skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sigh. How many ways can I put this? Having health insurance is a necessity if I don't want to continually be one bad day away from bankruptcy. The unit cost of insuring a person has increased 15% a year all decade.

If "much of what it pays for" isn't a necessity then that's just more evidence of how broken the system is.

Your high deductible approach is one way to tackle the problem however it has the problem of disincentivizong preventative care, so we might get a lot more 20k emergency room trips instead of 300$ physicals -- and have a less healthy population, to boot. But it might also be a component of a plan that worked.

I'd note that "most capitalistic" does not always mean "most effective" -- just usually, for normal markets. Otherwise we'd all take capitalist cabs to work every day instead of the socialist subway :)
Thanks for the heads up about this, just 'installed' the bookmarklet. Seems to work well.
I've tested many prices for my content products at iwillteachyoutoberich.com/scroogestrategy.com/earn1k.com.

Andrew, based on my experience and data from the content/marketing industry, I'd encourage you to charge more -- at a MINIMUM $47/month, probably $97/month or even $297/month.

If you want to chat about why I suggest this, and some of my internal metrics, please email me.
They're not explicitly sponsoring the blog post they are merely hosting companies that he trust whom happen to also have affiliate schemes. Why not benefit from a post like this?

If I were to recommend or talk about books I'd most likely use afiliate links to Amazon. Is that really suc a big deal?

As a blogger, there's really not much cash to be made
to offset the time/money investment other than ads (which tech savy audiences are mostly blind to) or affiliate schemes.

If the affiliate links are disclosed I don't see the problem and am often willing to help those who produce valuable content.
Another Sequel user here, very happy.

The only thing I'd like to see would be a more flexible object mapping layer on top of the relational core. Something along the lines of Python's SQLAlchemy.

Sequel::Model is a simple ActiveRecord-style ORM layer (in the sense of Fowler's ActiveRecord pattern) and in a way is very flexible, if you don't mind implementing a bunch of lower-level hooks for certain things.

But sometimes you do want a more heavyweight session-based approach where you have an object model with a bunch of associations, a flexibly-configured mapping of that object model to the database, and an ORM which knows how to take a batch of changes to the object graph and commit them to the database in one transaction.

Still yet to see a tool like this for ruby, but I think sequel could be a good foundation for it.
This is not really tangible or necessarily GDP positive, but it does really pay $15/hour while you work from home. I know that 99.99% of work from home jobs are a scam, but this is indeed real, my brother has been doing it for three months now and has gotten several paychecks. They are hiring in most non-UK countries. The job is rating the relevance of results for specified search engine queries.

http://www.lionbridge.com/lionbridge/en-us/company/web-site/...
how can she possibly be in danger of going homeless if her husband gets $1595 a month? it's b/c their rent is 1380.

just move to a cheaper apartment. if you're broke with no job prospects and stay in a pricey apartment you can't afford, how is that a sob story that should make us sympathetic to more welfare spending? why should i pay more taxes so she can live in an apartment that costs more than mine?
"Aside from the errors in this sentence (blocks, procs and lambdas are all just Proc objects"

No, they're different: http://innig.net/software/ruby/closures-in-ruby.rb
Cottage industry, possibly? Farming is difficult to pull off at more than subsistence levels without significant machinery, even if you're targeting the relatively high value hand-picked/local/organic market.

A lot of the obvious cottage industries also decline during a downturn, like miscellaneous arts and crafts, but I've run across people making decent livings from textile work that they sell on ebay. For smallish amounts of money, one step up the farming chain to baking is fairly profitable. However it gets complicated fast if you want to make a full income doing it, because there's all sorts of health regulations for being a baker or confectioner that pretty much prevent you from doing it out of your home kitchen. Can probably get away with ignoring them if you're selling cookies and bread to <50 friends and friends-of-friends.
Just as important is how people react to various presented identities.

As a simple example, if Tim Bond thinks my investments are positioned poorly, I'll listen intently to his feedback and think long and hard about how best to react to it. If, on the other hand, gurglesplat123@somesite thinks I'm positioned poorly, I'll pay very little attention.
This whole speculation thing is a mess: the pirates [sic] are probably bigging up the horror as much as the pro-DMCA crowd big up spposed benefits - everyone in the middle is throwing extreme bad/good scenarios too.(I sit in the middle, as it happens, and I reckon it will just be generally bad all round).

But what really depresses me is that this is done in secret.

That is the thing that concerns me most. I cant see any situation, even if this were a harmless treaty, where such a situation is healthy.
For there is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
Hamlet

I live by that verse.
It's not an illusion. It's real. I'm closer to poverty right now than I have ever been in my life.
No it's an illusion. I'm further from poverty right now than I have ever been in my life.

