skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you haven't quite reached the core problem. Many programmers understand "the wants and needs of the average human" just fine; that doesn't really cause as severe a problem as you suggest. We support non-programmers and non-experts, and we mostly frown upon people who attack newbies. More generally, beyond programming, we often have decent solutions for political and social issues, usually generated by ignoring the baggage associated with them and just dealing with the actual issues.

The fundamental problem, in my opinion: as programmers, we hold rationality as a core value above most other things. We expect rationality from others, and we cope very badly with irrationality. To the extent programmers manage to understand irrationality at all, we have an almost moral inhibition against exploiting it. That makes us utterly awful at politics, which currently requires expert-level manipulative tactics to deal with the majority of voters, who don't deal with political and social issues in rational ways. Anyone who refuses to use such tactics will lose to those who do.

A political hacker would need to have expert-level skill in rhetoric, not just in rational argument and problem solving. This doesn't seem like an impossible goal, but we first have to understand and accept the fundamental problem, and get over the constraints we've hamstrung ourselves with.
After doing some thorough research on the topic, I would like to say that I concede my point about the vulnerabilities of C/C++. Thanks tptacek.
Ask HN: Selling our startup's code
Hi all,

A while ago we launched a service called PlaceSteal - http://www.placesteal.com/

At its core is a fast Javascript library which extracts arbitrary US and UK addresses from HTML pages, on the client side. This represents about 30 days of development, it's well tested, it works really well, and it's full of all sorts of neat tricks like intraspecting certain mapping elements on pages, etc.

I note that FourSquare have started trying to enter this arena, but their bookmarklet/plugin sucks. There are also a couple of other startups who are trying to enter the same space: http://pindropapp.com/, and some company called EverPlace who are apparently in private beta.

My business partner and I both have other things going on, which is starving our current ability to spend time on PlaceSteal - and as part of considering all options, are wondering about selling the company's assets (ie: this Javascript library - the unencrypted and commented and tested version of: http://www.placesteal.com/bookmarklet.js?perl).

Anyone have any experience on this? How to approach companies like FourSquare, or any of the other big companies who have interested in the location space?
Given the state of the situation, a wiki-style site for information sharing is just not going to happen. Nobody, authors first, has the interest for something like that to happen - researchers are very interested in sharing, with other researchers. The general public doesn't interest them one bit (you can show the number of citations your paper nobody read has received to have your grant renewed or to get a better position, nobody cares if you've built a website that shares your research with the general public and has 10000+ uniques a day)
I agree that the topic is worthy of discussion, it's just that I disagree that the phrase you highlighted was more biased in favour of the US than your suggested edit. In both it is clear that the USAAF dropped the bomb.

The answer to your question is yes, inanimate objects can be responsible for outcomes. On a philosophical level, a rock that comes loose from a cliff face and kills someone driving on the road below is responsible for his death even though there was clearly no intention involved.

In terms of language, it's also common for an inanimate object to be the subject even if it was not the responsible party, i.e. 'the car hit the boy', 'the plane crashed into the tower', 'the house was destroyed by a bomb', etc. In none of those cases was the primary subject the entity which decided to cause the action.
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I understand what you are saying and I am not trying to thwart anything. The Americans are about to thwart themselves.

My question was based around the idea that by removing themselves from being the (and I quote you)

> most prolific tech ecosystem in the world.

- if there is anything to gain from being somewhere else in the world. I dont actually live in a European country (not sure where you got that from) and I see SOPA as potentially a way to profit and get ahead, providing replacement services to countries cut of by the 'shoot yourself in the face' mentality that the USA currently has.

By the way, I don't think this is good. But I'm an entrepreneur and we thrive on opportunity and this is a place to discuss these things no ?
With CGI, you do your own data persistence. It leads to gigantic blobs. Also, you spawn a process for each request.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/424839/what-were-the-main...

As I see it, it's the old low-level vs high-level discussion all over again. I'm sure you have seen it before.

Low-level programmers argue that they have control and know how everything is working. High-level programmers argue security, problem isolation, modularity (i.e. not only using your own code!), readability, maintainability.
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In the USA health insurance terminology "out-of-pocket" refers to what you have to pay for some procedure in addition to what you normally pay for insurance coverage. With the insurance I had when I was in the USA a visit to the GP would be 30$ out of pocket, on top of the monthly insurance fee (that was 300$, I think).
So someone needs to become a vegan in order to write about animal cruelty?

