skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was recently thinking of how much money I've spent on iTunes in the past two years (since we've "cut the cable") and a lot of our purchases were from TV series seasons that we bought after we watched the first seasons on Netflix and wanted to catch up with the latest. (Breaking Bad, Sons of Anarchy, Dexter, etc.)

Yes, they would deserve a cut on most of our iTunes purchases, but for one thing, I don't know what that would amount to. Maybe not enough. (I believe the iTunes affiliate rate is 5%, so that would be $1-$1.50 per TV show season, 25 cents per movie rental)

And indeed it doesn't seem to make sense: let's say they added a "latest season is on iTunes" link. It would tell the user "we are not able to secure the latest content for you". And if they added exclusive rentals on top of the flat fee, it would be tempting to delay the switch from exclusive to regular catalog for how long as necessary. It would be going against everything Netflix has been about from the start: flat-fee for unlimited consumption.
"Starting a startup will make them not only rich but also happy"

A bit naive, no?
How the Japanese Earthquake Launched the 'Impossible' Vending Machine
It has everything to do with gender, a man hacking a fleshlight would get none or almost none upvotes, I bet it would even get flagged by a few. Its a predictable fantasy of the average reader of HN, the equivalent of a photo of a pretty woman doing charity with a cat in reddit.

Is not only the fact that she is a woman, is the surrounding context of a sexual stimulation device that provoque so many upvotes. Personally I would downvote this if I could, I don't like my tech articles biased by hormones.
Jitsi supports it, among other encryption protocols:

https://jitsi.org/index.php/Main/Features
Hi, UX and interaction designer here, but once, a long time ago, I was a developer.

I learned to program typing in code from books and magazines, and, later, from reading and rewriting parts of open source projects that did things similar to things I wanted to do.

There's lots of ways to learn development like that today, online, including great open source books like Dive Into Python and Think Python and Learn Python the Hard Way.

There isn't so much of that for design. Not online, anyway.

I don't write about "how to design" because, like programming, it's something you have to learn by doing. There's no Learn UX the Hard Way, but maybe there should be.

One of the projects I tried once was running design workshops, so I could tease out repeatable design exercise and publish those: http://vi.to/workshop/premise.html I ran fifteen workshops, and ultimately discovered they were structured great for the attendees, but wrong for my goals.

There's a book, The Non-Designer's Design Book, which is pretty proscriptive, but does give you exercises you can try and repeat. There are other books, like Editing By Design, which tell you "why" certain things are important, but doesn't include exercises.

Critique is a related problem: most interactive designers today didn't go to school for it, so they're missing the common cultural and academic background that fine artists, architects and industrial designers have, where they've learned the history of the practice, learned fundamentals, and practiced constructive criticism for years.

I don't know if you're any good as a writer or a designer, but if you're looking to write about design and make an impact on non-designers, you could do worse than to take a design pattern or an element of design and make exercises around it. Give people ways to practice them, to study an implementation, to apply it something new, and to critique it, repeatably.
A similar problem is HR departments abusing the "knobs" on the position's requirements. For a software-based CRM company, they required something like 7 years of Java EE development experience for the lower level development positions, and 14+ for the team lead positions. How many 14 year Java developers are there? Furthermore, do you really need 14 years of experience in a particular language for this position? I think the HR desk is lamenting the lack of good applicants and turning up the "years of experience" knob, which is in all likelyhood counter-productive.
I was just about to comment about that: browsing for content on Amazon is a terrible experience, because they use mostly the same layout as the rest of their products. Netflix has the advantage of focussing and a single type of products and (hopefully) give a better experience.
I've been living in Japan for a few years now and I think maybe people are missing one of the key features of this video.

It's easy to look at a video like this and attribute it to stereotypes of the behavior of crowds in different countries. I think the overlooked thing is that lines in Japan are very often actively managed. If a new line opens up, very often there is a person standing by the ropes guiding people to the new opening in a fair way. If the ropes are too long (causing you to go back and forth unnaturally) there is a peson there who removes them and creates a short-cut. Similarly, they will add ropes or move the line into a better position or manage a 'cut' in the line when it passes in front of a doorway or path (like in the video).

This puts you at ease since you know there is an authority figure watching out for fairness. Its no longer a "me first" attitude. It also trains people on how to behave when in a line. When that authority figure is not there, people still adopt the conventions of when they are.

