adbge

How, then, can you argue that rigid identity is a necessary foundation for the usefulness of pen names and anonymity?

Further, I find your claim that men didn't have an identity prior to the advent of leisure time, frankly, extraordinary and, as such, the claim requires extraordinary evidence. Can you provide such evidence? Hell, even the argument that nomads don't engage in leisure time seems dubious. Wild animals have leisure time.

If that's the case, then, why defend hate speech and not Wikileaks? It seems to me that hate speech also has the very real potential of inciting violence (holocaust, pogroms, etc).

I agree with you, though, that Wikileaks probably is more dangerous (in the people-could-get-killed sense) than Stormfront, right now. It certainly seems much more likely that Wikileaks could cause violent rioting (and worse) than that Stormfront will suddenly come to power, although my observations don't extend past the US. It could well be the case that neo-nazis are a bigger problem in other parts of the world.

Personally, I find myself becoming more pro-Wikileaks as I see more interviews of Assange. The man is articulate and logically consistent (a rarity for any public figure) and I've found his arguments quite compelling. If you haven't seen him speak, I'd recommend it. He does a better job defending Wikileaks than anything that I could articulate in a post on HN.

    > It's obvious that for a lot of HN participants, the
    > site isn't fun unless we can divide everyone into
    > heroes and villains

Most news stations, for example, seem to me to be all about dividing the world into heroes and villains.

Also, do you think this is something that can be changed? My initial reaction is that this kind of black-and-white thinking is part of human nature, stemming from our need to apply our own morality to the events that occur around us.

    > these people where basic users, without access to proper
    > education, and needed a monolithic MS style set up to keep
    > them afloat, also people often without internet access, or
    > reliable power (or even drinking water ATM). The response
    > back was a blunt "oh well bad luck for them, thats not our
    > problem".

Why would these nations need "a monolithic MS style set up to keep them afloat"? It seems to me to be the case that a properly tailored GNU/Linux distribution would be a more user-friendly first encounter with a computer than anything from the Windows family (see OLPC, for example), and then there's the whole added benefit of not running a nation on costly, proprietary infrastructure.

Regarding your second point, I get the impression that you're talking with FLOSS advocates. If that's the case, then it's hardly surprising that they are more interested in promoting free software than discussing other social issues.

However, I'm not against allowing users with a certain level of karma the choice to view karma scores on threads if they really feel that HN is better with karma on, which it seems like a fairly large subset of users (or at least a significantly vocal one) wish for. I think that StackOverflow's successful moderation policies (and, to a lesser extent, HNs own) have sufficiently demonstrated that extraordinary members of a community can handle the responsibilities that come with increased privilege.

For example, I suspect that, if pg allowed individuals with high karma, such as yourself, to choose to toggle an option such as "view karma scores", no flood of dumb comments from high karma individuals would suddenly manifest. Further, I think that the transition from default karma displayed to our current situation has allowed anyone who has invested significant time in the community an opportunity for introspection that wasn't previously available. I'm now able to evaluate, personally, how my comments and behavior were effected by the display of karma and I'm less susceptible to the psychological effects as a result.

Of course, even if there isn't a significant negative aspect to allowing high karma individuals to view karma scores, it's still hardly worthwhile unless there's some kind of positive impact as a result. Perhaps mollifying the community would be enough of a benefit? Maybe a more pro show-karma individual would be better qualified to comment on the potential upside. My feeling is that it's possible that some subset of HNers exist whose experience with the community is improved by having karma scores enabled and, as such, it would be beneficial to allow them the possibility of a choice.

P.S. You guys want an intern, yet? :P

Have you considered allowing users to turn karma display back on once they have reached a set amount of karma, much like other features (such as downvoting)? I imagine that, as long as the threshold is high enough, users would have learned how to be a benefit to the community by that point and, in addition, it might remove some of the psychological tendency to "score points off of someone" if only a subset of users can see those points.

That seems highly dubious. Citation?

The reduction in battery life when switching from OSX to linux is also annoying, but you can tweak stuff enough (via powertop, etc) that it's reasonable enough.

    > A risk taker doesn't sit around feeling sorry for himself. 
    > Specially at 20 years old!

    > The iOS and Mango device respond very similarly to
    > basic things like swipes, pinches, etc... Android 
    > is a lot more jittery, even on the SGII HW. 

Now, maybe the 4G offers a smoother experience than Android (no GC + hardware acceleration?), I don't know, but the 3G experience was sure as hell nothing to write home about. I can say, however, that my Atrix is noticeably more responsive after switching from Motorola's firmware to Cynanogen Mod, but -- again -- I don't know how it compares to a 4G.

http://how-many-calories-are-in.com/ https://github.com/robertseaton/how-many-calories-are-in.com...

I'm specifically interested in books/other resources that lend themselves to self-study. It's easy enough to look up what MIT is using for their Intro to Algorithms course, but it's harder to gauge if a book or other resource is suitable for usage outside of a classroom setting. Bonus points if it has a practical focus so that I can quickly add the gleaned knowledge to my real-world toolkit.

Good advice. I've already done this with one company, but I will be more proactive about this in the future. After all, as you say, what's to lose?

Now the only rub is finding interesting companies! Especially when the smaller ones, who tend to be more flexible, I'm likely to have never heard of.

For extreme examples, try digging into some of Haskell's features -- I still have no idea what arrows are, but I've been given the impression that they're advanced and hard to understand -- or reading some of the discussions on Lambda the Ultimate. It usually turns out that the concepts are surprisingly simple, but it takes a lot of sifting through academic language to figure it out.

    * The Clojure community has a strong focus on web stuff, while
    the Haskell community has (to date) been primarily concerned with
    more math-centric fields.
    
