skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So if someone is running conversion tracking at checkout for analytics etc... what currency gets reported? The post says:

"You can choose to receive your payments in Bitcoins (paid into your Bitcoin wallet) or paid in your local currency directly into your bank account every business day."

If your shop currency is set to GBP but someone pays in BTC, what gets populated if using {{ shop.currency }} and {{ total_price }} for example?
Perhaps I read too much into the original comment. This is why the suggestions seemed creepy to me:

> Getting talking to a big group is hard; it's easier with singles or couples.

So my initial reaction is, this person is trying to target one or two people because they're "easier", almost as if they have less of a defense against your approach.

> The drinks or food line is a chance to get talking to people when they've peeled off from their group.

This immediately made me think of the previous line, and sort of hunting for a lone person to attack once they've left the safety of the pack.

I don't think talking to someone in line is creepy at all. But no matter where you engage them (food line/bar/bathroom/etc), if you've been waiting for someone to leave their group just to talk to them, that is creepy. However, it could be that the commenter was not suggesting to do this at all and I misinterpreted.
No, it explains succinctly why almost anything that does not offer the amazing value proposition of a 1990's computer (in the 1990's) would see its sales volumes plummet. That threshold is not met by the vast majority of durable goods. This is why it is a problem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_Arcade_Expo

that's funny, i didn't see "non-profit" or "charity" anywhere on this page. you guys should consider updating it.

i am angry because there is an ongoing, systematic monetary devaluation (and hence social devaluation, dot com billionaires notwithstanding) of all technical roles by people in our own industry. it pisses me right the fuck off and the games companies are at the forefront of the fuckedupedness and loss of dignity.

you chain this fucking guy to a pager and pay him peanuts and harass him to the point where he needs to resign and then flippantly post another job posting with such unbelievably thinly veiled condescension and arrogance, and it's about time an industry called you out for it.
blah blah blah.

I'm leaving because I'm underpaid.

blah blah blah.
Is it possible that Unicode is actually a bunch of horseshit? If literally nobody gets the spec right, then maybe the spec is wrong.
Can someone tell me why basic income won't just lead to inflation? Everyone gets more money which drives up the prices until the gain is negligible.
> Why can't we just have it be the future of Dance music

Because that's a stronger claim -- that it is the future of Dance music for everyone.

> why does it have to be "if you're a Nerd".

Because with that qualification, its a weaker claim -- for the rest of the universe, it may not be the future of dance music.
It sounds like you are surprised that there are people who are not like you. There are lots of people in lots of companies that prefer working longer hours and maintaining their social circles at work. The author of the post says he's one of those guys, and he took a pay cut to work there. He worked at Amazon, he's not dumb and he's not being willfully exploited. So one must assume that he did it because he wanted to. He could have left long before now.

Saying that he somehow has a problem because that's what he wants in life is pretty judgmental. Do I want to work that way? No. Do you? No. Does it mean he has a "problem" because that's what he wants? No.
The Singular Waste of America's Healthcare System in 1 Remarkable Chart
So how did you get over "the fear" and out of the comfort zone of regular work (assuming you don't get pushed!) and actually start taking these risks? Is the fear of failure a sign of lack of entrepreneurial spirit, or just a sensible weighing up of current priorities?
Customized diary for your team with leathery cover and handmade paper
>I don't see how this equates to a general purpose language failing at strings

And I don't see where I said it did.

I used to favor a dual Python/C++ strategy, but Python's multithreading limitations and the decisions around unicode have convinced me to move on. It's not like anything has gotten worse in Python 3, it's just that there has been a major change and the opportunity to do the right thing was missed.

I happen to think that UTF-8 everywhere is the right way to go, not just for my particular requirements, but for all applications, because it reduces overall complexity.
Linux memory manager and your big data
Java 8 introduces four types of method references
Super minor thing I noticed: in your city drop-down list, you have "Kansas_city" instead of 'Kansas City' - looks like the string isn't being parsed properly like the others!
> to get an education to seek greater opportunities?

