skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
These numbers would probably be much higher were not a lot of the jobs outsourced to countries where the prevailing wages were much lower.

They'd also probably be significantly higher if the computer field was strongly unionized.

The other interesting thing is that these wages pale in comparison to what the founders of an investors in successful startups make, not to mention CEOs, CTOs, various executives, members of the board, etc.

Also, if the survey had been limited to certain industries, like finance, and certain areas of the country (like Silicon Valley and Manhattan) the averages would probably be a lot higher. Though I do suspect that this survey was probably answered mostly by programmers in the technology industry in Silicon Valley.
Yeah, I definitely wouldn't rate Grooveshark 9/10. It's great, and I've happily used it for months, but it's no Spotify. Aside from the legal issues, the sound quality is generally pretty bad, the crowd-sourced music catalogue with incorrect song/artist/album names is maddening, and 9/10 for Mobile seems a high when you have to jailbreak before you can use it on one of the largest phone platforms.
> I think you misunderstand altruism.

Let's see if we disagree.

> Altruism is primarily about whether your motivations are driven by the welfare of others, or by the welfare of yourself.

That's basically what I said, so I'm not wrong about altruism.

The remaining question is whether folks who don't appear to maximize their expected monetary return are typically altruistic.

Consider an econ professor vs a strategist at a hedge fund. The econ professor has a much less stressful life. She's got interaction with students, etc. Some people value those things more than they do the chance at an extra $500k/year.

> "Never confuse non-monetary rewards for no rewards." That has nothing to do with altruism. It doesn't matter if a person is receiving a "non-monetary reward", in the form of a sense of fulfillment, or in satisfaction.

The claim was that folks who aren't receiving monetary rewards are necessarily/mostly altruistic.

I pointed out that they're often receiving non-monetary rewards.

It's not clear whether you're saying that someone who does something for non-monetary rewards is being altruistic, but if you are, you're wrong. (Consider working for apples, or so you can live some place that you like.)

> Your "envy driven versus greed driven" argument is still one of the most peculiar things

What's odd about it? People who are concerned about how they're doing relative to other people behave differently than people who are concerned solely about how they're doing.

Yes, it's possible to "implement" greed by taking from others, but that's seen as bad. For the envious, that's seen as good.
Apparently they used to have a Radio feature, but I can't find it. This would really be a nice feature to have though so that instead of building up a queue, I could just have Spotify do it for me. It's my only problem with the service so far.
This article seems full of idle speculation and not much fact.
Well, I'm not the OP and this almost sounds snarky, but after checking out your site (nice stuff, btw!) I just searched on FB and couldn't find anything for "fab apps bundle". have you considered marketing your product on Facebook? set up a Facebook Page. add a Like button to your homepage, or go all out with the little widget that links to said FB Page. Another possibility would be submitting your bundle for review by Mashable, SocialTimes, InsideFacebook, & other FB/social media blogs.
My favorite explanation remains the one I came up with at http://www.mail-archive.com/boston-pm@mail.pm.org/msg02716.h....
1) Shown to a huge number of people. Their traffic, I'm sure, dwarfs HN's traffic.

This is definitely true. My startup was at the top of the front page on HN for a day or so (a year ago), and that sent us something like 1500 visits. The subsequent TechCrunch writeup garnered something around 5000.
Trick question; you've specified the `ipsum` column twice anyway. ;)
I agree that he should be careful about the editorial conflict of interest issue. This is assuming he hasn't already cleared it with AOL. I do think that it is a conflict of interest, but in a similar sense that HN is run by YC and an inordinate amount of YC startup news is poured through here. I'm not saying that PG et al are causing this to happen directly, but it is not a coincidence.

I think the point I'm trying to make here is that you can't scold Arrington without acknowledging that this already happens -- either directly or indirectly.
We hire the MOST INTERESTING ENGINEERS in the WORLD.
A trillion dollar coin?
Deceptive marketing? Yes. Inflated prices? Yes. Lack of competition? Totally.

