skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And politics. It's happening right now.

There is currently a bit of a debate in Canada as to whether we should be joining the US and its allies in fighting the Islamic State, and all three of these are being heavily deployed by those in favour:

1) we must act now!
2) experts agree!
3) every decent person agrees IS must be stopped!

There hasn't been any deployment of physically attractive accomplices, although I guess that's pretty much what the Liberal's use of Justin Trudeau in opposition amounts to.

The difficulty is that none of these are actual arguments in favour of the proposed strategy. I am generally opposed to military intervention--because it rarely works and it kills people and costs enormous amounts of money and rarely works--but can see there may be a case to be made here. Unfortunately, by using what are widely recognized as scammer's tactics, the government has alienated itself from any evidence-based support (this would not be a first, for this government nor any of its predecessors.)

It would be lovely to see the actual merits of the mission debated, but it is clear that both the opposition and the government are interested only in deploying scammer's tactics in support of their favoured side.
Can someone tell us the importance of this discovery?
I've talked about, in person, the contents of K&R with people who were learning C; why did they choose to present things in that order? What kinds of practical aspects of the language are omitted? et cetera.

I guess it depends on your friends, but I'll support the parent's case of some of those being great in-person discussion books, especially Knuth. And lots of great math books. Knuth's little "romance novel", Surreal Numbers, is a great example of a highly discussable math book.
Also interesting that these posts are coming at a time when Bitcoin's value has dipped to its lowest level in recent months.
You did miss one fun rabbit hole with printf in glibc:

Search for register_printf_function, and realize that printf is now a function that can have whatever side-effects you like (which really sucks for optimization around logging code)
The core reason was the community
If you are in a customer-facing role or in constant conversation with customers there should be no issue with you tacking-on a question or two related to potential enhancements. You have plausible deniability, and you also have the option at any stage of not running with this yourself and actually doing it via the company (which is what your employer is most likely expecting).

One guy in a previous team of mine brazenly and proficiently used Socratic Method on the phone with clients to direct the conversation, getting clients to come up with answers to the questions he was looking to answer. This was genius not only because he covertly gauged market interest but also because having the client come up with the answer themselves makes them more inclined to buy.

It's a massive grey area and you have a lot of scope as long as no-one can pin anything on you (and as you mention, you want to avoid coming across as dishonest).

Regarding being honest and laying it all out on the table, I strongly advise against this route. Nothing good will come of it.
I took computer science and math courses at Michigan State myself for my Ph.D., and taught computer science there.

While the basic structure (lecture + exercises) is what you'll get in most countries (part of the point of my post was to dispute the OP's claim that there was little graded homework in Germany and no tutoring), I'd be surprised if your typical experience included, e.g., that homework didn't contribute to your final grade, was routinely done in groups (I've seen it happen at MSU, but it wasn't typical), or that your grade depended only on a single exam. In fact, looking at the syllabus for ME 201 [1], it's pretty obviously not the case in general.

To illustrate one of the major differences, consider that there really is no such think as cheating on homework at German universities. If you outright copy another student's work, the TA will generally just ask you to form a group to avoid grading the same solutions twice. Copying is considered stupid, because doing the homework yourself (ideally in a group) is important in order to be prepared for the exam, but it's generally allowed (again, exceptions exist). There are no complicated rules on when and how it's allowed to collaborate on homework [2] because the norm is that students are supposed to collaborate on homework (which has multiple reasons: working in groups is to be encouraged, it requires fewer TA hours and is thus cheaper, doesn't require anti-cheating technology, etc.) [3].

[1] http://www.egr.msu.edu/classes/me201/somerton/syllabus.pdf

[2] https://www.msu.edu/unit/ombud/academic-integrity/Collaborat...

[3] Obviously, cheating on exams or plagiarizing work for a thesis is a totally different story and will get you penalized or expelled.
Ask HN: Where to find great web developers
We are having an incredibly tough time finding developers with experience developing for the web. There are a plethora of junior people, but we haven't been able to find engineers who care deeply about making great websites.

Any ideas, or anyone who is interested in doing this on a contract basis?

I am (pretty) confident it isn't us as we've been able to find amazing mobile developers, backend, devops, and even data focussed developers.
Interesting to see VCs like Chris Dixon desperately pumping Bitcoin in a last ditch effort to wipe the egg off their faces.
OnionTip.com is a simpler way of incentivizing people to run Tor nodes by using Bitcoin.

It may be too simple though, since the amount donated in laughably low compared to the work done by the nodes.

Torcoin and similar solutions may be a better solution due to that issue.
Recipe in Java
Yeah, and the upcoming UI looks fantastic too:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UISZbGXP74
How about a browser plugin that lets you pay a few cents here and there to hide ads? You could whitelist the sites you care about (no need to pay off every random blog), and give them a sort of "budget" (unknown to the site). Then each time you view a page on cnn.com or whatever, your browser could toss a few Satoshis over to them in exchange for receiving a page with ads completely removed.

