skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are forgetting to ask the question "Why can McDonalds hire such unskilled workers and still run a successful business?"

McDonalds has put many millions of dollars into automation systems and foolproof menus that allow the food to be prepared effectively by minimum wage employees.

Short order cooks generally earn roughly double the minimum wage, so you can see how significant an accomplishment this was.

Most of the items sold by McDonalds could probably be sold out of an "automat" style vending machine, so I imagine that the decision to use actual humans is more about marketing than about production.

As for the NJ gas station attendant, the law requiring gas stations in NJ to hire people to pump gas (self service stations are outlawed) was simply intended to increase employment among very low end workers.

The objective could have also been achieved by outlawing dishwashing machines or farm combines, etc.

So your point rings true -- the value of a pump attendant is very low (lower than minimum wage) when set by the market precisely because people don't want the service and it wouldn't exist without a social policy driving it.

The situations you have mentioned all involve unskilled labor. The invention of modern farm equipment and many appliances is to blame for decreasing the value of unskilled labor.

The question that I consider most important is in how you look at unskilled labor. Is it a "class" of people who will never improve their skills and are doomed to live on whatever wage is the market price for unskilled labor? Or are the currently unskilled workers (many of whom are in high school) likely to obtain skills and experience that makes them command a far higher wage?

I'd argue that artificially inflated minimum wages, not intrinsic quality improvement, is why McDonalds relies far more upon pre-prepared items assembled (bun, pattie, cheese, lettuce, bun) in the store than on semi-skilled short-order cooking.

A restaurant like Noodles & Co. is a great example of how a chain was able to introduce one small skill (the art of stir frying a bowl full of noodles, sauce, and a few other ingredients) to make the food taste significantly better than if it were made in a factory and heated up, or stored in a vat then ladled on.

Again, I haven't argued that a living wage is unreasonable. I'd just rather see market wages left alone and separate state subsidies of the unskilled, along with career counseling, community college availability, and possibly free daycare.

The approach we have today is to proudly proclaim that our $6 minimum wage helps people, when it actually (and measurably) harms them, as I've illustrated elsewhere in this discussion.
Penny Stocks Can Be Very Profitable But Equally Risky
Generally markets work much better when the "referee" part is a known quantity. We are currently seeing a lot of problems based on the lack of knowledge about healthcare rulings and further government intervention. It is almost like everyone is holding their breaths.
"Except Hoover didn't engage in either a massive or unprecedented spending"

Then I guess it's fortunate I said "massive and unprecedented intervention in the economy".

As for "tax cuts", in Washington that's scored as spending, e.g. you can't in theory cut a tax (rate, of course D.C. ignores dynamic scoring) without making up for it elsewhere. When you apply the "money is fungible" rule and you're running an annual deficit, it comes out the same, either requires the same amount of money to be borrowed to cover it.

Your last (now edited out) point is a bit off since the fight over interpretation of the Great Depression has been going on from the very beginning and looks to be without end. There was certainly a CW, after all the (political) victors write the history, but that doesn't mean it's The Truth.

I don't remember your including Reagan's budgeting in your first draft, so I'll just point out that he was fighting and winning an existential war, something that didn't burden Hoover.
Minor gripe: Make individual apps their own repositories so other people can include them in other projects.

If you want to update mochiweb, itap, etc on couchdb and bigcouch, do you manually patch the changes into every repository? Is erlang-oauth in couchdb the same as oauth in bigcouch?

Look at riak for the Right Way™ to package Erlang apps:
The main riak repository has no erlang code (http://hg.basho.com/riak/src/tip/rebar.config). It has one dependency of riak_kv which in turn includes everything else needed (http://hg.basho.com/riak_kv/src/tip/rebar.config).

