skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hi,

Personal background: I work on this project, but only as a software engineer -- I didn't travel to Ethiopia, and don't have a development background (other than the last 6+ years at One Laptop Per Child). I'm not speaking for OLPC right now.

> The development community know all about this and are scathing of it.

People taking Approach A often think that the people taking Approach B are foolish and misguided (else they'd work on it themselves); it's not a point that carries normative weight by itself. We have to actually look at the arguments.

> a) these tablets are vastly more expensive than just hiring teachers locally - by orders of magnitude.

Well, steady. The two villages we chose are entirely illiterate -- they have no literate adults, and no-one there has ever been to school. One of the villages has potential access to one school that's 10 miles away and 3000 feet lower, which is not a plausible trip.

So now you've signed up to build two schools, and then find literate teachers who want to live in or spend all of their working time teaching in a remote illiterate village. And you realize that Oromo is highly dialectal, such that the two villages in this case speak dialects that aren't comprehensible to each other; your teacher probably doesn't know their dialect already. Is it still orders of magnitude cheaper than tablets?

> b) More perniciously, the tablets educate in English or Amharic: not in the local language of the population in question, which these children would otherwise speak; their parents are often not fluent in either.

There are no Oromo applications of any kind for Android, so in effect you're saying that this experiment should simply not happen, and these kids should not get to use technology. I don't agree with that.

Even if it's successfully argued that teachers are a better solution for Ethiopia -- I certainly agree that a small class size and a brilliant teacher is a wonderful thing when it's available -- there are a hundred million kids in the world with no access to a school. That seems worth researching a potential amelioration for, right?

Maybe you're missing that this is a pilot-stage experiment that only involved 40 children? It's not being proposed as country-wide policy.
It also looks like a considerable number of people on HN— myself included— had never heard of it. I mean, it appears the link to their site had never been submitted before.
You can also apply for the lottery, so what's the problem?

It's called a diversity visa for a reason. To add diversity.
LOL, you assume too much. On both your paragraphs. Not interested in a pissing match though. Keep your $40 or spend it; makes no difference.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not, but it has that in its name?
I believe pg mentioned somewhere that they didn't actually make anything out of the whole ordeal after paying back their investors; fees were probably the least of their concerns ;). Still, an interesting use case of eBay.
Newsflash: teaching kids to read is actually much much easier if it's done in the language the kid speaks.

"Good, many cultures are despicable and the ones that aren't shouldn't worry"

What is this I don't even...
How to turn off Java on your browser - and why you should do it now
Does Glacier support moving the frozen data from one account to another?
No, we're not. I referred to Apple generically in my post.

I also won't tell you which major tablet is user serviceable. Also, why would it need to be major? Is this a quiz?
CPython is written in C, not C++. Two very different languages.
You wrote 10 words, but I'm going to reply with a wall of text anyway. I believe the value being discussed above is the value to society of having a well educated populace, which is notably different than the perceived economic value to any individual; the main justification for taxes existing in any form is that there are many cases where people spending their money without intelligent self interest is for the best interest of everyone, including themselves (it's trivial to show how this can be true, see the prisoners dillema).

Having an educated populace has enough value that we have public schools; I don't see how informing adults is any different.

Note that I think there are also a ton of unrelated recent societal changes that make it not economically feasible for the news to be behind a paywall; notably that recent shifts that have dramatically reduced cost of publishing and aggregating have made it extremely easy to republish other journalists work trivially. All you need to do is have a subscription to the NYT paywall and one guy getting paid shit to reword their articles; to any other user they will choose the free content that has the same core information that the other site could never have afforded paying for investigative journalism. Patents on reporting facts are obviously untenable, so I see no real option other than the state supporting the media.
I have a lot of respect for this guy. Just talk to him for a bit and you sorta get this feeling that he'll succeed no matter what he chooses to do in the future. Keep it up buddy!
Georgia's CERT tricks hacker with phony file, records and him
Anybody else reminded of The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer by Neal Stephenson?
Show HN: Freelance Hacker Network
You probably could have chosen a less confusing name..
My preference is for a web based UI that can be hosted or run on a developers laptop - its about time we had a decent UI that is being maintained
I like readable/clean syntax as much as any other developer, but only someone who has never created a stack frame in assembly would decide to call a function instead of assigning to a variable.
> Newsflash: teaching kids to read is actually much much easier if it's done in the language the kid speaks.

They did not de-fund traditional education to bring in this form of education. If you want to do something to teach these kids their native language's written form, knock yourself out. In the meantime, this is a hell of a lot better than nothing.

