skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Economist is certainly not "Fox News with a higher reading age". Name me one other publication covering: business and politics. They have decent quarterly summary supplements on technology and good weekly science sections.

They have a bias in both their writing and their world view, but so does any publication, including HN. As long as you understand the bias then you shouldn't be led astray too far. There are of course articles which don't reach their average quality, but the quality is generally quite high. Higher than any other news and analysis publication I know of which is published every week.

Edit: grammar
OK will have a look at that.
That's so hard to quantify but I'll do my best.

Assume that my example is based on a recruiter working for a specialist agency in London. I'll base my estimate on that:

Salary of £60k would probably give you a fee of about £15k meaning the total charge to the client would be about £75k, probably a bit more but you get the drift.

From that £15k fee, the recruiters cut would vary based on his companies bonus structure which is generally based on overall fee's per quarter as opposed to individual placements.

Assuming an average performance per quarter (slightly ahead of predefined targets) a recruiter would probably take home around a grand for that placement.

A general rule in recruitment is that you aim to take home at least the equivalent of your salary in bonus every year. I've worked with guys who were earning in excess of £120k a year after about 3 to 5 years with the same recruitment company.

As for quantity, this once again varies from agency to agency. I have what I consider to be a busy desk and I have 8 open, fillable vacancies in front of me right now and they will be workable for about a week at a time.
I really don't understand what the big deal is with PDF support. If I click on a PDF I'd rather it download to my computer and gets opened with the appropriate application, rather than using developer time in a feature that feels out of place within Chrome.

This feature has been available in the dev channel of Chrome for ages, and until now it's still unstable. PDF's tend big documents, and it's generally the case that Chrome locks up and ends up crashing when opening a PDF that's more than a few pages. This defeats the purpose in my opinion. The moment I notice I'm loading a PDF in Chrome I go ballistic trying to close the tab to avoid the crash.

I'd rather have developers improving the bookmark manager than trying to make a browser a PDF reader also. And a bad one at it. This makes me want to go back to the Chromium nightly builds. Those where awesome and bullshit free.
Admittedly my answer didn't include anything to justify the "extremely in demand" part - my brain went into dreamland briefly.

A lot of people talk about how Chinese would be a key language to know for conducting business in the mid-to-long term, which is what I thought he was driving at. Though I imagine you need longer than 4-5 years to be useful at Chinese, as per this previous HN story - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1368051
Ask HN: Payment processing within my app, without losing (too much) money?
Example: Let's say I'm building a show/exhibition management app, allowing you to manage floor space, exhibitors, course participant registration, etc. To register a booth, a potential exhibitor will have to pay a fixed amount of money, let's say $100 for simplicity's sake. Except that with each payment, I as the service provider will lose n% of that payment in processing fees, depending on which payment gateway (Paypal or otherwise) I choose. Which results in me not being able to pay my app's customers the full amount due to them. The same scenario comes up for the show participants' payments, if I want to have that billing process administrated through my app, too.

So my question is, do I just tack on the % as a service fee to my customers, resulting in my customers only receiving, say, $95 instead of the $100 for booth registration? Or are there other ways to tackle this issue?
This is bullshit. Almost everything in here sounds great but is merely fluff.

I promise you that at many points, playing guitar felt like work to Jimmy Hendrix. Painting felt like work to Picasso. Muhammad Ali tried very hard to be the best. He also marketed the hell out of himself.

People who've never done something for a living that is a hobby for most participants think there's some clearly-defined line between work and passion. There's not. It's a continuum and you spend your life moving from one end to the other and back again if you're doing the right thing. If you're not you spend it all at one end.

Take advice, just don't view it as the gospel. Everyone here has probably been taking advice from PG, for instance, and is better off for it.
Managing the Federal Debt
Except if you're that small minority of people not currently in the UK ;)
So really is the problem politics, or the complexities that face governance? How does the final paragraph differ in an enlighten monarchy,or oligarchy,or anything else other than true 'pure' democracy?