Learn to love the gift of rebar -- recursive dependency resolving.
Bad flash drive caused worst U.S. military breach, not Russian
That might work for a project, but I guess the number of LOC you can write in any given time depends largely upon which language you write it in.
Personally, I began using Sinatra for new projects fairly recently, mainly b/c I find sinatra + datamapper very elegant. I also love python, fwiw.
Developers can and should take care of SEO themselves. No so-called experts needed. I did a talk about it this weekend at Lone Star Ruby Conf:

http://www.slideshare.net/luigimontanez/searchfriendly-web-d...
For a first release I'd say this is a good thing to skip in favour of shipping :)
Flash requires 2.2 iirc.
Done. What do I win?
thanks hopefully this can stay near the top for a while. been getting a lot of off topic posts again recently; adverts, thinly veiled spam, repeat posts etc.

one thing i do wish hn had is a link/title checker to stop people all linking to same story hours or days apart.
What a head-explodey thing to say. Care to elaborate?
PhET project (physics simulations)
very true. where i used to live, there was a very nice looking, new complex being built. i went to check out the property and ask about when units were available, and it was low income housing. i made too much to qualify for a unit.

and on the flip side of that coin, these units weren't any cheaper to rent than the regular ones in the area. in fact, they were nicer, and i thought they would be more expensive. perhaps you could say they were subsidizing luxury.
Today the Rails 3 Tutorial book PDF is 40% off
That's traditional for print publications. A reporter or essayist may get to suggest a title... but editors usually compose the headlines.
I don't know. I know that other IDEs have such functionality for other languages. I don't worry too much about the previous developer's style, because reformatting is a couple of simple keystrokes. As is reformatting it to another's standard.

I think it is a bit odd that anybody still has this argument.
Even on intervention, what'd he do, he held the federal budget pretty stable, he did the Smoot Hawley tarriffs which were large but I wouldn't call them "massive" or "unprecedented"..

What's the huge intervention? I see perhaps slightly more active than the typical President but, considering the massive and unprecedented circumstances, I don't see a whole ton of activity.

Regarding the never-ending debate on the topic of Hoover vs FDR, sure, although I'd say the victory was well-earned, and that documented statistics on government spending are a pretty solid fact.
There is a business in Ogaki which takes over a room at the local tech incubator (cost: ~$10 for 3 hours) and does a workshop on iPhone development every week. I'm told they occasionally need to split into two rooms, because they're filled.

Can anyone here even point to Ogaki on a map? Do you know how not-very-hard it is to be the most famous developer in a particular technology in Ogaki?

At the local tech incubator, we also put on weekly training events for things like software security, taught by people much less accomplished than anybody on Thomas' team, and we could still pack a room.
I can sympathize completely with your viewpoint, but in my experience it is a minority one. I tend to value code based on its technical merit as well, but non-standard formatting can work to distract from the very recognition of its beauty.

I would not want to disparage anyone their preferred styling. My only point is that you sacrifice a wider audience by sticking to it.
Exactly.

Just as raganwald suggests on his last line - people will be stung by their experience and simply buy an iPhone next time.

Crap like this damages the whole Android brand. Nobody wants to hear "Oh, well you bought this specific instance X of Android on phone Y. That particular one is no good, but it's your fault because you didn't spend a week reading detailed product reviews on Ars Technica before buying your phone."

It's entirely possible that sales will nosedive after the current round of phone contracts/plans are up, as most Android owners are on their first model.

(an Android user)
Ruby on Rails 3.0 pulls into station with Merb in tow
Yeah, I agree that those were important, maybe more important factors too. But I know alot of my non-tech friends made the move largely because they were sick of myspace spammers constantly contacting them.
Cool! I hope they can get a better way of drawing text on the videos. It gets a bit illegible in this one:

http://www.khanacademy.org/video/introduction-to-differentia...
fwiw, because of this discussion, i just got "@jcs" from a user that had it since 2007 and only had one tweet (the account was obviously fake).

