skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
reminds me of this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ubsd-tWYmZw
My current understanding is that they have several investors, and are currently turning down VC funding. I'll have to ask that explicitly.

I believe due to outside deadlines, they want to have the system fully up and running by July.
My understanding is that alimony is quite distinct from child support. Rather it is payments made directly to a former spouse and harks back to a time when women had no way to support themselves after a divorce (they could not work and probably had little chance of remarriage). So the idea was that the alimony would continue to support them as if they were still married.

I have no idea why it still exists, however.
The graph I linked to clearly shows that a majority of the western world have only small minorities that disagree with the statement that we have evolved from another species.

In other words: evolution.

I know you would like to continue to belabour the point that 40% of the population of most western nations are young earth creationists, but that simply isn't supported.

Dawkins' statement is a distortion of the facts. Most people in modern countries - with the exception of the US - have accepted the basic tenets of evolution. Like I've said elsewhere, it is only Dawkins that attaches to this the condition that in order to believe evolution you must not believe in a god.
Usually the data center charges a certain rate for each circuit and the customer can consume as much or as little as they want (short of blowing the breaker).
I think $4k a month isn't overboard for 3 teenage boys, especially if you factor in school & health care.

Health coverage should really be provided by the government, but that's a separate issue. Also, individual health insurance on teenage boys is going to be cheap: closer to $150 per month than $1000/month.

School is provided by the government, for 12 years. College, on the other hand, is ridiculously expensive, but if the government isn't forcing married couples to pay for it (I know some $100-300k couples who paid nothing) it doesn't have a leg to stand on in forcing divorced parents to pay for it.
Patently false. See: the last 5-10 years of open source. "many" may be accurate, "a majority" may be accurate, but "almost all" ain't accurate.
I would recommend against "cultural mapping" and spin off into a consulting service catered to expansion into the Chinese market. The consumer psychology is so different, that the main premise of many Western products will be valueless. The listed services will just be added as necessary steps in the consulting process, and that way you can cater to the specific needs of a company.
The kids on the article's photo look mostly Mexican. Moreover, there's no such thing as an "aryan race". This program looks a bit like Hitler's youth in some ways, but let's be pragmatic: the program gives teenagers in a rather poor area something to do with their free time, and something to look for. I think it's better to have them practising marijuana field raids (though ludicruous that is) than joining a local gang and end up in prison years later to be nothing more than mere parasites of the system.
Interesting -- I was contemplating a blog post that claimed that data plans weren't going to get really affordable (and thus be ubiquitous) for 3-5 years. Guess it would've been wrong.
No, no, no - down-vote away, be my guest. I was LOLing at the irony of it. Much as I'm doing now about this one, in fact.
The injustice is when the court strips the father of custody and then forces him to pay child support. Child support should only be required if the father voluntarily renounces custody. Otherwise, custody should be split equally and no child support should be owed by either party.

Also, everyone would be better off if these contingencies were all written into contract before marriage/child birth. It would save everyone a lot pain. Unfortunately, the judicial system has gradually replaced our great tradition of contract law with arbitrary rule by judges, much to the loss of everyone.
The CLR "Introduction to Algorithms" would be one of the canonical answers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Algorithms

It's certainly one worth having and the only book from my computer science education that I still reference frequently.

In fact, I'm tempted to say that it's the last computer science book that you have to read. After that you should be able to work directly from research papers, though a topical book can sometimes be useful in other areas with fairly wide breadth.
There's a world of difference between self-reflection and self-congratulation, seldom noticed by those practising the latter.
Yep, seriously. I'm not sure I understand why this post is of general interest.
Here are the questions I would ask:

Are they actively turning down funding or have they just decided not to seek it?

If the former, who have they turned down?

How much angel capital do they have?

What's their burn rate and runway?

Have any of the principals started companies in the past?

When are they going to add benefits?

Those things will help you assess stability.
I'd also like to say that this also happens with churches. Every church I've enjoyed didn't own their own building. Rather, they just rented space from the local high school, etc. These groups were extremely focused on building tight-knit communities, and were pretty free to adapt to changing circumstances. Conversely, I can think of a few churches with buildings, where the primary focus of the staff was maintaining enough donations to pay the mortgage.

This sort of phenomena applies to other communities in addition to technology businesses.
strong potential for rapid profitability

Just as an FYI, every startup from pets.com to paypal has said this.

There is also a strong potential for a slow agonizing death.

