skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I empathize with the feeling here, but it seems to me like the author is detached from both the reality of user motivations and the economics of UGC sites.

There are lots of reasons people use sites and create content, and I can't think of any case where they are monetary. Even something like Mechanical Turk I believe has a significant non-monetary aspect to it considering the pittance that people make doing it (granted it's supplemental income if they are stuck in a under-utilized desk job all day). The fact is that by boycotting content creation he is just joining the silent majority of people who don't post anything. Even on Facebook where there is pretty much nothing but UGC I suspect the majority never post anything. The question of what motivates people probably has a different answer on every site, and it's certainly worth exploring, but the answer is not to be found in what this guy thinks he deserves.

It's sort of funny how in a few short years there is a growing contingent of people who have gone from fevered excitement over new free services to bitterness over how much those free services are making from their content in just a few short years. But let's examine the economics of the situation. How much profit does Facebook make from a status update? A like? A comment? How much does TripAvisor make from a review? I don't have any numbers, but by any reasonable napkin calculation the economic value of a single user's contribution is just not significant. It's probably less than you would be willing to give a bum on the street. If Facebook makes $1 billion revenue off 500 million users, that makes you worth $2 a year not even counting expenses. Of course all users are not equal, so maybe you're an extremely heavy user and you're worth $10 even after expenses. What kind of economic incentive could Facebook afford to give you that wouldn't make you feel like a worthless cog in their machine?
Hey Swah, I pinged Anthony (the writer of the article) to get his butt in here and answer your questions. You might get a direct answer more quickly if you comment directly on the site or email him, though.

In the mean time, thanks for reading!
An appeal from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales (asking for a donation)
Such a lack of detail in the story. I wish they told a bit more details into whether or not the email was set accidentally to one person (Got the wrong Bob) or if some idiot just sent it out to people out side the UBS network ...
Behaving on expected value is not rational.
Instead of tweeting and cinching, why not just click the reply link? There are plenty on the page.
... or in the process of helping build the next Facebook.
This. I wasn't in an elementary school that bad (Radom, Poland). Still, the young bullies were friends with elder bullies. Some bullies were repeating years, and that meant there was no way I could get as big as them.

And, the bullies actually do know how to fight.

Actually, for me, being nice worked out just right. After some time, the few bullies that bothered me found themselves enemies of the school, including some other bullies. Serves them right.
WSJ: The Only Tech These Geeks Lack Is a Cart to Haul Their Gadgets
So I'll ask the obvious question as a person who has visited, but never lived in, NYC. Why is this a problem?

I've never had a problem getting a cab to take me where I want to go in the cities I've lived in nor the ones I've visited. The only downside I can see is if you're requesting somewhere that's remote and that would be difficult for the cab to find another fare on the return trip. NYC does not strike me as a place that would have this problem.
rtm and trevor blackwell have other fulltime commitments.
A follow-up question regarding REST, transactions, and doing multiple things at the same time ...

I see the REST services in the article expose some very fine-grained concepts, e.g., existence of patients, doctors, and "slots", i.e., appointments. It appears the REST services can readily let one patient book one slot to see one doctor, but most real-world systems aren't like this. So ...

What's the REST-y way to address this situation then, that's a bit more complex: (a) there are a number of conference rooms; (b) each conference room can be reserved for a contiguous set of 15-minute slots; (c) a client using the REST-y interface wants to fully reserve N 15-minute slots in a particular room, and either completely succeed or completely fail. Is there a REST-y way to do this or would one need to rely on some client-driven pseudo-transaction mechanism? (This is kind of similar to the parent's complaint about needing the "createUser" call.)
The truth is when I spoke about CouchDB at the first NoSQL meetup, I was thinking about "No SQL in HTML5" as that was currently the big debate in the W3C. The term worked for that purpose (it looks like IndexedDB is going to win as the local database spec) but aside from that I don't think it gives us much.
I actually learned of this from my coworker. He filed a few complaints already since they refused to take him from Manhattan to Brooklyn. It's actually to a nice part of Brooklyn too.
Comparing Democratic and Republican tax plans
I've donated to Wikipedia in the past, and am going to donate now. I think it's really important - Wikipedia is one of my go-to examples of technology that has significantly changed the world for the better. It's on us to keep it alive.
Even though I've read it twice, I still don't understand exactly how you get anything to run and start writing arbitrary files.

