skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Take it up with programming 101 instructors around the world, who beat it into their students' heads that "every line" / "every function" / "every class" etc needs comments, no matter how redundant or bad the comment was, because "good code is commented". No joke, fairly well respected science & engineering university, every line of every program through the first three semesters of a CS program was required to be commented. After a while, slapping in useless and bad comments became habit, required for the assignment to even be considered for grading. It takes a while to break that habit.
There could still be a service opportunity there. If it's especially easy to use his plugins via his service than there could be a business.
My brain automatically disregards snarky "TL;DR" comments. I can't help it.
You don't have a union problem, you have a direct democracy problem.
Thank you very much for your feedback. I'll add a way to up/downvote reviews soon. This should increase the quality. This is actually surprising how good most of the reviews are without this feature.

While moderating it's not always obvious _what_ could be useful to the site's author.
I care about the world that my daughter will grow up in, and I think it's important for people to understand that love isn't something that can ever be given or taken by force. It must be a gift.
Is this actually true? Wordpress is GPL, but why would a plugin need to be under GPL, unless it used actual code from Wordpress (not just API calls). Can someone clarify?
Easier said than done when developers have "write once, run anywhere" expectations. Mono famously has to duplicate bugs when implementing .NET.
Thank you! Can I use this quote? :)
A bit of Schadenfreude?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude

Be happy! A rising tide raises all ships (boats / skiffs / rafts / swimmers / floating bathtubs).
Can you tell us a little more about what the 'ranking metadata' is, as there's not much to go on from the announcement. It's also not clear whether the data is available only for Common Crawl's operational purposes, or whether it's intended to become an integral part of the public data set.
3rd party apps are not allowed to access the Social Graph beyond 1st level connections i.e. you cann't get friends of friends.
But I wonder , why does facebook not develop Apps based on their Social Graph by itself.
I'm very very happy you've found it useful!
I was misinformed. It happens.

Thank you for your understanding.
I don't understand.

The merits of hating / supporting a magazine is one thing. However achieving something of note before thirty is hardly an easy thing and not really something I'd criticize just to criticize. If you don't take support from your peers, or admire their success I don't really see what you yourself are working towards.

Also, by commentating on the general state of HN instead of reading the article, you are not in fact improving the quality of conversation found here.
15 ways to make small budget content marketing work
There does seem quite a lot of work involved though, I wonder how long it takes him to make one.
Scrappy content marketing for small companies (also relevant for startups).

Pretty basic, straightforward recommendations but also covers a wide variety of areas. Good 101.

Key point here is that SEO and content marketing are colliding/merging. Especially true in the US but true generally.
50,000 deaths are attributed to second hand smoke every year... That's 5X the homicide rate and isn't remotely related to liberty (children and many workers don't have the freedom to avoid 2nd hand smoke). I personally would love to have the freedom not to subsidize the health care costs of millions of smokers.
That's cool.. i get your point here.

That is one thing I like about monbiot, he references his work. I check his facts. Not all polemicists are the same. I have never seen a fox 'journalist' reference facts.
>$250k is middle class in California!

You might think this is true, but you're wrong.
Statistics proves that trade between nations reduces the likelihood of their engagement in wars (as documented, e.g., in Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature.) Therefore the western countries by buying cheap cell phones and what not made in poorer countries make them more peaceful (this of course in addition to helping hundreds of millions of people avoid extreme poverty.) If we followed the author's call and stopped buying things, wars would be more likely to start all over the world and many more people would be killed, probably also in Congo.
It would be cool if this somehow hooked into Amazon's Mechanical Turk and made it easy to request a larger number of reviews.

Maybe I want 20 to 50 reviews right away, and I don't have time to get credits? They could also let me buy credits for the same purpose.
First off, I agree with the statement about states like California paying more in Federal taxes than what they receive in Federal moneys back. I'm not sure how I feel about that because it can sometimes be a complicated thing that has issues in how our Federal government spending and taxation works.

But, isn't that the system that so many in the "blue" states advocate? Taxing money from those that have it to distribute it to those who do not? Consider that most "red" states don't have the state resources, for various reasons, that the others have. It would seem the citizens of the "blue" states would be proud of such a Federal system that is so similar to what they wish to do within their own system.
Here the Story of vWorker.com from it's Founder
In this interview, Ian Ippolito, founder of vWorker.com (acquired by Freelancer.com) shares what it took to build a company to over $11M in annual revenue
Full Show 12/14/12: Can We Talk About Gun Control Now?
I really don't see Prop 30 as the entrepreneurship killer its critics make it out to be.

Why does nobody point out that in the event of an exit, an entrepreneur has control over the timing of their income? Sure, I suppose some subset of people who sold an inordinate amount of stock in 2012 now have to pay more, but how much more? Doing the math, it seems this tax likely increases ones tax bill by roughly 5%.

