skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Because the US shows that wage flexibility by itself isn't particularly effective? US wages are just about as sticky as Europe's, despite a far lower (and dropping) section of the market under collective bargaining.

So why tinker with that ball of wax and hope for the best when you can just set a moderate inflation target and achieve the same end result?

Everyone knows what moderate inflation does. It's well studied and understood. People who work or put their money to work have little to fear from it (as rates of return reflect and include expected inflation). Naturally, you don't want high inflation or runaway inflation, but it's clearly possible to hit and maintain something like a 4% inflation target.
That was the old search-centric Google, not the Google of Gmail and G+ etc.

The more time you spend in Google's Garden, the more ads you'll see and the more they are based on the data you bring into the Garden. They no longer want you to leave.
I can definetely relate to the OP. The Indonesian(my native language) language doesn't really use gender specific either. That was one of the biggest problem I had when I moved to the US.
CodeSprint programming contest to match developers to companies
yea but GoDaddy being a domain registrar and hosting DNS for many domains already is a bit more scary in this case
I always do a coupon search, or just take the code from whatever their lowest Google ad price is. Just google "domains" they're always the first ad for me, and it's usually 4.99, 5.99, or 7.99 at the absolute most. (For .coms)
* Majority of the tutorials on the net are just useless. One can't uunderstand how the backbone internals works. We need more advanced tutorials than "Hello World with Backbone" and "Introduction to Backbone"

* Some important gotchas with backbone isn't documented ( or somehow i missed ), one example :

from document :

...

remove view.remove()
Convenience function for removing the view from the DOM.
Equivalent to calling $(view.el).remove();

...

in views, $(this.el).remove(); removes event bindings and if you call render() of this view again you should call also .delegateEvents(); somewhere in your code.
Password Security Scanner
New iPhone? No thanks, say cash-conscious Europeans
Showing some support on my site: http://www.mja.lv/
Yeah, I personally really love the graphs that I don't have to manually enter data for, like my weight (we integrate with the Withings scale) or any time-based goal [http://tagti.me] or pushups (sort of, thanks to an Android app that Bethany wrote [1]).

Thanks so much for the feedback!

[1] It counts pushups by touching your nose to your phone. You still have to enter on Beeminder but it's an odometer-style goal so no need to enter every day. It would actually be pretty easy to connect it to Beeminder so no data entry is needed at all, if there's demand for that...
Cliff Asness: A hedge fund genius goes retail
Bok! If anyone had asked me the 'outsourcing' question I'd assume that they don't really understand how difficult it is to actually build a business. Furthermore, I'd assume that the person asking me that question, didn't attain their wealth by starting and growing their own company (which would lead me to other questions).

However the question "What if someone copies your service, and offers it half the price?" is an excellent one and is basically getting at what your advantage is. It's not the same as 'outsourcing' in my mind.

You should also bear in mind that you should be testing the investor also. It needs to be a two-way street unless you're only after 'dumb' money (although dumb money probably comes with dumb advice too).
The summary of the infographic can be made in a single sentence: Paul Krugman has been right about the causes of the Eurozone crisis.

The "Don't cut spending" solution at the end mentions the real heart of the problem, "The ECB says its mandate does not allow it [to bail governments out]." -- All the Eurpoeans need to do is make the ECB a lender of last resort. In a liquidity trap expanding the monetary base will do very little to devalue the precious savings the Germans are so worried about, so it won't even hurt them.
I don't use any of their services except domain registration, I keep my WHOIS up to date, and keep my names regularly renewed, to avoid any mishaps, I have never had an issue.

