skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem with cash grants is something that does not show up when there is a Columbia professor watching things. And that is that the money gets stolen.

Many poor countries suffer from corrupt callous and cruel leadership. And this means that the people in power tend to steal from the poor. Thus, if some organization tries to
give cash to the poor there is a high likelihood that the money will be stolen and sent to a swiss bank.

It is much more difficult to steal bags of grain with "US AID" printed on them. They are heavy transport is expensive and no-one will pay full price for bags of grains that say US AID on them because they will know it is stolen. If you want to re-bag the grain, it will be a lot of work, and you will have to hire many workers some of which may inform the US embassy. Thus, once the US government dumps a bunch of grain in a poor place, even the evil corrupt warlords tend to leave most of it to the poor because it is too difficult to steal it and sell it.

There is a similar problem with cash crops. Initially when I heard activists complain about cash crops, I said "what is the problem? Farmers should farm cash crops in order to get the maximum amount of money for their land and labor." Well the problem is that if you plant cash crops (such as coffee, cocoa, etc.) you have to sell them to get some money out of them. But the local corrupt official and/or warlord will take control of all the merchants and make sure the farmers receive very little and take most of the money for himself. If, on the other hand the farmers plant ordinary food, it is very difficult for warlord to steal it. He will have to make his troops do actual agriculture work to steal the food, and they hate that.

So this will only work for countries with relatively strong civil society and there are very few of those among the poor countries.
People are not starving in America.Please visit poor countries before drawing parrallels.
We failed early 2013.
I was the founding engineer, but ended up doing Product Management at http://frankandoak.com after.

Engineering -> Business oriented role was the easiest thing I could think of.
Some programs, like schools, dispense services rather than cash. If you're talking about direct payment programs these are extremely efficient: 4.5% for SCHIP in 2005, for example. Other direct payment programs have higher overhead because they are means-tested (another conservative victory) and it costs money to administer means-tested programs.

Amusingly, the US state of Florida in 2011 enacted another one of those republican favorites, the drug test for welfare recipients. In practice it cost more to administer the drug tests than they saved by throwing the positive results out of the program, because it turns out that welfare recipients are far less likely than the general public to use drugs.
Colorado farmers bringing in nation’s first hemp harvest since the 1950s
So... recommendations for all the major books.
TellSpec – Beam Your Health Up
Microsoft, Skype and the NSA: why there's big trouble in little Luxembourg
I'm an Android developer and I wouldn't list my apps on an unproven platform - let alone pay to do it. FWIW.
Some very good tips. Really work yourself up from small groups.
Also you may sometime fall back and start having problems again. I get a shaky voice from time to time. Be gentle to yourself and just laugh it off. If people like you, they will be even friendlier after you've shown some vulnerability, since it makes you real and authentic.
Ya, all our dev tools servers are named after the product they're running. (Well, most of them; one is named after a mythological being; one is named after its function.) As a user, this is frustrating because rather than remember what function I'm trying to access (e.g. mail, wiki, bugs, etc.) I have to remember what Atlassian decided to name their product that implements the function I want.

(Fortunately some entires in /etc/hosts + a local Apache server set up with RedirectRules fixes this annoyance, at least for myself…)
Review: Apple's New iOS Software Plagued by Problems
Sounds good. Probably it's easier to do that with Skinny framework than Play2.

On the other hand, I'm afraid that most people are much less likely to re-write existing Rails apps in Scala.

When Rails users need to work with JVM for some reason, Skinny framework will be quite friendly. I believe that it's one of Skinny's raison d'etre.
I agree. Change has to be organic. You can't simply put in place some ideal thought up in the Bay area in Bangladesh overnight without there being major disruption and unintended consequences. Bangladeshis have to work through the situation, with outside parties providing assistance when it is requested.
That's exactly the direction we where going would you mind looking at our extension. You don't have to use it just maybe read and watch the demo vid. I would love to get your thoughts on it.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/latis/adkmonocjplf...
Google: Opt out or your face may be in ads
To skim means to remove "something" from the top(usually referring to liquids). Which makes sense to use to refer to a device that sits atop a card reader.

https://www.google.com/search?q=card+skimmer&safe=off&source...

One thing to remember is that keyloggers have been around much longer than card skimmers, keylogger is a well known and well defined term.

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

https://www.google.com/search?q=hardware+keylogger&safe=off&...

It's all very interesting to watch as criminals become more sophisticated.
I still can't imagine not find an example of where anybody would want to return 500MB of results to PHP for processing.
To always start with a clean environment. Who knows what crud is leftover.