Neither are they taking these children away from their family or village. They are introducing a supplemental window into the world. Any knowledge of culture these children could have acquired through verbal communication with their parents will still be transferred. If elements of a culture are willingly abandoned by people when they are exposed to additional sources of culture, those abandoned fragments of culture are not to be mourned.

Were they forbidding local education and preventing the spread of knowledge, then there would be an issue, but that is most certainly not what is going on.
And here is the article (rather abstract) with the original report: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/nn304410w
This is pretty awesome.

Couple things:

1) Clicking on tabs in the graph causes you to snap to the top of the page. Adding return false; to your tab/link handler will fix that.

2) There's no explanation anywhere for the lines - what do they refer to?

3) Would be nice to be able to zoom in and pan rather than click.
When you phone just fits in your pocket and then someone stretches by 5mm and now it doesn't. It is not the same size it is the difference between having to deal with your phone some way (finding another pocket, buying a belt clips etc etc) as opposed it it just fitting in your pocket. There is a big difference from one to another in terms of how the product can be used.
Disney will soon buy the rights to C, C+, and C++, and come out with C+++ in 2015.
Turntable.fm Founder’s New DJZ Dance Music Site And DJZtxt App
Apologies if I appeared to be ranting.

My objective was to emphasize that the entire business objective of Android, an operating environment that Google has spent billions of of dollars developing and protecting, is to provide a platform for Google's advertising in search, in maps, and, soon, in voice.

Because Google gets little, if any profit from hardware sales, and no (to my knowledge) license fee's from third-parties vendors, all of their profit has to come in the form of advertising.

What this means, is that when comparing a hardware product from Google, and from Apple - we need to understand that Google's profit comes downstream from the advertising revenue, whereas the bulk of Apple's come's front loaded, from the hardware sale.

This will then have an impact on the margins that each of the organizations will be required to pursue at various stages of the product lifecycle.

Apple will start off with a high (30-40%) margin up front, but has less pressure to monetize the user eyeballs in its services.

Google will start off with a lower (approaching 0%) margin up front, but then has much more pressure to monetize user eyeballs in its services.

Neither business model is inherently good/bad/otherwise, but you case see how the incentives for Apple and Google are differently aligned - we've already identified one - Apple did not release Siri on the iPhone 4, even though the phone was more than adequate to run Google Voice, which was release for the iPhone 4. Google's got no skin in the game selling you more hardware. Apple isn't really incentivized to release it's premium services on old hardware...
Actually, they don't do that [attention whoring] just fine. They've actually severely diminished that experience with the new system that limits the exposure your updates get unless you buy a $7 promotion. This scheme is a disaster ... yes, charge Pages for it, but not regular individual users.
Thanks for the feedback. The lines just link together the 6 selected points, which are whatever's nearest to where you clicked.
The XGA (1024x768) was intro'd in the early 90s. Maybe you missed the earlier discussion but we've all been lamenting the crappy default resolutions since then. We were not discussing bit depth or black and white vs. color.
Baby steps. Baby steps. Good luck in the new(ish) venture.
Well Objective C is a separate language entirely. This is just a library for GNU99 C.

Point about name noted, open to suggestions :)
A Developer's review of Microsoft Surface
Capture your Movember progress, make an animated gif and watch your mo' grow
I didn't remember what Buffer was, so for the first few moments I thought the circle was the feature. Show HN: a nice little CSS loopy thing for Bootstrap.

(Kudos to the team on the real project though - a lot more impressive!)
It is infinitely better than your data just suddenly being deleted before you had a chance to get it. At least you get to decide if retrieving it is worth the cost. Also, you can "pay" for Glacier using time/patience because you can download 1gb/mo for free.

All that said I don't think Glacier is set up to deal with a situation where one party inserts a ton of data owned by many other parties, so this is all very theoretical, but IMO it would be great to have something like this.
Are you aware that the name wish already refers to the wish shell that comes with tcl?

http://www.tcl.tk/man/tcl7.6/UserCmd/wish.1.html
I dislike the way you declare variables, I'd rather prefer the classic: "int x = 5;" but with some syntactic sugar for Stack/Heap.

It's interesting anyways, I love the simplicity of C but agree that it's a bit "outdated", and I dislike the radical change of Go.
If my data isn't worth $0.12/GB to me I can't see being too worked up either way.

After reading the pricing and FAQ a bit more, it looks like there will have to be a 3rd party in the middle. There doesn't seem to be a "reader pays" option in Glacier.

There. I registered data-morgue.com. Now, if I can just get a free week…
Personally, as a casual browser, there are so many ads with "calls to action" that informative targetted ads like the Pusher one could actually pull me in. I want to read it because it has no bright-coloured button in the bottom left corner.
Ruby Metaprogramming for the Lulz
Local languages make it easier for a regional government/power to control a group of people.

