skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most cash transfer research is based upon conditional cash transfers. Which are small monthly payments based upon education, health or nutrition goals.

I actually like an organization called New Incentives that is able to uses the merits of cash transfers in a Watsi-like way...basically making it a conditional cash transfer. http://newincentives.org/transfers

(fyi, this is not self-promotional but I connected with the founder because I like their concept).
Joe Armstrong is great, but come on: of course he took drugs!

I mean, how else could he write such an innovative language while pedaling his bike to the moon -- much less blow his trumpet at the same time?
Plack/PSGI (Perl) == WSGI (Python) == Rack (Ruby)

These are all abstraction layers (for each language) which then can be run seamlessly on top of CGI, SCGI, mod_(perl|python|ruby), etc.

- http://plackperl.org

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plack_(software)

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSGI

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wsgi

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rack_(web_server_interface)
The word "Contemporary" always makes me cringe a little. It's such a fancy synonym for "Now".

Anyway, I love ballet myself. I did ballet when I was a little boy (for about 8 years). I like going to ballet. Especially when my sisters perform in it. BUT this might be too much of a good thing. But, pff, who cares right? I hope you guys enjoy it! Fok all them haters.
There's been at least one experiment that involved giving an income for an extended period of time as well, unfortunately I can't remember where I read about it. Their results were at least in the short term similar: Some "abuse" (to the extent you can call it that when the money were given with no strings), but also a number of people who leveraged their "free income" into building businesses.
That first line is truly one of the best comments I've seen when discussing languages. I've clipped it and will use it from now on:

>> I'm not sure many people would use [xxx] in real life. I don't know... maybe some people... certainly not pros.
The data mentioned in the article says the exact opposite of "terrible idea" (see for example the "downstream financial gains" for long-term improvements in their situation).

So, I chose to give the data more weight than your arguing.
Reframing required: give people money only when that is the most efficient option for helping them, given the risks of a no-strings cash donation.

Otherwise, help them in a way that directly affects their wellbeing, causing a direct, measurable change in circumstance with decreased risk.
> Because the majority of the funds (I am generalizing) belongs/belonged to Russians who took advantage of the people on the conversion out of communism (dirty money).

You are not generalizing, you are just making this up. Only about 20% of the deposits in Cyprus belong to Russians.

> Greek's insolvency impacted Cyprus greatly, because a large portion of the Cyprus population are of Greek descent.

Nope. It impacted Cyprus because it participated in the Greece bailout and lost 4.5 bil to the haircut that followed.
The mobile app is much simpler to use than the website.
There is nothing wrong about being plumber, car mechanic or carpenter. Many of those people make more money and have better life than dummy with title and student loan.
"NAM is one of the actual reason, that a war between the West Bloc and East Bloc never really happened."

This seems to be a view not widely held outside of NAM countries. Do you have any facts, events e.g. to support that claim? e.g. how NAM countries worked during the Cuban crisis? Or how NAM countries helped during the Able Archer crisis? Or how they were involved in the Berlin crisis of 61 with the T-54 and M-48 tank standoffs? (three events that come to mind where the cold war was nearly going hot)
How is a tax voluntary?
Agree - agricultural subsidies are a massive problem. They're unfortunately also almost politically untouchable.
Pretty sure the people who paid the tax could already do that.
There are a lot of poor people, and a lot of them aren't distinguishable in terms of initial skills, and self-investing in learning new things is harder and riskier than self-investing in local farming when there aren't too many farmers. Only so many people can invest in land and livestock and farming and know-how before you reach local saturation, only so many people can invest in fishing equipment and know-how before they overfish the local areas, only so many people can invest in starting a business and that know-how and hire other poor people to do something that builds the economy, and so on. Once the low-hanging fruit of personal investment is taken, what then? Or as the economy improves slightly and the average person can more easily afford more vices, will they spiral down in that direction? Or is there a good argument that the low-hanging fruit won't disappear? Or will it not matter because through this type of aid the people will gain the skills necessary to compete in a global market, and that in a decade or two the average person can have a lifestyle approaching the average, say, Eastern European, without direct subsidization? I expect the 130 page report someone linked here addresses my concerns, and I'll add it to my reading queue, but it's not immediately obvious to me that this alone is a sustainable strategy in the sense that eventually no one will need a direct no-strings-attached cash transfer to survive. I think it will just create a dependency that will be perpetually (and increasingly in terms of dollar amount) funded by the richest individuals, corporations, and governments. Maybe that's not such a bad outcome if it's not too expensive relative to the total wealth of these funders and if many people's lifespans generally improve and contain more fun in them.
2 steps to better API Error Codes
JQuery 2.0 beta
You also will want to optimize the approach. For example, do you really need to draw each block as a cube? You could draw slabs of identical blocks as a single cuboid. That will complicate the code, but may allow you to run larger worlds faster. Also, you probably want to be smarter in computing which cubes to draw and what parts of them to draw (in a 'no reflections' world, you can see at most three faces of a cube. There is code for drawing fewer faces on lines 177-185, but that is disabled. If you figure out why, you may be able to improve the code). [My guess would be that the display does not look nice enough if you do. Maybe you will get flicker when looking at blocks near edge conditions (no pun intended)?]

