skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hyperion by Dan Simmons. It starts off with separate storylines touching on all the great sci-fi clichés - time travel, FTL travel, computer nets, out-of-control AIs, lost civilisations, humanity scindered into two estranged parts, mysterious monsters, strange maladies, it has everything. Except, at first, this pastiche just feels disjointed. But then, near the end, all of this wierd stuff, that you never really understand, gets pulled together into one, cohesive whole.

Hyperion is basically just a brilliant story, very enjoyable to read.

That said, if I was to criticise Hyperion, it would be that it doesn't fulfill very well one of the important functions of science fiction - the examination of the impact of technology on society.

Which leads to my second recommendation - The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula Le Guin. Le Guin in general is excellent for examining in depth the effects that small changes in technology may have on human society - it follows naturally I guess from the fact that her father was an anthropologist...
It takes really long to make 2 millions as a regular employee, though. Even freelancing, making much more than my employed friends, it would probably take me >= 15 years to make one million EUR (bloody taxes get in the way). And that estimate is without a family. One million really is not a lot of money, if I consider having to live off savings for maybe 30 years or more, in a future time by which money will probably have been devaluated a lot, too (though now I can't imagine life without work, maybe eventually due to aging one has no other choice?).

OK, so maybe betting on a startup to succeed is a dumb plan, some hedging might be in order (occasional consulting gigs to ensure a minimum income - any other ideas?).

Btw., I wonder what is the average savings rate for employees? I am 35 now, and I recently realised that I am probably way behind on my savings compared to my peers... I think maybe to save about 10000€ per year is realistic?

Still, in my first year of work after getting my degree, according to some statistics I was already in the top 10% of earners of my country. Nevertheless I felt that without inheriting some money from parents (which I won't), I would never have been able to even afford to buy a flat. That is kind of sick, I think. Maybe life as an employee is not so easy, after all. A friend of mine is also an I worker in the top 10% range, and he said he couldn't support his family without help from his parents.
Sprint Executive Satire
Agreed, this is probably one of my favorite sci-fi novel of all time.

Excellent story, well-developed characters. I think what makes this novel so popular is because all of us can related to the main character, Ender, on some level. Highly recommended if you haven't read it. It's too bad the sequels aren't nearly as good.
Thats because there's not a good answer, there are good answers depending on what you want to do with it.

For me it comes down to; I hate putty and don't like cygwin very much. Also mac hardware is well defined. I know I'm going to be able to dual boot the centos distro we use for development, and once I've got all of the drivers figured out, I can easily get the same mac again and get that config to everyone in our company. I've bought one too many dells with the same model number and different sound, graphics, wireless hardware. My mac also sleeps when I close the lid and wakes up faster than any other computer I've ever had. This makes me happy.

Note: This is just my reason. For every other mac user you'll find a reason of their own. Some little itch that a mac just happens to scratch a little better. And yes, I find mac fanbois with bs reasons for mac superiority just as tedious as most hackers do.
Twitter Economy: The Coral Reef of Social Networking
Harvard Law offers tuition breaks for public-service minded students.
"... What's the most inspiring sci-fi book you've read? ..."

I Robot: The 3 laws of robotics, robbie, positronic brains, susan calvin. Got the lot ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Robot
Go startup if you're ambitious, you'll learn much more (more work too)

The big powerhouse will be a nice line on your resume, but most of the time, nothing more.
Ahhh takes me back to the days of Amigas and mods. The memories, the memories.
If you want to learn about technology then work at the smaller company. If you want to learn about business processes then work at the larger company. However, you'd learn more from the smaller company if it only had 7-10 people. Furthermore, you can learn about technology in your own time. Therefore, I'd recommend working in the larger company.
How Apple Got Everything Right By Doing Everything Wrong
The price of houses in the UK for one has gotten ridiculous in the last couple of years - I was lucky and got a place a few years back, but if I hadn't, I wouldn't be able to afford it now - I think its becoming more and more common. The only way around it is to:

* buy a place with one of your mates and share it
* Meet a girlfriend/wife that earns a similar amount to yourself

The important thing seems to be to get onto the property ladder as quickly as possible.

