skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, not their income, their output, i.e. expenses.

I'm OK with them spending money to make (i.e. earn) money, or to save money. I'm not OK with them spending money to collect more donations.

For example if you want to hire an expensive but very very good organizer that will save the charity administrative costs greater than it costs to hire the person - no problem.

On the other hand if you want to hire someone who is really good at drumming up support and getting people to donate, that could be a problem, IF they are getting paid a lot. And I don't care that they will bring in more money than it costs to hire them. I'm still not OK with it.

How much is too much? I'd say a few percent - i.e. if it costs more than a few percent to bring in X number of donations, then don't do it. (Or if you do it let people know upfront that XX% of their money is being used to try to get more money.)

That's why I refuse to donate to pretty much any group that calls me. Paying for those calls usually costs around 50% of the money brought in.

There are some cases where the calls are by volunteers, and then it's OK obviously.

Take a raffle for example: some charities will award as prizes 50-80% of the money brought in. Normally I would not be OK with that, except that they are usually upfront about it.

Mass mailing: I don't know how much that costs, but if it costs more than a few percent of the money brought in, don't do it.

A "for-profit charity". That's where someone starts a charity, for the purpose of paying himself a nice salary. Suppose he pays himself 50% of any money brought in.

You might say: well there is still that 50% of the money that does some good, which otherwise would not have happened.

I don't agree.

I think that last case is the example in the article. He says to himself: at least I'm doing some good in the world, so what if I'm making lots. I (and I guess most other people too since he was forced to shut down) don't agree.
In the aftermath of a wave of criticism, his company collapsed.

One breast cancer charity that parted ways with Mr. Pallotta began producing its own fund-raising walks, but the net sum raised by those walks for breast cancer research plummeted from $71 million to $11 million.

But because his company collapsed, the true comparison figure that Mr. Pallotta raised became $0 million. As a business, it didn't succeed. And he's blaming the world. People often give to charities to feel charitable, and having a profit-motive undermines that - even if the result is that less money is raised. This is because people making donations are often fulfilling a need to give and help people - not by what is best for those being helped. The latter requires a kind of ruthless saint, quite different from the human motivation of brotherly love.

In contrast, ordinary businesses helps people, or else no one would give them money. A fantastic example of this is Grameen Bank "microcredit": http://www.grameen-info.org/index.php?option=com_content&... Usury (interest for credit) has got to be pretty much the opposite of charity, yet it seems to do tremendous good.
I'm pretty sure this occurred during the batch I was in (Summer 2008).
Python 3 Patterns, Recipes and Idioms: An Open-Source Book
For most things language performance is just a constant - the really hard issue is making something distributed and it's really here that Erlang shines. Being a Python programmer I know that creating a distributed application in Python is far from simple - while it's almost a trivial task in Erlang.
Hey, I read both (though I get annoyed by the redundancy sometimes--I'm considering writing a Greasemonkey script to display:none all visited link items.)
At least he had enough sense to give up the gimmick before it got old
Rogue wave - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
But I do actually make my decisions based on their management process. Personally if they spend more than 5-10% of the money on administrative expenses I don't donate. And BTW that cuts out the vast majority of the charities, I think (wild guess) that most spend around 50%, and some as high as 75% (police fraternities for example (again, wild guess)).

The newspaper example, I think, was more a case of the person not being upfront about it.

Also, I personally think that if the charity money did not go to him, it would go somewhere else. So by him consuming 50% of the donations for his own pocket he is reducing the amount of charity money in the world.

Others might disagree and say that if he didn't get the donation, no one would. So you might as well allow him to exist.

