skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Why work twice as hard when you only get 50% more money

1. Salary doesn't correlate to "hard work". It correlates to "bargaining position vs work undesirability". It means the responsibilities will either need to be separated into more jobs, or they'll need to compensate more if they can't decrease the job shittyness.

2. If you bring home 80k about 30k of that goes straight to living expenses. If you bring home 120k, only about 35k of that needs to go to living expenses, the rest is all disposable income. So you're working for about 80% more disposable income, not a flat 50% more money. The upper middle class has an issue realizing what the term "luxury" means.

3. While there are plenty of individuals who both have the choice between a 120k and 60k job and choose the 60k job for the better quality of life and subsidies they'll get, there is yet another subsection of the population who'll choose the 120k a year job for the somewhat extra disposable income. This is not a problem, companies aren't struggling to fill 120k jobs that much I'm pretty sure.
Even if they wanted to enforce it they'd have to prove it.

Otherwise patenting map reduce - which is practically one of the foundations of functional data processing - is down right silly
Agreed. It may be Off Topic, but it's incredibly important to shine a light on these things - unpleasant and uncomfortable as they may be. It's easy for us to look at history and marvel at the inhumanity that we're capable of, but Milgram's experiments (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment) showed that an individual's conscience is a reticent faculty, when isolated in the face of authority. It's imperative that we talk openly, and agree as a society what's allowed and what's simply unacceptable.
A racket is an illegal business operation. Extortion is coercing money out of a party under threat of blackmail (which yelp is doing), violence or some other negative action done on the extorted.
I'd second this, I personally don't hesitate flagging something I think is inappropriate. I've been around HN for a fair while, and lurked a lot in the beginning too, so I will often flag an article that may have been appropriate sans sensationalism.
A brief history of eye-tracking
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This is like saying that we should get rid of TCP because all we use is HTTP. Which, if it even made sense, would be a pretty bad idea.

What exactly is this guy arguing for? How is the OS supposed to "make higher-level APIs like these"? It seems like he hasn't completely thought through his suggestion: he's saying that we should move the filesystem into the OS and then hide it. Ok that's probably fine if you're not doing anything serious and all you need are ints and dicts. But what about a database? The only way the OS can provide a database abstraction is by taking over database functionality from applications.

And I'm pretty sure that exactly not what we want, and why the original designers decided to go with flat byte streams rather than structured data on disk. Yes, maybe you don't work at the level of abstraction of files and bit streams. But someone has to! The author is suggesting making that impossible except inside the OS...?

I think instead of "Death to Filesystems", the author should have made the claim that we should produce and standardize an abstraction level above the FS, and then everyone should start using it (which is a valid and very justifiable suggestion). As is, this post has come off as unreasoned.
I developed something pretty similar to this. Check it out at http://barsannapolis.com/.
> It's worse with children though because it is hard for them to "undo" their excessive ambition as adults.

I don't agree with your assertion. Do you have any per reviewed studies to back up your assertion?
The only thing that consistently makes people happy is dopamine. People get that from a lot of things. Some people even get it from helping other people, rather than ruling them. Hell, some people get it from having a lower status than other people (and a ball gag).
my username is displayed as the owner. I've looked at the access, error and secure logs and the only thing I see that looks odd is a GET request that contains a short (40 or 50 characters total) string of hex like \xc3\x83\etc, etc. But that request indicate it comes from msnbot. Could that be the culprit and they faked the user agent?
The primary barrier for me is that every time I look at Scala, I think that this must be what a Perl and Java love child would look like. Granted, syntax isn't a (sole) reason to discount a language, but gawd some of the code examples look really obscure. I can't imagine trying to read it on a day to day basis, no matter how powerful.
The point being that as long as there are external files (css,images,etc) in the page you will have to save it as 'Webpage (complete)' (or the equivalent in your browser) which saves the HTML file and creates a directory for the external files. If you are saving a bunch of sites/pages this way you end up with a lot of directory/html-file pairs. And were you to ever move these around, you would need to make sure that the directory/file pair moved together. It makes much more sense to have it all in one file (and as with MAFF a file that doesn't necessarily need a browser to extract the contents).

Linking to this to the subject matter, most of the lessons have to do with math and science, in a way that requires diagrams and specific notations. Both of which cannot be represented in plain-text or HTML without external files.
Helping Computers Understand Language
There is one more - http://tipd.com/ It's based on Pligg.com.
I think that everyone is missing the point of the broken window fallacy.

It's not that something is destructive. It's also not that something involves monetary transactions or not.