The last sentence seems to be the entire point of republicanism. So that ordinary people do not have to deal with the burden of these decisions every day.

I really don't think 'inefficient' is the right word there. Nor do I think 'politics' to be right word. Your points all point to the limitations and complexities of governance rather than any 'inefficiency'.

There are plenty of sources of inefficiencies within specific implementations of governance and the politics that formed around it. But those are separate from just the sheer difficulties that you pointed out.
Ubuntu has always been shooting for the mainstream, it is the central goal of the project. Just look at bug 1.
Been wrapping my head around CLOS recently and has been really making me realize how OO can be done.
Robert Pirsig has some words to say on this. If the idea of pursuing quality intrigues you it might be worth your time to take a read through his books, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" and "Lila".
Unfortunately, with Flash's security record, Flashblock is less disrespectful and more of a necessity. It seems like there's a new zero-day in the wild every couple of weeks.
How I Threw Hope Out The Window and Used Data to Build an Empire
Hmm so according to Mr. Rabbani, Hacker News is a waste of time.
Record 42 Million Americans on Food Stamps.
Let it simply flow. Jimmy Hendrix did not play guitar. He simply let his feelings flow unabated.

Could this be intentionally evil advice designed to prevent the recipient from ever amounting to anything? Infants let their feelings flow unabated. "Jimmy" worked his ass off.
That's not what I get from [1] at all. Maybe that was the case once but it looks like it replaces X now.

[1] http://wayland.freedesktop.org/architecture.html
They can still buy the recommended one (assuming you trust the opinions of those in the UK!). You can't follow the links, I guess, but at least it makes the decision of which one to buy easy.
of joy?
The things people will do for frequent flier miles...
I am already over the "Your X sucks" articles and we've only just gotten started. The title is so irrelevantly offensive (since it has little to do with the content).
See some discussion of this article yesterday at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1869226
Facebook Backer Mail.ru Jumps 41% After $912 Million London IPO
I'm still waiting for preferential voting. That would go a long way toward making the political conversation something more than the current two-party polarization.
> Don't take advice on your high-performance, flat tappet camshaft break-in from the Economist...

But do take heed of their admonition to understand precisely what you are putting into your vintage engines. I frequent a vintage motorcycle list and the discussions regarding additive packages and ZDDP specifically are frequent.

The consensus there is that ZDDP is the most important factor in engine longevity.
Apple sending Xserve to giant server farm in the sky
> I really don't understand what the big deal is with PDF support.

Not everyone has a pdf viewer software installed.
Why Quantitative Easing Is Bad For The U.S. Economy
I'm pretty sure that he means that you should read something in an effort to understand the author's thought process, so that you can formulate your own opinion. This is opposed to reading things as gospel and believing everything you read.
I'm currently using a bunch of these; I'm not using enlive for templating as such, just modifying existing markup after it's been generated. For classical templates I've found that freemarker, a Java templating system, works perfectly with the Clojure types.

clj-record shows promise but is still rather rough around the edges. I'm hoping to contribute some patches.

I'm still trying to get to grips with Leiningen: one thing I haven't figured out is what the best way to use local jar files for Java libs. Also, using locally modified versions of libraries which are already in the leiningen system doesn't seem an intended use case.
Happy Birthday, Android A History, in Screenshots and Video
Ask HN: Looking for feedback/advice on handwritr.com
I've been working on this little site in my spare time which makes use of Amazon Mechanical Turk. I got some really useful feedback from you guys off #startups last night, so thought I'd post here too.

Thanks!
It's really just "appeal to authority", which is a very common logical fallacy used in politics. Everyone has their opinion on the intent of the founding fathers and that is used to sway many political arguments.
hire a good startup law firm (i like gunderson) and get standardized incorporation, vesting etc docs. it's worth it. (but try to only pay $5K or so with promise to pay more later when you get funding etc).

