skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>But the major advantage is lifestyle modelling. Poor can see what Not-Really-Poor does that makes it all hang together, that solves all the problems at once. And he sees how he could maybe get there himself.

Hmm.

We pay our mortgage and bills on time (mostly), we cook for ourselves, we use second hand washable nappies, walk rather than driving (we need a car for our work though; walking may actually cost more I've never done a complete analysis but have heard this suggested), have second hand and donated clothes and toys and furniture, cancelled our TV license, grow some of our own food, etc., but we're still poor.

How poverty causes poverty for us is that we can't afford as healthy food as we'd like. We don't have time/money for entertainment (except the net which is needed for work) and we get excluded from social activities by entry costs (we can't afford to go out to meals or buy drinks at the pub, etc.).

Moreover as we have a mortgage on a house we have maintenance costs which we can't afford, this is a time bomb really as dilapidation is progressive, early action avoids more cost later. I should now be doing repairs for winter but can't really afford them.

We could be poorer, we can afford 3 meals a day again and even some non-essentials, and largely this has been a choice to value a particular lifestyle and promotion of creativity over material values.

Basically we don't want for more education on frugal living but I can see that others do. Indeed we have friends with more money than us (and in particular a friend on benefits!) that we try and encourage to make savings when we see them wasting money.
You're bringing this as if there is an objective measure for the 'needs' of the living space of two people, and that what is considered 'normal' is way above that objective measure. You're not bringing any supportive evidence for this (in my eyes) grandiose claim, other than proof by vigorous hand waving and stating it in terms of great certainty.

The one objective measure one can bring to the table is the lower boundary - which is maybe around 2 m2 per person, as there are numerous houses (e.g. dwelling where illegal immigrants are housed in by human traffickers) (I'm just making a guess here, based on hearing for example about 50 people being packed in small houses in farming areas). I suppose you're not seriously arguing that this is what we should strive for, yet this is (objectively) how little room humans can 'survive' on. (if it were possible on less, these people would get less, considering human traffickers probably try to minimize their costs in order to maximize profits).

You quantify your statements by saying that 30m2 is 'livable' for two people. I don't see how you can make this assertion. What is 'livable' or 'comfortable' is entirely subjective. One may get /used/ to living in a smaller room; heck, one would get 'used' to being sodomized daily with a coke bottle too, I guess, as long as it's done for a long enough time. That still doesn't mean it's something to aim for. You're projecting an entirely subjective /opinion/ (houses should be small, people should not have much stuff which is implied by living in such a small house, ...) onto this discussion and present it as /fact/.

Anyway I'm perfectly willing to accept that there is an 'optimum' in the sense that the median of the population would feel comfortable enough living in an apartment of a certain size. I know of no way to measure this optimum, because so many of the variable are hard to quantify. Instead we could say that the reality shows preferences already: the amount of space people feel most comfortable in, in function of their spending capability, is the house they live in! This may not be perfect, but it sure would show that what 'people' in general find 'comfortable enough' is a lot higher than your 30 m2.
Either work with his style or fire him. It's that simple.
That was Ray Ozzie, not Ballmer.
One thing I notice about a lot of "biz" guys is that that have no idea how long some piece of work should take. If you don't know the effort, how can you possible judge if he's being productive or not? Lots of people suck at estimating. It doesn't mean they aren't productive. Maybe his top notch work is taking exactly how long it should? Maybe you should discuss a strategy where delivery is more important then code quality?

As long as you remain clueless about software development, you'll just have to take his word for it.
ThinApp [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMware_ThinApp] is pretty useful when needing to do "classic" browser testing.
how much time does it take to protect that $70 per year?

is it fair compensation for your time, or mostly for peace of mind.
Why Every Site Should Have A Data Portability Policy
While you are correct that most scholars don't believe that Jesus was born in 1 AD, the reason the change was made was to distance scholarship from Christianity.
> I can't trust a company/developer who is reactionary to the market share and their profit line as opposed to doing their job good in the first place.

They did a damn good job in the first place. IE 5.5 was such a tremendous step forward in reliability and consistency that web apps stampeded towards it and away from the alternative, the hideous Netscape 4.72. Before anybody could plan for it, tens of billions of dollars of activity had moved to IE, and Netscape's market capitalization was a smoking crater.

The catch was that the web apps of that time were brittle, something like Perl or PHP code with HTML snippets hard-coded into it. The brittleness of these apps prematurely standardized the quirks of IE 5.5/6. Microsoft had no choice but to put the product line on long-term support. Consequently, a lot of app authors sensibly decided to target IE 6's carved-in-stone quirks rather than emerging standards. At that point IE 6 was there to stay for the long haul; trying to migrate away would have been tilting at windmills.

