skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fail.

They graduated with the expectation that it was going to be a sellers’ market, that they were going to have multiple offers, step into an upper management role and have significant strategic impact on a Fortune 500 company, and that’s just not the reality.

What? The moderate expansion of 2004-07 has barely passed and already it's being romanticized and blown out of proportion. The OP is completely out of touch with reality.

Getting into an upper-management role out of college, and having significant impact on a Fortune 500 company, did not happen, except for extremely well-connected people. The median Ivy grad, much less median college grad, did not have that as an option, and no one expected it either.

In fact, the major reason the bulk of the talent went into finance was its reputation for having a faster career track. They would rather pay dues for 4 years working 70 hours per week than for 10 years working 50.
♲ ≠ ♺
I think that Darcs did help draw attention to Haskell, just that it's still not especially popular. The fact that we're talking about Haskell and not e.g. Joy says something about it at least crossing a low threshold of popularity, though.

(XMonad is a much less significant example for Haskell's popularity, IMHO.)

It seems highly likely to me that Haskell's type system made inventing Darcs's theory of patches significantly easier. While a Darcs-like system could be written in C, designing the system as a whole was almost certainly aided greatly by Haskell's type checking and lightening of certain conceptual burdens through laziness.
This writing in this article reminds me of the science fiction Charles Stross writes. It has lots of interesting points on enterprise IT versus web 2.0, but imho would have been a better read if it was a little bit more straightforward.
Departing Yahoo President Has History of Missteps
And nowhere does Kohn say that adequate compensation isn't important.
ASK HN: (click on link to view question, duh!) Learn web development?
I would like to learn web development (whatever that includes). From what I have garnered from reading it is good to start off with aiming for a goal and working on a project. I would like to make a website like Y.H News, just for kicks. What would I have to learn? What books would you guys recommend for learning that?

Thanks!
Ask YC: Do You Read Comments Before Submissions?
I actually caught myself clicking, and reading comments before I even read the article. Inherently, there is running the danger of jumping into a conversation and getting some facts wrong; however it provides me with a fairly decent barometer if the article is worth the read or not.

Anyone else do this? What's your excuse?
I'm a 'late boomer' and teach high school CS to the so-called 'entitled.' I can say from personal experience that while there is indeed a percentage who follow that modus operandi, the truth is that the current crop of high schoolers work a lot harder at their studies than I ever did, have more pressure to perform well on standardized tests than ever before, face a future marbled with inordinate debt obligations from their undergraduate and graduate degrees, and see a marketplace unsure about where, or if, their skills matter.

This article sucks and the author should be ashamed of herself for not doing better research into this generation before writing them off as a bunch of incompetent brats. They are far from it.

This generation represents our future lady. Disparagement might keep you employed by selling magazines and newspapers to a dwindling audience but encouragement rebuilds nations and economies and provides hope to the billions yet to come.

These are great kids. We should celebrate them. They play by rules 'we' have set for them and as I have said, they work incredibly hard against all odds. It is my belief they will ultimately drive a worldwide entrepreneurial explosion unseen before. Not out of greed, as this article incorrectly infers about their parents, but out of pure necessity. In that regard, they are very much like their grandparents just after WWII and we all know what that generation accomplished for us.
I guess I can now sympathize with everyone who complained about too many econ/politics/non-ruby/xyz posts to HN.

Front page story about a suggested change from 'RT' --> '♺' on twitter? If I had less faith in HN I would label this a jump the shark moment.
The irony is that the application is depicted as a piece of paper, and not a web form.
I use Google Analytics + a Wordpress stats package to track RSS pulls etc.
I was intrigued by the symmetry implied in the title, so I read the article. But there isn't any symmetry. All he means by "all data is code" is that, in Haskell, some things that look like data structures are really functions. That isn't anything like what code=data means in Lisp. Luckily, there are a few other interesting things in the article.
Joseph Pine On What Consumers Want
US FISCR court releases secret ruling compelling telco to release email subject lines
Email contents, safe; email subjects, unsafe?
Anyone else do this?

