skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reserves is a kind of dodgy term. Never trust a table stating what the reserves are, unless it's something well-studied like oil (which will have dozens of different charts, depending on what you mean by "reserves"). Like oil, lithium will keep being produced as long as the price keeps rising, as new reserves are found or uneconomic reserves become economic.

It's more a question of price, how quickly it rises, and what the alternatives are.
Looks very slick. Took a little while to understand that the buttons at the top all work via drag/drop. It looks like you can only add information in a single text box. I can see the appeal if you're just organising a single iteration but a title and tags are probably going to be required to organise a backlog.
Would you also call taxes theft? Having to stand in line at some DMV versions?

All of those steal time or money from a person who hasn't agreed to it.
Too bad the game doesn't allow you to ditch the car. Car falling apart is huge money sink. First thing I'd do is to get rid of it.
Made it through the month with $411 left, a root canal to pay for and apparently I owe a collection agency money for a car.

Wasn't terribly impressed with the choices I was given though, because I've been in similar situations in the past and, while it may be very different in the US, I have never had any significant problems. Also, why do bills like car registration cost more if I choose to pay them later? In real life I once had to pay my electricity bill a month late because I didn't have the money - I called them up and they deferred the payment by a month. They didn't suddenly charge me extra.

EDIT: Just played it again and made it through the month with $274, with no outstanding bills.
He cut your pay in half, not your hours. It's stupid.
Should be using LocalStorage ... what version of FF, OS you on? Possibly a bug and I will have a look.
Apps for Failed Institutions
Trio win Nobel Physics Prize for supernovae research
People are already non-functional in the real world. That is, a world without houses and supermarkets. A virtual assistant will not change the dependence on technology and society radically, it will only add to it a little.
The Game Changer: Siri, a Virtual Personal Assistant
Code Folding in Sublime Text 2
Private Anti-Piracy Investigator Spills The Beans
Right. And here's a different flash site, which shows that literally hundreds of millions of people worldwide increased their real income over the last twenty years:

http://www.gapminder.org/labs/gapminder-china/#$majorMode=ch...

Somehow hundreds of millions of people in China and elsewhere went from far more deprived conditions to first world status over the span of a few decades. Nothing in that game compares to the horrors of the Cultural Revolution or the mass starvation of the Great Leap Forward. So clearly it is possible for an entire civilization to pull itself up by its bootstraps through capitalism. [0]

Finally, as noted the game stacks the deck against reality. It starts you out as a single parent with no savings and evidently no family members who will help you out...without any acknowledgement of the fact that broken homes, divorce, out-of-wedlock births, a lack of a high school diploma, and a failure to save are the major causes of poverty. [1], [2]

If the game started a few years earlier and asked "do you want to complete high school" and "do you wait till you're financially stable before marrying & having children", the overall message would be very different. Indeed, the authors would likely be accused of having unfashionable political sympathies for simply advising that people mimic the behaviors of middle class Asian immigrant families.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Third-World-First-Singapore-1965-2000/...

[1] http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba428

[2] http://thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/2010/pdf/bg2465.pdf
People who make music are not dependent on the music industry - they are the music industry. Moronic is the person who thinks that nothing can be done to foster a society where the creation of art is respected. Throwing your hands up and saying it's too late is just pathetic. Thankfully there are enough people out there who respect the value of recorded music that it's still a $9 Billion industry, and in fact, the "tide" has risen over 3% this year.
- study loan: don't get one in a field where job prospects are bad, better to go do work instead

- cell phone: don't get one if you can't afford it (ditto for a regular phone)

- kids: if you can't afford them, use a condom (yes, that's harsh, but that is something that really beats my understanding, people already living on the edge that decide to have one, two or even more children)

- in general: if you can't afford something, don't buy it.

Your prior decisions will determine to a large extent whether or not you can survive on a very basic salary when hard(er) times hit. Getting a room-mate and sharing the cost of things that you are unable to afford by yourself are good tricks to get around some of the more practical limitations that a low wage job gives you.

