skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
His only argument is "X clients should not crash when the X server crashes".

I can't see a real reason, linkbait excepted (very effective linkbait, BTW), for such an inflammatory article.

X is light years ahead of Windows in many regards. I do daily work that would be very uncomfortable to perform without being able to forward X requests over ssh. To do that on Windows servers, I would be required to run a tsclient inside another tsclient. The mere idea terrifies me.
Most "industry" developers can barely use Subversion. How are they supposed to handle Git?
Sexually Transmitted Diseases - Pictures
The data visualization is pretty well done and convincing. That said, I think the concern about nukes that most people have is less about the possibility that it will wipe out civilization but instead, a bit more selfish - themselves/ourselves.
Einstein is famous for being a theoretician.

But the basis of the theory of relativity was an empirical fact: that the speed of light appeared to be constant in all directions. The theory of light waves traveling through an ether (like sound waves through air) suggested that we would be able to find the earth's speed relative to it, by measuring the speed of light. But that wasn't what people were finding...

A lot of the really smart theoreticians today don't seem to be basing it on new empirical facts, they're just making clever theories up. Clever people like to do that. Of course, it's not their fault if there aren't any mysterious facts that don't fit current theories - but that's the place to start.
OK, are we supposed to feel happy that we can only kill less than 1% of the world's population with the available nukes or feel sad that we have spent so much time, energy and money developing weapons, just one of which can completely wipe out everything in a full 15 sq km area?
Java doesn't require getters and setters :/
Scanning headlines
Ha! Believe me .. no you wouldn't. In many circles an MCSE is like an anti-qualification in that unless the person has a good excuse, it is often viewed as a negative. At best it's neutral. And any employer wanting one - steer clear.

In my humble opinion, of course.
It is true that if you simply don't have proper ID -- your wallet was stolen, for example -- it's still possible to fly; I think this involves going through the "heightened" pat-down screening. But you are correct that rant-ish reports posted on sketchy web sites that make broad assertions of constitutional law are generally good sources of entertainment, but not legal advice.

John Perry Barlow (of EFF fame) litigated this issue in late 2006. He lost at every step. What came out of that is that the TSA does indeed have a written regulation requiring you show government ID, but that regulation is secret. Info on his litigation is at http://papersplease.org/gilmore/
You should have checked my profile I guess before you made your claim ;)

Anyway, a few dozen is pretty good, more than most people have.

I figured you were owner of a large outfit that runs thousands of machines.

That's when you start to get interesting statistics.
Facebook on its way to being social superpower
Well, ok. I don't think nukes were developed to wipe out humanity. They were developed to cause the utmost amount of destruction to a single point of interest. I don't think Iran wants 1000 nukes. I think they want one, so they can aim it at the Saudia Arabia oilfields.
Men and women aren't equal. Men can't have babies. Who is going to secure the opportunity for a man to give birth?

And they don't have equal rights under the law. For example, say a man and a woman have sex and make a baby and the man says, "I can't support this child, I think you should have an abortion." Well, he can't make her do that, but she can still sue him for child support. But if he says, "I do not want you to have an abortion." She still can.

Would you argue, that with equal rights under the law, a father of a child should have equal say in whether or not a child he has conceived should be aborted? Do you think a man should have the right to force a woman to give birth to the child, take custody of it, then require her, by law, to pay child support?
Interesting. I just checked, and Brook's The Mythical Man Month makes 5:1 and 10:1 claims (The Surgical Team, first page) and also cites the Sackman, Erikson, and Grant study.
Also see for the general phenomena: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
Obama sinking w/ health care reform?
I think he understands that X will crash sometimes (he admits that Aero does), but what he wants is to not lose his running apps. I don't think that's unreasonable or whiny. Separating out a state representation server that's stable from the rendering server that's pretty likely to crash would be cool. It could also allow for *nix users to have something like RDP, which is one of the _very_ few things I actually admire about windows.

I don't know enough about X to have any idea how much effort that would take, and from being on the X list for the past year, I know that a suggestion like that would be ignored without having code to back it up, but I still don't think it's a bad idea.
Our Mac Chromium Updater: Stay Up To Date On The Best Versions Of Chrome For Mac
For those curious, as I was: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receptive_aphasia (also known as Vernicke's aphasia). Basically, these patients get words mixed up and speak funny sentences like the article.

