skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
doki_pen, you make a great point. Lets also not forget that many people who end up in these situations actually grew up in them as well. Many of their parents didn't finish high school, don't have good jobs, and were born when their parents were only teenagers. A lot of people who live out these scenarios have never had anything better modeled to them. Preached to them, yes, but modeled? No.

So when a kid, at home, is always being told and modeled things that will skew them away from making good decisions what do you expect? What do you expect when their Mom, who they love and trust (for no other reason than its their Mom, how do they know any better?), tells them that their teachers are wrong because of x or y and that you need to look out for yourself and that no one will help and yadda yadda yadda... yeah, some people aren't making bad decisions with all the facts laid out in front of them.

Its easy to be an armchair quarter back, but instead of riding these people through their misery, why not show some love and compassion and try to help them out. This will go much further than beating them down and continuing not only the economic cycle, but the cultural one as well.
Building the BBC Homepage beta - an under the bonnet technical view
I had the same experience with a company in Gibraltar, got to the phone interview, went well, was told to expect an email with details of flights over and heard nothing, it's been months now. The CEO didn't come to my rescue, and I haven't heard from them since.
I'm not a mobile user and I have HN loaded as a Firefox app tab. Go figure.
I suppose that could be done but financial security is only partial goal. The other goal of unity and equality is probably a little more important and that breaks pretty quickly if there is significant disparity between our standard of living.

This reduces the chance that any sibling will have a lifestyle that is relatively more affluent than the others. And when we get a freeloader, it encourages the other siblings to not give up on his life. It may be easier to give up if you can tell yourself "well he is getting what he deserves".

This assumes a great deal of good faith, obviously. It can easily go bad and turn into resentment if (a) we get a freeloader and (b) he remains a freeloader all his life. But even in that worst case scenario, the hope(from our cultural upbringing) is that there will be less resentment(for the financial unfairness) and more sadness/empathy for the sibling who went the wrong way all his life.

My father's brothers have been on this model for couple decades and it has mostly worked out. They've had multiple freeloaders at one point turn into super productive contributors a decade later(and after lots of hardwork by the non-freeloading siblings towards the freeloaders).

This model is most easy when you are still young and life is simple(as it is for us now). It becomes very challenging after we all have wives, children and grandchildren and different local interests and politics. It usually leads to (somewhat bitter) splitville where assets are divided. This is one area my siblings and me are most weary of and want to do a better job of than our prior generations.
Simple: the system/blog replies with a confirmation of reception that includes the post text. Just hit reply, edit it and send.
Great pictures. I'm going to guess that the photographer used flour as the snow? Maybe not, it seems almost too white for flour.

Most appear to be Star Wars Lego but the third- and second-to-last images almost look like cosplay (almost).
Why success has nothing to do with being part of the ‘elite’
Amazon probably did market research to determine what people would really want. When I read your list of things the Fire doesn't have, I realized I wouldn't miss any of them.
You forgot to mention that the price is $200 under what most tablets cost. This is just the first iteration, but I fully expect the Amazon market to become relevant as a result of this device's popularity.
China is far from first world. They have modern cities, but their GDP is less than $5000/year pp. They employ slave child labor to make your cheap plastic shit. They work 14 hour days. It sucks.
Consumers are starting to lose themselves in unecessary features. Do you really need any of this to use the Kindle Fire for what it was meant for -- a cheap portable book/game/movie viewer?

To each his own, but I bought the new Kindle for this reason. I own a Kindle Keyboard, but it was just too much -- I just wanted a barebones reader. Even the touch, IMO, is overkill -- who really needs to "touch" what is supposed to be a book? So I picked up the $79 Kindle and was very happy. It's really thin, great aesthetics, and has all the barebone features I need to do one job really well.
You should read the original article:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/10/10/111010fa_fact_...
(subscription required, unfortunately =/. use your uni account or something)

The tone there is much more neutral, because Michael Clear in fact qualifies his statement.

quote from the new yorker article -----------------------

Clear responded that his work for Allied Irish Banks was brief and of "no importance". He admitted that he was a good programmer, understood cryptography, and appreciated the bitcoin design. But, he said, economics had never been a particular interest of his. "I am not Satoshi," Clear said. "But even if I was I wouldn't tell you."

