skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can't answer the rest, but

> Are there even any estimates on how much money is lost due to tax evasion?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_evasion_in_the_United_State...

Googling also yields some results that ballpark in the same area.
> why do we let people to abuse technology instead of using it well.

Because there is a demand for web based applications,because we cant throw everything in the trash saying we got to start over. Because the web is a way to distribute software with next to 0 cost.
For a community that's all about "disrupting" everything in the world, this place sure gets itself in a tizzy over every little change to its own world.

Look, it's just a little change. It's not the end of the world. The impact is likely to be minimal, with only the very worst comments remaining unendorsed.

Give it some time before you write up essays about why it's a bad idea.

Accept a little disruption.
I wrote to info@salaryfairy.com and they removed me within 2 minutes.
So far the prediction average of 2 people is less than half of what I currently make (and less than half for the average salary for my role in that city)

You need a LOT of people to make this work... so far it seems like a nice idea but not sure it can work relying only 100% on "crowd-smarts"
Oops! He didn't say NoSQL or SQL anywhere in his comment.
Dont get kidnapped.
Mathematical Writing – Lecture Notes (1987)
It would be cool if you got recruiters on board, so they can see the crowd estimated salary of an employee - so they can see what people who actually know about technology think someone is worth.

I don't really like recruiters, in my experience they tell you you're aiming too high, but don't know anything about the technologies.

So my feedback is to try and aim to get recruiters and employers to use this to find new candidates.
Ask HN: How do you earn your money?
I'm currently a student and wonder how developers tend to earn their money? Do you work for someone as an employee or have you got your own company? Or is it a mixture of both throughout your careers?

I do work part time as a developer in a start up and can't help feeling i'm building a dream for someone else. Not that the experience isn't really good, (It definitely is and I learn more in work than in uni!) but i can't help feeling that the current university paradigm of work hard, good grades, get a job seems to be bit of a misnomer unless you're happy building things to make others wealthy whilst you earn £30,000 a year?

Unless i'm missing something important, I am young and naive after all!

This is a subjective question. I just want to get a few thoughts especially from you old timers who want to tell a youngster some home truths! :)
Your "except" is pretty big to be put in "except".

Apart from that, simply resistance from users, who are not really "computer people" and basically know that clicking the "w" icon launches the application on which letters can be drafted, is not a small matter. I hope the training programmes are well planned to cover that aspect.
That’s not true in the UK. The farthing was removed from currency in 1961. When we decimalised in February 1971 the old pre-decimalisation coins went out of circulation in August 1971, only 6 months later. Even more recently the 5p and 10p coins changed sizes in the early 1990s and the bigger ones went out of circulation a year later.
Just because physics doesn't have a notion of identity, doesn't mean there is no such thing.

Identical particles have different identities because they have a different location in space-time. The location in space-time creates the identity.

There's also a problem with the math of your claim. They can't "be the same particle" if you can have two of them. 1 != 2
So the only thing you didn't answer is the actual question, which was how much time it took you.

And "your time" counts when we discuss "how long"...
Bootstrap Faster in One Step
There are so many things you've overlooked... This will be an interesting experiment, however I don't think it's a good approach and this decision will likely be reversed.

What would help HN is a system for qualitative feedback to posters who make poor posts. Currently, users notice they are slow or hell banned, have no idea why, and register another account. Why not provide warnings with one or a few preweitten reasons? How about holding banners accountable for their bans, as some seem to ban contrarian viewpoints?

Anyway, good luck with this system. I'm unlikely to spend time writing a comment that may not be seen. I already care less about what I'm writing here, because I discount the chance that it may never go live.
> Thanks, I read that article. Do you think Indian English is strictly colloquial similar to the dialects of English we have in the US? Or does it have its own accepted grammar enforced by proofreaders and copy editors?

I'd suggest that's a distinction without a difference. Or to be more precise, it's a distinction whose difference - the level of official ossification built up around the dialect - isn't really relevant to the question because it has more to do with external factors, and little to do with the language's actual developmental status.

For example, American and British English have crossed the boundary that you propose despite being so similar that native speakers are often hesitant to even regard them as different dialects. But they do have separate rulebooks, because at some point in the past few centuries Americans of high social rank decided that England's culture was no longer the ideal to which they should continue to aspire.

On the other hand, take Haitian Creole and French, which are so different as to not really even be mutually intelligible. But up until very recently Creole did not have an official grammar (or even spelling) enforced by proofreaders and copy editors. How come? Well, Creole's spoken by poor people, and French is spoken by rich people. Rich people set up the social institutions you propose, and for a long time they had a strong interest in maintaining French as the only official dialect.

The example is extreme, but I hope it does illustrate that there are actually two different continua at play here, and while they may be correlated they aren't closely tied together.
Interesting, but I found it incredibly hard to come up with sensible estimates for profiles.

