skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unfortunately, many resources are finite; for example, there is a finite amount of land, and in many places, society has for quite some time been about extracting more value from the same resources, rather than being a case of the resources being there but with insufficient labour to exploit them.

Many people in urban environments cannot afford their own island of land to produce food on; they don't own the enough means of production to support themselves even if they supply the labour themselves, so they are obligated to work for someone who has the capital already (the 'gatekeepers') on whatever oppressive terms they offer to obtain the minimum needed to survive. As a result, the next generation of gatekeepers hold an even greater proportion of the wealth.

Economic problems arise when the gatekeepers no longer need everyone to supply everyone with everything they need and want - now those who aren't gatekeepers find that they cannot get a job, and they don't have the capital to create a job.

Some will try to 'gate jump' - e.g. take a revolutionary idea that is highly profitable, bootstrap it on a shoestring, and become a gatekeeper themselves. However, this is not a scalable model for the whole population, since it relies on luck and there is intense competition among potential gatejumpers and between gatejumpers and enterprises run by existing gatekeepers (who have the resources to crush gatejumpers if they become a threat).

Ultimately, I think the only solution will be some form of income redistribution scheme; perhaps it would work best if the government made it a condition of the income redistribution scheme that beneficiaries work on creating and discovering things, such as science, art, public interest software, civil engineering projects and so on (essentially creating a larger government sector that produces things that don't have a commercial model but benefit society at large, employing the surplus people that are not needed to produce what is needed commercially).
Being Eclipse's 16yo Coop Student Guinea Pig
I feel like I've lived some kind of sheltered life now, in that I didn't even know winning was a thing at hackathons until I read this article. I don't think I've ever been to a hackathon that had prizes and winners.

When I think of the term "hackathon", what comes to mind are events like the OpenBSD hackathons (http://www.openbsd.org/hackathons.html), the Wikimedia hackathons (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Amsterdam_Hackathon_2013), and SuperHappyDevHouse (http://superhappydevhouse.org). You can't win any of those, at least not in any kind of formal sense.

The use of the term "hackathon" here seems to mean something else, less of a dev-party and something more like, a time-limited, minimum-viable-product startup competition. Is that a recent thing?
Actually, doing science is moral, and so is farming. Both are helping you to live a better life, which is the essence of morality.

So I agree with you that the author is totally wrong, just for different reasons.
Tesla being fought in TX by dealers
Yes, that's a bit of a stretch and I say so as a physicist. But he is referred to as a "mathematical physicist" which is as close as possible to being a physicist if you are really a mathematician and your work has been used in physics.
If this is being presented as a security problem, know that this is a non-issue. This is intended behavior; Heroku config vars are considered secret. If this is just showing off that you can run multiple apps from a single database, then, yes, that too should have been clear.
What is the deadliest power source?
because it is cheating to the judges, competitors and to possible people that join up with my team and would put in hours for free. I am already out there with my company. The number of successful startups that come out of a hackathon is actually quite low I'd say.
Yeah those parallax effects are pretty good and fluid too :)
There are some services like "Captcha Brotherhood" were you get points for solving captchas of other users, which you then can use to let other users solve your captchas.
Try tracking the hackathon tag on Lanyrd and looking for hackathon groups on Meetup.com in your area :)
Management consultants.
The last "I" and "I" are swapped with CSS. Bots don't realize this, but humans do.
What if we have a product manager who's asking for a status report on every single open bug every meeting?
I just solved a bug in someone's CUDA agent based modelling library which caused a runtime error when compiling for a more recent CUDA compute architecture.
The actual bug was due to the more recent architecture enforcing pointer alignment, while the older implementations just ignored it.
My fixing of the bug, created other bugs (largely due to my lack of CUDA experience)and I eventually solved it by coincidence when applying my fixes from a reset across the whole code, rather than at a local level.

I may have made no progress towards the task in these 2 full days I spent working solving this issue, however I have greatly improved my CUDA programming knowledge and debugging technique, which I would have otherwise never done, so when I inevitably reach another bug It should (hopefully) be much quicker for me to solve.
Calorie restriction diets are not a viable method for combatting aging; they make for absolutely miserable patients.
Call for Help: I'm looking for recruiters
More yikes. This goes to my main concern that Blizzard might take issue with it, because people could confuse it for an official app.

At least it's free. :)
Five advanced Git merge techniques
At the end of the day somebody has to muck the horse stalls. (That somebody was me for a while)
Callbacks are imperative, promises are functional
What makes you think that? The author is the one claiming the result, which is that people who study science (which is amoral, not immoral) tend to be good people, is counterintuitive. If anyone, the author is the one in confusion.

