skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not toiling to work out how to get someone to click on ads. I'm toiling to feed, house and educate my children. The pay cheque from Google enables me to do those things in the best way.
Much more than $750 billion a year, when you factor in the costs of the huge government bureaucracies that administer it and all their employees.
Why do we play videogames? Why do we create art? Why do we eat tasty unhealthy foods? Why do we go on hikes or climb rocks?

Why do we write posts complaining about other people not saving the world?

We do things we enjoy, things we're passionate or curious about, things we care about or have no choice but to do them. Glamour is a factor. Money too.

Perhaps if I had diabetes, or someone very close to me was suffering from the disease, then I would spend some time thinking about how to more efficiently manage one's blood sugar levels. Perhaps if I were closer to the realities of obesity, then I Move You (my former startup focused around getting healthy through social pressure) would have worked out differently. I learned that this isn't something I'm passionate about, but I know there are others who are.
I don't get the sense that there's an obvious, simple solution here that is just waiting to be implemented. I don't think it's that the only reason it doesn't exist is just because programmers are choosing to work elsewhere. Basically I think this question is probably built on faulty assumptions.
Show HN: My weekend project, Image Picker
How does this differ from Quid's offering? (http://www.quid.com)
It does make it clear with the obvious "RELATED POST" language that is in capital letters between the "<user> likes <page>" and the post below it.
This is a huge part of it. There's a certain arrogance in this tired, oft-repeated claim. And more subtly, people can be great at different things. Tech stuff has always come quite easily to me. Chemistry, biology, or creating social change? Not so much.

But my focusing on the stuff I'm good at hasn't stopped other people from doing (what my doctor friends decribe to me as) extremely interesting research in the health area.
Good point, but I'm not sure I agree with your second sentence. At every place I've worked at since 2008, most devs used laptops and plugged them into monitors and keyboards. I'm sure other places are different, but it makes a lot of sense to go laptop-only.

Except for GPU performance, modern laptops are pretty much on-par with desktops. Laptops cost more, but people with desktops usually own laptops. Having two machines creates the annoyance of switching between them. It's small, but it's there. For most devs, it makes more sense to buy one really nice laptop instead of a nice desktop and a mid-range laptop.

My current set-up is an 11" Air that I connect to a 27" screen. If I want more real estate, I could buy another 27" display and chain it. It's stupidly fast: 2Ghz Core i7, 8GB of RAM, 256GB SSD.

Oh and while I enjoy using big screens, I find my most productive times are when I'm on a plane. The lack of distractions and the knowledge that I won't be interrupted for hours helps me stay focused.

I don't want to come across as insulting the intelligence of everyone who doesn't buy expensive laptops. The right combination of environment, mindset, and knowledge are worth more than any fancy hardware. When it comes to tools, use what you love and don't pay much attention to cost.
Happy to help. Yeah I saw Xinerama. In the end that might've worked, but I wasn't sure how well this worked in practice during everyday work and whether there'd be driver issues with the external USB graphics card. I also heard about some issues about generally swapping monitor configurations (i.e. using the laptop at home and then bringing it into the office) and how it can be a pain so I decided to stay away from slightly "hacky" solutions like that.
There are pretty good ways to make a good deal more money more predictably than working at Google or playing the startup lottery...
Sorry, MySQL crashed :-(
Seeing how pharmaceutical companies and other medical related things have a lot of money thrown at them world wide, I think that isn't the case. Computing isn't the only place where 'the greatest minds of our generation' reside, there are a lot of them in the medical community.

Also there has been a recent trend of quantified self and medical start ups starting to gain traction, such as fitbit, mybasis.com, the tricorder xprize and so on. For quite a while it's been a software only world and just now we are starting to see an uptick in consumer electronics start ups.

Not everybody can work on curing cancer.
Family man here, yes.
Maybe we can set up our economic system such that the only way to make profit is to deliver utility more cheaply than other companies.

That way, doing good wouldn't be something on the side -- it would be the main thrust of our competitive economic system.

(setting things up this way is my life goal)
I actually feel the opposite way. If the search is fuzzy and incremental with good visual feedback there's no way I'd rather launch things than typing their names, except maybe dedicated keyboard shortcuts. Of course, something else is needed for discovering apps.
Thats a very myopic view. Indeed its not good if everybody work on things that 'matter'; it is essential that some people do work on things that don't matter.

Not everybody can be doing and/or should be doing cancer research or whatever the author seems to perceive is important.
Because curing cancer and solving major issues doesn't make money right now. It takes major investment and years of research for something that may or may not give return.

