skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Phil suggest that I should have bettered myself whilst unemployed. I have a masters degree in Mathematics, professional programming experience in 13 languages including Java, JavaScript, and Python, more if I include things like SQL, HTML, etc. in which I also have professional experience. I speak four human languages (and bits of three others). Perhaps a vocational school will make me more marketable.

So how did I waste my time during my 83 weeks of unemployment? Mostly looked for work. I read and did a few exploratory things. I went on quite a few interviews as my resume is pretty good, but one look at me told the tale of my age. I coached a high school basketball team (and wrote a Java GUI for game stats and management). I did work around the house, repairs etc. I paid bills and figured out ways to stay afloat. Sorry, I don't have a gaming console. I exercised to try to stave off depression. I visited my failing parents weekly and took over their financial chores. I took up singing. (No one would pay me for that either.)

To be fair, Phil was probably not talking about me, but about younger workers like my son. He hasn't been in the work force and is not eligible for unemployment benefits. His generation is having a harder time than mine. Maybe he should study SQL at U of Poenix. He doesn't have a gaming console either.
Star Wars Blueprints by Vesperin
Can't answer all your questions, but as a brit thats been on the brink of applying, I know that all applications go through a system called Ucas (http://www.ucas.ac.uk/).

I'm not sure if what we call 'Oxbridge', the big 2 (Oxford & Cambridge) handle their own applications, but I'm pretty sure Ucas is the place you need to start.

I know it works (at least for UK students) on a points system, where you get points per course, and the amount is set by the grades you get.

Things are different if your a 'mature' student, and if you have 'life experience'. Best thing to do is get in touch, and write a very compelling 'personal statement'. The latter being the first step to application.

I'm sure theres a few guys here who can give you more (oxbridge) related advice.
I hope not too. It's a good solid PHP platform, and a nice alternative to Zend Studio for most scenarios.
You're right about the down votes. That's my bad. I know of no productive means by most people's definition of productive. I always say the same thing, and that's to write your senators or the equivilant in your government. What more can be done? Certainly not attacking and defacing private property based on what you read on the Web. People who defend these acts or play the devil's advocate are only fueling the attitude that is getting these people in trouble.
The first few lines are misleading - Javascript doesn't really have an integer type. At least for Ecmascript 5 http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST... both integers and floats are stored as IEEE floats and the type is called Number. "Small enough" integers are stored exactly so this works well enough in practice.

(Despite this, it does have some functions for converting and parsing integral values.)

Ecmascript 4 (abandoned) had some support for an Integer type (it was a kind-of pseudo-type mess where the value of a Number was checked to see if it was an integer or not).
Getting to Obama's Goal of 1 Million Electric Vehicles
you have an idea, you don't have a startup. everyone has "good" ideas. a good startup/business is made in the execution.

my suggestion would be to either learn to code on your own and start doing it by yourself, or pay someone to do the coding work for you.

i, myself, teamed up with someone i didn't know well to start a "disruptive medical startup". i did all the work, paid for a lot of the necessary tools/data/etc, and after 6 months, everything fell apart.
Mine are entirely young, lower-class, and without family. They've all been students in the recent past, which corresponds to an inexpensive lifestyle... and they still get the same amount of unemployment as anyone else.

One particularly striking example is a fellow who works summers fighting fires for the forest service, and is "unemployed" the rest of the year. It's not a safety net or insurance in his case, it's planned (I'm unsure as to whether he's able to do this repeatedly, or only for the one year).
"I would be strongly tempted to take my business to vibrant competitive offerings. Sadly, Google is pretty much the only game in town"

There has to be a way to change that, and it might not be from a direct attack on AdWords, or even PPC.
The teaching at Oxford (and Cambridge) is stellar and more Americans should consider it as an option. Getting onto an undergraduate programme is competitive but egalitarian: you need to show you are a top performer academically and then impress at an interview. Your competition at the application stage is (very roughly speaking) the smartest kid from every British school. Very few of them will get in; every course has many more applicants than places.

