skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really wish someone could explain this to me. My local observations are the same as parent. I have no unemployed, graduated friends, in fact, I have still-in-school but employed friends. They're all making great salaries and living in fun cities like San Fran, New York, and Boston.

I practically have a job offer at a firm in New Tork and I'm a year from graduating and I've a decent shot at graduate programs too.

I must be doing something fundamentally different, or there's some systemic bias in my favor. I am lower middle class, white, male, nerd, not particularly socially apt, average university, ~100k loans, American, CS and physics maajor, living in the northeast.
Viduthalai Mani - Front-End Developer | Web Designer | UI Designer
I think what we are seeing over and over again as articles similar to this run in papers all over (HuffPo, NYT, WaPo) is this point: Most young people are bad at searching for jobs! Just like we're bad at dating, we're are bad at job searching. Obviously not everyone is bad, but a large majority of people who are unemployed or underemployed do not have a system in place that makes there job search efficient or effective. I'm currently working on addressing this problem, so hopefully stories like this can stop.
The site would benefit from some kind of tour/overview that doesn't require signing in first.
Cool name, bros
I may be missing something rather obvious here, but I've read the article three times, and can find no reference to 'coaching' or 'after-school tutorials' at all here. Are they mentioned elsewhere?

As a former teacher, here is an example lesson plan:

AGE GROUP: Year 5
TOPIC: Introducing prime numbers

STARTER: Mixed multiplication table questions on board.
MAIN ACTIVITY: Write the number 92 on the board. Ask students whether '92' appears in any multiplication table. When the answer '2' is received, stress that multiplication tables do not end at 10 or 12, but continue on indefinitely. Repeat for the numbers '999', '186', and '495'. Next, write the number 71 on the board. Students will conclude that it does not appear in any 'tables'. Explain that it does, offering a reward for the first correct answer. With or without hinting, get the answer '1' or '71'. Offering a second reward, get the second of the pair. Explain that every whole number is in the 'one' times table and the 'itself' times table. However, such numbers are called 'prime' if those are the only ones. Ask students to name other prime numbers below 50, discussing suggestions.

Complete is_it_prime.doc. Students who finish quickly should attempt is_it_prime_2.doc.

That's not meant to be particularly inspiring or anything, just representative. As a teacher, you have a legal obligation to have such a plan for every lesson you teach (this was true in the UK, can't speak for other countries).
PHP: print vs. echo, which one is faster?
There's always a conflict between goal-directed, sacrifice-oriented work patterns and life-directed, interpersonal-directed work patterns. If you're goal-directed, you're looking at that 100MM in sales. If you're life-directed, you're counting the days until the baby takes its first steps.

I'm unhappy with everything I've read along these lines, and I've read a lot of it on HN and elsewhere. I'm also unhappy with my own balance many times. The problem is that both extremes are not lives I would want to have. I do not want to be a Buddhist, sitting around in loose-fitting clothing feeling perfect happiness. I also do not want to be a driven type-A sort that is counting pennies the last day of his life.

My best guess so far is to start out enjoying the struggle -- go freaking do something with yourself and the world. As you begin to gain traction, back off and actually have a life. The trick, of course, is learning when and how to back off, so I probably haven't added much to the discussion. :)

One thing I know for sure is I agree with this thesis: happiness cannot be just around the corner. It must be whatever you are doing right now.
There isn't, really, but it quells any concern of fit/finish.

When I was learning to play guitar (self-taught), I had the expected hard time. I didn't know what I was doing. So, sometimes, when something went wrong, I was inclined to blame the instrument. I mean, I'd only paid $200 for this guitar, amp, headphones, etc., in one package. They can't be any good, right?

When that guitar broke, I still wasn't any good at guitar, but I went out and bought myself a Les Paul. Les Pauls are expensive guitars but, most importantly, they're used by people who play guitar for a living and are taken on tours and all that jazz. I paid for the privilege of not having an excuse to blame the instrument any more. It's more guitar than I'll likely ever need.

