skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This really interesting, and somewhat depressing at the same time. I also remember the 'big-bang' in the UK, and the rise of the yuppie, "loads-a-money" types etc., which corresponded with the start of my working life.

A few years ago, I had some contact contracting in a large corp., and it was quite a feat to adjust to the life 'inside', where to be quite honest, life was a good bit slower, with a largely out-of-sight board, and dictates coming from on-high.

The take-away for me, is that not everyone is a Paul Graham, or a Zed Shaw, or a fogus, and that if you support the overall welfare of the country, then we should also support the population at large with reasonable roles that can support them with a living wage.

If we don't do this, and we haven't been, then the consequences of a giant unruly, unhappy and active underclass await.
You're right that it's gotten harder for blue-collar people in the US. However, those jobs now belong to former subsistence farmers in developing nations, so it's quite different when you look at it from a global perspective.
Google Confirms Hints Dropped About Dart 'Structured' VM
Inception of The Art of Computer Programming
Note: That graph is personal income per capita, not personal income per worker or per hour worked.
Bug in Google Analytics?
There's an assumption here that being richer just lets you buy more stuff and services.

Wealth, however, is power. While Bill Gates may be no more capable than me at driving faster on the 101, I definitely can't pay a lobbying firm 10 million dollars a year to make sure government policy serves my interests, or secretly pay to have lies told in support of my cause by dozens of seemingly credible people.

Some proportion of people are going to be unethical, and there are > 400 billionaires in the U.S.

The conveniently ignored problem with rising wealth inequality is the power imbalances it creates, and the strong reinforcing feedback loops it enables.

[edited to fix typo]
From Sushi to Tunisia: A Guide to Swaying Majority Opinion
This is all totally sane. Virtually everything on our "careers" page (which is far from perfect) came from feedback from people who passed on us. The single most important factor we've identified so far is responsiveness.

It is so easy to inadvertently go dark on a candidate.

These guys observe that employees are almost never as dedicated to the company as the founders. A similar thing happens during recruiting, except it's the employer who isn't as dedicated as the candidate. For most companies, the simple truth is that your decision on your next hire is not as important to the company as the decision is to the candidate. Your next hire is unlikely to totally transform your company. But it will certainly be transformative for the new hire!

As a result, you should assume time is moving 10x slower for candidates than it is for you.

The only thing I'd add to this set of advice (ie, the only bit of advice I have that I think ranks up there with theirs) is, debrief the people who pass on you. Actually debrief everyone. Find out what people hate about your hiring process, so you can start fixing it. I've found that nobody minds questions like these, so go ahead and ask.
Per worker, not by hour worked, where I believe I've seen [citation needed] at least the French and likely others have us beat.
The first half of your comment is idiotic and unworthy of HN. Find me someone who has actually stated that the poor deserve their lot. The Tea Party's primary gripe is that the government is picking winners and losers and the best way to get rich is now to lobby rather than to work hard. Even Reagan, the godlike idol of the small-government right, never thought the poor deserved it, he just thought that the best way to help them was to grow the economy as a whole (through policies that ultimately sucked).

The second half I also disagree with, but it's just a failure of logic and a disconnect of values, not flat out idiotic.
Does Using a 3rd Party API Decrease Your Engagement Per Post?
It saddens me that you introduce the straw man of the zeroth percentile, "firmly anchored at zero". It wasn't in the linked article, which only talked about quintiles, none of which are anchored at zero. And with respect to these statistics, clearly someone taking an unpaid vacation is not in the class "production and non-supervisory workers".

I have little problem with inequality. I do think there are some downsides, like the threat of violent revolution, but my point is that I'm not making some hobgoblin of wealth or income inequality. I don't really care whether 20% of U.S. wealth is controlled by the top 1% or the top 10%.

But it does strike me as a little troubling to see -4% gains for the bottom percentile over a period of 80% increased productivity (taking those stats at face value).
The 'what people want' on that page shows that people are confused between wealth and income; nothing more. The simple fact of saving money for retirement creates more wealth concentration than that.
have you seen the demos they shown so far? the metro view in tablet form can be all you ever see. the legacy desktop code doesnt even get loaded. it's similar to what apple did with mac osx and ios, except you have the option of loading either of them.
Attacks of the Brain-Controlling Parasites
Fun fact: I was asked to find a solution to this problem during an interview at a proprietary trading firm last year.

