skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First off, most of what follows is anecdotal.

I've worked at a couple of mom-and-pop businesses. Most of our customers at a couple of the places were people working at or just above minimum wage.

Were our customers to have their income doubled it would be great for the business. More customers with much more disposable income? That sounds fantastic. And in turn the cost of higher wages for the employees is smaller than the reward from a more prosperous customer base. On a $2 cup of coffee for instance, the wage cost is somewhere between $0.15 and $0.50.

A customer making $8/hour would balk at a $3 cup of coffee, but a customer making $16/hour would have no issue with it. Even accounting for a 15% to 25% increase in cost all the way down our supply chain, we would still come out the better for it. As would most businesses.

Even businesses were wages are the majority of the expenses wouldn't be hurt. If the cost of a service is 75% labor wages, and that cost doubles, you need to raise the price of that service by 35%, right? But your lowest income customers have a 100% increase in income. Probably a multi-times increase in disposable income. That's good for business.

The problem with competing with walmart has little to nothing to do with labor and wage costs. It has to do with Walmart's highly optimized supply chain and one-stop-shopping at very low prices. Doubling of wages would have very little impact on the dynamic between Walmart and smaller businesses.

Though smaller businesses may benefit from a consumer base with more disposable income having to be less price conscious and not having to shop at walmart out of economic necessity.
Sounds like you discovered an opportunity for a job ...
You can also send SIGUSR1 to dd for progress info. From the manpage:

Sending a USR1 signal to a running 'dd' process makes it print I/O statistics to standard error and then resume copying.

$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null& pid=$!
$ kill -USR1 $pid; sleep 1; kill $pid

18335302+0 records in 18335302+0 records out 9387674624 bytes (9.4 GB) copied, 34.6279 seconds, 271 MB/s
Have these workshops been running for some time already? It's amazing to see stuff like this happening all around the world.
Sun/Oracle has always held the trademark on JavaScript, not Mozilla. And TC39 predates the "JavaScript Renaissance" that you're talking about.
Don't forget taxes will take a large chunk of any payout away. Sometimes as much as 50% when you factor in state taxes.
Sorry, while I said "I believe", I should have stated it as a fact, as I consider it essentially proven by economics.

I suggest you read Man, Economy and State by Murray Rothbard. But if you want something shorter and quicker, try Economics in One lesson by Henry Hazlitt. Both are available free online.
Sorry for over repeating what people always say, but I am genuinely so grateful for the UK's NHS.
Although to be fair, there are a few "rich people in tech suck because they're rich" articles which are more hostile.

Not because they're rich, but because they've departed so far from the founding values of technology.

Picking on the average "Google bus" rider is mean-spirited and pointless, but the "leaders" of private-sector technology really are rapacious assholes. This sector of the economy really is run by horrible human beings and pointing out is not mindless hostility, but confronting one of the most important issues that our generation faces.
> why they aren't just including everyone

They are. At least, that's my takeaway from the Snowden revelations. They are just using various and overlapping justifications for it, e.g., Schneier's notion of robustness of NSA surveillance programs [0]. The NSA's goal is to collect everything from everyone. Therefore, they want to use the broadest and most expensive justifications and criteria for collection.

[0] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/01/how_the_nsa_t...
If a system can parse for keywords, any tracking or recording is already enabled.

It's also not how the phone system works.
You seem to be assuming that it is the decision of the business to keep the employees in poverty.

They might be able to afford to run a business that employees fewer workers, which is the opposite of the intent.

It's one thing for a business to fail due to market forces or poor choices by management/owners. It's another for a business to pushed into closing, thus employees losing their jobs, by a government mandate that attempted to make the employees' lives better.

That's the initial wave of negative consequences that I said would have to be survived before the positive results would come to fruition.
Not having the advantages and disadvantages of the existing system sold to us as a bundled package, perhaps?

You really have to consider the whole budget, in its entirety, and compare the amounts spent on those things you find to be worthwhile, and those things that you abhor, along with the actual results yielded from that spending. Different people will have different opinions, and therefore produce different numbers when calculating the net value of government, by subtracting disadvantages from advantages.

Pretend that government is a cable company. Some people like the social justice channel, and the safety net channel, and the environmental protection channel. Other people like the foreign wars of choice channel, the temperance channel, the religious non-interference channel. And some people like the robust infrastructure channel, the rule of law channel, and the tedious indie film channel. (Someone has to, I suppose.)

Most customers would prefer to only pay for channels that they typically watch. But then some of the less popular channels would have to be dropped. The cable company executives really like those unpopular channels, so they work together to ensure that customers cannot buy the channels they actually want unless they are bundled with all those other channels. And they set the price really high, because all those cool guys walking away from explosions on the war channel and the heartwarming tales of people overcoming adversity on the social justice channel cost a lot of money.

