skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Exactly. Assistentialism is easy to defend, hard to attack ("you mean you should NOT help them?"), and spreads very easily, but totally fails to help, most of the time.

A government shouldn't build hospitals for the poor, or schools for the poor in the same sense it shouldn't have buses with separate benches for black people ("affirmative action" programs face the same problem). It a big problem of democracy as a form of government that it encourages "for show", high-visibility/low-impact, governing, and assistentialism and affirmative action fit the bill perfectly. Most rulers are not trying to help the poor, but to show that they are helping the poor.

Back where I com from, a few decades ago, there was a system of informal government called "coronelism". Affluent farmers or city politicians, called "coronéis", would build informal support networks around themselves (paying for a bright poor kid's education here, paying for a poor woman's surgery there, etc), and make it so that for most poor people they were the only way into having access to basic services of civilization. It was a crooked incentives game, and they elected themselves like this while laundering taxpayer money and sabotaging any sort of project that would provide real education, health care, etc, to the poor people, as a form of keeping control. The rest of the country needed to move forward a lot before this could be suplanted.

I feel most affirmative action programs work in the same way. You can't criticise hospitals or housing for poor people in the same way you can't criticise the "coronel" for putting that bright poor kid through college and making a lawyer/doctor/engineer out of him, but neither of these actions actually change anything in the scale of society in the long term.
For many pregnant Chinese, a U.S. passport for baby remains a powerful lure
Yes. If music is on, I want to listen to the music. It's distracting if I'm trying to think about something else.

An interesting exception is in cafés, where I'm fine to hack away as long as the music isn't too loud.

One other point about music while programming is that it leads programmers to put headphones on, which I sometimes find detracts from collaboration.
tests for those environments

Sure sticking to ECMA-262 can help
http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecm...

you can read, re-read, etc. the spec to get a good feel of the language
but at the end of the day, some hosts could implement things a bit differently,
especially on the "blurry" parts of the spec.

For example, two engines could support regexp but have a slightly different implementation
and be both valid ECMA-262 edition 3, idem for number precisions, etc.

So if your main concern is to avoid browser-centric JS features, test with the engine of those browsers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript_engine
* Chrome => V8
* Firefox => SpiderMonkey / TraceMonkey
* Internet Explorer => IE JScript / Chakra
* Safari => JavaScriptCore / SquirrelFish
* etc.

most of the browsers will provide their engine as a command line tool
ex: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Building_only_SpiderMonkey
(for IE you can use Windows Script Host).

and simply put, you can run your JS code base on those tools
to find the common denominator and/or limitations, imho
it is simpler to run tests on the command line than in the browser itself.

If already your library work with all the engines you're in pretty good shape.

Another way to be in "good shape" is to simply re-use one of the popular
JS libraries, like JQuery, as those are pretty well tested.

But to be honest it depends on how far you want to go,
most likely testing only the JS engine will not be enough if you deal a lot
with the browser DOM, you will have to test in the browsers anyway,
and there that's where the fun begin, because as much as you can find slight difference
of implementations in JS engine, you can find bigger differences in browser implementations,
yep even if all that is supposed to be "standard".

here few links that may help

http://www.quirksmode.org/js/support.html
http://www.quirksmode.org/compatibility.html
http://www.quirksmode.org/js/introevents.html
http://ejohn.org/blog/building-a-javascript-library/
http://code.google.com/speed/articles/optimizing-javascript....
I've had some good luck with http://jobs.freelanceswitch.com. It requires a subscription (< $10/month) and you can cancel and re-subscribe at will.
Given both of our countries' track records, if the police had easy access to a device that could inflict great pain without leaving a trace on the human body, the ethics of crowd control would be the least of my misgivings.
Dennis Crowley (foursquare) has a clear sense of direction
Boards of Canada. I suggest starting with the Trans Canada Highway EP. The track is called "Left Side Drive".
One thing to keep in mind is that it's "just a TV show" and that it has the benefit of hindsight. They can look back at history and find the great (or the disastrous) ad campaigns and riff on those. They make it look like Draper (the pitchman in that clip) just knocks out those hits with just a few hours of brooding between sessions of drinking and screwing and being bad towards his wife. In real life, its a lot more random and not so easy.
Motown always does it for me
Spoilers

Don't read if you haven't seen it yet!

Saito dies at some level (if I remember right at the top dream level) and he enters limbo. Cobb goes there from the snow compound dream level but Saito has already been there 20-40 years (maybe they said in the movie, I forgot that too). Cobb then helps him remember Saito is in a dream so they can wake up together from the limbo state.
iTs Cool
Ask the cubans that were forced to leave how much they got for their land. One of the things that people take for vantage and dont realize is the stability of the US government. I'm not saying that mexico is on course for collapse but the police have lost control of the north border
Glassworks by Phillip Glass gets me to be productive, it is repetitive and some people can't stand it but it works for me. For math the only thing that works for me is silence.

