skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, I think that the problem with what you're saying is the definition of "consent". Suppose there existed a part of society that was born to people of means, or at least - connections. Then, suppose there was another part that was born to generations of neglect, and even abuse by the other part (I think that in the US, abuse had taken some extreme forms at various times in history). Now, I'm not so sure that a person coming from the disadvantaged part of society can actually give his free "consent" to sell a kidney to someone coming from the well-connected part. Sure, both side may want what the other side offers, but I doubt the freedom of such a decision. There are many forms of coercion - some of them very subtle yet very powerful.

EDIT: Though, again, my main complaint isn't about one opinion or another regarding this issue, but about the lack of discussion of what is, in-fact, the real issue here. Instead, I see commenters suggesting ways to deal with vandalism or "crap data". To me it sounds like discussing the (efficient) mechanics of, well, I don't want to give extreme historical analogies here which do not apply, but the point is that people are quick to suggest ways for improving a process before giving serious, and I mean serious, thought to the question of whether this process should exist in the first place, and what could its effect be on the minds and souls of the people its targeting.
Have been using this for a while now as a quick way to get data a bit readable. Works pretty well.
I fully agree with you. It seems the louder somebody shouts "Apple is the best, they invented x" the more you can be sure that

- the person has not much background in computing
- often hated/never could get PCs to do what they wanted/is scared of computers

But they don't realize that Apple's great computers are standing on the shoulders of decades of PC innovation (partly done by Apple, but also many others).

Downvoters: Try to read the comment and understand that this is not attacking people who like Apple, but fanboys who shout "Apple is the best because..." Don't turn voting into a popularity contest based on the products YOU like.
That's an interesting question. I wonder if it's not also social habit as it would be somewhat awkward to try to talk to someone's feet or if they were sideways to you.
During shared meals I suspect they do. It'd be awkward to hang out with an upside-down person.
I'm ready for space tourism.
If you want reproducible science, the software needs to be open source
Can't see why you're being downvoted here. I think it's a reptilian defensive response from the REST academics.
Starforce, for those here not familiar with it, is essentially a very competently designed kernel rootkit: it installs a VM in kernel mode triggered by interrupt handlers, hooks nt!SwapContext to track every execution context on the system, and basically runs as a resident service to decrypt functions in game titles on demand.
What effect do you think calculators have?

I do some SAT tutoring, and I find that students are helpless at basic arithmetic if they can't use a calculator.

My suspicion is that calculators prevent students from developing mental math skills, and that this hurts conceptual understanding across the board.

But I can only see the results of the system, so I don't know what actually produced the types of students I'm seeing. I may be wrong about calculators - from what you say, it could simply be that the system in general is bad.
How Jetpac Built a Photo Quality Algorithm for $5k in 3 Weeks
As someone who has suffered a bout of bilateral tendinitis and a bulged neck disk, let me blunt and say: bullshit.

Now, I'm not telling you that there are not forms of RSI that are some, weird, self-defeating psychological thing. And certainly a positive attitude may help with recovery. But do not run around telling people with real, physical issues that it's all in their head.
I like having my subconscious manipulated by headset-adorned white women, you insensitive clod!

(Serious point: the reason it works is because it works. Ie "sex sells".)
Please downvote this comment too. The more you downvote me without commenting, the more you confirm my superior skills in system design.
The kiosks actually coming up missing would be a bigger concern than hacking.
Doesn't many luxury cars have innovations way before normal cars do, simply because these innovations have yet to come down in price? I think there will always be some features you can get on an Audi that you can't get on a Volkswagen.

And there's even holy flamewars between BMW, Audi and Mercedes supporters on car forums :)
> "Nothing wrong with that, just don't claim the chef is making vast strides..."

I take it you don't watch much cooking channel.

Also, while the linked article mentions a variety of related power supply information, it only speculates on what the claimed innovation might have been. He looked at, and later ruled out, a couple things, but that doesn't mean there wasn't some other unique aspect. I would have liked to see research on the claim of uniqueness, rather than research on what else was available at the time. Perhaps the unique thing was missed.

It's interesting that whatever one thinks about the Apple II claim, the most innovative consumer power supplies shipping in a ubiquitous product this past decade have been Apple's laptop and cell phone chargers.

It could be argued the latest iPhone cube charger and the Macbook MagSafe chargers are "fit and finish", but to me that's like arguing the difference between a UPS truck and a Prius is fit and finish.
The Power of Yes
In the US, there's usually a local school board for the city that's in charge of buying textbooks. Of course, there's a lot of different factors that they have to account for, like state and federal standards, as well as the limitations of their own budgets.
> dynamically typed languages are just technically impossible to refactor automatically without the developer's supervision

For sake of argument, let's say that's true and then ask - How much does that actually matter in practice? We have unit tests don't we?

