skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Loan payments, most likely. Too much money in car loans, credit cards, and the like are traps that too many people fall into. I personally cannot fathom why anyone would willingly take out a loan to buy a car that was not their first (used cars are not that expensive if you're willing to save for a few years), or why anyone would use a credit card without knowing they have the money to pay it immediately, but I do know that people do this.

They also had two kids. Kids are expensive; they genuinely require new clothing every year, lots of doctor visits, etc. Of course, if you're not too proud for it, you can get a lot of this stuff from friends and family with older children, but it's still expensive.
How to Wake Up and Instantly Achieve Something Everyday
nauseating mix of hubris and ignorance

I'm afraid it's a nauseating mix of having operated real pub-sub systems such as TIBCO Rendezvous on major stock exchanges.

What Twitter does is not difficult and they do it badly.
What makes people laugh at twitter is the problem is not that hard, but they make all the classic mistakes.

Every time someone wrote a reply Twitter... this was the most expensive work the database

Sorry, I am going to laugh at people having scaling issues when they use a database like that on a messaging system. There was an essay by PG where as soon as he heard they where using Oracle (or C?) he instantly knew to ignore them for much the same reason.
Yes, i found this incredible. My question though was- why was his new wife not receiving any alimony? She, by all accounts had younger kids as well.

Seems like he needed a better divorce attorney.
Sounds like you're asking for trouble :)

You work for HackerNews? Straight to Gitmo!
Yeah, bad example. But it really doesn't change the point. Companies skirt out of the US for tax reasons too. Did innovation happen in Sweden? Yes. Is Sweden suffering from the loss of rich people who don't want high taxes. Not at all. It's a richer country than America, for starters, the range of social services is amazing, you can walk home at 2am and not be afraid, etc.

And I disagree about the article. Think about it: most people are roughly the same. If they really have similar starting points, they'll generally have similar ending points. Again, Slovakia doesn't "soak the rich". It's about providing the mechanisms to avoid the rich getting richer and poor getting poorer. It's about providing the tools for true economic and social mobility. That used to be the American dream; now it's only a dream since the reality is quite different.
I like Attenborough. Like me, he is an agnostic that is not interested in being labeled atheist. He also understands that science cannot possibly be used to describe "god" or the lack thereof, but that doesn't equate to a non-existence of such a being.

It is a logical, critical assessment. I feel that Dawkins misses this, even though he may play it some lip service.
What of programmers/architects who are also users?

Moo back to you. :)
Scott's updated HD streaming requirements require some seriously beefy hardware. This does exists for high end home entertainment systems. And by high end I mean real high end custom build stuff for rich people, not just early adopters like us.

Also DRM outlaws a lot of cool technology like that. It is stunning that the media conglomerates have successfully legislated their own deeply flaws business plans.

If they had successful done that with the VCR, we still wouldn't have DVDs. Ah, but back then Sony didn't own a movie studio.
Ok, but knowledge of sub-prime lending == personal spending discipline, or it should. He writes about sub-prime loans and other "financial innovations", yet he fell for them hook-line-sinker. If you know what's going on in the world, you should know how you fit and how to maneuver within it.
> Turning that into "40% of people think that the earth is 6000 years old" is called twisting your statistics.

You clearly did not read what I linked you.

Asked whether it was true that "God created the world sometime in the last 10,000 years", 32 per cent agreed, 60 per cent disagreed and eight per cent did not know.

