skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Toast might not be 'worth' $4 to you, and certainly the raw materials of toast don't cost $4, but that doesn't mean it doesn't provide $4 of value to the person buying it. That's what you have to measure. To me, a good cup of coffee and a nice breakfast in a quiet cafe with friendly staff is worth at least $4. And I choose to spend my money that way.

Valuing toast especially highly is not the problem with the tech industry.

The problem is inequality. While tech generates huge returns for investors people in tech will earn a lot. What needs to happen is that money paid needs to be spent - on toast or anything really - rather than being further invested. By spending, money moves around the system, gets taxed, gets redistributed between everyone relatively fairly. If tech workers earn more than they can reasonably spend then they end up investing it in houses and companies, meaning the money stays with the few and pushes the poles apart - the poor get poorer and the rich get richer. That's the problem.

If everyone bought $4 toast then all the coffeeshop workers would earn more and the tech workers would have less to spend on houses. That would be a good thing.
U.S. FTC Cracks Down on Customer Data Privacy Violations
This is only news because it has to do with a major tech company and not a minor one.

It's probably some of the google stocks the company had that's the stock bonus. Comparing to the income CEOs in the tech industry this is actually nothing special at all, unless we talk about major companies, like yahoo. Four of the lower CEOs at google got about 128 million this year.

CEOs of other major tech companies are billionaires in NETWORTH but at least they now the PR value of not giving their CEOs this much money. Examples of billionaires that have a relatively low pay, Sergei and Larry (1$), Steve Ballmer (1 million $) and the amazon CEO (about 50k $).
What would you say about an application-specific tracker? i.e. software that only takes screenshots of your work in a specific app, e.g. Xcode, and never of the desktop or any other window.

Let's say this is for personal use and not any big-brother scenarios. It periodically saves screenshots of a particular app, keeping only those screenshots that differ from the previous one and making in effect a compressed-time screencast of your work in that app.

This is something I've thought about making but I'm not sure how many people would find it useful. Any votes?
Yeah, although Wikipedia Zero does have real benefits, it is a bit problematic. I have wondered if a Creative Commons Zero policy might be better.

I'm not for DRM, but if we have to have licensing baked into the web, let's use it for good.
Nonsense. I don't know about this COO at Yahoo, but when you take decisions at the top of a multiple billion dollar company that will significantly impact the topline or bottomline of your company, of course your job is worth millions of dollars, because your level of impact is way higher than the janitor cleaning the floor in your offices.
He's not hellbanned most likely. He used the forbidden "mast##b##ing" word, which will instantly kill a post on HN. For some reason.
Toronto building guardian? But note that it doesn't necessarily exist as the whole arrangement is a reaction to a specific combination of extremely high regular rents and laws that make it hard to evict squatters but allow people to live permanently in office buildings while paying rent and bein evictable on short notice. If any of those factors doesn't hold, there will be no such "guardians".

For example, I am sure it is not possible in Germany because tenancy contracts that include short-notice eviction clauses are void.
I can't say anything about the 'per week' or similar time interval units, but hasn't Steve Jobs created huge amounts of wealth for society through jobs creation/economic trades? and for that has been worth his salary? (that is only one example...)
Datacenter as Computer: Introduction to the Design of Warehouse-Scale Machines
if Google becomes a mess and Yahoo keeps rising and rising, then we'll know how valuable she was.
According to the Yahoo wikipedia page, their yearly revenue is 4.98 billion or about 96 million per week. So to make himself worth 1 million per week he just has to increase revenue by a hair over 1%.

Doesn't seem outrageous put like that, or have I completely misunderstood?
Are You Investing Or Gambling?
How San Francisco creates its own housing crisis
San Francisco's solution is to allow short-term double parking for commercial deliveries. It's less infuriating to other drivers when it's explicitly legal.
The law was changed in 2012 for residential buildings http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squatting_in_England_and_Wales#...
All it realls proves is that "deciding to do something" is not the simple, conscious event that it seems to us.
Well this depends on how you define 'worth' I suppose.

