skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Doing a project with my retired father
My father has recently retired so he has a lot of spare time. Being capable of using the web and fluent in English I was thinking of creating a web application where he can be the operator.
I was thinking of web shop or a web brokerage where he can move the orders from the website to the provider.

Do you have any other ideas?
> but you know one of the big lessons of a big project is you don't want people that aren't really programmers programming, you'll suffer for it!

Take that and shove it up your cross-functional agile team :-D
If it were every consensus I find it hard to believe that they would be built. And removing the only Jews from an area is sort of the definition of ethnic cleansing.
Barcelona vs Real Madrid Live 14-8-2011
That first paragraph and next sentence make absolutely zero sense. "Things have happened, except the opposite." What the hell does that mean?
Calling something an "experiment" isn't an invitation to screw it up.
I don't think personal trainers should get into the nutrition business. That's what registered dieticians and certified nutritionists are for.
On a lighter note: This was forewarned long time back - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hox-ni8geIw
more interesting pictures you might like to see and tweet to your friends (this criminal israel....):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps9UEQO6tpU (abbas' cleric)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=iyegOJ4dlmw&playnext=1&list=PL0FA9286BCE61B1FB
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNo7vTOAWN4&feature=relat...
That would be very good news indeed, if it turns out to work on anything but mice.

But after reading a lot of that kind of articles over the past years, I'm starting to wonder what's wrong with mice. Whenever a new treatment is tested in mice it seems to work wonders. It makes them not just a little bit better but orders of magnitude. It's like a miracle. Mice must have an incredibly bad natural constitution. You throw them some homeopathic pill and bang you have cured cancer. You drop some genes on them, whoosh, a new human ear pops up. It's amazing :-)
Striking how old most of these papers are, many from the 60s and 70s, very few from the 00s.

Those who don't learn from the past are destined to reinvent it, poorly.
I have read a bit of your book. Even if I tend to think that reality must be a lot more balanced. I think that overall you are not making enough tantrum. Let me be clear you should go balistic over this facebook story regarding your role. You owe it not only to you but to all the wannabe developpers out there who will end out on this side of the story more often than not. Programmers tend to think they are in the business of developping software. They are in business, period. And all the tricks, connection pulled , poker face etc ..., are SOP in brick and mortar business. Nothing to blink an eye about. But with web business where idea and execution are so intertwined, you should push capitalism american style to reward you whatever the means (media, judicial system, pick your choice ). It is the action of people like you that determine what is fair and what is not.
Random thought: winklevii, done nothing , reward fifty kilo grands. Jack kilby , done everything, reward see an inferior OS lock the market under his watch.
I feel you, I feel the same way.

I also like starting projects more than finishing them.

I think writing down your ideas will help solidify them. I find from experience that the more I write about my ideas, the more likely they are to come to fruition.

see: http://www.paulgraham.com/discover.html

This is not exactly a new idea, but I think it doesn't apply equally to all people.

You're the type of person who likes starting projects more than finishing them. This has implications about how your brain works or generally on how you think. Not everyone is like that, some people prefer to finish projects they already have, and it's not a matter of some acquired discipline either.

If you're like me, your ideas might seem scattered, you jump from one idea to the next, one day you think "man wouldn't it be awesome to build an app that does X!" then two days later, you feel constrained, and want to explore other ideas. So you jump to some other project or idea. Exploring various ideas seems very exciting, that's why you feel a bit drained if you spend a lot of time on just one idea.

When your ideas are scattered like that, you need to work on polishing them and flushing them out. The best way is either writing about them, or talking to other people about them. If you're introverted, writing about them is probably easier, and even better perhaps.

This next bit might be controversial, but if you like starting projects more than finishing them, your personality might be xNTP on the Myers-Briggs indicator, which (the next bit is even more controversial) means you have "extraverted intuition"[0]. This basically means the same thing I said above: your ideas are all over the place, only when you express them do you get to solidify them and get a better picture.

[0] http://greenlightwiki.com/lenore-exegesis/Extraverted_Intuit...
Not in the spirit no, but still part of the experiment. I honestly don't think Sam is going to get much heat over this from people who matter in his life. Most smart people will look at it from the experiment POV and not the emotionally charged theft and wire-fraud angles.
Ubuntu UK Podcast recently reviewed the Meenee laptop.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B004GGBUJY/
Said it was good for the money. Hinge a bit flimsy, not quite able to push full screen iPlayer. Basically a laptop size netbook, with price to match.
That is bad (especially because I personally like that one the least). Could you share details about your configuration?
Go Daddy Domain Name Search Tool
Sounds like a great idea. Think its important he has a genuine interest in what it is he'll be doing, if possible. Maybe have your Dad note down all the things he finds clunky on the web for the next fortnight and build something to help him out, something he can have input in and use to help and sell to others.
It throws type error at run time, not compile time.

