skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Giving people food, money etc, gives people incentives to not bother working.

Well yeah, but according to this kind of economistic thinking, paying a guy $40/hour instead of $20/hour encourages him to work half as many hours. Giving people anything for any reason, including as trade/payment, can always be construed as encouraging less work-ethic.

And likewise, withholding anything or inflicting any suffering or punishment can always be construed as encouraging work-ethic.
The only thing keeping you from killing people is fear?

I think moral values (no matter where they are derived from) keep people from committing more crimes.
Control the Complexity of Your JavaScript Functions with JSHint
For those who didn't dive into the spec, the non-blocking recieve syntax has changed to use the select statement:

func f(ch chan int) {
select {
case v := <-ch:
fmt.Println("got", v)
default:
fmt.Println("did not block")
}
}

http://play.golang.org/p/ql0qSUVXeX
I can almost relate. Consider comparing Raspberry Pi to say Commodore 64 or ZX Spectrum. Anyone familiar with programming 8-bit home computers of the 80's knows how simple they were by their hardware and how easy it was to grasp them. What was(and still is) great about them, is that any kid(regardless of age, as long as they can read) was and still is able to learn how the computers work. How many kids these days get to actually count CPU cycles? How many even really what it means without taking an university course in computer architecture or microarchitecture design? Yet, this is the exact stuff the kids are interested in! They want to learn how it works. And no, explaining that CPU executes some "instructions"(what are they?) which operates on "data"(what is it?) in "registers"(what are they?) and produces results which are "pushed"(what does it mean?) to the "stack"(what is it?). Of course, one could argue that none of this matters nor it should matter. We should go away from it, and aim higher. Teach Python and functional programming and hope they become proficient. I think this is a very wrong approach to teach kids about computers and how they work. I think that demystifying the computer starts best from explaining what and how it does what it does. Programming comes later in regards to demystifying the computer, which should not be "just that box which we program and somehow turns the code to windows and buttons for us to click".

Of course, I am ignoring the point that actually getting to do any kind of programming or tinkering on Raspberry Pi is orders of magnitude harder than on say Commodore 64 or ZX Spectrum. Or even your average Windows desktop. These days there is just simply no suitable platform to actually play around with, and only universities seem to have some experimental simple hardware setups with simple operating systems for educational purposes. You really have to take a course or get an ancient home computer to see how stuff works. I think it is sad.
Researchers propose a way to build the first space-time crystal
Well, contract law and property-title enforcement. Take away private property and Mr. Libertarian isn't going to be so happy that people copied his program-code and took over his factory.

Hence why it's properly called proprietarianism: organizing society with private property as the prime principle.
New ActiveMQ Failover and Clustering Goodies
This article is brilliant. Each and every point Jacques makes is spot-on. I'm sure many will disagree with his stance, but he makes an excellent point. Irrespective of our personal preference, we are effectively locked in to and subordinate of our government and its policies. Any self-respecting human who has contemplated this should be sick to their stomach.

Realize this: we're floating in space. Not one soul on this planet knows why we're here, where we're going, or how we should conduct ourselves. In essence we've been handed our own "Gary's Mod" and yet we've resolved to have infinite and mostly useless structure. I'm not praising anarchy, but like what was mentioned in this piece, I should have a choice.
Some of the best technical thinkers I've met came from a liberal arts background. The exposure to a broad range of ideas from a variety of fields including both the natural sciences, math, the social sciences, literature, etc., prepares a person to think about problems from a variety of perspectives, to think about the impacts of their decision making processes, etc. It's about mental flexibility, it's about being a cultured human being, it's about having a shared language and metaphors to enable one to better participate in society.
The 30 minute charging time kind of sucks, but it's a small price to pay for owning a completely electric car, and I'm sure it's probably up there as far as improvements go on the priority list.
That isn't the same. If you do that you will get an Irrefutable pattern failed exception. You don't actually get access to x if justOrNone returns Nothing, because you are pattern matching and the Just pattern doesn't match. So you won't be able to use a non-value in further computations like you can with go.
Why can't you combine them? I can see all these (perhaps with the exception of 3) being perfectly blend-able.
Well if you care about majority of Ukraine and Russian users you better support Opera, I'm sure there are more countries where Opera is popular but in those 2 if has the market lead.
Read Montague: What we're learning from 5,000 brains (video)
TextExpander and Take Control: Why Intuitive Software Still Needs Manuals
Oxford and Cambridge can be a little strange about the degrees they award, almost entirely due to tradition. Undergraduate degrees almost all confer a BA at Oxford and they don't award BSci or (I think) BEng so reading a STEM subject would still get you a BA.

