skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I came to a similar conclusion as you have about seven months ago. My conclusion was that 9-to-5 takes far too much time and energy out of my own life; I'm essentially giving all of that time to someone just for the ability to pay bills and enjoy eating out on the weekends.

I had very little time to do any of my personal self education or projects (not all of them are programming related either).

I chose to resign from a great company and a great job to pursue my own interests. I've been pinching pennies everyday for the last seven months living off of what passive income I have. I've been (with more-or-less consistency) rising at 6AM every day, showering then meditating and running a spaced repetition program for thirty minutes. Three days are dedicated to projects and two days dedicated to self education.

When I speak of self education I am not speaking exclusively of programming which seems to be the common interpretation amongst techies - it's a full fledged curriculum involving Mathematics, Logic, Rhetoric, Psychology, Physics, Philosophy, and etc...

I've completed two major projects in that time and actually read more books in the last seven months than I ever did in the three years I spent in the work force. 9-to-5 is quite a sham, unless you happen to have a job working in the R&D department of some corporation where you have the opportunity to explore, learn, and be creative that the other cubicle workers do not share.

After seven months though, I'm a bit weary of pinching pennies - I want to be able to eat out at a nice restaurant when I want to or buy that new computer because I want to; or go sailing for the weekend with my girlfriend and friends. Many things require money. My solution here? No job, but contract work - I now have a two month contract that will make me enough money to live for another seven months. I've also considered going into part time contracting so that I can continue to make money but also have enough time to pursue my polymath interests.

Good luck, leaving the group mind is worth the risk (it really turns out there isn't much risk) - you will feel much more free with your intellectual pursuits, projects, and personal development.
Great column. It's so good I expect a million frantic rebuttals from Americans who don't like the truth well told.
Fake it till you make it!
It's easier to make someone talk than to plant an agent; you would need to match the right person with the right position, at the right time. Too many moving parts. It's just easier to show up at the right person's door on the first day of their vacation and flip them.
Your comment reminds me of the experience Leslie Lamport performed : checking the ten first quick sort algorithms found with a search engine and how half of them were wrong.
Guided tour didn't work for me. It loaded but never started playing. I didn't immediately notice any other way to find out what exactly the site is or does. Clicking the links in the bottom columns just took me to other sites.
Whatever you do, remember about this rule: Capitalism separates fool from his money. Aka: invest only in things you understand (Warren Buffet's motto).
Invest the money into the business before paying the taxes. It'll seem a little more ;)
I have seen this work and work well on a large website that was simultaneously releasing in something like 20 different languages.

However that company was not in the USA. And I see no way to square that development philosophy with Sarbanes-Oxley, so publicly traded companies in the USA cannot do it.

But for an interesting example of a large well-known open source project with something like that development philosophy, check out http://clang.llvm.org/. The strategy scales better than you'd expect!
The Difference Between Google and Apple
Revision3 Offers Conan A Job
Another Big Ouch for Microsoft IE
I want to somehow use the money to make more money quickly (within a 2 year time span).

As others have pointed out the best asset you have is your ability to crank out mobile apps that people are willing to pay for. Not to burst your bubble, but even $24k a month is nowhere near enough for you to kick back and watch the returns flow in. The investment opportunity you seek--short term, high return, low risk--simply does not exist. If anyone attempts to convince you otherwise, reach for your wallet, because you are being had.
I disagree. Investing in the stock market is far from safe. Not even an index fund over a 30-year period; we don't know what will happen in the next 30 years.
Crowdsourcing the World's Landmarks
Mozilla release Firefox 3.6 Release Candidate 2
He's confusing clicks with visits, which is probably the largest source of his discrepancy. In a nutshell clicks are a count of times a browser requests a page while visits are unique browser sessions: http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?...
I use Decibel Audio Player (http://decibel.silent-blade.org/). All it does is play music, and it does that pretty well.

If you're looking for a simple GUI audio player, I recommend it, although I'm not really sure how closely it follows this philosophy.
1) I'd set aside enough money to live for a year in something that's boring, low-return and dead safe. And I wouldn't touch it. This will give you enormous flexibility when deciding what to do with your life and career.

2) I'd talk to financial professionals to figure out how to structure things for maximum gain (e.g. what can you legally write off? can you create retirement programs for yourself? etc.)

3) I'd take classes in my areas of weakness, so I'm better prepared for the Next Big Thing.
Newton and the apple -- the real story
krmmalik: If you want to see a huge collection of seriously impressive breakfasts, check out this thread on the egullet forum: http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?/topic/53260-breakfast-t...

Probably best to start from the end and move backwards as many of the earlier posts are missing photos. Maybe this will give you some inspiration for other things to make.
You have to keep clicking the forward button. I figured it out, but it is confusing.
I think just by convention, more sites have the logo on the left. Also, if you think of the three bars as physical objects, it sort of feels like the bars will topple over in 28. It kind of reminds me of the stack overflow logo a bit. Although, I guess you should consider the entries independently, I also like the designer of 89's work a little better.
I think the problem with having people admit that it doesn't make sense to run the IT department as a business is that it flies in the face of capitalist ideology.

If a corporation can better succeed by having everyone work "as a team" instead of as businesses buying and selling services, maybe society can, too? But wait, doesn't that sound like "socialism"? ;-)
My solution is to make my first project in a language too complicated to be able to search around and find code snippets to incorporate. That's not to say I don't spend a ton of time searching around for tutorials or things like that, it's just that most of the things I find are at best tangentially related to what I'm doing, and just copy/pasting isn't enough to actually help me: I need to adapt what I find.

When I do this, I find I get a better understanding of things faster and also retain it for a lot longer.
or you can take a algorithm class and become one within 2 years, as somebody once stated ;)
Ask HN: Review our Business TV Startup
Hey All,

Would love to get your feedback on a site I am working on at the moment. We just launched today so expect it to have a few bugs that need ironed out still.

Thoughts on branding/UI/Site content etc very much appreicated - either positive or negative. Will take them onboard/review and implement.

(Note: smart phone goodness a couple of weeks away)
"You can talk about Twitter.com and then you can talk about the Twitter ecosystem. One is a web site. The other is a fundamental part of the Internet infrastructure." ...which is owned by a single company. The bigger twitter becomes, the more this worries me.
It doesn't have to be safe. It just has to be safer.

You wouldn't tell this guy to learn to day trade or go into real estate. He's not going to buy savings bonds or open a money market account. He's not going to put it all down on gold.

So what is he going to do with his money?
Probably due to the typical HN reader's belief that anything is possible.
Limited liability is a very good reason to incorporate, even if it costs you a bit!

Luckily for the OP he is likely in a relatively safe position. If his app store money fails, he likely has the talent to quickly jump into a development job somewhere else, and not have any capital tied up. So long as he keeps well away from debt, incorporation isn't a big deal. However, as he stated he wants to make more, which tends to incur risk-taking, which limited liability is ideal for.

I've seen several horror stories of genuine hard-working people lose almost everything because they were fully liable. Yet I've seen some very lazy, non-talented people lose virtually nothing because they incorporated. I know of one guy who lost hundreds of thousands, and still managed to retain control of his business after the banks stepped in. They now own ~40% of his company, but he's still earning the same wage.
This was the first thing I noticed, too. I'd recommend having a 'sign up' link at the top right where the 'sign in' link is--that's where people expect it to be, and that's where they'll look for it.
Expand, grow, conquer.

- Hire a few contractors to grow your stable of apps. You seem to know what works. Expand on what you're doing so you can do more of the same.

- Build your brand, that way you can use the market you've built to transfer interest from one app to other apps, (as you've been doing on line with your excellent blog posts).

- Figure out a way to diversify your revenue stream. You're already concerned about the app store closing or changing. Hire someone to port the apps to Android. I think that's a long term play, but if Android takes off, I think there's a large upside potential.
Hey All,

Would love to get your feedback on a site I am working on at the moment. We just launched today so expect it to have a few bugs that need ironed out still.

Thoughts on branding/UI/Site content etc very much appreicated - either positive or negative. Will take them onboard/review and implement.

(Note: smart phone goodness a couple of weeks away)
Apple Jan 27th "Come see our latest creation"
Like others mentioned, keep in mind you owe about 45% taxes. 30% ish for actual taxes then 15% for self-employment tax. SO that 24K is really about 14K.

Also keep in mind that was during the holidays it seems or maybe after a few game launches that did well. You won't see the same level of revenue steadily unless you keep releasing and have good pricing strategies.

My advice, save it up or use it to reinvest in your own company for now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accredited_investor
What makes a good security policy
In the SuS description of poll(), it says that POLLOUT means "Normal data may be written without blocking." However it does not say how much data. It is unexpected that a write() call would block instead of returning a short count; for example, if you feed it a 2G buffer, it could return 4096 indicating that only 4k of the 2G was actually written.
Yes. Just make sure you also publish on your blog or so the stuff you send out in emails. That helps build a reputation, in case you need to resort to writing a book or giving talks (or doing some other corporate training as a consultant) later.

