skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What happened with the whole "volume button as a shutter button" rejection issue? Especially now that Apple does it in the stock Camera app. Is it allowed on the App Store?
PIPA's Own Sponsors Backing Off Bill; Ask Senate To Hold Off On Voting
This is interesting, when I studied CS at university I'd say there were 2 different types of people that got high marks.

There were people who were self taught , either before they started CS or once they learned some programming at university they identified other areas outside the course that interested them and they could apply their new programming skills.

These people typically got jobs in the software industry after graduation and become software developers.

The other group of people were people who were just generally high achievers and learned enough programming to pass the course with good marks but nothing much else. They got equally high marks because they were good at passing exams.

Most of them either retrained for a career in finance , went into academia or got management gigs at tech consultancy companies.

I can't think of anybody I know who is a working programmer who is not self taught to at least some degree.
Yea I have to second you on that as I was completely fooled for a second...how is this different from Pinterest?
So how long until we can drop the prefix versions. If the answer is > 2 years I say --prefix tags are bullshit.
Here's another word for you:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity
And what about Monsanto GE/GMO crops pushed and financed by the B&M Gates foundation? http://www.activistpost.com/2012/01/monsantos-gmo-corn-appro... (I took the first link in DDG, may be unfortunate, I knew from the very good http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_According_to_Monsanto )
I wonder if this could be a way for companies to figure out (surreptitiously) how managers are doing

You can get a gut feeling by examining the coffee mess.

If you find that people are leaving less than one cup or less in the bottom of the pot, and it's not yet lunch, that's a sign you've got morale problems.

Happy people make more coffee for their peers. Unhappy people take a cup for themselves and let someone else do it.
Yes, please.

I'm sure we can all make do without HN for one day, and it would definitely help the protests.

And to everyone who says that if you are not from the US, thers nothing you can do: actually thats not completely right. If the media in your country picks this up it will vastly amplify the message. (Think: "worldwide outcry becaues of SOPA")

(btw, I'm not from the US either)
Yes, you've managed to figure out why tax exempt status exists.
"I feel we should remove DNS-blocking from the Stop
Online Piracy Act so that the [U.S. House Judiciary]
Committee can further examine the issues surrounding
this provision.

"We will continue to look for ways," Smith continued,
"to ensure that foreign Web sites cannot sell and
distribute illegal content to U.S. consumers."

While I don't doubt they may to try to introduce something similar in another bill, it looks like they are pulling it out. What have you seen/heard that says differently?
I generally dislike Jobs and much of his attitude, but this is an unfair statement. Just because he didn't make any donations public it does not mean he didn't make any, we have no idea what, if anything, he donated.
Very cool! Based on the site, it looks like the public release is slated for the end of January. I'll definitely be trying it out.
Show HN: A program to open cmd.exe in the Explorer's current path
Why should someone have to give away their money if they are rich? Sure, it is a good thing to do, but they may have worked hard so that their family will be ok when they have died. People should be able to choose what they want to do with their money without self-righteous people judging them for their decision.

How much money have you given to charity?
Will you be leaving all of your money to charity when you die or will you leave it to your family?
I really need this for my phone. Having it as a Share option would be great.
Time to start vaccinating animals?
Adobe Quietly Eliminates Creative Suite Subscriptions
"Lifetime charitable contribution as of 2007" perhaps. Why taint a good deed with headline abuse.
I honestly don't see what about this post is Hacker News worthy. Is it just the fact that the post was written by the Minecraft developer? Or it it the (somewhat questionable) display of humility?

It's sort of like posting a long list of your accomplishments and then saying "but I don't consider myself special, and I have much more to learn". If the sentiment was true, you probably wouldn't say it, and almost certainly wouldn't say it this particular way.
Huboard: A kanban board built on top of GitHub Issues
This is quite similar to the BSON ObjectId specification used by MongoDB:

http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Object+IDs#ObjectIDs-BSO...
I find it very hard to believe that anyone significant knew about this at Google. Do you really think that they are in such dire straits that they have to scam Africans for profit?
killer feature for me:

screen capture to clipboard, paste to hopper, and its already uploaded and shareable. i need this like 4 times a week. i would push to buy it at work if it was priced right and based on our existing google apps, so safe for proprietary data.
Following the same reasoning we shouldn't laud Google for all the great stuff they did either, like GMail, Search, etc.

Sorry it's one or the other.

I know I like to say, we're IT and if anything goes wrong it's not our fault, but if anything goes extremely well, we'll take the credit--but then I know I'm being facetious :)
govtrack.us and it's sister site popvox.com. On govtrack I have trackers set up for my senators and the representative from my district, some general trackers, and some trackers for specific bills. I get a daily update (but weekly is an option) of activity related to my trackers. Popvox lets you approve/disapprove of bills.

