skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Allot of software that is good and useful to people might actually destroy jobs.

If you create a testing framework that is more robust and simpler than a previous one then it makes testers more efficient so a company needs less of them.

If it can be picked up easily and intuitively then it destroys the jobs of people who sell training on testing frameworks.

Your best hope is that your testing framework makes someone else more efficient at doing something innovative which does create jobs.
http://screencast.com/t/34PsdV0G If you don't like ads, simply turn them off.
Not to mention that while at work many of us are limited in our choice of browsers. Until recently I'd probably arrive at SO via Bing, since it's IE's default search provider and my employer actively blocked installation of Firefox & Chrome.

Now that they're not doing that anymore, I'll arrive by google most of the time.
> For example, what if customer does not upgrade the plan, but downgrades? How would proration work in that case?

Stripe deals with the prorata and credits the customers account next billing cycle.

> what if Stripe cannot charge credit card for a day or two

Stripe re-trys at time intervals you specify

> What if user managed to resubscribe again using different credit card

Stripe handles the connection because a subscription and card is attached to a customer object. Stripe will intelligently tie all this up and only charge the customer once even if two cards are entered.

> What if the card is permanently unchargable

After a specified number of failed charges stripe will send you a separate webhook at which point you know this is a completely failed card. Simply send the user an email and ask them to re-enter card details. If the card authenticates stripe will tie things together and correctly charge for the subscription.
Walks And Walking in Essex - The Forest Way
You bring up a good point. Real everyday people aren't Facebook's customers, they're actually Facebook's product.

But Facebook does impact the rest of society. Families are sharing photos with loved ones, important news with those far away, etc.

Facebook's situation doesn't change my opinion though. It's an exception, not the rule.
10 Steps To Turn Your Passion Into Your Business
Epic to FTC: Google Search+ is violating users' privacy
You should check out HotRuby, which is a Ruby interpreter, written in Javascript: http://hotruby.yukoba.jp/

Should be pretty interesting to see Twostroke running on HotRuby running on Twostroke running on HotRuby running...
I am all for using really small fonts, but this is a bit too unreadable - http://img23.imageshack.us/img23/2720/unreadable.png
Brazil is the only BRIC country standing ground on Internet Freedom
Rome has(had?) an honour system for public transport too. We didn't realise that no one ever pays unless they see inspectors getting on the bus. Lots of people would leap up and punch their biglietti when we punched ours because they assumed we had seen some inspectors. I couldn't work out what was going on until I read about it in the Time Out guide which explained that almost no one pays :-)

London had exactly the same system and the same fare evasion problem on the high traffic bendy bus routes. These routes were always overcrowded probably because of the number of unrecorded passengers using them. They withdrew these buses and replaced them with ones which take longer to board partly because of the fare evasion and partly because a sort of bizarre bus xenophobia (hatred of a foreign european style of bus) inspired by the Evening Standard which resulted in an election promise by mayor Boris to get rid of them.
Then again, Google do have certified Adwords professionals and partner companies whose name they don't want to sully with some widely misunderstood statement, and even some of the least reputable search engine agencies offering ad-buying as a service probably have a net benefit on Google's bottom line
Great article on character development in education, with clear implications for entrepreneurship.
with the recent heavy handed crack down of any NYC protesting, I would be worried of even attempting this. NYC has cracked down hard on freedom of speech.
Nvidia  does not support SOPA
...we need to compute the value at risk so we know how much capital to set aside in case of defaults. Why in the world would I need that ? Well since....I can go on and on...

And if you went one step further, you'd have realized: "to reduce the risk of a bank failure and potentially saving thousands of jobs."

But to pretend that what I'm doing is on the same plane of someone say vaccinating a kid with malaria in the tropics...

Lets think about the guy vaccinating a kid to prevent malaria.

But lets think a few steps back. Rather than thinking about the guy with the needle, think about the guy in the lab coat. He's currently sitting in a lab somewhere, fucking around with gene assays in order to create antibodies. Why does he do this? Because some other guy might use the antibodies to stimulate an immune response to malaria parasites in rats. And the other guy might find out the first guy was wasting his time.

The vast majority of people who are trying to do exactly what you ask (creating a malaria vaccine) are "building things 'we don't need', throwing stuff at the wall and hoping something will stick."

And if you back up a couple steps more, you realize all this was only possible because someone built biologist tools (e.g. gene sequencing machines, bioinformatics software) which are neat and cool and bullet points on a CV and also completely useless to "real people".
Well said, Kyle.
Flake: A Decentralized, K-Ordered Unique ID Generator in Erlang
This is a good article, and the bit about money saved by pirates being pure economic surplus that is spent and stimulates actual jobs is gold.

