skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well you can sidestep the issue slightly. Ask what do they need the money for? If they are hungry buy them a meal at a local cafe then buy some dry food (like crackers), canned meat such as spam that can be kept in a tin till needed and UHT Milk (milk in a cartoon that doesn't need to be refrigerated till opened. Don't forget some bottle water, also low alcoholic beer may be a subtle alternative if they don't have access to a clean drinking water supply within reason (In ye olde days, drinking beer was common during the day as drinking water was often polluted) [1]. Also vitamins and supplements too.

If they need money for the Bus or Train to get home, then buy it for them. Get a taxi (you hail/pick it not them) to the train or bus station (don't walk there in case its a setup and you get robbed on the way and don't use your own car)

However, everyone has a story. For every person who is desperate and needs money, they are others who abuse peoples kind genorisity. They may use the money to buy Crack or Heroin or they made need it to buy their baby some food. You simply don't know.

[1] http://www.healthguidance.org/entry/14208/1/The-History-of-B...
European Court of Justice will decide over Facebook/PRISM
Giving money enforces and condones the behaviour of begging. I'm sure people's intentions are good, but by giving money directly you're keeping them on the streets.
I live in Boston (and occasionally NYC) and I rarely give money. My grandfather taught me to rarely/never give money, but always buy any person a meal that asks for it. And I've done so on several occasions; taken someone to a Subway or whatever is nearby and bought them food; or to a 7/11 where they could purchase whatever food/toiletries they needed. Especially in the winter around here, being outside like that all day is brutal.

I have had a few occasions where people ask for money for food, and I tell them I'll just buy them food and they refuse. But I've had many more times where they are excited about it. Generally they ask for very little, sometimes just a cup of coffee and a bagel.
What about using Redis as a celery backend ? Redis has a pub sub mechanism which seems quite reliable, so no need to poll.
I don't know about the person you're responding to but I don't take myself to live in the streets. I don't even go into my town most months and when I do it's to go to a shop and then go straight home. Pretty much everything I want I order off the net, or drive to a supermarket which is massively outside of town.

I don't work on the streets either, I work in an office or at home.

The streets are just the transport to and from places I actually work and live. They're not somewhere I do anything other than pass through.
I try to keep it simple - with an Excel sheet.
Look impressive, but 'GPS'? That'll be handy for google searches.
Better to help those who don't deserve it than to neglect those who do.
Well, consider the example of Carrier IQ.

The Carrier IQ software was installed on some Android phones, some iPhones and some Blackberry devices: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/9222319/AT_T_Sp...

Where was Carrier IQ found first? Why?
Event sourcing on Rails with RabbitMQ
If you mean "how can you know you can trust the charities on GiveWell", the whole point of GiveWell is to rank charities by how effectively they use their donations to help people.

If you mean "how do you know you can trust GiveWell", I guess you don't.
I always try to put my personal assumptions aside and buy the person a meal - in the UK a lot of convenience stores have "meal deals" on that cost around £3 for sandwiches, a side and a drink. I usually go with that without asking them first, and then listen if they want to talk.

I think the worst thing about being in their situation would be that most people wouldn't listen, and sometimes that can be just enough to get you through the day.
Yeps, the repetition over this is what led me not to give money but instead helping them in this other way.

Also, trust your instincts.
Good idea. What do you think I can do when I'm on a train and there is nothing I can do but to give money? That where I get to hear most of the touchy stories.
High Tech India [Computer Chronicles] [1989]
I think that was more of a discovery than an invention
There is a small "Close this and read quora" button in that popup in the lower right part.
That's a good tip. Thanks!
What! It isn't your civic duty t give random strangers money.
There are probably charities that provide services like employment advice/assistant in your area, or food parcels or the like. They might accept donations - it's worth checking and harder for the individuals to abuse if they are lying.
I don't think WAFs are worth the maintenance headache. I help manage a pentesting firm. Once in a blue moon, we'll get a target with a WAF installed that can't be disabled for the test, and it's never more than a speed-bump. Generally: I wouldn't bother.

