skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
During late 1990s aka. "the dot com boom" there was a severe shortage of corporate lawyers in Silicon Valley due to the deal work exploding with record IPOs, M&A and VC activity etc.

Alongside the shortage, the cost of living in the Bay Area was rising which increased when there was an exodus of lawyers from law firms going to the Bay Area for in-house opportunities at startups. As a result to combat this, Law firms in SF/LA increased their associates pay which was then being matched throughout the rest of the country.

Once this happened it resulted in the increased wages leading to the prices at the level they are because:

- Noone wants to cut their wages - companies also do anything they can to prevent wage cuts even if that means reducing headcount.

- Law firms prestige are linked to money - in order to attract the best talent they compete on price by paying the highest starting salaries and bonuses. Likewise in order to keep the rest of the employees motivated they pay the same salaries across departments. Thus they then had to tackle the issue of the increase overheads so law firms increased their rates to manage increased overheads and to increase profitability of the firm ensuring they keep their best talent around.

However, with that said the reason lawyers are expensive despite the "oversupply" of them is because if you require a law firm with experience that is able to handle complex litigation, transactions etc and is able to allocate a significant amount of man-hours at your case then you're going to have to compensate them in order to do so.

So to answer the question are lawyers expensive, they're not. You can find one to handle basic paper work inexpensively however, if you require an experienced lawyer who can handle complex litigation, complex litigation, transactions etc and is able to allocate a significant amount of man-hours at your case then you're going to have to compensate them in order to do so.
The problem is that one tenet of our legal system is that ignorance of the law is no excuse for breaking it. Such a tenet is absurd given the sheer volume of existing law and the rate at which new laws are being created. If we want to keep the tenet, every citizen should be issued a single book of a reasonable length that accurately summarizes which kinds of behavior are legal and which are not. Then, if someone is accused of breaking some obscure law, a demonstration that the accused could have reasonably concluded that his behavior was not illegal based on an accurate reading of the standard summary should be sufficient for acquittal. You can't have it both ways.

The law should serve the interests of man, not vice versa. No one should have to fear going out into the world and trying to accomplish something because he might inadvertently run afoul of the law. Such a state of affairs benefits no one but lawyers.
The article implies suicide, but doesn't actually say that explicitly. Does anyone know what the case is?
JobAware, a bootstrapped app doing it right.
Let me see if I'm understanding this properly..

Two researchers who face the problem of an exponentially expanding database containing digital translations of genetic information determine that they can solve their storage problems by.. sequencing their digital data as DNA? Wouldn't that be like Project Gutenberg publishing all its data in books to store it more efficiently? Perhaps data encoded in DNA could address a problem of physical space at data storage centers, but it would pretty much kill its accessibility.
>An asshole behind a keyboard doesn't use the same keyboard to say how they were wrong.

If the apology comes before the resulting firestorm, sure.

Fact is, getting caught is a amazingly effectively catalyst for remorse.
Thanks.

If all goes perfectly, I will discuss more ways to think about the problem than just those two, and try to show some connections that may surprise people. But, judging by your nice article, I doubt that I'll prove to have anything to say that you don't already know. :-)
Twitch.tv competitor own3d.tv shutting down after buyout fell through
One challenge I would expect is the difficulty of running current from the (relatively) stationary generator (or the grid if the generator's power isn't suitable) to the rotating blades. You can't just use a wire; it would get wound around until it broke. Presumably there could be some sort of slip ring, or perhaps an inductive circuit like that found in Reelights.

Of course the engineers have already solved the similar problem of running power to and from the hub that must rotate to face the wind, but that rotation is much slower than that of the rotating blades.
From your article:

> We will follow Evan's lead and use a frequentist approach.

I though: "how about using the correct approach instead?", followed by a helpful comment about how you are a Bad Person¹. Hem.

Then I noticed that the way you talk about p-value doesn't sound very frequenty. And then your comment. I eagerly await for the rest of the sequence –err, series².