Should this really cost $5K+ or more to get standardized docs? It should be possible to get high quality legal documentation necessary for starting your company for a fair amount less, but maybe I'm wrong. Do others here have experience on this?
Make sure you explain pointers well, the additional level of indirection introduced by them is usually hard to grasp for beginners.

Show the relation between pointers and arrays. Offer some best practices on using pointers. Explain the most common caveats like buffer overflows, problems with null terminated strings or off by one errors.
Yo eof, I hear you're some sort of technology guy.. I really need advice on which toaster to buy, what do you think? Oh I think toasters are overrated, what about a kettle?
Finding Nemo's Nemo's dad should have become the mother of Nemo's kids
Korg publishes Montron synth circuit diagram [pdf]
The article paints a pretty bleak picture of what working is like in corporations. I have worked at a 6000 people strong tech company based in Palo Alto (okay...why hide it...VMware) and it was nothing like what the article describes. One could suggest new things, argue with managers, walk up to any person and so on. I have heard similar things about other companies with less than 10000 employees.

So, may be the author is talking about the juggernauts employing 50,000 or more people?
I think people throw around ideas like this without considering the side effects. One problem is that if you remove our bipartisanship you introduce the possibility of electing someone where a small group of extremists is able to gain a majority vote because the rest of the candidate pool is so spread out.

Imagine an election with 15 candidates. 14 of them are democrat/liberals and 1 of them is Neo-Nazi. Who wins? This might be an extreme case, but if you divide up the voting sensibilities of the majority, you risk the chance that a smaller group of like-minded people may overrun the race.

Similar instances of this have occurred in the past, such as in France's 2002 election, where Jean-Marie Le Pen made it to the second round of elections because he was running against many other candidates:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Marie_Le_Pen

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_presidential_election,_2...

I'm not saying that a partied system is a good one, but it's does solve some problems that should be considered before you dismiss the idea entirely.

edit: added link to french election page
Try a few of the links here:

http://www.bingocardcreator.com/abingo/resources

Basically, it's testing one version of your website against another version, so that you can measure which one better compels users to do something.

So, for example, you might try testing your normal "Buy Now" button against a double-sized, bright red shiny button. You'd show one version to half your visitors, the other version to the other half. Libraries like this one let you keep track of who saw which version, and whether they actually bought your thing.

After a week or so collecting data, you can see that, for example, 4.8% of visitors seeing your old button clicked it, whereas 6.6% of those who saw the big red one clicked it. That's valuable. As in, measurable in dollars valuable, so you need to be doing it if you run a website that sells things to people or otherwise gets value out of people doing stuff on it.
It's quite a decent and neat feature if you have to read a lot of PDF's (i.e. academic paper hunting): you can quickly scan through the PDF opened in your browser and decide if you want to actually keep it. Otherwise the PDF will just be downloaded to your Download folder and then you have to read through them and clean up those unwanted.

That being said, I don't like Chrome's implementation though. Usually switch to Safari for "PDF mode".
I concur!

Ran a couple of Xserves a while ago to run web application stacks on it and most of the time I diverged from using the GUI to administer things I shot myself in the foot (Apache, firewalls, initscripts, networking etc.).

The nice hardware - those CPU load meters were gorgeous - unfortunately doesn't make up for those problems so I switched back to non Apple hardware + Linux and never looked back.

Don't fight the system is a nice mantra to follow when using Mac OS X Server and that's not hard when you use it to administer a collection of other Macs & the network they're on or when using the built-in services without wanting to tweak/upgrade the versions yourself (iCal server, Mail server etc.).
alright, but... "no pain, no gain"
I think recruiters would do a better job if they spent more time reading HN. You probably understand your "product" better than most of your competition ever will.
If you love nc, also check out socat (http://www.dest-unreach.org/socat/)
Again, I may sound harsh here, but, given a couple of exceptions, my experiences with recruiters are nothing short that horrendous. That is why now I resort only to personal connections and on networks like Linkedin.
I'm also noticing a worrying trend recently:

(caveat: I'm not an native English speaker but I have lived in the UK and I use English as my working language. I can recognize UK accents pretty well).