I too thought it was superfluous hipster talk and got bored reading it. The point of the article in my mind was that after women's fighting for the choice to work, now they want to choose not to work.
When you run svn update and get a conflict on file foo.c, the contents of foo.c indeed have the conflict markers, but svn helpfully leaves you a file called foo.c.mine, which is your originally modified file.

I'd hardly call that "gone forever".
I'll take you up on that if we ever meet. :)
On the last part, I'd caution you to look into that. I had a name that wasn't mine on my credit report and soon other things started appearing on my report that weren't my accounts. A lot of companies that report to the credit agencies just report the last four of your SSN and name. I started getting calls for someone that wasn't me from collections agencies.
Wolfram's 1994 book "Cellular Automata and Complexity" (http://www.amazon.com/Cellular-Automata-Complexity-Collected...) covered most of the same ground as NKS, but was a collection of papers and was a lot more readable; even it was almost 600 pp.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recharging_alkaline_batteries
The amount of info companies like G, FB etc know about their users is very very scary.
i don't get what the eff windows has to do with X server crashes taking down X apps? "Windows does it too" IS NOT an acceptable solution.
What about the total incompatibility between general relativity and quantum mechanics? Each works incredibly well in its sphere, but the "fact" is that they both describe the same universe and there is obviously something missing between them. There have been several attempts to develop a common framework, superstrings just being the latest, but so far none have been really useful or convincing.
It's so easy to do. When I first started my business and got some early success, I thought "this is easy" and tried to do four other businesses at the same time, all bootstrapped from the revenue generated by the early success. That was easily the biggest mistake I have ever made :)

Now I just throw all those ideas into a drawer and ignore them, tantalising as they are!

I can't imagine the temptation given the resources these guys had.
> But I wouldn't say adding a line to your installed apps, adding a line to your urls, and then creating your template files is a lot of extra work.

Of course there are some like this. A large majority however, are not thought out well enough to provide any real benefit without the user writing some other glue. The best example I can think of is django-favorites.

The best example of a pluggable that works well though, imho, is django-tagging. It's well thought out, and works well.
Check out your homepage on IE8! Those little green buttons are a problem.
True. But the point was that X doesn't do it in my experience, maybe I'm unique, maybe not you'll need more numbers. But the ONE windows box we have here has the same problem. So I could make the exact opposite case ("windows crashes, X does not, windows should learn from 'X'") and it would still just be anecdotal evidence.

The author suggests that windows has 'the solution' for these kinds of crashes, that is why saying but windows does it too is relevant, it somewhat negates his assertion.

If windows would really be rock solid I think I would have a different experience, and - sadly - I'm not alone in that.

What the underlying reasons are is anybodies guess, but by bitching about it it is not going to get solved.

His parting shot is:

"I'm sure the blame-game will be played thoroughly in the comments, but it will only detract from the real problem here. The Linux desktop needs a modern, robust, and advanced graphics stack, which makes sure that crashes and bugs remain isolated, without them affecting the users' work. Microsoft has shown us how it's done, now all the X world needs to do is follow."

Whereas if he would simply contact the maintainers of the code with a reproducible error and a stacktrace I'm sure they'd be happy to help.
Be careful also, it may explode while charging
It should be noted that this method only maximizes your chance of getting the best one, it doesn't take into account that the second best is much better than the worst. 37% of the time you use this method, you're just stuck with the last one you meet.

If you want to get as good of a wife as you can, only pass up √n before choosing the next one that is better.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem
Anyone notice this in the comments to the essay: "I am holding off publication of my research until I can figure it all out. But I am on a right track to getting pretty close to solve some of the most puzzling fundamental physics problems. So close that I no longer even bother to discuss my ideas on my own BLOG any more.

Quantoken"

He has announced that he is a quack; this is almost a 3 line distillation of the essays in Martin Gardner's "Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science".
No offense to you personally, but your thoughts here are exactly why Linux won't take over the consumer pc market.

People don't want ot learn what's going on under the hood. I cringe at the thought, but they may not have the aptitude to comprehend it even if the did want to learn it.

Microsoft treats their consumers like their consumers don't know anything about computers. Most of them don't. Linux users are geniuses compared to most computer users and they are very curious. They also know enough about the technology by going through the ranks that they are apologetic about problems that occur. "Oh it's just a bug, here let me restart."

Microsoft on the other hand writes an OS for any PC and any user. Any hardware combination and an almost infinite set of software installed and perhaps running simultaneously.

I don't think people really give them enough credit for this enormous accomplishment. nix is written for the experts who know how to use the tool correctly. Try building a tool for people who know nothing about the tool or what it can do, the power it has, or how to not make mistakes with it. It's really* hard.

