skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Haven't you heard? The naive "loyal" employee doesn't exist anymore [1]. Now "permis" are basically contractors that chose company benefits over the extra cash. This means they are a lot more mobile and expect market value for their labor. If you can't react to this then get used to working with people who have lower market value, and replacing them when they're worth more.

They don't owe you anything if they work for you. They're not family. Welcome to the free market. Try not to die.

[1] well, indoctrinated people still do but they're probably not going to leave the place they're currently serving life at
The nice thing about non-subsidized phone is that you can use it with any SIM, including prepaid options.

I don't know how the situation is in the US, but in Europe it's quite common and in big parts of the world it's your only option.

For example: When travelling in Thailand I can get a SIM at every 7 / 11 for about 5 bucks with 100 baht credit. This is more then I usually need for the few weeks there and it's extremely convenient when you want to call around the country without being hit by absurd roaming fees.

Having lock-downs of any kind on a phone to me is a killer criteria for not buying it. Subsidized or not.
I think it is generally a good thing as long as it's not skepticism for the sake of skepticism, without any substantial argument.

To illustrate this, I've often found myself totally agreeing with an article until I read a rebuttal from an HN comment which helped me put the article in perspective.
Summer 2010 Choice: Ferragamo Python Fiammetta Bag
Maybe they discovered a planet that orbits a binary star but whose orbit doesn't match what physics would predict for planets in a binary system. Almost as if the planet itself were adjusting and compensating...
As hyperlink:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1627390
Can you check that you're not becoming obsolete due to Moore's law before savings recoup costs ? Also, consider the potentially reduced product flexibility of hardware vs software.
I'd be fine with this as long as it is an optional install. If the software is forced on you is where it becomes a problem. Apple could have the best intentions ever, but as mentioned in the article, if they have this capability the government, at some point, will come knocking.
Marco.org - Charging an iPhone with AA batteries
"Suite Sister Mary" still gives me goosebumps when I listen to it.
Great commercial. I recognized almost every product there. TJ really does have a unique and eclectic mix of food. The thing I notice is that I can find 99% of all the items I need when grocery shopping there but I only end up spending $50-60 a week instead of $100 or more that the same items would cost at a Stop and Shop or Whole Foods.

The one thing they seem to be lacking is a meat and seafood department. All their meat is shipped in; it's not bad, but it can't compare to Whole Foods. My solution is to get everything at TJ, then stop by Whole Foods to buy a pound of fish and chicken. Best of both worlds...
The period from 1980-1992 (or so) was a golden age for heavy-metal / hard-rock. So much incredible music was made during that period that it boggles the mind. And almost all of it stands the test of time incredibly well.

Of course great metal was made in the 1990's as well, it just went mostly unnoticed by most people, as metal retreated back to an underground status (where it probably belongs). "Extreme" metal in particular had a great run during the 90's. From the Florida Death Metal scene of the early 90's through some of the great power metal bands of the era, to the Norwegian Black Metal stuff... lots of great music came out. But gawd, the pop music of the 90's... how utterly rubbish.
When I first saw the title of this post, I immediately thought of Seneca (the Roman Stoic writer) playing at slavery and poverty. I haven't read the Seneca in a long time, but my strong impression when I read it was that he trivialized the whole thing by dressing in rags for a day once a year and proving to himself he could handle it. I'm guessing that your comment is implying something like that about Banks, Orwell and this blogger.

I don't know (and don't much care) what Tyra Banks did and I need to read the blogger more fully (I've only skimmed it), but Orwell spent years of his life (at different times) investigating poverty. The simulated or forced poverty he underwent in England was measured in months, not days or weeks (in 1927 and 1928). He also explicitly discussed (and agonized over) how "real" his poverty was given that he could wire home for money (and sometimes did, as I recall). I think that simulation can only go so far, but not all simulations are equal.
Hey, not before they come to Utah first!

Kidding aside, I used to live one block away from a Trader Joe's and am sort of over them now. It can be a frustrating place to shop when you just want 'regular stuff', rather than paying the markup for fancy varieties of things. It's very nice to have as a supplement to a normal grocery store though.
Will HTML5 be Secure Enough?
46% of SMBs a Victim of Cybercrime – Most Lack a Dedicated Security Resource
"Figure another 50 to 100 years or so?"

5 to 10 years? 500 to 1000 years? 5000 to 10000 years? 5 to 10 months?

What are we basing our estimates on?

