skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know what you mean to imply with this question ---- when you donate to any non-profit, the money might be spent on any number of things, including overhead, as well as money sent on to beneficiaries. The only difference with DonorsChoose is that we actually give donors a say in how we spend their donation: on overhead, on materials sent to a specific classroom, or a combination. (Donors can decide to send a donation specifically to cover DonorsChoose overhead, in which case all the money goes into our general fund). The donor may also decide to donate to more than one proposal --- it could be two or three or five or ten proposals at once. That is also one credit card charge.

I really don't see why you assume that because the money being donated is spent on multiple things that would be separate credit card charges. That makes no sense, who does that? I can't think of any e-commerce site either in the commercial or non-profit space that would do this for no apparent reason.

I might add that, though I think this is more or less irrelevant, DonorsChoose does not send the money directly to teachers, but instead purchases the materials itself and has them shipped to the teachers (this is to reduce the incidence of fraud, and to make sure the money is spent on the materials the teacher said they would spend the money on --- the specific materials are chosen by the teacher, but we actually do the purchasing). If a donor specified all their donation go to the teacher and students, then the money they donate goes only to the vendor(s) for that proposal, who then ship goods to the teacher at their school, and the money we spend on staff expenses, web hosting, etc., etc. has to come from donations earmarked for overhead (including the optional donations).
Hmmm... I'm trying to sign up right now and I'm stuck at the "Ideally, how would your mentor's experience level compare to yours?" single-item drop down.

You see, I think I would make a good mentor for a junior software developer. I've worked in a lot of different domains, using a lot of different tools. I took the Construx "peer mentoring" course, have led educational seminars, etc.

But, I'm also part of a small team working on a brand-new startup, and would love to be on the learning side of a mentor relationship with someone who has early-stage startup experience. And I have to pick just one option. Seems conceptually broken to me. Maybe I'm an outlier.
Point taken, it will happen as soon as we have all the pages under the new framework.

There's a lot of stuff under the hood though that needs porting, backwards compatibility is the real slow-down here.

Last weeks changeset was well over 17K lines and we've done the 'hard ones' , but there is an awful lot of functionality in the other pages as well, and a huge set of maintenance tools to make it possible to manage all this.
I've never seen the appeal of Scribd, and I'm no fan of the direction they seem to be stumbling in, but it seems a bit unfair to dismiss invitations to join a user advisory board and/or come visit them as "not much of a response".

Even if both are mere PR exercises, it's an improvement on the kind of content-free hand waving I'd expect from a company desperately seeking profitability.
Great idea! Hope this means politicians will start listening to their voting base rather than special interest groups.
Every new thing you do in life is the right thing.

Sorry, couldn't disagree more. To take an extreme example, I could go out and rape or murder someone, which I've never done before. But that's definitely not the right thing. Decisions have consequences, and should be weighed accordingly. I agree that we should always be seeking to expand our horizons, to experience new things, to grow as individuals. And I have. But if that lust for novelty is your only moral compass, you're in for a rough ride.
Bill Gates on 'Oprah' today, in the center of education controversy
I've always felt that you grow and perform best when faced with stiff competition. If no one around you is challenging you it's probably time to move on for your own sake. Otherwise you become complacent and stagnate. Even if you push yourself, you probably won't be able to push yourself harder than others would.

So, while last place in the majors might not be as much fun as first place in the minors, it does provide the best opportunity for growth. Ultimately it probably depends on your own goals.
on the other hand, it makes for an interesting rootkit hook.
Just verifying what you said: My account authenticates with OpenID.
Why you mad tho?
Nitpick, the controls were "mechanically assisted" (i.e. "power steering"), not fly by wire. The first FBW fighter was the F-16. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Dynamics_F-16_Fighting_...
I read it as simply that he was excited about something cool he found. And it is cool. Perhaps you already knew about it; I didn't. Either way, there's no need to be an asshole. ("This plebe"? That's crossing the A-line.)
> I have content hosted there too

Can you please or anybody else explain me why you see any added value of scribd at all? I see it only as an annoyance. If I'd like to read a pdf I'd prefer to click on the link and read it, not to go to some suspicious site which demands from me to sign up there only to do what otherwise would be one single click.

