skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"It implies that the requirement to get prenatal care in order to receive the box played a role."

This is the hack of the box that is not being understood here on HN. The hack isn't that its a box or that cellulose is the ideal crib material, the hack is this is the nearly ideal carrot/stick to get moms to prenatal care. There are zillions of other ways to get moms to prenatal care across the whole spectrum of human experience ranging from intensive education, shoved at army bayonet point, bureaucracy and paperwork, tax codes, legal enforcement by goons with guns, who knows what else.

The true hack, the reason this is on HACKER news, is this is an amazing intersection of minimal overall total system cost and its incredibly polite and pleasant and basically civilized.

Its like all the skinner box psychological manipulation brilliance of Zynga, but applied to lowering infant mortality rates at the absolute minimum possible cost.

Frankly I'm not surprised, as a cultural thing, Scandinavian types might not have all the answers to everything, but when they do have an answer, its inevitably always the most elegant and efficient. Health care, architecture... baby boxes... no great surprise once again they rocked it.
A two-part video on how to create a simple java event calendar.
How Windows Red can fix Windows 8: The right strategy for Microsoft
Awesome! can't wait to work on this!
Well, it is useful if you want to work for or hire HN readers. :)
> It's really not a bad position to be in. You have a job after all.

This! When we get into positions like the OP we really should remember this, as it's not easy for every developer to find new work straight away. We're not all head-hunted etc. and we don't all live in SV.

So yeah, take your time to line up something else and only when you have the job offer should you jump ship.
I wish that the author had actually included a benchmark with nice pretty graphs. The list of example hardware is nice, but doesn't tell me nearly as much as a couple of benchmarks would. Blanket statements such as "EC2's price-to-performance ratio is horrible" don't really do much to convince me. Yeah, the author is probably correct. But to what extent is he correct?
This is a terrible idea. There is this whole thing called familiarity, and most people will interpret this signs negatively because they won't stop to read the small text.

I hope this doesn't spread.
Link to the Ideapaint website: http://www.ideapaint.com/
The overhead of the GIL is probably insignificant for a single threaded python program, in part because the GIL is very coarse grained. Go uses (afaik) finer grained synchronization that therefore has more overhead. Also since python is slower anyway the relative cost of locking is much smaller than in the faster Go.
hmm it does feel stupid to ground oneself to absoluteness when everything around is relative.
Self-Organizing Organizations (For Real) - InfoQ
All you’ve ever wanted to know about self-organized companies, without daring actually run one.
I don't know why, but reading those signs made me feel all warm and fuzzy. :)
Leadership: Power vs Influence
There are two forms or dimensions of leadership. One is power, the other, influence. Often we confuse the two. After all, those who have power often have influence, and those who have influence have a certain kind of power. In fact, however, the two are quite different, even opposites.
We can see this by a simple thought-experiment.

Imagine you have total power, and then you decide to share it with nine others. You now have one-tenth of the power with which you began. Imagine, by contrast, that you have a certain measure of influence, and now you share it with nine others. How much do you have left? Not less. In fact, more. Initially there was only one of you; now there are ten. Your influence has spread.

Power operates by division, influence by multiplication. With power, the more we share, the less we have. With influence, the more we share, the more we have.

To paraphrase Shakespeare, “The influence we have lives after us; the power is oft interred with our bones.”

People still contend for power. If only we would realize how narrow its limits are. It is one thing to force people to behave in a certain way; quite another to teach them to see the world differently so that, of their own accord, they act in a new way.

The use of power diminishes others; the exercise of influence enlarges them.

-Excerpts from http://www.chiefrabbi.org/2013/06/03/covenant-conversation-korach-power-vs-influence/
Obama Plans To Tackle Patent Trolls, Limit Abusive Patent Filing
On the subject of historical sites... We did a tour of an ancient monument on Orkney last week only to discover that thugs had broken in and scrawled graffiti over the inside of a 5,000 year old building:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maeshowe

:-)
It's the UK. It's a tongue-in-cheek play on the familiarity.