i opened a support ticket with twitter and asked them about reclaiming the username. their auto-responder said they will only take an active account if it's due to a trademark claim, but if the account is inactive (meaning no logins or other activity on the backend in a long time), they will free up the username. they won't directly assign the inactive username to you, they just make it available for registration.

the auto-reply said they will investigate how inactive an account is if you ask them to, so i asked them to for this account. two days later they replied and said it had been made available, so i quickly went into my settings and changed my username to it. all of the followers and everything migrates to the new username, but any old links or tweets referencing the old username don't forward. hopefully my old username is not released back into the pool for at least a while.
Ask HN: Please review the advertising page for an iPhone game I made w/ a friend
http://onehotgaming.com/perilcanyon

Hey everybody, thanks for taking the time to look at this.

A little background: a friend from college and I put together this game over the last few weeks, based on a project for a class we took together our senior year. This is entirely a side project, but since we put a lot of work into making the game, we want to put enough work into selling it so we have at least a shot of making it successful. Since we're very much novices at this sort of thing, we'd really appreciate some advice from the HN community.

This is our advertising page (for submitting to review sites, etc.). Basically we want it to be the landing page for any potential customers.

Some specific things I'd like feedback on:

1) How is the game description copy?
(Is it too verbose? Should it be a bulleted list?)
2) Does the color scheme/layout work?
3) How's the video?

Related: any tips for good iPhone game review sites to pitch this to?

Tangentially related: can anyone recommend a decent A/B testing tool for Django?
In honor of the official release of Rails 3.0, today (8/30) the Ruby on Rails 3 Tutorial book PDF is available at a 40% discount (using the link above or the discount code "rails3finalhn"). The offer expires at midnight tonight. Don't worry too much if you miss the deadline, though—the online version of the book will always be free. :-)
4,000+ Apps for business. What's your favorite?
It's not a matter of forming the parens into another style -- that's a solved problem. The problem is that sticking to individual styles can hurt the adoption or contributions to a project.
I don't see how Khan academy is truly 'controversial', but obviously it is threatening enough to the status quo for people to try and frame it in a controversial light.

Since learning is my greatest love, school has always been my greatest enemy. I've been enamored with the Khan Academy from about the first 30 seconds of the first video I watched.

I've come across a few references to the idea that the biggest factor in education is the skill of the teacher, and that there is no way of guessing which teachers will be better than others. Apparently, there is no correlation between teaching ability and experience or education level. The Khan Academy model lets us leverage the impact of the greatest teachers and make excellent education available to anyone who wants it.

[edit: typo]
Clickable link: http://onehotgaming.com/perilcanyon
seiji, we are planning on releasing the apps separately as well (esp. rexi) and accompanied with blog posts. Also, we will transition the copies of apps that we have been using to their public projects (ibrowse, mochiweb, etc). But we wanted to get this open first. Thanks for the feedback.
What were the two SEO companies he hired? Even though they cost him $4 million in sales he wasn't making that $8.9 million a year without their help.
Steve Jobs has been listed as the #1 CEO in the USA. He seems to be doing a great job on 1 through 3, and has #3 particularly in the bag. He may do other things as well, but you couldn't say he has in any way shortchanged any of these three jobs.
Hops are also a big cost factor. Light lagers are very lightly hopped since there's almost nothing in the final product to balance their flavor. There are big IPA recipes where hop cost is easily more than grain cost.
Whoa, I thought there were issues with the sprawl of hardware that has come out, and the phones which can't upgrade to new OSes. But now we find out that you can't even trust a NEW phone to have the newest OS?

This is as bad or worse than the PC industry.

But is this because of Google? Are they manufacturers starting projects for ver x.x and then only to find out after 6 months of work that the new OS is not compatible with the software/hardware they've developed?

