marklgr

For some reason, I can't remember for my life how to use cpio, which I find worse than tar even though it has less options. I always mix up input/output mode, and I never remember how passthru mode works exactly.

> I end up doing a second search on Start Page or Google because DDG still does not have search by date

!gday, !gmonth and !gyear are my main 'exit path' from DDG. I also have a good deal of "site:foo.com !g". Otherwise, I've been reasonably happy with it for the last eight months.

The goal is to prevent "echo chambers" where prone to be influenced people build violent or extreme views that will have a real and very detrimental impact on society. It denies the premisse that "speech is just speech and does not harm anyone". It sure is debatable and it raises many issues, but it is not about just making the net look prettier.

Free speech, American stylen is all or nothing: either you can say absolutely everything, without any reserve, or it is not free speech.

Free speech, European style, is: let's cut the bottom 1% in public places--knowing full well it will necessarily be somewhat arbitrary, debatable and potentially dangerous--if it gives a much, much saner space for everybody else. That's a trade-off, and not an easy one: opponents to it will immediately ask "who decides", "what if they want to shut _you_ up", or they'll invoke slippery-slope style arguments. But, for all these issues, there is some point where the trade-off is a huge win for society, according to proponents. That's always debatable, but I think it is as reasonable a stance as the previous one.

Besides, it's not because a limit is very difficult to set that we should give up defining one. For instance, think about under age sex; who's to say what age is ok, but two weeks before is a serious crime? It is prone to the same kind of induction and slippery slope arguments as free speech, but most people (me included) don't argue about setting some arbitrary limit.

Encoded things are not meant to be human readable, like some sort of "secret code". The underlying bytes of some Unicode string probably won't be human-readable if you read it byte per byte--it will be like the platform's "secret code" for your string.

Conversely, you can decode the byte message into something readable, ie. your Unicode string.

Why not just keep calling it (the popular definition) "loss aversion", and name the other concept with the more precise "reference dependence"?

Growth mindset does not imply you can achieve anything, just "you definitely can get better". Perhaps overconfidence can become a risk, but it seems a much lesser evil versus the cost of believing the opposite: "Here is your definitive level, for ever (don't bother)".

I'd rather suggest "Four Views on Free Will"[1], much more in touch with the state of the art and not difficult to read.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1405134860

That sounds like a fairly postmodern-ish stance, which I don't really subscribe to. To me, some opinions are better than others, and being able to articulate them well, showing where they come from and what they immply, is part of what makes many discussions interesting. I don't assume an opinion is so good that others will understand it immediately so there would be no need talk about it, or that it is a great piece of wisdom that I should study or let others study.

Good discussions can make you see things differently, take a new perspective that you had not fully considered before. If you only make "life statements" and never cordially exchange points of view, you lose a much useful way of changing your own; you risk keeping yourself in a warm sense of certitude, losing precious feedback from other people's insight.

This is not about trying to convince people, it is about bringing convincing arguments to make an interesting discussion. Otherwise, that's just your opinion thrown in there, and why should anyone care?

> I have no interest in arguing or convincing those who do not.

In my experience, people who say that have a lot of interest in convincing others. It's like, "I don't care what people think or say". It's mostly pre-emptive reply to criticism.

Even if it's true, Hume was a great thinker and keeps historical value. Besides, I'm sure he would agree with your being skeptical of any book, whatever its theses :)

It's precisely a slippery slope argument[1], which is generally much debatable.

Perl somewhat indulged the nix culture tendency to write extremely concise and cryptic one-liners, but* this does not mean that verbosity is good and expressiveness is bad.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope

In your .ssh/config file:

    Host *
    # Do not send pubkey to each and any host
    PubkeyAuthentication no
    # Use Agent
    IdentitiesOnly       yes

Then override 'PubkeyAuthentication' to yes for each known server you want to connect to.

It depends on how you define "you". If it's the conscious self, then it does exist, even though it's anywhere near in control of as much as it believes. It's more like it's sometimes notified of what happens in the hood, and it got some veto on that.