Sometimes it's not so clear that things are so black and white. Just because I write about an issue doesn't mean I will first have to get on one side of it.
I don't dispute that Facebook played some part in the revolution, just whether the people whose revolution it was actually call it a Facebook Revolution.

Related anecdatum: I live in an ex-Soviet Republic. It is rare for someone here to actually say "The Foo Revolution"; instead people talk about "the early 90s" or "after independence".

(Also: your quote is taken from an interview with one of those foreign media organisations who had already decided that Facebook was the hook they were going to hang the story on.)
I agree with you on the gist of your argument (I think), but there are 'ways to reliably mitigate memory corruption flaws in C/C++ programs'. For example, using std::string rather than malloc()'ing a char* every time you do something that works with strings is certainly a way to reliably mitigate memory corruption flaws in C++.
Completely agreed on both points. The first line is so baffling I read it twice. Do they think programmers talk to each other in this mysterious 'code'? The writer of this article would be deeply disappointed by a glance at Code Academy.
Using a buggy XML parser has little to do with C...
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I would argue that while I believe his correction did not change the partiality, a change to the active voice would have been more effective in highlighting the responsibility of the USAAF in destroying Hiroshima.

With that said, there is no contention that the US did not bomb Hiroshima with a nuclear weapon. Would anybody reading any of these suggested phrases really be more or less likely to view the US as being responsible for it?
Judging by the replies to this tweet, it seems it was the official 'Twitter for Android'.
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I am currently writing part of a web application in C++, the other part of the web application is being developed by another programmer in Ruby On Rails.

In a single request, the RoR part 'does' about a two dozen 'things', which takes it around 2 seconds to complete.

The C++ part 'does' around 1.2 million 'things' which takes it between 0.1 to 0.2 seconds to complete. Building the the component that does 1.2 million 'things' is simply impractical in Ruby.

Admittedly, very few web applications have this type of requirement, but perhaps in the future many more will. The two dozen or so 'things' the RoR does would take a LOT of code in C++. Well, compared to RoR it would be a lot of code. And the 1.2 million 'things' that the C++ application does would be absurdly difficult to program in Ruby, and as mentioned, would take an absurdly long time to execute.

So at the risk of sounding cliché, perhaps it is less a matter of Ruby vs C++, and more one of using the right tool for the job. Once that decision has been made, programmer productivity has more to do with the programmer than the language. I am extremely productive in C++, even though I have to write a lot of code to be productive. If I was a LISP expert, I would be ridiculously productive, but only after 10 years[1] of learning and gaining experience in LISP. Most projects don't have 10 years for you to become productive in the language of choice.

[1] Yes, I am exaggerating. It would only take 9 years to become highly productive in LISP.
Myself, I learned from K&R, and I thought it was great at the time, now I'm less sure of this.

I've heard that "A Book on C" is supposed to be a much better book for learning C
So you say it's not a straw man. Maybe you have some more words left to explain yourself on that point?

He was asked for the problems. It's not his job to advertise social networking services.

One of the big figures of Software Freedom is asked about the drawbacks of social networking services and you start your argument with saying that he doesn't talk about the benefits. And then you compare the drawbacks to the ecological damage of washing machines (with the recent advances in efficiency, nobody is making as strong a point against them as you are trying to force). Nope, sorry, that's a straw man. And a very weak one at that.

I think if anything, having those three big issues out there (privacy violations, tracking by government, careless spreading of the two into the social graph), Mr. Moglen would be correct to say that the cost is already too great to be weighed against with any benefits.
At the risk of sounding like flamebait, it's because Python and Java developers don't know what they are missing without deterministic destructing. Of course there are way to 'code around' it, but knowing the exact lifetime of objects is very often very useful, and often makes for much easier to understand code and easy ways to avoid resource leaks.
Rise, Fall, Controversies In 2011, But 2012 Seems To Be All Lucrative
Last year, for real-estate was full of happenings. It has seen lot of ups and down during the year 2011 .The growth in the sector has seen steep curves, with this scenario the sector is faced with a great challenge to provide the products combining affordability, comfort and quality.
I think this was summed up by a guy at a conference that I went to "developers, on the whole, pride ourselves on being logical but when it comes to technology discussions we get too emotional".

It is the same reason why there was conflict in the Robber's Cave experiment between the two groups. As a species we group together with people we mentally associate with and have a natural prejudice against any external force.
While all your comments are valid, the people behind Raspberry Pi are not entirely new to this.

