skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Buckeye Air Conditioning
Buckeye Air Conditioning: Afr-Dynamics Air Conditioning Contractors Provide Professional AC Repair & Installation Service in Fountain Hills, Gilbert Park, Queen Creek, Scottsdale, Chandler, Paradise Valley, Peoria, Tempe, Cave Creek and Glendale Arizona.
One thing that really bothers me is how much universities are allowed to raise their tuition on existing students. I started college paying about $6k a year in tuition my freshmen year. My senior year cost me $11k. The difference in tuition raises overall probably increased my total loan amount by ~$10k by the time I graduated. This is huge and there is no way students can take this into account when applying for college. I don't know why there are no laws protecting students by requiring fixed tuition rates for students? Universities are notoriously bad for raising rates by thousands a year, which students must take into debt or leave.

*Edit - Ok, the tuition when I first went to college was $20k a year. I had a $14k scholarship, so it was a manageable $6k a year. Now the tuition, 5 years later, is over $27k. That is a 35% increase at about 7% a year. Pretty ridiculous if you ask me, especially for a state school which should be affordable.
Ask HN: Freelancing projects
Hi,

I'm a self taught programmer (C++ and Python on Windows and Linux) where can I find some online freelancing work ?

(I've tried vWorker but the prices are from low to insignifiant for most projects.)
I've actually got a ton of ideas for inventions but I have no idea how to break into the business. Any advice? Any books I could read?
But what can I buy with my internet points?
I can only speak as to Apple as of 2004-2009, when I was there. It was intensely pragmatic, much more so than other companies of comparable size I'd been at. The focus was on shipping, and whatever it took to get product out the door. Once projects were no longer directly in the gaze of Barad-dûr, however, politics set in and things ossified rapidly.

Day to day in my world was a lot of C, Objective-C and C++, with Python for rapid prototyping and glue code; Java formed the backbone of the store infrastructure, but there was plenty of other stuff going on. Fairly standard architecture (huge Oracle DB, loads of web servers). Teams tended to be undermanned, so there was constant tension between getting stuff done and standardization; much of the time, the wrong balance was struck, meaning that people couldn't easily switch roles, but still had a lot of bureaucratic scutwork to manage. Things were improving when I left, and I imagine that they have continued to do so.
Stripe gets a lot of love here on HN, and it's almost universally praised as having no faults and being better than Paypal in every single way. And yet I never see anyone discuss the experience for users. I actually really like the ability to use Paypal on a site to pay without entering my credit card information to yet another source of potential hacking. If a site that allowed Paypal payments moved to Stripe, I would actually find that frustrating and inconvenient. Developers seem quick to praise Stripe as perfect because it does seem to be close to that in the facet they deal with (on the development and merchant end); I understand that developers save a ton more time by switching to Stripe than users lose by having to enter their payment information, but your users really shouldn't have to be concerned with that detail. That being said, I do really like Stripe, but I worry that they'll grow complacent and never expand into the user-facing features because the huge success they've had in other aspects means no one is really pushing them to grow into those areas.
Although the trend of always-in-classes and class-per-file didn't necessarily start w/ Zend (was prevalent in many PEAR libs), the fact that they do it makes it fairly standard now.

Having [unfortunately] worked in really large PHP codebases both with an without this level of organization, I can say it is just too painful to maintain unless you can quickly find the source location of a class by knowing its name. Same for functions...globally scoped functions can be difficult to find.

It's probably just as much of a lack of tooling/IDE support as anything, but I welcome the "functophobia".
Check-In On Facebook With Facial Recognition
I don't normally quote scripture around strangers, but:

"What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun."

Ecclesiastes 1:9
> Do you have any other good reading material for someone like myself?

I'm afraid I don't personally (I'm into abstract and theoretical math, which I'm guessing is not your cup of tea). But I should dig something up before I teach the subject again, so I would be as interested to read replies as you.

Gilbert Strang is an applied mathematician and also the author of a popular linear algebra book; I would guess that his books might interest you. But this is speculation, I haven't read any of them myself.
Google, p-p-please make it available for iOS. Come on, make love, not war.
Less appearance than quality of implementation: I tried ST2 for a couple months but the random hangs got old (e.g. the file / symbol search would often hang for noticeable periods of time).
If I knew what your code was trying to do I might be able to write to it directly. But these guidelines would suggest that if you are going to call methods on the id object, it's best, if possible, to put the methods in the id object itself.
> "It's not a tiny demographic, it's double digit percentages of the population, at least 1 out of 5 people and maybe more."

This is an extraordinary claim that demands substantiation. Everything we know about US labor statistics suggests that the long-term unemployed are a tiny portion of the population (6.16 million as of last month, out of a labor force of 239 million). That's roughly 2.5% of the work force, or 1.98% of the total overall population.