When people don't like the real cable company, they can get satellite, or an over-the-air antenna, or tv-over-fiber service, or online streaming, or buy and rent DVDs, or pirate shows. But in this metaphor, you could still get those things, but you still have to pay for the cable bundle anyway, whether you like it or not.

Can you see any advantage to not forcing a person who hates watching football to buy the NFL Sunday Ticket, even if you really like watching football? Remember, that guy is making it less expensive for you to watch.
I was the first upvote--did not notice the cost and would not have upvoted had I known. I do love its looks.
I've heard similar stories from people making international calls to China.
If the government acted for the citizenry as a whole, then they wouldn't have to ban these transactions. At best, the government imposes the majority view on the minority. I think that in general this is more dangerous than helpful. Imagine that the government, with full support of 80% of all US citizens, banned doing business with anyone of Iranian descent, not just living in Iran. That's not feasible in the current climate, but it's certainly possible. I think I'd prefer it if such laws were fundamentally unenforceable.
>This is like telling people thinking about becoming a volunteer firefighter that they should factor out of consideration the possibility of a fire.

No, it's the opposite. The vast majority of firefighters eventually have to fight a fire. The vast majority of startups never catch fire.
> I've heard people claim Apple focuses on 1-3, I've never heard people say Apple focuses on 4 and 5

I think 4 applies to an extent; MacOS has very good (albeit stolen from Emacs) universal text navigation shortcuts, for instance. Funnily enough, they used to be quite keen on 5, with Services and Applescript. Services are still around, but have faded into obscurity, with surprisingly few users even being aware they exist; to an extent, they may be replaced by action extensions.
So the one potentially interesting aspect of the article was withheld.
Which means that their competitors who still offer delivery would start making more money, and could afford to hire the drivers that your parents let go...
Holy smokes, where to begin...

> if rich people don't create jobs, then how can it be their fault that there are not enough jobs?

No one is blaming rich people. They are blaming the system (aspects of it, at least) that we have collectively created.

>If jobs really come from the middle class, why hasn't the middle class created more of them?

Much like fire needs heat, oxygen, and a fuel a successful business needs entrepreneurs, capital, and demand. If the middle class doesn't have disposable income that limits available capital and demand for creating and sustaining a business by middle class entrepreneurs.

>Arguing that wages for middle class jobs should go up raises the question of where that wage money should come from. The answer is capital, i.e. rich people.

Creating value creates money. That's how this whole thing works. It doesn't have to come from rich people, it comes, ultimately, from profit.

>The USSR and China attempted to eliminate rich people by adopting a communist economy.

You are jumping a bit far, there. I don't think anyone is advocating communism.

>But before there was Google or the iPhone, there were rich people writing checks to the people who envisioned them.

Capital doesn't have to come from rich people. Just as centralization of economic control is inefficient and ultimately harmful in communist systems you cite, it is just as destructive in a capitalist system.
Programmatically Opening the iOS Simulator Data Directory For Your App
If you read the constitution, there's a section called the Enumerated Powers Clause that gives the federal government very specific, limited powers. If we had kept to that system, the federal government would not be swallowing the economy, and we'd be much better off.

Consider this- the federal governments debt alone (including unfunded liabilities) is more than the amount of US dollars in circulation.
It should be showing error messages as a notification, found in notification center. Also, error messages should be automatically appended to `logger.lines`, which you can browse in a textgrid using `logger.show()`.
> but I'd enjoy some kind of citation on that claim that the majority of Tor users are using it for nefarious purposes.

I don't know about exit nodes, but at least for hidden services that seems to be true (assuming you count torrents and drugs as 'nefarious'). See http://www.verisigninc.com/assets/labs/Measuring-the-Leakage... / http://www.ieee-security.org/TC/SP2013/papers/4977a080.pdf / http://donncha.is/2013/05/trawling-tor-hidden-services/
Why I stopped being a startup programmer
Nice article as always, thanks Alex!

What I’ve found is that a successful approach to A/B testing is really dependent on the type of company you’re operating and product that you’re offering. Small cosmetic changes to the UI or copy often result in equally small changes to click-thru or conversion rates, and so these A/B tests require relatively greater levels of statistical power in order to achieve significance.

For mega-traffic companies like Google or Amazon, these kinds of tests are worth it because a sub-1% lift still contributes substantially to their bottom line. They also have the traffic numbers to properly power tests of smaller changes in a reasonable amount of time.

But for everyone else, ‘shallow’ A/B tests of a button color or call to action will often yield inconclusive results because they don’t the traffic numbers. For these types of companies, we’ve seen that deeper changes to the product, UI layouts or entire UX workflows are what move the needle. Designing these tests require more thought and development work up-front – but at least you’ll be making substantial improvements in an experimentally rigorous way instead of just spinning your wheels with some one-off design tweaks.

