skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem with making something like computing (or any non-standard) A level a requirement is that it immediately limits people who couldn't study it. Not all schools offer computing (or other less popular A levels), and by making it a requirement you're penalising those who had to attend them. In practice, that means rural and less-well-funded schools.

There obviously has to be some prerequisites. Perhaps the solution would be a summer school for students without A Level computing. Most universities offer a foundation year for people who want to study engineering or maths related subjects but don't have the A levels required. However, given that you only need to cover under 1 semester of work, you'd be pushed to convince people that because they didn't study a computing A level they have to add an entire year to their degree.

Probably the best option would just be to make it a strongly required subject, and cover the basics in less time. If you don't have computing A level, you need to work harder.
Awesome. Please pass on any comments/feedback. We'd love to hear from her.
I live in a world where, due to the continuous advancement of technological efficiency and the resulting elimintation of jobs, it's becoming increasingly ridiculous to expect people to work for a living. Society no longer needs contributions from everyone.

When you get to the point where what you do on a day-to-day basis is no longer directly tied to your livelihood, what will you do? As the number of ways in which an individual can make money rapidly dwindles, what will humanity do?
How did molecular machines evolve?
Wt (I haven't used it): http://www.webtoolkit.eu/
Probably under an article talking about some specific benefit of social networking. Hopefully no one will be enraged by your only analyzing the truth of that benefit there, rather than recounting everything terrible about social networking that went unmentioned.

When you respond to a Santorum argument about the terrible things about gay marriage with a list of good things about gay marriage, you have accepted his arguments as true, and started a new discussion.
"People lost their homes." makes me think he's talking about he housing market collapse, which was partly caused by unscrupulous banks lending to people they shouldn't have. The topic was banks digging up info on Facebook about borrowers... it's not a parallel but it certainly could be discussed in the same breath.

I agree it's a bit obtuse.
Bingo - if something's being sold, it's because it's scarce:

http://journal.dedasys.com/2007/02/03/in-thrall-to-scarcity

If what you sell is not scarce... watch out.
Hakin9 Magazine New Mobile Security Issue: You're are Infected
"Pro quality" TV series? You mean like "CSI: Miami"? Or "Gilligan's Island"? Or do you mean movies like "The Smurfs" or the US version of "The Vanishing" or "Leave it To Beaver"?

Yes, I'd gladly do without all that TV and all the movies, and most or all of the books. Oh, and the popular music. Especially the music by Selena Gomez and Demi Lovato and Ashlee Simpson.
Show HN: New Site Design for Ripe Apps (Lot's of jQuery goodies)
The point is that data is there at all. You won't find that in many sciences. What it looks like is profoundly unimportant.
Hehe, suddenly I imagine legislators writing laws called SOPAFactoryHelperMultiplexerWhalesemenAbstractBaseclassTemplateDongleSingleton. shudder
This guy sounds very eccentric, and clearly has a love for documenting his study of languages, but I'm not convinced he's a polyglot, at least by my definition of the word. Picking up bits and pieces of dozens of obscure languages is an interesting hobby, but as a translator and multilingual myself, I find someone who speaks, reads, writes, and understands 3 languages with native-level fluency much more interesting. However, the book in question bears investigation.
Pro tip I learned from the world of ultra-cycling (riding a bikes for days at a time):

- Drink coffee as you prepare to nap

- Take 20 minute power nap as caffeine gets in your system

- Win
Would be interested in where you read that if you find it again - below is a link to an article that says the optimal team size is 5 to 8 based on a Dunbar analysis.

3 in unstable as too often 1 person feels left out, 4 is an even number so risk of split vote.

http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2004/03/the_dunbar_numb.html
Mark Twain's excellent 19th century guidelines for writing on the web
Firstly, I'm loving http://caption-of-the-day.com/ - but it appears to be broken. "Click to View" only activates the top post (in Firefox 9 at least). Will be adding you to my list of sites to visit regularly though...

