skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think your view of 1920 society is limited to what was happening in a few urban centers to a few select minorities or social groups. I have heard stories from my grandma and great grandma's time and the 1920s was no "social revolution" for them. The citizenship from 1924 wasn't very real and more token then anything else.

So, I guess to answer your question, no. I believe the 1920s society would have a lot of growing up to do and any back tracking from the economic problems of the 1930s would be intensified by today's economic problems combined with globalism. The 1920s started our isolationism that was only lifted (for the common man) by us being bombed.
I paid off my parent's mortgage at 29. Moved to the US from India when I was 28. Getting rid of mortgage was the best way to "save" money for the family.
Huh? The article makes no sense at all. I mean WTF?:

"But something was troubling me with this number. In color theory the thing doesn’t work like that. In order something to be complete red + green + blue should be 255. But in this case we have (0 Red + 68 green +204blue = 272) And 272 <> 255."
Fry's has breadboards. A small section, couple of rows in what is otherwise a massive consumer electronics store.

I can get most of what I want in my city, but then that's one of the reasons I've chosen to live in a big city.

Of course, the main place your argument falls down is that the items you describe are in fact available. Perhaps not in the channel you want, but they're available.

So where exactly is capitalism failing you?
I've been locked up in a Russian prison while travelling. Met the local Mafioso. Ate great Borscht.

Haven't seen a winter since 2006. I chase the sunshine around the world by doing mini-migrations to avoid the cold.

I learn a little bit of the local tongue everywhere I go. Can say 'Thank you' in around 30 languages.

I met up with my step-dad after 25 years of separation. An amazing guy and someone I definitely want to get to know better.

My other great achievements are a work in progress though...

EDIT: added a missed item
"Are you measuring the value of an MBA by the odds of becoming a billionaire (or even >$100M)?"

I admit that it's a quick-and-dirty metric, but that applies to PG's argument as well as mine.

"People achieve that level of success without regards to their education."

Some do, but the point is that education helps. Consider this list:

"One of the best ways to become a self-made billionaire is to attend an Ivy League school. 16 of the 52 self-made billionaires have Ivy League educations:

Warren Buffett, Columbia
Bill Gates, Havard
Carl Ichan, Princeton
John Werner Kluge, Columbia
Edward Crosby Johnson, III, Harvard
Sumner Redstone (Viacom), Harvard
Charles Bartlett Johnson, Yale
Edward Lampert, Yale
Steve Ballmer, Harvard
Geroge B. Kaiser, Harvard
Leonard Blavatnik, Columbia, Harvard
Ronald Owen Perelman, Penn
Michael Bloomberg, Havard
Stephen Schwarzman, Yale, Harvard
Eric Schmidt (Google), Princeton
Jeff Bezos, Princeton

An additional six billionaires have near-Ivy quality education:

Sergey Brin, Stanford
Larry Page, Stanford
Philip H Knight, Stanford
Charles Schwab, Stanford
George Soros, London School of Economics
James H Simons, MIT

The conclusion is clear. If you want to become a self-made billionaire, get the most prestigious educational credentials.

The best degree to get is an MBA. The following nine self-made billionaires have MBAs, and it's worth noting that eight out of the nine have an MBA from one of the nation's top three business schools: Harvard, Wharton, and Stanford.

Steve Ballmer, Harvard, Stanford MBA
Geroge B. Kaiser, Harvard, Harvard MBA
Philip H Knight, Stanford MBA
Charles Egen (Echostar), Wake Forest University MBA
Leonard Blavatnik, Columbia, Havard MBA
Ronald Owen Perelman, Penn, Wharton MBA
Michael Bloomberg, Havard MBA
Charles Schwab, Stanford MBA
Stephen Schwarzman, Yale, Harvard MBA"
* I've arranged big underground raves with international DJ's

* I've successfully started a bar in Ibiza from scratch

* I learnt PHP, javascript, SQL, CSS and HTML from scratch without any help

* I hold three patents

* I've done three startups

* I survived an English boarding school

* I bought a boat that I live on, which I've totally refurbished and redone without ever having had a screwdriver in my hand before.

