skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Labor is actually a substantial part of airlines' expenses.

Southwest's most recent SEC filing indicates that its 35,000 employees represent 32% of its total operating costs, or about $3.4bn. These employees served about 101.9 million passengers. [1] That's about 2,911 passengers per employee, or $33 of labor cost per passenger.

A traditional airline such as American Air, with 70,900 employees, has labor costs of $5.9bn, serving just 98 million passengers [2], which is 1,382 passengers per employee or $60 labor cost per passenger. So costs per passenger are almost 2X.

That makes me question the data in this chart. The only two data points related to labor are crew costs (3% of savings) and administration (2%). But actual labor costs appear to be a much more substantial part of the savings.

[1] http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/92380/000119312509015...

[2] http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/4515/0000004515090000...
yeah and she also got airtime from neil, her boyfriend, with 600k+ followers.
It looks like he's an impressive acrobatic, but that video doesn't really show him dancing.
You should check out "4 Hour Workweek" by Tim Ferriss. I'm only halfway through, but he has already touched on a lot of concepts that I think would really hit home with your concerns for freedom.

I run 'yet another web design company' and while I don't have a family, my social life is rewarding and I don't usually put more than 30-40 hours in a week.
(Disclaimer: I wrote this post)

What made you feel it was untrustworthy? I have a huge amount of respect for the Hacker News community (been reading this site everyday for over a year), and I would really appreciate the opportunity to be given constructive criticism.
> But was he really doing what he loved, or was he partially an automaton doing what his parents engineered him to do

Someone with that much musicality in him will make music no matter what. He's right up there with Stevie Wonder and Prince. They make music.
Good point. Web apps are going to be unavailable wherever wireless access is limited.

I didn't even think about that.
Why do your friends and family think that? Do you agree with them?

Given your freelance background, I would imagine you might know more than most first time entrepreneurs? I haven't met any business owners who surrender having a life for their biz (though I haven't met any multimillionaire business owners, either). Perhaps finding patterns in your freelancing and building those solutions into products while continuing the per-project work would be a good in-between to help you decide?
Beware the Planners
There's probably some labour cost hidden in other categories as well, like station costs and reservation costs. But still, I'd expect labour to rank much higher considering that 10:1 productivity advantage.

There's actually another thing that's surprising. Low cost airlines, at least in europe, have a younger fleet of aircraft using less fuel. That doesn't seem to figure in the chart either.
Michael Jackson is dominating Amazon and iTunes sales.
Re: dropping HTML end-tags that can be inferred

At a large enough scale, it might be worth it, especially if the stripping were automated as part of deployment, so origin-side authors can use whatever's most readable.

Do you know for sure that rendering engines are slower when having to infer end-tags? I would think the most common case is when you elide a end-tag by just ending a containing element, instead. I can't imagine that being a big rendering delay.
I'm not in the Bay area, but if you'd seed on TPB I'd be happy to share what I learn.
Uh, would you also favor giving them separate seats in the back of the bus?

I'd rather they stayed off the bus entirely.

And what would you say about a manager that avoided hiring followers of some other ideology, e.g. Communism?

I guess it depends on the ideology, doesn't it?
There's some sensationalism in the editorialising around this piece, but I find it hard to argue with the core of what Gates is saying.

You're not going to be able to sell a piece of software based on the idea that it has less bugs. People expect software to be bug-free. When people buy a new version of a product, people expect new features. I mean, history has proven him completely correct - today, vendors provide free updates in their software to fix bugs and sell new versions with more features.

Secondly, you're always going to have bugs. It's inevitable. What's important is that your software, both in terms of design and testing, is resilient enough to avoid major bugs that a large proportion of people will run into. Historically, Microsoft were good at this - there's a reason they were behind "Writing Solid Code". What remains are bugs which are quirks and corner cases, which are generally less important and are harder to test for. Of course, the situation with security is rather different, as certain quirks and corner cases can have serious unintended repercussions.
Why not? I work as a freelance software consultant, and I just switch between working on other people's projects and working on my own projects as needed. I don't have any plans to stop this anytime soon. Maybe as I get older I'll change the ratio of consulting/not-consulting to provide for a family, or I'll find some other way to generate money and stop working as a consultant, but I really see no reason not to just do this indefinitely.
Rate My App: AntiLinks
I don't think it is real. I've listened to Gates speak several times, and this piece sounds nothing like him.
Freelancing is good, but is it sure? If yes, then don't care and live the way you like, if no, then think again.