Secondly, whilst watermarking works for funny pictures, or people who solely sell artwork, it isn't something I would class as a solution. For people who mainly want to share their work, but simply don't want it ripped off, it's ruining the original artwork. Watermarks are ugly.

Also, the OP says he's not concerned with distribution...
When privacy advocates are as honest as Moglen, they recognize that the biggest problem facing them is not governments or Facebook but those damn, stupid people who keep letting their privacy be invaded. Sure, people will say they want privacy, when you ask them using that loaded word, but time and again when faced with the choice between revealing information and getting some small thing of value, they reveal the information. But underneath the Moglen viewpoint is a huge disconnect: If privacy is about individuals exercising power over one's own information, and the vast majority of people consistently decline to exercise that power, then what the hell are privacy advocates advocating for?
There's one point you're missing, and that's that you're only talking about people in America or other rich, large countries. The money is an incredible bar to, say, Hungary.
The great thing about MG Gruber is that you don't even need to read the posts to know whether it's going to be a Google-bashing. I love that sort of consistency with my morning coffee.
Come on... Camorra, 'Ndrangheta and Mafia are not the same thing. Neither every one that borrows money at too high interest comes from Mafia. There is not such thing as a huge, bank, single, Mafia organization in Italy.

And in this article there are not even comparison of this crime (extortionate lending) in Italy with other countries.
Python 3 has full featured closures. In Python 2 it is not possible to alter what a variable references. It's still possible to alter the contents of the object being referenced leading to the "put the value in a list" type of hackery to simulate full featured closures.
Payoff.com Raises $2M, ‘Gamifies’ Personal Finance Management
Private Investing Network CapLinked Raises $500K
Just-Eat moves to conquer French food delivery market, acquires Alloresto
Chill Out Guys, It’s Just A Toggle
In the article, they probably meant "organized crime" as a whole. To a foreigner, Camorra and 'Ndrangheta don't say much.
IPad has potential as programming teaching tool, if Apple would let it
Making big data work for you
assuming rational actors

With great respect, I find this approach flawed in analyzing the behaviour of large companies. Assuming rational actors, the thinking goes, every company is providing value and acting efficiently.

For starters, actors may be “rational,” but they suffer from information inefficiencies, so they are doing the best they can with what they know. Sometimes, they proceed “rationally” from flawed assumptions.

For example, they may believe that Waterfall is how to get a project done. Often this is not correct, so the “rational actors” produce waste.

Another problem is that rational actors in the small don’t necessarily produce rational behaviour in the large. Rationally, it is often in an actor’s best interests to do something that harms a team in exchange for providing a personal benefit.

This is how turf wars and silos competing with each other arise even with “rational” actors.

So in summary, I suggets it’s very dangerous to advance an argument that since the actor are rational, the results must somehow lack waste.

I would argue the opposite: That the larger the team, the more likely that rational actors will face situations where being rational means producing waste.
We need better infrastructure to bridge urban digital divide
I was shocked with Wordpress handling such a traffic without any noticable server load change on an average server.
I'd heard this as someone who fixed a design at the blueprints stage, charging £1,000 for what amounted to a few pencil marks. When asked for a break down the following was given: £0.10 for materials (the pencil), £999.90 for knowing where to make the marks and why.
I should add- Making my pics CC on flickr has resulted in a number of people using them and crediting me properly, from blogs to small magazines.

One is even in use by a state park on one of their signs, which is somehow particularly gratifying.

I really need to go take a pic of that sign.
Like a car, or a house?
You need to be very careful about things like this, you're making big assumptions that could have huge consequences.

What do you think the computer literacy rate is for children who don't have computers at home ? - it's easy to assume that computers are ubiquitous and everyone uses them all the time but it's far from true.

The children most likely to be computer illiterate are also the ones from the most financially and educationally disadvantaged backgrounds. If you cut them off from getting an IT education at school what do you think that does to their employment and social mobility prospects ?

