skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hah, it is the same here in the USA. The people who studied the easy stuff don't have jobs, and if they do they are low-paid and don't offer much security. The sciences don't even pay that well, although they can if you try hard and schmooze.

100% of the people that I know who studied CS or Engineering (Chemical/Mechanical) _have jobs_ that are well paid, have nice benefits, and are able to live in nice areas of the country and if they want to raise a family. The liberal arts kids, not so much. There is no way of saying it nicely, but for the next 10 years of their lives, they're fucked.

It is IMO hugely unethical for the educational system to shove 'you can be whatever you want to be' down everyone's throats during HS, then expect the Liberal arts to actually be able to find a job, earn enough money to pay off student loans, save $ for a house down payment, pay for health/car/etc insurance, and be able to save for retirement. I am never reproducing (yay childfree), but I shudder to think how my peers with children are managing to pay for for childcare. Oh, and don't forget those who do did not finish college, yet still have $20k of loans collecting interest.

Would you write a check for $150k to a 18 year old kid and let them go party in NYC/LA/Paris for 4 years? Replace Paris with college and that's what college is like, unless you study engineering or maybe medicine.
Unfortunately, the US doesn't really do that in very visible ways for people in the middle class and up besides offering a good environment for business, and barely seems to get the job done for poor people, which raises the question for many of what people are actually paying for. I feel an obligation, but much of the reasoning is abstract.
How many words do you have in total? Is it possible to record most or some of them?

90M is a lot; maybe we could work something out? :)
You can find essays from AWS users who swear it would be prohibitive--financially and mentally--to ever switch.

And you can find essays of people who run their own rack who swear the same thing about moving to AWS.

I worked at an all-AWS bay area startup that ran a $100k/mo Amazon bill, and now I work at a bay area startup that runs all its own hardware.

It's about tradeoffs. It's not just about cost. (Though there are many cases where Amazon is cheaper and it has little to do with your monthly spend, and certainly not an arbitrary threshold like $3k/mo.)

Writing this at the close of my employer's Open Enrollment period, I'd say this: Comparing AWS with running your own hardware is like trying to compare two health insurance plans. Each brings its own seemingly impossible tradeoffs. All you can do is bring your experience and judgment to identify core issues, make the best call you can, and suppress the urge to dream of the road not taken when you're knee deep in whatever hell you're experiencing that would be a non-issue if only you had went the other way.

Though if you loathe the AWS "fanboyism" so much then maybe it's the company you're keeping: Few currencies in a startup are as valuable as flexibility. The younger the startup, the truer that is.
Thanks! We use WP Engine to host the site, which they have a pretty nice system set in place to host WordPress. They have a page on their system architecture here: http://wpengine.com/our-infrastructure/

Basically, it just comes down to caching in a brilliant way. But other than that, we did not do anything special to WordPress itself.
Great job fellas!
No. Big data has a formal definition, but one that most people ignore:

When the size of the data becomes part of the problem.

(An O'Reilly author said this once, I forget his name.)

For example, physicists in the 80's who had 10s of MBs of data had a big data problem.

Nowadays, this typically means out-of-core data sets.
Ask any STEM undergrad what they think about the job prospects of their humanities peers.

This isn't a something that is really up in the air until you go through it and see how it worked out. Employment statistics are easy to find and are practically shoved down your throat when applying to colleges. Jokes about art students and coffee shops are now so strongly a part of popular culture that we see them in television advertisements.

There is a very large portion of the population that seems to have pretty crystal clear forward-looking vision with these things, and that's not a matter of luck but rather awareness.

In some situations the decision will only clearly bad in hindsight. Perhaps people looking to be lawyers or teachers a few years ago got legitimately blindsided. I think these cases are the exceptions that prove the rule though.
Patenting Software - Obama Administration Argues "Sometimes"
A lot of libertarians respect Marx. In general, he had a good understanding of the problems of a capitalist society and bad solutions to those problems.

If you are talking about his vision and insights, like oscilloscope, you get respect. If you espouse socialism, you don't.
> You can put as many img tags as you want, with any
format that you like, today. If your visitors support
the formats you're emdedding you're good to go

Hmmm, If I put multiple image tags with various formats that may or may not work on different browsers I'll get lots of broken image boxes on my page. Not quite "good to go" I think. No?

> Most users who don't run their own servers also don't know
a thing about image formats

Really? I suspect that very few web designers know how to run a server but all of them know the differences between .png, .gif, .jpg and now whatever is needed for HD-DPI
Sublime Text with the Solarized Dark theme, love it.
This is a flawed analogy in its magnitude, but not its spirit:

"Stores are free to block me from access if they detect I'm stealing, there will be no hard feelings."

Ok, but it's still wrong to steal, isn't it? Somewhere there's somebody actually paying out of pocket for whatever website you're using.
Education and the surrounding social structure is basically a bioreactor for ideas. I know this is HN, but the blatant disregard for how the humanities effect the enjoyability of your life is vulgar.

