skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It depends a lot on the country you're in.

In Switzerland, the last time I was unemployed, I got about 80% of my salary, and they would have paid it for two years. You have to 'prove' you are looking for a job, but not getting hired when you have interviews is probably not that difficult. Someone showed me applications from people who obviously didn't want to get hired, they were very colourful and with lots of drawings.

In Belgium I heard you don't even have to prove you're looking, and there's no time limit for staying unemployed.

In France there is the rmi, revenu minimum d'insertion, that gives you money, apparently not even expecting you to find a job. That policy is not as stupid as it sounds, there are serious economists defending it, they call it the negative income tax. It's really not very much money, but I've met plenty of people living from it.

The people who do this are usually not very proud of it and get out of it when they can.

All those systems are being slowly scrapped or made less attractive everywhere. They are leftovers from better times.
I've done night work and found it easy to sleep during the day. People who have problems almost always make the same mistake: Reverting to a night-sleep schedule on the weekend.
Bailout Is a Windfall to Bankers, if Not to Borrowers
I leave mine at the table. Maybe that is an advantage of my neighborhood in Nashville, TN.
Just as you can run across a busy highway once, twice, or ten times and come out fine, doesn't mean that's it's a good idea, so allowing one story like this won't cause much damage, but as an editorial policy is a disaster.
hopefully one of those upvotes is pg
First off drop the "next 'killer app'" idea. I have as of yet never been killed by a computer application. It is marketing speak for over promise under deliver. Look at your OSS heros how many of them ever had a "killer app". As far as problems beyond your skills, how do you think you get better skills? Playing it safe isn't the answer.
I have an office that another startup lets me use (for a few more months). We are working on getting some sort of coworking space going which would be ideal for me. Otherwise I will rent a small office somewhere (I can't get anything done at home with my wife and 4 kids there).
Good find. I was actually looking for that to illustrate the fate of most aircraft that attempt to ditch in water.

And yes, I should have been more clear, "gear" would include landing gear (duh), engines, flaps, elevators, or anything else that might "snag" on contact with the water and cause this sort of outcome. The larger the aircraft, the harder it is to prevent this. There is a water landing emergency checklist that usually includes retracting the wheels, pulling in the flaps, etc but the angle and levelness of contact here was all art. Very cool to watch. I'm glad there were some security cameras that caught the actual landing.
A County in China Sees Its Fortunes in Tea Leaves Until a Bubble Bursts
I really liked the "Intermission" where he discussed features that he would cut to meet the deadline. I think that's a very important skill and one I would like to improve on for my personal projects.
I have a dell mini 9, its great for college and checking email. Also good for light web browsing. Its not great for programming because the keyboard is a bit to small.

It works great with the new "cloud" web apps like dropbox and google docs offline.
The "cloud" fascination is reaching absurd levels
I agree. Cuts like that are hard, but doing them honestly and really reevaluating what's necessary at least one per dev cycle is really critical. It reminded me of Spolsky talking about how one of the best things they did on Excel 5 was being forced to cut tons of features: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000245.html point 13
While I agree with the assertion that warm bodies organized around a specific technology does not = win, I'm not certain that those are the only metrics for success at play in these articles.

Take the case of the small startup without an inspired coder CTO which didn't have time to wait for ruby or python programmers who went shopping for contractors. PHP can get you far and fast (and often badly).

I was interviewed to lead technology in a place like this and they knew I'd try to make them start over and abandon PHP (purist, longview). PHP had provided them capability and in their mind clearly "won" (developers existed and made themselves clearly visible on the market). They wouldn't have been in business at that point if they had held out for something better.
Without the disparaging remarks toward HN, this post would be much better. Granted, I'm new here, but I feel like HN is more about embracing intelligent discussion than embracing the "right way".

The fact that this post could raise a coherent counterpoint to the issue is evidence enough of that.
There's a Webseed extension to Bittorrent that allows you to seed a torrent off a webserver: see http://www.bittornado.com/docs/webseed-spec.txt . It shouldn't be too hard to set up on an EC2 instance if you needed to do so.
Nerd Merit Badges: 01 - Contribute to an Open Source Project
>I would expect that the median lifetime earnings of a Rhodes Scholar to be higher than that of an NFL player.

I agree. However, one must consider that many NFL players never even graduated from the colleges for which they played and have limited non-sports earning opportunities. One ex-Browns player in Cleveland is now a Realtor (sadly, a proper noun?) -- he's able to use his celebrity status to woo clients. Most aren't so lucky. Is it that being a Rhodes scholar results in high lifetime earnings, or is it that the skills/aptitude/drive required to earn this scholarship are the cause?
Good points but why not just comment within the thread?
I realize this may come across as an advertisement, but I'm not affiliated with them. I just thought it was a clever idea.
I didn't assume that it would be technically difficult, but I thought that an article that took into consideration Amazon's architecture to make a horizontally scalable BitTorrent tracker/seed for high-volume high-availability transfers would be an interesting read.
Agree on all accounts except on:

"I wouldn't call the article 'unreasonable' for valuing science over fallible human reason. "

Because I don't think this article values science. If it did, then it would simply state: "Here we have 2 keyboards which one is better?"