As far as I know the only "advantage" of the service was to make content infringement easier (a site for documents which is like youtube was for videos), and that the site owners expect people to pay for access to it is hardly surprising. But I like other mechanisms more.

My suggestion for everybody who is the owner of his own documents and wants to upload them: host them as the normal files on the normal sites, unless you do want people to pay for access to them.
You're right, that's a better title. A lot of the commenters seem to be reacting more to the title than the post, but whatever. My point was just that I wish I had done what I wanted because I was interested in it, not because I wanted to fit in with some group of "cool" kids.
I very much want to pronounce this "Handroid". Am I the only one?
Also, your sort-by-distance in the search sorts 1000 miles before 5 miles, which makes finding someone close to me difficult.

Common enough bug, probably an easy fix.
I think there are a few takeaways here:

* You have to charge from the very beginning. If you start a free service, and then try to establish a pay system afterward, your users will feel tricked and trapped and they will rebel loudly. Scribd seems to have been in a hurry to get adoption, so they made it free to host documents; as this guy said though, he much preferred hosting with Scribd over doing it manually on his university's web server. That could have been Scribd's value proposition, and a small yearly fee for that probably would have worked OK.

* SaaS could get itself in trouble if there are too many incidents like this. I already hear from clients that are concerned about using online services; the most common questions are, "What if they change their terms?", "What if they go away?", and those are legitimate concerns. Many of my clients aren't the most computer-interested people, so if they have concerns like that, then that means that stories like this have penetrated very deep into the consumer market.
In the short term, it is zero sum. In the long run, I agree with you. Therefore, such a scheme would be best used only for people who have been unemployed for a reasonably long period of time (say, 6 weeks).

As for citizens being unwilling to accept available jobs, why should the taxpayer be forced to pay unemployment benefits to people who are unwilling to work?
I don't feel like this is a particularly fair criticism of this post. First, this guy is rooting around in the kernel code for fun. Why are we criticizing this? Second, I've done a fair amount of C programming and mucking about at the OS level, and I wasn't aware of this feature. Maybe that's because most of my production deployment has been on BSD and Solaris, not Linux, but I found the post useful. Third, I didn't feel like the author was particularly tooting his own horn, just saying "Hey I found about about this cool thing; maybe you will find this useful too".
My father worked at Intel pre-Pentium days, and so I grew up around random wafer boards and chips he would bring home to show my brothers and I.

I spent a week when I was in Jr. High figuring out how to network two computers together so I could play Warcraft 2 vs my little brother. It's so darn easy now, it's almost not fair.

I blame Warcraft 2, CompUSA, and AOL for my current tech addiction.
The Primal Blueprint by Mark Sisson. He puts some sense of his own sense of humor into the book and I like his overall lifestyle approach.
I prefer PostgreSQL. The fact that it doesn't have many of MySQL's limitations is a big plus. Just he ability to add a column on a large table without locking the thing for a huge amount of time would be great for us. PostgreSQL can also use multiple indexes which, again, is a serious plus. The error messages that PostgreSQL returns can be much more informative than MySQL. At times when you screw up a query instead of "this is impossible" or "you can't do that", you get something more akin to "this is impossible because of X". Again, this is just my impression. Basically, PostgreSQL feels more like an open source Oracle (a grown up database) than MySQL (which doesn't feel very Oracle-y).

Now the tools are MUCH less friendly, but if you come from an Oracle (or probably DB2) world you'll be used to it. While they require more cryptic commands, they do work very well.

