skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Walmart spends a great deal more on cost of goods sold than selling expenses, which is where the retail wages are counted. http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/financials...

According to the data in the article, Walmart would have the same profit margin as Costco if they spent $3,500 more per employee annually. Ignoring part-time workers, salary-exempt, benefits etc., this is an hourly wage increase of about $1.75, still well under what Costco pays.
A couple of bundles have allowed per-dev split, but not all of them.
I wonder if it's because the jobs at TJ are so coveted that employees know if they don't bust their ass, someone will happily take their position? I feel the same way about In-N-Out which pays above market, people there always seem to try a bit harder to be pleasant and helpful.
>"I've shipped 2m downloads since starting"

I know a boss who just hired someone with 2 masters degrees that hasn't done that much.

You're fine. Keep killing it.
Glad to see a Vagrant maintainer hop into the fray. Also, really excited to see Docker being added as a provisioner. I'm a senior internal dev at a marketing firm and I'm using Docker to prototype / develop testing environments / workflows and translating them to Vagrant / puppet setups when it's time to hand things off to the junior devs who are running god knows what ( Win 7 / 8, OS X, etc).
That is some incredible dedication!

> Then gym 3x a day,

Did you mean 3x a week? Also, did you do much experimentation with your macro levels? And how would you adjust things given feedback from your sleep tracking?

Thanks again for this anecdote, it's really inspiring.
Yet VC industry as a whole has been underperforming.
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2013/02/venture-capital-returns.html

My guess is this is because most VCs cannot really discern trends, predict the future, etc - even though that is what they claim to do. ( The best ones can, to some extent )

So I would guess, based on this data, that crowdfunding equity will perform just as well as average VC or better, net of fees
You mean overworked and underpaid I presume?
The Benefits of Cash Without Conditions
Move to Oakland county outside Detroit where the public schools teach Mandarin from first grade on. Even better they use teachers from China.

http://www.theoaklandpress.com/articles/2013/03/04/news/loca...

Their long term goal is that with the entire population someday being fluent in Mandarin the area will become the first choice for Chinese manufacturing firms setting up plants in the U.S.
> But a single, cold test administration should be very difficult to game.

Oh come on. This was posted in a different comment:

http://www.physicschick.com/pole/2012xxxx/psych.txt

The following are very obviously the "correct" true or false answers to these questions from the MMPI-2:

T * My mother is a good woman.
F * Evil spirits possess me at times.
F * There seems to be a lump in my throat much of the time.
T * At times I feel like swearing.
T * My hands and feet are usually warm enough.
F * Ghosts or spirits can influence people for good or bad.
F * Someone has been trying to poison me.
F * Everything tastes the same.
F * Someone has been trying to rob me.
F * Bad words, often terrible words, come into my mind
and I cannot get rid of them.
F * Often I feel as if there is a tight band around my head.
F * Peculiar odors come to me at times.
F * My soul sometimes leaves my body.
F * When a man is with a woman he is usually thinking
about things related to her sex.
F * I often feel as if things are not real.
F * Someone has it in for me.
F * My neck spots with red often.
T * Once in awhile I laugh at a dirty joke.
F * I hear strange things when I am alone.
F * In walking I am very careful to step over sidewalk cracks.
F * At one or more times in my life, I felt that someone
was making me do things by hypnotizing me.

I cut out a few because I couldn't see how true or false mattered.
Large tech companies earn much higher margins than Walmart. Why aren't telling them to pay their janitors more?
what is this? :)
They seem to be going away. Restrict one asset class amd people just find a different rat hole to fling their money down.
> [..] working on it, mostly through lots of reading [..]

The Economist has lots of short pieces showing off a nice command of the English language (if you like word play and puns). Good reading material.

As for speaking: don't worry about that too much, but try to listen to spoken material or songs. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehension_approach)
Anti-Foreigner VC Also Supports Hiring Discrimination
My coworker's top endorsement is "Pizza" because of me and some office shenanigans.
I'm not sure what you mean 'synonymous' - svn has a higher user base (according to the eclipse community survey).
> There are lots of deployment solutions out there. What there isn't is a handy way to manage and track the assembling and customization of your various things-to-be-deployed, independent of the platform.

Have you actually tried Docker? It does exactly what you describe.

Docker containers are versioned similarly to git repositories. You can commit them to record changes made by a running process; audit those changes with a diff. Unroll the history of any container to reconstitute how it was assembled, step by step. You don't get commit messages because typically changes are snapshotted automatically by a build tool - instead you get the exact unix command which caused the change, as well as date etc. This means you can point to any container, ask "what's in there?", and get a meaningful answer. In theory that would be true if 100% of all code deployed used rpms or debs. In practice that never happens because developers never package everything that way.