*nix expects its users to know how to use it.
What a disappointing article. Maybe there's more meat to the studies cited in it, but the way they're presented here makes them seem borderline trivial, and certainly much less interesting than claimed.

1. A baby sees a box with a lot of white balls with a few reds; then the baby is more surprised to see 4 reds with 1 white drawn out of the box than vice versa. Why does it "prove that babies could understand probabilities"? Why not suppose that the reds are more interesting to look at because they were more rare in the original set? Show a baby four identical bears and a giraffe; which toy will she later prefer to play with?

2. "In 2007, Laura Schulz and Elizabeth Baraff Bonawitz at M.I.T. demonstrated that when young children play, they are also exploring cause and effect."

In other related and equally exciting news, MIT researchers discovered that water appears to be wet. Come on! What parent of a young child hasn't noticed that they're exploring cause and effect, every single day, all the time, at least since they learn to manipulate small objects?
And the study itself - gosh, couldn't it be simpler for a child to press one lever than two levers simultaneously, and therefore the group that didn't know what happens in that simple scenario spent more time with the toy?

3. "These children, who couldn’t yet add or subtract, were more likely to put the high-probability yellow block, rather than the blue one, on the machine."

But if the children learned the effect of each block from the first time they observed it in action, completely ignoring subsequent times and therefore unable to use any probabilistic reasoning, you would still expect the same effect to happen on average in a group of children. In other words, this setup doesn't even prove that the children can distinguish a mostly working block from a mostly non-working one (doesn't sound as exciting as "high-probability", does it?).

Given the way all these experiments are described, it also seems doubtful that the sample sizes were adequate, that there was a control group, that they were double-blind.

Basically all this seems like a bunch of wishful thinking, and a set of sloppy experiments drawn up to reach a foregone conclusion.
The 'bonus' section is a rant against the popularization of systems like IntenseDebate or Disqus.

Is really WP so afraid of these?
This site looks easy to maintain.
I think he doesn't have a full understanding of nuclear fallout. Yes, a nuke will vaporize 14.9 km^2, but it will render a much larger area unlivable. Also, many people will die in the following months from radiation poisoning. There is also the possibility of nuclear winter.
Because a lot of people had never seen it before and would never have seen it with a link from SOMEWHERE. And this is a good place for it.
Is there any practical consequence to this incompatibility?
Yes, X11 does come with a very very basic window manager.

It's been a LOONNGGG time (I switched to windows XP) since I have had to install one, but I believe you can see it by by taking

exec $foo

out of your x11rc, then running startx. Right clicking will get you an xterm, and you can launch things that require a GUI from there...
but i link back to original site...
Thanks for the conficker link
What I learned about business from a soccer game.
Well, several EU countries have de facto requirements for you to carry ID at all times. The US allows one to go without identification for pretty much all purposes. Heck, most countries allow much more leeway for stop and search than the US does (being shackled by the fourth amendment here).

In France, while the law now states that one can prove their identity by any means, it is up to the officer asking you whether they accept your proof. So, if the officer doesn't accept 100 non-government documents and you don't have your ID with you, you're in trouble. Not carrying ID at all times can lead to arrest.

In Germany, every person must posses a national ID card, but there is some leeway about presenting it to a requesting official (it doesn't have to happen on the spot). Nevertheless, most carry one all the time.

In Greece, ID cards are compulsory and you can be detained for not presenting one upon request.

In Italy, you're only required to carry your ID card when outside your local authority, but unless you know all the police in your local authority, you're simply required to carry it always. Failure to present ID can result in detention until you can be identified.

Portugal requires you to present your ID card upon request, but doesn't mandate that you carry it at all times.

China requires every citizen to carry an ID card which will soon have biometric data about the person including reproductive history.

In Spain, you are required to present ID, but failure to do so won't end in arrest unless there's another reason to arrest you and you can request that the officer come to where you store the ID.
That's just the thing. There is a total incompatibility between general relativity and quantum mechanics, but it's currently a theoretical problem. AFAIK there's no current experiment (coming from an accelerator or an astro. survey) that fundamentally requires it to explain its results (ducks). The latest and greatest was WMAP, and inflation seems to explain that data. (This doesn't mean that a potential theory of QG could not make predictions that one could test tomorrow.) Most papers are speculatory ("We think ... Future surverys will confirm (or deny) our theory...").

