skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is it really the case that the demand is so high or that supply is kept artificially low by tradesmen apprenticeship programs? I thought that was the point of the trades...to reduce competition by decreasing the number of competitors. Though this might be a misconception entirely...
And the Federal Reserve recently surpassed China as the largest buyer of US Debt. China has stopped buying as much as the US government will print.

Well, there's your problem.
How else could you possibly compare them?
Hah, I'm doing the same thing. But I'm using my stock for fresh chicken soup. It's a good break from hacking.

Super bowl (of soup).
well, not exactly -- you can't do ANYTHING on Quora as an anonymous user. On a Stack Exchange site, you could always ask and answer as an anon user. Now you can suggest edits, too.
I am. I come up with a dumb little site idea and decided to implement it using PHP and the 960.gs system, both things I want more practice with. Also tried out some new (to me) Photoshop techniques to try to modernize my design style.
Agree although I wonder why Oracle then seems to care so much about Hudson -- It's quite un-enterprisey compared to competing build systems which include Sarbanes Oxley compliance features, etc.
yes, back in the old days they used to measure an economy by tons shipped. It doesn't apply anymore due to higher value things being lighter, and tracking air-shipments would be a problem.

However, it does underlie a point - tracking the value of shipments by a currency value can easily obscure important facts.
Any reason why this couldn't be expanded to a vast range of places, seeing as it reads the same Foursquare API?
Interesting enough - but what's the trend? Is growth in US manufacturing growing at the same pace as China? Or is it continuing to decline, and will cross at some point.
Agreed. I've got one of their other super-inexpenside LCD scopes, this one:

http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/digital-storage-oscilloscop...

It's perfect for what it's intended for. Audio frequencies and sub 1MHz signals (so I can watch servo outputs and PWM signals from Arduino or RC gear, but not RF or processor bus stuff).

I'm not _quite_ interested enough to save ~$50 by being a beta tester, but if the early reviews turn out positive and it seems this'll let me watch signals on 16MHz microcontrollers I'll happily fork out $200 for one later.

Perhaps this isn't "web startup/entrepreneur" relevant news, but it's _certainly_ "hacker" news...
The Fed may have surpassed China as the largest buyer of debt, but it may not be the largest holder. Where do you think all the money in the Social Security trust fund went, eh?

Hint: It's somewhere in the blue part of the pie ;-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_public_debt#Estim...
I think what we're seeing is that Apple always did compete on price. We just didn't know it until we saw competitors trying and failing to match their prices.
I think we'll better wait for iPad 2, I'm sure it will be way useful than Xoom.

The only interesting thing about Xoom, from a programming point of view, is that it lets you code in Java, if you are so inclined.

Unfortunately I see no viable alternative to iPad today; unfortunately because competition will push Apple to make a more user friendly tablet.
I haven't seen this ad but "wrong and soulless" seems a bit of a stretch unless they are causing actual harm, which I doubt.

Taboo topics just generally bother me as a slippery-slope type situation; I mean, there is this confusion between talking about a thing (and thus evoking an emotional memory about said thing) and actually doing a thing.

Calls for self censorship around taboo topics, especially with regard to humor seem to completely ignore that. In reality it's either funny or it's not. Any claims that "it's wrong" to laugh at such and such a joke are almost certainly without any logical/rational basis.

When I make a dead baby joke (which I never do) I am not saying "dead babies are awesome."

I don't mean to go off.. it's just a pet peeve of mine. For the record, I haven't liked Groupon since I read that sob story about the coffee shop that lost their ass with them.
Rush is on for custom domain name suffixes
Engineers grow nanolasers on silicon, pave way for on-chip photonics
Maybe this sounds slightly kooky, but...

I believe there is no 'solution' to their plight. The timeline until singularity is too short for a complete retooling of the economy. However the pace of development at the higher end is fast enough and explosive enough that we can afford to keep on subsidizing the lower classes with bread and circuses until we reach sentient AI, at which point we will be able to provide everyone with robot servants and who knows what else.