Is there information on the road-map to the development of specifications? Or are these companies just aiming low?
This happened to me when I didn't put in an exact address. Try another (or a more exact) address. At first I just tried a city name, which it found, but that doesn't work. Street and number needed.
...which was a result of the soured relationship. if it had gone forward as the CrunchPad, w/ TC's vision, the price would have been lower. the "joojoo" is not the CrunchPad.
Perhaps it's because I'm young and dumb, but I see nothing ignoble about a self-centered ambition, so long as one does no direct harm to others in that ambition's pursuit.
Hardware manufacturers don't see themselves as Android distributors, they don't want to compete to see who can make the best home for vanilla Android. They see Android as a jumping off point, not a final product.
Does anyone know which part of Google organized the deal? The original press release is unclear. Google has a decent-sized treasury department; after all, they have billions of dollars of cash that needs a high-yielding home. Perhaps they viewed this as just a plain old investment.
I'm still working with Rails 3.b4, but I've found Rails 3 to be awesome. Very stable for beta code, even. ;) I hope to update to the release version in a few days, and update some older projects too.
SEO is great for developers but he was paying for SEM, those folks cold contacted sites to link back to him, that takes a lot of time to do and SEO alone won't get you to the top of the SERPs for common keywords.
Ummmm. Microsoft and Facebook were both in that list. So was RSS, if that might count for blogging.
A half-measure would be to brand the versions with something more distinctive and memorable than a number, e.g. 2.3 = "Android Ginger".

Maybe Google is shooting for where Apple is -- frequent, free updates compatible with the vast majority of active hardware. If they could get there, it wouldn't make sense to invest in branded updates. But what do they need to do with (or to) the carriers/manufacturers to achieve that?
You can donate to khan, even if it's a dollar.
I suppose. I don't think so, but if the votes matter at all, I suppose the majority agrees with you, though I'm more than a little surprised by them, since I believe I am factually correct.

So it goes.
Ask HN: Review my app, LayoutGenerator
Hi everyone -

I'm part of a start up working on creating a tool to simplify web development. Our first app makes it easy for developers to position elements of their site. People can draw in divs directly on top of an image/mockup using our editor (written in Cappuccino!) and we output cross browser compatible, table-free code. We'd love any feedback on this product and any tips on how we can improve it.

App is at: http://gen1.recreclabs.com

We eventually hope to make this a completely automated process (we have algorithms that detect various elements of a website) and have the editor be used only for minor fixes. Is this something you guys would find useful?

Edit1:

Some sample screenshots of websites we have been using are in:

http://dontbite.me/~okay/screens/
I always love talking to these guys at DefCon.
"one thing i do wish hn had is a link/title checker to stop people all linking to same story hours or days apart."

I don't. I think it is sometimes a symptom of a different problem. See:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1634847
Not sure why your being down-voted. I had to re-read the first few sentences at least four times before I could understand what he was trying to say. It was a horribly constructed opening that almost made me abandon the article.
I think this goes back to sunir's post.

Women at the school yard are competing on who is winning the popularity contest, which is like a political campaign. You need to bring together all the money and the tools to win the hearts of the voters. The tools are an enabler, rather than the end-game.

Like you said, men simply need to bring the biggest X, where X is football prowess, muscles, humor, girlfriend. Then the job is done.
My understanding is that the difference between 1.5 and 1.6 was huge in terms of what it provides in API/functionality and a lot of apps target 1.6 as a minimum as a result. Probably a lot more than target 2.1 or 2.2. 2.0 almost doesn't exist, it was upgraded so quickly on the devices that had it.

My experience is that if you're on 2.1 you can run most of what's on the market. I haven't used 1.5 or 1.6 enough to know about them (other than technically), but I wouldn't be surprised if 1.5 can't run a large chunk of the market and 1.6 probably gets excluded from a lot of cool stuff, too.
The one problem with this logic is that occasionally leaving it alone, as you put it, can be more costly than taking action. Often when we see the problems that emerge when the government takes action, i.e. with bailouts, we ignore the problems that were prevented.
Ask HN: HN comment-respond notifications, useful?
I thought about a feature I would like to have for HN; some kind of notification whenever someone responds to one of my submissions / comments.

