skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If I give a financial advisor 10% of all profit I make, and make no profit, he gets nothing. So, he has an incentive to make me money.

You're missing the point. Your financial situation is not the same as that of your advisor. If you make 8% per annum on a very safe investment, and your advisor makes 1% of your 8%, that might be a good deal for you. If you make 8% on a very unsafe investment and your advisor gets 1% of your 8% plus 10% of the transaction fees under the table, then you and he are no longer on the same page.

> Why would a deal on the investment make a difference there, and how would paying him by the hour solve this?

See above. And:

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/new-credit-card-pitchman-yo...

Quote: "The strategy, known on Wall Street as “cross-selling,” helps boost profits by steering customers from a firm’s brokerage operations to its retail and investment banks, and vice versa. Financial advisers benefit by earning bonuses for marketing loan products."

The financial advisor gets the bonus, not the investor. The reason the bonus is offered is because the touted transactions are unattractive to anyone who understands the markets, so there has to be an added incentive. In this way, a financial advisor feathers his own nest at your risk and expense.

The idea that a financial advisor has only your interests in mind is a myth.
I'm red/green as well and agree the glyph is the best way to go.
How is there not a huge angry thread about this not being appropriate for hacker news. Seriously guys. Flag this.
no Windows Phone?
Psychological addictions can be just as deadly as physiological ones. Death from overwork[1], death from playing video games[2], death from avoidable STD's all of these could be classed as deaths resulting from psychological addictions.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kar%C5%8Dshi
2. http://www.ranker.com/list/8-people-who-died-playing-video-g...
Anyone know the details of what happened? Can someone elaborate on this?
Bad side is that there are alot of scams and poor programmers, looking to snipe the job and squeeze money from employer in any way possible. From my personal opinion, atleast 80% of bidders do this (I'm working over Freelancer).

Good side is that with little hassle, employers can find really great freelancers that know to do their job. Personally, as a programmer from 3rd world country, these sites provide alternative, and a great way of earning money. Here where I live, starting salaries for programmers are around 500$, and peak at 1800$, if you get job in Microsoft, both 8-10h/day fulltime jobs. The IT market here is practically non-existant, except few high profile companies that offer decent working conditions. With these sites, I have freedom to apply my working conditions, rules and price.
In a democracy, the government and the citizens are not different parties; they are citizens and their incentive is that they have to live here as well even after they're no longer in power. To say governments never care about their citizens is silly, a government is not one mind, it's a collection of said citizens.
Exactly, but dyslexics can still read, because they can learn how to. Their genetics may not have given them a good start, but evolution certainly didn't make their lives any easier either; they still had to learn things 'the hard way' like the rest of us -- just with a bit more resistance.

Difficulty and ability are orthogonal matters, but you seem to be trying to defend a hard/static correlation between them. Of course difficulty affects ability, but it doesn't limit/promote anything. As long as you keep exposing yourself to something, your brain will adapt to get more used to it (i.e. 'get better' at it). That doesn't indicate how fast you'll be at it, nor does it mean you can't start at a lower/higher point than other people (which in itself doesn't dictate whether you up superior/inferior to them) -- it just means it's possible.
This. What did I (we) miss?
Security and Pervasive Monitoring | IETF Blog
http://valleywag.gawker.com/techcrunch-disrupt-kicks-off-wit...
That's funny, here I was thinking that the NSA's surveillance resources were supposed to be used to gather intelligence on foreign threats. Where do you see a threat from Brazil's oil enterprise?

Oh, wait, I forgot that the NSA's resources are, in practice, also used to conduct industrial espionage:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Controversy
My favorites:
Not in the world. Only in the "Land of the free".
Why is corporate espionage and sabotage by our guys something that is permissible?

We push for free trade agreements to neuter foreign businesses' competitivity, and then we still put them under surveillance; how is this okay?
As a remote freelancer:

Communication and cost are the main problems.

Usually clients have a hard time explaining exactly what they want and our visions might differ. When I turn in results, they are often different than what the client first imagined they'd be, but through iteration and conversation I can help the client clarify what they want or realise something else 90% of the time.

Time is another big problem. When you want something done in X time, I will do my best to catch that time. Sometimes this means discussing with the client until the feature list is cut down to a deliverable size. Other times it means sacrificing future flexibility of the code. I always try to get the best balance between "speed - quality - price" for what the client needs, but it's easy to miss.

Almost always, clients have an unreasonable expectation of what is possible.

I'd say at least 70% of my job is helping the client decide what they even want me to build for them.

Disclaimer: I have never worked through any of the sites listed in OP. My main source of clients are HN, my blog, twitter, and past clients.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6350331
I' m not sure it makes a ton of sense either, even for an older book. OTOH, knowing a lot about programming language history/politics and knowing a lot about math and rigorous CS theory tend to be negatively correlated in my experience.

