skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is interesting, because it's mainly an American thing. My friends in Sweden, Norway and Germany never hesitate to speak about compensation. Here in the UK, it's sort of in between.

My theory is that American's believe the ability to assess your own salary and worth is largely part of the attributes of success and worth. Other countries believe more in the employer to define this.

Cool fact - In Norway, everyone's income is public domain: http://skattelister.aftenposten.no/skattelister/start.htm
Thanks for the terrific feedback guys, here AND the UserVoice.

To be honest, I am super-surprised that nobody complained about the google-only login. Maybe a sampling bias here at HN?
The motivation for the change came from chatting with people looking at the site, and hearing strong reluctance from some about having to pay to evaluate the service.

The pattern we hear is that often people want to get it running in a sample app or side project so they can get a feel for it - even if their motivation is to eventually use it with their larger site.

The more precise quantitative results of the change will come now that the pricing change is public. We should do a followup in a week.
Single-Molecule "Engine" Vibrates Macro Object
There is more info on his blog, his wife is posting on it: http://dantti.wordpress.com/
I wonder what they did with alcohol to keep people from doing this same thing with it?
I'm so thankful. After 4.5 years of CS, the only class that taught me anything was my advanced algorithm class and I learned enough to retain an immense amount of the information a year later. This is fun stuff and I hated it two years ago.
As a dual-wielding RoR/.Net dev, I'm on the fence about this, on the one hand MSbuild and Nuget are a pale immitation of the tools we find in Rub/posix/foss land, but I do think VS is quite a powerful tool when held correctly. Ultimately I enjoy working in both environments, but each for differnt reasons.
This is by and large a red-herring.

Unless your Ruby app is leveraging JRuby's integration with Java... you can just take your Ruby app, fire it up on Rubinius or MRI, and you're no worse for wear.
Should add an option for users to disable this (like remember me on login forms)... not good for public computers if you don't know the form you just filled in but didn't submit will retain the data. Other than that, cool!
Webyshots – REST API for webpage screenshot capture
Your kids probably know better than you if you make more money than their friends' parents. With sleepovers and carpooling and all the time and activities they spend on both sides, there's really no way to hide this, especially at a $120k vs $60k disparity.
The big thing that rails has that .NET doesn't are the vast number of open source engines and plugins available.

For examples see here: https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/ , nothing like this really exists in the .net ecosystem, especially something akin to active record plugins, so you have to roll your own stuff a lot of the time when you could just use a plugin in rails.

Also, it seems like a lot of the useful .net stuff like mvc, nuget, entity framework are kind of clones of stuff that exist in the rails ecosystem already, so you are always going to be a bit behind the curve.
It's awkward and not relevant information. You can get on payscale the same as everyone else. Especially in the US where income is really significant in terms of basic needs like healthcare and there is no cultural norm that all sorts of work are respectable and worthy.
You're right, several things can be considered 'income tax' even though not called that way.

Didn't know that for Germany, interesting.

I guess the point is: compare cost of life and take away salary rather than raw salary figures.

Still, lower take away salary may be a handcap in attracting talent.
Sure you can quote stats all day, but it depends on your target audience. If you are running a tech website (such as HN/TC/Reddit/etc) you will see a HUGE portion of visitors using browsers like Chrome/Firefox and hardly any IE.

However if you are building websites that regular people use they still use XP and IE7... so much so that it can account for 10-30% of your website traffic.. It really pains me when HTML frameworks like Foundation 3.x drop support for IE7[1] and below because there is still the userbase there.

IE7/8 is not dead for most of the world yet. People who run statcounter websites are getting data from people who run their tools. I would trust if someone like Google Analytics released an average browser usage as they are more widely used. Who the F uses statcounter nowadays?

[1] Though you can do tricks/hacks to make it work for IE7.
They would require you to set up authorized viewer's faces beforehand I imagine.