Certainly individuals can make or lose more than a million in a week for a company - for example the CEO of Ratners, Soros, the London Whale or other traders who make millions in one trade (or lose it). Likewise a salesperson might manage to seal a deal worth 100s of millions in future revenue over a couple of meetings. As someone on the creative side, this galls me somewhat, but it is nonetheless true - some positions do potentially bring in far more money for a company than others.

You may question whether they should be or need to be paid that much, particularly if other workers in the same company are paid very little, but I think it's indisputable that individuals can influence profits to that degree in some positions.
Where there is something out of ordinary business should see it as an opportunity to change and grow. I know it's wishful thinking to expect something like that form McD, but it could easily be opportunity to give back something. Not everything in life is about making bucks.
I'm try to imagine, as a founder, saying this to a VC:

"In order to start this new company, I'll need to leave my current job. which pays very well and where I've spent years moving up the org chart.
This new company is very risky. We might not hit our performance targets.
So... I'll need a golden parachute, ya know, just in case I can't cut it."

I don't need to tell you what the VC's logical response would be. Too bad that logic doesn't apply to "top management".
Is there some type designer that makes extra-gross hangeul typefaces for DPRK use?

I swear I can differentiate between NK and SK with nothing but type specimens.
>I have a great business idea: luxury sanitation. White-glove garbage collectors and high-end toilet systems.

Except for the little fact that high end toilet systems are already a thing in places like japan. (See Toto's offerings)
Considering the stock went up 150% would say so, from a PR point of view, definitely not.
Chinese Central Bank Official: “We Don’t Want to Suppress Bitcoin”
Plenty of doctors literally and directly save more than one human life per week. No one would argue a human life is worth less than a million dollars. So, there :-)
If you followed the other links on that page it becomes a little clearer (
http://www.businessinsider.com/after-only-15-months-marissa-... http://www.businessinsider.com/how-yahoos-new-coo-got-his-62... and http://www.businessinsider.com/yahoo-coo-henrique-de-castro-... ). By the way I recommend you to watch that 2-minute video fragment in the last one. It really helps to get grasp of what is he like.

So, first off it isn't that surprising that he gets all that money after all (it's kinda natural because he is fired). Also, as he is fired, his work at Yahoo obviously wasn't worth that kind of money.

But while these money aren't disaster for Yahoo, just to think of it — it's huge. I wonder what he was actually supposed to do to somebody (Mayer) would like to pay him that kind of money so he would work for Yahoo. I mean, yeah, we all know that operating business like Yahoo isn't kids game, but just think of it: why nobody gives you that money so you would work for them?
“MTV for Mobile” Mindie raises $1.2M led by SV Angels & Dave Morin
Oracle to ship Java 8 in March, even with bugs
I found it worthwhile reading a differing perspective on the story: http://www.psmag.com/navigation/health-and-behavior/toast-st...
Ireland now has the ‘second-smallest’ forest area in Europe
Thanks, man!

Fingers crossed :-)
GC effect on throughput and latency explained
Europe to Ditch Climate Protection Goals
Key difference: de Castro was (presumably) poached by Marissa. This is pure speculation, but one way for her to have done it would be to offer downside protection.
How San Francisco creates it's own housing crisis
What is your type of social sharer?
A VC’s 10 startup secrets he wishes he had known as an entrepreneur
Windows XP is Jewish?
تفاصيل نتائج اختبارات القدرات العامة 1435 -2014 من موقع القياس
Happy 25th Tcl
The difference is, the candlemakers who formed a company are taking a risk with their capital, whereas the candlemakers who formed a union are getting all the upside while someone else takes the risk. Same reasons the airline pilot's union is not interested in forming its own airline, despite this being the obvious way to ensure its people are treated fairly.
Use your eyes, sort by size.