Now, when I do something wrong, I at least know that the fault is mine and not the instrument. (Yes, I know it's a poor craftsman what blames his tools, but I was indeed a poor craftsman, and didn't know any better.)

I suspect it's the same thing with bikes, jeans, etc. You're buying a better quality product because it's better, and gives you a sense of satisfaction that you won't have to worry about a loose thread on those jeans, or a squeaky chain on that bike. You're rich, so it doesn't matter that it costs 10x the cost of the next best bike, and is probably only 2x better.
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The real service name is KickUp, not Music Kickstarter. Arctic Startup has the company name in the title, unfortunately.
I was hesitant to criticize this person because I know how shitty the job search can be for recent grads (or anyone for that matter), but a few things bug me about the letter.

- It is written with a tone that lacks accountability and instead seeks to blame the situation on outside factors. To a certain degree this is true, but the bit about nepotism bothered me. There are plenty of people who are able to get jobs without being related to the CEO.

- Does it mention what industry or city/region the author is looking in (I admit I skimmed some of the article because it's really long and was making me depressed)? I know I'm somewhat insulated because I live in New York and I'm a developer, but I am trying to be unbiased. I went to a good (not top 10) state school, had a really bad GPA, and graduated right in the heart of the recession. I still had many good opportunities and a job within 3 months. The same goes for almost all of my friends, many of whom are not engineers or programmers. Maybe the author should consider looking in a different geographic region.

- The part about probably never being able to get married and have kids because of money seemed a bit melodramatic to me. People who aren't rich have been getting married and having kids for thousands of years.

- Is moving in with his parents an option while he looks for a suitable job? I got the impression that he has parents with at least some means because of the bit about sending him cash if they felt bad. This would seem like a good idea rather than spending everything you make on rent.

The moral of the story is that I understand the job market sucks, but if he is really as qualified and hard-working as he claims, it shouldn't be that hard to find something.
I am currently working on a project that involves some scraping as well. The most annoying things I came across so far are:

- Totally broken markup (I fixed this by either using Tidy first or just using a Regex instead of a 'smart' HTML/XML parser)

- Sites that need Javascript even on 'deep links' (I fixed this by using PhantomJS and saving the HTML instead of just using curl)

- Inconsistency, by far the most annoying: different classes, different formatting, different elements for things that should more or less be identical (basically fixing this whenever I come across a problem but sometimes it's just too much hassle and well, ask yourself if you really need to get every single 'item' from your target)

One more thing: RSS is your friend. And often you can find a suitable RSS link (that's not linked anywhere on the site) by just trying some URLs.

PS: No, I am not doing anything evil. If this project ever goes live/public, I'll hit all the targeted sites up and ask for permission. Not causing any significant traffic either.
> Am I bitter about all of this? Not entirely, because it all just sort of works itself out. If I can't get married (dating is tough when you're broke) and have kids, I don't need a home bigger than 500 square feet, nor is more study to obtain employment that I'm not only happier with and better at than what I already do but also more lucrative really necessary, since I'll only be supporting myself. As for the issues revolving around savings, investments, and retirement, you may be surprised to find out how much happier one can be if you simply accept that you'll be working until very close to your death

He has a hard time applying for jobs which he may or may not be qualified for and he's resigned himself to living alone in a 500 square foot apartment until he dies... Yikes. With an attitude like that I'm sure he interviews really well.
Ask HN: Would you pay for an Ad-Free Facebook?
I was just wondering whether people would pay for an ad-free Facebook? Apparently, each user is only worth ~$2 every 3 months and quite frankly I would pay $10/yr not be served ads.
I've consistently read that buying expensive mattresses is the way to go.
Google’s Knowledge Graph: Yeah, that’s the Semantic Web (sort of)
> these places assume I'll leave as soon as something "corporate" pops up.

