skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This statement reveals so much about what's wrong with Microsoft...

Good engineering is good user experience.
Perhaps changing the subject from Andrew Carnegie will express my discomfort with the implicit syllogism more effectively.

Cory Doctorow gives his books away for free. Cory Doctorow has achieved great financial and literary success. Therefore, everyone who gives books away for free will achieve great financial and literary success.
It may not be quite that easy though. This person would already have prior knowledge on making good decisions whereas the poor (probably) don't.

That being said, here's a book with a similar premise and a different outcome: http://www.amazon.com/Nickel-Dimed-Not-Getting-America/dp/08...

The author finds herself barely able to make it. Grant it, she approaches the situation rather pessimistically, the book still paints a decent picture as to why so many people are struggling.
South Korea was build heavily from foreign aid, both military and otherwise. How about Japan and the Marshall plan?
At 9 months, he had completed his goal, and a family member fell ill.

Wait, what was this? He got faced with a situation he couldn't handle with wise decision-making, saving, and elbow grease and had to tap into his riches to get himself out?

You know, the real problem is that he got a nice apartment and car. If he lived in a shack and walked everywhere, I bet he'd have been able to help his family member out. Was he just not trying, or was he trying and making bad decisions?
Just because someone does/threatens the things you have listed does not mean they have mental problems.
How to Pop Your Filter Bubble
Purchase B2B software on values not features
You could argue that most of Western Europe and indeed Japan was only able to recover as quickly from WW2 because of aid from the United States (e.g. the Marshall Plan in Europe) - and both areas seem to have done quite well.

Isn't it also arguable that present day countries that started as colonies also benefited from a degree of aid/investment from the countries doing the colonizing? Setting up colonies was an expensive and risky business, indeed the country I am in was forced to unite with our larger and richer neighbor to the south largely because of a failed attempt to establish such colonies:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/civil_war_revolution/sc...
Great Customer Support = Measurable Revenue Growth
30 bugs were reproducible and accepted (after duplicates removed)
4 bugs were fixed (4 previously reported bugs)
I'm not an IRC user but bitlbee looks interesting enough that I might give it a shot.
This is advice that seem vapid until you end up learning them yourself. It's hard to extract the real-life story and experience from just the list.

This sort of thing only reaffirms those that have already learned the lessons, and brushed off as vapid from those that haven't.
I agree. The book is a poor analogy of actually being poor. Let's put aside the money reserve for a moment. From wiki, it looks as if he put aside anything that would help him, such as his college education. Ok. But poor people also have things that weigh them down, things that hurt them, for example, dependents (children, family), addictions, debt, and what you mentioned.
quite possibly. I'm not terribly familiar with Kerberos as a protocol, but I know I've definitely seen Kerberos login misbehave in a way that caused it to take multiple minutes and then time out.

anyway, hope you figure out the problem. :)
What's the average tuition fee in a typical US college/university year?

The UK was about £3300, now under roughly £7000.
Ballmer certainly looks like a great boss, having great care for good engineering practices such as yelling, throwing chairs at people and being generally obnoxious.

Also, user experience is a part of good engineering.
I think what I meant was that being nervous about falling down most likely means you'll be walking a lot slower than the person with the safety net. If you only have what you need to survive, you're far less likely to take any chances with it.

Working hard, despite much propaganda to the contrary, isn't a solution. I'm not even sure what it means in this context. Being poor is very hard work in and of itself, as taking care of the basic necessities of life takes a lot more time and effort when you can't use the expensive short cuts that middle-class people take for granted.

When you're poor, everything takes longer, everything associated with money causes anxiety, the social stigma can prevent you from making useful connections, healthcare becomes more difficult to access, you have to spend time fixing or working around broken items, if you have a job you likely work longer and/or more uncomfortable hours, if you don't have a job there's the added stress and stigma from that, many government programs in reality become traps due to their desire to control poor people's lives, you cannot afford and/or do not have the time or energy left to make healthy food, etc. There are many, many other factors, many of which can be trivially seen to magnify other factors.
I'll add Rule 1A: Never talk net-speak with tier-1 support.

If only "shibboleet" worked in real life...
I had to setup AT&T DSL last week. The modem itself didn't have a connection (blinking DSL LED, no Internet LED), and I made the mistake of mentioning to the tech that I was using an Apple router instead of the Cisco router they sent me. He stopped investigating the problem right there and the only thing he would do for me was transfer me to Cisco support for the router even though I expressly stated that there was no problem with the router.
From a statistics point of view, your argument seems to be flawed. It's very unlikely for someone who is born poor to end up rich, no matter how wise their choices are.

