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This is why he's winning. People are fed up with the PC police and their purging of anyone with "toxic" ideas.

The world will not be stable with that sentiment for long. At some point, the "global citizen" will seek to express their political will; a will that will inevitably conflict with the will of the Nation-State.

To do that, the "global citizens" must have sponsors, leaders, and some way to organize. Would-be sponsors, leaders,and organizers will see the potential for gain here and will step in to sponsor, lead, and organize the "global citizens." And at that point, a central world government has been seeded and will begin to grow.

Alternately, people will remain organized in Nation-states and the "Global Citizen" mentality will fade away since it won't have any relevant meaning.

And ultimately, they'll discover that the "global human community" has as many differences as similarities and not all of those differences are compatible.

Or write it to a user-accessible log file.

Opaque error messages that fail to accurately describe the problem out of a misguided desire to coddle users drive me bonkers.

This is only because this example exaggerates a few obviously valuable assets that are difficult to measure in terms of market value.

(a) The Harvard MBA itself, both the "piece of paper" and the experience itself, has no conveniently measurable market value and thus doesn't count as an asset. Yet, it obviously is worth something.

(b) The raw human potential. A Harvard MBA graduate is going to be literate and is likely to have many cognitive advantages vs a "mumbai slum dweller". The potential has unmeasured value, degree or not.

(c) Social Capital. This not only includes the support networks of family and friends that tend to support new graduates as they bootstrap their careers, but also the general trust of others in society. For example, a Harvard MBA is not likely to have an unreasonably difficult time finding decent roommates in the Boston area, even if they don't have any immediate friends or family available.

College degrees are the big investment where the value of asset is essentially not measurable (at best you can look in hindsight). And everyone has raw human potential and social capital, but then everyone has differing amounts. For the other extreme: take away the degree. Replace the cognitive advantages with a mental disorder (say, an addiction or a psychiatric disorder). Remove the social capital. Take all that away, and you'll be more likely to find a homeless person or someone heavily dependent on the government to survive.

    import json
    import sys
    sys.stdout.write("%s\n" % json.dumps(json.load(sys.stdin).get(sys.argv[1], None)))

    $ echo '{ "value1" : { "sub-value": 5 }, "value2": 99 }' | python json-test.py value1
    {"sub-value": 5}
    $ echo '{ "value1" : { "sub-value": 5 }, "value2": 99 }' | python json-test.py value2
    99

The fact that you have to pick a convention is the crux of the issue. "Easy" is a subjective term, but the fact is there isn't a direct mapping between XML And JSON.

It means that if you're using XML and converting it into a programming data structure, you have to make a bunch of decisions about how to handle the XML. It means that if you're converting a programming data structure to XML, you have to have a bunch of specific rules for how to generate that XML.

With JSON, you only have to make those decisions if you need to use data structures that aren't supported by JSON.

First, a quick disclaimer: Apache conf format is not really XML. It leverages XML-like syntax but it's mostly not XML and avoids most of the serious problems that XML tends to bring, which I'll explain in more detail below.

XML was designed to provide structure to documents, it was not designed as a configuration syntax or a data serialization format. XML is meant for a document that already exists in its own right as a document, where the XML is added on as a layer to aid automated semantic understanding of that document's structure. It is not meant to directly represent programming data structures. As such, XML tags are designed to pop out and be visible from significant amounts of text that is not metadata. When there's more tags than text, as is usually the case when you try to use XML to write programming data structures, XML winds up being hopelessly verbose, and it's hard to avoid errors writing it (like misspelling end tags, forgetting a slash, putting end tags in the wrong order, etc.)