You might also use some of your money to pay another guy to polish your writing. Or to compile it into a book.
Most of my pc exploits involved searching for days to find just the right place to set 1 equal to 1, doing it and declaring victory.

I spent a huge amount of time on my Amiga tweaking disk copy algos to foil those rotten floppies that had tiny holes physically burned or punched into the medium. After you got the damn thing to copy, then you had to hunt through the executable to find out what behavior the program expected from the disk drive when it encountered the hole and put in a jump to skip this.

I remember my 13 year old self exclaiming "they use the drive error as the key?! That's just diabolical!"
It doesn't seem to. EDIT: Apparently it has a separate command-line interface (which isn't mentioned on the page). It just looked like YA GNOME media player.

One quick test is if you can see another program using it directly. The reason Unix programs typically have such an austere interface is because it makes it easier to use them from another program (which may be a nice interface).

There seem to be parallel ideas in RESTful web design.
Tried, does not work. Chinese market in the app store is small.
Tell HN: PG is speaking at Twiistup in LA
Lessons Learned as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence
It's a good start, but it feels like it's a bunch of unconnected ideas at this point. I think you need some better copy, but you also need to refine your layout.

Overall, it feels too busy. Items are shunted together in a confusing way, and they don't feel like they related to each other. Look at sites like http://www.pixelmator.com/ and http://feedafever.com/ -- their sites are brilliantly executed.

Focus on what you want your site to do:
1. Explain what you're offering
2. Convince people that they need it (especially as opposed to other, similar, services)
3. Make it easy to sign up and use

As it stands now, I feel like you have the rough beginnings of this, but it's not a finished, polished version.

More technically, here's what I recommend. First, you need to snap things down to a grid. This will make the page flow and FEEL better overall, and allow you to control how the user views it.

Second, you need to make everything more cohesive. It looks like you have seven different fonts now (the "favilous" name, "Bookmark Tools," the default body text, the sign-in button, the rotating text in the main box, the navigation links, and the "Follow Us" link), and a huge amount of colors. You should come up with a simple color scheme of maybe three main colors and a few shades of each, and cut the number of fonts you're using down to one or two. Yes, one or two -- the Fever page uses just one.

There seems to be a lot of empty space. Not white space, which a good design needs, but EMPTY space. Your main box looks like it's three times as big as it needs to be for the content it holds. Fix that, because it distracts the eye and looks unprofessional.

I would also recommend a color scheme that's black-on-white, instead of white-on-black you have now. It's much harder to read white text on a black background, especially for long periods of time, and since you're expecting people to be reading and browsing, you should probably focus on making it easy to read.

Finally, there are some instances on your site where you have an extra space before the punctuation ends. This looks unprofessional, and to grammar-obsessed reader, it's distracting.
I know you said 'no stock market' but it really could be a great move for you. I perfer stocks that pay a dividend because even if the market moves downward you're still throwing off cash every quarter. AT&T pays a nice dividend, so do Verizon and DT because of their long term phone contracts. Other good choices are Kraft and Johnson & Johnson, these are consumer staples that aren't going anywhere and that will pay you to own their stock whether it goes up or down in price.

It's not a '2 year high return' but like some of the other commenters have said, you're not going to find that.

Congrats on the app store success, I'd love to pick your brain. I'm currently working on some games for the app store , what type of apps have your written?
Product management (at least where I am) also does a fair bit of marketing work. They tend to shape the overall product, but all technical decisions are made by engineering, not marketing.
Schools should not "teach the controversy".  But why does Google get a pass?
Collide this story with Clay Shirky's piece, on hacker news two days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1056689

What flies out of the wreckage is the idea that it is not really about, in Clay Shirky's words, "Not enough women are arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks." The issue is actually how to triumph over imposter syndrome. Men are doing it by "cheating" and claiming to be able to do things that they actually can do even thought they think they cannot and are merely imposters. Women are failing to triumph over imposter syndrome.
Remember, that's not inflation adjusted. It's a common banking advice though. (Not a stupid one).

As for your problem, do what most people say here: invest in the best asset you know: your business model. If you are very lazy, then just simply figure out how to let someone else do the work.

And I wonder if you meant that question seriously? The wording sounds awfully naive.
The Smartest Unknown Indian Entrepreneur (2008)
so tricks taught at used car dealerships are the height of sales? I don't doubt you'd learn a lot, but if that's the best you can do, sales might deserve its reputation.
Freakonomics: The Price of Impatience
I have to think that if this guy's crimes were online/Internet/computer related he'd have quite a booming consulting business waiting for him each and every time he made it out of prison.