If you're going to do something WAF-y, my recommendation would be modsecurity.
How will not giving money encourage them to get off the streets? It's not like the proportion of beggars who are in it for the money is particularly high...
Most homelessness charities in the UK subscribe to the view that you are not helping by giving money to beggars. There's even an extensive campaign called Killing with Kindness

http://www.thamesreach.org.uk/news-and-views/campaigns/givin...

As someone who used to work in this sector, I no longer give money to beggars. Support the charities instead.
Redis is still not an AMQP, but yes Redis's Pub/Sub works quite nicely. Out of all the brokers celery supports I'd recommend only RabbitMQ and Redis to people.
As I commented earlier, I ALWAYS give and I NEVER judge. I do this because I'm a Latter-Day Saint[1] and God explicitly spells out in the Book of Mormon[2] how we should respond in such a situation:

Succor those that stand in need of your succor; ye will administer of your substance unto him that standeth in need; and ye will not suffer that the beggar putteth up his petition to you in vain, and turn him out to perish.

Perhaps thou shalt say: The man has brought upon himself his misery; therefore I will stay my hand, and will not give unto him of my food, nor impart unto him of my substance that he may not suffer, for his punishments are just—

But I say unto you, O man, whosoever doeth this the same hath great cause to repent; and except he repenteth of that which he hath done he perisheth forever, and hath no interest in the kingdom of God.

For behold, are we not all beggars? Do we not all depend upon the same Being, even God, for all the substance which we have, for both food and raiment, and for gold, and for silver, and for all the riches which we have of every kind?

Book of Mormon, Mosiah 4: 16-19

[1] http://www.mormon.org.uk/

[2] https://www.lds.org/scriptures/bofm?lang=eng
Sequoia Capital Teardown
I don't really care what you think. Also, like most of the people that help, I do that to help people, not to brag about helping.
Ask HN: State of the art mobile messenger (end to end encryption)
Which mobile messenger is currently considered secure? I know of two messenger apps: Threema, which is not open source and telegram, which has its own crypographic routines, which have been cracked at least once (as far as I understand it). Is there any recommendation (please include a link/source).
I think buying food in lieu of giving money ignores the fact that money is fairly fungible. A dollar saved on food expenses is a dollar that can be spent on the vices that the donor is trying to prevent.

As for my answer to the question, I try to limit my charitable contributions to charities praised for efficiency and effectiveness on the various watchdog sites, but I usually end up cracking and giving in person as well.

On a related note, writing my post reminded me of an old LessWrong post [1] I saw.

[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/6z/purchase_fuzzies_and_utilons_sepa...
I wonder if this will eventually lead to google making use of a decentralized federated search strategy where they provide the technology to everyone who wants their site to be findable by means of google, but do not actually produce the results themselves. From a technological pov that would certainly be far more challenging than their current system, but it might make them less of a target legally.
Containers Vs. Virtual Machines is a Fake Conflict
Yes, how could doxxing the judge possibly backfire? /s
The site looks good, I'm an AniDB.net user at the moment, but I could dig a UI that's a little more pleasing.

I'm a bit confused about your anime titles though, why is Fullmetal Alchemist in english, while Kara no Kyoukai is in romanised Japanese? Do you have a system that allows you to give preference to the title languages like AniDB does?

I also like how AniDB makes fansubs discoverable by showing who has subbed what and has ratings for the translations. Are you planning on integrating information about the fansub community? In my opinion it's a core feature of AniDB.
It's not my duty but helping someone in need, someone who asks you for help, is our duty. Just like you help a tourist. You help because you can.
Try spending a little time with them, chat about their life, their problems. Try to find a solution to get them out of beggary. Then if you want either buy them something useful or give them money or do neither ! Whatever you do just don't forget to give them a hug ! It will make both of you amazingly happy :D
Not the author of the parent comment but it's quite common here in Austria for beggars to arrive in busses, sprawl out in the morning, hit the "begging" hotspots / touristy areas and then drive back in the evening while giving a chunk of their earnings to their "boss".

