skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find it helpful to convert debt interest rates to real money. My student loans are down to the point where I could drain my savings and pay for them, and while they are low interest they're still above inflation. (Probably. It's kind of getting close.) But if I actually calculate in real money what's left, it's about $125 in interest left to pay over three years. I'd rather hold on to the cash; at this point in my life, that's a rounding error. A largish one, but still a rounding error. Whereas losing all my savings could really hurt; we dipped into them quite deeply recently when I had both my cars break down in the same week and also a moderate house issue.

Keeping cash on hand instead of paying off cheap debt can prevent you from having to incur expensive debt, which functions as a non-obvious term in deciding how much cash to keep around.
Well, Halmos wrote the first version of 'Finite Dimensional Vector Spaces' while he was working as an assistant to von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study. So the book is doing finite dimensional linear algebra over the real and complex numbers using the techniques of Hilbert space theory, a von Neumann speciality. Once von Neumann had to explain what he meant by 'Hilbert space' to Hilbert!

But that Halmos was a good writer is no joke: He was one of the best of the 20th century.
The problem is that "middle class" comprises a fairly wide range so your income level qualifies as middle class as would twice as much of an income.

According to:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/09/14/us-usa-taxes-middl...

"Some academics divide the middle class into an upper bracket that includes professionals and middle managers who hold postgraduate degrees and often earn more than $100,000 and a less affluent lower middle class that typically has some college education with household incomes around the national median.
Median household income in the United States was $52,175 in 2008, according to the U.S. Census Bureau."
It depends on where you live. Where I am, a 4 bedroom house in the city (mediocre school district) is $180k. So $120k is a good chunk of change, and you can comfortably live on a single income.

If her vision of a "middle class lifestyle" is buying lots of shiny things, you're screwed.
Mozilla Labs obviously needs adult supervision.

Removing the status bar (now requires an add-on) and the menu bar (now requires tweaking about:config) should have been a warning that the people at ML were operating without a clue, but the removal of the address bar goes far beyond just plain ignorance.
Ask HN: Where are the engineers interested in gaming?
Hi HN,

SkillAddiction (SA) is a skill gaming website that brings people together to connect and compete in casual games in tournament-style play for cash, virtual currency, and merchandise prizes. The website is a hybrid of a casual gaming portal, a social game, and a casino operator – it has the reward of a social game and the chance to win playing casual games, without any gambling. We have hosted over 1 million skill gaming tournaments and players have won over $400,000 in cash and prizes.

We are currently in the YetiZen gaming accelerator (comparable to Ycombinator) and looking to bring on a third team member (technical).

- We are live, http://www.skilladdiction.com

- We have revenue and customers - a couple thousand of them

- Customers love us. Last week a returning visitor spent 160 minutes at our site and a new user 28 minutes. People will be using the stuff you build, a lot

- You are not alone. The current application didn’t appear from nowhere. One of us is a hacker/hustler (more hustler) but knows the world of PHP, MySQL, CSS, HTML, Javascript, and other technologies

Compensation includes salary and equity.

Get in touch and let's see if there could be a fit - myprofilename@skilladdiction.com

*Remote work is ok, but you'llneed to be in the SF Bay area to meet frequently.
> Unfortunately, most of these people are also deep in debt and have already made such cuts.

You might be underestimating the middle-class-ness of the problem. My first job out of college was pre-screening people's credit reports (in 2004, so in quite good economic times), and it was shocking how many middle-class and lower-rich-class people were living way beyond their means, while applying for expensive short-term debt to cover it up.

The worst I saw was the owner of a local chain of stores whose wife or girlfriend was clearly cleaning him out, and he was applying for short-term unsecured debt.
Twitter Reveals British Celebrity Sins Despite Legal Injunctions
ACID isn't a banking issue, it's an issue in any database where data integrity is important. Having written administration software for life insurance companies, you can be sure that we designed our software to rely on ACID semantics.

Without transactions, correctly writing the software would have been far more difficult, especially in situations where you need to rollback a transaction that is partially completed because of system errors.
What interested me was the cross-cultural comparison, which is only alluded to in the CNN article but explained a bit more in depth here: http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2011/05/23/nearly-half-of-ame...