In summary, this kind of behavior is taught and socialized into people because it's valued. In America (where I'm from) it is considered inefficent to have a person standing by a line telling people what to do. People are expected to self-manage. This also means when you're waiting on a line in Japan, you're not really thinking about the line very much. You're free to talk, read or daydream without worrying about your place in line.
ditto the 'have children' comment. I've consciously chosen not to reproduce, after having the equivalent of a 'dry run' for raising kids for a few years, and I certainly couldn't see myself ever being happy as a parent.
I've seen several job ads requiring "5+ years experience with Technology X" where Technology X is not yet 5 years old.
Ask HN: If developers are in such high demand, why aren't development interns?
Locating and securing employment last summer was a long and laborious tribulation. It's nearing the time to begin my search for this summer. If the generally consensus is that the market is undersupplied with development labor, why is finding internships so prodigiously difficult for developers?
If the price is right, producers couldn't care less about platform lock. If Google, Apple, Amazon or anybody else is willing to pay the right number of dollars, they can throw the bits into /dev/null for all Hollywood cares.
Definition: A person is a Randian rationalist if any particular entity only supplies a proper subset (i.e., less than all of) his interests.

Definition: For simplicity, let interests = job + gym membership.

With these definitions, a Randian rationalist wouldn't consider getting an employee gym membership. Which seems to be what the author is advocating.
I think the guys who will truly disrupt Hollywood will figure out how to produce & distribute content without the Hollywood machine. Youtube was one of the first ones to do this, and I believe there will be many more startups who will continue on this path; the key to beating Hollywood is by not playing their game.

Or in pg's words: http://ycombinator.com/rfs9.html
Thanks, those are good points.

It sounds like they need good automated analytics to find suspicious cases for deeper review.
Keep telling yourself that, if it makes you feel better.

Whatever else you can say about the US, our First Amendment is rightfully the envy of the world.
Yes, but it's still strongly lacking in most other clients to be useful.
The thing is, you can't bullshit a human either. They will execute wrongly if the instruction is wrong.
Have you sent an email to Philip Greenspun? He definitely has the connections in Cambridge to people who may be interested in this or could help. He's probably bought books from Lorem Ipsum in the past: http://philip.greenspun.com/
Don't forget that companies also discriminate against old people in favor of young people.

The result? They don't hire anybody despite a looooooooooong line of overqualified greybeards.

(I am young myself, too!)
Thanks for the excellent suggestion. I'll think about it.
So how long until one of the major tech players buys (or we hear rumors or talks of purchasing) a TV network or even a studio?
No, there are countries that do not agree with the moral evaluation of freedom of speech that the US constitution and the Supreme Court made and make.

There is nothing to live up to. It’s not an issue of progress, it’s on issue of a different moral worldview.

Americans taking freedom of speech on top of everything else as axiomatic are ridiculous and arrogant. I think freedom of speech is important and I do think what happens in the UK is overreach, but I personally prefer putting human dignity above freedom of speech.
Hey, this is beth from scanlime.org. I was doing my best to keep the site up, but it looks like Dreamhost just pulled the plug. I'm pretty annoyed with this.
Right, the biggest barrier to creating applications isn't programming, per se, it's fully understanding all the logical relationships, dependencies, performance characteristics, and edge cases of the desired features. Compared to getting all this right, writing code is a breeze.
when a paper is folded in a 1 1/8 cylinder for 70 years there should be wrinkles marks on the paper.

A capsule was owned by the family of the soldier who brought it home in 1918

http://www.interbug.com/pigeon/messaging/photos/wwi_british_...
Pick up the book "Growing a Business", by Paul Hawken.
I'm a confessed Rand hater.

The reason why is because the vast majority of people I've ever met who bought into her ideology were selfish assholes who used the writings of Rand as a pseudo-intellectual justification for their selfish assholeness.

So in a way the hatred is personal, though a couple of steps removed from Ayn Rand the actual person.
I can second this. I'm a 26 year old programmer and I've done one all nighter in my life. I don't remember what happened after hour 26. I know I attended class until 2pm but I can't remember any of it.

I can get anywhere from 3 to 6 hours of useful programming in a day and a couple times a year I might do 10 hours. I am far more productive at an average of 4 hours of work per day than trying to do 8 or 9 hours. I've worked with people I considered far smarter than myself and I can match or beat them by putting in a third of their hours working on similar problems.

Just this week, I did an estimated 2 weeks of work in about 14 hours over 3 days, most of it staring at a whiteboard. All of the code was written in 2 three hour sessions on the final day. I frequently do things an order or two of magnitude faster and smarter when I'm well rested and relaxed.

I don't mean to brag. It really bothers me I come in to the office just before the daily standup, work for 6 hours and leave before anyone else. (I usually spend an hour or two doing non-programming tasks each day)

I can definitely say "work smarter, not harder" is really effective for me. I don't know if it's true for everyone but I suspect it is.
You'll find that stepping back from a problem, even when not sick, generally can help your overall perspective. I personally like to take walks and focus on things other than the problem at hand; this almost always results in clarity for me.
I'm thinking of the perks he mentions in terms of a utility function. In other words, how much salary would you trade for paid vacation, company gym membership, company cafeteria, etc.?

