skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This topic is so hot in the community it's hard resisting the urge to weigh in. That being said I don't think I can add much to the particular direction the current conversation is going.

But given that I gave in to the urge to comment I do want to say this: Good job Heather! Keep up the coding and continue to have fun doing what you're doing. Solve the problems you see fit to be solved.

My guess is that you have a pretty good support network and you'll brush this whole thing off soon enough. However the next time you are one key-stroke away from submitting another project to GitHub, and you are given pause due to this whole fiasco, I say charge forward and submit. I look forward to seeing your contribution to the community. Just as I look forward to any contribution from anyone across the globe.
It should be noted that the article is written by Alfie Kohn, who has a number of books on education. See http://www.alfiekohn.org/books.htm for the list, and http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/hm.htm for one that is very, very critical of homework.

His basic thesis points in that book are these:

1. Homework is just extra practice. If practice is done right, it helps, if done wrong it hurts.

2. Studies do not find a simple correlation between homework and grades. Increasing homework does increase the correlation between the parents' socioeconomic status and grades, and the reason is that the likelihood of correctly practicing homework depends on how well the home environment can guarantee correct practice.

3. There is a very direct correlation between homework, home conflict, and children's dislike of school. In the absence of an academic benefit, these negatives are very telling.

I've read the book. I found it compelling. But then again I disliked homework back when I had to do it, and don't enjoy telling my son that he has to do his.
I've spent a lot of time working with pipelining software, first for my last job doing bioinformatics research, and now for handling analytics workflows at Custora. We ultimately decided to write our own (which we are considering open sourcing, email me if you are interested in learning more).

The initial system that I used was pretty similar to Paul Butler's technique, with a whole bunch of hacks to inform Make as to the status of various MySQL tables, and to allow jobs to be parallelized across the cluster.

At Custora, we needed a system specifically designed for running our various machine learning algorithms. We are always making improvements to our models, and we need to be able to do versioning to see how the improvements change our final predictions about customer behavior, and how these stack up to reality. So in addition to versioning code, and rerunning analysis when the code is out of date we also need to keep track of different major versions of the code, and figure out exactly what needs to be recomputed.

We did a survey of a number of different workflow management systems such as JUG, Taverna, and Kepler. We ended up finding a reasonable model in an old configuration management program called VESTA. We took the concepts from VESTA and wrote a system in Ruby and R to handle all of our workflow needs. The general concepts are pretty similar to to Drake, but it is specialized for our ruby and R modeling.

Some more useful links for those interested:

JUG https://github.com/luispedro/jug

Taverna http://www.taverna.org.uk/

Kepler https://kepler-project.org/

VESTA http://vesta.sourceforge.net/
I write software because I enjoy it, not to advance my career. I enjoy interacting with real users of my software, solving their real problems. Contributing to open source is not enjoyable because many of the people you have to interact with are so obnoxious, so I rarely do it. Not everybody is trying to pimp their CV.

For example today I found a memory leak in a popular open source library. There's a good chance it is installed on the computer you are using right now. It never even occurred to me to submit a bug report or patch because when I have submitted patches to this project before one was completely ignored (somebody else fixed the issue 6 months later) and the second time I got flamed (that crash causing bug still exists as far as I know).

I have about half a dozen local copies of projects related to things I'm interested in that have various improvements or fixes that will probably never be submitted back to the project, and I don't think I'm unusual in that. Most of the issues are fairly obvious and tend to get fixed eventually anyway.
Does it have to have big differences? It's a slightly nicer system with a fairly shallow initial learning curve. If you're on a new project, what's the problem? I'm wondering how well it would work as an actual make replacement.
Ask HN: What is your dumbest project on Github?
Since people are mocking strangers' code on Github, maybe in solidarity we should share our own most embarrassing contributions to Open Source/Free Software. I see a lot of people saying they are hesitant to contribute things now, which is a terrible shame. Perhaps we can encourage others by showing that none of us are perfect.
The work was being done in Costa Rica, onsite. And the software was used for their own online gambling site (we were testing the production site, not software that they provided to other people).

I concur that it was probably a more complicated legal matter, but our counsel was pretty confident that this would have been problematic.
"the people behind the software might have some emotional investment in their work."

If you are coding to relieve an unresolved emotional tension that just has no other outlet instead of solving an actual problem, you are in the wrong industry. Go be the first Jackson Pollock programmer.
Gracias Senor Gluck!
You found a bug! Search on my site is ignoring the "+" (i.e., search for "Nook HD" returns the exact same results which accounts for the difference) probably because I forgot to urlencode the query. Will fix, thanks!
Solution for the one-vote problem could be a box at the top of the front page with "Which (if any) of these five new stories are front-page worthy?" Does potentially provide a lot of visibility to crappy posts though.
Translation: before calling out "bad code" (with or without scare quotes), run a quick cost-benefit analysis of what might cost you to speak your mind vs chuckling to yourself or sharing in private with someone. So much for claiming the moral high ground.

