skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Build a business using it. Pithy version:

1. Look for a niche that hang around online, but don't know much about web stuff. Mumsy things, crafts... anything that's a tightly knit niche

2. Find their forums/blogs etc, and ask them what would make their lives easier? What would be the one thing that would be awesome that they want.

3. Build it. Possibly hire people to help you

4. Have a free, lightly crippled version (so it's still highly useful and awesome, but clear there's more awesome where that came from if they cough up)

5. Hire (hint hint) an awesome marketer and copywriter to design, write and perform ongoing analysis and optimisation of the sales funnel, traffic generation and site navigation

6. Reinvest the money in entering more niches, and refining the process

You should be able to launch a site a month, with an average sales volume of 7-15k from each site after 6 months or so. 12 months down the line, that should be earning you upwards of 100k p/m sustainably, with a max of 4 employees. I'm fairly sure you can live off that.
Keep in mind that I say this as a person who's mostly self-educated. There is an alternative point of view: http://weblog.raganwald.com/2005/07/why-you-need-degree-to-w...

In this blog post, the argument is that bigger companies hire people with college degrees precisely because it's a pointless hazing ritual. Granted, that isn't applicable to startups, but there is a reason for a lot of companies to only hire people with college degrees.
Hire people to do the things you do which have the worst tradeoff of hours expended per unit of value added. Alternately, hire people to automate those things.

And I'd SERIOUSLY consider at the very least a) setting yourself up a SEP-IRA and b) socking away the maximum in an index fund. It is essentially monopoly money to you anyhow at the moment, right? Trust me, you won't regret having 30 years of appreciation on your monopoly money when you retire. (This will also simplify your tax planning for this year.) Index funds are a no maintenance investment -- as long as you can pretend that the money doesn't exist, you can get by with checking them once a year (or less!)
I have nothing but the greatest admiration for anybody willing to put up with actually cooking in the freaking morning. I, being the lazy continental European that I am, never went beyond boiling some eggs. Oh, and I think I once even scrambled some eggs. But other than that never anything more complex than baguettes and croissants.
Because there's more than enough customers in the world to everyone else wealthy too?
My honest opinion is to bank the remaining after taxes - especially if you don't have six months living expenses set aside in a money market fund or something like that. If you do have that, then use it to buy other people's time to make your small apps.
To add to icey's comment, why not use the money to develop a framework (or build on an existing framework) to be able to port your apps to other mobile platforms?
Higher education conformity
but I doubt that anyone works harder than me

Seems like a pretty bold statement to make on a forum full of workaholic entrepreneurs.
Hrm, I think you're forgetting about the most important money making tool available: compound growth. Let's assume the following:

You invest your current 24,000 and each month you add 20,000 to your investment. Let's further assume that you can achieve an annual return of 3.5% and that return is evenly distributed over the year. In this scenario you'd end up with $520k after two years. You're half way to being a millionaire.

If you instead contributed $25k each month you'd end up with nearly $650k after two years. That's 50k above your contributed principal or an 8.3% return over two years. Further, your risk is significantly reduced over any other get rich quick scheme and this allows you to continue to focus on what you're doing.
I use PostRank (what used to be AideRSS) to sift through my piles of hundreds of RSS feeds. Basically some feeds are so high volume that I can say, "give me the top 30% most popular" only and just look at those. There are buckets like "good", "great", etc.

It does various things to determine the interesting-ness of a blog post.

http://www.postrank.com/
LCA: How to destroy your community
Why rural america? I've driven through my fair share of it and lived in it for a long time, and based on this heuristic I've got to say that you will mostly just be seeing large expanses of farm fields.

With the kind of money he has: Costa Rica, South of France, Tahiti, [insert sunny place]. Mojito Island
The feel that I've gotten is that nobody is really making any money with Kiva. Most people I've read have gotten roughly a 1% return. Have you heard much about people having success with Kiva that exceeds a bare return on principal?
I don't know what to do with the money, how to use this very large monthly income to actually make myself rich

What would you do if you had already made yourself rich? What would you spend your time on?

Why not start doing that right now? Why do you need to "make yourself rich" before you can do it?
That's pretty risky. If you have a few million dollars that you want to invest into a dozen companies, you're diversified enough that if you make good decisions, it should pay off.

But at an angel level he probably only has enough to invest in 1-3, even fairly small rounds. So it's not too unlikely that all 3 of those companies fail and he loses it all.

High-risk bets, even those with high expected values, are bad if you can't afford to make the same bet enough times.
This feeling is extremely common with very intelligent/competent people. I think one reason is that it is difficult to find a valid basis of comparison. If something comes a great deal more easily to you than to most other people, you won't have to "work" at it the same way they do. Most of society measures a lot of things based on the time and effort you put into it. If you simply have a better idea/better understanding of something, that's not a valid measure. You may still work at it -- you may work very long hours in fact -- but if you are getting results that far exceed what others are doing, it can be hard to quantify how and why that is happening.

