skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are a number of reasons to have stock in a company, the dividend returns are often not a big factor, as the dividends are usually far less than the cost of purchasing the shares.

Instead purchasing shares has other benefits, such as certain tax concessions (e.g. franking). To increases in the capital value of the shares purchased which can then be sold for a net profit. Additionally holding shares (especially large numbers) gives you certain voting rights to how a company is run. This is why certain wealthy individuals are known to purchase stock in public media companies. (There are examples were some media influencing has taken place.) You can also lease your shares/work with short sellers for gains. (which is trying to earn money via speculating the movement of the share price.)

A bit more on short selling: (this is grossly simplified)

Short selling is the idea of selling shares that have not been purchased beforehand. Let's say Person A sells person B 50 shares at $1 each, however after the deal is made the share price drops to 50c each. Person A is able to scoop up the 50 shares for half the price, even though person B is contracted to buy them for $1. In effect a decrease in the share price has given Person A a profit. My example sounds a bit fraudulent (selling something that you don't actually have.) In the real world it involves leasing shares and the idea that shares will be available to buy at a later date. Porsche famously bankrupted many short sellers /speculators by quitely buying up all the spare VW shares. (Something they deny publicly.)
I sure hope you aren't implying that Google is the one with the checkbook for Pinterest. Feminine interests + Google = death.
The extra 2% back (assuming 1% from another card) is nice. While I do this as well, it does not end up making an impact on most stuff when I run the numbers. Combined with the shipping & customer service convenience though... :)

The 2% gas (& food?) / 1% everything is the same as any other (good) card.

Also yes, pay it off immediately. Not paying off any credit card immediately is insane, because the interest rates on basically all credit cards is abysmal. There are a lot of credit cards that will have 0% intro periods, but then the standard 10~15% rate after that. I've never seen one with an actual low interest rate (and if you think about it, why in hell would anyone offer such a card?) - correct me if I'm wrong though.

Treat it like a debit card, but enjoy the benefits of building a credit score.
Every time one of these articles come out, my Google+ stream fills with this stories. In fact, I read it first on Google+ than on Hacker News.

If you are on Google+, and you participate, you will notice that it's a big success. I'm not saying this because I love Google, I'm saying it because it's almost the only social network I feel compelled to use.
And we also need to acknowledge that the management in a company invariably enjoys collective bargaining rights...

No, it's illegal for corporations to collectively bargain to set workers wages. On the flip side, if employees unionize, it's illegal for the employer to refuse to do business with them.
I think it's partly a gambit or defensive permission, or sort of an allergic reaction to having C++ suggested to him SO MANY TIMES over the last two decades.
The US economy has no need to export anything into third world countries their economy's are simply to tiny accept much in the way of imports. In-fact we have long flooded most of them with cheap food which we lost money to create so balance of trade is even less valuable than you might think. http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/

Canada, is another story we really need to keep them happy: http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c1220.html

We export half as much stuff to China:
http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c5700.html

And Ethiopia is next to nothing:
http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c7740.html
I'd rather see the watch button replaced with a Google Reader style interface for projects. Let me see that Rails has 97 unread commits, Twitter Bootstrap 32 unread, and little forgotten project has 2.

"Little Forgotten Project has two updates? Cool! I'd forgotten all about that neat idea, let's see what they've been up to."
Rails mountable engines: dependency nightmare?
Yes, sorry. I was going off memory there. That's the patent I recall. Would update, but no longer have edit ability.
Although it is true that certain languages give you the flexibility of writing "utter crap", I can also write pretty crappy unmaintainable code in pure C just as easily. Nevertheless, after 14 years of coding in C++, I love how beautiful my C++ code comes out. All that "OO crap" makes my code easier to understand, debug, maintain and extend. I would take that at the expense of how much more difficult it is to create binary compatible libraries in C++ (something quite easy in C). I can see how for a kernel, that would be more important.
You're right that most consumers don't really act like it's a priority for them, even when labeling regimes exist and they have said that ethical products are important. The best you can get is a 10% premium from a segment of relatively wealthy and socially conscious people.[1]

However, for those that do, I'm not sure "self-righteous" is the right term. I think the word you were looking for was "non-hypocritical".

Anyway, I think this just shows that the checkout counter isn't the right place for us to exert our ethical standards. When no one's really watching, and the pain is significant, we're weak, atomized individuals. We even know that our individual purchasing decisions mean zero to giant economic forces. So it's rational to just go for the lower price. All progress with labor standards have come about in other ways - journalism, legislation, and unionization.

[1] http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~hiscox/Depelsmacker.pdf
I agree that the download was a particularly bad example, but I think the same argument can apply to any progress bar. As a programmer, I always measure progress as the percentage of tasks completed, whether that is bit downloaded, modules installed, mappers finished mapping, etc.

