skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't love Mint but I would never say it "sucks". Also, it is a pretty difficult category. Being able to safeguard the data and credentials alone severely limits the universe of people/groups who might try to do it.
For example, consider this journey:

https://www.google.com/maps/preview#!data=!1m4!1m3!1d83509!2...

30 minutes by car, 1:18 by public transit.
Unfortunately, I don't think it was a joke. Such negative, very disappoint.
Not sure why the downvotes. But its not that math heavy, you just have to know basic proof techniques,set theory and a little bit of number theory. Something everyone can pick up in a month or two at most.
Did you build your own control panel or are you using something like Cpanel?
Marriage Isn’t For You, It's For The Other Person
Why This Multi-Purpose Portable Mobile Phone GPS Jammer Is Welcomed Now?
LOL for an "objective" question.
Hey I can blow things out of proportion and create unreasonable expectations just like the author does :)
Just trying to understand your argument: So, you are saying that neither Google nor Apple has really changed the world because their achievements were much more inevitable in a short period of years (<5) compared to potentially stopping starvation? (Which I think we'd all admit is not inevitable at all.)

I can see the logic in that if that was entirely true. But I don't know if I can agree that either Google or Apple's particular takes on various high achievements were actually inevitable at all (search in various forms, and maybe not the PC, but the iPhone, certainly).
I'm not really sure how charging for API access would break your ability to out-maneuver Mint. Technology moves faster than regulation so today regulation comes after power of technology. All a framework does is abstract way complexity, which makes the banks that fall under it subject to a more-pure market and its effects. Banks with premium services can compete on price while working on the same customer data easier. Access to extended data can be bidded on by banks for those willing to give up personal information for better services. I don't comprehend why the banks would need to "open up" anything, or even agree to standardize their API. The framework can be a sanity check on banks as well. (we deposited $100, only $95 is reported, flag., handle flag by docking bank "determinism ranking"), banks that don't rate highly as handling the framework calls in a deterministic manner are not officially supported and lose mainstream customers. Consumers can regain control of their personal information, bringing a new market for personal data that isn't owned by someone other than that person.
Probably because programming languages require a precision that natural languages do not have, so you end up having english words that only mean a certain form of their meaning, and completely broken grammar (and/or near impossible to implement). At which point, you are just confusing people by saying "it is like english" (or X natural language).
What about a job at Google, Facebook or Twitter would be better? If you think they're strictly better, there must be some huge downside to my lifestyle I mentioned that I don't see. They offer worse hours, less pay, less autonomy, higher cost of living, and they're on the wrong end of the country if I want to keep close ties to relatives.
I think it's somewhere in between his description and yours. I would say that great programmers do a lot of programming on their own time just because they enjoy it.

I'm often surprised at the fact that most professional programmers do almost no programming on their own time. They're no more interested in it than most plumbers are interested in unclogging toilets for fun after work. Most programmers program for a paycheck, because they'd rather do that than clean toilets.

Great programmers ARE often interested in other things, too, but they are interested enough in programming to do it as a hobby outside of work; they're not just doing it for a paycheck. (And, yes, I exclude those who are currently going through day-job death marches at work and need something completely different to recover after work. I've been there, too, but when the tide changes, I'm back to programming my own projects for fun.)
> Now a country that used to be considered one of the best places to live during the Soviet times is the poorest country in all of Europe.

Pretty sure Moldova's decline didn't happen because they told Russians to go home. Estonia also told Russians to "go home" and is now in the European Union and doing pretty. Belorussia didn't tell Russians to "go home" and now is a weird post Soviet dictatorial dystopia.

It seems here, if anything, Moldova didn't yell "go home" loud enough. And come to think of it, don't really remember too many of the Russians packing their bags either. Even to this day from what I hear many refuse to learn and speak Romanian. And when spoken too in Romanian respond with "please, use human language" implying the local population is inferior or subhuman.