You can't just design educational systems aimed at the "average" student, you need to cater to every student.
Programmers don't just suck at politics, they tend to be actively apolitical. Or have some kind of abstract view of an ideal system that has more in common with eg Star Trek than real life. Real politics is just too tied to the cool kids in high school and their dynamics for status stratification and meme transmission.

I'm the same way btw so I'm not being holier-than-y'all.
'Rogue' Attorney General Spreads MPAA-Fed SOPA Propaganda
There seems to be some controversy as to whether or not the D-Wave machines actually are quantum computers. I don't understand this fully myself (so please elaborate if you can!), but it seems incredible that this 84 qubit quantum computer would just pop out of nowhere when the state of the art seems to be just a few qubits.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-Wave_Systems#Criticism
Groupon Deal Script
Show HN: 3D Tunnel Effect for Demo
Fighting Internet piracy: CES takes on SOPA vs. OPEN debate
Mad Catz releases the MLG console controller: for $100 have it your way
I would suggest that the capittal cost vs marginal cost is the wrong argument. Yes, its correct but the marginal cost of a single photo is soooo low you will never make any money back (expect perhaps with massively popular photos and very good DRM systems)

ANd this approach does need a DRM and all the attendant (SOPA?) legal framework

The article does mention the solution

"You would not expect your writers to work for free"

No - but writers work for commission. If you went out without any commission and took the photo, then you dont get paid for the photo. If a beach front hotel wanted a nice shot for its website and paid you 200USD to go do it, then you got paidf - and any extra resell value you make is a bonus

So, if you are in an industry where your work can be reproduced at near zero margins, you get paid in commission of the initial creation - not the ongoing rights sales. Some ancillary benefits may acrue (credit)

As someone who gets paid to write code, and also writes code for free (OSS), this difference is clear - and to be fair it is clear also to Madonna (couple of years ago she gave up rights for music sales to more of the cash from tours.)
I packaged this stuff into a small shell script: https://gist.github.com/1594482
Yet even the author publishes regularly in closed-access journals such as Nature

http://scholar.google.com/citations?sortby=pubdate&hl=en...
If you only ever need to do system administration from one or two known locations that you can test in advance, this works.

But if you're travelling and need to connect now over a mobile data network or public wifi or any one of a myriad configurations that don't reliably support IPv6, then you might be disappointed.
What's Wrong with C++ Templates?
historically true but coding is a much different pursuit than it was a generation ago. the population of programmers is changing from the legacy of i.t. department hermits towards people coding the internet as a means of self expression. as the net becomes indistinguishable from society itself this inevitably leads to politics.
I don't agree.

Recently I started to work with node.js and after switching from Rails where you have a pre-configured ready-to-go project within seconds, with node you need to assemble the whole thing yourself.

For example there is no "standard" file layout, there is no "standard" way to initialize your ODM and there is no "standard" way to package your assets.

Am I supposed to just choose something for myself re-inventing the wheel again?

Thanks, but no thanks.

Instead I'm browsing other people applications on github and, yes, templates and boilerplates.
Ask HN: Review my startup, codekaraoke.com
We have just launched a new site called Code Karaoke. We came up with the idea because during meetings it was pretty common to write down code snippets on the whiteboard written as music. We certainly had fun with it and were hoping other people would as well.

The concept is simple. Using your language of choice you write a code snippet in such a way that it resembles a song. Here are a few examples

* Love You Madly - http://www.codekaraoke.com/songs/2/love-you-madly
* Vitamin VB - http://www.codekaraoke.com/songs/6/vitamin-vb
* Recurse the World - http://www.codekaraoke.com/songs/8/recurse-the-world

I hesitate to actually call this a startup since we don't have a way to monetize it. But it's here for fun anyway.

