skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is no universal answer, and I think the criteria change somewhat on where you are in your life and your current and short-term expected income brackets.

Generally speaking, a car is never an investment. It's a rapidly depreciating utility assest. However, for some of us a car is also an entertainment item, and we get a large amount of pleasure from owning and driving a vehicle that makes the drive fun.

Some of my rules of thumb (and these sort of have to be adjusted for your location, and inflation over time).

A "basic" salary, meaning you can eek out a not-intolerable living, is equal to 1x your current age. At this income level you can mostly survive without a lot of frills.

A "good" salary is 2x your income level. Here you can often look at buying a modest house and maybe a new or 1 year old reliable middle-class car. At much less than this amount it is probably unwise for you to take on any significant debt.

A salary of 3x your age will generally put you into the upper 5-10% income bracket, and if you manage your funds with a little bit of logic you should be able to make significant contributions to a retirement fund, a savings slush fund, own a decent house and have a luxury(ish) type of car.

For most of us in tech jobs, making a salary of 3x your age isn't difficult or unheard of at all.

If you're going to carry a traditional mortgage, you can probably afford a house that is about 5x your current income level. This is one place, IMO, where if you have a semi-predictable career growth potential you can go to 8x, especially if you're younger and expect your income increases to significantly outpace inflation for the next few years (again, not uncommon in the early stages of a tech career).

If you plan to keep your car for 5-6 years, then .6x-1x your income is usually manageable in terms of a vehicle purchase price, scaling towards the higher end as your salary increases.

As an example:

25 years old, make 50K. That would be about 30K after taxes, or $2500/mo. A .7x car would be a 35000 vehicle. 0 down financing would be 686/mo over 5 years with an average interest rate. A 5x house would be $250,000 (yes, not a lot in some places), which on a 30 year loan with 20% down and taxes/etc. rolled in to the monthly payment puts you right around $1100/mo. So your car and home eat up 1800 of your 2500/mo. Another 250 for utilities and 300 for food, and you're bumping up at about 2350/mo. The other 150 would be for a small amount of savings and incidentals. It's obviously very tight, but the idea is that your salary is also going to be increasing over short time while your major expenses (car, home) stay mostly fixed. Buying a cheaper vehicle (a .6x or $30000 car)(or financing a lesser amount) would be a wise thing to do at that stage if you weren't confident about future job opportunities.

Again, these rules of thumb might not work in San Francisco, or if your career is going to be in the dog grooming industry. But for most non-outrageous cost of living places for someone who has good career potential it is, IME, a good beginning estimation point.
Notes from a lil' app on Heroku/MongoHQ
Forget about even answering the question in the title. This is a poorly written article on a very silly premise.
Nope. I'm on the fence about whether I get enough value out of twitter to even bother to keep checking it, much less pay actual money for it.
Getting 500 error
I find it wholly unnatural, hence the rage >:|
Lil' because this is a little app, not a massive deployment. I hope the notes will be useful to newcomers mostly.
What would that static ram device be, and how would you scale it out?
Ask HN: Twitter feed format
Can the twitter entries for HN also include the link to the discussion page? In fact I would prefer the short url to be to the discussion page on HN - rather than the article.

Possible? Others feel the same?
I think it was commentary on the typical iphone fanboy more then the iphone itself. The point is, most people don't know why they want it, they just want it.
Of course they forgot to add an "I'm outside of the USA." checkbox which would always make paypal the winner.

Just my small rant.
You had a drill? Wow that's way ahead of me. I had a tooth "taken care of" in a dental hospital over here (PRChina). They used a hammer and chisel.

There was a stern nurse whose only job was to go around the cubicals(booths?they're certainly not rooms) knocking out teeth. On my way out I seen her in another cubicle doing the same to some other poor chap.

My jaw was more painful than the actual tooth for a good few days after that.