So much depends on their location -- do I assume they'll be staying where they are and try to estimate what salaries there should be like, or estimate based on my own location? -- and the sort of places they might like to work. If you're currently in a university or a small business you might be paid less than at a bank for the same work, but you might be choosing to work there for other reasons, so it's not that useful to point out that another employer would pay more.

I found my estimates were generally much lower than the averages from other users, perhaps because I currently work in a university myself.

Edit: and indeed, it turns out that the estimates I'm seeing for my own profile are about double my actual pay. Which isn't surprising, because that's about what I might expect in the private sector in the same location.
Apple and Google’s wage-fixing involved dozens more companies, over 1M employees
This reads like an advertisement for MongoDB. Is it the real verdict?
I was trying to get feedback on this in an ask hn earlier:

Ask HN: When is MongoDB the Right Tool for the Job?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7446919

edit added title of post.
Hm, I've read your comment several more times and it still plainly reads to me that you are arguing that China's leadership, being engineers, have a better grasp of the futility of being corrupt... and since the United States is led by lawyers then corruption is to be expected.

In short, we should expect the United States to be corrupt because of lawyers and China to be not corrupt because of engineers, and I'm just saying that's the opposite of the truth.

I really don't care all that much, I'm just really curious now why you bothered to mention China at all if what you were trying to say was that the US is worse than we thought.
This raises a pretty interesting question. Suppose I apply for a Basic Job at your institution, where all the work is sort of worthwhile, but not worthwhile enough to happen unsubsidized. What job do you assign to me? How do you choose it? I assume you're not choosing the "most worthwhile" of the jobs, because how would you know?

If the work is digging holes one day and undigging them the next, overhead here is low. If there's some other system behind what the jobs are and how they get filled, potential for corruption seems extremely high. Say I'm a Denny's and I'd rather not pay so much for my kitchen staff. Can I list all the positions with Basic Job and kick back to the administrator when he sends me someone?

Germany has no minimum wage and extremely low unemployment. What would their Basic Jobs be?
New study shows we work harder when we are happy
> I don't understand - how does a Basic Job prevent you from either going to school or taking part time work? No one is obligated to work a Basic Job. It's just what you do if you are unable to find anything better.

With this comment, it becomes difficult to see how you're arguing in good faith. If your Basic Job tells you to work at a particular time of day -- and classes and/or a part-time job are in the middle of this work schedule -- then they conflict. Sure, you can go to school and/or take the part-time job instead, but then you starve.

How is it that you're incapable of understanding that this creates a conflict?

> Back of the envelope calculation, please.

Okay, using your straw-man scenario, there are 50M people requiring $20k worth of income. That costs $1T upfront (same as if we provided the $20k Basic Income to all 300M people). Now with our Basic Job, we're basically asking people to do work that they don't want to do -- since as you point out, if they're not closely supervised then they won't do the work.

So let's assume we need a poorly-paid supervisor for every 12 basic-jobbers, a somewhat better-paid line manager for every 20 supervisors, a somewhat well-paid district manager for every 50 line managers, and an actually well-paid regional manager for every 100 district supervisors. Furthermore, lets assume that all these jobs come from the ranks of the currently-unemployed, so that they're not pure overhead but are providing support in and of themselves.

Job description $/year No. of people Total cost
Basic Jobber 20k 45,973,453 919.5B
Supervisor 30k 3,831,121 114.9B
Line Manager 40k 191,556 7.7B
District Manager 60k 3,831 0.2B
Regional Manager 100k 383 -

...This would be an overhead of about 4.2%, compared to the effectively zero overhead which a Basic Income requires (all you need for BI is one-time-only verification of citizenship, and careful monitoring of when people die so that the payments stop. You don't need to employ millions of people to do that). So this would cost roughly $420M more than an equivalent Basic Income program, while simultaneously preventing 50M people from doing something more useful with their lives.
They should offer A/B testing on your profile to maximize you estimated salary.
Hack n' Slash video game allows users to modify source code within the game
Here's a vote strongly in favor of exercise, but against steady-state cardio such as jogging. [0]

[0] http://www.simplyshredded.com/cardio-for-fat-loss-high-inten...
I don't know about credibility but I use clamav and it was able to detect a (windows?) virus on my USB stick when I plugged it in while running Linux and removed the virus as well. That was useful.
Agreed, thus far the predictions seem very low to me. With the exception of the occasional non-profit professional profiles, where the predictions are much higher than what my friends who work in the non-profit sector report.
Because my anti-socialist upbringing taught me unions are bad. Therefor things I think are bad must be unions.
If you do plan to keep your license active, your state may have a poorer-lawyer fee scale. Take advantage of that. Same goes with CEB requirements. There's no need to pay for the expensive all inclusive programs.
How do you figure that? I think I answered the question the same way every other person here did. The question was how long it took to break even on costs, not how long it took to develop. My time isn't a monetary cost.
That, and doing some basic research to post additional useful information (facts, numbers, stats, references, background info, etc) on a relatively new thread.