* I have been asked to star in a pornmovie, but declined

* I've had a short but glorious career as a male stripper

*I had fun doing all of it

:-)
Compile-time choices are a terrible code smell. If object creation is sorted out (through dependency injection/service locator/etc), the compile-time choice can usually map to exactly one runtime option and exactly one conditional.
Citation from the blog:

We offered Lucas $20 for taking out the garbage each week. Twenty dollars for five minutes of work, an extreme amount, just to see of our instinct was accurate. He seemed excited by the prospect of all that money and the first week eagerly took the garbage out. We immediately paid him the $20 he had earned.

The following week I ended up taking the garbage out. Even though the $20 offer was still in effect, Lucas had no interest. It simply wasn’t worth it him to do something he didn’t want to do. We could have raised the offer to $100, or $1000 and it wouldn’t have mattered.

Question:

Does any one know how to alleviate motivational problem described above? Not in psychopath but in otherwise almost normal person.
sure feels like it reading some of the replies to this thread :/
I guess it's easy to assume that. To my Hispanic eyes it's different though. Somewhat recently I read that Mexico was now No.2 in obesity. Behind the US (No.1). But this is a recent development, even newer that the US's obesity I believe, and it came about starting in the 90's, when Mexico opened up with the North American Free Trade Agreement and finally (I still consider it a good thing, for Mexico at least) allowed freer importing, and exporting of among other things, fast-food american chains. We gave up the torta for the burger.

But another interesting observation is that here in the US, the trend not only coincides with the "Low-fat" assault (see Taubes' GCBC), it also does with the embargo imposed on Mexican cane sugar in the late 70's, and the subsequent adoption of High-fructose corn syrup as the sweetener of choice for Americans. And then you see some longing for "mexican coca-cola".

In short, I believe that Hispanic obesity has been growing alongside everyone else's here, not causing it. Back in the day there were only the "fat gringos".
I used the rarely rare words used (rare combination of words used only 1/few time(s)[ORG]):

(i) The first search[1] revealed "gstar", but although they both have similar writing style, gstar doesn't have an active participation on privacy discussions (based to the query only [2])

(ii) The second search[3] revealed "astine": now this is interesting because this user has a very active participation on privacy discussions[4], especially I think he was inspired by _why[5].

[1] http://searchyc.com/sentiment+that+inspires

[2] http://searchyc.com/user/gstar

[3] http://searchyc.com/Ethically%252C+is+it+fair

[4] http://searchyc.com/user/astine

[5] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=774337

EDIT: [ORG] Based on the original comment at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1197027
Yes, Open source beer/restaurant had source code and the washing machine doesn't have one yet (I couldn't find).

But my argument was against the idea of 'a project having to have a microprocessor or any code running in it to be an Open Source project'
Yes. Web colors are supposed to be sRGB, but hardly anyone has a monitor that displays actual sRGB. Laptops and LCDs are convenient in so many ways, but we probably had better color reproduction when CRTs and desktops dominated...

Due to poor LCD quality, aging backlights and operating system configuration differences, all the parameters that affect color can vary wildly: gamma, color primaries... There's no guarantee of what #0044cc will look like, nor is there any guarantee that it would be perceptually about twice as bright as #002266.

At least Mac OS X 10.6 has finally switched to "PC gamma" (2.2) by default, so that eliminates one source of endless confusion about digital color.
Illinois and Missouri border states other than each other. And the population is not concentrated on the borders, let alone a single one.
Do Jesus Really Want to be Seen in These Places?
They should name that color "Hooloovoo".
I like HN karma. Back when HN was new and there weren't many people around, it was a good incentive to stick around and contribute. Now that "leaders" is gone (although only hidden), I'm not sure there is that much incentive to contribute. The community is still small enough, however, that it's easy enough to identify the regulars, so maybe karma is not that important.

