skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To be fair, the rich are getting exorbitantly richer. CEOs are making multiple hundreds of times what one of their workers makes. We are heading back to the age of Rockefellers and Carnegies, where wealth is taken from the many so the few can be insanely rich.

And it's not like the educated aren't doing much better either. Google makes billions but doesn't pay a ton more than anywhere else. Wages and salaries have been pretty stagnant for those making less than 200k. Meanwhile, costs increase for a net loss of income.

So what else is there to do, other than tax the rich? That's the reality they are building for themselves by being so greedy.
Uh oh! Didn't know you were here too.

It's nice to see entrepreneurs like you, coming out openly with business figures. Helps newbies like me, to go on and keep focus only on the product. Unabated by tiny bubbles we see in funding side of story - aka "herd mentality".
I thought there were two implementations, a 32bit and a 64bit
Do you think recurring billing makes more sense to web apps than desktop apps? I think users are entrenched with the idea of "buying" a desktop app and "subscribing" to a web app.
I submit that Arizona should be held in contempt for McCain's own trolling pretending to be a concenred politician
That assumes that a programmer working 70 hours is more productive than one working 40 hours.
This phenomenon applied to the Internet is especially egregious. The Internet has happily existed for decades with very little fiat law. Facebook hires a good PR firm to spin Eternal September as a good thing, the self-entitled masses show up with no concern for how this world might be different, and every sad-sack politician is suddenly looking to solve non-problems to appear hip and relevant.

Number One rule of the Internet: If what's being said affects you in a negative way, stop listening (this applies from OSI L2 on up). If you cannot handle this responsibility, please leave.
"5. Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite."

This is why I object to most usage of cursing in writing (see recent threads on the subject). Using the most extreme language for relatively mundane situations leaves you nothing to work with when extreme language is warranted. Ex.: using the phrasing "go the f^@& home" (see thread of same name) in a mundane discussion about work hours really is pretty pathetic insofar as it wastes & deflates extreme language better used where more appropriate, such as describing the feeling of having your rib cage pried open with a car jack (been there, done that, f^@& applies).

(Some of us suffer net-nannies, so pardon the veiling.)
Rusted before any use was gotten?
Rent time with founders from Parse, Hipmunk, Sincerely and Reddit through Exec
25+ Death-Defying Photographs by Vadim Mahorov
I think the original post still stands - try explaining the above to an irate customer.
Blackberry maker out to capitalize on rivals
In the latter example, a single member of staff can now do the job of a row of checkout clerks, supported by maybe a trained engineer to fix faults in all the stores in a given region. Soon, maybe these too will become redundant (perhaps replaced by RFID scanners to scan your bags and bill your credit card automatically when leaving the store).

One for PG's 'startup ideas so disruptive they're scary' list
And is there anything wrong with people feeling like they are creative?

Same argument applies to Guitar Hero. People may make the argument that they're not playing guitar and therefore should stop playing Guitar Hero, but many people find it fun. You can disagree with them, but that doesn't make it less fun.
I may still have an old tape with some LOGO programs I wrote back in 1989, when I was 8.
Interesting. Is there a place you can point me to, to read up on this issue?
Yea,

my $file_handle = open(file.txt)

my $text;

while (read $file_handle, $buff, 1024) { $text = $buff }

read returns the number of characters read (0 when it's finished which will end the loop). I don't know of any generic "read" function, so it's up to you to define how many characters at a time and give the $buffer scalar to read into. it's just a different way of doing things

norkakn is a better resource than this comment
You can thank slave labor for the good life during these times. I am not talking about sweat shops, I'm talking about real slavery. It wasn't uncommon for the military to enslave people and take their land. If you had a problem making bread for 15 hrs a day or having the empire use your land to grow wheat without paying you, then you can just be killed. Most of the time it was done publicly.