But using law to impose your "moral perspective" on a pricing structure is not a solution.

The problem is that there exists no plan with reasonably-priced, reasonably-fast non-capped internet access, while there is a demand for it.

This is a market failure caused by a lack of competition in the market.

We should seek out and advocate for solutions which increase competition in the consumer broadband marketplace and ignore foolish non-solutions like this.
"Application No. US 12/973387 filed on 20-Dec-2010"

One can only laugh. They founded an entire company on a patent put together by looking at what people are currently doing, and noticing that there isn't a patent for it yet.

I can't wait to see how hard this one gets smashed into the ground!
If you object to the word "successful," then just replace it with something else. His meaning is the same as in evolutionary biology: it out-competes its peers and continues to exist. He does not mean to imply that its good or that the people who comprise the culture are happy.

By analogy, I would claim that sharks are successful. By the standard above, they clearly are: they've continued to exist and out-competed peer species for millions of years. But I'm making an objective claim only, not a value judgement on whether or not this is good.
This was by far the biggest missing feature from Rapportive, which is already one of very few free services I'd pay for.

In addition to just seeing the sender's photos, LinkedIn title, recent tweets (hover to see whole thread), etc. in the sidebar, if you hover over any email address inside the email (e.g., anyone cc'ed) it'll instantly display the information for that person as well.

I don't ever keep Twitter open (maybe I'm in the minority here) so even if you only email friends, it's nice to see what they've been tweeting when replying to their email. But if you often have people you don't know showing up in your gmail, it's a must-have
tl;dr

The court didn't "OK" the body scanners; they remanded the rule back to the TSA so that they can go through proper notice-and-comments by publishing the rule to the Federal Register. They (rightfully) ruled that there were no colorable substantive claims against the rule, based on the petitioners' arguments.

What can we do? Lobby Congress to legislate around this nightmare.
I'm in Canada and was disappointed that we were cut out of the stateside Spotify launch, so I went looking and heard a number of recommendations for Rdio.

Out of 18,384 tracks it matched 3,142. Considering my tastes are pretty mainstream and my files have very clean tags, it's hardly impressive.
The Periodic Table of Videos (1 video about each element)
Every time I see one of these signs[1] at the airport I feel strongly tempted to paste the word "theater" at the end of the last sentence.

I'm too scared of getting arrested and, in turn, having that arrest blow my chances of immigrating[2].

[1] http://www.flickr.com/photos/katiekills/5616870009/

[2] Though the more of this sort of BS I see, the less I really want to stay here in the US. :(
That's a shame for now, but the fact that related artists are presented very clearly (and you're able to quickly see their most popular songs) doesn't make discovery as bad as the article is claiming. I find myself listening to a lot more different music with Spotify than other discovery services such as Last.fm.
I would bet that the respondents were mostly from the US, and mostly from the technology industry in Silicon Valley.

However, it would certainly have been a much more meaningful poll were if there was some demographic information (location, sex, age) along with information on industry, experience, and job description.
In your scheme, you are simply trading assets that are reflected by a liability of the organisation that runs the system, so you are not actually using gold for everyday transactions. It's the same as the difference between using gold itself and a gold-backed currency.

As to the question of what is better, my answer to that is two-fold.

First of all, history paints a misleading picture of the strength of gold-backed currencies. After all, when things go seriously wrong economically under gold-backed currencies, ending convertibility is usually one of the first things that governments do. Then the final death of the currency happens after it has become a fiat currency, but of course the failure is ultimately one of a gold-backed currency. Generally, whether a currency fails is not related to whether it is fiat or gold-backed anyway (such as with the failure of the Weimar mark, which happened to be fiat money; but both the move away from gold convertibility and the hyperinflation were caused by the First World War).

Second, while it is obvious that fiat money can be rejected totally, and gold will always retain at least some minimum value based on its use in jewellery and industrial production, this is not a useful measure to decide which system is better.