Here's an example -

A very large Smalltalk application was developed at Cargill to support the operation of grain elevators and the associated commodity trading activities. The Smalltalk client application has 385 windows and over 5,000 classes. About 2,000 classes in this application interacted with an early (circa 1993) data access framework. The framework dynamically performed a mapping of object attributes to data table columns.

Analysis showed that although dynamic look up consumed 40% of the client execution time, it was unnecessary.

A new data layer interface was developed that required the business class to provide the object attribute to column mapping in an explicitly coded method. Testing showed that this interface was orders of magnitude faster. The issue was how to change the 2,100 business class users of the data layer.

A large application under development cannot freeze code while a transformation of an interface is constructed and tested. We had to construct and test the transformations in a parallel branch of the code repository from the main development stream. When the transformation was fully tested, then it was applied to the main code stream in a single operation.

Less than 35 bugs were found in the 17,100 changes. All of the bugs were quickly resolved in a three-week period.

If the changes were done manually we estimate that it would have taken 8,500 hours, compared with 235 hours to develop the transformation rules.

The task was completed in 3% of the expected time by using Rewrite Rules. This is an improvement by a factor of 36.

from “Transformation of an application data layer” Will Loew-Blosser OOPSLA 2002
When I was young, I used cat and grep like that until an old Unix sys-admin remarked "What a gratuitous use of cat!". At the time, I did not understand what he meant, but now I do. So whenever I see cat and grep used like this, I think back to that lesson I learned.
I started wearing one of these while I'm working

http://www.amazon.com/Mueller-Reversible-Splint-Wrist-Brace/...

Mueller wrist brace with splint

It only worked with a full-size keyboard and mouse. I can't wear it while typing on my laptop. I'll occasionally pop an Aleve in the morning if my forearm is bothering me.

Previously I was having occasional numbness and tingling in my right wrist. That has gone away.

Doc also suggested wearing a soft wrap on my wrist at night. Keep the area warm to promote healing, and keeps it in a relatively neutral position to prevent further inflammation.

http://www.amazon.com/Mueller-Wrist-Support-Wrap-Black/dp/B0...

I also have started lifting weights, though my doc said that could actually be putting further strain on the area. I think that was the case at first, but now I feel like my arms are strong, but more importantly my core and upper body and back are stronger. Helps with posture, and a lot of times the root of the wrist pain originates with other parts of you body being in a poor position all day. (skip the isolation exercises and just do compound exercises, especially deadlifts, probably the most underrated and unsexy, but its one of the best exercises)

Make sure your desk is low enough. It was subtle, but lowering it an inch put a lot less pressure on my forearms and less reaching.

And I drink a ton of water all day, which ensures I get up at least once an hour to pee or fill my water bottle. As others have said, taking breaks could be the most important.
Eta_carinae did not demand that open source authors fix any problem a user complains about. He only stated that the exact opposite attitude is not a good idea. Arguing against A is not the same as arguing in favor of (not A), because there are more than 2 possible positions on the issue.

Similarly, cheald does not demand that users of open source projects contribute fixes for bugs. He also only stated that the exact opposite attitude is not a good idea.

Arguing either of those extremes is pointless: the discussion starts polarized and neither side will yield an inch. Introducing slavery into the discussion doesn't help.

Most authors of open source projects are interested in having their projects be used by many others. It is the usefulness to many others that provides a sense of accomplishment. If they don't pay some attention to problems those others encounter and for instance fix clear bugs in early releases, their chances of achieving that goal are lower. Observing this fact about the system is not argument in favor of slavery. There are no normative statements involved.

Similarly, if you, as a user of an open source project, want some bug fixed, the best way to go about it is often to write the code yourself and offer it for inclusion. That suggestion does not reduce them to slaves either.

To make a bazaar work, all parties involved have to be flexible in their expectations.
Developing Operability
Apple & The Law of Large Numbers
the payment is about seven dollar according to the article

This is unrealistic in practice. The Simple Dollar article cited describes making >$7 in an hour, but $6.55 of that comes from writing an article on email autoresponder marketing and writing a review of an unspecified service. Those aren't the kind of tasks that anybody can accomplish in a timely and competent manner, nor is the supply of those tasks reliable.
It's a decent list, however, it's a red flag if my Twitter account isn't up to date and or if it's non-existent?

Better spec that I own an iPhone and use Foursquare while you're making a list of obnoxious requirements. Uh oh, I don't even have a Pinterest account yet!

