skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Note to recent graduates about the value of your degree:

I graduated right after 9/11. Right after. I remember when I was in school that our local paper had 5 pages of jobs open in my field. Good paying jobs even for those with no experience. By the time I got my diploma in the mail, I had not had one single phone call. Those 5 pages of ads had been reduced to a single column on the back of the sports page.

I remember going over and over to the University career center week after week trying to polish my resume, going to mock interviews.

At one time, I had started calling companies up and offering to work as an entry-level engineer for minimum wage if they would just give me a place to use my skills.

No such luck.

In the end, I got a job working in a warehouse for very little money. Over just a few months, the economy go a little better and I ended up getting a job as an engineer for a tiny firm that went out of business.

After I did get some experience, I have found it easier and easier to obtain a job. Even to the point I am at right now where two groups at my current job are in a fight to win me over for a new assignment. Even in this terrible economy.

Here is my advice:

Your degree is worth something....

Don't take the economy personally. They don't want to hire you right now because they can get an expert cheap instead. This will change with time.

Right now is a great time to think about Graduate School. When you graduate you will be light years ahead of your peers. Promotions will come much easier for you later down the road with a graduate degree.

Please don't give up. Your loans can be deferred. Spend some quality time with your friends and family.
It's interesting to look at the home page of the source website for the submitted article:

http://www.bible-researcher.com/

The matters treated in another subpage

http://www.bible-researcher.com/canon1.html

are issues I have researched extensively, as are the issues treated in the submitted article. I'll have to defer to others to reply first to the substance of the submitted article while I go out on a date with my wife. I'll come back and see how the discussion has developed, post other sources as needed.

See

http://learninfreedom.org/iqbooks.html

for a bibliography on issues related to the content of the submitted article, which I had better update soon.
Why are does ssn withholding go up so much every year?
self employed people (esp) have had a large tax increase that no one talks about. In 2000 after $76,200 there was no more SSN tax. In 2009 it's $106,800. That's 40% more income taxed. What is the justification for this?
http://www.ssa.gov/mystatement/maxtax.htm
Moves to delay the burnout of social security. Raise the revenue w/o EXPLICIT tax increases, blah blah blah.
Cool site, but not a real comparison. I know google does a lot of personalization, based on being logged in or your cookie, but it can't do that on this. I'm assuming the other engines do something along those lines as well.
Actually, my impression after reading the piece, is that his response is 'we are sheep with guns'.

I've met two types of gun enthusiasts: the ones that like hunting o other sport shooting and are basically nerds who like throwing around statistics and how-to tips, and the ones that believe a Mad Max dystopia is coming any day now, or are possibly convinced it's already here, who strike me as a bunch of paranoid lunatics.

A gun is a perfectly valid home defense option, but the dystopian crowd always seem to be waiting for some kind of reverse rapture in which they'll finally get to show how well-prepared they are. They remind me of the martial-arts types that talk endlessly about what would happen if they were ever to get into a fight, but don't feel comfortable riding public transport.
You can often tell which one is Google from prominent Wikipedia results.
And yet, the odds of a random adoptee growing up in the same city, choosing the same profession, favorite color, and rubber-band wearing habit are astronomically lower than those of an identical twin doing so.

Many twin studies, particularly those done in the past few decades have been rigorous. And the correlation in IQ, career and age of marriage between such twins, are far higher than those of siblings, or adopted siblings growing up in the same house.

There may be a political reason for rejecting the role of heredity or the large body of research supporting it, but there isn't a scientific one.
"A wavelet is a part of a wave which can be best compared to a e-mail in a e-mail thread or a message is a discussion forum."

Isn’t this wrong? As far as I understand, a wavelet should be compared to an e-mail thread and a blip to an individual e-mail message. And this comparison just makes sense in the context of a messaging widget serving the same purpose e-mail serves today.

I would be eager to discuss possible outcomes of this new technology. Exciting times are coming, and more than never it’s unbelievable open to everyone to participate in the shaping of the future. Web 2.0 is becoming a commodity.

Three questions to discuss:
- What will be the distribution and evolution of gadgets? Will we converge to winner takes all monopolies in each of the functionality spaces? This depends a lot on gadget inter-operability, how will one be able to move a wavelet from wave to wave. Will there emerge wavelet standards? This way gadget (and robot) developers can extend each other efforts opening up competition.

- How will online identity change? There are already a lot of privacy issues on debate, I think most of those are non-issues raised by the demoed gadgets. People are aware of those and most of the things raised by now will be just solved with some preference settings. Of primary interest to me will be how will these robots extend and manage our online identity? Big issue.

