skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What are you doing differently due to the "economic crisis"?
You can't read the news without seeing several articles detailing the economic crisis we are in. Phrases like "worst X since the Depression" are thrown around with alarming frequency.

Personally, I haven't been directly affected yet by the current economy. I still have a job, and the job market in my specialty and region still looks ok from where I'm standing. But I'm concerned about how things will look 6 months from now.

Here's what I've been doing:

* More networking. Emailing colleagues from old jobs, setting up lunches, staying in touch.

* Keeping resume up-to-date.

* Fixing a side-project website that I did a while back, which has fallen into disrepair. (I think it's a decent demonstration of my abilities, when it's working, anyway.)

* Learning a new programming language/dev environment

* Trying to cut down on how much I read the news. Or at least articles about the economy. It seems like it's stopped being helpful, and for me I'm just starting to feel needless panic at this point.

How has the economy affected you, and what are you doing about it?
If the issue is really the resource consumption of the OS, I'll believe it when I see it -- thus far every iteration of Windows has been more bloated than the last.

Is XP still shipping on most low-power notebooks though? Not from what I've seen... From what I've seen, most "email, word and internet explorer" users are using vista and getting along OK.
The difference is that very few if any plugins are sold and it is somewhat easy to downgrade to an older version of Firefox. Could you imagine what would happen if iPhone OS 2.3 came out and 10% of the apps in the itunes store stopped working? It would be a PR nightmare for Apple.
Nice! twitter confuses me how it will convert your urls to tiny urls when you don't want to - but won't when you need it to.
Strangely, Google is your friend:

http://www.google.com/search?q=ponzi

Something like the first three hits all give you the answer. Even more strangely, WikiPedia gives you the answer too:

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

Did you try looking things up before asking?
Before I worked on App Engine I would have agreed with you that distributed transactions were fundamental.

But it is hard to overstate how troublesome App Engine is to work with. I am grateful to Google for providing this service but it really requires you to start with a greatly lowered set of expectations. There are a wide range of severe bugs that make the service unusable for a significant number of people.

By Google's own admission, the development environment does not reflect some basic errors the app encounters once deployed.

<gobbledygook>For example, the "500 Server Error" issue makes it impossible for some people to deploy their app entirely or otherwise requires radical revisions because no logged errors are issued in development or production to explain a "typo or mis-configuration"</gobbledygook>.

Until basic issues like these have been addressed, I would consider distributed transactions on App Engine to be, ironically, a luxury.
"But I have yet to find a good, definitive guide out there."

Really? I thought this was the definitive guide: http://innig.net/software/ruby/closures-in-ruby.rb

It seems like a good guide to me.
Clearly reads like a joke to me.
Why Learning Haskell/Python Makes You a Worse Programmer
Twitter users alone is a small sample, but I think there are other anecdotal samples that support (but can't prove) the author's hypothesis. I can't remember anyone talking about PlentyOfFish, and this includes people who have tried multiple dating sites. Compete, Alexa, Google Trends and other traffic estimators also show Match having higher traffic. The only statistics showing PlentyOfFish as bigger than Match are the comScore numbers quoted by Mashable.

It's also important to remember that Markus Frind was accused of overstating the PlentyOfFish traffic levels to generate buzz years ago when the site first became popular. Although the post went off into a satirical conspiracy, there could still be something fishy going on.
Don't suppress your intense compulsion to write just because it got you into trouble a few times... It is a gift. Manage it.

1. Always send your stuff to a few friends before you hit the publish button.

2. Don't write inappropriate personal confessions. Invent a character, have them live the inappropriateness and call it fiction.

Edit: 3. Revise the shiz out of your work until it is good enough that others can enjoy reading it.
> It's also now officially a GNU project, so it's not going anywhere any time soon.

I first read that in _exactly_ the opposite way it was, surely, meant. Heehee.
The worst question I ever got asked was: "If your friends were here, what one word would they use to describe you?"