Also, keeping angles in degrees means you have to convert to radians on every iteration. It is easy to get rid of that. That will be a tiny, tiny speed up, but if you want to get top speed, you will eventually have to make many of those.

Almost every such improvement in speed will come at the cost of code readability and maintainability.
If there's any chance of that, then yes, definitely start a new repo just to be safe.
While I agree that these countries need helping, it always annoys me how so much is spent on foreign aid when people in our countries are still living on the streets and in relative poverty - we need to solve our own problems before we start giving money away willynilly.

I've been homeless and unable to find a shelter because there were only 15 places in my town, I've known people who have been hospitalized because they couldn't afford food, how can we consider giving money to a foreign country when the people around us are struggling just to live?
Here's the website I always refer to for http status codes httpstatus.es
A useful exercise may be to examine why you thought I was mocking you, even though nothing like that appears in the piece. Similarly, your defensiveness in thinking I asked for, or wanted, some kind of apology isn't supported anywhere in the article.

Really think about where those responses come from, because I think that could be one of the best lessons you take away from the article, since your heart is in the right place on the issues I was trying to raise. I suspect part if what impacted your perceptions here is that this article was not solely, or even primarily, directed at you. Thanks for reading!
Here is my data:

https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&...

I believe that the sustained, multidecadal, multitrillion dollar improvement in living standards of 1.2 billion people is a little more compelling than an NGO's spreadsheet. Capitalism scales.
Landscape Designer, Landscape Design Build Company, Firm Ideas California
"MIMD hasn't been shown to scale, and its not locking that is the problem, but I/O and memory."

We're going to have to disagree on this one, as we have some obvious examples in favor of MIMD scaling on the TOPS 500. SIMD is just a tool for a subset of parallelizable problems.
.NET and Node.JS – Performance Comparison
Sorry, I thought you were talking about the giving in the article.
"Contemporary dance" is actually the name of the dance technique: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_dance
> In North America, we have money in companies, hedge funds, etc. In Europe, banks are the major depository.

But then, banks put those deposits to work in companies, hedge funds etc., so it amounts to the same, with an intermediate which mitigates risks (not perfectly as illustrated here) and takes a fee.
Check Out Report in London
Another property inventory report is the check out report, which is a key element for the end of tenancy, together with the end of tenancy cleaning. This report is a self-evident document, containing written and photographic elements, which describe in details the status of the property and all the appliances inside it before the tenant moves out.
There's no doubt that many high achievers have some sorts of dysfunction as motivators; I always point to the paternal failings of the fathers of (say) Bill Clinton or Michael Jackson. But even granting that pattern, you'll generally find a stable presence within people's broader family, and examples from Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg show a much more common pattern of extremely supportive parents providing a strong foundation for success. I would love to see research about the families of a cohort of YCombinator participants, for example.
Sigh. I was worried I'd see this comment when I clicked "discuss". Look, I think having a dance performance at your tech conference is a bit silly. But so what? It's definitely not actively bad, it's not like it's somehow mandatory if you attend the conference, and a lot of people there might like it. Also, you seem to be saying, "this is a tech conference; no girl stuff allowed!" Just relax; not everything at every conference needs to revved up on testosterone.
I am among those appreciative of his contribution to my education. At the same time I wish he'd let the word 'fuck' regain its undoubted impact by not using it on what seems to be every conceivable occasion (excuse the pun).
There is such saying in Poland (although the origin of it is India):
give a man a fish and you will feed him for a day, give a man a fishing rod and you will feed him for a lifetime

Yes, I know it's not scientific proof, but it comes to mind right away.
As I said, it's all really complicated and no-one wins. In the end Cyprus loses, Greek Cypriots lose and Turkish Cypriots lose too.
Goodreads and Amazon were two places I used to go to check out book reviews. Now I can get best of both in one place. Makes a lot of sense for Amazon to buy them.
Rebel Labs interview: Sven Efftinge founder of Xtend
On being the fastest growing tech company and making mistakes
Email is in my profile :)
On the contrary, having the taxpayer step in if the FDIC runs out of money is politically feasible. In fact, it would be the kind of bailout that the "common" people ("Main Street," to use the term politicians love to use) are always being portrayed as demanding, in the sense that the money would be bailing out the bank accounts of millions of average, middle-class Americans.
I'm astonished by some of the reactions here.

