skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree: Carrier and vendor relationships are the root cause of the problem, not incompatible chips or anything.

Maybe I should have used a different word than hardware, but I'll stand by that word rather than replace it with some airy abstract phrase like total product experience. When I say "Google is now in the hardware business" what I mean is: The average customer buys the physical phone, the OS, the carrier, the contract, and the warranty as part of one big package. Unless the customer is among the 0.0001% of customers who read Make magazine, they don't buy the hardware and software separately, nor -- in the USA -- do they get to independently shop for a carrier. They buy a package, and they call that package a phone. They want the whole package to work and be supported. If the new version of the Maps app doesn't run on their phone, my guess is that this average customer doesn't say gosh, the hardware is compatible, the software could theoretically work, and the open-source maintainers are on my side, but it's too bad about my platform's dysfunctional carrier-vendor relationship. They say "gosh, my phone sucks now".

It's a problem for everyone. In Apple-land it manifests as "the iPhone has terrible reception and doesn't support tethering", though of course the iPhone hardware and software offer pretty good reception and do support tethering; it's AT&T that sucks. In Android-land it manifests as platform fragmentation: There is no one thing called Android; instead there are half a dozen little Androids no two of which are alike.
No, the worst thing is buying the car new. When you drive off the lot a car gets hit with immediate depreciation. The first year captures a lot more of that 30%. If you simply buy cars that are 1 year used you save a ton on the deprecation to the point where a 3-5 year loan at 6%ish never puts you underwater if you put a little money down.
I actually think that the Black Eyed Peas make great music! In terms of lyrical content no but there is a lot more to music than just the lyrics and this is even more true in the case of the Black Eyed Peas. I get the impression that for the group the sound and production take center stage and the lyrics are just an after thought but I think it's a worthy trade off because the musical arrangements themselves tend to be very creative and the novelty of the sound intrigues as the brain tries to make sense of something quite unlike anything it's heard before.
I don't understand. Are you trying to be funny, or just really lame?
No. The real issue is that derivatives have to a large part been intentionally made hard to understand in order to create a complex system that can be gamed by people who understand parts of it, for a time.

And this system has become completely divorced from any useful risk-managing effect derivatives were originally created for and is now creating impossible-to-manage risks of its own, and more importantly, is having a huge net negative effect on the economy.

Rather than mediating between those who have money to invest and those who need money to create value, the financial industry has in large parts become a parasite that sucks profits out of the economy while providing no value of its own.
Echo Nest: The Musical Brain-- How It Works
I don't know how it is in the EU, but in the US it makes very little sense to buy a new luxury car. Many people who like luxury cars also like owning the newest one. This means they lease and/or buy them and only keep them for 1-2 years. If you look in the used luxury car market you can find great deals. So great in fact that I'm amazed anyone buys one new, but that's what people like to spend their money on I guess.
Not a good article at all.

a) Nobody has ever confused a car with an investment.

b) "Assuming a modest 10% return". 10% after taxes and inflation is not a modest return by any stretch of the imagination and I'd be thrilled if I could achieve that consistently. If he hasn't factored inflation and taxes in then all his sums are wrong.

c) "Here, look, my $4000 student car costs more than $4000 in running costs and depreciation over three years" is not a useful example in the context of luxury vehicles. With luxury vehicles your running costs will be a much smaller fraction of the original outlay. (Although I admit depreciation will still be a big factor. Probably best to get one second hand that's a couple of years old.)

d) It's just a generalization of the general truism that millionaires have often become millionaires because they're frugal.

e) If you've got, say, five million dollars, you can cheerfully drop a hundred grand on a car and it's only a small fraction of your wealth. Not a sensible idea, but not fatal either.

f) In the second paragraph he essentially says "Millionaires often drive cheap cars except when the drive luxury cars". This is not a particularly impressive insight.
The Teachers’ Unions’ Last Stand
Previous submission, submitted with the canonical URL:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1283523
I think your general rule is only for those who learn this way. I find that a lot of programmers learn this way but not all...so this general rule isn't universal ;)
you can watch the results here: http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/23/watch-the-tcdisrupt-hackers...
Lewis Pugh: 'human polar bear' swims Mount Everest glacial lake
Lawyer "love letters" (patent license demands)
Facebook's biggest demographic is 30 something women with kids. They are unknowingly putting pictures of their kids in public. Young bachelors don't understand the outrage, but one day you will.
Livestream of TechCrunch HackDay demos
Depends how you look at things I guess. Without simplifying the discussion Twitter's value is in the stream and data they generate, not their userbase. Having encouraged an ecosystem this is a conscious choice they now seemingly want to rectify.
We don't think so. Some observations:

- were business app focused.