Go with whichever one you feel will give you the most career AND personal network/contacts growth.
At this point, we're financially stable. My current unemployment seems to be running slightly higher then burn rate, and I have a fair amount in savings. The homes we are looking at are within the range of what we can cover provided that one of us still has a job, and the mortgage and one car payment will be the only debt between the two of us.
Game consoles have shown us how to raise the barrier to entry: only run signed code by default, and require a "license to code". The security class I was in last semester discussed this; it may not catch on for consumer PCs, but it's not inconceivable that it could be the model in the business world.
The fact that the perceived cost of moving (or the benefits of staying) exceeds the perceived benefit from moving does not imply that the perceived benefits don't exist.

Note also that the benefits and costs may be on entirely different dimensions. It's not uncommon for folks to stay because of friends and family yet consider moving because of "opportunity".

I think that that example captures something interesting. The benefits from moving are typically far more speculative than the benefits of staying put.

I do think that folks who move are somewhat different, albeit not different enough to argue that their choices are useless in determining what non-movers actually prefer.

However, I put in the "smart people" question because people aren't fungible.

Note that the headline claim is that "more equal societies do better", suggesting that "do better" depends on "more equal". Maybe that's true, but it's not the only factor. A less equal society that attracts more productive people could easily do better than more equal societies which lose said people.

The question can easily come down to envy vs greed - do you care what other people have or do you care what you have. Me, I care about what I have.

I find it interesting that the envy-driven folks go to such lengths to argue that equality has no costs. That would be a very surprising result, as everything else seems to have tradeoffs. (In engineer-speak, "good, fast, cheap, pick two",)

That's not to say that the benefits of a particular level of equality don't exceed the costs, but to point out that "it's all good" usually indicates a position that isn't as strong as asserted.
Realistically, I'm not sure recording uncompressed HD video is a good idea anyway. Given that the video probably arrived in some compressed format, you should record/copy that, not decompress it and record/recompress it.
worse is when you are paying alimony to a remarried wife. (Note, I do not do this so I may be wrong, but I've heard horror stories).
BitTorrent DNA: More efficient access to rich media content online.
The counterargument says that a marriage is basically an agreement where the woman agrees to lend her womb to a man in exchange for him supporting her and her children.

That's way too sexist for me (if that's what marriage is, then we should change it,) but I'm still not convinced that a man should be allowed to leave and only provide half the minimum support for his children. It seems like the woman is seriously getting screwed in that situation: she has to raise the kids on her own AND find > 1/2 the money to support them. Nobody gets married with that understanding, and nobody wants to.
Which often the father wants to give but the court grants custody to the mother. And then he is forced to pay alimony as well.

Note that if you have a child out of wedlock the same things do not apply. Moral hazard anyone?
What tabs do you open first when launching your browser?
That's interesting. I had noticed that the folks who were in finance to Make a Difference and all that cost us hundreds of billions of dollars (at Fannie and Freddie). Meanwhile, the mercenary, only-in-it-for-the-money hedge funds outperformed the S&P by 20% last year.
What to Do When Someone Steals Your Work
> you can walk home at 2am and not be afraid, etc.

As can the vast majority of Americans.

And, you're ignoring the parts of sweden where "certain folks" can't even visit.

> Again, Slovakia doesn't "soak the rich".

The US equality advocates argue against flat taxes like Slovakia's. They argue for "soak the rich".

Perhaps their efforts are actually contributing to inequality....
It doesn't change your claim, but it now means you're down from 1 to 0 pieces of evidence for it. If people start lots of startups in Sweden despite the high taxes, what are they?

I don't think most people are the same. And that is a topic I know a lot about, since I am in the business of trying to identify the exceptional ones. I think the distribution of ambition follows a power law, like the distribution of any talent. So if you give people equal opportunity, you'll have a power law distribution of wealth.
DocStoc Out of Beta with a Bang
Smart Tips for Using Saved Searches On Twitter
Yes -- but he should be left with $2777 per month to live on? You basically can't live on that sum of money on the east coast unless you want to live a collegiate existence.
"The best way to predict the future is to implement it."
- David Heinemeier Hansson

Heh... I was going to call this one out for being a restatement of Alan Kay's 1971 quote, but it seems someone beat me to it:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=412440
This story is being covered ad nauseum on political blogs, has already sparked a comment here about "Aryan homelands", the primary sources are sensationalistic (who could blame them) and I doubt there's an interesting debate to be had about this on Hacker News. A great Politics Reddit submission. A very bad Hacker News submission.

Flagged.
YES! Thank you for this clarification.

I personally enjoy thinking about the implementations, instead of looking at the code itself. Knuth makes that easy (hard?) by not spoon feeding you.

Plus the typography of Knuth's books is so wonderful. It's a pleasure to read.
So now you bait and switch?