> Meanwhile, Lusardi, Schneider and Tufano also looked at how different countries compare. They consulted with local partners to set the number used in local currency at a comparable level. “Perceived capacity to cope with an emergency is lowest in the U.S., U.K. and Germany, all countries in which 50% of households or more would probably or certainly be unable to come up with the emergency funds,” the authors wrote. “France and Portugal occupy an intermediate position; 46% of respondents in Portugal would certainly or probably be unable to come up with the funds as would 37% of those in France. The highest levels of coping capacity are found in Canada (28% certainly or probably unable), Netherlands (27.9%), and Italy (20%).”
Unusable HN, scared hackers
- ridiculous code changes
- basic lack of usabli.. wait, I am not even going to list it
you all know we need a better system... bot nobody wants to talk about it because lets face it, we all imagine ourselves to be in the place some day where we have to be in PG's good books
Getaround, The AirBnb For Cars, Launches
I could see this being successful in finance. While I personally don't want to work for a big bank, I bet those that do would pay to see successful resumes--especially from "non-target" schools. However, I also think it would be unwise for the successful candidates to share their resumes so that might be something to consider.
What part of that does insurance play?
'Angel' tax-credit bill signed into law
I hate to break it to you but you're living beyond your means. A high interest loan is not an emergency fund. Ideally you should have enough money to live for 6-12 months if your income stopped tomorrow.

I know when I was younger I didn't have such things, but then the recession of 2002 hit and I found out really quickly how much it sucks trying to make a house payment with an unemployment check.
Engineers, scientists, and "business" people need more training in the liberal arts, not less.

Those 4:00 AM moments are the ones we need more education for....questions of ethics, of weighing values, of being able to see and reason from multiple viewpoints, of being able to communicate efficiently, of being able to empathize accurately.

Don't get me wrong - I also wish all of us were more educated in highly abstract thought (math). It's just that many of us stop learning and questioning the day we learn to count. If "value" or "riches" is a number to us, we need what the humanities reveal more than anyone.

"Riches" is in the eye of the beholder, one supposes. I got a B.S. in biochemistry before my M.D., have fairly extensive software engineering experience and training, have a modestly low Erdos number....and yet I tell you my colleagues and I would be better docs and engineers with a strong emphasis in our early training on the humanities. In my case, I'd have been much better off turning my minor in English into a major, learning to draw and sculpt and create more, writing more, reading more philosophy/ethics/history, learning more foreign language.

We need more medical students and programmers who major in the humanities. Medical schools in particular nowadays push hard for people from the humanities (those students also need to take a relatively few science requisites) We need people who move between disciplines more easily. We need fewer specialists. Those 4:00 AM moments...when you lack data, when you lack algorithms, when you need to understand broad fields, understand and communicate with people, and make the right ethical decisions require the liberal arts at least as much as our ability to count.

To paraphrase a dead poet or two, our lives ain't about laying pipe. Go read and think over poetry and literature and history and the dilemmas a thousand cultures already worried over - we'll be better engineers or entrepreneurs or doctors.
Firefox has a search box because it's helpful to users. Period. End of story. If it's not helpful to users, it'll go away or be replaced. Mozilla does not build features to generate money. Mozilla builds features to make the Web a better place for users and developers.
I actually disagree that this community is largely driven by money. I think this community is driven by people who want to make an impact. The startup-minded folks have decided that they can make the most impact through a startup. Personally, I recently finished my PhD and I do research in industry because I feel that's where I will make the most impact. I'm tired of making solutions-looking-for-problems. But that's less of an issue in science - my field is more "exploratory engineering" as I explained in a comment last week.

Be warned, though. The path to being a tenured professor is littered with brilliant people. Another reason why I did not want to go into academia is that the tenure process at a research university is grueling, and you aren't given much to bootstrap it with.
Sorry, my goal wasn't to make any sort of racist implication. Rather my point was that a boring speaker (which he was, and I didn't make clear) is, well boring. Personally I love Aussies because of their no-nonsense approach. This guy just said what everyone was thinking. In too many conferences I go to everyone just sits around pretending to look interested.

My apologies for any offense caused.
Dropbox, the startup that most easily came to pg's mind, began with a single founder, who didn't already have a relationship with his co-founders. It was also a great idea, well-worked out from the beginning. Not undermining the five points, just saying that they're more guidelines.

It's crucial to look at the founders, because that's what does the work. Just as Catmull says of movies, a successful startup is made of many creative ideas; also, many implementation challenges, flexible adaptations and tests of determination that is very hard for one person to handle.

A startup is an on-going process, not a one-off event.
If you looked at the demo, you'd see that's precisely what this experiment is.
Seconded; imo this paper is a pretty good introduction to the basic concepts and motivations of information theory even today. Impressive for a 63-year-old paper.
Minor nitpick:

>> - Windows Phone is not, as far as I know, a resource light OS. Putting it on an underpowered phone in order to keep the price really low is likely to lead to an even worse user experience than normal. Again, trash-talking end users would be the result.