The attitude that Moldova was so great _because_ Russians were imported in there and placed in administrative positions, replacing the native population, and without the Russians Moldova just fell apart is a bit silly. (Ok, not a bit silly, it is ridiculous). Native land owners, intellectuals, teachers, priests were deported by the tens of thousands by Stalin. Most died in Gulags. Can't blame Moldova too much for inviting Russians go back to where they came form, 70 years is good enough time to crash un-invited at someone place.

> Now a country that used to be considered one of the best places to live during the Soviet times is the poorest country in all of Europe.

Spoken from the point of view of a family that was imported by the Soviet officials, brought in to displace locals, given nice free apartments, good jobs. Yes Moldova was a pretty nice place to party. (They used to say "Go to Moldova, pay 1 ruble for a giant teapot filled with wine", stuff like that).
Any company has a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value. I just find it interesting that GS seems to have adopted that as its only goal.
Looking at the ShotSpotter reports... this is crazy. I was aware that some shootings happen, but it seems like Minneapolis has 4-5 shootings per week on average. Really depressing idea. 4-5 in a year would probably be a high number for my area (in the UK though).
There are already plenty of armed citizens in the US. If this incident follows precedent, gun sales will have spiked dramatically.
Your perspective on this issue is an asset to me. I also have been tinkering with different approaches for about three years. I started out hacking on Virtuemart for Joomla, then tried Spree for Rails but I have found that they are too biased towards the online store checkout flow.

My most recent attempt has been built with Active Admin and Rails. I built it in a couple of months so we could have something for the bicycle shop I opened recently. I admit it's quick and dirty but it tracks work orders, sales, inventory and customers. I have not addressed payments beyond a select field for credit card, cash, check, etc. but I have considered integrating with an online processor. Currently we use a Square like reader from our bank and the stock printer for the store desktop. We don't have a touch screen but we do use tablets on the floor for work orders and sales occasionally. Since the printer is on the network, we can print receipts from any of the devices the sale is being made from.

I have published everything to my Github account (https://github.com/websitescenes/point_of_sale). Much of it is hard coded for my specific shop but I plan on making a general version that would be more configurable.

I am interested in following your progress because you seem to be attacking some of the angles that I am ignoring. Thanks for your response.
I would like something like Mint that comes with a consumable personal API that is safe to call. I want to generate my own reports, but I certainly don't want to handle banking-level security.
Honest reply: at that time, I lived two houses down from the Court Square E/M/G/7 station and 0.3 miles away from an N/Q stop (and another 0.2 miles away from an E/M/R), so everything was pretty much right there.
You're still arguing against a strawman. The conversation isn't simply about whether or not what prisons do is "exploitation". It's more specific than that. Not is it about whether or not prison lobbying is sending undeserving people to jail. If we were to have that discussion I would likely agree with you.

What we're talking about here, however, is whether prison work programs themselves are rehabilitative or exploitative for the prisoners themselves. My claim is that prisons lobbying to get more people into said programs is irrelevant when considering the quality and fairness of the programs themselves.
> But adding this as a requirement is perfectly reasonable?

If you don't think it's reasonable, why agree to the project?

> Next time I buy some bananas at the supermarket, I'm going to tell the cashier that if my clients don't like them, they won't get paid

That's a red herring fallacy, it has nothing to do with the situation we're discussing. The cashier has no contract with you, and didn't agree to anything.
Both Google and Goldman are corporates. How about adding Pfizer to the mix? The result doesn't change. It doesn't matter what they do, their priority is not saving the world, even as a side effect. If you want to save the world, you are on your own. Non-profits? Maybe. Or a tiny company where you can have influence on the company's direction. But, not in a corporate, unless you drink your Kool-Aid everyday, then it is a different story.
> Also, there is a certain segment of the population that fights denser development that would encourage transit improvements. I don't really understand why such a person would live in Hollywood, for example.

