skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It might also be pertinent to take into account how long ago an article was submitted. I've noticed the votes-comments quality filter myself, but I've never really added "submission age" to that mental filter. I'm not sure how it would affect the results, but I certainly think its something worth researching.
PC.

I might do that. Thanks.
Also scratching a browser-related itch: http://pagestackandroid.appspot.com/

Bookmarklets that make it easy to bounce pages between devices (similar to Instapaper but with an Android client & a more streamlined UI).
This article and all others on the topic seem to confuse two different trends: 1> That there is a real incentive for the very best to return to India and China because they are self-confident and know that they can thrive anywhere, and 2> That the current H1-B regime (read indentured labor) is abused by corporations, especially IT outsourcers to bring in bodies. In my case, after a PhD at a top 5 engineering school and a 7 year wait at a Fortune 500 company, I finally got a Green card. I started a company within a month of that, we have over 100 employees (all in the US) and we are hiring today. The generation of PhD's before me used to get their Green Cards in three months. I see a lot of my friends now contemplating a return to India and China. I think this is bad for the US and bad for Silicon Valley.
It basically comes down to this, in intellectual fields, the most productive workers are 10X better than the median. Multiple that with a 10X tolerance for risk (which a lot of immigrants with much lower fixed costs and lower expectations from life tend to have) and you are talking about losing someone who is 100X more valuable (in economic terms) than the average worker. If we don't figure out who these people are and insist on having them wait in the H1B line along with everyone else, we are doing ourselves a great disservice. BTW my cofounder is American, also falls in the 100X category - so this is not a statement about "all Chinese/Indians are superior to all Americans". His daughters are learning Chinese as a backup plan.
By mixing legal with illegal immigration (due to the relative strength of some of the lobbies) and uber-skilled with somewhat skilled immigration, we are creating a mess.
Unemployment could be higher for men, and there could still be discrimination against women in the workplace. Those are not in contradiction. Your comment seems like a non sequitur. (Leaving aside whether there really is sex discrimination in the workplace, a complex question that almost certainly has an answer more subtle than "yes" or "no")
But these same protectionist rules that made Sparta glorious for little time, led to Sparta decline in the long run.

What did for the Spartans was all dying glorious deaths before having enough kids. The Spartan economy, operated by the Perioikoi and Helots, was strong enough, but it relied on there being a critical mass of adult male Spartans to maintain it. Protectionism was little to do with the fall - the Perioikoi could trade with whomever they pleased.
Discrimination comes in different forms than % of people being employed.
No, it's not supply/demand economics, that was my point. It would be if Americans created jobs that immigrants later filled. That is not happening.

Rather, both Americans and immigrants worked hard to build a tech industry that then created jobs. Without the immigrants, the Americans would not have been able to create an industry more significant than, say, the Japanese or Italian tech industry. Thus many jobs would not exist, and the wages would not be higher.

You did not say words like "create", "stolen", "give", and "take", but they are implicit in making your supply/demand argument work.
I have experienced the effects that "stress" can have on the body first hand. It's not pleasant.
Phone screen with not just your standard questions, but also simple algorithmic questions. An example might be to ask the candidate to write an algorithm to shuffle a deck of cards and describe it over the phone. This is sometimes a good indicator of whether they can communicate their solutions well without a whiteboard present.
1. Yes but Spartan rules of being killer fighters made immigration impossible.

2. The Perioikoi could trade with whomever they pleased - but - but no one wanted to trade with them because of the iron slabs being used as currency of exchange.

Dig a little deeper into the motives as to why such rules were made by the Spartans and you will see that it was pure protectionism.
Oh what the hell people? Is this what it's come to? Am I now expected to feel bad for the guy who, after making as much as $255,000 up until the age of 55, only has enough savings to live for 2 or 3 years? Who, with a business degree, chose to move to New York of all places. The heart of the financial industry and the hardest hit area probably in the world?

I have a lot of sympathy for people who have lost their job and if you were making $30,000 a year I can understand not having a nest egg. But for this guy I have no sympathy.
My first instinct is that I can get 80% of the way there with a tag in my Delicious account. The other 20% would be in a UI that was really geared towards being a home page. As a result, it'd be great if folks could try out the interface without having to sign up first. No reason you can't let people add a couple URLs to see if they like it, and only require sign up if they want to save their bookmarks beyond that browser session or access from another computer
Apple dropped ZFS from Snow Leopard before Oracle bought Sun (and the acquisition hasn't even closed yet; AFAIK companies are supposed to behave as if nothing is going to happen until the deal closes).
"The experiences I'm having with business owners in every city makes me understand some things:

....

2. Twitter is underhyped. I'm now convinced that Twitter has locked up a whole raft of businesses and that Twitter is actually worth five to 10 billion dollars.

....

