skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It happens more often than you think.

My parents made too much for me to qualify for financial aid, but didn't contribute much to my educational expenses. I had to take out loans to cover the cost of my tuition. I also was able to pay for a few semesters by working and living cheaply.

I don't think most families pay 100% for their children to go to school. I think that is a suburban middle class day dream. I could be wrong, though.
But that was "searchenginejournal.com", this is the far different and more insightful "searchenginewatch.com"
Simple full-text search engine in 200 lines of Ruby
There are a lot. I've used JustUptime before and had a good experience. A few friends swear by Pingdom.
Cisco, indeed seems to be doing ok in this respect.

Nike still had that image in 2001, yes, they've done a pretty good job of PR to indicate they're working on cleaning it up but I am not yet convinced that it's a solved problem. By the way, Nike has also been convicted of copyright infringement (a much lesser charge, the child labor situation really is in a different league).
Mac clone maker (Psystar) wins legal round against Apple
"To question history, to correct it, you need people who are not anyone's children."
Anand, Indian Writer.

Oddly, this same thought has been on my mind for quite a few weeks now. To move forward, especially to look back at history and learn from it, we can't be anyone's children, however uninstinctive and bastardly it sounds.

Because if we are going to become someones lineage, rationally we should go back to that incestous tribe somewhere in southern Africa. And all of us too. It is undoubtedly our partial knowledge and living with the legacy of the few generations before us that many a time makes us unable to rationally and honestly analyze and learn and move forward.

There are two not-insignificant roadblocks to this. Perhaps more too.

The first one can best be illustrated by a 'lower-caste' friend of mine who once told me that his identity is something he didn't choose and can't escape from, most probably, till he dies.

The second is the weltanschauung question. What if you really do believe that you are part of the blessed tribe/religion/group/whatever. So it also requires a 'scientific worldview' for the lack of a better phrase.

In both, in different ways, the identity imposed or chosen becomes the lifelong prison.

Regards,
Jay
http://www.jayasankar.org

PS:- Paul, this was too small and sort of 'Cliff Notes' type. May I request a longer, deeper essay.
Yes it's wonderful to leverage community but the way to get hired is A) find people who are hiring; B) develop skills which are in demand, and/or advertize that you have them; or C) do something interesting that makes hiring people find you.

Looking for work by putting an asterisk next to your name when you post on Hacker News is like saying that your job search consists of watching television.

If you read Hacker News and you have free time, why on earth are you not building some kind of business? Pick some tiny problem and build a tiny, awesome solution. Do some consulting. I gotta tell you, if I were coming here looking for people to hire, it wouldn't be the people who have no hustle and expect jobs to fall out of the sky and land in their lap.
I posted on casual encounters that I wanted to meet a chick to get busy in a Burger King bathroom because I love that Humpty Hump song and got a bunch of responses. Some included naked pictures. The only thing I put in my ad was a Burger King logo and a picture of Humpty Hump. True story.
Digital Speech Processing Course
Progress in software....

Is it just me or is it that most progress nowadays seems to be just rediscovering features that old specialized apps like emacs have had for decades now?

Seriously, conversations... GNUS has had that for ages and it is a very nice feature.
The problem with this analogy is that the world of finance does not map directly to physical goods or how a person would handle a real world asset they own (as opposed to abusing other people's assets).

Let walk through the first couple of sentences:

>> "John Paulson borrows one cow so he can sell it for $100. He gives you $10 as collateral."

No one in their right mind lets someone walk away with a $100 cow for a $10 deposit. If you are a car rental company, you don't force the borrower to deposit the full price of the car, but you make up for this risk in volume across many car deposits and you have insurance and the backup of public crime fighting organizations.
If you have a single page contract for "you borrow my cow and give it back later, here's a $10 deposit" you have none of this.

Second is the use of the term "borrow". If I loan you a cow and you return a different cow, this may not be acceptable to the lender. This is not "borrowing".

>> "You buy your neighbors cow for $100, which you finance by taking out a $90 loan from the bank and use John's $10 to make up the rest."

ok, full stop!!! No bank operating correctly will give you a loan against a cow that you have already loaned to someone else. This is the root of why people use the term "ponzi scam" in reference to such transactions.

>> "You brag to everyone about your financial health. You have assets--two cows you own, plus one Paulson owes you--worth $300, and liabilities of just $100."

Sorry, there are still only two cows in this story. This is not software where you can magically copy a cow.

And so goes the problems with analogies like this.

