skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm gen X. I'm actually in my third "career". Trust me, I didn't do security after leaving the army because I liked it.

You're 100% correct though, I have no problem limiting my tolerance for bad situations these days.
Your assumptions on this are off. He may be making $100K per year, but definitely not $25K for one search term. Google takes at least 40-50% of the CPC as rev share. Also, the traffic estimator you used is broad match, meaning it includes every query that somehow includes "personal development" such as "Tony Robbins personal development" or "personal development workshop". Many of these Steve will not rank for, even though he is number 1 for the exact match.

I've run a site with similar content and good search rankings that gets around 50% of the traffic of Steve's site (according to Compete), and our AdSense revenue was nowhere close to $100k per year. Even though Steve was using AdSense more aggressively, it makes me wonder how he was able to earn so much. The average earnings per click for us was only 15 cents or so.
The new trend in using algorithms to design buildings is a fancy way to divorce the building design from the problem at hand - a classic principle of deconstruction.

As far as the state of architecture in general over the last 80(!) years, I disagree with you. The current philosophical trend is deconstruction which is making some architects adhering to that philosophy quite trendy and famous, but there are many other architects who could care less about the latest trend and pursue their own work with a different core philosophy (myself included).
David Sedaris on undecided voters
It sounds bad, but I totally agree with you. People LOVE their apple products, they have an odd attachment to them. (Rarely do you hear people telling you they love their computer...well they do when their computer is a mac).
They are more likely to tell their friends that they should get one too.
I worked at McDonalds for $5.15/hour for a year in high school. I was satisfied because it was better than working as a bagger for the same wage, minus "union dues."

These jobs aren't so terrible as they are numbing. I don't remember hating these places, I don't remember them at all. I don't remember much of my youth before 18. That part of my life is simply gone.

Does that scare you?
Hm. I don't know...when people say things like that, it tends to reflect feelings of persecution more accurately than fact.

As recently as the late 1960s, American youth were idealizing personal freedom, quality of life and independence, and "adults" were criticizing them for it (probably in the WSJ). San Francisco is practically a monument to the era...
Hey, RescueTime is giving out medals now, too. Someone needs to create a virtual trophy case. ;-)
The sound of a million pirates crying out in pain...
Stop being so negative. They just need to add a Flux Capacitor.
> Note to entrepreneurs: this is a feature; there are lots of young and ambitious professionals who would love to use their skills in a less rigid environment. Start something other than a web application company and capitalize on this.

A lot of this is because of the structure of the industries. Software is as pure intellectual capital as it can get, outside of tenured professorships. As a result, the firm's entire capital base exists in the minds of its employees, and this gives them enormous bargaining power.

Hardware companies take significant physical capital to start, so employees can't just leave and do their own thing. That's why you don't see a flood of ambitious youngsters going into hardware. They can't - not without venture capital and a network of suppliers.

Same goes for financial companies - sorta. In finance, the primary capital base of a firm is its reputation and network of dealmakers. When you're just starting out, you have nothing here, which is why newbie I-bankers work 16 hour days and only get paid in the high 5-figures. But once you've been at it for a couple years, you've built up a network, and those clients are yours, which is why experienced I-bankers rake in the dough and have nice working conditions. They simply have more bargaining power.
http://www.askoxford.com/betterwriting/plainenglish/writingm...

"Here are seven non-rules imposed on writers that can be safely discarded...

(3) You must not end a sentence with a preposition."
Please fix the formatting, your lines of text are breaking the page layout.
I can't believe the doctors didn't already think of it.

Oh, they have. Homeopathy is much more popular in Europe than in the USA, and according to Wikipedia some European health insurance actually covers it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_and_prevalence_of_ho...

Covering homeopathy with health insurance strikes me as smart. For one thing, it saves everybody money. Sadly, an over-the-counter homeopathic remedy is more effective if it costs $25 per dose than if it is sold at cost (keep in mind how the treatment works). But an Officially Sanctioned Government Treatment, the true cost of which (5 cents, for the formal-looking box) is hidden from you, is probably almost as good as the $25 stuff. Especially if the box has lots of testimonials and some impressive-sounding Latin words.

It also encourages people to get their homeopathy from an actual doctor, who is able to make use of actual medical science when it proves necessary. This helps discourage the problem of overenthusiastic entrepreneurs cutting out the middleman by convincing people to treat their diabetes and Stage I cancer with nothing but an extremely dilute, patent-pending snake oil solution.
True, but it does keep the irrelevant conversation out of the way of discussion of the actual news item.
Apparently I left out a necessary ;) on that sentence. ;)
On Lisp - Clojure (Chapter 5)
Derek, thanks for chiming in and clarifying. This is super helpful.