You can see the trustees here:

http://www.charity-commission.gov.uk/Showcharity/RegisterOfC...

David Braben has been in the computer games field since the 1980s and has made a fair amount of money from it, Eben Upton works for Broadcom (the chip supplier for the Pi), and the rest are all pretty well known in their fields too.

So overall, I think they should by now know what they're doing, and with Braben on board should have some money to make it happen.
Passive founder deadlock - the biggest startup killer of them all?
Three thoughts:

1. This will create a new category of credit card fraud by making programmable credit cards acceptable.

2. I don't see the benefit of having one credit card instead of two in my wallet.

3. Wasn't NFC meant to solve this problem (more elegantly?)
Whose success and accomplishments? Why would a researcher be jealous about some website getting many visitors? Maybe I'm misunderstanding your point.
you would only be an asshole if you linked it like so: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=backbone
15 Million Dollars - Sky to Integrate and Invest in Zeebox
Only two months since is was launched by former BBC technology chief Anthony Rose, Zeebox has been making waves in the industry, due to its deep Social Media integration and unique temporal metatagging technology which pulls contextual words in real time from broadcast TV using a number of technologies and then links them to relevant information from Wikipedia, Twitter and Apps from the Apple ecosystem.
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Argh I just finally compiled 5.3.8 last week - oh well.

90 bug fixes, some of which are security related

Hopefully APC has no issues with it, gave up on eaccelerator.

Interesting they took the time to do the 5.4 backports in there.
They can't, so just throw some mathy teacher in there and hopefully the students will more or less teach themselves, and if you're really lucky, each other. That's how every high school CS class I've ever taken has worked. It's not ideal, but it's better than no CS at all.
Anecdotes are not data. Perhaps Cory Doctorow is leaving a lot of money on the table. That may work in his case, but for someone 'at the margin', it may mean they are forced to do something else, rather than write.
The HN title should be modified to reflect that this applies to England not the UK as a whole.

[Apologies for, yet again, playing the role of the bad tempered Scot.]
>> That makes us utterly awful at politics

But makes us fairly good activists that don't just use hype but real arguments (and in some cases real action).

Proper activism may not be able to change political scenes all the time, but it does usually leave a dent.
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No. Going outside is an act that happens on common grounds. Using facebook happens on commercial grounds. You can choose not to use facebook and eliminate the problem right there. You cannot choose not to use roads.

You are right to say that we need better rules to regulate the second, or to go with Moglen - the people should know better than to even ask for such rules instead of staying away from the problem. But that doesn't mean that the same logic must suddenly apply to civil society, no matter how paranoid (and, at times, rightfully paranoid) you may be about the tracking that happens there.
Pretty much the same kind of database is going to be created in Israel, pushed forward by a single Member of Knesset, while ignoring advice from leading security experts. (see for example Adi Shamir, aka The "S" in "RSA.")

The law is currently in a two-year "trial" period (despite the fact that nobody bothered defining metrics and requirements for gauging the success or failure of the trial), following which it will become mandatory for every citizen under punishment of [possible] incarceration.

Let's just say I'm going to jail in two years...
What did you just say!?
I find it really aggravating that schools such as the ETHZ get billions in taxes a year yet refuse to publish the majority of their papers online.
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This is a very good memory card for my Sony Camera It stores a lot of pictures on the card and I am an avid photographer and it is nice to be able to take pictures
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>> Me: I think that’s totally relevant and will definitely put it in. (N.B.: In the end, I did not put this in the story for several reasons, not the least of it was the fact that it was late and over word limit.)

So what ARE the reasons?!?!

I'd like to hear why Adrianne Jeffries didn't include any of Moglen's points in the final article.

Does Adrianne Jeffries really think Moglen's ideas are "totally relevant"? The tone of her article suggests otherwise. She introduces him as a "militant" professor, and the title of her post appears to mock the entire situation.

The telephone exchange is certainly entertaining, but Moglen's points are relevant and I'm disappointed the author didn't include her reasons for omitting them from her article.
Software programming to become compulsory in schools
I feel the same! It's probably because we have a vested interest in this area, but putting that aside it's nice to see something coming from the government that I think is a genuinely good thing (for a change?).
Only two months since is was launched by former BBC technology chief Anthony Rose, Zeebox has been making waves in the industry, due to its deep Social Media integration and unique temporal metatagging technology which pulls contextual words in real time from broadcast TV using a number of technologies and then links them to relevant information from Wikipedia, Twitter and Apps from the Apple ecosystem.
Also effectiveness of SOPA, doesn't it?
I just wish that Google will include in the social search everything that they got access to. That's the only way that this thing won't be evil.

