skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You do what statisticians do ... take a small sample and estimate.

Spend 20 hours each doing 10 different things, and then pick 2-3 of them to spend 200 hours doing. Then pick the one. While it may take 10,000 hours to be truly awesome, you can probably get a sense of being "good" at something in a much smaller amount of time.
Yes, but HN being a North California and tech-centric site this is quite relevant, IMHO.
I think that engineering disciplines where professional certification are required tend to do a better job of rewarding experience. So do most professional degrees.

(That said, my father's an EE, and I know that age discrimination is a problem in his industry, too...it's just posed as a question of salary discrimination.)
Is pagination still necessary?
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/say-hello-to-gmail-voi...

"And in the spirit of open communications, we designed this feature using Internet standards such as XMPP, RTP, and H.264, which means that third-party applications and networks can choose to interoperate with Gmail voice and video chat."
There are many aspects to consider in the differences in drop-out rates. One is that not all engineering programs are the same. MIT's education is very different than RPI's or Georgia Tech's (I'm went to GT). The RPI or GT style is more like 5 years of boot camp (yes, its really a 5 years program, another problem to consider when comparing against a management degree). Its a non-stop grind of 6 classes at a time with tests every week. MIT's is fewer classes with higher student:teacher ratio. The MIT program is structured to guide students to the finish line. The GT or RPI approach is very clear that they are trying to cull students.

I don't think either approach is wrong. They are just different. Do they produce different types of engineers? maybe. There are many other aspects to consider as well.
You make a pretty broad generalization that programming sucks as a career. I think you need to compare the best engineering jobs to the best MBA jobs, and the average engineering job to the average MBA job. So compare working at justin.tv to working as a Bain consultant. And compare being a typical big company engineer to being a middle manager. Does engineering still come out poorly as a career choice? Being an MBA middle manager's not exactly a load of fun, and you have student loans to pay off.
Not quite. My father was an aeronautical engineer. He hit his 40s and.. that was it. He was, thankfully, offered voluntary redundancy and they replaced him with someone half his age.

Thankfully, he had it in him to go back to college and retrain. He's now an analytical chemist, making far more and doing less work ;)
I'm guessing that none of those you linked to do the job, because they'll just send periodic snapshots. I want something that does streaming.

Worst case I'll install Skype but I won't be able to get the client in the browser.

I just can't believe there's no open source streaming webcast software.
It is quite a dilemma. It depends on the number already voted. For example, if a post I don't agree with is quite rational and has low votes I up-vote. But if it already has some votes I leave it there... Unless it has a double digit number and the other side is much lower, then sometimes I down-vote (and feel almost guilty about it.)

Many times I agree with someone but their post is incomplete or has a part that isn't good, then the replies tend to say the whole side is invalid because of that... It's very hard for me to pick what to vote specially when groupthink or fanboys back either side (yes, including my side.)

There isn't a perfect way without granularity on votes.
So if you could do it again, what degree/career path would you have chosen?
Gears of War 2: A Sterling Sequel for Xbox
So the solution is that these neighbors kids should be charging a lot more. Why would they do anything for $20?
The average case is effectively the only one that matters, since that's where most people will end up.

The fundamental difference between your average MBA and your average engineer, in my opinion, is that engineers are viewed as tactical assets by the business people, whereas business people view themselves as strategic assets. Only in small tech companies are the technical problems so important that the engineers become strategic advantages. That kind of thinking is still pretty rare.

(But for what it's worth, your hypothetical Bain consultant is earning a six-figure salary, traveling around the world and developing hugely important business experience and professional contacts that will serve him well when he leaves consulting. Even the best engineering jobs have limited expanse and authority -- you interact with techies, focus on the details of implementing someone else's vision, and rarely rise to a level where strategic thinking is required.)
After having read a lot of these types of language debates, the only conclusions I can safely arrive at are 1) that every language has its advocates and 2) some people are highly productive in their preferred language, much more so than the average programmer would be in their preferred language. But the real question, imho, is how do average programmers compare? How will the same app written in C++ and Java compare, when written by non-superstars? The question merits some empirical research.
What symmetric high bandwidth applications?

I can't think of any consumers that want to upload as much as they download.
Pagination is not just necessary but the only way for many scenarios in production. A typical example is fetching sorted and transformed search results from a large catalog. Without pagination you get to terabytes. Not just that I/O would take ages and cpu usage skyrocket, it would make the system un-cacheable too. This is very common for large web services. Of course, it all depends on the details.

