skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is anyone able to explain this chart for me?

When they say that the 'Top Fifth' are all of the people in the labor force making over USD112541, does that mean that 20% of American workers make more than that?

That's pretty astounding to me, if it is indeed the case. At a labor force size of about 154 million people, that means that over 30 million people are making over USD112541. I know that a good number of people are making WELL over USD112541 actually, though I thought it was just because of my neighborhood and social group.

To see the aggregate numbers is staggering. Where is the money coming from to pay that many people that much? I have some inkling that this is what leverage and debt do for an economy, but ... wow.

Any econ profs, or grad students around to explain ho this is possible?
not a bad break down - I would say that ratings for me should not be based on nostalgic quality but rather on quality of ideas.

One of the best under rated in terms of "hard" and in terms of quality ideas for me has been Greg Egan (especially his short stories).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Egan
In my world it definitely is. They are MUCH more local for those of us living in the city (Denver in this case) than Groupon which typically has deals that are 20 miles from my house.

For me and my social circle, Living Social is something we consistently use. Most people I know have actually unsubscribed from Groupons mailing list.

Anecdotal for sure, but I think there might be at least a kernel of trend in there somewhere:)
SeedCamp say they are a "seed" fund, but act as pure VC. Can you name a single SC funded startup that made it big? YC has nothing to worry about.
I know you meant "got slammed" but getting "god slammed" is probably how their server felt.
Is this title still referring to the object mentor essays that were posted a couple weeks ago?
Show HN: Use Twitter to register domain names
He says 501 companies had the idea of the IC engine, all but 1 ( ie. Ford ) died.
Ok.
But its not the idea being overrated that killed 500 and kept 1 alive, cause they all had the same idea to begin with. What killed the rest was - competition, traction, capitalism, free markets, better execution, call it whatever. If the idea ie. IC engines, was overrated, you wouldn't get a car from the entire 501. What happened instead was - you got 501 car guys, & over time 500 car guys vanished and 1 car guy survived. That's what you'd expect anyways.
So how does one go from that to dissing ideas themselves ?
The Nike Air MAG, Back to The Future Shoe is REAL
In the rare circumstance that someone hasn't read Isaac Asimov's Foundation Series, this immediately reminded me of Hari Seldon's work (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional))
True enough. It just seems like it'd be disheartening to be plugging away at Java with enough foreknowledge to push through the JCP if you really wanted to be playing in a different playground.
So the working class has been taken to the slaughterhouse?

My billion dollar question: What happened at the end of the 70's / beginning of the 80's?
Snifever
Great summary. You've essentially pointed out the differences in their models. YC funds a lot of companies per batch only operating in one location. Seedcamp only takes 10-20 teams at a time but runs short events all over Europe.

Of course, there are many many other differences but these are the most obvious.
For me, the issue with lambdas isn't adding them at all, it's why they've decided to never break backwards compatibility in any way. It's like deciding you'll never ever be bald and you're not willing to have a hair-piece. So by any means necessary you'll cover up the baldness with your own hair. Instead of embracing your new look of baldness you'll comb any hair over, whip it around in a circle, whatever it takes. They had basically a perfect opportunity to just say "Java 6 is what it is" and make Java 7/8 the new thing with reified generics, lambdas, etc. Lambdas got added through the regular Java process of never breaking anything so they'll be there and I'll use them, it's just a missed opportunity. But I don't think it's a case of multiple valid choices leading to a mess, it's more one big foundational choice leading to a mess.
By all measures I've seen, the U.S. workforce is dramatically more productive than the European workforce. I suspect the amount of time spent working is a significant factor in that.
The primary problem with this type of comparison is that it completely ignores economic mobility. Someone simply isn't born into a given income bracket and stays there for life. Most people's earning potential goes up over time. Speaking for myself, I think I've been in all five quintiles.
Ask HN: "War on talents" but startup are implementing "no vacations" policy?
Apparently, we have "war on talents": startups are complaining how it is hard to recruit top talent.
However, on the other hand, many of these startups are actually offering "no vacations policy" which basically means less benefits and smaller salary (if you quit you don't get accural paid off).

Maybe I'm naive but these two trends are not compatible from my point of view. Why companies are offering less benefits while complaining that there is hard to recruit top talent?

Who is advising these companies to do things like this? Or maybe this is just a trick to target demographic of talent pool without actually saying "older than 35 need not to apply"?

