skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's my take on all this: You can't stop a determined group of people from disrupting society to some extent.

That's because it is way too simple to mess things up, all it takes is a hammer and you can probably get a 50:1 kill ratio. (the number of people one asshole can kill before being killed themselves).

Terrorists are the 'griefers' in real life. They need cooperation from the media to give their deeds the attention otherwise there would not be enough incentive for them to go through with it. Hence the trend towards the more spectacular but less efficient ways of killing people.

If wholesale murder really was their goal they could do a whole lot better than they're doing, let's hope they don't catch on to that.

As long as there are people willing to have their minds poisoned by 'authority figures' without thinking for themselves and taking responsibility for their own actions this problem is unlikely to go away.

A better approach would be to limit the media exposure to the dry facts and give proportional attention to the deaths of people that die in less spectacular but equally tragic ways.

CNN is just a big a factor in a terrorist attack as the victims are, and as long as that's the case this sort of attack will continue.

Imagine hearing 'a terrorist attack four months ago killed 12 people' versus live footage from the scene of a blocked off times square within minutes of it happening.

The first would result in a shrug, the second keeps nations glued to their tvs, gives the terrorists more recognition and therefore an incentive to continue.

We're way too fascinated with this terrorism thing taken the amount of people actually killed on average per year, it would be much better to direct the funds and effort going in to all this to more productive - but less politically sensitive - issues.

Poverty for example kills a lot more people per year than terrorism ever has, or ever will.
Yes: you are in a minority within a minority. Of the programmers who read to further their education after school is done with (an already-small number), most will be complacent to read books, or blogs, or at the most journal articles. The number who dive into a foreign codebase—that is, one they have no association with and don't rely on for anything—without the expectation of eventually contributing something (i.e. In OSS) is vanishingly small.
The pricing on the backups page is pricing for the backup service.
This is just another example of the "clear only if known" (COIK) problem, which is pervasive especially in tech. The proper way to explain a complicated system to someone who doesn't know anything about it already is to start with the most basic of simplifications, start with a mental model and build up from there, adding levels of detail at each step, making sure that each level of detail makes sense in the context of the previous level. Working from overly simplistic, inaccurate abstractions down to the nitty gritty details.

Instead what tends to happen is that people describe each component in detail and the entire system in too much detail. None of it makes sense because none of it has context, but eventually with persistence and immersion it may make sense, but it's a lot more difficult than it should be. Nobody sensible tries to teach someone about how cars work by giving them a circuit diagram of the EFI system, yet that's not too far off how many devs are introduced to complex systems in software engineering.

The problem is far worse than this may seem though. Because at a very fundamental level software engineering lacks a common set of abstractions and a common language to even properly discuss software design at a wide range of levels of abstraction. This is reflected not just in problems educating "noobs" but also in the very design of most software. This lack of vocabulary and mental models is devilishly intertwined with a distinct lack of design patterns at certain scales in software, which helps explain why so much software tends to be a tangled mess of crap rather than well-designed and modular. We build big ball of mud after big ball of mud instead of tractors, cathedrals, and cruise ships partly because we don't have the intellectual tools (vocabulary, models, design patterns, etc.) to tackle design problems on that scale.

Compare the complexity of software architecture patterns such as MVC or layering to the construction patterns of, say, an automobile, a house, or an airplane. When you start doing that you realize just how incredibly young this field still is.
60 Visionary Examples of Creative Photography
How about cusp[1] then?
It is an eclipse plugin. Never tried myself, but it could be a starting point.

[1] http://sergeykolos.com/cusp/intro/
Unless the project is the Apollo-11, I have never understood why 9-5 is not sufficient. That's 7 solid hours of work (1 hour for lunch). If pointless meetings consume a lot of that time, I get that may not be sufficient.

Personally, whenever I've put in 7-8 solid hours of coding and/or design/thinking, I'm spent for the day. Done. Over. I just want to give my brain a rest at that point. I don't think it's humanly possible to be working at peak capacity for anything before 10 hours a day. I wish modern workplaces focused more on how to create an environment/culture where employees are in "the zone" more often than just having them put in longer hours. That I believe would produce higher quality work.

This whole thing about expecting programmers to work beyond 9-6 is just sad. I have never once seen a Product Manager or Business Dev guy work late into the night.
I heard the claim once in an interview with a German social-democrat who had to justify why making the labour market more flexible (i.e. removing some unemployment benefits in that case (see Hartz IV)) was in common people's interest after all. The guy cited a statistic that found long-term unemployed people comparable in misery to cancer patients. Long-term unemployment was (and still is) a big problem in Germany.

