skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are definitely legitimate reasons for doing this quickly, and having the policy in place to delete sensitive customer data (vs. turn it over to other companies) is definitely a good thing (and a lot better than a lot of companies in the past).

Probably the best time to think about continuity for users is when the service has just been set up. I think it matters a lot more for things like Geocities, Vox, etc. than for a more realtime communications service.
The author mentions always giving MongoDB its own server. Can anyone shed some light on that?
I've observed the same issue. Some exit nodes work, but I get the 502 errors frequently.
Is there a Socket.IO interface, such as Tornadio (https://github.com/MrJoes/tornadio) for Tornado?
As with most things coming out of India, I would take this with a grain of salt. There've been promises of things like a $10 laptop and a $35 tablet in the past. When (if ever) they actually materialized, however, the price was either much higher or the quality/features much lower than promised.

Relatedly, this is a big difference between India and China. In China, when the CPC decides to do something, it happens, no matter how many heads roll in the process. One of India's biggest failures has been its inability to keep up with its promises.
Who hasn't got their chicken pox yet?
I never understand why we keep drafting all sorts of identity mechanisms instead of using public key. It's easy to understand, very secure, and battle-field tested.
> There's plenty of nostalgia for these establishments, but the things that have replaced them electronically give us incredibly better selection at less of a cost.

The question is: who will buy all these things (doesn't matter if it's online or offline) if more and more people don't have a steady paycheck?
He's still there: https://plus.google.com/104560124403688998123/posts
Anonymous gets banned from Google+, creates his own social network
In economics a public good is defined as a good that is both non-rivalrous and non-excludable. In other words, a public good is defined as a product or service where the following are True:

- An additional consumer of the product or service does not impact the ability of others to consume

- It is not possible to prevent someone from consuming the good

A good example of a public good is something like national defense.

A bad example of a public good is university education. University education meets neither of the criteria necessary in order to be classified as a public good.

I think that what the author means to say is that there are positive externalities that are associated with the provision of public universities.

While your conceptual waiter with a degree in women's studies is a dubious example of the benefits of education, there is some evidence available that suggests that the availability of education is, in the aggregate, strongly correlated with certain positive societal outcomes.

This is a bit outside of my areas of study, so I am not able to suggest specific readings. However, I can point you in the general direction of a couple of Google scholar search results:

- Education and Crime Reduction: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=education+and+crime

- Education and Macroeconomic Effects: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=education+and+...

Of course, there is also some evidence that strongly calls into question the general purpose of post-secondary education. Is post-secondary education beneficial in its own right or is post-secondary education simply another useful bullet point on a resume? Is it a signaling mechanism or is it a valuable addition to society?

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics) (Yes, I know that this is wikipedia, but it is a nice article.)

Edit: I clicked update too fast the first time. I nearly forgot to say. If the primary benefit of post-secondary education is that it provides a useful signal, then it stands to reason that there may be more cost-effective ways of achieving this end.
"a job isn't a right but something you earn"

I definitely agree but when you are at a company who has employed you for a long time and have been doing your job well, then who's not to say that now unemployed person hasn't earned that job. The time spent at that job performing well could have been spent learning some new in-demand skill but think of the opportunity cost. Now when these people are unemployed, do we really think society has provided the motivation, resources, and most importantly, direction, to change their view on career and development. It's a very big step and I believe its naive to think that unemployment is an event actionable enough to make someone switch their mentality.
I don't know why you've been downvotted. Anyway, I said it before, the question remains: with which money will these unemployed people buy shiny new things? Because Government handouts won't cut it.
Very cool stuff. I've been fighting with uploading 3D videos, and one of the things there is a side-by-side video uploader which makes things super easy
Maybe the theater degree will offer the waiter more opportunities for self-fulfillment outside of work.

This is a private benefit, not a public one.

And he won't spit in your food.

So the primary purpose in giving people economically worthless education is to prevent them from committing crimes?
I think this is pretty accurate, however there is a potential structural problem: entry level, or low level jobs in general don't pay people enough to invest time or resources in improving their skills - certainly not for longer term shifts in the economy.

"Earning" a job, implies that people invest their own resources in preparing themselves for the future. I am vehemently in favor of that as a general way for society to operate.