For casual browsing I use Spotify and just look around a bit for something I like, the artist radio has found me quite a couple of gems.
Remember when he promised the end of spam? Actually, I cannot think of any of his predictions that were accurate.
Wow, that's actually a really tempting idea. (Starts making plans to buy up half of Buenos Aires.)
I've often thought that being involved in a variety of online communities over the years has really increased my ability to think critically about a topic. By now, I've seen and had so many arguments on such a wide range of topics that I'm able to recognize similar patterns in new information that I come across, and make better decisions because of it.

While debating certain things over and over does get old, at least you've thought things through in a very thorough manner.
You might be interested in reading this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_English#Modern_Englis.... As third person singular personal pronouns, he and he/she are both acceptable in the dual gender case. If we're going to be strictly PC we should say gender-neutral, but A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language was written in 1985, so I hope you let it pass. :)
Haha, I was thinking the same thing while watching it last night. Terrific movie indeed.
Should be? Why?

If "absorbed into other markets" means "wal-mart greeter", then that's bad. I'm all about efficiency and won't advocate make-work jobs, but if you don't have a base of demand in the form of a healthy middle class, it's hard to find people to buy the goods that you do manufacture.
Thanks. If you register it does show you the number of rights/wrongs for each word in that training session. I'd like to add something to show overall stats so that you can see your improvement. I don't have any hard evidence to show that learning to spell words A, B, and C will also help you learn to spell D and E. Of course, at some point if you learn to spell all of the words that you use, then you're definitely better off.
I use Alfresco for multi-page apps and nothing for a single page app. As for performance, the difference posting a form via form post or as a JSON call is negligible but the nice part about jax-rs is you can change use multi-inputs so if you wanted to you could set a forms action to post directly to the REST service and write a handler for form post. So if you want to form post data you can. As well, you can still provide a json post service as well as make the get and put json services. So you can have handlers for plain text, XML, json, and form post for a single rest service and jab will serialize them into the same object for your routine. Personal I do it all via xhr request becase dojo and jquery have a nice API for serializing a form into a json object.
> The way to reclaim any of these is to destroy the object, which lets you reclaim all of them.

I asked why one should mix management of resources, and you answer that one should mix management of resources. But I still don't know why?
That's not exactly that great of a cost. Just use it when it's appropriate.

"Hidden Cost" implies a real danger, particularly a long term impact, and this article has no such dangers to present.
Stop the trend of athletics over art and that might help creativity.

Remove the federal government from schools to stop the standardization of the school system and that might help.

Try to change the way smart kids are thought of in school and make it where they are the cool kids.

Stop giving medals and trophies to every kid and only to those who win. If students realize that they are going to have to work to be #1 then they might get more creative.

Just some thoughts.
on every page refresh? every second?? thats really not expected!!
Amazon Successing
Right. This is why curing aging is just about the best thing we could do from both an economic and humanitarian perspective.
I'm just getting my feet wet with jQuery and found Paul Irish's "10 Things I Learned From the jQuery Source" is hilarious and very informative.
What a computer scientist sees is an infinite tower of reflective interpreters.
Do Plants Talk?
I tend to agree. On the other hand, people seem quite happy taking caffeine and alcohol and daily or near-daily basis. Even mixing the two. So I guess your statement doesn't hold in general?
I was going to try to find a YouTube clip of it, but I couldn't, so let me just recommend The IT Crowd episode 2.5, in which Moss invents the best bra ever known, except for a few fatal flaws which cause their pitch at the end of the episode to fail miserably.
Ask HN: What makes written content "good"?
The interesting/entertaining webservice http://iwl.me piqued my curiosity about writing styles in general and lead me to ask myself what makes one piece of written prose better than another? I'm thinking about structural suggestions (e.g. subject and verb do not alway appear in the same order) rather than say emotional (e.g. it makes me feel happy). Any experienced writers or editors out there who have knowledge of this or perhaps a link to a source that has suggestions?
Basically all newer hardware has the ability to convert from sRGB to linear RGB during texture sampling, and back again during ROP. See these OpenGL extensions:

http://www.opengl.org/registry/specs/EXT/texture_sRGB.txt

http://www.opengl.org/registry/specs/ARB/framebuffer_sRGB.tx...
you mean having dramatic background music played while pitching?
;)
Exactly what I wanted to say. In fact the last time the Swedish king tried to exercise the powers that he thought he had by not signing a law he did not like, the parliament immediately stripped him of those powers and passed the law anyways.
"Birth Tourism" and "snakeheads" are both really interesting terms. It's fascinating when words cross language boundaries.
What would you listen to while writing lisp?
The first scene is "here's where he is at now" and then the rest of the movie is a flashback explaining how this happened.
You remind me of the scene from "The Graduate" where everyone is trying to tell Dustin Hoffman what to do with his life and someone says "Plastics. That's where the future lies." (Or something along those lines.) If I recall correctly, that bit was used (much, much later) in a commercial for plastics. I didn't know until later, from an older acquaintance commenting on it, that the scene was humorous and the suggestion of "Plastics" was viewed as a rather ridiculous thing to include at the time the film came out.
Experiments with HTML5 &lt;canvas&gt; and &lt;audio&gt;
Do you consider mass vaccinations of mid 20th century a public good project? Do you consider them a failure?
Automation has greatly reduced the amount of agricultural work, and jobs today which we regard as central to the economy are also likely to be eventually automated. Probably what constitutes "work" will change, and things we regard as recreational today may become "work".
Any plan that is not fully funded, in cash, is not a pension - it's a bet - a bet that someone (else), somewhere, sometime, will assume the risk if it goes south. Those who offer "public" pensions are the worst offenders - everyone knows the taxpayer will be on the hook for it - it's easy to promise the world to a public employee when it's not coming out of a bottom line.
What kind of protection could be used to block it?
I think you're missing the point. The point is that the technology isn't about the things, it's about the people and how it affects your life.

Nobody cares that the carousel is a wheel. Just like nobody cares that your phone has a 1gz processor, or that your display has 1080dpi. It's that a 1gz processor makes animations smoother or programs run faster so you can get things done. The 1080dpi is so that you can see your photos or video in life-like quality.
A lot of this has to do with marginal value. The cost of basic survival has gone way down - but in the process, it's freed up a lot of disposable income, so people build bigger, better, and yet less efficient ways of doing things to soak up that extra money.

Health care's perhaps the biggest example. A hundred years ago, millions of children died in infancy from things like measles, whooping cough, polio, etc. Now this has been wiped out by vaccines that cost maybe a day's salary for a parent (and cost the manufacturer probably pennies to make). Same with antibiotics.

The money all gets spent on the other end of life. We now have the technology to keep patients who would've died within the hour alive for months in an ICU. That costs millions, and doesn't work all the time. But when it does - how can you put a price on that? What price is there on a father being able to see his kids grow up, or a grandparent being able to meet their grandchildren?

The same goes for many other areas. We can build 1200-square-feet houses pretty cheaply. But why bother, when there's some family that's willing to pay over $1M for that 5000-square-feet McMansion?

I think a lot of the problem is that American culture is so damned competitive. It's not enough to have enough - you also have to have more than the neighbors. There's really no end to this game - it will always be possible to have something slightly better, it's just that it becomes increasingly expensive the more you try to squeeze out.
With respect to the US, the “(~ 10x)” estimate is wrong; please stop throwing it around as a given.

I refer you to this table from the Uniform Crime Reports:

http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/data/table_43.html

African-Americans make up about 12% of the US population and, for all crimes, about 28% of arrests. This is out of proportion to their population (and other subthreads can pick up the argument about why that disparity exists), but if black crime were ten times the rate of white crime, and if the racial proportions of who got arrested reflected this (which is of course another issue), then African-Americans would make up about 58% of arrests.
There is no web censorship in Nigeria, only ISP's might ban a user from their network if a report was made about that user. The average 'broadband' speed in Nigeria is 200-400kbps and mostly wireless access. But with the completion of the MainOne submarine cable, it is expected that things here will change for the better. Nigeria's population is huge, 150million although the purchasing power of the average citizen is low, It's a strong emerging market.
The problem is, when a person uses 'they' as a single pronoun, he seems uneducated.
Question: When you read the title, did you imagine the article was by a female author?
I'm sorry but I think this is bad advice.

I'm not against learning C in general. I think everyone should. But his question isn't should he learn C ever it's should he learn it in his spare time between High School and College

The best thing I did for myself during college was to program on my own time in languages that people use out in the world. Learning C, Assembly, Data Structures and all the rest is great but when you get out into the world it helps to have been programming in Python or Ruby for 4 years and be experienced in that.

So I say "No". Learn C in school but in your free time I suggest you learn Python (Here's a great starter book I used when I taught a class on it: http://www.amazon.com/Python-Programming-Absolute-Beginner-3...)
Doh! Had to edit the title to use &lt; and &gt;
It's not about being scared, it's about being prepared. It's about making sure you have the choice as to whether or not you'll be working when you are 70, 80, 90, or whatever age you start to feel old.

