skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's the unemployment rate data by education level in chart form:

http://www.deptofnumbers.com/unemployment/demographics/

It's interesting to observe the structural nature of these series. At no time (in the visible history of the chart) does the unemployment rate of a higher education level exceed the unemployment rate of a lower education level. Through recession, recovery and expansion, education looks to be a verifiably sound strategy for increasing your employment prospects.

Also worth noting (from the original link) is that the labor participation rate (employed + active job seekers as a fraction of the population) is higher as education levels increase. You're more likely to be working or looking for work the more education you have. Lower education levels have greater rates of people not working and not looking for work.
It seems to me that the real reason is that the attributes one posses to drive them through college are also valuable attributes in business success.

Someone who has no interest in working hard to attain good grades in high school and therefore does not go to college is, generally speaking, someone who has no interest in working hard to get a good job. However, if you took one of those employed college grads and stripped them of their degree, I think we would find their success in business would remain unchanged. It is the person, not the degree, that leads to employment.

Ultimately, we simply do not have enough information to reach any conclusions from the data.
I assume he's referring to Nokia and RIM itself. This article was on HN last week:
http://www.itworld.com/mobile-wireless/160601/rip-rim
The metaphor with jazz music isn't terribly illuminating.

The short of the algorithm is that it generates a set of random vectors and evaluates the objective for each one. It then stochastically chooses between perturbed components from elements in that set and new random components to build a test vector. If that vector performs better than the worst one in the set, it replaces the worst one.

I'm pretty sure that process doesn't look very similar to jazz improvisation. It's also not nearly as complicated as it's made out to be. I also am a little frustrated that neither of his problems were good fits for an algorithm like this and so I dunno if I can walk away calling this a neat algorithm.

I am super inspired to play with protovis though.
In my province using a phone while driving gets you a $300 fine plus three demerit points (out of 12).
Many thanks, the inability to place it was really bugging me.

Now I just need to work out what the Bach that keeps going round my head is.
I was hoping you would spot the irony.
Where has my submission gone? Why it's not on the frontpage anymore? Is it what I think happened really happened?
Restoring a Linode Backup
The BLS doesn't report the data monthly, but it does occasionally break out the unemployment rate for higher levels of education.

http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_chart_001.htm

In short, yes, the trend continues.
When $12 million was stolen and nobody did anything about it
This sounds like way too complex a question to answer with the small paragraph of information provided. So with that little amount of information, I think the best way to make the decision is by thinking about your team. Of the two mercenary coding has the advantage of actually feeding people so if you really like your team I think you should try that, build and ship a few products for other people and see if with a new perspective you can't think of another product.

You already have a network and customer base, why not try to build products for the new businesses THEY are entering?
Create and style a 3D Text
Want insightful? Google. Because that is where your questions belong. You're making a point/asking a question (why Mac for webdev?) from a completely skewed perspective.
Don't leave me hanging...
The only fact the author cites to support his claim, that people are mostly unaffected by television, movies, and video games, is

"Steven Johnson, author of Everything Bad is Good For You, writes that over the last ten years—a period of unprecedented fictional violence in television, movies, and video games—“the country simultaneously experienced the most dramatic drop in violent crime in its history.”"

doesn't actually support his argument very well. The rest is loud opinion appealing to those who already agree with him to begin with.
The only problem with building too many things is you will not have the time to give every project a chance to succeed.
The counterpoint to "yeah it would be better for the rest of the world to catch up" would be multiple free-trade zones with a common currency, free trade in goods and free movement of labor within each zone, and then tariffs between them. So the US would be one such zone, the EU another, etc. Lowering tariffs between zones would be conditional on greater freedom of movement and coordination of monetary policy. In theory, this would allow each zone to prosper while preserving some degree of social stability.

China operates this way today, and the US operated this way in the 19th century. Not sure why the US gave it up. One can site economic theories, but economists don't make policy, coalitions do, and I don't know who the members were.
Jerry Seinfeld Persoal Archives
Could not agree more. You have a dying product, not a dying business or bad employees. Level with your employees (who probably already know this is a dying product) - and then set a revitalising target - Build in the next two months at least two online profitable (cash positive) services. Which ones? Ask your employees now, and over next few weeks ask your customers. They have pain points that clearly are being better met elsewhere, but when someone credible asks what pain can I solve, most people reply seriously.
Directory Submission Tips: Which Directories You Should Submit to?
Thank you.. the link seems to be down.
What's the size of your organization? Having a core team used to work together, and that doesn't need to find a huge amount every month is quite a different beast, and probably much easier to redirect following a different path than a big(er) and with more inertia.

Are you using/working with open source libaries/platform? Surely if you are active in a big community (say django), finding some gig to cover the salaries and buy you some time shouldn't be too difficult.