I think very smart people also get a lot of hostility from other people out of jealousy or out of feeling threatened, which I think is part of why some people seem "very sensitive" to criticism. And then if it is normal for you to accomplish things at a certain level, "praise" often rings kind of hollow. For some things, it is a little like if your spouse made a big deal every single day about "Gee, golly whiz, you drove home from work without getting into a deadly car wreck!! I'm so proud of you!! You are just so amazing!!" You might think something like "Um, yeah, I do that everyday. Shut up and get off my back you whacko."

The antidote to this feeling is finding a solid basis for comparison that makes sense to you, that is rooted in facts and not in social BS that can be biased either by being excessively impressed or hostility/jealousy. Sometimes people who know you well can give meaningful feedback, both in terms of constructive criticism and in terms of telling you 'Yea, verily, you did good -- most people can't do that' without it feeling like it just rings hollow. But most folks who are only acquaintances will not be a good source of meaningful, useful feedback for this issue.
I did exactly this for a while in college, for this exact reason. At one point I was getting hung up on seven, eight times a shift.
It's not whether norvig knows the difference or not. It's whether the person who's reading the title knows the difference.
In a perfect enterprise this would work. But in reality this is just a theoretical as the solutions the author debunks.

The problem with companies is that they have departments and whether you like it or not those departments compete with other departments for resources. That in turn means those departments have matters that they want to keep internal (like “we pushed a lot of next quarter’s sales onto this year to make ourselves look better at review time”)

To make the point try this and see what reaction you get. Go up to a senior exec. in your company and say “Hi. I’m from IT. I’m going to sit in on all of your internal meetings, have access to all your internal numbers and pretty much act like a part of your team. Except that I won’t be reporting to you and will report everything you say and do to my own boss”

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying I disagree with the author. But for his theory to work IT people need to realize they aren’t the biggest hurdle. The bigger hurdle is to get your organization to buy into transparency. To adopt an open culture where people act as a whole organization and not a series of departments. Only then can IT integrate itself as the author suggests.
At the end of the day you succeed (in the larger world, not the Silicon Valley echo chamber) by having a great (or even good enough) product that hits the market at the right time, and can pretty much grow because you have customers willing to pay for it, directly or indirectly.

If all you have is a "me-too"|yet-another-Twitter-client that appeals only to the geek crowd, and has no viable business model, Silicon Valley is the place to be. Especially if you want to burn through early capital living in one of the most expensive locations in North America.
Creating your own distinction between work and life is a challenge, but a fun one to tackle. It's helpful to have a separate working area with a separate computer for example.

But I have to disagree with the point that it gives the employer the right to ask you anything at anytime. You have to set boundaries. A set schedule helps. The easiest is to stick to the 9-5 schedule since most of the other employees will be doing that.
The Sure Thing
Sure, but that assumes that you have a 0 and an O sitting right next to each other to compare. That said, the reason I don't like dotted-0 is because I feel it's too noisy. I think a slash is the right balance...but that's me ;-)
Thinking Outside the Box: Web TVs Skirt Cable Giants
I have been using Nerd Tree since the beginning and had forgotten about Netrw.

I just asked Nerd Tree's author if there are any differences. Let's see what he says.

Probably Netrw is more powerful (supports ftp, etc.)
Fair enough. Modified to "I know I did the hard work".
Thanks. I have yet to explore FuzzyFinder!
This would be a much stronger finding if they had found any correlation between vowel sounds and the success/failure of actual brands, not just the perceived appeal of fantasy brand names. Does the fate of a brand really depend on what people think in the first five seconds after they hear the name without context? This is the same kind of thinking that makes Microsoft spend millions on compelling one-word domain names like Live or Bing, which haven't been hugely successful. In my opinion, brands are built through trust and reputation, and in comparison to that, any effect of vowel sounds is a rounding error.
no, we are talking about a dynamic programming language, not a dynamically typed programming language.

The name of the language 'Dylan', he is using, is short for 'Dynamic Language'.

You can read about Dylan in the Foreword, Preface and Introduction of its manual:

http://lispm.dyndns.org/documentation/prefix-dylan/book.anno...

Common Lisp and Dylan were 'sold' as 'OODL', Object-oriented Dynamic Languages. Norvig argues in the context of OODLs like Common Lisp (CLOS), Dylan, and related (say, Smalltalk).

'Dynamic' in this context does not mean 'dynamically typed', but being capable of changing the language, its implementation or the program - while the software is running.

Dynamic features are:

* adding, removing, changing classes

* adding, removing, changing methods

* reflection

* introspection

* meta object protocol

* first class representations of classes, methods, ...

