skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
gittip has an upper limit on the number of tips from any one source to any one person, specifically to avoid the issue you mention. Reaching $60000/year in tips would require at least 50 very generous tippers, or more likely several hundred modest tippers; thus, a few people dropping out would not have such a drastic impact.
Very nicely made. Thanks for sharing.
This kind of stuff is always published on Sundays. The good journalism has to wait for weekdays: when office traffic, the news room being fully staffed, and new news to write about all intersect.
But it's not. At least, I only see that after a reinstall, or maybe once a month, when I want to install something cool and new.
I found the article very skippable because it really shrinks down to what you stated in those two lines, a prejudice cruzade against a plat. Zdnet at its "best".
> object oriented programming in elisp is just part of a standard library you can import.

This is how OO is done in Common Lisp (CLOS is the standard here) and Scheme (no standard object system, but every so often someone writes one for themselves).
First pull request!

https://github.com/randomdrake/nasa-apod-desktop/pull/2
Thanks, so it would be more secure against brute force attempts. Also, if it were encrypted and type as dots, it would be more secure in general.
I think one of the best ways to do this, is to keep the social system smaller once it reaches critical mass. It sounds counter-intuitive, but hear me out.

New users that join once critical mass has been reached, will be able to create their own graph and enjoy the social network in question equally to when a person joined it 4 years ago (given the site is still the same in terms of functionality). However, the person that joined 4 years will become bogged by an ever increasing graph of connections to pages, friends, groups, history etc that eventually undermine what made the site relevant to them in the first place (ie Dalton's experience with Orkut).

So, just as in the real life, social relationships come and ago, a natural decay has to happen that allows a person's graph to remain relavent. Currently Facebook (and to a certain Google+) are doing it right. They filter. Heavily. If you don't interact with the people from 4 years ago, you just don't see them anymore on it.
I deplore the increase of this kind of hopelessly biased political-advocacy posting on HN. Why not also some articles on Intelligent Design and the perfidies of the Darwinists? How about some articles about abortion?
ARM Launches UK Forum to Shape the Internet of Things
Yes. You don't want it landing on top of the rover, so it flies a predictable path away and crashes.
I instantly thought of FutureShop ads. Low budget ads that try to be funny.
I disagree with the conclusion, but whole-heartedly agree with this quote:

I think there's far more low-hanging fruit in making native development easier than in making web/hybrid apps feel "right". I've seen two just good hybrid implementations (Quora and Pocket), and yet I still run into defects using both.

I think the "write-once-run-everywhere" benefit of web views is disingenuous; the phrase should really go "write-once-optimize-everywhere".
The model where you work to pay off a degree you only got into debt for because you needed it to do the very same work does seem to be getting uncomfortably close to at least a mild version of indentured servitude. In indentured servitude, you worked to pay off the transit expenses needed to get to the work (and then the housing expenses at the destination, which you couldn't pay yet because you first had to pay for the transit).

That's one reason I'd rather have a state-funded university option provided, instead of funding it retroactively via debt. Basically, the current generation should fund the next generation's education, rather than loading it onto them at the beginning of their careers as debt. Or, if student debt is necessary, its repayment should be tied to income, so payment doesn't amount to more than, say, 25% of someone's income per year.

Though in a way, that's still much better than being on the really low end, because many college-degree holders do get okay jobs. If you've never driven through some of the poorest parts of the American south, it's a quite surprising experience, especially going off the highways into smaller towns. In parts, doesn't feel very first-world at all, with whole stretches of people living in what seem to be barely-standing-upright shacks.
Poverty is like slavery in a very flippant sense. You only have to read some of the first-hand accounts of human trafficking to get the sense of the difference.
Funny, this is still a pretty black-and-white issue for me, and I don't quite understand how so many are defending Craigslist.

When Facebook blocked a Google Chrome extension from exporting friends (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2729084), nobody defended Facebook.

Nobody defended the medical supply industry in an article about how they're blocking startups from selling to hospitals (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3889305).

I don't recall ever seeing a comment defending ISPs that attempt to block users from downloading illegal content -- even when those ISPs are themselves part of a media company.

Hell, just a little less than three years ago, when Craigslist blocked a Yahoo service for pulling data from CL and customizing it (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=970934), the opinions on HN were quite a bit different than they are now. (Amusingly, you left a comment in that thread too -- except that you didn't seem to be defending Craigslist nearly as much as you are now.)

If there were no such thing as a good online directory, and somebody built a startup out of digitizing phone books and making them searchable, and the phone companies then filed lawsuits against that startup, would people come out of the woodwork defending the phone companies? I find that difficult to believe.

If regional banks started blocking access from Mint.com, would there be grounds for defending them?