Often, yes. Somewhat depends on how interested I am in the actual article. As strange as it may seem, I might spent 5 minutes reading comments to see if it's worth spending 2 minutes to read the article :)

Additionally, there is generally not a whole lot of truly "breaking" news out there. Instead, it's a lot of rehashing of basic stories, concepts, etc. I consume news from a number of sources, so often times the submission headline + comments gives me enough information to supplement what I already have.

Pre-reading comments can offer valuable perspective that is good to have read BEFORE reading the actual article also.
Web Startups with a subscription based business model
Are there any founders here who are building Web Startups with a business model to sell subscriptions (or at least a free+premium model and not an advertising driven business model)?

* How difficult was is to acquire paying customers?
* What type of customers are these -- individuals or small
organizations?
* What kind of objections did you typically face before
they signed the check?
* And for the benefit of the startup community, can you
describe how you acquired these customers (i.e., personal
contacts, cold calling, selling at relevant trade shows, etc?).
Tell Dell your favorite online tech community.
I did not want to risk telling them HN was my favorite community. Most users here do not want to be bothered and everyone wants to keep the circle small.
That's the same take on it that I've got. A perfect example of this was the submission on the front page "Dude where's my job?" where someone linked to a comment that proved to be more insightful than the actual article itself.

Often, the discussion of submissions can be more enjoyable than what I've just read, and in some cases, more accurate, and have more depth of information.
yep see this - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=429802
What happens when deprecated purveyors of old technology get hit with web 2.0 and 3.0? The answer is they get replaced. By the same Gen Y they so despise.

That's not really true tho'. The skills of uploading a video to YouTube or making a website with PHP are insignificant compared to inventing TCP and wiring the entire planet with bandwidth. Could Gen Y bootstrap the Internet if it didn't already exist? That's an open question.
It definitely belongs in the "just for fun" category.
"Consume" has negative connotations. How about "transact"? Voluntary transactions are good, because if they were bad people wouldn't do them.
This is good too from the same site - top Dragons Den spoofs: http://launchlab.co.uk/article/Business-Blog/Top-five-Dragon...
An open letter to Carol Bartz on rebuilding Yahoo
That is why I tend not to write about things in my life that have happened in the past, but rather discuss things I learn, as I learn them. Then, sometimes years later, people with similar problems find my posts through Google and thank me (and sometimes I search my own blog for solutions to problems I remember writing about).

If I find myself with nothing to write on my blog, then I take that as an indication that I'm not learning enough!
Mainframes in the Cloud?
consider ruby on rails : http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/10/13/what_is_rails....

read this : http://poignantguide.net/ruby/

then buy these : http://peepcode.com/products/rails-from-scratch-part-i
Hah, I missed that. Thank you
What split are you seeing? I'm very curious.
PS - we're aware of how Ask HN topics work, might wanna put the brief subject in title :)
In A Down Economy, Startups Rise From Coworking
I disagree: I don't thread them. Reason being, it kills linear conversation, and that's something I don't want. Linear conversation helps keep a strong conversation going.

So on the site, there are two "commentesque" systems. There's one for the general critiques (the focus of my site), which don't get threaded because they're grouped by the user that made them. There's no discussion in those comments, or there's not much. The focus is on constructive, objective feedback.

For the forum, we decided to go almost entirely minimal. A screenshot from the alpha can be found here: http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=f18vb&s=5

The idea is that we wanted to focus on back-and-forth talk. The three of us in that thread all knew each other on an older site of mine, so that's already established, but we want a feel of community. As in, instead of lurkers and posters, you've got a place where if you're new, you can talk to older users and become sort-of welcomed into things. You lose that with threads, because suddenly it's all-too-easy for a user to get completely ignored if they don't join one of the bigger threads.
Meet Tim Cook: The Man in Charge of Apple
So what you're saying is that Google has banned tea in the afternoons. You're right, that was helpful.
Seeing Both Sides: Why Do "Asshole VCs" Survive?
This is why they should give names like Chris to unknown serial killers.

