skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What about the case where an actor buys what he wants to buy, but that's not what he needs?

Who are you to say what he needs? Obviously by your values, the cigarettes aren't "correct", but it's really not your life to live.

Anyway, I think that Godin has it right as far as he goes. However, a market cannot function where there's no reasonable expectation of property rights. I mean, you're not going to risk investing in the drip irrigation system if you're afraid that the local warlord is going to just shake you down for any money you make, and maybe even rape your daughter in the process. And you're less likely to enter into a contract to partner with someone else if there's no court system to enforce the contract.

This is why so much of the aid to places like those in Africa, where there is no effective protection of property and no established system of enforcing contracts, at least for the little guy, is an abject failure. Much of it winds up being absorbed by the parties other than those for whom it was intended, and in fact makes the problem worse by strengthening those local bullies.

Godin is right, but before his solution can be pursued, we need to stop providing the sort of aid that so frequently perpetuates the bad system.

[EDIT: fix grammar error]
Something's happened to Nickb, but he'll bounce back eventually.
Anybody looking for collaborators in the Minneapolis area? (Email in profile)
I can't get anything on the site to play - it just sits there thinking when I click on a song. Overloaded?

Site looks great though. I'm excited to try it out!
Supposedly a similar agreement between Apple and Google is a factor in an antitrust investigation.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/07/source-apple-and-google...
I read his original blog on advogado today. There's a mention of his father undergoing a mental breakdown, and of his sister having drugs and alcohol problems. It ends like this:

-

"and i go home and draw cats and doctors in space. without the medication. i'm a stiff. an upright. i'll never pass a joint. maybe mj works, maybe mj's death. i have too much mental illness in my blood to find out. narco+alco have turned kooky people i love into obliterated people i love. god, god, god, please keep her alive. (if i'm lucky maybe god will let a horse run by.)

families are a network of lost packets and bad routing.
cause you got spouses on the vpn. it's not all that bad,
but it's fun to moan, ya know."

-

While there are some errements, these themes are far too recurrent to just be whimsical.
How an iPhone App Developer Tweeted His Way to Success
Yes, we should be discounting everything Zed Shaw says, instead of arguing things on merit. I for one think Zed is right this time.
This article is really sloppy and full of errors; it's not worth reading.

Unix had computer networking built in from the start

Bill Joy and his buddies added networking to Unix in 4.2BSD around 1977, 8 years after the start.

Work on Unix began ... after AT&T, ..., MIT and GE pulled the plug on ... Multics.

AT&T pulled out in April 1969, but the development of Multics continued elsewhere; GE/Honeywell/Bull worked on it until 1990: http://www.multicians.org/chrono.html

The syntax of many of those commands, such as chdir and cat, are still in use 40 years on.

chdir doesn't exist on Unix. It's cd.

The idea of users directly interacting with the machine was downright revolutionary.

In a way, yes. But this revolutionary idea was also present in CTSS and Multics before Unix started, heavily backed by DARPA, and the major reason for the ARPANET project that began in 1969. By the time Unix V7 was out (in 1977?), in addition to many timesharing systems, PARC was pursuing Alan Kay's 1969 Dynabook vision, there were Altos in operation at PARC, the Star was well on its way to production, and thousands of Altairs had been sold, not to mention things like the COSMAC ELF, the IMSAI, the Osborne 1, and the Apple ][. All of these had, as their central principle, the idea of users interacting directly with the machine.

What helped this grassroots movement was AT&T's willingness to give the software away for free.

Not to anybody but universities, and I think even an academic license included some derisory fee.

In May 1975 it got another boost by becoming the chosen operating system for the internet.

Not even close. If there was a chosen operating system for the internet in the late 1970s, it was TOPS-20.

The wars are over and the Unix specification is looked after by the Open Group - an industry body set up to police what is done in the operating system's name.