Zeno's paradoxes are about convergence of infinite series, something quite puzzling back then. But the infinite regress problem here (or in related free will questions) is not about convergence.

To me, it's a so-so language, with some bad parts, some ok. On the plus side, it's easy to pick up, and it gets the job done for many projects. Perhaps it's a bit like the Ikea of programming languages, if you will--no the best of furniture for sure, but when you need a table and some chairs with little efforts, it's nice to have, and they're not horrendous unless you couldn't build them correctly.

PHP is the language many people love to hate; I guess some of them like the idea of being able to point the black sheep of web development, so that they can tell "maybe we have some flaws, but at least we're not one of these PHP shops".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_%28psychology%29

> The problem is as always telling the truly good ideas from the just good.

Not only telling the difference, but defining it. The difficulty is avoiding post hoc evaluation, ie. the idea that looks very good in hindsight because it succeeded and the great implementation makes it look compelling.

He's more of a symbol, especially in atheist circles, than a great scientist. His "bout" with Wilson is pretty depressing.

Sam Harris's book on free will was quite naive--he missed a lot of the key points of today's debate, while being fairly emphatic as though he had just discovered something crucial. I certainly don't hate him, but he remains a dilettante, to me.

There are people who blame gun control, so I guess many people are apt to come up with their pet peeve.

For its supporters, it's a strong point of basic income: people, especially unqualified, won't have to accept pretty much any job just to get a roof over their head and some food in their plate. So this gives back some power to say "no" to the worst jobs.

Opponents to basic income argue, among other things, that this is too much power and some workers would become exceedingly picky, without the fear of not being able to pay for rent and food. There definitely is a moral aspect to the question, with "anti-cheater" emotions/reactions.

This could be like specializing in a technology used professionally by a couple of shops only, with many prominent individuals already working there. If a somewhat abusive culture develops over time, how much would you be willing to put up with it, or even embrace it, knowing that resigning could mean never working with that hard-learned technology again?

Another point of view is that the wage of the labor (eg. $5/hr) is a subjective amount coming from the negociation between the employer and the employee, and consequently their respective bargaining power. So, for some jobs, the real wage is not $10 or even $5/hr, it is effectively "the lowest amount law let an employer pay someone", due to the dramatically unbalanced negociation. In this view, minimum wages protect the poorest and most exploitable job seekers from having to accept whatever the employer with full bargaining power is willing to concede. Of course, not everyone subscribe to it and it comes with its own problems too, but it is still an important part of the debate, in my opinion.

> Or because I'm right but present an unpopular opinion?

Some opinions are neither right nor wrong, they are just point of views, and the unpopular ones tend to get downvoted--admittedly, to a lesser extent on HN than other communities, but still happens. This has the unfortunate effect that, as you point out, the downvoted author doesn't know if there was something wrong with the tone or content, or if it just happened that his/her views are unpopular.

Maybe asking for a few words (presumably in a small, unintrusive ajax form, and not visible in the main thread) as reason for downvoting could be useful, and somewhat deter "not-my-opinion-at-all" downvotes.

This might happen in some (arguably extremely rare) cases, but you know that's the narrative that will be used every time it will be somewhat convenient to torture someone.

Indeed, once you resort to torture or other "questionable" means, you can't accuse or deny enemies from using them too; this sets new standards. The argument is generally "but they already do it", and in my opinion it fails to recognize 1) the large scale validation for every belligerent, 2) the race to "no-rule" warfare, as limits are one-upped once (de facto) accepted. So it's not because _some_ belligerents are willing to use banned means that everybody should start using them too.

Quite often, the person doesn't realize he wants it to be true, so this raises the question: don't you have similar motives unbeknownst to you, and are you skeptical about them too?

"If this swamps the courts, all the better, because that will force legislators to act, which will then cause a debate, which will be useful to society."

Considering the amount of problems that currently exist and that forced nobody to do much, I don't think the "if <bad thing>, then <debate> and <better society>" idea is a particularly good bet.