A new job for a machine calls for a new OS install/etc.
One of my favorite pg videos is the one where he's being "heckled" at Defcon 2005:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8Lb8ZgQP74

I don't know why, but there's something sort of inspiring about rolling with the punches and then going on to keynote PyCon.
>whether to buy that fair-trade coffee

This really does make a difference you know. You're looking at considering a couple of dollars overhead, yet it provides genuine support to the growers who made a commitment to pay their workers fairly.
"those saying the federal heath insurance exchange cost $634 million are incorrect. The official said this figure includes all of the company’s contracts for a Health and Human Services Department program over the last seven years"

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/10/10/rumor-check-obama...

Still appears to be $100M+ ...
What is a hostname for?

We have IP addresses. They are unique numbers that will always resolve to one unique machine, on which a network service exists that we want to talk to. We use the hostname to refer to the unique instance, and a URI's protocol name to refer to the service we want.

smtp. ntp. www. ftp. These are all short names that work great at expressing both what and where the service you want is, under your domain. But what if you have more than one? is it www2? ntp4? ftp3? which host/service do I want?

Context is everything. Your hostnames should be a representation of what you want to access, assuming a service with a default port. Instead of www2, www-devel. Instead of mysql255, mysql-qa-dev-ext. These are contexts that are specific to what you want, not just random identifiers you can use to pinpoint an exact thing.

Renaming hosts is a pain. It should be minimized, which is why CNAMEs are useful. If you can, try to give teams DNS control over the records pointing to the hosts they manage, so they can control them without waiting for the DNS admin to put a change through in a week. Make DNS changes work automatically and immediately (trust me, it's perfectly doable even in large environments). In most cases, you don't really need a host's name changed, you just need a CNAME to the new host you want to use.
or you can take university classes, a win for both the visa and language situations.

the random foreigner who replies to a couple of job listings, has industry experience, and can crank out more than php or javascript spaghetti (because there are plenty of good developers here who will work for much less than sv wages) can definitely find startup-like situations. or maybe i just lucked out, dunno.
D3.tip: Tooltips for d3.js visualizations
Okay, here's my workflow:

When I'm interested in something (e.g. cryptography) I open a bunch of tabs with usual suspects (google for cryptography, crypto stack exchange, google for crypto books...) and crawl these for even more tabs. Once I get a broad base of subjects to learn from, I slowly read these tabs and perhaps open more from these.

More often than not, I run out of time, so I have to temporarily store these tabs. I use my browser bookmarks for this.

My real bookmarks (real as in "the way bookmarks are intended to be used") are just in the bookmarks toolbar instead of hidden in bookmark folders.

I don't store important stuff in bookmarks. Bookmarks are not important. Important stuff is left as an open tabs to be reviewed ASAP.
Tip #3 is especially helpful in my experience. These things don't come naturally to us introverts.
half-life 3 confirmed

Valve gets their platform launched. Strategically, in the long-term, a platform is worth far more than any individual AAA title, or even a franchise. Note: not a "linux version", a "steambox version".

Yes, no one has the incentive to push Valve's platform but Valve. They might pay someone else, but any game of comparable interest to HL3 would be very expensive. They aren't as wealthy as Microsoft. No one is. So, really, HL3 absolutely fits - this even makes sense of its curious delay.

They can always port it later (though, not foreshadow, and well after the initial publicity, or its force will be dissipated).
I think both Mark and Kevin made some really good points. I find the Sensor vs QRCode debate pretty interesting. There are pro's and con's on both sides. I agree with Mark that the sensor (or sensor like) User Experience is much smoother and more natural than scanning QR Codes. The time investment is lower, and it's just plain easier for consumers to understand / use. However, sensors have a physical proximity requirement (aka range). What if the consumer is out of range? Another potential issue for sensors; The automated nature of sensors creates a potential for excessive push abuse. Just imagine your phone beeping every time you walk past a store in a mall and you can't stop it from happening. There are other issues that affect both Sensors and QRCodes, such as security. If I remember correctly, I think a few people experienced this at Defcon (scan the QRCode, infected with malware). Same could be said for sensors (hypothetical of course, but imagine a sensor pushing malware to you automatically?). These are or will become real issues. I think Kevin had some good points about the Business Model, it was pretty unclear to me as well. If fact, I didn’t even know it was a paid app until I read this article. And even then, I think investors prefer a reoccurring revenue model over the one-time payment. Anyway, very cool for them, and I wish them success. My only gripe with the whole thing was the Design. Maybe it's because I'm a Designer, but I was not impressed at all by the Design.
Why stop at Word?
i dont really like ubunt for various reasons but you are using the wrong arguments here. you can easily change the ui in ubuntu and make it much more reactive if you dont like unity. use mate or cinnamon then. plus ubuntu is very stable, i dont really know what gripes you have with it in terms of stability. Ubuntu is used almost as is in several companie like Google and I seriously doubt they would go for something unstable.
A Look at PyPI Downloads
well pre-industrially work was largely home of near the home based. Everybody pitched in, in much the same way you see work being divided up in developing countries these days. While many benefits arose from industrial society, I don't feel that semi-disenfranchising women from large swathes of the workforce was one of them (men get the crappy end of the stick too). The wikipedia page on the housewife indicates that it's a thousands of years old phenomenon, but I think that is making assuptions about money being as important in society as it is today (and outside of industrial society it really isn't).
Where Android scores over Linux
New York's Petty War on AirBNB
I don't think this has been a significant problem for Give Directly, which sends money to people directly via the M-PESA cell phone network, in reasonably small amounts at a time, and with unpredictable timing. There's no easy access point for a corrupt official to swoop in and become involved.
I think I'm just a neurotic "anti-hoarder" and it extends in to the digital realm. A lot of stuff gets deleted instead of archived in Gmail, too.

