skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I started thinking this through and here's a problem I see. If companies decide to only do business with other "good" companies, then they have to decide whether every potential customer is "good" or not. How do you define it - where do you draw the line? Do you hire another person to make this decision? Outsource it? Or maybe there's a y-combinator startup that provides an API call - isCompanyEvil(company_name).
http://passphra.se does exactly that =) Although it's sadly not https.
No, the annoying part is when they call you and immediately demand you verify your identity to someone without even any Caller ID.

(And my but they get shirty when you use the appropriate language which the situation requires when telling them to get off the line.)
"Keep looking, don't settle"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXnChrXCsyM
Actually, Monsanto also sells most "conventional"(non-GMO) seeds. It's very difficult not to deal with them, as they have a near-monopoly. If you're going to look for evil, look there.
kind of related: https://plus.google.com/103697821787469756035/posts/ZE69T4eN...
The prospects for a near-term funding desert
Idea for a startup: a ratings service to track and rate the ethics/values of companies. This company would be to ethics as S&P is to finance. It would probably have more clout though, if it has a way of distributing its product to the person in the street. The person in the street probably cares more about ethical performance than finance performance when they are making daily buying decisions.
[Disclosure: I went to wes and didn't major in CS (though wish I had taken more classes in it)]

I think the main point from this article is that the type of thought wesleyan teaches has proven itself well-suited to the creative, innovative thinking valued in the tech and startups especially. While this isn't necessarily programming focused, there are other roles in the industry Wesleyan is showing it has done really well in.

Also, while more grads move to NYC than anywhere else, I will say there's plenty of wesleyan tech talent out here in the bay area (CEO of rdio, a bunch of folks at google, and startups).

The school would definitely be well served by beefing up it's CS department and trying to attract more talent. With a solid programming community on campus, I bet we'd see some awesome projects emerge especially as tech mixes more with the strong arts and music scenes.
This is of course true; ALWAYS profile the code before and after any optimizations, it is quite common for things not to act the way you'd expect (either because of the hardware, the compiler, or even other bits of code you're not aware of, which perhaps relies on certain assumptions).
I want to point out that your "gig" which you quit was bat-shit insane and not an environment to be in. You quit it because it was fucking awful. They made all your staff work consistently overnight and completely forsake your sanity and happiness.

You made the right move. Pivot to be happy. You tried the self-employment route. It didn't work. Get another job.

What line of work are you in? Ruby? Contact me if you want advice/work. "Bigf1sch" on Skype.
A lot more than just your deaf customers hate phone calls. They're disruptive, intrusive, unreliable, and for many people with autism-spectrum disorders, extremely uncomfortable.
Why would we lynch Cloudant, but Apple and other companies (that make much more money from Monsanto) get a free pass?

Of course a startup is excited to get a big client, as they should be. If Apple was a small company and signed a deal with Monsanto they'd probably make a big deal about it too.

For a startup a big client can be the difference between success and failure in the early days. Apple has no such excuse, they could refuse to sell to Monsanto if they wanted to. Why don't you do something that requires real sacrifice, like boycott your favorite company, instead of harassing a little startup?
What service are you running where the "overwhelming number of [y]our users" tell you that phone is their preferred method of contact?

As I wrote on the blog, email allows me to:

- respond when it’s convenient for me.
- keep most of my attention on what I’m doing.
- archive and share the correspondence easily.
- filter content I don’t want to hear anymore.
- remain anonymous.
- make careful, researched, edited responses.
- include screenshots, links to videos, and other files which might be helpful.
- continue to correspond if I loose my hearing and/or speaking abilities.

