skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Does anyone know how to find the right data plans for GSM/GRPS devices?
I am looking to make a tracking device with a monthly plan that is <$5 and possibly <$1 a
month. What is basically needed is to send SMS text (few bytes of data) from this device every minute or so about the location. I think that the major wireless network providers such as AT&T, Verizon would be expensive if we just buy SIM and activate a data plan. I need to find re-sellers of data on either their network or other network. Amazon does it with somebody for their Kindle for even much larger data plan, but of course it is amazon, so the rules are different.

It would be great if somebody could help me with this, or just point me in the right direction. If you live in the bay area, I will also buy a pint! Additionally, my fiance' says I am a great guy to hang out with ;)
Yes, and i was pointing out how bad it is.

So you can only go crazy on futile options and not useful ones? Give me a break.
I don't disagree with you, but I think pair programming (at least as how it was explained to me, and how I've approached it in my studies/work) is less a mechanism to foster creativity and more as a 'second set of eyes', a way to alleviate tunnel vision. (I not-so-fondly remember staring at an error-throwing piece of code for at least twenty minutes until a friend pointed out that I had accidentally used a ')' instead of an ']').
That's not quite what I meant, most CS classes cover many other things than design patterns.

The problem is more that in an undergrad degree you are unlikely to need to do any large scale (by industry standards) project. So the way that they teach you good design is largely forced and the most academic way to do that is through a "design patterns" type class where the project that you are building is small enough not to require design patterns in the first place.

This will then educate people that you should really always look for patterns to apply and ways to abstract things since you will be artificially marked up at college for building abstractions and will look for them in every problem you have.

On the other hand someone who is more taught by experience will start by writing awful code like putting their whole program into 1 or 2 functions , they will then experience pain points because of this and realise certain re-occuring problems and either come up with their own solutions to them or read "gang of 4" , this will teach them design patterns the natural way.
SOPA Author (Still) Violating Copyrights?
And they (or whoever was making those phone calls) fraudulently misrepresented themselves, thereby committing fraud by the laws of the US. Not sure about Kenyan laws.
"Last I checked, you have been in the business of finding other people's digital information on the web, aggregating it, and offering it up as your product for more than a decade."

I believe there is an important difference between indexing Mocality's content and the things that Mocality is upset about. I believe is is reasonable to expect Google not to call your customers and pretend to represent a join venture, lie about your offering to them, and to pressure them into buying something.

<joke>For one thing, that doesn't sound like a very scalable crime model.</joke>
On the contrary I greatly enjoy my snoozing time. When I wake up in the morning i'm at my most comfortable, and drifting off to sleep is nice. Plus I get that weird dream continuation thing going :)
These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.

I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation. Expect me not to show cause why I seek or why I exclude company.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson (1841)
Depending on industry and country, unions are by-and-large very strong here in the EU, especially in Germany, and I wouldn't be surprised if they would very quickly put their foot down once such a practice becomes known.
Guerilla activists hack Bank of America ATMs all over San Francisco
You have my sympathy. Was in a similar situation and tried lots of things... hiding myself in a conference room, headphones, being artificially mean, blocking out parts of my calendar as alone time, telling people I preferred to be left alone for the next few hours - unfortunately none of it worked because when people want something from you their impulse is to turn around and ask you when the barrier is so low. I'll admit that it wasn't a one way street, I probably unknowingly did it to people when they were in the zone.

The only thing that really solves it is if you can convince your employer to let you work remotely even a day or 2 - thats when I actually got to do real work. Just my 2 cents.
Reddit participating in Jan. 18th all-out strike on the internet.
Similarly I feel like if it is hard to find out they might be too high in price or slimey to deal with.
My current company, a startup, has an even split of developers, half under 30 and half over 45. I'm one of the old guys. The development environment and approach, mostly set up by the young guys, is pretty modern -- lots of open source tools, hosting on launchpad, test-driven development, code reviews, all developers in one big open space, everyone does everything (as opposed to developers doing development, testers writing tests, build engineers creating build infrastructure).

The young guys seem to thrive in this setup. It's driving me nuts.

I am most productive when I have a problem to solve and I can immerse myself in it for hours every day, days at a time, without interruption. But now I have to do timely code reviews for others. I also have to respond to reviews of my code. The encouraged way of working is to commit small, reviewable pieces, but then each commit involves several interruptions, and it's difficult to go on to part 2 while addressing everyone's concerns about part 1. The infrastructure is problematic, because no one actually owns it, so there are more interruptions to deal with problems there.

Everyone has an IRC window open, and while there isn't too much social chatter, there is a distraction every time that a message arrives. (I hate IRC. I was forced to it in my last job, when people would IRC my officemate to get hold of me.)