It's probably not worth taking much notice of this particular mindset.
This method results in much shorter numerators and denominators than the list of primes it generates. Simplifying this fraction only chops off 2 or so digits on average.
Given the size of Reddit, I wonder what the probability distribution of new accounts would be be on an article.
Don't you have it exactly backwards?

I've heard (from people like Andrew Mwenda) that say that Western aid to African governments ends up not helping the citizenry and just props up bad governments.

Aid that completely bypasses corrupt governments and goes directly to citizens seems to be less likely to be stolen by middlemen. If you look at Give Directly (http://www.givedirectly.org/faqs.php) they send cash directly to a person's cell phone, and their audits have shown very little money being lost to corruption.
I apologize to the world for this thread. There are clearly topics that an open forum, or at least this one, can't be trusted with, and this seems to be one of them.

We have some ideas for new moderation features that we hope will make comment threads more civil. I don't know if they would have helped in this case though.

The one thing that did work here is the flamewar detector. This story dropped off the frontpage extra fast, after which the only people seeing this discussion were people who sought it out.
just to confirm if I go to Thailand and want to do a business road trip wherein i'm speaking at say a meetup.com event, I can get into trouble?
As a developer watching that video, that line was the one that stood out the most.

There is nothing more frustrating than to be asked to build something using old tools when better options exist, or when you are asked to build apps that don't stretch your abilities, or when you work for people who don't understand how software can change the way that their business operates (who tend to not be technical).
Frankly, I don't have the time or patience to re-learn the keyboard. I'll stick with QWERTY.
That's bloody adorable.
The problem with this keyboard and others (like Dvorak, Colemak) is nobody else uses them.

I have one of those old indestructible IBM model M keyboards with removable keycaps. I love that keyboard. I decided I'd try to learn DVORAK and work with it regularly, so I did so. And I realized something: every time I'd work with a keyboard, I _will_ be working with QWERTY. There's no way I would request to an employer that I have a special keyboard just for me, or try to reconfigure software to support it.

So I went back to QWERTY. May not be ideal but I know everyone supports it.
"Mr. Needham is not apologetic at all for the shutdown that he sees as regrettable but necessary collateral damage if it focuses the public on the horrors of the health-care law."

In other words the ends justifies the means. This is not how laws are to be repealed. If they're successful then a very dangerous precedent will be set. I'm admittedly not the biggest fan of Obamacare in its current form, but these tactics to effectively repeal it without due process unnerves me.
The main reason I find this interesting is the hacker scene in South Florida is so small. I bet if they caught one of these guys, they could track it down to the mastermind faster than somewhere like NY or SF.
The death of Medibuntu: A harbinger of doom for Ubuntu?
8 votes and "Error establishing a database connection"... I thought those days were over :(
Later Halo franchise games were X-Box only, but given that I played the entire game on Windows, I think I can confirm that the original Halo was not an X-box exclusive. (It was the only console it was released for, though, so in that sense it was more exclusive than games which are ported for all three console platforms.)
It's an impressively in depth and well reasoned analysis, and takes into account common bigrams which is something I'd never considered being important for keyboard layouts.

I tried switching to Dvorak many moons ago, I'm feeling it may be time to have another crack at an alternative layout, both out of interest in improving efficiency and reducing strain.
Seems down, Google cache link
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:SFeCVEf...
Did you miss the story earlier in the year about the Princeton math students who did just that?

1. http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/06/cades-witty-hea...
> There are some serious failures of the UK method - faith schools are a scary abomination; Beth Din and Sharia courts have led to child abusers and wife beaters not being reported to police, but just moving to a different part of the country (to continue abusing), women are unable to obtain a religious divorce, etc.