But yeah, ship the gel.
Internet Scammers: Alexandra Oncescu and Bogdan Ionut Dita
I've done a couple 7 day retreats and have had some similar experiences to the author, though I'd already been doing meditation for a while so was more inclined to "just sit" from the start. The one thing that always impresses me is how much crap gets dredged out of your subconscious. Old fears, regrets, guilt, etc., would come to light and seem like an absolute crisis right in the moment. Then ten minutes later, I wouldn't be able to remember what I was so worried about. Definitely a worthwhile experience, and by the end of seven days, nothing could faze me, everything seemed carefree and effortless.
It's not an official feed, but here's one that I've been hosting for a while. http://twitter.com/HNComments
In IE7 I get a 406 error when trying to view the examples: This error (HTTP 406 Not Acceptable) means that Internet Explorer was able to receive information from the website you visited, but the information was not in a format that Internet Explorer can display.
Sounds suspicous - unless he's some kind of genetic anomaly, he'd be completely depleted of serotonin and the drug would have nowhere near the effect even a single pill had the first time around, at least as I understand it - all my E-tard friends back in the day used to tell me it was kinda pointless to do E two nights in a row, and definitely pointless ot do it every night - severe diminishing returns (no idea if that's true or not - i like my brain intact)
If the dev is getting the job done, let him work 1 hr a day if he wants that. If he is slacking off a lot then don't hire interns have him pick up his slack and show you why he can't get the job done and needs help.

If the dev is really not being effective, try setting deadlines, and giving him more interesting problems to solve. Don't require any hrs, in fact let him know that if he can meet the deadline with 30 minutes of work per week then he earns himself a vacation for the rest of the time. However make sure his estimates are reasonable. Basically become a "slave driver". Note: DO NOT MICROMANAGE. Give him a "what must be done this week" thing, and check up at the end of the week, or before you leave every other day (and by check-up I mean ask him if hes on target, facing problems, etc, 5 minutes max).

If all does not work, cut your losses.

Regarding the intern and yourself. Question yourself/intern as to the interaction needs between everyone. If you all need to be together at the beginning of the day to discuss something, then ask your developer if he can teleconference in the morning, then go back to sleep (if possible). Let the intern work whatever hours he/she wants if its also development work and not client-related. Remember measure productivity VS hours. I find that I can be more productive in 1 hr on the TRAIN with my DINKY NETBOOK AND NO INTERNET than 5 hrs in the office or even at home. And usually after the train ride anything that I haven't solved is already well discussed in my mind and 20 minutes of google + typing solves that when I get home. I can't mention this enough, if the productivity is not suffering then let him be.

Have you considered flipping the work day? Would you be happier coming in in the PM?

The only time anyone needs to be in the office is for people to communicate, and to keep track of people, if minimal communication is necessary there is no need for fixed hrs especially in a startup.
Ditto

<my HN username> at gmail.com
That wouldn't address the major problems with Facebook, which is

A) That Facebook would still have your personal data and would possibly still be misusing it.

B) For most people, Facebook still has the largest "critical mass" of your friends, family, etc., which makes it difficult to pointless to move to a different social networking site.
The links you cite are before the latest big changes to the security procedure in FB. Have you tried it after the changes?

Also "just" Google may be bigger than you think, e.g. your voice or text mail may end up in a lot of different departments that use it to train algorithms. Remember what happened with their WiFi sniffing.

My default stand is: all big companies are evil and will abuse my data if they need to. Therefore I want to spread the chances of abuse among different companies.
Hell NO!
So does the medical establishment at large - it's well acceptd that while SSRI's seem to work, there is no way, other than trying them out, to know which one will work for person X.

That said - given the possibility of serotonin syndrom and the mad bender this guy was allegedely on, it's a wonder he's alive.
people (including me) will show great resistance since they have so much time invested in FB

The solution is to make something that can coexist with Facebook which solves the problems with using FB. The truth is that you don't have to absorb someone's entire social graph. You only really want the approximate 20% they talk to about 80% of the time. That's the part with most of the value anyhow. In fact, knowing what that 20% is might be even more valuable than having the entire graph. What this means is that a genuinely useful Facebook adjunct can easily map out the most valuable part of the Facebook graph.