The Oxford University Entrance requirements, http://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate_courses/courses... , state the following:

"US qualifications: Successful candidates would typically have SAT Reasoning Test scores of at least 700 in Critical Reading, Mathematics and the Writing Paper, or ACT with a score of at least 32 out of 36. We would also expect Grade 5 in three or more Advanced Placement tests in appropriate subjects or SAT Subject Tests in three appropriate subjects at 700 or better."

- I have no idea what that all means, but for comparison, every single Brit applying will have straight A-grades in their A-levels, and selection is almost entirely based on the interview (and in some cases, extra advanced examinations). So take these entrance requirements with a pinch of salt; they're necessary but not sufficient.

All that said, the colleges have extremely wide lee-way in how they make their offers, so exceptional candidates with a slightly offbeat scholastic record might have a chance. Some cynics also note that foreign students may have an advantage because they bring in far more money. But all in all the academic requirements are quite high. To sum up, it's very hard to get in, but not because of prejudice or snobbery, just intense competition.
Owner: Kitten froze after waiting in cargo hold
Reasons:

1.) To focus more on Java

2.) Because the low usage of the RoR NetBeans functionality didn't warrant the effort the team put into it.
It would be useful if, rather than offering vague assertions that statistics exist, you actually presented some.

The simplest way to determine whether unemployment induces people to consume leisure: measure whether changes in the duration of unemployment benefits affect the duration of unemployment. Do you know of any such measurements, or are you simply assuming that reality supports your views?

Edit: The classic paper on this topic is Meyer, but it's a bit old. http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:xdATBYGtHBcJ:w...

This paper strongly supports the theory that unemployment benefits create moral hazard.

Here is a more recent paper showing the same thing in Europe, after a natural experiment: http://ftp.iza.org/dp2171.pdf
Obscenely technical.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRB6Qzx9oXs

(A google tech talk from someone at the FHI called "Whole Brain Emulation: The Logical Endpoint of Neuroinformatics?" Yeah. They're pretty serious guys.)

EDIT: They also run lesswrong.com. I imagine that's enough to get most here reaching for the UCAS forms...
There are ~15MM unemployed people in the United States. Let's say we want to improve the lot of 20% of those people. To what program can we direct 3MM people for a year of skills-building that will result in those people, with some degree of certainty, becoming employable?
s/There is a breed of female founder/There is a breed of founder/

There, fixed that for you.
This story broke my heart, but I thought the customer service lesson made it appropriate for HN. These customers paid a handsome fee for rush service; $70 to be precise. It isn't that the service was rendered poorly or incorrectly, it's that it was not rendered at all. Let this be a lesson to those who may think they're merely a cog in the wheel among wheels in the system: your failure does matter, willful or not.
Toy Store: ORM for Riak, Redis, Cassandra, Memcached, darn near anything
increased some of my weights by up to 120%

Just to be sure, do you mean that if you were lifting 50 lbs before in some exercise, you're now lifting 110 lbs?
A-levels are what high-school students take before applying to undergrad. It's a series of subject exams, like the SAT-II or (more appropriately) the AP; getting an "A" in A-levels is like getting a 5 on the AP. Generally speaking, any hopeful applicant to Oxbridge should have scored at least three A's.

Applying to Oxbridge involves applying to one of the colleges that offers that degree programme. See this list:

http://www.comlab.ox.ac.uk/admissions/ugrad/Computer_Science...

I suggest you look at

http://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate_courses/how_to_...

If your test scores are sufficient, you'll be invited to an interview. See previous discussion:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2103161
Future work defined by current work
Quick translation: "Even the impossible happens. You'd think that an abandoned spaceship laying on a Moscow street would be something out of science fiction. Alas, it's reality. Correspondent "MK" discovered the Soviet orbiter Buran laying, like garbage, on the outskirts of the capital. Nobody seems to care that at one point it was the symbol of our country's might in space."