If that's your opinion fine. But I feel that even if the second case is the real one I still am not OK with it (but I think the first one is what actually happens).
Caltech creates 1um resolution microscope cheap enough for home use.
Have you ever been to Beijing? I lived there for 6 months just 2 years ago and 'ultra modern' is not the phrase I would use to describe it. Internet access to any site not hosted on the mainland is unbearably slow (bad news for travelers), the subway has only one line and the cars are always crammed full, and many of the cars on the street are tin boxes with recycled bike pedals and tractor engines inside them. Granted, I was there before the Olympics, while they were still doing a lot of construction in the hope of impressing everyone. If you were there then, and got an ultra-modern impression, did you ever look off the tourist beaten path and see ultra modernity there? I'd be surprised.
Regardless of whether he would need to, or what kind of person would do such a thing, that's exactly what he did.
50 or so in my case. But the person who thinks the feature doesn't exist has a karma of 2053. Maybe it's not conditioned just on karma?
Or at least extending the javascript specification to include an API that all of the engines can implement. I think this is basically the one thing keeping javascript from entering the mainstream as a general purpose language. As soon as you can reasonably tell people that their server side javascript will run on more than one engine, you'll see a lot more development.
wtf is nhk?
I'd say that the #1 reason for their decline was the fact they they've been seen as competing with Google for the search crown. Maybe I'm wrong but maybe Yahoo should have been focusing on (what I consider) their strengths: delicious, flickr, y!live, fireeagle, developer network, etc.

Competing with Google in a field where Google excels, without trying something VISIBLY/OBVIOUSLY different/better was a losing strategy.
Lucky Startups - Live video interviews of startup companies around the world.
The Buzzwords of 2008
Working out helps cure colds
Market for Corporate Jets Goes Into Free Fall
http://www.google.com/search?q=nhk
extra points if you would've used LetMeGoogleThatForYou.com
Fill 'Er Up With Human Fat
The Worst Predictions About 2008
Jsregex
Boom in music video games helps original artists
That was kind of the point of the post.
Sony’s Netbook “fits in a pocket”, Might Not Fit Netbook Category
I'm sure it'll come along eventually. And absolutely, Word on Windows has some good stuff too. My point was, the program on two different operating systems is quite different, so it's not worth judging somebody based on their liking Mac Word.
Hurt my lower back coding years ago on a wooden chair so here are my tips.

- Eat healthy, plenty of greens and veggies and as little sugar as possible. If you're young get in this habit and you won't need to break it when you're old (late 20's being old)

- Switch up coffee and caffeinated beverages for green tea.

- Get up and move around often during the day. Might hurt the end LOC numbers but being away from a problem can help you come up with a solution. Plus it gets you away from your desk and be social for a bit.

- Exercise. Seriously. I don't care what your deadline is, you can put aside 60 minutes to run/walk/shower. If you can't, then go for a longer walk and find a more realistic goal/job. You'll gain health and be able to stay awake longer without aides.

Nothing is more important than your body. Take care of it you only get one.
I found this especially amusing after he got pissed off at proggit for constantly memeing the "Zed's dead" line from Pulp Fiction.

Whoo for respectful debate over essays!
Yeah, we're kinda suckers too.

I still think this site has more signal-to-noise than any other social news site except Metafilter, which is a good sign. I can still look at the top stories each day and find perhaps 20-25 that're worth at least a look, and 10 or so that generate discussions that I'm interested in participating in.
Yeah, and that's an important distinction, especially in cases like this.

You can be pissed off and rude and not be a troll. If you do, the people calling you out as a troll are often trolling themselves, albeit more benignly.
Ask HN: Do you use your brain or Google to solve your problems?
I know I had this habit that whenever I found a bug or error in my code, I would head to Google. Copied paste the error message into Google and hoped that Google would find the answer for me.

But, after several times of hoping Google to get me the answer, I found that Google didn't actually give me the best answer. And, sometimes, even wrong answer.

So, slowly, I developed this skill that I can now solve problem independently. I admit that I still need help from Google. But, Instead of copy paste the help from Google, I can actually analyse the solution myself and modify it to suit my problem.

