skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure. Where I live (Melbourne, Australia), $1380 is not much above the minimum you could pay for an apartment. It's about what I pay. To get much under that you need to go to fairly far out suburbs.

To get under $1200 (1,080 USD) for rent + utilities, you really need to move to a satellite town or further. From what I understand this is a tricky issue. Lower rent areas are also often high unemployment areas. People do worse outside of their normal circle. Moving away from existing support structures is often a negative turning point. It is a principle of social welfare that people in financial distress should avoid substantial moves.

On one hand, you want to avoid quick knee-jerks like yours from paying "high" welfare payments. On the other, you want to avoid moving people around.

I imagine this sort of thing is even more of a problem in the US then here, with higher variations in costs/income across geographic areas.
One of my predictions for 2020 is that services like Mechanical Turk are going to employ a significant number of people in the US. The only reason this hasn't happened already is that there is a lot of friction once the tasks get more complicated than checking whether or not an image is porn. But once someone invents a 'programming language' for outsourcing that allows people to easily Turk higher-wage tasks, I think we are going to see an explosion of piecework knowledge workers.

The fact is that these people are never going to have jobs again, and once their unemployment runs out there is going to be this huge unexploited resource just waiting for someone to arbitrage.
I read it when I was fairly young; I know I didn't fully grasp many of the concepts in the book, but it didn't feel "difficult". GEB's strength is also its weakness--it's engaging and inspiring, showing evocative connections between all manner of concepts that are themselves intricate and fascinating, in a manner that gives even a reader with little knowledge of the subjects a glimpse of the underlying abstract beauty. It's little wonder that many people cite it as having been a major influence on choosing to study some topic it touches on (particularly AI).

But now, returning a decade hence, equipped with a deeper understanding of the material--particularly with the many faces of the self-reference paradox (which amusingly includes fixed-point combinators such as Y) that so deeply fascinates Hofstadter--a lot of GEB comes across as somewhat superficial and self-absorbed. Yet had I not read it, I doubt I would have ever explored the topics in the first place, so in a way the book itself has indirectly ruined my ability to enjoy it, an almost Hofstadter-esque twist of fate!

In the end, GEB is a beautiful but fundamentally shallow book that ties together a lot of very deep concepts--so perhaps I can understand that, if one takes it at face value, it might seem intimidating. Taken as the intellectual candy that it is, though, it's a delightful bit of light reading (so long as the material is mostly new to you).
I wrote an article awhile back on continuations in Sleep:

http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2008/07/24/fun-with-contin...

I don't find a need for them in AtD (my current project), but when I was doing distributed systems work they were very valuable to me.
The First Internet Marketing Conference, Ken McCarthy and Marc Andreessen [1994]
In other words, Artificial Intelligence will be the inadvertent result of Google's war with search spammers. Google will get better and better at detecting non-human generated content until robots are generating such high-quality content that we won't be able to tell -- or care -- that it's generated by robots.

P.S. I am that robot.
I really appreciate the author's rigorous scientific stance on the actual utility of these suggestions; I went into this article expecting pure pseudoscience (judging on nothing more than the title).
If only there was a nice way for it to follow you on to a non-OSX machine. By that the solutions which give you read only access aren't good enough.
If you are going to go with an unmanaged host, I highly recommend buying your own servers and looking into colocation. If you are going to bother installing all the software yourself anyway, you'll get a much better price.

We were paying $800 a month for two high end servers at LayeredTech in Texas to handle our rails site (about 2M pageviews/day) We then bought two supermicro barebones servers and set up at a local co-location facility in Toronto.

The upfront cost of buying the servers (which were better than the ones we were renting) was $3500, but our monthly fees are now just $160. It didn't take long to pay for the server cost, and we'll have them around for as long as the hardware lasts (I expect it to be a while!).
would you be able to email the script to me? was always a fan of fedoras changing background (based on time of day) but this seems more useful.
I didn't say it was a good test. Actually I sent him an email about it as soon as I saw it. Never-the-less, I still don't think that it makes any sense that people are acting like whiney babies because Andrew is trying new things.
> I wonder if people will really be willing to pay for opinionated tidbits

I guess it's supply and demand: people will be willing to pay of opinionated writing on the net when there is a shortage of free opinionated writing on the net. I.e. never :-)
But the Obama graph shows massive improvement since Bush left office!!!!

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1130898
Does anybody have experience with scaling their Rails application on Dreamhost or Joyent? I have just started using Dreamhost VPSs with overall a good experience but have not reached the point where I start looking into scaling the app.

