skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
These numbers seem implausibly low. How are they derived?

It says they come from W-2 filings. But do they bother to match up different W-2 filings from the same person? i.e. if I work two part-time jobs, are those added up? Or even if I switch jobs part way through the year?

Of course it doesn't include income from non-work sources (investment income etc), though that shouldn't change the median that much since people in the lower half don't have all that much in passive income.

Of course it doesn't include tips either (or it can -- reporting of tips on W-2s is, as I understand it, complicated and whatever the law is, it isn't followed).
periodically-dumped-source software? Hopefully someone can come up with something catchy.
people doing PhDs usually wind up doing bad research

FTFY

Seriously though, limiting it to STEM majors would goose academia in the right direction.
Dropbox is just a regular directory on disk. There is no magic. There just happens to be a process watching that directory for changes. (or not. you can always kill the dropbox process, and your files are still accessible)

Of course most users don't encrypt their local file systems in the first place, so whether dropbox has something for local security is irrelevant.

For people interested in securing files on disk the same solutions you would use without dropbox are the same ones you can use with dropbox. In a nutshell, either encrypt your whole volume or mount a file-based volume.

Personally I use a Truecrypt volume, and I placed my drop box folder inside it. I do this so I can still access all the files from the web and mobile and have the versioning. Alternatively you could place the volume's data file itself in the dropbox folder to be synced. You would of course lose the per file granularity, but you do get a "snapshot" feature since you can restore your whole volume with the versioning.

Keep in mind that if you place a trucecrypt volume inside drop box, then it will only get synced when it is unmounted.
"It is worth remembering that the epicentre of the 2008 disaster was American property, hardly a free market undistorted by government. "

This was the line of the piece for me.

CWuestefeld gets a +1 for mentioning regulatory capture, which, in our current system, is the actual status quo.

Government will be unable to fix the various financial and regulatory problems we're facing so long as corruption continues to run as deep. There is no major industry in the country that doesn't have the lobbying and campaign finance dollars to capture its own regulatory bodies. Until we can solve this problem, any government led effort to regulate our marketplace will fail.

Taxing the rich is also something that only appeals to the ignorant. You can raise the taxes on the rich all you want, but the rich aren't going to pay more taxes. Complicating the tax code actually empowers the rich because they have armies of lawyers and accountants at their disposal. Complicating tax codes just creates a glass ceiling for the middle class.

Given the level of corruption and the services that the wealthy have at their disposal, the best we can hope for now is a level playing field. Get government out of the way, weaken it, starve the beast, whatever. The idea is not so much to deregulate, but to make the return on investment for serving the American people ( or at least customers! ) greater than that of buying lobbyists and politicians.
Have you tried looking at factual.com?
Something you should think about: Twitter wasn't called Twitter when it started.

And if you want to see a super ugly logo look at the very first Apple logo -- it' s a second rate hippy doodle of the worst kind: http://www.edibleapple.com/2009/04/20/the-evolution-and-hist...

I'm a branding guy, but my advice is to to put every penny into building a great product!

Once you understand what that product does (and that takes time) then focus on branding.

Too many times I see folks come up with a name, or they buy a domain and then try to think what they should do with it.
Hi, this is just the first public release. Hope to get more features inside and more testing before actually installing the first version into lamernews.com.

The code base got just a few days of after-work hacking, so probably this will take a few more days to be ready.

Thanks for the hint.
Raymond McCauley: "Find an exponential trend and hitch-hike on it"
Honestly, I've always been extremely confused by the Google Reader sharing mechanism. I use Reader all the time, but I've never been clear on who exactly the shares go to. This is much better, IMO.
URDU SEX STORIES: Sexy Tricks
Strongly disagree. Sure, when there is a dislike button a few people use it in an abusive way, but it's obvious that this is statistical noise. But when a majority of votes on a YouTube video consists of 'dislikes' there's usually an excellent reason. The result of having only positive voting is SEO, blogspam, and content farming. Hell yes I want the option to downvote things.
There is a 'view full story' button at the bottom that gives you a single page.
When you're selling a product, there's always the need to seek more attention. We all cared about Steve but this book is a product that is intended to be sold.
Android 4.0 Icecream Sandwich Supports Stylus Input
> I have recently started considering dropping out

Don't. If you're looking to work as a physicist at a biomed or similar startup, a PhD probably looks better than an MS, but at a regular tech startup, you'd be surprised to find out that beyond the core employees, most people have average or below average experience/education. On a team of a dozen software engineers that I'm a member of, one has an MS, and it isn't in CS. Either way, if anything, I'd try and combine work and school.

No. I've been working in and out of startups for over a dozen years and I've seen or shown my transcripts since graduation.

