skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it detects where you're located and put some relevant map because I see the SF Bay Area personally.
That sounds like a great idea but are economy is based off of consumer spending which can just free fall.

"From 1929 to 1934, U.S. personal income plunged 44%, real output nosedived 30% and the unemployment rate soared to 25% of the American labor force." and the great depression still had 5 years left.

"By Jan 1, 1934, as many as half of all residential mortgages were delinquent" let alone all the ones that had already failed.

And it can fall far further in the next one. It's a house of cards and the bottom is far further than you might expect.
I was hoping this article was described a startup which runs out of money - whose idea, source code, and service can will live on.

Still a fairly good read about startup working hours. Reading it on four hours of sleep, I can relate.
> If what you say were true, then we wouldn't be suffering from unemployment.

Uh, why not? I don't get it. Of course business liquidations and a decline in capital investments produces unemployment.
You forgot to mention writes persuasively based on a handful of good ideas filled out with trite brain candy.
There is usually a compromise made between being optimized for pushing, or optimized for lifting.

Some sort of configuration that allowed you to lock the handle so the shovel part was tilted up for pushing, and then you could set the handle to be more upright to lift/throw.
I'm not so sure. After becoming conditioned to having to click the "Allow" button over a long period of time, it might become rote for people to allow even the most detrimental processes (having become accustomed to UAC's paranoia). It seems likely that the average user who would be afflicted by such maladies (spyware, viruses, etc.) couldn't tell the difference between a malicious and non-malicious process.

Even if they could recognize these processes as dangerous, would UAC really do all that much to protect the computer? Although it does reduce the potential for damage, it doesn't inhibit one from acquiring a virus in the first place.

Of course, if a person is messing around with their own system files, I'm not sure how effective a warning box will be in preventing whatever it is that they're doing. UAC seems to be a textbook case of "security theater."
In my experience, searching aggressively for a co-founder is not very good. You might find someone and they will probably have all sorts of issues (e.g. unmotivated, lacking in skills).

Just start building and if you find someone who is interested bring them on board. There are more followers than leaders, be a leader, execute and when you have something cool people will follow.

People are more likely to think your ideas are worthy if they can see it rather than you just explaining it anyway and therefore you have higher chances that they will want to join you.
Someone should actually make a cofounder match site.
He's proposing an expansion of the money supply, not inflation. It will only lead to inflation if the money is not withdrawn quickly enough as the economy recovers.
Yep, that's it.

It would be nice if these people did something useful, but Keynes' point was that this is an optional feature which should not be allowed to detract from the main goal.
I'd like to use this system to build out my customer service team.
EC2 charges separately for compute, storage, and bandwidth. IIRC they did reduce bandwidth prices, but compute prices have been the same for years.
I don't understand how this is a response to anything I've said. Yes, consumer spending needs to plummet. Many thousands of retail businesses need to shut down. They are not viable. The profits in recent years were from phantom earnings: totally unsustainable and artificially credit growth, mounting consumer credit card debt and MEWs. The quicker we get the liquidation and write-downs over with the better.
It's clear that the massive investments in housing over the last few years won't produce the returns we expected. Yes, we're going to suffer because those were bad investments.

But look at the bigger picture. We have productive economic resources (labor), why should they ever be sitting idle? It's not like we don't have problems to solve. We have to pay off our debt to the Chinese. We have to figure out what to do when the oil runs out. We have to make sure we don't destroy the planet sometime during the next century. We need to figure out how to take care of all the baby boomers once they retire. There's LOTS of work we need to be doing, but we're sitting around twiddling our thumbs. That makes no sense.
World's first garbage truck powered by... garbage
You graduated from UT-Austin the same year I did, but I got my degree in Electrical Engineering. I'm still in Austin though and it sounds like you live in Seattle.
It can be, but like Paul Graham says it all depends on your ability of identifying a good programmer. I made the mistake of not interviewing the candidates well enough and wasted a month's worth of time and labor because of it. Most people on the site, from my experience, are 3rd world country programmers with the equivalent of a degree from Devry.

