skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You just complicated email by adding money and monetary transactions to it. This approach would also do a horrible disservice to the roughly 6.7+ billion people with not much money; it assumes someone's communications are to be judged primarily by how much money they have or whether they have bitcoins, rather than the value of what they have to say. Making communication over the Internet more expensive (when the opposite should occur), breaks the Internet and drastically devalues one of the things it's best at and was designed for.

It would be like charging every visitor to your web site, to deal with scrappers, form spammers or dos attacks.

There are already excellent solutions to every possible scenario the money approach would supposedly solve.
How did this make it onto Hacker News? Squabbles like this happen at every university (or at least the ones I have been to). Universities are often quite conservative places with a tendency to restrict student activity beyond what is sensible and students often fight back.

This is a run of the mill occurrence.
Linode hacked again?
The merits of charging CPU time are arguable, but adding monetary costs to sending email is absolutely immoral. Especially something like Bitcoin, which has a steep learning curve.

Unless your goal is to transform email into a system more closely resembling snail mail, but for cipherpunks.
Source? AFAIK they use over a hundred metrics including PageRank and what you're talking about.
I had this exact same idea about a week ago! You can create a forwarding email address that has a payment barrier to sent emails through.

Regarding point number 3, I think the service should charge a small fixed fee for each accepted email not some percent. This would enable users to create services based upon email alone.
You could charge people for support or consulting with your entire operation occurring over email.
I think the author of the article used it intentionally. The premise of the article is that sometimes developers find themselves having to or choosing to do a death march despite knowing it's unsustainable long-term, and there are ways to make the death march more productive and mitigate the negative effects.
Homeownership is about psychology. Taking out reckless drug use, the #1 predictor of whether a person will have mental health issues (from depression to schizophrenia) is the number of involuntary moves due to adverse economic circumstances. That feeling of being "chased", when coupled with low social status and economic failure, does psychiatric harm that takes decades to recover from-- especially in children.

Owning a home makes people feel safe. Renters know they can be priced out at the end of a lease cycle. (Most of the yuppie "luxury" buildings, because they target people who work obscene hours, pack an automatic 15-20% increase in the first year, just because people hate moving.) Owning may be a worse deal on average (expectancy) but it doesn't pack as much volatility.

The error is in the idea that homeownership provides protection. As the OP points out, a mortgage is just renting from a bank. If you have a catastrophic income loss, you're just as exposed to eviction. This can even be true if your mortgage is paid off-- if you lose the ability to pay property taxes.

I don't like being an involuntary renter (read: I made too many bad calls in my 20s) but homeownership in a city is almost always a bad idea. It's an investment that (a) you cannot move and (b) other people can fuck with by, say, building ugly things near it. The obscene cost of housing in most cities has far more to do with NIMBYism than natural supply/demand issues, when the real problem is just that urban homeownership is a pretty raw deal.

This analysis didn't even cover upkeep and transaction costs, or (even worse) the career-altering loss of geographic mobility. Urban homeownership is entirely about prestige and emotion; it makes no sense otherwise. But it's an enormously expensive hobby, making boats and cars look like childrens' toys.

Renting is throwing money away, but so is owning in most cases. The best we can do is to make housing a commodity (what suburbia originally intended to accomplish, but at horrific costs) or, more accurately, to accept the fact that that's what it is. That is, we need to tell the NIMBYs to choke on a dick and build high-rises (i.e. solve the supply crisis that is making housing more expensive than the natural $125-175/ft^2 level-- price of new house construction-- at which it belongs) yesterday.
Some Chinese "researchers" reskinned Android, then released it without the source and claimed that it's a new OS they developed from the ground up. Nothing interesting.
I think the decomposition is important but not necessariy that you have to continue that process until you have atomic parts.

Understanding the decomposition allows you to internalize the behavior of a complex entity and thus understand and predict how it will behave in different (i.e. previously unseen) contexts.