More importantly, it dramatically reduces the amount of consumable information available to someone. Instead of being able to learn from tens of millions of books and billions of web documents, now you are able to learn from, if you are lucky, hundreds of books and thousands of web documents.
A Beautiful Eulogy for Architect Lebbeus Woods
I agree. Also loved the fact that he is very humble for all of his incredible success.
A+ for clever use of typedef void star
AT&T and T-Mobile Open Networks to Customers of Both Carriers in NY and NJ
I don't know anyone who actually makes that much in profit.

Most info products leverage information asymmetry. They aren't really "products" in my mind, much closer to scams than anything else. They find ignorant people, string them along, and then sell them information that is either worthless or available for free with the vague promise of "making money online", whatever that means. In some cases the information actually has negative value because it's so wrong.

Some people DO get large checks at the end of the month running this kind of scam, but those same people also spend thousands per month on paid advertising trying to shovel people into their lead capture system. Adwords, CPM buys on shady networks, whatever works.

I don't know of, and have never seen any evidence that you can, actually make £15-25k per month in profit. They usually leave that part out. If you are selling some worthless ebook for $10, you can push plenty of them through Adwords alone, but it's not going to be free, and worthless info products don't scale well once you deplete the initial pool of ignorance. You'd be much better off with fiction, actually.

The whole of "Internet Marketing" is people pretending like they are making bank, but they have little net worth and they put in insanely long hours to walk away with very little profit. Most of that "4hr work week garbage" is the same thing.
Side note: I was going to go to mixergy.com to try to also make the argument that the usual content from Mixergy is far better than this, but found that I couldn't actually load the site without first signing up with an email address. I look forward to the future messages delivered to my account, no@piss-off.com. I also realize that my argument would have been wrong.

Sorry, but this is really rude and immature. Andrew has put an incredible amount of effort into compiling info at Mixergy.com, apparently with the goal of gasp making money. And you can get most (almost all?) of his content, which exists nowhere else and is hugely valuable, completely free. All he's asking for is a way to contact you in the future. And yes, partly to try and convert you to a customer at some point. God forbid you should actually pay for the value you're receiving, right?

Ugh. We (developers) are the worst market.
+1 and check out 'What Color is Love'

great talent and will be sorely missed...
Prey On-Demand now available for all mobiles
Pretty sick. Will try it out
Very cool - just a few weeks ago, I spent two weekends (8 hours total) building https://www.delayed-tweets.com. Sinatra on Heroku + Stripe along with a bunch of gems to connect up to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. It's mainly for my personal use right now, but awesome to see others having simliar needs to schedule and cross post social updates.

[edit] The "big" monthly cost for this project for me is primarily the SSL add-on. Everything else amounts to nothing since I have no long running dynos, even for resque.
Nice work!

Any chance Zoho Creator is coming soon?
In a world where developers at places like Amazon have been putting huge numbers of people out of work, and the tech industry cheers this as high-value disruption of moribund industries, developers who think they should be immune to the same forces are breathtaking in their arrogance.
"Bluegoose C runtime"

What are the performance implications of these features? How do they compare with similar C++ functionality, especially things they do at compile-time? Can I have a pretty graph?

What trade-offs were made? Can they be improved? Are certain aspects or semantics optional? Do you pay the price of linking this library simply by linking it, or do you "only pay for what you use"?

Is it safe? Type-safe? If not, what's required to make them safe?

If you don't answer these questions, somebody like me will who's ignorant of how this is supposed to work will produce their own data. That's not good, you understand how it's supposed to be used.
Are you guys gonna support Redis or Couch?
What qualities does he have that make you think this? Could you please give some examples?
Why Apple (and You) Might Miss Scott Forstall
You're quite right. I think my complaint was that it reduces the definition of "database" to "anything that is used to store data", rather than the database being the json file(s) themselves, at which point we have degenerated to about the same terminological point where it would be reasonable to call saving CSV or MS-Access files into a Dropbox folder "Dropbox-as-a-Database", which seems an unhelpful label, if nothing else.
Kim Dotcom's new Mega project
@KimDotcom
Servers overloaded. Adding capacity. Stop reloading :-)
I'm so liberal I'm practically a socialist, but I don't see how you could have this sort of regulation without it having a chilling effect on new services. Generally when an event like this happens, the company behind the service is dissolved, so who is even on the hook for keeping the data available?

This is a very real practical problem. I basically never use any SaaS app that isn't at least as established as, say, Basecamp and if enough people think like me you've got a horrible chicken and egg problem. I'm not sure how you fix it, but I don't think it is via laws.
Yes depending on the community interest.
Consistent with the complaint leveled against my previous comment, I should think that this is really consistent with the DBMS syntax of the Opa language</pedantry>
I would love support for Postgres and MySql as well.
Already seems to be smashed down by traffic..

