skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Both my sister and her husband are professional journalists at one of Britain's broadsheets and they have a very tough job of it. My sister was a freelance journalist for a couple of years looking for piece after piece before finally getting a job.

We have a lot of discussions about payment for content and how journalists should be compensated for their work and why they deserve to be compensated well.

A professional journalist works very hard indeed, they have to produce content on demand very quickly and to put aside their pride when sub-editors mash and reshape it to what (they believe) the editor asked for. Journalists have to create pieces out of events which are of little or no real interest and to do so without flinching. It's a hard job.

The job of a freelance journalist is just as tough and in some ways even tougher as the majority of it is selling and pitching. I was astonished when my sister told me how often she was sending out pitch ideas to editors and how she would engage multiple editors daily and of course be rejected by most of them. Professional journalists whether freelance or retained earn their keep and the majority of them (certainly the ones who haven't reached the confines of seniority) work extremely hard.

However in all of this there is something that my sister and I disagree on. In fact we've decided not to speak about it much because it's an understandably emotional subject for her and one that I feel very strongly about. And that is the topic of whether someone has a given right to receive compensation for their work.

I find it very difficult to empathise with the sentiment that anyone's work has a god-given value. Software is sometimes valuable in isolation as code, on a disk but most often it's not. Years ago you could produce software and sell it on cassettes, now many of our most successful companies are ones which provide a more scalable, hosted five-nines uptime service for free than many ever even charged for.

It frustrates me that writers should sit down and complain that nobody is prepared to pay them for their work. Many other industrial workers and even knowledge workers have found their skills devalued by the passage of time and have had to deal with it.

Unlike all those other industries which got crushed under the wheels of time though we still fundamentally need writers. We want good writers, we need informed writers and good writing is still not in unlimited supply. The survival skill writers need is not penmanship it's entrepreneurship. This may be unpalatable but it's also unavoidable.
Hoarding is beneficial under a gold standard.

I make everybody else that is using the US Dollar standard richer if I hoard gold. It means they can buy more real goods with their dollar. This principle is demonstrated in the 'printing' of dollars, in which increased supply devalues the dollar and makes it possible to purchase less real goods (whether you're talking houses, real estate, gold, silver, platinum, or oil as a baseline).

The same concept is demonstrated in the adoption of bitcoin. Finite supply means anybody holding bitcoins will benefit as demand goes up. Anybody holding a dollar bill would benefit from my gold hoarding.

Ask China how awesome it is to have an appreciating currency while the rest of the world foolishly destroys their currencies: China gets to buy more foreign goods every year with their same yuan notes, while the rest of the world can buy less and less (China can also more easily begin purchasing their own goods, which means less need to export; and they can more easily buy foreign natural resources, as the yuan gains against eg the dollar (since commodities are priced in dollars)).
Regular Expression Repentance
It won't increase your aerobic capacity... It will raise your lactate threshold. The only way to increase your aerobic capacity is to spend a large amount of time exercising at an aerobic heart rate.
I think fpgeek was referring to the Gingerbread browser and making sure web sites are compatible with it, not application development.
Another supply and demand aspect of the problem is the glut of interesting reading on the Internet, coupled with the lack of any clear way for a large general interest publication to be profitable online.
I went to J-school. I have the benefit of holding a degree from one of the most prestigious schools in the world.

I've been out of school for six years and have yet to find a single job, in spite of the half-dozen successful internships with various mega-media corporations.

*A single media job.
Previously discussed here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4798791

The previous discussion is more informative.
First observations? Lots of photos of babies & kids. Looks almost like a political campaign scrapbook.

Wondering if the use of sans was meant to similarly imply some sort of warmth. The conversational tone of the text, the babies, the font choice. The very idea of having an interactive photo book in the first place. I mean...I can understand people finding it a bit ridiculous. In fact, I self-identify as Catholic and I find myself chuckling, but at least every part of this site feels like a choice.

Oh, also? Looks like there is some sort of catholic analytics service run out of Vatican City? http://analytics.catholica.va/
I agree that it needs some work now, but I think it was pretty good for the time when it first came out: http://web.archive.org/web/19980130005011/http://www.vatican...
Download it directly from the Mozilla site: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mobile/aurora/

The Ace has very little available memory, so Mozilla still blocks it for Beta & Release because they think it doesn't work well enough. But your mileage may vary (greatly).

This is the Aurora build (Firefox 21) which has some more optimizations.