I used my low wage job (mailroom boy) to expand my knowledge about computers which eventually landed me a higher wage job. My typical meal back then consisted of plain macaroni with ketchup, because the rent took away 5/7ths of my income, and the electricity bill another 1/7th. That left me with a grand total of 100 'credits' to feed myself for a month. Not a whole lot. I made pretty sure that there were no kids, phone bills or debts to go with that, and I did whatever was within my means to cut short that phase of my life.
It's not so much that wanting people to pay is being an idealist, but that wanting things to be some way other than way they clearly are is being an idealist.

In another, less sophisticated time, you would have found a reality not far removed from the shop owner I described - and they would not have been considered lazy.

But a shop owner who railed against the shifting sands of humanity, pining for simpler times lost as he was pilfered blind, would clearly be sorrowful idealist.
Karl Marx’s Long Shadow in Eastern Europe
Write-up on Swedish conference: Android – To Industry and Beyond?
If you're living paycheck to paycheck, it means you're spending 100% of what you get. A bad month makes it expenses > income.

The trick is to not live paycheck to paycheck in good months, and it seems like $9/hr should be enough for a bit of savings.
I've been thinking about the BackLog problem a lot ... the problem I've always had is the backlog tends to massivity (that's a word, right?) really quickly. A profusion of ideas and notes and bugs that end up as a special type of project debt and dragging the tool and team down with it. My current thought is that beyond the immediate future, the backlog doesn't belong on your wall at all ... use a wiki, or a bug tracker, or something designed to capture that sort of information more completely than a planning tool. Stories get promoted to the wall during planning and they are acted on immediately.
Wake on LAN through Internet
This is a borderline submission. I don't want to troll with political articles but I found the following quote worthy of interest over here:

... According to a 2009 survey of more than 26,000 people in 36 countries conducted by the Gallup Organization, only 31 percent of Americans agree with the statement that “entrepreneurs exploit other people’s work.” By contrast, 70 percent of Bulgarians, 72 percent of Estonians, 54 percent of Latvians, 79 percent of Lithuanians, 70 percent of Poles, 63 percent of Romanians, 73 percent of Slovenians, 73 percent of Slovakians, and 69 percent of Croats agree....

Many times when we talk about the Silicon Valley we talk about how the culture is so important because it fosters entrepreneurship. It's interesting to see some stats related to entrepreneurial culture in other places.
Good job, link to an https article when over half the content on the page is delivered via HTTP.
I've definitely timed my run pretty well :P

I've had a look at the site, but not signed up as I have had a pretty clear vision for storywall that I wanted to get out in the last couple of weeks.

What do you think of trello?
4.0, ubuntu, cool idea btw, I hope you fly with it.
There's nothing that says that various technologies act in some sort coordinated, "equal and opposite" ways.
"Nickel and Dimed" was mentioned in one of the fact-bubbles. I highly recommend the book for anyone who wants to learn more about the decisions people face when in situations like this. I was spent for a time (about 10 months) being unemployed and lived on about $40 per week, skirting my rent, not having phone/internet, and getting my power cut (twice). Even though I ended up taking a job I didn't like, it payed well and I pulled myself out of that situation. Never Again.
On Heroku, you can use any Scala version that SBT will use. I even used parallel collections in the sample app: http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/scaling-out-with-scala-...
Things I didn't do/have when I couldn't afford them in real life: children[1], pets, smoking, a car, entertainment[2]

[1] ok ok, I know that sometimes this is unplanned or you already have children before you have no money

[2] often had to turn down things I wanted to do because I couldn't afford them
How to Protect your Domain from Hijacking
Heh. You can loose your car if it isn't "road legal". But this caused me to loose a job (probably because I was living far away). This didn't stop them from firing me second time in the same game when I tried to join union.
The math question told me that "I was lucky that I am capable of helping my child in Math and Science" so I guess it does work!
This is a non-starter from many angles, aside from the choice of platform/language, a choice in which they completely missed what the actual target market does and how they do it. Inconsiderate product/market fit.

