skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually, you can commit from github. Go to any file and hit Edit at the top right. It's a single file editor, so don't expect much out of it, but it is conceivable for someone to contribute without using git.

And to your point, you cannot add files via github.
The Most Important Writing Lesson I Ever Learned: don't click on boring links.
The argument is not that "charity improves healthcare" (though in some specific cases it does, locally), it's that since birth rates tend to fall, the claim that "saving a child will only increase the number of starving people in the future" doesn't hold.
I did not find that comment condescending, though I expected to when he mentioned that he was going to explain how the budget worked. In fact, the thing that struck me while reading the entirety of the piece was how well he advocated for his position and explained difficult ideas in an accessible way while not talking down to the nun or criticizing her for not sharing his point of view. If all scientists could write in such an effective way their politics would be much better received I'm sure.
He's got a valid complaint mixed in with emotion and opinion. The valid complaint means you can't dismiss it out of hand, but the emotion and opinion mean that the comments get out hand.
What I wrote is fine and not an example of the author's points. You just didn't want to read what I wrote. Okay. My content is not what you want. Okay.

There is another point I omitted (to save space!) that likely is a better explanation of what is really going on: The point goes back to McLuhan's "The medium is the message". So, in particular, the issue is not so much what the author said or what I said but just "the medium".

So, what was "the medium" and its role: The old medium was narrow, if you will, short on 'bandwidth'. So, there were a few huge audiences, and a main goal of ad copy was to reach as large a fraction as possible of one of those huge audiences. Well, that goal was difficult. In rough terms, the technique was to appeal to 'the least common denominator'. And a need was to get the message in a very short ad.

Now with the Internet, the medium has changed. It is no longer the case that the audience does not want to read. Instead the audience does want to read but only relatively narrow content.

The writing lessons he praises are not so much good for writing but at one time were good for some of McLuhan's media.

I was offended by his claim that he had found good lessons for "writing". I've done quite a lot of quite serious writing and much more very serious reading, and for that work his lessons are badly wrong. Here is a current sore spot with me: I'm writing software on Windows and, thus, am using .NET. So far I've collected over 3000 Web pages of documentation on the parts of .NET I am using. Nearly 3000 of those pages are from Microsoft's MSDN Web site of documentation. I've been programming for decades but am new to .NET.

Now for the sore spot about writing: The writing of the .NET documentation has been by a huge margin the worst part of my software project. For me, reading Knuth's TACP was fast and easy, but reading Microsoft's .NET documentation has been a total pain and very inefficient. The main reason for the difficulty is much the same as for the author -- a determination to concentrate on 'writing' styles that refuse to concentrate just on information.
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_the_good_news_of_the_d...

That video does a very good job of explaining this. As child mortality decreases, family size goes down. I'm sure the data is manipulated to suit someone's purposes, but all seems reasonable to me...
True, there are mitigating factors. I just got annoyed when Tiny Wings was used as an example of a great game, particularly when the explanation of its success started off by citing its mechanics, and even more particularly when McCoy's focus on games is entirely about mechanics. Tiny Wings may not have copied much, but they copied everything that there was to copy. Tiny Wings is a better game than Wave Spark, but people keep citing it as an example of a well-developed game without realizing that Illiger didn't need to do any playtesting, didn't need to do any focus groups, and didn't need to actually have the big idea.

I'm sorry if that came off more aggressive than I intended. I don't like writing long posts. I think that my perception of the situation might also be skewed by my preference for gameplay over art; I play Dwarf Fortress and Aurora, for pete's sake. I was also following the game-a-week project while it was in the process, so there's that.
Don't remove the word "fuck." If you must, provide a censored alternative, but the "fuck" helps things like this grow popular.

