skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you're changing the subject.

As a participant in this thought experiment, you can (and should) use whatever resources you might have available. If volunteering at a community center is the thing, then you would go down there and do that. The question is: given whatever you want, what would you practically do?

I'll touched on the two follow-up questions, but they weren't the point 1) if you've got an answer, why aren't you doing that right now? and 2) do you feel it is moral to take your best guess for fixing poverty and push it on the rest of us? Would you mandate community center service, for instance, or do you think writing a check for somebody working at a community center has the same effect as somebody who has a life purpose for doing it? (and how would you tell the difference? What if there's simply not enough people who really care about working at community centers? What then?)

Those are great follow-ups, and the conversation should continue along those lines, but really, the point was what practically was supposed to make a difference if you personally had to do it. Not some generalities about some program that looked good on 60 minutes. What you would go do right now to make one person not poor. There's Bob. Bob is poor. Go make him not poor.
I see a mention of what differentiates Jetpack:

No, that’s not correct. Jetpack has access to the browser chrome - that is, the stuff surrounding the page you’re viewing - with simplifying APIs wrapping the more complex native APIs add-on developers usually deal with.

This is about more easily authoring Firefox add-ons, not just tweaking page content. http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/20/strap-in-mozillas-jetpa... [Edit: citation]

I still think adding that to Greasemonkey would have been more productive. It sounds like Jetpack users run Firebug just like Greasemonkey users do, so I don't see the added value.
do you have a macbook pro? I really need one, new or used
From the look of it you also want to worry about ring-wraiths and passing wizards
Obviously the building passed ISO-AK47 standard.
My personal views:

Libraries are like strangers. The application and the library have a very strict interface. They stand arms length away. If something is malfunctioning in a library, you don't touch it, you either make the fix in application-space or use another library. There is a very distant separation between the two.

Frameworks are like spouses.. you marry in to them. They hold you hand, set rules, tell you how things will be done. This can be a good thing. You can accomplish things very fast. But if something is wrong between either one of you, you will have to get involved neck deep trying to figure out what's wrong, and fixes need to be applies to both. Just like a marriage, it's easy to get in to, and things progress very fast and happily, but if stuff starts going sour getting out of one is no fun.
I think, that´s the difference between professional programmers and hackers. Hackers cant stand to write code without understanding what is happening behind the scenes. Therefore they need to go deep into their codes and understand each aspects. In the other hand, when your code for a big company and follow a lot of rules and demands, you are more inclined to use solutions like frameworks, because you are not having real fun, your are just ... working. Make sense for you ?
I'd like to think that these tweets are actually parodying the "real" Twitter, but sadly I know better than that. Oh the world... what an interesting place you are...
> The goal of this experiment is to take away lofty ideals and ask practical questions: just what are we supposed to do that is going to help? Just what really helps and does not hurt poor people? So pick a strategy and pay for it.

I can think of two things the government could do that would help poor people, while not costing anything (this is in the UK, but most probably applies to other countries):

1. Housing. Housing is very expensive in the UK, mostly because of govmt policies (incidently the people making these policies personally profit from them, surprise surprise). Reverse these policies and the cost of a house could easily be reduced to £20,000. -- http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/05/19/housing-policy-and...

2. allow people on low incomes to set up a "microbusiness" that as long as its turnover is less than £2000 a year, doesn't reduce the benefits they get. Any such businesses that currently exist are part of the illegal economy and not paying tax anyway, so the govmt wouldn't lose any revenue. -- http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/05/13/reforming-the-bene...
Macbook Pro needed
Hi, I need a macbook pro, 17" core 2 duo, if you have one i would be interested in buying it, used or brand new.
Thanks
The real message is not contained in the content.

It's a fucking stone tablet personally delivered. The medium is the message: Your TED talk is a big deal. We're serious about it. Make it good.
Especially the wizards, they hand out cursed rings to screw with people at every opportunity.
Let's just say that if you sent a letter to that place addressed to B. Baggins it wouldn't be returned.
Why, Dave Fayram (http://www.google.com/profiles/dfayram), does anyone use Windows anymore? "It's suffering from massive bitrot these days. Most users report frequent crashes, hangs, problems waking from sleep, and general slowness."

Hmm. Sounds familiar. Or it would if I were still eating your company's dog food.
That sounds artificial. Prove to me that there are only those 3 cases and outcomes.

You are essentially saying is that only addicted, mentally ill or people with abusive spouses are permanently poor, everyone else is just temporarily poor. I think that indicates a monumental disconnect with reality.