Stephen Hawking read Natural Sciences for what it's worth.
I suppose the key aspect here was the parents actually being friends with the victim, not the ethnicity of the stalker.
Why I Enrolled in an Online Scala Course
Kabam is making a social game based off The Hobbit movie
That explains this tweet from Stephen Elop: https://twitter.com/ceoStephenElop/statuses/2505601530138460...
not Arduino but close ...
http://jeelabs.org/2012/09/20/serial-hookup-jeenode-to-raspb...
Just curious, your son is paying back $100k in loans within 2 years of graduation?
Original presentation of the vulnerability with demo: http://youtu.be/Q2-0B04HPhs
Shit.

Thanks.
If he had an 800 math SAT, he would know the odds were still pretty damn low.
> It's different and the horizontal scrolling might not be everyone's cup of tea, but screens seem to be getting wider so it makes sense that sites start adopting a more horizontal oriented approach to web design to accommodate larger resolution screens.

It seems very tablet like. Side scrolling isn't a big deal on a touch device. Not sure how I'd like it in a browser with a mouse that only scrolls one way, but the video looks nice at least.
It's called trolling, and it's a well known and written about phenomenon. There doesn't even have to be a reason.
You can:

func main() {
x := 4
f := func() { fmt.Println(x) }
ch := make(chan func(), 1)
ch <- f
f2 := <-ch
f2()
x = 5
f2()
}

http://play.golang.org/p/NK5YLVT4zB
Youthful Arrogance - Advice for students
That's not real Stephen Elop, you know? :)
This story is all about empathy...
I don't think kids in high school are old enough to have neck-beards.
Connecting a RaspPi to an Arduino:

1. Get USB cable

2. Plug USB cable to Arduino

3. Plug USB cable to RaspPi

Steps 2 and 3 can be reversed.
I don't know what you mean by your first example, how does that lead to using undefined data? And your second example is incorrect, if you use an Either in monadic style then each successive function call after the error occurs is doing nothing. It simply returns the existing error from the Either, it doesn't try to run a computation on the non-existent value.
Running My Own Business: 6 Month Report
This Piece of Glass Can Store Data Forever
Wait. «A data set of 3.4 million pins was used»

How on Earth do you get a data set of 3.4 million debit card pins? Shouldn't that be impossible?
Considering morality is founded on a fear of someone doing to you what you did to them, then yes.

This is a fairly basic interpretation of the golden rule but it stands up to the majority of counterpoints.
Epidemic prevention certainly is, in the same way fire protection is - both a fire and an epidemic can rage out of control and kill lots of people. They are public goods because they have large positive externalities.

Both are also dirt cheap (i.e., single-digit percentages of government spending) and very few people oppose their public provision. So why bring them up?
I would guess the opposite. QR codes are too early. They need to be scannable by a device that doesn't require reaching into your pocket, fumbling with your phone and then trying to get the right angle.

Combining a couple projections, I see them going from utterly useless to gimmicky cool for a particular crowd within 2 years.
Which is why everyone should install AdBlock
Video: How Does WebRTC/RTCWEB Work? A Technical Explanation
I have an S2, And I'm reading this from it. I was like "woow", then clicked the link that says "the code" instinctively and a sec later realized the stupid thing I just did (not smart reading that code from a vulnerable device). luckily, I pressed the back button before the page loaded.