Couldn't really find great english articles about this phenomenon so I don't know how reliable these sources are, the local media usually calls it "begging mafia" or "organised begging":

- A paper dealing with this topic: http://webs.schule.at/website/Texte_online/Organized_Begging...

- http://www.neurope.eu/article/slovak-clans-control-organised...

- http://www.viennareview.net/news/austria/end-station-for-u-b...

- http://viennatimes.at/news/General_News/2010-09-06/25437/Beg...
I thoroughly enjoyed his creative symbolism for Caps Lock.
Compare cost of living between 2 cities
Everyone has a story. It might be you another time so be respectful but if required be polite but firm and refuse. If its a train they will move on to the next person/carriage. If they are telling you a story, then take the lead and ask them questions. Such as they want to go home, well tell me about home. Your parents, your brothers or sisters. The cute girl in the coffee shop who you went to school with. Tell me about them. Look for consistency in the story but you have to use your gut.

In my opinion, you are better off buying them the meal and food or the ticket yourself at the next stop. Never give cash.
I established a formal policy of not doing business with strangers in public areas - and panhandling is definitely a business. It just happens to be one that works by creating and subsequently monetizing guilt. An adept panhandler will combine the skills of a con artist, a mugger and a thief, so that you are first frightened and thrown off balance by their aggression, then guilted by their pitch, and finally robbed by their sleight of hand.

When panhandlers or other street people behave more aggressively I simply run away like a scared animal. They do not have a moral right to touch or yell at me, but neither do I have the right to use violence against them for that.

The good you need to do to solve "the problem" of homelessness and poverty involves gradual systemic change - handing out cash to one person at one time is going to maintain the status quo. You have no way to know whose story is a truthful one when you are so suddenly confronted by it - it is like making a blind investment. Only invest if you force them to commit time to you. If they refuse they are up to no good and you should run away.
Wouldn't confirmation and welcome emails fall under "implied consent"?
http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/com500/infograph3.htm

Seems like update emails might too, depending on the circumstances.
I'm sorry for your loss (your freewill & freedom I mean)
Like I say, I'm not accusing you personally of anything!

And I agree with you completely - most people that help, do that because they think that helping people is the right thing to do.

I'm saying that there are a whole other (much larger) class of people who actually don't help at all, but say that they do (to their friends, on HN etc) because they don't want to be thought of as miserly.

Just look at the comments on this thread. At the moment, by far the largest number are saying that they don't give money, but that they buy food or other goods instead. If that were true, I would expect to have seen someone give a homeless person food at least once in my life, or offer to take them somewhere they could buy food, or just stop to talk to them. As it is, I've seen zero people give food, maybe a few hundred people give money, and hundreds of thousands do nothing.
Give the money to a charity that will be able to aggregate it, and use it better - as they understand the problem more fully.

Single datapoint: there is a beggar near my house who people give money to. He's been there for /years/. Is his problem being solved? I presume not.
Yeah, I've been using redis with celery in production to perform lots of network io related tasks on a low end machine because

a > Redis uses less memory

b > Redis is easier to setup
Yes, I live in Paris and it said beggars can make up to 30€ a day on certain locations. Moreover they have access to bare necessities like food, clothes, free street clinics and sheltering during winter. Some beggars aren't homeless either.

Every cent given to street beggars goes for their comfort, not their survival. I'm not implying that is a bad thing, just don't think you've saved a person by giving them some quids.
'Model'? So are they curing cancer by simulations now?
Let's please not invite drama onto HN.

If you have a story to submit about how a magazine chose to report on a subject or how that subject responded, submit it. It might still be too superficially dramatic for HN, and it might get buried or flagged off the site. But it might not, and if you really believe the story has substance, there's not much harm in a good-faith submission.

This, on the other hand, is merely a solicitation of opinions --- not even informed opinions --- about interpersonal drama unrelated to HN.