In any case, the first three are most likely false in this case and the fourth is just silly. Do you appropriately, discretely and professionally inform the author of every tweet, blog, or page that is wrong on the internet?
I attempted to view this URL at work. It was blocked by our Barracuda filter.

"The link you are accessing has been blocked by the Barracuda Web Filter because it contains spyware. The name of the spyware is: Spyware.Exploit.Misc.MWBR"
The thing that bothers me is that some people changed their tone after they found out she was a woman and after they read her post. This speaks volumes more than the original comments. If anything it seems there's an implication that somehow women are unable to cope with jackasses as well as men.

Would it have even made HN at all if she was a man and wrote the same way? I doubt it, but if it did, and she was a he, he would have been pounded to the ground in the comments.

Of course, all of this could have been avoided if people act the way they're expected face-to-face. None of these people considered the "person" who wrote the code. And none of them considered "not useful for me" != "not useful". If it was, why are there so many tools out there besides UNIX?

BTW... Twitter's short form is a lame cop out IMO. You can be curt and still not be condescending. Allegedly "smart" people could have been cogent without being asses.
Sorry if my comment sounded harsh. I actually disagree with my own statement. Cell phone companies ought to be able to lock their phones if they want. And we should be able to unlock the phones that we buy, as the petition argues for. Provided we buy them, that is. Cell phone companies could prevent us from unlocking phones by leasing rather than selling them, if they so choose.

We're all adults here and perfectly capable of making our own rules through contracts. The anti-circumvention clauses of the DMCA seem unnecessary to me.
They are locked, by default. I bought it in a T-Mobile store, because my Nexus 1 died while I was travelling and needed something quick (it's an HTC Sensation 4G, which is the worst phone I've owned, possibly ever). Maybe they'll unlock it immediately if you ask them to, I dunno.
Being a true Markov, his history is irrelevant!
that's cool, but it means that when i look at the site there's little to tell me how popular or good different people are. i don't know how you can do it, but getting more feedback would help a lot, i think (but i will try it anyway, i suspect, in the next few weeks - santiago).
URL says it all.

https://github.com/minimaxir/display-justin-timberlake-sexin...
I am actually working on software right now for managing the interiors of driverless cars. Forgot your purse? Get a text. Puked in the car? We'll bill you to clean it. Put in a bomb? Call da police.
Pedobear revealed through github search
To me, both this and the original complaint, come from dogmatic sentiments like "Legacy Code is Code Without Tests".

http://www.kjetilk.com/2009/02/legacy-code-is-code-without-t...
If you've ever seriously written shell scripts you'll know that they're not 100% portable. You always have to go through hoops to make them work properly across operating systems systems. BSD and OS X come with the BSD userland tools, with the exception of bash being default on OS X. Linux comes with the GNU userland. A few differences from the top of my head:

- BSD utilities do not accept any -options after filenames, GNU utilities do.

- The situation is reversed for BSD find. It insists on accepting a directory name as the first parameter.

- BSD sed doesn't support the -i option in the same way as GNU sed does.

- Even different versions of GNU utilities are not necessarily compatible. A few years ago I ran into compatibility problems with 'head', 'tail' and even 'free' across different Linux distros. I can't remember the exact issues though.

So I agree with the grandparent, Node and Python are a lot more portable than shell scripts.
To add on, you're also effed if you want to buy used phones. They're locked, and since you were never a customer, they won't unlock them for you. Even if you were to "become" a customer for a month with no contract, they still wouldn't unlock them for you, I think you have to be a "customer in good standing" for three months or so according to most providers' policy? That's also only for the carriers who have policies that allow their agents to unlock.

Myself, yesterday I paid a person in India ~$2.00 to unlock an iPhone so I could use the gift on another service. People on Craigslist or local GSM repair shops are less lucky, I've seen demands of 40-100 bucks for the same privilege.
I believe the previous vis was for businesses in general, and not specifically tech startups like this one? Also, that visa required the person coming in to bring their own money to start something.
An unsigned artist reaching #1 may single-handedly change the record industry.
That was a very poorly written blog.
I enjoyed reading David's post and only have one issue:
Oxford Comma? Seriously? That's ridiculous, unnecessary and unparsable.
Yet some of the people singled out as the snarks in this article are people active in the community as teachers, participate to user groups, spend a lot of their free time on maintaining beginner-oriented software. Life is best seen in shades of grey and I'm sure they sincerely regret having reacted that way.