Btw, there is nothing to be ashamed of to work on others' ideas and projects, and 'mercenary coding' sounds a bit like you feel you are prostituting yourself, probably neither good for the ones in your team that will end up selling their services to keep the company afloat, nor for your customers.

What about your market ? if you think it's really dying, don't die with it. You should consider open source your product. Might bring more visibility, new customers and new "mercenary coding" ;)

If your market isn't dying and is small only if you focus on a national context, selling your team/product to someone having more connections to your market abroad could be an option, but will likely have an impact on your team, and on your product. Is this worthwhile ?

Bonne chance.
I'm not surprised by this at all. As the article states, these companies should have focused on providing savings services to the poor. Most of the microfinance industry was just an outgrowth of the credit boom happening in the West.
The lack of a delete key never bothered me in Mac OS X since every single text field gives you bloody Emacs shortcuts.

If anything, it's more convenient to be able to do Ctrl-A, Ctrl-f, Ctrl-f, Ctrl-d, Ctrl-d than reach all the way over to Home, hit right arrow twice, then hit Del twice, especially when you use caps lock as Ctrl.

You can kind of do the same in Linux (GTK+ has emacs keybindings you can enable inside text fields as well), but it'll always work better in Mac OS X because they have the Command key and forced everyone to make good, consistent use of it, so using Ctrl for emacs shortcuts usually doesn't clobber anything.

Honestly, globally available emacs keys and the ability to run Photoshop/Premiere Pro/Cubase/etc. without giving up my UNIX-like commandline are the two major reasons I like using a Mac. Quirks with Finder don't bother me since I only use it to browse files -- almost everything else, like moving or copying files, I usually do using the commandline anyway. Things are also more consistent and more stable with a Mac, since they tailor the hardware and software to specifically match each other and Apple is very big on getting developers to follow their UI conventions. I also enjoy using multi-touch gestures on the generously sized touchpads they have on the newer Macbooks and Macbook Pros.

But other than that, there isn't anything Mac OS X has to offer that Linux doesn't provide, assuming you're using it on well-supported hardware (which can be hit or miss when shopping sometimes).

Everything really is slower on a Mac too. All the file operations are hooked into Spotlight so it can keep track of all your files for a search feature people like me never use, and I don't think HFS+ performs that well to begin with. Not to mention the hardware is a weak compared to equivalently priced PCs.

Even so, I still find that everything's more than fast and responsive enough for me, and you'll always be able to find someone who'll pay a good price for your 1-year old Macbook Pro, making upgrading to the latest model that much cheaper.
I think wrong as in old, as in out of date.
Clearly the fact that you're blaming people for these excuses shows that you're above them and their petty blame.

Seriously, why is it always about blame and responsibility (or lack thereof) for some people? I mean, sometimes things that lie beyond our control cause problems. Like corn syrup... which does have an impact on obesity. It isn't shirking responsibility to discus things outside one's control if they really do exacerbate our problems.
Measuring REST
Does it make any difference for China sitting on a pile of $3 trillion reserves?
It's been quite a small bit of time, now, but IIRC I had some direct correspondence with the author/creator of Readable, and he was a quite agreeable chap. I realize this doesn't speak to the technical merits, but the exchange left me feeling more comfortable about using his product. (Leaving aside the role of advertising and the need to support sites, a separate but not insignificant concern.)

Here's the old URL/site, which is also more visible with Javascript disabled.

http://readable-app.appspot.com/
Guy Kawasaki Enchanting Founders Conference [video]
Give me the notes, or the best approximation you can manage, and I can probably help with that one too. If someone else doesn't get there first. :-)
Heh, so are we going to kick out their students which we've enrolled in some of our top research universities?
Google Image search has always been pretty dodgy for me. It's obvious a lot of sites are gaming it w/ celebrity pics for instance, the resulting pages often don't have the image or they break out of the google previewing frame and go to a paid registration page for whatever site.
Either it's not getting the volume of upvotes to keep it on the front page (fairly likely), or people are flagging it which is combining with the low volume of upvotes to push it away from the front page. Either way, it's a pity, as it means that the conversation here will probably die down, but it's not especially surprising.
What statements encode serious programming concepts?

* Duck Typing - "If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck"
Scale Fail (Josh Berkus on how to build systems that can grow)
Delizard: Realizzazione siti web, Web design, Seo
"Legally, Readable's source is under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license."

Erm... Why? Correct me if I'm wrong, but Creative Commons wasn't made for code. There are plenty (even too many) open source licenses to choose from. Why not one of those?

