skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Uh, that the housing bubble would end was absolutely predictable. It wasn't a matter of butterflies in the Himalaya perturbing the system. When the housing would was hard to predict.

That poor policies result in problems is not unpredictable and so it's quite predictable that this "recovery" will end in grief. When it will end is a different matter but your analogy with the weather is misplaced
You could probably get away with just "Transgender" and "Other," but there's a pretty huge spectrum out there.
I've heard tell that physicists had been claiming freak waves are eminently possible, the math clearly shows it.

That sailors had been claiming they had witnessed and/or experienced such freak waves.

But oceanographers were doubtful and that was the accepted status quo on freak waves until one of them was caught on camera hitting an oil rig.
So, if I understand you right then because these polls are 'meaningless' we should assume the likelyhood of HN being populated by 95% females and 5% males as just as high as the reverse ?

Personally - and in contradiction to the link you posted - I'm assuming that people are either not going to report in or are going to tell the truth and that the chances of lying/not reporting in are about the same across genders.

With lying being very very low.

I started this poll because of this http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=749514 link posted (and dead within seconds) by a user that identified herself as a female by her name in the forum nickname.

It made me wonder how many of the anonymous nicknames belonged to females because for the most part all the names that I can relate to a gender on the forum with the exception of DaniFong belong to males.
Webkit is everywhere and it's great! Now if we could just get IE and Firefox to use WebKit for rendering :), it would be AWESOME!!!
poll amended.
A fireside chat (Krugman & Stross)
Depends on what you are doing. If you want to kill a sexp, the keyboard is going to be faster. If you want to kill a random block of text that has no structure, then sure, the mouse is going to be faster.

Guess which programmers usually do.
Only men should be using computers, duh.
Now, do IT people, especially programmers get happier as they age?
I agree with you about the default keybindings (they're sadistic), but I think that people will have an easier time learning Emacs if they wait to start rebinding things until they're familiar with the conventions.* There are a lot of patterns in the way keybindings are defined for various major modes, for example, and rebinding everything to make it more like textmate or whatever obscures them. Also, it's a good idea to check if new bindings are replacing another highly useful command, particularly if one doesn't know how to access it otherwise.

Some of this probably matters less if using Emacs on other peoples' computers isn't an issue, though. (Same with using Dvorak or other layouts.)

* Perhaps around the time they start learning Elisp, rather than copying and modifying other peoples' config files. Nothing wrong with doing that, just, that comes much earlier.
So his argument is that we should ignore all possible risks to our oil supply and let everyone have cheap oil? That works great until one of those risks becomes reality, the price of oil instantly skyrockets amid dire shortages, and we don't have any alternatives because oil was cheaper than all of them.

I hope that none of the people railing against speculators are also environmentalists, because oil speculators should be an environmentalist's best friend: nothing could possibly promote alternative energy better than high oil prices.
When you're a teen you're either extremely idealistic and deeply troubled or extremely idealistic and happy, either way exciting times.

Your 20s are a weird transitional period between that and adulthood.

Your 30s, your adulthood, for the wast majority of us, you're finally coming to terms with the fact that you will NOT be just like James Bond, or Michal Jordan, or Michal Jackson, that you will in fact be perfectly ordinary.

This sucks hard, but you're an adult now and quite possibly may even already be responsible for your own family.

So most of us adjust.

And when you're old, you wake up realize you're not dead yet, and that right there puts you in a good mood.
You are correct that the author argues that restrictive government policies ameliorated some of the effects of very low interest rates. But on a close reading of the article, even this author, who seems to think government control of the economy is doing very well so far, concedes that there is already "misguided investment."
It seemed that a bunch of people thought a transcript would be useful, and considering I was going to watch the video anyway, I decided to jot down some notes for anyone interested. It's not a transcript by any means, but I think you'll get the gist of the questions and answers.

The video is an hour, and I figured the notes were too long for posting here, so I threw them up on a private link on my Tumblr account: http://bit.ly/18I4Td
People tend to vastly underestimate the effect that emotions have on physical health. Chronic depression, anger, and stress are basically the equivalent of an all bacon diet. Probably far worse for your health than being morbidly obese. The reason there are no angry or stressed old people is that they're all dead.

There is a bunch of scientific research about this in Emotional Intelligence, if you're looking for cites. (And Malcolm Gladwell opens his newest book talking about this as well.)
Working through Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, as well as some books on Statistics and Machine Learning.
Been unplugged all day so haven't been around to respond. This is a completely fair criticism - the wording in my post is indeed too plain. Without understanding the normal forms making smart decisions about denormalization is going to be very difficult.
Well, so far the ratio seems to be just as skewed as it was then.
A lot of generic SQL stuff in there for sure. But, last I worked with MySQL (it has admittedly been a few years) the indexing options were severely limited when compared with PostgreSQL. Last I used it you could not index an expression or qualify an index with a where clause for example. Also at that time MySQL could only make use of one index per query.