[1]: https://xkcd.com/386/

[2]: Come to think of it, this does looks like LessWrong material to me.
Because a lawyer can give you a lot more value in 5h than a software developer in 5h.
My planned second article will be entirely on that theme. :-)
There goes the neighborhood :(
This is why I recently left Twitter; it's just a breeding ground for smartass one-liners in hopes of retweets rather than intelligent conversation. I don't buy the idea that "this is just the medium" because it's easier to be mean than it is to be nice. If you want to have an argument with someone, write it out somewhere else and tweet the link to them.

Even if you're only following prominent people in your industry, you see some really embarrassing back-and-forths. I didn't want to get myself involved in the ones dealing with my friends and people I enjoyed because I have no idea who I will run into throughout my career, so I deleted my account.
I think it's already been pointed out but I'll clarify a little more.

You've hired an independent developer, at a reasonable rate.

Hiring a lawyer from a law firm, comes at the rate of the firm. He bring to the table the resources of a large law firm, and along with the cost of operating a law firm. In addition to his nice salary.

If you had hired an tech consulting firm you'd be looking a similar hourly rate if you brought in a partner.
Apple's Steve Jobs, Google Utilized Illegal no-Hire Agreements
Oppa Wolfram Style
He's not really your friend if he's charging you $700 an hour.
I've known network consultants who charged banks and other Wall St firms $2600/hr for troubleshooting. A network outage could easily cost some of these firms millions of dollars per hour, so paying $2600/hr to fix such an outage is petty cash in comparison.
Ads vs. Reality - Fast Food
Wow thats amazing. Honestly feel bad for any IT admin who bought any of their products not knowing about those backdoors(assuming they arent disclosed anywhere). I personally would be extremely upset to read that A)they had backdoors in the box they sold me, and that B)they intend to keep them intact for "customer support"!
Wouldn't it just be a normal one-sided hypothesis test? The only thing that changes under H_0: A > B vs H_0: A = B is that you're only interested in the area under one side of the curve instead of both. The test statistic remains the same, you just get a different p value.

It should let you get away with a lower sample size at the expense of possibly only being able to conclude "A's better" or "A's not better" instead of "A's better" or "A and B could be the same" or "B's better." (It's unclear to me what would be the problem with looking at the P values for both the > test and the != test, for a single test, and only "falling back" to the > test if you happen to be in a range where you can say "we can't say for sure that B's better, but we can be pretty sure that A isn't better," like how the different P values are presented here[1].)

It still wouldn't be valid to do something like "oh the two-sided one was inconclusive but leaned in favor of A, so let's do a one-sided one to check if A's better after all," though.

[1] http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/mult_pkg/faq/general/tail_tests...
Most of the time, contract law is sufficient to handle such agreements between service providers and their customers. Why should unlocking phones be given special treatment under the law? Early termination fees are very enforceable and generally seem to be sufficient to stop people from breaking their contracts.
What an unkind title. Rest in peace Aleksey and thank you for the countless hours of entertainment you gave the internet. Impossible is nothing, sometimes we just need to be reminded.

Edit: looks like the title has been updated
Amazon, Apple, and the beauty of low margins
Cisco focusing more and more on software and services. Interesting litmus test will be their hard VC and telepresence endpoints. Enterprise market and Cisco a leader...however Cisco knows future is soft clients, UC, video-enabled apps, services...how quick do they leap?
>There is nothing that you can do about it.

Such irrational defeatism.
Thanks everyone for your congratulations. We're really happy to join a great, growing team with alignment on culture, technology, and vision. There's still a lot of work left to do though. Now back to building things.
Yeah I think that's definitely been the problem thus far.

There's a wind of change in the air though, I would definitely encourage you to try contacting the large manufacturers directly and see if you can get some buy-in. We've had some very encouraging discussions with some of them recently.

