skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I got the same impression from a 3 word reply. If it was me and with that level of position in the company, I'd ask.

"I'm sorry, we were unable to fix the issue. [Ask them a probing question about their environment, or requests for video]."

Seems to me, the person left the already frustrated customer with very little else to say.
> Last year's buzzwords are this year's forgotten fancies.

Some of them, yes. A great many are not. Taking your "last year" to be poetic rather than literal: -gate is cliche, "meme" is totally a thing now, "my bad" has diffused into informal communication all over Anglophonia, lolcat-speak still has everybody's great-aunt snorting at her Facebook wall, texting acronyms are well-known to everyone, word truncation + s is on its way to becoming totes ubiqs, etc.

Not to mention you're using a pretty useless definition of "outdated" if it includes literally everything.
> am able to land $1.5K 2-bdrm houses in the east bay very easily

Unless you're talking Oakland/Concord or the hwy 4 corridor, I call shenanigans.
You forgot $300/month for a parking spot for your car.
Critical Java vulnerabilies confirmed in latest version
Someone had to do something to upset the status quo of paywalls and ignorance because it certainly wasn't going to happen from within the publishers. Increased scientific literacy and better science reporting due to the availability of the entire paper (and all the other papers that support or refute it) instead of a press release are greater goods than profit for Elsevier (which wouldn't be significantly affected by releasing historic papers anyway).
I found it funny that they claim that they help make Customer Service awesome.
I don't think the customers are assholes intrinsically - just sometimes say mean things.
This company seems thin skinned. I agree its best not allow abusive relationships with customer fester. However I don't agree that you should react to a customer blowing off steam the same way as a customer that is serially abusive.
Thanks a lot for taking the time to write it down for me!
Much appreciated :)

This makes much better sense to me now.
One premise the author stated is "cutting your spending rate is much more powerful than increasing your income". The idea seems to be that this both increases one's ability to save while also lowering the bar for current and future expenses. Many people could benefit from taking a hard look at their expenses and trying to find areas to cut.

That being said, taking this orientation has its limits. First, there is a floor to how much savings one can make on a given lifestyle. Additionally, the upside potential is limited if a lot of time and effort is spent on trimming expenses.

Some folks, especially the type of folks who frequent HN, have substantial opportunities to increase their income (e.g., through freelance work) that often suggest that increasing income is MUCH more powerful than cutting one's spending rate (I think patio11 has mentioned something like this). Often times the equivalent of one or two hours of tech consulting can cover the cost of many "unnecessary" conveniences that save one time and/or effort. Additionally, it's much more scalable -- that is, the upside of saving more of an increased income frequently has more upside potential than cutting costs.

Of course, not everyone can do tech work, and even tech workers will probably need to adjust their spending to a lower level once they are on "fixed income", but I think these lines start to stray from the central issue.

As for startups, I think a holistic approach to assets and resources needs to be considered. Specifically, often the scarcest asset is founder time, so spending money to save founder time is often an <i>extremely</i> prudent choice to make in terms of adding value to the company.
Did you even read the overview of the study??

"Medication use decreased by 62% after the 14-month controlled trial"

8 years later there was no controlled study and 62% of the subjects stopped medication at 14 months! Doesn't the article sound extremely dishonest now?
Compared to the 1876 and 1888 elections, the 2000 election was pretty tame. I cannot even comprehend what would have happened if the "Compromise of 1877" had been repeated for the 2000 election.

I still think Fox screwed the country by calling Florida an hour before the polls on the panhandle closed. The voting margin in panhandle probably would have erased the dispute and allowed for an easier transition. That lack of a proper transition cost us in Asian politics (NK) and probably didn't help our readiness for 9/11.
sqlite3 ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.LaunchServices.QuarantineEventsV* 'vacuum'
Now that is has voice messaging, Facebook un-friends (aka blocks) Voxer
Stephen Fry's discussion on language and grammar pedants (https://youtube.com/watch?v=J7E-aoXLZGY).
> A better response might be "I need more information, because I can't get this problem to happen on my machine. Can you tell me more about exactly what you were doing when the problem happened?"

