skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This strikes me as a mechanistic, black-and-white view of certain aspects of thinking and learning that are, in reality, replete with many nuances, qualifications and caveats. It's a classic case of simplistic, Philistine shotgun approaches.

His disdainful view of the value of rhetoric and vicious hostility to the achievements of high culture, or the use of language in artistic ways to express in more aesthetically appealing ways thoughts that can be expressed more "simply" toward largely semantically equivalent ends (from an empirical perspective, anyway) also rubs me the wrong way.

I mean, sure, saying something as tersely as possible is often valuable and a good lesson to teach. It is also often the wrong thing to do or, more likely than being flat-out wrong it simply has costs as well as benefits. What precisely those are depends on what you're trying to achieve with your writing.

Should one take Dr. Covington's suggestions when writing a novel, an interesting anecdote, or a persuasive expository essay, even if one is otherwise partial to the goals of clarity in the thinking and writing that goes into it? Do most writers we consider interesting, compelling, thought-provoking, intriguing, entertaining, etc. follow his stylistic suggestions? Would their writing conserve those essential qualities if they did?

In short, while his objectives may be good lessons for people that write in unclear, logically incoherent or circumlocutory ways, he seems to tend toward very extreme reductions. It is a necessary part of intellectual development to learn to grapple with the complexity that inheres in many facets of existence, and that includes gestalt complexity that cannot be reduced to very simple atoms as, for example, in the ontology Functional Programming preaches. The world is not a giant software construction.
Yeah, I've had just about enough of these projects self described as the most awesome thing since sliced bread. How about we act like adults.
What is greed other than a way of describing people putting their wants and desires first to an extent we don't approve of?

In my experience there is no limit to how strongly small children put their wants and desires first. Therefore they are, by definition, "greedy". There is no malice in this. There is no awareness of consequences for others. But any adult who acted in the same way would be considered incredibly greedy.
A frozen cast of the artist's head made from own blood
How is that a coherent statement? Even if a "proof" was possible (which it isn't by definition), you could just pick a different set of axioms & arrive at a different conclusion.
That's the best idea in the history of conscious thought!
Good news: Venture investment is back
Not to mention the planet could explode suddenly, so yeah, no one can be literally 100% sure that they can recover their data.

> Does that mean that noone really has a backup?

No, it means in some abstract sense no one can be 100% sure they have a proper backup. But there are some fairly obvious ways in which you can get that number pretty close to 100%.
I've seen this story repeated a number of times now. Murdoch seems to be obviously wrong to those of us that follow this stuff. I wonder however, if Murdoch is trying to convince the 99% of the public who don't read HN/Techcrunch et all that Google is doing something bad here when he doesn't believe it himself.

If not he is simply out of touch.
You forgot phone D that claims to support phonebook access when queried programmatically but crashes if you try to use it. Or phone E that supports camera access but returns all images rotated 90 degrees clockwise.

Both of these are real bugs in handsets with Sun certified J2ME implementations.

Android might be able to avoid these problems if it required OEMs to pass a comprehensive test suite and include a bare minimum of libraries, but since it's open source I'm not sure it can be forced.
One difference is that you could work for thousands of software companies. In search there's Google and somewhere down the road Bing. Everyone else faces a near impossible road uphill. What if the only places you could work is Google or Microsoft? Do you think you would still get a fair treatment from either?
In how many ways do Krugman's arguments fail? First of all, he's preaching to the choir by ignoring any need to even suggest a casual relationship between American economic prosperity and the availability of formal education. Then, he ignores the difference between public spending on higher education and the availability of education overall.

>Education made America great;

I'd argue that individual freedom led to American prosperity, and individuals' choice to partake in education was merely a consequence of a free society.

How can someone look at OpenCourseware, free textbooks, and the self-organizing study groups surrounding the former two and not conclude that education is more available than ever before? Up until WW2, going to college was an unlikely occurrence for the child of parents who had not themselves gone. Was the "American Century" really the result of upper middle class education alone? It was not until the GI bill that college became an odd expectation.

The underlying logical fallacy in Krugman's piece is that attending college is the only form of "higher" education available or even desirable. Shouldn't we instead be asking why lower socio-economic status Americans seem to have adopted an anti-learning cultural bias? Why, as Dean Kamen asks, do we not celebrate society's engineering achievements? It's thinkers? Government subsidy of education is one convenient target of many for those who think more government is the answer to all of society's ills. Never before in America has so much knowledge been available for free from the comfort of one's home (star), and yet he argues that we have some sort of education crisis.