UPDATE: RE source of "no vacations policy" it is just based on unscientific survey based on interviews me and my friends had in last few months. Also the latest post form balsamiq (http://blogs.balsamiq.com/team/2011/09/09/vacation-policy/)
I'm hesitant to put an exact figure on how much that would cost, but, including all the RnD that you would need to get even a basic working system, I would say upwards of 1 million. To get something that would work well (not requiring frequent modification to keep it running) and be somewhat realistic, anywhere in the region of 15m to 50m. Once the first one was running and you could just duplicate the design, I would guess that parts and assembly would cost around 100k.

If anyone went into this project with less than 1m to spend, I would be skeptical of their success even if they weren't paying for labor - this is something that would take perhaps dozens of prototypes to get perfect, and the cost would add up quickly even if it was very modular.

However, that's just an arm chair estimate. It's not my field of expertise (I'm not an engineer), and it's quite likely that a committed group of people could pull it off for much less.
Backwards compatibility is great and all, but at what cost? One of the main reasons why Windows eventually started to collapse under its own weight was backwards compatibility.

If a piece of software is so tied to backwards compatibility that it cannot change it will, necessarily, die.

That said, statements like "Once added, you can't ever make any changes to lambdas" are obviously bullshit. Programming languages can and do successfully undergo significant changes. Ruby 1.9.2 is a completely different beast than 1.8.0 (including significant changes to lambda sytax), and I'd expect there are few (if any) applications that could be upgraded without significant changes. The same could be said for PHP 4 -> PHP 5, Perl 5 -> Perl 6, and Python 2 -> 3. Contrast those languages to Java, which is largely the same since 2001.

Sure, there's a cost to everybody when you have to upgrade your app, but there's a much greater benefit when it is all said and done.
"All papers are freely available online"

Why not have links to each one?
To give a specific example, if you friend someone on Facebook from Diaspora then Facebook would probably have cached copies of any data you publish that is accessible by that friend, including all your public data. (I guess you would have to agree to Facebook's TOS when you friend that person, even though you don't have a Facebook account.)
No, this is inspired by that list, with an additional set of constraints.
If your universe has a mere 400 old software ideas, and you choose 4 (e.g. JS, async, VM, hidden objects) your combination is one out of 1 050 739 900. That is the mathematics of innovation.
I think you have a good point. OTOH, Rudin isn't really an example of the problem these people are trying to solve.

Yes, Rudin is good and worth the money. The students who buy it usually know this, and often plan on keeping the book for the rest of their lives.

The real problem is that huge numbers of people have to buy a brand-spankin'-new college algebra text for $180, and then can't sell it back at the end of the semester, since the department has decided to change to a different text. A free, quality text would benefit these people greatly.

(Meanwhile, the low price for a used 2nd-ed. Rudin on Amazon today is $25 including shipping.)
What happened in the late 70s?
Trillian is either a good or bad example, depending on your perspective. I don't want to have N IM accounts; I want to have one account/identity that can reach everyone. That has not happened with IM and I am skeptical that it will happen with social networking.
I don't know if I saw this on HackerNews or Reddit, but this one has a graph that goes well with the link in the parent post.

Left behind in America: Who's to blame for the wealth divide?

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20102289-503544.html
These are household income quantiles, not personal income quantiles. It's not stated on the chart, but that lines up better with: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_...
Reagan (1981-1989).
Backlink Rank Checker tool
Quarantine had me running around in high school reading Quantum Physics books and mostly failing to understand them. Good book.
The article goes on to point out how Ford successfully disrupted the market but then lost a lot of market share later by sticking too closely to his original plan.
Google Keyword Tool VS Paid Tools
As a business featured a few times on Groupon, our merchant contact at Groupon has been ridiculously good. She (hi Emily!) answers emails at all hours of the day. It's part of the reason why I've always rooted for them, their sales team seem to be good, hard working people.
Which HA environment did you go with?
Groupon Panic: Is It Insolvent - and Could IPO Get Pulled?
Looks like Ford may have thought that way, but didn't say it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2938254
What's your source for that "no vacations" claim?
MAKE MONEY NO WORKING FROM HOME
The guy with the great story of bootstraping himself with pigs and whatever he could feed them and then eventually becoming the frozen french fry king (an important secret to McDonald's success, his were consistent)is J. R. Simplot: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._Simplot ; George Gilder celebrates him in a book where he ends up being one of the Micron investors.
Sirens of Titan is on the list hence I feel the list is valid. The relative position might be wrong though...
The US doesn't do terribly well in terms of economic mobility compared to other developed nations, either: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4662456

It's hard to move out of the bottom quintile when the bottom quintile is generally doing so poorly, though of course it's possible, in some cases, to still do so.
In most of the EU 4 weeks is quite on the lower end. I have 28 days and I have friends who have 32-35 days/year (working days).
This is one of the great benefits about living in Europe :).
We went with Rackspace's Cloud Servers. We're using their load balancers with a couple of app servers, a background processing/search indexing server, and 2 database servers for a master/slave setup.
Car Rental Singapore - Cheap Car Rental
I would mark Diamond Age as "OK" at best. Interesting ideas, terrible and rushed ending. If Anathem is worse than Diamond Age, it most definitely does not belong on the list.
Top Grossing Game for the iPad was Built with Flash
Sorry. My Markdown syntax was bad. There are now links to the articles marked by ↗.
CoffeeScript: JavaScript without the Fail (slides)
The post is a response to the original object mentor list of 10 papers; this post claims to be oriented more toward technical depth and less toward philosophy and design.
Yup. The chart ignores changes in demographics.

