skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There has been a considerable amount of growth at the high end. But it's not being distributed down nearly as much as it once was. How many companies offer defined-benefit pension plans anymore, for instance? Nearly zero in the software industry; Garmin is the only one I know of that comes to mind. It's also well-known that executive compensation has skyrocketed while other wages have failed to keep up with inflation.

I don't think this is a complete explanation, though, and your point is a good one.

I also believe that the transition from one-income to dual-income households has had a pretty deleterious effect on the buying power of the average household. Rather than providing financial security, the second income led to a bidding war on homes, cars, and schools. It's a shocking fact that today's dual-income family has less disposable income after necessary bills than yesterday's single-income family.
so let me get this straight... they wrote a terminal app that sends all your code to some third party? wow yeah lets just throw security out the window. no mention of the privacy implications on any of this. not sure if any of my clients would want their intellectual property sent out to some random third party. thanks but no thanks. i'd rather use xterm or gnome-terminal.
Works fine in IE11.0.9600.16384 as well as Firefox{,-ux,-nightly} in Windows and every browser in my Arch machine.
Theranos: The biggest biotech you’ve never heard of
MoPub & the mobile advertising cake
You know what sucks? Bounds crashes with your NSArrays.
Apparently I can edit the link text, so I've done that. Normally, I'd just go with the title text, but that was was too long to fit, so I had to get a little creative. Thanks for the tip.
Dropbox disables ASLR on Windows
Feature Freeze, Feature Complete, Alpha, Beta, Release Candidate, Gold, Release To Manufacturing...

I've worked at a few software companies and none of them have used these terms quite the same way.
As I look at the dome versus the trees I wonder: Why do animals seek to isolate themselves from the environment and plants seek to permeate it? No judgement, just curious.
Great job guys, really looking forward to see it in action.
The more I hear about Postgresql the more I'm intrigued.
I'm a sysadmin by profession and I manage quite a few MySQL servers.
Are there any good resources to learn Postgresql (both admin & usage) outside of the documentation?
Well yes you have to pay it back before the end of your lifetime.

WSJ had article on student debt recently, with lots of data. Median debt load was 18-19k USD [1]

If it were all via Federal Stafford loan, the interest rate would be 3.9%. If the payback period was 10 years, the monthly payment would be a whopping $191 per month.

[1] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732443200457830...
120Hz monitors are already standard equipment for professional PC FPS players: apparently it makes aim significantly easier. It does seem to usually take some drastically lowered settings to get anything resembling 120Hz minimum from the video card, though. Of course there's also the problem of getting 120Hz panels at the sort of DPI that Oculus needs. (The 120Hz LCDs were apparently an unintended by-product of the LCD manufacturers' drive for 60Hz 3D.) This is one area in which LCDs are still playing catch-up to CRTs, by the way.
Just watched the presentation at TC disrupt. We need a open communication framework so bad. I hope these guys succeed with their mission
Rethinking the Scale of Graduate Education
I tried the HD prototype at Unite 2013 and it looks really really good. Just look for the video of RogueCraft and you'll see text appear just fine.
>How do you make sure that the academe that is selling their project as 'basic research' isn't just pulling a fast one on you and sucking your funds to tickle their intellectual jollies?

Spoken like a true engineer
The Myth of the Private API
The prosecution has to make it a capital case or not when they file formal charges. Until Manning was charged there was no way for a death penalty to be on the table, but the prosecution couldn't "pre-charge him" with a capital case and drop the death penalty the week after, it had to be at the same time. So no, not for a single day.

However if there was public awareness of the link itself (and its contents) at the time Barrett pasted the link then I would agree that it makes no sense to charge him with pointing out information that's already out there, as by then he's not the source or someone with involvement, but an observer.
We've been looking at ant intelligence the wrong way
I'm already a user of it. It's really nice and convenient.
I see this a lot with new programmers that come to work for us. Many of them understandably think that some of our practices are obviously wrong and should be changed, but few of them figure out how to be effective in spite of the obvious correctness of their opinions.
How do the directions compare to YourNavigation?

http://www.yournavigation.org/

Despite the clunky interface, I was pleasantly surprised by its biking directions: not as good as Google, but not terrible either. (I was in NYC when I tried using it for awhile.) It's fully open-source.
The worst part of this thing is that students loans do not need to be that high because college costs should not be that high. Student loans are artificially high because of two reasons:
1. Government subsidies
2. Increasing college costs

Government subsidies are there because the government knows that a kid who goes to college will be able to give a better return on it 'public' investment, since lifetime earnings for a college educated individual are about 50-100% higher than a high school one. This will make them pay more taxes etc.

