skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If the group thinkers can re-invent Bolshevism for the classroom and the workplace, allow me to invent my own journalistic sociological gloss to bring attention to a physiological trend that the group thinkers might not appreciate.

It is an anthropological finding that the human brain decreased in volume by 10% — about the size of a tennis ball — around the dawn of civilization 20,000 years ago. It is believed that the decrease in volume coincided with the emergence of cooperative, prosocial behavior, which enabled the members of reduced-cranium groups to solve some problems that eluded their more amply-brained relatives. The larger brains were adapted to more independent modes of survival.
Bonobos have smaller brains than chimpanzees, but can solve problems that larger-brained chimpanzees will not solve, unless they decide to cooperate, which is unusual. [There are videos online of cooperating chimpanzees in the lab.] Successive generations of domesticated animals exhibit reduced brain volume in comparison with their ancestors.

The assumption that assimilation into the group is always good ignores the flip side of cooperation among prosocials. Prosocial behavior doesn’t imply feeble-minded docility. Fear of separation from the group, and antagonism toward larger-brained independent individuals is deeply ingrained. The reduced brain volume is compensated for somewhat by vindictiveness. Prosocials reward conformists and will punish transgressors at some cost to themselves. Road rage is an example. The capacity for revenge, even if this is costly, is the flip side of cooperation.

Groups are good at solving some kinds of problems, but not all problems (cf. Jaron Lanier, DIGITAL MAOISM:
The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism http://edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier06/lanier06_index.html).

One should exercise caution when internalizing group values.

In a study published on July 15, 2011, in the Institute of Physics and German Physical Society’s New Journal of Physics, researchers have shown that swarming, a phenomenon that can be crucial to an animal’s survival, is created by the same kind of social networks that humans adopt.
…
Locusts rely heavily on swarming as they are in fact cannibalistic. As they march across barren deserts, locusts carefully keep track of each other so they can remain within striking distance to consume one another — a cruel, but very efficient, survival strategy.
— Science Daily (July 15, 2011), Swarms of Locusts Use Social Networking to Communicate

It’s a locust-eat-locust world out there.
The Big Five Personality Traits and Internet Browser Choice
Does anyone else think we should only consider actually getting DMCA repealed as a victory?
> Following the same reasoning we shouldn't laud Google for all the great stuff they did either, like GMail, Search, etc.

You know, why not think of Google (or Microsoft, or any other Zaibatsu-pretending-to-be-one-brand) as companies resident within a start-up incubator? Treating Google's Adsense team as the same "culture" as Google's Search team makes about as much sense as treating Sony Pictures as being the same company as Sony Computer Entertainment, or Virgin Airlines as being the same company as Virgin Mobile.

So, don't say "Google did this to GMail today" or "Google's search is amazing" or "Google merged their Page Creator into Google Sites"; instead, say "The GMail team launched this today" or "I love the Google Search folks" or "Google Page Creator got bought out by Google Sites."
On the other hand, do you really agree with the sentiment of the GP - that foreign aid is already at saturation point?
The Top Tech Positions That Need To Be Filled: PM Is #1 & Engineers Are...
Foreign aid by any government is most certainly not given unconditionally. Even disaster relief carries political ties.
We charged a flat fee of $300/month for big stores.

Elsewhere it says Viaweb had 1050 customers. So does this mean Viaweb had < $3.8m / yr in revenue when it was sold ?
Congress needs to learn about atomic commits!
Isn't this just one aspect of what SimpleGeo offered?
Yep, we're only migrating the "Storage" product. Factual is taking over customers from the "Places" product.
I'm a young guy who works the same way you do. The insights I have after a few hours of hard work are worth the increased mental energy required. (It can be exhausting, and I don't want to talk to anyone after I'm done.) The downside is, as you've said, very few people seem to even attempt to focus for long periods of time.

I think a big part of the problem is the obsession with collaboration, as the article mentions. I feel it often leads to more and more 'fake work,' where employees deliberately work in an unfocused manner to avoid real work.
Yet they are both done for the profit of the company. What is the difference you see?
Every Company that has stock holders? Absolutely.
Are Nigerians All Fraudster - Youth in General?
Africa holds over a billion people, and is the second-most populated continent. I'd say the people there are already aware of what parts of it are conducive to human life.
Mandatory States
Well I just copy&pasted from the article :) But it's impressive! definitely props to whoever came up with it.
Definitely helpful. Thanks for taking the time - there's nothing like an educated outside opinion to firm up priorities.
Don't keep us hanging, inform us about the state of the Gates back door! By golly, if it's kept locked, I'm going to hate those guys!
Perhaps this is your intent, but I thought I'd mention that the word "flack" is considered a pejorative by many PR professionals:
http://www.prnewsonline.com/prnewsblog/index.php/2008/10/15/...