Compare the US population pyramid in 1950: http://tfw.cachefly.net/snm/images/nm/pyramids/us-1950.png

To the US population pyramid in 2005:
http://tfw.cachefly.net/snm/images/nm/pyramids/us-2005.png

Look at just how many more people are in the 40-55 demographic (peak earning years).
Who owns our modern myths and legends?
A Visual Introduction to Chef
Excel VBA failed to disappoint
AOL said to discuss deal with Yahoo Advisers
a boom needs a webvan
To be fair, Carter's reign wasn't exactly an economic wonder-time, and I don't think Reagan was influencing the economy that much as governor.

I do think there's a political dimension to the change, but laying the blame at Reagan's feet exclusively seems like simple political point-scoring.

Edit: it's funny seeing this comment getting down-modded. I think I'm significantly more liberal than most people here, but it looks like people are upset that I called out empty partisanship? I fail to see anything particularly inflammatory about what I wrote.
Let me confess: I'm failing to rephrase the argument because I'm not sure it works. ;)

I see three threads in this essay, all of which are basically correct:

A) Some software is like a combover, in that it starts out great, but gets gradually uglier, but the ugliness grows so slowly that it never stands out as an urgent problem so you never really confront it.

B) If you postpone confronting a problem in software it just gets harder and harder to fix when you eventually do confront it.

C) Java has now spent, like, fifteen years without lambdas, so adding them now is extraordinarily painful.

... but I can't justify the implied connection between any of these threads.

A and B are disconnected threads because combovers don't really become more difficult to fix over time. Whether you notice your combover on the day you lose your first three hairs, or ten years too late, the solutions are the same and are pretty simple: Get a better haircut that doesn't try to hide your baldness, shave yourself bald and embrace the baldness, or buy a hairpiece. This is quite unlike the way software works -- most of real life is quite unlike the way software works; that's why programmers always feel misunderstood -- so the metaphor just breaks here. Better be sure to abandon your metaphor before this point. ;)

And A and C are disconnected threads because, while some projects have the combover nature, I don't really think Java is one of them. Combovers happen slowly, below the radar, but the "problem" of missing lambdas didn't slowly creep up on Java's designers: Java is missing lambdas because its original designers deliberately left them out. (What, you're going to claim with a straight face that a team with Guy Steele on it just accidentally forgot about closures?)

The world has changed around Java, such that it now seems like a good idea (to some people) to add closures after all, and the language is certainly well into middle age and therefore hard to change, but this isn't really a "combover" situation.
IMHO Jack Vance should be in the list, be it the Tschai series or some other. Really loved it.
I think this is rather accurate, and wanted to say so after attacking you yesterday in another topic.
What is the best way of Mastering JavaScript?
Two wrongs don't make a right... usually
"Can anyone explain what the appeal has been for investors?"

The usual shtick about how growth trumps all other considerations. "It's the fastest growing company ever!" "Who cares if COGS is absurdly high / users aren't buying / revenues have been overstated / etc? Fundamentals don't apply when they're growing this quickly!" "This is a winner-take-all market, like with Amazon in the 90s!"

I remember reading endless defenses of Groupon's business model on SeekingAlpha in the months leading up to the IPO filing. People would trot out all sorts of highly sophisticated models and theories to demonstrate how Groupon was pretty much exempt from the laws of thermodynamics. I'm too young to remember if the same pitch was used for the Dotcoms of the '90s bubble, but the logic sounds eerily familiar.
This is a user-agent issue. Tell your user-agent to ignore Posterous' rendering hints.
One very unique thing I've noticed about Justin/TwitchTV is that many of the viewers are willing to, and actually want to watch commercials to support the casters.

I remember a big part of the whole Warp Prism controversy on Reddit having to deal with it blocking commercials. That alone is a really big positive sign in my opinion that this is really going somewhere.

