skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Ultimately the value of a person's labor depends on scarcity, just as the trade value of things or experiences do, and we've seen how lack of scarcity makes trade value crash.

Apologies for being pedantic, but you're confusing cost--i.e., market price--with value. These are two different things that are not dependent entirely upon scarcity (I assume you mean supply/demand balances of both commodities and labor itself) alone. There are many factors beyond scarcity that are inputs to determining the value of a commodity (including the commodity of labor) to both society and economy, which may or may not be included in determining the cost of said commodity--and the calculations of both are not guaranteed to be equal.

From almost any perspective--economic, historical, philosophical, psychological, etc.--the cost and value of an item are rarely equal. This is especially critical in analyzing and theorizing on trade relations, as the value of a commodity to one agent is often an independent determining factor in calculating the cost of that commodity by another agent.
Great post Josh. I agree 100%! Voice is much different than when I was climbing poles 13 years ago. The overall landscape is changing. The demand for more bandwidth means VoIP is going to just keep getting better and better. That coupled with better compression like WebRTC will help companies move to a more agile solution. The days of the heavy box PBX are coming to an end.
Thank you! I do not have any paying customers outside of my circle of friends. This is for 2 reasons:
1) I just finished building the billing system 2 weeks ago
2) As mentioned, I have asked many potential customers what they would like out of a collaboration tool and if they would pay for Idealist. The response has been positive. I have not actually asked anyone to pay yet because the product has some key functionality under construction and changes frequently.

If it sounds like I spent most of my time focusing on product development instead of customer acquisition, it's true. I am looking to spend more time acquiring customers with a co-founder. The truth is that doing everything by myself is too much (and I have weaknesses too).
it's kind of a brilliant publicity idea!

unfortunately, it does run the risk of a lot more users giving negative feedback to get similar treatment.
I'm also a fan of the "energy" system in TBS. A recent game that used this method is Legend of Grimrock (really great game if you like old school). Also, the author mentioned Age of Wonders. That's another great game with a good turn-based system. AOW2 is coming out this year!
That would be /b/ on 4chan.
Very cool. We're in the live streaming business and currently using Wowza to redistribute our content via several distribution layers.

I wonder if they'll release the source eventually...
I'm still incredibly confused as to what Meteor actually _is_?

Is it a javascript framework (think, a js framework)?

Is it an MVC framework (think CakePHP, Ruby on Rails) that happens to use Javascript for the language?

Is it something I can host anywhere or only on Meteor servers?

The demo is neat, I get that - but what is it?
Cool, but seems like it's not available in Canada.
Two things.

There's a fixed amount of resources. So you can only manufacture, grow and produce to a limited extent - even if all the production is automated. You can use the greater quantity of resources per person to provide more affluent lifestyles to everyone.

Think of it this way: if there is enough energy to support 80% of the people in a typical USA suburban lifestyle, but you have instead 60% of the people. The excess can be used to give the people more per capita. Providing "more" in whatever sense requires greater productive output.

That's the first thing, resources.

The second is occupation of time. Not all people need to be employed all the time but with an excess of resources one can concentrate on attaining a higher level of education, healthcare, etc.. These things in turn require more focus on training, more intelligent input to push on to give a greater quality of life for everyone.

Yes, more people create greater needs. But with resource limitation and wealth being focussed with a small group those needs simply don't get met, there is not so much more employment as is needed to meet those needs with a degree of quality. Instead what happens is resources get stretched - austerity measures and such.

There's also the corollary of economies of scale. Greater production requires a decreasing number of additional personnel. Going the other way this means there is a point at which even if you produce less you still need a similar number of people to do it.

[Would be happy to get feedback on holes and flaws in this thinking though.]
I think he's counting on the part of the contract that he describes as being roughly "If O'Reilly fails to do X, Y and Z, the rights automatically revert to me." It sounds like he is confident that it is O'Reilly that breached the contract, not him.
Presumably he doesn't specifically mean e-commerce sites, just sites that are required to be highly responsive - where you don't want to send the JavaScript, then the JSON, then do the rendering. You want to start with the static, rendered HTML then decorate that with JavaScript for subsequent interactions.
The "pattern" library is also worth checking out:

http://www.clips.ua.ac.be/pages/pattern
I really like the redesign, but fixed headers are driving me nuts. When I read my eyes fix on the top portion of the webpage, when a fixed header is there I feel like I must retrain myself to start reading a little bit below the header.