I see Linode and Heroku being recommended here a lot - will definitely explore them too.
One small note, as pointed out in http://innig.net/software/ruby/closures-in-ruby.rb posted by arohner above: although in 1.8 proc is an alias for lambda, in 1.9 it's now an alias for Proc.new.
We can still control this. We can refuse to elect anyone that allocates money to the enforcement. We can lobby to amend the Constitution. We can elect a President that will put someone opposed to this on the Supreme Court. We can sit on juries and find anyone charged with these crimes "not guilty". With enough organization, anything is possible.

The real issue here is two-fold; nobody cares about this particularly ("laws only apply to other people, not me!"), and that voters tend to act against their own self-interest (remember "joe the plumber"? too poor to have health insurance, but didn't want the government to give it to him for free? what!?)

Personally, I'm working on technical solutions to ensure that people "infringing on copyright" can't be prosecuted. (Or rather, so that their network providers and their own machines can't provide evidence against them.)

Things like IPredator are a good start. I can almost guarantee that if you use that service for Bittorrent, you won't be going to jail for your file sharing. Tor is even better (but very very slow). I hate technical solutions to legal problems, but right now, they work very well. That's why nobody really cares about this; people will pay their $10/month for an untraceable account in some country that hates the US (there are plenty), and they will continue to "steal" TV shows and movies. (Until the movie industry starts pricing movies correctly, of course. Make non-DRM'd new-releases a 99 cent download, and piracy will be gone overnight.)
Accounting might actually be safer, but not because of job requirements. It is one of those "blame-a-person / someone needs to testify" type of positions that could be problematic going the computer / overseas route.

Plumbers, Electricians, etc probably are OK, since robots really need to advance to replace them (like quantum leap) and locality is important. Manufacturing is probably hosed, and that is a huge problem.
Ask HN: FOSS for Profit?
How do you determine if a FOSS product is allowable for profit usage? I work at a large corporation that has a lengthy review process if you need to use FOSS for your project. FOSS is discouraged if there is a market solution. The impression I have is the company has a team of lawyers review the licensing and determines if we can make money off of it.

I know Paul Graham provides YC startups with the legal advice to start their company. However before that ever happens typically people spend lots of time producing a prototype/V1 of their vision. If they create it and its not allowed to be used for profit wouldn't that pose a huge problem?
I don't know what vacancy rates are like over there but here in Melbourne they are very low. There is some real trash being pushed for around that $1380 figure here and they still have plenty of people turning up.

Going down to the $1000 figure that you can find a few very average houses in very average areas for and you have over 50 groups turning up to inspect. I've been to a few of those and though, just one of these people has to be a full time 2 income couple and we have already lost being students in casual/freelance work.
> What is a name?

Haddocks' Eyes.
Why I don't write about programming and why it's not really worthwhile to do so
Sure, but it's predicated on doing good work. If Paul didn't kick ass @ google, no one would have followed his work after he left. If he hadn't built something awesome after he left, they wouldn't have asked for him to come back.

Skill is the common denominator to all of his good fortune.
Is the Wordpress founder annoyed somehow that he has helped create a thriving marketplace?
Ah yes, only Mr Bucheit (and other connected people) know what "people want", the rest of us are just jackasses [sarc]
I don't see any changes.
Yeah, some people deserve to starve. Fuck 'em.
"The part of the answer on why I want to learn functional programming should be clear to almost everyone here"

It isn't clear to me. Why don't you explain why you want to learn functional programming?
I think the barriers to entry in many business fields are just getting higher and higher.
It seems to me this story should be about IDG's apparently total lack of oversight of its reporters and their sources.
> For example, 69% of all criminal cases in New Haven between 1710 and 1750 were for premarital sex.

Once upon a time, making love to a woman meant spinning the pregnancy wheel. In this metaphor, you get a 10% chance of a baby if you have sex with a maiden fair (it can go as high as 1 in 3 if both parties are very fertile, i.e. teenagers), times the 70% failure rate, times her chances of establishing you were the father (depends on her status, your status, and if your looks are distinctive; call it %50), times 50% because you are only giving it half of its genes. So, overall, you are getting a ~1.75% increase in presence just by having sex. You stood an equal chance of ruining her life, of course.

Right now we are probably going to see people like sex less and less as time goes on, because the payout in pleasure does not match the new equation, which takes abortions, contraceptives (but also DNA tests), into account. Now it looks more like this:

- odds she can become pregnant (10%)

- odds she can prove you're the dad (0-100%, 0 if she's married and in on the con, 100% if she has the means and determination for a DNA test. Depends on the situation, but can be determined beforehand.)

- odds the pregnancy fails or is prevented (70-100%, again depends on whether protection is used, she is pro-life, or pro-choice, or whatever. Possible to determine beforehand.)

- genetic contribution (50%)

We get to 0-5%, but the main difference is that now a lot of factors can be determined beforehand. An affair with a married woman gets you a %5 increase in presence a time, topping out at 50% per child who, again, you won't be responsible for. We're essentially talking free points here. On the other hand, a college student you met at an abortion rally is probably not going have that baby.

