skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This looks to be mostly is about the following thing from Demos: http://www.demos.org/publication.cfm?currentpublicationID=8D...

... which seems to be all about the state of the US middle class in 2006. (I see no sign of anything based on more recent figures, though I could have missed something. The NY Post article says the 4M figure is from Demos in 2008, but I don't know where they found it.)

The 12M and 4M figures are not for the total size of the middle class, but for the portion of it deemed to be "secure" in the middle class -- i.e., at little risk of falling out of the middle class. That's supposedly on the order of 1/3 of the whole middle class.

Curiously, the Demos document and the NY Post article are both about the alleged scarily large fraction of the US middle class that's in danger of dropping out of the middle class, which has supposedly got scarily larger over recent years; but neither sees fit to say what's actually happened to the size of the middle class. I'd have thought that if lots of middle-class people, and increasingly many at that, are at serious risk of ceasing to be middle-class, then that ought to show up as attrition in the number of middle-class people.

There's also no definition of "middle-class" offered. It seems to me so vague a term that anything said about "the middle class" is useless without some indication of just what notion of "middle class" is being used.
I think the best justification for using scala is that on one hand you have a very nice language which is maintained by some very smart people and has a lot of nice things that are otherwise only available with ocaml,sml, haskell, scheme, or F#, and on the other hand the programs are running on one of the best just in time compilation virtual machines that exist. Thats a very very nice combo.

[note for clarity: by smart, I mean the maintainers/designers are folks with phd's whose careers are dedicated to understanding how to design useful/powerful programming languages]
Something I wonder about: when you hear these stories about super-programmers who work normal 40 hour workweeks and yet do something really impressive in a year, is it because they're super talented or is it because they have this huge intellectual capital reserve from past experience they can draw upon?

For example, if you look at Lars Bak's resume, he started working on the Beta programming language in 1988. (For HN readers that aren't familiar with it, Beta was an exceptionally innovative language, and I'd highly recommend learning a bit about it.) Then he joined the Self team in 1991, where he did the first dynamic-optimizing JIT compiler. Then he worked on StrongTalk at Animorphic/Longview, and then was the engineering manager for HotSpot at Sun. He's spent 20 years working on basically nothing but optimizing VMs for dynamic languages - it's no wonder that he could kick out a dynamic JIT for JavaScript in a year.

Paul Buchheit once had a thread on FriendFeed about how long it takes to build a really cool project. It took him about 3 years for GMail, and Google was kicking around in Larry & Sergey's head for 3 years before they incorporated. That seems fairly typical for most Google products.

So while most successful people will say "Work reasonable hours and get enough sleep," I wonder how many of them are able to say that because they've already put in the hours necessary to attain mastery in a subject. Perhaps the solution is to optimize for rate of learning+retention: work as long as necessary to fully understand the subject, but quit when you feel you can't concentrate and remember things. Sometimes you can work for 15 hours and learn nothing, while sometimes you'll put in 3 mind-bending hours a day and learn tons.
He talks about nuclear right on page two, column one.

"Depending on who is doing the accounting, on the decommissioning and storage realities, and how the next four or five Chernobyls are going to pan out, I strongly feel that nuclear power will end up to be something between a staggering energy sink and a minor and temporary source that clearly was not worth the monumental hassles."
don't forget a nice way of dealing with the fumes.. that could get kinda trippy in zero g without good ventilation
"Um, what planet are you from? At least 3 major world religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) regard gambling as evil."

They also regard all manner of activity evil that most people (and even adherents) find perfectly acceptable and engage in every day. Bacon, beer, and shamefully clad women come to mind.

So let me ask what planet you are from. Have you ever gone to a casino and asked the gamblers what their religion was?
"Yes" to #1. I also would really like to know how they intend to do the "working offline" part. It's about time that saw some 'outside the box' innovation... and preferably as an integral part of browser.

How it's going to be standardized across browsers (running inside diff OS) ...well, I'd like to test-drive that.
I lost my wallet last night. Thanks for the thought HN but a little too late.
How ironic, a 4136 word essay about minimalism.
Maybe it's because people make such a big deal about it. You see the price of gas a couple of times each time you got to work and news anchors will do a story about the price of gas each time it goes up a couple cents. In contrast, we never see the price of bread or jam as often as we see the price of gas. I guess it's an observational bias.
I think you missed the point of my post. My point was that consumers produce 22% of pollution directly, and 78% indirectly.

Suppose I contribute 22 tons of pollution by driving my car, and GM contributes 78 tons of pollution building the car. Therefore, if I don't buy the car, pollution only drops by 22 tons!

