skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A 24 hour waiting period seems like a great idea for newly created accounts. At least for comments. It doesn't work for guns, but maybe it would for HN.
Poll: RMS: Boon or Bane?
A recent thread made me curious about the majority opinion on RMS.

[EDIT] So, does he help his cause or hinder it?
He kinda looks like the guy who wrote The Watchmen
They do the same for iPhone and iPod.
At that time (4 years ago, last time I did a resume) C++, C and Perl. I wouldn't list Perl now. There are some other languages I've worked more with in the last couple of years that I would only mention only if they were in the "nice to have" section of a job description, and duly noted as only "some familiarity with".
Most affordable sit-stand desk I've seen is from GeekDesk
http://www.GeekDesk.com/

Still pretty pricey at $549 for just the frame. (Luckily its compatible with IKEA tops)

I wish IKEA would bring their adjustable legs back to the US, since their desks are so customizable.
I think they are burnt out from a year's worth of health insurance debate.
You knew the pedantry was going to come.

The title is invalid syntax. Or at least I'm pretty sure it is unless you have a function or class named Dynamic_cast. I hate C++.
First, I think I misread your original comment. You’re right that missionaries proselytize, by definition. I guess what I objected to was “would you like jesus in your life? no? what about now?” which is not how any of the missionaries I know interact with people.

-------

In response to this second comment:

In the places I have any experience with full of desperately poor people, the outsiders who decide to settle down, whatever their official institutional ideology, mostly care about helping people, at an individual level.

> this is a slippery slope to cultural imperialism.

I’m somewhat skeptical about this. In the places with the most severe cultural imperialism – for instance, Latin America – said imperialism was done in the name of god and the king, but was at root much more about material advantage and personal self-interest (read: theft) than salvation, the latter being mostly a convenient rationalization.

Today, pretty much everywhere in the world has been under the “cultural imperialist” influence of the west, linked by a globalized economic system.

Moreover, I think you oversimplify in suggesting that Christianization is just a mechanism for hegemony. I don’t know much about Korean culture or religious diversity, but from your description it sounds to me like Korean elites seized on Christianity and bent it to their own ends, quite independently of the missionaries who had brought it there. At the same time, Korea was industrializing and urbanizing full speed, building an export-led factory economy. We could speculate about what the power structure would be like in Korea if the population had remained entirely Buddhist, but it’s not as if feudalism would have survived, and I don’t think the outcome can be blamed on Christian missionaries without likewise indicting centuries of Western technological advances, foreign bankers, American consumers, and the rest of the prevailing world economic system. (And Koreans of all stripes, too.) In short, it’s complicated.

-----

For what it’s worth, I also find packaging aid to desperately poor people with religious ideology to be distasteful/awkward and agree that it is potentially abusive.
It's a disinfographic.

And where are books? Copy says "less than 5% of retail sales" is online, and graphic shows sectors all at 2% or under. What sectors bring the split back up to 5%?
Porting to Linux: Planning a release 7 years in the future
Yes, that's positively evil. Almost like patenting eating: don't want to die of hunger? Pay me money for the right to eat.
It's unlikely we'll ever see eye to eye on this topic, we clearly have very different views.

I don't agree with most of the assertions you make. You seem to claim that book burning is a goal of the kindle, but I don't think you can really substantiate the claim. As far as I can tell the goal of publishers is simply to have control over the digital content. Remote deletions are a side effect. I also don't agree with you that capability is the only thing that matters.

By analogy: a knife can be used to make a sandwich, and it can be used to to repeatedly stab people in the face. The knife affords stabbing (which is arguably far worse than remote ebook deletion or modification), but I think knives are still generally a positive thing in society. Most things in life aren't forces for pure good or pure evil, so for me (and for most people) it's a matter of finding the right balance.

Right now, every inalienable, natural, human right you have can be violated by random strangers, the government and yes, even by companies. This is pretty much a fact of life, and I think that taking an absolutist position about this isn't helpful.

If DRM is a net benefit to you, then yay DRM. If not, then use alternatives. In the grand scheme of things, I think it's a bit of a non-issue. Yes, I admit universal DRM (for the broadest sense of universal) would be pretty awful. But it takes slippery slope logic to say that a bit of DRM here and there will lead to totalitarian DRM in the future.
Wow! That pegged my CPU. The fan increased speed three times!
Do you know about Trauma Crisis insurance
Australian TPD insurance,Critical Illness insurance,Australian Trauma Crisis insurance covers serious and permanent disablement if you are unable to work again but does not cover temporary disabilities or many traumas.
Is this Ted Dziuba's startup? I just tried a search in my area and it only came up with 1 item. It doesn't seem very useful so far.
Installed just fine for me, although I see zero evidence of it actually doing anything for me.
This was basically his Startup School talk. He definitely has many great points but I question a few. Such as, using IM as a replacement for speaking directly to a coworker within an office. How can this be more efficient? I don't see it.
Mike McConnell, the WashPost & the dangers of sleazy corporatism
As far as i understand, GPL license is a "hack" for living in copyright world, until the abolishment of copyright.
Are you forced to only buy and use a Kindle? If you don't like the fact that amazon modifies or remotely deletes your books, don't buy it.