The way to do it is to send a tar file that happens to extract exe files to ~/bin.

Besides, if you run a fancy wm, that's your problem :)
Scoble's blog post's thesis was 'Google could never build Instagram.' He seems to have changed his argument: 'guys, you don't get it, Instagram is innovative!'

Clearly Instagram is on to something, and I think they are doing some innovative work, but that has nothing to do with whether or not Google could build this.

Also, a stopped clock is still right twice a day: sure, Scoble was right about Twitter (and possibly right about Foursquare...we'll see), but he seems to call everything innovative and exciting. The products that flop are swept under the rug and forgotten, and the ones that make it are trumpeted as evidence of prescience.
I built a bot that used screen scraping, OCR and play reconstruction from the beginning. I had pretty generic logic to handle all the major sites. When a site changed up their display, I just generalized my approach to handle it. I don't really see how they could counter this in general. My bot was never detected. I timed my bot based on statistics I gathered from other human players, including play schedule, breaks, click response time, etc.

I know a guy who worked for an international gambling syndicate, primarily betting on horse races. According to him, they tried to get into online poker bots, but kept getting caught. It sounded like they were using groups of bots and collusion, which I think is how they were detected.
World Population Growth Infographic
I just got a significant check from a client today -- I am sure that affects my money now vs. later answer.
Poll: How well off are you with women/men?
I'm really curious about how hackers interact with the opposite sex, it's a stereotype that hackers are bad in social situations.
I could use some help
If you're good enough, its worth a shot. They often want people who can tweak a kernel finely enough to shave off microseconds of execution time though, and you're under constant time pressure. Not everyone can work like that
Still reading through, it's definitely piqued my interest. However, in the interest of consistency [as it translates to readability] two issues right away:

1) Get rid of the infix modifier to the filter. The statement is made that in ANI everything flows left to right. The infix operator while providing familiar 1+6->7 notation conflicts with the above flow statement. 1,6+->7 while not immediately familiar is easy to understand after explained. However, added special case rules for infix operation muddies the water.

2) In the following code sample provided, the left to right rule is again not followed and thus leads to increased difficulty in [human] parsing:

multiPrint= [string\ s, int\ times] {

\\[std.gen] <- \times s ->std.out;

};

"Hello, World!\n", 10 ->multiPrint;

Instead, to be consistent and follow the previous left to right flow rule, use the following syntax:

multiPrint= [string\ s, int\ times] {

\times -> \\[std.gen];

s ->std.out;

};

"Hello, World!\n", 10 ->multiPrint;

In general if there is an everything flows left to right rule, there should not be a <- operator.

imho
I don't know when you filed your complaint. However, you can attend the hearing over the phone. You just call and everything is all set on the other end. The driver (and his lawyer) has to be present.

My coworker had his hearing over the phone a few weeks ago.
I know who Martin Fowler is. I love his "Refactoring" book.

On the other hand, once you get famous, you can go around and get big $ telling people what they want to hear and you can lose your edge.

