skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, I do mean that. I ran the numbers & graphs in a few minutes on Excel and came up with results that matched the article's graphs (right down to the automatic color choices - heh). I also mean that the real-world actual, estimated, and (alleged) ideal distributions are a near-perfect match for the mathematical theory. Ergo, it gives lie the selfish "should" part: we are living the reality of statistics, to wit a near-zero differential of income between one person and the next necessitates a huge fluctuation between the bottom & top wealth holdings.

The "innumeracy" comment comes from the fact that those decrying "unfair!" do not realize that a miniscule (two millionths of one percent is nigh unto zero) linear adjustment of percentages translates to exponential variations when applied across hundreds of millions of people. They're performing an equal linear division of the population (20% increments) and somehow expecting the wealth numbers to come out with a similar "fair" equal division of holdings; realizing that the rich should indeed have more than the poor (hence the semantic difference in terms), they resolve this cognitive dissonance by "allowing" the rich to hold some 3x the wealth of the poor - oblivious to the statistical fact that variations in wealth are a matter of exponential-accumulation percentages, not linear accumulations multipliers.

I don't see how income can slide much more "fairly" (i.e., gradually) from the richest to the poorest than a differential of a vanishingly small three millionths of one percent. To say that somehow it "should" (obvious moral arguments of "it's not yours to distribute" aside) be _one_ millionth of one percent instead is to wage class warfare, a very real and bloody process as history shows, because the dividing lines for the 20% groupings mean the guy at the bottom of the highest bracket is making $0.10 more than the guy at the top of the second-highest bracket, and the guy at the bottom of the second-lowest bracket is making $0.0003 more than the top person in the lowest bracket. Comparing between adjacent individuals, and even across entire brackets, with real numbers should strike most as decidedly fair. Is the 80% division hundreds of times wealthier than the 20% division? and the very top unto billions more than the very bottom? sure - and that's reality, folks: the wealth distribution curve is a natural consequence of miniscule percentages aggregated over hundreds of millions of people, and no amount of "should" and social-reengineering (to wit: "comply or die") can render viable change to a natural, social, statistical phenomenon.

But since many people cannot cope with exponential consequences of uniform miniscule percentages applied across a population of hundreds of millions, we will always be faced with those who cry "unfair!" and insist on forcing their notion of "fair" upon the population. The 20th Century suffered some 100,000,000 dead as a consequence, and the authors of TFA (and, it seems, you (rwl)) want to repeat that toll for want of the 0.000003% more their neighbor makes, when 0.000001% would somehow be OK.
Yahoo search direct
try it http://search.yahoo.com/
Not to mention that their newest, more standards-compatible browser is not available for their older OSes, ensuring we still have a nice long ride with their old crap browsers.
You need to work closely alongside some teachers. The teaching profession is busy and often labyrinthine, with its own unique bureaucracy (and camaraderie). And as for expecting a teacher to plunge in and start using a web app, you must first find out if they can effectively use a computer...

If you're in the UK, be sure to check out the Times Educational Supplement website, in particular the forums: http://www.tes.co.uk/forums.aspx?navcode=14

There's also the BETT show every January, essential to check out the other players you're up against: http://www.bettshow.com
Ask HN: How much can you make from ad networks like Deck, Carbon, Fusion, etc?
I'm working on a web and mobile app that would fit nicely with the type of sites they're typically on, and those networks are the only kind of ads I don't really mind. Does anyone have a ballpark on what you make serving those ads on your site/app?
semi-related: do you ever get tired of interviews that amount to "So what do you look for in a company?" "Well we look at the founders, more than the idea."? I'm always impressed at how genial you are in answering the world's most predictable questions in these interviews with big business outlets.
possible he left it unattended in a public space, and it was more or less found

That's still theft, unless he turned into the police. Since the owner filed a police report that scenario is unlikely.
Buying stolen goods isn't much better than stealing.
STAXYN - News - Health
I'd say c-o-m-p-a-s-s-i-o-n also goes a long way.