Just think about the current web 2.0 economy. If a nineteen year old is able to write a piece of software and execute on a plan that makes him a billionaire in a few years, that's... really quite amazing. Yes yes I know, some people are going to call bubble. Whether or not it's true, I think it's evident that the pace of innovation has sped up more than most people realize. Things like this will continue happening and happen quickly. We're at the beginning of a fantastic time when the pace of wealth creation will increase exponentially, with the internet as the great enabler.
I wish I had not used the WAF build system, it works - it’s okay, but it introduces more WTFs than necessary. I can perhaps dig out from under WAF at some point but it would be a monumental undertaking.

— Ryan Dahl, in reference to Node.js

http://bostinnovation.com/2011/01/31/node-js-interview-4-que...
Everybody is getting hung up on the price of this device, which I admit is high, but a comparison to the iPad's price is not fair. As stated below, the closest iPad is $730. Also the hardware is a generation and a half ahead of the iPad. The iPad doesn't even have a camera, very basic need for any kind of video conferencing (Xoom comes with 2). Please see the comparison chart [1] for more details.

But yeah, having to buy the Xoom from a carrier and paying atleast one month of data plan rate before cancelling it is kinda ridiculous.

[1] http://static.skattertech.com/media/2011/02/infographic-play...
This is a huge frustration to me as a developer, I wish I could buy an iPod touch style android device.
They have been, and still are located in Shenzhen, China:

http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/contact_us.html
Hire Me Foursquare Campaign
Online resume resembles FourSquare check-in history format
If you only need to prove to people who recognize you which account is real, post a video of yourself explaining how to tell the difference.
Yeah, sounds familiar. I've been cooking up a way to manage a locally mastered static html website hosted in Amazon CloudFront. I may well use it as an opportunity to learn git (over SNV)...
I just received my CR-48, now what should I do?
I received my Chrome Notebook from Google this weekend. I've been playing around with it and put it in developer mode. Does anyone have anyone know any interesting hacks that people have tried with this computer? I feel like there is a lot of potential here for a cool project.
Logistics isn't just the factories. Buying power, relationships, knowledge, and engineer / material expertise are all factors. Having your own retail chain doesn't hurt either (so you don't have to agree to no cell contract = no WiFi nonsense). Motorola doesn't have the combo.
I would advise against that. There are too many places in he mess of tables of data configuration that might refer to specific auto-increment id columns were things will get out of sync. Basically you are trying to do MySQL replication on specific tables only, but there are too many relationships among all the tables.

If it is a small amount of content, such as a handful of pages for a brochure site, putting them in a feature might be best.

If it is a site where customers or visitors generate content on the site, then periodically re-initialize your dev and staging environments with copies of the live DB, running it through a script to anonymize all the user info and change passwords and etc.

If you want to create content on your dev and move it live, then doing a full database copy and moving it live, with settings that are particular to live overridden in settings.php, is probably the best way. I advise against this, basically you are re-launching the site for every change.

If you are truely desiring to be able to create content in multiple different places and move it to live, then probably the best thing to do explicitly program and configure for that, by specifying feeds of the content and setting up the different sites to ingest each other's feeds.
SuperBowl?

http://github.com/tony-landis/PonyExpress

It needs a few more hours of for docs and testing before it is ready.
An intelligent race which knows anything about stars would note that Sol has a disproportionately large output in the radio spectrum. This would likely attract considerable attention and debate as to the cause. Careful analysis would reveal a very precise and regular Doppler shift lasting approximately 365.25 days...
Cool idea - is the % of foursquare users in a sample population consistent? What if Tuesday is "bus in the foreigners/elderly?" - valuable info regardless, but I'd be curious to know how that holds up.
I moniter a few sites that between them hit 20+million page views a month (~30k/hour), and can say from personal experience that, for any real idea of a day's stats from Google Analytics, you really do need to wait 24 hours.
Regarding "how" - do it fast and quick. We recently had some drawn out reorg at my company and it was really stressful knowing something might happen to you. When a firing does it happen, it should be as quick and painless as possible. To move forward, do just that. Give the team a quick explanation of what happened, and then move on with life and start searching for a replacement.