Do you live to work, or do you work to live?
I'd stay away from elance and other similar sites if I were you. Focus on getting your name out there as a freelancer in certain niche communities (Django, for instance) rather than competing mostly on price for any kind of work.
"This is the first clear evidence that suggests our ability to produce sperm is very ancient, probably originating at the dawn of animal evolution 600 million years ago,"

That is pure guesswork. You only have to read the whole article to see it is a "theory".
Mint.com has millions of users who have provided that information. That said, in the medium to long term we're working on a unique solution that will permit you to keep your usernames and passwords only on your local computer while keeping the less sensitive data (transaction history, balances, etc.) on our servers.
Hmm,

Andrew Wile began work on proving Fermat's theorem in 1986 at 33. He finished first presented the proof in 1993 at age 40. He was not eligable for a Fields Medal, which I personally think is a travesty (An award reserved for the class of people considered most fit in the field? What's the justification there ).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wiles

Raymund Smullyan received his PhD at forty and has made significant contributions to logic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Smullyan

It has been hypothesized that mathematics has grown so large that mathematicians are now more likely to make contributions because of the amount of material which it is necessary to learn.
The visualizers are very well done, and in Safari 5 they don't seem to max out the processor, so that is good. However, some of them are fairly low res, just blown up larger. I wonder how much resources they would use if they had a high quality version.
I don't disagree that standard language is dynamic and a representation of culture (and those who control it).

However -- while I have heard plenty of suggestions for resolving the issue from college english professors, none of them have managed to convince the Central Board of Oppressive English to accept their proposal, and so we might just be stuck with non gender-neutral pronouns and awkward she/he constructions for the time being.

'They' might emerge as a ambiguously plural/singular gender-neutral pronoun, but in the meantime I won't berate anyone for sticking to the accepted standard.
I agree with the thrust of your comment that vernacular is what it is and attempts to police it are foolish. Though there's no need to be rude. And "he" is not a vernacular (Muphry's Law?). But this case is a lot more subtle than you imply.

Generic singular "he" is an older usage that is slowly phasing out as society changes. When I find myself using "he" for this, I always notice that it doesn't quite feel right anymore. Of course most people who favor this usage point to its "standard" correctness (cf. this thread), but that's pointing to the past. What's interesting is that we're in a pluralistic stage where there are many competing alternatives -- generic "he", alternating "he" and "she", "he or she", singular "they" -- none of which quite feels right.

This is untenable in the long run because it forces you to think about which one to use. That's way too much runtime overhead, and it's not how language works. Vernacular is a don't-make-me-think thing. That's the real problem with sprout's suggestion in the GP, i.e. rewording to drop the generic singular altogether. It's a viable alternative, and I do it all the time, but it's also the most expensive.

There's no way this gap won't get filled. The only reason we haven't seen it yet is that fundamental language shifts are slow relative to a human lifespan.

The option I find most annoying is the "sometimes use 'he' and sometimes use 'she'" one, which is like solving a design problem in a function by offloading it entirely to the caller. Not only do you have to think about which one to use, you also have to reference-count to keep the two in balance over time. No way is that one going to survive. (I also find that people who do this tend to be annoying tsk-tsk types, though maybe that's a prejudice.) My money's on singular "they", because it's the simplest, it's truly generic, and -- amusingly contrary to all the pseudo-grammarians who freak out about it -- it has a long history in English. Great examples at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they.
She has always been active in the community. Since retiring she has volunteered at the hospital, nursing homes and in the community 5 days a week.

Combine that with her great-grandchildren and she is working a busy schedule!
These fine folks give $1,000 for small projects on a monthly basis: http://awesomefoundation.org
There has never been and never will be a computer algorithm that can take the place of a good editor. Period, cannot be done but it won't stop the clueless from trying.

For example I may not wish to ever see stories about say Britnney Spears but I guarantee if she dies from an overdose tomorrow I will want to know it.
Watch "Art and Copy". A poignant reflection and reminder of why advertising is important.
Mathematics is good at making young people feel old.

Take Galois, for instance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galois). Solved one of the major mathematical problems of his time. Founded a major branch of abstract algebra (seriously -- in a three quarter grad level course, you spend about a quarter on it).

Died at 20.
Then again, a plan fully funded in cash is a bet that you have enough money, skill, and/or luck to keep its real value, after any inflatiatory and investment influences, equal to or above what you will need when you retire.
It's not just on paper. In my own experience I have gotten a lot of utility out of researching old patents (I do aluminum anodizing as a hobby and found detailed descriptions of stripping solutions in patents).

Society needs a system to ensure that innovations are not lost. Abolishing it is in someways similar to the idea of abolishing scientific publications. If you do that, how will breakthroughs be communicated to future generations? Or are you saying that having such a mechanism in place is a bad thing?

Just because a problem is hard and a solution hasn't been found doesn't mean that the idea motivating it is flawed.
So? It means what it means; you can't argue that something is insulting because it would be insulting if someone else was directing the growth of the language.