skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure, here goes: the mouse moves the way I expect it to in Linux and Windows. On Mac, it feels like I'm dragging it through sand. I can't find combination of settings to fix it. The OS also has so many cute animations that if feels sluggish. For example, when I log in, I type the first letter of my name, and a password box animates into place over the course of about a second. I can't find a way to turn the frills off. I get the feeling that Apple products are designed to make users feel good, while Linux is focused on letting people work. I think Apple is doing the right thing, I just wish they paid more attention to the power user rather than forcing arbitrary UI decisions on them.
The author objects to a bicycle internally recording state that actually belongs to "the world". The problem with this criticism is that a bicycle is not a good example of something you'd model in a program. The abstraction was taken too literally.
I agree. As a Wikipedia admin since 2004, I'm upset by the increasing hesitance of long-term editors to allow anonymous IPs to explore and edit. One wonders if they can even remember when they were a green anonymous IP editor, adding content or fixing typos, before being wholly sucked into the wiki-world.

I too wish that Jimbo were more stubborn in sticking to his principles of openness. But openness seems to be giving way to consensus. And the admins on IRC seem to have his ear on vandal fighting.

However, if flagged revisions are meant only to replace protected and semi-protected article status, then I think it's a good move. Because it allows people to edit and hash things out, even if the changes aren't immediately shown to the public. This is better than simply locking all users out. One hopes that we can curb the proliferation of flagged revisions, but I'm not sure one will be able to stop its expansion to nearly everything in Category:Living people.
That's quite a nice idea! I certainly hadn't thought of that. I would upvote this several million times if I could.

Another thing that sometimes makes sense is Model-Based Testing (I was involved in the ModelJUnit project - http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~marku/mbt/modeljunit/ - for example). It can sometimes catch these kinds of subtle API misuse issues.

Finally, I did some work on a tool that will statically analyse a program and that will attempt to ensure that action a() never occurs before action b(), for example. I wrote a blog post about it a few days ago:

http://www.plsadventures.com/2009/08/prototype-static-analys...

So it's not like it's an insurmountable problem (people manage to produce software!), but I definitely like your suggestion of using explicit state machines whenever you insist on using mutable state.
"nobody pushed you into the revisionist camp, you simply made a claim that is - lets put it delicately - not mainstream."

I think you just did push me into the revisionist camp. I did not make a claim, except that there are people who deny the Holocaust. I also say that I personally can not verify it, but that is not making a claim.

Merely taking up the discussions means that you will mention arguments of the revisionists, which will end up making you look like a revisionist. Having a question about the HC makes you a non-believer.
Your "better" example is almost exactly true of my car.

According to the dealer, the "Miles before service needed" that shows up when I start it is based on the number of cold starts, not just the number of miles actually driven.
Someone sabotaged the Black Internet network last night and it has just begun to recover. Their entire infrastructure was down and a lot of customers (including my office) were left without any Internet connection until just a couple of hours ago. Feels kind of scary that retaliators could make so much damage so quickly.
Ah yes, I've had that dream too. Unfortunately, the 8-hour, structured workday is in place because it works well for average people. It would be hard to find a workplace where you can say to your boss "I got my work done for the day by 11:30. I'm gonna take the rest of the day off."

Actually, I did know one guy who worked at a place like this in Australia. He completed his project for the week by Tuesday and when he asked his boss for more work, his boss just told him to take the rest of the week off.

Unfortunately, almost every other place requires you to still sit in your seat for the remaining time.
4chan. Even more spartan and insanely popular.
But that ruins the joke for people who get that it's a joke.

