skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Building managers typically get free or cheap housing and make pretty good income, one way or another. Architects, plumbers, contractors, and others involved in building and maintaining offices don't do bad, either. These jobs are in high demand; watch Dirty Jobs host Mike Rowe's TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_rowe_celebrates_dirty_jobs.htm...

Electricians and others who run wiring for new installations (I know several people who do this) all make pretty good money. The guys who work for utility companies fixing stuff after storms are unionized and make a comfortable living. Power companies themselves make money not only in the delivery of services but also in state-of-the-art energy trading.

I have direct experience supervising road crews. Most states have a mandated minimum pay for road workers; even the guys holding the stop signs are making $16-22 an hour, and that was in Ohio, where the cost of living is about half of the Bay area. Public transit workers are also almost always unionized. Government workers (I interned at the County Engineer office) make salaries on-par with other knowledge workers and have generous retirement.

The hardware is the major outlier here, but for the most part, the workers making your hardware are doing relatively well for themselves compared to their fellow citizens. And they are largely irrelevant when discussing income inequality in the US.

The reality is that useful skills bring in good money. The people providing for your quality of life are doing pretty well for themselves and will always be in work. Being unskilled and being unable to provide real value is a problem without an easy solution. I feel that people should be ensured a base quality of life, but that's not free. If people didn't aspire to more, no one would have anything at all.
I really think you need to look up what "conspicuous consumption" means. It isn't just about buying a slightly better, slightly more expensive version of a product. It's about spending money purely for the sake of showing off how much money you can afford to spend.
Well technically HTTP as an application-layer protocol is unchanged. So I don't really understand your comment. The messages are HTTP. Whether the headers are compressed by an underlying protocol (such as SPDY) doesn't seem to be relevant.
Law Credit
man, that's about the most arrogant way you could put it. I mean, at it's root, I think there is a valid question, "what do we do with unskilled laborers?"

The thing is, how much money you make? usually has more to do with how much money you are involved with than anything else. Now, sure, if you are highly skilled, you have a better chance of scoring the jobs involving more money, but that doesn't weigh any heavier than connections, certainly after you pass the bar of basic competence, from what I've seen. People working for top-end consulting companies, from what I've seen, are not on average much more skilled than people working at ISPs or smaller companies.

There is a 'shadow IT' industry where people do, essentially, our jobs for $10-$15/hr. Some of these people are quite good, (and often 'real IT' companies that pay real wages will snatch people out of this 'shadow IT' industry.) It's interesting to watch this happen; usually one person in the "shadow IT" industry will get a real job, and then the good people that one person knows? over the next few years they will get real jobs through this one person who got a job. I mean, you need a certain minimum level of skill to be considered, and beyond that, the better you are the more social bullshit people will overlook, but a lot of it really is 'who you know, not what you know.'

I know a bit about this, because I worked my way up through the 'shadow IT' industry into 'real IT' and now I run a company that is somewhere in between 'shadow IT' and 'real IT'

From what I've seen, the difference between working for peanuts in the 'shadow IT' industry and working for six figures in the 'real IT' industry, once you pass a certain minimum skill level, has more to do with who you know, and how confidently you can present at interviews than anything else. I can't tell you about several times where I was picked over people that I knew were vastly technically better than I was.

As for the real question you are asking, "what do we do with unskilled laborers?" well, there are two problems. first, there just isn't enough work to go around at minimum wage right now. Next, we live in a country where basic medical care is unaffordable on minimum wage.

I think both problems would be solved if we could find something higher-value for low-skilled people to do. I mean, sure, education maybe could help? but personally, I doubt it. I didn't go to school, and economically speaking, I am doing much better than people I know who did. I think most of the wage/education correlation you see has to do with the correlation between going to college and having well-off parents.

I mean, I've gotten a job through parental contacts (I mean, only one, but it was in the depth of the dot-com bust. I /really/ needed that job.) and almost all my other jobs through contacts that I earned myself; and yeah, I didn't go to college, but I had access to a computer, compilers, programming books, and training from a real live programmer and a real live sysadmin from the age of four on. I was privileged in the same way that most people who go to college are privileged.
It is for the financial elite. They want to OWN and let the "common man" RENT.
A locked boot loader is the entire reason why I won't be buying a Motorola Droid Razr. I really like the looks and features of it but what happens if they refuse to update the OS to fix potential issues down the road? The fact that I can hack (and have done so) my Galaxy S and upgrade the OS as well as uninstall all of the bloatware is immensely appealing to me.
It's a lot scarier once you realize that only 45% of Americans are workers. What this actually means is that 87.5% of Americans are earning less than $26,000.
Magnitude 3.9 hits SF Bay Area
Forget clinics, but surely the best surgeons have far higher success rates than the worst?
The same arguments about how apple products are not conspicuous consumption can be applied to gucci and bugatti.

