skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I saw Jared Spool give a really great talk (http://www.slideshare.net/jmspool/revealing-design-treasures...) about Amazon once, but this slide specifically addresses what you're talking about: http://i.imgur.com/ZQpWe.png

Also, I accidentally learned that pressing ~ twice while focused on a SlideShare presentation gives you their dev log. http://i.imgur.com/e2rBO.png
Nice, got me thinkin and tried this:

_.throttle ->
console.log("Foo")
, 500

And it works!
Twitter Fitter
Twitter Fitter helps you shorten the length of your tweets by shortening links using bit.ly, using contractions where possible, and swapping out longer words with abbreviated versions.
I think the underlying assumption in the article is that people who get an education are more entitled to a high paying job than those who don't have such an education.

That entitlement is a huge question. Why should they be entitled to higher paying jobs? Because they worked hard to get there? I used to work 12 hour days as a construction worker making $10/hour. I work half as hard as a programmer as I did as a construction worker, yet I earn 8 times as much. In the 4 years of school it took to get here, I can't even pretend that I worked harder than my former colleagues did. Clearly how hard we work isn't the only factor in our wages.

So what is this entitlement based on? I'm not asking what wages should be based on. We almost all agree that you should be paid according to the value you add. My question is why it is (or why is it supposed to be) surprising that someone with a PhD in medieval studies can't find work. What is the assumption by the general public based on?
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Yep at #1. Perhaps, as an exercise in empathy, people here could imagine how their lives would change if, due to "supply and demand", programmer salaries dropped to $20k/year.
On the same hardware that Ubuntu (and friends) didn't work on? I've been having problems with resuming, and wondered if going to Arch would help, but couldn't think of a real reason why it would.
the Console Message Inspector is pretty useful, it shows a lot of stuff that is normally hidden.
These people could come to SE Asia and actually make more money teaching basic English, in cities where the cost of living is 1/4th or less that of any US city. The English teachers I talked to in Hanoi said they couldn't spend their entire salary there if they tried.
In case you're interested, the thing you're discussing is usually available at heritage tomato sellers (at least in California).

I am currently growing 16 different "heritage" tomato plants that are precisely low-yield less-watery cultivars from Italy and Greece in the round-red style. As you suggest, the person who sold them to me said it was hard to sell those particular plants because everyone expects heritage tomato plants to look "unusual" (as compared to my motivation, which is mainly flavor and aroma).
"Why would colleges want to hire tenure-track professors if adjuncts can teach the same number of students for less money?" That is precisely the point. There is an oversupply of people willing to do the job and thus people are willing to do it for less money (teaching adjunct). If there were a shortage, then the university would be forced to pay more and give more benefits (hire tenure track).
PyBrowserID supports local verification in Python: https://github.com/mozilla/PyBrowserID
Considering first the US alone: given surplus production and low utilization of potential resources means efficient use of existing resources. This is empirically validated by US farm output growing 1.63% annually from 1948 to 2009; input use over the same time grew only 0.11% [1]. Using less land for farming is logistically and ecologically sound.

Expanding to the world, why are low income countries, in aggregate, exporting agricultural products (but not raw foods) while the local population starves [2]? I do not understand the nuances of the global grocery supply chain to answer this definitively but my background in finance intuits me to believe it is a distribution rather than agriculture problem - witness how "it costs more to truck a container from Djibouti to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, than to ship the same container from China to Djibouti" [3].

[1] http://www.ers.usda.gov/data/agproductivity/

[2] http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServ... (See Annex Table 1 and Annex Table 2, pages 25-28)

[3] http://www.economist.com/node/21553050
This seems like an important step towards the fabled "Computronium"(1) allowing our environments to compute. Heavy handed regulators should pay very close attention to the consequences of monopolies granted around these ideas. One misstep allowing the patenting of "controlling stuff with touch" instead of allowing only the much more restrictive specific methods of detecting that touch could prune an entire branch off our technological development tree for decades to come.

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computronium
The bottom line is: People don't like being manipulated. "Not turning an addict away" is different than actively seeking addicts (or purposefully turning people into addicts). McDonald's R&D doesn't attempt to solve the question "how can I convince someone to eat every single meal of the day at McDonald's."
Since you ask: Yes, actually, it does.
Vodafone in Australia (not sure about everywhere else) once had a similar service which they pitched as being able to find the answer to anything. I only used it once or twice, often while trying to prove something in a bar.

Pretty handy service however I think you'd want to be able to call in your question as there might be a bit of forwards and backs in trying to work out exactly what you're trying to get the answer to.
Similar to our trust on the 13 root servers then.

I guess this all depends on who to trust.
“You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won’t believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!”

http://www.dyeager.org/blog/2008/04/probability-evolution.ht...
Fair enough but my point was that if there are librarians that make $250,000 it is because they are at the highest level of administration over a library system, not the librarians that you meet at a reference desk.

