skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, that's not quite right.
Randomly picking people from a distribution should eventually end up giving the original distribution.

Taking n people from a pool m times, then the means of those m samplings will be normally distributed however (given the constraints of the CLT of course).
Eradicating poverty is very good economic investment even if we ignore the decency and compassion - these are people that cannot consume and cannot produce so they behave like a double punch on potential GDP and growth.
There is an easy answer - the operator is trained to ask for names and contact information on every call; all tech support, operators and customer service representatives do. If she doesn't there is a chance her call will be monitored and points will be destructed from her call score, affecting her employment. No, QA might be cool and ignore this obviously prank cool, but do you think QA at the NSA will be cool, laid-back people when it comes to procedure?
It seems like this step is precisely what the YCombinator process is meant to complicate. The entire structure is designed to make it feel like a competition for PG's attention. By structuring it this way, it makes it much more likely that the people who "win the competition" will say yes to YComb.

I suspect that vibe emerges from the scaling aspect of things - if a regular VC firm invests in N deals a year and YC does 10N [], then there is no need to 'create' a competition for the attention of PG and the other principals. It will just emerge out of the large number of portfolio companies. (And this is not unique to YC, but may be exaggerated - VC firms are notoriously busy for the same reason.)

And YComb moves fast! People tell me there isn't a lot of time to think. Implicit in YComb's structure is the statement, "There are a dozen people in line behind you that will take your place." It's all very American Idol.*

Again, this sounds like a scaling issue. If you're investing in fewer companies, you can spend more time hand holding with the teams of each one. HUman attention is the thing that doesn't scale, so it makes sense that it is the thing in short supply.

It sounds to me like teams need to precompute their responses to lots of possible situations. And get as much information about the downside of participating as possible, beyond the headlines and the hype. But this is the kind of suggestion that I'd give anybody considering YC (or a job, or the military, or a college, or a grad school, or a training program).

[*] I don't know if these numbers are accurate, but the point is that YC is well known to do many more, smaller deals than VC firms.
Jenkins loves node.js (updated)
In the sense of a rational actor that maximizes their own utility.
What's more, judging by his karma people are upvoting this shit...
I think 2A/RKBA, drugs (== black/latino community, generally; white people rarely go to prison for drugs and white/asian communities aren't torn apart by the drug war), and maybe people with garden-variety secrets (cheating on a spouse, cheating on taxes, looking at questionable porn, etc.) are the strongest natural allies in terms of turning out the votes. These are pretty evenly split left/right.

Funding could be from cloud providers who are getting screwed; even Google probably loses a marginal $100mm due to this issue, so for them funding a PAC with $25mm would be a rational choice. Plus, being anti-NSA is a great recruiting/retention thing for employees, so any worthwhile tech company could probably justify PAC support just as an HR and marketing expense.

You could probably get the tea party side, and civil libertarians in general, for free, but they're not a meaningful political bloc. The problem is at least some of the tea party side would be pro-military and might view support of NSA as supporting the military.
Tough. That's the real world. Complaining that "there aren't enough good cars available to buy" when all I want to spend is €500 will not get much sympathy.
If you're really that numb to people's suffering that you argue that it's possible to live on a 30$ weekly food budget because one wing nut posts a web page about it...

Well, it really does make me think you're trolling and that you've already make up your mind that 90% of the world is in poverty because they made poor decisions.

You could drink your own urine to save money on water bills as well....
Ask HN - Why doesn't HN have code snippets in comments?
I see users paste code and error logs all the time, and it really doesn't look very good. Perhaps a real code snippet needs to be added? After all, this site is built for hackers.

Also, I'm not even talking about syntax highlighting--though that would be a plus--just basic formatting.

Thoughts?
Offer $1,000,000 salary. Solved.
The crowd-work industry is woefully immature at the moment. However, it's potential is far greater, 1000000x or more.

The way to imagine it is that all work that gets done in the world could be split up into pieces and coordinated by software. When there is a lot of this crowd-work to go around, prices will rise and crowd-workers will earn a reasonable income.

Much of enterprise software today is already this, the filling in forms and systemic procedures. However, it hasn't been intelligently designed to be distributed through the internet, instead having been mostly a transfer of pen and paper forms into a computer.

Another type of crowd-work is of the physical variety, what amazon, uber, task-rabbit do. There are complaints that these reduce wages, but I don't buy that. There is pent-up demand for things that currently don't get done. For example, I might hire someone to clean my house, but the current mechanisms are too much effort. If there was an uber-like button to press, I might do it every once in a while.

I could get carried away and talk about this for hours so I'll stop. But the essential point is to reorganize all work through web and mobile interfaces, have human -> computer -> human, instead of the inefficient human -> human system.
That's because it is absolutely foolish to think that this problem is purely economical.

