skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is interesting that you mention amazon. The Internet 1.0 version would be amazon.com consisting of a bunch of programmers who would hook into the digital infrastructure of manufacturers, logistics providers and customers. Then by applying some fancy math they would be able to provide amazing value to customers who would then shop exclusively at amazon.com. At that point amazon would charge a ‘vig’ for every transaction on the Internet and become very successful in the process.

Needless to say, that hasn’t panned out. Amazon has invested huge amounts of capital in its physical infrastructure. Everyone thought they would kill best buy. Best buy is making a resurgence (look at its latest report) and anecdotally I see best buy having better prices than amazon. Internet company price match is now common among many big box retailers (Best Buy, Fry’s, etc.). Amazon is going to invest a huge amount $12 Billion in capital in the coming months. Co-incidence?

So, long story short, it appears that many of the latest internet companies are beginning to realize that you need a deep physical presence to make things work (see Bonobos). You can’t just build a fancy website, run some machine learning algorithms, do some A/B testing and conquer the world ☺. Look at it this way, Uber has raised $350 Million. Will the digital component (website, algos etc.) be more than 10% of that? I doubt it.
Honestly thank you for posting that site. I posted a Show HN yesterday. Went to showinghn.com and didn't see my show hn on the site. Turns out I've been banned from submitting links for the past 733 days so their scraper never picked up my show hn because my submission was dead.

edit: off topic, but I was wondering if anyone knew who I could ask to have the hell ban removed on my account? (other than emailing pg)
Did you notice the data point in the article that Costco makes $2 billion in membership revenue and yet makes $1.7 billion in profit, which means they effectively lose money on their sales?

In fact, a little known feature of Costco's business model is their ability to sell all their stock well before their suppliers require payment for goods (Net 30)? This means they have an effectively _negative_ cash conversion cycle, or in other words, their suppliers are paying to stock their products.

Everything about Costco's business model is backwards.
Is there any reason to go to college beyond the prospect of making more money with a degree?
We used to have a similar in-house developed audio feedback in one of our apps [1]. The engagement rate was low. We replaced it with the standard email feedback and we got an order of magnitude more feedback. Plus with email, you automatically get the ability to answer back and communicate with the customer. In my opinion users prefer UX concepts they are used to, even if they are less efficient. But it probably also depends on the app type and its audience. So best to test it for yourself and see what works.

There was also a startup doing this [2]. Looks inactive since their iOS SDK is "coming soon" for already a year.

[1] http://focusofmyday.com
[2] http://saygent.com/
Except college is a negative sum game, an expenditure of resources to boost one's relative status at somebody else's expense; it was a ticket to money when few people had a college degree, but the more people who have one, the more find you can have a degree and still end up poor.

And as you say, affluent people typically behave as though they don't want to reproduce anyway. In some cases that's actual lack of desire, and in others it's because by the time they finish climbing academic and career ladders and jumping through all the hoops, they're too old, but the end result is the same.
I've had a lot of success by including a field called email in my form, hiding it with css so humans cannot see it, and whenever a submission/login request/post is received, I merely check to see if the email field has been set.

If so, I know it wasn't a human that submitted the post - they could not see it - whilst automated spam tools seemingly cannot resist entering something in that field. I emailed suspect postings to myself with IP address info to add them to an IP block-list later, but showed them a fake "success" page or a "your post has been selected for moderation" page. The latter turned out to be more effective as it resulted in fewer repeated attempts.

I removed the annoying reCaptcha code altogether as a test, and never had to reinstate it. Real users hated the reCaptcha thing anyhow.
I don't think it's nitpicky. Often the bulk of the work is implementing a given algorithm efficiently, instead of just writing a formal paper with lots of hand-wavy "a sufficiently smart compiler..."
Check out Timoni West's design, which takes these things into account: http://blog.timoni.org/post/318322031/a-practical-boarding-p...