That was close
I quibble with your quibble. This article does conflate economic return with actual value. Many people contribute positively to society (including economically), without necessarily being directly compensated proportionally to their contribution. For example, I am an engineer at a research institute that does a substantial amount of cancer and other medical research. As a CS guy, I get a pretty nice salary. However, there are plenty of folks who I work with whose degrees came from liberal arts education who contribute more directly to the cancer research, but whose salaries are lower than mine. Much of this research might actually go on to make pharmaceutical companies substantial profits, but these people will not be directly or proportionally compensated for that. If some of the research does not translate to therapeutics, then they will not have increased economic value at all, but will have definitely added intellectual and scientific value - a value that is not really easy to measure on a simple economic scale --- and certainly not on one so simple-minded as the one used in the article.
I guess my question is whether we need the journals at all ... the process of printing the journal itself certainly isn't the hard part, but is there a way to properly do peer review in an open system?

I'm certainly happy to see this consortium has moved in the right direction, but could it be even more open?
That's really interesting. Thanks. So in theory a startup might be able to get that 20 million figure down to 5 million if they're lean?
>I beg to differ - the error messages produced by such a program will be obscure, as all the context is lost - if the first call to someFunction fails, for example, there's not necessarily any indication that the error came from that call rather than the one after it.

This is completely incorrect. If you use Maybe, then you get Just value or Nothing, in which case there is no indication of what error occurred. This is used when you don't want to consider what error occurred, simply that the computation failed. If you use Either, then you get an error or a value. The error obviously gives the context you are looking for.
Site TOS don't really matter too much or else Google could never exist. They're mostly to limit the liability of the publisher and not to prevent anything with the accessor. Googlebot is not a lawyer, it can't decide the legal implications of scraping or what exact activity can be done with the data it finds.

Google also overlays facts it finds by crawling the web in maps (Google Places and the One Box results) and uses the creative contribution of other people to provide things like reviews inline on SERP. Google is a bad target to sue though because they will punch you right back in the face.
How to Become a Sensational Coder
Alex, I have lived in more than one country, so I have made specific observations of precisely how little influence the FDA has on the drug regulations of other countries. And I previously provided numerous examples to you of the FDA keeping drugs off the market or removing drugs from the market based on evidence of safety and effectiveness.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4245571

I would submit that the underlying system corruption is probably stronger among enterprises that sell schedule I controlled substances here in the United States than among those that sell government-regulated, physician prescribed medications. Both regulatory systems, the system that makes some drugs I've seen you speak up for contraband, and the system that makes some newly invented drugs legal items of commerce, may indeed need further reform. But it's an exaggeration (contradicted by thoughtful comments by drug industry researchers who have already posted replies in this thread) to say that the enterprises that develop new drugs for prescribed medical treatment are corrupt in general beyond what Goldacre claims with specific evidence.
It's fair to look at this industry with a critical eye, but let's not forget that many of these companies have spent billions of dollars to develop drugs that cure many very serious diseases.

I can't take serious the statement "the way medecine works is ludicrously appalling" if you consider people can now live a fine life with the AIDS virus and there are hundreds of diseases that can now be managed and cured, thanks to medicine.
Question: how do you feel about the lack of exceptions? To me, that's the biggest drawback to Go as it feels like sacrificing a major improvement in reliability and boilerplate reduction (obviously with Python-style syntax, not Java).
Optimizing MySQL for Flash
Wot, no hash check?
Agreed!

For some people Apple's conventions align with their tastes, or clash with their tastes. I think many more people have a meta-preference to have everything just decided and encapsulated for them (sometimes literally encapsulated: not 'having to worry about' battery replacement, for example). These people greatly outnumber the people with a meta-preference to have everything customizable, or open source, or whatever.

