skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He might be thinking of Ray Charles's probability of killing a Jew over any number of lifetimes. If the Ray Charles life simulation is run enough times it will eventually contain an event where he kills a Jew if the chance is non-zero. So statistically he has killed more Jews than happy marriages have ended in divorce.
I'm a student pilot, and based on conversations I've had with my CFI (certified flight instructor), this article seems accurate.

Basically, it's really expensive to learn to fly. Think $112/hr for an extremely basic 2 seat plane, and around $65/hr for the instructor, at least in the NY area. Even assuming you do all the bookwork on your own without an instructor, that's around $7-8k for a private license(40-50h). After that, you need to get an instrument rating(40h), for around the same price.

Then, at 250 hours, you can get a commercial rating which lets you fly people around for money (you can't solicit passengers though). At this point, pilots usually go for a CFI rating, which lets them teach students. Most flight schools are happy to have the cheap labor, and the pilots want to get more hours so they can apply to regional airlines. The pay is pretty horrible (maybe $20-$30/h when you start), but it's the only way to build hours for most pilots. After doing this for a while (could be up to 600-700h), pilots either manage to find a gig flying businesspeople around on a corporate jet, an odd job like ferrying cargo around on a small plane, or go to a regional carrier. Regional carriers pay even worse than being a CFI, around $20k-$30k starting, but the tradeoff is that you're building time in a "serious" turboprop/jet plane, which the big airlines require before even hiring you as a first officer.

You have to take on a massive amount of debt to become a pilot, then get paid terrible wages once you start. Even when you hit the top and become a captain at a major airline you're still only making around $100-$110k, and very few pilots achieve this.

Raising the number of hours required to be hired as a pilot will cause less people to become pilots. It means CFIs will be instructors for much longer, making it harder for newly minted CFIs to find a job to pay off their debt.

The fundamental problem is that avgas costs a ton (up to $6-$7 in NY). If it was free, or at least much cheaper, to fly a plane, the hour requirements would not be a problem - pilots could just train for longer. I think the solution is going to be electric trainer planes. I see the most promising company in this area as beyond aviation (http://www.beyond-aviation.com/). They're developing an electric version of the Cessna 172, the most popular plane produced to date(43k+). Their president was the COO at Cessna for 6 years, so I'm really hopeful they can achieve their goal.

An electric plane has three major benefits: no avgas needed, air inlets can be reduced significantly (no oxygen-hogging combustion reactions) for reduced drag, and significantly reduced TBO. Background: on piston engine planes, a mechanic needs to disassemble the engine every ~2k hours of flying, replace bad parts, and reassemble it. This costs around $15k, contributing a nontrivial amount of money to cost of flying. On an electric planes, the engines last much longer (think 20k-30k hours), so this cost all but vanishes.
Small UX nitpick:
The fact that the 'recent uploads' had a regular text mouseover image led to me wondering for a couple of seconds whether something should happen if I click. Did it anyway, I've been jamming for a while.
It wonder if how the HN demographic maps to genre popularity.
I seem to remember that specific Swing L&F (look & feel) is at least partially generated code using an in-house tool.

It also implements a specific interface Painter<JComponent> which explains the Why and the javadoc is copied from its parent class.

So it is not as much an example of beauraucracy as of code-generation.
Time traveling in Vim
If you're looking for a mature alternative, there's homesick @ https://github.com/technicalpickles/homesick. I use it everywhere and it's great. Unfortunately, it does have a ruby dependency.
Ah, it's been a few years since I logged into Facebook. If a like is analogous to a twitter follow, then this is a lot less interesting than how I was interpreting it.
Sorry, ya, the tower used to be less niche than it is, the world has moved on mostly to laptops and the desktop market is stagnant. Even Apple sees no future there.

The iPod V1 was a great product back then, unless you are reinforcing Cowboy Neal's position that it was lame compared to a Nomad? Also, Apple spends very little money on marketing, and that was especially true back then. Apple's recipe for success has been to package the right technology at the right time into a package that is very well designed. Those who attribute their success to fanboyism or marketing are just deluding themselves with bias.
In Which I'm Not Alone
That depends on what is meant by "holding his own with seasoned Javascript & Ruby devs". In my experience, the only thing that makes you a good programmer is building things. What has this guy built? A handful of project euler solutions? That doesn't make you a valuable programmer. There is no free lunch. There is no magic bullet.
Does this include money donated during the primaries? If so, it could be a huge difference between money spent in the general election vs general election+primaries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resisting_arrest