EDIT: A colleague of mine, a great teacher by the way, once phrased it: "You've got to love your students. It's as simple as that."
Problem is that while the real estate is cheap, the taxes are not. There's also the potential liability of owning land you have no ability to monitor and maintain.
Oracle Stops All Software Development For Intel Itanium Microprocessor
With that definition, there can never be a "lack of middle class jobs" (to borrow your phrasing). Precisely 50% of the country will be middle class at all times.
I have to disagree, at least somewhat. Insight, understanding the basic concepts has always come fairly easily to me. The REALLY hard part is the disciplined practice needed to be able to actually apply what you know to real problems.
A simile is a metaphor.
Foundership is a cycle of learning and mentoring.
The graph (and the article's conclusion) would be more sensible if the bottom bar were on a linear axis while the top was on a suitably scaled logarithmic axis.
The author does not comprehend the consequential differences between percentages and absolute values.
+1, me either. But once they're in, life is easy. Just ask Groupon or any slam dunk subscription site.
Agreed - the article makes a dubious claim. Many universities regularly accept high school students that haven't yet gotten a diploma as part of their early admission process. All that is required are standardized test scores, a transcript showing what has been learned, and evidence of excellence.

The claim that MIT is somehow a national treasure and unique here seems to miss the point. I know this because I was accepted early admission to MIT and graduated from there.

Extracurricular activities and evidence of capabilities have always carried significant weight in MIT's decision making process, but this is also the case for many other schools. It's only the graduate school process that requires evidence of completion of lower education. Try getting into a PhD program without a high school diploma or an undergraduate degree. And no, I'm not talking about honorary doctorates.
DAE think the Apple form-over-function worshipping here is a bit excessive? Scary, even?
This is true, and teaching is hard because of this, but I think there is a "correct" way of handling it. Think about the kind of background the questioner has, what they already know, what they don't know, and what they want to know. Phrase your answer on that level.

Doing this in a few seconds time requires both intimiate knowledge of the subject at hand, and the ability to intuit a person's world-view as it relates to that subject. If I know nothing about the person asking the question, then I ask them questions so I can figure out what kind of an answer is appropriate.
I talked to Mark the day he got his laptop stolen, this story is 100% true.
This article argues that apps are the only future for browsers and by virtue of the fact that Firefox doesn't have a dedicated "app ecosystem" it will be extinct.

I don't follow the reasoning since I don't really see why I have to use Internet Explorer to use a Microsoft web app just as I don't have to use Chrome in order to get my Gmail.
Makes sense, the AMD 64 stuff has won out, so why continue down this path of something that fewer and fewer people have?
The only numbers I know are the ones that haven't changed since before I was a teenager (basically just my parents' numbers and 911), my own Google Voice number, and Bing 411. That's partially because I can always look up numbers in my contacts, on Facebook, or online, and partially because I make phone calls less than once a week.
A slower browser allows people to "savor" their Internet experience? Are you f*cking kidding me?
I'm not in the Apple boat, but I do know what you mean about the Google-iness of Reddit, and more generally the Google-iness of Google. Aside from google.com itself, there's something about everything they design that is very off-putting in a way that's hard to describe.
Sounds expected. Red Hat dropped Itanium support and Oracle's Unbreakable is, more or less, Red Hat without the hat.

Luckily, we still can run Debian.
Offline Labs Goes Online With $1 Million Seed Round
From http://www.hadapt.com/about (very slow to load right now), two of the guys are Daniel Abadi and Kamil Bajda-Pawlikowski. They worked on HadoopDB [1], which was an attempt at creating a parallel DB on top of Hadoop, that would leverage mapreduce scale, while taking advantage of the benefits of relational databases. I think the hope was to have some sort of system capable of taking on Vertica.

Looks like they've turned it into a product. Ah, more coverage here [2].

1: http://db.cs.yale.edu/hadoopdb/hadoopdb.html
2: http://www.dbms2.com/2011/03/23/hadapt-commercialized-hadoop...
Interview with Jochen Kronjaeger - Physicist, Cold Atoms Group
Local governments cut education spending first because it is the single biggest category of spending. Added up over the nation, police, fire, prisons, roads and mass transit cost less than half of what education does (at the local level).

