skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's a great distinction. As you saw, the definition of 'good code' for this post was definitely based on the 'good code' remarks I hear from coworkers, where it is often the notion that more objects, bigger API's, etc., is 'good code' and a 100 line one-class add-on is 'bad code'. Great distinction though, thanks for bringing this up!
I think it would be simpler to regulate ridiculous overdraft fees. Plenty of banks do just fine without charging them. There's no healthy reason for a bank to charge a very large overdraft fee or to charge an overdraft fee more often than once a month.
Every seven years, not every fifty. That said, this rule caused all sorts of problems - because debts had to be forgiven on a regular basis, no one would lend to the poor at all.

In the first century BCE, Rabbi Hillel came up with a novel solution - the creditor 'sold' the debt to a rabbinical court, who didn't have to cancel it since (I believe - memory's a little hazy here) the letter of the law referred to individuals. The court in turn gave the creditor power-of-attorney to collect the debt at any time and the right to all the proceeds. Problem solved.

The mishnah (a codification of Jewish oral tradition) on this part of the Torah and Hillel's reinterpretation of it is really interesting - the rabbis aren't stupid, and they can see that Hillel's playing fast and loose with the original intent of the law, but write that it was necessary in order to 'repair the world'.

This wouldn't be the last time something designed to protect or help the poor completely backfired due to unforseen circumstances.
> It's called being a complete cunt to your fellow human beings

I can certainly agree that the policeman in question fits that description. But I'm sure he was "just following orders", which included the very urgent task of clearing some random sidewalk in a park. Although who is the bigger piece of shit depends in part on whether he was indeed ordered to do it, or was simply a poorly trained hothead acting without authorization (the police are sadly not empty of of power-hungry assholes who will use any excuse to "teach people a lesson", though I don't think such bad apples are quite as common as some people allege).

Frankly, I'm sick of people such as yourself cheerleading violence against people you don't like, WWF-style, because you're fighting some sort of culture war against the imagined enemy of hippiedom, and feel that you can use any means necessary to fight it, including violent ones. That sort of playground bullshit is to be expected in kids, but you're grown up, so what's your excuse for not applying some rational analysis to the pros/cons of using violence?

Actually, in the kid example, I blame the kid who punched there too. Poor impulse control isn't a justification for violence, and kids like that, if that behavior isn't fixed, often grow up to be violent adults who get "provoked" into fights, justifying it, just like the kid, by blaming someone else for "forcing" them to throw a punch in the bar.
I've been blocking these apps as they appear in my news feed. I have no interest in finding out what stories my friends were tricked into sharing.
Yes.

From ml-class.org,

"Students will have access to lecture videos, lecture notes, receive regular feedback on progress, and receive answers to questions. When you successfully complete the class, you will also receive a statement of accomplishment."
That's an interesting example. But if an opportunity exists in the market for somebody to come in undercutting me and selling cotton balls for a mere 500% markup, then I think it's still okay.
Don't get me wrong, I like Gladwell and his writing but the usual criticism is that he cherrypicks useful facts and disregards conflicting ones so that he can build up his case. If you try to refute him point by point, you can't because every fact in his essays is correct. Every specific point is going to be correct and irrefutable but conclusion drawn from them would be just so wrong.
I was just about to post the same thing. I agree with the underlying thesis that a good shipping product is better than perfect code that never ships, but the author seems to be confusing good code and over-engineering.

Good code does exactly what it needs to, but will be maintainable and won't have to be thrown away when that "fantastic" product ends up getting popular.

I also tend to believe that doing it right doesn't necessarily take much longer. The code I write now is much better than the code I wrote 10 years ago for a number of reasons, but I still get a lot more done, and a lot faster than I did back then.
Probably a big-city problem.
ATP World Tour Finals Predictions
When the City of San Francisco tows your car it's something like $60 a day in storage fees. Those will outweigh your interest costs pretty quickly.
And comments like these are the reason that this story should never have been submitted, and hopefully will be removed asap.
In theory, college students are adults.

These kids, though, don't seem to be acting like it. They think they're playing a game.
Nunc dimittis
Minor Pet Peeve: Googling for Python Documentation
As a fairly amateur programmer, I end up making making frequent use of Python docs to remind me what is and isn't possible. I appreciate that Python 2.7.x is still pretty standard, and I use it for many projects that need modules which haven't yet been ported. I also use Python 3, where feasible, but when I google for "Python 3 [whatever function I need]," Google still brings up the Python 2.7.2 docs. Is there some easy syntax I'm missing to consistently let me search Python 3 documentation?
Regarding bringing water to the poor: Even if you're a charity, if you can charge for it and make money off it, that means you can bring it to the next group of poor people sooner.