If you thought he could've meant that people who aren't good could be amoral instead of being indecent, then you are most likely, although not absolutely wrong. Keep in mind amorality for a human is not well-defined, it is more often used to describe non-intelligent life or abstract entities. Society would consider an amoral person "immoral" in a casual sense of the word, because a person who is indifferent towards morality is per definition likely to commit immoral acts if there are no repercussions.
Enticing, To Say The Least
Work, being a core part of life, is meant to be interesting, engaging, and meaningful.

Actually it's meant to more or less enable us to fill our stomachs and to help to provide for our kids. "Work" started quite a while ago, millions of years before iPhones, nice cars, paid vacation and houses. We might go back to basics one day too. Maybe a solar storm, volcano explosion or asteroid might just wipe the last 100 or so years away.

Otherwise, why are we wasting our time on this planet?
Why is dog or an antelope?
Yeah, confirmation e-mails suck from a UX perspective. However, they don't gratuitously suck - they solve the problem they're trying to solve, and often users can tell why they're necessary. Extra form fields suck from a UX perspective and have the added problem of not actually solving the problem they're trying to solve.
> If you think psychology is ascientific, then you're living in the psychology of about a century ago.

On the contrary, psychology is today widely recognized as scientific in name only:

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/12/the-myth-o...

But beyond the many psychology scandals presently being discussed, it's important to say that descriptions, regardless of how detailed they are, don't constitute science. For science, one must risk a testable explanation, a theory. The absence of theories, testable and tested, and on which different psychologists can agree, is what separates psychology from mainstream science.

In the crafting of the new DSM-V (about to be published), psychologists added mental conditions, and removed conditions, based on -- evidence? -- no, on votes, and secret votes at that. This is not science.

The unscientific state of psychology has led the present director of the NIMH to take note of the gradual eclipsing of psychology by neuroscience:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=faulty-circ...

A quote: "In most areas of medicine, doctors have historically tried to glean something about the underlying cause of a patient’s illness before figuring out a treatment that addresses the source of the problem. When it came to mental or behavioral disorders in the past, however, no physical cause was detectable so the problem was long assumed by doctors to be solely “mental,” and psychological therapies followed suit.

Today scientific approaches based on modern biology, neuroscience and genomics are replacing nearly a century of purely psychological theories, yielding new approaches to the treatment of mental illnesses."

> Psychology has been incredibly rigorous since the 1920s, and by virtually any metric it's as hard a hard science as any other hard science.

Quite false. Few psychologists agree with each other on anything, and fewer still are willing to put forth a testable, falsifiable theory about the workings of the human mind. This is why spectacular frauds like Stapel and Hauser can play the field like a badly tuned violin -- few practitioners are qualified to recognize that it's not science.
Polyglot Programming with Python: Python/Scala Interop
It is so much better idea to use meta-programming to solve this problem – https://github.com/excilys/androidannotations/wiki/Injecting...
It shouldn't be possible to win a hackathon. Building things is fun, and the fun of one team is not worth more than the fun of another.
Well, to throw in a wildly out of context Einstein quote: "We cannot solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.".

What I'm trying to say: you cannot generate a set of test problems using the program you are trying to test, unless you know the program is correct, which is probably why you want to test it to begin with (unless you are just writing tests to prevent regression). On a side note: if you ever find yourself working on machine learning, you'll find that the same goes for rigorously separating your training set and benchmark/test set).

Formal verification of software is hard. It's a huge field of research. If you really want to prove your algorithm is correct (not your implementation of it!), you're probably better off going the mathematical or formal modeling route. If you want to test your implementation, maybe you don't need to test every single case. A set of carefully hand-crafted test cases might go a long way.
“Yo anons, we could use a little help in shutting down illegal slander and blackmail censorship project ‘spamhaus.org,’ which thinks it can dictate its views on what should and should not be on the Internet,”

Nobody is forced to use Spamhaus, right? They aren't dictating what is on the Internet, they are offering a list to filter what they think is junk and people can choose to use that or not.

Also, I am curious, did he ever care about Spamhaus before he started to get included in their blacklists?
I see where you're going, but I'd argue that the issues you've identified with labor mostly only apply in the first-world.

There's still an enormous amount of traditional "labor" to be done in the third-world, where just getting clean water is itself still an achievement.

The first-world is definitely heading directly towards the problems you've described.
A multi-purpose EDITOR variable
Podcast Interview with Github Co-Founder Chris Wanstrath
"Do you believe in science?"

What kind of question is that? Nature follows its laws whether we have an opinion about it or not. Science is just the study of these laws. The question itself makes no sense.
BioBlender: Blender for Biologists
The math is kind of fun, but the conclusions in this article rely on a rather irrationally 'rational' view of how people behave, as well as far too much zero-sum reasoning. Clearly, the respect you feel from your boss has no impact on your productivity, and thus he wishes to reduce your wages to just above the point where you'd quit?