If you get a real pair of gucci shoes from the store (not from the department stores), you really feel like you are walking on air, and you can walk for miles in these dress shoes without forming boils on your feet.

I don't have a bugatti yet :P But BMW and porsches drive effortlessly and brake effectively, which really help when a taxi cab tries to cut you off.

Now, tying this back to apple, the macbook airs are lighter than most netbooks yet still perform better than many monster dell laptops. It's somewhat nonsensical to try to argue that apple products aren't as lavish as gucci or bugatti.
A few ideas:

- Charge a small subscription for saving scores etc, just take those options away from the free users or segregate it so you have the ghetto public stuff and the awesome subscribers' stuff

- add customization, ad-free and anything else you can think of that users might pay for ... yes there's an on-going cost but if you can get any dollars at all out of your biggest fans that's better than the penny or two they're worth per month right now.. a single $1 purchase a day almost doubles your revenue

- interstitial ads like mailarchis mentioned, find a way to put them in and show them to each user at least once per day

- get a referral system in place so that these people who obviously love your game are motivated to share it

- outsource the backend through companies like http://parse.com/ if you need a full-blown database for your app might be cheaper than your current arrangement, and we (http://playtomic.com/) are debuting our first Android version next week which has free leaderboards that might suit your requirements

- sell the ad space yourself or use it to promote other games of your own
I think he's making a point about components and the laptop's manufacturing: even if you do find a Dell with components that compare to a MBP, that Dell is made of cheap plastic with a WiFi antenna that works intermittently, comes with bloatware, etc.
Tus recetas faciles
MMT has resurged recently in large part due to the evangelizing efforts of Warren Mosler. One of his intros to MMT for the layperson is "7 Deadly Innocent Frauds". For a counterpoint, here is a comprehensive refutation of 7DIF: http://conant.economicpolicyjournal.com/2010/10/refutation-o...
I'll be getting in touch shortly.
Is this a joke? Harping on Ron Paul on military spending? Seriously? The FIRST line item on his "plan" is a 15% cut of the DOD, including "all war funding ended":

http://www.ronpaul2012.com/the-issues/ron-paul-plan-to-resto...
Internet Wireless Plan
The price appreciation is artificial. It's disconnected from economic reality.
All it takes for the new Mayor of NYC to decide to issue thousands of new medallions and the price will fall.

This is what happend in Israel, when government issued many new taxi licenses and price fell from ~ $75K to ~ $25K.
I just made a WordPress port of skeleton, a quick look at foundations shows it to be very similar in terms of the responsive CSS, in fact they use exactly the same CSS, based on the 960 grid. The differences are foundations has a lot more "stuff" you can see in the github /marketing folder. It contains a slew of layout options, .php examples, javascript, fonts, etc, some are actually quite interesting and worth a look.
This is such an interesting story, it's too bad politics are going to destroy our ability to talk about it on HN.
How outflanking competitors with inbound marketing
Appreciating a product for being well-made doesn't make it a status symbol. People can like quality products themselves, not just the showing-off of them.
Simple Hickey
Independent Music Community
> I don’t find that using Clojure making the overall process
> of writing new code faster

He's talking specifically about writing _new_ code. I think the implication here is that Clojure encourages more consideration up-front, resulting in designs that are easier to modify down the road.

Given how much time is spent maintaining code vs writing new code this seems like a reasonable trade-off.
It isn't just a status symbol. That cheapens what Apple offers.

My father was a mechanic who bought tools from a specific supplier that was regularly 3-5x more expensive than generic tools. The reason? They would last 10x longer and work twice as well.

I see my MBP as a tool. It is worth the premium for quality.
I get my back up a bit when people talk about reducing shopping cart abandonment like its somehow this lost revenue. It's not lost revenue until you get a sale and the customer returns it. Until then, you are just speculating.

There's too much focus on the real-world customer where they somehow abandon a full grocery cart and leaving the store. This doesn't fully correlate on the Internet.

People abandon shopping carts all the time:

- they get disconnected from the internet.

- their browser crashes.

- Windows/OSX decides it needs to restart after an update.

And sometimes people, me included, just like to store stuff in a shopping cart as a way to "favorite" items while I'm browsing a site like Amazon. It's like bookmarking a product, without committing it to a Wishlist page (like on Amazon).
AT&T's Android sales are catching up to iPhone
Actually, we did start to pay off the debt but this was at the very end of the Clinton administration. If you'll look closely at the graph you supplied you'll see this. Note that the first Bush budget wouldn't be until 2001.

