skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tommy, I saw the domain name of this post and went to the main site. My suspicion was correct, you're from Richmond. I am too and went to Virginia. Awesome to see a Richmonder on the front-page of HN!

I agree with this a lot. Just the act of typing it out is better (even if just marginally) than straight up copying and pasting especially early on in your career. There are some pretty complex tutorials for Java EE that rely on copy/paste and even with the context it's hard to absorb a lot of it.
Of course I'm being sarcastic. The person I responded to was spouting evo-pshyc nonsense. Evolution has no "goals" or "strategies". What possible explanation could you have for something like this arising? How would you falsify a theory of its existence?
More contributors means more work for the project maintainers since it's more code they have to review, discuss, and commit. Very often the maintainers don't care about bug fixes or enhancements if it's not for something that's impacting their work.
Coincidentally, my team got first place in pub trivia last night after several beers apiece.

QED!
>When in society did "Look at what this jerk is doing." become something unwarranted? //

The point is here that it's assumed that the people making the pull request are attempting to make an honest contribution and the response they're getting is "look at what this jerk is doing".

I don't think it's possible to give real life examples without making it possible to find the people involved. Clearly the author isn't wanting to publicly chastise particular leaders; nor would they it seems want to draw attention to particular code that wasn't adopted and led to [over-harsh] dismissal of the contributor's effort.
Very importantly slaves were allowed to be freed, by a court of law in the UK.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somersetts_Case
Were you able to read the blog? Is it not down for everyone?

It's down for me.

But thanks for the kind words!
Does that actually work? It seems like it'd be very hard to find what you're looking for.
Is someone really "guilty" of breaking an unjust law?

No.

An unjust law is no law at all

Agreed. So, in this case, a "pardon", now that I think about it, isn't exactly the right thing, in a sense. I mean, it's a nice token gesture, but it still implies that a law was actually broken. An apology for being victimized by a non-law would be more appropriate.
my fail. I meant "investors who DO NOT get equity"
Music and architecture bring joy to people who like them. Even in musical competitions, most of the audience enjoys most of the performance. Sports seems to be zero-sum; people don't appreciate a good game, they appreciate one arbitrarily-labelled team beating another.

(Interestingly I'm far more able to appreciate professional wrestling, since (at least some of) the fandom for that is more interested in seeing a good performance than which side wins (and indeed often it's the "loser" who has the most important and hardest job))
PopularDating.net | An Online Dating Site for Singles
Manufacturing Innovation Will Drive U.S. Economic Growth
The title reminds me the famous Winston Churchill's attitude to sports. Once asked how he is keeping terrific mental and physical prowess in his age, he answered "Absolutely no sports."
Pure genius
[pdf] Google: What’s  Trending in  Display for  Publishers?
Surprise, you can transmit a signal similar to that of a radio transmitter by also being a radio transmitter. Just wait to be tracked down extremely promptly by the FCC, or almost worse, a roving band of Amateur Radio engineers with a van full of direction-finding antennas and a high level of passion for enforcement who will come nail you to a tree for firing this thing up.
"They seem to have some success"

The rate of preventing relapses is (as far as I'm aware) no greater than those who attempt to quit without the steps.
Best Buy to sell Microsoft Surface, joining Staples
It is down for me.
>Derision of stupidity is probably one of the worst characteristics of hacker culture, because “stupidity” tends to be shorthand for “disagreement with my point of view”.

Then it's not stupidity. That's not what this article (at least that I can see), or my post, was talking about. I was referring specifically to failure to RTFM as the big one, with a side order of bad commits and pull requests.

Ask any tech support monkey at the end of their day what they think about the average person. Then remember that this person is getting paid to do it. How do you think someone who rolls a project as a labor of love feels?

And anyways, if you have an open source project, and it's set up in such a way that commits have to be approved by one person or a group of people, then that one person or group of people are the only people who's point of view matters, at least when it comes to that code in that project. Don't like it? That's what forking is for.

>Derision and bullying are indistinguishable from each other

Disagree. Derision is a society's way of pointing out that you did something you shouldn't have. I have absolutely no problem with mocking stupidity. Stupidity is evil and everything wrong with the world, and should be mocked and driven out mercilessly at every opportunity.

And you'll forgive me for thinking that pointing at a silly pull request and saying "wat" isn't even on the same ballpark as "bullying".

>What does blithely ignore mean?

Okay, as an example: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Introduction

A well defined process and a very good guide to what you should do if you want to help. Ignore means just that, "ignore". If you got a pull request into that system, then you obviously got ahold of that information some way.

>I will posit that anyone who is trying to contribute to your project is doing you a kindness.