I’m not hearing impaired, and I much prefer email. Phone calls are only acceptable in a small number of situations, and I want to be the person to decide when those situations occur.
> Lua is a lot like Ruby or Python but about an order of magnitude faster

I'm surprised to hear either of those statements, both that Lua is a lot like Python and that it's an order of magnitude faster. Now, the last time I seriously looked at Lua was for my master's thesis work about four years ago, so I'm willing to believe that my impression of Lua is out of date. However, my experience on using it for a medium-sized project was that it is nothing like Python. My procedure for programming is

1) think of semantic construct,

2) think of how to express this construct in this language

3) type it in

My experience with Python is that step (2) is almost automatic - for whatever reason, every construct I'm used to using has a clear, terse expression in Python. And I've never spent an extended period writing Python, so I don't think it's because Python has really shaped the way I think. (The closest analogue to Python programming is using the STL in C++, in my experience.)

With Lua I had exactly the opposite experience. Every time it came to step (2), it felt like what I wanted to say was almost expressible in idiomatic Lua, but not quite. It just felt like I was running a race with a 50 pound backpack the whole time. Every time I tried to write a Lua script, I'd eventually throw up my hands and write my program in Python instead.

Now, it's certainly possible that I just never really understood Lua's paradigm that well, and that if I'd kept going I would eventually have reached enlightenment. I don't think so, though - tables just aren't that hard, oonceptually. However, the point is that, out of the box, Python gives me by far the least cognitive friction and Lua by far the most of any programming language I've ever used. I therefore have to strongly disagree that Python and Lua have much in common other than a small overlap in the niche they each fill.

And as for the order of magnitude speed difference, I find that hard to believe. Again, my information may be out of date, but when I looked at it Lua converted all numbers to double precision floating point numbers internally, which dragged its integer benchmarks down quite a bit. (In fairness, I think that was the same time frame where Python could only use primitive integers for the numbers 0-99, and had to box everything else.)
My dad lives in singapore and sent me a list of laptops his computer guy sent him. They all had Core i7s and platter hard drives and weighed a ton with mediocre battery life.

All my dad wants is a light laptop with good battery life to email people and surf the web on. He doesn't care about hard drive space or the graphics card. The spec lists were long and confusing.

I compared it to the Macbook Air I just bought. It was cheaper than the options he sent, lighter than the options he sent and had an SSD. It will do everything he needs and wants from his laptop better than the other options.

Then I saw this zenbook. It seems to be pretty similarly specced and is targeted at the windows market. Hopefully he can hold out until they have it there, or pick one up in the US. Kudos to the rest of the manufacturers for competing with the Macbook Air.
From this site's About section:

"Since Jesus walked the earth, God specifically used the marketplace and its leaders to advance the Gospel. Our goal is to explore how God has historically chosen the marketplace to transform lives and how He seeks leaders to again step up and share His love through commerce: the lifeblood of every community.

As you explore God’s heart for business, understand that success in the marketplace and intimacy with Christ are not mutually exclusive. We seek to discover what it means to be anointed for business and the unique opportunity God has given us to transform markets with His love. Come unlock your destiny in the marketplace and become a market-smart and spiritually sharp leader who is empowered to advance the Gospel where it is needed most."

Jesus Christ.
I could have sworn CrunchBase had a metric for public opinion of a particular company, but either I was mistaken or they've discontinued it. "Monsanto" would certainly be followed by an angry frowny face.
Depends on what you're doing. In my research the moment I'm working on difficult to access data or with new techniques, Python becomes the better tool immediately.

R is absolutely beautiful for manipulating small data sets. It's the only reasonable way to plot things (with d3/protovis coming in a distant second) and it's supercharged by Hadley Wickham's work. It's also totally crippled for "general purpose" programming and turns to C every time you need more speed.
BitBucket: Should issues be sorted by *importance* or *date created*?
I liked the one comment in the article where the guy recommended a public service that gave the deaf a real phone number which just contained a recording informing callers that the person was deaf. That way they could enter a real phone number of forms that insisted on one.