If you're a business, being able to charge for it and make money off it means that more people are going to be willing to give you money as an investment and accelerate your build-out even more. This can easily outpace the pace of donations.
That's like saying Spotify should never have tried because "everybody under the age of 30 torrent it anyway".
Just another sign people are realizing design is eating the world.
Ask HN: Social aspect to financial markets and stocks
I know there's been some thrusts into using sentiment and a social aspect to financial markets. Can somebody point me to these. I'd also love to see what people think can be done with crowd-sourced stock opinions or social feed sentiment based stock recommendations. I was thinking it is perhaps more useful to give negative recommendations or options rather than just buy/sell type output.
There is a list of clients at the official mpd wiki sorted by interface, here are the qt based ones: http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Clients#Qt

I personally use ncmpcc in terminals, Sonata as a gui interface and MPDroid on my phone.
If you don't want to see intemperate comments calling people cunts, it's in your power to stop that by not posting them. Nobody's even making you click on the story or comments at all!
> If you can, you will build a much more maintainable piece of software. Instead of 3,000 lines of code, you have 1,000. Instead of a ton of object dependencies where one change means having to find the references to it in all of your objects, you simply change what needs to be changed, knowing there’s no extra dependencies in your code for the sake of having beautiful code.

What? So 3000 lines of code to do the same thing would be "good code", and 1000 lines of code would be "good software".
I don't mind the bit which calls people cunts (and I apologize for the fact that I deleted that particular bit in favour of a pithier bit while you were writing your own comment), it's everything else.
"It's hard to have a gut feeling about how many pieces of cheap paper is moral to take in exchange for a durable good."

Except it's not "cheap paper", it's very precious and expensive to the poor folks parting with it.
Better Off Ted and Firefly (as some-one mentioned underneath) are perfect examples of shows that would thrive under Netflix. They have such huge appeal to the tech savvy audience who are most likely to adopt Netflix. It wouldn't surprise me if the rights to those shows are owned by big TV companies though, who have little to incentive to sell them on.
And the bunker datacentre in the UK http://www.thebunker.net/
Very wise. VMWare has established a precedent with ESXi V4 starting out free, then drastically changing terms, conditions, and pricing with V5. Their prerogative of course, but there is no way I would build a business around free beer software unless it was also free speech so I can fork it if I have to. They have open sourced this code, so you can take a chance on it, but you have to be certain there is enough of a critical mass of code commits from the outside that it could fly on its own were VMWare to close it back up.
" Instead of 3,000 lines of code, you have 1,000. Instead of a ton of object dependencies where one change means having to find the references to it in all of your objects, you simply change what needs to be changed, knowing there’s no extra dependencies in your code for the sake of having beautiful code."

i agree about the notion of focusing on big picture when designing a product, but, this article seems to make an assumption that beautiful code means more lines and more dependencies, and that by skipping some corners you greatly decrease both, while making your software more robust. That is a direct contradiction. you skip corners to ship faster, test the market, deliver on deadline, but not to make your code easier to work with.

As engineers, we're perfectionists, and each time we design a piece of software we try to make it a little better, easier to read/maintain, more elegant. That is not something that is achieved by cutting corners. 100 lines of code is fine for a prototype, but that's not what great products are built on, and certainly not how you achieve less dependencies.
I might be out of this site moto, but..

Just my IMHO - If customer's business processes can not be described by clean code this means business process is messed up itself.

And if client want to ship it now and do not care if it is right - process is broken.

I think this comes from the world of proprietary software, where agencies write some mess code to fit exactly current business practices and continue to "iterate" with this mess patching ad-hoc new and new requirements from executives. This leads to huge overhead in software. The only reason we do not see all this disgusting shit - it is proprietary.

This approach is good for agency. And sometimes - for client. But not for all of us. I am talking about banking/law/health/etc systems built with exact ideas represented in this article.

In open source world such approach simply will not work. Nobody will want to touch junk spaghetti code.

So... I believe this approach flawed in long run. And we as developers should be more then stupid machines producing code. We need to think forward and if something do not make sense - tell it and push through if needed.

just some random rant after seeing boss pushing project which kinda fits client's business schema, but then it starts stagnate, 'cos it require more changes... And these changes lead to even more mess..
As a rough time estimate for you, the AI Class is taking me about 2 evenings of maybe 2-3 hours each per week. Your mileage may vary.
Show HN: Visualize your LinkedIn profile in a timeline
Shareholders for Motorola Mobility Approve Merger
My apologies; and thanks for bringing this up! Someone above brought up the same thing.