I recognize the benefits of some of these practices. Code reviews do catch problems. (On the other hand, a code review often acts as a substitute for a design review, so we actually end up reviewing and maintaining bad designs.) More people know more of the code, and we avoid problems created by a guy going into a cave for weeks at a time.

But there is no denying that this style of working really makes it difficult to concentrate, at least for me.
تويتر تنتقد جوجل لتغييراتها على محرك البحث
Interestingly, six Republican co-sponsors have asked Harry Reid to postpone the vote.

http://www.opencongress.org/articles/view/2461-Six-GOP-Co-Sp...
> As a person who usually doesn't finish the full course of antibiotics if they're feeling healthy: Why does it matter?

You can feel healthy before all of the bugs are dead. The ones that remain are more resistant than the ones that died. By lettimg them survive, the baseline next time is "somewhat resistant".

Each time, this happens, the survivors are more resistant.

You're basically breeding resistant bugs. Either kill them all or leave them alone.
Your other option is to become a consultant, if you can stand it. This is meant both seriously and as a joke.
> I have confidence that Google employees were not involved with the fraud aspects of what occurred here

How come, when Google India was obviously involved, looking at the post that you link as well?
Hopper: Stop emailing yourself notes, files, and images
It's almost perfect, I just wish it were uglier.
The book "Peopleware" has documented this very concept decades ago (according to wikipedia, first edition was published in 1987), yet here we are in 2012 with still more "cool open" environments for programming teams.

Here's a link to the top positive review in amazon, giving an insight as to its content http://www.amazon.com/review/R1R3N8JI29OPPE/ref=cm_cr_pr_vie...

Lots of startups want to recreate the cafe experience as a workspace, but I'd rather work in a real cafe, with more people and more noise than an open space office. In a cafe, you still have somewhat of an expectation of privacy, there's less the prospect of someone interrupting you just because you're within reach.
There have been lots of explanations for honeybee deaths.

Here's another recent one - http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/parasite-turns-honey-be... .
C# allows it but but Java doesn't have this. Hence why it's standard operating procedure to just use setters from the beginning, because it might be nontrivial to update all references.
Bill Gates is required by law to give away 5% of equity in his foundation every year otherwise he would lose charitable tax-exempt status from IRS... so yes, he gave away billions but at the same he avoided to pay billions in taxes to government by funneling most of his wealth into his foundation.

So the whole comparison between him and the government is pointless since it's the government that made it possible for Bill Gates to even do charity at this scale by sacrificing its own tax revenue.
I'm a little late to the discussion, but I have to point out it's actually very easy (and free) to create your own "Wwwizer" on Heroku (this assuming that your DNS service cannot solve it).
It's just 8 lines of code.

Shameless plug, but if you want instructions: http://bionicspirit.com/blog/2012/01/10/domains-merged.html
Experiments in the Revival of Organisms (1940) [video]
The New Gmail Sucks
"Learning is good only if it either enables you do to something useful or you enjoy it."

I completely agree. But something is not only 'useful' if you can use it in your career.
APCS is still Java at this point.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Placement_Computer_Sci...
It's like you're reading my mind!
I think Bill does try to make sure all his money is well spent though. His foundation doesn't throw money at a problem. They come up with a strategy first for a given problem and execute on that strategy.
> since you seem to have more facts than anyone

I don't. I just repeated what Nelson Mattos wrote on his blog.

"a team of people working on a Google project improperly used Mocality’s data and misrepresented our relationship with Mocality to encourage customers to create new websites."
Except there are cases where it will be way more pain later and no perceptible loss ahead of time. Imagine you are debugging something and you want to know where your public variable is getting set to 3. If you are using java and public members you will have to check every single call site, whereas if you have a setter you can just add a single if(x==3){} and put a breakpoint in there and you have done in 30 seconds what would have taken 30+ minutes.
Correct: no conspiracy required, just bias.
Criegee intermediates found to have big impact on troposphere
Yes, that's how capitalism works after all.
They are not patent trolls. See: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Patent_troll
I think he has/will have far overshadowed his MSFT impact by the time he passes so whether this would happen or not is irrelevant, IMO.
I couldn't make it past the first page of the article because I felt it was veering too much into the territory of "I have an axe to grind, and I'm looking for anecdotes to support it." My two sentence take:

1. In my experience, private space and time is necessary for individuals to get real work done.

2. In my experience, small, focused teams which have as-needed discussions and well-partitioned responsibilities are massively more productive than individuals when it comes to solving large problems.
Thanks Matt. I removed that block while I investigate, and will report back when I know more. It's obviously not our intention to leak any search results through us.