The schools on the other hand are taking the subsidized college loans in the form of tuition and fees and using them not to increase educational standards, but rather, invest in extracurriculars, building etc. The government does not tie college loan financing to college performance at all, so effectively it just subsidizes the borrowing costs for school in the form of cheap college loans.

(shameless plug) I wrote a blog post about this if anyone is interested to read more:

https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/35d383a4fbad
Why is rent wasting money? I am not entirely sold on that idea. If you have a lot of cash that you do not need to access in a foreseeable future then maybe.
It's an asset from the point of view of the bank or institution that made the loan. And they can transfer those assets from one investor to another. And the value of those assets can be based on unrealistic expectations about future default rates, so in that sense, student loans certainly can be a "bubble".

The real damage done to the economy by the mortgage bubble wasn't all of the people who lost money on homes when prices collapse. The most damage was due to the effect it had on banks' balance sheets when their assets (the value of debt-backed securities) lost value, which meant they had to call loans and restrict credit to make up for the difference. In that sense, a bursting of the student loan "bubble" could also have damaging effects on the economy.
Real Programmers (1984)
Yeah, that's one of the things that would make pasting a link just fine in my opinion/analysis, is if that data were already publically-known (and not otherwise legally restricted somehow). I'm not diving into 40 pages of indictments to research again, court PDFs are driving me batty, but to the extent that information was already out there somehow I don't see justification for charging Barrett for simply pointing that out.
Those affect government loans, not the private ones which are the subject of the posted article. The loans issued by JP Morgan do not have their rate capped; indeed they float and are indexed to LIBOR.
Ask HN: How to monetize for an extremely niche market?
I am currently near the end of creating an iOS application that focuses on making it easier for students at my University to check the bus timetable. The timetable is only available either at the bus stops, or online as a difficult to read PDF document. Most bus stops aren't even covered, but my application estimates them from distance and time measurements. Furthermore I've pinned down every bus stop on the route by parsing OpenStreetMap. These bus stops are not available anywhere else (and especially not with any times associated with them).

Some screenshots are available here:
https://i.freeih.com/7278/iphone_screenshot.png
https://i.freeih.com/7279/iphone_screenshot_3.png

How would you go about monetizing such an application, if at all possible? Obviously, it will never make much, but pocket money would be pretty awesome, no one has paid me for my apps before.

My ideas:
- Fully free app with ads. The ads would come from reaching out to local student centric businesses (student lettings agencies, pubs, bars, clubs etc) and possibly including student offers via the app.
- Free basic version with iOS ads, pro version without ads + added features such as reminders

I wish to pursue the first idea as it sounds interesting to go and talk to these businesses and see what they think. Any advice?
or github, aws etc. Oh yeah thats right, couldnt use those either. I guess you host everything yourself on a private network that you install all the connectivity for globally ?
I'm fairly sure that the tech is based around "structure from motion". The API simultaneously estimates the position of the camera at each point in time, and the location of some reference points (blue circles in the vid).

Because the device has an accelerometer, it is even able to extract distances, not just relative distances. I'm actually surprised by this as I always assumed the accelerometer was too noisy to be of use for this.

I tried to do a similar thing myself, but the problem is technically very difficult. While a lot of research has been done on structure from motion, actually packaging it into a usable API is a big task
"Chia-Jung Tsay’s analysis of classical musician auditions explicitly drew on this idea by providing participants with only 6 second clips of each performance."

Speaking as someone who studied violin in college, this is absurd - you can't judge an entire audition based on a 6-second clip. Was any effort made to ensure that the clip was representative of the entire performance?

Also, a video can give you an idea of the musician's technique, which for many instruments is probably worth a lot more than an arbitrary 6 seconds of audio.
I really don't see the difference. Either way you're agreeing to abide by a set of rules by the owner of the service. If you don't like their rules, use one of the alternatives.
password protect your private keys - its what the cool kids do anyway
Ah, appears I misread your original comment -- you were talking about third party browser implementors. My bad.
Yes. The structure I priced out was also only 8 feet tall.

About half the cost -- if I recall -- was doors, windows, and skylights, and the other half was the walls, ceiling, and floor. So you'd expect a structure with roughly double the surface area to be roughly $3000 instead of $2000. Depending on material choices, you would probably end up with a cost of between $2000 and $4000 by the time you put the last coat of paint on it. Again, having not actually followed through I don't have a final bill of materials. I could have over-estimated the cost of something, or forgotten something else entirely.