The point, Cler continued, is that Nakamoto's identity shouldn't matter. The system was built so we don't have to trust an individual, a company, or a government. Anybody can review the code, and the network isn't controlled by any one entity. That's what inspires confidence in the system. Bitcoin, in other words, survives because of what you can see and what you can't. Users are hidden, but transactions are exposed. The code is visible to all, but its origins are mysterious. The currency is both real and elusive -- just like its founder.

"You can't kill it," Clear said, with a touch of bravado. "Bitcoin would survive a nuclear attack."
Well, there's already a lot of comments here pointing out that he game is unrealistic and rigged. But I'd like to add to this a bit, and to say that the memes which the game is rigged to spread are not only wrong but pernicious.

There are two views of poverty in rich countries. One view holds that poverty is caused by poor people who make bad decisions, and that it's possible to lift yourself out of poverty by making good decisions instead. The second view holds that poverty is caused by external factors, that it's a trap that poor people can't escape, and that the way to solve poverty is by giving ever-increasing amounts of taxpayer-funded free stuff to the poor until they stop being poor. The cartoon versions of each of these extremes are silly, and there's a bit of truth in both of them.

The real trick, though, is that the first belief, the belief that poor people can pull themselves out of poverty, is true only to the extent that they actually believe it. A poor person who believes he can get out of poverty by making sensible decisions will make those decisions. A poor person who believes his poverty is the fault of, and can only be solved by, other people will not. Convincing a poor person that someone else is responsible for their situation is just about the worst thing you can possibly do for them.

Those who want to support increased welfare are openly hostile to the idea that poor people can take responsibility for their own decisions and start making better ones to solve their problems. And this, I think, is a huge factor in perpetuating poverty.

I want to help the poor, really I do, but I'm certain that teaching them the correct values is far more important than handing them cash.
> There is nothing different about the plumber and the artist.
> Both would like to be paid for their work.

No. A plumber wants to be paid for work, your musician wants to be paid a rent. A plumber wants to be paid once, your musician wants to be paid for every copy.

If your musician comes to me and offers to make a song, and I agree to pay to fund it, then fine: we make an exchange just like a plumber and customer. But a plumber does not then impose restrictions that I cannot copy their pipes and stuff, or cannot allow anyone else to use them.

A plumber is not given special monopoly privileges -- that is the difference. Now, such privileges might be pragmatically justifiable as a market mechanism (as is the contention of copyright), but there is clearly a difference between having them and not.
Twitter joins JCP and OpenJDK project
If there would be ruby but no python, or python but no ruby - the remaining one would be worse and less mature than it is now.

Having competition made them both stronger, no doubt.
You may well be right and perhaps there is no future in paid apps. However that should be the choice of the creator/publisher, not somebody who cracks the app and re-publishes it. If their app is worth 99 cents or whatever then people will vote with their wallets.
I find it pretty obnoxious that someone leaked this. This is classic "ruining it for everyone".

That app, when I worked at Amazon, was open to any employee. It would totally suck if they had to restrict access because of some idiot. I always thought it was pretty awesome that I could randomly query all sorts of data at Amazon.
Resorts World Singapore, please let the dolphins go
Κατασκευη ιστοσελιδων
Tap dancers probably also hate the word "tap" being so blatantly misused ;)
I have the luxury of a corporate job that allows me to create software applications for internal users that are much better than what they were using before - so much better that their daily enjoyment of their jobs is significantly improved. (And that says a lot more about how bad their old tools are than it says about how awesome a programmer I am.)

As challenging and frustrating as it can sometimes be for me to get the application stack working, it's nothing compared to the aggravation and sheer misery I'm eliminating from my users' workflow.

One group sits close enough to me that I can actually hear the reduction in swearing each time I replace a shitty old tool they have to use with something that was actually designed with their needs in mind. That's a pretty nice feeling.
Wrong. Even Fred Wilson mentioned about the swagger. Try going to uncrunched.com and feel the difference.
I did click their links for the swagger somewhat. Soon they'll realize that's what gets pageviews and go back to their old model. Right now, without the personality, they're a dry rag and wide open to competition. They effectively lost their USP when that main guy left. What makes them special anymore?
It may be a useful skill, but it's also not what's being taught in an algorithms course.
Show HN: Wannaask.me - Anonymous questions for Facebook users
You're assuming that the interface audits access.

The vast majority of the internal tools I've seen have not audited, they are utilities that are built for a specific purpose and it's not anticipated that someone would leak information out of it.

To me, that looks a bit like a SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services) report. If so, unless they've gone to great lengths to audit access... it isn't audited and the web server logs aren't going to help.