Note that she wrote this in January, 2010.
It's a good point, Walmart is doing better in both volume and margins. That might imply Walmart has poorly allocated some of its returns.

There's a floor, though, where that argument isn't as compelling. It's not like we're talking of dropping from 20% to 10% margins, here, Costco's 1.7% margins might not be sustainable, or might only be sustainable for a business with less fixed capital.

I mean, maybe you're right, maybe 1.7% isn't that floor yet, I'd just need more information.

But the last piece focused more on the fact that Walmart is in business relationships with more poor people than just its employees. So even if Walmart has poorly allocated its returns, I'd rather see those margins distributed to customers or foreign suppliers first, because my hunch is that the humanitarian impact would be greater on these groups, who I see as larger, poorer, and having fewer substitutes.
Now that I've read some more, I'm curious.

Are you referring to the MMPI or something similar? Or to Unicru and Kenexa? Unicru seems to ask much more prosaic questions than MMPI.

And yes, when I speak of gaming, I am assuming prior knowledge and preparation - but not necessarily inside knowledge.
Manhattan real estate prices… in Cambridge
"Big Brother likes your post."
It would take days to learn where things are supposed to go, in the opinion of the person writing the documentation. Where things actually go in the real world varies from distro to distro and application to application. And just when you think you have it down, you try to find where that new app just installed to, and you begin the process again.

And when you finally figure it out, Fedora moves everything to /usr.
What you say cannot possibly be true. I have been told time and time again that the arrival of a Walmart always spells doom for adjacent businesses, and the people who told me that seemed very sure about themselves.
Xiaomi's founder, Lei Jun, is an experienced Internet entrepreneur, and Xiaomi's management has a number of ex-Google China and ex-Motorola China folks. So, as a tech entrepreneur in Beijing, I see Xiaomi as more international than most Chinese tech companies (and way more of a tech company than any of the Chinese State Owned Enterpriese (SOEs) that operate in the tech sector).

It's interesting to me that they hired Mr. Barra away from Google. Perhaps he already had a working relationship with people at Xiaomi?

Welcome to Beijing, Hugo!
Ello, thanks for the kind words! That beep was created in Ableton Live using a standard square synth, a high-cut EQ and a bit of vinyl distortion (which is also responsible for the crackle). The heartbeat used to be an 808 kick drum that went through almost the same process. Finally, both were laid out on a 10-second bar and implemented as a single mp3 loop. Hope this helps!
Nope, still get the same Google warning and your red background
And this is why I believe the HR department needs to give less emphasis on Resume and the "flashy keywords" and focus on the projects that the candidate is involved in / what role he/she played in it. Just looking at the portfolio, you can have a pretty good idea of what you can expect.
Handheld-metal-detectors-waiting-for-you
Hippies and libertarians become unlikely allies in a war against solar power
Creating Quality Content, Building a Community, and Making Money with Your Art
TIL: create a scsi device named after the pattern virtual box uses and be immune to all trojans.
If all airlines would just go the way of Southwest you wouldn't need it for seat assignments. I haven't been forced to hold on to a stub for a while now.

But from a higher-level thinking point of view, neither of the requirements you mention mean a stub is necessary. I know this is a little nitpicky, but e need to step back from things like this to realize that the entire premise of a stub is only required because of previous decisions in the system.

The only things the user actually needs is (1) a way to find a seat, and (2) a way to verify their identity to agents. The stub happened to satisfy those requirements, but they could easily be solved in different ways (like Southwest has done).

That's the biggest problem with this entire article, it's only thinking about the last step of design decisions, so it's not going to come up with very innovative results.
Yes. Junk mail is economically inefficient and solely supported by the subsidization allowed via high first-class post rates. There is a cost for every piece they send out. They are not paying this cost. Hence, externality.
>your average group of citizens wouldn't stand a chance against the military in serious armed conflict

I disagree with this - traditionally the US military hasn't fared very well in guerrilla warfare scenarios. Look at the number of deaths out in the middle east - fighting in city streets, that kind of thing.