Fact is, someone can work full-time in this country and still not be able to feed their family. How are they going to get ahead when not working because you are looking for a better job (let alone getting more education) would mean not feeding your family in the meanwhile?

I thought it particularly telling that you think case #3, "trapped by circumstances like medical bills" can not be fixed by money. Universal health coverage would take care of that one, for sure.
"First of all, it's very difficult to learn to do something like solder on your own, by yourself"

... Huh? Googling 'how to solder' is how I learned to solder. It wasn't difficult to follow the directions.
I'm sure they WANT him to use they card

I'm not.
not agree, you already have a "comments" link
You're right, but it's also true that having a high IQ gives one an immense advantage.
I have a lot of experience with the unconventional animals, many of which have much more potent odors than human waste and sawdust does great. Cedar has great absorbency for liquid and odors, it also helps significantly that cedar generally has a really nice smell to it.

I've even composted the waste before and it doesn't change the odor given off by the heap. If you still frequently cut your grass, you're going to be smelling composting plant matter far more than the human element.

Personally, if I had the land available, I wouldn't have a problem with a composting toilet on my property. However, I'd probably stick with a low-water toilet for inside the house.
This is wonderful reading; I especially enjoyed the recurring use of "torment" to describe the indignities inflicted upon modern math students.

I'm also amazed to discover that V.I. Arnold is still alive! His work has been important for so long that I simply assumed he (like Landau & Lifshitz) belonged to an earlier time. I'm delighted to discover I'm wrong.
Try living in rural North Florida without a car.
"The notion however that your future path is set because of your past choices is part of the myth that the poor need to have destroyed through education. Tomorrow is about what you do tomorrow, not about what you did yesterday."

More blame-the-victim rethoric. Suppose what you did yesterday was give away all your belongings save what you wear, erase all higher education and job experience from your brain, and teleported you and your family to a city where you don't know anyone. You are now in an equivalent situation to many poor people. Now tell me with a straight face that what you do tomorrow would be unaffected.
I will never use a realtor again.

My girlfriend at the time and I dealt with two different realtors when looking for a home in Austin, and both of them encouraged really bad decisions. The first was pretty new to the job, and was a bit heavy-handed in his tactics and advice, and I saw right through it. The latter was much more subtle and good at it (she'd been a realtor for 30 years; we didn't stand a chance). We ended up in the wrong part of town, much farther out than we intended to be (we weren't familiar with the area, and were driving 3 hours each way, on days off from work, for our excursions to look at houses, so we didn't know enough to know; we were also in a bit of a rush because our apartment lease was up soon), and in a neighborhood and house that was not at all appropriate for us, and not at all what we'd asked for.

I've since read quite a few books about the sales process, and influencing peoples decisions, and I've realized that our realtor had used just about every single trick in the book to convince us to buy quickly, and from a seller that was associated with the same real estate company. There are very few people on this earth that I have strong dislike for, but that realtor is one of them. She was an extremely good sales person, but a pretty horrible person.

The incentives are way wrong in that business, and the kind of folks, in general, it attracts are not who you want to trust.

I'm sure there's an honest realtor out there somewhere (maybe even two or three), but I've never met one. I consider it a very expensive lesson learned, and one I'll never forget.

When we sold that abysmal house, we sold it ourselves, and we were completely honest about everything that was wrong with it (and in the time we'd been there we had fixed almost everything that the realtor-recommended inspector had conveniently failed to notice when we bought the place). It sold to the first person that looked at it, and for a fair market price for the neighborhood and size. And, I rented a place out here in the valley from an individual with no realtor involved. Found it on craigslist, it was a good deal in exactly the location I wanted, the landlord is a nice guy, and he likes my dog. No complaints at all.

Anyway, I can't say enough bad things about realtors, in general. I just don't see how there is any good reason to use one in a world with craigslist.
This is what I would guess at first sight too, but reality disagrees: it seems lot of people around HN are very religious of their frameworks...

I think the term "hacker" has two definitions around here and in the web-development world.

* Those who are interested in the internals of the system at the lowest level (non framework hackers)
* Those interested in developing and hacking the framework it self as a platform and knowing all the details and hacks on it (framework hackers).

Regarding the non-hacker just-programming-for-work people, I totally agree with you.
This is true. And my comment deserves all the down votes it gets. The "poor are irresponsible" comment pushed an anger button in me that I didn't even realize was there. I just had to vent.
I'm glad you weren't in charge when I was a #2. I made some bad decisions, like starting a family too early, and had some bad luck when I was young. When I reached the point where I was ready, I asked the Government for help and I received it in the form of assistance and college grants. I also worked and now have a large student loan payment, which I pay with a smile every month.