If this is representative of his work these days, he should preface it with something like "I'm not a doctor but I play one on TV"
Those were my thoughts as well. I like the idea of a language where multithreading is the default, but all those back slashes - it reminds me of * in C.
I'm waiting to see how good their email client will ben but I don't think they're mature enough to kill gmail. They already have email integration, they just need to add 'attachments' and the basic email product is already there. Also, many people 'talk off of facebook' on gmail in addition to facebook (like me, although I'm not a heavy fb user)

It will be interesting to see what else they plan to add.
"Would you rather have a $100k steady job, or a 5% chance to make $1m in a year with a startup?" -> Definitely startup, even if the expected utility is half.
Infrastructure Automation with Chef
I don't know if I agree with the authors position based on the examples he gives. I'm willing to bet the Google engineer who allegedly was offered the $3.5M in stock to stay was a very key engineer. Google doesn't offer everyone millions in stock not to quit. And as many of the readers of HN know, every startup is not being acquired for talent grabs. Just because we hear of a few (or even what might seem a lot), the percent in comparison to the number of startups is miniscule. I hear about someone winning the Lotto every week; that doesn't mean everyone is winning.
Don't dilute your idea
Facebook's EdgeRank algorithm is a Pseudoquasimetric in disguise
I agree in principle, but not when applied to Martin Fowler. I doubt the guy who literally wrote the book on refactoring did so without any real-world experience.

http://refactoring.com/catalog/index.html
There is room for more than one Q&A building tool. You can be the low-cost or you can be targeted on one specific industry.

You may need to pivot, but only if you don't get any traction.
I agree. But sometimes it is better to get feedback before you launch so you can correct the course early. Most of the time they want to see profits.

So I guess it is a matter of getting advice early and funding later.
Same with apple pie.
This thread breaks the really admirable hacker news quality of not giving in to snark.
It's about a New York City that's 25 years long gone, but this question, and thread, reminded of Ted Rall's recollections of driving a Cab in NYC during the early 80s

http://www.rall.com/longarticle_003.htm
I don't work in FX specifically, but I've worked in various other areas in finance and trading technology [1]. Potentially off-putting factors I can think of:

- Poor working environment. Typically you'll be answering to traders, who are demanding at best, and come from a range of technical and non-technical backgrounds.

- Long working hours, with the potential for weekend work. Presumably not dissimilar to an entrepreneurial lifestyle, except that you're working for somebody else's firm.

- The areas with the most potential for earning, such as algorithmic trading, tend to have a large proportion of their pay in a performance-related bonus, so there's an element of risk involved: it's not free money. Certain top developers invest their own money, giving them even more risk and potential payoff.

Despite this, there's normally plenty of applicants when a job becomes available. For me, the most common reason for not hiring somebody has been a lack of technical skills; in the UK at least, the demand for expert C++ developers in finance definitely outweights the supply.

[1] There's been tough periods, relating to some or all of the above points, but overall I wouldn't do anything differently: every day I get to work with bright people on interesting projects.
His argument seems to rely on companies becoming unable to pay going rates. I'm not saying thats not going to happen, but he seems to be predicting a software bubble without really defending that prediction.
What is your skill set?
Great advice. I run 5 miles at lunch and it clears your head, heart, and really makes you to tired to be frustrated or in the mood to fight with anyone or any code.
I believe the law is also to prevent discrimination.

How does one know the true reason a cab might refuse to take you? Sex? Race? Age? What if a cab took a white guy (non-threatening looking) to a location, but refused to take a black guy (also non-threatening looking) to the same location?

Yes, there are valid reasons like shift ending, etc, but perhaps they could have signs stating their hours.
As an entrepreneur who needs a quick buck to invest in my startup I feel that this survey is a better gauge of how much one desires money now so as to invest in whatever they're doing.
He had me until "This is going to end, and badly."

Bubbles end badly because of leveraged bets on overvalued assets.

Call me insensitive, but this doesn't strike me as so bad:

"they will find themselves unemployed and without savings."