On the other hand, many content websites often do pointless pagination (perhaps to increase page views for ads.)
Free Beer for Hackers here in Innsbruck:-)
I wonder how creating a raid1 device composed of a real block device and a ram disk would serve in this regard. Has anyone tested this?
Most of these options don't pay real money. Amazon Mechanical Turk? Really?
(On open/free source licenses.) I came full circle back to GPL. If you see the glass half-full, the latest AGPL is a great option for a web startup to distribute their code. It would address the question from investors or plain MBA-style CEOs "How would you prevent a competitor from taking this code and making a better service on it?" while at the same time giving grounds for a community of competitors to factor their development costs. (Including debugging as development.)

I couldn't think of a scenario where somebody can argue they want to take an open/free source project, modifying it, and give a service online without redistributing the code. Well, unless if that person is an [insert your favourite derisive descriptor for anti-social people.]
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It's a problem of information asymmetry:

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

There are various solutions to those kinds of problems, including signaling (expensively demonstrating that you're worth it), some kind of screening service, that for a fee will aid buyers in choosing who is really worth it, things like guarantees, and so on.
http://cappuccino.org
Ask HN: Any good publications that deal with the Internet?
I'm working on an essay regarding the Internet and how creative minds can use it - regarding various mediums and their limitations. Usually I'd just publish it online and link here, but this one is exceptionally good, and I'd like to see if I could get it published somewhere more reputable. Does anybody know of any good publications that deal with articles like that?
dim sum ... I find it pretty tasty, but that's mainly due to the seasoning and marinate, not really the feet itself.
Can you imagine searching for "John" on Facebook without pagination?

I think of pagination as an incentive to make search better, because people rarely click to page two...
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I suppose that for many sites this simple equation is the main reason for pagination:

pagination == more pageviews == more ads displayed == more money
The major difference there is that China caters to expat enclaves because they have money, just like US caters to Jewish enclaves. Yes, I agree it's elitist, but that doesn't make it any less 'real'. It's part of today's China.

Your example is also a little off; immigrants band together out of necessity and survival. That's why there are Chinatowns and Indiantowns, etc. It's in their best interest.

Side note: expats tend to flock to other expats due to several reasons, but one is also survival. It's much easier to find friends or business partners with other expats because there less ulterior motives. As an expat, whenever you meet a native Chinese, you're not sure they're nice because you're an expat and they need something, or what. In fact, most Chinese people are very regionalist and are not 'nice'. They're only nice because they think you have money.
It is true there are many facets of China. The way some expats live in Shanghai or Beijing is a small view of that. Amongst the locals, the lifestyles are highly diverse. The difference between East and West China is enormous.

I have lived in Shanghai for over 8 years (I'm a white male from the U.S.). I live in the nicest part of town and my office is a comfortable 5 blocks walk from home. I pay dearly for this comfort. And I'm not naive about what the high cost differential is buying me. I do know how the locals live. I'm married to a local Chinese lady and we have a family together where I deal with issues of raising a child according to multi-cultural values.

Do not confuse the simple fact that many expats are willing to pay for whatever comforts of home they can with the fact that most of us that have been here a while are aware of the difference.

If you are young and ready for an adventure, come to China and live like the local poor for a while. It will be a great life experience. After that, you should have enough perspective to use what money you have to live with what comforts you find most desirable.
>Since you took millions of free code for parsing all these pre-existing document formats, don't you think you owe to the community and should release your convert-to-flash code as well?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't iPaper descended from Macromedia's Flashpaper? If so, they might not have the rights to open-source it even if they wanted to.
Interface is very nice. Well done.

The main challenge when doing this is the quality of the data, and that's where you still seem to have some issues. It's a hard problem though.
Is Now the Time to Buy Stocks?
I fondly remember his days playing for the Hornets. But he's the exception, not the rule.
I'm probably paraphrasing someone here, but ... by the time you start seeing articles like this, chances are you're late already.
Stop IE6 campaign - A campaign devoted to wiping IE6 off the web
Clean Room Technician: You know what they do with engineers when they turn forty?
[to Aaron, who shakes his head]
Clean Room Technician: They take them out and shoot them.
Furthermore, it's stupid to compare numbers of technical graduates. It's not the numbers that count but the quality.

Has there been any academic research on the average quality of technical graduates in the USA versus India and China? I don't mean just memorization of facts and formulas, but ability to creatively solve real-world problems. Perhaps that's impossible to objectively measure.
Excellent analysis!! There are many local Chinese that are very competent and much better equipped to be successful here than foreigners. Best of luck to them all ;)
1. Wait until Apple mention your app on an advert

2. Sell sell sell!!!!!!!!

3. Profit?

They don't get any traffic to their website, so I guess the question is how many people they have using their app, and how much cash does that make.