Considering how popular the campaign has been online, I'd say it's an outstanding idea.
You should definitely write ugly code. People pay me and people like me good money to come in and clean up your mess when adding features becomes an endless exercise in breaking things in unexpected ways for the whole team and productivity plummets.

Relevant blogpost: http://swizec.com/blog/my-very-own-daily-wtf/swizec/5829

Relevant website: http://thedailywtf.com/
Eleven-Year-Old Boy Gains Place At Hebron University
I actually feel this is a valid concern, but only when the person is not referred to as a 'cofounder'. Cofounders should be in at the ground floor together. It sounds like he should be employee #1 or an independent contractor if you don't trust or know him well enough to share everything.

So, assuming we're actually talking about employee #1, I think having some measures in place is a smart idea. Just like a prenuptial agreement before marriage. Sure, you may be 'in love' with this person now, but people change, things can get nasty, and it's good to have thought ahead instead of being completely blinded by love/trust.

I know most people are saying 'the codebase is worth nothing', but depending on the project this may not be the case. We all like to look at successful software products and say "Meh, I could clone that in a weekend, it's not about the code", but in reality there are probably hundreds of edge cases that we haven't thought about until we're actually building it ourselves. As well as that, polish takes time. UI/UX polish, refactoring code, simplifying how components interact with each other, iterating, etc.

If somebody wants to go compete with you by building the product themselves, then wish them luck, because they have no idea how many intricacies there are in most software products, and by the time (months or years in the future) that they figure them all out, you'll already be way ahead.

But if they can just copy and paste a folder and be in the exact same starting position as you, then the only advantages you have are non-technical - which you should of course also have, but don't underestimate the value of a good technical advantage as well.
This is a really cool idea. I like how it plays on the idea of NT properties being boring fusty places where you go for rubbish school trips. I don't know if it's a function of age but I'm actually quite excited about visiting a National Trust property on the weekend if the weather stays nice. I encourage others to do the same and support a really worthwhile charity.
Yes, with a bit of glue code, you can have 'cell magics' to run code in another language. This notebook has examples with R code:

http://nbviewer.ipython.org/urls/raw.github.com/ipython/ipyt...

There are extensions for Cython, Octave and C too. And there's a generic mechanism for scripting languages (%%script), but that only captures stdout, rather than moving objects between different languages.
I used to follow Falkvinge on Twitter but nonsense like this is why I stopped.

It's one thing to be in favor of personal liberty (which I am) and in sensible economic practices.

It's another to say that this toy that has yet to move beyond a small percentage of even techie libertarians is going to bring down the biggest country in the history of the world.

It's just idiotic.
Well executed trollbait, you have to give credit to that.
And the universe is losing stars on the rate of 30 supernovas per second. Should we create a action group for star preservation?

A big number means nothing until putted in context.

4 billion per day gives a trillion and a half per year. Also known as half the us health spending for the same year. Or 10% US GDP.

While this may be troubling in other situations - in the current situation due to inflation the us will surely pay less than the amount borrowed in real terms. So this works to reduce the debt if measured in "goods and services" metric. And if US gets in deflation spiral the debt will be the least of the worries. While the interest on the debt is lower than the Fed target inflation rate there is nothing to worry about.
The crazy part is that so far at the Amazon sales events I've attended the AWS staff frequently repeated the recommendation that you buy dedicated iron for your 24x7 workload and use EC2 for bursty jobs, usually pushing VPC as the way to tie everything together.
Mobile Prototyping for Designers with Xcode Storyboards
I agree. But with an annoying wording correction: no one needs violent protection. People claim the need to be protected from some other people's actions via brutal means. I can also claim that I need some protection against a smile on your face. If I'm powerful and crazy enough I can even get a law passed "against cultural harassment" using which I may drag you to court and maybe prison.

