skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Except just like food stamps or gift cards, the dishonest bum will just sell them for fifty cents on a dollar, and the honest one will get a square meal either way.
"The Only People For Me Are The Mad Ones, The Ones Who Are Mad To Live, Mad..."
But minimum wage affects many more wages than just the minimum wage itself.

It shifts the whole range to the right, with some compression at the top end.
The problem with "solutions" like this is that they don't really fix the problem where it lies. Weight gain is attributed to caloric surplus, there's no two ways about it.

Drinking water before a meal will help you feel a little fuller and ultimately, eat less. People ignorant to nutrition will begin to use this as a free pass to eating even more poorly.

If you really take a step back and look at this, what they are suggesting is filling up with less calorie dense foods (water being the ultimate example), preferably with a high satiety index (here's a list: http://www.mendosa.com/satiety.htm).
I am male, and I am not into porn. That doesn't mean it doesn't accurately reflect the desires of males, on average.

Material like that will cater to it's audience. Then the only question is, who is it's audience and do they represent a significant portion of the greater whole we are trying to study.
Developers who play games better are better in software development as well
Capitalism and F/OSS advocacy are not contradictory. I'm of the opinion that for certain kinds of software, F/OSS is the most efficient approach in the context of a free market.

In particular, for software that (1) has a wide audience and (2) does not provide a significant competitive advantage, it makes sense to share the development burden amongst others that need the same software. A successful open source project is cheaper to maintain because of market forces: more organizations (including your own) are able to develop expertise in the software, driving down the price of such support.
Why Apple Should End Its Fight Against iPhone Jailbreaking
Just a random anecdote here on portion sizes:

Piper's in Raleigh has a really good fish n chips plate - my wife loves it. However, it's an insanely huge portion. $13.95, but it's more than enough for two people (she split it with a friend last time and they couldn't finish it). Dropping the sizes in half and making it $10.95 would still be a good value (well, in line with the rest of their portions, FWICT). The waitress has said that most people don't finish the fish because it's too much - it just ends up being thrown out. You can't easily reheat fried fish the next day as a leftover (well, I can't - any tips?)

Getting Chinese takeaway always felt a bit expensive (for the good stuff around us). However, we've cut back on portion sizes, and my wife's dinner is enough for dinner, then lunch, then usually another dinner, all from an $11 menu item. In those terms, it's a good deal. But if you tried to eat it all in one sitting, it's too much.

I just do not understand restaurant portion sizings.
It seems to me you confuse personal emotional experience and understanding. The first doesn't necessary improve our judgement.
I think I missed it too.
As viscerally unappealing as it is to find myself agreeing with Calacanis, I'll note that Facebook doesn't even need to intend to trap YC companies for the net effect to be negative. The problem is the same as with "strategic investors": an early, quasi-structural relationship with a potential acquirer may be perceived as a de facto right of first refusal to the rest of the industry. It can be a trap even if it wasn't designed to be!

I sort of watched this happen with a friend's company.

Obvious caveats apply: (a) I'm not a social networking entrepreneur and don't know the space that well, (b) you have to balance the risk --- and the opportunity cost of another business in a different market --- against the benefit of collaborating with Facebook, (c) to whatever extent Facebook benefits unreasonably from this program, YC probably suffers.
This sounds completely bizarre. If your ideas are such that they can be stolen and executed upon by others trivially, than a job at Facebook (with a signing bonus) is pretty damn impressive exit.
This is called Sonification.
Have very old history, starting from listening to RF noise
produced by logical elements switching from 1->0 or 0->1.
I used this technique before when debugged software
for Atmel AVR. Put your PCB inside the AM antenna of the receiver and you can hear (and guess) what is happening inside.
Maybe first ask if that's ok? "Can I buy you a sandwich" is a lot more friendly than "here's a sandwich".

I've made that exact mistake myself, but I think this may be the better approach.
I did not use DuckDuckGo before. Now I'm trying it. Say all you want, the interview worked.
Say what? Posterous isn't rocket science, but I'm pretty sure they wouldn't consider a signing bonus at Facebook impressive.
Not completely true, sometimes being first matters.
>Let's face it -- the movie that sums up the life of a corporate developer best is _Office Space_. The IT Crowd doesn't make it much more appealing.
>Meanwhile, lawyers and doctors and biotech and all sorts of other fields where there are more women -- they get the awesome shows and movies.

That's it! We need the IT port of House!
> combined with being fascinated with eyes (possible hallucination or sensory distortion)

In an artistic sense.

A sample of what she could do:

http://pics.ww.com/v/jacques/eckart/dscf1836.jpg.html
If a bunch of startups that might have grown big were nipped in the bud by Facebook, it would be as bad for YC as for them. So Jason is essentially claiming that by agreeing to let YC-funded startups get early access to Instant Personalization (which is all this deal amounts to), we were acting against our own interest.