Sort of like the NY Times paywall we all know and love/hate, but easier to deploy for less gigantic sites with less staff, and more voluntary (users who don't pay would just see ads as they do now).
Great Barrier Reef coral losing strength
cool, my slight modification: http://maxbittker.github.io/Mojulo/#eCAqIHkgKiAoc2luKCh4K3Rp...
It sounds like your parent is pro-drug-war.

"We tried so hard to stamp it out, and now we are just going belly-up and some adman is trying to sell it to your grandma"
The only thing that made me weary here was having a baby on immunosuppressants, and the danger that could present for the fetus. Anyone knows if this can affect the baby on the long term (associated with premature birth)?
i would start on my project and i would convert to a 1099 contractor and run it through your startup's paper (LLC or S-Corp). your current employer can be your first customer.

in fact that's exactly what we did and it worked fine. you might even end up getting a raise. i know one thing for damn sure though: there's no way in hell a full time job and a making progress on startup are compatible. it's just too much work. if someone came to me for advice or money and they wanted to do this, i'd laugh in their face, in the nicest way possible. it's a pipe dream. the only cases i've heard of in which this was possible are jobs in dysfunctional orgs where you don't actually have to do any work - which are out there, so if you've got one of those, maybe you've got a shot.

this path requires you to quit. it's a way of solving the problem you describe through another mechanism. as an added bonus, it protects you legally in a number of ways. at the cost of some management overhead, but if you can't deal with management overhead, just forget about the idea of running a business.

there's two ways of doing this:

1. notifying your boss that you will quit, and that they can retain you as a contractor for $x/hr, or

2. just quitting, and then giving them the option.

either way, you don't ask permission in a situation like this. you have to do it for reals.

the most important thing in starting a business is getting into the mindset that you are in this for yourself, on your own, and this is for real, no bullshit. having a full time gig is extremely detrimental to adopting that mindset. most startups die because never being truly started. they just fizzle out with nary a whimper.

also, look at it like a test - if you can't even accomplish this minor task in the execution of your world changing startup, you probably don't have what it takes to do the next step either. this convert-to-contractor trick is extremely common and i've seen it done 3 or 4 times myself. if you are valuable, the current organization is going to want to retain you as long as possible and you can dictate terms to a certain degree.
How to be a part of Silicon valley startup ecosystem?
Let me give an into about myself first. I worked for 2Yrs in an MNC and started a startup one year back in my town Kochi, India. We started with a product for indian commodity market which got an award from govt of India, It was an OpenData project. We just did it as a hobby project, to learn how to do things, We didn't have a monetization plan for that, It was later when we got a call from WORLDBANK, saying that they would be interested in funding us if we are going ahead with OpenData or Govt related projects, But we turned them down as we didn't plan to continue with OpenData projects.
We where bootstrapped by then, so we started with some other product and earned a revenue of around 75k in 8 months. We had a dream to come to silicon valley. As we got some money, we thought to come here, applied for TCDisrupt and came down.

Now I'm here at SF for 2 months. I met many people, including some YC alumni. I can feel the ecosystem and the energy spread out here. The last two weeks which made a huge difference in my life, I learned much more than that I did in my last one year. I badly want to be a part of this ecosystem NOW, and build something exiting. I have a great team of 4 members, I believe this ecosystem can do a lot for us to build a great product. Now, I want to take my team here. I think we can do things in a month which we do in India with one year time

I am looking for some options for that. There are some issues including VISA, funding etc (none of us have an immigrant visa, in B1 now)

I think, if we don't end up in paying for visa, we can manage some of our early days expense here with the revenue we have now. I asked for help/suggestion from many people I met here most of their suggestion is to raise funding here or to get into some accelerators like YC etc. Am trying all those, didn't get a string to hang on yet

I don't think I am the first person who faced this issue. I would appreciate your suggestions and comments regarding the same
I'll say, somebody is a little confused.

I still say, they don't understand varargs, don't understand the difference between stdio and write(), and most importantly, they are not curious enough to read documentation and make smart guesses. And I am saying, the bullshit obfuscation involved in this article, sharing so many meaningless implementation details about a very specific libc, will not help answer this question or gain insight more than RTFMing and being curious about the world would.

So... If you are even asking questions like... "Does printf use assembly?" I'd argue you are not thinking it through. You need to get yourself to a place where you can answer that yourself. It will be a very obvious answer when you do. Writing frivolous blog posts is not the way to get there.
Micro-gambling
Peer-2-peer gambling
Webcams

The real wonder is why haven't any of the major players in these areas adopted it in any way. Curiously it is the payment provider industry who has paid it some attention, rather than any of these.