I'd also wager that if the military was used against the populace, a great deal of the military would defect out of principle. So not only do you have an armed public in unfavorable conditions, our hypothetical evil government also has an unknown number of traitors in the ranks.

That leaves more indiscriminate options (bombs of various flavors) - and if things ever got that bad, we'd probably have other countries getting involved and even more defection.

In short, it's not near as simple as "government has tanks, therefore government wins".
Before any naysayers complain about the idea of using undocumented endpoints, keep in mind that this is all in the context of web scraping.
The Great Internet Land Grab
And Netflix's DVD side of the business (the one Reed Hastings wants to kill somehow) is turning in 50% margins.

http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/25/netflixs-streaming-dvd-marg...

(That's old, they've dropped precipitously since then to something like 48%...)
Will Bitcoin Take Off in India? - BTC Geek
Great book, but it will make you a bit paranoid about what you say/do at work. It did help me understand what HR is really doing.
Poll: Would you vote online if you could?
In your next government election if you could fill out your ballot as an online form would you?
This seemed very familiar to me. I remembered seeing Square offering a POS kit[0] just this spring. Interestingly though, they no longer sell it and instead are only offering a (very slick) stand/reader[1].

I wonder why they stopped offering the whole kit. My only guess it was a MVP style trial balloon offering to gauge interest before building their own hardware. Or, it didn't fly, which may not bode well for Shopify either.

[0] http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/02/20/square-launches-ip...

[1] https://squareup.com/register/hardware
That's a scary thought.. As recently as 2011 when given an Aldi and a Rewe next door to each other, it was really difficult to ever choose Aldi (in fact, the only reason to really venture in was their cheap and unlimited 3G SIM card resales). That said, Rewe managed to also make itself more useful in the process by actually having everything I needed so the extra price ended up working out, to some degree, if you count convenience.
Yes. If that person is a cashier at Walmart. The value added by that employee is simply not that high. They shouldn't get paid more just because we don't want to be poor. If you only make 20k you shouldn't be having 2 kids. If you continue to make poor life decisions, the outcome is living below the poverty line.

Note, that I'm not against helping the poor. Charity is great, and helping people move up is great. Simply telling Walmart they should pay more for the same work is stupid. If you want to make more, you should provide more value.
Before I closed my account I endorsed my roommate for Alternative Medicine and Chromotherapy. I don't believe it's still there.
Walmart owns Sams Club which is equivalent/competitor to Costco.
Hi, you can set up weight-based shipping rates so products over a certain weight have different shipping rates applied. You just need to tell Shopify the weight of those products. http://docs.shopify.com/manual/settings/4-shipping/4-shippin...

If that's not good enough there's apps like Better Shipping that can set up more complex shipping rules - http://apps.shopify.com/better-shipping
Ultimate BlackHat Script
I'm not sure what you're arrangement was, but when I was contracting through an agency, HR was not involved. And contract expirations were a constant worry. It can take months to get the ball rolling for a contract renewal.
...it would immediately be a target of fraud and unhappy customers and soon have to charge a more substantial fee. Bitcoin early adopters are willing to put up with more insecurity and inconvenience than most customers.
This is so bizarrely misogynistic. I didn't realize people said things like "plow her pussy" outside of bad porn.
I see your point, but with this kind of thinking we would have badly designed monochrome tickets forever.

Is it a better design? Yes. Does it account for everything? of course not. Is the technology there? Not quite — but ideas like these could spark something in someone somewhere.

Everything can be done better. Lets aim for that.
My first experience with Aldi was in Frankfurt when my then girlfriend (now wife) wanted me to go get her something that was on sale/a deal. It left an impression - it was a mix of US black friday and hypersensitivity to efficiency. Know what you want, focus on retrieving those items, and be efficient. Lots of grumbling if you held someone up or weren't ready to pay at the checkout counter. It was one sampling, but I still remember it 11 years later.
Good post.
These HR tests favor extroversion and obedience. In my experience, brilliant people are highly unlikely to exhibit these traits.

