skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If Toronto is anything like many American municipalities, a large chunk of that cost is pensions. Pension funds are often not fully paid up, and payments into the fund are often subject to rosy predictions about future earnings that lead to shortfalls if the fund manager underperforms. Additionally, public pensions often have a large 'defined benefit' overhang meaning that many beneficiaries are contractually entitled to fixed payouts. Finally, many public pensions are also based on final salary at retirement or in a short (1-3 year) period leading up to retirement, so it's common for in the US (and likely elsewhere) for police to work ridiculous amoutns of overtime in their last few years on the force in order to puff up their pension. Since the administration of a pension fund can involve payment obligations that reach back for many decades, the burdens of past financial or contractual mismanagement are often cumulative and ultimately fall upon the taxpayer.

This is not as exciting or scarifying as police spending too much money on military toys, but it's a much more likely explanation for budgetary increases. One other possible problem which has recently been an issue in San Jose, California is that police academies sometimes spend a lot of money training new officers, only to see them leave immediately after graduation for other cities/counties that offer better pay or benefits. In the US many municipalities run their own police academies and there are no contractual obligations on graduates. San Jose has been strenuously trying to reform its pension system, so (unsurprisingly) new entrants to the force get a much worse deal than senior members whose benefits are locked in and have to be paid for by cuts to the benefits that can be earned by new members. So graduates train up in San Jose and then take off for some other city in the area that's offering a sweeter deal, possibly with the encouragement of of the police union that is not enthused about pension reform.
> This was frustrating for the simple fact that we spent more than an hour writing the blog post.

You are way too hopeful if you think that an hour of writing will result in tons of traffic.

Take the time to write substantive, polished articles. Most of them will not be hits, but once in a while your work will pay off. One hour is nothing.
If they've got the traffic, and they can provide the same or better experience as Kickstarter or Indiegogo, why not? Better it fund the community than a third-party site.
Ask HN: I keep doing the same thing over and over, how do I change?
So in the past 4 years I worked on creating a SaaS product in a particular niche and it goes down something like this:

1) Build product

2) Get a few paying customers

3) Start working on improving it for customers

4) Realize product is bloated or is pretty lacking in features.

5) Build more features.

6) No increase in sales, keeps building

7) Gets tired, refund users, abandon working on it.

8) Starts hating 9-5 job, repeat the whole cycle again.

Is my problem, finding a market fit first? I automatically assumed that because of poor sales, I must be lacking in features so I immediately start building. But I get really burnt out by doing this. I almost always end up refunding my customers because I realize what I spent months building is lacking.

The biggest problem I have is, when I start to make incremental changes to the product, I keep having the urge to restart from scratch. However, it's a huge time sink to do this again and again (4 times already). I'm beginning to think this is just an issue with me.

I'm basically in my fourth iteration and I think it's finally clicking. Something is deadly wrong with my thought process.

Any insight would help.

I built the product. I built the website. I got a few customers. Then I get burnt out building more features or making it "perfect". Then I can't work on it anymore and so I look for a job.

After 4 years, I either introduce a change in my process and turn this into a sustainable income or I just give up completely.
Cloud Foundry is a self-hosted Heroku. Both are PaaS (but it's you who provide the "P" with the former).

VirtKick is a self-hosted DigitalOcean. Both are very simple IaaS (but it's you who provide the "I" with the former)

Does it explain?
In the USA you always key in the PIN after swiping/inserting/removing the card.
Hi, thanks for letting us know -- are you still having problems? We enabled the embedded video on mobile devices a little while ago.
It's still someone's own choice to install a Wi-Fi router and powering it on. The fact that many of them don't exactly understand that it might be privacy issue (if and only if they put identifying information in the SSID) does not mean that Mozilla and Google are thinking for them. The assumption that the router owner does not mean the SSID to be public is also not warranted.

