skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Much of my family is "top 10% in a developing country." Yes, they can afford people to make their food and clean their houses. That's just because of how poor everyone is, and there is a very negative aspect to that situation as well.*

But if you look at their apartments, personal possessions, etc, their standard of living is comparable to people living in public housing in say the Bronx.

*) My dad once asked one of our servants, a young man maybe 18-19, to go buy a pack of cigarettes. He came back without the cigarettes, telling my dad "I'm sorry, I couldn't buy them--they were [as much as he made in a week or two]." He never asked him to buy cigarettes again... In general, its extremely awkward to have domestic servants in poor countries because those people are actually really poor. Their kids have no opportunities. They'll work until they're dead with no hope of retirement.
Proven: Customer Interviews Save You Time and Money
Which was hilarious because I put up some old C code of mine [1] and while looking to make sure its all there it hung on me. I immediately wondered if I had been the cause. Fortunately it came back fairly quickly.

[1] https://github.com/ChuckM/Project3DC
You might want to look for Cache Oblivious Data Structures (and algorithms).
I was a bit bummed to find out that financial assistance is only available to women. I wonder why that is.
LOL. That's exactly what my friends told me.
I generally try to limit my spending to those things that I get a really high return of value from, knowing that most things do not qualify. On the income side, I put a value on maximizing freedom.

I don't work backwards from a retirement date to the present, but forwards from the decisions I make today.
Before jumping the fence and start writing for a newspaper I used to believe tech and business information was really bad in newspapers and magazines. Then I became one of the "bad writers". Truth is those articles are not "bad", they are just not written for you. Someone with a deep knowledge of the insides of Washington, or fashion, or the restaurant business will think the same about the politics, lifestyle and dining sections. I read the NYT daily and, honestly, its hard to find a better example of good journalism these days. Yes, of course not everything is Pulitzer-worthy but journalism is not different that any other endeavor. Your average is far from your best.
SEEKING WORK - Remote (I'm very inexpensive)

Latest Projects
// http://goo.gl/hgsiY
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Main skills: PHP, SMS Gateway, AJAX, JavaScript, jQuery, jQuery Mobile, Git, MySQL, Youtube/Google API's, Android Applications, Design/TwitterBootstrap/Foundation, & more.

timothydmoody@gmail.com (Tim)
I just spun up juju on AWS and was pretty impressed with how damn easy it was (the toughest part was looking up my AWS keys). Now I'm really excited to play around with it and see how it interacts with Chef.
Agreed—mostly because it's SIMPLE!
Look pretty cool.

Is this is using LXC Containers ?
Are you using MySQL Proxy for in awesome proxy?

Thanks
No I don't think he was. You missed the entire point of the article, I guess.
The wealthy bid up prices. Depending on the industry, you can buy equivalent good and services for much, much less than you can in America.

Obviously this doesn't apply to an iphone, a private jet, or a Bugatti Veyron.

But if you want a haircut or groceries, it applies. Likewise to a host of other goods and services that the poor spend money on.

Give me bottom 10% in America ($10,500) and I'm very, very poor.

There are countries where you can live like a king on that same amount of money.

(It depends how much you value personal services such as maids, cooks, etc. which tend to be most affected by this phenomenon)
http://isgo1point1outyet.com/debug/vars

I kinda figured they wouldn't leave the polling time at 5 seconds.
In the U.S., a couple options:

Join the military - we have bases all over the world and chances are you might end up assigned to one.

Join a Federal Agency that does overseas work - State, Intelligence Community, etc.

Join a megacorp with a substantial overseas presence, apply only for jobs that are in countries you want to live in. They'll handle all the work visa nonsense.