I once heard someone say that physicists make for good programmers (@daksis, maybe, but he's also a physicist I think). There are many disciplines within programming, along with multiple business verticals, horizontals and angles by which to sell information. Explore (meetups?) the ones you find a) hard and b) interesting and get a good picture of what you may want to do when you finish school. Now is not the time to pound the pavement without a degree or start-now skills. Much less embark on a startup adventure if you don't have the experience or commitment.
Yes, exactly that. And personally, I'd make it a global option, but a per-feed option -- either in addition or instead of the global option -- would be fine with me as well.
Voila.

collection.each(function(model) {
model.set({visible: matchesSearch(model)});
});

And then, in your view:

model.bind("change:visible", function() {
$(this.el).toggle(model.get("visible"));
});

... assuming that you have a "matchesSearch" function that can tell you if a given model matches the current search term.
Join us in #lamernews on freenode, also if antirez reads this you're welcome to ops.
Radiation's Big Lie
im guessing the OP was referring to the fact that apple products could be considered as a conspicuous consumer item
CivicSpace released a CSV db of that a while back.
http://www.boutell.com/zipcodes/
It's not exactly fair to put that on the author. Authors have publishers and it's my understanding that publishers require publicity. It's in the contract. Maybe Walter could try to take a moral stand, but I'm not going to blame him for not rocking the boat here.

Anyway, I've been able to relate some of the book excerpts to friends who previously weren't planning to read the book but now plan to. And as for this 60 minutes interview, I'm truly looking forward to hearing some of the excerpts in Jobs' own words on tape, which isn't something that could be included in the book anyway.
The next million apps
I do think that looking at all workers is a valid metric of how we're doing as a nation, but it is important to remember that all workers does include those working part time. It is a valid metric because there are many people out there who would like to be working full time who are not, but it can be misleading because it sort of looks like everyone took a pay cut. But that isn't the case. Some people took a pay cut. Some people had their hours cut. Some people got laid off and could only find a part time job to replace their full time job with.
I recall Stephen Fry's great comments on Steve Job's "Apple stands at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts." statement.

But it has always bothered me that the age of reason also means the age when the scientific principle and liberal arts not only split but often end up with an "us vs. them" relationship.

This may be one of the least coherent and strangest things I've ever tried to express on the Internet. But I suspect that if we as a civilization were not capable of making a distinction between the hard sciences and the liberal arts, then Steve Jobs would have sought early medical treatment and would be alive today and for many years more.

Allow me to try and explain. The leading smart people used to be expected to know both the "science" of the day and the arts.

But then we get the age of reason and people start to specialize in one or the other, but rarely both. And we do end up with two separate and often defined against each other areas of knowledge.

Does this make sense? Just google image search for Millau Viaduct and tell me that product of engineering isn't also art.

I think the world has lost something by this split. I think engineering and science have lost a bit to. But I also suspect the liberal arts have lost a lot by not requiring a thorough knowledge of the hard science as a foundation.

Hell, I wish doctors were required to learn and know A LOT more math and statistics.

Somewhat ironically math is still considered an art at our universities.

But by not requiring a deep, and I mean deep knowledge of hard science for any liberal arts degree, our great institutions have created an artificial separation between learned people.

And there's also this distinct sense of mystique, an accidentally created legend about non-science "knowledge". This sense that the demon haunted world contains nuggets of powerful knowledge which would be evaporated if the light of the candle that is science would shine on them.

This mythical belief plagues society in surprising ways.

I think Steve Jobs decision to first try "alternative medicine" is party because of this.

And while every typical western (North America and Europe) university has "core" requirements, I think that's a joke. I think if instead everyone had to learn an almost equal share of hard science and liberal arts for any degree, then we'd have a better civilization.
Biographer: Steve Jobs regretted not having cancer surgery earlier
2 Taxi Medallions Sell for $1 Million Each
MCMS: Minimal CMS in server side JavaScript
Hop on my spaceship, there is still room!

Good work Scott and team!
I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that Isaacson is "seeking more attention."

I think the attention-people (media) are begging for his early words and competing intensely for his time/words. The publisher may also have some stipulation in Isaacson's contract about how available he is to make himself to interviews with media outlets. Not saying I have evidence that's the way it's going down - just that such factors are at least as arguable as a hypothesis that Isaacson is an attention-monger.
So are most browser animations done with javascript or css? Seems like from vinhboy's comment most are done in javascript.

I know there are a ton of advantages to using css for animation, so why do most people use javascript? Easier to code?

Oh and btw, this is awesome. I will definitely be using some of these animations in the future. Thanks :)
I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to accomplish, but the USPS TIGER database can (sometimes) be useful in this area: http://zip4.usps.com/ncsc/addressmgmt/tiger.htm
If you use 1 JS script on your site, i'll agree. What happens when you include 3 of these though? 10? 15? Suddenly you have tons of duplicate code, trying to implement getAttribute across browsers...wouldn't it be better if they all used the same DOM abstraction library...if only something like that existed...
Are you referring to the perception of Apple as a luxury brand?
Ask HN: What would you like me to talk about at Startup School? (Heroku)
I'm James, one of the founders of Heroku.

