skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, why spend 250.000 on a home built out of wood framing and drywall? You can build it yourself with lumber from Home Depot and some specs. Plumbing and electrical aren't that hard to figure out. And making walls with drywall and insulation isn't that hard either.

If you take a summer off work, you could probably build a decent house on your own for around 20.000 bucks. And that includes one foot apart floor joists (not the 16 inches common today) for stability. You first of course need the lot and somebody to come by to pour the foundation right.

My two cents. However, I can't currently take a summer off.
Right, the article should have been about it being expensive to be the urban poor. Suburban poor have it much better. They largely have cars, because people in a city pay more to park a car for three months than people in the suburbs pay to buy a car. They shop at and work Wal-Mart rather than 7-11, and Wal-Mart costs less and pays more. Etc.

The moral is, if you're poor, get the hell out of the city.
"most listing agents will cover some or all of the buyers broker fee, so the actual buyer (typically) ends up paying somewhere between nothing and 1%"

One of my goals in life is to correct this misunderstanding among buyers. BOTH the buyer and seller pay for the agent services if they are used. Believe me, it is not your fault in thinking that the listing agent and/or seller pays for the buyer's fee, because that is the way the paperwork is worded and that's what everyone says, but it is NOT the complete story. Even most real estate agents don't seem to completely understand this fact.

I want people to not get lost in semantics and to understand that, as a buyer, you WILL pay for any services you use (and you may even pay for services you don't use if you're not smart about it.) In the long run, you will pay even more than the seller. The fact that the HUD-1 form creates a fiction doesn't mean that you don't pay. If you REALLY understand how everything works, you can get a real value and service for what you pay, saving money in the overall process. If you don't understand how it works, you will pay for an agent who may not have your best interests at heart, and not even realize that you paid for this dubious benefit.
Good luck. From my experience (and I don't really mean to be snarky) you'll need it.

My TN stay in the bay area was handled by this company: http://www.jewellfirm.com/
Really? "7.2 watt-hours in 15 seconds in watts" doesn't "just work" in google. Can you post a one-liner that does the same calculation in google or other site?
me too! I was thinking of studying on my own for the A-plus certification, but it would be great to study with a group of people over the internet, who are at the same level, maybe we could exchange flash cards with each other
Which has got me thinking...if Django is a full stack framework. Then what is Pylons?
"My off-topic opinion is appropriate for this technical/entrepreneurial forum because I believe it to be correct" is not a valid argument.
for M-L, brush up on your basic* math, and jack up on the probability and statistics. an eetsy beetsy volume on numerical computing, just enough to understand machine representation of numbers and enough to understand errors (and their propagation!) should be enough.

don't hesitate to read engineering texts. the first few chapters of various DSP texts should give you an idea of what to look for ("oh, so it's loops over real-valued vectors! cool!") but if you read EE texts, feel free to ignore complex variables (unless your earlier math text was good enough to introduce them as vectors of two components :-)

An interactive language, preferably Octave/Matlab should come handy.

None of this will make sense right now, but hints are supposed by like that ;-)

--

[Edit:
* basic as in naive set theory, ability to reconstruct and prove properties of Real numbers using Dedekin-cuts, basic proof techniques, sequences, series, limits, functions as sets, basic trigonometric functions, the derivative and the anti-derivative, and most importantly understanding the various type of integrals, specially the Reimann. touching "real analysis" from the standard and Non-Standard angles should be enough. All this could be done in 2-3 months with the right texts. This is the minimal you will need to understand things; the basic properties of the logarithms should come handy, specially converting between logarithms of different bases (you will be working on bases 10 and 2, while the natural number is more prominent in engineering than CS.)
]
Seems highly plausible. The concerning part is how do we get out of it? I wouldnt be particularly excited about a world war at this point.
"half of the government budget goes towards the military"

This is some serious misinformation that I see repeated over and over again, propaganda style. It's really under 21%.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d4/Fy2009spending...
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This is great! although I do have a few comments. Looks like the OP has the makings of a fun children's book on his hands. My only qualm though is the Star Belly Sneetch Machine spits out Sneetches with star's on their bellies.

Probably a more functional idiom would be a Sneetch goes into the machine and spits out a Sneetch with the a star on his belly, whilst the original Sneetch is shuffled off somewhere or parts ways.
I agree with virtually everything he says about teaching (this is ironic because I really hated his ODE lectures as a student). But the idea of "mathematics is a part of physics" isn’t well justified in the article and is, with all due respect to such a luminary, ridiculous. Instead of dozens of examples we all can think of here’s my own: I am working on applications of topology in computer vision and data analysis. No physics in sight! His attitude toward proofs (outside teaching) is also very odd.
This article is of extremely poor quality. It's just all over the place, jumping from one cliched argument to another, without finishing a thought or connecting the evidence. Running out of oil is a very serious concern, but it has zero to do with the depression. And the idea of some sort of "civic generation" is hooey. FDR was a cold blood politician just like all the others, not some dewy eyed savior.
Lots of hard work. We have been living beyond our means, borrowing money, being greedy...

