skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is one of the fastest media turnarounds I've seen in a recession.

IIRC, the 2001 recession didn't end in the media until later 2004 and early 2005, with the sales of Flickr and Del.icio.us and the development of FaceBook and YouTube. I remember that I didn't even look for sumer internships in 2003 because I figured the market was so bad nobody would hire a mere intern, and about half the companies I approached in 2004 said "We liked your resume, but we're not hiring now." In 07 (after this had all ended), I talked with a fellow computer programmer at a fencing class, and found out he was making half what I was because he had graduated into the sluggish job market of 04 instead of the growth market of 05.

In the 91 recession, I recall the media being very subdued and depressed right up until Netscape's IPO in 95.

I don't remember the 79-82 recession, but to hear my parents tell it, there was a widespread belief that America had permanently lost its technological edge, and things would never get better. This perception didn't change until around 1984, and even through my childhood in the 80s, I remember recurrent fears that we'd lost our economic supremacy to the Japanese.

The only recession I can think of where people started proclaiming "We've turned the corner; happy days are here again" a mere year after it started was the Great Depression. If you read http://newsfrom1930.blogspot.com/, it sounds almost exactly like something you could read in the newspapers today.

That alone makes me suspicious of this recovery. The point of a recession is so you stop doing what you're doing and find new uses for your labor and capital; that hasn't happened so far. In all the recessions above, that's what brought the country out of it: new markets opened up and absorbed all the workers that were laid off by the old ones. I haven't seen that yet (though there are some interesting developments in mobile and in the revival of hardware hacking); mostly we've seen government attempts to paper over the inefficiencies in old industries with taxpayer dollars.
It doesn't recognize cycles longer than two (one english and one japanese) phrases. Another example is "How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?"

The real question is, are there any sequences that neither terminate nor repeat?
This article is nearly five years old.
I have to imagine by virtue of the type of people who visit HN - ie the programmers/techies and to a lesser degree the marketing/business types, it would skew significantly male. It might be interesting to slice and dice inside those numbers though to see how those who frequent HN compare with the Kaiser study - Anatomy of an Entrepreneur: http://www.scribd.com/doc/17772299/Anatomy-of-an-Entrepreneu...
I lie all the time to people who do their best to stop me from telling the truth. When people relentlessly and shamelessly manipulate situations to deter me from telling them something, and I can afford to wait, I'll wait for an opening. It's like dealing with a military adversary who interprets truth as aggression. You don't strike when they're posturing right off your coast. You wait until their navy is in port and their planes are on the ground, and you hope they won't go to the trouble of punishing you, or that they calm down before they manage to muster a retaliatory strike. I don't feel guilty about lying under such circumstances. They're demanding to be lied to, and I'm telling them the truth against their will. Whether I'm doing them a favor by ultimately telling the truth or just telling the truth for my own selfish reasons, I figure they share responsibility for the lies I tell in the meantime.
Must a posting preserve the editorial spin in the original headline? "In Earnest" indicates sincere and intense conviction. This value judgement is at odds with journalistic neutrality, isn't it? I took the HN headline to be a removal of editorial spin, not an addition of gratuitous spin. (Edit: Ok, I missed the word 'derailing'. Both headlines are spintastic.)
The Snow Programming Language
As a surfer I already think waves are incredible...this just confirms it! Ocean waves are an amazing thing. Lots of untapped energy.
Could you geolocate the IPs in the scrape and then overlay them on top of a Google Maps API? That'd be a bit more useful: security cameras in your neighborhood.
It's the same as accounting. If people are allowed discretion to use their judgment to pick the most accurate reporting methods for each time and situation, or the statistics that best reflect reality, then inevitably you end up with nothing but lies. If you standardize reporting, then sometimes you end up reporting meaningless numbers, but everyone is in the same boat, and there's less long-term distortion (as long as the people who wrote the standard have an interest in accurate information.)
I'm almost certain that symbol means greater-than.
Real Human Interface
First off, it couldn't be a glider, if you wanted it to do that. Secondly, a balloon might be a better option.

