skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I thought that basically described a bubble. It was not a speculative bubble rather an increase in demand caused a spike in prices well above the long term sustainable level. There was a lot more copper available at 4x the price in the long term, but people where not increasing production as fast as possible, because the price was not sustainable over the long term. Which kept the price unnaturally high for a long time period.

Unless I am miss using the term but a 4x increase in price over a few year is abnormal.
I think you were right to begin with. They opened the savings account in the summer and fully paid off their credit card debt in October.
Hacker News doesn't validate
I received my bachelor's degree in 2002. I've been pondering graduate school on and off, and have done a bit of graduate study online. While I can't speak from the position of someone who is currently there, I can offer this with regard to your first point...

It's been nearly seven years for me now. I've stayed only slightly in touch with one of my undergraduate professors. I feel that getting academic recommendation letters may be difficult at this point. If you're going to wait, I would suggest maintaining conversation with the professors most able to write letters for you.
Threaded ones let you follow a main conversation, ignoring digressions and side arguments; you can see the shape of the overall discussion, tracked by evolving subtopic. I have found that I approve of it; "derails" are rarer.
Congrats guys!This is looking great
Meanwhile the creator of R wants to return to a Lisp-based statistics environment:

http://books.google.com/books?id=8Cf16JkKz30C&pg=PA21...
As a person with some savings and some credit card debt and an uncomfortably large amount of mortgage debt, I'll say that in an economic downturn there's definitely value in having liquid cash to spend -- you can cover important debts such as taxes or mortgage during a job loss.

It's technically cheapest to run your savings as low as possible in favor of paying down debts as aggressively as possible. I was doing that a couple years ago when times were better, but for the moment the cost (a couple years of financing your savings at reasonable credit card interest rates) sure beats having your own personal liquidity crisis.
i just coded threaded responses that's linear in time, within and between grandparents-grandchildrens subs

newer response is pushed to the last node on respective branch to preserve time order

tree structure on flat file, output generated by recursion

then i looked at drupal which also has threaded posts ... i wonder if mysql approach is easier
This is again a reason why you shouldn't make accessing internal company services too easy. Yeah, it can be a pain but once someone figures out a little piece of the puzzle, they can run amok in your network. In hindsight, tying customer service methods to employee Twitter accounts was the big mistake.
It's extremely profitable, but that does not mean it's large. IBM made $10.4 billion USD it's got 386,558 people which is a large company, but the recording industry is significantly smaller than that.

PS: Your iPod is not part of the recording industry, the local band that's waiting for their break is not part of the recording industry even though they would like to be. The recording industry is focused on promoting and selling music and while they make a lot of money they don't really use vary many people.
Allowing developers to create their own semantics as they see fit does not create a more semantic web.

The whole point of having semantically meaningful documents is so that machines can better understand them. Having a system where each developer creates their own "meaning hooks" is worse than useless - its a waste of time and bandwidth - and leaves us in the same position we are in today where a machine ignores markup and tries to infer meaning from context.

Standards and convention are important.

The only way to create a truly searchable and meaningful web is for us all to use an agreed upon set of tags that add meaning.
Many phones don't run at their full CPU speed to save battery power...
Economic Downgrades and Musical Chairs
Another annoying thing is that people think a certain structure is a Ponzi scheme, when really it is the parameters of the structure. What might be a Ponzi scheme in one generation is social security in a shorter living, more prolific generation.
Ever wondered to yourself "Hey, why am I using Japanese words for typhoon and tsunami?"
amazon did go down once. smugmug has a blog post about it and what they did. go google it. the entire blog is amazing and informative and i highly recommend it.

i'd link you, but i'm lazy
Oh no, big deal.

Google doesn't validate: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fgoogle.com...

Standards don't always dictate quality.
I'd be pretty shocked if it did.
> Via, with their excellent Nano competitor, seems more than willing to fill the void.

AMD's 'Neo' too:

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/252/1050252/somethi...
Design patterns are the same across all engineering disciplines.

Mono was designed to port the .NET to other platforms
> The only way to create a truly searchable and meaningful web is for us all to use an agreed upon set of tags that add meaning.

completely agree.
If it makes some people think about the idea of no god, I'd say it's worth it. Besides, we've been bombarded by religious propaganda our entire lives (at least in America), it's about time the other side started speaking out.
The Digital Gangster’s Twitter Hack Screenshots Very Funny Prank
"There's probably no God"

I was going to be critical of that weak use of the word "probably" (especially in the context of atheistic belief), but then I realized it better explains the true situation - that it simply comes down to where you assign your faith.

