skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a naive view, with inaccuracies in at least one of the "facts" it claims to be wrong. It's what I would call a level 2 grad student view. Level 1 - you believe every research article you read and everything your advisors tell you, and you glom onto one area or viewpoint in particular without considering alternatives. Level 2 - you reject everything that isn't in line with your viewpoint. I've seen professors stuck at level 1 and 2. Level 3 - you start to see what's 'right' and 'wrong' (and more useful or less useful) about everything you learn.

Consider this "fact" from the article, which has no citation whatsoever:

"Increased K-12 spending and lower pupil/teacher ratios boost public school student outcomes."

Which the author claims is "wrong."

Actually the evidence suggests that it is right, although the effect of class size alone may be small. And it is not just a matter of how much an effect reducing class size has on learning, but also in what circumstances and to what extent. And even with these "facts", it doesn't mean that big classes are inherently always "bad" and useless - MOOCs are still quite useful even though 90% of students don't finish them. And large class lectures actually could be made more effective if given after (not before) a lab or other interactive learning activity. But a wealth of research has showed how one on one tutoring is generally the most effective method of teaching (which also directly contradicts the author's assertion that reducing class size has no effect).

http://www.districtadministration.com/article/does-class-siz...
http://www.ppta.org.nz/index.php/-issues-in-education/class-...
Not going to happen. Not now or ever. Why?

* trust. People don't trust google with their data after a few major fuckups. The same goes for all cloud providers.

* hard to control information flow.

* absolutely worthless support

* features are not comparable.

* cost aggregated over 5 years is more. People use office licenses forever - literally 10+ years.

* legal and regulatory issues.

* PATRIOT act which at least for us European customers throws the safe harbour scheme out of the window.

* Training and fungibility. People are used to mashing word and excel and those people are easily replaceable.

* Availability. Businesses require better availability than your average internet connection but don't want to pay for a better one.

I can't see any reasons to actually use it other than a short term cheap out and the false pretense of lowering support costs.
I am Italian (hey Volpe :-D), but I lived in the US for a little while.

I understand that what made American great is its ability to use talent from other countries, honestly US does NOT have the best scientists or engineers but it offer to the best mind the opportunities to shine, opportunities that we don't have in my country.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4967533

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/24/laws-of-physics-can...

"“When you look at physics, it’s all about laws and how the world works,” he told me. “But if you don’t tie those laws into a much bigger purpose, the purpose in your heart, then they are going to sit there and ask the question ‘Who cares?’"
Local mirrored copies of all files on separate hard drive. Bank safety deposit box with bluray discs of files for long-term storage, things that rarely change (my photography work alone is several TBs). Rapidshare (using 3TB right now for the same $8 a month, I accept it's not the most reliable place if a Megaupload situation ever happened). Skydrive for my important documents and programming work. Small program I wrote makes the Rapidshare/Skydrive backups incremental and encrypted on a regular schedule.
I hire on odesk regularly ( over 4100 hrs ). I would not hire based on the English structure used in your question. I don't think you would be able to communicate successfully. So personally not much.

So improve the English or find the subset of jobs that do not require English. (apologies for English being such a pain to learn)
Show HN: How to test javascript with QUnit
If I want a copy of an album, I can go to iTunes/Amazon/etc. and download the copy they offer, in a format I don't really want, encoded at 256kbps or similar. I have no idea what happened behind the scenes; which version of the album I'm downloading, what the source material was, how it was transferred from the source to their systems, so on and so forth.

Alternatively, I can go to a not-so-legitimate website, and be presented with 10+ different versions of the same album (originals, remastered editions, reissues, international releases, vinyl rips, etc.), each of which is typically available in all the popular formats (FLAC, MP3 320kbps, V0, V2, etc.)

I can plump for the FLAC, along with which I will often get high resolution scans of the source material, as well as a LOG file to verify the veracity of the copy. If I want to re-encode it, I'm free to do as I please.

Then to top it off, the legal services have the audacity to charge as much as a physical copy of the CD. I despair...
"The Forever War" by Joe Haldemann. Possibly the best science fiction I ever read!

"The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" and its video lectures[1]. Highly recommended!

[1]: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...
I must admit I didn't think this would be news. I only turned it off because (in the grand scheme of things) no one was using it. It would not be a huge deal to resurrect it but it just wasn't making any sense by the numbers so I turned it off to focus solely on my newsletter publishing business :-) (A bit like 37signals with Sortfolio, except coder.io wasn't making a penny ;-))

If enough existing users are bothered by the shutdown, I could look into re-enabling it in January.
Which is my point exactly. I didn't say Europe is "better", if anything it was more savage; but that had high costs and many lessons. The US still thinks you can dominate the world and get away with it. Well nuh-uh.
You can almost always extract more from your current employer (if you haven't been doing so), you just need to demonstrate the passion and will to do different things. If you do chances are you will get some more opportunities - if not then it really is a dead end and you should move on. The biggest mistake you can make at any job is to not learn or take away anything from it. Sometimes you just have to ask for what you want.