The interesting thing is that there is stuff that is (indirectly) observed and actually part of the modern framework of cosmology: dark matter and dark energy. Modern cosmology says that for every pound of regular stuff there is 5x dark matter and 14x dark energy, so it'd be important to figure out what it actually is. As one of my elderly professors put it, "I hope to live long enough to learn what this stuff actually is; my friends always ask me what it is, and I my answer at the end is always 'I don't know'." There are current experiments that try to detect dark matter particles (in cosmic radiation I think), but they don't seem to get a lot of attention, maybe if they find something.
How does this article get so in-depth without mentioning a nuclear winter?

The real fear of nuclear war is societal collapse, radiation being everywhere, and the ensuing nuclear winter, which (according to some) could wipe out humanity. Not the direct blasts.
The doctrine of the cold war was MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction. But the point wasn't that we had enough weapons to totally eliminate each other's populations, it was that we could totally destroy each other's economic and governmental infrastructure.
I'm in the same boat (Atlanta). Tickets are cheap from what I've found- $89 each way if I book nowish.
Automattic owns IntenseDebate, so I don't think they are. He is in fact arguing against JS commenting systems that have no non-JS alternative. IntenseDebate is meant to augment the existing Wordpress commenting system, rather than replace it entirely with a fancy Ajax widget that can't be read by search engines.
No. The only times when both quantum+special relativity (quantum field theory) and general relativity are both "in effect" are immediately after the big bang. IIRC the time-scale is something like 10^(-20s) after the big bang. It is only of importance in cosmology and at very high energies. Unless, of course, we're missing something...

That said, we could have asked, in the 19th century, is there any practical consequence of electricity and magnetism being the same force?
Does anyone here know how OSX's Quartz handles stuff? Apple say it's "based on PDF technology". Does that mean my entire screen is a big PDF file?
I agree about the parameters, mostly. Only gotcha is the Influence/Cialdini reference someone rightly made, which may indicate that no change may be required.

I find it easier to think about in terms of 'cost to society.' See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectualization .. which of course I only learned about in counseling. I value it a lot. However, I only skimmed through, but I didn't see a claim that these cases were "because of a lack of counseling."
I may pay higher taxes, but I get a lot of "socialized" service. Seems like a decent tradeoff to me.
Do you have sources for these? I'm not disagreeing with any of them: I'm just wondering if there's a handy country-by-country guide somewhere, or whether these are just ones you happen to know, or the first ones you looked up, or ...
"Yup. Thanks for all the feedback. I’m going to redraft the image with radiation, fallout, nuclear winter, failure rates, poisoned water supplies, crop deaths, deformed babies, and cancer all factored in. After I’ve had this stiff drink…"
I can't imagine going through this whole revolution just to start my own country.
All I have to do is give a toast to King George and pay a tax on tea, a small price to pay to stay part of Britain.
by reading this book : http://progit.org/book/
They don't want to aim it at the Saudi oilfields, they want to aim it at Mecca.
+1

Am I the only one who heard the rumor that we have enough nukes to destroy humanity 8 times?
Microsoft treats their consumers like their consumers don't know anything about computers. Most of them don't.

In the same sense that Delta provides plane flights for people who don't know anything about basic preventative aircraft maintenance, the lazy ignorant bastards.

The computer is not an end goal. The software is not an end goal. Knowing arcane trivia about the difference between the kernel and userspace is not the end goal. The end goal is get your work done better and faster so you can turn off the machine and punch out for the day. Microsoft gets that in a way that few OSS writers do.
I am not saying you should cover it up; just don't publicize it. I agree with you on the counseling bit -- take action, but again, be discreet about it.

Regd, students hearing about it, I am not so sure. One was in CS, the other in Chem, not sure about the 3rd. Precisely because we are in the era of FB & T, many might not have heard about it when compared to a university wide email.
Jeffrey Dahmer attended Ohio State University. Joseph Stalin attended seminary (!). Osama Bin Laden went to King Abdulaziz University.

Man, I'm almost up to literally advocating the devil now.

To be fair, flipping through the famously despised people, a really large % of them either dropped out of high school (Hitler, Manson) or college (Dahmer). I was going to say it was surprising, but really, when your sample set is people we all consider to be really messed up, it kinda makes sense.
yeah i've heard that, and after reading this i still wouldn't be surprised if we do. the effect of radiation clouds, nuclear winter, etc. is far far far more devastating than the blasts themselves, which even according to this guy could still kill hundreds of millions.