skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A large majority of people that are persistently 'homeless' in the US, by which I mean completely destitute and sleeping outside, have serious mental disease AND/OR are alcoholics, AND/OR are addicts. In fact, most became homeless due to one of these three reasons, rather than turning to alcohol or drugs to cope with their situation.

No amount of social justice can cure someone's schizophrenia. Some treatment is available to homeless people, but again the vast majority are not willing to participate (the drugs have very unpleasant effects, so this is unfortunate but you can empathize with someone not wanting to experience those side effects).

If someone becomes an alcoholic, loses a job because of it, becomes alienated from their family and social support network, and ends up deciding, under the influence of that addiction, that they prefer to drink at the expense of everything else, even housing, what can social justice do to help them?

There are ways to improve the situation. Decriminalization of drugs, more research into how to treat people with mental health issues and addictions, more resources smartly applied to treatment.

TLDR; People don't become homeless because of poverty or a regressive tax code, they become and stay destitute because of mental illness and addiction. Finding ways to intervene is important, but the existence of homeless people does not imply social injustice. There may be social injustice in the US, but this is not a symptom of it or proof of it.

References:

http://www.psychosocial.com/policy/dualdx1.html

http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/162/3/314.short

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1034/j.1600-0447.2001....

http://barrettfoundation.org/causes-of-homelessness/

Quoting from that last link:

> In addition, approximately half of people experiencing homelessness suffer from mental health issues. At a given point in time, 45 percent of homeless report indicators of mental health problems during the past year, and 57 percent report having had a mental health problem during their lifetime. About 25 percent of the homelessness population has serious mental illness, including such diagnoses as chronic depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorders, and severe personality disorders.

> Substance use is also prevalent among homeless populations. In a 1996 survey, 46 percent of the homeless respondents had an alcohol use problem during the past year, and 62 percent had an alcohol use problem at some point in their lifetime. Thirty-eight percent had a problem with drug use during the past year, and 58 percent had a drug use problem during their lifetime.
It doesn't for me. A lot of people were wrong about the Internet. It was a revolutionary technology, but for every revolutionary technology that has succeeded, there are plenty that fail.

If we look back 10 years from now, BitCoin could either be hugely successful or a mere afterthought. I'm not going to hold anyone accountable for being "right" or "wrong" about predicting its future. But I suppose this is why sensationalist journalism works.
This idea seems like a pretty normal way of seeing the world among PHP developers.

Please allow me to vent/rant -- I'm finishing up a project where your comment resonates loudly with my frustrations.

I'm a journeyman freelance programmer trying to move from doing WPress marketing sites more interesting programming/development problems, and I just got out of a 2 month Magento project (Magento is an MVC-patterned store software that is based on the Zend PHP framework): extending it to allow users to sign in and create their own product listings.

This was my first time building MVC/OOP modules in the context of a framework, and it took a little bit to connect the OOP principles that I've studied to the actual implementation within the larger framework... but the last month has been like "WOW... I can finally see in a pragmatic way why OOP and MVC are both such a powerful tools!"

Not to mention that, since we were working with extending the system, studying that stuff seemed like an essential learning process if we were going to create the system, even if I was only tasked with the "front-end" side of templates and visualizing the things from the database.

However, the senior guy in charge of creating the functionality to manage products for users thought I was from mars-- his application, which was wholly separate from the Magento install and used a separate database, was patterned around directories, with a set of configuration and include files shoved into the head.

He intend me to integrate his functions by shoving his (single, large) functions file into the head of (each of) my template files, and then calling functions to return arrays of information that I could then push into markup.

Apparently, this is "the right and normal" way to do this stuff in the PHP world, and my process of writing modules, extending existing objects, creating routes to view the data through the framework's template system was all stupidly overcomplex.