I wouldn't be so negative if the ignorance of the copy and comments weren't so palpable.
Thanks, I really appreciate it.
Will post back here when I track down the storage issue.
"People who make music are not dependent on the music industry - they are the music industry."

Be realistic - a lot of people in the music industry do not make music.

--

The problem is; people need to be compensated, but the way they've traditionally been compensated in the past is no longer tenable. This is where innovative ideas are required. Conceptually, copying an MP3 is no more theft than quoting someone without permission to a friend is theft.

Charge people for the service - not for the goods; because the goods have no finite value.
Async in .NET
Songwriters figured out how to write jingles long ago.
>Startups figure out how to make money out of free apps.

I don't know if most of them do. If I look around in the android market there are some great apps, that very likely do not make any money although they offer actual value to the customer.

I don't get it, why should apps be released for free?

Especially on Android I am surprised as to how many free(mium) apps are available, which could and should be paid apps, since they offer value to the user.
Many apps however useful may not generate enough revenue by offering an ad-supported version of their app.

It's sad to see that the developer community is shooting itself in the foot by releasing so many apps for free/ad-supported. I am pretty sure that most ad-supported apps will not create a great revenue stream for the developer. Buyers simply get accustomed to this trend. See the divergence of revenue models between Android and iOS. I don't know if it's the market that speaks here, or maybe just a trend in developers not trusting in the value of their own product. All in all it seems that this trend of releasing apps for free does nobody any good, since it will stall innovation at some point.

On a side note, I would really like to see a comparison of how some similar apps perform which are either paid, freemium or donate. Maybe there is some threshold for when it makes sense to publish an app either freemium or paid.
Also, who starts smoking when they can't afford it?

People who are depressed, whose friends mostly smoke, and who can't see how they'll ever get out of this financial hole that seems deeper every month. Assuming it costs $80 a month to start smoking, the difference between $0 and $80 at the end of the month looms larger than the difference between -$100 and -$180. In the former case, you're going broke smoking. In the latter case, well, you were already broke, so hey, no change: still broke.

[Edit: I didn't actually play the game. I'm just responding to your comment about it. :) ]
Open Source Digital Signage Running On ARM Linux
Hardcore tech-interview style riddles and mathematical puzzles
You can't sue someone for being a patent troll just because you have a trademark on a game called "Patent Trolls"! Just like Bethesda can't sue scrolls for being scrolls now.
Might there not be a slight naming issue with using "Azure"?
Study in Keith: Live-Coded Musical Performance
The difference is that the plumber fixes hundreds of sinks, the artist fixes one and then extracts rent from users.

"Last I checked, no artists are selling MP3s to consumers on a per stream royalty basis. "

Still, every time the record is aired in public (bars etc), royalties are paid. And even when selling to consumers, they'll sell a vinyl disk, then a cassette, then a cd, then an .mp3, then a .wtf... and every time, it's the same damn recording, and if you try doing the format shifting yourself, they'd like nothing more than throwing you in jail.

And let's be honest: most record companies and artists ALREADY make more money from merchandise than they make on recordings, the same way comic book publishers make more money from toys than from actual comic books. This myth of the starving artist being robbed of revenue by downloaders is just that, a myth.

Now, where's that cassette that killed music back in the 80s...
Great. Playful (asking you to solve a "train a travels at 70mph..." question when you say you can help your kids with their homework) and creatively designed (cute distance-from-work slider for picking where to live). Of course it's propaganda, but regardless of the realism it does do a good job of simulating the low-income mindset, where every decision ("The ice-cream truck rolls round. Can your kid have an ice-cream?") ends up about money.
I think the rule is, never title something with a question when the answer IS "no." That happens all when e.g. reporting on sexy rumors that everyone knows aren't really true.

