skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sounds like a society of couch potatoes and drug addicts to me. From my perspective you have a much too optimistic view on the human race. If people are not forced to exceed, they will not. Suffering, that does not cripple, defines us. It makes us stronger, more agile, more determined. I would go so far as to say that when we have dreams and goals and we strive to achieve them, by making work towards step by step, each moment we feel better about ourself. Each success builds us and makes us more confident.

If it were not for women, I'd just sit home playing World of Warcraft, drinking energy drinks and masturbating, to put it bluntly.

Even if our basic material needs are met through automation, we are all still engaged in a very bitter competition for other resources, you do realize. There simply can not exist a state of utopia as long as we reproduce sexually (I have a very Freudian view on this). This is a catch-22 of course. The state we are in defines what we consider an utopia.

You are assuming that if we didn't have to worry about producing material resources, creativity and intellect would be the determining factor in who gets their way. Why not violence? Why not intimidation and sociopathy? As tightly knit social groups (small villages and communities) break down and we live in one global village, nobody really knows each other. Most of the people we meet are complete strangers to us. It's much easier for exploitative and cruel personalities to thrive, because they can stay hidden in plain sight. They can pretend and manipulate to their dark hearts content without the fear of retribution. If they get discovered they can just move to a different location.

As we have more material resources as welfare and a legal arm heavily protective of women and children, women don't need a protector nor a financier. They can just get the sperm they want and raise kids outside of marriage. Old institutions that were the bedrock of civilized society will all but crumble to dust. Widespread soft polygamy will replace it. Those with the most instant charm and good appearances will win, instead of those who build things to last on the long run. Short term strategies will win over the long term ones.

These are all hyperboles I use to describe my views of the modes of societal change and interaction.

It is my theory that the easier it is to meet material needs, the lazier people get and more prone to instant gratification. It's not that difficult to extrapolate from this one simple truth.

Also one of the problems I didn't touch upon, is how our natural instincts that were developed for a very different world will overtake and corrupt us: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_Stimuli. Slow seduction of irrational and unbalanced stimulus can make our behaviour very self destructive on the long run.
Designer Sunglasses – Lots of Choices
The problem isn't that there aren't new jobs being created, it's that almost none of them can be done by the people who were displaced.

You lay off 10,000 factory workers. Do you think they can ever be airline pilots? Or programmers? Or financial analysts? Or what-have-yous?

Sure, a small (very small) percentage of these folk will successfully retrain into another field, but the vast majority of them will be left behind. They do not have the educational background to pursue the knowledge-based jobs that are the only ones hiring.

And even if they did have the necessary educational background for retraining, who would pay for it? Education in the USA is already absurdly expensive, and the employer sure as hell won't be picking up the tab.
Too many accelerators? Too many investors?
MongoDB has the potential to be faster than traditional relational databases simply because it does less, way less. The trade off makes sense for some applications, but not for all, it really depends on your requirements.
You mean Google or Facebook? In both cases didn't they extensively modify it, and still only use it for certain parts of their offerings?
Yeah - looking forward to their story on camera. They seem to debunking every popular notion..
Scotch Eggs Recipe
Would love a 1 column mobile version. Have been using this quite a bit. Nice work.
The difference is that as a self-employed consultant, you can fire bosses (we call them customers) that cause you too much trouble. It's a question of balance of power, and one should not underestimate that difference.

Similarly with startups and investors. If you have the ability to walk away and find another job, that gives you power. This is a big reason CEO's make obscene amounts of money in this country while floor workers don't.
Usenet is the internet. The internet is no longer compatible with European law.
Hi Edward,

I've asked myself the same question. My approach was data-driven and similar to what @sitkack recommends you.

I really like that people like you exist and ask questions like that. The only way to a better world imho.

I dislike @waxy's idea, because by putting a registration barrier he locks ideas. I've the picture of a kobold hiding a sack of gold, hehe =) Don't get me wrong, it's fun.

However, I was thinking that when I get enough data I can use prediction algorithms for future trends, add a list of common problems to the fields to be resolved. Then it should be possible to solve it using algorithms and input of people only. Those people would be the modifier for the algorithm, by telling their location specific problem with a question/answer game.

It should be possible to solve loghoritmically. You could ask people questions, similar to the iphone game that guesses which artist you think of by asking questions. log(2) 100 ~=7 (yes/no)

It could use Google-Trends/Google Prediction API or the new startup that google bought to forecast future trends.

I've chosen my last idea using that method. But I haven't written the algorithm down yet, so I followed it manually..

