skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is a huge oversimplification to say that unemployment benefits are "paid with borrowed money". There is an economic calculation that pairs with the humane calculation behind unemployment benefits.

To wit: people are not going to be allowed to starve in any case (there is a floor to our society's capability of being coldly rational). Furthermore, becoming homeless imposes additional costs across the economy (simplest case: the direct expense of eviction, lost rent; more generally, deadweight loss to the whole economy). Finally, if a significant portion of those in the "welfare check" phase of unemployment will end up employed, but would not end up consistently employed without that cushion, society has to factor in the cost of additional long-term unemployed people.
Chris, I could not agree more. This seems to happen in the Valley every four or five years. I lived through two of those crazy cycles before finally leaving in 2009 along with a bunch of other people. By 2013, another wave will leave.

I also find it interesting that a lot of people live in the Valley in their 20's, but when they hit late 20's/early 30's, they're gone. I'm not sure how it ties in to the above statement (or if it does at all.) The most common reason I've heard is that the Valley is a terrible place to start a family.
It's quite a shame that your philosophy of mind class didn't cover recent philosophical research where neuroscience and empirical psychology are taken seriously.

There is plenty of philosophical work that attempts to make sense of recent advances in brain science. A lot of it is centered around the 'hard problem of consciousness', or the question of why we have phenomenal experiences at all (and how these correlate to neural events). Although most serious proponents discard dualism, not all of them agree that phenomenal experiences can be reduced to physical phenomena (Dave Chalmers, Thomas Nagel).

To the scientifically biased the idea that physicalism isn't true is abhorrent, but contemporary philosophy, although not univocal, has serious arguments against it. If you find yourself dismissing this idea right off the bat out of scientific intuition I would urge you to read up a little bit on modern philosophy of mind.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
http://consc.net/papers/ncc2.html
As a lawyer and an iPhone user, I have only one thing to say about this plaintiff and his lawyers.

"Whiny bastards."
We're not limited by money. The limit is the number of good applicants. We've always funded between 2.5 and 3.5% of groups that apply-- not as a conscious plan, but it has always worked out that way. So we've grown as the applicant pool has.

I don't know how we'd have to change to fund 1000 startups a year. We don't think that far ahead. It would be premature design. But we could grow another 2 or 3x without dramatic changes.
Comet - A Key-Code Database [pdf]
FWIW (in FF at least), hitting the stop button (after the site has loaded) stops all the gif animations. Flashblock can ensure that Flash ads don't start up either.
People here aren't going to want to hear it, but that's the kind of person this site promotes. I constantly see stories about 'You don't need a good idea to start a company' (yeah, that one just got posted!) and how you should just start a company and go for it. About how good ideas are worthless and only doing something matters.

It's bull. Starting a company is HARD WORK and not something you should jump into without adequate preparation. I'm sure YC details the work you'll need to do to get going, but most people don't get accepted to YC.

The problem isn't Silicon Valley. It's the idea that just being in Silicon Valley somehow solves your problems for you. It doesn't. For every problem it solves, it creates at least 1 more. Creating a viable internet-based business has NOTHING to do with location. Or for that matter, any international business.
I hate iTunes, but I've tried and failed to find a usable replacement on Linux. The best I found was Banshee, but the UI's not great and it's quite unstable :(.
I've gone through UCAS recently.

'UCAS Points' are only really counted for the lower-end of universities.
Any university anywhere near Oxbridge in terms of reputation or entrance requirements gives offers based on A Level or International Baccalaureate or other qualifications, often followed by an interview.

For example my first and second choice universities offered AAA and AAB respectively.
Emory Mathematician Solves 250 Year Old Problem
Right - I wonder what would happen if Google would stop the 20% personal projects policy and instead start the 20% customer service policy?
If I was doing any kind of Ruby work I would go with that. I am using PyCharm from Jetbrains for Python work and really like it.
http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2010-1...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=159648
Not as much lately. SolarWinds also IPO'd on the NYSE.
Yes, and graduates with an interdisciplinary background and strong reasoning skills are more likely to get the interesting jobs than pure software engineers who know JUnit inside-out.

(Generalizing from myself with a sample size of one)
"Second: Although our Ruby support has historically been well received, based on existing low usage trends we are unable to justify the continued allocation of resources to support the feature."

I would say, not a whole lot according to their trend analysis.
Project Voldemort: A Distributed Database
Overall a good answer, however there is something to add.

For British students, once you turn twenty-one you no longer have the same strict entry requirements, instead it's more a case of proving that you're the kind of person they want than showing what exams you've passed. (Though they're likely to ask you to do some studying before applying, to demonstrate that you're willing/able to learn.)