I meant 'good code' as seen by those that write 3000 lines for an API where only a simple 1000 was necessary. I work with plenty of people that see it this way, which is why I phrased it like so.
I'm not much into role playing games so I don't have any idea about WOW.

I think the best approach is to focus online dating around these concepts :

1. Location based - same city. I personally feel long distance relationships suck.

2. In known social network - friends, friends of friends, colleagues, etc. much like google+, facebook. Friends of friends are good prospects to find potential dates you can trust(your friends know them). This will solve "trust" issue. Also, there will be some kind of social pressure to behave in a good way.

3. Things to do together(online or offline). Just match making isn't enough. Give them ideas and things to do together:

a) Online ideas - play games, chat, watch movie together(+video chat), etc.

b) offline ideas - Visit places (restaurants, amusement park, sea beach etc), attend events, do activities(cycling, walking, swimming, dancing etc). How about group outings (his friends and her friends) to get things started?
Payday Loans
But what incentive would entrepreneurial people have to help the poor if not profit? It's nice to be nice for the sake of being nice, but it's also important to eat.
Yes, those are LG monitors, and you can see a PC workstation under the desk.

Too bad they replaced whatever was there with those monitors
If you re read what I said I was referring to the frictionlessness (is there a word like that) when you want to do the sharing.

I do not want to see any pop ups when I want to share. Maybe we should differentiate between frictionless sharing and automated frictionless sharing.
>Do you really need a full objet-oriented API right now? Do you really need to make a dozen interwoven classes, when it’s possible just a hundred or so lines in one class will do fine? Can you do all the same error checking and unit tests in a much smaller code base?

Do you really need to split your data into small pieces, when you can use global variables and have a code-base that eliminates the need for function arguments and complicated function invokation strategies in a much smaller code base?

While the fight for proper functions has been largely won thanks to unit testing, a lot of people think that the database gives them back the license to code against global state and believe a code-base should be judged by the number of keystrokes needed to type it.
Lubos Motl is a smart guy, but he's known for having his own somewhat strongly-held opinions on quantum mechanics. I don't believe his assertion that it's a "crackpot paper", but am sympathetic to his argument that Nature is over-hyping the paper.

I would really need to sit down and read the paper carefully (as well as Motl's rebuttal) before I can have a more informed opinion than that, though.
Why Mobile Marketing Is A Great Venture?
Why Rel Nofollow is Important to Seo Rankings
I'm a huge fan of Sonata ( http://sonata.berlios.de/ ). While it isn't a Qt based interface, I've used it a bunch over the last couple of years and it functions great as a simple GUI frontend for mpd. Anyways, just my 2cents.
As I understood it, the question was not whether it's ethical to "charge for it", it was whether it was ethical to charge big bucks, ie. make a killing profit.

If you had a filter that can purify water, and you could get away selling it for huge margins, like 500%, just because they need it and they'll sacrifice other things in order to buy it, would you?

I, for one, don't think that would be moral. A heathy profit to sustain your business would be OK.
Sorry but if you're hungry the rational thing to do is to acquire food. If you're sick the rational thing to do is to assess your options for immediate help. I use the word immediate here intentionally.

You're referring to difference in rationality but these are actually differences in time preference. A starving person prefers food NOW while someone who is well fed can wait a little longer and wait for a good deal to come by.

If you're on death's door, then long term financial planning is not a rational choice. Long term financial planning is probably the worst choice they can make as they'd be dead before any dividends are paid.

The poor are not coerced into buying food, they are making a choice and their choices meet an immediate need.

Recommending that people don't sell the poor food or that we never lend the poor money, what in immoral thing to say.
The main thing you got out of this long article about quantum mechanics was a parenthetical aside in the first paragraph?
I see Drinkify as an experiment, and perhaps there will be those that use the service for a giggle, but there isn't anything there that will help evolve humankind.

It's not really even worth discussing, is it?
Thank you. EnglishRussia is not only a blogspam site but also full of stupid porn links.
I'm lucky to work in an extremely liberal work place in London, to the point of unlocked computers being sabotaged with a fairly well known website showing old men conducting sexual acts on other old men.

Saying that, I've worked in other places were I'd defiantly avoid looking at anything featuring the nsfw flag.
Wow. Nobody has mentioned that this argument is a strawman yet?

It is not profit itself that is usually attacked; rather, it is the exploitation of the poor (whether in terms of the environment or labor) in the name of profit. The first example I can think of is the oil companies in Nigeria who have left environmental disaster because it was more profitable to pay off the right people.

We can go round and round about sweatshops, but the immorality is the disconnect between those making the money and those supplying the labor. It is the conditions that trapped workers in a factory while it burned down that is immoral.