To be a statically type language you would need to throw the error at compile time.

How do you raise (or not raise) error of this code at compile time and still make it feel like dynamic type language?

x = (rand() > 0.5) ? 42 : "42"
y = x + 1;
"I cannot understand why Sam's charity raising has raised such an outrage"

You misspelled "theft" as "charity"

His ethics are pretty dubious.
He admits ( see here http://sam.odio.com/blog/ ) to having earlier bribed a blogger with a Mac Air for positive coverage in association with a previous enterprise.
Assuming they can increase cost of delivery (something that, apparently, congress is against), chances are this is what would happen: they raise prices to cover (marginal) costs, and some customers run away. A commercial company would reply by either cost-cutting, shutting down (parts of) the company, increasing productivity, or finding new revenue streams.

The USPS does not have first or second options, and the third on its own only helps if it brings in extra work, which it does not (remember the 'some customers ran away' part?)

It all boils down to the fact that the USPS is not operating in a free market. They have huge expenditures that they cannot get rid of. If you have an employee, but no work for him, and cannot fire him, it makes economic sense to take on work that pays less than what the employee costs. Sure, it loses you money, but it loses you less money than not taking on that work.

So, that leaves the fourth stream. In e EU, that has seen post offices turned into shops, selling mail-related stuff such as postcards. That may work, but especially in smaller villages, it is easier to outsource the post office tasks to existing shops, rather than trying to compete with them in a market that cannot sustain two shops.
what he did was within the bounds of the experiment

I still don't understand how this is supposed to make anything okay. The experiment was set up to see how people dealt with a system inherently fueled by some combination of altruism and curiosity. I personally assume this means that, among other things, it is looking at some measure of morality. Thing of it is, you can't really construct an experiment about morality or something like it without making immorality (or something like it) within the bounds. (Or, more accurately, you could attempt to but then you'd also be dealing with a measure of how people respond to authority and similar which complicates things.)

Secondly, I think I could say just as easily that being an asshole is well within the bounds of US law. Yet, people tend to respond negatively to people being assholes. What is allowed and what is "right" or "good" or whatever are two entirely different topics.
I think it's that casual gaming is a rapidly growing niche and the gold rush is still on. So it gets all the press and the inevitable conclusion that there must be something that it will replace, which is true in the sense that people have a finite amount of time to do things, but how many gamers do you know who are playing little other than Angry Birds or whatever the hell else these days?

Portable gaming might be a different bag though. Those are largely regarded as time-wasters anyway, and some of the titles you see on Wii-Ware and DSi are also available on App Store and Android Market (e.g. And Yet It Moves), so clearly someone sees an intersection there. I regard portable gaming consoles as mainly for kids personally, and I don't think there is direct competition but time will tell.
> I honestly don't think Sam is going to get much heat over this from people who matter in his life

I agree with you there. Although as an outsider looking in to Sam's life with only this one saga to judge him by, I'd call him a morally bankrupt snake (emotionally charged - yes, but my truthful gut reaction).
> 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

Really? You should definitely show us how.

I've been thinking about the issues of dynamic/static languages for a long time, and haven't yet thought of a unifying design (maybe I'm just stupid).

The big difference isn't type inference/dynamic type system, it's the difference between compile-time and run-time. In Go and Haskell, classes are compiled. In Python, classes are created at runtime, so if you wanted type-inference in such a language, it would have to be performed at runtime... Also, proper typing of OO languages is very complicated, see Scala (e.g. sometimes you want the function to return the type of this object, even when it is inherited...).
So we're down to formal definitions? No problem, I'll bite.

Apartheid - "... an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime". [1]

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_of_apartheid
The Jonathan Card experiment was a good one to watch but then this Sam misusage of Jonathan Card experiment turned out to be even better. This is no personal but at least I can see a few things here:

- Sometimes we should try stupid things (like trying to get money from a Starbucks card), eventually we will success! Probably this is the same idea with the trend these days: fail often, fail fast, fail cheap (kind of).
- Don't be greedy. This one is obvious. If you happen to find an exploit of a system, don't act like a jerk! Tell the admin/webmaster/etc. so he can fix it without further damage.
- Anything else HN?
Giving to charity should be a personal decision, not something used to raise one's own profile or to prove a point.

His email to Jonathan, and his subsequently passive aggressive "olive branch" reply also demonstrate how he's totally failed to get that this is a community reaction, he's abused a commons, for which he is rightly getting castigated.

With any luck, he'll grow up, realise that his narrow world-view isn't inherently superior other people's. If he really wants to show he cares, he should donate his own time, and his own money to worthwhile causes.

