skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I respectfully disagree with your analysis. Let me explain why through an example.

Suppose you have two options, A and B (seen below):

A: Work for large company Z which reaches 100 million people already through a $10 product. You make an incremental improvement that improves sales 1%. You have now made $10m contribution to the company.

B: Work for yourself. You found a startup that is getting half a million unit sales a year (pretty good, right?), and you double sales somehow. You've only produced a $5m value despite doubling the output.

The answer is that often big companies are much more levered and each unit of input can create much more output (primarily because of breadth of resources and reach) than if you were to work by yourself. Your value is how much you can contribute. Your highest value is your value at the company where you can contribute the most. By a reasonable application of some auction theory, you would expect that your market pay (including costs you can't see like payroll taxes) should be approximately what your second-highest value is. (Because if it were higher, the highest-value place can lower it and you'd still be working there, and if it were lower, the highest value place may not have you)
For the level of education and skill needed to make a good engineer, it is underpaid. It's not about entitlement -- it's the real economic forces the article mentions. The most skilled people will be attracted to other careers.

Maybe it means engineering isn't as valuable as we think. Or maybe it means engineers aren't as good at wielding their power.

I think it means more engineers do it for love of the work. And there's no gating body/cartel to protect it.
Here is my take on why HTML5 is worth all of the hype
Very good point, we'll definitely add that in.
Cite a source, please. Apple has said nothing about GPL software. They did however respond to a takedown request by a copyright holder.
Thanks for the article Eric. I greatly appreciate your transparency and willingness to share. It is a great contribution to the community.
@mmagin - you would be surprised what the real story on this is. Protein in this sense is a made up word. The original term comes from biology and refers to cell walls and the like. In the world of nutrition it has been co-opted by marketers to define quality foods. The truth is that it doesn't define quality at all.

In fact, the latest accepted research shows that the body needs 23 amino acids to survive (this is most likely what the marketers call protein). Broccoli and many other foods contain several of these amino acids. Meat also contains these amino acids.

What's been corruptedly marketed is that some meat contains around 18+ of the amino acids so they say eat meat for "protein". Of all foods, meat contains the most amino acids, but it also contains other things that reduce the value of the 18+.

They have been finding that eating vegetables/fruits/nuts is much better because they don't have the other bad things that meat does.

(with that being said I am not a vegetarian, I do eat meat, just not a lot because I like to be fit and in shape)
Do you offer a web version of the app?
I would bet that an extraordinary doctor can indeed touch millions. The best doctors reform the practices at their hospitals, improve the standard of care, and get brought in to do the same at other hospitals.
wow!...amazing works, I agree the key is to launch fast...
Perhaps you can start by using the service Spreadshirt offers. They handle the payment, printing and delivery, so you can focus on the niches you want to address and of course the designs.
Is your idea working? Great! Then it is a good time to learn about printing shirts yourself. I think this way you can start with almost no costs and really learn if you idea is viable.
The easiest and fairest fix would be to hook Watson's buzzer up to a dataset of previous Tournament of Champion question-winning buzzer times. Or just use Ken and Brad's previous buzzer times for even more control. Pick a new human-achievable reaction time for every question.
Sorry but I've heard similar arguments made for every salary north of 40k. There's nothing 'entitled' about expecting to be paid relative to the value you bring -- that's the American way.
I think that @shazow might have an issue with that. ;)

By viable MVP, do you mean WeddingType? The two have completely different code, so I wasn't able to redo anything I had before. I essentially had a design framework, but major design is essentially different.

Superhuman? Nice, thanks. :)
That's odd, I've always thought that given its college-bowl atmosphere, Jeopardy! is uniquely poised to attract people who are both erudite and of quick wit.

The guy who hacked Press Your Luck fits more your stereotype; given its flashing lights and general brouhaha, PYL seems more of a magnet for that sort than Jeopardy!. There are also quite a lot of that sort in The Price is Right fandom (yes, it has a fandom!).
Soap, ballot, jury, ammo.