If the SSID was mandated to be identical to someone's name (or any other identifying information), I'd say the problem you describe was real. But since it the information broadcast is mostly pseudonymous, I think it's quite a small thing you are arguing. If people are including personal information in their SSID, by all means tell them!
Aleph Zero
So they thought they were under attack by a nation-state, and destroyed their USB(?) mice. Yes, we ridiculed them in 2013, but post-BadUSB they don't look _quite_ so crazy.
That's a great idea, be sure to mail them about it at info@archive.org!
He he, again addictive games by 2048!
I think one can hardly exaggerate what an improvement over cmd.exe PowerShell is. Even if I really hated the outcome, these days PowerShell is just too damn useful to ignore as a Windows admin.

One thing I am seriously disappointed with is the documentation or lack thereof. PowerShell's Get-Help/man cmdlet is admittetly nice, but compared to the kind of documentation you get with Perl or Python, I am left underwhelmed.
But the expectations and success are defined by the employee when they arrive, based on what they think is most necessary. We rely on their experience to come up with the best solution and provide them context to make the best choice.

For example, let's say you have two people in the same role, one at the top of the range and one at the bottom. The one at the bottom may do something like write a small script to audit resource usage, whereas the person at the top of the range would create an entire software platform for building such audit tools.

Both are doing the same job (auditing resource usage) but one is doing it at a much higher level, and both are needed, one to solve the immediate problem and one to solve the long term problem. And both are getting paid slightly above what they could get if they left the company and went somewhere else.
author here. thanks; fixing this right now.
I assume that this is for in-state students only, all of whom should understand the grading system.
This is unusual, but doesn't seem like a problem. You are working for company A and being contracted out to company B as a "consultant." B is probably paying A for your services assuming they are in fact separate corporations.
Oculus Connect Videos and Presentations Online
Hackers swipe e-mail addresses from Apple Pay-competitor CurrentC
it isn't about gambling demographic, it is about voting demographic. To make the "salt of the earth holier than thou value" voters to vote for gambling you need to throw them a good cause they would thus supposedly support by their votes.
This is quite cool. I'm installing it right now on my system.

From the wiki, it says it will soon be available on homebrew as well.

https://github.com/facebook/osquery/wiki/install-os-x
Totally agree.

>>> Salary Range.

Too many times I see "Competitive", "Highly Competitive" "Plus Good Benefits" - you are simply wasting my time. Write out the benefits in point form and also add the salary.

>>> Name of the client/company.

I want to know who the company is straight away rather than wasting 3 - 7 days waiting of your phone call or email about more information on the company. Why do recruiters even do this?

">>> What are they looking for?"

Another classic blunder recruiters do. The best one is when they list some technologies, for example "Our stack is, Python, C++, C, HTML, CSS, etc." - etc.? Really? Its unprofessional in my eyes.

Location:

"Various" "enter_vague_region" - unprofessional and lazy.

Human resources will not find good employees doing this. They seem like headless chickens throwing unnecessary buzzwords into requirements. Why is there so much confusion?
Internet.org App Launches in Tanzania
If you don't pretend you've heard of it before, it's an abstract scenario that might as well be hypothetical. You're answering based on the question and only the question.
perhaps. I would agree that many things start proprietary because owning the IP is where a lot of the value is, but, as a consumer, the fact that it is proprietary presents no additional value to me. If I was investing I might see it as a good thing. Instead I read it as: check out our new device for selling you 100 dollar cartridges that will only be available from us.
If that's true, it's not ironic. Buying a lottery ticket is a choice. Paying taxes imposed on the entire population is not a choice.
You don't see any problem with Federal agents lying about who they are to further their own goals?

Why is it illegal for me to lie about who I am, but not the other way around?
No advice but I am impressed you've been able to build multiple products and get people to pay for them. That's pretty cool all by itself! Way farther than I've gotten :)
Is an email "content"? Is a blog post? A HN/Reddit/whatever comment?