Most likely the same for international 'mature students' as well.
He's certainly riding on his previous success, but only a tiny bit, if you look at the orders of magnitude increase in his sales.

How did many thousands of new readers find him and decide to buy his books almost without doing any promotion? Through much lower cost of books, instant delivery, easy discovery through search and auto recommendations. And now he has more time to produce more. Accelerating sales!

The 1,000 true fans analogy doesn't hold for him at all. He has at least 10,000 fans and that number is going up fast.
I believe GroupSpaces raised an angel round in 2008 and only started looking for the VC round in 2010.
I'm a computer scientist currently taking the History and Philosophy of Science course at Cambridge (an interesting combination that is one of the perks of being an exchange student) and wholeheartedly endorse this. Logic, with its philosophical roots, has had an enormous impact on Computer Science, and I believe Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Mathematics have a lot to say about Computer Science. (AI is a kind of special child: I think you need some neuroscience added in as well.)
After searching high and low for many years, I've settled on Akkurat Mono--a commercial font, well hinted, and gorgeous on Mac OS X.

edit: link: http://www.lineto.com/The+Fonts/Font+Categories/Text+Fonts/A...
I agree with your point, but this seems like a difficult problem to fix.

http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/philosophy/footnotes_plato.ht... is really accurate.
Unlike say, physics, there is a big shortage of over-arching theories in chemistry. The field (in my experience of it, at least; about 5 semesters' worth) is mostly a collection of ad-hoc rules, with many exceptions and special cases. So I think the historical approach is more or less necessary for teaching these fields.

It works the same way as when bootstrapping a computer, where you have to load a bunch of fake "operating systems" (e.g. BIOS, Grub, early stages of init daemon) before you can run the latest version of the "real" OS. And after that, you will still progress mostly by patches.
It's about time we looked at GPL'ed implementation standards for Android call and text encryption, especially considering the trailing and security through obscurity approach by GSM networks.
According to the NB guys it was "low usage". It makes sense to spin it out for the community to maintain if they want it.
So the Soviets copied this with no more than a shrug of the shoulders? That's kind of hard to believe. Those engineers were just as good, if not better, than the ones in the west...

Any rocket needs roll, pitch and yaw to get into the right orbit, or to reduce stress along a certain axis, or to orient comms antennas towards the ground. Saturn V did this too.
This sounds right in theory, but isn't how we've actually seen it play out in practice.

For one, the people typically participating in a question like ship dates are not just from the project team, but from other roles as well, i.e. people who will be involved in marketing the product, selling the product, engineers who work on similar products, etc. These people have less of a direct interest in the outcome vs. simply expressing what they think is going to happen. So diversity of participation by role is pretty key.

Your point about self-fulfilling prophecy is also something we get asked about regularly. In practice, the market is available to trade 24/7 until the outcome is known. So going through your scenario, let's say the market is showing a really high likelihood something is going to ship late. Management decides to mitigate that risk by putting more people on the project. Well the market is still open, so if no one actually thinks putting more people on the project is going to do a damn thing, then the likelihood of being late will remain high in the market. Or maybe those people just got pulled from another project so now that project is in jeopardy. Well the market would hopefully begin to reflect that and when the answer is known everyone will be judged on whether they were right or not.

So ideally if your marketplace is setup correctly and people are actively participating, you're getting all this realtime feedback about what people think is going to happen AND you can even see what people think will happen in reaction to the management decisions you're making. Usually an employee wants management to know something is screwed up without having to stand up and say it to their face in a status meeting.

Also in your scenario you're assuming management is making decisions based on the prediction market alone. I've never seen this - instead it's one factor they consider among others. Despite my belief in the value of prediction markets, I also believe in management being able to make independent decisions. Prediction markets are just a simple and systematic way to get human input from those who have different perspectives.
And if you like those, the mother-of-all-infoviz-books is Jacques Bertin’s 1967 Sémiologie Graphique, finally back in print in English translation after 25 years out.

about $50 on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1589482611/
Hi Erica, thanks for the article!

I think it's worth denoting a difference between B2B companies (like 37signals) and B2C companies. I'm mainly talking about the really large B2C companies.

Web hosting sounds a lot like a consulting business. A great way to start a business, make a lot of money and have an exit but not the same as the fame and potential money to be had in the B2C game.

Not saying one is better than the other, but there are a lot of people out there (myself included) that could never find satisfaction in a B2B and will always chase the next Google. For those people, the Valley is ideal.
I'm not endorsing Greenspun's plan, I'm just pointing out that the original poster didn't even bother to read Greenspun's blog post.