I'm mentioning this because I believe such posts are genuinely useful and surely deserve the points they get.

BTW I don't think I ever got near a hundred points for a comment. But I suppose it can happen in the above circumstance in a popular thread.
There's something very striking (to me) about your back-of-the-envelope numbers here.

Are we really endorsing the idea that one person in six should be on welfare?
Honestly, I think its great that your community thinks so fucking highly of itself that its a privilege to comment on the self absorbed drivel that this board contains. Seriously if you think this place is so fucking special you have mental issues, fuck you and fuck your comment system
Speaking of reactive DOM and JVM languages, this [1] impressed me greatly about a month ago. It's using Scala.js which is coming along fast w/ Scala.Rx and ScalaTags. I found it's a great way to share rendering code between the server side and client side. I was also impressed w/ the readability and small size of the TodoMVC app [2].

1 - https://groups.google.com/d/msg/scala-js/DtRyjfD6qqA/Bfd2pDC...
2 - https://github.com/lihaoyi/workbench-example-app/blob/todomv...
Holy. Fucking. Crap.

Jesus tapdancing christ that is seriously scary to see in something that's allegedly "all totally secure now, for really reals". More so the fact that such simple sanitization was missing for so long.

Well, I guess I'll put off learning node a bit longer then.
We use Github ($25), Google Apps ($20), Pivotal Tracker ($7) and Enterprise Chef (within free tier). So in total $52.
DITTO!! We know when we're not wanted. Sounds like the "elite" want a place to rule. I won't be a part of that. EQUAL VOICE FOR ALL!

---
>hkphooey

>This perhaps marks the beginning of the end for HackerNews.
Who wants to contribute to a "community" where there is active censorship of posts critical of YCombinator companies (see Dr Chrono), or you get hell-banned for no good reason, and now this poorly thought-out "rule"?
CPerciva pointed out an obvious flaw. Another is this: if you had to start a brand new HackerNews tomorrow, would you implement the rule? Of course not, because nobody would have any karma points to begin with, so they wouldn't be able to approve or see pending comments, meaning no comments would ever get posted! Duh!
Now you could argue that the HackerNews moderators and owners have karma points and they could approve comments to seed the system... but then why not just have a private forum for all your start-up friends, invite only, so you can be sure they all speak right?!
reply

>jgh

>I have been a lurker and infrequent poster here for a number of years and have lately been feeling increasingly alienated from the HN community. I am not on "the in" by any means in startup culture or silicon valley (in fact, I live in Southern California). As somebody who very much feels on the outside looking in on the craziness that is silicon valley and the startup culture (although my entire career has been spent in startups) I feel like this move only serves to further alienate people like me.
I agree we would really benefit from a radical simplification our entitlements. Going through the simplified and unified but still arcane ACA application process personally brought this home for me, especially when I realized it is a system that can become a single entry point to multiple varied entitlement programs that formerly each had their own different qualification rules. Digging into it I saw that one of the goals behind it was to get more of the people who are entitled to Medicaid into Medicaid, the biggest barrier being that it takes a college degree and several days of dedicated work to navigate your way through the application process (I exaggerate, but not by much)

I also agree that we are decades away from sufficient public outrage to fuel the political machine to make these changes. Much like the flat tax, it makes sense to most people but will never happen due to the strong motivation of current rent-seekers to maintain the status quo.

While I would much prefer a basic income to an increase in the minimum wage, I am torn by the fear that it would turn us into the world of Neal Stephenson's Anathem or Mike Judge's Idiocracy. I support Voltaire's assertion that "Work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice, and need"
as a 3rd-generation minority female entrepreneur, i can attest to this. however, even with those powerful role models, i had (and have) to fight a fairly gruesome battle.

fortunately, i am a warrior and don't really know any other way. otherwise, i'd have given up long ago.
For people wondering about BOSS linux, it is Debian based, and is bundled with LibreOffice, Gnome, Iceweasel (browser) etc. the usual stuff and is distributed by CDAC Chennai. CDAC Chennai adds value to the distro by providing support (they have a toll free number where anyone call for any doubts in relation to BOSS), ensuring all the drivers of local printers are present, local fonts are all set up and working right from the beginning. They also provide training when any govt. department switches to BOSS.

Source - I worked in CDAC Chennai and was involved in a project related to BOSS, and quite a few depts. were switching to BOSS while I was there (2 yrs back)
Our Saas, Pixtulate, is currently in beta and bootstrapped. We have optimized for lowest cost possible at the moment and our traffic is still fairly low.