I don't know anyone at Twilio but if they want to perform a public service and gets lots of karma it wouldn't be a bad thing to go do.
As does R :)

> c(1, 1, 1) + c(2, 2, 2)
[1] 3 3 3
> matrix(c(1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3),
+ ncol = 3, byrow = TRUE) +
+ matrix(c(4, 4, 4, 5, 5, 5, 6, 6, 6),
+ ncol = 3, byrow = TRUE)
[,1] [,2] [,3]
[1,] 5 5 5
[2,] 7 7 7
[3,] 9 9 9

Not quite so concise and elegant but it's pretty straightforward stuff for most R users.
The solution to pollution is dilution.

If everyone is doing it, we should each take 1/1e6 of the blame.
bundler was the biggest mystery. Many times after I thought everything was set up correctly, I'd try to launch a console only to be told I was missing Gems. This isn't a big deal until I'm on an airplane and can't re-download the Gems -- but why everything disappeared to begin with is still a mystery to me.
Are we talking about asking or requiring? I agree no one should require a phone number, but it's completely reasonable to ask if people want to use that rather than email.
[Contest] Win "Ghost in the Wires" Book by Kevin Mitnick
He was referring to the platform not the product. Everyday it seems I find yet another reason to hate the tech "press".
I use WhatsApp instead of SMS mostly. It has benefit of working not only with iPhone users, but with Android as well.
And when I say "get more done" it was in reference to java rather than perl.
It gives you a sharp enough knife to whittle the Statue of Liberty or cut your hand off. I've found this flexibility much more useful for debugging purposes (redefining methods on the fly) than writing easy-to-follow production code.
Apple's business model has apparently based on selling premium products at a premium price, not giving away some products and selling in add-ons.
Interestingly, 3 times in the last 2 days, I've had the amazon.com website give me a 404 on a link on one of their pages. I don't remember ever getting a 404 on their site. In all the years I've been using them, which is a long time.

Your rant paints a bleak picture, and I hope my experience of the last 2 days was coincidence.
With iMessage being released I wonder what is the plan for Facetime? Is it complementary, or is it going to be killed? Are we going to get iMessage on Mac/Windows as well?
Best Tools to Store and Organize Daily Inspiration
Finding inspiration as a website designer is no longer difficult in today’s world. Not only can you find it with a simple search through other websites but you can get lists on blogs that provide enormous numbers of examples that people have found around the web. All of it is just bundled there, waiting for you to take a peek through and find your own idea in the mix.
i'm seeing literally dozens of comments saying that it monsanto is the most evil company that exists, and literally, not one comment giving a single concrete reason why it is.

why is hitler evil? i can tell you in 8 words. he ordered the deaths of millions of people.

why is monsanto evil? seriously, name ONE thing that makes them evil.
In theory, it is, but in practice, the Green Revolution hybrid(very carefully cross-bred) seeds required you to get new seeds every year, because the seeds you'd get from your harvest would be cross-pollinated improperly. GMO could possibly bridge this gap, but you don't want GM crops cross-pollinating with everyone else's, if only because if it cross-pollinates with an organic farmer's crops, the latter can lose their organic certification. The solution to this is the terminator gene, that makes it impossible for such a situation to happen.

I'm not going to support Monsanto's IP actions here, but they aren't pure evil the way, say, De Beers is.
I will give anyone here that wants to do this a boat load of Twilio credit to get started. Email me jsheehan@twilio.com
I think you nailed it - phone call today is far more important and intimate than it ever was. Same thing with an SMS - it's a guaranteed read. To me, if it's important - send me an email or a letter. If it's urgent and super important - send me an SMS. If all of my networth is going down the drain and you need a split second decision, call me.
"I have an important message about negativity. Please watch this 34 minute video to find out what it is."

No.
I mainly use TurboCAD and Altium Designer, would love to use your program with these. Looks like really neat software, great work!
> But heavy usage of robots and large-scale food growing are exactly what conventional agriculture is about, and small-scale, local, human labor-based growing is the goal of the organic movement.