Thirdly, http://www.thevlecks.net/rmj/earth.html
It could keep up with the sunlight, if developed to be fast enough.

Lastly, I would look into APRS as a better alternative to free wifi, in this situation.
Matt Taibbi covered this in great detail:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/29127316/the_grea...
City to launch culinary incubator
Clarinet
It's Official: Captchas Are Bad for Business
DIY plasma gun
HN does have some members who do not fit in either category. :)
suggestion for an amendment of the poll ?
I actually bought one of those to try it out back when I started the project. But the price was more like $1.50 from the place I bought it from (RobotShop). Since then, the price has gone up, so I feel ripped off at five bucks, eheh.
China growth fuelled by cheap debt rather than corporate profits
I don't see why people are particularly upset about the Ninjawords dictionary. I mean, you only need to look at the literal universe of scatological, explicit, sexual terms cataloged in a place like wiktionary to understand what was found to be objectionable.

Fuck, shit, dick, cunt, ass, tits, and whatever else the 7 dirty words happen to be this week weren't the problem.

Here, just peruse this list: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Vulgarities
This is the only reason they get my business over a closer and much cheaper coffee shop (with no wifi).
For Group of (Accounting) Skeptics, the Truth Is Out There
Hey, thanks for the links. Only problem is, I'm Canadian, and it's tricky to find people who will ship to me...

But yeah, if we could get a bulk order in together that would be great!
The Best Board Meetings
Misleading title. Pleasurable != drug.
Entertaining vid, but this is blog spam.
No. Or at least if they are, this is most certainly not proof. This article is anecdotal BS.
People 'get happier as they age'
well, in the great depression and the recessions you mentioned the government did not give out billions and then went on to print money like there is no tomorrow. I would be more worried about inflation now than really a depression. I just can not see how a depression can occur. The whole problem was that banks lost billions! The economy was fine, what was not was the banks and the banks now are sort of getting fine, so I say on with the champaign.
Thanks for posting this. The other content on the site is pretty good too!
..is 40%+ taxation not considered heavy? I consider it pretty heavy. taxation is especially harmful to the primary source of economic growth: new small businesses. the tax burden of hiring new employees is so strong (and so risky due to litigation resulting from contract dispute) you'd think the government liked unemployment.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=591309
Ok, I'm not a PC-nazi but I think someone needs to call the article out:

This is generic claptrap ("use help"?! he, and it's pretty clear it's a he, could have at least looked at how hard emacs help is to use for beginners) interspersed with sexist pictures and commentary. It is offputting to many people, and I'd like to see my favorite editor associated with higher caliber tutorials.
WebKit working on QNX via qtwebkit [pic]
hm, didn't realize it was going to be a duplicate, but it is interesting because that means we can compare the change over time.
I do not understand how these pictures are sexist.
Aha. So by scrolling down to find the 'end' I made it worse. Thanks for the tip.
There was physics/math involved in getting the man to fly into the pool.
What happened to grumpy old men?
The Londoner brewpub on suk soi 33. Brewed beer > brewed coffee.
I saw Embrace, Extend, Extinguish play out first hand with the standardization of SPF. Things seem to be going well and seemingly right before consensus, Microsoft shows up and says it won't work because clients, namely Outlook, don't support it, despite that it has nothing to do with MUAs. This distracts people enough so that Microsoft has enough time to come up with SenderID, which co-opts the data format of SPF allowing MS to say they are trying to be compatible when it really subverts the intent of the standard. They also claimed they may or may not have patent interests but won't say exactly what they are, that will have to wait until after everything is standardized and the patents are filed--because since this is such an innovative idea Microsoft is being kind enough to file patents so that the community and standard is protected in the event someone else is waiting with a submarine patent, even though the IETF discourages standards that are patent encumbered. Microsoft gets to say it is trying to work with the community, and through press releases and public policy statements confuses the goals and intent of SPF and SenderID. IETF decides to create two RFCs and gives them Experimental status, thereby almost ensuring that no one will adopt either fully, but to this day we still need to create multiple DNS records and are never sure exactly how email receiving systems will interpret them.