As for savings, save as much as you can afford - I probably save 10 - 15% of my salary at the moment (no family to worry about) and it leaves me with enough beer money too!
fanpop seem to have done pretty well bootstrapped - hovering around the 5000 mark on alexa..
Can't grasp credit crisis? Join the club.
"All these investments, of course, were highly risky. Higher returns almost always come with greater risk. But people — by “people,” I’m referring here to Mr. Greenspan, Mr. Bernanke, the top executives of almost every Wall Street firm and a majority of American homeowners — decided that the usual rules didn’t apply because home prices nationwide had never fallen before. Based on that idea, prices rose ever higher — so high, says Robert Barbera of ITG, an investment firm, that they were destined to fall. It was a self-defeating prophecy."
have to write quick before the link expires!

Erikson's Malazan series - excellent - in my opinion much better than Jordan's WOT.
WOT started very well but (IMO) degenerated into cloned characters with nothing ever significant happening.
Each Erikson book can more or less stand alone, however the intra and inter plots are suitably intertwined and complex.
Reapers Gale did waver a little, one or two new characters are too similar to other ones (a constant issue for me in WOT - the characters seemed so similar that i could never remember who did what)
But the characters are believable and the archae/anthrop - ology expertise of Erikson is very evident.
Patrick Rothfuss' first book, The Name of the wind, was a great start to a new series.
These two (modern fantasy) authors are the only ones i trust currently to give me a good read - in comparison to sci fi, fantasy seems (again IMO) to be in a bit of a rut.
startup (a) do, to not (ask)why (did not)!
My first company was a solo effort, and it operated profitably for 6 of its 7 years in operation. Kept me in food and houses, but I never really took vacations and never really had the chance to get caught up enough to move forward with the business. I don't recommend it, though obviously some folks manage to make it work very well.

But, we're keeping it small and growing slowly with Virtualmin, so far. We're still debating whether to accept further funding. I think we'll know in a couple of months once our new product line is released publicly.
Luboš Motl has several responses to this question on his blog:

http://motls.blogspot.com/2005/06/why-no-new-einstein.html

http://motls.blogspot.com/2005/09/why-no-new-einstein-ii.htm...

This one isn't directly addressed to the Smolin piece, but it addresses the "No New Einstein" question:

http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/09/bad-physicists-and-populis...
If you have never worked for a major corporation, I would suggest taking the job at the major corporation. You will have gained real-world experience and the drive to never work for a major corporation ever again.

I recommend working for a major corporation at the early part of your career because you will learn that inside a major corporation you are nothing but a cog in the machine. If you are happy doing that type of work then life for you is set. If you are not happy doing that type of work, then you now have the adult-equivalent of "don't touch that!" branded into your soul.

In essence, the only way to know what type of person you are, start-up or big corporation, is to test the waters at a big corporation. The other way around doesn't work in my opinion because you need a stable environment in which to formulate a decision, and a startup would simply have to many unknowns to formulate the decision properly.
OA5 Business Processes
Did you have your fingers in your ears and your eyes closed waiting for this to happen for a while now? Join the other club.
all 19 companies gave amazing presentations. I'm sure all will be spending the next few weeks talking to potential investors and figuring out how to take their businesses to the next level.