See: http://whatthefuckhasobamadonesofar.com/ versus the PG version: http://whattheheckhasobamadonesofar.com/
On creative machines and the physical origins of freedom
I think you can certainly make an argument for military spending in terms of the side benefits associated with developing any complex technology, but I don't think the societal cost of increased militarization justifies military spending.
This is so cool.
Hot Videos are so funnly :)
I'm sorry I mean gifs :)
Yes, a great explanation, especially the wrap-up at the end.

You can see how people with too narrow a view of technical design would misconstrue this point. If you're hell-bent on (shallow) perfectionism, you perceive the dichotomy as perfect vs imperfect. One step more healthy is simple vs. complex, because it means you've recognized that time is finite, and too much complexity can legitimately kill a project; it's one of the first real-world constraints on viability that intrudes. "Viability" is really the goal, though, typically, when you include the motivations of the humans involved, like seeing their project be successful and have an impact.

The more you can align your moral compass with viability rather than turning smaller issues into battles between good and evil, the more successful you will be.
It's not random. Clients generally download the rarest pieces first. That way, the torrent is less likely to break when the swarm disappears.

If everyone downloads the most popular pieces first, then as the swarm shrinks, clients will soon only have pieces that everyone else has and nobody's downloads would finish.
The trick is to find way to knife through a couple of those layers of management to the managers who actually know what should be done. You really can't ask most users or managers because they're just not helpful.
A comparison of C++11 language support in VS2012, g++ 4.7 and Clang 3.1
I get that, and I do usually enjoy the heavily sarcastic approach sites like this take to make their point ... it just seems to me that "wtf [organisation]" is something more akin to how i'd emphasise how unbelievably ridiculous, say, oil companies are for yet another spill/cover-up/buyout etc

In this situation, the intention is really to celebrate the fact that NASA makes awesome stuff and the whole WTF comedy angle seems a bit awkward to me :)

[EDIT] I just realised out exactly why it seems awkward to me ... http://whatthefuckhasobamadonesofar.com/ works because it's sarcastically about what he's done, whereas "wtf NASA" is aimed directly at NASA and comes across as angry. The URL needs to be something like "wtfhasnasaeverdonefortheworld.com" (like the page heading) for the joke to really work I think
Are you talking about µTorrent? If so, µ is pronounced "mu" or "mew"; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%9C
LEAVE HACKERNEWS ALONE!
> "he microscope-story was just fluff to prime the reader to be open to the idea that science can benefit humanity."

Not just that, but to drive home that although the benefits of research may not be known at the time they are nevertheless existent.
For Jennifer Sultan, a Dot-Com Bust
Calendar - from scratch or plugin?
What are the benefits of jQuery calendar plugins (i.e. wdCalender and FullCalendar)?

I'm looking to make a scheduling component to my website and all calendars seem to be are grids. That's really it. I have a pretty specific visual confines so if I were to use a plugin... I'd need to be able to adjust the CSS 100%.

Since I'll be doing that anyway, I'm just not sure I see the benefit in these plugins. I see them as follows:

1. Drag and drop events - don't really need that currently. Clicking the event and bring up an "edit" box should work fine. However, how hard is this develop on my own after the fact?

2. Various pop-ups (i.e. view details when click event) - easy to implement on my own

3. Month, Week, Day Layouts - easy to implement display/hide toggling

The only area of the calendar I am currently unsure about is the ability to get the dates to actually line up appropriately and for it to match with the real dates, i.e. it knows that the days all the months start on, which year is a leap year, etc. I briefly discussed this with my partner, who is dealing with the back-end, and he ensured me that this is something he could and would deal with on the back-end. But is there something that I could do on the front-end that these jQuery plugins provide? Or is there something that's easy enough to implement on my own?

If someone could help me think of other benefits of these plugins that I'm missing, that would be great. I don't want to start designing my own calendar and then realize after hours of work that I should have went with a plugin. But the way I see it, once I develop the static grid, that's 80% of the battle on the front-end. The remaining things like toggling views, view detail pop-ups, edit events pop-ups... all very straightforward for me to do on my own. Learning the ins and outs of a specific plugin would seem to be more of a hindrance even. But want to know for sure before I march ahead.