I don't remember people talking about making things poor people want at a profit as immoral, save malt liquor and pay day loans. (I should mention that it is the exploitation of the situation of the poor that is the problem, not the product itself. It's the poor person paying a quarter of the wages to keep current on the loan while the principal isn't touched that is the problem -- the cycle rather than the profit itself.)
I have seen many people have this issue. Being very smart and not being able to construct and argument on the feet.
I always advise them to join Toastmasters. I'm a member and it has greatly improved my persuasive abilities.
>You know, the usual sort of museum experience.

The WW2 museum in london is like that as well. It's a lot of fun.
Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1520552
> "All it is meant to do is let you know."

Specifically, it allows you to make an informed decision as to whether, when, where, and in whose company to access the page in question.

For example, I don't care one way or the other about "explicit language" for my own sake, but I'd like to limit my toddler's exposure. An NSFW-language warning on videos is a courtesy to me.
Totally agree. Where did you read that this was what is going to happen?
That's a great insight, but it's interesting (though I'm not arguing wrong) that it is required.

It is problematic to associate profit with morality, and this cuts both ways. The author states that trillions spent on charity is sinful which implies that the lack of profit is immoral.

The problem for the poor is that they are at best a risky or at worst bad investment if profit is the sole concern. So I believe you have to find a way to address this too.
Mobile Web App Behaves like Native App - How?
Hunting For A Tech Job In Silicon Valley
I think you're making a blanket assumption that all businesses that have poor people as customers benefit the poor. This isn't always the case. The thing is, it's not always the case for rich customers either. The simple fact may be that richer people are usually more educated and capable of determining whether or not they would be better off. So the question for me isn't whether it's OK for a business to be making money off of poor people. The question for me is whether poor people will be more negatively affected by immoral businesses. After we understand the question in that context, then we can clarify that yes, it's not right for these businesses to make money off of poor people.

I agree with you for the most part. But I don't think we should say it's REQUIRED. I think we should be careful about making such a blanket statement because such blanket statements make for easy cop-out justifications for bad and unethical business practices. We unfortunately usually don't figure out that someone's getting hurt until it's too late.
It doesn't matter if a competitor can spring up overnight, because at the end of the day, is Drinkify really providing any value, other than that of fleeting novelty? I argue that no, they are not.

Real entrepreneurs create value, not products. Building something of value takes a lot more time and hard work. The corollary of this, of course, is it's true for your potential competitors as well.

So, if you're worried about whether your competitors can one up you in a weekend, it might be a sign that you aren't really creating anything worthwhile. Fun, or cool? Sure. But valuable, no.
A few coworkers and I signed up for the DB class and ran into the same problem. What we decided to do instead is just read through the material whenever we get a chance and not worry too much about the assignments (unless we get time). We don't necessarily get all the benefits, but at least we're able to take something good out of it.
At this point there's a decent installed base of automated bill-reading machinery, though. Not that these ought to be sacrosanct or anything, but the cost and inconveniences associated with a rollout of new bills is substantial.

Plus, people will complain about the new ones. :)
4 oz. Speed

Serve neat. Garnish with wedge of kiwi.

- http://drinkify.org/matthew%20good

Is "Speed" slang or?
Writing an API isn't the problem - being a perfectionist about internal design is.

My design process has gone from "write code that does something" to "figure out what data you want to store and how to validate it, then write code".

Once the data is in a defined format, it's much easier to change how the code works without breaking things. That's the way to go about API design - designing callable libraries that work in only one language and have only one implementation is a quick way to cut off a huge swath of developers from interacting with you.
Wordpress Jetpack Plugin Vulnerable to SQL Injection
It would be nice if they linked to their sources without passing it through what looks like a stumbleupon type service. In this case they link to http://2leep.com/bar.php?url=http://moscow-walks.livejournal... as the source.
This company Derwent Capital seems to be able to generate quite a return with data mining twitter feeds. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/8755587/Twitte...
Usability findings don't necessarily have to come as a study.

Neither the line you quote promises one specifically.

The article was an interesting read, anyway.
It would be enough stopping spending trillions of dollars in today's wars.
Can We Get a Dependable Flashlight Today?
Gadsby: 50,000 Word Novel Without The Letter "E"
That's amazing. A facility with 1600 employees that needed untold resources to construct is decommissioned as useless because the Washington Post writes an article about it.

They're of course within their rights to do so, but it's sad to think that all the work needed for the facility went to waste and its employees were laid off just because someone wrote an article on it.
I absolutely agree. I have too many coworkers in the 'more code, more objects' camp; which is usually bad news for the end user. That's exactly why I wrote the article.
Ah, yes, the democracy virus. Democracy sucks, honestly, but unfortunately the cure is much worse than the disease. :(