skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Look at Salesforce, Workday, Amazon, etc. They are all negative or razor thin. Oracle and SAP are used to 85% gross margin on software.

Workday has a profit margin of 62% versus Oracle's profit margin of 82%. It's less but it's not that big of a gap.
while i appreciate the analogy, the final question irks me a bit: "how can clean code come from a messy desktop?"

i've worked at places where the most brilliant, clean code comes from the minds of veritable slobs. i'm sure the "clean, organized" approach works for many, and it is definitely a good mantra to live by, but to assume that it's the only way to achieve good clean code is a bit arrogant.
It's cute, but negative SEO can lead to extortion.

A blackhat actor puts links to your site all over their network of bad content sites and then forces you to pay them to remove their link.

A competitor might create bad links to your site to push you down in Google's SERP and you'd never know what was going on if you didn't know how to look this up.

A "disavowal tool" was meant to help combat this kind of extortion, but imagine how much work it would be to monitor this kind of activity and disavow all sites that might want to create bad links to your site to drive you down.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en
Universities can (and sometimes do) take a more ethical aim than some other funds. Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinvestment_from_South_Africa...
You may want to give this a try (although Facebook recently changed their code, and the author is still struggling to keep up):

http://www.socialfixer.com/
Or, 50 shades of yes, otherwise no which is plain
My brain needs sleep because of AMD/ATI drivers. It's been a decade and they still suck in linux.
I was questioning the accuracy/legitimacy of your assumptions around what "[m]ost of the English-speaking world" think.
Create an iOS image browser app with RubyMotion, RMQ, and Vim in 36 minutes
I find it a little off point that he focuses on the desktop not the structure of the code itself. My desktop remains clean (it's part of why I am never a fan of huge monitors, actually) but the real clutter is in the mental model and abstractions littered about in the code itself. That's where my mise en place happens.
I bet it's a lot like GOATSE.
In slightly related news,nobody is talking about the UN Millenium Goals [1][2]anymore, which are due next year. And it doesn't need a prophet to predict that we will miss most, if not even all eight, of them[0].

[0]http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/pdf/report-2013/2013_progr...
[1] http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Development_Goals
Dell has a limit of 10 servers per invoice, sends 750 letters to online.net
>> above all never let the system win.

It's awful that our justice system creates this sort of mentality
Author here. I agree with you.
For a complete analysis you'll have to ask a lawyer. But for me, the fact that you "may not reverse-assemble, reverse-compile, or otherwise reverse-engineer any portion of the Intel Materials provided solely in binary form" (http://appcenter.html5tools-software.intel.com/TOS/, see II.2.C) is enough of a red flag already. I'm not going to use or distribute something to my users for which I signed away my rights to examine and see what it actually does.

Furthermore, they want the right to disable access to some content somehow if they think it is illegal (i.e. they have rights to arbitrary censorship of content and apparently also some mechanism built into the runtime to enforce it). Am I going to distribute or even sell stuff to users that Intel can disable any time they like? Certainly not.

If they wanted a license that puts off developers who have plenty of choices nowdays, they succeeded.
To be fair though, investing in Coca Cola or McDonald's is like taking money from fat rich people and then distributing it to poor thin people. I see no hypocrisy, just stupid rich people accidentally helping to feed poor thin people, with the foundation taking the arbitrage.
This is why I'm creating a new IDE, one that allows you to focus on the tasks that are actually part of your coding in a clean and unobtrusive way.

This post makes me think I'm on the right path.
Did someone at Dell mistake the "email" memo from the French government?
Lines of code can be particularly misleading. Read:

-2000 Lines Of Code

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...
What would you prefer to see, $xx billion burnt in a hurry in 10 years and then run out of money, or have a foundation that keeps on working for upliftment of the most vulnerable human beings decades or centuries using money from its past investments after Bill and Melinda run out of time in this world?

