skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With some tweaks this could easily become a lifestyle business for you.

I can tell this project comes directly from your own pain point, one that I have also had on many occasions.

Where you have probably fallen off track with it is by not defining your target market at the beginning you've got into the trap of presuming "extra features" = better value for the customer.

If you look at what you're selling - it's a simplification of an existing technology. You aren't in the business of selling people 'more' instead it's your job to refine, remove & simplify the process of sharing mail. Therefore every feature you add, it's just getting closer back towards the way things are done now.

From my point of view you are targeting individuals on the verge of starting a team. Bloggers with an assistant, co founders with their first users, freelancers with dedicated outsourcers.

You're the gap between a hellish inbox and really complex costly ticketing software.

A few general pointers spring to mind. I feel the word 'mail' should be in the name at least.

Your landing page should make people say 'hell yes' in 1 big headline, 3 bullet points and 2 small screenshots. A real hit between the eyes. Sell on emotional benefits like "fly through your inbox" "delegate like a pro" "goodbye repetitive e-mails'.

Also you have to make your onboarding as frictionless as possible. People with 1 well managed assistant will eventually get 2 or 3. They will think about future costs before they sign up with you. You want to HELP your users expand their team, so make it clear up front that it's pretty cheap to add extra e-mail addresses.

Some flat pricing to instill trust (we won't screw you over when you expand) plus a low (paying) entry tier. e.g $5 per e-mail flat. Make it a no-brainer to start (and then stay) with you as they grow.

Don't forget, e-mail is crucial to a business - I don't know how you're fixed for offering awesome support but that would also be a big selling point for your market segment.

Take a good look at your running costs and see how many users you'd need to break even at different price points. Also how many users it would take to cover costs & your existing salary after taxes.

I could go into further detail, just shout up if needed. Good luck!
The acts (sexist/racist/-ist) themselves, no. But one can say it is reinforcing the status quo of "Us vs Them" in the context of whatever -ism.
Coursera was down
That's not an entirely fair way to put it, Raymond. Yes, some folks said that maybe Python doesn't need enums at all. But many more said Enums should get into Python, including Guido. The issue was sealed in a face-to-face discussion during the recent PyCon language summit in which many core devs participated. So presenting this as some evil ploy to "drown the opposition" in a flood of email is... unfair.

Naturally I participated in the discussion, but the vast majority of emails I sent was to steer it long after the decision to add some kind of enumeration was made.
Divs are a like a club too, except the dinos are extinct and so they're expected to be generic. Maybe I'm just feeling nostalgic for something that doesn't exist, but even when looking at clean, clever, or well-architected markup I can't help but think it could be much better.
Because people/companies aren't the rational actors tradition economics makes them out to be. Case in point: low credit scores are uncorrelated or even positively correlated with good job performance (cf. the featured article's citations). Yet regardless, companies still base hiring decisions off of them (in the wrong direction, the data suggests). Mr Carpenter had to go through undue hardship due to ignorance and stereotyping of poor people. In summary, I hope Adam Smith's invisible hand slaps some sense into these companies.
> This sounds like a juicy area to start suing employers that don't follow the law.

How do you establish an employer didn't hire you because an HR person saw your credit report and didn't like it?
So it makes me wonder if he paid income taxes on that money. My guess would be no. I would guess the situation is similar for all those born with money. This makes this advantage doubly unfair.
Well, in a 16x16 block you only have 16x16=256 pixels, so the blocks themselves are basically "true color". Stack blocks and you'll have lossless true color. Of course, this was more interesting before .png support became widespread in browsers.

(Also, I believe you're not restricted to 16x16/256col blocks. If you can fit a pattern of 255 distinct colors + transparency over a larger image, you could stack several frames to create the same effect, without having to drop down to 16x16 local blocks)
You probably didn't turn it on when you ran the config wizard thingy.
(Good) credit history happens from a repeated pattern of meeting one's financial obligations, including mortgage payments, utility bills, student loans, car payments, etc., and not doing financially reckless things like overdrawing bank accounts, skipping town, etc.

Generally one needs to have owed money to have a credit history, but this isn't the same as not having debt.
This Enum is slated to be introduced in Python 3.4, where range is (not acts like) a generator.
That's the problem with self-proclaimed usability experts. They see the word "consistency" and think to themselves "Oooooh, I shall make everything consistent".

This is why in Gnome, all tab bars are on top, including in the terminal. Consistency for the sake of consistency.
That can work if you have leveridge , for example having a high demand skillset where they do things like "offers in writing".

If you are a kid trying to get minimum wage job with bad credit they'll probably just move on.
I don't endorse doing credit checks on candidates, and it's certainly not something I would ever do myself, but I can testify to the fact that employees with financial problems can be an incredible drain on the company and can have a major negative influence.