* changing the class inheritance

* changing an object from one class to another

and more.
Give it all to me. I will make good use of it and give you back some extra bucks in a couple of years.
Find a co-founder (or not) and invest in an app in a more stable ecosystem with longer-term potential.
If anyone knew of a way to turn 24k into millions, why would they say how to do it for free?

Because people are social creatures and often take great pleasure in talking about something they know a lot about and may have difficulty finding many people that really want to listen/discuss it. Besides, as gets stated here often, a great idea isn't worth much. You still have to put in the time and effort to get any payoff. So it's not much of a threat, really.
Looks nice - need to experiment with a delicious alternative - this could be just what i'm looking for.
i echo the congrats and everything else icey says, basically.

things that i would add:

- consider just sitting on (some/most of) the money for a while. you don't need to make a big hasty plan and execute just because you have some cash to spend right now. thats not to say do nothing. just don't throw all your resources at something immediately just because you have the resources to burn.

- diversify. as you said, the app store won't be forever. try looking into other things that are either just becoming viable for development, or things that are going to be longer-lasting.

- pad your account. no matter what you do, there will be dry times and hard times. make sure you're good to go for that. stash some money away while you have it.
To advocate for the devil: how many useless (or at least unused) abstractions has this produced in your code? How many interfaces have only a single subtype (or turn out not to need runtime virtualization at all)? How many dead/untested accessor methods are there? How many declared methods went unimplemented because they weren't called? How many "plugin" interfaces have you written for software that doesn't need runtime plugins?

It's been my experience that "future proof" code tends to be filled with this stuff, and that the cost of all this chaff is vastly higher than the authors think it is when they write it.
Tumblr DNS hijacking
Make sure you pay your taxes dude
Property can be a short-term investment too. Buy something that needs work, do it up, sell it on. It's fun, creative and rewarding too, although not without risk either.
Can Social Sites be used to create sustained traffic?
I don't think so...

I think the future of work is going to be ~10 work days, 6 days a week, and minimal benefits.

The problem is that there are SOO many qualified people out there and not enough jobs for them. It's an employers market; they can make ridiculous demands, and people will show up to meet them because they have to.

Look at movies like "Up in the Air"...there really are people that live their lives in airports and hotels. Yes, to the extent that the person in the movie did. This sort of thing is becoming the norm.

In case you haven't seen the movie: it is about a guy who spends something like 300 days per year on the road.
The internet thing to do would be to make a member-only site where you teach people everything you know about making money on the appstore, and charge 97$/m subscription. Run that for a year or two, then sell it.
China's cyberspies aren't the only ones prowling Internet
I know it's risky, but I wouldn't count out the stock market.

With the whole financial meltdown, the stock market tanked, and there was no doubt they'd go back up. A year ago, even though I was 15, only had a grand or so, and needed the money a year and a half from then for college, I considered the stock market because I knew they were going to shoot back up (and they did).

So if it were a year ago, I would be screaming stock market at you. But now the Dow is back over 10k, so I see it as a much more risky move. That seems pretty high considering the current state of the economy.

But if you see it fall back down toward 8k, I would buy, as one can be pretty certain that it will be back around 10k sometime in the next 2 years. Also, right now, interest rates are in the toilet, but stock dividends from most companies are actually paying decent rates.
I don't agree, or at least if it does go this route then people will end up getting unions involved. From where I sit people are already sick of 45 hour work weeks so making this even more intrusive is not going to last long.
I wonder why was I using MiniBufExplorer until now, instead of this.
One way to fix this problem is with a shareholder's agreement that guarantees shareholders the right to participate in future funding rounds on a proportional basis to the shares they already hold.

So, assume you hold 99 shares and your employee holds 1 share. If you sell yourself 1B shares for $100, you'd be obligated to offer your employee ~10M shares (10101010, I calculate) for $1. If he accepts, your employee would continue to own 1% of the business.
At first that sounds crazy (run a get-rich-quick scheme, and that will get you rich quick!), but that's actually a pretty good idea.

Assuming you can pinpoint some of the secrets to your success (or, more importantly, things that sound like they will help people succeed), you can write a book, start a subscription website, etc selling those tips. Saying "I'm making $24k from a wide variety of apps, and it's just me in my free time" is a pretty good selling point.
Invest in yourself! Working for yourself can make you a lot happier. Since your living costs are low you're in a great position to build a business using that cash.

EDIT: Plus by starting a company you'll immediately promote yourself to CEO. If you ever get a job again in the future, it'll be at a higher level, more pay, etc.
With a kindle, how do you keep multiple pages in front of you at the same time?