There is the replication thing. When we picked PostgreSQL back up this year to play with for a new little system, we discovered that they took one of the formerly external replication systems and it has been put into the tree. This is a very good step, as the replication situation was a big problem for us. Before there were little third party things (based on triggers) that you could take your chances with, and there were paid replication solutions. Having one built in is quite nice.
You should really find a way to incentivize people who want to pay to join the site. I can't even figure out how to join as a payer, let alone a reason why I should.
Land of Lisp sample chapter available
u mad!
Don't hate, Joe Damato is teh man sex.
Sigh...I really wish that I had picked a different title. Believe me, I'm definitely not the type to just stick to the same routine. I've packed quite a bit into the last 15 years of my life, thank you. But to the extent that I did things to impress others or meet someone else's expectations to the detriment of my own purpose and interests, it was probably a mistake. That's all I was trying to say.
You have no idea what you're talking about.

Please be careful. It could be that his thoughts are excellent but his communication is flawed. It could also be that he has a great deal of general expertise in the subject but is mistaken in this specific statement.

Thus, a general statement about him could be false is also aggressively ad hominem. You might want to consider focusing on the statement itself rather than the speaker, such as:

"Your suggestion is entirely wrong."

JM2C of course, and it is possible that I don't know what I'm talking about. I am not a psychologist or a logician.
VMware: Check Under the Novell Hood
Straight faces are seriously overrated. Smiling brightens everyone's day, if a ridiculous title helps you smile, more power to it. (I just finished typing my handwritten notes from How to Win Friends and Influence People into my computer, so this sort of stuff is on my mind right now.)
A site co-founder here. Great idea, this is much more of a continuum from vision to execution (sort of like extrovert vs. introvert) than a binary issue. I agree. We'll consider a new type of input option for many questions that are structured like this. Also, it's certainly worth mentioning that we are taking a risk by trying to match opposites to allow for many different skillsets in a team. Although Dr. Wasserman's research right now supports this variety in founding teams I think much more research needs to be done along these lines. We hope to help collect some of this data over time to be more confident in our approach through feedback from users on the site. Thanks for taking a look at the site and helping with your comments. More updates to the system coming soon. - Aaron
I have a strange history with computers. In fifth grade I was selected (still now sure how) to go to a week-long summer school class for programming. We used some sort of IBM PCs (I have no idea what they were, I just remember booting them up with a 5.5" floppy and having to punch in the correct time as it booted) and typing in the BASIC commands the teacher wrote on the board.

In eighth grade, me and a buddy spent way to much time programming a 'choose your own adventure' story in BASIC on an Apple IIe. Something from that fifth grade class must have stuck. For some reason though, I never connected what I was doing with computer science. I guess I thought I was just playing around with a toy or something, so when my college adviser suggested I major in Computer Science, I said no way.

At some point during High School I'd gotten my hands on a copy of Photoshop, Version 3 I think. That somehow led me to major in Information Design, which oddly was in the school of journalism. I took classes on print and web design, some flash even, but most of the curriculum was journalism-oriented.

After college I worked in newspapers for about six years, creating info graphics and designing pages, but I was always involved in any IT project that came along. I helped setup a content management system, upgrade servers, etc.

I also started in newspapers right about the time their downhill slide started. The conversation du jour was always about how newspapers could make it online. Eventually I transitioned to working on Flash projects, learning Actionscript 3 (basically ECMA script) and eventually taking some .net classes at a community college to learn about object-oriented coding and all that.

Now I work for the state IT department and have a few side projects going as well. Someday I might actually post one here. I'm more of a designer than a programmer, but I think where I've landed - at least for now - fits my strengths very well. I still wonder what would have happened if I had majored in CS from the beginning, but I would have probably missed out on some fun traveling and great experiences that I had while newspapering.
I think there are "Rockstar" teachers out there in terms of their impact on students if not their popularity. I had a few teachers growing up that changed the trajectory of my life for sure.

Not everyone can be a rockstar though, and it's probably a pretty poor analogy for what good teachers can do for someone. I think the teacher that is still around and trying to keep subjects interesting and fresh after 20 years is more deserving of praise.
Phusion Passenger 3.0.0 public beta 3 released
Yet another good point; I've run into that, too. In this case, the information is relatively segmentable, so it could be deleted without causing lots of chaotic running around the database, dumping this and that.
Read about the book and check out the TOC here: http://nostarch.com/lisp.htm
Your study would have more impact if you backtest these metrics on the general population of Threadless tshirts.
I'm struggling for the right terms a little bit because I honestly don't know the correct programming language independent computer science term for what I call structured value types. What I mean is simply this:

C++:
vector<Rect> v;
for(int i = 0; i < 1000000; ++i)
v.push_back(Rect(Point(i, i), Point(i + 1, i + 1)));

Java:
List<Rect> v = new ArrayList<Rect>();
for(int i = 0; i < 1000000; ++i)
v.add(new Rect(new Point(i, i), new Point(i + 1, i + 1)));

On a 64 bit machine, the C++ vector will use 16MB of RAM whilst the Java List will use around 48MB of RAM. Also, the C++ Rects will be tight, that is located next to each other in memory and can be iterated over very cache efficiently. The Java Rects will be all over the place. Iterating over them might cause a very large number of cache misses.

[Edit] Actually, I belive the Java list will take even more space because I forgot the per object overhead for the Point objects, which is 8 bytes each (in addition to the pointers). So the Java list would take 64MB if my ad hoc calculation is right.
People still don't understand all of the things they are agreeing to on sites like this:

Scribd Creator Terms Of Service
http://ipadtest.wordpress.com/2010/05/06/scribd-creator-term...
Oh brother, I sympathize with you on this one! There seem to be few topics quite so impervious to reason. But I can assure you these girls do exist. (I've met two, but unfortunately in neither case did I make it to the diamond-free opportunity in question)

And I agree, never argue this case. It is an article of faith more holy than God or Nutrition...
Why AwesomenessReminders is Actually Really Awesome
Security Awareness: Free Mac OS X Virus Scanner; only today
This sounds a lot like what Vidoop tried to do. Their initial idea was to replace passwords with an authentication mechanism based on selecting a number of pictures that fit into user-chosen categories. A person would select 3-5 images from a grid of 12 with each image belonging to a distinct category. Those who picked the images, in the correct order, corresponding to their chosen categories (selected on sign up to the service) along with their username was deemed authenticated. As far as I know they hoped to make money by selling ads within the categories, so if one of the categories displayed was "pets" you might see ads for petfood for example. They moved into doing captchas at some point too.

Anyway, it seemed like a promising idea, but they folded last year. Good write up from a former employee here: http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2009/06/05/the-fall-of-vidoop/
My wife is a librarian. I love libraries, browsing around, finding stuff on chance. I also love ebooks (I've developed a pretty horrible O'Reilly habit since I got my iPad).

Most of what you say is true here, but it sounds like where you went kind of stunk. - libraries need to cease being book warehouses and start becoming community centers and resources. A good library will have computer classes, solid wifi, and an engaged staff working to help out the community around it.

That community is most likely not a bunch of HN readers who want to use a free beowulf cluster and all the other really cool stuff they can't justify buying for themselves, but I could see a tool lending library being quite popular in most communities.

As much as I like ebooks, the dream of "no dead wood" is probably not going to happen anytime soon - there are a whole ton of books out there that aren't available in digital format, or are out of print but still sitting on shelves somewhere. Frankly, the DRM scheme of having content restricted to ink on paper is a relatively reasonable form of copy protection, IMO.
The parts I think are bullshit are the parts like

The logic behind not eating legumes (and dairy) is the same as the logic behind not eating grains: the adult human digestive tract is not capable of fully digesting these (e.g. the protein lectin in grains), causing gut irritation and ultimately causing autoimmunity and inflammation.

which as far as I know aren't sufficiently grounded in fact... they sound suspiciously post-hoc.