Sounds like they had to do some layoffs recently, so I'm guessing the answer is "not enough".
Proof people hate coming back to work on Monday's.
i think if you invest for the long term (3 yrs or more), a lot of stocks are still undervalued at this point... and they continue to fall as we speak.
"Location aware" is the most over hyped nonsense since tag clouds IMHO. Sick of it.
Apparently you've identified a major inefficiency in the labor market. You ought to be able to make a killing by founding a company to compete against those run by frat-boy MBAs and employing the talented engineers your competitors have discarded.
Not for me. When this kind of crisis hit a bottom it plateaus there for a while and doesn't suddenly spike up 30%. In fact, in that graph the top curve follows the bottom curve, except the last bit. Based on that they should predict dividends will collapse soon dramatically.

They either didn't base their argument well or are completely delusional and can't read their own graphs.

And this current crisis is all about prediction based on past data can be plain wrong. See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=360412 The End of Wall
Street (HN main page today. Beware it is very long!)
You can click to hide "chat" and "invite" so they just appear as a single line item. They have two new lab features which may help you.

Google Calendar gadget - Adds a box in the left column which shows your Google Calendar.

Navbar drag and drop - Allows you to reorder the items in your navbar using drag and drop. With this you may even move chat and invite way to the bottom.
On the downside, most bugs ever discovered are most likely in c code. Especially memory leaks, buffer overflows etc.
Paypal has a load of services for billing credit cards and sending money to a merchant account; they purchased Verisign's online payments business a while back. Presumably that's what's being discussed here.
the point isn't that we've necessarily hit the bottom. if you look at the dividend/price chart, we're probably heading into a big "hill" just like some of the early ones (we've only begun to swing up.

the point is that things are relatively cheap where we stand today. they may get cheaper, but they may not. look at your downside risk (missing 25% of a bigger bottom) vs. upside risk (we've already hit bottom).

or, if your nicholas nassim taleb, you think that you'd be crazy to make any decision based on the graph, because tomorrow everything could go to zero, and you'd be broke.

i'm thinking of shifting part of my portfolio to stocks. but given volatility, like the article says, it's going to be a small segment, and i can allocate more as it goes up. but i'm investing in the long term, and if the S&P goes to 0 then i won't be worrying about money. i'll probably be worrying about people trying to break into my house and steal my cans of campbell's.
I read an article recently saying that Google tested more results per page (i.e. less pagination), and that the increased search/loading time actually made users have a less positive experience.
I don't know where you're getting several hundred dollars/mo from. Customers obviously need to consent to the recurring billing upfront, but I'm not aware of requirements more onerous than those imposed by the credit card companies.
Which is what confuses me. How can there be a consensus that something is undervalued over a period of time ... wouldn't the markets just correct the price quickly?
Soon, you'll be able to TEACH each other also from within Gmail.
yes, yes, yes. stocks with dividends. stocks that have been crushed. big name companies that have been around for a long time and will continue to be.

appreciate your downside risk against your upside potential. if you fear the market will go to zero than we will all have much bigger problems than counting our returns.

if you have any faith in the american model than you must conclude that this too shall pass.
Exactly. In most cases, pagination isn't about performance at all, just page views.
AFAIK, if you're not doing loads (well into six figures) of transactions, you don't need to get external auditors in. But there's a lot of work in figuring out what is required, and the penalties for screwing up are severe, so you may want to anyway.
New Relic Raises $6 Million For Rails Performance Monitoring
http://www.amazon.com/Panic-Story-Modern-Financial-Insanity/...
Well you can consider Streetread ( http://www.streetread.com ) a member. Try accessing the homepage w/ IE 6...

Big supporter of this..
I like this idea, although maybe not as much as the chatbot game.

The problem has already been mentioned. If you're going to make something for celebrities, it better be something that they are willing to pay for....and this doesn't seem to meet that threshold.
If lotteries are a tax on those who don't understand odds, buying in the current market would be a tax on those who don't understand what's happening.
It would be pointless. Just let linux cache the data and don't worry about it.

If you must, cat all your database tables to null (i.e. read all the data in them) a few times, then you'll be sure they are in memory.

If you used a ramdisk you'll be paying double: once for the data, and again for the cache.
Ask HN: Hey hackers how many hours do you sleep?
just another poll...
The author suggests several "contest" sites, but these typically rip off rather than reward freelancers.
Hi Technologizer.