Use your boxes, and please please please use them in that order.
Also: if you're being paid $100k and, in turn, generating hundreds of thousands of dollars of value for your company, you're undervalued and underpaid.

The software industry is one of the few industries where a single person can create mountains of value all by themselves. Comparing software engineer salaries to janitor salaries makes no sense as janitors aren't creating multiples of their salary in value for their employer.
Is any of my data sent to Taskforce servers or leaked in any way?
Looks like the site is down. Sounds neat nonetheless though, I've been hoping that Google would ramp up the tasks part of their site to no avail. They talked about maybe doing an API and recurring tasks but thats the last I heard.
Just 4-5 years ago most Telco's were building portals and walled gardens where they were licensing the content themselves (or even had teams creating it in house) and selling it in various ways to their customer base. So never mind a 30% cut, they were competing with content producers. If you were trying to sell content the Telco was hoping to sell forget a 30% cut, you couldn't even get on their platform and you earned a big fat $0.

If you really were lucky they'd decide to let you on but would take a 50/50 or 60/40 revenue share.

30% is starting to seem not so bad...compared to that at least.
On the Taskforceapp site: that's an interesting way to do screenshots... I'd like it even better if the images lined up with their mouse-over images, but still, quite cool. When the page loads, that is; seems they're under a LOT of load right now.

I'm interested. I've got 5k emails in my inbox right now (~15 unread), I'd be game for a different way of looking at email as a whole. I haven't been happy with anything yet, but I do love me some good integration...
This is easy to answer: no.

Watson doesn't represent a big advance, it's another narrow AI system, and this article is a good example of how the capabilities of such systems are always over-interpreted or misunderstood. The classic problem with narrow AIs is that they don't scale to a larger system, except perhaps in trivial/uninteresting ways.
Are you sure you know where the local restaurant's food comes from? It's most likely from SYSCO: http://www.sysco.com/products/productpage_search.asp?product...

Not every local restaurant sources local organic farm-to-plate food.
This is a great example of a huge problem with the patent system. MS were absolutely within their right to make a compatible system, and everyone all around the world benefited from it. Boo to Caldera (aka SCO the linux patent troll).
As one of the first hires at 1000Memories, I can definitely say that we have plenty of fun, and that the office is an upbeat place.

Part of the reason we can do this is that we don't consider ourselves as being centered around death, but rather as being centered around life. We view our site as a place where friends and family can come to celebrate, rather than to mourn. Most of the design on our site reflects this intention, and most of the memory pages on our site fit this theme.

Occasionally, there are tragic stories shared on our site, and we're certainly saddened by them, but most of our memory pages have a celebratory and upbeat tone.

If anyone's interested in coming by and seeing our office (in the Mission in SF), feel free to shoot me and email and we'd be glad to show you around.
Poor phrasing; it was median mid-career salaries of people with history degrees (versus petroleum-engineering degrees, versus software-engineering degrees). So I guess it's a stand-in for whatever it is that the median history major does.
Way to ignore what was said to link to a mendacious wiki page.

Hint: AI researchers have been promising the moon for a long time - that page's arguments amount to smugly pointing at paper airplanes as evidence of progress. Yes, Watson is "AI" in the broadest sense, but then so is Minecraft monster path-finding. Comparing this to where AI people have been saying we'd be Real Soon Now for the last ~40 years is like comparing the Android barcode-reader app to artificial vision.

I'm a supporter of AI and extropian ideas, but TFA is link-baiting piffle. A Jeopardy!-playing machine is an accomplishment and heralds future advances, but it is a very early step on a long path.
"But the people who thought there was going to be some kind of central library of domain-specific classes in your company, that you would reuse in multiple disparate applications, I think that was always fairly naive"

Well, perhaps, but I've seen it done successfully in NeXTSTEP/OpenStep shops back in the day, such as an investment bank. Not one big library, but a few frameworks so there's some separation.