Conclusion: plain text sucks. :/
I have read all of PG's essays and have seen some of his videos. This one is awesome. The way he uses the slides or I should say the way he doesn't uses the slides during the talk is how it should be. Whenever, I read about him and see what he is doing, it makes me wish, can I be like him 10-15 years down the line and have my own YC kind of thing in India.
My comment is not specifically about Java. I really think there is a limit to the usefulness of fusing all data to the code that operates on it. I'm not religious about it or anything, I think it's just something that bears consideration in today's software ecosystem.
3? 2:

Make desirables
I meant certain people.
I did C and E and of course lots and lots of incredibly horrible things happened. I have not seen millions of artifacts, though - that would be impossible.

The museums are just emotional "pieces of art" in my opinion. They help me to learn something about the nature of humans.
Interesting to me.
I didn't miss your point. I disagreed directly with your point, because I think you're wrong — probably for Slicehost, and certainly for a sensibly-run company that does what they do.

Aren't they already using a SAN? Aren't they continuously expanding their "pie" as they get more customers and replace superannuated servers? So not USB but SATA: populating the new servers with 500GB disks instead of 250GB, or three disks instead of two. Maybe you know more about how Slicehost operates than I do, and I'm wrong about the above? If so, I'd love to have details.
I thought your argument was specious, but hardly warranting a public apology. In any case, spending 30 days in airports and airplanes sounds absolutely miserable; far from an "adventure". But, hey, different strokes for different folks and all that.
Poll Technica: 5M copies of Snow Leopard? Will you upgrade?
People say there is no law authorizing the income tax. I don't remember the arguments nullifying the 16th amendment, but they have them.
Brought to you by ... (drum roll) ...

Microsoft's Unlimited Potential group!

Yeah! Not the (dreaded) Limited Potential group. These are the Unlimited Group people.
As usual, Jeff finishes by confirming that the whole post was a waste of your time, but this time it's a bit novel: an admission that he's a troll!

http://blog.wekeroad.com/blog/nothing-to-say/
Who on Earth writes a Bike class? I've seen whole arguments about whether Car should inherit from Vehicle and all this rubbish, all because people are taking vague and non-realistic examples, then getting tangled when they try and realise them.

While I agree with your point, I don't think the problem has anything to do with Bike, Car and Vehicle as a choice of classes and that files, windows, threads and connections are guaranteed to be used any better. The problem is that people who use these classes as an example don't put them in the context of a concrete domain. I'm pretty sure that I would write a Bike (or Bicycle) class myself if I was developing a bicycle racing game. So the advice to the authors should be to choose a problem domain (hopefully something fun) and stick to it. Whether Car inherits from Vehicle or User implements Principal depends, ultimately, on the problem domain.
And would the sleazy realtor problem be solved by flash content and banner ads?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justification_(theology)
Beijing loves IKEA, but not for shopping
Fruits Permissible For Diabetes
> Having a question about the HC makes you a non-believer

I did not see you ask any questions, only state your doubt.

> I also say that I personally can not verify it,

Yes, you can. Find some camp survivors and have a chat with them, then wonder how we will remember when the last ones have died.
Agreed. If you had been here, i would have picked up on the body language/intonation cues that it was a joke. But keyboards don't got that :(
Ask HN:How to focus on the best idea?
I've read a good chunk of pg's essays. But what I really want to know will come from a variable amount of sources (ie you guys). If someone has a few good ideas (4+) for intriguing startup's how do you focus on only one of those and ignore the rest?

The problem is that when focus is shifted to a single idea the remaining ideas still seem intriguing and they lure me away as the rough patches hit during the current project.
Let's say that in 10% of controversies of this nature, The Scientific Consensus is wrong and the revisionists are actually correct. I personally don't have time to review every controversy in enough depth to decide which ones belong to that 10%. For issues that I care about I may read enough critical work to form an opinion about whether or not the critics are kooks, and if they aren't kooks, then I may do enough follow-up reading to decide whether or not they are right. For issues that I really care about I may learn enough that I can advance arguments for one side or the other in my own words. For issues that I don't have time to look at, I assume that The Scientific Consensus is correct.