You can branch off of any intermediary image. This branching mechanism is used by the build tool as a caching mechanism: if you re-build an image which runs "apt-get install", it will default to re-using the result of the previous run. Uploading and downloading of containers takes advantage of versioning, so that you only transfer missing versions (similarly to git push and pull), and only store each verion on disk once with copy-on-write.

A Dockerfile is a convenience for developers to specify exactly how to assemble a container from their source, independently of the platform. Each step of the Dockerfile is committed, and benefits from the aforementioned benefits.

Customization is a special case of assembly: just use a pre-existing container as a base, and assemble more stuff on top.

All of this can be tracked, managed and automated as described above.

> A deployment tool that did that would become very popular.

Right. :)
TradeHill suspends IAFCU relationship and Bitcoin trading activities
I’m all for research and hard data, but I can’t help being a little sceptical of these results.

We use data: URIs all over the place, typically storing icons and other small graphics as background-image sources in CSS. Over the broadband connection I’m using right now (roughly 5Mb/s download speeds) and with a cleared cache, our home page seems to be downloading and rendering in about 1.5s in all of the major browsers, and the lion’s share of that is downloading the HTML file first and then downloading various standalone images that we haven’t yet optimised at the end. Over a 3G mobile connection of dubious quality, in the browsers I can readily test with, there’s a lot of extra lag up-front, but little difference in the middle section where we download and render the CSS/data: images. These results are both fairly consistent with what we’ve seen throughout development and testing, across a decent range of test scenarios over an extended period.

So while I’m not sure from these articles where the difference might lie, I don’t see how to reconcile the results we’ve seen with the idea that switching to data: URIs somehow slows things down by 6x or 10x as reported in the linked article series. I wonder whether either the people doing these experiments weren’t measuring what they thought they were measuring or perhaps they’ve hit an awkward use cases that some/all major browsers don’t optimise well rather than a general problem with using data: URIs. The latter is certainly plausible, as there are cases with for example SVG where some browsers seem absurdly slow but everything works with the kind of performance you’d expect in others.

Meanwhile, data: URIs continue to have some concrete practical advantages for mobile, perhaps most obviously that they tend to circumvent mobile Internet providers “helpfully” compressing your graphics on the fly so they look terrible on your visitor’s 300dpi smartphone/tablet display, which is a particular problem with image sprites if their compression starts bleeding one image into the next. For reasons like this, we’ve found that in practice our decisions about how to send graphics on web pages are rarely dominated by speed considerations anyway — though they surely would be if using data: URIs really slowed down our pages by a factor of 6-10x!
Wasn't saying one is better than the other, but I'm biased because I primarily use git :)

Xcode supports both, though git is enabled by default.
Your attack on christine walton was really unnecessary, tasteless and gross. It reflects poorly on you and your argument would be stronger without it. Not to mention it is rude and even cruel to her - regardless of being rich, she is a person.
VCs are (as a class) not particularly good at identifying quality

The question is: why is that? Having been an investor and an entrepreneur, I certainly agree that VCs miss many good companies and fund many bad ones. But that's not for lack of trying, expertise, time spent, or motivation.

If you think that crowdfunding will do better than VCs (as a class), then you must either believe that the crowd has some ability that VCs can't develop (and what is that and why can't VCs develop it?) or that the crowd will simply fund everything regardless of quality.

I personally don't believe the first and am not sure the second is the best answer.

Personally, I think crowdfunding--especially as AngelList does it--could very well be the future of the seed/early A round. I don't think the crowd will get better returns than VCs, but I also think the crowd won't care very much about okay-but-not-great returns; that may be the reason it works.
Zenefits ... raised part of their round on Wefunder even though they had tons of investor interest after Demo Day.

Why?
These days, I would prefer to say that the thing in your hand has a phone app, and for many people that app gets very little use.
Home 3D printers take us on a maddening journey into another dimension
Well it's not an asset class at the moment, it might get there one day but if you engage in it for a return you are an idiot.
How was the beep sound made (see the youtube video)? Javascript? Happy to get replies or some actual code of that beep
Ask HN: How do I teach my sixth grade class programming?
Hi, I'm a sixth grade math teacher at an Urban school in Raleigh, North Carolina and want to teach my class about programming. I've experimented with python a bit myself and was considering using udacity.com's lessons but I'm not sure if it would be engaging and entertaining enough for kids. I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions that they've seen work well at a sixth grade level in schools. I will be doing this during the kids' daily advisory period which is 25 minutes long for six weeks. Thanks for your help!
I actually figured I would have to do this kind of proxy or in the least offer a tunnel broker as part of any 'IPv6 only' service, if only for the purpose of helping potential customers actually access the service they would pay for.
What do you think Hugo Barra can bring to Xiaomi? I mean as you said in the other comment, culture in Chinese tech industry is completely different from in U.S. not to mention Google. So I am curious on your opinion about this. Honestly speaking, given Xiaomi's marketing style, I wouldn't be surprised if there is a brand image consideration of this high profile hiring. What do you think?
I would think an engineers personality should be different from a sales person's personality.
Now you're nitpicking. The only reason I mentioned RPC's is as an well-known example of a specification, to contrast that with a concrete implementation.