I like notifications, the only reason why I actually respond to skype messages is because of the little icon in my taskbar. I would also like to respond to HN comments, the problem is, I forget to check the sites. So I thought some kind of browser notification would be nice.

If you agree that this feature would be useful, and like to use it, program it, because I won’t. Here is the thing, I can’t program, I am willing to learn, but I don’t want to wait for this feature until I am able to do it myself (years). I have no idea how to implement it, but I guess some kind of javascript snippet, or Mozilla addon, or Chrome extension, or similar. (I suppose an hourly email digest would even do it)

The notification should have an input field for the username and get the comment responses in some fashion like:

1. Got to the /threads?id=username

2. Check if there are any new <a href=user?id=username> since the last time the site was visited.

3. Show some kind of notification for the number of new entries on the site that don’t match the username

If that description is confusing, it is because I really have no idea how to do this kind of thing.

This somehow described how to track the responses to the comments, but I wouldn’t know where to start for the user’s submissions.

Anyway, all that done, it would also be nice to be able to track other users. Notify me, if someone I am “following” made a submission or comment (not the responses to his/her comments, just comments from the user I want to track)

In the case there is already a tool like this available; I would kindly ask you to tell me about it.
Debuggers aren't necessary to get someone excited about programming.
This tool definitely has its place.

My niece recently asked me how to learn to program. Since she not extremely tech literate, I gave her a pointer to Zed Shaw's book. We had two sessions together to get her up to speed. These included going through the pre-reqs of learning to to use the command line, creating and editing .py files, the differences between the interactive interpretor and executing scripts, how to read a traceback. She stuck with it, but it took away from some of her interest.

If I had to start again, I would definitely point her to this app.
I'm pretty sure if you try to submit the same link multiple times HN will show you the originally submitted story.
When You Want To Identify How to Write Literature Review Of Top-Quality
Knowing how to write literature review is vital for a good research paper. The literature review will provide the reader with others viewpoints on the subject matter. No research paper is complete without this section. Therefore, it is important that you have a good understanding of how to do so.
MySpace Introduces Sync with Facebook
Actually, what you're writing about -- the very fact that the economy is so complex that nobody can fathom it -- is pretty much what one of the Austrian gods, Friedrich Hayek, wrote, and he earned a Nobel Prize (partly) for this.

Yes, it's quite impossible for any one entity to understand all that's going on: every project and its priority; every input to those projects, and how readily other inputs can be substituted (aluminum instead of steel? we could do it, but...), and so on.

The only way to work this stuff out is to let the market handle it. And this is exactly what is being done when you see prices fluctuate in response to supply and demand, etc. This allows people to indicate directly just how important each choice is to them.
Yes obviously it's art. The way the art is delivered, in this case HTML 5, is affecting its function. Take out the location stuff and there were similar projects being done by the Remedi Project circa 1999 in Flash.
I don't multiply by 6, instead I use various techniques that works quite well:

- http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/books/1-agile-estimating... (with free chapters; also read the various presentations on the site)

- http://www.amazon.com/Software-Estimation-Demystifying-Pract...

One key point is to really understand what is risky in terms of estimating (either technically or politically or because it's too vague).

At some point, you can really become accurate as long as the scope is well understood.

In my case, the Fred Brooks technique does not apply: my last customer iteration was 70% infrastructure, 20% code, 10% pm. The one before was 70% code, 10% infrastructure, 10% documentation, 10% pm.
I thought it was funny, even though I'm a well known Rubyist. Fuck Ruby!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test-driven_development
Why is this down-voted ?

One of his big "lessons" is doing social-media. Can't imagine how much money he spends on FanPage and Twitter.

Only can wonder if that expense pulls him any clients (especially compared to Google's search).
Title correction for the original article:

How we admitted to violating Google's trust and threw away $4 million in business.