skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Historically, people have agreed with you... the free silver party was all about creating inflation so that debtor farmers could pay off their (presumably fixed-interest) debits with cheaper money.

However, I think that the rise of the variable-rate loan means that inflation no longer helps debtors nearly as much as it once did. Also, for those working for others (rather than selling commodities directly, as the farmers during the free silver movement) ones paycheque does not always keep pace with inflation.

The rich don't keep their assets in dollars, they keep them in things like stocks and realeastate, which tends to float with inflation.

Inflation hits the middle/upper middle class by bumping us up in income tax brackets. If you are fortunate enough to have skills that are in demand, you can expect your wage to rise with inflation, however, tax brackets move much more slowly, so you end up paying more in taxes.

As for the lower middle/lower class folks, people who aren't in high demand jobs, well, their pay quite often lags inflation by quite a lot. (in fact, some people see this as a positive of inflation. It's very difficult to issue pay cuts to employees without major morale issues. In inflationary times, simply not issuing raises does the same thing in an almost passive way. Good or not, it's no fun for the worker who sees his buying power shrink.)

Of course, inflation hurts those on fixed incomes the most. Who knows? this might be our way out of the social security mess? but yeah, it's going to suck for the people depending on that cheque.

So yeah, personally, I think that this idea that inflation helps the little guy is... outmoded.
Computer snafu is behind at least 50 'raids' on Brooklyn couple's home
Battle Royale: Client vs. Vendors
Microsoft says its "contentious" relationship with open source is changing
I think in this case, the compliments should go to bill joy, the creator of csh.
To OSX users I highly recommend a note taking application called Notational Velocity. If you have a simplenote account you may use it to centrally store (optionally encrypted) the notes database in the cloud.

Interface is spot on. Very keyboard oriented and hacker friendly.

Notation Velocity: http://notational.net/ / http://github.com/scrod/nv
David Byrne on remote musical collaboration
Do you have a little more information about that? I'm curious to know how the software would do that, and how sophisticated it is. I would imagine it is simply based on user input representations of the bills, and fairly simple tests, but even that would be difficult to do accurately/effectively.
He nailed it:

XML should be used for markup, JSON or YAML for structured data.
A free graph theory book by David Joyner, Minh Van Nguyen, and Nathann Cohen
Number of comments, updated every 30 minutes:

http://api.femtoo.com/trackers/content/?trackerKey=f2t4ba37b...

open, RESTful API's, no propriatory software required...
"There are many people in my family with one or more post-college degrees, and they are just as superstitious as anyone else."

If "religious" is equated to "superstitious" you can see just as many (educated) "superstitious" people in the USA as anywhere else. (google evangelical christianity. Not all of them are illiterate bumblers) You have "healing crusades" and prayer groups to overturn the Health Care Bill and so on in plenty.

What divides religious belief from superstition? Perhaps nothing.
That depends on who you're asking, I think :P

In general it seems to work fairly well, but as with any system there are both people who abuse it /fraud)and people who get abused by it (get defined out of the system because they're "not sick enough" - they're treated as unemployed instead).

There was a study recently with the conclusion that there is 5-10% over spending in the system (e.g. people get more than they were supposed to if everyone filled in every form correctly), including both mistakes and fraud. In my opinion that's pretty good.

Edit: link to governmental info, in English: http://www.forsakringskassan.se/nav/f86d9f2974b05d211aaa2c19...
Lately this topic gets repeated and I picked up this phrase which I like "Control your own schedule while paying all the bills is a pretty good life"
However, the problem of some paramedics is exactly that: they do think about their work when they go home. They see a lot of unhappiness and can't shrug it off. In that way, every line of work has its problems. The bottom line is: don't take your work home with you, unless it's also your hobby and your 'homework' is not just a continuation of your work. At home I do as much as I can in Scheme and Python, while at work I program Java. I'll be switching to a Ruby company soon and I'm not sure I'll continue doing as much Python at home.
Or in ~/.zshrc:

bindkey '\e[A' history-beginning-search-backward
The 2010 Lisp Game Design Challenge
Superstitions beliefs in the US are more prevalent than you think. The uneducated believe in aliens, creationism and angels. The educated believe in alternative medicine, but fear that electromagnetic RADIATIONOMFG causes cancer and that vaccines cause autism. Instead of Swami Krishna using parlor tricks, we have Jenny McCarthy and Oprah pushing pop books that have scientific words in the title.

The only difference between Indian and US superstitions is that US superstitions use scientific words rather than mystical words. "Evil spirits caused the tsunami" is no less superstition than "global warming caused the tsunami".
Supreme Court Unveils New Website Design
As a professional iPhone developer with a multiple top ranking apps, that shit just doesn't really happen anymore. You're much more likely to get a call from Apple with suggestions on what to edit.