Production of products back then wasn't too advanced. Many of the slaves had the experience and skills to contribute to a specific value chain of these empires. Using bread as an example, in their culture the slaves had experience baking and farming. The only difference is they aregoing to do it for free and the stuff they produce will go to their rulers. Any problems with that, you can get murdered.
Visual twitter, beautifully done. That's all, but I love it.
This might be awesome. Arizona's discrimination laws are offensive and annoying. Their own government are essentially trolls to society.

Governments don't operate by the third law of robotics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics) so perhaps it's possible for this law to take effect and for it to instantly outlaw themselves. Sweet!
Such is the difficulty in targeting a non-standardized system. Developers have a hard time making apps for platforms that vary wildly. It's a lot more cost effective to hit the big, easy targets on Android then focus your effort on iOS. Single-platform, more purchases, and less development work.
Great book for the aspiring writer. Most of it is filler material, but the ~16 pages of real writing advice is worth at least the cover price.

One recommendation that stuck with me is to avoid words ending in "ly". I now make that effort, and the results are an improvement.
Flickr's Digital Camera of Choice? iPhone
Pathwright launches, powered by Snakes and Jazz (online learning)
That's good money. If that keeps up, with modest growth, you can count on a steady side income.
Epic Resignation Letter is Satire, Sparks Discussion on Privacy
The post briefly outlines our philosophy, and goes into some of the tech that runs it (not that tech is the "point"). We'd love to get some feedback!
This is where some "celebrity" came into play. Since we weren't getting organic traffic (nothing to index but the sales letter) and didn't have a blog up (big mistake!), a few people with lots of Twitter followers RTed me. It's a lot easier to get signups to non-binding "I'll notify you once there's something build" than it is to get actual signups. Only about 20% of the announcement list ended up converting.
Testing the Ballmer Peak: Ballmer Peak-a-Thon SF, open bar hackathon
Only if 1/2 of them have tilt-shift applied.
The Anthropology of Tablet Computing
334 Hours of Ruby on Rails
Poker is hard, especially for cryptographers
Nice, thanks for posting Dodd. Glad to have it shipped.
For one thing, some less expensive Android phones have very limited internal storage. I have a very decent one who's achilles heel is the internal storage. The internal storage has been completely full pretty much since I got it, and any new app either has to be installable to the SD card (and most are, thankfully - except for anything Google makes for some reason) or be critical enough to displace an existing app.
Pretty sure it says iOS Text Editor roundup. Syntax highlighting is in there, other code-specific features are listed under additional features because there's really only two "code" editors in the mix.
>To what extent can you actually require someone to work longer anyway?

You can reprimand and/or fire them if they don't. Seems to work for most American companies.
It's the Food Channel for geeks, seriously.
Learn To Succeed Like Google
Sadly, music keeps me unfocused; so the silence it is.
I think this will happen eventually as well, however it still feels far off, I definitely get frustrated with Java's lack of functional programming, I just think its so well rooted now in so many organizations it will be a while until a new platform can really take over.. I haven't really looked at Scala but plan to, the problem is, there just aren't many companies using it and unless you're starting your own, it feels like you have to keep your experience in line with what companies are using
Thank you; this isn't anywhere close to being my game, but your hint book's helped me to come a lot closer to understanding the details :-)
One of my theories is that "morning people" have a tendency to get promoted in managerial tracks, while most IT workers tend to be "evening people". Thus to the mismanagers, it appears that their staff comes in late all the time - so to the "morning people", the "cure" for lateness is to make folks come in earlier and stay longer.