Serial-killer-namers, hope this helps: http://www.yeahbaby.com/article.php?page=79
Not Amazon. The article said that customers purchasing went up immediately by 45%, $15M per month. Since the company was at $25Bn it was obviously a brick-and-mortar company.
I wonder if "afternoon" is banned, too...
SHOCKING title... but gorgeous pictures.
Agreed. Stupid catchy title for link bait, but the photography was in fact pretty good. Too bad they can't be honest in their presentation.
Mark Cuban on startup investing (and Gmail management)
Fail. 'RECYCLING SYMBOL FOR GENERIC MATERIALS' (U+267A) is not generally available on platforms other than Mac OS X. On that platform it is only provided by the system font Apple Symbols (as a fallback) and versions of the included Japanese font Hiragino (what you're actually seeing). It is not included in Arial Unicode MS on Windows, which in turn is irrelevant as Arial Unicode MS is only included with Office, and (sigh) Mac OS X.

From looking at the Vista fonts I have available, it doesn't appear to be available there either. If it does work, I'd be curious to know what fonts it's provided by.

Let this be a lesson: Don't use weird Unicode characters unless you know that everyone that needs to see them can see them.

FWIW, if you can't stand the little blank boxes, here's a Free font set that covers most of Unicode: http://dejavu-fonts.org/
I browse YC mostly for the comments, searching for interesting titles with comments and then jumping right into the comments. Nine times out of ten, the comments are way more interesting and informative than the article itself (this is the same reason I read Slashdot from time to time).

Sometimes, I'll get to the comments of what looks to be an interesting article and see discussion about how the article is crap or misleading. This saves me from wasting my time.

The raw nature of individuals discussing their experience, opinions, and knowledge of a particular topic is always more informative and interesting than an article, which needs to stay on topic and have a theme and an ending.
So you think I would be able to build a site like this merely through learning RoR?

I was playing around with RoR with Agile Rails by D.H. Hansson etc... Was having problems upgrading my Ruby on my Mac through the command line. I have played around and tinkered but to no avail. I simple havent been able to get it installed.
At the end of the article, it was stated that tryptophan in foods does not go to your brain because of other substances competing (and taking priority) for transport resources.
Students Paying More and Getting Less, Study Says
Strategic farming practices could help mitigate global warming
No. Using undiscovered evidence, I've pieced together the facts to uncover that Jack the Ripper was, in fact, the Loch Ness Monster.
you could easily make this site (or something very similar) in RoR.

I assume you're on leopard? something like this tutorial should set you up - http://danbenjamin.com/articles/2008/02/ruby-rails-leopard

make sure you install the apple developer tools before doing stuff though. They're on the OS X disk and also on the apple developer connection website.
News.YC faster (plus new traffic stats)
The word "cohort" is a technical term in demographic studies, and the correct word for the article.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cohort_(statistics)
It's the Mail. Intellectual honesty is not their stock in trade.
awesome.

News.YC is still my primary source for most news, it's an amazing community.
At first, I thought this was another iteration of the "You can't prove we're not inside a computer" meme, and thought Oh, jezus christ, not again with this bloody tripe.

Turns out, it's actually quite an interesting development.
You'd have to start them off at a pretty low salary though (like 30k if my back of the envelope math-fu is good today). Would you take a job at a lower pay rate if they claimed to offer weekly raises? Seems like this would really shift too much power to your employer.

What happens in year 2 on the job where its no longer possible to keep raising the pay on a regular basis?
Agreed. I can't wait for the next time I critique some asshole who has read this to respond "I really appreciate your sharing your feelings about my suckiness as a human being...".
My friend code: 100577628 =-)

This is fun.
I agree that RPC is bad, but I don't think it is because it blends the boundary. I think its downfall is that it masks failures.

