skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask the right questions. Create hypotheses. Create experiments to test your assumptions. Measure, measure, measure.

This is what everyone always, consciously or unconsciously is trying. Taking a more scientific approach doesn't necessarily need to increase your chance.

The thing is: there is no pattern for success generation. This is against the nature of being exceptional. Stop seeking it.
Annual income of richest 100 people enough to end global poverty four times over
It was written in 2008, so it's dated. But in point of fact, it does mention Python as an interpreted language.

Of far more concern than the datedness of it are the grammatical errors; this is a 5 year old blog post, so you'd think he'd have either noticed by now or a reader would have pointed them out (please, programmers— is it really so hard to learn the "its-it's" rule?). Now that's something that could have been done better.
It could cause them financial harm. Libraries have a fixed budget and choose wisely which subscriptions to take. If people at a department already know where to get the stuff that JSTOR offers for free, that will make the JSTOR subscription less valuable and other subscriptions more valuable to them.

Academics are quite used to being creative in acquiring articles. It's not untypical to ask colleagues and friends at other universities to scan and email articles that they can't get access to through their own library. Before the advent of the Internet this was done with letters. Downloading a torrent is a minor inconvenience in comparison.

A large majority of people I have talked to have at some point acquired scans of at least on book online (be it to give it to students because the library has only one copy, for convenience during travelling or because the local library has no copies and an interlibrary loan would take some time while they need the book now).
Do you have a citation for the story, are you sure it really were Czechs? It seems a bit over the top. The Czech Republic is right next to Germany, so even before the fall of the wall, they had the ability to watch Western TV, and also generally were far from as secluded as Russia or even North Korea. And of course in the nineties, they instantly had free press and all, given the Czech Republic was always a very westward-leaning country (Prague Spring and all).
Meanwhile in Spain -- a modern, secular, wealthy, western, capitalist country -- some people really are eating roots to survive the winter.
good question; I usually declare fields optional for the reason described in the reply above. I just re-ran the test with all fields declared as "required". It ran ~2% faster.
I imagine some of my clients could have been in a similar situation to Campbell's: they want a site or mobile app for marketing purposes or whatever. Since it's not crucial for their business, they don't know what they want. Yeah, maybe they have a marketing department, even a digital/social media division. But that can only produce so many ideas, and there's too much internal feedback to guarantee that ideas for, e.g. a mobile app, would be effective or innovative. So maybe they decide to hire a design firm with experience designing innovative mobile apps. In most relationships, the process would only alleviate those problems slightly: they would get more ideas, from outside their own offices, but only a few which the firm considers "best" and they would be subject to the firm's biases anyhow. A 'hackathon' like this is clearly a much cleverer option for a corporation: they get many ideas from diverse sources, they get to choose which ones to prototype—and they get 30 prototypes! And then they pay up. This isn't really about hackathons, it's about efficient economics. "Exploiting" is in the original post's title, but it's really no different from the normal exploitation inherent in every economic interaction.

As a consultant, I am used to a certain level of inefficiency—paying me even as I brainstorm, for example—which hides the exploitation of my labor. I am upset about hackathons like this because they reveal the exploitation and how it is tipped in Campbell's favor.

In a somewhat different vein, being on a college campus, there are similar exploitative relationships, in a sense, at the hackathons I go to. hack@uchicago just had a really awesome hackathon. I was coding, and had an excellent time, but I didn't compete. I know a few other people didn't compete for the prizes either, but were still building cool stuff. We had three main sponsors: UChicago's Physical Science Collegiate Division, UChicago IT Services, and Inventables. All three were engaging in rational economic transactions, beyond charity, much like Campbell's, but nobody's pissed off about it because the economics aren't obvious and the exploitation is many levels of indirection away: nobody directly got a product out of it. The PSCD, however, got some marketing and something to put on their website which will help get them more grants, researchers, whatever. IT Services regularly hires students. I would be willing to bet that the folks from Inventables approached multiple hackathon participants with an eye toward hiring, and I bet the winner straight up got a job offer (which he deserves, for the record, if you're reading this Paul). Meanwhile, I got free food and an excuse to work on a weekend project. I'm not upset because I don't feel exploited by that exchange. I think everybody got what they wanted out of the hackathon.

tl;dr: The economics make perfect sense for Campbell's, not for developers. Chances are any time somebody sponsors a hackathon, it's also an economic exchange, but this one is exploitative (or, if you're a Marxist, this one makes the inherent exploitation of every economic interaction more obvious).
Seems like it:

> Your goal (...) is to define the angular position and velocity for each of the joints that connect the solar panels to the station for every point in a 92-minute orbit. Limitations on any solution include making sure the masts for each panel aren't in a shadow more than they need to be, making sure the cycle can be repeated each orbit

Sounds like (if the finalist is deemed good enough and their solution will be used) a lookup-table of numbers will be uploaded, not your actual code running on any actual chips in actual space.