But the point is the same. Is $2100 really that cheap, when compared to a $4000 stick-frame structure with comparable function, or is it only cheap when compared to a $40,000 house with a bathroom, kitchen, furnace, water heater, and appliances?
Science is not a business.
"These smaller, more digestible, incremental papers are also more useful to other researchers"

Survey papers are useful to other researchers. Minimum publishable units are a waste of research time, and the pressure to pad one's CV and get "results" (which actually means more papers) worsens the situation. It is even worse when a grad student is told that they were "scooped" because their half-finished MPU was published by someone else.
If they wish people not use it in that way, then they should make it impossible to use in that way, or ban those people from using it.

Those are really the only two options, no matter how much we wish people would be honorable.
MapQuest Open is very hit or miss. In Australia, the directions & geocoding are pretty good. However, in India it's atrocious - but still good enough for what we need.
"Bandwidth Limit Exceeded
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to the site owner reaching his/her bandwidth limit. Please try again later. "

Argh, couldn't even catch a glimpse
I'm surprised no one has mentioned David A. Wheeler's "Diverse Double Compiling" (http://www.dwheeler.com/trusting-trust/) as a solution to this problem.
Do you hate it because it's inefficient or because it's cutting you from a pleasure source ?

Some times I feel like the efficiency argument is a bit of an excuse that we use because being in the zone feels so good. Especially if you're the geeky type that doesn't derive much pleasure from social interaction it feels like someone just pulled the plug from your morphine drops and put some Tabasco instead. On the other side, working in the after-glow of the zone is inefficient but nobody seems to mind too much about that.
Sorry for the late reply.
It was pdfs.
Grow3.js: Build algorithmic 3D structures with JavaScript
I find the reasoning specious. In particular, files and programs are the same in MS-DOS and Unix. You can, for instance, ls the ls command or cat the cat command. He's also completely ignoring the superiority of the file system's namespacing (by directory) to just having two global buckets like in elisp.

The execute bit comparison is especially specious. If I try to execute a non-executable file, it fails. It doesn't go look for an executable file with the same name. Same as if I try to invoke 0 in Clojure. e.g. (0)

He's right that the symbol resolution of the first entry has different rules but ignores the fact that the shell isn't very good at higher order commands. Which is probably okay for a shell but not much use for a modern programming language.

Finally, he's right that multiple namespaces are a good idea, but that's Accepted Truth these days. It's just that we think namespacing should be under the control of the dev, not dependent on the type of the variable.
If you are looking for a good mapping alternate checkout Leaflet.js. You can load from a variety of tile servers. I think a while back someone had a tutorial an setting up your own tile server on AWS. Actually http://tiledrawer.com/ provides a base AMI. Another good commercial solution for geocoding is http://smartystreets.com/ if you need to do batch processing.
From the article:

> The exceptions that were crashing us were caused by people using String.prototype.substr. That function works perfectly on strings that only contain Unicode 1.0 data, but as soon as you're storing UTF-16 in your UCS-2 string there's a possibility that when you take a slice you'll split a valid surrogate pair into two invalid lonely surrogates.

To me, it seems like it'd be nearly impossible for somebody to trigger, but there's always Murphy's law...
The digits 1, 2, and 3 appear more often in data than the digits 7, 8, and 9, so you can do data entry faster with the existing layout.
Tech Companies Escalate Pressure on Government to Publish National Security Data
Could it just be that in mechwarrior / car sims your avatar is 'sitting' and so your brain expects your body to be sitting at the same time?
>Given that these domes don't float

This has been an idea I have been pushing around fro a while.

Building a living platform floating in the SFBay.

Admittedly, this has been nothing more than a day-dream - so I am unfamiliar with what imperial entanglements attach themselves to the reality of this....

But assuming that it can be done, what would be the barrier to entry for the following scenario:

* Standardized deployment platforms.

* Assume a Hex shape

* Standardized MEP+IT infra in the base of each platform.

* Set solar capacity for each platform

* A range of models of living spaces

* Communal-esque structure for shared work/meeting type spaces

* [a range of other options, I could go on and on]

---

I do not know the legal preclusions to an idea such as this... and clearly there are costing issues. But if you can have an open design for the platforms, figure out how to get them economically built - and provide the standards/spec requirements for the on-platform structures.. it may be viable, and while this has long been just a thought-exercise for me; I'll just ask the obvious: Anyone else interested in this type of thing?
Yeah maybe you could have the user iterate through a search tree the way an optometrist performs an eye exam, "Which is better, one flip or two?"

But I don't know if there is a way to create a tree of the possibilities.
Actually the vibes I get from world-wide accademia is kind of the opposite direction: Human Sciences, even applied sciences related studies that are not ready to produce money (turning them some way into a small-term investment) are not funded anymore, because states (all over Europe for sure) are cutting down budges and research is one of the main sectors that gets cuts down to fractions. So if a company doesn't fund your research (which will not, if the company doesn't have any substantially imminent gain), no one does.

