skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I used volunteer for the Red Cross. Several times a week I would work with families after they had house fires. Whatever money we spent on them (clothes, shoes, food, medications, a place to stay while the found new housing, etc.) was nothing compared to spending time helping them make a plan to get their life back together. It reached the point that I always wrapped up with them by making them promise that they weren't going to just "lock up" and sit in the hotel for a couple days watching TV and avoiding life.

I know of a local church that now has a career helping program. One night a week they'll get people together with others that can help with resumes, networking, and financial planning.
Sounds like someone overheard a feature, didn't understand it and then misinterpreted the example.

A direct pay-pal knockoff would have nothing to do with Apple's core business (selling hardware). And to be at all plausible, would have to support transactions that have nothing to do with their hardware/software ecosystem.

Microsoft is the sort of company that might have been distracted into building a financial arm during its years of plenty. Apple really isn't. That sort of absolute diversification is antithetical to how Apple operates.
But the oath says (emphasis mine):

"I, _____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will
support and defend the Constitution of the United States
against all enemies, foreign *and domestic*"

Not the government, not the Army itself or even the President, the Constitution.
I never actually developed note-taking skills. After a semester or two, I gave up on even trying.

Basically, my calculations usually look like this:

interesting quantity < mess[0] < mess[1] < ... < mess[n] < final result

I've found it's very easy to copy mess[j] to a new line, edit, and repeat. It's harder to rewrite mess[j] on paper. Storing complicated expressions in emacs registers is also quite nice.
Or, they'd be even more "worthless" now.
The more you read the crazier it gets. I had to stop reading after a couple of chapters because of the caps and horrible writing.

Before spending more than 5 minutes on this, read "his vision" on this chapter: http://www.speakeasy.org/~lion/nb/html/doc010.html
Unfortunately, there are a huge number of corporate environments that have virtually no reason to upgrade their browsing platforms. Many of these environments don't even really have a technical reason to not do the upgrade, they are just administered by overworked staff and upgrading IE6 to something newer and safer is just at the bottom of the list.

The bottom line is that until the end users who have to use IE6 every day become inconvenienced enough (in the form of sites blocking them out, not warning them) or the people who pay these IT admins actually think it's a priority, we're not going to make much headway on this issue.

With that said, I think that initiatives like this are a great start. What I would like to see is a distributed technical effort to encourage upgrades, which is what they are doing, followed up a technical effort to block access to IE6 starting on a specific date. Let the note of encouragement that participants place on their sites let users know that unless their browser is upgraded, they will be unable to access the site as of June 1, 2010.

Eventually these IT admins will be placed in the position of having to choose between keeping IE6 to support their legacy intranet applications and upgrading IE6 because third party sites have started to implement functionality that IE6 doesn't support.
Discussion has started here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=742029
And what would be a good financial penalty for physically modifying a hunk of plastic and semiconductor that you bought?
Source please.
Also, statistically, do gun owners live in unsafer environments to begin with, hence the perceived need for ownership?
At my day job we have some (unpatched?) Windows 2000 machine (no service packs) running IE 5.5 (I think?). I carry around a flash drive with a Portable Firefox (among other apps) install on it for browsing at work.

They're 2.0 gHz P4 Dell machines if you're really interested in the specs. :p
Does anyone know if Netflix is moving to a burn-on-demand model like Redbox?
This is the same old trick that AT&T used back in the 60s and 70s to somehow pass legislation making it illegal to plug anything non-AT&T into your phone jack: the stability of the network. Yet any GSM expert would tell you that what Apple has to say is complete bollocks.

If you've been following Apple's ongoing battle with the EFF, you can see what the real motivation for Apple's propaganda is: Apple has a series of tightly controlled revenue streams flowing through the iPhone, and they don't want that closed ecosystem threatened by the open source community. Movies, music, videos, applications, and other digital content connects the device directly in with their iTunes revenue streams and helps create a complete "suite" of products from Apple that users will be locked into purchasing.

Since the iPhone's release in 2007, developers have threatened that chain ... not with illegal pirating (although that's going to happen regardless), but rather with something Apple fears more than piracy: competition. The developer community has put together a complete community environment for the iPhone including Unix world, software repository, and even their own compiler and tool chain... and they did it long before Apple ever concocted their own. And developers distributing their own software are creating applications that can do more than AppStore apps, lending themselves to many times the number of sales that they'd otherwise get in the AppStore. That is at the heart of what threatens Apple, just as competing telco equipment was at the heart of what threatened AT&T back before they were broken up.

In reality, a jailbroken iPhone is no more unsafe than a laptop running an AT&T air card. In fact, a jailbroken iPhone runs more like a regular computer than one fresh out of the box. This all comes down to revenue for Apple and their bending over for AT&T. Apple will do anything, and say anything apparently, to protect that revenue stream from ever having to face real competition.
This attitude seems hard to understand for people who didn't grow up poor. You need a certain amount of money to get over the threshold of not living paycheck-to-paycheck. There are several ways you can get it: grow up while already over this threshold (if you could call your parents and ask them for 10K if you had a real need, you're over it), borrow the money (for example, for college), get lucky, or live far below your means while saving it up.

The time when you can borrow the money is a limited window, usually, around 17-23. If you don't understand that this is important and possible, the window vanishes.

Living far below your means while saving up money is not only very difficult to do, culturally, for Americans, but takes a long time at minimum wage or some small multiple of it, and you have to resist the urge to do things like buying business casual clothes in the hopes of getting a better job, or buying a newer car in the hopes that the maintenance will be lower enough that it pays for itself, etc. Those things can work, but they fall under "get lucky". :)
Well, a couple of years ago I was forced to use IE6 on a 500mhz machine running windows2000 in a project in the local government.

It was not pretty, although I managed to install XEmacs and survive.
Yeah, you do get the point. It allows people to endorse products so that other people can "window shop" what people like.
Britain has. Using or taking part in an action which uses American WP munitions could (theoretically) be a court-martial offence.
I'm not sure if you're being facetious or not, but it's because 7 & 8 are much more standards compliant and take way less time to hack on to get working. Plus they have a huge market share.
That's exactly the situation we had at the place I used to work. Management believed it was better to deal with the limitations of legacy software than with the expense of modernizing it. As of 2006, when I left, they were even still using Windows 98 on a handful of PCs because there was no reliable way to get all the data out of one of the applications and the software vendor had gone out of business.
So I wonder why Opera isn't that list of suggested replacements? Minority browser, for sure, but it has worked pretty well in my few stints with it.
2^n chicks at the same time, man.
I think he means why not get rid of IE all together? 7 & 8 are more standards compliant than 6 (which isn't saying much), but they still are lagging behind Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera.
I met Mr Bulatov at the Maker Faire (why do you Americans think it's cute to employ faux-medieval spellings?). His pieces are even more impressive in reality.
Yeah, I was reading that, and the bit about having 8 beers every week after collecting his unemployment check, and the bit about buying 4 packs of cigarettes, and various other things, and thinking - wtf? No wonder you're broke. Get your priorities straight.
tcmalloc: http://goog-perftools.sourceforge.net/doc/tcmalloc.html
http://mituzas.lt/2006/12/06/google-perftools-tcmalloc-squid...
Here's an anecdote from my experience:

The majority of the users of my company's web application use IE6 on Windows 2000. Additionally, many of these computers have Vista stickers on them, and are quite powerful. Their IT groups already have established practices to support the machines, and they are used almost exclusively to surf the web and run software that was purchased 5 years ago. Our users aren't even unhappy, as their work does not center around a computer; thus, the corporate IT infrastructure has no motivation to upgrade them.

That said, we still pressure them to upgrade, and I'll be extremely happy when they eventually do.
As of how recent?

As far as I know all government machines are running FDCC(Federal Desktop Core Configuration) and the machines I've seen run IE7 with many IT departments recommending Firefox.
I have several applications in the AppStore. Among them is a ballistics calculator that caters to only a small group of people. I've found that the same basic rules apply to the AppStore, that apply elsewhere in life: work hard, design a quality product, and support it... you'll make good money. Word of mouth is the best advertising you can have. Have an occasional sale when sales slow down and that's all you need to know.

You don't have to spam, advertise, or write a bunch of useless rubber-dog-poop toys. Just make something that's good quality and keep supporting it.
Can you explain the difference? Because I'm not seeing it.
Yeah, arena allocators are great. I wouldn't immediately go and write my own from scratch, though: talloc (http://talloc.samba.org/), Postgres, and APR all implement variants on the arena idea that you can copy from liberally.
This isn't unique to the poor:

However, while past studies cover a wide range of choice situations, there is a remarkable
consensus in the literature that future outcomes are discounted (or undervalued) relative to
immediate outcomes. Put differently, an identical (positive) outcome will become increasingly
attractive the closer it is located in time to the time of decision-making.

See: http://www.mit.edu/people/shanefre/Marketing%20Letters.pdf

Also:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/magazine/19Science-t.html
I sort-of agree with you, but these people were hardly poor a year ago! Their household income easily exceeded $75K! And, it was obvious that they had considerable disposable income.
Tried this for about a month and ended up with a drop in conversions and slightly higher cost/conversion, so it doesn't work for everyone.
Boy, it's really hard when you are using a digital phone system where all the beeps you hear back are identical =\
Sifting Through the HTML 5 Hubbub
If you read both paragraphs in the Web App section, I made almost immediate comparison between the two:

* (Django, Pylons vs Rails, Merb)
* (web.py vs sinatra)
* (Beautiful Soup vs HPricot)
* (Paste vs Mongrel)
* (Moneta vs Shove)
* (Psyco vs RubyInline)

I would defend myself and say that all these modules are useful for web development. For example:

* You never had to scrape other site's HTML and parse the elements for useful information?

* You never curious about hot-and-shiny key value databases for work?

* You never felt like a certain function could have been optimized and make your web app faster?

Especially in these two paragraphs, I actually use all the ruby modules I mentioned in those paragraphs (minus merb & DataMapper), and I use all the Python modules mentioned as well.

For other non-web related or modules that I haven't use frequent enough, i set it aside and "downplay" it in the article.

Lastly, no amount of blog post could do justice on these two languages. The best way to know about these languages is to use it to hack on something.
Baby steps. Baby steps.
OP here. First off, I see a lot of the comments have a very similar theme. 5 months is too soon to give up. Well, I haven't given up, I've only decided there is no business model without overhauling the concept (which I am not prepared to do for the moment).

I have watched traffic, and the habits of the users. The bounce rate could be lowered by tweaking some things, but there is not enough to bring users back on a weekly, or even monthly basis. I am open to suggestions, and will continue to watch my traffic. I have too many other decent ideas to sink more time into a fun site that has no business model (and don't tell me ad-supported is a valid option).
This puts a lot of consultants out of business :/
GM requires the use of IE6, or it at least did when my father last worked there (about a year and a half, two years ago). It could have changed by now but considering they were just moving from 95 to 98 when he left I doubt it.
Before you change to Google Voice for voicemail, please note there is no way to make GV pick up on the first ring. If a call 'times out' from your cellphone it will then ring another few times on GV EVEN IF YOU HAVE DO NOT DISTURB ENABLED. With my phone the wait is so long it's impractical to expect callers to hold on for it.

Please understand, I think GV is primarily good but for many of us this 'lack of feature' is a deal breaker.
>On the other hand, I found Pimsleur and similar methods of learning languages to be semi-helpful and possibly worth spending money on.

Arg. Sorry but I have to disagree. I used Pimsleur to get up and running quickly with Dutch, and later realized that (other than for practicing basic pronunciation) it's worthless. That was two/three years ago, and now that I'm at a much higher level, I've gone back and listened to the phrases they wanted me to learn.

Junk. Some phrases were severely antiquated, words were mis-translated so you may be saying a phrase and you actually don't know what you're saying, etc. The only thing it's good for is listen/read/repeat pronunciation, and that's not so good when driving.

Rosetta Stone's a bit better since you're listening/reading/repeating, and learning some real vocabulary, but you're spot on: it feels like it's for kids. As far as language learning software goes, I only found one that was worth anything, and it came with a Dutch textbook (CODE series... Dutch only). It has movies/audio/text with quizzes afterward, vocabulary/grammar exercises, and listen/repeat/playback feature.

Pro-tip for the OP: Languages are living things, you can't learn them by yourself. Any native speaker, no matter how unprofessional or unskilled at language teaching, is much more help then some software tool. Your office cleaning lady (who's probably better at Spanish then you'll ever be) earns less than $10/hour. For the same price of Rosetta Stone Spanish 1-5 ($700) you could have 70 hours of speaking time with a really interesting person.

I found a Berkeley exchange grad student who was teaching Dutch for $15/hour on the side, learned a lot, and we ended up falling in love with each other. Not saying that will happen for you, but it reinforces my 'find a native speaker' method. :)
I don't understand why people up-voted you while you are not even able to delete an img tag.
That seems like an awfully complicated way of doing it, why not use a digital voice recorder (your pc/cellphone) to record each set of beeps and play it back.
Dead President's Twitter Account
I feel must add the obligatory thought - "Yeah, because making jailbreaking illegal will definitely discourage those who want to crash transmission towers."
Programming means that sometimes you have to snap two blocks together
Because to recommend that people leave IE6 is to work together with Microsoft (a company which has no more desire to keep supporting IE6 than anyone else) rather than making a large and powerful enemy.

Because anyone who is still using IE6 is statistically likely to have reasons (real or imagined) for sticking with browsers in the IE family. Why fight that, when the payoff for merely getting them out of IE6 is so great?

And because any program to get people to switch browsers subtly encourages people to try something other than IE. 100% of the world's IE6 users are IE users, but less than 100% of world's former IE6 users are IE users.
The alternative to such dictatorship over own content could be buying own domain and running own mail server. However, most people won't run such system, nor would they accept implied costs.

Or you can buy your own domain, and have an email service provider, of which gmail is a mostly free (cost wise) one, host it. I recently switched from running my own mail server to using gmail, and it was simple.

The idea of using "twitter style" (guh!) @some.name addresses loses a lot of functionality, like throw away or customized addresses, that perhaps many people don't use (but more people should). Plus, what importance does the @ have to do with this scheme? Just use some.name. One advantage of hierarchical email system, of user@domain, is that there isn't a landrush to get exclusive access to the user portion of the name. Two people named Joe can exist at different domains without conflict.
Just my opinion but I think your statement is pretty immature. It seems rather that for some reason you want to put them down and I don't believe its because you think it will help them.

Let them be responsible for themselves. It doesn't help you to criticize others.
Nope.. that compatibility mode is for IE7, not IE6. (And my understanding is that it's not even a perfect emulation of IE7.)

Microsoft's official recommendation for developers is to install IE6 in a VM if you need to test compatibility. It's that bad.
One of my first jobs during University involved automating windows interoperability for a small Linux distribution. I must agree with the author, "Interoperability with Windows is hard. But somebody has to do it.", I'm just glad I don't have to do that anymore :)
We'll have to rethink things long before that.

Once we achieve workable computer vision, automation is going to rapidly replace all non-creative human labor. And that's a lot closer than the technology required to make even an at-home lab* capable of turning out a copy of, say, an mp3 player. (* Allowing for separate machines that print circuits, build cases, etc)

Less complex/capable 'replicators' that turn out spare parts won't be that disruptive. The first world doesn't fix modern goods much as-is. When we do, we're tend to pay disproportionately more for the knowledge than the parts.
Why do so many people, on reading a piece like this, immediately start to argue about who's fault it all is? Is that really the most important aspect of the situation? Is determination of fault likely to lead to a solution?
I'll take a shot. In his post there is not one word about revenue, cashflow, plan for monetization , etc. It's the typical "Let's get more users" gauge of success.

Businesses make money.

Just look at exactly what he is saying. He is talking about his lack of user traction as a reason for why his startup fail. i.e. "my startup failed because i don't have enough users".

Businesses fail for one reason and one reason only.
They spend more money than they make.

How is this a business?
Sometimes the question isn't even "do we spend time and money to update our applications", because sometimes the code for the applications is long gone, along with the company that wrote it, and all they have left is the compiled code running on some server in a back closet.
Well, they're fairly useless on their own, it's mostly using them in conjunction with other methods of learning (i.e. a good textbook or two, a few movies, podcasts, games, talking to native speakers) that makes them helpful because you get a little practice where you might not otherwise.

Not sure if the quality of these language learning tools depend on the language being taught and perhaps with individual learning preferences as well. I thought Pimsleur for Mandarin was acceptable and similar to the texts I was using, and since I had the most trouble listening and speaking Mandarin (as opposed to reading/writing), it was helpful to me. But again, disclosure: most of the language programs and resources I've tried were free through school, which was immensely helpful in deciding what I liked and didn't like. I'm not entirely sure I'd buy Pimsleur either ;)
depressing and actually not an isolated case. the story highlights problems in America: laziness, gluttony, little or no education, and worse... inability to fix their own problems that do have solutions. of course, the problems are always someone else's...
I really felt bad for this family until she turned the job down. In my mind, that changed everything.

That's understandable to me; she'd essentially be paying to work. That would both worsen their immediate cash situation and make it harder for her to search for a decent job. The real problem is the ridiculous incentives caused by unemployment payments that immediately go to zero once you have any source of income.

The point where I lost sympathy was when the guy was making a good salary and was determined to spend every cent of it. If you're living paycheck to paycheck in the best of times, you are going to get screwed, it's just a question of when.
Hm, we didn't learn about that stuff in chemistry. It was more about learning the names of different molecules and pouring stuff from one beaker into another. Maybe you were educated in a better school system?
This I don't doubt. I'd rather have a dollar today than a dollar tomorrow. It's that this family applied such a steep discount factor that is problematic.

One also shouldn't think of the discount factor just in terms of dollars spent. We can compare the pleasure today of drinking Pepsi, smoking, etc. with the probable pain later associated with losing one's home, etc. How many units of future pain is that Pepsi worth?
At private courses yes, but the green fees at the public golf course in Golden Gate Park here in San Francisco are $14 weekday and $20 weekend. I doubt it would be more expensive to play in Northern Indiana.
That is correct, they are not the same thing. That statement is coming from my use case, where I, have so far, only use them for manipulating objects during run time.

Be it calling function, setting attributes, or adding extra functionality by including modules.
I think you could actually build a Twilio app to cheat... if only there were more hours in the day, I'd try it!