I learned a lot out of doing that, and the module that I'm building for another client (aMember/Zend) is both smooth and fun because all of the database interactions and template stuff is already in place and just works... and I can focus on the UI Javacript stuff...

but I feel really badly for the project owner of the Magento project, as I feel the codebase is... well mostly a bunch of functions in a single file and a bunch of single-form .php files that make SOAP calls and depreciated mysqli_ calls...

Now, I dunno-- I'm definitely the less experienced programmer, but if this is the norm in PHP programming (surely it can't be), I will be spending my summer trying to build enough projects in other languages that I can transition out of doing PHP.

Sorry for the rant, but it was cathartic for me :D
But people often need to parse URLs before they provide them to their computers (via click or keyboard), and I think that's the point.

The issue is that URLs are often the only piece of information users receive, and it's why we've conditioned users to expect meaningful URLs.

From our standpoint, it's not too hard to make URLs more meaningful, even with user-generated content. Plenty of sites incorporate the title of submitted content into the URLs, and it's even easier when creating content for oneself.

Would you prefer a link to http://www.example/about or a link to http://www.example.com/?id=123. Which are you able to understand before clicking it? Which are you more likely to click?
"No way. Have you looked at the whitepaper? The entire thing? Even completely ignoring the clever leveraging of cryptography, the sheer genius behind the methodology of the protocol makes me think that someone(s) extremely talented came up with it."

Amateurs can be talented. On the other hand, look at how the Bitcoin protocol is described and how its security is analyzed -- no formal definition of security properties, no formal threat model, analysis that is limited to a specific attack strategy, etc. The most talented person in the world cannot be expected to duplicate the decades of research on secure multiparty computation and digital cash single-handed.

For comparison, here is the work of a pair of talented (i.e. Turing award winning) cryptography researchers:

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/cis/pubs/shafi/1982-stoc.pdf

"And besides, Bitcoin obviously did something right, because it's the only decentralized digital currency to take off."

I think the vast majority of Bitcoin users know little about Bitcoin's security properties or what it means for Bitcoin to be "secure." The fact that a system is popular does not mean that the system is secure, even when the purpose of the system is to provide security. Caesar ciphers remain remarkably popular, despite the ease with which they can be cracked.

It is also worth pointing out the Bitcoin is pretty unique in not having a "bank." Most digital cash systems require that currency be issued by an authority of some kind, and seek only to decentralize transactions (i.e. allowing offline transactions). Being the only digital cash system without a bank that became popular is not as big of an achievement as you make it seem -- there was not much competition there to begin with.
It's quite possible that I just couldn't figure out the right way to do REST APIs in Meteor, before giving up and switching to Derby. I think I'm going to have to try it again soon.
It should save you even more than you describe, as you shouldn't need to over provision as much. The odds of two 95% percentile requests stalling your 1x dyno is pretty good. The odds of getting 5 such requests is much lower.
Tangent:

The FizzBuzz question should really be "write me 3 versions of FizzBuzz, explain why they're different, and under what conditions would you use each over the others."

The fact that the FizzBuzz issue is a matter of whether the candidate can write it at all - and that so many interviewers don't view a "nope" answer as a full-stop red flag - indicates a baffling state of industry affairs.
Quick question: Other alternatives to URLs? I'm not very informed in the subject.
Google's Android Has Hit A Wall, And Now It's Fading In The U.S.
from the article:
"This kind of leak is a dream come true for advanced corporate espionage or intelligence operations."

i disagree. this is banal stuff for "corporate espionage or intelligence". they have that and more for ages. no data that has a price is private.

what is interesting is that we could now have a decent open sourced BIOS implementation. ...Maybe if someone in china or other country with less software copyright starts the project we all can contribute?
I think that is another valuable thing to measure in terms of overall success and direction the fund is going, and I'd certainly like to. I was hoping this would help founders who are trying to raise Series A right now figure out where to focus first - but I agree taking a longer view would give a more complete picture. It just needs a bit more math and data, but I'm noodling on it.
It provided a lot of lines of code, and it was the main contributor one year IIRC. But most of that was Hyper-V related code, to make Linux work better as a virtual machine guest over Windows.
I made no claims about computer scientists. Keen argues that the assumptions made by mainstream economics are in fact terribly wrong.

