skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually, it's a slightly weird situation. Unemployment is fairly level across the economy. Job losses are concentrated in construction and manufacturing, however.

Also, finance didn't suffer so much - only about a 9% job loss. I suspect finance fared better than other bubble-related fields mainly because of their highly flexible wages. (I.e., construction or manufacturing has layoffs, finance just cuts bonuses.)

I graphed the figures a while back: http://crazybear.posterous.com/structural-shift-in-the-econo...
Great tips about converting videos to iPhone iPad iPod with best video converter
Six Bite-Sized Innovation Lessons From eBay's Design Think Tank
I agree completely with this article. Math and physics are hard. It requires a certain disposition to be willing to sit with a problem for minutes or hours and have faith that you will be able to find the solution. The fields are also littered with geniuses and people with significantly more talent than yourself. The gap between those who tried and those who were gifted was severe at my alma mater(USC).

I remember being in an intermediate mechanics course with only physics majors when our professor asked us how long it took us to complete the homework sets. I was regularly spending 15-25 hours a week on them. Some of my classmates were completing the sets in 2-3 hours. What shocked me wasn't that there were students who could complete the assignments that quickly but that:
1) students were either taking 2-5 hours or 10+ hours to complete the assignment. It was very bimodal.
2) that the gap in efficiency between the best and worst students was almost 10x.

In comparison my estimate of the gap in efficiency between the best and worst medical students is 1.5-2x at the most. No medical student can claim that they can accomplish in 2-5 hours what would take another medical student 15-25 hours to learn.

In the end I made the choice to go in to medicine where I was consistently in the top 3% of my class. There were a handful of 'superheroes' in medicine but not many. Most of us started in the same place and where we ended up ranking in our class was a function of effort. It was a refreshingly level playing field in comparison to physics.
I love the idea, but think I will stick with the FitBit, simply because I hate wearing anything around my wrists. Especially since I am typing at a keyboard so much of the day.
I want to say that while I did very well in math in high school, it didn't hold my interest until I got into calculus in university, and am now deeply interested in advanced vector analysis and other applied mathematics (I still hate proofs). I very much agree that much of high school is spent drilling useless topics into students heads that are completely unnecessary and never even explained beyond a few ridiculous "real-life" applications. All the interesting math is locked away, available only to those who suffer through meaningless tests and bureaucratic madness. It would be much better to introduce higher level topics first, showing students the incredible usefulness of high level math, and then using their curiosity to dig into the lower level concepts that make everything work, instead of forcing them to try and be interested in boring low-level rigor that , without a high-level structure, is of limited use.

It's like we're teaching kids mathematical assembly language instead of Python.
The modern capitalist society is extremely unlikely to end up in this state. Companies grow larger, that is their modus operandi. Once capital can be used to buy capital that produces capital you have eliminated humans from the equation. There is a level which we are approaching where some industries will become almost entirely automated. What happens in that situation is a few people make all the money and the rest don't. We are seeing an ever increasing disparity between wealth gained through capital investment and wealth gained directly through labour. Even high-end labour produces far less money than investment does. Most high-end labour tasks are tightly coupled to capital investment.

Do you really think that the history of wealth production is somehow going to change radically to a sudden redistribution of wealth to everyone so they can relax and take it easy while living off the fruits of others investments?
I'm curious: there are at least 3 or 4 such products (Up, WakeMate, etc.) ... do any of them have patents?
I am firmly convinced that if you don't enjoy programming you'll never actually become a programmer.

It does not matter how smart you are.

It does not matter how much you WANT to become a programmer.

So the first thing I do when introducing someone to programming is point them at tools that will allow them to be productive quickly to see if they "get a kick" out of creating things with code.

I think Joel's advice to start with C is GREAT. But only if the question is "I think I love to program. But I'm a noob. I want to become a great programmer. How do I start to become one?"
Creating groups for sharing content with a service similar to Instapaper?
Does anyone know of a service that allows a user to save an article to read later, but assign that article to a specific group? My technical knowledge is limited but growing so bear with me. Imagine if on Instapaper, you could create a group of people with which you have like-minded interests. They could be friends, family, or colleagues. All they would need was an Instapaper account. You could then throughout the day save articles, videos, and photos to those corresponding groups.

Could a bookmarklet be used for this? Could you be able to select a group from a larger list of groups using a bookmarklet?
Useful strategies for managing virtual teams
It’s a fact: 17.2 million people in the U.S. are working from home at least part of the time. That’s over five percent of the nation’s workforce.
If you'd like to see more examples, here's my slide deck from SVG Open:

http://mbostock.github.com/d3/talk/20111018/

A while back, I also gave a talk on D3's force layouts:

http://mbostock.github.com/d3/talk/20110921/ (slides)
http://vimeo.com/29458354 (video)

If you have questions about D3, I'd be happy to answer them here or in the d3-js Google group.
Steve Jobs' Vision: Liberal Arts And Technology
I'm pretty sure there was a link to it from Dennis ritchies' home page:

http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/who/dmr

The site is down now though. Some forums say it's temporary but I don't know for sure.
I'm working in a sector where several companies have spent $50M and produced things worse than what I want to produce.