Over time, the first scenario is going to be more desirable than the second, but this will become harder with time as married men demand DNA tests of their children. Eventually, sex will become about cuddling and intimacy, rather than the sufficient condition for reproduction for men.
In my experience you don't get back security deposits nearly soon enough to use them to pay the next security deposit, unless you have somewhere to go for a while in between. I've typically gotten the security deposit sent to me about 2-4 weeks after moving out (states vary on the legal requirements; California gives the landlord 3 weeks to return the deposit). Meanwhile, the new place often wants the deposit before moving in, when you sign the lease.
I can't wait for these to be in iTunes and downloadable... Right now the podcast feed has some old stuff in it. I'm flying from HNL to LAX in a few days and would love to have some PyCon goodness to watch!
IANAD (am not a doctor), but codeine is allegedly more effective at smaller doses when paired with other painkillers. Smaller doses = less potential to develop an abusive dependency.

It's fun to see sinister intentions in government policies, and maybe they are sinister, I don't know. But there's nothing sinister about arranging things so that significantly less dangerous are more widely available to the public than are doses of straight codeine. That some druggies destroy their livers with Vikes/Percocet is tragic, but it's strange that the usually libertarian-leaning Hacker News would be so opposed to making good painkillers available by prescription. There is something nanny-state-ish about removing a relatively safe painkiller from the market because of what abusers might do with it.

Also, the doctor you quoted seems rather paranoid...
Read the license. If it's one of the usual "open source" licenses, for-profit use of the software is allowed. (It's not considered 'open source' if it discriminates against for-profit uses.)

Perhaps you also mean whether the software can be included in your for-profit, for-sale, possibly closed-source product. The answer is still 'read the license'. Some licenses are OK with that reuse, others aren't.

If you're wrestling with subtle GPL interpretations or 'copyleft' clauses you'll want to read more of the way these things have been interpreted in the past. But there's no shortcut beyond reading and understanding for yourself, and it's not so complicated it needs paid-professional interpretation unless (1) you're with a giant risk-averse bureaucratic organization; and/or (2) you're trying to pull something fishy, far from the usual interpretations. (eg: "Is there some loophole way we can structure our code to include GPL code without making our entire product GPL'd?")
For those who don't know what dragonegg is; it's a rewrite of llvm-gcc as a plugin for gcc 4.5 (which is the first gcc to support plugins) so that you can pass the -fplugin=./dragonegg.so switch to gcc and generate llvm IR.
Everything is fine with Chrome 5.0.307.9 beta on OSX, except if Chrome has been open a long time, I eventually lose the ability to right click on my username on the upper-right hand corner of the HN website.
Yeah, the problem I see with direct hiring is that a lot of the work entrepreneurs do is about creating efficiencies which remove these people from the workforce.

Mechanical Turk would be a good counter example but I don't think anyone in the US could realistically make a living from it.

Maybe the answer is a start up that aims on giving these people a new skill set, which allows them to do something that is fairly procedural but something that can't be automated. Some of the jobs we find boring and monotonous may seem new and exciting to people just moving into tech.
I think this is part of the illusion mentioned above. Throughout the history of technological advancement you have the destruction of jobs that seem very hard to replace.

When industrialisation began you had massive shifts that were probably scarier then the ones we see now. One relatively unskilled person could create hundreds of nails effectively destroying all employment in nail making. It would have seemed ridiculous to suggest that more people would be working in manufacturing stuff 100 years later when artisans were being replaced by machines at insane rates. Then we started consuming many more nails (and other stuff) because they were cheap and making many more nails. making became the staple employer.

One thing that might give you hope is reconsidering the flexibility of certain aspects of the labour market. There is no reason to assume that we need x unskilled jobs and y low-skilled jobs because there are inherently x & y unskilled and low skilled people in the market. Earlier generations of automation actually replaced fairly skilled labour with relatively unskilled labour. You didn't need to apprentice for 5 years to make forks. There is good reason to assume we can go the other way too, in fact, most advanced economies have done this.
Completely aside, this article lists only his successes, so it presents a biased view.

Edit: changed prevents to presents.
Creating a Simple Game in Clojure
I'd certainly replace one of those with AIMA, though I'm not sure which.
Machine Vision / Video Analytics - getting computers to see in factory and security surveilance is always a growing industry. Requires collecting data and using a machine learning algorithm, and selling skills.
I've just posted an example of using Penumbra to create a simple game: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1141556
"Challenges" is kind of subjective. GEB is really a bit fluffy (as I said in another comment here), and SICP is only challenging if you've never seen a functional language before. PLP is also not particularly challenging as such, but it is a satisfyingly informative treatment of the practicalities involved in implementing a conventional programming language from the ground up.