- chrome web store is focused on enhancing chrome, which makes their strategy different.

- were more focused on the overall monetization/distribution layer. The actual cloudomatic.com property is a small piece of that.

- it moves everything forward.
Making a point. It's exactly the sort of problem a lot of Facebook noise-makers are focusing on.

There are different levels of privacy, and privacy can be expected online. How else do you buy anything online? You're giving out your credit card / bank data and billing and delivering address, but when was the last time you saw those broadcast online to everyone who can google your name?

If Amazon started listing names of people who purchased things (and what they purchased), you can bet people would get pissed. What Facebook is doing is about the same thing, and it's getting worse all the time, hence the uproar. But remember the uproar is happening in a tiny amount of the internet - the goal of all this is to get the average user to realize what's happening, because they should be upset about it.

edit: As an example, take a look at the Facebook phone number site. People are clearly expecting FB to be holding things at least somewhat private, when they're not. And they keep opening things up further and further, and the UI keeps implying it's just you and your friends. Nobody but us geeks even consider reading privacy statements, so the UI is all they go on.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1370786
Actually, I'd say most people do have the attitude he has about privacy, which is what makes the wave of privacy hand wringing mildly annoying. Most regular users of Facebook or Google couldn't care less. I can't back this up with data, but I'd bet on it. Even if its a lot in absolute numbers, the materiality threshold is really high. If ever HN user and every techcrunch reader quit facebook tomorrow, I doubt that would be enough to provoke a drastic course correction from fb.
g) He also states he assumed 8% yearly depreciation, then goes on to use 10% yearly depreciation in his math on the very next line.
There are different levels and types of privacy, and people believed they had certain types of privacy, while understanding they didn't have others.

For example, I fully get that Google has my IP address and search queries. But I fully expect that you do NOT have that information. Likewise for my email on gmail. If Google were to take my old emails and post them on a public site I'd be upset.

Likewise, I'd be upset if Google went around my neighborhood gathering wifi data. Unencrypted or encrypted (which given their computing power, they could likely break, given the state of current implementations) I'd not be happy -- it breaks the unwritten assumption I have about what data is private.

And the relationship with advertisers is another issue. This is more an issue that I have finite time to deal with things and the last thing I need is for Facebook giving my name and email address to thousands of advertisers. And companies like Apple probably even have your credit card info. You probably don't want them giving that info away to advertisers either.

And lastly, there is also a component, at least in the US, of fear of intrusion by the government. If for some reason, the government wants to start auditing supporters of gay marriage, they could use the Patriot Act to narrow down the real name of Jack_2099@yahoo.com. The less info Yahoo and other sites have on you, the more difficult this becomes.

The fundamental question is why give up your privacy? What are you getting out of it? What do you potentially have to lose? Not today, tomorrow, but what about in ten years? There's very little upside to losing privacy, but _potentially_ huge downside.
the lyrics are just an after thought

Your observation reminded me of this quote, from a pretty good book about a pop-music group:

Steered by their instant harmonizing, the duo's way of composing produced unusual moves that released a flood of catchy melody to which they sang dummy words or pure nonsense. Only later, generally speaking, did they fill in their lyrics - and then mainly phrasally, only bothering about overall concepts in formula terms (e.g. using the second or third person, aiming towards a sort of punch-line, and so on). Rather than tell a story in traditional Tin Pan Alley style, [they] wrote their lyrics to create a mood or a tone, so as not to get in the way of the effect created by the music and the sound. This bred a casual attitude to normal sense which later turned explicitly free-associational. There was always just enough sense in a lyric for the listener to get the general idea. The rest came from the sum of the parts of the record as a whole. [They] rarely thought long about their lyrics.

This is, of course, about John Lennon and Paul McCartney in the 1960s. (Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles Records and the Sixties)

This is how pop music has worked for nigh-on fifty years.
I came across OrientDB a week ago, while looking for a Document DBMS that could be embedded in a client side application. Sadly haven't had time to fully check it out yet, but it looked the most promising of the options out there.

The Java/Hibernate pattern seems to be common for java applications, but there's doesn't seem to be (as far as I can see) for a document/object based alternative. I'm currently working with an object graph that translates very poorly to a relational DB, does anyone have any experience with any non-relational alternatives?
I once thought my car was stolen, because I had been completely out of it with fever, and we both forgot my boyfriend was the last one to park it... and he parked it far away.

The police came. We found my car. They smiled but didn't make fun of me.

Then they invited us to a LAN party.