But the best way is to just go into a company and ask the CEO/Engineer/Developer/Worker questions and do so for as many componies as possible. Process that information into clean datasets and you can start to work with that.
That's Business Intelligence.

hope it doesn't sound too mad. If so, just forgot what you read. :P
Hmmm, then what does the Google Closure Compiler mean?
Unfortunately it's mostly all piled into Gille's magnum opus, the 1500-page History of Techniques (1978), which to make matters worse is out of print in English and sells for absurd prices online (though some university libraries have it).

I read it mostly second-hand via Bernard Stiegler's Technics and Time, which is widely available in English and summarizes Gille extensively in the beginning portions. That's an okay intro in the purely summary parts, but is tied up in Stiegler's own project of somehow re-theorizing what time means via a mixture of technical evolution and Heideggerian philosophy, which may not be what you're interested in (I found it a bit over my head, but I'm not at all versed in Heideggerian philosophy). Maybe since it's caused a bit of a revival in interest in Gille, someone will re-print an English translation, or a good secondary work.

Oddly his only work that is widely available in English, Engineers of the Renaissance, is quite good but has none of this in it; it's just a straightforward, well-researched history of Renaissance-era engineering.
GIF Polyrhythms & GIF CLOCK
Also, I never said SQL Server is slow - it isn't, anyone that would say otherwise must have an agenda, which is not my case. SQL Server is an incredible database and it has served us well.
I wrote an article on this transaction that I had posted to the HN community that breaks down a number of the points and explains how it works.

http://cameronkeng.com/hn-how-do-i-pull-a-google/

A few things you should consider about international taxation is that it's complicated and only works because they have the infrastructure to sustain it.

Disclaimer, I'm not saying what they're doing is right or wrong, but simply placing it into context

1. Individuals have a hard time using international tax law similarly because of CFC rules (closely-held foreign corps). If anyone owns more than 10% of a foreign company they must include or report the income as part of their current earnings.

2. The effective tax rate is only "2.something percent" of income the income google earned outside the US.

3. To have an APA (Advanced Pricing Agreement) with the IRS is incredibly expensive and time consuming because it's like getting audited in advance and then justifying it before you ever do anything.

4. You need to pay at a minimum a big 4 accounting firm 10 million to start a project of this complexity over a number of countries.

5. The dutch companies are simply a "conduit" to allow the money to ultimately reach the Caribbean island tax havens because they have no income tax and simply charge a flat tax of 15k.

6. On cperciva's note, this tax plan could be considered "post-poning income recognition" but in reality it effectively is never repatriated or brought back into the country because google is such a multinational company. They could use the money for their international business very easily or they could use their foreign cash reserves to purchase an asset in a foreign country and still retain the ownership by the US main company.

I could go on for a while but this is just a the tip of the iceberg.

I've practice this area of taxation before as a CPA so I could give you a number of other examples.
I think the OP was suggesting that another language could be used for this purpose, similar in function to CoffeeScript in that it compiles down to JavaScript, but statically typed (or even just straight C). That way most of your app could be written in CoffeeScript or JavaScript, but for those few functions who's performance REALLY matters, you could reach for a different tool that makes writing this inhumane but performant flavor of JavaScript easy.

It's an interesting idea, and having little to no knowledge of compilers, I'd be interested in your take on it. Could emscripten already be used for something like this?
Ooh ooh! I know this one! [bzzzzt]

What is... a company!

What'd I win?
Lady Gaga - The Fame Monster Top Charts (Infographic)
also known as structural typing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_type_system
I think the problem is that students should be taught to think, not to pass tests.

I was taught to think, not so much by school but by a select few teachers and especially my father. I learnt metric growing up. When I started construction everything was done in millimetres and meters. I moved from the UK to Canada, where the construction trade is solely imperial (it's not like the UK where you can get legacy tape measures that have inces and meters, I have inches and feet) and I didn't struggle. It was about a month before my boss said "Doesn't the UK only use meters, are you coping with the change?"

Of course I coped, I learnt to think. A foot is a generalised measurement so that multiple people can work to the same measurements. A meter is a generalised measurement so that multiple people can work to the same measurements. If someone calls out to me "cut at 1321mm" I cut at "1321" the same as if they'd just called "cut at 52 inch".

I've seen guys, high school graduates (in the UK I only did high school until I was 16, and the newbies I get given did it until they were 18) and they're confused by the mere notion that an inch is divisible up to a 16th on a tape measure.

I personally cannot comprehend how they don't understand. How lacking is your education that you can't find 9/16ths on a tape measure? How lacking is your education when you can't cut a 22.5 degree angle from a 16x16 square (measure up to the half way point and trace a line to the 0 point giving you the desired pattern)?