If our culture becomes more technically savvy, then I think there will be a higher value placed on systems which offer sane defaults and present few degrees of freedom up-front (like Apple) BUT do provide hatches for users to get more control (like Apple alternatives).
The Foundry and Luxology join forces
This is a fair point. I'm using the term probably in all of the ways you mention, plus another. Partly thats rhetorical, and partly analytical. Huge portions of reserach are paid for by the US government. The logic is to finance knowledge as an economic public good (ie, can't patent science, ideas, flow freely etc). That is the positive externality. And we fund it like we fund NASA and Defense, a communal public works. Or like roads, etc. The idea is that all should be able to drive on the information superhighway...etc (i know, this is stretching slightly optimistic, traffic etc;). But this is not what we are getting out of the system as a society.

& You raise some interesting points on what that front...But it just points to the answer: Universities are acting as hierarchies (ie, like firms) with monopolistic pricing power under assumptions of profit maximization (viz, rent seeking). You have to ask your self: self: why are these 20-30Bn investment hedge funds being not only tx exempted by the government, but having their operations/cost based subsidezed (viz, grants) and having their revenues subsidized (viz subsidized loans, grants) etc?

These institutions are highjacking huge flows of money that are supposed to be charitable contributions. The are leveraging the prestige of the projects financed to create a massive rent-seeking opportunities for themselves, not to further the free flow of information. This rent seeking is counterthetical to their stated mission and the public policy principles that underly their tax-exmpt and socially privledged status. The degree as entrenched credential is now a giant "hold-up-problem", with universities as the opportunists. And With kids as the hostages.

They should just hand out Birkin Bags at graduation. In the latest colors. To he!! with the sheepskin. =D

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birkin_bag

[edits]
I remember a client asking for vtiger once. I downloaded the source, and didn't even get to installation before I fired the client.

I really, really feel for you on this one.

The only thing I can say is: Make a beachhead of clean, working code. Slowly work your way out. Make it very clear to this client how much of a favor you're doing them, and give them meaningful status reports (even if all you did is rewrite the glue between to pieces of code).
"But I'm still going to rewrite my URLs so you don't see my choices."

What do you mean by this? How do you rewrite your URLs? Greasemonkey script?
Then how would we refer to the Hurd?
How Do Startups Identify the Competition?
This is certainly interesting stuff. Can you recommend an article that deconstructs their motivations and/or comments on whether or not what they're doing is actually legal?
It's all crazy. Absolutely batshit crazy. People hide behind it all the time and defend it as well.

In your example, it is why people buy the plants from someone else. It is purely risk mitigation. It allows them to break the implicit contract without risking severe punishment. The drug dealers are willing to take a larger risk as there is a high probability of financial gain or a higher risk of getting killed by their importer/pusher.
as an add-on question... does anyone have experience with selling wordpress plugins? is there a market for commercial plugins, or are most people not willing to pay since there is a lot of free stuff?
While I believe you could use all of these technologies when they have been abstracted away into APIs / programming languages etc, I have a hard time believing anybody could understand these technologies to the point of creating abstractions which is what is meant when one says they 'develop in assembly': you expect them to know stuff that, C, for example, abstracts away.
The cost is millions or billions. Pharma companies develop molecules that never even make it to the animal testing stage. Only one out of so many molecules makes it to the market and brings in money. If it's discovered that, after perhaps a decade of animal, volunteer and patient testing the drug can not be marketed, the cost that went in to that needs to be recuperated from the next one that can be marketed. It's a very expensive process.
I can understand that you like Apple products and will stick by them, but I don't understand the kind of disgust you express about being the kind of person that doesn't like Apple products.

Is it a product, or a tribe?
Ask HN: What physical thing would you build?
What would you love to build, if neither money nor skill/knowledge was an issue?
It's all about trading the social contract against risk of punishment. It's so absolutely unenforceable that more people break the social contract than adhere to it.
> If it's so easy to fix the system, people would have already done it.