I see this as being years away at best though. They would have to build infrastruture around the movie delivery system for it to work - you'd have to register viewers faces and demand they set up the room correctly(well lit?), and of course, people would have to be cool with paying for that overhead. A competing service could easily continue doing things the way they do today, and thus get more customers, more money, and in turn pay content companies more. If it makes content companies more money, then I don't see them adopting the facial recognition model.
David Petraeus Was Brought Down by ... Gmail
Form content recall is a native Chrome feature now.
Developing for Android with Pascal (JVM compiler) and Eclipse
In Idaho, the US state I live in, all government salaries are public. Many people are shocked to be able to find out how much their neighbors make as teachers, police officers, and bureaucrats.
Why is this a website feature instead of a browser extension, where it would work for every site?
I find it peculiar that anyone would describe ActiveRecord that way. In my eyes it's a behind-the-curve ORM based on the most basic ORM pattern available from Fowler's "Enterprise Application Architecture", and it seems most of the people _using_ AR never read it and have not thought at all about the tradeoffs vs. other ORM patterns (such as Data Mapper ; before anyone mentions the Ruby DataMapper ORM: That one doesn't actually implement the Data Mapper pattern).

I particularly dislike the way it tends to result in code that is littered with leaky database abstractions where schema details tends to find its way into peoples controllers and views because it encourages people to call AR methods on model objects directly instead of even trying to encapsulate.

Ruby is my favorite language, but Active Record is one of the things I hold greatly against Rails, not only for AR itself, but for the inspiration it provided to many other Ruby ORM's, that while they may improve on various aspects still to a large extent also end up encouraging leaking implementation details for your models all over the place.

It'd be great if even 10% of the people using (and writing, it would seem, given that e.g. the Ruby ORM "Data Mapper" doesn't implement the Data Mapper pattern at all) these ORM's actually read the relevant chapters of EAA and pondered a bit on how it related to their applications.
Any bets on how this is going to play out?
Quantitative Legal Prediction – Presentation  Stanford CodeX
Perhaps this has changed in the last couple of years, but the last time I was in .NET land, the most glaring difference between the two was the community.

Rails, being built upon a foundation of open source, instills a strong open source ethos into its community. The amount of free, permissively-licensed open source libraries available for use with Rails is staggering. Rails' entire ecosystem, down to the preferred OS kernel, is open source and free. The buy-in to work with Rails is exactly $0. This produces a community who almost rabidly shares code and knowledge as permissively as possible.

Compare this to ASP.NET, where, until recently, there was a buy-in for everything, and you had to pony up a fair bit of cash just to play in the sandbox. In the ASP.NET world, everyone wants their $15 or $50 or $500 for every little bit of code or whatnot. The entire ecosystem feels like it's composed of people with an "enterprise" mindset who expect that everything should be paid for. This massively hampers growth of the technology and its community. It is directly antithetical to the open source ideals that have catapulted Rails to where it is today.

Any time I had tried searching for solutions to .NET problems, they were behind paywalls, behind license restrictions, or otherwise hidden away. When I search for solutions to Rails problems, they're on StackOverflow and Github. Where is the GitHub equivalent of ASP.NET MVC projects? The OP argues that the lack of SO questions is a good thing. I'd suggest that instead, perhaps it's symptomatic of the community's attitude towards distribution of knowledge.

Like I said, the last time I worked with ASP.NET was a couple of years ago, so perhaps this has changed by now, but if it has, it'd be a tectonic shift, and I'm rather doubtful that an entire ecosystem can change like that in such a relatively short amount of time.
Our motivation with the free plan is to let people who are interested evaluate the service. We tried a 30day free trial, but we heard from some users that they really didn't want to put in a credit card to sign up at first, and some didn't think it was enough time.