I wish I had read this paper before.
libc implements a function called open. Its documentation appears in section 3 of the UNIX manual. Because of that, we call it open(3). Linux implements a system call called open. Its documentation appears in section 2 of the UNIX manual. Because of that, we call it open(2). From assembly, you manually call open(2). From a C program linked against libc, you typically open(3). open(3) can be hooked, because it's just a regular function. open(2) is not a function, and so cannot be hooked like a function.
"""Always-On reflected in bills: Currently the side-by-side bills still include the cost of always-on even though it will be retired when the new pricing launches (to be replaced by min idle instances). We’re working on a fix for this. Until then you can comfortably subtract 48 instance hours per day from the estimate. """

Please don't provide a calculator for a new billing system and then ask your customers to manually adjust the output of the calculator. Terrible user experience and in this case it inflates the apparent bill.
In a centralized VCS check-ins and branching are the sorts of things that risk breaking tests and require your team's awareness

Huh? Branching code in no way affects the code that has been branched.

Instead of a flat directory as your sandbox you've got a full VCS at your disposal

I don't get it. I can make as many branches in Subversion as I want. It's pretty common for me to have a couple of active branches off the same parent, as I try a couple of different approaches to a problem.

So far, the only advantage I see to Git is the ability to make offline commits (presumably they sync when I have a network connection). But that's only an advantage in my hypothetical future where I'm developing code as I travel around the world.
The Death Star: A Pentagon Purchasing Nightmare
Gandi because you get full control of your zone file and SSL cert
What kind of cryptography do you need to use, in order to avoid the prospect of two different predictions, encrypted with different private keys, resolving to the same encrypted text?
I don't understand why this is downvoted. Does somebody disagree? Why?

It's true, every time I see CoffeeScript vs JavaScript examples, they're often unfair. Some addressed in this older thread[1].

Another thing I don't understand is why make the parenthesis for function calls optional? Such as

sum_and_difference 5, 2

Especially since one of the most common complaints about JavaScript is ambiguous inconsistency (var, semicolons).

Ok, so parenthesis are optional,

foo = myfunction()

calls myfunction, but

foo = myfunction

does not? I suppose this is better than the way Ruby does it where you have to jump through hoops to get a reference to your function, but is this really better than making parenthesis for calls mandatory?

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2542492
I think it primarily applies to less capital intensive products, and more specifically software.
Arrow button in CSS3
As a US citizen you may not be aware of this, but the time between 1970 and 1980 was also when full employment was effectively abandoned as a policy goal in most Western countries.

In countries like France, Germany and Australia, unemployment was constantly below 4% for many decades after WWII, even below 1% in many cases. What's more, rises in the unemployment rate due to recessions were quickly and successfully fought using fiscal policy. In fact, such policies where quite consciously implemented after WWII even in countries that did not see large scale destruction, because the consensus was that returning soldiers needed to be given employment to avoid social problems.

Unfortunately, low unemployment meant better bargaining positions for workers, and so getting rid of this "problem" was quite openly discussed for some time (this was documented in a PhD thesis, http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=11941). Economic troubles in the 1970s helped convince people that something needed to change and made it easier for attitudes towards economic policy to be changed, i.e. the shock doctrine. Thatcher in the UK was probably the most memorable driver of this change with her very open fight against unions.

It seems to me that a nice test of which of the two explanations fits the bill better is to compare the development to countries in which those measures of inequality, unemployment, and decoupling of real wage from productivity increases did not change at the same time as in the US.

Was it because the large corporation developed differently, or was it because those political shifts happened at a different time?
Breaking Down E-Commerce APIs
Just conjecture: senior management in established corporations have stacked the payscales in their favor. I know senior managers in established corporations who have received ridiculously large bonuses and stock option grants for doing nothing other than what should ordinarily be expected of them for the benefit of the corporation, and their level of risk is so small relative to their reward. In some cases, the benefit to the corporation is of questionable value, yet excessively lavish compensation is granted. I suspect that some of these senior managers are greedier and more short-term oriented (I'll milk this baby as much as I can for my personal gain here and now) than their pre-yuppie predecessors. Maybe there was a greater sense of self-restraint and balance in depression and WWII-reared generations (or maybe just lower expectations and objectives)?
Go through vimtutor (just type "vimtutor" in your shell), and you'll know the basics.

vimtutor is probably the very best introduction to vim that there is.
Can Windows 8 save the PC?
Sorry if I'm late to the game but I have to say I started using vim-coffeescript with coffeecompile on watch mode and it's wonderful. It's basically like the window on the homepage but in vim.
Cheaper alternative to AirBnB: CampInMyGarden.com
I find it most ironic that the customer development guys are so fond of preaching their philosophy of how to properly build businesses, yet they're failed entrepreneurs and have yet to successfully prove themselves. They're better marketers/bloggers than they are entrepreneurs, buyer beware.
No Greg Bear???

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Music_(novel)
"Don't write inflated and ridiculous job posts; they're a turn off to good people."