More often than not, I'm getting phone calls from recruiters with a very strong cockney accent that clearly have no idea of what they are talking about and they sounds like they just landed on that desk without any previous experience in the industry. These are particularly pesky. They go straight to the flag-raising questions and they make you feel like a complete idiot.
Honestly, these cowboys are just damaging the image of an already deeply wounded industry. I don't know how your industry deals with dishonest or unprofessional behavior, but if you want to get the trust of people like the one hanging in this community you have to work on some mechanism to keeps the bad apples out of the basket.
I can actually smell a business idea here, like a guild of super-hero recruiters, who never let you down and do actually find you your dream job.
I would phrase it differently, but I tend to concur with your sentiment, especially the bit about reading. Yes, I understand that the author is saying you should read deeply, not shallowly, but the way he says "don't read" is, in my mind, dumb, especially if people merely scan his headers.

I wrote a longish essay called "How to get your Professors’ Attention — along with Coaching or Mentoring" in response to the ways I've responded to students and previous professors have responded to me: http://jseliger.com/2010/10/02/how-to-get-your-professors%E2... . A chunk of the essay concerns the importance of reading and how people use reading to test your seriousness. I think it's much better advice than not to "read."
I'd like to narrow the question down to which companies are profitable.

Successful and "make it big" are subjective. Profitable isn't. You either are or you aren't.

I don't work there or know anyone at the company personally, but I'll start the list with one that I remember reading was profitable pretty much right out of the gate: GazeHawk
Sorry, I couldn't come up with a decent "rust monster" analogy on the spot. But actually, there are some analogies between adventure structure and lifestyle choices. I actually work as an employee, and the set number of encounters per week is good for my personal sense of safety and mental hit points, but there's a certain yearning for the sandbox world of entrepreneurship…

(I think with this post I used up my nerd budget for today)
I like your question! Most YC Companies have been named and written about -- why don't you do the research and write it up for us?
Engineering Cohort wanted
I always thought it was a shame that HTML only defined two elements for content: <div> and <a>.
Three More Ways for Students to Compete in the Imagine Cup
Reminds me of when Windows NT was all the rage.
I agree entirely. Ideally there would be a way of simply merging items to get all the references to the same story from different sources, and combine the comment threads.

But that won't happen any time soon. Cross-referencing is the best we can manage for now.
What about a "You've reached name level, now go forth and build your keep!" self-help advice book?
Anyone want to give a few examples of cool things they actually do with netcat?
Why Dogs Wag Their Tails
a friend of mine used to have a funny variant of this (more a jab at me when i would be leaving for the gym)

"no pain, no pain" :)
I hear you, I voted a few days ago for the C book and this is why I did (and I'm primarily a Python guy).
He says in the article that you need 70-80ft for HF, 6 ft for VHF and 2 ft for UHF, so I would guess so.

However they do also say you can use plastic tubing with it, so I guess carrying around 6ft wouldn't be hard, though how practical that would be in rough conditions is questionable.
That's odd, the comment I replied to was saying that x is useful for things other than workstations, and I was saying that it wasn't more useful than weyland on mobiles and servers.

I have no idea how this comment mixup happened...
Blurred images in canvas + CSS animated text-shadow (Webkit only, no iOS yet)
Absolutely right. I built several flat tappet engines years ago and the failure is because people don't break them in and take care of them.