Definitely a better response. No excuse for the casualness of my tone - just reflective of my relationship with Jon (which at the time was more casual/familiar than with others)
But which is the cult, mustachianism or consumerism?
How does Wufoo store its forms?
By this I mean, what database technology do they use? Relational SQL type or json document type like mongodb? What sort of tables / columns?
Nexus 7 outsells the iPad market share in Japan
rolls his own linked list

Are you saying his implementation is bad, or are the available library linkedlists optimized in very special ways...?
Wow. I am always blown away by these sentiments. Ten years ago, in school, I lived, quite comfortably, on $1000 per month. That is $12K per year (you don't really pay taxes when your income is that low). I did not have a lot of spare cash, and I would not have wanted stay on that level forever, but I was comfortable. I never worried about paying for food or rent, and I could go out occasionally. When I got my first job at 40K, I felt wealthy.

I am now living on 80K in a city that is more expensive than New York, and I feel almost filthy rich:

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/economic-r...

Seriously, what do you people spend your money on that requires so damn much of it?
At our company we want only happy customers. Thus we're very liberal with giving refunds when we can't fix a customer's problem.

There's no sense in having someone being mad at you and your brand because of $30. And the interesting thing is that most of those customers back off from taking the refund and prefer to keep using the software omitting the not working parts.
People are happy to ignore questioning if living in the highest-demand locations in the entire country is really a reasonable and responsible use of money.

Apparently, irresponsible spending is only when others spend on things I don't value.
http://web3dblog.wordpress.com/2013/01/18/bkl-and-the-minecr...
Get a Fake Facebook Girlfriend for $20
That's one line from an interactive chat, not a flippant email or something...
> What do you find offensive exactly?

The lying?

"Medication use decreased by 62% after the 14-month controlled trial"

The study wasn't controlled for 8 years. The link to the study was linked by other people.
Bearing in mind that it was Boeing innovating by introducing lithium ion batteries (by subjecting them to a couple of hundred thousand hours of testing at their own expense) that caused the problem, I'm not sure what further risking their reputation with "Boeing puts the zero in being" Musk would prove. Desperation?
Ah yes, thanks. I'm so used to benchmarks being trivial that I keep forgetting that Octane contains full-fledged applications!
Fair point. We definitely have more trash though. So much of it. Frozen great mounds of snow-covered hepatitis in winter, and stinking black fermenting vessels full of distilled evil in the summer.
>I was quoted a little over 3% a month ago, and my credit is not the greatest.

You have to consider things like origination fees and points, though. Everybody thinks they're going to stay in their new house for decades, but the average is something like four years.
Frankly, you deserved what you got.
Facebook Cuts Off Access to Voxer
Completely agree. I used to love as a programmer selecting "Works for Me" from the dropdown on QA reports because in my mind it was like selecting "Fuck Off, Noob". Terse replies can come across wrong. Even, "can't replicate it yet..." would be much better as it shows you're willing to still try. Or "can't replicate it on my environment" because it means the customer has a valid complaint. "Cant replicate it" means you think the customer is explaining something wrong or is otherwise nuts.
Once you're in the SF/NYC scene with your job, you are kind of stuck because there are no houses to buy for $380k anywhere around you. So the fact that $1700 could pay a $380k mortgage is irrelevant, because that purchase can't happen. Also, where did you get the $95k+closing costs=$115k cash down to get that $380k mortgage if you're making $75k or less?
> Educated STEM people usually have a strong devotion to science, but science very often fails at revealing the truth

The article criticizes journalism for not properly reflecting science and scientific opinion, so it implicitly accepts science as the gold standard. I think the lesson is that there's more demand for scientific novelty and certainty than science itself can satisfy, so science journalism focuses on the conjecture, controversy, preliminary results, and premature conclusions that arise in the practice of science instead of focusing on the emergence of consensus among scientists. The job of a science journalist like Tara Parker-Pope or a pop science author/advocate like Gary Taubes is akin to the job of a prosecuting attorney: to tell a single story as compellingly as possible. The article is about cases where journalists succeed in telling a simple, intuitive, compelling story while science itself is telling a collection of messy, incomplete, counter-intuitive, and/or contradictory stories.