I mean, what kind of answer are you supposed to give to that?
It's a joke... You know, like... haha... funny. That kind of a thing.
Has anyone actually been asked this? When I first entered the workforce and started interviewing I remember prepping for this question (and its corresponding strengths one) and had nice prepped answers.

To date no one has every asked me this - and when hiring I've never asked it.
Well, another big point is that Mozilla pre-releases it's software. I'm not 100% aware, but I don't think Apple provides the same convenience to developers.

Wouldn't you like three days to see if your software is going to run smoothly after the update?
This guy is 4 times smarter than you.

I'm sure he'd be awesome if it was ever actually necessary to move Mt. Fuji. The fact remains, he works for Microsoft in this day and age. How smart can he be?

(Maybe he just really likes their corporate culture?)
Cannot hang apples from the pole.
We're Festivus people.
i took a relocation package that i would have probably not taken otherwise.

i'm also working on developing my resume/portfolio and finding some smaller freelance type jobs on the side to help pad my emergency fund.

edit: i suppose i should include some 'good' things i've done --

i made some very smart investment choices and haven't lost much in the stock market.

6 months ago i downsized everything, moved back in with my parents on a temporary basis, and started saving up a lot more money to try and brace for impact.

consequently, i'm about to buy a very nice place in a very cool area for a very low price.
yah.. I wrote it partly to take that ambiguity away.. also seemed a shame to take up some of your 140 characters with a long url, then only to see that Twitter compressed it for you in the saved Tweet, reminding you that you could have typed more :)
Be offended all you want. I do most of my programming in Perl. I could be wrong, but I'm just sharing my observations.
Sorry, stupid, stupid stupid - I still have to learn the difference between this place and other "forums". That wasn't a question, it was a heading to indicate what the article was about - I see that now.

Sorry, sorry, sorry.

Wanted: skill in pre-leap lookage.
IPod Nano Green Canvas Sport Case by Speck 
Accessorize and protect your iPod nano with the stylish Canvas Sport case! Inspired by classic sneakers- this case boasts a cool, sporty look and gives great protection to your iPod. Features a canvas body, rubber edges, sewn-in screen protector and belt clip!
Yes, but too bad no one ever writes blog posts about the millions of bad ideas that just turn into other bad ideas. That's the narrative bias in action.
I've been asked it maybe half of my interviews. If you're going for an interview, be ready for this one. I've had at least one interviewer be very persistent about it.

There should be an equivalent question for interviewees to ask - how about "what is your company's greatest weakness?" Or "what would be the worst part about working here?"
Ugh.

I'm guessing "CHUG!" is frowned upon.
Can't we all just proclaim in unison that The 4 Hour Work Week is crap and never mention Timothy Ferriss again?
on the typing more front words - have you seen tweetshrink? http://tweetshrink.com/ - it'll shorten words like later to l8r to save characters - http://tweetdeck.com have integrated it's api into their twitter client
How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days (by the World of Goo people)
Being on the other end of the table sometimes, no one has asked this question, but they really should. It is actually a much better question than asking the interviewee "What is your greatest weakness?".

I think the sorts of questions an interviewee asks is more revealing than any sort of digging you might do with the standard bullshit interview questions.
http://github.com/choonkeat/hquery/tree/master

Hquery: Uses pure HTML as "template" for rendering views a Hpricot sequence (in the .hquery counter-part file) is executed to modify the pure HTML and the resulting HTML is output to the browser.
Yes well, all that Linux work and Now Windows 7 for Netbooks kills it. I guess I can retire as a wealthy opensource programmer as my work is now done!
Just to follow up, I did as you suggested: created a new account with Apple and reapplied. I was accepted immediately. Thanks for the tip!
Right.

But why's half the thread treating it like an actual analysis?
No offense, but the lot of you commenters just need to get out more.

I wasted a lot of my youth and early adult years psychoanalyzing myself in order to learn and master myself, when going out into the world and participating and exploring it, having relationships with people, is the true path to self-actualization.