Further, google is solving big problems. How bout better internet service, cars that drive themselves, making computers more accessible, a universal translater, etc.

How bout the fact that many of the top grads from schools go to work in finance. If we could get all those people to go work at google, the world would be a better place.
To launch a Facebook clone you sign up for Heroku or AWS, push some Rails code, and start promoting yourself. To launch a medical device you spend years cutting through regulation and red tape, negotiating with and marketing to an industry that is probably threatened by your existence and will do its best to stop you.

Screw up at Facebook, you get yelled at on Twitter and your share price dips for a few days. Screw up a medical device, you get sued out of existence.

This probably doesn't explain the whole thing, but it is certainly related.
Disagreed. It isn't a matter of patience, it's all about incentives.

Almost all people who are smart enough to make a difference aren't foolhardy enough to make terrible economic decisions that will drastically reduce their quality of life.

The existence of economics PhD students still baffles me.
Tautologically true.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautology_(rhetoric)
Well, I upvoted you, because yes, but I'll make a refinement to the question: just replace "greatest minds" with "greatest programmers".

Seriously, great programmers are needed in bioinformatics, engineering and infrastructure. Some already are there, but the field is generally unglamorous and you can get much better pay for a job that doesn't involve your deep knowledge of microcontrollers at all. Bah, even if you're a civil engineer starting with just a basic knowledge of programming, unless you get lucky you'll get incentives to switch into developing knock-off websites way too many times. The chance of return on improving your basic programming skill to average is just higher than on improving your decent material engineering skill to superb.
Sorry, MySQL and word press couldn't take the traffic I guess :-(
ML itself is interesting, and I think the material for the class is good. I enjoyed the first round of homework - not too easy, but not really too hard either. The tough thing for me will be seeing whether can I maintain the extra work for the full 10 weeks.
Don't forget the (ugh) Charms bar, and also default apps for any file types for which you haven't changed the associated program yet. Couldn't say whether the start screen is faster than the start menu, for me search results always come up instantaneously, and it's hard to get a lag time below zero. But my computer was reasonably powerful; maybe it's a different story on lower-end hardware.

Anyway, I've upgraded one computer and this was a good reminder to go out and buy a copy so I can upgrade a second computer. I'm personally happy with Windows 8 in that for me the upsides outweigh the downsides. . . but for the sake of fairness I feel obligated to disclaim that I'm both more comfortable with adjusting my habits and more able to adjust the OS's behavior than many people out there.

Long story short, Windows 8 is both a impressive technical step forward and (for desktops) a stunning UI step backward. Which of those matters more is a choice for the individual.
Reginald strikes again!

But the real question is why a mind as bright as Reg is doing biz dev at a services company in Toronto? Shouldn't he be saving the world?
I'm not familiarised with the laws in your country, but I CAN see from here how the history sucks in large ammounts

I copy here a few more notes written about this case:

"Note that after six years of investigation and who knows how many taxpayer dollars down the hole, the DOJ is neither charging Nancy with harassing any whale on October 12, 2005, or any date since then. The indictment does not even allege that Nancy harassed any whale"
(http://www.nancyblacklegaldefense.org/charges.htm)

Uh oh, "Ortiz boy/girl" in charge, you are shorting of ideas, think quickly...

Thanks god, whe have the 1001!

"When federal prosecutors can't muster enough evidence to bring charges against a person suspected of a crime, they can still use a controversial law to get a conviction anyway: They charge the person with lying.

The law against lying--known in legal circles simply as "1001"--makes it a crime to knowingly make a material false statement in matters of federal jurisdiction. Critics across
the political spectrum argue that 1001, a widely used statute in the federal criminal code, is open to abuse. It is charged hundreds of times a year..."

...Nancy Black, a marine biologist and operator of whale-watching boats, recently became ensnared by 1001. When one of her boat captains whistled at a humpback whale that approached the boat a few years ago, regulators investigated whether the incident constituted harassment of a whale, which is illegal.

This past January (2012), Ms. Black was charged in the case--not with whale harassment, but with lying about the incident. She also faces a charge of illegally altering a video of the whale encounter, as well as unrelated allegations involving whale blubber. Together, the charges carry up to 20 years in prison. She denies all wrongdoing, including lying..."

This is is taken from an article in the Wall Street Journal about the aplication of 1001 to targets like Nancy when all other charges failed... ("For feds lying is a handy charge, Emshwiller and Fields)".

I strongly recommend its complete lecture to all interested in the Aaron's case. It is terrifying.