But personal anecdotes don't actually determine what's going on in a whole country.
That is very cool. How might they keep the helicopters from bumping into each other at such close proximity?
The folded pages seem to be painted (calligraphed) only on the exterior. Otherwise, they would be unreadable, right ?
Anybody else get a little question mark over their head when they got to "RESTful"?

As an end user, I can't remember visiting a site and being angered by its URL structure enough to stop using it.
"By the way - its not just apple. Any company is essentially a dictatorship. But most of dictators are scared or clueless so they rely on layers of committees upon layers of committees to do their work."

That's something else--I don't know the best word for it, but something like aristocracy or something. In fact, a lot of "corporate politics" boil down to, essentially, squabbling lords and nobles playing for power.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/02/21/business/21un...

That graph is the scariest thing I've seen about this recession, and I think it makes a pretty convincing case that this time actually is different.

I honestly think unskilled labor is dying off. I can't imagine what new jobs can be done with minimal education that won't be automatable within the next decade, and many existing jobs will be lost as well. It's a matter of time before people start smashing self-checkout machines.
That's an interesting idea.

Locally I've seen a variety of people springing up offering to do meal services (eg they'll cook for you and your family, as well as their own).
RightSide Capital Announces New Seed Fund; 100-200 Investments/year
The article explains part of that. It costs money to move. First/last month's rent, utility activation, and the costs of moving their actual stuff.
I've been thinking of hiring a bunch of commission based salespeople for our startup. Has anyone done similar? Can people still receive their unemployment until they start making some sales or would they have to stop immediately when they started calling on prospective buyers?

We can't afford to put them on a salary yet, but it could be a good opportunity to help get some unemployed people going.
It's just people I guess.

The thing is that working as a hacker (white hat) has made me actually less worried about my bad security habits.

It's like real life. If your sane in your habits and stay alert not much is likely to happen.

It's like insurance. You only insure as much as you feel is at potential risk; once the cost of insurance outweighs the risk you (should) stop paying.

Same with your passwords; the risk of losing them is fairly minimal. If someone wants to get them really bad they will do, not a lot you can ultimately do to stop them. Reasonable vigilance should be enough to keep you secure.

(and by that I mean having enough sense that when XYZ site's password database is compromised you change things etc.)
The day of reckoning for an entitlement-based economy is coming. Many people will have a hard lesson to learn: no one deserves a job or unemployment benefits. This idealism is a product of good times.
correct. For most, such nuclear devestation would be extremely displeasing to envision. However this does not make it scientifically bad, and if you were a nazi you would probably use darwinism to justify it.
I agree on the influence of new technologies, but the current economic downturn has had nothing to do with that.

The fact is that many people are unemployed now due to the eceonomy being as it is, and there seems to be a consensus that things won't change anytime soon in that regard.

Couple that (on a slightly longer term perhaps) to the end of cheap, abundant oil to fuel every aspect of modern civilisation, and I think there could well be an issue of how to have everyone employed effectively.
Had a buddy who became a certified electrician. It helped him during the tough times. Also know a couple of people who do some carpentry (furniture, mostly).
That's a reasonable position up to a certain point. Not knowing what housing rates are in their area or what restrictions they have (mobility, special care, schools etc etc) it's impossible to just say "go live someplace cheaper".

Equally however, the NYT's writer glosses over the issue with the opposite emotional reaction of "how can you ask someone to move from their home?".

Neither position is particularly compelling in the absence of more context.
what do you consider unskilled labor? Are you talking entry service jobs?
No, it may not be a dense read. But this is exactly what made it hard to finish (for me). Meandering anecdotes and self-indulgent tangents bore me. I've read a couple of Hoftstader's books and I think he could really benefit from an editor with a bit of backbone.
As I understand it, being "lucky" as an angel involves (in the first place) quality deal flow. With Paul's background I would bet he's got incredible deal flow.

(There are a lot of other things too, I'm sure, but this is a big one.)
POST IT AGAIN!! POST IT OVER AND OVER!! POST IT EVERY WEEK!!
There was some interesting discussion about this a couple of days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1127274

I guess one problem may be that the new jobs require skills that the old jobs didn't, and not all of the newly unemployed would be able to acquire those skills.
Yes this is a great time to ramp up a new project.

I found a great designer who was laid off from a full-time job as an Art Director. He is doing contract work now but only part-time while he looks for another full-time job. This gave me an opportunity to get him involved with a new project. I got favorable terms on compensation and he's more interested in the project because it's not just another side job.

I know a few programmers working in the US on visas that were laid off. Both decided to return to school for masters or phds instead of attempting to find a new job within a month. I'd love to hire them to do work but haven't done enough research into whether that's feasible. Both were previous co-workers. Hard working, smart and motivated to do well as programmers. But didn't have much initiative to step into design or program management. This ended up being their down fall. The company wanted people that could code and absorb layoffs in testing, design and management. Being a good programmer wasn't enough. /sigh

Definitely some great talent out there that has stumbled into bad luck with the economy.
Shift Happens
How long until there's a yapython?
Yea. I think Monty has lost some (maybe a lot) of credibility.
It's an interesting model: work on something for a while to show people what you can do, convince friends in high places they want you (back), get "acquired" and EOL what you spent six months to two years working on.