Anyway, this all leads me to understand that Twitter is way underhyped and is worth more in the marketplace than anyone has estimated yet."

So the author "understands" that Twitter is underhyped because, citing item number 2, "Twitter is underhyped." What kind of silly argumentation is this?
Efforts to eliminate the penny
This really screams "start a business" at me. Sales guy, probably has a killer rolodex, enough savings to live for 2-3 years, complaints about not being able to fill his free time.
Mouse wheel / Shift+PgUp is infinitely more usable for scrollback access than Ctrl-A ESC. Ctrl-A ESC is sufficiently hard to access that it might as well not be a feature - rather than scroll up to see a command's output, I re-run it piped to less.
I remember an article about college graduates not being able to find jobs during the dot bomb era. I was one of those statistics. Fortunately things have changed. I was able to consult/contract and meet people and my career took off from there. It sucks to be marginalized, and it's reality for those who do not have the right skills and/or know the right people.

Of course the situation is different for older people. They already have experience and there is age discrimination (which does not make sense in most situations because it's not like workers will be in the same job for 10+ years).

The one thing that did not work for me was to spam resumes. Better to identify an area you want to get into and meet people.
CChronicles - Watch The History Of Computers
It does matter to a parent, because parents (and people in general) should worry about things in proportion to their likelihood to happen and their impact. But we are irrational creatures, and we don't.
doesn't seem to take into account the "ask hn" types of posts. the ones that tend to get voted up also tend to have interesting material in them, as well as a larger number of responses.
RCov 0.9.0 Released with Significant UI Improvements
good point. thanks for the hint.
Well, the term "pay off" may mean different things. It may mean "pay off" for Norway or "pay off" for the oil companies.
There's a whole generation of engineers in a similar situation. But what to do? Typically they cost more than a young buck, and their station often requires income now versus a startup windfall later. What is a creative approach for them?

My uncle is just such a hacker. Developed the Canon Cat, target disk mode on the Mac, tested nuclear weapons in Nevada when he was a kid (and god knows what else he still won't talk about). But in America where we succeed by embracing the new it is equally characteristic to leave our old champions behind.

This is worth fixing. We're forsaking the very people we hope to become.
A 1000 employee company I know almost never makes hiring mistakes and has almost no turnover. One of the first things they do in the process is on-line assessment testing through a 3rd party. It could be for a specific skill or general aptitude. Score less than the 95th percentile and they disqualify you. They pay up front to eliminate the posers so that they can focus on legitimate candidates.
Most comments are discussing the specifics of this event -- and of course Knuth's edit was problematic by a number of established WP policies.

But are there other policies which could capture this sort of primary-source contribution/correction?

Could primary sources and original researchers prove their identity/credibility and provide reliable material directly to Wikipedia?

Would such alternate policies be a good idea -- and maybe even necessary, given trends in media?

It's convenient to rely on the traditional informational middlemen -- news media and scholarly publishers -- but that world is shrinking, and lagging all the topics Wikipedia could usefully cover.
I made something like this a few years ago, although much simpler and with public links. Batch opening of links sounds like a good idea.

http://www.lkozma.net/links
Increase in wealth for whom? The upper class or the middle class or the lower class? I think qui bono is the central question in this issue. The wealthy in America benefit, but the middle and lower class does not.

Research shows, as the middle class increases in wealth, then so does the whole economy and through increasing H1B's, we are eliminating the middle class american worker to jobs overseas.
Agreed. When having interviewees code, I really don't care about the result. I care about the process. I have always learned much more about the candidate from the discussion about the exercise than from the actual result.
Aw nu, not the "anything that's true should be allowed in wikipedia" meme again. Seriously, why haven't all the people who believe this got together and started a new inclusionist encyclopaedia yet, instead of trying to force wikipedia into being something that its guidelines clearly state that it isn't?
Excellent!

Does it require use of the PLT Scheme implementation, with use of PLT's "educational" extensions to the Scheme language, or should it work as-is (with, perhaps, some obvious adjustments -- such as using display instead of print, though even that can be problematic for a beginner) with any implementation that conforms to the standard?

It kinda looks like it would require PLT Scheme specifically, judging by hints in the introductory text (such as "Everything you needed in this tutorial is provided in PLT Scheme."), but it doesn't just come out and explicitly say so.
Net2DC (http://www.net2dc.com/) focuses on non-profits, but they're affiliated with http://affinitylab.com/ which is home to several very early-stage startups.

In the past, I've also seen several Dupont-area startups hiring on Craigslist. I assume you've already looked there?

And maybe it would help to narrow your search a bit. I know there is a active Drupal development community in DC and I believe the Rails user group does meetups as well.
OMG, Twitter has to have the best fricking marketing people in the universe. Just look at the title. It's like it is expected or assumed that everyone has to be on Twitter and the fact that teenagers are not on it is some troubling problem or some curious aberation. It sounds like "why don't teens exercise."

