skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Waiters are paid a market wage that anticipates tips. Diners and restaurant owners are, along with servers, participants in the market. Just because the market for restaurant service is not organized exactly the way the market for bus drivers is doesn't make it not a market --- in fact, given the public pension situation in most US states, the market for restaurant service is far more efficient than it is for bus drivers.

City bus drivers are surly and, at least in the case of San Francisco, obviously not even properly incentivized to properly stop the bus and pick up passengers. But because you have virtually no role in determining the compensation of a bus driver, the fact that buses are driven poorly has little bearing on how much the drivers make; instead, public sector unions play the largest role in establishing wages.
Wall street executives have extensive connections in the political world. They will almost certainly seek new regulatory rules that will protect their profits, for example by mandating a minimum spread between wholesale/retail prices. Of course, they will lobby in the name of protecting ordinary investors, even though only large institutions capable of participating in the pre-IPO process will benefit.

Wall street will lobby to adopt European-style rules where multiple-class stock structures are illegal. The FB IPO absolutely could not have happened if Mark Zuckerberg didn’t possess super-voting founder stock.
If you use unit tests and Interface Builder, that time should largely disappear.
Don't worry, it's not a real key, just a random one following Mailchimp's key conventions :)
I was just on Subtle Patterns this morning, and I now recognize where Chris grabbed the two background aluminum images!
If, after increasing the wages, tipping is no longer 'required' of customers, the total price of a meal would stay roughly the same. The owner would raise the price of the meal by about 15%, and pass that on to the servers, however tips would no longer be expected.
The syntactical situation I’m talking about is identifier-name. The basic idea is that if the name (in the above example, “Jessie”) is the only thing in the world described by the identifier (“my oldest friend”), use a comma before the name (and after it as well, unless you’ve come to the end of the sentence). If not, don’t use any commas.

I've never heard of this rule before.
I've commented on this before, but I am a soft keyboard hater. I have a hard keyboard on my phone and tablet, and won't buy a device without the option.

I'm incredibly glad that Android doesn't go with the dogmatic 'our choice is the best choice' approach. It means I can use things as I want them, not as Google wants me to.

I can't agree with you enough.
How to set up a simple (and free) email drip campaign
Recently I was thinking maybe software industry is too much obsessive about tool making. I wouldn't mind spending much more time and effort using a bad IDE re-factoring bad code that works good and cures cancer. I don't really care how awesome the static analysis tool I am using, or how awesome the meta-meta-meta-meta-meta-meta-meta-meta programming language I am using if I work on pointless product. Maybe I am wrong and those tools are the only way for real breakthroughs in bioinformatics.

what do you think?
From Business Insider: "In addition, Pao alleges that females in the firms were often left out of dinner meetings held by male counterparts. She says women weren't invited because they would "kill the buzz.""

I imagine the men want to hang out with one another and exclude women so that they can talk freely, without having to worry about 'creating a hostile work environment,' eg, by talking about sex, their marriages, etc. So their options are:

a) invite the women out with them and behave the same, and risk getting sued for a "hostile work environment."

b) exclude the women from these dinners.

c) include them, but refrain from speaking freely, thereby 'killing the buzz.'

d) eliminate the dinners altogether, which may lead to reduced morale, engagement, commitment, etc.

I'm not stating a position here, but identifying that, even if this specific allegation is true, it's not necessarily spiteful, and that each course of action has pros and cons. The same thing happens with say, recovering alcoholics – they’re constantly invited to functions where alcohol is served when they’ve sworn off the stuff, but they can’t sue over their discomfort; nor do they get upset when others enjoy alcohol.

On the other hand, excluding anyone on any basis from associating with higher-ups is bound to hurt their chances of being promoted up the ladder.

The other allegations are more problematic, if true.
Teaching Programming to a Highly Motivated Beginner
Of all these functions you list, why does the customer need to be involved? These could all be abstracted away from the user.

If servers were paid more (and tipping were no longer required), people could still tip on top of that. This still creates your "spectrum of competition."

If the restaurants were trying to encourage up-selling (your wine example), then they can give bonuses correlated to how much wine each waiter sells.

If tipping is mandatory, it doesn't ensure servers are polite and helpful! This is common sense. If tips are considered a guarantee, then the incentive to work harder is removed. Additionally, waiters are often rude when they feel they have been tipped poorly. So, again, tipping only when you've received exceptional service, makes more sense.