If a pharmaceutical guy cannot figure out how to make a profitable business without violent protection, it's not mine or your problem. If we cannot figure out how to make efficient drugs peacefully without inventing "patents" and "licenses" (that basically allow bullying others), then it's our personal problem.
As soon as I saw the large "KEEP GRASS" text I would have immediately interpreted it as "keep off the grass", I wouldn't have read the two smaller words in between.

Same with "KEEP MOBILE PHONE".
They will only pay you to fix their code after they've released their product and are selling it for a profit.
Because we like competitive markets.
I used one for the first time last week. I was on major computer vendor's site looking for a new laptop battery. I had some questions about the differences between different batteries they offered and delivery timing... I tried Googling the answer and a lot of people had the same question, but no answer. A "live chat" box appeared, I clicked it, and the answers were quick, clear, and exactly what I wanted to know. I was pleasantly surprised.
> the code they wrote for the sake of beauty is crap.

From my understanding, this is the crux of the article. The problem with this is the misunderstanding of why people employ patterns in programming. It's not for the sake of beauty, but because of sound architectural principles.

Maybe that's how he interprets beauty, but then using the word beauty diminishes why the code was written the way it was written. That beauty is subjective.

The reality is good code and good practices have real measurable value that mere "beauty" does not.
How to Trick OO Programmers into Loving Functional Programming
It went down for me around 10pm BST last night. I assumed I had hit a data limit or something. This morning I checked their website, their twitter feeds, google news and found nothing.

So i phoned them at exactly 8am this morning. I was on hold for 47 minutes. Turns out its not just me.

Extraordinarily disgraceful communication with customers about this. They should be completely ashamed that they had a 12 hour outage they refused to publicly acknowledge. I can forgive the outage but the outrage of their poor communication is sad
Minimize use of CxO titles at early company stages
Golang heap corruption during garbage collection
I've never had major surgery so perhaps it's different for that, but I've found (through periods of no or crappy insurance) that doctors visits are significantly cheaper when you say you're paying in cash.
Funny, but I don't want bright signs all over the place. If I go to see some place, I want to see the place, not some smart aleck's stupid bright signs all over.
I also live in Austria.

Of course there is no official way to hold slaves in Austria. However stories of foreign diplomats that hold "household staff" under slave like condition surface with saddening regularity.

Very often they are stripped of their passports in a country where they don't speak the language, so their perceived options are very limited.

Being a UN seat with a lot of diplomats certainly aggravates this problem, as do the restrictive immigration laws, that do little to protect people that want to escape from such circumstances.

Also in the case of the actress, her perceived options might have been very limited, while in practice the "only" thing she would have to fear after defecting would be assassins sent after her. Scary enough.

So I also think the question shows a limited view of the world, but is not offensive enough to accuse someone of being brain damaged.
FEMEN supports Istanbul protests (VIDEO, 1 min, nudity)
If you could store the resulting drawing into svg or something, it would be great for brainstorming. Still waiting for a company to produce it.
Gridlock generally occurs when one of the two parties is opposed to a bill, but here the President is following Republican initiatives - in the Senate, John Cornyn's 'Patent Abuse Reduction Act', and in the House, Jason Chaffetz's 'Saving High-Tech Innovators from Egregious Legal Disputes (SHIELD) Act'.

Since this issue seems to have some bipartisan support behind it, perhaps something will actually get done.
Actually, I find that it's usually when the ugly code starts to cost them more. Basically, it's a car without brakes. It will get you where you are going, but it would have cost less all together if you'd installed working breaks from the beginning.
Original source: http://theclickdesign.com/projects/national-trust-natures-pl...
"I never actually got around to learning -- or even thinking about!-- what exactly the GIL is"

David Beazley does a good job on explaining the GIL. There are multiple videos of his GIL talks on YouTube. This one, for instance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Obt-vMVdM8s

He has a page about this at http://www.dabeaz.com/GIL/
The problem is training your kids to only draw on those walls :)