(Disclaimer: haven't spoken Russian regularly since I was 10, but luckily, newspapers are written for that sort of literacy levels anyway.)
Roadsend is an implementation of PHP that produces native binaries.
Thinking about Mr. Jobs? ;)
Every high school chemistry textbook I've seen actually works this way! It's horrible. The chapter starts with Dalton, works up through Rutherford and Bohr, and the last two or three I've seen ended there. Each section is presented as fact, and the kids are quizzed to make sure they know the material, before tearing it all down and teaching them a new bogus theory in the next section. Ugh.
If you ask how to write a book "start typing" is the good answer.

Just F*ckin Do It, that's what it takes to be successful

I promise you: get off your ass and good things will come, you may fail sometimes, but if you aren't failing often you're not trying hard enough

TL;DR: Just do it, don't overplan it, you'll plan about it later
Yes! Please please please email me!
Do the numbers you're quoting include the people using Facebook through that built-in integration (the People hub)? Or do they only count the dedicated Facebook app?
I'm not sure what you mean, can you elaborate? Do you mean that Buran can land without computer assistance?
It's mentioned in the linked article: not much at all.
Its already happening in Google Apps. Technically Google provides free support and phone support if you pay $50/year but if you signup with a reseller they also provide support and usually have a contact at Google for any issue they can't resolve.
" * TextWrangler/BBEdit: GEdit, Emacs, Vim"

Yes, but you're ignoring a pretty steep learning curve for the last two.
UK engineer develops own heart valve
$500M spent to buy Danger in 2008 plus assumption of debt and the $260M write down they later took on discontinuing the Kin in 2008. So probably around $.75B - that is still a ton of phone licenses they would need to sell to recoup.

And that isn't even taking into account the R%D spent on the Windows 7 phone, which they are said to spend $400M on marketing for.

If Apple was only selling OS licenses for the 14M iPhone4's it shipped at MS's price, they would only have made $112M-210M in revenue.

http://gorumors.com/business/microsoft-kin-revenue-loss/6154...
http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/26/microsoft-half-billion-doll...
Let me restate that— Sub-Saharan Africa is not, in general, a nice place to live for a vast number of people. These particular people are involved in the production of a luxury export, so they happen to show up on our radar screen, but the fundamental problems are not being caused by chocolate, and my buying chocolate from someone else, or indeed the collapse of the entire chocolate industry, is probably not going to do a lot more than make me feel better about myself.

So okay, I stop financing slavery. What am I going to do to actually make it stop?
My favorite programming font is Pragmata[1]. It is however, commercial and not very cheap.

[1] http://www.fsd.it/fonts/pragma.htm
Netflix: List of ISP Streaming Performance
The shuttle always lands by itself. Looks like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-R2dCWZ92ew

If you've seen the shuttle on the back of a 747, that's just for transport, not landing.
Ask PG: Can Y Combinator do 1000 startups a year?
So, the State of the Union speech just passed and I'm wondering if innovation and entrepreneurship is the way for the U.S. to grow it's way out of this slow economy. So, Paul here's a question:

If the U.S. government was willing to give an innovation/entrepreneurship grant to Y Combinator (of course this is all hypothetical) of a significant amount, then how many startups could Y Combinator theoretically fund per year? And could it make a significant impact on the U.S. economy?
I go back and forth on the Erica.biz website. She's obviously smart and motivated and knows what she's talking about. But everything comes across as spammy. I don't doubt her methods work well, but there's something about her and her blog that rub me the wrong way.

EDIT: After looking at the parent, her website isn't spam. It has good content, but it LOOKS like spam. Maybe I've just spent too much time on the Internet and these things pop out at me.
> What more can be done?

That's the whole crux of this. If all of your legal recourses for changing the law don't work, sometimes, you have to move to illegal ones. morality != legality. This obviously requires a lot of thought, a preparation to deal with the consequences, and a serious commitment. But sometimes, it's worth it.
A Bad Sign for Google
Google,Facebook,Twitter are extremely atypical outliers.

