skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A 15-year secular bear market is not the same as a 15-year depression, or even a 15-year recession. It's fifteen years of overall crappy growth, not fifteen years of straight negative growth.

The last fifteen years, you'll note, have been especially good: only one minor blip in 2001 since the last recession ended in 1992ish. We can't expect that kind of thing to last forever.

According to this analysis:

http://www.amateur-investor.net/Secular_Bear_Markets_vs_Secu...

there were secular bears (as measured on the Dow) from 1906-1921, 1929-1949 and 1966-1982. No reason there shouldn't be another one now.

On the upside, this means relax. It doesn't mean we're all gonna die. It just means we might have to live though the 1970s again, except with better clothes and worse music.
Python ships with plenty of good python code. Just take your time and read through the Lib directory of your standard python distribution.

http://svn.python.org/view/python/trunk/Lib
Your hosting provider is behaving terribly. I'd change providers right away. You don't need a dedicated server either.
Human Beautification Algorithm
Proposed Structure for Raising Money
Ask HN: Best Financial Advice Posts?
Recently there were 2 good posts from accomplished businessmen on how to get rich:

Golden Rules for Making Money by P. T. Barnum (1880): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=310056

And

Mark Cuban on How to Get Rich: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=323540

Can anyone recommend any other sites/books that are as good as these? Thanks!
> Does/will Coke cut its branding budget?

Yes, of course. They all do. When you have less demand and people have less disposable income, you tend to put more money into measurable advertising that can directly impact the bottom line. I think you'll agree that Coke's brand is safe and as Buffett says, the moat is very, very wide indeed so to them, cutting branding budget will not show any impact for at least 2-3 quarters.
billcara.com
"YCombinator startup will be featured on TC in exchange for the exclusive launch story."

Translation

"TC: Hey, tell us about your startups when they're ready launch, we want to write about them on our popular and relevant website. YC: OK."
mechanical turk is a great way to get feedback or have surveys taken quickly and very cheaply. mturk.com
What's digital marketing expert mean? Just extensive experience with online advertising or?
Thank goodness for the dot com bubble
"... In OSUT, or the US Army’s basic training for grunts (read: infantry), I saw guys who couldn’t knock out one push up, run one mile in under 15 minutes, and knock out more than 5 sit ups, improve so greatly, that by the end of 13 weeks, were doing 40+ push ups, running 3-4 miles 7:00 min/mile pace, and rocking 50-60 situps. ..."

And they are also 17-21 y/o who are physically screened for fitness and physical defects and are closely observed for injury. Busy days and extreme levels of motivation (bad language & big sticks) also help. Don't go and try this form of pt, especially pasty faced programmers who's idea of exertion is moving phone books as monitor stands. Aim for fitness that is achievable that is maintainable for years to come even with your changeable schedules.
I remember a Discover magazine article on something similar from when I was just a little kid. I can't recall the exact thesis, but the basics was that researchers were using an algorithm to combine pictures of people into a single face.

The interesting thing was that the more pictures they combined into a face, the more attractive the face became! Of course, once they added enough faces, and the male and female pictures became almost the same androgynous face - still attractive but too average to be appealing in my (3rd grader at the time) opinion.

Beauty as an average seems like a strange concept at first, but I suppose it's true that people aren't usually attracted to sharp or surprising facial characteristics.
SonicSwap Puts Your iTunes Library On The Web For Streaming And Sharing
It does say

"In three years from now we have to figure out what the optimum model is."

There is a difference between being not profitable, and being optimally profitable.

*started with the wrong markup
"... Why diesel? ..."

Easier to store. In diesel engines you get 2X the mileage per gal.
Michael Arrington has made no secret (in the past, at least) of the fact that he HATES being scooped and LOVES to get exclusives. And so he should! He's trying to run the best blog in the game, so unless a piece of news is truly massive, why does he need to run non-exclusives?