It'd be interesting to hear what the reaction was. Honestly I've often wondered what would happen if you had a "gilded-company" style compensation -- everyone gets paid twice as well as anyone else in the industry, but at the same time, it's far more difficult to get hired / easier to get fired for nonperformance.

There's a lot of research that suggests employee compensation is inversely correlated with satisfaction with one's job -- no matter what the job is. How strange is that? If you get paid more, you actually feel like your job is less important or interesting, and vice versa.

What sort of macro effects did you see?
I disagree with your statement and wish you would provide a counterargument.

I think the four color theorem is an exception because mathematicians weren't impressed and excited to find that computers could prove theorems. Instead they were disappointed and considered it somehow "wrong". We should be pushing forward with automatic theorem provers, and we would be if more mathematicians could program.
Could you not indent lists? It makes them preformatted text, without line breaks, which has messed up the whole formatting of the page.

Just have numbered paragraphs, like:

1.) First item.

2.) Second item.
I don't think that's true. There's been a fundamental shift away from working one job all of your life (as our grandparents did) and being more of a free-agent that could never have been said before.
you are bringing up two very different things here.

1) you said IISC was " full of either Brahmins or SC/ST" , and when asked to back it up , you're saying "Please walk into IISc and you shall know".

That means nothing. You can either prove it or you cant. It seems like you cant,so lets drop it.

2) "We definitely have a smart bunch of people in pure sciences than in business. Why do you think we cannot retain them here in India ?"

This is a very interesting question to me. And it seems like you are playing a very important part in retaining "smart" people by organizing/being involved in things like Barcamp.in etc.
Remember that the money is coming from somewhere, from whoever the advertisers are making money from. In Steve's case the money probably eventually comes from suckers for get-rich-quick schemes. So it's not clear that by accepting that money and giving it to charity, the world would actually be a better place.
rapidshare, zshare, sharebee, how many of these can exist? i mean if rapidshare goes down, just use one of the dozens of others no?
Why has this bug not been fixed yet?
I think this quote from an ACM interview with Donald Knuth in answer to a question on the future of programming sums up the problem of the current state of programming nicely:

"I'm worried about the present state of programming. Programmers now are supposed to mostly just use libraries. Programmers aren't allowed to do their own thing from scratch anymore. They're supposed to assemble reusable code that somebody else has written. There's a bunch of things on the menu and you choose from these and put them together. Where's the fun in that? Where's the beauty in that? We have to figure out a way we can make programming interesting for the next generation of programmers."

reference: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1378715
In 1901, a 14-year-old published article in a newspaper describing the world of 2001
The boomers have had a tremendous effect on society. If you don't believe me, go visit a Whole Foods or read Bobos in Paradise.

They said things would be different and they are. Marijuana may not be legal yet (in most states) but a lot has changed.
Poll: Which Generation Are You?
What generation do you identify with? What do you see as the defining characteristics of that generation? What about defining moments?

Date ranges taken from Generations via Wikipedia.
Silent Generation (1925–1942)
Baby Boomer (1943–1960)
Generation X (1961–1981)
Generation Y (1982–2001)
Why not use the RIM Smartphone Simulator if your on Windows to test it out?

I posted today about this: http://dmix.ca/2008/10/creating-a-blackberry-version-of-your...
Thanks. Is this better? Immediate feedback expected!
We also have a program like the one described in Denmark with joint productions between programmers, musicians, architects, moviemakers, animators, graphic artists, etc.

The first graduates just finished their second joint production (and thereby their thesis) this summer. It'll be interesting to see whether or not the graduates will make it in the industry.
The quote I always hear about that from Rob Curley is something like this:

"We're in the newspaper business, and for too long people have been stuck on the second part of that word."
There has been a lot of conversation about generations and demographics here on HN lately. There are definitely differing viewpoints and relationships between them. Where do you fit in?
GAP? Pari/GP? Mathematica? Magma? There is much room for programming in modern pure math research. In fact, I think we will end up seeing much more computer-aided-math than you think.
The behavior of economic phenomena is far more complicated than the behavior of liquids or gases.

Is predicting the result of a coin toss complicated?

Analogy aside, I don't think one can compare the two. Economics deals with a huge (huge!) quantity of information in doing a prediction. If there was a human that could somehow process all the news, weather forecasts, CEO interviews and financial information, I don't think it would be that hard for him to make predictions, even on a global scale. The issue is that we attempt to capture all this complexity through a handful of insufficient abstractions. It works sometimes. Sometimes it doesn't, much like predicting the weather from a barometer.

If all that information would be quantifiable numerically (syndicate pressure = 0.34) I'm confident that we would have good models and predictions. Models in economy share a lot of the pain of models in biology.

