skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you're missing the point, I'm not attacking HackerDojo or hackathons, those can be quite fun. For the right reasons. But if someone succeeds in this task, that invention is worth millions. Coke is offering 10k. That's exploitation disguised as a "party".

It just feels awfully similar to that guy you kind of know inviting you over for beers, and then preceding to try and convince you to build his app idea for a couple hundred bucks and no equity. Even if I wanted to help him, why would I do it for so little?

It just seems like coke is piling on the "Get those nerds to build X idea and let us profit off it" train, and the lowball offer isn't helping.
To be honest, bitcoind, the original Bitcoin client has a very accessible json-rpc API [0]. This is the same daemon that runs behind the QT front-end of the "official" Bitcoin client. RPC is not my favorite (gotten spoiled by RESTful), but bitcoind's implementation is easy-to-use, and most languages have nice, easy-to-use json-rpc libraries [1]. You run bitcoind as a headless client on your server. It's pretty robust, and multithreaded. The benefit to that setup is that you are in control of everything, no need to depend on (or pay) a third-party. And there's no need to store Bitcoins on the server beyond what you need for your transactions, since you can set up a cron job to periodically forward x percentage of the balance to an off-site wallet with ease.

However, if you want something with a RESTful interface that you don't have to maintain yourself, ycombinator-funded Coinbase appears to have a nice API. But unlike bitcoind (which I've used for several small and one largish project), I've never used coinbase or any of the other third-party APIs.

[0] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bitcoind [1] http://json-rpc.org/wiki/implementations [2] https://coinbase.com/

EDIT: Clarity, grammar.
I don't think that is true. A dollar spent on creating a business is a dollar of demand too.

The only advantage consumption has is that its easier for a politician to point to.

And there is no proof that consumption gets us out of a recession faster. It is an unproven assertion. Where is the double blind study?

And, yes, if government is going to use force on citizens to implement a theory, some proof is required. Especially if that theory selectively avoids effects that don't fit the goal of expanding government.
I remember when smartphones first got cameras -- there was a mass hysteria by the usual suspects that this was a tool by which all of our bathroom moments would be invaded.

Then smartphones got video capabilities, and again...tool for pedophiles and creepers.

It's the same garbage with every advance of technology, usually by people with an agenda.
I jailbroke my phone and installed the Nitrous addon to give all apps access to the Nitro engine. Though, i'll admit it's not an option for everyone.
I went to MIT, you get over it (felt as the dumbest person in the room always). Its actually pretty great that anybody in the room can teach you something. Now that I left I hate it, I have to argue about things that seem trivial to me all the time.
Please see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_troll

The term refers to entities who are in the business of enforcing patents they aren't generally even using in the marketplace. This is distinct from someone who actually thinks their work is being affected, as is the case here (even though in this case it seems to be overblown).
Whenever I hear people talking about the minimum wage I want to know why they don't talk about the earned income tax credit instead.

EITC: Money is given to the poor people that need it most. The money that goes to them comes out of progressive taxation. Very little dis-employment effect.

Minimum wage: Money mostly comes from higher prices, which fall disproportionately on poor people. Fairly substantial dis-employment effect.

The only reason to favor the later is that politicians can rely on the public not noticing that they're paying for it.
So, you will ring fence certain jobs as only for people without families? Perhaps like paper rounds? But if a job is available to a teenager it is available to the fifty year old who just got laid off and unless it's working in a strip bar, is likely to be a better worker all round.
Some interesting structural differences are not captured by 23andMe nor even with technology like Ion Torrent, for example repeat sequences related to ALS, Huntington's, etc. To get the full picture ultimately you'll need a full sequence with longer read lengths to span the structural variants, and you'll also want the methylation/epigenetic markers which convey which genes are turned on or turned off. Just knowing you have the gene doesn't mean nearly as much without knowing if it is turned on!
How Play Framework slowed my code to a crawl.
How do you deal with patents? In my view, an open source shop is not compatible with holding patents, but the space is very heavily patent-encumbered. How do you resolve the conflict?
What Went Right in Afghanistan?
That article is not talking about the multiplier effect. It is talking about consumers consumption smoothing...buying automobiles after the minimum wage goes up because there has been a permanent increase in their income. From the article:
"Our estimates are silent about the aggregate effects of a minimum wage hike."