This analysis ignores the fact that if I won't buy a car, GM won't build it (reducing pollution by 100 tons).
Freebase Hackday and Image Game
IANAL, but using a patent is grounds for infringement. Unlike the GPL, patent law has no SaaS loophole.
Can someone from mint.com confirm these figures? Surveys are fine but I trust transactional records more. The figures don't seem far off as I compare to my mint.com breakdown, but I'd like a more comprehensive and modern approach to this data collection.
And, you know, there are 169 million other voters in the US, so don't bother voting because it won't make any difference.
Live Style - rapid css editing
You're right. What you're doing is not sustainable.

Your wife has stayed with you through 84 hour work weeks, a car crash, brain damage, and pills. All indications are that she's an amazing woman and that you're lucky to have her.

So, do what your wife wants. Stop worrying about entrepreneurship. Just... do whatever she wants. She's much more important than any business you've ever had, have now, or could have in the future.
Chinese Firm Exhibits Kindle Look-alike
Did you leave it in El Segundo?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpPkGZ6zhzA
It's free trade - everyone who participates ends up wealthier.
True, but how would you prove it? A service just gives you the results, it does not tell you how it comes up with the results. Someone looking for infringement would need access to a similar base dataset and would have to run a lot of queries to develop enough proof to get any potential lawsuit off the ground. The only path I could see for such a lawsuit to develop would be one where a disgruntled employee provides enough evidence to get things rolling.
Well, I would say that the valid conclusion from the arguments is that Sales Dept should have a blogger. Whether a new hire, or current staff who starts testing the water part-time, or whatever.
That makes sense. It's probably a case of focusing on what you're best at, rather than trying to fit into someone else's mold.
Or you could charge per-seat. E.g. theoretically (back in the day) NT Server cost $x + $y/user connecting to it.
As a complete aside - if you are an on public sewer, run that shower as long as you like.

Showers don't waste any water at all, it all gets reused.

It's little known that water that people use gets recycled many many time in its journey to the ocean.

Big city in the north pulls water from a river, uses it, down the sewer, and puts it right back into the river. Next city down the river does the same, and over and over for each city down the entire river's length.

The problems are cities like atlanta which have mostly septic systems. And watering lawns.

But using water in showers or washing machines doesn't waste it at all.

Next green movement: down with septic systems!
I think you're telling yourself that moving to the bay would be better for your marriage.

It sounds like your wife is trying to tell you staying and changing your lifestyle would be better for your marriage.
I see a lot of conjecture about how secret pricing is or isn't beneficial, but one thing that seems to be overlooked is the complexity of enterprise class pricing.

If I call BEA (now Oracle) for a portal, the application stack is modular down to app functions, such that if I want publishing in my portal, there's a publisher module. Document repository is a seperate cost as well. I could buy 'just portal' if I really wanted, but without speaking to a BEA sales rep, in the absence of a LOT of prior experience, I simply can't know WHAT to buy.

That said, I've always found the 'per-seat' pricing model to be a pretty effective form of price discrimination. $10 a seat means that the 100 employee company is only paying $1000, but the 30,000 employee company pays $300,000. It's fair(ish), and it's an effective way to scale support costs as well without having to pay per hour or incident.
Golf. Garmin. Google Earth. Good times.
At an open source confrence I was at (flourish) they had an android developer which developed games. The sales were considerably lower for android apps I believe it was 10% of the sales compared to iPhone apps.
Hey bossy :-)

There's also Super Happy Dev House: http://superhappydevhouse.org/

... but I would still encourage you to continue asking if this is what you want to do with your life before thinking too much about how you would go about doing it.
It looks more like his text editor was configured to auto-remove unused whitespaces.
Intriguing observations about the potential for mobile Safari to provide a "Mobile 2.0" phase with new expectations about internet experience.

The post starts off with what seems to me like a strange analysis:

"...but Firefox and Opera were and are non-mainstream tastes. Most people use Windows without thinking much about it..."

I guess I perceived that FF & ( were non-mainstream choices ...because 90%+ of PC were sold with only IE installed. :/
get the man a spell-checking program, and fast. He's worse than me!

Other than that, uh, I guess he understands more than the average hippie? not saying much, if you ask me. He also seems to ignore that energy is usually quite cheap compared to human labor; I dono about you, but yeah, a lot of my expenses are energy related, but a lot of them are labor, as well.
If you own a home you mean. If you have a mortgage, the interest is tax deductible, so you pay a lot less in taxes for at least the first half of the term.
I wouldn't consider it much of a concern - people can live just fine off of dumpster diving. Tons of perfectly edible (much less "contaminated") food gets thrown out.
1. You sue.