... or coat every wall, furniture and surface in the house.
To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if there was any preference to the platform. The marketshare of iOS is 25% and Android is 38%[1]. In that 25% almost all iOS users have a consistent screen size, DPI and even OS version. Any changes (think of Retina display in iOS 4), the OS handles transparently. The fragmentation of Android makes it a lot more work to support. Additionally, there's only one store; The App Store. Android has Google Play, Amazon's Store and possibly a dozen more.

iOS in my opinion has much richer tools (Xcode, Instruments, Simulator) to develop with too. I should point out as an iOS developer, I don't exactly have extensive knowledge of Android. If there are rich tools to deal with fragmentation in a seamless way, please let me know. I'd be interested to see how it stacks up to developing for iOS.

I can only speak anecdotally about iOS vs Android but I'm preparing to launch a startup this summer, we're going to have an iOS app but not an Android app until later this year. The primary reason would be we're extremely limited for time and money and the last thing we need is testing the app on 50 different phones just to find the UI doesn't fit on some of them and the performance is sub-par on some. What a pain. Our testing is conducted entirely on our personal iPhones (2x iPhone 5, 1x iPhone 4) along with the simulator and that works out as completely sufficient. The experience we get in the palm of our hands is guaranteed to be almost identical to potentially millions of users.

I can see why there would possibly be a preference. It's a dream to develop for this platform.

[1] http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww-monthly-201205-20130...
It is only me who noticed that average level of intelligence of participants is quickly approaching that one of /b/?)
If the president has taken such a dim view of patent-holding firms, maybe he should focus on the PTO first who is giving out incorrect patents left and right. Only one in ten patents, or 12% to be exact[1], are given out in compliance with patent law.

Imagine if a bank teller had a 88% error rate when giving out loans, thus handing out large sums of money to people who can't repay it. No bank in history would allow such personal to still be employed, or they would go out of businesses thanks to competition in the market. The PTO do not have any competition, so instead we are left dealing with the after effect with 9/10 patents being incorrectly issued for fully 20 years periods. Patent trolls and patent-holding firms would likely not exist, or would at least have extremely smaller effect on the market if PTO actually did their job correctly.

[1]In an effort to assert the quality of patent, one can look at the result from reexaminations. Like with code, if it is not tested, its quality is indeterminable. The PTO publish yearly a report for ex parte reexaminations, and during the latest period of 2011/09/30 -> 2012/09/30, the reexamination certificates only gave 12% of all examined patents a pass with all claims intact. This is averaged across all technical fields, as PTO do not have numbers for specific markets. I would guess that software patents will have slightly higher number of faulty patents (~95% of incorrect patents?), but statistics over the IT industry patents doesn't seem to exist.
Chocolatey official public feed now has 1,000 stable packages - Google Groups
>> ... or coat every wall, furniture and surface in the house.

... and never take them to anybody else's house.
Usually it's when they get their first non-seed round of investment and realise their product doesn't let them grow as fast as they'd like.

Products growing through sales can go without proper cleanup for decades. Friends have told me stories of single SQL queries taking upwards of 15 minutes to run (and then being rewritten in SQL+PHP that does the same in 20 seconds)
Reuters: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/08/us-usa-debt-bondho... "It has dire implications for the economy at a time when the macro data is softening," said Ben Westmore, a commodities economist at National Australia Bank

CNBC: http://www.cnbc.com/id/100388142 "The minute we default, there would be a complete collapse in the bond market," said Peter Schiff, chief executive officer of Euro Pacific Capital and a critic of U.S. government spending habits. That would leave the U.S. struggling to refinance more than $4.6 trillion that come due within two years, including $3 trillion of Treasurys due to mature in 2013.

The Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/01/h/267205... This story has three possible endings. Either Congress lifts the debt ceiling, and we all live happily ever after, at least until the upcoming battle over the continuing resolutions; or Congress doesn't, and we only get a massive dose of austerity; or Congress doesn't, we get a massive dose of austerity, and then we default, with interest rates shooting up and the financial system melting down. This shouldn't be a difficult choose-your-own-fiscal-adventure.

Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/sites/igorgreenwald/2013/01/09/why-the... Welcome to the permanent crisis. It’s the only way our increasingly dysfunctional government can get things done.
In my experience, "good" code and "pretty" code are the same thing - and similarly for "bad" and "ugly".
Of course, when I say "pretty", I mean well laid-out, properly documented, non-spaghetti code. I've spent far too much of my time tearing out thousands of lines of "bad" code that wasn't written in a way to allow for easy changes.
When I read it I thought they were building a customized version of Google TV, which was strange because I don't remember Google announcing that they've open-sourced Google TV (btw, is Google even allowed to do that?)
Actually, the trend is away from using 2to3 - it's now seen as preferable (and quite possible) to have one codebase which works on both 2 and 3. That's the route Django went for, and what Flask is doing. Numpy also switched from using 2to3 to supporting both from a common codebase.
Short Seller Seeks Valley 'Pretenders' (WSJ w/ Google redirect for paywall)
To use your analogy, is it better to have a car with no brakes now, or to save up for another year to buy a car with brakes? The problem with the analogy is that it's _obvious_ that you should save up another year because of the danger.

But in startup-world, it's not obvious at all. To really abuse your analogy, if you're being chased by wild hungry bears, you don't care whether the car has brakes.
True but only if it's the first sign you come across. If I'd read any of the other signs beforehand I'd have laughed and made a special effort to inspect the 'reserved' sign.
Somebody please pack this all together and sell it for $50. This is how Apple do business. Sell hardware and software together.

It's a very cool project for the technically savvy, but if you sell it to consumers, you'd have to provide support, something that could be time consuming. Or make it foolproof (Apple's strength).

I have a Raspbmc setup, and I get a fair amount of interest from visitors who are impressed, and want their own cheap media centers. I dissuade them, unless I am sure they can troubleshoot computer issues, SSH/SFTP, image an SD card, and know basic SQL.
Great! I'm about to start on a freelance project writing web stuff for set-top boxes, nice to see what's out there in the open source world. Thanks for posting. :)
Pepsi Vending Machine Trades Cans For Facebook Likes
This all sounds great, but I've worked in places where this has been the philosophy.

Unless you have somebody in charge who understands the importance of code quality (and why a bad codebase can be a ticking time bomb) you will find it very difficult to budget time/money for the removal of technical debt.

You will often meet the attitude of "well it works now, why waste time rewriting it?" or "sure, do that. But let's clear this milestone first", "oh, priorities have changed we need to add this new feature first".

This usually gets externalized to developers who end up working excess hours firefighting a horrific codebase or implementing a bunch of features twice, once in the clean codebase and once in the dirty one.

I've had times where I worked 8 hours at work and then came home and worked another 6 getting the new codebase in sync to a point where it could be replaced.

And when people start loosing money because shit is falling apart due to a tangled, buggy codebase without proper tests guess who's ass is on the line?
Impress.js: Beyond the Presentation Challenge (July 1 Deadline)
Clear-coat is an awesome idea! I remember seeing this a while back, but only white was available. My kids are going to love this.
That's one way to look at it. Another is when this app started 3.5 years ago, Rails & the app had a drastically different performance profile and Amazon didn't have super-over-subscribed hardware. Not that it matters much, but there's nothing convenient about having to engineer around EC2. And doubling your capacity or constantly upgrading instance sizes is not cheap, nor a scalable solution in any practical sense.

Pick your language though. With terrible forking performance, any process-based execution environment is going to have similar issues. And I found running a servlet container on anything smaller than an m1.large to be an utter waste. 1.7 GB RAM isn't enough for many JVM-based apps and threading could easily overwhelm the system. Anything less than high I/O capacity just can't keep up.
Warmly Walkthrough