skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think this article (and some of your points too) are conflating minimalism with simplicity. Minimalist is buying 1 Kindle and putting all of your books on it and then selling them. This is more expensive.

Simple is keeping your books you want to read again and getting rid of books you've read and aren't going to read to reduce your bookshelf space. Then get a library card and check out books to read from there. Less $ and simpler, though not necessarily the most minimalist you can be.

I think minimalism is one aspect of simplicity, but not the only one. Simplicity also involves practicality, economics, sustainability, etc.
It's important to remember that some people are poor by choice, e.g., dropped out or just lazy, some are poor by circumstance, e.g., mental illness, addiction, disabled, and some are poor by a combination of the two and everything in between.

I used to have a different view of the world. It seemed if someone like me, from a lower middle class family could go to college and pay for it myself without much trouble then why can't everyone? Stop complaining and just do it, right?

My girlfriend of seven years has spent most of her adult life working with the homeless. Long talks with her, events at homeless centers, and the occasional talk with one of her clients has changed my views. Yes, there are some people who are pretty rotten and all to happy to work the system. Most people are not like that though.

Imagine trying to study if you're bat shit crazy. I've met people who will only sleep in chairs because they think beds are where "they" shoot you with lasers. Ever been addicted to meth or heroin? Try finding the fortitude to enroll in school while fighting that battle. Fractured your spine in a car accident while you where unemployed? Try gutting out that pain and getting a job. Parents beat you, sexually abused you, told you you're shit every day? Well buck up and get on with your life son! This is the land of opportunity!

I can only imagine how difficult life is for many people. I come from a privileged world, one without endless money, but endless love and encouragement, where going to college was never questioned, just assumed. That type of upbringing opens doors. It's important to remember that.
How long did you go unemployed...being turned away for even the lowest things, like shelf-stacking in supermarkets? It's hard to judge another man without walking a mile in his shoes.

It's not that hard, thanks to the power of statistics. For four of every five poor people, the answer is less than 26 weeks. Of the poor who spent at least 27 weeks/year searching for work, the answer is also less than 27 weeks.

More than 9 in 10 of the poor who actually searched for a job for at least 27 weeks found one - just over half of worked full time, one quarter voluntarily part time, and one quarter involuntarily part time [1].

[1] The precise numbers are in this report: http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2008.pdf
I cite 2008 because the 2009 report isn't yet released, and 2010 isn't over.

[edit: Hi downmodders. Sorry for injecting facts into this discussion.]
I think that not including these forms of the drugs you mentioned will entirely defeat the purpose of legalizing all drugs in one fell swoop. Aside from their scary chemical properties, you should take into consideration that the people who are addicted to these drugs are often driven to desperate situations because of their illegal status and resulting cost. Having known several heroin addicts, it is not realistic that they would reduce their intake to opium willingly even if that meant they are within legal rights to do so. The same goes for cocaine; many people graduate beyond the use of cocaine to crack because simple powdered cocaine fails to fulfill their need or because their nasal cavities are too damaged to suffice.

What I am saying is that I believe your idea of waiting for the market for processed drugs to "dry up" will inevitably mean creating a class of drug users who will continue to be persecuted until they presumably die out. This seems remarkably inhumane.
I always thought that the Nobel prize winners are always very abstract. There are better awards to look at for examples of books you actually want to read...
Thanks! It's just a few lines of jQuery.

Thanks fo the advice about the text. We'll look into that book.
I rarely find this an issue. I've found I'm more likely to be waiting for a client to be getting back with some sort of feedback, and therefore using my time to be working on another project.

This may be down to handling client expectations at an early stage. If you make it clear that as a freelancer you will be working for several people at any one time, and give them a time estimate for when progress will be made, I've found most clients are fine.

This does mean I have to make sure I'm progressing enough on each project to keep each individual client happy, but I've found for a lot of people, as long as they see some progress and you're keeping up communication with them - which can be as simple as a 'here's a quick update' e-mail - then they're happy.

If you get a client who wants you to work solely on their project, this can be more of a problem. As I've been freelancing a while I'm in a position to say I can't work that way, and know that I'll find other work if they then do not want me to work for them. When I was starting out and work was thin on the ground, I couldn't be so picky. Then again, I didn't have as much work to juggle either.
There are security implications to this decision.

JavaScript uses a security model called the same-origin policy. There are differences in the implementation between different browsers but here's the gist: JS may modify the DOM if-and-only-if the domain containing the script shares the domain of the DOM. Loosely, the check is done by comparing document.domain strings. If the strings match, everything is kosher.

You can truncate document.domain by lopping off period delimited prefixes. Even if you lop foo.com down to the TLDs, you won't be able to do the same trick and cut bar.com down and get scripts to run in the same context.