On the other hand, while I've not read all of Types and Programming Languages, it definitely starts to get into some challenging (and very interesting!) material.
No, it does not show that more people are finding jobs; it shows that people are losing jobs much more slowly.
Wow, Google Docs now has 'Google Groups Disease'. If you're not logged into Google, you can view this document. But if you are logged in, they require you to login again to view.

Direct link to the presentation: http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~jimmylin/cloud-2008-Fall/Session5...

Maybe Slideshare is better?
Though not the primary point of the article, I quite liked this line:

"Of course the tech companies are all about being paid, for doing what they do. The users are like hamsters on a treadmill. Do you ever think about paying hamsters? I don't think so!"
I believe it has to do specifically with how drawing to the screen happens; if that has to go through the browser, then it can't utilize hardware acceleration.

One interesting test we did recently was to make a very simple flash app that draws some basic controls on the screen and scales to the window size. It also prints out the amount of memory being used by the AVM. In IE, memory usage was extremely low and was about the same regardless of the screen size. In Firefox, memory usage was higher and also almost entirely dependent on window size. To me this implies that IE is allowing Flash to interface with the video card directly, while in Firefox it's having to maintain its own frame buffer internally.
Government insures that account is kept around with crazy regulation that complicates the entire thing. A simple tax system which could be done by anyone online because of simplification of the tax system would create an enormous efficiency gain.

Having done a little bit of work in plumbing with my dad I'd have to say that the home service type plumbing isn't getting automated anytime soon. But the manufacturing based plumbing such as installing plumbing into caravans I can see eventually getting automated.
The applications I use most heavily, in my maximized windows, make good use of the horizontal space. I do most of my editing in applications built on top of the Eclipse RCP, which allows a lot of flexibility in arranging multiple window panes.
Nice article and the lessons apply to mathematicians as well. Few mathematician are willing to engage in civil meta-mathematical discourse and usually all such discussions end up in a shouting match about the intellectual inferiority of whoever is involved.
The Bloom Box: An Energy Breakthrough?
They've tried it before.

"Times Select" was a paid feature for access to its opinion columnists (regular news was free), but it lasted just two years: http://paidcontent.org/article/419-new-york-times-to-close-t...
I just saw the broadcast; it doesn't seem the video is up yet.
It's not quite that simple - the unfortunate truth in most American cities is that cheaper areas also have worse transportation, which is downright necessary both for work and for self-improvement that leads one out of poverty.

So yes, you can suck it up and move to a less convenient location, but there's a limit to how far you can take that. At some point your reduction in rent will be made up by increased transportation cost (e.g., need a car, no matter how crappy, instead of a much cheaper public transit pass).
You stood an equal chance of ruining her life, of course.

I would say you'd have had a greater chance of ruining her life than of ruining your own -- while the father may remain unidentified, the mother generally cannot >_>
I hear you on the "giant risk-averse bureaucratic organization".

What if you don't understand a clause? Or worse if you think you understand....build a product...make a million...then get sued for half?
> We can still control this. We can refuse to elect anyone that allocates money to the enforcement. We can lobby to amend the Constitution. We can elect a President that will put someone opposed to this on the Supreme Court. We can sit on juries and find anyone charged with these crimes "not guilty".

In the USA, one effective method would be to organise people to vote on digital rights issues in the primary elections that both main parties hold.

In most of Europe, organising into Pirate Parties and seeking election directly is probably the best line of attack, since European countries tend to have (vaguely) proportional voting systems.

> nobody cares about this particularly

In the UK there are an estimated 7 million illegal filesharers, which is roughly a quarter of the people who voted in the last general election; I suspect the proportion in the USA is similar. All these people have a personal interest in this matter. If all (or a signifcant minority) of these people voted for whichever candidate was best on digital rights issues, it would decide the election, simply because there are few voters who would be swayed by an anti digital rights stance and therefore it would be in the interests of all candidates to take a pro digital rights position.
Not sure what you mean by entitlement-based economy. Everyone certainly deserves a job since everyone should participate in some productive way in a social environment.
"Mama's baby, Daddy's maybe"
It depends on which "an Android phone" you want to consider. Manufacturers can lock down the phone as much as they like.

The N1 however requires one simple command (which can and probably does void your warranty, depending on how nice HTC/Google feels like being) and then you can flash whatever you like.

For other phones, there's usually a nonsupported hack that will let you do the same.
What to expect from Compojure 0.4.0
Thanks. Weird - it worked fine for me and I was logged in.
Dreamhost shared hosting is some of the worst in the business, they oversell like crazy. Not sure how their VPS offering is, but in terms of price you will pay much less for the same VPS (on paper) from Linode. I've had great experiences with both Linode and Slicehost (using them almost equally for both small sites and a startup (schoolrack.com is hosted on a 4 cluster Slicehost setup). My vote is for Linode.