However, a quick search on the internet for "health unemployed" (without the quotes), turns up articles like http://www.mja.com.au/public/issues/feb16/creed/creed.html

I also heard of other studies that found that top managers, despite having lots of stress on the job, are still more content and less prone to stress-related ills, than people who get their stress from being low on the social pecking order. (Perhaps somebody can find that study?)
I would do close to anything to get a first hand view of a rocket launch. The shear force that is necessary to lift 100tons+ off the ground is a spectacle in itself.
Know Your Rights: H.264, patent licensing, and you
Tangent, something I wrote a couple months ago: http://hosheng.blogspot.com/2010/02/intangible-assets-and-su...
The startup I work for, http://www.gobloomhealth.com, is working to solve this exact problem. Employers outsource all their health benefits administration to Bloom Health, and we match employees to the health plans best suited to them. Two of our early customers are small software dev shops.
That's just you ;-)

http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/archives/202911.asp

They seem to be courting Redmond.
Our data shows women only work 76% of the time that men do. Interestingly, the National Committee on Pay Equity found that women earn 77% of what their male counter parts do. </quote>
Why?

I guess it's cool to waste money and not have to worry about losing customers or getting your budgets cut.

I'm with one of the posters there - it will be more interesting to see how many adverts are overlayed on the projection.
The authors basically says that it does not always like when people changes his stuff, so he thinks it's fine to do a kind of read only open source with additional unwritten rights (basically i've got the impression that it's okay to send him he likes, but he won't tell you before the rules for him to like things or not...)

He does not take into account at all that you can just modify copies of his stuff. Not his own (unless he planned to do a kind of wikipedia like repository for his code, freely modifiable by anybody without even registration).

And also: copies are naturally free in the digital age.

Also, i'm not fond the whole "i'm a good programmer, you are only allowed to look because you could be a bad one and do a mess in your own copy -- and oh I forgot: I happen to like free software, but not when I write the program" thing.
Build a Custom-Printed Circuit Board
The other way round could also work: Make people use Emacs for C first, then switch them to Common Lisp.

(However I like Scheme better anyway.)
> ... people expect that you publish code because you want it to be changed, and not simply read.

Browser-interpreted code makes this quite a fuzzy issue. What are the rules with running tools like GreaseMonkey? Is there a legal or moral line that shouldn't be crossed with tools like GM?

As an aside, I wonder if there is any gender bias in the "publish code"-->"you want it changed" conclusion. I've observe that females tend to state problems in order to find empathy, and males tend to state problems in order to find solutions (of course, this is a gross simplification). Mixing these two types when a problem presents itself can sometimes result in conflict. Perhaps the same tendencies in people sometimes conflict over code (i.e., some present code to look at and admire, others see it as an opportunity for improvement).
Keeping the Record Straight - Criteria for Round the World Sailing
I think it's pretty cool that they had cameras capable of recording at 500 frames per second back then.

Harold Edgerton was doing amazing things with high-speed photography around the same time, inventing camera and flash technology that allowed for faster and faster exposures. Do check out his work if you've never seen it before.
They must have been hopped up on Mike and Ikes.
Yes, I've never seen that one before but it definitely looks promising. I'll have a look at it and see what it can do.
I would guess the majority of source code available online is explicitly open source. So it's reasonable to assume that this particular bit of source code available online is also (intended to be) open source, if there's no indication otherwise. Fiction is not the same, for various reasons: a work of fiction posted online is probably not "open source" (creative commons or similar), so that's not the default assumption with unlabelled fiction.

This is just culture clash. You're coming from a writer background and publishing things for people coming from a hacker background. If you explicitly state "this is not free software: look but don't touch", people will at least understand what your expectations are. Not everyone will understand or agree with you, but most will respect your wishes.

Similarly, I suspect a hacker-turned-writer would be likely to have a similar attitude to his fiction as to his code, and use a CC license. Or artists in general, actually: two examples I can think of are Randall Munroe and Jonathan Coulton.
I think you're missing that point. By saying, "You're a single person, you cannot affect change," you are discouraging everyone that would have (in this case) deleted their Facebook account. What if the number of people independently inspired by such an article is enough to make a minor dent in Facebook's bottom line? But they won't do that because of the constant beating of the, "Your vote is just a single vote and cannot matter" mantra.

Sure, convincing a group of people to delete their Facebook accounts is better than just deleting your own, but discouraging people en masse from enacting simple changes also discourages emergent behaviours in the crowd before they even start.
Source? Also, OLED seems much more amenable to being interleaved with eink than lcd ever could be (the pixel element is self illuminating), is anyone working on doing so?
Yes. However keep in mind that Lisp has left the forefront of functional programming mostly to ML derived languages.

Common Lisp isn't even very functional. Not much more than e.g. Python. Scheme is a bit more functional oriented.
One of the funniest stories surrounding the 'Tulip craze' was that a captain of a long distance sea voyage upon returning to the Netherlands found himself in the ante-room waiting for his masters to hear his report.

