skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Really, your post answers your question. There is value (and risk) in either specializing or generalizing, and there is room in the world (and the job market) for both.

Personally, I am a database specialist. I do have skills in other areas (I do python coding as a hobby and I can write C# code that at least works), but my strong suit is definitely in databases, and even with databases I focus on MS SQL Server and Access with just a little experience in some others.

I personally chose to do that because databases appealed to me and by specializing I could gain a depth of knowledge that very few generalists can. In terms of careers this limits my options somewhat, but it means that within my particular domain I can out compete most others. When the company needs a generalist that can do a lot of things, I am probably not their best choice, but when they need someone with a deep understanding of SQL Server and relational theory then I am a good candidate.

Its all about trade offs really.
... or anyone.
> Since employed people have it, why shouldn't self-employed?

Often the problem comes down to fraud. The reason self employed people in Canada can't get EI( our unemployment insurance) is that it's too easy to lay your self off.

For these same reasons, family members can't be layed off from a company.

If we did have this EI for self employed people how would we differentiate between someone who just wants the summer off vs someone who legitimately has no clients.

Another problem is what happens when someone realizes that they can make more money on EI than trying to tough it out with their remaining clients and trying to rebuild their business?

If each case has to be reviewed by an actual person this could take weeks at a time and would probably eat all of the money put into the pot for this new style of EI.
Figure out how something is produced
My guess would be the almost Sisyphean feature request list that's still being worked through:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363
For me, Ubuntu 9.04 already boots in under 20 seconds. I'm at the login screen 18 seconds after pushing the power button (so that includes the time BIOS still has control). I'm using a pretty low-end laptop.
Societies with more men than women are violent, and start wars.

True. Then again, higher numbers of women make a greater contribution to overpopulation. Decreasing the number of women might screw the next generation and sort out the one after that. That's probably an outrageous view, but so's your point.
Ask HN: Review my startup, Devver.net: Accelerated Ruby testing
http://devver.net

Sorry that the service isn't actually available to play around with yet (it's in private beta). If you sign up for our beta list, we'll work to get you an invite as soon as we can.

That aside, what do you think of the idea and site? What isn't clear? What questions do we need to answer?

Thanks in advance for your help!
Ben
Clickable link: http://devver.net
So far... from the interviews I have conducted, the answer is usually "No."
StumbleUpon’s Su.pr is Really... Super
He asked about it previously and people said they didn't want it.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28085
I mean I never intend to move back to the US. I like to visit.

And I'd like to not get arrested at the border and forcibly repatriated, if you get my drift.
Unfortunately, RC4 and AES are not comparably secure, and by conflating the cipher with the protocol variants, that issue is somewhat muddied by the article. Nobody should be using RC4. It's also a bit misleading to say that AES encrypts "16 bytes at a time" where RC4 encrypts 1 at a time: AES can easily be turned into a byte-at-a-time stream cipher using CTR mode; there's just not much value to doing so in TLS.

There's another reason why DHE isn't super popular: inside enterprises, security groups will have reasons to want to monitor connections to their servers. DHE makes that pretty much impossible, by decoupling the server's private key from the actual session key. This sounds like a good thing until you realize that such monitoring has no privacy implications at all (they own the server, they can just sniff the sockets), only (negative) operational implications.
7 years is a long time to have spent working on a single company.
I think that there is some value in calculating the time it takes for the group to go from one participant to many participants to see if there is an exponential growth rate taking place.

It's midnight and well, I decided to do just this at 5 second intervals and then count the number of people dancing (and also flocking too the party, ie in the frame), just to get a rough idea.

0 seconds - 1
5 seconds - 1
10 seconds - 1
15 seconds - 1
20 seconds - 2
25 seconds - 2
30 seconds - 2
35 seconds - 2
40 seconds - 2
45 seconds - 2
50 seconds - 2
55 seconds - 3
60 seconds - 3
65 seconds - 3
70 seconds - 3
75 seconds - 7
80 seconds - 11
85 seconds - 17
90 seconds - 21
95 seconds - 26
100 seconds - 35
105 seconds - 46
110 seconds - 59

At this point, it became too difficult to count the number of people joining it every frame, but the data seems to indicate exponential growth.

(I'm also assuming Guy #1 was dancing for some time on his own before the person with the camera decided to film it, so this would show the exponential growth more)
Dupe from a few weeks back, with some discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=613402
Do check out Khalil Gibran, specifically his philosophical poetry book "The Prophet" (you should be able to find it for under $10 in any decent bookstore). While it is coated in pseudo-religious (and quite pretty) language, like the part I quoted, it is chock-full of really interesting ideas that are worth pondering whether or not you have religious inclinations.
Yes. Her problem is not simply bad luck. Her problem is that for a while she was unwilling to entertain jobs she didn't like, and even now she only does it for 4 hours/week.