Statistically speaking, the typical valley startup builds something quickly, fails to acquire users, burns through angel funding, and dies quietly.

The typical _succesful_ Valley startup is not that different from the business described in the post. Remember, the most succesful YC exit ever, Heroku, is a hosting company.
Nick Bostrom is indeed the director of the FHI. Anyone interested in the sort of perspective he has might want to read The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant (http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html), the Simulation Argument (http://www.simulation-argument.com/), or the Anthropic Principle (http://www.anthropic-principle.com/).

The FHI has also "sponsored" www.overcomingbias.com, where Robin Hanson still posts and a lot of Eliezer Yudkowsky's sequences originally appeared.
My university somehow managed to teach TCP/IP using this methodology. I stopped going to that guy's sessions pretty quickly.
> More like 90% of the way to being half as good as Windows.

That's pretty harsh and rings of fanboy-speak. Have you tried Ubuntu recently? Compiz (which has been around for 5 years) replaces and dare I say improves on expose, and you can drag/drop files into choose file buttons.

Yes, I know you said it's the long-lasting/deep integration that makes those features compelling, but I fail to see any examples of that integration that warrants such a negative blanket statement.
"I personally know two people who deliberately did not take jobs because they knew they could stay on unemployment"

The plural of anecdote is not data. :) Furthermore, unemployment insurance is something people pay into in the first place. I imagine it's not setting the government back a heck of a lot more than, say, the Bush tax cuts.

And cutting off people's ability to pay for rent, food, and a car seems like a pretty poor way of getting out of a recession. The fact is that millions of jobs have been lost and they haven't come back.

I guess ~9% unemployment is the new normal, though— them's that got shall get, and those that don't deserve whatever happens to 'em because they're lazy. If they weren't lazy, they'd pull themselves up by their bootstraps, ???, profit!

I have to ask a serious question here: what's the endgame here? You cut off unemployment insurance. What happens to the people who suddenly have _no_ money? Is the answer "not my problem"? I can't imagine how Americans expect to "win the future" if their default reaction to an entire class of their countrymen reads like Ebenezer Scrooge.
Netflix as Robin Hood? Has ISP oligopoly met its match? I hope in some way...
If you're in America, I may be able to help.
ntoll is a legend. just wrote himself into the boingboing history books :-)
Heh... :-)
The problem is that the true Silicon Valley way (build great stuff and change the world) has been overtaken by the poser Silicon Valley way (go to parties and focus on raising money). This happens during every boom. Fortunately, the next crash will get rid of the posers again.
OTOH, the "very special vehicle" already existed from the Apollo program so it was pretty practical to reuse it.

There is actually a lot of history from the Apollo program on why they chose to use what they did. Trains and barges were considered as well as the crawler they ended up using. Remember that Cape Canaveral is on a marsh, and that they had to make a turn between the VAB and the launch pads.
Stunning: Amnesia Connect Fuses Microsoft Surface With Your iPhone and iPad
There are indeed studies that indicate a positive correlation between duration of benefits and subsequent employment stability (ie, that giving people a longer cushion within which to find a job allows them to find better jobs).

I'm sure you could reply with a study that supports your point of view. This thread would then get very boring, as few of us are qualified to vet the studies.

It is, however, not very compelling to argue the lack of empiricism in a comment thread on a Greenspun article that takes as a premise the idea that people are spending 99 months playing government-sponsored Xbox. Maybe not so much with the high horse with you, on this particular thread.
Yeah I knew that which is why I wasn't complaining. Agreed, this is boring.
Pandora's recommendation engine is far better than Grooveshark's.
That's primarily why the program (and Starting Strength) preaches starting at the minimum weight possible (usually just the 45lb bar) for each exercise, even if you're confident you can do more.

