skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wouldn't regard Excel as "hardly coding". It depends on the difficulty of what you're doing. If you're using it as a data structure to organize numbers, then that's obviously not coding. But complex Excel data modeling feels like coding.

I did this a lot at my last job. Some portions of the spreadsheet function like tables and calculations on data. Others control input variables. Yet others would just display the data in charts and graphs.

Sound familiar?
I don't see how that'd benefit a community like Hacker News.
I developed moderate CT several years ago.
Fortunately just switching to a split keyword and time, my symptoms went away.

Its just weird now that I have to use a big keyboard plugged into my laptop.
I have found finding the balance between quality and actually shipping to be one of the most challenging aspects of being a good developer. Sometimes "good enough" really is, and other times it really isn't. Distinguishing between the two (and all the gray in between) takes experience.
We used sphinx (http://sphinx.pocoo.org/). Uses reStructedText and you can pull in comments/samples directly from your code to help make sure everything's up to date.
I'd also like to mention, since I apparently got downvoted because of this response, that it completely misinterpreted my original comment, quite clearly. When people ask me to do work for them for free, there's no way I'd agree. Of course that's stupid, and I've heard that plenty of times, and turned it down every time.

What I was saying, and what I thought I made clear but apparently didn't enough, was that you should be doing work because you love it. And if you do work in your free time because you love it, you shouldn't be throwing a hissy fit when you aren't making immense profits from it.

You should not do custom work for other people for free, I never advocated this. There is no indication in the original article that someone hired him to take that photo, and I would say it's fair to assume that he definitely was not hired to take it. He took it himself, because he wanted to, in his free time. And now he's complaining that he put it online and people want to use it. That's where I call bullshit.
Probably not. Nobody would notice except people who already don't support it.
Just an additional FWIW:

While I do think the variance ratio in math is significantly different from unity (without speculating as to the cause), it's worth pointing out that while this does explain a lot of the gender imbalance in math, it doesn't come close in computing. Off the top of my head, in math it's something like 35% women, a 1:2 ratio, whereas in tech it's closer to 10%, or 1:9.

To explain a gap that wide based on variance, we'd have to assume that men are way more than 10% more variable in computer ability than women, probably more on the order of 100%, and that seems very unlikely to me (there's not really any data to look at there because CS performance is not as commonly measured as math is).
The Social Aspects of Programming Language Design
Ask HN: Review my new Mac app TwistedPair. Promo codes inside.
I created a new app called TwistedPair as the sister utility to the Mac's native AirPort utility. I used my Macbook at work with a wired connection, and often have to "settle" for wired connections in hotels without WiFi. If I had a problem connecting, it took treading three menus deep in System Preferences, and got frustrating quickly. So I scratched my own itch, and made a menulet that displays your wired network information at-a-glance in the status bar. You can also enable AirDrop on your wired connection, giving you the ability to transfer files between your wired and wireless Macs.

I welcome your feedback on how the app might be improved. If you take a promo code, please leave a comment.

Mac App Store link: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/twisted-pair/id490427284?ls=1&mt=12
App Website link:	http://twistedpair.me/

Promo Codes:

H3PYNT939X4E
PMJPJWLE6TYP
34T6HXA9MK7H
Y9WL7MYKPEL3
RE4LFNYAMPPX
4FJL6F3JLM3H
AWKMA6NWXA6R
I'd donate to support it (I already donate periodically to wikipedia and I'd happily donate more).
Now let's just hope they do OSC justice...
I don't feel that a lot on the app store... the sorting by relevance seems to work well, at least in my experience.

that said, I suffer it on the Android market, where everything I search returns a thousand different apps in random order (e.g. search for Skype retrieves a dozen apps - some times Skype itself is not even the first result)
HN could go dark with Reddit to see what happens when nerds have nowhere to hang out.
They are responsible for fostering a vital economy. Since undercapitalized entrepreneurs are the source of many of the US's great companies, congress is responsible for making it so that they continue to be able to operate efficiently.
I don't see how this can be fixed. I have yet to see a single proposal for internet governance that makes me feel "safer" than the current arrangement.

Whatever entity is given control of the global name or number spaces has extraordinary power. Any such organization will be subject to corruption, both from within (the subject of the article) and without (e.g. SOPA). Moving governance up to higher levels of government (like the U.N.) isn't any better. Do we really want France or the WIPO to have any input, much less China or Russia? That's a rhetorical question for anyone concerned about censorship.

I think it inevitable that the Internet will continue to splinter along national boundaries. Ultimately, the internet will consist of national networks, separate and insular to varying degrees. The challenge for hackers will be how to connect to the networks outside of our own respective countries.
This is a nice complaint against ICANN, but I'm disappointed that it didn't explain any potential solutions to the problem.

Whose hands should DNS oversight be in? What alternative solutions are out there?
Absolutely yes. Sure, most Hacker News readers know about SOPA but how many of those have actively opposed that bill yet? Raising awareness can't be bad, especially as this probably is the last opportunity to effectively take a stand in this matter.
The cast looks great, but I'm honestly not sure about Gavin Hood. His XMen movie was fairly campy, and there will be a lot of pressure to do the same with the Ender's Game movie. I have my doubts.
And here is the reason I left photography and became a programmer. It's a great hobby and a shit profession.
Everyone is going to say how this is preaching to the choir. But I think it's good if it goes black so the largest news media has even more of a story. It's one thing if just Reddit goes black, that will be a big news story. But it's another thing if many sites on the internet go black.

Come to think of it, I may do this with my website as well. It's no hacker news or Reddit, but it's a good day to do it.
Gifts for science geeks
That's correct. If you remember, Tim Cook described this limits on PPC based products as a "thermal problem" which is what drove them towards Intel. Presumably, ARM's licenses don't have this problem, in part, as @rbanffy implies, because the ARM architecture doesn't rely on a single source as the PPC did.
Used RE4LFNYAMPPX
This guy makes more than a living (from the look of things):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYkNKP96b84
I'm about to get on a plane and don't have time to fully rebut, but I assure you the treatment of men in nursing school is a problem taken very seriously. Google "recruiting men in nursing," to see more.
Does this link actually work for anyone? I'm just getting the sites home page (and don't see that story in quick scroll)
We should have an erlang day on jan 18th
Someone a long time ago, possible H.G. Wells, said "Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write". He was right. This would suggest that most citizenship is effected inefficiently.

I suspect in 10 years at least, things will go similarly for programming. But maybe in 30,40,50 years; better diets,better environments, nutritional junk food, better education, designer children, gene therapy, drugs, implants, whatever will push mean IQ out of its current local maximum.
1) The more sites decide to shut down on the 18th, the easier it becomes for major websites like Google, Twitter, and Facebook to join. It also increases the chances that this is going to be covered by the mainstream media.

2) Perhaps a blackout will give some HNers the final push (and time) to make some phone calls to their representatives.

3) It can serve as a demonstration of what the web will be like if SOPA kicks in. Many HNers think that SOPA is a bad idea, a blackout will make us feel it as well.
If you want to create art and sell it, great for you. Take all the necessary steps to protect your work from theft while at the same time raising awareness for your artistry.

If you want to create art to share with the rest of the world, great for you. Do so without strings attached and without expecting anything in return.

I see the purpose behind both posts, but they seem to be arguing over something that doesn't need to be argued over. Some people like to sell their software, some like to give it away. Neither is right, neither is wrong, the only context in which the actions can be judged are when they are done so through the artist...it is up to the artist to decide whether selling something or giving something away is right or wrong.
Hopefully that's where good docs come in ;) But I definitely agree that can cause confusion if not explained carefully.
I did a test with different Geocoders (Google, MapQuest, Bing, Yahoo, Nokia). Google was lightyears ahead of the rest in my test. It was for the Netherlands, though.
This might be a minority opinion, but even as a huge sci-fi fan, I'm not sure the story holds up once you know the ending. I'm sure I'll end up seeing it anyway though.
I think you meant "land of contradictions."
Right, I understand that. At this point, they haven't responded to me at all.
The DMCA doesn't apply outside the US. Given that US laws cannot be applied in other countries (but they are trying with ACTA), you need to block piracy at the border. ICE has been doing this with Operation In Our Sites, but SOPA attempts to streamline the process.

(Some copyright owners mistakenly or optimistically sent DMCA takedowns to The Pirate Bay, and TPB wrote hilarious ridiculing emails back.)
This is a neat idea. Best of luck! Looks great.
Well pause in video games is actually kinda complicated. By the jak period I had a pause mask (64 bits) that could pause all sorts of independant parts of the game separately. Particles, Camera movement, texture cycling, light changes, enemies, etc.

Sometimes you just want to free the characters in place (and usually enemies and the like) but don't want the whole screen going motionless. For example in Crash, when Aku came out, I wouldn't want to pause the fruit from flying to the score. That would look odd. The Aku pause is to give the player a breather, not just to pause.

Also, the real pause brings up the pause menu, which you certainly don't want with Aku.
I think it's supposed to be for solidarity. It's not to raise awareness on HN as much as show that we are right there with the others.
The comparative advantage the professional assignment or stock photographer brings to the table isn't just creating a "good enough" photograph, it's about creating the RIGHT photograph for the client.

This is why microstock and craigslist haven't completely destroyed the market, since the professional can reliably create the RIGHT photo for the assignment (or in the case of stock, consistently predict and create the exact images the target market needs).

But it does exert downward pressure. The photo editor/art buyer is always cost-conscious, and whereas she used to only have the option of professional-quality-work at professional rates, now there is a huge pool of "good enough" photos at vastly lower cost. Buyers of photography, as it turns out, aren't actually that discriminating, so more and more frequently they're opting for the "good enough" photo instead of the RIGHT photo.

And this is where the professionals start to get irked. It'd be one thing if the new competition were undercutting them with similar-quality work at lower cost. It's be they're being undercut by work that is often objectively lower in value to the client, and they know the client would be better served.

It's actually quite analogous to the issue of outsourcing: a vast new pool of cheaper but lower-quality labor supply becomes available, and many firms move operations overseas. The end-product is crappier but cheaper. Nobody actually cares about quality, and given the choice, they'll go for cheaper and "good enough" over expensive and good.

Interestingly, Apple is somehow managing to upend this paradigm by producing really-good quality product at premium-but-not-ridiculous prices through design and manufacturing innovation and exceptional marketing, and is taking back market share from the mid-tiers. I can't think of how the photo industry as a whole can accomplish this, though, since it's B2B rather than B2C, and it's an army of independent professionals and not a unified association. (There's a legal limit on how much the industry can coordinate: the major photographers' trade organization was fined for price-fixing years ago becaused they had published pricing guidelines.)

(DISCLAIMER: I worked in the photo industry for years, and still shoot the occasional assignment)
A simple demo of a modal dialog in Bootstrap Toolkit.
Right. Understood.
He's got a point.
Hmm, I suppose in this hypothetical example, I know that this somebody isn't using that clip in their work because I specified "on its own" and "without any transformative addition/change".

If you are embedding the video in the middle of a document, its clearly not on its own and has been added to. However, if you embed 10 minutes of a video in the middle of your document, now that might be too much to be considered fair use.

I think your point is that a weaknesses of the algorithm I proposed is that media considered "fair use" could be flagged as infringing. My response to that is that Google already has procedures for dealing with images/videos that were questionably reported as offensive.
I've been on HN for over a year :-)

Starting out is hard now in console gaming, except "maybe" x-box live or something. You'd have to start on iPhone, Android or the like where the costs are lower.
I work in marketing->e-commerce and I think it's a great idea to learn to "program". By no means am I a good developer, but I have played enough with Rails and PHP and deployed a couple of simple apps to production environments and I feel like I know enough to understand how to put together a coherent business requirements document.

I think if not programming, at least process modeling or class diagrams should be learned.
This has been all over my Facebook and twitter feeds..

Maybe "This photograph is not free.. But this marketing is" would be more apt now!
So what?

You chose to make your photograph free. John Mueller chose to charge for his work. The point is that the creator gets to charge for his work if he wants. If the price is too high, he doesn't make money. If the price is too low, he doesn't maximize revenue. But it is his choice to make.
This was the first American title that was heavily produced by Japan. Before us, Tetris was the only external game that had sold really well. Across all consoles/machines!
If they're selling the product, then they only have to provide the code to the customers. I could be totally off, but that's my understanding of the GPL -- it creates an obligation to share the code with whoever you distribute it to, not to everyone. In that case, they have no obligation to ever respond to you unless you paid for a copy from them.
HN itself? No

All the startups/sites that everyone on here runs? Absolutely

You don't even have to go 100% dark, you can just have a splash telling your users about SOPA. You need to realize
The "Galaxy Song" only specifies that there are a 100 billion stars :-)

For some serious geeky pedantry, it's hard to beat the Wikipedia entry for the song (especially the section entitled "Accuracy of figures quoted in the lyrics"):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_Song#Accuracy_of_figures...
It's in a very early stage (not production ready), but some colleagues and I have been working on a automated testing DSL built on top of RSpec that lets you generate API documentation from tests which validate the documentation is correct. It requires RSpec and a Rack-compatible service (incl. Rails). I think the idea has legs.

https://github.com/zipmark/rspec_api_documentation
"but nobody wants to live in"

Not true, people want to live there, most just can't afford it. In fact in some of these towns most of the units have been sold -- just not sold to people who live there.

"Can someone explain why this does not indicate the Chinese economy is headed inexorably towards a massive crash"

Probably in the same way that no one going to see Adventures of Pluto Nash didn't cause a massive crash in the US economy or even in the film industry here. I'll elaborate...

What percent of the Chinese economy is real estate? 6%?

What % of Chinese real estate do these ghost towns represent? 1%? 5%? 10%?

Are there 20 success stories (boom towns) for every ghost town? 5? 10? 100? None?

Ghost towns maybe a real and dangerous symptom of a coming Chinese crash. Or not. It's really hard to jump from "giant examples of waste" to "the economy is going to crash".

There are certainly other indicators that housing is a huge bubble in parts of China. There's also the inexorable and unbelievable growth that China has experienced over the last few decades. Growth like that has a tendency to make lots of things look like bubbles that aren't.
Silly error... I don't (currently) use G+ on a daily basis, so this error message is a bit facile - I haven't even touched G+ today, so either the HN shared circle is too big, or it's reached it's own daily limit.

Edit: apparently the limit is 1000, so just add the shared circle from a posting that has < 1000 entries (like this one: https://plus.google.com/106419647632534512037/posts/DaWro5Hp... )
Call with current continuation for C programmers
Yep, I bought the 3M Ergonomic Mouse - it's not really a mouse, it's more like a joystick.

http://www.amazon.com/3M-Ergonomic-Optical-Compatible-EM500G...

If you want to continue using a regular mouse, switch hands (it takes a bit of getting used to). Or buy a wrist guard that keeps your wrist straight. That helps a bit.
Infographic: Profit Hunting In The App Store
How Much Should People Have Saved In Their 401Ks At Different Ages
The flaw is that no one is going to recreate that photograph from scratch. Any professional who sells photographs is amortizing the cost of his equipment over many sales. Buyers pay according to what they (and the market) think that particular photograph is worth. The cost of the equipment doesn't really factor into it.

It's similar to buying anything on the market - A toaster would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to build from scratch (http://www.thetoasterproject.org/), but no one pays that much (not does any manufacturer expect that much) since no one is really going to build one from scratch.

The author's argument gets really weird at the end when he claims that if someone misappropriates the image, he would charge the cost of his camera, his laptop, his software - the whole shebang that went into it. It's a very strange way of computing the loss of value to him. The loss of value could be zero (if there was no buyer for that image in the first place - a lot of photographers take excellent images without anyone actually buying or wanting to buy them ever), or it could be many thousands of dollars if it is a piece of art that is highly valued. Basing the value on the cost of the equipment that went into producing it does not do justice to the image either way.
Charity Engine: donate processing power
Fixing DNS -- how to break up ICANN
Tumblr has already had a blackout event. Users loading the home page for the first time that day saw text that was randomly changed to strings of "██████" and images defaced with censor bars. (Subsequent viewings showed only the anti-SOPA banner at the top.)
The only reason I would say "NO" is because I'll miss HN for the day. That being said, it's the right thing to do. There needs to be solidarity shown throughout all web companies. It's the only way to win.
Between the "preaching to the choir" and "solidarity" arguments, I basically come out even. But I think HN, being fairly low-profile to mainstreamers and very much full of our SOPA-fearing choir, could serve as the place that we can rely on to continue having an intelligent conversation w/r/t SOPA while everything else is blacked out.
I've seen a lot of people argue that sites like Hacker News shouldn't engage in a protest like this on the grounds that most of its audience probably already supports the protest's cause. I think this is a fundamentally flawed view about the nature of protesting.

It is without question that the most effective protests are those that have direct impacts on the opposition and its supporters, but protesting is bigger than that. It is about trying to be heard just as much as it is about being heard. It is about speaking your mind and standing behind things you believe in even when your protest may fall on deaf ears.

For that reason, the overwhelming amount of people within the Hacker News community that oppose SOPA is the perfect reason TO join in the protest.

I would miss Hacker News for the day, but I would take great pride in being a part of a community that stands up for what it believes in.
I think Paul Graham and the Admins of Reddit should go around Silicon Valley and ask to be paid to take HN and Reddit down for the last three weeks of every quarter.
I managed to give myself RSI [+], to the point that typing was seriously uncomfortable, by typing something like 20,000 words in a single day. What got me on the road to recovery was a pretty radical cure --- two weeks cold turkey on keyboards. That reduced symptoms substantially, to the point of twinges of pain on individual fingers, at which point I'd just stop using that finger.

At this point, I'm largely pain-free, but when that changes, I'm pretty aggressive about treating it --- laying off the affected hand, taking anti-inflammatories, and wearing braces for a few days afterward. (It's almost always the case that I've slipped into typing with bent wrists, and braces force me back into good habits.)

[+] repeated stress injury --- more likely tendonitis than
carpal tunnel in my case, but diagnosis is tricky
It's a symbolic gesture. I believe this leads to a fundamental question of whether it's essential to the kind of political movement we represent.

So for instance democrats depend on notion of symbolic representation to ground their concept of political representation. Without the former, the latter becomes vacuous.

"What kind of advantage does it give us?" seems to be the question. Perhaps it's a moral boost? In the political game, it technically says nothing. In perhaps our own schema of doing things, it technically says nothing. But the idea that people use these tools and can intentionally limit themselves (like with Freedom, the app that locks yr Internet connection) to represent freedom.