The more general issue is that Internet has become a place of competition and EXTREME negativity, just read any article on Hacker News if you need convincing. Some dude will spend months or years working on some shit, only to be greeted with cheers and claps like "wow, that sucks", "How is that useful?", "Your code is bad and you should feel bad", "LOL, you handled security like my 2-year old handles the TV remote". So no, it's not even a problem of calling out code when it's bad, it's just a simple matter of recognizing that those people you so hastily call out are in fact human beings. And NO ONE likes to be humiliated.
rent, vehicles, and living expenses are fine (so even booze to an extent) but Spring Break and this here seem far past the grey zone
Over the last thirty years, households have gone from predominantly single bread winner, to dual earner. And at the same time, consumer debt has done up while savings have gone down.

Now, if worker compensation was growing significantly faster than inflation, wouldn't we expect the amount of disposable income to be higher, and hence savings and debt to be lower? Why were Americans forced to tap home equity and credit cards to continue consumption? Either prices went up, or people started consuming a lot more. The article claims disposable income went up, but if that's the case, why the credit binge? Doesn't add up.

Moreover, even if you ignore this, the share of national income of the bottom quintiles has been dropping monotonically over the last 30 years, but it was rising with the rest of the quintiles prior to that. That tends to indicate that broad based productivity increases were accruing benefits to workers. Now it tends to indicate that productivity increases accrue solely to capital and not labor. It is not a stable situation.

The apologetics seem designed to avoid debate about the problem, just like climate change, because the assumed solutions would conflict with closely held ideological beliefs. That is, ideological belief trumps contradictory data.
Why Onshoring High-tech Manufacturing Jobs Makes Economic Sense
Is Android just for poor people?
slightly more portable than python

Can you elaborate on this?
I'll go first. Here is a command-line utility in C that counts:

https://github.com/pjungwir/range

I thought I had a worse example, but it turns out it's not on Github . . . yet. :-)
I think adding "Does this code represent a risk to others in some way" to that is also valid. Especially in the security realm, but even in day to day stuff. If code is going to cause other people headaches, help them avoid that.
I know the core basics of find/sed/grep and I've even used awk on occasion (though I typically have to Google for that one), and occasionally I use them when I'm ssh'ed into a box.

But as soon as I want to do something more sophisticated, I again reach for the tools I know better.

No I can't use my GUI tool on a box I'm ssh'ed into, but I can push my changes to a git repository and pull them to be local, where I can do complex things really quickly and without having to memorize tons of obscure options and corner cases.

In a case where that's not as feasible (hundreds of megabytes of log files, say), and what I need is beyond my find/sed/grep skills, I usually drop into my language-of-choice and produce a tool that is much easier to use for my purposes. Honestly I haven't touched awk in a long time because the pain is so much greater in awk to accomplish what I can in my own more familiar toolset.

I get that those tools work fine for any old-school Unix hacker, and the combination is quite powerful in its own right. I don't have the desire to BE an old-school Unix hacker, though, and my tool-set is quite powerful enough to accomplish what I need without going through that particular hazing ritual, thank you.

My need for tools like this happens rarely enough that even if it would be faster once I'd learned the tools to type out the appropriate command line, the amortized time to GET to that skill level in those tools would be far more than the time it takes me to just use my "less optimal" tools.
I would like to find business problems to solve for companies, but how would I figure out what those are? What are some things I can do to discover those problems?

Also, I have read few of your past comments, and was wondering if you could be my mentor of some sort? I would love to become a consultant, but don't know how to start.
Dude, I don't know what to say to you. You're going to argue for the sake of it, even though you're objectively wrong. Maybe you can shed some light on why people do that?

The man HIMSELF admits he is intrinsically an asshole, and that even when he uses his real identity he can't help himself. Yes, he's trying to be better. But an alcoholic trying to fight the bottle is still an alcoholic.
Can you link to other examples of this happening?
In a lot of countries, it's impossible to put something in the public domain immediately.
Salary Guide 2013
Well, now I'm curious for that CLI. Why do you need an utility to count from 1 to 10?
Agreed. I experienced a big. Bug the other day that appeared like it deleted all my notes on my iPad and online and this caused me to finally bite-the-bullet and move my notes to Evernote from my offline iPhone for fear of never being able to access them again.

Was a painful upgrade experience (and the bug resolved itself in 24 hours), but I've suffered similar sync bugs over my time with Simplenote over the past 2 years and I didn't feel safe with the service anymore.
What about happiness? Hope for the future? Ability to have your spouse raise the kids at home while you earned enough to pay for a house and car?