I work with a guy who pounds on his desk daily, curses at code, has OCD, walks about aimlessly, is anti-authority, depressed, and is a self-described autistic. In other words, he's the type to score 1%. However, if you have any advanced math problem he can solve it in minutes, whereas most people would either take days or never get the right answer. For me at least, I have no problem interacting with the guy and joke around with him often. But I do notice that with other people things will usually end up standoffish or awkward.

Perhaps, HR would be better served by using the personality profile to train the other workers in how to interact with a new hire and get the most out of them. The idea that a company should have a singular culture built of singular personality types, not only sounds like a flawed plan, but one that in the end is impossible to achieve.
I guess the question is partly

"does the market value the work being done by that one wage earner enough to support a family?" and partly

"should the state step in and support a family when the market value of their labor is insufficient to support that family?"

And to what level is support needed?

No answers here, just questions.
Those are the obvious ones. I've taken the MMPI. There's a lot more than just those. None of these are the seemingly innocuous ones I was talking about.

Again, I'll reiterate: can they be gamed? Yes. Is it likely? Emphatically, no.
My top skill by number of endorsements is "Penetration testing". I am in infosec but some girls that have endorsement this skill know nothing about this profession...
Since Hugo's departure happened right after Nexus 4 price cut, they are very likely related. It is embarrassing + losing money for Google to sell 16GB Nexus 4 at $249 while 16GB iPhone 5 at $649. As the product VP, Hugo did a poor job on Nexus product quality, marketing/sales, and inventory management. Not surprised to see him leaving the ship.

NOTE: Nexus 7 2013 recently had GPS and touch problem and required another OS update to fix them. In fact, Nexus phones never had good product quality ever since Nexus One.
Childhood Trauma and Its Link to Major Depressive Disorder
By psychologist David Hosier MSc,who himself experienced severe childhood trauma.
There is a nice comment collapsing extension for Chrome. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-collap...

I tend to read HN like so:
* If the article and the discussion look interesting and I'm not too familiar with the topic, I read the article, then read the discussion. I usually read the whole thing, skipping over trolls/derails.
* If the article looks good but the discussion seems likely to be bad, I'll save the article for later and check the top couple comments to confirm I'm not interested.
* If the article is something I've read before or know well, I'll quickly skim the discussion to see what I can learn from it. In this case I can move very quickly because I have a lot of context.

Over time I've learned to skip or pay attention to certain usernames, styles of writing and word choices which makes this all fairly quick.

That said, the best way to read, and one to which I return from time to time, is to subscribe to a "best of" digest like HN Weekly and avoid HN between issues. That way, the filter is very high-level, and you avoid ever looking at threads before they're completely settled.
I am not sure about Dropbox being in the second group. I can take a picture on my phone, return home its on my laptop and I can print it out and hand it to someone.

Likewise I can create a document on my laptop and save it in Dropbox. Later I can show it to someone in a restaurant on my cell phone.

Both are examples of bridging the real with the virtual world. Stuff I do on a weekly basis in interacting with my 97 year old non-digital Dad.
Hey there - sorry to not answer your question directly. Just commenting here. Very happy to see how positive the responses from others were. Makes me feel very good about the community here on HN. Take that as a sign. You can learn more by just continuing to ask and be curious.
20,230 is what is reported by the US Government: http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes412011.htm

So the number stated is the mean, not the mode or median.
Petition President Obama to force Ryan Bates to do new Railscasts
> ... Not like that's unusual with Chinese companies ...