Edit: still reviewing to make sure, but it appears that it isn't sending the search term via us. In fact, that's why it is going through our server, to specifically strip out the referrer. This appears to be an optional setting in the Microsoft ad center that sends the keyword bid for that ad.

Edit2: that does appear to be it. If I take all your examples and append ssn to the query, ssn doesn't appear in the resulting URL. I'm guessing they just have broad match on for those terms. You probably know as well as anyone that the coverage in the query space for ad terms is pretty wide, so if you search for something near the head you're bound to hit something exactly. I also tried a bunch of other queries, and since this setting is optional a lot of times the advertiser didn't set it and so their bid term is not send back; this is the case for example if I search for google and up at https://www.google.com/chrome?hl=en&brand=CHFX&utm_c...
The guy was cheap enough even to pay dmv plates
All of your objects are immutable? Besides that's hardly an argument for having public members, being able to remove the setter or getter (or conditionally throw exceptions in them) is one of the exact reasons why you write them.

The intent of the comment you are replying to "best practice is if you would add a public member, instead add a private member and a setter & getter" which is generally correct.
If Bill wants to give away billions to good causes and as a side effect he gets charitable tax-exempt status then I'm more than happy with that. His money is being far better spent than his tax dollars.
He is not a pop icon, so... no.
As a self-taught programmer I started out with completely the opposite level of confidence, and considered myself a really lousy programmer.

I always assumed there were all these "real", "professional" programmers out there that really knew what they're doing, pick crystal clear abstractions, had profound knowledge of security implications, database optimization, data structure usage, good use of object orientation, introduced no memory leaks, knew just what algorithm to pick and wrote great, clear and understandable code.

I still kinda think I suck, but at least now I know that I'm not alone :)
CNET, supporter of SOPA, is trying to manipulate public opinion. It was not pulled and there's no victory.
> The way current C# does accessors / properties is just about perfect

As far as I'm concerned it's quite far from it, because C# still allows public fields, properties and fields are incompatible, properties and methods are separate and Microsoft specifies different naming conventions for fields on one hand and properties & methods on the other.

Perfection is Smalltalk's way of doing it.

And in a syntactic line closer to ALGOL, Ruby is about as good as it gets: no public fields, "properties" are normal methods (setters have a little bit of syntactic sugar, but not much) and auto-generating a bunch of getters, setters or both is a class-level method call.
I'm not one to rain on anyone's parade, and great artists steal, etc etc, but isn't this a complete ripoff of Pinterest?
You should have read the whole article. The author does cite numerous third-party sources of evidence.
To be honest, most of those kids are the types who will start coding/hacking on their own, not sure if a special school is needed for this

I might be a special case but for what it's worth: I didn't start programming until I was a freshman at Stuyvesant High School. I took the intro course on a whim and was hooked. If the computer science program didn't exist, I might not have gotten into it. I was more into art than math/cs back then. I didn't have much of an environment to discover that I loved programming before that, and I bet many other kids don't either.
Yes, this is what I meant. Sorry if my original post came off too strongly. I didn't mean "haha you screwed up." We've all screwed up. It was more a commentary on how no other devs, unit tests, or human testers caught this before it went live.
Don't sweat the small stuff - use flask blueprints
> The mere act of adding a getter violates immutability.

Uh what? No it does not. Writing stupid getters (or classes) might, but writing getters does not "violate immutability".

Naturally, getters are not of much use if all your fields are final and hold immutable objects, but the latter can be tricky in many OO languages.

Getters significantly improve the situation there, by providing a point at which you can clone your internal state and return a copy, letting you keep your object immutable even if you have mutable fields (of course this assumes you can deeply copy all your mutable member objects)
Seems like every generation needs to learn the hard way.
I don't think I made that assumption in that post at all.

My point was more that a formal CS education is likely to give you a different perspective on programming vs being self taught.

I would imagine most self taught programmers focus on results oriented learning, when I first learned to program before doing any formal CS my approach was "I want to do X , what is the minimum set of stuff I need to learn in order to do that good enough", after learning more formal CS and being forced to consider things like abstraction and efficiency for their own sake I would always focus more on them in every program I write.

Not suggesting that you can't be completely self taught and learn everything you could from an academic education (you can) but you are less likely to spend a month learning a bunch of design patterns and algorithms unless they directly apply to something you need to do right now.

