skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> who is going to consume these products if people are saving?

Peter Schiff tells the story of a six guys stranded on a deserted island: five Asians and an American. They divide up the work as follows: one Asian hunts, one Asian fishes, one Asian gathers vegetables, one Asian cooks, and one Asian tends the fire. The American has the job of eating.

Peter says that an economist would look at the situation and explain that the American is the key to the whole enterprise. Without the American, the Asians would not have jobs.

The truth is that supply is its own demand. Whatever you produce that is surplus, you can trade for another's surplus. The problem in economics is not how to increase demand, but how to increase supply: how can people produce more useful things so that they can trade their surplus for the surplus of others.
10:06p Shared dropbox folder... seriously, what next? haha 10:07p

10:07p Got email describing next steps. I suppose I wait for human intervention to arrive. (PS: So far, none of this is easy. If it weren't for it feeling like a treasure hunt, I'd have probably given up already.)

10:12p Decided to register while I wait...

10:15p Got the welcome email...

10:17p Fell into a rabbit hole.

Sorry, but this is much too complicated. I realize this is a VERY early prototype (I hope) but there is no way a user will open an uploaded html doc to follow a url in order to link my account to my shared folder. Surely there is some other way of doing this via Dropbox's APIs?
When you have kids then you really live on $7000 per year. Believe me.

So maybe when you are younger it is good enjoy a little because when middle age crisis comes (and it will come) and if you didn't enjoy when you were young all kind of crazy shit can happen. Happen to my father in-law: all his millions are worthless...
Re-use the Twitter social graph for your site's friend network
It's not a judgement about the relative contributions of Steve Jobs versus that of Dennis Ritches. It's a judgement about the shortsighted, irrational, overly individualistic mentality that attempts to attribute the ONE PERSON to any contribution, no matter how large. The fact is, that both Dennis Ritchie and Steve Jobs relied on entire _communities_ to accomplish what they supposedly "did on their own," which is the unsaid IDIOTIC hyperbole that is routinely thrown around HN, starting with "I did this project in a weekend posts" (which if they were honest, they would say "WE, me and the other people who built the fucking libraries, languages and other tools, did this project in a weekend).

The problem is not Dennis Ritchie and it is not Steve Jobs. Both were people who were doing the best they could in the situation that they were in. It is YOU PEOPLE who are the problem. Your fundamentally dishonest premise that credit can be attributed to any one person in any project that involves more than masturbation (even that is a collaboration between the person and the providers of food that enabled him or her to get past puberty). Frankly, I'm sick of all this bullshit.
Definitely ask to see the figures. If they truly are profitable and have closed a series A - TAKE IT.

Usually startups that are successful have a tough vetting process. If they want to hire you, they want to hire you. Do not get greedy, but take some equity and get a bit higher salary as well.

Be careful, though. I have seen a few things about company exits that leave some shareholders with nothing (some stipulation with the deal itself). Good luck
Yes. Something like x dollars per customer per year would be slightly less optimised but more robust and defensible.

Don't forget that by providing you with sales / revenue / customer management they are bringing a lot of value to the table.

Who will develop the product ongoingly? Who will provide patches and support? These might seem like obvious questions to you but they must be discussed and written in a contract.

Finally, make sure your contract includes sufficient legal protection. i.e. the product has no guarantees and you are not liable for any cost, damages or loss, direct or indirect. If things go ahead then you definitely need a lawyer to help you with this.
That's how I generally express my satisfaction with businesses, but sometimes just "never eating here again" is too generous to the restaurant that served you food with hair...
This is clearly the "build it and they will come" bullshit. I had hoped the Hacker News crowd would be the first to recognize that demand doesn't just "appear."
Because you will go bankrupt if something serious happens while on this plan. Go see the details of his coverage, I bet it only covers basic things, and 50% of hospitalization drugs, and some crazy deductible. So if he gets cancer or heart disease (most common serious illnesses), he is fucked, and will be fucked every year, if he can still afford that insurance after the first year.
Nowhere in that paragraph does he say or imply that grandparents where living on 7K dollars in nominal terms. He simply notes that they lived simpler lives. That is supported by the data. Our grandparents had median incomes about 40% of what we have today (in real terms) see:
http://www.stanford.edu/class/polisci120a/immigration/Median...
"Remember how upset they got when their bonuses were in danger unless they got bailed out?"

Entitlement is entitlement. Your argument is that of a child: he's doing something wrong, so I am too. Why can't they be above it?

"If you're a tax payer, you're entitled to good government. You're entitled to be treated fairly and equitably. You shouldn't be short changed just because you're only middle class."