If there was one thing I would change, it would be how karma is doled out for submissions. It seems unfair that if someone submits my blog that I don't get any points for the post. But since I am usually first to submit my own stuff, I guess I don't really care :)
What he's talking about is branching in code to avoid all subversion branches. That's probably pathological.
What do you think of this proposal by pg

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1006589

from not quite three months ago?
If you could post out the field or type of application/system you have in mind at least briefly, you might be able to get a much higher relevant response rate. Everyone has their own interests and areas their most fluent in...

Is it a content management system? does it involve crunching large quantities of data? is is mobile application? does it involve building something physical or making an electronic gadget? etc..
I think the telling part is that don't have anything to hit back with. Apple came at them with 20 patents and only has to make 1 stick. Apple and Nokia will probably settle (it seems more about price and licensing then winning), but HTC needs to win and that is extremely difficult with these patents. Check the Sun/Kodak history for an example.
French contestants torture each other on TV Game of Death
The suit from Apple covers 20 or so different patents. A breakdown is here: http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/02/apple-vs-htc-a-patent-bre...
Adobe: Why we're using HBase
Speaking Hindi is not a necessary condition for one to be considered Indian.

Tao te ching is not a religious book.
Wasn't he CEO at the time of the Kodak suit. That was probably not handled well.
I think Microsoft would abolish the patent system in a heartbeat if they could. What part of their operation depends on the successful prosecution of their patents?
Did you get any rewards/recognition from your employer for your work? (I understand that the feeling that your app worked great itself is a big reward).
Patent trolls are such a problem because the usual economics that protect a company from suit (eg. being countersued) don't apply since the patent troll doesn't actually produce anything that could infringe. This is a great example of exactly that.
How Google taught me to cache and cash-in
A psychologist who is a Facebook friend of mine was surprised that the French psychologists obtained permission to reproduce Milgram's famous experiment.
Yes it is, but as far as I know its not widely used outside of the turtle programs. In my opinion, instead of delving deeper into it, the student would probably benefit a bit more in the longrun by spending the bulk of their time on something more mainstream...this would open them to a much more available set of documentation, support, communities, etc. Though maybe I am wrong and there is a thriving massive Logo development community!
Binaries are not merged - if histories diverge and one side changes but the other does not, it will choose the side that changes. If both sides change, it will record a conflict and you have to choose one side (or create a new binary that you tell the system is resolved). You can run an external merge tool with 'git mergetool' and there are over a dozen it knows how to run, but I don't know which of them will handle images. You can also use .gitattributes to help you diff binary files efficiently, but you still have to either choose one side or manually create a new binary. I mean, even a merge tool won't help much there - if you have images that changed on two different branches and you want to combine them, you have to fire up Photoshop or something anyways - that's almost always going to be a manual process. Though, in the four or so years I've been using Git (and the years before that with SVN and CVS and RCS) I don't remember having to do that very often - thus is the life of a coder, I suppose. The people who create and modify images for programs tend not to tread on each other.

Also, this is really the same problem even for systems without solid branching capability, like SVN. If two people modify a binary image at the same time and one commits, then the other will get a merge conflict when they update and will have to solve the conflict in order to commit.
I agree and don't think it's limited to programming. Considering business, it's difficult for a large established organization to make drastic changes.

It's much easier for a new entrant (startups) to innovate because they don't have the same baggage.
Yep, and a bit about doing some search stuff with Dish Network which they had reported on earlier.

> The Wall Street Journal this month reported that Google is testing a new TV-search service with Dish Network Corp. that is designed to allow users to find shows on the satellite-TV service as well as video from Web sites such as Google's YouTube. The March 8 article noted that Google has been talking to partners about adapting Android—the operating system it developed for cellphones—for TVs and set-top boxes.
Don't take this the wrong way but on every comment I've read from you, there is "A/B" :-)

Not sure how Zynga's effectivness might be against your religion, but "A/B" is part of you somehow: religiously or not.
Iphone Audio Booster
I was on summer vacation with my friends to a sleepy hot springs in eastern Japan. (At the risk of stating the obvious, one is naked when in a Japanese hot spring.)

