skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I do agree that a good database can replace memcache in certain circumstances, isn't a 24ms response time from memcache a pretty good indication that something is seriously wrong there?

I'd expect <1ms, if your network allows you to get that from Mongo
A quantum tin-cans-and-string telephone might be a better analogy since the photon beam can be obstructed, unlike a walkie talkie's radio signal
Why Patent Injunctions Are Even Worse For Open Source
I don't see any reference to continuations in there.
That's pretty hostile. I came here and now have a green card, with the intention of eventually gaining citizenship.

Now I'm wondering how much I've harmed my future mobility (should I choose to return to my birth country).
While I understand the reason for auto, and see the benefit in less typing, etc, I still do it the old-fashioned waytoo. I prefer be explicit.
Fungible - the mess the news industry is in and the opportunities that lie ahead
>"The difference here is that Microsoft is using its Windows monopoly power in the OS market to exclude competition in the browser market."

Some might see it that way. Personally, I don't think that's Microsoft's goals at all, it's just an unintended consequence of them trying to slowly phase out the Win32 API and Desktop applications, and switch entirely to Metro-style WinRT-based apps.
Does that actually work? Is it enforceable? I would imagine that if you sent back a contract with modifications for their review that they would balk at hiring or you would get involved with the lawyers who are so much better at legal negotiating than you are.

I definitely would not do that with a consulting contract. The chance that something weird would come up is generally worth it to get a good client.
> listen, the state doesn't have a "moral right" on your money, energy, or time

Of course it does. Without the state, there would be no property rights.
> Does anyone know if this (using verified-by-visa, mastercard-securecode remove any payment protection if you get key-logged etc) is correct?

Yes. It's the whole point of the system, to remove even more risk from the CC companies and banks, and put it on you.
Eduardo Saverin renounces US citizenship to dodge tax bill
it's business brother. you're not asking to date his sister. you earned the money, go ask for it.

and procrastinating is just fine. but you don't QUIT without getting that kind of dough.
Can London Afford the $14.5 Billion Price Tag of the Summer 2012 Olympic Games?
Hardware macroarchitecture vs microarchitecture
The US is one of the few countries that doesn't allow its citizens to avoid double taxation. You are still liable for US taxes on foreign-earned income above $80,000 per year.
Bogus Report: 55,000 Twitter accounts compromised
Who is the "they" here? Unless the govt. is doing it, it doesn't count as subsidy.

Also, I thought govt. loans were much smaller in total than private loans. Is that incorrect?
I think your intuition is exactly correct; it's the function allocations that are killing you.

Fascinating stuff.
You seem to be railing against a straw man - the article is not your typical sob story about people who have degrees and can't find jobs.

In fact, the author at no point in the article brings up anyone who fits that mold: degreed but can't find a job.

Can we, like, talk about the topic of the article instead of making up straw men (like your fictional Art History major) to attack? It does no good except to stroke the already massive egos of everyone here.

What the article does actually talk about is that, for a range of things such as housing and education, the cost has far, far outpaced inflation (or income growth), and is considerably harder to afford for this generation than the last, and presents numeric evidence of this.

This is about the fact that, as a relation to income, college has become much more expensive, to the point where loans are unavoidable, where they could be realistically worked off before with part-time jobs. To be fair, Canadians still have vastly more affordable tuition than most Americans.

This is about the fact that, beyond college, home ownership is a pipe dream - housing prices as a multiple of income has jumped from 1.6 up through to a national average of 6. For major Canadian cities, the multiple drifts up to 8-9.

This is about stagnant wages in the face of rapidly rising everything.

So even for our fictional Hacker News hero - the one who got a "useful" degree, the one who has figured out the job market, the one that freely scoffs in the face of pathetic liberal arts Untermensch, even he faces slim to nil odds of ever owning a home, massive debt out of college, etc etc. Growing the hell up doesn't seem to help his case.
Could you not be naturalised after renouncing it?
Typo in the Bloc.io link URL in the closing line, block.io should be bloc.io : "Jared Tame is a co-founder and mentor at Bloc, where he’s teaching people how to become web developers in 8 weeks."
Great nugget:

> a US credit card costs 2$ on the black market and a UK starts at 60$, americans are all in debt.
The left side of the V should be tad higher. Unless I know the name of your website, it seems like "erolo" with a check mark in front. May be I am too dumb :)
What was the actual page count of the privacy policy?
Oops -- think I broke it when I changed the survey link text. Think it's fixed now, thanks for posting.
yea, the world is a weird place. seeing a lot of angry ethical reactions on reddit, i can't help but think: on one side, there are people like this guy in the comments who left marketing a health product due to false claims, or me refusing to code for certain clients based on "personal" ethical judgments and on the other side there are these "crackers" who steal the credit cards of random people and who even hate them.

one thing i want to believe, you can't build a future on crime, or can you?
I have used it, for a few days, but easily could have used VNC or some like it instead.
I'm not sure which infrastructure you're referring to. Roads? Police? College?