As for "transparency," I think the most transparent scheme would be customers are expected to pay the list price. No tacit agreements about tipping or service fees. If it's not a listed charge on the menu, it's not required and it is purely optional. How much more transparent and simple can you get?
It's not a real key, just a random hash to make the example feel more real. Seems we hit the Uncanny Valley of code examples ;)
There's a "learn X the hard way" template linked from the http://learncodethehardway.com homepage (https://gitorious.org/learn-x-the-hard-way/learn-x-the-hard-...), encouraging people to reuse the format to make their own
Not interfering at bad times is part of the quality of interaction that you can tip on. Furthermore, how fast he brings the food out is far more dependent on the kitchen staff than him, so penalizing him for it doesn't make any sense.
"moni", the future of cash management on the fly.
Twi[L]ighTDz help the government of bangladesh to protect thier sites 
Twi[L]ighTDz ( the general of the last legion like Arab forums call him ) helped yesterday the government of Bangladesh to secure and protect their sites from other hackers, and they have publish about him to thank him about what he did for them.
Points 2 and 4 are against the interest of the customer, so why should the customer incentivize the server to perform them?
Probably the same reason that stuff I order internationally and pay import duty on invariably includes the cost of delivery (which can be £50+ for US reasonably-fast shipping) as the 'package value' declaration.

I can't easily imagine a system where this makes sense.
Sorry for this: You really need to have a graphics designer give your site an update. It's so painful to the eyes that I can't even bring myself to sign up.
For the longest time I was wondering why you were saying that the exchange rate from US dollars to Brazilian Reais is 1.2 when its actually closer to 2.0 ...
Facebook's Privacy Policy has been summarized by TOSSOS
I just tried them. They said the best quote was Geico, for $410/six months. I went to Geico's site, and it came to more than $600/six months.

This much discrepancy doesn't bode well.

What I would love to see is a button, so that it'll take me to Geico's site with the exact same quote (all the information filled in).
Sure, that might be good advice, but such absolutism isn't viable as a workplace system. Research into propinquity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propinquity) tells us that romantic relationships are actually quite likely in the workplace. We should develop systems that handle this less-than-ideal(sometimes) behaviors. One of those systems is anti-discrimination law.
I've been wanting to learn Lua for a while and this seems like a good resource.

But it'd be nice to have some Mac-friendly setup instructions. I'm sure I can figure it out for myself but others may find the information useful.
I spent this morning fiddling with elisp to get emacs to do something I wanted. On the one hand, it's incredibly annoying, considering that I don't know anything about elisp. On the other hand, I figured out what I needed, and now it's a little easier.

On the gripping hand, there's zero chance that I'll be trying to replicate that functionality in emacs. Even with the wiki, and it's random ~/Desktop/elisp_notes.ver2.txt feel, isn't that helpful.
My only restaurant experiences outside the US are in Europe, and my experiences are that service is perfectly friendly but much slower.

This doesn't impact me much (nothing wrong with a leisurely dinner), but it is murder on the small business owners of restaurants; below $50USD/table or so, success or failure in food service is all about turnover.
Can't wait to try this, perfect timing for summer.
>So no, I wouldn't call the service "superior"— rather more irritating and intrusive because that's the best way to get a good tip, while pretending to be superior.

This seems to lend more support to the inference that you personally have atypical preferences than it does to the inference that the American tipping system as a whole doesn't result in greater aggregate satisfaction with service.

You acknowledge that most people tip more when their servers do things that you find "irritating and intrusive." To me, this suggests that most people don't find those things irritating and intrusive, and in fact like them, and that's why they're willing to surrender more money when they experience them.
Nine-year-old’s lunch blog shames school into making changes
> But you know what else is pretty good? PyDev

It's not. It's really not. I've heard good things about PyCharm, but the best environment for Python that I have seen so far is Emacs. And Light Table definitely looks like an improvement on that. My only concern with this is the speed. I want this to have the same response time as Emacs or Vim. Then there would be no reason not to use it.
I agree. Treat trolls and snappy shitheads like they didn't do anything offensive or annoying. Reward their good behavior and don't respond to their bad. Most will quickly realize that constructiveness instead of belligerence is getting them the attention and respect they seek. Challenging trollish behavior will just force them to attempt to justify their behavior through argument and attitude.
I'm not interested in encouraging up-selling or table turnover, so you're saying I should not tip?
You seem to have missed this part of the article:

but after breaking things off with him, multiple Kleiner Perkins partners and an outside human resources consultant allegedly ignored Pao’s complaints about repeated harassment and retaliation, and rejected her requests to transfer away from Nazre.

Having once been in a relationship with a person does not open the door to continued harassment after the relationship is over.
An embarrassment of riches
Define "murderers". Depending on how widely you spread that blanket you could cover every government employee in the world. Include "or through inaction" as a modifier to your definition and you and I are just as guilty.
Aw, that is a very boring "access denied" message.
If an establishment has a declared service rate, I'm much less likely to consider tipping in excess of that rate, even for service that would receive more from me elsewhere.

