skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Free 10-day Buddhist meditation retreats, incl. room & board, at one of the many Vipassana Meditation Centers world-wide (http://www.dhamma.org). Very old-school; the real deal.

The Goal, by Eliyahu Goldratt (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0884270610). Most real-world systems have a single constraint that limit the system's ability to achieve goal units. The best way to improve the system is to (0) define the system's owners and their goal for the system, (1) identify the constraint (2) improve the situation at the constraint in a way that does not require significant investment; (3) if the improvement resulting from the previous is not sufficient, decide how to improve the constraint in a way that does require significant investment; (4) subordinate everything else in the system to the decision arrived at in the previous step; (5) start over at step 1.

The Game, by Neil Strauss (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060554738)
When I was a kid, the documentary series Connections. It was the
first time I'd ever seen someone follow vectors through history
instead of recounting it one period at a time, like most books and
classes do.

Discovering Lisp was a big one. This was in 1983, when the default
programming language was Pascal. Lisp seemed (and in retrospect
was) startlingly better. There was no one single book or quotation,
but I remember how excited I was to get my hands on a photocopy
of the InterLisp manual.

Kenneth Clark's documentary series Civilisation (and the accompanying
book) impressed me a lot. In fact, it was clearly the model for
Connections. I've never read anything else better about art. His ideas
are extremely subversive, but few get it because he usually speaks
in code. And he
had access to stuff like no one else ever will again.

I also learned a lot from his book The Nude.

One of the biggest influences on my ideas about startups was an
essay by TJ Rogers, the CEO of Cypress Semiconductor. I don't
remember the title, but it cut through the usual corporate bullshit
like a knife. For me the important thing was not just what he said,
but that one could even be that candid.

Of all the books I've read in the last 5 years or so, Hardy's A
Mathematician's Apology is probably the one that stuck most in my
head.
Anything by Heinlein - "Starship Troopers" especially
Ayn Rand - "Atlas Shrugged"
While you're not monetizing things, you might as well create a new Web server OS where it's actually easy to install applications.
Hack a meal in 10 minutes or less. No ramen allowed
what is your best Hacked meal in 10 minutes or less. No ramen allowed
It wasn't working for my first few searches, but I tried "Cybershot" and got some results, I could see how this would be useful in looking for reviews.

I'm not sure what to say about the use of a cartoon dog in a search tool, however...
An open-source (hardware) synthesizer.
I would open a scuba club.
They (Intel and AMD) keep saying that. If there's an elite few, it's because there are damn few jobs that require that as a primary skill. Other skills are more important as primary skills and if you have those you don't need threading skills. You'd be better off investing in those other skills.
Whew! Brilliant article. I've been having a lot of conversations about this lately. I'm a freelancer. I became one because I wanted to get out of the cubicle. Now I'm doing all sorts of stuff. I'm working on amazing projects, things I never planned on (or could even conceive of.)

The hard part is that I'm working a ton. But I love it! I'm happier than I've ever been. I feel stronger. I feel like I can do anything--and I will, without hesitation. I am worried about the future at times. But I guess that comes with being in the wild, like the lions you're talking about. Great analogy! That really pumps me up.
I'm not sure if "The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit" changed my life, but it reassured me I was on the right track in starting a business. It reads very well today and I'd recommend it to any professional.

I was particularly struck by this quote:

"I really don't know what I was looking for when I got back from the war, but it seemed as though all I could see was a lot of bright young men in grey flannel suits rushing around New York in a frantic parade to nowhere. They seemed to me to be pursuing neither ideals nor happiness -- they were pursuing a routine. For a long while I thought I was on the side lines watching the parade, and it was quite a shock to glance down and see that I too was wearing a grey flannel suit."
Well, back in the days of the dot-com craze the biggest idiots were indeed successful. For a while, at least.
paintings and songs.
We (over here at snaptalent) just put up joinstartups.com We'll keep this up to date with all the startup jobs (and only the startup jobs) from our network
Wasn't Oracle funded during a recession too?
We don't have any UK jobs at the moment so for now we've made our ads magically disappear when hit from any non-US IP addresses, we'll be out there soon though :)
If what you make on your own time is related to the business your company is in, then there's a good chance they can lay claim to your idea. So if you're working for UPS and have an idea for a revolutionary package tracking system, you probably wouldn't get to keep it.
How about a Zork style room-model file system?

