skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To me, I see this strange contradiction in how stackoverflow is evolving. Joel Spolsky (one of the founders) gave a very interesting presentation[1] in 2009. The key takeaway I've always remembered from his comments was the idea of "anthropology". The science of trying to really understand human behavior and make the website amplify good communities.

What I see 6 years later is a lot of "why is this question closed as 'not constructive' when it has 500 upvotes?!?!"

There is clearly a disconnect between the way the end users see stackoverflow and the way the moderators see it. These days, it seems like the stackoverflow guys (not necessarily Joel specifically) are inexplicably blind to human behaviors that was was highlighted in 2009. But, I don't have the whole story so maybe someone closer to the situation can explain.

I don't know who is right or wrong. The thing I'd like to know is if stackoverflow still "works" for the quality contributors who invest their time writing extensive and insightful answers. Or, have a significant percentage abandoned the site because they wade through too many questions from homework, or outsourced sweatshop employees who don't even do modicum of googling, etc.

On the other hand, are the majority of complaints distorted because they are mostly voiced by the Eternal September[2] crowd?

So, is it experts leaving? Or newcomers overwhelming the site with bad questions? I don't know if one can gather from website analytics which of the 2 situations is dominant.

[1]http://youtu.be/NWHfY_lvKIQ?t=3m18s

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
If you are a lineman, you are three times more likely to die from electrocution than from a fall.

(They die from electrocution at 35x the normal population rate, while the death from falls is 5x the normal population rate.)

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1568699/pdf/envh...

That's just fatalities, ignoring the other dangers like getting your arms blown off.
There is a project working on true decentralized markets, http://openbazaar.org, it's already in beta.
I don't live in LA so am not too sure about the wage market there. But 12$/hr seems pretty low for any job, let alone a developer position, in the second largest city in the US?

I bet some HR person came up with that stack and the corresponding pay.
I feel like this has to be some dev exacting revenge on these guys
Have you read the documentation for pgrouting?
Interesting work!

At first glance it would seem that Erlang or Akka provide a proven infrastructure for building such a multi-agent system+. Yet, a key construct is the notion of time and its passage.

(+Which is subtly different from an agent-based model, for simplicity let's assume they're both the same thing.)

There is a profound observation by Rich Hickey in his talk [1] 'Are we there yet? - A deconstruction of object-oriented time' (the baseball field slide): "Perception is massively parallel and requires no co-ordination - This is not message passing!"

For example if the said ballpark suffered an earthquake, would the Matrix need to pass messages to each agent? Would a spectator continue walking toward the hot-dog stand just because the message hasn't shown up yet?

From this perspective, the notion of 'container clock' presented here can be useful. Question is whether we 'get to stop the world when we want to look around' (Hickey), or not.

[1] http://wiki.jvmlangsummit.com/images/a/ab/HickeyJVMSummit200...
Welcome to the Paycation Opportunity (www.davidseymouriii.paycation.com)
For that matter, it's hard to beat the NaS battery

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium%E2%80%93sulfur_battery
If they're willing to sell power for $X now and willing to buy
it later for $Y, what does it matter the method?

In the UK, to encourage adoption of residential solar panels there is a scheme of "feed in tariffs" where you can generate renewable energy and receive a guaranteed, above-market-rate price for it. The goal of this is to reduce carbon emissions.

For example, you can buy residential electricity for 15p/kWh [1] but sell energy from your small hydro installation for 19p/kWh [2].

Obviously, the goal of reducing carbon emissions would not be achieved if people simply charged batteries at 15p/kWh and sold it back at 19p/kWh!

Of course, this issue only arises because feed in tariffs are subsidised.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...
[2] http://www.fitariffs.co.uk/eligible/levels/
"Missouri Farm Boy"-Turned-DOT-Engineer Invents a Better Snow-Clearing Vehicle
> This week I had to plug a mechanical board back into the laptop because my fingers began to ache after just six months.

> Mechanical keyboards cushion the impact on the fingers, other types transmit it into the joints.

That sounds to me like you're typing too hard. Short-travel keys definitely take a lighter touch than mechanical keyboards, and 15 years of finger-pounding on cushioned keys is probably a hard habit to break.
Radio Shack embraced the internet way too late. Without doubt, the internet was going to destroy every hobbyist store out there, and if they'd got out in front of it they might have survived.

That said, I'd wager Sparkfun and the like are still much smaller companies than Radio Shack was at it's peak.
Only problem with the sister sites is that their user base is much smaller than on SO and the value of SO pretty much boils down to "everyone's in there so someone may help me".
Agreed. That $1.3B isn't just profit from flying passengers around.
Right, although to me "back end" implies "feeding the front end" which isn't the case here, rather that 2 page report is more of a side channel and the consumer is another data processing engine.