This is an actual open question, though. I have no problem with that.
Unless the reserves turn out to be at least 20x larger than that table, all electric lithium-ion is not going to happen. Are you saying that that table is off by 2000%?

Sure, it's not a fixed reserve but a smooth price curve. That doesn't mean a lot in practice; people aren't going to pay millions to extract every last bit of lithium from the earth. The point is that lithium-ion batteries for cars are most likely not going to be the long term solution. The same applies to solar panels and fuel cells that have rare materials in them by the way.
Go to your local business library they often have subscription access to market research libraries.
I think what's at issue is that Google will bow to court orders from any jurisdiction, no matter how tiny or corrupt and no matter how detached from American ideals of press freedom. A prosecutor in the US would have a hard time obtaining this kind of court order.
Same here. I would also sometimes add "food" to that list, though very briefly.

Although, I must add, I was soft-poor.
I concur. In metro Atlanta (USA), my mortgage+taxes+fees is rather less than in this game (and what I assume would be a smaller place in-game.)

Having a dog and a high-end cell plan, among other expenses seemed incongruous. Visiting schools, given the evening job (and only one job!) should have been trivial, as school are open in the a.m. The food shopping choices were awful too.

For a more realistic look (if several years old), a former colleague of mine took the "Food Stamp Challenge", and ate on a budget that could be purchased with food stamps, in response to claims the rate was too low.

http://www.dynamicrange.org/2007/05/food_stamp_chal.html
> - kids: if you can't afford them, use a condom (yes, that's harsh, but that is something that really beats my understanding, people already living on the edge that decide to have one, two or even more children)

I totally agree. If you only make $9/hr, maybe you shouldn't have kids. If we ever get around to controlling reproduction in the US, income level seems like a great place to start to me. (The game also tried to make me feel like a bad parent because I 'let' my kid get teased for eating free lunch and 'risk my child going hungry'. Where's the "Eat your damn food and mock people who have to pay if they try to mock you" option? Also I didn't pay $15 for a field trip which forced them to stay at the school that day when I know kids at my elementary got their field trip fees waived.)
Spine Mobile 1.0 release - native feeling mobile web apps
It should be called 'microsoft windows'. That way we can have 'Apple windows', 'digital research windows' and so on. Window managers are a class and you should not be able to monopolize a class name without some sort of addition.
Kudos for a beautiful rant, I really liked it an resonated. But after it and all of the comments in here I remembered Jobs' saying: "Computers are bicycles for mind". Which means you need to pedal it to get somewhere. As much as programmers would like automation and being lazy, It's still about pedaling.
>It's an expensive car that does not look good ... It's not faster or better than other cars

Sounds like a luxury car to me.
With most web architectures, your state is outside the process (RDBMS, NoSQL, filesystem, whatever persistent store you're using).

So the main benefit using threads (easy sharing of in-process state) goes away. For web architectures, concurrent request handling seems to me to be best achieved by multi-process, rather than multi-thread.

There are some minor benefits to threading (e.g. an in-memory cache of global state can be shared amongst multiple threads, rather than being replicated among multiple processes) but:

- there are out-of-process cacheing technologies (memcached, redis etc)

- threading doesn't come "for free", in that you need to pay a performance cost in terms of locking in your interpreter and/or a code complexity cost in terms of access to your shared data structures.
What do you mean by "hits", it's not a well defined term. Are you talking about page views, visits, visitors, unique visitors, etc ?
Quite a silly game, but it does a decent job of showing how all the options are not always considered by the people who most need to consider them. It's easy to say "I would make a fun homemade gift, take advantage of charitable dental programs, get a roommate," etc., but the people in hard situations often don't have the mindset to do this.
IBM Signals A New Round of Acquisitions
if your landlord does something illegal an alternative option is to tell him to go fck off rather than to pay or move out. Good luck evicting me if I'm up to date on payments and the contract stipulates terms that I've lived up to.*

I have never ever experienced a landlord trying to raise my rent mere days after I moved in, like they seem to do in this game.
Raycaster in HTML5 / JavaScript
I don’t even know what I am working for at the moment since everything seems so unpredictable. Every feature that I design and code may just get changed or scraped upon completion. Even if I do complete it, when am I going to get paid for it? Or will I even get paid?