This sentence struck me as a little odd. Is the USA at a point where McDonald's expect a burger flipper to commit to a career with them?

Maybe I'm biased because all the non-skilled jobs I worked were before/during university, but I never got the feeling that anyone believed I'd retire from there.

Yes, we had the whole rigmarole at the interview "I want to work here because you do great customer service blah blah", but I was never asked about spending my entire career there.

I even know a guy who was begged by the McDonald's staff to work weekends there (after he left for a corporate job), because he was better than all the other staff.
> I really wish someone could explain this to me.

I'll try, although I don't have any special insights, I don't think it's mysterious. From goodside's comment: "I majored in CS." From yours: "CS and physics maajor". I probably don't have to tell you that there's tremendous demand for so-called STEM majors. I don't know about your friends' majors, but these are really both "isolated, non-representative examples".

I think there are plenty of people going through what this 29-yo is going through, and part of that might be because they have degrees in things like English, Art history, Philosophy, etc, and have little or no concrete idea of how to apply this degree in the real world. Part of it is also because there is little support for developing skills outside your narrow major in many colleges and universities, and there's this drift between what many students expect from school (prepare to get a job) and what the schools deliver, which is more abstract. Plus many new grads don't know much more about how to go about finding a job than just pumping out resumes, because that's what they're told to do by (some) "career centers" and counselors on campus.
This is a nice useful blog post, but it does lead me to question to state of Rails -- is it me, or is it incredibly complicated these days to build a production ready Rails site?

I still love the simplicity of developing with Rails, but all these things you need to remember to deploy give me cold sweats.
That depends on your net worth, your definition of 'expensive', and which Lotus you're talking about.

The Elise is on the high side of 'normally priced', but as commuters they're great because they get decent gas mileage.

A well-appointed Exige is close to $80k I think, and cuts the mileage in half. It's a track car, really, so anybody driving it on the streets is probably 'doing it wrong', but I've driven more serious cars as daily drivers so I'm not one to judge.

I can't really comment on the Evora because it's 'new tech', and is supposed to be expensive as such. They're expensive compared to the Prius, but they aren't really comparable either.

Edit: s/Elan/Elise/g. Memories.
>not particularly socially apt

I'd put money on your being a lot more socially apt (in the areas important for this stuff) than you think you are, as compared to the rest of the population.

"socially apt" is just another word for "common sense" or "not being a self-hindering idiot" in a lot of circumstances. It doesn't have to mean being a slick sunglasses-at-night bastard.
Mangento Development Best Language for Ecommerce Solutions
I somehow don't think that's the case, given that even crappy airlines have dozens of support staff dedicated toward fielding customer complaints (figure 100 callers per cancelled flight, and dozens of cancelled flights due to weather or whatever, and that's a lot of bandwidth).

The primary reason their web support people don't get any such messages is because they don't make their contact information available. Given the quality of anonymous discourse these days, there'd be an extremely low signal-to-noise ratio even if they did.

"Why don't you fly to Wagga Wagga? Your site is broken!"

"This used to cost $49 (in 1965) and now it costs $999! Your site is broken!"

"The church of the dancing cactus demands you put a dancing cactus on your web site in order to get our business."

Balance that echo chamber that comes from only hearing corporate demands, hire-the-lowest-bidder mentality, and constant ad campaigns, flight schedule changes, price formula changes, availability formula changes, and overwhelmed servers, and it's a wonder it works at all.

The primary nut to crack here is a way to significantly improve the signal-to-noise ratio for customer service complaints.
I feel exactly as the author. In my country (Portugal) never was such an educated generation and never was such a problematic generation. There is more than 40% of young unemployment. Does that mean that 40% of young people don't worth a dime or are making it wrong?
There are a shocking number of people here with no outward empathy, understanding nor willingness to see outside of their own limited experience.

The world is not the tech industry. Not everybody has the same perspective as you. In fact, more people find themselves in this chap's shoes than in yours.

