skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
are they trying to say that foreclosures are more in non-white areas??? the stats in general says that new immigrant and non-white demographics has a higher savings ratio than average whites - the personal family debt is humongous amongst whites because of their buying habits of possessing everything big, big car, big house, big TVs, etc. ending up in BIG LOANS & MORTAGAGE!!!!!!!!!

i guess the non-white data is more of a help to non-whites than the so called real whites :)
It makes perfect sense, if the entire decline was in architects then there would be 0 architects left.

Though I'm a mechanical engineer and my company hasn't really been affected, and my brother is an architect and his company has shrunk from 15 to 3. So I imagine the OP is right that a large chunk of the decline is from architecture/construction related jobs, but certainly not all.
Yet we had tremendous trouble hiring a solid developer (Denver/Boulder) a month and a half ago. We had a bunch of applications from the barely qualifieds, but it seems that those with a strong skill-set are still in demand.

Hell, I still get 2 or 3 queries a week from headhunters, and I'm not actively looking.
Textmate - Best text editor hands down.
Cyberduck - FTP client.
I'm looking for HTML/CSS work right now. I'm having trouble finding one of my usual sources that isn't booked up.
Because that is the more nuanced answer to "build or buy?" Of course you don't always want to build. But in borderline cases, err on the side of building, because there are often hidden advantages to building.

Are we clear now? Are you convinced I'm not advocating making your own electric power generation stations?
I just found Smultron, and I love it.

http://tuppis.com/smultron/
Web 2.0 logo 2009 chart (flipped & dead companies)
Examples of the Wisdom of Crowds in Daily Life
Anyone remember the name of the Japanese game show where the comedian was locked in a room for (n) and had to win his way free via magazine giveaways? I always thought it was fake/marketing, but an interesting.
> For example, McDonalds doesn't price a hamburger based on costs, but the best price point for a variety of factors, where raising the price will tend to lose profit.

McDonalds doesn't sell hamburgers at a loss. As its costs increase, the price where it maximizes its profits is affected.

> In other words, raising minimum wage doesn't mean Bob won't get a job

That's simply wrong. Things that can't be produced profitably aren't produced voluntarily. There are lots of goods that aren't produced because they can't be produced profitably. The folks who would have been employed producing them are either unemployed or doing something else, displacing someone else from that job.

Of course, good people are welcome to pay folks more than the value of their labor, price things below cost, or set their prices for reasons other than profit maximization. If their economic theories are correct, everything will work out well for them and they'll have significant economic advantages over folks who do otherwise. Those advantages will cause economic harm to said other folks.

Yet, good people don't actually act on their convictions. Instead, they try to coerce others to act on those convictions. Curious.
FuNdAnGgO - We are the number 1 drop ship source
drop ship source, drop shipper, drop shipment, wholesale distributor, drop ship wholesale, electronics retailer, computer parts wholesale, discount computer parts, computer parts stores, wholesale computer parts, FuNdAnGgO - We are the number 1 drop ship source! Lots of discount computer parts from our wholesale distributor.
I may be able to help you out. zackster@gmail.com
Electric vehicles offer rides in the green lane
Then pick any other example. How about Scribd. There's easily 10m worth of upside, but no single point of failure. IMHO this makes it a better business than Loopt. Not easier in the sense of requires less work, but easier again in the sense that if it doesn't go viral the first day they can keep iterating until it does. And maybe it never will, but the chances of success are still much better because there are more options along the critical path.

edit: At any point if Scribd hadn't been able to add a zero to their traffic stats they could have leveraged their asset to do something slightly different. Loopt never had this luxury. If at any point they couldn't add a zero then the whole project was worth nothing. My point was that someone more experienced would have known this and chosen to start a business more like Scribd and less like Loopt. (If they only cared about the money.)
a poll is a better estimate than just guessing
It would be quite easy for axod to pass along user's IP to the server instead of masking it through Mibbit. Having the user's IP as their realname isn't a real fix..
I prefer WTFPL.

DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE
Version 2, December 2004

Copyright (C) 2004 Sam Hocevar
14 rue de Plaisance, 75014 Paris, France
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim or modified
copies of this license document, and changing it is allowed as long
as the name is changed.

DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE
TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION

0. You just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO.
The blog really ought to validating user input, because there are many things worse than unclosed <p>s that can happen if it doesn't.

Of course, "ought to" and "does" are two different things...
The shape of Planet Earth
Very interesting. I had not worked out or seen the math for this. I don't doubt that such a number could exist. I do question the speed with which one could find the number and the utility once it's found.
The Brits proposed biggest.big.small.tiny for host names but got shot down.
emacs with TRAMP does too
I'm a lisp advocate and I don't have any problems with this.

You developed and optimized in lisp. I assume that you did so because that was the most productive way for you to do so. Then you decided to hand-compile to C because you needed more performance.