Thanks!
Does anyone know how this letter first came to be published?

Update: Google Books answered the question for me:

> Dr. Stuhlinger responded to the sister in a letter that was published by NASA/George C. Marshall Space Center in 1970 titled "Why Explore Space?"

[1] http://books.google.com/books?id=qXuLydSqzDQC&lpg=PA55&#...
But in this case that's almost completely wrong. For example, "bug-ridden"? Outfits like NASA use classical techniques (code inspection etc.) to ensure that their software has exceedingly low error rates. This has been well studied. Such an approach works, it's just too expensive for most commercial projects. As for "slow", how likely is that?

On another note, it's pretty cool that the first three names credited in the JPL coding standard document (which is linked to at the bottom of the OP and is surprisingly well written) are Brian Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie, and Doug McIlroy.
x86 became hyper-complex, and won the market, because x86 chips have always remained backwards-compatible with previous x86 chips and software. Some issue as with Windows.
Well, US produces lots of surplus every year. We don't give them out. Instead, we burn them. Really now?
Play with the raw data as you like at Gapminder.org.

For example, here is a graph I created of infant mortality vs children per woman: http://www.bit.ly/QTPNBk
(starts at 1900, press play to see changes to current)

Note that each axis has a small 'various sources' button under it that will cite specific sources.

You may also enjoy Hans Rosling's TED Talk on global population growth, as he gets into the details pretty thoroughly. https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_...
htop will solve all your problem. Why even bother Monner?
I'm on the same boat. Which is why I believe anyone who (in an ideal world) is seriously seeking to change the state of life in those poor countries should spend their money on creating jobs and "factories". By factory I don't mean silicon factories, but basic needs of those people, be it hospitals or modern agricultural facilities. But, sadly, in reality that can't happen. If you want to create jobs, you first need to have a powerful (and obviously not corrupt) central government. Without that, nothing significant can be done.

So, what should be done? I don't know. Education, a benevolent government, jobs, no drugs, secular & democratic laws... You can't have any of them without having others already in place. But, any progress is better than nothing. And in the long term, maybe

Afghanistan might be a good example. 30 years ago, a war between Soviets and US ruined the country and its (modestly functional) government. For the next 20 years they were "governed" by former US ally, the Taliban. Religious zealots who would kill girls if they wanted to go to school. Then US (thankfully) attacked the Taliban and for the last 5-6 years they've had some sort of a central government. It's (to some degree) corrupt, it's not efficient, it lacks technical knowledge, but still, it's a form of government and has some power and the desire to change the country. And they're making progress. 10 years ago Afghanistan was a forth-world country. A country from another century. But now, they've headed to the right direction. In 10 years (if the continue their progress), Afghanistan might very well become a country that people "might" consider living in (in the large cities at least - if they had the choice). It wouldn't become Norway, but it would be an average country instead of the hell it was 10 years ago.

Edit: I found a nice (read: sickeningly sad) article about Taliban and U.S. from 2001: http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/23860 The rest of the site is garbage, but this article is not.
A very good point, but -- ironically -- not very clearly stated.

Indeed, most HN commenters seem to think that this piece is about advertising. It is not. True, that is the primary example used, but later he talks about writing novels.

The point (as I understood it) is this: give value to your readers. No one wants to read something just because you wrote it. They want to read it because they get something out of it: fun, information, etc. And brevity & clarity mean your reader has to work less to get the value.
Maybe one side was facing the sun slightly?
You were probably eating Planters or some other 'big brand.' Most peanut snack foods come loaded with sugar, carbs, and bad oil. http://www.fatsecret.com/calories-nutrition/food/peanuts/car...
> And I'm with you on "hacker". I don't have a problem with the word itself, but its so overused in these circles to the point that its irritating every time I see someone try to stuff yet another everyday activity under the hacker term.