To avoid these kinds of disappointing tests, another thing to consider is setting a minimum detectable effect. The idea here is that validating a small change in improvement requires more statistical power (i.e.: more test subjects) than validating a large change, and at some point in order to justify a continuation of the test you’ll want to achieve some minimum amount of lift. Once you can say with statistical confidence that this desired lift isn’t achievable, you can stop the test earlier and move on to the next.

Most importantly, you should be designing these tests with empathy for your audience. Ask the questions: What changes can I make to my product or website that would motivate my users to take the actions I want to them to take? What are they looking for? What do they care about? And why? More often than not, I think you’ll find that the answer is not ‘a different button color’ :-D

In the end, A/B testing is really a very unsophisticated way of answering the question ‘What works better?’ We’ve done a lot of research into better solutions to this problem, and have found that an automated approach using a learning algorithm almost always leads to faster results and higher average conversion rates. You can read more about that here: http://splitforce.com/resources/auto-optimization/
Thanks for your appreciations. It is hard for me to explain those ideas as other do. But yes, I feel the current problems is we forget the demand side of economy.
So you're dependent on a cloud startup for basic auth and you've got no more security than any other isolated two factor auth system.
hmm...strange. let me look into it.
the dollar amount?
Cryptomeorg: Snowden gave files to multiple outlets as insurance
When the NSA collects evidence on someone and uses that evidence to prosecute a criminal case, they can and should file a motion to suppress that evidence.

The NSA data is collected under search issued by a FISA court. So, during a suppression hearing, defense counsel can challenge the validity of the warrant. If their challenge is denied, they can appeal. If their appeal fails, they can petition the Supreme Court. In all these courts, the proceedings are public record and the standard for a warrant can be debated by lawyers and the public alike. We have an open process for checking the work of the humans issuing FISA court warrants; Use it.

Even if the warrant was valid, the NSA might have overstepped its bounds. This can also be challenged when the NSA defends the admissibility of its criminal evidence in a suppression hearing. An independent judiciary can decide if the executive branch has acted outside its bounds. No, an investigator isn't punished for the overbroad evidence collection, but they are embarrassed by having a criminal get off due to their sloppiness. We have an open process for checking the work of human investigators in this country; Use it.

It isn't as if the government just takes that evidence and unilaterally decides to blow people up. We have due process in this country; Use it.

/s
There's also a weird recent addition, the "Author-izer" [1], where the author can generate non-paywalled direct links to the definitive ACM DL version, and post those links on their personal website. This is distinct from the author-pays open-access option in that it's free, but just generates open-access links that you can post elsewhere, rather than making the paper fully open-access, as the pay option does. I don't bother to use it myself though, and instead just self-host a copy of the final PDF.

[1] http://www.acm.org/publications/acm-author-izer-service
Really? Are most laws actually justified on the basis of "we really wish we could be libertarian, but we need to curb this behavior"? I don't think I've ever saw a law justified on those grounds.
> By that analogy the use of any encryption can be justified as helping criminals?

That is certainly the view of the security services: anyone using encryption we can't break is a potential enemy hiding something we want to know.

That is why there were export restrictions on encryption technology until it became obvious that was detrimental (crypto developed elsewhere wan't covered, so the restrictions put allied commercial users at a disadvantage to other countries in the industrial espionage stakes without actually affecting the people the restrictions were aimed at at all).

It is also why services that offer encryption are pressured into giving authorities access to the private keys, and those that refuse (or can't due to the design meaning the keys are only in their users hands) tend to get shut down.
Software developers make $100+ an hour. The jobs are there for people willing to adapt to them. You can't just wait to be handed a job that matches your current abilities.
About User Interface Sounds in Chicago Bikes
This is a pretty big problem with dying proprietary solutions. They'll bundle and do other dirty tricks to keep revenue up. Heck, you can't even install flash without nagging for a slew of add-ons like some mcaffee crap. Now they're just putting the add-ons on without asking?
This argument isn't about people starting small businesses, but rather about millionaires patting themselves on the back for being wealthy. Many of whom think of themselves as job creators because they have a maid and a gardener while getting richer by being clever on the stock market.
UAProgressView — Simple, Lightweight and Powerful
For many small businesses, increasing the minimum wage would increase the cost of their employees but not increase the income of their customers. These businesses would see an increase in expenses but none of the benefits of a consumer base with more disposable income.

Walmart wants a higher minimum wage because their consumer base includes minimum wage employees.
As a bearer of an apparently hard-to-pronounce name, this looks interesting, but I don't know that I would do this.
>If you want to make millions in software, get a job writing code at a bank and invest your salary.

Really? Even if some 'banks' pay better, these banks tend to be located in a handful of cities in the world - but there are startups in a lot of more locations.