As such, it's no real surprise that a lot of Y Combinator startups make it on to TechCrunch. As pg explains above, Y Combinator pretty much tells their startups this, and if they give Arrington an exclusive, that coupled with pg's reputation can seal a story pretty easily.
It appears that SL has had its growth significantly affected by the credit crunch:

http://secondlife.com/whatis/economy-graphs.php

I'm not saying it definitely has been.
Yes ofcourse! The struggle is ongoing; especially when you have a team of software developers. We do continuous market research by regular interviews/polls, keeping up with news in the interest area, talking to people (or forums) dedicated to your target area and finally looking at current companies in the focus area. We have one engineer give 30-40% time on market research and other's keep tab on specific focus areas.

Keep coding on the side, work on the re-usable components (in case you change the focus area or the main value add). Example, infrastructure (databases, user management etc), maybe getting your garage ready for primetime. Even if you discover the idea you have would not work in the market next idea can have a quick ride on this infrastructure.

And finally, experimenting is the best way to find out. If you are thinking revolutionary then any type of market research will not be conclusive. If the idea is evolutionary then you have lots to gain from existing market research (get membership of some marketing companies) and you own!

Best of Luck
~M
Better? Sure. But I'm not sure if your example holds. I don't know the situation, but I'll guess that building smaller homes is producing a type of product that is more recession proof. Similar to producing household or business basics, or (even better) cheaper substitutes.

I'm not sure you have an equivalence here. The small startup/small exit "industry" can be thought of as producing small businesses for purchase. Therefore, it is subject to the market for small businesses. I agree that the demand in this market is somewhat independent of the demand in mega-acquisition or IPO markets, but I think it's a big statement to say it is more recession proof.
"... Has anyone else struggled with this balance of work when building their prototype and business plan? ... The cheapest, fastest product ever built is the one never made ..."

At the same time over-analysis could stop you building a product at all. Would a bit of research, then release a version quickly getting feedback from users work?
Aren't those 'one -offs?'
Why does bootstrapper have a structure for raising money post?
I've tried the Gore-Tex thing, and honestly prefer to just layer up and stash dry stuff at home and office. I do tend to ride pretty hard (even when commuting), so the problem I have with a really "waterproof" outer shell is that I end up sweating as much moisture out from the inside as is trying to reach me from the outside.

I have a lightweight rain jacket and a pair of "Rain Leg" waterproof chaps which gets me through my 15-minute ride without getting too soaked.

I do agree about the mass transit in Portland in general -- TriMet is fast, cheap, and reliable, in my experience -- but I have to transfer twice in the 4 miles between home and work, so it's not really time-effective.
No!

The Erlang pitch is "Distributed, reliable, soft real-time concurrent systems".

Distributed supervised processes are a mechanism to achieve error containment and fault tolerance.

"making reliable systems in the presence of software errors" (pdf)
http://www.sics.se/~joe/thesis/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf
Yep, fixed. Nice work.
Audio preview for comments on YouTube (inspired by the XKCD comic!)
Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.
Just checked again facebook there is a way to send invitation to all my 500 email contacts with couple clicks. OF cause i understand that is facebook (with own dedicated servers and policy). But still can't understand why it does not work for us
"... I would recommend against it if your goal is health, because endurance athletes have health problems ..."

There is some truth to this statement. Endurance athletes do have the tendency to train beyond their limit running the risk of damaging cardiac systems for example. Especially as they age. I can think of 2 Olympic athletes in Aus who recently had to undergo medical checkups & procedures for this, Mark Tomkins a rower ~ http://www.nbcolympics.com/athletes/athlete=736/bio/ and Lisa Curry-Kenny an Olympic swimmer ~ http://www.finda.com.au/story/2008/08/24/lisa-curry-kenny-he... Both these athletes probably trained beyond what was probably good and suffered irregularities in their heartbeats. The risk of other injuries profiles include http://www.google.com.au/search?q=endurance+athletes+and+ris...
Time for Corporate Governance Reform?
Another thing you should do -

I clicked Yes, then it asked me to register, so I typed in my info. Then it says check here to agree to the terms and conditions, so I clicked there, and it took me to that page (normally I would have middle-clicked, but I was pretending to be a normal user). So I read the terms and conditions, and when I'm done I want to go back to sign up. So I press back, but my browser pops up saying "Do you want to resend the information?" I press Yes, and all the text I entered is blank.

