skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Part of the issue is that the 10% unemployment rate is not equally distributed across all demographics.

If we generalize the desired startup labor pool as college-educated adults over the age of 25, the national unemployment rate drops to 5.1% (http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t04.htm). I can't find a great source, but I'd also wager that when you factor location (NY metro) and industry (technology), the unemployment rate drops even further--almost to the point of natural unemployment.

If you fit this profile you shouldn't have a difficult time finding work, and hence we have a "war for talent" in the face of high, national unemployment.
I disagree on structure. This is a everything-argument. For instance, should there be an epic war and a return to levels of knowledge and technology to pre-Industrial Revolution levels, all of your arguments still hold.

So what explains the trend that things are getting cheaper? I think it's because people learn more quickly the value of something. I can sell an ignorant person a moldy hamburger if I'm cruel. They may not know, or may be so hungry they'll take the short term reward without being aware of the long term damage. Today, I can hardly make a movie without having every intending consumer become painfully aware of every alternative.

It's that value is suddenly more transient. I think it's because the speed of information causes the time constants on those transients to shrink drastically.
"I agree with you and generally this is a great way for a startup to save money as well because new grads are cheap."

I'd argue the opposite case — if it's true that a good programmer is at least 5-10x more productive than an average programmer[1], you'd actually save money by paying the experienced programmer significantly more when compared to hiring a team of beginning or average programmers.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month#The_surg...
easy.
with ups you can track zip/city to zip/city.
thus they know what city and zip they are coming from thus they add your zip or city and wahlaa you have your results
"...until that day when I accidentally created an infinite loop and rang every number in the database a hundred times."

A developer that worked for me did exactly this a few years ago, only instead of ringing numbers he sent them overcharged SMS messages. I had to call up every single affected customer and explain to them why they had just received 50 SMS messages that cost them $5 a pop. After that I of course refunded the money - only problem was that the SMS gateway charges 40% on each transaction, which I couldn't get back.

Very expensive mistake.
Monads in Ruby (a 3 part series)
... And in my more paranoid moments, I think that the reason public schools suck is that otherwise we would flood the world with self-disciplined people who can organize society for themselves and would grow very tired of working for and buying from the current owners of our world...

(yes, you can call me damn hippy!)
Online dating: altered reality
Out of curiosity, are you keeping a log of popular HN posts or just remembering them and searching? You're always first on the scene and comprehensive, it seems.
Here's one small macro that I think addresses most of the pain:

;; (with f ((var val)...) body...)
;;==> (f (lambda (var...) body...) val...)
(defmacro with (f bindings &body body)
`(funcall ,f (lambda ,(mapcar #'car bindings) ,@body)
,@(mapcar #'cadr bindings)))

You use it like this, assuming you have monad functions UNIT and BIND:

(with bind ((v1 e1))
(with bind ((v2 e2))
(unit (+ v1 v2))))

If you need multiple types of monads, and you can't just give them each different function names, then use generic functions for UNIT and BIND (with two differences from Haskell: Haskell's 'return' is generic in the resulting monad type, not the argument type, and the type's resolved at compile time). When I've done this in Scheme I only needed one kind of monad, so I didn't bother.

WITH can be handy for other things; I already had it lying around when the occasion came up to use a monad in Scheme.

Oleg's written about another approach using delimited continuations.
I'll add my dissent. I've consulted with 4 different startups in the past few months. And they're not afraid to hire entry level.

However, they seem to run into problems when they want to find senor people to mentor the entry level hires. Entry level developers are rarely able to lead a team much less handle the various technology decisions of the contemporary tech startup.
I am able to install the system and run the demos on a Ubuntu server without any trouble by following the system guide.
Working for one of the big defense contractors at the moment, they definitely prefer to hire fresh grads. They will burn 6 months of you being completely unproductive on their dime to train you in the blink of an eye. Thats $50k to them before you even did anything. Plus they have a process for everything and have experienced guys holding your hand and checking your work.

They also figure once you start out there with good pay you will become out of touch with the market rate, and they raise you extremely slowly compared to the market, so that by the time you have been there 5 years you are a bargain to them. Most people just don't keep enough connections outside the company and are incapable of moving on.

So they look at the total cost over 5, 10 years+ and hiring a bunch of new grades and training (even paying for grad school) is cheaper for them.

Startups don't have that luxury. 6 months from now, we might be out of funding. And if we care about what happens 5 years from now, we're super rich. So lets hire better people first. And they don't have the luxury of a fixed process and senior engineers to check everyones work.
There are small startups that will hire entry-level people. However, I agree, the relationships with the entry level people are not necessarily of the mentor-apprentice variety.
The frontpage with a threshold of 100 points
Presumably, that's what Orto did (a post about which I linked to in the original post), and apparently with reasonable performance results for the examples they provided at the time (circa 2008). Javascript runtimes are becoming absurdly fast these days, so I wouldn't put an efficient and effective JVM-in-Javascript out of reach on spec, at least not yet.
That's an interesting app. I reckon a lot of people will ask you why this is better than just using a spreadsheet.