It's at that point that you regex it to something else. [0]

I won't stop using hacker; because it has history. But I do laugh when I see it get applied to everything, it's sad, in a humorous sort of way.

At least the IT community hasn't ruined wizard yet.

[0]: http://xkcd.com/1031/
It'll be great if uploading files are allowed.
seriously, though, what's with the blacked-out sections?
Unlike other mars rovers, Curiousity isn't solar powered. It's nuclear powered. RTGs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_gen...) are not new, but I have no doubt that plenty of refinements went into the process to make this one better and more efficient.

Now what if this is the next fuel source for cars? We could dramatically cut down on our use of fossil fuels. That's pretty world changing.

The automated landing represented a huge engineering challenge as well. Lots of lessons learned can likely be transferred to earthly pursuits. Imagine a rescue helicopter that can automatically fly into dangerous situations and save people. Imagine robots that are faster and more efficient at producing or harvesting food.

Then of course, every time we land on a planet, we get better at it. The earth has a finite surface area. Barring major catastrophes, we'll probably fill it up eventually. If the experiments of today can provide a place for the people of the future to move, I think that will be the biggest contribution.
You are clearly attention whoring by choosing titles that are more likely to generate foot traffic than to accurately reflect the contents. This is disingenuous. You are, as GP said, in no position to offer authoritative advice, so you might try and respect your target audience and puff your cheeks less.
After working for various start-ups and freelancing most my, I took a full-time contract at Inuit (TurboTax/Quicken) about a year a go. I was very surprised how much I enjoyed the work there. The start-ups I worked at were never huge successes so getting the chance to work on a Rails app that gets hundreds of thousands of requests per minute (it's embedded in TurboTax) was something new for me and provided a different set of challenges.

I've also found that large companies (or at least Intuit) are very open to progression and innovation. When I started our team was on Ruby 1.8.7, Rails 2.3.5, in a physical data center, used Perforce, and a bunch of other "enteprise" software suites. Now we are cranking on latest versions of Ruby and Rails, Github, AWS, and Campfire.

It has been a much more rewarding experience than I would have thought. Oh and you have no idea how good it feels to get real, publicly traded stock :)
When asked what VCS they’re using, people reply more often with “github” than simply “git”.

sounds like author swims in a specific contained pool that he believes is the only pool around. all the git command line commands still work; why not just use that?
This is why I always use Bitbuekt. As far as I am concerned, I dislike Linus so I won't use git. Well, I still use Linux because it's a great software, but git? Nah. Stick with Mercurial myself. No wonder why Python and Django and Python stick to Bitbucket lol
Ask HN: Does anyone know if demonoid users will be targeted?
Following the recent raids and arrests of demonoid related assets, I am curious if anyone has heard whether or not users will be pursued?
I was looking for exactly something like this, really nice interface.
Commits are by no means an accurate measure of developer contribution.

ripley's lead is probably undeniable, but the differences in commits between the next four could be developer preference of code per commit.
My personal experience is the opposite, I find eating only protein for dinner leaves me without a fullness sensation. Such as Sashimi, I can eat that forever while Sushi (with rice) fills me up.
Very cool, but I am still amazed by how CSS animations are killing modern desktop CPU. I guess this is because my Chrome browser is not using GPU acceleration for CSS?

If I duplicate 10 times the watch, my CPU hits 100%.
Switched around the process architecture. Less code now :)

Will look at dropping the target-output option.
As I understand it, Gates funds health related research, e.g. clean drinking water or malaria. Your parent was discussing the simple provision of free food.
How To Maximize your AdSense Revenue...
or wind.
App.net funded with $500,000.
htop is nice but it's not so usable for generating output that you can graph up and use for comparing things.
That's true, and the point that I was trying to make is that we need more of these built-in checks and assertions, even if they mean that the system isn't running at its maximum potential efficiency. I think that software development practices (especially in the financial industry) have gravitated too far towards speed (in computing and executing actions) and not enough towards safety (e.g. doing some meta-analysis and determining if the computed actions make sense given higher level trends).
Do some Googling. My grandparents were all born in Ireland from 1905-1920. My father's father was one of 6 children, my mother's mother 1 of 13. All families lost at least two children each that I'm aware of -- stillbirths were often kept secret.

