skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How can I do something meaningful?
A few months ago I saw a thread on Hacker News that really lit a fire inside of me. Someone posted a Ask HN thread asking something along the lines of "Does your startup help change the world?"

I couldn't believe some of the responses. There were tons of people saying that their iPhone apps were because they made it easier to find restaurants.. or that their B2B social media marketing startup was because it was improving productivity for marketers. I'm paraphrasing but that was the gist of many of the responses. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing but respect for people who have successful typical startups. But that said, I think people sometimes are extremely sheltered if they think that those sorts of problems are really impacting lives.

Families who never thought it would happen to them across the United States are finding themselves homeless. My wife is from a small town that just 15 years ago had very high employment. Today the town is rapidly turning into a miniature Detroit after the main employer of the town closed down and moved overseas. Countless numbers of children are going hungry this summer since their primary and often times only nutritious and filling daily meal is their school lunch. My city recently had a free health treatment clinic for one day only. Hundreds of people stood in line for hours and hours, only to be sent home since not all were able to be seen.

And yet, that's just in the United States. Elsewhere in the world, one BILLION people don't have access to clean drinking water. Hundreds of millions of people work 12 hour days seven days a week for in exchange for pennies. People are killed or imprisoned every day just for speaking out against their governments.

I'm not delusional or hopelessly optimistic. I'm aware that these are all major global problems, and they're far more complicated than any one person could ever hope to solve. But what I am interested in is finding out a way that I could be doing something as a career to be a part of this. I don't necessarily think that you have to be a nonprofit or charity to still contribute to these sort of things. SwipeGood and Sparked are two examples of this.

But my question is - has anyone actually built or is working on something related to these sorts of issues? I'm fascinated by stories such as the one behind Charity Water (http://www.charitywater.org/about/scotts_story.php) and reading about organizations like FreeGeek. I'd love to start a nonprofit of my own, but I have no clue where to begin. If anyone has any advice, thoughts, or would like to connect I'd love to hear from you.
I think it is in the firmware loaded into the wireless hardware. I browsed through the driver source and didn't find anything to account for the limit there.
It seems like the owner manually updates the page.
DangDeal - Popular electronics and books for less. Way less..
I have no idea who you talk to, but I'll say this: just because you target your website at the general public doesn't mean that your user bases isn't significantly slanted toward techies. It's not just the subject of a website that can bias is like this; it can just be their size, or their newness.
You mean an Alpha or Beta version? Prototype's generally don't fall into the software specific region.
Can we really not differentiate between the two? TV, on its own, is a one way medium. Social media is interactive and allows two way communication. This is going to get some people up in arms but it is a realistic knee jerk reaction to think about shutting down social media when your populace is organizing mayhem using these networks. Even if shutting down the networks is an exercise in futility.
You can generally tell by browser share breakdown as I mentioned in the post wrt to statcounter.
In my experience — and this does require experience — you can avoid big problems by simply factoring well. For me, the best proxy for “well-factored” is the least amount of code necessary for a defined task.

If the code is clear, then it’s unlikely that performance problems will be expensive to fix. Caching is a good example — most of my methods will allow an “if cache exists” block to be inserted near the beginning in about 5 minutes, when the need arises.

But experience does matter. I’ve learned that LINQ can be expensive unless you understand a few key behaviors. Knowing the platform very well allows you to not make huge mistakes on a first-pass.
Yeah, it'll definitely get more interesting once developers get more stuff in there. But remember that to get those developers motivated you first need to launch the area.
Using nature as a model for the internet, the economy, or other large systems is not new. Much of the science and (more importantly?) mathematics of explaining both is similar.

Kevin Kelly (of Wired fame) is a great explainer of these ideas. He has lot of interesting writing on his website. http://www.kk.org/

I think Biz Stone is one of the most advanced thinkers of social media. I hope he keeps writing about this.
I don't care if my employees take naps, just get shit done.
Wait, you're both wrong.

It's perfectly possible to write a statically-typed language that looks exactly like Python or Perl or Ruby. It's just that nobody's done it yet.

So in the mean time, you have to pick between expressiveness and ease of development versus safety and speed. There's no concept in computer science that prevents us from having all four other than "it's hard and people are lazy".

Haskell and Go are good examples of good progress in this direction, though.
Starting to finish
The version of the problem in which all of the above is true except that the codes must be unique also appears to be the wrong interpretation of the problem statement. I'm sort of inclined to do something else with my time, since this seems to be more of a mind-reading challenge than a programming challenge.
As a Ruby noob and without researching too much, here's my question: would x.succ! do it?
Encouraged employees and my co-founder to use the futon, and did so myself several times.