That is the author's real point. If we don't have a good enough handle on the principles necessary to make this into an engineering problem, there just isn't any sense in trying to guess when these technologies will arrive.

Unless you have some facts or data you're keeping from us.
High Level Documentation: Layered or Package Diagrams?
Flying cars have long been a symbol of the possible technological height of human transportation. But we're not exactly surprised by their absence. Similarly, can't Drexler's '90s idealism be regarded as the possible peak of nanotech? Does the fact we don't have tiny toasters in our bloodstream really negate the acheivement of nanotechnology in medicine and materials science? Personally, I don't think so. This article is too deliberately inflammatory, and doesn't properly look into anything beyond what is now an ancient thesis - as far as fast-moving research areas are concerned. This makes his dismissal of nanotech as sweeping as Drexler's predictions.
I meant that it failed to even remotely match the growth rate of organically adopted solutions like HTML and JS.
(3) is nonsense.

You could ask that same question about anything ever created.
Tell HN: Fill out your profile, good things come of it
I've connected with some fascinating people from HN, maybe 1/3rd of the time people write to me and 2/3rds I write to them. Had some really cool conversations, got book recommendations, talked about projects, lots of good stuff. Sometimes a person doesn't have their profile filled out and you have to dig through the comments and submissions hoping they submitted their own site or posted their email. Sometimes even after that, there's nothing there - then you've got to try to google their username. Nothing there? Well, no dropping them a line then.

That sucks - you'll miss out on meeting some cool people. Take the 20 seconds to put an email in your profile or a website that you run.
I think patio11's list is his customer list. the 50,000 people who have given him money, so that's not 50,000 clicks, that's 50,000 sales.
Ten Founder Success Factors – And a Few Surprises
We know how to train the brain of a human being to learn physics (well not always), but that doesn't means that we understand how that brain really works.

The life if full of examples of things we know how to use but that we don't understand. Sometimes it's just impossible to control that things. Think in the stock market or economics. Chemist has been studying this type of things for centuries and you can see the result: there are chemical products everywhere you look.

What the post attack is the concept of creating nanomachines that doesn't degrade (Cosmic rays! oxidation! temperature!!) and do exactly what we want.

And about the "artificial DNA", it's something so simple... Really! the problem is in the emergent properties of DNA, proteins and environmental effects, this is where you loose control. Even nature has problems with that, life forms die, had cancer...
Ask HN: What is Gravity?
While watching a documentary that mentioned gravity (forgive me the particulars escape me at the moment) my 8yo son reached across my lap and tapped the space-bar pausing the video. He then turned toward me and asked, ‘what is gravity?’

Now, in our house we require explanations for actions because we are becoming, sadly too late in life, convinced that being on purpose is paramount. Because it is our opinion that if you do not understand, even at the most base level (epistemological questions aside), why you are doing something then you will never have any power over what you do. When any of us does something that results in negative consequences we try to be in the habit of either tracing down the root of our reasoning or admitting that we had none.

To this end we have made much of the distinction between description and explanation. Briefly; all explanations include description but not the reverse. When we ask one another for an explanation and instead receive only description it has become a sort of litmus test for a lack of purpose.

So when I began my pedantic diatribe on gravity -- two objects attract each other with a force directly proportional to the product of the two masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them… 32 ft per sec per sec... ad nauseam -- my son put his hand on my arm and said, “That’s a description dad. I wanted an explanation.”

It was then that I realized that I don’t have one. Yes, I have analogies but the very definition of an analogy precludes it being the thing it analogizes.

And so I ask (with assistance from the great brain augmenter Google): How is gravitational force produced? Is it associated with an elementary particle, a graviton? Is it related to strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces? How is it transmitted through almost-empty space between the earth and moon?

Why is the explanation of gravity?
CarrierWave as a replacement for Paperclip
> (3) is nonsense. You could ask that same question about anything ever created.

He wasn't being literal - he was saying, "This seems awesome and I wish I had this four years ago." Is this an American thing? I see it all the time in the States, but after thinking about it I don't think I saw it in Europe or Asia.
Sprint closes in on Boston 4G market
is that the author's real point? i didn't see him say it anywhere.
What ‘Fact-Checking’ Means Online
I believe its the same months every year, that would make it June,11 to August 11 as the months one has to be there in SF for the Summer 2011 cycle.

Regarding the start and end of the application process, assuming it would be started and ended with the same lead time as the winter 2011 cycle, the start and end dates would be:
Start - Mid Jan 11
End - Mid Mar 11

These are just guesstimates assuming that YC repeats the same pattern every year. It would wise to keep checking HN to see if they indeed do that.

