skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was not being hyperbolic. In your first post you specifically indicated that you interpreted his meaning as racist. If your concerns reflect reality, it is a real risk and should be treated as such. My contention is that your concerns do not reflect reality, and that it is unlikely that very many reasonable people at all would have mistaken this for racism.

'Urban slang' is pretty clearly associated with a particular socio-economic group (regardless of if you wish to acknowledge that or not)

Still, that's not a very convincing argument. You say yourself that you don't believe Schiller was referring to race (contradicting your initial statement), so why should I? Because in some other context it could be used to express something racist? My Uncle Tom likes Oreos as much as he likes Twinkies. Does that make me racist?

I did not and do not claim that "urban slang" could not be interpreted to have racial connotations. I do claim that in this case you have to willfully distort the author's intent in order to read it the way you expressed in your original post, and that characterizing it as the author's mistake is unwarranted.

But I am a little concerned that it might point to a deeper, socially embedded racism

Define "socially embedded".

If the same idea can be expressed in two different ways, one of which is considered vulgar, what, exactly is driving that categorization?

This is ambiguous: you're implying that racism is driving it just after stating that you don't believe that was what was meant. You're reading something into the text that is not there, and not citing any other reason.

I do think a lot of eyebrows were raised by it, yes.

What does that mean? My question was unambiguous. Your answer is not. You're saying you think people both did and did not interpret it as racist.

I think it's a little ironic that we're talking about whether he should have to take care in the words he chooses to use

We aren't talking about whether, but of how much. You appear to support self-censorship even while seeming to acknowledge that few if any in the audience actually regarded the term as reflecting racist intent. I do not agree. I think that is unreasonably excessive in the majority of such circumstances.
I can't tell if you're serious. If you're trolling, I applaud you. You got me. Now please leave.

If not, let me state unambigously that you have completely misconstrued what I said, ascribed opinions to me that I do not hold, and expressed one of the most horrifyingly totalitarian ideals I have ever had the displeasure of reading. I'm hesitant to write a more detailed reply because I'm not sure whether you've just fundamentally misunderstood what is being discussed or whether you're completely out of your mind. Do you truly wish for people to be imprisoned (or however else excluded from civilized society) for using parental controls on a prodcut they give to their children?
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Neat idea but I think it could easily devolve into youtube grade flaming in the comments.

Threading or (at the very least) engadget style comment grading, modified so that the arguers can't vote each other down, would be top on my priority list.

Some way to divide the argument by paragraphs and vote up and down each one might be nice, as well.

IMO it's difficult to boil down any comment worth making into an integer, let alone a boolean, particularly if controversy is involved.
What's In a Design, Apple?
Here is the audio version as an Mp3: http://blip.tv/file/get/Building43-FiresideChat738.mp3
The Microsoft Reaction Experience
hm... time to get coding :)

maybe we can 'memory map' some of it ? Subsequent locations in memory that you plot to a screen on over modificiation (b/w would be ok in this case I guess), a bunch of bitfields that get 'latched' whenever a key is pressed that the brainfuck mainloop has to walk by every now and then, resets and uses as branching points ?

That should do it.

It doesn't need blocking io, see. Polling latched inputs is the way the machines of old did it, it's a bit less efficient but it works.
I don't think that people provide input so that the sites they like survive. I don't think people vote on Digg because they realize that if no one votes, Digg dies. I think people just like to share their opinions and express themselves. If a restaurant pisses you off, then of course you want to tell other people to avoid that restaurant, not just to help them, but also to spite that restaurant.
Right on. I go to a large state school that a huge number liberal arts students. I've never met any students in the sciences (esp. not computer science) who have held unpaid internships (unless you count research for credit), but I know several students in the liberal arts who are doing internships completely unpaid. I even knew one who was living in London for the summer out of his (or maybe his parents') own pocket! I can't fathom the idea. Maybe when you have to /pay someone else/ to let you work you should take the hint that the market doesn't value the labor you are doing. But hey, we are talking about liberal arts majors here! (I kid, I kid...)
Hah! I remember that... I was still a kid, I really wanted to write a music composition program. One attempt after the other, this giant, monolithic piece of spaghetti. I just could not be done. Around the 700 or 800 line mark I lost overview and it would grind to a halt forever more subtle bugs to fix.

This went on for weeks, maybe even months.

Then a friend told me the magic words: "structured programming". I went to the library and read a book (I forgot the title, I think it was by Wirth).

Within 3 days I had it up and running.
SLAs aren't necessarily 100% guarantees. It's not unreasonable to expect that a Broadband provider will provide advertised speeds some reasonable percent of the usage time - say "100% of advertised speeds 95% of the month, < 75% of advertised speeds for no more than two hours/month" - or some such SLA. I'd be willing to pay a bit more for those assurances.