There's solid research to show this works - and if you try it, you'll see what a difference it makes. The only reason it's not OK is because of some stupid macho attitude to work and sleep.
I up voted your comment, however:

Drug dealers, Pedophiles and terrorist all use email, cell phones, public roads and snail-mail to organize, and conduct, their illegal activities. Is it a realistic reaction to consider shutting each of these down every time there is a new conviction?
That's not a problem, since to actually use the things you have to put them in your ears. Hence, if the feel of them affects sound perception, you want to include that.
That's an argument for revamping the backing dictionary, really. If __hash__() is a problem, make it return a thread-safe proxy that delegates to the object's dictionary.
Let me ask you about those monitors!

I'm running 3x17-inch portrait monitors in the same configuration (turnable 3-monitor stand), and while I'd love more space to work with, I once tried a 22-inch monitor in the middle and the height of the thing was daunting enough that I couldn't keep the entire screen in my field of view at once. I can't imagine doing that with a 27-inch, let alone three of them. Is it something that you just have to get used to, or are you just sitting/standing really far back?
I do not think Cupertino has much use for 'heating water', most of the year.

Luckily, it also appears to be possible to use the excess heat for cooling stuff. That would be much more popular in Cupertino, I guess.
Don’t Quit Your Day Job, Transform It
I answered all questions correctly. At the end they ask you for your name and your email.

> We have received your submission and will be responding shortly
Not what I expected. I'm pleasantly surprised. I was all prepared to act like a jerk, roll my eyes, and remark on how this is totally not new as honeybees have been proposed as basically a business/trade mental model for thousands of years by various cultures (Greek for sure, but I think also Indian and Persian). Kudos for having a new spin on this comparison.
Just make __hash__() wrap the underlying dict in a thread-safe one that delegates the calls.
So as to not come off as a total douchebag from my previous comments, I will commend you on doing what it takes to get noticed.

I am in the same boat (as you) and I can understand it's hard to get people to notice you especially if you have no backing/funding/whatever. I'm flying solo so it's especially hard for me.

However, if you want us to give you something, you have to give us something. :)

I'm not going to sign up, but I will keep an eye out for your announcement when it does go live! :)

Good luck.
I am so much more refreshed and clear-headed after a 20 minute mid-afternoon nap than after drinking any amount of caffeine.

However nap or no, just having a regular schedule and 8 hours of sleep a night makes either remedy less necessary.
Out of curiosity, what do you think a language geared towards "big software" projects would/should look like and does it exist, yet? Or would you argue, at some point, we hit a design vs. code problem where choice of language doesn't matter so much as does choice of framework and we push more of the boiler plate code onto the framework?
Hah, just did the exact same thing with a chocolate cupcake.
this isn't associated with Jonathan but uses his name

My name is Jonathan and I give this guy permission to use it. If you don't want someone to name their knock-off after your product, maybe don't name it after a common first name :)
I personally really like the Python documentation at

http://docs.python.org/

Another example of documentation that has served me well is the numpy+scipy+matplotlib combo:

http://docs.scipy.org/doc/

http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/contents.html
The difference is social media cannot be controlled. TV news can. It's a valuable tool for governments to have at their disposal in a time of crisis. Especially in the era of media consolidation a government might only need to influence a few large companies into spinning the story towards a particular direction. Naturally in a time of crisis with no other information the media is more likely to repeat official government information/opinion in any event. This is exactly why TV & radio stations are often among the first targets during a foreign invasion or domestic power struggle.
Study: social media doesn't correlate with unrest, economic austerity does
Although I'm not a teacher, this topic is near and dear to my heart.

My current firm recruits CS, Engineering and Financial Mathematics grads from top schools. Even in this environment, we need to give everyone a math test as part of the hiring process. We can't trust the GPA. Top software firms make developers write code as part of the interview. Even CS (which seems tougher than most majors) suffers from grade inflation. The beauty of this system is that "grade grubbers" who nag the professors for better grades ultimately don't get rewarded. People who are in school to learn do.

A prior firm that I worked for (large consultancy) did a study on if GPA was predictive of good work performance. They found that there was a pass/fail barrier of a 3.0 for technical degrees, and 3.2 for non-technical degrees. Folks who couldn't find a way to hit the lower barrier on average didn't do as well. Folks who did better were more likely - but there was no benefit for getting much higher. A 3.8 student wasn't any more likely to perform better than a 3.1 student. (Slightly off-topic - the only other predictor of success was people who worked at least part-time while in school. It didn't matter what the job was, but people who had to work doing school on average performed better than those who didn't.)

So what can be done that doesn't crush the professors? My grad school forced every non-Phd class to hit an average GPA. Want to give more As? Then give more Cs. When every professor is forced to live by this, nobody suffers in the evaluations.
I wish i knew how to take a 30 minute nap! I just can't seem to, so i end up having to power up on caffeine.... not the same
It's dependent on how much sleep you normally get, your individual circadian rhythm, the quality and duration of your nap, whether or not you are prone to sleeping disorders, your biochemistry, and other factors.

