skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem with your thought experiment is that you don't help poor people by throwing money at them. (See the article referenced below). You help them by creating institutions which help children develop important cognitive skills and avoid making poor choices in the first place. Education, adequate housing, policing, parenting skills, etc....

If you grow up in an environment where getting good grades is actively discouraged by your peer group, your parents have poor/counterproductive parenting skills, you consequently have low cognitive abilities, and you have every incentive to drop out and sell drugs, then it's possibly too late, and no amount of cash in your pocket is going to help you. But if you have good parents, grow up in an environment that values education and that's safe enough and free enough of distractions so that you can learn, then you'll likely be in your category #2 above. Small advantages that begin at infancy accrue and snowball over a lifetime, and that's one reason why middle/upper class kids _generally_ tend to grow up to be middle/upper class adults.

From
http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/970417/mayer.shtml --

"Increasing parental income not enough, according to study Increasing parental income alone is not enough to break the cycle of poverty, according to a new study by Susan Mayer, Associate Professor in the Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies.

Even if their incomes increase, parents who have experienced persistent periods of poverty often have such problems as chronic illness and low cognitive skills that make it difficult for them to help their children escape poverty, Mayer reports in her new book, What Money Can't Buy: Family Income and Children's Life Chances.
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The study shows that non-monetary factors play a bigger role than previously thought in determining how children are able to overcome disadvantage, Mayer explained. "Parent-child interactions appear to be important for children's success, but the study shows little evidence that a parent's income has a large influence on parenting practices.""

So in answer to your question, what would I do to help the poor, I'd say it'd have nothing to do with spending my money and everything to do with spending my time, say, tutoring and hopefully inspiring a child.
I understand ratios. Thanks for your help. I believe they are focusing in the inequality as in average income. Meaning $ figures increased or decreased within those two groups. They are still the 90% and 10% groups so the rich got richer and poor got poorer.
It tells me what if what's my hypothesis?

I really dislike when people use the word "smart" or "intelligent" in these situations, because it makes it sound like "intelligence" is innate, like a genetic trait. Even people's IQ scores are not genetically determined, and an even more amorphous trait like "ability to amass monetary wealth" probably has a lot more to do with skills you acquire during your upbringing than with genetics.

So if you want to say that rich people are better at gathering wealth, sure. That does not imply that the poor people, if they had been swapped at birth, could have acquired the same skills from the same situation.
Cocoaheads Talk on Atlas & Cappuccino
To mail it himself would take some long-term planning. He'd have to book off a time when he knows he'll have the bill and the address with him, not put this off until tomorrow, locate and go to a post office/convenience store to buy stamps and an envelope, get the money in his account, and then keep it there for five or six business days until he's sure that it's been cashed.

If you're living paycheque-to-paycheque, this is more difficult than you would think - especially the part about having the fifty bucks sitting in his account for five days without touching it.
Then maybe you should clarify your original comment?
Thanks! But this is just too tantalizing:

Editor’s Note: As this article went to press, V. I. Arnol′d submitted an update on the interview, based on subsequent correspondence and events. It was received too late to be included in the article.

Will we ever know what the updated interview would have been? (Maybe I should email Arnol'd to find out. :-)
Anatomy of a JavaScript Bookmarklet
In theory, if the feature provided by the library is very important (apparently it is important enough for C# implementors to build it in the language), you can expect that the library will eventually becomes standard or quasi-standard. For any language, its programmer is expected to learn not only the language features but also standard libraries, so eventually the difference of "knowing" part will be leveled out.

In practice, there are two factors that work in opposite directions, and which factor you're looking at changes pros and cons of language feature vs. library discussion.

* Time difference - for language features you have to wait until implementors implement them. For libraries you can start immediately. That gives you time advantage, sometimes for as much as years.

* Pressure difference - to make it standard language features there are lots of pressures to make it right, and effort is taken accordingly. Similar amount of effort is needed to make a library feature into standard position. But for those who wrote that library feature in the first place, usually their need is fulfilled easily, so there may not be enough incentives for them to push the feature into standard.

I feel the time advantage the 'library' approach gives me is crucial, so I prefer flexible languages (specifically I use Scheme). But in this side I do see the effect of the latter---there are tons of libraries, each of which is "good enough" for a specific circumstance but a bit short to be truly general, reliable solution.
I cooked up something for YQL so you can try it in the YQL console: http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/console/?q=select%20*%20from%...

Use either documentContent or documentURL to specify what you want to use. I quite enjoyed trying War and Peace (from Gutenberg) although the whole book is a bit big for a single request.

Also this my personal API key. So please don't be jerks with it. Enjoy!

Disclaimer: I work for Y!
It's not quite that simple. Don't forget the third dimension.

Sometimes you can get around it by leaning the box at a vertical angle, thus reducing the length that actually needs to get around the corner.
Most of these points are highly debatable. I don't have time for all of them, but taking a couple...