By charging more as the number of users grows it ties the cost to the actual value they're getting. With the free tier at 50 users, we think that gives everyone a chance to try it out without giving away the farm.
I would imagine it's easier for a site owner to provide this than get everyone to install a browser extension.
Show HN: CSS3 icons and glyphs that you can use for free
Fortunately, non-empty intervals of real numbers do not exist in computer science.
I personally hate C# (Ruby is an amazingly better language)

Why? I've spent the best part of the last 5 years programming python and JavaScript. Recently however a new project has shown up where I might have to use C# and I'm really excited. From what I've seen and based on the little tests I've done, C# looks like an awesome language. Striking a prefect balance between the being too dynamic and free from and being too rigid. What is it about C# that you "hate"?
If I was a foreign government I'd have multiple spies working inside Google by now.
Not-so-insightful article but an interesting service provided by the company.
With cloud-based APIs to handle things like DBs (Parse), files (Filepicker.io) and now auth (Dailycred), one can just pretty much do everything on the client-side.
In my experience, kids can see how much money is going out, or how much their parents care about saving money, buying luxury items, etc., but have no idea how much is coming in. A frugal $120k family can live identically to a profligate/indebted $60k family, and kids will be none the wiser until they gain a more subtle appreciation of earnings by profession.
I dunno, just an American cultural thing, and varies by country. When I was in China, it was just a natural part of conversation: "Where are you from? What do you do? How many brothers/sisters do you have? How much do you make?"

I'm cringing at all the responses in here saying "this is why", as if it's some universal truth, when really it's just rationalizing the particular culture people have been steeped in. Why don't women walk around topless at the beach? Just culture. Some cultures see it as perfectly normal.

I wish people were more okay with it here in America. I make it a point to answer honestly if anyone broaches the subject, and to ask my close friends. Doing my part to change things. :)
Well, as the article says. I looked for journos who had covered start-ups/companies in similar niches rather than picking someone at random.
If your parents never talked about money, you're lucky - you probably grew up having enough of it not to worry. In poor families, money is a popular topic. I suspect that is one of the reasons why the nouveau riche brag (talk) about money frequently, while those who grew up rich are more discreet.

As for salaries - it's a cultural thing, in the US/UK it is common to mention salaries in job offers (so you could compare easily), in other countries it isn't (or wasn't, like here in Austria, where new laws require mentioning minimum wages ...).
> Why you'd want to be covered by TC is a different story.

For fun.
"Long shot"
I really like this. Great idea. The main issue I see is pricing. I would offer a yearly option. Also, creating a Lightroom plugin would go a long way with more serious photographers.
I created a social network called Unadu. It gave the users a voice, along with every other current aspect of online networking. It gained a little traction in my area with only a few hundred users over a 4 month span. Over the last 3 weeks there was virtually no activity. When you fail, fail fast right? So I retired the network and immediately went on to working on the next project. I learned a lot; mostly where my strengths and weaknesses area.
I've actually been surprised, more often than not, when I've found out how much people make (including some family friends I knew as a kid). It doesn't correlate all that well with how much I would've guessed they were making. One big reason is that people have wildly different savings rates, and I don't generally have a way to guess that: someone who "looks like" they're living at $70k/yr might actually be making a lot more and banking it for early retirement.

Another reason was that, even when only estimating spending, as a kid I tended to over-emphasize "conspicuous consumption" and gadgets: assumed the people with bigger TVs, new game consoles, better cars, etc. were wealthier. What I massively underestimated was the cost of "nice" vacations (esp. compared to relatively minor items like game consoles), so it was really the people who liked to travel a lot who spent more, but I never saw their spending happen when I was around.

edit: To add one more confound, I think I also put too much emphasis on "class" associations: I assumed parents working blue-collar jobs made less than white-collar, which was not always true, esp. when you took into account that some blue-collar families had 2x incomes.
That's only true if you want to learn programming on a locked-down platform like an iPad or a smartphone. You can still write code for Windows or Linux that anyone can download from your web site or Github without jumping through any hoops. And despite all the prognostications about the death of the general-purpose computer being imminent, there are still infinitely many useful programs that you can develop for a desktop/laptop machine.
How does that explain social behavior among people working at different companies?
Get The Evernote Windows Application on Ubuntu 12.10 via WINE
VS is a really solid IDE - one of the best available, I'd say, if it supports what you're working in.