I have used their hosting in the past, and I wouldn't recommend it to a professional, but would to someone who wants to post pictures of their cats, or run a low traffic personal wordpress blog.
You're a native speaker, right? Can you really see a new character and be confident about your guess? I usually think "This is probably a Zhi, but it might be a Ji, too, or something else entirely." Granted, some characters, like animals, are easier.
Here is Godaddy’s statement in support of SOPA
If you're referring to the second comment, it seems that he used operators not permitted by OP.
Cool, please send a pull request and I'll merge it in and update the readme.
5 lessons learned as a non-technical founder
'let' is a way to make things more local! When I say: let x = 0, I'm saying "hey, I don't care what 'x' is in other scopes, in this local scope it's 10, dammit!"
A single currency across countries with such different economies, histories, cultures and languages would still result in the same outcome IMHO.
Dropbox- Move your files in few seconds [Guide]
Yet another reason to move away from GoDaddy. They're making it way too easy now!
This won't change the fact that rating agencies hiding bad debts in packets with better debts caused the crisis in first place.

Period.
Statically compiled Ruby
This blog post from their lead lobbyist defending their support is absolutely grating.

http://rudysyndrome.com/2011/10/28/online-copyright-laws-won...

"Most of what we are seeing is either 1) rhetoric, 2) regurgitated lobbying spin, 3) criticism of language we have already fixed, or 4) retweets by people who like to steal music and buy fake, but cheap, goods."

Ugh.

(oBDisclaimer: I work for a registrar that unequivocally supports the Open Internet."
Godaddy has to be one of the least trustworthy domain registrars I have heard of and I am surprised that people still use them. I guess their crass commercials must be drawing in the customers.
I speak as a PhD in Pure Math, as a director of two companies, one of which employs programmers, and as a coder who writes stuff for myself, and for others.

None of the stuff you mention is essential for a startup. It's likely that almost none of it will be the vaguest bit relevant to your startup before you have to be employing people. If your "startup" fails, or turns into a small side-line, then almost nothing of math or algorithms will be essential.

However, if your startup really does go "viral" and take off in a big way, only then will scaling matter, and at that point the math and algorithms might matter.

Until then, the only math you need is: "How will I make money from this?"
I work for facebook and I worked on the deployment of these large hiphop binaries of our code base. We considered multiple options - binary diffs, multicast, etc. The problem with multicast is that it's hard to configure and maintain in our complex cross region datacenter setup that has to travel through other peering networks.

We ended up with a torrent deployment system that scales beautifully.
I would expect that SOPA on the whole would discourage domain registration and the general development of web properties amongst the masses so I'm a bit surprised GoDaddy supports it just from a business perspective.

Anyone care to enlighten me about what I'm missing here?
Show HN: gender distribution of attendees in Facebook event (Chrome plugin)
I was just wondering... What if there is an unseen rational that trumps everything smart people have against SOPA?

Would it be possible to get a SOPA proponent to argue their position? At least those against it have itemized their reasons why. They could easily do a point by point argument.

PS: I am against SOPA.
The math level of Ron Maimon's answer is a at college undergraduate level at best, it's just a case of patiently enumerating a lot of different cases. In fact I think this is more of a CS question than a math one. It would be interesting to ask a similar question, limiting it to four operations, to a good interview candidate to see how they handle expression parsing and case analysis.

Tangentially, Ron's answers on Physics Exchange are consistently among the best, I think he has the highest reputation there.
he Willem, you still work there? First time I see Hyves on first page at HN. I didn't even know they were writing a blog on product development. How's it working? Are you writing articles alone, or are several guys writing on what they are working on? Very good idea in any case.

Anyways, good luck with the fight against Facebook ;-)

BTW, if you don't recognize me, I was the only frenchman working there at the time...
Please can we at least try to ensure HN doesn't go the way of Reddit?

I'm against SOPA as much as the next guy, but it's a moot issue. Browsers will just release new versions that use alternate DNS systems or get past any 'blocks'.

There's nothing uglier than an internet hate/protest mob.
On one cheap Linode VPS instance I already have 5 websites hosted, plus a personal email server, plus several private git repositories, all for ~ $20 per month. I get my domains from other services, like namecheap.com; and good/cheap hosting for PHP stuff (and even Rails) can be found on DreamHost.com.

