skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I see an awful lot of people dramatically under-valuing their own time in here. Anyone who's capable of building and launching a successful software system necessarily commands a pretty high rate.

I value my R&D cost based on what I used to make when I was coding for the man. Which was a lot.

So three years in, I haven't broken even on my real opportunity cost. Given my trajectory, I fully expect to. But it's not an overnight thing.
I'm baffled by the logic of people who recoil at the idea of a basic income because it's "socialist", but if you were to ask many of them if lowering taxes for nearly everyone by X% is a good idea, they'd scream "YEAH! Money is much more efficient in people's hands!"

Maybe if you don't call it a basic income and call it a guaranteed tax rebate instead we'd get everyone on board.
On Understanding Types, Data Abstraction, and Polymorphism
There is very little value in knowing that some people disagree with a comment, but there is tremendous value in learning other ideas. This is a bad policy.
Best PHP IDE for 2014 – Survey Results
Very nice indeed. I'd rather have it without the exterior moulding, though.
I'm a bit surprised that I'd never heard of this before. That is an impressive exchange rate.
I always wish we had some sort of standardized way to do Oauth-style payment via e-banking. As in, I go to onlinevendor.com and click "pay", it redirects me to my bank, I log in and accept the charge, it directly charges my bank account.

Online payment is the only reason I have a (pre-paid) credit card, but it really doesn't need a credit card. I don't want/need "credit" and since it's online a "card" is useless. We already have e-banking for many things, why can't I use this for payment?
I must correct a minor error: "[Unity3D's] web browser target depends on a clunky plugin with a low install base."

This is no longer true. Unity3D can now (or very soon?) export to pure javascript and run in any WebGL-conformant browser without any plugins.
> Can anyone tell me why the two codenames are so similar? It would seem that they're wildly different exploits.

A previous article, "How the NSA Plans to Infect ‘Millions’ of Computers with Malware" [0], linked to "a classified list" [1][2] of the various "QUANTUM*" programs entitled "There is More Than One Way to QUANTUM".

If I'm understanding your question correctly, the table in [1] and [2] should illustrate the (similarities and) differences.

[0]: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/article/2014/03/12/nsa-pl...

[1]: (TS/SI) https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1076... (PDF)

[2]: (TS/SI) http://i.imgur.com/ZxVAnju.png (a screenshot of the slide in [1], for those who may prefer to avoid PDFs)
That's a great point. They only looked at the last 25 years, but I bet the story is different in the late 70s and early 80s when interest rates were significantly higher.
I was sad that they didn't consider the fact that people save or don't save often as a function of their experience growing up. I remember finding vegetables that my wife's grandparents has canned in jars "for later" from the 60's in their basement. They were savers, they had lived through the Great Depression.

Then there were people for whom their whole life the folks that gave them money, their parents or their employers, were always there for them to give them more when they needed it, they haven't saved anything. A lot of them got caught out when the Great Recession hit.

Are their children and people who lived through that more inclined to save again? Hard to say, but it seems like it isn't really relevant to compare the savings behavior of a 40 year old to that of a 20 year old. They had completely different life experiences. And when the 40 year old was 20 it was a different experience than the 20 year old is currently experiencing. As so much of our behavior is driven by our past experience, this sort of cross generational behavior comparison analysis totally falls flat for me.
Risk aversion should not be an issue in your twenties. Packing a crew of developers into a house or apartment cant be any worse than living in a dorm. Even in your thirties failures can be managed with the help of a supportive spouse (whatever the flavor of the relationship).

I am a textbook case of a guy ho did not manage his entrepreneurial career properly. Like a lot of HNers I am basically introverted. Even worse I grew up in a culture, rural Maine, here you did not ask for help; you did it yourself. I had other advantages: degree from a top flight school and college friends that were or became wealthy. But I didnt take advantage of all this, I kept trying to do it all myself. I started several companies which were ultimately unsuccessful. Between startups I supported myself by consulting with a good 6 figure income. Finally in my 60s I became less risk intolerant. My partner got some kind of autoimmune disease which meant I needed good health insurance and a steady income. The downside is that the startup adventures and a divorce left me with no savings or investments at all.

So my advice is to cultivate your circle of friends and serious acquaintances. Learn to present yourself and your ideas effectively. I think a first time, straight out of college personal startup is a real crap shoot, but at the same failure costs nothing. The advantage of being an employee is that you learn what a real company is like. A relatively new company with fewer than 100 employees should show you what a post-startup company looks like yet give you personal flexibility. You will learn about such things as sexual harassment policies, hiring, corporate culture, that can be very expensive to learn by trial and error.

If you are looking for a startup, one lead by people with previous startup experience, successful or not, can be a good bet. Your share ill be smaller, but your chances of success will be larger.

