skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a degree in theology from an unaccredited school, and I tell people that my "degree" is unaccredited any time I am interviewed, so as to avoid any possibility of being accused of fraud.

I make almost all my money in IT, for which I have had no formal training of any kind. I've done free-lance programming, unix administration, network installations, etc. Some was freelance contract work. At one point, I was an employee of one of the largest mortgage securitization companies (at the time), in charge of application packaging and distribution, laptop certification and 3rd tier hardware support of the same. I am now a CTO of a smaller company. I doubt my lack of an accredited degree would prevent me from getting a job almost anywhere in the field where I was qualified.

But I never trash someone who got a traditional degree. For most people, it is necessary to get past the gatekeepers.
Up to a point that's correct, but not substantially so.

Index funds are typically managed (for a very low fee) in such a way that they track the market. That means that to lose all your money the entire market has to completely collapse to $0, which hasn't yet happened and probably won't.

This is different from investing in a single company (or indeed in a house) - single company stocks have frequently reached $0, and houses can get caught up in natural disasters. Gold melts, paper money burns, people die, startups fail... but the weighted average of the market only suffers from a little bit of irrationality every now and again.

EDIT: It's also possible that the company managing the tracker could go bust and/or make a huge mistake. That did happened to one UK index fund and cost the participants about 10% of their accumulated capital. Spreading money around is the only way to limit your losses when the universe decides to hand you a truck full of bad luck.
There's a piece of original Google hardware in a display case in the basement of the Gates CS building at Stanford - a disk array or somesuch - constructed largely of Legos.

It makes a lot of sense as a solution for prototyping. Lego should introduce a line of blocks with standoffs and screw holes specifically for mounting circuit boards.
I agree.

(Sorry, couldn't resist:) You can extend the clever answer to XORing the strings, if you extend the XOR-operation to strings. But I probably would not use that in production code.
The list doesn't tell you anything though. It's a pat on the back for making a decision irrespective of whether it is the right one for you, and it doesn't tell you anything about how any of those people actually achieved anything.

We all love identifying with famous people that we admire, but make no mistake: these people all lived very different lives, and each had a host of reasons why apparent lack of credentials did not get in the way of their notoriety which are unique to them. Reasons which you cannot conjure just by reading a list.

Some were born at the right time or to the right parents. Some had extraordinary luck. Some spent most of their lives languishing in obscurity, poverty, misery, or Actual Work. Some were in fact quite well-educated, if not college graduates. Joseph Campbell actually had an M.A. from Columbia. George Washington had family connections and owned slaves. Eric Hoffer spent his whole life doing manual labor. These things are relevant to framing the relationship between their self-education and notoriety.

You're not worthless without a degree, but neither are you Einstein, Faulkner, Hemmingway, Tesla, or Benjamin Franklin, and you won't become more like them by hearing about their accomplishments again. Maybe most people understand that, but I've fallen into that trap enough times over the years to want to post a warning where I can.

I had started to get into this in my comment but left it out for the sake of clarity, because my point, ultimately, is as I said: there isn't much to learn from reading a list like this.
Implementing Exception#continue in Ruby
What apps are you flipping?
I'd move the "Take a Tour" link to a more prominent location and make it a button. It took me a while to find it. The tour was good at showing me what this was all about though.
To you, perhaps. The bigger point is you're able to replace that functionality on Android.
Noodle had an excellent point about diversifying, so I won't go into that too much.

However, there is still a metric shit-ton of money to be made on the app store. I don't see people leaving it in droves immediately. He knows how to make money in this environment right now, so in my opinion he should spend at least some of the money he wants to invest on something he already knows how to do well.

I just don't see the wisdom in avoiding a marketplace you already know how to make money on; even if it has a chance of going away. Max has already proven that he is able to identify a market and take advantage of it once, who is to say he couldn't take advantage of the "next big thing"?
Who couldn't do it? The Interviewer or the Interviewed?
Your In a perfect enterprise line carries the implication that no companies are like what he described. But I've worked in multiple companies that worked like this.

Just because your company doesn't do this doesn't mean that others don't.

As for your silly example, you're pushing enforced openness. But people, even in the most open companies, sometimes need to be closed. However if the company is working well then people have no problem reaching out to IT early.

Incidentally in my last job there indeed was a woman who was part of IT but sat in on another department's internal meetings, saw figures, etc. She took on that role after the previous project manager left. Said project manager was from that department but was managing several IT people. Either way IT and the other department are integrated together.
I tend to like the historical approach, too. So did Bohr? "Just as many sports players go through warming-up exercises before entering the arena, so Bohr would relive the struggles which had taken place before the content of quantum mechanics was understood and accepted. I can say that in Bohr's mind this struggle started afresh every single day." -some book on 20th century physicists I don't recall

..but reading the original papers? I can't imagine ever deciphering Newton or Maxwell (before Heaviside fixed up the equations, it was some horrific mess of like, 20 equations with 20 unknowns). There are great benefits in a clean, logical development.

On the other hand, I hear Dirac's papers were remarkably clear. Maybe reading the originals is easier for math?

"..if one wishes to make progress in mathematics, one should study the masters and not the pupils" -Abel
So, you'll probably get about $100k until the income is gone. If you keep working, you have 50-50 chance to keep going for a longer periods of time - most likely less than that.

There's no way to multiply that little money in just few years by investing it without jeopardizing it all. You won't even qualify as a professional investor as you don't have enough money for it, so your options would be limited anyway.

If I was you, I would try to milk the app store as long as it's good and network like crazy while doing so. Focus on quality, not quantity - find out the guys who actually get top-notch shit done. Get yourself known, you should be able to build some steady secondary income by telling how you did it and how iPhone apps should be done.

When your app store income is drying up, you should already have $100+k in the bank. Go through your network and find some other overachievers who are bootstrapping a startup with a solid business plan and who need your skills. Apply some of your capital as a seed money to get leverage. Work your ass off for a while. Profit. Retire or repeat.
That's a great point noodle. I hadn't thought of the catalog builder as a plug-in before.
I was recently laid off from (oddly) a Three-Letter-Corporation after a 3.5 year run of things, but probably not the one you work for. For the last 20 years, I've been passionate about technology, and for more than half of that, I've been publishing technical articles (or at least rants) on my findings. It's now been a little over a week since I was let go and you'd think I'd be up to my elbows in projects and knowledge... but now, I'm having trouble mustering up the drive and passion I used to have. It's like my soul is gone.
i didn't mean to imply 24k a month wasn't impressive (it's way more than i earn!), but the impression i got was that this wasn't going to last for long.

which suggests another approach is to use the money to find ways to extend how long this can last. for example, by porting to android.
The Entrepreneurs’ Manifesto & Declaration of Rights
This is offtopic, but: why / how do you find so many duplicate articles? When I saw that this was posted, I was immediately pretty sure you'd leave a comment linking to past posts. Are you doing this manually, or do you have a script (that, e.g., checks the 'new' page and searches for the title and URL on searchyc?)
TL;DR version of your post:

I agree.
Infographic: The BRICs are Rich, But Poor
Buy AAPL, they made you some money already - they will make you more with "iSlate" soon enough. </semi-serious>
> Or talk to pg about putting some into ycombinator.

Is ycombinator taking investment? I thought it was closed.
Berlin is also cheap and interesting.
Don’t Laugh At SMS Games: Snackable Media Sold $170 Million Last Year
"But with smart, technically-oriented people, I'd expect there to be more sharing of real experiences, but that's often not the case."

That was a problem for me too, finally I learned that it's just like expecting them to be good at cooking. Social interaction is a skill unrelated to a technical competence and experience in particular environment affects it more than than ones intelligence.
Travelers Checks are so 1994
"This sort of thing is becoming the norm."

You say this based on what? Do you have links to studies or reports on jobs, travel, time on the road?
Tell HN: I created a Delicious+Hacker News Chrome Extension
For the past 6 months, I completely abandoned Delicious for Hacker News. I figured the history of my upvotes was basically a replacement for what Delicious was offering me. Someday I figured I would write an app to search my HN history for good material. However, I just realized that I only have access to the past 7 pages' worth of upvotes (210 in total).

I have been losing links I thought were saved! I wrote this mashup extension as a quick solution that enables me to keep a permanent record of links I like here on Hacker News.

The extension works by popping up a save form every time you upvote. I plan to make it more subtle over time, but in the spirit of lean product design, I plan to live with this for a few days and decide what to do later on.

It is only about 15 LoC. Fork it on Github if it's useful to you!

http://github.com/paulrosania/hacker_sync

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/cdlbaeiklbcclmbibhedlihcaeocidhj
This is great feedback, thanks. I think you are right that the homepage needs to explain who we are and what we are doing in a better fashion. We need to show people that we are different to Delicious.

We are aimed at bookmarking rather than some other sites where it seems a bit of an after thought.

I also think we need to highlight the bookmark tools more as 'favitlater' is a really bug feature but one that doesn't seemed to have been picked up here.

You are right about the fonts and we will revisit this. With regard to black on white - once registered a user can select from a range of different backgrounds (including white ones) and you can also upload your own.

Thanks very much for your feedback. We will discuss it and keep you updated as to any changes that we make! Much appreciated...as are all these comments!
Congrats, delicious needs more competition in this space. I started working on something like this with a couple buddies of mine about two years ago with the read sites later stuff, syncing across browsers, etc. Our project, favtopia.com, ended up getting put on a semi-permanent hold as we had other things we needed to work on. I think you guys are on to something really useful, with a lot of great features other offerings lack. Just keep refining your landing page (and the rest of your site), making what you do really clear to your visitors, and I think you guys will do well.
I'm starting Android this month, everything is in place. I'll post comparison posts on my blog after I test it out for a couple of weeks. I personally don't think Android will work, but I'm generally a pessimist.
Clicky:

http://github.com/paulrosania/hacker_sync

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/cdlbaeiklbcclmbi...
Blogspam. Blah blah, "I didn't pay attention initially", blah blah, "here's a condensed version of their site", blah blah. Just link to the original site then if you have nothing to offer.
A corporation is a government construct, hence it is a socialist construct, not a capitalist one. It is a direct creation of and controlled by the government.

<a href="http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0411e.asp>;
"We should recognize that state corporatism is a form of socialism, and it is nearly inevitable in a mixed economy that the introduction of more socialism will cartelize industry and consolidate wealth in the hands of the few."
</a>

Therefore, describing it as capitalist is misleading.
I have the exact same problem.

And no, don't pay your taxes YET. I would actually invest in hiring some artists and developing even MORE apps. Maybe just outsource their development. It can be a lot of headaches but if you were able to code the apps yourself then likely you can extract decent work out of shitty Indian or Chinese consultants.

Or, find some people here in the states and convince them to work for you.

Keep growing your business. Become a player.

Or, retire to a cheap country and fuck girls and and enjoy life.

That's my advice.

-Calin
Where do you think we should move it to? Would it be more obvious in the main bar running at the top of the page?
Apt-cyg, A command-line software installer for Cygwin
Seems like there MIGHT be some real estate opportunities in some parts of the US. Short sales in Vegas or parts of CA might be interesting. Income properties (strip malls) might be available for cheap. Fourplexes, too.

I tend to lean towards our current irrational spending/printing resulting in hyper-inflation (or at least inflation) though plenty of smart people support deflation, too. If you buy the inflation arguments, don't keep your money liquid. i.e. If you buy a $500k house and inflation drives it (any everything else) up 10x to $5m, you bought a $5m house for a song. If you keep $500k in the bank and there is 10x inflation... Ouch.
Ask HN: Who's Hiring in Hawaii (or telecommute)?
I'm mostly just entertaining the notion right now, but my wife and I recently discussed the possibility of relocation, and Hawaii immediately went to the top of our list. I grew up there, on Oahu, and ideally, that's where I'd like to end up, to minimize some of the shock a it.

I'm a good front-end developer, okay in Photoshop, and moderately proficient with Python/Django, Java (currently loving the Play framework) and PHP, with less experience in Ruby/Rails.

Most of the work I've done is intranet, or "Secret", as I'm currently a federal contractor working for the ATF.

Anybody have any openings or spots they're looking to fill? I suppose telecommute positions would work as well, if travel requirements weren't too aggressive.
BTW the dollar is going to tank in the next couple of years. The stupidest thing you can do is buy dollar-based securities. If you MUST invest, buy GOLD.

No joke.
The west just needs the Iraqi news anchor who was stating 'The Americans have not invaded Baghdad' while the tanks were rolling past behind him. Fox should have handed him like $5 mil and got him to host Fox News, he would have been so much more convincing than the complete hacks they have on it.

I can just imagine him in Haiti right now, "Haiti recently received a very minor earthquake with little damage to the countries infrastructure, to which the international community is overreacting and pouring money into the worlds latest non-catastrophe." Behind would be a levelled city-scape filled with burning buildings.

Incidentally, he'd have been the best guy to handle the Clinton-Lewinsky affair. You just have him say "The President did not have sexual relations with that woman!" in front of a presidential sex-tape. The man would have, quite frankly, been the most useful tool to American media propaganda. Sadly he's probably dead now.
Agreed with the sentiment. The worse part is the post has 5 points which is more than some of the good posts/articles out there.

Also, to give some leeway to the OP he might have been trying to point out the fact that the code had errors (which was later corrected) and showing why blindly taking advice from random blogs might be harmful for your career. In that case I would have appreciated if he had left a comment.
I'd be ashamed to approach a YC company with my 24k. Like - it's not THAT much money!
Actually, that's a good point. Could you invest some of that money in another developer to speed up dev and iteration? How about a cheap marketeer to spread the word online about your apps?
Tell HN: Embed HN Comments on Any HN-submitted Page
I've always wanted to read HN commentary of a page within the page itself, instead of flipping back and forth to HN.

So I wrote this greasemonkey script that embeds HN comments on top of any HN-submitted page.

http://share.shmichael.com/hn_comment_embed.user.js

I'd like to thank Michael Cheng (chengmi) for extending the searchYC API.