What we are seeing today is that (1) the emerging standards of 1998 have finally been carved into stone, (2) the web app frameworks have finally gotten good enough at separating logic from presentation to make rewrites worthwhile, and (3) IE challengers finally accumulated enough development to compete. This is not because Microsoft was evil, but because you have to climb a tall hill to replace a pretty good solution with an ideal solution.
Exactly. I think there's a lot of astroturf/fake reviews on Amazon for example.

It's soooooooo easy to create fake/throwaway identities on the Internet I think you often have to be very very skeptical about the value of any gushingly positive or gushingly negative "reviews" of a commercial product or service written by a stranger, especially if it's a sort of mainstream category like books or music albums where there might me a traditional PR/advertising company involved that's now doing "social media" promotion. Giveaways: same writing tone/voice/pov used in each review; use of industry-specific insider/professional lingo that the average Joe wouldn't know; reviews that are just too complete/thorough, etc.

Which then leads back to what I think is going to be a service category in increasing demand in the future (and thus an opportunity for more startups): trusted curators and aggregators. Entities that don't just include everything. Entities that discriminate with an eye for quality, and try hard to be independent from vendor influence. For example, for me it once got to the point where the only movie reviewer I would trust was Roger Ebert. With other reviewers I couldn't tell if they were paid shills, or they were naive/ignorant, or too much a slave to their own personal genre tastes, or they just weren't going about doing the review in an intelligent and balanced manner. Ebert I could generally trust. I want a web-based Roger Ebert for doctors, for auto repair shops, for schools. Seems like there are some guys doing quite well doing it for wines, for example.

This is actually one area where I think crowdsourcing is horrible, by the way. Crowdsourcing when applied to reviews is almost the total opposite of trusted curation. What if the crowd in question is full of fools or paid shills? Garbage in, garbage out. The Idiocracy effect where quantity drowns out quality.
> Factory-implanted backdoors ruin a commercial relationship -- and could be discovered before deployment

Only if they are discovered.

You can hide the firmware in ways not even the "official" firmware can access and only a mask inspection would show you have a small amount of ROM where none was supposed to be (or twice as much as you state in the chip specs). If I were paranoid, I would be seriously investigating whether such a plan could be actually conducted - how many processes would have to be compromised and how many people would have to be involved to introduce a feature like this in, say, a popular cellphone radio controller. Can we vouch for the integrity of the hardware/software stack in the towers themselves for not having any backdoor/sleeper code or logic?

Again, I don't imagine this as being the work of gangs, but of governments. It's like having your communications blocked as soon as tanks cross the borders and planes start dropping bombs. It's a very nasty scenario.
I can't say for sure what Google is using to parse results and identify them as a forum, but if you look at most forums, you'll find that the link structure looks like this:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/delta-skymiles/1096718-variou...

Popular forum software will usually put a meta generator tag as well. In this case it is <meta name="generator" content="vBulletin 3.7.6" />

And there is usually a clear hierarchy in the page and source for forum, threads, posts, and replies whereas a regular site might just have h1, h2, and p tags, and a blog might have blog, posts, comments, and replies.

There is likely no sure-fire way to get your site indexed a certain way, these steps are probably a good step. If you're looking for a solid forum platform with ease of use and good SEO, look at vBulletin (full disclosure, I work for vBulletin)
Creator of first digital image aims to smooth the pixel
>But I come from, and live in, various countries where there is decent welfare, universal healthcare and deferred interest-free loans or token fee university education so that's in place more or less anyway although it could be formalized and streamlined more

Where?!?
Database replication will always fail. What you need to do is treat database changes no different that software changes. Developers should make modifications to there local database (they are running local right) and then as they complete their work. The need to script the DDL and DML. This way, the changes can be versioned and applied in sequence to existing environments as well as new environments. The root of all change in a system should always be versioning, to try to manage it any other way is inviting trouble.
You seem to have a flare for melodrama. I say this only because I do, too, and I feel like I am seeing it in you.

Be careful with that, when you are writing the narrative of your own life.
curl http://news.ycombinator.com/ | bcat
I had happily come to office at 7-8-9 AM to meet an higher up or attend an important meeting or whatever. That doesn't happen everyday.

In an startup, quite contrarily, I had want my co-founder to schedule meetings taking my timings into account. When not possible, I had come happily.
Petition to Apple: Fix Your iPhone 4 Design Problems With Free Cases
read all the above comments just to see if anyone posted this one.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzGWvZAd228
wow, talk about interpreting what I said way out of context and intent......