2. You go through discovery, comb every line of code of the person you are accusing, until you find what you are looking for

It's really that simple. All it costs is money (for both sides unfortunately).
The title of this post is misleading. Even the article states that there are 31 million families in the middle class. It further states that while 12mm families were "solidly middle class" (whatever that means) in 2000, only 8mm families were so in 2006. It then states that 4mm more families are in danger of sliding into poverty based on 2008 estimates.
Spying On Myself - Still a need for a centralised lifestream
Paradox of Privacy
I'm surprised it isn't more. In places on the East and West coast you have to spend close to half your take home income or else live in a complete crime ridden run down ghetto.
Google versus the Government: The Future According to Google - Yale Law Journal
It's called Yield Optimization.
We don't, but Boston, Washington DC, and many college towns do. Hell, I'd say that even Evanston is a bit skewed that way. In the city, certain pockets like the Southport Corridor probably exhibit some of the cutthroat nature of NYC because we're so over-condo'ed in those areas. But Chicagoans, we just drive everywhere. :)
no, it's not that simple, that is a fishing expedition.

No judge would allow that during discovery.
No, it's enabled; in XP at least, TweakUI is the only place you can go to disable it (besides, perhaps, some Group Policy setting).
I've heard that passwords can be compromised by the sound (probably over multiple entries) of the keystrokes, since the attacker can figure out how far apart the keys are and listen for patterns, though I haven't seen any demonstration of this yet.
Another practical advantage of not naming your price is that it ensures you get maximal contact with your market. If you publish a pricing matrix, some percentage of your market will (almost by definition) "price themselves out" of your product.

I call myth.

In the general case when there is an offering A that costs a known figure $X and an offering B that costs a phonecall only to get a quote then I won't even bother making that call unless there is a serious headache with offering A.

Not telling a price speaks "we are more expensive than the others". It also speaks "we will waste your time with phone conferences and powerpoint presentations" and "we wear ties and are very important, probably much more important than you".

None of that gets my business if I can avoid it.
Has anyone used Hobix? http://www.hobix.com/.

Seems very hard to beat a lisp style solution such as the one posted by mahmud. lisp html generation always seems so much more concise than other languages.

I've started writing one in python similar to mahmuds. Might be the perfect time for me to learn clojure.
Right now I work at Meetup, so if you could give a little more detail about what was in the post, I could probably just e-mail Scott and ask him for it directly.
While there may be advantages to carrying a photo of someone else's kid in your wallet, the difficult questions and embarrassing situations that are going to come up from that are just not worth it.
Change your business model and kill your business? (2005)
huh... there will be one more expired patent?

Even at this point (30 or 40 years) from that day, PR is, practically, only of academic interest.
Certainly monarchist ideas were easily eliminated and equal rights were a fundamental idea, but aristocratic thought was not uncommon among the Founding Fathers. The split between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists was often worded in aristocratic language. The people were split pretty evenly between pro, anti, and indifferent to the Revolution.
Yeah. I love how they ask a professor to tack a completely spurious evolutionary explanation on there. You know, a speculation coming from a professor on the basis of a sound scientific theory is still just a speculation.

On the whole, I wish people didn't feel the need to jazz up empirical results with that kind of pseudo-technical commentary. It muddies the reader's mind about which part actually constitutes the science.
Oh, wow, cool. So the post was talking about how they decided to change from free to paid. He was talking about how they had an initial sharp downard turn in meetups, but eventually recovered.

Thank you!
So they say. It may be "only one of the signals", but its the biggest by a long shot.

Don't believe what Google tells you about its algo, test it yourself. Remember, its in their best interests for everyone to think their algorithm is so complex that it can't be spammed or replicated. Neither is true.
finance.google.com

i like to hack money :)
Maybe it just uses a CAPTCHA solver to get a list of likely characters?
In reality you don't hire people for that, way too risky.

You simply have a few "good friends" run a bidbot-script on some leftover machines. That's near impossible to detect (just create new accounts and cycle credit cards regularly) and makes the scheme entirely bulletproof.
Every major search engine (Google, Yahoo, Bing, ~Ask) uses a form of "PageRank" for their rankings. That is to say, all major search engines use the a graph as their primary ranking metric (other than relevancy, obviously).

I don't know how the patent plays in, but its fair to say "the cat is out of the bag" that a weighted link graph is (currently) the best way to algorithmically determine a given website's authority.

Disclaimer: I don't work for a search engine, but I am an SEO.
Microsoft Will Prevail, But Say Goodbye to Monopoly Profits
Thanks! I just added santa barbara for you, it should populate with listings soon.
I am also experiencing this bug. Safari 3.1.2, MacBook.
Seconded. Please.
"Peking University Founder Group independently developed this terminal, and it has nothing to do with the Kindle," Founder International said.

Except for the fact that they completely stole the design, of course.
I would love if you could get it to also interpret equations...
I know you're just quoting the standard line, but without "not hacker news!" postings, how do we, as a community, transmit a sense of what is and what isn't? Just let people guess why articles are killed - if they are? Thinking about it a minute, I'd rather have a loose rule along the lines of "not hacker news" comments should be relatively verbose in terms of what is wrong, rather than a simple, dismissive "not hacker news!".

I think the appearance of articles like this is a good indication that this sense of what's appropriate hasn't been transmitted (or at least my sense of it:-). This article is blatant politics/reddit bait, and is certainly not something that would be of more interest to hackers than to the general public.
Scala is not only means [A Ladder; Stairs],
But also A Rock, in Slavic languages...
And Marin (the creator of Scala) has polish last name,
and most probably is polish..
It's not clear that taxes has to make the balance. There is no entry for savings, for example, nor for debt service. I guess they classified "expenditures" as not including savings, as that's not really expending anything.
Very lightly.
more small vendors will start selling inmplementations...
whoever modded me down for writing that gets a fair chance (and my points) to explain why a suspicion of patent infringement would allow a discovery procedure to establish whether or not that is true.

see: http://www.nolopress.com/definition.cfm/Term/7E770269-7AEF-4...

http://ralphlosey.wordpress.com/2007/02/25/forensic-fishing-...
Another "How to make a Hackintosh" post. Ground breaking. People have been able to do this for quite a while now, I don't see how this is news at all.
Right. This is what's going into my notes (bit less Hard in science than originally possible, but I figure it's not any more than 20 or 30 years of technological progress, so not a particular sin against writing):

A ship/station/other space-bound facility can have "meditation rooms." These are simply spherical glass rooms exposed to space on the outside, with no artificial gravity. The glass is either permanently semi-frosted white, or, if the technological level of the facility permits, can vary itself from completely clear, through frosted, until completely solid in any color (or pattern) you wish. The adaptively-colored walls can thus be used as fully-surround 3D movie "projector". The air circulation in the room causes you to tend slowly toward the center, then float—rotating slowly—in silence. The room also comes with many different kinds of writing/drawing/painting utensils, for the whole of the "bubble" can be used as a large whiteboard (it can be zapped clean in an instant, no matter how indelible the instrument used to mark it). Because of this, these rooms are also frequently used for group brainstorming—and paintball.
Text messages are a scam. Especially when the company also charges you that .15 when you receive a message without consenting to it. And when there are no alternatives and little price competition because it's commonly accepted practice in the industry to make a huge windfall off of texting.
Yes, I do think they helped. Before HTML 2, validation didn't exist, so whether or not a document's markup made any sense was merely an opinion. "Best viewed with" was the order of the day because there was no way to know whether a browser would handle a document reasonably other than testing them together.

The web mostly interoperates now, but if we eliminate validation with HTML 5 I fully expect a return to the trainwreck we faced in 1995.
Something that I haven't seen mentioned: working a day job and living extremely frugally for a coupla years, then using the savings to fund your venture. You've already started your company, but perhaps it would be better in the long run to stop now and start again in a few years. It'd sure give you time to think about your ideas.
Given that a very disproportionate amount of the average US income is from a few people making a lot of money, I'm not convinced that looking at expenditures averaged over the population is in any way indicative of the situation of someone making median income. (According to Wikipedia/US Census Bureau, 2007 median household income was $50k, quite different from their average of $63k.)
Two words: selection bias.
... and meetup is still alive and kicking.
In other markets landlords and developers pay the broker fee, but maybe that opens the door for Redfin-like model, which touts discount brokers.

I'd argue that discount rental brokers, who mainly show apartments and screen tenants, are easier to commoditize than sales brokers, who play a significant role in a very expensive transaction.
Clarity - Eschew Extraneous Obfuscation
My assumption is that this method is used to get as much as possible off big companies

I think that your assumption is grossly inaccurate, and you should probably put some effort into basic sales and marketing concepts.

I will tell you that 9 times out of 10, when you think a corporation is trying to exploit some nefarious tactic to rip off some or all of their clients, that the reality is simply that you don't understand the process or are missing some key data point. IE: corporations are not all dark and evil. It's important to understand this and grasp it. Presumably you (the generic you) would like your venture to become large and sustainable and "big" someday.

Anyway, others in this thread have done a good job explaining some of the concepts of value-based selling and other reasons why for some products it is impractical to have a one size fits all pricing model.

To answer your question, though, one of the benefits of no price tag is that if you were to publish a median price, you might scare off some of your small or large clients from calling up. They would either think the product is too expensive and complex, or too simple and limited for their needs, when in reality neither is true. By talking with a sales agent a price that is fair and accurate for that customer can be established.
Especially true when you scroll to the very bottom and the end result is Audio and DVD not working.
Ask HN: What are you working on?
I know this question has been asked before in one way or another, but in the mean time projects have been started and finished. People have changed jobs or even fields, etc...

What are you working on? And where? Start-up? Academia? Your favorite MegaCorp?
PageRank is only interesting to people who do not understand it.