Suggesting that Broadband providers should be held accountable, at least to some degree, for their advertised speeds doesn't cut it with me.
C can throw exceptions. the call is 'raise'.
> My bet is that they know what they're doing.

Apple has become a company that stands for censorship. I hate to be associated with that.

The fact that the censorship is a conscious decision by Apple makes it even worse.
Does it play nicely with clicktoflash?

http://rentzsch.github.com/clicktoflash/
Didn't the woman who wrote Harry Potter do the entire first book in a coffee shop? Well, at least thats the PR! Just think - we might have no Harry Potter if her local coffee shop (cafe) had kicked her out. I'll leave that up to you, if you think it's a good thing!
Rails + Flex
My last name is McKenzie. Kalzumeus is a burrito-loving dragon from a long-forgotten RPG campaign.

My business plan in 15 seconds: Find a problem that I could fix which hit a group of people I knew I could address. Develop the minimum salable fix for the problem. Sell it. Then start iterating.

Three thousand commits to subversion later...
I'm not sure whether the makers of the current OS get to determine what the next OS is.
Weird stmt. Its like saying 'Compared to Ferrari, most cars are piece of junk'!
I was just stating that Theo will undoubtably turn up with some hilarity. He will most likely end up whipping the anoncvs mirror administrators into shape.

I do agree with the article.

At the end of the day, it's about as bad as people who used to mess up their sendmail relaying a few years ago. It in no way affects the credibility of OpenBSD, which is how it is worded and discussed.
Pardon me for mixing you up with a burrito-eating dragon, Mr. McKenzie! I am, none the less, a tremendous admirer of yours, and think you represent very well the highest chance of success for a solo hacker to make a part-time business viable. I reckon you're actually the case study on how to do it to profitability with minimum risk and hassle.

The other one to look at would be Peldi Guilizzoni's Balsamiq: http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/ - but he happened to find a really good PR/blogging mix that hit right at home with his audience. I reckon that's a fantastic way of doing things in many markets, though the Bingo Card model would work in almost all direct-to-consumer markets. Fantastic stuffs, and congratulations and thanks for sharing the knowledge.
At the risk of being ridiculed because it's not trendy: C#, ASP.Net Web Forns and SQL Server 2008.

It's all down to the tools for me.
From experience (my sister-in-law and a couple of other family members), they have a high return rate. People expect them to behave like a full blown laptop but they don't.
No, and I think you're retreating from your argument because you can't defend it.

You asked: "Who do you think pays for medical research and why?"

It appears everyone, including the US, pays for medical research via taxation and government directed research and this dwarfs private investment on a global scale (absolute or per capita), even in the only first world nation to avoid socialized medicine (i.e. the US).

You didn't challenge this interpretation when the other poster said:

"Even in the US, the largest research funder is in fact the US government, just like every other country."

Yet, you suddenly suggest that you meant:

"The US pays for a lot of medical research because it is a populous first world country" which is true but utterly facile.

Why don't you answer your own question? Who pays and why? Maybe then we'll be able to figure what you're actually trying to say and how it relates to the topic being discussed.
Great site, well designed, neat. Concept is good. But I wonder how you can/should sustain the avg readers/writer's interest to come back to your site again and again. I love Scribd's ePaper viewer, and I believe you can add that to your site as well. Providing a pdf download should be optional and should be upto the creator to let people download. Scribd viewer lets people stay on the site, and then you can throw related essays, related categories, etc outside the reading pane! Build a community around the writings. If I were a writer, and am willing to publish my writing free on your platform, (at least) I would like to create a following around my writing. Letting people download the PDFs doesn't solve much purpose.
That's correct, I'm a free market guy and I try to include in each example the upside of being open. Apple is starting to frustrate a lot of users with the closed nature of their ecosystem. We're all informed enough to know that a closed system can be more streamlined and easier to use, but using ease of use as an excuse to kick out competing products is a sure way to slow the technology industry down.

Also, I'm not saying Apple should do everything the way the Slashdot, digg or engadget crowd wants them to. However, something as simple as carrier choise, browser choise, mp3 player compatibility and how you spend your "data minutes" seems an easy thing to do for people.

It's easy to love Apple products, but it's becoming hard to support them--if that makes sense.
name three things that have risen in popularity or frequency in the past thirty years

Rubik's Cubes, international flights and home computer repair accidents.
Well, as far as I'm concerned you're very welcome, whatever your gender. My curiosity was mainly in the ratio, not in identifying people, but I'm quite surprised at some of the developments in this thread. (in a positive way).

