skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Having read the interesting article submitted here, I have to say that it is refreshing to see an analysis of different approaches to retailing that focuses not only on the demographic groups served by the different retailers, but also on the SKU (stock-keeping unit) count for each retailer. Having more different products in stock is more expensive than having fewer different products in stock. Carrying "name" brands is usually more expensive than carrying "store" brands.

There are plenty of other differences between the shopping experience at Wal-Mart and Costco. A peculiarity of local geography is that we find that the two Costco stores at our end of the Twin Cities metropolitan area are just never on our way to anywhere else, so we let our Costco membership lapse after just one year. For quite the same reason, we hardly ever shop at Wal-Mart. But we shop at Sam's Club (the Wal-Mart version of a warehouse store like Costco) all the time, simply because it is on my way to work and largely on the way to many of our other trips during the week. Today we built a trip to Aldi into our schedule while our daughter was at soccer practice about halfway from our house to that store. We love to minimize driving--driving costs both money and time. Some stores cannot thrive unless they are within SHORT drives of many customers. Some of those stores have to extract a lot of productivity out of each worker to pay the workers even minimum wage.

I still wonder when Amazon is going to go all-in in setting up major same-day delivery centers in most metropolitan areas in the United States. That could have a revolutionary influence on my shopping habits. And if robots can do more of the stocking of shelves, and eventually self-driving cars do most of the delivering, that business model could end up with huge market share. I'm very happy when workers at menial retail jobs are paid more--I have had such jobs (at
Sears and at Target, many years ago). But they best gain opportunity to advance themselves economically when they also can save on their own consumer spending in retail stores. Everyone likes low prices day in and day out.
This might help - http://youtu.be/mWBvcJAXwu4 (Simon & Garfunkel)
Not a question, just an interesting comment: This reminds me a lot of the Tears In Rain soliloquy from Blade Runner. I'm sure everyone has their own interpretation of that quote. Personally, I felt like it was Batty's way of proving himself a living being. He talks about the memories that will be lost with his death. And isn't that exactly what death is? Loss?

I see parallels here with the Impetus Girl. It's the loss that brought her to life.

Ref: The Blade Runner quote: "I've... seen things you people wouldn't believe... [laughs] Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those... moments... will be lost in time, like [coughs] tears... in... rain. Time... to die..."
a smart recruiter would realize...

Nobody said the smart recruiters are their target market.
There's a comment in the source code about b64:

# If you don't like non-valid characters in the hostname,

# then use hex encoding rather than base64

So far, I've not encountered a failure using b64 encoding. But that could be an issue. And as you say, other encodings could be used if that does prove to be a problem.
It's enough of a chore that entire products exist to help. I rather like "Visual Assist X".
I appreciate your input, especially as counterweight to those who underestimate the sophistication of these tests.

However I question your absolute statement. What man can create, man can circumvent. (How's that for an absolute statement?)

Would you say that the people who created the test cannot game it?
Earth life 'may have come from Mars'
The completely public ledger of all transactions until the end of time (by design!) also makes BTC rather unattractive for serious criminals. They are much happier with digital currencies (like Liberty Reserve) which are designed to enable money laundering through and through.
Projects of Coursera 'Startup Engineering' course get funded
Can't tell if this is sincere, or just a summary of what everyone else has said.

Probably sincere, I guess.
Almost. That's more like "click-tivism". Click a button "make a difference".

This game seemed to work because players formed some sort of personal connection with "the girl". Less "do a good deed" and more "we've got to save her!". There's a huge difference. That's why I mentioned World Vision. It would let people forge an actual connection with the being on the other end of it... and mourn when they die.
> So if you just send back the empty envelope, it sounds like it will cost the company postage, even if it's less than a brick.

It will. They pay per piece to get each envelope/card back, the rates vary based upon volume (https://www.usps.com/business/reply-mail.htm).

So, if you notice how little they paid to get the letter to you, if everyone returned the empty BRM's, it could easily double or more their cost for postage to have mailed the things out.
Walmart tried to move into a dilapidated mall in my neighborhood and everyone fought it and they couldnt. They moved a mile down the street to a slightly less wealthy neighborhood, in a dilapidated strip mall. Five years later, the strip mall with walmart is bustling with business and the other mall is still mostly empty. Wasted opportunity to get business into the township.

Even though I generally wouldn't shop there, I have no issue with walmart, for exactly the reasons this author suggests I wouldn't
Wal-Mart has listed key executive compensation of around $63m USD this past year [http://insiders.morningstar.com/trading/executive-compensati...] and reported yearly revenue of $473,000m USD [http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=WMT].