That should at least make one skeptical about his claims. It is possible that we've done something that wasn't in our interest, but surely by default one should assume we understand and care about our interests more than Jason does.

Or to put it more briefly: this is mere linkbait.
I would say like any other commentary on the web, consider the source!

Jason makes some good (if generic) points about any industry where large incumbents will try to absorb or nullify innovative competitors or startups.

Microsoft did it in the 90s and 2000s as well..

But we all know how much Jason hates Facebook, so he's using them as the bogeyman in this example, because, well, he hates Facebook!

Mapquest learned this the hard way when they got stomped by Google Maps.. If your product doesn't have built-in "hard to replicate" or proprietary features (or data), then a better-funded competitor can just buy their way past you by using more resources to replicate what you have.
Almost exactly a week since the last announcement. Right on schedule!
When it comes to learning about new technology, I can associate with the difficult of learning something new now than it was in my teens. I started programming in the early 90s in Basic and C (available in India back then), which was more exciting then, than learning Scala now which on occasion feels like a chore.

However the argument can be made that we need experienced folks to evangelize what is good and productive in the current context and the more of them the merrier.

The in-ability or lack of desire to learn something new is a determent to the individual and should apply equally to all professions. It does not adequately answer the question, Given the choice of 2 programmer equally skilled in new technology X why is there a preference for the 21 yr old over the 45 yr old?

While the economic arguments (lack of family responsibility resulting in the ability to work long hours and lower cost including benefits and pay) apply in the case of start ups they do not address the industry as a whole.

Peaking at an would be an excellent reason, it implies that the experience gained from practice is not sufficiently relevant, which I cannot immediately judge and is possibly correct in the context of technology. I am inclined to think that it is more related to the inability of those responsible for hiring to realize ability outside of their own limitations.

I always thought that your essay on not being able to recognize a better programming language outside of the one you knew (forget the title), is more generally applicable.
Exactly. I do the same. So I don't think that the concept is out of the realm of possibility.

Generally, anarchists acknowledge that there'd have to be a lot of social change before a state of anarchy could actually come about. If the government disappeared today, it'd be total chaos. Kind of like how I'd advocate for a total abolition of the prohibition of drugs; such a transition couldn't happen right away, it'd have to happen over a period of time.

An anarchistic society would have to be significantly different than our own. I think it'd end up being much like the Internet; there'd be a large number of very small communities. A decentralized network.

I'm not sure if this would ever come about or not.
I think asking them to return the card games the experiment. They might get paranoid and think it's some weird undercover sting. Or more likely, maybe they think they've found a sugar daddy who's going to start hooking them up every week, so they want to play nice.

It'd be interesting to see if the results would be different if you just dropped the card off and walked away.
I am not sure one can really say that there is an age where a mathematician peek. They do generally make their great works young, but that if often because it takes many, many years for the world to realize that the work they are making is a big deal (solving famous, difficult problems are one exception). In addition at some point they are going to end up more and more involved with the politics side of mathematics (organizing and presenting research, holding conferences, getting grants, etc) which means there is less and less time to do actual research.
I find myself highly amused trying to imagine what great insight the 'female perspective' might bring to physics (or pure math)
I started to contribute to this, but found myself in a convoluted Amazon payment maze. Sorry but I bailed!
Technology hasn't changed if you want to be one of the people building the blocks rather than gluing other people's blocks together.
Believe it or not, to somebody who hasn't had a whole lot to eat in the recent past, everything that one would normally hold against a McDonald's meal becomes a big advantage. That high-fat, protein-heavy, "empty carbs" meal, the one you probably shouldn't have for lunch every day, is pretty much exactly what a homeless fellow ought to be eating in the winter. Sure, it'd be nice if he could get a veg or two to go along with it, but there's a requirement for concentrated calories you probably wouldn't understand.

(I've been homeless in Toronto, back in the mid-'90s. Big recession. Some of you may remember it. It took eight weeks to get a gig shining shoes, and even then I was among the working homeless until I'd saved enough to pay rent up front on a room you probably wouldn't think of living in. And no, eliminating the minimum wage wouldn't have helped -- I would never have been able to afford to move indoors. I do wish I could figure out where these amateur economists get their ridiculous ideas. I'm sure it looks good on paper, if you eliminate things like, oh, the cost of food and shelter from the equation. Remember, the solution should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.)
Facebook has the money and scale to implement anything they choose to. Trivially or not.
You can scroll through the history of your terminal, but not of individual screens by adding this to your .screenrc file.

termcapinfo xterm|xterm-color ti@:te@

Not 100% there, but does well for me.
Agreed. I cant handle anything with Calcanis, but a chance to listen to Gabriel Weinberg is always worthwhile.
I understand what Jason is saying here...but to be honest, it's hard to tell someone that is used to living on $40k/year, that they shouldn't take an offer of $20M - that instantly makes them a millionaire.