There have been times where a five minute nap leaves me completely refreshed and revitalized. Other times, it makes things worse. I'm not certain, but I suspect that the times it has been worse is partially a result of chronic sleep deprivation, such as going a week or two on five hours a night. In those cases, 20 minutes doesn't make an appreciable dent in the deficit.
Twitter hit by "Pictures of Osama Bin Laden" phishing attack
> the code for each language is clearly different.

It's always the case. That's why writing them is interesting.
2005 Zuckerberg Didn't Want To Take On The World
Reddit and community journalism
The same maxim applies to cyber security as physical security. Defenders must be right 100% of the time, an attacker only has to be right once. That will never change--even if you deem your systems "impregnable" (if you do, ask the French how the Maginot line worked out for them).
The Internet has all but destroyed the market for films, music and newspapers
PillowChat: How Not to Build a Chat Room with jQuery, PHPillow, and CouchDB
Yeah, #succ is something else. For example, if your object supports #succ then you can use it in ranges.

e.g., (1..10), but also ("apple".."kiwis") or ('A'..'Z').

In this case, String#succ returns a string with the last alphanumeric character transformed into its successor, e.g., "apple".succ == "applef".

The only time I've used it is implementing the range interface; I've never called it directly, let alone to increment an integer.
>> Open Street Map doesn't allow you to enter two addresses and find a route between them.

That isn't true. CloudMade offers a routing service based on OSM data, and a number of applications use that service to offer driving directions
I'm not sure a language can solve all the problems.

One I think would help would be the inability to interface with concrete APIs. If you want to have a variable or instance attribute or argument to a function or method, its type must be declared in terms of an interface, not a particular implementation. This way, you never get yourself into the situation where you say, "I don't want to inherit from Foo, I want to implement its interface myself" but can't.

Beyond that, there is only so much a language can do to help you. It's nice to have guaranteed privacy, but if you use it like the Java standard library does, it becomes the worst language feature ever. To prevent misuse of a powerful feature, you need to be smart and you need to have other smart people reading your code.

The "way forward" is to realize that software development is not easy.
Probably because Apple's adding Reading List, an Instapaper-lite clone.

However, Marco's said he's "cautiously optimistic" that it will actually drive up the number of users of Instapaper.

http://www.marco.org/2011/06/06/safari-reader-and-instapaper
If it's the early stages of talking with an investor, wireframes (psd or otherwise) are probably the best way to go. Although it's nice to have something working, unless it's really good you might be tripped up by the deficiencies of a prototype or alpha version. There are some excellent resources for wireframes at Smashing Magazine http://goo.gl/nd0o
We napped at my old DoD contracting gig.

They encouraged us to take a half hour nap if we were feeling sluggish/brain-tired as they knew that half hour of rest would buy a lot more development time than having the developers try to push through the last four or five hours of the day with a groggy brain.

I'm the type that ends up more tired after a nap, so I'd often leave the office if I had a difficult problem and just take a nice half hour walk. I'd usually come back with a fresh mind and a solution to the problem.
I had this revelation a year ago. It's helped me massively.
The second problem is not well-defined, so how long it takes has considerably more to do with how many possible interpretations you have to try before you get it right and how long it takes you to grok the grid scheme than how long it actually takes you to solve problems of that nature. You may want to consider rewriting it. As it is, I've lost any interest I initially had in your company as a whole. You need to stand out to applicants as much as they need to stand out to you, and this is doing exactly the opposite.
It's the root device that's on EBS. On most AMIs with EBS root that's the entire OS i.e., /etc, /dev, /bin, /usr, etc. and not just the OS kernel.
Perhaps I wasn't specific enough with "MMOs." I'm talking about the kinds of games where players can create their own maps, with their own scripted NPCs, and push them onto the server, where other players will then pull them down and execute them in real-time. Second Life, MOOs, etc.

This is basically an equivalent model to web-browsing. You don't load compiled Javascript into your web browser's process address space and jump into it; you put an interpreter between you and it, both for the sake of the code (JS has its own debugger, which treats the browser as a black box that scripters rarely have to think about, and never see backtraces from) and for the sake of the web browser (which doesn't have to deal with any consequences of bad scripting affecting the validity of the browser's own data structures.)
More Stuff is not the Right Stuff
What's odd to me is that while napping will improve my energy level if I'm tired, I'm only inconsistently tired.

