skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If one's main concern is taxes, they vary considerably within the US from one state to another. There are websites with good info on that. Here is just one: http://retirementliving.com/RLtaxes.html

Further, my best understanding is that for most jobs of the exact same type, it makes little or no difference to take the same job title elsewhere for more pay because in most cases the additional salary merely covers higher local cost of living. Those increased local costs of living are typically there due to more amenities (ie San Francisco is more expensive in part because there is more infrastructure, culture, etc there than in Nowhereville USA). Plus, people who are well off in a way that makes them highly mobile (some US retirees fit this descripton, even if not "wealthy" per se) so they can live just about anywhere they choose can already take advantage of doing things like moving south of the border.

I do understand the argument in the article about looking to escape existing governments. That's a very different motivation from wanting to escape/reduce taxes, which can to a large degree already be done without jumping through the hoops involved in seasteading.
It's funny, I was 35 when I realized life was short, quit my corporate job, and started working on startups. My mid-life crisis, complete with impractical sports car.

At 35, I had enough experience that working on boring projects for idiots became physically and emotionally painful. I'm still working for an idiot, but it's the one I see in the mirror every day, and at least now I'm fully engaged and invested in what I'm working on.
Sony brings the Holodeck to life
Loved that. I feel this all the time. Especially building software for the 'man'. On to be funded though - or at least have time.
Time to learn about YouTube
Estimation is an important feature.

1) by story points for team effort

2) by story points for business value

3) by hours for work to be completed in the current "iteration"
The claim was "How do you piss off a technical woman so she will leave your team? It's easy. Just go and lob a few complaints about her behavior that would never apply to a guy."

I'm a man and I've also been in the situation of overly sensitive office managers. Maybe this problem does happen to women more often than men, but to say that it never happens to men is completely untrue.

Playing the sexism card every time you run into a bad manager with a dysfunctional team seems like wasted effort to me. In the case above it's really hard for me to get past this developer's sour grapes to know if there was real sexism or just inability to recognize her (or anyone's) competence.

I'd rather see some thoughts on how a reasonably competent team loses a solid female developer.
Top 15 Paid Android Apps of 2011
Interesting. I didn't know India was well represented there...
I seriously hope they don't consider a menu design to be a major competitive advantage. Presumably, people will use Path not because of the menu system.
I think the answer to that would be: "Don't set up a seastead near where pirates have been hanging out"

Now that can change, but piracy is usually related to failed states (hence Somalia).

Seasteads would have to be built relatively close to peaceful stable countries.

Honestly, I just don't see how priacy can be an issue, if the seastead is outside of government jurisdiction they can use high tech weaponry to counteract pirates. Of course, this increases the cost of the seastead, which tilt the scales against it.
Whether or not this incident was motivated by sexism, there's absolutely no indication, based on the facts presented, that it was. All that's there is a bare assertion that "wow, you were really hard on S" is somehow equivalent to "you're being too emotional" in terms of sexism, and that we should be offended.

Here's the relevant part, from the post:

It's a very bizarre and stunted conversation. The woman is clearly going to great lengths to not elaborate. She's answering things as succinctly as possible so as not to give you any way to claim that she's being emotional. It doesn't matter! You can still play that card!

Here's what you do. After the meeting, you get her on chat and you say "wow, you were really hard on S". It doesn't matter that she was answering direct questions posed by the boss and had to answer them. The more you accuse, the more it becomes true, so stay at it!

I don't see any hint of missing context, I plainly see the claim that "wow, you were really hard on S" is an accusation of "being emotional." Which is bollocks, plain and simple.

If there was more to the story, then it should have been presented if the author wanted to rack up page views by blogging about sexism in the field.

If there's not, then she is overreacting. Not because she's a woman, mind you. Because she really is too touchy about this.

Quite frankly, the fact that she's raging over and reading so much into a statement that is, by normal standards, extremely neutral, leads me to believe that even if she has been directly accused of being too emotional in the past, then maybe there's something to the accusations. Some people really are overly sensitive to perceived slights, and the fact that they're women doesn't necessarily mean the criticism is unfair...
IPhone 5 rumor roll-up for the week ending Dec. 2
Trip to the beginning of the web
No, you're explaining your viewpoint, and claiming it represents a "social contract".

While I periodically hear whining from some people, particularly the OpenBSD crowd, about other open-source projects using their code, I've seen no evidence of it constituting "the BSD viewpoint".