This way you start at the bottom at each exercise, focus on getting your form right first, and then start stacking up weights. Better to take some time getting to lifting heavier things than to rush and make a mistake.
Hi, I'm Erica (the author of the article.)

I'd say 37signals is probably one of the most common examples on sites like HN. They're the poster child for no funding.

Having been in the web hosting industry for 6 years, I can safely say that my $1.1M exit was a small one for a dedicated server company. Most of the other dedicated server/colo/datacenter company owners I know are millionaires many times over. Robert Marsh of Rackshack nee ev1servers is a popular example of someone who started from scratch and sold out for mega millions. And the guys who started The Planet have flipped several web hosting companies to the tune of 8 figures+.

It's a common thing in web hosting to sell a company, then use that money to start another one, then regain customers and sell for more, and do it all over again. Not sure how doable it would be today, but that was a common thread throughout the past 10 years.
What's the biggest flaw? :)
Especially since those Turing laureates aren't going teach most of the undergrad classes.
Ask HN: Does anyone have any information on "JS-Blogger-Client: inserted post"
I noticed this morning in one of my feeds that comes from Blogger, a new post called "JS-Blogger-Client: inserted post". I went to follow the link and it was gone. Since it sounded like a cool "project" I searched for "JS-Blogger-Client" and was given a slew of results all from blogger blogs.

After a little research, it looks like the person who was able to post the message across all of the blogger sites was a webmaster at Google. It's obviously just a screwup that shouldn't have happened but I'm genuinely curious about what exactly DID happen.
The typical small business fails as well. My list was short but again, any successful internet property I can think of did not start in the manner suggested in the article. I also think about the motivations behind the best entrepreneurs I know (some with 100M+ exits) and never did they want to build a small business. They always wanted to touch as many people as possible, build something cool and later, reluctantly, strap a business model on.

Not a popular opinion here I know, but true nonetheless.
My mileage did vary. Nobody in modern academic philosophy is a dualist.

Facts are nice, but philosophical debates tend to be about things that are fundamentally unprovable, unobservable, etc. I think a lot of people that come from the sciences and other "hard" disciplines are frustrated by how useless their facts are in solving these debates.

As someone with degrees in both a hard science and philosophy I'd say that philosophy is more useful to other disciplines than other disciplines are to philosophy.
The issue at hand is people damaging private organizations that chose to not do business with another private organization. Not fixing messed up or unjust laws. Not fighting a faceless government. Simply attacking a business they don't like for not doing business with an organization they do like. That's what's being defended here by the people arguing against my points.
Great. Next joint course: Operating Heavy Machinery and Scrapbooking.
Sad, really.
I completely agree with the author, but I don't think it was taken far enough. The positive examples at the bottom are crawling out of whatever pit of hell the "184 milk jugs" came from, but meaningless colors, exuberant gradients, fading bars, big overlapping data points... these are all examples of chart junk as well.

My favorite information design mantra is that your design should be exactly as exciting as your data. This probably takes it too far, but much like statistics it is so easy to lie with graphs that you're better off assuming you're lying accidentally.
Github. No funding, charged from the beginning for premium access.
I live in Silicon Valley but organize an incubator in Paris (with other branches in other European cities). I argue these issues daily with our founders.

To hire someone in Silicon Valley, plan on spending a minimum of $80K. A senior engineer will cost you $130K easy. So I don't understand why salaries would be a barrier to hiring in Europe, people work for cheap there.

One of the barriers I see is the lack of super-angels. I don't want money from dentists and doctors, I want to raise money from entrepreneurs who know what it's like to start a company. The problem is that in France (and Europe in general), even the successful entrepreneurs tend to hide, because it's not polite to talk about being successful/rich.

In Silicon Valley, there is an endless stream of entrepreneurs with serious cash who are interested in hearing your story.
"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."

That is really all they needed to point out (for me).
Your stance just reflects the depth of the divide - I refer you to C.P. Snow's lecture "Two Cultures", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures