skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's true, you can.

On the other side, tax authorities actively try to punish foreign companies operating in Germany with taxes like the Außensteuergesetz (AStG); applicability varies from country to country, from case to case, and in my experience if you ask two accountants whether your Ltd is subject to AStG, you'll get 2 opposite answers.
Are we expected to type all URLs into Google search now? This is an awful idea.
participating in a zero sum or negative sum game makes you, on average, poorer. we all need to play the status game, we have to keep up appearances in order to function smoothly with others in both the personal and business worlds. but explicitly reason about which activities are actually delivering the utility.

one of the ways that other people's thinking strikes me as insane (and not in a hyperbole sense, but literally insane) is not considering the alternative uses of any given chunk of money when making buying decisions. I watch time and again the people around me purchase something they want less for more money, simply because their thinking is compartmentalized i.e. the two items don't get thought of at the same time.
Let me rephrase this: Search don't sort.

There cannot be a single organizational hierarchy that is intuitive to all users.

So lets try a flat namespace where every class and method can be found both by name, metadata, comments etc. Think the chrome universal search autocomplete.

Content should be addressable by more than any one namespace!
Clothing communicates information. Although this information is highly contextual, it is still information.

Understanding that people judge you by how you dress isn't snobbery, it's accepting reality.
Currently there are two branches in phone contracts:

1) Cheap feature phones (under $200 real cost) with a voice plan but no data plans.

2) Smart phones ($500+ real cost) with $30 data plans.

Both of those are subsidized by the attached plans so the consumer pays $0 to $200. Where does a low-end smart phone fit into this ecosystem? A $400 real cost phone is already going to be subsidized down to $0 out of pocket.

It seems like the only vendor who has any interest in really cheap smart phones is Virgin Mobile, who will sell you an ok Android phone for $200 but with a $25 unlimited data plan (and 300 minutes). I'm not sure if there is really much money to be made chasing this market.
Excellent point. I'd also add that most good ideas are hard to recognize. Imagine trying to sell dropbox "Yeah, its like free backups meets FTP. Not sure how we're going to make money" or Facebook "Its the new myspace/friendster!"

A lot of the success is in things like marketing, good UIs, implementation, beating the competition in features, strong partnerships with other companies, creative new solutions, good policies, and lots of luck. The idea guy can't help you with any of that. The devil is in the details, not in the big idea. Most "big ideas" are plain to see, its some kind of technical or creative specialization that helps you rise past your competitors.
The TidySongs Hustle
The TidySongs Hustle
Ya haha we realized that which is why we reached out on HN. You make a really good point. Thanks for your feedback.
A few years ago I made a similar word cloud of his essays using Wordle:

http://i.imgur.com/akCnD.png

I've often thought it would make a good shirt or book cover.
I meant physical cash, not a number in a computer system somewhere. I don't use cash that often - which made me wonder about having a roll of cash stashed somewhere.
> where does "CS doesn't do abstract" perception came from?

Hell if I know -- you should be asking yourself, since you're the only one who is making this imaginary claim.

If I had to guess, it comes from your deep-seated psychological need to make sure that getting an engineering degree was the correct decision in life, and not one that will ultimately lead you to a lonesome, unhappy and desperate existence in your middle years as a mid-tier engineer of no particular importance. And worse, you might spend those years watching the guys with the humanities degrees become successful leaders of their fields (and yours), starting families and having many children with their beautiful wives. (This foray into the source of that claim, which only you have made, was facetious, mind you.)

Or at least that's what I would guess from the degree of defensiveness you've employed to protect your choice of major from attacks that you imagine are being leveled against you -- despite the record clearly showing no such thing has been said.

I can't imagine why else you would interpret relatively benign statements about the benefits of other fields as being pointed and offensive like you have.
define "most". saving is a cultural norm in china. I've heard figures of as much as 50% of many family's income being saved.
Any support for Sphinx (search, not the Python doc thing) on the roadmap?
I think requiring an addon is optimal, and I'll explain why.

I see "why can't it just be an option?" a lot. Maintaining an option has a cost. Every option introduced in software creates an additional code path that must be maintained, and must be made to play nice with other features and their options. This can add up rather quickly, especially when options have many subtle interactions with other options. It's not about how easy one option is to maintain, it's about how easy all options are to maintain when we decide to add this one.

In the case of the addon, however, the cost of the option is removed from the main code base and the developers who work in it, and shifted to the addon which is (presumably) maintained by developers who care about the feature. In this way, the cost of the feature is distributed over code and development effort that best serves both the users who care about feature in the addon, and the project's user/developer community as a whole. With the only caveat that the addon api must be sufficient, the addon solution is optimal.