A company = Hard work, but is more sure than freelancing
That quiet sound you sometimes hear is emacs, calling you.

I can type the => character in one keystroke using emacs, though my key combo does technically contain two keys. I could reduce it to one if I really wanted to.

(And I might, because I just found an entire redundant key on my Kinesis keyboard that I never use -- the one right below the X key. Thank you for prompting me to look for such a key. To an emacs user, finding an entire spare key under a finger is like striking gold.)

Similarly, I found that Ruby doesn't use ; as often as :, so I swapped the two when in Ruby mode.

That said, I don't like the arrow operator either, but it has nothing to do with typing. It has to do with the other side of ergonomics: Visual clutter when reading. In a similar vein, the array() operator is my pet peeve: tons of redundant characters, even if you invent a macro for typing it.
Do you have health and long-term disability insurance? If you tomorrow get into an accident and lose all your fingers, are you going to end up living in a box on a street corner? If you make sure that your freelance gigs pay you enough to take care of that part of life, there's no reason why you can't continue doing what you are doing for as long as it makes you happy.
Dude, you're missing the best part: maybe you won't be the one who has to do the actual work.

Spend your time making sure the work's good, meeting customers, making business.

Then, eventually, stop even doing that and live off your equity in the company.
Danny, thanks for replying so fast. Makes conversing much easier :-)

I certainly didn't mean to cast negative light on the post. I sent a link to my friends at work with the text: "Seems like a well intentioned best effort, but there are surprisingly little links to source or archive material."

I could just be a lazy jerk who doesn't want to get blamed if one piece of information happens to be wrong. Probably I should have just said "work in progress", as you did.

I did greatly appreciate the note at the bottom of the post about work-in-progress and pooling-knowledge. The honest are typically interested in openness and collaboration.

The reason why I felt like a disclaimer was necessary in my comment and to my friends was that I personally hadn't verified the claims you had made, and it wasn't obvious to me that the information was correct. I would expect to see a note on methodology: were you cycling through refreshes of different web pages? or noting "last change" dates in webpages? Are there internetarchive.com (or equivalent) perma-links that should exactly when stories occured? The wikipedia timeline highlighting is totally obvious (and easy); I'd simply like to see that kind of thing for more of the "facts". Where did the information come from. If you state it I'll believe you and feel pretty confident in the information (would probably verify later if wanted to publish an academic paper or something, but otherwise good 'nuf for random intuition :-)

Maybe I'm just paranoid in general when it comes to news.

That said, your timeline really is the bomb. It's super interesting, and I appreciate the work you did :-)
I agree with the car control. +1 for that.

Funny enough, playing video games when I was younger helped me with the car control aspect. I had recently gotten my license and it had rained a little bit. I went to make a right turn and the paint was slick enough to dislodge the rear and slide a couple lanes of traffic. There was no hesitation when I turned into the slide like I had done countless times before playing racing games and it saved me from spinning out and possibly hitting oncoming traffic. +1 for videogames too.
Very interesting article--you're good at spotting new publications that "delight the mind," as the guidelines say. The article talks about a lot more, but I wouldn't quote this little piece: "Most people don’t realize that this process is already under way. In fact, it’s happening all around us, across the full spectrum of how we understand intelligence. It’s visible in the hive mind of the Internet," because that relates to something I heard a while back at a lecture by John Raven, current publisher of the Raven Progressive Matrices IQ test. He said that rather than thinking of intelligence as a trait of an individual, we can think of it as an emergent property of groups. Better communication among groups leads to more intelligence for all of humankind to enjoy. Thanks for sharing the article and boosting our intelligence here on HN.
In my opinion CSS isn't that complicated to use a framework, but that still a good thing if people always upgrade other frameworks and merge them to create a more powerful one!
There's no need to change JSON. This is a non-issue if you adhere to a few basic security practices:

1. Use crumbs to protect against XSRF.

2. Responses that should not be cached by proxies should have a "Cache-Control: private" header.

The "what if there's a broken proxy" argument in the post is specious, since a proxy that's broken in this way will cause much more serious security problems than are being discussed here (e.g. John visits google.com and gets Jane's cached Google homepage from the proxy).

3. Responses that should not be cached by browsers or proxies should have a "Cache-Control: no-cache" or "Cache-Control: no-store" header.

4. If you're still concerned, wrap your JSON responses in objects yourself; there's no need to modify the format to do it for you.
yeah the media had been talking a lot about, that I wanted to remember some of his songs: I used radio FM.

