skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are a lot of problems that can be solved by technology but require some "niche" competence. Take the emerging field of data science.

It's possible that market dynamics will change in a way that favors small businesses over large corporations. Is it likely? You have not convinced me.

Google needs thousands employees in order to run the infrastructure that maintains its current scale, and in order to develop the features needed to keep its competitive edge. Fifty employees is not going to cut it.

It is conceivable that it could be run with, say, 5000 employees instead of 50000. It is possible that the additional 45,000 employees are basically unprofitable, executing vanity projects to give shareholders the impression that Google is innovating in new directions. If that is the case, as programmers we should probably be thankful, because that money is going to bid up our salaries, rather than being paid back as dividends to wealthy shareholders.

In other words - even if businesses could be run much more efficiently - the beneficiaries would be the shareholders, not engineers. Only if the shareholders used their extra dividends to buy more software would it balance out to engineers. If Google suddenly became far more efficient, fired 90% of its workforce, and paid dividends to shareholders, that would not magically create a market opportunity for 1,000 new small businesses to pop up. The new jobs would be in whatever the shareholders getting the dividends choose to spend their money on.
> See, getting value out of Google is something that's learned over time.

This is very true. Especially early on, while learning basic concepts, I found it very difficult to Google things because I did not know the terms or concepts involved. When I was attempting to self-teach my first programming language (Python), I could not understand the difference between parameters and arguments - but I didn't know that that was how to characterize my problem either. I just thought "why doesn't 'x' mean what I said it means over there?"
The beautiful girl Jenny falls for Chris and marries him. I think she has made a terrible mistake; it's natural to be jealous. But I keep the feelings to myself.
The beautiful girl Jinny falls for Chris and marries him. I think she has made a terrible mistake; it's natural to be jealous. But I keep the feeling to myself.
Without commenting on Yahoo! specifically, I think it's the case that sometimes companies become so dysfunctional they're beyond redemption. One company I worked at used to do contract work for Nortel. At one time it occurred to me: "you know this seems like stuff they could do in house, why are they paying us to do it?" Apparently the institutional bureaucracy was so bad no R&D-type project could get done internally. Of course the company filed for bankruptcy like a year or two later.
I think the criticism that we haven't made a strong enough point of why this makes the Web more secure is legitimate. We haven't made this point as well as I'd like.

I'll take that as inspiration for a future blog post. Thanks for pushing us, please continue to do so. We listen.
Just in case the OP reads this and is interested, this exaggerates somewhat for Melbourne. Particularly if you're a kid coming over on a working holiday, which actually sounded like a really good suggestion for the situation.

Yes you'd be looking to pay that for a nice, new or renovated single bed apartment in the middle of the city or an expensive area. As hinted at though, as someone with $5-10k in the bank coming here to be a barista there's no way you'd be able to get a lease for one of them anyway.

Head even a 20 minute tram ride out from the city, however, and suddenly you can pay AU$1,400/mth for a 1 or 2 bedroom place in an older building. (Though you may struggle to get a lease anyway...)

If you were on a working holiday you would likely be better off finding a shared place with some like-minded souls, and end up somewhere around $1,000 for rent + all your bills and such to live somewhere pretty nice.
Sorry, that's my bad. It's fixed now if you pull the latest eyedee.me.
It's amazing how many column-inches, irate blog posts, etc. can be generated by a off-the-record "sources close to the deal said that the deal was worth $X million" remark from one source.

Having seen this for a Y Combinator exit (no names) where the bullshit factor was around 10X (according to what I've heard from actual insiders vs the Techcrunch leak), I find it hard to get too exercised about it or to understand why anyone else is so worked up.
I was surprised that I found every single one of the sixteen public demoes to be well thought out plans to infiltrate large markets. Not one of them made me think, "yeah, but how will you make a profit?" I especially liked flightcar! What a great idea and going after two different billion dollar industries.
How do you get any of the benefits of redis over a Wan link? So confused by a hosted redis solution...
I'm curating a flipboard magazine on web development
Here is a Firefox add-ons to add the missing "browser support":

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/openid-for-fi...

(I have not actually tested this add-on myself.)
How hard is it to install ECC memory into a random desktop computer? Are they all compatible with it? Do you have to change BIOS settings?
Honestly, my examples were based on true stories about people that I know that I've heard in the very recent past. One person makes far, far less than $100K and received just below a $10,000 refund.
Gradle build progress
Let's Google "recursion"
Haha, I'm a programmer who will write 21 nested callbacks no more :). That's enough for me to claim for now.
Every time you create an account at a new site, you're opening up a way to get hacked. Because, like most humans, you probably reuse passwords, or at least have password similarities. And many web sites tend not to have the resources to properly secure their user database.

So, accounts on every new site you visit is both inconvenient and slowly degrades your security.