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/piechart_2009_US_total
He hadn't commented when I posted the original post.
Star is very different from Macs (and Lisas). It has things-on-a-desktop, overlapping windows and black-on-white text, but it feels completely different.
Other suggestions:
"coding"
"under construction" (we have a commonly recognized symbol for that too)
"building"
Trulia CEO Pete Flint on Zillow
To OEM or not to OEM is the question
hazenet.co.uk - $8.40 for 1GB

intovps.com - $10 for 1GB

prgmr.com - $20 for 1GB

vpsfarm.com - $21.6 for 1GB

chunkhost.com - $37 for 1GB

linode.com - $39.95 for 1GB

slicehost.com - $70 for 1GB

Whats your bandwidth requirement?
Great to see Randall getting this kind of exposure for doing such a great thing. Anything that pushes more of a better quality of information into peoples' heads in the most effective way the better we will all be.
So generally you can plant a hidden camera operated remotely in some attractive item, like a laptop (hey! there's already one!), wait for the victim to take the bait ("steal" your laptop) and after that you can record whatever you wish without anyone pressing against you any wiretapping charges?

Even camera don't have to be started remotely. Hey, my camera is always rolling and sending stream to remote server. That's my laptop and that's how I'm using it.
Yeah but there can be a transition of those jobs from "paying a wage you can support a family on" to "not doing that". That seems to be what's happened, we've replaced a lot of trade skill jobs in manufacturing, etc, with non-skill jobs at Walmart or the gas station.
Here are the historical file sizes of Adobe's Flash Player installer (compressed .exe for Windows ActiveX Control):

* Flash Player 2 (1997) = 0.2 MB
* Flash Player 3 (1998) = 0.2 MB
* Flash Player 4 (1999) = 0.3 MB
* Flash Player 5 (2000) = 0.3 MB
* Flash Player 6 (2002) = 0.5 MB
* Flash Player 7 (2003) = 0.6 MB
* Flash Player 8 (2005) = 0.8 MB
* Flash Player 9 (2006) = 1.5 MB
* Flash Player 10 (2008) = 1.9 MB
* Flash Player 10.1 (2010) = 2.7 MB
* Flash Player 10.2 (2011) = 2.7 MB
These guys are in a tough spot, sort of adding icing on top of what the real data is: the listings themselves. However, that information is tightly guarded by Realtor brokerages often, and it is curious how that isn't seen as an unfair trust or monopoly situation.
Sure; in the particular context of a ten minute interview, you'll have prepared and it ought to be relatively easy to be concise most of the time. But if they throw you a curveball, then I don't think it ought to reflect negatively on you if you're a bit verbose (though it might reflect negatively on you that you didn't anticipate whatever the question was).

I replied because the quote was taken out of context, and I don't think that the idea applies in the general case.
As I said above, I can absolutely vouch for the veracity of this story. I talked to Mark the day he got his laptop stolen, and I was talking to him when he realized that it was still backing up to Backblaze.
extremely useful means of scheduling your twitter stream
That's the only tangible outcome that would come from suing the person who uploaded it. Getting money for "damages" is the only reason to sue the individual, in this case.

If you want the video taken down, it would be more direct to go after YouTube. In this case, the individual isn't really the "publisher," YouTube is. You probably wouldn't even need to sue YouTube, you could probably go through the "inappropriate content" channel.
And for scripts that google is too slow to put on their cdn...

http://www.cdnjs.com/
What's the backstory here? You usually only see this style of contrariness in old timers, and it's usually reserved for IBM.

Did Ed Bott have some skin in IE6, and he's upset that Firefox blew a hole in the side of Microsoft's lack of maintenance on IE6?
While I understand that this is the current plan, what is the guarantee that this plan will not be changed? Is this a technical limit, or a social one?
We're working on it. The hurdles are state money transmitter licenses and federal laws including but not limited to the USA PATRIOT Act and the Bank Secrecy Act, plus ad hoc regulations that come from the U.S. Treasury / FinCEN.