Maybe you could have gotten acceptable performance with a high-performance lisp implementation, maybe not. Regardless, the fact that you hand-compiled to C doesn't suggest that developing in C was a mistake.

I don't see why any lisp advocate would ever object to someone saying that developing in lisp was their best option.
Windows Live writer Vs Scribefire. Battle for the Best blog writer software.
That doesn't look like JS syntax... am I missing something, or are they using JS to parse/interpret it?
Wolfram - Macsyma/lisp anecdote (posted on Nov 2002)
found it across on reddit and thought there would be something interesting to add here - specially from the "elders of the internet"!
I found this across the borders on reddit and thought there would be something interesting to add here - specially from the "elders of the internet"!
Ask HN: Is email "modern" technology?
During a presentation at work recently, I made an offhand comment about email being "semi-modern," along the lines of the telephone. I got a relatively strong (negative) reaction to what I thought was a pretty benign comment.

I've noticed that people seem intimidated by the rush of new technologies coming out recently, especially web 2.0 stuff. These are people who are considered technologically proficient (although perhaps not necessarily by readers of this forum).

I think it's pretty obvious and probably also empirically provable that email can be considered relatively primitive compared to newer forms of communication. What do you think?
Find people smart in things you know little about. I had years of fun with a group deep in political theory. Then I left school and now I have to find a new group.

But, there's a large percentage of people who just aren't intellectually motivated. Which is fine: family, friends, and/or fun are all equally valid motivators. When you're with them, focus on what you enjoy about what they enjoy. E.g. if they're socially focused, focus on the social interactions you also enjoy. Don't screw it up with geekishness.

With all that said, this is completely wrong: "The problem is that part of trying to fit in is emulating the behaviour of your peers." NO. It's about finding a way for all of you to get along being yourselves. I'll happily drop some random geeky-but-mainstream jokes with my non-computer friends.

Also, you're probably going to have to hang out with multiple types of people to get all your bases covered to get balance.
A bookmarklet for Password Chart would be cool.
No, but there are several women I sleep with occasionally. Do you think having a girlfriend would help alleviate the problem?
They are rarely equally convincing and interesting, though.
Search Marketing
Our Toronto internet marketing company offers search marketing and web marketing services such as search engine marketing, ppc marketing (pay per click), website

design, link building, and copywriting services.
It's JavaScript object literal syntax.
Ask HN: How much time do you spend on the work vs. the rest of your life?
If you divided your life into, lets say, four areas:
1. Work
2. Health
3. Relationships
4. Personal growth

In all honesty, what percentage of your life would each receive?
Minimum Viable Product: Case Study Me
Spatially locate and manipulate the sources of energy (e.g., cut or shred to size, grasp, lift, and ingest)

Supportive though I am of the technological goals, their overview documents are a conspiracy theorist's wet dream (chainsaws? scary robotic heads? angry-looking tree-eating robots?!). Someone needs to give their marketing people free tickets to the upcoming Terminator movie and explain that most of the audience are there to root for the human character. I, on the other hand...
I think it's pretty obvious and probably also empirically provable that email can be considered relatively primitive compared to newer forms of communication.

Care to elaborate?

What modern form of communication allows you to:

-Send a message using a basic plain text format

-Send a message using an advanced layout (while also offering a method for people who just want a plain text message to see that version)

-Attach a document, drawing or file to your message

-Send a message to one or several recipients simultaneously at your choosing

-Participate in this communications infrastructure with your own servers (I think this last one is particularly significant).

I don't think that people are "intimidated" by some of the new technologies, they just fail to see the benefit or improvement. You could also say that the majority of these things are not really new "technologies", but moreso new presentation layers over basically "primitive" technologies.
Wolfram Alpha Easter Eggs
Your examples are accurate, but they miss the point: there is some correlation between different intellectual abilities, such that being good at math does predict being good at detecting analogies, or understanding a document (just not as well as it predicts being good at specific kinds of math).

People are different, but some people are generally smarter. Doesn't mean that someone generally smart, but bad at X, can pretend to be better at X.
How to find it: do MD5 on some random input. Then do MD5 on that output, and repeat until it converges. The problem is that you could end up in a cycle, instead of at a fixed point.

The speed with which it can be found: I'm going to wave my hands and claim this is in "Analytic Combinatorics" by Flajolet and Sedgewick. Seriously, though, under the assumptions we've been throwing around here this is a "random mapping" and these are reasonably well-studied objects.
Depending on the company... sales engineer, resident engineer, deployment engineer type positions generally offer an opportunity to visit customer sites (and thus travel) to assist with getting your product deployed or working in an unfamiliar environment.