If you avoid decomposition and instead view each entity as a one-off with its own unique behavior patterns then you are limited to memorizing the behavior on a case-by-case basis. Any extrapolation or prediction of behavior would be as effective as random guesses.
Safari doesn't support it. But native apps can support it. I believe Chrome for mobile also supports it.
Of the programmers who made Quake, John Cash went on to lead WoW, probably the most inhabited shared reality yet; John Carmack went on to work on Oculus; and Michael Abrash ... is doing whatever he's doing here - I'm still reading the paper.
It's really easy to start with Oculus SDK as it's already integrated into all major (and minor) game engines, such as Unreal/CryEngine/Unity3D. So, there's lots of people both indie and professionals who are already developing VR games (or porting existing ones). See http://www.riftenabled.com/admin/apps/

Also, there isn't market yet for VR games as consumer VR isn't yet available. Most developers are just experimenting and waiting for the final hardware.
of every software problem in history
Or even better, just flag the story altogether to make it disappear, once again. Stay classy.
I'm a big fan of that blog, but I actually found the most inspirational post on it to be the one that crunched the critical numbers: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-sim...

The key realization from that post: spending less and saving more helps you retire early not just because you're saving faster, but because you need less to retire: your retirement savings only has to support your expenses, not replace your full income.
It's a future value of an annuity calculation.
http://www.ultimatecalculators.com/future_value_annuity_calc...

You do have to take into account the time value of money with the mortgage payments still, because $1 today is worth much more than $1 30 years from now. It's the difference between nominal dollars and real dollars.

Conversely, even though rent goes up in nominal dollars, it stays the same in real dollars (or even goes down as a house becomes less marketable over time).
Not sure I agree..while it will depend on your display, I certainly find the left in this image (DW) easier to read than the right (GDI)

http://i4.minus.com/igp9IxeEX51ES.png

(I know these comparisons have been done to death in the past)
Academia, nonprofit work, the arts and other low-demand "dream" jobs are also extremely demanding and not possible for everyone to do.

My argument was that being one of the (high percentage of) chemical engineers with a job is better than being one of the (low percentage of) humanities academics with a job. I'll acknowledge that survivorship bias is a potential problem.

Do you think humanities PhD washouts are generally happier than Chem E washouts?
I don't agree that artificially restrict myself financially is a good idea.

If I tied to mortgage payments, I am less likely to try financially risky startup.

If I tied to the house I own, I'm less likely to move for the better job opportunity (or just closer to work to reduce my daily commute).

Another disadvantage of owning house is that all major repairs have to be paid by house owner.

On the other hand, it's much less likely that anybody would kick me out from my own house vs chances of my landlord kicking me out of the house I rent.

Another advantage of owning house is that owners have more control over the house than renters have (paint walls any color, having pets etc.). Neighborhood composition tend to be different around houses that are typically for rent and houses are typically for owners only.
Video: Virgin Galactic's third supersonic flight breaks altitude record
> Do I need to know the 12 Astrological Houses to reject astrology? Do I need to know the King James Bible to reject Christianity? Do I need to know Mein Kampf to reject Nazism? Do I need to know the Talmud to reject Zionism?

Well, that is the catch. You don't need to know anything to reject something. But to argue against something, to have a discussion, requires you to know what you are arguing against. But things like Christianity and Nazism are poor examples. Christianity is not factual, it's personal and spiritual, unless you want to talk about theology. And about Nazism I know too much.
Of course they are separable.

If you are buying a home to live in rather than an investment you can ride out the odd declining market.

Seems like people have a lot of 'once bitten, twice shy' syndrome when it comes to housing. Market corrections like 2008 are exceedingly rare. I am not saying prices go up forever like so many idiots did around that time, but if you buy in a non-volatile market, it is a pretty safe bet that your home price will at least retain much of its value.
I think this article is conflating a couple of very different things.

* How much email is sent worldwide.