Our site is http://www.facecash.com.
Perhaps an undervalued skill is determining the amount of accuracy necessary? When asked on the spot like that, you may be better off giving an education guess than shuffling through a giant binder.

Sometimes I'll see somebody being asked a question which I know they know the answer to but they'll misinterpret the motivation behind it and the desired answer. This makes me wonder, is it a situational thing or some kind of cultural/language barrier?

I also notice that solid hackers get along really well together because they can anticipate how the other person thinks and know what they want to know (or already know/don't care about). Hacker types seem to be much more culture-biased than the average person, so when you introduce somebody from the other end of the spectrum you get a huge rift.

I suppose that 10 minutes is enough time to notice if this rift exists.
I would say if it doesn't make any sense, or is making some kind of broad logic leap like this, then it is probably MS purchased FUD.
Meet the Airmen Who Watch Over America's Nukes
For better or worse, the US is not Germany. Comparing the two won't necessarily be that enlightening. Consider, for a moment, why the thief in this case is not being prosecuted at this very moment. I would consider that even more unprofessional.

So yes, abstractly, a thief should not have to give up their rights, but on the other hand, it's a thief -- and there's a particular concrete US ethos that influences mine and the jury's thinking about this. We wonder why we should care about the rights of this particular person who chose to steal other people's possessions.

In other words, cry me a river. :-)
Action/writing/only/syllable/alone have multiple syllables, your post would not compile. Makes what he did very impressive.
Peter Van Roy's book defines it as "an execution is called nondeterministic if there is an execution state in which there is a choice of what to do next". I believe the only thing you mention that does not conform to this definition is co-routining, but I wouldn't categorise it as concurrency either (nor does the book).
Detroit is Dying… Quickly
Hacker or Hustler? I propose a 3rd Character Class.
Hackers: You build shit. Good shit sometimes.

Hustlers: You sell shit. If you're good, you close some deals.

Can Hackers be successful Hustlers? Yes, sometimes. That accounts for the supply and demand preference for Hackers on HN. Unless you are an exceptional hustler, you can be made redundant by a decent extrovert hacker who has a head start on understanding the technical benefits of your business.

Can Hustlers become Hackers? Not often. The exception where a Hustler believed so much in his/her project that the Hustler learned to code at least enough to get good specs is a theme I've seen before.

Building and selling--forgive the simplification--is enough to make a product and earn revenue. We see this transactional business model with many webapps. But is this enough to grow a startup to reach all of its commercial goals? Perhaps there is something missing.

Prophet: A third founder category.

A prophet has deep subject matter expertise. A prophet foresees the need for a solution in the industry and knows enough about the tools available to create a solution proposal. A prophet/hustler is more than a hustler because a prophet’s focus is visionary and long term over short term and transactional. A prophet/hacker is more than a hacker because the prophet dives deeper into market need and development future of the project.

A prophet can be a standalone member than neither hacks nor hustles. One of my favorite contract management startups has a PhD in Linguistics that provides the technical expertise, but she doesn’t live in either of hacker/hustler roles.

The prophet is often the initial founder, because the prophet is master of the conceptual. But not always, as a prophet can take the form of an early advisor or investor who shapes the technical skills of the founders and finds a market for their work product.

Who's the prophet on your team?
Mike Butcher - Facebook Acquisition
In case you couldn't tell, it's fake.
To be concise is more indicative of mastery rather than proficiency. You can understand something very well and be able to navigate your way through your own domain of expertise at whim. But if you can do that AND also communicate your domain to those for whom your domain is horribly foreign then you've demonstrated that you've not merely mastered the domain but that you have a grasp on a more foundational framework that translates to virtually limitless perspectives.

Proficiency is to navigate your world, Mastery is to successfully guide a complete alien through that world and have them see it, even if just dimmly, with the eyes of a native.
The Law on Fonts and Typefaces: Frequently Asked Questions
turn on compressed link display in your preferences. it's what reddit originally looked like, and it's much more minimal than the current design
The killer tablet app is a permissively-licensed, open sourced, javascriptable, browser-based window manager.
And is definitely not insane.
I think that's a particularly salient point for most intelligent/dedicated people to understand; if you're intelligent, you've got to remember that most people have a harder time understanding things than you, and if you're dedicated to your idea, you've got to remember that most people don't care about your idea as much as you do.
interviews = press = applications.

