skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Of the 20% or so in the labor force, less than 10% don't find a job. 10% of 20% is 2%. So of the poor people not in the labor force in 2008, only about 2% could possibly have been poor and unemployed in 2007.

There may be an additional source term of people who were unemployed but not poor in year N-1. But since the number of people in poverty remains roughly stable over time, this source must also be balanced by a sink of people who were poor in year N-1 but not poor in year N. I.e., for every person who becomes unemployed and enters poverty, there must be another person who leaves poverty (the exact balance varies a bit from year to year). Numbers on this are somewhat harder to come by (most surveys don't track the movement of individuals throughout categories).

(Again, rough numbers, these fluctuate a bit from year to year. )
The whole sig struck me as over-the-top and obnoxious, personally. "HERE IS A LIST SHOWING HOW IMPORTANT I AM."

Hint - if you're really important, all you need to sign is your name.
Facebook response to iPhone app Contact Sync story
Here's what I do -- I schedule fake meetings when I don't want to be bothered. People see the time as "occupied" and don't request meetings at that time.

Lately, people I work with have become fans of the 5:30AM meeting. Perhaps they don't realize that I'm not in Singapore and, hence, am not at work at that time. Either way, I just beat them to it and schedule a meeting ("sleeping") at that time. Then they see it and pick some other more reasonable time.
I doubt many people actually enjoy Zynga's products that much. They just can't stop playing. There's a difference between liking and wanting, and Zynga games are optimized for the latter.
Experts-exchange.com: Internet Leach
I use a customized Wordpress instance as the front-end for the website. Worpress search includes both posts and pages by default. I fixed the bug by excluding pages from the search with a filter function. Now only archived newsletters will show up when you search for a given keyword.

In the future I plan to make the search a much more prominent feature, sort of like a search engine for new books. At that time, I will use a backend which will contain the individual books, rather than simply do a text search through the newsletter archives.
And a checklist?
Image Transmission Through an Opaque Material
In a nutshell, I aim for a life with the fewest variables. I'll admit that "minimalist" doesn't fully cover this. Possibly "simplicity" doesn't either.
I would be curious to find out which library (if any) they're using to interact with the TMDB API... I wrote one of the two Ruby libraries available (ruby-tmdb) so I would love to get some feedback from them if they are using it!
Well, Douglas Adams thought of it, too.

In HHGG, the Earth is just a massive computer for calculating the question to the answer of life the universe and everything.

All the biological components are merely instances and sub-processes spawned by the main program.
Please make something to extend some of the more popular web-based time tracking systems out there. We already got sites like tick/harvest, etc... which does a great job at project based time tracking.

But a project compromises of;

- benefit management.
what each employee is entitled as part of the company, and how can they make the claims, etc.

- training management.
how many training hours each employee is entitled, and how they can start to apply for training course, etc.

- leave management.
how to apply leave in the system and sync it to the time tracking system, etc..

All these areas have plenty of opportunities to grow. If you have the skills, do make something in these areas.
My boss and I do this regularly. It makes it very simple to dictate early morning, late night meetings and leave a good gap for coding/working time during the day when we feel we want to do it. Usually we just schedule meetings with each other and if anyone asks either of us, we know we are busy.
I find using this mechanism in builders like this is more appropriate and not an abuse. Its definitely aids development & maintenance.

Conversely though I find that using it in ActiveRecord is cute (ie. a bad thing!).
Having had one and having seen friends with twins, multiples are definitely harder. Yes there are certain economies of scale but I don't think they even come close to balancing up the additional chaos, effort and exhaustion.

(And +1 for sympathy and respect that you've had triplets and are still here to tell the tale).
That's not necessarily true. There are, I'm guessing, plenty of contracts Akamai has with the U.S. government for content delivery (the military comes to mind) that are not public knowledge and probably require some level of security clearance.

Of course, I'm just guessing here, but would you really be surprised if this were true?
I like to think of the younger twin as a backup copy, in case the older twin becomes lost or damaged.
http://www.bingocardcreator.com/articles/facebook-like-butto...
Discussed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1646778
Every problem has a software based solution
A Concise Guide to Social Networking Etiquette
Re-imagining Enterprise Applications in the Cloud
Facebook responds to questions here: http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/microchick/2010/10/facebook...

What else would you like to know about this app?
Subdomain. An advantage that I didn't see below is that you can change the DNS to point the subdomain to a different server.

So, you could use domain.com for your projects, and point blog.domain.com to a hosted service (Posterous?)
Generally there are two essential knives; a chefs knife and a paring knife. I agree that a bread knife is nice to have, but I could probably get by without it.
TL;DR - designers who have been making games for themselves lament that someone started making games for everyone else.
In terms of design ethics, the airport seats are different from the other examples. "The suck" is forced upon people without choice.
> If a 6 character variable name can be shortened to 5 characters without losing meaning, then I do it

While i totally agree with the general sentiment of your post, i'm really not sure about this one.

