skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wish for this also but I also know why it can't be that way. The hosting company is in the business of providing a server in a short time period and can afford to keep them on hand. Presumably multiple customers will be asking for them and every server they provision means more revenue.

Your company is probably not in the hosting business and every server that is deployed is an expense and depending on the level of bureaucracy (3-4 weeks in your case, 6-8 weeks in mine) it takes time to make sure this expense is budgeted for, make sure there is room (physical, power, bandwidth, etc) in the data center. I love working for smaller companies because you can cut all that crap out but then smaller companies usually don't have the $ to buy lots of servers.
I agree, and, no, I haven't heard of people making money with Kiva, but that's (at least partly) because I haven't really heard of Kiva at all. My comment was meant to reference the success of e.g. Grameen bank which seems to get decent returns on its microloan business, but also applies a lot of local knowledge.
I wonder if this automated bug sniffing could evolve into something that can actually restructure a program to make its architecture better.

Further, if that's where this is going, maybe we'll be a step closer to "Do what I mean" programming.
I'm being shown the line:

"Favilous is supported on all major browsers excluding Internet Explorer 6. Upgrade to the latest version of Internet Explorer."

I don't think I need to see this as I'm on Safari.
I learn by building stuff.

Being able to show off something you've built is better than showing a certificate for something you studied for.
NY Times Apparently Planning To Commit Suicide Online With Paywall
A lot of excellent ideas are viewed as "crazy" when first proposed. That is probably a bigger reason you aren't going to get a qrq scheme from an online discussion: Either they are burned out on trying to convince people casually or you won't recognize it as brilliant. And that comes back to my earlier remark: An idea isn't worth that much. Execution is what brings in the money.

That still won't prevent some folks from wanting to discuss it just because that's the kind of thing that floats their boat. Maybe you aren't that type. Some people aren't. But some people just like talking about stuff. <shrug>
i think that it's pretty clear that getting rich is largely luck. you were in the right place at the right time with the right skills. if it was more than that, then you'd be able to repeat it without advice, right?

given that, two approaches make sense to me:

1 - treat it as a lucky break and consider how best to make it last over the long term, as a one-off. but you say you don't want to do this in your question.

2 - try to somehow increase the odds of getting lucky again. you can use money to improve your chances in various ways: by improving your skill set; by allowing you to fail more often before you starve; by out-sourcing work not associated with "taking a chance" to someone else; by entering a market with a higher barrier to entry (where you need to invest more up-front) but with, hopefully, less competition.

perhaps the best approach is to see (1) as yet another way to do (2). in other words: invest the money so that you have a small but reliable income over as long a period as possible (a ramen fund, if you like), so that you can keep trying new ideas.

ps i think the biggest argument against the "luck" hypothesis is that very rich people tend to get richer. but i suspect that's because they exploit information available only to people in their position; $24k doesn't buy your way into that.
if you like the Unix philosophy you mighty like Pike's the Acme text editor - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_%28text_editor%29 (and Plan9 in general).

Many plan9 programs post a file tree which you can manipulate with regular Unix tools - Acme's are described here - http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/4/acme

for instance, if I name this shell script C

#!/bin/rc
tags=`{cat /mnt/acme/$winid/tag}
s = `{echo $tags(1) | sed 's/\.c$//'}
8c $s.c && 8l -o $s $s.8

And middle click on a 'C' in the tag bar (or anywhere in the window) and the filename ends in .c, it will be compiled and linked for me. The /mnt/acme/$winid/tag is exported by Acme which provides a file tree to all of its windows.

Other similarly behaving programs in the distribution (including the windowing system) are described in http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/4/
Do what I would do. Just take a trip around the world, and forget about it.
I share your grumpiness. But given the number of otherwise-smart people I've had to explain this to: yes, this is something that needs to be explained to the median reader of Hacker News. Too many developers in the modern world work only in abstractions and don't have any grounding in the way bytes are laid out in files.
Teach Yourself Programming in 10 Years.
What sort of authority does a program manager have?