There's a mentality that moving a feature to an addon/plugin/whatever makes it a second-class citizen, but I think in most situations, if executed correctly, it's better than trying to maintain it as an integrated feature.
How is that a justification for making HN more jejune?
Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace program (not reality TV, a and "Total Money Makeover" (a book, even though it sounds like a reality TV show) does delve into how to take a deeply-in-debt situation and start budgeting properly.

Step 1: Create an emergency fund with $1000 (as a rough starting point, your financial situation may be different) to handle the unexpected and avoid making more debt. Adjust the $1000 number based on your income level and possible expenses. A homeowning breadwinner with a wife and kids would need a good deal more.
See: http://www.daveramsey.com/new/baby-step-1/
I've never had the experience of interacting with Reuters or Al-Jazeera. Based on my experiences with other forms of media, I am pessimistic that they live up to their attempted reputation, but do agree that their product does seem more informative.
Graylog2 Open source Log management
I don't disagree it's a common refrain, but still rubs me the wrong way all the same. If you're the idea guy and you want 'just' a developer, go put some bids on elance and run with it (and yea, there's some good devs on elance but they're overshadowed by the rest).
Should be the other way around. Money taken out for known expenses should be on par with money for bills.
There's a show in Canada named Til Debt Do Us Part that has a similar premise, except they usually visit higher class households (usually $100K/year+ earners) who still have managed to rack up tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of consumer debt.
I just wasted ~2 hours reading various pages of this wiki, it's a great resource.

My question is: Other than the obvious educational value, is there something concrete a beginner can do with a minimal kernel? What beginner projects would you recommend?
I'll add to that that creditors tend to ignore medical debts (according to a credit analyst I know), and that hospitals tend to cut deals for the under-insured.
That is bad advice. Always always get out of debt first.

CC debt is highly liquid. If you're fucked, you can max it out within 24hrs. Ergo, it doesn't make sense to have a pool of savings around and service the debt interest payments when you could clear out the debt and put that interest payment to good use elsewhere.
Actually, out of the entire population of Canada (including people who can't vote), only 10% voted for the conservative party. Similar numbers happened when Chretien was first voted in too. It's just a feature of FPTP in general. Being voted in contempt of government is only practically possible in minority governments and most of the time Canada has had majority governments.
Actually student loans is one of the best ways to borrow money. Very good point, we will look into this.
This honestly feels like another case of Gnome 3, where a group of inexperienced "UX" people want to make a big splash and change things and take away features as part of their "grand vision". If you disagree, you are wrong. If you have alternate suggestions, you will be ignored.

I think it fundamentally arises from the perception they are developing the interface for some kind of idealized idiot/user that doesnt exist. As is usual, software written for "other people" misses the point and just generally sucks.
direct link: http://bit.ly/500kApps

Edit: Why the downvote? God forbid someone puts a direct link to the infographic
Disclaimer: Been in the UK rarely, never to the US. I don't claim to know a lot about these places.

My impression is that it's just far less dangerous (and so a lot more compelling?) to go without an emergency budget here in Germany, so I wonder if this comparison misses to include the risks involved?

Sure, if you have family and a good deal of property/a mortgage to pay, you've got a lot of incentives to stay in business. But if you're renting? Already living in the lower middle class? No kids?

Worst case scenario: You lose your job (2-4 weeks notice) and are bankrupt at the end of the month. You can apply for help from the state (unless you find something else). You'll get a (60%? No idea, but something like that) percentage of your last salary for a while, afterwards you end up on a different and quite a lot lower benefit level, but you'll most certainly keep a TV, keep a (reasonable) flat, get good healthcare. If you do have kids you get (a bit) more money, education is mostly free for them.

I don't want to claim that it's all roses, but this is the worst that you actually need to worry about in my very humble opinion. What would happen in the UK or US if you run out of cash completely?
Ubiquity, not "Ubiquitous". It's funny how when you actually know about the subject of the article you realize the author can be misinformed.
Control Isn't Everything
agreed, and take it a bit further - a developer who is unwilling or unable to teach themselves the basics of business - delivering on time, understanding customer development, financial terms/concepts/ramifications, etc - has no business in a web startup.
France attempts to "civilize" the Internet; Internet fights back
Weblocks is an advanced web framework written in Common Lisp
>the express purpose of inflicting financial pain on an adversary in order to intimidate them into changing their behaviour

as an immigrant of 10 years in the US i've been under impression what this is exactly what civil court system is (i'll leave for your imagination what the court system for in my old country)

>rather than to correct a wrong.

i'm at loss here - how would you do that other than by forcing the adversary to pay and change their behavior?