In this case, code seems to be explicitly labeled as client, server, or both. Sometimes, you really do want both. Consider a calendar which is sent down as HTML from the server for mobile clients, but updated on the fly by javascript in full browsers. Typically, however, your client code is explicitly marked as such and calls into server code with the very proven success/failure ajax callback pattern.
Add to a list
Of course, such a system already exists, although it makes more and better use of mice than Emacs. See http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/acme/acme.pdf for details.
Things I Learned the Hard Way: Programmers are Tiny Gods
also, you could learn python (theres a 'famous' web project called django) -- reddit.com is a site very similar to this one, and its open source. Great way to learn code.

http://code.reddit.com/ # download and hack away :)
This is great.

Are the events that brought in the largest spikes in traffic known? Do page views correlate to new accounts?
Two months ago I was worried that with the Obama surge things would break apart and collapse and become generic as a site like Reddit's become. To my surprise, it's managed to hold together incredibly well. And I love it: this is absolutely the best community I know of on the Internet.
Long time reader, first time poster. Just wanted to say that the quality of submissions and comments is what always keeps me coming back to HN, and it's great to see active interest in maintaining the quality.

You'd never hear something like "Growth can't keep going at this rate forever without ruining the site, though. Between those two alternatives, we prefer growth to slow down. We hope it will happen naturally—that we'll simply run out of new people the site appeals to." coming from a profit-driven site
Yahoo has been downhill for years. They should have acquired Google, YouTube & Facebook.
> "[W]ith sufficient caching you can write popular apps in arbitrarily slow languages."

Somehow I doubt this pronouncement will stem the tide of statements along the lines of "x is written in a slow language and therefore won't scale", although they have been mercifully less frequent around here of late.
That's kind of a bullshit question. Of course we could. We don't need to re-invent Internet protocols (beyond fixing the mistakes of the previous generation -- IPv4 and DNS flaws, anyone?) at this point though.

Right now, it's more profitable to build on the platform we grew up with than to think about reinventing it. Programming talent and intelligence haven't suddenly declined in my generation thanks to the Internet and PHP. There have always been crappy programmers -- they just use PHP instead of BASIC now.
I belive the huge spike was techcrunch
Hey, What About Pixar?
YouTube Comes To The Wii And PS3, But Not Xbox
YUI on Github
I don't think the idea is to promise the pay raises. Where would the production-incentive be, if the employees thought they had earned the pay-raises up front?
Well, I like your point. The only problem I see with linear conversations is when the comments are too many to follow responses easily, things get really messy at that point and the very best one can do is jump around following links and trying to understand the dialog.

And, you're right, if you don't join a popular thread in a threaded comment system, you will probably be ignored. But you won't if you're one of the first to post in that page, thus somehow making the oldest more relevant, and if you get lots of replies your comment will be seen by more people, which makes sense to me since it would be a hot topic.

There is no perfect commenting system, I guess, but the big flaw in linear conversations is that replies are not emphasized and the relations between comments is easily lost. It would be useful when time is relevant.

I would prefer a threaded system, sorted by rating as well, kind of what Reddit or HN has: the hottest, top-rated, most recent comments on the top; the oldest, lowest-rated, not-replied-to ones more likely to be ignored.
I think he's saying that a cushy job can lead to a mediocre career. Once you get used to high pay, perks, and having it easy, it gets extremely hard to leave for a risky (but likely more rewarding) opportunity. That situation is the norm at many large corporations in highly regulated industries (government contract, aviation, etc). My first job was just like that, and I'm so glad I left.
I've been reading News.YC for last few months and it's now my primary source of IT news/discussion. While I restrain myself from posting sometime because I'm not perfectly fluent in english, I have deep admiration for the community and it's insight on the "hacker" world.