The good news is that for most of these, there's lots of bonus pay/subsidized housing involved. Working overseas you can save unbelievable amounts of money.
Or just link to the status page instead (http://status.github.com) which is separate from the main site.
Bunnyhopping is allowed, but the problem was that for one Half Life run macros and authotkey was used to sequence things.
Bunnyhopping using only mouse, keyboard or gamepad is okay
How to rip dvd to amazon kindle fire with dvdfab9
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Are we going to see another 3.2 release outside of security issues?

There have been enough performance and functionality related issues in 3.2.13 that I was hoping to see at 3.2.14.
> Do they mean that people actually pretend to be surprised about someone's lack of knowledge?

Yes, I think so, or at least the common reaction is usually over-dramatized. I've observed this behavior in friends, colleagues, and in myself. When learning about someone's lack of knowledge, it's very common for the other party to react with "Really?! You don't know xyz??" I think 99% of the time the person saying this is not actually surprised, and does not actually need confirmation by asking again "You don't know xyz??" It's just a social tic ends up being kind of exclusionary and negative.

> Just tell participants that they may encounter people from a variety of backgrounds, and they should not assume that every understands what everyone else is talking about.

This is fine and well, and I'm sure the people running HS would agree with this, but tbh it is a little obvious sounding. The thing with avoiding "feigning surprise" is that some people (like myself!) might not even realize that they do this. After I read about this rule of theirs last year, I've been trying to cut down and was a bit saddened to realize how much I do it.

It's a pretty similar attitude to this comic, in the sense of adding a twist to the more general form the rule that you proposed. Recognizing that this is a positive opportunity for sharing some neat factoid instead of an opportunity to put someone down is not obvious, unfortunately.

http://xkcd.com/105/
You had already posted this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5642344
Cuba is a middle-income country. It has a GDP per capita 3x as high as India, and 5x as high as Bangladesh.
>>>The name "Hotmail" was chosen out of many possibilities ending in "-mail" as it included the letters HTML

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotmail#Launch_of_Hotmail
> There's so much food in America that obesity is a major health issue.

Sort of stupid. It actually costs money to eat healthy, which many people can't afford in the states (fresh fruits and vegetables, grocery store far away, no car, just by crap at the convenience store then).

The US doesn't compare well to Europe on quality of life for those not in the middle class. Ya, they can afford some crap, but not what they really need to improve their lot (decent food, decent education, healthcare...). The libertarians don't really get that, and think everything is peachy perfect in the states (except for too much socialism).
I think what matters most is the hand-lettering, not how the ink got on the page. What you seem to be missing is the fact that the emotional impact of a handwritten card comes from the handmade letterforms of the writer, not the ink. This, of course, would preserve that.

I think you might be doing that "my default is to just find fault" thing that someone was writing about in a blog post that got submitted to HN in the last few days. This looks like a nice service, and while I would never send a handwritten card myself (I hate to write by hand), I would be touched to receive one of these, even if it had come out of a printer.
You're incredibly ignorant. And then later, Just a statement like [his statement] really shows you haven't been outside your home town.

Wrong is wrong. I shouldn't need to spell that out, but I obviously do. Whatever point you're hoping to make, you do it an incredible disservice by yoking it to comments like the one I responded to above.
Definitely worth a watch. Interestingly, they agreed on quite a bit. The one thing I was struck by, was the extent to which they agreed that government regulation was an inhibitor of innovation. Actually, I expected that from Thiel, since he's well known as a libertarian, but I wasn't sure that pmarca would share that viewpoint. But they both came down pretty hard on government in that regard.

I think both agreed that energy is of critical importance as well, and that the nature of the energy markets have had a big impact on shaping progress in other areas.

Also, I think Peter Thiel made a fairly interesting point about the connection between our imagination (as a culture) and Hollywood's portrayal of technology. It is a little odd that some of the most well-known and popular movies with a large technological element are the ones where the machines are coming to kill us. I'm sitting here right now trying to think up some good counter-examples, and am coming up fairly blank so far...