WP7 is actually a ridiculously light OS. All of the current WP7 phones uses the older generation Snapdragon processors, but they are still faster then most of the newer Android handsets with dual-core processors. MS went to great pains to make sure that everything was optimized (and the UI is hardware accelerated), which is why their hardware specifications only had support for one SoC.
However, what he said is spot-on. I am looking for some discernible "point" in the hope that the comment is not just the arbitrary expression of an individual's taste, which it now clearly is.
Google Will Reveal Mobile Wallet Ambitions on Thursday
"My experience is that journalists report on the nearest-cliche algorithm, which is extremely uninformative because there aren’t many cliches, the truth is often quite distant from any cliche, and the only thing you can infer about the actual event was that this was the closest cliche. I should write a separate post on this at some point.

It is simply not possible to appreciate the sheer awfulness of mainstream media reporting until someone has actually reported on you. It is so much worse than you think."

-Eliezer Yudkowsky, http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/01/predictible-fakers.htm...
This will never happen, but if it did, the answer is simple. Abandon Wikipedia and make a new one.

Unlike real estate, we will never run out of empty websites to build encyclopedias on. And, unlike a house, once you own a "free encyclopedia", you've invested nothing and can abandon it at any time.

If the world governments want to make a sanitized uneditable copy of Wikipedia, great. Nobody will use it, but it will make them happy. And that's what's great about the Internet.
I may be slightly embittered towards my school, but I think the difference has more to do with what they are allowed to charge than with actual curriculum differences.

Here are the actual amounts, FWIW: http://www.adm.uwaterloo.ca/infofin/students/UG%20Schedule%2...
wow that is super cool. what did you use to make that?
Lottery is just a tax for those that are bad at math. Why would you do both? Putting money into a low yield savings account will get you a statistically better return over your entire lifetime than buying a few powerball tickets every week.
As a "vertical screen space nazi" I surely sympathize with the proposal. I always try to customize my software to use as little toolbar space as possible, maximizing the actual content space.

However, suitable alternatives would have to be found for common usage patterns associated with the location bar, in particular I can think of the following:

1. Properly displaying your location relative to the structure of a website.

2. Verifying the security and validity of an address you are visiting.

3. Typing new addresses and search queries.

4. Copying and sharing the location you are in.

I can think of a few UI alternatives for each of those use cases and the article presents some others, many would require a pretty big change on the way we do things on the Web.
This is exactly how I've been doing it. Auto-transfer set up on the bank account, and taking cash out for spending money instead of just letting myself use a credit or debit card.
Like I said in the other comment, I did study this issue (to understand under what condition I can offer Tagxedo to users and when I can sell Tagxedo artworks).

Use of the logo design is fine. The use of the entire essay with distillation of selected words is definitely fair use (very transformative). The word "Y Combinator" is ... generic, but I'd buy that this is subject to debate (and yes I did refer to pg's YC not the math term). OTOH I can argue that this is really a commentary of YC so ...

And I didn't do this out of profit motive. It is first and foremost a tribute. Second, Tagxedo as an entrepreneurial venture is partially inspired by pg and YC. Third, I spent several hours to process the text and come up with the best design (much more than I usually do). Unless somehow boatloads of orders come in, I don't see how I can break even time-wise (which I already knew before I started).

I offer Tagxedo for free and many kids love it. Teachers told me that Tagxedo opens their eyes, seeing words and languages not as boring, but fun and artsy. If there is a any hint of profit motive it is to perhaps allow me to justify continuing to offer Tagxedo to everyone for free.

That said, I might take it down if I get a C&D from Paul Graham and associates. I wouldn't mind if pg takes this and run with it (sans Zazzle), adding to the famed gray and black T-shirts :D
That wasn't really a real beta. that was simply a copy of then Aurora to the beta channel to test the process and the channel switching utility in Firefox.
I don't believe that someone who is capable of founding a business cannot learn web programming. Flat out don't believe it. Much of the time, you hardly need to write code as much as think logically and build a product.

In fact, if it turned out that someone wasn't able to code, I probably don't want them as a co-founder because I don't think they are smart/determined/focused enough to run a business.
Your kind is more common than some might think.

"Hi, this is $obvious_female_name calling from $company for $candidate, please?"

"Oh, I thought this would be a technical interview."

Result? Instant 1.0 score, which basically means that if you hire this person, I will quit.

Turns out they've hired a bunch of those people anyway, and I quit anyway.
I look forward to your announcement of a replacement.
I use Tagxedo to make this.

http://www.tagxedo.com

Perhaps I should rephrase:

I made Tagxedo so I can make this :D
How do you come to the conclusion that a coder's projects have nothing to do with previous experience? Docco comes straight from literate programming and the English major is a major influence at least in project choice. It's not about CS insights, it's the non-CS insights at work here. Underscore is nothing new in CS, it's just well crafted, has a good API. How come similar projects by CS majors went nowhere? I think the ugly syntax did them in.