EDIT: Yup, using cc for source code is not recommended: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/FAQ#Can_I_use_a_Creative_Com...
I hope this doesn't track what I'm reading unlike the new readability.
Delizard's Blog
It could also work out the opposite way: instead of blowing up schools, kids today can simply let off steam by playing GTA. That scenario seems pretty likely to me.
So the source is licensed CC-Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike, but there's no public repository or support? That's a curious approach.
Bitcoin iOS app open sourced
He doesn't—that's why he wrote the word "stolen" in quotation marks.
Co-incidentally, a few months back I took up this vow. My stats were bad. I completed 2 small projects every month instead of 1 per week. But still the motivation levels were higher to do something better the in next schedule.

IMO, the size of the project being small is the key.

Building bigger stuff may sound nice, but not everyone can spend time on something for too long. It's not time as in hours or days. But time as in motivation. For me long development times, without releasing prototypes would be de-motivating. I love to show it off to people and hear them call it "cool" or atleast "good idea, but not usable". So then when you have a prototype in a week, you can make your next project as working towards v1.0 of the previous week's project.

Disclaimer: The site is down, so I haven't read the post. I read the title and the comments were interesting, which pushed me to post my experience.
This has 13 points at the moment. The submission which is currently 6th place on the homepage has 12 points and is, like this one, about 1 hour old (i've submitted this after that one was already on the home).

I smell censorship...
This attitude is why so many open-source projects are shit. That said, the habit of shipping often is a good one to have. But I think it's important to follow through and deliver something of quality every time you ship.
Reminds me of Jason Kester's "geekbeach" idea. Discussed here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2213225
About Essay criticism
Your essays are perused and criticized by your peers. This is a fact which you will have to accept whether you like it or not. There are many areas in your essay which you will be criticized on and it will be beneficial to know these areas in order for you to avoid the mistakes in future.
In no way is Don Stewart responsible for anything being shit.
Author's points:

1.) proliferation of Internet access

2.) the rise of the hedge funds

3.) global marketplace

therefore, the glass is half full.

1.) Yes, the internet usage penetration rate is still not at 100%, even for the advanced countries. There are still alot of room to grow. However, to start new companies in the current environment and have it go big is very hard. The reason is that internet market itself has matured, and there are plenty of monopolies already. Did you see any new companies blowing up in the last year, even though VC/angel funding have increased dramatically? No, because Facebook, Google, Apple, Zynga, Amazon will either move into the market just as quick, or buy the company out for measly millions before they get big. Look at Zynga dominating the social games, copying competitor's concept, and crushing them. Look at Google snapping up talents and companies left and right, in areas beyond search. Look at Facebook moving into Foursquare, Groupon and Quora's territory. These modern age internet monopolies are scary, having the reach of giants but are as nimble as a ninja, able to focus thousands of programmers onto a market overnight.

2.) Hedge funds are actually decreasing in size, not increasing. [1] In 2011, the hedge funds held a total $1.29 trillion, down from 2008 with $1.93 trillion, down 30%. Even though the stock market is back to its near 2008 high.

3.) Yes, global marketplace. BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) will allow companies to grow even further. Look at China, overtaking US soon as the world's largest economy. Oh wait....Facebook/Twitter/Zynga are banned in China. Oops. And Russia has alot of Facebook/Groupon/Twitter clones too. Doubt the Russian government will let US companies get their hands on Russian people's private information if they get big. Brazil and India....too poor. No way they have money to spend frivilous money on farmville items and facebook ads. Yeah, this globalization thing isn't looking so hot.

Not to mention, we're in the start of a global economic depression. The next 10 years, we will see the following:

- China's shadow banking blows up

- Japan finally succumbs to its own democraphics, and along with losing northeast as its prime food producer and the nuclear crisis and the emergence of other asian exporters, suffers a -5% GDP every year.

- Greece, Portugal, Ireland will leave euro or default, leading to a massive wave of other countries doing the same thing, leading to euro failing and European banks suffering 70-80% loss on loans.

- US dollar resume its decline, and as more countries shift its uses/accumulation of dollar to other safe currencies, resulting in a dollar hyperinflation scenario. Which will be great for US government so they can get out of their $70 trillion obligations to social security/medicare, although US banks have $200 trillion shadow derivatives that will bankrupt them.

So, the next 10 years will be horrible for both founders and VCs

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedge_fund#Industry_size
Why there are so many engineers in India
"Through recession, recovery and expansion, education looks to be a verifiably sound strategy for increasing your employment prospects."

That assumes a causal relationship. The chart only shows correlation.
People in the US used to (and still do) commonly say similar things about the russians.
Twitter without a short character limit would become something else entirely. "Microblogging" has "micro" in the name for a reason. Without the 140-character limit, it would just become "blogging", and plenty of services exist for that. Microblogging offers an interesting niche, which tends to get used for short messages that often include a URL.