This is incorrect. There is nothing in the charter of any organic farming organization I've seen regulating the use of automation and machinery in agriculture, nor the scale of the operation. Organic farming is strictly about eliminating the use of chemical and genetic additives (herbicides, pesticides, fertilizers, hormones, antibiotics, chemically-treated fence posts, direct genetic modification, etc.) in our farmed food and textile products. A huge factor limiting the spread of organic farming practices over conventional is the increased production cost and decreased yields due to the difficulty of managing pests and weeds.

As an example, an organic farmer in many cases must employ workers at great expense to go through the crops once a week or two with a hoe and manually clear out weeds, rather than being able to drive through with a tractor and spray herbicide every couple months. This adds substantially to the cost and difficulty of growing organically. If robots could be leased or purchased to do this work instead, the viability of organic growing would be significantly improved. In many areas, there is no labor infrastructure allowing farmers to find workers to do such work, and so growing certain crops organically is not even a realistic option for them.
"I don’t fully understand the business of Cloudant"

The only part of the post I needed to read.
How about next protesting Microsoft, Oracle, Dell and any other company that contracts the Department of Defense ( one of the biggest suppliers of violence in the modern world )? Guess that means we also need to start going after thousands of subcontractors too, and anyone who buys Windows, Dell computers, or uses government services. While we're at it protest the police departments; they purchase weapons, which funds makers of weapons, like Smith & Wesson, HK, and Remington. But let's not stop there, how about those chemical companies like Dow and BASF. Surely they supply those Devils Monsanto! I'm 100% that I can find a link from them to gasp Apple! Omg! We must shut down the evilness that is Apple!
Didn't mean to use marketing-speak.

When I said conversational, I meant that our app talks to the user, waits for a reply from the user, then does that cycle again, like Siri does. There are a lot of other ways to do voice interaction, like voice actions does (you press a button and then talk and then something pops up) or Vlingo (where the interaction is mostly hands free, but sometimes requires you to press a button).

I'm also serious that we thought that people wouldn't understand the differences between us and Siri. I'm not talking about people commenting on HN, I'm talking about someone who casually hears about our app as a "voice app" from a friend, or who glances at the headline on TechCrunch. The differences are in the details of the execution, and they can be subtle, especially if you haven't gotten a chance to use both apps and do a comparison on how they perform at texting-while-driving.
While unemployment remains high, a degree from Khan academy (so to speak) is not likely to get anyone out of the resume pile and into a job.

Consider all of the people who go to community college and transfer in to the prestigious school for the last two years, and get the same degree. You don't need to get a degree from Khan academy, you just need to get the knowledge. Then you can transfer to a prestigious school and get the degree that gets your resume noticed.
If I had Monsanto as a major client I'd make them sign a confidentiality agreement.
Rather offtopic can you comment on the post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3104637
Does Microsoft still run their sites on Akamai? I know Facebook does.
"This 'voting with your dollars' thing is a bunch of bullshit."

It's not all or nothing. If everyone would just subscribe to a CSA and buy the rest of their stuff from the grocery store then that alone would completely shift the face of food production in this country.
Diaspora — Share the love.
Wow. My hat off to you, sir. :)
efficient

Not efficient so much, as it externalizes costs away from the customer purchasing transaction and onto other actors in the system, like farmers and the environment.

Monsanto is not the only beneficiary of their evil ways, though: because of their evilness, millions of Americans spend less on food than they otherwise would.

Have you thought this through? Are you saying exploitation of some to the 'benefit' of others is okay?
What do you work with, software?

I work with software and I did quit and it was great. I just completed my first freelance project and it worked great. I'm not looking back yet. Although I notice it is hard to stay disciplined, but I'm working on it.
I read this years ago, but Monsanto's genetically modified corn seeds had something they referred to as a "terminator" gene, which is what made the genetically modified plants single generation. However, when natural plants were pollinated with pollen from genetically modified plants (my biology is probably wrong here), seeds the natural plants produced retained the terminator gene.