No, I'm not forced to buy and use a Kindle (a rather facetious question). I'm not forced to buy and use teflon-coated bullets either. That doesn't change the fact that these two items which currently are legal have properties that I believe are immoral and illegal. Current law (specifically Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the US Constitution [1] and the Federal ban against armor piercing ammunition [2]) suggests that certain properties of these items are legal only because of technicalities. I can advocate against these items even if I am not forced to buy them. A rather basic and reasonable claim on my part, if you ask me.

How exactly are freedom of the press or speech in danger?

If society is saturated with items that allow companies or governments to take away natural rights, then these rights are in danger. Just because these items haven't achieved full saturation yet doesn't mean we shouldn't be protesting them now.

The Internet pretty much has stopped any one governing
body from taking that right away from anyone. In fact, it's destroying many newspapers.

Apparently not, given the Chinese government's success in censoring the internet there.

[1] http://topics.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articlei#section8

[2] http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/921.html#a_17
I don't understand where the data for this graph came from. The 2000 Census?

It claims online electronics sales of $1.3 billion. But Newegg alone sold $1.3 billion... in 2005.
http://www.allbusiness.com/business-planning-structures/star...

The numbers just aren't believable.
It's a shame to see Stallman turning his back so coldly on Freedom 0: "to run the program, for any purpose"

The AGPL is a goddamn clickwrap EULA: you can't just run the program without restriction if it involves responding to requests over a socket.
To anyone on here who is hiring: I just launched a job board that specifically targets the HN niche. You can use the coupon code "HN" (in caps) for a free full time job posting. That coupon is good for the first 100 posts (I don't think that will be an issue). The site is Genius Pool: http://geniuspool.com/?s=hn (I'd love any feedback but that's a separate thread).
I'm typing this from a standing desk: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1038179/Fredrik2.jpg

It's a "Fredrik" from Ikea, which courteously lets you choose the height of the desk and shelves, and doesn't stop you from putting them in the wrong spots. I've been using it for almost a year, and it's perfectly sturdy.

One caveat: make sure you make it high enough. Using a standing desk when the keyboard is even a few inches too low can be miserable on your back. The desk should be at the height of your elbows, and no lower.
"Tests can go way farther to help verify the expected results of your code."

This is definitely debatable, but I think we should agree to disagree at this point.
Is he considered mentally ill because he's homeless or is he homeless because he's mentally ill? There's a distinction between the two, and how my reading of the article comes across is that they're suggesting he's mentally ill because he doesn't want housing.

I'd assert that the people doing cross-nation marathons spending night after night sleeping in a tent on a roadside are far more mentally ill than a man choosing not to have a home.

He doesn't need to be treated for being homeless, if he has a condition he needs to be treated for its cause not its effect.

Where I grew up there was a chronic homeless man. Throughout the summer months he saved enough money to ride out the winter in a cheap apartment. He busked with a guitar and harmonica and was homeless by choice. He frequently refused people's donation if they threw in anything too big, especially to the kids and teenagers.

As he once said to me, he chose to be homeless and live off generosity rather than be homed and live off charity.
A better question is: Why do we need to put the archaic virtual keyword in front of a method? Shouldn't non-virtual functions used in an inheritence way be declared as private while the other being automatically virtual ?

Then if he agrees, he's ok. If he gives you more examples of why C++ is archaic, he's great. If he begins talking about non-virtual methods being more optimized than virtual one, thanks him for his time and try to find someone else.
To reflect the enhancements to the language since 1983, the name of the language has been changed to: dynamic_cast<std::integer>(C)++.

I would think so.
Lean is about efficiency, but also about being frugal -- just like any other business. Lean is largely about reducing waste (muda). In my opinion, a $700 event about "lean" business is counter-effective and a waste of money for many startups.
Static typing and testing are not replacements for structuring your code so that when you read it at each level of structure you know that it is right.
> Regarding 3: don't you think happiness should be optimized?

If happiness is defined as the feeling one gets from winning a bingo game or watching a hilarious comedian, then nope, I sure don't.

If happiness is defined as behaving in the way that causes the largest possible number to appear in the final cell of the National Happiness Spreadsheet of the Ministry of Happiness, then no, I don't care about that either.