It's not like you're going to work your entire career at a non-paying startup. At worst you come out with a unique experience and go find a paying job.
Stu, thus far I have been really pleased. For us, Kroud is a Quora + Uservoice for our customers. The goal is to create a community around best practices and FAQs.
What is up with all the terms around pseudonym's and substituting the author's name and such? I get having terms that move a lot of the risk to the young writer, but I don't get why you'd be so malicious as to demand that they can't be associated with a book they've written.
I am not a hacker. I am an introverted fella and lack social skills. However I do just fine when alone with the opposite sex. Add one person to the mix, and the situation starts to change.
New Protest Site Against Full Body Scanners
Dave Barry's Blog: GROIN UPDATE
Looks like a computationally executed VHDL.

Interesting, but not necessarily useful. And looking how hard it is to "write" good vhdl logic, I'm not sure how many could handle coding in ANI.
Was it around 4:30 or 5:00 in the afternoon? Likely just shift change cab drought.

Around shift change, cab drivers have to get the cab back to the garage so the next cabbie can take over. If they don't get it back on time, there are repercussions. But cabbies like to maximize their working time, so they're happy to take fares going in the same general direction they're going.

You can file as many complaints as you want, but no cabbie is going to take you to the Bronx when they have to be in DUMBO in fifteen minutes. If this rule was 100% enforced, the alternative isn't more convenience, it's less convenience, since cabs around shift change wouldn't stop at all. At least this way people moving in the general direction of the garage get rides.
As for it being a bubble - would you rather get in now, when (if you assume it's a bubble) VCs and angels are throwing money at people in an unsustainable way - or wait a few years until things have died down and they don't have money to throw?

With almost any financial transaction, there are ways to bet both sides. With this one, you get in as an entrepreneur - you do a VC round, you tell Google Facebook made you an offer. Now is the time. Next year Google might be happy to let people go to Facebook.

With stock market bubbles, it's selling short. With the real estate bubble, it was buying default swaps against the mortgage bonds.

As VC is by definition a private market, it's much harder to short; instead, if it's overheated, you need to be selling assets into it (which is what taking a VC round is), assets you have to be creating.

If you wait for the bubble to burst (and it is a bubble), you might be locked out for years.
How Do You Celebrate the Data?
What's interesting about the way he's written these, is that getting rejected became his goal. He started hoping for rejection. Which seems totally backwards until you realize that he wins in every interaction - either he gets rejected, or he gets what he asked for.

And I'm assuming that's the whole point of this exercise. Once you can re-frame rejection, it disarms the sting entirely.
Thanks, it didn't occur to me that you can discard pre-flop.
Yeah, it could use with different characters for syntax.
Hi, I'm the author, I appreciate your comment. You're demonstrating that you still have some rational perspective here; my thesis is that many people have lost that perspective. I am an ex-Googler, and I am seeing more and more talented engineers leave Google to start a "company" with the express goal of getting acquired for talent, sometimes even hoping to get acquired back by Google.

When people see a valuation in the marketplace (eg, a talent acquisition that makes everyone extremely wealthy) and assume they can achieve the same kind of returns with minimal effort, that is the hallmark of a bubble. The same thing happened with day traders and real estate speculation.
It's almost always between 4:00 and 5:00 in the afternoon. If you need to catch a cab at that time in Midtown, it's time to find a hotel queue.
You know Facebook + Google, as big as they are, do not equal United States of America, which is still bogged down by the biggest recession since the Great Depression. What bubble are you talking about? These companies sit on small mountains of cash and can afford bidding wars over top engineering talent, especially that software is their livelihood. Let me assure you, hiring managers of 99% of companies in the US don't stand on street corners and bid up software engineers' salaries. You can sleep in peace...
Would you pay 50k to join a startup and work for free as a consultant?
Latch concept is probably worth exploring further. Does anyone know of a language with native variables being a FIFO pipe? I.e.

x = 1 // x now contains 1
x = 2 // x now contains 1 and 2
y = x // x now contains 2, y now contains 1
...

This sort of thing. Not as an add-on construct, but as a native part of the language.
I'm not going to disagree with you that there are tons of fantastic opportunities — I'm working on my own startup as well and haven't (yet) run into any problems because I'm a woman.