The challenge of walking into a scenario and getting something to work using little more than your wits and site debugging skills while under "observation" can offer a lot of rewards, and opportunities to see various new landscapes.
There are lots of great suggestions here, one I haven't seen yet is Spirited Away. (http://drikin.com/spiritedaway/)

This app hides app you haven't used for a little while so the app you are using currently is the most prominent thing on the screen. I find it really helpful to declutter my screen in a non-invasive way.

You can also exclude things like video players and the like from being hidden.
The interest rates here are pretty much zero ...
Computational complexity lectures by Fields medalist Tim Gowers.
You can only do that if you have money. Otherwise you'll die of starvation.
Forums? Email? (Gmail does have pretty good search) Actually, even factoring in search, unless your group ends up having a _huge_ amount of messages a basic text search should be enough. In that case, IM should do fine.
How exactly is state-controlled media good for democracy?
This kind of question smells of lmgtfy.com
It is standard divide and conquer identity politics.

The NYT could have conclusive proof the world would end on December 12th 2012, and the headline would be "Women and Minorities Will Have to Forgo Christmas, Hanukkah Celebrations"
Poll HN: How many HN readers are working on a Startup?
Curious how many of you are currently working on a startup, and how many aren't.

moved to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=614281
Currently working on a Startup full time
Currently working on a Startup part time
Not working on a Startup at all
A Day In The Life Viewed Entirely In Logos
How to phrase this as gently as possible: I do not think people have been enthusiastically embracing the flash document viewer in the hope that one day they will be able to use the integrated Buy This Copyrighted Content button.

That said, I wish Scribd and their writers the best of luck.
Working on a master's degree. My startup ideas always turn out to have been solved a month before I think of them.
"Jurassic Park and Kleenex" made my day.
For what it is worth, if you are actively looking for work a more professional email address would be better. Ideally, it should be something like 'zburt@mydomain.com' (or zach.burt, zach, etc) where mydomain.com hosts your resume, professional blog, portfolio, etc.

If that isn't feasible, even your school email address would be pretty good (a free domain isn't a deal breaker, but would rank pretty low for me) - but the local-part should be more professional than 'zackster' or 'zackattack.'

Nothing wrong with using nicknames/handles for personal stuff, but I would shy away from doing so while actively asking for work.
I'm working on a master's degree, play squash with profs, try to teach my research to my (ever so patient) girlfriend, and consider watching lectures on MIT OCW to be "personal growth". It's all blended together!
I don't know... I find it sort of interesting that Central Park has a 13% non-white population...
Fusion works, but its full-screen mode is rather unfortunate—this is putting it kindly. While running full-screen, when you drag the mouse to the top of the screen, the Mac menubar appears. There's no way to turn this behavior off (please prove me wrong!). I honestly can't imagine a case where anybody could prefer this, and to have no option at all to disable it is a real disappointment. When my license expires, I'll take another hard look at Parallels.
Real Time Confusion: Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook
My equation is to achieve fulfillment in personal growth (area 4) through work (area 1) without messing up my marriage (area 3) and still having time to keep up my health (area 2).

The overwhelming majority of my time goes towards work (area 1) since I'm usually bootstrapping a startup while also consulting to pay the bills. Since I have to maintain my marriage as well (area 3), my health (area 2) usually suffers because there's just not enough time in the day. The end result of this situation will probably be the loss of a decade or two (hopefully not 3) of lifespan. C'est la vie.

If I could cure myself of being a degenerate entrepreneur, or make/raise enough money from a startup that it can be my full-time job and limit myself to 60 hour work-weeks, I could achieve some kind of balance. But its never really happened so far. It is the goal. I think I might achieve it next time.
They don't have to sell the content. Writers can seek vendors and produce "sponsored content". This is likely to skew and fuck up free literature as we know it, but it's done routinely, and for free: people write tutorials for vendor's services and products with no commission (how much effort has gone into "teaching" Google Adsense by SEO professionals who only wanted to pad their resume? would be nice if google sponsored the texts, but they wont, so it's time for authors to look into less known vendors and introduce their products to the reading masses for a fee.)

Or get a better advertising company: [Shameless, but very muted plug] :-)

[Edit: this is strictly for the non-fiction trade publications, the sort of stuff that you typically see on Scribd. Fiction might have a better future in ebook readers and their associated online shops]
I hesitated to comment on this post for a long time but I think you're pretty much completely off base.

I don't really see how the first 3 paragraphs has anything to do with the problem that I'm having, and I think that for some reason you've just assumed that I don't have hobbies (!?).

As for the "give up the I'm-so-smart routine", I've already explained what I meant several times elsewhere so I don't think I need to get into it again, but needless to say, I think you've completely misinterpreted what I was trying to convey. To be honest, I think that paragraph of yours sounds more arrogant than anything in my first post. But then again, sometimes things just get lost in translation.