(More pragmatically, try to estimate who really has the power in a situation; who has other options? Who is dependant on whom? Remember that a company is not a person and does not have physical or emotional needs.)
Why doesn't the press love you?
Me, personally, I use my judgment. Others go by whomever has the cleverest lawyers or the most well-paid lobbyists.

Or you can cop out and say that since there is no perfect way to write a law relating to this, there should be no law. Which is effectively the law of the jungle. Some people prefer that.
You ever heard of union-busting? I mean, since when did tech workers form unions without being fired en masse?
How can we reignite the FA Cup?
No idea what you're talking about. The number of people 'playing the startup game to strike it rich' is a minority? I mean, yeah, people want to change the world but I'm sure they want to get loaded as well in the process.
Change of subject: I'm very interested in Bayesian modelling. Would you be as kind as to provide me with some resources to learn the ins and outs of this?

Also, I feel like akinator.com is using a Bayesian tree. Would you confirm this? What algorithm do you think they are using?
Having used the internet for the last maybe 16 years, I've seen a lot of disturbing shit but I could not finish watching this.
Yes, the scale is unique for many reasons, one of the most important being that most of internet backbone including consumer services are located in the US jurisdiction. Your pro tip is worth nothing.
Direct Invoice's official launch
A new generation online invoicing application. Manage multiple accounts, currencies and languages in one app. Very simple to use and very flexible according your needs.
Spotify explained
This is a repost from 4 months ago. Original thread is here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6253248
Thanks!
yay censorship
These are great and are excellent introductions to Clojure(Script) that should be in the standard LightTable download.
Show HN: An Open-Source Data Science Curriculum
In my experience it's slowly becoming a 'weird' flag but linkedn is more often cited as weirder flag.
When people want to pay large sums of money for 'quality' quite frankly that's great.

We are in a world with resources diminishing and a jobs market decreasing.

Artisan style products are our best bet at keeping it at bay for a while.
With many of these points I completely agree, I also believe that there's data to back them up. The following however:

- the generate revenue very early on in their lives
- they keep expenses low

Is in direct contrast with many of the most successful startups. As far as I know, Google, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Skype don't fit this criteria.
The question is whether teens actually are a critical demographic to Facebook.

Others here have already suggested that the main selling point of Facebook (keep in touch with friends and relatives whom you don't personally meet often) is not appealing to teenagers who see their friends daily and already have more contact with their parents than they'd ideally want.
Lets also not forget that Fed prints tens of billions of dollars per month. All this money has to go somewhere and today a good chunk of it goes to all sorts of investors buying stocks and pre-IPO shares of tech startups. That's the only logical explanation for crazy valuation of profitless Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and others. Also, the only explanation for why most people producing real goods on factories and farms in US and all over the world are getting poorer while guys coding services that waste money for years still get huge salaries.

I'm not saying that all of Silicon Valley is producing worthless stuff. I'm saying there is a distortion on the market caused by "free money" (compared to money that has to be saved and withdrawn from others, less profitable activities). Without it SV would still be a great and pricey place, but not hugely at the expense of everyone else like it is today.

PS. Before we start a flame about "crazy libertarians", consider what's more crazy: me questioning Fed's policies, or the fact that war in Iraq costed $6 trillion and killed 1 mln people (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War). That wouldn't be possible at all if the Fed couldn't create money out of thin air. Once you deal with morality of this situation, only then please criticize me about my opinion on QE and other monetary policies in general.
It is -- you can just type in an email or phone number in the normal Facebook search box.
Exactly! I've had friends living in school buildings(huge!) empty post offices, bank buildings, even a church!

The guy in the church stayed there for about 4 years...
No more time limits on Spotify
Monty is a boss. He's creating a series of videos on digital signals which I heartily recommend: http://www.xiph.org/video/
Better that we spend our money on high-quality versions of "the simplest facets of life", like coffee, than doing weird things that are just status symbols, like opera.

And I don't think it's at all fair to say small businesses languish as a result. Small businesses are booming by providing these things.
That's totally not my experience. Yes, it requires more space/RAM, but in fairly regular for today 4GB RAM machines, Win 7/Win 8 fly compared to Win XP with 3GB RAM.