(working from years-old memory, I don't mean to present the above as representative of the exact order of events, but I'm sure someone else could be found who could reasonably corroborate it)
If by "physics/math" you mean video editing, then yes.
For the perspective of an aspiring coffee shop owner, I recommend (if you have not read it yet): "I opened a charming neighborhood coffee shop. Then it destroyed my life."

Via http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=461791

http://www.slate.com/id/2132576
Ask me: A webdeveloper from Belgium
I've been watching HN for quite some time now and I see more and more 'coffee shops say no to laptop users' and it strikes me that here, in Belgium, we have no such thing. Or not that I know of anyway.
That inspired me to create this. Are there any questions you, HN readers, would like to ask about life in Europe/Belgium? Of course any question is welcome and I'll do my best to give a unbiased opinion, but don't feel offended if I feel a question is inappropriate. This is just a wild idea, if this is not appropriate for HN for some reason, feel free to tell me why.
Everybody was boycotting the (non-existent) app store for the first year of the iPhone's existence. I don't think Steve Jobs was upset about this.
Each of the tips is an important and non-obvious point, and several are unusual and probably good advice: post a cheat sheet, write down interesting commands, update your cheat sheet. Tips for beginners are always pretty generic. I'm sure someone, somewhere has suggested the same thing, but I give him credit for 33% unpredictable content, which is actually pretty good.

As a longtime emacs user, I'm still working on a few of these. I often discover useful new commands and forget them by the time I need them again -- obviously I should have them posted on my cheat sheet. I don't use command-apropos or the included documentation as much or as well as I should, either. I think insufficient use of help is way too common -- a lot of people ask me for help as soon as Google fails them.
That's a good question and I don't have a nice pat answer for you.

It probably comes down to personal preference. It may work in a way that is better for you or you may like the way it looks or it may offer features that the others don't.

The world seems to like choices, we have many text editors, web browsers, languages and operating systems, restaurants, etc.

Note, I am also the founder of pennyminder.com so I think there is lots of room for both full featured PFM's as well as simple and unobtrusive ones.
Love this post.

One family business is running businesses like these, and it frustrates me to no end when people (for whatever reason, not just working on a laptop) hog a seat and a table for hours on end after buying the cheapest thing they can find on the menu once when they walked in. I don't mind if someone sits there for 10+ hours a day if they keep on buying food and coffee regularly, and I know I've sat at a table for hours on end working but even went as far as to make a timer on my laptop to get up every like 30 minutes to go get something. But it's crass to sit there like "oh, this seat is mine, I bought ONE small cup of coffee 3 hours ago, stop looking at me like that".

It's one thing for a coffee shop to look busier by having a whole bunch of people sit there and work away, attracting passers-by, but it's another when people who don't buy anything just hog the tables preventing new customers from coming in because they see a total lack of available work space.

That being said, I remember once when I was at a family friend's coffee shop and there was one customer who just. wouldn't. leave. He was told about their time limit policy about customers getting x hours with purchase (rarely enforced...except with people like these) and he was like "whatever" and acted like he was going to buy something but then settled back in and worked. I saw this go on for 20 minutes when I decided to boot him off the wifi. I don't think he realized I was purposefully doing so until I kept on kicking him off, and the outrage on his face was unbelievable. It was as if he felt he was entitled to sit there and do whatever he wanted after buying a 50 cent bottle of water earlier, how dare I interrupt what he was doing. Unfortunately it's those types of people who ruin the whole experience for all the reasonable folk.