My point is that an algorithm is more general than any particular implementation. They aren't concrete. They're abstract. (And of course if patents only covered one concrete implementation then nobody would bother getting them.)
That's the Aldi I know and love from The Netherlands... so I assume it is like the ones in Germany.
whenever i received an endorsement for a certain skill from someone who has never seen me perform that skill i quickly remove it. recently however, after trying to remove endorsements several times, they still appear on my profile. i've since given up on linkedin for not providing any integrity.
The catch is that the girlfriend and the subordinate seems to be the same person.
Except that obviously wasn't the case in the linked article.
A lot of what I knew about Walmart came from third party sources (activists, whatever), so I decided to go to a primary and read Sam Walton's book, and I must say it gave me a new appreciation and understanding for the vast machine that is Walmart. I highly recommend it:

http://www.amazon.com/Sam-Walton-Made-In-America/dp/05535628...
I recently sat in on a meeting between one of my small-biz clients and a lower-level, and very young, employee of a Chinese company. Prior to the meeting the employee had gone on a shopping spree as evidenced by the many shopping bags accompanying him.

During the course of the meeting, it was my client that was kissing butt for a shot at getting some business in the Chinese market, and would pay this Chinese company for the privilege.

At the end of the meeting, my client quipped "don't spend too much [money here]" to which the Chinese visitor responded, "I'm Chinese, of course I spend too much."

The whole meeting was definitely a wake-up call for me, especially after hearing what came from a Chinese national in their early 20's.

EDIT: I will also note that things weren't all roses for the Chinese company trying to operate in a capitalistic fashion. There is a lot of (probably justified) paranoia that the Chinese government would come knocking and severely interrupt their business.
If you liked ActionScript but want to get back some performance I would recommend checking out NME. It looks a lot like ActionScript but outputs C++ (among others) and can be compiled as usual. Not the best, hand-tuned, C++ but probably good enough for a lot of projects.
i was confused by the grandparent comment - when a "ripoff" company tries to hire innovators, they get shit on? okay...

isn't that what they're supposed to be doing?

we should at least see how this plays out, maybe he'll quit in a fit of rage because they won't listen to him. who knows.
Google's All Grown Up, and That's Too Bad
It's like if Zynga made Watsi.
I don't think peer review is necessary to confirm the relative levels of compensation as stated by the article. If you think those numbers are not accurate you are welcome to cite other sources for the wage levels.

As for bringing up Apple, are you trying to make me defend Apple? I'm no fan for a whole host of reasons, red herrings though they may be.
Well written article, enjoyed it although I also noticed the much-higher margin Walmart has.

It's very obvious that Walmart allows less wealthy people to buy more. Paradoxically, the very people suffering from stagnant blue-collar wages are Walmart's customers.
Luckily I was on an IT maintained machine that takes nightly snapshots of home partitions so I was safe in the worst case. Had I done that on one of my personal machines I wouldn't have been so lucky.
It's more than alleged if you're into the Android modding scene. MIUI extensively rips off Cyanogenmod, contributes nothing back to them (including source, not that they have to under Apache 2.0, but they should) and also completely ignores the GPL for things like the kernel for every version of MIUI they release for any phone. Just do a quick search on XDA developers to see what I mean.

As already mentioned, their only redeeming quality is their phones are easy to mod, but they ignore licensing obligations and have as long as I can remember.
If you liked this article, you might also be interested in "Scraping Web Sites which Dynamically Load Data" http://blog.databigbang.com/scraping-web-sites-which-dynamic...
Yes, that one surprised me. I would think the personality type they want is never maddened.
Ask HN: Do your grades really matter?
A little background.

I'm now (going to be) a second year physics student at uWaterloo, and due to the fact that I was ill, I didn't do too well during my second semester, and a couple of courses in my first semester.
I still managed to pull off 80/90+ in all my core courses, and I'm now a bit worried as to whether I'll get a decent co-op job.

I have a pretty reasonable resume, a couple of github projects in C++ and python, a research internship in algorithms (with a paper on the way).