Note that Myspace and Facebook coexisted for awhile.
Unfortunately though, FP is being sold as panacea of concurrency problems, at least in Java world.

I think that FP is much more than that, it actually helps me solve problems in a very different and elegant way. I don't know how you classify this benefit but for me it was analogous to solving a problem with recursion or loop; while both can solve problems, recursion seems to be much more intuitive and elegant way - Same for FP vs Imperative approaches.
Forget tech savvy folks -- what about just regular Farmville-playing people!
Vex-Based Webcam Platform
Too bad.

Some people I've met (like Paul Böhm, which IIRC is the founder of MetaLab) seem very much pro-startup, but it could be that my experience is not representative of the norm, as I am hardly a regular member.
Using new features of TeX π, Knuth has inserted interrobangs along critical fault lines, and he intends to offset the entire West Coast, widening rivers and reflowing the Pacific; the Bay Area will be left flushed and right ragged, creating many widows and orphans. The only way to stem this bold, unjustified plot is to transfer a well-padded figure of $175,921,860,444.16 immediately to the Bank of San Serriffe.
How do you feel about retroactively applying the new, lower cost to early adopters? I'm on the verge of doing some extensive A/B price testing and plan to do this with any users who buy at a higher price.
Yes, sorry about that, we saw that last night and will hopefully fix it tonight. Had never seen that error before and I think it only happens on IE7.
no matter what the results of google vs facebook will be, we can be sure this has currently given quora a lot of press. very ingenius marketing
One can still dream!
Yes, but buttons are buttons wherever they are, and browsers even style them according to the OS theme. That's why I think they should be treated as buttons and not hyperlinks.

And the sad thing is that desktop applications are starting to do this too. The new Symantec Antivirus interface is all webby and slow (something else I don't like), and uses the hand for buttons. This makes me a sad panda.
How will this be earth-shattering?

Not trying to be a dick, just wondering if you have a point if you're not kidding.
The Best and The Worst Motorcycle Moments on Video
Some males react to competition like bonobos, others like chimpanzees
Unless you already have a relationship with the employer, is a big pain in the butt.. the amount of noise vs signal in the web job market is enough to discourage anyone.
Great website - very simple + nice interface which is huge for a website like this. I especially like the contributor's functionality where you can send out the mockups for feedback. In the past, where I've been on teams that had to send out jpgs of the designs plus maybe a surveymonkey survey, your website puts it all together for the necessary feedback people need.

Even better is the create a "clickable" website part. I didn't really see that until I made an account (though I just looked back and saw it on the homepage). I think it's really important to have this functionality. I used to copy jpgs into powerpoint to try to simulate this somewhat.

I agree with the comments about pricing above perhaps being a bit low. When I saw this "Compare" page: http://mocksup.com/compare, it's obvious that Mocksup has a lot more features, but is lot cheaper than the other services (none of which I had heard of). I guess on the one hand low pricing is good, but it's almost too low because it made me think, why would these others be able to price so much higher? That almost made me want to go to the other sites and compare, when I probably would have just signed up with yours right away (I didn't though as I was really impressed with Mocksup). Great stuff over all. I'm a new user.
I doubt professional photographers would want that. But I can imagine they would want a "auto-backup to a secure account."
or Geraldo Rivera opening Al Capone's vault live on television. Anyone here remember that?
Essentially they're creating dedicated circuits between two endpoints to eliminate store-and-forward delay at backbone routers.

I think the title overdoes the impact of this: this isn't the kind of technology that is going to hook end systems to the core of the Internet, and this approach prevents routing from being done at the network level. I could imagine some kind of overlay routing scheme making use of this to connect points near the edge of the network. Or, as the article states, between big datacenters.
He will start using email again.
I think you may both be right. Would pg fund this team, or would he be picking 2+ teams after filtering out all the ones that don't work together well?
http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?RubberDucking
TMTC #26 - My Journey
My cats will probably never think I'm intelligent no matter what I do
"Lisp macros need knowledge of the structure of the s-expression."