My work doesn't even require a high school education to get hired and we've had some phenomenal employees who failed high school. The irony is we get bucket loads of retards who graduated high school.

There's a big difference between learning and merely storing data. The problem is that we're creating a generation of databases. I'm sorry, but I have computers, and phones, and fuck a pocket book that can retain data for me. I don't need a million kids to do that. I need a kid that can read a tape and cut an angle so that I can train them.

I don't know how I'm supposed to train someone who's passed high school that should so obviously have failed.
That's good advice, thanks!

It's hard but I'm trying to be genuinely curious about others. There's nothing worse than someone pretending to be interested, asking questions and then not really listening to the answers. I try to avoid being that person. One thing I try to remember is that everyone has something interesting to say if you push the right buttons.
GitHub Flavored Markdown Online Preview
I heard about stigler through the excellent documentary "Der Ister"[1] which was a very good treatment of time and heidegger's philosophy of technology. Thanks for the info on this other book.

[1]http://www.theister.com/
Lost Steve Jobs interview headed to the big screen
If you actually dig into the statistics, the 9% of America with persistent unemployment problems are mostly not e.g. bank underwriters who got creamed by FICO scores making them totally obsolete. That makes for a great newspaper piece, because well-educated people are not supposed to end up unemployable, but it bears little relationship to reality.

Unemployment is dominated by sectors directly connected to the real estate/financial boom (construction, real estate, finance) which are no longer booming and could not sustain historically high employment levels. We're simply seeing reversion to the mean plus a wee bit extra, which only looks cataclysmic when your recorded history began at the top of the market.
I feel like a dick, but I have got to ask. Is it Disney? Disney is on both the couchbase and 10gen sites. Both sites mention that they are using their NoSQL solutions to power their social and online games. Couchbase powers Zynga and can arguably be considered the leader on this specific market. Am I close?
I disagree. Most small business owners in fact work at least 60 hrs/wk.

There's a tremendous difference between work that is well integrated with family life (as self-employment can be) and work that's away from everyone else. Indeed if he is lucky he'd have his spouse helping with business administration.....
The downfall of this is where our current economic system projects us :

Developers make AI and machines capable of replacing farming, mining, power generation, resource refinement completely, except for technicians and mechanics.

It isn't far off from the same machines entering the human service workforce, replacing the cashier and drive through clerk. They replace cars and planes (already have auto pilot, google car in ~10 years).

At this point, we have crisis. Our current system has you buying a good and the company providing it making the money. If the company consists of hundreds of technicians as its only labor force because the entire production process is automated (your big Mac is farmed by robots, overseen by robots, butchered, packed, shipped by robots, cooked by robots, and served by robots) and the ~$5 you pay for it goes entirely to the company coffers.

It would not take long for everyone's wealth to trickle into the hands of the few hundreds of people positioned to rule over the production of 99% of goods. It is kind of like what OWS is doing right now, but much worse. There is no fast food job for the high school grad to do - you must learn engineering, art, or hard science to have any function to society, because any rote task or even service job has been replaced by robots.

And then they replace the mechanics and programmers with genetic algorithms. The company becomes a siphon of any money they make straight into the stock holders. And there would be no employees, because everything is automated. You don't even need an engineer to watch the top level of maintenance bots, because you have 10+ of them and they know how to fix themselves.

The end result though is that we have this situation where we pay money for what robots do, not people, and the money just goes to those that funded the robots original creation forever. That kind of situation would not last long, but it would be nice to avoid. It will require a huge reinterpretation of any viable economic system when you can make goods and provide services without any human interaction.
Dislaimer: One of the HBase committers here.

There is/was a LOT of hype in NoSQL. Hype and very little understanding what NoSQL is about and specifically why/when choosing a NoSQL database makes sense and when it does not.

It is not about SQL vs. not. It is about consistency, availability, and partition tolerance, and which of these you are willing to give up. Surprisingly few people know about the CAP theorem and what it implies.

Generally there two main reasons why you switch to NoSQL (Not Only SQL) databases.
1. You need to scale out (add more storage and query capacity by adding more machines).
2. You do not want to be locked into a relational schema.

There is no magic in NoSQL! To scale out these stores give up exactly those features that would impede scaling out (for example global transactions).

What one has to realize that you give up a lot by letting go of relational databases: Fast ad hoc queries, transactions, consistency, and the entire theory and research behind it.
I don't see why relational databases are "unsexy". A good query planner is almost a work of art and it is amazing what they can do. In fact we use them alongside HBase.

Instead of ad hoc queries you either get slow map/reduce type "queries" or you need to plan your queries ahead of time and denormalize the data accordingly at insert time.