PS - I am not a manager. This is just from observation.
I suppose now would be a bad time to mention Viewsonic's G-Tablet which has a Tegra 2 chip (just like the XOOM), a 10" display (not quite as nice as the XOOM's), and 16 gigs of RAM for a bit under $400? :-)
That's what I do, except I use svn rather than git.
There are a lot of important items that are not "development" that are missing: product management, business development, sales, etc., that can all be helpful to the aspiring hacker.
The kicker for me was discovering that Facebook's PHP shell (http://www.phpsh.org/) is in fact written in Python.
Ask HN: Please review our Startup BusFeed
Hello HN,

We founded Busfeed.com as a web application for sales professionals.

BusFeed is a Sales 2.0 application,
We harvest Business and Social network intelligence to help sales people get closer to their prospect and help close deals faster.

To get a Free 30 days subscription, Please use Promo code: BF_30DAYS_YC

Web site is www.busfeed.com

We appreciate your feedback.
Some would disagree
"The US remained the world’s biggest manufacturing nation by output last year, but is poised to relinquish this slot in 2011 to China – thus ending a 110-year run as the number one country in factory production."
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/af2219cc-7c86-11df-8b74-00144feabd...
Ah, thanks for the correction.

The last time I ordered something, it came via Hong Kong Post.
Admittedly anecdontal, but I've always found 4 weeks before to be the optimal point.
I call it American Tackleball...
An excellent discussion about this exact topic came through HN yesterday. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2183415, and in particular the comments.
Logwatch on Ubuntu Desktop/Server
From my vantage point it looks like the demand is high. There is a mining boom, there have been serious disasters the past 2 years (bushfires, floods), and for some reason new residences are still being built at a fast clip.

I'm sitting here in Austraia, trying to summon up the will to fire up XCode and instead being dragged away to surf trips with my brother-in-law and all his tradie friends. They all have houses that I once dreamed about owning after I sold my startup to Google. That never happened, so I spent some time researching the trades here.

Many of the trades have apprenticeship programs but are essentially unlicensed. For instance, for some reason you can make loads of money laying tile at the moment. There might be "tiling apprenticeships" but for the most part you can just show up and make $20/hr lifting boxes and cleaning up, and $50/hr putting the tiles down.

Plumbers and electricians are in high demand, especially in the mines. In addition to demand, they have to be licensed, and thus they make more money. There is an apprenticeship period, various certs for residential, commercial, data, hospital, high-energy, marine, etc.

The apprenticeship period may be pushing up the wages of sparkies a bit but there does seem to be a lot of work. I don't think these apprenticeships are artificially limited like the way med school seats in the USA are limited. Plus, you get paid $19-$20/hr as an electrical apprentice, which is $40K a year.

One interesting thing I learned is that sparkies and plumbers can sign up for on-call insurance jobs and charge even more money. During this weekend's floods in Geelong my electrician friend's phone was constantly ringing. I think he got about 8 jobs that he passed over to his partner.

All that said, I get a bit of a bubble feeling over here. Especially for residential building. Who are all these new subdivision houses supposed to be for? The tradesmen building them? I can't imagine a lot of office drones communting from the Bellarine Peninsula to Melbourne. Or even being able to afford the homes in the first place. In other parts of the country, once the mines are all tapped I wonder where the money is going to come from.
Took me a minute to figure out why it thought my github account had perl in it. Unfortunate that perl and prolog both use the the .pl extension. I think GitHub makes the same mistake, or did when I put the prolog stuff up anyway.
It has a really nice REST API interface as well. One of the ways that API is expressed is through XML, but there are also JSON and Python versions (yes, the API sends you Python code in one version!)
Non-questions like these are also why a great many people dislike philosophy.
It sounds like you're trying to sell both the service AND the software. Why not just offer to sell the software to anyone who wants it for X dollars, and for the people who don't want to host it themselves, run it for them for Y/mo?
So apple can buy the CPU for it's iPad from Samsung for less than Samsung can????
very nice clean use of raphael.

referenced stylesheet "all.css" returns 404
Yeah, make it a smart phone app, charge $2.99 for it and include everywhere that foursquare supports, money to be made! Although maybe foursquare could just release a similar feature.
While you're technically correct, incidents like this can be actionable under tort law and damages claimed to compensate for income not earned.

