skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've already transferred 80% of my domains away from GoDaddy. This last breach of goodwill and trust has motivated me to move the rest.
This didn't match my own experience. I spent the last few years being poor, and I felt like I had to be working all the time. If I wasn't doing something that could potentially bring money in, I felt guilty. Recently, I moved to the DC area and got a salaried job. Even though I've had a 4 hour (total) commute each day, I actually feel like I have more free time and am more relaxed than I did when I was making one third to one fourth as much, mostly because I'm not freaked out about money at all times.

That's probably much of the reason that people report being happier: if you've made less than 10K so far in 2008, and don't know when your next check will come in, or from whom, your life is going to be pretty stressful. If you have a steady >50K job, any monetary problems are pretty optional.
Misleading title. Article doesn't answer the question. Just says some people are trying to look into it, tells stories, mentions occasional guesses.
Normally if I feel I'm slogging my way through an article I'll be reading it in the NY Times. I've had suicidal thoughts before when I've come across a 'next page' button at the bottom of one of their articles.
What kind of proof would you find acceptable?
Snackr: A Tasty RSS Reader
> There is no crisis. Certain conditions produce certain effects. When smallpox is introduced ...

Perhaps - just perhaps - people facing a massive die off due to something like smallpox might view it as a crisis.

What is viewed as the "crisis" in places like Italy, is that people do want to have children, but feel they can't, because of the many reasons cited in the article.
I agree, but thought it was interesting anyway. I couldn't think of a better title.
There are huge implications. Think about real estate - the demand to build new homes. That could impact millions of people in their employment. Think about systems like Social Security, where a large young working class pays for the retired class.

There is a trend followed very closely in robotics about the number of elderly people per worker. The larger that ratio gets, the more we'll need robots. And not in 30 years -- in 15 years. We need to support the baby boomers. They'll be 70+ in 7 years. It's even worse in Japan.

The cultural landscape will also change significantly. The Muslim minorities might not be minorities for long. This is a change of epic proportions.
I am happy how simple it is. And how simple the news.yc one is too. I always thought ranking was more magical
Why Windows Software Could Use a Rush of Fresh Air
I think nearly all companies pursue the same tactics, but we only notice the winners. When I was at Motorola long ago, I stumbled across an outline of how to compete against other cell phone companies. Technological innovation was a minor point. Most of it was using legal tactics to tie up competitors, confounding standards bodies, securing exclusive deals with some countries, etc. It also talked about how competitors were doing the same thing.

I think if you ran a business and didn't do these things, you'd be roadkill on the information highway.
I forced myself to skim this article all the way to the end just to see if it says a single thing about its alleged topic. I found nothing. Anybody?

I did learn that telling chicks he studies romance scored one of the researchers a "torrid, monthlong [comma delimited] affair". Well, at least it was "torrid".
This whole idea strikes me as extremely confused. Data mining is just observation. Any extrapolation from data is a theory. Anderson and this author seem to be surprised that you can get so far with an incomplete theory that doesn't explain everything. That seems obvious to me -- remember classical mechanics?

Here's a particularly bad example:

"When you misspell a word when googling, Google suggests the proper spelling. How does it know this? How does it predict the correctly spelled word? It is not because it has a theory of good spelling, or has mastered spelling rules. In fact Google knows nothing about spelling rules at all."

"Spelling rules" are a heuristic extrapolation just like the one Google is making, but are probably less accurate! Why is a set of rules designed to be memorable and useful to a human more of a theory than rules that you have to write down, and need a computer to use?
This usage is very popular around jtv. We commonly refer to people who live a more standard lifestyle as "real people".
More evidence that like other animals, humans don't breed well in captivity?

(Offended europhiles -- I kid, I kid! Also, this quip is not original, but I can't recall where I'd first read it.)
Why is it that almost all of these pranks have happened 10 or more years ago?
Care to explain yourself? Would you be happy if people stopped reproducing?
Generally good advice, but I disagree with #9 (avoid debuggers, learn to unit test). Unit testing is important perhaps if you have a large project with many contributors, but no good hackers I know learned to program with testing and "Best Practices".
Linux Commands I Hardly Knew
To Yahoo: Open up your search index to gain market share
http://www.m5hosting.com/
I must play this game until my fingers wear off. I wish I could start today. I've been sitting there hitting refresh for over a day now. They need to hurry. Another few months of checking for D3 updates 240 times an hour and this becomes unhealthy.

This looks like a mona lisa of a video game. I haven't wanted to play a game this bad since that last metroid game came out.
0 babies per family is an edge case.
I disagree (but that I did write TFA). I have a piece of commercial software I sell, it has an extensive set of unit tests. I'm the only developer and I wrote them because I need to know that if I ship a new version to my customers that I haven't broken anything. Unit tests give me the flexibility to refactor, improve, bug fix, etc. with the assurance that I'm not messing things up.