It was built on the .NET stack using

* ASP.NET MVC 3
* Spark View Engine
* NHibernate
* Autofac
* AutoMapper
* SQL Server
* and more...

Recently we also added as part of the site

* GitHub Gists AND
* CodeMirror for a code editor

I'd love to get some (constructive) feedback from the HN community!

Thanks.
Thanks!

I read his concerns about distribution a different way.

If you give your photo away for “credit” then the best possible scenario for you is someone will see your photo, contact you, and ask if they could borrow one of your photos… for credit. Try this… next time you’re at dinner, tell your waiter you’ll tell all your friends how good the service was if he gives you dinner for free.

It occurs to me that as much as I hate DRM, I'm actually making a "DRM-light" argument.

I think it's possible to have a file format in which the artist "signs" his work, perhaps along with whomever he sold it to -- a secure provenance chain. The payment provider would perform this service as part of the digital transfer.

That way you could distribute anything you want, however you want. The value would be in the distribution chain.

I'm a hobby photographer and professional programmer and author. Believe me, I know the pain this guy is experiencing. But the simple fact is bits are worthless. The photos of Ansel Adams aren't worth nearly as much anymore. But the provenance of a piece of work, being able to show that it came directly from the artist, perhaps with a personalized message on the back? That's priceless.

The economy just isn't based on physical goods as much as it used to be.

(BTW, "click to view" is supposed to slide out a section where I provide my own snarky comments. That way if I decide to use one of the images in a presentation some day I've already got a few jokes lined up. Works on FF 8.0 in Ubuntu for me, but I'll look into it.)
"Many hands make light work"
that's so true, once my article got 500 unique visitors by only being on the frontpage for 5 minutes :D 500 unique visitors in 5 minutes + new visitors keep coming because it was still there in rss feeds and there is a huge community following hackernews via rss feeds.
I'm not saying that Grove is not a good idea (It is actually!), I'm just a little afraid how the product targets a niche that are used to hack/configure things themselves. And, don't forget that developers enjoy hacking or setting up these kinds of server.

But yeah, I do agree with you that from a CEO point of view, it's not worth to waste time on this as there are already existing solutions.
In some ways that feels limiting. Hipchat can embed images, videos, and files. Are these things possible over IRC now?
Unfortunately, I would wager a guess that most of the money is in these large, rich countries. There is little incentive for Elsevier et al to lower prices when they can demand top dollar from American and European universities.
Slain Biotech Investor Leaves $1 Million to Support Entrepreneurship
Yes, that's true, but at the cost of syntactic noise. It's a preference, and one gets used to it I guess, but to me all the try blocks are harder to read than code where variables have a fixed lifetime, so where you in many cases can avoid the extra indent level.
Many folks would be happy to allow their photos to be used just for "exposure" or even for fun. Likewise many writers would happily allow their writing to be published for free. This is the case for both aspiring professionals and amateurs who never intend to make significant money with their hobby.

Unions often successfully pressure major players not to deal with these "scabs." There are some good arguements for maintaining a market for professional services by setting a minimum price through collective bargaining.

In a pure market economy, professionals must either demonstrate they are that much better than free or cheap amateur work. Clearly in this case the photographer is much more skilled than a typical amateur and produces stellar work. Unfortunately, in most cases, a publication can easily settle for an inferior free work without any impact on sales.

The marginal cost of a photograph these days is almost zero. Professionals are under a lot of pressure to demonstrate value. I think the good ones can, although many hobbyists produce professional quality work.

In my opinion, a respectable publication should set a minimum price for a work and pay, even of they do not have to. This improves their relationship with their suppliers and encourages better work down the line. Sadly, the economics of publishing may make such generosity infeasible.
s/lame joke/Seinfeld reference :)
I get that it's essentially the same thing, but there's part of me that likes to 'see the difference' that I'm making. If that makes sense. It's kind of like how I feel better building a Habitat for Humanity house than I do when I give money to them. Not because of trust or anything like that, it's simply a matter of seeing the outcome.