I'd argue that spending 0.01% of revenue on key executive compensation (which is the 'paying executives millions' you talk about) is irrelevant to Wal-Mart overall and how much they can or can't pay their workers. Even if you stripped the executive compensation and gave it to the workers (2.2m of them), you'd only be handing out $30 to each person. That's a few hours of work total, and amortized over a year? Not a factor at all in the grand scheme of things.

...

The article is well worth a read. It's interesting and insightful and discusses more interesting things like business models, target demographics, value-mindedness, etc. I recommend it if you can get it to load. (It was fine for me.)
Qantas membership cards now have integrated RFID tags which can be used in place of a paper boarding pass to drop baggage and alight the plane. The only requirement is that you must check in online within 24 hours of your flight.

In fact, the bag drop is particularly clever. Qantas give their frequent flyers robust bag tags with integrated RFID chips, so at the airport you just scan your card and drop your bag. If you don't have a bag tag, it prints you a "classic" adhesive tag -- with an embedded RFID chip!

I think the paper ticket's days are numbered.
Automation, Interoperability, and the Future of Mobile
Interesting, that there's a large amount of projects that are centered around Bitcoin or just use it some way.
I find this quite interesting, just what is the diference between a SOA arch and a micro service arch, maybe just the size of the "atomic" services?
A former coworker of mine endorsed me for, among things I actually do know, "lubrication", "flexibility" and "potatoes".

It took me a good while to notice and another good while to stop laughing. Of course a tiny bit less observation on my part could have published that to my actual profile.
Are blue sky laws no longer applicable?
Actually, at least in the U.S., the regular first class postage rates subsidize the junk mailings. That is one part of the reason why the USPS is bleeding red ink. First class mail is way down (due to electronic bill pay and email and other internet systems) and they no longer have the cash cow that was first class mail to utilize to subsidize the junk mail delivery.
In lowest zoom level, if you scroll the map, it snaps back to the original center after scrolling fades out.
Is 17:42 not clear that it is after 12:00?
Hi Prefinem,

Include a small piece of Javascript that sets a hidden field in your form to some password when the page loads.

Then, when the form is posted, verify on the server that that field has been set to the password.

This should get rid of most of your spam. The reason it works is that you are being hit with spam from a program called "Xrumer", which doesn't emulate the Javascript of the pages it interacts with. It simple brute forces the forms on every single page it finds, and solves their captchas too. However, even the simplest Javascript will stop it from working.
http://www.linuxsystems.com.au/astycrapper/index.html - An Asterix plugin which waits untl they stop talking, then says a random phrase. You don't even have to be on the phone :)
LaTeX in the cloud with Sage
A bit more involved than a click, but that's the premise behind http://watsi.com (YC funded).
Indiegogo also charges the investors up front rather that only if the funding succeeds - I know this has prevented me from giving money in the past. It's annoying to deal with the fund/refund issue.
This is a great pity. I'm looking to upgrade from my Galaxy Sii which seems virtually indestructible, and this matters. All my iphone friends have cracked their screens and I'm clumsier than all of them.
This is so wrong that I just have to laugh. Yes, Costco DOES pay its executives millions.

http://insiders.morningstar.com/trading/executive-compensati...

Can you name one Fortune 500 company that doesn't pay executives millions? Facebook, Google, and Apple pay its executives millions, and yet its contracted janitors get low hourly rates. Where's your rage?
I've done that too, in the same situation. But I think it may backfire. Some investors may be nostalgic for their days in a startup. Others are still looking for that "startup edge" which differentiates from stagnant corporations.

If your clothing says "corporate", you may send the wrong message and drain some interest.

Obviously this varies by area and industry.
Yes, but I hate it when the TSA agent writes all over my phone ticket.
First, some of them do,clearly, get into the water. See the documentary Gasland. Second, the companies that pump these chemicals into the ground have made it very difficult to do actual science on the situation. Also, see Gasland for lots of examples of that.

EDIT: also, since many of the chemicals are liquids and they are injected into an aquifer that feeds wells, the only thing we really need to know is: are any of the chemicals lighter than water. Even if they are not, once the water is pumped out, the remaining liquids will certainly be next.
I think we're forgetting that the Walmart customer is not the Costco/Trader Joe's customer.

I would argue that Walmart pays minimum wages because they can and their customer base doesn't really value the benefits of paying higher wages and 'participatory management' - primarily lower turnover and thus more engaged/invested employees who deliver better service and higher productivity. Walmart most likely sees their employees as replaceable and the average Walmart customer is driven by low prices and not great customer service. To that end, the lower the Walmart cost structure, the more margin they have to work with to stay competitive (without having to lower CEO salaries, etc. of course).