But it is obvious on its face that the publishers' concerns have virtually nothing to do with jobs (except a particular few of course), and that this is just offered up to Congress to use as talking points when replying to constituents or deflecting questions.
I really think this is the case of their website design not giving a feeling of quality... Their design is OK... but I bet if they could give the site a softer look and have it convey a feeling of assurance/reliability - they'ed have a much better product... I realize design is a small part of the equation, but it goes a long way in gaining trust in the brand... Right now their site gives me the feeling of "stodgy corporate", slightly sketch... they need to fix that... stripe in comparison gives me the feeling of "cool", "reliably", "smart"... i'm just one dude though... who has been regrettably using authorize.net - so take it with a grain of salt...
They don't operate simultaneously. Order is not defined in some constructs, but it's still there and can also be forced.
I don't mind it. I think the biggest problem is that it uses JavaScript. The small delay between hover and style change makes the site feel sluggish. Using the :hover pseudo class would be better, and is supported by all browsers other than IE6.
The easiest way is to do it like in the rest of the world: when the agents board you, have them check your ID. Simple!
I haven't got to that stage yet cos I'm still building the prototype with one other designer. I plan to use one of those selenium based services that can simulate a lot of requests at once. I need to do way more research here but as they say I've gotta get the app functional first before I worry about scaling.
Portal home cybercampus.unair.ac.id | unit system informasi FISIP
For me, not to knock your work, it was nice to see some working on it visually. I should be much more clear here, I thought your book was very helpful and your insisting that people actually type the code out [edit] is very helpful. I have zero background in coding (or in any technical field.)
I strongly disagree. "Big problems" are the same as a misplaced "passion." To find happiness, learn what passion actually is. It's different from "interest."

In my own life and many of my friends', "passion" is often mistakenly replaced by "important, abstract idea that sounds good." As in "I am passionate about saving the environment." Of course the environment is important, and having an interest in it is one thing, but this is not the same as actually being called to work day-to-day on this issue.

The decision you should actually make is something like: I enjoy making sense of large, ugly datasets. Or, I like cold-calling businesses and convincing them of the value of something they would never think of. If you enjoy that day-to-day work, then sure, go ahead and use it for the environment. But don't get a degree and a job in "environmental studies" just because the issue is interesting.

A "passion" is the thing you do even when you're tired or sick, and practice even when you have better things to do. You don't always enjoy it, but you do it anyway. You would be happy working another job in order to keep doing it.

For many of us who found programming, the discipline and long hours of humiliating bug-hunting have taught us what "passion" really is. But many people never have the chance to do that. High school classes, college clubs, and even most Millennial-oriented "save the world" jobs are generally more about "interests," things that are impressive-sounding and interesting in the abstract, rather than "passions," gut-wrenchingly difficult disciplines that demand our attention each moment.
This has actually been studied:

http://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/melissa.bateson/Bateson_etal_2006...

> We examined the effect of an image of a pair of eyes on contributions to an honesty box used to collect money for drinks in a university coffee room. People paid nearly three times as much for their drinks when eyes were displayed rather than a control image. This finding provides the first evidence from a naturalistic setting of the importance of cues of being watched, and hence reputational concerns, on human cooperative behaviour.
Thanks for the props, not sure what you mean by principles of web dev?
Gray and Reuter's Transaction Processing is absolutely superb, and it covers a good part of this stack, everything lower-level than query planning. However, it covers every approach to doing this. If you want to know how Postgres, say, does it, that's a lot less information, and may be more digestible.
Android Fundamentals
Possible for pg, no doubt, but not for any of us.
I am actually astonished that this is the first time something like this is tried in the US. And I also don't understand the negative comments here in HN - most of you guys probably had a passion for computers at even earlier age and would have enjoyed this kind of school greatly. Here In the Sofia (the capital of Bulgaria) this is long established practice - we have loosely specialized schools and students decide where hey want to learn at about 13 years of age. You can of course switch schools as you like, but more prestigious ones have some requirements. The point is that I did know I wanted to work with computers and made this decision then to go to he programming school here and I consider this one of he best decisions in my life. Most of my classmates have ended up with quite accomplished careers in IT but a surprising number end up with very different professions - doctors, dentists, musicians - the emphasis on programming did not hinder their progress that much maybe even helped hem.
Virtual Stock Trading
I think it's good that people have more options than they used to. But for the vast, vast majority of people, their career will not be the fulfillment of some life-defining purpose, and trying to treat it as such is going to lead to disappointment.

Basically, I'm saying that it's ok if what you do for a living is not an all-consuming passion. I know if you're doing a startup, there's a good chance that it is, but there are other ways to lead a satisfying life besides through your job.

