skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Telling someone to be grateful that they have a roof over their head since most of the world doesn't won't make them any happier about shivering under a blanket because they can't pay the gas bill for heating.

But, the thing is, every US state that gets cold enough in the winter has heating assistance aid available from the utility companies. If you can't afford to pay your gas bill in the winter, it gets paid for you. This seems to be mandated by the public utility commissions.

So, if you're shivering under a blanket because you didn't pay your gas bill, it's probably your own damn fault that you didn't apply for home heating assistance. I've even had the gas company mail me a big letter in multiple languages when I was a few days late paying my bill saying "do you need help paying your bill? Please call us." And in a lot of northern states, it is illegal for the gas or electric company to shut off your utilities in the winter months, as long as you can prove financial hardship.
Video! (please please please)
I'm not sure it happens much, but the way you're framing it makes it sound more ridiculous than it is. Cutting into my profits diminishes the return I get on my investment. This reduces my incentive to chase any particular investment unless I'm simply ravenous for money.

Similarly, most people decline to work 20 hours a day, seven days a week. People who earn overtime could earn a lot more money if they did, but the ROI doesn't justify it in most cases.
I agree with almost everything in this article, except for one crucial point. The article says "And if a Python program has adequate unit tests, it can be as robust as a C++, Java or C# program with adequate unit tests."

So what is an "adequate" unit test in Python? I know some advocates of weak typing who believe that the unit tests should include tests of expected input types. 99+% of the time that's going to mean checking exactly what you'd get from static type checking. Rarely, there will be something more complex, e.g. the foobars variable can reference a FooBar object or a list containing 0 or more FooBar objects. (And then I'd question the design of the API.)

I really don't want to write those unit tests. I'd much rather have the compiler do that testing for me.
It depends why it regressed. Even if the text processor library didn't regress, the dependency may have reverted to an older version somehow.
Two things I would have liked to have seen in layoffs I've been through:

1) Some understanding from management that these are "resources" or just $$ values you're cutting. These are people. People with families, bills, mortgages, and dreams. People who (like the article indicated) are still close friends of those who remain at the company. In most cases, people who've busted their ass for the company in the past.

2) Just once I'd fucking like to see at least 1 member of upper management affected by a layoff. They've got the biggest salaries, wouldn't you get the most "bang for the buck" by cutting a couple of them? But no, they're always immune. It's just the nameless faceless rabble that suffer for what are usually management mistakes to begin with.
How do you ensure that the unit tests are correct?
To get a street vending permit for a food cart in NYC, you have to resort to going through black market channels. New street vending permits haven't been issued since 1993. A lot of the permits sold on the black market are fakes anyway and prices can amount to tens of thousands of dollars. It's astounding how you have to deal with corrupt people to "legally" get into the New York City street vending market.
Did you by any chance have the users who haven't had any Python installed?
It's simplistic to think that "it's your own fault if you're poor" which is what tjic is implying.

I was irritated by the above post because I don't think the above poster has really been poor before. When you're 13 years old, with no home, no parents, perhaps in 70s Taiwan where government services were at a minimum, living off a bowl of white rice every day, trying to study and get into the best college because that's your only ticket out for 4 or 5 years, I don't think there is much you can do at all. To say that you can fix your situation in any state is insulting.

My father did get out. But he suffered for four years, which seemed like eternity. One bowl of rice, passing out because he didn't get enough nutrition. What would you have him do? Go work and forfeit a college education?

He didn't need anything, by the way. But to imply that there was more he could do about his situation is INSULTING.
set max-memory inside the config, it'll automatically do it for you as long as you are using expire on the keys.

The implementation according to antirez is that they sample 3 random keys, and expire the soonest one, so put your high priority data with a longer expire and you'll be fine.
I don't understand why google would want to fund something that in it's video touts that it can hide ads on webpages.
As written by a person who's never been poor.
You can't mandate love or wonder, only responsibility. This guy's acted responsibly so far.
what's the number?
Actually, keeping an impending layoff a secret is possible. I was part of a sizable layoff at a medium-sized publicly traded company that was AFAIK a complete surprise to everyone below the director level. Certainly no-one else at my level, or even my immediate supervisor saw it coming. (To be fair the company had cut costs in other ways several months before due to the recession.)

FWIW the company was very professional about it, letting us work the rest of the week if we felt like it (not that I did as I started looking for a new job immediately), giving us access to an outsourcing firm, a reasonable severance package, and--most importantly for the US--paid health insurance for 6 months.

