skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You have a curious definition of "all sides" in which the solution space appears to be "Impose European-style levels of benefits" XOR "Unemployed people starve in the snow." I am missing anybody here seriously proposing the second option.

I suspect the downside to having employment-at-will, very modest unemployment benefits, and a liquid labor market exists. I also suspect that it can be measured in terms of objectively verifiable criteria, and compared with the alternatives. For example, I suspect that I can look in a US newspaper for a count of the number of cars burned last night by immigrants rioting over lack of economic opportunity. It will take me a whole lot of searching, because few newspapers publish articles titled "BREAKING! No riot today, either!"

Then I could look at the same number in a French newspaper. (100 a day on quiet days, spiking to over a thousand on New Years or during periods of mass unrest. You might think I'm exaggerating. http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1869392,00.htm... )

Alternatively, if counting riots seems a little messy, I could look at unemployment statistics for those under twenty five. In the United States, for youths at large, it is about 11~12% right now. In France, it is over 20 -- down a bit from a few years ago when it hit 25%. For socially disadvantaged groups in America, for example black males without a high school degree, it is about 48%. For similarly situated folks in France (for example, uneducated immigrants), unemployment is close to total.]

I can go on if you want me to.
Absolutely. The ideal system would combine high worker mobility (at will employment, no non-compete agreements, etc) with a generous safety net to minimize the cost of losing one's job.

It seems like the issue here is the way unemployment is funded.
I am not a lawyer and am not competent to give legal advice.

That said: I can only assume that you are standing so close to the problem that you can't appreciate the sheer scope of your legal peril. The odds that you have a case are not worth the legal fees to calculate. Lawyers' calculators are not optimized for small numbers. Save your money and change the name. Unless your promotional materials include a fleet of blimps.

If you do hire a trademark lawyer, your money would probably be better spent by having him or her help you with your next name. I'll do my part by suggesting a list of names you should avoid in the future:

Sitecrosoft
SighBM
Sicombinator
Sapple Computer
Siteman Sachs
Sintendo

Though it's a pity about the last one, which would be a great name for a site specializing in off-color Flash games.
A small bug: if I want to search for "basket", I'll type "basket" + TAB + [ZIP] + Enter. It looks like your overloading the tab key though, so it selects the first suggestion when I hit tab. You might consider handling suggestions the way Google does on their homepage, that seems to work well.

Edit: typo
> especially in a potential future crisis where the PRC is disconnected from the net.

I don't follow. How does blocking out-bound traffic from going to China going to help you in a future where China is no longer even connected to the 'net?
Google Maps To Add “Google Store Views”?
Working against that is the I gather widely held opinion that a lot of people don't get totally serious about getting a job until the unemployment benefits run out. Of course, when you have a secular horrible employment market like today's you've got a different problem.

You've got to be careful here, set up the incentives wrong and you get an unsustainable European welfare state (particularly for us, given that we provide so much of the world's security).

One other issue WRT a situation like today's: you've got to be careful that governments don't go bankrupt when revenues crater and social payments skyrocket due to a very nasty recession/depression.
I can shoehorn a loaded point of view into this, too:

The folks at Cato believe that corruption is a Constitutional right. Lessig believes it should be a crime. Of course, this is yet another application of the libertarian golden rule: he who has the gold gets to take the liberties.
Because even if you try to make it clear that it's a consensual act (sex, relationship, whatever) between any group of people of age, the people against such a movement will claim that you are a pedophile, that it's against (insert some religion)'s beliefs for a union to be between more than two people, etc. The people who don't know better and don't think of polyamory as mainstream will find that emotionally appealing.

In the end you have a mess (see: same sex marriages today) where you think people should know better and realize this isn't about what's "right or wrong" to any individual on any level, but a matter of discrimination when it comes to benefits that are not being given to one group but to another. But they don't always know better.

In the US, we're barely scraping by trying to get the same benefits to gay couples, let alone any mix of more than two people. A movement to do what you suggest...I can't imagine what kind of uproar there will be and how many people will be conflating polyamory with polygamy and being very against it as a result. At the minimum.
Reshaping Relationships through Passion
The paper you posted is a good example. The conclusion is:

sudoku = map (map head) . search . prune . choice

Note how the "code" never mentions the data to which it is applied, namely the Board object. This is why I can't agree with the GP's argument that FP is closer to "code" than anything else -- I think it's as far from "code" as you can get. There are no "instructions" here, just an equation representing something complex ("the solution to sudoku"), in terms of slightly simpler parts. The simpler parts are, earlier in the paper, the complex parts; and are of course described there by simpler parts.