Let me know how it goes, if you don't get any joy perhaps we can hook you up.
Which is why I put my shitty scripts in gist (in fact I am such a shitty programmer, I practically have an empty github public profile), I share them in my blog, and last week, I was actually horrified that someone used my shitty scripts and shitty methods that I outlined in my blog (http://blog.chewxy.com/2012/11/16/random-documents-from-couc...), I removed my gist.

I don't want people to use my shitty methods or shitty code, I just want somewhere to put my thoughts.
How To Launch An App
Google hosting stuff on Github and not on Google Code? Is that because of the easier forking? Is this the first sign of Google abandoning its own open source project hosting?
That "stat" surprised me as well -- small dogs @ 10 years and large ones at 17? Uh, no.

Great danes and Irish wolfhounds (and other big breeds as well, AFAIK) only average something sad like 7 years, whereas those little yappy toy poodles average twice that.
Curious to hear from someone working in a company who says things but not show it's true.
In fact, if i say i am rich, tall, blond with a famous sense of humour, you are ready to believe me, but if i don't say anything but i prove it, you refuse to believe me... strange.
Discretio doesn't say anything of this kind but show the entire client software source code. Do the same please.
Isabelle - Generic Proof Assistant
Who cares how long it took the author? The API is what matters. And I personally think her API beats the snot out of obscure sed, awk,and grep compositions.
The translation of the Facebook wall post seems incorrect. It's also in Russian and not Ukrainian. Here's my go at it:

You damn egoist, pick up the phone. Who will take care of [your?] mother?! At least sell your source code and fuck off to Costa Rica. The very same paypal will give you 200-300 pieces [I think these might be pills rather than dollars]. Pick up the phone bitch!

Edit: thanks for the corrections, indeed, that would most likely be $200,000-$300,000. Although I'm a native speaker I didn't grow up in Russia so my slang and colloquial language is pretty weak :>
It is yet to be determined, according to the NY medical examiner:
http://www.ivygateblog.com/2013/01/aleksey-vayner-reported-d...

A friend who spoke to Gawker implied that it was a drug overdose, though it's not said if it was intentional:
http://gawker.com/5978638/aleksey-vayner-the-yale-grad-with-...
Even though there may be a surplus of lawyers in general out there, that specific lawyer can charge that much because (this sounds obvious) people are willing to pay that much. If he specializes in a certain area with the potential for a big upside for a client - doesn't have to be monetary - think immigration law (however, usually these clients can't necessarily pay that rate), people are willing to pay for peace of mind and hopefully just once for the job done right.
Show HN: My new project is like HN meets NextDraft, for the WP community
You're just going to have to land your first gig, then expand your way from there. You'll have to knock them dead, and slowly bring in more people.

Sidenote - Sounds like you're in the DC area, and if you're going for government work, I hope you have a lot of solid connections because 2-3 years of experience isn't always enough to land much more that a contract workerbee position.
You are indeed the genuine loyal friend that he needs to get re-established. Some of the comments here are good suggestions.

Assuming that you are also involved in IT (well you do read HN) are you able to help him get some consulting gigs? If he is motivated and able to get some basic support, then doing small, well priced jobs for local businesses is a great way to ramp up.

Being a consultant avoids the employer background checks and helps him avoid the low pay trap of menial jobs. You may need to monitor his manners and speech as after 18 years, he may have picked up some habits that are uncool in our current society.

Best of luck to you both.
Most of my personal projects are at least a bit embarrassing, but those two are the worst:

XML to LaTeX parser (failed proof of concept) https://github.com/hamaxx/lml

And shell simulator in JS (just for fun project) https://github.com/hamaxx/jsbash
Thanks, you addressed some of my questions about neo4j in particular. And the viewer worked fine on an ipad.
Every Belkin product I ever bough had problems (KVM switches and routers), so I just stopped buying from them, even cables. Now I'm not going to buy from Belkinsys too.
Yeah, the article half tries to paint a story which doesn't really make sense without a cause of death.