I've read a lot of the econ literature in this area, and have never seen a defense of the minimum wage on the basis of multiplier effects. Too few people are working at the minimum wage. And, the minimum wage is too blunt of a instrument to try to counteract business cycles.
Yeah, I even wrote my own MVC framework for a small project and I still don't know what MVC is "supposed" to mean because every single implementation example I see is completely different and at odds.
Yes I am very much aware of it. Scully turned out to be poison :)
NoSQL - Do I really need it?
Nice work! Very polished, good puzzles. The whooshing sound when going through the menu items in the main menu was a little annoying, but otherwise there wasn't a bit I didn't like.
This is not an "MIT event". This is an event hosted by the MIT Media Lab. That equates to 40 faculty and senior research staff, 75 "other staff" that support it, and ~140 students. So let us laud them for their efforts and consideration, and properly direct any ire toward the MIT administration where it belongs.
Ask HN: What is the best website for crowd sourced domain names?
I have spent way too much time trying to come up with a domain name for my website and am going to try to crowd source it.

Here are some website's I'm looking at:
NamingForce.com,
SquadHelp.com,
PickyDomains.com

Has anyone had any luck with the above site's or any advice?
Apple caused the trend of embossed text + gray backgrounds, but they never went low-contrast; in fact their home page still uses a quite dated top menu, and sharp black on white text.

Colorful, pastel, monotone and low-contrast UIs are just a general trend along with "flat" design, I don't think it's roots can be pinpointed.
Pin, Stripe for Australia is in now in open beta
"To thine own self be true" - How to properly navigate your career
Instaclustr - MongoHQ for Cassandra
GetGoing (YC12) Introduces Platform to Make Travel Easier & More Affordable
New Tomb Raider Launch Video - Bad, Old, and Tired Marketing
So Google Glass is really just useful when you're not interfacing with people. I can't get past the anti-social nature of the device - people already mistake my bluetooth headset for some sort of microphone that may be recording at all times - and that's unintentional as I just sometimes forget to take it off (it can rest on my collar) as it's still blinking and such.

Something that invasive up by the eyes would make me feel like a complete pariah.

Perhaps having on your "glass" would be equivalent to say, having a press hat - ie, you're on duty and publicizing the fact that someone could be googled at any moment or being recorded, etc.
If you think common lisp is complex, you have no idea what the words complex and simple mean. I know you have to know monads. That does not make haskell complex. Just like needing to know hash tables doesn't make C complex.
For me, I don't mind their pricing because it doesn't look gimmicky. I like the idea of using the 128,256,etc as the pricing model but I don't agree with it in practice.
Lehigh Univ Entrepreneurship Master's Students Launch and Sell to Graduate
I'm certainly guilty of pimping a YC company by submitting this, but
their approach to validated segmentation is really interesting.

After so many mentions of airline reservation systems by pg
(below), I'm wondering if GetGoing is using LISP?

http://paulgraham.com/gh.html
http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html
http://www.paulgraham.com/carl.html
Why You Shouldn't Announce your Big Startup News at SXSW
Tax credits rely on someone who is struggling to stay afloat to fill in yet another set of forms, correctly and then wait for the government to process it.

They were and still are a disaster in the UK - something like 20% of eligible people have never claimed and now billions have been overpaid - yes, clerical error and overly complex systems means the UK government is trying to claw back over payments from some of the poorest in UK, who have already spent it anyway. It's ridiculous.

