mbateman

Are those really commonplaces? Because they are both false. Having good ideas is equally important for speaking and writing well. And you can be snowed in multiple media.

Your #1, at least, applies to both speaking and writing. In fact I'd think it applies more to speaking. Think of teachers and lecturers who can explain things with analogies on the fly, vs. those who just repeat things at the same level.

> There is no criticism of Posterous or anybody else intended by the post, and I apologise if it comes across that way.

> I did, however, try to make a point that I would never move my business onto a free or pre-revenue site.

That sounds like (and certainly comes across far more strongly in the blog post as) a criticism. It sounds fairer the way it was put here than how you said it there. Not having a monetization strategy that involves charging customers is not coextensive with being a mere portfolio exhibit.

I'm not sure about that. PG leans a lot on whether or not the new law "warps society", which could comport with a natural law view, but is more naturally interpreted as something more empiricist or pragmatic.

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EDIT (in response to parent's edit #1): Everyone -- utilitarians, legal positivists, conventionalists, etc. -- thinks that the law should adjust to certain realities. Likewise, the parent's definition of "rules that humans...would voluntarily adopt" is orthogonal to questions about the source and authority of the law.

I am very sympathetic to natural law but PG's piece doesn't really strike me as falling one way or the other on this issue.

See also this comment and PG's response: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3694703 -- nothing to do with scarcity or technology, there.

I also looked this up, and found the original paper that coined the term, which starts:

> The "Wolf Fence" method of debugging time-sharing programs in higher languages evolved from the "Lions in South Africa" method that I have taught since the vacuum-tube machine language days. It is a quickly converging iteration that serves to catch run-time errors.

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=358695 (if you have access)

Anyone know what the "Lions in South Africa" method is? I couldn't find it via Google, it just kept turning up references to the same paper.

Dell's supply chain is very impressive, but so is Apple's.

And user experience is "nothing a couple of expensive consultants can't fix"? Really?

Or situations in which the data wouldn't incriminate the owner of the data but rather someone else, etc.

Okay, counter-anecdote. I grew up in Chattanooga. Those neighborhoods range between fine and quite nice.

Most people in Chattanooga live in the burbs, so I feel like there may be skewed perspectives as to what counts as a nice place to live. Downtown can be quite nice by urban standards.

While it might not be the best place for technology in the universe, it's a very nice place to live, and I'm glad that they are incentivizing tech and making the most of their internet infrastructure. It does seem a bit gimmicky overall but the incentives might tilt it to being the best option for some talented people. Who knows.

We definitely do not live in a fascist police state. However, there are elements of the cultural and political scene that can be accurately described as fascist.

To put it another way, it's certainly true that it is still possible to live a happy and basically free life in the US, and many other countries. However, it's also true that unjust laws has seriously negative effects that make many people less happy and free.

These aren't contradictory. It's also possible to be basically healthy but have an illness, basically financially stable but have unexpected expenses, for a team to have good fundamental teamwork but still have some coordination problems, etc., etc.

Despite an overall good state of affairs there can be bad things that are important to consider, especially when the trajectory seems to be that things are getting worse.

Doesn't everyone use XQuartz anyway?

I think you may be missing tptacek's point. Things like code signing make it harder for bad things to run without the user's permission.

Is Gmail for Business any different privacy-wise than free Gmail? (The free part is less important to me.)

original story: http://cen.acs.org/articles/90/web/2012/02/Battery-Desalinat...

actual paper if you have access: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nl203889e

People are just holding Google to their own standards and terms. If the standards and terms are strange or otherwise inapt, that's on Google.

1) I registered most of my domain names 5 or 6 ago and haven't bothered switching. I never had a problem with them personally and so I continued to use them. (I use them as a registrar, not as a host.)

2) I am not the most avid follower of HN and either never saw these stories or saw them and my eyes just glazed past them. I'm not interested in most stories here, not even about services that I use. Analogously, I use Gmail and don't read the horror stories about them anymore, but if Google were supporting SOPA I would probably switch from Gmail. I use AirBNB, didn't care about the silly meth head vandalism scandal that made every single top news story here, or various other criticisms, but would probably never use them again if they supported SOPA. etc.

3) Even if you don't buy the above, it still seems perfectly reasonable to be more offended by the support of SOPA than by the run-of-the-mill corporate incomptence that underlies most horror stories.

4) Complaining about downvotes is pretty lame, and I really can't tell if you're trolling or not, especially with a temporary account.

5) I can understand the sentiment that a self-fueling moralizing crowd is a distasteful thing to behold. But that's not an excuse to never agree with a boycott or take place in a collective action. Anyway, I don't think my original comment was particularly moralizing.

There, I took 200 seconds or so.

I got my domains on GoDaddy because it's cheap, easy, and didn't seem important enough to invest time into. I'll be moving them off GoDaddy now. Even if small boycotts didn't accomplish anything (which I don't believe), I would move my domains on principle.

"we need" does not imply "I personally have an obligation to provide with my own career decisions"

Well, they are contraries as you present it, and they aren't mutually exclusive only insofar as someone is being inconsistent. "Pragmatic" usually means someone who doesn't act on principle, who is willing to be inconsistent to satisfy his desires, etc.