Jobs should be more than a paycheck. You exchange your time/effort for growing/learning. Both parties are aware of it and should act accordingly. If one party is not living up to the bargain it's time to find a new partner.
That is also the case for pthread mutexes and posix semaphores.
"state mandated severance pay packages... a direct attack to start ups"

While it's true that many startups fail, I wouldn't go so far as to say severance pay is an attack. You can fire someone with two weeks notice in Spain, paying 33 days of severance for every year paid (used to be 45). AND take home salaries are usually lower.

What is done in practice, to compare worker compensations across countries, is to factor that into the salary equations, it means that workers are a lot more expensive than what the take home salaries might imply, but consider:

Employee A at an US startup has a take home salary of US$ 75.000 will cost US$ 100.000 or so to the employer per year.

Employee B at a Spanish startup has a take home salary of US$ 56.000 (43.000 euros), and it will cost US$ 100.000 or so to the employer per year :) , factoring in severance, healthcare, social security and other benefits.

As jordinl and others stated, most European countries have a three-month trial period for employees as well (edit: and it can be renewed, making the hypothetical 6-months-in non-performer as easy to fire as in the US).

So, an European employee is usually NOT more expensive than an U.S. employee, it requires different considerations (and setting aside money for severance & stuff). It probably is a lot more bureaucratic, but that's it (on the other hand, there are a lot less lawsuits). If the reason for moving into Europe was cheaper salaries, bad luck, but if the reason was an unexplored market, it should work out.

Edit: I do agree that there are some strong laws against beginning your startup in a garage, but the physical location shouldn't be a problem.

About starting a new company: you can buy a pre-made company for 150 euros in Madrid, and probably the rest of Europe, with most of the paperwork solved for you. There are plenty of programs for helping new startups get off the ground (depends on the country, some are more progressive like Finland)
Reverse Network Effects: Why our large social networks may soon implode
Notwithstanding something exceptionally rare, why the need to back up FLACs on S3?

I back up my music collection locally, and I have double-redundancy of sorts (it's backed up to a RAID 5 array on a file server, so in theory it could withstand the failure of the original drive and one of the back up drives), but if worst comes to worst I could just acquire everything again.

With a couple of exceptions they're just lossless copies of widely available music recordings...
Do you have any links to peer-reviewed journal articles that conclude beyond any possible doubt that we're not hard-wired in any way for religion? If not, do you believe it simply because it's a comforting assertion that fits in well with your world view? And isn't believing something without evidence simply because it's comforting rather...religious?
I'm more afraid of my government than I am of al Qaeda.
Money Quote:

One would expect that the bigger the network, the more value users derive from it.

However, as networks scale, the value for users may drop for several reasons:

Connection: New users joining the online community may lower the quality of interactions and increase noise/spam through unsolicited connection requests.

Content: The network may fail to manage the abundance of content created on it and may fail to scale the curation of content created and the personalization of the content served to users.

Clout: The network may get inadvertently biased towards early users and promote them over users who join later.
Been in both situations and IMO I would recommend Android, especially for a startup. Remember, release fast, release often is today's mantra and this simply cannot be done with Apple.
I mean, you'll lose a whole month of Apple bureaucracy before having the least hintch that your app fails because of some bug in your live setup. Small details which you can't sand off when you have those LONG release cycles.
Because of this I've always seen Android apps evolve much more faster and provide meaningful feedback from day one after the first beta release.
With Apple you can't have a beta release, nothing can go wrong, everything has to be perfect the first time.
For example, right now we have in both stores the same app with version 1.1.1 for iOS and 4.3.2 for Android. The IOS one is using the first version of our backend API while the Android one has forced the API to change four times because of business needs which have made the app evolve.
So basically, we release an MVP for IOS which is there, idle. And we have an Android app which is evolving fast, is providing cohort data, feedback, business models and new ideas are being developed only for it. I would have waited after three or four android releases before going the IOS way.
Your site seems to display any arbitrary html sent via email. So it will load flash, javascript, honour meta redirects to other sites, etc. Try running it through https://emailprivacytester.com/

E.g: https://receiveee.com/1QQGEpdt/908
From the article:

"Update: You can simply rename the .m4p extension to .m4a and the file will play fine."

No DRM whatsoever.
Great with competition, regardless what you think of them. I hope this means we'll see a Google where users don't have to use Hacker News to get customer support.