He stood there for a while being ravenously hungry, and spotting an onion on a little plate made short work of it with his pocket knife.

Imagine his surprise when he found himself in the brig for eating a 'prized possession', he'd just eaten a Tulip bulb that at the market rate of the time was worth more than his ship.

--

That's from memory, I'm not sure how accurate it is, or even if it is true, it was in our history books in school. But still, even if it is just a story it illustrates nicely just how 'crazy' the Tulip craze really was.
This just took effect for me and I hate it. Is there a way to opt out? I haven't been able to find one.
Please could you publish the raw anonymised data, or at least give us estimates of the variation? Without that, the data are meaningless.
58k images!
if acronyms and proper names were capitalized, we'd have everything covered? punctuation already signals the end of a sentence.

i could read and comprehend what you said in your example, but it required more mental effort. i don't think reading a blog without caps requires more mental effort, but if it does to most people, then i might have to switch back.
I think a lot of the reason people like posting on someone's wall on Facebook, as opposed to mailing them, is that they truly can take back a wall post after it has been submitted and delivered. This is only possible with a "benevolent messenger," an authority between you and the other party that can be biased in your interest. People don't like truly impartial records, although they like to look like they do.
I do this kind of thing using a one-liner:

while true; do inotifywait -r --exclude '^\..*\.swp$' -e CLOSE_WRITE src_dir; sleep 1; rsync -a src_dir/ dst_host:dst_dir/;done

This version has a race condition, but is sufficient for pushing a source tree into a testing environment automatically during development. You could also use the -m switch to inotifywait and a while loop on the output to avoid the race.

I wouldn't want to use anything apart from manual deployment script to deploy to CDNs since a daemon adds another point of failure. To check for a failure you'd need to check that the daemon has done its job, at which point you'd be running a script to do this and so could just use rsync at that point instead.
I often find that I can't properly "read" code without a mindset of wanting to change something about it. Of course, I sometimes invent a trivial "something" when I really want to understand a piece of code.
> After all, I was almost blinded by the infamous Lisp parentheses!

Lisp's parenthesis seem to share their deterrence factor with Python's significant indentation. Most people who have used one of them for a while don't even notice them any longer. At least not as a problem.

Interestingly, Haskell seems to be strange enough, that nobody fears its significant indentation.
I know you said "Most VCs" not "all". Howard Morgan of First Round Capitol, said that they'll do competitive investments, but cautiously and with separate partners on the board. That's one partial exception at least.
If my calculation is wildly off base, please let me know why, I would appreciate it.
What Twitter’s Blackbird Pie could learn from QuoteURL
Twitter Media's @robinsloan launched today a helper tool for quoting and embeding tweets. The idea is to make people to use html instead of screenshots.

This blog post is a list of suggestions/feedback based on my experiences with a similar project, QuoteURL.
When the Soviets had leaking oil wells they couldnt seal, they nuked them
I wish space travel was a bigger priority, specifically for governments since they seem most capable so far. We've made so many incredible advancements in the last 20 or 30 years, it'd be awesome to see how spaceships would have evolved had we put the same amount of effort into developing them.
It looks like no-vowels slows down my reading to about 50% of original speed, whereas no-caps slows me down only to maybe 90%. This might be because I spend so much time on IRC.
I would say "publishing" must always be a distinct step, and that there has to have been a conscious effort of some sort on the part of the programmer to put the code up separately from its existence within a program. However, even if some people disagree with that, I don't think it could be argued that obfuscated code was to be considered "published"—which could actually be a good argument for code obfuscators.
Only 1/3 of the periods in e.g. this sentence signal the end of it.
The fact is that a lot of people don't respect Parliament as an institution any more because of the abuses of expenses. Parliament clearly think that this will bring some positive publicity to them. The BBC have also done quite a bit to try and make democracy a bit more transparent with things like "Democracy Live" so I guess the projection ties in with that campaign.

EDIT: In fact I was asked by a pollster if I respected parliament a few months ago so it's clearly something they're worried about.
Check around; there may be launch sites closer to you than you think. I saw a small rocket launch in Virginia that put a satellite into orbit. However, the public viewing spot was about 2-3 miles away. It was still awesome. http://www.marsspaceport.com/
Works fine for me in Chrome on Windows, 4.1.249.1064. Mac might be on an older release or have a platform-specific issue.
There seems to be two types of coders (or maybe even more!). Those with their own families, and those without. If you have a family, you have found something more important. I don't, so I will spend sometime with friends and family, but most of my time coding. I could go out every night, or watch tv every night, or read a book, but I prefer to create something.
If I was considering hiring an employee with Facebook on their resume, I'd definitely ask their opinion on these matters. If they didn't see a problem with them they aren't working with me. If they did see a problem and didn't do anything about it, I'd weight that pretty heavily against them.
In this day and age, yes, you are largely correct, but I don't think it was always so. I get the impression that at one time, "loyalty" between employer and employee actually meant something in both directions; the company might take some losses to hang on to people and/or help them out. Perhaps more so than would happen today.