Or rather, im rly not sure abt dis one ;)

It's all about balance really, and very often this balance is only subjective, even if we generally don't like this idea
So we can probably assume he was attempting to help Israel, the country we are fiscally and militarily tied to already. Kinda funny - I wonder if he has some sort of mental illness if he didn't already realize this.
I always wonder what the super-minimalists (< 100 personal items) do about food. I easily have 100 (less if you consider redundancies: should I count each fork individually?) things in my kitchen and most of them get used regularly.

Either they are eating out all the time or they are using someone else's kitchen, both of which seem somewhat antithetical to sub-100 minimalism.
Sure, you can boil down tactical execution to "do this, then do this, finally do this." I don't think it's best, but it's certainly a way to go.

But if you boil down your whole strategy to "All we need to do is X and then Y and then Z" you're doing it wrong.
Zuckerberg: Keep the Talent Acquisitions Coming
I'm also in NC and agree with the above.

The following comments reflect what I hear/know about compensation in RTP.

In general, I've heard very little buzz about jobs in the $120K to $150k range here that are permanent positions. The few I know making that range are oddly enough managers, even at smaller shops. Some of the smartest lead devs/architect type hackers I know here can't locate opportunities at that salary level.

I do know a few contractors making in that range, but they are the exception rather than the rule. I also feel that there is some significant downward pressure on top salaries here in the RTP area. But I'm underexposed in my personal network to hackers working in consulting roles.

I'm consistently amused by comments on threads here saying someone should be making "$120K to $160K." Maybe in SV or Redmond, this is true, but I don't see it here.
NO SPAM SEOs, eh
We're going off on a tangent here, but I don't agree. I mean, most people do have only one or two Phillips screwdrivers and use them on all screws they see that have a 'cross' on them, and I guess it'll work in the majority of cases like you say, but it's uncomfortable to work with the wrong size, and will damage your screwdriver and/or screws to boot. 'right tools for the job' and all. Having 3 sizes is not excessive IMO, and having only a #2 is not an example of a minimalist lifestyle. For disassembling an Xbox or other piece of consumer electronics you need a #1, for putting up drywall a #2 and for mounting a heavy bookshelf a #3. All fairly regular tasks I'd say.
Ask HN: DOM-style parser or SAX parser?
We are building web services (APIs) which can be used within iPhone apps for data synchronization. I was wondering which one is generally better: SAX parsing or DOM-style parsing in the iPhone app. There is no dependency and we can chose any but I am confused whether to chose the easy one (SAX), as it is sequential and not a memory hog like DOM. Any particular reasons to chose DOM if you dont need to?
It's more toward the side of the entire episode dedicated to the product than to the casual mention...
Speed up your Fabric deployments with Parex
The $300 quadrocopter: your iPhone is a remote control
If by "poor", you mean people who's needs aren't met, we just don't have very many of them in the US. The author of this article certainly was not poor by that definition.

http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2004/01/understandi...

As for aging, that was an issue in the past, particularly when most work was manual labor. Luckily, the present and future are much better - projections suggest most old people will be capable of working well past 65. Here is the hot paper:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/329/5997/1287

If you are on the wrong side of the academic paywall (my NYU library account still works), here is a press release: http://www.iiasa.ac.at/Admin/INF/PR/2010/2010-09-09.html
Facebook Groups: Privacy Blunder or Twitter Replacement?
:) Greetings to you too.
Why do you find it cute in ActiveRecord? (Recall that I don't develop with Ruby or Rails, so I'm genuinely curious.)
"Oh, I almost forgot: never work for equity. 99% of those projects will never go anywhere. I tell my clients that they’re welcome to throw in some free equity on top of my normal rates, but I get paid in cash for the work that I do. I have plenty of entrepreneurial projects of my own, so why would I work my ass off for 3% (or even 30%, though they never offer this much) of someone’s Facebook clone?"

The most valuable paragraph in the whole article, IMO.
Why we choose our own job titles
There are plenty of people that make their own spirits/beer/moonshine, even though other substances are available. In some areas of the US, there is a thriving, illicit moonshine trade, yet there are liquor stores abound. Some people prefer moonshine.

An addicted crackhead would start chewing on coca leaves if he could buy them at Wal-Mart? Or if he had only started chewing on coca leaves, he would have never gotten hooked on crack?

People have preferences to foods, why should drugs be any different.

Also, the US did outlaw liquor (18th amendment), and many people went through much hassle.

People would not be addicted to soda, if we had granted them easier access to corn and corn syrup (see what I did there).

Side note: I would like to see the percentage of overdose deaths related to legally manufactured pharmaceuticals.