Good luck.
Skowmunk.
Apples and PCs: Who innovates more, Apple or HP?
I know you're being facetious here, but I do think most of those commits are internal changes and not API changes. Things like removing unnecessary instantiations of variables, adding/removing deprecations, docs, and cleaning up tests.
Those are actually "micro" machines. That's a very different scale.
Seeing as how the question was worded - "Have you lost interest in programming?" and how the OP says he no longer enjoys programming - causes me to place a lesser value in the responses. It's clearly a bias in the wording of the question.

If it had been worded "Most programmers don't lose interest in programming. Have you?" then I'd expect to see a completely different set of results from the same respondents.

That's nothing against the respondents and nothing against the OP, it's just human nature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitation
ARM is going for 40-bit extension, to allow addressing 1 TB of RAM.

Source: http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4206387/ARM7-40bit-v...
Last I checked you write Java, and it generates the UI and the services. It is a server framework because the same tool is responsible for the development server side and the client side, it is an evolution from stuts or JSF, but in the end you are developing the UI from a backend developers perspective. I know that it generates client side code and that it uses the familiar JS client model. But it is still designed for the comfort of the backend developer. Quit honestly GWT et. al. further alienate the designer in favor of the developer.
I guess, but I was thinking more of the case where you end up in a cycle of constantly taking new ideas and making minimum viable products out of them without developing them (or your big idea) further.

Of course, that's a much better "problem" to have than to be mentally constipated for long periods of time without bringing anything to fruition ...
Time lapse screencap video of a games programmer
These are labeled micro-machines, and seem to be the same things that the author calls "millitech" (both cite tiny accelerometers as an example).

So it seems there are some terminology differences to sort out.
I doubt he made 1.5 million off bingo card creator
Ask HN: A payment model similar to Google's App Engine?
I'm building an application that will be able to register events from companies/bars/theaters etc. that are interested in exposing their events to a larger audience.

If a user finds an event interesting, he/she can favourite it or save it in their calendar. Once the user does this, it's a +1 count on the number of people/potential visitors for that event.

On the business side of things, I'm wondering if something like the GAE payment method would be a good idea.

That is: allowing the company that posts the event 20 'potential visitors' for free (a free quota), and for every other visitor above these 20, they would have to pay something like 5 cents/visitor. That virtual money would be coming from a balance in which they deposit money via paypal or something. When that deposit runs out, the event goes offline (is not shown to the users anymore).

Has anyone (well...except Google) tried this with any success in their business? Is it a good/bad idea? Any shortcomings? Do you have any suggestions or recommendations with regards to this plan of payment?

The reason I want to offer this quota is for small, independent events to be noticed for free...at least for the first 20 people.

Thanks!
This type of compensation structure might work for programmers, but I think it would be extremely problematic to implement for many other classes of employees essential to a successful company. Specifically, this wouldn't work for people who function within a highly mercantile ethos, for whom the exertion of leverage in negotiation, political connections, and aggressively tiered performance-based compensation are expected and customary as a key determinant of compensation.

These dynamics, which generally offend the sensibilities of engineers and people who are accustomed to perceiving the world in highly deterministic, logical ways, play to the strengths of "sales sharks," marketing professionals, regional/channel managers, etc. It is not in these people's interest to have salaries transparently tiered, disclosed, or roughly equal for identical classes of role. If these people couldn't do some combination of (manipulate | persuade | flatter | schmooze | arm-twist) someone into giving them higher compensation, they aren't very good salespeople.

They would come to see a business with Fog Creek-like political conditions governing compensation as having perhaps noble goals, but not competitive compared to other opportunities at other companies. However, a successful company needs a certain amount of these people in order to grow.
I often split my big projects into smaller deployable pieces (e.g., rather than 1 large feature launch, "silently" deploy backend changes first, then expose in the UI).

This approach also helps in debugging: deploy and fix each piece incrementally.

The only times I've burned out are when working on a massive update without any visible progress. When I finally deployed, I would be overwhelmed with a huge number of bugs to fix.
What algorithm is used to get the centroid clusters? Do you need to know the number of clusters in advance? I am familiar with max-link/min-link/avg-link hierarchical algorithms, but not centroid related ones.
Oh come on, I would love to delete weather, stocks, and a YouTube from my iPhone...so even still, not perfect.
Http://cicotips.bloger.hr/
"It also depends on what your time scale is. I’m willing to bet, at some nebulous point in the future, long after Drexler and I are dead, someone may eventually develop a technology sort of vaguely like what he imagines."