If you always earn $10,000 a day in profit from customers entering your shop, and someone barricades the entrance to your shop for one day, I don't think you'd have a hard time in court showing that you "lost" $10,000 that day.
Why did that thread get killed off so quickly?

The general consensus almost everywhere is that the ad was in extremely poor taste, which I agree with.
Anonymous Takes Revenge On Security Firm
Dynamictivity is hiring
Performance would be nightmarish. Git is super elegant and great, but not very performant. Imagine having to deltify a terabyte of data? Good luck with that!
Interacting with women can impair men's cognitive functioning
What about I don't want to pay for 3G, and don't want it?
Xoom is not an option... I already pay for a mobile data account (with tethering)... why pay for another account?

Furthermore, iPad 3G requires no contract.

No, there is no real iPad competitor yet.
The torrent: http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/6156166/HBGary_leaked_emails
One can assume that most readers of the Economist are in the elite, more or less... and elites have always been fond of expounding on how their status is justified. When it was ok to say "God loves us better", that worked; now the elites justify their status with "scientific" reasoning that "proves" that they deserve their status because of some innate personal feature. Surprise, surprise.

While my experience does not a scientific sample make, when I worked in a hardware store for two years (more or less doing my undergrad), I thought that the population was about as smart as the students I went to college with. However, the long term blue collar hardware store employees neither understood how to go to school, or how to mobilize education when they did get acquire some.

So... I think there is sytemic, multi-generational differences in access to the training that allows you to succeed in the supposedly meritocratic society we would like to believe we live in. The difference in training is definitely manifest in "pure" cognitive ability, but if your parents don't read to you as an infant, push you to do your homework, or help you to go to college, OF COURSE you are going be dumber by the time you join the workforce as an "adult".

Read Bourdieu.
fail. next?
Clickable: http://busfeed.com
OP: Please don't let "_____ could just release a similar feature" stop you.
Dynamictivity is a fun, unconventional, creative place to work!
Purchasing power parity in local currency?
I hadn't really given it too much thought. The intention wasn't to make money off of it. Some money to cover expenses but I'd love to not be the one managing it, having nodes of these sites all around the web.

But that's lofty - so a hosted solution is a bit easier to swallow - and I'd be happy doing that as well and breaking even (time/energy/stress, etc).
[Confirmed] Gawker launching new layout tomorrow morning.
That's because you don't know what social darwinism means....

(edit) ... it means that individuals who win the various competitions in society (jobs, attractive spouses, etc) succeed because they have innate superiority in some way, and that we should allow such competition because it somehow propagates excellence.
I've been doing more web programming lately and have been doing pretty much the same thing. These days when I visit a web site I pay attention to the design and keep an examples folder in my bookmarks that I can reference for ideas and code.
A message queue is shared state. It may be more convenient shared state, and since it only needs to be got right once it might be more bulletproof shared state, but you have multiple threads that are serialising on access to a queue no matter how it is implemented.
looks similar to the method used by the ancient Romans

http://www.phy6.org/outreach/edu/roman.htm
What is Super Bowl?
i think the intended application is when printed then photocopied.
Ask HN: email pet peeves?
My pet peeve is people who don't close the email conversation, especially when it regards plans that each side has to agree on. For example, we go back and forth about dinner or whatever, then I send you an email that says "cool, see you at six, bye" then you say "yep, see you then. bye".

On the other hand, I top quote a lot...
FWIW, I found two takes on database versioning:
http://www.gsdesign.ro/blog/mysql-database-versioning-strate...
https://launchpad.net/dbvcs
$800?