If you're hosting content on blog.example.com and example.com, an attack on blog.example.com could truncate the document.domain down to 'example.com' and execute malicious script on the primary domain.

I would recommend using blog.example.com and www.example.com, but never example.com.
I kindof get that. But SaaS != WWW. What's more, some SaaS supports data portability--as of yesterday, even Facebook does this! So I can't really understand the concern, at least framed this way.

The web as a timesuck is I guess a good argument, but limiting yourself to checking e-mail surely won't harness any inclination people have to read news or watch media. Right?
I use namespro.ca for Canadian domains (ie .ca)
For me, having one's needs met kind of equates to not being poor. (I am aware that the official definition of being poor is just some percentage of the average income - that is not a very interesting category imo).

It seems rather to me looking at marginal improvements or as you call it would pose a better explanation. If you know that if you work really hard, you can afford a house and a nice car, it might motivate you to work hard. If all that working harder gives you is money for an extra bottle of beer, the motivation is not quite that great.

The jobs mentioned in the article are not really set up to changing anything fundamental about the guys situation. You can't get rich by donating blood.

Also there seem to be other problems he had, like depression, that prevented him from seeking a better paying job (also his age, of course).

How old are you? After a certain age you begin to notice that working actually tends to take a toll. So you think twice about trading your health for money.
Again, I'm a college student. Re-buying stuff I threw out based on a naive criterion like that would be terrible with my limited resources.

An inventory would help me better decide what to throw out and keep me organized. If someone built an inventory app that could keep track of purchases via bank reports and OCR'd receipts, I would probably pay for it.
All of that is fine, I agree, but his statement was stronger than "minimalism might cost more if you do it a certain way", it was "saving money is not a legitimate motivation for minimalism". The latter is what I disagree with.

This is running the risk of turning into semantic wanking over the meaning of "minimalism", so I'm going to shut up now.
Are you sure you're not mixing together minimalist and frugal? I have an acquaintance whom I'd consider very minimalist, however everything she does buy is top of the line and very expensive. When she goes out to eat, it's Michelin star restaurants. When she travels she considers 4 start hotels slumming it. At the end of the day minimalist and frugal or pretty orthogonal.
Ok, what if being an asshole makes one happy? ;)
Oh well. Still, your company can leverage "As seen on Oprah" for a conversion boost.
http://validator.w3.org/ has an entry for HTML5 (Experimental)

I don't know if that means the validator or HTML5!

Then BOFH's can brush everyone off with
"The site is valid Nhtml, please contact your vendor regarding this issue"
Well, I think he is wrong in regards to beeing a better person. "Costs less" can mean "costs less" environmental desctruction or social unjustice.
Ask HN: help.. Startups and H1b visas
Can startups hire people from abroad? What are technical, financial, or any other difficulties involved in it?
I am currently working in Ireland (not a citizen) and want my next job to be with a startup, which are rarely found in Ireland. So, I am considering to move to US for the same. Any help will be really appreciated!
Come join us on irc, at irc.gnome.org, channel #mono and #monodev and we can give you some ideas that might improve your development pipeline.
Thanks! We'll look into that bug and try to fix that strange hover behavior under Webkit.
With the English version being Paul and St.Paul.
Frugal implies you are sacrificing quality or desire in the name of money. Minimalist implies you find joy in simpler things and a simpler life and therefore don't need or even want outlandish luxury.

I'm just as content sleeping at a Best Western as I am at a 5 star hotel. My Scion gets me to the grocery store just as well as a BMW would, etc. I'm not sacrificing anything, I simply don't feel a need for excessive luxury.

And I agree with the OP of this thread. Thanks to my minimalist lifestyle I too have plenty of leeway to do whatever I want for quite some time. It's a great feeling.
Thinking back, I realized that all my larger contracts have been with companies where I had an inside contact (friend who was working there). Also, look for companies in fields outside of internet technology. They certainly won't be spending $500K on webapps, but do want a modern presence online.

I'd recommend asking friends/family if there company is unhappy with their current website or other technology services. The market rate for design agencies is probably $15-50K, so an individual who can do it for slightly less than that and in a friendly manner is highly attractive.
From my viewpoint it comes down to manageability. I've got scripts that make it take < 2 minutes to set up a new domain or subdomain on my server, and each one of those is in it's own directory so it can be copied, backed up, or moved to another server easily. If, on the other hand, you're using somebody else's hosting system, subdomains could be a big pain.

For one project of mine, I'm keeping my images on a separate domain so I can switch to a different system for hosting images... For instance, host them on a single-threaded web server or move them to S3/CloudFront.

Similarly, if a project involves different technology than the main site or if it may involve different technology in the future, that's a good reason for a subdomain. If you might want to host it differently, that's a good reason for a subdomain.