I flagged it and, for my part, would be thankful if people didn't post stuff like this to HN.
Nimbus Note launched client for Windows with immport from Springpad.
The long term solution (getting someone off the streets) is irrelevant for most homeless people. They're homeless now. What might be done to fix their situation in the future isn't something they spend much time thinking about. Unless you have a way to get someone of the streets right there and then, giving them money is by far the best thing you can do.
> Laser is line of sight, limiting your range.

Yes, with current equipment it limits your range to somewhere beyond the orbit of the moon. Yes, we can now keep a laser and a receiver tracked on each other from 300000km away.

> And nature has a great way of jamming lasers, called clouds.

There are wavelengths that are not hampered much by clouds.

> If you were able to get a decently powered laser in a satellite

We can.

> it wouldn't be able to control too many aircraft unless it looked like a porcupine.

... but this is a problem, you'd basically be limited in total bandwidth by count of satellites. Meaning you either need to launch a lot of them, or reduce bandwidth per drone.
For a 'hard to fill' role 20-30% first year salary isn't unheard of at all
Good point. Why? Because I was poor too a long time ago. Neither I or my family begged for money, but worked really hard to get it. I sympathize, I guess. No one knows how it feels to grow in a family with low resources. It goes unnoticed.
Sharp is a pretty big Japanese company. They rarely make own-brand consumer stuff for markets outside Japan though, which is why you haven't heard of them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_Corporation
That's a pretty fun project, but it's a bit sad that the electronics were lifted form an existing keyboard.

Are mindstorms flexible enough to emulate USB HID?

edit: it looks like mindstorm EV3 is bluetooth-enabled. I don't know the details, but it might be possible to get it bound as a bluetooth keyboard, and thus to have a fully functional "pure-lego"[0] bluetooth keyboard.

[0] the mindstorm EV3 brick runs a Linux distro on a 300MHz ARM9 core with 64MB RAM and 16MB flash (plus a SDHC slot). Whether this remains "pure lego" may be up to debate.
Grid Style Sheets for Constraint-based Layouts
With container solutions like Docker and prebuilt images the setup part is kinda eliminated. Although I don't remember having any special configuration issues with RabbitMQ as well, it just works TM. That's always nice right? :)
you are paying BOTH - another reason this is an issue.

expats pay tax on full amount to host country, plus tax on amount over $92k to US. So the money over $92K is double taxed - making it "pointless" (not completely, obviously) to earn that extra
"You must sign in to read all of Quora." ... nope!
The point of GiveWell is that they thoroughly investigate the results of the charity, and recommend places that are highly effective for your marginal dollar.

Maybe they don't succeed in their mission, and they are the first to point out their limitations.
Not all drones are small. I had the chance to get a glimpse of an RQ-4 Global Hawk being refurbished for a museum recently. The thing's practically a full size plane.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ve69jkhqxtpppv0/IMG_0608.JPG

That's with the 130ft wings removed.
So taking the advice or instruction from someone smarter than you is a loss of personal freedom? Can you explain?
Yeah, I lost all interest in the story after seeing this.
While I share your skepticism regarding the numbers quoted by the original article, a few remarks about the cosmic muons:

I think you are overestimating the cosmic muon flux quite a bit, see the particle data book for the discussion of cosmic muons.

http://pdg.lbl.gov/2012/reviews/rpp2012-rev-cosmic-rays.pdf (page 5)

Also ionization loss by fast muons is pretty low, it's in the "minimum ionizing particle" regime, and most cosmic muons we see "down here" are in the >1GeV/c area.

http://pdg.lbl.gov/2013/reviews/rpp2012-rev-passage-particle... (page 4 is muons on Copper)

But again, I think your doubts about the numbers is certainly warranted. With a experimental setup needing such a long exposure time to yield statistically usable numbers, I think one cannot really prove a lot. Certainly a detector more suitable to the task of counting radioactive decay, such as a calibrated large-volume geiger counter, would be better. At least one should run both setups in parallel for an extended period of time to be able to do cross-corralations.
The 1.0 to 5.0 system doesn't exist any more. What is in the OP's blog post is how it's done as of 2014. (Very recent Xoogler here).
Monitor and Test Your Students With Google Docs
You are leaving implicit a very important question: What are your goals?