I know many "educated STEM people," but I don't know anybody who does any significant reading of scientific literature outside their field. I've read a lot of abstracts (and a few articles, when they're available) while trying to look one layer deeper than the news, but I don't have the background to understand a lot of what I read, and I've never gone to the library and reviewed dozens of related papers to get context for the paper I'm reading, like a real scientist would. Virtually every vote and consumer choice influenced by science is influenced through news media, science journalism, or classroom education, not by direct exposure to the work of practicing scientists.
My side project is based on this article. I was intrigued by the graph in this post and so I created an interactive chart to explore it. The calculator will tell you how quickly you can retire and what your savings rate needs to be.

http://networthify.com/calculator/earlyretirement
I've been waiting for an invite for more than a year. After a while I lost interest.
It is just an iPhone application, why name it as a startup?
At $20-$30 a month on coin-op laundry you are probably better off looking for full-service laundry that charges by the pound. Before I moved into a place with a washer/dryer of my own I was spending ~$10-$15 every two weeks (50 cents per pound) to drop a laundry basket full of cloths in the morning and pick it up perfectly folded later that day (took about 4 hours, but I would pick up in the evening).
well im not even sure its a drug company conspiracy... i mean it certainly benefits drug companies no doubt... but it also benefits government research scientists.... it benefits DeBeers mining company because they can blame workers illness from dust in mines on HIV instead of on the mining.... it benefits a countless number of lawyers... it benefits all the HIV clinics and their employees.... how about all the people in academia that "research" this stuff and receive NIH grants to do so? i mean the benefit is a lot more spread out than just being of benefit to drug companies.
> I have pledged to no longer do any volunteer work, including reviewing, for non-open access publications, which unfortunately includes pretty much every publication from [commercial-publisher].

The volunteer aspect of peer review is the worst part. How much is an expert's time worth? How much is a two-sentence review worth to an author? If it were paid on an hourly basis using an honor system, it would be fantastic for quality and consistency.

That closed journals ask for volunteer review makes it doubly bad. But I still believe paid review for open access journals would be a good thing. I know, it is an unrealistic fantasy.
This alludes to one of the key problems with central-bank managed credit: you don't get accurate price signals about how much real capital is currently available for investment.

The return on capital obviously does depend on the supply -- more supply should mean lower interest rates, exactly as you're describing, which is exactly what you want in order to keep the level of capital investment at a useful level, neither too high nor too low.

But when your dominant interest rates are chosen by committee and defended by central bank open market actions, all that price signalling doesn't happen. Investors of all kinds get false signals about the availability of capital throughout the economy, and you get clusters of malinvestment.
With sufficient thrust Boings fly just fine ...

(RFC 1925)
The earliest really large-scale instance of this occurred in 2001, when more than 30,000 researchers signed a letter boycotting any journal which didn't make articles open access within 6 months of publication. The boycott meant not reviewing for, editing for, or publishing in, any such journal. Signatories included many of the best-known scientists in the world. One of the authors of the boycott was Nobel Laureate Harold Varmus, who had just completed a term as Director of the US National Institutes of Health.

It's unclear how many of those researchers followed through on the boycott. Some did -- I've met many scientists who say they send letters similar to LeCun's. I've also met some who signed, but who now admit (often sheepishly) that they didn't follow through.