My advice is just to learn the language and do it yourself. You will probably have to modify the site in the long run anyway.
Also, some comments stimulate interesting sub-threads. In cases where something is voted way, way down but has positive responses, it's probably trolling; positive with a lot of positive responses could mean "thought-provoking".

Of course, the real trick is to encourage interesting discussion and not just an echo chamber...
Yes, in the industries where the bad investments where made (finance). But that alone cannot explain the withdrawing of investment from other industries.
Ask HN: Should you include extra features only if you can remove code elsewhere?
As a php webdeveloper I add code to websites on a daily basis, they even pay me for it! Most of the time it's the customer who wants extra feature a, thinks it would be nice to also include b and the finishing touch would be adding c! But after some time now, I notice things getting slower and slower even tough there are no extra hits. I regularly ask myself what happened to that clean, fast website I started developing ages ago. And it made me think... Lotus (the car manufacturer) makes it cars fast by removing weight and keeping it very simple, as such their design principle is "Performance through light weight". Shouldn't webdevelopers do the same thing? I remember them not including electric windows because that made the car a bit heavier, they only included them when they developed new tires that cut weight. I think people often forget about this, and I think that's a shame. But adding features is something that is done for the customer/site visitor most of the time. Now my question is:

What do you think about it? Should you just include all the features the customer/visitor wants or should you say no and ignore the requests? After all, speed matters a lot in our business...
I agree with Terminal emacs being available anywhere. I do miss the anti-aliased fonts that are available in Emacs.app, but I have to be able to start separate emacs processes for different projects.

Also instead of using cmd-c and cmd-v Mac key bindings, I do M-| (shell-command-on-region) to 'pbcopy' to copy the region to the OSX clipboard. It's a godsend.
I did a number of increasingly difficult projects, and learned by doing them. The first ones didn't make it out to the public, but that wasn't the point.

My first project was simple HTML, just to find out exactly how a webpage works, how to upload files to a FTP server, etc.

My next project was some simple PHP - reading something from a database, having a user make changes to it, etc. I used PHP because once you understand HTML PHP is pretty simple. I installed WAMP (http://www.wampserver.com/en/) which has everything you need to start doing PHP. Also PHP is good for beginners since there is a huge community - whatever problem you have someone else will have had it before you.

Next I started doing sessions and more advanced stuff with PHP, javascript and Mysql (database). I actually made a Danish version of hacker news :-) (http://www.deloghersk.dk)

After 1½ years I'm getting pretty fluent, and would feel confident programming a lot of stuff you see on the net: blogging software, CMS software, etc.

I didn't have any mentors, Google was my only friend. I used this site a lot: http://www.w3schools.com It has some excellent and very simple tutorials on HTML, PHP, MYSQL, etc. to get you started.

One thing I have to say here: Do it. It's worth the effort. I regret not having learnt to program ten years ago, it would have made my life so much easier when dealing with technology. So even if you don't end up programming a lot it will help you tremendously in understanding and managing technology.
As you implicitly point out, jyothi's suggestion is not how things are normally done here.

Upvoting is generally for agreement or promoting something well written. Downvoting is usually for things that are outright false or trollish. Disagreement is expressed by... well... disagreeing (yes, that means via reply) OR voting up another comment that already expresses your disagreement (no point having many people say the same thing).