>the express purpose of inflicting financial pain on an adversary in order to intimidate them into changing their behaviour

as an immigrant of 10 years in the US i've been under impression what this is exactly what civil court system is (i'll leave for your imagination what the court system for in my old country)

>rather than to correct a wrong.

i'm at loss here - how would you do that other than by forcing the adversary to pay and change their behavior?

Edit: just to make it clear - there is no doubt that the US civil court system as it is is a major improvement upon the way to "change the behavior of your adversary" as people who lived through 1990s Russia and saw the alternative would confirm. A cease and desist letter is much easy to endure/survive than a steel rod or a bullet from TT :)
> I'm also polishing up the resume to begin sending out June 1.

Why are you reading HN instead of doing this? Close your browser, finish your resume, and apply for ten jobs online before you go to bed tonight. Apply for ten more tomorrow. Repeat until you're employed.

Good things come to those who hustle.
One reality show I would really like to see would be about sending entitled people into low income neighborhoods so we can all watch them realize just how hard working some people are and just how well most people manage their money. Maybe then they'd stop saying misinformed stuff like "all that person really needs is someone to help them with a budget." A budget helps you cut excess spending. There's not a lot of spending in low income places almost by definition. There is not a lot of excess.

Deeply in debt people typically don't come from low income neighborhoods, they come from the middle class. Low income folks can't get credit that easily, even when credit was easy.

Most poor people I know work amazingly hard and manage their money well.
When I started college, I had 1000$ to my name. I didn't take out any loans and worked my way through a full load every semester for four years. Graduated and found a job and lived in places well below what I could afford. Every pay check I put between 55-65% of what I earned into savings. A couple years later I bought a house. Took the rest of that savings and put it into the market. Now, eight years later, I've got six figures in the bank and another five in the market. It isn't impossible to come up with money, you just have to think longer term and be disciplined about it.
The way hospital balance sheets work these days, they charge you that much to subsidize the many patients who (a) could not afford health insurance, (b) are unemployed, underemployed, or employed without health insurance benefits, (c) avoided preventative health care and healthy lifestyle choices like most Americans, (d) went to the ER as their primary care provider, long after they should have first visited a doctor about preliminary symptoms but could not afford to go, (e) could not legally be turned away by the ER, and (f) had absolutely no way to pay for their care even if they wanted to. The fact that your insurer had to pay almost $13,000 is the point of the individual mandate in health care reform. Otherwise, the only way to keep ERs from closing (and many ARE closing) is getting people like you and your insurer to subsidize the people that use no insurance, get no preventative care, do not manage symptoms and walk into the ER as disasters.
But the alternative, having a $2000 expense and no cash, would be a emergency. You can pay off $4000 in debt (and that doubling is probably hyperbole, but whatever), If you can handle small emergencies that will come up. Read Chapter 6 of Dave Ramsey's "Total Money Makeover" for a more thorough analysis.
Reminder: add an email to your HN profile 'about'
This is just a reminder that your 'email' field isn't visible to anyone but you and moderators. If you want anyone to reach you, add an email or a URL to your 'about' section.

What prompted me to post this: yet another mistakenly-[dead] comment, and no way to contact the poster directly.
Sure, but portable devices have totally different UI, or different programs altogether (like Firefox for Android). Why would this impact the main desktop application?
I've been working my butt off in the corporate world, trying to save a year of living expenses for my family of 5 in the suburbs, in hopes of quitting and doing my own thing once I had that cushion.

I hit the 9 month mark, then had major health issues that are wiping a lot of it out.

At first, I was fairly devastated. Then someone told me, "Isn't this exactly the kind of thing that savings is for?"

And you know what, it is. Sure, I wanted to quit my job in the near future. Sure, I wanted to be the rare married family guy who still had the flexibility to do startup work.

But how blessed and thankful I am that I am "only" going to have 3 months stored away after this is all done.

It is always good to keep things in perspective.
There have been times in the distant past where I was contacted by people from the mainstream media for interviews or TV appearances on well known shows. I always politely turned them down, because I feared similar exaggerations and distortions to those described in this article. Anything connected with AI or robotics tends to be reported on very poorly and in a highly sensationalised manner, and I didn't want to end up being misrepresented or be portrayed as a crude stereotype.
> Am I an underachiever or is she out of touch with Midwestern America?

What has she achieved, besides you? The answer doesn't matter.

What matters is that marriage is an investment and you've both made a bad one. You both deserve better and will have to separate to get it, the sooner the better.

It won't get better.
What I'm interested in though isn't what makes a decision by a person ethical or rational or whatever, but rather what makes a social system itself (or an algorithm that interfaces with people) ethical or unethical. E.g. looking at the ethics of the design the social system behind the Zimbardo prison experiments, rather than looking at the decisions of the individual actors once they're already in that environment.