Also, the cryptic comment is clearly in Russian. That, or some unlikely intersection of Russian and Ukrainian. More likely, they figured the guy was Ukrainian, so the comment must also be in Ukrainian.
That's pretty much what demeaning means, though.

It's not "a single skill" as if you were telling Torvalds that his juggling skills were crap and he should keep his day job; if someone has enough coding experience that they're releasing OSS on GitHub, coding is quite likely their job (or they're in school to make it their job).

So yeah, snarkily saying that the product of someone's career activity makes your eyes bleed (or whatever) is demeaning to them -- i.e., directly attacking their dignity and others' respect for them.
To be honest, that pull request was awesome, hilarious, and extremely constructive. The tweets, on the other hand, were mean-spirited and negative.

"Tongue-in-cheek comments and a very lax tone" make our community less sterile and boring. The fear of a sterile and unhappy programming environment personally drove me away from programming, and I elected to study music instead. I will always be grateful to Ruby on Rails, Github and the developer community for helping me to rediscover my love of software engineering, and get back into a career that I love.
Phoronix is like that....
Speculating that since the terms are not disclosed, they are not material to Cisco's earnings. That suggests they sold it for a lot less than the $500M they bought it for[1].

I wonder why they couldn't figure out how to make it work. I blew it by not working on NetApp's low end box (the Storvault) I really should have, it would have helped me understand where the sticky problems in 'consumer' are.

[1] http://www.twice.com/news/cisco-systems-buy-linksys-0
Will you leave your job to join the sharing economy?
Is there a particular reason you're not allowing the browser to use its native scrolling behavior/scroll bars? It just "feels wrong" on my mac.
* law firms are inefficient in their use of technology

* legal work is more likely to be boring, so you have to pay people more to do it (this is related to the first point above)

* if an app has a bug, it's usually easy to spot - if a contract has a bug, you may never know about it until it bites you. so you pay for the best attorney you can get, in the hopes of getting fewer bugs

* lawyers are more at the beck and call of their clients - really need something done overnight or over the weekend? they'll do it (though they'll resent you for it)
More importantly, let's petition the Whitehouse to respect petitions!

Has anything useful come out of "We The People" petitions beyond a pressure release valve for angry mobs?
The ultimate traffic driver "PHP is terrible! No PHP is Great!" now gets automatically downvoted so something has to fill the void.
200-300 "pieces" = $200,000-$300,000. One "piece" is 1,000, typically applied to money.
Yes I was shocked to find out that parrots run an average heartrate of 350 bpm or so, for 40 years. 7 billion heartbeats.
Right, you need to install them. Having node is a less onerous requirement than having all the gnu tools, on windows.
I'm heating up my popcorn kernels in a large pot of oil as we speak, things are about to get very entertaining. If Antigua start a piracy website selling US copyrighted material, won't the US just ban access to the site and other countries (definitely the UK and Australia) will follow suit? Potentially resulting in free-speech and Internet rights advocacy groups (and the likes of anonymous) kicking up a massive storm of trouble?

It's obvious the bans on Internet gambling is due to the fact it's hard to regulate and it's even harder to tax and when it comes down to it, it's all about money. The US only has themselves to blame, this isn't about protecting people from addictions because lets face it if you want to gamble legally you can go to a casino and if you want drugs you can walk down to the corner and if you want booze you can go to a bottle shop or bar. What's the difference between Internet gambling and going to a casino? The government can tax non-Internet based casinos...

If it gets that far and something isn't worked out prior, this will be an interesting test of Obama's merits as a president and where he stands on things like unrestricted and free Internet access. Given the US's harsh words against China's censorship over the years, it would be pretty ironic if the US were to block such a site.
"piece" is a slang word for thousand. You got everything else right.