Extrospection is the path to enlightenment
I've been wanting to use this for a long time but Safari's version of Greasemonkey doesn't support the GM_xmlhttpRequest function anymore.
Yep. POF is the world's most elaborate banner ad for other dating sites. It probably gets a bloated CPM for having targeted traffic, and I wouldn't be surprised if it could support a high click-throgh rates on CPA ads for the other dating sites -- because it's fairly useless for dating, itself.

I'm not sure if the author was being serious or satirical, but it's kind of a shame that the article was so dopey, because there's probably a real story here.
Fortum seem to be addressing my main concern with plug-in hybrids: who is going to do the massive changes needed to support them in our electrical infrastructure?
...when programming in less powerful languages, because they start to seem inadequate.

I constantly find myself wanting to use idioms from these languages, or noticing how much less code I'd be able to write if I was using one of these languages.
Sorry, don't have many. Why don't you tell me about some of yours?
Rapid-iteration and rapid-prototyping seems to be slowly gaining traction in the gaming industry. The high cost of game development plus high risk makes for an environment where trying out things in small increments and with quick turnaround is very valuable.

This dude talks about it a lot: http://lostgarden.com
Update: I probably should have made it more obvious for some people that the title of the post is not entirely serious, and mainly I'm just griping.

I think this explains the whole article and why there is no serious discussion here.
My Eee Pc 901 works fine with suspend/resume, both take just a couple of seconds. The only thing that sometimes fail is audio, but that is easily recovered.

EDIT: With Ubuntu 8.10
advertising seems more stable than subscription based. At least according to the Economist, advertising spend changes little during recessionary periods.
The title is catchy but imprecise. After discovering the concision of python and haskell, the author has less tolerance for the verbosity of c#, the language with which he earns his living. Perhaps the solution is to earn a living with a more concise language.
Analysis: RIAA Strategy Shift Mired in Murky Legal Waters
No, because it's not true. Ferriss is probably the most marketed person on the planet, and 4HWW is talk about tons, but the book has good, specific information (that the reviews always leave out). Much of it isn't original, but if you haven't seen it anywhere else, it's new to you. Some of it is very detailed and original (or at least I haven't seen it anywhere) and worth taking a few hours for.

Don't confuse the man with the message.
I'd agree. Writing has opposite goals of coding, and perhaps trying to write a novel would in the least distract his hypergraphia long enough to stop him doing damage elsewhere with it. I mean Stephen King has hypergraphia, perhaps it's just more suited to prose than code.
I absolutely agree and we did our best to automate as much of the process as possible. There were a few problems that required a pair of human eyes though. First, no copyright holder sent a complaint in the same format. Some sent a simple email with a file name and ip/time stamp while others sent a long poorly rendered xml file that was automatically sent from some contractor's hacked torrent client. There was no rhyme or reason to the manner in which we received the data. Another issue was file name problems. The copyright holder would send out complaints for a user sharing the movie "Dune" when in reality the file was only a copy of pictures taken dirt biking at the local dunes.

The automation mostly came in pulling known data like our IP block from the complaints, and having a good IP logging system. We broke the process down to 3 steps, each very quick. A complaint only took 3-5 seconds to process, so the issue was just the sheer volume in them.

When the end result is the possibility of a lawsuit, it is in everyone's best interest to maintain a human element in the chain.
This is a great interview question. The point isn't the actual answer, but the way an interviewee responds. It's a mind game to see how the person will react. Will they deny weakness? Will they confess a horrendous flaw? It reveals a lot of character. Plus it is just plain fun to ask people ridiculous questions with no correct answer.
Blind Man Sees With Subconscious Eye
Wow. This would feel so out-of-place in the US that people would wonder about the mental health of the shouter.

I like the assertion of importance implied by the shouting; it seems that the US car corps have enough separation between the performance of a company and the impact on the exec that it doesn't carry the same weight.

The "down economy" or "lower consumer spending" are too well-established as escape-goats.
The problem is that the "weakness" question has become so predictably overused and coached that everyone has a "weakness as a strength" answer readily prepared.