Lastly, the advice about getting to know the owners/employees is the best :) I don't spend much time actually working, but when I have there were always a few customers I got to know and even once ended up working with because they decided to chat me up after seeing whatever I was doing on the side, like reading some tech book or coding on my laptop. I always included a little something for them, like free cookies. Those are the kinds of customers that make my day.
I've gradually been going more and more often to our local coworking space - no worries about taking up table space, unlimited coffee, other freelancers to bounce ideas and news off of, and it's no big deal if you want to leave your equipment there for a bit and run out.
Sure; the article covers exactly this - you can get by without money incentives if you have good social incentives. Predictify lacked the latter and the former, and the top comment seemed to forget this important conditional.
There are a lot of different ways to help. Most people think the best way to help is to fix bugs or do code cleanup. While this is true, it's also very important to help other users. I send quite some time on a Linux distro forum and helped other people there. Same on IRC, I tried to help a lot of beginning users start mIRC scripting. It might not have been the most exciting things to do for most people, but I've been thanked a lot for doing simple things like giving a kind response and doing some effort to help other people. And after all, I'd rather work with some software if I know there is a good community of users to help.
Over time? That was 3 months ago.
Hudson River Helicopter Crash + Twitter Spam = Absurd
If I'm not mistaken, the Netflix recommendation algorithm corrects for this effect by normalizing the scores. For example, suppose you're a movie cynic. The most you'll ever rate a movie is 3; suppose your average rating is a 2. Someone else might rate movies from 3. to 5 with an average rating of 4. From the recommendation engine's point of view, the cynic's 2 rating is equivalent to the other person's rating of 4. Thus the algorithm corrects for different notions of "average."
A lawyer could hugely undercut most of his/her peers on this sort of thing and still make a nice amount of money. Annoyingly, when lawyers do these standard documents, they're basically functioning as secretaries who happen to charge hundreds of dollars an hour. You're paying them to bear responsibility for the legal effectiveness of the document, not for the document itself. But that's really annoying on occasions when the documents are a whisker away from being form letters.
I think I've posted the full FAQ on voluntary response polls enough times that this time I'll just provide a link.

http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=194473&tsta...
I like to use such analogies, but have actually found them very limited for persuasive purposes, or only very effective with certain kinds of abstract thinkers.

Of course, if you already agree with a speakers' point, the analogy makes sense and helps make the matter vivid.

But when a listener intuitively disagrees, the analogy can derail discussion. Even though in the spirit in which it was offered, it aligns one axis of the issue at hand, with one axis of the offered analogous situation, the listener instead may focus on -- and comment about -- every other dimension of the two things that are wildly different.

For some thinkers, all those other differences are easy to factor out -- of course they're different in those dimensions, and the wild variance only serves to highlight the similarity-in-one-dimension-of-interest. But for other fuzzier/holistic thinkers, every difference is a distraction to be considered separately, and the attempted analogy may harden them against your point.

Worst case is when some other aspect of the analogy so dominates listeners' thought (or can be cynically flipped against you to imply you've said something you didn't mean). This is why Nazi analogies can be so conversationally-derailing -- whatever one small comparison was being intended, the response is "how dare you call [Bush|Obama|Teachers' Unions|Evangelicals|Mall Santas|etc] Nazis!"
What will twitter do in order to fight this spam? Will it have an anti-spam filter in the future, like your e-mail program does?
The whole thing is laughable. Very little bad debt was defaulted--most of it is hidden on the fed's balance sheet or by mark-to-magic accounting. Banks are letting people live mortgage-free to avoid booking a loss. The CRE, Prime, option ARM, and ARM problems are just getting started. And then there's this:

http://www2.standardandpoors.com/spf/xls/index/SP500EPSEST.X...

H-50: A PE ratio of 116. This quarter is 118 so far. (!!!) Anything over 20 has been traditionally considered bearish. What do the people in-the-know think about this?

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/las-weeks-insiders-transact...
Why do they not allow fast forwarding? I want to get back to the 20 minutes mark but I cannot. Not worth watching that 20 minutes over again.
Snow _could_ be great. Its delivery as a completely unfinished project, though, gives it an air of non-seriousness.