Note also that people who receive unemployment benefits (including food stamps) are required to be part of the work force (i.e., they are not lumped into the substantial out-of-work-force bucket).

There's also the question of just how much these benefits are, and why anyone of sound mind would voluntarily, permanently go on them (even if they could sit on these benefits in perpetuity, which they can't): a single person is only eligible for $200 in food stamp benefits a month, scaling down to $668 for a family of 4. How many people who are on this benefit do you think are there voluntarily, because they're too lazy and $200 a month is such a strong incentive to stay out of work?

There are so many crazy, absurd leaps in logic required for a person to conclude that a large portion of the population is too lazy to get work and just leeching off society. The reality is a hell of a lot more reasonable.

> "We need to enable and reward the creators and punish the consumers."

This is counterproductive and absurd. We don't need to punish the "consumers", we need to help them become creators. This is my problem with libertarian types - you assume the world's problems can be solved by puritanical moralizing, and that people need to be beaten, not led, to productive behavior.

Like I've said elsewhere in this thread, this is moralizing in the guise of economics. Your punitive measures will have no positive effect besides making you feel better about having wrought vengeance upon those you perceive to have wronged creators. There is no rational basis for believing that punitive measures will make net-negative-value people into net-positive-values.

So yeah, if we did things your way the world will go to hell in a hand basket. But that's okay, so long as "justice" is served, and those icky no-goodniks are properly flogged for their icky laziness.
"Yes, it's frustrating. Yes, it takes 10 times as long as just hacking it out."

Yes, unless you are immortal, life is too short for this kind of crap.

Multiply the "takes 10 times as long" with an arbitrary n problems, and you soon end up wasting years on things that should take a few days.

One way to make "the best way to have a future is to be part of a team that values progress over politics, ideas over territory, and initiative over decorum." actionable is to change your job if you are working in a company where you have to jump through political hoops and "take 10 times as long" to get engineering improvements done.

Imo, being able to play political games is a valuable skill, to be used on the very rare occasion such game playing is really necessary. But you shouldn't have to do it every other day, especially on engineering problems. In this case, it might be better to just change your job, unless you have very very strong reasons for staying on.

EDIT: Not taking a position on the OP's situation or actions, fwiw. Just saying if it takes 10x time to make changes because of politics, might be time to move on.
it's wifi only, so it would be useless anyway in most travels.
That is creepy, not awesome.
> Also, someone mentioned "garbage" being underground citizen. I think that's wrong.

It's true. Roosevelt Island has an underground network of "trash-sucking tubes".

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/08/trash-sucking-island/...
I attended the University of Chicago, paid for it myself, and took on 100% of the debt.

I'm still paying it off, but it was worth it! My life is without question 100x better for it.

Your point is fair, though: with few exceptions student's expectations of how transformative their college education to be absolutely eclipses the reality.
But if you "overpay" all the investors then it doesn't look like a signing bonus.
Have been playing around with this feature and notice that there is a clear boundary when it comes to performance. It comes down to the size of the letters. If you scan a lot of letters it does recognize the words, but the letter recognition turns out to be poor. As soon as you zoom in a bit the performance will improve drastically.

All in all, neat feature :)
Venezia - vaporetto - gondola - impresive daily traffic
Venezia - vaporetto - gondola - impresive daily traffic
Right, someone who believes Javascript is a terrible language compared to Ruby with no justification of that belief is the person who can debunk the "Node.js Gish Gallop." This article teeters on producing the same logical fallacies that it calls out self-righteously without actually adding to the conversation of WHEN to choose one over the other. There are no silver bullets, no panacea for web frameworks and servers. Claiming "well my web server is better than yours" isn't an argument nor does it debunk anything; it's just pandering for fanboyism.
remember all those ios-first apps android users had to wait months for? karma is a bitch. :)
They're water tunnels. They deliver water from the Reservoir to the New York Metro Area. They're so deep underground for two reasons (1) imagine you have to build a tunnel that should last for the next 150 years – it needs to survive nuclear war, new technologies you've never heard of, meteor strikes – any risk of contamination is unacceptable and (2) more importantly, because the terminals of the tunnels are so low with respect to the reservoir, 95% of the pressure needed to deliver water from the reservoir to all of the buildings in New York is provided by gravity. Only 5% of the pressure comes from pumps. Which is pretty amazing.
This article is really very wrong about conventional solar cell manufacture - especially the "Almost every solar panel..." paragraph. Here's a decent resource on standard manufacturing technology: http://pveducation.org/pvcdrom
Use Instagram with webcam
Once you get used to using vim properly, you'll find that you almost never need to move one character left or right (h or l). It is actually a nice setup that your index and middle fingers are responsible for moving up and down in the file since that is what you will be doing most often. There are much better ways of moving horizontally in the file than one character at a time. You can use w and b to move forward and backward via words which is much more efficient than single characters. You can also use f and F to 'find' a character forward or backward. I typically use that to navigate between method arguments or parentheses. So you can type f, and it will move your cursor FORWARD to the comma. Then just press ; to repeat the search (and go to the next comma). If you want to go backward, do F, and it works the same way, only backward. I'm sure there are better examples but the point is, if you are using h or l often, then there are probably better ways to navigate. Also, this sounds kind of confusing at first (having to remember fFwb; etc), but just learn one at a time and you won't have to think about it after a while. Soon you will find yourself typing an email and accidentally ending up with jjjjjj in random places... :)
This is a great tool! Along with Kicktraq (http://kicktraq.com/) and Kicksaver (http://www.kicksaver.net/ - I made this a while ago), there are now third party projects like this for every stage of a potential campaign, from the planning stages to last-minute rescues.