That has an explanation!
There are many that enjoy doing the actual work, making rather than dealing with customers/associates/quality control.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1_YoG7lqI4
NRC wants government to support venture-funded businesses
Have you seen Terminator 2? If not, watch it :)
Why free software shouldn't depend on Mono or C#
I'm sure he wouldn't talk that way in a controlled presentation, but I believe it's likely that he could have answered that way in an interview back in 1995 in part because of his nature and the reasoning behind the statements.
Netflix Prize May Have Been Achieved
As I told a buddy earlier, the piece is below RMS' usual standard: "This is a serious danger, and only fools would ignore it" - poisoning the well rather than arguing the case properly...
It's a very cool field, and it's been around for longer than most people would think. Follow @againstthespin on twitter if you want to get my (infrequent) thoughts on the subject. And read Moneyball by Michael Lewis if you want a brilliant writer's thoughts on the subject.
I've known many people who've made a living well into their 50's doing freelance work, and they lived quite comfortably (nice car, nice house, nice and long vacations, etc.). Not web design, but I can't imagine IT and database apps are dramatically different from design for freelancers. I did freelance work on and off for about five or six years, and was always well-paid when I did.

Treat your customers better than they deserve, work dramatically harder than you would if you were on the payroll, charge through the nose, and make sure you interact more with the customer than the design (or servers, or database, or whatever; the way you explain things is more important than what you do...you have to do a good job, but if you fail to explain it well and in a way the client understands, you won't get referrals and you won't make the client happy). These are the keys to living happily and being well-paid in a freelance business.
It's actually not that good a point. Using JQuery you can get a web app as low as 1k so slow connection isn't that big a problem. Web apps can integrate into most of the iPhone's features like contacts (notable exceptions being location and camera). The other stuff he mentions like p2p, mDNS, etc... are very specialized applications that to the best of my knowledge only work on unlocked iPhones (I could be wrong though I know bit torrent has been banned from the app store)

A web app is never going to work for edge case style applications but for the majority of web sites it's probably a good idea just to spend a day customizing their site for an iPhone (I've become fond of iWebkit: http://iwebkit.net/) rather than buying a mac, learning objective-c, etc...

Bottom Line: Look at your requirements and decide if a Webapp will do. Don't just jump to native.
Feature suggestion: Tell me which of the 4 compressors gave the best result.

This is a good idea, but I can't technically do this currently. The compressors are run one after another (it's essentially like "pngcrush infile outfile && optipng outfile && advpng outfile && pngout outfile"), so there is no real "best result", it just gets a bit smaller each time.

Also, since the point of testing 4 png compressors is to get the smallest size possible, why not use "smallest" as the default setting?

That's a good point, I've just committed the change :)

Thanks for the suggestions!
Time Series Data Library
To be fair, Easyjet, Ryanair, Westjet, etc. don't handle nearly as many flights as KLM, BA, Air France, etc.
Companies appeal to China to drop Web filter plan by AP: Yahoo Tech
There are always idiots in any organization that prides itself on superior customer service, who provide the counter-example of the norm. This article does a good job of showing this.

As for myself, I recently had the most extraordinary case of customer service from my local Apple store, that dwarfs anything I have experienced from any other company. They went above and beyond, vastly exceeding my expectations. Since I would not expect them to do this kind of thing on a regular basis (or they would go out of business), I won't go into any details. But man, is this one satisfied customer.
Great how he leaves out the fact that it is his site.
Questioning My Faith In Object Oriented PHP
It's probably just a factor in parsing, which is plenty fast anyway; it would have no effect on rendering.
I use a variant of this, for the sole reason that it provides a reasonably flexible grid system that is very easy to use, keeps everything proportional and consistent, and works in all modern browsers.

I don't enjoy spending lots of time tweaking CSS for each site individually, when I can just throw it on a grid and have it looks great.
Depends on where you live. At-will employment with a single firm is more risky than having multiple employers.
I'll take your word on it. Since I use an inexpensive (shared) hosting service, how would I go about checking to see if they employ APC opcode (or any other such as listed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP_accelerator ) ?

PHP info page doesn't show anything but "Zend optimizer" (which is not a caching optimizer).

Are APC or any such accelerators/cache-optimizers commonly used by hosts (silently, without showing up in PHP info)?
Calling all entrepreneurs…
Guesstimate: if someone cares about performance, they should have already installed an opcode cache, which probably wouldn't have to re-parse constant strings.

But then thinking: you'd expect constant double quoted strings to also get this treatment, so single quoting still gets you nothing.