The horror stories are from 6-9 months ago, and are outdated. So, while folks trot them out in threads like this as examples of how terrible iPhone development is, actual iPhone developers know that it doesn't really come up.

Our last two updates were accepted within 24 hours, for instance. Our last new application took three submits, due to issues on our end- every email from them was helpful, and actually IMPROVED the final application. Turnaround was 48 hours, and, on the last submission, they expedited to same-day when I asked them to.
The Gifts Project - Social Shopping Extraordinaire
I guess it depends on the person - I used to know a doctor who got extremely stressed when he had to break it someone that they had an incurable condition and that basically they were going to die.

Not something I could do.
Slacker Americans who insist on actually using the time the contract gives them might receive, say, 14 days off in an April to April fiscal year, in addition to public holidays (which are roughly as numerous as they are in the US, but not on the same days -- people work on Christmas and get off on the emperor's birthday, for example). While it is very much not the normal practice, I have special permission from my bosses to be allowed to take the majority of my days off at Christmas so that I can travel home and see my family.

The contract also allows for sick days, bereavement days (1 day for a child/sibling/spouse, 2 days for a parent -- I'm just reporting), and days off for weddings and childbirth. These are, ahem, not utilized to their fullest extent. In practice, the only sick leave I have ever seen taken at my company involved a) a nervous breakdown and b) chemotherapy for metastatizing bone cancer. (He got better... and came back to work!) Our best engineer came in the day after his mother died (although my boss tried to send him home).

Unused leave of the first kind accumulates, which results in older employees in my company having literally months of it sitting around. They will likely never use it, and they'll lose it when they separate from the company. Japanese law specifically forbids you from paying people for unused leave because the government thought companies would force people to work until they dropped, then take the payout.

We're very slowly getting better about this. There is at least one twenty-something male at my company other than me who actually takes all his vacation days every year. (He also left at 5:30 for much of my first year at the company... and stopped after he was informed that, quote, he was less Japanese than Patrick is.)
Hmm. Is "1-3-2010" January 3 or March 1?

Folks from different parts of the world disagree.
Imagine if the skeptic had a heart attack at that very time...
Also sounds alot like Infochimps:

http://infochimps.org/
It's not benign to teach children to believe in superstition. You know gods and goddesses do not exist.
There's a long-held cultural convention that lying isn't morally wrong as long as you successfully lie to yourself first. It may be pitiful, dangerous, or whatever else; but at least it's not evil. This seems to apply to all but a few isolated subcultures.
Title should be: "How you're going to get screwed by eBook DRM"

But then you wouldn't need to bother clicking through because it's all right there in the title.

I wouldn't trust much of the rest of the article, there's some real nonsense in there e.g. he's got the worst explanation of EPUB I've ever read:

" It's based on XML—extensible markup language—which you see all over the place, from RSS to Microsoft Office, 'cause it lays out rules for storing information. And it's actually made up of a three open components: Open Publication Structure basically is about the formatting, how it looks; Open Packaging Format is how it's tied together using navigation and metadata; and Open Container Format is a zip-based container format for the file, where you get the .epub file extension. When you toss those three components together, you have the EPUB ebook format."

I think that's just the overdetailed Wikipedia blurb transcribed into lazy-tech-journalist-ese. In reality EPUB is just XHTML bundled in a zip file. And nonsense like:

"we've only see EPUB on black-and-white e-ink-based readers so far"

So I must be imagining the EPUB books I read with Stanza on my iPhone? Or the web-based EPUB readers?

He also tries to explain the issue of DRM on the standard EPUB by analogy to Audible Books from iTunes. Maybe buying songs from iTunes (or Amazon etc) with and without DRM would be a more recognisable comparison?
If you want to take the long shot odds, go for it.
There are so many cool things you can do with JSON. I just created a boolean logical statement builder on a web page by using free form open and close parenthesis, and and/or radio buttons. A little regex to change the parenthesis into square brackets, then an eval(), and I can walk the whole statement recursively.
[update]

A second sale of a $2 item brought in $1.84, so it appears to be an 8% fee collected off each sale.
Either the guru actually believed in his own power or he's the world's dumbest charlatan.
Ask HN: Books to get started on Angel Investment
What books do you recommend to get started with Angel Investment?
As one of the earlier commenters pointed out, lisp welcomes you to the 1960s.
I don't think Murdoch is an idiot, far from it. Is he a liar, well I'm with Dr House (a fictional medical consultant) on that one - we all lie in some measure. Here Murdoch is spinning the standard lie equating theft (illegal) with copy infringement (tortuous) in order to enhance peoples guilt.

They are markedly different. Equating them is, as I rather cicuitiously said, intellectually dishonest. Theft denies a person the possession of the property, copyright infringement does not.

Copyright as it has been formulated, to encourage movement of works into the public domain in return for a limited monopoly, is a fantastic legal device. But the likes of Murdoch have perverted this deal - I don't deny content creators a right to profit from their work. However, the major corporations and the governments that have acceded to their demands have denied the free enjoyment of much work which should by now have entered the public domain.

The terms of copyright should have reduced in-line with lower cost reproduction methods but instead it has increased. If there is any theft involved in all this it is theft from the public domain.

Intellectual property is not really a "new class" of property it has been around for centuries and began precipitating into law with Queen Anne's Statute in the early 1700s. It is simply a reflection that a man should earn from the fruit of his labours whether they be physical or ethereal fruit.
Ask HN: Experience with Protocol Buffers
Does anyone here have experience with protocol buffers?

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

I need to move some data faster and with less parsing on either side of the transmission, and these seem like a good choice.
Well JSON also lets you get around browsers' same-domain policy without having to set up a proxy, which I think might be more important.
I've read the whole book(not saying that you haven't ;) and haven't found any references to Tao being a "God". Tao is a Way of Life, analogous to the concept of Dharma in Hinduism, Buddhism and other Indian religions.
You Suck (On web apps that mismanage text)
The Real Logo Design King - Logomojo
Meet Paul Rand, the logo design king, in this article by LogoMojo.
how does a sql engine cache [results and plans given] queries?

i would naively assume that there are two caches (ignoring compiled queries - see comment below). one, up front, is a literal cache: repeat a query text exactly and bang, you get the previous results.

but then it would make sense for a second cache based on the structure of the ast after parsing a query. if the structure is the same, but some parameters have changed, then it should be possible to re-use much of a previous [plan].

if i understand the article correctly, it's saying that this doesn't happen. the only way to get this is to use a "compiled query" that you then call with a variety of parameters.

is that right? if so, why? seems like my second level cache wouldn't be that hard to implement...

[edit: i realise this wouldn't avoid the needless passing from linq to text and back to ast, and i agree with the general tone of the article that you need to justify worrying about optimisations - i'm just curious about how sql engines work]

[edit2: clarified by explicitly mentioning plans]
In a lot of small/middle sized companies, you officially have paid vacation but it's badly looked upon to actually take them. It's the same as being the first one out of the office at the official ending time...

In bigger multinationals like Sharp, it's a bit different. Some employees sued them over this a few years back, so now employees are forced to take their annual paid vacations.

Of course, as foreigners you're allowed and supposed to be a bit lazy/eccentric/quirky so you can take day off more easily (plus they understand the argument of taking days off to go see your family)
Large Hadron Collider smashes energy record again
As far as I am aware, Google Wave still lacks the promised ability to embed Waves into web sites. What is the point of collaborating with people, if the results can not be published? Even though there is an API, and open source, Wave is effectively a walled garden. Sure, the rest of the web can be brought into Wave, but Wave can't be brought out to the rest of the web.

Just about every use I have for Wave depends on this one thing. The ability to publish, share, and embed waves outside of wave.google.com. If they actually added it, I'd probably be using Wave like crazy. Without it, no matter what other functionality they have, I have no use for Wave other than as a curiosity.
UK here - I get 33 days, with only days we have to take off being 2 at Xmas and 2 at New Year. Apart from that it is completely flexible.

Can take that any way you want - some people take it in big chunks (4 weeks or so) other as a mix of days here and there with a few weeks as well. Approval process is pretty straightforward and is mainly about giving enough notice so that people can plan round your holidays.

My wife is a lawyer and she gets 36 days, but she rarely gets to take them all due to the pressures of her work.
Very cool, and appropriate that you're basically using PG's spam filtering to identify users on his site :)

I think the next step is to write a more complex filter that does not assume word probabilities are independent of each other, i.e. take unusual phrases like "entirely dissimilar" into account.
Yeah thats ironic, inst YC supposed to be a "seed" stage investment firm, and not a marketing company?
Brilliant.

Enter your address in the system as the default one; complain until the police stop showing up; commit loud crimes.
Wow reading some of these comments makes me realise how good I have it as a teacher in Australia.

We have 13 Weeks paid leave per year. 2 weeks for every 10 weeks worked, and then 6.5 weeks break over Christmas.

On top of that we have 10 days of paid sick leave each year. I can take sick leave by simply emailing that morning and letting them know that I'm not coming in. Sick leave accumulates and is paid out when you leave the employer. The beauty of this is that there is absolutely no stigma associated with taking time off work. If you're feeling over worked then take a 'mental health' day. No one will ever question you for it or demand to see medical certificates etc.

On top of this of course we also have "long service leave", which I assume every country has. It equates to 11 weeks paid leave after working for 10 years. So basically every 10 years a teacher can look forward to around 20 weeks paid leave (if the leave is taken between Christmas and term 1 break).