Govtrack SOPA page:
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h112-3261

Popvox SOPA page
https://www.popvox.com/bills/us/112/hr3261
shrug pay taxes and have your money spent in ways you disagree with, or, run a foundation and spend your money instead on goals that you do agree with. Sounds like a tough decision...
I like to choose days in which I plan to be distracted, and days in which I plan to concentrate. During the former type of day I fix bugs, talk to people, do odd chores. During the latter type I stay home and turn off the router, and try to get some detailed design accomplished.
Bill Gates, Blackwater, and Monsanto. Conspiracy Theater
A mobile version is coming soon. I'm just as eager as you are to use it on my phone.
Play! framework allows you to use getters and setters with public members as you would in C#.

Not sure how this is implemented.
Patent abusers then. Is there a reasonable argument that Apple is not abusing the patent system to try to stifle their competition?
it doesn't seem to work for me in Safari 5.1.2. Does it require Flash? I very intentionally do not have Flash installed.
It went on for months, even if they outsourced a team that just happened to interpret its orders "creatively", having such a scam operate under your watch, while you're paying them, is--to put it mildy--quite the oversight.
What is wrong with different naming conventions for fields vs. properties, and methods? It makes it immediately obvious what is what at a glance.

*Honest question - I first learned programming with C#, and so those conventions seem 'correct' to me.
the article is about how philanthropic bill gates has been (along with others), i think the US aid was just a tactic used to help put the amount in reference to something more easily understood than just a number. it seems poor taste to criticize his personal or professional history in light of the positive changes he's trying to affect. i think most people on HN are familiar with his competitive personality and the business practices of microsoft, and those have been discussed at length, but that isn't what this article is about.
I felt he was confusing my two points, and it got frustrating. Collaboration does not imply literally working with those people in the room all the time.
It's never been the DNS part I've had a problem with. It's the process by which things are deemed illegal and the appeal process.

Love it or hate it, the DMCA has clearly defined rules that protect both the host and the copyright holder. SOPA dictates removal of entire sites -- not just content -- first and foremost, with an appeals process after the fact. Literally shooting first and asking questions later.

Frankly, after that, the DNS process by which they sought to remove content was a trivial concern. It's the process itself that has problems, not how they planned to do it.
Four Seasons Spent $18 million on a Website redesign
Oops, meant to say "adding a setter violates immutability"
What is bad about trying to provide "drought-tolerant" seeds to Africa? It's not like GE seeds are gonna ruin Africa, they might very well help fight the hunger problem. I don't understand the general negativity against GE food - if it's tested well, I don't see any reason against it.
I don't understand why this was downvoted. This is an excellent question.
He also has a PowerShell version (in the downloads section on github) which is really nice, I think.
Except it went on for months, even if they outsourced a team that just happened to interpret its orders "creatively", having such a scam operate under your watch, while you're paying them, is--to put it mildy--quite the oversight.
What am I missing? Author claims that if you know that you have as an input the permuted numbers 1..n you can "sort" them? Why would you have to "sort" them, why not just create the order?

def quasiSort( a ):
return range( 1, len( a ) + 1 )

a = quasiSort( [ 3, 1, 2 ] )
print a
That, and make sure it doesn't happen again. I'd be a little worried about how Google manages the business side of things; they have a good brand and the potential to make a lot of money, so of course someone will find it advantageous to take shortcuts turning one into the other. The philosophy and reliance on automation, which can be designed to dismiss complaints and block normal feedback, can be used to have some teams shield themselves from accountability. At a higher level, there's the possibility of selective blindness and negligence hiding some level of malice and irresponsibility.

Mnemotechnic for a proper apology: regret, responsibility, and reform.
Including Rockefeller and Carnegie in that graphic is poor choice if you ask me. True they gave a lot of their money away... but mostly to their own causes.When it came to their own workers they were more willing to give money to thugs who killed them than giving them equitable wages and working conditions.

And while I find it impressive what Warren Buffet has accomplished, I don't find it very productive for humanity. I'm not anti-capitalist, but the pure money makers who gather wealth without providing a service/product are not heroes in my book.
SOPA Opera: Which Legislators Support SOPA and PIPA?
That would explain a lot, indeed.
It's worth noting that there will be an announcement when do you so, which I presume is audible to both parties on the call.
I don't believe there should ever be a law forcing this, but I would certainly judge anyone who gets that rich and didn't give anything away (if I knew they didn't, instead of just guessing).

I'm not against inheritance, I stand to do pretty well from it myself in the (hopefully not too-near) future, but there's different levels. In general I think anyone who can afford to ought to give to charity as often as possible (and again, I'm not talking selflessness, I can't preach living a budget life in order to give more to charity given that I chose to prioritise living well over giving to charity), but for the super rich, does giving your children $10b really help them more than giving them $5b?