It seems to me that mismanagers never get the point that longer hours "in the seat" do not correlate to more positive work acomplished. In our profession, we've been aware that "crunch mode" is counter productive, but the lessons don't seem to get uphill to the people that dictate such things.

http://www.igda.org/why-crunch-modes-doesnt-work-six-lessons

That truth seems to stop flowing upwards in organizations is something that appears far more often than I'd like to happen. In the worst companies I've worked for, truth stops moving upwards at my direct superior's level. In the better ones, it is a few levels uphill. The most bureaucratic and hidebound company I worked for - GM - had 15 levels of people between myself (and I was salaried) and the CEO; which was more than enough for multiple thermoclines of truth to occur.

http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/15/the-wetware-crisis-the-t...

http://www.cio.com.au/article/250886/thermocline_truth/
Illustrating why Twitter can't replace website comments
Hi cletus, totally unrelated to this story but would you mind sending me a mail on colin[at]colinfleming.net? I tried to contact you through your blog but the contact form seems to be pretty broken (both the captcha and the submission). Thanks.
"valid" yes, "working", maybe? I'm guessing unquoted multi-word font family names cause problems in older browsers.
> Number One rule of the Internet: If you don't like what's being said, stop listening

That's fine. I agree.

What happens if AA says to BB "I know where you live, and I'm going to fucking kill you"?

And if AA puts BB in a filter, and stops listening, and so BB morphs to BC and keeps writing. And then socks to BD, BE, BF and BG, and finds all relevant social media that AA is on, and posts anti-$MINORITY screeds, with credible threats of violence?
Looks awesome. Really easy to use, and visually intuitive.
How about this simplified version:

1. Try both byte orders

2. If one produces valid text and the other does not, choose that one (this will get you the correct answer almost every time, even if the source text is Chinese)

3. If both happen to produce valid text, use the one with the smallest number of scripts

(Note that this just determines byte order, while Patrick was talking about the more ambitious task of heuristically determining whether a random string of bytes is text and if so what encoding it is. My point is just that you really don't need to be told the order of the bytes in most cases.)
Some Amazing WordPress Statistics to Brighten Up Your Day
Would he also say the impossibly bad half-puns that preface each chapter?
"In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them" - John von Neumann
Business writing doesn't need to stink
adennis is an awesome startup guy. I couldn't be more proud to know him.

To those who don't know him, you guys might remember him from: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2332349

That was him about a year ago, and a lot of people called it the best "looking for a tech cofounder" post they had ever seen.

A year ago, he was an awesome hustler/non-tech founder looking for a tech founder. Now he can deploy his own apps too. Just another data point for how far he's willing to go to get success.

Congrats adennis, looking forward to great things from you.
I know the organizer. It should be a fun event.
White House: Yes, We’re Still Anti-SOPA
Just because an article mentions it again doesn't mean that "fragmentation rears its ugly head once again". The numbers are improving, if anything.
I wouldn't underestimate the power of hype at this point either. That is, people using it simply because others are and they want to be just as hip, or people like you and me trying it to see what the fuss is about and perhaps staying because it's good enough and we're already there.
However, most Python programmers tend to just read the
entire file into one huge string and process it that way.
I feel funny doing that. Having used machines with very
limited amounts of RAM, I tend to try to keep my file
processing to a single line at a time. However, that
method is going the way of the dodo.

contents = file('filename.txt').read()
all_input = sys.stdin.read()

This is not the correct way to do things. The first example given is better.

for line in file('filename.txt'):
print line

Generators are a beautiful thing [1][2]

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/519633/lazy-method-for-re...

[2] http://www.dabeaz.com/generators/
I've just seen a screenshot on youtube. It looks interesting.
Those were just examples. And I'm not at all concerned about the download time, having wi-fi and all. My concern is the space that takes on my phone (and why).

But if we're talking about speed specifically, do you think a 10Mb app would be or load faster than a 1Mb one? This makes me wonder by the way... Does a non-optimized image (part of an app UI, not a photo) take longer to display in a mobile?
Politics, Ahoy! Germany’s Pirate Party Scores Another Election Win
Neat way to kill two birds with one stone. Not only do you get to promote Exec but you also get people to donate to a wonderful charity. Its great that you got such great founders to donate their time.
Download Instagram For Android Today
What do you want mobile phones to do in the next 40 years?
Not huge, but my brother has a HTC Wildfire S (early last years budget model) and struggles with constantly juggling apps. Not all apps on Android can be moved to SD.
Haha...thanks buddy. Appreciate the vote of confidence.
Location-Based Push Notifications Lift Off With Urban Airship
Ah, The Agony and Ecstasy of Reganwald.