I hadn't considered it until you pointed it out, but in the case of trolls, flagging is functionally the same as downvoting, so I really only downvote things that are blatantly false.
You don't comprehend the macroeconomic scene if you think we're dealing with a "financial crisis." Dozens of sectors are at over capacity. Debt growth has hit its ceiling and households, governments, and businesses all over the country need to repair balance sheets. This is not about banks or financial firms.
It's all relative. Expanding the money supply has an inflationary effect, even if the absolute effect is simply to slow deflation (which is still relative inflation).
Yeah, I thought it wasn't in 2030, but has been defined as $now + 20 years.
How will this help us pay the 45 trillion dollars of combined public and private debt? Keep in mind our GDP is 13 trillion.
Ah that sucks... It was a static image and the second screen shot was SF so I thought...
Honestly, I've stopped reading comments on HN altogether. The worldview that this group furthers is morally bankrupt and self-serving. The world doesn't revolve around you guys, really.

The pro-business, lets-make-millions-in-a-year attitude is beyond suffocating, and blocks out much of the discussion we can have here. I realize that some of the qualities that drew me here in the first place are rooted in these attitudes, but its quite gross to be surrounded by it. I find myself wishing I could use HN as my main news aggregator, but really, its not any higher quality than the competition.

This community could use a little sense of humor and humility sometimes...
I hate them, too, but the puzzles can be fun to do if you're not being faced down by a sweaty middle manager.
Excellent point. We don't do scrum/agile, but I found the daily quick meetings valuable. What worked for me as team lead was to change my parking spot so I came in through the door nearest my team (we were at opposite ends of the bldg) and I'd hold a 5-10 minute meeting before I even sat down that day. A very simple "how did things go yesterday/what do you plan to do today/are there any obstacles or questions to get you going" and we were done. Contrast this to the larger status meeting with the bigger group which normally turned into a 1 hour waste of time!
He needs to learn about inflation too ;-)
They actually know about the use case: it's one of their 5 suggested use cases: http://etherpad.com/ep/about/product#uses5

But you're right, marketing specifically to software shops could be a good way to make a profit.
Oops, I meant to add footnotes. Sweeney and Sweeney is here:

http://cda.morris.umn.edu/~kildegac/Courses/M&B/Sweeney%...

It's an awesome paper.
Economics Commentary: Washington Could Use Less Keynes and More Hayek
Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to work any more in cocoa emacs.
Kirubakaran has his emacs posted on github:

http://github.com/ki/my-dot-emacs/blob/master/dot-emacs.txt

It looked quite good to me.
That's both a little harsh and by your own standards asks for a downvote...
I think I'm reaching my google latitude saturation point for today... That's got to be the 8th link on the subject (or even more) in less than 24 hours!
+1 for Aquamacs. I've used Emacs on/off for 15 years and I've grown to detest the need to "feather my nest" every time I move to a new seat. I want a usable default configuration, and Aquamacs works reasonably well for me in this regard.

Customizations: Capslock == Ctrl, Emacs menubar is hidden, one .emacs entry for ye olde 'newline-and-indent. That's it.
Pretty much all discussion boards are founded on the principle that "we'll actually have real conversation this time" or "don't say anything you wouldn't to the person's face."

They eventually grow and grow, then turn into SA:Forums or Digg, and people run off to create new places like HN. These then grow, get too big, and the cycle continues.

Let's try not to worry too much?
But, but, but, if you use anti-aliased fonts in Terminal, you're all set in Emacs (as well as everything else).
Could you outline how to configure it to collect only textual content?
I saw an article in IEEE magazine about the singularity and it seemed more about people talking about the implications of technology rather than actually working to build technology. The singularians seem to be a group of very capable technologists - why don't they allocate their time and resources to improving technologies that could make the singularity happen instead of talking about it? Is hyping the singularity a meta-strategy to attract the resources and effort of others?

Charging 25k is a strong sign of cultish scam behavior. Go figure.
I rarely look at the names unless it's an extended conversation and I want to make sure I'm still talking to the same person.