Given that eliminating the limit entirely seems like the wrong answer, I also don't think it makes sense to extend the 140 character limit to something marginally longer; that just seems like pointless churn that would break the expectations of various tools that interact with Twitter and other microblogging services.
Frankly, I have never seen a file explorer that does cut, anywhere. MS Windows, for instance, does not delete a file on 'cut', and does not copy it on 'copy' (if it did, "copy, shift-delete, paste" would be a no-op)

Cut/Copy/Paste/Undo is a huge UI problem in file explorers. Apple historically chose to not implement any of them (but it did have 'Put Back' to move any file or folder back to where it last was). Following pressure from Windows users, Mac OS X added copy and paste, but not cut. I certainly can understand their reasoning, and also am happy with it. It is not as if I spend hours each day moving files and directories around; if I did, I would do so using the command prompt.
Ah, I see. Yeah, I agree; I'd like to see t.co better integrated into the normal web UI, not just the link-sharing interface (twitter.com/share?url=...).
I meet people who license code under Creative Commons. The license is made for lots of stuff, but it doesn't deal with the intricacies of source code.

Some of them are often confused about open source licenses. It probably doesn't help that there's such heated debate (GPL vs. BSD, for example) amongst the licenses.
It's nice that you can customize it because the default - serif - font isn't that readable, atleast not on win7+opera.

Also, I think they need to update the default font families because calibri and other post Vista fonts are as commonly used as Arial & co.
According to

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t01.htm

there are 239,146 people aged 16 and over in the US who are civilians and not in institutions (like prisons or hospitals), of which only 139,674 are employed.

That leaves 99472 unemployed. Which is about a 42% unemployment rate.
The thing he glosses over is that most businesses don't need or even want a perfect logo - good enough is perfectly fine especially as it can be had for a tenth of the price.

And that is properly a bigger change than these spec work sites.
MECARD - share contact info on mobile
They are trustworthy enough that I can rule that out. Could have been an employer of course. The list was posted online at some point. And the shop acknowledged the incident and is working with the police.

I used the quotation marks because of course the data was copied, not stolen, but the word "stolen" is usually used.
Life isn't fair.

And besides with those rules the companies would simply move out of the country.
Language processing for dummies
F Ab G F C Ab G F C(0) Db C Bb Ab G

First eight and last four notes are quavers, C(0) and Db are crotchets. Plus I used (0) to notate down an octave.

It could be from one of the cello suites... but looking through them I can't for the life of me find it. Definitely it's played by a cello, pretty sure at the start of the piece, might be for solo cello or might be something close to the brandenburgs..

Would be immensely grateful if you could place it, I've been feeling so dumb for not knowing it for about a week now, I know I really ought to.

edit: I think there's a good chance it is in F minor as with my above notation, but it's quite possible I'm wrong about that.

edit: because I hate music written with letters.. http://misc.corincole.com/bach.png
I never claimed anything different...

However, to be more accurate:

"So is LastPass, unless you disable offline login, or enable the use of a Yubikey"
As stated in the linode backup docs, a disk snapshot might catch your DB in the middle of a transaction, so you should dump the DB to disk on a schedule, and then restore the disk followed by restoring the DB from the dump.
I disagree. Having more released projects increases the chances that at least one of them will succeed, or at least start to show some promise.

Though, it probably depends on the kinds of projects. And assuming, of course, that the quality is decent enough for a first iteration.
Calm down man. Jeez. I don't know anything about the ngmoco case but I would like to see how their operational costs compare to before. And yes, a link would be helpful.

typeof(NaN) returns "number" is obviously a bad example, but how about this?

1 + "1" * 1 == 2 // returns true

You really wouldn't know why until you dig into the language spec. There are lots of little things here and there that trips you up on a daily basis in JS I've never really understood why anyone would use it to write large systems on the server-side. It's a language that you have to deal with pretty much everyday when you are using NodeJS, I don't see how using JS can make the people using NodeJS more productive. But maybe that's not the point.

But maybe it is, given that on it's website it openly admits that it takes inspiration from Python's Twisted and Ruby's Event Machine.

V8 is essentially single threaded. That's common knowledge, but then again, Python isn't much better either.

So let's look at it's other selling point - Event driven programming/networking. Is that something new? No. Is that something proven? Yes, as it seems to work very well for Ericsson. Are callbacks necessary in EDP? No. Are they everywhere in NodeJS? Yes. Are they easy to read and manage? Obviously No.

For argument's sake, let's say event-driven programming/networking is a very good idea that it warrants slapping on a terrible language and programming practices on it. What about the eco-system? Well, there isn't much to say, or we wouldn't be reading this thread.

I don't know man, I don't see the merit in having yet another event-driven programming platform and marrying it on a terrible programming language. It doesn't even have bindings for other languages. I don't really understand the hype, but maybe you can enlighten me because I really haven't been able to find any in depth analysis of NodeJS.
Palimpsest for iPad - it's like Pandora Radio for interesting articles