32% of UK are young earth creationists and 8% "do not know". So please do not sit there and tell me that this "does not approach" 40% of people anywhere but in America. Your statement is simply false. This is NOT uniquely an American phenomenon.
This is racism, pure and simple, teaching young kids to torture and kill any non-Aryans in the vicinity. The anti-immigrant people are Aryan supremacists who want America to be an Aryan homeland. It is despicable that this neo-Nazi propaganda is being taught to young people. Children are not born hating, they are taught to hate through brain washing outfits like the homophobic, racist, anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi boy scouts. It is repulsive. We should be teaching our kids about programming and useful skills, instead, we are teaching them to use minorities for target practice a la Ralf Fiennes' character in 'Schindler's List'. It is enough to make the sane people like me want to move to Canada quite frankly.
I've also noticed this pattern. My textual reviews are fairly positive, but I have a lot of 1-star reviews. In some cases, people have emailed me and it has become clear that the app simply didn't meet their expectations (in 9/10 cases they didn't seem to have actually read the app description).
Here on HN I much prefer interesting discussions rather than smarta$$ comments. However I think people overreact to your comment. It was a humorous answer to a sentence that was implying second degree, thus setting an "easy" atmosphere.

Funny thing is that right now there is a humoristic (french) song about some guy feeling imprisoned in his university tiny bedroom ( http://www.deezer.com/track/35237 )
The 3% (of users affected) number has been trotted out a few times. Has twitter ever backed that up? It feels like a way of marginalizing the people who're complaining about the change, by painting them (us) as a vocal minority.

(Following up: A trusted source confirms 3%)
He gives lip service to being agnostic, but like most atheists, doesn't really see the difference.

Evolution really has nothing to do with god. The only people who think it does seem to be ones like Dawkins and creationists that discount it completely. The rest of us don't see the conflict.

Evolution does not allow one to come to a conclusion that there is no god. Nor does it create - in any critical assessment- the environment to say you don't believe in god, and that this belief is supported by science.

Only faith allows for that.
I've updated my post based on your comment above. Thanks, it was rather helpful.
If my understanding is correct, the $4K is paid after taxes and the ex-wife pays no taxes on the money received. That is, he is going to pay $48K per year in child support but has to earn maybe $70K pre tax.
I'm sorry but I just have to ask this as well... If the majority of the BitTorrent community are criminals, what reputation is being damaged by the Pirate Bay guys, and why are you so worried about it?
His book has to sell well because he's been ass-raped by the alimony-industrial complex.

Although he made a lot of really dumb decisions and had some bad luck to exacerbate the problem, the man-hating court system is what fucked up his life.
I and the grandparent know this, but we're cheap lazy and hate shopping.

(Apologies to the grandparent if it's just me.)
Is there something I can write at/near the beginning of the description that would discourage people from trying it who probably won't like it?
That $2400 has to cover two adults and two live-at-home young children: all utilities, food, transport, education, property maintenance, out-of-pocket medical, and entertainment. (They each also have older children who, despite not living at home and the alimony, might need some support.)
Is Exotic Travel The New Bootstrapping Technique?
More interesting to me is expense per employee:

I think indirect expenses per employee would probably be a much better metric. Amazon buys and sells lots of stuff, which pushes up both their revenue per employee and their expenses per employee; similarly, Google pays websites to place adsense adverts and then resells the space via adwords. On the other hand, eBay just puts buyers and sellers together and doesn't act as intermediary, so the value of goods sold via eBay isn't reflected in eBay's revenue or expenses.

It's a basic maxim of economics (and accounting) that equivalent transactions should be treated equivalently; and whether goods pass directly from seller to buyer (as with eBay) or through an intermediary (as with Google or Amazon) therefore shouldn't affect how we compare the companies.
Does Apple let you (as the developer) reply to reviews with a comment or a sub-review?
And yet, Twitter is kind of hard to ignore.
Great combo: 27 & 30

"The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That’s where we come in; we’re computer professionals. We cause accidents."

"It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter."

And for wholehearted agreement: 58
"Good specifications will always improve programmer productivity far better than any programming tool or technique."
> child support should be no more than 1/2 the minimum cost of raising a child

Am I a horrible sexist if I disagree with this?
I hate to link to faux news, but see here:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,207858,00.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Views_on_Evolution.svg
Fair enough.