That is a severe misrepresentation both of the origin of OSF and of the current activities of the Open Group.
Take a look at this chart of USCF rating distributions:

http://main.uschess.org/datapage/adult_ratings_2007.png

50% of adult chess players with a USCF rating (who already tend to be more dedicated to chess than most chess players, who tend not to have a rating at all) have a rating of only 1400 or below.

With a rating of 2400 you're getting up around the 99th percentile. You could easily crush virtually every chess player with a USCF rating. Of course, there are chess players who are even better, but they are the elite of the elite.

(Note: I wasn't able to find the equivalent FIDE rating information, so I have to use USCF ratings here. But you can bear in mind that a player with a given FIDE rating is generally stronger than a player with the same USCF rating)
Would you allow (or prefer) your children to educate themselves online before/after high school?

My oldest son is about to be a senior (twelfth grader) in an online high school. We were just online for the school's orientation to this school year. He was a member of the founding class there, so we have a LOT of ideas about the trade-offs in online education.

One way he gains satisfaction for his social drive is by taking most of his eleventh grade and twelfth grade classes as a dual enrollment student at our friendly state flagship university. The university offers courses that would be quite impracticable to offer online.

He is looking forward to a RESIDENTIAL college experience, where he has much face-to-face interaction with classmates throughout all hours of each week. Neither he nor I would consider an online college environment--that would be missing out on too much. Please note as a response to the premise of your question above that some students attend some colleges at HUGE discounts from list price, and at some highly endowed colleges list price for any student is still less than the actual expenditure per student on instruction.

Is anyone here working on an online education technology? Website?

I am. It's very early stage, so I can't describe it with exactitude (because we are still making up our delivery model), but the idea is to scale up my current face-to-face math teaching and build a community among learners who can't travel to my town for the community I'm already building up with my in-person classes.

Life is all about trade-offs. Some trade-offs fit one learner, and some another.
Which is an entirely different claim to make.

Zed likes pretending that he knows _why's name is Jonathan, when in fact every person here who knows _why says it isn't, and when _why didn't like people speculating about his name to begin with. So Zed's a dick, too, and, typical of Zedshawism, he doesn't get his facts right, choosing instead to trust a specious Wordpress blog whose author is both unknown and a dick himself.

_why never said he was Buddhist. _why said nothing. The rest is speculation. So judging his philosophy is a little bit stupid as well.

I agree with your second statement, which is that _why didn't treat his projects well. But Zed isn't talking about other people. Zed's talking about himself, as always. He's no Jason Scott, who devotes his life to archiving other people's work. Instead, without anything to go on, he calls _why a nihilist (only for him it's a capital-N Nihilist), a "Nihilist who was just jerking people around and playing a long con on everyone," which is pretty offensive in my book. He also calls _why a dick (er, he calls "Jonathan" a dick), and he talks about how he's better than _why because he left up his code after insulting the entire community.

I don't know if we'll ever hear _why's story, but I'm going to give him the benefit of a little doubt. I won't lie, though: I think the guy had every right to remove himself from the Internet. I'd understand his motivation in removing everything, suddenly, without warning. Hell, the only reason I still have this HN account is that there's no option to delete on this site. And leaving gradually isn't leaving. Even when he completely vanished people made it a drama: If he'd announced this a week ago, we'd have had a week's extra drama.

So maybe Zed cared about his projects more than _why, but he doesn't care about people. He cares about pretending he knows shit about philosophy and psychology, and, stripped-down theme or no, about Zed's So Fucking Awesome, enough that his ego gets to influence every story he decides to force himself on. That's not caring about people, especially not caring in the way _why did.
Another hint, perhaps going in the same direction: this thread (http://listlibrary.net/ruby-talk/2002/06/00iG41gy) on ruby-talk, where Jonathan Gillette is both using the wgy@riza account and another one ...
You're conflating the niceness of calling someone a ninny and the niceness of kidnapping someone's nanny.

edit: I'm not sure what the issue is- it's clear there is a difference between material niceness and immaterial niceness, and Zed, to my knowledge, has never been materially unnice.
* I have no problem with making sure the kids of the Mexican immigrant can go to college but this guy's arguing for equal treatment for all and that's just not something the Government should be trying to do (because it will profoundly backfire)*

As a matter of fact that's exactly what the government should do. Equal treatment at the hands of the government wherever it interferes is precisely the point of a democracy.