So you did want to get all anti-chinese here. Your statement would have been just as valid without the 'chinese' qualification.
Scientists discover water from deep within moon's surface
Is 07:44 clear whether they actually mean 07:44 or 19:44?
YouTube Easter Egg: Play "Snake" Game While Watching a Video
As someone who runs a pretty big shopify store (in terms of SKUs) littlebirdelectronics.com, this makes it super easy for us to move from being an online store to a brick and mortar store.

In the past we've tried to sell our wares at Makerfaires and the like, and in the end we'd be getting people to use our laptop or iPad and place their orders through our site.

This dramatically simplifies the whole affair!

Credit where credit is due, this is pretty awesome :)
Match command line arguments to their help text
I don't see how I'm supposed to take these designs seriously when they're based on guessing what the core constituencies need and what their constraints are. It's easy to make something look prettier, but I have no idea if this better serves TSA agents, counter agents, gate agents--let alone the airline's bottom line. How much does it cost to print this ticket compared to the old one? How long does it take? Will I need new printers? Do the barcode readers need to be reprogrammed?
I wouldn't really consider them an expense in the same way as labour costs. Maybe in terms of the costs of distribution and storage for things that aren't moving. Things that are moving though with a profit margin aren't really a cost center.
Also, single earner household? Its not 1950.
There will always be fans of a product willing to put a few bucks down to see it happen. Not going away
He didn't leave the killing of Egyptian children to humans, nor the razing of Sodom. You flat-out ignored my first question, though, so I can tell you really don't want to debate. Let's just stop this here.
Arts and Culture are part of their founding DNA and you can see how hard they are trying to retain the spirit of Kickstarter to fund projects that may not have clear commercial value by giving more face time to these projects.

When Kickstarter put in place restrictions on pre-sales and other types of projects (http://www.kickstarter.com/blog/kickstarter-is-not-a-store), they were primarily addressing the hardware/tech category that changed the core nature of what Kickstarter was meant for.
At the previous company I worked for I was given one of these tests in the interview process. Later I asked the HR Director about the test and she told me "Well you did crazy good 100% accurate, however the software also factors in when people give answers that we want to hear you failed that because and it said you were not being honest, however I ignore that one because I think that if you're smart enough to know what the right answers are then you're most likely smart enough to know what would be best for the company given the chance"

Smart HR Directors will get it right however I feel sorry for any company that uses the results of those tests to actually make a decision.
Your Startup's Timing
Advice on entrepreneurship
The information you're curious about does not seem to be in the public record. It's not easy to convey things like that through journalists, especially business journalists. Some of it may not even exist: some of the best coders I've ever known don't really have a favorite language. Knew a math PhD from MIT who used to just churn out Perl and C++ all day happy as a clam. I asked him if he'd prefer Lisp or something but he didn't really care - all about the algorithms for him.

Anyway, there are still good indications that Marissa Mayer has kept up both an academic interest in computer science and suspiciously coder-like habits well after her ascension to upper management.

Mayer was still teaching CS classes at Stanford after becoming a Google executive.[0]

She uses a terminal-based email client.[1]

And uses plain text for all her personal organizing.[2]

[0]http://ecorner.stanford.edu/author/marissa_mayer

[1]https://twitter.com/marissamayer/status/327200020128489472

[2]http://lifehacker.com/265651/google-vp-organizes-her-life-in...
In many cases websites that load data asynchronously through an API are much nicer to scrape, as the data is already structured for you. You don't have to go through the pain of extracting data from a mess of tables, divs and spans.
Okay, I didn't know you've taken the MMPI, so fair enough. I would be surprised if answers to the innocuous questions were that important though; they strike me more as luring you into a sense of complacency and so that you end up answering honestly when it comes to the important ones.
One-income families of four are only below the poverty line if the sole income earner cannot produce enough value to support a family of four. The problem isn't that people are being exploited and underpaid for the work they do. Maybe it's that the education system has failed to produce more valuable workers: maybe it's that the value of (most) human labor has dipped so far that some level of basic income is necessary.