skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> In industries with a high barrier to entry, the market naturally tends away from competition. Broadband is one such industry, due to the enormous initial infrastructure costs.

Maybe things are different where you live, but the bandwidth / price ratio has increased over 400% in the past 4 years for me where I live. Not a single website was blocked because the greedy corporation didn't want me to see it. Perhaps a few people were able to pay extra to video-conference, watch HDTV on demand, or do remote-surgery because my torrent downloads were throttled imperceptibly, but I think that's probably a good thing.
A ten year old can slit their wrists as easily as the next person, that doesn't make them a doctor, no matter how earnestly they have studied an anatomy book.

Similarly, poking around on a keyboard doesn't make a ten year old a programmer, merely an enthusiast (no matter how gifted).
When you mention someone else's nick.
Why are you concerned about who applies? Wouldn't you be more concerned that offering a low salary is going to have the same hordes of unqualifieds applying, without the benefit of the actually qualified people applying as well?
Yes. Finns who cannot afford the above get government support that is equivalent to an estimated minimal reasonable cost for such expenses.
I just learned a lot about how Wikipedia editing disagreements go from this
Deceptive? Who is being deceived and about what?

Regardless, C++ seems to show that "Knowing the basics of operator precedence should be expected." is unreasonable, at least wrt C++.

Note that C++ isn't all that complex wrt precedence, so the real problem is with the claim. Humans can do about 10 levels of precedence. Since demonstrating precedence knowledge is not the point of a programming language....
"I'll put it on github soon enough. Just need to get some things figured out first."

from http://twitter.com/mape/status/17468758231
Disagree, I think that's rare across the whole spectrum of programming work that's done. The vast majority of websites have perhaps 100's of users at most. The majority of software written has anywhere from 1 user to 10's, sometimes 100's, and more rarely thousands to millions. For every hedge fund trading platform I bet there are 1000's of Bubba's blogs and Joe's file-munging Perl scripts. The latter is the general case, not the former.

Almost every doctor or pharmacist you deal with on a daily basis can say something or do something that, if mistaken, can end up getting you dead or seriously sick -- or at least fail to prevent you from becoming so. A dead website can be fixed and brought back to life. Dead humans cannot. Well, for now anyway! :)
Ah, yikes, I can't edit the URL - start at this part would be more informative:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fatalism#Recent_edits
Wow they're not going to get any work done on there tonight!
Facebook Apps Must Now Ask Users for More Specific Permissions
Ask HN: Good Books / Sites on Mobile Phone Technology or GPS
I have recently become interested in these two areas of technology and was wondering if my favorite community of smart people knew of any good books on the subjects. Could be textbooks, references, fun overviews, or anything else, as long as it is reasonably interesting to read. Thanks!
How should I bee paid ?
Hello, I work as Web Developer (LAMP, CSS, JS) in SF, and right now I am paid 18K and I want to know how much should I be paid for that position.

Thank you again,
Kind of nifty, but why does every tech-savvy music project have to sound like the euro-techno they play at Neiman Marcus?
Still waiting for that full text search API. I believe the ticket was 'started' in October last year. http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=21...
> they aren't nearly as smart. They are the NCOs of the academic world.

You clearly don't have much experience with NCOs.
> I'm talking about much more infrastructure than just broadband. They have good public health-care systems, public transportation systems, etc. --- not just good intentions, but good results. What reason is there to believe that they won't do public broadband just as well?

Taken as a whole, they are considerably poorer on average than US citizens (especially professionals of the calibre seen on HN). I'm not convinced, based on their self-reported claims of excellence, that their policies, if emulated, would make the USA more prosperous or more pleasant to live for the average person. I think this is doubly true for the intelligent and motivated.
Actually, all the studies talk about incentives in the sense of "additional compensation that is conditional upon performance" not base pay. Here's why more money works: not everyone has the same expenses. Some of the best are married with kids. I don't like to spend time away from my kids or my wife, but knowing that when I take two weeks off its to go visit the wife's family that I'm paying to fly to Hawaii makes my life, and hers, that bit more bearable when she hasn't seen me for days.
Yes, a low salary will get you some young qualified programmers, or some older ones with no life. But you will increase your hiring pool by offering more money.
No, it doesn't solve the problem of how to tell the good ones from the shit ones, but it does increase the total number of good ones available.
Silicon Valley hottentots?!
Will it really cost them that much more though? Since they assign your "Tote Day" for you, it seems like they could save a ton of money on the efficiencies gained in their delivery/location scheduler.
Awesome stuff! Especially the fonts and graphics make it look very geeky. I watched Wargames just 2 days back :)

I wonder how he maps it on an image of the world map? Is it possible to mark co-ordinates on an image of a world map? I always thought I had to use Google/Yahoo maps API to do such mapping.
Was I supposed to bemoan the fact that they've improved it? I'm sure if you grepped the web you'd find that people have been praising the improvement of products they like since... since at least the early 1990's.