I've noticed I don't mind fixed footers, they are not within my natural reading area.
Dropbox for Wi-Fi? I haven't even gotten past the first page of instabridge and I already think the tag-line is more confusing then explanatory.

Do you anything that has to do with shared cloud storage or collaboration? If not, just don't compare to Dropbox just to try to seem disruptive or give yourself an 'air' of success even before launch.

Also: Frontpage explains nothing about what the service does. I would try boiling it down to a few short bullets or an effective one-liner instead of leaning on people knowing what dropbox does and somehow apply it to your model.
NASA Rover Finds Conditions Once Suited for Ancient Life On Mars
Works fine, same setup. Nice work.
Oh god please no.
Wat?

This comment literally makes no sense. Can you try explaining it again?

Canonical can't force any other project to use Mir. So, what are you saying?

Any open source project can be forked. So, what are you saying?

Canonical suing linux END users? What? What are you trying to say here?
New Needs Friends
Lesson for startups here: There are tons of devices/apps that do exactly what this does already. What's the difference? Automatic has great design, snappy domain name, and most importantly mass market positioning. These had traditionally been targeted towards gear heads, but Automatic smartly positioned it to be something mass market (gas mileage, etc...)
I wonder how Progressive solved that problem with their OBD II + Qualcomm MSM device.
and yet they are very different products, moj.io uses a mobile data network, automatic is just a bluetooth dongle.
If I'm branching out into a new field or learning a new concept where I have minimal knowledge, I'll often check for a book on the subject. Personally, I'm a fan of the Head First books.
Only if you care about high quality learning materials. Find me any set of online materials that is maybe 1/2 as good as SICP (not including the online edition of the book itself). I mean that seriously.

Of course most tech books now show about as much thought as a series of blog posts, but for quality in-depth learning materials we still aren't at a point where books have been surpassed. And when the day comes that they are, I suspect that the result will look a lot like books, just in the form of a webpage.

If you want to do more than troll the API docs, or read your 25th monad analogy tutorial you really can't beat a high quality book.
The ULA guys are talking about keeping cryo fuels in depots. They have some thoughts about hydrogen boil off (which they use in their internal combustion engine (H2 + O2) to both do station keeping and temperature management.

I have not seen proposals for on-orbit cryo fuel transfer. But I'm sure they are out there.
Login flow and initial writing experience all seemed excellent, and I'll be recommending this to some friends over GDocs for their next collaborative project.

The only niggle that immediately stood out to me was that the buttons on the "Import" modal are using the default Bootstrap styles instead of the flatter ones used throughout the rest of the interface. I doubt it would've stood out to me had everything else not seemed so carefully considered.
Handful? Do you mean dedicated product guys? Otherwise, I'd make a wild guess there's much more than a handful. Almost every one running a small business selling their own product has to be the product guy.
Um... you realize this is a news site for STARTUPS. The entire point of which is to develop new business models and "kill" incumbent competitors. So I guess we like to focus on the mortality of companies, as it is often a techie who is implementing his own version of doomsday and demise on large incumbents. All through creation (new technology, new media, new models, new information) ironically enough.
I work for an agency that often picks up work from large agencies or in-house teams and most of the time I find myself using either Subversion or Mercurial. We use Mercurial for our own projects, but one client uses Git, which I use at home and prefer it to Mercurial.

It's a situation I imagine a lot of development agencies find themselves in.
This turned out to be a very interesting talk. The speaker set off my BS detector at the beginning with all of his grandiose statements, but the images near the end of the talk seem to prove him right.

I'd love to hear more about this. Anyone have any more information on this guy?
>The world is full of wonderful alternatives

Because those alternatives as just as bad.

>We've been running a very high traffic system there with individual box uptimes of 700 days before we had to reboot them during scheduled OS upgrade/maintenance.