He paid for college. He paid for taxes while he was using the infrastructure you've mentioned. Now he's going to greener pastures and you still expect him to continue to support the U.S. through taxes? I don't think that makes a whole lot of sense. I don't continue to pay college tuition because at some point that "infrastructure" helped me land a job. I paid that debt off, and it's behind me.

I don't want to turn this into a political discussion, but this is why I disagree with people suggesting that the U.S. will fix its problems by increasing the taxes on the rich. The rich will leave- the U.S. doesn't offer anything that other countries in the world can't, and at a cheaper cost.
In my experience, of the best ways to get started in design is to replicate other people's designs as perfectly as you can, just to get the hang of designing something good.

For example, the other day I recreated the hat icon here: http://hicksdesign.co.uk. This is mine: http://cl.ly/GYHw.

If you make one thing every day, you'll eventually be pretty good at fleshing out your own ideas.

Resources:
http://pttrns.com; http://teehanlax.com/blog/iphone-4-gui-psd-retina-display; http://dribbble.com
True. But do you consider those extra billions to be money he didn't earn in the United States? In this case, it does seem like the US is going after income that was properly earned in the US, it's just that with startups (and IPOs), you can cleverly renounce your citizenship in between the time the work is done and the money is realized.

I see this as different from someone going over to England, working, opening an account, making investments, and discovering that they owe (or at least have to file) with the US.
I came across this essay by way of a citation in a paper I was reading. I posted it here because I think it's yet another way of explaining why readable code matters.
Build A Chicken Coop Plans
Nothing happens when I click the Sign Up button. Chrome Beta, Win7.
Searching without PageRank
Offline: Ghost Limbs
Richard Stallman: Consummate Pain in the Dupa.
Tried signing up through your Sign Up text box on the website, but when I click the "Sign Up" button to submit my email, nothing happens.
Hey guys - cool idea. I tried entering my email, and there's no success indicator. Click the button, and nothing. Not sure if I just signed up 10 times, or failed to sign up at all :/
The reference to the Redditor that automated his work and took a disproportionate portion of the bonus pool was a strong example of changes to come. Any thoughts on that piece?
9 Ways to Ensure that you DON'T get good help
Related Queries and Spelling Corrections in Search
That's probably also how Yukihiro Matsumoto, the creator of Ruby, got hired by Heroku. Sometimes an interview really isn't necessary and can only do harm.
Alternatively, you can hold Cmd and double click a folder to open in a new window.

In addition, i find adding your editor of choice to the finder toolbar quite handy (open current folder in editor). Here is the applescript i use to open in sublime text - https://gist.github.com/1541764

You can easily modify the above to fit your editor of choice.
Very cool, but this portion is hard to read - and made me an immediate skeptic of the authority behind the product: http://i.imgur.com/1kddf.png
That's a legal right, not a moral right. Strictly business, in other words.
Same here. Good design lives or dies on the details. Not a good sign.
i am using firefox since versino 0.x, now of course, apple brags about a monopoly on tablets and firefox is not there, if gartner/idc predictions are true, tablets and other arm based devices will rule the world in 2015. so it is better for mozilla to target apple and ms at the same time.
My Chrome JS console gives me a 500 error when I try to sign up.
Why do you want citizenship? What do you think it gives you over having the Green Card. When I was going through the process to get my Green Card, my lawyer pretty plainly said that unless I really wanted to vote, getting citizenship gives you nothing but ads many liabilities.

The only real benefit I could have seen for myself was if I lived outside of the US for more than six months of the year from time to time.
That's fair and I agree with you that features need to be weighed against each other. But I really don't think a feature's presence or absence in another operating system should have much weight in a discussion about Linux. Nor would I assume that because another system made a feature tradeoff it's the right tradeoff, either in general or for Linux specifically.
I don't think Apple blocks Firefox on iOS. Other browsers like Opera exist in the App Store, maybe Mozilla just hasn't developed FF for iOS yet? Or am I wrong?
This was more or less Thoreau's argument in his essay Civil Disobedience (1). He concluded that the US was acting immorally in its war in Mexico and therefore he didn't pay his poll tax. They locked him up overnight, and then his aunt paid his tax and he was let out.

Some people conclude that those who collaborate with the federal government are evil and therefore deserving of arbitrarily bad treatment, and that's what gets you terrorists and violent anarchists and so on. Also, one looks in vain for the government which always behaves ethically and can be relied upon to continue doing so which one ought to be supporting instead.

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Disobedience_(Thoreau)
There are places other than California to do things in tech, believe it or not.

Facebook wasn't even founded in California, for example.
Given the question at face value, this is the only answer that makes any sense.