Why should we not allow people to devote their life to historical studies? Why should we look down at those whose studies may inspire the simstim visions of our great-grand-children?

Society is creating enough wealth to ensure the pursuit of knowledge for those who wish to undertake it. And pursuit of knowledge is a more driving force for economic growth than any subsidy, any tariff.

"The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed."
Would some sort of ccache style solution be appropriate?
There are a lot of very entitled comments to this post. I have a feeling that many of those commenters have never experience true hardship. It's easy for such a person to overlook the myriad of advantages they have and have no conception of the difficulties faced by people without them.

Before making the typical ignorant "you have the power to change your life" or "stop being lazy" comment ask yourself how much do you really know about what the bottom 10% of society life is like. This question itself has issues of course, one of which is that many people do not know how little they know. Spend some time ding a little research online. Several interesting stories came out during the run up to last US election. Typically of conservatives whose idealogical world view proved inadequate when they ran into real people with real problems.
Fewer downvotes if oscilloscope can explain why "capitalism" (or specifically let's say the US implementation) raised median wages for a period and then, didn't.

I haven't read Marx, but if you two have, then maybe you can explain what feature of the Immiseration thesis is acting here, what changed when in the economic or political landscape, etc., in order to correspond with the evidence.

On the broad whole, over multiple generations, "capitalism" seems to have been good for workers: http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lzdx1tJidd1qc38e9o2_500.pn... (via @delong)

---------

As far as the crisis theory goes: is it true that workers' wealth was destroyed more than let's say upper-middle-class to upper class wealth? Stock prices declined a lot more than home prices in 2009. (Important because the medium and lower quantiles' wealth is mostly the house—but higher quantiles own liquid assets like stock shares. Some of the lower quantiles also have pensions coming to them; pension funds invest in equities and bonds and CDO's and other things. I don't know if pension funds experienced a greater hit than, let's say, hedge funds (which only take top-quantile money).) So in order to justify that "the workers" lost more wealth than "the rich" (who, obviously, have more to lose)—I'd want to see some numbers on decline in home values versus other assets, as a start.
Cincinnati?

Forgetaboutit. The job offers you'll receive will tear your soul appart and will make you question your abilities and sanity.

There is pushing paper and bits at P&G, soulless jobs at 5/3 bank await you. Swing by Lexis Nexis in Dayton they'll teach you to translate court records in strange formats using their own home grown language (that you not find any use for outside of those walls) to be added to their mainframes. They didn't want me apparently because I wasn't robotic enough and objected to coming in on Saturdays if they need me.

It is just not a tech area. I've been there and the best advice is to just leave. Pick a coast, or some people suggest Chicago, Minnesota if you want something closer. Heck Texas is better too.

Sorry to be negative but I've been there and the best advice I got was to leave and it worked out pretty well.
Awesome portrait photo retouching (+ tutorials)
I like your points in general and agree but with regard to this statement:

"it's the story of an entrepreneur."

I think there is a big difference. The life of an entrepreneur doesn't have anywhere near the echo chamber that is on the web especially with regards to tech and silicon valley (and as the OP says "Initially it was everything you read on Hacker News"). Yesterday in fact on HN there were all sorts of high fives over a list of "30 under 30" of dubious origins (no mention of the "expert" judges that picked them). PG was right up there with the congrats as well on that.

Back in the day, we had articles in Inc. Magazine (the 80's) and some people read "Entrepreneur" and there was an article here and there in the local newspaper and it was probably more about someone who worked hard then got lucky. I was actually featured in one of those articles and of course it was 7 day a week work as well as luck. But it was definitely not "hit out of the ball park" like you read about today. (I was able to buy a Mercedes at 25 iirc and that was back when they were not as ubiquitous). So there were much less dreamers and more realistic people that entered entrepreneurship then you have now.
One of the NYTimes commenters made a good counterpoint to this: just because you have family with a home does not mean moving in with them is a viable option -- said family may be drug addicts, violent, mentally ill, abusive, or manipulative.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/19/us/since-recession-more-yo...
that would be really great. I'm working on my first meteor app, building a real time project management collaboration app (old app at taskup.com written in PHP), and I would love to use firebase for real time data integration.
plug: beta at taskup.meteor.com
Get a cheap thinkpad off of ebay (t4xx/t5xx) and put linux on it, use the rest for buying textbooks, pen/paper and what you don't spend on that save for emergencies/get health insurance. Then learn how to program, python is a good start with MIT 6.0x classes.
This, 1000x times. I have over 1200 posts on my blog http://paulstamatiou.com and I've purposefully avoided stuff like pagination, related posts (lsi) at the end of articles, tags/category pages and other features due to slow time. I'm at about 60s on my Macbook Air now which I can deal with.