I do however live in a country with strong social security and healthcare, so financial problems are relatively more often the result of personal issues rather than just bad luck.
Hmm doesn't work for me, is it an option you need to turn on?
People with trucks arrange their lives with the expectation they can immediately move large objects. The rest of us only move large objects a few times a year and borrow our friends' and families' trucks, and they resent us for it.
The Hockey Stick: The Most Controversial Chart in Science, Explained
I think it's important to increase visibility of women in tech. There is no "us vs them" in this story! The "us vs them" would be "guy techies vs girl non-techies". As soon as a woman is "in tech", she stops reinforcing the status quo.
And in many places bash isn't the default shell either.
For landlords and banks that's clearly a feature, not a bug. A person with a "safety net" is a lower default risk.

For employers the situation is more complicated, and legal considerations rule the day. Companies can and do get sued for discriminating against individuals who exhibit low-class behaviors or appearances. Credit scores are a clean, legal, objective way of weeding out a lot of the same people.

Also, if an employee with a troubled history (especially a criminal record) messes up in a way that results in litigation, the employer can face accusations of negligence for putting him in a position where he can do harm. Proper screening helps the employer make a case that all necessary due diligence was performed.
Changes coming to AppleCare coverage
Agree 100%. There's a more general notion of conscientiousness [1] that, without evidence, seems the really deep, meaningful thing we should measure. Credit score is crappy because cash-only people won't have it and it's effectively monopolized by three data providers with who-knows-what for commercial/financial incentives.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
paususpender while true
do
done
Yeah, you're almost certainly right. It only works if they need people, and then they probably aren't wasting time with long search processes.
Yes it does and that is because it actually assigns all of the rest to a variable named '_'. The use of the underscore as a throwaway variable is just a convention and the interpreter is not aware that the result should be ignored.
How were they drains on the company?
Was it just correlation between financial problems and people who were a "drain" or where they continually asking for extra pay or stealing things to pay back debts?
A "launch" tab at the top, where we can publicly launch projects without having them compete with popular articles.

The same way the "ask" tab works. It would help make sure the community easily sees every new project.

I see interesting projects fall off new really quickly pretty often. Launching projects is such an integral part of the community, it makes sense to make the site work better for it.

Base it on "HN Launch" in title or something?
May be a culture issue but this title worked for me (native American English speaker, urbanite) because of the opposite sexism you didn't mention: most 'taggers' are male. The title implied that the girls are trying to clean up their own neighborhood and provide a counter example to the choices young, male taggers are making.

Would love to see if these girls can reach out to their peers in South San Jose or Oakland.
but isn't the fact of having never borrowed money, and have always saved before buying stuff even safer than taking any obligation whatsoever?
also, paying your phone bill on time gives you a good credit rating?
Having used Appfolio for managing a small investment property portfolio, I wish they would spend a little less time analyzing the philos of CSS and a little more more time on high-priority features that customers have been waiting for. There are a million things in life we can spend time on, and the real challenge is to prioritize. Do we a) Get a PhD in CSS, or b) Deliver features that 90% of our paying customers have been asking for? To quote Steve Jobs, "I'm proud of the things we did; I'm even more proud of the things we didn't do." You didn't catch Steve Jobs writing a dissertation on CSS... he had more important things on his mind. As a customer, you can't help but get frustrated when priorities are being so mismanaged and you're paying $4000 a year for it.
There are a bunch of red flags here. It's possible this app has an ulterior motive.

At the top it says the author is Douglas Rushkoff but the avatar in the FB screenshot (under The Story) is Jacob Appelbaum's[1].

Here are the permissions it requests[2]: "publish_stream, email, rsvp_event, publish_actions, friends_online_presence, user_online_presence, manage_notifications, manage_friendlists, create_event, ads_management, xmpp_login, read_stream, read_requests, read_mailbox, read_insights, read_friendlists, user_work_history, user_website, user_videos, user_subscriptions, user_status, user_religion_politics, user_relationship_details, user_relationships, user_questions, user_photos, user_notes, user_location, user_likes, user_interests, user_hometown, user_groups, user_education_history, user_games_activity, user_actions.video, user_actions.news, user_actions.music"

There would be no point in requesting most of those if all you were doing was publishing a message or deleting content.

As PaulMest pointed out, apps do not have access to delete most of your content.

[1]: https://twitter.com/ioerror

[2]: https://github.com/kylemcdonald/socialroulette.net/blob/mast...
Ah. I stand corrected :)
Yep, modern retail chain stores basically work under the assumption that their staff will steal everything if given half a chance.
No current debt could be you having a credit card, using it to buy groceries, and paying the balance off every month. Your credit score will be fine.