Also, lets say the foundation did not invest in Walmart shares. How much evilness of Walmart would've been reduced?
Google Just Made Rap Genius Disappear
Oh, it was the latter.
As someone who is regularly working on 2 or 3 different projects at any given time, de-cluttering has been incredibly helpful with my productivity. Especially when I'm on my laptop.

Every additional program I have open is a potential distraction. Every single one of the 20+ tabs I have open is a potential distraction. When I'm on my desktop, I can afford a bit of that. I can move some distractions to the monitor on the right and place it behind something else. But I still make a conscious effort to cleanup my workspace regularly.

I didn't think those extra open tabs had an effect on me, but they do. They're a constant reminder of the many things I have yet to work on, and the significant impact they (can) have on my life and family. Removing those tabs and windows to focus only on the task at hand has been tremendous in helping me with my constant state of anxiety.
Google to $2,000 in 2014
I thought she meant that the background apps are constantly restarted - which they are.
You answered your own concern here.

>> based on liking the team

We all know that the idea without an execution is not worth much. It's easier to halt everything by saying the idea sucks rather than saying that he doesn't believe in the founder.

>>seeing who else is investing

Social proof is a huge factor and touches many aspects of every day life. And at the end of the day, investors are humans.
The article we're talking about does not accuse the Gates Foundation of investing in apartheid South Africa.
And what is the role of his wife and
her schooling from nuns?
"Disinformation" would be an accurate description of your claim.

Code.org is not "pushing for pay deductions on teachers whose CS classrooms consist of <40% females" as you claimed.

The actual proposal: [1]

* isn't about teacher's pay, its about classroom funding rewards being paid by Code.org [2]

* doesn't refer to % of class that is girls, it pays $750 if 15 or more students reach a certain goals, and $1,000 if, of those 15 or more, 7 or more are girls.

[1] http://code.org/educate/20hr

[2] Direct quote: "These rewards are not cash prizes for teachers - they are classroom rewards. This program is not permanent, it's a one-time campaign to see if rewards can help grow the pool of C.S. teachers and increase total enrollment (especially by girls)."
Thanks, well caught :)
Another sin: Not letting me up/down scale the text how I like with my browser. Depending on the environment, time and other circumstances I like or need different font sizes. Leave the choice to me.
Talk to someone with experience who is both objective and tough, who can first tell you if you are in the wrong.

If you convince them of your case, seek their guidance in approaching your board and other influencers. You should also seek advice from the company's legal counsel, he is obligated to protect your confidentiality. Also quitting or firing are not the only two options here, but I'm sure your legal counsel should know about this type of stuff.
I see your point. Unfortunately, we are taking a subjective term and applying it literally by one's interpretation of the word 'messy'. A subjective term is hard to measure objectively.
Agreed. That sort of thing is to "computer science" as "shop class" is to "mechanical engineering".

Mechanical engineering students generally take many shop classes, and computer science students spend a lot of their time learning vocation-styled computer skills. All are important, I could get behind getting more of any or all of these into highschools (though programming less so than the other three), but I don't think we should be honest with the terminology we use. If for nothing else, we should keep our terminology straight and honest so that we do not perpetuate misconceptions about what fields actually entail.
People wanting to generate outrage about things that aren't actually happening.
My take here differs a bit from that of the rest of the thread.

How about this OP - who are you to fire your coworker after he got a cosy relationship with a board?

This is literally no better than firing an 'idea man' after they did nothing, except just bring an idea, set up a company around it, and code the first version.

Who are you to do that? If you were good enough to found and run a company by yourself, including raising money, you would be doing that. Where are all the companies you founded and ran by yourself in the years and decades you didn't have your current cofounder? Even if he showed up to work three days: one day when he talked with you and then brought a huge investment from a board that you couldn't bring, then 18 months later to sign some Series A papers with you after discussing them by email, and the third day he to sign the IPO documents before quitting, you should still STFU and thank your lucky stars you're allowed to get 40% of an actual company that he actually orchestrated for/with you, in exchange for nothing more than working there, much as you might for whatever salary "S&M" or "product design" is worth.