This doesn't follow at all. The difficulty of fixing a system is just one possible reason it might remain as it does; regulatory capture is another, as is well-financed lobbying at the legislative level.

Pharmaceutical companies have a very clear financial interest in seeing as broad as possible use of their products, and demonstrably have the lobbying reach to forcefully advance this interest. If reform of medical trial data regulation is not a vote-winning platform (and it's hard to argue that it's uppermost in many voters' minds), then it's perfectly plausible that a broken system would persist despite the availability of easily-implemented solutions.
Your point about 'it has to be 4-year' conflicts with your point about 'you can take up to 10 years to do a 4-year degree'.
My local bus company has failed to grasp QR codes in a mind-bogglingly thorough way.

Every stop has a poster with a QR code on it, advertising that you can now look up when the next bus will be here by scanning the QR code. The first thing you might notice is that the poster is actually a photo of a QR code on a poster, and is taken at an angle sufficient to render scanning the QR code impossible.

The second thing you might notice is that all the posters are identical - they are, in fact, an advert for the QR code you are meant to scan and not the QR code itself.

So where are these QR codes? Somewhere else on the bus stop? On the post for the sign? No. Reading the smaller print on the poster reveals all: You simply visit their website on your PC and go to a specific URL, which delivers you a page full of QR codes. You then scan the QR code corresponding to the bus stop whose schedule you wish to view.

Couldn't be easier!
"But it's an exaggeration [...] to say that the enterprises that develop new drugs for prescribed medical treatment are corrupt in general beyond what Goldacre claims with specific evidence."

edit: Response moved to pastebin: http://pastebin.com/cniysd82

(Didn't realize how long that was going to get.)
Electric sports car
The X1 isn't all that upgradeable either. Fundamentally I don't think anyone has figured out how to make the Ultrabook form factor very friendly to user modification.
If you want to teach/learn low level, I think an Arduino is a better tool than a Raspberry Pi.
'Science Guy' condemns parents for preaching Bible studies over evolution
> Everyone I've talked to in Japan who has upgraded regrets it.

... and yesterday I saw a rather long prime-time Japanese TV news piece about how screwed up Apple's iOS6 maps are, where the reporter was travelling around to various places in Tokyo and showing how crazily Apple maps misrepresented them...

So the story's clearly made the jump from something techies know about to general news, just when all the resellers are trying hard to get people excited about the iphone 5...
FYI this was a tongue-in-cheek presentation done to Dave McClure and 500 Startups Geeks On A Plane Tallinn group yesterday as a fun way to compare the US views on many things tech and startups.
a machine which could simulate itself.
There is an alarming amount of laziness in the conclusion of this affair. I'm hoping that significant actions were left out of the post.

Who has the kid been talking to online? What else has he been up to? Who else is he harassing? How was he going to escalate the "game"?

It seems that the author wanted a peaceful resolution so badly that he manufactured one falsely.
You forgot second order effects. Leg gets fixed - you get back to work - goods and services are rendered, taxed, consumed and saved.

Your neighbor benefits by having an individual in whom society has invested millions in to train and care for back at work instead of being dead. That's a waste of money.

Humans are worth saving simply because we invest so much in them.
I didn't know that. Is there something I can read that'll back it up?
Life beyond JavaScript: Google RoboHornet test
yes it works now, however, you need to press the call button to initiate the format
The only semi-useful QR code I've ever seen in real life was on one of those little reminder cards in a parking garage to help you locate which floor you parked on. I say semi-useful because the QR code took you to a webpage that told you the same exact information the card had on it, and none of my friends or I could get reception inside the garage, so we all had to wait until we were out of the garage before figuring out what was on them.

I can see the usefulness of QR codes, but I don't think I've ever seen one implemented in a non-trivial or non-gimmicky way. They're a solution to a problem no one outside of marketing had.