(star) Even at minimum wage, an internet connection only costs at most a few hours labor per month. And, the computer sufficient to partake in this knowledge can probably be found at some upper-middle class curb on garbage day.
This is off on a tangent from the piece about Google and Rupert, but it's worth noting that in the general discussion of the demise of the traditional print newspaper business, few folks point out that the small community papers are in a better spot.

The real issue is that the national and world news has become a commodity that you can get from nearly anywhere. At the same time, the quality of the reporting has declined. Folks like Politico may represent the future of national reporting -- a leaner group of highly talented journalists getting interesting stories out. But why pay to read about some major national news story in paper XXX when you have 1,000 other news sources to read essentially the same content?

Conversely, take a look at small community papers. For example, my hometown paper is online at http://bristolri.com/. These guys are doing just fine (I know the publisher). You can't get their content anywhere else. And you know what? Average everyday people want to read local stories about the new school superintendent, the police report, the controversy over a local land development deal, the letters to the editor from their neighbors, etc. They buy the paper. Local advertisers still advertise. The paper is doing fine, and he's not alone -- lots of small papers are doing OK because their content has not been commoditized.

As for Rupert Murdoch, I think he's going in the wrong direction. If I were him, I'd worry less about distribution rights on my essentially worthless commodity national news content, and I would instead set my target on the big ratings agencies. The ratings agencies played a huge role in the credit crisis -- they basically gave bonds a gold star that were, in reality, crap. They should be vulnerable with some sort of new model. There are few companies positioned as well to destroy Moody's as News Corp / WSJ / Dow Jones with their depth of financial industry content / resources / etc. I don't have any idea of exactly what a rating agency 2.0 would look like, but it would seem like a much more productive and valuable place for Rupert to put his focus.
"From the perspective of copyright law, yes, it can be classified as quoting"

Then aren't we done. Fair use and all that. It doesn't matter what value Murdoch places to them. In fact, why should it matter? Should every teaser be worth $1,000,000? If you let the marketplace decide then what happens? Probably what we have right now, because at least one news producer will think that Google is providing a great service.

"but those 'headlines and teasers' do carry news value"

Newspaper vending boxes have a nice glass window in front so you can read the headlines and choose whether or not to buy the paper. How is what Google does any different at all?
How about post-it notes or index cards?
Is that the only real challenge, raised by email, that comes to mind? I can think of another one right away: the protocol allows people to send me messages as if they have come from someone else.

Another one: people can send me emails that I cannot reply to. ("Thank you, kind sir, for offering me some Tadalafil, but you can exclude me on any future offers.")

By my reckoning, Wave addresses both of those challenges pretty well.

I've noticed that not even talking face-to-face will guarantee that a given participant will judge what to say or not to say. I've known several people over the course of my life who seemed to be born with a missing mechanism that allowed them to sense, from nonverbal cues, when it's time to terminate an interaction.
Apparently that is the "hard problem" of conciousness: How does the mind produce concious experience? The topic of this article is the "soft problem": Why is it useful to conciousness at all?
It's just that one gradient in the background.

I agree with your overall sentiment, though. You know, often times, I find sites designed like that really uncomfortable to use. I can't explain why. Everything is too nice, and too slick. Maybe it's like taking a friend's ferrari out for a spin and being afraid to get it scratched - not sure.
I wouldn't be so harsh. Yes, his choice of words could have been better. But it's obvious that to exert relevant subjective judgment you need careful reasoning. I think what he meant in this context is that you can't use deductive reasoning as the main learning strategy in literature and history.
The economist doesn't like Mr Moore's attack on capitalism?

Tomorrow - the Catholic News review of Dan Brown's latest.
If I recall correctly, wasn't the sixth finger actually a dominant trait?
Your analogy is logical, but there's still a difference. Newsstand and newspapers agreed beforehand the terms of their cooperation, and while they don't pay just for displaying the paper, they do pay certain amount of money for each sold piece, as is was agreed. But with Google, nothing was agreed beforehand, Google just decided that it will display the part of the content and will provide link as a payoff.

But now I don't want to criticize Google, nor do I want to be Murdoch's advocate. I just notice that the newspaper critics don't look at the issue from publisher's perpective, thus making their articles a bit one-sided.
Sculpture made out of Discarded toys by Robert Bradford
The difference is that a business person makes decisions which allocate their own capital, politicians get to play with other people's money.
Do you know the guy who always talk about his big ideas but never got around doing it? Or the guy spreads entrepreneurship religiously and read whole lot of business book but never started a real business? Or the guy who always ask you to quit your job and start your own business but never do it himself?