I have noticed the following things about tasteless tactics: 1) they're often horrifically effective; 2) people with taste will pronounce that they're ineffective without providing any evidence.
Track the Rugby World Cup in Excel
It is good to take care not to create a false dilemma.

Of course the government is not the only actor that can, or should, address moral problems.

As I understand libertarianism, they are not at all against solving issues of poverty or hunger. But they do believe that the government is not necessarily the best solution to every problem. Of course that statement should be obvious, as government tends to be less efficient and more watered down than other organizations. So the question is in the details.
(i) Sales staff are usually salaried exempt. I would be interested in a specific counterexample (ie, "inside sales at Airbnb is non-exempt!").

(ii) As a result, OT compensation for sales staff is usually zero.

(iii) This filing claims Groupon paid OT comp in the past. That was probably dumb. They don't have to.

(iv) By doing that, they created a basis for sales staff to argue that they were in fact non-exempt. But see (i): the expectation among sales professionals is that they are exempt.

(v) The other specific complaint in this filing is that Groupon didn't include commissions (variable comp) in the calculation for time-and-a-half overtime. In other words, they paid time-and-a-half overtime, which (see (iii)) they didn't need to do, but didn't do it to someone's satisfaction.

How legit does this case seem to you? It looks like a gotcha case over FLSA status. You think the whole sales team signed on for that?

I'm not saying they're going to lose (it'll probably settle out). But does the core issue in here really seem legit to you? It doesn't to me.
Do they support private registration?
Inequality can be a bad thing without being an externality. Externality has a precise economic meaning. Pollution is a negative externality because the byproduct of my voluntary transaction to buy gas and burn it in my car is that you have to breathe the exhaust. You are an external third party that is hurt without compensation. What external third party is being harmed when one person produces a lot and gets rich and another person doesn't?

One economic argument against inequality is that it results in people spending a lot of resources on guard labor. If I live in neighborhood with lots of inequality I have to spend lots of resources keeping the poor people from stealing my things. Therefore, reducing inequality via income distribution can create a public good in the form of less crime (and less resources wasted on protecting property). Thus, you can argue that redistributing income makes sense on the same grounds that having public police makes sense. That is an efficiency argument for reducing inequality.
The Tea Party has millions of people, so there may be a few different views in there.

However my impression was that the bulk of the Tea Party harbors a lot of hate for welfare recipients and social services in general.

They believe the poor should pull themselves up via bootstraps and should not receive direct help from the government.

Am I wrong about this?
"So the interesting question is not why economic inequality is increasing, but why for a few decades in the mid twentieth century the trend was reversed."

Or maybe why even today, other countries have reversed that tendency.

And the answer to that question is pretty simple, progressive taxation.
Top Repair Projects You Should Never Pay For
...debrief the people who pass on you.

That's an excellent point. I'll add it. (It's a historical accident it's not there already: We wrote this advice for the companies we work with, and since we ask candidates for feedback on behalf of the companies, we didn't think to tell our companies to do it, too.)

Also, I really like how transparent your jobs page is about how your process works. That's something else we should add: Tell people what to expect, how long it usually takes, etc.

Thanks for the suggestions and kind words!
I get a ton of email to my own gmail, which is just my first initial & last name. I didn't realize there were as many people out there sharing them until I got that email. One that bought a car about 6 months ago, one a cell phone, etc. Since I have no way of contacting these people and it's not a domain where I can block out certain addresses, I will usually get at least one email a week where I go uh, what is this? For a while I kept getting building floorplans in progress from one company as it seemed they all used a common address book with the incorrect email added.
The gap between what you can do and what Larry Ellison can do isn't as relevant as the gap between what you and Larry Ellison can do and what your average single mom living in welfare in Durham can do.
Nice collection of papers. Thanks for sharing!

Here is a set of papers about distributed systems, which I read in a course and found very useful to get good understanding of distributed systems research so far: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~dahlin/Classes/GradOS/index.html
I call b.s. In economics, the extremes are strongly self-reinforcing. I would be really surprised if in a given year more people left the top 0.05% (in net worth) than stayed there. I'd even be surprised if the ratio were less than 5 to 1.
None of those things work right now (and honestly probably never will). This only has very basic HTTP functionality.

One of the most annoying ones is when sites have Javascript redirects, because my server doesn't know how to follow those. So going to "twitter.com" doesn't work because they have a Javascript redirect to HTTPS. :|
Gamasutra: Indie Game Marketing: ARTICLE III - Game Related & Maintenance
You're right, we don't have real data. It's all anecdotal. But we speak to a lot of hackers, and we've yet to meet a good one who's said he likes those posts, and we've met plenty who hate them.
I really don't know. They wouldn't capture multi-founder startups, but it's probably a fair proxy for degree of independent entrepreneurialism that Paul's talking about.
Just like most other languages, you can abuse its features and make unreadable code. CoffeeScript is not unique in this regard.
>All the extra stuff we have.