If you could automate the value input for each task that would be make it easier to use. Instead of arbitrarily deciding the value yourself, can you link it to some external metric (site visitors, users, likes, sales, etc)?
how did their product end up turning out, out of curiosity?
Excellent question. The parochial mentality that workers must be colocated is clearly part of the problem.

However, using remote workers is not the only solution. As a remote worker, I can tell you that I have to expend more effort communicating than I would if I was co-lo'd. Granted, I'm an extrovert so I don't mind terribly.

For more on this, see: http://evan.tiggerpalace.com/articles/2010/12/10/rule-0-choo...
I never followed up and they never gave me the full name until I'd sign an NDA (which I didn't).
Ask HN: What's your favorite IDE?
OK, I might get flamed for this. I would like to get an idea of how many people are using what IDE.

Please, write the name of the IDE first, and on a separate line. Then you can add your comments.

If you see your IDE in the list already, just upvote it. That way we can get some stats going.

Thanks
His homepage http://www.jaka.org/

Sorry I didn't notice your comment earlier.
Hmm.. now I'll wait for a 61 year old's thoughts on where social media is headed. That should be equally interesting.
http://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=9000
Great, as I was JUST thinking of making a chrome extension to filter posts with 100+ points.
> I know Patrick recommended using apt-get, but I'm going to counter-recommend pulling any third-party code you use into your own source tree and building it

Counter-counter-recommended. This is needlessly duplicating immense amount of work that distro packagers do.

> You do not want to be tracking down a subtle version incompatibility when you're setting up a new server or deploying a new version to the production servers - or worse, when you rollback a change.

This is why LTS releases exist. If you're locked to Ubuntu 10.04, then you'll be using the packages that come with it until you're ready to make the significant leap to the next LTS version three years later.

> If you always use Debian-based systems, apt-get works great. But what if one of your devs wants to use a MacBook?

Then they can suck it up and learn how virtualbox works. Even versions you've hand-chosen are going to exhibit cross-platform differences that will make them fail to reflect the reality of production: case-insensitivity and GNU/BSD differences are two such things that come to mind. (Indeed, both of these have been encountered in the last few months by one of last few the VM-holdouts at work.)
I tried running it for a while on my laptop while at home. Let it run for a week, didn't see a single coin. Calculated how long it would take to generate one on average, concluded that it wouldn't be worth it. There is teraflop GPU at work at the moment which is completely fallow, and I might be able to get some bitcoins out of that, but that would be misappropriation of resources. (It's not true, as the article claims, that generating bitcoins uses fallow resources. Computing those hashes burns a lot of juice...)
They froze the account that had all of our money. Our existing savings would've still been in action, allowing us to sue for the insurance which would then allow us to issue refunds.

You understanding of the scenario is flawed, and your bias is bleeding through. Stop looking for excuses to blame someone in something you know nothing about.
Finally, a hackernews I can keep up with.
I find that checking Facebook is almost always an emotional experience. I see so many more new babies than I ever did before Facebook.
Twitter feed with a threshold of 100 points: http://twitter.com/newsyc100
30Gb is pretty low end here (Australia). Eg, here's a price list for Internode: http://www.internode.on.net/residential/broadband/adsl/easy_.... The base plan is 30Gb/month for $40, the high end is 1Tb/month for $130.

iiNet's base plan is 20Gb/month for $30: http://www.iinet.net.au/broadband/plans.html

Telstra has a 2GB/month plan for $10, but that is really just there so they can price gouge people who don't know better: http://go.bigpond.com/broadband/?ref=Net-Head-Int-Plans-Broa...

I don't know what lets T-Mobile sell 3Gb as "unlimted", but they wouldn't be allowed to call it that here.
http://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=500

Only thing there is the Heroku acquisition
NYC startups are struggling to hire because there is a real shortage of skilled labor in the country including technology labor. The 10% unemployment reflects a surplus of labor that would normally be taken up by manufacturing jobs which we don't have since we became a service economy. The 08 crash was an excuse to fire legacy employees. We will never get the jobs back that we've lost.
21 million bitcoins seems like a low limit to set. According to http://newlibertystandard.wetpaint.com/page/Exchange+Rate the exchange rate is currently 221 Bitcoins per USD, so the total value of all possible bitcoins is only 95000USD.
Wow, looks a lot more interesting.
I agree with the author that programming (not just "tech") literacy should be part of every curriculum, I don't think this will solve the unemployment problem.