Too many atheists and macro-evolutionists (especially Dawkins), can't think outside their own dogmatic beliefs and realize that they, too, employ many powerful background assumptions which are grounded in faith alone. These assumptions, of course, are then used as a framework for claiming what is the "truth".
I am baffled that a programming language is getting coverage in the NYT. I'd like to figure out what, exactly, it is about this one that merits mainstream coverage, but I'm afraid I've been at the office too long and I think my perspective on the matter is permanently skewed.

As an aside, I used R briefly for a econometrics/philosophy course I took. I recognized immediately it was a powerful, functional language. What I wonder, though, is if the scientific programming libraries in Python might eventually be a better environment. Surely there must be some R users here who can comment.
I wish Google Checkout would move into PayPal's market. They've been a monopoly way too long. PayPal has fat margins right now and nobody comes close to beating them.

Google is the right company to compete with PayPal. They could implement it into many of their products and leverage their massive ad network.

I've also been waiting for Amazon to move into this market, but the closest they've come is Amazon Payments (https://payments.amazon.com:443/sdui/sdui/index.htm).
pg's stated before he treats HTML as nothing more than object code. If it runs acceptably on all platforms, who cares what it looks like?
Is there a demand for a start-up technical assistant?
Are you looking for a quality technical person to help get your start-up going? I'd like to introduce myself. I've been working with a couple business partners in an attempt to launch a successful web based application. We made some progress but never completed a finished, marketable product. This has left me in the place where I can either return to the workforce and suffer through the misery of corporate life, or find something different. I'm opting for something different. What I'm looking for is a start-up that has competent Sr. Developers who have more work on their hands than they can handle. I am a competent "hey can you fix this" person. I can build fully functional websites including the html/css/javascript/python/django/Postgresql/Apache/Linux with all the associated sysadmin setup. I'm not an expert at any of it though. Hence I'm looking to work with someone who already has a better handle on everything and could benefit from having someone to help out. My ideal fit is a project that's within 3-6 months of go live. Working on something that just went live and isn't profitable yet might be a good fit too, since you might need more people but lack the funds to pay for them. I'm comfortable working with other languages as well, those were just our choices for our projects.

I'm interested in all inquiries, including those of the pro bono, equity sharing nature. My main goal is to shadow and learn, so that your project succeeds and I get closer to being able to build my own. Email for questions and samples of work. I'd love to talk with you and learn more about how you're going about launching your start-up. Thanks!

gmail: sgibson12
At least on this site, it sounds like any startup would be preferred to any established company including google. Although that really does seem to be mostly the tone of this site.
Economics is hot right now?
Capitalism works just fine in a steady state economy because things break down. Buildings need to be repaired, styles change etc. Just look look at the plumbing industry it can grow or shrink but when your sink is broken and you don't know how to fix it you call someone.

Unless you're suggesting some form of utopia where people don't need to eat and nothing ever breaks. But even then someone is going to setup an MMO and the cycle of pretend money can start all over again.
To be frank about it: with a 5+ year break and coming from a "lowly" state university, it is going to be tough to get into the type of CS PhD programs you have listed.

Most schools do run a low pass filter on your GRE scores (if required) and GPA. The GPA is weighted according the repuation of your school. However, once you get beyond the filtering, these things don't matter.

The most important thing at a top PhD school is letters of recommendations from faculty, with the greatest weight given to letters from a professor they might know. ("They" being any of the members of the admissions committee who happen to read your file, or are present during the discussion. There is a fair amount of luck involved). This maybe hard for you to get if the professors at your current university do not publish (i.e., attend conferences, etc.). However, no matter what, do keep in touch with them. You'll need at least 2-3 letters from them. Letters from work will be fine, but do not carry heavy weight -- especially beyond one letter.

The other relevant things include: the school you attended, research experience (publications are your greatest asset), and lastly, your statement of purpose. I don't think anything else really matters too much -- at least to a top CS program.

But if you really want to go to grad school, there is always a way. Some tips:

(1) Apply to a lot of schools, as the admissions process can be fairly random. However, do not apply to safe schools for the sake of applying.

(2) Also, an alternative is to apply for a Masters program. Get in. Impress a professor or two. Upgrade to PhD program. Obviously, it is hard to find financial support for Masters student at some schools. If you are local to a great university, you can also take graduate courses a non-degree student (very easy to get in, as schools love money), impress one or two professors, and apply.