When not used for its intended purpose, XML winds up being hard for humans to write directly and hard(er than yaml and json) to write programs to parse it. In yaml and json, there's a standard, mostly direct mapping to common data structures in most high-level languages. With XML you have to make a lot of trivial decisions to make use of features that weren't designed for what you're trying to do. The most obvious examples are the distinction between attributes and tags: what does each one mean? What do tagnames represent? What do attribute values represent? What do attribute names represent? How do you handle CDATA that has more XML in it? XML is designed to elegantly handle something like this:

    <A>first section <B>marked up section</B> second section</A>

    <VirtualHost>
       <ServerName>my.server.domain.com</ServerName>
       <DocumentRoot>/var/lib/www/my.server.domain.com</DocumentRoot>
    </VirtualHost>

And that example highlights another problem with XML which is a flat out lack of support for common programming data types such as lists and integers. In the example above, how would you know that "<VirtualHost>" represents an item in a list, but "<ServerName>" should be a key in a dictionary? XML doesn't help you there, every parser decides for itself.

Note that it's not really fair to call Apache's configuration language "XML". Apache relies on XML for some structured data in its configuration file, but all the individual directives are parsed separately from the XML.

Fail at what? What were they were trying to "fix"?

> Yes, setting up a reverse proxy looks simpler with nginx or haproxy for that matter.

People don't choose nginx and haproxy because of the configuration syntax, they choose it for performance and features.

In the same interview he also admits that, in the U.K., incarceration is not a major issue with huge class and racial implications as it is in the U.S.. Thus, as Brits, they may see the world in a different way.

Note the presupposition: Incaceration in the US has class and race implications. That is the dogma. That is the "message." The next several paragraphs discusses the state of prisons in the US, linking to biased sources with sensational language like "out of control."

Now, you could claim that this tangent is needed to establish the relevance of the subject, but the manner it is presented strongly points to the fact that this is simply a propaganda payload. There's this:

The America justice system disproportionately and purposely targets minorities, which make up about 60% of the population behind the bars, according to the Center for American Progress.

Again this is propaganda. Question-begging. This isn't part of some kind of intellectually open enquiry about prisons, video games about prisons, or even prison simulations. This is one-sided preaching about a subject completely unrelated to videogames.

> Well, I didn't write the article; I merely said I think the author has a point

You did phrase a portion of comment in a way that took responsibility for the idea. Obviously incarceration in the US is racist, right? We're talking about how a videogame designer chose not to focus on this obvious truth about how incarceration is racist especially in the US.

PS to whoever is downvoting me: I have made my post less sarcastic. I will endeavor to be more respectful however it is worth anyone's time to study propaganda and how it works, so as not to be so easily fooled. It's important to be able to recognize it and not excuse it with "oh he's just pointing out <etc.>"

It's a point in the sense of being the dogmas of a pundit who disguises his propaganda using the form of a game criticism.

> I don't think Super Mario Bros' subject matter is comparable to Prison Architect's, and so I wouldn't expect the same kind of articles written about it.

Personally I would be mildly surprised to NOT find a kotaku article that uses a mario game as a flimsy excuse to make some completely irrelevant point or sensational hook that the writer (or editor) wanted to make anyway.

> I think he has a point about the absence of race and racism as gameplay elements being very conspicuous in a game about prison.

According to you. The idea that a game about prison HAS to address race is the dogma. That's the preaching. That not only has nothing to do with making games that are fun and entertaining, but it also has nothing to do with a true artistic culture (rather than a circle-jerking pseudo-intellectual culture of criticism)

PS http://www.city-journal.org/2015/eon1022hm.html

Neither did Mozart.

It most definitely is one of those cases unless you think Jay Carney's argument can be dismissed out of hand as being entirely factually incorrect.

> But when the press reports actual wrongdoing you should address the problem

By stating it this way, you have already ceded that the press's report is truthful and accurate. Furthermore, you seem to just accept that the press's views on what constitutes "wrongdoing" is reasonable and honest.

The substance of Carney's objections is that the report was not, in fact, truthful and accurate. He states, for example:

Elizabeth Willet, who claims she was “strafed” through the Anytime Feedback tool, received only three pieces of feedback through that tool during her entire time at Amazon. All three included positive feedback on strengths as well as thoughts on areas of improvement. Far from a “strafing,” even the areas for improvement written by her colleagues contained language like: “It has been a pleasure working with Elizabeth.”