You could switch to centralized identity silos, logging in with Facebook or Google everywhere you go. Now you've got the problem that these big companies are tracking your every move, enforcing "real-name" policies forcing you to unify all of your web activity into one account, etc.

Persona is the best of both worlds: convenience and reduced security exposure, plus your choice of identity wherever you go with much better privacy.
屌丝终有逆袭日，少年，加了个油。
...the USA has by far the best medicine in the world...

Citation needed.

The statistics that I've seen usually place the USA near the bottom of the industrialized world on things like life expectancy, child mortality, survival rate after open heart surgery, etc.
I admit it sounds contradictory. I guess I equate a nanny-state to the government taking care of something FOR you so you don't have to worry about it.

To me, a required educational course about taxes and personal finance would be akin to a driving course--not so much absolving you of responsibility as preparing you to accept it.
Potentially it is slower than tulip, It does magic stack slicing. also it works only on X86 cpu.
Google I/O Bacon
1. Go to https://developers.google.com/events/io/

2. Enter "IOOIOOOO" by clicking on the "I" or "O" images in "I/O" (They should wobble delightfully as you do this)

3. ???

4. Profit!!1! (with Bacon and Eggs)
I imagine it's a pun on "Fortran" ("for-" -> "four" -> "five").
I just wasted about 30 minutes writing a short solution, when I could have written the 22 callbacks in about 5 minutes. I did learn quite a bit about jquery, and the fn.delay isn't great. The funny thing about programming is that it does seem simple once you have a solution.

function animate_opacity_to(opacity) {
var elems = $('[id^=row]').get();
(function x(){
var el;
if(el = elems.pop())
$(el).animate({opacity:opacity},100,x);
})();
}
Except that I use cron jobs to save my mongodb and postgres databases to S3.

The only thing I lose is perhaps being offline fr several hours if one of my servers goes south.
I was replying specifically to this paragraph:

> I don't care about the 30 dollars turbotax charges me, I'll send 30 dollars straight to the CEO or promise to burn it. What bothers me is that I've been forced to do manual data entry - a pet peeve of mine as a programmer - because the government has been lobbied specifically to be less efficient.

in which the author reveals that he or she uses Turbotax, but finds the manual entry of data into the program onerous. I found this interesting as a criticism, since my own experience is that I virtually never have to manually enter anything into Turbotax. There was no endorsement of Turbotax or other judgement about the primary question under discussion in the article.
If you're sending payment events to Keen IO, you can build revenue metrics into your reporting pretty easily.

I also just wrote a script to run retention analysis using Keen IO funnels, will share soon!
For filters I use Sieve [1] (comes with Cyrus Imap and I believe some others like Dovecot). There are a few plugins for roundcube that provide an interface for managing sieve rules [2], [3]. I tested both linked below and both worked, but they seem geared toward users who want a UI for rule creation, like in Gmail, whereas I have an existing sieve script I want to edit directly. Anyway, filter functionality is there in roundcube that's at least comparable to gmail, so long as your imap server supports sieve.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_%28mail_filtering_languag...
[2] http://trac.roundcube.net/browser/github/plugins/managesieve
[3] http://www.tehinterweb.co.uk/roundcube/#pisieverules
Amazon Payments account holders are required to provide a Date of Birth
Just got an e-mail from Amazon stating:

"To ensure compliance with federal law, Amazon Payments account holders are required to provide a Date of Birth. You must provide this information before Sunday, March 31st, 2013 to ensure your account activity is not interrupted..."

The same statements can be found on this site:

https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/helpTab/Personal-Accounts/User-Agreement-Policies/Federal-Regulations

My question is: Why do they need date of birth? Perhaps they want to confirm that one is "over 18" but this still seems odd - and doesn't seem to be in response to any federal law that I know about (but I'm not a lawyer)

What's even more lame is when you click on the FAQ / and the question: "Why do you need my date of birth?" you will find the answer: "To make sure of compliance with federal laws, Amazon Payments Personal Account holders and some Business Account holders are required to provide their date of birth."
This is an incomplete definition of privacy. If the service and server collude, you are hosed. There are cryptographic constructions(anonymous credentials) that have been around for over a decade that prevent this. IBM and Microsoft both have (unfortunately incompatible) libraries that do this. If we really are trying to build the id scheme of the future, why not use these?
Whiteboards are my preferred method for this sort of thing. The building I work in is actually awesome for this; the safety shields (mol bio lab) at the end of everyone's desks double as whiteboards and the windows are write-on-able as well.