Of course, he'd probably still not be happy with that, and would do something dumb to send him back to prison where he's apparently happiest.
How to reverse a linked list in C is not hacker _news_.

Additionally, sites like these are a disease. At work, I overheard a phone screen in which the interviewer asked the question, "you have a collection of numbers, all of which appear twice, except one number which appears a single time. How do you find the number?" The person being interviewed gave the "clever" answer (xor all numbers together, result is your answer) within seconds. The interviewer said, "that's nice, but not what I'm going for. What if it's a collection of strings?" She couldn't do it.
I use http://github.com/jamis/fuzzyfinder_textmate which is an extension to the existing fuzzy finder vim plugin which tries to simulate textmate's fuzzy finder file opener (cmd T if you're on a mac). It's really quite awesome and I use it every single day, all the time, to open every file I work with. The downside is that you have to use an old version of the regular fuzzy finder gem because the guy who maintains that gem changed the api a bunch of times - to save you some trouble I believe the correct version of normal fuzzy finder (http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1984) you have to use is 2.16.
I didn't say to invest solely in the stock market. Some in stock funds. Some in international stock funds. Some in bonds. Some in a bank savings account. It's called diversification for a reason. You can buy more than one Vanguard fund almost as easily as you can buy one.

Time to plug Bernstein again:

http://www.amazon.com/Four-Pillars-Investing-Building-Portfo...

What you don't want to do is spend all your time reading hysterical ravings on the Internet and then somehow conclude that it is actually safer to blow all your money at the track, or on some crazy scheme to "double your money in two years". I don't care how scary the stock market is: It is less scary than whatever you plan to do to double your money in two years.
Try this query on Google:

http://www.google.com/search?q=age+of+earth

Some of the highly ranked results mention the possibility of a young earth.

Why is this acceptable?

Note that saying "google is a search engine" is not an answer. With enough complaints, Google may be forced to push down scientifically false information (at least for the most popular queries) down the rankings.
i actually really like the print catalog builder concept. i've not seen it on other (admittedly few) ecommerce solutions that i've looked at. i feel like if you were to develop this into a generic plugin for other ecommerce solutions, you might have something unique that people could purchase without having to make difficult decisions (i.e., switching ecommerce solutions).
http://blogs.msdn.com/techtalk/archive/2005/12/16/504872.asp...
You have the method by which you can generate lots of money in a short period of time; you just proved that to us with that $24k. But you say your problem is the time and effort expended to create your apps, so I'd suggest you take a portion of your money to hire others, create more apps, and saturate the App Store. What's it to you if the App Store won't last forever? You want something quick, so exploit it while it's there.
The poster expressed the sentiment that the app store ecosystem is fragile and the income will end. If you believe that, investing in hiring more programmers for apps would be a move counter to your own beliefs.

Since I tend to agree with that assessment, I couldn't recommend doubling down on building apps.

There may be other good reasons to consider that, such as moving in another direction (consultancy, which raises the interesting question: is there a such thing as iPhone app consultancy?), but not for that reason alone.

Edit: Google says that there is such a thing. It strikes me as likely that would be more stable long term, and, potentially, even more lucrative.
CodeMash Review
I find it hilarious that they just committed copyright infringement. By default in the US this photograph should be the property of the photographer/photographed, in no way should the FBI have been using a photograph taken from the internet, they're the ones threatening the entire world with 1/2 million dollar fines for copyright infringement on every dvd released out of the US.
I clicked the link and immediately thought, "How is this any different from Delicious? Why would I use this?"

Sell me! On the front page, above the fold.
You have a revenue generator model that's proven and works.

Why not do more of it? Scale up?
All pollution is practical, it takes discipline to dispose of waste properly.
An earlier submission: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243

Mentioned quite regularly: http://searchyc.com/teach+yourself+norvig+ten
Same for me. I'm on Firefox 3.5 (Linux).
Thank you very much for the feedback. I'm a major minimalist, so my work kind of reflects that, but I would like to spice things up just a little down the road. Thanks for checking it out!

Mark
Coding Craftsmanship
Actually, I was at Microsoft between '94 and '05 and that's close to what happened in many cases, but not because of a single program manager. (At least not in cases that I saw directly.) Rather, as the company grew, and more program managers and project managers were assigned to things, a lot of developers felt less in control of their work due to the collective influence of a non-programmer organization.

That kind of growth probably has to happen. To be fair, most all the program managers had engineering degrees, and some had been successful developers. The project managers came from a different track entirely, and I think that was a more challenging relationship for a lot of developers.
Do not buy a house right now unless you really understand your local market and it's very different than the national average. Home prices are going to drop like a rock this Spring.