However, this vision requires that people have sufficient resources to make these investments. Given the increasing disparities of resource allocation that we're seeing, why should we assume that this is possible?
Meteorite falls in Kenya
“We believe it is a heavenly body, probably a piece of a meteor that may have disintegrated on entering the earth’s atmosphere,” said Lt Col Vungo, who was accompanied by Thika police boss Paul Leting.
You can do this with code as well. Migrate from sourceforge, put an -ng on the name and put it on github.
The Color Of Your Website Has A Huge Impact On What People Buy
In a capitalist society, "people with deep pockets" is an approximation of "capable people".
I am retraining myself, too. By inclination I am a liberal artsy guy with only a slight interest in technical stuff, but I've seen the writing on the wall and am learning to program. Turns out that it can be quite fun anyway. :-)
However, science should modernize to modern computing's terms, so as to allow for easier cross training in modern techniques to make their uses of programming go smoother.
If you refuse to give in you will be amazed at what you can accomplish
Here is NASA's press release.
http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/feature_stories/spacecraft_to_enter...
Programming isn't that hard - why don't any of them want to join us? You could become a passable programmer in 3 years and there's no school admittance board you have to impress with test scores!
Deprecation is a signal that it will be removed in the future, not an immediate removal. The entire point of deprecation is that it allows library authors to signal that a thing will be removed in the future, down the road, when everybody as switched to something better. If that mechanism isn't reliable, then apparently there is something wrong with the language community.
To be honest, $10 laptop or $35 tablet; were Govt. funded organizations fighting for some limelight.When some politician appeared on news channels with a prototype, you know where the project was going.

This is more of Tatas attempt to fix things, but unlike Nano Car project, govt. does have some involvement here, so I am not holding my breadth.

And yeah like it or not, it is good that Govt stops if something is not popular. Thank god for that.
It is very unlikely to be using homomorphic encryption; it's only 2011, after all.

There are any number of ways to store an encrypted file such that you can transfer deltas to it instead of entire new versions. They support different kinds of deltas. Some of them are secure.

I have not read the code.
Actually there were quite a few companies trying to make a sub $2000 car but only the tatas succeeded albeit at a slightly higher price.

Yes there is a government subsidy for the lowest cost home but in India relying on the government keeping the same policy for more than 4 years is a little insane.
The idea being these skills are translatable.

In that case, Math is always superior to Women's studies. Math is economically beneficial and also helps maintain a functioning democracy. Women's studies only does the latter.

Following this logic, the author is incorrect that the public goods are being unbundled from the private goods.
Is this a politically motivated article or what? Most if not all of the comments of the page, not to mention the article on the page, deal with Republican vs. Democrat issues. The subject at the top is even written as "American politics".
Interesting - does anyone have a link to the actual study mentioned? I tried to post a comment there but their signup process is stupid.
So the primary purpose in giving people economically worthless education is to prevent them from committing crimes?

So it's economically worthless to decrease the number of criminals in society?
Certainly, as long as you can avoid giving board seats and heavy veto privileges to people you consider dumb. You can also bring in more relevant investors in future rounds.
This would mean that the value of one of these cheap tiny houses is about the price of three years worth of income. In America, a house (including land) averages around $200k to $250k in a fairly populated area (Denver, Portland, Seattle, etc - you can forget about SF) which comes in at around three years or four years of income. It would seem kind of weird to be marketing a $200k home as a "cheap solution" for the poor.
That's your problem, should have planned better.
To me, that is the real business model innovation of social/web2.0 - college students will just move back home, saddled with debt, and entertain each other on a site you control, generating revenue for you.

Their parents will fund their basic needs, at least until they themselves die or run out of credit, government subsidies, etc.

It was not designed to be sustainable -- it was designed to extract as much wealth as possible for its founders, as quickly as possible, before war/peak oil/or whatever hits.
TheAdvantrix
Interesting. Are you saying that Spotify's radio is more like actual radio? Where you just listen and what's on is on?

If so then Grooveshark definitely deserves a higher rating than Spotify for radio. Recommendations can be improved but not being able to skip a track is a big design flaw (for me, I can see how some want a set-it-and-forget-it radio).
The New Yorker[1] has one of many references on the internet, but the price was 100,000 shares of pre-IPO Apple stock at $10 per share. The visit happened (over the protests of some at PARC). There are some side comments about the visit in "Triumph of the Nerds“.

1) http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/16/110516fa_fact_...
To be a good programmer is hard. It requires knowledge of a lot of areas - math, logic, algorithms, particular languages, operating system, networks, databases, particular technologies.

Just think of what it really takes to create even a simple dynamic website.
PHP function to perform a basic cURL request and return the result. Got a little bit tired of writing "curl_setopt(...".
I would hesitate to call the use of an object as defined in the ECMAscript spec "misuse." Perhaps it is becoming a best practice to avoid it, but it's not misuse yet until we know that it causes an unavoidable performance degradation.