But when I'm writing a blog post and I constantly want to preview it in the browser (since lots of my posts have images and such I prefer seeing the real layout than purely in sublime text 2) I use a rake task I have that stashes every post but the one I'm working on so it only generates the one post.

Edit: and a faster generation time means I don't have to feel bad using lots of liquid filters / includes (which can help clean things up and organize my site).

Two things I'd like to see (which I've had to fork my jekyll for) and that I'll put on the github:

- "multiviews" support (it's how I get all my links to have no .html ending, well that and some rack:rewrite rules)

- support for different post types that are not in the main site.posts. I only have 2 types now but for a while had a regular post, a shorter "aside" style post that was not in the main feed nor homepage and had its own index and feed, and another post type for photos. These go beyond just different layouts. Though this is more of a CMS feature than a blog feature which may be a direction thing that Jekyll is not intended for. ?
Why Google Has Too Much Control Over Your Private Life
I guess it is the attitude and the culture maybe. It is closer to midwest than to the east coast. Add a little mix in of the fun from the south from Kentucky.
There's also HSA (although still taxed in California you'll still avoid federal taxes) which is tax deferred and if used for qualified medical expenses you'll never pay federal tax. After age 60 it can be drawn down on similar to an IRA. (Has the caveat that it to maintain an HSA you need to be on a HDHP, which for a healthy 20 something is probably a reasonable choice).
If they can't make the effort to call/text, then why do you even have them as a 'friend'?
Show hn : DIY - sit | stand | away - laptop workstation
cost ~$100, consists of 2x4's, shelving standards, hinges, thick wire, clamps, high tolerance for poor skills!
> On waiting to be hired: if market doesn't need my skills I can either wait for market to change... or I can work on my skills.

True. However, it is impractical to learn many valuable skills from a library (particularly a busy library where regular access to a computer is unlikely). A library is really good at one thing in particular - teaching you to think. It's not so good at teaching you to weld, to be an EMT, a dental assistant, or even to be a secretary. All of things require either a employer willing to teach you as they pay you (which is sadly uncommon anymore), or some form of formal education (which costs money).

I'm not saying that you should give up and not work on your skills, I'm just pointing out that it's not that easy.

> Parent post concludes with similar thought as yours: maybe he was just luckier at birth. Being better educated, feeling smarter and more driven might all be consequence of that.

It probably doesn't hurt. It's also easy to look on hardships you have not personally endured and say "If you only did this..."
Hehe, it's my favorite! Solarized Dark is a beast in the terminal too.
For me it is the single biggest feature addition. Just changing one file would require rebuilding the entire site in Jekyll. Something similar to a Makefile should be in place, which can track dependencies and rebuild only the affected files.
I have experimented with all those approaches,but the only one that works for me is reading a programming book that has lots of problems to solve.
Data is the engine of online markets and has become, indeed, a new asset class.

-- Interesting sound bite.
The blogosphere will always make things sound worse than they are. But was it really that exaggerated this time. I don't think there intentions were as bad as it came off, but they made a huge mistake. There response was honestly not all that fast considering the instant shit storm this caused. If a million users complain about something immediately after it hits the feeds, and it takes them literally hours to say much of anything about it, there's an issue. The apology was not heartfelt, it wasn't sincere, and came off far more like like, "we're sorry you didn't understand."

I think instagram/facebook should be able to monetize, but I think today marks a gigantic mistake in their history, they went down in myspace fashion. Users dropping like flies, the amount of traffic on services like instaport.me and http://freethephotos.com/ is phenemonal.

In other news, flickr came back from the grave.
Derek Powazek - I’m Not The Product, But I Play One On The Internet
You must talk to different libertarians than I. Most of them haven't read him.

Marx actually did not espouse 'socialism.' He referred to an 'lower stage of communism,' and was incredibly critical of the utopian socialists of his time.
Analysing Github Commits
My parents paid for everything I directly consumed for the first 20 years (besides my meager earnings from jobs), except for my public schooling, which is paid for by their property taxes rather than federal taxes. I owe them a debt much more than I owe the government for the things directly consumed.