You better have very good reasons for the switch.

When we evaluated NoSQL stores a while back (for #1 type problems) I was quite the skeptic. We looked at Riak, Redis, MongoDB, CouchDB, Cassandra, and HBase).
Eventually we settled on HBase because needed consistency over availability and we needed more than just a key value store, and we already some Hadoop projects... and I started to drink the cool-aid :)

Personally, I am not a big fan of eventually consistent (but highly available) stores, because it is extremely difficult to reason about the state of the store; and the application layers bears a lot of extra complexity. But your mileage may vary.

HBase of course is new as well, and I needed to start fixing bugs and adding new features that we needed.

As with "Java is better than C++" type discussions, here too, what store to use depends on the use case. As parent points out any hype about anything is a bad thing, because it typically replaces reasons as an instrument of decision making.

(not sure what I was getting at, so I'll just stop here).
The €5 textbooks I buy from my professors have consistently been the best textbooks, much better than the €120 textbooks in other courses.
I was a Software Engineer 2 at Google NYC, which is the level most new grads and people up to 3 years or so of experience start with, and my base was 106K, with the usual 15% expected bonus plus stock and options (though it seems like they've moved to giving out more stock rather than options). Can't say how that is compared to other offices, but I have reason to believe that I was very close to the mean salary for my level.
I've been waiting for something like this to happen. If the teachers' unions could get behind this on a national level and coordinate the creation of open access online texts for all subjects, then I might start thinking that they're something other than dinosaurs worthy of extinction. They have no reason to support the publishers' goals of keeping prices high since less money spent on textbooks is more money that can be spent on salaries, and their political power would counterbalance the corporate lobbying.
You know? I had a long post written out. About how I'm actually one of those developers who you're questioning and so on. But, none of that is relevant. The only thing that matters is this:

Growl is the #2 app in the entire Mac App Store. It has been in that position since the Growl developers first put it on the App Store weeks ago. The only thing outselling Growl is Mac OS X itself.

So, please. The next time you want to accuse someone of being "deliberately obtuse", consider that the person you are talking to might actually know what they're talking about and step back before you make yourself look silly and condescending. :)
For a $100 fee, you may fill out a preliminary MicroVenture Marketplace funding application and submit your business plan.

I doubt any YC companies are using this service with these kind of terms...
This transform to dynamic typing is not local and thus is more akin to embedding another language.
That type of crud is done by people who come from old media companies and think of the web as a hot new thing in 2011.

Agencies charge for how much production work they can do for the commercial - video shoots, retouching, flash, etc. This doesn't necessarily deliver conversions but no one is taking it seriously because the web is seen as secondary to print and TV.

Bad user experience is just that, bad. On TVs it's tolerated because you don't have as much choice as you do online. TiVo's major selling point was it let you skip commercials.

Apple's iAds have good UX, so do many ad network startups like http://decknetwork.net You don't need to be annoying to use targeted display advertising online.
Sorry. Actually, you are right. I thought you meant exactly the opposite. I will delete my comment.

We just sponsored an H-1B and a J1, and all I can say is to be careful about advice on forums. It's good for background, but get a _good_ immigration lawyer.
Could? This is literally exactly what Growl 1.3 does.
But, crucially, the things a test checks don't generalize.

I think this is the most important thing to note. When I say

Example test_fac1: (factorial 3) = 6.
Proof. reflexivity.

This is completely different from the statement

Theorem eq_fac : forall (n : nat),
fac n = prod 1 n

Tests are simply a mathematical proof of a relation on a specific subset of the domain and codomain of the function. Types, in the broad sense, are constrained proofs over the properties of all elements in the domain and codomain.

Types are useful -- they're perhaps the greatest success of formality in software engineering ever. However, they're not complete and completeness is hard. Types succeed because they provide a lot of benefit for very little pain (the constraints you discuss in your post). Your assertion is simply reinforced when we look at the other classes of correctness that we could guarantee. We could write fixpoint definitions for all functions which require structural recursion. We could push all side effects to typed lambda calculus sugar.

Fundamentally, we could prove our code correct. But that's a pain in the ass. And it still doesn't work. Tests complement proofs -- they ensure that our own conception of the definition fits our expectations. We could do all the work to formally prove our conjectures, but if our definitions were wrong the conclusions would be useless.

What I'm saying is that all of these things should work together -- and the result is a balancing act. We want additional guarantees that our programs are correct, but it requires us to program differently because only certain types of programs have the properties that we wish to exploit. The benefit is that we do have this additional information, so I agree that we should use it.