Amidst accusations that his concept was lifted from Mr. Daisey, can we expect him to say, "I am not a crook?"
New version of Creative Commons License 4.0
Yikes, that's a lot of cores. Glad to see the Postgres team keep pushing the scalability envelope.
Thanks.

That example doesn't live up to the hype that was mentioned by a previous poster and that had me worried. However, that hype was probably overstated.

For example, "there are certain race conditions if you rely on signals to interrupt system calls and the interrupt happens before the syscall is called" -> seems to imply there are race conditions inherent to the situation, not race conditions that can be introduced by programmer mistake (which is pretty obvious, IMO).

Also "since your code could have been anywhere in the execution path you can only do very limited amount of things within the signal handler that won't cause catastrophic issues otherwise" -> I just don't believe that; you can do lots of things in the signal handler if you know what you're doing.
*patents
Awesome, will check that out! What's the best way to approach people that worked for you?
(tldr; not being f(cked with is a fundamental human right)

I've been on this planet for a bit over four decades. Much of that time, I've spent in backwaters in the unusual position of being what one might term as an ultra-minority of one type or another. (In ratios of 1 to 1000 or more.)

One thing my unusual perspective has brought me to is this idea: That not being f(cked with is a fundamental human right. Sex between consensual adults can be a great and wonderful thing. Make that less than consensual, and it's not so wonderful any more. Likewise kidding around can be good, innocent fun. Make it non-consensual, and it becomes something negatively sadistic. In other words, the fundamental factor of cruelty in rape is the coercive and non-consensual nature of it, not the involvement of genitalia.

One might respond to this by saying: well, if you don't like it, don't go on the Internet. Unfortunately, the Internet has become something of a public space, in the same way that the sidewalk or a cafe or restaurant is a public space, private ownership notwithstanding.

So the question you have to ask yourself is this: are you >imposing< yourself on people in a way incompatible with their expectations? Are you misrepresenting yourself to accomplish this? Do you convince yourself that your targets somehow deserve this treatment? (Even more so if you have an ideology to help justify this.) Do you think the genuine hurt feelings of people who did not consent to your treatment is somehow wonderful and fun?

I'm not against anyone's fun. I'm only against non-consensual activity. If you're not smart enough to find a crowd with compatible expectations, then I posit that you're not smart enough to gamble with social norms through trolling in a way which has any value. If successfully misrepresenting yourself and hurting the feelings of others outside of their expectations is required for your brand of "fun" then you've been fooling yourself about what you're doing.
Show HN: Pictorious is a game that lets you show off how awesome you can be
Define "actual picture", I can tell you that there is no definitive answer on what "actual" would or should really be.
I got my BS in engineering (electrical), managed to scrape my way through all the hard math classes, but never really had a firm grasp on any of it. A bit later on in the real world, doing some signal processing work, some of it started to snap together. But then I read the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. Which I found to be more math heavy than any other prob books I'd read previously. But the way everything was describe, and laid out in the context of programming, all my past math just came streaming back, and suddenly made sense. It was like that "a-ha" moment, times 1000.

I don't know what the point of my ramblings are. I guess math finally made sense after learning programming first, much like yegge proposes in his post. But I had the basics down first, and I was at least familiar with the concepts.
I want to second MacKay's book. I had a terrible statistics class in college. We spent the entire time looking up tables of p-values and t tests, without a very convincing explanation as to why. The entire topic was damaged for me from then on until I read MacKay online, and then bought the paper version.