I earned a B.S.M.E, worked as a professional engineer and then switched to IT, because I wanted to and because I could, partially as a result of having a degree. This improvement in my life also enabled me to develop a startup in my spare time. I know that it would have been 10,000 times more difficult or impossible to do it without that help and opportunity.

The great part for the good 'ol U.S.A. is that they now have an extremely productive, $30k+/yr. tax paying citizen who is giving and will continue to give a great return on their investment. Assuming I don't get hit by a bus. ;)
"Just remember that the realtor works for himself, not for you."

That is great advice, no matter what kind of transaction you're entering into. I actually got involved with the real estate industry because I hated how it worked. It is ridiculous that incentives are so misaligned in this industry. I thought I could change some things in my small corner of the world, but I was too naive, and it will take much longer than I thought for me to have any impact. Unfortunately, most consumers simply don't care enough about their money to educate themselves. Sad and irrational, but true.

I will not work with anyone who stands to make more money simply by getting me to pay more. There is NO WAY they can represent my interests if that is the case. In my real estate brokerage, buyers pay for the actual services they use. They know the cost up-front, and there are no incentives for me to try to get them to buy a specific property or a more expensive property, because I'm not paid based on an (arbitrary) percentage of the property price. In 99% of cases, the money they spend on me will be spent whether I help them or not, so my fees aren't even an extra expense. Yet I still have to spend (relatively) much more time than my competitors to educate them about how and why I can help them, just because I am different. It's like the entrepreneurial cliches about the stupidity of introducing a completely new product (pioneers get arrows in their backs, right? It's easier to move to territory that has already been settled.)

There are real estate companies with good business models and good agents...they're just very rare :-(
'course we do. They have lots of challenges now and down the road, but you can't look at at a b2c website with a graph like that and not say that they are doing well.

Facebook and Google are both verbally and visibly reacting to Twitter. That's amazing.

They could pick up the phone right now and say, "We're ready to sell" and sell their company to one or more of the big boys. That's pretty impressive.

Are they profitable? Nope. Are they "getting lean", asking "five whys", measuring the hell out of everything, and other Eric Reis-isms? Probably not.

But there are probably VERY few entrepreneurs on the planet who wouldn't trade startups with @ev and @biz. They are kicking ass.
I'm impressed by Mozilla choosing to integrate jQuery and the Firebug Console:
https://jetpack.mozillalabs.com/api.html
"XML is evil and should never have been released"

Wow. Most loathing of XML seems to come from the misuse of XML. For example, defining application config files.

On the other hand, the number of robust parsers and relative ease of understanding of at least essential XML (let's skip the parts tied to doctypes for now) opened up a world of Web services.

Granted, BigCo and friends came along and tried to taser that with WS-* and the like, but the cat was out of the bag.

Nowadays folks may refer json to xml, but that's just building on the ideas kick-started by those devilish pointy brackets.

To stay on topic: What do I believe about programming languages, but cannot prove: That simple, well-intended languages will inevitably be misapplied. This misapplication will create headaches and heartbreak for people, and the language will be blamed for these woes as if it was meant (and thus poorly designed) for those uses along.
Top 30 iPhone Business Reference Applications
Product activation nightmares
My parent's own a 200+ year old house in France that has an amazing amount of tactile information held in it. To stick with the feel of the building we manually plastered the inside walls, which with exposed wooden beams in every room looks amazing.

Each wall is unique in how it settled, each beam is unique in the cuts. The original upstairs floor was beautiful as it was hundreds of solid beams of wood 30 feet long, sadly most of it had been affected by wood worm on the surface ( everything had been hit by wood worms on the surface but miraculously the density of the oak or something seemed to keep them out of the core).

While I like the convenience of manufactured products, they all lack the heart and soul that's held in a handmade product. Often they seem to be lacking in quality too, possibly due to the fact that it's the materials not the labor that now costs the most.
And in Java you get such idiocies as == for primitives and equals for objects. Would it have been so hard to translate == into a.equals(b)?
I don't see how this is different than Greasemonkey (other than addition of HTML/CSS). Is this more of a control issue due to Greasemonkey ported to Chrome?
I agree that there are many reasons.

The point of the site, is that any current review site for supplements, all you get is a review.

You don't know anything about the reviewer, like how long they've been lifting, what their goals are, how much they weigh, what their diet is, what their workout is etc.