So much for hiding an obfuscated buffer-overflow code execution exploit and taking over a space-station ... pew pew pew!
The Shark, we just jumped it. :(
I'd be interested in your thoughts :)
She also compared the experience to the Truman Show and interpreted even relatively innocuous things like a computer lab full of rather robotic "students" as an "e-Potemkin village". I'm not sure she could have sounded much more sceptical about what she was shown without punctuating every sentence with political asides, and frankly her account had more credibility because she didn't do that.
I thought your title was fine, the content was dandy, its just that some one was having a bad day. Keep up the useful submissions. BTW - like your site layout, esp the faded sidebar, it makes the content stand out more.
The blog is promoting the book, "Pick Four" (not Linchpin).
> "real" communism, one which is say, managed my an AI, with
> no one small group of humans in power, is probably going to
> be fair and equal. I'd like to see if that could work.

The problem with communism is the idea that there is a set of objectively ideal decisions that can be made to the greater good of everyone, be it by some AI or a committee.

It's not only impossible to find these ideal policies, they don't exist. Policy is always a compromise between different competing goals, progress is made in small steps and adjustments.

There is no great ideology from which perfect decisions can be deducted, there is no perfect system. The assumption of a perfect system leads to the idea of sacrifices on the way to it, which leads to a lot of suffering.

The ability to incorporate different preferences and different means of achieving them is the major advantage of open societies.
Could be useful for some things. I feel like it's a missed opportunity to employ somethings like session types, given the existence of a quasi-typed human-readable "schema" definition. It seems like one could (and should!) go further and make it an unambiguous protocol specification against which implementing programs could eventually be checked.
Debian Wheezy Local Git Server With Git Lite Workflow
As long as Ballmer is at the helm with minimal understanding of technology, design, and dev relations I concur that he'll just be a cog in the giant machine that's just been moving forward due to it's past momentum with deceleration.
It's amazing to see how little has changed over the last five years - the blog post is from 2008. I mean you would obviously pick Python or Ruby now, and use websites like Codecademy or Udacity. But the core message still applies: it's hard to learn to program and you will have to spend a lot of time on it. There are still no free rides. Makes be feel better about the long hours I've spent to learn to code.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is coming to Kiev, Ukraine
> I want to start a space company. Now what?

Try to strike a deal with a time company, and see if you can merge into a continuum.
IME, that's pretty much all of them.

But then I think that nearly everyone has a tendency to think that anything they don't fully understand must be simple.

You don't have to hang around here or on Slashdot for long to see that programmers suffer from this too...
Fencing Your SSL Errors With HSTS
App Engine(Python) Function Views
1. Write operating system:

http://www.sparrowos.com

2. Get God to kill enemy and let you out of jail.

------

God says...
lawyer exiled undertook impurity steps Receive slippery
June singing harmed written Angola Hart reclaiming meddling
INDEMNITY drunkenness abundant sentiment Panama flowing
cleared itch fearing studied day damage departure nill
shadows plucking answered alone

God says...

C:\Text\WEALTH.TXT

more
than £8,328,554:17:11 3/12, the capital of the public debt, at that
time, amounting to £46,954,623:3:4 7/12.

The Spanish war, which began in 1739, and the French war which soon
followed it, occasioned a further increase of the debt, which, on the
31st of December 1748, after the war had been concluded by the treaty of
Aix-la-Chapelle, amounted to £78,293,313:1:10¾. The most profound peace,
of 17 years continuance, had taken no more than £8,328,354, 17:11¼ from
it. A war, of less than nine ye
More secure, surely, but one can (and should) distrust CAs, and there are other caveats explained in that article.

However, I think that none of these issues apply to the piracy fighting threat model.
From what you say, you obviously have no idea what communism is. Not USSR, nor Northern Korea, nor China, etc.. they were never communist countries, not even a "form" of communism. Communism, in its origin form, means no government, gift-economy, direct democracy(as opposed to representative) and workers controlling the means of production.

"A communist society would have no governments, countries, or class divisions." [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism#Etymology_and_termino...
This is not about starting to learn computer programming, this is about starting to learn to get a "middle" job of programmer as proposed by persons who do not program themselves.

If you REALLY want to start learn computer programming look at Lisp or Smalltalk.
Hari Seldon from Asimov's "Foundation" series is my absolute favourite fictional mathematician, and I'm glad to see its in the recommended list! Brilliant database, I'm sure to find some new reading material here.
Didn't some canadian kids send a digital camera into space, using a weather balloon?

They didn't seem to have any issues with competitors, exports, imported, radiation hardened CPUs...

My point, while seemingly irrelevant, is: All space companies don't have to be NASA. There a probably a gazillion things people could make markets out of that involve space: I would buy a "kit" that let me send small objects to space, or take photos of stars, or take photos of earth...

