skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In what world can someone making $25k/yr (according to your graph of the 20th percentile) afford rent, cell phones, internet access, large screen tvs, dvrs, cars, refrigerators, dish and clothes washers, etc.? In most metropolitan areas just rent will eat up half of that, health insurance much of the rest, and a car all the rest. And don't even think about trying to buy a family with kids health insurance -- the average family health-insurance policy costs $13k/yr, and even a bare-bones policy costs around $5k.
That writeup was short and pointedly sweet.
The slap at Brendan Eich is very tongue-in-cheek. Much is made of his lack of beard, but the caption "Beard Myth Busted!" appears a few slides later.
(i) For CA, see http://www.management-advantage.com/products/overtime-exempt... which is probably clearer than reading the actual laws. Key requirement: "Usually work away from the employer's place of business".
I think this is where a lot of Rubyists/Pythonistas get lost. Just because the languages hide ideas like "interface" and "abstract base class" doesn't mean that those concepts aren't useful. Particularly in Ruby-land there's been a push to have common interfaces. They're only enforced by contract. And if you think about it, having "interface" explicitly in the language just means that the contract is enforced at compile time. Even so, you have to be careful. You could implement an interface and still just return null.
Let's not forget the cheapest option for those real emergencies: shitinmytoilet.com
From that link, it's clear that pg likes inequality because otherwise it's 'taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor, which adversely affects VC'

But the main article talks about 30 years where money has been taken from the poor and given to the rich - that is, everyone has not increased together, and the poorest have lost ground. This article doesn't really answer that.
First, it doesn't control for increasing health costs. Employer-provided health plans have seen large amounts of cost growth and this depresses wages, for which they substitute. This is better than the raw story.

Second, much of the top quintile gains have come out of the financial sector. You can see this in evidence by looking at the huge volatility in income through boom/bust cycles. This is bad.

Third, we're in a lopsided labor period where lots of low-end labor is available but labor capital production is actually quite low. This puts upward pressure on the price of higher value labor capital but downward pressure on raw labor capital. This won't continue as it's a byproduct of peculiar historic issues (namely communism, etc.).

Fourth, the information technology revolution has so far failed, I suspect for generational reasons. We've automated lots of low-end clerical jobs at large firms but that's pretty much where IT stalled.

In technology companies themselves, this doesn't appear to be an issue and technology seems to increase employment. It also tends to encourage additional technical fluency, which is then rewarded. But outside of technology itself, this pattern doesn't seem to hold. I suspect culture play a role here.
I think JavaScript gets many things right, but has an overly verbose syntax. So CoffeeScript hits a sweet spot by adding syntactic sugar while hewing close to the underlying language.

You and Alanis Morissette may call that ironic. I'd call it practical.
PDF: http://selflanguage.org/_static/published/organizing-program...
It seems like the one correct answer to the vacation policy question is, "Do what you want, as long as you don't hose the company."

If you want to work remotely for the next month and nothing depends on your physical presence at the office, fine.

If you want to fuck off for the next month and you're not on anyone's critical path, that's fine, too.

Restricting things a bit, "not hosing the company" could be interpreted to mean that you can take off when you want, but for absences longer than x days you need to let your supervisor know y days in advance so s/he can take it into account when necessary. It doesn't sound like this would be an unreasonable thing to ask, as long as x and y are clearly stated by the company and respected by employees.

This whole thread reminds me of why I don't work for other people. The idea of someone demanding my physical presence for a portion of each day, for no reason other than the fact that they can, makes me frown and cock my head to the side like a puzzled beagle.
The main problem statistically is how we account income. Generally the employer-paid health insurance and other benefits are not included, even though these can often vastly increase total compensation. Scott Winship did a good job following this but tends to shade into triumphalism.
Diffusion, not innovation, drives economic growth. This is simple to demonstrate by looking at the rate of catch-up growth. If there is a problem with economic growth, it is more likely that there are too few diffusion pathways than too little innovation.