It would be very costly for me to ship broken code to my customers.
Hmm... so the rating increases exponentially, by an order of magnitude every 12.5 hours?

Doesn't that mean that the number of points for a new post requires a something like a 5 megabyte sized int to be stored in memory?

Or did I misunderstand this?
It is interesting to read that the article and comments are all true, but wonder how these truths affect behavior. Yes, the environment is conducive to development. This truth describes the most significant music scenes of all time, including Memphis, San Fransciso, London, Detroit, among others.

Also, reading the comments below about going outside in LA and flip flops in Tampa Bay, these are spot-on assessments of the culture of many average Joes. Knowing this, one wonders how do extraordinary things happen in average places.

New question: How big is the environment we are analyzing? Paul decided to analyze the city, but we all have many environments of many sizes.

Example: My Digital Design professor asked, "Is the world digital or analog?" His answer, "It depends how close you are to it." An alarm clock is digital from across the room, but get close, open it up, measure the voltage across the timer, and you realize it is actually analog. The environments? The circuit board, the whole clock, the room.

So the city is one measure of an environment. The corporation another. The home yet another. Personally, I am an extremely creative individual who formed an web corporation with two friends who are excellent programmers. We're developing the business in an extremely progressive fashion, in some ways very different from Silicon Valley even. What is our environment? Our day jobs are with a big, old, rust belt corporation that does many things wrong all day long. This is in Cleveland, a city which is literally dying. So where did we get our drive? From being in the environment that continually tries to teach us bad lessons. Thus, when the environmental analysis is over, we realize one can fall in line with their environment, or they can learn from it, and go in a different direction using the lessons at hand.

John

President of some garage group three-man web corp in MBA run Rust Belt Cleveland
(Feel stuck? Nope, you’ve got the best lessons available.)
Dude. Its called culture. The totality of relevant experiences most of us share that shape our worldview. Have you heard of it?

Banning diablo 3 from hacker news would be like banning discussions of fairy tales in a forum on archtypal psychology or banning Judy Garland from a GLBT forum.
Relax. A slowdown in birth rates is a temporary disturbance (the opposite of the baby boom, in fact). Over time, society returns to a steady state. Yes, the finances get complicated, and we're looking at a generation or two that may see substandard retirement income. But it's hardly a huge social problem; three generations back we were looking at every generation having no retirement income.

And the "muslim minority" stuff is just alarmist (and, frankly, semi-racist) political spin. Past the third generation, minorities stop being minorities. They become culturally indistinguishable from the overall society, with at most a unique subculture. This is true of all cultures. They're malleable.

No one freaks out (here in the US) about the Polish Menace any more, nor about what all those greasy catholics (!) are going to do to our society, nor about all that lucre under the control of The Jew, nor about what will happen if we allow those awful Blacks to wed (!) our pure, white daughters.

Do you see the point? In 50 years, all this "ZOMG Muslims!" mania is going to look equally dumb. If all that scary stuff didn't kill us, what are a few muslims going to accomplish? :)

The saddest thing is how many of the people freaking out over things like muslim immigration (or, here in the US, mexicans) are grandchildren of people who saw exactly the same kind of discrimination.
After officially taking the test for the hell of it 4 times, the time when it actually counted (11th grade for me) they switched to the new format... I had loved the analogies!
Going off topic for a bit, my major financial goal has always been financial independence, as defined by having enough passive income to exceed my monthly expenses. Or put in another way, income from rents, leases, royalties, dividends ... subscription fees from web apps ... etc. stuff I don't have to trade time for pays for all of my expenses. Now, whether that means I have extra money to purchase luxuries is a different set of metrics. However, at that stage, I have time to pursue things, whether they are life-long passions, or a startup, or investing full-time.

That's why your typical middle-class earning $100,000 or more have difficulty building up the net-worth; that income is earned income, it is taxed much higher than passive income, and there's not enough time. I find it ridiculous to go for a 2 hour commute -- that is 4 hours each day, 5 days a week, or 20 hours. 20 hours of time spent in a car -- that's a part time job. A part time job you spend money, waste time and get nothing. (Even if you like driving, do you really enjoy driving during rush hour?) It gets worse when both couples in the family work, as now you're adding in greater expenses for working (a second car, clothes, lunches, and so forth). But the wage earners of families commute because they want their kids in good, suburban schools. Without time, there are very few investment vehicles available.

Contrast that with someone who have income-generating assets (high net worth -- primary residence is not an income-generating asset, and neither is the car, the SUV, or the boat) that meets/exceed expenses. If you don't want to stop working, you can keep working. Until your boss pisses you off, or you're asked to do something unethical. You don't have to commute unless you want to. If you want to go into real-estate as a landlord, you can focus on that without having to worry about meeting the next month's living expenses. If you want to do a software startup, you don't have to worry as much as burn rate -- just start coding. This appears to reinforce the cliche, "it takes money to make money", but it isn't. As mentioned in the previous paragraph, having money but little time means you're not going to be able to build up your net-worth.