Now it's time to work off the debt the baby boomers have been building up for the past 30 years...
As I recall, EICAR has been around for years. It's not 'new', by any stretch of the imagination.

EICAR might help inform you if your AV engine is running; it won't tell you how effective your AV engine is against current threats.

It's really only useful for developers to tell if their AV engine is scanning anything at all... consumers don't really get much benefit from it.
Yeah, I think this is an SEO play with the copy written by a mediocre copywriter.
The urban poor usually have much better bus access and walking access to jobs. That saves a lot of money. The cost of housing is also super cheap. And many inner cities do have inexpensive super markets, cheap ethnic grocers, and dollar discount stores for household goods. I'd need to see some actual stats on the price of milk or eggs by neighborhood. I'm not sure inner cities are really that much more expensive.
Yes, I mean sticking with Django and jQuery. I think it's really ugly to have DOM stuff in your view functions.
Don't let a community's rules dampen your curiosity. Philosophy is the sport of gentlemen and women.

I enjoyed talking to you, even though it felt like a monologue at times.
"both Bush and Hoover took steps to inhibit certain forms of new energy – Hoover passed prohibition, which eliminated ethanol, and Bush refused to pass any bills that promoted renewable energy."

Somebody needs to read a history book...
A society that maximized economic mobility would not be a fair one. It would mean arbitrary wealth transfers from the richer to the poorer.

...

Personally, I'm in favor of a 100% inheritance/estate tax, with every citizen's child given an equal share of society's inherited wealth on his 18th birthday.

How ironic.
I thought maybe we could use some of the taxes to build some community centers and hire some staff.

If volunteering at a community center is the thing, then you would go down there and do that. Can do. have done. But most of my volunteering has been fixing stupid "for want of $100" problems. Volunteers like the ones you speak of can line up but if there's no electricity, it doesn't matter.

do you feel it is moral to take your best guess for fixing poverty and push it on the rest of us? No. I feel its moral to use what science we can muster and use a results based approach to choose very wise uses of the limited resources we have.

There's Bob. Bob is poor. Go make him not poor. To help Bob (in this case) would require time travel. But Bob's son is a whole different matter. I can't cure stage 4 melanoma, but I can tell people to wear sunscreen.
Yes, I am a mediocre copywriter. I am just a developer who found a pattern in the data. Please, don't judge me on my writing skills as I am the first to admit that
I suck at writing. You should of seen it before my wife got hold of it (to edit it).

And no I didn't think about SEO I am a Flex/Flash developer and do not know the first thing about SEO.

My blog is at www.flairjax.com

Again, try to see past my horrible writing skills and see if you can understand the message or information.
No worries. It actually is possible in principle for world lines to merge because all quantum interactions are in principle reversible. But the odds are so small as to be effectively indistinguishable from zero.
See my comment below. I am a Flash/Flex developer and do not know a lick about SEO. And yes I am a horrible writer.

Actually, was invited to Ycombinator a couple of years ago was the last group to cut.

So again just a developer no tricks up my sleeve.

www.flairjax.com
That's not true. There's still a sweet spot for keyword density-it's between 3% and 5%.

Although, none of the on site stuff matters anymore without incoming links. Get the links and the on-site SEO right (high content/code ratio, keyword rich copy that still reads well, shallow website architecture, human-readable URLs and proper use of <h> tags) and watch out!

Having said all that, I'm not sure how well this reads, and yes 2009recession.com is a little over-optimized to my eyes, but I'm hardly unbiased since I'm an seo/sem. What else are they going to call it, though? How would you brand a recession analysis website? 2009recession.com pretty much nails it.

That PDF is some killer link-bait, though. A lot of time and research went into that. These are just first impressions, I only looked at it for a minute or two before clicking "back." (I must admit I'm here for the community much more than the content, sometimes.)
The US doesn't invade countries without strategic interest. I think that you mainly need to defend against neighbors and pirates.

Dozens of countries don't need to defend against the US to have their sovereignty because they are on "mutual" defense.
Yeah, that sounds like Pop history to me. I could deduce something similar from taking in mainstream newsertainment, but it's hardly accurate.
I'd prefer to stay away of calling him radical. Both building & living in that house seems pleasant to me and to many of the commentators here.

As I suppose is implied above, I challenge the notion that in this case (and many others), ideas about ecologically sustainability really do logically imply that people should build their own houses, live off the grid, eat locally grown foods, make their own yoghurt etc.