And at $78,000/year the pay isn't bad either :)

Basically it's the perfect job for someone who is also working on a startup.
My beef is with credit card fields that won't allow dashes IN THE NAME FIELD (and yes, I am shouting). The irony of a web application that refuses to allow Tim Berners-Lee to use his credit card to make a purchase is mind-boggling.

http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/09/you-suck.html
At first i read this as the 4K super HD Red cameras being supported by CR. Thankfully this is not the case and it is about an open source flash clone. The last thing I want to see is random penis at a 4K resolution.
I was involved in a software project there in the late 90's. Their software back then seemed to just consist of a search engine on the text of the bills. There may have been other tools I didn't know about. My project there was fairly limited.

My (probably incomplete or incorrect) understanding was that they would vet a new law by doing keyword searches concerning the main points of the new law. So if a there was a new law about people's lawns, they'd search for "lawn" and whatever other keywords or synonyms would occur to them.
Totally Nerdgay for Marco Arment
If a user enters that, the system could ask them which one they mean; optionally, it could even remember the user's preferences.
Deliberate Practice – Where Self-reflection, Work Ethic and Ambition Meet
> Almost. But they will be read first, followed by a "reinstate" or "let expire" decision.

Huh? Where do legislators read laws before voting? (US Congress critters typically don't.)

> If it's a bad or unnecessary law, this will cost political capital, which favours the "let expire" option.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

Almost all laws are the threat or imposition of force to some end. We hope that the ends justifies the means, but the means are force, so the bias should be towards no law.

Yes, that includes spending, no matter what its on.

That's why my rule wrt laws is "is this something that I'd throw my mother into jail over?"
Nice, but as far as I'm concerned Google Wave still delivers quite a poor/terrible user experience. It's slow, crashes occasionally and navigating around large waves is fairly tortuous. I still think that Wave needs more work to improve its general usability before it's ready for prime time.
When I was young my dad told me "never quit your job until you have another one lined up." I think that advice still holds, but I will expand it some. Get some side work lined up or something, but don't just quit without a plan. That's going to put you in a pinch and you might have to take another, even worse job because you need money.

When I've worked jobs or had lulls in jobs where I was working below my level it always led me to create new projects at home on my own time. These projects kept me learning, stimulated my desire to solve problems, and some have made me a bit of side money. Sadly none have yet taken off to the point where I work on them permanently.
None of these 3 is a functional difference
I suppose stress levels depend as much on your personality as the job itself.

Doing a pointless and futile job (i.e. teaching) stresses me [1]. Uncertainty and not knowing how to solve a problem don't. I know people who can handle pointless grunt work, but can't handle uncertainty. I could imagine enjoying an EMT or surgical job (bandage the bleed, pass them on) but not necessarily primary care (treating people for diseases they could easily have prevented by putting down the potato chips).

The trick, I suppose, is to figure out what stresses you and do something else.

[1] Teaching people who want a grade is pointless. Teaching people willing to think is not. In my experience, most teaching falls into the former category. 5 weeks left!
That's a moderately extreme scenario. You're inconveniencing users to prevent some possible but unlikely future inconvenience?
These dangers don't appear to be unique to IT, and apply to most jobs.
Ask HN: Using vague metaphors as job requirements
What comes to mind when you come across a job opening which requires you to be a "CSS rockstar" or a "PHP wizard"? Is this a by-product of a job market so oversaturated with incompetence that the employers must resort to extremes to make sure only people with real talent apply, or should I just disregard the entire thing as a meaningless trend?
Sorry we were late to the party, guys, we just got so wrapped up in writing software that people actually use.
if you are talking about JSONp: JSON is by no means required to do that. You could in theory easily pass a string containing XML to the callback function.
JSON is popular because there is a straightforward mapping from JSON to native types in many programming languages.
... while the lispers where still counting the closing parens needed to finally get their code running

SCNR
Think of it as every .NET developer, however competent, can build his next Windows Phone application.
This challenge is a bit flawed in that we have no way of knowing if the anonymous poster is willing to ever confirm that he/she made the post, isn't it? Not to state the obvious but it just seems that even if a great amount of technical work is put into this, you'll never know the answer unless the person in question agrees to participate.
May I ask what you new career is?
For me it's because it won't run on my computer unless I install the Moonlight plug-in.
I've never had any difficulties in being able to stop thinking about work when off duty, but then I've been around computers for so long that perhaps I have a very binary psychology.
Blogging with Nesta
"The Ninjas are deadly and silent

They're also unspeakably violent

They speak Japanese, they do whatever they please

And sometimes they vacation in Ireland"

-Bare Naked Ladies

http://www.metrolyrics.com/the-ninjas-lyrics-barenaked-ladie...