Thanks alot!
Threaded comments scale the conversation better. Linear stay more focused.
Also, mid-article:

The question [...] was whether the requirement established in Apprendi applied to the decision whether a defendant convicted of multiple crimes must serve consecutive or concurrent sentences if the harsher punishment required a judge to find facts not determined by the jury.
I'm not really sure where you think you are in conflict with what I said.

Emotional people can have high value, and you are missing out if you avoid them completely. I earn about 300% more when I let a recruiter get me a gig than when I contract myself out.

All I'm saying is that when I feel like 'everyone' doesn't value rational thought and logic as much as they value some emotional quality I don't understand, yes, I don't feel valued. I have seen programmers in environments like that quit and dedicate their lives to creating mediocre music. (Not that musicians aren't valuable... but I have seen some really awesome world-class programmers go on to be mediocre musicians, which just seems like a waste.)

"I don't know everything" and "I might be wrong" are core to creating a useful rational model from incomplete data. I think that surrounding myself with people who are more rational and/or more intelligent than I am helps to develop that humility. Spending my days amongst managers does the opposite.
It's good to see a counter balance the "OMG Developer Made 100K in 3 Weeks!" mania we've been seeing lately. Still, there is clearly opportunity in these apps. You just shouldn't overestimate the odds of having a big hit right off the bat.
Alternatives to layoffs more cost effective, layoffs done to please investment community
Wiimote Talking to Ubuntu
Hey Pclark, thanks!

I recently purchased an upgrade to Leopard and I never got a cd with XCODE, I would love to download it however being from a country with capped internet it is a significant amount of bandwidth. I don't think I have it installed, is that a make it or break it for Ruby?

Would PHP do the job as well?

Thanks again,
Aron
What Apple could learn from Palm's webOS
based on this analysis, he said, "it's possible the Ripper could be female".

Based on this quote I've concluded that the Ripper was either male or female. Startling information indeed.
My friend code is 100580351
whats the point? 6 months ago 90% of those big wig economists were saying everything is great and that you are a moron if you think there are any problems.

What would be better, is a site that tracks a person's prediction over a life time, so that people can know who to listen to
Wikipedia SearchMonkey App Now Default On
30 Muslims in remote region near Mali border feared vaccine causes infertility
Maybe it would be helpful if there were a way to see a user's 100 highest rated comments. I'm thinking it would help both in socializing the influx of new users, and also in getting an idea of what a given person like.
Wikipedia announces new technology on its 8th birthday
I mean I didn't mean any disrespect nor do I've any problems with this success. But at times he's just plain wrong. I mean others have said enough.
Is Google Reader next on the chopping block?
Good article. It's about time people realized Apple is more than El Jobso.
I agree, and what's more, It feels "livelier" to me lately, which could be the feel of the growing population. I'm not worried though, the discussions have continued to be excellent.
does not compute, Loch Ness Monster lives in Scotland and Jack the Ripper lives in London.

+ the loch ness monster is huge..there is no way he could have sneaked up on someone to stab them.

Don't really see what this has to do with startups or technology
I'm wondering whether the huge page view spikes that have no corresponding unique IP spike are actually caused by crawler traffic.
On a slow satellite connection I definitely noticed the new zippiness. No other site I visit loads as quickly - not even a google search.
How Google Is Making Us Smarter
It is not just about learning a language and some framework, though it's a good start. I'd recommend Python + Django. As you go, learn about software design, HTTP (RFC 2616 http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616.html), Javascript (http://javascript.crockford.com/) and preferably also some JS library (jQuery being my favorite), web app security (https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_Testing_Proje...) and more...
But most important, learn by doing. Start building something, no matter how unsignificant it may appear, right now. You will learn on the fly ;)
pclark,

I just figured out that XCODE is on the installer CD, it doesnt ship as a separate one. Woops, that should have been obvious.

Again, thanks for pitching in to help a newbie to the programming world.

Aron
Did anyone else look at that collection of CDs and think, "I could fit those in a couple inches on a hard drive?"
would be interesting to see what kind of hardware HN is hosted on