If a flash flood is coming, why would your family be any safer on one side of the river vs the other?
Hell no. There is a point in time when you cross the line between 'money I can spend in my lifetime' and 'money I can't spend in my lifetime'.

There literally is a point where you can't spend the money fast enough (on objects for personal use) to lose it. You can lose it doing dumb things in financial markets or with a business, but if you have $3 billion dollars it is impossible to spend it fast enough to lose it. You can burn $40 million down to see (see: most musicians and athletes), but not $3 billion.

Even earning 2% interest on 3 Billion (i.e. Treasury bonds or something nearly risk-free), you can make $165,000 A DAY.

So buy 3 cars today, and tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that. You just can't do it.

So whats the difference between $2 billion and $3 billion? Not all that much. (And I don't believe he is avoiding a billion dollar tax bill, he still has to pay some level of exit tax).

But the difference between being able to come to the US and not coming to the US is significant. What if he wants to go to a movie premiere in LA, or skiing with friends in Aspen, or going to Warren Buffet's annual investors meeting, or seeing a VC in Silicon Valley? You can shop anywhere, you can vacation anywhere, and you can eat anywhere. But some events only happen in one country or another. Some partnerships only happen in one country or another.

That's obviously assuming the IRS decided he renounced his citizenship for tax reasons and he is banned from the US.
If I got an SMS that my front door was opened in the middle of the day, I'd call my wife to see if she went home early. If she didn't, I'd call my neighbors and/or the cops.

My point on light switches is that (unlike outlets, which could just have a pass-through unit) they require someone actually un-attach and re-attach wires, which many/most home owners aren't super comfortable with. Even if they are, it's a meaningful time investment in comparison.
My experience with mastercard-securecode is that I can just enter gibberish until it fails the check, then my purchase goes through anyway.
I wonder if the negative reaction to this is just a result of scale.

Most people I know do everything they can, both legally and questionably, in order to minimize their tax liability.

(And they actually live in the United States.)
He's picking on a couple of numbers: cost of education and cost of housing.

Both have outpaced inflation. Canada's had the same commodities boom as Australia, Chile and Russia. Housing bubble obviously hadn't hit. yet. ( I hear they balance their budget and don't give away tax deductions for going into debt so maybe they won't have as bad a one).

Other obvious question is : have houses improved over almost 30 years making the question of average priced house then vs average prices house now a bit cloudy.

$6000 for tuition??? Not a bad deal. Canadian government must be subsidizing it. Maybe it was higher subsidies back then.

Bottom line cherry picking your comparisons are hard.

Unemployment was worse then:
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/fredgraph.png?...

But duration was better : http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/fredgraph.png?...
Remember the Unix philosophy? Something about small, well defined components doing a single thing well?

X violates it in every way possible. It has probably found a few ways of violating it that are not possible, and done it anyway. Wayland is a part of moving back to the roots. It will lack at least 95% of all the features X has, because they really, really shouldn't be implemented as a part of a huge, monolithic system that has to run as root. Instead, all those features should be their own libraries/daemons.

As such, Wayland will never understand networks the way X does. Which is good, because it shouldn't. Wayland will never do anything put pass OGL handles between processes, and do the last few stages of compositing, and forward input. It actually has a well defined scope, unlike the amorphous blob that is X.

Nothing stops you from implementing a network transport layer above Wayland. And somebody will. And since there is room for competing implementations, in less than two years, there will be better network display protocols than what X does. When you split huge, monolithic things into smaller parts with clearly defined interfaces between them, the parts themselves become easier to make.

> Other features lacking in Wayland:

- A close button which works

This is trivial. Just don't draw the close button with the application. Personally, I want my "close program" in a static place on the screen, so that's not a problem at all. If you want close buttons above windows, make the window manager put a small box it owns in the upper corner.

- consistent decoration across apps

When is the last time you tried to run apps from different toolkits on the same desktop? Notice that they look the same because it's implemented in the toolkit? X doesn't have consistent decorations across apps, and hasn't had them for a decade.

- efficient cut and paste

Why, oh why should that be part of the display server? Just why? Do you just want to pile all the features in the system into one big ball? And as for efficient, just how often do you cut and paste anyway?

Wayland lacks feature X is not a valid criticism against Wayland. Because that does not mean that a system using Wayland lacks feature X. And the primary feature of Wayland is that it implements as few features as possible.
It may certainly not be their goal, but they should know better.
FF's entire existence is based on a hate of Microsoft, so it only makes sense.