As Carl Sagan said, they laughed at Galileo and they laughed at Einstein, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
Nah, at the bottom should be "GUESS WHICH TARANTINO MOVIE CHARACTER YOU ARE!?"
You've been thinking about it longer and probably more in-depth than I have. There was a project awhile back called localhost that made me think about it. It wasn't as transparent as what I would like to see, though. 4chan also made me think about it. The content there has a very high turnover, and many of the users painstakingly mirror the parts of the site that they care about. It would be nice if they had a tool they could use from their browser to share out their mirrors so that those pages never 404. The next step would be to implement the way localhost intentionally allows poisoning (or as I call it, "controversy") or versioning, and a trust network would round out the implementation to deliver the most-probably-preferred version upon the first visit, with the option to choose. I don't know if this would be a browser extension or a new RFC surrounding HTTP and bittorrent, but it's what I think WebDAV should be.
What's new in Mac OS X Snow Leopard for power users
I know exactly what you mean.

If I start a project however, I will focus only on it, until its finished (thats not to say it then receives no attention). Only then can I start looking at the other projects I want to do - and decide which to begin next.

Otherwise nothing would ever be accomplished.
I don't think it is necessary to make such a big deal about it? You could have just apologised after the thread. You can still click reply and everything.
The tipping point between amateurs and professionals (what happened to average?) is probably not empty platitudes and a sweeping disdain for one's code. And sorry, Jeff, I blog mostly to help people. The rest of the time I'm just looking for some catharsis. I also don't have Google Alerts for my name or any of that nonsense.

So, to the extent that I can become a conduit for other programmers to have that same epiphany in their own programming careers, that means it's working.

That means what is working? Bolding something doesn't mean it magically makes sense. I don't try to make it a habit of engaging in ad hominem attacks, but if everything I hated about Jeff Atwood was something I hated about myself, I'd have thrown in the towel on programming a long time ago.
I agree with the first comment, this is pure sketchy nonsense.

The bike example: If you only consider the bike to be some thing in the world, and only give it attributes based on the world-context, then yes, when you take the attributes predicated on that context out you are left with nothing.

But what about all the stuff you can say about a bike that isn't dependent on the world-context? Color, weight, tire pressure, the wear state of the breaks, how hard the brakes are being applied, the pressure being applied to the pedals, the rate of rotation of the gears and movement of the chain, what gear it is currently in, the state of the gear changing apparatus, the condition of the spokes, the wear level of the tires, whether it has dirt or mud splattered on it, what kind of seat it has, is it a girls or boys bike, a ten-speed or a bmx, if there is a current 'rider' of the bike, and if so a reference to the 'rider' instance.

Now, you can use these attributes in methods that allow you to interact with other objects in the environment. Suppose there is a 'rider' on the bike. The 'rider' can call methods like 'shift up' or 'push on pedal', and these methods might take arguments. 'shift up' probably doesn't take arguments, 'push on pedal' probably does, perhaps something like the pounds of force applied ot the pedal in the forward direction.

Now, the 'world' object still has to exist. Collision detection, orientation of objects in it, as well as speed must be tracked here. The world object would also have to notify objects of 'what they hear' or of other sensory data which must be applied to them. Finally, when 'press on pedal(5 pounds, 2 seconds)" is called, the bike must calculate - based on the current gear ratio, the 'in-ness' of the gear system (perhaps the chain is off etc), how oiled the chain and gears are - how much force is applied to the wheels, and the world would have to notify the bike in response how much resistance there is to that force, and somebody has to figure out what the final state is (for example, if you are off the ground, the wheel would spin freely. Only the world knows if you are on the ground, but only the bike knows how this effects the computation of wheels speed.)

In the end, nothing will be a very good approximation of the real world. In the real world, there are no objects, just amalgamation of particles whipping around or sticking together. What we perceive as objects are just big sticky clusters of particles, and even those particles aren't really objects, it's globs all the way down.