You are in Foocorp documents. East is Bloggins&Smith, south is Vexcorp.

You can see Foocorp.xls

Bob is here. Jane is here.

Bob says "Jim, can we go over the numbers for Foo?"

> Use Foocorp.xls with Excel

(Excel starting...)
steak and potatoes

ny strip (bout half an inch thick)
Salt, pepper, garlic, shallots, butter
potatoes (cut into chunks)

turn broiler to highest setting. put all ingredients in a ziplock bag and shake, then put onto the broiler plate and broil. 8 mins late you have medium steak and potatoes!
A lawyer named Warren Brown decided he had more fun baking cakes than practicing law, so in 2002 he did just that: http://cakelove.com/about_story.php

It looks like he's up to 4 bakeries (soon 5), a cafe, a book, and a TV show.
so did Mike find out about this via HN?
an ice-cream shop would be neat too
Cross Browser Testing. Pick a browser, Pick an OS, Test website
Web 2.0, Meet JavaScript 2.0
I'm still on an H1-B work visa for 3 years. They said they will consider it once my term is nearing its end.
Crockford: The World's Most Popular Programming Language Has Fashion and Luck to Thank
Researchers claim to have developed robotic AI on par with a puppy
10 tools for Modern PHP Development
I'm sure...
You make an interesting point, but I'm not convinced that the ends justify the means. Just because Safari is better than IE does not mean it is okay to push it on people - especially when most of the people are using iTunes only because they have an iPod and Apple pushed iTunes on them. (This is just an observation. I have absolutely no real evidence to back up this claim.)

I do tend to be an idealist though, and I think that everyone needs to take the high ground when pushing for change.
If you boil salt water the steam won't have salt in it, will it?
User Interface Design Patterns
Sure. Email's in the profile. I'm here all night.
That would be pretty easy to monetize ;)
The half dozen or so books about Richard Feynman life and approach to problems.

(somewhat cliched but) Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

GEB.
"Don't believe everything you read in the NYT."

Don't even get me started on the NYT. Every time they mention the illegal wiretapping they still describe it as starting after 9/11, even though their own reporting shows this to be false. The whole paper is bullshit propaganda.
I love the first one especially. I've come to totally love interviews. It's so fun to learn about new companies from the inside. I go into every interview with a big smile on my face like I'm about to unwrap a Christmas present.

On #4, napa cabbage is good too.
Video: A Look Inside TechStars
Why Rails Will Not Reign Supreme (and why you shouldn't want it to)
OTOH, many users have been burned by things that could easily be fixed... but never were.
Your mileage for responses will be higher if you post in an immigration forum/newsgroup.
Data, not programs, is the only thing that matters — applications are transient
That's the worst idea I've ever heard in my life, Tom.
This is probably true,but if you are a server side programmer, then its useful to keep in mind that programming for multiple processors will be a necessary skill to know in the future and learn whatever little's possible.
You raise a good point, but O(1) is a much better punch line.
I only read non-fiction that's counterintuitive. I figure, hey, I'm pretty smart, so if it's intuitive then I can probably figure it out on my own. A list of stuff I cite most often:

No Contest & Punished by Rewards by Alfie Kohn

Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton

PG's essays & ITConversations interviews

The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto

The Singularity is Near by Kurzweil

This graph: http://alexkrupp.com/picture_library/plot.jpg

Dee Hock's essay on leadership

A handful of blog posts by Mark Cuban

All Marketers are Liars & Free Prize Inside by Seth Godin. All of the books that Seth recommends are also worth reading.

