skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many great comments. It is most commendable to want to maximise one's own positive impact on the world, but figuring out how exactly to do that is incredibly complicated - as the variety of opinions here demonstrates. In truth, many (or most) of the people or organisations that try to help out make virtually no difference, and sometimes make things worse. And to make things trickier, the best way to make the world a better place is incredibly personal, and depends on your skills, motivation, life stage, connections, preferences, etc.
Yet, that doesn't mean that it's impossible.

I've been there: now I am working on launching my own tech start-up (how unoriginal), but prior to this I worked in Africa and Latin America.for 4 years, designing projects to create sustainable jobs and to increase long-term income of small farmers. And I've seen so much waste, and incompetence, and worse... and a few pearls in unexpected places.

In short, it's not something one can improvise, creating something genuinely good is probably the most difficult thing in the planet, definitely not a little side project.
So, the best I can suggest is: read a lot, be suspicious of simple blanket solutions, develop your own opinions, and, most importantly, find 1-2 people with experience you can trust (not necessarily techies!), and learn from them.
I don't get the nobleness. If he wanted to donate to charity, why didn't he do so with his own money?
He basically took other people's money from an honor system, intended for solely different purpose and decided to donate that. How is that noble?

He just decided this honor system is not to his liking and decided to screw it up. That makes ou an a*hole.
After all this time, not realizing his own douchebaggery just makes him look like a pretentious douche bag. The worst kind.
It's tricky, because "experiment" doesn't necessarily mean you're following the scientific method and its levels of rigor.

Some people "experiment" with leaving produce at the side of the road and having a trust based money box for people to pay. If someone takes all of the produce without paying one day, the experimenter isn't necessarily going to analyze it scientifically and be happy at the seeming failure, but instead think "I can't trust people enough - experiment's over."
Your father may be retired but he's not yet braindead. He is a person, he has needs, friends, interests and he moves in a different circles to you. It would be in your interest to tap this information - find out what the pain points in his circles are and develop products for those.
As a rule of thumb older people tend to spend a lot of time and money on procuring chronic medication.
There are many other opportunities which you may not be aware of, but your father may be aware of.
Try that first...
So if it's that easy, why did natural selection not find this solution? It sounds like the cells already have far more sophisticated machinery to detect and respond to dsRNA. Evolutionarily, adding apoptosis to that must have been found to be a net loss.

Maybe it's that we're in a cleaner environment and live longer? Maybe it's that we can selectively administer the drugs?
BlackBerry Enterprise Server Vulnerable to malicious image file
It should also be noted that Sphinx was developed by Pocoo, the same group that develops Flask, Jinja, Werkzeug.

http://pocoo.org
Well, after I wrote my message above, I remembered the new nintendo console, so i looked it up online and watched its demo videos on youtube

I now think the Wii U can be what I meant if they can make the portable screen control play movie and browse the net, it will be exactly what I had in my mind

And it does look a lot less fragile than in iPad, its a controller built for abuse :)

The Wii U can really be the console that take me back to hardcore gaming
How to Upgrade to Kaspersky 2012 Product Line for Free
What makes me sad is the severe case of analogy fever going around. It's not just this situation, it's everywhere; when people hit a novel ethical challenge it's like it's too hard to confront it on its own terms, and it has to be dragged back down into being "just like" something less interesting. The world is changing in fascinating ways with brand new ideas and challenges to understand, and we're punting to tradition instead of doing them justice.

Well, you know what? Piracy isn't "just like" stealing, nor is it "just like" swapping tapes was in the 80s. Wikileaks isn't "just like" publishing someone's diary, nor is it "just like" the NYT publishing the pentagon papers. And this isn't "just like" Robin Hood, or stealing out of a collection plate, or totalitarianism encroaching on liberty, or a clever publicity stunt, or black hat hacking, or the tragedy of the commons or anything else. It's just... well, it's just like the Jonathan's Card case of 2011.

Analogies aside, did Sam Odio do the wrong thing? I think there are a few important aspects to consider:

What should the donors have reasonably expected would happen with their money and how firm a moral hold do they have on that expectation? I've seen a few people argue that they were essentially throwing the money out the window, but I'm not sure how well that applies. The Starbucks card is more attractive because it's more restricted. Nobody could use it to buy shoes or pay down their mortgage. It was intended for coffee, and I think the people donating expected it to be used for coffee.

So did he wrong the people who donated money? By that definition, yes - but our society tolerates a lot of different kinds of wrong. It's wrong to lie and wrong to stab someone, but only one of those is illegal. If people donate money intending it to be used for charitable coffee, and you use it for a different charitable end, how bad is that? At least, less bad than buying an iPad, more bad than using it for its intended purpose. It obeys the large-scale "paying it forward" end if not the particular means.