The important part is that you can make really cool stuff if you pick an appropriate approximation to model.
> the idea that you can keep a secret that 100,000+ people are in on is just silly

100,000 would be hard, but 10,000 vetted employees threatened with the power of the state for the rest of their lives is definitely done in militaries all over the world.

Look at the never ending revelations about the early Soviet era. Many aspects of the GULAG system are only becoming clear now.

I do not find the argument that governments can't keep secrets convincing at all. Even if the seal isn't airtight there is often such a highly effective ability to muddy the waters the truth becomes impossible to see through the disinformation.
create a spreadsheet with columns:

startup cost

time to build a mock up

business model

estimated revenue in a year

passion index

competition

comments

then you'll know
Oh yes, those loons. I think they argue it was never ratified by one state or another.

I'd pick a name other than "tax protesters" for them, though, to distinguish them from your run-of-the-mill folks who like to protest that taxes should be lower.
As stated in other posts here, the problem isn't so much the 'bike' example as the 'real world' context. Try using the bike example in a game context. You have to map controller buttons to bike.turnLeft(), bike.brake(), etc. These generic examples make a whole lot more sense in a valid context.
Who do the lawyers bill though, SCO? SCO is bankrupt, and clearly Novell is a much higher priority creditor than they would be. So they only get paid if they win. If they can't win, they're just throwing money down the toilet. No matter how unethical SCO's trustees might be, they're not morons.

Likewise, the incentive for other stakeholders to sue the trustees for not pursuing income needs to be balanced against the fact that they're suing an entity that's, y'know, bankrupt and unable to pay any judgement.
For the specific issue of the Holocaust, I believe the go-to anti-revisionist site on the Internet is the Nizkor Project:

http://www.nizkor.org/
BBS door games: Social Gaming innovation from the 1980s
Excerpts from Goebbels's diary:

February 14, 1942: The Führer once again expressed his determination to clean up the Jews in Europe pitilessly. There must be no squeamish sentimentalism about it. The Jews have deserved the catastrophe that has now overtaken them. Their destruction will go hand in hand with the destruction of our enemies. We must hasten this process with cold ruthlessness.

March 27, 1942: The procedure is a pretty barbaric one and not to be described here more definitely. Not much will remain of the Jews. On the whole it can be said that about 60 per cent of them will have to be liquidated whereas only 40 per cent can be used for forced labor.

(quoted in http://www.nizkor.org/qar-complete.cgi)
Wait, what happened with them all "getting arrested" and everything?
I knew reading the post was going to be a waste of time, yet I did it anyway. That was stupid. Thanks to your link, I now feel (perhaps irrationally) absolved. Thanks!
'Chipotle Ordering' Back in App Store
OOP is not something to do with real world objects. It's just told as this way. OOP is about encapsulating "data objects", related data and programs in close contact. Extending this brings us todays OOP concepts. But it is just data bind togeter.

Giving real world objects as examples hides details. So thinking as physical objects is a bad behavior in this context.
I almost exclusively use bash. Not because of a particular love of bash, but just because that's the default install on Linux (and even OSX). Consequently, I don't know what the real differences are between bash and other shells.

It's possible the author is like me: because he's not familiar with what the differences between the shells are, he can't say what does and does not apply to other shells.
> You seem to be claiming that the laws against meth ruin more lives than meth addiction itself?

Actually, I'm claiming that the laws against meth do not reduce any of the problems with meth addiction. In short, they provide no benefits. However, they do have costs.

The value of a program is the difference between the realized benefits and the incurred costs. The war on drugs doesn't have significant realized benefits. (I don't place much value on the "we're saying that drugs are wrong" benefit.)

> The data we have say differently.

Oh really? What data shows that the laws against meth reduce the costs of meth use? How about the amount of meth use? How about the availability of meth? (Seizures don't necessarily cause scarcity. Jailing 100k meth suppliers doesn't matter if we still have "enough" meth suppliers to satisfy demand.)