PS: Maybe we should come up with a SW Florida HN Meetup?
I'm not in Maryland either.
Being fiscally and militarily tied doesn't necessitate sharing all data, does it? Even friends like to keep secrets sometimes. Often, even.
I suppose we could debate this all day. My point is to me the luxury of a car is not very important. Indeed it's not important at all. I feel other people also feel that way, but feel like they "should" buy a BMW just because they can afford it. I'm not sacrificing anything here because the extra luxury I don't have and the status it would represent are both irrelevant to me.

I've made no real sacrifice with the Scion. It's made by Toyota and is a very high quality, dependable car. It will serve me well for many years. That's all a car needs to be in my eyes.

For things that are important to me, sure, I buy the best I can afford. But only a very small number of things are truly important to me. I suppose my definition of minimalism is just truly getting what you need, nothing more or less. I feel no need to "keep up with the Jonses", and overall just don't feel compelled to "be a good consumer".

I agree a minimalist lifestyle is not necessarily a cheaper lifestyle. I totally agree with that. But I do feel a minimalist lifestyle can be cheaper if your desires and needs just happen to work out that way, which in my case I generally feel they do.
You can view the response headers for a page and GAE will list the server as "Google Frontend"
Ultimate CSS Gradient Generator? Try using Compass (www.compass-style.org) They have mixins and color calculation functions builtin that make this a trivial 1 line of code thing to do, in Sass. It even generates supported directives for all browsers that currently have support for gradients.
I don't think enjoyment is at the top of your mind when the task at hand is to get three big guys off of your back...
Rethinking Stuff
Whichever is easiest with your setup. The important thing is to actually write - don't get too caught up in the technical details.
How Mint Founder hacked TC40
How to Follow the Doctor's Advice of "No Sex" After a Heart Attack?
Ask HN: Negotiating employee equity dilution during fundraising
Lets say a company is in the final stages of a fundraising round. If a new employee comes onboard, how much right do they have to negotiate to be given equity after the round closes (for dilution purposes)<p>Where is the line drawn on this?
This is important in more than just startups and software/websites. This is important is pretty much everything. Designing for human factors should be incorporated as early as possible in pretty much everything, from software, to physical user interfaces (with actual toggles and such), to boring old registration procedures (done with paper!). If you accept the premise that you should be designing for human factors at some point, then you should be applying it as early as possible to save you the most money, time, and generate the largest return. Your minimal viable product should have undergone some sort of "design" when it leaves the door. It doesn't have to implement everything, or even most of it. It just has to be ready to grow into something that does.
That's gonna leave a mark.
The American attitudes about what's safe for work are mostly shaped by sexual harassment law. It's not that our employers believe Porn Is Evil; it's that they fear being sued. It's not even that the courts believe Porn Is Evil; it's that showing an employee porn is one of the tactics of managers who want to have sex with their employees. Since forcing your employee to have sex with you is definitely slimy, we all go along with the NSFW stuff as a necessary cost of reducing slime in the workplace.

But it does mean that we can wind up with a case where nobody in a group would object to a picture personally, but nobody in that group can be allowed to show it to anyone else in the group.
I agree that his conclusion of instability is difficult and will offer the idea that of all the critiques of the stock market, instability is probably the least credible.

A stock market with round the clock, instantaneous transactions is one of the most efficient markets that exist. Instability would suggest that it frequently allows for inefficient outcomes. A stock market's prices are determined exactly by buyer demand and seller supply. It corrects itself in the event of freak transactions (like the flash crash) and if it doesn't correct itself, that means the supply and demand have changed and the price of stocks nearly instantly reflect those changes.
It's complicated and should really be written as a long blogpost rant and not as a comment but I will try to summarize it. Basically the problems are twofold: things that are inherent to all social networks and things that are Facebook-specific.

One thing I noticed on social networks with a very large userbase (the definition of a social network having a very large userbase is my mum being registered on it) is that the more life you have, the less likely that you're using it, hence the more boring person someone is, the more they post/comment on social networks, hence most of the user-generated "content" on Facebook is incredibly boring. This is very different from "small" networks where most users are "cool", "trendsetter" people. Obviously this is an oversimplification and I have really interesting friends who are on Facebook all the time, but it's still a generic rule none the less and it makes the whole experience more boring.

My particular problem with Facebook is that I simply don't get what's going on; who can see what. I mean, which action of mine will be posted on my wall, who will be able to see it, etc. This may not sound very humble but I consider myself a reasonably intelligent person but still with all that brainpower I just can't tell whether my theoretical ex-girlfriend can see the photos of me that my theoretical current girlfriend of mine posted and if she can, how to disable it. I mean, these are everyday trivial problems that average people living a normal life face, this is not just being afraid of the government / snake headed aliens mining your super secret personal data. Do I really want to show my theoretical drunk party photos with my old headmistress from my elementary school? But then how do I share them with my closest friends? The whole thing is just too much hassle so I wouldn't ever bother posting interesting stuff. Which leads to most people (or at least the intelligent ones) only posting boring, "politically correct" things that wouldn't offend even their old headmistress. Which leads to boring content.
For sure, if I'm hosting client meetings then I have an honest need for the better facilities. But if I'm just going out of town and just need a place to crash, the Best Western is more than adequate.
Good design requires understanding the problem at a much deeper level. A big company can rip off the design, but without that understanding, they really have nowhere to go. I think that's been most evident with Apple, but it happens anywhere you find good design.