So, just like EC2?
Stuff like that is what was used to implement zalgo text

Ę̮̱͔͓ͯ͗ͫ̌̏ͫ͌́x̘̤͚̰̫̫̗̤̱̒̓ͨͯ͑̓ͥͫ̕å̰͚̓͒ͫm̛̤͕̫̳̺̩̄̓ͨͥ͜ͅp̰͉͗ͤl̵̖̗̫͍͓͋̍̐͌̐̒e̡̧͔̮̿͒͋̈́͡ ̸͉͔͗͐̍ͩͫ̀ͭz̨͎̱̟̘̓ä́͊̉̾͜͏̺̲̘l̛̥͇͖̹̻̜̈̀̀g̴̗̻͚͙̭͍̩̔̉̆ͦ͌͘oͬ̾͑̉̋҉̢͙̹̹̺̺ ̷̢͖̲͇̺̪̹̙̺̘͐̄ͬ̍͆t̶͔̣̜̟͌̀ͪ̅ͧ̒̒ͫ̚ȅ̠̪̻̄ͫ̋͝xͭ͆͝͏̮͔̜t̟̬̦̣̟͉͈̞̝ͣͫ͞,̡̼̭̘̙̜ͧ̆̀̔ͮ́ͯͯ ̢̮͎̦͙͇ͪͪ̈͌ͬ̄̓̐͞ḷ̹̺̙̜̇̉́͡o̢̻̪̠̬̍͐̉ͮͥ̑͊ͪt̢̘̬͓͕̬́ͪ̽́s̢̜̠̬̘͖̠͕ͫ͗̾͋͒̃͛̚͞ͅ ̝̣̥̳͇͎̭̾̔̀̀̔̽̕o͇ͮ̋̅͋͆̈́̔͗͟f̙̙͕̮̈ͪͯ̿̈͠ ̯͎̺͎̺̃̀͟͟d͍͍̺͂̂i̪̩̙̭̝͖ͥ͂̂̈̒̎r̥̜̃̏̃͋̓ͥ̃̉̄͘͢t̳̦̬͆͂ͬͧ̏ͬ̓y̵̮̗̟ͩ̃̾͐́ͩ ̣͍̘͈̫͓̊ͤ̚͡͝cͥͭ͐̎͆͘̕҉̫̞h̴̢̫̘͉̖ͪͩ̓ͪͯ̑͑̓̎͝a̧̢̖͔̗̬̘̯̟ͪ̐͌̍͂̊r̷̝͓̬͆̄̽̓̋ͬ̈̔͝͠ā̗͑ͬ̀c͒̎͌̔͛͘҉̘͖͖̖̯̖͖͙ṱ̶͇͚͎ͯ͋͢͝eͦ̽͆͏̟̭̠r̙̖͙̳̾ͯ̈̕ṣ͙̈͆̔͗̉ͥ̋̔̕
I guess you're right. The copy on their website feels like it was written by the same person:

"Unlike other storage providers, Dump Truck doesn't rely on 3rd parties to store your data or use data deduplication to inspect your data to save on storage costs."
I think you mean framework.
Really? Wrong?

Perhaps you meant to say "it depends on the circumstances, the goals and current state of the other projects, but in my experience refactoring is a bit easier than rewriting"?

If not, wow...blanket statements are rarely ever true.
Some more items:

o Liquidity of engineering talent - thousands of engineers know how to immediately work with the AWS infrastructure

o Design Patterns - They are constantly being updated, discussed, improved upon. People share how to work around AWS issues.

o Commitment to reducing prices - AWS is constantly dropping the prices for everything.

o Commitment to increasing the number of services - AWS is constantly releasing new and useful services on their infrastructure.

o Likelihood of being in business in 3 years. AWS isn't going anywhere. You can rely on them being around.

o Really good post mortems. Each time they fail, they do pretty transparently, and deliver a really painful post mortem that encourages me to believe they are committed to constantly improving.

o Multiple Availability and Region zones. I can, with very little effort, make my services available in redundant regions. I don't think there has ever been a multi-region failure with AWS, and, at most, it's only happened a couple times in their history. Multi-Availability zone failures have happened (and Amazon has apologized - that shouldn't happen) - but, it's < half a dozen times.

o Market Leader Advantage - The market leader tends to win. Microsoft for Desktops, Oracle for Databases, Linux for simple Web/Database/PHP stacks. This isn't always the case (Juniper can beat Cisco in a lot of places) but you know Amazon will be a Top-3 contender for at least the next 5 years.

I realize a lot of these are "Business" reasons, which is incredibly frustrating for people who are comfortable with hosting bare metal, and realize that, given just half the money, they could go into a CoLo, rent a cabinet, buy some servers, routers, firewalls, storage - install it, and return twice the performance that they would get on AWS.