* How email is used in the workplace and the negative impacts of it.

* Ways to manage email in general and alternatives to email for personal (non-workplace) communication.

These are very different topics that can roughly be divided into workplace and personal spaces.

* Yes, there's a lot of email being sent. It should be pretty obvious why as it's ubiquitous, easy, simple and reliable. Nothing wrong with that.

* Workplace email is a completely different beast. I ran some fairly large internal mail systems for many years. Workplace email isn't about communicating nearly as much as it's "The Record".

A place to record, prove, ass-cover, expose and obtain implied consent in a way that is discoverable as evidence down the road.

The creation of anxiety and lost productivity here due to sheer volume and massive CC/BCC escalation is obvious - a significant part of many modern jobs is active defense of your own borders in a huge distributed audit trail.

* Inbox managers are nice, but they generally don't apply to the workplace, just as Twitter doesn't.
I just wanted to chime in with observations on working poor from my own experience. Anecdotal, but maybe interesting.

I mostly agree with the root, but I want to challenge 2 things: the vulnerability to advertising, and the perceived percentage of Americans incapable of functioning in a modern world.

From 7 to 5 years ago, I tried doing manual labor, unskilled and walk-on jobs (opener/gutter on a kill floor, union carpentry and hoist operator at a prefab construction shop) for 3-4 months a year, saving my money, and living in South America the rest of the year.

I'm not sure if 'seriously underprivileged' has an exact definition, but the people I worked with: very frequently didn't graduate high school, sometimes had extensive criminal histories (one guy spent 8 years in jail for dragging what turned out to be an undercover cop behind his car), usually had a variety of addictions (ranging from the pervasive smoking and alcoholism to the 4 out of 4 of my fellow heavy equipment operators in shipping and receiving who admitted to being addicted to meth), and 30-80% of the time depending on the job, spoke no english at all.

... most also had really, really well-attuned BS detectors!

They just like different things than I liked, so they gave a free pass to products, ads and political parties they and their friends associated with. Exactly like >90% of the designers and coders I know.

The people who are being 'abused' by advertising -- let's say, by credit card companies and sneaky zero-down-payment offers and buying things they can't actually afford -- aren't necessarily being hoodwinked, but I'm sure their self-control is weakened by the experience of being poor. How could it not be?

Everyone knew a payday loan is a bad idea. Everyone knew leasing a $40,000 car when you make $25k a year is a bad idea. Everyone knew spending more of your money on booze than on rent and sustenance is a bad idea. Poorer people just tend to have a larger amount of pain in their and their families' life, with no way out visible to them, which makes self-control harder.

Now, I know there are some people who are so impaired mentally that they can't function at all in society. But I would make sure to call out and challenge the idea that 15-20% of Americans of working age can't function in modern society.

The people I worked with could function, and were functioning -- and yet it is guaranteed that a large number would fall under that '14-20% of Americans are functionally illiterate' figure.

You might say there's confirmation bias, but I was always there during hiring season, and I saw the washouts, too. There were some people -- maybe 1 in 100 of the people who started at these places, and couldn't make it and were let go -- who clearly had mental issues. I remember one guy who lived in a station wagon in the parking lot during his stint there, wore overalls with a t-shirt and no underwear, and never bathed -- the company gave him a week because they felt sorry for him, but he couldn't really function, and he ended up going back to live with his mother.
These types of people are irrational, irritating, and the root cause of so much social strife:

"But prostitution is wrong!" So we make it illegal and cause prostitutes to get roughed up by pimps and Johns. They attract more diseases and end up straining our social support system.

"But drugs are bad for the community!" So we make drugs illegal and we have gang turf wars and a "fuck the police" vibe from the poorer areas of our cities. Tell me again, what was worse for the community?

"But I don't want to live in a city with lots of condos!" So we make it illegal to build new condos. Then a bunch of google employees start moving in and now the original votes are economically squeezed out.