This is the point I was paraphrasing.
I sometimes wonder if there are camps or cliques forming on HN. Sometimes the top voted stories are junk (sorry), and may have been submitted and voted up by Group A users. Group B users then voice their opinion of the submission in the comments, with the best of these negative comments getting voted up.

It would be interesting to see the data and trends behind submission upvoters and comment upvoters.
> an organization dedicated to protected their constitutional and civil rights

The appeal to emotion aside, that sounds like serious work, maybe they should avoid sensationalist blog posts and snarky little nicknames like "traitorware" that make them sound childish.

I certainly take them a little less seriously now than I did before I read the linked blog post.
Better title: Companies that don't go out of business create the most jobs.

An important caveat is that existing firms are so diverse that it can be misleading to think of a “typical” firm. For example, there are two simple categories of existing firms: those that go out of business (Deaths) and those that continue (Survivors). On balance, existing firms lose more jobs than they create. But once Deaths are set aside, Survivors usually create more net jobs than startups do.

I think they just proved that their own title is creative accounting. If the goal is a policy change, this report shows that we can reduce unemployment most effectively by keeping established companies open.
http://anyall.org/blog/2008/12/statistics-vs-machine-learnin...

(Note table near start of article, particularly entries for "large grant" and "nice place to have a meeting.")
How do I downvote this comment? You're disproving my argument ;)
What's your favorite web template company?
I'm presently looking for some template companies to replace the face of our site, I'm just interested in picking up a $50 one or something in that general range. I want a nice clean face before we put up anything, as the domain is already live. Does anyone have a company they really like? I was just browsing through some of the templates on freelancer but only saw a few I might like, but they look like I've seen them everywhere already.
A mass curves the spacetime around it. The curved spacetime then affects the path of nearby objects. That's gravity.
a lot of machine learning is parametric statistics...

and while I agree the term is really loaded, ML is different from statistics in its approach and the discoveries it made. For example, ML showed that some techniques are much more effective at scale (large datasets) than suspected by most statisticians, as recognized by "hard core" statisticians like Wasserman.
I was making a tongue cheek comment about Tyra. It had no reflection on Orwell.
Others have already mentioned competition but now you have a bigger player, Facebook, on the playing field.

FB has tried to make their application as simple as possible and my understanding (I'm not in the US so I can't use it) is that it basically uses your GPS to tell you the location you're in (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong). This sounds like a big part of your app.

How will you respond/differentiate yourself as a response?
I think your description of "too much skepticism" is really describing cynicism:

http://chipberlet.blogspot.com/2005/06/skepticism-or-cynicis...
Sounds good. If the mortgage payment and health insurance were going to be "OK" too, I would already be out there.
Evolution took billions of years to engineer the ribosome (and more importantly to engineer the whole supporting ecosystem where ribosome can do what it needs to do). I doubt humans will be able to do that in next 100 years.

Granted a similar argument can be made for many other comparisons (such as camera or airplanes) but at nano-scales physics of environment plays a tremendous role. The beauty of evolution was that it is an inside-out distributed process so the physics of environment actually helped engineering ribosome.

I wonder if humans will fall back to mechanisms such as guided evolution to create other "nano-machines". Lots of effort has started being put into that direction. Just google "artificial enzymes"
You are concerned oil prices might increase by a factor of 8? Like in the 70's?

http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article1375.html

In any case, I'm not sure what this has to do with CPI-adjusted incomes.

By quality of life, I'm only estimating the direction of change rather than the magnitude. I'm assuming that having more stuff is better - I'm happier with flush toilets/a washing machine/Bioshock than without.
Sugar Free Diet
Try the Sugar Free Diet formulae by 7daysugarfreediet.com/
Remember that the "email" field is not visible to other users! Put your address in your "about" box if you want people to see it.
themeforest.net is pretty good.
I always thought a healthy dose of skepticism was considered a good thing. We can't always take what we read at face value.
I'd wager this doesn't happen though on things which are truly laid out in front of us as a great idea/ argument/ event that has no perceivable flaw or downside. I think it is healthy to be sceptical by default though otherwise you end up with close enough is good enough. Things that actually need work/ refining are given unreserved praise and that discourages future pieces on the idea.

Interestingly enough if you go onto search yc and check the top submissions ever by karma most of the top comments are what you are looking for more of. The difference there are that some of those posts are defiantly great and don't warrant that level of skepticism.