I also know a guy who used to have a piece of whiteboard paper glued the back of his laptop so he could close it and quickly sketch something out if he needed to, his desk is also covered in the stuff.
A Little Bit of Markdown Makes a World of Difference
Newsbeuter is awesome for text heavy feeds, but less so for (say) photoblogs. I'd really like to see more development of different types of specialized rss readers and get away from the OP's argument that there's a "right way" to use rss.
The WoL Index:  Quantifying Incomprehensibly Bad Popular Music
Pretty hard.
ECC ram will work as normal RAM on non-ECC cpus.
To use ECC you need a Xeon (or amd equivalent)
processor and supporting motherboard.
You can get the Xeon equivalent of the latest i7 cheaper than the i7, you (i think) still need to get a server mobo though.
Another way to look at this is that the US is subsidizing the world's healthcare. Take the example of drugs in the linked article [1]. Given their pricing power in the environment, the article asserts that we pay 2x what other countries do for identical drugs, for no other reason than we aren't negotiating as a large group. As an anecdotal example, when visiting Beijing, I had some trouble breathing, so I went to a pharmacy to buy an inhaler. I didn't have insurance that worked in China, so I had to pay out of pocket. Not only did I not need a prescription, but I also only paid $4 for the inhaler, complete with medicine. The same inhaler + medicine costs $10 with insurance in the US (god knows how much without it).

Tom Sackville, a UK politician quoted in [1] summed it up nicely: "We end up with the benefits of your investment. You’re subsidizing the rest of the world by doing the front-end research."

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/post/why-an-mri...
I second both Udacity, and applying to every job where the description seems to fit you.

I was in a similar situation just a week and a half ago - almost 25, took 6 years for a 4 year degree(something you can't do in India, looks really really bad on the resume) and had no experience other than a failed stint as a freelance web developer and a useless 3.5 month stint at a company where I did nothing.

So, till last Sunday, I had pretty much 0 value in the job market. I had a Github account and some small projects on it, but nothing more than decent and I kept thinking I'll apply for this awesome position when I finish that amazing project. And I would've kept doing that for a long long time, but there was a thing came up where I had to travel to another city and I figured since I was going there, might as well apply to a few positions in companies based there. So early Sunday morning(2am ish) I send out a bunch of applications. By Wednesday I had a new job with payed more than what most of the guys I went to college with earn(in some cases it might be as much as 2x), had a standing job offer from another place for when I leave the job I hadn't even started yet, one co-founder pushing me to come over for an interview and offered to better what ever I'd make at the other place, plus 3 other inquiries.

And all that with a few half decent projects on github and a passionate(I think so) about me thing on the resume.

Granted that there are a lot more better programmers available in the US than there are here in India(my boss was shocked by the level of most coders he interviewed), but still it seems doable - getting a job solely on coding chops.

I'm not saying that if you start applying you'll get a job the next day or even the next week or the next month. I'll be the first one to admit that I got really lucky with the timing(a lot of start ups had put up wanted posts at that time) and with the apparent lack to good programmers who want to work at start ups in India. But unless you apply, you don't find out whether or not you could've got that position you liked.

So code some stuff up, put it online and start applying.
Very handy! Here's another feature suggestion: include the renewal rate on your price comparison. For example Namecheap does .co registration for ~$13 for the first year, but after renewal it's ~$22 (just did this yesterday).
Getting Derby ready for prime time
I encountered the same problem on a site I run where I provide custom subdomains. The RFCs technically prohibit underscores but they appeared to work fine in the major browsers, with the exception of cookies in older versions of IE (ie: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/794243/internet-explorer-...). I ended up munging underscores to dashes to make everyone happy.
How does it help vendors of tax preparation software and services if Norquist and his group succeed in getting taxes reformed, simplified, and lowered?

I think the reason Norquist opposes measures to make the existing tax system easier to live with is that such measures would tend to reduce pressure to implement his proposals to change it. He doesn't care one way or the other about Intuit, H&R Block, or your friendly enrolled CPA, the demand for all of whom would be reduced if he were to succeed in getting his proposals enacted.

As for myself, I happen to believe tax withholding was not one of Milton Friedman's finer inventions[1]. You should get your full paycheck every payday. Then, every quarter, you should have the privilege of cutting a check to the United States Treasury. That would keep taxes on everybody's mind!

[1] http://www.stephankinsella.com/2009/10/fck-you-milton-friedm...
The question is does the world lose out if we no longer subsidize the front-end research or would it just get redistributed?
What A Wonderful World
Keen IO is an analytics backend as a service. We built it so that developers wouldn't have to build in-house analytics infrastructure ever again. You can use our SDKs to track any event in your mobile app, website, or backend, and we expose powerful analytics features by API so you can do whatever you need to do with your analytics data.

There's no easy drop-in solution that will give you all the answers for your specific business, but we tried to make our platform extensible so that it can be used answer any type of event-based analytics questions (like those mentioned here).
Reminiscences of Paul Erdös (1913-1996)
http://stackoverflow.com/search?q=%5Bjavascript%5D+crockford
Thank you for posting this. I had never thought about how understanding the terminology required to Google was something that needed to be built up over time. Need to keep this in mind.
I believe you may have missed the first part of that sentence.