It's not so much that working towards a career is good, but I don't think it's the unmitigated disaster that some comments here are making it out to be.
I think you are misunderstanding the phrase unpaid overtime in this context. Most jobs are salaried, not paid by an hourly rate, and small amounts of overtime required to get the job done do not get you extra money, but you cannot be forced to work more than 48 hours per week unless you specifically sign away your rights under the European working time directive.

As for insolvency law, if the a company goes under and has insufficient funds to cover outstanding wages then employees are entitled to up to £400 per week of outstanding pay, plus statutory redundancy rights (based on age and period of employment).

When a UK company enters administration then the appointed administrator replaces the directors.
Yes, some tools are toys without much use. I don't dispute that.

But to make a blanket claim that no tool is useful, "not in a million years", is completely wrong. The real world full of real people has benefitted tremendously from certain software projects. Those projects have in turn benefitted from others, which benefitted from others, etc. Not all software is involved in the chain, but a lot is.

Software does things like predict weather (saving thousands, perhaps millions, of lives and vastly improving other lives), help design buildings and machines, allow people to communicate over extremely long distances at very little cost, etc. etc.

All of that software was enabled by various developer tools that have been built over the years. Tools like FORTRAN compilers, UNIX systems, make, gcc, VMS, etc. etc. All of those have been extremely useful. Indirectly, they have been extremely useful to real people in the real world. So why do you say that "not in a million years" would anything we build be useful. Maybe what we build isn't, but it certainly can be, and a lot of it is.

Is what I'm doing extremely useful? Probably not. But if I wanted it to be, the answer isn't to stop programming and go vaccinate kids. The answer is to apply my software skills to areas which are useful in general. The results don't have to be directly useful to "real people" to be indirectly useful to them.

Building some Facebook clone is probably not all that useful. But to come along and act like all software is simply an act of privilege and is never useful to "real people" is just plain wrong.
At the same time, I'd prefer our generation to be raised to follow our passion to what the previous generation was taught: get a 9 to 5 job where you'll be miserable but make a ton of money and live a nice, safe, and boring life with your 2.5 children.
Not to be too harsh here, but wouldn't you want that URL to be a little bit better optimized for search engines?

Just look at the results for "how to make duckduckgo my default search engine": https://duckduckgo.com/?q=how+to+make+duckduckgo+my+default+...
> That's correct, but any C IO (such as DB queries) will generally release the GIL, which allows other threads to run.

Ditto with Ruby too.
You are doing a selective comparison.

No one is going to mistake a four-year-old for a grandmother.

True. But plenty of people will mistake a 14, 15, 16, or 17-year old for an 18-year old.

The Viacom v. YouTube case proved that even expensive lawyers spending hours doing research can't manage to get even 99% accuracy.

Again true, but the odds of a randomly selected uploaded full-length movie being illegally uploaded is, I bet, significantly larger than the odds of a randomly selected explicit movie featuring people of illegal age. So the prior coming from what fraction of available content out there is illegal according to the two standards would likely lead to a larger false positive rate for pornography.
My Call to Senator Schumer’s Office on PIPA: It’s So Much Worse Than I Thought
A shell, gcc, makefiles...and not a clue of context of the world surrounding the toolbox to change it. Sounds like they were trying to churn out perspective-deprived automata.
Ah, so it was the video aspect of the google course. Tell me, you watched the video and read the code in the video, so can you think about why a video with code in it was superior to a book with code in it? Was it the talking? The active watching and typing? The inclusion of faces?

Thanks for your time. I also have videos but I want to redo them so they're better. Any insight will help.
Don't worry, they drill more geography in you before high school than they do here throughout high school. Teaching foreign languages starts from kindergarten. By high school if you're inclined and had good teachers you should know enough to have an ok conversation in at least two different languages. Plus you get exposed to so much to English / Spanish (you hear the original soundtrack for every movie for example) that you could learn a lot just from listening. I'm not sure about philosophy though, that would be a loss.(salutari)
Bitcoin miners back online
It's worth noting for non-Americans that it's a play on the common children's game "Duck Duck Goose" (I think).
Compare unemployment rates in geography, philosophy and foreign languages. We need more CS people. We don't need more philosophers.

(Though admittedly, knowledge of English or German might be very useful if you are coming from Romania.)
And the appropriate response is to publicly: admonish the behavior, investigate and report, then reprimand/dismiss the employee(s) who are found guilty.

If Google's management is innocent, then they need to prove so, and show it by acting ethically as described above.
Copyleft restricts individuals as well. What about plagiarism? Is it theft? Copyright is about the holder of the IP being able to control the use of the IP. Consumers can either accept those terms or not. I don't know what the penalties should be for copyright or copyleft violations but there should be some. I am also not sure about the best way to enforce it. SOPA or OPEN isn't the answer but there is a problem.
Agreed. Pricing is too important to let someone else set all the rules. I'm not saying that Stripe did a bad job with their subscription system, but I think it's a mistake to let someone else make all the decisions when it comes to such a critical aspect of your business.

