skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm in complete agreement. These trash cans are a complete nuisance in the neighborhoods where they have been deployed. This is especially true in the high-traffic neighborhoods.

I lived at 3rd and South for a while both before and after these were deployed. The old cans were emptied once or twice a day by sanitation workers. Very often, those sanitation workers would also pick up trash off the street around the cans. When the Big Belly's were installed, they started coming around every other day or so instead. No one touches these things. People simply throw their trash at them and walk away. I once saw a Big Belly covered by a pile of trash near 5th and South.

I got really good at opening them with the heal of my shoe, or using a napkin. Very often, though, they were either jammed shut or stuffed full.

The city probably could have just stopped collecting trash altogether to achieve the same result and save even more money.
Has anyone run the numbers on the $900K?

I'm thinking, a million people actually live in the "served area" and maybe one public trash can per thousand people, so figure a thousand cans.

900K divided by 365 is about three K per day.

Combine a thousand cans and emptied three times per day and 3K per day budget and you end up with emptying a can costs a buck.

Lets say each garbage man works 8 hours and never slacks off and only takes 5 minutes average to drive from can to can and empty. Anyway I'm thinking a thousand cans times three times a day means 3000 drivebys times 5 minutes each means 15000 minutes expended per day with the old system driving to visit each can. Now realize that you're not going to save any drive time using the solar cans. But for the sake of amusement we'll try it. Now 15 kilominutes given an 8 hour working day results in thirty or so trash trucks and garbage men under the old (and new...) system.

Not sure if that's reasonable or not. A couple workmans comp cases and the next million empties are going to cost an extra buck, sure. On the other hand, its hard to imagine burning a dollar of diesel between each can. Philly just isn't that big. Then again, if each garbage man was paid $30K per year aka $15/hr and emptied about ten cans per hour, thats $1.50 per empty so factor in lower pay.. But how do you actually save money if you have to drive the same old route anyway?

Interestingly the economics of big city garbage pickup begin to make it look reasonable to simply have the post office mail trash to the landfill. Its not many orders of magnitude apart, and fundamentally junkmail delivery isn't all that far away from garbage pickup. So it should cost about a "postage" amount.
Hi, I'm the author of this add-on. You might want to read the FAQ entry "Q: How is this different from disabling 3rd party cookies and installing Adblock?". Firefox's new 3rd party cookie policy is actually weaker than disabling them outright, so this will not change anything.
Wait... JavaScript and CoffeeScript end up at opposite extremes while having near-enough identical semantics?

That's a big red flag on this as a measure of expressiveness.
The data in the article based on LOC seems to match very closely conclusions based on other data. I do not know that we get to throw out this measure just 'cuz. This is proof of nothing, but no one is offering proof that we should ditch this measurement.
Bill Gates Will Pay You $100,000 If You Can Make A Better Condom
I think this plot begs a different question... which languages are being abused by the development community?

Javascript is way too expressive for its given position. I also believe ruby is more expressive than python, and yet the plot shows the opposite there as well.

This plot could have some interesting data, but there's far too much noise to really learn much from it.
Reading comprehension test: the article claims that the units communicate with a central trash pickup authority--units are only emptied when full. As a result, the trash authority can avoid fuel-wasting trips and optimize schedules on the fly to empty units when they need emptying. Supposedly, this optimization has, or will, yield roughly $1 million in annual savings.
But that's not true if there is a systemic bias involved that has nothing to do with expressiveness. If you're more likely to make small commits on "fun" projects, you're biasing the results against languages that aren't used as often in fun projects.
From Soviet occupation to a cutting edge digital country
> I'm curious as to why you believe microaggression is being misused here

You're using it to create a false equivalence between immature jokes and sexual/racial violence, and having done that, are using racial/sexual violence as an appeal to emotion and morality.