In no other channels have I seen people so dedicated to watching something that they want to watch the commercials. I think it has to do with the fact that viewers know it directly supports that caster alone (and a little to JTV of course). The money isn't all collected by the TV channel or network and then given out in contracts to writers/actors as they see fit. It's literally, you get paid on how many viewers you get. The correlation is direct.

I think that alone is a really new and awesome concept in media advertising that nobody else (that I know of) is capitalizing on in quite the same way.
There's also a psychological aspect. Although I don't think it's as important on the lower end, as opposed to the people who believe they're actually being somewhat frugal by not choosing the (often mostly superfluous) "deluxe* version.
I know and like lambda functionality and I also use Java. People pay me good money to write Java for them and I like the language and platform well enough so the chance to get closures in Java is great. At some point I'd love to use Scala or Groovy or Gosu at work but that's not the case now and I'm fine with it.
>Before this you could keep good records of your work and be safe in the knowledge that if anyone patented your idea after you created it, you would at least have the prior art to prove you came up with it first. Now you must patent it in order to be safe. A troll can come along at any time and patent your idea and screw you out of your hardwork.

This is only true if you apply for the patent at a later date, without publicly releasing the invention or giving out any details. In a first-to-invent case, you would have a prior art argument if you applied for the patent after the other party. However, if you don't ever bother patenting or releasing the invention, you do not have any protections in either a first-to-file or first-to-invent system. Those rules only apply when two patents for the same invention are applied for around the same time.

If you release the invention as a product, and someone files for the patent after you released it, that is a clear prior art case, and they should lose the patent.
My project, updated: See what Twitter listens to. feedback appreciated
How does basamiq's post equate to "no vacations"? The post says, quite clearly "Take vacation time when you like".
LexisNexis Puts Its Hadoop Competitor on GitHub
I'm not convinced. You have to look at each person's context, because your family's values will take you a long way (or hold you back).

And the US seems to have lower mobility than other rich nations:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/08/research...
> Nickle and diming retirement investments does not, in my perspective, contribute qualitatively to society

actually, study after study shows that algorithmic traders improve things for "retirement investors". more algo trading leads to lower spreads, which decreases trading costs for long term investors.

think about who value investors had to buy from before algo traders. they bought from human market makers who were ridiculous inefficient, and as a result, had to charge huge spreads. these spreads have a material (negative) impact on investment returns for value investors.
Google aided in de-emphasizing Flash when it began converting video to H.264 to support the iPhone in 2007. Apple and Google were partners then--people forget Eric Schmidt spoke in glowing terms about the iPhone and Apple on stage at the iPhone’s rollout: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3206653149996743169
This is really sad. In my limited understanding of business, I always thought that Groupon's greatest asset was it's sales team. Who else has a sales team that can hit so many small businesses across the us so fast. I was hoping that they would leverage this asset in more ways than just selling advertisement.
You know those “personal appeals” on Wikipedia.org?
But 7 set the low priority time down to 0 seconds default.
If the Government was in Silicon Valley
Definitely a bug, but don't you have to log in to the administrative interface to access those forms in the first place? On D-Link routers I've played with, that interface was password protected and was the mechanism for uploading new firmware anyway.
I wonder if they couldn't, what if Google took the offer back after they saw their financials.
Hiring advice for startups from Hackruiter (YC S10)
So much for " (-1, Disagree)"
This will be the shortest thread in HN history...

On serious note, I'm really not aware of a single one. I heard some
> Now, we're to be expected to make these same sites, using the same general design,
> work on devices with ittybitty screens and radically different physical interfaces?

No, we are not expected that. However you can have the same theme for your desktop, tablet, mobile version and the same content.

> You'll have your blog or what-have-you, and your blog will have a mobile version,
> and a desktop version, and they will be completely and totally 100% separated from
> and independent of each-other.

Oh no. This failed miserably with "accessible versions" of sites before. In most cases the moment you start to separate your content you already blew it.
We already have tools to separate content and markup from design. We have CSS media queries. There are some problems (e.g. images), but otherwise we can already make it work. Google for responsive web design, adaptive web design: there is something to learn.

> I think the "right" way to do this is to continue to make the desktop version of a site
> the default

Take a look: http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?933

> and then check the user-agent of the request on the server

Sometimes useful, bet generally a bad idea.

> Let the server handle which layout to serve up, not Javascript

That's CSS job, not Javascript's: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/responsive-web-design/
in short ronald reagan tax breaks and labor market deregulation: paul krugman has essentially a whole book on why this occurred (http://www.amazon.com/Conscience-Liberal-Paul-Krugman/dp/039...) It is an amazing book that really changed my view of labor unions. i would recommend it to anyone. heres an example from his blog: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/30/more-about-the-r...

he has a lot of stuff on his blog discussing tax policies and their effect on things like income growth.