I know I should be demonstrating that assertion with hard numbers, but in my defense I do know a lot about programming language history and politics. ;)
Hot Mess at Techcrunch Disrupt 2013
Regardless of your English syntax (rusty or not), what would you define as 'huge' for a MySQL app?
Nope, read the other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6350600
> Honest question, what's the difference between 'appear' and 'apparently' to you?

They have similar etymologies, but their current meanings are diverging. An apparent difference may not be visual -- at least, not to the degree that an examination of the word's history would lead one to believe. An appearance of difference still is primarily visual.

And yes -- this is to some degree splitting hairs.
And there are zero using Wayland. Zero.
The Daily Telegraph is notoriously full of climate change cranks, and regularly misrepresents the views of scientists and the IPCC. A previous example regarding arctic sea ice: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/07/arctic...
The article doesn't come out and say it, but the impetus for tax sales is that foreclosure proceedings are pretty onerous and take forever. At the same time, property taxes are the primary source of revenue for the local government and must be collected. So it doesn't seem ridiculous at face value to sell the debt to private investors and let them do the collection while being able to recoup the fees involved in foreclosure which can legitimately run into the thousands because the foreclosure is a process that drags on for six months or more (with various redemption windows after that which can be a year or more).

I'm skeptical of the "lien holder gets the equity" claim because it doesn't work that way outside of DC or in foreclosure generally, so I'd be very surprised it it wasn't a misunderstanding on the part of the author.

This article talks about DC tax lien sales, and doesn't mention keeping equity: http://taxlieninvestingpro.com/category/statebystateguides/d.... It looks like a regular judicial foreclosure.
Gaming the property tax system is not a binary proposition. How do you assess its value? How does the state choose whom to go after?

Did you even read the WaPo article? Do you not see how the existence of a property tax has come around to hurt exactly the most vulnerable population (and in this case, through no directed malice) I promise you, people living in Palisades (the richest part of DC) are not worried about property tax liens because they can pay people to deal with paying the taxes (either legally, say hiring an admin, or extralegally). It's not progressive because the bureaucracy and the hammer of the state causes a greater fundamental inconvenience to those of less means than to those of greater means.

As to the hammer, do you think the DC government would have sent "armed US marshals" to recover the house if it were in the Palisades? Why or why not?
Start your own forum if you don't like what the community votes for.
It says in the article that he was struggling with dementia. One highly possible reason is that he simply forgot.
I'm sure upstream would be more willing to work with Mir if there was technical reasons for its existence. As it stands, Mir provides no benefit to anyone but Canonical, who simply want control. That control comes at the cost of fragmenting a fragile part of the ecosystem. You can't expect the rest of the community to be okay with that.
I'm not saying that if you start out without being able to solve basic equations and then spend 10 years learning math you still won't be able to solve those basic equations, you will, but the effort to get there will be a power of that needed by a "math-inclined" person. And once there the math-inclined will still run circles around you.
Clearly a hack called Jackass that you run your presentation through to determine if you're a jackass or not is needed.
It's at the top of HN because it's been upvoted by HNers. How is it irrelevant if the masses say it should be up there?
I have personally experienced that metadata getting messed up - one day I found myself with a very vivid memory of having recently, in real life, an anxiety attack while crossing a pedestrian suspension bridge across a river near my home. But there is no such bridge, and I could also not tell when exactly this had happened. The only explanation I have is that this was a dream that my brain somehow misfiled as a real experience.

In constrast, I otherwise never remember my dreams unless I wake in the middle of one, and even then they completely fade from my memory within minutes.
It isn't worth the time or effort to do so. I tried it out (elance) a couple of years ago as a worker.

My impression of it is that basically it's a place for two kinds of employer: 1) the "I have this idea, code it up for me for equity in my 'company'" employers who either don't actually have an idea of what they want (and will needle you to flesh out their idea more fully) or have a generic "let's build the next X" (where "X" is usually "Facebook") idea; 2) the lowballer who wants to pay $500 for a job that would take a proficient team weeks or months to do.

As a "senior" level developer, I absolutely avoid these places. And I absolutely do not recommend anybody use them for work. There are far better ways to 'practice' with new languages that involve better compensation and better actual experience.
But snow is fine.
Each block is independent in FLAC (and quite short), and therefore wouldn't generate as interesting artifacts.
> As I pointed out before, there are no new ideas. Everything of value has been done before in one form or another.

Let's see: Take idea some X and the set A of all
efforts for idea X. Then take the effort in
set A that was earliest in time (probability
of exact ties 0). Call that effort T. Then
when T was done, idea X was a "new idea"
and not "done before" in contradiction to
the quote.

For there being "no new ideas", the
research libraries are stuffed with
journals of peer-reviewed original
research, and the usual standards for
publication are "new, correct, and
significant". So, those libraries
are stuffed with "new ideas" that
the quote says don't exist.