The act being wrong from the perspective of the donors doesn't mean it needs to be wrong for everyone, though. Sometimes you can do bad and good in the same action - feeding Ethiopian orphans surely must, by any measure, do more good than giving people coffee. How much bad is justified by how much good? I'm certain that everyone has an answer in them, and probably an uncomfortable one to think about too hard. For me, I think this makes it over the line as enough good to be worth it, but I'm not sure it would if I were more invested in the experiment.

There is an interesting sidenote that I think hasn't been addressed much. Would the reaction have been as bad if he'd bought $600 worth of Starbucks food and given it to homeless people? I suspect not. To me, that suggests that the actual end was less important to most donors than the means. That is, it wasn't a charity effort with a communal coffee card as a side-effect, it was a communal coffee card experiment with charity as a side-effect. Or perhaps the order of those preferences indicates where you stand on the morality of the act.
When I say complete I mean the entire system, from satellite imagery, to street view, to navigation directions. Additionally I am referring to the design polish that ties all these pieces together.

From what I have seen OSM is a lot like Android, open source, but fragmented because of it. Google Maps, while closed source, is much more polished and feature rich compared with anything I've seen based on OSM.

To be clear I certainly want OSM to grow to greatness, and it would wonderful if it was just as powerful and feature rich as Google Maps. I agree with you that OSM is a great project, and I like the open source aspect of it. That's not my argument though. My basic argument in the parent comment was that I think it is an over reaction to say it is "sad" to see the edits going to Google.

Whether Google's map is getting better or OSM's map is getting better people who use the systems are benefiting, so there is nothing sad about edits made to either system. And Google Maps has a much larger user base than OSM, hence it is more practical for business owners to tag their businesses in Google Maps, and people to add their streets to Google Maps.
Actually the DS has a touch screen which allows it to almost replicate the dual-analog sticks. So there are FPS games for the DS that use this. Admittedly it's a bit tough to play FPSs on the iPhone still.

I've played Tetris for iPod (with the circular wheel) and that was playable and enjoyable. Controls just need to be adapted properly.

There's no reason the D-pad and physical buttons are required for good controls. Just because current game ports have bad touchscreen control implementations doesn't mean it's impossible. In fact, the bad implementations are probably due to the fact a lot of them naively try to simulate DS-style controls on a touch screen.

There are tons of iOS games that utilize the iphones touchscreen perfectly for good controls, so it's absolutely possible to design good controls into games. It's just like when the DS came out and they started designing games to take advantage of dual screens, touch screens, microphones, and cameras.
Another useful Python library by Kenneth Reitz is tablib, "Python Module for Tabular Datasets in XLS, CSV, JSON, YAML, &c. ". See https://github.com/kennethreitz/tablib
Godwin's law!
The kid will most likely make the decision on this one. iPod touches are not marketed to them. They don't care about apps or watching mobile porn. They want the games they see ads for. Their parents will succumb because the DS has a smaller up front cost. Why risk the extra money for the extra features the kid didn't even beg his parents for?

In addition to that kids usually know exactly what games they want and don't care if they can get 50 games they've never heard about for $1. You don't reason with kids. You get them what they ask for if they deserve it.
Ask HN: What are the best technologies you've worked with this year?
I've had a great year discovering some new technologies (for us) that we've never used before. We've fully moved over to Python, but I thought I'd try to create a thread that we can all find interesting with a list of the cool and useful technologies that people here have used.
Samsung Galaxy Xcover Review
Samsung has brought out its new family member, the Samsung Galaxy Xcover. This terminal is particularly remarkable for its resistance to bumps and drops thanks to Gorilla Glass crystal, crystal capacitive resitencia a larger auqnue plan to go is not throwing in the air to test it.
Actually my father is in great physical shape. he runs, goes to the gym and rides his bike on a daily base.

the reason he wants to do this is to make another lucrative activity.

the question is more about the kind of services that might be lucrative, with one person operating the site.
seriously, all indian governments are more concerned about keeping their government intact for next elections then progress of nation. They care more about things which creates a buzz then those which are really necessary.
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Using bitwise and to implement modulo for a power of two is common as dirt in C; I'd object to it being considered a readability issue. Arguments about specific compilers in specific modes optimizing equivalent code to it using the % operator are beside the point. Often the whole point of using a power of two range is so that you can use a bitwise and at some point, and if it ultimately ends up in a library, it's likely that the argument to the and won't be constant (defeating the optimization). There are other considerations; at some point, the data type being wrapped around with the modulo may end up in a bitfield someplace (more likely in networking or tight storage situations). Being explicit about how many bits it uses doesn't hurt in that case.
Books/Blogs/Suggestion on planning and developing Web Application/Website?
Hi there!<p>I have this idea and just equipped myself with Rails. Are there any books/blogs on product development, planning web application or something?
I agree with that - but they should at least build an API that would let other applications send digitally-generated mail, or to order stamps, get parcel information, tracking details etc.
Limit the number of articles that can be in the frontpage at the same time for sites like Techcrunch.com.
Reporting of a phenomenon can increase the incidence of that phenomenon.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_suicide

It's not an unreasonable assertion that the reporting of the riots inspired people in different cities to carry out their own riots.