Wow, this pretty much describes a lot of people I meet at uni entrepreneurship clubs.
Ask HN: Am I lazy, or really tiered.
I've just spent my Sunday doing practically nothing. Just watching some TV and beeing bored. Now I'd really like to get some work done on personal projects, but I really find it hard to get the energy to work.
Every time I sit a the computer I get this tired feeling all over my body and my strength fails me.

Although when I really have to work (like overtime) I don't find it very hard to do it (because I have to).

Am I really "chronically" tired, or just lazy?
Look for the email I just sent you if you're interested in trying to get it auctioned off.
I think the author was actually emphasizing the point you made about "why should I care about some hidden feature which I do not use". The 10% of power users he was referring to are the ones who use far more than the features you stated. Those features you stated are actually general features which most people use, but these are just a small subset of the vast feature set that is available for users within Word. Most users don't even know these "extra" features exist, let alone what they do and how to use them.
Why not link directly to the blog, rather then some other one saying how good it is?

Edit: Based on all your submissions, are you just spamming your own blog?
Should one take Dr. Covington's suggestions when writing a novel, an interesting anecdote,

I really don't think that's what Covington meant.
In many other industries, there really are only 2-3 major employers you could work for. My sister's choices (petroleum geologist) are basically limited to ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, ConocoPhillips, BP, and to a lesser extent Valero. If you're an auto assembly worker in Detroit, your choices are basically Ford, GM, and Chrysler.

My point isn't that you'll get fair treatment (you won't), it's that life's not fair. It sucks to be an employee, it sucks to be a small business owner, and it particularly sucks to be one of the above when all your counterparties are giant monopolies. But as a society, our response to most people in these positions is "Suck it up and deal - you knew what you were getting into when you took the job." News Corp has been on the winning side of the "We're the only game in town" bargain a lot - they just finally met someone who plays the game better than they do. I really dislike the idea of changing the rules of the game because one billionaire is suddenly losing, when we didn't change the game when millions of middle-class families were losing.
Don't forget the nipple. Nipples aren't obsolete yet.
I other words he is probably too valuable to appear on TV.

Then what is he doing on Conan?
There are multiple genetic disorders that can cause 6 fingers. Several, but not all are a dominant trait.

I don't know whether it was ever common in South America. However http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polydactyly says that it is much more common in blacks than whites.
The way one of my teachers described it a few years ago is that we get uncomfortable around beauty without purpose. Beauty feels good, but only when there's a logic to its being there. Often it's better to be plain than to attempt overt beauty, because it feels more honest. And that's how Facebook feels to me. It's an honest design.
The fact that our government is moving towards Open Source to power not only the "Smart Grid", but the lifeblood of our country, is huge. It took some ballsy, persistent work to get this done.
Why not turn twitter into a massive brain for problem solving / brainstorming?
A task would be given to the twitter community along with a deadline.

The community would then collaborate to complete the task via standard twitter communication.

The task could be well-defined such as finding a strong move in a chess game or more open-ended such as inventing a new kind of robot.

As for the selection of the task, this could be done by the twitter community voting on proposed tasks.
What kind of work do you want to get done? Do you have a list of prioritized, itemized goals?
Are ou integrating any local data in your application, such a nearby places/establishments? If so where are you getting the data?
Of course they can, but they don't want to. It's a basic distinction, really.
I recommend either taking a power nap (about 20 minutes), or a nice cold shower to wake your body up and get you refreshed. Also, some sort of outdoor activity or exercise can really get the blood pumping and make you feel more positive and energetic.
I'd argue that individual freedom led to American prosperity, and individuals' choice to partake in education was merely a consequence of a free society.

You could argue that but it is wrong (well, at least the education-specific bit). Mandatory education in America traces back to the culture (in general) and the enacted legislation (in particular) of the Puritan settlers of New England. The Puritans believed in universal literacy so that everyone could read scripture. They passed laws mandating child literacy and required towns to hire teachers to teach the children. This was all mandated and required by the government and in some sense that can be construed taking choice AWAY from individuals rather than giving choice to them. At the time this system and these requirements were unique in the world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puritan#Education
Okay, I'm not the usual person to call out a HN item for not being on topic, but this time I have to ask: "Why?"

Why is this on HN? Someone explain please.
Google is indexing the full text of the stories, and using that text to help figure out when to show the headline and teaser. They might just be showing you a little bit of the story, but they are making use of the full-text of it in a big way. I think that's worth noting here.