It's NOT that stuff though. That stuff is cheap.

It's rent, food, childcare, healthcare, and education. These are not luxuries. Cellphones cost nothing compared to these real costs, which can't be reduced by a "low impact" life.
I've had pretty good success picking them up in digital formats - not sure if you prefer the paperback version, but if you're okay reading it on a screen you can get all of them digital.
How often do you need a reference to a function and how often do you call functions in Ruby?
AppEngine is a fantastic product, but every time I started using it I always had that nagging feeling that at some point the other shoe would drop (higher pricing, service outages, worse vendor lock-in) and the whole pricing change is about what I expected to happen eventually.

AppEngine over promised and under delivered. Now they're back pedaling in hopes of finding the sweet spot. It's costing them customers and making them look 2nd rate. I think most devs would have preferred if Google started with realistic pricing and worked their way down.

It's simple human psychology, if you set an expectation and surpass it, people are happy, if you fall short, people are unhappy. If pricing started in line with Amazon, Azure, Rackspace, Linode etc. people would say, "Ok, that's fair." and if Google made it cheaper, people would be ecstatic. Instead, they fell short and made people mad. Now they have to reset the expectations and hope to not screw up again.

Take this as a lesson, under promise and over deliver. Always.
LexisNexis open sources code for Hadoop alternative
I donate monthly to Ubuntu and the python software foundation.
That makes no sense. If having bloated syntax is good, why not just go all out with it?

createafunctionwiththesearguments() {...}

Your reasoning makes no sense to me.
Cable penetration should also be added to satellite penetration, since both serve (almost) the same purpose.
I'm sorry, but there seems to be an omitted first step in the entire comment thread of critiques -- from all comments coming from all political angles: examining the underlying data.

The NYT graphic tells a terribly compelling story that supports a particular political point of view. That tickles my bullshit sensor, and tells me it is time to question the underlying data and assumptions.

Frankly, this graphic makes me hear the sound of ideological axes grinding. That makes me want to question assumptions, data gathering, and data analysis. This is all thanks to Prof. Eyrich and his Stats and Econometrics classes way back when. (w00t Claremont McKenna College.)

I am not saying the graphic is wrong or it is right in the conclusions it suggests. I just find it telling that the discussion thread jumps straight to an Itchy and Scratchy Show level of discourse, without questioning the underlying data.

Where is HN's passion for analytic rigor? Or does A/B testing and statistical analysis apply to websites but not economics?
Actually quite a lot. Not anymore. My primary internet connection is a (truly) unlimited data plan on my phone with Sprint, but I don't go out of my way to abuse that fact, even though I live in a rural area where bogging down the towers shouldn't be a problem. This is pretty much a deal breaker for me.
The optional parens is something I personally go back and forth on. I went through a phase where I always left them off but have been moving back towards using them most of the time. The holdout is for calling things that take functional arguments. Here's how I'd write the nodejs.org home page example:

{createServer} = require 'http'

host = '127.0.0.1'
port = 1337

server = createServer (req, res) ->
res.writeHead(200, 'Content-Type': 'text/plain')
res.end('Hello World\n')
server.listen(host, port)

console.log "Server running at http://#{host}:#{port}/"

Notice `require` looks sort of like a language statement. The `console.log` thing is my own quirk. However, the call to `createServer` would require a hanging paren if parens weren't optional. It wouldn't look bad here (and, in fact the official example uses it to chain the listen call) but is less attractive if you're using longer functions. Calls like `memoize` and `operation` (think unit of work pattern) tend to work well with this.
Agreed... I read Cryptonomicon first, then Diamond Age (my favorite from him) then Snow Crash, and I found the third book a lot less mature and dated (I read it in 2001, almost a decade after it was published).

Diamond Age painted a very deep and rich tapestry of future vision.
See, that's the thing about tasteless tactics -- the fact that nobody says they like them cannot be taken as evidence that they're ineffective.
Yeah, I've jammed a product out the door as fast as I could do it without it being broken.

Well, I'm still dealing with bugs and systemic design issues today. Sure, the users are using it, but if I'd pushed back and taken the time to do a meaningful design on it, things would be a lot more stable today.
Pointers are integers
Totally agree with your point. Look for the stay-at-home dads with working wives and you'll find the people who have more time to spend preparing food and eating together, than money to go to restaurants, or live on take-outs.