1. DigitalOcean - $110/month
2. Google Apps - $5/month
3. UptimeRobot - Free (just as good as Pingdom)
4. CloudFlare - Free (serving under 2 TB/month)
6. Amazon S3 - $1.40/month
7. MixPanel - Free
8. HeapAnalytics - Free
9. Google Analytics - Free
10. BaseCRM - Free
11. MailChimp - Free
12. Mandrill - Free
13. Tumblr - Free (our blog)
14. CloudBees - Free (build, maven repos etc)
15. Desk.com - $3/month
16. NewRelic - Free (server monitoring)
17. GoDaddy - $9/year

I am absolutely amazed over how many services we can get free. On one hand, we would either have to invest more into development or do without, on the other, it doesn't bode well for our own likelihood of making money.
Sure why not. "Editors" killed Wikipedia, why not use the same system to turn HN into DIGG?
My prediction average of 3 people is more than twice what I currently make.

The estimate I made for someone was 70kish before I went on to see my similar one. I wonder if that's just the safe number lots of guessers are settling on?
This comment precisely reflects my feelings. One of my company names actually has my own name in it.
> Running a given query took 1 ms and running it again right after could take up to 15 seconds. You'd think the second time would be faster.

Were you able to determine why this was? It does seem backwards, given the data should be cached at some layer.
We won't, but we will make that promise explicitly on the homepage. Thanks for your feedback.
My use isn't specific to mail. Instead I would like something similar to Resque in functionality.
That's a resounding Lana-like yuuuuup.
Why don't you take a guess at mine? http://salaryfairy.com/fairy/guess/420
Wow, thanks so much for all the great responses! This has gotten me really excited. Lots to think about!

(And special thanks to those who left their contact information -- I really appreciate it.)
When people mine any of these coins, they are essentially investing their electricity and bandwidth in the currency. From an investor's standpoint, why is Primecoin better to invest in that dogecoin, bitcoin, or any of the others? It's an interesting idea, anyway.
Thanks a lot for the advice!

One reason I was considering PWYW is just to try it out because it sounds great in theory, and I'd love to see how it works out in practice. And the best time to learn that is when I don't rely on the money to stay alive. I've done some research of course, and I'd be careful to only work with people I trust and on projects I'm excited about.

Another reason was that I'd want to do a job I have little or no experience in yet, so it's well possible that I don't manage to provide any value to my first clients.

But perhaps freelancing before I have a portfolio is always a bad idea, period? I don't know.

> Also, that might sound like a lot of savings now, but ...

Don't worry, it doesn't :) It's simply that until I start traveling or move out, I'll need little to none of it - assuming no emergencies. Of course that's a ridiculous assumption to make, so I probably shouldn't allow myself to go much lower (thanks for the implicit reminder!). I guess I shouldn't travel without making some income too.
Correct, Copernicus as "celebrated hero of the church" is unsupported, he mostly flew under the Church's radar
That'd be nice, it explains why my avg karma is still less than 2 while I also get quite a few upvotes.

On the other hand, if I'm having a useful discussion with someone in an old thread, I often give them an upvote for their troubles as well. It's not like it affects the sorting or anything.
My sideproject, fantasysp.com, cost basically nothing to start around 7 years ago. I found free baseball boxscore data online and bought the domain and ran it on hosting I already had. The main cost was my time involved to code everything.

"True" costs didn't arrive until I thought I actually had something worth investing in. Which meant I had to purchase boxscore data for the sports I couldn't find.

So to answer your question... ideally your project should cost very little to start with. Once you discover that you might be on to something, then slowly increment costs. Baby steps.
Thanks for impactjs! I used it to develop this couple years ago: http://heartlight5.com Have fun!
Thanks, this is a good point I hadn't considered.
> Just because physics doesn't have a notion of identity, doesn't mean there is no such thing.

How is that not exactly what that means?
Because perhaps cows don't value the number of cows, but the average quality of life. Or something more complex than that.
> The real question is why do we let people to abuse technology instead of using it well.

I am (still!) amazed by the gap between how I see a computer and how most non-geeks around me do. To them, it's like a set of different, often frustrating tools rather than, well, an amazing piece of technology that can be prodded to do whatever you want (to the point where an iPad with few to no apps can provide them with all they need).

To me, there's a joy to finding just the right framework, app, or library that can do what I need done. To the point where I might end up enjoying the process a bit too much and get nothing done. To them, it's all about getting stuff done as soon as possible, with whatever they're familiar with. And since they find computers often quite frustrating, they will abuse the hell out of the little bits they know.

And so, in the same way that we would use a lighter to open a bottle if there isn't an opener nearby, they 'abuse' technology by using Excel for everything, or storing their notes in an open notepad window without saving. And as long as that works most of the time, they feel absolutely no incentive to figure out a better way.

Until, of course, it all goes wrong. Then they call us to fix it :-).