Bruce Schneier's interview on ITConversations

Magic Ink, an essay by Bret Victor

War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges

The Cluetrain Manifesto (the book)

I'm sure there's a lot more, but that's what comes to mind right now.
I'd go to school and take all sorts of different classes on all sorts of different topics. I'd love to go to school for the rest of my life.
It's called Debian. ;-)
Read the Wall Street Journal for free
:the_dip => 'by Seth Godin',
:essays => 'by Paul Graham',
:art_of_the_start => 'by Guy Kawasaki',
:the_innovators_solution => 'by Clayton Christensen & Michael Raynor',
:rich_dad_poor_dad => 'by Robert Kiyosaki',
:seven_habits_of_highly_effective_people => 'by Stephen Covey',
:stanford_technology_ventures_program => 'by Reid Hoffman (i.e., the session he did for STVP)'
I happen to like both ideas. I was big into P2P systems when I got my first programming job - this was right after Napster and Gnutella came out. Then I did a lot of research into programming language design in college.

There's some synergy in that every programming language needs some system to script if it wants to gain massive adoption, so you might as well use the programming language you just invented to write the cool app you're about to invent. Plus, there're some really interesting possibilities if you could replace all these social networking websites with a gigantic distributed P2P network. Social software partitions very well - even if a particular service has millions of users, it's unlikely that any given user exchanges data with more than about 150 other users. You'd eliminate the need for Facebook, at the least, and probably the need for most web startups.
I've got a couple friends that've tried that. It's apparently not all it's cracked up to be. It's great when you launch, but then you have these multiple users all asking you for support...
Good lawyers help.

What also matters is what group are you fitting into. Having a diploma which is evaluated to Master Degree of American university speeds up a process significantly. Process with Bachelor Degree is pretty slow. There is also an extra quota for those who have American education. And the process is much faster for those ones.

My EBGC process took about 20 months for the whole family. It could be faster, but I had to reschedule fingerprint exams for 2 or 3 months, being out of the country. My lawyers were pretty expensive, but they are much worth it. :) I have MS of CS from foreign university. It was evaluated to the Master Degree. I also have a bunch of certificates, but I don't think they play any difference.

Originally coming on H1B for two years and H2 for the rest of the family, I didn't have to prolong it and I also didn't use advance parole and work authorization (although, my lawyers made them for me).

I'm working for a pretty small company (less then 20 employees). My original position was not anything special, a regular IT fit, so I don't think it matters.

I have spent a lot of time learning the whole process and one of the most important concerns is the lawyers. They can help or they can kill.

Feel free to drop me a message to w at qwe3 dot com if you have any more questions.

P.S. I have a friend in SF waiting for his EBGC for almost 6 years now. Nothing, yet.
I love it when people vote small, well-meant comments like this down. Thx man.
"There is only one success, to be able to live your life in your own way." --Christopher Morley

I don't understand what someone will do with their billions if it's not work with the people you enjoy working with solving problems for other people.

"Little do ye know your own blessedness; for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour." Robert Louis Stevenson
Can you give examples of impractical things they do? (Or practical things they don't do).
That is a cool idea. I just finished a class this quarter on distributed systems, which I really liked. I'd be interested in hearing your ideas about P2P. Things like epidemic protocols and chord are pretty clever.
a candy store! with all kinds of crazy inventive candy! With a big gingerbread house just for you:)
Hey wait, but ideas are worth nothing! :)
Actually that's not how I meant it. Regardless of who is working on it, it shouldn't stop you from working on it yourself and doing it better.
I consider you're talking about your employers, aren't you? As far as I know H1B can be extended to 5 years at max (2+2+1), so you should better hurry up. Propose them to share the costs of legal process if it will make them move up. I doubt you will have fun extending your advance parole and work authorization every year while waiting for your EBGC.