The point is that some external agent forces someone to change their plans, foregoing what they originally intended. (Economics deals with making choices between the available alternatives; money is only the tip of that iceberg)

In the parable as I outlined it, the employment of the glazier is presented as a positive outcome, while ignoring that the homeowner is now unable to buy his new tires, and thus the homeowner has lost the tires and the garage has lost that business.

In the stay-at-home-parent scenario, there's a visible gain of a parent giving the child a close bond and (presumably) good upbringing. But the fallacy hides the fact that had someone else not meddled, that parent would be doing something else that also has a positive outcome (else an employer wouldn't be willing to pay for it).

We can see that in both examples, the person whose behavior was forced now must be satisfied with a plan that is inferior to their initial intent. And assuming that all are rational actors (as economists generally do), then we can conclude that the total utility thus delivered (over the entire economy) is lower than that of the initial intent.
Yeah, that was really odd. I kept waiting for the part where she was abused by those vicious Yelpers. By the end I just thought she was a nut.
fair point again.......... but people (at least a few) are engaged enough to post questions etc so someone is reading the content. Remember the point of the exercise was some FUN interaction with users
The limits of innovation
I disagree. Some things transcend that distinction and should be discussed in every community - they affect every human.
And this is coming from somebody who isn't thrilled HN isn't as hard edged tech/startup-culture focused as it once was. On the front page right now I see:
'When work doesn't pay for the middle class'
'FBI broke law for years in phone record searches'
'Professor Is a Label That Leans to the Left'
Flag those and I'll upvote you. But I'd like this one to get as many eyeballs as possible.
Mildly interesting, but not HN material. Flagged.
"most PC vendors wouldn't know good industrial design if you hit them over the head with it"

I've often wondered about this, surely the PC market is large enough that someone could come in with exceptionally well-designed machines, pre-built, running Windows, that had the "it just works" nature of a Mac. Is Windows really so broken as to prevent that?

I guess I'm thinking something like Alienware used to be only more focussed on overall usability rather than gaming oomph.
Interesting. I usually learn best by explaining / teaching.
While I found the original article believable and interesting, I can't help but wonder whether there's more than meets the eye to all this "Oh yeah, China is evil" movement that's developing...

The US government has been trying to get China to "behave" for quite some time. One of the very obvious points of contention is copyright law - as someone once said, "Chinese copyright is the right to copy anything they want". Now, the previous article painted this from the point of view of massive industrial IP theft - theft of patents, technologies, etc.

But we all know that there's another kind of IP that has a lot of influence over the governments of the world, and that's media IP - music, books, movies, etc.

It's clear that both are happening to some extent, but what are the proportions? Is 99.9% of the "Chinese IP problem" to do with stolen media? To do with the fact that you can buy pirated DVDs on every street corner? Or is it 99%? 90%? 10%? Basically, is the main force behind all this anti-china discussion the media lobby, or is it a somewhat more bona fide effort to protect more legitimate industry?

Cause I have to say - if I have a choice between the Chinese model of media copyright (i.e., no copyright protection) and the US one, I'll pick the Chinese one. It's a better starting point for improvement than the current US model.
I've found that some girlfriends act as viruses (#4) unless your drivers (#3) are very robust. Sometimes you can fix the driver to be less vulnerable, but sometimes you just have to uninstall the driver and advise the hardware to interface with another system that has a more robust driver.
This may be because there are more comments on each submission so your comment may be glanced over instead of being read properly like it would be if there were only a few comments on something.

The comment system is usually very good but for things like the Google/China post it is very hard to come back a few hours later and see what's new because of how things are ordered, I'm sure there would have been a lot of valid points in that thread which didn't get upvotes.
I'm not trying to say this is awesome marketing or anything of the sort. The point was to get people, I've never meet, to read the listing, hopefully have a laugh and then ask a question or contribute to the discussion.

Why so serious everyone
"You can’t just engineer anymore. You have to design" is bullshit. Design is a tool, you still have to measure its results, pretty is not equal to better.

You can really see this if you look at the history of direct mail, some of the best performing mailers ever were pretty ugly. (source: http://www.amazon.com/Million-Dollar-Mailings-Dension-Hatch/...)
nice - open source it.
The synth stomp boxes in general work pretty well so long as there's only a single fundamental (note) that has to be picked up, but they don't do well with chording.

The advantage of the on-board pickups is of course having one pickup per string, but also that they're designed with a specific signal profile in mind (i.e. how far those pickups will be from the strings) and with the dynamics of that instrument involved (i.e. the difference between picking up a signal in an electric bass vs. a flute).
JWZ has gotten the shakedown too: http://jwz.livejournal.com/1002269.html
"a plurality of processes executing on a plurality of interconnected processors" could describe both interconnected machines, and multicore processors. For example, does this patent cover doing a data reduction on a GPU? It sounds like it would -- for example, the Thrust library:

http://code.google.com/p/thrust/

does basically those two "claims", just on a GPU (which falls under your definition).