There are other points that are addressed in the opposite direction. Anyway it's good to have a wide variety of opinions floating around, makes it easier for us outsiders to get closer to 42...
What you are looking for is Khan Academy. Khan Academy with enough content, with sufficiently rigorous content, with sufficiently rigorous evaluation, to become accredited so that employers will value their assessment of a students worth. Actually, they would need to be better than merely being accredited, since employers sure aren't bending over backwards to pay accredited universities serious cash for access to their students.

See, what is Khan Academy really lacking at this point? Is the hard part their website with youtube hosted videos? Are they really just jonesing for some mobile developers? Or is producing quality content with broad coverage and depth their bottleneck?

Making an app is the easy part. Education is not failing for want of an app. Certainly not for want of a gamified app.

But hey, I can't stop you. Knock yourself out. Hell, pitch it to YC; I hear they are doing non-profits now.
Modern science has become a business, complete with advertising, trade secrets (the old be sure you don't tell Dr. So-and-so anything about your work, his group is doing something similar and you might get scooped!), and various kinds of corruption. The scientific method is still hiding somewhere in there, but it ends where publish-or-perish begins.
You could always do what Phil Z. did with PGP and write a book. :)

I would point out that the charge itself doesn't have a problem with the link per se, as much as the data located at the link. If the link pointed to something completely innocuous (such as Wikipedia's front page) then even our overbearing prosecutor here would be laughed out of the courtroom if he tried filing charges.
The office I work in functions almost as if we were remote. We communicate through real-time IM, a few IRC channels, our bug tracker, as well as email, of course, and some custom tools for monitoring the git activity of each team member. We also get daily email reports of all git activity, and there are weekly status emails from the CEO and/or CTO wherein they effectively brag about the accomplishments of the employees that week.

There are frequent days, in fact, when I have no communication at all with other team members about development topics except over the computer. If we need to talk in person about a design decision, it's frequent to schedule the meeting even if it's just going to be 10 minutes.
The finite numbers I have are thus:

Land:

I purchased 5 acres for $2,000 of Craigslist. It's worth about 5-6 getting it from a real-estate company.

Slab:

4" deep, 8" deep around a 1' perimeter..1100 sq ft total

- 18 yards concrete, $2200

- Bobcat rental (days w/ gas), $450

- Rented tools (concrete blankets for cold, et), $150

- Rebar/tongue-groove insulation: $1000

Solar:

Currently, I run off a generator, which was about $500. On the cheap end they seem to last a few years. Solar is cheap, though, and a decent setup from Arizona Wind Solar would cost about $2500 (4-5 panels, controllers, converters, wire, and extra batteries). You'd have to be careful with what appliances you used, though.

Heat:

I purchased a wood stove for $200 for the small cabin. Eventually, a nice Morso one will run me about $1500.

Framing:

- 16, 16' 13/12 gable trusses (building this by myself, so it's a modern pole barn), $1500

Windows:

- 15 3'x 5' picture windows (it's fucking dusty here), $2500

Well:

$8,000 50' out, piped 4' down to the house.

That's as far as I've gotten on the new build costs and well forecast. The costs are in the _slab_ (which will be stained for the floor) and the _well_.

Initially, I did not know about the "theft" problem. In 4 years owning this property (and having an unfinished cabin w/ easy entry for about 2 of those), nothing has been stolen. I'm not sure there is one, but I have heard stories. That said, I'm 3 miles off the highway, and you can't see me from the road.

I'm half-way in b/t San Luis and Fort Garland, which are each about 15 minutes either way. Currently, I bring in water. It sucks!
The current basis for this is John Gilmore's speculation[1] on a cryptography mailing list.

[1] http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg123...
I am posting it from Coast right now. I have to admit hands down to opera, there are some rough edges but I can see where they are going with this and it's awesome.

For haters give them a chance they are the ones who gave the ideas for what lots of modern browsers are doing and you will see them doing some innovative stuff again (no fan talk history proves it)
"Let's say that in Academia the percentage is especially high, as high as 20%. What are the other 80% supposed to do?"

Collaborate with the excellent 20%? What is wrong with encouraging more collaboration between researchers? Why should the mediocre 80% be pressured into publishing low-quality, CV-padding papers when they could be working effectively with geniuses?
Show HN: New LIVE multiplayer Aussie Rules game!
Yep, that's pretty accurate. I'll let our PhD guy come explain a bit more himself. Sorry, we're a bit busy with our exhibit at Disrupt, bit we'll be able to answer more questions later.
That's great I love AFL!