Bosses are people too! If you ask any "boss" if they want the best for the people working for them, the vast majority will say that they do. A useful theory of how others make decisions needs to not completely discount non-"rational" factors like emotion, fairness, and morals.
Yeah, don't really get this, it's basically saying, if you have the username, password and hostname for a database, you can access it...
If everyone did work that was interesting, engaging, and meaningful, society couldn't function.

I've seen many, many people cite this as some kind of provable, immovable fact -- a way to shut off the mind towards that line of thinking.

I'm not so sure. I see no inherent reason why some people should need to suffer merely to stay alive, why some people, or perhaps many people, should live lives of futility and meaningless work.

Frankly, I'd like to think that human ingenuity can overcome even that. Slavery was considered normal until a few hundred years ago, why should crappy work be any different?
Please don't; the Netflix challenge was a a historically embarrassing privacy catastrophe.

http://33bits.org/2010/03/15/open-letter-to-netflix/
"income redistribution scheme"
Ones views on this tends to be religious, as I am certain your perspective could not be swayed by any logic, nor can mine.

Do you live in America like me? Redistribution schemes move power from producers to bureaucrats, who are notoriously bad with it. This has been tried repeatedly with the same results every time.

There are two kinds of people, people who happen, and people who things happen to. I choose to be the former.

We are not limited by finite resources, we are resources.
Since Knowledge Graph was introduced, there are now millions of queries that don't even show any ads at all. For example, I search for "Hawaii" on Google (just did it in an incognito window), and I get a Knowledge Graph card and zero ads. I do it on Bing and I get travel ads for Alaskaair.

Your anecdotal evidence is worth nothing, we know the number of ad clicks because Google reports them each quarter. And they are rising by double digits quarter after quarter. So many more people are thinking that an ad is the best answer. Surprise, huh?
Happy birthday, NetBSD! My tool of choice for my first ten years of Unix. While Linux was scrambling from kernel update to kernel update, NetBSD felt pro on whatever scrounged hunk o' silicon I had powered up at the time. Congratulations on two decades of excellence. Here's looking at a few more!
A unifying theory is not a requirement for something to be a science. Physics was a science before the standard model.
Addon providers (of which heroku postgres is) can change the the config var they set at any time. Simply copy-and-pasting creds from one app to another will leave the second app broken when those creds are changed.
And yet my mother does it for free, because she likes her horses and the stall is across the trail from her house.

Point being: for every "crappy job", there are people who legitimately are willing and able to do it for free, and already do.
"The site is now home to about 85 businesses, including the software firm Symantec, the insurance company eHealthInsurance, a patent law firm, a baby ultrasound center, an adoption service, a restaurant and a cafe."

Anybody else a little depressed that Google employees took precedent in this story, over an _ultrasound center_ housed on a site with chemicals that might cause birth defects?
https://kernel.org/

Be very afraid.
Disagree all you want, but that's definitely not nonsense.

The way the Internet has worked since day 1 is as a bunch of relatively independent groups deciding who they'll talk to and in what fashion.

If a bunch of people don't want to talk to your ISP because of who the ISP hosts, that seems pretty sensible to me. And if they have decided to trust Spamhaus to make those calls, that also seems reasonable.

Supposing you get your wish and Spamhaus disappears tomorrow. What's your proposed solution? With the kind of money that on-line crime like spamming and phishing makes, it's easy enough to find somewhere to buy protection from law enforcement. Or just buy laws.

Either we decide not to talk to the bad neighborhoods, or the globally connected nature of the Internet means that we all live in the worst neighborhood.
This is more FUD than anything else.

Languages like Ada and Modula-2, just to cite two examples from many, allow for safer coding while having similar performance.

The people that cite the performance impact of bound checking and other features, usually tend to ignore that they can be disabled if required for performance reasons, because it suits their arguments that no other language can achieve C like performance.

Or they like to forget that the industry has invested more in optimizing compilers for C than for other languages. So they end up discussing languages without regard for the implementations.
I knew that it was hard, but still really suck when you are rejected no one but three times.

Thanks anyway...

"Good luck, Bad luck, who knows ?" XP
Exactly how convinced are we that college students that report that they don't really "believe in science" are being honest?
I wrote this rails app that lets you look at the schemas of your other rails apps. Might be interesting to incorporate this into it.
Standups are like communism, great in theory, often horrible in practice.

Of all the standups I've participated in going back 5 years I'd say only one was any good. It was every other day, it was forcibly limited to 15 minutes or less, it was always on time, it was never allowed to go off on a tangent, it only had about 3 or 4 people in it, and it was actively pushed away from being a status meeting. This contrasts with every other standup I've been a part of which almost always cut into productivity, and worse. For a while there was a daily standup with 12+ members that often went for 45 minutes and sometimes went for an hour and a half.