Edit: For the time being, it won't work on the newest submitted posts. searchYC should cache the page about an hour after submission. In the future I'll parse the HN newest page as well.
Clickable: http://www.wizifi.com
Related:

CEO's without college education
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/766831.html

Wanted: CEO, no Ivy required
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-04-06-cover-ceos_x....

...seems like a bachelor's degree is a requirement for big company management.
Good to see a study on this, but not surprising at all. Most of them think they are "better" than the masses, and don't have to follow the rules. "Life's a game and it's not fair. I break the rules so I don't care."
Clickable:
http://share.shmichael.com/hn_comment_embed.user.js

Get greasemonkey here:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748
No -- but it's the first time people have tried to quantify how much bigger the non-twitter.com ecosystem is than its twitter.com counterpart. Most news reports on the growth of twitter base their report on Twitter's comcast score. Fred's just making the point that the true size of twitter is much larger.
God dammit man, don't you know you're supposed to be careful with what you say on the internet, once you say it it makes it true: http://www.flyingelvi.com/main.html
This is well-documented in the literature under the name Dunning-Kruger Effect. It is different from Imposter Syndrome in that the latter implies pathology. You can learn more about research into self-appraisal and skill here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect
Investing in startups is a bad idea unless he's accredited.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accredited_investor
This is great thanks. You are right - we certainly need to make the homepage clearer in message. It seems to be getting lost at the moment but we are really pleased you have found the bookmarking tools and find them useful!
How many people click "Tweet This?" on a promo page?
It can be used by another program directly though--it has a command-line interface (decibel-audio-player-remote) that can do remote control, and it can output information about its current status to a text file. (It's not as good as most Unix programs, but it's a lot better than nothing.)

It's not command-line only like most Unix programs, and it's certainly not as simple as most Unix programs, but I do think it does incorporate some of the tenets of Unix philosophy (most importantly: doing one thing and doing it well).

I realize that there's other music playing software that may conform to Unix philosophy more rigidly, but in my experience good back-ends don't necessarily translate to good GUIs, and a GUI is what I want for my media player. I think Decibel is a good compromise.
Some of these guidelines are pretty nasty and serious, some of them are very, very subtle. For example, when reading this rule:

"5. Employ large amounts of legalese. Working with the project should involve complex contributor agreements, web site content licensing, non-disclosure agreements, trademark licenses, and so on. [...]"

I can't help but be reminded of the process involved in contributing to Clojure:

http://clojure.org/contributing

Obviously this comparison is not fair to the Clojure project, but if you squint a little bit, some contributors might be scared off by even the smallest roadblock.
> the reality-based community.

Ah yees, the folks who think that fire can't melt steel....

While evolution and age of earth are important, they aren't directly relevant much of the time.

If you're going to argue that competence outside of biology and geology depends on whether one believes in evolution and earth age, you get to explain why believing in ghosts and other such things doesn't have a similar effect.

And yes, ghosters and the like do push things on the public schools.
"I assume this problem doesn't only apply to people in a big corporation but even more so for people in a startup, where time is scarce and execution is king."

I found that I stopped learning things when I started working for someone else. Then when I started working on my startup, I started learning things again.

In a startup, getting stuff done is the most important thing. There's no one else to get stuff done, so if you need something and you don't know how to do it, you have to learn how. And unless you're an amazing programmer, it's usually predictably awful.
And Python does have multiple ways to do stuff.
I think you're at a different stage of career development than many of us. You have experiences and maturity that I admire. Your lesson that the way to avoid feeling like a fraud is to work hard is a great one, thanks.
i concur - as of now, scaling up could (but not necessarily ) mean having a captive outsourced team and capitalizing on your brand.
Why are you opposed to stocks/bonds? Not implying the trend will continue, but there are commodities and diversified foreign stock market ETFs that returned 50-100%+ last year with greater liquidity and less risk than nearly all startups.

Also, there are bond ETFs/funds that are very liquid. I am a big fan of the JNK ETF (~11% interest).
Invest in my company (or another hner) in exchange for convertible debt. Micro invest to help startups pay for concrete little expenses like hosting.
It might not give a high return on investment but it would be personally rewarding, and help you evaluate potential future collaborators.

Congrats by the way!
Or, since you're the government, you can just mandate that every foreign company 'partner' with one of a handful of PRC-vetted local companies.

Then all you have to do is rely on the ignorance and pride of the foreign company and maybe a few government edicts to ensure your ready-made plants have access to what they need to achieve your goals.
Perhaps S-Expressions would have been more hacker-y? XML smells of pointy-haired bosses, nowadays.
For the same reason people read about serial killers...we don't understand, and we want to see what makes them tick.

What interested me about this article was his perception of his situations. It reminds me of Al Pacino's monologue in "Two for the Money" something about how gamblers are only happy when they're on the bottom, because there's no where to go but up. Everyone wants to be good at something...