skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Trust me, I've learned all about financial responsibility. Over the past 6 years I've made great strides to save and live a very minimal life now. The lesson has indeed been learned.

There were some details omitted from my post regarding my finances as I did not want it to turn into a book. But long story short I had just started making that level of income the beginning of the year and I had a lot of expenses and debt I was paying off ergo why I had not had much saved. Selling the home was attempted but the house was tore up so bad from the renters that I didn't have the money to make it "sale ready". Selling the car was not an option as I was living in it at first.
It's gotten worse over the years. I think it's because project managers want to say "I want to leave my imprint on this app, let's change the UI around". Repeat a few times, and you move away from optimum if optimum had already been done.
I doubt that. If basic income was implemented as a straight, tax-free cash payment, which didn't contribute to income tax, and replaced current means-tested welfare benefits, I think that it would actually be a net win for everyone. If you work, it means extra money in your pocket, and your benefits don't get pulled out from under you if you go over the income limits. On the government side, administration gets much simpler - just mail out the checks to everybody. You could also drastically simplify the tax code.
If anyone is interested in doing this at home, without the $6000 giant ice cube maker, here's a kit for $60-80: http://www.studioneat.com/products/neaticekit

I haven't used it myself but I've heard a lot of cocktail enthusiasts rating it very highly. Seems crazy to me but then I do ridiculous things for coffee, so I can't really judge :-)
Google's UX took a big turn for the worse about 2-3 years ago, IMO. Not so much in terms of the design language (I rather like Material Design) but just the little bits of actual user interaction polish within their apps. Looks began to trump function and interfaces were often too visually simplified to the point where discover-ability of functionality took a huge nose-dive.

As a for-example, the new Google Maps for Android (7.x+) is much prettier than the old one but much more painful to use (still) in that it often makes you do 3+ button presses for things that used to be 1 button press, which is kind of a big deal for an app that people will often interact with (hopefully in some sort of dash mount) while driving.
Don't the physicians' associations artificially limit the number of students/graduates in a specific field? I had dinner with one urologist and he was boasting how great it was that there were no other urologists around and about his new house etc. I asked him how that surely wouldn't be corrected shortly by another doc serving the same area. He found it to be rather humorous, and explained there was very little new competition, even as many of his current colleagues were retiring.
This (and a couple of other comments you've made to this thread) would make a very good "lessons learned" coda to your blog post.

Living below your means, and having an emergyency fund / "fuck you money" in the bank is hugely valuable. Not always possible.

This is also a powerful argument for why social and emergency services should be accessible.
I can assure you that's not everywhere the case. In the bay are, $40k/year will barely make up for your rent/house payment - especially if you have a family to support. And then there's also a student loan payments, health insurance...
No. And I don't know. I'm sceptical about it tho.
Wasn't stack ranking one of the first things that went after Ballmer announced he was leaving?
I agree. The title is downright bizarre until you realize the article is consumed more by JS idiosyncrasies than about the OCaml modules.
Ricochet: An encrypted, anonymous IM client built on Tor hidden services
Critical fix for a potential data corruption issue in PostgreSQL 9.3 and 9.4
All I can say, that maintaining that is going to be a pleasure. These on your face things are perfect for understanding the structure quickly. Usually maintenance phase is where software is for most of its lifetime.

The less magic, syntactic sugar and tricks, the better.
What I see here is that people are quite generous when a member of our own tribe is harmed, hurt, or fallow.

I'm curious if it's because once you engaged him he was articulate and clearly not a normal homeless person, or if it was just that humans empathize more with people they resemble?
The dynamic typing is optional. E.g. at the startup I work for, the convention is to use static types for function signatures, and dynamic types within functions.

In general though Groovy/Grails is actually surprisingly good. Groovy is much easier to learn that Scala, more powerful than Python, and most Grails conventions are fairly straightforward and easy to understand. Both Groovy and Grails are a little bit under documented, which is frustrating, but not so bad as to be a deal breaker. That said for my personal projects I use Python/Django, only because the community is much stronger. And although I do miss Groovy's closures, the strength of the libraries and ecosystem, as well as the fact that it's easier to hire developers, more than make up for whatever syntactical advantages that Groovy has.
This is part one of a three part series. Part 2 is here:

http://blog.ellenchisa.com/2013/12/23/challenges-with-a-stac...

Part 3 is here:

http://blog.ellenchisa.com/2014/01/21/effective-performance-...
Some people don't enjoy that. If I've been having an especially meeting-laden day, I will sneak out for lunch, and get some takeout and go to a park to read and play with my dog for an hour. Or sit in my office and drink my soylent and catch up on my blog reader. The key is that I don't have to deal with people and have that blessed time to myself.
Not only that, the professional driver is probably better at it than the poster...
Has it been shown in this case that the CEO directly setup incentive structures for employees to knowingly violate the law?
> It's exactly your kind of attitude our society doesn't need.