In any case, my complaint is more about the wording than the actual technology that the patent covers. Patents are granted for such generic technology these days, that it's going to scare away people from trying to create new things (lest it already be covered under a generic patent that really doesn't relate to the new product.)
I love love love your design (so much I've bookmarked it as a reference for my own projects).

It's the perfect mix between extreme minimalist and professional.
Sales operations where you need many customers, each consisting of low price point "buys" typically require a large salesforce of relatively low-paid junior people who make most of their money on commission (similar to classified sales at newspapers). Basically a boiler room style operation where people "dial for dollars" all day. It's not a surprise that some sales people may have attempted these tactics without management's knowledge or approval.
This snippet presents a useful oxymoron. It's just a simple C/C++ hack, but like the best hacks, it's easy to implement and can save hours of time.
Agree on [1] -- remember the hockey puck mouse on the old iMacs? Steve Jobs actually said it was "the most wonderful mouse" when he unveiled it at Macworld (see http://www.thestandard.com/news/2009/01/01/steve-jobs-greate...)

On [2], the old "half-dome" iMacs let you adjust the height and even swivel the display horizontally almost 90 degrees in either direction. I owned one, and really liked how the display could be adjusted to point almost anywhere -- it was great for letting the kids look at the screen.

One problem with the more recent iMacs is it's very easy to pull out the power cord from the back of the monitor if you swivel vertically when the cord is taut.

In terms of iPhone ergonomics, I am curious how Apple will update the body in the next generation. There is a lot of room for improvement, IMHO.
Choosing parenting over work is great. But it doesn't mean we should devalue work in order to get it.

Better to have people choose between two good options than to make one option lousy.
Standard VESA mounts are available for iMacs and Apple displays. Bolt one on (slightly easier said than done on an iMac, but the cinema displays are fine) and attach to an arm of your choice, and the problem is solved.

http://www.computingplus.co.uk/monitor-arm-range.htm
Yes, but it's a little more complicated than that. In most cases you cannot trust the solution of straight Gaussian elimination. You need to take additional measures to avoid excessive error growth, such as using partial pivoting.

see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pivoting and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_elimination
Speaking from experience, in this example blowing it in person isn't as damaging, because you've already shown the other person what you're capable of. You come off as someone who's shy and nervous rather than someone one's strange and unapproachable. Shy and nervous can trigger the maternal instinct in a woman which will keep her around long enough for you to get past the awkwardness.
The mistake you're making here is thinking about it as a value judgement about the article. It's not. The article is solid. I read it. I've been following the story.

It simply has nothing to do with what Hacker News is about, and sticking it here to maximize the number of eyeballs it gets is an abuse of the site.

Here's some help, if the guidelines seem fuzzy:

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

There is nothing about this story that gratifies anyone's intellectual curiosity. Those of us who are inclined to believe stories reported in Harpers (myself included) already know about the torture problem. It isn't evidence of a new trend.

The rest of you reading this would be doing the site a favor if, instead of voting me up, you simply hit the "flag" button on the story.
Absolutely correct.
μολον λαβε
This anti-china propaganda on the internet at the moment is sickening. If you want to buy into the China Removes Avatar from Cinemas and Rides With Hitler, then go on, but I'm not going to involve myself in any more of these discussions.

China is trying to develop for 1/4 of the worlds population in a system that is different to yours, but is similar to the system that has been in place for 5000 years of chinese civilisation.

This will be my last sentence on china related topics till this propaganda wave blows over: Just because it's different does not mean you must kill it.
That's basically what happened to us. We had all our customers Yelp about us, many who haven't even heard of Yelp. Then they took them all down because those people only wrote one review, basically for us.
What is the motivation of NoScript in this day and age? You miss so much neat stuff now without out it.
I wonder how much AC has impacted larger national government as well. I mean, have you been in DC in the summer? Not the kind of place I'd want to spend large amounts of time in a big room with a bunch of old fat guys.
The point is not about failing or succeeding, it's about having a mindset that allows you to make efforts and improve, rather than believe that you can't change things and just give up.
Oh, no, what I was saying is I don't want to do that. I would simply state that "Your account has $10" rather than masking it with credits.
I don't know of any recent studies, haven't really looked, but I've been typing in Dvorak for about two years and this is my take on it.

1. I don't think the superiority of one or the other is really the issue here. The issue is making the switch. Those studies are addressing whether it's worth it to switch.