Are there new ideas in business? Sure:
The transistor, the integrated circuit,
the Multics processor architecture
(heavily borrowed since),
security via capabilities,
access control lists, and
authentication,
the microprocessor, RSA encryption,
speculative execution, out of
order execution, penicillin,
cardiac stents, and on and on.

'Nuff.
In TFA, it's mentioned that he has dementia.
Turns out no. It doesn't work either. I probably burned up 2 full days trying to get it to work. Would have just been easier to load bootcamp and Windows on the machine.
> Medical drugs are prescribed by doctors to treat medical conditions, not psychological ones.

There is no such thing as a "medical condition". There are physical conditions (of which psychiatric conditions are a subset) and medical (as opposed to, e.g., surgical) treatments for physical conditions.

For psychiatric conditions not to be physical would involve mystical mind-body dualism, which is an anti-scientific proposition.

> Yes, but you can't compare what he does to effective practices, because there aren't any.

Psychological malpractice is generally a subset of medical malpractice, whose standard isn't about "effective practices" but, like all professional malpractice, is about accepted standards within the profession.

> This is why such cases are so rare

Psychological malpractice cases aren't that rare. It's probably somewhat harder to establish causality in psychological malpractice cases than, say, some of the more obvious kinds of surgical malpractice cases, but that's not a matter of standards but of the difficulty in tracing particular harms to particular failures to meet the professional standard of care.

> why malpractice insurance is nearly unheard of among psychiatrists and psychologists.

Malpractice insurance is a practical necessity for psychiatrists -- who are, after all, medical doctors -- and is not at all uncommon for psychologists in clinical practice.

> Many psychologists and psychiatrists have ruined the lives of their clients but proved immune to prosecution

And many medical doctors in specialties other than psychiatry have killed patients and yet not been successfully prosecuted. That doesn't mean that medical doctors are, as a class, immune to malpractice claims, it just means that not every thing that they do that ends up causing harm ends up resulting in legal liability. Psychiatrists are no different.

> unless by the term "psychologist" we mean anyone practicing clinical psychology

Psychiatry isn't clinical psychology, it is medicine, and its practiced by medical doctors with a particular specialty, not psychologists. Making up your own non-standard definitions of terms to justify your completely inaccurate rants isn't helpful.
Ask HN: What are some cool/nerdy gadgets to buy?
I'm looking for something neat to play/tinker with. I already have a Raspberry Pi, not looking to buy an Arduino. I've looked at the Nvidia Shield (too small game library), Oculus Rift (waiting on consumer version), Leap Motion (not enough apps) and MYO (not out yet).

Any recommendations for gadgets among those lines?
I said it multiple times: practice will let you improve in anything but if your genetics is playing against you, you'll face a very steep road.
Can you please tell us why exactly Brazil is "not-so-friendly"?
https://twitter.com/search?q=%23titstare
I'm very skeptical of that part of the article and its a little disappointing to me that HN is so ready to take it at face value. It could be true, but it could be a journalist mangling the story like they do for any technically complicated topic.
I am a long time contractor on oDesk and owe a great deal to this site.I wanted to talk a little about the hate the hourly model with screenshots is getting. Here's the primary reason the video thing won't work. Most of the providers are from third world countries where internet while decent is rarely good enough to support uploads in such massive volume. I have a 4 Mbps DSL connection and while i get great downstream, the upstream maxes out at 20 KB/s. So yeah, that's out of the window. However, screenshots work extremely effectively. I have close to 5000 hours logged on oDesk and barring a one off incident where i forgot to shut the logging software down and ended up logging extra hours( I refunded the client) i have never had a buyer dispute my hours. Here's the thing, as an employer you have to be smart about it. When you post a job, only interview candidates with a good oDesk history,look at their past jobs, the buyer's feedback, their portfolio etc. Then talk to them over Skype, ask for code samples etc. If you reach out for the bottom of the pool ofcourse you will get burned, but a contractor with a good history (who might be charging higher)will never ever endanger his feedback history in such a cut throat marketplace where even a single 4.99 out of 5 can knock you off the first page of search results and costing you big time, all for a few extra bucks. This alone will weed out 99% of the dishonest providers. But you can still go and initially, for a week or so, monitor the contractor's work logs closely, you will know instantly if they are padding their hours since oDesk uploads around 5 to 6 screenshots per hour, along with mouse and keyboard activity reports. Just monitor them closely initially and then semi regularly afterwards and you will know what type of contractor you are dealing with. Once you have built trust and seen the contractor's work you can ease up. Finally,set tight milestones and demand regular daily updates and you will know what's going on.
So yeah, don' be lazy, be a little more vigilant and you can find some really good contractors at great prices .All the top contractors i know only work hourly and IMHO Its a great model for the employer and for the contractor, a simple win win.
Windows 4 != NT4
I try not to make assumptions about things I don't know, but these numbers beg a fairly major question for me. The government has stated several times that NSA surveillance and National Security Letters are only being applied to monitor suspected terrorist action; that this broad digital observation is only to protect our nation. Since I don't know that the government is lying about this, I try to take their word.