So, my anecdata sees yours. Any real data/benchmarks to share?
I feel that the definition of nice is too broad here.

Bill Gates is certainly ruthless when it comes to business. You don't want to come to him if you work at microsoft and your project is failing.

However I'm sure on a personal level he is very nice, and he is certainly doing a lot of good with his foundation.
IBeacon - bridging the gap between e-commerce and brick and mortar retail
I never realized USA was such a cheap place.

Here in Moscow, toast with coffee might easily run 10$ and that raises no eyebrows.
Squatters' rights? What's next, muggers' rights?

I'm glad to see a turn back from punishing the victims of crime to punishing the perpetrators. Perhaps now the government can do something about prosecutions of people for attacking burglars in their own home, another longstanding victim-punishing law.
At least as of July 2013, the appreciation in the stock price was due to the increase in the value of Alibaba and Yahoo Japan.

"But Yahoo’s turnaround remains very much a work in progress. Although Yahoo’s stock price has soared by a whopping 73% since Mayer become CEO, that gain is almost entirely attributable to investments the company has in two Asian companies, the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba and Yahoo Japan. Yahoo’s core advertising business remains sluggish amid intense competition from rival Internet giants like Google and Facebook."

http://business.time.com/2013/07/16/yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayers...
> If they lose 3 million teens in America they'll gain 3 million in Japan or Africa or China or Russia or India or etc.

They won't. China, Japan and Russia all have their own deeply entrenched social networks; Facebook is not going to gain much penetration there.
GotoAnything for Chrome Tabs
Source code: https://github.com/jiyinyiyong/tab-searching

Currently it only searches among Tabs.
Saw so many full breakfast specials advertised in London for $5-7. In Australia, the big breakfast without a drink is often $18-22. A juice or milkshake would be $6-8. I'd dream of $4 toast!
This blog post about North Korea by Sophie Schmidt, the daughter of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, is pretty interesting too, with lots of weird tidbits about the use of technology:

https://sites.google.com/site/sophieinnorthkorea/home
Agreed!

In Stockholm you can pay $6 for a cup of coffee alone. Ok maybe not cup of black coffee but $6 for a cup of cappuccino is no problem.
Its a forensic science post about how law enforcement can compromise TC. I'd be very worried if the people they were targeting weren't suspects.
INFOGRAPHIC: Brazil World Cup 2014 - HTML 5
As a founder, you take a gamble and the potential payoff is your shares. As an incoming exec hired afterwards you are likely to get options only, for a far smaller portion.

That said, not a golden parachute and certainly not the kind of amounts in this article, but I have insisted on clauses related to salary increases in agreements with VC's in the past. In my first VC funded started, we'd all agreed on a fairly low salary to keep costs down initially, but I pointed out it was not sustainable and that I wanted a clause in to put a floor on our salary adjustments at a specific point (I don't remember if it was 6 months or 12 months).

They tried to pull the "oh, sure, I'm sure we can adjust salaries later, it's just a minor thing, no need to put it in the agreement". But they yielded when I then came back with a two line amendment to the agreement and told them "since it's such a small thing, you won't mind if I insert these two lines, will you, since I'm sure you were serious when you agreed we'd be able to do the raises?"

I don't think they particularly liked me afterwards, but I'm glad I insisted given what I saw from one of the VC's afterwards.
I can understand why this would benefit the jobs market, but in what way you this help prevent "diminishing resources"? It's my understanding that quality products tend to be more resource and energy intensive to create, unless possibly in the case where these quality products are explicitly advertised as eco friendly etc.
Red Star OS is available from
http://www.openingupnorthkorea.com/DPRK%20Red%20Star.iso

Once found it through the wikipedia page about it. Installed it in a VM and ran it full screen to scare some of my colleagues :-)
You are making an assumption that those decisions generally do something nice for the company. There is an army of people whose only known accomplishment is getting in the right place at the right purely out of luck and riding a luck wave. They themselves would have contributed nothing to the that wave.