Our patent system would tend to point in the direction of diffusion problems, no?
here is link to ps.gz.

And you can find PDF at http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.127.5...
Yes there is a future. Gigwalk for example is a great idea (I was raising seed cap for the same thing when they launched) but it could be about more than taking photos for websites. Create a competing product that enables the buying and selling of all types of information based on location and make sure that the users at both ends of the transaction can remain anonymous. Alternatively create a product that will allow professional photogs and videogs to be located if someone needs a stock image or clip from their location. Disrupt the stock image/footage industry. Again.
Economics is exactly like religion. There are correct and incorrect answers, but most people ignore them, and believe something that makes them feel good about their place in the world.
Starting A One-Man Software Company
My Dubli - The Dubli Network
And he'd better educate himself if he wants to improve his standing. He was an economic inefficiency that has been unceremoniously weeded out.
there's already a drive toward giving up material possessions in favor of experiences. Robin Hanson calls this a "return to forager values" enabled by wealth after we spent a time in farmer mode.
> Amazon lost 3 billion before it became profitable

Where exactly did they find 3 billion to lose? How did Jeff Bezos manage to convince investors to give up so much cash? I'm really surprised about this
This chart has nothing to do with individual wages.

This is a sum of all incomes from all possible sources devided by population.
If only 10% of the population is driving economic growth, that would indicate an intense resource problem. Doesn't it seem plausible that we should seriously consider the possibility that somewhere around 1973 our essentially 19th century system of economics became obsolete and so was unable to drive much growth?
I'm not going to fight on most of the non-parenthetical aspects of the syntax -- it always sounds like a holy war, everyone is right, and everyone is wrong.

I've not looked closely at the implementation, but Python concatenating adjacent strings might be a relic of C-based languages -- the same rule applies there and likely a standard of the language with CPython being the default underbelly of Python.

Then your final (YUI) example, we have "random" commas. Again, the language syntax starts to trend towards generally inconsistent, and I have to enforce more style guides upon my team.

NOTE: I work heavily with YUI as well, and my team -- Python stack -- too writes shims to support "kwargs"-like syntax, so I can't really consider coffeescript having an advantage. Quick pseudo comparison...

YUI.module = function(name, func, kwargs){
kwargs = kwargs || {};
return YUI.add(name, function(Y){func(Y);}, kwargs.version, kwargs.details);
};
YUI.module("myCoolModule", function(Y){
...
}, {"version": "1.0.0", "details": {"requires": ["app", "model"]});
Egypt dipped lower in 1991 than in 2011, yet Mubarak was in power for 30 years. And the dip leading to the revolution only started in 2011, making predictions about his removal from power very nearsighted. Obviously, like weather, specific and accurate long range predictions are almost impossible, but its still a fault that should be brought to attention.

As for the map of Osama, it's very hard to see specifics. I'm also not quite sure what the lines mean (Newspaper based in x guesses y? Why even show x?). But there are several hotspots and I'm sure the government was checking most of them. There's definitely politics involved in combing through a 200km territory in someone else's country...

I'm a bit cynical about predictions, sorry. Especially when your proof is looking back at the past and say "Well duh".
In Canada, Blacksun.
The Unofficial Google App Engine Price Change FAQ
I don't know about the specific statutes in California, but from experience I'm pretty sure most tech inside sales reps are salaried.
Great story! Thanks for sharing.

Did you hire any freelancers or interns to get help when you were working alone? I'm considering doing that now to help me with some backend support work, while I focus on the core product. These are little jobs which need to be done to help me move faster.

If you did, do you have any tips or advice?
To summarize the situation (someone please correct me if I am wrong?):

1. Files for IPO

2. ASCOI (Adjusted Segmented Consolidated Operating Income) falls under scrutiny from public & SEC

3. VP of Global Communications resigns

4. Internal Memo "leaked" to major press outlets

5. SEC investigates said memo

6. Sales Team files Class-Action suit

Wow.
To make sense of this one would have to think about the nice houses and luxury articles these politicians will buy for their wives and/or mistresses from the money they got from the copyright holders for this.