Chrome can't run on a phone that doesn't have at least Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0+) AFAIK.
That's a good idea. I realize more and more how important it is to be really clear about everything. Or else, I end up being frustrated and the work suffers.
If you ended with only two names, try Pickfu.com to choose the best. It worked for me really well, I got 150 people reply in about 2-3 hours.
A good start, but shopping around is hard, if not impossible. I always try to do it when getting care in the states, and more often than not the person you're talking to has no idea what they charge, or else won't discuss it without having the doctor's orders in hand first. ("How much does a chest x-ray cost?" "We'll assess costs after the doctor orders some tests." "But how do I know if I want to see the doctor at this hospital if I don't know how much everything costs?")

Worse is the case of emergencies or worry, when you have other things on your mind than shopping around and possibly spending days or weeks slogging through the internet for lists of doctor and test center phone numbers. In that case you're literally trapped into paying whatever they demand.

In either case the system is absolutely monstrous and everyone involved (except, of course, the doctors and nurses) should be ashamed of themselves.
giving them h1b is not because they are the brightest, it's because there are not enough equally good workers for the industry.
I'm beginning to think that all the people who have ever understood monads have written an article trying to explain them.
God knows I've seen enough "two year old" error messages: "I don't like it! <spits out>". Well, what would you like, you sniveling little diaper wetting sot of a program?!?

I could not agree more with his comment about "Bad value {X} should be ...".

Oh, and the part about the amazing disappearing stack trace -- I've seen way too much "print e.toString()" which discards all that wonderful "where" information.
That might be the case for you both, but I certainly have a use case for this style of searching. I often want to go on a break over a set weekend/week with no set destination in mind, and very flexible with dates. This type of things is perfect for when your not explicitly looking for a specific date range or flight path.. more just experimenting with options.

Hats off to you guys, like the semantic query style rather than the traditional mould!
Thank you for mentioning Brogue, from a couple of levels I went through I found it very approachable (both in UI and gameplay) yet not shallow.
My point is that there's too much supply of low quality journalism. There's not much supply of high quality journalism.

Perhaps there's very little demand for high quality journalism and I'm just being naive, but I hope not.
Hopefully it won't actually. Most languages are not designed for compactness of source code, and most forms of factoring will produce fairly noticeable patterns; e.g. lots of funcion declarations.
Is this what's really happening at such major publications?

I'm starting my own online publication, and even though we're pre-revenue I'm STILL paying our writers.

Why? Because I truly believe in craft and content. Good, fresh, original content should definitely be compensated for.
Top Gear row: Tesla loses appeal over Jeremy Clarkson review
To be fair, the editor has only been on the job a month. http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlny/the-atlantic-hires-thr...
Exactly. Most internet folks fail to realize that the average joe doesn't, in fact, care the slightest about design, as long as the object in question does the job.
There is a huge difference between the price charged to an insurance company and the already agreed upon allowable amount they will pay. Almost all insurance companies make these allowable amounts available to providers; and it is very rare for a provider to bill the allowable amount. In my experience they usually bill double.

I find any article that doesn't mention the word "allowable" completely disingenuous.
It was news: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4798791
Compiling a CoffeeScript project is so quick that it would only add complexity without benefit.
Have you ever tried driving a car with the power assistance not working?

It's a horrible and unsafe experience in a modern car on the road and totally unfeasible on a racetrack.
My conclusion: Your typical KDE user is not in the position to do the non-trivial work of porting a large C++ code base. Nor does she know where to get started. Such bloatware needs at least one dedicated and interested developer on each target OS.

We now have one, so there is quite some movement on this front in the recent months.
While some technologies (like personal computers) have flourished, others haven't lived up to the hype. If the tech hype from the early eighties were true, we'd all have flying cars and intelligent machines in our homes, and normal passenger airplanes would fly at 5,000 km/h.
I think that was the parent's point...the term "hacker" has been diluted to where it can mean anything and everything. Just like the "pivot", "traction", etc.
It baffles me how journalism hopes to survive the disruption that the Internet brings with stunts like this, and the odd pay wall.

I'm doing a bit of work with journalists at the moment, and while I think many of the individuals would like to innovate, many of the structures and institutions that exist do not seem willing, they insist in framing the issue as "how can we get someone else to pay for us to keep operating as we are now".

I long to see journalism freed from the constraints that a daily print run onto dead tree once imposed on it, and re-imagined in an always evolving, interactive and yes, paid for, model. Just don't make me buy a load of content I'm not interested in, and don't try and charge me for a floor full of people who're re-hashing syndicated stories or writing fluff pieces.
Thanks for that.

We're actually based in Ireland but regardless of how different jurisdictions will define their cookie law, I'm guessing the enforcement across the board will be, as you say, "slow", if not non-existant (provided no malicious behaviour).
Is the yuan backed by precious metals?
This is Why Copying is Everywhere in Asia
How does this help me in any way whatsoever at being a better hacker? Except don't become a freelance journalist 2013, like that ever crossed my mind.