You're likely posting on here because you're under some illusion that you're an entrepreneur. How can you build a successful product if you can't put yourself in another's position?
CS field in America is about as easy as it gets, in terms of finding a job. Demand is absurdly high. That's not the case for every field. That's not even true for CS, as soon as you get out of the country.

The column is about someone in (apparently) Canada, who doesn't seem like he's in tech.
My understanding from reading about this on the CSS working group boards is as follow - the biggest issue is users assume CSS is instantaneous. If you ever see an interaction (other than animations), or a flash of unstyled content, it looks like a broken website. That means the W3C want to ensure any candidate they are using can be calculated on poor performance machines in a matter of a couple milliseconds. For one off variables this is not hard at all, but the the cascading effect of css means that a lot more calculations have to be made
That's a lot of lost business. Tying up over a million dollars of hardware and $40k a month worth of space.
I would pay for a social network that cared about my privacy and made its money through subscriptions, not through selling the information of its users. However, I strongly suspect that I'm in the minority and that most people would rather not pay a thing. Then again, that might be a good thing. I love Google+ because the only people on it, pretty much, are techies - so whilst profile updates are nowhere near as frequent as Facebook or Twitter, they're a hell of a lot more interesting, from my experience.
My best advice to anyone in this situation: time management, and cool projects.

Bottom line is, if you're spending 100% of your time trying to find a new job, then your time is not well managed. Set aside some of that time to contribute something positive to the world.

A few suggestions:

Volunteer at a local nonprofit. They are constantly overwhelmed with work, and will love the help, even if it's only 20% of your time. It will be great for networking, and you'll have a good feeling about it, not to mention something to pad the resume with. Also, you'd be surprised how many places you think are official are nonprofits who could use the free help.

Go to meetup groups. Spending money on a conference for networking is not useful when you can get the same thing for free. If you're technical, there are LUGs, programming language groups, database stuff, etc. Consider book clubs of people with similar interests.

Start a blog and actively maintain it. Rather than brooding on why the system is keeping you down, study up on things and write articles to teach others. Once you get a flow going, people will start linking to your articles and you'll have some recognition.

Just a few starting points. You can easily spend 1 day a week (20% of your time) working on a cool project like that, and still have plenty of time to search for work. And the next interview you get, you'll be a lot more confident.
It's nice, but surely the time taken cloning the initial Svbtle network look, feel and experience would have been better used making something different that surpasses the original.
Show HN: pocket-radio: channel your connections
While that is true, you would have to forcibly redistribute quite a lot of money to destroy more value than you help create.

When the masses have no currency, in effect, that's signaling to the economy that their needs are of no value. Therefore, businesses that solve the masses' problems gain no economic value from it, and will not generate real value.

So currency has no intrinsic value, but it does signal to the economy which needs are more valuable. And currently, one of the claims is that the middle class and poor's needs are valued so low, that it is creating economic stagnation, and there's little incentive to solve their problems.
It depends. The founders tend to hang around and retain power. Larry Wall (Perl) and Guido van Rossum (Python) have kept a fair amount of control and strongly encouraged a friendly atmosphere. Debian Linux became a voting democracy and is reasonably pleasant.

Nothing stops someone from forking an open source project, making their own version. The BSD Unixes are famous for schisms, and some of the new founders are famously ... opinionated. One of benefits of open source is that obnoxious but competent people boot themselves out.
> Well, you really need to tailor your application to be suitable for the jobs.

Be clear: You mean "you need to lie". When applying to a coffee shop, for example:

The person with a 4 year degree will not get the job. They will leave as soon as something better comes up.

The person with a 4 year gap on their CV will also not be getting the job, as it will be assumed that they're hiding something.
Yup. They've ported all sorts of things with Emscripten, including, I believe, Ruby, Python and Perl.
From what I recall, the losses are as real as the taxes.