Don't get me wrong. The blog author writes it well and gives a peak at the absurdity of the financial system.
Unfortunately, the financial system is so absurd that there are no useful metaphor against real world goods.
If by interesting you mean the twitter 'Fail Whale' + FEMA, then yes, that would be...interesting.
I wouldn't mind a link to my blog but I never fill out profiles in any level of detail beyond that.
Incubator Round-Up (Updated Jan 2009)
Xkcd - TED Talk
No matter how small you try to make it, it's always there. If you try to make it smaller you'll just push part of it below your conscious perception. Then it's a big freaking iceberg destroying things and you don't even know.

Better to disengage your identity. Use your imagination to adopt other people's identities. Experience and consider things from within those identities.
LG KE590 Black Unlocked
LG KE590 has 2 megapixel camera, 56MB of user memory, mp3 and 3GP 15fps video player, microSD memory card slot, Bluetooth 2.0 A2DP and much more.
Well, I don't think he's talking about Common Lisp macros.
I mean that practically the only buttons required on such a device are the buttons to turn pages (maybe some modifiers to swap between books and to go to the beginning and end of the book). Other buttons are superfluous to a "back to basics" device.

What I'm saying is, the Kindle has too many features and is too expensive.
Tony Hoare / Historically Bad Ideas: "Null References: The Billion Dollar Mistake"
Nope, you're not the first one to notice this.

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/03/sfearthquakes-o.ht...

http://www.wingedpig.com/archives/2007/03/back_to_the_future...
Web Design Company India
Spoken like a true, "objective", small-identity scientist. The problem with that view is that we all do have an identity, and attempting to deny, suppress, or "put aside" our identity is fairly impossible. A better path IMHO, is to realize a larger identity. Broadening of the identity is the natural progression from infancy to adult. Quote from Einstein:
"A human being is a part of a whole, called by us _universe_, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
You need an MD to be a psychiatrist.
In general, I find that it's a bad idea to destroy information. Keep all input intact as long as possible, so if you ever do encounter a problem, you don't need to reconstruct the original data. You can always process data into the correct form at runtime.

Of course, there are performance implications to this, but those can be dealt with. Encoding strings right away for performance reasons is definitely a premature optimization.
Js-scheme - a Scheme interpreter written in JavaScript
or get a monitor arm and lean back. I got one of these http://www.lcdarms.com/products/LCD_Radial_Arms/iLift.html . It has been really nice. I almost have my monitor positioned about like the light at a dentist's office.
Mosso thinks that Mosso is better than the competition? I'm shocked.
I'm not even joking when I say that I have this dilemma daily.
I don't deny the difficulties at all and these difficulties are hotly debated among economists even today when comparing say China or Cuba with the US. There is no completely satisfactory solution, but concepts like purchasing power parity are not completely meaningless even when different types of goods are consumed.

I agree that it gets very vague when societies are as different as ancient Rome and a modern industrial country. But knowing what share of a person's income is spent on biological necessities (basic food and shelter) is meaningful and can be expressed in dollar terms to make it more understandable.
A record of Hacker News as a snapshot in time. Also, as all the links have been tagged, it could lead to some interesting information visualisation, for example - how the distribution of links has changed as hacker news gets older.

Edit: It also offers a new metric of how popular a submission is.
This makes me wonder what really is the biggest mistake by a single individual in $ ?
Please stop associating this with Arrington. Arrington was likely the "victim" of someone disgusted with his anti-Europe rhetoric (which makes you wonder why he was back there in the first place). This, on the other hand, could be something far more serious - we will never know.

I notice most of the commenters here assuming, based on the description of the attacker, that it must have been some guy who wanted to sneak into the conference, or something of that matter. As I have a bunch of friends who work in the world of defense contracting, I am lead to a different image in my head; the description closely matches what my friends tell me to watch out for in would-be kidnappers. You see, there's a real industry in high-end kidnappings/murders/etc., and with our crap economy the incentives just become greater with every passing day. You will never hear about it in the news, but kidnappings of high profile people and their family members is rapidly increasing.

We are at the dawn of a new era of organized crime. Be vigilant.
Web design for Escorts and Massage Parlours
I used to work in a bank (via a consulting company). My girlfriend works in a bank (she's a salesperson in commodities - she sells future contracts to producers and consumers of metals who want to hedge their production). I have many friends who have worked or are still working in banks.

There's not a single one of them that's even indirectly responsible for the economic meltdown. They all work very hard at jobs they don't always enjoy, and provide an extremely valuable and difficult service to their customers. Taking my girlfriend as an example, she often has to juggle multiple phone calls, while checking prices and taking orders, dealing with often irate traders (who would rather swear at the customer than deal with them), all the while being absolutely certain that none of the numbers she writes down are wrong - a small error can result in hundreds of thousands of pounds of losses, and you don't last long in that job if you make errors - any errors.