You have to understand though, that BitTorrent was invented to enable the quick and easy sharing of large files, i.e. movies, music, and software. It was known from before the first line of code was written that the primary use would be to steal content.

It was never about legal activity. It was never about making the world a better place for anyone except those who want to parasitize the world more efficiently.

Yes, there are some legal uses of the protocol.

An analogy could be guns. Guns were designed from the start to kill. Some countries ban guns. Some countries have a constitution making them legal. Yes, I agree, it's not the gun that kills, it's the human, but when illegal behavior enabled by the product so vastly outweighs the legal activity, we should, as a society, recognize the damage it is doing and simply stop using it -- by choice -- not law, but merely an ethical decision about how to create a better world for producers and consumers of intellectual property, including the IP you may one day create and many already have.

I showed someone who had a role creating That 70's Show some of the content from the show on Youtube and she was impacted in a physical way. I saw her body slump and a dramatic sense of loss come over her.

When I saw that, I understood much better how people are hurt by content theft. We think it's being over dramatic to say that people's jobs are lost and revenues are lost and the risk/reward balance shifts to the negative for society due to copyright violations -- but it does.

It's wrong and it's bad for the world. Am I not guilty of copyright voilation? Yes, I am. I have done it. I also recognize that people are going to violate my rights as a content producer -- there are bad people in the world and I am and have been one of them, though as I mature, I am understanding more and more the value of honesty and hard work and real loss associated with those errs in my ways.

People who take risks to make people's lives better should be rewarded. Should they be rewarded to the extent they are? Perhaps not. The record industry and Hollywood, et al, could use a bit of a flatter organizational structure and find efficiencies that could allow them to produce content and distribute it more cost effectively, but that doesn't make stealing their property right and definitely not legal.

This is the problem with BitTorrent and this is why we should simply stop using it to steal.
I didn't realize that "Patty" was a company.
Presumably the restriction on RET applies to things like calls using function pointers and therefore, by extension, vtables? I could see how they might maintain return addresses safely out-of-band somewhere, but will every function pointer call have to go through vetting? Will we have to go back to the days when virtual functions were evil?
He said what she refused to cut back on, food, clothes, kids.

My reaction when I had some financial trouble recently was to quickly to cut back on food purchases and evaluate moving to a smaller house. However, fortunately I still have a positive cash flow.

I was surprised when he mentioned paying over $100 for cable/internet with all these money problems. If it were me, that would be the first thing to go and I'd move back to $5/mo dial-up.

Sounds to me like they were able to avoid any big costs (like house repairs), but their brains couldn't really understand the cost of recurring payments on so many small things.
Profit per Employee at Tech Companies Compared to Other Industries
So they went into details about how, exactly, "paying poorly gets you poor goods" works. We all know this, but perhaps not all of us understood the intricacies of

1) Quality Fade

2) 3rd party testing companies

3) cultural differences such as whistle blowing, information sharing and available "official"
Here are video lectures by the author of the convex optimization book (Stephen Boyd):

http://see.stanford.edu/see/courseinfo.aspx?coll=2db7ced4-39...

http://see.stanford.edu/see/courseinfo.aspx?coll=523bbab2-dc...

And video lectures by the author of the NLP book (Christopher D. Manning):

http://see.stanford.edu/see/courseinfo.aspx?coll=63480b48-88...
He also displayed a lack of financial acumen in his first marriage...
Accepting an offer Monday, startup versus traditional... what should I be looking for
I've been unemployed for a few months following a layoff, and now have to decide between working for a small startup as their 4th employee, 2nd developer or taking a normal 8 to 5 job at a large company (over 30,000 employees). What should I be looking for?

The startup idea makes sense and seems valuable. They are running transactions on the existing software, but aren't profitable yet.

The following is fixing my comments on funding. They have 1 VC with first round funding, some public funding, and some private investors from within their related industries.