I don't know, maybe teens don't tweet for the same reason I do not tweet. Maybe they have never actually felt the need to tweet.
What's a good hack for putting older, experienced people to work? My assumption is we're only going to be seeing more of this given demographics and changing career paths. Smells like a market opportunity.
Apple has a history of working on features and then dropping them. They had one in the works for years where your home directory would be sync'd to your iPod so you could plug into any Mac anywhere and get it all back.

It's more than likely that ZFS meant biting off more than they could chew, so they deferred it for another release.
True -- but I like the way AHWM works more than the way Compiz works, so that's not really a concern for me.
TechCrunch Japan’s Tokyo Camp: 12 Startups Demo Their Wares
True that, but the worth of printed word was varying like that for eternity. But at least there always was a score of quality publications which try to separate opinion, reporting and analytics into separate columns.
I don't have that problem. Perhaps there's something glitchy about the way rxvt-unicode works with your setup in particular -- which might be an rxvt-unicode problem, but not a problem that affects me, evidently.
Yes, and notice the first chart in his article. It has bars for Twitter, facebook, myspace and myyearbook, and surprise surprise his unknown company sports the highest bar.

Good job myyearbook! Way to get that 25% share of teenagers. So let me guess you have 4 members and one of them is a teenager. Your younger brother perhaps?
Introducing the nondenominational Laptop Burka
Wow.. it is evident that most of the commenters here do not really understand 1. The H1B process and/or 2. What the author of the techcrunch article is saying.

In a nutshell, and H1B visa is attached to a company, so if you have one, you cannot go work for another company or even start up your own.

What the author is advocating is that the president/government lift these restrictions, so that the skilled foreigners who already live in the USA can go ahead and help the economy grow.

Of course lifting the restrictions would probably mean that employers will be less willing to sponsor people for H1B visas, knowing that they can walk away anytime they please.
I like your writing style raganwald.
. . . or the Read it Later extension for Firefox.
Common sense should already suggest that trade is mutually benefical because well, I get stuff that I wanted, and you get stuff that you want. Why should trade only specifically benefit some certain classes of society?

Read the article on comparative advantage. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage

This is the reason why we specialize and trade, because everybody will be better off.
I think this is easy to explain scientifically. If one spends money on other people, those people will express genuine feelings of happiness. Seeing those facial expressions of happiness will activate 'mirror neurons' which in kind secrete dopamine. Afterward it simply becomes a feedback loop, ie: the more money you spend on people (different people), the more often you are happy.
I've had consistent issues with 3.5 crashing. I attributed it to firebug, but am not sure.
Have you seen this from TechCrunch?
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/08/i-want-to-love-firefox-...
Is this article a repeat from a few days ago, or does it just use the same clip art as the last article on the same subject? I remember vividly that awkward-looking guy, with the cheap-looking suit and tie, holding that pile of hundreds which aren't quite the right colour or texture to be real. He looks neither rich nor happy.
rvm Keeps everything separated from the system in ~/.rvm

version 0.0.25 coming out in a day or so will have support for:
* Named releases, named svn tags, svn revisions, svn head for 1.[8-9].X
* Rubinius, jRuby, REE
* Named Gem Sets (eg, being able to test different sets of gems against a single version of ruby)
* And much, much more... Hop on in #rvm for more or visit http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/ once 0.0.25 is out.
He is Michael Arrington's best buddy, so its only fitting that he sensationalize things and pull numbers out of his ass.
I'm curious whether having himself written on by the NYTimes in this way will help or hurt his chances for employment. Like you guys suggested, this guy sure is a whiner.
What does Wikipedia have to do with CS? What does Knuth's expertise in algorithms and typesetting have to do with Wikipedia?
> is there a reason to suppose that a drive with 'bad sectors coming off the line' actually has a higher expected failure rate?

If it doesn't hurt me to choose a different brand or a different model line, the more relevant question becomes "Is there sufficient reason to believe that a drive with 'bad sectors coming off the line' doesn't have a higher actual failure rate?" It's better to be safe than sorry, as they say, and my experience is that once a drive starts degrading, it keeps degrading.

The reason CPUs can often be sold at a lower capacity than originally intended without worrying about an increased likelihood of later failure is because transistors are discrete devices; if half of them fail, as long as the rest can still be accessed, you just have a CPU with the same architecture and half the transistors. On a hard drive, however, permanently hosed sectors represent actual problems on part of a single discrete device -- the hard drive platter -- and it's entirely possible that the rest of the device may be affected by this. Magnetic areas on a platter are quite so distinctly segregated as transistors on a chip.

> Marking something 'enterprise' grade is often a placebo and has more to do with service, contracts and well-marketed expectations than with actual differences in the goods involved.