No credit history could be you never having a record of having a credit card, because your activity in your country of origin isn't tracked in the United States. (When I moved here, that was still a blessing, but I digress...)
Michael, do you have any evidence for your assertion that "most people who have bad credit were unlucky"?
I keep coming back to this idea (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5653878) of creating an API that stores the original titles and then just unleashing a GreaseMonkey scripts that compensates for editors that forget <h1> != story.
Your right background checks are acceptable for say TS /DV clearance jobs but a shoe shop FFS
Yes you can. These 'implicit' subsidies you are referring to rely on completely made up numbers. It's not the same thing and trying to convince people that it is doesn't work.
Well Morgan Freeman has publicly commented on that pretty explicitly: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeixtYS-P3s
It could be that the under- and unemployed are heavily overrepresented in online forums. It's one of the few places where they can be treated as equals. And also, given the nature of the site, many people here are taking risky financial moves that involve non-traditional employment and the hope of future rewards; and knowing that your plan B could be completely screwed up by something that happens to you because plan A goes up in smoke in a disastrous fashion ( say your business gets sued by a patent troll or you lose customer data to carders because your contract programmer had a severe lack of clue ); that's likely to be a concern.
Someone reportedly did an informal experiment. One gun, 200 spins. Results:

Position Times
1 (barrel) 20 (0.100)
2 25 (0.125)
3 35 (0.175)
4 (bottom) 38 (0.190)
5 41 (0.205)
6 (death) 41 (0.205)

Source: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=11585888&...
It's very gray. I was just talking to a friend who works on Capital One's funds availability policies, and with complicated multi-factor models, it's difficult to discern whether the credit report was really the factor that led to adverse action.
See if they pulled the report. They could go through an intermediary, but you could make that unlawful (the current credit agencies are one step just above "hearsay" anyway) and aggressively enforce it.

Not that it would happen.
If its illegal by definition it can not be ethical.
It's funny because of the wasted resources.
They're less likely to waste their time getting almost all the way through the interview process only to fall at the finish line. Better to spend your time elsewhere. Besides - there's many legitimate reasons not to want people checking your credit... every credit check is a hit against your credit score and thus may negatively impact future ability to get credit for things like auto loans and mortgages.
The "invisible hand" often works very slowly.
By which time Mr Carpenter has been out of work for 3 years and is no longer the hot property he once was.
An empty history is a blank piece of paper, whereas one with negative records is stained for years. When you have no credit history, lenders can't form an opinion on you. However, you can build a history with only positive records by buying ever increasingly expensive stuff; for immigrants, a progression like car+apartment lease + furniture -> big TV/thing -> car -> house is common. (I never got up to the house part, but as soon as I had a credit card, I made sure I paid EVERYTHING with it)
In the USA any nontrivial medical condition will do it - glad I am in the UK now I am on the kidney transplant waiting list :-)
How much do you think that domain cost?
> True, but C++ does not and you still have the performance penalty of reference counting.

Not very relevant. For UI code, responsive resource allocation and de-allocation is much more important than saving a few % CPU cycles.

> Actually, are you aware that reference counting tends to be presented on the first chapter of many CS books about garbage collection as poor man's GC?

Yes! Sometimes the conventional wisdom doesn't hold in the end, or it doesn't hold for all use cases. But I should have been more clear that ref counting is GC, whereas what I refer to as GC involves sweeping reference roots periodically to identify garbage.
Is there a technical reason why algebraic types and pattern matching are only found in functional languages, or is it an accident of history?
The paradox of the proof
I've still yet to find a good use case for Enum. It's (lousy, inconsistent) syntactic sugar that none of my code will use.
The Abstract Wild, Jack Turner

Honest and challenging, without being sentimental.
> ... the electric car simply moves our consumption of energy

That's right. The nice thing about shifting the burden of energy production over to the electrical grid is that the energy becomes, in CS terms, an implementation detail: You can upgrade the environment impact of all the cars in an entire geographical area just by switching the underlying source of energy from, say, coal to wind or water.

That is already happening in many places. Many countries are already energy-sufficient based on renewables. Norway and Sweden get most of their power from hydro, for example, Denmark gets a lot from wind. Many countries (including Germany and Australia) are gearing up to become self-sufficient within 10-20 years. Germany was at 18% in 2010, planning to be at 66% in 2020.

As EVs increase in numbers and in mainstream acceptability, this will push companies to focus on the grid and on new energy sources. Right now, if everyone in the world switched to EVs, the grids would collapse.

Second point: The grid (or rather, its tributaries) is simply a better place to convert raw materials into electricity. The internal combustion engine is pretty efficient, but not particularly efficient compared to, say, a coal plant.

Lastly: EVs eliminate local emissions. That's a good thing.
>Compassion or no, it's fundamentally hypocritical to espouse productivity as a virtue and then do an about-face in your own personal choices.