He also suggests that people outside the field are making better contributions, but I haven't gotten to the part in the book where he argues that in detail.
AMI Firmware Source Code, Private Key Leaked
"How I explained REST to a beautiful cloud in the sky, while being sheltered by a tree born out of Mother Gaia's infinite love, yes, a cloud in the sky, no! actually it was about to rain, so the cloud wasn't exactly white and... well... never mind, just learn REST by yourself."
Inf-Ho-Graphic: Map of Area Codes In Which Ludacris Has "Hoes"
Anything which involves a company rather than an individual keeping a secret is a crock of shit as far as security goes.
I learned the same thing in school, but with an Alligator instead of Pac-Man =).
Understandable, but I would offer a counterpoint.

When it comes to "learning" frameworks, I don't think the highest level of abstraction is necessarily the best. Some are better able to cope with black-box behavior than others. For those who feel the need to understand their tools as they use them, I'm of the view that the Sinatras of the world are a better starting point.
I said that because it was the case with the first version of the benchmark.
Agree, that always bothers me, hand waving under the guise that it's too complicated to be understood. It may take some time but it can always at minimum be on a high level understood. If it can't then someone is lying or hiding something.

(For example I don't have a PHD in physics but a few years of reading and following up on linear algebra, and I can hold my own in a conversation on sting theory with with a PHD Physicist).
bubble, what bubble...
if I remember this podcast http://techzinglive.com/page/1285/225-tz-interview-gabriel-w... correctly (duck duck go founder), an nbc morning mention gained him something close to zero users.
The guy he was tweeting back and forth with said something to the effect of "If you guys actually knew us, you'd know we're friends and we're just joking," at the end of it.

We don't need to go back in time more than two weeks to realize the social shitshow that can be Twitter and how it can have an impact on your employment. Whether it was a joke all along or not, it was a stupid sentiment to troll with when speaking as even the slightest bit of a representative for Microsoft.
I can vouch for the fact, though, that internally the Windows team refers to it as "amd64".
He was evaluating the internet's impact on economics.
FASM[1] is quite good, particularly its macro system, and the Windows version includes a minimal IDE. FASM and MenuetOS[2] are both written entirely in FASM.

[1]: http://flatassembler.net/

[2]: http://menuetos.net/
So with the fax machine analogy, you're saying that not only did he have no idea what he was talking about with his predictions of the future, but he also couldn't even comprehend the present.

With relation to IT jobs, wow that is one hell of a stretch.
Less than ideal? Yes. Changeable at this stage? No. At some point we may have an alternate source of water but until this removing that reservoir will create a disaster.
"defer" is 50% of the reason I use Go. Open some resource, then defer close it the next line and move on. No more giant, nested try/finally blocks.
The author says the app developers have no way of knowing if he's using their app. Now having never developed an iPhone/Android app, just want to confirm if it is true. Isn't it that their servers would know that they are sending push notification to a phone after all?
I think a lot of people assume that cane sugar is healthier than HFCS although that may not be true. See: http://ideas.time.com/2012/12/27/what-you-need-to-know-about...

The reason the big soda brands use HFCS in the US is because it's cheaper (due to corn subsidies). The speciality sodas like Boylan's, etc. compete on quality, not price, so they are able to transfer that cost to the consumer. The consumer with more disposable income wants to justify the extra cost to themselves and peers. "Oh, yeah, this is 'Mexican Coke'. Sure it's more expensive but it has REAL sugar."