The Retina display is nice, but I find myself appreciating it for how it's used, not for its resolution (apps that don't accommodate for it look terrible). There is probably a lot of better technology out there, but soldering and gluing parts together does not a product make. People like it because of the whole package, and see it as greater than the sum of its parts.
> for extremely low pay

Not sure where you are from, but here in Canada nurses lead very cushy lives. Salaries of 80 to 120K are not uncommon, and that's with 4 weeks of vacation, 1 day in / 3 days out schedule, etc.
With honey?
Fair enough, I got what I deserved.
"reform" is often code for "we didn't screw it up enough last time". Other times it's code for "we're hungry and they haven't fed us recently".
Full disclosure, I was denied by every Ivy League school I applied to

schools use recent grads and professional bureaucrats whose job is to carry out mandates handed down, not by faculty, but by the trustees, who have a broader, and more worldly perspective on who should be admitted.

Admitted according to what criteria? I'm genuinely curious.

__

In my experience, for the most part success in pre-collegiate academia is overwhelmingly contingent on your willingness to follow directions and do a lot of busy work. There are exceptions of course, like a challenging math class or thought-provoking history class, but these are, as I said, the exception not the rule.

Most kids don't give a shit about learning - they care about getting good grades. And from what I'm reading in this speech, this is also an issue in Ivy League schools. This seems like a negative feedback loop. Maybe something needs to change?

Also, you say that we'd get very few "leaders" if we let professors pick the kids. Well the majority of these leaders, many of them from Ivy League schools, are dogmatic, stick-to-the-talking-points idiots, incapable of or unwilling to produce original thought. I think just what we need are more tinkerers.

Anyway, I was always under the impression it was primarily professors who sat on admission boards. But then again I never bought any of those "how to get into college" books.
There's a small typo in there. It's supposed to be "Shop Until You're Cut Off" if I'm not mistaken.
Anyone know a good, friendly, easy-to-deploy conficker killer? I think I have it on an old windows machine, and all the AV products are so fucking STOOPID that they do shit like refuse to install in safe mode.
Also, Amazon Prime is not available everywhere, for example it is not available to Hawaii.

Edit: I have had 3 Amazon packages arrive in one day - one by USPS, one by FedEx and one by UPS. I get mine at work, so I'm not bothered, but I can imagine it is a convenience for people who have to answer their own door for packages to know that everything will arrive in one go.
Kindle now available on woot.com for $149.99
More competition always spices things up, so it is sad - but as rendezvouscp notes, maybe good things can be made of the open sourcing! Code (And ideas) live on to blossom another day.
One day in and the Woot acquisition is already bearing fruit -- Amazon is now selling Woot's famous "bags of crap."

Being Prime subscribers, my wife and I get a shipment from Amazon usually on a weekly basis. I might try this just because I'm sick of throwing away Amazon boxes. Bags I can send back seems like a nice idea.

edit: Bad design on the part of Amazon. It lets me sign in with my account to see when my delivery dates would be, and even gives me an answer once I've signed in. However it doesn't tell me that all of the shipping addresses on my account are thousands of miles away from the only place the service is offered.
Isn't it even worse? None of those professions have access to copy and paste!

We all know programmers who would be sunk without it.
The scare quotes in the title seem somewhat editorial, and should probably be removed by moderator.

Also, a link to the original report on which the posted article is based: http://www.hks.harvard.edu/presspol/publications/papers/tort...
I think there is a large factor of "specific incentives spoil the game for me" in programming. What I'm trying to say is, the moment you put a price on something you diminish its value and decrease motivation. Just pay the folks enough to get the money factor out of their minds and give them great challenging work. The last thing that a passionate and competent programmer actually wants to think about is money. Carrot/stick technology is outdated.
> In the USA, many people who criticize single-payer health care don't have the first clue about it.

Actually, many do.

About half the US population gets its healthcare via some US govt. (FWIW, The VA was just found to have given HIV to about 1800 people.) It isn't any cheaper or more effective than the private system(s).

If the US govt is capable of delivering healthcare effectively, why isn't it?

That's why I wanted to give Obama a free hand wrt the folks that US govts already serve, with no increase in per-capita budget. And, since govt health care is supposed to be cheaper, the per-capita budget goes down 5%/year for years 3-6 (which is a bit over 20%). The savings can be spent on covering additional people or other programs.

For some reason, Obamacare advocates don't like that proposal.