It's not your co-founder's job to work for you. Who do you think you are anyway? Go design a product or do sales at a big conglomerate if you want pay grades, or go found a company by yourself if you don't need the things you've already listed your cofounder as bringing, including a cozy relationship with a board.

If you can found a company and raise money for it by yourself, go ahead and give yourself a 2.5x equity raise up to 100% by getting the fuck out and doing so. enjoy 100% of what you feel is 100%, since you feel your cofounder didn't add shit to the mix, in your extremely personally centered opinion.

Everyone else here has it 100% wrong, IMO.
Quickly Change OS X's Default Screenshot Format & Location
They've actually divested significantly in the past few decades. They still own something like 40% of the voting shares, but only 2% of the common.
How to Handle a Christmas Hangover
Because wine not?
Google will buy it and build a self-driving, electric car... I do hope that Elon Musk keeps Tesla though.
> Code.org is pushing for pay deductions on teachers whose CS classrooms consist of <40% females)

I think that's a grossly misleading characterization. Code.org is offering a small ($750) stipend to teachers who successfully complete a course. That is not pay, that's a minor incentivizing bonus. A further $250 is given to teachers whose class had at least 7 female students. (NOT 40%; if you have 7 females and 25 males, you still get that $250.)

Calling that a "pay deduction" is misleading at best. Calling it a percentage-based quota is flat incorrect.

http://code.org/educate/20hr
I can not stress enough how much lift I gained from reading Clean Code and Clean Coder by Robert C. Martin. If it was one set of books I wish I had fresh out of college these would be it.
I've found about 6 months to be the cut off point. I never set that time frame intentionally, and most of my jobs/contracts last much longer, if not for their full term and beyond. However, in bad situations, 6 months happened to be the longest I was able to stand all the negativity.

In one case I left after about 3 months, only b/c I knew right away that my place wasn't in that particular environment, or with that particular team.

If you're asking due to relevant circumstances, what don't you like about the job, and how long have you been there?
I feel exaclty the opposite, of both the technology industry, and Bill gates.

It's really easy to be charitable when you can't even count the money you have.
In addition to that, it's also easy to invest your time in charity when you left a company you worked for, with exceptional intensity, for a life, and suddenly you have nothing to do anymore.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that Bill Gates is "evil". I'm saying that there is very little to admire in such behavior. Most of the people, with unlimited money and time, and having exhausted their stack of accomplishments, would do the same.

Secondly, the root of the main problems around the world is not technological, but social in nature.

And again, don't get me wrong, it's good to cure people, invent cleaning bacteria, cleaner energy etc.etc. If you don't work out the social root, it's going to be a whack-a-mole game.
"Responsible disclosure" is just corporate marketing to brainwash security researchers into allowing corporations to eliminate any 'bad press' of their negligence to protect customer data that they vacuum up.

Are they paying you for your work? I didn't think so. No free bugs. Stop pandering to corporations who are to greedy to spend on even the most basic security systems to protect customer data because it cuts into their profits.
Prior art:

http://www.mrspeaker.net/2012/03/24/syntax-highlighting-for-...
http://www.linusakesson.net/programming/syntaxhighlighting/
https://github.com/adib/ColorizeWords

These are all linked to from other comments here. This is not new or unique. Sure, the design is different, and they are probably the first "big" name writing app to include it, but being more popular doesn't mean you invented anything.
Yes, in my experience, leveraging existing relationships and capturing the investor's imagination are much more widely successful strategies for raising a round than actually having a product or revenue. At the end of the day, a lot of this has to do more with social dynamics than fundamentals of the business strategy. That can explain how companies like Color can raise huge seed rounds on unproven ideas and then fail quickly.
5 things that seem essential that we launched Buffer without
One could hope so.. but given the number of millionaires (I mean tens and hundreds if not thousands of millions) all over the world not doing this makes me thing it would be like that (of course HN isn't representative of the world, but still).