That's what won't happen to most of us. Rather than filling out the form for food assistance, we will be filling out recruiters info sheets describing "a time I worked as part of a team" and rating our C++ skills on a scale of 1-10.
Willow Garage Personal Robot; Milestone 2 reached
I think that was in the context of leaving a big company to start a startup.

Joining a big company after your startup is acquired is a bit different dynamic. Maybe it can be likened to opium. I've never tried opium, nor sold a company.

But it must feel good, with obviously bad and brewing side effects.
I think this is a good idea. I already lend/invest via Kiva and would support it expanding to cover the whole globe. I don't see why the micro-financing model should just apply to the so called developing world. Why not any cash strapped small business anywhere? This makes more sense since the global financial markets accidentally flushed themselves (and all our money) down the toilet.
The actual function of traditional banks in an economy is to enhance liquidity by buffering money and lending where required, keeping the money flowing around the economy. I think we could probably cut out the middleman and do this mostly peer-to-peer, without traditional banks - via micro-financing over the internet, kiva style. Now might be a good time to get this working.
I think erlanger was talking about an inbox like reddit's where it just shows replies to your comments. A messaging feature is a little different and the messages would be private like email.
I thought so too at first, but if you look closely it looks like they have a beard? (1:03)
Just put a form in the header that submits directly to searchYC; that would be good enough and would put no strain on HN.

Without an easily accessible link, it's difficult to search content on the site. I've been a member for a long time, and I didn't know that searchYC existed until reading this post (previously I had been using Google, which isn't so great at indexing HN).
http://www.computing.dcu.ie/~humphrys/Notes/Neural/Bitmaps/s...
Leaving a comment on T/C is like spinning a roulette wheel. It can be really frustrating to have comments censored when they are not incendiary or trollish in any way. What's shocking is that many racist / homophobic / trollish comments are posted regularly. If you agree with Arrington on one of his douchy posts about how the NY Times doesn't understand journalism, you can say whatever you want.

Initially I stopped visiting techcrunch because of the ignnorance and hatred in the comments for a post Arrington made about a T-shirt company that sold intentionally offensive and incendiary products. I revisited a few months later (after I read they reshuffled and hired more reporters). Things were a little better for a while but Arrington seems to have returned to his aggressive and argumentative self. I didn't see discussion of it here but yesterday he went off on the Times and attacked their journalistic integrity for reporting techcrunch's dubious recent history (see last.fm).

Laporte is right, though, Arrington is a troll. He picks fights with anyone he can. "What are you gonna do about it" seems to be his attitude about everything, and when people disagree, he censors their comments from his Bully pulpit. This is no different from what people like O'Reilly and other right wing radio hosts do when they cut the microphone of people they do not agree with.
The point is that searchyc is kind of "hidden", a good percent of participants of HN don't even know their existence, maybe a redesign givin more focus to it, or enabling it use in the current design like adding it to the main page would be great. IMHO
My first order of business is to come up with a pretty good draft of my data model. I use OmniGraffle, but you can use any data modeling tool. Once I have a solid understanding of my data model, I generate a scaffolding.

Once I can see the data, interact with it, and tweak it to my heart's content. Then I turn to tools like Balsamiq, or just a large pad and pen to generate the views.
5% or less was for people who's choice is >0%.
Yes. But I doubt LiveCDs will reach the 10s limit. (Though they may probably benefit from the work being done.) At the current state of the art the Ubuntu LiveCD takes a magnitude longer to boot than a HDD install.
I'm having trouble finding the source (it was in the NYTimes a few months ago), but China has also undertaken a pretty sizable PR campaign encouraging people to have daughters to try and address the ridiculously skewed gender ratios, especially in rural areas (sometimes as high as 2:1 for males).
all 3 founders leave at the same time, only two years after being acquired? there is more to this than simply leaving to do other things. founders of sites like last.fm don't just let their babies go so easily, acquisition or not (think myspace, facebook, bebo, etc.)

I would say that it is connected to the RIAA drama and CBS sending them user info. If they resigned because of that, then full props to them (they just owe TC one big apology).

If the data sharing with the RIAA did happen and they didn't resign - then shame on them.
Not sure how you could use wrist rests, or why you'd want to. For a horizontal keyboard, wrist rests prevent you from bending your wrist harmfully. Of course, they also let you get lazy.