I'm personally a proponent of imposing unpleasant conditions on unemployment insurance to reduce moral hazard and make minimally productive use of the unemployed. For example, we can build a physical (rather than virtual) border fence with mexico with labor costs close to zero - we do is select random able-bodied unemployed people and make working on the border fence a condition of receiving further benefits. (Or similar projects - for example, we can reduce the waiting time at the DMV to 0.)
Google Testing Display Ads In Gmail
Google Developer Relations - how to find help and resources?
I use splits and vertical splits. Tabs are an option too, but I usually don't leave that many files open at once.

For browsing files inside vim I use NERDTree (or if I remember the filename :e <filename>). To quickly open the file's headerfile I use http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=31 - it takes only a :AS to open the file's header file (vice versa) in a new split. (Hint: Map a key to next split/window to switch fast between them. I remapped F1 for this purpose.)

If I really need to have many files open I just open a new tab/window in my terminal emulator. (There are also tabs in vim but I had not a chance to get used to the tab commands yet. gvim/macvim offer more abstract tab support - the tabs are real vim tabs but they are represented as UI tabs. So you can still yank/paste between them but have a more Visual Studio'ish feeling.)
RubyMine just tweeted: "We welcome all NetBeans users to start evaluating RubyMine as your new Ruby/Rails IDE! Expect some great news very soon on our pricing page!"

It is a good product and superior to NetBeans in many ways. The price was a little on the higher side though (but worth it anyways). If it comes down, I expect RubyMine to become the de-facto IDE for Ruby/Rails.
Wouldn't you want structural integrity in all planes upon landing?
CMD+down-arrow will also open a file; it makes the most sense when one thinks about it as navigating in Finder using only the keyboard. CMD+up-arrow goes higher, CMD+down goes into the folders, until it gets to a file, in which case it goes "into" the file.
Ask HN: What's on your company's intranet homepage?
While all of the companies I've worked for have had relatively-useful intranet websites, the one page that's always been lacking has been the companies' intranet homepages. They always ends up being a collection of disparate links that bring you deeper into the site rather than informative content that's been brought forward.

While I'm sure some of the solutions are industry-specific, I'm curious whether other companies have come up with more effective uses for this prime intranet real estate ... something more than a collection of links.
...

Tech companies is not an artificial limitation... just happens to be what we're talking about right now. The numbers cited are about SV startups, I think if you look outside SV there's way more than 5% female founders.
The singular of anecdote is update, the plural of anecdote is update more.

Bad evidence is nt the same thing as no evidence. Would you go back to a restaurant you'd never been to before if you got food poisoning the evening after eating there?
Unwillingness to invest in themselves or work towards improving themselves (or a lack of realization that they need to do these things). Most job seekers have a "take me as I am" attitude. Even new grads who should be all pumped up about learning new things seem to think that their degree alone will guarantee a job.

Even the grads (and other job seekers) who are eager to learn expect to have a company invest in training them. Why would I invest in training you if you spent 6 months job searching without once doing something that actually made you a better candidate for the job?
ECoupled induction powered cereal packet
"if this is the next Oracle or google it might still be worth your time".... i think 2% of the next google or oracle is worth anyone's time unless you're on the fortune 500 list...

I think a somewhat plausible best case would be a $50 million exit and 2% would be a million dollars.
The California Bay Area, now in 3D
"Gödel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter. It taught me a lot about thinking about not just patterns, but metapatterns and metametapatterns.

"The Emperor's New Mind" by Roger Penrose. A truly brilliant and eminent mathematician/physicist boldly stepping up to grapple with the profound challenge of understanding how math, mind, and physics intertwine. Penrose's commentary on the role of entropy in cosmology transformed how I understand reality.
This simply obeys the inner logic of each discipline. Philosophy without regard to its history would be myopic, and hard science would be bogged down by historical details. This is not to say that the history of science is not worth learning, simply that it is not useful for science.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_window_fallacy

Short version: Money spent for unproductive reasons doesn't add to net wealth.
As a hacker who married a philosopher, I can also say with confidence that this is a great synthesis.

More than just in grand sweeping ways, the fields align in the little ways, too. My wife understands my work more quickly than other non-hackers because she understands the concept of a rigorous artificial language ( she uses formal logic, I use programming languages ).
Philosophy is what you do when you don't know something and don't know how to actually discover anything about it but you are not wise enough to let it go and find something you could actually discover something about.
Perhaps, but both the Mozilla and WebKit stylesheets are available for reference in their respective repositories (and likely unchanged, for the most part), and IE9's purported stylesheet is here: http://www.iecss.com/