Not a good reason to block them however.
I have to say that I prefer that this is where the money went rather than what I assumed was happening in that people were just using it for their own personal gain. This conclusion is one which would have been hard to draw before the experiment started, the much more likely cases would have been it working well or flat out abuse.

It would be really interesting to see the same thing but with some way to enforce a limit of say $30 per transaction and no gift cards. From some limited observation of the Twitter feed everything appeared to work well while the balance stayed sub $30 which would have essentially been enforcing the conditions I'm suggesting.
The unauthorized use of fire on other people's property was already banned, it didn't stop people using it :P
CERN Unveils LHCHome2: Where Art Thou, Higgs Boson?
Top 10+ Reasons To Never Quit Blogging | Tech18
That looks extremely useful. Thanks! Project webpage: http://tablib.org
Jonathan's Card Experiments And Outcomes
I have yet to buy any ebooks from amazon, just downloaded most of mine through "3rd parties", and the kindle is a wonderful device for that, thus I can share my books with whoever I like.
More Sex? Please elaborate :)
No, what he's saying is on the one side the junk mail senders are blocking rate increases with lobbying and on the other side unions are asking for high amounts of benefits and pay raises. This is what he meant by squeezed (from both sides) dry.
Bateen hacker news
The type of x is Int|String

The type of (+ 1) is Int -> Int

The type of y is Int

Because x is of type Int|String and it's passed to a function that can only operate on Int, the program fails to compile.
Ask HN: physical prints: how do they do it?
I'm wondering how the companies that offer physical photo prints (of your instagram photos, of their photoboot app, ...) do it? Do they have to do the printing themselves? (Buy the machine, ...) Or do they outsource it? How does that work?

Anyone have any insights?
> I could imagine a similar analogy would be someone who is a professional racecar driver or just really into cars would be driving on a road thinking "I'm going to ease into this turn, and stay close to the inside" whereas most other people would be thinking "I have to remember to buy milk at the store after I pick up Jimmy from daycare".

I think a more accurate analogy would be taking a different route to work and not even realizing it.
is this just a service selling you access to Tahoe-LAFS?

No. Tahoe-LAFS is very different (access is only over HTTP for a start)

Why would you pay someone to have access to your own files on your own computer?

Ignoring the whole free-to-use-on-your-computer-but-we'll-sell-you-cloud-backup model, there is always the old fashioned you-pay-us-for-the-software model.
Everything is a semantics game: meaning matters. This is not about playing "gotcha" with trivialities. I'd like to convince you that there is a significant difference or bias about the way those languages are being showcased.

Isn't the whole point of this table to compare equivalent snippets of code? You're right, those languages do things very differently from one another - especially when it comes to OO. In this case, the stated goal was to define a class that exposes a public property. In this I believe PHP and probably Perl were represented badly.

If you don't believe me, look at the Python example: it's the exact same implementation I translated into PHP syntax above. So my terse implementation is an exact match for the Python example and it's a functional match for the Ruby example. Hence, I can't help but think that PHP and Perl were misrepresented by making them jump through unnecessary hoops that do nothing but make the language look more complicated.
I am at the Borobudur temple right now : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borobudur

I brought nothing on my long walk but water and Kindle.

Stopped for a couple hours. Reading an amazing book, with the temple in the background. Highlighting the most important bits as I come across them. The stuff I don't want to forget. The Kindle saves all of these to a file called "My Clippings.txt", which I'll later transfer over to my laptop, for memorizing and sharing on my site. This feature alone saves me hours of re-typing.

The next 55 books I want to read are all queued up on the Kindle. I could change my plan and stay here for months, and I'd have everything I need. I can sit in queues for hours, thrilled that my next 55 books are already in my pocket.

Filled with appreciation for life and my Kindle. It's topped my cellphone as my most important "don't go without it" device.