Perhaps the traceable nature of bitcoin makes it unappealing for these use cases. In the early days of bitcoin where it was relatively easy to get anonymous bitcoins (by paying cash through unscrupulous dealers not paying attention to KYC rules), these would have made great use cases for bitcoin.

Now however, I feel like bitcoin doesn't provide relative anonymity over more traditional methods of payment.

I think there could still be a case for a new mail-like protocol that combines email and cryptocurrency for an email system which is both encrypted by default but also everyone sets a payment level for mail to reach them.

So I say "My Address is <bitcoin address? mail address?>, pay at least 0.001 bitcoins to get mail through".

This system:

*Puts a direct cost on spam (therefore massively reducing it)
*ensures everyone owns private keys (so mail can be encrypted simply by knowing their address)

Two fantastic features.

Sadly it won't happen, mail is too entrenched.
Even if the animal is sentinel and can feel pain, what's the problem of killing and eating them?
The reason certain behaviours are considered moral/ ethical and are set as a standard is to make sure we (human) can have a reasonable life among one another, and not because the behaviour itself is intrinsically good. A lot of the time, something is immoral because it leads us into a rat race with no winner.

I think the main point I'm trying to make is that I'd love to see a concrete philosophical explanation on many of vegan-related stuffs. But instead, most of the time it's just pseudoscience and empty big words :(.
The page has conflicting memory statistics. Near the top,
each of the 6400 nodes is said to have 250GB of memory, while at the bottom, each node is said to have 32GB of memory.
You can probably compile it, you just need LLVM, and to compile "Copper" if I had to guess, then the source.
Why Full-Time Working Women Earn $320,000 Less Than Men Over a Lifetime
If you're referring to the recent price drop - you should learn about what causes price fluctuation in Bitcoin. It's actually largely due to the fact that Bitcoin is actually rapidly becoming USED rather than HELD which causes downward pressure on it. This causes miners to become un-profitable btw which will eventually cause upward pressure on the price (but that problem is worrying as it's getting really expensive to produce BTC - just a side note).

But while the price dropping is somewhat concerning, it is extraordinarily clear to anyone paying attention that BTC and crypto generally is growing in utility rapidly.

For context: I'm a fairly neutral observer who does not own Bitcoin. I do have USD on the Ripple ledger.
And authors would be willing to pay for banner ads or sponsored recommendations on the site.
Just noting that the article is not the source of the bullshit obfuscation, nor does it condone it. I'm part of the Red project.

http://www.red-lang.org/p/contributions.html

We're trying to undo this stuff. I was just answering a question.
Startup spams students under guise of internship offer
This is blatant abuse of Mario, their copyrighted assets, etc. I approve of it being reported to NOA. Additionally, who exactly is going to play this?

It doesn't use Mario in any meaningful way to help teach anything.

Mario teaches typing; that was cool. That was also approved and endorsed by Nintendo.

Get a life and create your own game instead of ripping off others.

This may seem harsh, but such blatant abuse of law does not belong on github nor on hacker news. Not only that, I'd be willing to bet this is a fork of the Mario games that were long ago taken off the web for similarly illegality.
I'm not saying that the company is right in taking any work you do outside of office hours (I think that's total crap)

Oracle can't take your cupcake business, but:

- They pay for your mind. That's why the agreement you agree to says, "We own what your mind produces". That's why they hired you.

- In working for them, you get access to tools, knowledge, and experience you wouldn't have otherwise. If you get some great inspiration while talking to the company's client, you're hardly a lone actor.

I don't love it either, but I understand the reasons, and for me it all comes down to how it is enforced. If you develop a web page under Oracle, they shouldn't have rights to that. If you develop an enterprise database that targets Oracle's market segment...
That depends on the agreement. Some claim rights over everything, others only over things related to the company's business, or to what you personally work on. Also, various states limit such things, and if the employer overreached it could be unenforceable. I don't think it's bad faith to ignore a contract that the state says is too unfair to enforce.

My suggestion: read the contract carefully, make a list of specific questions, and spend an hour talking with a lawyer.
There's some crazy, crazy infrastructure growth going on with BTC, Ripple, and Stellar. It's thrilling to see what is just becoming possible.
Livebirth after uterus transplantation [pdf]
Any other C library is more readable than glibc. Even on Linux, the Musl C library is far far far more readable.

The OpenBSD C library is the one I usually look at when I want to understand how a specific function works. It doesn't have insane optimizations or bloat like glibc, but it's clean and portable.
Thank you for posting this. I use Light Table on a daily basis, but don't participate in the community. This is good motivation for me to get more involved. If you have any questions here feel free to ask!
Glibc may have register_printf_function, but GCC does not have register_printf_attribute, so this is not as practical as it could be. That is:

__attribute__ ((format (printf, 1, 2)))

attaches to a function declaration to indicate that the function works like printf, so GCC can warn if a (compile time) format string does not match the variadic arguments. But there seems to be no way to extend this attribute, nor to make entirely new attributes in the same spirit.