You're right. I wish my taxes were lower for me. Maybe I should go protest?
Personal problems meant it was much more practical to make my own way than to have anyone else help me. :\
Are you providing any suggestions, or just degrading the few successes that actually exist at a sustainable price? These are relatively reasonable options at almost incomprehensibly low cost, and are miles better than what existed before.
If you happen to have an Android phone it would be cool if you could try my new app Trollaroid https://market.android.com/details?id=com.sprobertson.trolla... and let me know if you think it's fun, if it's easy to figure out, and if there is one feature I could add that would instantly improve the user experience. If you don't have an Android maybe just check out the homepage http://trollaroid.com and see if there's one improvement I could make there.
Ask HN: Is anyone using Google's Music Beta? Compare it to Amazon Cloud Player?
Sorry for a low-tech question but I was going to ask for a beta invite but since I already use Amazon Cloud Player and like it a lot, I was hoping to first get a few opinions from people who have tried both.

Thanks.
I am not saying producing is not important, my point is that you cannot just demote consumption to an unnecessary side variable, because even when you trade your surpluses, you each are the market for the other.

Does that not make consumption as important? What if no one likes fish other than the one Asian? What happens in that scenario?
I believe the idea is that the clocks are synchronised in the frame of the satellite. Due to the relativity of simultaneity, it doesn't make sense to talk about the clocks being synchronised in an absolute sense.

Even if the satellite is swallowed by a black hole, that measurement frame still exists as an abstract concept.
>A hacker's "freedom" to poke around in the system has been traded for the freedom of an average person to use the damn thing without worry.

The two are not mutually exclusive. Some Macs have been made in the past that were easy to open up, should you choose to. Others required special screwdrivers be used, removing choice. What is wrong with giving grown ups who have purchased hardware the ability to choose what to do with it? Support can simply be limited, for those who choose to customize, to system wipes.
"So if he gets cancer or heart disease (most common serious illnesses), he is fucked, and will be fucked every year, if he can still afford that insurance after the first year."

I already looked. $3000 deductible, no lifetime limits, and it covers major surgery, doctor visits are $40. If you want prescription coverage, there are plans less than $200 (in the $190 range) that cover 80% of prescriptions.

Cable costs this much. I'm not saying this guy should pay for this, but many people that claim they will go bankrupt can easily get a plan like this and not.
Dear John Carmack.
Yes as I said I emailed them. I sent everything, my business plan, my site, everything. Now maybe they didn't like my application. Maybe it was no good. But from my perspective, the only interaction I have with this VC is being stonewalled by them after spending time applying and dropping (what I believe) to be a great oppurtunity right in their laps.
I guess the uproar over the sleaziness of patent trolls, and Lodsys in particular is over. A shame. I wish that these stories would stay in the news and at the top of Hacker News everyday until a positive change to the system is made.
No, but people might do it for the handful of artists they really like or believe in.
Many of the online learning solutions quoted throughout this comment thread are excellent for people who are autodidactic (and I suspect a vastly disproportionate % of the HN audience are autodidactic).

But, for everyone else who lack the will power, discipline, attention span for self-education, college is a great way to structure higher education.

This is a great and accurate comment; it reminds me of what I wrote about in "Policies have consequences: Teacher edition" (http://jseliger.com/2011/03/06/policies-have-consequences-te...), in response to another HN thread.

The gap between the rhetoric I see on HN regarding education and what I see in classrooms is so vast as to be amazing. Many if not most people simply won't do something educational or vaguely educational unless there's some kind of external structure in place to make them do it—for more on this phenomenon, see Dan Ariely's book Predictably Irrational. The HN commenters who are wildly self-motivated and, as you say, auto-didactic, are the exception.

Which is great, by the way, and, as many commenters point out, the Internet is a great way for to achieve educational and intellectual goals. What the commenters miss is one thing: it's great for the highly motivated and interested. For everyone else, it doesn't hurt, but it's also not a substitute.
I don't think that paragraph is of much value, and I think all the replies you got kind of address a non existent discussion.

I don't think it makes sense to discuss if a mathematical concept is 'visible' just because it happens to be something that is often represented on a 2d plot.

This discussion is not visible, what's visible is the group of pixels that form the text on the display device you're using to read this webpage.

Honestly, is this kind of observation of any value?
Hall.com's purpose to be revealed soon.
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Good, but why not make all permissions truly optional?

I think app authors would be a lot more responsive if they saw stack traces from failed attempts to use a declined permission, rather than the silent number of users who never sign up because permissions are overreaching. Throw up a warning when you decline a permission that the app marks as necessary: "This app may crash if you deny this permission."
If the overall noise level is too high and you don't own a microphone, your freedom of speech can't be used effectively, you talk any nobody hears you. It is not a reason to drop freedom of speech, right? It's just the same with free software, the mere fact that you are allowed to read, change and distribute source code IS the key. Doing so is hard but not a reason to dismiss this freedom as irrelevant.
A lot of people do get that plan.