As eli_gottlieb pointed out, many librarian positions are unpaid so the $50K figure may significantly overestimate the salary of a librarian if volunteer ones are not counted.
> Connecting to someone's unsecured wifi is a criminal offence

what if the SSID is 'freewifi'?
"If you took a strict Econ 101 view of this, there would be no medieval studies professors in the whole country."

I don't believe that. (note that I am the guy who originally made the "zero pity" comment) Knowing how society developed from medieval times into the Renaissance is very valuable, especially from the point of view of someone who studies history of technology, markets, and means of production.
Within that context, there is most definitely demand for professors of medieval studies.

The conversation really is about how there isn't enough demand for dozens of medieval studies experts every year. Perhaps there would be demand for a dozen every five years or so.
Posted on "authentic jobs" no less.

I see straight-outta-compton interns get more respectful job postings than that.

Yet another reason I don't feel bad about being on the Python side of the fence.
"I have been predicting Zynga’s descent for a couple of years"

Oh, I know this trick. I also can predict descent of any company, but just not the timeframe. Eventually I will be right.
Do you work in games? (me too)
Its a meaningless phrase, with meaningless implications.
Twitter Fitter is a weekend project/experiment that I made. I hope someone out there can get some use out of it!
By what moral standard?
They do exactly what people outside of academia do: look at those who came before. They see their advisors doing fine. Academia is weirdly deceptive in that way.
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OK. please people, stop judging every fucking word people write. if you are going to submit a post just for using a word gangsta, please stop. we might as well start use the tag line "we judge you for every word you say" as tag line for hn now. should i say factorialboy is fucking offensive as a nick. is that what handles are coming to.
This is a significant advantage of the farmer direct produce box enterprises that have sprung up everywhere. Because the fruits and vegetables are spending less time in storage and get to the consumer quicker they are often treated differently by the producer, ripening on the vine/bush/ground for longer.
Could These Start-Ups Become The Next Big Thing?
The taxpayers also don't lose out because the mint makes the coins and mails them and pays the credit card settlement fee for less than the face value of the coins.

Nobody loses, except people who object to the subtle inflation by seigniorage. The Federal Reserve can control that anyway.
Size does matter... with goals that is
Jesus, calm down. You don't want to mess with me, I am a JavaScript 'ninja' after all. ;-)
Thanks for all the replies, I actually wasn't expecting so much of a response - maybe there are a lot more people out there in a similar situation. I like the medical transcriptionist suggestion, as well as the ebay & craigslist buy & resell though I'm not sure she or I know the best type of items to focus on. As for a niche site selling x-type of items... that sounds alright and one I've thought of - but what's a good niche market where the google ad words prices aren't astronomical? Anyone?
She got her certification from http://www.careerstep.com/medical-transcription-editing

It's between a 4 month and 1 year course, depending on how much time you spend training. She finished it in about three months by working on it all the time.
Or be the first to do it right...
> A great write-up and a typical example of what you should never do as a service company.

What I read is that you shouldn't enter into bad contracts. Somebody at AA screwed up and signed something "for life" without too many provisions put in for fraud and termination. The damage was done then. Those people should be found and punished.

> the damages to the brand, corporate recognition and being seen as a company that does not value their contracts as soon as it benefits their customers

But don't you think these customers went above and out of their way to abuse this. Yeah it wasn't in the contract, but selling the empty seat and making a living out of it. Or booking it under false names. That is fraud for most common sense definitions of it. In court it might not hold. But I think in the PR domain AA can redeem itself by just taking the responsibility and admitting they screwed up setting this up but also exposing what these passengers are doing and how they are exploiting the company. They can pit every other customer against them. "You know that time you were gonna fly to Europe with your wife but there was only one seat available, well it was so and so booking under a false, name he took your wife's seat!".
I don't think people only have one passion. I personally have a passion for pure mathematics and number theory. My passion for software and hardware comes in a close enough second that I chose to focus my career on development rather than pure mathematics.

I was all set to double major in mathematic when I got married. When my wife and I had our first kid I decided to finish up a Computer Engineering degree and enter the workforce rather than take an extra year to finish the math major.

Sometimes you have to find something you enjoy enough. I absolutely enjoy programming, but it still doesn't come close to how fascinating I find number theory.

Everyone has options, and they make (or should make) their choices fully aware of the likely outcomes.
Languages that are turing complete can obviously solve any business problem that is solvable. The trick is the ease with which your goals can be accomplished, and there is a tremendous amount of variability there (if there wasn't, we'd all be programming in assembly). I've seen bake-offs where different teams used different languages and the results were dramatic enough that I'd say the loser was clearly a "problem".
Now I know the reason why I felt uncomfortable about ActionScript. Flash folks were always convincing me that AS3 is perfectly fine and kickass language. Next time I'll just link this.
Supplemental skills are essential, even for us fancy-pants code warriors. On the day they were awarded their degrees, the half dozen buddies I have who graduated as computer science majors could barley fizz-buzz their way out of a shot glass; it took a lot of studying, experimentation, and self-direction outside the classroom before they really came into their own as valuable professionals.