By the way, the only significant open source software I ever released was under the BSD license. I chose BSD because it made the most sense for what I was trying to accomplish, and specifically did not want to prevent anyone from using the code in any way they saw fit. It would never occur to me to whine about somebody doing just that.
If you're a Canadian, you can join the Canadian Freelance Union: http://www.cfunion.ca/

They do contract reviews and they have some kind of deal on health benefits. They're also a local of the much larger Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union which has something like 150,000 members in it.

Yes there's a market for low-cost work, but don't sell yourself short as others in the comments are saying. Let's get that minimum rate a little higher ;)
My tech half life was almost exactly 15 years. I am just posting this to vent. The last year of my life has been frustrating.

I had my first job at age 21. A month before my 36th birthday, I left my last job. I have not been able to get a job since.

I have applied for 58 jobs over the past year and have gotten a response 11 times. I got a phone screen for three of these jobs, and got to an in-person interview for one of them. All rejected.

I am not a superstar but I have built solid things including sites from scratch that are still running on the web. I worked on parts of an iPad app that has over 3 million downloads in the app store. I solved the programming challenges on the HR pages of two hot companies. (Didn't hear back from one, was told there weren't any positions for me at the other) I even was on a team that made it to a y-combinator interview. My other HN account has a decent amount of karma.

I just say all this to point out that I'm not the typical square sob story where some guy making crystal reports for 15 years get the boot from IBM and spends his days whining about H1Bs on patriot message boards. However, sometimes I wish I was one of those guys. I can't even get a job doing something like ".NET Sharepoint integrations" because I've never done it before!

I'm mostly zen about the whole situation but at times I catch myself sliding into serious depression. I've been working on iPhone UI programming to learn something new. However, in the back of my mind I know that even if I get a job, something like this will happen again when I'm 42.

I don't know how I would get a management job, but I'm not convinced management is a safe haven. I have two uncles who worked at IBM for decades. They were made redundant in their early 50s and never worked in the industry again. Then again, at least they made it another 15 years and were able to pay off their house.

I could write more but you probably get the point. My only advice is to make a lot of money when you are young so you can coast when you get old (35?). I basically think programming is like pro sports. You can be an amazing rookie in your early 20s, a kobe like superstar in your late 20s and even early 30s. But mid 30s you need to make way for the next generation.
Top Stress Buster Articles from Healthy Lifestyles Living
A codebase that I can ramp up on in 2 days is a well made codebase, not a boring codebase. Byzantine Java codebases that use an ancient version of struts and reams and reams of useless badly design xml configuration files are boring and take forever to ramp up on.

Younger people dislike C++ and Java codebases not because they're boring, but because they come with reams and reams of badly designed verbose crap that takes forever to learn and wastes everybody's time. They don't have to be, but statistically they do more often than not.
I am intrigued, tell me more :)
The technical culmination of this vision would be that all of our expensive devices (i.e. refrigerators, air conditioners, heaters) will have simple APIs that can be controlled by any administration tool on any device.

For instance, our heating/air conditioning systems can have a standardized API that really only has the following functions, available (with some simple authentication) over any wifi connection:

1. Turn on
2. Turn off

Then an administration tool (probably on the cloud) can handle all the daily/weekly/monthly automation, provide a clean and easy to use interface, with all the complicated and special features we would like to see. We could change and upgrade our administration tools as we see fit. We would access them with our smartphones, home PCs, or for old schoolers, the wall mounted device.
"W" is being a bit unreasonable by going off on one at "S". Both of them kludged a fix, although "W" was a little smarter.

But it sounds like "W" is the kind of antisocial geek who just has to explain how stupid their colleague is, and how much better they are.

From what I've read, this sounds more like it's related to "W" being a bit of a jerk than it is "W" being female...
> Do people here think that Path should have been granted some type of protection

Of course not. If so, the same would have had to be said for any number of design elements created in the past.
I'd take this book with a grain of salt. I don't think they've consulted with an IL/maritime lawyer (or a lawyer at all?). Seasteading might sound like a hacker's dream but there are a lot of issues not explored in this book that would be incredibly important for anyone considering investing in this idea.

1. EEZ is not 200nm from the territorial sea. It's 200nm from land, they didn't read the UNCLOS definition properly "The exclusive economic zone shall not extend beyond 200 nautical miles from the baselines from which the breadth of the territorial sea is measured." (Article 57, UNCLOS).