Our system focuses on the reviewers, so you can see who a suppement did or did not work for, and if it did work for someone, what other things they were doing which may have attributed.
And the middle class people know how to get around that by buying items and returning them for cash or other tricks to let you borrow $10,000 on various interest-free cards. Then put it into a savings account and use the interest to pay for the holiday.
(flooha)I'm glad you weren't in charge when I was a #2.

(Daniel) I'm not saying don't help people.

I'm asking you what you personally would do.

Stick to the topic, guys. If you don't like the 3 choices I presented, fine. Provide your own. I didn't say people couldn't move between scenarios. Still stick to the topic. What would you personally do to make one person stop being poor?

To say you're glad I wasn't in charge assumes you know me. You do not. I've made my way from homeless to a pretty good life as a consultant. But telling my story is not the point of this question. Neither is any of the other smoke that is getting thrown up.
Bebo’s Growth Spurt Plateaus, but Traffic Remains Steady
they are used everywhere in Rural villages where there is no sewage network.
James Robertson wrote something very similar in 2006: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/blog/blogView?showComments=tr...
very informative. thanks.

i think in cappuccino you do everything in the "backend". there's no need to write javascript/html/css ... which is good in a lot of ways (you can output source for different devices, and i'm even guessing you could generate different backends - php, .NET) - but i'm more interested in the js/AJAX everything model, lighter on the backend.

i've never worked in objectiveC/J but js seems nicer at first glance. but i may just be saying that so that i don't feel like i would miss something should we choose etxjs.

more feedback would be appreciated guys.
These TED Commandments are terrific. I've organized conferences and recruited speakers for large events before, and I wish I had had this list to distribute.

You’d be surprised how many people willingly violate #7 ("Thou Shalt Not Sell from the Stage: Neither thy Company, thy Goods, thy Writings, nor thy Desparate need for Funding; Lest Thou be Cast Aside into Outer Darkness"). These people don't get that you actually add get MORE value in return by talking LESS about yourself/company/service. Instead of gaining respect and people's attention, it just makes you look amateur and low-class.

Respectfully, I would also like to suggest adding an Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt respect the moderator and not attempt to flout speaker rules just to make you look like a 'rebel.' It makes thine self appear as an ass.

...Michael

---
Michael E. Rubin
merubin@gmail.com // 847-370-3421 // twitter: merubin
I spent a lot of time and money learning to be poor - it's called 'grad school'. Which is why I spend a $ on a home made meal of rice/beans/vegetables instead of $5 on a McDs.

Shop at supermarkets at 8:00pm (4:00 on sunday) when they are selling off fresh food and never buy anything except own-label staples that isn't on sale.
Indeed. Composting toilets are amazing, especially when compared to 'drop' toilets (which I'd imagine constitute most people's negative 'alternative toilet' experiences).
what do you think about something like extjs?
I may be wrong but this extension shows more API's than Greasemonkey does. You're able to use Firefox's statusbar, tabs and notifications.
(off-topic, but it's amusing how their comment system removes the word "chink" from all comments even though it's the first word of the title of the article.)
[About wattvision.com home page]

Can you please change "info [at] wattvision.com" to "info@wattvision.com"? It looks jarring and I don't think it is going to make any difference spam-wise. It would be nice if you cleared "you@email.com" on focus.
The report uses two metrics of economic mobility: absolute mobility, and relative mobility. Relative mobility is unitless because it's an elasticity: it measures how much parent income influences children income.

This is from note 13 in the report. Also, the authors didn't come up with this themselves. The data comes from here:
http://www.iza.org/en/webcontent/publications/papers/viewAbs...

This explains nicely where the use of elasticity comes from.

Do you have other data that contradicts these conclusions?
Or another way of looking at it - he saved 50weeks of $100/week gym membership and 50 weeks of activity holidays in rural wales.
It's not an absolute good to maximize economic mobility, at least as it's defined here. Here, mobility is inextricably tied to outcomes. There's no reason to believe economic outcomes should be randomly distributed in each generation.

People should be perfectly free from government interfering with their ability to pursue success, but one would expect the children of successful people to be more successful simply because of inherited traits alone. Moreover, even aside from money, to the extent that a child's environment is his relationship with his parents, you'd expect children of successful parents to be more successful.

There's also something to be said for parents being able to give their children an advantage in life.

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. It would be sad to give up parents' rights in this way, but I think it would be well worth it on a public policy level.
is that true? photo?
The big difference is that JetPack has a simple API to manipulate the browser chrome. There will always be some things that the existing extension model allows that JetPack would have problems delivering, but it allows a huge subset of extensions that just need to execute some JS, maybe tweak some chrome, and display some content to be much simpler for people to develop without having to learn XUL.