My secondary point is: Don't just poo-hoo the space industry, because you can't think of anything in that space. I'm sure the Computer industry was difficult to get into before PCs... but people did it.
Please support AOSA by buying a copy... Money goes to charity, but it shows these books are appreciated. I bought pdfs lastvyear and the epubs last month as my yearly new year's charity.

This chapter surely is a good one, but the books contain a lot of good suggestions.
Here is an interview with them (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxtuZE5pOGA). But after that they've been totally silent.
Relevant: http://djm.cc/bignum-results.txt

This is a precise version of the challenge, to write a large number in 512 bytes of C code.
Hushmail does so, but, beyond the issues you cited, there is the issue of crypto-code-served-by-your-host. They can be forced to backdoor the client JS code and you wouldn't notice (this, btw, happened with Hushmail).
> The thing is: there is no pattern for success generation. Stop seeking it. This is against the nature of being exceptional.

Of the same idea is Alberto Savoia in his book about pretotyping, where he describes such a Law of Failure.

What one can do is try to fail faster and I very much suggest to read the book, it's for free: http://www.pretotyping.org/pretotype-it---the-book
I always thought that a googolplex was a googol to the power of a googol.
CRUX 3.0 Released, now supports amd64
There was no startup scene in Jordan four years ago. Now one’s thriving.
Historically, communist countries have [..]

never existed. The USSR, China, Cuba, North-Korea: none of those countries is, or has ever been, communist. If they called themselves communist, it was to legitimize themselves.
> You have an iphone, they don't

Don't forget the food, internet, health care, electricity, education, and freedom of speech. What have the romans ever done for us, eh?
We all know it's just not that simple...
The year of the web series second season?
Laptops, phones, and other devices banned from flights after Boeing 787 fires?
MPAA vs. Kim Dotcom
+100. NASA can easily write you a $1 million check and then some for a lot of things, but imagine the satisfaction each time the Space Station is mentioned...that sucker is (partly) running on my code. And then there's the resume thing and your name mentioned all over the interwebs if you win
I also include in marketing generating word of mouth, good site, store SEO, and so on.

But it is needed anyway, apps ( specially on iOS ) do not get traction anymore by pure organic growth alone.

For example: Apple removed the new app list from iTunes, and the search take in account popularity, so a new launched app has zero visibility.
This is the best one I've ever seen. The description seems fairly benign, but then one needs a ridiculous number like A(187196) to describe the applications of Ackermann's function to get a weak lower bound.

And the first two steps are rather small, which adds to the surprise.
A master would be wise enough not to make assertions on what can or cannot be done.
Aaron Swartz Memorial Service
In these cases, "investigating" usually includes trying to fix it if something is wrong and probably preparing some PR.

Don't expect that pg will come tomorrow and say "I investigated. Yep, they are morons. Don't use it!" Expect same changes and a blog post from InstallMonetizer saying "We appreciate the feedback of the community and to improve the product we ..."
Been following Andrew for years; this is great news.

For those of you who only know him for the Microsoft branding I highly recommend you read the rest of his blog. I think he's the most promising industrial designer of our generation; the next Ive/Rams.
So, shall we just arrest the richest 100 people, confiscate their wealth, and solve all the world's problems at once?
OK, and the annual income of the rest of the world is enough to end it how many times over, exactly? I can guarantee you, more than four.
A problem exists, because there's no standard way to access microphone and camera. And this access is absolutely essential in order to implement voip. Hence, we've got flash, which is becoming a big problem, because it's been discontinued on some platforms.
Well, the socks are paird when you take them off, so it makes sense to keep entropy at bay rather than fighting the same dreary battles over and over. Use these http://deseng.ryerson.ca/xiki/Learning/Main:Sock_clips or some equivalent, I'm sure there are plenty of options :-)
>There'll be plenty of cases when the content is inherently infringing.

True, and it seems that Mega's copyright infringement reporting page[1] has an option for that:

Takedown Type: Remove all underlying file(s) of the supplied URL(s) - there is no user who is permitted to store this under any circumstance worldwide

[1] https://mega.co.nz/#copyrightnotice
The larger issue is that programs to end poverty haven't done what they have advertised to do. Poverty in Africa is getting worse in many areas as the level of aid has increased. I hesitate to start taking people's money who I don't know and just assume aren't doing anything better with it to fund programs that have poor track records. It'd be more exciting if they tried to fund these things voluntarily and then people can decide freely if they think someone can end poverty. They won't but it'd just be more interesting.

The other more obvious point is that this nonprofit is claiming the world is under serious problems and that taking money from others to give to them will fix it. That is sort of a naked appeal to tax others and put it in their pockets.
Seems odd to argue he didn't suffer from depression (despite his fathers words).