If they've decided what they're worth, who am I to argue?
What product or service would it provide and how would it extract value from the current inefficiencies?

Tipping compensates for a restaurant owner's lack of information about the quality of her staff's effect on her business. If she were certain that a particular server was repeatedly producing highly satisfied customers who were likely to return or recommend the establishment to their friends, it would be in her best interest to pay that server more to retain his services.

The trick would be getting this feedback in a way that saves the customer from a 10-20% markup. Yelp reviews occasionally capture servers' names, but that's not likely to produce a useful sample, even putting aside all the usual problems with social review sites.

One could imagine some sci-fi mood monitoring technology that could tell the owner in real time which patrons were satisfied or agitated, and that data could be correlated to the server, the chef, the size of the bill...

The middle ground would be creating a low-friction, high-reliability scoring mechanism. But it can be hard to get honest feedback when the customer's money isn't on the table.
What is wrong with mentally adding 15% to everything on the menu?
I get the impression that had she been American, the school would have suspended her for her actions.
I agree. In fact, why not go a little further and make everything cost 10% more. Then, the customer knows up front exactly what the meal will cost. However the restaurant wants to split the revenue of the final check is up to the restaurant.
Congrats James and team!
ain't feedback a relic of all 'press-double-hard-to-be-sure' buttons? With handwriting recognition it shouldn't be that hard.
also, http://madebymany.com/blog/wizards-and-haptic-gestures
Servers are entitled to tips, although ironically not necessarily on wine; while it's customary to simply roll wine into your tip, if you're buying expensive bottles it's acceptable to tip less for it.

Tips are part of the way the market for restaurant service is organized. The expectation that you're going to participate in the full market by tipping is universal and an implied part of the US social contract. If this offends you, that's fine: just don't dine in places that expect you to tip. You'll be sending the message to the appropriate target, the business owners, and not to the servers who have no control over the way the market is arranged.
While the fragmentation such as it is really sucks for developers, I do see an upside.

It's a grand experiment with many competing designs, all striving to become the best and biggest (sounds like Osmos ;).

iPhone iterates down a closeted path. Innovation for iphone depends solely on the creativity at Apple. And while that is nothing to sneeze at, if some really left-field neato must-have innovative feature occurs, I think it's going to be found on Android first.
I can actually pay to find out how this (and Google's other Doodles) are made.
This seems like a completely backwards approach to me, but knock yourselves out.
Vim tips about the dot operator and re-usable commands
> I'm not totally sure this is true

Depends on the state you're in, $2.15 is the federal minimum for tipped staff (and the employer is supposed to match standard (non-tipped) federal minimum wage if tips don't bring staff over) but many states have their own labor laws going beyond federal standards. For instance NH has a $3.27 tipped minimum wage (and a federal minimum wage), Washington State has a single minimum wage (no tipped staff exception) of $9.04.
I found out about it from Zed: http://twitter.com/#!/zedshaw/status/204994953699536896
"Wait, so then it wasn't harassment?"

How on earth are they mutually exclusive? A nontrivial number of rape victims become bullied/manipulated into relationships with their assailants. Not sure if you're saying that excuses the crime.
Not every part of the market for restaurant service is arranged for the benefit of the customer. Some of them are arranged to improve the viability of new restaurants. That's obviously an indirect benefit to customers, not a direct one.
> It requires a POSIX emulation environment, like cygwin, which is a second class experience.

I understand Cygwin is a layer of Linux on top of the Windows kernel, but didn't Windows have some POSIX support built in?
Awesome Google Doodle Pays Tribute to Bob Moog, Electronic Music Pioneer
Me too. Look at definition 5 at Merriam Websters [1]. I think that definition must be related to definition 3 something is insignificant if it is approximately in line with expectations.

[1] http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nominal
It really isn't that hard: remove "tipped staff" exceptions to US labor laws and everybody will adjust quite fast.

Many waiters in high end restaurants are paid more than minimum wage, but you're still expected to tip.
That's an interesting take on it. As a counter point my adult daughter lives in Portland and has no car, one of her roommates doesn't even have a license to drive, so its not even a 'temporary' thing in that case. They do however have computers, and while my wife's uncle does not, it is certainly becoming like 'not having a phone' was to my generation.

That being said, how much would you say your claim of "impractical to function" includes some pre-defined notion of "function" ? Not trying to be circular here, there are real people who "function" (which I consider the basics, live, eat, work) without either cars or computers. I do not know if they use public transit to cross long distances or not.
Facebook works in "over 70" languages: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/internationalization/

One estimate says there are 6,910 languages in the world: http://www.science20.com/science_20/blog/rarity_koro_brand_n...