- Enterprise applications and google stake, if everything is open (as it seems right now) what will be Google’s interest on it? I might be being naive here, but I can’t see clearly how will google monetize the huge enterprise market for this. Wave provider hosting?
I wonder what has caused the sudden influx of articles excoriating post-modernism/structuralism on HN? It's fun to read, of course, but the utter bullshit of these cults is so patently obvious (to everyone, I'd hope), and yet I find it to be a useless exercise to spend much time exposing it.

I agree with Chomsky here: there are far more poisonous and important targets to address than this cult, which thankfully remains quite insular and self-contained and, ultimately, of virtually no consequence to the world at large.
One of the advantages you have as a start-up vs. larger corporations is that you CAN launch something before it's "ready". Getting feedback quickly and early is essential to evolving your product.

It's common knowledge that the earlier a bug is found the cheaper it is to fix. Same goes for problems in UI design, etc.
Microsoft Research has developed an interesting experiment along those lines, which unfortunately remains offline, although someone has registered the domain: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/blews/
I can never think of any "fair" searches to try. So often I just use google to get to a specific webpage from the Firefox search bar faster than I could by typing in the full address. If I search for something with a specific result in mind, all 3 engines will nearly always give me that as the first result (for example: woot, eztv, twit).

I never use search engines to look for a generic term the way search engines are always marketed, for example searching for "buy used textbooks" or "cheap prescription drugs" or "book a flight" since those results are always so commercialized that they're generally useless anyway.
Elitist jerks who like to believe they're superior to the great mass of people. I, on the other hand, didn't bother because in my infinite wisdom I already knew this fact to be true :-)
You know about the sysinternals tools, right? There's a gui version of lsof in there.

http://sysinternals.org/ (redirects to MS technet page)

I think http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896655.asp... (Handle) is the lsof-equivalent.
Where to invest $300-600k in Silicon Valley?
Anon for this. I'm sitting on some cash - I'm not sure buying a condo, some index funds for retirement, or some such "sensible" thing is really my temperament. I'm far more tempted to try some angel investment. Ideally I'd start my own company but I'm a couple of years away from a greencard (will probably be 2 more years and I'll be 35 and ready for a mid-life crisis :*).

I've been here a little while working in large semiconductor companies as a compiler/systems software/architecture guy. But, I'd rather invest in some small groups which are not in such a capital intensive.

I don't have the extensive network of contacts, startup experience or cash that yc has, but perhaps hackers here can suggest a way to dip a toe in the water?
> I stopped reading here.

Ignore that part; the middle of the article is interesting. Also ignore the very weak conclusion, which appears to be there because he felt there should be a conclusion. I attribute this to the way he was raised. ;)
"No burger_king.com either."

Wow, was there a point in history when people thought underscores should be used for spaces in domain names? (or for that matter, that it was even possible?)
This is about as useful as Yuil was - i.e. very. Sure, it turns out to be a little self-serving for the person's employer, but you have to acknowledge the brilliance of the effort and the fact that the results themselves appear to be on the up-and-up.
I think you should launch as soon as your service provides enough value to someone that they should care.

Yes. In general, you should release at the point when there is at least some set of users, however small, whose lives will be improved enough by whatever you've built that they'll start using it.
For someone who's looking to SEO their site, this tool is exceptionally useful just for that reason.
Yes, I specifically said books, because the three writers I mentioned are all smart guys who did important work early on in their careers, but then went on to write a lot of junk on other subjects.

The problem is that it's not Dawkins' or Chomsky's academic articles that have showed up on HN, it's the other stuff.
What would you propose instead? It seems that asking people which they prefer is the only way to do this, even if it does stilt towards the market leader.
Logos Ethos Pathos

It's not all about the logos, folks. Not knowing that is going to bite you for the rest of your life.

If somebody is venting to you about gun control, abortion, global warming, wolf reintroduction, or whether size matters, they are not going to respond to logic. A minute or two of conversation will tell you if they can be reached that way. Figure that out, and save yourself an ulcer.

This fact is actually one that even a hacker should be able to grasp, as it rests purely in your realm.
It might take a lot more with downvoting!
Simply, if you believe that IQ measures intelligence, you lose 80 IQ points.

Your comment is a self-negating insult. If IQ does not measure intelligence, than saying "you lose 80 points" is not derisive.
You shouldn't invest money in startups that you can't afford to lose. It's too risky. And from what you say, this sounds like money you shouldn't be risking.
HERE! Here here here here here (waves hand) over here here here HEEEEERRRRRRREEEEEEEEE
Too generic a title. This turns out to be a strange, rambling, fascinating article on a little-known study that started at Harvard 70 years ago and has been tracking several hundred men through the rest of their lives. Many became famous though most remain anonymous. One, the article reveals, was John F. Kennedy.