Be very, very careful with this line of thought. One day, a large number of people might decide that your attitude is one their society doesn't need.
Educational debt is non-dischargable. While it can be "easy money" for now, the debt will stay with you until you die.

And while specific skills training may help, more education won't bring clients online.

APUS is, despite its "public university" name, a private, for-profit institution, owned by American Public Education, Inc.

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

http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/apei

http://www.ripoffreport.com/r/American-Public-University-Sys...

Those interested in changes to U.S. bankruptcy code, including educational loans, might care to look at the Student Loan Bankrupcy Exception at FinAid:

http://www.finaid.org/questions/bankruptcyexception.phtml

Student loans were dischargeable in bankruptcy prior to 1976. With the introduction of the US Bankruptcy Code (11 USC 101 et seq) in 1978, the ability to discharge education loans was limited. Subsequent changes in the law have further narrowed the dischargeability of education debt.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that they can maybe also replace TomTom with location tracking services from Verizon - probably yielding a ridiculously comprehensive tracking for North America (subject to ToC, I'm not a lawyer).
Git Nested Repositories
Books, Gadgets and Freedom
One important thing to remember about MSFT is that more than half of the company is "the field" -- sales, evangelism, operations, and so on.

The stack ranking system is and was hugely popular with this org. It is popular nowhere else.

MSFT still likes to think of itself as an engineering company, but it is hard to have a tail that big and not sometimes accidentally wag the dog. Stack ranking is probably the best example of how true this is.

EDIT: To add some color to this tale, a Technical Fellow once told me that during the "rank and yank" period (when everyone was ranked and the bottom 10% were effectively fired) he was continually on the verge of quitting. If you are doing something like inventing the CLR, and you hired 5 of your favorite engineers, how are you supposed to react when someone tells you that it is imperative to fire one of them per year? What could the point of that possibly be? This is more or less a common sentiment among extremely senior engineers who ran important orgs at that time.
I'm pretty sure the person you drop down for street view was missing for a few weeks. I can't remember if street view was accessible in other ways.

I was looking for the short url last week. It used to be near the top-right under something like "URL." Now, it's in the bottom-right, under the gear, then "share or embed map."

I was looking for satellite view for awhile, until I realized they renamed it to "Earth."

I just assumed they no longer offered a printable page with directions. When messing around for this comment I found it under "Details" after you look up driving directions.
Duncan Coutts has been working on replacing the current fairly brain dead Data.Binary encoding for Haskell by using CBOR [1], which I believe is currently on the back burner (more important work to be done elsewhere). The results appear very promising and I'd love to see this announcement provide the impetus to keep the work going.

[1] http://code.haskell.org/~duncan/binary-experiment/binary.pdf
I thought Classic had finally been removed for good?

When I went to get directions a few weeks back and they told me that

a) I couldn't use Classic anymore, and

b) the new UI only had a drop-down for arrival time with half-hour increments, instead of letting me type a precise time (trains often arrive a couple minutes after the hour), and

c) they removed the option for getting public transit directions at all (that had been there and working in Classic for years),

I said three strikes and you're out and switched to Yahoo.
This is fairly typical and, except for the use of a database, the way most object files are converted to executables: that is they make it easy to access the list of unresolved references and include some (generally minimal) data about the reference they're expecting.
Yes, this blog post is from 2013.
The first full fiscal review cycle where stack ranking took effect was in June of 2014. The announcement was in late 2013, but well, Microsoft fiscal cycle runs July -> end of June.

I really don't see how the announcement of doing away with stack ranking (an abomination) dove tails in with something in 2013.

Note that the news articles of it's demise were in late 2013, and at large companies announcement -> implementation take time.

I doubt the half cycle reviews (late fall/winter) of 2013 fell under the non-stack rank rules, hell, year end is when most of the formal stuff takes place.

Another edit -- stack rank elimination was announced end of 2013, realistically the next review cycle (may/june 2014) it took effect. If I look at the poster of the blog's LinkedIn profile, she lists her leaving in Sept of 2012. So this is a valid comment on the stack rank system -- it was certainly a cancer. That said, the timing and lack of detail makes it a bit confusing as to the fact that stack ranking went away basically in mid 2014.

(edit some more detail)
1. I don't know.

2. It isn't necessary after Sarbox.

3. It doesn't matter because they haven't been sued with Sarbox. They've been caught red-handed breaking plenty of other laws.
I laughed only because this is insanely weird.
I could even see myself making this site as a joke but wouldn't post it as a Show HN project.
here's a toc with links to all 20 articles of the series http://lwn.net/Articles/276782/
There's a crazy theory going around Prague that says Google will acquire Twitter
John Forbes Nash (bio)
>In general though Groovy/Grails is actually surprisingly good.