That's why they're taking it up the butt from Google Chrome, Mozilla does not know how to deal with them. Nor do they particularly care that much about it, it seems (other than switching to increasing the version number every 2 months).
It's entirely possible they were trying to force me to defend the position I'd taken. It probably annoyed them that I took their pet interview question (that they expected me to struggle with) and shot it down in front of them. Not that I'm claiming any special skills - probability is a hobby of mine, this problem was a gateway drug into it and I work at the very low/noddy end of quantitative finance - so a certain familiarity with things like these is to be expected. I was more surprised the guy didn't recognise the name when I said it.
Considering that Apple hasn't been legally ruled to be an illegal monopoly and Microsoft has, the faux-righteous-indignation in the headline completely backfires.
I see your point, but if you have 5 sales reps with the authority to green-light extreme features, you're not really a startup anymore. You're officially a full-steam ahead business, or you should be.

It also comes down to the amount of money these guys are paying as well. If you're selling to say, banks, insurers, or some other larger player, you should me bringing enough revenue to justify the added expenditure. If you're selling $200+/month software tools, there had better be more customers for it somewhere. But if you're selling anything less than $100/month, you nailed it. There's a problem.
It is more of an attitude that he has. He either gets out soon or he will get caught sooner or later, the longer you go with attitude like that the more proud you become, the more shortcuts you take and then one day you make one mistake too many
Well this could be because US credit cards are magnetic and UK ones are (much more secure) chip-and-pin cards.
Apple blocks all non-Safari browsers from the store. Opera Mobile doesn't exist in the App store, only Opera Mini which uses a remote server for rendering. Other browsers in the store use iOS webkit and are effectively shells around the Safari rendering engine.
Any idea if the sign up is broken?
I like the site. I decided to sign up. There was problem. After, I hit the sign up button, nothing occurs. I have not received a confirmation email. Am I missing something?
Great post. I forwarded it on to my family and friends in order to give them some awareness of the people who're looking at them from the other side of the internet. Rather than sending more strident "think before clicking" warnings, this post is a great way to get them to think like an attacker so that they can avoid the attacks better.
Uh, clicking "Sign Up" appears to do nothing on Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera.

Worse: it looks terrible in IE (where finally, it yields a 500)
I bet there are designers who read HN who would like to teach developers design in exchange for development tutorials. Is there a HN Academy? Perhaps we should start one.
He did pay taxes on what he earned while there and contributed to your society. The company he co-founded created lots of jobs and helped the economy tremendously. The problem is that even if you aren't a resident being a citizen of the US has negative tax implications that are only seen in 2 or 3 countries in the world. If you plan to live overseas indefinitely its smart to get rid of your US citizenship.
> we live in a world where hand-written assembly is considered a badge of honor

Even in video games where this held true for longer, this is generally no longer the case.

> where people prefer to patch up a 40-year-old dinosaur rather than make something new

Also not true, Generally engineers prefer to make new things, The problem is that, creating new products from scratch to replace old ones ends up almost always being more effort than expected. Failure, is what causes patching the dinosaur the better approach, rather then engineering desires, Netscape is a classic example.

> where people to go ridiculous lengths to avoid using a mouse simply because Unix didn't have mouse support in 1973

I don't know what world you live in, because in the world I live in, computers with mice are much more popular than the alternative.

The fact that none of these systems are in usage is true, you can make excuses for them, but the fact of the matter is that there is a lot of smart people trying, and very little success. There is little evidence to support that this is a superior approach.
Online Marketing Extreme Fail: How's That Working For Ya Exact Target?
I found that:
"We’re experiencing the natural and healthy fluctuations of a market that is deeply starved for technical skills, or at least people who can use their creativity and intuition in unison with technology."

Is something that escapes a lot of people these days and something I agree with and have taken notice of for a while, so it may not be insightful to some but I believe it can help a lot of people to find perspective.
I like the idea of setting challenges, it's certainly more useful to me than the tutorial route.
From mozilla.org:

We have no plans to release the full Firefox browser for iOS. The iOS SDK agreement requires apps to use Apple's own JavaScript engine (or none at all, like Opera Mini which downloads pre-rendered pages from Opera's servers and cannot run JavaScript code in the client). Because of this, we have no supported way to distribute Firefox's rendering and JavaScript engine to iPhone users.
However, you can download Firefox Home for iPhone, an iOS app that uses Firefox Sync to deliver Firefox bookmarks, browsing history, and tabs to your iPhone or iPod Touch.
You are not tested on your ability to remember the golf ball diameter or equation to calculate how many spheres of diameter d can fit in cube c.

You are expected to demonstrate you can roll the concept around in your mind and make progress toward answering the problem. When you do interviews you'll find people who literally can't think to save their own lives. Their minds have atrophied to the point that the only way they can solve a problem is to have their hands held by a competent person and told "now i need you to find the volume of a gold ball", at which point they would have to be instructed how to do even that.

There are some idiots out there who have brains that have gone into coasting mode. No new learning, no new problems, everything they learned up till this point is the only thing they are capable of. You want to weed these people out quick. This question does that wonderfully. The incorrect answer is "ummm. I donno, and i don't know how to start.... Hold me".