The article is also a portrait of the psychologist who picked the study up halfway through, became obsessed with it, and managed to keep it going. He is quite a character himself and his life became intertwined with that of the men in the study.

I find a lot of (writing about) the recent wave of research on "what makes us happy" to be tedious and unimaginative. This is more of a historical piece and is refreshingly free of any conclusions on the topic. Indeed its psychology is all charmingly out of date.

On the whole, a pretty good read for a Sunday afternoon. Now I have some work to do!
YC ran a great little conference called AngelConf[1] a few months back. I'm not sure if it's intended it be a regular event, but if it is you should go to the next one.

[1]: http://www.justin.tv/angelconf/all?order=most_recent
You say "ideally I'd start my own company" -- have you thought about quietly preparing and working on the side on something for a few years? A few years is not all that much time. When it comes time when you can quit and start a company, you will have momentum and a nice personal runway.

Just curious.. that is what I would do.
Google and the Evolution of Search: Human Evaluators
Once you've established yourself as a genius of some sort, you get to go all Zen, and write columns like 'Remember to tie your shoelaces because if you don't, you might trip - now, what are your business's shoelaces?' The more glaringly obvious your insights, the more you'll be lauded as someone who cares about 'the little guy' instead of some high-falutin' elitist. Journalists love this stuff because 'guru' articles write themselves...

In person, Godin is a chameleon, alternating between monkish calm and bursts of hyper-creativity. He looks at my voice recorder with amusement. 'Do you ever listen back to more than the first 15 minutes?' he asks, eyes a-twinkle. No, I sheepishly admit. [...]

As I leave, I feel a gentle hand on my arm. 'Your shoelace is untied,' says Godin. I look down and he's right: it is. I kneel to re-tie it, an almost automatic act; but as I stand up, a wave of realization bursts over me: this is the lesson he's been trying to communicate for the last hour. And it's one that I'll never find in my voice recorder.
This is great, but I felt like my mental comparison weighted each individual result more equally than I normally would in a routine search. Another interesting comparison would be to show only the top result, top 3, etc. from each search engine.
Debian - Automatic File Replication Across Two Storage Servers
You don't think Spock is mainstream? Baby and Child Care alone sold over 50 million copies, which makes it one of the top 5 best-selling non-fiction books of all time. And that's not even counting his other three best sellers.
Hacking Traction: The Dark Side of Marketing Optimization
I've set a budget of ~20% of my liquid capital and can afford to lose it, I believe. I have no debts etc.

What can of financial position do you suggest is a minimum for an Angel?
Exactly. My advice: get the condo, it's a great time to buy.
Yes, it is a rehash of the Feld article.

The author clearly doesn't understand the nuances of the issues, and it just repeating someone else.
This is evidenced by: "Incorporating a LLC". You can't incorporate an LLC, you form an LLC. An LLC isn't a corporation.
Maybe kick it off with the first search pre-populated from, say, a dictionary word. (Though maybe that's not fair either, if it isn't the type of search you're likely to perform in real life)
"The American observer of Europe is often baffled at European claims to secularism since official expressions of religion are so public and yet -- apparently -- so taken for granted. A 10th-century depiction of the crucifixion, for example, is part of every Danish passport, regardless of whether its bearer is -- as many nowadays are -- a pious Muslim."

There's a difference between culture and religion. Having a 10th-century depiction of the crucifixion in my passport doesn't imply that I'm religious, but it does remind me that I come from a country with a long and rich history and culture. In Northern Europe religious artifacts are primarily seen as cultural heritage, not as a way of showing your devotion to a god. I can't speak for Southern Europe, but from my limited experience of living there it doesn't seem very different.

"American church attendance and religious belief is not off the European scale if one compares it with Europe's Catholic regions. A smaller percentage of Americans consider themselves religious than the Portuguese and Italians. Proportionately fewer Americans say they believe in God than the Irish and Portuguese."

The article compares all of America to a small very religious part of Europe. That would be like saying that Americans produce 20 times as many cars as Europeans because the average number of cars produced per capita in Detroit is far above the average number of cars produced per capita in Europe.

The US is the country with the smallest percentage of non-believers (3%), and as stated in the article Portugal and Italy aren't far behind(4% and 6%). The article doesn't however mention Sweden or France that are 46% and 43% non-believers.

Source: http://www.swivel.com/graphs/show/8244121

Spiegel should really know better than manipulating numbers like this.
His IQ isn't high enough for him to have picked up on that.
Looking at the source code you can find which site is used for which column when "engines" is defined: var engines=new Array("YHO","MSF","GOO");

Voting will just reveal that information.