Given the financial necessity of reducing the company's headcount, IMO they did it just about as humanely as possible. But then again it's also good business as those who survived could plan their exits given the opportunity if they felt the company was being unfair, and those of us who were cut can get the word out.
> Rapleaf uses the APIs of various services

Those APIs expose people's email addresses?
You know, I'll bet it's sheer coincidence that this guy also happens to have a course on how to start your own business that he presumably makes money off of.
Bruce nails why strong typing is important, but misses the point. He says, "realizing that the compiler was just one (incomplete) form of testing,"

Strong typing is really just a form of testing. But it has a couple of advantages. It is a form of testing with strong mathematical underpinnings. If someone says their application is correct with respect to the type system, I know what that means in a pretty precise way.

This has a couple of side benefits. When working in modular units or decoupled teams, when one team gets some code they know that if type checking has passed a set of requirements have been met. They understand what that means. While unit tests are useful, you passing your unit tests means very little to me, until I spend a few days going through your unit tests.

Another benefit is that all of your code gets these tests run on them. One of the few tests that gets 100% code coverage all the time.

Examples of famous bugs that could have been avoided with a strong type system include the NASA Mars orbiter bug. If they used a language like Ada that supports having English and Metric integer types, they would have been sure to mix them properly. And of course the compiler could enforce this through all of the code.

While Bruce does point out that weak typing (or dynamic typing) may result in less typing, it generally doesn't result in easier thinking. For me that makes it a relative wash in that regard.
A Traffic Jam is a Collection of Rooms
(1) Costs practically nothing; maybe 2x 1099 months if you wanted to bring in a recruiter to mechanize the process of landing people on their feet. The letter of reference should be automatic, as would reco's on LinkedIn pages.

(2) Is something every soundly-managed company already does.

(3) Is actually a favor that ex-FTE's would be doing for the company; converting FTE's to contractors is the basic idea behind all outsourcing, and is something the post actually alluded to.

(4) It's your call whether 10-15% of the FTE cost you're recovering in your RIF is well-invested by paying people's COBRA. You're doing the RIF to pull money back in. We're just haggling over the numbers now.

(5) Not offering severance is a pretty sure-fire way to get your best players to accept their earliest palatable job offer. Where is it industry standard not to offer severance?
But aren't these kind of events pretty rare?
http://www.backcountry.com/store/rankings.html
Password Cards
Don’t use “My” in UI elements.
Why Samsung's Galaxy Tablet Isn't an iPad Killer
Ask HN: I want to learn graphics design. Where should I go?
Programming is a great skill to have - also because it allows you to communicate better with other programmers (and evaluate code they have written for you).
I would like to learn some basic design skills to have that same advantage there. Pointers to books, tutorials and websites are most welcome.
I await the upcoming blog post "Doing Y Combinator in Your 40's." That's something I'd read immediately.
Instafetch works with Instapaper's list of articles, so no matter where you add a link (or mark as read), it will be synced with all devices including Android/Instafetch.

Didn't have the chance to test if it remembers where you left reading across devices though.

Anyway, I understand the benefit of having the app from the same provider. My point was that if you need a solution now, you can have it.
You're mostly right, and in my opinion the government needs to cut its spending very significantly.

However, you're confusing tax rates with tax revenue. It's quite possible that increasing the rate can lead to a net decrease in total tax revenue. And in some cases, lowering the rate can lead to an increase in revenue. This is known as the Laffer curve. See https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Laffer_curve

While this concept is the subject of some controversy, it's demonstrably true at the extreme. Raising the rate to near 100% will clearly decrease revenue. But on the other hand, decreasing it to 0% will also decrease revenue. But with more moderate values, it's really anyone's guess as to whether it will hold or not.

It's the same in business, really. One's revenue can increase by decreasing prices: more people will buy your product, and that may be enough to offset the per-unit loss.

What's really controversial is the question over how much people will forgo additional income due to changes in marginal tax rate. There are certainly boundary conditions, such as when the amount you finally take home after taxes is less than your cost for child care. More fuzzy is when the amount you take home is less than your value for free time.
"Make a product people want, everything else you can fix later."

That's the real meat there.
Perhaps he didn't want a kid. It doesn't matter; he got himself in this situation. He has admirably accepted the consequences by giving the best life he can to his child.
Clojure is using a lot more memory, any idea why that is?
Do you know why they block Google's CDN?
> The individuals were told first, and then there was an all-employee meeting to announce the layoffs.

That was my experience. I guess that's what they learn in business school. ;)
That's another thing he's got going for him: cachet.
Koyaanisqatsi
Tech allies at odds: Bezos, Hanauer split over income tax
He doesn't. (at least AFAIK)

Steve has some excellent articles on time management and I have been following his writing for some time now. Though some of his views are outside of my comfort zone, I have matured enough to not be judgmental across the board just because some of his ideas are "kooky" by my standard. Once in a while I will go back to one of his time management articles and every-time I read them, it perks me up real fast.
Thank you for sharing this. I'm 31 too, and currently working on my YC application. In my case, I'm even more focused on making things work because I have a mortgage to pay and a family to support. A lean burn rate is one of the means to this end.
Ask HN: APIs for finding company information?
Do you know of APIs or tools for looking up company information? That is:

- Given a business name or domain name

- Return:
- Revenue
- Number of employees
- Location(s)
- Type/field of business
- ...