My question is: Do you use your brain or Google to solve your problem?
Why, out of curiosity, do you hate it? You usually make pretty well-thought-out points, and I'm curious to hear the view of an anti-Rubyite. I just started playing with it and I'm liking it a lot.
An interesting take-away for me here was the importance of offline social networking in first getting TechCrunch off the ground. Networking is so important, and while the interwebs are a great place to connect with new people online, nothing can really replace getting outside the office/house/whatever and connecting with real, live people.

I need to be better at doing this myself. Great read here. Thanks for posting.
> Personally, I'd rather have one guy who works 4 hours a day that's
> passionate about programming then 2 of your non-loafers. They tend to
> cause me the most work in the end. ;-)

absolutely. I agree 100%.
For linux, I've switched from Liberation to Inconsolata, which was inspired by Consolas; you might want to check it out:

http://www.levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html
I'm really happy about this. I heard about Zed because of one of his first rants, but after browsing around his site I found gems like http://www.zedshaw.com/essays/master_and_expert.html . I'm really looking forward to reading more.
linked TED talk: "Can we domesticate germs?" http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/paul_ewald_asks_can_we_do...

I think there's no reason for infections to be harmful. Why not an infection that benefits the host? Some do, for examples the bacteria in your gut, that help you digest food.

How could we hack the environment to favour beneficial infections?
Gold worries me these days. It's gone up so much lately that I think it's overvalued. Of course, I discouraged my husband from buying up gold when it was much cheaper a year ago for this same reason and he still hasn't forgiven me. For a civilization collapsing catastrophe, I still think we're better off with the bags of rice and bottles of bourbon we hoarded instead.

I'm not a fan of index funds. At the risk of going against popular wisdom, I think it's better to put your money in a fund that is actually managed by a financial professional. Index funds follow the general market hell or high water, and even though their fees are generally lower since it doesn't take any brains to manage one, you'll never maximize your returns (or these days minimize your losses) with one. The key phrase to look for is 'no load mutual fund'. These funds will generally minimize fees at the time of your deposit and withdrawl. I've been happy with the Muhlenkamp Fund overall, of course they're in the gutter like everyone else at the moment.

The thing to remember is that the price of both gold and funds will fluctuate, and in either case you wouldn't be able to get at your money right away. I keep an HSBC high interest rate savings account for emergencies. There's enough money in there to pay my insurance deductibles if I crash my car into my house and both burn down. I contribute monthly to pay my semi-annual insurance premiums plus a little extra to give me that deductible buffer. It's probably around 2 months living expenses, which is within my risk tolerance, but you might want to sock away at least 3 months worth before investing the rest.
In fact, by almost any easily quantifiable measure, Windows is better.

Unless you go by customer satisfaction, wherein Apple trounces competition in both hardware and software.

I get what you're talking about. I just think that cultism stems less from a blind devotion to the "specialness" of the computers, and more from a general appreciation of them. I think OS X is better than Windows, and I've tried a few times to specify why, but mostly it's a combination of a lot of little things that are all very good, rather than any particular feature which crushes Windows. (I don't use Dashboard or Spaces, for instance, haven't turned on Time Machine for a while, and I'm not a big Unix person, so the big crowed-out features aren't it. But I still am absolutely certain that the OS is better quantifiably.)

The problem is that it's not easy to explain. There's a logic behind it, but it's a difficult one that depends on a bunch of little factors rather than one big one. That gets interpreted as cultism and fanboyism, but there's more to it than that. And I don't think that "special" ever had anything to do with it. Apple doesn't sell "special."
I'd go for the gold. 30,000 years of history deserve more respect than 100 years of a weird economy with major problems and a dearth of good explanations. So, physical gold, some silver, some mining company stocks, and maybe diversify by buying some stock in an farm company in US. Have some cash stashed away, and maybe buy some index funds.

My ideal portfolio:

25% bullion (Mostly gold, some 14k gold rings, some silver, along with a digital balance and a jeweller's touchstone kit for determining purity).

15% cash in a sock.

16% mining company stock.

12% index fund.