But if you're wasting people's time, then that effort is wasted, and having the opposite effect at worst. That time spent dealing with your question which is answered in the docs or telling you why your pull request isn't going to be committed could have been better spent advancing the project. Time is valuable.
Show HN: I invented, built, and released a 360º Video Camera.
Greetings, HN!

I have created a new kind of 360º video camera with GPS and live streaming capabilities. A device like this has never existed in this form factor or price point before.

After launching on Kickstarter, it has gotten coverage in Techcrunch and Boingboing, and received 89% funding in the first 24 hours.

I'd love to hear anyone's thoughts about the device, the Kickstarter campaign, and any ways of publicizing the campaign that I might be missing. I'm most interested in hearing anyone thoughts about how the Kickstarter page might be improved to boost conversions, as the clock is ticking.... Thank you!

Here is the link to Kickstarter:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1996234044/sphericam-the-easy-360o-video-camera
I don't work alone; I work in blissful solitude. Alone is a word for extroverts.
And the C of E did not ask to be treated differently from other churches. Bizarre Tory oddness as always.
The search in Windows 7 is actually quite useful.

Vista, not so much, but no one I know preferred the two-column layout of the start menu in XP.
Another perspective on this is that it's all relative. It's hard to compare wages across different times, but a lot of things that were considered part of a "very comfortable living" are still pretty easy to obtain: kitchen appliances, cars, televisions, frozen vegetables, a family meal out.

The reason the 50s in the US have such an association is that they were a lot better than the 30s & 40s, everyone's frame of reference. Also, cars enabled suburbs, supermarkets and other efficiencies.
I got interested in sports mostly coming from a gambling background (and then fantasy, which hits most of the same psychological buttons as gambling), a hobby I think nerds tend to be slightly more likely to care about. Betting money on a game certainly gives you a reason to care.

Even without the money, people watch sports for the narratives. If it really is just two teams of people you know nothing about, then for most people, it's going to be boring. Most sports fan watching a league they're not familiar with will be bored, even if it's the same sport. How many American football fans enjoy Canadian football?

Once you get to know some of the players, their successes or struggles, it makes more sense why people enjoy it. It's basically a soap opera with testosterone. And while many nerds might not be interested in sports of soap operas, the majority of time you can find some activity they enjoy that does follow the basic tenets of enjoying narratives about other people that are essentially meaningless to your life. I would say that in many ways Hacker News has it's own players and teams that it follows (Google, Apple, Zuckerberg, Stallman, etc). While the stories of these people and companies probably does impact a lot of people here in some big ways, I think a non-neglible amount of interest is derived from the same storytelling aspect that sports provides.

And of course there is the tribal aspect of it, and being able to share something with other people, that glaugh touches upon, as well as the appreciation of athletic talent and strategy.
I am the same way. I also graduated from the University of Michigan which has a great sports program, so this is usually the ice breaker in interviews, meeting with clients etc.. when they see my resume. I usually bow out and change the subject quickly.

I enjoy talking politics as well, but in many ways is just as pointless and arbitrary..."my side of the aisle is better than yours". When your presidential candidate makes a goof he is an idiot, when mine does it he is misunderstood.
This is why I love Tcl too. As a general purpose language I'd rather use something else, but for projects where you want to make it easy to redefine certain behaviours without rebuilding and you don't want to implement your own DSL (and you shouldn't want that, trust me...) Tcl is right there waiting for you.

I find myself building projects where I implement system specific stuff in C with Tcl bindings and then use Tcl to tie the libraries together. It makes for modular software and easy testing, both unit testing through tcltest and testing stuff interactively in development.

It's not The Best Language(tm), but it really ties the room together.
I totally agree with the title of this post and often times I have pledged to myself to never copy and paste even though I always get the idea first what is this piece of code is doing but still most of time I end up making mistakes with copy + paste.

At the end, the time spent to rectify the errors resulting from copy + paste is much more than I thought I would save.
Music and architecture bring joy to people who like them.

So do sports.

Sports seems to be zero-sum; people don't appreciate a good game, they appreciate one arbitrarily-labelled team beating another.

This couldn't be more wrong. Sports fans absolutely do enjoy good games, independently of which team happens to be their favorite.
Watch McAfee's strangest interview yet (12/14/12)
How can bug fixes and enhancements not impact their work?
This is probably a bad idea, but couldn't you store energy basically having wind/solar power water pumps to pull water from one location to another? Something like 2 lakes side by side with a dam in the middle pulling energy off the transfer between when energy is needed and then water being pumped back in the reservoir when energy is being claimed from wind/solar?
Thoughts on The Elderly Generation
I think the ribbon was an absolute disaster, i found it completely annoying and unintuitive, just my opinion though! In other words, I hated it!
AnaGator.js - Short for Analytic Code Aggregator...also this name allows you to have a cute logo with a alligator :)
I can't speak for anyone else, but after seeing the trainwreck that is the Start Menu in Windows 7, I immediately looked for a third-party solution to fix it and found Classic Shell.