Having done that, you're using that appeal to rationalize Adria's disproportionate response and overstate the severity of the offense, manufacturing a reality in which the conclusion of any rational observer is foregone; Adria is the victim of sexism backed by sexual and racial violence, rather than the reality: she overheard an immature and minimally offensive joke.

In this context, 'microaggression' gives you the rhetorical tool you need to tie together minor offenses into a broader tapestry of systemic violence and oppression from which you can use emotional appeals to justify almost any response, no matter how disproportionate to the original offense.

Adria chose to evoke public mob justice by shaming individuals for behaviors that she herself engaged in, while giving the individuals in question no equivalent platform to defend themselves. This was wrong, and was done in the name of an ideology that uses rhetorical tricks such as your 'microaggressions' to justify such disproportionate behavior.
By way of update, word is that only 3 people, including Nick, are going over to Yahoo!. If this is accurate, I am unclear on the long term value of this deal.
It's MOOAs, Not MOOCs, That Will Transform Higher Education
I don't currently block ads, I just block flash. But if this does come to pass I'll obviously have to block ads, and I'll have to show all my non-technical friends how to block ads.
https://www.newsblur.com/api
"be successful and happy" is a useful advice because there is an option of "struggle really hard but you will make it".

But it's not, IT/programming has no downsides, just dive into it and it's awesome.
The ability to highlight search terms in a page.

You may disagree that is a better experience for you, but you may not make blanket statements that "there are no such cases, period".
Unfortunately, terminology seems to be broken for me :(

[buster@Fry➔ ~] terminology
terminology: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/libelementary.so.1: undefined symbol: ECORE_X_ATOM_E_ILLUME_ACCESS_ACTION_ACTIVATE
trash collectors had to clear out each can three times a day. Now they do so three times a week.

Or you know they could have been smart about it, if the can wasn't full several collections in a row cut the pick up rate for that particular can. It starts being full/overloaded up the collection rate. Unless they are trying to say that this trash compactor is so good that it delivers 60x(3 times a day * 7 days a week * 3 weeks) space efficiency which doesn't seem likely. Maybe the new cans are larger?
Noted thanks!
Improving Productivity With Follow Up Emails For Real Estate Agents
The other thing passes within a few moments

Sure that one particular flurry of dick jokes passed in a few moments. Pervasive juvenile humor is part of a culture and environment that is hostile and alienating to so many. If you don't find that environment hostile and alienating, good for you! Not everyone is going to be exactly like you.

Seriously, if childish little jokes are so damn important, they can wait until the proper context. They'll still be exactly as funny a little bit later in a more appropriate venue.
Touch input to screen latency - game devices vs. smartphones
You could probably argue that from historic context, this was most likely firearms and swords/sabres or the like, as smaller knifes were unlikely to be regulated in the middle of the wilderness and east-Asian weapons were probably unknown/unlikely to be a concern.

However, I am not an expert on your curious rules regarding the interpretation of laws, so I might very well be wrong.
Fold out knife is intended as a weapon? Don't tell the other fisherman. They may get scared.
Decoding CAPTCHA's using Python
Does your app suck? This is what you need to do to make it better.
I was poking around and found this in the linked article, at the end of the article text:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://127.0.0.1:5337/
opmlEditor/comments/
button?title=The%20magic%20of%20HTML%205%20and%20S3&
editorialDomain=comments.scripting.com></script>

What does it do? Wouldn't it fail loading something from my localhost?
I currently drive a Dodge Ram 1500 pickup and love it. Do I have a need for it all the time? No. But there were a few factors that went into the decision:

- My wife wants to get a boat as well as we were gifted jet skis by her family.

- I anticipate moving at least three times over the next 10 years (the lifetime I give to the car barring any accidents) which the pickup will be great to be able to move things as well as being able to hookup a UHaul and go.