Taking my girlfriend again as an example, she often hates her job, but she does it and does it well for a variety of reason, one of which being that it pays very well. Part of that pay is the bonus. Now, despite the downturn, she's met her budget. She's created millions of pounds of turnover for the bank, because she's good at building strong relationships with her customers over time so they like to trade with her. Does she deserve her bonus? Absolutely.

I personally am deeply disturbed by the wave of populist anti-banker sentiment that has captured much of the world. It is wrong, it is base, it is misdirected. There are many people who are responsible for the problems we're having, but your average banker is not one of them. Here's who you should go after:

1) Stupid "homeowners" (I prefer the term "homeloaners", as I don't see that they own anything) who took up loans way beyond their means

2) Shark-like loaners (those who chased and made those loans)

3) Bond structurers who issued all these CDOs that caused us trouble (as the article points out, less than 1% of bankers)

5) Regulatory authorities who didn't do a good enough job of chasing up irregularities and smacking them down

4) Dumb lawmakers who passed laws that encouraged the above behaviour by either over-regulating (by forcing banks to lend to bad prospects) or under-regulating (by removing or dulling financial services legislation)

The average banker is no more responsible for the mess we're in than the average programmer was responsible for the dot com bust.
Now that is one impressive hack!

The source to the scheme interpreter lives here:

http://www.eriksilkensen.com/projects/js-scheme/js-scheme.js...

If there ever needed to be proof that JavaScript is a real language then I think that's taken care of now.
Comics grammar and tradition
Do we really need to have every single xkcd comic submitted here? I'm sure we're all aware of xkcd by now.
The story behind the $10 'laptop'
It seems to me that the problem isn't so much that you're "not saving much for your future" as you're "not saving enough to buy a comfortable house located in San Fransisco". Which might be indicative of a problem in one's expectations more than indicative of the necessity to make six figures as a bachelor.

(Incidentally, in many other places, socking away $2k a month would be considered pretty damn good. The starting salary for an engineer in my neck of the woods is $2.2k a month. You look pretty darn rich compared to him, even considering his vastly lower cost of living.)
I have no specific knowledge, but I'd be surprised if there was a general layoff in Engineering. It seems more likely that they are pushing on people they have classified as "underperforming". I think they also shut down a few remote offices (there was a blog post about this), and anyone who doesn't want to relocate will be out.
I think the biggest benefit is to be able to explore with tags. However a personal version would be of better use.

One of the reasons I upvote an article (apart from liking it) is to bookmark and to be able to refer to it some other time (most Ask HN posts around scaling, infra, marketing etc)

If in the future PG supports this on HN itself, I wouldn't bother to duplicate.
> One could sell, and move to a less-expensive property. Then, the original property would be available to one who is more-productive. The economy, therefore, gains when low-productivity individuals sell expensive properties.

that is the evil part I was refering to.
A friend of mine did this rather less obnoxiously for a couple of semesters at college. He used his girlfriend's dorm room for storage, did laundry in the dorms, showered in the gym after phys ed, spent a lot of time in the library, and slept in the woods (small, well-hidden leanto with sleeping bag) on campus. He's also a much better writer than this guy.
Ten tips for slightly less awful resumes
This is all hearsay.
no, if it was an ad i would have been paid for it. read the about section of the site about solicitations. :-)
Yeah, I was hoping for some serious discussion of the central issue - how do you end such a parenthetical statement with an emoticon?
crises are a great excuse to lay off a bunch of people that were on the low side of 'acceptable' anyway.

In 'good' times employers can get quite a backlash from doing this, in 'bad' times nobody complains and those that get to keep their jobs will work harder to avoid being 'axed' because of the crisis.

Oldest trick in the book, I've seen this happen at a bank where I worked in the gray past.

It would not surprise me one bit if employers would exaggerate the situation in order to push through even more layoffs.
At that point you might as well sign up for a regular Akamai account. DistributionCloud is more relatively low traffic sites.
Do you mean (1) n^2-2 always passes the Fermat test (to what base(s)?) or (2) if n^2-2 passes the Fermat test (to what base(s)?) then it is actually prime?
As most have said, this is very cargo cult. The effects were copied but not the causes behind them. The planes don't land.