Might as well just rename the site to Random News and post stuff from every field there is.
JavaScript Error Logging in Minutes
Of course, it gets linked in the standard way. A program with an empty main takes up about the same space. The point is that this snippet could be compiled very compactly with the right tools.
Exceptions have been called "glorified goto" for a reason. In fine, the OP says that GOTOs are perfectly acceptable.
I'm trying to get perspective on the size of the bitcoin economy.

As far as I can tell, there are 10.86m Bitcoins in existence at the current market rate $40.05. [1] That means there are almost $430m in "circulation".

According to the federal reserve 1.17trillion USD currency is in circulation. [2]

USD: $1,170,000,000.00

BTC: $0,000,430,000.00

0.0367%

Not a perfect comparison, I realize that. It is more of a rough estimate.

[1] http://www.bitcoincharts.com

[2] http://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12773.htm
Oke now imagine 10 people around you with Google Glass on their head. You don't even know if they are recording you or not.
Lessons the "learn to code" movement needs to learn from Hackathons.
Yes, in retrospect I'm not sure I agree with this one as strongly as I wrote it. Perhaps better to say that you should log by default.

But that being said, problems that the code needs to fix may be symptoms and you may need them for debugging. I think they're worth logging more often than not. Maybe just less noisily than your normal error reporting.
so fucking cool.. +1
One of the problems with US health insurance is that it is tax deductible only when "paid" by the employer. Making it deductible by everyone would help.

The article does not account for the difficulty of shopping around. If you have the time to travel then it's possible, but often medical care has some urgency so you need to use the closest service provider.

If this really is a trend then the best result would be for people to start taking out catastrophic health insurance. The idea is that they would be insured for very large and very unusual events and cover the routine payments by paying cash.
Here's a short list of things Phusion Passenger 4 supports that are not found in Unicorn or implemented better than in Unicorn:

- Support for multiple Ruby interpreters inside the same instance. But to be fair Unicorn is designed to be run in a different way so this may or may not be an advantage for you.

- JRuby support.

- Python support, and in the future more languages.

- Dynamically adjust the number of processes based on traffic.

- Real-time disk-backed response buffering, first introduced in 4.0 beta 1. Unicorn relies on web server buffering which tends to buffer the entire response before sending it to the client. Phusion Passenger 4 allows you to use Rails 4 streaming with ease, without blocking the server on slow clients, with good performance and without configuration.

- Phusion Passenger Enterprise supports multithreading, allowing you to use it for I/O-bound, long-running requests. Unicorn is strictly single-threaded multi-processing only and can only be used for short-running fast requests, by design.

- Rolling restarts (as implemented in Enterprise) are more automated and efficient than in Unicorn. Phusion Passenger Enterprise restarts processes one-by-one and only requires 1 config line. Unicorn's rolling restarts temporarily requires double memory. You can make it restart one-by-one but it requires manual scripting work involving signals.

- Out-of-Band Work. This is like Unicorn's Out-of-Band GC, but is more flexible: you can perform any arbitrary work (not just GC), and it also works with multithreaded programs. Phusion Passenger also spawns a new process before performing Out-of-Band Work so that your visitors never have to wait.
- Deployment error resistance (Enterprise feature).
- Live IRB console (Enterprise feature).
- Commercial support with guaranteed response times.

I wrote this response quickly so I may have missed some things. If anybody spots any inaccuracies, please let me know.
For what it's worth, the latest Firefox for Android has an option in Preferences called "Reflow text on zoom". It may be what you look for (but I don't use Opera enough to be sure).
Forget bad things - it's quaint to think of the days where asking someone nicely to pay you if they like your product actually worked, to the tune of 5-figures.

Nowadays you'd just get some kids on the internet explaining how them using your product for free is doing you a favor, "exposure" and the such.

> "Had he tried to do it a few years after that, I doubt the results would have been the same."

Isn't that besides the point? The point seems to be that there is always an ache that needs to be filled - often not needing a great deal of technical ability, just product insight.

If he came around a few years later, there'd be just as many things computer users wanted solved.
You wouldn't be inspired by 10x the number of robots moving about the solar system beaming back video, etc?
I'm surprised given the background that they didn't go with papyrus.
I don't know if we'll ever reach the "in every home" mark, or even say 90% of homes. This is different from computers for a lot of reasons. However the prevalence and wide-spread availability of 3d printing makes perfect sense.

Look at it logistically - if the cost of transporting bulk finished goods rises to a certain point, it makes more sense to just ship containers of plastic pellets, via slow and less reliable methods. Then local caches of the pellets are used in local printing facilities to make whatever. I can order a part, widget, or doo-dad and pick it up anywhere, or delivery by guy on bicycle happens, or whatever.

3d printing just has less waste and shipping overhead than making goods and sending them to a destination half way around the world.