(I interpreted your "a lot" as most, given the small number of people here)
I'm releasing a new web control every day in 2014
Very well. This is still trying to incentivize equality through what is essentially bribery. At least they don't intend on doing it regularly, not for now.

The rest of my claims still stand. In fact, the affirmative action is probably one of the lesser worries. There's other, much bigger reasons.
That's a great point too. I focused on the environment around the creation because, while a I read a lot about writing clean code, I had never had anyone outside of the kitchen teach me about how helpful it is to have a clean workspace.
livin' the dream, brah!
Top Geek Achievements of 2013
The "big moguls" would love more skilled programmers and computer scientists. I don't know why you think the evil employers want less skilled workers, but that makes no business sense.
Thanks for putting this into words.

Part of me thinks it is because text can be a poor medium for emotion or intention but this can't be entirely right. Another part of me thinks it's the whole eagerness that geeks have 'to set the record straight'. The nature of our work demands preciseness so seeing inaccuracy or errors demands immediate correction. Naturally we see our own POV as being the one truth and everyone else uninformed. If we spoke like those examples in real life, others might catch on and get defensive and the conversation goes downhill and each assume bad faith. Unfortunately geeks do not always express views in a considerate or polite way and it's something I hope we can all work towards improving.

Maybe we have to assume good faith and try not to take everything so seriously? Maybe we have to assume less about what others know? Should you just stop if someone makes a slight against you; you need not correct them? How do you tell someone they have without it escalating?
Forget the Bubble. Consumer Tech is Under-Valued
my solution is to add a contact in your address book filled with profane words and other abbreviations you don't want autocorrected.

e.x. http://d.pr/i/tQgZ
The first 3D printed organ -- a liver -- is expected in 2014
"Global poverty and disease in the developing world are, particularly in the way they stifle the potential of a huge fraction of the world's people, root causes of most of our other big problems."

No, they're definitely not the root causes. There's plenty of interest from the richer countries to keep poor countries in such condition, that is the root cause.
How does your IDE solve this? What does it do that other IDEs don't? Keep in mind that usually IDEs are distractions themselves. Most of the times you can code with Sublime Text and a terminal window open.
Over 200 million people get malaria each year, and approximately 1 million die. [1]

If the Gates Foundation money managers think holding Coca-Cola stock will help fund their fight against the disease, that seems like an extremely easy call.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22305225
Wow, visit this page: http://oldcomputers.net/rescue.html

They dont make their e-mail address clickable to prevent spam. They make you type in "heathkit" when submitting a comment, HOWEVER click on any of the "Contact Info" links and they use a pop-up to display the full e-mail address of the user that submitted the comment!

http://imgur.com/fuGbfZP
Sleep also plays a part in synaptic conditioning -- it's when the brain prunes itself by separating signal from noise...

"Sleep researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health believe it is more evidence for their theory of 'synaptic homeostasis.' This is the idea that synapses grow stronger when we're awake as we learn and adapt to an ever-changing the environment, that sleep refreshes the brain by bringing synapses back to a lower level of strength. This is important because larger synapses consume a lot of energy, occupy more space and require more supplies, including the proteins examined in this study."

"Sleep — by allowing synaptic downscaling — saves energy, space and material, and clears away unnecessary 'noise' from the previous day, the researchers believe. The fresh brain is then ready to learn again in the morning" (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090402143455.ht...).
How to Avoid Huge Ships
Yeah, I was a bit gutted to get to the end, and find a bloody cliffhanger!!!!! I'd love to read part 2.
There are a load of 'millionaires' that are still busy keeping their company going/growing, which is where their money comes from. The people like Bill Gate - the billionaires many times over - they have the luxury of time to decide what to do, and the money to make it happen. No doubt there are many millionaires with the luxury of free time, but probably not as many as you think. Meaning, if they stopped doing what they're doing, the money would mostly go away pretty quickly.
Same here. Clean Coder taught me what it means to be a professional programmer as opposed to a guy who programs.
How To Handle A Holiday Hangover
Because woops. I meant holiday and not Christmas. Blame the wine.
Ugh, it's seriously hard to read those articles. The writing is just off enough a bit to make it super jarring to read.