For me, it simply comes down to what I think of as "hacker morality": this tool sucks, and I can build a better one, so I will. I hate searching for stuff on Craigslist -- in fact, I never use it anymore because of the completely miserable experience that Craigslist is when trying to sort the wheat from the chaff. If I really wanted to get something from Craigslist, I'd probably write a crawler and indexer of my own -- I already have those tools -- and then stick a filter on to send me an email when it finds whatever I'm looking for.

Padmapper is saving me, and a lot of other people without those tools, all of that trouble. Good for them.
There are nearly 150 million poor and near-poor people in America who are not responsible for the damage done by the Great Recession.

150 million poor and near-poor people, really? Nowhere in the article is the definition of "poor" mentioned.
Thanks for this. Looks fantastic, Max.
For TimeClass one should not assume 86400 seconds in a day, and use DateTime::diff() instead. PHP The Right Way is better on this: http://www.phptherightway.com/#date_and_time

With the autoloader, there is no need to do include_once(), simple include() is enough. The file will be loaded only once for every class.
Some of those human-trafficking accounts are related to poverty as well: desperate people sometimes voluntarily sign up to human smuggling services (e.g to get them across the US-Mexico or Turkey-EU border), with mixed and often bad results. Many sex-trafficking cases are poverty-related also, not all based on kidnapping random people.

Admittedly, that's not Americans in poverty.
> the Reddit guys started with by making thousands of accounts and sharing, commenting, etc. In that case, the fiction became reality which I (assume) is incredibly rare.

I doubt it's incredibly rare, but appears to be quite common. I had the same experience with a new programming language mailing list about 5 or 6 years ago. In retrospect, most of the accounts were controlled by a small core group trying to "generate buzz", as one of them called it later.
The Happiness Heuristic
How to miss the point with smart minds:
1. Pigeonhole people ('<x> developer', '<y> developer'...)
2. Demand people who have prior access to adequate funds for international transport and 'symbolic fees'.

If you pre-bill the results of your little VC experiment and its participants as 'geniuses' then I think you are in for a rather unfortunate surprise.
I'm pretty much at the other end of the spectrum. For the time being I would probably discontinue my contribution if one of the developers I am tipping decides to do something I don't approve of (say, join Oracle). However, that's not my ideal long-term situation:

Ideally, I would, over time, decide for myself that I actually put total trust into people I support, that I trust them to do the right thing and continue to do so. To continue to make the right decisions, even if I may not understand their every reasons, even if I am actually opposed to a particular move.

Basically, I want to help „setting them free“. This concept exists for entrepreneurs in the form of „FU money“ but I would like see something like that to happen elsewhere, be it OSS developers, political activists or philosophers, caring mothers or fathers, teachers, artists, or musicians. I think crowd-founding makes possible which I could never achieve from the income I generate alone.

So eventually I'd like to decide (in some cases) to make my commitment irrevocable, if that would be by contract alone or by putting 500 weeks of tips into a safe fund, I don't know but I think independent of whether gittip is going to have a feature like that eventually I think this is an important step into the right direction, namely not expecting anything in return for the absolute trust I give out :-)

(I really like the idea of fully generalized reciprocity, i.e. all give not because they receive something in return but because they know enough people are giving, too. I'm not naive enough to think everybody will take part in such a scheme but I think these OSS developers show how much impact even freeing some of them could make).

(I absolutely agree on your other post, many will be suspecious of and reject no-strings-attached donations, I have no problems with that at all)
I am curious, what is wrong with NERD tree? I had some frustrations with netrw a while ago which caused me to drop it. I don't really use NERD tree that heavily, though.
Being an intellectual ought to be primarily a matter of attitude of respect towards knowledge of all kinds and, above all, a strong curiosity and interest in learning.

Thus what is particularly sad is not the fact that some subject or another is avoided and ignored by (intellectually) lazy people but that such people, proud of their ignorance, nowadays pass for intellectuals.

'My subject is more important than yours, so I am not going to waste time learning from you' is just a post-justification for being a dullard and a bigot.
Or, adapting the subtitle: Brain scans reveal simple 3D grid structure

Agree that the current editorialized HN title (Beautiful math: Human brain Connectome project) is nonsensical. The word "math" doesn't appear in the article at all, for example.
The United States will, I think, continue to see this for a long time. U.S. internal propaganda is very effective at convincing people that they are not so much poor as temporarily embarrassed millionaires, and as such political movements to change the system against poverty are met with disapproval by the people who need it the most.
The article claims that America's poor are being fleeced. I'm not sure I agree with that. Rich people are paying less taxes than they used to, but it's hard to make a case that the wealth of the poor has been forcibly redistributed to the rich (predatory lending aside).
That's half of the country, so I guess their definition is if you make less than the median.
This is very cool and interesting and HN worthy. I second all the notes here about vibrotactile displays. Please also read up about how people are developing devices that substitute somato sensation (touch) for vision for blind people http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_substitution
That's one of the reasons I wrote this. One thing you could do is write scripts in it. Or smaller programs.