Keep in mind that there are some restrictions on owning the company which brought you on H1B and which sponsored EBGC for you. If your lawyer doesn't know anything about that, fire him and find another one.
Well anyway you still can play GC lottery. If there is a chance, why not trying it? ;) My brother was one among hundred of thousands who's used that chance.
They aren't public servants or politicians, who cares about image.
fyi: the save is redundant. update_attributes saves the record for you.
And that's why you stuck "do it right" on at the end, eh?
Gaining global adoption is NOT about just translating some stuff. That's probably a very distant third in what matters for global adoption.
Selfish play doesn't pay in the big economic game
For me, it's mainly been people and their lives. The ideas and such flow from that.

This is an undergrad teacher who has had the most influence on me:
http://www.scriptoriumdaily.com/author/john-mark-reynolds/
Though I found monkeypatching liberating like everyone else, it has me worried, because there's no detailing of an interface between different modules that get included or monkey patched. It all comes with an assumption.

It takes a clear and simple architecture and some discipline to make sure your code doesn't all go to hell when you place monkey patch on top of monkey patch.
The options are endless... My wife and I both work, I do 99% of the cooking, often late at night with a less-than-stocked selection of ingredients.

A couple of ideas... soak a cedar plank for 3 minutes. Heat on grill on one side for 2 minutes, flip over and pour a good amount of rum on the now warmed side, salmon fillet on top of that, more rum on the salmon, season to taste. Cook for another 5-6 minutes. Grill some asparagus alongside the salmon directly on the grill, seasoned with oil and balsamic vinegar.

Thin porks chops cook quickly, and can be flavored with a mixture of apple cider vinegar, sugar and peppercorns for a sweet/peppery sauce. Cook the sauce along with the 'chops.

Chop up some raw chicken breasts and saute light butter. Cook batch of egg noodles at the same time, and heat some french-cut green beans in the micro. Make a sauce of sourcream, onion soup mix and herbs. Once the chicken and noodles are done, combine all the ingredients as an impromptu casserole. If you're not limited to 10 minutes, add some bread crumbs on top and bake in the oven for a bit to heat everything all the way through and let the flavors combine.
Take a daily multivitamin. It really helps. You get sick much less often, and when you do it's much less debilitating.
I hope they're not spending their time bickering, and just more time making things work better.
It wasn't meant to pander anybody - it was merely stating an opinion...
I'm skeptical about the standard take on financial freedom. I think that a normal programmer can save enough in 5 years to live overseas off the interest with a comfortable standard of living. So, financial freedom isn't some high and lofty goal for the driven and privileged, but something we all can have fairly easily and dependably.

Things like startups should only be done because they are exciting and fun. Not out of some desperate drive for money.
"What does not break you, makes you stronger".

Helps to get through times when things are completely sour.
If 10 minutes is prep time, you can do a whole lot with a crock pot. I also like rice alot, so I include a rice cooker. But, prep only takes 5 minutes, if that. Throw the meat, sauce, and veggies into the crock pot, and rice into the cooker. A couple hours later when I get back home, I have a delicious, warm meal waiting.
Yeah, I was really interested in Chord and Kademlia while I was looking at this stuff. You know that rtm, one of Chord's principle researchers, is a founder of YCombinator, right?

One other thing I really wanted to investigate: using statistical uptime records to distribute data across peers and get high-availability. One problem with P2P networks is that infrequently-accessed material tends to become unavailable - this is even an explicit design goal of FreeNet. It's fine when you're downloading the latest TV show, but it's a real problem if you want to distribute micro-social-network-apps over P2P. Yet most people keep their computers on at fairly predictable times of the day. So you could use that statistical uptime data, from their peers, to figure out where to spread data to make sure that at least one copy is always online at all times.

Then you could merge that with access-logs so that data that's frequently accessed migrates to computers near the ones that want to access it. Sorta like a P2P-Akamai. I've noticed that my flists on FaceBook and LiveJournal are very cliquey, and it's always the same folks posting. It's not outside the realm of computational feasibility to connect together your computer with all your friends' computers, P2P, and only push updates to people who are interested in them.
I won't cook if it takes more than 10 minutes so this will be great for me :) Anyway, my current favorite is..