For those of you attending Startup School next weekend or planning to watch the video stream, do you have any questions you'd like answered that are specific to me/Heroku?
Nice! Feels like when we first tried JavaScript animations and were all excited about it.
Rails for Zombies 2
Wahooly is Changing the Tech Investment Scene
Wahooly provides socially-connected individuals the opportunity to earn equity in potentially 100′s of startup’s by leveraging their influence.
Is the lottery ever worth your money?
I guess I don't understand. He puts the music on his website for free. People give him money for this music, using the button on his website that says "PAY ANYTHING" http://www.pronobozo.com/music/ So... he puts out his music for free, and people pay him for it.

How much money would he make if he stopped giving it away for free? About the same, since his music is CC licensed and allows free distribution anyway. If he stopped licensing it that way, he would lose a lot of money because a lot of his supporters are pro-free culture types. It would be a different business model than the one he's using now.
Forgive me for being nitpicky, but it should be noted that Netflix DOES NOT provide DRM free streams. Netflix is deployed through Silverlight because of its DRM implementation. Because of this, you can not watch Netflix on Linux without circumventing their DRM schemes.
Why do they seem low? $26k is $13/hr for someone working full time. There are a whole lot of people making less than $13/hr.
Yes it does. The problem is explaining the purpose of Truecrypt and it's use to the audience of those who read mainstream press articles such as written by Pogue. If the incorporation of encryption is not as slick as the rest of the product experience then it won't be used.

I don't mind my recipes for oatmeal cookies falling into the wrong hands. But the new junior food scientist at Coca-Cola who decided to store a copy of the secret recipe on their Dropbox folder so they can do some testing at home might be forewarned of this problem. Or for a real world example, the poster a few comments below who stores student grades on a Dropbox folder. I cringe.
I don't think his decision to refuse surgery was a 'stupid decision', he was just being human.

I'm afraid I don't see the distinction between "being human" and "making stupid decisions".
I have about 30 followers on Reader and I follow a similar number of people. We subscribe to feeds from a bunch of scientific journals and different sections of the arXiv. When we see a paper of interest (or a comically bad paper), we share it. The discussions (private within our approved group) are sometimes quite long and detailed (e.g. 10 pages worth of content in 40 comments). A fair number of collaborations and new papers were born on Reader. I probably see about 100 items per day in my Reader feeds, share a couple, and write a page or two worth of comments. At present, G+ does not keep track of which items I have seen so the interface is not in any way competitive.

I would prefer an integration of G+ circles with sharing preferences on Reader, but I don't want to give up the Reader interface for the much less utilitarian G+ interface. I'll wait and see what this change brings.
In fact the hard cap as to amount of energy we can extract has been reached - we would in fact use more if we could, but we can't extract it - we are running in place. This is often confused with efficiency when in fact it is a peak energy issue. Three billion people in the world living on under $3 a day and we there's no demand for more energy?

The example is not compelling; 100 years ago there were no cars - are we using more or less energy now with the advent of 'car technology'? The obvious answer is: way more. We are not just taking the net energy of 1910 and 'redistributing' it. Because this is what technologies do, provide an advantage that nature does not. But technology is not free - to develop it, make it, use it, dispose of it, all requires a lot of energy. An insatiable thirst to develop and use thingamajigs is what is causing the problem, not solving it.
More artificial, since they are buying a visa with a free house attached.
A lot employees in retail for example had their hours cut just enough to they become legally 'part-time' employees. This lets business off the hook from providing benefits like health care and other things. So these people go and get a second or even third job, all part time. They might work 60 hours / week but they are all close to minimum wage and at the first visit to the hospital they basically end up in bankruptcy.

Once you are in bankruptcy it can become more difficult to get jobs because shady employers often check credit history during the application process. Why? For the fuck of it, as part of the background check. So then there is this black mark on it.

There is not even a single thing that is wrong and we just fix that and bam! we are back up. Minimum wage is low, no single payer health system, our graduates are not competitive enough, housing is still expensive in major cities, there is just a lot of people just barely keeping their heads above the water. Not sure what the fix is and not saying there is a direct casual relationship between any of the things above or others, but it is obvious that he situation quite bad.
Some 30% of Americans have a Bachelor's Degree or higher.

According to the Census, the median income for people with a Master's Degree is $54K (for ages 25-64), while those with only a High School diploma get $22K.

We need to improve our education situation 15 years ago, IMHO.

Edit: I'm going to edit this because people seem to think I'm suggesting a causal relationship here. I'm not. People with Master's Degrees tend to be highly trained in their field. It's not particularly surprising they tend to earn more.

