skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>I don't think there is much debate that societies should try to mitigate that.

You haven't been reading HN then, and you haven't met the Tea Party. There are a lot of people here who believe that poor people deserve their lot and should wallow in it.

In my opinion society needs to use tax dollars to ensure a basic standard of living for all citizens. This idea (the welfare state) is deeply unpopular in contemporary America.
Better Google...Better...

Finally some reasonable communication, reasonable pricing models (extended discount) that don't penalize certain platform users (Python) over others (Java), better information on pricing and analysis of applications, reasonable free instance hours etc.

Keep this up and my rage will finally start to simmer down.

Now one thing that still hasn't been addressed is the following catch-22.

It's my understanding that in order to take advantage of scaling, user will have to pay a minimum $9/month (or whatever it is) fee. However, free users are resource capped. However, if you pay for scalability, but never need it for some reason, or only need it a couple times a year, you may as well have just stayed free -- otherwise you're out $108/year!

Still it's too bad that this pricing change and the charge-metrics are such a moving target, it's virtually impossible to figure out how to optimize for the change since any work somebody does to fix a 1000% price increase might go out the window tomorrow as pricing gets revised, or a metric gets changed (we've decided to measure electron transfer across system buses!).

This is a huge PR lesson -- heck this could be a 2 semester course! Google should have fixed the major pricing issues from the beginning, set a fixed target for people to work towards, been earlier with discounts and understanding language penalties, actually (shock) communicated with their developer base and done some actual price comparisons across their entire hosting environment to realize what a huge change this is introducing.

It's clear even Google didn't realize what a clusterfuck the new pricing model has introduced and Google's biggest problem, communication, has been the root of all the trouble.
US Senate Bill Would Fine Companies Millions for Weak Online Security
Could you please elaborate on why?
>Why would they want to pay more for iPhones with locked out features (like calls and email) instead of cheaper iPods?

...Or even cheaper Android devices.
The problem is how similiar the users from these tool are like the ones of your product. Getting users from SEM hacks[1] might give better results. Don't know. Would actually love to see a comparison.

[1] http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2008/09/sem-on-five-dol...
>In our current system, you have some protections as you can demonstrate that you are indeed the first to invent by using your product as evidence and you can publish your work down the road, if it becomes an issue. In the new system, nobody cares. He who files first wins.

You have protections only if you apply for a patent. You do not have those protections if you do not. That has not changed. The only thing that has changed is what is used to grant two similar patents that are submitted around the same time. In the current case, it's the nebulous "invention date". In the new system, it's whoever files first.
Good lord! What an abomination!
Actually that estimate of the value of the first 210 companies did include the ones that had already been acquired. On the other hand, I used such a conservative valuation for Dropbox that what they say ends up being true (in fact still an underestimate).

Also, we funded 64 startups this summer, not 60. (There were 63 by Demo Day because two of them merged.)
For newbs, what's the best way to find interesting projects and get noticed?
So I just started a Master's program for Software Engineering, and so far I'm loving it. The baseline knowledge is good, but I really want to contribute to actual projects in a tangible way, and hopefully learn something new. Given my lack of experience at this point I don't expect that I could find a job, so I'm willing to work for free in exchange for learning something and building a portfolio.<p>But I really don't know where to begin. Any suggestions?
Pitch your startup to CNN Money
CNN Money is looking for Startups to work with and is continuing the NextNY ABC(Always Be Closing) series that gives Startups access to big companies they normally wouldn't be able to get in front of. The end goal of the event is for a Startup to walk away with a money deal and for CNN Money walk away with a cool, new product and a partner.
Following is the link for Startups to submit:
http://money.cnn.com/startupevent/

CNN Money currently works with several Startups including Gravity, Disqus, SigFig, StockTwits and others and we are looking for more.

The event will take place September 22nd in the Time Life building. Complimentary cocktails and hors d'oeuvres will be served starting at 6:00 and the pitches will begin at 7:00.
RSVP to attend here: https://websvp.com/startup_event/
You should look at the hourly bill rates for licensed electricians and plumbers. These are definitely blue collar jobs, yet their hourly rates are probably more than most software developers.
Can you recommend any good books or papers on this phenomenon?
I often refer to June (our first month of summer vacation) as "homicide prevention month". I'm only mostly joking.

I do agree that time off should be considered when talking about teacher salaries. I know other states are different, but in Texas I feel like teacher salaries are mostly pretty good now, but they weren't for a long time.

In 1997, when I started teaching, my salary was $24,000 per year. That was about 43% below the median household salary in the Austin area at the time.

A teacher starting this year would make $42,000 per year, which is only 15% below the median household salary.

The median salary for the Austin area has only increased ~20% in the past 15 years, but the starting teacher salary (in my district, anyway) has gone up 75% in that same time period.