Here's my take. If you don't think that the next generation is going to pay your social security, what makes you think that it's going to pay your healthcare? That said, I appreciate that you're volunteering to pay mine.
Is there no comparable service which does ship everywhere? I know people have offered to repost it but just wondering why a company like magcloud would only want to ship to such a limited set of countries if the user is paying shipping?
My first bootstrapped startup has launched (iPhone ads). Prayers/Advice please 
After spending about 5 months on this and a little over 1k (I'm a student... every bit hurts haha) I have a little piece of expensive paper that states I own a company and a working non-traditional advertising site specifically targeted just for the iPhone (at least for now).
Any moral support, advice, or just general questions would be awesome! Thanks HN

www.adsreloaded.com
I am such a person. However, since I have a wife, two kids, and I track cars, "enough to live" means a LOT more than the genius buying the latest killer card deck. Work hard, play hard. Costs money.
Add Nouriel Roubini [1] and at least 2 other CEOs that are not listed. It feels like we're living in Graham Greene's "Our Man In Havana" [2].

[1] http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2010/06/30/274571/from-roubi...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Man_in_Havana
This'll work too. I like your idea.
"Steven Sinofsky -- president of the Windows and Windows Live groups -- is making a play for the entire mobile division as well in an attempt to bring a unified, Windows-centric product line to market"

Because that's why Windows Mobile has been shedding market share - it's not been "Windows centric" enough.

I wonder how many painful years it will take before companies figure out that people don't want a Windows-family, or Apple-family, or Google-family set of devices or services. Personally, I just want to be able to pick the devices, websites and services I want and have them operate reasonably well together.

That is why Android is so appealing to me. Or it would be if only they had decent media playing/syncing, which is the one thing the "device families" actually seem to do well :/
Keeping track of online group discussions
Did anyone else get a kick out of their sentence, "Firefox Home helps give you the information you need, when you need it!"?

If it's not an intentional reference to the world's biggest domain squatter, then it's a hilarious "incidentaloma." (The domain squatter's phrase is, "what you need, when you need it," e.g., http://www.bang.com )
IncPy: Automatic memoization for Python
Two chargebacks a year? Thats quite a bit. Do you deal with a lot of sketchy places? Do you file a chargeback if you're not happy with the service?
Photography:Digital Nature Stock Nude Photographers Cameras
Do people really throw around the words "easily get a high-paying job" that easy?

Anyone who wants to start their own startups and not making money is like having a business not turning profitable. Eventually they want the profit to be bigger than working as an employee.

If there are people who would want to work for free, or work for less money in return they get to do cool stuffs (but hear me: cool stuff including writing clean code base, writing proper documentation and writing unit-tests), let me know, I have several ideas that I'd pitch to them and let them run wild and add their own ideas... as long as I get some profits out of them...
Multiple passes at the target -- when should you talk to the investors?
"If you think that a company couldn't assemble a team of OUTSTANDING programmers by offering each $200k a year, you're crazy or stupid or both"

This is simplistic and naive. Money isn't what motivates most programmers. I know this may be hard to understand for many people on HN, but it's true. Many of the best programmers I know are passionate about a specific area or two. Imagine going up to one of the jruby developers and saying "Hey, I think you should stop working on jruby and make an asp.net site with me and I'll pay you $200k". They're polite so they probably wouldn't laugh on the outside.

The second major problem is the assumption that offering a lot of money will some how magically make it easy to identify good talent. It won't.

The third problem is that most good programmers aren't looking for work. Offering more money won't make a difference because they'll never know anyway.
Ask HN: So what was Knuth's "earthshaking announcement"?
Knuth's mysterious announcement at the TeX user group gathered some interest on here, but even several hours later no specifics about it seem to be anywhere online. Can someone who was there or found out about it share what it was about?
Neat idea! I think it would help if you had some more answers to FAQs; maybe if there was a walkthrough with some photos showing just how easy it is? For instance, it is not evident to me from looking HOW it would payout, or when, etc.

Also, the contact link is a dead-end at present. Other idea that could be helpful: including easy ways to spread the word about your site, since it's the kind of thing that people would want to share. (At the same time, be sure to work hard to avoid the appearance of scammy-ness, as that can happen too easily with 'make money quickly online' schemes.)

But it looks like a cool start, I'd try it out if I had an iPhone. Good luck!
"the problem is that when you interview you can't really judge those"

this is a real challenge. I'm trying to get better at judging if a company is good to work for, but so far it still feels like a crapshoot.

Of course, we often cheat and go to places where we already know someone :)
NYC to Chicago is about 720 miles. That's about 3.5hrs by train...sometime in our lifetime. Exactly when is just a matter of deciding to spend the money. The technology was invented 50 years ago.
It seems that after doing some initial work on these phones based around Danger's proprietary Sidekick OS, Andy Lees -- the SVP of Microsoft's mobile division -- instructed everyone to go back to the drawing board and rebuild the OS based on Windows CE. It appears the company didn't want a project that wasn't directly connected to its Windows kernel. This move allegedly set the release of the devices back 18 months, during which time Redmond's carrier partner became increasingly frustrated with the delays. Apparently when it came time to actually bring the Kins to market, Big Red had soured on the deal altogether and was no longer planning to offer the bargain-basement pricing deals it first had tendered.