This comment from the link above sums it up nicely: "I think it’s all a matter of context and intention. If someone who generally respects PR professionals uses the term “flack” informally (as I myself have done in a recent blog post), then I’m fine with it. If someone else is using the term as a derogatory remark to show lack of respect for the profession, then it makes me mad."

Just thought I'd share the above for any other HN readers. Using the word "flack" is seen by many PR professionals as a sign of disrespect.
I vaguely recall reading somewhere that pair programming wasn't meant to be for more than a few hours a day (like 4). An agile coach I know agreed with this. But I can't easily find this caveat on the net.
A nice solution to avoid namespace collisions while allowing users to create their own shortening URLs is to use their username as a subdomain (e.g., bcjordan.gethopper.com/meaningfulname).

Also:

* accept file and submissions by email: subject = optional shortener key, body/attachment = content

* slap a sign up with Facebook button on it

And one more thing... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEgk2v6KntY
"The advantage of abstraction" is not always an advantage, which is the whole point of this whole thread.
Different types of learning. I got very high grades in all my courses during college, but a number of them were due to the fact that I am really good at cramming and figuring out what to study and what to ignore. That's what it means to be good at passing exams.

Most of my CS courses I actually spent the time to fully understand and internalize the material. That was the material I truly learned.
Fill out this form:

https://stripe.com/global
"All rights, natural or legal only exist so long as they are protected."

Trivially false. Did women in the 19th century have the fundamental right to vote? Of course. Were the allowed? No.
I disagree. Abstraction is fundamental to programming. The more abstractions, the better. I'm not talking about design patterns here, but abstractions that hold explanatory power in your problem space. They necessarily increase code comprehension, reduce potential bugs, etc.

Abstractions reduce potential bugs by reducing the 'interaction-space' of a particular entity in your code. Think about a program that has 100 variables all in one function. That is potentially 100! interactions between entities in your code. When you make a change, you have to reason about all 100! interactions to be sure you're not introducing a new bug.

Abstracts greatly reduce this space. If instead you have 10 objects who each contain 10 variables, within the object you have 10! interactions to reason about. In the main function that ties each object together you now have 10! interactions to reason about. This is many many orders of magnitude easier than the original problem.

The more (natural) abstractions, the better your code.
Texas Instruments OMAP 5 Reference Design
As a community of thoughtful 21st-century people, I suggest we reject entirely the idea of "natural rights" and treat it as an archaism.

Natural laws exist; regardless of anything you, I, or the government does, gravity continues to exist as a physical, observable force. Natural rights do not work the same way; they are inherently and in principle unobservable both directly and indirectly. The only thing that is real are the rights that we have in practice (e.g. as a function of law, economics, culture) and the rights that we ought to have, based on testable theories of how these rights lead to human flourishing.

I say this not to demean rights or to say rights or liberty are unimportant. (Similarly, if I say evolution rather than direct divine intervention created humans, that does not demean humans.)

The reason I make this claim is because "natural rights" is a complex concept that many people struggle to understand. But most of that struggle comes from it being an unsustainable idea as well as a dead end: it discourages serious consideration of how we should best organize our society. Religiously-inspired philosophers (John Locke, in this case) spent much time on ideas like this; certainly some people inspired by these ideas did some good things. But I think in our modern era we should set these ideas and other bad philosophy aside and work from better foundations.

Not only will this lead to stronger, more useful thinking generally, but it will also lead to more secular, persuasive dialogue with our legislators in the short term. They are bound in various ways by the Constitution, but they are not bound by the theory of natural or inalienable rights, which is not actually part of that document (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declarationism).

edited for clarity.
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This point cannot be stressed enough, ideas owe everything to that which comes before it, acting like somebody brilliantly creates in a bubble without outside inspiration and help, therefore deserves to take away all the reward is toxic.

Its the tragedy of the commons at an idea level really.
I think there's a big difference between just having a public repo and actually promoting it. It wasn't too long ago that I myself wasn't using version control and decided to learn Git. Someone who's just learning isn't likely to pay for a service like that until they get some experience and understand how to really use it. In the meantime they're putting up half baked projects and little experiments that are awesome to them but worthless to everyone else. Don't you remember being a beginner and thinking you've just done something cool and advanced only to find out later that what you did before was actually pretty mediocre?

Now, of you're out there actually promoting something you've made it's a different story. You really shouldn't be bragging if you really feel something isn't quite ready. But then again I come back to my point about criticism. There's constructive criticism and there's overly harsh criticism. You're right,mthere should definitely be more talk and less action but we all know how we are. I've seen it a million times. A really cool project comes along and there's always those smartest-programmers-in-the-room types that have to tear it apart like its garbage instead of offering up some constructive suggestions or actually taking action. It'll probably never stop so the best we can do is try to grow thicker skin as project creators and try to be more constructive and less snarky as critics.
He's complaining that he didn't get proper training to 'know where to assemble for fire drills', among other things, after he no longer works there. Smells like sour grapes from a disgruntled former employee.
> The things that matter most are things you are born with and this sometimes causes you develop significantly negative feelings towards women as a whole.