However, think of the startup world: a guy who's new to it, a bit unsure, etc, might attend some meetups, and see a room full of guys — a situation he's probably comfortable with. But a take woman who wants to break into the startup world — in the same situation, is more likely to be discouraged by this because they're entering a room full of "others" and not people like her.

Yeah, if she feels uncomfortable you can tell her to just get over it, and a few will. But it stands that it's a lot harder to just jump into a new man-dominated field for a woman than a man. So those women-only events are still doing good — providing a more comfortable environment for those women and giving them confidence to then jump wholeheartedly into the regular 99% men world of startups.
Ok great, but why?

Is there more to hacker news than the frontpage? How many people are needed to maintain it?
time for web2.5 - where user generated content would really belong to users, ie. sites like Yelp would be replaced by anonymous intelligent (as in search and link/references/reviews rating) P2P style trackers who would return to the reviews searching person the reviews (actually the trackers will return references/links to the user's browsing software which will do actual "fetch" of the reviews' content) which would "belong" to the original reviewers and served from their blogs, personal computers/phones/VPS/"spaces" (and accompanied by review creator's adsense ads if they choose so). The reviewer's reviews and ratings thus wouldn't be spread among different unconnected sites. Instead all user's reviews and ratings would be kept at one place if the user choose so. Ie. the traffic will get driven to the reviewer's "place" in this reviewer centric schema.
Think Diaspora (the web2.5) vs. Facebook (web2.0).
My thoughts on the potential "bubbles" aside, I find it funny how it's become a thing to try to call out bubbles that may be occurring, given the recent monumental financial collapse.

So called bubbles always exist - they're hot sectors - and then there's a self correction of varying severity.
I'm really looking forward to playing with this when I get home from work.
Obvious. The only people who like 4sq are gadget-y people who derive so much pleasure from playing with new things that they will re-arrange their lives to do so.
I don't find the positions to be supported by anything.

99.9% of engineers get paid an upper middle class salary, with a few more getting these 7 figure bumps from acquisitions that aren't really.

I don't think something like 1/10 of 1% of engineers having something happen to them is something to worry about ending.
I don't know... I kind of like it. It's different, especially where the '\' is concerned, but the syntax as a whole has one thing I really really really like:

Much of the language doesn't use the shift-key, especially in the number-row. And where it does, it's frequently on easier-to-hit keys like '<' or '{'. There are still parenthesis, but they appear to be used far less frequently than, say, C.

Besides. You want ugly? Try K: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_(programming_language) . Or, heck, anything APL influenced.
I don't think it's a bubble.

A lot of people talk about top engineers being 10x (or even 100x) as productive as mediocre engineers. Assuming that's true (and I suspect it is, but admittedly I don't have any evidence to back that up):

Historically, those 10x engineers got paid maybe 2-3x.

Because it's become so much easier to start software companies recently (thanks in no small part to folks like Y Combinator, but largely due to cheap servers and FOSS), those 10x engineers can now easily go seek compensation that's more proportional to the value they actually create.

In turn, large software companies are finding they need to pay more to stay competitive with the alternative of striking out on your own.

What we're seeing here is pay becoming more proportional to value creation. Which I think is a very good thing.

As an aside, I think the rise in talent acquisitions is largely a backdoor for companies to hire top talent without needing to change their deeply entrenched pay-scales. Apparently Google is starting to figure out that it's more efficient to just pay people more instead of having them leave for a couple of years in order to take advantage of this backdoor.
You can always try http://www.lucidchart.com/
Wrong, there is a GTO strategy that a bot could employ which is the correct action for every scenario. Actually, it wouldn't be the same action every time for the same scenario, instead randomly bluffing with the correct frequency. You could try to guess all you want but it wouldn't matter. No amount of feel or instinct would allow you to beat it.
What is this, an anchoring exercise? :P Are you asking if I would pay to work in a startup? No, I can start my own for free.