Otherwise, give them money if you want to. Don't give them money if you don't want to.
Is getting people off the street and helping them lead productive lives not the aim of many charities? I prefer to give to them (and for them to use their judgement) than whoever I randomly find on the street.
How can we help these guys?
@tptacek (matassano) seems to like very much these guys[1].

[1] https://whispersystems.org/
TennisRecap – the concise tennis news you need
I'm part-way through building a plane at the moment, which will play host to a small quadcopter with its own video feed, so this story feels a lot like whats going on in my workshop. The intention is to build an automated system that will send the plane to a location, drop the quad, do a video survey, pick the quad back up, and fly back. This is purely for hobby purposes, as I am very interested in automatic flight systems, and while its too late for me to pursue a career in aerospace proper, its at least a means to fulfill my dreams of having such devices under my control.

I think that the next 5 or 10 years of innovation in aerospace is going to come from the RC/UAV hobbyists who are pushing the boundaries of drone technology. Already we are seeing in the RC world massive leaps in drone automation, which have immediate uses in the real world, and it doesn't look like its going to stop. There's not a day that goes by where someone hasn't released an innovative new aspect of drone technology - whether its flight, construction, recovery, or application.
Well, the problem here is that maybe you simply didn't notice. I have never noticed anyone buying goods for another people but I have seen a lot of people buying together, how can I be sure one of them were being helped by the other one?

When we are at a supermarket we don't usually notice anything beside our own grocery list...
Keep up the good work! Feedback:

- delete (document) doesn't seem to work

- change history would be good, potentially so I can revert a change if I change my mind later

- the app is clean, intuitive and responsive. I'd love to know a bit more about which JS framework you used, etc.
You'll have to decide what you should do for yourself. If you are philosophically inclined I recommend looking at Famine, Affluence, and Morality by Peter Singer not because it is right or wrong but because it may help clarify your own thoughts by laying out a systematic approach to reasoning about the issue.

http://www.utilitarianism.net/singer/by/1972----.htm

Singer is arguably the 'greatest' philosopher of the last fifty years [1]. Agree with him or not, he has thought deeply about the issue and his reasoning around it and expressed these thoughts within a framework of rule based utilitarian philosophy.

Singer's Ted talk on the subject:

http://www.ted.com/talks/peter_singer_the_why_and_how_of_eff...

Singer's homepage at Princeton, the link page includes links to most of his papers:

http://www.princeton.edu/~psinger/

[1] Not that I am interested in arguing. I only use the term to suggest that the list of candidates is not very long, at the moment. In fifty years who knows?
We have three title settings: English, Romaji and canonical. Canonical shows whichever title is more popularly used. Default setting is canonical.

We do not have plans to integrate information about fansub groups because of the types of relationships we're looking to have with larger presences in the industry. We will be adding links to legal websites like CR, Amazon, Funimation, etc though. Sorry!
You're misunderstanding me, I know closure is written in Java. But closure is not the slow part. I timed doing lein cljsbuild once and it takes like 22 seconds; that's not Closure. That's Clojure itself. ClojureScript would be much faster, it has virtually none of the slowness that JVM Clojure has.
You should only give them money if they are in front of YOUR home, so they are more likely to become a permanent fixture in YOUR life. I live in a tourist area which also has several well-run shelters, which are not a problem. The problems are the vagrants who will not accept rules and organized help (for whatever reason--I'm not addressing that). If YOU pay them to beg in MY neighborhood then you are paying them to stay right there and wait for more handouts, and they are a constant burden on the health, police, and social services system, to no avail. If you can't imagine encouraging them out in front of YOUR house, then don't do it in front of MY house. Volunteer for or donate to a relief organization, or take an individual into your home, if you really want to help.