> Corporations are not designed to help you, but at some point you have to trust someone not to hurt you.
NASA - The Tyranny of the Rocket Equation
I've never not had my co-insurance portion be anything but the percentage of what their negotiated rate was. I don't know if it is fraud, but breach of contract would probably apply if you did (assuming it wasn't in the fine print).
I second most of the listed services. Just because you can code or host your own systems, it doesn't mean you should. Any time spent on extraneous internal devices is a disservice to your core and customers.
Lastly, shameless plug but I think we have a better accounting solution in http://cheqbook.com
I live in New Zealand, and the system is neither completely liberalized, or deregulated, and works fine.

There is a public healthcare system that is paid for by taxes. The quality is really good generally, though rationalisation does happen with time, so we have quite big waiting lists.

However, there is also a private medical system that you're free to use. The largest one is actually a non-for-profit insurance society, and they run a chain of hospitals as well. If the public system is overloaded, sometimes Health Boards (government) will pay private hospitals to do operations.

Either way, medical insurance is really cheap, optional, and healthcare is seen as a right between the government and the citizen, not some weird relationship with an employer.

Move to New Zealand?
I find it interesting that Avalon seems to have progressed so quickly while BFL still hasn't shipped a working unit. I'm curious about how they managed to get up to speed so quickly.
I'll give you a practical example. What specific emotions do you feel when you take a moment to consider the following two lists of five words extracted from your comment?

1) mystical, Christian, exotic, prayer, pitched

2) productive, evaluate, tools, objective, applies

Answer the question (privately if you like) and you just "meditated".

Meditation is self-observation, nothing more, nothing less. If you want to learn more about how the specific "tedks" configuration of neurons works, that's what meditation (a.k.a. self-reflection, self-observation) promises, as opposed to science which by definition cannot do this. I'm pretty sure that many of the things you consider valuable already do count as meditation (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5331514 ), it's just that nobody labelled them as such or built a formal discipline around them. That might be part of why meditation seems like such BS to you.

The stuff about sitting there with your eyes closed and focusing on your breathing isn't really necessary (I don't really do this anymore), all that's meant to do is help you slow your brain down so you can look at it, kind of like using a debugger. You can get kind of high from that and while fun it can be a hindrance in all sorts of other ways.

All the spiritual stuff you see is perhaps best described as a metaphor for the kinds of things people experience, since they don't have better words for it. Ultimately there isn't a particular belief system tied to meditation, kind of like there isn't a particular belief system tied to the act of debugging a program (although people do like to get into holy wars).

Finally, there's this joke that says all Buddhists are either meditating or feeling guilty about not meditating. So if someone is telling you that you "should" meditate they are quite possibly projecting some of their own guilt about their own spiritual practice onto you. Of course had they been practicing meditation by being "mindful" in the conversation with you (this is just code for "paying attention to their own thoughts and feelings while not sitting in silence somewhere"), they would see that this is what their feelings were doing and they'd probably choose not to pressure you like that.

Anyway, hope this helps.
> If a site posts many items each day and you barely read any of them, delete that feed. If you find yourself hitting “Mark all as read” more than a couple of times for any feed, delete that feed. You won’t miss anything important.

Actually, this could be an interesting feature of an RSS client. If the user keeps marking items of a feed as read, either put the feed in silent mode (no longer shows up in inbox) or lower the relevance of its items so that they go down the list (if the items are sorted by relevance).
Flipboard 2.0 has arrived for iOS. Save & collect things you love
http://inside.flipboard.com/2013/03/27/welcome-to-the-next-generation-of-flipboard/
Rapid Weight Loss Is Easy
Well, I think that was Guido's goal in creating Tulip.
Those examples they listed are strictly things that would accompany a game...
This article seems likely to offend anyone that is easily offended.
"But unless you apply, you don't find out whether or not you could've got that position you liked.

So code some stuff up, put it online and start applying."

Nicely said!
This is spot on. I'm certain this 17-year-old is incredibly clever, but you could hire an entire think tank of clever people to do nothing but innovative R&D for $30M. Hell, I'd take a significant pay cut if I could transition from coding around bullshit UI quirks to actually solving real problems.
shrug yep. I'm saying more that there can be an atmosphere of required politeness.

I mean, look; the OP asked a really good, terse question and got downvoted presumably because it was 'rude.' That's just silly.
That's what Sparefoot does.
Stop user stupidity before it happens
Reverse Kickstarter
Can someone make a reverse kickstarter web site? For instance, all of the fans of Fire fly pool together money and either ask for someone to do it, or someone offers to do it at specific price points. Then a group is elected to do it when the time limit is up.

I offer this web site idea to the internet, please just someone do it, i am owed nothing.