Re: #3 -- I assume you'd prefer the gold standard. Most (non-Austrian) economists believe that the gold standard actually exacerbated the great depression. I simply would recommend readers read the entire wikipedia article including the section on disadvantages. Or read this:

http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2005/12/the_gold_standa....

Re: #6 -- your claim that lax crime policies were primarily responsible for the rise in crime. Evidence is actually that it was mostly demographics -- a rise in crime prone young men -- combined with the rise of drugs like cocaine, crack, etc... And there's little evidence that "tougher" and longer sentences do any good.

Re: #8 -- Democracy promotion abroad isn't necessarily a progressive idea. After all, our recent experiment in democracy promotion in Iraq is the brainchild of neoconservatives.
This is true, except the actual number is a lot closer to 3 than 30.
Learning to think in C++ is much closer to learning to think in Java

This is where I stopped reading. He mentioned "modern C++" many times, which actually should mean that C++ moved away from rigid pseudo-OO GoF-inspired structures, Java-style.

Java itself is a simplified snapshot of much older C++ (circa mid-90s) but equipped with garbage collection. Memory management is an interesting, actually, since C++ doesn't rely on heap allocation nearly as much as Java does.

Well, long story short: no, "thinking in Java" is a terrible, terrible way of describing how C++ programming should be done.

Thinking in _modern_ C++ is supposed to feel like you're trying to bolt on Haskell's type system on top of C.
Based on my experience with other developers, they can't figure out how to login to the database and create users, databases, etc, initially, IMO mainly due to the default config doing ident only by default, and not allowing passwords to be used unless you setup pg_hba.conf first. I think that gets into sysadmin territory for the masses of developers, that just want to install, run a few commands, and go.
I am a fellow Canadian living in Silicon Valley and San Francisco for many years now. I highly recommend this small San Jose firm which helped me get my green card.

http://www.schwerinandsumcadlaw.com/
4chan, eBaum's World carpet bombing YouTube with porn videos
Great post on twitter journalism.
Slim Down Bloated Git Repositories with filter-branch
That was the harshest criticism of Conway's "Perl Best Practices" I've seen.

Details and exact choices of libraries can be discussed, but... could you be more specific?

Or were you talking of 1990s code, before e.g. testing took over the Perl world? Nah, straw men like that on HN... not possible.
One factor has to be the fact that for a long time the only way to install Postgresql on windows was to build it within Cygwin. Whereas mysql could be run on win98 with a standard installer.
Not worth the read if you have ever heard of parallel programming before. The article is very long and introduces very few concepts and stays superficial.

If you are a coder, you'll be disappointed because there is no meat.
or just use google groups...
The fact that he calls it "Memcopy()" doesn't exactly lend confidence. I don't really see the problem with memcpy() anyway: memcpy() copies exactly the given number of bytes. If the programmer gets the source buffer length wrong with memcpy(), they are just as likely to get the destination buffer length wrong with memcpy_s().

And banning strlen() is just idiotic. The differences between strlen() and strnlen_s() (the suggested "safe" replacement) are apparently: (1) strnlen_s() takes a maximum string length argument (2) strnlen_s() returns 0 on a NULL pointer. #1 is pointless (what if the string has no predefined maximum length), and will just lead to programmers hardcoding inappropriate constants. #2 is potentially hazardous, because it hides problems: NULL and the empty string are not the same thing, so having strnlen_s() return 0 for both cases is misleading.
I'm not blaming the victim, I'm recognizing the only real solution.

I never said it would be easy, as it certainly wasn't for me. It is however the only method of success, period.
I know a bunch of people that dropped out of high school (usually later, at 16 or 17, since you can't at 14 in MA) and several of them have done quite well for themselves. As in gotten into Smith, MIT, or Wellesley. Many of the better colleges don't care about that high school diploma if you can demonstrate that you can do college-level work.

My list of "things that will really wreck your life" includes:

1) Getting killed.

2) Getting addicted.

3) Getting pregnant.

4) Getting convicted.

In roughly that order of precedence. Also, many of my friends that actually did have babies as teenagers wouldn't actually say it "wrecked their life" - rather, it just meant that their expectations for what their life would hold became dramatically different than what they initially expected.
you know i once saw you at the yahoo coffee bar wearing a shirt with a giant hammer and sickle on it. my immediate conclusion was that you were a hipster who skipped history. in case you need a little refresher on how cool the soviets were, read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
Edge cases! I actually learned the trick from an immigrant worker with an 8th grade education during a summer job moving furniture into a hotel thing. He had a couple of other neat string tricks to find fits as well. Books, covers etc.
Starview Cable Boxes
Rapid technological development has brought several changes in the equipments and electronics devices that you use in your daily life. Today a man can sit at home in any corner of the world and view all the channels transmitted throughout the world. The limited channels accessible a few days back is now history as many companies have manufactured the cable boxes that help the user to view all the channels by connecting the starview cable boxes with your television.
One of my professors, Carter Bays saw some C++ and said, "So, is C++ just the new COBOL?"