Text of the letter is here:

http://www.plos.org/about/what-is-plos/early-history/
Can't wait to see what devs build with this.
If there is not proven money to support infrastructure, then it won't be built, and to prove it with oil, requires pumping. People who build the infrastructure first in some grand plan fail at a pretty high rate (see the history of the USSR and some MN small towns that thought they would be bigger).
> This is why people with ADD often require external structure to keep them focused.

It's not so much about keeping focus it's the executive function part of it: keeping focused on the right thing. People with ADD can definitely focus, they just can't control it. That's why parents can easily dismiss it as lack of motivation. "he focuses just fine playing soccer" (a sport with adrenaline that gives results like stimulants)
I highly doubt the average car payment is anywhere near $150 a month. That's really low for even a lease, let alone actually trying to own it outright. And you're completely forgetting maintenance and repairs (oil, tires, batteries, lights, environmental checks, repairs). Even a modest car is probably at least $500 a month with everything added together, and from what I've seen, a lot of people can't make do with a modest car.

And then if you lose your job, you have no defined transportation expenses. Lose your job and you still owe all of that money for your car payment, insurance and whatever else.

And again, many of us are married. Needing multiple cars, gas, parking for two people (or additional cars for kids stuck in the middle of nowhere) starts to ad up.
I don't make that much compared to many of the other people posting in this thread, but having an automatic deduction of some significant-but-manageable amount going to a separate account is definitely a nice trick to play on oneself.
as I didn't intend it to offend at all

What on earth did you think it would do, make him jump for joy?

Especially since "it works for me" is standard helpdesk-speak for fobbing people off and closing their issues.

It didn't even occur to you to say "Sorry can't replicate it?"
12 year meditator here. You describe well the process of cleansing/polishing the memory.

> I found it impossibly hard to keep meditating on my own

Couple things to keep in mind:

1. Daily practice in some form is the real key. Just get up and do it.

2. There will be ups and downs, high and lows in meditation.

3. Vipassana is a pretty austere form of meditation. You are directly confronting the mind with little outside aid or warmup. Other forms of meditation leverage breathing techniques, concentration techniques and other practices that gradually bring the mind into submission, making the no-thought part somewhat more easy to achieve. Search around or shoot me an email if you want to know some other approaches.
I live in colombia. $75K/year make you RICH.

P.D: Despite what some can think, in Colombia the middle-class live well, no starvation or stuff like that. More or less US 14K/Year and you can live with other 3 persons in a very good place. If move to a town, then we are talking about be one of the "rich" guys around!

P.D. "Rich" is something like upper-class in USA. Obscene-Rich (jets, las vegas condo, etc) are very few....
Faster, Sooner: Why The U.S. Needs 'Gigabit Communities'
+1 and like! :-)
I remember a fun program from school. Pretty much, it was a maze solver.

Say you have a maze, and a mouse. The mouse, denoted by an uppercase 'M' character, starts out somewhere in the maze. The mouse has to find his way through the maze, to the end.

To add a bit of spice, say there's a piece of cheese at the end of the maze, denoted by the letter 'C'.

A maze would be stored in a file on disk, called something like "maze.dat." The file would be a normal text file, with a maze drawn out in simple characters.

Here's an example: http://pastie.org/5721807

(You can create a more simple / complex maze if you'd like, or maybe find one online.)

So, you've gotta figure out an algorithm that the mouse can use to find its way out.

Tip: be sure to handle the case where the mouse can't find a way out (yet) .. i.e. the infinite loop case.

I hope this helps. Have fun!

Edit: switched to pastie.org link since hn didn't format the maze properly.
That's the point though. I have around 2 hours of free time on the evenings, and I spend that time in the gym. I definitely do not have an additional 1-2 hours for meditation.

That said, gym is a very therapeutic experience for me. It helps me empty my mind of all stress-causing stuff in my life (e.g. work) and I get to focus on just one thing: lifting weights. I also gain additional benefits such as being strong as hell and looking great. ;)
Dell has some decent laptops with Linux pre-installed, Ubuntu:
http://content.dell.com/us/en/enterprise/d/campaigns/xps-lin...