I don't know what to tell you about S.E.O.; a few years ago there were some people who made subdomains by the hundred because they thought they got S.E.O. advantages from that -- S.E.'s like keywords in the domain. My understanding is that keywords in subdomains used to be unreasonably powerful, people exploited them, and now there's not so great. S.E.'s also appear to have depth limits on the crawls they do a single host, so multiple hosts might also be a way to get more pages indexed. On the other hand, there are powerful ways to get monolithic sites indexed too. Other people think it's better to put all your eggs in one basket so you can get a higher score on one host.

The truth is that people outside the S.E.'s don't know what the real rules are, and the S.E.'s will change them next year.
What are your current products/markets? I have found, the best way to go is generally tweaking the work you have already done vs. scrapping and going towards something completely new because you will run into the same unknown pitfalls every time.
>Not just misinformed, but attempting to perpetuate a wrong idea

It is entirely possible that they read an article (even possibly in the national press of their country) saying that "researchers believed that cell phones were at least partially to blame". This makes your statement "no one can claim ..." false. Indeed it might have been a neighbour or friend that told them, they might even have doubted it.

In any case, reading the second part of the post "the article doesn't seem to mention it at all. Does anybody know if that has been disproved?" clearly labels this as a current genuine enquiry that can be answered without assuming bad faith on the questioners part.

>which is foolish and just pandering to the "new technology X is killing us" crowd

So, when there's a temporal correlation between the rise of a global new technology and the apparent threat of a globally required (for on going human existence at least) genus [not sure on my taxonomy there?] you don't think it even deserves us to ask the question whether that correlation hides a causal link? There aren't that many global phenomena showing this sort of change in magnitude of use are there?

As it happens I have a vague recollection of reading about something along these lines in New Scientist, possibly in terms of "scientists have considered many possible explanations, mobile phone signals, ... [long list of varying suggested causes]".

---

Edit: Not NS it seems, but this came up - http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/are-mobile-p.... Also, try http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&q=%28%22mobile...

'Now a limited study at Landau University has found that bees refuse to return to their hives when mobile phones are placed nearby. Dr Jochen Kuhn, who carried it out, said this could provide a "hint" to a possible cause.

Dr George Carlo, who headed a massive study by the US government and mobile phone industry of hazards from mobiles in the Nineties, said: "I am convinced the possibility is real."'

Care to retract anything or are you going to continue in claiming these two studies (plus at least 2 more on Google Scholar link) are not credible research.
I have been contemplating leaving Facebook for a few months - - not just because of some of the privacy issues, but also because I feel like it's been a timesuck with little payoff. I have held off because of pictures, mostly.

I don't have access to the tool yet, but if it pulls off all my photos and other content, I'm likely to delete my facebook account.

Some people complain that they can't delete all the data from facebook, and while I get the complaint, that's certainly not a reason to stick around or not delete. If they are saving everything, and I delete my account, at least they can't save anything new going forward.
4-5 years of experience can easily get 120-150k without overtime and the stress? which state is that? (honest question, cause in Vancouver, the rate is about 75-80k)
-150 infographic blogspam.
Aneesh Chopra, Obama's CTO, on opening government data to entrepreneurs
I wish more open source libraries had this. This seems to be a trend in the javascript ecosystems. Coffeescript also has this. http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/
Keep in mind that this article is from the 70's, his yearly budget is $1765.

$1248 from cans, or $624 from plasma is a bigger deal if you look at them as a percentage of his budget. maxawaytoolong asked for examples of any job, which is what I gave.
If the Feds want your bookmarks they can already get them now. I can't think of anything exciting in my bookmarks, maybe you somehow have a bunch of secrets in yours?
> Inflation is non-existent, the markets are willing to lend to the U.S. government at all time low rates,

They're willing today because they don't have better alternatives. Those things will change.

> The correct prescription is a giant second stimulus

A second stimulus can't work unless it's done competently. What are the odds of that happening? (Recent example - salary increases to govt workers were counted as "jobs created or saved.")

> Now we should worry about growth.

Does spending $250k for a job count as growth? (Yes, the number matters, as does the duration of a job.) Are you really certain that the money that was borrowed by govt wouldn't have resulted in a job if it hadn't been borrowed? (Banks are sitting on money that the fed is shoveling to them, but what about others?)
You want a flash player AND server streaming software. Check out Red5 or Wowza for the server.

For players, check out jwplayer and flowplayer.

If you can host from your home ISP connection, it might be a good way to test things out.
That's freaking awesome.
Another comment about looking for work: never act like you NEED work/some specific contract.