OP mistranslates the comment horribly.
How to select a business mentor
no, you are taking to the wrong person in the firm. You need the more junior lawyer who can likely do your work too. Major partners are only needed to do huge deals or very complicated legal procedures. Just ask around.
So how do you protect against MITMs?
> $2600/hr for troubleshooting

Did they used to work in telecom? That hourly rate really hertz.
Thinking of moving to SF, check out this post about neighborhoods.
That is my understanding as well. Liability costs a lot. Think insurance costs, the costs you'd have to pay for every mistake, etc. "It's not a bug, it's a feature" doesn't cut it when someone's freedom or fortune is at stake.
exactly. I am in the same era as you and unfortunately haven't managed to hook facebook or google to hire me so my day consists of making the most out of the shit I am served each and every day. You know that 3 line shell script that accounts only needed to run once a year ? Yes that migrated into an 20,000 line perl module that HAS TO run every night without fail but nooooo do they want to (pay to) re-engineer it ? No. Because the customer would not benefit.

The most fun I have at work now is "try to get the most audacious python module through the firewall and then get it approved by the project manager as they have absolutely no clue about what I do".

Sorry kids but unless you make it (and make it big)... that's you in ten years time.

If I am honest, I have got over the "OMG what's it written in?" stage. If it works and if the (time saving per run * the times I need to run it ) > time it would take to write it myself, then .. that's a success. Then.. move onto the next issue to get some project tasks done, contract renewed, kids fed, mortgage paid etc etc etc.
Dear ICO: disclose Sony’s hash algorithm
Is it feasible to program a machine learning system (such as Watson?) to run a straightforward legal case, with a natural language interface?

Presumably the majority of "bread and butter" legal cases don't require an innovative step? Rather, they involve rolling out a set of standard arguments and countering a set of standard arguments put forward by the opposition, a bit like a chess game? I'm talking straighforward stuff, rather than the types of cases that set legal precedent.

If so, wouldn't it be a case of cramming a machine full of the necessary legal information, then doing a search to navigate a path to a winning position? If a winning position with the required certainty could not be found by the machine, the legal advice might be "call a human lawyer".
I think you are reading too much into the term "bullshit".

Now, granted the word can take on different levels of intensity depending on the circumstances in which it is used.

But it can and is used in general conversation and in that context it means nothing more than "I don't agree with you".

At least that is how the term bullshit is used here in Australia.
Regrettably, this is my most popular piece of code I've released: a ruby gem for parsing a goddamn stupid text format used only by the website Rightmove. I pity the poor fools who have needed to use it.

https://github.com/robotmay/blm
Interesting. I wonder if doing this is a sustainable job market for people long-term.
The problem is there's no lawyers charging extremely low prices in third world countries and it's exceptionally unlikely that you would hire a lawyer that isn't within an hour's drive from you. The same can't be said for programmers.
Clickable: http://python.org/download/releases/2.7.3/

The instructions I am trying to follow:

http://kivy.org/docs/guide/packaging-android.html#packaging-...
I have never seen anyone claim that the ABA bar and accreditation process did not have an effect on wages. That is a tough position to stake out. Do you have any evidence that the ABA's barrier to entry into the legal market does not inflate wages? And/or that patent bar admission does not increase the amount of money a lawyer can charge for their time?

Moreover the "new grads without jobs" is a fairly recent development.* Recent grads with jobs are certainly not billing $700 an hour, so I'm not really sure what that has to do with the original question.

* Given the recent decline in LSAT registrations it is clear that this supply surplus is temporary and is not the new normal.
IBM and Waterfund To Develop a Water Cost Index
Building a Game Library: steps, design decisions, sacrifices. Part 1
The dominant StandardModel++ theory is the standard model + super symmetry. String Theory is still in its formative years and best described as a collection of ideas than as a proper theory.
Coldest I've seen there was -43 celsius... Having a Honda hybrid was interesting under those conditions.
The comment is in Russian. Many Ukrainians speak Russian as primary language.