I'm really just being a weenie, though; I understand perfectly well that where you wrote "equal treatment" you really meant "equal results", and I agree with that point.

However, I don't think that was really the main thrust of his argument, anyways. What I got was "If you've succeeded, that's great, but stop being so damn smug about it and don't you dare try to pretend that anybody could do the same if they just worked hard enough - things could have just as easily gone the other way, and the same efforts could have left you struggling just like me."

Which has some validity, in my opinion. Hard work is merely a necessary prerequisite to financial success, it does not guarantee it (and as time goes on, things like college play less of a role since everyone does them, and there are fewer straightforward ways to shift the odds in your favor).

The very rich tend to mistakenly assume that chance played a negligible role in their ascent, which is almost never the case. Bill Gates probably never would have been poor, but absent a few lucky coincidences he could easily have ended up as a senior programmer making a middle-of-the-road wage instead of one of the world's richest men...
He's bashing. Calls _why Jonathan instead of giving him the courtesy of an alias, presumes to know _why's motives, calls him names repeatedly.
"Johnathan, I truly hope you’re doing alright, but that was a dickhead thing to do."

Extremely judgmental especially since open source offers no warranties or guarantees and implicit in this is the very real possibility of the code simply disappearing. It isn't like there is some contract (social or otherwise) that requires people to leave their code up online.
My take is that Zed thinks there are some things that transcend personal issues, which doesn't seem to be a sudden development.
None of those things involve scads of people freaking out and trying to psychoanalyze a man they don't know.

It's not the volume of stories, it's the tone of the comments.
I dont follow or use _why's work, but if used I would be pretty angry with him. Sure with DVCS there I have full commit history, but, now there is no centralised place to send patches, and take the development forward. There is going to be commotion for a long time before things settle down, and if my business and livelihood depended on it, you can bet I would be searching him to give him a piece of my mind.

Just think how would you feel if the Rails or Django guys decided to take everything down. You have the full commit history, if you had cloned the Github repo, so why do you care?
A Tour of my Brain
Flagged, this is Hacker News.

Just because you saw this on Digg or some other news site doesn't mean that it deserves to be on here.
Cancer types and rates have varied dramatically over time in populations and between populations. Ergo cancer is driven by lifestyle factors.
Yeah, I wasn't trying to suggest that I'm above designers or anything. In fact, I really respect good designers, because I'm not a great designer and I know how hard it is. However, the article is basically saying "Look, you shouldn't even be writing CSS, you're a coder! Coders code! You should hire someone else to do that!" This just seems a bit naive to me.
So, nothing then? Of all the plans to 'change the world', that's the worst I've heard.

Kindly stay out of the way whilst the rest of us continue trying to improve things.
I'm not sure what your point is (or why people upvoted this). Are you suggesting that Flickr's Terms of Service provide them a broader interpretation of copyright infringement?

Not at all, but your response betrays the fundamental misunderstanding here. It's not Flickr's job to adjudicate copyright disputes or have any "interpretation of copyright infringement."

No, the point here is that Flickr is not infringing some "fair use" right. That right doesn't exist. The right that does exist is Flickr's right not to host the picture. If someone complains to Flickr that a user's image is infringing their copyright, it's certainly not incumbent upon Flickr to pre-emptively argue "fair use" on the user's behalf.

If Flickr is truly concerned that the picture is infringing a copyright, why in the world would it be their job to absorb that legal risk on some user's behalf? If the user is so confident that it's a fair use, they can host the image on their own server and be prepared to make that defense in court, rather than expect Flickr to go to court and argue it for them.