The team I was on had our own frameworks, shared among the apps we developed. We also used/built our frameworks on frameworks from the bank's Architecture group, which were also used by other development groups.
Taskforce is really nice, I've been using it, and it definitely makes my life better.
That surely depends on your application's requirements?

NoSQL is a broad category containing many data persistence strategies and access characteristics; there is certainly no single tech that will fit every application best. I'm not any kind of cl pro, but the first step is always to work out what performance and persistence characteristics you need.
His Twitter feed is worth a read too, if it's legit (I guess he's not notable enough to rate a checkmark): http://twitter.com/kenjennings

"@IBMWatson, I'm-a let you finish, but homo sapiens is one of the smartest species of all time."
Your tasks are sent over HTTPS and stored in our database. We don't need or request access to your emails, however.
Yes, I did see it there.

Reasons why I added it.

Some people ( I ) like to read the comments first, if I see links, if I like the domain of or I deduce it is meaningful to me, in this case "etsy". Then it increases my likely hood of reading more.

If in a few days I think, "aahh what was the name of that stat thing written in node". Knowing I found it here plus a little google magic. Im there. "site:news.ycombinator.com node etsy"

Having upvoted your link ( in my saved stories ) the comments here begin to act as a form of "bullet point notes".

Most of the reasons above are to make it easier for me to find your article at a later date.

As I write this, I realise, a nice little application would be one which follows the popular links here into the article in question and "intelligently" pull out interesting links and associates them with this post.

Throw in the ability to personalise the data using your own white lists of domains, keywords to look for and it would be pretty sweet.
Sounds like you guys are getting what you deserve. Lots of interest in a great product. Keep up the good work.
Seems like got.io would be kind of cool for someone specializing in high speed storage. Thanks for posting, I'm enjoying trying to come up with ideas based on the names alone.
Notorious?
Are you also writing right-to-left, then? If everything about the system is reflected (including having a reading order of right-to-left), then you're right, it's not meaningful. But it's also not what's proposed in the OP here. When the two-dimensional text on the screen is re-formed into a linear string, it is the right end of line N that is attached to the left end of line N+1, and so the right-hand arguments of functions are "after" the left-hand arguments.
NokiaPlanB was a hoax
I have to admit this didn't go where I expected it to. Well written article, thanks Reg!
You might try using a distinctive color for links. I didn't even see them until I read your comment, said "bullshit" under my breath, and went back to look for them. Only then did I notice links are #000 and the text is #555.
Here is one of the most complex PDFs we've come across so far, at least in terms of the typography and number of crazy fonts: http://crocodoc.com/KhoD84?embedded=true
It's a great article and brings a lot of clarity to the events. He squarely lays the blame with Brian Lenihan - ("A single decision sank Ireland") - but I can't imagine the decision to guarantee the bondholders was his alone.

Also the bus was already in the ditch at that point - that decision helped make matter worse, but there was no soft landing possible at that point.
The value of a salary is measured by what you can do with that money. Making $120k in Palo Alto means renting a <1000 sq. ft. 1-2 br condo with about 35% of your monthly salary, if you want to live within a few miles of your work. Making $120k in Sacramento means owning a 3000 sq. ft. house (with a big yard) and 20% of your monthly salary going to a mortgage payment.

In Sacramento you could probably get away with being the only wage earner in your family too, because the cost of living is just cheaper. In Palo Alto there is simply no way that you could live comfortably on that money if you have a partner and child, unless your partner also works and makes a high income.

Now granted, at the end of the day you have live in Sacramento -- which is a cultural backwater, scores R+6 on the Cook PVI, and has 4 ultra-conservative talk radio stations -- to stretch your dollar like that. And it's questionable whether there are any jobs that would even pay so much for a similarly experienced engineer.