Ofcourse, once you make that first sale and have the FU money to fall back on, it makes gambling (i.e. growing to IPO) much easier.

I am a little skeptical of Zuck too though.
congratulations to the team, the effort is amazing
Given the timing I think it is pretty clear that he is talking specifically about YCRFS7. If you're building something on top of a platform there is always the danger that the platform provider will decide to incorporate your product as a feature. There is certainly a lot of precedent for this — in recent years Apple, Twitter, and Facebook have all done it.
Out of curiousity, why did you stop at the centre in your journey leftwards?
For sure.
That's why I made my "long tail" reference. (I'm geek first, female second. :D)

The Long Tail taught us that the single most popular thing still has less people into it than not into it.
We are going to need more identical-twins-separated-at-birth for this study, too.
There's been research either side of a county line in catering and related service jobs (short order, waiter, barmaid, etc.) USA indicating that min wage lead to more employment ...

I couldn't find it but there's this one from 2007:

"For cross-state metro counties and cross-state contiguous counties, we find strong
earnings effects and no employment effects of minimum wage increases. The large
negative elasticities in fixed-effects panel regressions are generated primarily by regional
and local differences in employment trends that are unrelated to minimum wage policies.
This point is supported by our finding that division-level placebo minimum wages are
negatively associated with employment in counties with identical minimum wage
profiles."

Dube, Arindrajit, Lester, T. William and Reich, Michael, Minimum Wage Effects Across State Borders: Estimates Using Contiguous Counties (August 1, 2007). Institute for Research on Labor and Employment Working Paper Series No. iirwps-157-07. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1005523
What's your taken on Foursquare and Facebook's own entry into the same sorts of space? Could you write up something about competing with an incumbent who already has the captured audience effect going for them?
Ask HN: back to math?
It seems like a lot of the most interesting jobs in software these days require a pretty heavy math background. Things like analytics and machine learning and computer graphics in particular. It's occurred to me that it might be worthwhile to go back to school and get a graduate degree in math, which is something that appeals to me intrinsically because I've always enjoyed math anyway.

Has anyone else done this? If so, did you find it helpful in getting more interesting work or did you just find yourself overqualified for the typical software job?
Posterous is out in the open for everybody to see. Why hasn't Facebook "killed it", then? Understanding user behaviour and preferences is part of what makes something defensible. Not having to build a product to operate at Facebook's scale (and expectation of reliability) at day one is a way to help discover people's preferences, especially for a "new idea".
Yes, just like google, right. Google video completely obliterated those youtube upstarts. Oh, wait.

That a company has the money and the scale to implement anything they choose to, trivially or not does not mean they will actually succeed in the marketplace.

Small companies doing one thing have something big companies do not: relentless focus.
Facebook is not an investor like Sequoia, they have a primary business to run and there is some merit to Jason's warning, linkbait or not. How would you judge a year from now if this was a mistake? What criteria are you going to use to assess whether or not the deal met your goals?
Sure, but a sub-$2M sale for a company still in embryo stage is a very different proposition.
I think you missed the sarcasm tags on the GP.
At this moment, the following article is sitting right next to this one on the front page, which is great:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1644200
Yeah, that was what they call a joke. Albeit, a lame one.
Why does that give it a free pass to write to places on the disk that are "reserved" or unallocated?

Grub may not operating within an OS sandbox, but it is required to play nicely with the OSes it is booting. The way to do that is to wrap your data in a partition or a file.
> Also, how could I forget Jason worked for Facebook? Obviously he didn't enjoy his job.

I think you are mistaken here, when Calacanis said he was 'quitting facebook' he meant that he would close his account there, not that he handed in his resignation.
Fair enough but as you said the young person is "learning to build stuff". There is an advantage in this in that they have a beginners mind and may well come up with a new and better way of doing things. But that is probably one in a hundred. In my experience (and this is an observation not a grouch) a lot of them just end up making a brilliant mess that only becomes apparent when the project gets to a certain size. Not all of them, mind you, some are so good so young that they manage to accumulate experience and judgement faster than anybody else. But there are simply not enough of them to go around. In the meantime someone who has learned about this stuff the hard way (and has the capability to reflect on it) can lend some guidance that can so that we get the brilliance without the mess.
One more thing - building architects often do their greatest work in their 60s. Software is not that dissimilar in that its about design and complexity. If I were starting out I would like the idea that I am entering a field where I have the potential to improve with age like that. Norvig's "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years" hints that its possible that that may be the case but its not recognized by the industry.
I like #11 but I'd fork it - python/django for a content-centric site or ruby/rails/heroku for a task-centric app - and throw in some jquery for either type. That'll pretty much cover 90% of web app ideas.
You're assuming that those working for $2 an hour were being paid fairly and that what they were doing wasn't worth $6.