And it doesn't seem clear that finance firms pay that well:
> The average base salary for a software engineer at a finance firm is $92,000, not far ahead of the average base salary of $87,000 for a software engineer at a tech company, according to salaries self-reported by employees on the jobs and careers site Glassdoor.com.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/silicon-valley-vs-wall-stre...
For Email Newsletters, a Death Greatly Exaggerated
Project Author here: Thanks everyone for making Hydra bypass Zephyros as my most starred project! (Especially considering Zephyros is deprecated in favor of Hydra, and I can't really delete Zephyros since people might still be using it.)
It is absolutely ridiculous how pricing schemes like that are even legal. Have insurance that covers a non-typical lab test? They bill $1000 to your carrier (regardless of what th e contracted rate will be) and you are usually responsible for a fraction of that because of deductibles. Don't have insurance and are a cash-only customer? They bill you $150. Have insurance and insurance declines to pay? You get billed $1000.

A real example of this, my son had a routine vaccination performed at a Baylor clinic and my insurance company drug their feet on remitting payment to them. So, Baylor turned around and invoiced me for $1250 and was ready to send that to collections. Turns out that the agreed rate with my insurance carrier for that vaccination was well under $100.
Hmm yeah, that would be pretty cool! Can you file an issue for this feature request?
This needs to be endorsed by Karl Pilkington.
I think you underestimate the number of programmers who are willing to work under such conditions for the "glory" they perceive the position to bring (and, of course, there is no shortage of people who actually think their lottery ticket is worth far more than it really is).

In an area where there is a high concentration of people who are young (naive) and (relatively) debt/responsibility free it's easy, almost trivial, for a founder to exploit them. I perused Angel List some time ago. The salary offerings were hilarious. It's very clear to me (mid-30s guy with a family and mortgage) that they are targeting a certain age and social group.
It seems to me that the two tactics could be complementary. If you discourage people from using Tor, then you don't have to devote as many resources to the people that use Tor.
"I heard there was a solar flare today"
Sure, just ignore all the asians, hispanics, women, etc in that photo.

You're arguing in support of a prejudice that says "only white males are libertarians therefore we don't have to listen to their arguments".

It's anti-intellectual.
Land art generator initiative (artistic renewable energy)
Copyright's pretty crucial for a lot of software. The GPL, in particular, depends on copyright law to have any useful effect. Why would you think code isn't a creative work but a photo is?
Probably. I think Amethyst does this, so we should be able to too. Can you file an issue for this feature request? Thanks.
Show HN: The Summer of Swift
Location: London, UK

Remote: As you wish

Relocation: Anywhere my USA/UK passports allow me.

Stack: Python (Pyramid, Flask), JavaScript (jQuery, KO, backbone), Node.js, HTML5, CSS3, MySQL, Ansible, Photoshop/Illustrator

Skills: Frontend, Backend and UI/UX design

Github: http://github.com/izolate

Resume: http://izolate.net/resume

---

Self taught designer and developer, looking to continue focusing on my skills in Python/JS. Have a keen interest in RESTful APIs, open source and good design.

On some days I can be that hipster designer, the other days a nerdy engineer. Desire to join a team that take both domains seriously.

Hugely enamoured and passionate about web development in my chosen stack. Looking for a position where I can just focus and give it my all. Bonus points for being in California.
> Had he been born in Africa, Hanauer points out — where the potential customers for his entrepreneurial efforts would have barely enough money to survive — Hanauer would likely be selling fruit by the side of the road

Africa in not a country. It's a continent with 50 plus countries, some with a middle class with decent spending power. So there's a high probability that Hanauer would in fact not be likely to be selling fruit by the side of the road growing up in a middle class family (as he did in the US) in an African country.
Where on that page does it say that updating Flash installs PlayPanel?
#webapps Seven features that make your web app wonderful for enterprise clients
> All the stuff about his previous posting, etc, is tenuous and circumstantial-- it seems totally feasible that it is parallel construction.

I've done similar things in the past (trying to find a user's real identity, when that user has taken active steps to stop anyone finding out - before you ask, tracking scammers, not doxxing innocents) and to me it sounded totally plausible. He made exactly the same kind of mistakes many of the people I've tracked down did, and they found him the same way I would have gone about it.
Exactly. My wording obviously could have been clearer.
If the boss of a company eats lunch with the boss of the mafia, I think that would be warranted.

However, I meant it more in a sense that the mails will be accessed by the NSA, be it on Googles servers, on the transport between Googles servers (they tried to fix that though, didn't they?) or before. As a link on the level of the mails.
Can someone confirm this? Does it offer it as an optional install (a la browser toolbars)?
You're missing the point. You don't need to build in support for Yahoo, Live, Outlook etc separately. We've got standards (like IMAP) which have been designed specifically to enable interoperability of software from different vendors.
Yep! Source code here: https://github.com/amizra/PitchTennis
This is awesome, I'll be using this to revamp my personal site.