But the point is that you can't say whether $120k is too much or not enough until you consider all the costs incurred to make that salary.
Maybe I haven't kept up, but if an account holder has their friends list publicly visible, can't you just open up another browser and refresh their profile until the relevant friend appears in the friends list?

Limiting factors:

A large number of friends would make this take a while.

Friends using non-self pictures as their profile pictures would prevent identification, unless the prompt contained their profile picture rather than a picture they are tagged in (or does the verification process only use profile pictures?).

Some third point I'm not thinking of.

Anyway, identifying pictures, when the target's friends list is publicly visible, seems kind of weak, on the surface.

EDIT: Probably to my eventual demise, but I've become exhausted and stopped keeping up with all the changing FB details. So, maybe I'm clueless on this point.
I agree with you but I'd also agree with redstripe when it comes to the parts of the article that said you "can't live in Silicon Valley" without being part of an IPO, or that you can't pay off student loans, or save for retirement, etc. Those things are definitely well within reach, even in San Francisco, on 100K/year. If you can get 130 instead of 100 and would rather do that job then great, go for it, but don't pretend that your doing out of "necessity" or in order to get by. That's the kind of thinking that gets you into jobs you don't like while being perpetually envious of the lifestyle of your investment banker friends.
What's the revenue model? Ad supported, premium features later on, or something else?
>> People have no problem that they can buy a kettle for £5 that was made in China, but take issue withe the fact that manufacturing jobs are going to... China.

Well, some people have a problem with that. Some people try to buy fair trade goods, and don't mind paying more for locally made items.

But it's getting harder and harder to find an item that's not made in China. A few years ago I tried to find a blood pressure monitor that was made anywhere but China. No luck. The only choice I had was not to buy one at all, and that wouldn't work for me. I've experienced this problem time and again.
I was with you until you decided to call people who pay you and organize your labor "ruthless jackasses." Just because you can't touch or appreciate their work doesn't mean that they don't add value.
The point is, culture- NOT gender, is to account for the disparity between men and women in the field.

I agree that the original comment is downvote-worthy, but this is far from an established fact.
I've received a lot of backhanded compliments in my life (i.e. you're pretty for a dark skinned girl) and they are annoying but I don't think this was one of them. To me it read like, "you're awesome, and the fact that you're succeeding despite the obstacles is even more awesome!"

I know the goal is equality, but I don't think there's anything equal about having to ignore parts of your identity in order to be respected and valued. We can acknowledge that the OP is a woman without losing sight of that goal.
Law Zero: Apple gets 30% off the top.
Fixing it right now...
I really like the idea. I can see this being really popular amongst a group of friends in lots of social situations - bars, dinner parties, events.

That said, I know Quora is the thing right now, but how does asking a question and getting yes/no from your friends have anything to do with Quora? Yes this is a Q & A service but Quora isn't a yes/no type of Q&A service. Also - this is amongst your friends, whearas Quora's popularity is being driven by the answers from 'experts/insiders/etc' to questions from 'outsiders.'

I don't want to just assume the headline is purposely click-bait so I'll just ask...how do you see this as Quora meets SMS?
Seems they may be having some issues at the moment. Getting a lot of nginx 500 errors & can't get anything to show up in gmail after installing the extension. I'll try again later.
If you're hearing an echo, that means echo cancellation is not working, either in your network or the network of the person you are calling. I don't believe handsets do any echo cancellation.
lol, i know. They came with the theme..

I keep experimenting with the colors but can't find one that isnt obnoxious!
Retail 2.0: Is new technology worth it for retailers?
I am not assuming anything. I've welded professionally. I've programmed professionally. I know welding is a hell of a lot easier than programming.
Name a job that is "completely necessary" to the survival of the human race. The only one I can think of being remotely close to that standard is a farmer.
I'd wager a significant portion of my (meager, startup-bootstrap level) salary that $120K in any neighborhood of the country (SF, Manhattan, wherever) is more than the national median purchasing power of an American family, which was the point he was making in the first place.
Also very few of Walmart's products are critical path - if they run out of lemon scented cleanup squares the store still opens (gratuitous hitch hikers reference)
RIM needs to shut up and ship
Congrats on the launch! I've actually found myself using Convore more often than I thought I would. Particularly because I'm often in places that block irc.