2. The contiguous zone is not "pretty much the same" as the territorial sea.

3. They don't really seem to understand what sovereignty is or how the international legal system works... a common theme of people who've previously tried to start their own countries. It's important to understand how flags work WRT sovereignty.
As for your last point, we already have oil rigs and the like far out at sea, don't we? I don't know exactly how they work, but they show that it is at least plausible.
Okay, you do realize that:

- the point of the post was not to prove that there is sexism in technology, but rather to show how sexism can drive away women

- that the existence of sexism in tech is one of the assumptions of the article, which is pretty reasonable given:

- sexism exists everywhere and there's no reason to think tech would be excluded

- the small number of women in tech

- the numerous other women who work in tech who have /said/ they've experienced sexism

- that she worked with these people for however long, and there's obviously numerous other encounters she's had with them that aren't relayed here because that wasn't the point of the article

- that just because men have a problem as well as women doesn't mean women cannot have that problem worse

- that there is definitely a range of social responses that are culturally permissible for men and not women, and that tech workers are not some sort of hyper-enlightened übermenschen who have utterly cast off the shackles of their culture and now see everything with perfect clarity

I'm not saying that we can know for sure that there was sexism involved here, but to call thinking that, "entirely fallacious and baseless" is complete and utter bullshit.

edit: gosh darn markdown
"I would prefer to deal with corporate politics over any interaction with the federal government or the state of California any day. Just going to the DMV is a nightmare."

Yes, but this is not a problem of government type, but rather of population size. I've worked in 10,000 person corporations before, and interactions are so full of bureaucratic nonsense that it's amazing you're able to get anything done at all. This is a human problem, not a political system problem. Once you go over the human capacity to know everyone (107 people), you get bureaucracy. This is why ancient tribes would split soon after passing around 120 people. Of course back then the cost of splitting was low since there was plenty of land to go around, and you could just kill anyone who hunted in your territory without worry of an international community.

"If you're talking about wars between firms, a much bigger problem is rival firms hacking one another's computer systems."

Actually, I'm talking about destroying a platform's economic foundation by causing physical damage to the platform that's expensive to fix. A man made floating platform is far more susceptible to attacks of this nature than land based communities. Furthermore, a community with no form of taxation would be ill equipped to deal with this sort of thing since the costs could exceed the amount in the contractual agreement.

"Yes, I left a lot behind, but I gained a lot more. In case you haven't noticed, there's a whole country built on this concept."

What I'm getting at is this: YOU might be happy uprooting yourself and seeking greener pastures, but do not make the mistake of assuming that everyone else thinks the same way you do or would enjoy it if they just gave it a chance. The vast majority of people don't want to move. They want to stay right where they are. It's only when things become so intolerable at home that moving seems the less painful choice where these people move (and indeed that was quite often the case with people choosing the "new world"). You might argue that this sort of person wouldn't move to a sea platform to begin with, but I'm talking about people born on the platform, who wish to remain rooted, and know no other life.

The author critiques the social contract with the following words: "Can we seriously say, that a poor peasant or artisan has a free choice to leave his country, when he knows no foreign language or manners, and lives, from day to day, by the small wages which he acquires? We may as well assert that a man, by remaining in a vessel, freely consents to the dominion of the master; though he was carried on board while asleep, and must leap into the ocean and perish, the moment he leaves her."

I'd argue that after a generation or two of people born there, platform life will be no different.

In fact, most of my argument is not regarding people MOVING to a sea platform, but rather for people born there, and what choice they have.
Zendesk should've left this alone. I can't even fathom why they'd start. The products don't look alike. They are takes on the same name, help / support desk, which is a standard name.

I don't want to rag on Zendesk. I've been using them for years. But with stupid remarks like this, their incredibly slow / almost non-existent development on the product, and lackluster support have me keeping an eye out for replacements.

Kind of dangerous with stuff like Assistly looming out there.

That said, I'm not sure an entire domain name was warranted for this. I thought it was just a blog post at first.
Hey, look, Ad Hominems on a domain name registered for the express purpose of an internet flame war between two competitors! It must be Sunday.

I wonder if these tactics actually have a measurable impact on sales?
Silverlight, WPF, WP7 & SharePoint Charts / Gauges
I think this would fall under a "design patent"[1] (though I may be wrong). Since they didn't bother to get one, as long as the actual assets aren't used, the interaction and design can be imitated.

Also, speaking as a designer, I would be thrilled if I saw people so fervently duplicating an interaction scheme I had created. "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery," and all that.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_patent
This has got to be mostly a perception problem, because it's all I ever notice when using any Android device. Swipe/scroll lag has always been noticeable for me. And yes, iPhones do crash/break/jitter, but it's by far a very small percentage of the time compared to how often they're used.