The proper response to an angel that red flags on something like that is: sorry, I'm too busy doing actual work to worry about whether my Twitter account is existent and up-to-date, I'm going to pass on allowing you to invest into my company.
Yeah... that would get really morbid as desperate people start to sell their organs to secure the welfare of their loved ones. Sometimes rational actors acting in their best interest is the least important part of how you model a problem.
I like how on his angel investment page here http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/angel.html it says

Not interested in [...] anything involving physical products.

and on the side he lists an investment in WakeMate.
Maybe you can connect the dots there.
Fad driven, or politics/corruption driven? The textbook "industry" is one of the most pernicious, that really should be put out of business... in today's world, even if we were doing dead-tree based knowledge devices, they could be tailored to the individual and printed on demand.

Of course, things like tablet-based (eInk or LCD) reading and khan academy are the future of learning.
Get Numerous Health Benefits from Coffee: More is Better
That won't be a major problem provided there is an easy way to change to e theme that gives better contrast/readability.

They don't need the default UI to acceptably cover 100% of their market if it can do a better job for 95% of people with a switch that does a better job for the other 5%.
Open-ended questions and problems are awesome.

Open-ended questions and problems are indeed awesome. Moreover, they are an essential part of a sound education in mathematics, even at the K-12 (primary and secondary schooling) level of learning. But open-ended questions used for teaching purposes should be carefully written for sound teaching points, and teachers using them should have sufficient background in mathematics to guide student approaches to grappling with them. One of my favorite authors on mathematics education reform (Professor Hung-hsi Wu of UC Berkeley) began writing on that issue in 1994 with his article, "The Role of Open-ended Problems in Mathematics Education,"

http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/open-role.pdf

and he followed up on that article with a wonderful article in the fall 1999 issue of American Educator, "Basic Skills versus Conceptual Understanding: A Bogus Dichotomy in Mathematics Education."

http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/fall1999/wu.pdf

Since then, Professor Wu has written many more useful articles on mathematics education, including guides for parents, teachers, school administrators, and teacher educators on how to apply the new Common Core State Standards in mathematics better to improve mathematics education in the United States.

http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/

http://www.corestandards.org/the-standards/mathematics

A good example of a beguiling textbook by a world-famous mathematician with lots of open-ended problems is Algebra, by the late Israel M. Gelfand and Alexander Shen.

http://www.amazon.com/Algebra-Israel-M-Gelfand/dp/0817636773

Some of the problems in this book are HARD, but they are generally well posed problems of actual research interest to mathematicians, that just happen to be accessible to pupils just beginning to learn algebra.

AFTER EDIT: answering the question kindly posted below, one example I had in mind is that Gelfand asks students to figure out how many different ways there are to group terms in an expression with parentheses as the number of terms increases. This essentially asks the students to discover the Catalan number sequence.

http://www.geometer.org/mathcircles/catalan.pdf
I expected it, and yes it is because I touched on a belief system. People usually downvote without response when that happens.

I am big on REST I will reiterate, I included it in my own thesis in 2006 and the reason why I like it so much is it does make services more simple. I have been pusing it, JSON and simple apis since SOAP made my life hell (but was a needed notch to get away from proprietary formats and opening up data). Engineers jobs are to take complex things and make them simple to use for not just other engineers but non engineers without abstract thinking.

I just think repeating the historical mistakes of web services like SOAP can happen to JSON, REST and more if we don't check it with the current market and just keep it simple. I think REST is the way but you can have some flexibility for pragmatic business needs, lots of programmers cannot put business needs over ego at times. Don't tell people they aren't able to call it REST if it doesn't spit out ATOM representation and only use Accept headers.

Tell your business partners when your api doesn't work in a game engine because the http library didn't support headers that it isn't a true service and the client is unworthy of connecting. Or you could just use headers first then have other options/endpoints/abstracted urls to resources for non capable clients and still call it REST.

In the market today most big apis are RESTish RPC and that version will win because that is what is the most common service available today due to consumer/client demands. Granted it's not pretty.
Role of Social Media in Managing An API Ecosystem
For the record, I don't own an iPhone and don't have a Pinterest account either (though I'm guessing you were being snarky there). However, at the seed stage you're investing in people and a quick way to start finding out about people is through their online profiles. So no, you don't need those things, but it makes it quicker to learn about you. Also, on a higher level, if you're doing an Internet startup I would expect you would be trying out and engaging in various Internet services. If not Twitter, than something. That said, and as I linked to in the post (http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/10/pitch-decks-are-...), I think conveying personal history in one way or another is very important.
Although I think this is a bit of an apocryphal anecdote, I presume this is happening in a professional setting. Messages of this type require a bit more tact than what you're suggesting.
I've been a Synergy user several times in the past, and it always seemed great for the first few days and then descended into annoying bugs. (No connection this morning for no apparent reason. Or my mouse gets trapped on one system once or twice a day.)