Just like iTunes, the Windows 7 Start Menu seems only useful for people who don't organize their program menu. I organize mine similar to how KDE does it (but I was doing it long before I ever saw KDE) and I can find any app in about 3 clicks.
Was at one point in a similar situation. Went to a math and science high school with the hopes of eventually going to Stanford or MIT. Instead, I ended at my state school. As a senior looking back on college, I'm extremely satisfied with my choice. I've had the opportunity to learn from some great professors and have gotten a few internships at Google and a fulltime job at Palantir from it.

Regardless of where you go you can always find great people and learn from them.
While Jobs are scarce to find - iCracked's 300+ iTechs buck the trend
Your FAQ better be very visible and better include the question and a working answer then.

Also (no offense, you might be a real genius) but a lot of people who think they are above everyone else really isn't. I've seen people frown at the use of Java reflection because it wasn't type safe then go ahead and deliver brand new features written in pl/sql.
A Billion Dollars Would Be Cooler, But a Strong Resume May Have to Do
Right. It's like: "CloudFlare caches things for you! Except for this thing here. But you can probably picture how great it is!"
I was able to read the blog (http://tommy.authpad.com/don-t-copy-and-paste-other-people-s...) but not the link in the OP.

I'll have to catch up with you guys sometime IRL. Really glad to find motivated devs in RVA.
Sadly stackoverflow has gotten to mean for anything but the most difficult questions, worded perfectly. They need to also be solved in the same paragraph to escape the wrath of stack.
Hardcore boardgamer checking in. Some random thoughts...

Our gaming group tends to binge on a given game; if we like it, we'll play it dozens of times and then burnout and never play it again. One game that's stood the test of time is PowerGrid. It's rarely anyone's first choice, but it's the second choice for a lot of us, so it comes out often.

Often, at the end of the evening when we're pretty tired, we'll play cards, usually Mu. Mu is an amazingly deep trick taking game that has the advantage of working really well for 5 or 6 players. Also, it's a partnered game, but your partner is not fixed throughout the course of the game, which gives it an advantage over spades/bridge (which can be a drag if you have a weak partner.) It also has some delicious elements of backstabbing and subterfuge. I highly recommend it if you like games like spades/hearts/bridge.

If you have a regular gaming group, interesting meta-gaming manifests itself. For example, we have one person who's known as the "crazy guy", who'll do something random and destructive just for fun. Or certain vendettas will arise, and someone will sacrifice themselves in order to sabotage someone else. You have accept that sometimes folks will be irrational and be aware of meta-game in order to do well in the long run...
If you've seen the movie, I'd highly recommend "Moneyball" the book too. It goes into a lot of great detail that the movie doesn't deal with.
> And responsible professionals insist on doing things correctly anyways.

There is more than one "correct". Cheap fast prototypes can and generally should skimp on "correct" scaling things because that extra work isn't necessary unless the idea takes off, otherwise you're saving a ton of labor skipping things that a final product might need but a failed idea won't.

> You don't blame the business when someone builds a bridge that collapses

Be serious; lives aren't generally on the line for most business apps and that kind of engineering is time consuming and expensive and totally unnecessary most of the time for application developers.

> do it wrong, and doing it right doesn't take significantly longer

I completely disagree.

>Programmers just need to be educated and learn how to write code.

Sounds like you need to spend some time running a business and paying for those programmers; you'll change your mind fast.
> And to this day, asking all my sports-obsessed friends why they like it so much, I've never gotten an answer I can actually understand or identify with

I'll try and answer it from a european perspective (soccer fan)...

In a nutshell: a sense of identity, sense of belonging, tribalism, 'banter' among opposing fans.

One of the highlights of a fan going to an away English premier league game (esp. against your fierce rivals) is to piss off the home support by singing something insulting about their team/players/team history etc. Then the home support respond by singing their own insults, and you get the atmosphere really fking rocking.

Other people you have a go at: opposing manager, the ref, even "gently" mocking your own players as a sign of affection.

I saw this documentary about Dutch football, where there was a guy explaining that Dutch people don't go to church any more, so they pack into football stadiums (modern cathedrals) on a Sunday, which provides a sense of community/identity.