Companies offer these things because they think, on average, employees will say "More than they cost the company to provide."

This post essentially reminds people that they should factor in the switching costs for all of these things. It also notes that those switching costs may increase super-linearly if multiple service agreements expire at the same time due to a change in employment.
> Could we program machines that can run the computers that run the machines? And how about machines that program those machines?

Given the history of progressive rounds of optimism and failure on this idea, so far: no. Before you can replace humans, you need to ... um ... replace humans.

However, the general principle of progressively more specialised machinery and skills is not new. It's called "the division of labour"; it really ought to be called "the specialisation of process" or perhaps "the specialisation of outputs", given that capital too becomes progressively more specialised to particular tasks.
Looks really good (bookmarked to read later). Although maybe some more motivation as to why you start music theory with circle of fifths -- as someone who knows nothing about music, I had never heard of it before.
If he was offered a salary of $100 million per year, I'm sure the author wouldn't refuse it on the basis of a gym membership being part of the package.

This example shows that the services he names have some finite value (perhaps zero or negative) which can be added to the salary value. A person considering a change in employment just needs to figure out what that value is, so you can put competing offers from different companies on the same scale.
Circle of fifths and circle of fourths allows one to algorithmically put together Irish traditional tune sets that mostly work. (Not exactly as stated, because Irish trad is really modal, but close enough for trad.)

Basically, take the home chord of a tune and apply one of the following:

If "major" then switch to the relative minor, or vice versa.

Go Round the circle of fifths or the circLe of fourths either direction, but stay on whichever side of "major/minor."

Go up or down the scale, staying on whichever side of "major/minor."

So for example, a tune set with E minor, G major, A major should work. (Again, not exactly it, but don't want to explain modes.)
If you're a good/better than average UI/UX designer, you obviously know something that other people (including me) don't. It's your job to identify what that something is, your audience can't really tell you :)

I find that often in things I'm better at then other people, I have a better understanding of some basic principles, that form a frame of reference and help me make decisions. I'm sure there are some basic principles that the average hacker isn't familiar with, so I think that'd be a good starting point.

I also find that I understand things best if it's written in terms I already understand, so I can connect it to knowledge I already have. Analogies are really useful for that.
South Carolina Department of Revenue Data Breach: What Went Wrong?
Since he's claiming to value benefits at near-zero, a better counterexample might be a job paying below-market wage, but with free use of a private jet, a personal chef and trainer, and other insane perks :)
I don't know about that. Nothing like a major motion picture or TV series has ever been platform-locked, has it? Video games, yes, but not traditional "mainstream" entertainment.
I did this Monday. I had meetings all morning so I spent three hours hogging the team whiteboard before I left for the day. It really works. I went and worked on some hobby writing I do and my brain worked on the problem in the background. The next day I had a new approach to try when I woke up.
Being biologically biased is not "bad faith", is just a well known human trait.
Airport Car Rentals: The Next $10 Billion Industry Ready For Disruption
"Position requires 7 years of iOS Programming experience" ... the iOS SDK is only 4 years old.
Oh okay. I'll check in on that ghubbard. I appreciate your response. Have A Good Sunday & A Great Weekend.
Hmm. Just thinking out loud here.

What seems to be working for Pandemonium, just down the street, is event and community space -- for them it's board and collectible card games. For Porter Square Books, it's some combination of having a coffee shop and events (readings etc).

Providing shared experiences in the physical world is something Amazon can't (yet) do.

(Adding a coffee shop might be enough -- based on the number popping up and thriving in Boston recently it seems that we have a nigh-infinite demand for them. 1369 could use some competition, right?)
An Interview with Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto
Qii - Full Sized & Pocket Sized Rollable Smartphone Keyboard
You did that wrong.

The trick is when you go out for a day to keep your wallet empty of cash, simply have your cards in there but no money.

I've travelled just about anywhere like this and the 'sorry man, no cash' works fine every time (I have some in my back pocket but I'm not going to tell a guy like this about that).

I also instantly lose any ability to speak a word of the local language and my English, so they're going to have to explain everything to me in Dutch (fat chance of getting more than 2 words across, within minutes they'll be reduced to sign language and scribbling pictures on pieces of paper). This takes a long long time. It usually does not take more than 5 minutes of this before they'll move on to the next target, their time is valuable.

When they get off shift they will have to pay their boss his part of the take, if you are hurting their figures by taking more time than average and it looks like you won't be paying or can't pay they'll shift their attention to someone more profitable.

To date this trick has been used and verified to work in: Romania, Poland, Italy, Colombia & Panama. What those countries have in common is a police force that earns relatively little money and very little oversight.