Obviously the question is where's the line, do you leave your loved ones just enough to, say, buy a small house, do you leave them enough to never have to work again, do you leave them enough to never have to work again and be able to live like a millionaire, or... I don't know where the line would be for me, if I became super-rich (which I don't plan on or expect), and I don't know where I think the line should be for people like Jobs/Buffet/etc. All I know is that if they give it all away I feel sorry for their loved ones, and if they give none away I will consider them selfish.

edit: I'm aware that the above views might come across as confusing, I think I didn't word it particularly well but I can't think of a better way to put it. Hopefully it's understandable, if anyone suggests it isn't then I'll give it another shot.
The problem with Monsanto is patents. If they didn't try to sue farmers that don't buy their GE seeds out of existence on unavoidable patent infringement claims (due to seed blowing into fields contaminating their non-GE crops), then fine, let them create whatever they want.
Whether this will work depends on who writes each of these sections.

For example if you ask the sponsors of the bill "who will hate the bill" they will always say "terrorists", so the field will not actually tell you anything and will quickly become useless.
Does anything in your privacy policy prevent you from looking through user pastes? It appears to me the answer is no, but IANAL.
I should have been more clear--I was referring to Java, which seems to be what the OP was talking about.
I would say around 8 because of NLP usage and complex algorithms. Checkout http://diglig.com
Make a USB Boot CD for Ubuntu 11.10
Nice advertisement for libertarianism.

In other news, Bill Gates has created more wealth and productivity for people worldwide than any individual (or government) in the history of the world. This equates to better medicine, more fun vacations, better food, more time with family, longer lives, etc.

In spite of being attacked by government (antitrust lawsuits) Gates continues to try to tackle the world's toughest problems.
When I was at uni java was the language of choice for intro to programming, basic data structures and algorithms. We used C for operating systems, C++ for OO programming, oracle pl/SQL for databases. I wrote my thesis on formal methods, they were very much the flavors of the day. I did touch on web programming but we were using j2ee and I almost flunked that course. Overall I achieved above average college student experience (which wasn't very much) in all those things above and then I became an excel jockey at Accenture for my first job and never coded after that
I'm still going to argue the point, there are no distributions in the sense of Linux. There's just "FreeBSD".

"BSD: Berkeley Software Distribution"

You're being pedantic here, again, I meant it in the context of linux distributions (that's what most people coming to FreeBSD are familiar with when they say things like, "I don't like the installer, I'll try another distribution!").

"PC-BSD: based on FreeBSD"

Right, this is the only thing I would say comes close to the general "idea" of linux style distributions - but I still think it is inaccurate to say that there are "distributions" of FreeBSD. PC-BSD even has its own kernel modifications in order to make it more desktop friendly - I would classify this as its own "BSD" IMHO (much as DragonFly was "based" on FreeBSD until they decided to completely fork it) even though it still relies heavily on the FreeBSD project.
Yep, I think I misread his comment, which was probably a misread of my original post, which I'll admit wasn't stated very clearly.
There is definitely a star power associated with someone like Notch which automatically gets more views. Same goes for a lot of the people you see get submitted here and voted up.

Is that the only reason? Probably not, but when someone famous says something it will get a lot more attention than if a nobody says it. Cet par.
For that I prefer the ActionScript3.0 solution: methods that imitate attributes.

You replace

public var myAttribute:int;

with

public function get myAttribute():int;

The caller uses both with the same "object.myAttribute", so you can just replace one with the other when the need arrives, without changing any other code.

This allows you to use all sort of syntactic sugar ("object.myAttribute++", "+=" and other assignments), and for dynamic languages you can get and set values just from a reference to the object and the attribute's name. This last part is invaluable for animation engines.
Kendo UI - javascript library for handling data
> Based on what I've read from decompiled Minecraft, I'd guess Notch is self-taught. The abstraction is just barely enough to get the job done

How can you tell from decompiled optimized code? Not saying you can't, just interested. Haven't read much decompiled.
Are there any really good Python or Ruby projects on github that have consistently atomic commits and a TDD style of coding? I would be cool to narrate a project like it was a sports event.
Stripe is US only.
Genetically engineered seed is sterile and patented. So the first hit is free, but you as a farmer is stuck buying seed for eternity. Handing out GMO seed is like giving Gilette razors to poor people.