I claim that the real measure should be: How well does the economy fare, how well does it serve society, under a modern fiat money system vs. older systems.

Here, there is a great amount of evidence in favour of modern fiat money arrangements. Compare the cycle of booms and busts in the 19th century with the relative calm of the second half of the 20th century. In fact, that period was so calm that economists even claimed that the business cycle had been tamed! (They called it the Great Moderation.) Of course, this was hubris as the current crisis has demonstrated, but it should give you a taste of just how successful the combination of modern central banking with fiat money has been.

(I do not think this calmness was purely due to using fiat money, but I would claim that using fiat money certainly helped. The correlation is obvious, one can debate over the causal link of course.)
Great application.I was a beta tester, my car was stolen with just purchased merchandise.I got the receipts for the insurance claim from the application.
I'm on the opposite side of that. I find it amusing when people try to justify certain actions with corollaries found in animals. The amazing thing about being human is that we can overcome instinct, and it doesn't even require superhuman effort. Regular old human effort will do.
So now... What if this business is based in China? Coca Cola can't sue them that easily, but they can easily sue Facebook.
I was liking it too, until the abrupt meter change in line 7. People almost invariably mess up the meter when writing this kind of verse. It's a hallmark of tone-deafness, or whatever the equivalent is for rhythym. For anyone who is paying attention, it spoils the effect.

But then I noticed something surprising. Yes, the meter changes abruptly from iambic to trochaic at line 7, i.e. the stress goes from even syllables ("I think that I shall never see") to odd ones ("First the root must be selected.") However, the shift is executed perfectly: the meter is a steadfast trochee for four lines and then reverts to iamb for the final couplet.

Accident? I doubt it. Each of the four trochaic lines is a complete sentence. The iambic lines all have exactly one sentence per two lines. No, this is the rare case where the writer knows exactly what she is doing. Bravo Radia Perlman!
I have no doubt that Comcast's lobbyists take every opportunity to push for "starve the beast"-style cuts to the FCC. But I sincerely doubt they think it remotely in their interest to see the US actually default.

Being able to squeeze more profit per subscriber loses its luster if another economic calamity causes home internet access to become a luxury again. They already see the danger that they may become a dumb pipe that only provides backhaul access for wireless cells. (see their wireless deals and partnerships)

If another economic snap forces people to choose between their home internet and their smartphones, guess who wins and guess who hemorrhages subscribers like a POTS provider? And they'll have a hell of a time convincing people to pick those plans back up, years later, if/as things recover. Even though home phone service has become dirt cheap with VoIP offerings, that hasn't brought back customers. If people cut Comcast and start to go wireless-data only, it'll be terribly hard to reverse.

To say nothing of Comcast's investments and stock price, which would tank (along with most everything else) in the crisis that would follow an actual default.
Mr Burns already had a trillion dollar bill: http://download.lardlad.com/framegrabs/5F14/109.jpg
I'm sure Google will fill in some of the gaps and improve functionality over time but without some radical changes I don't think Google+ is different enough from Facebook to make much of an impact. If they're lucky they can be the Pepsi to Facebook's Coke.
well from what I can see his first review is in February of this year.
Tweetbot and Push Notifications
Gender Diversity and Kids: Happiness Matters, not Nail Polish
It all begins at home. Should you allow your son to wear nail polish out of the house? If he likes it, why not? Wearing nail polish will not make him gay;
it will not make him transgender. It just may make him happy.
Only 5 different ways to do this?... that sounds like the most concise thing in ALL of PHP.
It seems to me developers have the following options regarding this sort of thing:

1. Only remake software that has obvious prior art you can refer to, preferably if the software being replicated is past the age of patent expiration.

2. Release anything that might infringe as open source, with a patent protection license clause (Apache, etc.), using a pseudonym to avoid being targeted.