It would be doable to keep up to date if someone wanted to, though whether it's worth the effort is another thing entirely.
I double-majored in CS and Philosophy during undergrad, but didn't want to stay an extra semester to complete the requirements for the latter. It's something that I hope to complete one day so maybe several months in Oxford is an option for the future.
To the Italians: University of Calabria? Higher than, say, Milan, Rome, Pisa? There's something seriously wrong about this ranking
Is your answer to my question, "I can't think of one"?
It doesn't matter if they're private organizations or governments. It's about the power relationship. I won't get into 'corporate america blah blah blah,' but I'm sure that you can see that in this role, MasterCard plays the same role the government does. There's a certain level of responsibility that comes into play when you're a gigantic credit card company that's different then when you're a mom-and-pop grocery store.
Don't Take That Cookie
No worries, I'm just happy to hear it registered with someone else. There's a much bigger goal here than Karma points :)
Either some of those training times are unrealistic, or there are broadly different definitions of competence. I'm extremely skeptical that ANYONE can learn enough about video editing in 2 weeks to become a professional editor. Or "go from zero computer knowledge to being a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer or a Cisco network engineer" - I'm not sure we have the same understanding of the general public's computer knowledge. There's a bit difference between "Harvard non-nerd" and the average unemployed person in terms of learning aptitude and in terms of computer familiarity.

Not to mention that with lots of people from Tier 1 schools having a hard time finding jobs, it's not like the recession is a result of not enough people having college degrees. I mean, training never hurts, but the issue we're facing isn't a skills-to-opportunities mismatch, it's just a total lack of available jobs in all sectors.
This NoSQL stuff has me confused. I didn't think those systems were considered relational.

Why does one need an object-relational mapper?
I would be dubious about joining a company that spent its first million of investment on a domain name.
giving people a longer cushion within which to find a job allows them to find better jobs

Actually, the second study I linked to (from iza.org) argues against that claim. I don't endorse that paper (not familiar with it), but you are welcome to take a look if you are actually curious about it. Of course, feel free to skip that step if empirics bore you.

Note that roc was the one who smugly appealed to empiricism, but provided none in his post: "The studies have shown that it looks nothing like party time in the aggregate."

Precisely 0 lines of his post provided empirical facts, but 2 lines (of 4) were devoted to attempts to lower the status of people who disagree with him: "moralizing from a privileged vantage...Welfare Queen...Trickle Down...Reagan's 'conservative'..."

I'm just pointing out that it [edit: attacking one's opponents] adds nothing of value to the conversation.
Perhaps part of the problem is both the Valley's and tech news sites' almost-obsessive focus on B2C (vs. B2B) companies. ;)
My biggest frustration with Adwords is that when you create a new campaign, Google sets ad serving to "optimize" rather than "rotate." This means Google gradually shows higher performing ads more often, which would appear to be helpful. But they do it before an ad split-test reaches statistical significance (which screws up proper A/B testing).

When you copy an existing campaign to create a new one, they even go so far as to switch that setting from "rotate" to "optimize" on the newly created campaign. And with the Desktop Editor there's no interface to change ad serving settings.

I'm sure it's profitable for them to have "optimize" set as the default. I just wish they'd allow users who are knowledgeable to select "rotate" without hassle.
Oxford goes through UCAS. You'll want to kill yourself when using it.

Only an absurdly low amount of characters (with spaces) are allowed for the personal essay, 1600, 2400, or something, so don't start preparing for a 36-page-long piece of circumspection.

It's really down-putting that there is so little focus on this part, as this is what allows applicants to stand out the most.
What about a ranking that evaluates the universities' ability to produce effective workers?
Good point. Probably should have just called it a mapper.
As another undergrad philosopher turned self-taught hacker I wouldn't see why you'd want Philosophy to come down from the ivory tower. It's hard to imagine what would be of Philosophy today if Kant had spent all his life writing about science and hadn't given us the Critique of Pure Reason.
If they could keep their mouths shut, some fiction writers of the proper genre would have been a pretty good add.
In a way, Silicon Valley has become the tech world's Hollywood. Wide-eyed, talented people are encouraged to move across country and make their fortune in a big way. And like Hollywood, they're not encouraged to slowly build their craft and name, through theater and small roles, they're encouraged to go and pitch their Superman reboot and try and get discovered by David Fincher.

It's why I've always been skeptical of Silicon Valley. I don't like get-rich-quick schemes, even if they sometimes (although rarely) work. The social damage done to those who fail, especially when they make up the vast majority of those who try, can create a terrible reputation for an industry.

Of course, Hollywood has been chewing people up and spitting them out for decades, so maybe this is a sustainable cultural model, if you don't mind the repercussions.
I'd like information/opinions anyone has to share on the real availability and quality of that support.

And what qualifies as "Enterprise"? If you've 15 Google Apps seats and are paying your $50/year/seat, do you actually get useful responses in a timely manner?

(It seems those dollar amounts would be well below anything "Enterprise". But I figure the multiple-thousand-seat clients are getting support from somewhere. Maybe this means the small fish who pay, can actually get some level of response?)