Once they do that, its often assumed that all their success was their own work. To expect such people to build anything of real value is a expectations gone too wrong.

While they are at the top, they socialize with their equivalent highly paid buddies. Most of them are in the same league as their's. Its basically a mutual-protection club, in which you need to take care of each other.

>>level of impact is way higher than the janitor cleaning the floor in your offices.

In case of people like these, if exec was swapped with janitor, it would make 0 difference. The Janitor would probably even perform better than the exec.
This is brilliant. Somewhere between art-hitsorical and truly investigative journalism of the phenomenon. Thanks for posting it up!
> [..] that cater to the bored and overprivileged, peppering their descriptions with buzzwords like “organic” and “fair trade” and “artisanal,” the most meaningless of them all.

Call me a socialist, a hippie or whatever but fair trade isn't something meaningless.
If that was the idea, why the hell would they agree to a contract that lets him keep all of it after working for them only a fraction of the planned time?
"Scot free"

Worth noting that squatting was pretty much never legal in Scotland - although we do have the Right to Roam over land which I don't think the rest of the UK has.
Before making any conclusion, compare the ratios of your founder salary/your startup's revenue and of De Castro salary/Yahoo's revenue.

I would guess the conclusion is that even that "$25k/year" may be too much and De Castro was ok.

Unfair to compare absolute values of both parachutes but not both companies sizes.
Isn't it true about any money that goes into North Korea?
According to ESR: "Seymour Cray, designer of the Cray line of supercomputers, was among the greatest. He is said once to have toggled an entire operating system of his own design into a computer of his own design through its front-panel switches. In octal. Without an error. And it worked."

http://catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/hacker-history...
Don't underestimate showing status. Bragging around of the artisan coffee you take every morning can be every bit about showing status as any other thing. Humans are very good at that...
A topic having loads of information answering your question:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7068672
https://github.com/datasciencemasters/go/
Opera is a weird thing and just a status symbol? You deserve to pay $30 for your coffee! But maybe it's the cultural divide between <fill in yourself>
French Riviera, the price would be similar or slightly higher. No SF-like big tech industry, but lots of rich Frenchmen and Russians, and tourists from all the world, who pump the prices up.
Geograph have gamified photo density heatmaps for the UK and Ireland:

http://www.geograph.org.uk/

[i.e. You can earn points by submitting images for an empty grid square or where there haven't been any recent images]
Oh my... another meditation on the issue of free will, and the existential angst we would experience if we learned that our choices are deterministic. Personally, however, I think that the whole question of free-will vs. determinism is a false dilemma. For me, another issue is more important:

Determinism vs. randomness.

If my choices are not deterministic, they must be random. I would rather be deterministic than random. In any case, if they are random, it means that I don't have free will either.

I like to think that all my choices are a result of the past; my genetics, my childhood upbringing (that I don't even remember, but which formed the neural pathways in my brain), my early memories, my environment, education, experiences, friends, knowledge that I have absorbed from the world... In each and every moment, I make a choice, which is the best choice I can make given my brain power/structure, my motivations and the external constraints given (is it raining? can I fly? when do I need to pay the rent). Even my motivations are largely determined by my genetics - avoid pain, strive for pleasure. I definitely hope that my choices are not random.

How does morality come into play, if our choices are deterministic? It doesn't - my morality is my internal concept that I use to make choices more quickly/easily. I don't impose my morality on other people and I don't really care how they make their choices, but I support different forms of punishment that modify the incentives of other people so that the society can function.

Finally, I don't think that the future is predictable, even though it is deterministic. Like you don't know what 1048936701349 * 13046871435 is before you calculate it, like even the computer cannot predict the result before calculating it (i.e. the fastest calculation algorithm is also the fastest prediction algorithm), the same way we cannot predict the future before it happens, i.e. before the universe "calculates" it.
It used to be, but doing so to someone's home (not business premises) was made illegal in 2012.