Have you looked at distributed counting in Cassandra for your counting needs yet[0][1]? Great info on its development and use at Twitter. It seems like you too have lots of interesting things to count. Your initial choice of Postgres for everything was a bit interesting. Your problem seems like a perfect fit for a hybrid solution (which you are already implementing by way of redis) that I think more and more companies will come to embrace by hook or by crook.

Continued success!

[0]General nosql at Twitter and a fair bit on Cassandra:
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/NoSQL-at-Twitter-by-Ryan-...

[1]Specifics on Rainbird, the counting system at twitter built on Cassandra:
http://www.slideshare.net/kevinweil/rainbird-realtime-analyt...

[cross post from the blog]
That is 100k in the valley though. When you consider the cost of living adjustment compared to else where it isn't extraordinary.
My viewpoint is from sheer volume of knowledge/skillset required to perform the basic task and the amount of effort required to stay current on the craft.
I know, it is kinda fun.
Sweet! Glad you got it!
Hi, redstripe! Is there someplace you can find lots of talented programmers with your mindset, who mainly look at "how the rest of the country/world lives" and think any salary "far above the country average" makes "complaining ridiculous"? Because any such source of programmers would be a gold mine!

In fact, you might even want to start a placement agency! On one side, you recruit young starry-eyed talent, and feed them a constant stream of images/rhetoric about how tough everyone but them has it, so their salary expectations stay low. On the other side, you hook them up with "Google, Apple, and others" who "generate enough revenue to pay people more" but are looking for bargains.

Everybody wins! (Except the developers.)
If you have money but no brains, hire some brains. If you have brains but no money find a funder. You can't have both no money and no brains....

So I got the recommendation to contact:

www.hashrocket.com
www.thoughtbot.com

And then attend my local Ruby meetup.

sdruby.org

I have called HR and TB and would be interested in getting additional suggestions.

Thanks
Where did I say anything about tracking a particular dollar?

Your entire post discussed the circulation of money in the local economy, and said nothing whatsoever about money coming into the local economy. Unless Walmart plans to keep providing your local economy with low cost steaks forever, and get nothing in return, money will eventually need to return. But it might be a different dollar bill spent by a different purchaser.

If I spend my money at a local restaurant that uses local produce/local products and is a small business, that's much better for my local economy than going to say Outback Steakhouse/Olive Garden etc. where they don't pay their employees well and the money I've spent is literally leeched out of my local economy.

If the money leaves your local economy, that's a good thing. It means you traded some inedible green paper for a delicious steak. Your community has gained, the outside world has lost. If, in turn, someone trades green pieces of paper for products produced in the community, you gain less - you gain 1 steak but lose some eggplants. (Of course, the community with a surplus of steaks and a shortage of eggplants considers the opposite trade a gain.)

It wouldn't surprise me if walmart destroys retail jobs - they are fantastically efficient. Computers and the internet have also destroyed many jobs (newspapers, for example). Money no longer circulates around the local economy. Is this also a bad thing?

Destroying jobs through increasing productivity is generally a good thing.

I've discovered a very enlightening way to think about such questions: explain the harm in terms of goods and services, without mention of green pieces of paper. E.g., "the housing bubble was bad because we labor and materials building houses we didn't need." Can you provide a similar explanation of the harm caused by walmart?

It's moral not to put my neighbors out of business and look out for one another.

Why is it moral to put a much poorer Chinese person out of business? Is the Mexican farmer selling goods to Walmart somehow less of a human being than your wealthy neighbor?