The lesson here is that one feature of V8 is an arguments optimization, but you must never pass the object to other functions (i.e., you have to manually inline the calls you would have made).
It annoyed me that in C#, you have to check whether someone is subscribed to an event before raising it. An Extension Method:

public static bool CheckedRaise<T>(this EventHandler<T> eh, object sender, T e)
where T : EventArgs
{
bool check = eh != null;

if (check)
eh(sender, e);

return check;
}
Did you comment on the wrong story? I do not understand how you connected a story about the Commodore 64 floppy drive in the 1980s with Apple & Google today.
Happy Healthy Long Life: The Longevity/Vigor Quest by centenarian Joe Rollino.
Strength Training Aids Mental Acuity in Elderly Women,
How do you deal with priorities within a GTD system?
There is a difference between stealing an idea and blatant copying.
The Tata car is a ridiculous piece of metal that should not be called a car. So I hope the Tata home will be better... Not very optimistic though...
No one in India bought that $35 tablet news since it was by the government.

Remember, in China developments happen with more government participation whereas in India developments happen with lesser government participation.
The divide isn't between SV and the unemployed, but between the educated and uneducated.

And educational status is strongly predicted by IQ in the U.S. EDIT: And since IQ is strongly influenced by genetics, this latest data suggests the U.S. is creating a genetic underclass. Taken far enough, this is the death of the republic.

Under IQ 90, 40% drop out of high school. Above IQ 110, less than 1% drop out of high school.

Percent with bachelor's
degree by IQ (ignoring
family wealth)

IQ %
--- --
85 2
100 10
115 30
130 75

Family wealth has a modest effect. For IQ 100, coming from a super-wealthy family boosts bachelor's degree attainment to 30%.

Source: NLSY project, early 1980s, as analyzed in The Bell Curve in the mid 1990s.
I wish it was at least a little more standardized across schools and majors. A little variance is fine but i went to a school where evreryone,not just me, had to study into the night to maintain barely passing grades in any technical subject while kids at other schools and "easier" majors maintained 3.5+ without cracking open a book.
It's a coincidence.

In the past decade or so we've witnessed a few industries lost to technology advancement - travel agencies, consumer electronics retail, newspapers. The way things are headed it's a matter of few years before titles such as 'real estate agent' or 'car salesman' are carrier around by significantly fewer people.

Number-wise the real estate bubble provided plenty of jobs to people involved in construction, mortgage financing, mortgage brokerage, mortgage repurchasing, real estate sales, etc. Without the housing bubble we would've seen slow but steady drops in employment, with housing bubble we're just seeing the same effect in a more abrupt manner.
How Should Canadians Hold U.S. Real Estate Investments?
Windows Phone 7 is 'stealing' the idea [of a touch-screen smart phone]. That is very different than just copying. Ex:

http://www.cultofmac.com/side-by-side-comparison-samsung-vs-...
It really only condenses 2 calls down to one, but since I never change some of the parameters, it saves me a bit of time.

def run( command ):
process = subprocess.Popen(
command,
stdout=subprocess.PIPE,
stderr=subprocess.PIPE
)
return process.communicate()
I was also surprised at the number of awards and honors he's acquired at an insanely young age. He even scored 760 on the SAT when he was only 8 years old!
By improving efficiency we are improving the quality of life of those around the world. Due to rapid improvements in technology those in the poorest countries can now easily access information, entertainment, books, knowledge from anywhere in the world at remarkably low cost -> Greatly improving their quality of life (if we agree that life like we have in the west is the goal).
Show HN: BetAnnoyer, you owe me bro (app I created)
The program has been around for 25 years, according to wikipedia.
Curious that the neighbors would rather have an unmaintained and abandoned property sit vacant and all of the potential associated problems with that rather than occupied by someone who presumably has an interest in keeping it up.
It's Tata (singular). What a lewd misspelling.
Thank you. That had not occurred to me.
A PHP 'get or else' which replaces

$some_var = isset($array[$key]) ? $array[$key] : $default;
Thomas Jefferson on Patents
Haha,this is kinda hilarious!
A High-Bandwidth Interplanetary Connection
Ask HN: What are some examples of software patents used for good?
In light of all the cross suing, most recently the Apple/HTC lawsuits, and stuff like Lodsys' trolling app developers it's hard to imagine software patents being more than tools for greedy companies.

In the interest of not falling prey to sensationalism I wanted to find out if there's more to the story than just "software patents are evil."
I often have to create a service/api to serve (and cache) 3rd party content cause of rate limiting. a few servers much < than 10,000's of clients. This makes a few days of work/testing into a few 10's of minutes.
The subject at the top is even written as "American politics".

Chill. It's just the name of the section within The Economist in which this article was published. They're UK-based, so they mostly write about other stuff than American politics.
I think to be a good/great programmer is hard. But to be a good-enough programmer to make a well-above-average living isn't that tough.
Consider that if you eliminate building codes, sealed windows, and the need for thermal insulation a "house" is trivial and could be made with anything from cement to adobe to some sort of lighter and stronger version of adobe made with modern materials.