Code quality probably isn't influenced by unrelated experience, but the decision making, what projects to choose, how extensive they should be, what's important, is heavily influenced by outside experience.

Look at the example of startups. Often engineers who start them focus on cool technology, lose sight of the business, customer needs, can't come up with reasonable product ideas etc. They need guidance from people who ran a software business, made these mistakes and understood what's important.

It's the same with any other additional discipline, if you major in English prior to programming you're better positioned to make a word processor or document startup. I think you'd also be better at designing clear APIs and readable code, documentation for others. So many CS-only majors are horrible there. If you majored in design, better at making design tools.

Sure you can pick up skills after getting a CS a degree and the startup approach could give you that. But is that a better approach than majoring in art then picking up CS?

When you have too many college grads coming into a field, taught similar curriculum and Java, you have narrow group think. A person that comes at CS from a different angle will make a bigger difference in CS than those grads. It's an outside perspective, helps in any field.

Another example who isn't a CS major is Ryan Dahl, maker of Node.js. Lots of CS graybeards laugh at his naive efforts and spaghetti, but for some reason his project is popular. Perhaps those who weren't brainwashed by college CS tend to stand out? Let's do a study on that.
Reminds me of EagleMode: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6yPQKt3mBA
I agree. The term "well-rounded" is often bastardized to mean "well-versed in humanities." It is particularly noticeable in college: engineers are required to take a large number of humanities courses, but people studying liberal arts only have to take one or two technical courses. Because of this, the average engineer is exposed to both technical disciplines and the humanities, whereas the average liberal arts student only sees the humanities.

Unless we redefine well-rounded in a way that is contrary to its original meaning, engineers may very well be more well-rounded than people studying humanities.
Neither?

When you get paid a lot of money, it's easier to be less careful with your money and not have anything bad happen. It's easy to contribute the maximum to your 401k, have the best health insurance and flexible spending account, save $1000 a month, and still buy a lot of things. If you lose your job, you'll probably get another one. And banks are more than happy to loan you money to bridge the transition.

All I'm saying is that consumption is not bad for any intrinsic reason other than the taboo of consumption.

(Let's look at your examples: owning a new condo, and going out of the country on vacation 3 times a year. New condos cost the same as old condos. You're paying for the ground under them. You're going to pay for that, in some form regardless of whether you rent or buy, so this isn't much of a "consumption" issue. Going on vacation isn't amazingly expensive. A cheap round-trip flight out of the US is $500. If you have friends, that's the total expense right there. So again, not an amazing display of financial ineptitude.)
But that particular feature generates them millions of dollars and is their primary source of funding. It's not far fetched to imagine if it came down to it, issues surrounding it might be more complex than other UI issues.
Sounds familiar! :)

"shykes 152 days ago

Expect a pricing page very soon."

Seriously, when are you going to post the pricing details?

I hope it is something very straightforward such as $0.04/process-hour.
I know that, and that's why I'm better at the piano than gymnastics, because I simply didn't put any effort on stuff I didn't like. What surprises me is that you did an important effort, though you say you didn't grab any reward out of it. That seems unusual to say the less - Everything I've spent a significant time practising, I did because either I liked it, or I rapidly got some reward (like in sports), or eventually because I was under external constraint (like going to school).
$120k a year is more income than about 90% of U.S. households. The median household income in the U.S. is about $45,000.

Your wife needs to find different friends.
A side effect of a compact neutrino detector would be the immediate obsolescence of all nuclear submarines.
I'm a marginally successful product guy and I regularly get asked by people how to find developers to implement their Big Idea.

I tell them to go talk to developers and find out the developers' Big Ideas and then work on one of them.

You get to work on a startup and hopefully build a relationship that will span multiple products and companies.
This sounds like unionisation. Not exactly a new idea? On the other hand, maybe the internet can provide alternatives to union.Or has this already been done?
When I looked at that pattern I though "Looks like one of Wolframs FSAs". And after reading the encoding algorithm, seems like it is. See http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/ElementaryCellularAutomato...
If you're in this situation, get yourself an account at an online bank (ING Direct, Everbank, etc.) with an automatic savings plan, then create a dedicated savings account for emergencies and label it Emergency Fund (important!). If there's no automatic plan, just set a portion of your paycheck to be direct deposited into that account. Just put in $50 or $100 per paycheck.

Once the account balance gets to a level you're comfortable with, you can divert that excess monthly savings into CDs and other safe (less-liquid) investments, that you can periodically cash-out to build up your emergency fund for bigger, longer emergencies. The added security will help you sleep better. At least it did for me.
I had a problem similar to this about two years ago. 9 hours in the ER on a Friday night to get checked out for a pain cost $13,000. I had to pay around $100 upfront, and then insurance kicked in and took care of the rest.