Do people who aren't suffering from depression commit suicide? I'd always thought that (attempted) suicide was like the smoking gun for diagnosing depression?
Amazing story...

spoiler alert, as these quotes were legendary:

"Not that we were allowed to talk to them, but riddle me this: How do you explain to someone that she's a YouTube sensation if she's never heard of the Internet?"

- Can you help us with e-Settlement so that we can put North Korean apps on Android Market?"

- No, silly North Koreans, you're under international bank sanctions.
I think the best way for you to realize the complexity behind it, is to take a look here:
- http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/K-12/rocket/shortr.html

With this you are only scratching the surface, so, as you can see, the journey is quite long.
If the reading of the above links does not scare you, and instead, it pushes you to learn more, then you are probably on the right path.
So learn, apply, fail, rinse and repeat.

You will also realize that electronics is, as well, an important component of a space company, so you will need to learn that too.
But how much of the rest of the world can afford to give up a year of income? For the richest people in the world, that's a lot easier.
also, the ASN.1 spec isn't free, which reduces adoption.
You don't address why this is better than the gravatar options of a random image based on email hash:

identicon: a geometric pattern based on an email hash

monsterid: a generated 'monster' with different colors, faces, etc

wavatar: generated faces with differing features and backgrounds

retro: awesome generated, 8-bit arcade-style pixelated faces

from: http://www.gravatar.com/site/implement/images/

I can see why extra options are good, I'm just confused why you wouldn't compare it against this similar idea that people might be familiar with.
Yeah, and most of these rich people are also huge philanthropists that donate massive sums to charity.
I think there’s a valid point here about the changing nature of programming in a connected world.

On the other hand, I think there are also real dangers that the article didn’t highlight. The old sayings that “when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” and that “it’s dangerous to put all your eggs in one basket” are as true as they ever were, and many of these modern, opinionated frameworks and plug-ins are excellent case studies.

Sometimes, using opinionated tools is a strength. If what you want to build fits a framework’s natural usage, you can get up to speed quickly and avoid much of the laborious infrastructure work that otherwise goes with starting a new project. That can be a big win.

However, sometimes it is a weakness. If you want to do something that isn’t quite what the framework does, breaking out of the box can be expensive, maybe even prohibitively so. Moreover, that applies not just when you first start a project, but also as the project grows and evolves, perhaps beyond the scale/scope the original tools were ever intended to support. And even if someone else comes along with a tool that is more suitable, it can be difficult to migrate.

If all you know is how to glue components together, you can take advantage of the strengths, but you’ll struggle to overcome the weaknesses, and worse, you’ll never create new tools that serve you better or let you create something that isn’t merely a recipe made from the ingredients someone else gave you.

I thought it was sad the other day, when MailChimp’s annual report web page[1] was doing the rounds on the web design forums because of some interesting effects used in its presentation, and the first question asked usually wasn’t “How does that work?” but “Does anyone know a plug-in to do that in $FRAMEWORK?” I’m betting that the next attention-grabbing web page using a new and interesting effect will be written by someone who asked the first question.

[1] http://mailchimp.com/2012/
If you have zero people seeing your stuff, how they will word of mouth it?
What a ridiculous assertion. So the implicit claim is that 60 billion (per year?) is all it takes to end extreme poverty. Does anyone actually think increasing aid by that amount would actually have that effect? Is it really as simple as writing a cheque?
Just started this site
Convergent encryption sounds great. But if Mega is using this, do they have any way of finding out which users have a specific file?

Example: Alice and Bob both upload the same file to Mega. Alice is raided by the MAFIAA. They get a court order telling Mega to list all users having a copy of that file. Can Mega comply? Or does not even Mega know that Bob has the same file too?

Related question: Is there any way for Bob to share his uploaded file with friends?
if you got 100 000 cakes that you must eat them all in 1 month and i take away from you 10 cakes or even 1000 did it really matter to you?
if you got 2 cakes for a month and i take away 1 does this matter?
Peoples definition of poverty changes over time.
On the prominence of women on HN
Linux Terminal: pidstat, know everything about your processes
In our post-moral world, we could at least pretend that's on the table.
Explained HSTS policy in depth. For more information about how to implement it;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Strict_Transport_Security
Dire poverty is self-inflicted. Corrupt, heavy-handed governments, pursuing illogical economic policies or deliberate starvation of opposition tribes. You could write that check tomorrow and the day after, Zimbabwe or North Korea or Somalia or even India would be the same. There are places in the world where the locals are killing people for offering the polio vaccine to children.

Further, global poverty is actually in decline around the world. http://www.economist.com/node/21548963
In this article, we learn that we can transform stock price increases into food and clothes, and that there is no corruption in undeveloped countries.

Hate to be sarcastic about this topic, but that headline needs it.