The courts in the United States of America regard resisting arrest as a separate charge or crime in addition to other alleged crimes committed by the arrested person. It is possible (and has happened) to be charged, tried and convicted on this charge alone.
While I agree with your points, rejecting a company because it makes that demand isn't quite right. If (hypothetically) you have 2 equally good programmers, and the only difference between them is one has a degree and the other one doesn't, then its natural to choose the former
While it may take four to six weeks to find out if somebody is right, it rarely takes more than a minute to know somebody is wrong. Hirers could certainly let the vast majority of applicants know that they shouldn't bother spending more time.
So the common notion seems to be that these money makes the parties owe somthing to the donors. But if that's the case, why aren't we seeing anyone on this list donating to both parties? I'm asking sincererly, as that's what I would do if I had $50M and needed a law passed. Better buy a guaranteed -- though maybe slightly moderated -- law change for $25M from both parties than a risk of losing it all with no result.
This seems to be similar to the concept of wu wei ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_wei )
This is basically how I live my life. Throughout high school and freshman year college (I'm 19) I was always so concerned about things that were utterly unimportant in hindsight, like not offending people, making friends, not being a shut-in (I've always been an introvert). I've found that simply not caring about stuff has made the biggest improvement in my life satisfaction.

For example, I tried to make friends in the first week of college by talking to random people. I joined some clubs and went to events. This completely failed, I didn't click with anyone; these kinds of things didn't fit with my personality. All of my current friends I've met serendipitously. And, because I stopped caring so much about it, I think I have much better social skills now.

Kind of fits with the Daoist philosophy of wu wei: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_wei

EDIT: hah, looks like someone else made the same connection :D
The Eiffel Tower is in France, not Canada. French copyright laws don't apply in Canada. Afaik, we don't have any provision in Canadian copyright law that allows the subject of a photo to claim ownership over that photo, regardless of whether that photo is a person or a copyrighted work.
From a legal framework point of view, the US is there already. It probably isn't as blatantly abused. Make no mistake, if you attract the ire of an aggressive prosecutor, you can and will be charged with some sort of serious crime.

http://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp/...

Another angle in the US is are situations where you cannot be charged with a crime, but your property can. For example, if you are travelling on an airplane with a "large" quantity of cash, the authorities can (and have) essentially "arrest" your cash via asset forfeiture. You have rights, but your property does not.
Yeah, sounds great, but not exactly true.

There are therapists out there who push their clients to blame everything on their marriage and get divorce. Some marriages that were working perfectly well until the poor therapy ended in divorce, to the later regret (at different times) of both members.

So at the moment of divorce there was unhappiness. But what marriage does not have periods of stress? But the marriage itself had been working, and would have likely continued to work were it not for the crappy therapy.

That said, this is an edge case.

Back to the point. CK is wrong in a second surprise. What comes as news in many divorces is that there were problems. People tend not to share what is happening inside of marriages. So the existence of problems is itself news.
Linux Gaming, an Overview: What You Can And Can’t Expect
Almost everything written here is incorrect.

First of all, Bayes predates Gauss. It is inaccurate to suggest frequentist statistics predate Bayesian statistics.

Second, neither is a special case of the other.

Third, neither Bayesian methods nor frequentist methods are inherently "more flexible."

Bayesian statistics set up a model and infer model parameters by applying Bayes' rule to the data. Bayes' rule is an indisputable rule of probability.

For any model parameter b, the result of applying a bayesian model is a probability distribution for b given the available data. Criticisms of bayesian models typically center around the fact that you must use a "prior distribution" indicating the modeler's beliefs about b before seeing the data. Bayesian statisticians have a number of responses to this criticism (that some people find compelling, and others do not).

Frequentist methods build models that are justified by their properties in repeated resampling. For instance, a frequentist method is "unbiased" if, given multiple hypothetical samples, it would on average produce the correct parameter b. Frequentist hypothesis testing reports the probability of observing specified data given some assumption about b.

A standard criticism of frequentist methods is that a modeler wants a probability distribution for an unknown parameter given the known data... rather than knowing the probability of observing the realized data given some assumption about the parameter.
BO did work very hard for the money, especially considering he was an incumbent president. I remember hearing some things about how this was the first time an incumbent president was outraised by his opponent. Incumbents have a staggering advantage in US politics. Looking forward to seeing how the final fundraising figures come out. (Google is not yielding immediate results for this question yet.)

On the tech side, the Obama campaign was pure genius. For example, they figured out that $7 was the sweet spot when they sent an email to my friend asking for money. And of course it was a seamless, one-click give, technologically perfect with no friction involved. He would just think "ok" and click the give button. He was flabbergasted on election day when they sent him a receipt saying he had given $399 over the course of the campaign.

And yes, it is normal for individuals and corporations to give more individually to Republicans. The economic case is more direct. If electing a Republican will lower your tax bill (or prevent it from rising) by $100 million dollars, then giving $1 million dollars can make a lot of business sense.