There really isn't any reason for anybody to use GoDaddy anymore, unless you're hunting for their coupons, but in this instance you really get what you pay for.
Exactly, and both JFS and XFS are still maintained as well. In fact, this is where all file systems should strive to get: stable releases with bug fixes only.
Twitter releases new JS template engine: hogan.js
Bad products, horrible software

That seems strongly overstated. I don't use a BlackBerry, but nothing about RIM's products strikes me as bad or horrible. They are, at worst, uninspired products in a market with much stronger competitors.

I get the strong feeling that many in tech want RIM to crash and burn as spectacularly as possible - I can swear there's a lot of schadenfreude in all these articles, and I can't figure out why there's so much anger towards RIM. It seems counterproductive, I would much rather see them sticking around and becoming a strong competitor.
Maybe WebOS running on QNX might have been a good move. WebOS has been universally appreciated for the UI and UX (whereas OSes from RIM are not particularly well known for UX).

The SDK is also very friendly to web developers because Enyo is mostly HTML + JS, that will allow it to compete in the app space while being the 4th ecosystem. I do know that WebOS came on sale too late for RIM to use it on the Playbook.

Improving the horrible dev experience will go a long way towards the success of the platform. The dev tools are just atrocious by today's standards.

A must read letter to the management from an employee

http://www.bgr.com/2011/06/30/open-letter-to-blackberry-boss...

Pretty prescient.
Giftwhip - Free wrap for e-gift cards & deal vouchers.
I've been preaching about the evils of GoDaddy for many years now. The founder is a war-mongering, ultra right-wing POS.
I think it's more likely we are already in a our own virtual reality in the form of a history simulation (see: Holographic Universe Principle). To me this explains why we haven't detected any other life-forms; after-all it's a living history of our species.
The people who knew they were going to be CS majors before they got to college didn't have their spirits crushed. When I TA'd the haskell-based course, they comprised about 25-30% of the students in the class.

The students who were trying out the field but weren't born computer scientists were the ones who were miserable. It was their second course/experience with computer science ever and dealing with Haskell was extremely challenging for them. Being an internet tough guy about it doesn't help them embrace the field, it turns them off more.
Part of the problem is that everything is in paragraph form. So for instance the

http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/#Model-fetch

explains in a paragraph that it updates the object and fires a 'change' event. Right below in

http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/#Model-save

the text explains how the backbone.sync handles the save function. What's sets me back is that the backbone.sync strings "change" and "update" are both quoted and highlighted just like an "event". It is not apparent from the method call if an event is ever fired. Upon careful inspection you notice it also calls set if the values are passed or values are returned differently. The set method triggers a change event.

Eventually these things become second nature and you just know them. The tricky part is finding a good place to start from. Maybe a list of good practices, maybe a good up to date tutorial showing a simple app that uses models, collections, views, routes, and a real backbone.sync.
Serious question: Has anyone in the HN community actually bought anything from GoDaddy?

I find it difficult to imagine that any HN reader would. Was there ever an era when GoDaddy's reputation and service were respectable?
I'd definitely disagree with that. While I'm sure there are some people who do like it, I think Gnome Shell is objectively flawed usability-wise. Just to list a couple obvious examples:

-The top bar is almost entirely wasted space;
-Having the bar at the top violates Fitt's law access to a window's close buttons;
-Again for Fitt's law, the top-right corner is wasted because that menu is rarely accessed by most, and there's nothing in the bottom-left corner;
-The messaging notifier thing frequently fails to let me know there are new messages, the accordion effect makes it hard to click individual notifications, and the popup notifications take an obscene amount of space at the bottom of the screen and often overlap with something I'm reading;
-There's no way for me to tell at a glance what programs I'm running, so I often forget that I already have a window with work open and my workspaces end up even more cluttered and disorganized.

I could go on but that's just off the top of my head. All of those are objectively bad design decisions when you approach G-S from a desktop use case. Clearly they're trying to shoehorn a touch UI into a desktop UI, but they're different use cases and when an unskilled design team tries to smash them together, you get the worst of both worlds.