Expect to hear a lot more news about the companies from this batch - there are a lot of really amazing teams.
yep. It's tough work. I hope to expand when I get some traction.
Based on the multiple articles I have read (PG, Marc Andreessen), these are the factors I use in making a decision:

1. Personal value of a particular experience

2. Market for the product being built

3. The people at the company, ideally there are lots of smart people you can learn from

4. The product being built

5. Compensation (Salary + stock + benefits)

Personally, I would pick the startup. If all goes well, I would work a few hours through the fall and spring as well.

good luck!
Do you really think 1 million means you don't have to work any more? 1 million is 10.000 per month for less than ten years. Unless you invest them I'm not sure you can't stop working forever if you have that amount of money.
This is like saying living is dangerous because you might die.
I'm in the exact same boat as the author - I don't actively use Facebook for any of my online activity, but I depend upon the Facebook apps and so on (like the Flickr importer I wrote at http://www.feedmyface.net/) so that my less tech-savvy friends who only use Facebook are kept informed of what I'm up to
Binary calculator created from marbles and wood
Wow. Life sucks and then you die.

Now that we’ve identified the worst case scenario, let's try to improve on it.
The UK situation is extreme, particularly in London. My girlfriend and I got jobs straight out of university, and we could forget buying a place, and even renting was using up so much of our income that it was just a treadmill.

We left, basically. We've moved to Vienna (Austria) and living relatively cheaply in my late grandmother's place. I'm trying to get a startup off the ground, she's slowly figuring out what she wants to do.

And yeah, we're super-lucky to even have that opportunity.

I honestly don't know how London is staying as populous as it is. As far as I can see you're completely stuck with graduate salaries. (except in banking)
Blunders prompt more care of data
Google your way to a wacky office
Man Builds Robot to Kill Him
The dark side of Extensions
More Bloggers Raising Money. Here Come The Politics. And Here Comes My Rant.
Privacy on Facebook
I can only imagine Asimov rolling over in his grave.
Good article, Matt. Thanks. I like the way you think.

I think that part of the confusion of people when they get into the startup scene, is that they loose sight of what a successful exit does for you: solves the money problem. That's it. Nothing else. Nada.

A successful exit will not buy you love. It will not make you instantly happy. An exit will not provide you with meaning and purpose in life. It will not make you immortal. It will not fix all the other problems in your life. It solves one and only one problem: the money problem.

If you talk to people in the valley who were sudden millionaires in the first dot.com gold rush, I think that you'll find that sudden wealth brings its own set of problems which you touched on in your article. I actually remember reading a number of articles about the struggles of the nouveau-rich after their dot com went public.

These things are worth keeping in mind when you're thinking about that startup, or in dealing with relationships while you're in a startup. Be careful burning bridges with family and friends when you're working 100 hours a week with your startup. They might not be there when you find your exit.
by changing the order of the words from the title, and creating a new phrase to remind you that you should do a startup because you may regret of not doing so.

this also shows that the startup world is so fluid as much a title can be. everything has a different intepretation by different people.

a startup is a personal experience and the reasons for someone who choses not to pursue a startup should not be the excuse or affect anyone's choice to make their attempt.
How to Scale Up Quickly by Steve McConnell
Why the iPhone $99 dev program is limited
I was accepted yesterday. The agreement states the installing test software on the device will render the device unusable for normal use.
yep. that's true.
"... Should I spend my summer at a small (30 people) startup or at a reasonably big (1000 people) CS/Art company? ..."

Internship hey.

It's not real work. If you go to SoftCo it might be a chance to improve an existing product niche like Flemlord suggests. But if you try a startup (30's a lot & I'd call this big) you might just see how hard you really have to work and learn something new as well.

If it was me I'd pick the one that gives you the "best payoff" for working up-wind in the future.
If you ever write a book on popular science in that prose please let me know. I wan to buy it.
Don’t coddle the cow. Kill the cow
I think a lot of us end up hesitating to bother opening an article because so often the submitted-title is a bad attempt at humor that instead completely masks the true topic of the article. Titles like "you really want to know..." are a total waste of my time. KNOW WHAT? If the topic is interesting, I will click. If it is about something of interest only to you, don't post it with a title that forces everyone to click just to know what the subject matter even is.