The mapper example is actually particularly pertinent. Hadoop's GUI shows me the progress of my M/R jobs with a bar, but it is as dependent on the amount of other tasks running on the cluster as downloading a file is dependent on the traffic in the network. There is no sane way to accurately estimate the amount of time a M/R job is going to take a priori, as far as I know. A stochastic method would be too variable and a method playing clever tricks with psychology seems especially insidious, from an engineer's perspective. You might as well replace it with an "Are we there yet?" button that responds to you in a soothing voice "Not much longer now".
Agreed, but proving someone is acting with ill intent is not as easy as it sounds.
If they had to pay for the health/welfare of their workers directly...

You mean if they had to pay some sort of compensation for work related injuries? Too bad only 50 US states have workers comp laws.
Awesome post. Love how Rob questions things and stirs the pot. Several good points.
The chair is compiling
I used to be a programmer like you, then I took a Paradigm to the ... sorry, I can't do it.

You raise very good points though are we asking to be saved from REST or REST Pedants who argue about minutia ?
IANAL, but those aren't punitive damages. Those are compensation for money lost as a result of Diebold's actions. Punitive would be getting cash beyond the harm that was actually caused.
Russia: huge human capital. Check. Large unified market. Check. Tons of Military Might abused to ensure cheap access to ressources. Check.

Russia is only about 100-110 million people. One third of the US. So the "large unified market" is much smaller, as is the "human capital" pool, by which I don't mean people, but scientists, inventors, etc. And the military might that Russia has and uses to gain cheap access to resources is so smaller compared to the US it's not even funny. Plus, Russia is recovering from both the USSR state bureaucrat dictatorship AND the US/IMF BS doctrines imposed on the during the Yeltsin era.

Oh wait, I can do the same thing for China, too.

Well, unlike Russia, China DOES have all that. And China is doing rather well. It's on the up and up, and already poised to a larger economy that the US. So, if anything, this supports my argument.
Chris Wanstrath, CEO and Co-Founder of GitHub, speaking at MIT
Not Looking for Upopia | Socyberty
First of all, you are comparing apple to oranges. Google+ is not a direct competition to Facebook and there are many ways all three (including Twitter) can coexist.

Lastly, the Facebook user experience is really horrible. That's one of the top reasons I don't use it. Menus are not ordered, options are hidden, many parts are not explained nor documented, top search works different depending which page you are one, etc. And even though my grandma uses it, most of the times, she's posting on other people's walls things she wanted to share with other people, or not posting on walls when she is trying to communicate with my brother. The experience is just too complicated.
I don't see any exploitation - they chose to work there, and they knew what the conditions were (presumably they talked to other people who worked there).

If you choose it, it's not exploitation. A slave did not choose it, therefor there is no comparison at all.

People do not do things voluntarily unless it makes things better for them. That means that to the employee, having this job is better than not having it.
Wow, this site has great design. This would've been perfect when I was first learning.
> But, DRM costs company's significant amounts of money to deploy and also costs them sales.

Not necessarily true on either count.
Conferences, where most people are strangers and there to swap contact info. And of course bars and clubs and conference parties... an attractive woman or man wants to give your drunken self their contact info! Woot!

And that's not even what I was really thinking of... in poor countries the last thing you want to do is pull out a smartphone, let alone pass it to the doctor, tour guide, taxi driver or whoever you think is standing in front of you.
"the internet" 30 years ago
May I recommend https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ao1OX3UN25EvdHR... or http://www.recommendedusers.com/?

There are many kinds of different people on Google+. Some came from twitter, but many of them are just new to the social scene are starting to get popular.
Some quick comments:

The skillsets in the profile needs some kind of order – either an icon (ie: ruby stone for Ruby) or alphabetical order (makes it easy for the reader to glance over). Right now I have to read each skill individually since everyone's skill set are in different order and jumbled up in both rows and columns (hard on the eyes to follow).

The icons – I have no idea what the icons are – it'll be hard on the user to mouse hover over every single icon (and it isn't instant hover, there's a second delay), it can get very frustrating if a user needs to look at more than 1 profile. Icons should be self explanatory. All the different animal icons and color combinations can get very overwhelming.
The illegality of distributing a title without permission has nothing to do with contract law. It's a basic principle of copyright. No contract needs to be in place, explicit or implicit, to prevent that.

DRM does not solely exist to make it harder to violate that law. DRM also exists to prevent use of the buyer's own rights. DRM prevents fair use as well as infringement, and I'm pretty sure the media companies consider this to be a feature, not a bug.