"...the law is so vague that harmless misstatements can be turned into federal felonies."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230329960457732...

link to the PDF (in case the other link fails)
http://www.nancyblacklegaldefense.org/For%20Feds,%20%27Lying...

In short:

This IS a shame, to ask 20 years for "edit a video" is indecent, abusive and ridiculous, and somebody had to say it.

I hope never, ever, to have a law like this in my own country. To me, It's like a sort of legal torture to crush a target and force a confession, even from innocent people, and must be stopped.
Ostensibly, a platform like Java or Rust is supposed to abstract stuff like the memory model. I haven't written a lot of Java code, especially not Java code that runs on many different native system / VMs, but from my perspective of blissful ignorance, it seems to have done the job?

Same with other high-level VM based languages like Python...
I'd say it is a lot more likely that your account got "banned" because you posted the exact same thing several times. HN has a dupe checker. If you post the exact same message twice, it assumes you screwed up, and kills the second one.

This is something that really bugs me about these meta threads. People attribute really heinous motives to the maintainers around here without knowing all the facts.
THIS IS COMPLETE AGAINST EVERYTHING I WAS TAUGHT AHHH
For some data types. Strings and objects can always be nullable.
I wasn't saying that any given programmer was the best mind of their generation - just that many of the best minds of these recent generations have been programmers, or involved in technology development in some manner.

And what are some of the "pretty good ways to make a good deal more money more predictably" that you're referencing?
Diabetes has a variety of causes. Concentrating on just one cause - too much sugar in the diet - how much money is spent by producers of sugar on, for example, advertising each year?

How much is paid by those producers of sugar in tax, and how much of that tax is used for research?

I agree with your general point though.
Are you against private resources being spent by a rich person to live to 94 instead of 92, or just public resources?

I really like the UK NHS "QALYs" system for public spending, but I think it's reasonable for individuals to spend their money as they please (and, as a benefit, if it were paid by 100% private insurance or out of pocket, late stage medical care would be more in touch with needs. An extra 6 months of high-quality life might be worth more than 2y of coma, etc.)
From your point of view it's a success - there's clearly interest. Put some content on the site, resubmit it. The audience is clearly there. Email me when you do and I'll be the first to upvote it.
> Screw up a medical device, you get sued out of existence.

Or, you know, people die.
Diabetes isn't a problem that we need technology to solve. Sure it could help, but that's treating the symptom, when what we really need to do is use preventative care to treat the root of the problem - corn subsidies and education.
Individuals are motivated by different sets of wants and needs. Financial security just happens to be damned near at the top of the list.
Is there any indication that education needs geniuses? Does it substantially improve innovation? When America was world dominant in innovation, were its geniuses in academia, or industry?
It's not just the processing power that matters: battery life is really important to making a tablet useful.

"Up to 6 hours" (as quoted for that Binatone) won't cut it, I don't think, even though the hardware's otherwise well able to handle email and similar. Unless you're really assiduous about plugging it in all the time you're not using it, it'll be dead every time you pick it up!

Cheap tablets probably make excellent status boards, though, left plugged in and running a browser.
If you knew the difficulty/incentive trade-off involved in making sugar management easier relative to that involved in getting people to click on ads, you wouldn't ask this question.

If web application developers had to jump through the same hoops that medical device developers did we'd all still be using AltaVista.
Richard Feynman’s Little-Known Sketches & Drawings
> Do you really want to get into body counts?

Yes, I do. Should we start with the first revolutionary socialist, Babeuf, who was executed by the guillotine or should we go all the way back to the primitive communist tribes that existed before states and classes that were massacred and enslaved by invading armies?
There is no need to choose though, we can fix all those things.
It's a clone of the ever-so-intuitive Mac OS interface. That's why it took me a while to figure out how to scroll, too, and why it looks kinda bad.
Why people gotta judge? Lead by example, or shut the fuck up (statement made by the excessive fucks in the article). Ignore what others do and do what you believe.
Thoughts on setting up a Reactive Company
Raganwald,

Have you considered asking yourself this question? You "take the friction out of writing and selling books." You could start with yourself and helping with Diabetes.
Because complaining is easy, and earns you social kudos. Doing something is much harder.

If someone makes this device and markets it 5 years from now, Reg can point back to his blog post and say "See, look how smart I am"
Type II diabetes is almost entirely the result of obesity. Put on 10 pounds and your fasting blood glucose will skyrocket. Sure, there are genetic factors that predispose a person to insulin resistance, but the dominant factor is adipose tissue. Type I (juvenile/auto-immune) is more interesting.