Would the average consumer in the midwest be willing to pay more for a 12-pak of Coke if it had real sugar? Maybe, maybe not.
It's mechanical, so neither.
Thanks for the writeup. It seems Heroku could implement easily a two-layer routing mesh to accomplish what you describe thought.
can't say for sure, but it looks like the parent comment is just sarcastic, not serious
Yes, but the sword cuts both ways. You wouldn't have been able to find these films either, so if the there's a DMCA takedown it ends up being a wash (for the vast majority). Sure you can have underground sharing sites, but that requires a much larger personal time commitment for an inferior selection. Worst case would be that MPAA uses the data and the site stops being useful so people stop submitting, so the damage it could cause to film sharing seems self-limiting. It seems a worthy experiment to me.
Blonde Takes It Anally - Free 3gp and mp4 porn videos for mobile
For all I know it's a stunt by the vending machine company to make people addicted. Free stuff for 1 week, then people have to start paying.

Actually Telenor in Norway recently sold a few hundred tablets for 1,- kr a piece 16 cents US, and this without a contract. First they said, no, no, no, it was a mistake in our computer system, but they ended up having to sell them anyway because they would have such a hard time proving that every one of the customers knew well and right that there must be a mistake.

Anyway special case scenarios would never be covered by your server saying 200 OK.

However, day to day scenarios would. If your server gives people access to a file, and the user has no reason to believe the server is making a mistake. Then the 200 OK holds.

It's like walking into an unlocked building. Many buildings are supposed to be unlocked and people walk in and out as they please. If you put up a big sign saying public library, then you can't go to the police and say someone broke in when you made no attempt to hinder them, then 200 OK holds.

The server is giving the file away. Yes, I asked for it. But unless it's a very limited special case where I seriously went out of my way to trick the server (like a scam artist would in real life), then you can't put a little note under the doormat saying thief.
She's not saying they're evil! She's just presenting a data point, and then some further advice on screening once you get a first meeting. The people arguing about specific entries on the list are missing the point.
this is the internet right?
http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/04/linux-kernel-in-2011...
Same here. We were struggling to fit 2 unicorn workers on a 1x dyno but can easily get 4 on a 2x. We're paying the same amount for twice the concurrency. The 2x dynos with unicorn have pretty much solved the queuing issues for us.
what do you call 1 queue and 2 coffee machines?
Ah. From that description it sounds like there's not a real difference in what widgets allow apps to do, but there is in how easy it is to add and utilize widgets (with Windows being at one extreme, where all or most app icons are widgets)?

Do you think that's an accurate assessment?
I think your sarcasmometer needs calibration; it's clearly not blinking lights when it should.

(I really didn't think of this, but when googling up, there actually seems to be an Android application called Sarcasm-O-Meter...)
The divide in wealth is surely something that will continue in America. I think in less than 15 years, big cities will have at least Hong Kong's wealth disparity. Put simply, I just can't think of the middle class jobs of the future. Even the labor laws in Italy are becoming more lenient in face of a down economy.

I think that companies like Exec, Lyft and TaskRabbit provide a window into what lower class jobs are in the future.
Ok, it's not tamper-proof, but if I'm pretty sure that my friend that mailed me a amazon.com link is not attempting a cheap phishing attack, I can recognize the product directly from the email body. I would call this human friendly, IMHO.
Good work. Am sure you will get better. All the best.
Many of those are only known by Facebook if you explicitly fill out the information - and while I hate to be cynical, if folks who use Facebook at this point in time don't realize that this data is collected then shame on them.

Facebook is consistently under a giant lens and receives critiques with every step it takes. Instead of actually taking some rational side to the argument, Om simply scaremongers.
Bitcoin is about economics and technology.

Technologically, it's pretty amazing. People who try to attack it on technological grounds are probably wrong.

Economically, it's a different story, and it's about the economics that economists are most concerned and most informed.
taude thinks similarly to how I do. Live Tiles feel like a part of the ecosystem and there's not a widget available for every app I wish there was on Android. Then you have to factor in that there's just not that much room on the Android home screen, and widgets come in a variety of odd shapes and sizes.