And apologies - this is a bit OT here and I'm not trying to be difficult nor argumentative, I've just often wondered if the majority of people view backend/frontend as specialized terms like I do or if it's really just a generic term for "works on visualization/UI" and "works on the other stuff"
I'd argue that you're talking about customer service, not software development. That's a different topic, I agree customer service should be responsive and local to customers.

If you notified your bank of some technical issue. They would probably respond thanking you and telling you that they would look into it. I would be very surprised if they followed up with you to tell you when it was fixed (although, that would be great service)

Edit: just to add, the software dev on site can review customer services logs asynchronously, he shouldn't need to be the one actually working the customer service queue
I would say Ship Often and A/B test. And before that, get really big test pool!

The first part to success is making it safe to fail
The one bug that I run into pretty much every day is the inability to CMD-V paste into the search box in a spreadsheet on OS X:

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=49853
Well, you didn't just ask why it's off topic. You threw around insults and used very vulgar language. http://stackoverflow.com/posts/27510345/revisions
Why are press releases on hacker news? The 'article' is practically devoid of content.
I'm looking forward to the day when I can push this out instead of MS Office. I'm guessing a few more years before that though.
Why is it obvious? Many goods and services are sold discounted for pennies on the dollar.

I might have thought it was a pricing error or I might have thought it was some sort of bizarre Danish Groupon-esque marketing ploy.

bookingbuddy.com is currently advertising 80% off sales. I don't see how 90% becomes unreasonable compared to that.
Totally agree. Click-bate... No information contained - just bloated article...
I've had this with orders on Amazon in the past year or so, though every time in my favor. I mean, it's a nice surprise to end up paying 10% to 15% less than your were ready for, but I am always puzzled WHY exactly I have been chosen as the recipient of this kindness.
The quality really wasn't all that bad. Much as today the only difference between brands is the label slapped on the box by the ONE factory in China that makes them all, in the 80s it was the ONE factory in Mexico or ONE factory in Taiwan or whatever slapping different stickers and shipping to different stores.

There obviously was no difference between VCRs stickered as RS or Sears brands, for example.

Some of the toys were junk, but there were no higher quality options. You could pay more money at Sears, but its not like it would be any better quality for the same product from the same factory.

One source of the reputation was ironically parts. The markup being about 1000% customers would expect aerospace grade parts for aerospace prices but what they were actually paying for was the cash and carry convenience of 4000 local stores, and they got all wound up about the quality only being commercial/industrial grade.

They made huge money off what amounts to fads. They cleaned up during the CB fad, early home computers...
For people who are more interested in these topics, you'll want to investigate "anti-islanding", UL-1741, and IEEE-1547.

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_1547

https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=ul1741+pdf

...if you wanted to power your house from a battery-fed inverter you'd have to install an automatic transfer switch, just like if you had a back-up generator.

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

http://powerequipment.honda.com/generators/connecting-a-gene...
This is the definitive presentation (transferred into PowerPoint by Colonel Boyd's acolytes) that quite literally changed the United States Military. Concepts like Energy-Maneuverability in air combat, and the OODA-loop came through and out of this presentation. It is very long, and very technical in terms of military context, but well worth it at the macro-strategic level. HUGE implications for the future of war and society.
It's not about "not trusting the user", but about the user not having to trust the author of the application.
Vidhub makes it easy to get client feedback on your videos
You can set different permissions for different devices, you are aware of that right? I can say my DVD drive is readable by gid x, but not the partitions on my hard disk... This is already what Linux distros are doing.
".. concludes the report which is stamped “protected/Canadian eyes only”

I smell a Canadexploitation ripoff of James Bond...
This looks very interesting. Does it play nicely with Webpack and/or Browserify?
You made me LOL "[...] I wish he knew a dozen programming languages... unfortunately he is still training on email."
Yeah, but your code is ultimately achieving some business requirement or it wouldn't be there. Being able to articulate that is an invaluable skill. Requirements are generally poorly written, so if something needs to be done a certain way (e.g. so the numbers in the reports across multiple products are consistent) then the business sometimes needs to know the algorithm.
My mistake was actually seeing "Desktop Manager" but reading "Display Manager". The intention was just to point out that KDM was retired as the default DM for KDE Plasma 5, but I wasn't paying close enough attention. I deleted my comment to avoid further confusion.
Seth Godin wrote that 5 years ago, i think (hope) the economics are shifting, in the last 5 years a lot of the omgcats apps (market opportunities that can be captured with lousy software) have already been written, i think it may not be so easy for companies started today. However with the pace of innovation in the last 5 years (basically the coming of age of functional programming) it's a lot easier for a single person to write high quality software.