Can't employees just ignore what he/she says?
That seems like an even quicker way to end the profit run. If everyone knows how to do this, the market will slow down and then soon my tips will be worthless since they no longer work. Then I killed the goose that lays the golden egg.
I've adopted a strategy (on flexvite.com) where I test and push each change immediately, but periodically roll-up and announce a list of changes since the last roll-up.

I'm still calling these roll-up summaries 'releases' on the web site since people are familiar with that concept. I've received some positive feedback about using this approach. People like the immediacy of how quickly their feedback is addressed, but they also like being able to thumb through a summary of "What's new" since they last looked.

Here are some examples of those summary pages (they look just like release changelogs):
1. http://blog.flexvite.com/2009/12/17/flexvite-splat-release/
2. http://blog.flexvite.com/2009/11/11/pow-10-new-flexvite-beta...
3. http://blog.flexvite.com/2009/10/12/14-new-flexvite-beta-imp...

The hardest thing for me is deciding where to draw the line and do an announcement of changes that have been released recently. I've considered announcing individual changes one-by-one as they happen on appropriate mediums (i.e.-twitter), but it seems like it would be a little spammy.
The FBI Sucks at Photoshop
Pay your taxes. After that, it wont seem like all that much money.
It isn't quite a scientific paper, but Feynman's "Personal Observations on the Reliability of the Shuttle", http://www.fotuva.org/feynman/challenger-appendix.html, published as an appendix to the commission's report is an excellent piece of work.
I'm pretty smart, but you still need a confluence of certain things at a certain time, which was clearly the case with the app store about 8 months ago, and which I took advantage of.

One can never know if everything will fall perfectly in place the next time.
I worked in the Bay Area (SF, Cupertino) for 5 years and now work in Manhattan.
New Free Fonts
I travel a lot either ways, it's a great tip, but is not that expensive that I could blow the money on this.
I've looked at it. I really like acme/wily's general design, but can't stand the mouse-centric interface. (Same with plan9 overall, actually.) 9p is pretty cool, though, and I plan on having the 9p protocol as an example file for the non-blocking server framework I'm building.

I use Emacs, but my ideal editor would mix Emacs's general buffer and mode extension model with vi-like keybindings, and use Lua as an extension language. Life is too short to write yet another editor, though.
How does one manage to publish code that is so badly botched? [Update: The code in the blog post is fixed; the original versions are below.]

The recursive solution does not work. It never sets “next” to NULL for the original head of the list, so now the list ends with a cycle.

The non-recursive solution does not work either. It never assigns anything to “previous”, so it always returns NULL and sets all of the “next” pointers to NULL.

This is easy to see if you actually compile and run both of these on some sample input:

#include <stdio.h>

typedef struct Node {
struct Node *next;
int value;
} Node;

Node * reverse( Node * ptr )
{
Node * temp;
if(ptr->next == NULL) {
return ptr;
} else {
temp = reverse(ptr->next);
ptr->next->next = ptr;
return temp;
}
}

Node * ireverse( Node * ptr )
{
Node * temp;
Node * previous = NULL;
while(ptr != NULL) {
temp = ptr->next;
ptr->next = previous;
ptr = temp;
}
return previous;
}

void print(Node *head) {
Node *curr;
for (curr = head; curr != NULL; curr = curr->next) {
printf("%d\n", curr->value);
}
}

main() {
Node a, b, c;
a.value = 1;
a.next = &b;
b.value = 2;
b.next = &c;
c.value = 3;
c.next = NULL;
printf("Iterative:\n")
print(ireverse(&a));

a.value = 1;
a.next = &b;
b.value = 2;
b.next = &c;
c.value = 3;
c.next = NULL;
printf("Recursive:\n")
print(reverse(&a));
}
invest in building products
Serious question.

Are they doing the wrong thing? Is there a standard that says the only line ending is \n.