Maryland police are pretty nice, as long as you're white.
Statements like that generally assume that that's an investment adjusted against inflation or devaluation......looking at the interest rate alone on a currency is meaningless without the rest.
Indeed, only iPhone upgrades are "Free", because they're subsidized. But the majority of people don't seem to get that just because you're not paying something at that particular point in time doesn't mean you didn't incur that cost over a stretch of time. It's also why people still think of iPhones as being worth $200 when in fact they are worth $600, and why they get so angry when they get hit with the early termination fee.
My code's compiling :-)

(Actually, I'm waiting for a data extraction script to finish, but I suppose I could be doing more productive things than HN while I wait)
It doesn't matter until you're denied a loan application or a job interview because of what is out there about you.
Well, the article is pretty useless, as pointed out by philk above, so here's some advice for everyone who's not a millionaire:

http://www.banking.state.ny.us/brblc.htm

"Leasing can be beneficial if you want the newest model car, plan on getting a new car every two to three years, plan to drive fewer miles than the lease limit and plan to take very good care of the car... If you plan on driving the car for more than four years you are probably better off buying."

And for those with money to burn, here's a George Best quote:

"I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered."
Great overview and guide! I always hated running and went through lots of the latest shoes. I picked up a pair of Vibram 5fingers after a barefoot-style running clinic. Now trail running is actually enjoyable and I wear them while working out and at work on occasion.

Wearing these things makes walking around on this planet a much more engaging experience. It's not just about ridding yourself of all that cruft that is your shoes, it's about reconnecting with your body in a more natural way.
I would rather my children didn't use something like this. Purely because it's a waste of time. Children socialise just fine at the local park and school.

While at home they need down time and time to be bored. It's an essential element of developing your own personality.

They've got 400 years of books to read as well, the sooner they start on that the sooner they will finish.
Out of curiosity: when did you start your Facebook account, at what age (approximately), and were you in school at the time?
One problem is that not everything people put on the web is intended to be public for everyone in the world to look at. Especially Facebook is seen as (and used to be) a way to communicate with people you know, not to be stalked by people you don't. It's a mix of broken implicit promises and false (but absolutely natural) expectations.

Another, perhaps bigger problem that you seem to have completely missed is that Facebook, Google & Co. don't just collect information about what you put online, but also about what you do online, and can correlate it to a frightening and potentially harmful degree:

"Dear Rick,

By analyzing your search and websurfing profile we are able to offer you products that are tailored to your personal interests. Included is your personalized catalog: "Kingsize anal dildoes".

Christmas is near, and you still haven't found the right presents for some of your family friends and colleagues? No problem! Just send us the name and address of the person you want to surprise with a special present and for only $5 you get a personalized gift catalog tailored to that person's interests!

42 of your acquaintances have already asked us about special presents for you."
They may depreciate slower, but the insurance and maintenance costs are a heck of a lot higher in absolute terms.... I'm sure they more than make up for the lesser depreciation.

Cars aren't investments.... bottom line. You buy an aston martin or ferrari because you want one and can afford to treat yourself to one..... not because you've somehow rationalized it's resale value into some kind of pseudo investment - if you think that way you probably won't keep your millions very long.
I'm from the US. Here's why I previously bought a new car (the high-end trim level Matrix, not luxury though):

I wanted a low mileage car because I had owned several high-mileage, but reliable, used cars, and calculated that I spent at least $200/mo over the year on routine repairs and maintenance.

A low-mileage (sub-30K) late year model, otherwise identical used car cost only $2,500 less than the new car.

The interest rate on a no-downpayment loan for the new car was 0% for 12 mos and 3.9% after. The interest rate on the no-downpayment loan on the used car was 13% from the start.

On the new car, I wouldn't have to pay for the first major service for about 18 months. On the used car, it was coming up in a matter of months. (The 30k). Not to mention it would soon need new tires, brake pads/rotor turning, and it was the half-life for the struts and major transmission services, too. (That's $1000 right there.)

You have no idea how the used car was treated in the breakin period and early oil changes, etc, and by only 30K miles, the damage won't have shown itself the way it will have by 80K miles. So when buying a low-mileage used car, sometimes you're actually making a greater gamble.

As you can see, all the logical points added up to buying the new car. It would actually cost less because of the financing and repair bills I would be less likely to pay during ownership.

Additionally, I was able to buy it right away, without having to hunt around, because the first few used ones I found with the trim level I wanted were safety cone yellow. Ugh.

Moral: BUYING USED ISN'T ALWAYS A SMARTER DEAL.