And, this is not just something that's useful for esoteric mathematics papers; my "enterprise" code in Haskell looks very similar.
As a non-statistician, am I right in thinking that the problem here is that with this many parameters, you can fit almost any data? Or something?
Ask HN: How can I get my hourly rate from $65 to $125 in the next 90 days?
I was inspired by some of the comments on this post:

http://www.zacharyburt.com/2010/02/how-i-landed-a-50hr-side-gig-with-very-little-effort-how-it-relates-to-picking-up-chicks/

I feel like I'm not really maximizing my income potential as a freelancer. I've been programming for 5-6 years and I've been doing it fulltime for about 2.5 years. 100% of the work I do is PHP/MySQL and I've done it all, from MVC (CakePHP, CI, Symfony) to CMSs (Wordpress, WPMU, Drupal, Joomla) to Facebook apps. I generally charge $50 - 65 / hr, mostly because I've gotten almost no response for rates above $65 / hr. But from the sound of the comments on the post linked to above, I should be making quite a bit more? Or is my skill-set just not work more than $65?

So I'd love comments or suggestions for working out a plan to get my hourly rate above $125 in the next 90 days. Please don't post something like "just ask for it" because I just can't believe that it's that easy.

Here are ideas I have so far:
a) Clean up my resume and portfolio, which are both out-of-date and a bit light on technical details
b) Learn Python/Django/Pylon or Ruby/Rails (I've been dabbling for awhile)
c) Build up a little more in savings so I can ride out a bit of time between work
d) Find places to find great work (I mostly look on Craigslist right now)

If I make it, I'll write a blog post detailing it all :)
Good read, thanks!

I never considered comics on the iPad, but that could be really cool. Comics are something of a guilty pleasure for me - I have really enjoyed comics on my iPhone, specifically "The Umbrella Academy".
Funny, but not as good as the econ paper I once came across extolling the virtues of a method which allowed one to "sidestep the issues associated with negative degrees of freedom" (or something to that effect.) In other words, fitting a line to one data point :-)
Sounds like a major hassle to change names plus it may look shady to your customers.

The lawsuit sounds pretty bogus based on what you've said. Surely Google can't be allowed to have exclusive use of "oogle" just because it sounds like part of their company name. That would be like Microsoft saying no one can have a company ending with "soft".

That said, I'd say this would be expensive and time consuming to fight. May not be worth the effort even though you may be in the right (ethically if not legally).

Is there any chance this could get you into the press? Small company being picked on by enormous corporation. Could be good for you.
Another level is the censoring.

Don't get me wrong, I love HN and the quality of posts here. But I was censored early on, (probably) for giving _one_ tongue-in-cheek comment about Erlang (it even got many upvotes).

At first I didn't notice that I was being censored, until I accessed HN from another computer, where I saw that all of my posts where not displayed, nor where my comments. Even the loading time of HN was significantly slowed down while being logged in with that old nick.

While I'm a guest here and must accept the hosts, I'm writing this, just to let you know that some stuff is happening in the background, which is perhaps not apparent to everyone. :)
Okay, slightly more seriously than my last response:

The "z" is a plural: "Sitez". Surely this meme, while old, can't be so old that only I remember it. Can it?

Meanwhile, let me introduce you to Google's website building business: http://sites.google.com

That's arguably in the same field of business -- enough to cause confusion in the marketplace, which is the legal standard -- and their URL is two characters away from the alleged infringing URL.

I guess this company could try to argue that Google is infringing their trademark... provided they launched before Google Sites, which came online under that name in 2008. Except, oops, the opponent is Google, a company whose legal team's lunch budget could probably buy and sell us all.

Run away!
Unemployment rates are counted differently in other countries. In the United States, you have to be looking for a job to be counted as unemployed, so our numbers tend to look lower than they actually are.

Also, an American friend of mine who lives in France tells me that, because of French social programs, unemployment is not as scary or devastating there as it is in the states.

On the other hand, I have a French friend who lives in the States and enjoys the American sense of innovation and competitive spirit which he feels is lacking in France.

You're right, standard of living is hard to be objective about. One common measure is the Human Development Index. The US does pretty well in this compared to the rest of the world, but not compared to our more socialist sisters in Europe like France. I think one of the reasons for America's HDI lagging behind European countries is our lack of universal health care, but that's another topic.
Damned if I can figure it out now (time for bed) ... let me return to your question in the morning and see if I can remember my reasoning and if it still makes sense.
> Desktop computing is pretty much a solved problem. Incremental improvement is all we're going to see from here on.