Sam - go spend a month somewhere like Uganda, there is a huge amount to do - I can even hook you up with a couple of charity contacts if you want.
They say you don't need to do great things, just little things with great love. That's pretty true in my experience.

Also, there's always that snarky little angle when seeking for something meaningful to do: you're in effect seeking a meaningful life, or just a meaning, for yourself. So there's that selfish aspect there as well. And that sort of implies judgment: you decide it's wrong that other people are wronged; however, the world is often a bit gray and it is gray on that, too. You don't know what these people are going through by living their poor lives and great suffering. And you don't know why. And no matter who it is you can't just go out and decide some people need help: these people need to ask for help themselves, only then they can receive.

That's what I think the starting quote means: you can ask for being a helper yourself and then wait how that unfolds in your case. Most likely it's something that comes up in your everyday life, hence the little things with great love. That's where you have the greatest possible leverage to do good because it's your everyday life and you're invested in it yourself as well.
"Some people think you are a monster."

Add me to that list.
I'm not seeing why this is all so bad. The whole thing was an experiment to see what would happen and Sam demonstrated one scenario. Self-interest at the cost of societal good is an ever present factor in human behavior and a community cookie jar in the form of a Starbucks card is not going to change that. Jonathan's cold response, given that he obviously thought differently, should be no more suprising than something like this happening in the first place.
That would be a nightmare in terms of reliability and security.
So all the charities setup that either a) give away money by a rich donor - e.g. Carnegie, etc. or b) request donations (e.g. for a major crisis) and allocate it how they see it fit, would be considered what?
You're probably best off making as much money as you can and putting it to work via an efficient charity than trying to save the world yourself.

This post spells it out via endless links of endlessness: http://lesswrong.com/lw/373/how_to_save_the_world/
"lastminute.com", "lastminute" and the colour magenta are all trade marks owned by Last Minute Network Limited and/or its group companies.

The T-MOBILE acoustic logo, and the color magenta are registered and/or unregistered trademarks of Deutsche Telekom AG in the US and/or other countries
I’m really not sure why he shouldn’t criticize Nintendo because you think there are similarities to Apple – similarities that are ancient by now. That just doesn’t make sense on any level.
I did this indirectly, when i applied for my today's job. After hearing my hourly rate I was really pissed but just didn't say anything because I didn't want to spoil the deal just because one overconfident offer. So I sat there, silently. And in the end my new boss himself made me a better offer, without hearing any counter argument/offer from me. I think it is really a powerful tool, especially when you know how and when to use it.
I used to have a proxy business; my best clients were Iranian people; a lot of them doctors, PhDs etc who wanted to to hire servers to read / mirror 'Western' information via VPNs. One guy who became a good friend actually ended up buying a rack full of servers via me to provide open communication for all his friends and family.
Start by doing something small. Do it well. Do it again and again and again. Until you think you can scale it up and it doesn't interfere with any of your personal commitments or dreams.

I was really impressed with this video by Derek Sivers about how startups don't need funding to start. Though in a different context, it puts the point across. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KLnXjqKL5g) If you want to make a big difference, start by doing smaller things and scale up.
you're misreading it - there is act of charity and there is charity organization.
Kajal Agarwal Sleepy in Pink Dress Cute Photos
Ahh the bart, and yet another reason to freaking loathe those trains.

I don't under stand why the silicon valley can't actually innovate in the area of public transport and traffic light controls. My home town of Madison, WI had more advanced traffic control systems (sensors, logic for controlling traffic flow and adjusting light times, etc), and the east coast kills it in the public transportation area. 90 a month for a monthly subway ticket versus 8 dollr one way trips on the bart.

// gripe
"Matthew Kang, 26, a former commercial bank analyst in Los Angeles, has it worse. Last year, he quit his prestigious job to open Scoops Westside, an ice cream shop in Culver City. I feel like a janitor sometimes, he said"

CRY. ME. A. RIVER.

This takes over-privileged whiny rich people to new levels.
It has no null??! Who's on first?
Okay fair enough then. Thanks for clarifying :-)
Almost all of you forget what the costumers want. That is to play games on the device they carry around the whole day.

A handheld is as good as a big console. The phone in your pocket is the market.

And quality and fun matters on an iPhone or Droid too. Nintendo could help here with bringing games to the biggest market.

They won't kill themselves. It's either some cool ports for 10$ to the iPhone or selling less games to the DS because of the high prices and pirate modules. They can make new stuff for the DS and bring classics to the App Store or do special versions for it.

Touch controls are no problem. Only because some hardcore gamers have a problem with it doesn't mean to make no games with touch controls.

Zenonia shows how a Zelda game would be like.

I got nothing from Nintendo since the SNES because they suck so hard compared to the rest. They lack creating beautiful devices, capable of creating beautiful worlds.