We're all lucky that Kickstarter's pages are so pleasant to scrape.
It might be convenient, but patio11's anecdata suggests using Stripe can dramatically outperform Paypal or Google Checkout: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/08/06/stripe-and-ab-testing-ma... (of course this will vary depending on the site)
The problem is, I have worked several places where the problem wasn't that nobody understood the problem, but that nobody would solve it. Either because they were busy with other things or because egos were on the line or some other intraoffice drama. Which puts someone in the situation described here in a predicament. He can tell people, who already know what is wrong, how to fix it (in nice ways), and watch as nothing happens. Or he can just do it. I fall into the latter. Just Do It. If your managers are childish enough to use it to attack each other, that is there problem. But I'm at work to make a good product and that is what I will do. I won't gloat about it. I won't call people stupid for implementing it that way or not solving it earlier. It will simply be a ticket I work on that goes out in the next release.
Esoteric: Intended for or likely to be understood by only a small number of people with a specialized knowledge or interest.

I think the body of knowledge regarding vi(m) hotkeys would fall under this definition when considering the entire world. I mean no ill will by the description.
Won't this impact YouTube dramatically?
> If you do need to pass in additional information, refactor and change the primitive to an object when you really need to, not because you might need it at some point in the future (and the chances are you won't).

That's a lot harder than doing it right to begin with, and requires significant API-breaking changes across the code base.

Due to the cost of doing so, it's far more likely that the code will be hacked poorly to incorporate the necessary addition, as the substantial changes now required would be much too costly.

YAGNI is misused to justify being lazy. You're always going to need maintenance (except when you have the rare piece of throw-away code), certain approaches are always going to incur high costs to maintenance and future development. YAGNI doesn't apply when past experience provides sufficient evidence that you do need it, and you need it now, when you're writing the code.
I wonder if this has anything to do with Google wanting to server more and more paid content through Google Play and Youtube. Will Google be on our side or their side when the next SOPA bill appears?
Another common remaping is <ESC> -> jj:

" remap Esc to jj in Insert mode:
inoremap jj <ESC>

I've been using this for a while, much better.
Avatars.io serving 500K avatars a day, 10MM served in first month
Indeed, the launch date is there, but it's only accurate to the day. To figure out the actual launch date+time, you need to look at the deadline and subtract the project duration, both of which can be found in this element on each page:

<span data-duration="X" data-end_time="Y" id="project_duration_data">
Just add a text area and let people share some html. Now that would be cool!

Change some HTML in that text area and refresh automatically in all listeners.

That would be an interesting toy to play for a while.
Yeah, sometimes I think I might have had a better experience there, but then I think "I'd probably be more than 150k in debt" and the feeling passes. Plus I'm doing fine without having gone there. It's definitely a great school.

I can't imagine what it's like to have that debt hanging over your head. It seems like it'd only be worth it if you get hired out of school for something really amazing or with a ridiculously high starting salary.
Disclaimer: I am not a physicist, and most of this is from memory relating to DIY experiments ~2 years ago.

* Copper oxide panels are not new.

* They are much less efficient than silicon panels.

* Cu2O is much more expensive than silicon.
What happens if you have two pages, each listing the takedown notices applied to the other? Seed the pages periodically and wouldn't you get a pretty good measure of the popularity of your taken-down links by ranking them based on how often they are taken down?
Hey. I am the other cofounder. You are right, we should encourage more designers to link their works with actual applications. There is an option and some have, but we need to do that with more apps.

Like Jenn said, we'd love to help when you're ready to do an icon. Let us know and thanks for the comment.
Do you feel better when disconnected from Internet?
A voice of sanity at the FTC
It is a valid difference, and politicians are aware of it.