As for a "reason" for people using Android: most of the people I know who use Android-based devices have "It's not Apple" as one of the top few reasons for using it.
When Do You Ovulate
>> mechanic at the tire shop that fixes my car charges $92 an hour for his time

This is not a valid comparison - he probably gets 40% of this, the rest goes to the shop. As a comparison, how much would a company charge for your time? Typically 2.5x your base salary (before benefits).
There was some discussion about using self-signed certs with SPDY which would be treated as insecure (no lock). I don't know if a decision has been made.
I agree, why the f are your comment down voted?
I wasn't trying to present an empirical study. I just think that the thought process of religious people (much as it baffles me sometimes) does allow them to make a distinction between satire and devil worship. It's not a matter of being more or less religious. I'm sure even the pope is perfectly capable of telling those two things apart (nowadays).

That hotel guest probably just wanted to make a political point (unless she was clinically insane).
Mac font rendering is more accurate (pretty) but less precise (fuzzy). Windows font rendering is more precise (sharp) but less accurate (ugly).

Comes down to taste.
The Cult of LEGO
The reason you're getting downvoted may be related to the fact that this is not data Interpol would be in the least interested in. What they need are actual transactions/shipments/links to people, not some rather shallow stats extracted from a month-old copy of listings.

I'd be really impressed if someone actually runs a Bitcoin client that correlates transactions with prices from SR. Since most sellers select prices in USD, the values in BC are usually not nice and round. Then, you could start creating a profile of Bitcoin users and link them with given certainty to SR accounts. Now, that might be of interest to Interpol/local agencies.
understand if Path's GUI designers are pissed that people are copying them so quickly, and making them lose their advantage.

Repeat after me: The arrangement of a popup-menu is not patent-worthy.
Do Nice Guys Finish Last?
I got a bit distracted after I realized I recognized the voice in the video, but it looks like a nice project management tool. I wish there was more information about estimation though.

Right now, we use Pivotal and the lack of estimation on tasks makes it an incomplete offering. We estimate feature, but that is a fairly rough estimate used for longer-term prediction. It isn't until we break things down into tasks that people really understand how long it is going to take. Just having to estimate hours gets people to really think things through.

Given that half of project management is about predicting completion dates and judging risk of slippage, I'd say estimation is absolutely required.
Looks like this utility provides some information that htop does not provide (net i/o). While htop shows you the full process list, glances by default just shows you the most intensive processes on your system (by default). I don't view this as a replacement for htop, but rather a supplement to it.
The more you know ... I've never had a touch-screen phone; actively avoid them.
Well, it's that compatibility checker screen that throws my relatives off. They don't even know that they have add-ons for the most part. And they don't know that Firefox just updated on them. All they know is the next time they start it up they're greeted with a foreign window spouting off something about add-ons.
And Hotmail et al did?
The “bridges” mentioned are potentially one of the most interesting developments of the next few years. We’ve seen a huge, huge explosion of Arduino projects, but soon enough it’ll be commoditized and simplified for the layperson as in the Twine box(1). However, I’m particularly excited by CSR’s BLE (Bluetooth low energy) chips (2), a SoC promising 3 years battery life on a coin-cell for wireless peripherals, which could potentially create an entire universe of environmental sensing motes, similar to Nike+’s shoe-sensor. Unfortunately CSR is not particularly hacker-friendly, requiring a nearly 10k developer seat (3) to develop for the otherwise cheap chips.

[1] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/supermechanical/twine-li...

[2] http://www.csr.com/products/45/csr-energy

[3] http://forum.sparkfun.com/viewtopic.php?t=16425
Google Doodle on Demand: Get Google Doodles On Clothes, Stamps, etc.
Damn Good Copywriting - How to Sell a Snow Blower
Rumor has it right now that they're dropping the Desktop 'app' entirely from ARM tablets.

FWIW, every time I run across a friend who still works there, I urge them to read this book. They usually have already.
Why did Chrome supplant Firefox? It was/is faster. Most people (certainly people like "my mom" or "my grandfather" who are so often presented as examples in these discussions) don't need/won't ever use things such as: plugins, tabs, javascript consoles, CSS debuggers, etc. Strip ALL that out and make a solid, simple, FAST browser that is monetized by search/ad deals.

Make a "pro" or "developer" edition with the extra tools and features to keep the likes of us happy.