And if you read the subtext of the picture carefully, it says, "To activate WiFi functionality on this device, a minimum of 1 month data subscription is required."

My god, is it rude to just point and laugh?
I doubt Samsung is that screwed up but I do know one company where outside vendors got a better price then one of their own divisions. The CPU is not the only component.
It used to be that you could make a steady middle-class income as a factory worker, airline stewardess, or retail clerk. Not so much now.

If you truly believe this, can you tell me what good or service the factory worker/retail clerk had back then, but lacks today?
Disagree. It's the whole point of the page, so it isn't excessively redundant if you say it more than one way... I'd just put a single column that's a different color (ie, green) for the best day, maybe with an embedded checkmark or some other indicator for the color blind.

Google "comparison chart" and see how <a href="http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://printgreener.com/... facets</a> can inform a viewer in a simple way.
See if you can install a Linux distro.
I'm not sure it ever made the front page (I've been lurking around the "new" feed).
While you are all technically right that the iPad 32GB/wifi+3g is comparable to the Xoom, it isn't in the mind of consumers. Consumers will compare $500 v. $800. After all, Apple's $1500 laptop is not spec-wise comparable to a $500 Windows laptop but that doesn't make a difference. I am betting on Apple releasing a $300 iPad in April.
> "2. They know lots of things other than what they’re specialised in. Theirs is the gift of a broad mind, constantly fed with the stimulant of being interested in what everyone else is doing."

> COMPLETE SHIT. People like that obsess over a small number of subjects and become exceptional at them. Plus they're they're generally socially inept.

I'm generally the smartest person in the room, usually by an arm and a leg, perhaps by another few appendages too. How do I know? Well when you feel like you're communicated with morons, because they're talking about whatever starlet is in rehab this week. Do I dwell on it? Rarely. Do I make everyone else feel smart? Ha! Just because they can't understand words with more syllables than in their first name doesn't mean I should make them feel better (>lol indeed). If they want to talk to me, I'll try to talk on their level and if I can teach them then I'm happy to. I'd say I have a vast general knowledge and likely deeper than most people, but I believe that's only a virtue of having a high general IQ. Get me on computers, psychology, or any of the sciences and I'll talk all night. Heck, I'm even good on engineering or even any hands on subject (I work in construction). Ask me about sports and I've got so little knowledge that I'd likely rank in the 1-10 IQ range on a sports based IQ quiz. I have zero fashion sense. I'm socially inept in groups, I literally hate being in large groups.

> "5. Even when things go very badly wrong, they’ll be smiling. Smart people never get ruffled because their smart brains present them with alternatives faster than the bad stuff can happen."

I spent this afternoon building cabinets. I backed one up against the wall and thought "It's leaning forward a little, I should probably bracket it to the wall", sure enough I walked away for 2 seconds and BOOM! It fell over, broke both doors off, tore the washers out of one panel and broke the riveted-pin out of one of the hinge plates. I spent 5-minutes swearing at my own idiocy, not because I'm an idiot, but because I was smart enough that I knew I was fucking up before I actually fucked up. I fixed it, I made new pivots out of old flat brackets by drilling new holes and managed to force the pin back into place and solder it.
No, git will not track database changes. Features however can handle much of the configuration (that is typically contained in the database) in code, which can then be managed with git.

If you want to create content on your dev or staging site and push it to production, check out the deploy module:
http://drupal.org/project/deploy

Tracking changes to nodes in production is probably best left to Drupal's built in node versioning system. Diff (http://drupal.org/project/diff) is a handy module to track changes between revisions and if you want a little more advanced workflow check out revisioning (http://drupal.org/project/revisioning) and workflow (http://drupal.org/project/workflow). Good luck!
Sorry if I sound overly negative, but: Am I missing something, or does this pretty much only appeal to the HN crowd who can think "well it doesn't interest me, but nice hacking!" and not to anyone who actually cares about the NFL?