You know what would help African farmers? Education about irrigation and scientific, low-moisture farming techniques. Provide non-hybrid seed and equipment than be used by locals to clean and store it.
The documentary Food, Inc. (among others) has a segment about Monsanto's "business" practice, in particular seed saving for following year's planting. So the problem is not necessarily GM food but how they twist farmers arms through litigation. If software patents are bad, imagine patents over the constituents of life!
If you use a Mac http://getcloudapp.com/ does something similar, Clipboard capture of screenshots and adds the link to clipboard once the upload is done.
Stop back in 5 days and find out, or send PG an e-mail.
The US does a lot that I don't think is represented in that number. For instance, the military aid that we render to foreign nations in time of natural catastrophes is second to none, particularly in terms of expediency, logistics and supplies. Haiti is the first thing that comes to mind, but there's tons more examples like Fukushima, South-East Asia in 2004, Pakistan in 2005, Myanmar in 2008, etc.
The title here is misleading. According to the graphic, Bill and Melinda Gates' net worth, $59 billion, is $2 billion more than the US budget for foreign aid. They have given away $28 billion, 48% of their net worth.
huh? shift rightclick -> open command window
Your very own Grima Wormtongue
Funny anecdote: the original PCR experiments were done with water baths at various temperatures. They manually moved the DNA samples from the boiling water (denaturation), to hot water (55-ish degrees, annealing) to hotter water (elongation, 70ish) and then back to the boiling water for another round of amplification.
Why Startups Shouldn’t Hire PR Firms
Is it? At the most some team inside went rampant and will probably be fired. Aren't there bound to be some black sheep in any organization with 1000s of members?

The notion that Google needs to scam some African directory service for profit just seems ridiculous.
I have DropBox, EverNote, and Springpad, on the multiple devices I use: work/home PC/laptop and smartphone.

The above tools serve to keep notes and files. Nevertheless I continue to use e-mail as an archiving tool because:
- it pops up unread in my inbox for later processing. If I want to use it on a specific device, I can just leave it unread until I have access to the right device.
- more importantly, email is ubiquitous, and I can have somebody else email me a file.

I still need convincing on what problem Hopper solves for me that the other tools don't.
That said, trivially easy drag-and-drop file storing is cool, and I for one welcome our so-simple-my-grandma-can-use-it usability overlords.
IOS 5 Jailbreak – Top Apps and Tweaks for Your iDevice
I understand what you're saying. I would like it if everyone who died rich donated money to charity. But I also think that if someone has worked hard to earn that money they have the right to do with it as they wish, without judgement.

If I got rich I think I would donate most of it to charity. I would only leave enough with family to take care of my children. I don't think children should be brought up wealthy/spoilt/privileged.
You do realize Bill Gates isn't even at Microsoft anymore, right? This isn't about the company, but what he's done independently, after the fact. He could have simply sat on that money, or left it to all to his family. Instead, he chose to make a difference in the world at large, a noble cause in my book.
So if the top 400 wealthiest individuals in the US gave half their net worth to charity, they'd merely double the annual charitable giving of the rest of the United States? [1]

In other words, in four years, the United States in total will have donated more than the entire net worth of those 400 people -- net worths that typically took lifetimes and generations to amass.

If you ask me, that single factoid casts the Giving Pledge in an entirely new light. Yes, Gates and company have done some fantastic things with their charity [2]. But the rest of the country is doing far more than they're getting credit for. Year after year. And as they aren't spending down their net fortunes, it's entirely sustainable.

That's something we don't hear nearly enough.

[1] Give or take some, as I'm sure those 400 people themselves likely contribute to that total.
actually, I generally procrastinate until early October and than something hits me.
I was a product manager for a CMS so i was already familiar with http, js but I rely only designer cofounder to actually produce all of it, I just stick the template variables, control flow and looping where necessary.

As for web programming practices i picked up the stuff on cookies, stateless servers, sessions by reading up on django middleware along the way as i started coding the app and had to add things like user registration.
How To Get Ahead Of The Competition in Local Search
There are many parts of this article that boil my blood. The biggest of which is the use of "Groupthink" to describe a practice of creativity. Groupthink has a very specific meaning in many peoples minds which does not apply in this situation. Dilution of the word Groupthink as well as the mischaracterization of a practice the author happens to dislike are both egregious.

Creativity is often spoken of as an end. I do not believe that is true. Sitting in complete isolation being creative does good to no one. Instead, it is a goal to share and execute on your creativity and vision that you have thought of in your own mind.

Programming is interesting because it is a marriage of creativity and skill--it is not art nor engineering but is a craft. You forge creativity with skill (and experience) into lines of code.

However, that does not scale. If we have 50 programmers working in complete isolation then we will have 50 different programs. Collaboration becomes key to scaling the craft.

The only way to scale craft is through constant, effective communication. The tools we use every day as software developers serve to enhance, enforce or provide communication. Even in completely remote projects like Linux, there are tools used to ensure communication: code is submitted to a committer in small, readable patches; style guides focus on the readability of code rather than their cleverness or creativity; changes are discussed and debated on mailing lists and IRC; subcomponent Czars are assigned that share the overall vision of the project.

The so-called "Groupthink" isn't about Creativity--it is about effective real change in the real world by actually applying the creativity that we have instead of allowing it to evaporate.
> Does anybody know if Notch is self taught? I thought he had a CS Degree from somewhere?

I have a CS degree, and I'm 99% self-taught.