Technology is very good at creating value, but not very good at creating jobs. All 72 tech companies in the S&P 500 combined employ about 2.3m people [1], whereas just Wal-mart employes about 2.1m people. Those numbers are worldwide employment, but for reference, the US had 15m unemployed in November.

Even the breakout, unimaginable success that is Google only employs about 28,000 people. And I'm sure that for every hire Google has made, they've displaced many more people that used to depend on print advertising. (To be clear, I'm not saying that technology is net bad for the economy. Technology creates a lot of value for the individuals that work and invest in it, and for the economy as a whole. However, technology is not a massive creator of jobs.)

So unless startups become a multiple of the size of the entire S&P 500 technology sector, they're not going to make a noticeable dent on unemployment.

[1] I compiled a spreadsheet (https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AqpDDf0Sr4EXdDJMZEt...) based on information available on Wikipedia[2] and through Google searches

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_S%26P_500_companies and individual company pages
I was a 90s kid too. Do yourself a favor and NEVER watch any of those old cartoons again on Youtube. I have and it shattered my childhood memories.
A few people have mentioned Excel, yes. My answer is this is easier to use than a spreadsheet. And it would be hard to get the labels in Excel.

And yeah, people don't like inputting data manually. But tying to some external input seems like it would complicate things and the tool would lose some flexibility. I don't know... I'll keep that in mind.

Thanks for the feedback.
It just occurred to me that while I vote up great comments, I don't remember the last time I gave an up-vote to a thread. Am I atypical?
Doesn't seem precise...

http://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=489 (489) doesn't see a thread with 490 points, but http://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=484 (484) does. Caching? Rounding? Thread in question: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1990498

Still, awesome, many thanks! Especially because it drags up a bunch of good-but-older entries that I may have missed.
Getting no results from over doesn't mean there haven't been any items with that many points (though in fact there haven't been any with 9000 points). Over doesn't pull stuff off disk. It just applies a stricter filter to the pool of recent stories from which the frontpage is generated.
Ask HN: How do I license Amazon's 1-click tech?
Amazon licensed it to Apple in 2000, but according to my research they remain the only licensee and details about the transaction are private.

Bluntly: what's Amazon's deal, here? They've completely changed how the web works with AWS, yet they haven't gotten around to set up a reasonable licensing system for 1-click? I want to pay them money!

It just seems silly for such an innovative company to lock up the most obvious shopping metaphor in patent bureaucracy when they could be taking 2% of my sales instead.

Jeff! Werner! It's been 10 years. This isn't about protecting your innovation against Barnes and Noble anymore. Now it just kind of... sucks.
Maybe the startups need to try somewhere else besides NYC or Silicon Valley where the markets are already saturated with startups. There are a lot of other places to find employees.
Of course, if many people used that threshold, almost no story would ever reach 100 points in the first place.
Hopefully quant.ly will some day need its own threshold.
need a silent business partner / visa sponsor? (i already have an llc and make iphone apps, and am looking for an android dev team) - i have gmail and my name is jkatzer on there. (take that spam bots)
Am I the only person who thinks we're getting screwed in the US? I mean, I keep reading about how Asian countries have internet that is 100x faster than ours after we dumped billions of dollars into helping them upgrade their networks (which they didn't do), and now the big internet companies want to put restrictions on our use of broadband, or in effect, charge us more for the same crappy thing we've always gotten.

Maybe I'm being emotional, but maybe it's just bullshit.
Oops, that was a bug; fixed.
You can buy them already. You just can't use them anywhere useful.
The name made me think of an equally interesting service:

A web service which tracks the value of products over time. Pull in data from e-tailers, eBay, Craigslist, etc. Essentially a big horizontal graph of the value over time. This would be useful for people looking to resell goods (approximate cost) or for people comparing what brand of item to buy to get the highest resale cost.

For the monetization strategy, allow retailers to buy exclusive brand placement on a given product. Or affiliate links.
Javascript is a bad language with poor libraries, and I'm forced to use it. I've said before: if it weren't for its distribution, it simply wouldn't be used. If given other choices (emphasis on the plural there), not one developer would opt for Javascript.

"The good parts" of Javascript get a lot of play, but I don't want to have cope by using patterns and avoiding the dull, broken bits that go along for the ride...and I'm surprised that many (most?) other competent developers that wouldn't put up with such compromises in their "real" languages aren't as irritated about Javascript as I have been.
I've been thinking along those lines as well, but it's kinda hairy to do so... you'd have to load a few (or many, depending on the limit) pages, and inject their results into the viewed-page.

Seems like more bandwidth than it's worth. This is (obviously) a better solution though.
Andy Clark on Embodied Cognition
I know people who have done this and different people have a different appetite for risk. But what you are thinking of doing is illegal from the USCIS perspective.

On an F-1 Visa you can only work for upto 20 hours only on University related jobs (library etc). Not on your start-up.