Giving money to the people who need it, means that the power to use that resource is directly in the hands of the people who have the most interest in using it well.

Frankly, their incentives are much more aligned with their long-term wellbeing, than are the incentives of a faceless charity committee in a Washington office somewhere. Plus, you don't have to pay for the endless decision-making - and the unavoidable inefficiencies in decision-making far removed from the action.

It's one of the reasons free markets win out over statist command economies - making much better use of information local to the decision.
Best Sleep Tracking Gadgets and Apps
I sometimes have a very cynical thought that some places should be given condoms, not food or money :(
yes, Please read the NAM wiki. The design of the NAM was actually for as per the official definition, was to break the cold war. And ever since, it so happened, it has been struck with a lack of direction.

Well, isn't it obvious? During cold war, countries were being pressed to join either of the blocs, but NAM provided a barrier against this pressing, when countries unanimously agreed to stay neutral and share the opinion.

Due to its nature, that whatever was happening, was on a diplomatic behind closed doors basis, where discussions were being held about stances hiding it from both US and USSR bloc, it is very hard to trace, what they really did, and how they did it. But, with a attendance of 55% or 115 countries, you cannot rule it out as just another organization.

EDIT: http://mealib.nic.in/?2029

please check out this official foreign policy extract from 1983, it was a big event in world politics. reading only the Introduction will let you know.
What are you basing this on? I've been using PHP for well over a decade in high load environments and never experienced it turn "to cold dog shit" .. any issues I have experienced had a good reason, not "no apparent reason".

But then, I've never used a PHP framework in all the time I've used it .. maybe that has something to do with me never having had negative issue with PHP.
Hands on: Ouya review
> I think this is shortsighted as it's very difficult for relatively wealthy people to put themselves in the mindset of somebody who is living in extreme poverty, especially in a different country.

I think the perfect example of this is the reaction whenever someone want to do something "techy" in Africa, where there's almost always a stream of "but they're all living in mud huts with dirty water and no food and haven't got electricity" type replies. Meanwhile Africa is expected to pass 80% mobile penetration this year - they might possibly have passed it already... Waste? Of course for some, but in many countries, SMS is the way for people to banking, for example.
That's an interesting HTTP status codes cheat sheet.
But doesn't giving away money make the poor less interested in finding a job?
Sooner or later they will get addicted to the free money.
This is not scalable. The problem with charitable giving is making sure the biggest percentage of the money given goes to helping people. First of all- a 10% fee is outrageous - the best charities have at least 97% going to the poor. Also, with cash it is MUCH harder to control corruption. I always believed it is better to teach a man to fish - the best use of this money is to fix the underlying problems. Lastly, it is more scalable to manufacture food and other goods in a factory.
However, I can see how giving people money would help them better in some ways- they may know better how to spend it and they can invest it, improving more than themselves.
Perhaps the best solution would be for a type of currency just for charities. Using this would allow for tracking, which would limit graft. It would also have a social stigma so no one would collect too much and could not be spent on luxury goods. This may be like food stamps- I am aware it is not a good system, but can anyone suggest a better alternative?
That's pretty much my view - I haven't done any "serious" DIY for years once I found out that a really good tradesman will be much faster, much better quality and often not even that expensive.

Of course, the trick is finding the good tradesmen.
Agreed. If we buy the principle that individuals generally make better decisions for themselves than governments or committees can do for them, there's no reason why it should be different for the poor.

In the "fishing pole" analogy: You may give them a fishing pole in the best "central planning" fashion, but they may have little use for a fishing pole because there's practically no fish in the region.

By giving them money, you trust them to decide for themselves whether a fishing pole would be more useful than say a plow.

I think there is a point where people stop trying to be self-sufficient and start relying on handouts. It would be interesting to know what triggers it.

But the assumption that some external provider of aid always knows which kind of aid is better is probably a fallacy.
I completely agree. IMHO the real mistake was "just" the initial announcement that included a tax on the insured <100k part of the accounts.
> You are not generalizing, you are just making this up.

Calm down. Firstly, one number states that 30% of deposits are foreign owned [1]. Secondly, the accurate description of Shenglong's error would be "exaggerating."

> Nope. It impacted Cyprus because it participated in the Greece bailout and lost 4.5 bil to the haircut that followed.

You just attacked a straw man by quoting Shenglong out of context.

[1]http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/27/business/global/bailout-gr...
>But to actually wish that something wont get good enough to be a general solution even if it can? How does that make any sense?

It makes a lot of sense because things do not happen in isolation. A "good enough web platform" could bring a lot of OTHER outcomes too.

I wrote one in my comment already: all computers because Chromebooks, glorified clients.