The problem with a formalized methodology like standups (or agile in general) is that if you don't have very well defined and explicit reasons and goals and you don't make that a part of the system then people will just drift into doing what seems to make sense to them, which is status reports and aimless meetings.
What dynamic nature does C have that every other systems programming language in the world lacks?
That's not why.

Bosses aren't trying to fuck you over. If they're aligned with the company, they're trying to maximize A - B, where A is what you contribute, and B is what you cost.

For most of the industrial era, it's been considered easier to reduce B than to increase A. Why? Many reasons, but the fundamental one is that most of the work was concave, which is what OP describes when he has cost per unit approaching asymptote m, which is equivalent to performance approaching 1/m from below, with more learning.

He's focusing on concave, commodity work and he's right about that stuff. Machines are also taking over the commodity work, leaving only the convex for humans. See: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/gervais-macle...

With convex labor, the managerial assumption that A is at a maximum falls flat, because no one even knows what that "maximum" might be. With concave work, management could assume that A was near its maximum value and occasionally fire a slacker.

What this means is that, for convex work, A-maximizing is a worthier goal... but almost no one has figured out how to manage that kind of work. [ETA: a more cynical view is that someone else gets a bonus/credit for reducing B, but the worker himself gets all credit for improving A.]
PeerCDN - Leverage Your Users' Bandwidth using WebRTC
remember when HN was for people who had good jobs? because it was full of good people?
Problem is the majority of developers in the world are not elite, thus the security pain we have to endure nowadays.
> And regardless of whether he's right or not about Spamhaus, his credibility in my eyes has gone straight to absolute zero.

Wasn't that entirely the point of the article, to attack his character?

If he was some lawyer stiff, people wouldn't be reading this - they enjoy reading content-light articles that spin caricatures of charismatic individuals. Assange all over again!

It's hardly debatable whether he would have gotten media exposure like this if he didn't behave in such a manner; I think that overall this exposure will help his cause, not hurt it. Even if a majority discard STOPhaus claims immediately on the basis that their spokesman appears to be a nut, the minority dwarfs anything they would have reached otherwise.

tl;dr you only saw this message because it was raw, brutish, and insensitive.
She doesn't do it because she loves to muck stalls though, does she? She does it because it is part of owning horses.
> the only true science is mathematics

Not to hate, but I hate it went "purists" restrict a words definition to the point that it is useless. Math is the only science that has no use, ever, for lab coats or experiments or physical objects and benefits people only in the most indirect ways. Really, math is -IMHO- closer to philosophy. It is about developing logical and consistent models, but in math they are just easier to verify their consistency.
I see, I completely misinterpreted your comment. Apologies!
Ah, pointer alignment bugs...I remember this being a big thing when porting C code from the X86 to the Alpha.
>Why so many jobs are crappy

Because there is no labor movement.

Jobs were even crappier back in the day: arbitrary work times with no overtime (16 hours were not uncommon), child labour accepted, no holidays, fired for whatever reason, blacks and women worked effectively under different laws, so work safety measures, bizarre employer demands, etc.

In american a lot of those were fixed after long struggles by the workers and the (glorious) american labor movement.

Nowadays a lot of the unions are BS (and viewed as suspect from the left and "lazy" from the right), and one of the reasons is that they do not represent enough of the workers anymore (in some fields, there is zero participation even).

Those are now too apolitical, apathetic, and indoctrinated to "each one for himself" to join them and shake them up to function properly.
"The directors of the five top-grossing films of 2012 are all in their 40s or 50s" - What does this prove? Are they innovators?
"But there is another reason to keep innovators around longer: the time it takes between the birth of an idea and when its implications are broadly understood and acted upon. This education process is typically driven by the innovators themselves." - I don't fully agree with this. 'typically' is a broad word.
As I noted below, <b> and <i> are meant to be typographically-significant elements, so it's not just byte-saving. Google is using <b> and <i> correctly in that case (even if that's just a happy accident).
establish_connection will automatically parse a postgres URI for you, so you can just use:

ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection(ENV['DATABASE_URL'])

This also works for class-specific databases:

class Photo < ActiveRecord::Base
establish_connection(ENV['PHOTOS_DATABASE_URL'])
end
Very poorly argued points. There is no case made that innovators actually get better with age, nor indeed a decent definition of an innovator. Apparently, best-selling authors and directors are the best example of innovators that the author could come up with. Skip.
Yes, many work towards a more advanced society where we'd try to automate away unpleasant labor; and whatever residue of unpleasant jobs remain would be shared equally. (As opposed to bosses using tech to deskill and commoditize workers, as alluded to in the article.)
Attaching PDFs to emails with Prawn and Rails
It's possible to find good subreddits, to make a few 'multis' to read a few times a week.

Meta filter, twitter, something awful, LinkedIn will come up.