Something else that Peter Thiel mentioned at least twice was the phrase "risk averse". I think that's a pretty important point... as a society, have we become so risk averse that we aren't willing to gamble on the big breakthroughs anymore? Are we content to just sit back and wait and hope for a steady stream of incremental, sustaining innovations? I think he might be onto something with that.

Edit: Something that neither Thiel nor Andressen mentioned, that I think is relevant to this discussion, is the recent re-emergence of the hobbyist / DIY / amateur scientist / solo hacker/builder movement. Hackerspaces, cheap embedded / embeddable computers, Arduino, Beagleboard, rPi, 3D printing, cheap DIY CNC milling machines, etc, are enabling thousands or millions of people to take a stab at building things they never could have tried to build before. And go visit the recent HN thread on "Hardware startups" and the CDixon post... looking at what an entrepreneur can do now, in terms of having a physical product built at scale with a much smaller capital investment than in the past... that's got to encourage some new companies to form, and some people to start working on ideas and dreams they've been stewing no, no? And hardware devices aside, cheap computers, cheap Internet access, Open Source software, etc., are making it so much easier for people to explore their software and virtual ideas as well.

But, then we'd be back to Peter's point that "we got 140 chars". So, is it lack of imagination, or something else, that's keeping us from getting radical, disruptive breakthroughs? Or are they out there, on the cusp, just... about... to... happen.
Well, I'm glad you have the answer :P

I agree with your statement that cameras will be accepted in the future, but I'm not sure it follows that it's a great idea.

On the other hand, I'm not even convinced cellphones and facebook are great ideas, so my life is probably not representative. (Now get off my lawn.)
Cuba is a weird case, due to the socialist economy.

Monthly salaries are about $15-$30. No, I'm not forgetting a zero.

They get free education and health care (though quality of the latter varies) and they get a few cheap food as rations.

There are a few other benefits, but in large part they're quite poor.
Ask HN: Pros and Cons of an invite-only launch?
Our team has decided to launch CentUp by scaling up to about 5000 users in a controlled manner. We've gone back and forth on whether we should open up to the public or stay on the same path. One one hand, we're dealing with a small team and a complex system that could fail. On the other, an invite system ads steps to a sign-up process that might turn potential customers away.

What have your experiences been?
I see what you're saying, but I think you/rayiner are still missing the point.

There are fresh graduates in America right now that can't find jobs. More clearly, these fresh graduates would be homeless/living in poverty were it not for a little help from their parents, either that or they're holding on to the last shreds of help that our welfare institutions provide. These folks could leave America and find jobs elsewhere that might give them a very, very nice looking income.

I have a friend who was a history major who couldn't find a job right out of college, he went to China with really no clear idea of what he would do there (besides being an 'English tutor', which his sister already living in Shenzen was)... and what do you know, some company decides to hire him to be their spokesman. It turns out businesses in China will pay white/Western-looking people some serious money for gigs like this. He's now in China, with a Chinese wife and it seems to me he's pretty happy with the decision he made. Opportunities like this do exist, and they're actually not that uncommon. Leaving America for a better life is now very much a viable option. Not for everyone, sure, but for some it could be the best decision they ever make.
Yes, US currency also smells very bad.

However, the US seems very aggressive about replacing worn bills. This may be related to the fact that so much of our currency goes in and out of automated machinery these days, and people don't hang on to cash very long.

Anecdotally, bills today seem much tidier than they did when I was a kid. Of the dozen bills in my pocket right now, none is older than 2006, and none are crumpled.
codeacadamy and hackerschool should get together.
It was bound to happen and showing targeted ads when people check-in is a no brainer. The issue Foursquare has is retaining the user base. I was an avid user for the better part of a year and then it just got tiring, it became a chore to check-in places and Facebook already had a similar feature. The badges aspect is cool, but the badges mean nothing and most of my friends stopped using Foursquare after a couple of months so there was no one to brag to and another issue is that people would cheat check-ins. I was competing for a local store that I would visit every morning and caught someone out checking in to the store when it wasn't even open and no, they didn't work there.