Defining better as either:
a) Fastest to type in for a user with IDK a 2 year experience in it.
b) Easiest to learn, from scratch.
c) Easiest to retrain for a person that already dominates the other keyboard.
d) Healthiest over a period of 10 years (RSI anyone).

Instead of doing an experiment or honestly revising the studies mentioned. This article spends most of its time, attacking the Dvorak history or "hoax" as the author calls it in the end.

So this study is neither truly scientific nor truly logical.
Is simply the author trying to support his preconceived notions: "Dvorak is a hoax". And using "ad hominem" attacks or self selecting studies to support his conclusions.

as I mentioned before for real science on keyboards check:
http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/

And thank very much for your comment, it is nice to see succinct well thought argument on the internet.
While reading this, I couldn't help but feel that it had the tenor of an english lit assignment... then realised that it was exactly that.

A+ notwithstanding.
Total pricktease. This paper was published in 2005. It is indeed an interesting paper, but this blog post is lame. This is not news. Although, you could have guessed from the overhyped language.
I think the one I've heard goes, the artist is imagining the sculpture beneath that lump of marble, and they explain the actual creation of it as just removing everything else that's not the sculpture.
As a pilot, it's great to watch a guy make something hair-raising into something that looks like a milk run.

I'd be interested to see if the pilot had a float rating. I'd also be curious as to how the wind was in relation to the river. Ideally the plane would be pointing directly upwind as it hit the water.

However the details worked out (and we pilots love the details) the crew had only seconds to configure and land the plane. Kudos to them for being able to change context and execute a fairly rare maneuver without flaw. There are some great stories about commercial jets doing just fine without engines (check out the Gimli Glider for instance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider) I remember one from South America that involved going through a cloud deck to land on a levee. This pilot gets to add his name to some of the best of the breed. Completely outstanding.
Although I admit these companies are providing a great service, I have been doing just fine with Google Docs, Gmail and the Xoopit plugin to do all my backup (automatically).
I get the impression that most VPS providers ban BitTorrent and IRC.
This sometimes results in a bucket full of charming though:

Cached Object: no no please let me live, they still need me, I have children.

Programmer 1: all cached entries say that before they are invalidated and since when do you have children? Never mind now vanish for ever.
Ask HN: What unlocks with karma, and when?
I've just been a little curious about this recently, since I've noticed things appearing that weren't there before. I now have a "flag" link under the title on comments pages, and can set a topcolor in my profile. What becomes unlockable, and what are the milestones to each?
Ask HN: Choosing a industry/field
How did you choose the industry or field that you specialize in? The biggest barrier I have found to starting a company ( or perhaps its another form of procrastination) is finding a field or industry that is sufficiently interesting to me, comparative to alternatives. I am curious as to how you (as an employee or entrepreneur etc) sat down and decided that from today on I am a online retailer, a web consultant, a MD of a Logistics company etc. Did you just choose the field with the most interest to you, did you solve a problem that is personal to yourself, did you follow a methodology of finding a problem like Steve blank suggests?? cheers, cameron
Giles is still angry that his post "Muppets" got downmodded a lot. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=172894)

I thought his criticism was valid though. (Not that he cares one bit! ;) ... Both those articles started off assuming that PHP 'won' something, and then tried to explain why by pointing out good things about PHP and its community. Neither of them started by laying down the contest rules, examining all the contenders, and picking a winner... They started with a winner and worked backwards somehow into the aether.

On the other hand, if you just realize headlines are by definition linkbait, you can make the mental substitution of the phrase "became more popular than any other toy language" for the word "won". Suddenly those articles make more sense, even if they become less controversial (or insightful) in the process.
I'm finding (not that this is a unique observation at all, though) that there are two kinds of founders: engineers who are accidental entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs who are founders. If you need to think hard to find even a sector to found a startup in, you're probably doing it wrong. Not that you can't be successful, and I wish the best of luck to anyone, but it seems like the giants we all know come from founders who started coding to solve some problem, and let the company grow from there on its own, instead of the other way around.
No EC2 needed.