From the wikipedia page on "Economic Mobility" [1]: "Children previously from lower-income families had only a 1% chance of having an income that ranks in the top 5%"

I can't imagine that making perfect decisions for one's entire life would change those odds too much. If you're born poor, you're probably going to stay poor. It seems that the decision for most poor people is "Do you want to struggle and deny yourself for a 1% chance at being rich, or do you just want to enjoy yourself while you're here?"

It's always made sense to me that poor people spend most of their money on making life less boring. It's not like they had bright futures lined up but they threw it all away for booze. Most of them were born screwed and had sense enough to see it.

[1] http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2006/04/Hertz_Mobilit...
First airbnb, now loopt. Something evil has infiltrated the house of ycombinator.
Source: https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/491/
CoderBack - The cloud in the cloud
The cloud in the cloud... can you imagine it?
Poor people have a different mindset, and I suspect that many of them have a feeling of hopelessness (justified or not, I don't know). I suppose that it could be really easy to improve your situation in a year but then saying that it is possible doesn't actually change anything. If it is truly easy to change your situation, the mindset (which then is the main cause of continual poverty) is not changed, that is. I feel that that would be blaming the poor for their problems while not actually taking steps to change their mindset. Perhaps we cannot change everyone's mindset, but we should take steps to change some people's (?), making a difference in their lives (and not just "it's your fault").
"....men who fall for it are stupid"

In fairness to GoDaddy, I doubt there's a significant portion of its historical customer base that has "fallen for it," i.e., bought products or services from the company solely or primarily because of its scantily clad models.

GoDaddy got to where it is today because it was -- at least for a long period of time -- the cheapest provider of domain registration widely known to the general public. Say what you will about its upsell tactics, or its spotty service level, or its arguably shady subscription terms. But the sticker price of $2.99 per domain was a monumental proposition back when GoDaddy first came onto the scene.

Do its ad campaigns objectify women? Yes. Are they cheesy, sleazy, and in questionable taste? Yes. But their purpose has always been simply to attract attention and traffic to the site. Now, that branding might get folks in the door, but it doesn't actually sell product. To claim that people have purchased GoDaddy registrations because they "fell for" the ad campaign is a bit of a stretch.
>let users completely block apps from their wall

/ Or perhaps have an option to "block apps in this category". So if I'm clicking on the x for a game's posting trying to entice me in it could offer me the choice to block that game or to block all games.
2600: "LATEST VERIZON DENIAL OF SERVICE ENTERS FOURTH DAY"
(from http://www.2600.com/news/view/article/12106 , pasted because their site is taking ~60 seconds to serve it right now)
You have entirely and completely missed the point.
The point is that they are buying things that make their lives better. They aren't buying things that make themselves healthier, no, but they're buying things that make their lives bearable, and you're making the assumption that that's an 'unwise' choice. Their preferences aren't in the line of work hard for nine months, they're on doing well enough to have a bearable life.

And, anyhow, your story is about a single, healthy man, with a very clearly defined plan and an escape valve, not a bunch of trapped mothers trying to raise children.
IMHO if you can work with a startup that is using technology you find interesting, that would be the best thing - you'd get a lot more breadth of experience and you'd have more of a chance to play with newer stuff. If you do join a big company, like you mentioned, make sure it isn't one of those Java shops where you wouldn't learn anything. I think that's a perfectly legitimate thing to ask in an interview - what kind of technology you would have the opportunity to work with.
oh, so what's the point? It's basically a bluetooth microphone?
Many of the most successful apps were not the first ones in their category. They didn't invent a new market but improved existing ideas and somehow became more popular than the original ones
I think I missed the part of the article where they discussed a good reason not to privatize Amtrak. If government subsidy made it better than private sector alternatives, that would be something. But the argument here is what, that we should preserve a system that even with heavy subsidies can't manage to do better than the variety of profitable alternatives? Who does that help? It sounds like a decisive lose-lose.

The only argument in favor of preserving the status quo is to protect the jobs of Amtrak workers. But if that's the concern, it would actually be cheaper to let the market lay some of them off and just cut a giant, multi-year severance check to each of the affected workers.
Doesn't look like the link works now - 'Error establishing a database connection'
The guy is older than both Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos. From what I can tell he is pretty set in his worldview.
Well, it's just a heuristic. Also, would you consider that level of abbreviation for your own site instead of descriptive names? You do want users to be able to remember URLs if at all possible...
We're trying something new and innovative, and of course we'll have to iterate on it. We're moving as quickly as we can to fix this and make it work for consumers and businesses--obviously, it doesn't work for us unless it works for both of those groups. We have a chance to really improve local commerce, and I hope we do.

As soon as a business wants to opt out, we block them permanently in the system and remove any pending deals. We're changing the product right now to make the language more clear, and we're not going to use any trademarked images until the business approves the deal. We're going to make it really clear that a business hasn't approved a deal until they do.