The strategy tax kills again!
This only works if there's a time-limit. Facebook's doesn't have one, so they make the problems inordinately time-consuming, which has the side-effect of filtering for not just skill, but desire to work at Facebook as opposed to the many alternatives that won't make you spend the equivalent of nearly an entire workday applying. Six months ago when I applied, I spent a day completing a puzzle--and getting their puzzle-bot to accept it... it only runs every few hours, on input which is unbounded so you're not sure how optimized your solution has to be. If your solution doesn't pass, the puzzle-bot does not tell you why. Afterwards they asked me to do another puzzle at which point I voluntarily dropped out of their interview process. Overall I would say the experience was very poor and reflected badly on Facebook in my mind.
> With the always-connected social features they want on the phone, there is really no alternative plan pricing.

Always-connected doesn't necessarily mean huge amounts of bandwidth. They could have built this thing as a social media device that was doing simple messaging and heavily restricted / optimized features for photo & video. I think there would be a space in the market for such a thing for teens, but MS clearly badly missed it. And if they have pissed off their carrier partners in the process then it is even worse because they desperately need their support if WP7 is going to be a success.
I think you over-estimate how well the 'average' person in the USA is living today.
TeX 3.15
Teens Experiencing Facebook Fatigue
Quite the 180, Facebook. My data belongs to me is a core belief now?
"After spending a lot of time falling asleep at the library while facing the philosophy books, I determined that the concept of destiny is a construct that allows man a gentle release from facing the terror of his existence, and that a Hyundai full of twenties would pretty much offer the same benefits. And so, I ultimately said YES!"

According to http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_much_volume_is_1_million_dolla..., 110 million in twenties is about 220 cubic feet.

According to http://www.usatoday.com/money/autos/reviews/healey/2010-03-1..., a 2011 Hyundai Sonata has about 120 cubic feet of passenger and cargo space.

So, assuming TechCrunch is right, the Woot CEO is wrong. It's actually close to TWO Hyundais (Hyundai?) full of twenties.

(OK, maybe one after-tax Hyundai)
check out page 9 and 33

here is a digest (in Russian) http://smartnik800.livejournal.com/92667.html
Web Design Clients From Hell
Funny article about the different types of horrific clients. So True!
I'm not getting any emails, including the welcome one. It's not showing up in my spam folder in Gmail either.
Thanks for the feedback! I have an FAQ in the forum but its not great at the moment. From a users perspective a walkthrough makes a lot of sense.

Forgot about that... put up a temporary page with my e-mail address in it. I'll throw up the "have a blog" page soon too.
In Finland, all men are subject to a mandatory service. Women can join in voluntarily but the numbers have been really low number, to no surprise.

The service can either be military training (at least 6 months) or civil service (pacifist option but it's twice as long, which is criticized internationally by Amnesty). About ten percent of young men are dismissed each year: some for a real reason (medical, psychological, other), some for "other" reasons.

While officially never admitted, the system is heavily geared towards re-enacting Finland's WW2, that is, defence against Russia, Finland's eastern neighbour. It's a collective wartime trauma in constant replay.

It's an archair system that will turn into something more modern in a couple of generations or the coming decades, if not for anything else then for the lack of funding.
That's hardly the fault of the arms dealer. It's incumbent on the buyer of the faulty landmines to understand the consequences, not anyone else.
If they just stopped censoring the internet as well, too, we could be talking about something likening a "right".
It would be interesting to see if Sinofsky does pick up Windows mobile, he has been attributed in large part with success of Office 2007 and was pulled to do Windows 7 after the Vista fiasco, so he has 2 good back to back performances.

Many believe he is the current natural successor to Ballmer but don't quote me on that.
I did a quick twitter trawl an hour or so after, and it seems like it was actually a joke: a new successor to TeX, using XML, arbitrary precision, and auto-layout.

Also, my favourite was this one: http://twitter.com/elmindreda/statuses/17444964495
"Anyone looking to profile Twitter users can easily identify all programmers today simply by searching for "Knuth"."
The code will be MIT licensed, just need to get everything worked out. I'll give a shout at @mape on twitter when it is released as well as leave a comment here.
Fact: you can wrap input elements in a label element. No extra for attributes required, either.
Starfish From Pencil
What is the use of pencils? only writing? No.....it can be used for wonderful creations.
No, it is not editorial, that is the title given on the front page. The practice by online news publications to have different headings is very common.

No, the original link serves a different purpose. Andrew Sullivan is not your average news aggregator, and his commentary on the subject brings in a lot of weight. In addition, there are links in his article which show his prior research in this area along with a piece by Salon. Thirdly, some people prefer a quick newspaper style summary rather than an abstract from a peer reviewed journal.