If happiness is defined as the vague and general satisfaction of human wants--the economist's "utility"--then yes, or at least much closer to yes. But this definition is too vague to lead to any widely shared ideas on how to measure it or pursue it. It does suggest to me that the measuring and optimizing needs to be done by the person experiencing the wants and the satisfying. But I already know not everyone agrees with this. :)

*

I watched the Harris lecture. A few thoughts:

He really didn't make his claim that science answers moral questions. If we assume the moral premise that humans should not suffer, then some other things logically follow, and perhaps science will later tell us some useful conclusions there that we don't know now. I agree that there is enough hard-wired similarity in human nature that some premises like "people should not suffer" can be widely accepted and used as a starting point. Nevertheless, widely shared assumptions is not the same thing as science having "proved" those assumptions.

I don't think we have a lot of problem even today with the widely shared assumptions. It's the ones that aren't shared that lead to the conflict. My feeling is Harris wants to be the guy that gets to tell everyone else what science has told us about morality, and then also get to declare the argument over because it isn't his opinion, instead it is "science".

It is manipulative, and dishonest, to claim that science will be able to answer moral questions objectively, and then proceed to "prove" this by using examples of behavior that you know in advance your audience will find offensive and outraging. Any preacher or imam can "prove" the will of God using similar tactics.

He hints that brain state will eventually provide the new knowledge that we need to answer questions of right and wrong. If I could, I would suggest that he reread Brave New World. There was very little suffering or unhappiness in that world--but I, and I think most people, wouldn't want to live there.
Someone will probably do it 'just for fun'
After finding out what language/library someone is most proficient in I always ask them what they find bad/wrong about that language/library.
Except that unlike every single other user on the planet, RMS doesn't give two shits about your data in a SaaS environment.

He cares about whether your application code generating responses on the server is GPLed, along with a few thousand other people. He also passionately cares the javascript running in your browser is GPLed, and is perhaps completely alone in this.

It may be simply because he has never used a rich web app, out of abject fear. He normally surfs the web via emacs+gnus+smtp+aliases+wget -- he is not one of us, you can't argue with him on your own terms.
I find it interesting that in a recession, during a time of heightened homelessness why are they focusing on one man in Time Square. Is it perchance because Time Square is one of the biggest tourist destinations in New York? It's all I could think reading this. It's like a desperate attempt to create a fallacy that will ensure tourists will happily spend their dollars in stores, it doesn't appear to be a genuine humanitarian effort because harassing someone daily certainly isn't humanitarian - heck if I lived or worked around Time Square I'd probably offer to file a claim for injunctive relief on Heavy's behalf to keep the 'humanitarians' off his back.
They take education seriously sure, but a school that is 10x more competitive and 10x as expensive as a state school has at most 1.5x better teaching. It doesn't scale. The real asset is the student body. The department is good because it's competitive more so than it's competitive because it's good.
> Depending on the judge, invalidating gene patents isn't that far away from invalidating the whole concept of software patents.

How so? The judge said "you can't patent discoveries". However, you can patent the use of discoveries to do something useful. That's why they tried to claim "if you suppress this gene, good things happen". The problem is that they didn't say anything useful about how to suppress said gene.

You can't patent chemistry or chemical compounds. However, you can patent the use of a chemical compound to do something specific which you actually claim. For example, the Viagra patent probably doesn't cover that compound's use in a floor wax.

Similarly, you can't patent a theorem, but you can patent the use of a theorem to do something specific.

> In the mean time - yay! for the judge that said that the biological structures and processes that make me alive aren't owned by anybody.

However, certain things done with some of those structures are very much patentable.
... but if you really care about X11 support, you should probably be using the XQuartz releases anyway (http://xquartz.macosforge.org/). They're still "official", just not guaranteed to be as stable as OS updates.
A study conducted by Thomas Kepler, Colin Crossman, and Robert Cook-Deegan of Duke University found the patent in question "surprisingly broad" and that "if enforced [the patent] would have substantial implications for medical practice and scientific research" [1]. As a result the patent ended up stifling innovation, violating the legal justification for patents.

The arguments you provide may justify the existence of some patents, but certainly not this one.

[1] http://www.reuters.com/assets/print?aid=USTRE62F5YR20100316
Don't let healthcare stop you from starting your own company. You can get COBRA continuation coverage for 18 months.

I'm currently using COBRA continuation coverage; this is the second time I've done so in 10 years, and it's a great way to keep your same health plan while starting up a new venture. With any luck, within 18 months your new company will have the critical mass to get your own small business plan.
One of his other books, In Defense of Food, might almost be a better recommendation to read first. If they like that, go for the novel version - The Omnivore's Dilemma.
It is - HN stripped out the template name from the title.
The 15 Money Rules Kids Should Learn
Dupe.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1227781
It's a mistake to reflexively apply the hacker's justified aversion to patents to other fields.

It may very well be true.