Check out this incredible video of Greek basketball fans (!) - a sport not exactly renowned for passionate fans like the European/South American soccer terraces...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcvAOpnnMK0

(brace yourself if you are not familiar with the concept of "banter" among fans, and check out the english translation in the video description ;-)

Here's another cool video of really passionate Borussia Dortmund fans (they have really amazing, well-behaved, yet passionate support) marching in a tunnel in Manchester, co-ordinated chanting, the whole lot:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZnUlEJFPjs

Hope that helps!
I'm of the opinion that the best thing for large projects is new blood. If large OSS projects rotated people through triage and new contributor on-boarding, e.g. how to make a patch, how to get it approved, and so on, then in the long-run the number of contributors will grow.
I don't want to put words in hazov's mouth here but Gödel is a total nonsequitor here. This thread isn't about formal set theory. The question is not whether mathematics can be axiomatized in a satisfactory way in first-order logic, but what it is mathematicians study. Since not everything in mathematics is obviously related to geometry or numbers, it is hard to write a satisfactory definition; just look at the difficulty that, say, Wikipedians have had trying to cook up a canonical one. But saying that mathematics is just about rigor or abstract structures makes just about everything mathematical. Not all scholars are mathematicians. And if mathematicians just study abstract structures, what's so special about, say, elliptic PDE, or Fourier analysis, or commutative algebra?
Nice calculator. Thanks
Agreed that fostering relationships with contributors promotes more contributions.

But, if someone's first contribution had naive mistakes, and it took more of your time than it saved, I can sympathize with a leader who doesn't try to get similar contributions.
> UNPREDICTABLE

First most (interesting) code deals with exterior inputs. Typically "user" inputs. Which means software engineering is far from as predictable as CS 101 might make you believe.

Second, sports (at least at the game level, and to some extent the player performance level) are highly predictable. If they were not book making and sports betting would not work.

I kind of stopped reading at that point. But, it sounded like actually theme was "care about the sports industry as it is a market" which is very much different than care about sports.
When the goal is to change behavior as a whole it helps to not point anyone out. If you linked to a Github pull request that demonstrates this behavior, that guy now becomes the eye of the storm, instead of the community where the focus should be.

If the author did that, we'd all be talking about how githubuserxyz is such an ass for belittling contributors and how dissimilar we each individually are from githubuserxyz.

It doesn't help the conversation - which is one that the community needs to have.
Why do I see people talking about this kind of thing in Tcl being perfectly okay, while PHP is nowhere near as randomly dynamic and gets a lot of hate?
While the website is down:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.sho...
I was also turned off by the use of "geeks" when he really means "hustlers looking to make a buck". Maybe they overlap, and there's especially a lot of overlap on HN, but a market opportunity is not uniquely appealing to geeks.
I have a BA in English literature. I'm not a developer, but hope to be eventually. Anyway, the question is ridiculous. One may as well ask, "Can programmers read a book and write a pithy criticism on it (grounded in some school of literary criticism)?"
Flawless grammar and the ability to reason about abstract things like linguistics, historical context and an author's intention are obviously easily transferable skills.

I would expect cult behavior from certain kinds of developers however.
The author is coming from a point of view that I don't know if anyone else in the OSS world holds, and that the Internet doesn't seem to agree with. Without hard evidence, he's talking out his defecation hole.
I love Alfred, so my main hope is for it to retain its simplicity and speed during this update (I don't see myself using this feature as I don't use any of the current advanced features either - other than the calculator).
Just a thought regarding 2FA in general.

Why are people manually typing in keys? The authenticated website could just have an API with a receiving point for a token. A press of a button in a mobile app would unlock the login form for a short period just like a normal 2FA key, only with typing from the user.

You could use the numerical codes as a backup if the mobile device wasn't network accessible, but just being able to "push button" authenticate in a mobile app would make them a lot more usable normally.

Has this already been done, and I just haven't heard of it?
Support for GitHub, Facebook, and Twitter accounts in our developer portals
Why not go for the big fish: find clubs a way to cut their wage bill while maintaining performance. There's plenty of money in that.
To me this sounds like you haven't really taken the time to understand how any sport works. Usually there's a lot more going on than "kicking a ball around", and these subtleties of planning and strategy are really what make them fun.
I think most people who care about it would either (a) already have Authy installed, or (b) care enough that downloading another app isn't going to prevent them.

When it's opt-in you're really not going to get a lot of people saying "Okay, I guess I'll do it if you make it really easy for me." It's either important or it's not. Most folks on HN would probably say it is and enable it as a matter of course, especially for a service with as much business value as Stripe.
It's definitely nice being able to work with intelligent people to solve a problem, you learn a lot (and sometimes you feel like others are learning, which is rewarding in itself). Working with uninspiring people can be pretty distracting and counterproductive. I was fortunate to co-work with a few people having similar goals and work attitudes in the past; in short people i could become friends with. Does this happen in generic co-working spaces?
If being a good developer was only related to technical skills and background, hiring would sure be a lot easier.

One of the best developers I know was an English major. He's even more amazing as a leader. He now leads a large team of engineers and I hope to someday get the chance to work with him again.