I'll second that. Groovy is amazing but under appreciated on places like hacker news. Interesting that you bring up python because I find groovy very pythonic in some ways. Even more so with the new type hinting stuff python is introducing.

Although for lighter weight web stuff I've been watching the http://ratpack.io/ project.
I visited 4 years ago as a tourist from México, our mid-level hotel had a PC however we didn't bother to try going online. If you get the chance, do visit soon. It's a special experience, when coming from a very different modern world. Seeing a place for yourself that you have heard so much about gives a healthy perspective. Plus they can use the CUCs, pronounced cuuk (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_convertible_peso).
Can anybody sum up what his main achievements are?
My god the pain with Google maps just never ends. Ever since they announced the new interface it's been broken.

I imagine the wireframing process for the UI went something like this:

"What's the list of features we need to support?"

"Here it is"

"Okay, let's randomly scatter all of them all over the screen and bury the most used/useful things 2 or three levels deep in various menus. Reversing actions should require the user to go to different interface areas and we should clutter the interface with local photos that nobody is interested in since we already offer streetview. But let's make streetview hard to use, even though it was a solved interface problem before."

"Is that all?"

"No, let's go live before key functionality is active, like multiple-stop route planning, let's make it use webGL and make it a little crashy, and let's make sure that features that people use literally every day, like toll avoidance, won't remember being set ever and we'll bury it 2 levels deep in a different hamburger menu than the one that's always there and only shows up some of the time."

"Brilliant!"
Very sad. The non-wearing of seatbelts in taxis is something I'm acutely aware of at the moment as I'm in Bogota, Colombia, where taxis very rarely have seatbelts in the back seats and driving conditions are erratic.

In my experience, i.e. just the people I've met (mostly in their mid-20s), locals here don't care. In the rare cases seatbelts are available, they don't wear them, and they even laugh off my suggestions to do so. The taxi drivers generally do wear them in their front seat, but I've also noticed them going without.

It's very strange and infuriating to me that not wearing a seatbelt in taxis seems to just be the culture here. I'm from the UK so wearing a seatbelt has always been a natural instinct. It's such a simple, low-cost action that can have such a high payoff in the event of a crash. It just seems obviously a better strategy to wear one than to not, but maybe that's based on my points system where fitting in with the traditional, 'done thing' weights much lower than trying to optimise my personal safety.

I've noticed this in other Latin American countries too, in particular Brazil. In Brazil if I remember correctly the taxis did actually have seatbelts fairly often, but locals (again, just people I met in their 20s) don't wear them. Indeed, when I suggested a friend buckle up in a taxi doing 80 km/h on a city road, I was told something like "that's not the Brazilian way". I was absolutely dumbfounded!

Back in Bogota, one interesting side point is that Uber cars generally do have seatbelts, and are in much better condition than the typical street minicabs. As a result, when I can order an Uber, I do. I think it's a very interesting thing that's happening there - the Uber cars aren't just disrupting on price, but on standards too. The latter is far easier than the former here, I'm sure, and despite the non-seatbelt-wearing culture you'd imagine it has to appeal to enough people to give them a competitive edge, which may go some way to pushing up standards all round.
Photos Capture the Joy on Playgrounds Around the World
|the things that Snowden leaks had disastrous real effects,

I agree, this is undoubtedly true. I also firmly believe Snowden is a hero. Any highly illegal or immoral activity of the US government (or any government for that matter) could be hidden under the same argument. We live in a democracy. It is impossible to change the government if we don't know what our government is doing in secret. Put succinctly, you advocate we shoot the messenger. Have you consider that it is the government who has placed the troops in harm's way by undertaking such outrageous, immoral, and illegal actions as opposed to the guy who merely told us about it.
I'm pretty sure I implied nothing of the sort.
As far as I could tell, they're not alleging he stole any technology. The patent they mention in the lawsuit is for a method of mapping real-world video footage into stereoscopic panoramas that can be viewed with existing, off the shelf VR headsets. They're claiming that he used "feedback" that they provided under NDA to improve his headset, but carefully avoid claiming they created even an iota of the technology used in the Rift.
Pretty much everyone I know that goes out to a club regularly wears earplugs. People are unlikely to even notice if you are wearing a pair of musicians earplugs.
I applied at several places but due to my age and experience I was deemed "overqualified". So I resorted to other means to eat and survive during that time.