Nintendo games always look like so much behind and that took the fun out for me. My wife has a DS and the Zelda games lack gameplay and convincing worlds. It's sad. So much potential but not used.

Nevertheless I see great potential when they would do something for the other side. It could help them to improve their own hardware.
Pantone seems to think you can: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantone#Intellectual_property
Think about it. OpenStreetMap is free data. You can make your own maps, your own selection of data, data analysis, your own routing, you can contribute and the changes are live within minutes, you can provide free maps to people, you can use open source software to edit.

From Google you only get whatever they decide they want to give.

Could you give examples what you mean by complete? POIs? In that case Google has a lot of leverage. Street/way-wise OpenStreetMap is vastly superior in many if not most cases at least here in Europe (not to mention countries where there is no monetary interest for Google).
So that's why I couldn't get it to work—have a look at this[1].

Thanks for teaching me what the documentation failed to—it's neither in the front page example, or in the API documentation for Response.

[1] https://github.com/kennethreitz/requests/issues/105
Nice.. I too was working with embedded C++ dev w/ a Blackfin & Sharc combo and yes the standard build cycle was kind of lame. I attended a Blackfin course that just happened to be located at Analog Devices HQ. In the 4 days that I was there I got an OSC (Open Sound Control) library w/ message parsing and Lua support up and running hooked up to desktop GUI audio control apps built with a framework I've created in Java. I continued to try and get things going with the OSC message parsing to Sharc communication for DSP control (Ambisonics mostly), but then Android steam rolled me..

I already had a real time app dev runtime / framework in Java for J2SE that immediately started porting to also run on Android. A modern SoC and Android w/ my framework on the desktop and on the device for 3rd party app dev is now driving my future audio hardware dev efforts. First though I get to do a general release of the software dev framework as a product which never really would have happened without Android showing up. Things changed a lot recently!

Anyway, good idea with the scripting / Blackfin deal though as that can pay off big.
But you can do so much more with it. Music + Connecting with others + gaming + videos + everything a dev is coming up with.

And you don't have to pay 40$ for a game, only 1-15$. As they said in Penny Arcade: Who has more fun, you with a 40$ game or me with 40 one dollar games?
Yeah the authentication parts of urllib2 remind me of the horrible 20-letter classes glued together in Java, just the thing I wanted to escape from by using Python. Seeing that I'm trying to make this script interface with a website that uses both cookies and http auth this library seems like a godsend.
In MSVC, this warning's off by default: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/wzxffy8c(v=VS.100).a...
If a news organization which is publicly funded has to make a choice between breaking important news or obeying the law, I would rather that they report the news.
Not necessarily, it could mean that one market is saturated and they are looking to open up new markets.
It's clear that there's a difference between organisations setup to receive and manage charitable donations and something that is essentially part of the commons.

Not sure if you genuinely misunderstood, or you're just being quite boringly pedantic
it is a politician's jobs to make actions that result from basic economic realities illegal when those actions conflict with the warm fuzzy picture their constituency has of the world.
Chinese Government Finds 22 More Fake Apple Stores - MacRumors.com
are you kidding, i'm pointing out the historical reasons for why we add punctuation chars in our passwords, as it directly impacts the solution space a brute force attack needs to cover.
Many years ago, a couple of my friends got together and planned a vacation. One of our friends who didn't want to come along jumped in and said - "Hey why don't you take the money pooled in and donate it to earthquake victims instead of taking a vacation." He felt really smug about this suggestion and couldn't stop patting himself in the back about his brilliance. I am not making this story up. The two of you should meet and congratulate each other.

Of course, there are several other ways of contributing to charity but I know the itch to scratch when you dreamed up this "awesome" scheme might have been too much to resist.

"make sure he's OK" - so you emailed jonathan before you put your script in action, didn't you?

"I was saddened by his reply" - One would expect someone who is so easily saddened to have some empathy for his own victims .. or maybe not. Maybe next time, when yuppies buy each other coffee you can keep out or do charity on your own dime?
I always think excitement over these kind of articles is overblown. Wouldn't it work like this?:

1. Develop a super-treatment for fighting a broad range of infections

2. Enjoy a few years of low levels of disease

3. The "super-bugs" that are naturally resistant and were naturally selected by the broad application of treatment make a comeback

4. Back to step 1
Isn't the real problem attempting to build an abstraction that lets programmers assume the datacenter won't go down? Aren't you better off building a system like Google's Megastore/BigTable that assumes datacenters go down, and handling it in software?

The obvious downside is, of course, that you'll have to rewrite all your software, but doesn't that give higher reliability at the end of the day?

Disclosure: I work for Google, but on stuff totally disconnected with any of this.