Many people who are newly interested in classic cars are under the impression that they can treat them like modern cars after a restoration. Unless you've spent the money to update the internals, you need to follow the tried and true practices of the past.
How much are you paying AMT workers?
Even better, make sure you explain function pointers well.
I remember a quote something like "CLOS is best thought of as being implemented in CLOS" - which pretty much sums it up for me. :-)
Well how do you make money? At some point you have to be charging more than they are receiving, right?
This is a welcome addition, since the new Skype beta is really a whitespace monster, but honestly? The thin messenger style main/contacts window is WAY WAY better. I don't want to have a full screen Skype app that gets in the way, I want something that I can plug in and forget about until I get calls.
A black hole engine that could power spaceships
Do you Domestic Abuse Affect Child Custody | Your Classified Articles
Interesting (to me) UI insight: if a workspace is not scrollable or scalable, its dimensions are limited to the minimum common dimensions of landscape and portrait modes. Thus Chalk's work area is almost square.
Do colleges really need 30,000 applications to find 1,500 great students?
There's no way to know yet. Most YC companies haven't had their fate determined yet.
What elements would you like to have?
I use it for:

- creating quick and dirty proxies (nc > fifo > nc). (edit: you can also bridge udp->tcp this way, which makes proxying UDP through an ssh tunnel possible)

- making simple GET requests (printf "GET / HTTP/1.0\r\nHost: www\r\n\r\n" | nc host 80, or save the full request and pipe that to netcat)

- checking if a port is open (nc -p 8080 host, tends to be quicker than nmap and less to type)

- dumb file transfers ('nc -l port > file' on one machine, 'file | nc host2 port') on another (or using tar for directories). Usually I use ssh/scp, but sometimes that nc trick works just fine..
List comprehensions.

Because the syntax is powerful, concise and readable at the same time. It closely reassembles mathematical set notation, making it fairly easy to grasp. Moreover many interesting problems can be expressed in terms of list comprehensions (like the Norvig's spelling corrector[1]).

[1] http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html
Beware of Too Much Tinkering
This is where one of the few cases Chrome is aiming at cross-platform support at the cost of reusing native functionalities.

Every OS X and most Linux desktop distros are capable of rendering PDF natively. Personally I think OS X default PDF viewer renders much better than Chrome. They should just reuse it.

Similar thing for H.264 playback. AFAIK Chrome use ffmpeg to decode H.264 and WebM content. It's fine if there is no native codec to do that (H.264 on Linux, WebM on all OS). But on Windows 7 and OS X where hardware-accelerated H.264 playback comes by default, they should reuse that.

I have a fear that if they continue to do so (invent their own not-so-good stuff instead of reusing existing and better tech), one day Chrome will become the cross-platform shit that can run on every OS but not good on any one.
There used to be a good list on Wikipedia but it's been "deletionated" over the past few years.
For those who want a PDF or PostScript copy of the book, It is available in PDF at http://learnyousomeerlang.com/static/erlang/learnyousome.pdf... (1.1MB) and and PostScript at http://learnyousomeerlang.com/static/erlang/learnyousome.ps.... (3.0MB). Thanks to Holger Weiß who went over the site, scraped it and converted the files.
The Economist publishes these articles for the same reason it ran an obituary on Martin Tytell[1]. It makes an interesting read, informs people about something they otherwise would never encounter and helps to broaden, however slightly people's mental models of the world.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Tytell
This post seems kind of a lame attempt to name drop or ego stroke.

FWIW, I've happened to have exchanged a couple of emails with pg in the last week, and my experience with email sample sets was in no way like the linked article. The linked article seemed more like Steve Jobs email missives than pg.

Just sayin.
have lived and hacked in metro/downtown Atlanta my entire adult life (however decently well traveled inside and outside the US), I think the emphasis on traffic being horrible cannot be understated. I would love to see a large scale study of Atlanta residents' overall perception of Atlanta grouped by how many miles they drive per week avg. It is an amazing city provided you are within walking distance of your destination between the hours of 7am and 7pm weekdays.
> am seeing that urban transportation doesn't work because people don't use them

The regions under discussion aren't urban so urban transportation simply isn't relevant.

Urban transportation requires a lot of density or a lot of folks going between common end-points. The latter is fairly rare and is very different from a lot of people going past a given point.