I imagine that this is how it works for many middle class families - children generally aren't large marginal consumers of Federal resources, unless I'm missing something significant. Their healthcare certainly isn't that significant (generally some antibiotics and vaccines), and is generally covered by private insurance.
Probably not. I don't think that in the large that helps with readability / maintainability. Even in the small, I find languages which don't allow forward references (Ruby, sh) rather annoying. It forces relatively insignificant implementation details to be read first, rather than starting with the big picture of what the program does.
Would you call a local radio station with say 10k regular listeners mass media?
I find this funny.
It's a time-weathered rhetorical device, and probably wouldn't be effective if it weren't also somewhat offensive. Although responding to the device is... unusual.
tl;rd: We're not selling your pictures, just using them for our own ads.
I don't get it. Why not just learn Hive (it's SQL), or use python with Hadoop.
It's when you use more than 2 computers to make a chart.
It's significant because that's the point at which the govt is getting more than you for your work. That's why it feels wrong to many, and is not just like any other number.
They know and they don't care. It's not a customer's prerogative to worry about how a company makes money. As much as people like Instagram, if it disappeared or went under, people would move on and forget about it. I would say that the onus is on the company to find a way to monetize that does not insult, mislead, or deride their users.
I am a Python programmer yet Jekyll is still my preferred static blog generator. I strongly considered Pelican but did not like all the magic it came with. Pelican would consolidate all my blog posts to the same location and had various (configurable) directory conventions that I would've to follow.

I needed just a simple compiler which converts markdown to html while retaining the structure of the site. Ideally, what need not be processed should be left as is. This gives developers like me a lot of flexibility to design a site.

Jekyll has not been updated for a long time but it still serves my needs quite well. I hope future releases would support minification and preprocessors like Coffeescript.
> I haven't read Marx,

If you haven't read Marx, then I'm not interested in having this discussion with you, sorry. It'd take far too long to even get basic terminology straight. Here is a copy of the "Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie" which introduced this theory: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/

Or maybe Capital I, which develops it (and the rest of Marx's ideas and provides his critique of capitalism) here: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ David Harvey's lectures are a great guide if you decide to give it a read: http://davidharvey.org/reading-capital/

Plenty of online forums are more than happy to provide you with a basic outline of Marx's theories, including /r/communism101 and /r/debatecommunism.

> is it true that workers' wealth was destroyed more than let's say upper-middle-class to upper class wealth?

I will point this out though: this question does not make sense in a Marxist analysis. There is no 'middle class' or even 'upper class,' these are vulgar economists' terms.
He isn't just "in publishing", he frequently writes about legal topics for the Verge. For example, he covered the Google v. Oracle and Apple v. Samsung trials in great detail. However, if you're curious as to why he made the career choices he did, you can always ask him directly: https://twitter.com/reckless

I have no reason at this point to doubt his judgment, as he is clearly quite a capable individual, as he has managed to become the managing editor of one of the top tech news sites in an industry bursting with competition and upstarts.
Where are you getting those numbers? Not saying you're wrong, just curious. A quick look online shows ~18k federal, ~6k CA, and ~6K SS + medicare, which is 30%ish
Ghshephard nailed it, as usual.
Its hard to imagine unix without vi; I didn't realise there was a time when it wasn't there.
I work on Tcl, Perl and shell scripting for Windows and Linux environments, to automate semiconductor chip design over networks.

It's part electrical engineering (my background), part OS-level scripting, part data-parsing, and I'm enjoying the cross-domain development very much as it seems to encourage thinking about problems from multiple angles and levels of abstraction.
This write-up explores the ways that internet business models, and companies' respect for users, are governed by factors more complicated than just "if you’re not paying, you are the product”.
If we can reach 10% of the speed of light in a few hundred years, maybe at that time we can have one-way missions like the suggested Mars trips now.

Such a trip might require a fusion power source though.
very simple - eliminate the tax advantages of assorted non-wage benefits

yummyfajitas, that may shift compensation more towards wage/salary rather than benefits. What is it going to do about the unemployed youth?
Perhaps they could profess that devotion without taking out student loans and drowning in debt? Like, you know, by checking out books on historical studies at their local libraries, and enjoying them every evening?
The World Only Cares About What It Can Get from You
if you haven't read…

Surely you can answer my question why the wages went up and then down.

oscilloscope posted a part of Marx's theory that's hopefully topical and has some insight to share with those of us who haven't yet set aside the time to read something long. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me to want to discuss that.

harvey

Thanks for the references, I will keep them in mind. I love video lectures.

There is no 'middle class' or even 'upper class,' these are vulgar economists' terms.

OK, all I intended was rough percentiles. Let's say the 30th–60th percentiles are "all house", 60th–99th are "house and equities", and >99th may be invested in a hedge fund. Speaking of the USA.

I don't mean to imply some unified psychology to a social class, or anything like that.
Tell me about your life. Supportive parents? Good school? College paid for? I can't imagine anyone other than a person who's definition of adversity includes "having to study really hard" making a post so sickeningly lacking in basic human empathy.
A take on Instagram's new ad policy

I mean its not bad. I agree with your original statement that I too, don't know the majority of people who post stuff to HN in general, and I don't have issues with that. However, when someone submits a name in the title, I expect it to be a name that is relevant or something I would consider important. Names like Marc Andreesen or whoever makes a lot of sense. Wil Wheaton, not so much. Of course thats personal opinion.

That said, even with blog posts by Marc Andreesen, you don't see stuff like "<insert name>: title". That sorta irks me. Personal problem, I know.