That's not to mention e-books as sources. Even if we figure out the virtual library issues (lest we bankrupt every grad student -- comprehensives in the social sciences can encompass 200 books!) we still have to look at workflow. Should the grad student have 4 kindles all synced, every e-book markable with programmable gestures both robust and simple enough to compete with paper?
Am I getting too old and grumpy or are the kids today getting too young and clueless? For the sake of Odin, it's Monday - even the Sumerians had problems with incompatible newline markers depending on the type of clay used to make the tablet. This is certainly not news and I sincerely hope it doesn't qualify as hacker either.
Someone smart enough to create a black box (which a million dollar business never turns out to be) that takes input of 24,000 and returns as output 2.4 million is not going to give it away at a marginal cost.

He's asking, in essence, how to get rich quick. If i have a grq idea, i'm either already doing it and getting rich, or planning on doing it (raising capital, finding co-founders, et al).
Crossing The PhoneGap For Multiplatform Mobile Applications
What you're looking for is a get rich quick scheme, but you're not going to find one here (not a legit one, anyway).

Here's an idea: have your cousin in the Illinois state legislature throw you some lucrative contracts. That's the kind of get rich quick scheme that works. Don't have a cousin in the Illinois state legislature? Then you'll have to do something that requires more time investment if you want both a reasonable chance of success and a high, rapid ROI.
Yes, if MS changed to use 0xA (AKA \n or LF) then this problem would start to disappear.
Perhaps port to other smart phones, like the Nokia n900 or Android phones. I Don't know if this is worthwhile, but perhaps worth keeping an eye on.
Well done! play it safe though: a nice property and an equity tracker fund.

Jesus I wish I was in your shoes.
I didn't want this to turn into an "Exchange sux!" thread, with that level of discourse, but you are right in bringing up existing products.

The market is huge, and email will never die. I consider calendar integration as the 'next big thing' (that Exchange has had since before the turn of the century). Exchange and Outlook are successful as a product, yes. I don't consider going up against an entrenched Microsoft (and IBM) a viable business plan in this case, but I am willing to be convinced. There IS a market for hosted Exchange servers that some are already meeting, but "Outlook + Web-Outlook + IMAP elsewhere" does not meet my needs as the IMAP protocol for elsewhere is insufficient.
I think what you are looking for is to incubate startups
I'd love to try your advice but I've never been able to find such a niche. Everytime I try to think of one, I get "niche block". Any ideas?
I think the answer heavily depends on how confident you are in yourself. Do you feel your success was a fluke, or could you mimic it with something else? Having 24K in capital is great, but if you know anything about the tech startup space you'll know it's no sure ticket to riches. You need to board a train that can take you higher, and that either means something you do yourself or tagging along with someone else. Both are uncertain roads, so my best advice is to research and weigh your decisions carefully. You might come back and ask HN a 'Should I invest money in this?' question.
I would think about monetizing your experience of making money through apps; take a small amount of your money and create a resource for building and deploying cheap apps - this could be in the form of a PDF, etc. Add a dynamic element like 2 hours of personal consultation. Sell at a few price points and package this through a new app "Learn to sell apps app" - buyers need to get the app to get the PDF.

This type of strategy leverages your experience & diversifies your revenue streams w/ very little capital requirements....to make serious income you want to move beyond just creating apps which may have very short life spans. Good luck
Pants on The Ground Song | 12 News Issues
What does a program manager do all day?
Wow, quite relieved that I am not alone!

:D Thanks for sharing this.
It seems to me what he's looking for is more like a "get-rich-investment". He has time and money to invest in something, and wants to use them to maximum advantage. No need to belittle the post, it's quite valid.
Ask HN: How do you juggle time spent on learning vs. time building things?
Hi,
I started work at a big coorporation with a three letter acronym about a year ago. The consulting job is quite challenging and fun. Most of all,
I get to learn how to deal with people.

However there's one general thing which bugs me about work life:
During my uni time, I always found time to study beyond the "required stuff" (i.e. to pass the exam) and focus on the fun part (aka. study for f's sake).
Looking back over the last year, I haven't been able to read any scientific book, learn a new programming language, read any fundamental papers nor any
published specification of my field. It just feels like there's no time for things which are important but not urgent and instantly useful.

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.

How do HN people organize their time in this regard? How much time do you spend in actively learning fundamentals vs. time spent on building stuff?
I do NOT want to invest in the stock market, or invest in anything long term like bonds or property. I want to somehow use the money to make more money quickly (within a 2 year time span).

If you’re looking for investment tips, I recommend the book A Random Walk Down Wall Street.

If you’re looking at the broader question “what should I do with all this free cash flow”, hiring someone else (as many others have suggested) isn’t a bad idea, as long as you think that the time freed up by delegating work to someone else will free you up to work on your next money-making project.
I didn't RTA, but traditionally? Work with marketing, infrastructure, release, and project managers to create the program and ensure it stays on-track.