    * Haskell's web stack is still very much a work-in-progress. It
    severely lacks when it comes to documentation of even "simple"
    stuff necessary for the web, like shuffling data into a database.
    Unless you're looking for a type signature. The Haskell community
    loves to provide documentation in the form of type signatures.
    
    * Learning curve. While both are functional languages, it was my
    experience that Clojure's emphasis on simplicity and ease-of-use
    made it very easy to pick up and start tackling real things. 
    There is some ramp up time if you're getting used to the tools,
    such as Emacs or the Java ecosystem, but you don't have to worry
    about things like monads slowing you down.
    
    * It's a LISP! LISP is cool.

Not that familiar with idiomatic Ruby, but using one letter variables as iterators in for loops (and some other things) is pretty idiomatic C:

    int i;
    for (i = 0; i < queue_size; i++)
        queue[i] = get_rarest_peer(t->peer_list);

    > 3. Give the candidates a short but difficult unpaid development test
    > 4. Everyone who passes this initial test gets a job to work on a real project

    You must be careful, however, because not every Java
    platform is free. Sun continues distributing an executable 
    Java platform which is nonfree, and other companies do so 
    too.
    
    The free environment for Java is called IcedTea; the 
    source code Sun freed is included in that. So that is the
    one you should use. Many GNU/Linux distributions come with
    IcedTea, but some include nonfree Java platforms.
    
    To reliably ensure your Java programs run fine in a free
    environment, you need to develop them using IcedTea.
    Theoretically the Java platforms should be compatible, but
    they are not compatible 100 percent.

If anything, this reads like an advertisement for FiOS. Verizon's FiOS dominates every (positive) metric. I've heard that they've stopped deploying FiOS to new districts. A shame, if true.

Guess I can always hope Google's fiber project goes well and someday sees deployment in the Chicago-land area.

Apple actually does comparatively little spending on R&D when contrasted with the likes of Microsoft or even Google. [1] When it comes to design, it's well known that Apple is of the mentality that good design is something recognizable and, that being the case, they don't invest in human-computer interaction research. [2]

[1] http://b2bspecialist.posterous.com/chart-randd-spending-comp...

[2] http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/97958-why-is-great-desig...

Having used both Google+'s Circles and Facebook's lists, a lot of people are missing the point. Sure, Facebook's lists may be capable of some or even all of the functionality of Google+'s Circles, but that's not addressing the important difference in functionality between the two.

Google+ has clearly been designed with Circles in mind. It's easy to tell just from using Google+ that the Circles idea is a core architectural component and not just something that was tacked on. Facebook's lists pale in comparison. They're clearly an afterthought and not many people use them.

I extensively used one of Facebook's private groups to mimic the new functionality in Google's Circles with a group of my close friends for about three - four months and, while it was adequate, it's nowhere near as polished or fluid as my experience with Circles. It's really no contest.

> But it definitely will not require a major architectural overhaul by Facebook.

To those who are saying that it would be trivial to implement Circles functionality on top of Facebook, I sincerely doubt it. It'd be like saying that it wouldn't take much to for Blackberry to adopt the same UI polish of iOS. It's comparing a system that has clearly evolved (BlackBerry, Facebook) to one that has been designed (iOS, Google+).

I think us nerds to be careful about just comparing Google+ and Facebook on what features they have, lest we need to be reminded of: "Less space than a Nomad. Lame."

1) Abandon the absolutely batty practice of representing everything with a single symbol. It's crazy. We still can't reliably represent mathematical symbols over the internet in text, we have to rely on images. I'm obviously biased, but mapping mathematical functions to actual words (ala programming) would be a big win, imo.

2) Lock up all the physicists, mathematicians, engineers, logicians, you name it, and have them agree on a single unified notation. Every symbol ought to have one meaning and everyone needs to stop stealing symbols from a different field and giving it a new meaning! I'd wager that more than half of the symbols in this list (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mathematical_symbols) have several valid interpretations. No thanks!

Indeed, I think this is the number one issue of converting users to Ubuntu, and that there are two types of not working that turn off potential users:

1) Learning a new workflow. There are tons of viable open source alternatives to proprietary software, but new users can often be overwhelmed by the idea that they're going to have to transition to a different workflow.

A year or so ago, I agreed to help my mother's secretary with her malware infested XP installation, but came to the conclusion that only a nuke from orbit would suffice. I told her that I could install Ubuntu on a separate partition, which would allow her to access her old files. However, learning OpenOffice proved too much for her, and we ended up doing a clean Windows' install.

So, users' need to be made aware of recommended alternatives to Windows' software and they very much need stellar documentation on how to complete simple tasks. It seems like many Windows' users just internalize a set of steps to complete a certain task and have a very hard time adapting when presented with a new environment.

2) Lack of out-of-the-box hardware support is still a serious issue, especially for notebooks. Many of my semi-technical friends/co-workers have expressed that they would like to try out Ubuntu and that, inevitably, they would like to install it on a notebook computer.

I typically caution them against it because of the not insignificant chance that they will end up with missing hardware support, usually wireless, which is critical to basically every notebook user. Sure, it's often possible to install proprietary drivers or firmware, but this is definitely not a task that someone new to Linux can reasonably be expected to overcome.

Something like lack of 3D acceleration is not a huge deal (maybe more of an issue with Gnome 3, not sure), but lack of wireless support, significantly reduced battery life, and broken suspend-to-RAM are serious issues that plague Ubuntu (and Linux) installs on the notebook. Canonical needs to make serious in-roads with hardware vendors before they can reasonably expect to reach 200 million users.

Again, I think it's not "Linux isn't ready for the desktop", but "Linux isn't ready for the notebook" that Canonical needs to be concerned with if they don't want to be left behind in our increasingly mobile-leaning future.