So, what I want to know from the HN community is, would you hire me for a good co-op position (whether in software or otherwise), or am I doomed to a job where I need to file papers all day?
The fact that you are developing "at the pleasure of the King" seems to be missing. It's a good thing for Apple users to know as well.
Aldi has improved in the Chicago area in the last decade. There's been a wave of new construction in more affluent suburbs and stores have expanded to include liquor sales in certain areas.

But yeah, it's still no frills. Staples like milk and baking goods are dirt cheap, but I wouldn't chance the produce. Lots of processed food. Bakery is all mass-produced.

Interestingly, the supermarkets I've been to in Germany lately are becoming more like US ones (Rewe, Edeka) but some are still super no-frills (Penny Markt, Norma)
> especially two.

Or for that matter, three, since the statement seems to be assuming 3 children and one adult (if there was a second adult, why would it be a single-earner household if they are under the poverty line that way? Surely the other adult should at least be on welfare or disability...)
This reads like the beginning a shakespearean drama, filled with betrayal, vows for vengence, unexpected twists...

I hope most of it isn't true.
Apparently Aldi has one of the toughest receiving for their produce nowadays. So that may have changed.
Did Earth's Life Originate on Mars?
This isn't entirely correct; rdiff-backup will give you a full copy of the latest version of the file as well as a set of binary diffs that can be applied in sequence to roll it back to an earlier version. rdiff-backup will actually end up being a little more space efficient for each incremental change since its diffs don't need to store entire filesystem blocks.
Not necessarily. IndieGoGo offers two types of funding: flexible and fixed. Fixed is exactly like KS where you only get the money when you reach your goal. With flexible, you get whatever you raise but are charged different percentages based on whether you reached your goal or not. If you did, you're charged 4% but if you did not, you're charged 9%. Thus you're incentivized to be more conservative on IGG as well.
Hey Dominik, awesome work congrats—I just asked this on the main thread. Not sure if you saw this, so I ask again: How was the beep sound made? Javascript or a sample? I like its warm sound very much, would be happy to know how to get to this beep. Thanks!
LinkedIn suggested that one of my friends should be endorsed for 'pregnancy'. Well, I couldn't resist that suggestion so I went for it.

I called him up the next day and we both laughed about it. He then added it to his profile. Since then he's been seconded on that skill by somebody else, too.
Historically "just make everyone use PGP" has been a major issue.
Leapin' lizards, it's a robot with a tail
TigerJython: A Jython programming environment for beginners
It will depend upon how the sale is set up. Anything is theoretically possible, but the biggest obstacles are SEC regulations put in place to protect small 'retail investors' from 'speculative' products.
100 million years old bacteria found 2.5kms below the ocean floor
The powers that be at KS seem more interested in pushing projects they personally like (artsy projects) instead of tailoring their recommendations to each user. As such I find their newsletter useless as I imagine a lot of people do.
Probably sends out a call to verify first.
You're probably getting a little emo about things here. I'm not sure why that comment should "really worry" you. And you're extrapolation of the story into

Stories like this represent a global shift of power, financial resource, and more importantly, talent.

is just plain wrong. If you it makes you feel any better, you're not the only one around here that makes those kinds of emo analysis.
Hi Chris, I agree, underdogs deserve their shot at the title. I actually duplicated the functionality of Hacker News at (www.plantdietlife.com) with an emphasis on plant based diets.

I think one way to address the great idea you're bringing up is to use the code I have produced for PDL (voting algorithm and all) and create another site that's only for peoples personal projects. We can have some sort of verification process where the submissions have to be approved as a "personal project" to be on the home page. Once the item is on the home page we'll demand that it needs a certain amount of comments/likes in order for it to be removed and for the next personal project to appear.

IDK, it's just a quick idea. I look forward to seeing how this vision of yours progresses.
Sam Walton has been dead for decades now, and many of his ideas (giving stock to employees, even store workers) made more sense for the early growth stages he oversaw than the company that exists today.
True story, I had to do this to get the Good Sam (basically an RV services company) to stop mailing me. Phone calls didn't work, so the next time I got one of their mailers, I shredded the contents, stuffed them all in the reply envelope (that thing was at least a full pound - the junk was manilla-envelope sized), and added a note that says to remove me from their list.

It's been two months now, no more messages from them.
The market does that. Their janitors get paid a lot.
Your app is pretty cool. How long did it take to build? How big of a team?
We put together some fun histograms from the raw data in Statwing. You can play around a bit more yourself.

https://www.statwing.com/open/datasets/cb2e735b5e8428f521828...

Thanks OP for making the raw data available.

(Edit: Disclosure, I work at Statwing)
I think with more perspective, there is nothing maddening about it.

It's like a pool filter. Any one particle of feces can float around the pool forever, but in aggregate the feces level is reduced.