Or,

- Given a series of constraints such as:
- Revenue
- Number of employees
- Location
- Type/field of business

- Return matching businesses
I know that if I really need generators, then I really need to install something newer than the 2.4 that comes with RHEL/CentOS 4.

Generators is 2.6+, right?

BTW, an ugly approach I used (more or less as a joke) was to check for generator availability and, in case I can't use them, use a list comprehension instead. There is a performance/memory hit but, depending on what you are doing, it's a usable alternative. And a nice place to hang humorous comments.

But I agree that, if your users don't want to install an alien (from the package manager POV) Python in order to run Mongrel, getting rid of python code is the right thing to do.

It's like having a weird dependency, kind of requiring a Fortran 77 compiler in order to run Perl...
Complicates things needlessly. By all means, charge more if necessary. But tiered pricing for a sandwich? I don't think so. Simplify.
Many thanks you just saved me from some ugly code I was using to check for http/https; this method is FAR more elegant.
>It doesn't matter; he got himself in this situation.

They both got themselves into the situation, but only one had the option to get out of it.

My point is that for him, the kid may not be number one priority, and I wouldn't blame him for that. It's one thing if you really want the child and then you turn around and spend all your time at your start-up, another if you didn't want the kid to begin with.
Only 2% Of My Friends Are Using Facebook Places -- Here's Why
But that's during the compilation phase - this is the compiled binary. Binaries that are compiled with debugging information turned on will include this information for a similar reason: so that when you're debugging a program, or when it breaks, you can map that to places in your source file.
Was there a Computer Science degree when he was at school? His degree was in Physics.

How do you get a degree in CS when no degree in CS is offered? To imply you need a CS degree implies that there has to be a degree for you to be considered an expert in it.

What if you invented the computer? Are you not qualified because you didn't get a degree in your invention?
If you're technical and you think you've got enough hustle to start a company, you can run at an arbitrary standard of living for a long time as a 1099 contractor.

I'm past arguing that YC isn't worth it because the money is too small and getting funded is a bad trajectory[1]; the program has clearly been a huge win for a lot of people. But you can execute the 37signals playbook after attending YC. Just go, launch, and then consult.

If you have a 3-person team with a strong dev that has a short runway, that dev should have no trouble picking up 1-2 month projects to keep himself going with the company. It is so straightforward to do this, the money is so good, and the commitments are so flexible that I'm led to question the "you should make as little as possible" advice.

Why burn your family out? There's no points for effort, only for execution.

I'm 34, for what it's worth.

[1] I still believe both those things, though.
Pick up a copy of Photoshop and work your way through http://psd.tutsplus.com/. Be warned though: Photoshop can be quite addictive!
I'm in my 30's and I feel I have one huge advantage over numerous 20-somethings: ability to do short term contract work, and fund the startup that way. This is assuming :

a) you have enough networking/experience to land sufficient paid contract work fairly easily
b) your short term contract (3-6 months) can provide you just enough income to keep you going for the rest of the year.

Sure, I certainly don't have the careless energy level as I had in my 20's, and have a lot more responsibility, but the ability to work smarter, having a better eye for what may or may not work through experience, and identifying the right people to hang out with surely makes up for the shortcomings.

Last, but this is huge for me personally, is the feeling of 'this is my last chance' that's ever more so prevalent now than in my 20's, where I always knew I had some leeway years left as an excuse to not put in 100%.
> When working in modular units or decoupled teams, when one team gets some code they know that if type checking has passed a set of requirements have been met. They understand what that means. While unit tests are useful, you passing your unit tests means very little to me, until I spend a few days going through your unit tests.

Except that "type checking has been passed" doesn't actually tell you anything about correctness either without spending a few days going through the types. It's very easy, and very common, for bad programmers to build a few BigBallOfStuff types and essentially re-invent an ad-hoc dynamic type system that will pass static analysis in a way that is utterly meaningless when it comes to behavioural correctness
Unit tests are "correct" by definition, because they represent the specification for the code that they test.

You aim to encapsulate all the intended behaviour in your tests.

Thus, when you encounter a bug, you start by creating a test that replicates the bug, correct the test to the expected behaviour (so it now fails), then fix the code. That is: red, green, refactor.

Not only do you fix the bug, but you improve the specification and improve the efficacy of your tests.