I've found that textbook interview questions don't do anything other than badge the interviewer as unimaginative and 1 dimensional.

IME, the best interviews are conversations and not interviews at all.
I always ask that question of the interviewer in the form of "What aspect of your job is causing you the most pain?" It almost always gets a frank discussion of the problems the group is facing. I also ask about funding, profitability and business model.
Actually, there are some serious points here. Consider this:

http://www.postmodernprogramming.org/stories/fixed_point_mad...
So why not use IronPython or F#?
That's an extremely rash claim: I'm struggling to adapt to a different language, and so will you.
Interesting....my Erdos number is 4 too, but I'm in a different field. There are long math tentacles into the world.

Thanks to Gowers et al for this fabulous book!
hello_moto was way out of line. That said, it's probably a mistake to underestimate how smart Microsoft is. They should be respected as a formidable adversary. If they were all nitwits, they wouldn't have been able to build a platform as successful as XBox 360, for example.
Whats new in SQL Server 2008
But if the article was named that, I doubt it would be front page on HN right now.
I always answer that I am not very good at direct sales, that's why I became a programmer. It's even the truth.
I really enjoyed the lifestyle message of the book, which I think is an interesting goal, but the "specific information" about how to implement it kind of upset me.

There's enough room in this world for a few people to be selling vitamins or "information products" via infomercials, but that's only because there are a lot of people doing other things. Good for him that he found his niche, but it's totally misleading to suggest to everyone else that we can all race cars, dance competitively and live all over the world by following the exact same path.

Also, the suggestion that all favelas are just like "City of God" was pretty offensive.
I have a buddy who apparently took the 4HWW to heart and moved to Argentina to work as a freelance software engineer... he seems to be doing well.

Personally, I thought Ferriss made it seem a little easy, but who knows? Did you actually do all of the challenges? I guess you can't knock it until you've tried it.
irb & script/console tips
"Omit needless words!" -- Strunk

Read The Elements of Style to find out how novel writing works. Using fewer words is just as much a part of writing as using less code is part of programming.
Swarm: A true distributed programming language
I find it really odd and a little embarassing that part of my fascination with languages (including conlangs) comes from the ability to say things that the people around me will not understand. It's sort of a combination of intentionally alienating myself from others and being able to say what I feel like saying and knowing others will be too ignorant to understand.

I used to make up "alphabets" as a kid. As I learned more about linguistics and writing systems, I even got as far as making something vaugely like Korean script, where several sub-characters form one larger block character which all add up to one syllable. I wrote things in these alphabets, but never disclosed the meaning to anyone else. I never really got obsessive about it, though, but if I had a harsher childhood I have a feeling I would have written entire journals in it.
Thanks! Wait... oh. Sorry.
Yet it may be exactly the right advice. Sometimes you don't need to know more, you just need some good spanking :).

If you noticed, the author is a professor specializing in studying procrastination:

http://www.carleton.ca/psychology/faculty/pychyl.html

What he basically says: there are no cheap tricks. Most of the time you think you have some wonderful method, it's just another way to procrastinate.
The moral of the story: don't bother improving yourself, unless you have the freedom to improve your environment accordingly.

That's the moral of the story? That's not a moral, that's whining.
Don't improve? Seems immoral.
Viktor Bout, arms-dealer extraordinaire - Flying anything to anybody
The obvious answer is to switch to Brainfuck, the any at-work language, even Cobol, will be a pleasure to work in.
Pretty funny...a site meant for php tutorials has a php error (see comments)...
Error as copied from www.phpit.net -
we all have our bad days, this one was just a little bit funnier than the others...hope you got a laugh from this one!

<Copied text follows>

Warning: require_once(/home/phpit/public_html/wp-config.php) [function.require-once]: failed to open stream: Permission denied in /home/phpit/public_html/wp-blog-header.php on line 12

Fatal error: require_once() [function.require]: Failed opening required '/home/phpit/public_html/wp-config.php' (include_path='.:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php') in /home/phpit/public_html/wp-blog-header.php on line 12
Yikes, not another procrastination article: http://www.google.com/search?q=procrastination+site:news.yco...
+1 for "thusly"

edit: I guess I'm still getting the hang of HN etiquette. I was impressed by the clint's usage of an unusual word and got downmodded for expressing that concisely. So, next time do I use a complete sentence to express my admiration, or do I avoid any discussion of word choice / writing style?
I've asked something like this while giving an interview before: "What's your greatest weakness? And don't do the thing where you turn it around to a strength."

That just really seemed to confuse people. They weren't very good candidates though.
Why do firms adjust by cutting workers rather than by cutting wages?
If there's a header file for an API, does that mean that it's public? Or does it have to be in XCode's documentation? I'm wondering specifically about AVAudioFoundation / AVAudioPlayer.
Quite simply because if they cut wages, those people with cut wages would just leave. And then they would have a mass walk-out on their hands.
There are two claims here: "POF is not really that big", and "Emergent AI clickfraud bots are causing POF's traffic". People who are treating this seriously are assuming that the first claim was the real message, and that the author merely indulged in some whimsy after. I think it more likely that the second claim, the joke, was the point of the article, but there's a lot less to be said about that, and so people who want to say something serious about POF are ignoring it.
GateHouse: You’re doing it wrong
I've been switching my domains to namecheap, but this is for personal stuff, not business.
I believe his point was that science and religion don't necessarily conflict with each other.

Yes, religion suggests things that have no use to understanding the world in raw science terms. Instead, it tries to find meaning. While I love science and the great benefits/improvements it gives us, it has not taken any steps (nor should it) towards finding true meaning in my life.
Embed Any File or URL with Embedit.in
This article is two years old, at which point F# wasn't much more than a research project.
Kylec, as a programmer you should be already really awesome with logic, organising information into structured flowcharts and be able to abstract information into skeletal frame. You know how PG's essays are pretty long but they go from start to finish with clarity of direction and logic? I'm pretty sure you can write well too, because you can code, and because you mentioned "length" as the difficulty, not grammar or spelling or your stuff not making any sense. Maybe you just haven't had a really good english teacher back in HS, don't let that limit you. Take a writer's workshop or join a toastmasters. Hmmm is it possible to start a HN writing group?

Writing was my best talent (coughwascough) before i found programming. I believe there's some inherit link between the two.
Google Replacing Some Cash Bonuses with Android Phones
Summary: You can't cut wages because workers will just go somewhere else. So, the solution is to print lots of money instead, so the money supply is inflated, and thus EVERYONE's wages go down.

I swear, you have to be a PhD to not see the problems with that idea.
The author's C# example predated the release of LINQ, which makes the C# syntax much more like the Python's. The author's code:

string.Join("\n", mylist.ConvertAll<string>(
delegate(Foo foo)
{
return foo.Description();
}).FindAll(
delegate(string x)
{
return x != "";
}).ToArray());

can be rewritten as:

string.Join("\n", (from f in myList
where f.Description() != ""
select f.Description()).ToArray());

which is super-easy to read and understand. Maybe not as concise or pretty as Python or Haskell, but definitely a step in the right direction.

Others' comments that the author should consider F# are well founded, as it integrates seamlessly with other .NET-based code (such as C#) and is a pretty great language. However, it's worth noting that the post was written in 2006, well before F# was widely known about or distributed.
This is a good question. I'm reading the Andy Grove (Intel) biography and there are a bunch of times where they cut wages and a few times when they kept workers that could have been laid off (like when they got out of the watch business).
Comparing C# 2.0's functional capabilities to Haskell/Python is terribly misleading. You can perform functional tasks easily in 3.5 using lambda expressions and built in functional operators such as:

listOfTestObjects.ForEach(x => sOutputDescriptions += "\n" + x.Description());

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/04/08/new-orcas-...
Thanks for the catch Arthur, i'll patch that up