Appjet = left google -> appjet -> google acquisition.
reMail = left google -> xobni -> remail -> google acquisition.
FriendFeed = left google -> friendfeed -> acquisition by friends at facebook.

(It's not just a "web" thing -- check out some Cisco acquisition cycles from people who leave, create new products, then get acquired back again. I think most Cisco Family acquisitions involve actually keeping the products they acquire though.)
interesting! What type of data are you translating (iphone app text, webapp text, etc)? Can you elaborate on your experience with mechanical turk? What did you notice to be the major problems/inconveniences?
That probably depends on the rules in your state. You should contact the agency that handles it. On my unemployment (CA) form it asks me if I earned any money for the weeks I am claiming for. Presumably they subtract any money I earned for those weeks from the benefit amount I would receive, so it could be that if your employee does not earn any commission for a given claim period then they would not lose any unemployment benefit but its always safest to get it from the horses mouth.
They could have set aside enough money for that when they still had money.

Also, you're double counting some things. First month's rent ... you would have paid rent money not to move too for the same month. And last months' rent, well you already paid it where you are, when you move out you skip paying rent for the last month. Basically whether you move or not you pay the same number of months of rent.

And you get your security deposit back when you move out and can use that to pay the next one (unless you trashed the place).
I was introduced to and learned functional programming through Python, beginning with these series of docs:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-prog.html

http://docs.python.org/dev/howto/functional.html

I would say I program primarily, though not strictly, in a functional style in Python, Lisp, and R. For my applications it's more for the purpose of a modularity rather than concurrency-critical issues, so Python's functional programming limitations aren't noticeable (don't know in your case). There is a 'functional' module available for Python which extends on map, filter, and reduce, and lambda's single-epxression limitation does not necessarily make it functional-hostile.
Lucky streak? Sounds like he had a hand in shaping all those companies and he knows the people at Google doing the acquisitions. He created Gmail. He's a technical expert putting his money to work in businesses he understands and can help grow.
Interview with Vancouver startup cofounder on their recent LemonStand release
Google’s challenges of freeing VP8
Ask HN: Was it a good decision for Mixergy to become a paid service?
I really love all that Andrew Warner has done. In fact, I probably listen to an interview or two each week. But I don't think the subscription model is a good one, especially for $25 a month. Maybe something cheaper, like $5 would be palatable. And it's weird that there's no set price; you can pay either $25 or $50 or $100 for the same service.

But I do understand Andrew wanting to get paid for his admittedly-excellent archive of work. I would too. So, I don't like the subscription switch (or the price), but I respect it. Still, I think the entire business model is flawed. It's only the dated videos - one week or older - that you need to pay for. So, I think the vast majority of listeners will simply tune in for the current week's fare, and tune out everything else.

Maybe I'm just naive - or even cynical. But I'm not sure.

What do you guys think about Mixergy's transition?
Why the GPL does not apply to premium WordPress themes
Premarital sex: An economic model of its rise and de-stigmatisation
What we do know is the walled garden approach of private sector companies at the time, such as Compuserve. We also know that Tim Berners-Lee tried to get private sector hypertext vendors interested in the WWW, but none were interested.

The unknown are far more important than what we do know. It is the unknown that blind us rather than the known. A library with lot of unread books are far more valuable than a library filled with books you already know and read.

What you have demonstrate is just one scenerio amongst many, with some unwritten assumptions built-in.

To think that you know enough the operational mechanism of history to predict alternative path of history is hurbis.

Anybody can come up with reasons for past events, because we have hindsight. However, it takes real talent to be able to predict the trends of history.
This is probably one of the most shameful and depressing discussions I've ever read on this site. It's amazing the backlash this appears to be causing. For a community full of people running startups and sites, either full-time or on the side, the concept of being upset over having to pay someone for their time is appalling.

Most of the users here should appreciate that a person's time and effort are not free. If you don't feel Mr. Warner's time and effort is worth what he's charging then go somewhere else and find a similar resource. To come here and pout like upset children that your free toy might be taking away from you is sad. To threaten to go out of your way to circumvent his system as some of you have is even worse.

For those of you who have products or services you actively charge for, I hope you have had the common sense not to chime in against this decision as if it was an attack on your very being. And if you haven't, imagine how you would feel if someone so callously ripped your decision to try to earn a living on your work.
As a follow up, all these guys are borderline cases of "long-term unemployed".
I'm curious. Do you own or rent?
> I don't know how in the US, but in Europe it is illegal to write publicly "Joe Average, a murderer", if the person had no trial, yet. Regardless of the widely available proofs.