And if you're pursuing a life-long passion, it doesn't matter if it is "active" leisure or "passive" leisure. It doesn't matter if it is stressful or not. The basic living expenses are covered. The lower parts of Maslow's heirarchy of needs are covered. The fact is, you're pursuing a dream. That's wealth to my eyes. That's liberty and pursuit of happiness, right there.
1. Natural selection has nothing to do the question. This is an issue of culture, not of genetics. You could easily have a situation where we globally had declining birthrate. The interesting question is - why are birth rates for these populations falling? Is it purely a matter of wealth?

2. If you reduce Americans to the wealthiest subset, you'd see the same trend. Historically, if you reduced Americans to their non-Irish subset, you'd see the same thing, because the Irish were the poor immigrant group of the time.

3. Europe isn't a thing. Very few people even think of themselves as Europeans. Well, so far anyway. I hold out hope the EU will gain currency. What's important is still national identity, and European countries have survived waves of immigration before.

4. Agreed. This isn't a crisis until population levels dip quite a bit more.

5. Mormons, albanian muslims, and ultra-orthodox jews haven't reversed any trend. Their birthrates are (roughly) constant. It's everyone else whose birthrate declined.
So true.

Being rich means you can give your kids:

a better education
better healthcare, and
a backup plan if they become disabled, among others.

All this without having to depend on the state.

There are some very compelling reasons to be rich.
the conversion factor would be life expectancy * 2, wouldn't it be? So ~160*11.6 / 1000 = 1.86. Overestimate since life expectancy is just shy of eighty.
Why Less Is More And How To Unlock the Web
I count two transistors. Does that really count as an integrated circuit? I've always viewed the definition of an IC as a manufactured object, this is clearly hand-built.
wrong. See http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2008/06/selection_bias_1...
The Website's Down
Hall of Shame Craigslist Ads for Programmers
used to do safari. now im on firefox because of speed, and better extensions. lets see if safari 4 can turn the tables
> They have watched about 25 of the 1,158 videos shot during the November 2007 sessions and Eric and Erika's date is among the best.

I'd be more interested in the dates that went poorly.

Speed dating is an interesting experience, if you are into low-risk new experiences. I went to several speed dating-type events when I first moved to the city. Dating aside - it's a great place to meet friends of the same sex. I saw a lot of women trade numbers with each other. If you dislike the context of traditional dating (guy paying for dinner), it's a philosophical bargain.
Yahoo Rocks my World (Sorry, Google)
If this were online, and free, I'd be sniped so hard. http://xkcd.com/356/

Luckily, I don't buy games.
For all this talk of the $15 billion valuation at which Microsoft invested in Facebook, didn't they get some extra goodies for their money? As I recall there was some kind of exclusive advertising rights as well as the stock.

If I sell you a can of coke and a billionth of my company for a dollar it doesn't mean that my company has a billion-dollar valuation.
> And the "muslim minority" stuff is just alarmist (and, frankly, semi-racist) political spin.

Islam is not a race.

> Past the third generation, minorities stop being minorities. They become culturally indistinguishable from the overall society

Where are you from? This has not been the case with Muslims in Europe at large.

> Do you see the point? In 50 years, all this "ZOMG Muslims!" mania is going to look equally dumb. If all that scary stuff didn't kill us, what are a few muslims going to accomplish?

How much do you know about Islam and its history? Islam and the Western culture are fundamentally incompatible.
The Wikipedia article actually lists fertility rates farther down, and white Americans clock in at 2.0 - significantly higher than the Europeans.

While the Times article certainly has an alarmist tone, American fertility rates are an anomaly in the industrialized world.
> Past the third generation, minorities stop being minorities.

In the US, yes. In Europe it's the other way around. First generation immigrants work, second generation becomes antisocial and militant. Look at France.

> This is true of all cultures. They're malleable.

Definition of "malleable": can be flattened by hammering.
This sounds to me like you're making a speech regarding the current silliness of popular opinion rather than the points in question.

Once we set up social institutions (like Social Security in the states, for instance) we make certain assumptions about the way the population numbers are going to behave. If we're wrong, or in the case of the U.S. if we keep making promises we can't keep, then those social contracts become null and void. That's a huge implication for the average citizen. I'd even use the word "crisis".

The Japan-medical-robot story in particular is interesting, as it follows along with the general meme of building our way out of our problems. I'm a huge fan of immigration from all corners, but having said that I'm not sure if replacing, say, 50% of your country's population is such a good thing for all of those social promises you made -- the new management might have much different ideas of what is equitable and what isn't.