Walkscore.com gives Hollywood a Walk Score of 97, which is described as a "Walker's Paradise" which means that daily errands do not require a car, or it gives it an 87, which means most daily errands do not require a car. (It gives different scores depending on how you search for it--I think the 97 is if it centers the map on Santa Monica Boulevard, and the 87 if it centers it farther north).

So maybe you find people living in Hollywood who are not worried about transit improvements because their neighborhood is fine without transit?
Dang. Where can you work when the culture is "we compete to get horribly rich by making the world a better place," then?
I would hardly call not falling over yourself to help a pretty member of the opposite sex purely because of their attractiveness the same as the targeted psychological games pick up artists use. One is manipulation, the other is having some self respect.
This is illogical. You don't show that "they didn't change a lot," only that they did what they did what they did first. That doesn't diminish the achievement of accomplishing an ambitious goal, and it doesn't diminish the effect.
> Wadhwa began by launching into the myriad recent sins of the financial industry: credit default swaps, a housing bubble, and widespread economic meltdown, for starters.

The "financial industry" may not be a brotherhood of saints, but someone who is going to claim that CDS is inherently bad and the housing bubble and economic meltdown were the sole product of the "financial industry" clearly hasn't done his or her research.

> Gregory Ferenstein, a writer for TechCrunch and one of the moderators, then asked if there was any good in the great majority of the finance industry. Wadhwa answered a flat no.

Given that so much of the wealth in Silicon Valley derives from the ability of founders and employees to turn equity into cash, this is an ironic position. I mean, is Wadhwa completely oblivious to the fact that GOOG $1,000 gives Google an even greater ability to recruit and retain the best and the brightest?

> He also claimed that the costs of starting a company have become so low that investment bankers are hardly needed to support them.

Starting a company is one thing, but growing a company is another. Look at the amounts that were (and are being) poured into companies like Twitter, Pinterest and DropBox in their later rounds. It's no surprise that names like Goldman Sachs, Fidelity and Allen & Company are on the investor rosters.
Not yet, but 42Floors is on track to so far.
Thank you, Poe's Law.
The biggest reason it is not ready for prime time: security. The regular user is very likely to get all their bitcoin stolen from them sooner or later. Heck, even the people running the exchanges and other bitcoin services get hacked all the time. There simply is no good way to secure bitcoin for the regular joe at this point in time.
If you buy the prepaid SIM card from their website, it's only 99 cents with free shipping.
just get a bunch of random people to shoot in the air all over town

So now instead of just shooting someone, you're also engaging many conspirators in your plan?

Law enforcement tactics are often discounted using contrived scenarios that criminals simply don't undertake. Firstly because most criminals generally aren't masterminds, and for those that actually are, the proposed circumvention activities usually leaves even more of a trace that ends up with people in jail.
I stand corrected!

I actually maintain a Drupal site which sells tickets and things through civiCRM. This Drupal Commerce could work well with that and give me an opportunity to find out 'the hard way' whether I can use it on other projects where I would think Magento.

Thanks for the tip and maybe see you on the Drupal Commerce forums at some time in the future!
This is magnificent! I wish I knew about that before!
Yes, it works with any unlocked GSM tablet that supports their spectrum, including the AT&T iPad 3, although you may not get LTE speeds.
What's Wrong with Reddit Lifehacks
We actually implement the same ruleset from HTTPS everywhere :)
"The executive also led feature-implementation across the operating system, and he managed both bug-fixing processes and feature distribution to consumers."

This statement is interesting to me. My understanding of Apple's organizational structure is that individual leaders are given broad responsibility for specific things. As I read this, my impression is that Mr. Lamiraux was the buck-stops-here guy for any and all bugs that come through iOS. (Among other responsibilities.)