Yea, I'm cynical, why are you not?
In Australia we have 4 weeks plus 10 public holidays (In Melbourne, one of those is for a Horse Race).

What I learned from that link though -- is that the concept of "Long Service Leave" is unique to Australia/New Zealand. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_service_leave
Getting ShowOff source code high-lighting for Clojure
This is shocking to me. Are you sure? Being non-exempt is a big deal. And it cuts both ways: it also means your employer can dock you when you show up late. Are you sure about this? Are junior devs literally punching timecards?
My immediate reaction was WHAT THE FRACK.

Thinking about it a bit more, I am surprised that the European Union is effectively capable of shoving this type of legislation down the metaphorical throats of its member states. Were there other countries besides Denmark opposing the law?
In the battle of Amazon vs. Walmart, I have to vote Bezos.

Also, healthy interstate commerce is rather important to the continued success of the Union. WTF, Walmart? If this goes ad absurdum and any jurisdiction can tax any transaction which has an endpoint on their turf, interstate commerce would potentially require tracking compliance with thousands of jurisdictions. "Insane" doesn't begin to cover it.

If I assume that Walmart's strategists are rational, the real intent is probably something like "make Amazon waste money" or "make Amazon get negative PR" or "make Amazon be distracted while we update our business strategies." Probably all of the above, but it's still insane.
Superb! I've recently started with Chef and the learning curve is very high, especially if you're like me and haven't touched Ruby before.
call a function taking no arguments without using ():

foo = do myfunction
> I worry the compression, while cute, could start to get a little extreme after a while

Not my experience. I love how short my code is. http://www.paulgraham.com/power.html

> there seems to be some interesting inconsistencies

Yeah, there are. These bug me less now than they did initially. Like any language, you have to know it well to use it well. But there's much less that you need to know about CoffeeScript than about, say, Ruby or Python. CoffeeScript's feature set is small enough that you can master it very quickly.

> is there a clear unambiguous grammar for it anywhere?

https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/blob/master/src/g...
I find the lack of increase in (inflation-adjusted) median wages to be the more interesting headline, not the distribution of wages per se. In effect, the average person has not seen any improvement in prosperity from the large productivity improvements that technology has brought us. I think that's problematic, in part because it makes it harder to argue that the tech sector's growth will bring prosperity to the average person (rather than just to us techies).
try Memoirs Found in a Bathtub if you haven't already. It's like The Man Who was Thursday meets Dr. Strangelove.
The powerful do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must. I have the gun, I'll take the pesos, that seems fair to me.
Detailed Incident Report at http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrust...
I don't really have an opinion about any of this. All I'm saying is, if you want to read tea leaves on how much this filing has set the whole Groupon sales force on fire, it's helpful to know that it's taking advantage of a technicality.
The European Union didn't shove legislation down anyone's throat. Until recently, Denmark was the only country opposing this; they changed their mind, and all the EU did was say "well, since everybody agrees, let's all go ahead and do this".

If anything, the EU slowed down adoption of this change -- it would have happened in most EU countries a long time ago if it weren't for the need for unanimous approval.
At least the top graph about productivity refers to "overall compensation."

I don't have a chance to find the original source for the numbers, but unless the graph has been grossly mislabeled, benefits are probably included.
strange, I found God Emperor the most interesting.
Android ‘Jelly Bean’ comes after Ice Cream Sandwich
We're pretty good at it now. A=Republicans, B=Democrats. We switch every couple of election cycles and see how it goes.
> What happened at the end of the 1970s...

...was that "reaganomics" took over after that.
Realtime Keyboard Heatmap now on GitHub
I'd bet that eating food that can't be heated in a microwave is probably more healthy for you.