However, if the U.S. government requested data on over forty thousand users last year alone, how many terrorists do they think are out there? Tens of thousands? Hundreds? Over a million?

Now, I'm aware that only some of these requests are National Security Letters and FISA requests--many, if not the majority, are just law enforcement requests. Still, though, even if only ten percent of these are related to national security, that's four thousand threats to our security last year--from Yahoo!'s user base alone.

That seems hard to believe.
>Projects need to take a strong stance on what to include or not because every piece of code in there needs to be maintained.

In theory maybe.

In actual reality, from the 15+ years I follow Linux/OSS, projects are all to happy to NOT maintain code, let it rot, do tons of incompatible changes in major releases, or even start from scratch whenever they feel like.
This is great, but it should hit closer to home. People love The Onion because the articles almost sound true
How long will it be before ereaders are so cheap and disposable that libraries loan them out instead of physical books? Have to think it's not that far off, at least before it starts happening here and there.
Sorry, but sending code upstream for their distribution-specific display server (which has no technical reasons for existing) isn't benefiting the rest of the community.
I'm no expert in this field, but it seems to me that it was very similar with airbnb. I.e. lots of big competitors with the same functionality.
These sites have always been a race to the bottom. If you're not in a market where you can lowball you're definitely losing money.
I used both Odesk and Freelancer to hire developers, and I urge everyone to look at my previous submission (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5177951) about deplorable protections at Freelancer.com.

In summary, my $2500 project was closed by the developer at his will, with no money returned and no way to even leave a feedback! Multiple attempts asking the company to allow me to even leave a feedback came to nothing.

Freelancer is not to be trusted.
This already happens at the library in the town I grew up in: http://brookslibraryvt.org/borrow/digital-media
Your two-sentence summary is better than the entire article in understanding what's going on.

I read the whole article, and I somehow missed that sentence buried in the middle of the story. So Mr. Coleman wasn't "left with nothing" but presumably received something like $65,000 (i.e., $71,000 minus $6,000 or whatever the final legal bill was). Nowhere does the article say exactly what he received in the end.

The way the tax sale works sounds quite unjust and corrupt -- we don't need the reporter to make it even more evil ("left with nothing") by obscuring key facts.
Except there's so much that TutorSpree could've done in the marketplace model. They could've built a better scheduling system. They could've built a better way for tutors to offer discounts for purchasing packages. They could've built a bidding model where tutors could pay to show up higher in the rankings. They could've built a content network (e.g. various blogs about tutoring or education) and have tutors pay a fee to have their profile featured on those blogs.

You know what I hate doing? I hate printing paper that says "Tutor available" with my name and credentials on it, and those little paper tails that you rip off on the bottom with your email and phone number, and then going to the local university and posting it up everywhere. I will pay money to a service that solves that marketing problem for me.

Edit: to put it a different way - dating sites have this problem even worse than tutoring sites, because the presumably monogamous members of a couple meet each other, they don't need the dating sites anymore. Tutoring sites have a smaller problem because the tutor-tutee relationship isn't exclusive.
Maybe he forgot. Maybe he couldn't. Life is hard and complex. Not everyone is smart and clever. The weak side, for a debt of $40 gets all his properties auctioned and report a loss comparable to life-long savings. Totally reasonable and fair.

Agree with you, can't see anything wrong going on here too. (i'll state the obvious: i'm joking).

It's not simply a case that here we talk about:
- People with dementia or major problems
- Lonely
- Most of the times, old enough to be completely invisible

And the state, private contractors and greedy individuals use them to refill their bank accounts. And it's perfectly legal. And some people, as you are doing now, simply try to justify it.

I'll tell you what is fair here:
- He doesn't pay
- Warnings should be issued
- He should be given a greater amount to pay (i guess 100x the original amount should be enough)
- He still doesn't pay
- Insitutions try to understand why this person isn't paying
- Take appropriate actions according to the situation. If the lack is anyhow justified (eg. person incapable of self-support) simply drop it and warn social services. Otherwise proceed to court.

Seems a lot more reasonable. But ehi, this would mean lot of effort. Why not just raping and looting the weaks. Keep up with the great job!
Umm, no not really. I charge around 60$/hr on oDesk.Have closed to 5000 hours and can easily pull in upwards of 5K USD a month, which is an extra ordinary sum for someone sitting in a country in Pakistan where the conversion rate i 104 PKR to a USD.You can easily get well paying clients if you spend a little time building up your history, and are really good at what you do.
BTW, Odesk is great!