I recently rediscovered this for myself: http://arclanguage.org/item?id=11880
I've been in an interview where they bluntly said "8:30am - 6:00pm are the required hours minimum".
Saw this years ago... would be nice if they did a follow up; this must be at least 5 years old now ?
A) Too late to do anything about the data Facebook already has. Long Term Solution: a network the users control.

B) If there is another site that's painless to migrate to, then this isn't an issue. That's why such an outlaw tool would be useful.
Changing the database schema or reconfiguring the cluster hardware requires first saving and shutting down the database

This is where it fails when compared to many NoSQL solutions.
Maybe it only has memory for one month or something.

I am not arguing for it, though, so don't downvote me just because you don't like Homeopathy - I didn't invent or advocate it.

Edit: According to Wikipedia there seems to be a memory of a fraction of nanoseconds http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_memory (they seem to measure a specific kind of "memory", though). But what for example about waves, are they not also a kind of memory? Some waves last longer than a nanosecond.
Poll: Invoicing, how do you do it?
How do you create invoices?

Please answer the poll and explain which solution do you use and why.

(Shall I add any other point to the poll?)
Software Installation
Custom Solution
Mr. A reported current cannabis consumption, together with a previous history of polydrug misuse (i.e., solvents, benzodiazepines, amphetamines, LSD, cocaine, heroin).

Decrease in level of cannabis intake led both to disappearance of his paranoid ideas and hallucinations and reduction of his panic attacks

I agree; they have no idea what caused what. Why didn't they at least mention how extensively he used (for example) solvents? Plus, who knows what was actually in the pills? Is ecstasy typically pure? A few times I thought about taking a small dose of ecstasy before a psychotherapy appointment (its original intended use,) but as far as I know, there's no way to reliably get a pure, known dose illegally.
These kids don't have any product yet and as far as I can tell there is no reason to expect what they're building will be successful.

Most of the challenge will be in marketing. If they can get a hipster fringe to adopt it and give them real value, they can use this to bootstrap themselves. (Much as Facebook did with the college crowd.)
Not to mention Google can afford to experiment and make mistakes like Wave, Buzz and Orkut. Whereas Facebook or Twitter don't have that luxury as their revenues are a fraction of Google's.

Personally, I think web search is a lot more valuable compared to social networking. I hardly ever even bother to check my FB profile anymore. If I want to get in contact with a friend, I text or call them on the phone. If I wish to maintain a business contact, LinkedIn is the way to go. At one time MySpace seemed like a good purchase for $580 million. In a bubble economy, things look best right at the peak. I don't know if Facebook has peaked, but if they continue to become ever-more spam infested and continue to annoy and frustrate users over privacy, I can see someone beating them at their own game.
I'm not so sure. What advantages does OOP have?
Many high-end cameras are bought by "prosumers," not professionals per se.
I agree with you mostly, but price per share does carry some information. You don't think there would be any difference if the price per share were $0.00001 as opposed to $1,000,000 - even if the market cap were the same? There is a subtle difference because the price is determined by the buying and selling of the shares - and different types of people would be buying and selling the shares at these prices.
Lately, the majority of my experience with LinkedIn has been endless recruiter spam (They wardial all the tech people at my office by looking at who is listed as a "Developer" at my company, or just keep sending me email spam offering crappy job prospects) or discovering former coworkers who want recommendations. Looking at said coworkers often yields them taking credit for projects they didn't do or work on. It's like exposing the resume lies in an entirely new, social network-ey way!

Of course, LinkedIn is making huge contributions in the technology space - they are the minds behind Project Voldemort - one of the burgeoning Dynamo+Bigtable NoSQL hybrids. They're also a big user of the Hadoop stack and much of their tech team has written some great articles about their use of it over the last year or so.