It seems weird that Microsoft still haven't implemented two-factor authentication for Outlook.com. Maybe Yahoo will beat them to it.
Simple Advice, On Advice
I've avoided learning touch typing because a few people I know who learned it early have RSIs now. I know my sample size is low and I have no scientific evidence, but the concern has been just enough to keep me from pursuing it over the years.
Genearal
The work ethos is different as well, europeans tend to regard extreme outliers in wealth as extreme outliers, less as role models.

I think part of these stems from the fact that some of the extreme outliers in europe (in terms of wealth or political power) often inherited their wealth. Whereas the USA has the attitude that "This is America, the land of oppertunity, where an illiterate immigrant can step off the boat in ellis island and if he works hard enough, he can own a skyscraper in Manhatten". Whereas, in Europe, there are many people who inherited their wealth. There is also a much more noticable class system.

Strong employee rights comes from blue collar people who, being aware of the class system, do not believe that they will ever be mega rich, and hence fought for more rights & laws for themselves.

(Not to say either 'meme' is correct, I'm just pointing out what people think, which informs what they think.)
Comprehensive Google Analytics Advanced Segments Template Collection
But then the opposite side is "ea_spouse" in the USA....
Are you suggesting backing them up on pirate music sites?
Does Spotify have access to "entire album only" tracks?
Zarafa works wonderfully and is a snap to setup.

Edit:

Here are the docs for the latest 7.1 branch: http://doc.zarafa.com/7.1/

And here is the link to the community (open source) section of their site:
http://community.zarafa.com/
The danger is that many people will have very little power to make a real choice, resulting in more powerful businesses being taking advantage of them.

That's the attitude that informs how & why that law was written.
This should be mentioned when we have people saying, in response to gun control, "Demand a plan! It's already too late; we need to do /something/".

Doing "something", something which the security state crowd had ready in '96, is what got us the PATRIOT act and the TSA.

The strong anti-gun crowd is trying to wage a slow war against gun ownership that would result in an Australia-like confiscation of weapons and the repeal of the 2nd amendment. Don't let the "do somethings" win again.

/rare political post on HN
"The war on terror isn't about preventing death, it's about preventing fear."

That's a good one.
Should You Trust App Store Reviews?
This probably depends on the juristiction, but I strongly doubt it's that easy to get around employee law like that. Often the laws are written to basically say "Person A is an employee if they do a type of work for pay etc. etc.", regardless if they have a "labour contract" vs "civil contract".

If it was that easy, then all companies would do it.
Not advocating copyright infringement, nor was I suggesting that in particular.

That would be a viable back up strategy, though. Have a rare copy of a recording? Make it widely available, then if your copy is destroyed, the odds of you being able to acquire an identical copy again are much improved.
China opens world's longest high-speed rail route (2,298km - 35 stops)
Isn't this something the market will mostly take care of

Only if there is a perfectly functioning market. Which there often isn't in many cases. Hence the laws.
Question for business owners/founders: how do you feel about people signing up for your services with these throwaway email addresses?

On the one hand, I respect people's privacy and right to use whatever email address they like.

On the other (more relevant) hand - I sometimes need to contact users who violate terms and conditions that their access may be switched off (I'd never do this without contacting them 2-3 times). Also, I might need to inform them that something has changed which might affect their usage. My service can be quite integral to a lot of apps, so to me that's an important feature...

Thoughts?
No Budget Budget: Pay Important Bills on Time, Every Time - Without Budgeting
statsd: Simple daemon for easy stats aggregation
is elitism really the right word? it sounds like you're mad at something and using the word "elitist" because it's the first thing that comes to mind.

what i would suggest doing is sitting down and thinking very carefully about what has happened and what annoys you. make a list on paper if that's the way your brain works. tease out all the details and your emotions.

i would guess, if you do that, that (1) you'll see that the "elitist" part is largely emotional related to how you feel and (2) that you can actually some real problems at a lower level (like being rude, or lazy, or incorrect, or not giving credit, or whatever). once you have more detailed lower level problems you can think about how to address those.

tldr - "elitist" is an emotional "catch-all" phrase that isn't helping you or anyone else here. you need to do some work and think through in more detail what happened. once you do that you'll have a clearer idea how to continue.

tldrtldr - only once you see things clearly can you fix them.
To my mind the two-space rule still applies when you are writing text to be displayed in a mono-space font. Otherwise, one space, yes. This unfortunately means you need different habits for the two environments, unless the software compensates somehow.
Mahout on Windows Azure - Machine Learning with Microsoft HDInsight
I honestly like the album format. But then, that's because most artists I really like tend to have coherent albums that are best listened to as a whole(eg, Pink Floyd or Dream Theater). I agree that for most music the album format doesn't make sense. But for some, a set of 5 minute singles just doesn't do it for me, I like longer pieces that all tie in together.
Contribute to open source projects. As soon as you have commit access to gcc, you will be making at least $200k+ year, hehe.