If you believe a 5% decrease in take-home proceeds from successful outcomes will stop entrepreneurship, I've got some swampland in Florida to sell you.
A gradient can be used as a design element (in buttons or elsewhere), without skeuomorphic intent.
Let's be honest - the autotools bring a nontrivial amount of cruft to the table, and are regarded as "black magic" by most developers.

The automated dependency tracking that I refer to is how automake-generated Makefiles track dependent headers &c. for some compiled languages. That's not at all relevant for the bootstrap project.
Honestly, that's a lot of TIME as well.

When I was in leaner times, I did a lot of the stuff in http://onceamonthmom.com/ and http://www.amazon.com/Once-A-Month-Cooking-Spending-Enjoying...

You can get a lot of nutrition for very little time and money if you do this
Not really that much; video (mostly Netflix & Youtube) uses more than normal website resources as a whole do.

Besides, like RAM and unlike e.g. plastic, unused bandwidth is wasted bandwidth.
"This is a pretty narrow group."

Depends on your definitions.

"entrepreneurs who have had an exit in 2012, and little to no income before that" -- Pretty narrow.

"People expecting fair treatment from their fellow citizens" -- Not narrow at all.

Retroactive law of any kind sucks. As the point of law is to provide rules to guide conduct, "retroactive law" is something of a semantic nullity -- it cannot possibly guide behavior because its guidance is not knowable as people behave. It is little more than than infliction of a legislature on some population, under the color but not the substance of law.

Your freedom and property depend on our general refusal to apply such law to you, no matter how much we may want to. Absent that general refusal, you depend on your absence from sets any set of people from which we might want to apply such law.

If you are confident that you will be the same as everyone else on all important dimensions, you should be safe without that general refusal. If you've any ambition to be different in any important way, maybe you should consider your interests more broadly.
G5 Leadership videos - Guy Kawasaki and more - 6 months free
I doubt the numbers people chose had any correlation to perceived value. My guess is they were just testing it to see if it would actually let them pay for a different amount. It's such a different idea, most people just aren't used to it.
Well there goes Net Neutrality...
> I'm sure many CS graduate programs offer very good courses in cryptography.

On the topic: I have an interest in crypto and for a while I was looking at grad schools for cryptography. The number that even offer a course is less than impressive, and the number that offer more than one class are shockingly few.
This is the single more cynical entry I have ever read before. "There's an opportunity in unconditional love". It may sound like dividing by 0. May be it is not the case. Christian Church has definitely been riding the unconditional love opportunity for millenia. It is perhaps the time for Her to be disrupted. Google vs God, may be the title of an interesting movie.
One nice example of deep insight is the Ramanujan Tau sequence, which comes from expanding out the product (1-q) (1-q^2) (1-q^3) all to the 24th power and multiplied by q, as q-24q^2+252q^3-...

Ramanujan noticed that the coefficients a_n have some remarkable arithmetic properties, namely the sequence is multiplicative: a_m a_n = a_{mn} when m and n are relatively prime. There's a more complicated formula when m and n have a common divisor, and he also conjectured that the size of a_p is upwards of 2*p^5.5 when p is prime.

This led to the beautiful study of modular forms and all of the above statements have profound explanations, the last of which was proven 58 years later by Deligne in 1974, as the Riemann Hypothesis for curves.

PS: there are plenty of random discoveries that can be made about the sequence, for example a_n is congruent mod 691 to the sum of the 11th powers of all divisors of n. This also has a good explanation that is now known. Lehmer conjectured in 1947 that a_n is never 0, which has been verified up to n=22798241520242687999, but is still an open question.
Australia had neither a War of Independence, nor a Civil War.

Fun Fact: Most Australian's don't know the name of the first Prime Minister because it was so uneventful. A bunch of people sat down, signed some papers, and Australia was founded as a country.
The Forbes brand is about money and wealth - they're most famous for the Forbes 500 list of 500 wealthiest individuals - so including academics or open-source people wouldn't make sense.
Thank you for the suggestion! I'm not sure about AMT though. Do you think the quality would be sufficient?
I've come to realize that some people are afraid of the concept of God. This fear manifests it in several ways.

My mother-in-law is afraid of dying. But more than a healthy respect that one might expect with regards to ceasing to exist, so afraid that she cannot talk about it. She cannot utter its possibility, nor conceive thoughts which involve a state of the world in which she is no longer living. It really puts a crimp in estate planning as you might imagine. Here is a person who refuses to write a last will and testament. The will is only a useful document when you are dead, and to think about the things you put into a will you have to start with "ok so when I am dead ..." And for her, she will not think that thought. She cannot even think of being dead in the abstract her fear is that powerful.