"It isn't right that Wallmart's (or McDonalds, etc) employees require subsidies from the government!" So we raise minimum wage and (through perverse incentives and lobbying) cut welfare benefits to the partially employed. Minimum wage companies replace people with machines and the government gets higher unemployment and less productivity (since engineers are creating machines to replace the unskilled, instead of the skilled).

It's all the same thinking over and over again. An emotional appeal that has nothing to do with good policy. This is why Khan's video is so important. It reaches out to people and educates them without judgement. Talking to your friend he may feel like he needs to stick to his decision, otherwise his friends will see him as weak, but if he comes to these facts on his own maybe it will enlighten him.
Troubleshoot Windows Applications with SpyStudio
I hear this every now and then from "the experts", but I am not sure if it is broken in the first place. Email with a nice client is very efficient and effective, it will not be beaten in the near future. What do we replace it with? IM, skype, google hangout? Nope
I think the author has suffered from a lot of psychological pain stemming from his childhood, and I can sympathize a lot with that. I think he really did have a wealth addiction, like he describes.

However, that doesn't generalize to the entire industry. People (especially men) like money and power because of the benefits they brings. It doesn't have to be an addiction. Furthermore, the idea that it would take an addiction to wealth not to see how immoral the finance industry is, is reliant on having very specific (and wrong, in my opinion) political views.
Whether buying is better than renting depends entirely on your locality. Price/rent ratios aren't the same in SF, New York, and Baltimore.

Baltimore has high rents (relative to prices) because of Hopkins, for example. There are many wealthy people from the Middle East who come here for treatment. Many places, price/rent ratios are under 10 years. If you can buy and will be in the area for a while, you should.

In NYC and San Francisco, price/rent ratios can reach absurd numbers: 40 to 50 years. Why? Emotional bullshit, a sense of prestige, et cetera. Buying only makes sense if you expect apocalyptic increases of housing prices (see: Tokyo, especially in the late '80s).

Some of the hardest-to-predict relevant variables are (1) what you expect housing to do, and (2) whether you think your career needs will favor (or disfavor) a move. There are a lot of sociological factors that no one can predict. But most people, when they buy, are betting money they can't really afford to lose.
This is fine and good, but not very useful advice to people who find themselves of looking for a miracle in the last 2 weeks.
>It has been many years since people actually suffered from the weight of zillions of spam messages in their inbox.

And this is part of what makes email close to useless these days. Outside of your own organization you have no idea if your mail was delivered or black holed at a server somewhere never to be heard from again. Too many servers still do the wrong thing, accept and delete, rather than reject at HELO.

You wouldn't care much if the post office dropped all the ads for $5.99 pizza before they got to your post box, but if your bills got lost regularly you would be unhappy, and that's the problem with email.
Your Inner Fly: Fighting dipterans share genes with you and me
You are awesome and supportive and the advice is great. Feeling a little more optimistic about this!
Thank you!
That's not a death march insofar as I understand it. Crunch time happens, emergencies happen.

Death marches are where overtime becomes normal time, where crunch mode becomes normal mode. Going full-speed on the home stretch for a few days isn't necessarily bad, but a death march is when that turns into weeks, or months.

That's your cue to GTFO.
Sunk costs are sunk. Unless the marginal utility of that piece of paper is worth compromising your ideals and dropping another $20k in tuition, the sensible thing to do would be to drop out.

Given that he's already got the brand, the majority of the education, and the network of going to Yale, I'm not sure it is.
OpenBSD Moving Towards Signed Packages — Based On D. J. Bernstein Crypto
I'm not sure how "work harder than usual in the run-up to a launch" == "rely on a miracle".

I suspect we may be used to sufficiently different industries that we're speaking at cross purposes, though.
This is interesting. Do you have a reading list or any good resources on the topic?
is there a python version of SaaS app using Stripe?
https://github.com/RailsApps/rails-stripe-membership-saas
It's a sales call. Your first priority is to qualify the lead. The work matching your skills is a part of it. More important is "Will I get paid, and if so, how much trouble will it be?"