This is not to say I agree or disagree with the photo being taken down; I'm going to remain agnostic on that point. But implying that Flickr has to defend someone's mythical "fair use" right is nowhere near accurate.
Yeah, that's fine, but if you think of open source as an intellectual gift of sorts, isn't what he did sort of like giving a kid a chocolate bar and yanking it away and throwing it in the trash mid bite?
this is great, i'm a huge fan of electronic music--really good stuff to get creative with. also check out grooveshark and thesixtyone for discovering music.
right, because like 99% of hackers don't watch scifi stuff, right? What better audience is there for a movie like avatar than hackers?
The freaking out I think is ludicrous. The psychoanalysis, well... I liked the eulogy, and I like the postings of his quotes. I didn't mind this post, but I took it more to be a "look at how this guy made a programming manual moving" than a "look at how he let us know what was going to happen." I'll upvote anything featuring the (P)G.

I do find it silly that this has become so fevered in 24 hours' time. I'd find it hilarious if two days from know _why set up his Twitter and his web site again and was all, "Hey guys, I'm back, how you doing."
There are four levels of health: how healthy you are, how much health care coverage you get, how much health care coverage insurance you have, and what percentage of the population has insurance.

Uh, the last three aren't levels of health at all. Further, you neglect "How much stress is in your life, how much exercise do you get, how well do you eat, how many infectious diseases are you exposed to, and how many dangerous activities do you engage in". These are factors that can sometimes determine how likely you are to need specific health care in the future - ie, whether you remain healthy.

But this shows how far the current debate about "health care" is from the question of society encouraging general health and well-being.

Plus read the article! It offer some analogies for this situation.
Nice. I wrote a similar thing last year, powered by my own engine:

http://drupalmodules.com/module-finder
Didn't Zed just have a whole essay about how it's the author's right to do what they want to with their code [1]? _why had absolutely zero obligation to anybody with his contributions.

People should be allowed to take things offline if they choose to, it's laughable that Zed is suddenly high and mighty because someone took their ball and went home.

[1] http://www.zedshaw.com/blog/2009-07-13.html
That's why it's stupid to think of open source as a gift. It's great, but you're not entitled to it.
Just look at what it did to Shaq.
heh, author here, I was going to wait a while to submit this, its a little bit messy right now and theres quite a few things that need worked on, but I wanted to get it up sooner rather than later.

Ive got a lot of ideas for what to do with this, but any suggestions / feedback / examples I would be happy to hear.

some goals

* Fix bugs, few problems with the html being rendered etc
* Clean up layout, its rather ugly right now
* Add other documentation types (user guides etc), and link to other
good sites http://learnyousomeerlang.com/ etc
* Make googleable very important
* User comments, ala php docs
* Make it easy to include documentation for 3rd party libraries
There was a tryruby repository at Github, but I don't know if it was all that was needed to run it.

One of the things that bother me more is the fact that he also pulled the plug on all the mailing list of his projects, which would have been the right place to discuss what to do with the code.
Finally a Good Use for Google Knol: Sharing Information About Flu Research
I don't think it'd be rude to go knocking on his door (if you know it). It's just that it's a major anomaly to cease communications in such a way, isn't it?

NM and HN may be a low priority for him, and that's fair enough, and he can't be doing both forever, so you're not going to be saying "where have you been?" or "what's going on?" it's more like "is everything okay?"

A few people have been left high and dry, and if it wasn't for them, you'd probably back off completely.
A prototype static analysis tool for observable effects
If the libertarians were able to take power tomorrow and started eliminated government programs, you don't think ANYONE would feel like they were being forced to do something they didn't want to do?

It's only coercion when you're forced to do something YOU don't like, but when it's something you like being forced on everyone else that is OK?

There is no possible route to eliminate coercion as long as people within the society disagree.
Well, try it out. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=site:y...
I assume that it has gotten a little bit impossible to contact _why.
My actual stated plan was to worry about my world, which is to say the people and places that matter to me. If people stopped trying to treat the world as a single breathing mass, we'd have less conflation and we'd all be a lot happier.