That, "make mo money", is the poorest and most cynical incentive to "get an education". Education is it's own reward. Not everyone desires/benefits from going into debt for a piece of paper.

People should be free (by having basic income) to choose their own education (or not at all). And not be forced into becoming fuel for the economic machine.
iPhone Dominating Smartphone Market in Japan
Heavily updated .NET memory profiler from JetBrains in early access
Yes, we did. Poor laborers often used to get paid in company scrip. You could buy anything you wanted with your paycheck, as long as your boss approved and it was stocked at your company store.

Then we started making employers pay people in no-strings-attached cash, and things got a lot better for everyone. Command economies aren't just terrible for nations, but for much smaller economic domains as well. Like company towns, or welfare systems.
Paying someone "near market value" for a regular developer at a normal company, but leaving them on call 24/7 for 5 years is paying them "way below market value".

I say this as someone who went through that exact situation: I worked at a small company for five years out of college, and was on-call for 24/7 for most of that. Someone called me on my goddamn honeymoon (which was basically the only real vacation I took during the interval) to troubleshoot a minor issue I had left explicit instructions for before I left.

They were very good with salary increases, and I didn't get more than a 5% raise out of switching jobs. But I went from working 50-60 hours a week, plus perpetual on-call, to working 40 hours a week.

I loved working there, loved the people, had a lot of fun but ... I wish I'd left years earlier. It wasn't worth it. It's hard to admit it, when you love a job that doesn't love you back. But I will never go back to working the job of two people unless I'm getting paid the salary of two people.
Very exciting.

I think they could further enhance merchant adoption by rewriting with an even more laser beam focus on the "benfits" vs. the "features"

Eg eliminate the top paragraph entirely and rework their current bullets to something as simple as:

- - - -

Start accepting Bitcoin today and you'll:

a) Get paid your full retail price in your local currency (or in Bitcoins if you prefer) settled daily.

b) Pay less than half the fees of a normal credit card transaction (about 1%).

c) Never receive another charge back.

Click here to add Bitcoin to your store right now.

- - - -

The wording isn't perfect ( particularly bullet (a) ) but you get the point.

The "positioning" of Bitcoin as a currency is hard to understand for most merchants and ALWAYS leads to questions about volatility etc.

So in the spirit of "Don't make me think" anybody building Bitcoin as a service startups should work hard on messaging.
Increase Your Earnings With These Simple Changes To Your Writing
I've read _The Name of the Rose_ and really enjoyed it. What should I read next?
I think they highlighted in there that $3000 of the $10,000 must be spent on healthcare coverage. Sounds like they're deliberately setting out to remove the chance to let people have a healthcare cost sink them.
And meanwhile altcoins (alternative cryptocurrencies) are booming like never seen before - even more so than bitcoin.

Litecoin just hit 30usd, Peercoin nearly at 4usd.

http://coinmarketcap.com/
I disagree. In a small company, everyone takes on multiple roles -- so why can't a single person be a programmer, web developer, system administrator? I've done that job many times.

The only issue is if the workload is more than one person can handle. In this case, the work sounds like it's only slightly more than a one-person job and it's unfortunate he's not paid accordingly.
> I agree, an Unreal Engine compiled to javascript doesn't make sense.

That demo runs at 60 FPS in my browser, allowing me to casually spend more money on more video games. Your objections seem ideological, as opposed to perf benchmarks, distribution improvements or other quantifiable terms.

Can you expand on why it doesn't make sense?
The biggest problem I seem to have in these situations is that I can't remember people visually.

If I'm introduced to you, and we talk for half an hour, I will not recognize you an hour later. If you remind me who you are, then of course I'll remember the conversation and your name and everything, but I just have zero visual memory of people.

This is even to the extent that my wife once sat down next to me on the train (we didn't usually make the same train), and I spent the entire trip thinking "I think I know this woman from somewhere, maybe?" before she finally couldn't hold it in any more and told me who she was.

(Yes, I score in the bottom 5% of prosopagnosia tests.)
Considering how cheap consumer electronics and entertainment are these days, I'm genuinely concerned that this 'minimum income' would be high enough to permit many to live in perpetual 'childhood' - cheap food, cheap entertainment.
It's not exactly easy for miners to change the rules of Bitcoin because those rules are also verified by non-miners. The software would have to be updated.

Nobody has figured out a decentralized way to peg a cryptocurrency against some external price. You can't really measure the price that other people are paying in trades; you basically have to take their word for it, which means they would lie if it was in their interest.
No, of course not. But the idea that minimum income would cause everyone to just quit their jobs is predicated on the presumption that the poor are morally inferior. Thus, analogies to what middle and upper class people do once they reach a certain level of income are irrelevant, because those people are not morally inferior. You might see a middle class person leave his comfortable line engineer job to get an MBA or PhD to increase his earning power, but that's a mark of the moral virtue of the middle class. A poor person given any sort of income security would just sit on his ass and eat mcdonalds all day. Or so they say.
I downvoted you. I think completely justifiably. Is your type comment really appropriate for HN?

Quote from the post: >>First things first - you may wonder, how could this job possibly be so good if I'm leaving it behind? No, I did not burn out. No, the conditions are not awful. I am leaving because I have always wanted to teach.<<
The price going up or down is not success or failure of gold, it's the nature of supply and demand. Gold is used to store value as a hedge against inflation, so people investing in lots of gold would probably expect gold goes up when things are rough in the economy and goes down as things get better.

That's the investment function of gold and other precious metals. That's why big financial organisations keep gold.
[shamefaced] I almost completed Tuesday's quick crossword.
quite right - I blame man flu and a very fuzzy head.
I wonder how the name is pronounced.

My first language is Brazilian Portuguese, but I tend to read it in Spanish because of the double "L". But that in turn would make it sound like the Portuguese version of "cork", like a bottle cork.
Cards waste no time addressing needs to improve
For a website who's shtick it is to remove the top 1M results from it's index the designer thinks having the default option remove nothing is a good idea apparently. Also, I don't think it actually works unless www.adamwest.com is not in the top one million results for "Adam West"

https://millionshort.com/search.php?q=Adam+West&remove=1000k
Thanks a lot! Fixed
We decided to even shut our Web Store down for Thanksgiving.
As I recall, there is some talk about using the 'other half' feature of this to attach a hardware keyboard. A quick search reveals:

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=91535
If you work long hours, you should be paid accordingly. If you want to volunteer your time to make a company profitable that's your choice but I reserve the right to believe that's dumb/wrong. It also devalues the work of every other developer.
But by providing them a minimum income, you basically make them into fuel for the economic machine - a consumer with no viable skills. And the vital years for gaining these skills are full of distractions, made all the easier to acquire by a basic income.
Today 90% of economy is worldwide, instant, over the internet. Internet did not exist 30 years ago. Gold can't fly through the wire. New digital economy needs reliable digital money. USD and EUR are highly unreliable digital money and we all know it.
obvious answer: universal healthcare.
"Distractions" have existed forever. Comic books, baseball cards, marbles, pogs, etc. have always been around for teenagers to blow their money on and spend way too much time with. Saying that the existence of video games has fundamentally changed the economy as a whole seems wrong.

Moreover, if that were the case, we would have already seen it. A mincome wouldn't change that. Yet, right now, teens are one of the most under-employed demographics (as in there are more looking for jobs now than in the past), at least in the US. If they were all distracted by video games, we would have seen fewer looking for work.
This is very interesting. Half of my customers are international and accepting Bitcoin might increase that number.

Definitely going to check this out.
> So Nintendo was losing money why exactly? Because Japan was not printing money as fast as US? Maybe the problem is in printing money at all?

Because Japan's currency deflated, while the US currency inflated. Printing of money is simply a means to control deflation or inflation.

All of the "thought experiments" on deflationary spirals ignore the fact that one happened: the Great Depression of 1930s. And back then, the US Monetary system was pegged to the Gold Standard.

We fixed the problem by getting off the Gold Standard. It turns out, basing your country's economy on a deflating commodity was not a good idea.
Do the "welfare state" programs include Medicare and Medicaid? Otherwise $3 trillion spend ($10,000 x 30,000,000 people) is pretty close to US budget expenditures today, but that figure includes all healthcare, defense and bond interest payments.

http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/08/federal-spe...

It's probably an affordable program at $1,000 a year, but at that level, is it going to make a difference?
That would be something useful to note on the website
s/wrong/selfish and irresponsible/
There's always localbitcoins! (And Coinbase has been relatively smooth)
That implies that they're not talking about scrapping the welfare state. That's fine, but it implies that they are not speaking plainly, and it also eliminates the basis for my question.
There is an easy solution for the MtGox withdrawal problem:

- open a bitstamp account, get it verified

- wait for the price between bitstamp and mtgox to be stable

- convert your mtgox usd to btc

- immediately transfer your btc to bitstamp

- immediately convert your btc back to bitstamp usd

- withdraw the usd

Only issue: hope the price doesn't move too much while it is in BTC.
Ask HN: Does anyone have some good Career/Life Advice for an 18 year old
I'm still in High School with about 1 semester left. Once I finish up High School I will be going to a Community College for 2 years then transferring to a University. (Just trying to stay out of debt and save money) I already have about 15 credit hours from doing dual credit English/US Hist/Govt during school and the summer. I plan on majoring in CS. I've been dabbling in programming for I don't know how many years and in High School I've taken a Visual Basic .NET class and AP Computer Science (Java), both of which have come very easy to me. I have a part time job as VB Developer doing reports/SQL Queries mostly. I don't mind it but it's not the most enjoyable thing.

So does anyone have advice on what I could do to improve myself for future jobs and life in general? Am I on the right path?
> The same problems it has had for the last 10000 years. You can't seriously expect these "realizations" to have an effect on Gold prices.

Supply and demand have an effect on the gold price. Markets go up, markets go down.
"I have a database field limited to 100 "characters"."

Well there's your problem right there...

"The user sent me a form submission with 150. I need to do something to resolve that."

Any software that defines "do something" here as "silently discard 1/3rd of the user input" is software I'm going to throw in the trash. If you must have fixed-length fields, surely telling the user "much characters, wow overflow" is better than just chopping the input.
This statement says much about you and very little about unemployment.
This is a free country you can downvote me as much as you want but you cannot distort facts by quoting half paragraphs. And facts are that that if he was paid enough he would have stayed longer at Penny Arcade in order to later fulfill his dream of teaching.

> Doing so comfortably requires that before then, I need to put away a lot of money to support myself when I’m getting paid a truly ludicrous wage. It is true that I am paid below market value, but not so significantly as folks on the internet assume. I live quite comfortably on this salary, and while it’s less than I could make elsewhere, it’s not out of the bounds of reasonable expectation. But I want to accelerate my plans for teaching. So here we are. I love this company, but I have goals that won't be fulfilled by working there, so it's time to move on.

TL;DR I'm leaving because I'm underpaid.
> virtually only an IDE makes sense to use up all

I disagree, this is a strange sentiment that I see on HN all the time. That somehow the complexity of an IDE with dozens of debug windows and library organization trees deserve lots of screen real estate.

You know what deserves lots of screen real estate? Whatever I want to focus my attention on.

It could be a simple text editor, or VLC showing reruns of Road Runner cartoons while I balance my checkbook on another monitor, or a realtime log viewer in one screen and a process lister in antoher - point is, it doesn't matter, it's my way of working and it's not so bizarre that I need to acclimate myself to the clutter that inevitably shows up when using OS X for complex work.