PS: I served as a student representative on an admissions committee at UIUC in the past. I also came from a "lowly" state university. However, I jumped to PhD program directly after my BS.
"The co-creators of R express satisfaction that such companies profit from the fruits of their labor and that of hundreds of volunteers."

That's an interesting reaction from the first designers of the program.
The Grand Unified Theory of Classical Physics, a 1771‑page work that he’s self-published on his Web site. It claims to offer explanations with no “spookiness or weirdness” for quantum phenomena like entanglement, as well as some extraordinary predictions: that under certain conditions electrons acquire antigravity properties, which Mills calls “the fifth force,” and that the mysterious dark matter permeating the universe consists of large hydrino agglomerations.

Link: http://www.blacklightpower.com/theory/book.shtml
Another interesting paper hidden behind the academic firewall.
1. 0 years is the optimal gap. Time off counts against you. If you want to do this and don't see a strong reason for delaying, go in right now.

2. You probably won't be publishing when you're working, and open-source projects are good but not enough to put you over the cusp.

3. If you can get a research position, that'll be better for your grad school prospects than finance.

4. I don't know the answer to this one.

Caveat: I was in a math PhD program for a year, and CS may be different.
Intel Mac owner?  Please try Picasa with OurDoings
Unfortunately the only Mac I have ready access to is PowerPC. I really want to see if Picasa on the Mac supports picasa: URLs for loading buttons, if the web uploader API works, and if the pages I created that work with Picasa on Windows and Linux also work on a Mac. Can someone please take a few minutes and try it?
HackerSpaces, two in the UK. Hacker Groups, two in the UK. I see PG's essay on moving to where the things you want to be part of are in a different light now compared to when I first read it.
My app: http://ourdoings.com/
At least in the physics world people just post everything to arXiv and their personal websites. This way you only need to pay attention to a couple of places to keep up to date.
Dawkins has said that he wouldn't use the term 'probably' preferring to use something like 'highly improbable'.

I don't think saying god is highly improbable based on the evidence before us is dogmatic. Dawkins is on record saying he would like there to be a god and is waiting for concrete evidence. That doesn't sound dogmatic to me.
if the scientific programming libraries in Python might eventually be a better environment.

Well... there is R.py http://rpy.sourceforge.net/ to give you most (if not all) the functionality of R in conjunction with all the scipy goodness.
He didn't hijack those accounts; he gave out the credentials in a forum thread and others jumped on it.
The Japan problem was not the savings rate. The problem was the government propping up failing institutions for years, instead of just letting them go down. We need to start saving. Let the retail and services based economy decline. Let the creative and manufacturing based economy grow. Export. Krugman and company are going to kill the dollar.
That said, the W3C validator does reveal several issues with the HN code. Sure, they aren't do-or-die issues, but they do have an effect. The validator reports that alt text is missing for several issues, that many attributes are missing quotemarks and that the DOCTYPE is missing. These issues harm accessibility and robustness.
Or you could use privatization and use a tiny, well-placed amount of carefully considered government intervention and have awesome results. Example: The East Side of Santiago de Chile. Tolls do not slow traffic because they are done by RFID tags and ... OK, I don't have that much data behind me, but the data point that is Daniel Cussen says the system is effective. People I talk to generally agree.
Yeah! We should have floppy drives too!
Nope. Several countries in Europe use the same markings.

PS: There is a reason you can get an International Driver's License.
Sure was a heck of a guess to end up with a staffer.
Apple’s Lowered Expectations Pay Off
suggestions? could be simpler, will play around with it.
Again, it brings up the case of why passwords are bad at this level.

Maybe staffers should have used a secondary password to get administrative rights.

Or maybe they should have been using an entirely different account.
My 5D Mk II just shipped. Right around the time I posted this comment. I feel serendipitous.
This does bring up a good tech question -- how do you prevent people from doing a rapid password attack?

Anyone have an article or some ideas on how this could be done? Is limiting attempts the simplest way?

Even if you do limits, aren't these session-based? I'm guessing a cracker isn't going to respect sessions.
Having only very minimal experience with R, I get the impression that while python is fantastic for programmers, and the tools are probably close to or better than R's (no idea about library support), it's still a programming language, and requires one to think and structure things like a programmer.

R, at least in the beginning, comes across more like a powerful set of Excel formulas, so I think a non-programmer might pick it up faster without having good programming form.

(Not to say one is more powerful than the other, or that R programmers aren't as good as Python programmers, etc, I just think it's a difference in community viewpoints)
Must be a slow news day.

