language of the state of Kerala. (note to hackers - the language name is a palindrome!)

It combines influences of Sanskrit and Tamil with a very unique pronounciation (to untrained ears Malayalam is more "flowing" and "liquid" vs the other South Indian languages which are more "staccato"). It is almost impossible to pick up the correct pronunciation and lilt of Malayalam without some deep immersion.

That said, I knew an Englishman,Graham Hall (now deceased unfortunately) a journalist/author who spoke fluent, accentless, perfect Malayalam. An incident where he chastised a local plumber trying to rip him off (no doubt assuming the blond foreigner was clueless about the local cost of repairs and prices of parts and such) in fluent Malayalam, with perfect slang, indicating what he thought of the plumbers' parentage and ancestry, made the local papers. (The thoroughly nonplussed and chastened plumber refused to take payment for his work and fled as soon as he could!)
CSS is obviously always coupled to HTML in the sense that CSS applies styling and layout to elements in HTML. If you don't have an element to delimit the chunk of content you want to style, you cant do it with CSS. The point is just that the markup HTML should be independent of any particular presentation.

You don't have to use divs, you can use semantic elements (P, whatever) if that is appropriate for the content.

You definitely might not just as well use a table. The trouble with tables for layout is that they have the wrong semantics, which means they makes the page less accessible.
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I think he's saying that gas gets into a tank at the electricity equivelent rate of about half a megawatt.
I used to bookmark HN links but I never went back to them. Now I actively prevent myself from bookmarking and I am finding that I am learning a lot more and spending my time on HN reading rather than just lurking, refreshing and skimming comments.
People are irrational: they are loss-averse; subject to endowment effects; randomly switch between social and economic valuations of their time.
These counterpoints to avant-garde farming sensibilities bear repeating: no-till requires herbicides, but is potentially better for the environment than organic; there is not enough animal waste in all the land to fertilize all the crops in the land; monoculture is efficient; etc. Indeed it would be intellectual complacency to demand organic food without acknowledging these things.

On the other hand, there are hints of complacency in the author's arguments as well. To say that gestation crates protect piglets does not end the argument -- it should cause us to ask whether pigs should be bred that are capable of destroying their own young. To say that fossil fuels cause farmland to be more productive does not end the argument either -- it should cause us to ask whether food is too cheap, which is to say, whether all the external costs of food have been adequately priced in. This is not precious high-mindedness, but sober reasoning in light of the fact that catastrophic environmental damage may result from burning fossil fuels, or that serious infectious diseases may result from intensive animal husbandry.

As for farmers being portrayed as helpless, I would say that they largely are. A farmer can hardly avoid the worst practices of the trade if he is to be competitive; which is why it is only reasonable for the worst practices to be prohibited by law, or driven to extinction by public opinion. Certainly law and public opinion can be incredibly ham-fisted, which is why, I suppose, there's value in articles like this.