Possible solution: add target="_blank" to the terms & conditions link.
This isn't forgiving users. This is adding a gimmicky feature that frustrates late night hackers.

How about trusting your users? Short of a BAC test there's no surefire way to know they're drunk, and in addition so what if they are? Impossible to detect the context of when someone really shouldn't be sending an email.

Virgin Mobile did a similar thing with their mobile service a few years ago in Australia. Just like this it generated a lot of media interest and discussion, and just like this it is a useless addition by a 'funny' engineer (Jon Perlow? Likely, given his single use case he quotes as inspiring this.). If anyone else had done it it would have been derided -- Google can't keep public goodwill like this for much longer.

Thank goodness it's in Gmail Labs and not actually released.
not sure what problem they're trying to solve.
I think the more interesting question might be why does this sound shady. It's not coincidental. People have a tendency to regard press 'deals' as very shady and be very suspicious that they are occurring.
It only sounds shady the way the author spins it. PG explained it in plain language above, and it sounds normal there.
Online advertising management, social media (whatever that means), branding and image building in digital. Knowing how to deliver your content (video, blog post, product) effectively online and in the best of cases making it so people -care- about that product.

That's my definition, at least.
XHTML  —  myths and reality
do {
reduceEnergyInput();
increaseEnergyOuput();
} while ( stillFat() );
Internet Companies Hammered by Economic Concerns
That might be true if people's compensation wasn't heavily option-oriented.
Google Using TinyURL?
Feeds layout is great in Opera 9.6
"... That being said, WebKit kicks Gecko's ass right now (at least for this particular app). It renders and scrolls many times faster and in fact is just shockingly good in Safari 3 (not quite as great in Chrome). ..."

Where is the slowdown? Is it the DOM? Is this with code custom code or libraries? I'm just curious as I've been re-listening/watching the Resig "Best Practices in Javascript Library Design" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LKDImgRfrg
Admittedly it was probably either the environment or the remote server causing the problem. I was running it under Cygwin on Vista, and it was a fairly huge project. I was running git under the same environment for the same thing (with a different remote origin), and even then I noticed git was much more snappy.

It's nowhere near an actual analysis, just my experience in my limited use (and probably influenced quite a bit by things that I've heard).
Say "strength training and conditioning" and that's exactly what it is.
IMHO, the secular bear market started in 2000, and we're halfway through it. The peak in Oct 2007 just barely bested the market peak in 2000, and then like a month later started its slide. Right now, stocks are where they were in 97/98, so that's 10 years with zero overall growth.
Uncov is hilarious mostly when it's exposing just how ridiculous and stupid a lot of the start-up scene is. Dziuba is pretty damn smart, and he makes a lot of good points, and it serves as a great counter to a lot of the TechCrunch-wannabe bloggers out there. I've always enjoyed reading it, and I don't see why a grim economy would make it less funny.
So, Ted Dziuba always strikes me as pretty much negative about everything. I don't know him personally, but everything I've ever read by him has been hyper-critical of everybody involved in our industry. And yet, he's involved in the industry as well (he has some kind of media startup or something, that I don't remember and can't be bothered to look up), and so ought to have a sympathetic view of the trials and tribulations of this life.

Attacking everybody and everything just doesn't seem like a healthy way to approach life to me, and whenever I read his articles, I'm tempted to respond in kind and explain what a douche he's being...which is then transferring the unhealthy attitude onto me.

I didn't realize uncov was a Dziuba effort, or I would have skipped it. And next time I will. Life is too short to spend it railing against everything and everybody, and I certainly don't want to get sucked up into his hate maelstrom.
while ( woman < attractive )

{

drink (beer);

}
Check out the latest browser statistics..