It shouldn't require you to be stealthy to be taken serious but I fully understand.

In my life at least one female programmer has had a pretty good influence on my development, here's to you Jenny Yip, wherever you are today :)

I'm part of a group of people that are involved with alternative energy, one of the guys there called himself 'fungus'. Everybody assumed him to be a male in is 30's, imagine the surprise when I found out he was a 13 year old whip-smart kid. Holding his own in a community where the average age is probably around 40.

If you're in that situation it's probably quite comparable to what you have to put up with. People will not give you 'full weight' because of who you are, instead of letting your creations stand on their own.

For a long time I thought about how to set up an abuse free forum, and my naive idea to require people to register with their real name went out the window when I realized that this guy, who is one of the best contributors there would not have joined at all.

One day...
Short: we use a Django frontend to an Erlang backend.

Long answer: we used Django because that's what I knew best, but we're going to switch to Pylons because it's more flexible (being a so-called "glue framework") and has less dependency on a database (tried writing a custom authentication backend in Django without a database? Good luck).

So Django is great if you have a database; less so if you don't (I guess that's the whole "full stack" thing).
That's what I figured.

Great podcast with Joel and Jeff, BTW.
yeah but don't eat too much of it.
The reason I actually put that up there is because people were taking it without permission/credit/linking/etc.

So, I'm starting to give up on actually having these things on my site and letting folks take it as long as they give credit (and some SEO juice).
Can it? What evidence is there that the placebo group or the calcium group were vitamin D deficient? One group taking vitamin D beyond their normal daily requirement does not mean the other groups were deficient.
Why is the focus on money here? The impact of the technologies they create dwarfs any monetary contributions. What's the value of their technology on top of what the obvious sellable product is? That is, how much more valuable is their product to the user on top of what the obvious product would have been?

It affects some products more than others. Productivity tools have high leverage, as do protocols and standards, because they are means to ends. End-user products like food, music, sex (for fun, not reproduction), and housing tend to have little leverage because they are closer to the ends. That is, more of them increases wealth.

iPods are good because they let lots of people enjoy more music than before. However, it is probably on slightly better than the obvious product and in any case, the possible impact of a media player is limited.

UNIX (or HTTP or C) on the other hand is non-obvious and a fundamental tool impacting work higher up the value chain. These things have enormous impact on wealth because of the knock-on effects of the tools and they afford. Innovation and development is approximately exponential and, rarely mentioned, prone to get stuck in local maxima. Here be dragons. Would we have as powerful an Internet if it weren't for a few key UNIX design decisions? What would a Microsoft designed world-wide computer network look like?

Try this: how much time do you think people spend trying to align things in PowerPoint that could be made a snap with better tools (maybe 2007 fixes this)? Let's say 2 min per presentation. With an estimated (by Microsoft) 30 million presentations a day, of which say a tenth are newly created, that means 6 million minutes, or about 11.5 man years, are wasted. Every day. Because PowerPoint doesn't make alignment easy. Not to mention that it may limit people's ideas. What if other Microsoft products have shortcomings more severe than those in PowerPoint?

Microsoft products often strike me as worse than the obvious product, prospering because of lock-in/short-sightedness.

By giving his money away, I doubt Gates could ever make up for the value creation Microsoft has blocked. He would have to find something with enormous leverage that would otherwise not happen -- don't get your hopes up. Thus, though I hope he proves us wrong, Gates is down in my book as one of the bad guys. Things are looking better now, but we've lost years of exponential innovation. I bet Kurzweil is annoyed.
I think non-technical people are easily distinguish between a 10 inch and 12 inch screen, but do not understand that resolution is also important. The Mini 10 (not the 10v!) has the option for a 1366x768 screen, while the Mini 12 has 1280x800 screen. Resolution-wide, the Mini 10 is "bigger."

Part of this confusion might be because of Dell's pricing. When I was looking earlier this summer, the Mini 12 cost more than the Mini 10 (with the high-resolution screen), despite having similar hardware specifications.
"It's not vitamin D. It may be vitamin D or it may be vitamin D + calcium. Why didn't they have a group that was supplementing only vitamin D and not calcium? I don't know, but since they didn't test that, there's no way to know that it is just vitamin D."

The first rule of scientific criticism is: always read the paper.

The classic clinical manifestation of a Vitamin D deficiency is rickets -- the direct consequence of a calcium deficiency. This is because vitamin D is a known enhancer of calcium absorption from the intestine. All other benefits are hypothetical. In light of this information, the researchers controlled for the variability of dietary calcium across participants in the study; they chose to supplement calcium for everyone up to the highest US RDA value.