When I say "mathematical concepts", I'm talking about algorithms, not content. I think that e.g. the core of DeCSS qualifies as a mathematical concept, and it's illegal to express it under current US law, although that law is widely ignored.
Crack me up.

I am still learning programming the hard way - namely, by checking out how other folks do it, then struggling to do it myself. However, I've learned enough, I think, to get the impression that some people get rrrreeeallly attached to their architecture.

I have come to believe that all these models, "patterns" and such are very useful tools, but only that. Seems like we keep having these religous wars about language, patterns, architecture, whatever.

All of it is only useful as long as it, well, useful. When the "architecture" starts hindering the function, it has stopped doing it's job.
As annoying as that is, it could be turned into a design feature of your programs - only doing message passing.

Hoare's CSP pretty much takes this approach, and for my money, I think that sort of approach makes the common case of parallel programming easier.
Boost.Intrusive does this, without the casting or offsetof'ing.

http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_47_0/doc/html/intrusive.html

Not that most of what you said isn't true. Just picking the nit that 'the container owns the data' holds only for the STL, not C++ in general.
github is awesome: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3641704
I cant even think of a reason myself why to join G+. Right now, Facebook offers almost everything I would have need.
> The economic system is the only KEY differenciator to build an economy

Are you kidding? Socio-cultural values, religious beliefs, natural resources, foreign policy, domestic policy, monetary systems, infrastructure, none of these things matter at all?

Your inferences from history might have value if we had a reliable World Simulator, where we could change and control variables at will and observe the results. But we don't; extrapolating any kind of simple narrative from history pretty much guarantees you're at least partially wrong. Reality is complex, and is under no obligation to work in ways that make intuitive sense to us talking monkeys.
What, an methodology that encourages (pedants note: I did not say mandates) a CRUDdy API, where resources are grouped together behind different urls, making automated interactions of any significance an almost hilariously slow series of HTTP requests (oh, oh, oh, keep alive!) while at the same time giving the API designer a smug sense of satisfaction and accomplishment might be worth looking at skeptically?

Naaaaaaaaaah.
Louis Vuitton Calfskin Leather
Oh sure, "We have problem A, let's add problem B, while solving nothing."

Please explain to me how this would fix anything? ;)
First of all, you are comparing apple to oranges. Google+ is not a direct competition to Facebook

No matter how much they are claimed to solve different problems, they work in the same way and occupy a similar brain space. Facebook is already well above and beyond the level of time sink that many people are willing to accept. Their user numbers are already starting to drop in many countries because many people -- even ordinary users -- eventually run out of patience.

Given Facebook is already wearing peoples' patience thin, it's unlikely many people really want to give full engagement to both sites at once. People just don't have the time, and after you've spent 30 minutes on Facebook, do you really want to go over to Google+ and repeat the same process again?

It's kind of like trying to play multiple similar MMORPGs (say, WoW and LOTRO) at the same time; they occupy the same sort of brain space, so when you're bored with one, you probably don't want to go play the other. But maybe you can actively enjoy two different experiences; say, World of Tanks and EVE at the same time... or Facebook and Twitter.

Google+ could hypothetically win out against Facebook, but it's unlikely that they can seriously coexist with a large overlap in users. Most likely, Google+ will end up like other social networking services like Orkut; very popular among some particular groups (Brazillians, in the Orkut case), but very lacking in penetration outside of that, due to the network effect.
You're going to need a ControllerFactory for those Controller's; but at least you're using MVC. Did you remember to not have your Singleton instance instantiated until its first call?

Programming is an art as well as a science; and those papers were guides to direct us toward something useful, not to be followed as creed and memorized to be recited in a religious ceremony. The sooner people learn that, the better.

In all, I agree with your the post.
This reminds me of the novella "Manna":

> He looked at me for a long time, "A computer is telling you what to do on the job? What does the manager do?"

> "The computer is the manager. Manna, manager, get it?"

> "You mean that a computer is telling you what to do all day?", he asked.

> "Yeah."

http://bit.ly/xP6sLk
Just to follow up, here's a posting from Linus around that time: http://goo.gl/tTvg2

"The changes to get linux to compile with C++ were very minor, so if your extensions are well-written, it should be no problem at all getting it working. Gcc gives reasonably good error messages anyway, so you can usually just try to compile the old code and fix the problems as they crop up.

Linus "
This man is being downvoted unfairly.

I've read Torvalds' post at the top of the page. I've also read the balance of opinion on this page. The majority view is that C++ really is a terrible language for writing a kernel. Fine, I accept that.

Now re-read Torvalds' post. How many people here would want to work with someone who regularly expresses himself like that? I know, I know; substance is more important than image and so forth. But that post reminds me of what people said working with Steve Jobs was like before he died.

Life is too short to work with jerks.