In contrast, for predicting the detail of fluid turbulence or mathematical chaos, the problems are very easy to state, and there is very little information to process. Their mathematical solution and their numerical stability is what makes them complicated.
Well, it certainly looks like we'll have the opportunity.
Thats a significant success by any measure, especially considering its in billions of dollars.
As an iPhone fanboy and iPhone app developer, I absolutely welcome the first Android phone to market! Gogo G1!

I want an aggressive competitor to iPhone. iPhone isn't perfect and having a great competitor can only drive Apple to making their devices better.
If those limitations are hard to measure, nearly impossible to judge at a glance, and are not guaranteed to even be present in an individual, how do you have a discussion about their effects on a person's success?

Either way, my point was that I felt you should ignore physical attributes not related to mental abilities when discussing talent. I think using them as examples of "talents" making a difference just confuses the issue.
Ha, I was just working on designing one, though for a game.
Whenever I get a new prescription from a doctor, I jump online and do my research about it.

I know there are several brand names for placebo drugs, but would it be obvious if a doctor prescribed one to me or my family?
Our grandparents are just one example I don't think most people started and ended the Great Depression working for the same company. I think today's world is much closer to the historical norm of lot's of small to mid sized companies fighting it out.
(just found this) lifehacker is calling them "url shrinkers" - http://str8.to/best-url-shrinkers.
Spy Fears: Twitter Terrorists, Cell Phone Jihadists
Agreed, this is the type of information that is tough to find elsewhere, since it tends to be somewhat specialized.

So for everyone posting -- thanks!
At least for me, it's important that the n810 fits in the pocket like an iPhone, unlike a netbook.
I've read plenty of both Krugman and others like him that make the same point. I find it entirely very unconvincing. For instance, take the city of New Haven, where I went to college. In the 1950's the city had a thriving industrial base and tens of thousands of high paying union jobs. Over the next few decades many of these businesses collapsed due to competition from lower priced manufacturing in the South and West. Manufacturing jobs went from 43% of New Haven employment to 20% by 1973. The famous Winchester factory went from an employment of 10,000 to around 700 by 1979. In that year there was a massive strike. The strike caused the factory to hemorrhage money and corporate actually ended up selling it for peanuts to the employees. But even as an employee owned enterprise, it failed to make money, and eventually it closed completely. Today Winchester rifles are manufactured on a multinational basis, with some parts being made in Utah and others in Portugal. This same story was repeated across the rust belt, from Detroit to Philadelphia. None of this fits Krugman's story. The unions were strong, they were just asking for more money than the market would pay them (although the market was rigged, as I note below).

If your interested in reading more, I highly recommend Douglas Rae's City: Urbanism and its End. Here is an except from Google books that talks about the decline of manufacturing in New Haven: http://books.google.com/books?ei=FgwCSeeYGoLmygS73cy3Cw&...

A lot of the worst downsizing did indeed happen during the Reagan presidency. But that had a lot more to do with Volcker's strong dollar policies, high interest rates, and the resulting rise in the trade deficit, than it had anything to do with Reagan's policies. For the past thirty years, foreign governments and investors have been selling the U.S. cheap manufactured goods and then buying our financial securities. This has decimated our manufacturing sector as domestic producers have been unable to compete with manufactures in countries with an artificially weak currency. But its been a windfall to everyone in the U.S. who borrows money - from leveraged buyout firms to the government itself.
California Sucks at Laws
I'm generation X - the worst of all the generations :p
The NYTimes.com Prepares For HD Video; Drops the FeedRoom For Brightcove
I agree, this post reeks of incompetence.
Study: Influencers are Alive and Well on Social Media Sites
I think both matt and the wsj are off. It's not about a sense of entitlement or superior productivity (which I don't believe for a minute). The wsj "brat" characterization doesn't match the "lazy" characterization I've more commonly seen.

The real story is that the younger generation doesn't want to work hard because at some subconscious level they understand that the current system will not continue and will not reward hard work as it has. They know they won't see a dime of their substantial FICA withholdings. They know they will not ride another bull market to retirement and collect government checks. Perhaps at some level they have even sensed the precarious state of the dollar and the potential futility of trying to squirrel away wealth. Why work hard when the government will tax or inflate most of it away, and you're unlikely to get good compensation in the first place?

The older generations are too invested in the system to reach similar conclusions. (Though it's interesting that doctors and lawyers are leaving the professions in droves.) It's the psychology of sunk costs. Asking around about social security is highly illustrative. A large fraction of young people will come right out and say SS is probably going to collapse in coming years. Very few people in their 40s will admit to this obvious truth.