We've certainly gotten negative feedback from a few businesses, but in general people seem excited about this--word of mouth is a great referral, and businesses understand that. The promise of u-Deals, if it works, is that your best customers become your big advocates.

Should we have gotten this right from the beginning? Yes, and I'm sorry we didn't. We've gotten things wrong in the past, and we're going to get things wrong again. As always, we'll try not to get the big things wrong, we'll do everything we can to make it up to our users, and we'll get it fixed as fast as possible. That's the nature of trying new things, and it's how the world gets better.
I never said anything about access control lists
I use KeePass and synchronize the database file through Dropbox. I can recommend this combination, it works well both on my computers and (Android) phone.

The downside is that I sometimes have to enter the master password on my phone's on-screen keyboard, so it is probably shorter than it should be.
Fighting (for?) Europe: How European Elites Lost a Generation
Steve Jobs certainly looks like a great boss, calling the entire MobileMe team into an all-hands and asking them point blank why the fuck their software doesn't work.

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Steve-Jobs-Not-Shy-of-Using-t...

we can both play this game all day.

user experience is indeed a part of good engineering, but it's not the be-all and end-all, and eventually you will /always/ run into a place where you must compromise between a system which is well-engineered and one that behaves in accordance with user expectation.

this is why OS X doesn't have full ASLR and DEP, because it can cause applications to start crashing at random because they were poorly written in a way that used to be invisible.

this is why UAC on Windows Vista is a terrible experience, because even trusted applications need to prompt the user to make sure they approve of them executing on an administrator token.

this is why our operating systems still have to reboot while applying security updates, because long-running services and the kernel have to be replaced and there's no good way to do it seamlessly yet.
Somewhat of a different case, but urban light rail networks were actively destroyed by car companies who didn't want the competion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_streetcar_scanda...

It would seem monied interests want to keep us in cars sucking oil instead of whizzing along tracks. I see this as being a big impediment to the creation of viable nationwide rail networks.
I barely made it half-way through the article, it sounded like an United Colors of Benetton add adapted into a Nobel-winning Economics paper.

Just a couple of gems that made me skip it:

"""
they may well be more driven by ideas, simply because they have less information about the world outside
"""

So, supposedly, us, the rich people, live in the "real" world, why them , the poors, live in a world from which they cannot see "outside". Ok, I got it.

"""
She would also read to us books on Mother Teresa, on African children, etc
"""

Mother Teresa and African children in the same sentence, what's this, "feel-good bingo for well-off people"? Also notice the "etc" after "African children", that's a first.

And I could go on and on. In case anyone's curious (and before you start downvotting me), I'm furious about the condescending tone of this article because some time ago, when I was 15-16, my family went from middle-class status to poverty (meaning less per US$ 1 per day per person) in a very short time. I can still remember my mum, an engineer by training, going to the market place early in the morning to sell home-grown parsley. She gave me most of that money in order to pay for private math-lessons given by my high-school math teacher (that was the only way to get into CS school). I still try to help my parents as much as I can, but 10 years later they still rely mostly on subsistence agriculture. But, nevertheless, they're happy with it, that's their life, they have their small piece of land, they garden it, they live under the sun in fresh air and not in a God-forsaken cubicle with artificial lights, and my dad would look very strangely at these "rich", paper-writing people who think he's living in a "different", lesser world.
It really depends which room. With Pandora you're at the mercy of their recommendations too, but they aren't really held accountable for bad recommendations. Sure there is an algorithm, but I would bet on people picking songs any day over an algorithm if anything were on the line. With Turntable.fm, you're playing for your reputation, and some people take that VERY seriously. Some of the bigger rooms I've been in have had incredible selection, especially the ones with DJ thresholds.
Shic - IRC client in only Bash
Out of interest, what are you doing a Ph.D. in?
Google's Anti-Competitive Strategy for Offers
Google's using Gmail's priority inbox to give preference to its own daily deal emails over all the rest
Technology’s Child: Why 21st-Century Teens Can’t Talk On the Phone
As a former Apple engineer, I can confidently say that, while Jobs is the putative boss of everyone in the company, 99.9% of Apple engineers will never cross paths with him.

I know a fair few people at Microsoft, and elsewhere, and I've never seen evidence that the engineering talent distribution at Apple is really all that different from the talent distribution anywhere else. There are superstars and dolts in the expected proportions.
Entirely true. I've interacted with this guy before, and he was rude, demanding, and childish, but to me, that only told me that he was young and inexperienced in the community, not that he was mentally ill.
Not really sure where you're going with that.

A) Standard employee
B) Self-employed but at complete mercy of a company (facebook) which does not know you even exist, who's everyday change of mood could wipe you out

Does not really sound like much was gained going from A to B.