I think That the case is mixed (at best). I think that this is all besides the point anyway. I think that many people enjoy building their own houses, live off the grid, eat locally grown foods & make their own yoghurt. However, they seem to want these things to be moral imperatives, not just preferences.

Superficially, it's similar to people that like to photograph unusual doors or meet descendants of historical characters. It gives them a framework to travel & meet people. I have no issues with that.

But this case is problematic because it's political. it implies there are benefits to this far beyond the personal enjoyment of the individual.

I think the house is beautiful. I appreciate that he is an ethical consumer with regards to his chosen building materials. But I reject the case that manufactured housing is bad.
Reminds me of the organ piece ASLSP by John Cage which began in 2001 and is scheduled to end in 2640.
Websites 'keeping deleted photos'
Also, what would be the benefit of SEO? I have no ads on the site?
I concur, there's no science here. Just a pretty good system for picking complimentary colors with nice contrast. "How to pick colors everyone likes" is overplaying the hand a bit.
When I was 14, I thought that sex in a pool was a contraceptive method because "the chlorine would kill the sperm".

14 year olds can be monumentally ignorant about very important things. How many geometry tests do you have to skip before its one too many?
I think he meant that if you were going to pick one language that was both high level and perform well it would be C++. To do better you would have to, as you suggest, split it in to two languages.
It has some extra functionality, but it also looks like it has less. There doesn't appear to be a way to execute cross-domain XHRs yet.
It sounds as if you aren't a US native, so I won't assume you are. However, a few remarks:

> none of U.S. cities rank in the top 100 most livable places (Mercer Cities Ranking)

Unless I am mistaken, this link shows 8 US cities in the top 50. Are you referring to something else?

http://www.citymayors.com/features/quality_survey.html
http://bwnt.businessweek.com/interactive_reports/livable_cit...

> crime, largest per capita prison population in the world

Honest question, is this totally a bad thing? Does punishing criminals under a certain standard imply something poor? Or am I fuzzy on the statement?

> infrastructure - roads, bridges, buildings etc. (don't get me started; it's almost third world country level)

Whoa! Have you ever been to the US? This is a very bold statement to make. (note: I've been all around the world in my days)

> average lasting quality of housing (drywall, cheap wood framing, bad carpentry on windows and doors etc.)

Hmm, I've never seen this in my travels around the States. Quality depends on many factors. I've lived in newly built to 40+ year old homes and I've never had the problems you've mentioned. I've never heard of anyone I've personally known with those problems, either (not that they don't exist, of course).

> no functioning Euro-style city cores, urban sprawl, stuffed highways with commuters

Some areas could use some help, but I've successfully navigated around San Diego, Seattle, Washington DC, NYC, and other metros without a personal vehicle, and have relatives who do so all the time. Does this not fit the description? On a side note, my personal city is 400,000 people over 115 sq miles (county: 900,000 people over 832 sq miles) - it's a different way of life and trying to force a metro-city transportation system into this area is bound for failure (though I will agree that there is room for improvement).

The US isn't perfect. But not that imperfect, either.
Have you considered the option of not getting another car?
The whole point of Google PowerMeter seems to be that utilities don't worry about presenting the data; they just send it to Google.
Isn't it important though how good CPP is at being Haskell, and how good IO is at being C?

This seems to come back to that original Scala-is-not-functional article, which seems to argue that it isn't features or purity that makes a language "functional" or not, it's how good the language is at working with that style.
Well it doesn't look like you have much content.
The after looking around a bit, i found the 'shop' icon, but thought I was already in it, as it was highlighted. But clicking on the shop brought me to an alphabetical product list by brand.
Is this really the way people shop?
Particularly on a site which is loaded with reviews, I'd expect to shop by product type, and then make a purchase decision based on the reviews/scores.
The way you have it, as far as I can tell, you are expecting people to select a brand, and then look at the products by that brand. That doesn't seem efficient or effective.

You really need to work on usability. You've clearly done design work, but navigation needs a lot of work.
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Sorry should have been 'upheld' not 'passed'. And please show me where in history ethanol wasn't kept out of the market with a heavy burdensome tax, making it to expensive?

Also show me a bill passed by the Bush administration that gave more subsidies to renewable energy than to big oil?
Christopher Alexander (the original design pattern guy) has a somewhat similar view. Except that he took four books to say it. The books are quite beautiful though.
jgervin - or someone - can you please explain this part?

Also, income inequality, measured by the ratio of the top 10% of wage earners compared to the bottom 90%, increased dramatically during both presidential terms. The ratio increased from 7.1% in 1928 to 7.8% in 1932 under Hoover, and from 6.8% in 2001 to an outrageous 7.9% in 2006 under Bush, the year the Center For American Progress study was conducted.