Software is a lucrative career path, but a college education from most universities is almost worthless on its face. Degree holders with a dim economic outlook need to consider the value in supplementing their education with a skill set that allows them to capitalize on their specialized knowledge.
I'm not sure but Zynga seems as a classical example of Christensen disruption.

With mobile and new social network games Zynga is basically disrupted and they are trying to keep they dominance by acquiring new mobile gaming companies. They want to think that social games are more like TV shows, but unfortunately social games are more like YouTube - much less control over users, returns are not predictable, ...
So if it says this in my contract it's invalid? How?
I was confused by this reference too. I'm still trying to figure out what the author meant by that.
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I have lost faith in Adobe because they cannot get their products working on case sensitive HFS volumes. The problem has existed for almost a decade I think. The fact that one cannot install Creative Suite on another volume makes it even worse.
Believe it or not, I imagine that all the time, and keep a long list of subjects that I casually read about on the side as a hedge.

The first thing I would do is ditch programming as a means of producing a living, and only do it as a hobby, and immediately reorganize my life to transition to a field that pays what programmer salaries are now.
Watch who you're talking to, I'm the Python Capo di tutti capi after all.

You should learn to relax, you wouldn't want to have an unfortunate heart-attack while skiing in Tahoe or anything, now would you?
If it uses the LLVM backend... that kind of means it is as portable as LLVM, no?
For example: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/early-bloom.html
Don't want to get into Zynga's business model but it's one sided to reference this "failed" acquisition without referencing the "with friends" franchise which has been a pretty incredible acquisition for them.
>some human groups drew the genetic short straw.)

Let me guess which groups: the ones you don't belong to?
Absolutely will be using this. Excellent. Much needed!
Obligatory Thomas H. Benton link:

Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go http://chronicle.com/article/Graduate-School-in-the/44846
Future U: Classroom tech doesn't mean handing out tablets
You misunderstand the experience.

Go to Vegas sometime. Watch the people who are playing the slots for hours at a time. They are not enjoying anything. What you're seeing is compulsion and addiction, not fun. That those people are there is not some wacky accident. It's the point.

I believe that Zynga is pursuing exactly that cycle of addiction. They're a metrics and viral marketing company, not a games company.
Even C++, OOP's flagwaver-in-chief, now supports
templating, which is effectively a competing compile
time strategy for writing polymorphic code.

When did C++ become OOP's flagwaver-in-chief!?!? It's a multi-paradigm language and hasn't been held up as an OOP exemplar for like 2 decades.
Or get a discectomy and get the hernia fixed? :)
Oh the humanity! After flying 10's of millions of miles a few wealthy individuals are no longer able to fly to the Louvre on a whim.

Meanwhile my neighbours and I have to catch a bus that is always late, often doesn't arrive and leaks when it rains.
$15k is pretty small. I think there are some members of Flyertalk.com who managed to churn far more than that during the programs run.
Then why are there deb files for Ubuntu? I don't think they're doing exactly the same thing, since e4rat is using specific features of the Ext4 filesystem.

Edit: Actually, the directions say to remove Ureadahead when installing e4rat, so maybe they are quite similar.
As noted in the article comments, much of the AS weirdness goes back to Macromedia - but Adobe itself has its own share of blunders.
I happen to share your passion for mathematics, but IMO, mathematics is actually a really poor example of "see, I have this passion that I can't make money out of, so I decided to become a developer".

The kind of money that is available in finance to someone with an advanced degree in math or physics is nothing short of astounding, with CS a distant second. Of course, there are all kinds of ethical compromises one must make for that.
That's correct. In addition, you use the processes themselves to encapsulate logic. So the communication channel AND the logical parts that works with them are essentially the same.
Wow, I'm stunned by the response! I expected to get, at most, a handful of comments.

Apologies for the delay in responding -- I'll go through and add comments as appropriate.

Thanks everyone for the advice, suggestions, and anecdotes!
W2013 Application 
Does anybody know when YC will start accepting applications for W2013?

Thanks.
Levis Wallet for Sale
Great points. I think you're dead-on in your observation that the hybrid's biggest values often go unnoticed. Executives won't see or hear every little thing you do that adds value; interfacing between design and dev is the big one, I agree.

To be honest I've never given much though to marketing myself. Maybe I'll pick up a Seth Godin book or two this summer.
Yet another reason I don't feel bad about being on the Python side of the fence.