I'm with enneff on it irking. But at the same time, I would rather occasional disrespectful leaks like this than locked down environments that would prevent whistleblowers exposing the really bad stuff that happens (not in reference to AMZN, just in general).

That's why it irks me personally, not because I care about this data, but because it's irresponsible and disrespectful and helps to bring in the kind of culture that makes it harder for the whistleblowers to operate in when it comes to things that should be leaked.

I've probably phrased the last part of this post appallingly.
this doesn't seem like the sort of leak that anybody is going to be too angry about.
People have to get it out of their heads that Amazon believes it will make serious coin on selling the devices.

The estimates of how much the Fire cost to make are hugely speculative and do not account for a bunch of other Amazon's costs, such as affiliates marketing. The pricing at $199 means Amazon's goal is to drive volume. The pricing of the $79 standard Kindle means Amazon's goal is to drive EVEN MORE VOLUME. The pricing of $0 for the Kindle reader on the PC, iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and browser means Amazon's goal is to drive EVEN MORE VOLUME.

Why? Because they monitize by selling content via their cloud service and by delivering an end-to-end consumer experience across MULTIPLE devices.

Stop focusing on the shiny device. I know it's pretty and you can touch it, but the value proposition has shifted. Devices no longer matter (in relative terms). What matters is how an experience can be delivered ACROSS these entities:

experience = people + devices + services

Plural.
If it's missing an SD card slot, I'd miss that. 8GB isn't that much space when you're talking video.

That said, $200 is getting dangerously near the comfort zone for a device purely bought with the intention of using it around the house (where WiFi negates the need for large onboard storage).
Chandler Locksmith
right? instead of 'poking' girls you like, you can buy them a drink.
Perfect Anniversary Gift | A Gift of Poetry
One day every Starbucks will be a betting shop
On the other hand, this "leak" is very good news for Amazon, right before a major day for Apple. The tech journalists will have to cover the Amazon story, thereby eating into their Apple coverage.
90% of my use case for one of these would be on a train or a bus. No reception for 3G or GPS, no use for a camera/microphone/HDMI/card slots. Blue tooth might be handy if I had blue tooth headphones, which I don't.
I.e. don't fucking bother unless the management changes completely. I agree.
Three quotes, hopefully not out of useful context, that seem incongruous:

"Rubinius is about the join JRuby and MacRuby in the realm of GIL-less Ruby implementations"

"I spend my free time working on an alternative Ruby implementation which doesn’t use a GIL (MacRuby)"

"I respect Matz’ decision to keep the GIL even though, I would personally prefer to push the data safety responsibility to the developers. However, I do know that many Ruby developers would end up shooting themselves in the foot"

So developers using GIL-less MacRuby, JRuby and Rubinius are prone to foot shooting? I wish they'd blog about this more, I've never once heard a MacRuby or JRuby developer blog saying "I went back to MRI because I needed my Ruby code to be run more safely".
YouTube Launches Site Specifically for Teachers
It's not racist at all. Quite the opposite. It's culture-ist.

It suggests that the success of Asian immigrants is not due to their race at all, it's due to their culture. And that this culture can be emulated by people of other races to achieve similar success. That's the exact opposite of the racist view, which would be that Asians are richer than black people because Asians are better than black people.
Best practices in managing deliverables?
The idea that the US suffers from structural unemployment is a conservative red herring intended to justify government inaction in the face of an unemployment crisis that is gutting our generation, all the while spreading the misconception that the unemployed are all lazy or unskilled.

In a situation of real structural unemployment, we would have a lot of unemployment in a few specific industries where consumer demand has collapsed (because people are spending money elsewhere), but have this offset by rising wages, rising prices, and massive business investment in other industries which produce things people want to buy instead. This is the story of the dot-com boom, where high school dropouts were trained into server admins because Disney and every other company out there wanted to run their own search engine.