Organic giving from individuals who work in the educational sector doesn't come hand in hand with organized, well financed political pressure in the same way that a lobbying effort/targeted giving coming directly from a specific industry does.
Ask HN: Can I have a 'fake' business name for customer credit report?
I'm thinking about launching a gift buying service for men to help them pick out gifts for their wives and automatically sending it to them before significant dates. The problem I'm facing is that many women handle their husband's credit cards. Seeing my company name on their credit statement would definitely get these men in some trouble and defeat my sales.

Is it legal and even possible to have a different name appear on their credit card statement? I remember reading a few years ago about porn companies doing something like this but I can't find any information on it.

Thank you for your help.
I completely agree with you.

I've followed many different coding standards, none of which perfectly match what I use for my own code.

Even if the coding standard was different in every way from what I like, it's still better than me doing it the way I want to and everyone else doing it their own way.

Coding standards are not about choosing the "one true way", but about consistency, just like you say. Whenever I see anything in a codebase that breaks any convention (whether a programming language one, an idiomatic one, a naming convention or anything), I assume it breaks it _for a reason_, and that I need to investigate why.

Having a consistent style also increases the usefulness of automated tools and search/replace.
This is amazing! I had no idea that such a thing existed.
According to my numbers, since mid-June 2012, the overall success rate for all projects in all categories has been ~72%. Much higher than Kickstarter's all-time success rate of ~44%. Successes seem to be increasing.
My point is it is possible to write a similarly slanted article about the west pointing out only the negative things (and they are legion). The author has had some very bad experiences in China this has colored his views and is the basis for the many sweeping generalizations and unjustified statements in the article such as 'the world does not want to be led by China in the 21st century' or 'The domestic Chinese lower education system does not educate'. Also the feelings he describes of wanting to be part of a community but never quite fitting is not unfamiliar to many who live in the west. That said, the US is still miles ahead of China (and most of Europe) in guaranteeing equal rights and protection regardless of race or origin.
Modern editors generally don't require you to hit space four times. There's a "convert tabs to spaces" option so you can hit the tab key, and most of them do auto-indenting anyway.
Do any other engineering fields suffer from these broad-stroke categorizations? Do Mechanical Engineers have additive VS subtractive manufacturing debates? Or do they just shut up and solve problems?
How about we mine mars to make solar panels from Iron Oxide? Or bring machines to mars that will build solar panels?

Then we could have an entire electrical power source for human habitation or machine experiments.
Engineers always present this as a false dichotomy. You can work with other people (and their code) without pissing them off. "Stay the hell out of other peoples code" is no better than "Act with impunity". Thankfully there is a middle ground. It's called talking to people.

People who are the most passionate about programming are the same people who tend to identify with the code their code! If you say the code is wrong, you are also saying they are wrong. You can mitigate this type of territorial response by convincing them to disassociate their identity from a code block. We aren't a group of rockstars writing hit after hit, we are a team of engineers iterating through possibilities and routing around roadblocks.

For dealing with intergroup rivalry you're better off going to the group responsible for that area first to show your results. Get their support before going up the ladder. Let them be part of the success. Otherwise you paint them into a corner when the big boss comes down and says "Why are other teams fixing your problems!?" Now they must attack your solution to justify themselves.

edit: I'm seeing a lot of other threads say "Just don't work at places where this is an issue." When you find robot planet let me know, because this is an issue everywhere. With your customers if not with your co-workers.
Any chance of kickstarter releasing a dump of this so we can all have a play? Even at just a month of data it'll stop us all scraping the hell out of the site.
So when I google an artist/song, someone's upload on youtube would not be in the first three results?
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-06-linear-algebra-...

I agree, it's very useful. He gives nice explanations of some of the decompositions and why they're useful.
I found the picture humorous, reminded me of so many post holocaust games, unfortunately it also reminded me of some cities I passed through that border the Ohio river.
Network effects and name recognition can work against it for a time.

I'm thinking currently about the demise of Kodak, and similar situations where where a dominant player is displaced by new technology. Had Kodak pursued digital early and aggressively things would be different now. I bet politics didn't allow that outcome.
Google Updates it's Search Algorithm to Punish Sites With Too Many DMCA Notices
For the record I first got a link to this page in 1997 or 1998.

Its a timeless page.
It's an incomplete list. TKBM has only been tracking projects that ended since mid-June 2012.

According to my numbers, since mid-June 2012, the overall success rate for all projects in all categories has been ~72%. Much higher than Kickstarter's all-time success rate of ~44%.
Kitty Cam Shows Not All Cats Are Killers
> then we have missed the mark

I don't agree. I have offered an open text, including free supplemental materials, for 15 years (so I think I have some credibility). But other people want to do other things. Free is Free for the authors as well as for the readers. If someone wants to have a go at giving away a text and selling the slides for classroom use then I wish them luck. If students and teachers find that useful then good.