Firefox within a year should have 50% of the market
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Its all personal preference, but as designer dealing with IE and seeing these statistics makes me smile!
Ask YC: All things being equal, why would a browser render pages differently? 
I recently reinstalled my operating system, and reinstalled Mozilla Firefox. For all practical purposes, my configuration is exactly what it was two days ago.

However, now I've noticed that margins are a few pixels off in FF3. I'm concerned about designing on this box now, as my CSS might be a few pixels off.

I'm wondering, what might be the cause of this discrepancy?
This is equivalent to hiring an outsourcing firm to teach you how to program.
Most of these trainers will not teach you the necessary fundamentals, provide a harmful crutch, and for all of this charge money for readily available, quality information from the internet.
Yeah. That's history by now. Give it a rest.
Yep. Sorry for the late reply. I don't believe the two original authors are still here at CU. Though, you may contact Michael Main or Andrzej Ehrenfeucht with any concerns. They both have been around a while and are closest to theoretical CS.

It's a great read. Enjoy.

http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~main/theory.pdf

Facultly contact info can be found here:
http://www.cs.colorado.edu/people/faculty/bytitle.html
"... Webkit is probably an order of magnitude faster than Gecko right now. And as far as I can tell, JS has nothing to do with it ..."

This is where a cross-browser test suite could be handy checking which api you call against different browsers. Have you looked at http://ejohn.org/projects/dromaeo-javascript-performance-tes... then ( http://wiki.mozilla.org/Dromaeo ) and http://dromaeo.com/ to see the real difference b/w browsers?
> Yes, because it will mean a whole generation will struggle.

Which Generation? The baby boomers trying to retire on their savings that are slowing being wiped out?

The Gen Xers that should be comming into their peak earning years?

The Gen Yers that are starting out in the work force?

Or did you mean to say that the entire population will suffer for a generation, generally considered to be 20 years?
Death of Good Times? Hardly
Yeah - it's a tradeoff, and and an interesting one to look at.

You get higher efficiency as most of the data is in a locus around one sim - so it stays on one server and you don't need to move data about - check data, reorder data, etc.

On the other hand, you get lower overall utilisation - as you might have one server maxed out, with ten sitting idle right next door.

So interesting they've taken this approach - it's got the significant advantage of being more simple and robust than other approaches.
Yahoo Web Analytics
Smart angels and VC's will certainly still be investing. I would guess they'd be looking more favorably at companies that have a clear business model, but they're always going to take chances on interesting ideas/technology/people.
Two points:

A) Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.

B) The point of my posting the link wasn't to remind anyone of the personal history. It was that as a business decision, Facebook not accepting Yahoo's buyout offer looked brilliant in 2006 and 2007, but now looks questionable (at best). Who knows what Yahoo can or can't afford at this point, let alone $100 per user.
I think Zuckerberg is pretty adamantly against selling. Money or no money, he's currently got the keys to the one web site that every college student is coming to rely on. That gives him a lot of power, and it gives him a lot of leeway with trying to make money. So, as of right now, he's still in a pretty good position.
Why would you want to see that?
I don't understand why MySQL has 9 different storage engines.

Would someone mind quickly posting the benefits of that architecture as opposed to focusing on one 'storage engine' and making it really good?
I really doubt its the margins.

What kind of fonts are on the page? I bet the problem is that you don't have Microsoft fonts installed. (they're not included with Linux distros, for example)
In theory it shouldn't. That's why I try to be as risk neutral as possible and why I'm doing a startup.

The problem with some of these over capitalized startups is they throw themselves in to risking seeking situations.
See, the 15k in capital will be given out in denominations of canned food.
Yep, 2 years ago all the exact same people were talking Web 2.0! Change the World! Everyone can be the next YouTube! You'd be a moron to stay in your secure job when you could be a billionaire!