This pattern where the younger generation senses the jig is up and gives up the struggle before their elders can admit it is not rare. You can see the same thing in Japan. You saw it in the Soviet Union before the fall.
Sounds like a needed service: we need something that the doctors can prescribe and get from a pharmacist that actually is a harmless placebo instead of antibiotics. Maybe it can go under many different technical sounding names.
Just In Time For The Election, Politics.com (re)Launches
http://www.google.com/search?q=y+combinator+electronic+parts

Google would have found it for you on the first try.
Annoying - I keep on seeing different standards for X and Y, and never know which one I belong to, because I was born at the end of 1981. I am XY I guess.
My wife spent a few years in an aerospace engineering major, and I was quite confused when she ended up in a "C++ For Engineers" class. C++? Really? For engineers? They don't even teach C++ to comp sci students anymore.

Why not Python or something where they can just crunch numbers and write programs instead of learning how to navigate the minefield that is the C preprocessor and the C++ STL?
>Just try to remember that yours is not the first generation to pursue these goals.

Ours is the first generation with the technology to enable it.
The people you refer to in the 1960's didn't actually _do anything_ they just talked about doing something (there's a great South Park episode about this).

Matt and many others are doing what he talks about.
I was born in 1982. I grew up loving brands like Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I think one of my generation's defining characteristics is the way consumerism has been encouraged from such a young age, and the way we are willing to embrace brands.

Which leads me to a defining moment. In the 1970s Hot Wheels (or was it GI Joe?) tried to create an animated series based on their brand. The government stepped in and said: "No way. You can't have a 30 minute commercial for your product and pretend that it's entertainment."

When Reagan was elected, they said: "Ah, forget it, make as many brand-based TV shows as you want." And thank god they did, because we got lots of awesome 80s entertainment.

I read somewhere recently that a writer had produced a screenplay aimed at teens. The studio's advice was to put more name brands in the script, but only the ones that the kids think are cool. The coolness factor is supposed to bleed over from the brands to the film.

I'm not sure if these trends are good or bad, but I think it does have a big influence on what my generation likes, and the type of work they do. How many of us became graphic designers, advertisers, and branding experts? How many of us are creating a brand for ourselves?
GenX FTW!
Segway reinvents omni-drive? What's new here?

Here's a LEGO version: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/photos/19030
The real story is that the younger generation doesn't want to work hard because at some subconscious level they understand that the current system will not continue and will not reward hard work as it has.

Pundits said exactly that about Generation X in the 90s. They turned out to be mistaken, as you are.
| Hardware companies take significant physical capital to
| start, so employees can't just leave and do their own
| thing. That's why you don't see a flood of ambitious
| youngsters going into hardware. They can't - not with
| venture capital and a network of suppliers.

I suppose you meant 'not without'. This is still largely true, but there are also FPGAs and HDLs and simulators: you can do your R&D and prototyping with fairly low costs (and take VC funding by the time you're ready to market and manufacture a product).

You still have a significant point in this respect, however, and what I meant was more along the lines of entrepreneurs could do something to address the problem of "I didn't spend 4-6 years studying engineering to write PHP, MySQL and Javascript" -- ideas that appeal to those who want to solve harder problems (and perhaps problems related to hardware, but solved in software). If you look at openings at places like Intel you'll see they also employ a great deal of people in software functions (from compilers to data mining/machine learning (for manufacturing)).

There are lot of problems outside of social networking / advertising / web content (not that these are bad problems to solve, no offense intended to anyone) that take low capital to get into yet are complex enough to attract a pool of talent that has fewer options.
In most cities or college campuses the older buildings are all more beautiful than buildings built after 1940, at least to my eye. The worst are the brutalist and modernist buildings of the 50's and 60's.
>If history teaches us anything,

If history teaches us anything, it's that economic reality changes. In the 18th century, the optimal size of the firm was small. There were many independent artisans. In the 19th and most of the 20th, industrialization occurred and firms faced increasing returns to scale. Soon, the mega-corporate-conglomerate ruled the world. Now, information technology means that even small teams can be highly productive. Billions dollar investment funds are run by 20 people.

It is not unreasonable for young people to wish for or strive for the return of the artisan age.
> Again I think u joined yesterday just to fire this debate

There is a created field in the profile.

Edit: And yes, this should not have been raised here in the first place. This is not the forum for random prejudices.
SEFLIN FreeNet baby.
Unexpectedly, the Silent Generation isn't speaking up in the poll :)
Date Local: The case against long-distance relationships
You should read the Berkshire Hathaway annual reports and learn from the Great One.
software for embedded systems is still in C and C++ and that is generally what engineers care about when they are coding.

I agree it sucks, and it's too bad they can't move away from it sooner rather than later. Probably a great niche for any number of programming languages - if you can ever get the big multi-nationals and military to adopt it.