True -- but when you explicitly use drives that have failed the quality control required for "enterprise" drives as your retail consumer grade drives, that kinda changes the landscape a bit.
I don't know anyone with a twitter account. When I was a teenager (2 years ago heh) all I used was msn/irc. Facebook/gmail chat seems to be a bit more popular among the kiddes these days though.
Roughly a quarter of the people aged 65+ are working full-time. So, when did 58 become "middle-aged?"
Read up on Joel Spolsky's days at Microsoft trying to build a GUI code-builder for VBScript. Ultimate fail. Too complicated for basic users, too simple for power users.
It's hard to find an exact number, but it surprises most people that Medicare has a very good overhead cost percentage - between 2% and 5%, depending on who you ask - which is miles better than any of the private sector providers. The numbers for the VA are similar. When you consider that they managed to do this without being able to use many of the cost-control tools that normal plans would be able to (like being able to use bulk to negotiate lower pharmaceutical rates), it's pretty amazing. Yes, government us usually quite inefficient - but they're got a pretty good record when it comes to health care delivery.

As for TR Reid, he knows more than most about exactly how the UK's NHS works, and how it doesn't result in everybody dying - he lived in London for several years (he was the WaPo bureau chief there), and his son (who was in my son's history class) had several serious hospitalizations.
Don't tell lies that can be falsified by looking up publicly-available data. Is this really so hard?
It's actually more like asking a candidate airplane pilot to fly in a simulator.

I'm personally a huge fan of interview questions that require candidates to do tasks that are as close as possible to what they'll actually need to do on the job.

For devs this means coding, designing etc. For testers this means creating test cases and for a UI designer it means doing UI design. If someone made me interview an accountant I'd have them do some actual case questions for accounting. I wouldn't be able to tell if they did them particularly well but that's a whole other issue and is probably why no one has asked me to interview any accountants.

Like many other folks that interview using this strategy I've come to it after seeing how many people have a great resume but are completely unable to do the actual work. This is often true even for people that pass reference checks with flying colors. After getting burned a few times you realize the benefits of getting people to demonstrate their abilities before hiring them.

The counter point to getting developers to code during an interview (and presumably to accountants doing accounting problems in an interview) usually takes a form like "I can't write code in an interview setting b/c X, Y and Z but I'm a great coder under normal conditions".

I'm sure this is true for some people and it is unfortunate that those high quality people miss out on jobs they are qualified for. It's also a loss for you as a hiring manager. But as a hiring manager you're better off with an interview process that mistakenly screens out some good people if it ensures fewer poor hires that you ultimately have to fire. A poor hire is very expensive in terms of time, team morale, money etc.
I went to school in DC for four years and moved to Manhattan with my roommate (now co-founder) to start our company. At the time, the tech scene wasn't really alive and well (this was 2006-2007), but I've seen more of my friends enter the field with more consumer-facing companies - rather than those startups that siphon into the government. It's a good time to be in DC now.

Here's some resources you want to check:

- Social Times (DC based tech blog that covered a lot of DC companies) - http://www.socialtimes.com/

- iStrategyLabs (interactive PR/ad agency; Peter holds a ton of meetups in the area and practically knows everyone; feel free to email me for an introduction) - http://www.istrategylabs.com/

- Anyvite (DC/MD social invitation/events startup; a YC company and all around cool guys) - http://anyvite.com/home
DC is a tough town for startups. You may be able to dig through In-Q-Tel's investment list for some options though:

http://www.iqt.org/technology-portfolio/index-alphabetical.h...
Pair their work ethic, real world experience, and life lessons with the passion and technical skills of a 20 something hacker.

I started my first business when I was 27. My partner was 41 and had done things I hadn't even imagined. He was so smart, so seasoned, and knew the ropes about so many things that he saved us both countless hours and dead ends. And I was able to do things he never had a chance to learn. We made a great team.

Now I'm on the other side of that relationship. And would love to do it again with someone in their 20's. I have a million ideas that come from years of real world experience and not enough time to act upon them. (One of the reasons I'm here.)
Enchance your vlc player with new skins
The Copyright Paradox
It is a common figure of speech to refer to people in their late 40s or 50s as middle-aged; common enough to be ingrained in concepts like "middle-age crisis". It is technically correct, since this age represents the midpoint of one's adult life with modern life expectancy.
"Meet Anakin Skywalker, promising pod racing whiz."
Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=773137
I'm sure jwz will be perfectly happy with the situation, since they were magnanimous enough to offer him free tickets to their event.
I'm a delicious user and used to use a tag as you describe. I almost built this on top of delicious but decided against it as I didn't want to have to add the delicious signup as a requirement and then have to explain what delicious was.

I really like the idea of being able to use it without signing up - seems obvious now you mention it! Will look to add that shortly.