They're no more believable now than they were then.
Exclusives are shady because companies use them to "buy" uncritical press coverage. It's not clear that there are any exclusives here, though.
Ask HN: Where do you turn for graphics/design work?
I'm trying to find someone for some graphic design work -- where should I look?

I've had bad luck previously via craigslist.

I'm looking to find with whom I can build a long term relationship and hopefully work on a few projects I have in mind.

Where did you meet your designer/UI person?
Engineering Windows 7 : User Account Control
...and most of the military uses diesel engines for vehicles.
> The Gen Xers that should be comming into their peak earning years?

Drats, screwed again! Curse you demographics.

//shakes fist
The first paragraph and the first part of the second paragraph describes me so well that it's scary, so I really appreciate the advice in the rest of your comment.
I think the argument is that different domains impose different requirements on the storage engine. The type of data organization I would like to use for a read-mostly web application vs. an OLTP-type transaction processing workload vs. an OLAP-type analysis workload might all differ fairly substantially.
We switched from MySQL to PG when mysql suddenly returned different results in a unit test when we upgraded to a newer minor version. Never looked back.
I work for Georgia Tech's (I hate to use the term) incubator. Very different types of startups come out of there than YC. But media and investors come to us every day looking for new companies. Why? Because we see a lot of deals and vet them. YC does the same thing. Angels, VCs, and TC know that PG sees a lot and only accepts the best. PG is the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval for Web app startups.
I tend to chose PostgreSQL because of the query language. It is more comfortable to program in.

As ORMs become more prevalent, things like query language start to become less relevant, but so do relational databases. I really don't care how my data is stored, as long as it's safe and performs well.
Here is a good place, I'd need specifics but I'm a UI guy and looking for people to work with, hit up the email in my profile...
Japan's Nikkei down 10%
Where can I buy financial Dramamine?
Where can I buy some financial Dramamine?
If your product pipeline is empty - you have your product ready and you have no clear plans to upgrade it, you can reduce your engineering headcount. You will feel the pain of hiring back as soon as you decide what to build next, but if it is in a remote enough future, I say do it.

While it's not always the brightest strategy, it's not always a stupid idea either.
Except that the hypothesis is not that there's at least one person that would let an AI out, but that ALL PEOPLE would let the AI out.
I agree completely, you can't be a jack of all trades. Pick one thing you are great at, and focus on that. Your time is worth a lot more than it costs to get someone to do that secondary task
Well, I pose to you this question:

Would you rather have 1 type of car that the government makes that works pretty reliably and is a middle-ground car, or would you rather have a selection of cars to chose from; sports, truck, sedan, minivan, etc. ?

Everyone has different needs. I use MySQL extensively for it's memory-based storage engine, MyISAM for quick & dirty non-escential data i/o, and InnoDB for when data needs to be managed securely for processes.

I would use PG for transaction-based data processing in a high-volume situation with multi-processing clusters. Otherwise MySQL works fantastic for all my needs.
I would expect certain features of beauty to remain constant over time, like symmetric features--which is suppose to be indicative of normal development and hormone levels.

However, other features--what's considered attractive--I expect to change over time, especially if it's a secondary sexual characteristic used in preening. It'd be interesting to see it change over time.
Advice for Chris Messina
There's "How to Get Rich" by Felix Dennis - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=283983

There was some discussion on investment books too -
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=248469
The most low-effort way to get in shape is to start riding a bike wherever you go. The fun and practicality of this will keep you hooked. Get a fast bike that you love to ride and you will naturally push yourself.

Once you are reasonably fit from cycling, you'll have the enthusiasm to start a more structured exercise routine and stick with it, if you wish.
20 Places to Find Your Next Web Development Job
As the world economy continues to look shakier by the day, and major corporations have begun to trim work forces, it might not be such a bad idea to start looking for a new job. Sites like Craigslist, Monster, and HotJobs have a lot of listings, but they’re not well filtered. Searching for jobs on those sites can be a crap shoot, and many of the best job offers aren’t posted on those mega sites.