The debt wasn't being paid off at a great rate but it was being paid off and the person's main point that you responded to is correct. We were well off financially until some very irresponsible actions by the Bush administration.

I disagree with the point about us never being able to pay off the debt. It can be done and there are historical examples of countries with higher debt/GDP ratios that were paid off.

Note: When talking about debt of a country people generally mean the debt of the government. There was a budget surplus at the end of the Clinton presidency and this is what people usually mean when they claim a government was/is "paying off the debt".
I am widely regarded by friends & colleagues as an obsessive command-line junkie (often to a fault). I still love and use Dropbox regularly. I think you are incorrect that the problem was solved years ago!

Dropbox takes 5 minutes to install and start using. To start using subversion, you have to learn how to use subversion! God forbid you need a server.

Dropbox's ease of use is so spectacular that it benefits me doubly: I use it when I don't want to think about working copies and committing and svn upping (which is often), and I use it to collaborate with non-programmer friends. "Just install this and accept my shared folder invite" is kosher to any computer- and web-literate person.
Yes, you are not safe even if you are logged off from Skype!

PDF here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3137303

"When the caller calls a Skype user who is currently
off-line, the Skype application will still provide to the
caller the user’s most recent IP address, as long as the
user was running Skype in the past 72 hours. For this
reason, we are able to retrieve the IP address of a Skype
user that used Skype within the past 72 hours" (!)
Making mentoring specific
Steve Jobs Tried To Treat Cancer With 'Magical Thinking': Biographer
Why are we reading a link to a very short slashdot comment about politics unrelated to tech?
Having written a bit of Scheme and Clojure - Clojure's distinction between data structures make many things simpler - from writing code to writing macros.

As far as his comments on testing - I suggest you read this, http://blog.8thlight.com/uncle-bob/2011/10/20/Simple-Hickey....
you see this was posted today: http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2011/10/upcoming-changes-to...
Ask HN: CPM on Android/iPhone?
Just curious to know what some developers on these platforms are earning on CPM?
Yay for gov't estimates.

I think the estimates were made for the plans Clinton put. He didn't plan to go on war with Afghanistan or Irak or make huge spending.
I'm sure FL experienced this as well, but for the past few years, as foreclosures have left whole neighborhoods vacant in parts of CA, NV and AZ, people have been coming through and just ripping copper piping straight out of the walls. Thousands of dollars in damage for a couple dollars worth of scrap metal.

And I was kidding about the meth head thing. Last time I was up in Portland, they were doing a bunch of work on the railroad. Some guys had ripped out all the ties along a half mile stretch of the line. Again.

Trying to police the source of the cash is smart. It's just probably not going to fly with this law.
Canada has an over-inflated real estate market, especially in Vancouver, which is equal to the bay area or even more expensive and the best weather we can get within Canada is Seattle style around Vancouver. Canadians finding US houses attractive in these two cases is not surprising.
> But I think it goes both ways; I'd like to see more hard scientists with a strong background in the liberal arts.

Exactly, I actually kind of have a little bit of sympathy for a guy like Oppenheimer that cited John Donne and the Bhagavad Gita after the first nuclear test (even though even the thought of nuclear bombs almost makes me sick to my stomach), but I suspect that today's scientists are not that versed in "liberal arts".
How Two Teenagers Broke In To Silicon Valley - And The Music Industry
How can the right wing argue for free markets when there are mandated monopolies right under their noses? Uhh... The right wing is NOT who's in charge of New York City. NYC as a whole is firmly in the camp of the left wing, democrats, Hilary Clinton and friends. It's not even close.
If they were educated properly, they'd know better before they got to college. Again, IMHO.
Your Need of the Day While on Move- Bluetooth Headset
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I wish I could upvote this a hundred times. You cannot, by definition, simultaneously maintain a trade deficit and reduce the sum of public and private debt.

I hate to trot this link out again, but: http://internationalecon.com/Finance/Fch5/F5-9.php
> It is a matter of media feeding made-up facts since current conflict started

Therefore the past 30 years mean nothing?

His crimes did not begin and end with the NATO operation. He was notorious for decades, in particular when certain Western governments were all too happy to offer him hospitality and (military) trade deals knowing full well what he sanctioned against his own people. But who cares about such trivialities when they're our friends, right?
Sifting through the day's top-list on the AI appstore... WTH's this? "Newton AI. The power of a 1000 research assistants at the click of a button, and they'll run all day tirelessly.". "99c launch deal, just for today -- get it now!" Hmm. Click.

You're now waiting for it to download to your little AiPod that'll beam 'brain bits' to
your home-bots, that're now busy sketching out the next monalisa onto a couple of shiny new dreamPads.