Although if you wanted to game the site you could already do it in different ways.
Yes, I've thought about that. In fact I've written some code already, I have what I believe is a good niche and I know how to build what is needed, but I'd also like to get more involved in the startup world in advance of my being able to start my own company.
I've got to disagree.

Around half of UK-national Oxford students come from state schools (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article4027010.ece), and as that article says, that's at least in part because teachers scare their kids away from applying because of the very perception you're espousing.

What's more, independent schools are a very varied lot. The vast majority of the independent sector is day schools which are effectively high-end grammar schools with a strict dress code. I'm not going to pretend there isn't an advantage to going to one, but they're not substantially better than the best schools in the state sector: that's borne out by the statistics.

The teaching in Oxford and Cambridge is much more intense, and has a much greater emphasis on one-to-one and one-to-two teaching than any other Britihs university. That's where the real advantage lies; the reason it's not adopted elsewhere is that it's eyewateringly expensive. (The odd legal status of Oxford and Cambridge, historically, was at least in part to support the cost of the tuition system).

The problem with Oxford and Cambridge is one of perception rather than reality. The kids who get the grades (think 1600 SAT for our American friends), and who apply, have a decent chance of getting in.
Your argument seems circular, to say the least.
Yesterday, I had two searches for which Google was failing me, "prius chipmunks" and "ie6 image reload", so on a whim I tried bing, and bing had the answer in the top three for both. I was really surprised. I'll keep using Google, but I'll probably try bing when I'm stuck in the future.
Despite the myths of a hyper-motorized nation, Americans own fewer passenger cars per head than the French, Austrians, Swiss, Germans, Luxembourgers and Italians

I find this very surprising!
Majority-minority tensions? Is this an euphemism for racism and xenophobia?

My observation is that most of us Europeans are pretty racist and xenophobic and big hypocrites about it too.

Now, while I will not erase the above, keep in mind that both the EU and US are huge and diverse places and generalizations are generally useless. Huge in different ways and diverse in different ways.
The point isn't that he started a "field". The point is that Dawkins's ideas about selfish/cooperative genes (and the extensions of those ideas to the very idea of ideas themselves) have given rise to new directions in biology (and philosophy, in the case of memes).
My score: Google 3, Yahoo!! 3, Bing 1.

The test is to a large degree unrealistic. Do a search for "sf restaurants". Google and Yahoo!! (in a recent upgrade!) both have extremely useful OneBox/Shortcut results that aren't captured in the comparision.
Where did you write this up? I would like to read about it.
You can measure that effect quite easily just by comparing to a control group of random pairs of adoptees (from the same orphanage/etc as the twins).

Any environmental correlations between twins should also be present between random adoptee pairs.
Lame post -- was waiting for some examples of markets that have great word of mouth, and yet came up totally empty.
One thing to consider is to what extent the user will be depending upon the quality and comprehensiveness of your specific product. A product used for recreation or convenience may be very partial and/or may fail frequently without causing much disappointment, and users may be happy to have it early. In contrast, my startup made a product that many users considered vital to their professional and business success, that required substantial initial investment of effort, and that users often used under considerable time pressure. Anyone starting to use the product who became wedged by incomplete features would be extremely unhappy. For this product, it was necessary to get it over a fairly high threshold before offering it (apart from a demo or alpha with no expectation that it could be depended upon). Most products aren't in this category, and profit from early release. But even so, for your specific example, I tried Pandora on its release day and was disappointed, and wrote to Tim Westergren to tell him so; he answered within minutes promising future improvements, which should have been impressive enough, but it took me two or three years before I tried Pandora again (I'm now an enthusiastic paying subscriber).
white murder rate is less than that of Britain.

A couple of things to keep in mind:

1. Britain is a statistical outlier in terms of violent crime rates in Western Europe.

2. The underclass in Britain is much more white then the underclass in the US.

The article seems to be cherry picking to minimize differences between the US and Europe.
That's an anecdote, not a study. The criticism I leveled is at twin studies in general, not twin studies .

Heritability is very specific measure, and it does not mean "genetic". Zip codes are highly heritable; number of arms is not heritable at all. I refer you to a great article on the subject of what "heritable" really means in this context:

http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/520.html
Twin studies are not worthless, but they are limited. If you are trying to figure out why people from the same city and class have differences in trait X, then a twin study will help find that out. But if you are trying to find out why people from different classes and/or locations have a difference in trait X, then a twin study will not really randomize the environment, because both twins will likely be adopted by someone of the same class.
About the cars:
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/tra_mot_veh-transportation...

Yes, America is on top. Plus the article doesn't say what kind of cars the Americans drive and what kind of cars Europeans do.