You are more likely to just start hacking away at something then think "oh, this code is a mess how can I fix that?" rather than reading the entire gang of 4 book to start off with.
ssssshhhhhhh

(contrived example for making a point... visiting a draw() method with a solid renderer interface is the answer we usually use)
Rep. Smith Waters Down SOPA, DNS-Redirects Out
GetClicky data inaccurate if somebody using chrome has you as a "top site"
Similar experience here. Previously I logged into my Paypal from overseas and was subsequently blocked. No message as to what happened or why I could not log in. I worked out that it was probably because of the sudden change of location. Tried for weeks on and off to reactivate the account, but was forced to coordinate for family members to send me additional personal documents since Paypal required more documentation than one needs to travel around the world. Calls to customer service were answered in condescending voice, and worded in a way to make it sound like "my problem", and nothing helpful came from the calls except the same information found on the website.
Are you making the argument that it would be impossible for him to do any charity if he was taxed or that he wouldn't do the same thing if he had to pay taxes?
Apple rejects Taposé because it’s too advanced(?)
Wow... it's been ages since I thought of UMTYMP. I went through two years of UMTYMP, and it was the most amazing program. In those two years we covered four years of high school math. It taught me math quick, and also how to work hard.

A side benefit is that because I was taking math at the University of Minnesota outside school hours, I had a free period at school when I would normally take math. (Along with two friends.) We had free reign over our Macintosh computer lab for nearly an hour a day for two years and it was AWESOME. I programmed some pretty wicked stuff in Hypercard, messed around with ripping audio from TV shows onto the computer, fked around on the school's network, and loved it all. (I'm dating myself a bit; this was around 1990-1992 or so.)

Programs like this are amazingly awesome, and they should spread far more than they do.
I agree it's better than what we had before, but...

1. Basically now we're stuck with +five lines to specify one thing. When can we switch to just one line, and drop the prefix versions? I doubt any time soon. We're only now dropping support for IE6.

2. how useful is it to be able to build stuff that only works in some browsers? I get that it helps push stuff forward, but you get myriad posts on HN that are like "look at this sweet thing I built (only works on chrome)" or something similar. Good for you, you built something cool, but you might as well have done it as a native app because I can't run it without downloading a different browser.

Interoperability is one of the basic premises of the web.
> > The abstraction is just barely enough to get the job done

> Or, in other words, the perfect amount...

... until your first hire
totally agree, haml is awesome. However there are a couple of cases where html/erb is more readable:

1) when working with a lot of knockout.js bindings, html attributes seem more natural when there are a lot of them
2) when working with a deeply nested DOM structure, usually such a mess is not needed, except for HTML e-mails
John Sculley: Steve Jobs Was Never Fired From Apple
Here it works like this (in my own layman terms): once you file for bankruptcy you'll have someone assigned to handle your company's business and this person's duty is to find out whether the company is just suffering from temporary cash flow problems and business could potentially continue or if it is all hopeless.

In the former case, an agreement with all creditors will be reached to write off x% so that the company can continue eventually - in the latter case, all money that can be squeezed out of the company will go to said creditors but of course they would still lose potentially most of their money but they can then write it off on taxes and it is considered a normal business risk. Also there are certain rankings and priorities for this distribution of what was left - social insurance and health care rank highest, they are also the ones that will HAVE you shut down first if you are late on payments, they will literally write to your customers(!!!) and tell them to send any payments to the insurances instead of to your company because you haven't paid your dues. This is also when your customers will freak out that you will go bankrupt and will very likely stop paying anything until they are being forced to in the bankruptcy process. So as a company just scraping by and hoping to make it SOMEHOW, at that moment you are frakked because you won't have a single euro coming in and anything that would come in will instantly go to social insurance and health care. No more cash flow and if you do not declare bankruptcy right then and there, you as the CEO can get into serious legal trouble.

Next in the ranking then come the other creditors with certain priorities and also employees but they are pretty much last so most of the time, they won't be getting all of their owed salaries out of the bankruptcy assets; and that's where the federal employment office and a government run fund will step up and pay you. Oh and you won't be losing your health care either, it will all be taken care of and until you find a new job you will receive unemployment money (let's say 80% or so of your former salary).

I had to go through the whole process after working a few years in a sweet startup and it really, really broke my heart to not be working with those guys anymore but it was also an extremely valuable lesson in "politics", learning to read management-speak in a situation like that and knowing which possibilities you as an employee have. And I was also very thankful for all the social security available to me as a citizen - I pay my taxes a lot happier now.
Nick says he wasn't aware of a couple of tags. I think it's fair to assume there were tests, and plenty of them but a use case was overlooked. Which I think is perfectly reasonable. Automated tests don't catch what you don't know.

This doesn't say anything about 37s and how they work. I guess the only thing that matters is how much time it took for a fix to be deployed.