I don't think people dislike G-S because it's revolutionary; I think people dislike it because it's genuinely--and perhaps irreversibly given the silly politics Gnome plays--flawed.

The Mint guys seem smart, so if they feel that a fork is necessary then it's probably the only way to do what they want given the constraints. They've shown a good track record of putting quality solutions out, so if they release Cinnamon at some point I'm sure it'll continue to be developed.

Edit: I also find it a bit funny that G-S was developed at all, because with a little customization you can get extremely similar functionality in Gnome Panel. Just install AWN, enable the Scale plugin in Compiz with a hot corner at the upper-left, move your panel to the top, and set a gconf setting to remove minimize and close buttons. There--you've just re-created 80% of G-S functionality and without having to spend years in development.
Monkeys hooked up to a VAX
That people jump up and down and shout about stuff in The Daily Mail is no surprise. That Harvard would give a damn about it is odd.
This is the most interesting thing I learned today! (no really, no sarcasm here)

Thanks for the explanation.
https://github.com/codebrew/backbone-rails will generate backbone scaffolding and includes JS that binds your rails model set/get to html element change events so you can go from 0 to functional and see how Backbone could work. Try a new Rails project with a basic model and generate the Backbone scaffolds for great examples to mimic in your app.
I have heard this claim. But in practice, with real Chinese people trying to read an unfamiliar character, I've never seen it actually work.

In English, we'd try to break out prefixes and suffixes, and come up with "some kind of disease", or "something to do with the heart". But in my experience watching Chinese people, unfamiliar characters just get a "dunno".

Could it be that the difference I'm seeing is because of the use of simplified characters rather than traditional? Maybe simplified characters have cleaned out some of the clues.
> I disagree. The simple solution to this is to write tests.

That's a step backwards. Code error checking should be done as early as possible. In order of earliness:

* Typing in the code. (Ideal: it is clear from the syntax that the code performs X instead of Y.)

* Compiling. (Strong type checking ensures you cannot return 5.3e7 or null from GetHostName.)

* Running the code at all. (Code contracts and assertions trigger if GetHostName returns "".)

* Automated unit tests. (Check that DB.GetHostName() returns the same string given to DB.Connect().)

* Automated integration tests. (Check that the DB module can connect to and retrieve useful data from a dummy database.)

* QA ("Hey Joe, the system hangs when I give "¤;\@" as my username and press the connect button rapidly for a few seconds.")

* Customer ("Hi the system has a problem, please fix.")

The further up, the faster, more accurately and with less "noise" the error can be discovered.
Seems like a decent executive would have started a division running Android with Blackberry customizations a while back.
Is This The Demise of The Republican Party?
Functions define scope. The end. Not hard. One rule.
The advice here is pretty general, and I fail to see how this applies to the situation of having a fulltime job versus just being time-constrained (which we all are). The advice is fine, but I claim there's nothing new to see here.
I will have to disagree with you here. The program charges the same rate as the Code Academy school and what's more, you don't have to pay up front (unlike CA), but can choose to pay in installments over two or five years. Furthermore, if you let them find you a job upon graduation, they will use their recruitment fee to refund you the cost of your tuition. This suggests to me that they are certainly not just out to make a quick buck.

It remains to be seen whether the program will create employable graduates, and a level of skepticism is healthy in any situation, but I think your characterization of the program may be a bit pessimistic.
> why not sell your house

They want to know if you really have "skin in the game". Just say "that's not a risk I can take, but I have worked X weeks on it for free, and will be on a low salary during the first year or so, and I have had other options - I'm committed".

> why you're better, what if somebody (startup/big guy) copy your idea with less price, why cant i pay somebody to do it (outsource)

Talk about your competitive advantages. I don't know them, and can't give you any non-cliche answers. This is the time for boasting.