That has other consequences: you loose control, you don't own your apps (the company does, and it can take them from you in an instant, like Google Reader), etc. Not to mention the privacy implication of ALL apps running in a web browser, getting their data remotely. Or the implications for companies and governments locking content, pushing you out, demanding a premium, etc.
The Trials of Conference Organising
want to help people ? give them a job that can help them live.
How not to pitch your startup to journalists
Put it this way: if you were really poor, would you rather be given money to help your sort your own life out, or for some charity to use the money for 'what's best for you'. I know what I'd want.

A problem is that people are often not free - due to family or social pressures or even plain violence (e.g. domestic) - to decide how to use money.
Yeah? I'll see your 'Contemporary dance performance about gender' and raise with 'Anti-gay musical touring Malaysian universities' http://gu.com/p/3em7z

_____
I know, a bit off-topic and redditish, but it was serendipitously opened in the next tab
Wasn't that the Cypriot's own idea though - the EU didn't suggest that?
The problem is that it's a lot easier to misuse/abuse money than abuse, say, water or food.

For example, a nonnegligible number of poor people end up using the little money they make on drinking or gambling as soon as they possibly can, while staying just as poor as before afterward. You could say it's OK if it's money they earned themselves, but I think it makes sense for everyone to think twice about letting charities donate money directly when those in need end up misusing/abusing it.

Giving food/water/other necessities instead of money prevents this, while at the same time giving poor people a chance to worry about finding a job, etc. without having to constantly worry about where to find water, etc.
Thanks for speaking up against those in this thread who virtually blame this guy for the wrongdoing of others around him.
How does a poor person find a job when they don't have the money for basic necessities that include resources that help find and acquire a job?
I have a plush toy on my desk here that keeps my town from being hit by asteroids. It works fantastic, no asteroids have hit this town since I put it there.
If you're interested in loaning rather than giving Kiva might be a good choice for you. Basically they do micro loans directly to people that need it to scale small businesses. IE buy a second cow and sell the milk. They've been very successful. Here's a telling sentence from their wikipedia entry: "As of March 4, 2013, Kiva has distributed $408,326,900 in loans from 896,353 lenders. A total of 532,492 loans have been funded through Kiva. The average loan size is $402.64. Kiva's current repayment rate for all its partners is 98.98%."
Great to hear you're planning to do some Postgres benchmarks!

To improve fairness, you might want to consider using pgbouncer (setup to only offer simple session pooling) in between the Postgres db and any framework that doesn't have internal support for connection pooling.

E.g. I'd love to see how Flask performs using just the psycopg2 driver (i.e. raw db access, no ORM) and pgbouncer to handle the pooling.
You're saying that running a query across the internet to ec2 is 5 times faster than running it on dedicated hardware in the lab? I find that hard to believe.
So what exactly are these conferences for?

I was slightly supicious anyway - information about most tech is only a few clicks away these days so I'm not convinced they're a necessary part of an engineer's ongoing education. But now there are dance performances? And people get sent to these things on work time/money?
That's an excellent idea, have the military bring their own tanks from home and air-force pilots to own their own jets.

That will teach them to be more careful with the gear too!
The problem is many people won't use them even if they're free, or they think it's a conspiracy to give them HIV...

When I consider all the benefits of well-managed genetic engineering and population control at just the level we could implement right now (i.e. no sci-fi tech), I sometimes wish RISUG[0] was mandatory for all males that have gone through puberty, with 5-7 year followups to redo the treatment unless the male both wants to have a child, and passes the thresholds of various requirements (maturity, responsibility, financial security, whether they have or should have partners or not, good genetics, etc.) to be allowed to have a child. (Though if they want a child and only fail because their genes (or the genes of their chosen mother) suck, there are others who don't want a child but have good genes that can be used as donors, and initially there's still all the currently unwanted babies, and there will inevitably be people who illegally slip through or reverse the enforced treatment.)

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_inhibition_of_sperm_...
I'm judging that you are trying to say something in a sarcastic manner, but can you elaborate please? It did not connect.
Is this website written with PHP or what?
http://blog.railsberry.com/index.php ???
To be honest, expect more of this crap.

The only question now is who's next?

http://youtu.be/thSTpGnWEAs
It's a performance for all developers who will be in Krakow (where both conferences takes place) around that time. It's an additional thing for those who want to experience art and boraden their perspective. Read the post, it explains it all, thanks!
Supposing you could travel back in time and give your earlier self a book (or at least, a few sheets of paper) that described 'good programming' (e.g. using GOSUB, in this context) - would you do it?

Would you have been better off 'doing things right' from day one, versus experimenting and muddling through?
It does as little as possible to distort the free market.

In contrast, something like giving free food to developing countries is pretty damaging to the free market, because it will suppress local prices and drive local farmers out of business.
Foreign and Russian are a little different concepts.