There are much deeper and more complex problems PER INDIVIDUAL that you don't know about. Personality traits, undiagnosed mental disorders, a horrible upbringing, etc., etc., etc.

To summarize all these people's problems as stemming from a singular cause does nothing for anyone. I think we can show that helping a particular individual does way more good than trying to solve a whole "group of people's" "problems".

That's why when you read stories about a single guy helping a single homeless person/person in straits it truly does mean more for us as individuals than just a charity wanting us to throw money at them.

Case in point: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/york-city-programmer-homele...
Real-time updates so you can see articles moving up and down the home page without refreshing, and automatically update the vote count when you vote on an article
It absolutely is. Freecycle, Couchsurfing, etc.

Now you have Uber joining the fray as "ride-sharing". No, these are professionally licensed drivers cruising around town in sleek, jet-black towncars. They are not "ride sharing" any more so than that restaurant is "food sharing" to me.
At a very early stage but well-funded startup, where everyone is relatively equal in age, capability or experience, I think the idea of everyone making the same 'monthly nut' money, like $100K per annum could be appealing. In the Bay Area, I actually think $100K after taxes/medical/401K deductions would be reasonable, high side. Cash/Stock bonuses could then be variable based on contribution. Equality, transparency and trust would be key
There's no evidence to suggest that this was malicious in any way, nor anything to suggest that FC intended to "trick" him. Plenty of service implement these types of defaults, and bugs occasionally happen.

He's taking a presumptuous "principled" stand against something that is not necessarily an ethical issue. Sometimes shit just breaks. He has no idea whether there was any malicious intent, nor has he even finished dealing with FC customer service. (I bet they'll give him a refund.)

He is writing a screed based on an unproven assumption about an incident that will probably be amended by FC. This seems like linkbait.
You wouldn't happen to be a marketer for Spishak, would you? :-P
You'd think that, wouldn't you?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...

There is a greater relative disparity in wealth between the rich and poor in the US of A than India. (relative poverty) Out of the developed countries the US is easily one of the least unequal (if not the most unequal -- I haven't checked) places. This is, of course, because universal health care is communism and social security is for spongers and the lazy.

In absolute terms there is undoubtedly more extreme poverty in India than the US. Why that is so is not as simple as the country's broken social institutions, we're still talking about the world's largest democracy here. I would imagine the caste system plays a part. Colonialism too.
It's interesting what external events are formative. For me, it was the SSC being cancelled (thus, wanting to be in private business and then funding science vs. government-funded big science at risk always to Congress), the MOVE bombing in a nearby city (learning that even a black mayor can be racist, as well as incompetent), and Challenger ("perfect systems aren't", kind of the Rumsfeld thing).
HOWTO: file design bugs against an open-source project
Why You Should Hire Me
That is not true ... charity and economics are not a zero sum game.

If you elevate 1000000 Indian people to the working class they will begin consuming a lot of stuff, some of which will be made in the US or having major part of its IP from US. Some of these dollars will come back home. After all what one person spends is another ones income.

There is nothing wrong of course with trying to help closer to home first.
Because people would rather believe a provocative falsehood than accept a benign truth.
I don't think max depth exists; just hit "link" to reply.

Yeah, it's probably aggressive to wear it on a t-shirt. But I don't see the purpose in protecting flagrantly abusive speech.
I did not mean to suggest the problem was purely economical - the individuals I'm referring to have also been receiving professional help for, when necessary, prior addictions, career training and mental health problems (although such cases happen to have been the minority in my specific experience). I understand there's always more that can be done, but I do believe there exist people (in a tiny minority) who do want to lower the amount of responsibility in their life to the point that they are homeless, and that there's nothing that can be done to actually help said individuals, and I also believe that it's pointless to criticize society at large for not doing enough unless you can suggest specific, actionable things we could all do better. I don't say that with a defiant attitude - honestly, if you think I'm missing some action I can personally take to improve things, I'm all ears.
Study shows men feel insecure when their partners succeed, but women don't
In the long run, 9-to-5 is terribly unhealthy as well. I wonder when we get rid of this 40 [or more] hr/week stigma.
The key difference is that the majority of math research is communicated in writing (journals, etc). Erdos wrote and co-wrote so many excellent papers that his reputation was off the charts. He was unique.

Beacause of this, most working mathematicians would have walked through fire to collaborate with Erdos. (He also made it easy for others by randomly turning up at their houses to work long days on math.) His quirky and accented English was a small barrier compared to his singular reputation in his community.

Compare this to two competing and somewhat interchangeable startups, both trying to do "the Youtube for Cats". In this case, you're not selling to a market that already knows you - you need to speak and communicate to build credibility and reputation fast.
I don't think there's much correlation between how much someone works and how good they are. I like to think I'm pretty good, and I work 8 hours a day, and some of my coworkers are also great and work more than that. I generally value my work/life balance a lot and really don't like exceeding 8 hours a day/40 hours a week (and can feel my productivity drop after roughly those amounts of continuous work), but this is probably mostly a personal matter.

