billswift

The best single rule I have found, useful for academic disciplines as well as internet forums is "Everybody overstates the accuracy, applicability, universality, precision, or other some other aspects of claims they have made." Anybody who actually cares enough about something to go through the trouble of writing it up, unless they are being paid by the word (which has been noted elsewhere has its own problems), is going to be emotionally invested in their work and writings. So my best advice is to assume from the beginning that it is overstated, and consider a weaker version, or a charitable interpretation, of their claims.

Given the limited amount of information available in an online post, a charitable interpretation is even more warranted online than in a book.

>I can't imagine how much it would suck to be a judge.

Judges obviously don't think having gross amounts of almost completely unaccountable power sucks, or they wouldn't be judges.

No matter how brilliant someone is, they still only have limited time. Increased capabilities increases the options someone has within their available time. There is incredible diversity in the goals and the specific capabilities people bring to whatever they are doing, increasing the capabilities could only increase the diversity.

Before you get too wrapped up in the idea of "other valid fields for patents", you might check out some of those other fields. There is actually quite a bit of evidence against patents in many other fields as well, though the only link I have handy is to Derek Lowe's discussions related to pharma - http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/patents_and_ip/

Actually most of the world, that has gotten rid of royalty, seems to be doing its best to bring back at least some of the trappings; for example, http://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/07/21/presidential-transp...

Except that once you start avoiding or ignoring them, it is never likely to become the "right time". Handling criticism appropriately is one of the most important skills any would be entrepreneur (or consultant or any other small business person) needs to develop.

>An underlying premise of Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange is that there’s tremendous amounts of knowledge tied up in “ordinary” people, and given an easy way to show it off and a little incentive they can make this knowledge available and help as many people as possible.

That is the underlying premise of free market economics and small-government conservatism, too. Go read some Thomas Sowell, a lot of his books discuss the issue, especially A Conflict of Values and, in more detail, Knowledge and Decisions.

In fact, it isn't even completely true in Europe. Early Medieval serfs in Northern Europe also wore trousers, but rarely, if ever, rode. The major point, shared by your Chinese workers, is freedom of movement and aversion (in Northern Europe driven as much by climate as modesty) to nudity. Protection, as from brush, is another factor, but more an occasional one, rather than always present.

One big problem with Wikipedia, and the big cause of the ongoing deletionism controversy, is the divergent purposes of outside content creators and wikipedian editors.

Most of the outside creators contribute out of direct interest in the subject matter. Too much editing is done for ego-boos and a sense of enpowerment. This isn't always true, of course, but it is true often enough to generate the problem and keep it going.

"Professional always means power." Frank Herbert

Most specifically, the power to exclude competition, that is the sole real purpose of "professional licensing", whether medical, legal, engineering, or other. The "protecting the public" is fraudulent window dressing to impress the suckers.

I heard about someone back in the 1970s who replaced the barrel of an old .38 Special revolver with a piece of pipe (about an inch-and-a-half or 40 mm) and used .38 blank cartridges to shoot golf balls about a hundred yards.

Since the compressed spring has stored energy the answer would be "Yes, but so little as to be completely unmeasurable." E=mc^2 applies to all energy and mass, but if you work the equation with sample energies, you will quickly discover that a substantial amount of energy becomes very, very little mass.

Two other articles linked in the OP about Nvidia and linux:

Linus Torvalds Calls NVIDIA The Worst Company Ever, http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEyM...

and, NVIDIA PR Responds To Torvalds' Harsh Words, http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEyM...

Both are well worth reading.

This is the fourth time in less than 10 hours that this has been posted. At least the first three used the correct title. Here is the first post with comments, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4158865

Hardin overstated his case, for much better and more nuanced treatments, go to Google Scholar and search for "Elinor Ostrom" "Tragedy of the commons". She won the 2009 Nobel in economics, largely for her work in how "the commons" really are managed.

Already posted, with comments, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4158865

>Less can be more. The better you understand, the pithier you can be.

The one real weakness of this idea is communicating with others, if you don't share the same understanding you will lose parts of your audience. This is part of the problem with C++ I have read repeatedly on HN (I don't know C++ myself), that everyone uses a subset of the language, but too many use different subsets.

>must include the vendor as a threat

Or anyone who gets access to the vendor's database.

Decent article about why DRM and other copy-proofing measures are poorly effective. Really bad title, both here and the original.

Best quote:

"The computer industry are not opposing your bill because they want to encourage copying, or because they are bloody-minded, they are not opposing you because of your self serving rhetoric about rewarding artists (remember Peggy Lee, Michael?), they are opposing you because what you want is provably impossible. You can only succeed by making all Turing machines illegal."

Flagged; this is just self-posted political BS.

And another Carrington event could fry all electronics, and possibly all electrical equipment depending on how powerful it is, at any time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_event

Because no one can have it all:

<blockquote> You can have anything you want: No dream is too big to achieve.

But you can't have everything you want: We live in a finite world for a finite period of time, but with infinite imagination. </blockquote>

- - Peter McWilliams, Do It! Let's Get Off Our Buts

Because we rarely ask our muscles to work that way. Deadlifts, especially, strengthen our bodies against the most commonly encountered stresses. While bench presses are commonly recommended, I think overhead presses and bent rows are more helpful at preventing injuries.

And the HN discussion is http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4122783

I would claim that being willfully "incompetent and lazy" in a way that harms others IS evil.

How to Solve It is a very good book, but it doesn't address the issue you want; it is mainly about problem solving and was intended for math teachers.

For review, I suggest getting cheap, out of print textbooks and working the chapter review problems. When the review suggests you are having difficulties, only then reading the appropriate section. That lets you target your problem areas without wasting time, and getting bored, doing a lot of unnecessary reviewing.

That wasn't even the first post attempting to discuss it. In an earlier one (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4102907) PG posted a reason for the ban (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4103210), then the thread he posted it on was killed.

PG posted an excuse (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4103210), then the thread he posted it on was killed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4102907

Almost everyone has at least heard the phrase "the wisdom of crowds" by now. The most important part of the idea, and the one most people are not familiar with, are the (fairly severe) limits on its usefulness. I wrote a review of the book for Amazon, and one thing I pointed out is that it was a much better balanced treatment of the subject than I had expected from all the hype about the idea that I had previously read. The hype is already all over the place, and has been for years, there is no need to add to it.

I agree that the main point is customer service, not some abstract right thing, but waiting until they scream loud enough is not properly taking care of customers.