7% ag company (basic foodstuff, like wheat or other cereals).

15% in a savings account.

1 pistol, 1 body armor and 3 years of ammo. Consider investing in self-defense and food.

I know, it's very reddit of me, but this way, if the shit hits the fan, you'll only lose a small amount of your portfolio, and the rest will go way up. If things are fine, you're fine. Not as fine as your peers, but fine nonetheless.
I read the article. I wouldn't call one anecdote data, though it's about 1/10,000 of a good start.
"What you have witnessed is a year long proof that programmers will usually
only listen to the man who seems toughest, not the one who’s most possibly
right."

I have noticed this throughout the years - there is a whole lot of testosterone around and it only gets worse. I like his mention of the OO book covers in the early days ;)
no, it's that you're talking about two different things.

you can downvote comments once your karma goes over a certain score. but nobody can downvote submissions. no doubt that's what andreyf was talking about.

also, the karma numbers keep changing, which is why nobody seems to know for sure where the thresholds are. back when i got the right to downvote comments, you only needed about 20 points.
She wants to make yogurt bacteria fluoresce in the presence of melamine, which is causing a load of trouble in China right now. That seems not only clever, but commercially viable.

In any case, DIYbio and bio hackers are about bringing the hacking spirit to biology, which right now is very capital intensive. Genetic engineering now is like computing in the late 60s: big mainframes locked inside ivory towers and Fortune 500 companies.
That's a little harsh. It was a pretty significant anecdote - a 6.5x decrease with the only clear change being Pallotta's company-charity being forcibly stopped from continued involvement. Is there room for other plausible reasons to have caused the drop? Definitely. And of course if, hypothetically, Pallotta's company-charity was involved with sufficiently many causes, you would even expect there to be at least one anecdote with such a substantial drop. But to call it "1/10,000 of a good start" is much more unreasonable and illogical than thinking the anecdote might be of worth.
Zed actually says intelligent stuff but in a very obnoxious way.

This makes him a "half-way Reddit". Because Reddit is a place where most posters say stupid stuff in a very obnoxious way.

So, in a way, he was made for the environment. Sorry to see him leave.
Misleading title, especially since the author himself admits that "you won’t just need big pockets to afford this netbook, you’ll need a deep one to tote that 8-inch screen as well".
The beep you don't want to hear
Google shines when you must deal with a problem that occurs due to third-party code (particularly proprietary code). When things _should_ be working in your code, Google can help sort out an obscure issue much more quickly than trying to search through the source for a third-party library.

Your brain works best to debug your own code, but isn't as efficient to discover flaws quickly in unfamiliar source.
There's a macro question of how to use all resources at your dispoal to address coding questions: maybe look at pragmatics' wetware book.

the micro skill you have to develop: scour delicious, IRC, stackoverflow, Yahoo search, forums for your language/framework. Also krugle, koders.com, gotapi.com, (can't tell if anybody's maintain codase.com for java/C++)

Google custom search engines are great, too, carefully choose 20-40 domains to include.
Indeed, he said in 2004:

I embraced OS X as soon as it was available and have never
looked back. So a lot of "In the beginning was the command
line" is now obsolete. I keep meaning to update it, but if
I'm honest with myself, I have to say this is unlikely.

http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/20/15182...
let me elaborate on this phrase, as i realize i only put in a half thought and can't edit anymore.

"i used past sales of comparable homes, price per sqft, etc.."

i did a lot of excel work to compare and graph historical and current costs and such. i knew a number that i considered to be fair for the market, area and building/neighborhood, plus or minus a bit for upgrades/issues and used that number to make my decisions.
both. brain, google, brain, in that order.
> he allowed ... his girlfriend to perform surgeries without a medical license.

What, a guy can't be a little romantic anymore?
Not sure about the title. It appears to help you feel a bit better, but not cure the cold.