That said, I always read via google reader, since the actual interface makes it impossible to say "I have seen all these, don't show me them again!".
In depth explanation why the iPhone doesn't allow background processes
This is pretty neat - love the concept. I'd take you up on the "just passing through" crash couch if you had the place in May.
Yahoo Outlines Why It's Worth More Than MSFT Is Paying
Probably anything by L Ron Hubbard. To be fair I haven't read anything by him but if his religion is anything to go by the books are probably beyond insipid.
Is it Wednesday already? Wow, the week is flying by.
Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea. Sapkowski's Wiedzmin. And Tolkien's LOTR, of course.
"The Forever War" by Joe Haldeman, among others.

The book will put the timeline of your life into context, outline your limitations, and provide a grandiose example on the importance of communication.

("Ender's Game" and "Stranger in a Stranger Land" are among my top 5, but I thought the gem described above deserves attention.)
I do. Put the million in a savings account, move to an affordable area and rent, or purchase a living space and bank the rest, then live (modestly) off the interest. Or if you can tolerate greater risk, pursue investments with higher returns, and/or expatriate yourself.

The question is, could you stop working and retain your sanity? I wonder about people who achieve success too early in life--they have many years ahead of them and much to learn, and wealth in some ways may be a hindrance.
How to think like a Pythonista
IE8 and Connection Parallelism
JavaScript metaclass programming
this brings up a point..

do we need a YC hacker housing feed? We are moving from the Midwest and are interested in meeting as many people out there as possible. I have been trying Roommates.com now for a while, but many people there are not as crazy into the start up experience as we are.

We are planing on renting a uHaul in the middle of May.
People undervalue $1 million (or similar numbers) incredibly. It doesn't mean you don't have to work, but it pays for just about all of the things you end up working the first 15 years of your life for - house, furniture, "stuff". Once you've purchased all that crap, any money you make over and above that actually seems like a lot more because it's not going toward buying couches and bedroom sets.

I made my first million when I was 22, and though it didn't keep me from working ever again, it basically paid for all of the things I needed. Anything beyond that has been incremental gains. It's a lifestyle changing amount of money.
Ender's Game:

Inspired my company: www.endergen.com. Who's goal it is make systems of play that augment intelligence as well as hopefully laterally solve world problems as you use them.

Frakenstein:

For the morality that you must take responsibility for the consequences of your inventions.

Cryptonomicon:

Inspired most of the work on endergen(See Ender's Game Above). Introduced me to the concepts of privacy/security implemented in technical form and the conflict between the two.
The whole e-mail/password account verification is a hidden cost in itself. Use openid/clickpass!
Matt Maroon : Hacker News 2008 :: Aaron Swartz : Hacker News 2007

Don't get me wrong, though -- they're both good writers, so the above isn't a swipe at either guy or Hacker News.

However: "trailer-dweller" seems a little mean-spirited (and inaccurate) when it's clear who you are referring to with that example.
Google sees surge in Web use on hot mobile phones
8 common lies told by enterprise software sales people
Taming Ruby on Rails with FiveRuns
Murderer nabbed via tracking, Web search
Increasingly I wish my friends would move to a more open service like Friendfeed that is good about playing nice with others and exporting data feeds to the outside world.

Unfortunately, Facebook is the local maxima that most of my friends are stuck at. And I neither see that changing, nor Facebook becoming more open any time soon.
"It depends."

Taking a contrarian point of view, at the major corporation you might find yourself on a smaller team not unlike a startup, with supportive management, opportunities to work on diverse projects and a clear path for career growth and advancement.

I worked at a company with several thousand employees that was much like the above. I bailed after a few months to go back to doing my own thing, but in retrospect it would have been a great company to continue working for. Several managers asked me to stay, not because I'm Mr. Wonderful but rather because they genuinely cared about keeping people on-board. One day after I left I had a voicemail from someone at the company, and I never returned the call because I figured it was some HR flack doing a survey or something. I later looked up the person's name and learned it was the Senior VP--that's how much they cared about losing an employee.