Absolutely do! Only then is any nutritional experiment, Paleo or otherwise, complete. I would wager you will feel worse after reintroducing grains, but I would love to hear your results first hand.

Well actually I did go back on grains and sugars the other week because I was in Japan. I didn't really notice much change to my well-being, except that I felt hungry and constantly craved sweet stuff. If there were other effects I can't deconvolve them from jetlag.
If it's family, they're running Ubuntu, so I use VNC to connect and resolve the issue (hopefully educating them along the way). My wife and I share a machine at home, so I suppose that one doesn't count.

I generally tell friends that I'm not familiar enough with Windows to resolve the issue in a timely manner. I also tell them that I would have to google the problem and they'd be better sending it to a specialist. Afterwards, I refer them to a couple of breakfix shops.

I tell co-workers that it'd be a conflict of interest and I don't do any "computer work" outside of our company.

Anyone else gets a polite "no."
Adaptive Traffic Lights FTW
with regards to titles, the ship has sailed a long time ago. It's like calling a product or service "cloud" - it can mean almost anything.

The thing is, some words and phrases have a very specific meaning. Say, xen-based virtual private server, and you have a pretty good idea what you are getting. Other words have a very nebulous meaning. say "cloud service" and you might as well say "solution" for all the information it conveys. It's folly to insist on a tight definition of a word once the rest of the industry has decided it's meaningless.
Relevant: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/cartoon_the_only_consta...
Avvo hits back as Florida attorney changes tune
I use PostGIS with 9.0RC without any problems.
People are born with different skills. While I sense some hyperbole in the previous comment, there's no reason to attack him.

I'm also not a great team player -- I work very well in small teams, particularly when I'm in a leadership role, but I detest bureaucracy and fiefdoms, so I don't do well in larger organizations.
Economics Thesis Writing
Students majoring in economics will have to write the economics thesis. Writing this thesis provides students the ability to consider certain economics problems and come up with individual theories. To obtain a good grade you need to know how to write this thesis in the best manner possible.
Pity. I thought the article would be something like this
http://etutorials.org/Programming/Software+architecture+in+p...
> It's the higher ranking officials and the C-suite that wine and dine with the vendor that you should worry about.

About a year ago, a company I know of, but ought to remain nameless, outed a CTO who did too much wining and dining (and traveling) with one hardware vendor. It was a violation of the very strict code of conduct every employee has to sign when hired.

Their current CTO is a tech guy no vendor will be able to bullshit into a bad idea.
Last bug report, I promise:

In chrome on Windows, the bio field you see on mouseover is showing up to the left, partially off the screen, so I can only see a few words of the bio.
He did. From the post:

As a courtesy, I sent a prepublication draft of the above post to Scribd's press team and asked for a response. They were kind enough to reply to me pretty quickly with the following
If you feel bored and lonely, do something that scares you. That's how I got through difficult times. Lots of geeks remain geeky out of self-consciousness. Never be afraid to make a fool of yourself. 10 years from now nobody will give a shit anyway. Go out and do something new that scares you.
Sounds like you're annoyed with these folks for discovering something new (to them) and being excited about it in public. What exactly bothers you about that?
Hah, brilliant from a business standpoint. It's an ad platform running a captcha service as a front.

I've got to wonder how well it will work, though: at worst, a bot could just OCR and respond with random phrases from the ad, and get what? A 10% success rate? That's astronomical compared to captchas. And to be less annoying, they'll have to be more readable and simpler and essentially hand-made: all of which contributes to easier bot attacks. So we have: hand-made + bot-vulnerable = more-expensive + not-a-solution.

Not that captchas are foolproof. There's quite a large business in human-botnets to break captchas.

That video is quite good, though. I love their captcha example.
Won't You (Cheaply) Help Darpa Gear Up for the Coming Robopocalypse?