Does that mean that it might be the combination of calcium + vitamin D that conveys the greatest benefit? Well, yes, in fact, that turns out to be true. But since it's trivially easy to supplement calcium and vitamin D simultaneously (and nearly every vitamin D supplement that you can buy includes a calcium supplement), clinically speaking, it makes no difference.

But most importantly, the title of the original paper is "Vitamin D and calcium supplementation reduces cancer risk: results of a randomized trial." (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17556697?ordinalpos=1&...), suggesting that the authors are well aware of the relationship between the substances, and are actually interested in the combined effect of calcium and vitamin D. They wanted to know if calcium + vitamin D had a greater cancer-reducing effect than calcium alone, and found that it did.

As for your other critiques, the authors state right there in the abstract of the paper that the results are for postmenopausal women in Nebraska, and they don't try to overgeneralize. But since the relationship between vitamin D and calcium are the same for men and women, it's really not unreasonable to suggest that the results could apply more generally -- even if you had to adjust the nutrient levels to fit the age, sex and location of the patient.
Ten Great Twitter Applications for BlackBerry Phones
I can't wait for wimax. anyone up for a betting pool on which telecom will go whining to the FCC and congress about"unfair competition" first?
Which is why I said "command of the language". Good grammar is merely the starting point.
kohana, from my 3 weeks epxeriences, its pretty lightweight and provide most of the features that django provide.
Two problems:

1. Market: People don't know what they want til they see it.

2. Development: You don't know what problems your idea has (nor their solution) til you see it.

It's an entrancing dream to anticipate all this stuff, which is what corporate new market development and new product development is all about. It's hardly effective (that's not how that corporation began anyway) - plus they are better at it than you.

Build your idea, hacker. Build it, and gaze upon reality!
I thought the whole point of netbooks is that they are damn cheap...
For years I had a big poster on my wall showing diagrammatically the the main complex of biochemical pathways of the human metabolism. Awesome and humbling to contemplate.
Daily it reminded me that cause and effect relations in this system cannot generally be simple.
Vitamin D seems to be good for general cancer prevention.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_D#Role_in_cancer_preven...

Otherwise, this is fun! :-)

"High Calcium And Vitamin D Intakes Associated WIth Higher Risk Of Cognitive Impairment In Elderly"

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/05/070501115230.ht...

"Low Levels Of Vitamin D Link To Cognitive Problems In Older People"

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090122093918.ht...

But I guess most kids here below 35 don't think about using the keyboard after 50. Yet. :-)
Checked out your site. Have you tried going after a niche in the DIY website creation biz to differentiate your offering?

A thought...why not go after restaurants? Have a way to upload menu easily, a location with map info, maybe even online reservations. Fully outsourced, customizable and charge monthly.

When you do go outside, drop by restos and show them your screenshots (done in PS) and get real feedback. You can probably hit 10 restos in a day.

Note: this is just top of my head -- not sure if anyone is even doing this.
You mean from the milk? Milk doesn't have anywhere near as much as is suspected to be necessary.
great idea!! and to reach 'ramen profitable' in a very very quick way (and a lot more tasty) offer to be paid partially in food!
Predicting the Unpredictable
The point of a netbook is not a single point, it's multi dimensional.

A netbook:

- is affordable

- is small enough to take with you

- is light enough to carry with you without being a burden

- should be able to use any kind of internet connection that you can find and should have a backup 3G network in case nothing else is available

This makes the target market range from schoolkids all the way to business people. It's a pretty good concept.

I had one of the original compaq aeros, I absolutely loved that machine and then that whole form factor was discontinued. I had to wait for many years until something comparable came up (the libretto series just wasn't), and I can tell you I'm very happy with my little acer+3G option.

Wherever I go in europe when I get a page I can do whatever it takes without searching for an internet connection. The thing even fits inside the glove compartment of my car.
One clue is here:

"Previously, scientists at NIST and elsewhere have been unable to coax any qubit technology into performing a complete set of quantum logic operations while transporting information without disturbances degrading the later processes."

Definition of a qubit: "A quantum bit or qubit (pronounced /ˈkjuːbɪt/) is a unit of quantum information." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qubit)

It seems that the problem was getting the initialised qubits to do anything at all.

However, it seems that they now have a process to create a barebones processing unit and stack (if I understand the following correctly)

"As a result, the NIST researchers have now demonstrated on a small scale all the generally recognized requirements for a large-scale ion-based quantum processor. Previously they could perform all of the following processes a few at a time, but now they can perform all of them together and repeatedly: (1) “initialize” qubits to the desired starting state (0 or 1), (2) store qubit data in ions, (3) perform logic operations on one or two qubits, (4) transfer information between different locations in the processor, and (5) read out qubit results individually (0 or 1)."
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