So you can register new format specifiers for printf, but it seems you'll then have to disable warnings about bad format specifiers during compilation. Those warnings have very few false positives and catch real bugs in real code.
I've asked about the concept here as well:
http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=109979
I suggested a two designs and the one I mentioned on hn has an ascii drawing about halfway down the page.
Bitcoin can't handle micropayments. The block chain is limited to about 7 transactions per second, and every node has a full copy of the block chain, so traffic goes up roughly as the square of usage. There's a minimum fee for each transaction (if you want it confirmed in any reasonable length of time) and it's currently about $0.30. That's more than many merchants pay to process a credit card transaction.

Nor can Bitcoin handle fast payments. It takes about an hour to get solid confirmation of a transaction, by which time the price of Bitcoins may have changed substantially. If you're selling anything that actually costs you money, you have to wait for some confirmations. One gambling site tried accepting unconfirmed transactions. People would bet, then, if they lost, double-spend to kill the payment.

A distributed digital currency without these problems is technically possible. That may be the currency that actually becomes useful for micropayments. Meanwhile, Bitcoin for vending machines, music tracks, and parking meters isn't going to happen.
Just wanted to mention, that gallery link is barely noticeable because of the blue color. I didn't notice it on multiple visits till you mentioned there was a gallery.

Changing the link color should fix it.
You should try 1Password: https://agilebits.com/onepassword

It's the most recommended password manager on Hacker News.
How to Get More Likes on Your Instagram Photos
If you confined the search to newspapers, you could construct a live list of article availability vs territory for all the major search engines. I'm actually quite surprised that there isn't one already.
On a day-to-day practical level, very little, but I suspect it will give us a lot of insight into tectonic plates and ocean current systems, so maybe better weather predictions.
> "when will we ever use this stuff in the real world."

That can be tough to see, even when
there is a lot of value in the real world.

Some of what some such math has going for it is
being part of a rock solid directed acyclic graph
of theorems and proofs that are about the highest
quality thinking. e.g., little risk of being wrong, on the planet.

Next, much of the math is both quite abstract and
general, both so much so that in principle, and
sometimes in practice, a lot of applications are
possible.

Next, some of the intention is to prepare for the
future, and, since that future is not here yet,
now we have to guess at what the most solid tools
will be.

> I don't know how an intelligent person can argue in good faith that fiction is not only meritless but basically useless.

That claim is stronger than I made, but, still,
my main criticism is that, according to 20th century
standards of intellectual safety and efficacy,
fictional literature looks poor in comparison,
in particular, because it (1) does not make
clear just what it is claiming to be true and
(2) fails to give solid evidence for much
in such claims. So, as information or knowledge
we don't much know what we have.

To be a little nicer to fictional literature, at times
it can describe situations in human experience,
say, suffering. But, for one, the experiences, e.g.,
the suffering, are not given a solid description, that is,
are not documented with good facts and references. E.g., we have famous fictional literature about the French Revolution, but from all that literature I read, and, indeed, the history courses, it was never explained that due to The Little Ice Age there had just been three years of crop failures so that many peasants were starving. Should have been mentioned. For
another, solid solutions are rarely even considered, much less often presented. So, such fictional literature can
make a reader feel some pains but be helpless at
alleviating the pains -- incompetent.

I said long ago in high school, if a writer of
fictional literature actually has something
important to say, then they should write an
essay.
First and foremost, reconsider signing any of these assignment agreements ever. If you're talented and the company wants you, you have plenty of room to negotiate. And since this isn't a compensation or revenue impacting deal point you'll should find leeway. If they say its our way or nothing, its some quick insight into the organizational structure and culture. Consider if you wish to aid and abet that organization and management.

It should be a point of personal principal to never sign an NDA or an assignment agreement or even employment agreement. Of course the any of these that come with 9 figure checks attached are worth thinking about. If you're trustable and upstanding with who you're working for and they are with you, that will be enough.
Would this still be the case if monkey studies showed the treatment to be worthless? It's one thing to give someone a treatment that is believed to be effective that carries a 1% chance of HIV infection. It's completely another thing to use a treatment that has had no controlled human studies against Ebola and the one controlled monkey study didn't show any benefit against Ebola, and carries a 1% chance of HIV infection.

Now, as mentioned in the article, the blood will be screened for a variety of pathogens, including HIV, so the risk of HIV infection should be very low.
After reading these lame, generic examples, does anybody on HN have any good ideas for bitcoin-based projects?
Hypnotic Effects of Snapchat Stories
red looks awesome, and has come a lot further than I expected! (i peeked at it a few years ago and there didn't seem to be much). I love that small executable sizes are an explicit design goal.