He's accusing the Times of failing at simple fact-checking. He's accusing them of failing at responsible journalism. Either Carney is wrong or it is "one of those cases." It can't be both.

Have fun when the press happens to make you the target. Have fun not being allowed to defend yourself while they skirt whatever truths they feel like they can legally get away with to promote their self-serving narrative. Have fun when people come in and tell you that you should not bother to tell the truth in the face of lies, because you'll just cause a snafu. Have fun seeing your associates share the article with each other as if it's credible and honest when you know it is full of half-truths and omissions, and you can't say anything about it because they have ink to spare to bury you with more lies.

No, probably not. Although humility seems like the sensible approach for decent people, a newspaper that has published a deliberately biased hit piece against you is not decent people. The Times declared war on Amazon, not the other way around. If Amazon apologizes, the Times will merely use that as ammunition in their next hit piece.

Amazon knows NY Times is going to attack them no matter what they do or say. If Amazon makes any admission of guilt, the Times will simply use that as ammunition in the next hit piece.

> Rather than fighting it out in public with a newspaper.

Here's the thing: when you call something a "newspaper," especially in this context, you're giving them a privileged status. This privileged status comes because people expect newspapers to behave with journalistic integrity. We give them status because we trust them to do their research and make reasonable efforts to maintain objectivity and be intellectually honest. If even a portion of Amazon's criticisms are true, it is clear that the NY Times, in publishing this article, violated the journalistic standards that earned them the status we accord to them.

If the NY Times is deliberately trying to promote narratives about Amazon rather than doing research and reporting objectively, honestly, and factually with reasonable attempts to minimize bias and maximize credibility; then it's not only imperative that Amazon stand up to them, but it's imperative that you do, too.

By how much? And is HFT the cause or is it merely correlated?

http://blogmaverick.com/2014/04/03/the-idiots-guide-to-high-...

High-Frequency Trading, while also an umbrella term, virtually always refers to a subset of algorithmic trading involving arbitrage over extremely short timeframes. HFT is not about being faster than "slow expensive humans" it's about being microseconds faster than other HFTs.

How? It seems like this should not be that hard to explain.

That's not true, not like HFT anyway.

First, you can quickly and succinctly describe the traits and benefits of a smartphone. You can be high-level at first, you don't have to explain how every detail works. There's no question, for example, that a touch screen doesn't actually work as advertised. You can just say that a smartphone is a cellular/wireless computer device with a usefully large touch-screen display.

In contrast, the unknown question with High-Frequency Trading is: is it actually providing value to anyone but the traders themselves? They might say they are "market-making" but are they really market-making (a trading role with proven market value) or are they merely exploiting structural inefficiencies in the trading infrastructure that mostly hurt everybody else? Maybe they are, but they should be able to describe it in a high level terms first (market-making, liquidity, etc.) where their role provides an obvious benefit to the market, and if you don't understand the high-level terms (eg liquidity) you can look them up.

So far as I can tell (and I am willing to be proved wrong here) there is no consensus answer to the question of whether HFT is actually valuable to markets.

> "hints" (read: concludes)

This distinction is very important, because establishing reasonable doubt in favor the school and teacher who have been tried and found guilty in the court of public opinion is different from declaring Ahmed to be definitely guilty of a hoax which was definitely done to provoke a divisive scandal. "Hinting" offers an alternate narrative that is as least as plausible as the original one. We can thus retract the condemnation of school, teacher, and police without declaring Ahmed to actually be guilty of anything.

He's not making a fuss, the fuss was already made! Even the President tweeted about it. Accusing someone of fussing for asking a reasonable question is hostile and dishonest rhetoric. Indeed, seeking out and offering relevant evidence to question the sensational outrage narrative is doing what EVERY responsible journalist covering this story should have done in the first place.