I've met people who respond that way thinking about God. Abstract or not, conversational or theological, just can't go there. My Dad is like that. Its because he has combined the notions of "God" (sort of the abstract concept that Paul talks about of forgiveness and love) with "Religion" which Paul talks about as using Fear and Greed to exhort behaviors.

It is sad when being unable to think thoughts about a subject causes hurt to those you love. Their love prevents them from bringing it up, and the circle is complete.
I just was in an artist's studio where he was working on several very large commissioned stained glass windows. Numbers everywhere.
Not 'our' privacy. Just people who have political influence who receive political 'donations'. Ie. Journalists, politicians etc.
In both those examples information about why the variable needs to be set to that specific value is lost. At some point the variable needs to be set and the more information on why it needs to be set to a particular value the better. You can't pack all the required information into a function name and i would dare say you shouldn't.

Granted I would personally do:

const int perfecttemperature = 350; // 400 will burn them, 300 they will be mushy
.....
oven.setTemp(brownie.perfecttemperature);

but still comment it as to why i picked 350. Comments are for the why, and the why is the most thing to understand.
I am Facebook friends with Ryan Lanza
I'd say a lot of people see jailbreaking as a term for piracy, which is rather unfortunate. Steffen Esser mentioned releasing a jailbreak that actively defended against piracy, and the number of twitter responses to that was impressive.
As usual, depends on where you live. Most of the time when I see that $250k tossed around it's in reference to couples. Typically for a single person it's $200k. So a couple only has to reach $125k income each to be taxed at that rate. In some parts of the country it's not hard to imagine that two people can reach that and not be particularly wealthy based on local cost of living.

But as you say, I would imagine for most of California this isn't an issue.
> that 10 ohm 1/4W resistor smoked across a 12v source

Hahah, that's exactly the configuration I used to make fuses for rocket engines we were building with friend in high school. 10 ohm resistor on 12V burned quite nicely - and well enough to ignite the fuel.
Exactly. (Frustrating that the other thread hi-jacked the attitude.)
Oh, I think they make lists of "young people who did impressive shit" in part because most lists of "people who did impressive shit" are pretty well dominated by older people. It's a little like making lists of "women who are important for some fucking reason or other", which is lefthanded admission that general lists of "people who are important for some fucking reason or other" are extremely male dominated.

-- Observation by a 47yo female
one of the most powerful essays I've ever read.
I searched for data, and found out that in the past 30 years, 543 people have been killed in 70 mass shootings. That’s an average of 18 deaths per year. For comparison, three times as many die from lightning strikes....

Mass killings are as inevitable as lightning deaths

There are public policies which deal with lightning risk, e.g. formal implementation of the 30-30 rule for sports facilities.
Yes indeed - the same :) They were cheaper than Estes igniters as well!
I prefer to lean towards overcommenting, and I prefer that developers whose code I will have to work with later do the same.

But as you say, they need to be good comments, and comments that either describe intention or explain something in the language that might be rather obscure can be very useful.
I payed reviews from http://www.feedbackarmy.com/ which uses AMT. I prefer your website criticue, the quality of the comments I received is better.
When you subtract any two functions that are exponential, the answer is 4?
You can use a throwaway email address
Wisconsin faced a similarly grim[0] fiscal situation three years ago - high public union labor costs and years of structural deficits plus the recession resulted in a deficit of over 20% of the budget.

It was ugly and underhanded, but as many will remember the Governor successfully pushed through very unpopular[1] public union and budget reforms. It sucked, but it worked. We're now firmly in the black[2].

There are probably negative consequences that we'll learn about at some point, but at least the state resisted the urge to just raise taxes and not deal with its largest problem. California could learn a thing or two.

[0] http://www.jsonline.com/news/milwaukee/69771807.html

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Wisconsin_protests

[2] http://www.jsonline.com/news/statepolitics/state-to-release-...
I think you missed the point. Gun control might be a good idea, but not because it will reduce the likelihood of psychopathic spree killings.

Psychopathic spree killings are such a low-probability, extreme event that there's almost nothing you can do, at a public policy level, to influence them. Your monkey brain may protest that this simply cannot be (as mine does), but our monkey brains are wrong.

Instead we need to look for significant trends. Or consider that our actions might cause other harms more often, which is especially likely when our actions are driven by low-probability events. Basing public policy on such extreme events is not just stupid, it's immoral.

And yet, that's exactly the job of the media. The media works, by and large, by telling individual stories to provoke general sympathy or outrage. This is a good thing when that story is representative of a larger problem. What we have now is random phenomena driving larger political discussions.
What a ridiculous thing to say. Let's arm all the kids, they're defenceless. Let's arm all the old people too, they're defenceless. In fact, let's arm everybody because after all, when kids and old people have arms everybody else is defenceless.