For the vertical layout, the spacing of the keyboard prevents wrist bending: the two sides of the keyboard are roughly shoulder width apart. When you aren't typing, the natural thing to do is put your hands in your lap.
YC Add-on Collection for Firefox
Sigh. There was a time on this site when a simple question would never be downmodded to spam levels.
I'm currently on my second project and for both (and everything else) I use two tools:

Xmind Mind Mapping: I paid like 120 bucks for it, now they decided to open source it (that I did not like much, but now you can get it for free!) Their software is amazing.
http://www.xmind.net/

MacJournal: Quick notes, texts, transcripts, voice notes, video notes, etc I have in there. They have full screen writing which is amazing.
http://www.marinersoftware.com/sitepage.php?page=85

First stage UIs: Balsamiq.
http://www.balsamiq.com/

Final UIs and documentation: Axure Pro (Windows only :( ) (VMWare anyone :) )
http://www.axure.com/

Creating manuals, customer support and FAQ: ScreenSteps. (I cannot recommend this software enough! AMAZING)
http://www.bluemangolearning.com/screensteps/

Project Management: Merlin. Fantastic software.
http://www.projectwizards.net/en/

Sales and CRM: Daylite. Just started using it. Very powerful, but the learning curve is steep.
http://marketcircle.com/

Remote team work: Basecamp and Campfire.
www.37signals.com

If everything else fails: a pen and paper :)

Hope this helps
Live thumbdrives, maybe :-)
I don't think all 3 leaving at the same time means anything. One would assume that they're probably great friends, and feel that their combined effort in a new project (when the time comes) is better than 1 or 2 going separate ways.

That's how I see it, anyway.
Live CDs will still boot slower than full installs, because accessing the CD is a lot slower than accessing the HDD. I'm wondering whether the boot time for Live CDs will be fast enough to avoid displaying the progress bar, or whether they will have to boot Live CDs differently than HDD installs.
Method names in Obj-C are very similar to messages in Smalltalk. They are modeled after Smalltalk messages, in fact.

As a Smalltalker of over 10 years, I have to ask, why are we still naming methods with strings? Why are we programming with flat text? I can easily imagine a hypertext programming environment, where method names, variable names, etc, are rich objects, in much the same way that text in a WYSIWYG word processor are rich objects. All of the formatting information is there, but you can see as much of it as you want. Most of the time, it is out of your way so you can just write. The way we program now is like using really old versions of WordPerfect with the formatting characters. Granted, you don't want your programming environment to be buggy like Word, but I see no reason why such an environment couldn't be made rock solid.

Note that I am not advocating visual programming. We would be retaining syntactic structures. These would just be augmented with selective information hiding/showing and other automation. (Like type inference?)

Current IDEs are trending this way anyhow. With things like code folding, code completion, and highlight-searches, we are part of the way there. Strongtalk uses hyperlinked code browsing, but last time I looked, this was only to aid in navigation/browsing.

I suspect that abandoning flat text would enable entirely new ways of programming. I could imagine something that looks like Python or Ruby, but which is statically typed compiled with a Hindley-Milner type inference engine operating in the background. The types would mostly take care of themselves, but you could make them visible for hand-tweaking whenever you wanted. (Like at optimization time in your development cycle, after you've run the profiler!)
Stress and Exhaustion May Improve SAT Scores
> Nobody should be using RC4.

I don't think this opinion gets enough play. A collision attack on SHA-1 is published which is still 'academic' enough that nobody has actually produced a single collision and Debian thinks it's worth re-keying their entire infrastructure over ("Attacks will only get better!").

Meanwhile, Fluhrer, Mantin, Shamir tore RC4 a new one almost a decade ago and everybody just applied a kludge and forgot about it. Then 5 years later, improved attacks are published and still no talk about permanently retiring RC4.
Well, if they all left at the same time, I really hope they are working on something new. It's interesting that Felix, RJ and Martin were actually the original team (I thought at first that they were just part of the original team): http://www.last.fm/about/team so I'm looking forward to see a new startup from them.
FCC opens up inquiry on Arbitron radio ratings gadget
The Passion for Speed
Automobile Speed - The speeding passion for the top speed cars in the world
11"x14" artist sketchbook and a pencil to play with the idea

long walks / showers to help focus

dead simple
Yep, Arrington is the kind of drama.
Another very powerful option is Xmind:

http://www.xmind.net/
i don't have specific experience, but i think your best bet would be to leave what is now free as free, and offer more features for $. convert to a freemium model. that way, you won't drive off the people who are using it for free, as they're going to be your best sales leads.
Not to avoid them, to extend them.

You're not going to get much more than a day before someone calls you up and says, "Hey, the file's corrupt, send me another".
> PHP is not any worse or better than any other language.

I also disagree, but in the sense that PHP is both better and worse than other languages, depending on your metrics. I feel that talking about code terseness is weird if it takes more effort to actually complete whatever project you're working on (due to lack of libraries, less active community, what have you).
Well, a cheap hack could be to add it to the footer, I mean where is the immutable law of web design that dictates all search boxes should be at the top of the page?