You are not burnt out. You are just living in fear. I totally understand. You are going to have to confront a different fear to change this situation: your fear of sticking up for yourself in contract negotiation. Bottom line: if someone owes you money, its your fault. If you don't know if you will get paid, its your fault.
So get a roommate, look for a new place, move to a cheaper area, get a different job. I've done all of these things at one time or another.

I've paid as low as $125 per month in rent, but most typically in the neighborhood of $225-300 (this is in one of the 15 biggest cities in the US, a major college town, to boot).

Serving/bartending you can easily make $15-25 per hour and work 25-40 hours per week. I've also worked as a valet part-time for another $10-15 per hour. Package handlers can make $13 per hour (last I saw, several years ago) working the late shift. These are jobs that generally have no degree requirements whatsoever.

My roommate was once a couple grand short on tuition money. He stripped for a couple weeks and was able to pay it all off. My sister's husband brings in close to $40K in the Army, and they give money to pay off student loans, too. I've had several friends work in Teach for America or as an Americorps Vista, receiving relatively meager salaries but getting a living allowance, money toward student loans, and a resume-building experience for aspiring non-profit workers.

Meanwhile, remain tenacious in seeking out opportunities that make use of that degree, and make every use of student loan deferment and forbearance until all high-interest credit cards are paid off. Enter into debt management in order to get credit card interest rates down into the 5-8% range.

The only saving that should be happening is an emergency cash fund. It doesn't make sense to save until your debts are paid off, unless you can reliably invest at a higher return (e.g., your employer matches your contribution up to 3% of salary for an effective 100%+ ROI).

I know how easy it is to get dejected and want to give up, but you absolutely must soldier through it. Cut costs everywhere (don't eat out, sell that car, start biking, take up cheap hobbies instead of paying for entertainment, cancel cable, etc.) and pay down high-interest debts. Things get a whole lot easier once you start having some cash margin each month.

That was the main thing I hated about the quiz. Everything was so binary. Rarely in life are we constrained to a box other than the one we construct for ourselves.
Would it be ok to mention we're hiring Scala people in Canada? jobs@gushhq.com
The game is also advocating playing on the lottery as investing in your future.

That's not even the right message to send out.
I'm really cheap, but to be fair that was 5 years ago. But I'm sure if I had to, even now I could live on very little money.
It feels like a less-complete version of Pivotal.

Which is good in a sense, because Pivotal is an awesome product.

Can you explain why someone would choose StoryWall over a service like Pivotal?
This describes the life of around 50% (may be more) of Tunisians. The probability of bad things occurring to you is increased by the bad infrastructure, evil government, the general hardness of life and the chaos the country is living on.

So for me, this is completely realistic. Just drop the costs (and also the earnings) around 10 times (for poor people) to adjust for the living expenses.
Hairstyles For Fine Hair 2011
Germany, Munich
Show HN: Start a blog on github
Favorite Links of The Month (September 2011)
Here is a lineup of our favorite links from the most popular design blogs that have been posted in the last month. We hope you”l find them useful.
"kids: if you can't afford them, use a condom"

It is totally possible to predict when you'll become poor and therefore decide not to have kids. It beats me why do people ever get poor when life is just a sequence of such obvious decisions.
Great WordPress Design
This is pretty cool however the demos are not rendering correctly on my iPhone 4.2 Safari Browser.

Also huge +1 for awesome doc layout. Ability to switch from CS to JS? Nice.
The court will decide if they are confusable. I bet I couldn't name my game "Angry windows" either
All you need to know about MR dampers