Is the Mac also doing the wrong thing then but using just \r?
Web Laureate Insight, "Twitter: Oh Twitter"
Google now serving Cowardliness
I'd look for ways to make myself even richer. It's a game without an end, and it's fun to play.
I completely agree with you on this. This guy clearly knows how to successfully conceive, develop and bring an idea to market. There must be countless ideas in his head. Invest in those!!
Rich Students Will Get More College Acceptance Letters in 2010
Now, see, that's the kind of ignorance the article was trying to treat. It's very much not microsoft's fault. Early teletypes had two command bytes: "\n" (newline) would advance the paper, and "\r" (carriage return) would move the type head (on a typewriter, the paper carriage -- thus the name) back to the start of the line. If you wanted to do both, you had to send both.

So if you have a text file to print, you'll either need to include both command bytes or else have some "terminal driver" software do the translation for you from a single "end of line" marker. This feature was a Unix innovation. It didn't exist in other contemporary systems (VMS, for instance, from which CP/M and MS-DOS stole lots of other ideas).

So the problem was that Gary Kildall, in 1977, failed to recognize the great idea Unix had and cloned VMS behavior instead (and Bill Gates likewise cloned CP/M instead of Unix). And due to backwards compatibility pressure we're still living with the result. But it's clearly not a case of someone having made the "wrong choice".
1. Make More Apps
2. Diversify into Android
3. Stick it in the bank until something great comes along.

Cash is very useful. Do not downplay that.
Http://www.xfire.com/video/1efe25/
I love that whoever wrote this used the word 'bendiness' in a serious article. 'Flexibility' anyone?
If the goal is an employee-centric benefits system Unions don't seem to be an appropriate hack. Why not just break the privileged employer-employee tax relationship for things like healthcare and 401k? Frankly, I don't see a Union-member situation as much better than employer-employee.

As for the office-less office: after having done the telecommuting thing for a while, I just don't see it happening in a large way. Like the paperless office, it sounds obvious. But we'll still be talking about it being on the horizon twenty years from now.

Too many people in positions of influence are innately suspicious of work that doesn't manifest physically.
Which is of course a terrible idea when you're trying to report a problem that has or could have security relevance. I'm definitely not going to pay for support just so I can report security bugs to Microsoft.
> It gives the right to the employer to ask you anything anytime because he could be working.

The key is "not answering" when they call out of business hours.
If the only reason people pay attention to you is that you have the ability to fire them, you aren't much of a manager. I worked for years as a team lead. I had no authority to fire anyone, or dock their pay, the most I could do was to say nasty things about them like "They have their own independent ideas about how to get things done instead of genuflecting to me."

If he was a good program manager, people would have respected what he did, which was to understand the market for the product so well that he could inspire and lead the team to build the right thing at the right time.
It isn't even about GNOME and GUIs, but things like this (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1037509). You don't need to add an "overwrite in-place" option to sed when you can add it to everything by making it its own command. Unix design concerns how functionality is factored at the level between programs, not just between objects in a program.

See "cat -v considered harmful" (http://gaul.org/files/cat_-v_considered_harmful.html). GNU just does bloat bigger and better. (Compare BSD make and GNU make, for starters.)
Traditionally, program managers say "What" and "Why," project managers say "When," and development managers say "How" (which encompasses "Who"). I guess facility managers used to say "Where," but that's stretching things...
I saw this book when Paul Buchheit shared his amazon history, haven't read it. How to Be Rich by J Paul Getty.

Also, read this, http://blogmaverick.com/2006/01/02/my-investment-advice-for-... & this http://blogmaverick.com/2008/10/04/how-to-get-rich/
It sounds easy to do so. Too often however, I find myself reading how-tos and copy-pasting tutorials while building stuff...and forgetting everything after I finished.

I have the feeling that google has significantly changed the way I store things in my head (for the better or worse).
Instead of remembering how things are done and why so, I at best save a mental hyperlink to the information or worse, I just rely on google to be available and give me the tutorial/code snippet I need at that very moment (and again forgetting all afterwards).