(In the sense that design is how something works and not just aesthetics.)
I'm kinda over the whole .ly domain thing. Find a new cool-sounding TLD where there isn't the risk of having your domain seized because of possible violations of Sharia law.
"If your influx of new contracts is stable enough, why not rent a cheap office, get said other person as an employee and work together at the same place?"

I'm not sure the influx is that stable. And I'm not sure I want to shift to being a manager of a multi-person development shop. I suppose if I'm sub-contracting then I'm doing much the same admin work there as I would with a regular employee, except I think having that formal "business with employees" arrangement adds some complications (payroll, taxes, insurance, etc.)

But it has crossed my mind.
Look at the hodgepodge of answers I got to this question: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/9371/what-is-...

I was surprised that there wasn't a polished product in this space.
Well, you would have noticed it if your order book had open limit orders on PG: a sudden drop and recovery like that would have cleared them all.
Woot woot for Name.com!
If you've got the awesome team you say you do, then you should aggressively do some Lean Startup-style validated learning.

1) Come up with an idea

2) Create a Wordpress landing page for that idea (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1697302 ). Sure WordPress landing sites are ghetto, but if it's good enough for groupon...

3) Buy ads on Google/Facebook to drive traffic to your landing page. If you're angel funded, you're racing against time, not money, so buying targeted traffic is a way to get validated learning in a shorter amount of time.

4) If people are responding to your landing page (clicking through the ads, signing up for an email, etc), make a survey to find out their thoughts on your idea, it's competitors, and what they currently use to solve that problem.

5) When these marketing efforts help you find an audience that is reachable and responsive to your idea, start building! When you have something, monitor usage and solicit feedback to find the next thing to build. If something isn't getting used, scrap it. Repeat as often as possible.

If you're looking for a small tight market, I would highly recommend using Facebook ads. You can target by interests and groups, which means you're showing your ad to people who have self-selected to show their interest in the market you're looking at.

I'm making an online trading card game, and I made a survey on Wufoo, posted it on my site, then made a FB ad pointing to the survey along with a $25 Amazon gift card to a random person that completed it. I spent $75 on ads targeted to Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and Magic: The Gathering players, got 50K impressions, over 200 completed surveys, and this was in only 3 days. $100 total got me validation of my idea plus other useful information, and 50 or so people signed up for my newsletter and to playtest when I'm ready.
"My particular problem with Facebook is that I simply don't get what's going on; who can see what. I mean, which action of mine will be posted on my wall, who will be able to see it, etc."

Given their track record it is safe to assume that everything you do will be public. If not now, then at some point in the future.
I have always found the discussion of Groklaw posts on Slashdot to be interesting. It's curious that this article has not yet been posted there yet.
If a six character variable name is a real word and the 5 character variable name isn't, in my mind you've increased the number of objects in every statement that variable appears in from 1 to 5.

Now, there are some really common ones that are more or less idiomatic. i is iterator, ct is count. That said, those save a lot more than 1 character.
Wow, thanks for the info.
I agree. If people understood the simple difference between strategy and tactic. this problem would not happen. Another important tool for identifying conflicts and dependencies between tasks and tactics is project management methodologies. I know it's not very hip and doesn't get the hackers among us excited, but: Like Steve Blank I once had a job and a boss I didn't get along with perfectly. I managed a huge IT project for Renault-Nissan with developers in 2 continents, 3 time zones, and some very crucial strategic goals to attain. I am not an entrepreneur and I use the principles of project management (PRINCE, PMP, and countless other similar methodologies) every day in every aspect of what I do.
10 Green Business Ideas to Help Get You Started
That's what I've been doing. I don't like to leave people hanging, so I try to find someone who can take care of them.

I also like that people feel they can come to me as a first point of contact when looking for a developer, that if I'm not available I'll (hopefully) point them to someone who is.
Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud: Envato
That tumblr post completely misses the point of the W3C article. He should be ashamed of himself for posting it.
what would be nice is if this generator also created compass code.
Please add the ability to edit comments. I made a spelling mistake and had to delete the comment and repost it with corrections.
What are the cars on this list about?
http://bugbear.com/ind.html
Google Apps standard edition is free. The only thing you're saving here is the 5-10 minutes it would take to switch MX records and verify your domain.

Name.com has this built in as well and they're a proper registrar.