skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>You know what would help African farmers? Education about irrigation and scientific, low-moisture farming techniques. Provide non-hybrid seed and equipment than be used by locals to clean and store it.

The solution is never so simple. I could just as easily and correctly (ignoring all human implications) say "You know what would help African farmers? Move them somewhere more conducive to human life." Sounds awesome in theory, but consider the implementation details and effects on life of both options. You always have to make a trade off in practice between what is an "ideal" solution scientifically and what can actually be implemented given the real humans involved.
On the other hand someone who is more taught by experience will start by writing awful code like putting their whole program into 1 or 2 functions , they will then experience pain points because of this and realise certain re-occuring problems and either come up with their own solutions to them or read "gang of 4" , this will teach them design patterns the natural way.

This is exactly how I taught myself. The transition from unorganized to organized (patterns) happened for me pretty naturally. For me, it was learn how to organize, or quit. Now-a-days, patterns are everywhere (and probably have been, but I didn't get it until I got it :)
Misleading title. From 1994 to 2007, Bill Gates "gave" to a foundation an amount slightly larger than what US Foreign Aid "gave" in the single year of 2007.

The Foundation has not given that money to charities, it has given some small percentage and invested the rest so that it can last forever.

I put gave in quotes because possibly both parties are not giving unconditionally, but rather purchasing either respect or obedience or something else.
You might want to try wishtunes on the appstore for iPhone as a way to capture snippets of text.
And yet if they say anything otherwise they are accused of being nihilists.
Providing capital to fund productive and risky ventures undertaken by others is a valuable service.

Everyone on HN recognizes the importance of angels and VCs in the ecosystem - what's so different about what Buffett does? What's so magical about an IPO that means, once it happens, no one who risks their own money on the venture should count as having contributed to its growth?
http://wayback.archive.org/web/*/http://www.viamall.com/secu...

eg http://web.archive.org/web/200012060403/http://www.viamall.c... :

"About Security

All online transactions at Yahoo! Stores are handled with industry-standard SSL encryption."
HTML5 Logo The Majority Of Web Developers Are Moving To HTML5
We do have a second column. Right now the search suggestions appear there and sometimes maps, but there will be more!
"Functional Thinking" by Neal Ford
Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son (2011)
Thanks -- will look into that bug.
>Genetically engineered seed is sterile and patented.

This is not accurate as a blanket statement. Not all genetically engineered seeds are sterile, only a limited subset (Monsanto only acquired the sterile technology in 2007 and I don't think they use it in all seeds)
We're looking into different providers, but right now that is coming through BOSS, though you're right that is MSN on the backend.
Thanks for telling me how to do my job, I'm a kernel developer :-).

A bug in kernel code means you panic the machine, so you have to do a reboot.

Whether you load the modules at runtime, on demand, or the driver is statically compiled into the kernel has nothing to do with it. The decision of when to do linking does not influence development a bit.

Also, having multiple machines is required, not optional, because you use the dev machine to connect with a kernel debugger through a serial/firewire link to the test machine.
Sublime Text: The text editor you’ll fall in love with
Looks pretty real to me...they didn't have cgi back in the 40's. However, if they could do that then why wouldn't they still be doing it now with better technology?

All a bit morbid for me.
I recall that the SSL wikipedia link didn't work right on some mobile browsers, but maybe that is fixed now as they've changed the way that is all set up.
Greatness exists in all of us
The "Award Winning" Link redirects to http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/ecommerce/vw/pcmag.html instead of http://ycombinator.com/viaweb/pcmag.html
Dropbox 2.0 Learns a Hard Lesson About the Rules of Android
> they have to focus on getting someone who can speak the local language

So, for you it's just some small "regional team" when they stop calling from Kenya, after speaking local language, and then some people from Google India take over?

(*) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3462983
Amen Borther "forgive me father I used 5 GOTOs last week"
Journey to the Center of an Espresso Machine
If you squint really hard you could make that case, but in SQLite they are really not the same. You cannot use SQL syntax and you can't do other operations on cursors other than read the columns for the matching row.

Virtually all other database engines calculate the query results up front. It is more effective in their implementations to do it that way. For example they will also calls to ask how many rows remain in the results. SQLite has no such API and the only way to find out is to actually retrieve each result row.
That's right - I remember when the DMCA got passed and there was just as much opposition. Now the DMCA is the new "sanity". Something tells me we're losing the war.

I find myself accepting that some of the things I would like to do are just going to have to be done underground.
The productivity increases caused by the computer revolution did not increase real (adjusted for inflation) wages though.

All the profit was eaten by entrepreneurs and finance. Wage-workers got very little, their wage growth rate actually decreased significantly since the computer revolution.
It's a victory for the internet now that all our organization and effort that would be directed to (simply delaying) PIPA can now be directed toward passing useful, protective legislation.

Of course this seems like a pipe dream, but we're at the height of awareness about SOPA and PIPA's effects in the tech community. If we are ever going to organize to become offensive in legislation, now is the time, and the postponement of PIPA is beneficial.
Sigh. If I had a dollar for every "your compiler should optimize away X", I'd be retired. Should doesn't mean does.

Plus, no, often I can't afford a function invokation. Because it's yet another cache miss.

If all of those things don't matter (or you work on a large enough team that the benefits of abstraction are worth it), yes, add getters/setters everywhere. For the rest of us, we might have actual _reasons_ why we don't cargo-cult our code.
You seem to have good and evil confused. Speaking as someone who's just ordered a number of meds online, helping me find the meds I need is "good". Trying to hinder this activity and censor it for stupid damn reasons is "bad".
Fighter Jet F-35B Vertical Landing (video)
Cleaning up Adobe Captivate’s SCORM Publishing Template, Part 3: JavaScript
Sounds like the should then be sacked automatically for fraud against the electorate and their position come up for re-election (with them excluded for a term).

No, it'll never happen.
PopVox has an “organisations endorsing” / “organisations opposing” section. It's not as gameable as finnw suggests, except for some misrepresentation: the “US Chamber of Commerce” is a large, extremely right wing lobby, some industry groups don't exactly represent their constituents; call it a start.

SOPA: https://www.popvox.com/bills/us/112/hr3261
PIPA: https://www.popvox.com/bills/us/112/s968
Because that's roughly the worst way to render sprites, in terms of performance :)

You want sprites to be an array, and render that in one go.
I think this video was made for Metallica clip:

http://youtu.be/S28LDft7cO4
France Loses AAA Rating from S&P
It's really intimidating for new coders to have their work publicly available. The programmer community are very harsh critics and I know I don't want someone to come looking through my code and call it shit. I know it's not very likely but it's still a fear however irrational.

There are times when you hope someone will find your project useful but know (or probably feel) that everyone else is better than you so you end up qualifying your work with some "it's not finished" or "I know this is crap but.." statement.

It's weird because we have this fear (I keep saying we and I'm not sure if this is a universal sentiment but it definitely applies to me) of harsh criticism but we're also proud of our work and hope its good enough for people to find useful. I guess the solution is to keep your public repos but be careful how you promote them outside of GitHub and "good" programmers also need to be just a bit nicer with the tone of their criticism. It takes guts to show off your work I think.
Speak for yourself. I see "the Internet" getting increasingly aware of the need to act politically to keep what we've got. They will absolutely keep trying to pass laws like this - but maybe this one won't pass.

We didn't have anything like this kind of organization or response to the DMCA, even though I think we all felt a similar outrage (of course the DMCA doesn't overreach to this extent). This is new. This is progress.
PG discusses both OpenMarket and ViaWeb here - http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html
Stack Overflow can Make You a Better Learner, Too
If you add a hot key that allows the user to automatically upload the file/image etc. it would save steps and differentiate you from email.

I'd probably use it, and may even pay for it depending on the price.

EDIT: Just because I am price sensitive doesn't mean others are (don't price it low on my comment). You also may have some lockin with this since you will have their files so keep that in mind when pricing.
The point here is not if Google is evil or not. Obviously, the heads of Google weren't aware of this scam.

The point is that any employee of Google can access such data. And Google holds a lot of data. A real damn lot of data. Moreover, it sounds like it was much more than a lone employee scamming people. It was probably a small organized group.

It means you data, and sometimes your business isn't always safe.

Thus, Google is dangerous. It's not Google's fault. It's just what happens when you get too big or too large.
Javascript tree planter
This is awesome..
The compiler can't really change things like the class hierarchy, and a lot of the more interesting optimizations are done at runtime.
Or, in other words, the perfect amount...

Philosophically, I agree. I view premature abstraction in the same light as premature optimization. I believe both abstraction and optimization are incarnations of your understanding of the problem. You want them in important places, not necessarily everywhere, and hence you want them late enough in the engineering process that you understand which places are important.

That said, within the comfort zone, there are high and low levels of abstraction. For example, in a project the size of Minecraft, I would expect CS major code to contain an ObjectFactoryFacadeCollection or two. Minecraft has nothing of the sort. It sticks almost exclusively to the Mob::HostileMob::Zombie inheritance we all grew up with. This is not bad or good[1], it's simply a reflection of the low-abstraction style of attacking problems that I associate with self-taught programmers.

On the other hand, its Magic Number to Constant ratio is downright scandalous . . . ;) Though it's possible that some of that is an artifact of the compilation/decompilation process.

[1] I'm lying, in this case it's a good thing.
So, where can we find this mythical journalist then ...

I'm kidding, I think.
IPad 3 Said to Have High-Def Screen, LTE
3. You can have orders forwarded by fax.

Not much to comment on regarding this, other than it jumped out at me. Wonder how popular this feature was and if it was automated at all

[edit: quote from http://ycombinator.com/viaweb/howitwor.html]
A huge benefit to this tool would be instant change feedback. Specifically, given that this site uses bootstrap, it would be nice to see the changes you put in to the various input fields change the css settings for the editor itself.
If you aren't interested in a post, don't vote it up and don't comment on it. This type of meta-commentary is not useful. The (as of right now) 161 votes and 99 comments on this post indicate that it certainly is HN worthy to a significant number of people.
Which is why many projects have moved beyond writing such things by hand, and use css-compilers. And interoperability is never one of the premises of the bleeding edge, which is generally what those myriad posts touch on (HTML5 audio, for example).

Many of the older CSS3 specs are now supported in modern browsers, so I'd say we're pretty close, really. Or now, if you only support the most recent version (which accounts for what, >50%?). A stupendously far cry from where we used to be not too long ago.
How To Get People To Tell You The EXACT Product They’re Want
WRONG. That's like saying all software is proprietary. While some prominent genetically modified organisms sold by Monsanto are sterile and patented, it doesn't mean all GMO's are or have to be.
Microsoft Trustworthy Computing Turns 10: What's Next
What everyone in the SOPA debate is missing: IP is not a fundamental right
I had to edit the title as it was too long.
A big benefit for a user like me would be how to integrate it into my day to day workflow. A chrome/firefox extension would really go a long way.
I'd kinda like this kind of evaluation on the code I write for work.
Top Pentest tools you can use to make your Iphone become a pentest device
I've been meaning to build this exact same thing for some time. Upon opening my inbox it goes "me me me me(2) me me(5) me". I found the same thing; Dropbox, Evernote, and everything else could provide the same sort of thing, sure, but they just don't fit in with the way I work. I don't want to tag things, or add a title, or install an extension or an app.

Open window, ctrl+v, move on.

One suggestion, grouping of similar items. If I find multiple links or have notes I want to correlate I usually end up replying back to myself so it stays in the same thread.

For the record, I just e-mailed the Hopper link to myself.
People use email because that's still the only ubiquitous app.

I use Dropbox and Pinboard and Instapaper. I still find myself emailing things to myself because whatever iPad app I'm using doesn't yet integrate to any of those but does have email.

Email also exists on all sorts of devices that don't support apps.

That said, nice job - the simplicity and UX is great.
Then you just reinsert the provisions in another bill next year.

A "win" would be a law that materially increased internet freedom.
It's European ;-)

But no. As far as I can tell it's Pinterest. Maybe they're hoping to get acquired?
> Computer Engineering is generally hardware and firmware design, something that is becoming less and less important as generalized processors have become smaller, cheaper, and more powerful. At this point, almost everything can be done in software, so a Computer Science degree is more important.

And who, exactly, do you think is designing these new processors?
Interesting, back when I was vetting location services I looked over SimpleGeo and something struck me that they would not be a stable platform to work with.

Call it a gut instinct.

I'm glad I made the decision to roll my own location system from scratch otherwise I don't know what position I would be in now.
This system does precise temperature control (heating and cooling) of the reaction vessel, which is filled with your sample DNA and the right enzymes.

There are other systems which benefit from precise temperature control: make chocolates (getting the right consistency depends on following the right temp curve), sous-vide cooking, SMD soldering ovens, there emerges a need for generalized PID (proportional-integral-derivative) temp controllers. But hey, one's just emerged! http://brettbeauregard.com/blog/2012/01/introducing-the-ospi...
You clearly have never worked with an outsourced team. Shit like this can happen with the utmost of ease - unless Google has an internal time constantly involved in the actual area of the outsourced team.
Straight Talk About Grading
Making your code public is a good exercise in taking the criticism of others, and learning which type of criticism you can easily discard.

My GitHub page is far from impressive, it's mainly a collection of project that I think are fun to work on, or things I like to play around with in my spare time. Still, I make half-baked things public because I'm hoping someone will come along and offer feedback.

In terms of negative feedback, I refer you to this interview with Rich Hickey. http://www.codequarterly.com/2011/rich-hickey/ Here's the section I'm thinking of.

Fogus: What would you say to people who claim that Clojure is not a “real Lisp”?
Hickey: Life is too short to spend time on such people.

So even the creator of a programming language (not trivial to implement!) has to field a fair amount of flak from nay-sayers.

So if you're inspired to write something, put it out there. The worst thing that can happen is that someone will offer to help. The people tearing it down are spending their lives criticizing rather than creating.
5 Proven Ways to Generate Revenue From Facebook
ITC: Motorola does not violate Apple patents | Apple - CNET News
Reiterates the fact that the more you realize you are a terrible programmer, the better you are. Very awesome of someone with his stature to flat out admit the fact that he has flaws. Kudos!
That link gives a 404 for me. :(

Also, going from your webpage, hitting the about button, it says you can read about the development progress, seems to link to the same place (well, without the "www"), and it also 404's.

Thanks!

Edit: Seems to be a typo, you have

http://www.explodingfistbump.com/articles/how-and-why-we-cre...

in the links, and going to explodingfistbump.com and following the link there, it is

http://www.explodingfistbump.com/articles/how-and-why-we-cre...

where the difference is the "d" in "-we-created-a-directory-"

Edit again: Foo URL shortening. Well, anyway, the second link works, the first one doesn't. I hope you can find the typo from this.
Yes, it's called the "Overton Window".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
FYI Blog Spam, source is: http://frugaldad.com/microsoft/
Haha that was awesome
>You're saying: one mistake in a tiny branch office, entire global company goes out of business.

Nope I'm trying to temper your outlandish general statements; and failing.

napierzaza said, roughly, it was Googles fault if they hired criminals and those people were acting criminally either through lack of oversight or otherwise. You said something along the lines of it being expected that Google would commit crimes and that this is merely the cost of innovation. I asked if Google inc. acting criminally bothered you and you appeared to answer that it didn't that it was impossible for them to do good without also committing 'evil'.

TBH I can't really believe anyone who values the rule of law (particular its equal application) could countenance such a position. So, do you believe that rich corporations should be immune from the laws that bind the rest of us?

Hypothetical: If an employee in McDonald's overcharges all the customers do you think that McDonald's/the franchisee is completely devoid of responsibility because it was "just an employee"?
You shouldn't optimize a personal project for your first hire. Do the simplest thing that works, and then abstract/iterate.
A new idea fills the window of what the public regards as unthinkable, causing the desired idea to shift into the window of what the public views as sensible, without its proponents necessarily having explained any benefits of the desired idea.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
Oh, you can certainly bring it down for a refactor. Just grab your guns, as long as our previous laziness has not allowed those in power to take them away.

Am I advocating the violent overthrow of the US Government? Nnnnnnope, just stating a point.
I have been very happy with github. I've been using it for the last few months and it's worked pretty well. Specially for hg-heads like me. :-)
The ideal solution is to be less talk, more action. You can fork a repo in Github and submit a pull request when you're ready. Instead of typing out a long complaint, clone the repo and try and fix it if you can. Then push it back, and you've solved the problem for everyone once it's done.

Realistically, though, I think you should avoid putting your code in the public domain until you're ready for the criticism or the feedback. Working in the open right from the start and expecting people to stay hush until you personally announce it is a stupid idea if you're concerned about people spreading the word too soon. You're not going to be able to issue an embargo on your work until a set time.

In this respect, why would you even push your code to a public Github repo in the first place if you objectively knew it wasn't ready for public consumption?
Philosophically, I agree. I view premature abstraction in the same light as premature optimization.

It's usually easier to optimize later since optimisations are often just taking sections of code independantly and making them quicker. There is the whole 90/10 rule (or whatever it's called) that says it's better to highly optimise a few sections of bottleneck code rather than the whole thing.

Trying to retrofit an abstraction to a piece of code is almost always a horrible experience frought with mess and compromise.
I'm not looking down on him, just saying he doesn't really belong in the same company as Bill Gates. There is a lot of Microsoft hate out there, which is partially deserved, but he still provided a needed and useful product/service that has revolutionized the PC industry. And then after doing that he turned around and gave most of it away. Much more praiseworthy than Buffet IMO.
I don't use prefixed versions in any of my work. pretty much all of them are for non-layout styles, which just means that people who don't upgrade their browsers to the latest version get a slightly uglier version of the site. I like to give people a reason to upgrade without breaking my site for them.
Do you have any links to his comments? I agree with him (Most ruby "hackers" couldn't write a single line of code for an F1 car), and feel they also don't have enough soft skills, I'd like to see his view on the matter.
"Has given", then.
I disagree, the DMCA caused a huge outcry on the Internet of 14 years ago. It's just "the Internet" was much smaller. Much much much smaller. In 1998 my non-technical family had heard of the internet. In 2012 they live on it. It was slow, but the accumulated change has been enormous.
I don't know about that story, in any case putting illegal ads on your public web site seems a weird way to make money. Wouldn't it be rather easy to find you and sue you? I am sure the police knows where Google Headquarters are??
"First, polls have shown that U.S. citizens drastically overestimate the amount of the federal budget allocated to foreign aid. As I recall, the average estimate is 25%; the reality is less than 0.1%."

That is very hard to believe. Why would anybody think that the government gives away a quarter of its budget? I would think that a guess would be based that on something reasonable. Like your own personal or family budget for instance. Who would (or could) give away a quarter of their family budget? Not many I'm guessing. I would expect guesses between 1 and 10 percent. Twenty five percent sounds like a polling error. Or a missed decimal place.
The HP-15C was reissued at long last
Wow that's impressive!
One of the best calculators ever made