All of those deficiencies may have since been eliminated.
No Snow Crash joke yet? I'm disappointed.

And besides, I'm not sure what this is good for.
Yes! "Other" please :)

(Edit: and just as i post, the poll is edited. Now all us weird people can vote, too! Yay!)
There are fewer coffee shops per capita in Manhattan compared to places like Portland and SF. I'm assuming because rents are so expensive. However, you were looking in the wrong neighborhoods. The coffee shops are in places like East/West Village and the Lower East Side.

What you are experiencing in Pittsburgh is a function of cheap rent. I lived in Minneapolis many years ago and the coffee shop scene was similar to what you described. The attitudes toward people hanging out and not buying anything are much different when the rent on a space is $900/m instead of $9000/m.

I wouldn't say that electricity costs nothing. Ritual Roasters in SF said that laptop users were costing them upwards of $2000/m in electricity charges.

Ritual used to have a bazillion power outlets you could plug your laptop into, and they'd have them covered up only on the weekends. During the second week of March 2007 (a date that shall live in infamy) they covered up nearly all of their power outlets permanently in an effort to encourage higher turnover and cut their $2,000/month electric bill down.

http://sf.wikispot.org/Ritual_Coffee_Roasters

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/03/...
There is a glut of credit in the world. Free trade and huge pools of untapped labor in the developing world have kept inflation in consumer goods and wages to a minimum.

Not so when it comes to investments. There are thousands of hedge funds who charge 2/20, that's 2% even if they lose money. Who would give them money? Lots of people apparently, there must be pent up demand.

And all that credit has to go somewhere, commodities, real estate, stuff like that.

But commodities, and even real estate are volatile, so there's a lot of speculation. And what's the benefit of this moneyed activity? There is none.
Technically speaking, jailbreaking an iPhone now consists of clicking a button and rebooting the phone - tasks which I am pretty sure you don't have to be 'technical enough' to do.
Restaurants and commercial furniture are designed to get customers in and out as fast as possible. Ever notice how most fast-food places use plastic banquettes with seat backs that are pitched forward? They're intended to be so uncomfortable that you don't linger after eating.
Pay Yourself First - So You Can Pay Others Too
Ask HN: web-based decision making software?
In our team we occasionally have to discuss some applications and make approval decisions about them. We currently use ReSubj to keep track of it, but it gets really hard to keep discussion in one place, decision making conditions in another (which is our heads) and send responses through our mail client. Not talking about deadlines and replies from the applicants.

I've checked google for 'decision making software' and found some applications, none of which are fully web-based and none of which provide outside world integration (i'm talking about generating web-forms and automated actions on each decision making step - for example sending email responses constructed out of templates).
To summ it up, what we need is: tools to receive the issues, a set of tools to host the discussion (not just stupid post/comment thing, we need it more like google wave), rules and conditions that trigger automated decisions and, finally, tools that talk to the outside world when decision has been made.

So, we are now thinking about implementing our own little software. The big question is if it's worth trying to make it more than just internal tool? Do you think businesses and teams would like to buy this sort of thing?
Can anyone explain to me why this matters? As far as I can tell, the ratio of m/f on HN is of no significance, and furthermore is not really relevant to the type of articles I expect to find on HN.
Money is security, control, power and yes even social acceptance in very real non-metaphorical terms. Saying that may be cynical but it's reality.
Browser Compatibility: IE6+

Are you sure HN is the target audience for this?
Yeah, I was going to post this as well. If you use Emacs change your keybindings to whatever you're comfortable with. This isn't freakin' VI or an editor you use in a sysadmin / dead server environment: Emacs should be the editor you spend most of your life in as an IDE, for mail, news, writing documents, etc.

Also put your keybindings.el somewhere online so you can load it up when you're in a new environment.

If you use Bash some of the handy default Emacs bindings will be known to you already.
"I don't mind if someone sits there for 10+ hours a day if they keep on buying food and coffee regularly"

Isn't this a bit consumerist, consume something or get out? (And didn't that jump out at you when you wrote it?) Perhaps there should be a 3rd way, paying for time at a table. The problem is the pricing (and people taking the piss).
Github appears to handle this correctly

$ ssh -L 1234:irc.perl.org:6667 git@github.com -N
channel 2: open failed: administratively prohibited: open failed
^C

But anyway, this is not a huge deal. It is only available to vetted users (those with git/cvs/whatever accounts), and that "Unauthorized use is prohibited" banners that show up when you log in should cover the server admin's ass when someone does something illegal. It is no more "a threat" than an open wireless access point.
If you were to be kicked out of one coffee shop, then simply that coffee shop loses your business and another one gains.