There is also the M4700 which can be configured with up to 32GB RAM, matte full HD display, and Ubuntu/RHEL if you want more power (but less portability).

I like my M4500 very much, but they are a bit expensive unless they have a good promo.
FYI - you can also have 100,000 goroutines on a standard desktop without hitting resource problems (the go authors mentioned debugging a system in production that had 1.3 million). I doubt the same could be said for futures.
Wow, thanks for all the feedback here!

To be clear, my son is not at pre-school for the academics. We feel that it is important for him to experience a social atmosphere, and although he is ready to learn at a kindergarten or 1st-grade level, I don't know that putting him in a class with children much older than himself would be beneficial.

I've never felt there is "something wrong" with him, but it would be good if he could operate within the norms of a classroom.

I would like to homeschool, but my wife does not feel up to it. (I'm not putting her down at all, it's a big task and requires buy-in from both of us)

For academics, I continue to teach him at home interactively, and he also loves self-directed study.

The real difficulty for him is listening to the teacher, and not running around when he should be sitting, not screaming when he doesn't get his way, etc. At home, if he has something interesting to work on he can sit and concentrate easily for an hour or longer.
Good Software Project / Bad Software Project
Do this program in C:

https://bsd7.cs.sunysb.edu/~cse219/Handouts/homework_1.html
San Francisco Hacker News meetup – Thursday Jan 24
Hi Everyone,

I'm organizing an SFHN meetup this coming Thursday, January 24th. It will be at Founders Den at 665 3rd Street #150, San Francisco, CA 94107 from 6pm-8:30pm.

Drinks and snacks will be provided!

Please RSVP at http://sfhn2.eventbrite.com/

Thanks!

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Group Contact Info:

website : http://sfhackernews.com
facebook : https://www.facebook.com/groups/gosfhn
meetup : http://www.meetup.com/San-Francisco-Hacker-News-Meetup/

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HUGE thanks to our sponsors:

Founders Den : http://foundersden.com/
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Correction. The "cat-v considered harmful" mentality.
Please explain which gimmicks you think are currently active. Your knowledge of California budgets seems to be a few years dated. We've reformed a lot about the budget process in the last few years. Up to and including how many votes are needed.

There's a lot wrong in California, but a lot of people are barking up the trees from years ago instead of the ones that are real problems today.
I'd say figure out some projects that let you get familiar with different basic data structures(stacks, queues, linked lists, trees, graphs, hash tables etc), what they're useful for, and some of the basic algorithms that are useful to know for each.

A decent one for getting comfortable with graphs off the top of my head would be something along the lines of a peg board. Users can attach each peg to any other peg, and once you create a closed shape it fills the shape in. It would give you a good understanding of graphs, detecting cycle etc, and is not a trivial thing to do.
Ten Hundred Words of Science
I once had a user complaining on twitter "HelloInbox sucks" (that was my company in those days). I responded "Sorry to hear that, what is the problem?". Guy asks for email address. Sends a 2 pager, starting that he really liked HelloInbox but had a list of addition featured he wanted. So awesome!
Sneakernets Never Say Die: Power Plants Infected with USB Malware
If you want walking distance to Bart, I'm talking concord, walnut creek, pleasant hill. on a lucky day, orinda or lafayette even. If you have a family & want a nice large 3 bdrm with small yard, you can get one for under 2K in nearby San Ramon and take the BART commute bus to the actual BART...I know tons of people who do this everyday. I actually considered doing that myself but was able to land a nice albeit small 2brm with walking distance to bart. If you don't mind an additional 30 minutes of car commute time to the actual BART station, it dramatically opens up possibilities...Danville is very nice.
Those are aggressive estimates. I bought an old car for $3500 (equivalent to $150/month for 2 years) and I pay about $80/month for gas/insurance.