I don't think the old stereotype of "consumers" as some sort of purely passive livestock is especially useful any more. Clay Shirky's old but very readable "Here Comes Everybody" makes a similar case at much greater and more articulate length.
German here, studied CS at 4 German universities.

No idea about your visa, but if you are enrolled somewhere that shouldn't be a problem.

Application process: will vary widely, for many human sciences you can just enroll (Sociology, History, Gender Studies, all that stuff). You might even be able to just enroll for Business in some places.

For CS degrees sometimes you have to apply formally and show what projects you have done, submit your grade sheet, sometimes interviews. For my M.Sc. I was allowed to interview via Skype because I was abroad at the time. They gave me proper coding and interview questions and grilled me for 45mins. Some proof of A-Levels will be required.

Living costs: Will vary depending on where you go. Berlin will be dead cheap, so will be many places in the former GDR, while southern cities like Munich or Stuttgart will be more expensive. Hamburg is also fairly expensive. Nothing like the Bay Area or NY though.

A very nice resource for German Universities is: http://ranking.zeit.de/che2014/en/

No idea about the other mentioned countries, but I was surprised that Scotland didn't show up, but they might be only free for non-english EU citizens.
Pet Theories
Re: the original convo, they're stuck on the fact that arithmetic mean isn't terribly valid on a skewed distribution (and response/completion distributions are generally positive-skewed because of the firm/hard lower bound on task completion).

However, I do get what you're trying to do re: identify whether the problem is related to outliers. But in general, comparing to median has a lot more validity. Median isn't as sensitive to skew, and will be closer to the peak. For your purposes it probably wouldn't be a lot different but you wouldn't have pushed the "it's wrong" button.

All said, though, even comparing 50th (median) to 99th is pretty coarse. I'd probably be looking somewhere closer to 75th percentile for a comparison. Basically, you'd want to guess what percent might reasonably be affected by performance spikes and compare from there.
In theory, theory and practice are equivalent. In practice, theory and practice are quite different.

My engineering and computer science classes taught me more about "how to think" than the liberal arts classes I took - those seemed to focus on regurgitating facts or the professor's viewpoint. And I certainly didn't get the impression that the in-major kids were doing anything different, just better practiced regurgitation.

I think if "liberal arts" education were fulfilling its promise, it would have long ago adopted programming (an unforgiving applied logic) as a core component (scheme/haskell, not python). People in general learn by example, while teachers (having already learned) tend to emphasize abstract models. This is a great recipe for model precession, fostering an illusion of thinking critically while being at the mercy of now-invisible built in assumptions.
Currently finishing up my Master's in CS at a German school, Saarland University. The town the school is in (Saarbrücken, near Luxembourg) is extremely dull, especially with my rather poor German skills, but the education I'm getting is top-notch, and you can't argue with the price.

Anything you're wondering about specifically?
This is doubly true for PHP. Upgrading an (already likely secure) database class in a framework that uses PDO is a lot easier than changing a thousand calls to mysql_query after the fact. You don't have to worry about wrapping every echoed variable in htmlspecialchars() when you're already using twig. PHP developers keep running afoul of what are already mostly solved problems. Imposing a bit of structure and modularity now will make responses to issues easier later.

Although the downsides of this are the possible vulnerabilities in the framework itself (as well as the potential learning curve and lock-in) there are likely to be more people using, and finding, those vulnerabilities than would be in your quick-and-dirty handrolled quasiframework. Even if the latter is more fun.

And if you're on shared hosting... umm... you should probably reconsider that. If that's not likely to happen soon, then database-driven sessions, regular backups and SSL are a must.
Just FYI, I wrote this up (http://esd.io/blog/t-mobile-dns-hijack.html) and I'm told off the record that T-Mobile intends to fix it.
I think the syntax highlighter felt pretty much the same way as you do.
I surely am. This is my life. Was my life, anyway.
Disturbingly, this is even more dangerous than them storing credit cards on their servers, since the MCX system uses raw bank account information. If you think it's bad dealing with reversing charges and changing numbers when you get a credit card stolen, try dealing with ACH fraud.
Great service and command-line tool! Very easy to learn, (I was quite productive with it after using it for about a week) saves me a lot of time and I also think that it brings together a pretty awesome C++ community.
Article is correct in general, though very wrong in details.
Yes, you can study (not for free) but cheap (for like 3000 dol. a year). If you want to study for free you need to learn the language. If you learn the language, there will be a special governmental scholarship granted to those American (or any foriegn students).