In other words, you're simply wrong that Facebook is running out of people who don't have a Facebook account. I might buy that Facebook is running out of people that don't speak the languages it supports though.
Can You Patent A Steak?
Ben Affleck-Fundraiser4 Elizabeth Warren Draws Big Stars, Big Bucks -
True_religion, Great point. As a matter of fact, PageSynopsis is just part of my larger effort.

There are many different ways we can use, benefit from, others' (other developers') work. Traditionally, using a library and linking it into your own code was the primary way to use other people's work. (There are pros and cons.) There have been many different efforts for the last decade or so to make "reusing" others' software "easier". You may recall things like component-based software development, etc., or more recently, certain architectural designs/paradigms such as SOA, and so forth. Open source software is another way in which you can "reuse" others' work.

I have no problem with one or another of these approaches. I use a lot of open source software and I open sourced a lot of my software before (even before open source was considered an important part of the development community). I was a big believer of component-based software development (which never realized).

This is just a different effort. Do you really want to run hundreds of "small" services yourself? Just hypothetically, if you can find (virtually) every functionality you need as a Web Service, do you still need to code it into your own program or run it as your own service? This is a rhetorical question, but I see this as a future. I believer that having a uniform interface (e.g., REST based WS) can make this dream a reality. REST-based Web services have been getting popular for the last several years with wide "install bases". I think we are on a good track (so far).

More to the point, the program part of the PageSynopsis is not that much. Any competent developer can probably implement this in a day (or, for even less) including all extra functionalities. But, why spend a day? And, spend more hours maintaining it, when/if the service were already available? (Also, that's hundred days for hundred developers.) I believe that the real benefit of PageSynopsis (and, other services I'm currently developing) is that, if you choose so, you do not have to worry about anything other than just the "interface". I developed this service almost a year ago, and amazingly it just works for me to this date. (Google does heavy lifting for me.) No more extra jar files I have to worry about. No maven, ant scripts to maintain.

I hope you see that this can be useful.
The problem with Android fragmentation is the impossibility of most developers to reproduce device-specific bugs. Without physical access to one problematic device it could be very hard or even impossible to debug bugs. There's only so much you can do with the emulator. And most developers don't have access to more than very few devices. If you're not a company, it's hard to invest in all sorts of devices.
I can't read this. If there's a vulnerability in the sequence of events described at the beginning, it needs to be called out more explicitly. If I wanted a mystery, I'd pick up some Agatha Christie.
You're assuming my comments and submissions are good on an absolute scale. I'm not. A lot of well timed snark helped me get to 500. Back when comment scores were visible, a well considered snarky comment on a rising new submission would tend to collect upvotes, and I would seek them out. That's much harder to do these days because snark is much less popular and thus more frequently downvoted.

My point wasn't that it is trivial, but rather that 200 points or 500 points or 1000 points is obtainable and that the better one's contributions are, the more easily realistic karma goals may be met. Three hundred points seemed like a lot at the time, for a short time, then it was just another number - and I've probably lost that many points via downvotes.
Isn't this exactly what "always online" it supposed to prevent?
Certainly it introduces a new complexity to the case, no? I'd go as far to say significantly more complexity, especially if their break up was anything like the average break up today and the ensuing drama--where depending on the time of the day, each partner could be found guilty of harassment if they chose to pursue.

On the larger topic of sexual harassment, I often wonder if there should be a word for sexual harassment just as we have one for rape(where stop means stop). With sexual harassment, seemingly normal conversation could be construed as criminal.

Alas, don't shit where you eat.
I was in NZ in Nov. 2009 when they launched their first "rocket." it was all over the news and papers. A "big" deal. So the day finally arrives and I'm watching the recap and I see the rocket. It was maybe 20 ft tall if that, launched from some sheep grazing area with spectators hanging out here and there. Thoroughly unimpressive. Don't get me wrong NZ is a great place but I just don't see them in the space race.

There is no way something like this is happening in NZ.
Exactly what is transparent about the "list price" on the menu? It can mean anything at all. It may reflect the cost of ingredients or track the laboriousness of prepping a dish, or it may instead track the popularity of the offering and have nothing whatsoever to do with expenses; in some cases, the list price on the menu may not even fully account for expenses and instead function as a loss leader.

The tip is the only transparent part about the price of a meal; in addition to its obvious surface meaning, understanding the subtext behind tipping also gives you an idea of what the restaurant wants you to do (eat faster, buy wine, &c) and adjust your behavior accordingly (towards or against the restaurant's interests).
What sort of data are you looking for if I was to email the prices. My old insurance is through progressive and leaky was around $350 more than what I am currently paying. While geico was much closer. Is there a form? Or just use what I got on the other sites and paste them accordingly to to leaky's estimated prices?
Ohhhhhhh, gotcha.