I also worked at a small startup that kept us working 7 days a week, including holidays, for several months, then made a bad deal and dumped us all.

"It depends."
We're using HtDP, not SICP. Our approach is quite different from MIT's (past and present).
SemanticHacker
Snowcrash...
This guy is childish... Why was this even posted?
That's actually quite funny. I met a prominent CS professor at a major school (think top 10) who admitted he doesn't know any programming languages (C, java, etc.).
Like Dianetics. Oh, wait, L. Ron was trying to be serious in that one.
I think in the right sort of corporate environment, a bit of initiative can give you a lot of opportunities the less-motivated might not have (or want). You also can learn how to work in a team, and probably have better hours than your startup counterparts, giving you more time to work on outside projects--such as your own startup--or in general to just have a life, meet people and pursue hobbies.

I like having some distance between me and management when I'm working as an employee, because then it doesn't grate on my nerves that I'm not working on my own startup while watching someone else run theirs, with the knowledge that they're using me to make their own dreams come true. I'd rather not see that, and in a large organization you don't have to because they're somewhere else, in a different building perhaps, or political appointees, for example.
Not exactly: if you go over the speed limit, you are definitely increasing the risk of an accident (people still do, and accidents happen, but that's beside the point).

But did SOX show any red flags for Bear? None that I'm aware of.

If SOX was working according to how its authors intended, we would have seen the warning signs much earlier.

As it exists now in practice, SOX is just a paperwork albatross.
I would have entitled this article, "Don't Let This Happen to You, Now Get Back to Work."
This is a fantastic idea. I'm going to be in Seattle this Summer and am hoping to drive down to the Bay Area for a weekend. I'll send out an email if it all pans out.
We're not buying Apple's new unlimited music plan
Look at all these robots that make up larger robots

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Simple_machines
There is one - J. Craig Venter. I know he's not a physicist but I think the comparison is valid.
Free Windows for Supercomputers from Microsoft
Apple patent would allow iPhone clamshell
Google Code University
"It’s pretty crappy trying to get your data in or out of Facebook"

http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/API

But judging by the tone (and general ignorance) of the article, the author is not a developer.
I don't think you could have a legitimate hacker frat without π.
This is ridiculous. For the vast majority of users Facebook has been a resounding success. It may 'fail' some people but there is a reason why it has tens of millions of active users. You can't please all the people all the time and nor should you try.
and the man attached the machine to a .22 semi-automatic pistol loaded with four bullets.

.22 LR? He might wake up in the driveway quite disappointed.
Lovd by Less - Open source social network based on RoR
I'm not related to these guys, but seems to be a great opensource effort based on RoR.
I agree it's somewhat of a gamble, but it is an easily underestimated round. There's a ton of murders with .22LR every year.
Should Mac Users Run Antivirus Software?
When you have a leader like Steve Jobs, who understands the business on such a fundamental level, you can afford to be a bit heavy handed to make that leader's vision a reality.

Problem is, there is only one Steve Jobs and vanishingly few who come close.

I think most companies would do well to avoid Apple's tactics.
Heh - so that's why I slapped an Apple sticker on my company's standard-issue dell PC. :)
If Apple's DNA is their people, then Steve Jobs is the Creator
Has anyone read The Fourth Turning? What's your take?
My understanding is to apply for YC you need one or two strong co-founders. Remember, most VCs hire a key team and are not solely sold on the business idea
My Dell logo is hiding behind an In-n-Out Burger sticker.
Why has Bear Stearns's stock been rallying?
The brain is more resilient than people realize:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/3685791.stm

(I couldn't find a picture of the guy who shot 12 nails into his head deliberately, but he survived http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2002945554_w...)

Suicide is a bad enough idea by itself, but the possibility of turning into James Brady is very high when not doing it right. I mean, if you're dead, why spare expense? Get a 45 ACP minimum.