Don't act like you're on some sacred mission I'm not. You're on Hacker News. I know why I'm here - I get a thrill out of debating people. You're here for no better reason. The difference is that you seem to think that your argument is above mine.
Zed didn't seem to try very hard before assuming the mantle of Internet Behavior and Buddhist Philosophy Police.

[Edit] The downvotes truly boggle my mind. Since when did it become socially acceptable to public dress down a software community member without any facts, evidence, or corroborating information? Zed Shaw is trolling. He has nothing in the game (he 'cut all ties' to Ruby, remember?), no relation to _why, and no reason to be publishing invective from his bully pulpit other than a desire to inject himself into the conversation.

He doesn't know what happened to _why, or what _why has planned, or whether the code is gone for good.
Rupert Murdoch Shuts Down London Paper...
What Kind of a Thing is Twitter?
Thanks much for the article. As a sometimes PokerStars player and fulltime software guy, this stuff (including the Coding the Wheel article set on a poker bot) is super interesting.

I haven't been playing as much online this past year and recently exchanged a series of emails with PokerStars support. Basically, I was arguing for the ability to have a pseudonym instead of a fixed logon displayed as a user and in log files. It seems like a simple step to kind of cut-off lowest hanging fruit for unethical players. Some of the heads-up displays (skins riding on top of the poker stars client) are showing opponent hand ranges based on data mining game logs. This seems like something that should be part of the thinking process of the game, not your HUD tools. No casino is going to let you sit down with your snazzy odds calculator at the poker table.

The official response is that this is info that a player knows about the opponent anyway and doesn't represent any threat to the integrity of the game. Course, maybe I read too many postings from players who are multi-tabling 24 games at once with their backend dbs and HUDs.
Zed's material on Buddhism was a response to John Resig's "Eulogy to _why" in-which he excuses _why's behavior with an analogy to a Buddhist tradition.
Another one:
http://ftp.df.lth.se/pub/scene.org/music/groups/starving_but...

look at the .txt file : both Jonathan Gillette and Kylie Gillette are present ...
Shorter Zed Shaw: "It annoys me that you're all talking about _why instead of talking about me, what I believe, what I did for the Ruby community, and how I left it. I'm going to try and change that."
I don't think the article went into the fact that most of people's medical spending happens in the last couple months of life.

Per capita medical costs will just keep ballooning until as a society we change our attitude and approach to dying of old age. We simply can't afford every called for treatment for every dying geriatric. There has to be some rationing mechanism whether it's the market and individual wealth, insurance bureaucrats, or government death panels.

"Old Age" isn't even a cause of death anymore for statistical purposes. Sorry, but when a 90 year old dies the cause of death is old age, regardless of whether it was heart failure or cancer.
Is it that the costs of running a paper are 2 high or is it the fact that people aren't advertising or is it the fact that people aren't reading newspapers anymore, or is it a combination of all 3?
I would love to see a comments/discussion section for each page. This would be a great way to leave tips/issues you found with the docs. (and could be used to improve the docs)
It also keeps the hacking attempts more-or-less contained to a single known user's account. Handy!
But you can't separate a person from the context of their society. We had millenia of human existence without any idea of riches, so obviously it's not an intrinsic desire. Perhaps it's intrinsic in the context of a society that has things such as rich and poor, but that's different.

(I'm finding it hard to track replies in this thread, so apologies if I stop my side of the discussion.)
Bad analogy. Most automotive defects lead to breakdowns, not serious crashes. Most serious automotive crashes aren't caused by mechanical defects. When your car DOES breakdown, you buy a new one. Preventative medicine and lifestyle practices extends life in lieu of the option of replacing your body
By psychoanalysis, I mean all the people talking about why he did this, what he was thinking, etc. Going on about his tweats and things he put in his books and treating them as "clues" is just one expression of that.