There are price points where 3d printing makes more sense logistically than injection molding. I don't know what they are, but basic logistics suggests it is true.
In this press release, somewhat buried, is this message:

http://business.opera.com/press/releases/general/opera-gears...

“Opera is also experimenting with WebKit in several research and development projects, and many of you got a peek of one of them, codenamed ‘ICE’, last month. As a leading innovator in browsers, we are very excited that ICE received such great buzz. We will provide more information about ICE and other exciting R&D projects in the future, but as we are also really proud of our new browser on Android and our Opera Web Pass operator offering, those products will be the main focus at MWC,” says Wium Lie."
A good friend of mine was earning a decent salary as a tech blogger for CNET. In 2009, they let him go, and now he is barely making ends meet with some sort of deal with another site where he earns commission based on page views. I think it's a general trend.
China also dramatically counters this notion. The Yuan has appreciated significantly (for a currency) over the last decade, while they've simultaneously gotten far wealthier.

Real world calling. China pegs the Yuan at 6.22 Y / $1. It's appreciated by something like 3 cents over the last decade.

How do they do this? They continually buy dollars with Yuan. Increase the supply of Yuan, decrease the supply of dollars. They can't stop, or the Yuan appreciates, devaluing the dollars they already hold and, more importantly, hurting their exports.

This is why you're seeing the federal government borrow money for 0.1% interest, and why there's been almost-zero inflation despite deficts and quantitative easing.
> There is nothing evil happening on either end of this.

I am speaking in pure material terms. I am not injecting morality.

This is a despicable trend because we are seeing emergent, widespread immiseration in advanced, developed countries.

The quality of our journalism is suffering, and journalism is a bulwark against corruption in a democracy. Corruption is bad not because it is immoral but because it leads to waste, which reduces our material well being. David Simon, the creator of The Wire has spoken about how important local papers were in catching corruption at the city and state level of government.

I said that this is worse than sweatshops because at least in a sweatshop the workers earn subsistence wages.

> If it is actually a product or skill that merits the money in a changing market, and if the specific one being offered is of good quality, in the long run it will harm the one unwilling to pay.

The product and skills are valuable. There is a demand for them. What we are witnessing is deflation. The demand is strong, the ability for the creators to be credited is what has broken down.

I will not just be a passive observer in all of this. The end game to this scenario is obvious. We are looking down the barrel of a new feudalism, and I do not want a period of reduced living standards and stagnation.

An entire generation has had it's prospects diminished, and the trend is only accelerating.

Perhaps all that is needed here for the market to correct this is for consumers to be educated. This is a new trend, and I would like to draw people's attention to it.

Do you still feel warm, fuzzy and excited when you buy a ticket to SXSW? When you know the festival organizers, bars, restaurants and hotels are all making money, the only people not making money are the performers and the volunteers that draw the crowds and make everything run?

In the absence of knowledge about how SXSW works the organizers are able to exploit the performers. I am not going to keep their secret for them.

I'm boycotting SXSW until their labor practices change. Who's with me?
Timescales might be wrong, but do you really think that flying personal transportation (or helicopters, as we currently call them) and intelligent machines are an unlikely prospect?
Stockpiling gold is extremely helpful if the standard is gold.

It reduces supply, which boosts the value of every other outstanding dollar. I boost everybody else's current purchasing power by increasing the real value of the dollar bill in their pocket by reducing the availability of gold, since the true measure of a bill is what goods it can purchase.

Not to mention, markets take note of the true availability of gold. Hoarding gold doesn't mean it is destroyed, and the market knows that in general estimation, because the market knows in general estimate how much gold is mined / stored / sold / etc. IE that gold can and will come onto the market, whether today or when I die, and the market prices accordingly.

Any currency backed by a gold standard when I hoard, will benefit over any nations not on a gold standard or specifically with a depreciating currency. I can buy more and more and more of their exports for the same dollar.
Which came first, that's the question, right?
"This is the fundamental characteristic of bitcoin that puzzles me. Most currencies are inflationary, which in low doses is a good thing: it disincentivizes keeping the money under the mattress, maintaining a healthy flow of currency. Bitcoin is by design deflationary: it's value increases over time."

Thank you for this. I constantly try to explain this to bitcoin fanatics and they don't get it.
The text is just quotes from the man himself.
Standards in Cloud Computing Interoperability
My Experience With Meditating
True, especially since video is all most people would get out of a manned mission either.
Ez Lease Rentals. The first Rental Guarantour in the USA
Amateur Beats Library of Congress at Digitizing Newspapers
Ez Lease Rentals. The first Rental Guarantor in the USA
The Database Startup That's Closest to My Office (If Not My Heart)
Move your cursor to the edges of the book for easier page turning, not very obvious but it is there. At first the page numbering at the bottom threw me.