His book starts from first principles -- simple ideas about probabilities -- and it builds a foundation for understanding Bayesian methods. And he explains, basically, why the p-values and t-test stuff is a bunch of crap, which was an immense relief.
Maybe after this hits the front page, they will magically earn all the badges?
Charlie Kindel: Google Will Abandon Android
I've dealt with people who have wanted a retraction of negative comments to their business on the web, I explained it didn't work that way as best I could, but there isn't much you can do. Same with this, if they are irate about a low rating, you play nice, but you don't expect them to learn the ins and outs.
Hey guys - Just wanted to share what we've been working on and get feedback from the HN community.

Pictorious is a fun, new game that inspires people to take awesome photos and challenge their friends to do the same. We're still very much in learning and iterating mode so welcome any and all feedback on this project.

We place a heavy emphasis on sleek design, performance and, of course, fun. We built the app using Objective-C, Node.js and MongoDB. We've also built out a REST API for our partners to pull in photos and other relevant data.

Coming soon: create your own challenges, better photo browsing and deeper game mechanics.
Added it as well, thank you.
Instagram finally hits Google Play (Android)
What do you find incompatible between GC and systems programming?
Definitely a place to start.
Link as it won't isn't showing up in the Play store search just yet: http://instagram.com/android/
There is no less structural information in, say, a Python code block than in a C code block. Once you get used to the syntax and language semantics, you will just as easily be able to understand the structure and flow at a glance.
In the article, OP wrote about Facebook: "They didn't want you to do anything but what you wanted to do naturally, they just wanted to pay close attention and help."
Does OP or anyone else have specific examples of what Facebook did in their early days?
Ask HN: What's in your .bash_aliases?
The Case Against Kids: Is procreation immoral?
David Byrne's Journal: Technology Give and Take
"The world we're dealing with now on the Web begins with ASCII"

I know nothing about the implementation of early web browsers/gopher/etc, but I doubt there ever was anything on the web that used ASCII. 7-bit email may have been around at e time, but I would guess Tim Berners Lee just used whatever character set his system used by default (corrections welcome; being snarky isn't the only reason I write this)
I dont have an iphone to try it out, but looks really good!
> Number One rule of the Internet: If you don't like what's being said, stop listening

That's fine. I agree.

That's find in my book as well. There's a consensual transaction. If one party doesn't like it, they can stop it.

And if AA puts BB in a filter, and stops listening, and so BB morphs to BC and keeps writing.

Then the transactions are no longer consensual. As I commented elsewhere, I think not being f^cked with if you don't want to be is a fundamental human right. Also, in this day and age, if someone has to get off the Internet entirely to achieve this, then something is wrong. If the concerted efforts of another party are involved in this state of affairs, then there is likely something unsavory and sadistic at play.
As somebody who makes quite a bit of money off infoproducts (ebooks etc) -- and who has a lot of friends who do it as well -- I can assure you, there are support costs for ebooks. :) People lose download links, you have to reissue. People want refunds. People have complaints. Not a lot, but it adds up.

Lower-paying customers almost always are more demanding, less appreciative customers. I've seen this in my biz (infoproducts, courses & SaaS), heard it from friends in theirs (SaaSes, restaurants, training companies etc). It's a truism probably because it is largely true.

As you brought up in your last sentence, there's also opportunity costs of going with a lower price.

You've also taught those customers to only pay you $3-6, which means you may have a harder time selling them on fancier products later.

Finally: Especially with infoproducts, when it's a no-brainer, people are likely to buy on a trigger and then never use what they bought. If your goal is to help people, change their minds, build a community, this can be a kiss of death.
The Devil in Groupon's Details
You are definitely looking at the wrong developers. Long ago I figured out that being able to code well was just a portion of being a great developer. Learning how to deliver business value through coding is huge, and it's not been easy (at least for me).
Instagram is the most overrated app of the year.
I ended up going with this one for better or worse. I'm afraid I still don't quite understand it:

my $text = do { local( @ARGV, $/ ) = $file ; <> } ;