In the way that you cannot pragmatically prove that code has no bugs, neither can you prove your tests are correct (bug-free). But by having a test suite that can run continuously, and that you add to, you are increasingly improving code quality and, most importantly, ensuring that regressions don't occur.
Same with taxi medallions.
I take a pizza flyer, put it in front of your door. If it's still there next morning, I'm safe to go into your flat. No Google needed.
Bill Would Give USJD Power to Shutter Piracy Sites Worldwide
Why your prospective customer's view of the world is more important than yours
The problem is he might become saturated with orders. He has two options - say he can't deliver or raise his prices so high that his remaining capacity will be filled with the highest priced customers.

As a customer I like choices and the on-demand pricing model allows him to tell his customers his product is always available - though sometimes at a higher cost.
Sometimes you meet someone and you have a pleasant conversation with them, so you think they are nice enough, so you invite them to a party. Then at the party it is clear they are out of their depth, they are too shy or too aggressive, or both, with some odd mix of insecurity and uncertainty over how to behave. And then you wish you hadn't invited them to the party.

That is my perception of Ben and Mena Trott, in so far as their personas on the web go (which is the only way that I, and most people, know them). It is astonishing that they were such early participants in blogging, yet they failed to ever find the right tone.

I remember that my first impression of MoveableType was favorable. This was in either 2000 or 2001. I had the impression that it was the best blogging platform around. At that time, the world of PHP only had stuff like PHPNuke, which was unbelievably bad.

Once TypePad got going, my impression of Ben and Mena Trott changed for the worse. There was the incident where Mena called out someone for being an "asshole" at SXSW, and then her awkward attempt at an apology:

http://www.sixapart.com/blog/2005/12/words-you-shoul.html

Is appropriate to use this language when you are talking to your customers? Even if this is your honest opinion, is this the best way to express yourself?

If the goal was to alienate their user base, they went about it with scientific precision.

I recall at one point Mena wrote a post where she talked about how her and Ben were trying to learn how to enjoy wine, rather than always drinking soda. To me, the post had a quality of "Everyone says blogging is suppose to be personal and we are suppose to be pioneers in this field, so I will now try a post on a personal topic." Possibly others enjoyed her attempt at being transparent, but to me the tone was forced and awkward.

My overall sense then, and still now, was they were lucky to be early into blogging since if overlapped with their personal interests (Mena wanted to better organize her sewing circle by posting announcements online, so she asked her husband Ben to create some software that would make it easy for her to do so - this was the beginning of MoveableType). Once they realized they had something valuable, they wanted to commercialize (which is understandable). But after that they seemed to be in over their heads. They never seemed able to establish real rapport with their user base.
The post-investment salary rule is something a lot of people trip over, but it's important. The rule is simple:

Pay yourself enough that you're not thinking about taking a part-time job to support yourself (and your family). You should be able to focus on the startup without financial distraction.

You don't need money to put into savings. You don't need a fancy car. You don't need fine dining. You're sacrificing now for the chance at big upside later. Every dollar you waste on yourself is hurting your chances of bigger success.
Mainly convenience, I suppose. Also the immediate feedback on solutions could be good.

How many times do you really do the exercises in books, no matter how much the authors stress that it is important to do the exercises? I tend to skip and save them "for later".
definitely would like to read, getting traction is the hardest part of any startup
I don't know, anecdotal evidence here, but the majority of cases I see pages taking a long time to load due to 3rd party js etc, it's waiting for actual data, rather than anything else.

The OP said:

"and I noticed the render time of my site (and a few others) jump up anywhere between 5x and 100x."

Which would indeed suggest that it did load, but at significantly reduced speeds.
How could he possibly do that if he got her pregnant on the first date?

95% of the people I have gone on first dates with would have made disastrous life partners. It's kind of a lot to ask of him.
HOW TO: Attract Attention to Your Website
When it comes to the web, it’s all about how visible and how accessible you are. You may have your own website, but if you don’t have any visitors, it’s as good as being dead online.
11. You like paying thousands of dollars out of pocket for medical procedures because no one will sell you a health insurance policy at any price.
Another option for using a CDN that will let you maintain better control and outage visibility, is to sign up for a paygo CDN account yourself. GoGrid and Speedyrails resell Edgecast CDN and Softlayer resells Internap CDN both of which are very good performing CDNs with both origin and pop pull models. The cost for these services would only be about $0.57 per 100k jQuery hits (assuming 24KB minified version is used).
Being poor is living where nobody pays for lawn service.

Being poor is living where everyone collects aluminum cans for money.
Unit testing not only replaces the need for strong typing, it does so without any extra effort on top of what you'd already do for unit testing

That's not true. I work on an e-commerce system. Ensuring that people don't accidentally use Floats where they shouldn't requires quite a bit of additional effort which could be avoided with a type system.