Rails really doesn't do "IDE" well, but that's because its entire toolchain is built to be used independently of an IDE.

(Edit: There's Rubymine, which is actually pretty decent, but I usually just stick with Sublime and my console because it ends up being faster anyhow)
A language that is lazy by default lets you control the evaluation of arguments. Ordinarily, they're not evaluated, and if you force them they are.

However, macros are not just about whether to evaluate -- but about exposing the internal syntactic structure of the arguments.

In Haskell, using laziness you can implement control flow, short-circuiting, etc. If you want functions that work with the syntactic structure of their arguments, you need heavier machinery:

* Thick DSLs: Define explicit AST types and have a DSL that explicitly constructs those AST's.

* Template Haskell (the arguments' syntax has to be in ordinary Haskell)

* Quasiquotes (Need to parse strings)

I think the need for exposed syntax is relatively rare (e.g: a function that evaluates and shows a trace of the evaluation). In those cases, I think explicit AST types work pretty well, as Haskell has extremely light-weight syntax for constructing user-defined data types.
I get tired of these screeds. If you're so upset by restrictions, etc, stop consuming Big Content. Otherwise admit the basic fact in play: those companies have such a captive audience because everyone wants their content so bad that they can get away with sorts of crap and people will put up with it. Copyright isn't to blame here. You see the same thing in other industries where branding is paramount (think LV bags).
I had this problem. My parents never talked to me about how much things cost. I had a rude awakening when I learned how much basic rent was, even more so when I learned what my rent was when I was a kid.

My kids will know how much their stuff costs, and they will earn their luxuries.
Secrecy around compensation became widespread when anti-discrimination laws came about because it's easy fodder for complaints and lawsuits.

It's pretty trivial to figure out what household income is within 10% if you know a person at all. Your privacy isn't something that employers give a hoot about.
Housing, startup incubation, hackerspace, coworking, and more for $10 a day
What do you guys think of Project Inspire Us?
In case I was unclear, the taboo is real, and has sociological explanations. I'm just saying there's an economic incentive behind it that favors businesses over employees.
Kids know if you spend more money than their friends' parents. Not if you make more.
I guess you could find the shortest path by iteratively deleting an edge and checking whether the best cost has got worse. If it does get worse, then put that edge back in and try deleting another edge. If it does not get worse, then permanently delete that edge.

I think this should terminate (after trying all edges once each) with an example of the shortest path (that consists of all remaining edges).
It seems this is a particularly difficult topic to talk about. We all seem to agree with each other.
As a Brit living in Norway, I thought it was strange when I first learned of the tax lists being published for public consumption.

I have to admit to looking up people I know, celebrities, and others on the tax lists. More out of idle curiosity rather than anything else.
That's ridiculous. Saying "wouldn't it be cool" isn't prior art. Describing a working system is.
If only there were a way to obscure the Kinect's ability to measure the room.
Frankly, I think ya'll hit the nail on the side, but not collectively on the head. Take a little from column A, little from column B, and we can see the real problems with Groupon. As one commenter said, they only work for certain merchants with high markup. This is why there's so many Chiropracters and massagers on these deal sites. Trouble is, all those services are once a year kinda things. Thus, you get one massage on Groupon or Amazon or whatever, and then next week they;re hawking another massage, are you gonna get it?

Combine this with the fact that Groupon is reknowned for being slow to pay merchants. That's fine if yer paying back Wal-Mart, who has lots of money, but for small businesses that use these services, 3 months waiting for payment can be crippling. Read about Groupon's payment policies. They're assholes. Slow assholes.