In other news: Programmers Captivated by Power of C
Unemployment can be a misleading measure. The number of job seekers is not a particularly meaningful measure, nor is it accurately measured. It's much better to look at how many workers are supporting the population of the country. The proportion paying taxes is getting to be less than half. Anyone not paying taxes doesn't count.
Having gotten through this process for a Ph.D., albeit in a different field (Math), I'll answer this as best I can. My answers relate to getting a Ph.D.

1. Don't wait. Opportunity costs are low right now (bad economy) and waiting hurts your chances. If you wait at least 5 years, you are > 27 when you start grad school. You graduate at age 32. That's over the hill. Many grad schools will flatly reject you for this reason.

2. Publications might help, if they are solid technical works in peer reviewed journals. Industry experience could also help IF it's hardcore R&D work. Academics care relatively little about open source, unless you did something truly awesome (e.g., FFTW).

3. Yes. R&D type jobs are the only jobs that won't hurt you when applying to grad school.

4. GvR could probably get into a good grad school. Below that will probably not help very much.

However, many places will give you a masters if you pay tuition. Don't expect to jump from the masters to Ph.D. track, however.
I've still yet to understand why people care so much about validation. We can barely get browsers to render things the same way, but we flip out because some folks don't close their tags.

I've never figured it out.
A, this isn't useful to anybody. B, it's not true. The end of DRM mixed with the software update and the announcement of the 8-hour battery meant for some really interesting stuff. Not all keynotes are stunning. I actually preferred this one to the Macbook Air one last year.
Ask HN: Looking for a student partner to get startup off the ground
My fellow founder, student, and friend are looking for someone to come on board and help us get our ideas off of the ground. We are looking for someone with strong design skills to complement our development skills. We would love to find another student who has the same work ethic and spirit that we do. If you would be at all interested, please post a comment here or email me from my portfolio to get in touch. Thanks!
code that does not validate is more lielly to break with browsers updates.
"does the length of time I wait to apply matter?"

If you are doing things that are not academia oriented, the longer you do those things, the less chance you will have at acceptance.

"I'm obviously going to continue the work that I enjoy doing."

Careful, academia may not be right for you :-)

"Publications, open source contributions, industry experience?"

Publications will by far trump anything else for most departments. And letters of recommendation (preferably from people the department has heard of...).

"Should I take the time to find a research based position at a company like IBM or HP?"

This is probably the only thing that would realistically help you. You would need to stay at one place long enough to contribute directly to refereed papers, this will really help your application. There are a lot of research positions at places that are not big companies, too, and those tend to submit more papers. Often they are looking for staff programmers and you can "get in on" some papers over time as you work hard and make good observations etc. Or you could be the assistant who is writing the performance harness, etc.

The hard part would be getting in the door probably, in my experience anything CS related will usually accept CS graduate students into internships etc. but finding a full time job there with a BS and no previous CS research experience will be tougher.

---

Academic departments typically only care that you can code well enough to pass their classes. You need to be able to program, for sure.

The better you are, the easier it will be to get through school -- you will need all the time you can get in order to concentrate on algorithms, linear algebra, etc. But it probably won't you help you too much at application time (unless maybe you have won programming competitions).

"Does status in the software community affect acceptance into a CS program?"

Probably not too much, unless the program is linked to a software product (like where I work, the University of Chicago CS department and the Globus grid computing community are intimately tied).
I vote you up as I'd like to know the answer as well
Technically you're correct, but by giving out the credentials in a public forum he should have known better.
Neat...as a side note, what are some prominent design/UX and PM type blogs? I have searched around and not found too many, especially those directed towards PMs. (For design/UX I am aware of Usability Post, Signal vs. Noise, and Functioning Form).
> Raven has the phrase "POOR IMPULSE CONTROL" tattooed on his forehead, an indication that he has been arrested for committing a violent crime

Neal Stephenson's Snowcrash
Yes & No.

A book, conversation, argument, radio show or even a bus ad never make anyone believe or disbelieve anything along these lines 'off the bat'. But then, it probably doesn't make you buy laundry detergent. But having concepts out there in this form does have an effect.

A big one is normalising atheism. Making sure it's not something foreign or taboo. Making people comfortable having it around them. Making sure it's not an extreme position. The immediate things to counter is the idea that atheism is an extreme position, an arrogant position or a dangerous one.
(... why is the PDF inside a zip file?)
"We have customers who build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet." - Ugh, SAS isn't about science, it's about administration.
I've always wondered why there isn't a secondary battery or large capacitor to hold a few seconds of charge once the main battery is topped off, to avoid overcharging the main battery.
Just be glad it wasn't built on Viaweb.