EDIT: Removed excess snark.
I wonder what Linus thinks about Objective C as another as an alternative approach to Object Orientation in C.

IMO Objective C gets much farther in implementing polymorphism and dynamic binding than C++ can even dream of.

Although I hear good things about Boost, I think thats like patching the language instead of fixing the fundamental flaws in its design.
As a primarily imperative programmer who is just becoming more familiar with Haskell, I'd love to see a compare/contrast between Haskell and Ocaml from someone with expertise in this area.
To avoid confusion, the link is "A discussion on Stack Overflow which was inspired by this rant by Linus Torvalds"
Look, man, it just can't.

Cute library though.
I went, he is an enthusiastic speaker defiantly worth attending.
I have not yet seen any application that would be improved by full HATEOAS. Fielding argues that you need it if you intend to be around for decades. Guess what, the Flickr API is verging on a decade and it's still doing fine.

Some things in the Flickr API could be nicer with more HATE. For instance, currently, the client needs to know how to turn a returned photo ID into a URL. Fielding would ask why the API doesn't just return URLs in the first place. (One answer: because that would be inanely repetitive.)

But that's mostly cosmetic. Yes, we expect the client to translate IDs to page URLs, but we also expect it to understand what the difference between a photo and a user is.

Nobody has explained to me how "Hypermedia" APIs are supposed to be traversable without a programmer embedding significant domain knowledge into the library anyway.
Thanks! We're hoping that people on HN pay it forward and help new learners by sharing resources that they found useful when they were first learning.
If you don't even want to pull the phone out to begin with then you're most likely not hitting them up for their phone number unless they happen to have a card or you happen to have a pen and sticky notes.

It's possible that the people who are already too cautious to even reveal that they have a phone are the same people that would never make use of a service like this.
With both sites getting bigger by the day, I think this patent issue is inevitable.
I use C and C++ extensively (30+ years writing C, 25 or so writing C++).

I much prefer C when writing systems-level code. It's simpler and a lot more predictable. You don't get the illusion that things like memory management are free.

I /have/ written drivers in C++. Here you have to be very careful about memory allocation (calling 'new' in an interrupt handler is usually death, though I've also written very specialized allocators that work in IRQ contexts). STL isn't going to cut it, especially if you're writing something real-time that needs very predictable performance.

So, my basic prejudice is that while you can use C++ for systems stuff, you still really need to be close to C semantics, so you're basically buying namespaces and "C with classes" at the risk that some yahoo later on is going to #include <map> and utterly hose things . . .
It's caused by the checkbox to deny third-party cookies, and it's on their known issues page.

http://support.google.com/androidmarket/bin/static.py?hl=en&...
Contrast this with the comments for the Amazon Prime article a few stories down :(
Making Time for What Matters
Why You Can’t Dismiss Nokia’s 41-Megapixel Phone
Just like his usability articles, Estimates.

Luke has some good stuff out there, but it's all guts. Very little to none formal work.
Rob Walling recently shared some tips for using oDesk (about 17 minutes in):
http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-64-hi...

Screencasts are highly recommended!
Oh yeah, China is doing rather well NOW. How about China, like 20 or even 30 years ago ? It was a poor country, underdeveloped. And you know what changed ? Their economic system. Just that. It was so sudden in China you can easily trace the roots of their economic boom. It supports my argument, rather than yours.
The headline seems a little alarmist; the article in question wasn't "censored" completely, it was just removed from Google. (I'll preemptively disagree with the argument that if a page is not Googleable it doesn't exist.)
You may want to post this to Quora instead.
They were appointed once, yes. Purpose is in the eye of the beholder to a large extent; it seems to me that the Constitution's authors saw the purpose of the upper chamber primarily as a check on the populist passions of the lower one, and specified the appointment of senators precisely to avoid them being beholden to public opinion in the their state of origin. Then again, the same people preferred the idea of Senator being a lifetime appointment, somewhat like the House of Lords in Britain...
And that's why I won't need Google Maps anymore; congrats guys, that is awesome work.

A couple questions/comments;

- You'll probably need to work on the readability of some of the Asian charsets; Korean works just fine, Thai and especially Chinese are very hard to read. I guess you'd need to detect specific characters and render them slightly bigger (that is what we sometimes do with Chinese, rendering English text as 14 px and Chinese at 15 for example).

- I'd be interested in knowing what the final size of the tileset is.
Kudos to Google for this contest, they took the extra mile in protecting its users.
In my three years of being on this website, I haven't had to downvote anything except spam or deliberate trolling. And that too, rarely.

Maybe it is a good idea to have the value of downvotes diminish the more you use them.
No. That's true for the backed by Amazon stuff. The bulk is small shops to whom Amazon is just another layer between your credit card and them. For those cases they do nothing.