It's sobering, and makes me think that there's a lot to know about business that I don't know.
[ First off: I'm a committer on Project Voldemort, a Dynamo-style distributed data store ]

First, Riak is excellent. I can only say positive things about it as well as the folks that work on it.

Re: "store for unimportant data". I'll go beyond that. Not only should new databases be suitable for reliable storage, new databases should do things than existing databases can't. I am a bit sad that NoSQL had become to mean "replacement for an improperly tuned, ad-hoc sharded MySQL setup". To be clear, having a simple setup that provides partitioning, replication and defaults more tuned to modern hardware is a fine goal -- but why not do better? If I wanted something better than MySQL, I'd use Postgres (or properly tune my MySQL installation).

For example, Dynamo-style stores allow for any replica to initiate a write (something not possible with primary copy replication), allowing high availability applications. Some systems (Voldemort, riak-core, HBase with co-processors) also allow custom code to run on the server, significantly extending the capability of a system in a way in which a store procedure can't.

It's also sad to see NoSQL style systems repeat many mistakes that MySQL has made. MySQL in late 90s with MyISAM is a completely different beast from MySQL today with InnoDB: far better concurrency, durability, referential integrity, better replication. BerkeleyDB JE is also a powerful beast: log structured storage (this is why we're using it as the default storage engine in Voldemort), Paxos-based leader elections with tunable replication.

Schema-less data or (as in Voldemort) evolvable schemas is also a huge feature, but it's not impossible to replicate it on top of MySQL (e.g., Friendfeed's data model).

Here are some things that I'd like to really see evolve in NoSQL space:

* Support for new and interesting distribution models. Allowing users to choose between eventual consistency, quorum protocols, primary copy replication and even transactional replication.

* Support for large, unstructured blob data: Riak is going the right way with Luwak, I believe Facebook has been using HBase as a front-end for Haystack -- it would also make a great choice for Haystack's metadata store.

* Most NoSQL systems support transactions within the scope of a single value (or document) via the use of quorums, serializing through a single master, etc... However, it'd be nice if something like MegaStore's Entity Groups (or Tablet Groups in Microsoft Azure Cloud SQL server) were supported.

* Secondary indices, whether internal or external (by shipping a changelog) to the system.

* True multi-datacenter support (local quorums if desired, async replication to the remote site) including across unreliable, high latency WAN links (disclosure: Voldemort supports this -- https://github.com/voldemort/voldemort/wiki/Multi-datacenter... )
IPad, iPhone and Android users to dominate online holiday shopping season
A Mathematician's Lament

"TEXTBOOK PUBLISHERS : TEACHERS ::

A) pharmaceutical companies : doctors

B) record companies : disk jockeys

C) corporations : congressmen

D) all of the above

We have millions of adults wandering around with “negative b plus or minus the square root of b squared minus 4ac all over 2a” in their heads, and absolutely no idea whatsoever what it means."

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:qcqr-s07yTgJ:...
Sorry, I`m not PG, but I couldn`t help but comment. I hope you don`t mind.

From everything I`ve seen about YC and PG, they seem to value the co-founder much more than the idea. So the second attempt may work, where the previous attempt failed, because the people were better.

My favourite story about YC are the guys from Reddit. When they applied, their idea was to develop an app which let you pre-order your coffee from Starbucks and avoid the line. The idea didn't go over too well, but PG and JL really liked the co-founders, so they brought them back and worked out a better idea. They realized that these guys were special enough that the idea didn't matter.

As for controls to prevent inside gaming...I'm curious to know the answer to this as well! Are companies encouraged to brainstorm together? If so, do they have to sign anything?
I believe this is largely incorrect.

You can learn to love something, largely because you find yourself successful at it. On other threads you can hear from people who hated math until they learned logic and they were off to the races. I am sure that programming has the same thing; in fact, I know programming has the same dynamic. I know this because there is a steady stream of "how Python/Ruby/mobile apps/ditching my boss made me fall in love with programming again" which suggests strongly that one can change affect. Too strongly for it not to be true.
“In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.” - Johann Von Neuman

I so related to that statement in college. I took all the necessary math and engineering (fancy word for more math...) classes to get my EE degree. I was able to apply the math well enough to be able to stick around in my engineering program (although there were SEVERAL different points in time I almost changed major, and I did dabble in getting a philosophy minor.) In college, my mindset was: "study enough to get by. beer. boobs. football" (yeah yeah, I went to a Big 10 football school) But I didn't really care about the math too much, as long as I got my degree and a paycheck at the end.