[Disclaimer: I am far from a HN old schooler, or admin, or super mod, I'm just a reader. This is just a suggestion.]

This account only submits links to that site (and it looks like most posts on it, save the ones on topics already on HN main page.) While most posts look relevant to HN, at least relatively, this post in particular doesn't seem to worthy.

Your last 60 submissions have only 78 votes, 1.3 votes on average each (if you take out the default vote 1.) This saturation of the channel will probably backfire on you with people just ignoring you.

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=technologizer

In particular this entry doesn't have anything with HN and looks just like an automatic submission, IMHO.

What I mean is perhaps it could be better if you throttle it a bit as some of those posts seem interesting for some people here.

Just a thought. (And crossing fingers you're not PG's nephew or something :)
It is in memory, only it's linux that does it and not mysql.

You can also create a memory table in mysql if you don't need the data stored permanently.
GOOG & YHOO researchers agree: tasks, not search, are the future
I like bugmenot and retailmenot. Not so much CushyCMS though.
Tech writer Emru Townsend, who chronicled his leukemia battle at HealEmru.com, has left us
Product Reviews:Airport Tycoon 3 & Luxury Liner Tycoon Twin Pack
Unfortunately, 25% of the users of my site use IE of some kind, and about half that is IE6. These are people who will either ignore me if I ask them to get a new browser or will never come back.

Look guys, there are reasons that people don't upgrade, some good some bad. The other day a friend's 386 died, and with it all these Lotus 123 documents, now, do I berate them for using obsolete software or attempt to get them back on their feet?

(And yes, it is annoying to support IE6 and I have burned development time doing so. Mostly its "kind of okay" though, since I haven't run into anything too serious.)
>by the time you start seeing articles like this, chances are you're late already

I disagree on two counts:

1. The market has seen no significant net increase in price, and is down significantly on recent (12 month) highs. So one may be early for this cycle (or at bottom). Alternatively, one may be late in the sense that there will be no further investment opportunities ever in the future, and that one would have needed to invest during a previous cycle:)

(This is see as evidence that it is not too late)

2. Markets act on fear and greed. As Buffett said, be "be greedy when others are fearful". Sentiment changes slowly, and heterogeneously (by which I mean different investors change their sentiment at different times and speeds). My observation is that most people are still fearful, but some are not, and the author of this article (and Buffett) are two such examples. So the logic "one person calls 'buy' -> no opportunity" does not hold for me. Now, if many (>=50%) are calling 'buy' then it is time to be fearful.. (This I see as rationale for why your statement isn't true, but not evidence)
If you're desperate(I once was), they're great ways to build your portfolio... but once you have something to your name, run and don't look back.

(But keep your loyal customers. They're usually cool once they realize that you don't suck.)
Like GM?
I mean, what if there's a sqrt or something like that in the model. Imaginary numbers are fun to pay off, but no fun to receive :)

Also: perhaps the model was built up using empirical data and they just never really had a chance to update the model when home prices were going down... I don't find it all that weird for them to produce data-driven forecasts ;)
I was asked to provide a little support to a neighbour the other day - nothing serious but I did notice the Windows 98 machine was running some pretty old software. The owner made his case that the machine did everything he needed just how he liked it so he was going to keep his machine locked down and unchanged. Hard to argue against that as it is exactly the sort of line a great many corporates take - get it working then leave it alone.

Why bring this "Luddite" up? Well he is an active participant in a number of web communities plus does a fair bit of web shopping - he is certainly not the sort of user I would want to exclude from my sites. He will "upgrade" one day when his current PC dies but that could be a while yet.
Luckily most of the really annoying sites have a "printer friendly" version of their articles - and printer friendly is m_eiman friendly. And Instapaper friendly too, yay!
Seriously, very, very funny!
I fear I may be breaking with etiquette here, so please let me know if I am, and then I will remove this comment..

I did an analysis of this recently, available at: http://saffell.wordpress.com/

My conclusions:

1. Now is a better time (on average) to make a 5-10 year investment than a random point in time is.

2. For 20-30 year investments, the recent fall in prices make little difference to returns over such a long period.

This is all based on historic data (from 1871 to 2008), which, as we all know, is no guarantee of future performance..
Speaking of pagination with Google, has anyone else noticed lately that
Google seems to be forgetting the pagination value you can configure via
the "Preferences" link? For a while I thought that perhaps Firefox was
losing the cookie, but the same browser hasn't had any trouble keeping
me logged into my Google account, even when the search preferences are
lost.