You started out with a condescending post which implied that anyone who'd stayed awake in CS 101 would find Twitter trivially easy to scale.

Then you switched course to claiming that you know how to do this because of experience working a gigantic installation.

Or are you asserting that the average CS 101 project consists of running the production messaging systems for major stock exchanges?
It's still 320x240 screen, and that site looks pretty heavy on things that take a long time to render.
PLP is pretty good. We used it in my university course on compiler design, I quite enjoyed reading it.
He asked if it was, and I gave him the benefit of the doubt.
this brings up an interesting point. Would you make your wife sign a pre-nuptial agreement before getting married?

I often see people who have gotten divorced sign a pre-nup, but people I've spoken with around my age group (20-25) seem to be adamantly opposed to a pre-nup.
It's a good idea, but how do you expect to compete with scribd/docstoc and perhaps even legalzoom?

Some things to point out:

You spend too much time on the home page explaining what your site is. To be honest, it could be done in one sentence. The buttons at the bottom right make me feel like I'm pressing 'next' or moving on to step 2 of some process. The home page, ideally, should have a one-liner of what the site does, and then perhaps some links to example contracts/forms and a search bar up top so that the user can get to accessing documents as quickly as possible. Also, I'd clean up the site design a bit. Maybe make it wider, as something about such a narrow site makes me uncomfortable. Also, you might want to look into making a logo. It's not absolutely necessary, though.

You want me, as a user, to click on FirstDrafter, and start looking for documents within seconds. Don't make me read that whole pitch.

Good luck.
> This is especially strong in the US due to things like minimum wage being below living wage

No one pays more than a job is "worth", so a minimum wage simply means that jobs that are worth less don't exist.

Folks learn to become valuable. Working is one way for them to do so. But, if they never get that first job, they never learn.

If you think that folks should have more money than their labor is worth, give them your money (or tax money). Pricing them out of the labor market is bad for everyone.
If the government provided health care, he'd still be paying for it, with his taxes.
Whether or not something is illegal doesn't make it unethical or morally corrupt.

In any case, I do not consider copying or sharing information to be "stealing" and "disgusting". Whether or not it hurts the livelihood of programmers, artists, or anybody else is immaterial. They were are not in fact, deprived of anything except potential revenue.

If society do not see musics as valuable enough to fund, than so be it. Men have no obligation to fund anything that they do not see fit to be produced.
Taking into consideration the fact that the percentage of people likely to put in the time to explore documentation and settings and discover the original configurability is probably quite small, and a reasonable assumption that not everyone who discovers the functionality will use it, yeah, the number sounds all right.

Note, btw, that the number they seem to be going for is the above -- e.g., "according to the accounts database, only 3% of users ever changed this setting", _not_ "only 3% of users are claiming to care about this now that it's been removed".
How Twitter and Facebook Now Compete with Google
Aneesh: it's really not that hard. For two adults and three kids that is not much money for food, utilities (particularly heating + ac), internet, two cell phones, transport, clothes, pets and the inevitable accidents life throws at you, eg $35 to go to the doctor plus $50 for medicine for even simple illnesses. Don't mock them until you've tried it, particularly given how expensive groceries are on the E coast. My data point is that when I moved from WI to NYC my grocery bill for purchasing basically identical food rose by 130%.
Hello Colin.

We can handle word files at http://www.cfhdocmail.com ! It's not impossible, just a few years work to get right :)

Our best prices are for UK mail, but I believe you're international so you might be able to use us for UK print/delivery.

We're primarily a web portal (upload word/pdf files and send them to addresses), but do have an API you could use.

Would you be interested in using us as a UK Hybrid Mail provider?

There's contact details on our website if you'd like to use us.

Will

p.s.
I'd appreciate a mention of my name if you do get in touch, so we know where the contact came from :)
Seriously, you do understand the concept of different costs of living, right? Your astonishment at paying $0.5MM for a house is irrelevant; that's the going rate and probably cheaper than renting in that area.
Right. I agree mostly. I believe that the US being "the land of opportunity" is more than a euphemism for patriotic babble. Extending it, with a cynical slant, I think you could almost call it the "land of opportunism".

The "equality" spoken of certainly isn't a zero sum game. I don't think that you wind up with US like polarization -- which drives its innovation -- in a more "equal" society. That's why a lot of the European efforts to duplicate a Silicon Valley sort of culture seem to fail. It's just not part of the social fabric.