A more authentic case of eccentric homelessness was Richard Stallman's period of living in his MIT office.
I can't help picturing one of the characters from an old Val Kilmer movie called Real Genius. This computer geek character had graduated--finished grad school, too--years earlier. He had ensconced himself in a secret hallway behind a closet in one of the freshman dorms. Every once in awhile he'd go creeping in and out of the closet of whatever guy happened to live in that dorm room at the time. No one minded much because he had such a reputation for accomplishment. I got the impression he was supposed to be Richard Stallman. Anyway, it's a fun movie, and various characters reminded me of people I knew in school.
One thing is being angry with the whole car, another is spitting the owner of the bodyshop down on main street in the face for taking his family to Florida.
I just fucked myself with this. Now I have to wait 5 more hours and can't override it. I learned what noprocrast was the hard way.
Ask HN: MicroISV ideas?
I'm a reasonably competent programmer - not a rockstar, but I can build stuff that works - and I've been doing hobby programming projects for over a dozen years. Typically my hobby projects are somehow game-related, because I'm a PC gamer at heart. But as most of you know it's pretty hard to actually finish a playable game, especially when you're not good at designing graphics. To add insult to injury, all the game ideas I come up with are megalomanic.

I've been wanting to do a micro-ISV project for quite some time. Typically my ideas are game concepts, but frankly I'd like to work on something doable and realistic for a change. I want to do an interesting, profitable software product in my free time (I have a day job). This isn't with an unrealistic aspiration of it making me rich, I just want to make a bit of cash on the side by doing what I do best. I'm not really doing it to learn new technologies, and not really doing it for easy money either.

Therefore I'm not looking for consulting or freelance projects, I'm specifically looking for a project idea that I design, execute and market myself. I see lots of interesting ISV products in existence in all sorts of markets, but somehow I fail to produce any sensible ideas myself. The rare times that I've actually come up with something (or had a friend suggest something), it turns out the product's market is basically already over saturated with cheap, quality software.

So my question is not just "who here has any ideas" but more like "how do you GET good ideas". All I come up with is game concepts, and frankly I feel like it's time for something more "serious".
You don't really need a $100K salary to be comfortable as a bachelor in SF, but it helps. Raising a family here is a mixed bag. It helps to have a lot of money because the school system sucks. You'll either need the extra $100K for private school or drug rehab if you send your kids to public school. I love SF but if I had kids I'd move somewhere else. Oh, and buying a house here is insane unless you're mega loaded or you buy and sell houses professionally.
This story is awesome. When is the movie coming out? :-)
Massachusetts just decriminalized possession. $100 civil fine for possession of less than 1 ounce.

You are still subject to Federal prosecution, though. There is no way around that unless the Federal Government decriminalizes marijuana.
Ask HN: How do you explain a social news site to computer noobs?
So, I just launched www.cuuute.com.

It's a social news site ala reddit/slinkset/HN. But my target demographic is going to be users of www.cuteoverload.com, www.catster.com and www.dogster.com, or http://petoftheday.com/talk/index.php. (Think ladies who love cute animals and pets)

One of the problems I'm having is that noob users don't get social news sites _at_all_. They think it's just a list of static links.

How would you explain how a social news site works to complete computer noobs? I'm planning on making a video to explain it, but I'll take all suggestions.

P.S. I know the site's a bit rough around the edges. I just launched 4 days ago.
"Starting in version 0.4 two extensions are packaged with the main download: a primitive API wrapper for Last.fm Web Services, and an interface to the flot JavaScript graphing library. "

(load 'last.fm)

(load 'flot)

http://code.google.com/p/js-scheme/
Wiki Paths
My friend was let go from Goog ~ 3 weeks ago.
Was classified as "underperforming," put on PIP, worked his ass off while on PIP, and then fired without any severance.
He was with Goog for 3 years, not a new hire.
At a sufficiently high level, everything is old. However, for real products, the details matter a lot. Just because X is conceptually similar to Y does not mean that they are the same, or that the difference is unimportant.

Threading has been around forever, but I don't think any other email client has Gmail's "conversation view" (I'm kind of surprised that nobody has copied it yet, actually).
I know the sentiment that you're getting at, but the other side of the coin is ponying up and not being afraid to call yourself such-and-such has a significant effect on taking one's goals seriously.

There's a difference between, "I founded a company" and "I'm a founder". Similarly, getting the girl that I'm dating to start referring to herself as "a writer" rather than saying "I write" helped her to start taking that seriously.

It's like the effect Paul describes of wishing he could get all YC teams on the cover of Newsweek. Once you start telling people, "I am a [writer/founder/artist]" you're setting yourself up for failure, which is a pretty powerful motivator.
Have you overlooked the impact that the education behind the credentials might have on performance? A good grasp of the law that a Harvard law degree implies is surely relevant to a career as a lawyer. Ditto for a computer scientist. I don't think I'd want to be operated on by a surgeon without a medical degree, no matter how talented.
I usually use alternative parentheses.

This is a statement <its kind of goofy :)>

Or if I'm feeling particularly geeky and the audience will appreciate...

This is a statement qq{its kind of goofy :)};