It's much harder to make the case that investing in things like education and healthcare will result in much larger economic growth for the country overall, and thus produce bigger gains for all in the long term. (Full disclosure: I think this is true.)
How to get a lot of followers on Twitter
I agree with what you're saying, but does this approach scale? What I mean is: (say) Google gets millions of applicants a day. If all of them start calling up Google devs wouldn't that waste a lot of their time? (I guess a reason why this works is that not many people are doing it)

On a related note, I've found that I get a lot of benefit just by calling and speaking to a real person. For instance, an airline representative once saved me nearly $800 on an offer that was not mentioned anywhere else
They never mentioned using CMS, and CMS isn't the default GC, so I assume they weren't using it.

CMS actually isn't the highest throughput GC, it's there for low-pause systems where there are extra cores available to perform GC in the background.
One of the big features of fresh is that it is able to merge configuration from multiple sources into a single output file. This applies to both shell (aliases) as well as configuration files.

For example, @twe4ked uses my tmux configuration but also has his own additions using the following:

fresh jasoncodes/dotfiles tmux.conf --file
fresh config/tmux.conf --file
If autoloading namespaces or namespaced functions was possible then static classes wouldn't be needed and things like this would be commonplace:

\Requests\get('http://google.com');
Using private internal classes or something. Even with namespaces it'd look okay, so you'd go InternalFrame.TitlePane.MaximizeButton.Painter() or something (I've forgotten Java tbh) and that actually looks okay to most programmers IMO.

I'm guessing this shouldn't even be exposed to anything outside of an InternalFrame anyway.
You may want to reduce the speed of the slider on the homepage. It moves too fast to be able to read the text on the slide comfortably.

Alternately, if you want to keep the current speed, you could reduce the text to just a heading.
IOS 6.0.1 update brings iPhone 4S battery issues
Well, I suppose that after a decade or more of turning civil aviation into a awful career this was bound to happen. Airlines have successfully stripped pensions and frozen pilot wages for years.

At this point, a regional jet pilot is making less than a Starbucks barista or Apple Store salesman. ( http://blogs.wsj.com/middleseat/2009/06/16/pilot-pay-want-to... )
This is how Visual Basic 6 and below worked; True was -1 and False was 0, so that bitwise and logical operators could be unified.
Specifically, I read an internal eye-tracking study for a major retailer that found that consumers don't look up when searching for something specific, so all the over-head signage the retailer had just purchased was essentially useless.
The one that I hate more than any other is the "You look great; I'll contact you in a couple days" to then never hear from them again, even after you try multiple follow-ups.

My favorite was the one where I got flown out to the Bay Area for an interview at Apigee[1]. They dropped the ball by not having everybody there to interview me, meaning they couldn't get all the information about me they would have liked[2]. When I left, it was all roses (including a said follow-up comment like above), and then complete and total silence. I get you may not think I'm right for the job, but flying somewhere takes a lot of my own, personal time.

1. I'm naming names for two reasons: one, I, like the author, think it's deplorable. More importantly, if you are going to take a potential employee's time without the courtesy of a simple reply to one of multiple questioning emails by saying, at least, "No, thanks", others deserve to know what to expect as well. I couldn't even get a response on how to get reimbursed for incidental travel costs without tracking down somebody outside of HR.

2. I don't think this had any impact on their decision to ignore me. It didn't even concern me, but, taken with the other events, it points to a lack of respect for candidates.
The point that the OP seems to understand, but doesn't explicitly state, is that no life situation, however apparently solid, lasts forever. The first section has a distinct tone of numbed acceptance, the voice of someone who has just experienced absolute horror, and who's view of the world is far more balanced than an ordinary persons. Most of us live under the delusion that we are safe, that our situation is safe, and that tomorrow will be better. This is comforting, and probably useful as a coping mechanism. But it's not true. No matter how healthy you are, you could get sick. No matter how solid your job, you could lose it. No matter how much you love your wife or you think she loves you, she could have an affair and ask for a divorce.

When pain stacks upon pain stacks upon pain until you can't take it and then it keeps going even more for an unimaginable time, something burns away in you, leaving you a kind of stark clarity about the world and yourself. It is a realistic view, but not a happy one. I believe they call it 'shock'.

What we conventionally call 'happy' is actually a pleasant delusion. (Luckily?) this delusion is quite resilient! It seeps back into us, and we start to believe, once again, that everything is actually going to be okay this time around.

You wouldn't think it, but I think it's easier if you don't suffer this sort of torment alone. Consider the life-bending events of 9/11. Overall, I'd say that New Yorkers recovered emotionally really, really fast, mainly because everyone felt that horror and shock. But personal tragedy like this is tough because our culture tolerates friendship that doesn't tolerate "general unpleasantness". Anyone going through this will be a wreck, that's a given. But so often friends will turn their back, unable or unwilling to endure the unpleasant inconvenience of a friend in dire need. This is, of course, inhuman.