The original deadline for an answer from both was tonight and starting Monday, but I am going to see if I can extend it as the startup offer only arrived at 2ish.

Both offers are a slight pay cut from where I had been, although the startup does not currently offer benefits. I'm getting married in July and we're currently looking to buy a house, while planning on postponing kids for a least a year.
He knows now.
I'm afraid so. How often do the courts grant the father custody? If the mother can't support herself and them, then they should go to the father, end of. But for some mysterious reason that almost never happens...
Here in Jamaica I would say most people believe the Bible to be God's word. There is not much of an evolutions vs creation controversy here as it is in the US. Outspoken atheists are a minority. Most of the population live like like pagans, but if asked, many claim to believe in 'The Father.' Some don't want any 'white god.'

As a former Christian (I left Christianity in early February), I can understand Dawkins' frustration. I'm almost ashamed to admit it, but when Obama got elected, I thought he was the 'false prophet' of the book of Revelations, who would set the stage for the Antichrist. Ain't that some shit...
Wherever in the geek news sites the names of Dawkins, Harris, or Hutchins appear, raging debates follow. Even, ironically, debates between agnostics. I hope that HN can avoid these in the future. I left Slashdot because of them.
Why are you changing the subject? How is this relevant?

You said young earth creationism was uniquely an American phenomenon. You said that nowhere in the Western world does young earth creationism approach 40%. Except.. that's -exactly- what is happening in the UK (32% + 8% "don't knows"). I've provided you with the evidence. The reason I chimed into this conversation is because you were making statements that were simply false.

You don't think I'm acutely aware of the US acceptance of evolution? Why is that relevant? Did you somehow read into my statements that the US didn't have a major problem? Dawkins statement is SLIGHTLY exaggerated, statistically. Your response, however, was substantially more inaccurate.
Baseline’s Ron Conway: ‘I Don’t Use Twitter Or Facebook’
>Music is an abstract language we, humans, speak to express ourselves. You can't touch hearts and souls by generating random sequences within a given scale.

What if you randomly generated something that was identical to a famous piece of music? Is there a reason why that couldn't happen? And, if not, recognize that it doesn't actually depend on the prior human creation of the piece...so I don't see why, in theory, you couldn't randomly generate (or grow via GA or whatever) a good piece of music.
What's your risk tolerance? Do you have living expenses for enough time to find a job if the startup doesn't pan out as quickly as hoped for?
If there is one thing above all else that hackers love to do, it's self-reflect. The "Ask HN" threads are just extending this self-reflection to this special something we all love and enjoy (HN!).
I'm a student so going to a tailor is out of the question although I'm not so sure I'd even think of that on my own if I had bundles of money. I guess I should try that sometime.

I've been fairly happy with the clothes I've bought by mail order though, there's been a few snags sure but you can send them back and it tends to be cheaper. I do go to the store sometimes, especially for jeans as it's hard to find pairs that fit me since I've got skinny long legs.

As for the skin color thing, I can honestly say that I have no idea whatsoever on how to judge that.
Not sexist, but you're wrong.

Child support should represent the minimum acceptable contribution of the non-custodial parent (father, in the vast majority of cases) to the child's welfare. Should he contribute a lot more, in cash, gifts, and college support? Absolutely. I would. However, the government shouldn't require him to do so, and the spending should be at his discretion. Right now, that freedom is completely taken away. The custodial parent should not be getting a huge check and the freedom to spend the money however she wants. If I end up having a kid with a wife who divorces me to live it up with an illiterate biker, those CS payments damn better be going to the kid's college, not her beau's lottery-ticket budget.

It's a bizarre inconsistency. Parents can stay married and financially neglect their children. They can make $300k combined per year and still refuse to pay for their kids' college. Yet, if they divorce, the one parent who rarely sees the kids (usually father) is forced not to pay up merely to the minimum level of decency, but far beyond that if he's "rich" like the article's author.
You will learn that Exxon is 300 times more profitable per employee than Starbucks.