I think it's exactly that sort of zero-to-rich mobility that makes the US attractive for people on both ends of the social spectrum, but is also connected to it lagging behind other developed nations nearer to the median.
You're missing my point. I definitely agree that excessive spending can be a drain and will affect corporate culture, and you've pointed out some great examples above. But I think what makes this post interesting is the fact that there might be psychological implications to moving into any larger building, even if it doesn't have tons of amenities.
I was part of the slow agonizing death at a smaller company with 15 years history. It's not fun even when it's just your salary riding on it.
More confusing is that this guy is claiming that his alimony payments are more than 2/3 of his take-home income. I think he meant child-support.
Wait, what?

Of course you pay child support if you fathered the kid, regardless if you married the mother or not. It's the whole point of Maury Povich "You Are Not The Father" episodes.
I don't think a fairytale that is predictable from the first sentence is going to teach anyone here much.
"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."

So, I should stop downloading the latest version of my favorite Linux distro via BitTorrent as "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"?

Outrage, justified or not, does not make illogical arguments any more valid.
Go with which one you think you will like the best, if the pay is similar. On HN people naturally assume this means a startup but sometimes the bigcorp is the correct choice. For instance, I would work at Apple before I took a job at another online music startup, but I'd work at another online music startup before I took a job at Oracle.

Upside for non-founder early stage employees is pretty bad unless the company is Google quality or flips in 18 months. I won't ever be an early stage employee again unless it's a weird situation that pays $100K+ per year. Founder, sure... early stage employee... no thanks.
Even more confusing, you didn't read the article:

> I was handing over $4,000 a month in alimony and child-support payments

So no, he did mean alimony and child-support.
Good article, but all problem description, no solutions.

I'd like to understand what drove the Japanese and American industries to turn around, and how much of that is applicable to China.
Is the startup giving you equity or options?
WHAT are you talking about?

This has NOTHING to do with race at ALL, did you not read the article? It's about giving these children something to do that's (while a little strange) MUCH more helpful to them than trying to force them to learn a... programming language. Not everyone WANTS to do what you like to do, and until you can accept that, you're going to have a very closed view of the world.
Music is not just notes. With the exception of some of the modern genres (dance/electronica mostly) music is performed by people and truly good music has nuances not seen in the scores.

There are performances of Bach that I'd turn off after 20 seconds, and there are those I keep in my music collection for years, if not decades. Performaces differ dramatically.

Or take Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here - was it the scores, or rather Gilmour's unique articulation on the guitar that made us listen to this album? How about John Coltrane's emotional outbursts on the sax? Nina Simone's cosmic-deep vocals?

Music is a far more subtle art, not yet understood from the point of view of Cognitive Science. What random notes are you talking about?
Gamers get to interact with racers in Volvo
I can't ever see myself spending more than $1/pair of socks. That just seems ridiculously frivolous.
In that case, does the EU have a deal for you; they're planning to charge money for "enhanced" Galileo service.
Thanks kyro.

Scribd/docstoc, as near as I can tell, as essentially document dumps (in the sense of supply dumps) -- you have to dig through them and figure out what you might want.

What FirstDrafter does, in contrast, is --

* atomize various clauses into user-selectable Lego blocks, so to speak;

* offer pre-configured forms with specific Lego blocks already selected (overridable by the user).

LegalZoom does not seem to do business contracts.

I'll give some thought to your design comments.

Thanks again.
I'll also add that I usually recommend that newcomers begin with Volume 4, and turn to the earlier ones later. I think that for many people, skipping the preliminaries, and starting with an interesting and relevant topic (combinatorial algorithms) gives more immediate pleasure than beginning with the lower-level underpinnings.
Options ... any recommendations on how to interpret these?
You ought to read The God Delusion to better understand the argument you're trying to refute. That book isn't centered around evolution; I don't actually recall evolution being discussed in it. The arguments were about biblical contradictions; hypocrisy amongst self-professed believers; and a contrast between the morality preached by various religions relative to the sort of world that such a system might create.

And as I said, Dawkins freely admits that his disbelief is not supported by science: he cannot scientifically prove that there is no god. Rather, he identifies himself as an agnostic who believes that the likelihood of there actually being a god is extremely low -- but he can't prove it.
Interesting way to reduce personal spam
Judges routinely invalidate pre-nups, especially if the marriage produced children. In the US, there is a curious legal fiction that child support rights "belong to the child" and thus cannot be signed away.
Sort of the "one good deed requires another" system, there? :)
> Of course you pay child support if you fathered the kid

But not alimony?
aka you want everything for free
pawpaw mail was discussed on HN http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=554958
Articles like this remind me of the covers of Cosmopolitan, the same content every month shifted around the page with a new background image.
Is anyone else getting redirected from the article to rotten.com?