Wait, why is the grandparent post considered racist and yours is not ?

Wife beating ("preferably" using nothing more than locking them up and a twig) and doing anything you want to (your own, or bought) children, is perfectly legal in islam (/sharia, which is the same thing). So you claiming that those things are bad, is no different from saying islam is bad, which is far more racist than what the grandparent post was saying. He merely claimed that large amounts of muslim-only areas are causing problems, whereas you're the way of life that makes someone a muslim is immoral.

Believe it or not, different religions don't just differ in dress and the form of the cross in the front of the building, they have different values. Islam was created by a military conqueror, it's values center around that. The basic promise of islam is not that allah will give muslims a good or healthy or happy life like Christianity promises, it's that allah will make them victorious over others. The return effort that is demanded from muslims is that they should make allah victorious. And yes, that last statement is followed by, if possible without fighting if needed by any means necessary.

As if that wasn't enough to make your post racist, you put another whopper in there : "And I'd prefer schools to conform to a national curriculum". You want to take the right of people to educate their children as they see fit away ... How is forced education into a state-sanctioned ideology any different than what's called indoctrination in China ?

Your post is not just far more racist than the posts you're complaining about, it's also far more worrying. If the state thought like you did, we might as well ask Saudi Arabians to take over our government.
Sorry, but people are starving in America: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/US/hunger-children-america-slow...

Are you aware that many kids in America grow up without access to even a basic grocery store and decent nutrition? Starvation can be slow and steady.
I've worked several programming jobs since switching to Dvorak, and it has never been an issue---it takes < 10 seconds to change the layout OS-wide. No need to request a special keyboard (and I leave my keycaps as QWERTY because I touch-type anyways).
thank you pg.
Yeah their landing pages leave a lot to be desired. I haven't seen the app directly.

The UX of a QR code is a disaster. Stand back, hold up your phone, DONT SHAKE. It's annoying.

But then there's the issue of having QR codes all over our products. Do we really want another UPC code making our stuff look horrible? I don't.
The cabbie I had last night explained it to me. All the staffers left town to visit family until the next day Congress could do something, which I think is Tuesday.
> How did the government not figure it out?

Government procurement is an incredibly coreographed ritual with a minefield of rules and regulations designed to make the process as human-proof as possible. Unless there was conclusive evidence about CGI's lack of clues, the process would continue with them.
I very much agree. Trying to find out more about Beacon, but there isn't much out there.
This is so cool, it looks CGI. Unbelievable. At first I thought the camera was in a helicopter, but a drone makes more sense (and is even cooler).

Elon Musk is Tom Swift.
W3TC and all of these issues would be a thing of the past. That there are Wordpress sites that lack it or its analogues perplexes.
I'm relatively sure that every OS supports changing the keyboard layout without being root and for just one user, so unless your employer specifically disabled that, then that shouldn't be an issue.

The point about the keycaps is valid, but ideally you shouldn't be looking at them anyways. Additionally, I learned Dvorak an a QWERTY labeled keyboard, and found that eventually I just associated the labels I saw with what I was actually typing.
I don't see what the point of changing your keyboard layout is.

I don't know if QWERTY is even a good layout but what does it matter? Isn't the best keyboard layout the one you already know?

Thinking about it now, I can't think of any common digraphs or trigraphs that are inconvenient to type on a qwerty keyboard. Don't fix what ain't broke.
I think this appeals more to the business traveler than the budget conscious vacationer. In some places (detroit) rental cars are super cheap (sub $20/day).

I dig the model silvercar is trying to pulloff though. It is the jetblue of car rentals. Entire fleet is the same, lowers cost of maintenance (fewer spare parts, fewer training courses for mechanics, etc). They offer a premium reliable product at a fair price.

Now if only they would hook up with founderscard and setup a deal for its members...
>I've heard of people having lots of issued with Mint too

It's based on Ubuntu, so probably shares some of the same problems, especially when it comes to driver support.

Network and audio hardware is most often the main culprit, lots of no-name brands out there that mobo makers toss on to keep costs down, unlike CPU's and GPU's where there are only a few well known, well-supported options.
Ask PG: What do you think of quantum computing?
I think you've just hit the nail on the head. Gifts in this program have the same function as loans would traditionally have : they are supposed to be invested in improving one's life. They were obviously not free, the money was traded for promises that carry a social cost if one doesn't deliver.

A basic income would have no such effect. If it's enough to live on, why would everyone invest it in becoming a better and more capable individual ? (note the question is not "anyone", but "everyone". The aggregate effect of free money is what will determine the outcome. Not what exceptional individuals might achieve with it, but what a lazy drunkard would achieve with it matters)