The chocolate maker Cadbury would be a good example of this.
It seems these are lessons we must perpetually relearn.
Extraordinaries brings crowdsourcing to micro-volunteerism
Of course, C++ already has std::accumulate, which is basically the same thing as a general fold or a summation, depending on which version you use. So, there isn't really much of a reason to write sum manually at all. :p

http://www.sgi.com/tech/stl/accumulate.html
Family Values: "Red States" Have Higher Divorce Rates Than "Blue States"
So is using facebook's API to access facebook against the TOS?
Thanks for the tip off, I'll definitely check his work out.
Here's the link to the actual announcement - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/election_2010/86...

"No clue why the Photoshop guy could not update the "2005" reference with a more appropriate year label." Well, given that was the last election and those were the results, I would say that "no clue" is accurate but perhaps not applied to the "Photoshop guy".

Overall, I'd call this a compelling work of art for taking election results back into public spaces rather than 24 hour news channels (like, ironically enough, BBC World). It's a shame the UK is looking at a hung Parliament, thereby depriving this real-time (ish) counter of a victory moment.
He said that our population tended to be male, I agreed and said that we selected an equal # of men/women. I'm not a statistics god, but doesn't that account for that particular bias? There are certainly others-- we'd be the last people to say that this represents a perfect cross-section of society.

Given that we selected 4,000 man and 4,000 women (randomly), how does the preponderance of men in our broader dataset effect this particular analysis?

Sorry if I'm being obtuse-- I didn't do the actual analysis and I'm really pretty rusty on my stats.
KoFounder: Share Ideas. Collaborate. Get Noticed
When HATETRIS reached Hacker News, someone posted some
JavaScript which would modify the game to have gravity.

I believe this is in response to the diff I posted. I'm sorry if I infringed upon any stated or implied licence in posting that. I will of course remove it if you feel that is appropriate.

Personally I feel what I posted, given the readership of this website, was directly equivalent to simply saying "Wow, wouldn't that be really hard if it had gravity!" That was the way I'd intended it to be read anyway.

For what its worth, I really enjoyed your programming style, it was clean, concise and built in such a way that extending it to include gravity was trivial. It took me longer to remember the syntax to diff than to figure out the changes.
I don't think grades/school should be used for employment at all.* Grades may coincide with good skills but they are _COMPLETELY_ orthogonal.

1. Most programmers in the US go through 16 years of school. The final 8 have an effect on where you end up. Of the first four(high school) only about 1/3 of your time is spent on math/science* * . Of the final 4(at the two colleges I attended) only about 2.5 years are spent on math science. Of that 2.5 years only about 1.5 are computer-science specific.

This means you're determining somebody's programming competence based on information (What college and grades)
that is less than half(48%) based on math/science proficiency and less than quarter(19%) based on computer science.

2. They're subjective. Especially liberal arts(i.e. MOST of school).* * *

3.It's incredibly expensive. Computer science and math cost next to nothing, but for some reason I'm supposed to give some school 60k over 4 years to spend about a quarter of my time studying what I'm interested in.

4.If you test out of a class it doesn't count for grades. If I work very hard and do 16 weeks of calculus in 3 and take a test, I get credit. If do nothing and just ace the class I get an A to pad my transcript. This creates a DIRECT incentive to do less.* * * *

* I am absolutely all for hearing about research/coding/contests I don't think schools opinions should matter at all.

* * I mention high school grades because high school grades determine which school you go to.

* * * Yes, math and science in high school/college can be and frequently are subjective as well. Teachers give credit for effort/showing work on problems/homework/etc. etc.. My high school algebra grade was a C despite getting 90+% right on exams because I didn't do the homework and the teacher wasn't satisfied with my explanations.
Exactly. I can't tell if patio11 and run4yourlives are messing with me or not!
They may be some people who are like this. But I know enough people with good grades, who are much more tolerant; and some even see their chase of high grades as a waste of time.
I think that he's more concerned with dealing with the guy that is not pulling his weight, not with motivating the 9-5'ers to work overtime.
Doesn't work for me in Chrome on a Mac. That's a deal-killer.
On a related note, it was refreshing to have a voice-over by a person who's actually competent. Sometimes it feels like the internet aggregate of videos is 70% silent/irrelevant music, and 29% average joe commentary.
i believe the correct grammatical use of "e.g." uses commas anyway, in which case i would have easily understood the example without caps:

only 1/3 of the periods in, e.g., this sentence, signal the end of it.
Norbert: a cluster manager and networking layer built on top of Zookeeper