The last paragraph sounds incredibly condescending. "Get better attitude and lifestyle"? It really sounds like you're trying to say that you live a "better" life and have a better attitude than what I have, even though the only thing you know about me is my age, what I did last night and a personal issue that I'm trying to understand for myself.

As I said, much of this can be attributed to misinterpretation on both sides. Obviously we could go back and forth clarifying various aspects of our posts but I don't really see the value in that. I prefer just to take some of the lessons I posted elsewhere under this submission and work from there.
I hope everyone here knows about the Overton Window (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window).

Viewed in that light this article isn't dumb, and the authors aren't stupid. They are re-framing the debate in terms of copyright law reform, public good and public policy rather than technical merit and economics.

Notice how the comments here are about how dumb their ideas are? That's what they want - for their ideas to be accepted as part of a valid debate.
I find a combination of the native key shortcuts with Dropbox works for me (you can also get a viewable image URL if you drop it in your Public folder.)
Working fulltime at a startup (unpaid), consulting three days a week for another (paid).
Will you make up your mind already? You can't possibly be doing all 3 at the same time.
The question is meaningless for me. There's no dividing my life up into this area or that area. It's all one big rolling ball of string. Ok, maybe I could split it up into "job" and "not job" but health, relationships, personal growth are all blended together (along with entertainment, home maintenance, chores, walking the dog, and goofing off). I could tell you how many hours I bill a month but work still flits in and out through every waking hour (and maybe some dreaming hours).
Currently studying and developing my own ideas in my free time.
In terms of waking hours, let's see...

1. Work/commute: 62.5%
2. Health (gym): 1.4%
3. Relationships (romantic & otherwise): 12.5%
4. Personal growth: meh. I don't itemize downtime, and I need downtime. Building the business quite obviously helps me prepare for the future -- spending time on my non-renumerative hobbies does, too, by preserving my sanity.

(Someday I'm moving the business from downtime to Work and will recover the rest of Work for my own uses. Hopefully in the not-too-distant future.)
Before financial independence: 95%.

After financial independence: 20%.
Yeah, how often do you create screens anyway? For me it's roughly once per reboot...
It might be worthwhile to try anyways if the current solutions suck. :)
Full time since January. Still in dev phase and a while before going live. and it's not a pretty sight to see your savings declining steadily (we are bootstrapped on top of this). Yup, I am all in as much as I can go.

note: There is a poll option that might better suite this topic (instead of 4 comments being voted up and down).
Ask HN: Best way for a small (3 person) team to collaborate with source code?
SVN seems a little too overbearing just yet - any clever solutions with dropbox or the like?
The problem with this thinking is that businesses don't exist in isolation. No points of failure mean no barriers to entry: if it's a matter of grinding through a pre-defined process, anyone can theoretically do it -- and if someone can raise a VC round and employ ten times as many grinders as you, they may catch up to you.

But someone competing with Loopt has different problem entirely. To even have a hope of competing, they have to make a deal with a carrier. And the number of available carriers drops as Loopt grabs more of them -- which gets easier with each one they get. When you're at the bottom trying to catch up, the fact that Loopt scaled a cliff instead of a foothill looks like a smart decision.
Tell HN: Monetization Meetup (May 18, 2009) at Googleplex (Bldg #43)
I like WebOb+Google App Engine.
Interesting idea, but some of the interpretations are way off. The Jerry/Walter thing is weird. Why would you compare the Dennises against a group of similar size instead of just comparing the ratios betwen Dennises and everyone? I mean, maybe people who were born in a certain time period were more likely to both become dentists and be named Dennis.

It says "221 of these Dennises are "extra" dentists--choosing the profession just based on their name." This statement is almost farcical. Even assuming there are more dentists per Dennis than among normal people, the wording of this sentence suggests there was no other reason for these people to choose to be dentists. I think they must have skipped over some part of probability law.
I think you're right, and I agree. That said, I also think that most people prefer convenience over anything else.

iTunes has managed to sell an incredible amount of content, even though it doesn't make much sense to me or you. I think in the past I've overestimated what an individual will pay for the ability to Buy This Copyrighted Content. I guess time will tell if this model can apply to text-based content.
I think those posts by minus are your choices (in lieu of the traditional poll).
Results from 2 months ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=532814
Creepy: http://www76.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Are+you+self-aware%3F
Booze, weed, and four hours of sleep? Either this is an atypical day, or somebody couldn't scrounge up a good-looking version of the Provigil logo.
Use http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll to submit polls.
Sorry, my intent wasn't to dissuade anyone from Buddhism or to be disingenuous, only to point out that it isn't the only form of meditation and also that the fundamental assumptions taken as the basis for meditation can and do (heavily) influence your approach and view of life.

Personally, I chose not to accept that to live is to suffer or in your words that life as a human being is inherently unsatisfactory, rather that it is a state full of potential and opportunity to grow and help others.