What reason? A company using a silly word in a job title has nothing to do with Python or Rails themselves from my POV.

If it does, perhaps Rails developers can enjoy being on the "Rails side of the fence" after reading this job ad for a "Python rockstar": http://www.linkedin.com/jobs/jobs-Senior-Python-Developer-29...
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The British War Loan is not a comparable that supports your point, because it is callable.
Yes, I was thinking that too. I like simplicity and I like complexity.

I was also reminded of an old a comment from Guy Steele: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LG-RtcSYUQ&t=1h21m11s
Mailman, the original BitTorrent client, Gentoo's Portage/emerge tools, yum, Eve Online, and a large swathe of 90s-era Red Hat Linux system configuration tools have all been written in Python, all predating Django and your "Ruby backlash" timescale by at least 2-3 years. And not one of them is web-related.

Most of the code that gets written in Python has nothing to do with web development. Web development is just high-profile.
"10^{10^{26}} is 1 followed by 10^26 (100 septillion) zeroes. Although listed in years for convenience, the numbers beyond this point are so vast that they would be the same in whichever conventional units one could list them in, be they nanoseconds or star lifespans."

All you people who've been saving your OMGs for something a bit more ridiculous than an inane celebrity reaction, now could be the time to use one...
There's a difference between the triple-A mass-market games you see at Gamestop, and the social games you see on Facebook.

Pointing out that AAA-games are expensive to develop in a discussion about social games is missing the point a little, I think.
I don't think we disagree. But it's likely that most people who end up in a Ph.D. program in Medieval Studies don't have many passions that are marketable: there's a lot of self-selection involved, and if the main subject of the article was also passionate in, say, EECS, I think it's a fairly good bet she would have chosen it. And passions in Medieval Studies are likely correlated with similarly un-marketable passions.

Though, maybe not. I could totally see someone being really interested in the structures of everyday life of medieval peasantry. Seems worthless, but you could totally parlay that into a profitable business doing furniture making or even green/natural/traditional housing.
Rather than using the rate of inflation to calculate I suggest using the rate of return on capital.

Let's say that for 5 years, AA was able to return 50% on its capital (massive growth in the sector), after that it is the rate of inflation.

In that case the benefit for the passes to AA in todays dollars's (assuming 3.25% inflation): (350000 x 1.5^5) x 1.0325^25 = $5912563.906.

We use the rate of company's return on capital rather than inflation. Here's why:

Imagine you own a stock trading company that can double the money risk-free in its bank account every 12 months. Wouldn't it make sense to borrow money as long as the interest rate was < 100%, because the benefit of those funds would be 100% - the rate of return on capital of your company?
I'm not sure if it's such a bad idea in this case though. I don't know how much the marginal cost of a seat on a flight to London is, but it's a hell of a lot less than retail. Provided this handful of AAirpass customers aren't, in-and-of themselves, generating more flights that AA has to schedule, their actual sticker price to the company cannot be accounted for at retail prices.
I'd love to see this applied to guns where you have to make a much more intentioned grip for the safety to be disabled.

a gun that senses it is being held in a weird way will not fire.

I think the first application will be on a mouse. A mouse that has multi-dimensional touch features would be great.

This will also make creating an interface to control things like the whole house very easy. Basically enabling complex control of a full building's BMS easily.
Swipe Selection for iPad keyboard prototype now functional
On the contrary, I find ZeroMQ provides a great foundation for an Erlang-like distributed actor system:

https://github.com/celluloid/dcell
The Use of Wireless Mouse and Wireless Keyboard
There appears (I think that is the key word, I'm not actually sure if its true) that paying off debt is more flexible than fulfilling your 'future shares' option.
> she could find a job to catapult her into the middle class in a matter of months. It's a choice on her end.

On what basis is this assumption made? I'm genuinely curious because I think it reflects the attitude of many in certain segments in our society. The idea that poverty is a choice, and if they wanted to they could just choose their way out of it just like that.

Keep in mind the context of the present age we're living in - unemployment, across almost all sectors, is still extremely high. Are all these people, especially the educated segments, just choosing to live off public assistance? It's pretty clear, and this was the whole point of the article, that having an education isn't an IWIN button for middle class standard of living anymore, and yet society keeps selling that idea to the younger generation.

> That said, I'm not massively sympathetic toward her.

It's dangerously easy to judge people who aren't doing as well as oneself.
A few years back there was a pepsi promo in Finland that involved collecting codes from bottles and returning them for rewards. The lower amount reward tiers were sensible, but if you collected codes from a thousand bottles, (cost roughly 1250€), you received a laptop worth 2000€. Considering you can still resell the drink, you can probably see the problem.

Link in Finnish, but scroll down for pictures: http://www.pulu.org/pro/1-1500-litraa-pepsia-ja-sony-vaio-s5