Extrapolate this out to the worst-case scenario and you've got the entire world buying corn seed from Monsanto because natural corn is extinct, through decades of unintentional pollination.
Gosh would that ever be a destabilizing force on American cities.

Right now, from a municipal funding perspective, homes with children are revenue negative, homes without children are roughly revenue neutral, office/industry is profitable, and retail is VERY profitable. (all this is before you take into account tax incentives for relocation/retention.)

Why will cities fight over a mall, or a car dealership, or a corporate headquarters? A mall draws in shoppers from far beyond municipal borders and the (local part of the) sales tax stays with the physical location. When you pay tax on a new car, you're paying multiple years worth of sales tax on driving in one go. If you buy a car in a different city than where you live, it's like if you shopped in that city every single week for the entire time you own the car. Offices are the same as malls in that they draw from beyond municipal boundaries.

If all of a citizen's sales taxes went to the city they lived in, as opposed to where they shopped, then you'd see local (or at least small scale, localized) commerce boom because no city would want to deal with the traffic, road construction and maintenance costs, etc that come with huge retail developments.

Dude, this is blowing my mind. This will be a blog post soon.
C++11 regular expressions tutorial
I didn't write the original comment being referred to but I reserve the right to drop the F bomb where appropriate.

This is real life, we're adults, and it is possible to communicate and deliver an astute/sophisticated/poignant perspective using expletives (just as much as it isn't). If you're offended by someone writing 'fuck' then you need to grow some testicular fortitude.

swearing is not equal to the 'aggressive ranting of an insane person' - that's ridiculous.
why? What Cloudant does is fairly immaterial to the article.
Smells like 2006 in here :-D

I'm not a web-dev guy at all--is this still a problem today?
The last time I paid attention to the Java vs Lisp vs C++ discussion, the shibboleth about JVM memory usage was that the JVM pre-allocated lots of memory to optimize for the case where the application was going to be big and long lived, at the cost of longer start up times and bad memory usage benchmarks for toy programs. I was under the impression that huge JVM footprints were mostly because of this pre-allocation behavior, not because the JVM itself uses lots of memory to maintain itself - am I wrong?
You're right about the seed currently being a bigger source of revenue and profit than RoundUp, because it's currently protected by patents whereas the herbicide patent expired in 2000, and now Monsanto is being undersold on generic glyphosate (without its special additives) by Chinese chemical producers who have been incentivized and subsidized by their government.

However, RoundUp seed patents begin expiring with soybeans first in 2014, and it looks like canola will follow a year or three later.

RoundUp (the herbicide) apparently accounts for 10% of Monsanto's revenue, but the corresponding seed will soon account for zero.
Tiny Apps are Hard
A lot of corporations use Akamai, Microsoft included -- http://www.akamai.com/html/customers/customer_list.html.
Interesting enough, the only name missing from that list? Google.
This is an unbelievable post. We're going to move back to Java, because.....file access will suddenly be an order of magnitude faster, therefore dynamic languages will suddenly be too slow?

what form of crack is this ?
I like how I dont have to visit Coding Horror regularly to see whether there is a new post but rather just check HN
Here's a copy of the rant: http://siliconangle.com/furrier/2011/10/12/google-engineer-a...
Mergers and Acquisitions Insight From an Ex-Googler
I was worried this wouldn't work very well for them, because Google always wants to put "relevant" stuff first and "most recent" (the way Twitter does it) later. So from that point of view, they could never match Twitter for latest news. But putting the latest news on top of the relevant ones is a pretty smart way to do it, rather than just relegating it to another tab.

Also, danmaz74 has a point. If you search for #Android, you should see only posts containing the hashtag "#Android" and then sort them out by relevancy, and so on. But 100% of the posts should have the hashtag in them if that's what the user was searching for. For non-hashtag queries they can use their regular relevancy algorithms.
> It's virtually impossible to live in modern society

If you truly consider those "multinational companies" to be so unethical and dastardly, then don't. Live outside of modern society. Many people do. You do not.

Your hypocrisy is telling.