Same goes for http://kim.com & http://kim.com/mega

-- UPDATE --
@KimDotcom
Servers overloaded. Adding capacity. Stop reloading :-)
Sure, I think this is a cogent explanation free of BS.
Excellent point. There was a HBR article a while back that underscored this point. That the most successful companies (and entrepreneurs) in part took best practices from one industry and applied to their own.
One amazing example of this is the porn industry. If you call yourself a tech entrepreneur and haven't spent any time actually studying the way the porn/adult industry operates - you are way behind.

That industry is always at leas 5+ years behind. Doubt this? Go to the way back machine (if it's available, lol) for some of these companies 5 (even 10 years ago) and see how they marketed their product. The sales funnel, the payment processing, everything. Even micropayment and such - they know what they are doing.
not HN material
What is this? I ask because neither the title nor page give me any indication.

[edit] At the time I asked this the HN title was "Freelancing, solved."
hm, looks like they've edited that bit out
Caveat emptor. Also never trust that a single copy of anything won't vanish like a fart in the wind one day. If stuff is important to you, keep your own copies.
Howdy Maascamp, I hope you're having a nice week. Here's a post from earlier which explains the concept (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4710470)

My co-founder (sabalaba) and I have been working on Hackerlist (http://hackerlist.net) - a selective network of great freelance engineers.
This seems like something many of you have been looking for as there are a shocking number of "freelance" posts (from both clients and programmers) on HN each month -- HN ids: 4596379, 4463692, 4323612, 4214767, 4184757, 4053078, 3914001 3783658, 2539892, etc.
We admit, at this stage Hackerlist is an experiment. We're only asking for your time and patience -- we'll help you land contracts with top companies, handle the logistics, and you'll keep 100% of your earnings. No catch. We'll handle the vetting process, source contracts, and continuously work one-on-one with you to improve our tech until it serves your needs. Unfortunately, to preserve high quality, we're unable to accept more than 32 candidates and 6 of these spots are already filled.
If you'd like to be considered for Hackerlist, email me at michael.karpeles@gmail.com or submit your github username on http://hackerlist.net
Our long-term vision is to create a realtime system (think the intersection of mechanical turk, stackoverflow, oDesk) where trusted freelance engineers can immediately clone a git repo, start hacking on a technical problem, and upon completion, get paid what they're worth.
P.S. Suggestions and feedback are appreciated -- we don't want to build something you don't need.
I just have to say that I think your execution is exceptional. Everything is so clearly laid out, your design is great. Even though I didn't understand the x/y axis of how you were rating the movies, it didn't matter, up and to the right just meant 'better', which was simple enough for me.

If you don't mind my asking, how long have you been working on this?
Side projects boil down to two types - "for fun" and "for profit (maybe)".

My side projects are like yours; I dabbled for some time with machine learning and AI, despite being under-educated and under-brained. And though my projects never really succeeded I sure did learn a lot, and some of that familiarity helps with (and helped me get) my current job. The rewards were the fun of messing around and trying to understand something, and I didn't need a metric or goal for that.
I imagine "worthwhile enough to steal the design" and "worthy of 20-year monopoly" are mostly independent variables. There are plenty of ideas worth "stealing" that aren't worth a patent.
The margin between the the social buttons and the text is too narrow. You can still read the content but it's distracting.
Sounds great. SC -badly- needs curation like this, and the ultra-simple interface is fine so long as the music is too. Good luck!
I believe this is very helpful thing they are doing.
TL;DR - Hackerlist is an oDesk alternative specifically for talented engineers.
Can I edit my HN submission- something wrong with the url I submitted
Wow with a one-of-a-kind idea like that, can't imagine they would have any trouble at all.

Hint to startups: don't try to solve problems that are already solved.
What does Jack Dorsey have to do with Apple making changes?
Interesting, do you mean you're working with the RescueTime on a consulting basis to craft their email drip strategy?
One way to fix the chicken/egg problem is to start off by decoupling the data storage from the application.

Disclaimer: I'm the lead developer on OpenPhoto which does just this.

http://theopenphotoproject.org
Interesting! Where is the open source code? Can we contribute to the backend and frontend design?
I think there is a really significant editing problem - if you share everything, the unfiltered stream is way too much for yourself or anyone else to meaningfully consume at a later time, but if you are constantly picking and choosing what is and isn't worthy of sharing, then you lose the unobtrusiveness of the solution that your parent praised.

I think I may have said the same thing you said.