The important thing is that I don't want all the other garbage I have backgrounded showing up in my field of view when I don't want to pay attention to it and I want this happen with a single mouse-click. This is a solved problem on virtually every other platform with a windowing metaphor in the last 25 years.

Apple's concepts around window resizing and full screen support make it seem like this is a problem so complicated we could solve P=NP and efficiently fold proteins with less effort.

I don't want to install addons, I don't want to spend several seconds breaking my work flow to resize windows just so or any other madness. This should have been solved with the first release of OS X, not the brain-dead hacks that keep getting shipped that nobody obviously thought to actually try and use in Cupertino.

> There are also a ton of third party software to automate this as a keyboard shortcut or similar if that's the key.

I do have an addon installed to solve this, but this is stupid core OS functionality and It's unbelievable that I'm living in the 21st century and full screening apps on multiple monitors requires years of waiting and entire OS upgrades.

Considering that mostly what I need to do on my Macs is virtualize Linux boxes, use MS-Office and ssh and run VLC, my next machine is going to be a Windows machine. Since

a) they're so cheap as to be virtually disposable

b) they haven't made core basic OS functions like moving files, accessing network shares without hanging the machine or Maximizing windows an unpossible task worthy of years of wait just to hope that they haven't screwed it up yet again and solved only by me wasting my time dragging things around or installing half a dozen third party kludges to hack the OS into something resembling a usable platform.

I'm not asking for weird edge case user environment things, or highly specialized workflows, or ultra-specialized niche window management or other things, just for the things to work as the user would expect.

I love love love my rMBP hardware-wise, but OS X as a user environment has been broken for a long time and it's regressing every release with problems that were solved on multiple platforms a human generation ago.

sorry venting
Keep Your Home Safe While on Vacation
The reason that point of view is unpopular is because you don't appear to have taken into account the ever-increasing automation of our work, making it very difficult to earn a living without having a high level of education - something which many people are just not well-suited for. Not everyone can be an engineer, and those other people are supposed to do what with their lives?

If we don't provide for them, they will find other ways of providing for themselves. Robbery, burglary, blackmail, whatever they can find. Personally I would rather make sure that people in that situation be freed from material concerns. Most people want to do something with their lives, and this will give them the time that is needed to do something creative rather than wasting their lives trying to earn enough to eat on a minimum wage job at McDonald's.
Ask HN: Got your Google Glass invites?
I applied for the Google Glass Explorer program and got the invite within days, on Monday 11/25 to be precise. I was excited at first until I saw this article:

http://www.engadget.com/2013/11/25/google-now-inviting-developers-to-buy-glass/

Does this mean every developer that applies get accepted by default or what???

Please share if you had applied for Google Glass and whether you got an invite or not.
Do we seriously need another mobile operating system?
As a European we are bit further down that path than the US.

I assume most of the readers here are "wealthy", would not need basic guaranteed income. So let me explain why this is a good idea from a rich man's perspective.

You give poor people a basic sum of money so they don't climb over the fence and kill you in your sleep.

That's it.

Behind all the nice language this is what it boils down to. It is paying off poor people to stop pestering you. Chump change for security. Europe learned it the hard way through numerous revolutions and war - keep the lower classes happy and everyone benefits. Social housing, healthcare, the lower rungs of Maslow's pyramid.

The Romans called it panem et circenses. Not a new idea. Focus on the panem. Hungry people do desperate things.

Want to see how society looks like that does not get that? Brazil. Mexico. Have a nice house in Sao Paulo or Mexico City? Then enjoy your 3m high wall with barbed wire around it.

Sharing a bit of wealth means personal security for you. You don't get robbed. You don't get infected by shit because no one gets shots (yes, you want basic healthcare for all). You have a nice large market to sell shit to, so job security (the basic Henry Ford insight).

So there you have it, even if you hate poor people there is good reason to give them some money.
I Can Haz Spanish Lessons: Cat Pictures Now Have A Purpose