(Dude wrote the world's first implementation of merge sort. It's saved on paper punch-tape! And he has stuff in one of the 1st 3 Knuth books.)
Here are the results for different sites:

http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2009/05/20/attack-of-the-...
Springfield MO
Springfield , Missouri is home to well over 151,000 residents who enjoy the big city amenities with a small town feel.
In Smalltalk/X, you can just inline C in a method. There are ways of doing that for Ruby as well. It's also fairly easy in Smalltalk generally to do callouts to a DLL, or to implement your own "primitive" method in C.
And, even once you've got password logins working, authentication works really strangely in postgres. Every database has a single "owner" (based on who created it) who has full permissions. If you want to make more permissions available to another user, you have to grant them manually, on a table-by-table basis. Want to grant SELECT on every table in a large database? Sucks to be you!

Compare this to MySQL, where there's just a single magic table of permissions, and you'll begin to see why a lot of system administrators prefer MySQL to Postgres as well. :(
I must mention that pgAdmin makes this MUCH easier to do.
Most (non-Austrian) economists believe that the gold standard actually exacerbated the great depression.

It's possible to run a sound currency regime using fiat dollars. But the U.S. has not done so. And the people pushing our decidedly unsound monetary policy were mostly progressive Keynesians.

As for the depression, the problem was that the government printed far more greenbacks than it could back with actual gold. As a result, people started trying to redeem their notes for gold. Since banks did not have enough gold to redeem, the banks failed. The government refused to devalue for many years, resulting in a catastrophic deflation. The depression could have been avoided by devaluing while still still maintaining the gold standard. If you step in front of a freight train and get run over, do you blame the freight train?

Re: #6 -- your claim that lax crime policies were primarily responsible for the rise in crime. Evidence is actually that it was mostly demographics -- a rise in crime prone young men -- combined with the rise of drugs like cocaine, crack, etc... And there's little evidence that "tougher" and longer sentences do any good.

The homicide rate in Baltimore, DC, and Philadelphia increased ten fold. Were there ten times the number of young men?

Re: #8 -- Democracy promotion abroad isn't necessarily a progressive idea. After all, our recent experiment in democracy promotion in Iraq is the brainchild of neoconservatives.

By any historical standard, neoconservatives are progressives. They did not splinter off until the 1960's when they got upset with the excesses of the left. Before that, they were Trotskyites. They are only considered "conservative" because the country as a whole has moved so far left in the past century. Neoconservatives inherit the tradition of promoting democracy from progressives like TDR, Wilson, FDR, etc. If you read the Weekly Standard or any other neocon rag, you'll find that they hold TDR as their idol. TDR founded a party called, "the Progressive party", and was an original proponent of promoting democracy abroad. The neocons are very much a part of the progressive movement.
"If college were free then money wouldn't be the answer."

But college is free. MIT is free for people who make less than $100k/year. Stanford is free for people who make less than $100k/year. Amherst is free for people who make less than $60k/year. Most other private colleges will give full rides for people of the income level that this article is talking about.

Is money still the answer?
Your argument is unconvincing. You rely too much on the idea that all malleable variables in a person's life are under their control and that they have the knowledge or personal ability to change them and furthermore that if they don't then they deserve the outcome.

I mean, seriously, "No, no, don't help this mother because her child has a chronic disability. It's not going to do anything in the long run." "This dude's poor and is manic-depressive, I don't think we should give him any psychiatric assistance because, seriously, he's not going to STOP being manic-depressive." "This guy over here lost his home because his house burnt down and his insurer is refusing to honor his claim. Don't worry about him! He'll just pick himself up by his bootstraps!"

Fuck off.
I really wish we could kind of dump email as a technology, since it's really outgrown what it was originally designed to do.

What I'd like to see is mass adoption of Jabber/XMPP, since it handles IM stuff, along with tons of other features. I think it could probably totally replace e-mail, since most servers and clients support offline messaging, so you can queue up messages even when you're not online. Also, imagine how everything would change if you used IM for password resets or signup confirmations, instead of having to wait a few minutes to get an e-mail with your info, it would be nearly instant.