If it's a new market, you can point out that scrappy tech companies that "lose" the land grab can be attractive acquisition targets. Would you rather integrate Yahoo! or LinkedIN into your existing business?

If it's an old market, it's got proven fundamentals, and new entrants will probably be deterred by the existing competition.
The BSA backed off SOPA support several weeks ago - the linked piece is from more than a month ago.

Its initial support did lead to a couple of firms quitting the BSA though, notably Kaspersky.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/11/even-the-bus...
Mobile Morning Coffee (12/22/11)
http://www.unscatter.com I went ahead and added it there. Here's a search engine showing what the future may be like.

note: I haven't had time to support unscatter.com the past couple months. It's a side project and I've had a lot going on so some things may be kinda broken. For example, right now you only get one page of /twitter results. So please don't take this as advertising a polished project, it's far from not. Just trying to do my part.
Most Europeans learn English (as a foreign language) without a "constant background exposure". And in my country, most people learn German and French (two popular choices for a second/third language) without constant background exposure, too.

So the fact that "most learners learned more Chinese from overseas residence" is a surprise.
Move your Domain Day?

Something tells me the affiliates are about to have a very wonderful christmas.
I'm from Yorkshire, so I'm quite tight with money, but I'm sure this is well over the 'impulse buy' threshold for all but the 1%.

If I'm going to spend $130 on something, I want to be a little convinced that I'll still enjoy using it after an hour. A remote controlled ball? I don't think so.
Uh, Switzerland, anyone? Quite a lot of culture difference in a country that has a lot more than just fiscal unity. I'd say, more than in most countries that are a lot bigger, both geographically and by population size.

Actually, here in Poland, EU slowly (too slowly) forces us to accept our own cultural diversity.

Stop panicking. If our culture was defined by our banking system then we wouldn't have that much of a culture.
Part of it is playing catch-up with Germany but another part of it is that the Germans restructured their economy quite a bit to reach as close to full employment as they are. I'm having a hard time finding any sources to link to but they provide a lot of government incentives for hiring part-time workers and income top-ups for those workers. As their exports have experienced growth the income has been spread out as it increased.
These other nations just enjoyed a huge influx of private credit to rev up their economies - no plan, no accounting for the long-term impact of the changes.
I also liked the tutorial http://arturadib.com/hello-backbonejs/ - very quick to skim through.
most of it is beautiful <3
The bar probably needs to be fixed
This is brilliant. I love it when people explain mathematics like this. Just took a look at her site, will definitely be donating. Thanks for bringing this to light.
Learn Clojure as a holiday project
Even with their extreme coupon usage, from what I can tell they are still not using them as loss leaders (if we ignore all costs besides registry/icann).

You also neglect to see the effect of thousands or tens of thousands of savvy people actively changing their mind about a company and NOT recommending it to people or bad mouthing the company. My suspicion is, the kind of people reading HN/Reddit are also the type of people that get asked 'computery' stuff quite a bit. I know from personal experience I've probably influenced ~30-50 people's registrar choice this year. Even if it were 1-2 as the average number, the knock on effects could potentially put a nice dent in them.
Why even support them at all?
What does "Open Internet" mean though?

You can't reasonably support free speech in all instances, just like you can't reasonably support an "open internet" in all instances. There have to be some exceptions.

It's the listing of those exceptions and how you deal with them that's the tricky bit. So saying "I support an open internet" is just ignoring the issue.
On a pretty large rails app, we switched to 1.9.2 about a year ago. Startup time for our app is much, much worse than it was under ree, but our average response time significantly improved -- we saw close to a 50% drop in the time spent in ruby code across nearly all requests. I wouldn't use slow startup time as a reason to avoid benchmarking your app in production mode against 1.9.x, since it could result in a huge perf boost across the whole app.
For years, yes - years ago they were cheaper than anyone else and no worse than anyone else. It wasn't until last summer, I think, that I finally moved the last domain off of GoDaddy.

If you find one of the not-infrequent "Which registrar do you use?" posts, even on HN a lot of people still use them.