Ahmed's clock looked suspicious and he was told by another teacher not to show it to anyone else. But he did anyway. His responses in the interview are rather odd and don't offer the sort of simple factual explanations like "I found a wrecked clock in the kerbside junk, got it running, then tidied it up by stuffing it into an old pencil case". He didn't say anything about why he chose that particular pencil case, just that it's a common thing you can buy off of Amazon. The police report said his behavior was suspicious. Normally I'd discount a police report as being lies, especially with blatantly subjective words like "suspicious", but in this case that just happens to fit in with all the other facts that I've seen, which ARE suspicious. The final fact being that somehow, CAIR was right there immediately to promote the religious persecution and bigotry angle.

I'm not saying this sort of circumstantial evidence is enough to prove that Ahmed intended to commit a bomb hoax, but it's more than enough to demolish the outrageous and sensational media narrative of a poor precocious tinkerer who is being oppressed by the evil bigots in bigot-filled Texas who are too bigoted to recognize genius that is so plainly obvious to Mark Zuckerberg, President Obama, and all the rest.

I'm way more bothered by the way everyone has just assumed that Ahmed's teacher and all the police are clearly racist idiots refusing to back down in the face of supposedly obvious misunderstanding, which seems FAR less obvious the more evidence comes out.

Well, you weren't in the classroom where he set the alarm to go off, were you? So it's not like you're in a position to reasonably judge the reaction.

Suppose he did just take apart an old clock and piece it back together for fun, and didn't specifically try to make it look like a bomb. What was the purpose?

If it had been me, I would have been eager to explain why I chose that particular case. Like maybe-- look "how portable this is" or "look how you can hang this on the wall now" or something like that. Or maybe even just-- "well I was messing around and just happened to have the case so that's why I chose it." I also would have been up front about the fact that all I'd done was dismantled and re-assembled an old clock. I wouldn't have tried to pass it off as an original circuit-board project of my own.

There's nothing like that in this interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mW4w0Y1OXE

Also, as the OP notes, Ahmed makes a comment about using a cable to fasten it shut to make it look less suspicious. OP wonders why would he have been thinking something like that, if he did not know that a suitcase would in fact be suspicious? Sure, such a comment might have been made as some sort of back-rationalization after the whole thing blew up, but along with the other red flags it's a suspicious statement.

And if he did deliberately try to make it look like a bomb and did nothing to assure his teacher and fellow classmates that it was not real, then it's perfectly fair to call it a hoax.

And as far as the quality of discussion, the point it really went downhill was when this responder seized on that one small sentence (0.8% of the post!) and responded with pure empty rhetoric: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10225065

> If you want serious debate I'd suggest you can start by not defending the comment that's clearly overstepped the boundary on what constitutes serious debate.

No. If you want serious debate, don't defend a comment that skimmed a thoughtful contribution to cherry-pick the most potentially objectionable bit of rhetoric and then posture off an out-of-context quote of it. And, don't repeat that same mistake.

[0] http://www.carryology.com/bags/whats-in-my-bag-what-refugees...

TeamCarryology: @Brad, I think you've missed the point entirely. Through this piece, and by using 'carry'as a thread, we're able to bring this 'serious' and dire crisis to the attention of our 130K + readers, in the hope that they may take interest in these people and visit the International Rescue Committee to learn more.

A community that shares a public library is a community that shares a very broad range of common customs, traditions, values, and interests. They are literal neighbors. They have a shared interest in the success of the community along multiple economic, social, and cultural dimensions. "Knowledge for the common good" is a value, but pursuit of that value conflicts with other things the community also values. Resolution of all those conflicts provides natural checks and balances.

The only common interest of the "file sharing community" is sharing files, and any political or technical issues that happen to be directly related to sharing files. The virtual community can grow and expand infinitely based on only that one dimension. There are no natural checks and balances the way there would be for a real community. Instead of resolving conflicts, anyone who doesn't share that one primary value is not part of the community.