From the S3 docs:
"Any publicly available data in Amazon S3 can be downloaded via the BitTorrent protocol, in addition to the default client/server delivery mechanism. Simply add the ?torrent parameter at the end of your GET request... "
Anyone know what they're throwing from the ferry near the end? Life preservers to people in the water, maybe?
Video of US Airways descent into Hudson River released
The Gimli Glider incident sounds incredible. I can't imagine how spooky it would be to be in a jet at 40,000 feet and have the engines go silent. How much of the noise in a jet is engine noise vs. air resistance?
“I Can’t Think Of Anything To Write” Syndrome
We're on good terms with VLC and I'm also an ffmpeg developer (mostly in the realm of h264-related stuff).
thanks for the response, it concerns me in as much that i think that your probably correct. its easy to excuse myself as an undergraduate, and "put it off" till later, but it seems that the successful people don't even consider second guessing themselves, instead they have started. although i take (perhaps falsely) solace when reading of firms such as sony and hp that started with the intent to create something, but without an ideas as to what those things would be.
what the fuck ...
One Day You’re Indispensable, the Next Day...
The plane comes in from the left about 2:00. What's really impressive is how quick they have people out of that plane.
"... Good points but why not just comment within the thread? ..."

Read ...
http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/summon-monsters-ope...

and specifically ...

"...
When you build a system where you get points for the number of people who agree with you, you are building a popularity contest for ideas. However, your popularity contest for ideas will not be dominated by the people with the best ideas, but the people with the most time to spend on your web site. Votes appear to be free, like contribution is with Wikipedia, but in reality you have to register to vote, and you have to be there frequently for your votes to make much difference. So the votes aren't really free - they cost time. If you do the math, it's actually quite obvious that if your popularity contest for ideas inherently, by its structure, favors people who waste their own time, then your contest will produce winners which are actually losers. The most popular ideas will not be the best ideas, since the people who have the best ideas, and the ability to recognize them, also have better things to do and better places to be. ..."
1000 items/day isn't that much. I run through 1200+ on originalsignal.com every day & it doesn't take that long.
from talking to Giles (I work with him), I think his problem with hacker news is that it's basically turning into another digg/reddit/slashdot type of thing. It's basically a pool of links outlining what's popular with whoever the users of the site are at the moment, and that group of people is likely to change over time.

I think what would work better is a pool of links that shows you stuff you might find interesting based on past usage (voting up/down, friending others, etc). Don't show me what's interesting to everybody who reads the site, show me what's interesting to _me_. As Giles has said in the past, I have a need for better filtering mechanisms.
My parents own a motel and from my experience you're right. I watched the place for them during the holiday so they could take a vacation. I got plenty of hacking done and even created a new blogging system that fit closer to my style of writing.
The Dvorak keyboard might have some slight advantage for English text, but it's noticeably worse for programming where you need ;=+-,./{}[]() and the numbers quite often.

There might be a advantage for a programmer's keyboard, basically QWERTY with common punctuation on a fifth row above the numbers. But my few brief experiments with unorthodox layouts caused no end of hassle when trying to use other people's machines, so I gave up.
"You have full control on what your php.ini have."

If you're writing, for example, an open source application or an application that is hosted by your customers (I have worked on both) you can't assume you have any control over the php.ini. The recommended php.ini file has short_open_tag disabled and having short_open_tag enabled makes it more difficult to use PHP to template XML files. It's not deprecated yet, but I wouldn't count on it sticking around forever.

All my PHP software works irregardless of the php.ini settings and works across all platforms. If that's not a concern of yours, that's fine. We just have different requirements.

"<?while($r=loop($rs)){?>"

You're making the assumption that my template constructs are just simple 1-to-1 mappings to PHP statements but that's not the case. My {loop} tag gives access the previous entry, whether or not the row is odd or even, whether or not it's the first and last entry, etc. It's a very powerful tag for the kind of common tasks that come up in a web application. But that's just one example, there's also tags for caching template blocks as well as tags for interactive controls. The level of complexity that's hidden behind a few simple tags is enormous -- which is entirely the point. I have lots of code which uses PHP itself for templates so I'm aware of the difference. I didn't start using templates, I started the other way and worked towards using templates because they make the job easier and quicker.

"Here is an idea, better performace is gained by not loading the templating engine at all."

For a compiling template engine, there's the initial cost of compiling the template when it's been changed but then there is very little additional cost. It generates a regular PHP file that's run just any other. Once the app has been running for a few minutes the template engine doesn't need to be loaded at all.

"We can continue discussion without making attacks?"

That wasn't an attack. I was making a point -- the template engine insulates you from all kinds of problems. If you forget to wrap some variable in your h() function, you might never even notice. However you've just opened yourself up to a cross-site scripting attack. And even if you never make mistakes ever, you might not be the only one working on it.
I just wouldn't even think about it. Get yourself in interesting situations; join a research lab where you're not cleaning glassware, do GSoC, etc., and just not worry about founding a company, especially since you're still in school. Trust in randomness, and you'll find plenty of great opportunities if you make yourself available for them to find you.
At 250 apparently you can change the color of the bar on the top.