If you have been admitted to a graduate program at Stanford, go for it.
I'm actually really confused. I don't understand how companies agreeing to not cold call each other's employees is "overwhelming evidence of wage fixing".
It's not just about Google, et al. At this scale, it affects the workers down the chain. Maybe the Google employees were getting $250K instead of $500K, which meant that companies downstream could get away with offering less, because they didn't have to get in a bidding war with those upstream.

Something this big clearly had effects on salaries across the board, at a scale where its difficult to casually judge the exact effects. Would wages everywhere be higher if it wasn't for this? I don't know, but I don't think we can rule out the possibility.
I wonder what the general mood is regarding this in Apple and Google. More importantly, I wonder if there are going to be any significant repercussions. Would appreciate comments from employees of these companies, whether this information being uncovered has had any effect in the workplace so far.
Wouldn't that last example lead some (many?) service providers to send your account to a collections agency and hurt your credit rating?
Bitcoin relies on unique and stealable tokens to represent wealth. Digital cash does not.

Bitcoin is actually worse in terms of security for the end user than the centralised systems we have now - with banks keeping ledgers of who paid what, who owns what, in charge of security and paying insurance etc. if money is stolen from banks, it is their responsibility to make it good, if they can't, the state steps in. Contrast that with the many bitcoin exchanges going bust. Ordinary people are not good at security (physical or digital), so keeping hoards of intrinsically valuable stuff at home without paying insurance is a terrible idea, and I'd argue that keeping hoards of intrinsically valuable stuff anywhere is a bad idea, and digital currencies have moved on from there.

Bitcoin is still trying to be a digital analogue to paper cash, so even if the protocol is not broken, the premise is.
If a company gets away with breaking one law then what law do they break next?

Most police in the USA are believers in the broken widows theory - surly the same applies in corporate law.
Why It's Time for the Journal of Porn Studies
can I ask you where you're from?
There's plenty of work for good coders, you seem very delusional. Try to send some resume
Thinking about it a bit, I bet this wasn't born out of a desire to want to keep wages down per se, but a desire to avoid turnover of productive up-to-speed people

I understand your thinking but I don't think it logically holds together. If the main concern was stability, that could be addressed by matching/topping any competing offers ... so you're right back to this being about holding down wages.
One of the strengths of HN is that founders and creators of products can and do have the ability the ability to engage with people posting about them. The proposed rate limit and censorship-by-default largely eliminates this unless the response happens to be on a sufficiently high traffic thread.
A price comparison website. It used to be free for merchants and users alike and after incorporating we managed to establish a PPC model without losing but a few merchants.
I did. I may not have been clear, though. He says HTML5 is a poor substitute for Flash because it doesn't work for "high-performance desktop-ready games for Steam." I'm saying that Flash has never been any good for "high-performance desktop-ready games," and devs really, really need to stop deluding themselves that it is.

Basically I'm saying I have trouble trusting anyone who thinks that Flash was ever a decent high-performance gaming engine.
Could you explain to us why the US government is partaking in exact same tactics that they tried to drag the Chinese through the mud with?

Hypocrisy seems to be the name of the game here: spying on attorney-client communications, pwning sysadmins to get access to infrastructure and rifling through trade secrets of companies. The last two of which the U.S. has put on their outrage face and publically shamed the Chinese for doing.

Regardless, the Snowden cache was bulk, and was given to Greenwald, Poitras, and Gellman. Snowden isn't giving marching orders in the background, he left it up to journalists to decide what gets published. While they probably still collaborate, Poitras is in Berlin and is most likely one of the primary journalists behind this story and not Greenwald.
Anecdotaly, I recently moved home to San Francisco from Charlotte, NC. The dominant employers in Charlotte are the big banks, and there aren't a lot of major tech companies there. I was surprised to find that the pay scale -- contract or salaried -- is about the same or less in SF for a senior web developer, despite the great difference in the cost of living in those cities. Maybe this explains it.
Your method would increase complexity while making the pact harder to hide, and keeping down wages is a nice side benefit. Keep in mind people generally don't start off trying to do overt wrong.
I have access to 12 months of 0% interest up to about $10-15K with a fee of about 3%, $300-500 total due to my credit score.

I think the access to Credit allows people to live paycheck to paycheck.
Two weeks ago my money came from the startup I worked for.

But I have now switched to freelancing, with said startup being my only client at the moment. I might look for more clients later, but I’m hoping to make money through Gittip and releasing my own products instead. Like you, I want to be in charge of my own destiny, even if that means not doing what has conventionally worked for others.
Ask HN: Do you think HN needs a new look?
Don't get me wrong, I love hacker news, and think it is perfectly functional as it is.

That being said, I think it could benefit from being redesigned slightly - to keep up with the newer design trends we're seeing across the web.

I've seen very few changes over the past few years, and am curious what other peoples opinion are?