Another cool possibility I see with Jabber mass-adoption is authentication. You could develop (if there isn't already) a way for people to login everywhere with only their jabber id, and then the site could just IM you to ask if it was really you who attempted to sign-in. This is a lot like OpenID, except I think alot faster and probably a lot easier to implement.
Quick guide to somewhat advanced JavaScript
OneRiot Announces API & Real-Time Search Partnerships
Sun seeks to build world's biggest App Store around Java
Great article. I have wanted to write that exact post for about a year now. Good to know it's already been done :).
The part of how "New treatments will cure STDs." That's been wished for since before the 70's. Still not there.
IMO it's lacking first because it's only on T-Mobile, which is one of the smaller carriers in the U.S, so there is less of an incentive to develop apps for it, because there are inherently less users. Another issue is that T-Mobile has a very small service area compared to AT&T or Verizon, so applications that demand connectivity to work effectively would have trouble. This is a big issue for companies that develop applications for serious business/government use like ours (emergency management). Not being able to listen to your Pandora radio is one thing, but not getting alerts about an emergency is totally different story (this is just our case in particular).
jGrowl is surprisingly robust and well crafted. I've used it for a while. Though... its been out a while, too.
Yes, I understand that. That's why I asked if his drawing was supposed to be to scale.
What You Can't Do with HTML5 Microdata
Steal Our Ideas
Well here's the thing: your typical web-oriented developer doesn't like SQL much. Probably because thinking in sets is very different from OO or whatever they're into. Most of them try to hide from it behind Rails/ActiveRecord or Hibernate or whatever. MySQL has a very basic, crude SQL and so doesn't intimidate them. Whereas to use PostgreSQL to its fullest requires really getting into set theory and relational thinking.

Plus if you look under the covers of MySQL each "table" is just a file on the disk. Unsophisticated database users feel comfortable with that too. "Sharding", another thing they like, is another attempt to evade using advanced features (not that partitioning is actually "advanced" these days, nor is a semi-decent query optimizer) that other databases take for granted.
Libraries are below you. Frameworks are above you.

Unusual examples: A java applet is a framework. A SAX parser is a framework. Event-driven GUIs are frameworks.

Any exceptions?
Motorola A1600 – The best option
The Motorola A1600 is available with a business card reader in order to provide easy and fast capture of important contacts information. It also has a taking dictionary that recognizes the words and even pronounces them aloud with a human voice. Thereafter, it displays a translation in the native language of the user. This tool is extremely helpful when it comes to eliminating difficult communication barriers.
Safeways here in Silicon Valley will ask for your phone number (the card is linked to this) if you forget your card. Pretty handy.

Curiously, my parents never signed up for a bonus card because they use it to track your purchases and my dad was not comfortable with this. Once I moved out, this habit lasted for exactly one visit to the supermarket before I realized I could save 10+% and got one. Money > privacy.
But then you do need a library and run slam into a brick wall and realize you should have just used Python...
How To Put Free Software Experience On Your Resumé
My Rails app runs on MySQL because my blog runs on MySQL and, since they're all black boxes for me anyhow, why bother installing another service.

At work, our Rails apps run on Postgres because our Big Freaking Consultingware runs on Postgres and, since they're all black boxes for me anyhow...

File that as instance #572 of the Power of Defaults. Now, go take a look at the popular OSS and commercial packages for deployment at web hosts, and you're going to see a preponderance of MySQL. (Wordpress, VBulletin, etc, etc.) That is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In Smalltalk, if you're curious about ??, you'd be able to find it instantly, and read the method. As you know from the article, it's fairly short and would be obvious to a competent Smalltalker in seconds. If that's not enough just take a second to type in

nil ?? [ self halt ]

And right-click "Debug-it." Debugging in VisualWorks is so painless, people actually write code in comments for people to understand by debugging -- and people will even follow it while in another debugger session! (And even doing that a 2nd, 3rd time is just as easy!) To heck with comments or API docs, you can see how everything works and tinker with it!

Your division between access by the implementer vs. the "fresh set of eyes" is a misconception you're taking from C#. There is nothing in Smalltalk that demarcates the "implementer" from the regular programmer. It's "Turtles all the way down!" You can actually implement a debugger as an ordinary Smalltalk app, and in 5 minutes, you can be browsing a stack. There is little difference between programming and meta-programming.

In other words, Meta-programming is easy and natural, not esoteric.

You just see Smalltalk as a funny sort of Blub where no one knows what the language/library will look like, because you see things in terms of the programming you know: Blub. Take it from me, I've been to dozens of Smalltalk shops over a decade: this is not a problem. It's sometimes a huge advantage! One can create very powerful domain-specific languages and tools this way.
The 'missing link' headlines on pretty much every news item about this find are BS. The fossil record will always have holes cos only a tiny percentage of creatures manage to die in a way that eventually produces a discoverable fossil.

We don't need 'missing links' to validate Darwinian evolution. We've seen it happen in the lab, every counter-argument has been discredited and it has stood up to any and all scrutiny for 150 years.
Congrats Kris Allen..new American Idol winner
You can accomplish this using SQL. These guys have written some handy functions to grant permissions on multiple relations: http://pgedit.com/public/sql/acl_admin/index.html