logicalmind

Let's take an example. Imagine that I start a company. I IPO but retain 51% ownership. Let's say that the remaining 49% of that company is owned by 1,000 individuals. Now let's say that this company can become more profitable by cutting a few corners, with the problem that these corners are currently unlawful. As the majority owner I decide to use the companies "free speech" to grease the wheels of a few politicians who can make these laws go away.

This companies "free speech" is now funded by over 1,000 shareholders. Some of which may not even support the message being produced. Are you aware of all of the lobbying done by the companies in which you own stock? Does the corporate voice truly represent those of the shareholders?

Yes, but corporations are a way for sentient beings to skirt liability. A corporation cannot go to prison for life. A corporation is designed with the goal of producing profit for its sentient owners/shareholders. It has no interest in leading a "healthy" life, only a profitable life.

I see your point, but I don't believe we have the same definition of "information-free". Unless I'm mistaken, upvotes are anonymous. A comment of "thank you" or appreciation is essentially a publicly identifiable upvote. The information being conveyed is to the commenter and that information is the appreciation of the comment from an identifiable individual.

In just about every situation you could say that greetings, salutations, etc. convey no obvious information. But I'm not sure how far we'd get without them. I personally believe that things like this are what maintain and bond a community. But that is simply my opinion. I'd take a thoughtful comment reply, even if in disagreement, than an upvote any day.

One example of downmodding that I've seen personally is that someone will post a reference of a link or a book that I had never heard about. When it is particularly valuable to me I like to respond thanking them for posting it. I don't expect karma from this, I simply want to convey my thanks to the person who provided the information and to encourage other people to do the same. I also upvote them, but I think the personal thanks is more valuable. I've had these "that you" comments downvoted consistently, to the point where I no longer thank people and ultimately delete the comment. I find this behavior strange in a "community".

I think you take a major strategic step when you force yourself to use the straight pieces horizontally. You learn how to play without relying on them to clear large areas.

I'm not sure if it helps, sometimes it does for me, but if you do a google search for something and the results seem out of date, you can click on the show options link and show results sorted on the latest, past 24 hours, past week, etc.

Interestingly enough, your comment above shows up as the top result for the latest search for "ubuntu ntp":

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=ubuntu%20ntp&tbs=rltm...

Do they subscribe to the HN RSS or index the site that quickly, pretty interesting.

And that guy has a new book to promote.

"I had students two years ago who did a project which is way more obvious now than it was two years ago; it turns out you can tell people are gay by analyzing their social networks."

This is one of the reasons I use social networking so sparingly. It seems like it would be fairly easy to do analysis based on a large stream of social networking information and use that to determine traits of a person that they did not intend to share. I'm sure that a lot of it is used for targeted purposes, like advertising, but it can also be dangerous. Maybe I'm just paranoid.

Here is the tech crunch review, which is the polar opposite of the engadget review:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/05/google-nexus-one-the-te...

Newspapers don't have (large) online distribution channels, but google does. Newspapers have content and google has the online distribution channel that gets millions more people to view that content.

I don't find this very surprising. Google/Youtube simply wants to own the distribution channel. If your company is taking their distribution channel and wrapping your logo and ads on top of it and making revenue for you, then they aren't going to be happy about it.

The way I interpret the article is that he is riffing on the fact that Hacker News members are generally interested in startups and likely believe in the constant release and iterate cycles that are used to determine a viable concept or product.

He might be pointing out the fact that those kind of people are stuck on the "random music" idea he used initially and not giving him valuable feedback on his evolving idea. But I'm just guessing.

I don't think that ordinary people are the problem. If by ordinary people you mean natural persons* . In the US government, the elected officials should represent the will of the people who elected them. The problem is that special interests find that money is better spent through lobbying. This allows them to buy votes and even write laws. A massive amount of money is spent lobbying:

http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/index.php

This money obviously has an effect. Ordinary people aren't creating lobbying groups.

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_person

I don't mind if the information flow becomes unidirectional for a reasonable amount of time. I usually go by the duration it takes for me to fill in the background information for the underlying idea. When the value of expressing the idea exceeds the time I'm willing to spend on explaining background information, I usually do not share.