Brazil has free education if you study in portuguese.
There are much more countries not mentioned that also have free education for foriegners.

Germany is very difficult country to study. Very compatative even for Germans. The foriegn students will be accepted only after German. Admission to programs is different from US and difficult.
How It Helped Expedia: End to End Automation and Multi-Cloud with AWS, Openstack
Seems to be just about HTML and JS rather than front-ends in a general sense.
Tinder Taps into an Age-Old Truth: Looks Are All That Matter
This is really interesting and very cool to see. The approach we're taking with Eve (gory details at [1]) is that you can treat everything as relational and doing so provides lots of benefits. One thing that wasn't clear though, was how you extend that notion down into the OS-level for both performance and semantic reasons. It's encouraging to see someone with requirements as deep as facebook's find that this strategy works in that context.

The next step would be manipulating the OS as relations. E.g. an insert into the process table allows you to actually spawn a process. It would start to get really interesting from there...

[1]: http://incidentalcomplexity.com/2014/10/16/retrospective/
FCC Proposes New Rule to Make All Your Cord Cutting Fantasies Come True
If you are interested in working on Project Ara and future projects that incorporate modular Android and hardware networking, check out

http://static.leaflabs.com/flyers/ara/LeafLabs_Hiring.pdf
I'd like to remark that there's a similar trend that seems to go on in high schools and with college admissions. By all accounts, I've heard that it's not too difficult to attain perfect high-school grades (save for some of the very competitive high schools), whereas that's usually a serious achievement in European schools. There's a similar comparison for the AP vs. IB examinations.
The Race to Replace the Mythical Anonabox
Seconded; I think the swishy UI interactions and the sound effects are perfect for each other. There's nothing worse than a terrible site hiding a great product, but you guys nailed it. Purchased!
The 99th percentile matters
I agree. I use OSX and Linux at home, but I am a Windows admin at work. And while I strongly prefer Unix-like systems to Windows, I welcome every effort to improve it and make my job easier.
Did it really work well with gamers? Or just hobbyist gamers? I mean, sure many systems have had expansion ports on them. The vast majority of them have never been used. And the market of game systems to computer gamers is massive.
Exactly what i was wondering. RBI (Reserve Bank of india) does not allow entering PIN's on touch screen. Infact they (RBI) go to such a length that a card processing terminal should be ONLY just the terminal and the hardware should be approved by the RBI which might take months.
When it comes to Norway, be aware that the Government has proposed the introduction of tuition fees for international students outside the EU / EEA despite a unanimous Parliament that said no to this under a year ago. [0]

[0] http://isu-norway.no/blog/
If your friends just created the account to upvote you (or they only use the account to upvote your stories) then there is no too much difference between a friend (aka meatpupet) a sockpupet and a bot. (The system also detects voting rings and other methods to game the site.)

If your friends are regular users, they would have understand the explicit and implicit guidelines of the site, and upvote stories because they are interesting. (Another unexpected behavior is to write empty one-line comments. It looks like astroturfing and are generally downvoted.)
Don't do it alone?
I didn't know it was illegal to lie about who you are. There's lots of exceptions like "impersonating a police officer" and "identity theft", but I'm pretty sure it's not illegal for me to lie about who I am to a girl at a party to further my goals.