I would love to figure out what variables contribute to me becoming tired in the afternoon. I'd rather not get tired at all, then take a 20 minute nap to get refreshed.
Squirrels Do 17 Percent of the Damage to Fiber Optic Network
I assume you mean "apple".succ == "applf"
?
SimpleDB latency is bad, but not that bad.
Here's the same article, formatted for print (I find these easier on the eyes): http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/print/2011/08/apple-pa...
Tailorstore - custom clothes shop done the right way
Solar heat for oil wells: Mirrors in glasshouses…
First - I did not intend to spam and I'm not related to the company in any way (apart from being a customer now). Let me explain:

I thought it's worth sharing this site for a couple of reasons. Mainly, because it's an online company which has done everything right (as far as I can see). Their items are displayed in a great way, they're clear about every detail, they update the price on every step (instead of surprising you at the end), they show every detail separately and allow you to read about it even more (fabric weights, characteristics, colours used, ...) They are fun to use (subjective, I know). They have great presence on the internet - couldn't find a single bad opinion about them, people are happy to show off pictures of their products on flickr, twitter, facebook - they say how excited they are about the products.

Their website is helpful in every possible way: for people new to tailored clothes it's got simple explanations on every step; for people caring about environment/world, it's got information about the manufacturing place, organic fabrics, short paragraph about work conditions; all newsletters are opt-in; all scripts are there because they're helpful (for example they'll tell you if your measured size doesn't fit in the expected range and let you ignore or correct it) - no silly stuff. They pretty much nailed it in every way I can think of. And on top of that they can really compete with prices - I can't find any local service in a similar price range. When they don't offer something, they say it without trying to hide the fact (for example they explain why they don't do phone contact and what is their policy instead). What they do offer is still pretty unique (completely custom clothes). They even try to upsell in a nice way, if you buy a shirt, it seems that other items / accessories start appearing on the front page instead.

Even though I just came back from shopping, I ordered a shirt from them (an hour after seeing the page for the first time) and couldn't be more excited about it, even though I normally hate shopping for clothes. I hope that people who try to sell anything on the internet will see this example and learn something from them.
Most likely: minus x% for some positive x.

Reason: "In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!". You will need energy to produce fuels, and you have to put more energy in than the fuels will be able to produce. So, unless you already have an energy source that is cheaper than fossil fuels, this one will not be, either.

Also, I am not a chemist, but chances are that it will take time to make this invention useful, if it is possible as all. I do not think enzymes are as chemically stable as platinum, and hydrogen is quite reactive. Worse, if you pick the obvious stuff (water) as source for your hydrogen, you also end up with oxygen. That, too, is quite reactive.
I want to see EA make a Google+ SimCity. Even a socialized SimCity 2000 port would be great.
My dad had a saying, "you have two ears & one mouth. Use them in that proportion".
Bacterial Fuel
Yeah I came here to point this out. I'd understand if pip weren't mentioned, but easy_install has been the standard for many years.
Everything that people contribute through Map Maker is available freely for non-commercial purposes (with some restrictions). However, the license is certainly not as permissive as Open Street Map.

https://services.google.com/fb/forms/mapmakerdatadownload/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/3gj/efficient_charity_do_unto_others...

"Just as there is only one best charity, there is only one best way to donate to that charity. Whether you volunteer versus donate money versus raise awareness is your own choice, but that choice has consequences. If a high-powered lawyer who makes $1,000 an hour chooses to take an hour off to help clean up litter on the beach, he's wasted the opportunity to work overtime that day, make $1,000, donate to a charity that will hire a hundred poor people for $10/hour to clean up litter, and end up with a hundred times more litter removed. If he went to the beach because he wanted the sunlight and the fresh air and the warm feeling of personally contributing to something, that's fine. If he actually wanted to help people by beautifying the beach, he's chosen an objectively wrong way to go about it. And if he wanted to help people, period, he's chosen a very wrong way to go about it, since that $1,000 could save two people from malaria. Unless the litter he removed is really worth more than two people's lives to him, he's erring even according to his own value system.

...and the same is true if his philanthropy leads him to work full-time at a nonprofit instead of going to law school to become a lawyer who makes $1,000 / hour in the first place. Unless it's one HELL of a nonprofit."

(and the comments)
Please elaborate... I don't understand the criticism. I find the question quite interesting. What is ambiguous about it?
Linden Lab Launching Separate New SL-Light Experience for Web & Tablets Soon
This is a great question and something I struggle with everyday. All I know is that the typical answer of.

"Well, I am going to do this thing that makes money and then when I am rich I will give back"

Is bullshit. You either give back or you don't. It's not a question of time and money.

I try and do as much local charity work as I can, I try to be present when listening to friends and family. I try and treat my wife and my family as the most important people in the world so that they can bring that love to other places, but I hear what you saying.

I want to be working on things that change the world. I think at some level, we all want to be.

Thank you for asking / sharing.

Kent
Of course it's also possible they make the judgement call of being willing to eventually cough up an amount up to the statutory damages for copyright infringement in these "exceptional cases".