By the way, I think that social search is very overrated. But I might be wrong.
Thanks for the reply. Have you tried any other distros on it? Specifically I am interested in Arch. Thanks.
I suspect the average teenager today hardly uses e-mail at all.

Yes -- I was surprised (and somewhat weirded out) recently to discover that my younger sister, who's in her early twenties, thinks of email exclusively as a formal communications channel, and never emails her friends (she texts or Facebook-messages them instead).
Back in 1993 I was doing GCSE Computer Studies which included everything from desktop publishing to writing simple BASIC programs. But when I want to continue this into A-level, I had to personally convince the computer studies teacher to let me do it on my own since the school didn't offer it as an option. In the end, I did a mostly self-taught AS Computer Studies with some guidance from the teacher.

I was extremely lucky to have a well-resourced school and a flexible teacher
Seeing how that worked out with European flights passenger data, I am surprised there is no discussion of making European banking data being stored outside of Europe somehow mandatory - to prevent terrorism and all that good stuff.
Waiting to receive pieces of daughter’s dead body
Quite the contrary: this is a worldwide problem. E.g. I'm from Europe & I despise our politician's tendency to copy/paste US law.
A straw man is a component of an argument and is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position.[1] To "attack a straw man" is to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by replacing it with a superficially similar yet unequivalent proposition (the "straw man"), and refuting it, without ever having actually refuted the original position.

I don't think I misrepresented Moglen's position in anyway. He only spoke about the negative aspects of social networking, but nothing about the conveniences. Argument by analogy isn't a strawman.

I agree that recent advances in washing machines have improved them, and that the environmental impact of them is far outweighed by the convenience.

Indeed, that is my point.

For me - and many others - the convenience and advantages of social networking outweighs the costs. I make that decision in full knowledge of those costs, and I think it is fair to point out that there are advantages as well as costs.
I heavily recommend PHP farm to test your code with a given version of PHP:
http://cweiske.de/tagebuch/Introducing%20phpfarm.htm

This allows you to have several versions of PHP, each one with a given php.ini, given list of extensions and a given PEAR.
Personally, I have spent a lot of time customizing and mastering Vim. But I agree with you that mastering a powerful editor is not a sufficient condition to be a good programmer. That realization occurred to me after I found that a few programmers that I respect very much have very primitive editing skills (which was very difficult for me to swallow at first).
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I think you underestimate the potential interest in open science (and by extension, open data).

The access limitations act as a barrier when it comes to the application of research. Yes, of course, a multi-billion dollar company with huge R&D departments will have all the subscriptions available, but what about the smaller companies and start ups? What about individual people?

Also, the current system rewards incestuous island thinking. There isn't a giant catalog of knowledge, and it's a shame. Imagine one library with all the world's research and data, open, categorized, expandable, for everyone to use.
The first time I see a company recommending to install VirtualBox and Ubuntu on it just to get the app to run on Windows. Better than saying Windows is not supported at all I guess :). Must be getting a lot of support tickets though. But it does look like interesting OSS project.
Freedom.txt
> Astronomers are incredibly dedicated to outreach.

I really don't want to sound overly critical - I'm sure that there is good will behind whoever made the site you linked - but that site is what represents astronomers' dedication to outreach then I don't really know what to say...

See, if researchers really wanted to let their research known to the public the efforts on their behalf would be much, much more focused than what it took to put together that site. Take your average startup as an example - they're seriously dedicated to outreach, their success depends on it - would you give them even a 1% chance of success if their website looked like that?
I think this is a great move. Although it would be interesting to see how many people actually take the new subject.

The problem at the moment is as the article says, just get used to Microsoft GUIs and not know anything behind them. And what happens is people do other things in the lesson, as they get bored, or find it to easy so they don't even bother. The whole MS access stuff can be very dull.

They could even bring in sections of web development into the new course, ie setting up a LAMP environment and learning PHP. And not just learning to create table (shudders) based rubbish in Dreamweaver or the like.

Or on the comp sci/software dev side of things learn Java programming for Android. Although I would think that iOS dev would be a step too far at this stage - not sure?

Or maybe start teaching them a high level languages such as Python or Perl to help give them a good understanding of programming practises etc.