For example, I personally don't like prorating costs. I want my customers to be able to make changes and play around with the new features before deciding to pay. I also don't like the idea of having a few plans and forcing every single customer into one of them. I want everyone to use the software how they want, and pay based on that usage. These are important business decisions that would be impossible (or at least very difficult) if I used a pre-made subscription system.

Luckily Stripe makes it incredibly easy to roll your own subscription system.
Here is a question:

How do you handle merging someone else patch into your dual-licensed project?

The GitHub hosted code is GPL, but your other code license is for commercial projects (you charge a fee for the NON-GPL license).

Obviously, the patch is based on the GPL project, but you don't have copyright on that patch (to be able to merge it into the non-GPL codebase).

Do you ask the contributer to give you the copyright?

What if it's a simple bug fix that's only a few characters?

What if the contributer says no?

Is there a way to make this happen smoothly?
I wish stripe was in Canada.
Mobile billing
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This just gives me more reasons to not invest any of my money in Bitcoin. The market is just to volatile.
Systems Engineering Announces New Cloud Computing Application
Systems Engineering Announces New Cloud Computing Application
Conversely, if a student thinks this is something they want to do, and find out this is not what they want, better to do that sooner rather then later. Cheaper to do it this way then in college.
More than half of those bad experiences are downright un-true (leave out parts of story) and involve some type of shady operations by the user.

From what I've read, more than half of the Paypal "horror stories" involve people being completely truthful that they're doing something shady, and not understanding why Paypal is suspicious.
SOPAman - Comic
How many attacks and/or suicide bombings have taken place during your time there?
Made DDG my default search engine in Chrome today. Not because of the redesign, but just because I think it's time to start looking at alternatives. (The fact that I don't even need to qualify what I'm seeking an alternative to means I should be looking at alternatives!)
Just switched to DuckDuckGo as my default Chrome search-engine. Should be fun :)
greetings from Romania.

Big kudos to Mr. O'Reilly for publicly acknowledging that accessing content by any (nondestructive) means generates value for society at large - even if not immediately financial for the copyright holders. Not accessing it at all would mean zero value at all, for nobody.

Having access to pirated material/software in the past that I wouldn't have afforded at the time helped me develop skills that later on allowed me to afford paying for value.
I'm still not 100% legit but I'm putting more money back in the system, sometimes because it's easier buying things the right channels, sometimes just because it feels better. It's true that I'm biased towards supporting smaller, independent projects but that's also because that's easier (=cheaper).

_______

Now that it got mentioned, a quick word on Romania. While using p2p / cracked software at home is risk-free (less some extremely rare cases where some large sharers get busted as example) businesses do need to have proper licenses. Also true, smaller businesses might pass undetected by the BSA, but it's a risk most don't care to take.
Years ago, international prices compared to our per capita GDP would have made most purchases prohibitive. In a perfect world piracy wouldn't happen, but thanks to piracy at large people (me included) had chances of becoming digitally fluent and start generating value and start choosing to pay for content/services.
Yes, probably! This is how it is coming out of assistly, but duly noted.
Might be helpful to mention OS and browser.
>I have heard that if someone flies into a country on Your Airline Inc., and is denied entry, it's the financial responsibility of Your Airline Inc. to take them back to where they come from.

It's been this way for over 100 years. If someone was denied entry at say Ellis Island, it would be the steamship co.'s responsibility to get them back at no cost to the passenger.
I think you didn't make a fair translation from ruby to javascript there,
here goes my attempt:

function map_unless_nested(arr){
return arr.filter(function(it){ if (it instanceof Array) return it }).length?
function(){ return [] } : function(fn){ return arr.map(fn) };
}

console.log(map_unless_nested([1,2,3])(function(n){ return n + 1 }));
console.log(map_unless_nested([1,2,[1,2],3])(function(n){ return n + 1 }));

edit: also a translation for the last example

function map_first_innermost(arr){
return function(fn){
return arr.map(function(v){
if (v instanceof Array)
return map_first_innermost(v)(fn);
return fn(v);
});
};
}

console.log(map_first_innermost([1,2,[1,2],3])(function(n){ return n + 1 }));
Do they provide two factor authentication?
I used to use Zend_Queue, but it was the wrong tool for the wrong job, so switched to using Gearman for job queues.
mine as well.
Specialized High Schools already exist in NYC. I attended Murry Bertraum for Business Careers (in downtown manhattan) and took computer science electives in QBASIC, Fortran, and Java. This was in 2004 - when obviously Qbasic and Fortran had nothing to do with the internet - but that's the education system for you. There is also Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Tech and Bronx Science.