So yes, kudos for a well-written piece, and may you find happiness once again (you will).
I disagree on your third point. First, Blizzard knows that it can't stop gold sellers. Even if they shut down all the big operations, there will always be people willing to pay money for virtual items and people willing to sell that can take their activity to some place that Blizzard can't police (like trades on ebay or in person). Second, and more importantly, gold selling is profitable and Blizzard definitely wants a chunk of this revenue. My evidence for this is to point out the real money auction house in Diablo 3, which was created in an attempt to solve these problems. Blizzard will probably introduce the same thing into WoW once they figure out how to do it properly (from what I hear, the D3 AH is having issues with inflation at the moment).
You are probably correct, but would be interested in your take on the 'real money' auction house in D3. Doesn't it have all the same issues?
Saddling the horse with type-classes in Scala
Here's to WSJ featuring labor shortage stories.
Introducing the Leap
So who are all the roads and luxury cars for?
> To solve that problem, all I have to do is validate that all your moves are legal.

Fair enough, that keeps me from cheating you by playing an illegal word. Now, what prevents you from cheating me by saying all of the words I play are invalid? (And are you really prepared to wait until my phone is in radio range before you learn if your play is accepted or not?)

That this would make for an incredibly boring game isn't relevant.
nicholasreed makes a good point. Let me make some stuff clear:

- I paid a $500 refundable deposit by mailing them a check they never cashed.

That was legit. A $3,000 deposit is silly though.

- To the best of my knowledge no jobs were found from App Academy's partner companies.

- I don't believe the $83k average salary thing.

That said, Ned is one of the greatest mentors I've ever met, and he's radically changed my life.

:)
I think apprenticeships in general are critical. It's good to see that others see their value. So many people feel this sense of entitlement. Nothing comes without hard work. Mentors make it easier. Apprenticeships are amazing.
This June i jokingly told my fiance "I wish you a great husband" on her birthday. She laughed. I laughed. 2 months later and 1 month before our wedding we separated in the most disgusting, disturbing way possible. The joke was also on me. I was alone and devastated. Then suicidal. Then just hopeless and completely alone. I'm not sure i know how to cope with this. Life as a gigantic lesson, never meant to be completely understood. You have to accept, reflect, move on and hope for the best. I think you've managed to fight at least half of the battle. Very interesting read. I wish you the best. I think you're almost there!
The bright side of course is that the world is open right now in a way it's never been before. I've spent the last two years bouncing around the globe, mostly in SE Asia. Thanks to the internet and a remotable skillset I can land in a new city tomorrow and have income and probably new contacts willing to show me around town.

This kind of thing is always traumatic but it's a great time to be a hacker with no ties.
In case you did not read the article in depth, most of what is happening to cause this shortage is due to more and more regulations. There will still be people who want to fly even if their salary is cheap, because that is their passion, just like there were writers and authors since the damn of civilization even when they could not make a living out of it. Salaries are not everything.
Great local search apps for iOS
> What I have seen, though, is a lot of pathetic doom-and-gloom and sky-is-falling idiocy from the right wing -- people crying about how "my country is done for" and other such stupidity.

Sounds like Kerry supporters in 2004.
> I'm not precisely sure what it is, but it seems to be the same thing that causes people to gloat when their favorite sports team wins.

I disagree. Though sports fans have moments when they feel intense hatred for the other team, almost every fan knows that at the end of the day, it's just a game. They know that -- just like their team -- their opponent was just trying to win as a matter of pride.

The consequences of political contests are much more serious, which leads many political supporters to actually hate the other side. They don't see politics as a game; they see it as an idealogical war that directly affects their quality of life. Many actually think that politicians they don't agree with and their supporters are evil. If you want proof of this difference, just look at the comments on articles about sports rivalries and compare them to comments on articles about divisive political issues.

However, I'd guess that if the winning team of a sporting event was allowed to modify the rulebook for all future games, it would begin to look a lot more like politics over time.
> I can’t wait to see what Tapjoy does next in this ever-escalating arms race. One thing’s for sure – it’ll be very profitable. And very shady.

This kind of cheerleading seems very distasteful. I hope that Tapjoy doesn't do anything next. I hope they just go away. Why would you hope for an unethical company that doesn't care at all about building an honest product to come up with a new way to get around restrictions preventing its dishonest practices?
They are not true window managers, but IIRC there are at least 1 or 2 programs that allow you to do a limited amount of tiling on OSX. I could see someone writing a program for OSX that listened for window events and did resizing, and then calling is a 'tiling WM' since it was modeled after such for X11. Maybe that's just me over-thinking.
Build an iOS Music Player – Tuts+ Premium
Who's going to contract with them? The existing pilots unions have the airlines all tied up.
On OS X, the "Fred" voice is pretty close.

say -v Fred Hello. My name is Fred.