But quite often, the business argument is a more important driver for CxO people making decisions (and assigning budget) than technical reasons.

And, with all that said - I've been in about a dozen Tier-1 data centers in the last 15 years, and, with one exception, every one of them has had multiple sustained outages. (The exception has been Switch SuperNap in Las Vegas - 3 years and no major outage.) - So, failures are part of the business. I'm not expecting Amazon to eliminate them, so it doesn't disappoint me when they happen.
Absolutely. It's like hiring a tour guide rather than wandering around.

If you wander around, you have absolute freedom to discover anything and you'll almost certainly find things that a tour guide wouldn't show you. However, unless you go in with a comprehensive plan (good luck writing one before you know the topic well!), you'll probably also miss things that the tour guide would definitely cover.

If you hire a guide, you're out some money, but you have someone who knows the topic showing you all of the parts that they feel are important. You have structure and a narrative, which makes it easier to see the big picture. You can still explore on your own - but when you do so you'll have a base to start from and some ideas about where to go.

I've found that I learn best with a mixture of the two. I'll read a couple chapters of a book, then do a small project or write some exploratory code to cement the knowledge. In the course of doing that, I'll usually end up reading docs, StackOverflow answers, blog posts, other people's code on Github and other online resources. When I either finish or hit a wall, I read more and repeat.

Of course, there are bad books that make for awful travel guides. There's no point in having a printed copy of the documentation, or a long-winded book that spends 1,000 pages describing the basic syntax of a straightforward programming language. I think that when people think of tech books, those are the ones that come to mind - gigantic tomes full of reference material for outdated software. It's unfortunate, because there are plenty of really valuable books still being published.
How is it "official"?

Edit: I missed who posted it - thanks for head's up.
Blog posts and wikis are great for finding a quick fix/example on how to solve a small problem. I find books useful for when I'm learning a new concept from scratch.
If you took it as such, sure. I'm talking about trying to recycle useless peanut gallery commentary into more productive conversation.

The guy that comes into her comment thread acknowledging he was one of the called out tweets goes on to say that he was admittedly kicking someone because they were down. What value does jumping on such a bandwagon add to the real issues besides reinforcing that behavior in others?
Are publishers more useful to fiction authors? There is a great deal of work to be done in turning what the author creates into something the public buy and I suspect it may be qualitatively different for technical manuals and fiction.

Charles Stross (of Laundry Files and Merchant Princes fame) has some excellent words about this on his blog (www.antipope.org, look over at the right sidebar on his blog) where he describes and discusses the significant amount of work done by his publishers.
It doesn't say how much it costs to publish with Analytics Press.
As batiste suggested below, some countries do have a mandatory army service. As someone who served a bit more than a year in just such an army, let me point out how paying taxes in cash is vastly superior a solution to paying in work:

I am an application developer with a very narrow set of "deep" skills. Working as such, I get to charge rates that reflect those skills' depth. If I pay my taxes, I am taxed for some 260 days of work at what I'll call my "peak" rate.

If I were to be drafted to do government work, the probability of me working in that very area is extremely small. Even if, every know and then, I'll get that lucky batch of work, I'd still spend a lot of time getting to know the respective code base, the objectives of that project and, after a week or two of acutal work, passing things on.
Much more likely, I'd end up in an office somewhere. I am somewhat able to hackishly use Excel, so that might be what I'd do: I'd hack up a couple of unmaintainable spreadsheets to solve some problems which I wouldn't actually be proficient in. Were I to do that work for a client, I might, at best, charge half of aforementioned "peak rate".
If that government work were to be sloppily organized, I might even end up working outside, cleaning up a forest or assisting in building a road. As you may imagine, I'd be a terrible fit: While I consider myself healthy, I'm not used to outdoor work. At best, I might accomplish 2 hours' worth of skilled labour in an 8 hour day, at worst I'd screw more shit up than I'd fix.

Paying cash, I get to contribute at peak_rate * tax_level and leave the government work to people actually hired for their skills, not the amount of available draft days.

Also, I assume many a startup wouldn't take too kindly to missing each of their employees for another month a year. Some countries already do (e.g. Switzerland: 300 days of mandatory military service, done (as in "doing time", rather than "serving") in one part of 21 weeks and some 6 annual parts of three weeks), and while co-workers missing another three weeks per year is certainly bearable, it still seems a mostly useless burden.
I don't think making wild guesses

The problem is that the Scenarios section in any business plan is typically full of this kind of bullshit.