On the one hand, my notion of how much software should cost says $50 for a Synergy clone is insanely expensive. But if I think of the benefit received, I've got to say that a Synergy clone which Just Works probably is easily worth $50.
The point of Mechanical Turk is to decouple the workers from the task being done. As computing advances there should always be some kind of task that requires human effort.
I genuinely don't think it's passive aggressive. "Please throw trash in the waste bin" is a very standard message.

However, the general idea of reducing the friction involved with following the rules is good. Having laws (such as those related to "piracy") that are openly ignored has a corrosive effect on a society's respect for the law in general. For the most part, I agree with Larry Lessig's comments on that matter.
I developed bilateral De Quervain syndrome (tendinitis in the wrists, starting near the thumb, spreading across the wrist) in college. I went out into the work field and suffered so much pain that I could barely shift my car on the way home from work. I was absolutely panicked.

I got physical therapy (where they told me the exact type of tendinitis I had), learned stretches, did strengthening exercises, and started tracking down better keyboards.

In the end, the Kinesis Classic contoured keyboard proved to be the one that saved my wrists. You'd be amazed at how much of a difference consistent, light keystrokes make. The other major element was stretching and light friction massage. By working on several wrist stretching exercises throughout the day, and making them part of my unconscious routine, my pain was alleviated within about six months. I also wore high quality wrist braces for the first couple of months, which provides an important rest for your joints.

Several years later, I discovered rock climbing. As pointed out by another commenter, this is fantastic for wrist health. The stretching and strengthening of the wrist (while having fun) is hard to match anywhere. Within about two months of beginning rock climbing, I ceased to have any wrist pain at any time. Not even a twinge.

Another few years later, I developed a bulged disc in my neck (ironically, it may have been initiated by a couple of preventable climbing accidents!). The entire left side of my neck and left shoulder became a bundle of tensed muscle, in a vicious cycle of self-defeating automatic body response to injury. The solution was ultimately to do more things that improved my posture. I've done weight training, focusing on my back and rear shoulders, and perhaps most importantly I've started walking more. Walking has an almost magical ability to reset your posture, provided you break out of your old habits of slouching. The other huge key for me was a Steelcase Criterium chair. The amount of relief provided to my neck and shoulders by having proper back and elbow support is simply indescribably.

If I point out that someone is slouching, or using devices that are an ergonomic catastrophe, many people respond with things like, "but I've been sitting like this for years without any problem." Well, I used to think that, too. Certainly, there are people who go their entire career slouching, leaning, and mousing on their outstretched arms. But here's the catch: you don't really know if you're prone to these issues until you've already developed them. So, for the sake of your future, I encourage all of you to 1) exercise 2) stretch and 3) get an ergonomic setup and use it properly.
Half-baked adaptations:

Combine with a Vegas pokie/slot machine. Complete menial hits in exchange for a few more cents to play.

Or combine with vending machines. You want that can of Coke? Pay by categorising 30-40 photos quickly.
technically the equivalent is

echo -n > file
Turn a spiderable list of links into a dropdown + a go button with jQuery
In 3.1 it ran like molasses in dev mode. Fortunately someone came out with the rails-dev-tweaks gem that largely fixed that. 3.2 is fine in dev mode.
Mechanical Turk takes up to 30 days to approve payment for any task, so instant payment is out of the question.

Having a terminal where someone can sit for hours on end being the same place as a cash dispenser isn't the best idea. The users would probably be better off breaking into it. They need to be separated.

Perhaps a better solution would be to start a sweat shop full of terminals where the sweatshop owner pays them on approved tasks, after taking a cut.
I'm not sure what you mean? It's pretty obvious what this implies isn't it?
Is Linus' Law real?
Spoiler: The algorithms actually work by doing text analysis on the captions and other metadata, and no actual image analysis.
I upvoted this anyway... and may well again if the story is picked up by another major outlet.

A different but similar piece, also well worth reading, is

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3609485
If you want to bring your project to wikipedia
There's a big difference as a developer, between knowing all about Twitter, it's platform and APIs, having used Twitter accounts enough --- and worrying about whether I've got my personal Twitter account up-to-date.

I don't have the time to tweet several dozen times per day (what it would really take to learn anything meaningful about me @140 characters a shot). Period. It's not worth the time trade. Should I be tweeting so I can have a couple thousand followers (half of which are literally worthless)? Or should I be throwing that hour a day into my business?

I could give you a simple bio that would be far more concise and useful than what you could possibly extract from Twitter postings. And, you don't like wasting your time either: if you have to scan my Twitter posts to compile a picture of me, you're going to waste a huge amount of time I could save you with that simple bio.
[Review] God's Jury: The Inquisition, IT & Privacy
If you need to be told to put trash in a trash basket, you deserve to be condescended to. If you don't want to be treated like a child, don't act like a child.