The biggest plus for me though is that I'm 6' 3" and 250lb and don't necessarily fit into some of the cars that are economical when it comes to fuel. My previous car (Toyota Corolla) actually would hurt my knees when driving more than 30 minutes because I had to angle my legs in a weird position in order to drive.
> The threat of violence worked for him and his coworker. Without it, they had zero negotiating room and the driver would have likely been fired. Could I have gone to the police? Maybe, but they likely wouldn't have done anything.

They police would have done something if they beat you up.
I think so much of these types of actions stem from growing pains. It all stars with defining a policy (no assisted open knife ads!). You then have managers telling their employees to enforce it, but the TOS hasn't been updated and the front-line employees do not have the tools to really identify who is actively infringing. Once the front-line employees come back with dozens of complaints (or users complain), the management realizes the mistakes and things get righted. I'm sure it's no different for you - once you create the policy, you experience the problems implementing the policy that then force/cause you to create the tools/etc.
You won't get in on the good deals with that strategy. You should focus on getting in on the best deals to mitigate upside risk. That, plus getting good basic economics of the round, is what Sam is advising investors do.
I'll see what I can do thanks!
I still like tabs. I'm often logged into multiple remote machines where, for me, a terminal emulator's tab represents a unique SSH connection and that tab then has tmux running on the remote machine.

Otherwise, I'd be running tmux on my local machine, then want to run tmux on a remote machine, and nesting terminal multiplexers is not good.
How to buy Bitcoins Anonymously
Google Reader is Already Gone
Unlock Phones So People Can Use Public Airwaves
How is being disruptive any indication of smartness?

It is the field which enables you to change industry standards, not the people who populate it.

If anyone is well known as being disruptive I would say it was the scientist. Science research has a waaaaay longer and more impactful history of being disruptive to society than anything else in the (recorded) history of mankind. We programmers are a new breed and are still in our infancy. Programming technology is still in its respective dark ages.
That's a fair point, but - for whatever reason - the way it's interpreted in practice seems to be mainly (if not exclusively) about firearms.

Come to think of it, I don't know why that is, and I'm not arguing that it's correct.

Anyway, the real point is that there seems to be a lot more variation in laws concerning the legality of owning knives, nunchucks, brass-knuckles, etc., than there is about guns. Guns may be more highly regulated in general, but I don't know of a single state where private ownership of, say, a pistol, is illegal. But I'm pretty sure there are states where switch-blade knives are. But I'm working off memory here, so maybe I'm wrong.
Noticed that it dropped off the "More" dropdown, and doesn't even show up under "even more".

You can still get there directly, however: http://www.google.com/reader
CSS: Everything is global and how to deal with it
> dealing with user-generated content (like these ads) is hard.

That's not really an excuse because no one forces Google to be in the user generated ad business. They want money from advertisers so they should do all they can to offer the best service possible.
Yeah I lost count on how many times I had to tell Google my client was not a pharmacy and not offering any prescription medications (even though we were bidding on terms that related to that market segment).

I understand (and can tolerate) false positives in regards to software but there was no excuse for the uneven application by human editors of the guidelines.
Fair enough. That is an entirely valid critique. However, I do not think this makes the article worthless. Given the apparent correlation between known expressiveness and the data derived here, it may be that they had a good notion using length-of-commit as a measure for expressiveness.
I'm a PHP developer who often uses w3schools as reference. What score do I get?
The Management-free Organization
> Rule of thumb: if I think we’re on hugging terms, I’ll go in for the hug. Otherwise please don’t touch me.

Looks like you're sexist too!

You should check your double standards at the door if you want to be taken seriously.
I wonder what this implies about YC's demo day. The hottest deals offer poor economics but attract the best investors. Besides investing in a YC index fund, those looking to mitigate upside risk could pursue a top-10 strategy. But in that case the economics of the round (what percentage of the company you own for the $) are worse.
I used to work at a shop that sold firearms (among many other things) online. I didn't see all the laws we had to follow but quite a few I noticed (I worked on the intranet site).