No, and I'll give you an example. Take a simple relational table with some kind of constraint. Begin a transaction and insert some data into this table that violates the constraint. What happens? Guess what, it depends on the db. Some databases/drivers will throw an exception immediately upon insert. Some will wait until the commit has occurred to throw the exception.

Subtle differences like these exist all across the various relational db world. Not to mention that they all do locking and concurrency differently, which is probably the biggest problem.

The elephant in the room here is campaign financing. As long as a person* with great wealth can outweigh the desires of the majority of people we will get the government that we deserve.

*By person I mean a legal person http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_person

How will you define "real"? Clearly the representative set of bits that make up the image are not "real". If you're attempting to determine whether the underlying scene was real then this photo alone may not be the best evidence. If you're trying to determine whether the image is original and unmodified, then you have already lost. The image is modified when the picture is saved on the camera itself and then any time the image is saved in any other program.

If you clarify your definition of "real" then your bet may become more enticing.

Is anyone else bothered by the subtle social underclass undertones made in the article? Like:

"Most live in this city’s poorer districts and begin their academic life well behind the curve."

"..two other students ambled by, one wearing a pair of clown pants as a headscarf."

"..a 4-year-old boy in a FUBU jersey and long dreadlocks..."

It's almost like the point being made is that, even dummies like these can benefit from our program.

What you say is absolutely correct. But the real point of what would be considered public health insurance is that the risks are spread over a much larger group than simply a base of employees. The pricing mechanism is based on the risk of the people in the group. If the group is defined as the employees of the company, then that number is going to depend on the risk factors of the entire group.

If the group is the entire population of a country then you are going to pay a rate that is based on the risks of a very large population. If the people are on average healthy you will pay less. If the people on average are unhealthy you will pay more.

All this aggressive price negotiation is fine if that is your choice. But keep in mind your company will have to employ other people and if the company does not provide health insurance you will be expecting your employees to also perform these same kinds of price negotiations for their medical services.

Your Mom obviously gave birth to you. Out of curiosity, how did she pay for it? Did she negotiate the price?

It depends on your age. When you're in your 20's and single and your employees are also, healthcare isn't usually a huge issue. But when you work for startup(s) during your 20's your body will take a toll from all of the hours of hard work, lack of sleep and bad diet. When that, and the likelihood of having a family, catches up to you, you will find healthcare a necessity.

You may have to pay for recurring prescriptions. The birth of a child, and many other things that will surely become necessities.

Health insurance is a cost that comes out of your profit. If you are ramen profitable after the costs of health insurance are removed you'd be even more profitable if the cost of health insurance was not there.

If you're ramen profitable without the cost of health insurance, then by definition, you can't afford to pay for health insurance.

I find that it is highly dependent on your target employees. For example, if you are a recent college grad and intend to employ recent college grads, you can probably get by without health insurance. However, if you are older and/or have a family and intend to employ people who also are older and/or have a family those people will expect at least partially subsidized health insurance from the company.

And the costs of health insurance are relative to the size of the group you insure. The larger company you work for, the less expensive and more comprehensive the health insurance is likely to be. For small companies with few employees you will pay a lot for health insurance.

Isn't this a contradiction to being "ramen profitable"? If you're only ramen profitable, how can you afford health insurance for yourself and employees?

The Law of Hacker News Comments: Any sufficiently long comment thread will converge on a semantic argument.

Prediction, the comments in this post will converge on the semantics of the word "negative".

In case people are wondering, here is how the Clojure name came about:

"Clojure is pronounced the same as the word "closure". The creator of the language, Rich Hickey, explains the name this way: "I wanted to involve C (C#), L (Lisp) and J (Java). Once I came up with Clojure, given the pun on closure, the available domains and vast emptiness of the googlespace, it was an easy decision.""

At least this is how it is outlined in this document:

http://java.ociweb.com/mark/clojure/article.html

That's what I thought too. Obama has to make a decision on Afghanistan soon. Could this be a political attempt to sway his decision. It would be incredibly interesting if Obama now decides to dramatically increase the number troops in Afghanistan.

I agree that he should not have won this award at this time, but is it Obama's fault that they gave him the award? The criticism should be pointed at the selection committee and not the person who received the award. Unfortunately, the news (and commenters) seem to be blaming Obama for receiving the award.

And constituents in 2010 who will not care about their congress-person's stance on this issue when it is time to vote.