Anyhow, my friends had been badgering me for a while while in the indoor portion of the hot springs to transition to the outdoor portion with them. I told them I would come out in a few minutes. This particular hot springs, being mostly natural, has an uneven gradient -- it has a transition from 1.5 feet deep to six feet deep which is about as abrupt as falling off a cliff. The transition is marked with a log suspended above the water and a warning sign outside the door.

Anyhow, while I was still gathering up my courage to go outside, a little boy splashing along in the two-foot end of the spring approached the gap in the pole that permits access to the deep end and, before anyone could warn him away, vanished.

I only have two coherent memories of what happened next: one, I remember thinking most strongly that I was disregarding the advice in the Boy Scout Manual by entering water to remove a drowning victim and, two, as soon as we broke the surface he spit boiling water in my eye. This made me happy because it meant I didn't have to attempt rescue breathing.

What made me substantially less happy was going from being the gangly white guy in the corner everyone was making a pretense of not staring at to being the gangly white guy in the center of the room who everyone was making absolutely no pretense of not staring at. I handed the child to his father (didn't say anything -- my Japanese totally failed me out of embarassment) and bolted to the corner. Then folks heard the commotion from the lady's side of the springs and came over to see what was happening. I bolted out, got changed, and searched the vicinity for icecream while waiting for my friends to finish their baths.
Methinks the goddess doesn't understand very well how money flows, and how external forces like government regulation are what distort the market.

state grantees getting paid to collect the information are expected to get some of their data from the Federal Communications Commission, begging the question - why not require the FCC to create the map and save $350 million?

She also seems to assume that when the government does something, it's free. How can she not realize that if the FCC does something, it needs to pay its employees, etc. If the FCC doesn't need to do it, then it needs fewer employees, and we can all save on taxes?
Project Manager's View vs. Developer's View
Have you tried, say, Radio Shack? It depends on the store, but I know at least one of them in Rochester stocks breadboards and basic components. If you need something less common or you don't want to pay the Radio Shack premium, might I suggest DigiKey.com?
QCon SF Keynote: Techie VC's Talk About Trends & Opportunities
Hopefully that was just clipart, rather than any serious suggestion. It's not mentioned in the article text.
I think this affects version control systems specifically because the nature of the beast is to create a format to track changes over a long period of time. Changing that format is a huge pain in the ass and rarely worth it.

In VCSes more than in regular software, you really have to get the design right very early in the process.
So you never branch or merge?
The storage model does not - it is not file-delta based, like SVN and Mercurial. However, you as a developer can (and often do) think of the commits in terms of a changeset or "work introduced" - this is evident in tools that exist like 'rebase' which treats each commit in a branch as a patch and the collection of unique commits on that branch as a patch series and helps you transfer that series elsewhere. The 'cherry-pick' command is similar - it enforces your thinking of each commit as a changeset or patch to what came before it.
That also bothered me. Why should the math matter?
After reading over some of my lower rated comments, it also became clear that most of the time they actually sucked.

You can learn a lot more than this from low-rated comments. Like highly-scored comments, they allow you to get a feel for what the community as a whole thinks. (If your comment is at -4, it's only there because it can't be downmodded any further.)

Here's an example. One thing that bugs me is when people spend an hour writing a rant about some simple bug in an open-source project. I reply, "comment out the line in question and send them a patch". This is nearly always downmodded to -4. What I've learned from this is that people here don't really want to write good software, they just want to talk. It is a discussion site, after all. But I think it's funny that the idea of, gasp!, contributing to an open-source project they use is so offensive that 5 or more people would click the downmod button on a post suggesting it.

(And in case you think I'm saying "every time I get downmodded, it's because I'm so much smarter than everyone else, and they just don't get it," that's not true. Most of the time, I'm intentionally being a dick because that amuses me, and the most karma I can lose is 5 points.)