Costco and Trader Joe's are known for great customer service and easy return policies. Based on my observations, people who shop at Costco like to save money, but it's from a best value angle and not from an absolute cheapest I can get angle. The Costco consumer has to be willing to shell out an annual membership fee up front and you're buying in bulk which means you have to be able to pay for goods you use in the future. Trader Joe's wants to be the neighborhood store and that means they need happy employees, not employees who are thinking about how they're going to pay for the knee surgery they badly need.

I'm probably making broad generalizations of the different customer bases here but it's what I've personally observed.
Are there any China-based HNers willing to give a perspective on the startup situation in large Chinese cities? How friendly is China to entrepreneurs and their ilk? How likely is it that in a few years, it will be common for SV engineers to move to China for better opportunities?

I have several friends who have lived/worked in China, and I always hear very conflicted reports. On one hand, that there are plenty of smart, capable people, that the tech industry is booming, that it's well on its way to displace {Silicon Valley|USA|etc.}.

On the other hand, I also hear that it's impossible to do business without running into corrupt organizations/officials, that ruthless copying is celebrated more than true innovation, and so on.

Would love to hear more takes on the topic.
I actually like this part of WebForms :(

The event model, no, but the templating and compositing absolutely.
Wait, it costs money to receive calls in the US?
Only one of the circles on the charger matters (I'm at the office now so I can't check it). It's actually really easy to clean that off with your finger, and that's the only thing that matters in terms of holding it on.

It's still a bad design, but once I figured that out it was useable again.
He argues that good startups have no trouble raising VC.

Sometimes, VC will even throw money at really, really bad ideas...

http://money.cnn.com/2010/03/26/news/companies/terralliance_...
I'd love to have an Aldi in the Silicon Valley, at least if the concept is similar to the ones in Germany.
You are really making me want to do this.
I liked the colored groups- that's actually useful information, disregarding its superficial similarity to the "real" periodic table of elements. It would be interesting to see a table that does a good job of grouping along other attributes like you've described here.

It pretty well falls along the lines of what I once wrote about- that HTML should be split into multiple, mutually exclusive sub-languages- with guarded sections of code that does not permit tags from any other groups to be interpreted as actual tags, as enforced by the browser. If browsers had this ability: to whitelist certain tags, imagine how many XSS attacks we could avoid, by having a special container in which script and style tags (and any other tags or attributes that cause the evaluation of code) strictly do not and cannot work.

OH well.
Ah good call on the whois.
How a big bet on oil went bust
I'd be interested in seeing how the distribution of pay for all employees, through a Gini coefficient or other means, stacks up for Walmart vs Costco.
Spinning a buckyball so the surface moves at speed of light requires six million million million RPM.

Just sayin'.
I am not sure why anyone would want to be an executive, unless one gets paid millions. Executives work crazy hours, travel all the time and don't see their families. Who would want to do that, if not for the millions ? Sure, some would, but not many
Everyone is going to own a fancy smart-phone; the marginal cost of adding "smart" to a "phone" is asymptotically approaching zero.
Testing MsgPack and BSON
The importance of asking how and why in the creative process
Atari 2600 emulator written in Ruby
#1-9: It's awesome.

#10: I agree with the comments about personatest. I flat out refused to login because I didn't recognize it and the Gmail bridge wasn't working.
Benefits of Utilizing the Die Casting Process
I'm not going to complain about $8 million dollars going to charity, but even the slate of charities was conspicuously different. Nearly all other bundles include Child's Play and the EFF as the charities. For this Bundle, Electronic Arts must have insisted that they change to several much larger, mainstream charities instead.

That, combined with their clear intention of using this to promote Origin, left me with a bad taste in my mouth.
Source code: https://github.com/chesterbr/ruby2600
The value of a customer saying "NO"
Don't just get files, use DNS for Command and Control too.

http://blog.strategiccyber.com/2013/06/06/dns-command-and-co...
Really neat graphic.

I would have maybe brought design patterns higher up the tree and have the Apple Frameworks underneath them.

Reason being that it's more important to know how to use/approach the frameworks than it is to be completely versed in all of them. They often follow the same delegation patterns, etc. Knowing how to approach the documentation and look in the header files for help is -- to me -- primary to the details of the frameworks themselves.
> Life may have started on Mars before arriving on Earth, a major scientific conference has heard.

Umm, I and others were saying this 17 years ago:

http://arachnoid.com/lutusp/mars.html

So, definitely a fast-breaking story.
This is probably a stupid question, but how does a crowd funded equity round actually work? If I'm trying to raise $1MM for a 10% equity stake (picking number out of the air), is it a first come first served thing (as soon as we reach $1MM the round closes), or is there an auction where investors can place bids? Also is there any secondary market once you take a position in one of these companies?
Minimalist Tamagochi?
I personally detest the faux-personalisation of adding "your" and "my" in front of everything. To me it's equally as bad as the faux-politeness of having computers say "please" and "thank you".