If you invest the time to make yourself less replaceable, you will earn more money.
There are a whole bunch of things I find troubling about your comment.

- Minimum wage in Canada != minimum wage in the U.S.

- Economy in Canada != economy in U.S.

- Canada has free health care, blunting the impact of a low wage job without benefits (as opposed to the U.S. where a lack of health insurance can be devastating)

- Not everyone with a minimum wage job is able to work all the hours they would like to work.

And that is without touching on whether or not you think a 54 hour work week is a reasonable thing to ask someone, possibly with children, to be working at some unfulfilling minimum wage job.
In Canada, the standard work week is 40 hours. Often it's 37.5.

52? 6 days a week? Not every job allows for it. You want to abolish week-ends? Come on.
This is a normal feature of the "Great Firewall". Any such terms found in the traffic will cause a connection reset. Try http://www.ebeijing.gov.cn/ and type "Falun Gong" into the search box.
An interesting read, but disquieting since it's mostly speculation and opinion without any real data or any models of debt and the dependencies of the economy on debt. And white papers of this sort appear to be the basis of policy decisions with far-reaching consequences.
Truecrypt is not an option for the majority of users. You've gone from a slick user experience to one of..."Why not just keep things on my USB stick again?"

These are solved problems as evidenced by other providers like Spideroak and Wuala where encryption happens by default on the client's device.

At the very least, Dropbox can offer this as an option. With the recent funding, if they are planning to offer business plans...surely encryption will be default there at least?
No, in fact it returned a page full of results when I searched for "tienanmen square"
this doesn't seem to have any link that gives this result
> It's what people who don't have anything to add to the conversation say in an attempt to sound smart.

This applies to literally every comment on this page.

It is not "well nobody can really say" dismissal. It is a matter of media feeding made-up facts since current conflict started. You must've missed the photos of insurgents storming strongholds in their flip-flops, the same guy posing dead in more than one position and other marvels of staged photography. The fighting was there, but it was not done by "insurgents" photographed by the press. Whatever was coming out of the tube was an A grade orchestrated bullsh#t. That's what's depressing. If you are comfortable cheering on his death provided with such accurate and transparent media coverage, who am I to spoil the fun.
It's a biography about steve jobs. Im pretty sure there will be no issues with sales.
We spend $8Bn on some new stealth fighters.
We only ever use them against countries with no air defences. So the fighters never get 'used up' so there are massive job losses at BAe.

The traditional option was to fight a competent enemy - but then your own people get shot down which doesn't play well with the electorate.

A modern solution is to sell your weapons to an ally, then destroy them and then sell more of the same replacement items to the replacement government. The big advantage of that is that the replacement government is normally pretty well disposed to you - if they know whats good for them.
Tell us how hard things were for you. It helps people like us that are used to everything going wrong without quitting. And plis, tell us multiple times to "NEVER QUIT". It's very important. Thanks .
I've always wondered about Steve's decision to severely limit stock distribution at Pixar when it had its IPO. What he did was apparently legal, but many staffers there felt like they were treated unfairly. A theory I've been considering is that Steve did it to avoid changing the people who made Pixar what it was[1]. I mean, Steve certainly didn't seem like he cared about having the money, except maybe to say "told you so" to all those who doubted him after his removal from Apple. Just something that seems to fit with the facts that I'm aware of.

[1] Of course, John Lasseter, for one, ended up with a load of money and nobody could argue that he changed. He just went from collecting toy train sets to having actual train sets installed in his backyard.
MC Hammer to launch his own version of Google (really)
Brown note
Lose respect? Cut him some slack. He has worked hard on the biography and is promoting it ahead of release. It's what people do prior to the release of a book, movie, startup, etc. Should he be hiding out under a rock or something? It's on you to avoid articles about the book if you think they will spoil your reading experience.
Falun Gong resets it though
Here's a direct link to a CSV of the 2000 Census Fips Region/Zip code, which I believe is taken from the USPS TIGER DB:

http://www.census.gov/tiger/tms/gazetteer/zips.txt
This seems close to what you want, but not quite there.

http://code.google.com/p/s3fs/wiki/FuseOverAmazon
I suspect if you were a Copt you'd have a much different perspective.
" I'd rather work with a neophyte who wants to improve over a veteran who is static any day."

So true.
> Some people took a pay cut. Some people had their hours cut. Some people got laid off and could only find a part time job to replace their full time job with.

At the end of the day that still looks like a collective pay cut. Some took a part-time pay cut, some took a paycut down to 0.

From what I hear from people working in retail (I am sure it is true for other places as well), employers are cutting everyone to part time hours so they don't have to pay benefits. So people find 2 part time jobs to make ends meet. They effectively work full time and more , but now they don't have health benefits. First trip to the hospital and it is all over, they can't get out of dept, ever.