The point of these articles is there is no "business"; if people with laptops actually were good customers no-one would have any problem with them consuming resources (space, power).
Make your internal tool, and use it for a while. See how it works, and then decide if you can generalize it to a larger market.

No sense in putting the cart before the horse.
I used to be a huge MySQL fan until a coworker forced us to use PostgreSQL for a big project. At the start I wasn't happy about it but have since completely changed sides. It is an amazing piece of software with some exceptional code and engineering behind it. When you are faced with high concurrency (especially if you have nontrivial write volume) PostgreSQL is a beast.

We peak at 1000s of transactions a second on an OLTP database that is over 100GB in size and PostgreSQL handles it like a champ.
Guy is merely asking the questions.
It's the nearest choice most place have to what you suggest. There are few venues that allow you to pay directly for table time, but you're (ehtically) doing the same thing by regularly purchasing items from them.
I think it makes sense to just collect the opinions. What if there's also something we don't know about, that we should use instead?
Can Twitter, Facebook, and LiveJournal confirm this rumor?
Thanks for being inclusive!
Satisfying your curiosity is its own reward I guess. It may not 'matter' in any other sense than that. I was just wondering about this and figured the best way to find out is to ask.

There is no greater significance to it than that.
You're welcome, apologies for not thinking of it right away.
Allowing command-restricted users to trivially bypass firewalls by default is insecure.

Most individuals (myself included) don't realize that SVN over SSH with command-restricted SSH keys would allow the users unmitigated access to the SVN server's network. I should know better, but still have made the mistake.
The original claim was about private medicine leading to greater investment. That's why it was pointed out that the largest single investor was a US government agency.

Showing that other nations with socialised medicine have higher per capita investment is entirely germane since the point is at what level the US could be investing if it chose another approach. It's evidence that directly contradicts assumptions in this thread.
Private Chinese firms are already complaining that they're being squeezed out by their state owned counterparts (who are getting the bulk of the bank financing and government stimulus funds): http://www.chinastakes.com/2009/8/china-stimulus-plan-critic...
What's the point of declaring "this is not a huge deal"? This, like an open wireless access point, can be very huge deal depending on the network/organization in question.

Moreover, a "vetted" user is any user that has acquired a vetted user's SSH keys or password. With individuals regularly SSH'ing from remote, compromised machines, this happens all surprisingly often.
Targeting Linux before Mac OS X seems like a very odd choice.
Best nugget from the video for me was Paul's opinion on the iPhone being the next big platform because hackers are building apps for the iPhone (vs. the Blackberry or Palm pre, which are almost non-existent among hackers).
Ask HN: What should I do with my domain name of 11 years?
I've owned a domain name for 11 years and haven't used it in MANY years. It is now up for renewal and I'm starting to wonder if I should just let it go. Call me stupid, but I feel a little bit emotionally attached to the domain name (!). It was the first domain name I owned after all.

Is there a good reason to keep a domain name that's not being used and that I probably won't ever use again, besides trying to sell it for profit?
Academic year effect?
3) The Soul of a new Machine, Tracy Kidder.

3) Neal Stephensons wired article on laying fibre optic cable across the globe: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html
I'm sorry but you've just done the exact same thing again. You've essentially said that the entire US tax structure is bad, while only providing anecdotal evidence for your claims.

You claim that common sense will produce certain economic results, however in most fields claims of "common sense" would be laughed away. Anyone who argued that we can know both the exact position and velocity of any particle would probably be regarded as having common sense less than 100 years ago. Unfortunately, common sense is not proof of any measurable claim.

In addition, you continue to ignore variables in favor of the ones you care about. Specifically, you argue that the savings would positively benefit very specific segments of funding and revenue for certain small businesses. Meanwhile, you completely ignore the effect that the taxes have on other variables, like infrastructure development. This is the same fallacy of Power that I proposed before.
Follow the link, it seems to work fine on MacOS.
They have the assets to backstop the debt bubble they are creating but what I am hoping is that it puts the US and China back on an even level since all of there foreign reserves will have to go to the debt or they will have to inflate the yaun taking away some of the advantage they have now.
I feel like you're trolling me because I called you out regarding your comments about the Lower Haight filled with beautiful women. I'm not sure what points of mine need to be addressed. However, I did respond - good show. You win.

I've thought about these issues and have decided you are right. Only Miami and Milan rival the Lower Haight when it comes to the likelihood of running into a beautiful woman. Cafe Reverie and most of the Inner Richmond are indeed WiFi "hot spots." A good walking tour of SF would include a stroll up Haight Street starting at the Fillmore. Walk slowly while immersing yourself in the rare natural beauty of your surroundings. Take your time. It's unlikely you will make it up the hill without being approached by a half dozen startlingly gorgeous people, but once you do, head over to Cole Valley to recharge your spirits and check your email in the courtyard at Reverie.
To answer your last question, I think you are way-over-thinking the problem. But hey, I'm just one guy with an opinion.