It's not YOUR plane, it's their plane. Yes, I realise that colloquially we all say things like "hurry or you'll miss your plane", but that's a different context.

It irritates me that designers and marketers think we will appreciate politeness when we interact with a company's computer systems. I don't expect my plane ticket to be polite or personal, because it's an inanimate piece of paper written by formula.
They had Watsi.org as a charity
Is this pretty much the market speaking and saying that Wal-Mart has a crumby business? Especially factoring in that a lot of people couldn't even work there without government subsidies in the form of food stamps, etc.

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/06/report-walmart-force...
Charlotte restaurant week
Thanks. I've actually done some machine learning work both in industry and academia, so I'm both aware (and excited about) doing numerical stuff in industry.

I've yet to actually meet someone in industry who does numerical work that isn't some form of data analysis. Maybe someday...
Thanks.

There is a slight downhill for the first 300meters or so, then it's basically dead flat. I don't expect to ever be going super-fast or anything on the commute, more like only when I actually go a seek out a steeper hill.
Lived in France half his childhood and likes good cheese != American. Pines for cheddar != French. I can relate (except for the cheddar thing, especially the cheddar that American audiences are thinking of). The digital nomads are from everywhere and from nowhere, and I wonder about our children.
Through ambiguous verbage, this author very carefully skirts an unfortunate fact which ruins his argument. And that is: Trader Joe's has a very high number of employees per square foot. TJs is swarming with employees. They're trained to do every task and can fill in for one another. My local TJs, a microscopic one and the smallest in DC by far, usually has over 15 employees, often 20, day and night. I know: I counted them.

I think that this guy is saying that Wal-Mart can't do what Costco does because it has more SKUs and thus a higher density of employees. But TJ's density is much higher still, and it pays like Costco does.
I agree. I tend to avoid Walmart due to its low quality on a lot of the store brand goods, but don't actually have any issues with how they run their business. They aren't exactly hiding that they are a low-cost retailer.

If people have problems with the wages Walmart pays they should stop attacking Walmart and go deal with the people who actually set the minimum wages: your congress critter.
This sort of setup is exactly what makes me, a Vim user, absolutely sure I made the correct decision by not picking up Emacs instead. :)
You mentioned games in a previous post as being bad for Kickstarter, but I think this post proves you wrong.

An angry mob will post horrible screeds on the Internet about you if you don't execute perfectly on a game regardless if you used KickStarter or not. The developer's reputation is on the line whether you have KickStarter funding or not. The only real extra opportunity cost to under performing on KickStarter is closing off that source of funding in the future.
The ones in MI seem to be similar to the ones in Germany.
Author here. Thanks for the comment!

Interesting that the Chromecast sticks out from the side of your TV. Mine is an 40" Samsung, and the HDMI port is deep in the center of the TV enough to completely hide the plugged Chromecast from front view, so I cannot see the light at all. I don't even know it blinks! :D As mentioned in the article, I use the TV's USB port to power Chromecast, and I really enjoy the cleanliness this design gives me as I have severe aversion of cord mess.

I completely agree with you on the wired connection part, and I feel for many urban dwellers the instability of 2.4 GHz will be a major headache to use Chromecast. My neighborhood is relatively Wi-Fi-sparse with only a dozen or so visible SSIDs so it's fine for me.

As for the HDMI cable thing, I did get a ~$3 HDMI cable from eBay so I'm fine. I'm just pissed off by the whole HDMI cable scam that's widespread at places like BestBuy for general folks.
Shouldn't it adjust based on the extremes (Or standard deviation) within the zoom area? In that case there would always be some purple, and should fix at least the specific problem the parent showed.
w00t, one upvote! :)
Sic?

It would be funny, if there was an Eliza like program named Elizier
Several Resources For SQL vs. No-SQL Topic
Hugo Barra is leaving Google
GoDaddy is pure evil. Remember SOPA/PIPA?
This is reminiscent of "The Hunger Site" which started in 1999. http://thehungersite.greatergood.com/clickToGive/ths/home
Mini Human 'Brains' Grown in a Dish
That's a good idea, linkedin!
I should endorse few of my competitors for midnight poll dancing or something ...
All fair points. Especially the notion of api-company w developer investors. Investors naturally become evangelists for the company and that could prove to be amazing. Hasn't played out yet, but I believe it can be powerful.

I think Zenefits is an awesome company as well. With regards to allocating a slice to the crowd, I don't know how often that will happen. At least for me personally, if I commit to invest, I typically want to invest as much as possible (trying to learn from Buffett). That would likely mean that if I was investing in a round I would prefer that no slice is allocated to non-value add investors. Could certainly debate whether or not the "crowd" is a value-add investor.
Thanks nekitamo! I will try this after a change I will do tomorrow morning.