What I don't get is why the newspapers don't shut Google down in their robots.txt and then offer up a "firehose"/API a la Twitter that anyone can get access to for a fee. Yelp, Delicious, Twitter, Flickr, these services all have APIs that can be used to incorporate their content into other services, on their terms. I know the guardian and the new york times are working on APIs, but they should offer up a full-text firehose version that a company like Google could pay a fair price for.
"The MUD I started when I was 14 ... I taught myself C and C++ and Java and UNIX networking for it ... eventually ... gave it up."

sounds more like a good learning experience than a failure.
Given the end size, some simple padding wouldn't allowed for that, but I don't think he was trying to behave like a complete nonce.
Wrong topic. :)
I want google to comply and stop linking to AP and Murdoch. See if their revenues increase after less people can find their content.
Consumers.

"At any giving time you are either a consumer or a producer."
A stackoverflow clone for User eXperience
I think even true entrepreneurs go through nontrepreneurial phases.

I know someone who started and sold a company many years ago. In the past two years, he has started three "projects" all with the intention that they might become real companies. He met with failure on all three -- one for personal reasons, one for technical reasons, and one for business reasons.

To those who don't know his history -- but who do experience his regular and excited descriptions of the ideas he's "working on" -- he might seem exactly like a nontrepreneur.
It depends on the goal of your writing. Concise writing with minimized wording and maximized content is good for informative writing. However writing a book or a paragraph to cause or reflect emotional effect does require additional unnecessary words and possible redundancy
I go through phases like this. Like a cat, either hyper-focused to the exclusion of almost everything else or totally lazy. How long the phases last is as far as I can see totally random. I've given up on trying to control it long ago, I just go with the flow.

Making sure that what really needs doing gets done is quite important, if I'm not careful I'll forget about some detail (like filing taxes) and get in to trouble for that.

One of the best ways to get 'unstuck' that I have found to date is to find something small that I'd really like to do, then go do that. Once in a more active mode it tends to expand on to other things.

Not sure if that would work for other people though.
What's wrong with a little skepticism? There is a whole lot of bs passed off as science regarding climate change. In particular the models which claim to predict the temperature centuries form now by modeling a chaotic system with boxes 100mi in width using parameters with +-10% error _each year_ is ridiculous.

Plus what do you want us to do? Spend trillions we don't have to try and reduce our oil consumption by a fraction? Other countries will just burn anything we don't.
I guess the articles authors definition and my definition of being awesome differ.. That is just a way of becoming rich.
Opera does this for its free Java MIDlet browser (Opera Mini). They also resize and recompress images into JPEG.
There's a plan!
Those are more logistical challenges to email and could be changed with technical means. What I mentioned earlier is more social and inherent to email - and moreover, Wave actually would make these problems worse.
Documentation so ... non-existent.
Soros is quoted as stating "The science is beyond dispute" on global warming, and is prepared to invest $1 billion as proof of his conviction.

Do you consider the science beyond dispute?
Do you think it is primarily caused by human activities or not?
How much do you care, and what have you done about it - if anything?
By his own criteria, I am taking the title of his presentation literally and denotationally, in the most simpleminded, straightforward and unambiguous way possible. After all, if he doesn't quite say precisely what he means, he's not writing very "clearly," is he?

He purports to teach me to "How to Write More Clearly, Think More Clearly, and Learn Complex Material More Easily."

I don't buy it.
Sadly meatless article.

I recently created a Wave account, and the real "psychology of Wave" is that the people who created it don't understand the reasoning behind all the different types of communication people use, and so they decided that it'd be dandy to mash them all together with -- horrors! -- live typing.

It's worse than IM, because of the live typing (not an option!), the fact that people can see your mistakes, and you have to click the damn "Done" button every time.

Not to mention, your replies don't necessarily end up at the bottom. I experienced a situation where I was continuing my thread of thinking, and the other person replied to one of my previous points. I could no longer add a message at the end of the conversation, it always replied to their last message. So message B was above message A.

It's worse than email, for many of the same reasons.

It, in theory, could be better for document collaboration, but the interface is clearly designed with IM/chat in mind (even though it's badly implemented), and so it's impossible to use it to create documents. There are many competitors to it for document creation that work better, more fluidly, and with less hassle. (SubEthaEdit, Bespin, etc.)

IM, email, and other media are used because of their inherent differences. Asynchronicity has enormous usefulness, it's not just a relic of "inferior protocols" as Google engineers seem to think. Having multiple channels for different types and flavors of communication, too, is a GOOD thing.

Sadly, it's clear that they had no ethnographers, "design thinkers," or even a person who "gets people" on the team. Their UI widgets may be pretty and make sense in their incredibly narrow context (the mouseover stuff is nice), but sadly, the whole ecosystem is simply not fit for survival.

Too bad.

I can think of 15 or 20 ways that they could REALLY improve communication on the web, if only they had "people people" on their teams.
We should go about this a bit more structural maybe, set up a website to rate vcs/angels ?