I don't let other people's working longer hours than me affect me, though, because I know that my total productivity would decrease if I worked longer hours. If that's not the case for other people, or if they like work so much that they want to do more of it, or if they are bored in the evenings/weekends and want to dabble in something, that's great for them.

I think the factor that helps is that I don't have management that will say "yeah, but X worked 60 hours a week and you didn't", but I'm pretty up-front about that anyway, and just stand my ground.

All that having been said, I do find the US work ethic a bit crazy. Working crazy hours isn't good, and the amount of hours worked per week isn't usually proportional to productivity.
Clearly Americans want different content to the rest of the world. That or TIME believes they do. Or, perhaps the US version is written independently of the rest of the world's, which is written as one?
Yeah, it shows we have economic structural / systematic problems even here - that need to be fixed, and they can be.
I said "by and large" they don't have to worry. At least worry about starving; elsewhere I noted the concern today is about "food insecurity", and a bigger concern is obesity.

The latter tells me things are qualitatively different. And that's in a very short time, my parent's lifetime, for they were born during the Great Depression. Probably even mine, e.g. the modern Food Stamp program began shortly after I was born.
Post-processing in digital photography usually denotes the process equivalent to developing the film in film photography (which can be a complex process where multiple choices can be made that affect the result). Sharpening, noise reduction, brightness, contrast and so on. These are an integral part of the workflow - nobody would simply publish raw images straight from the camera (turning the raw sensor data into a JPEG involves multiple choices that someone has to make - it's either the photographer or the engineers that wrote the default conversion algorithms built in the camera.)
Entrepreneurs are optimists
Relevant - https://soundcloud.com/madiha-1/students-question-the-nsa-at
The reason for the high cost of rent and of purchasing houses is because of "rent seeking" on the part of landholders who wish to keep land costs high by restricting land use. Fix the zoning codes and density restrictions which will diminish the artificial "rent seeking" and you'll see a corresponding increase in market efficiency and lowering of the cost of housing.

For example, in Manhattan which is where I live, the number of people in Manhattan has decreased from 2.3 million to 1.6 million or 700,000 fewer citizens with a corresponding increase in the cost of living as there are far fewer apartments.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/30/opinion/gothams-towering-a...
I absolutely agree with you on the CEO pay issue -- the (founder) CEO should be paid somewhat less than the lowest "real" engineer (not an intern or trainee), at least until Series B or later. Generally on the order of $100k in SFBA, vs. $120-150k for IC engineers. At a seed/pre-A/A, maybe $40-60k vs. $80-100k. A non-founder CEO is probably a sign that you're fucked until B, anyway, but would require a much higher cash comp. Founders should have their upside primarily in equity. In a VC funded startup. In a self-funded small business, founders tend to be substantially below market for a year or two, then approximately market, and then start taking money (if they can) at market or above around year 3 or 4. The problem with non-VC-funded startups is it is much less likely for employees that the company will be sold, so their equity (if any) is less likely to be meaningful, so they demand much higher cash or bonus compensation (i.e. the normal in consultancies). This raises costs for the company, and makes certain kind of people non-hireable.

Paying everyone the same is actually quite common at startups. Or, paying the same job roughly the same (i.e. paying all eng/design one thing, and maybe paying sales people on a totally different structure). I've seen companies up to 50 employees do this, with essentially $100k and $150k for two types of employee. There was some variation in equity, both by date of hire and responsibility.

There are huge organizations (USG, military, union shops, etc.) which have standardized pay, too. It seems to work well for them. The basic principle is separating cash salary from other motivation. That works in some places, doesn't work in others. It would probably be a horrible idea to pay a sales team which had variable levels of work output the same fixed salary with no variable compensation.
So what you're saying is that you read Atlas Shrugged and decided to put Rand's conception of the worst possible way to run a company into actual practice?
maybe, maybe, by adding a marginal deterrent for him to become a doctor. Maybe by increasing his malpractice insurance costs (but there would have been no data for him, so it wouldn't have helped, and it would increase malpractice costs for competent brilliant newbie docs)
It takes one person to make a difference it's just sad people in Silicon Valley can't contribute together to fix this particular problem.
>It works for Red Bull because that's their business

Red Bull sells sugar water. How is it their business?
A universal health care system would probably fix a lot of this, as it should reduce the number of untreated mental disorders.

When I was still considering moving to another country, one of the factors I used to assess the attractiveness of a country was the worst worst case metric. The worst worst case metric looks at what might happen if things get worse than what you think of when you hear the words "worst case".

Basically, I looked at how prisoners and the insane are treated. For instance, the metric allowed me to rule out Serbia pretty fast.