No - keep it simple stupid, almost everyone can work out what they have to spend by looking in their pay packet. Working out what complex tax credit - no way
I don't think anything about the minimum wage is as settled as you make it out to be.
It's always worth a moment to look at anything that helps independent "X" efforts use the internet to 1) compete against the Universal Plastic Culture of our modern society and 2) do it in a realistic manner - stuff has to be paid for

I'll prolly only be an occasional user, but that's the whole point of crowd-funding and the like
Take a look at Yehuda's talk from Seattle: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ed_o3_59ME - I think it explains a few things very well, and helped me out a ton
Isn't competition that takes advantages of factors beyond the free market still competition? In practice, shouldn't the free market extend beyond the "market" itself, and into the state as well? Because all real-world capitalist economies are really mixed economies where the state still has an effect on the market. So aren't rational economic actors making use of every weapon at their disposal by lobbying, pursuing tax loopholes, patent trolling, etc?
> MVC2.

While we're being pedantic, it's Model 2, not MVC2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_2
There are so many free things on Android that it's hard to get myself to try paid for games. The exception is games that I get to know through some other source, like your excellent web page with live demo.

I'd pay for this game on android, but paid level pack would also work for me.
I do see the value in true "niche" boards based around a community (HN, StackOverflow, a subreddit, whatever) since it's a way of people within the confines of that community to connect with one another. This board doesn't even seem to offer that, though; It's just based around one particular hard attribute a job listing could have. (Not that I'm trying to contradict anything you've said.)
These sort of thought experiments come from the same place where they say we should tax the unemployed for oxygen inhaled & subsidize oxygen for the employer. i find uchicago-style social-engineering-disguised-as-economics alternately fascinating & repulsive, depending on which end of the table I am sitting at.
Teenagers don't need to support a family. Without much in the way of valuable skills, they may still want a job for spending money and experience. Your proposed minimum wage would make this illegal.

College students don't need to support a family. They may want to take a low-paying internship to build experience in their chosen field. Your proposed minimum wage could make this illegal.

Mothers of school-age children who are supported by their husbands don't need to support a family. They may wish to do part-time, low-skilled work to build expertise in preparation for a future career after their children leave. Your proposed minimum wage would make this illegal.

Retirees with pensions don't need to support a family. They may wish to do work, possibly even very low-skilled work, as a way to combine a hobby with a sense of being useful. Or possibly as a launching-pad for more of a "fun" career than the "serious" career they've already finished. Your proposed minimum wage could make this illegal.

Low-skilled immigrants do sometimes need to support a family. When one member can't do it alone, sometimes mom, dad, and the oldest kid hold down four full-time jobs between them to make it work. The arrangement isn't permanent; it lasts until they can do better. But in the mean time, they can support themselves. Your proposed minimum wage law could make it impossible for them to support themselves this way, and force them to rely on charity. This in turn could make it impossible for them to immigrate at all.

Some people have very low expenses. A paid-off house, a renter, a garden in the backyard, and a low-paying job can be enough to make ends meet. Setting the minimum wage at a level such that someone with a mortgage and unproductive hobbies can raise a family would force this person, who could otherwise support themselves, to rely on charity.

I could go on. My point is that the world is a complicated place. Not every worker is a single-head-of-household-with-three-children sort of worker. Not every job is a permanent career. They can be educational, transitional, temporary. They can be held by all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons.

Provide assistance to the poor if you like, but don't make work illegal. Don't ever do that. There's a huge potential to hurt a lot of people, just because they're living lifestyles you aren't familiar with.
It also depends on what kind of stuff you've done with your VCS. "Creative" SVN layouts may be difficult to merge.
Sure but the question is how much control is possible; people have been trying to control nonlinear systems since the 18th century without much luck. If society/economy/culture is a dynamical system that generates the power-law income distribution and this system cannot dissipate its "energy" and the exponent reaches some critical value then it will collapse or we'll have some kind of catastrophic phase transition.