The bottom line is that Dvorak is more efficient in terms of movement. It's optimized for typing in English (other romance languages are quite similar) and QWERTY just isn't.

2. From personal experience, I think that the mappings of punctuation are superior in Dvorak. I especially like having the dash and underscore easily accessible (next to Return) for programming. I also find punctuation more natural overall in Dvorak.
I had this happen too back with GrandCentral, and it took forever to figure out because of the way it interacted with the PBX number it was forwarded to -- it would automatically hang up when you answered. I didn't figure out what was causing those calls until it became a Google Voice account, and saw the 0s calls in the logs (not sure if they showed up before).

But GV gives you a major advantage over getting a new cell number with the same problem: you can block callers with one click.
Yes. If I care about improving the lot of poorer people, I'll do it with my own money and probably with less beaurocracy. If not, get your hand out of my wallet.
Is it such a big deal? I for one definitely think that messages here are scanned for illegal content and nobody tells us.
The separation of the Chinese racial identity with that of its government - most Chinese perceive the government as representative of their ethnicity, and despite whatever flaws must be protected against malicious foreign interests.

So basically, the more posturing the West does, the more aggressively the Chinese will side with their government. Suffice to say, current foreign policy exacerbates this.

No outside force can possibly get the Chinese to revolt - in fact any outside force is likely to do the exact opposite, and help cement the Communist regime's power. Most new-generation Chinese are happy to give up freedoms they've never known how to enjoy, in exchange for the chance to escape poverty and live a better life.

So, the only way to get the Chinese people to revolt against their government is for the economy to stagnate, and for people to no longer perceive a worthy "trade" of their freedoms for economic progress. As soon as the people lose hope of a better life, support for the regime will crumble quickly.

Speaking as a Chinese, anyhow.
I think my title may have been a little misleading. I don't scrape the data from Yelp and Craigslist, I meerly used them as my inspiration. All of the content is added manually by myself (hence the empty parts of the site).
Chinese censorship policy is considered fair game but American censorship policy isn't? Strange perspective.
IMHO Project Euler teaches bad programming by asking you to solve specific cases instead of general problems. I've found at least one problem where the straightforward correct answer failed in the general case, and the generic solution was significantly more complicated.

Edit: this one http://projecteuler.net/index.php?section=problems&id=13
Yeah but that's like wanting to become the world's richest man even though you know you'll never get to spend the money, and rather more likely be tortured or something.
Thank you so much. Minimalism is my guiding principle in designing things. For this website, I took it even more to the extreme than usual, to focus on the ease of use and helping users find the content, but this is literally one of the best compliments you could give me. :)
yeah, the hockey puck mouse was just pitiful. The head-scratcher for me with the new mouse is the gesture of 2-finger swiping (laterally) while your other three fingers are (presumably) stationary on the mouse. It makes my hand ache just thinking about it.

loved the fully articulating arm on the old iMac--one of the sacrifices they've made in their quest for aesthetic minimalism (which I appreciate, mind you, it just sucks that you can't move the display easily anymore).
The middle class generally pays the brunt of taxes everywhere. The poor don't have enough money, while the rich are too powerful and too mobile, besides having wealth locked up in capital structures that would also hurt businesses to tax.
China has not been conducting attacks on foreign companies via the Internet for 5000 years and it's not inappropriate to question an environment which forces US-based companies to deal with sophisticated computer attacks just because they're doing something China doesn't like.

We've been very good about ignoring what China does in China. (One could argue that Americans, myself included, are exceptionally good at this actually!) This recent wave of controversy is about what China does outside of China.

I would expect the same outcry to occur if any other country was staging the type of operations the PRC regularly conducts in foreign infrastructure. Frankly, the fact that outcry is so long in coming is the only thing that surprises most people in security.

I agree that people need to be careful to not go overboard, but your assertion that no one should ever be critical of China because they're different is equally absurd. Different systems deserve to be appropriately examined and talking about the ramifications of each is both appropriate and necessary.
Cute, someone disagrees with me so I get a downvote instead of a response. All in a thread about a dubious off topic submission. Nice, HN, keep it classy.
I didn't see your handle in any of the responses to the original article. The author made a lot of points. I would be interested to hear which ones you take issue with.
def sum = series.map(_.sum).foldLeft(0.0)(_+_)

Gah, no, stop. Remember, kids: everytime you use naive map-reduce for floating point arithmetic operations, God kills a kitten.
Is there another link to this story? The author responds to the comments on HN but this can't be the post they're referencing.

Update: I'm not sure which was the "original" article but this story was posted earlier on HN here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1061735