Personally, I don't know why I would need all of the stuff you described just to make a decision. Think about it this way. If the decision was a significant one, it would be embedded in your thought process, you would not be able to forget about it. If it isn't, then there's no use spending all that time on it.

Anyway, Fogbugz comes to mind. It's not a decision maker per say, but its a tracker. I love fogbugz and actually the new version 7 allows you to easily add custom fields, so you can probably add some poll features. Fogbugz is good because the premise is simple. Track bugs so you don't forget about them, and collaborate with your team to manage the fix. Making decisions possibly has a similar worklflow. Check them out. Track bugs/Track decisions : Fogbugz!
I have an immediate, almost visceral disagreement with the suggestion that a mouse is more efficient, but I may be wrong. For sake of argument: I think the "just pointing vs. using the keyboard and getting more thought involved about structure disrupts the sense of time" argument may have something to it. Still, using a keyboard well counterbalances this by being able to take advantage of greater structure - I very frequently use elaborate keyboard macros, for example, and the mouse doesn't have any clear way to say, "Ok, the thing I just did, apply that in a batch to the rest of those that look like a C function prototype." The mouse is more immediate, but you can do more powerful manipulation with the keyboard if you know the program's keyboard shortcuts, etc. (That's not necessarily a good trade-off for many kinds of programs, but for a text editor / IDE, it's probably worthwhile.)

While there have been some attempts to do that with mice (such as mouse gestures), by design, mice are about position, changes of position, with a few buttons as flags. There aren't enough distinctive signals.

Also: The Emacs mouse support is not great. It probably hasn't been a high priority.
Neal Stephenson, 4.12: Mother Earth Mother Board (old but worth a read)
Great article!! Thanks for your continued contributions to HN. I'll test out Mixpanel with my new merb app in a month or so.

One design decision I've made to my funnel is to not force a user to sign-up too early. My user has states not_registered, registered, and premium (paying). You have these same states. You are simply forcing a user to become registered prior to creating a bingo card. Would you get better conversions if you moved the sign-up requirement to after creating, but before being able to save a card? In my, app (nothing to do with bingo) I'm betting I will.

In order to achieve this, in merb, I assign the user_id in the session cookie to a UUID. At some later stage, once they register, I map this UUID to the DB's user id. This also solves the issue of not exposing incremental db user ids in the cookie.
* Bank books are happy fiction
* Banks are delaying foreclosing on houses so they can keep showing it as a profit
* The Fed is pumping billions into their operations
* Option ARMs resetting, as mentioned elsewhere
* Available credit is shrinking
* People are spending to shrink their debt, hence an increase in the savings rate, and a decrease in spending on goods and services
* Government numbers are lies.

Think for a moment. Where does the government money, what is keeping this charade going, coming from? They are borrowing it, printing it, doing just about anything they can. What they are intent on doing is kicking the can down the road to the next administration.
"The government will have to borrow nearly 50 cents for every dollar it spends this year..."
We have a massive debt which we are going to have to eventually reckon with. Gradually, the government will have to pay more and more to borrow, as well as borrow more and more to pay off the interest and have enough to sustain the banking system. Is that a vicious cycle, or what?

Pop the champagne cork, but watch out for the falling house of cards. The reason depressions represent opportunity is that the herd does not see it coming. Its your choice whether to believe nutcases like me!
+1, I had a really hard time reading through even the simple examples!
When you're a girl on the internet, you don't use an obviously girly name unless you want a certain kind of attention. Nuff said.
Quality blog comments:

If I were you, I would (Being that youre a SEO person!!!)

Not make it difficult to understand your writing (First Line!!!!)

Before you complain about BING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And get a copy of word from someone !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What?
I didn't mean it's a tool to make one big decision. In that case, yes, it'd be natural to keep all the stuff you need in your mind. I meant that it's more like lots of small, but important decisions - as if you are approving YC applications. Imagine the flow of the applications they have and I guess it gets obvious that you need at least a set of rules to handle these.
At the coffee shop I frequent, with your purchase you can get a card for 2 hours of WiFi. This seems like a good way to limit your laptop per dollar ratio.
You kind of get this feeling while surfing. When you have clean, calm sets - every so often, like every few hours depending, there's a big, bad ass outside that comes and if you stay where you are, it will break on you - so everyone scrambles to paddle out towards it before it gets to you. If you get outside in time you get to turn around and catch it early for a nice long ride.

Sometimes you'll have orderly sets for hours, and then there's one that has combined into a big, bad ass wave twice as powerful as any other. Its great to see.