Also, the "Federal" part might be spooking you. How about police officers? Do you object to undercover officers?
Ironically, the founder went to Wharton, the institution that is the embodiment of the exact opposite values of the university that he is founding.
I invite you to work on a project that is managed this way. The answer to your question will become clear.
It's the cutting off of a service to serve as a pretext that's problematic. If they dress up as pizza delivery men and are invited inside, even without a warrant, that's perfectly OK - the law is not meant to protect criminals from their own stupidity.
Is there a reason you're not naming them? You disclosed it responsibly, and presumably they have now fixed it. I don't understand the rationale for _not_ naming them.
Even more odd is they still have their message about FF not being supported for Inbox up for Nightly. I just switched my User Agent to Chrome and Inbox works fine in FF.
Project Ara video update
Earlier discussion of the project web site submission:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8463629
> Similarly, if you speak with police without a lawyer present, the policeman can say that you confessed to them (or said something that damages your case, at least), regardless of whether it's true.

I've always found that one really interesting. Let's say they arrest me, put me in a room and try to interrogate me for a few hours before a lawyer shows up. Even if the only words out of my mouth the entire time are "I would like to speak to a lawyer please", what stops the Police from saying I said something else entirely?
Yup! The only reason why it's not today is because we couldn't get a formula merged into mainline homebrew until the download link was public. It is now though, so we'll sort this out soon. Now that you mention it though, this would be a pretty easy, high-impact contribution that a community member could make as well!
> insane prices for ink cartridges.

I know right? Printer ink is more expensive than human blood. Not even kidding.

http://i.snag.gy/OBC9U.jpg
We didn't become a success, but it did help blow up our traffic.

That's the fallacy: "blow up" is a relative term. 1 user is infinity% larger than 0 users.
I'd really love to see and outsider do writeup on why Perl 6 is where it's at.

JWZ explained it more than a decade ago: http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
Link fixed, thank you!
Canada has worst climate change record in 1st world
Probably caused should be established, the police should not be establishing probable cause.

eg. If you witness someone selling stolen goods, search them, don't sell them stolen goods and then search them.
You can write a library in rust that will never invoke unsafe code, even if you can't have an entire standalone program.

>I dont understand why this is difficult idea for people to accept. Just use the good bits of rust. rust doesnt need to be 100% safe; its not, and thats completely ok.

It's okay for now, but I'm eagerly waiting for a version where the important pieces of unsafe code can be formally verified. Give me safe unwinding, memory allocation, and sockets, and I can cover half the world.

As far as I know this isn't an especially difficult request. I could probably cobble together something right now by borrowing bits of verified C and gluing them to library-limited rust.
Hemingwrite – Portable E Ink word processor with Cherry MX switches
Don't forget Flash and (until recently) PDF reading support.
Generic "HP 3D printer compatible" building material sounds like it could be a nice, profitable little niche...
Looks like you're right. My experience in a graduate program doesn't extrapolate to undergrad. Just looked this up: international undergrad tuition at UBC is about $24k and international graduate tuition is about $7.5k.

Edit: to further clarify, it appears that graduate rate is only for "research" graduate programs. "Professional" programs can be much more.
You're correct, but like Jeremy said, they have mobile apps in both the Apple [1] and Google [2] Store. Funny enough, they both have over 2000 ratings at 1 star.

[1] - https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/currentc/id912922036?mt=8

[2] - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.currentc
My immediate reaction is that it looks pretty useless apart from being a foray into bringing digital and physical closer together, which may lead to other interesting things. We need springboards like this to find out what works and what doesn't and make something better, but in and of itself it doesn't seem too interesting.

Just the first reaction to some of the videos that are mostly bleh marketing. Might have to revise my opinion once I see some more.

Looking forward to seeing someone do a hands-on video, or just create something for 30 minutes with a camera looking over his/her shoulder.
Does this mean we'll be able to see balance on the blockchain in one place?
And employers wonder why they can't get the "best talent" in the industry. Why recruiters act so dodgy, I don't know. It sets out a bad example of what the Human Resources Sector is/has become.