The point is, when you have incredibly poor country, excessive influence of religion, poor health and a high child mortality rate, you have more children, both planned and unplanned.
No, I don't think that that's correct now with media now: Consider Web sites that want to report news on some of the common subjects, e.g., politics, the economy, international relations, business, science, technology, computing, energy. For each of these subjects, there are Web sites with interested readers.

Then, good news for aspiring writers: For such a subject and Web site, go for it! Just write some solid, new, meaningful, hopefully useful and insightful, information about the subject. Then attach an appropriate headline, subheading, and first paragraph, and, presto, be confident that you will have done 'good writing' and will reach about as much of your audience as is reasonable. No tricks. No magic. No secrets. No special techniques. Just accumulate, organize, and document the information and, then, publish it on an appropriate Web site with appropriate titles, etc. Then, if I am interested in your subject, you will get my full attention; no more secrets of writing will be required.

Here is a big, huge point about writing now, media now, and the points here: It has finally become fairly clear that the best writing on Web sites now is not from 'writers' or journalists at all! Such 'writers' can polish their craft, work on their technique, etc. all they want and will still lose. What such writers are losing out to are subject matter experts with no particular skills in writing at all. So, for a piece about, say, US-China trade, f'get about a business journalist-writer and, instead, get an expert in US-China trade. Want to know about a new supercar? F'get about the auto 'journalists' and, instead, go to a video at Jay Leno's Web site and watch the chief engineer of the car describe the details.

This lesson has been so well appreciated that many Web 'news' sites are trying to get as much of their content as possible from subject matter experts who are not 'writers',
with good lessons or bad, at all.

E.g., want to know about venture capital? Okay, read the business journalists? Usually not! Instead read Hacker News, especially the comments, Fred Wilson's blog AVC.com, etc. Net, the good content is not where writers have learned lessons in writing but where the writers are subject matter experts and know what the heck they are writing about, i.e., have the information.
Well, it does seem pretty convincing as support for the conclusion "aerobic exercise is sufficient". If the choice is between sufficient and unproved things, how can you rationalize disregarding sufficiency?
you've got outcastventures.com. feel free to start the transfer process!
It doesn't make you cruel, but it does show you're taking a cheap cop-out. There are plenty of charities that work towards improving the local economies, which include some really interesting things like microloans. The 'starving children' is just an appeal to the heartstrings because sick children win more money than anything else.
The elements are a bit too small to get accurate results. An indicator for when the 5 second limit is reached would be appreciated. Also, please indicate how long I have to wait, it has been splitting video for a long time now.
This might be a stupid question but;
Is this the same concept as
http://appjs.org or http://cappuccino.org ?

ps
http://pyjs.org/will_and_abe_guide_to_pyjamas.html 404's
ds
App.Net reaches it's goal
Is this going to inspire more companies / startups to go the crowdfunding route? (I think so). How many companies are going to now cite: "App.net style" of pre-launch efforts? Is this a good or a bad thing?

This is a whole new era, either way. Congrats to the App.net team!
App.net just reached the $500k
Impressive.

https://join.app.net/
Oh no, we get so much of it here (Vancouver, BC), this site actually made me hurt reminding me of what's to come.
Very valid point, just curious about what there plans are.
This sounds like a pretty good approach. Why must it be "in the future"? Why don't you work on it yourself? This is Hacker News, after all.
Two things,

By his "standard" Gmail is just a fad... a 10 year fad.

And also, him using his own git server is fine and well until his server gets hacked.