I agree that we're just going to see incremental improvement with the current UI paradigms. Maybe this is just a sci-fi reverie, but I'd hope that at a certain point, we see a new generation of desktop UIs. (Centered around what, I don't know. Maybe 3D layout + 3D gesture recognition. Pan, tilt, zoom.)
Deciding on a ballpark range will help you pick out the lawyer you want - usually more established lawyers will charge higher fees but they're not necessarily "better", especially because in your case the types of trademark claims they are probably going to go after you for, trademark dilution and trademark infringement based on confusion are straightforward and could be handled by someone right out of law school. I agree with the above poster that on first look their claim doesn't seem that strong; it doesn't seem as if the average user would confuse "sitezoogle" with a google product but again they can plausibly make that claim. I'm happy to give you advice for free and suggest a couple people that can help you in California if you email mdayal [at] ucdavis.edu.
highscalability.com == architecture/infrastructure porn.
Associative memories and AI
Another Yahoo! bot behaving badly? Between them and MSN/Bing's bot, what the hell is going on with search engine spiders lately?
Is this like the exodus of the Ruby programmers? Remember Ruby was on rage couple years ago? But suddenly became out of favorite due to various issues. Looks like Python is the same way. People play around with it and find out all kinds of issues. When a new language appears (Clojure), people leave in doves. Just another fad.
This post is reminiscent of The Design of Everyday things. A book that receives much praise but really annoyed me. Not so much the message, but the way it was written.
And ask an average person who might work for you why they should subsidize your likely-to-fail startup with their own health.

It seems like the general consensus on HN is that The Government should subsidize startups and small-businesses Just Because, but that it's evil when the same government subsidizes the employee that didn't work quite hard enough and needs to eat food and live in a house while they look for a job they can do better. I don't get it.

(I bet if I wasn't so sarcastic when I made the organ-harvesting reference, I would have been upmodded!)
Google architecture: http://highscalability.com/google-architecture

Google infrastructure: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_platform

Amazon architecture: http://highscalability.com/amazon-architecture

No one will layout the blueprint for you, but most general information regarding infrastructure are out there.
More impressive is that the Xbox 360 is the most successful of its generation. The Wii may have sold more units, but game sales on the Xbox crush it. They also somehow charge decent rates for the Xbox Live service which their competitors give away for free, and they get more use out of it while doing so. It's truly amazing.

The video game console market has historically done to consumer electronics corporations what Russia in winter has done to mighty European militaries. For MS to have succeeded, and by many metrics come out on top, in 2 generations is an incredible feat.
I agree. You would think that they would realize how important a well-designed and attractive website would be to their target audience.
I think selling to parents for use in educating children is not the best idea in the world. They're generally looking for edutainment, which means you can #import all the reasons why game development sucks for a small developer (huge asset budget, quick content rot, lack of a good search marketing hook) and then add "And by the way, they will not under any circumstances pay more than $20 for this."

However, there is a lot of opportunity in selling "boring" applications directly to teachers. In particular, I'd suggest addressing pain points like "Prep takes too much time." One idea I keep coming back to is "Keeping parents in the loop takes too much time" but I don't know if I'm in a good position to execute on that. I think it could potentially be a hit if done well, though.

Also, homeschool folks need a whole range of curricular/admin support services and the portion of them which actually spend money have a much, much better sales cycle than school districts would want for equivalent services.
I am pretty sure any domain registered with 00gle in the name they contact. When I registered officezilla.com I was contacted by the lawyers for the Godzilla trademark. It's just a way the law firms make more billable hours, writing form letters. That is about all it is. I told the Gozilla people I was not interested in them and not only did they go away they sent me a letter I could use the domain officezilla.com which I figure was just another way to drum up more billable hours.
"I doubt it will erode Google's market share or traffic much (or at all), but only because the average computer user is neither informed nor interested in privacy and security."

AT&T's behavior seems to have had no effect on iPhone enthusiasm. When I've asked people about having to use AT&T to use their iPhone, it seems a total non-issue. They simply don't care if a company was engaged in illegal spying, they want what they want.

It reminded me of when there was much more railing against software patent, and Amazon grabbed on for one-click shopping. There was some noise, but Amazon's cheaper prices soon won the day.

The Dead Kennedy's had it right: Give me convenience or give me death.
honestly, there was no thought of google when you decided to suffix your names with "oogle"? The actual spelling of the word is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googol so you just happened to choose the bit of the word the misspelled...
Rails 3.0 Beta/Prerelease Available Now and How To Install It
3. Make more babies.

This is what the Australian government decided to do. $4000 per child, no questions asked. (subsequent governments have fiddled with this and pandered to their support base, but the concept still remains)

The treasurer came out with a phrase 'one for mum, one for dad, one for the country'.

It worked. Birth rates are now higher than they have ever been.

I'm normally against this type of government wastage. But it's not hard to see that the $4000 will be earnt back within a ~25 year period once the child becomes an adult and starts paying taxes, even when you take inflation and future value of the $4000 into account. The $4000 was being paid out of revenue at the time as the government had no debt. (subsequent governments have started to borrow again, being unable to be fiscally responsible more than a couple of years)

It's actually the smartest strategy of your three, because the old people need to have as many young taxpayers working as possible.
I don't assume that the options are mutually exclusive. That said, I'm pragmatic enough to know that someone has to pay for a system like the Danes'. It comes at the expense of high taxes for all.