Ingredients: 1) 1/2 jar of sweet and sour cooking sauce that has vegetables in it (Uncle Ben's!) 2) Packet of microwaveable whole-grain rice (the healthy stuff!)

Directions: 1. Microwave the rice for 90 seconds. 2. Put the sauce and vegetables into a bowl and microwave for 90 seconds. 3. Blend the rice into the hot sauce / vegetables.

This is what I eat for dinner every day my girlfriend isn't working the evening shift. Takes 3 minutes. This can also be varied by using frozen vegetables which you defrost first with the microwave on Low for 5 - 10 minutes. You can then blend in tomato ketchup, pickle, onions, and all sorts of stuff to just get a rice + lotsa goodies type meal.
This is where being a YC company is invaluable:

1. PG said he would contact the NYT journalist personally; he probably did the same with TechCrunch.

2. Even without Mr. Graham making calls on their behalf, how seriously would Kirkland's claims be taken without the YC pedigree?
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

But not for the standard reasons of food safety or socialism

To get a real taste of how regular people lived and struggled back then. That was the life my great-grandparents and grandparents escaped so that I could have a real life.

So whenever I "think" things are tough, I just slow down and imagine that it's Packingtown, Chicago in 1906. Things suddenly seem a whole lot brighter now.

Here and now is a special time and place. Let's not any one of us squandor it.
Upvotes should save comments too, in a separate section.
Inquisitor for Firefox. But I do not know much XUL. So please... anyone. Do you want a great idea? Here it is.
Having the best product does not guarantee success. Not even close.

As you can see here, nothing beats out some well-placed PR (at least in the short-term).
War of the Worlds
The story behind Dean Kamen's combustive meeting with Steve Jobs
Ohh... I would add another signal to traffic lights (think a blinking light of some sort) to signal that an ambulance is coming in from behind, and that you need to get out of the way. Combined with adequate intersection routing (block perpendicular direction, clear upcoming road as mentioned) and an expert AI to plan the path to clear, it would speed up emergency responders. What do you think?
pg says NYT was "pwned." http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=142524
Ah, good point. On another note, people who vote on HN are the smartest people in the world. That's my opinion.
And releasing early.
That future remains elusively out of reach. I've been doing multi-threaded programming for over two decades and lock-free algorithms nearly as long and it's just as marginal now as it was then.
Read The Djinn's Wife (http://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0704/thedjinnswife.shtml).

If you lack motivation to work on advanced software, this should put you right back on track. It is... Asimovesquely inspiring.
Read Salon for free: http://www.salon.com/news/cookie756.html
has anyone read The Demolished Man? :)
Don't get me started on pie charts!

http://blog.rescuetime.com/2008/01/11/no-pie-charts-not-ever...
Hackers and Painters, especially How to Make Wealth. I grew up overseas, and really didn't have a decent grasp of how the whole money thing worked until I started reading up on economics and money. How to Make Wealth really crystalized a lot for me.
You do realize that we have no way of accurately defining nor measuring Intelligence.

IQ tests are nothing short of an ego booster and have been shown time and time again to be inaccurately ways of measuring intelligence.

http://www.audiblox2000.com/dyslexia_dyslexic/dyslexia014.ht...
Looks cool. Keep doing it for fun :)
My wife's took 5 months, but then she married a local. :) But before that was a three-year tragicomedy with all the problems you bring up, plus another nasty one: the "visa discount". Large employers love to cut your salary by 15-20% if they can get away with it. What are you going to do? Quit?
The question every investor would like asked is how to distinguish good startups from bad. I think most collect hueristics applied to a few numbers and gut feelings.

Founders seem to not get along? Seem not passionate enough? Market too small? Market too hard to win? Not builders?

All lame.

Persistence, vision, and flexibility are things I've repeatedly heard help predict winners.
yeah but by then the Singularity will already have happened so who cares
Experimental Games being given away free with t-shirts at Target