So, in my opinion, a lot of the "teachers are underpaid" rhetoric comes from folks who haven't run the numbers recently.
The beard slide made me laugh, but it doesn't hold any water. Ryan Dahl is clean-shaven in the node.js intro video on their website. Also, I think Javascript is great. Its 'bloated' syntax makes for minimize-able files which can end up being half the size of the originals. That's just a preference thing.
Honestly, it's a little of both.
First, I'd like to note that your usage of "space opera" is arguably a relatively archaic usage of the term; while that meaning is still in use, there's a more contemporary meaning wherein "space opera" refers to a sort of setting. A setting of broad spatial scope (interstellar/galactic), a setting with war involving starships, a setting full of action. It is adventure, but it can be literary, and it can be hard SF.

Neuromancer isn't just pioneering (which it was), it's incredibly well-written. But like other commenters, I disagree that it's xenophobic, and I don't think its success is rooted in xenophobia in the audience. I also disagree that Gibson's work portrays a "takeover" of Western culture; the ethic ruling the world of Gibson's novels is the ethic of the international mega-corporation, which is hardly a Japanese thing. And also there are lots of non-asian cultural bits: the Turing cops are Swiss, there's the whole cultural slant of Count Zero (not to spoil it for any who haven't read it), the Tessier-Ashpools are French/Australian, etc.

Props for mentioning Cherryh, though. Cyteen is frigging fantastic. Indeed, Cherryh in general is fantastic, although some of her stuff is serious business and some of it is (good) fluff.

As others have commented, hard SF is so very very not dead.
Most web apps would require some sort of a back-end and storage. So you at least need to know some SQL and a server-side language (node.js is an option, but seems much harder than PHP).

And then you can't just "learn" javascript, you need to learn programming paradigms (data structures, control structures, how to modularize the code, etc).
> I have to imagine there were "better" cars than the Model T,

What definition of "better" are we using? (For example, higher top speed isn't relevant if you have bad roads.)

> or other cars that had more prototypes and iterations.

Prototypes and iterations cost money. Ford had more money, so why don't you assume more prototypes and iterations?
One bite-sized takeaway: own a company, don't be an employee.
I would like to read this, but unfortunately there's a database involved in serving the pages. Remember, kids: text and images were served happily on the 'net long before MySQL existed.
tab, arrow worked in ff
A skilled tradesmen can get six figures.
I suspect you're the exception rather than the rule, Paul. Checking the numbers released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the percentage of self-employed workers in the economy has FALLEN from 10 percent of the workforce in 1968 to 8.5 percent today.[1] Fewer people are working for themselves, although you're right that the 1980s seem to be when things started to change.

[1] http://www.bls.gov/webapps/legacy/cpsatab9.htm -- only stats on unincorporated single-owner businesses go back to the 1960s, but the stats on incorporated single-owner businesses don't show any significant change over the last 10 years, so it seems hard to argue that Americans are really more entrepreneurial now and those numbers just aren't catching it.
The easiest and most obvious answer is to scratch your own itches, as it were. Find a bug in a piece of software you're using? Report it, or better yet, fix it. Poor documentation? Improve upon it. Missing feature? Try to implement it.

If the software you use has no immediate flaws, you could ask your friends about their itches and try to scratch them.

If that's not an option either, then there's always the internet. Look around on sites like freshmeat or hacker news for new and potentially interesting projects. Offer a hand where possible.
Y Combinator by the Numbers
You ARE better off.

But you are also in the top 20%.

The bottom 80% are not as lucky as you. The bottom 80% cannot afford 2 cars, or a house, or cable, or an iPhone, etc.

Have some fucking perspective. You are doing well; but look around you. The rest of the country is NOT.

A tremendous part of the economy is out of work and cannot even afford to go to the doctor. You're living in a bubble.
Internet.bs for me. Very cheap, straightforward management, quick to propagate changes.
How we built a social music sequencer in 48 hours
I must disagree about Zelazny. I find that it handles re-reading quite nicely, except the second Amber series, which didn't take that well to reading even the first time. Lord of Light is especially awesome, and especially awesome on subsequent reads. It's not really SF, of course, but it at least pretends (unlike Amber).
The article mentions that Lowe's has already been working to offer wifi in their stores, so it doesn't seem like too much of a reach to just use ipods.

It seems like it would be expensive to have 25 cell phone data plans per store, but maybe they are able to cut some sort of corporate deal.
Do-it-yourself video recording on Causes
Why?

The sole purpose of a helper is to keep code out of templates and presentation out of controllers.

How could they do a better job of that than they do now?