Compared with MySpace, with which Mr. Hacker tries to inexplicably link LinkedIn (For doing "nothing" over 2 years), this alone is a huge boon to the community as a whole. MySpace was a SQL Server + ASP.net shop and as far as I know did nothing useful for the tech community except make us run away screaming in fear from the horror Murdoch hath wrought.

What exactly does a site like LinkedIn have to do at this point however? They're still technically relevant - I don't cringe and laugh at the mention of it like I would say, MySpace. It has proven for many people I know in recent months to be a boon. At the very least I get a weekly email with updates of people in my network. It's sometimes incredibly useful to know where people have moved to jobwise, etc. Or if somebody really, really good is now on the beach and just hasn't called you yet - it gives you a chance to grab them before someone else does.

Also - WTF is with the site layout? It looks like it's 800x600 fixed, with about a 200 pixel gutter for the content. It looks smushed in like crazy on my screen.
I am working as remote consultant/developer for like 4 yrs now. Once you get a good reputation in any sphere looking for new projects isnt a prob anymore. I specialize in Rails/ajax/push/e-commerce and don't really advertise my services for last like year, while have stable deal flow and even employ team of devs that help me. However I work onsites from time to time when needed.
I humbly suggest using the Cedilla instead of Tau to avoid confusion with Tau for torque. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cedilla
Premature optimization is actually cool.
Thanks, but sounds like there is some heat issues with the guruplug:
http://1wt.eu/articles/guruplug-slow-heater/
http://plugcomputer.org/plugforum/index.php?topic=1735.60
You can be a good bricklayer without knowing much about structural engineering.
What happens when you want to build something taller than ten stories?

What happens when you want to program for more than ten CPU cores?
It's pretty buggy.

It refuses to update if it'll cost you over 100k in fees. Try an average transaction size of 3$ and a total monthly volume of 1,000,000$ for example.

If you're going to provide a slider with only a few pre-set values you should at least support all its combinations.
"You start to look at yourself and you say, 'I may be a sociopath.' I don't think I am, but this looks exactly like [the brains of] the psychopaths, the sociopaths, that I've seen before."

That is exactly what a sociopath would say to an NPR reporter.
Functional may solve lots of problems, but you can't deny the advantages of a good OO design.

OO benefits tremendously from Functional programming. It's much, much easier to develop in a system where you can treat calling most of the methods on most objects as if they were stateless. A system that uses less state is more flexible and easily changed. A system that better encapsulates state is also more flexible and easily changed.
depends who your target market is, but the predictions angle is a bit sketchy.

as far as i can tell, even the paid predictions are just a stock and a forecast, but there's nothing to let the eventual user know whether they are good or bad predictions.

historical performance information about the forecasting system, general principles or something might be helpful, but at the end of the day, as far as i know, they're just randomly pulled out of the hat and i have no reason to believe they've ever been profitable.

a buyer would need a reason to buy, especially since stock advice out there is frequently offered for free.
I agree, so it's a good thing he didn't make that claim ;-)

Lots of languages are incorporating functional features, from dynamic languages like Python to even Java's support for closures. To really get your head around these features, it pays to play with a real functional language for a bit.
Im all for heresy, even though i don't agree with the author, his heresy is useful, we must avoid programming religions. It at least helped me understand a cultural problem programmers have at the moment with FP. The downfall of OOP was that it was misunderstood by all the imperative programmers. Even though it was adopted, it was misused. The downfall of FP will be that it is misunderstood by all the oo programmers, if it gets adopted it will get misused.

I never found FP hard to learn or use. I know now that it was because when i got introduced to it, i only had about a year of imperative programming experience and no OO experience at all. I was a rather fresh mind. My advice to all OO programmers willing to learn FP is to approach it with a fresh mind, it may save you a lot of headaches. Imagine you know nothing about programming, you may be surprised how close to the truth that is for some of us(including me).