I would just ask that you consider putting some real time into trying to figure out why the scores bother you and decide, once a reason is identified, if it's something worth changing your mind over or not. Perhaps it isn't. No big deal. We all see the world slightly differently.

I mentioned in another comment that karma is a good way to encourage people to contribute in the beginning, since it's a way to make the contributers easily identifiable. Later on, though, the effect is the opposite. You are a smart person, but suddenly you have to compete with the people that have been around longer. They have 20,000 karma, and you have 700. Naturally, you are going to hate karma, because people tend to say "well, if you had been here longer..." instead of actually engaging you in real conversation.

I had this problem on Perlmonks. I remember hearing, "I don't know who this jrockway is, but he only has 4 XP, so you should probably ignore him." Of course, I wrote the book that was being discussed in the thread. What would I know about that? So because of this bitter taste in my mouth, I never bothered reading Perlmonks (except for some of the classics, like btilly's rant on "functional programming".)

StackOverflow came along, everyone started at 0, I answered a few Perl questions, and now I am near the top there.

But it's not all good. Just the other day, I got 100+ karma for answering "How do I write a program to print 'hello world' reversed" with "print "dlrow olleh". Why do I deserve a better reputation for that? (Why did I post it in the first place? Dunno, maybe I was bored? Or tired of dumb homework questions?)

It sounds dumb if you think about it, but here we are. People trust the karma number, but it's really not worth trusting. Except when it is.
Exactly. You're already creating all your objects with factories, so all you have to do is build a FactoryFactory that builds the right kind of factories and you're good to go...

http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.219431
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/the-worlds-rubbish-...
Joel Spolsky, distributed version control, and Taco
FourSquare vs. Gowalla at SXSWi 2010: We Have a Winner
Nagios notifications via SMS using clickatell
perhaps his sample size was too small
> But the US isn't top of the per capita lists either.

You're right. But the ones that are higher don't have much "total mass".

We've discussed three ways to compare - total GDP, GDP/person, and "how much can they do". The US is not at the top of any of them, but it's high on all three.
>> "Guess what? Microsoft also tested multiple versions of blue for links in their search results. A specific color of blue (#0044CC) drove $80-$100 million dollars a year increase over the light blue the design team tried first."

You can't change a color, see things increase, and claim it's all down to a change of color. Also as bing "increased", Live "decreased". Has Bing been successful?

It makes for a fun PR story, but it's complete BS.

Whatever happened to science? How much money did Live search make? How much is Bing making? Have they been able to add any traffic?

Some hard data would be interesting.

One point to note is that they essentially copied the colors straight from Google.
You're right that a lot of the Jobs anecdotes can be spun both ways (for example, when he told Knuth he read all the books; or how exactly he got his new organ); and it's hard to know the empathy bit without getting close to him. So let's look on the grander scale.

Philanthropy is hardly unknown to the Silicon Valley; there's Bill Gates giving away scores of billions, or the Google guys, or Steve Wozniak's past decades of work. So Jobs is certainly aware that his peers consider charity a good use of their billions.

And Jobs is rich - WP tells me 5.5 billion & increasing, and any plausible financial management plan has him having sold off a fair bit of stock (just to reduce risk if nothing else).

And Jobs has the personal motivation: he is, I am surprised to learn, a Buddhist. Is there any global religion which in general puts as much emphasis on good works & not possessing billions as Buddhism?

Yet, Jobs apparently does not significantly give to charity: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070620152256AA... Keep in mind that even your basic tithe of 10%* would mean dozens or hundreds of millions a year being given away to someone.

A narcissistic asshole, one might well expect, would give money away like a drunken sailor to show how awesome and munificent and successful he is, and immortalize his name on foundations and buildings and scholarships etc.

A psycho/sociopath... not so much.

* I realize that I can't simply take 5.5 billion and divide by 10 years, but with numbers as big as these, whether we go by net worth or income doesn't matter so much.
Oh man, I had that movie on vhs and watched the guitar battle scenes countless times. About the ep: we were an acquired taste so be prepared but yeah happy to email it to you.
Discrimination Against the Thin