But seriously, devote sometime to create your image, whether writing open source or giving presentations. It's good and it makes you more skillful. I actually love writing OSS, even more than money.

A good freelance job offer usually COMES to you. The one I've been working to I've got from a HN spreadsheet. I contribute to one of the libraries that they used internally in the project so... they accepted me at first sight.

I don't have your amount of experience and I make ~$40/h(which is low by market's standard!). Having good communication skills and being able to let your client have almost no overhead from managing you can clearly be VERY VALUABLE. It's actually the employer's dream to find someone like this.

I've also worked with bad freelance jobs: didn't pay me in time, codebase was shitty and so on. I advise you to drop ship and look for something else. I have pleasure when I work

Aim to be a contractor bringing way more on the table than just flipping bits skills. :-)
I'm not certain about it but I think debts from criminal offenses are not cleared on personal bankruptcy

Not all debts can be cleared by bankruptcy in the USA AFAIK. I don't think you can clear college tutition fees with bankrupcty.
> I think as scientists and engineers it's extremely important we separate the empirical facts from the political propaganda.

Right but a single anecdote about your own car doesn't move the conversation forward. It sounds like you may know more on this subject than most, give us some details and sources.
Interesting, it gives Apple nothing and serves to fuel the "post-Jobs Apple turns to shit" buzz.
Agreed. Ireland is 7 years I think (though it's being reduced). UK might be 1 year.

To think of it from another perspective, harder bankruptcies mean that your debtors are not able to escape from their debts as easy. Surely that's a good thing for a business?
Also, Stock options are mostly at least in Silicon valley an excuse for a company to get away with paying less to their employees. Another excuse is to use them as a way of saying "It is your company so suck it up and do X" where X might be work 18 hours a day to anything. Classic case of misleading vividness [1] of stellar performance of a fraction of the startups causing this phenomenon to spread.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misleading_vividness
Neither "So I asked the Doctor Parent should we conduct the confirming test?" nor "So I asked the Doctor. Parent should we conduct the confirming test?" are gramatical in the first place, and there are much better ways of clarifying what is intended than single or double space after the period. Having said that, I have no doubt that an example where both options are gramatical - and possibly even plausible! - could be found.
I am very experienced. Re: the number of "outsiders" - not as big a deal as you might believe. Good lawyering helps.

Its better to be considerate and balanced. The cliff only exists to protect against bad hiring decisions, 6 months is plenty enough time to figure out that someone is a bad fit.

You are correct about shares not being a very good tool for motivating people. Your suggestions about salary or sign-on bonuses are actually worse because that takes away from the working capital.
Ubiquitous Programming with Pen and Paper
You're asking the wrong question, my friend.

Don't blame the CRUD for all the bullshit that is often associated with it.

(Reminder: CRUD stands for Create Retrieve Update Delete, and is the underlying philosophy for the database applications that run the world we live in, the 90% of the iceberg that most hackers never see or even think about.)

I've been doing CRUD for 33 years and it's been an incredible ride. I credit my CRUD work for putting me in the right hand 5% of that bell curve, ahead of the rest of my fellow hackers who have built so little of substance.

Sure, I've built apps that move people and things to the right place, and also have done a lot of "reports here, manage documents here, upgrade calender software here", but what job doesn't have some crap work go to along with the gravy? I've never seen any good job without it's share of maintenance, refactoring, testing, process, and meetings with drones.

I've also build software that generates other software, invented new frameworks, and devised algorithms that dramatically improved the way we make and build and move the stuff that's probably in your cubicle right now. I've taken cool academic theory from my pure mathematical background to build software that has blown away the posers everywhere around me. And you know what? You do that just once, and every champion in the enterprise runs to you with their giant budgets to solve their CRUD problem du jour with your "genius".

Believe me, you don't have to work at "Intel, Google, Apple, or NASA" to "change the world". You're just as likely to be a cog in the wheel at those places as anywhere else.

You can change the world from where ever you're at, and in fact, if you're working on a CRUD app, I think you're actually in a better position to do it. You just have to ask a better question.

My suggestion: "How to you escape the shackles and bullshit of your CRUD job and use all those great resources in your head to turn that job on its side and change the world from right where you're at?"

Find the answer to that question. It may be easier than you think.
Illegal activity is okay if it's convenient? come on.

In the end, they created the product. Under US law, they have the right to sell it any way they like. They could charge $10000 per digital download and load it with DRM. If you don't like the rules, don't buy the product, that's the choice. But please don't play the victim and justify what you're doing with a "it's their fault for dressing too damn sexy".
Can some mod change the title? There's no DRM, only the file extension is different (.m4p instead of .m4a). While .m4p is usually used for DRM'ed files there appears to be no DRM in this case, you can simply rename the extension to .m4a and it'll play fine.

I have updated the post accordingly.
They have a complete enough library for 90% of the Internet population.