The original article has more hitech companies http://royal.pingdom.com/2009/05/14/congratulations-google-s...
Those would mostly be bots. Bots older than 23 are rare :-)
That's why on Slashdot a +1 Funny vote will not earn the poster any karma.
If you're joining an early startup you're making a big bet on the quality of the founders and other early employees. How well do you know them? What's their track record prior to this startup?

Joining as an early non founding employee is not great on the risk/reward ratio. You take on almost as much risk as the founders with much less upside. If you think the company has a high probability of being successful it may be worth it, but I'd evaluate them very carefully.
A Fine Brand: from ascii to awesome in 8 sweet months
This happened to me when our company moved at the height of the 1st dot com boom and ended up burdened with space that caused us to close (rumor said about $1mill / 100 people). It certainly was months of disruption. In my neighborhood I can think of Sun, Netscape, Bay Networks and SGI that had this happen. The big move is at least an indicator to look twice.
I think this is just part of human nature - checkout amazon ratings. I think an app either fulfills the intent of the user (yay!) or it doesn't (it sucks!). Maybe prompt them on uninstall to tell you why?
> why was his new wife not receiving any alimony?

You mean "child support".

Alimony is a payment directly to the ex-spouse, for the ex-spouse's enjoyment / benefit.
Her. Her discontent.
I think the last addition to the question helps address this. At this point, I'm looking at getting married and buying a house in the next few months. It's salaried, with stock options.
Quibbling. Ok, let's accept your position. They aren't fallacies if you choose to believe that the OP doesn't really have a problem with Dawkins' position. So what are they then? Derogatory assertions without offering any argument to back them up? Childish insults? And anyway, why is the OP so passionate about it all?

Frankly, I doubt very much that he accepts Dawkins' factual claims. Why to I think this? Because he rejects the one factual claim that Dawkins is quoted as making in the article (40% of the western population holding creationist beliefs). You only have to watch Dawkins in action for 5 minutes in an interview to know that the guy weighs what he says and writes very carefully indeed, and will always have studies to back up these types of claim. This all leads me to believe that'fallacy' is the right word in responding.
I know that SEO stuff might be relevant to some peoples interests here, but this is neither "Hacker", or "News".
What is their runway?
40 upvotes in 2 hours - I think HN has spoken.
All 3 are coming in with business experience in the industry.

I only know them from the interviewing process.

From what I've seen and heard there is a strong potential for rapid profitability. They are currently turning down venture funding, and going from using consultants to expanding the developer base.
I think $4k a month isn't overboard for 3 teenage boys, especially if you factor in school & health care. As for the Alimony, it depends, if the wife had stayed at home for the past 21 years to raise the children and has no skills/experience to fall back on to support them herself, then yeah, he needs to support her as well as pay the full cost of raising his sons.
The actual expense of raising children involves the time spent and associated opportunity cost.
its a question of stability. you say you're getting married and want to buy a house, with kids in the future.

how financially stable are you? if you were to take the startup job, and it were to go south in 6 months or so, could you handle that? could you handle the wedding and house and kid while searching for a new job, if the startup were to go under? etc..
Why was I down voted? The picture doesn't point to any nasa source, and article was farcical and very oddly worded, like a tabloid would be. What about that doesn't suggest "make believe"?
I'm literally amazed that you have managed to get away from those thought, I didn't think people that held such extreme views could be convinced. Congratulations, I'm happy for you.
MBDA Community Exchange: View topic - home based business
It's not an overreaction. It's an ad that attacks a competitor. :)
With so many SEO articles I find that it's all so incredibly gimmicky and formulaic. It's more about writing link bait to get link juice and build traffic than creating and sharing quality content. For that reason I would rather not see HN become a resource for furthering that pap. There are likely some SEO articles that fall into the latter category, and I wouldn't mind seeing them here from time to time...

That said, this one belongs in the former.