I don't understand the numbers. Surely the ratio between the top 10% of wage earners and the bottom 90% is always 1:9? I get that it must be a measure of the different amount of income earned by each group, but I can't think of what the number might be measuring.
I have not links to this besides from Digg. And I have almost no out links so what's with all the SEO talk? Just want to get the information out thats it.
I'll second that. Qt is a beautiful toolkit. It's just enough C++ to be useful, and avoids all the templates and obnoxious flotsam that makes that language such a horror. Signals and slots work great, and other tools (qmake for example) are a pleasure to use.
Google’s Beta Love May Die In Fight For Enterprise Customers
A really detailed response would be a book, and I'm not sure this is HN-worthy material...so I'll try to be somewhat brief. I realize that your mind is made up, and since I'm (finally) starting to learn how hard it is to change a mindset, I'm not even going to try to change yours. I actually agree with much of what you're saying, and we can agree to disagree on the few other parts.

As I said before, I invested in this industry because I hated it and because I thought the incentives were misaligned. I definitely have a different background than any other agents or brokers I know, which puts me at odds with most of them. That being said, I think there IS a role for a (much smaller number) of good, honest real estate agents if the incentives are realigned and consumers can be made to understand more of the process and what they're actually paying for. As with any industry, SOME intermediaries do create value. To think that no intermediaries create value is, in many ways, just as ignorant as trusting agents too much and paying the 6% "like everyone else does." I just want consumers to be able to separate those that do create value from those that don't, and to pay a fair price for the value they receive. Those seemingly small goals will probably not happen industry-wide in my lifetime the way things are going, but I'm slowly working on it...

I initially tried a more revolutionary attack on the real estate industry (and MLS), and was severely beaten by the experience just like so many that came before me. One of the main obstacles is the entrenched players in the industry and their power over the regulations, etc. Even more powerful and disturbing, for me anyway, is that most consumers simply don't care if the industry changes because they don't even understand financial basics. Most alternatives to the status quo fail because of consumer inertia, not competitors.

I think the industry WILL change, but not die. I've looked at where I think the industry is going, and right now I'm satisfied to educate consumers and to save them a substantial amount of money. A website can't replace an agent in all cases, on either the buy-side or the sell-side. Of course, in some cases, it can. I believe my company is doing better work by operating in the customer's interest on the leading edge of the industry, versus working on an idealized version of where we or others might WANT it to go. This is probably the least lucrative company I'm involved with, but it is very satisfying when some people do get it and we can help them out.
Well... you accidentally made a really good SEO play! Congratulations.
I find it ironic that they're targeting "anyone who can build a Web site" & their first demo is ad blocking!
Even though you guys are close to bickering, I have to say I like it that the comments on this site contain phrases like "reflect the hideous face of dame fortune."
The best conversations are those that aren't predictable. Get away from the mundane as fast as possible. You are a unique person, if you hide that uniqueness, you become boring and nobody will want to talk to you.

eg:
You: "Crazy rain eh?"
Girl: "Yeah."
You: "I love the rain, it reminds me of Rangoon."
Girl: "You've been to Rangoon?"
You: "No but it is the best city name in the world."
Girl: "I've always been partial to Riyad"

If rain reminds you of an episode of star trek or of an algorithm, say so. You'd amazed how far you can get if you say something w/ total confidence no matter how absurd. If the person blows you off, it's all good. 99% of people aren't going to be your friends.

Don't be boring and don't be afraid. The more you do it the easier it gets. You loose absolutely nothing by trying.
A friend of mine pointed me to this article when I was curious about die cut cards in the past:

http://printedproof.com/printing/how-and-where-to-create-die...

I never actually ordered them, but hopefully the article will help.
jgervin, I suggest adding a lot of footnotes. Pretend you are a skeptical Wikipedia reader who loves to stamp "citation needed" everywhere. There are a lot of figures mentioned - they all need sources. You mention a Center For American Progress study and a ComScore study - you should link to those. I know you have a list of sources at the end, but that's kind of an archaic paper-like solution for a medium with hyperlinks.

I suspect this would be more persuasive to skeptical readers if you moderate the tone. Avoid terms like "outrageous" and "orgy of oil consumption". I would prefer it to be just facts - facts I can check by following hyperlinks!

Also, put your email address on there somewhere, or some other way for people to contact you (other than direct messages via your Twitter account). Many people will have suggestions, from spelling mistakes (like "different generations that grow and dye" should be "different generations that grow and dye") to factual and logical criticisms.
> Sorry should have been 'upheld' not 'passed'.

That's mainly what I was complaining about.
I would be interested in something that worked the other way around: is there a way to teach stupid, wrong, brave people timidity, without psychologically scarring them?