One thing I'd really like to do is to make a massive index of emacs-lisp code on github. That would be a fantastic resource.
Do you check HTTPS certificates in your API clients?
Didn't the country at large just drop enormous sums of money propping up failed companies full of rich people?

Edit: Additionally, I think "wealth" and "money" are not the same thing and as such any argument that the wealth of the poor is being unfairly taken cannot be denied purely on the grounds that they don't pay much in tax. Their wealth is being taken before they even see a monetary representation of it.
See, this is exactly the sentiment that the parent was talking about. And this crops up repeatedly on HN. It seems incredibly presumptuous to go to other fields and demand that they produce answers in the way that you were trained: "philosophy doesn't yield data like hard science, so it's not as important!" Why should they listen to an outsider who doesn't even take the time to learn the field?

More to the point, why should one be proud of a reductionistic and truncated worldview?
I think you might've misinterpreted what I meant? I didn't mean to imply anything about the growth of iOS or that ObjC being just perceived as an easier language because of the growth. I trying to say that Objective-C was really criticized for its verbosity and forcing manual memory management, and Apple has made changes in direct response to those with ARC and more concise literals, which IMO makes it "easier" (espc. wrt ARC)
I've use a poor man's shell script that does pretty much this and works on OSX https://gist.github.com/1144996
Calling something slavery doesn't make it so. Statements like this are ridiculous, and they also minimize the evils of actual slavery.
Tools released at Defcon can crack widely used PPTP encryption in under a day
Since the poor and near-poor pay far less in taxes than the services they receive, that's irrelevant.

The middle class and non-connected sort-of-wealthy are the ones getting screwed by the bailouts.

Unless you assume that the poor have a right to what others earn (as opposed to simply the right to not get screwed and exploited by the wealthy, as the parent is talking about), then the poor have nothing to complain about as far as bailouts go.
The idea that poverty is slavery is not new. The notion of "wage slavery" is nearly centuries old[1]. (People disagree whether it's appropriate to draw parallels with chattel slavery, i.e. people as property.) This CBS News article is really about the high rate of poverty and disproportionate distribution of wealth in America today.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery
From their Terms and Conditions (http://www.strava.com/terms):
>You agree to indemnify and hold Strava and its subsidiaries, affiliates, officers, agents, representatives, employees, partners and licensors harmless from any claim or demand, including reasonable attorneys' fees, made by any third party due to or arising out of Content you submit, post, transmit or otherwise seek to make available through the Site, your use of the Site, your athletic activities which generate the Content you post or seek to post on the Site (including, but not limited to, athletic activities in connection with any contests, races, group rides, or other events which Strava sponsors, organizes, participates in, or whose Site is used in connection with), your connection to the Site, your violation of the Terms, or your violation of any rights of another person or entity.

Are clauses like this actually legally binding and enforceable? I see them in almost every contract, usually the same words, like a boilerplate. I can see why the cyclist wouldn't be indemnified for the accident, but would the courts grant Strada a compensation from the cyclist?
According to wikipedia:

According to the U.S. Census Bureau data released Tuesday September 13, 2011, the nation's poverty rate rose to 15.1% (46.2 million) in 2010,[2]

Which mean the "near poor" people are lumped in with the poor population so that it become somehow, 150 million people, which is about half of the population of the US.
I don't know if Strava is using an algorithm to alleviate this, but isn't it a bad idea to follow routes set with GPS when the positioning is only accurate to 10 meters?
OS X Workstation Management With Chef
Lots of terrorists use cell phones, so using a cell phone is terrorism?
But that's a shame! The honest rich and the honest poor are all those that want no part of government bailouts or handouts. There are plenty of both, and we need a system based on individual rights so that rich and poor alike can all prosper as far as their own ability can take them.

(We don't have individual rights today, and we haven't had a consistent adherence to the ideal in well over a century. For example, if you own a home, it can be taken under eminent domain. If you have built a giant enterprise on your own, it can be smashed by antitrust. If you have an innovative idea in nearly any field, you'll find that regulatory restriction make it difficult or impossible to execute, with a small number of exceptions like the computer industry.)
> Do people who get these magnetic implants actually develop different "qualia" along with their new perceptions, or do they just add different interpretations to existing qualia?