On the flipside, as a 'blogger' (if I can call myself that yet), I think it would be cool to get 'surprise deliveries' from my wishlist... basically remove me as an intermediary and just send me the stuff that I want. Especially if it's only a few dollars here and there, in which case I'll more than likely spend it at the corner store before having a chance to put it towards something I really want. But maybe that's just me.
"light", but not "good".
I'm sorry, but his photography is terrible. Cliche, boring and not even that well produced in the technical sense.
Sure. Why would I pay you to build a car or a house that already exists?
I haven't seen anyone on HN making the argument that artists shouldn't be paid, but I have seen several saying they don't think artists should control the pricing and distribution of their work. To me, that is the most fundamental part of copyright.

Gary Larson gets to say that his works don't appear online and the creators of Penny Arcade get to put all their work online and make money indirectly. The point is that they as creators get to choose.

We can go back and forth all day about if you copy a photograph without the photographer's permission you have stolen from them, but what you have done is violate his/her copyright.

In recent days, we've all been applauding Louis C.K. for the approach he took distributing his stand-up video. Some have been saying that all video content should follow that model. This ignores the fact that DRM-free online distribution was his choice, and every content creator should be free to choose what method works best for them.

I personally think the author should have included the cost in hours and education to get him to the skill level he has today. His cost of living vs. how many photographs of that quality he makes is also valid in how he prices his work. The point he was trying to make, though, is that this is not just a hobby for him and the idea that his work is not free is worth ranting about.
Actually, and this is very surprising, most multi-billion dollar biopharmaceutical companies do not have access to scientific literature.

I have several friends that work in big Pharma (Merck, Pfizer, etc). The common scientist working there has zero access to scientific literature. They routinely read abstracts from Pubmed and then guess about the methods/results based on the abstract.

Scary, but true. Management at big Pharma has effectively gutted R&D because it is too expensive.
Glad to see others power nap also, I thought I was just weird.

My routine is at about 1:30 slouch in my chair leaning back with my hands atop my head with fingers inter locked.

Whats strange is that I don't really goto sleep. I can hear everything going on around me but my mind is just totally blank and not focused on anything.

I stay like this for around 15-20 min then snap out of it fully refreshed!
Exactly, plus the article gets quoted and reposted on other portals, it gets retweeted and everything. Its just a crazy ride. Even this article is trending, I am wondering what the results will be this time :D
While I agree in part with your argument, using words like nonsense' and 'moron' somewhat let it down.

He didn't argue that that was the cost of viewing his photograph, he argued that his is what he would be looking for if you used it for commercial gain without permission.

Some photographs do sell for millions of dollars; many news photographs sell for thousands despite the photographer having no skill and having just been in the right place at the right time.

Do you actually now how much a magazine pays to use a single photograph?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2011/nov/12/w...
I wonder how much he paid for all the photos by other great photographers that inspired him over the years?
I love the community here for so many reasons :)
Bangalore, India.

Hachi Labs is looking for 2 solid coders. If you have the skills, confidence and heart to solve some complex database, search and algorithms related problems - do ping us!

More details about our requirement - http://jobs.hasgeek.com/view/e607q
You make it sound like open science is about opening up journals to the general public, while it's primarily about making your research more open to scrutiny by the academic community, making your data available so that data miners can work on them and even changing the whole "publish a paper" tradition to something more organized. I mean, most papers can be coded down to a few sentences of substance, with the rest being introductions and hypothetical rambling. You know, most journals (at least in the life sciences) don't even have a comment section (and even when they do, discussion is hampered by the fact that there are so many journals out there)
Espeically with the Jan Lokpal bill solving the problem of corruption, we need a crowd-sourced bottom-up solution to empower the common-man to report corruption locally.
Enterprise Apps are Not Written for Speed
If he doesn't want his photo to be seen then why does he put it online?