Wrong. You're suffering from confirmation bias.

Guys obsess about money and looks to prove their worth to females, but most of that shit doesn't matter, actually. (It's held against you if you're severely deficient, of course.)

What does? A strong sense of self-identity, confidence, the ability to be both a risk-taker and a stable provider, and, more generally, being an interesting person. These are much harder to work on, so you don't hear as much talk about them. You need to be able to enjoy your life without a girlfriend. You need to have something you love to talk about, and, preferably something you can be good at.

Suck up your pride, ask for help, and start working toward taking responsibility for more of your life.
Isn't that pretty much the same as a private repo? I don't think that would be very useful. I think the public or private options are fine. If something isn't ready I doubt anyone would want to follow. Projects that aren't ready have a high probability of never being ready. Plus it goes against the "social coding" part of github. I think the way they do gives you more incentive to finish something once it's public. As for private repos, well I assume if you're paying money for it then you're not fucking around plus I'm sure once the money rolls in GiHub doesn't care if you're social about your coding or now. I mean, it's a great site but it's still a business.
I'm in the same boat. I love my pinboard and dropbox, but I still email documents to myself. Mainly work documents, and since I consider my dropbox a personal account, I don't store work documents on it, or install it on my work machine.

Also, rave for pinboard: It hits that spot for me of doing one thing, doing it well, and not trying to do any other goddamn thing for me. It is $10. I think it's worth it.
Show HN: WebEngage - online surveys with targeting
Hello. I am Avlesh - co-founder and ceo at WebEngage (http://webengage.com)

We have done a small experiment with online surveys. We added the capability of, what we call as, "targeting" these surveys to specific visitors on your website. So, when you create a survey using WebEngage and want to display it to visitors on your website (via a WebEngage widget), we let you choose from a bunch of conditions. E.g. you can say, "this survey should only be displayed to visitors coming from Google search and staying on my home page for at least 30 seconds".

Have a look at a demo survey on http://webengage.com (please wait for 10 seconds for a survey to pop).
Clickable - http://webengage.com (please wait for 10 secs).
New Amazon design
When the discussion of rights comes up, I think that George Carlin has some wise words on the subject.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9-R8T1SuG4

"...Either we have unlimited rights, or we have no rights at all."
-George Carlin
Looking into the original intent of the constitution and imagining the emotions of those involved with its drafting leaves a sense of fantastic optimism, intelligence, and idyllic hope. It's a beautiful piece of Ameprican history that I always take the time to read into when it comes up. I'm glad it was brought up in this context.
Your argument is an echo of a similar one made during the debates over the Bill of Rights. While there was general agreement that the government should be limited to enumerated powers, there was a lot of debate over whether there should also be enumerated rights. Those in favor argued that the enumerated powers would tend to expand and intrude on core liberties unless those fundamental rights were also made explicit. Those against generally argued that including the rights would send the wrong message, and that we would eventually be limited to only those rights. The latter argument lost and here we are.

So what about IP? Well, as you say, we ought to recognize fundamental rights even if they aren't in the Constitution. But it's fairly clear that the founders didn't find copyrights or patents to be fundamental, since they failed to include them in the Bill of Rights but instead explicitly included them in the enumeration of powers. And the term 'intellectual property' wasn't coined until long after the Constitution was written. Copyrights and patents weren't a separate form of property in the law, they were monopolies granted by the state in order to promote manufacturing and distribution, which were at that time very capital intensive.

Regarding your example:

[T]o say that you don't' have a right to it, would be to say that others have the right to forcibly take it from you, wouldn't it?

No, as you noted earlier the Constitution concerns what the government can do to you. It is silent as to what your fellow citizens can do. The 'forcible' part of your hypothetical is already covered by other parts of the Bill of Rights (the Fourth, for instance). So I'd rephrase your statement of the question:

"To say that you don't have an exclusive right to the invention would be to say that the government could copy it and make use of it without your permission, wouldn't it?"

That's closer to the issue we're debating. And in fact, the Government has exactly that power today. But that doesn't settle the issue, because it has the same power over real property. And in both cases, the owner does receive compensation. Why compensate someone for something they're not in some way entitled to?

History is not going to give us the answer as to whether IP is a right. It's going be decided as a matter of modern politics, not historical precedent.
But there's the catch! For an entrepreneur a 9-5 is a short day. And keep in mind that for billions, a 9-5 would be a miracle.