Even if you hadn't been able to net them off now they (in theory) reduce your future tax liability. Of course, generally speaking it is unlikely to end up applying those losses to income taxed at that high a rate. And there are former coworkers of mine (who lost badly trying to hold onto ISOs) that refer to capital-loss carry-forwards that their children will inherit. Nevertheless, the reality is at least the tiniest bit less bad than it sounds.
You're conflating "open source" with "specified". Without a detailed specification, all alternative implementations are still forced to reverse engineer everything from the code--including any and all bugs or other quirks that the code contains. Furthermore, I've heard from those who have more knowledge about this that NaCl is heavily laden with Webkit-specific details. So yes, NaCl is open source. But that doesn't mean that Firefox, Opera, or IE could implement it, even if they wanted to.

The take-away here is to note that open-source does not preclude an EEE strategy. Once Google creates a specification for NaCl and Pepper, then we're talking. Until then, it's quite worrying.
No, this is not necessary to build a production-ready Rails site. If you want to send your files through a CDN, then you'll need to perform this configuration (which is still easier than writing the logic yourself.)
What's a skilled news staff good for when you don't have a paper anymore? If you can't sell their product, they are just a cost center.
You could already do that by compiling Ruby with Emscripten, there is nothing new here.
If you played to Carmageddon you would not be in doubt, I think
Except at Github, apparently: http://instagr.am/p/Kt05fpp2OL/
My Bicyles: top ten benefits of cycling
Avoid complexity in problems; seek complexity in skills
How the Facebook IPO could help the Boston Phoenix
The feel good is that of the state of the mind.

"I wear a 1.2k jean and ride a 20k bike. I justify my success"
I don't know what clearing the right bricks means, but clicking on a bunch of them in latest Firefox did nothing.
Building qreer.com
Nope. It's totally irresponsible. Given the power of the internet and the ease by which information spreads, the real potential is there. And even then, it makes no difference.

Publicly (or to their face) calling a former employer "sleazy" is very, very unprofessional. It demonstrates poor taste and lack of restraint. And ultimately, self-importance.

"How dare they not recognize that their pathetic company is NOT my dream job? How dare they offer me money to continue to support their petty operation?"

Are you people even serious in defending this?
I actually came up with a very effective method for identifying scraping and blocking it in near real-time. The challenge that I've had was that I was being scraped via many many proxies/IPs in short spurts using a variety of user agents - so as to avoid, or make difficult detection. The solution was simply to identify bot behavior and block it:

1. Scan the raw access logs via 1 minute cron for the last 10,000 lines - depending on how trafficked your site is

2. parse the data by IP, and then by request time

3. search for IP's that have not requested a universal and necessary elements like anything in the images or scripts folder, and that made repetitive requests in a short period of time - like 1 second.

4. Shell command 'csf -d IP_ADDY scraping' to add to the firewall block list.

This process is so effective of identifying bots/spiders that I've had to create a whitelist for search engines and other monitoring services that I want to continue to have access to the site.

Most scrapers don't go to the extent of scraping via headless browsers - so, for the most part, I've pretty much thwarted the scraping that was prevalent on my site.
There are many, easily correctable errors. The Univac isn't called Unicvac. The Osborne 1 wasn't available in 1976 but 1981. Microsoft windows was released in 1985, not 1982. Speech recognition was available with Dragon Dictate in 1994 or so.
AT&T mobile chief: Windows 8 can boost Windows Phone
Getting a virtual personal assistant isn't very expensive, most SF/SV engineers could probably afford it if they wanted to (whether they would need it is another question though..) The really expensive thing is getting a local person who can do "real" tasks for you in your area, there's a lot that can't be done on the net yet.

BTW, it seems like you are hellbanned PGenes. Contact an admin to fix it?
Count me in too. I'm just not a fan of tennis. One 2560x1600 monitor feels much more fluid than tracking my head across two monitors that amount to a 16:5 screen with 3" of deadspace (bezels) running down the middle.
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