Anyway common wisdom is always going to lag behind today's actual best practices
If the bookings were on United's website (it doesn't say exactly) then they should be liable regardless of how it got that way. If the bookings were on another website then the DOT will likely agree with United. Having worked for a large travel OTA, the rules for the taker of money are different than for a third party who only collects the data but not the money.
In any random set of data there will be 'clusters'. There's actually a pretty good chance a cluster will appear.

It's like a lottery, it's very likely someone will win it each week. Humans have an incredibly poor intuition about statistics.
Yes, it's bffs with Browserify :-)
In 10 years (since 2004), over 400-600 users, I've seen exactly one instance of Access in use, and that was by a developer (not a casual user) who had been using it prior to 2004. On the flipside, Excel and Word are so prevalent that they've now become the default "operating system" - window/OS X are secondary to those two apps.
Agreed; spider graphs really aren't helpful past about 5 variables.
the sniffy tone of architectural critics is irritating. at least in the post war era we actually built sufficient housing
Better tools for MongoDB? Redgate invests in 3T
I've heard east coast (US) coal is dirtier than west coast (US) coal, particularly in sulfides. The acid rain fix known as the Clean Air Act of 1990 was heavily lobbied by the east coast coal producers and bears some marks to show for it. Burning so called "Clean Coal" has to do with how much gross weight of sulfur you pull out of the coal, which makes sense for coal heavy in sulfides, but less so for west coast fuel. As it stands, to burn west coast coal in the US requires the addition of sulfides to the coal so it can then be pulled back out.

As for other impurities... there are a lot of radioactive crap in coal that is aerosolized during the combustion process. The most notable of these is uranium, which is carried away with the rest of the fly ash. There's a "shadow" around coal smoke stacks where such fly ash ends up accumulating. If it makes it into the water table or onto arable land that is used to grow crops, BAM, you've irradiated a small chunk of your population.

Depending on the source of the coal, there are various other heavy metals that can end up in your fly ash.
Don't go that way. Seriously. It's better to offer your services for free to local non-profits than work for peanuts. The main thing is that clients who pay the lowest also treat you the worst. You'll meet a lot of unreasonable demands and overally crappy people while working those very low wage projects.

Go to your local non-profits and offer them your services for free. Be clear that you're just learning and that's why you'd make them a web page or an intranet app for free. You'll get to learn, some feedback, more or less honest customers and karma points. Once you got experience and portfolio, you can go after the better paying projects (~$10/h or so) that are run by sane people who will treat you well.

Source: Started freelancing back in high school, almost 10 years in business.
The fact that the coordinates are hard coded seems odd, is there a reason for it?
The result is still the same though.
Why did they have to tear all of these innocent burritos open? Savages...hopefully they at least let someone eat the remains...
Highly Distributed Computations Without Synchronization
Any idea why do they need prolog?

(I'm assuming that the person who compiled this has a clue, which is a thesis not very well supported by the posting itself...).
“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who had practiced one kick 10,000 times.” - Bruce Lee

I think that attitude is how you get 'expert'. In the military for example, you train your muscle memory such that in combat, when your adrenaline is at an all time high (no drug touches it IMO) your body just tends to do what it needs to do because you have trained it so. This also ties in with Bruce Lee's view on forms. You have to learn the form, and practice it, until you forget it... if that makes sense.

The bottom line is that practice makes perfect. In todays world though, with athletes who have the ability to do nothing but train, I think it's harder and harder for a layman to compete. When I was a kid I went to the national junior olympics without even trying. If I that same kid today, I doubt I could make it past state.
I'm not sure why the question was closed, but the name calling and vulgarity in the edit probably contributed to the downvotes.

http://stackoverflow.com/posts/27510345/revisions
$80 for 5 hour flight seems like reasonable price. Ryanair has similar distance for $40 (London Athens). 1 hour flights are often for $12.

Edit: NY to London is actually 2x distance between London and Athens
Actually I did ask, strange you didn't notice that since it's right there in the link you posted.

And yeah, you are right, I used the word 'cunt' after they started behaving like that, I'm sorry if that scared you; I did it because I was really pissed off by all their bs. Have you ever felt annoyed some time in your life? Apparently not, lucky you.
Docker Swarm with TLS authentication
$12 bucks per hour? You could work at McDonalds in Seatac (just south of Seattle) and make $15.
Don't know where you have been, but coal use has decreased the past few years. Natural gas and renewables have already started to replace coal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_power_in_the_United_States...
Good point, but I could imagine certain shapes becoming very recognisable after a while. Ensuring the ordering is such that a 5-1-5-1-5...pattern is unlikely, since these spiky shapes will all look the same. And yes the angles don't carry any extra information, but they are a helpful guide to the eye. I can see where you're coming from, but thinking about these plots a bit more carefully I think you are too dismissive.
That's after losing $500 Million in Q1 2014. You've cherry picked a very, very good year for airlines with low capacity, strong demand and low oil prices. It's a highly cyclic and usually difficult business to be in.