In business schools they teach the MBAs to layer it on by the ton.

The 1% thing I find frankly the least offensive.
Show HN: bandmule.com
Ask HN: What is your favorite editor and why?
I've been using sublime and find it pretty useful but as I gain more programming skills, I thought it'd be worth the while to see what others use and why their editors may be 'better'.

I am looking for something that is obviously easy to use but also looking to see if there are any super smart editors out there? When I did a quick Google search, I found WebStorm but again, would like to hear more personal opinions on here. Thanks!
Ask HN: how can I filter stories by point threshold?
A while back, someone showed me a way to show a list of only stories whose points were greater than N. Does anyone know how to do this? Thanks in advance!
65mph is slightly too high for most models.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fuel_economy_vs_speed_1997...
> It seems like every app seems to offer different and restricted sharing choices... Apologies if there's something I'm missing here. I'm fairly new to iOS.

Sadly, you really aren't. The current, not-even-officially-recommended way to share data in between apps is to have one register a URI handler, such as omnifocus://, and another be able to detect that such a handler is there and provide a "Send to OmniFocus" button if there is. It's not great, is it? It's up to app developers to tell each other what their URIs are.

The new "Send To" screen on iOS seems to have been designed for extensibility, even if it doesn't actually offer any. Fingers crossed.
Though, the "25 times" takes the limited lifetime into account. The short term effect is much more. For example the so called "20 year global warming potential" is 72, compared to CO2's 1.

More here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global-warming_potential
Did it make anybody feel weird when the browser started scrolling? Almost made me nauseated.
We organized this.
Maybe I'm missing something, but why not create a software RAID 1+0 array of disks (easily doable with EBS volumes and mdadm) instead of relying on a heartbeat-style solution as described in this post?
Ask HN: How to create my first API?
Building my first API? Trying to make this process the most efficient and mistake free (if that is even possible). If anyone has any helpful resources that would be great.
When I read "Dropbox for Wi-Fi" I thought the app would be something like a shared folder between clients in a local Wi-Fi network.

"Couple your Wi-Fi passwords to your FB account and easily share them with friends" would have been a clearer description for me.

I really like the idea, though. I sincerely hope it will catch on.
For Android: http://blog.qr4.nl/QR-Code-WiFi.aspx
It's a good point. I see two options: 1. we're irrational morons and just like RedHat more or 2. systemd is technically so much better than upstart.

Perhaps both.
you can use something like abc@example.com - apparently there is no verification step.
look who posted the announcement...
Totally agree with this, both the DC-X comment and the size discrepancy. I have heard it argued that getting the avionics working and the throttle controlled engines are the 'hard' problems, once you get past that scaling is 'just engineering'. That any progress is being made is great.
When you subtract the technological component, these things become bad pranks. My fathers generation used to search paper bins for porn and spy on the girls locker room, and these kids are scaping your laptop for porn and spy on girls through their webcams. Whilst I get that these things are slightly different, using technology as an excuse to blow an action all our of proportion is not a wise thing to do. We honestly should know that because we work with technology. See, a murder is a murder whether it was done with bare hands or with a guided rocket. Theft is theft, whether it is through snatching your wallet or hacking your bank data. So when kids do things they used to do in very similar ways the did in the past, with the only variable changing being technology, it'd be foolish to call them heinous criminals, or psychopaths with no empathy.
At least that's my stand on the issue.
pg himself posted the link. I'd say that counts.
Is it a javascript framework (think, a js framework)?

Yes.

Is it an MVC framework (think CakePHP, Ruby on Rails) that happens to use Javascript for the language?

Doesn't quite follow the MVC pattern but I would put meteor on par with Ruby On Rails.

Is it something I can host anywhere or only on Meteor servers?

Yes. You can host it on your server. It isn't well documented or supported(to me), however.

The demo is neat, I get that - but what is it?

I am not sure what you're trying to ask here.
There are things you have to really care about and things that just have to be good enough. Version control is in the latter.

Just use Git. Or Mercurial. It doesn't matter. They are just about the same and the minor improvement you might get from one over the other is just not worth the effort of thinking about it. Now go do something more useful with the cycles you save.

In summary: anyone who has a pressing need for this product has their priorities wrong.