To think that you are above this time investment, or that you can achieve great success without equally great risk, is to believe that you are entitled to more needlessly. This entitlement (not you, just generally) is a mental disease which guarantees failure. Entrepreneur has this same tone. All pomp, without the blood, sweat, and tears to make it mean something.
Philosophy also teaches one to carefully define terms and examine underlying assumptions. Clearly stating the problem often makes the solution obvious.
It's a bold stance, at least. From my experience, it's idiomatic Java and just one of those things you have to do.

In practice, it's useful because it allows more easily for instrumentation later on. And you can easily throw a "synchronized" on the method if necessary.
I did google it and found some polls but nothing that I would consider reliable data.

Maybe my disbelief is too strong.

But judging from the responses and the indications about average knowledge, I'm starting to wonder whether democracy in such an ignorant society is a good idea. P
It's funny, I actually like the design of the site. It holds up well to the test of time. A lot of newer sites could learn from this. Aside from the 640x480 site design it's perfectly modern.

As they say, Simplicity is the height of sophistication.
Trough traditional sources.
I only needed very specific POIs.
guilty as charged. I do it almost everyday. very simple concept. UX is great.
Real Madrid vs Mallorca live
I would really like to see case studies be a result of GitHub. There is so much data available to us thanks to Git, that it wouldn't take that much besides some commentary here or there to have a GitHub repository be a very powerful teaching tool.

A good programmer's "DVD Commentary" would teach me a lot, I think.
My world is full of actors.

God says...
C:\LoseThos\www.losethos.com\text\DARWIN.TXT

ess long continued, had been rendered
highly attractive to insects, they would, unintentionally on their part,
regularly carry pollen from flower to flower; and that they do this
effectually I could easily show by many striking facts. I will give only
one, as likewise illustrating one step in the separation of the sexes of
plants. Some holly-trees bear only male flowers, which have four stamens
producing a rather small quantity of pollen, and a rudimentary pistil;
other holly-trees bear only femal
This idea is the reason that employers want the ability to see all your private details on Facebook when making the hiring decision. Just sayin'.
Is there a context in which it is not seen as a sign of disrespect? Perhaps when someone on HN says "flack" the disrespect is entirely intentional.
Why do most programmers work so hard at pretending that they’re not doing math?
Are you sure? Are you sure that people working at Google didn't just do something for their own profit?
screenshot http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1720553/Screenshots/78.png
I empathize with not wanting to become cocky, but I feel like you're lying to yourself. I could see them as truths if we were talking about triathlon, but something intellectual and logical as programming? If you are able to reach the point where you find yourself enjoying programming, then I think there's good chances that it's only a matter of time - and rightly focused effort - until you are able to produce work of any level of quality, including the current level of the best programmer, and beyond. What sort of limitations make you think otherwise?
Craigslist against SOPA
Has Google broken its promise to users?
Instead of calling intellectual property we should refer to it as intellectual monopoly since that is really what its. It restricts what you can do with your own property.
On a random note, is there a more timeless variation on that phrase? The pots and the kettle that I usually encounter are all made of shiny, silver-colored metal, except for their handles; I've seen a couple of black-metal pots, but not routinely. ...A Wikipedia article[1] suggests that a pot might have been blackened by smoke from being held over a wood fire, which obviously does not happen with electric stoves.

Anyway, at this point, in the spirit of George Orwell[2], I consider it to be a dying metaphor, and have no desire to put it into my writing. Hence my desire for alternatives. So, first off, there is the word "hypocrite". And then if you want a clever thing to say, I don't think "You see the speck in your brother's eye but ignore the plank in your own" will become obsolete, at least for a while. (As long as wood is used for construction, it will probably be put into planks, and people will probably encounter them at some point in their lives. And I don't think "plank" has any competing meanings at the moment.)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pot_calling_the_kettle_black

[2] "Politics and the English Language". In particular, do a text search for "dying metaphors". http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm
WebEngage is really a simple tool with amazing UI. Great work by Webengage team.
Thanks Chirag!
Obat Herbal Diabetes,
Better to play whack-a-mole than play Manhattan Project.

And nobody has to play whack-a-mole. iTunes is a perfect example of "getting with the times".
I'll give you all that, but the color palette is not great. Even using "web safe" colors, I think it could have been significantly improved.
A well-abstracted program can be easier to optimize because modules are more loosely connected and their internal implementations can be replaced/optimized without breaking the rest of the code.
If YCombinator funded/supported say a company that allowed your house to get trashed with no reparations or attempt to make good, then yes I'd hold that against YCombinator. Ultimately Google Inc. is where the money funnels to & is ultimately responsible for it's subcultures.

This idea that Google can't be held responsible for bad employee behavior is borderline religious. Praise Google when it does something good, let Google off the hook when it does something bad.
Freebies | Dedicated site for my unused resources - you should do the same