And then we'll both sit back and watch the world burn while the defenceless people try to come to terms with their new-found power and slaughter each other.

What's despicable is that there is a country full of people that are so insecure and that have such little faith in their law enforcement that they feel the need to stockpile ammo and weapons as if there is going to be a shoot-out any moment. And guess what, they're all surprised when there is going to be the occasional shoot-out and when people that shouldn't have access to guns find it all too easy to get their hands on them.

The power to kill is bad enough when we pass it on to the state but that's a necessary evil. It isn't called the state monopoly on force for nothing.

If you're so insecure that you can't live without a chunk of iron under your pillow then you should look at how you can improve your society to the point where it is safe enough to live a normal life without having metal detectors at grade schools and armed shopkeepers.

Keep the poor as poor as they are, keep the insane living on the streets, give everybody access to as much hardware as they want and you will reap exactly what you sow.
i wish i could adjust the width of the code section. otherwise it's pretty neat.
For companies that are trying to "recruit" you away from your current employer, they are already aware I would assume.

Also, it seems like it would be make sense to deny an offer/opportunity if it's less than what you're currently making and/or vesting value.

I do agree that the counter offer strategy is not always a guaranteed win - I was more curious about people using this as a way to find out their "market value" (what someone is willing to pay/offer you)
Sounds like http://www.wifichat.net

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4497623
> Flat design is here to stay.

I think web design is an art form. Like all art forms it is in a constant flux. We definitely are headed to a more flat era. However, I can not discount trends, it is their nature to change with the times.

Steve Coogan states in 24 Hour Party People, "the history of popular music is like a double helix." Everything is always a reaction the last trend. http://youtu.be/GhpezhJxUYU?t=44s
I won $50 for correctly predicting that Paul wouldn't change the picture that appears with the assault rifle.
Well, I get a better deal than that now, other than the free Amazon data part. Even that's not a compelling reason as I have little desire to watch movies on my phone.

Now if they let me piggyback my tablet over their phone to watch videos then maybe. Even then, probably not.
The ranking metadata consists of: domain ranks, url ranks, and booleans for whether blekko considers the domain or url to be webspam or porn. This list will expand in the future.

The data is currently available for Common Crawl's operational purposes, and is eventually going to be part of Common Crawl's public dataset. We're currently ironing out a useful format for making it efficiently accessible, compatible with some other metadata which Common Crawl is planning on making available.
It seems that most people do not mind paying a bit more to great products, which is great news for individual businesses.
2013: Flight to Substance?
You could replace it with "Universe" or "everything that exists" or "total consciousness" or "enlightened perception" or "stillness" or any number of words or phrases...
That's hard to speculate on. It might not have. But at the same time, I'd like to think that if a service is revolutionary/unique enough, it will gradually get some traction.
Douglas Coupland's radical pessimist's guide to the next 10 years
I HATE the flat look. I prefer to see gradients, drop shadows, and rounded corners. That's why I can't stand Android & Windows 8.
By the time someone writes the software, the business need has already changed. Software doesn't work.

What?

Since when did specs become immutable? Needs have changed? Patch the spec. It's faster than patching the software.

From http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000036.html:

"The most important function of a spec is to design the program. Even if you are working on code all by yourself, and you write a spec solely for your own benefit, the act of writing the spec -- describing how the program works in minute detail -- will force you to actually design the program."

Sure, you'll still find out the design was wrong in some areas, and you'll have to change it. But at least you'll have a design to start from, as opposed to a hodgepodge of features carelessly tossed into the interface wherever the programmers found it most convenient to stick them, implemented in whatever way made the most sense to the programmers at the time.
I basically agree with this. I tend to adopt some mixture of the following:

1. Write the function and the type together, and use the type checker to perform an initial check for program correctness.

2. Write the function and the type, but comment out the type, and see if the type checker can infer something more general than the type you supplied.

3. Write the type but leave the function undefined - this gives you a skeleton of your project and lets you write both top-down and bottom-up at the same time, filling in the details later on.

4. Use a function, but leave it undefined and don't give it a type. The type checker can infer a type for it, which often helps you write the function itself.

5. Write the functions but not the type, and let the type checker figure the whole thing out (great for throwaway programs and scripting).

With combinations of these, and a brutal dedication to refactoring and modularisation, I find that I can quickly develop correct, re-usable code.
Really? Find me one today. Find me a textbook that says that published in the last ten years. I'm tired of seeing this trotted out as a straw man of the crowd who thinks sometimes comments are good.
There's no way I'd live anywhere outside of the bay area. I love being in a city and not having to worry about the policies of a red state government.