And finally, none of this was ever proprietary or complex. Groupon had no firewalls or sandbags against competitors, and frankly, the way it treats its client businesses, it was bound to be fucked eventually.

My folks have a boutique ad firm in a small town. For the past year, they've gotten calls EVERY DAY from Groupon-like services, or even Groupon aggregators who act as middlemen for these services. It's a hugely growing market but never once has Groupon been at the table for one of these calls. They're being eaten alive.
www.projectinspireus.com offers an overview of the 30,000 square foot dome with pictures and video.
I don't think writing Template Haskell macros takes a lot of effort. It is probably harder than Lisp macros, but the main effort is studying the TH API once.
Yearly pricing has ticket-shock - 8USD a month is nearly a hundred bucks, right now. And its a lot more hassle to refund than not collect.

Monthly pricing has big advantages.
I am one of the maintainers of luvit. There is a meetup in SF on December 6th about it if you are in the area[1].

Also, I wrote a blog post about luvit after a talk I gave at Open Source Bridge which might be helpful in providing some context[2].

[1]: http://www.meetup.com/lua-devs/events/89091842/

[2]: http://ifup.org/2012/07/03/luvit-nodes-ziggy-stardust/
20 All Too Common Coding Pitfalls For Beginners
Yeah, we knew we wouldn't really be reaching many potential customers.

I did get a few interesting emails from potential investors, and people who work at other tech companies who saw integration potential.

I'd never spend a penny on outsourcing PR. Ever.

It was a great little boost for the team. Everyone felt really proud. Why? I don't know. It just felt good to have a wee bit of recognition after all the hard work everyone put in to launching the product.
Yes, this is one of those reasons. Also, the customs.
The answer is actually pretty simple, it causes a lot of problems and very little is any "good" comes out of it.

The problems seem to originate from two things; first people often judge their own 'worth' by comparing their work output to others, and two, people who don't understand the details of a particular job seem to think it is much easier to do than it really is.

So in the first case person A, who thinks highly of themselves, and very poorly of a co-worker person B, finds that the co-worker is getting more compensation than they are. This triggers a management issue where someone has to explain to person A the discrepancy. There are a number of real explanations (like Person B is actually doing a harder job and/or providing a more valuable role) that Person A, may be unable to accept.

Or person B may have a role that is significantly different, like they are in marketing (vs engineering) or finance or analysis. Can you compare salaries for someone who cranks out a thousand lines of code a day with someone who can tell you precisely which of those lines of code are making the company money and which ones aren't? Both are great skills, that latter is harder to find, you might pay them a bit more. But explain that to the person writing code? Not easy.

When I was at Google it was proposed a number of times (by engineers) that everyone's salary should just be part of the info available. They didn't do that, but I could see someone like the 37Signals folks or some startup doing it from the start.

I've not worked at a company where that was the case so I can only speculate on what it might be like. For folks who were internally OK with their own perception of self worth it wouldn't matter, for the sociopaths it would give them a new game to 'win', for folks who were not OK with their own self worth it would be devastating.

I do know that individuals can change this, so when your out socially talk freely about specific amounts of money you earn, or save, or spend. But be forewarned that it will make them uncomfortable. But if you can get a community built up where its considered the 'norm' then converting your workplace to use it (assuming they have enough of that community employed) can work.
Is it common to minimize JavaScript usage when building a website?
Hi pyrotechnick - saw your feedback and then saw the the title had been moded. I think the new tile is fine (less colorful), but its the same message so I think either is fine.
The richest tech entrepreneurs in Europe
I watched this last night:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oj__w87vkow&feature=plcp

"Social Mechanics: Bonding, Gratitude and Karma (Earthlings 101, Episode 7) "

Poor people are karma producers. Rich people are karma consumers. Rich people buy karma from poor people to make themselves feel better.

The whole Zog series is a fun (if a bit hard-line) presentation of evolutionary bio theory, in animated form.