It is common to argue that intellectual property in the form of copyright and patent is necessary for the innovation and creation of ideas and inventions such as machines, drugs, computer software, books, music, literature and movies. In fact intellectual property is a government grant of a costly and dangerous private monopoly over ideas. We show through theory and example that intellectual monopoly is not necessary for innovation and as a practical matter is damaging to growth, prosperity and liberty. -- Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine in Against Intellectual Monopoly.

Against Intellectual Monopoly is a book that made the case against patents and copyrights in all of its form.

You can read the entire book for free at this website:

http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstfi...
Don't think the optimization point holds. Optimization for Java really kicks in at runtime and the JVM is fully in loop regarding byte code modifications.
What if you get the chair used without TFM? :(
I mentioned this on another submission but Christophe Grand's Moustache routing library, http://github.com/cgrand/moustache, is great in conjunction with Ring. It makes very idiomatic use of destructuring to define routes, for example you can do stuff like the following:

(def admin-post
(app [""] "admin post index" ; /admin/post/ or /admin/post
["new"] {:get new-post ; GET /admin/post/new
:post save-post} ; POST /admin/post/new
["edit" id] {:get edit-post})) ; GET /admin/post/edit/:id

(def admin
(app [""] "admin index" ; /admin/ or /admin
["post" &] admin-post
["posts"] {:get all-posts} ; /admin/posts
["settings"] {:get settings})) ; /admin/settings

(def main
(app [""] "index page" ; /
["post" slug] {:get get-post} ; /post/:slug
["admin" &] admin))
> Would this company have made the breast cancer detection procedure that they had a patent on if they did not have the ability to protect it with a patent?

According to my reading of the case, the company didn't invent a breast cancer procedure. Instead, they found a gene that has some involvement in breast cancer and tried to claim suppressing said gene. They lost because their patent didn't disclose or claim anything relevant to suppressing said gene.

IFRC, the judge said that they didn't invent anything, which they pretty much conceded. Since you can't patent discoveries, only uses of discoveries to do something, they lost.
This company may not have. But society in general would have. http://bit.ly/UX90n is a good econtalk which talks about patents, competition and innovation and argues that patents are detrimental to society.
I tried to rate the video five stars and it was just THROWN ASIDE and the site tried to force me to login.

Usability FAIL.
Walden 2, by B.F. Skinner.

It's like an instruction manual for a utopian society, in novel form. This book set my mind on fire with crazy and inspiring ideas about how society could be...
Yes, exactly! I didn't become the half-decent programmer that I am until I finally embraced the fact that my code sucks and adopted highly defensive coding practices as a result.
It's more accurate to say they've withdrawn advertisement due to pressure from Color of Change.

Given Fox's ratings I'm sure they can fill the void with less picky companies. The network's demos don't mesh with Apple's target market anyway.
I've long since taken C++ off of my resume, because I haven't used it for 10+ years, since I was in school. But because I'm a normal person for a HN reader, I've kept up with the news, and in learning so many other languages at one time or another have a pretty decent idea what's going on. Recently we started hiring for a C++ position, and I was asked to sit in on the interviews. I said that I didn't really know C++, but I do know enough other stuff to keep up.

Or so I thought. Our interviewer handed out a bit of code something like this

int some_func(int, SomeComplexObject&);

.. some code context...
{
{
int a = 1;
SomeComplexObject b = new SomeComplexObject()
some_func(a, &b);
}
if (b = 0) {
cout >> "Error" >> endl;
}
}

or whatever, something like that, and asked what was wrong. People with "years of experience" in C++ would strain and strain to find "the" error. This is of course a steaming pile of errors, the only legal code line is "int a = 1;" and that's redundant (just stick the 1 in the function call).

I don't have C++ on my resume, but after that experience I'm pretty sure I could put it back on without experiencing too much flak.

On that note, if you're into languages I really recommend the C++ FAQ Lite: http://www.parashift.com/c++-faq-lite/ Anybody who can follow that should probably just leave C++ on the resume. We all know C++ is massive, this is an interesting case study in how the massive language interacts with itself.
Fat Loss Tips - How to Correctly Lose Fat
I have one question as regards ergonomics. How do you keep good neck posture? I've a habit of protruding my head outward really close to the monitor, and reading books at a very close distance (like 6 inches). As a result, my shoulders, neck, and head now make out the x^3 curve (it should of course ideally be somewhat straight). I have to consciously think about keeping my neck straight... but it's very hard to be mindful of this 24/7.
Another really simple thing you can do is walk around while you're thinking. I know you probably incorporate this into "stand up when not operating the computer," but it bears repeating and emphasizing. Not only does it get you away from your keyboard and chair, it also helps stimulate the thought process.
I love how they think their network's reputation is 'beginning' to change, and that it isn't already hopelessly ruined.
I would think you could modify a drafting table into a serviceable standing desk without much effort.
Its actually watered down aop. AspectJ sets the standard in AOP for Java.