Remember, the article you're agreeing with says that helpers are bad because they are "just functions". This is, in a word, crazy. It's one thing to design with objects; it's another thing to turn all your functions into classes so you can pretend you're OO.
According to the article the iPhone may have been chosen for the cool factor.
Just because I might disagree with your methods of equalizing income, doesn't mean I "believe poor people deserve their lot and should wallow in it."

You've turned a political disagreement about the methods to accomplish some desirable goal do so into a moral argument. You've decided that if I think there is a better way to elevate the poor than your way, I must want them to stay poor and thus must be evil.

Why do you feel you need to frame the argument as such?
Google Paid $125 Million for Zagat
Not true in California, it may stop accruing, but can never expire. http://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/faq_vacation.htm (See #4).
I'd kinda suspected. I've spent a lot of stray moments thinking about the whole "recruiting is obviously broken" thing (and congrats for taking it on). And I have yet to come up with a genuinely good solution.

I put together something called "wantmyjob" that used the OKCupid solution with making and answering questions about your workplace. But that really won't work for startups since they don't have a bunch of existing employees to recommend them. I'd also probably have to commit the cardinal sin of trying to charge the job seeker -- not so good.

Similarly, there are a lot of places that will certify that you (as an individual employee) aren't a bozo. Those don't scale terribly well, but worse, they also charge the job seeker.

You can make money but not do the world much good by charging (probably bad) employees a small fee to apply or charging bad companies a lot for dubious access. But while that's probably where the money is, it does the least good for the world of almost anything you could do in recruiting. Maybe a "schlemiel match-up service" for mediocre-to-bad companies with exactly-equally-bad employees? Don't know. I'll bet you guys wouldn't be passionate about that one ;-)

And yet, how do you make enough money and still scale well on matching up the best companies (who don't have to pay as much to hire) and the best candidates (who should never, never be charged anything at all)?

It's a hard problem. Glad you're thinking on it.
I've lived in England and New Zealand and I felt the same; none of them seemed especially unusual to me. Who would describe something as "awesome"? Probably anyone who grew up in the 80s and watched Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, for a start...
It seems like a common experience at a hardware store to have an employee help you find what you need (versus, say, a grocery store), then finally direct you to the front of the store to pay. If that same employee could also ring you up on an iphone, I think it would at least be very cool, if not more efficient.
Doppelganger Domains
Notified means they and their manager were told that the sick leave taken exceeded the norm, there was no retaliation, just as a check of reasonableness of leave. I am not sure how longer duration illness were treated, may be put on short-term disability benefit.
Technological progress should cause increasing economic inequality

Is this view at odds with mainstream economists?

I believe the mainstream view is that technological progress is a tide that should naturally lift all boats.
Cool, I've played quantum golf before (which is easy) and quantum tic-tac-toe (which I never quite understood), I'll have to play with quantum soccer.
I want land. I want to build my domain. I want to be master of my kingdom. I want to landscape it how I want. I want to pick which trees grow and which get cut. I want to slowly aquire/make the appliances I want. I want to build storage to house my wares. I want to have a machine shop. Honestly, for me, owning land gives me just another creative outlet. It's one more thing to 'Hack'. Do I line the driveway with sugar maples or cypress tress? Do I build a deck with a pergola, or screened in porch. And don't take this the wrong way, I mean actually build with my own hands. Dig holes with my own spades. mix my own mortar and lay my own foundation. A lot of the desire to own land stems from the (perhaps instinctual?) urge to build a HOME, not just a place to stay.
Because social status (and the perceived security of that status) is very real and hugely important to a large % of people. Difficult to quantify, but absolutely a major driving force in real life. We all compare ourselves (to some extent) to those around us, no matter if we're working at McDonald's or as an executive at MegaCorp.
They're both straightjackets. Chef is easier to cut your way out of and then use as a normal jacket
Well they just refunded my 4 helicopter ride Groupons for a total of $596 that would have expired next week. If I let a Groupon expire though, I wouldn't bitch about not getting a refund, no matter the state law.
I think the outcome of this type of policy, as mentioned by others, is largely a product of the culture of the place that you work.

Where I work, we're given pretty generous paid time off, with very precise definitions of how said paid time off is to be taken, accrued and if not taken in its entirety by the end of the year, how one can "roll over" some of those days into the next year. Every 5 years or so, we get an additional 5 business days.

I get 30 days of paid time off. I used 15 last year. And I've never even come close to the 30 allotted.

I'm salary, and I have really real deadlines. But I've been at my company and in my sector for a long enough time that I know when I can take time and when I cannot. I can get in 15 days by taking the first week that most public schools start off. It's usually a lull time, and being a homeschool family, vacation packages around that time are usually great deals. We have a lull time around Christmas and August due to being a B2B business, and outside of that, I know my deadlines, manage my workload and have a boss that doesn't care if I give a day or two notice when I want time off (primarily because of the former ... I self-manage my time to ensure the least impact for that time off).

