skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can get a springy finger strengthener for $10 or so, by the way. I found that after using Emacs for long periods of time I'd get a lot of tension built-up in my pinkie. (No RSI problems in my wrists, but my pinkie was really bothering it me.) Stretching it with one has helped a lot, as has using a typing timer (such as xwrits or workrave).
I've definitely seen evidence that the school one goes to correlates with success, but are you sure that the causality flows in the direction: academic credential --> success?
It seems plausible at least that if the parent is wealthy, seeing to it that their kid is well-educated is a good way of signaling that their kid is decent material, it's a costly signal so only the wealthiest of parents will probably be able to afford it. And since the kids of wealthier parents tend to do better, the education signal, by some accident ends up being used a great deal to gauge future success.

I actually think that it used to just be a straightforward signal of wealth, but these days we don't want to admit that that's the case, we instead want to justify it as producing some useful economic product.
Anywhere in the peninsula or even south bay.
They started us on Meta (an in-house branch of Scheme, built on the .NET 2 framework), then it's to C++ for the next class in the sequence.

The university is called Northwestern.
Goldman Sachs cracks
This is true. I didn't go into detail about the reasons large organizations can't cheaply measure the performance of recruits, but this is the sort of thing I meant.
The kind of people who are generally receptive to that kind of approach seem to prefer HTML emails, IME.
Thank you I will do just that.
Best pg essay in a while, in my assessment. It all rings true for me, although I don't think big organizations (complete with flawed, credential-based assessments) are going away any time soon.
Hmmm perhaps you're right but again I don't want to come off as spammy/scammy. I just want to help push our product in a informative manner.
Check out the Hat Factory in SF - http://hatfactory.net/. It's a neat spot that's near public transit, affordable and run by some cool startup-y people.

Let me know if you want an intro to them (email is in my profile).
Fíam » Horror story with GeoDjango
Ask HN: best way to read ebooks on the computer
Ask HN: best way to read ebooks on the computer.

I have read a few programming books in hard copy that I got out of my library and found that I was able to learn a lot from them, but there is a wealth of free ebooks available online to use. The main issue I have with reading on the computer is when you close a pdf you loose where you are and the next time you open you have to find your way back. Do you guys have any suggestions for ways to read ebooks on your computer.

Thanks
Peepcode is awesome.

I was lucky enough to get a discount on the Unlimited package, back when the Australian dollar was almost equal to the US dollar. Very pleased with my investment.
I think I wrote my first programs at the age of five, on a ZX81 my uncle had put together.

Despite this exposure to BASIC, my programming abilities seem to have survived. So I would say - if they can hack it, GO!
Schiller vs. Ballmer: The Inevitable, Unexpected Keynote Smackdown
Actually I don't think inherited money is that dangerous. Unless it's coming from more than a generation back, you don't even get it till you're old yourself. And when people inherit money young, if anything it seems to screw them up rather than giving them an advantage.
No we don't. Not about the individual.

But we do know that this was the correct choice for the majority. We also know that the majority didn't take it. So we know that the majority made a mistake.

It doesn't take much of a lapse to void the benefits.
Yes, but that's because they hired someone experienced, not because they hired someone who knew your plans and designs.

In my experience, CA employers are very careful about IP from former employers.

The "IP theft" cases that I'm (somewhat) aware of weren't "took stuff to new employer" but "started own biz using prev employer's stuff".
I'm not sure exactly how to demonstrate the fairness to you if you don't see it in the above hypothetical case, esp if you agree that you wouldn't "lend" your entire retirement to a poor credit risk individual. I'll take one more shot at it:

In order to attract prudent capital to a riskier investment, the projected rate of return must be higher than that of any available safe, or safer, investment. IOW, to lend to "high risk" customers, the credit card company has to charge some form of higher fees or rates. If they don't elect to offer lower rates to the "low risk" customers than those that they have to charge the high-risk customers, then someone else will come along and cherry-pick the low-risk customers.

Said only slightly differently, why would anyone choose invest at arms-length in something riskier if there were a safer alternative available with an equal rate of return? They wouldn't, and any attempt to compel them to do so via regulation is unlikely to produce a result that you'd be happy with. It will either dry up credit for everyone, dry up credit for only the riskier potential patrons, or result in #1, followed by the demand for changes to the bankruptcy laws to enable creditors to safely lend at the mandated terms to all comers. I doubt that any of those will be a net benefit to society, except possibly the second, which would still result in extreme short-term pain to lower economic status individuals, who are disproportionately represented in the "high risk" cohorts of the market.
Looking at the comments here you should remember who the people here are (hackers) and who your audience is.