Unless the customer was coming to pick up the weapon themselves (at our location) we would only ship guns to FFL's[1]. The FFL was also the one who did the background check as far as I'm aware. I don't know what percentage of our sales were local pickups but I am guessing we did the background for those (we had an FFL).

They shut down but the company made it up to 70 or so employees. I don't know how we kept up on the laws. Our suppliers might have done that as we were sort of a middleman from the suppliers to the customers.
I do remember that we needed to track a lot of things for the ATF and they had to be very accurate. The ATF would come in once a year or so and audit the logs and other things related to shipping. I never saw them but I remember the boss(es) being stressed during those weeks.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Firearms_License
The whiskers on the Prolog and Logtalk plots would tend to confirm what PG had said in one place or another, that a language can be both more high level and less expressive, apparently using a definition of expressive related to line count. In that light I'm kind of surprised they do as well as they do in this post.

As I get more serious about Prolog I think it's kind of a shame more people aren't exposed to it (apart from apparently dreaded university classes). It's pretty impressive just how quickly one can write a parser, and for writing an "internal" DSL it rivals or exceeds Lisp (depending on one's taste).
I just realized that Adwords is Google's equivalent of the iOS app store. They review stuff and either remove or block certain "items". I cannot help but wonder how civil and accomodating the people effected by the adwords changes are compared to the developers effected by the iOS app store. Is it just because the developers know how to make noise better than the non-tech ones?
Professor developing Google Glass app
Looks like they just updated the link in the CL ad to another website (was previously a direct link to ReviewTrackers.com), funny enough the new link is also to a website that I own. Now redirecting the new link to this URL as well- http://www.reviewtrackers.com/company/careers/#rails
> There is a lot of weak-ass criticism going on in this thread when the data -- whatever about its methodology is troubling -- seems to almost perfectly back up what is the common experience among programmers.

So?

I mean, really, I can come up with completely bogus metrics all day, and whenever one produces results in a domain that happen to align with CW in that domain post a infographic using it, but that doesn't make that metric meaningful.

> The final conclusions in favor of CoffeeScript, Clojure, and Python are pretty obvious, I would think.</blockquote>

So? A metric that has no intrinsic validity doesn't become valuable just because it produces conclusions which match what you would have assumed to be true (whether based on valid logic or not) before encountering the metric.
I'm afraid you won't find anything like a Delaware LLC in Europe. Our laws are just too diverse. In the US you have state laws and federal laws, but in Europe every country has their own laws. Especially things like consumer protection differ fromcountry to country, and can be a PITA.

As far as online payments go, you're stuck to either PayPal or the recently launched rocket internet stripe-clone called paymill. Haven't tried that out yet, though.
That's bullsh*t, knives kill just as guns do. In the UK we have many more knife related crime than we do gun related crime.

That said, the issue here is not how lethal one is over the other, but Google playing judge,jury and executioner for something they should have no right to jurisdict over.
>Does anyone here really doubt that you can get more done with a single line of Python than a line of C/Java/C++?

I've never understood this criticism before. Consider this line of python:

x = 3

To this line in C:

DoAllTheThings();

A single line of code is a bad comparison because it doesn't say anything about the underlying language or platform.
Show HN: Excel-data, a gem for querying a ruby server from excel
I made a ruby gem for interacting with excel via remote data queries to a ruby web server, with .iqy file (Excel's terribly query file format) generation and helper methods for parsing dates and times sent as parameters by excel. Once you've got it setup, it lets you query your webserver's data from inside excel.

This is my first ruby gem, and I'd love to get your feedback.

http://noahpryor.github.com/excel-data/
There's a pretty fine line there. It's hard to define specific rules for it, and it seems that "use your best judgement" seems like a poor statement, given how little good judgement seems to surround this kind of stuff.

To be honest, I've sat here staring into space for a while trying to think of a good answer, and the best I can come up with is: At a tech conference, leave it up to the women make the first move, if there's going to be any moves made. That's by far the safest bet for making everyone feel the most comfortable, even if it means missed opportunities.