No, I don't think unemployed people are all lazy. Where the heck did I even come close to saying that? I believe the "basic income" as described in your link is wrong for right now and has more of a basis in some future.

People are unemployed because we are in an economic downturn and people are not spending and capital has also dried up. Companies are going without more than automating. This isn't the consequence of some tech revolution, it is the consequence of poor decision making on Wall Street and in Government.
It's more like:

Q: Which Denny's should I go to: the one on Main St or another one?

A: You should go to the IHOP on First St. It's the best all-day breakfast restaurant in town.
I repectfully think you may be overlooking two things:

1. While storing fewer bits may be objectively superior in one sense, it is overlooking the far more significant question of which helps a human understand and work with the equestions. Math is encoded into the universe, but our expressions of it exist for our own understanding.

2. We get a lot of choice in how we encode information, and that choice can change the number of bits used substantially. For instance:

c = 2 \pi r

c = \pi d

c = \tau r

c = 1/2 \tau d

All say the same thing, but their lengths vary considerably.
Hmm, I only have vague recollections about people reporting problems with lxml and I can't trivially find any supporting evidence with Google so it is possible that it is good enough in almost all cases (since afaik it doesn't actually implement the HTML5 algorithm yet it presumably doesn't work when you need browser-grade compatibility, but such extreme requirements are rare). In any case lxml is a superb library which I would recommend to anyone; personally I often use html5lib with the lxml treebuilder to take advantage of all the nice features in the lxml tree. It is also the best choice I am aware of for fast parsing of possibly broken HTML in python.
Hedging
My employer uses .NET, but we use the "Rails" model for databases. We have population and migration script directories (for each database) which each contain numbered .sql files. Everything in SVN, update to latest, make your changes, make a migration script, commit script. Repeat.
> He shows up and begins working and when it comes time to get paid. It turns out he’s going to be paid substantially less than the offer he accepted.

Wait, do contracts not exist in this wacky world?
Thanks. But, vBulletin is not free :( Any discount or coupon code?? lol ;)
Yes you're right hehe.
less powerful version of Lisp?
that's weird but oh well ..
Your comment doesn't fit the article very well which may be why it is being downvoted.

"this is more like a religious propaganda than science"

First of all, it is about math, not science. And it is not like religious propaganda, which relies on authority or faith. It clearly and cogently explains reasons why using tau is better than pi.

"Throughout the article they have only demonstrated how a particular community is more comfortable with using double pi."

No community was mentioned. Just ideas.

"If they like the tau so much they should be writing papers on its advantage."

The manifesto is exactly that: a "paper" about its advantage.

"I think scientists should be more concerned about finding and confirming important things than releasing such propaganda."

From the manifesto: "Tau Manifesto author Michael Hartl is an educator and entrepreneur." He is not a scientist.

So that's probably why people are downvoting you. You probably just skimmed the article instead of reading it and therefore misunderstood the article.
> he is consistently missing deadlines and has failed to be very productive. His work is of top quality (why I selected him), but his progress is disappointingly slow

Programmers "misunderestimate" deadlines. There are countless books written about this, and very little to do about it other than recognize it as an inconvenience.

The largest factor is usually "scope creep", where business interests inject additional details as the project progresses, each of which adds time but rarely get adjusted into the estimate. All these time deficits accumulate and interact to snowball delays far beyond expectations of both technical and marketing teams.

Either stoically push deadlines back for every change, or ruthlessly postpone these requests till future releases.

Also keep in mind that if your startup is doing something new, you're often asking for deadlines on "inventing the lightbulb". It will work when it works.

Startup development is usually not "engineering". Building a bridge is a known and quantifiable effort. Inventing a new business engine is often not.
> HTML5 will also help in building new features. One feature that the Gmail design team is now working on is the ability to drag files from the desktop into the browser.

Working on? I've been using this for the past few months, ever since I heard about it. One time I wanted to send an attachment on a machine without Firefox or Chrome. I didn't bother, because it would have taken too long for the value it would have added to the email.
Stop seeing him as just a "dev", give him his due respect for being co-founder of a company and see things improve!
Isn't this largely a hardware problem, not a software problem? No matter what you do on the software end, your screen is still going to be made up of millions of tiny dots.
I've heard it said that a good notation is worth 10 good theorems.
With the rumors of an official x86 Android port in the works maybe ChromeOS doesn't have much of a future? Their dual-OS strategy always seemed awkward to me.
It's really difficult at that site to get a description of what a concept is in their language. You can get a lot of what it isn't, but nailing down what it is is quite a challenge. Even the "what is the difference between objects and concepts" page is very vague: http://xlr.sourceforge.net/concept/objects.html

It seems to be a Haskell typeclass, or a Java interface. Arguably this entire language is a reaction to the fallacious belief than an object must be a concrete noun and all methods must be concrete verbs. Contra to repeated assertions to the contrary, there are numerous Object-Oriented languages that can express the exact same solution to the "max" problem that the site tends to go on and on about: http://xlr.sourceforge.net/examples/maximum.html , with varying levels of precision on the mapping. But I actually am having a hard time coming up with any current language that is actually incapable of expressing the putatively-hard generic "max" function, and a number of them are pretty much as clean as XLR.