If your audience is hackers the advice here is good, if it isn't you should probably look elsewhere to back up the your choice. For most people the only distinction between HTML and plain text emails is that the plain text email looks boring and doesn't have clickable links, meaning that you can't click through to a webpage. Copy-pasting a link is still for the geeks.
Email is actually a pretty poor new customer acquisition tool for all the reasons spelled out by previous commenters. The best use of email, in my experience, is to keep existing users engaged and informed about your company/product.

To answer your original question, we send user emails in HTML so that we can include light branding elements (logo, etc), but design them in such a way that they look like text emails. That is, we don't go overboard with images and tables (most webmail clients default to images off anyway). You will also want to create a text alternative for those precipitants that can't receive HTML.
I thought this was going to be funny?
while growth rate is not in itself visible, what drives it is something that's usually even more visible than the size of the user base: the quality of the product.

I'm not convinced. Most startup founders think that their products are the greatest thing since sliced bread, but they're often also aware that they are biassed. How many startup founders haven't at some point been disappointed by the size of their user base and said to themselves "gee, I think what I'm doing is really cool, but maybe the market for this isn't as big as I thought it was"?
A big reason I think they're de-emphasizing MacWorld is the crazy swings it brings in terms of stock prices and expectations. Apple isn't going to introduce an revolutionary iPhone year after year, and year after year AAPL goes through massive trade activities with speculators. We started holding up a MacBook staring at the share price every year and watch it go freakin' crazy.

Secondly, old media is dead. Long live new media. New media that we have in place -- online news, pro and amateur blogs, twitter, rss, facebook, chat -- has easily outstripped the effectiveness of things like trade journals and trade shows.

Thirdly, MacWorld has always been an odd compromise internally. Preparation for it begins early but with that pesky Exodus (12/22 - 1/2) right in the middle, it puts a rush on the rest of the 5 days to polish all of the marcomm materials and presentations. Then you have the devs all stuck in SF for an entire week.

If MacWorld was held at a later date then the costs might be justifiable -- it's why Apple left MacWorld Boston. The catch though is that MacWorld can't be held at a later date lest it be trumped by CES. Either way, not showing up Macworld is going to decrease the enormous strains an arbitrary January date puts on the company. The Town Hall meetings are perfectly sufficient, a lot closer, a lot cheaper, and a lot more controllable.

Also, Steve Jobs not doing a keynote isn't a big deal. Schiller will not be his successor (I thought at one point it was going to be Forstall but that idea went out the door), but if there's no big products to push, Steve might as well just hand it off to his lieutenants. If and when Schiller announces an Apple product, then be worried.
Paul - you assert that the economy is less controlled by the biggest companies than it was 50 years ago. Is this supported by data? I would be curious to see what % of total GDP is booked by the top 1% of companies in 1950 and in 2000.
We've always had entrepreneurs in the U.S., but clever little firms haven't taken over the economy yet.

Big clumsy companies still have the advantage in a lot of areas. I'd like to see those areas eroded, but I suspect some of them are growing.

For example, my impression is that fewer doctors are in private practice than there used to be, with more of them belonging to clinics. There are certainly fewer independent pharmacies than there used to be.
The Gaussian Plague
It's still kind of depressing that so many people are using IE that this is even an issue.

Especially the "gamers" that this virus is targeting -- shouldn't they be using quick, reliable browsers rather than being a slave to IE!? Guess they're not as cool as many of them think...
I have a hp tc1100 tablet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Compaq_TC1100) that I use for reading. It has two distinct advantages:

1) You can disconnect the keyboard so that it becomes easier to handle and more like a book, meaning that you can read in bed, in the sofa, etc.

2) You can switch the screen orientation so that the reading area becomes more like a book (higher and narrower)

Regarding finding my way back I usually just leave a PDF open till I'm done - the spurs me to finish it as well :-)
http://www.abevigoda.com
What it boils down to is that Kahr is just a great businessman. He understood what people wanted, gave it to them and tied in a great revenue model that didn't scare people away.

He did this by truly understanding his target customer and their risk/expense threshold.
I bet most of you are using Macs or Linux on the job ...

I wish. The places that I have worked, doing the kind of work I do (which usually means I at least have local admin permissions to my own machine), it's more likely that I will be using a Windows box with Firefox as my primary browser.
"College admissions officers do not, as far as I know, follow up on the careers of the people they accept and see how they did."

I checked for an article from the Harvard Crimson about the degree to which the admission office follows up on admitted students after they enroll, although I didn't find the link just now. You've received other replies mentioning various ways, with various degrees of formality, that admission offices can and do check their results. Now that many admission offices are making very fine distinctions among applicants as admission rates plummet below 10 percent, there will probably be growing interest in validating the criteria on which admission decisions are made.