And a lot of people get denied that plan.
IOS5 Breaks Data Storage and Crushes My Soul
Your fist statement "having a degree demonstrates to employers that you'll be a good employee" indicates that there is value in obtaining a degree.

Yes, to the individual. But it creates an arms race scenario where everyone is induced to spend more resources than is socially optimal. Bryan Caplan addresses this in more detail at http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2011/06/me_and_the_retu.....
I didn't see any plans like that. What's the exact name?

If you're hospitalized, hist $40 doctor visit is every time doctor checks on him for 10 seconds. (That's true of any plan though.)

If here were a magical $90 plan that covers everything (or almost everything), nobody would pay for $1000 ones.
As does working for $40k a year and investing 30k annually which is what I did. There's no stock market magic required.
ok i've been playing with Siri for a few hours now. this thing is awesome!
Well, the "no lifetime limits" is thanks to the legislative healthcare reforms that were driven by a need to reduce the number of medical bankruptcies, so obviously that's a good step towards making healthcare more affordable to people who previously would have been driven into bankruptcy.

But a $3000 yearly deductible is still likely to be utterly unaffordable to a significant portion of the uninsured, and it would be surprising if they weren't subject to copays as well.
> but you still need someone to consume your product

Do we? We're not trying to make a lot of money, just enough to get by. And we're talking about an entire economy here, not about the profitability of an individual business. The whole point is that people in this model don't really care about how much money they're making (or, put another way, they place a very high value on their time).

The question is whether there would be something fundamentally wrong with a society in which people spent very little, but were nonetheless productive doing "their own thing".
MixRank (YC S11) is hiring engineers to solve hard problems at massive scale
MixRank (YC S11) is looking for a generalist hacker who will work with us to make online advertising less annoying, more relevant, and more effective. We want to bring the same kind of predictive analytics investment banks use to online advertising. Think of this as one giant optimization problem, with tremendous rewards if we can get it right.

At MixRank, we're:

-building web crawlers that index the web, tracking hundreds of millions of ad placements per day

-analyzing this massive amount of advertising data and writing algorithms to identify the best performing ads and traffic sources for advertisers

-funded by Y Combinator, 500Startups, and several great angels

-building a real business; we have thousands of advertisers using our analytics and have been growing revenue by 46% per week

About the job:

-We're still an early stage startup, and you're going to be one of our first hires

-You'll be able to work independently and own large portions of functionality

-You can work whenever you want (even the middle of the night), as long as you can get things done

-You can set up your work environment however you like, including any hardware you want

-You'll get generous equity and market salary

-You'll be like a founder and help us build the company, including being involved in critical decisions like system architecture and hiring

-We want to hire motivated, entrepreneurial people whose next job will be founder of their own startup

About Us:
http://mixrank.com/about#team

About you:

-You’re a highly productive coder, self-motivated and able to learn new skills quickly

-You're hungry, ambitious, independent, curious and driven

-We're based in San Francisco, so you should be local to the Bay Area or willing to relocate

-You develop on Linux or OSX

-Some of the technologies we use every day include Python, PostgreSQL, Javascript, Git, Bash, and Unix/Linux; experience in any of these is nice, but we like generalists that can pick up new things quickly

-Big data, statistics, machine learning, and analytics expertise is very helpful but not required

Shoot an email to jobs@mixrank.com and tell us about yourself, and something impressive that you've built.
Insightful.

So the argument in favor is that corporations are publicly chartered and have an obligation to act in the public interest, companies with publicly traded stock even more so. Sucking capital out of the market and leaving it sitting on a shelf while the broader economy stagnates seems contrary to the public interest, so limits on corporate cash reserves should be enacted. Anyone care to elaborate an argument against such a limit?
Halloween Deals, trick or treat?
That I agree with.

I suppose I (personally) think it's generally inevitable (and even mostly good!) that machines continue to evolve the way they are doing now - "good" primarily because the newer types of systems provide so much more creative power to non-engineering types, which make up the majority of people.

But, as someone who is deeply interested in computers today primarily because of the power that was available to me as a young child on an early PC, I think that one of the most noble goods that can be done for the future is to provide tools to allow future generations to have access to similar capabilities for exploration and design like we had. The most obvious way to do so seems to me to be "open Web" tools. Web stuff that lets kids play the way we did in BASIC (hopefully even better!) seems like a really good thing to me.
Wow, actually transcribed two lines correctly:

One, two! One, two! And through and though,
...
He left it dead, and with its head,

That's two more lines than I'd have guessed.
I don't do well with digital notes. I don't know why. Despite numerous attempts, I can't manage my thoughts on a digital sheet. It's not convenient enough...yet. A physical notebook feels better to me... So digital notes and task lists aren't something I typically use.