Now, out in the wild, I find enjoyment in the application of math (I do signal processing) and I only wish someone was there to help me see the "fun", or applicable side of things back in school, so I could understand even more now. I think the big problem with my college courses was that the course material simply existed just to exist, whereas now in my job, it exists to perform a function, and it's kinda cool to see how stuff works. But make no mistake, now that I'm though with my studies, I'm more than thankful I had to take all those ball beater math classes, so I actually (at one point at least) knew the 'math' behind the math i'm using, I knew more than the math, I knew how it was derived, and THATS every course building on each other, and it's tough, and there's distractions, but it's necessary.
Thanks! We will be integrating with Twitter as we grow (We launched Thursday).

When we first started working on this we considered an "add-on" platform to the likes of Twitter/Facebook - but decided we wanted our own system from the get-go. There was no real data-set to explain why, only the fact that we can control every part of the User Experience that way.

The obvious downfall to creating another Social Network is the challenge of building a userbase - but with the natural virality of debating we feel we have a strong chance to bring friends of friends into Barkles.

Thanks for your honesty :)
I've had a few co-workers come over from the UK and Ukraine. We've joked a lot about how Americans don't walk anywhere and I've even warned them to be careful walking because drivers don't ever expect anyone to be walking.

One thing that didn't come up much on MeFi is how religious the average American is. One UK co-worker was a quite astonished when I said that more than half of our office probably went to church almost every week.
Same here. Let me know if you're interested in talking.
20 Cool Facts about the New Madrid Seismic Zone
Your failure with the facts reveals that you are just an angry partisan.

President Clinton cut capital gains rates further in 1997 than G.W. Bush did. Also, President Carter cut capital gains, while Bush senior made no change in capital gains rates but famously raised other taxes in 1990.

Current longterm/shortterm rates range from 15/25 or 15/35, which is hardly "non-existent", especially when you consider that these rates are a double-taxation on resources that were already taxed as income.
ClickOpp and Website Marketing
Coding Machines: A hard SF short story (2009)
Worker Rush: Descent to Bronze (5-part series)
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Student Entrepreneurship Series cont'd
>When 50% of the people were farmers

Farmers are highly entrepreneurial and work very hard, a combine is a welcome invention. It's the hired farm hands who are worried about the combine harvester. It's a very interesting question, what will happen to our society when we have less and less need for manual and rote labour.
I went to the main URL after finding the blog confusing and when the blog reloaded I assumed it was the front page for what you are doing.

Problem is that people don't read. They scan for a rough idea of what any site is about. On your site, you need to start reading to figure out what this page is about (bad), and then have to get through a lot of distracting links and text that are irrelevant. Once you start writing you waste time telling us what your product isn't (physical teleportation) and describing how great it is before simply telling us what it does.

Suggest showing people what you do with a screenshot or photo that makes the app sound incredibly useful, with a huge "DOWNLOAD" button right beside it. The text should convince people sitting on the fence.
It doesn't matter that it is not scary. Most people are unilaterally afraid of anything to do with radioactivity.

Which is, in my opinion, like being scared of a house cat because you've seen lions before.
Quoth the FAQ:

---

Will you fund multiple startups working on the same idea?

Yes. If you fund as many companies as we do it's unavoidable you'll end up with some overlap. Even if you tried not to accept competing companies, you'd still get overlap because startups' ideas morph so much. The way we deal with it is that when two startups are working on related stuff, we don't talk to one about what the other's doing.

In practice it has not turned out to be a problem, because most big markets have room for several slightly different solutions, and it's unlikely that two startups would do precisely the same thing.

http://ycombinator.com/faq.html

---

With regards to "Also, are there any controls in place that prevent any inside game being shared with these competitive companies?" your main security is that YC are honest, not that there is a special Arc module which PG turns on to firewall off parts of his brain.
Donalddesantis is wrong about girls
I specifically like how your "team" page links back to your Dogfights.
Like what? Should we burn them in effigy? Seriously, what more is there to say?
Math at the lower level never holds anybody's interest (even those who go on to be very good at a STEM field). It is exactly (half of) what you said it is: boring low-level rigor. It is absolutely not of "limited use".

Your comparison to assembly/Python doesn't fit at all. You cannot start in on vector analysis without an understanding of geometry and algebra. You can start Python without understanding assembly at all. You can go back and learn assmebly after you've learned Python but this isn't true in most cases with higher level math. How do I explain the chi-squared distribution without wasting the entire semester on basic maths? Math isn't like an Apple product, it doesn't "just work."