MIT admission office McGreggor Crowley, in one of his admission travel sessions in the last year, said his office has done studies of which students perform best in upper division courses at MIT. Taking really hard classes in high school is a better predictor of upper-division success at MIT than having a spotless G.P.A., for example. He asked a large audience of high school students how many had done baby-sitting, and very few raised their hands. He said if that is one thing that kept you busy in high school, be sure to mention that on your MIT application.
"The emissions of burning methane have less of a green house effect than methane gas itself."

True only if the methane is present in the atmosphere. In this case it is trapped in ice or under water.
I had a kindle for about a week. (Long story short, Took it to class, it broke and Amazon wont replace it). During that week, it worked pretty well for reading things, no strain on my eyes.

Now, i just use Preview on my mac. It saves where I'm at and it's UI does the job.
Why shouldn't we expect pay raises take a hit at a time like this? The US economy is not growing much, if at all, and in fact is most likely in a recession. There's a strong possibility that inflation in the next 12 months will be well under 2%, and that we may even slip into deflationary environment overall. In a -1 to 1% inflationary environment, we should be happier with a 2.5% increase than with a 5% increase in an 8-10% inflationary environment. If you ask most people, they'd be happier with the second case however.

(I'm hoping my own salary review is completed prior to my boss reading this HN comment, but honestly, if I don't get a merit increase, I'm not going anywhere, so there's relatively little tension to compel them to grant me one.)
Cartoonists are good at finding the flaws in the current system but not really finding ways to fix them.

So looking for some more reasonable ideas to address his concerns: There are already limits on the kinds of investments low net worth individuals can make and quite possible some for of useary law limiting interest to ~20 - 30% which would cut down how much credit people can get and reduce there payments at the same time. A few changes to how people can invest their 401k's so they need some reasonable P/E and diversification if they have less than say 200k and are over 55 might not be a bad idea.

I think most of what he is complaining would be addressed with those changes and something like them might even become law but we would still have capitalism. Because capitalism is about having markets determine price which would still happen based on the actions of people with more money.
I think it's actually Nobel Prizes per alumnus, i.e., it includes advanced degree-holders as well. (See http://www.admissions.caltech.edu/about/notable, which states that "Caltech has over 20,000 living alumni—of whom 17 are Nobel Prize-winning scientists", and goes on to list lots of notable Caltech Ph.D. alumni.) So the graduate admissions committees are apparently doing a good job, too (though clearly they screwed up in my case :-).
Ask HN: Finding US teenager for moderation?
We're a startup in Asia with a new community site that is starting to pick up first users in USA (14-24yo girls)

Due to timezones we're looking to get a freelance moderator in USA (we would do the rest ourselves during our waking hours). As a startup, budget is pretty meager and all collaboration would be remote over Skype etc

We'd ask one of our more active users but we'd rather pay to get someone reliable and also because there is some other work that person would need to help with.

Any others who have recruited paid student moderators for their sites?
I ordered the chocolates awhile ago for my girlfriend... It was delicious.
12 Chocolate Chip Cookie for $18.95. I'm amazed people would pay so much. I wonder how many sales she gets.
if anything it seems to screw them up

That's why it's dangerous :)

Buffet has it right: leave them enough so that they can do anything, but not enough so that they can do nothing.
On the one hand, high SAT scores are still rather scarce,

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/41382...

but on the other hand, any one applicant with perfect SAT scores can still be rejected by plenty of colleges.

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/377882-how...

Agreed with the point that on a dollar-per-SAT-point basis, there is little rationale for choosing commercial SAT preparation over simply self-studying with the released previous exams. The most decisive thing to do to raise SAT scores is to read widely and avidly in English.
Stay in MA
The real textbook case isn't the knowledge workers themselves, but salespeople joining competitors and taking their rolodex.

The same thing applies to consultants, who can parlay relationships their previous employers built up for them.
That's only true if your program (a) isn't written yet, and (b) wouldn't benefit from doing things which are difficult in Python (e.g., from being even higher-level). It's not learning time -- I already know Python quite well.

I know Python-only is fine for many people, but for others it is a showstopper. I've got a bunch of Lisp code I wouldn't mind hosting on Google's servers but there's zero chance I'll ever take the time to greenspun myself macros, multimethods, parts of the MOP, various Lisp-only libraries, and so on that it uses, and then re-optimize my program for their unique architecture.
You're right, and now I'm trying to figure out why I misremembered that.
Greenland Deglaciating at Triple the Rate of Last Year
Every country that has a 'research' nuclear reactor spends hundred of million to do 'big' science.

What would that have to do with the nuclear power industry?

.

Producing isotopes is the main use of the [research] reactor.

What would medical-isotope production have to do with the nuclear power industry?
Credentialism and Mandaranism are artifacts of state dominated societies. It's really that simple. Free market economies feature so much creative destruction that power has little chance of persisting across generations. Only in a system lacking Darwinian market selection mechanisms do credentials become so critical. Credentialism emerged in China because the Chinese state was always much more powerful than the European crowns.