Additionally, I think there are too many barriers between me and my task list with services like this. I'm launching a similar product which helps individual keep track of people they know within their browser. My burning question is wondering whether the browser is the place where people are asking "Where did I know this guy from?"

In a similar vein, I wonder if people will want to require an internet connection, browser, and however much time it takes for the user to access their account. Reducing the time gap between epiphany and recording seems like a noble goal for your product to tackle. I think if you get this part right, you'll have something that's marketable. (I believe it's usefulness is obvious and without question.) Other companies in this space have reduced this gap significantly by deploying a mobile version of their service.

Regardless of a viable business model, this is really cool. :)
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Anyone got a 'why not Sinatra' for this?
I think you can make that argument for my country of origin. They can add negative for the brain drain as far as I'm concerned. I guess the same holds for a lot of Indian or Chinese students who came to the US. As for grad school and postdocing, the way it works is that this has very little to do with training or investing. I feel I earned every cent they paid me for doing research.

Grad school and the postdoc system pretty much a cheap way for universities to get labor at 50-70% of the private market rates. Universities call grad students "students" so they can get around various labor laws and not paying for things like health insurance. The use postdocs because it's easier to lay off people compared to staff scientists.

So they hire persons with masters degrees to do grunt work for 25k/year and call them grad students. Then they hire the smart ones with PhDs for 40k/year and call them postdocs.

Basically you're put in front of a computer or in a lab and told to work on this task much like private industry except maybe your work is a bit more interesting(?) You write reports about your work called "papers" and after 4 years you write a giant progress report and call it a "PhD Dissertation". There's very little actual training or education involved in this process. Or at least not more than you find in the private sector.

It's pretty much labor like it is in private industry. I guarantee you that without grad students and postdocs, very few scientific papers would be published, because grads and postdocs are the ones doing the actual research.

When you see news of some professor discovering something, you can pretty much be sure that it was discovered at 11 in the evening by some grad student or postdoc of his. He was just the manager and subsequently in charge of public relations. That's fine BTW ... it's not like Steve Jobs single handedly built the iphone, but he still gets all the credit for it.

I myself published over 30 papers in my career, many of them first authored putting in 100 hours week a lot of the time, so I think I earned the money I made.

You can argue whether those papers are the equivalent of an $800 toilet seat, but that's a different discussion altogether. I put in the sweat equity "on the bench". I earned that money.

Professors mostly spend their time teaching, managing their workers, excuse me, "teaching" their grad students and postdocs, and writing grant proposals. Academia has the same typical structure as anywhere else. The only time you spend any meaningful effort being "educated" without giving back is as an undergraduate.
I wonder why "long long" is 40 bits?

The immediate reason is that the ALU is 40 bits wide. The reason it has this particular size is probably a tradeoff between computational power vs silicon area and power consumption.

A non-function-pointer is "16 or 23" bits?

Near and far pointers, sort of.
Since you mention zenni… If you are using a 27" monitor and blended bifocals, you really owe it to yourself to get a pair of $14 single vision computer glasses tuned to your work distance. (anti glare pushes the price up from $7.)
What an annoying reporter doing the interview. Ask an open-ended question and let him talk about it, don't constantly interrupt him and put words into his mouth...
Context: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/more-wood-behind-fewe...
thanks for the offer - i may take you up on it at some point!
Essentially, it let's you take something like

before '/blog/:id' do
@blog = Blog.get(params[:id])
end

get '/blog/:id' do
@blog
end

put '/blog/:id' do
@blog.update_attributes(params)
end

and turn it into

path 'blog' do
var do |id|
@blog = Blog.get(id)
get { halt @blog }
put { @blog.update(request.params); halt :ok}
end
end

I feel this is DRY'er than the Sinatra representation. It also has nice integration with Rack itself. The implementation is very simple, easy to get into.
i'll check it out.
Yes. But they say why: http://reneerb.com/concept
I think that's just impossible. On 40K you will pay

$580 medicare

$1,680 FICA

$3,410 federal

$1,824 state (NY), and maybe some local, depending on where you live.

If you can invest $30K after that, you're some motherfucking frugal genius.
CSS3 Image Styles
That is a great point. At $work, we're about to revamp how we do ratings. The idea was to only consider positive feedback, but maybe we should figure out how to include negative feedback too. But that brings up the question of how to avoid the spammers, scammers and idiots that inevitably popup?