All of that said, we have a PTO policy, and I know of very few people who get anywhere close to it. Nor do I know of anyone I work with that actually takes advantage of the "rollover into next year" policy because there's no point. We simply won't use them because there's too much to be done and too few people to do it and in our corporate culture it's "get it done" or enjoy unemployment. Frankly, I'd find other employment if my employer decided to do the whole "we don't track vacation" policy because in my field at my company that'd basically mean "no vacation".
Either way, it shows the growth as steady, since inflation has not been particularly high in the last 20 years.
The Wheel of Time series borrows extremely heavily from Dune.
Do the stats on incorporated business include LLCs?
Had the same problem until I found out that page up/down seemed to work better
You're in luck. Nebraska has the second lowest rate of unemployment in the US.

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/laus.nr0.htm
The rather large discrepancy between these numbers and Statcounter's mobile numbers is explained by the first comment. Statcounter doesn't put tablets in with mobile, Net Market Share do.

http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_browser-ww-monthly-201108-...
I put together something called "wantmyjob" that used the OKCupid solution with making and answering questions about your workplace.

Funnily enough, the idea we applied to YC with was "OkCupid for jobs."
A astro-physics friend of mine once said that when companies with large balance sheets begin that spiral into becoming a black hole or neutron star, you can tell the process has begun because it creates a jet of high-energy engineers moving away and at right angles. :-)
I'd be interested to know what problems you had. We literally dropped Java 6 into our million line project without problems. Despite what the OP implies, this was huge for us. If Java were maintained like, say, Rails we'd still be on 1.3.
"it would strain the fabric of the organization to reward people that way."

This is so true, and I also think the fabric of our society will be strained as the gap grows. Especially when the offspring of these highly productive people begin inheriting enormous sums. Maybe a larger estate tax is a good counterbalance.
The whole thing about TechCrunch being perceived as being so influential to the success of a startup is strange to me. TechCrunch doesn't make or break your startup. How you grow your business after the initial launch traffic dies down is what matters.
You can just take a look at the diagram, which is hosted at Gliffy: http://www.gliffy.com/publish/2886461/
The epiphany is when you realize how isomorphic to python/ruby javascript is! That is really lucky!
I donated to adblock+ about a month ago
You don't seem to be serious, but I'm making this reply for other people in HN. I might be wrong, so judge and reply.

Large corporations decrease inequality?

Yes. All (most) software developers in a large corporation are paid the same wage. Well, there are persons that can make millions not working in a company (ie. Indie game developer, iphone app developer...). But when you work for a large corporation, you might take 20% more than the average developer, but not 20X times more.

So large corporations increase equality among developers. Boss get paid 10 times more than a dev. gets? Well, a boss is not a developer, and you are doing the wrong comparison here. Compare the boss in this corporation to another boss in another large corporation. They are getting paid in the same range, no? That's equality.

When you are your own boss, and your friends is his own boss; you can become as unequal as you want. So, small businesses and startups promotes inequalities.
A little bit of fly-by fanboy there. I don't mind the claim, but I suspect there's a host of reasons. Perhaps there are some enterprise lock-out features (the article mentions this), a (slightly) higher bar to rooting, a known repository of "safe" apps (although these might be blocked), an appeal to customers' sensibilities (subjective "cool" factor), ...

... or maybe they just got a good deal as Apple works to unload back stock in preparation for the pending iPhone 5 debut.

You might argue with all of these criteria. I'm just saying that it's likely the company had a reason, and a considered response is better than Android v. iPhone sniping.
Foundation, the book, was absolutely brilliant. Brilliant concept, brilliant structure to the book, and even the sentence-to-sentence writing is better than Asimov's usual (I normally find the actual wordcrafting to not be Asimov's strong suit).

But ugh ugh ugh. Every single book thereafter gets worse and worse, and by the end it's so bad that I actually welcomed the blatant fanservice reappearance of you-know-who.
I specifically didn't want to give an example. I thought it might appear that I was merely cheer-leading my language of choice and undermine the point I was making.

However since you've asked I was thinking that perhaps something Javascript based, like Coffeescript or perhaps Clojure/Clojurescript or perhaps even Links http://groups.inf.ed.ac.uk/links/

There are probably another 100 reasonable candidates. I guess this leads me to the point I should have outright stated, that given that so many languages have already been written, it is highly likely that any new language will spend a lot of time covering ground that has already been covered by some other language. Surely it makes most sense to start off hunting through all these languages to find something that most closely matches what you need and continue from there.

Who knows, perhaps that's exactly what they've done.
I wasn't too keen on Zendegi. About a third of it is how a revolution could happy in Iran next year, and seemed a bit too influenced by the Iranian presidential election protests. I was also annoyed at how it wasn't as hard sf as his other books.