Small time corruption eradication starts with you, the tourist. If you're going to be a fat sitting duck and you pay up too easily when you've done nothing wrong then you carry a part responsibility for keeping things that way.

The Romanian police was actually really funny, they started off with 1500 Euros in fines (my crime actually was better described as 'driving with a foreign license plate'), quickly dropped to about 100 Euros and then when they found out that I didn't have any money centered on impounding the car. When I readily agreed to that they sent me on my way...

I positively hate corrupt police. Don't pay them.
There is a very simple rule to travelling in unsafe places: don't attract attention to yourself. McAfee failed that rule from the second he set foot in Belize.
I don't detest your thought, I just find it ridiculous.

If you want to use the life as software analogy, here's one.

Life is about making choices, and choices involve tradeoffs. If life was like software, to remain free to move around in any circle and jobs, besides employment benefits, one would also only program in the most popular programming languages (Java,C#), speak the most commonly spoken languages (Chinese and English), eat the most commonly available food stuff (McD's), dress the most commonly worn clothes (T-shirt and Jeans from age 3 - the day you die), do the most commonly done things (Watch TV) so you can have things to talk about when you hang out with your common friends. Some people like those lives, and that's fine. But some others like to have the finer things in life, and that involves going off the mainstream and be elitist as you would probably say. Instead of programming Java, some would program in Python. Instead of watching TV, some would like to read a book or go to museums. Instead of working for 50k a year with minimum benefits like everyone else, some would work for a company that gives them PTO, health insurance, gym membership etc etc etc. People work hard so they can get hired by a company to have those things. They want it. That's their freedom. Their freedom to choose the life best suit them. It's not that they can't leave, they don't want to leave, because they feel they've earned the benefits in the first place. If some would like to leave, that's when they are making choices that value something else over employment benefits. That's also freedom.
"The so-called skills gap is really a gap in education, and that affects all of us."

That closing line doesn't really sound like the gist of the piece at all. It sounds like manufacturing employers just don't want to or don't feel they can afford to pay works a fair wage.
"According to the source above, family is around $4000, and individual is around $3000"

Additionally, I think the average listed there is a misleadingly low self-selector in that most anyone who has a pre-existing condition is likely to get quotes so expensive that getting an individual or family plan outside of the workplace is simply not a financially viable option.

There are many, many Americans for whom health insurance outside of a workplace group policy simply isn't an option, and that is sad, but the last thing needed to fix this problem is an application of Randian principles.
interesting especially in HTML but the black lines (mirrors) need to be able to MOVE as well as adjust the length. Maybe I missed it but the only way to move a mirror is to walk it one edge at a time.
Thanks. Asking in HN is one of the ways through which I could identify what people want :) Your thinking on using analogies exactly reflects mine, thanks for the suggestion.
Yeah, if you pay attention to the video you can spot the fire cones and staffers (there are approximately a dozen on hand each time one of the lines move, just at the front of it).
That's a really good question. The reason why I started at the Circle of Fifths is because it's the foundation and it is highly mathematical. It's a tad bit painful to start with, but I wanted to start from the ground up. This will make the other stuff far more understandable. I can go on all day saying "this is how to make a chord" but starting here will let you understand the later ideas better.

I also started here to demonstrate how logical it all is.
> In Toronto it would be wayyyy more.

Have you actually bribed a Canadian police officer?
And your Second its cause for constant anxiety.
This is the transition between manufacturing as a blue collar occupation and manufacturing as a white collar occupation.
One of them got arrested for the unpardonable offense of "liking" the post of the other.
This advice is for people carrying drugs, guns, 'sex slaves' etc. It shouldn't be read as applicable to anybody traveling in Central America. Though I think one key takeaway is that its not wise to go driving around on desolate roads in places you don't know well.
The author implies a false dichotomy in the following paragraph.

"This is why I don’t accept the usual “benefits” package. I go for the jobs that offer minimal benefits and high pay. I go for the jobs that challenge and improve me, not the jobs I’d settle down in and feel like I can’t get out of."

Why not go for the jobs that offer great benefits, (at least) good pay, and challenge you? And, if you find you can't leave such a job because it is just too good, then maybe the job is worth sticking around for?

I work in an at-will state which means that I can leave my employer at any time for any reason and they can let me go under the same constraints.

If ever there was a phrase that deserves the derisive phrase "first world problem" it is "the benefits are too good for me to leave."

Finally,

"A less obvious reason [for great benefits] is that they increase the employee’s dependency on the employer and create barriers to the employee leaving the company for a higher paying and/or more challenging job."

this isn't a less obvious reason at all. At my current employer, the company explicitly provides strong incentives to keep employees. People still leave when they find another challenge more to their liking, benefits and all. And that's exactly the way it should be.