I am somewhat interested in questions like whether or not it's morally acceptable to lie to a system or a (non-conscious) robot. At least on the surface this doesn't violate any of Kant's moral objections to deception. That is, Kant said (more or less) that the reason why lying is unethical is that it deprives the other person of their ability to make a rational decision, and our rationality is part of what makes us human, so lying is unethical because it deprives others of their humanity. So e.g. is it unethical to lie to about your age on a porn site? It might be, but if it is then we'd an entirely new framework to justify that sort of thing.

It almost seems like based on the power imbalances between people and algorithms, and the traditional justification against lying, it would almost be morally virtuous to teach your children to lie, as long as they're lying to a machine and not a person. (Of course a machine could be composed of people who are following an algorithm when interacting with you, but they still aren't making any sort of autonomous decisions for themselves.)

Anyway this type of problem is a little different than the problem of what makes the systemic design of a social system ethical or unethical, but they're both just different sides of the same coin.
Here comes Twitter 2.0
Funding Prospects for UK’s other Tech as deadline looms for Tech City Launchpad.
> Depression = failure

Just to clarify, depression (mostly) leads to failure. Depression doesn't define you as a failure.
ThriftDB a new service from the Octopart Guys
Greenstart: YC for Greentech
Does anyone else enjoy the panels side-toggle feature in Opera?

I would be just fine with moving the url UI elements into a panel, so long as I Never have to give up the the side-toggle widget...
$40k is roughly average income, which is not the same thing as middle class.
I probably would have been quite screwed. I didn't think that I would end up needing a bigger safety net than that, but I'm glad I had that around. Saved my butt!
Yeah, I could, but such a laptop would not fit my favorite backpack ;)

Actually I'd like to own a laptop with a 1400*1200 screen, because I spend a lot of time reading articles and don't care for width.
It's a much bigger waste of space than the location bar, especially when keyword searches are much more flexible.
It depends on the subject matter. Reuters and Al-Jazeera are by no means objective on all subjects -- the obvious example is Al-Jazeera and anything to do with Israel. (They immediately begin frothing at the mouth and spouting angry gibberish, just like, e.g., Fox news does in the US when reporting on Democrats.) But Al-Jazeera has useful reporting on other subjects.

I think the key is to try to figure out who's useful for what subject matter. Vanity Fair is probably not reliable for anything.
Crazy. The scary part is that $2,000 isn't very much money at all. It really would only take a very minor emergency to blow through that.
New deep space vehicle to be based on Orion: NASA
We are currently experimenting to find the best way to roll out sphinx.

We already have one alpha user that seems pretty happy with it.
Agreed -- but that worked much better when I could buy a 13% savings bond (late 80's) than showing my kids the <$1 month interest payment they get now.

I realize that inflation may well have eaten into that 13% hugely but as a pre/early-teen that didn't factor into my view.
How is it that we, who have built the free internet, are letting them, who stood in its path on every turn, take control? Why aren't hackers in positions of power?
I have a friend at work who I try to help. I can't count the number of times or ways I've tried to tell him pay day loans are bad news. The one time he came into some money (by cashing in a part of his 401K) I suggested he open an account at a credit union or even walmart (he lives 3 blocks away) but he ended up opening a "savings" account at a pay day loan shop because it was just around the corner.

It is horrible and sad but the reality is there really is no helping some people...
TinyPay.me Gives a Big Advantage to The Little Guy
Provo ut apartments
Conveniently located provo ut apartments
A reporter was trying to interview my mother about my sister. My mother said, "It's not that we don't think you're important but ...". This wound up in print as, "It's...that we dont think you're important."

Honestly, whoever did this is a failure at their job. This can't be a common practice because it's so blatantly wrong. Even Reddit commentors don't get upvoted for crap like this.
Can anyone figure out where a year went here? He plead guilty in April 2010. Was he really just sentenced in May 2011?
I'd extend that emergency fund to more than a "few" months worth as soon as possible.

If you lose your job, it may take quite a few months to find a new one.
Yes tornado/gunicorn/thin/... support is planned. Stay tuned!
Has anyone even considered the security implications of this? The number 1 way to train users against phishing is to tell them to look at the address bar. Once they know what it means (which in my experience takes a minute to explain), they can easily tell that Bancofamericaa.com is not the bank of america.
I would not agree that it's copyright infringement. We've transformed the content of copyrighted work and is using it for a transformative (educational) purpose.

"since the defendant has engaged in both types of
transformation, we would expect a court generally to find that the defendant’s use
is transformative and that the transformativeness factor weighs in favor of the
defendant’s fair use claim (though how strongly it does so may vary depending on
how transformative the defendant’s use is)"
http://www.utexas.edu/law/faculty/treese/fair_use_transforma...