It need not be hypocritical to perform actions that disregard one of your claimed virtues, as long as said actions are in line with some of your other claimed virtues (or in line with well-founded consequentialist-type reasoning).

A man who preaches courage may find himself on a battlefield where courageous action leads to certain death, and would be wise to retreat to safety.
> > In reality, "premature optimization is the root of all evil" is advice given to new programmers

> It's also for experienced programmers who dink around with macro-optimizations.

The hilarious thing is that everyone seems to think everyone else's optimizations are premature.

Don't believe me? Just go ahead and ask someone an optimization question, like maybe on StackOverflow.
Those who respond might not know you, but I'll be damned if their first reply isn't to tell you that you probably shouldn't even be optimizing in the first place, because obviously if you'd thought about it more carefully, you'd have realized it's premature.
Don't crap on the CSS developer for honing his craft and sharing his knowledge.

That's like saying the guy who developed the CSS for apple.com shouldn't share his CSS knowledge because because customers want a 5mm thick iPad and Apple hasn't given that to them.
> For landlords and banks that's clearly a feature, not a bug. A person with a "safety net" is a lower default risk.

I remember reading sometime ago that credit card companies would often actually offer better terms and larger credit limits to people receiving benefits (welfare) than those who were employed when the total amount of income was the same.

An unemployed person losing their benefit was judged to be a lower risk than an employed person losing their job.
I think you missed half the argument. Windows is noticeably slower than Linux or Mac on the same hardware. Isn't that a problem?

And if optimization always hinders evolution, boy should Windows be evolving... I mean... the NT kernel should have smashed through all kinds of antiquated paradigms by now. It should be doing memory deduplication, disk deduplication, fast JIT compilation of binaries for alternative architectures. It should support live process migration between machines, joining of systems together efficiency to form larger super-systems, a better permission model obviating the need to rely completely on virtualization for true privilege isolation in enterprise environments. It should have truly efficient network filesystems supporting disconnected operation, sharding, etc.

Oh wait... it's stuck in the 90s... never mind. And it's slow.

Linux, which optimizes a lot, has at least some of the things I mentioned above.

"Premature optimization is the root of all evil" is a deeply nuanced statement that is nearly always misunderstood. "Optimization hinders evolution" is probably likewise. They're quotes cherry-picked out of context from the minds of great craftsmen who deeply understand their craft, and alone I do not believe they carry the full context required to comprehend what they really mean. I think they have more to do with maintaining clarity and focusing on higher-order reasoning than they do with whether or not to try to make things run faster. (And like I said, the most effective optimizations are usually higher-order conceptual algorithmic improvements.)
Shoot, I can't make this month's OpenHack.
it looks cool though; I will try for June. Thanks a bunch!
Indeed: http://status.coursera.org/
Black History Month may have not been the best example, but I think there is value in highlighting success of minorities in a field where there aren't as many minority models to look up to.
Why oh why do people throw non-default templating languages into their tutorials when it's not relevant to the tutorial at all?

When you write your views in ERB, your tutorial's accessible to everyone who's used Rails, and the HAML / Slim / Mustache / Liquid / whatever people can convert them over easily. When you write your views with something other than ERB, someone who's only familiar with ERB has a much harder task, especially if they're new to Rails and don't know much about alternate templating languages.
I guess I was doing it right the whole time. Somewhere along the line I decided recently that I didn't like putting too much into the "namespace" and started transitioning towards relying more on parent containers (especially if sections where properly id'd), but it looks like this might be bad practice.
I can see why you would think that, but then again, what's the other alternative? You either have time/resources to do it now, or you don't. As far as I can tell, you really have three choice: you can do it, forget it, or write it down. If you write it down, at least there's a fighting chance you'll revisit the idea when you do have time/resources.

Also, empirical observation shows me that, in my own case at least, things that are put on lists do sometimes get done eventually. I'm always obsessively making lists and writing down notes about possible new features for Quoddy, and over time I find that I do keep working further and further down the list... to the point that now I'm starting on stuff that was originally labelled "Speculative / TODO: Sometime Before The Heat Death Of The Universe".
Tips To Never Miss a Flight Connection Again
I think it is important that if a women/black man/[insert-group-here] person/anyone is excited to work on things in tech, that they realize that people will look upon them with whatever illogical stigmas they have, and move beyond that. Because there will be people in the t̶e̶c̶h̶ world that are able to see beyond the superficial things and connect with them as a person to work on things they love to do.

At least that's how it has been for me. I can't imagine what it would be like if I stopped every time to take offense to someones irrational beliefs they had about me, and tried to form [insert-group here] to do something about it that has nothing to do with my interest with tinkering.
Looks like he just rewrote the ideas of [Nicole Sullivan](http://stubbornella.org) and [Harry Roberts](http://csswizardry.com).