Being forced to reproduce what you've learned at least once without having google is actually useful (at least for the way my brain works).
1. If you don't already have one, set up a gold-backed IRA and contribute the max.

2. Then, I'd personally either invest in gold or silver 1 oz bullion. Apmex.com is a great site to buy from. Chances are extremely slim that you'd lose the cash your making, if you convert to gold.

3. Keep some in a money market account, like EmigrantDirect.
^ This is my main question with the site as well: what differentiates this from other bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us?
Nice problem; I hope to have it someday.

First: I echo the previous posters urging you to reconsider the stock market. It's low maintenance and is a nice way to diversify away from your business if you feel it's not sustainable.

I just reread your post and noticed the implication of "I do not want to invest...long term like bonds or property". If you plan to need/use the money within, say, 5 years (preferably longer) the stock market isn't for you--so you're doing something right there by not wanting to go with stocks. I just think that people are urging you to think long term

That said, you want to make money fast short term. I will add to those pointing out that this is generally difficult. However, you do have at least one good idea proven to work at the moment: your success in the app store. Your best bet to make more money quickly in the short term is to attempt to scale what you're already doing. Note: this may not be possible. I still think it's your best bet given the constraints you give. You're worried about time investment, but that's nothing that hiring someone can't alleviate (but not remove).

Finally, care to answer a few questions about your success? I imagine you're hesitant to share more identifying info, but how about things like what you do for marketing? Or how much time it took to get to this level, how many apps, and how much time it takes?
Competent people worry that they might not be competent. To a large extent, that constant critical self-appraisal is what makes them competent.

In contrast, incompetent people regularly believe they're doing a great job.
There are two times when it's easy to chase dreams: when you're too young to have many responsibilities, and when you're too old to catch them. He jumped ship in the middle of the hard time. That takes enormous courage, and more power to him. --Lynne Flaherty on my FB
Google:  Sees Light
Robust Real-time Object Detection

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/viola/Pubs/Det...

This paper describes a visual object detection framework that is capable of processing images extremely
rapidly while achieving high detection rates. There are three key contributions. The first is the introduction
of a new image representation called the “Integral Image” which allows the features used by our detector
to be computed very quickly. The second is a learning algorithm, based on AdaBoost, which selects a small
number of critical visual features and yields extremely efficient classifiers [6]. The third contribution is a
method for combining classifiers in a “cascade” which allows background regions of the image to be quickly
discarded while spending more computation on promising object-like regions. A set of experiments in the
domain of face detection are presented. The system yields face detection performace comparable to the best
previous systems [18, 13, 16, 12, 1]. Implemented on a conventional desktop, face detection proceeds at 15
frames per second.
Ok, I'll bite. I just don't like talking about this sort of thing because it often devolves into scammy ideas. For instance here is a dead simple way to make money if you are really hard up:

Build a site where the only goal is to serve ads and get visitors. Give away N of your ad revenue to a random visitor. Write viral hooks into it to propagate it faster. Of course it won't work for long - someone will eventually try to increase their chances by registering thousands of accounts - but while it works you could probably make a ton of cash.

Edit: perhaps with his appstore experience he could do this on the iphone - figure out a way to make it cost prohibitive to register thousands of accounts by tying accounts to a phone number?
Well, it's not a zero-sum game necessarily. But that is true. I guess it depends partially on what your tips would be. If you have tips, say, for getting on the top-25 boards, obviously sharing those will hurt you. But sharing tips for how to get websites to link to you, and even those to make better apps, won't necessarily hurt you noticeably.
heh! i had that exact same (cracked) game! it didn't hold my interest for very long, though.

i could always tell the difference between the companies that rolled their own weak-ass protection schemes in-house, and the ones who ponied up for the good stuff, like softguard.

the simplest game i ever broke, before i even owned turbo debugger, was the dos version of rampage. all i had to do was NOP out three calls to INT 10h, the bios direct disk interrupt, and it wasn't able to 'see' the corrupted sectors on its copy-protected floppy anymore.