Inside Apple, is it that literal? I contrast that with other software companies, where those responsibilities are largely delegated out to many different people, but there is rarely a single person who is accountable. For example, I could never imagine a single, go-to individual at Microsoft who would be responsible for the bug-fixing process in Windows 8.
T-Mobile doesn't have "contracts" any more. Everything is effectively a prepaid plan, no cancellation fees
Western Union are sort of right. Bitcoin although more stable recently than it ever has been, is still pretty unpredictable and laws surrounding its use are somewhat untested in a lot of regions. When Silkroad shutdown it cast a new light on Bitcoin, people think Bitcoin is for buying illicit drugs anonymously and don't currently see it as a valid alternative to actual currency, at least not yet. Once more and more countries release their stance on the currency, then Bitcoin might be ready for the prime-time.
And, in spirit of the HN: of course, starting your own company that will do good, is the best option, if you can.
Sounds to me like the same thing happens in politics. At least in Mexico it seems only the greedy and self-interested people get involved in politics, when in fact politics should be an area where people with more interest in the public wellness than their own should be.
The joke is here, it just isn't evenly distributed.
I was considering trying Elance until I read this.

Not I am thinking I cannot afford it because of the demand it would place on my time to manage and because I can't trust that a 5 star rating correlates with quality.

Sheesh... I wouldn't have been willing to have that argument for $800 much less write any code.
> 37signals is an outlier because their readers are potential customers

Your readers are always potential customers.
Not Google, but I did move from Apple to GS. At Apple I felt like I was making toys for first world adults. Nothing I did really did much to improve the situation of anyone unless they were interested in renting movies on iTunes.

Whereas at GS, I was writing software to sell municipal and corporate bonds. Companies and city infrastructure were
funded more cheaply as a direct consequence of my work.

There was simply no comparison between the two, my work for GS was far better for society.
200mb free plan is not available to business accounts.

As a SaaS who's customers sometimes purchase iPads for an entire small business team, I was dismayed to learn this from a Tmob sales rep.
Why is this treated like some insight? People who are running big successful companies are too busy to do a lot of stuff, blogging just yet another thing.
Mint didn't do anything to stop technology advancement. The thousands of companies Minte wants to connect with, all with their own unique snowflake systems, did that already.
How early are you if you don't mind me asking? Are your secondary plans ready to go? (I assume you only have your current customers on the lowest plan based on your revenue)
How are you marketing it/planning to market it?
Good comment. Didn't realize F# let you have inline functions, everything as an expression and partial application. Forgot about pattern matching too!

I don't really see a need for workflows, I can do everything I need to use workflows for with custom LINQ.

I'll reconsider pushing F# for some of the c# work I do. However, if someone isn't bound to the CLR, i'll ask what F# gives you over Scala :-)
Exactly. If Fleming had not discovered Penicillin, somebody else would have sooner or later. But it was still worth doing.
Elon Musk? Mark Shuttleworth?
Lingo, the scripting language for Macromedia Director, looked almost exactly like that. It was a real pain in the ass as soon as you tried to do anything more advanced than, say, drawing rectangles.
It told me Victoria Bitter made me a God among men, but Coopers Pale Ale bagged me "Nut Smuggler".

Definitely broken, VB is worse than sea water.
Reminds me of this old Kids in the Hall skit:

Bad Doctor: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pbjypn9JtKE
> If you know it exists and want to shoot someone, just get a bunch of random people to shoot in the air all over town.

The cops catch a few and likely trace the requests back to you via use of plea bargains.

> Or even better get a few speakers and some youtube videos of people shooting.

Oh yes, even better. Traceable evidence, with fingerprints and maybe purchase records! Not to mention the system to set them all off at the right time.

By the way, use of these tactics escalate the murder charge to first degree when they catch you, as it's pretty clearly premeditated.
Tom Preston-Werner - http://tom.preston-werner.com/
If google self-driving cars project succeeds (and it looks like it will), it will save dozens of thousands of life per year in the US alone.