Nope. The beauty of free speech is that it's only illegal if it's either untrue or you cant prove it (which are in essence the same thing in the eyes of the law) :)
On second thought, what I'm thinking of is even broader than unskilled labor. Plenty of jobs require training or minimal advanced education, but they could still be done by computers or robots. Manufacturing, retail, accounting, and similar fields seem easily automatable in the near future. For instance, once reliable anti-theft systems are built, many retail jobs will be eliminated.
Whole Foods is just one case. But it sounds as if nothing will convince you that businesses can be run in accordance with humanistic ideals, holding profit making as important and excluding everything else. What makes you think that we become automatons as soon as we have shareholder responsibility?

Have you ever run a successful business? I come from a family of entrepreneurs, and from that vantage point I can tell you that more often than not someone working for the good of other would be repaid in kind, while those strictly out for themselves faltered. But it was not that the increased likelihood of increased success caused them to pander to the public, looking for a cut. They continued during the worst of times, for their customers, suppliers, employees, themselves. They persisted when hope ran out, and some failed. But they tried and tried again, driven by that same basic goodness, until something clicked.
A related law-review article someone else on HN shared with me:
http://web.bu.edu/law/central/jd/organizations/journals/bulr...

My interpretation is that the precedents in that article support this author's intepretations -- WordPress themes and plugins are not derivative works of WordPress. Merely calling simple interface functions is not enough to make a derivative work according to those cases.

Also, it may not be clear at first glance, but the author of this article and several of the commenters are lawyers.
Ugliest powerpoint ever, but it does have some benchmarks about halfway through. It's a bit out of date.

http://llvm.org/devmtg/2009-10/Sands_LLVMGCCPlugin.pdf
The relative value of blog content vs. actual news items may be quite low in the majority of posts, looking across the general quality / salience of NYT blog posts. Though some blogs like DealBook and Economix probably have high readership, I wonder if people will really be willing to pay for opinionated tidbits.
I rent.
They are indeed all Proc objects:

Proc.new {}.class
=> Proc
lambda {}.class
=> Proc
proc {}.class
=> Proc
def block_class(&block) block.class end
block_class {}
=> Proc

That write-up does have some great info in it, though.

Edit: there's an interesting comment on wycats' post that suggests the &block creates a Proc, and that blocks themselves are neither objects nor callable, ie, they can only be used directly with yield. That makes sense.

Even in that case, the original point still stands; we're still only dealing with Methods and Procs.
Ok, I think I agree. They should move ASAP, but their credit is probably horrible.
Its like they say, the harder you work, the luckier you get.
I had to dig around for a while, but exercise seems to have a slight beneficial effect in the general population. From
http://journals.lww.com/acsm-msse/Abstract/1997/10000/Aerobi... :

Two of four subtasks that reflect complex cognitive speed (Stroop color/word interference and Concept Shifting Test) showed main and interaction effects with age of aerobic capacity in a hierarchical regression analysis, accounting for up to 5% of variance in parameter score after correction for age, sex, and intelligence main effects.

Still, that study is rather weak evidence. The benefits could be relegated to preventing decline in older people. Anecdotally, I do feel duller on days when I don't run; even if I didn't, I'd still exercise. It helps me relieve stress.

In terms of general benefits, most people would be better off if they exercised more, not less. I mean it's not like fit people wake up one day, look at a mirror and see a firm, toned body with six-pack abs then scream at the sky, "Nooooo! Why me?!"
Isn't that a bit of oversimplification?

Google buys a lot more companies started by people who weren't Xooglers.

Also, those steps between

leave google -> ... -> get acquired

are really, 'make something people want' and as we know, that's not some simple formula. Conspiracy theory, or not. :-)
Do you mind sharing what kind of app you're trying to localize (iphone, web, etc)?
What is Mixergy?
The body bags stopping a war is a recent phenomena. Leaders have not hesitated to send the youth out to fight. Look at the daily death tolls from the Battle of the Bulge vs Iraq. Technology made the viewing of a war and its horrors in real-time. If we can keep our people safe, I am all for it.

Also, a person who could get shot at makes snap and sometimes bad decisions (ex. killing bystander). The dude in the office can be positive (failure just looses a drone not his life).
Sounds like a good interview brewing. I agree though I don't have the numbers to back up my position yet. Would love to hear the lessons learned from your experience.
Unless someone pleads guilty, I don't understand how this can be remotely correct.
'When I was living in Italy, I was once trying to tell someone that I hadn't had much success in doing something, but I couldn't think of the Italian word for success. I spent some time trying to describe the word I meant. Finally she said "Ah! Fortuna!"'

-- pg
The Spiderwick Chronicles 2008 DvDrip
It's also proably true that areas that are cheaper to rent have less job prospects.