I think I answered this before, but I didn't qualify for government assistance as I had made too much money that year. I couldn't even obtain food stamps. The American welfare system is focused on the long-term poor/destitute versus those who fall on hard times.
I'd be interested to hear more stories out of Microsoft about the actual engineers that are doing the real technical work. A lot of these grief pieces seem to come from people that are in the PM/lower-middle management space.

When I RTFA, I'm not totally sure what the author did that actually provided significant value, particularly in that final stretch.
Do you think that cognitive biases (like anchoring, for example) don't have any evidence for them? Do you disagree that humans have high false positive rates when looking for patterns (like the classic gamblers fallacy)?
And the quality of that response can be heavily dependent on how much we've been in a similar situation. Daniel Kahneman talks about this in "Thinking, Fast and Slow".

It makes sense that quick reactions can be good if they're responding to things we have done many, many times before. It also makes sense that quick reactions can be very poor if they're responding to things that we've not done much.
I wasted a few minutes the other day searching for a spreadsheet in Google "Drive"...because by default only "Docs" are selected and for whatever reason that refers only to "Word" style documents now, not spreadsheets. Especially confusing since people still call it Google Docs, so when you open it and it just says "Docs" you're just thinking, "yes, I'm on Google Docs" not "I'm viewing only Word style documents". Terrible.
Jesus Fuck! Did I just download a PDF from the NSA!? Derp.
It's an interview with the authors of "The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies" on the impact of technology on productivity, economic growth, and wealth inequality.
Look, I'm one of those few people that likes ads. I get how ads subsidizes free things, but well, it doesn't really matter because I like good ads by themselves.

Yet, I block ads on most sites because I don't like being tracked. The argument is quite simple. I don't know you (ad network), and I don't want you to watch everything I do. I'm pretty sure you won't do anything bad with that data, but I don't like it anyway.

I'm quite ok with my bank knowing what I spend money on, because I do know them, I have a choice on what bank to use, and because the service they provide me does require that data. None of that is exactly true for ads.
Nirvana Engine for ZX Spectrum (2013)
Why Go for decision trees? (2013)
Tirar uma página do Ar
Preciso hackear uma página do facebook, porém não posso postar as informações aqui, quem tiver interesse pelo serviço entrar em contato cmg, pode ser por e-mail wagnerdebian@gmail.com
You can try bing maps. I'm basically done with google maps for good. My impression is it's no long a map service but show me the nearest Chili's Grill & Bar on my smart phone service.
>the debt will stay with you until you die.

You're wrong. It will stay with you until you pay it off, on relatively easy terms, and payments only begin after you graduate.

> And while specific skills training may help, more education won't bring clients online.

Most people seeking a degree aren't in fields where they are looking for "clients". Most people want a degree so they can get a job. If you are referring specifically to learning to code, I wouldn't recommend that anyone use any paid school. There are more than enough free online resources to teach yourself to become a very proficient programmer.

>hxxp://www.ripoffreport.com/r/American-Public-University-Sys...

Most online schools, and indeed most online businesses, have one or more "Ripoff Reports" posted. That site is hardly credible, and I question the motives of anyone that would even post a link to such garbage on a site like HN. Most of those "reports" are written by competitors of the business at issue, angry ex wives, the owner of Ripoff Reports himself etc...it's an extortion scheme, asking people for money in order to modify posts. Posting there is SOP among scumbags. Their PageRank is their only asset, and they use it for extortion.

>http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/apei

I had no idea that they were publicly traded on the Nasdaq, but that bolsters my confidence in them.

I only mentioned Apus because that is where my sister is going and it is working out well for her. They are fully accredited, and a big chunk of the money my sister is getting is in the form of Pell grants, which do not have to be paid back (your eligibility for both loans and Pell grants can easily be determined at http://fafsa.ed.gov). Yes, you have to pay back the loan portion once you have graduated and have a bachelor's degree. My point was that in a situation like OP's, this would be the first thing that I would do. If you were homeless or close to it, this would be by far the best and lowest cost way to access cash, especially if more education was in your plans anyway. When helping my sister look into this before she enrolled, I was amazed that more people aren't using online schools.
what a great presentation, very powerful stuff
Here’s how much of your life the United States has been at war
Out of curiosity, how old were you at the time?
"Nontechnical background":

>To fund these projects, he earned at least US$36,000 by fixing and reselling damaged iPhones,[2] and was also a sailing coach and did boat repair.[6]

>In 2009, he founded ModRetro Forums, a website for discussing modifications to old hardware devices such as game consoles and PCs.[3]

>During his study at California State, he worked as an engineer at the Mixed Reality Lab (MxR)[12] at the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) at the University of Southern California as part of a design team for cost-effective virtual reality.[2][3]
I find this hard to believe:

"Though MapQuest still has the second-highest share of the domestic market in online mapping, about 25 percent"