I love splurging on things, but not when the splurge comes back to haunt me month after month. ;)

EDIT: I agree with you about the luxury car, period, and also I wouldn't buy one used. That's why I'm trying to talk my husband out of a BMW, period. IMO the cost difference between a low-end BMW and a high-end VW isn't worth it.
I remember an IT guy telling me that the extent of privacy when sending an email is roughly equivalent to talking loudly on a public streetcorner. Hyperbole I hope, but everyone assumes that email is private - Hypothetically maybe, but realistically I doubt it. The only thing truly private is the inside of your head. Tin foil hat aside, the problem the OP misunderestimates is the boundaries of marketing. Every ad agency would love to have realtime data of your BP and heartrate when viewing their commercial, and if they could, without your knowledge, they certainly would. Of course no one would sign an opt-in clause.
I had to make sure I knew my multiprocessing well, having only learned it by proxy while hacking a hobby OS and playing with pthreads. I walked through this little book over three days and it was fun.

I still don't think I understand the full implications of multi-threading still, even though I have written a mini-library and studied "Java Concurrency" book.
A simple hack that has worked wonders for me: On any given day my to do list has exactly one item. This enables me to focus better on the most important thing. I try to make it about one day's work, but who knows...

Today's item: Get buffering working on complex lookups.
It may be valid according to the wording, but denying supported features to all but one rendering engine is certainly not compatible with the spirit of any web standard.
Trying out new AdWords campaigns for the first time in ~8 months. Got one A/B test live and another coded. (That is the Mother of All A/B Tests for me, since it completely removes one product from my site.)

I also nailed a freelance proposal, got it accepted, and did half a day of well-compensated work that should make the client happy.

Progress on Appointment Reminder, on the other hand, was not so great this week, aside from paper prototyping and a few more pages added to the development notebook.

[Edit: Pace Paras, none of this was actually done on Sunday. I quit working weekends when I went full time, aside from de minimis customer support.]
Any time I've looked at leasing a car, it's a bit more expensive than what it would have cost me if I had purchased the car, used it for a couple of years, and then sold it.

With the lease, I'm paying a premium for not having to worry about being able to sell the car afterwards... it's certainly simpler.... but I'm not at all sure that it's cheaper in the end.
Why not? I wake up, make some breakfast, then check hacker news while I eat.
Take of your shoes?

It might just be me, but after having read that article I didn't get much new information.

Could we please consider a hiatus about barefoot running on Hacker News for a couple months? By that time, the jury should be in on what the medium term benefit is of these things and we should have some interesting new information to read.
What's wrong with https://www.google.com
World hottest news: Unite union says BA strike to go ahead
Most users simply don't realize how little privacy they have online and what consequences it can have.

They're relying on social instincts that tell them that only the people they percieve as being present can hear what they say, and that it might get passed on, but thereby becomes hearsay and gossip that can be denied.

They may know intellectually that online statements are much less ephemeral and private than spoken words, but the act based on their instincts, not their knowledge.
You're right, there is no problem with privacy. At least, for me & you.

That's because we know that our facebook data went from private to public a long time ago, and we have modified our behaviour accordingly.

However, you should also therefore know that not everyone in our social network understands the implications of these default changes.

So, the geeks are upset on behalf of the non-geeks they know and love.

And they should be. If you don't think so, I challenge you to question 5 of your less techie friends and family on this issue. You will be amazed at how few of them (a) understand what the hell you're on about, and (b) care.
I'm experimenting with price and freemium variations for my web app, which have turned out very well so far (more on that in another post). I'm currently adding support to my timeline app so the color palette includes previously used colors, which has been a highly requested feature. Two year wedding anniversary is also this weekend--trying to balance it all is always fun.
my team worked on that. here I am beating level one:

http://vimeo.com/11956359

we also hooked up blink detection (blink and mario jumps) and eye tracker (based on our open source eyetracker: eyewriter.org)
I have an idea for a social network for kids 10 and under. Sand, grass, swings, hoops, seesaws, and ball games.

Social networks make sense for adults because we're removed from my family, friends, peers by geographic proximity and time .. plus we have too many casual "friends" to network with face to face constantly.

Kids? not so much. Kids can make friends within few minutes. Let them play outside, somewhere safe.
I suspect a BMW 1-series hatchback, which is much more comparable to the Yaris is also much closer in price. Perhaps that would provide a good compromise for you.

I suspect the utility your husband sees in the X3 has little to do with a car's supposed function of transporting people and property and much more with its value as a status symbol. Unfortunately for him, displays of wealth tend to hinder one's attempts to accumulate wealth.
A citation on this pretty please?
You forgot to mention sex or drugs! What kind of generational freakout essay is that?

Twentysomethings these days... they've got no proper appreciation of the classical literary styles. ;)

At least the OP's got the correct form, and he mixes in the confessional I-was-once-an-insider I-saw-the-light-on-the-road-to-Damascus trope, which is always a crowd pleaser.
"To make matters worse, I was born with a hyperactive cerebral sequencer that will sample and loop any catchy tune within a 100-degree radius."

I wonder if there is a name for this psychological phenomenon...