Some make the argument that how we teach STEM based courses can be adjusted so that we start from high-level stuff and teach low-level mechanics along the way. While this approach is intriguing, it will never work. It relies on an assumption about students that isn't true: they are actually interested in the subject. If I had to guess the percentage of students with a deep interest in their subject I would put it at a little bit below the actual graduation rates. Most students are in degree programs nowadays because it is the next step, all of their friends are doing it, it is expected of them, and/or they are trying to make their parents happy. Many of these students will find out what it is they really want to do (whether it is in their first field or their second field), many will recognize that they hate their field and still slog through for social reasons, and many will fail. College is a life changing experience for most people, no matter what category they fall in.
Its the apocalypse. Everyone return to IE6 quickly.
Another factor: taxes.

$60k in one year is taxed at a higher rate than $30k/yr for each of two years.

RRSPs in Canada mitigate this... But you're probably still better off with $X/2 income.
Google: Microsoft uses patents when products "stop succeeding"
Oh, great to know that, thanks!
Agreed. I wish more books would adopt this strategy: "Ok, stop. To move forward with the application we will need code that does X, Y, and Z. Here is the spec that I want you to code for the next step. Work on it for a bit. If you're having trouble check out our forum for other people's attempts at a response and you can see 10 ways to solve the problem. On the next page you will see the code answer and the book will continue with an explanation of the code."

Even as a beginner you can tackle small snippets of code using the basic control structures.
Inversion of Control Containers and the Dependency Injection pattern for Java
You will learn things picking up C that you need when using those other languages, but which might not be immediately obvious if you start with them. Pointers, memory management, et cetera...
Symptoms Of Lead Poisoning
Hey, entrepreneurs, we’re living in a bubble
Thank you all: Relaunching after feedback from this thread
Just wanted to thank everyone for feedback on my site. Here is the relaunch

Few days ago I read a post here by @berube on testing new ideas. http://startupbound.com

A bit late for me to implement that concept as I already invested and launched my product. In that thread I had asked for some feedback on my product site because I was having good success selling offline but not from my website. I got some good feedback about the site and also some hints from @berube's post.
So here is the redesign and re-launch with new bold domain to match the game http://FuckThisCardGame.com . Already seeing positive response and inquiries from retail.

for those interested in seeing the old site here u go http://FuckThisCardGame.com/oldsite.png
...except nobody can tell me accurately when half of my life is over so I can retire at the right time.

Note particularly that statistics only work when applied to large enough populations. I will not be 70% dead at 70, I'll either be 100% dead or 0% dead.

http://jerryjousting.blogspot.com/2011/04/statistical-single...
That does sound like fun. Can you address how meaningful the work feels to you too? (I don't mean the question to be provocative.)
I think the human race will reach the apex of its evolution when all the social darwinists die off.
Show HN: Listen to and share your podcasts on Flapcast.com
If you want to get someone hireable as quickly as possible, tell them to learn C# or Java by all means.

But if you want them to "achieve enlightenment", you've got to get them on scheme. And if you want them to see through all the smoke and mirrors, and gaze upon the simplicity that is the machine, you've got to teach them C. Assembly will work too, with the proper arch (and x86 is not it).
I really want to use D3 but my target market is non-US (heavy windows use) and non-technical users. For that reason, it is hard for me to push them to change their browsers away from IE.

Do you have any recommendations for getting D3 (really SVG) to work on IE? It seems like there was a hacky way to do this in protovis but in d3 it is difficult. Do you assume people will simply not use SVG and use the DOM instead? Chrome frame?
It's not about the size of the database or deployment. It's about the number of applications interacting across the same relational interface. The fact that applications can turn off strict mode is a big blow in this area. You can't be sure your data is "obviously correct" to paraphrase a different HN post.

One of my customers logs certain web data into a MySQL database and loads/processes it in a PostgreSQL database every day. The data is then accessed in Pg by at least three different applications.

That's reasonable, btw.
I was just going through their archives trying to answer my question and found a great discussion on this post:

http://musicmachinery.com/2011/05/14/how-good-is-googles-ins...

There are some insightful comments from names I recognize from my research.
I hear a lot of the first half of your post but not a lot of your second half of your post (I agree with both). Most people look back and remember how hard/dumb/boring/useless that one class was and how they never use it in real life. Barely anybody looks back and remembers how something that they learned in their math class was integral to their ability succeed later on in their career. For example, almost everybody complains about how hard/useless calculus was. These same people are able to take a volume integral in cylindrical coordinates no problem. There is a fundamental disconnect here.

And anything you don't remember? Well, being familiar with a concept makes it a hundred times easier to learn the second time.
We'll make it work. We are just getting started with Hackodex. It would be fun to connect hackers in real-time to build something cool.
Thanks, glad you like that! It always annoys me about how static team pages usually are on various websites.
Fix Casc Exe Error