3. Move to a location outside of legal jurisdiction, and use business trickery to operate in countries. Have fun setting up shell companies and other ways to frustrate litigants.
Gender Spectrum - Support for Families of Gender Variant
Gender Spectrum provides education, training and support to help create a gender sensitive and inclusive environment for all children and teens.
I'm really tired so I'm not 100% sure it's exactly linear, but if the bandwidth is around half then you get twice as much usage. So instead of 5 hours it would be 10 hours, which I'm guessing is around 1.4% of the month.
It would be good if the book involved a problem or app that is well suited for backbone and the book/code works on that app until the completion
Is it possible to see couple sample pages?
This Summer:
http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?id=10549
No. You should really read more before pontificating.

Feminism did not arise because we suddenly stopped valuing women as mothers. It arose because that is all we valued in women[1].

The history, if you bother to read it, bears this out. Hell, even today, certain attitudes bear this out, although with the help of feminism, we see less of it in modern culture.

Do you think a woman should be allowed to become a doctor? A physicist? To run in a marathon? SHould she be less valued if she chooses not to be a mother? Should she be forced to make a choice between those occupations and motherhood? And if she chooses both, which should be more valued by society?

[1] Ok, not all, but I'll leave out the other aspects so-as not to confuse the issue.
Four Thoughts For An Early Stage Startup
Equity which has a pretty good chance of being totally worthless, even if you're lucky enough not to work for a company that will screw over its shareholding employees, like Skype did.
This thing is very common in India. Check out http://emergic.org/2009/02/17/we-versus-vodafone/
http://emergic.org/2009/02/18/we-versus-vodafone-day-2/
http://emergic.org/2009/02/18/we-versus-vodafone-day-2/
Would love to hear more about "I write scripts that do things for me with a single command."
Comcast appears to be aware of the net neutrality concerns since they don't give their Xfinity streaming service any preference[1]. Their VOIP, however, doesn't count against your quota. They claim that is because it uses different infrastructure.

1: http://customer.comcast.com/Pages/FAQViewer.aspx?seoid=Frequ...
>Secondly, the author doesn't make a convincing argument that the fact that the reason why men get all the risk and all the reward is because of something innate, instead of a self-perpetuating social system that actively encourages one gender to risk it all and reap the rewards, while holding back the other gender to mediocrity and risk-free existences. The possibility is raised for a few sentences, and discarded, as if it's ridiculous, and it's obvious that the reasons are inherent.

I think that the mechanism for what he is describing is the difference in neurotransmitter and hormone balances. Nobody is going to argue that men have more testosterone than women and that women have more estrogen than men. Nobody is going to argue that these things change behavior - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testosterone#Physiological_effe... Similarly, nobody is going to argue that men cannot bear children because of social conditioning. Why is it so difficult to accept that men and women are physically and psychologically built for different sets of requirements and therefore have different probabilities of performing particular actions? I'm not suggesting that it's set in stone, but there are certainly tendencies to go in a particular direction.

>the statement "the British Empire did a lot more good than harm" is a disgusting, privileged statement that really doesn't elicit much more than pitying contempt from me.

Completely agree, building roads for your slaves doesn't free them.
Whoa... take out liquids? When did that start?
Having spent over 8 years doing drug R&D I can tell you that it is most certainly not the other way around. The specific kind of chemistry you need to develop a drug (a discipline known as medicinal chemistry) is exclusively practiced inside pharmaceutical companies. The academic research in the field is paltry. Without a compound, all e basic bio in the world is useless.

By your logic though, aren't all technology companies subsidized by the federal government? Don't companies like Intel and IBM use various discoveries from academia to make their products? Aren't all software companies essentially benefitting from government funded research into computer networking, language design, etc... Where do you draw the line?
I love the gid-scribe idea, I am learning backbone atm and one of the problems is the changes in 0.5.0 seem to put lots of old resources out of whack by a few degrees.