Cooking vegetables in a microwave is one of the best ways to keep nutrition locked in.
Chrome on the Rise... Browser trends for Sept. 2011
NASA using Android in Space
I prefer the last answer.
It's hard to ignore the thought that the inflexion point and the beginning of the Reagan era coincide. I try to push the thought away, but it keeps coming back.
Puppet has invented a new language with its own syntax.

Chef has invented a new object system and execution model within Ruby.

Neither's approach is particularly good in this respect, but the latter is less onerous.
Steel Beach begins with perhaps the best ad copy I've ever seen.

WIN FREE SEX!
Is there any chance you could publish financials (% which goes to G&A, etc.) for the charity directly on the website, where you solicit donations?
Give people options and they will generally do the right thing. An intelligent, competent, highly productive employee who is hired by a fast growing and profitable start-up knows better than to take too much vacation to the point of looking stupid. Try this policy at your local dead-end job. Nobody would show up. Because nobody gives a st.

My point, hire smart people, give them a reason to give a st and they'll do the right thing.
Well put, as pg's essays usually are. But I think there are rather large gaps:

1) He glosses together reduction of income inequality with elimination of it. The zero inequality thing has been tried and failed.

2) one of his arguments is that better education of the poor will increase wealth inequality, because it will increase the number of customers and the number of possible entrepreneurs.

While the premises are no doubt true, the conclusion isn't. There are other inequality-decreasing factors that might well have a stronger impact. At the very least, a better educated population might have the wherewithal to organize and vote for increased taxes on wealthy people. Less cynically, better educated people need less stuff to get by (e.g. their cars last longer), and they are savvier consumers. And empirically, if one excludes the U.S., the best educated countries tend to also have the lowest income inequality.

3) pg neglects the costs of U.S. monetary policy on risk taking. The past 20 years have seen low inflation. When inflation is low, there is less need for money to be invested in order to preserve wealth. With higher rates of inflation, investors have no choice but to try and extract greater value out of the wealth they have if they want to keep up.

4) A related point: pg's argument is that high taxes reduce the large rewards founders get, causing them to take smaller risks. Yet there is nothing intrinsic about taxation that necessitates the burden fall primarily on the recently wealthy. PG's argument doesn't easily apply to "old money" -- would the decrease in upside of a wealth tax outweigh the incentives to invest imposed by a wealth tax?

From a tech progress/startup perspective, wouldn't the elimination of capital gains in favor of a tax on wealth cause exactly the right kinds of incentives for starting companies?
I recently (past couple of months) had to look at chef vs puppet. I went with Chef, since it seemed easier to setup, and I liked the methodology behind it better. That said, there are a few issues around its choice of dependencies (solr, how I hate you).

Basically, I liked how chef treated the terminals as "dumb" and the configuration could be stored in source control. All of my nodes/"cookbooks"/recipes/users/data bags are stored in version control, with a few simple shell scripts to batch load the data. Also, chef nodes ping back to the server, which could cause problems (if you had tens of thousands of nodes hitting frequently), but also solves issues like "what if a server is offline when an important update should be pushed"

I believe that puppet has far more tools for seeing what's going on with your servers, when they last updated, that kind of thing. Also, the recipes/cookbooks you can get from the chef repository can be a little hit and miss (I had to heavily modify a few to make them work in my environment)
Yeah, this and the U.S. government's granting companies permission to use huge amounts of mercury to mine and refine gold on public land are the two most unambiguous cases of government wrong I know about.
For puppet, so long as the service that you have has a stop and start setting (i've not come across one that doesn't) and you've told the service to subscribe to a file for changes - then it should automatically do a stop+start at the very least.
Looking for Advice
Hey HN,

Looking for advice on finding hackers interested in business and pitching ideas to them.

The ultimate goal is to build a service together, but I have no background in coding. How have you determined a good hacker in your experience and what are some key considerations when befriending/ interviewing.