If something isn't doing anything about the problem, it isn't a solution, it's merely another problem.
Sony Launches Words Move Me, A Literary Twitter Clone
They risk being sued personally if they breach fiduciary duty. It isn't that the corporation risks being sued if its administrators breach fiduciary duty.
PostgreSQL 8.5alpha1 released
"The holocaust and global warming are not differences of scale - they are differences of kind."

With global warming there are at least four positions argued: GW is real and man-made, and we need to take direct action against it; GW is bogus; GW is real and man-made, but a cost/benefit analysis for allocation of limited resources says we should still spend time and money on other things (fighting malaria, improving education) besides carbon reduction; GW is real but natural, so attempts to change it via human behavior are a waste.

The mainstream media (and many online writers) like to portray controversy (real or invented) as having only two sides: Politics is always left v right, Democrat v Republican (there's no in-between or off-the-2d-axis thinking); health care reform debate is only for or against the Obama plan (you can't possibly be for reform yet think Obama's plan is wrong); global warming is either a man-made issue that demands immediate direct efforts or else it's total nonsense (one cannot possibly agree with the science but disagree about what's the best use of time and money).

There are two issues here. One is how to deal with out-and-out revisionists. The other is how to encourage healthy debate on complex nuanced topics, part of which is to not demonize as revisionists or deniers or obstructionists all dissenters from the orthodox view.
I suspect there would be millions of data points on the bioinformatics corresponding with the taking of that quiz.
Aboomba tests a new fundraising strategy: Get married
Aug. 25, 1991: Kid From Helsinki Foments Linux Revolution
These are principles many of us have been telling bosses, clients, readership -- anyone who would listen to us -- for quite a while. They're principles that get ignored every time they're brought up, though. It's awesome that Craigslist is demonstrating that they work, and terribly sad that so few people seem to be taking notice.
Also if the killing was planned from the beginning

Excerpt from a 1922 magazine interview with Hitler: "Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews. As soon as I have the power to do so, I will have gallows built in rows - at the Marienplatz in Munich, for example - as many as traffic allows. Then the Jews will be hanged indiscriminately, and they will remain hanging until they stink; they will hang there as long as the principles of hygiene permit. As soon as they have been untied, the next batch will be strung up, and so on down the line, until the last Jew in Munich has been exterminated. Other cities will follow suit, precisely in this fashion, until all Germany has been completely cleansed of Jews."

Excerpt from Hitler's speech to the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, seven months before Germany invaded Poland: "Today I want to be a prophet once more: if international finance Jewry inside and outside of Europe should succeed once more in plunging nations into another world war, the consequence will not be the Bolshevation of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe [die Vernichtung der jüdischen Rasse in Europa]".

(quoted in http://www.nizkor.org/qar-complete.cgi)
Yeah... It's a good book, but this reads like some kid's book report.
government should feel wrong ;)
why is it weird to say you work for the government if they sign your paycheck?
I'm from Pittsburgh, and if anyone who's doing this wants to drop by, I'd love to say hello. Just shoot me an email, it's in my profile.
http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/five-essential-phone-scre...
I can see that most of us here at HN do not like most of Atwood's posts which are silly and ridiculous. However, I can also see that almost all of his posts earn more points than some other good articles. Wondering why ?!

By the way, this link has just 2 points now !!
How about doing this in an email? You know, apologising to the person and not at the pulpit?
The only one I where I can confidently say the deniers are wrong is evolution theory . . . I can even run experiments . . .

Maybe you have an excessive need for certainty. Most people who enjoy thinking about these sorts of issues at all are willing to come to a conclusion without running their own personal experiments or doing primary source research.

You could consider making your views less informed and more tentative. It's not so bad if you have some wrong opinions. Almost certainly you do, some on subjects you've never even thought to question.

That said, you might find lesswrong.com and overcomingbias.com interesting places to hang out.