I think resources should be paid for (I just bought the peepcode videos from a comment here) I would be mildly worried that $49 might be a little high for some, but then again I hope I am wrong. Previews are always nice to see, the first couple of chapters to get a feel.
My only point is he is blaming google for everyone of his own failures. Rather than blaming google, do something productive about it. A lot of these issues have been known issues and if he did any sort of diligence would be fully aware of these by now. As I pointed out there are plenty of successes on the Google Market, and a lot of developers on doing very well on the Market itself.

I welcome his advice for other developers to wait, that means more opportunity for developers that do want to develop on the Android marketplace.
It's not irrelevant in practice, at least not for me. I deal in enormous amounts of data that couldn't possibly fit into RAM.
With most of these services you're bound to not be able to find a few songs. What's important is whether or not it fails gracefully into letting you manage those missing music files yourself and Spotify, Rhapsody, and Grooveshark are the only ones that let you do that to some extent.
> I would argue that, after 1.5 years of running my own business, I am more of an expert than any fresh-out-of-Harvard-MBA

I congratulate you on your experiences, I truly do, but last time I checked, HBS wasn't accepting recent grads, part-time students or the occasional dropouts looking for a career change, nor those with little experience. Never mind people looking for the name cache. It wouldn't hold true for 100% of the cases, of course, because Harvard is a business after all, not a bastion of ethics. Some rich kids are going to slip in, but the vast majority are qualified to attend ~ same holds true for any incubator program.

HBS grads have on average four to six years of solid work experience, national service or administrative experience prior to being considered for admission, not to mention recommendations from employers, civic leaders and the like, a history of competitive grades, extended education, community service, upstanding morality and all that. You can check it out here: http://www.hbs.edu/mba/faq/

Not exactly a bunch of lightweights.

I'm not sure where the MBA are coming from on your end, but I can say without a doubt that a grunt with 1.5 years experience doesn't scale up to someone being admitted into the top B-Schools in the U.S. And once graduated with that fresh diploma, well, they'd give you the headlight stare if you tried to compare your TS/YC experience against theirs. They're on a whole 'nother level than someone jerking SEO. Personally, I don't like the twats and usually won't work with them, but I don't like MIT engineering peeps either, my personal preference, but I would be remiss if I didn't point out that as a whole, on average they're hard-working, intelligent strivers and given the choice, I'd go work with a recent Harvard MBA over a TS/YC grad with X years experience, and not just because I know the doors to opportunity will open faster, but also because more often than not, these people have been there before and know how to act.

In two years you should apply to Harvard, Stern, Wharton, Tuck, Stanford or Sloan. Let me know what the admissions committees think of you or if your outlook has changed.
As for #2, if I were you I would change the application name in the Android Store to "Out of Milk Shopping List", if you really believe search results matter.

I mean, have you noted that almost all the applications that rank in front of you have either "shopping list", "shopping" or "list" in their titles? I bet search gives more relevance to titles than to categories/descriptions, and you are getting bitten by this. Note that "Mighty Grocery Shopping List" which is the first paid app on the shopping category ranks on the first page when searching for "shopping list".
Has anyone on HN ever actually used one of these in code they've written?

I've never understood why y-combinator is useful or impressive. Interesting, maybe, but not really useful.
Pretty much every service out there has related artists. But the US version of Spotify has only that.
What having a daughter taught me about business - Part I
It's great. By far the best browser for my Cube. I'm not much of a Firefox fan so that's saying a lot.
Not just big customers. Here in Toronto (not in Shaw's jurisdiction, but if Shaw isn't slapped hard on this very soon, Rogers and Bell will do the same), we have Time-Of-Usage rates with smart meters. Our usage is still fairly predictable because there's three time bands, but we pay 5.9c/kWh at low price, 8.9c/kWh at mid price, and 10.7c/kWh at high price (http://www.torontohydro.com/sites/electricsystem/residential...).
You've never seen a dog overcome instinct?

It's not a uniquely human ability.