Does Foursquare still have a large user-base left to monetise?
>> In exactly what way am I worse off simply because some rich tool has a private jet or a Bugatti Veyron?

Measures of "happiness" and "contentedness" are tightly bound to our environment. Being at the respective top or bottom of a given social order has a meaningful impact on quality of life perceptions. Obviously, some Maslow'esque hierarchy of needs applies here, and no-one in the world is happily starving.

> But even when they're not, they almost never cost you anything; in fact, because the rich choose to soak themselves with Veblen goods, their extravagant purchases actually help you by driving the economy.

That seems to make the implicit assumption that conspicuous consumption is the most effective means of investment for those assets. It may well be the case, but I've never seen it suitably demonstrated.
It depends on what you consider wealth. In the developed world, having servants is a sign of wealth because labor is expensive. In the developing world, labor is cheap- but plasma TV's certainly are not.
If you're going to be that dramatic about it you could at least give some examples.
Yes, I take that for granted along with many other things. It doesn't mean that I have a less enjoyable/more for-filling lifestyle without them.
Ok, interesting. I assumed top 10% was somewhat better off.

I also read 'developing' for 'poor', which made me take a broader reading of your point than I think was warranted.
Because that's not journalism. You already have that. They are product catalogues. Even if you somehow manage to keep some kind of integrity in the process, that only covers a fraction of the content that a newspaper / magazine generates. What would be the interest of Best Buy in writing about, say, CISPA if theres no related product they can sell to you?
Rethinking 'Form Follows Function'
I think that it could be very plausible to say that "it feels more like the venture capital IPO machine is in full force just to crank up the IRR on their funds", but I think that you are missing that the powerful thing about personal computer wasn't that everyone would do the same thing (I suppose it was general computing calculations), but that people were free to explore many different things (solve individual pain points) in the same way 3d printing will (I think it may be even more than that but I'm limited by the contraints of my own insight into potential future applications[imagination] at this time).

I guess if you even look back on the origins of the personal computer, people gave very narrow reasons for its use and failed to make the connection to how it could be valuable outside of those reasons (outside of the angels/venture capitalists and entrepreneurs).
Huge congrats to Jon and Tim! I worked with them in 2011 and it's an amazing team that I'd be honored to work with any day. Yahoo! is lucky to have them.
Don't forget that Americans working overseas still have to pay the IRS!
Here's the maintenance policy: http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2013/2/24/maintenance-policy-f...

Tl;dr: after 4.0 is released, no. But bugfixes have been merged into 3-2-stable that there should be a 3.2.14 before the security-only releases start.
3d printer obsolescence
With all the popular hype around 3d printing these days, I just thought I'd post an "ask" to HN:

How might time/tech render 3d printers as obsolete one day as 2d printers now are?
The cost of living thing is very, very real. Have US customers, but don't fucking live here (I am in NYC to visit).

There are many places where you can have a much better standard of living than the US for the same price - including regular roundtrip airfare to visit your friends and family. There are frequently huge tax advantages, as well.
I'll add another data point to this. While working for Thalmic Labs (of the MYO fame) last semester, one of the best purchases decision was to buy a 3D printer. We were able to find a big, cupboard size professional 3D printer for a great price, and we bought it. It ended up being invaluable for prototyping the design of the product. The difference between the first prototype, and what the final product is going to look like is incredible. In addition to simply prototyping, it also greatly helped in demos and testing, as we essentially had a prototype that for all intents and purposes looked fully ready at every demo, which definitely helped with testing the different sensor design, and form factor designs and getting valuable feedback from it.
I made this app fresh on rc1, so theoretically that's the difference. Steveklabnik/attendr is the repo if you want to poke at it.
I wonder if this is because there's multiple 3D printing companies fundraising now?
Just a note that you wrote your (predictable) "you clearly have never lived abroad" statement ~30 minutes after someone else made the same incorrect observation and was decisively corrected. I often wonder how and why that kind of comment happens here.
Promotion System Redux (about Google) [2010]
True, I'm probably projecting my view of what's worthwhile, and also highly valued here.