If I am wrong about what a concept is, I'd suggest the correct solution is a page somewhere early in the sequence that lays out exactly what a concept is. No handwaving. Not something at the level of "An object is some data with associated methods", but a literal discussion of what a "concept" is with actual syntax, preferably running code. If that is there, I couldn't find it in ~10 minutes clicking around looking for it.
> I can't control what he does in his spare time, but I know he can't do those things in the office.

You are trying to control? You want to get a grip on his partyboy liefstyle by chaining him in the office. That's like a caricature of the "evil" business guy. Ridiculous.

I am pointing this out because I believe this can lead to even more problems in your life in general. You have to develop other methods of dealing with people (specially those that are important to you). There are whole fields in the social sciences dealing with that kind of stuff and I am no expert in this so I shut my mouth up. But I can guarantee you will have trouble working with creative people of any type, if you don't cease to play controller games.
I get these except in my case they're sent from USA over the pond to me. It's clearly profitable if it's worth sending snail-mail spam that far.
Haha. You may have uncovered a whole new industry: extreme dating.
Russian spies allegedly among us
I love the title, but more details about how would be very nice :-)

Summary of article content: design for viral use, minimize friction. We removed as much as possible to let people immediately open their photo and start editing.
Seems like an okay plan. I would put more importance on getting people to use your paid product. I've also has developed projects in limited hours per week, and the features I thought were important at the time really weren't after I put it in front of actual users. The faster you get feedback on your paid product the better.
Don't know, but today is Stevens last day on the Supreme Court....
I'm pretty sure the parent post is talking about charges made to those receiving money from you, eg retailers, and not to charges made on consumers directly.
For me (although I don't do this) it's matter of principle. For example, companies that send me spam catch a nerve.

Here's my thing with spam: it's cheap or, in the eyes of most PHBs, free. When you send me a spam, what you're saying to me as a potential customer is "You're not valuable enough for me to take 30 seconds and pick up a phone to call you. Instead, I'm going to monopolize a few seconds of your time every day so that you have to see my name while you're deleting things from your inbox."

It's incredibly rude, incredibly disrespectful, and it really ticks me off. So if a company that I do business with adds me to their "waste this person's time" list, I'll take a few minutes to send an email to my rep asking for them to explain why they value me so little.

Is this a waste of 5 minutes? Would it be easier to just write a spamassassin rule to filter this stuff out?

Yeah, probably, but it makes me feel good; it's the principle of it.

I suggest GP is the same way...
Does (((λ f . (λ x . (f x))) (λ a . a)) (λ b . b))) reduce into the identity function?
Easily request files from clients without forcing them to sign up for Dropbox
* Because server software configuration sucks much less now (compare sendmail.cf to Postfix or qmail)

* Because modern server software is more sophisticated and delegates less to insanely complicated configurations; more unicorns and fairy dust, more "batteries included"

* Because things that involve complex configurations are more likely to sprout "aftermarket" utilities (like monit or god)

* Because a 5-minute "get it up and running" first user experience is now the barrier to entry for new server programs

* Because so much server software starts out pure open source and requires good documentation just to get people to use it in the first place

* Because high-end sysadmins are far more likely to be Python, Perl, or Ruby programmers now than they were in 1996
$12 per month for a debit card, four bank accounts, unlimited transactions, good ATM coverage, branches open until 8 PM every day, friendly service. Sounds pretty good to me.

Also, your suggestion would imply that I should only spend cash, presumably meaning that I take out huge sums of money once a week at the ATM, then spend the week having to juggle cash, change, etc. It's not worth the hassle at all. The fact that debit cards are the most common method of payment in Canada seems to imply most people agree with me.
> Why does Google feel the need to dominate every corner of our Internet experience?

I think a lot of that is preventing the internet to become a closed box. Google needs the open web to stay open. Not only for monetization reasons but also to be abble to gather data. Companies like Facebook or Microsoft want to own the whole net, so "war" is unevitable.
In spite of other products, Oracle seem to be committed to an Open Source Virtualbox.
by all means, use it
That title change is totally misleading. They not only upheld it but actually strengthened it quite a bit. The part they struck down was a built in check on the power of the SEC.