An option would be that you can apply for an OPT, get am American/resident co-founder, set up the company and then work on your OPT.

The USCIS considers something as 'work' even if you do not get paid for it as long as the company would have hired and would have paid somebody else to do it. So one way to get around this is to have an American/resident co-founder who can be doing all the 'work' and you can share profits in the concern.

Hire lawyers. Most people find that it is not worth messing up stuff with USCIS.
none

I am way more productive from the command line.
I doubt it. I think most of us are deliberately conservative to offset the lack of downvotes.
Yup, works now. Thanks again!
Procedural Building Generation in Unreal Engine 3
"If a better article comes along, it will receive more votes and become the new #1."

More votes than what? A previous article's votes on HN?

As time goes on, there are more people reading HN, so even shitty articles posted today may get more votes than stellar articles posted two years ago.
yeah, it would seem to me that with amazons patent reservoir and others reservoirs that creating a marketplace and a way to pull in that ability legally into your app would be a natural.
If they have a problem with the benchmark (personally I think SunSpider is a garbage benchmark) they shouldn't use it.

They definitely shouldn't include it and then include a completely unsupported (and technically irrelevant) trump statement. That single caption says all that needs to be said about that article.
I didn't realize they had a patent for this until now. Does this mean that no shopping cart can let you check out in under 2 clicks?
Is this gawker.com only? I have accounts on related sites like kotaku and jezebel, but I don't see any of them in that list.
Fabric-based tool for deploying WSGI apps
This might be of interest: http://blog.labix.org/2010/12/10/integrating-go-with-c-the-z...
The bug you cited is hard to explain in less than 4 sentences (I just tried, hard) and allows people to whom you've given control over some of your DNS records to take control over more of your DNS records.

PowerDNS, on the other hand, has had remote buffer overflows.

Again, your call.
well in all fairness their product was not developed yet!
Even better I changed it to 200 points and found some great gems I had missed.
Any chance of a ranged version, like "over 5, but under 200"? For some reason, while upvoted stories are mostly good, the most upvoted stories less often interest me, since they seem to be disproportionately about politics, business, self-help/motivation, or some sort of drama. This list is almost a perfect list of stories I'd like to filter out: http://news.ycombinator.com/best (ok, there's some good stuff in there too, but it's not bad as a heuristic).
One big problem with regulation is how subject to manipulation it is. It provides a false sense of security to just assume government regulation means someone is actually writing sensible rules and that someone is actually enforcing them.

The idea that there is some central intelligence that can decide the soundness of investments deceives the average investor or saver into thinking they need do nothing themselves. All the while the government is actively making things less sustainable and handing out favors along the way.

One could argue that the same is true of private stamps of approval. But there is competition and many voices out there, each having their own tolerance for risk.

To have government regulating things is like your brain never having doubts, never weighing competing concerns except for political ones. And many people think that way, just going along with the crowd. But we can't afford to have that sort of thinking govern everything.
Http://www.jesad.com/baby-carriages/
Take a look at these creative baby strollers and have fun.
The bit about iOS barring JIT is technically incorrect. I've shot that one down before so I won't bother now, but when Apple gets around to adding a JIT, miraculously that overarching constraint will disappear.

However yes the GPU absolutely matters in some cases. They should print those benchmarks if their goal is making lemonade, however. They shouldn't just try to manufacture reality.
That was perhaps a little harsh in the phrasing; I wasn't really implying any of those things. I think I am saying that this appears to have been a blind spot on the part of the web standardization crowd and the browser makers. Maybe I'm entirely wrong though, and there were efforts that simply hit hard problems, as you say.

I'd never heard of any discussions around determining a proper IL, though; if you can, a link so relevant MLs and such would be most appreciated.
Yeah, Sencha did this to get their name out there. Not really sure why they are necessary, though, given that ACID scores, HTML5 test results, and performance numbers are known by everyone.
Why is this getting up voted?

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting.

I don't think any hacker would seriously consider coding on a touch based interface.

> If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it.

See title.
Two things.

One, I use DJB's qmail distro and it works fine for me. Yeah, I need a patch to get STARTTLS or (god help me) a DNS RBL. But it's not "pretty much useless" by itself; that's hyperbole.

Second, the semi-official collection of patches you're referring to is called "netqmail". What are the netqmail vulnerabilities to which you refer when you say "the security track record looks..."?
"lickable" sounds good...
One thing you could do to simplify the UI at least for now is only ask for one input at a time. The list of textboxes is a bit overwhelming.

Even better, if people keep asking you the Excel question, tell them how much you love Excel and make it possible to copy and paste data straight from Excel. I suggest this because I did it for my app.
Is it just me, or have the front page point totals exploded in the last few months?

pg — care to share any traffic data?
Or maradns. Also secure, and damn simple.
bitcoins are divisible, and their value, like paper money, is asigned by those receiving them