I don't think power-law distributions have 2 tails - they have one very long tail.
Thank you for mentioning the case of implementing algorithms. I could not agree more. Without comments, it can be excruciatingly difficult for a reader to map (thanks for using that word, spot on!) the code to the high-level description of the algorithm. Comments provide that mapping. This gets more important as the algorithms become more complex, as in higher mathematics.
Show HN: We're building a cloudspotting app at StartupBus, tell us your thoughts
Attorney General: Aaron Swartz Case Was a ‘Good Use of Prosecutorial Discretion’
It really seems like you didn't read my post before you replied to it.
"Quite a bit of job postings list TDD as a requirement, in fact, which is silly. It is a bit like requiring vim or emacs."

Sorry, no, TDD isn't like vim or emacs. Your choice of vim or emacs doesn't change the code you produce. TDD does. Whether you agree with TDD or not, it's completely reasonable for a job to require it, just as it's reasonable for a job to require that you know and use MVC (in their app), or Rails, or any other technical solution to a problem.

If I'm hiring somebody, they have to know TDD and apply it, or they won't work for me any more. Period. Just like they have to know what local variables are and use them. Right or wrong, it's a coding/design standard, and it's perfectly reasonable for teams to choose and enforce their coding standards.

Now, that person might be able to convince me that they have something that solves my problem (a need for easily-changed code that does what the programmer intended) better than TDD. Say, a fancy type system. If so, awesome! I'll listen. But "I'll use TDD when I feel like it" ain't gonna cut it.
Coming from a programming background as well, I would like to make a couple points:

It helps to preface constructive criticism with praise. Make sure they understand what you LIKE before you dive into "rough edges".

I find it helps a LOT to phrase constructive criticism as a question.
For example:

Do you think it would be faster to use JSON here instead of XML maybe?

Just a thought from a long-time customer-interfacing programmer.
Are those normally hyphenated? 8)
He did mention if it is throw way code he doesn't write tests in his second to last point.
"A few months ago I wrote an entire 100 line program without any tests. (GASP!)"
I agree about the poor data, but I don't think this is an issue chiefly because you are trawling for an untested hypothesis, which you can then test using more robust methods. This is more about what to investigate, which is nearly infinite in theory. If this points you in the right directions, all the better..
But if you really do succeed in the big ground-changing way, you can decline the prize money and keep your IP. We specifically worked that into the contract with them for this reason.

I understand why people are afraid of big companies, and I have certainly seen the wreckage of these things done wrong, I just don't understand how any of those fears are founded in reality in the case of this event.
I'd be okay with some bare subsistence level income, but the reality is that politicians will buy votes by redefining "bare subsistence" over time.

Eventually these types of programs all get out of control. See medicare, social security, student loans, food stamps, etc.
I see it going the other way. Apple needs a bridge product between the iPad and the iMac. They are also getting clobbered by PCs in the business market. I suspect the big announcement will be a mid-range line of macs aimed for large scale roll-outs to corporations and governments. I read an article backing up this viewpoint in Business Week a while back, but alas it was only in the print edition.
Love that Hubba is repping the Toronto startup scene. What a fantastic, thriving community to be a part of.
Thus ensuring all HS and College students that want to work part-time (or during the summer) can't because there are no jobs available that pay the requisite wage.

The earned income tax credit phases out a over 40k/yr for a married couple with one child. which is ~$20/hr working 255 days/yr. Other benefits and subsidies might phase out at higher amounts so the wage in question would be higher still.
well, it does answer my internal question of whether I could find a consumer facing service that would replace GV in case that service goes down the tubes.

GV has become my defacto number these days. It would be tough to lose that functionality.
Major props on open sourcing the app! My only complaint so far is having to build with Ant, but that's pretty minor in the grand scheme of things.
Hiring decisions are made at the margin though. Even strong companies stop hiring when the additional cost of an additional worker is less than the additional value to the business.
This scares me in ways I don't understand. I feel like I just looked at the price not too long ago and it was $26.
Although really old (and outdated) I found this Sprout Core introduction useful. The first 3-4 minutes was enlightening for me.

http://vimeo.com/24487742
Why RSA Works [pdf]
There's a big reason this won't fly in the US. The GOP won't support it because it's a gift to moochers.