Also I've read at least 2 studies showing that min wage in the US didn't decrease employment but did increase earnings (ie people weren't sacked nor even underemployed because min wage increased).
Damn it, that will teach me to make poor jokes. I just meant he has no real insight on whether or not the job will 'suck'
So much irony during that interview!
I believe the title should read "Clean Undergrads at Northwestern University Feel Morally Superior." FTA: "Some 58 undergrads were invited to a lab filled with spotless new equipment." I don't think this sample has any remote chance of being representative of the "People" population.

The "clean" and "dirty" passages used in the follow up studies employ very strong positive and negative words, respectively, and no control group seems to have been used to compare how people make moral judgments after reading very positive or very negative passages irrespective of cleanliness.

This is not even pop science it's trash science. It's dirty, but reading it makes me feel more morally superior, not less, contrary to the conclusion of the "study."
It's absolutely true that sometimes F/OSS can make sense as a tactic within capitalism.

Generally though, F/OSS is used as an example of how people don't behave rationally, in an economic sense.
I was just quoting what I read, I'm not sure if that's confirmed.

http://www.allfacebook.com/facebook-hot-potat-2010-08
http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/28/facebook-to-pay-10-million-...
You can also edit the carrier plist to enable the native USB/Bluetooth tethering for your computer.

http://www.appfaction.com/blog/2010/08/how-to-native-tether-...
I'm a big fan of Rifkin. His book "The end of work" really made me think about what the future of employing people will look like.
I wouldn't hire Dave Winer in a startup because he is an internet legend and I would assume he was very expensive.

Part of his salary would probably have to go on the marketing account but I'm sure there are wiser ways to spend that money in a startup.

I would be more OK with having him in a technical advisory role or something similar. That would give me most of the publicity value at a much lower price. (I would then of course also make sure his experience was utilized to the fullest extent possible, probably as a mentor to the tech team.)

Not sure he would like that, though.
Usual meaning of regrets are things you really wanted to do at the time, had a chance to try, did not and didn't do anything else that was particularly exciting. Then felt a nagging about it your whole life, which only gets worse when you're out of time.

If you took an alternate path that made you happy, you probably won't have regrets. If your life was crappy, you will have regrets about lots of little things. But a good life means whatever regrets you have will be minor curiosities, not severe psychological problems.
There's something satisfying about people disagreeing over a message from a man whose oeuvre was so concerned with subjective reality.
It's not so much being satisfied that every choice you made in life is the best one, but, being satisfied with who you are today (on the whole), coming to understand that who you are is the sum of every choice you've made, every relationship you've entered into, and every experience you have had. Change anything in that chain, and you are somebody different.

As long as you haven't lived the life of Methuselah (nearly a thousand freakin' years to get on with something, and the only thing posterity has to say about him is that he had sons and daughters before he died[1]), as long as you've tried to participate in your own life and haven't found a reason to loathe who you are, then there is no room, really, for the what-ifs or the coulda-shouldas.

[1] I'm no Bible literalist (or believer, for that matter), but I think that was the point the writer was trying to get across as a moral lesson.
20-30 years of sanity might be better than none.
I think calling it linkbait is dishonest to Jason. While he's known for such things, it looks like his genuine opinion on the deal, and not an attempt to get more [page]views.
I don't 100% buy it yet. I feel the same way about capitalism that I do about religion; losing my religion was a long journey over a period of years, that took a lot of unlearning. I'm in the middle of that process with capitalism now.
Very interesting! Is available any video? Maybe you could also enjoy the "Institute for Algorhythmics" - see http://www.algorhythmics.net/en/?page_id=2
Can you, jacquesm, or some other knowledgeable sort give an example of a situation which could call for this level of sorting?

Sorting a billion of anything in 1s seems likely to kick against other problems.

Just curious (I'm not asking why you'd want to, but you can tell me that too if you like).
A lot of applications generate their own data. The pure "on disk" piece might be a fraction of the total.

e.g., consider z-sorting vertices for a million-polygon model as it rotates (that's useful for some kinds of transparency.) Bandwidth to main memory is a small piece of the total.
De-emphasize Age, Refocus on Play
I think that the perception is that YC may be acting in its own interest but not in the interest of the founders. This is strange, because after all, once you are 'on board' anything that is good for YC is good for the founders.

Unless it is about increasing your 'batting average' by having a series of smaller but more-or-less guaranteed exits. In that case your goals would not be aligned.
Analytics seems more stats oriented. Actually, I'd say the same about machine learning, too. Not that math and stats are fundamentally distinct, but there are different graduate programs offered for the two.
That's not what I'm calling bullshit. Keep reading.