All the above is void without benchmarks.
Also, push notifications, in app purchases, simply being able to generate a second revenue stream...
They would find consensus amongst women if they studied their response to the size of a man's bank account.
The processing time was around 4m20s on a MacBook Pro with 3GB RAM.

Is this good or bad? One possible speedup I could use is to compress more than one image at a time, although the progress indicator would probably have to become asynchronous.

Just curious about PNGOUT - did you get permission to bundle it with your app? Their license http://www.advsys.net/ken/utils.htm#pngoutkziplicense seems pretty restrictive: "Redistributing, repackaging, or reusing the PNGOUT or KZIP executable is prohibited without the express consent of Ardfry Imaging, LLC, and a formal business agreement.

No I didn't, thanks for pointing this out. I'll remove it for now; didn't realize their license had that restriction. That's pretty lame :\.
Team claims Netflix' $1M recommendation-engine innovation-award
I am a huge fan of Crossfit. I began several weeks ago, and cannot remember being in as good shape since my peak in college (I was on a top-3 Division 1 crew team).

Be sure to follow the site's advice (and brianm's), however, about starting slowly. It helps to scale back some of the workouts to even a fraction of the time/intensity, and only working 1 or 2 of the workout sets (it is normally 3 days on, 1 day off).

My advice: start small, build up, don't give up!
From the guidelines:

Please submit the original source. If a
blog post reports on something they found
on another site, submit the latter.

Also, previously posted:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=563827

That was two and a half months ago and replies are no longer possible, so if you want to comment, you have to do it here.
Ask HN: Looking for in-browser programming tutorials like 'Try Ruby!'
I'm trying to create a list of really good interactive, in-browser programming tutorials like 'Try Ruby!', but in other languages like Python, LISP, Scheme, Javascript, Erlang, etc. I don' know if they even exist, but if they're out there I'd like to locate them and create a nice web page for easy reference. So, if you know of any that are any good then please post them in a comment. Thanks!
Palm Pre Mojo SDk Leaked
Google homepage doesn't close html tags, on purpose
First, you don't need to be condescending.

Second, are you claiming that because no accidents happened to occur, that Southwest was in the right to fly passengers in planes that safety inspectors deemed unsafe or which were two and a half years overdue for an inspection? Or perhaps your point is that over-all, Southwest has a better track record than other airlines, to which I must ask, what is the probability that Southwest's spotless record (in terms of deaths) actually indicates that they're safer than the other airlines, and what is the probability that it's just dumb luck? I would be quite interested in the answer to this question, though it seems airline crashes are both fairly rare, even for airlines with poor safety records.

The point is, while I'm certainly not saying that their safety record is meaningless, I think it would be foolish to overlook things such as flying planes which have either failed inspection or which are years overdue to be inspected, especially given the low number of data points in the form of commercial airline crashes.
How are they different from cell phones in this area?
It's difficult as a solo consultant to build a sustainable business: you have only your hours to sell, it's difficult to stockpile them, and jobs arrive unpredictably. When you are busy it's hard to look for additional work, so that porpoising (alternating periods of work and idleness) is hard to avoid. I would look to join up with another two to four like minded consultants. This gives you an opportunity to spread out your marketing and sales efforts across the group, take on larger assignments, and have backup in case of illness or other temporary inability to complete the job. Partners also give you time to renew and enhance your skillset--obsolescence of expertise is another business level risk--and others to compare notes with in new or challenging situations.
No, I am not implying that.
Well reasoj being from where i come, not many people leave a happily paying job to freelance. And most of those who do, build their own company. Amongst my local tech group also i am the only one who is not either a employee or employer.

Yes i have seen some businesses though not completely failing but not doing great, which kind of deters me just to jump right into it.

And i think that is a good idea, to have some personal projects/passive income besides client works. Thanks for reminding :)
I think this is a great idea and has much bigger potential. One of the themes in publishing right now is that the money has gone out of content, since there aren't enough people willing to pay but that there's still good opportunities in curating (for example what hacker news does).

What if these syllabi were made up of free blogs and articles, like Spolsky's Best Software Writing.
I doubt it. And I guess safety is on everyone's priority list.
They are not granted access to the data set, so it would be statistically unlikely to achieve 10% RMSE improvement on the test set solely by chance.
Your second paragraph is amazingly motivating. Within these 7/8 months i kind of became rude/aggressive while working, and frankly did not give those points much thought.

Will implement them and definitely going to be more expressive, polite with my words and firm with my action. I think that will be more professional and will go a long way if i have to do some meaninful/longterm business.
Imagine27