I'm not sure what the right answer is with regards to magnetic implants, but some people who have used the haptic compass mentioned in another comment have reported developing a seemingly innate "sixth sense" of direction. Presumably that might apply to a wide range of augmented sensory apparatus.
What is the output of "rm -rf /"?
BTW I'm looking for more guests in coming weeks. http://www.hnpod.com/be-a-guest
For a good introduction to the Connectome project, this is excellent: http://www.thersa.org/events/video/vision-videos/connectome
The hard part is, how do you know your founder is good to her word? A year of work, and you get nothing. That is a huge risk.
What's wrong with people paying back the cost of their training to make money? Why should other people be forced to pay to improve the lives of others?

There should be policies that protect students from making bad debt decisions to pay for education that won't pay for the debt. Other than that, I don't see student loans as a significant contributor to poverty.
I think exclusive was added recently, but I can't be sure. Anyone else remember it?

Additionally you can't copyright facts.

From Feist v. Rural a collection of facts can only be copyrighted insomuch as they are creatively selected and arranged. Feist specifically states it doesn't matter how hard it was for them to collect the facts.

The selection isn't creative, because there is not selection, And the arrangement is only by geographic location and time--the only viable way to post such material, so not original or creative.

In addition Padmapper doesn't take the writing directly they just take out the relavent facts.

Again facts aren't copyrightable if you aren't copying a creative selection or arraignment.

I see this as no different than a T.V. guide publishing short blurbs about the episodes and order of a TV show.
"Many users don't like it, vendors don't like it, and developers don't like it."

I would love to know how he came to the conclusion that developers don't like it. I'm building a Metro app in JS with VS 2012 and couldn't be happier. What is there to complain about when the preview OS, the SDK and the IDE are free? The level of documentation already available (incl. the sample projects) is also impressive.
"In technology, long term thinking is impossible, because everything changes so fast, and the pace of change is quickening. The rules are Nobody knows when a sudden shift in technology will open up new markets and business models."

I agree with the idea that a startup's vision is subject to the shifts in technology around it. And for the same reasons that you point out, I agree that it does not make sense for all tech startups to be thinking too far ahead. However, you could also argue that the sudden shifts in technology happen because there are companies whose vision is BIG and executed as planned. Some companies are just more susceptible to technology changes because they're building on platforms that are susceptible to those changes.

But no, I have yet to build a successful company, so who am I to act like I know? :)
This is the written equivalent of poverty porn. It's obviously very well written, but doesn't actually suggest any pragmatic solutions other than to elevate the poor to the status of martyrs. The single call to action which it does give conveniently isn't aimed at anyone at all. Whose responsibility is it to make poverty a priority? Congress? The public? The rich?

Pieces like this just leave a bad taste in the mouth - it'll obviously help shift copies of Mr. Smiley's book - but I'm not sure its going to do anything for actual poor people. And if there's anything worse than massive social inequality, its trying to make money off the back of it while masquerading as some kind of social crusader.
accei guess the biggest problem is that a long pass phrase would tend to logical phrases like 'willyoumarrymeedward' where as user name and passwords rarely form a logical phrase. So guessing at valid passphrases would be easier to do
If I wanted to read this kind of thing, I'd hang out on the front page of Reddit. I come here for my news in the hope that even if it is a vacuous political op-ed masquerading as sociology, there will be some sort of technology connection.
I've really enjoyed the recent episodes, thanks! (I especially like the podcast recommendation bit.)

FWIW, I found Ilya's audio quality to be really swishy. Might want to make a note of the setup and try something else in the future.
similarly, engineers who won't criticize or endure criticism of their own work are seriously poisonous for a company.
An investment fund that makes trades based on superstitious beliefs
That can't happen. The shader compiler in modern AMD GPU drivers is based on the compiler for their first unified architecture, Xenos. Which was written by Microsoft.

AMD simply does not have the rights to the software needed to open-source it, and likely never will.

However, don't count the OSS drivers out yet -- the shader compilers are in their infancy, but there is a lot of dev interest and LLVM-based projects have a tendency to move fast.
> "What Padmapper is doing, is effectively trying to sell hamburgers inside of a McDonald's: They are leveraging someone else's hardwork in developing a user base and repeat customers, to further their own goals."

The analogy fails in two respects:
1) Padmapper doesn't make money off of Craigslist listings.
2) Padmapper shows facts about the listing, not the CL listing itself, and it links back to the original listing. If that's considered 'selling burgers inside of McD', then Google is also 'selling burgers inside of McD'.

The difference between the two situations are that in one case, there's only one place content is posted (padmapper/CL case). In the other case, content is posted to a lot of different places (google/web).

If history were different, and most content were hosted on AOL/Geocities, and Google was doing the same thing it's doing now, would you make the same argument for AOL/Geocities that you would for CL?
But you can always parallelize the spamming itself.