With A you're simply lost (in life).
With B you're blind.
You wouldn't and it also wouldn't be considered showoffy, so I don't think that's the intended meaning.
A single, healthy man in a developed economy.
I just don't understand why police officers are so antagonistic towards photographers. Even if they are thinking from a purely "I don't want my mistakes to be caught" point of view, aren't they aware that arresting people in their full legal rights garners a lot more attention than anything they might have been doing in the photos/videos of the person?
The internet is or soon will be a human right in the EU so that should make any ban impossible.
Yeah, twitter is actually one of the closest things to IRC imho. The key of enjoying it is to learn enjoy the moment. Keep it minimized in the background, or on a other desktop or something, and check it out occasionally to see if there is anything interesting going on at the moment. If not, then proceed doing whatever.
This is actually a really good list of rules. Despite what you may or may not think about Bob, this truly is a solid set of ways to structure success.
What "evil" has AirBnB done? Yes, they're disruptive to the hotel industry, and you might claim that hotel taxes are a major and legitimate source of cost-recovery (although I'd be perfectly happy if AirBnB negotiated to collect occupancy tax and then pass it on to the city). That's approximately as evil as Amazon or any other online merchant, though.
All they did was pull most of the seats out of the first floor of a single car, and provide some bungie cords. You have to watch your bike at all times, since there's nothing preventing another rider from walking off with it, and you'll have other riders moving your bike to reach their own. There are rules (e.g. no trailers) which are not posted. The staff fully expect every rider to visit the website beforehand to make sure they conform to all rules.

I expect vertical bike racks, clearly posted rules at every station, and helpful staff.

Amtrak has a dedicated bike car on some of their lines, which is much better. You hand your bike over at the bike car and they'll have it out for you at your destination stop. They're faster, safer, and more trustworthy with my bike than random rider x.
One year is nothing. From experience I'd say that being poor is not hard for a year. It's the 3rd, 4th, 7th year, ... when your clothes all have holes that you've no energy to repair, your home starts to fall in to disrepair, you've been wearing leaky shoes for over a year, there appears to be no hope of ending your situation ...
yeah, this lines up with my external perception as well, and the same is generally true of steveb at Microsoft; the only time I or most of my teammates ever see him is at the Company Meeting every year, and occasionally at engineering town halls.

that said, Steve Jobs seems (at least from external appearances) to have far more thorough top-down control over the company's engineering efforts than Steve Ballmer does; the highest I ever see engineering efforts come down from is our division director.
The old standard file permission system is the default on most unixy systems because it's easy to use and understand (more or less). That doesn't mean these systems don't have ACLs.

http://linux.die.net/man/5/acl
Yeah, except for the whole Dropbox making passwords optional thing. I asked AgileBits about this and they have stated that only syncing via Dropbox is supported at this time.

I very much want to find an alternate sync solution. I think it is kind of pointless to have a secure password solution if the underlying sync is insecure or more accurately has a dismal approach to security.
Screenshots, image scraping, mass editing and combination. Canvas Glue v1.2
> While it is annoying, it is how he got to where he is.

Not necessarily. For years GoDaddy has had the cheapest non-promotional domain pricing. That's what made a lot of IT-savvy people use GoDaddy despite of its annoying user interface.
I love when the official government media outlet for a first-world power focuses on something like this. Does this mean they're giving him a pass? Or does it mean the UK will start preemptively arresting everybody with Asperger's as a threat to national security? If neither: What relevance does it have to any of this?
Bits and Pieces: Teaching and Learning
"Wikipedia is Adding a Love Button Next Week"

like, a clitoris? let's hope not, men will never be able to find it.
Does life online give you 'popcorn brain'?
Thanks for posting, but I don't understand something. Are these... important people? I've searched for a few president names and none seem to appear. I've also searched a few names on the list and couldn't really understand who they are.
It's more than banding together to get bulk discounts. Loopt is facilitating group buying - that's the "democratized" part of it.
> that one friend everyone seems to have who couldn't handle their acid.

Do you characterize people with other drug sensitivities as "unable to handle their [Advil/Codeine/Penicillin/Accutane/etc]" ?

A drug makes 1% or 0.1% of its users go insane can still reasonably be characterized as very dangerous.
I think there is something one or two steps away from what you're doing now which will be a success. Especially if you can figure out a way to lower marginal costs to deliver a service through this kind of shared pre-buy (for instance, it's only worthwhile for a business to open late at night if customer demand exists; this way customers could prepay for midnight meals at a place which normally closes at 9pm on weeknights).

Or really any service where a business might be capital constrained and where economies of scale exist.
No, sudden unforeseen and expensive illnesses aren't that common. Sudden costs are. Costs don't even need to be unforseen, they just have to be more than you can deal with on a timescale.
Maybe you do. Maybe this post was about finding shameless solicitors. Who are you and how do we get in touch?
People need to chill and not downvote just because they disagree. Seriously, what is wrong with the parent's comment?