But if we're talking about curious, all-or-nothing thinking, I have to wonder why you're so obsessively focused on the French? A quick Google search tells me that the unemployment rate in Denmark (horrible
social welfare state and all), is only around 5%. Perhaps the problems in France are specific to France?
Suddenly Google's action in China and Hillary's speech to the Chinese all make sense.
I've been using python for about 8 years before feeling like i wanted to move. I think that puts me well outside the fad window.
RubyGems has an issue with installing prerequisites on prereleases so you have to install them all yourself.. I wrote up some stuff on how to do that: http://bit.ly/rails3install
> Guess what then, you aren't charging the clients enough.

Clients have a choice too....
Our company was launched in 2003, well before Google Sites. Since we also own the trademark for Bandzoogle, it isn't a stretch to change to Sitezoogle. My lawyer (who can't officially represent me) said that the trademark office looks mainly at the first 4 letters of the name. Google Sites is a trademark, which is very different from Sitezoogle.

The very worst that can happen is that I lose a few thousand dollars defending their contest. It's not like they are going to back down at this point. The next thing they'll send is the domain dispute letter. If I lose, fine, I'll change the name. But just instantly giving in to the big "do no evil" bully seems a little premature.
I wonder how many people write in the expectation of a financial reward. It seems like - aside from the occasional King, Brown or Rowling - even the most popular writers have a tough time supporting themselves by writing full-time. Most writers must hold down a more mundane job. Is there really a downside to self-publishing if it isn't realistic to expect a payoff either way?
I understand the pigeonhole filing example, but I quit "filing" years ago. It's tedious. Tagging also takes too much thought, particularly at recall time: did I tag that "development" or "programming"? I just use search.

I have a script that monitors my desktop. Any file not modified within the past 8 hours is moved to a folder dated for the end of this week. That gives me 52 folders a year, granular enough to find a file manually if I know roughly when I dealt with it.

My desktop stays clean except for what I'm actively working on, and I don't look for files hierarchically or by category/tag. To find something, I use Spotlight search. That's faster than navigating a folder hierarchy would be even if I knew exactly where the file was.

That's also why I love Gabor's reMail on the iPhone.
Well, after reading that blog post earlier, I really wasn't getting anything out of it, so I understand why you would be asking the question.

I wouldn't focus so much on how you can get your hourly rate TO $125, but rather think of it as 'what can you offer to make your hourly rate worthy of $125.

Is anybody really looking for a PHP/MySQL programmer? No. They are looking to get a product/service/feature etc. built.
What do you offer in that equation. I suspect that your experience with the language is only a portion of that.

It isn't always easy to figure out what soft skills you bring. Why do you program? What do you really like about it? Do you like creating beautiful code? If so, only so many clients will pay extra for that.
Are you able to make systems run with incredible efficiency, so the client could save on server costs? That may be worth the extra $$ to them.
Are you good at designing usability? If that is a missing piece, that may be valuable as well.

I've found 'what can I offer' is better than 'what can I get'.
Rails 3 Beta Top Line
I recently landed a job via Craigslist. It pays well for my region(Michigan) and seems to be a great company to work for so far. I have a feeling I'm the exception though, not the rule.
That second part is not true at all. The Xbox has been an innovator in pushing online connectivity. It's de rigueur now, but they really pioneered it almost a decade ago. It's the biggest shift in console gaming since the NES.
One successful claim against you changes the rate you pay for each employee. If your rate is set at 7.25% then for one employee you might pay 7.250% * $12,520=$907.70. You pay that much for EACH employee, e.g. 10 employees yields a bill for $9,077.
Rails 3.0 Beta Release
Call To Action Buttons: Does Size Matter?
Port Elizabeth and Addo hotels
A toll bridge, for starters, or at least a piece of one.
A valuable piece of land with a durable building on it (eg capital city)
A piece of a growing and profitable company (eg Google)
Royalties or income streams from work you create (see Elvis, Paul Mcartney, etc)
A piece of valuable farmland
A piece of valuable mine
A piece of a company you create and grow (see succesful startup)
A hunk of precious metal (eg gold, silver - they've been valuable for, say, 5,000 years or so)

Not:
cash
speculative stocks
bubble inflated real estate suitable for a shrinking demographic
managed investments
consumer junk
I think it should call into question the whole point of athletic competitions. If we are at the point where it is essentially a genetic lottery, in the sense that the winners were simply born with lucky genes, then why bother?

Is it really cheating for someone to want the same genetic advantage gifted to another? At what point is a genetic deficiency considered too great and thus a "disease"? If someone is too short, we make them taller. What about someone of average height who wants to be above average?

These are the questions people should look at. Whether they will or not, is another question.
http://www.coastlawgroup.com - great team, Seyamack Kouretchian there is the technology guru to speak with.