Credentialism has declined in the US to the extent that certain segments of the economy have adapted and grown so fast as to escape the clutches of government control. The segments still under firm influence of regulation are heavily Mandarin and Credentialist. Think medicine or law.
Solving Puzzles: A Facebook Tradition
So, why the taboo on letting 14 year olds rent/buy porn DVDs?

Are you saying it's an irrational taboo? Or a rational taboo? Is using 18 as the magic age for buying porn really the best we can do?
I know that Swarthmore, my alma mater, has had 5 Nobel laureates (if you count one Economics prize), and is comparably selective, and only slightly larger than Caltech. Note that it only has 20-30% as many science grads as Caltech [rough estimate].
End Game: Cringely's predictions for 2009
Is this more evidence of Apple shunning anything they didn't invent and don't own? That hasn't worked for other companies. What do you think? Will it work for Apple?
I don't get why Google doesn't respect the Accept-Language header. Even though my Firefox is sending this as en, I get redirected to google.co.jp. Is there a reason why most sites ignore this header and favour ip range based redirection?
Legal Documents served via Facebook (Australia)
How much space does empty Innodb table take?
New Open Source Cache System
Intresting question, but the feasibility of it is not dependent on my ability to give a good answer. Regardless, I'll give it a shot for argument's sake. Of course everything you say is valid. you would need to do these things.

I would also mine all the successes, details of interview process and characteristics of successful applicants and their applications for commonalities and then see how many of these can be easily added to an application for 'bonus points'. Of course it depends on how black-hat you want to get about this.

The first thing that came to my mind though, having read pg's essays, would be 'teach them LISP' :)
Laying off George
I'd probably build their social network: connect them to hundreds of influential sources of free marketing. If you're judging performance, the initial performance of a connected founder will greatly exceed an unconnected one. If you don't wait long enough to watch market effects take over before judging which startups to keep, you'll only end up with the networked ones.
I got one for my stepson (7) last year. He's had a lot of fun making random Weewar maps and looking up Zelda online, but the programming interest hasn't grown. Though he keeps wanting to "do a deal with Lucas and Nintendo" to write a Zelda and Star Wars game.

I started programming silliness at 12. I would have probably been fine getting into it earlier, but I'm not so sure I would have given it much mindshare earlier than that.
I came home from school each day and programmed late into the night too. Unlike your friend, my parents DID think I "needed to go outside or something." haha
I agree, it's a bit shock-jockish. His point isn't really that PROGRAMMING isn't appropriate, but that parents shouldn't force things on their kids too early.
This is not an either or. Use the proper MIME types and send a HTML version and a plain text version in the same message.

HTML email is one of those things that some people get religious about.
Their stock price was never really that high relative to earnings. The threat of U.S. government action kept it in check. That company was making eBay like profits with even better margins and their growth was strong.
"The Last Question" by Isaac Asimov (1956)

http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

"Oh, hell, just about forever. Till the sun runs down, Bert."

"That's not forever."

"All right, then. Billions and billions of years. Twenty billion, maybe. Are you satisfied?"
Google releases the App Engine dashboard
Hacker News Search Extension for Firefox
Stax Networks launches Google like AppEngine for Java Apps
I've met the unfortunately named Mr. Dikshit and he was a bit of a douche. He was splashing around chips and bragging about how rich he was. So while I hate to see this happen to the industry, especially given that what they did probably wasn't illegal, I have a hard time feeling sorry for him in particular.
Maybe you're missing the bigger picture: no one would have enough money at today's prices. College costs would have to come down because very few people can afford to pay for school. House prices would have to come down because no one could afford them.

In the 1940s people didn't take out home loans like they do today, and home prices were significantly lower. In 2000, people were paying 4 times the adjusted price of a home was according to census.gov (http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/census/historic/value...).

> The majority of people can't handle credit.

I stand by that. The average debt of credit card holders is over $16,000 dollars (excluding mortgage) (http://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/credit-card-indu...). 55% of Americans with credit cards don't pay off their balance monthly. That's the majority of credit card holders who can't handle credit, and I doubt they have $16,000 around the pay off their balance. According to NYT (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/07/20/business/20deb...) the American's will save, on average, $392 this year. How are you supposed to repay $16,000 in debt when you can only save $392 per year? It would take 40 years assuming interest wasn't collected on the principal amount.
UPDATE: Fixed a bug where textareas and text inputs that weren’t inside form tags were not modified. I also removed apostrophes as a paired character because it became annoying when I typed contractions.
Using pip Requirements
Ironically they've largely reversed their opinions on that, especially now that their occupancy rate is half of what it was a year ago. Now they want it to be licensed and they want in on the action.
Scientists Call AP Report on Global Warming 'Hysteria'