In summary: 2 million doses delivered, 3 doses per child, 18 reported deaths (of which two apparently were in child who didn't take the vaccine at all). Depending on the sources, the actual number of deaths caused by the vaccine is 3 or up to 16. This is ontop of a base infant mortality rate of 12 deaths per 1000 infants per year. Also controversy over the actual need to vaccine Hep B and Hib (the two additional vaccines added to the original 3-combo vaccine), over spending their resources on other vaccines.
UnderOS - native iOS development with Ruby and RubyMotion
A way to test this hypothesis: elephants and certain whales have bigger brains than us. By the article's reasoning we should find mechanisms in these animals' brain which prevents neurons from "untethering".
I think you're quite missing the point.

> Many will be uninterested, many will refine their skills, but many will become 9-to-5 enterprise monkeys as a direct result of this.

The kids in the Chicago Public School system are 87% from low-income families. If these course result in "many" of these kids becoming 9-to-5 "enterprise monkeys" then that would be a smashing success beyond anyone's wildest imagination.
It's a false dichotomy. There's no solid rule. Sometimes going to the authorities is the best course of action, sometimes a direct approach, and sometimes going to a third party. It depends on the situation.
That's the thing though. As I understand it, or as it's said to be: points have zero extension. So, no amount of points, not even an infinity of them could ever have extension. But, it should make sense for a line to be composed of entities with infinitesimal extension as you say. I have seen the term linelet used before for these entities.

Charles Sanders Peirce said in 1903, ”Now if we are to accept the common idea of continuity […] we must either say that a continuous line contains no points or […] that the principle of excluded middle does not hold of these points. The principle of excluded middle applies only to an individual […] but places being mere possibilities without actual existence are not individuals.”
> GMOs aren't bad in principle, but they are risky

Yeah, but how can someone praise the legalization of marijuana and the prohibition of GMO at the same time? GMO and marijuana are not always bad, but it's important to let people make their own decisions about them. It's like he doesn't even know why he's pro-marijuana legalization, isn't it about individual freedom to put what you want in your body? Thought so. Also, the free laptops for all policy has been tried elsewhere and has always been a big and costly failure.
The 10 most influential Internet freedom activists of 2013
Project page: https://github.com/under-os/under-os
I don't really get the canonisation.

I'm very happy the the Gates' foundation is doing good work. You'd be a fool to say that it wasn't. However, I don't believe that the tech industry should be proud as a result, nor do I think that there is a particular difference between the foundation and some other charities, nor do I understand the obvious astroturfing.

I especially don't think that the act of charity somehow excuses the dodgy business practices or Microsoft or the long-term damage done to the tech industry.

So we should be grateful that the Gates' money is being used to positive ends. But that certainly doesn't make Bill a saint, and I suspect that this hyperbole and short-term memory-ism can fuel the backlash.
Depends on what you mean by religious. Most Uruguayans are from Catholic backgrounds but they (at least the ones in Montevideo) behave in a secular way: No church on Sunday, and instead of having Carnival followed by Lent like all the other Latin American countries, they have Carnival that lasts for 40 days.
On the other hand, I often find that my reading position is reset, when I open Safari on my iPad, so the chance of me finishing a long-form article in Safari is not that great.

Slate/Salon tend to put something like 100 words on a page, and NYT also have way too few words on a page. New York Magazine and the New Yorker tend to strike a decent balance, as I seem to recall.
Dude, wtf. How about a private juvenile detention centers ran by a company with a history of child abuse in those prisons? At least more due diligence?