If google life extension project succeeds, it will be a game changer, better than just saving lives. (Why? Because now humanity is stuck in a short cycle - study till you're 20, work for 40-50 years, spend 0-20 years in retirement. If we can increase the life span, it will all go towards the work phase).
Making a loss on Bitcoin
I may be biased (being a Google engineer in the New York office) but if you actually want to contribute something--anything--to the world, if you want to enjoy your job, then Google wins hands down.

I have a finance background and previously worked for UBS and in retail and wholesale stockbroking. I fully understand the role of, say, market makers in the financial system (ie providing liquidity).

I hear those same arguments being used for HFT but honestly they don't really stack up (IMHO). I don't really see HFT doing anything harmful however so ultimately I don't really care. I can see the appeal from a technical background of being a quant. It must be a challenge and I'm sure you can make a lot of money, which is fine, but it doesn't really contribute anything to the financial system.

The real problem I have with Goldman (and their ilk) is the serious crises they've instigated all the while banging the drum of contributing to the financial system.

This includes the subprime crisis [1] [2]. Goldman wasn't as guilty as some but its hands weren't clean either. You'll often see the "don't hate the player, hate the game" defense here. Sorry, no sale. You're accountable for your actions regardless of the incentives.

More disturbing is that Goldman (and their ilk) is killing people in the name of profit [3] [4]. Sorry, but that's morally reprehensible no matter how you look at it.

Now US regulators have made at least five mistakes (IMHO) when it comes to financial regulation:

1. 30+ years ago allowing investment banks, once partnerships with unlimited liability, to incorporate and have limited liability for their actions;

2. Not allowing investment banks to fail ("too big to fail" like Merrill Lynch). Bailouts of investment banks could reasonably be described as welfare for investment bankers;

3. Allowing banks to take positions as well as operate as market makers. There really should be strict separation here;

4. The carried interest tax treatment of hedge funds that mean executives pay less tax (as a percentage) than most of the population. Congress really has been bought and paid for here, most notably Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) who has steadfastly broken with party ranks to resist carried interest reform [5]; and

5. Strict regulation on commodities market to separate speculators from hedgers. Driving up food prices causing untold misery even death should result in criminal liability for the organization and key personnel.

So work for Google. Don't work for Google. Whatever floats your boat. Ultimately (IMHO) I think Google has a net positive effect on the world.

Whatever you do, as an engineer, I strongly believe you should stay away from investment banks and hedge funds as you're actively contributing to misery in the world at this point.

[1]: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/08/12/in-one-bundle-of-mort...

[2]: http://money.cnn.com/2010/04/24/news/companies/Goldman_Senat...

[3]: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/may/23/goldman...

[4]: http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/07/23/how-big-ban...

[5]: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/30/washington/30schumer.html?...
Same here. ReadyForZero works for somethings, Mint works for others. Can't one of them buy the other out?
is jlg part of this (or rather, was he?)
I'm torn too. I'm from the Dewey decimal system. I collected a library a reference books over the years, trying
to keep on top of things. I wish I had the Internet growing
up. I'm waiting for a young Einstein type to arrive, and
see how he, she uses the gift of the Internet. And no--I'm
not really impressed with what guys like Zuch are doing(yea,
I kniw it was helpful in overthrowing dictatorships), but
I'm waiting for something really amazing. A gifted, determined kid has the potential to do so much?
The PC market of 1981 was taking off with the personal computer of 1977.
One of the big sticking points is liquidity, he argues, adding that family support payments can currently only be useful once converted to local fiat currencies.

“We’re a long, long way from sending momma in Mexico $240 each month or a Somali family in a refugee camp $200 each month in bitcoin that is held in a wallet for conversion to local fiat currency and spending as needed,” he suggests.

This is absolutely the case.

It's worth noting that there are tremendous opportunities for arbitrage in a market like that too.
You make your linux binary executables future-proof by statically linking them. It's a rare event that it happens, but I've no problems with 15 year old a.out binaries on 64-bit systems.