So yes, having less kids is a big problem for the Europeans. It's not the end of mankind, but I'm not sure it was played up as such, was it?
Noyce (of Intel fame) thought the same thing.

See http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/06/... for more details.

The relevant paragraph:
"Robert N. Noyce, co-founder of chip giant Intel Corp., is credited with developing the manufacturing process that made economical the wide-scale production of integrated circuits. Kilby and Noyce bickered for years over the other's claim to have invented the integrated circuit. Ultimately, the two agreed to share credit. In 1995, Kilby was awarded the Robert N. Noyce Award, the Semiconductor Industry Association's highest honor. When Kilby won the Nobel Prize, he invited Intel's other founder, Gordon Moore, to the ceremony as a gesture to the contribution of Noyce, who died in 1990. Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously."

But, technically, Kilby's chip counts because it was a circuit on a semiconductor substrate. It just looks odd because that image is blown up considerably, the real size is 0.040 x 0.062 inches. A modern IC would look substantially similar under a high enough magnification.
avoid debuggers

I'm of the opposite school of thought: stepping through code with a nice debugger -- even non-buggy code -- helps build the internal mental model of how code works, so you can more easily 'run code in your head'.
Happiness is subjective, and frankly my happiness is dependent on what I achive in life, as I expect most people on here are. People on here are trying to set up companies, most of whom will likely fail as most start-ups do in the first couple of years and they bring a lot of stress and depression, but everyone on here seems positively extatic that they're doing something that in two decades they can say they did something with their life.

I would hate myself if I got to 80 and realised I'd never accomplished anything. If I have kids, I know I'll have done at least _something_ with my life, I'll be able to say 'I raised my 2.4 kids well' and be proud of it. Just like I'm proud that I've moved to a different country.

I'm proud of my life already and I'm only in my 20's, having kids is only going to make me more proud of my life, just as many other things I aim to accomplish will. So I really don't care if I'm not as smiley happy for a few years as I'll be happy that I've done things other people haven't.
Actually, modern ICs are surprisingly regular and clean looking. My wife is a semiconductor process engineer and I occasionally get to peek at the electron microscopy images over her shoulder. She isn't allowed to tell me what they are, but I can read the distance scale, and these are transistor-sized features. And they have square corners and straight lines. It's pretty amazing stuff.

But yeah, if this thing wasn't produced by photolithography, it's sort of a evolutionary dead end. Whatever the semantics of what qualifies for an IC, this really isn't a meaningful predecessor of a modern chip.
Choose Concurrency-Friendly Data Structures
You're wrong.

The article cites longitudinal studies showing randomly selected couples are happier before they have kids and after kids leave the house than while the kids are home. It shows a significant portion of randomly selected parents would rather do chores (e.g., grocery shopping) than spend time with their kids. Neither of those is adequately explained by selection bias.

Selection bias may explain why childless couples, on average, are happier than couples with children. But not any of the dozens of corroborating data points presented in the article.
Agreed, happiness has been proven to be subjective. Paraplegics are happy 1 year after their disability causing accident, so wouldn't parents of newborns be the same? It's not a change in circumstances that makes the paraplegics happy, they're still disabled, they didn't magically gain the ability to walk and just not mention it so they keep getting disability. No the paraplegics happiness is subjective, they become happy being a paraplegic just as a parent of a newborn will become happy being a parent.

It's also safe to assume you'll only be happy for a year after your kids leave, and this likely explains the newlywed syndrome that they're happy for the first year and then reality kicks in.
You miss the point. A few generations back there was no "western culture". There were protestants (here in the US, the "good guys") and the Other People: catholics and jews, who didn't share "our" values. They were fundamentally incompatible with our culture, and didn't belong here.

The same is true now, it's just the faces that have changed. I know quite a few muslims, actually, of varying levels of religious devotion and professional development. You might be surprised to learn that none of them are terrorists or militants. I dare say I know more about Islam than you do, honestly.
Oh please. Take a look at the charts of the world human population of all time : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Population_curve.svg

Where is the crisis now ?

(I'd started to write a long answer adressing this topic but it would have been too long. If you want to digg into this matter I'll follow you).
Europe has had a dominant christian majority for many hundreds of years. The rise of another majority, with a strong atheist minority means huge cultural and anthropological changes are afoot. It isn't racist to point this out. It's race baiting to call every comment dealing with race or religion racist.

It actually betrays a good bit of naivete about the history of the world to think such changes don't matter.

And you clearly underestimate the effects of an aging population. Look at the numbers. They are staggering.
It always amuses me when people point to their kids as their proudest achievement. It puts me in mind of this:

function generation(input) {
output = input + 0;
generation(output);
}

Lots of activity, no progress. Your greatest achievement should be something you did that any kids you have would be proud of. Merely spwaning offspring is something that anyone can do - and some of the best kids in every generation come from the worst homes so 'doing it right' is hardly a value added activity.