Sugar production in the US is heavily subsidized.
Judging by all he's accomplished at Microsoft, I'm sure Scott could successfully lead a team to solve his problem and bring a product to market. But he doesn't.

I (luckily) would not have use for such a product. If he doesn't care enough to tackle the problem, why should I?

Same goes for Obesity. Most of it could be controlled by changes in diet and behavior. If people affected can't be bothered, why should I care?
I am currently looking for an ultrabook but for the last couple of years I have used the following setup:

* (Acer) eMachines E732Z bought on clearance for $400

* Drive bay adapter + SSD to replace the DVD drive

* Upgraded to 8GB/RAM

Total is <$800AUD (even less because the SSD was a spare)
My Dad is almost 70. I guess this gives me standing to drop some unhelpful anecdata.

At this point he's holding on to unlock accumulated Long Service Leave, which will occur in June.

I suspect he will get a job after he has Retired. Why? Boredom. Working hard is ingrained in the man. He is terrible at idleness. He can do it for a day or two (and no man alive is better at a good afternoon kip), but then he wanders the house like a restless poltergeist.

I expect he'll take his decades of hands-on electronics wisdom and work part-time at a local TV repair place. Just to keep himself busy.

As for the meat of the article -- which really is about trying to forestall the Greece-times-a-zillion excitement that the future of US fiscal policy promises -- I don't know what to say.

You guys are going to find that tough. In Australia we've had compulsory retirement saving (superannuation or colloquially "super") since the 1980s. Australians have now accumulated well north of a trillion dollars of assets against their retirement.

Is it perfect? No, it's riddled with problems. But in terms of forestalling a fiscal nightmare it's one of the most far-sighted reforms ever introduced.
What an ignorant post. How exactly does "laying down the taco" help Scott Hanselman and the other million of US citizens who suffer from Type 1 diabetes?
Because the diabetes researchers use Google.
Hello, I could do something, if you want contact me. What kind of app it is and what kind of music/soundss you'r looking for?
Why doesn't `kill -9` always work?
Yep this is blocked under "Pay-to-Surf" at the company where I work. Not sure what security provider they use, but this isn't looking good for a YC backed startup...
As a fellow 14 year old with a working product (mine's used internally within my school, but deployed at daltonplanner.appspot.com), congrats! It's nice seeing another "kid" around here on HN.
Not if you live in Belgium, though, as a family member discovered: the Amazon App store isn't available there, for some obscure reason, which makes it hard to get software on there. It's fine if you live in the US or UK, though.

(Does Google Play work in Belgium, incidentally?)
Uh, finance? Maybe this isn't as obvious to a non-New Yorker, but that seems to me like the easiest way for a smart person to make money.
Oh goodie, another arrogant whine by raganwald where he can't understand why the greatest minds (implying people writing code are somehow the greatest minds) aren't doing what he thinks is important.

This post makes two incorrect assumptions. First, that the things he derides (Google automating targeted content, Facebook introducing new search features that are tangential to their current features, Apple changing form factors) aren't beneficial to society as a whole. Second, that problems he would like to see solved are more important than problems other people would like to see solved.
I did not say the guy sucked, I said his design sucked, and it does indeed. And Microsoft's recent approach to design sucks as well, the new Windows logo is a 90 degrees rotated trash can. That was my personal opinion, I just write what I see and how I feel, I wouldn't downvote the folks who greeted the design, because it's their opinion (probably based on the lack of taste, but that's their own business).

All of that weren't personal offenses to anyone, but your comment was.

I can say 'Dude, your design sucks' to my best friend, and it doesn't concern my respect to them in any way. Even geniuses sometimes make crap, especially when they learn. What's so special about this? Are you a bunch of fanatics here to go beat and burn anyone who's got opinion different from yours?
Granted many many many people use Eclipse/NetBeans/IntelliJ to come up with the XML.

If this is a concern, you can always use the mvn command-line passing arguments and archetype to generate the first skeleton XML.

I'm not nitpicking when it comes to XML vs LISP for configuration syntax.

Features is what I'm looking for so I would have to pass arguing minor things like this.

Thanks for the example though.
Looks well thought out, might be easier to target local politics initially.

I've developed http://www.unbaa.com in an effort to increase equality. It's a simple tool for democratic decisions and is unfortunately on the back burner for now.

Happy to discuss concepts so feel free to drop me an email.
The answer is well known. All challenging real world problems require deep domain knowledge besides programming.

You need to have medical expertise to even consider providing solutions to people with diabetes.

That's why we have 100:1 ratio of useless, solving not existing problems projects to world changing ones.