I'm more than open to debating this though, it's a super tough issue. I've never been in an awkward spot at a conference like this, but I've definitely experienced it with women in my undergrad Computer Science program (both personally and as a third party).
The way to do it is to have a good reputation among founders, and the way to do that is to a) work hard to help the founders you invest in and b) don't screw them. This becomes very important when the founder you really want to invest in is choosing among lots of offers.

Of course, you also have be able to identify the good companies, which I will write about later.
http://noahpryor.github.com/excel-data/
clickable link
"The reason is because I didn't catch the other users. Or their infraction isn't as bad."

That's your reason, not Google's. Google knows full well who is bidding on what keyword. Are you suggesting they are under-staffed, under budgeted or overwhelmed in their task of keeping AdWords clean? I'm not buying it. Google has the resources to evenly apply guidelines, they're not a one-man show who's too busy to squash out violators.
Yeah. That's one of the things I hope to learn a bit about by partnering with my buddy on one of the ventures inside the warehouse.

It's complex, but it's a negotiation, like anything else, and eh, that's something I'm not good at now, but I'm getting better.
I started going down the "business cards are useless" path, but then I thought of a way to make my cards more valuable: I put a coupon for using our service on the back side. Here's pics of front and back: https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/112838119585811037366/alb...

P.S. Feel free to use the coupon code if you want.
How ironic that now that you brought them up, the "scandal" is hijacking this thread and we aren't talking about this positive stuff.
Also, if everyone were to try to buy firetrucks, the price goes up — and makes me wonder how supply and demand fits in with the categorical imperative (if at all).
You can also tear it by being extra forcefull with the "pull" using the left button.
Why is Ubuntu not Linux and Mint is?
I came across this blog post where the author suggests that if someone wants to start using Linux, s/he should go for Linux Mint, and not Ubuntu. Because Ubuntu is not Linux. Ok. I hear that a lot. But I want to know exactly why it isn't and why Mint is. Need a good explanation.
I don't think anyone is saying it is completely uncorrelated with the real thing, sure if you split the chart in half the languages on the right will mostly really be less expressive, but this we know without having the chart anyway and the more granular results don't seem trustworthy.
This is also very good advice for entrepreneurs. Choose what you work on based on the upside risk rather than the downside risk.
These are valid lines of code (plus or minus a ;) in both languages.
It's much better to invest in a good company at a high price than a bad company at a low price.
The hourly cost of labor for a couple of unionized employees (the minimum would probably be a driver and a loader) is probably greater than the hourly cost of the fuel that's used, especially if they're running overtime. Factoring in employee costs like health insurance, pensions and vacation time, I'd guess at least $100 per hour for a two-man crew. You can get many gallons of diesel for that amount, especially if you purchase in bulk for a fleet of city vehicles.

Also, the number of garbage trucks that the city would need to own would go down, as would the number of employees needed to maintain them.

I think the article emphasized the fuel savings because they didn't want to explicitly call attention to the fairly obvious conclusion that this efficiency improvement, if successful, would cause lots of city employees to lose their jobs.
Oh, I see! That's an awesome response :)
Am I weird in that I'm completely ok paying, what I deem, is a fair price?
See that's the part I don't understand. I did a separate numerical analysis that the largest cost of garbage pickup is paying people for windshield time not fuel cost. If you skip stopping at every can along the way, you cover the same distance slightly cheaper, but $900K implies an absolutely huge savings which doesn't add up because its nearly their entire departmental labor budget, not, I can drive from the dump to 3rd street in only 7 minutes now instead of 10 minutes because I'm not stopping at every can.

I would have to check my numbers. It might be that garbage men total cost of salary and benefits is a (large) multiple of $30K/yr (getting into software engineer pay territory) in which case windshield time is even more incredibly expensive. Then it might work out that reducing labor cost by 10% or so would actually work out to 900K/yr.