Compare, for instance, with the first public release of Clojure, which was very usable for everyday programming, and came along with detailed explanations on the rational and motivations behind the creation of the new language.
Do you have any examples where URLs that were only discovered via toolbar reporting (from one or any number of visitors) appear in Google's search results, even though never linked from any other page?

Some sites use unique per-user access URLs as their only access-control; I would have expected more tales of woe if such URLs regularly received Googlebot visits or appeared in search results.
The bit about teahouses in China reminded me that in America, especially the suburbs, we don't really have places like that. It's kind of sad, the only place that comes to mind is Waffle House at 3AM. Most restaurants and coffee shops seem to discourage customers sitting around for several hours.
Design Articles
Only runs on x86-64 architectures and operating systems.

Only runs on POSIX-compliant operating systems.

Snow currently requires the experimental GCC version 4.4

Snow also could have benefited from being prototyped in Awk and Sed first. How can you be influenced by "Smalltalk, Python, Ruby and JavaScript", and still end up writing your compiler in C++?

Good luck to the author, if this is a first attempt (but compiler writing != language design.)
This is definitely the most shallow comment I have made, but: what a deeply unfortunate application icon.
What exactly is interesting about this language? The two strongest qualities I see (easy binding with dlopen and parallelization) are unimplemented, and already exist in similar languages.
:) Yah it could use a better one or at least tweak the legs. Propose a better one and i'll post it on the arora-dev mailinglist.

Originally it was suppose to be a sleeping polar bear, later on we noticed other interpretation :)
I'm going to have to disagree with '6. Keep Your Keybindings Standard.'

When I started with emacs, there were some bindings that would make my hands ache after a day of use, usually from the transition between difficult keybindings, not any one key combination in isolation. One of the first things I did was add in the ergoemacs bindings, and I never regretted it. It's not as if doing so made me suddenly forget what the old bindings were, although I am slower during the rare cases when I'm on the normal keybindings. But it's a small price to pay for not having my fingers hate me.

Editors are meant to be customized to your workflow and what works best for you.
It does not appear the Carstensen survey controlled for the many ways unhappy people deselect themselves from the old-age pool, by dying early. (It's unclear whether the Charles review considered this, either.)

There is plenty of evidence from other research that "happy people live longer". Because of this quite-literal "survivor bias", these reports provide essentially no evidence that "less-happy people become happier as they age".
The Virtues of Small Software
Ask HN: Summer readings?
1. What will you be reading this summer?

2. What have you always wanted to read and have never gotten around to?

3. What do you think every hacker/programmer should read?
And this time they're using x264; it seems like they value their bandwidth!

One thing that should be better-documented are Justin.TV-side bitrate restrictions; I assume that they don't want users broadcasting 1-2 megabit DVD-quality streams over their network, but nothing of the sort is listed in the guide.

Additionally, there's the matter of constant bitrate requirements: H.264 streaming works under a leaky buffer model based on two parameters, the rate and buffer size. For optimal performance Justin.TV should document what buffer size they set on the viewers' Flash players so that the encoder settings can be set accordingly. For example, let's say that Justin.TV uses a 2 second buffer:

I pick a constant bitrate of 500kbps. (bitrate=500)

I set the maxrate to 500. (vbv-maxrate=500)

I set the bufsize to 500x2 = 1000. (vbv-bufsize=1000)

If the buffer in the encoder is greater than that used by Justin.TV, it's possible for the stream to drop out for viewers during local bitrate spikes, so getting it right is important, especially at higher bitrates (at 300kbps you probably don't have to care much).

Another issue to note is latency. Total latency in a connection is as follows:

(Encoder-side latency) + (Network latency) + (Decoder buffer size)

x264's default encoder-side latency is about 40 frames in the latest version; if anyone's interested in how to lower that for a low-latency stream, I can give more information.