I visited some houses in Costa Rica that were cinder block structures with corrugated roofs and wide bars for windows (to prevent thieves but not geckos) and these were very comfortable. Materials and construction costs couldn't have amounted to much.
THE CRAZIES Leaks Server Certificates of Defense Information Systems Agency
There might also be an effect of continuous education hiding unemployment or rather, to put it bluntly, some people who would otherwise be unemployed, hiding in the education system.

Many of those with high school diploma who are not unemployed are not employed either but are taking part in further education. Similarly, many of those with an undergrad degree are currently in grad school, etc.

It would be interesting to compare the employment rates of the various groups as well.
if you're interested in ssh-like functionality and http, I just wired browserid into my shell server for in-browser logins: http://benctechnicalblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/browserid-in-b...
A designers most used function:

In SCSS I use a very simple mixin for rounded corners, something I use frequently when designing sites.

@mixin radius($dist) {
border-radius:$dist;
-moz-border-radius:$dist;
-webkit-border-radius:$dist;
-khtml-border-radius:$dist;
-webkit-background-clip:padding-box;
}

Then in the class just add:

@include radius(5px);
I don't think it is education per se, but having a job that people are unwilling or unable to put at the other end of the world. I have friends that have a high school education, but have skills that command $50 - $80/hr. They are in vocational jobs working the ND oil fields. Automation is nowhere near good enough to replace them, and at -20F when a pipe needs repair you need good, skilled people now.

I guess depending on how broad your definition is, then it my scenario supports your assertion. All vocational people have a training period (modern version of an apprenticeship).

I'm not sure a lot of IT is actually that safe. Companies have a lot easier time outsourcing IT to another country then welders. Silicon Valley has inertia and good laws to foster innovation and startups, but others can change their laws and unfunded liabilities of the state government might not allow for stable conditions long term. SF's attempt at taxing might not be an anomaly but a trend.
Ha, I noticed that, too. But it was the headline of the article, so I thought I had been mistaken. I'm relieved to see that's not the case. Shoddy editing.
Advanced OO Patterns in PHP [video]
And the kind of education that offers real financial benefit is often technical or mathematical in nature.

So there is something I wonder about: is there an IQ "floor" below which very few people will be able to benefit from or even complete this sort of education? What percentage of the population falls under this floor? And what will they be doing in the future as both the "service" and manual labor sectors, the traditional absorbers of people with no degrees or impractical "soft" degrees, dwindle in the number of people employed?
I'm pretty happy with the similar "squatter's rights" laws. Abandoned property is generally a drag on a community (e.g. lower property values, danger to children, haven for criminals). If someone is willing to provide upkeep in such a precarious situation for years and the owner doesn't protest, I'd love to see them take possession.
Education level is more likey to be an effect than a cause. Those from not poor families have better education levels. Education level is influenced by ethnicity, age, gender and host of other factors (mental health, assertiveness, "drive", etc).

I'd believe those other factors have huge influence on employment. It's not so simple as get education -> job & life of ease.
Again, look at the context.

Also, in addition to hard incentives, are you providing any soft ones? Literally saying, if you're bored or unhappy, we'd like to know. (And we're not looking to screw you over with the knowledge.)

Are you backing up such statements with actions that demonstrate your good will?

If you were taken by surprise, were you communicating effectively with this employee? ( A primary action that can demonstrate good will.)

Finally, what's the demographic in question? Young people, on average, "go off and do things". It's one reason some employers favor married, settled (even "boring") employees. They are more predictable.

(And these days, getting married and starting a family is less "the thing to do" than it used to be. It's still done, plenty, but it's not the course of action that it used to be.)

If you wanted them to "do things" with you, it seems perhaps you should have been more pro-active in making that part of the assignment. Even then, there's no guarantee.

For many employees, disengagement begins long before they quit. If you want the relationship to be valued, your only course of action is to begin doing so from your end.

Too many self-interested employers (speaking generally, not necessarily of you) get their undies in a bunch when employees -- perhaps taking a cue from them -- start acting the same way.

To repeat my and others' question: What's in it for them?
One thing this article is missing is that lots of technology innovation is deflationary. As The Great Stagnation points out, lots of people are substituting $1 plus two hours of Farmville for a movie (and dinner out, and gas to get there). As more forms of entertainment and social status are available to the unemployed, the pressure to get a job lessens. You may not be employee of the month or drive a nice car, but if you have lots of free time you can get a pretty good mount without affecting GDP.

There's an assumption that a growing middle class with an increasing standard of living is the norm. From what I can see, it's been the norm for a pretty short period, in a pretty small part of the world. There are plenty of reasons to think that the New Deal plus the GI Bill plus the Great Moderation was just a weird, aberrant part of human history.
I get the feeling a good chunk of programmers would have tried their hand at early electrical / mechanical engineering. Planes and cars were in their infant stage. Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (IBM in 1924) would have been interesting.

// Some in the IT field would have been selling snake oil, because they do it today.