However, I believe the commenter said airlines, not United in particular. IATA published a 2013 report indicating that in fact airlines worldwide in aggregate made $4 net per passenger per segment.

http://www.iata.org/pressroom/pr/Pages/2013-06-03-02.aspx
I believe $12/hour is also right around the starting wage at In-N-Out Burger in LA, just to put that into perspective.
That's actually just your definition of a level playing field, there is no 'true' level playing field. (Well, other than literal playing fields that are level)
I think this is a problem with the industry as a whole. You're generally not very valuable as a new, junior, or in-training developer, so to go from no knowledge to a place where you can learn and earn is tough. However, this creates a squeeze for proficient senior developers. The industry creates a bottleneck for early-career developers that restricts the supply of mature developers, which affords these developers very high market value.

It's not surprising to me that there are ads like this or sites where people can and do willingly work for $3/hour (and not just because their cost of living is lower), while at the same time the higher end of the market starts at nearly 6 figures fully loaded. The market wants senior developers, but doesn't want to invest in junior dev to get there.
> “There is a growing, highly organized and well-financed anti-Canada petroleum movement that consists of peaceful activists, militants and violent extremists who are opposed to society’s reliance on fossil fuels,”

Anti-Canada petroleum movement, or Canadian anti-petroleum movement? This doesn't seem like an accidental word re-arrangement.
> For built in functions yes Excel is better. As soon as you start venturing outside of Spreadsheets and into data analysis (where Macro's come into play) stop using Excel.

I see Excel users in 2 camps:

Those that don't know what functions are, and if the do, tread carefully with '=if(...,...)' and get intrigued. Though those that get intrigued are in a minority.

Those that know what functions are have Excel act as a full-fledged IDE, which it does pretty well. This second camp either write libraries to call from Excel, or have someone write them in C++ if the libraries are that important.

Excel is exceedingly good for hacking, or I should say, playing. It is not a spreadsheet, it is an extension of skin from keyboard to screen for visualizing data, from brain to 2D hackable multi-dimensional grid, that is as easy as playdough.
At this point, it would probably be helpful if you told us your definition of the word "expert".
I think this is the point where someone is supposed to say whoosh. The person above was being sarcastic.
> In my opinion all the platforms have their pro's and con's, and none of them are going to disappear anytime soon.

I wasn't suggesting that PC gaming will disappear. However, it's clear that PC gaming isn't a growth sector. Given that is where Valve dominates, where does that leave them?

Valve may not consider themselves a growth oriented company, but they do look for opportunities to innovate.
"Unfortunately, your request for a 5% raise was rejected. We're sorry to see you go. Can you help hire a replacement? Just write up a quick job posting w/ your basic work experience and daily routine. Thanks."
Damn! I was going to apply to this but I only have experience with GoDaddy and BlueHost, but not HostGator. I'll have to take my Prolog experience elsewhere.
In there case of here in Edinburgh, the High Street isn't really the high street for shopping as it's part of the Royal Mile in the Old Town:

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

The real high street is probably Princes Street, which is in the New Town, which is fairly old as well:

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

While being a spectacular street to walk along - the actual shops are pretty dreary. Last time I checked there were 3 O2 mobile phone shops.... which seems a bit much for one street that isn't that long.
Oh don't be a pedant. If coal were more expensive, it would be used for important things - not pissed away. That says little about rich vs poor.
It's 2015!! Why do massive projects like LibreOffice not have their package downloads and updates over https?
You are 100% wrong. First off, neither of us are going to significantly lose weight at 2k/day. That's not much of a deficit unless you are really, really fat or really, really active.

Secondly, yes I can eat garbage like McDonald's and Wendy's and only eat 1500 calories/day and lose weight. That's exactly what I did.
I co-founded a startup to do that for 2012, called ElectNext. It was kind of like OkCupid: We let you rate your issues, and we asked you questions, then we showed your similarity score to your candidates for President/Senate/House. We were even starting to support state-level offices too. It never got much attention, and we never figured out the revenue model. After a year I left, and my partner took it in a different direction.

The thing I was most proud of wasn't the matching part, but the part to determine candidate positions. If you just ask them, most will not answer. Using past votes is a tough approach, since you need to decide what each bill "means", and bills have lots of stuff attached. More importantly, that only tells you about incumbents, not challengers. In fact almost any signal works better for incumbents. Our most fruitful source of information was FEC donor data, because every serious candidate had information there. Also "follow the money". :-)
I'm just fine with Aleynikov's conviction being overturned. Again, the charges against him seemed ambitious.

"Ambitious" is a bit charitable, in this context.

"Patently vacuous" -- to an extent that suggested, at the very least, a breakdown in the internal controls and safeguards (on the part of both the FBI and the prosecutor's office) designed to present precisely this kind of a fiasco from happening -- might be a better description.