Why wouldn't those startup dudes down the street try and build a beefier/faster "runs at 50x universe speed" AiPod for the AI platform you just bought your
Newton AI app for?

-------

Why wouldn't AI be able to simulate 'regular universe time/ human time' faster? Why couldn't AI have stronger, more varied randomness?

The bottleneck would be interactions that require a peek into regular universe time: live human input (phone calls, emails), weather, biological data etc.
These guys truly get the whole "Social" thing.
Just right-click on an email and go to "Tag...". You might want to delete the default tags (which originate with TB 1.0) and create your own new ones from scratch.
I've spoken to Eastland drivers -- I've been riding with them for years -- and thats exactly what they do, minus the complexity. They announce an address over radio and the closest driver takes it. I don't remember how they enforce this policy in the company (sorry), but they do and it works.

As a customer, I don't have to muck about in some app, especially while buzzed, to get a car. I call and get a real person and am done in 5 seconds. No app can do that.

Admittedly, it works because they have a lot of drivers. I can see how this becomes a problem when you have many smaller companies and you need to hail the closest. Thanks for the perspective.
That's true, we thought about making it more general but our blog is targeted towards game developers
Except Brin wasn't trying to respond with a proper argument, and if he had, a public interview would have been a totally inappropriate setting.
Bake in Google Chrome Frame.
Very excited by this, looks very nice and pretty handy. The more choice in this space the better in my opinion. Having Tim Ferris in there makes it seem like this is going to change my life.
Yeah, maybe you can finish load testing your server. (Sorry.)
Thanks for the feedback. I'm glad you liked the post!
AOSP source code is now back online: http://groups.google.com/group/android-building/msg/c73c14f9...
This publicity makes the difference between 5 billion copies and 6 billion copies. 5 billion copies is a lot, but why leave money on the table?

(Yes, I know they won't really sell 6 billion copies.)
It's something that my father-in-law had to go through a couple of years ago (the all "let's take out half of his intestines away"). Ironically, he was later diagnosed as not having had pancreatic cancer, which is good, because he's still alive. But yeah, it's a hell of a surgery, he was on the surgery table for 7 hours straight and after a couple of hours the main surgeon just wanted to give up, but somehow my brother-in-law bribed the lead-nurse and she convinced said surgeon to do his best, which he did (this is Romania, things like these happen).
I don't know much about the bond market but is a Treasury IOU in the sense you mention really much different than a Treasury bond? I suppose the ability to reneg on the IOU without disrupting the bond market would be a difference. Provided this is true. That is, if the Treasury does not pay the IOU to the Social Security wouldn't there be a repercussion in the bond market? I don't see how a Treasury IOU would be different than a Treasury bond.
Welcome to economics. Trying to model real, functioning economies is a lot like trying to model natural language. We think we understand a lot about it, but there is a level at which we really don't know what's going on. And it doesn't help there _everyone_ involved in an economy is not only willing, but eager to game it.
No I didn't :)

You can learn "accounting, cleaning, hiring, cleaning, customer service". You can't learn passion about coffee.
Are you referring to business class immigration? In Canada, its $800k, and you don't get a house ([http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/immigrate/business/index.asp]). But yeah, point.
Here we go:

http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/20/the-scourge-of-pentile-retu...

But thanks anyway for the downvote. ;)
I've known a few people, close friends parents and a family member die of cancer. You can struggle on through chemo and radiation therapy for 4-5 years or you can go in 6 months. I'm not sure I can say which one is best. The ops are by no means magic cures, if you survive the op you are in a lot of pain from chemo and radio therapy. Example, Morphine sickness is pretty horrific. Quite common for people to reject it and take the pain because you feel so bad on it.

Having seen that and if I knew that I had a cancer which was very unlikely to be cured I would definitely consider not going through with the surgery. Better to die quickly than live in constant pain for another 5 years?

Its easy to make the stretch to trying a bit of alt medicine. It's is not going to make things any worse than they are, if anything the placebo effect of feeling you are in control is probably quite strong.

I don't think it's easy for a healthy person to understand what's going through someones mind when they're faced with this.
That is a massive hole. Very nice find. I hope you notified the ad network of this before you posted it though, responsible disclosure of these things is important because this hole can now be used by anyone to do pretty much anything. The most obvious thing that comes to mind is a spammer using this to redirect traffic through a third party domain which is whitelisted.
"why hasn't China invaded the USA yet?"

Well for starters, the Chinese don't seem to really be in the business of invading countries on the opposite side of the world, do they? Unlike another little country I can think of...
Or maybe I use a different library? Maybe jQuery is not to my liking at all? The convention of writing libraries as jQuery-specific is a cancer in the community right now. Making a library specific to a particular utility should be a secondary project goal.