Looking for someone that has SMART (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, Time Driven) goals at the beginning of each day. Looks at the purpose and open to creating multiple options on how to get there.

Looking for something with an ebay type structure.
What would be the level of difficulty of something like that?

Any advice is greatly appreciated!!!

Thanks.
The $9, as far as I can recall, was for the three always-on instances you got. Since they're retiring those, allowing you to set your own, you can take that off the bill. It sounds to me like you can be on the free plan with enabled billing and only pay for overages.
Carol Bartz for Techcrunch editor.
In fairness (in the UK at least) the decoupling of unemployment and inflation occurred in the 1970s well before minimising unemployment rates ceased to become an objective of government policy at the end of that decade. Exogenous shocks like oil prices and trend decline in the competitiveness of (UK) manufacturing helped drive this.

Thatcher's shock doctrine may have had many flaws of its own but the abandonment of targeting unemployment via monetary policy was preceded by the previous administrations' failures to actually achieve their unemployment objectives.
I thought it was dart?
Small Startup of Four Looking for Office Space in SF
Hey everyone, I'm working on a startup called Vayable.com, a community marketplace for unique travel experiences. We're looking for shared office space in the Mission / Potrero district of San Francisco for a small team of four. Our team list (http://vayable.com/team) is outdated, but you can get a sense of who we are. Since then we have added an engineer (Shelly) and a designer (Kristin), and Justin works remotely (from South America) so he won't need to share the space. We're still very early stage and have a limited budget, so we're looking for something cheapish. If you have extra space that you're looking to rent out, please send me a message at june@vayable.com. Thanks :)
Honest question: Is that really what you thought? It seems obvious to me that I was implying a defense that the phrase I quoted also appears on the page, directly next to the phrase ekiru quoted, which makes the mixup a little more understandable, because it means I didn't see something that simply didn't exist. Did you get that and post your reply anyway, or did I just express myself poorly?
yeah that is definitely true, but the underlying issue is fairness (which is trickier).
Another Ruby 1.9.2 gotcha hashes are not arrays
I'm inclined to agree. It's striking how the graph showing the wealth flow to the top 1% correlates with changes to the capital gains tax rate. There are benefits to a low cap gains rate, but below a certain level, it seems associated with slower growth, more of the income flowing to the top, and more volatility and crashes.

You can make the argument it's goosing the economy to concentrate more and more capital into a single point of failure, a deeply interconnected network of financial firms. And you gotta wonder what the economy would look like, if Wall Street hadn't been siphoning off so much of the brains and capital to play card tricks. It might otherwise have gone towards, say, innovations in healthcare, transportation, energy, even domestic manufacturing.
It's his best work, though, especially of the SF genre (I like Miguel Strogoff, but there's nothing speculative about it).
Yea for sure. Going into the design industry, I would like it to be something fun and down-to-earth. My favorite (already taken) ones are "Running with crayons" and "Who you know". Any recommendations on favorite articles?
I have a copy of a collection of soviet stories, including two by Altov (and his wife). It's a Portuguese translation of a French translation, but it's still great (although I wonder how much was lost).
Outside of a metropolitan area, it's easy (I've done it, and had plenty of money to spare). Inside of a metropolitan area it's a lot harder and probably requires roommates or living in the suburbs or finding a particularly cheap area to live.
Waaay ahead of you there partner: http://lifehacker.com/5837900/rent-out-your-toilet-with-cloo

All we need now to cover all the bases is a rent a my wife for the evening sorta site.

Edit: I love the comment by DoJo* there, very germane: "We're all clear, right, that there is no possible world in which this does not lead to someone advertising a bathroom and then filling it with 63 hidden webcams and selling the videos on the internet? We all aknowledge that it would be impossible for that NOT to happen, right?"
Show HN is a deliberate request for feedback. My comment was stating I have zero ability to provide useful feedback because of his choices. Totes bad taste.