in the mildly difficult range was this flight simulator i cracked for a friend. i found the protection function that i wanted to NOP out and wrote down the sequence of bytes that needed to be changed. but when i searched the executable with norton, those bytes weren't found! further exploration revealed that the programmers had applied some weak XOR-style "encryption" to the copy protection routine i was trying to get rid of. i had to write a little utility in C to break that one.

i tried to break several of the sierra games, like king's quest. but they were using their own in-house interpreter, so trying to crack it with an 8086 assembler was approaching the problem at the wrong level of abstraction. i couldn't do it.

i never did manage to get any of the softguard games, either. they were doing really wicked things like using the INT 1 and INT 3 interrupt vectors as scratch space. they knew perfectly well that people like me needed those interrupts to be intact for our debuggers to work. i tried redirecting the first 100 calls to a different area of memory, but they were really fiendishly thorough. i gave up.

bet you've got some good stories, too. hint hint.
Judging from his home page, he seems to have made the right decision.
Be wary of trying to recreate the success using a similar but different model. Many people fall into that trap and fail.

For example, if you carefully built apps and they seem to be selling well hiring a bunch of people to build more apps may not work. The apps may not be of the same quality, you may not be able to communicate your vision adequately to them, and maybe just timing is incorrect now.

Personally I would continue doing everything you are now and completely ignore the money side of things. Pay your taxes and pretend that money doesn't exist. Keep progressing forward and see if you can continue increasing revenue.

Use some money to cut corners if you can, but throwing a bunch of money at a problem doesn't tend to have a good success rate.

edit: Also by looking at your uploaded image - it looks like you half your income this year is from the last month. Try to keep pushing growth forward, whatever you have been doing is working well.
You should have kept reading. It was a fairly nicely written satire of the "he" referred to in your quote.

On a broader point, although it is efficient to quickly dismiss the ludicrous, it's unwise to universally ignore every such instance. Rather, consider using a heavier dose of skepticism. After all, some discoveries really are weird.
It took me a moment to find the "Sign Up" button/link. I checked in some of the usual places.. At the top of the page near the "Sign In/Have an account?" link, the main navigation, and in the actual slide show to no avail. I eventually found it and felt stupid for not seeing it earlier.
My thought too. Help others do what you've done and take some equity.

Or your could simply re-invest in yourself. Could you scale what you're doing with more resources?
Depends on the company. Since a Program Manager sits above multiple projects, some companies think of them as just a coordination role -- a little more than a PM but not yet a director. But other companies think of them more like super-PMs, parachuting into their poorer-performing projects and taking over until the PM and the team can get their act together. In these tougher Program Manager roles, they're responsible for the day-to-day life-or-death of the project.

Sadly, more companies are leaning to the idea that the Program Manager is more like a fancy clerk. They end up pretty stressed out and under-appreciated.

This gets to the central question: How do you create, run, and release a huge effort that might take hundreds of man-years, like Office 2012? Something like that covers a lot more ground than simply kicking out some code. There are all sorts of things that need to be coordinated.

Companies are still sorting through how to set up and run programs, in my opinion. There is a LOT of room for screwing things up between 5 guys and 150 guys. There are a lot of tricks to use, but many times people want simple answers and the simple answers are not forthcoming.

A lot of time employees just go to their PM and then go around the Program Manager directly to the higher-ups in the organization. Makes the whole thing quickly devolve into a Charlie Foxtrot.

(Disclaimer: I've done quite a bit of setting up programs and helping companies manage them)

EDIT: I've describe a Program Manager as being "over" the entire effort. Some companies just kick them out to the side of the whole thing. This is an even worse setup, because the business drivers aren't directly connected to the work.
I have been, in effect, "working two full time jobs" -- one for a paycheck, and the other spending a great deal of time resolving my health problems. Getting more efficient and healthier has gradually started providing me some time, energy and mental focus for doing more than just getting through the damn day. For many people in this trap, I think that general approach may be the only way out.