I was just actively appreciating all this an hour ago on my walk. Then came back to see this article. So there's my counterpoint, for what it's worth.
Mark Zuckerberg plays Angry Birds on Google+
"You can’t cut and paste quotes from an e-book."
Pretty sure you can highlight things and then they would appear on Amazons new kindle social network to copy and paste? Although doing so one the kindle itself is fairly clunky.
How to restore back image preview on folders from thumbnail view.
That's a reasonable argument for a general change in accounting standards, requiring all pension plans to be pre-funded. Specifically requiring the USPS and nobody else to do that, though, feels more like something political is going on.
Python is an excellent first programming language, and has enough legs to support or launch a career if there's an inclination that way.

I would, however, still recommend Python 2 rather than Python 3. Although the world is slowly walking toward Python 3, it's still unclear when the majority of libraries and frameworks will support it. Starting with 2 will in no way inhibit someone from eventually moving to 3 when that's appropriate. Virtually everything (including 3rd party packages) in the Python world is available in 2, and a big chunk is not available in 3.

One of Python's deserved claims to fame is "batteries included." It comes with just about every facility you could ever want, and they're all generally easy to use. For example, to get input editing in a console program, "import readline" and you're done. Astounding.

But another benefit of Python is 3rd party library and framework support; "extra batteries available." Everything that can be done in and outside of Python can be done with Python 2, but a substantial portion of the 3rd party world has not yet converted over, and it's difficult to say when that will happen. The only people, IMO, who should use 3 are people who already know Python and who have a specific need for something provided in Python 3 or a 3rd party package.

I'd go with Python's excellent online tutorial to see how it goes, and then look at other resources if interest remains.

http://docs.python.org/tutorial/index.html

You'll note that python.org still defaults to Python 2 in their doc URLs.

Here's Python on the 2 vs 3 question:

http://wiki.python.org/moin/Python2orPython3

I wouldn't go with PHP as a new programmer, unless there's a specific desire to work on WordPress or Drupal sites. PHP is fundamentally a web language, whereas Python is widely used in all areas of programming. You can still do web work in Python if you want, so there's no advantage with PHP except with specific frameworks that use PHP; there's every advantage with Python because of the huge number of domains covered by it, including the web.

C and C++ are going to be very difficult first languages for someone learning on their own. Lots of system programming is done in C, and C++, and they have their advantages. I would wait until at least one language is learned, and an appreciation for programming in general is attained, before learning C/C++.

http://www.google.com/search?q=learn+c+programming

I'd make the same comment for Java as I made for C/C++, for someone learning their first language on their own: wait. Learn Python first.
Steve Blank's "Four Steps to the Epiphany" is one of the best business books for tech startups. It's very practical, easy to read and just generally takes a very no-nonsense approach by guiding you from the initial idea to actually launching your business.
http://www.stevenblank.com/books.html

Minor caveat: I found the typography of the book lacking and the design of the many diagrams to be very confusing. I'm hope these things issues are fixed in the next edition. This shouldn't discourage you from buying this book.

I've read 37signals' books but they are less practical, more about high level business principles and the ideology of business of software that 37signals adheres to. Maybe you will find the stuff inspiring and guiding.
http://37signals.com/rework/
http://gettingreal.37signals.com/
I like how this thread suddenly buzzes with science. ;-) Engineers doing some engineering, I guess.

Isn't it impossible to distinguish signal and noise on a per-sample basis, though? A sample has no context, only a frequency. By itself, it can be both - no?
南京祛痘
I don't get why internet start ups should be expected to change the world. The vast majority of businesses ever created don't really do anything most would consider truly meaningful or world changing.
When my bitcoin mining rig will no longer be profitable, I may redirect its awesome GPU resources to the task.

Wikipedia has a list of other worthwhile projects to consider: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_p...
If you increase prices and demand falls enough, you don't get a revenue boost. Upon one USPS increase, they lost my business altogether (save for maybe 5 stamps per year, instead of 120); a one cent increase cost them a lot more.
Exactly. I worked for the USPS for a short time 13 years ago & my dad still does. A lot of the postal workers want to get rid of this clause as well. They realize that it is a giant albatross hanging over their necks and they are willing to work something out. It is Congress that will not allow it.
I'm sure a kit if people who made great thing with VS are overjoyed that it doesn't look like shit.
Well, as someone tweeted, "Odio is just another variable in the experiment".

It wasn't really a fair experiment if you wanted the outcome to be positive. This is how it works. There might have been many who were gaming it; Odio is facing the backlash only because he admitted to it.
Sure. Thats picking the right algorithm though, so rendering is O(n) say not O(n^2). But yes these things do make a huge difference.
I just got a Nook SimpleTouch that I'm looking forward to carrying to Everest Base Camp next month. There's simply no way I could carry a physical copy of Infinite Jest (2.8lbs) with me.
Thought it may have been from my post a few months back:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2625009
but on the other hand it's even "clunkier" to copy and paste from a paper book.