"The investigators found no difference in symptoms between the group that exercised and the one that rested. And there was no difference in the time it took to recover from the colds. But when the exercisers assessed their symptoms, Dr. Kaminsky said, 'people said they felt O.K. and, in some cases, they actually felt better.'"
Comment stalking makes Santa sad...
A few other tips to add here beyond the other great ones already mentioned. I had to learn about these the hard way.

1.) Massage.

You may not think it's the manliest thing ever, but if you can afford it you should find a good local masseuse and get yourself an hour session. Even if you go once and never go again, you'll get an education in just how kinked up your back and shoulders probably are.

I tweaked my back lifting a lawn mower out of my car a couple years ago and didn't think much of it at the time. Over the next few weeks I started to have all kinds of shoulder problems and other various pain to the point where my arms were getting tingly and I couldn't sit and code for more than 30 minutes at a time.

Long story short, I went through a few doctors before I finally just decided to see a masseuse and see if it helped. I was lucky to find someone that knew what they were doing and helped get me straightened out. It took about 5 sessions over 5 weeks, but I've never had problems since.

2.) Trigger points.

Learn what they are and how you can fix them. This was my problem that the masseuse turned me on to. Trigger points are essentially little micro-knots in your muscle fibers that can add up to cause big problems for you. For me, lifting that mower was really just the straw that broke the camel's back. It just exacerbated all the trigger point problems I'd been creating over years of coding and not stretching out my back and shoulders properly.

If you know where the common trigger points creep up and how to get rid of them you can save yourself a lot of pain and downtime (not to mention massage bills).

Buy these two things: The Trigger Point Therapy Workbook (http://www.amazon.com/Trigger-Point-Therapy-Workbook-Self-Tr...) and a TheraCane (http://www.amazon.com/Thera-Cane-Theracane-TheraCane/dp/B000...)

The book will show you how to identify and treat the trigger points all over your body, and the TheraCane will help you reach the places on your back that you can't reach yourself.

3.) Yoga.

Once you get all your issues straightened out, yoga and/or a good daily stretching regimen can help keep you kink free.

Hopefully some of this advice is helpful. I was really messed up for a while until I figured all this out. Again, echoing what others have said, please take care of your body. It's the only one you have.
Funny, I figured this would be a post about the software company in Oregon of the same name.
I'm with wheels here. You're asking about opportunities in a South American country and then go and make a cheap dig that can't be addressed or refuted in the context of this forum without going wildly off topic.

While I understand that the political landscape of a country is an important consideration when making such a dramatic move, it would be a lot more civil to phrase your reasons for leaving in terms of policies and not in terms of vague grievances with a specific politician.

Perhaps travel to another country will give you the opportunity to experience other political environments, most of which are significantly different from the US, and give you a better understanding as to what makes for an effective government and why many people may be bothered by your unfounded allegations regarding the future of entrepreneurism in the US.
Even if you are irreplaceable, that is no guarantee for others to recognize it.
And the letter to Reddit, Dear Reddit is his last blog rant :)
I've stopped clicking the links to his posts because they're always things I can't determine why I should care about. Most of his posts that I find from here could have been written by a non-programmer, and if they were the people here would complain they were off-topic.

It's very Valleywagish actually.
29% of MIT's graduating class goes into finance.

http://www.questbridge.org/cmp/partner_schools/mit/academics...

I'm sure a large number of those graduates would still work in a non-engineering field if the finance industry didn't exist, but I think that a) a substantial fraction of them would go into engineering, and b) an even more substantial fraction would at least be doing something that creates wealth.

I guess we'll see next year; I don't imagine finance will be a major destination for several years to come.
Recess PHP Framework Public Preview
That happens to me occasionally when I work really hard on something. A couple of years ago I was doing math almost constantly for a few weeks, and by the end I was dreaming about problems every night. I felt like I was going insane, since after I started having those dreams I was thinking about math almost continually.

Dreaming about something usually indicates that I'm about to get a lot better at it, though, so it's kind of nice.
Fat of the rich as SUV fuel? How poetic in a Fight Club way.