In terms of preparation, write up a draft contract now so that all that is left are:

+ Describing the scope.

+ Describing the fee.

+ Describing the retainer.

+ Minor negotiations over terms and conditions.

Invoicing and payment terms are critical. How often will you invoice? How quickly must a client pay? What happens if the client abandons the project? What happens if you decide to 'fire' the client?

Payment is what separates clients from leads and tire kickers. Insist on a retainer. Insist that it is applied against the final invoice. Insist that it is enough to keep you from becoming upside down. It should work with your invoicing cycle - i.e. if it's two weeks worth of your work, then your invoicing cycle should be two weeks. If the lead wants a 30 day payment window, then your retainer should cover 30 days.

Any non-payment should be grounds for terminating the contract without prejudice. Have an interest rate for unpaid invoices that is higher than the worst credit card. You do not want to be the client's bank.

Require mutual indemnification for consequential damages.

Require mediation prior to any legal action. Arbitration is ok if the amount in dispute is over $10,000 or so. For less, don't include an arbitration clause.

I say all this so that you can give a fee immediately to close a sale - i.e. walk out of the first meeting with a retainer in hand. That's hard to do if you don't know what a proposal looks like and it's hard to write a good proposal when you are focused on closing the sale and thinking about the actual work. Preparing a proposal should just be a matter of looking at the work on offer.

A couple of other things:

+ Know how much the project needs to pay. If you can make $21,000 in three weeks, it doesn't so much matter whether you work 200 hours in that month or 160 or 240 when you're a one man shop with one project.

+ Be prepared to walk away. Go with your gut.

Good luck.
Paramount stops releasing major movies on film
>"Email is probably most invasive form of communication yet devised"

Oh, I find unscheduled phone calls much more invasive. They require that I make myself available at that moment, and if I'm not in an immediate position to talk, then I need to similarly inconvenience the caller when I return the call.
The "prerendering" function isn't for human consumption. It's meant to make the page spiderable by search engines. Since it's a single-page app all content is on the page so the #/home/ links aren't really something a search engine would care about.

I think the days when you'd put HTML documents on the web like emails with no dynamic behavior in them are over, and have been for quite some time now. If you have content you want people to read and act on, you're going to want to develop the user experience.
The NSA probably isn't thwarted by TLS. I imagine that they have direct access to datacenters.
Minecraft Statue of Liberty
What are you actually including in that $400/year though? Are you taking full maintenance and upkeep costs into account?

A new roof and new coat of paint will already blow your budget. Your pipes will also need replacing after 30 years, as would your hot water heater, among a plethora of other expenses that come up.
Useful!
Option to use the 'real' ASCII box-drawing characters and shadows would be a good add!
Thanks, Patrick. Great advice! You captured the essence of the deal perfectly, with all its subtleties. (the "dribs and drabs", etc.)
As a non-American I find this rather grating.
The Universe's Most Important Alarm Clock Will Wake Up Rosetta Tomorrow
You are what you do. As such, it's worthy to take time to practice empathy.

I was recommended to do so when I suffered a bout of burnout and depression in 2012 and it was a self perpetuating movement for the positive.

Bravo to Chad for raising this in a technical forum - I think the industry can only benefit from a pragmatic approach to empathic skills.
Zero commercial value is a highly dubious claim. If the website happened to be refined to be so popular that students wouldn't want to go without it and they would be able to charge for the service, then commercial value would naturally be present.
Personally I would go with:
askcompanyname@mydomain.com
Because as JacobH stated, "contact" feels to formal.

Everything else has all ready been recommended, ie:
support@mydomain.com for CUSTOMER support.
press@mydomain.com for dealing with vultures.
partners.partnername@mydomain.com for partners.

I'd make my catch-all something like "generalinfo@mydomain.com"