6 more points to go!

*Thanks to everyone who voted this up. I can now confirm that this is indeed legit. On your settings page you can enter a six digit hexadecimal number that will change the color of the top bar. I'm going to try some of these out! http://www.somacon.com/cgi/colorchart.pl
this article shows that you dont need a lot of time to build cool stuff
That seems like it worked really well. There's been a lot of gnashing of teeth about the fact that jet engines can't survive ingesting birds, but it seems like all you have to do is have a body of water past the end of the runway and a rescue boat ready, and a failed engine is just an inconvenience.
I think they're getting rid of the life preservers, because they're bulky and would allow fewer people to squeeze into the boat.
Consider my upmod as a research grant. Please report results.
As I'm not much of a gamer, at first I thought he built a rocket propelled grenade. I was surprised he hadn't been visited/silenced by the FBI, etc.
PHP won because web designers now can be programmers too.

I don't care about algorithms, binary trees or what fuck. I can code a web page in a day and that pays the bills.

It could have been an echo, a print or a put, but it had to be simple for us, not scary as system.console.writeln()

Most of you will never understand, you all come from a C or Lisp background and can make a computer cry for sure. We don't care, we just want to spit HTML in shiny ways and 'echo' is all we need.
You've won everything you're going to get. Congratulations.
There is a fundamental conflict of interests in asking for new information from a diverse cross section of people (aka the web) while also wanting to only see those things with which you already agree.

If your purpose is knowledge or worldly depth/breadth, there is probably greater value in doing exactly the opposite. You know best those things which you already like.. so exposure to those ideas you don't already like would provide the greatest bang for the cognitive buck.

If anything, we need less filters. (imo)
Ah. I come here mostly for the discussion. It's honestly quite rare that the actual link is that interesting to me. In fact, the commentary here is probably the only thing that really differentiates it from Reddit/Digg.

But if he wants content personalized, Stumbleupon might be a good avenue.
Your made a really good point. I like HN, but the selection of headlines in the front page is mostly irrelevant to me. It just tells me the topics that people are discussing, but they are usually of less interest in my point of view.

I find many more interesting things by just scanning the "new" section. It would be nice if there was some way to have a front page with just the news that I like.
Heh. It probably looks like that. But determining who has "the best team" doesn't change who won the league championship. It's just an interesting footnote. (Does anyone think the Phillies were actually the "best" team in the MLB, or that the Giants were actually the "best" team in the NFL? The "best" team doesn't always win the championship.)

And, honestly, the primary reason I wrote it was to determine how much I suck at fantasy football -- it always seemed to me that players would score really well when they were on my bench, and suck if I started them. Optimum points, and the difference between optimum and actual, are a way to measure that.

(It turns out my gap between optimum and actual wasn't as big as I thought it'd be, and other teams had a much larger gap. Just because you have a feeling about something doesn't make you right.)
No, I believe there's a higher threshold yet to post polls.
Mind Hacks: Breaking the news of Eliza's creator's death to her
Wait, Google Video is being discontinued? Google Video? Wow, I thought that was here to stay.
I would have imagined that there'd be more. For instance, I can't downmod overall topics, and that seems like a fairly straightforward thing to unlock for much higher karma levels.
Except most of the comments are debating whether or not this sort of thing should be on Hacker News in the first place.
Indeed, there is design and then there is Design. There is architecture and there is Architecture. There is programming and there is Programming.

Anyone can write but not everyone can (or rightly wants to) Write.

This is nothing new. Pulp outsells literature and I'm sure people cry rivers over it. Does that mean pulp "wins"? By one measure, obviously. But they still won't teach it in school and noone will remember it when it's gone.
HN is better than reddit because it doesn't have politics, plain and simple. Let's please keep it that way.
Just because an article with a subjective title gets voted up doesn't mean the community necessarily agrees with it.

Unless you're on Reddit and the post is titled "Vote up if you think PHP won!!!"
just build something that you yourself need for day to day life or your hobby
Don’t live with a broken IDE
That's actually available at 0.

http://arclanguage.org/item?id=3426
That is not an available option on HN.
I have downvote arrows on comments, but at some point they ceased to affect the score. Which is to say, I click on the downvote, and the points go down by one, but upon reloading the page, the score is the same as before.

(And yes, it's happened enough times that I know it isn't just someone voting the comment back up in the intervening period.)
It's a rather strange argument: Use the least popular language around to make the most money. He's probably right. When I was younger (and I'm not that old) I did a stint working in COBOL. And honestly, you couldn't pay me enough to do that day in and day out!! But those that can stand it and know how to do it are paid well and have reasonable job security.