It's part of the job.. everyone gets sick of their job sometimes but pg seems to like his job in general.
I simply beg to differ.
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
Under the Hood – The Tech Powering Search Direct
This happened to me with a cabbie! I tracked mine down through web history as well.

A friend made a short radio story about it:
http://thebarkandthebite.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/cab-for...
Although I am not an American (i.e. I don't know the entire scenario in absolute certainty, but I work here in US), I totally agree that the government shouldn't intervene, at least not at the expense of tax payers.

I am totally baffled by the ever growing inequality between the rich and poor (pay, taxation, power differences, and etc). I was always wondering when we could ever see a significant change in such absolute unfair situation. Can we possibly use technology to make a change?

Hoping to see a better outcome by the time my children grow up, or before I die!
Why is it disappointing? 237,000 people left a terrible region with few prospects in search of something better. Most likely they are better off where they are now.

If Detroit dies, but the people living formerly living inside it are better off, isn't that a good thing?
Oracle ends all Itanium development
This is great for dealing with clients. If I have a team and only 1 person from that team is in direct contact with that client, suddently GrexIt can allow the team to instantly see what the client has sent directly to the person in contact. Great if that person is on vacation or out for the day. Keeps business going.
Future CSMajorCEO: Summer Internships for Ivy CS Majors in the bay area
I am mentoring about 12 kids this summer.

If you're a sophomore in CS at an Ivy, come meet me at MIT sloan Apr 5, Columbia Apr 18 or U of C Apr 28

or just text me 650-283-8008
Nevermind that any music, video and applications on the second hand laptop may fall under copyright infringement if left on the laptop.
Why the heck can't the police help with the recovery, and also prosecution of grand theft?
First of all, at the moment he hasn't been proven guilty. Second, when and if he is, criminals aren't stripped of all of their rights.
....wow, you lose your laptop(s) often...
what demo is the app targeting? How many beta testers are you looking for? Do you have irl friends?
I don't think that what you're calling mastery and proficiency are matters of degree like you seem to be expressing. Ability to communicate can be completely separate from understanding, because (particularly if you're of above-average intelligence) most people don't understand things the same way that you do.
GeoHot attempting to hide evidence and has now ran away to South America.
It is incredible how consistently throughout the years ZD Net has been a mouthpiece for MS FUD.
Then it's not a quote.
I have a network of several crowdsourced humor sites that make a decent profit (~2k) every month between them-- they include unrelatedcaptions.com, mylifeisbro.com, and averagetextsfromlastnight.com. I sold the flagship site - mylifeisaverage.com - since it demanded too much time and I had other projects I wanted to focus on.

Licensing for the paid iPhone application for mylifeisbro.com (I didn't develop it) also brings in about a grand each month.

It took about a month or so to make my first dollar from the first site I launched "mylifeisg.com" (now defunct)

Once there was a user base to pitch new projects to, the other dollars became easier to make.
Web development as a full blown software engineering profession is not simple. But what I meant is that I think I'd find it just as easy, if not easier, to teach a 12 year old basic web development; and produce something they'd find interesting, while being educational, as it would be to do this with 8bit BASIC.

And the tools now are so much better. I remember as a kid using graph paper to draw sprites, and the converting the images to hex streams by hand. Not mentally challenging, but tedious and error prone.
The costs of FOIA
Tried to read but I am distracted by all the clutter!
Fred Wilson’s $5,000 Startup Lawyer Challenge
"then you've demonstrated that you've not merely mastered the domain but that you have a grasp on a more foundational framework that translates to virtually limitless perspectives"

I should have phrased that "not merely grasped" instead of "not merely mastered"
I don't bother remembering a phone number, unless calling that number will result in the person on the other end bailing me out of jail.

So far, 100% success rate.