Once you start feeling desperate, you'll make irrational decisions such as quoting lower rates, accepting more difficult clients, and the worrying will drive you crazy.
Mono's ASP.NET or MVC or Manos are all running natively compiled code, so for equivalent tasks they should all be faster than interpreted languages.

Whether this matters or not will depend on the what your application is doing and how many users you have. For example, if your application is database bound or file system bound you wont likely notice much of a difference as the time you spend running CIL code or interpreted code is a small portion of your overall CPU consumption.

With Mono 2.8 we significantly improved Mono's web server scalability, but this will not matter if your application does not use or require more than a handful of CPUs. But is incredibly useful for people that are scaling servers under load.
Ask HN: iPhone crazy play counts after iOS4
Hello there guys,

I've had an iPod Touch for almost a year now. At iOS3, the Smart Playlists didn't work properly but this bug was solved on iOS4.

But iOS4 created a whole new problem: crazy play counts [1]. When a music is played on the iPhone, the play counts act randomly. It might increase the music's play count by any amount (I've seen musics go from 0 to 253) or increase other music's play count.

I bought an iPhone 4 yesterday and the problem also applies.

Are you guys experiencing the same issue? Have you found a solution?

[1] http://discussions.info.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=11302489
1. search is not permalink

2. search could not be sorted by release date
What? If you're at MIT everyone there belongs to the cult of the lambda calculus. The /only/ answer to that question for MIT kids is SICP.
I'd love to know if there's a lib for generating annotations like this from source comments. I've always loved docs tha include the code for reference, helps to see what's actually going on :)
Would-be Akamai spy busted by feds
Most of the time, I'd argue that you can't really say 'No' at all. Not if you want a happy client. If you do say no, then you'll just end up delivering an end product that isn't exactly what the client wanted and didn't have that feature they requested. I can't imagine any situation where that results in a happy client.

So what do you do? I say: Get the client to say 'No' for you.

Getting people to understand the trade-offs and sacrifices for what they might consider a "quick 'n easy" feature is the name of the game here. You've got to flesh out all the assumptions that they have when making such a request so that they understand what the impact is on schedule, budget, and code.

But what they still don't understand is why Projects X, Y, and Z will have to be pushed back for 2 weeks or why Joe and Mary will have to pulled away for 3 weeks just to do this "quick", "simple" thing. At this point, what I usually do is spec out the entire feature (front-loading all the mockups, copywriting, etc) on the spot or in a meeting immediately following. The reasoning is that "If you want this feature tomorrow, then it has to be designed today." And well, practically speaking, you can't implement it by tomorrow if you don't know what you need to do yet anyway and, worse still, you'll build the wrong thing if you don't at least discuss it in some detail with your client first.

If the feature isn't important enough to spec out in detail now, it's not important enough to be done by tomorrow.

In my experience as a solo webdev freelancer (so take it for what it's worth), clients usually see my point and give in when they realize that we're trying to compress about a week's worth of back and forth emails, phone calls, and let-this-idea-sink-in time into about an hour--sometimes even realizing that they don't really know yet what they want.
It's basically: who is the project manager? This is another job that comes with every project. WHo is really managing the thing? It could be the designer, it can be you. It's not hardwired into the backend nor the frontend skillset. It's just another area of responsibility.

However, outsorcing design is simpler. In the end it is the backend "sys admin" person who has to deal with the suits about the last few stitches, who has to come into office physically and so on. OTOH at the beginning of projects it's easier if the designer can show visual approaches to the suits in person.

I myself always opt in for the project management role, because sub-contracting to a backend guy is just one thing, but selling the suits additional SEO stuff and whatnot is a nice opportunity (onece the suits deal with me anyway).
I had the same experience. We had a customer whose cookies were mentioned on Oprah and then Rachel Ray at a later date. We saw a bump in traffic, but the customer didn't warn us until a few days before air, so our recommendation was to leave the site alone rather than risk introducing changes that could produce bugs. We put a little time in to tweaking the site's error pages to be more friendly, but when the air dates came, nothing spectacular happened. We actually saw a little bit more traffic from Rachel Ray than Oprah, probably because cookies are a more relevant topic for her show.
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30 Beautiful Vintage Websites For Your Inspiration
Here we have gathered some amazing examples of Vintage and Retro web designs which are bold and creative in their own way. Let’s have a look and Enjoy!
Sorry I should have been more clear. I don't think anyone should be prosecuted for ingesting a substance. My post was in relation to the sale of these substances. I apologize for that I should have been more clear of what side of the transaction I was referring to.

As well, I agree existing users will most likely not switch to the other less potent forms, but they will most likely use it when there is not an availability of the illicit substances to stave off withdraws. As well if they decide to quit they may use it to buffer off of the harder substances. My point was that a good portion of new users will no go through the hassle of finding a unsafe illicit substances, when a simpler less harmful form is available.