I agree with you, it's a better way to do it and to raise the standard of living in this country. It might even have a big effect on reducing crime.
> Generally soap destroys bacteria through acid-base reactions with the amino acids in the bacteria.

I'd like to learn more about what you mean by this, since everything from my biology training has taught me that the mechanism of action of detergents is primarily disruption of the lipid membrane of bacteria--ie. causing lysis and release of cellular contents into solution[1]. The disruption is due to the amphiphilic nature of detergent molecules (they are attracted to both polar water molecules and to the non-polar lipid molecules in cell membranes, ripping the lipids away with agitation of the solution). Amphiphiles are not acid base so much as partially charge-polarized and capable of hydrogen bonding, and partially charge/hydrogen bond neutral. Attaching to lipids and water simultaneously is thermodynamically favorable for them.

It's true that bacterial S-layers are proteinaceous and provide some protection, but detergents are still effective via the above mechanism (though often more so in concert with EDTA, urea, or other agents).

Some bacteria (ex. Streptococcus pneumoniae, Klebsiella pneumoniae, some strains of E. coli) have a capsule that would provide resistance to detergents, but it is generally a structure made of polysaccharides, not amino acids (ie. polypeptide). Bacillus anthracis does have a polypeptide capsule that would serve as a barrier to detergents, but it's an unusual characteristic.

This is not to say that high or low pH (base or acid) cannot destroy bacteria, but it is not the primary mechanism of action of soap or most so called anti-microbial products. "Explode" is not quite the right word for soap (it would be for hypo-osmotic lysis buffer). It really tears holes in the cell membrane.

Some anti-microbial soaps do contain agents that inhibit bacteria through a mechanism other than lysis. Triclosan is in the anti-microbial soap commonly found in hospitals, and it inhibits fatty acid synthesis--preventing bacteria from forming cell membranes. It's typically combined with a detergent though.

Ultraviolet light sanitizers (254 nm light) knock some bonds loose in DNA, causing thymine dimers to form. This doesn't quite destroy them, but it does prevent them from replicating and can inhibit production of harmful gene products by throwing a wrench in transcription.

You're right about soap overuse being damaging to skin, and glove changes are important. One of the most simple changes I've heard suggested is a switch back to brass doorknobs, since the copper kills bacteria via the oligodynamic effect (still not very well understood).

1. http://www.piercenet.com/browse.cfm?fldID=5558F7E4-5056-8A76...
Really? By what standard are you holding this revolution? From my perspective, the field is growing rapidly and I believe it will eventually take off.
The idea that TDD involves some kind of blind faith that the tests will generate grand designs and beautiful code is both silly and wrong. You are right about that. Good design and good code require skill, thought, and knowledge irrespective of whether you are using TDD. So as I practice the discipline, I am thinking all the time about larger scale issues, and I am _not_ being blinded to those concerns.

However, the act of writing tests first has a powerful benefit: the code you write _must_ be testable. It is hard to understate this benefit. If forces a level of decoupling that most programmers, even very experience programmers, would not otherwise engage in.

It also has a psychological impact on the programmer. If every line of production code you write is in response to a failing test, you will _trust_ your test suite. And when you trust your test suite, you can make fearless changes to the code on a whim. You can _clean_ it and improve the design without trepidation.

Gaining these benefits without writing tests first is possible, but much less reliable. And yet the cost of writing the tests first is no greater than writing the tests second.
I think that if they hadn't gone DMCA on Design Modo there would be a lot more sympathy here. Until LV shows that copyright was infringed (show us the exact copies), I'm on the side of "the DMCA was used incorrectly here and even maliciously."