It also led me to rule out the US.
you can't really do that for biology or chemistry.
While you have a point, and it should be noted that the US government has never been able to tax more than 20-22% of the nation's GDP (not even in WWII), there has been a sea change starting with JFK in taxation policy towards "the rich". The history of top marginal Federal income tax rates is (memory plus http://www.ntu.org/tax-basics/history-of-federal-individual-...):

Peaked at 77% during WWI.

Down to 24% the last time Republicans ran the economy (down and up a tick as engineer Hoover tried to fix the economy :-( ).

63 then 79% under FDR pre-WWII.

Up to 94% during WWII.

Never got less than 82% post-WWII, and "We like Ike???" after he kept Truman's 91-92%.

Then down to 77% under JFK in the first supply side tax cuts.

Bounced between 70% and the mid-70s LBJ through Carter.

Down to 50% Reagan part I, then down to 28% after the great tax rewrite in '87.

Raised to 31% by "kinder and gentler" Bush I and to 40% under Clinton.

The devil 'W' reduced that to 35% ... where it's stayed, even under Obama and Democratic legislative super-majorities.

We also need to factor in that inflation pushed people into higher tax brackets until Reagan, and capital gains taxes have never been indexed for inflation (nice racket, the government inflates the currency then taxes you for merely running in place).

One should also note this is intended to change people's behavior. The lower the max marginal rate, not to mention the capital gains rates, the less people focus on tax advantaged investments. I watched my parents change their business strategies quite a bit from the '70s to the '80s, and in ways that ... trickled down a lot more.
Could deflation cause problems for bitcoin?
He got what he wanted, right there.
I still don't think there is any doubt about the t-shirt in question. I upvoted you for that poster though, wow. It's like something a graphic artist would submit knowing it would be rejected. Its imagery is right out of dystopian sci-fi. Is it real?
There's nothing wrong with paying everyone under a specific job classification the same. Say, your shipping clerks. Nothing whatsoever wrong with that. What is insane is having them vote on it. That makes no sense. The only exception to this might be a very small group of reasonably well educated (in business as well as their craft) individuals. They could objectively look at the business and just as objectively make decisions. At that point you, effectively, have a quasi de-facto multi-CEO situation, which could be cool if the business is not going anywhere past that point. Impossible to scale.
Mind dropping a link so interested people can check it out?
`vim` from a terminal or use the MacVim.app in /Applications
are you saying that there is simply no way to improve the circumstances of these people, or that they're just not worth the effort because they refuse to help themselves?
Snowden wins whistleblower award in Germany
Begin lines with spaces to indicate code:

def luyt():
return "Hello, Luyt"

if main:
print luyt()

Easy does it ;-)
Things I Changed To Present Like Steve Jobs
What First-To-File Means For Your Startup
W3C Approves RDFa 1.1 for HTML5
For some reason that guy has a writing style that makes it extremely hard to figure out what he's trying to say.

Sure does, but maybe you should just say "he's incoherent." :) And thanks to hga for explaining.
> Since you say that he was "eluding the police" or "escaping the police", and the information I have found says that the police were not involved until after fire/rescue arrived, I assume that you have better information about the case than I have been able to find.

You're conveniently overlooking the fact that he was on the roof, a pointless activity were it not for his desire to avoid detection.

Does a person proactively make choices to avoid cancer even when no cancer is present? Yes or no?
A Mind Prison
I was actually trying to clarify the meaning of the word to take the pejorative bite out of it. A fear of strangers makes sense in some contexts.

Of course foreigners cannot be xenophobic about themselves, they aren't foreigners to themselves. Agreed that if you have a strong accent it makes sense to worry about it; this is the pressure that drives assimilation.
A lot of programmers are terrible at their craft.
I'm no expert on Denmark but I bet that Copenhagen's homeless issues are a mix of lack of resources and a politically correct unwillingness to forcibly detain people who really should be placed into care (chronic alcoholism, mental disease, drugs). That is perhaps what the parent meant by "choosing" to be homeless: substance abuse/mental health cases who opt out of the system to pursue their addictions. No point arguing about the definition of "choose".

America's situation is different; they have an idealogical opposition to social welfare and there is no system to opt out of. The homeless situation in SF is far worse than in any EU city I know of.
Sharding is for DB-admins not developers. When I see something like "SELECT ... FROM student WHERE shard_key = ..." I cringe.
Just free stuff offers
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Some people are not currently worth hiring at any wage due to their attitudes, ability, addictions, or mental illness, let alone at a wage that would put them above the poverty line. Eradicating poverty is far from simple, increasingly expensive the further down the tail you go, and almost certainly not a good investment.
I accept your premise and I can believe children can't grasp that subtlety. I don't know of many adults who obey your premise, though.