I value personal services far more than most tech items beyond a laptop and phone. And they also cost more here which makes me overvalue them mentally compared to their global value.
So have US customers (who pay near-US rates) and outsource all your work to skilled local contractors. Added bonus: it scales way beyond your normal 168/hour week cap.
Yahoo acquires Astrid
Top 10% of Bengalis have 35% of the income, in a country with a purchasing-power parity (PPP) income per capita of $1909. So my guess would be top decile makes about $6-7k/year. This is in a country with zero public services (while someone living on $10k/year in the U.S. has access to public education,* public housing, food stamps, Medicaid, etc). India is substantially better, but at around double the PPP income of Bangladesh, that puts top 10% of Indians probably right around the bottom 10% of Americans.

*) American school spend on average $10k/year per student.
Ugh. Really?

I truly don't get the hype about that movie. They definitely got the visuals right, but a lot of it felt "off". Quite a few of the cultural stereotypes were awkwardly over-played too.

Also, Japan is really a different bird when it comes to integration. Not all countries have the same jarring and visceral division between foreigners and local society.
No, but I'm at school with access to one.

I'm printing out my final project for a rapid prototyping class as I type this out! :D
Donation will only get you so far and sooner or later the novelty of the idea will wear off.Ebooks seems to be working a little better now, but its still a very niche product.

The thing with blogs/specialist is that they don't cover a big scope and they are not consistent. The job of a journalist is not to write a masterpiece on a subject once in a blue moon, it'ss to write information pieces everyday, on a consistent schedule and focusing of the issues that could have an impact on the readers life. Even if the reader has not heard of them before or care deeply about them. And in order to do that, they usually ask -or should ask- specialists.
Veblen goods aren't the most effective means of investment for the greater good, but their exorbitant cost funds the salaries of the craftspeople and engineers and technicians who make them, and the designers and writers who market them.

I'm not saying that buying a Bugatti is a social good; it clearly isn't. I'm just saying that those purchases aren't a drag on the middle class, except to the extent that they represent a missed opportunity for a more-just burden sharing to offset a needless sacrifice by the working class that could realistically be addressed by the rich.

Again the point is: simply sitting around being rich isn't intrinsically harmful to the lower and middle classes.
This is one of those cases where deciding on whether the system is ACID or not depends entirely on where you draw the system boundaries.

If you draw it at the boundary of the central general ledger, it's going to be ACID.

If you look at the way transactions pass through several intermediate systems (each of which is ACID) en route, I guess it could be called BASE.
Philz Coffee Raises 8 Figure Round
Can the redesign include "working" this time? Most broken thing I ever tried to use.
Sanders 'shocked' at snagging 'Madden' cover
That's not always true, or maybe I'm just weird. I admit, there's a lot of feeling out of the loop with friends in a different country, speaking a different language, but it's not forever. (And no, I'm not living in one of those American colonies that always seem to form either ;)
Walmart Garcinia Cambogia: Is This the Best Brand? | Garcinia Cambogia Review
Its not just New Delhi. Hyperbole, but every woman in India is a potential rape target - All the women I spoke to complained of being touched, physically felt-up, had comments passed on their dress or female anatomy and yet they did nothing about it. What keeps them safe is still a mystery to me. The government sure aint doing much to change the sexist attitudes.

In the USA we take the freedom to wear bikinis and shorts for granted. Hard to see women in India dressing like Americans do.
>Social media and on-line communities are more democratic than traditional journalism

Democracy has nothing to do with the editorial process.
There are some people you can never make really happy, I guess and I am sad to say it appears your mother is one of them. That should not hold back the rest of us though.