Live Tiles are consistent, with only three square (rectangular) sizes to pick from. The fluid scrolling through them (rather than page by page) makes it feel more spacious. I have an entire home page dedicated to Facebook, for example, because the Facebook widget that shows me updates (and only one update at a time) takes up fully half the screen. The weather widget I use takes an entire line of icons, and the calendar widget takes up two columns by three rows. It's like playing a jigsaw puzzle trying to arrange a useful "live" home screen. Live Tiles are also visually consistent, which Android widgets are not (my Android home screen looks hideous).

A Live Tile is a app shortcut that also acts as a widget by displaying useful information. An Android widget is a widget that can also link to the application. That tiny difference is a huge gap in comparison.
Most places around the globe have coke with sugar. Its purely a cost conscious decision on coke's part
Really hoping for Google Fiber here in Austin
You're relying on Crunchbase data? It appears (now I could be wrong) that even the Crunchbase data on your own company is wrong. Crunchbase shows referly raised $2m. Is that correct? If the Crunchbase data on your own company is wrong, how can you possibly rely on that data to evaluate other VCs/companies?
http://code.google.com/p/ta2as/ ... ?
Isn't this what analytic packages are for? The app receiving the push message on your phone could anonymously provide analytics back to the server and with that knowledge alone, they know you are using it. Also additional analytics can be provided to see if you actually open the app.
Two RECAP Grants Awarded in Memory of Aaron Swartz
First iPad Mini Clone Hits Market: Ramos X10
I'm very happy that there are several active open source projects to choose from. I get a similar impression of Meteor vs. Derby as I get from Rails vs. Django.

(To me, their difference is about productivity vs. flexibility, although IMHO Rails eventually became just as flexible and "won". So it's interesting to see if Meteor achieves the same.)
Fair. Most of these movements are starting out in the urban areas but they do move towards the rural ones since it is perceived to be more "cool."

It's actually healthier to do neither of them since they're both pretty terrible for you. But if I ever crave a nice Coke on a hot summer day the one with sugar, out of a glass bottle, feels amazing. Maybe that's all nostalgia though.
taude already explained it but I will add my two cents. With widgets the look depends on the developer, which I found annoying when I had an android since I had to go through several screens just because some widgets where really big.

Live tiles are "free", they are the same icon that you would use to start the app and the look and feel is more uniform and rearrange between them in a more convenient way.

Also you can pin a lot of app specific items. For instance, from the people hub I can pin a tile of the whole app and/or pin specific people, and when you do that the tile itself seems like a different app. In my wife's tile I can see whatever she posted on Facebook or twitter, and also it serves as a shortcut to publish something on the wall, or to call or text her, it's just very convenient!
The Strange Case of the Super Mario Bros. Movie
My blog has been mentioned once (in 2004) on a german national news show (RTL Aktuell).

I got ~500 uniques more that day. I guess in 2004 german TV audience wasn't too much into internet ;)
Yeah, a Live Tile is a widget, but it's a well integrated widget. It's an application shortcut that displays information while still looking like an application shortcut. Widgets are completely separate, visually. Windows Live Tiles don't need to be specifically added, if you add an app shortcut to your start screen it's automatically also a widget that looks visually consistent with the rest of the OS.

Your assessment is not too far off. Live Tiles is a more elegant way of handling widgets.
I tried to order in january 2012 and they said back then that they replaced the free physical books with free CDs. Now it says:

Note: We are no longer offering the Intel® 64 and IA-32 Architectures Software Developer’s Manuals on CD-ROM. Hardcopy versions of the manual are available for purchase via a print-on-demand fulfillment model through a third-party vendor, Lulu (please reference 1 and 2 below): http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/IntelSDM.
I don't think the problem here was anonymity. As the links were easily accessible the email addresses were being scraped and there was a phishing attack being carried out (which Coinbase blogged about yesterday).