The usernames on this site are very small and inconspicuous. I take that as a sign that HN wants us to focus on the content of the message rather than the author. When I'm on sites which place more visual emphasis on the author (names in big fonts, avatars, etc), then I always notice who writes comments.
Doubts over India's $20 Laptop
many IT professionals have never studied it at all

These IT professionals have never coded at home? They have never read even part of a single book on coding?
Also, what do you mean by "broad survey crawls"?
Changes in the money supply do not appear to be correlated with short term inflation at all, so it's not certain that short term expansion will produce any effect.
I worked for a startup run by a Canadian and a Japanese a few years back, so I assume so...
http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ojbyrne built Digg for $10 per hour (and a total cost of ~$200) and was hired through elance...

http://digg.com/programming/Digg_com_created_for_only_200_00

...so you can get your ideas implemented well at a low cost, but what you do with it then and how you progress is really the hard part.
"A bounds check on the exploitability index" (Bas Alberts)
One of my friends who works there said their largest cost is salary.

Can you explain how salary is subject to Moore's law?
Not all IT professionals are programmers. Not all coders do it for fun.
If you cut away all the economist talk and get down to the core of the problem it's very very simple: For the last 8 years America has been spending more than it has made. Production is not up to world standards, just look at the auto industry.

Bailing out companies and fiscal stimulus of one sort or another won't save you from the basic and indeniable problem: You're broke.

There's only one way out of that: Spend less and work more.
Aquamacs, fn key is meta, panic sans 10 font, <3 fullscreen-mode.
JUnit, for one thing.
Yes, consumer spending needs to plummet. Why?

We had a positive personal savings rate last month. Once you have a positive saving rate there is no long term problem with spending. (http://www.bea.gov/briefrm/saving.htm)

Now government spending is honorably out of whack, but that's not really related to what you're talking about. (http://www.frbsf.org/education/activities/drecon/answerxml.c...)
Titanaboa Cerrejonensis was 45 feet long
Tales of a BeOS Refugee: From BeOS to OS X (by way of Windows and Linux)
Don't worry too much about standard Mac keybindings.

Emacs shortcuts will soon be wired into your fingertips and you will be efficient on any platform - windows, linux and mac. In fact, you will very soon forget about the platform and focus on your work at hand.

That's the reason old hands prefer to stick with traditional emacs keyboard interface. Dumping some Mac idiosyncrasies is a small price to pay for the freedom and power.
I don't understand what's so bad about witty one liners, per se. I wish there was a better mechanism for filtering the types of cascades you mention as opposed to arbitrarily declaring one liners off limits. (Ie, have different _views_ into the same thread.) Seems there should be a way to have quality discussion _and_ the occasional bit of humor. Slashdot manages to do ok despite "+5 funny"...
Ask HN: Using open source platforms for web app development
For the past couple months, I've been researching and testing platforms such as Drupal and Joomla. These content management systems are very flexible, and seem like an easy way to develop a web app of sorts. Do you think its wise to use open source coding to try and build and market a branded service? In todays market, it is important to keep in mind how easily a competitor could duplicate your offerings. This would seem inevitable with these sort of platforms.
We are building something like this at my startup. http://www.clikball.com .. It is closed invite right now since we are still rapidly building it out, but if you want to try it out and see if it fits email me - anotherjesse@gmail.com

We have private groups for sending to multiple people, sending to only to a single user. You can share publicly as well then anyone who follows you can see it (the twitter permissions model).

We had the same wish :)

Right now it is only usable via a Firefox 3 / Flock extension, but support for more browsers is coming.
I have noticed that high-quality comments are still voted up pretty well, and while some witty banter gets a rocket ride too it's not unbearable.

This community has been over variations of this topic quite a few times. The conclusion I drew from reading those discussions was that telling people how you think they should behave, and expecting it to actually happen, is not going to work (regardless of the quality of your argument and/or the population).

I've wondered for a while about the effectiveness of two different 'scoring' ideas. One is to make downvoting beyond some threshold (-1, perhaps) cost one or more point of karma for each downvote -- so if you really feel the need to drive something into the dirt, you have to give up some of your own karma as pennance for your obvious lack of self control and inability to follow the site guidelines. The other is to give up on global karma, and split the voting mechanism into categories such as 'agree/disagree', 'signal/noise', etc., so there are mechanisms to express a handful of the different reasons people have for voting.