This is nothing close to what we see. The economy has been poor since 2001, and since 2008 employment has fallen in practically every sector except internet, health care and mining. Silicon Valley is a bright spot, but it's job creation is trivial in the scheme of things. And even here much of the activity has been driven by loose monetary policy rather than an underlying shift in consumer spending. The fact we aren't getting as many bubble stories these days also leads me to suspect that even in California things are now getting slightly worse -- something unexpected under the structural explanation where we'd expect things to be heating up even more in this situation.
But I equally hate "tap" and "touch".
And that is what really separates the poor from the impoverished most times. When you look at those who are in the worst of the worst situations you realize that these people have little to no support network. If their parents made the same choices they did, or they don't even have parents anymore, or reliable family and friends, what are they to do when it gets tough? I know that if things every got really crazy tough for my family I could go to either me or my wife's parents and we could stay there, we have a social safety net. Lots of people living in these scenarios don't.
Tu Mejor Carta de Venta - Negocios por Internet
The cynic's money is on this "leak" being a PR stunt.
You are deeply misinformed about labor legislation.

The employer can and does interfere regularly with labor attempts to organize.

Tens of millions of dollars are spent every year by businesses hiring labor consultants known affectionately as "union busters" who spend their time and efforts intimidating employees.

Talking to a union organizer can and does get you fired. Particularly workers who are passionate supporters of unionization.

Even the laws that do exist are rarely enforced, and even when they are the penalties are minimal. Employers figure it's cheaper to pay a couple thousand dollars in fines after they've won an election than it is to not break the law and lose it.

Labor regulation is massively skewed toward the employer compared to any other developed country. Unless you think that any labor regulation at all is an encroachment on the employers' rights.

Full disclosure: I've spent some time labor organizing and have been physically assaulted by management for talking to employees in the parking lot, so I'm a bit biased.
FM 12 Key
"cell phone: don't get one if you can't afford it (ditto for a regular phone)"

This is kind of a tricky thing, right? Phone access is still essential for job hunting, and payphones aren't terribly common anymore either. Borrowing a friend's phone is sometimes possible, but for getting a callback? Not so much.

Same thing goes for internet access (which, of the two, I think would probably be a better investment once a job is secured). Even so, low-wage jobs are often very dependent on scheduling and thus require a phone to get updated about shift changes.

(note also that yes, you can get net access from unsecured wireless networks [increasingly shunned due to piracy and access concerns] and public libraries [which may not be convenient to get to])

Simply not getting a phone (generalize to point of contact if desired) is not really a good option.
Damn. I thought this was an easter egg:
http://gigglebang.com/?q=exception

(In case it's fixed, it'll actually throw an exception)
if people are buying it as a cheap portable book/game/movie player, then yeah those features are unnecessary. but from everything i've heard, the primary thing driving returns on android tablets so far isn't that people dislike it, it's that people expect more than it is. some overeager salesperson or fanboy tells people that an android tablet can replace your computer, people get annoyed that it's just a tablet.

if amazon is successfully managing expectations for this product, it has plenty of features. if the fanboys get out of control and oversell it, then it is sorely lacking.
Which is probably the case also for this hack. It's probably possible to devise logic that would remove this limitation, but I assume that would be mentioned in the article.
Pull the wool over my eyes, please (The good and bad of hidden fees)
"climb to a perch from which it is incredibly easy to fall"

This is a succinct way to put it, and a good list. Can you say more about "social pressure against out-of-wedlock births"? You see this as another thing that encourages unsustainable lifestyles?
.Net Developer Shortage
The Beatles (well, their label Apple Records) was in a long running trademark dispute with Apple [Computer] which went back and forth for decades.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer

If you ever wondered why it took so long for The Beatles to be sold in the iTunes store it's mostly because of the litigation and bad blood between the two parties. I imagine that cold, hard cash healed all wounds.
Burying the Hatchet
HN Request: Marketing and Sales for Hackers
We're a startup composed of all hackers. We've built our product, and tested with real customers. We're ready to start spreading the word about our startup, where should we start?

Is there an MVP-like strategy to sales and marketing? Best way to get press releases? Which blog do we ask first to write about us? Will asking one blog to write about our launch hurt our chances with other blogs? What other methods can we use that have a good ROI? How do we sustain a stream newsworthy articles over a longer period of time?

Blog articles? Twitter? Facebook? And when can we best expect a visible ROI on each? We need a "Sales and Marketing for Hackers" book.
It's possibly they just locked down the work stations to disallow anything but IE, then don't have WiFi for laptops.
Physics nobel description
Is it really coincidence that two of the most popular scripting languages, Python and Ruby, made this language design choice that you think is incorrect?

It seems more like a case of "worse is better". The GIL lets programmers ignore a lot of parallelism bugs, so it lets people get their regular work done faster at the cost of long-term scalability. That certainly seems to be the "Rails way" and it is a philosophy that has led to popularity.