Personally, it's the current content of HN that interests me first and foremost (the NEW in NEWS). Putting the searchbox in the footer would emphasise this and not break the site design.
He could even just put the search box on the submit page with a label like "Want to check if it's already been submitted? search for it:", as a way to reduce duplicate submissions.
I guess sometimes it takes that long to be successful. Though, last.fm was successful earlier than expected
"That's what won't happen to most of us. Rather than filling out the form for food assistance, we will be filling out recruiters info sheets describing "a time I worked as part of a team" and rating our C++ skills on a scale of 1-10."

Did you mean "Rather than" or "Before"?
Interesting - this is quite different from anything I've ever heard on the subject. Can you expand on the reasons here? Also, it doesn't seem that you are talking about a tech company, which is pretty much implied when you talk about startups around here.
There's plenty of fuel for speculation in this particular case! There is the open question of whether Last.fm/CBS handed user data to the RIAA (covered at http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/22/deny-this-lastfm/). Fast forward a month from that article (which alleges the CBS overlords did it unilaterally, then asked Last.fm to lie about it), and all three founders are looking to cash out ASAP. Conveniently, this is the two year point of the acquisition, which is likely the end of the vesting/retention period for the founders. That is due speculation.
As a founder when (if ever) do you pass over control of a business you started?

That's a hard question to answer. Obviously it depends on what your goals were initially (build something, make some cash) and whether or not you've met them.

After building and selling a business what do you do next? Build another business and sell it? Or perhaps build a business, and keep on building it for the rest of your working days? Is that what twitter is up to? EV sold blogger a while back.
Waaaiiit.. You're not serious, are you? Does not B follow from A? I'm trying to see the satiric point here, but I just can't find it.
HCI - Environmental and Engineering
A premier hazardous waste transportation and disposal, environmental management and construction company focused on protecting our clients, the earth and its resources
that and a search would be welcome additions. messaging is kinda pointless, but the little envelope that changes color when you have a reply is a fantastic usability feature. search would also be nice but can be pretty easily done with google...
I could be wrong but I think what's happening is this:

RC4 is the only stream cipher anybody really knows.

People don't really understand how OFB and CTR mode work, and don't get that AES is already a serviceable stream cipher.

Therefore, people don't really have a "go-to" stream cipher besides RC4.

You'd hope eSTREAM would change that --- Trivium would make a great replacement for RC4 --- but it may be that NIST simply has to bless something to make RC4 go away.
I agree, but I can't delete the story anymore (there's no link).
Minimal design inspiration for web
The first part is worthy of some speculation, I agree. However, the second is just a matter of course. It only makes sense to wait till you have fulfilled your contract obligations and can cash out. There's little wrong with that that I can see.
How's LISP run time compare? Most of the time I'm concerned with speed for applications (and near zero response time).
I didn't get that from the article. From what I understood, the point he was making was that the AP systematically relinquishes control of the plane as conditions deteroriate. By the time human pilots get hold of the plane, the conditions are for too difficult for them to handle. My issue with the article is the implications he makes. He compares the Boeing to the Airbus and then talks about the philosophy behind the Airbus. As I replied to sweetdreams, his statements about the plane (eg. Who's in charge here?) are misleading. It's as if he's saying that pilots are in full control of Boeing, but not in an Airbus.
for me it would have to be books per year: maybe two or three. i know it's kind of a cliche, but the internet killed my need for them.
> This sounds like a good thing until you realize that such monitoring has no privacy implications at all

If you don't have forward secrecy then there is the possibility that an adversary can silently sniff your traffic for as long as they want and then later steal your private key and decrypt everything.

This is a threat that really matters to some people:

http://www.libertysecurity.org/article342.html

http://techmeet.sarava.org/uploads/Agenda/SSL_For_Activists....
too bad that its going to probably bury the recently released http://peashootapp.com/ which is pretty similar.
Very nice writeup there; good job :)
Oh yeah. I'd totally like that too! (In fact, I just made a mention about how nice it would be yesterday)
With regard to a messaging feature, it might be nice to be able to contact some people here via email (or allow yourself to be contacted) without having to reveal your email address in your profile.
Or maybe they all just wanted to dance and the genuine heartfelt lack of agenda is what brought about the success? :)
I know this is weird but I want to try and model this effect mathematically. The new gender ratio driven by a function of the current gender ratio for 20-somethings. Too many boys, would lead to girls and vice versa. There would likely be a damping effect of cultural inertia that would prevent rapid oscillations. I suppose one would also have to take in to account intergenerational marriages, death rates .etc.
I believe meetup.com did this. They started free, but now charge $18/year (or something like that).

I believe the result is that now people consider it more reputable, since for any given group, someone somewhere is willing to spend $18/year for it. On the other hand, they probably lost many users.
Pointless presentation
Converting to a freemium model is the best way to do it.

Users don't pay for something after they've already been receiving it for free.