And the idea that life expectancy is what counts is absurd. 79 years of fighting for jobs where you're worked like mad fighting every week to stay out of debt while trying to get your kids some semblance of education in shittier and shittier school systems sure sounds a hell of a lot nicer than the past because what, iPhones exist?
I think most people would find it demeaning to hear it said about their code.
YC alumni Eligible raises more than $1M in under 48 hours via AngelList
May the best photo win.
Betting the Company on a Graph Database
Missing option: grow a thicker skin and don't take everything personally.
It still crashes my (still existing) iPad 1.
We used chef Nancy (link is at the end. Was a "small group dinner" with around 7-8 people, we got Mexican Food :).

https://chefsurfing.com/es/chefs/chile/region-metropolitana-...
Some people take the perspective that by not speaking out about something, you by implicitly accept how it is, or even embrace it.
I experienced when I first started out as a developer, my co-workers were just like this. They'd rip apart sites left and right, people's apps and anything else they could set their sites on. I was hazed on a regular basis for the code I was writing, simply because I was considered a "junior" developer.

It wasn't until after I left there I realized how incredibly myopic and arrogant these people really were. This was one of many lessons I had to learn. There is no one way to do anything in development. Sure there are certain things you should and shouldn't do - but one way to do everything? Hardly.

After I left said company I really gained more respect for how people write and maintain code. As such, I now just keep my eyes and ears open for best practices. Unless it's going to be constructive, I never hack on anybody else's code. I know the feeling of thinking you've done something wrong. When in fact, it might just be a different approach to reach the same conclusion.
Politeness? The reply might have be forceful, might have use the word bullshit, but it what way did he offend anyone?

I thought he hit the nail on the head.

It's no body else’s business but your own what you choose to put in GitHub.
There have been a lot of posts to HN, including submissions of articles with a point of view contrary to this article, claiming that the current generation of young people are "screwed" or the like. Both of my two older sons have netbook computers and mobile phones (not the Apple brand) even though our family income is solidly in the range described by the article. My second son recently mail-ordered computer parts and assembled a new desktop PC for my wife, which is quite a blessing. The simple point of fact is that young people today have opportunity to enjoy goods and services that were unavailable and unimaginable to their parents at the same age. All four of my children have had opportunity to obtain good education that prepares them for productive adult life--my oldest son is already working full-time as a programmer for a start-up. We have spent out of pocket more than most American families to pursue educational opportunities for them at the primary and secondary level of education, largely through homeschooling, but we can afford what we did with a middle-class income. We live in a nice house (rented, in our case) in a peaceful, crime-free neighborhood, and travel as we have occasion to travel. Our lifestyle has improved over the lifestyle I grew up with.

As a younger Baby Boomer, I am prime political fodder for appeals to "protect Social Security." Yet I support entitlement reform, even at my short-term detriment, because I care about my children. I do agree that young people today need to have older people like me drain less of the money they earn through work to fund entitlements paid to me. Rather, I support reforms that raise the retirement age and age of eligibility for other old-age benefits and put more of the economy's money in the hands of working people who can best decide how to spend it, funding entitlement programs on a more actuarially sound basis. Understanding the basic facts about the economy is an important first step for hackers and other entrepreneurs to have a business environment in which they can innovate and invest. Current policies are unsustainable and anyway are based on false factual premises. Americans can buy more of what they want for fewer hours of work than ever before in human history. Hackers can keep right on innovating, because Americans will never feel like they have enough. History makes that clear.
Do you happen to know if the original developer did in fact ask for feedback?
The thesis of the article is middle class stagnation (the actual truth is, inflation-adjusted hourly wages have fallen since the early 1970s, they have not stagnated). These "increased benefits" are due to skyrocketing health costs which the employer has been paying, not any new fringe benefits. Because employers in the US have been fighting universal healthcare for decades, unlike every other industrialized country. They fight tooth and nail to stop universal health care with campaign donations, then cry how much they have to pay into the HMOs of their workers.

A worker who purchases the same basket of goods and services that the typical family has in 1970 is not going to "cut it". To make the same wage he did in 1970, he will now have to pay for his own job training, college degree and so forth. Employers now require more education from workers. The typical family is now forced to pay a new expense in their basket - their own training and educational costs - forced meaning if they want to remain a typical family, and not fall further then they already have.
Another big step backwards for the U.S.
There is love for R in Drake! As of about an hour ago:
https://github.com/Factual/drake/commit/f63dd2630ca3e5e4a6a6...
> How does such a minor problem affecting only a fraction of Gmail users suddenly become Gmail's Second biggest problem?

In my opinion the problem is this: the larger the mailbox or the more often you use Gmail, to higher are the odds of facing described problems. I.e. the heavy users have most problems. So there is the problem, it's just a matter of time until someone else solves it. When someone else solves it, it means those heavy users will migrate to this someone else. (Remember they were also the first who actually had any reasonable use-case in Gmail, that used to be advertised as Mailbox for messies/people with many mails.) The rest will just follow automatically, it's always like that. ;)