Just thinking out loud...
I think that bk has an excellent point with putting a small "If your comment is just a witty remark, please don't post it." note under the comment box.

The psychology of such a note might help a lot, besides not all recent posters would necessarily know that thoughtless witty comments aren't highly valued here.
Before /. got overrun with trolls and idiots, it used to be a nice combination of one-liners and honest-to-god interesting, information-dense material. I liked it that way.

In fact, if you could mix the jokes with the information density in just the right way, I think that would be a hugely popular site. People like laughing, and they like having jokes to share with the other hackers during the day.
> but labor would be redeployed to new ventures

Labor won't be deployed to new ventures when all of the companies that were involved in the malinvestment aren't allowed to fail.
You're right. And the problem with that is that the only opportunities for 100% coverage happen when you can start a project that way with the buy in of everyone on it. That is only likely to happen when everyone is familiar with TDD and comfortable with it. That creates a substantial hurdle for a group to cross when adopting it for the first time.

I prefer the approach we used here (at a non-startup). We simply decided that we were going to use automated tests as much as possible on a new project. Everyone was encouraged to use them. Our coverage wasn't 100%. However, when you are committed to creating an automated test case to reproduce any bug regardless of how the bug was originally found, your coverage expands. Usually you can write variants of the same test to cover related areas.

I can't speak for every member of the group, but my total testing time went down slightly and my test coverage improved enormously. Full TDD is not necessary in every instance. Just because you can't immediately make the jump to full TDD doesn't mean that automated unit test tools won't make your code better, and your testing easier.
In the "scrip" economy, couldn't they just let the value of the scrip change organically? If scrips are getting too precious, you can tell your babysitter that he'll be getting one scrip per two hours instead of one hour. If scrips are indeed that rare, he'll accept it, and the scrip-time ratio will naturally reflect the scarcity of scrips.
Since this thing does happen with Dollars, I reckon his analogy is bad, and adding more Dollars won't solve the problem.
I always urge caution when internets fill with the trendy ire at "puzzle" questions in interviews. Yes, some questions are stupid. Yes, some interviews value the wrong things. Yes actual "brain teasers" and "gotcha" questions as an intelligence test are asinine. Yes, yes, and yes.

But... there are questions that sound very similar to such questions that are perfectly legitimate analogies to various computer science topics. Yes, you might say, "so ask me in computer science terms, not knights and dragons". And my response would be "Why? Do you have trouble with abstractions?". When I mention knights and dragons I'm making it very clear that the answer doesn't require some nuance of the C standard library or some knowledge of the JVM. I'm emphasizing the -abstract- part of the problem, for a reason.

Not to push my own blog but I wrote about this exact topic at length: http://lbrandy.com/blog/2008/09/here-be-the-code-monkeys/
Well, yes and no. It depends on the product I guess. They just need to be smart and include (say) the name of the album or the caption of the photo in their ad targeting algorithm.
Don’t Get Caught in the Recession Trap
Well, what about those who already _are_ my followers?
Wouldn't they see each and every of those group tweets?
Successful People
I have been sporadically working on a site quite like this one, but with a very different puzzle type. Congratulations on bringing out a working first!
Then, the idea was to let miners dig them back up. The burying and mining activities themselves are silly and useless, but then the multiplier effect kicks in. Keynes says the important thing is to get money circulating so that resources can (eventually) be put to practical use, whereas if everyone saves and does not reinvest then potentially productive resources are left fallow.

http://www.economictheories.org/2008/11/keynes-theory-of-sav... gives a little more context.
All Wolfram's own web stuff is done in Mathematica.
There's a free Mathematica player that lets you run but not edit.
NYTimes releases Article Search API