Yes - A redesign would be nice - not too different though of course!

No - It's perfect just the way it is!
So three years in, I haven't broken even on my real opportunity cost. Given my trajectory, I fully expect to. But it's not an overnight thing.

Same here - approximately three years in. We aren't far from "breakeven" in terms of actual dollars spent, because we don't actually spend much money right now. But in terms of return on founders time, we're way in the red right now.

But, we're in the B2B space, doing complex enterprise software that addresses challenging problems using cutting edge technology. You don't go from zero to thousands of customers overnight. TBH, we're only just now at a point where we have a real product (two products, really) that are ready to sell to the early adopter / earlyvangelist types. So now I get to go out and meet customers and see if I can retrain myself, on the fly, to be a sales-person.

So yeah, nobody expected this to be an overnight thing either. It's been a tough slog so far, but we think we're getting close to really turning a corner.
The indictment rate of grand jury is about 98-99% (wikipedia). As far as I know, only prosecution presents its case, defense is not.

Wiki link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_juries_in_the_United_Stat...
This isn't censorship and I think that word gets thrown around much too loosely.

If there are multiple people in the discussion then it is very likely more than one will pass the threshold to vote. If there isn't then nothing of value is lost as you still get to make your comment to the other side, you still get your last word in, it is just not public and the conversation will die immediately. Much how it is now if the other side doesn't reply to you.
industry media is usually fawning

- why pay a writer to write a whole article when you can just reprint a press release with slight edits?

- they live in fear of "losing access" because they have nothing else to cover

- kool-aid-drinking sells

E.g., can you imagine TechCrunch announcing a new startup and then criticizing its concept? it would make startups would think twice about giving them any releases, writers would be able to produce less content, no kool aid.

outsider media, on the other hand, can land on the other end of the pendulum of being overly cynical, paranoid, underinformed etc.
Thank you for that. I was about to ask whether react on the server + react on the client is possible (instead of exclusively server or exclusively client).

Is there a tutorial targetting such scenario specifically?
A lot of brokerages will hook banking features up to your trading account, such that "checking" and "trading" essentially become just two parts of that account like "savings" and "checking" are for most standard bank accounts. You do typically still have to wait X time for settlement, but if you have margin or cash in your main account (which can also be put into action trading immediately), you can tap into that via a checkcard or similar.
This is going to be a lot more revolutionary than a lot of people think. I mentor Lego Robotics teams, and this year's season will mark my eighth year doing Lego Robotics. During this time, I've shown the kids (ages 9-14) hundreds of programming-related things, ranging from quadcopters to Arduinos to WebGL experiments to Leap Motion devices, and what never fails to captivate them is when they make the Lego Mindstorm brick display something.

When kids on the team seem reluctant to start programming, I always bust out the smiley face demo: they push a button and the smiley face smiles. It's ridiculously simple, but that's part of the appeal - they see that it's simple and they want to know how to do it themselves. If I were to show them an Arduino blinking out a message in Morse code using an LED, they assume that it's over their head and could care less how it was done, but when I show a simple demo using the Mindstorms display everyone's captivated.

Each Mindstorms brick costs $200-$250, and parts can add hundreds of dollars to this cost. Since the price of the MicroView is 4-5 times smaller, there can be 4-5 times more people captivated by them - not to mention how school districts that have fewer funds can now introduce students to programming as well.
Ask HN: How to become a valuable systems software engineer?
> When Google and Apple have profits per employee of over $1M but the average engineer salary is only slightly higher than $100K according to glass door while both these companies are building stockpiles of cash holdings, something is obviously broken.

Liar's Poker[0], here we go again. This is the exact sentiment that plagued the finance industry in the 80's and lead to the bonus fiasco that exists today on the Street.

The question is what do we do about and is it the same? (I don't have an answer, just curious)

A couple of interesting notes:

1. In Raghuram Rajan's HAS FINANCIAL DEVELOPMENT MADE THE WORLD RISKIER[1]? he notes:

Therefore, the incentive structure of investment managers today differs from the incentive
structure of bank managers of the past in two important ways. First, the way compensation
relates to returns implies there is typically less downside and more upside from generating
investment returns. Managers therefore have greater incentive to take risk.

2. Daniel Pink talks about the Candle problem[2] and two main points on his thesis:

- As long as a task requires only mechanical skill, bonuses work as they would be expected – the higher the pay, the better the performance.

- Once a task calls for even a rudimentary amount of cognitive skill, a larger reward often leads to poorer performance.

[0] - http://www.amazon.com/Liars-Poker-Hodder-Great-Reads-ebook/d...

[1] - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11728

[2] - http://www.spencertom.com/2009/10/25/daniel-pink-on-the-surp...
Has anyone compared Nashorn vs nodejs (V8) yet?
And presumably if you found some one standing over a corpse hacking at it with a blood stained axe you'd think they where trying to administer a new form of CPR?

Its direct evidence for Christ's sake.
I was at Google for a time during the tail end of this time period, as well. I cannot claim anecdote to match data, but the pay of people I knew of, as well as my starting pay both there and at Microsoft, do sit in the "slightly higher than 100k" range. (After writing this, I realized I hadn't calculated in stock options well, which probably pushes it up towards 200k, but not so high that the "higher end of 100k" seems unreasonable) Perhaps I'm simply a low-end engineer, and the mean values are in fact higher, but this was my experience.

Having been at Google as well, you can tell me if you shared my experience that seemed the most enlightening about this, that during the various periodic review processes, there seemed no question of "are you adding additional value, should you be compensated as such." This is a discussion that I haven't had at any of the tech jobs I've worked, in that I've honestly never felt my wages were in any meaningful way tied to the value I contributed. (qualifier, I think I've fell on both sides of this line, in that it hurt and helped me, I just find the lack of incentive alignment may be the "way to approach this problem")
Few comments on here suggesting that it might be over priced, and yes it probably is, however some people like my self just want something simple to play around with, without buying loads of different parts when you don't really know what's required, if that costs me a few extra dollars to be lazy well that's ok with me :)

Never used an Arduino before and like the idea of having a screen to use, so ordered one to play around with.

Good luck with the project!

Edit: Just realised, I'm a long time lurker on KickStarter, but this is my first backing!
Commoditized sourcing for content marketing, aka hiring some fiverr to hurl some blogshit.
I may be missing something important, but at a glance there are about 140M jobs in the US. If we gave each of the ~320M US citizens $20k/yr, that comes out to roughly $6.4T/year as mentioned elsewhere in this thread.

If there are roughly 140M jobs, presumably there are 140M people working those jobs, meaning that there are approximately 140M people who must cover that $6.4T, which works out to be ~$46k/yr for each working person.

If we assume we can completely wipe the following off the books: Social Security ($773M), Income Security ($541M) and Medicare ($471M), the net cost per year drops to $4.6T/yr, which works out to be ~$33k/yr for each working person.

Total federal income tax[1] in 2013 was around $1.3T (Individual) + $273B (Corporate) = $1.59T. An increase from $1.59T to $6.2T is about a 290% net increase.

I did some very rough spreadsheet-math with [2] and [3] and came up with the following. If we didn't tax the $20k at all, and left everything the same as last year, the bottom 77% would be a net negative of ~$1.2T assuming all of their income tax went directly to pay for the $20k.

I assumed that the number of people in the top 2% made the same average salary as the top 1% in [4], and came up with the top 2% of income tax payers as being a net positive of $1.4T. I made that assumption just to make the math easy and to err on the side of optimism.

The 78-98 percentile come out to be a net positive of approximately $350B.

Looking back at the $1.3T federal income tax total for individuals, this would mean that after the $20k/person was paid for, the total federal income tax dollars would be roughly $600B (Individual income tax) + $273B (Corporate income tax) = $873B.

Looking at [5], it seems that there was a $3.803T - $2.902T = $901B deficit last year. If we knock off the difference in income tax revenues ($1.59T - $873B = $717B), then suddenly we have a $901B + $717B = $1.618T deficit again.

This all assumes that jobs stay constant, of course. I realize that all of these numbers are very rough, but I had some fun doing spreadsheet math so I figured I would share!

[1] http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_...
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rate_schedule_(federal_income_t...
[4] http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/...
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_United_States_federal_budg...
CouchDB is a total joy to use, and because it's just REST, you don't even need a driver.

There's a neat helper library in nano, but that just constructs requests for you.
I'm not "repeating" anyone's propaganda. I've worked in union situations before. I understand the ramifications of unions. As someone who tends to do quite well in this field, unions would be very deleterious for me personally: Unions are as much if not more about "equality" between union members, even where equality is measured by specious metrics (such as seniority), as it is about the employee/employer relationship.

The AMA is not a union by any traditional metric. It is a professional association. If a doctor is lured to a hospital for enormous sums of money, the AMA has absolutely no say over it. Nor do they dictate that another doctor has to be offered the job because they've been practicing for two months longer. Nor do they dictate that the doctor has to be paid for scale grade 7E because to do otherwise would cause resentment among other doctor's.

It would be great to have a professional association (presuming it didn't become too involved in its own enrichment). No thanks to unions.
The thing is that she never said the thoughts were reasonable; it's perfectly possible that she acknowledges she's a bit over-sensitive about it just like you might do something out of fear that you'll be thought of as incompetent or unsuccessful.

On the other hand; thinking that this kind of thing is never discussed is rather naive. There's plenty of people who are very observant about these kinds of things and will happily discuss them when the opportunity arises. We even invented a word for it: gossiping.