I don't know if I can prove it but I think the moral had priority for Steve. This can be seen most clearly in his anger in certain cases (like the Gizmodo phone theft, or his view that Android was intellectual theft), in which he stated explicitly that he would rather act on principle rather than do the pragmatic thing, e.g. (paraphrasing) "I would rather give up the company than let them get away with this." But it can also be seen in other cases as well.

I think he was unusually consistent and principled, but with an unusual conception about what is morally right. I don't think he saw making money as pragmatic and bringing technology to the masses as moral, for example. I think he saw shaping the world according to his vision as moral, and thought both money and technology played an important role in that.

Steve Jobs was definitely not a pragmatist. He believed there is a moral dimension to his work and products.

A novel proof involves making novel connections, rigorously showing how different parts of mathematics can be made to work together in ways that haven't been thought of. When you look at it that way it's not hard to imagine the value in solving puzzles like this, even if it's impossible to know the specifics ahead of time (which are by nature unknown).

Their marketing is definitely hyperbolic. Even in terms of Apple's own services. The supposed data syncing in iWork actually doesn't work on the Mac versions. It only works between iOS devices. So if I edit a paper on my Mac, and I want to use it on my iPad, I still have to go through an annoying uploading/downloading phase. There's nothing seamless about it.

If you go to the bottom of http://www.apple.com/icloud/features/documents.html you can see the web interface you have to use.

I know this is a tangent to the OP but I was very annoyed to discover this last night, I feel like Apple was pretty misleading here. There are clearly technical difficulties that still need to be surmounted.

With a track record of comments like this --

> I realize the Sanfran wannebe hipster-crowd here like their shiny iGadgets and want to reaffirm their own worth by appraising the company which they have attached their identity to, but this is getting a little bit out of hand and quite frankly, rather silly.

-- you should feel dirty.

(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2924758)

It's hard to tell now that karma listings are hidden, but in the past this was definitely true.

I really hope that the OP is wrong in implying that the matching is in response to that NYT article, which was one of the most churlish things I've ever read.

Your brother is quoting the author of this article, in fact.

On modern buildings of course you want to build a ramp. But the cost of adding ramps to every already-built place accessible only by stairs is extremely high. At any rate, that isn't to say that it shouldn't be paid, in many cases, just that it's better (when possible and feasible) to develop technologies that let the disabled deal with it themselves. There are buildings with stairs and ramps or elevators. If you're disabled, it's good to be able to access these buildings when you come across them.

Along the same lines, the purpose of accessible digital text isn't only to help the blind, it's also to help the dyslexic and who knows who else, and generally facilitate content extraction software of all types. It's good when to do when it's feasible, but it's better to not have to rely on people doing it.

The optimal solution is to find or create some tool that lets you bypass these options. This is a bit of a tangent, since that's really not what this post is about, but it's worth mentioning.

If you're stuck in a wheelchair, it's good when people build ramps, but it's far, far better to have a wheelchair that can go up stairs.

The former makes you dependent on the consideration of others, and sometimes that consideration is really not a reasonable thing to ask or expect.

Even in this apparently simple case, as others have pointed out, it is not easy to make everything accessible to screen readers. Also, what about older websites and archives of scans and so forth? It's far better to focus on tools that let one be as independent as possible.

I understand the annoyance. And I really hate it when people respond to requests like this in a hostile manner. But at the end of the day it is better if the person with exceptional needs can take on the responsibility for making these transactions possible themselves. (Also I'm sure there's loads of money to made developing these tools.)

Not sure why you're being downvoted.

Pretty disgusting how this entire press release amounts to political posturing and taking credit for the Arab Spring, with, what, one sentence about how terrible it is that names are now being released unredacted?

You can argue that Wikileaks isn't the one ultimately responsible for this, that it's the Guardian or the US government or whatever, but in their response they seem almost totally unconcerned with protecting individuals, and overwhelmingly concerned with getting credit for political revolutions.

Notability is not temporary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability#Notability...

What difference does it make that you're playing against different people? People engage and justify behavior based on types of action.

One punishes a cheater that one will never encounter again partly on the presumption that other people also do this to cheaters they encounter. Thus one engages in a behavior that, if performed universally, will reduce the likelihood that one will encounter a cheater.

This is almost exactly the same as iterated games where you play the same person over and over and thus confront the other player's action as an instance of a type of decision (a strategy). The fact that it isn't the same person doesn't mean you won't think in terms of types.

Yeah, you can try to free ride and just hope that other people punish cheaters for you and that you'll benefit without ever having to do it yourself (since punishing incurs a cost). But if the choice is between no one punishing cheaters and everyone punishing cheaters, then you choose the latter. If you're thinking in terms of types, those are the two choices. Even if it doesn't totally make sense in a particular context to do this, people habitually think this way.

Human beings think in terms of types and systems of actions, and choose actions at least partly based on what types and systems of actions they are endorsing. These game scenarios rely on that in the same that iterated games do. It's tit-for-tat all over again, just one level more abstract.

Grades are not binary. An average grade doesn't indicate worthlessness, intellectual or otherwise.

To answer a slightly different question than the one you asked: I don't think a department can care about quality of its students if it marks differently-qualified students as equal.