skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the point is that these are the types of projects that you don't support at all.

I've got a few of these on my back-burner right now... $50-$100 /month, 0 effort.
To the folks who tried out the commenting:

A lot of comments are blank. If you entered valid text and that didn't get written to the database, and is a bug. Can you please describe any bad experience you had with the commenting system.

Thanks!
That is pretty cool. I really wish I could use something like that for my "customers" at my client company right now. It's really frustrating to know how many cool and useful tools are available, yet can't be used because of bureaucratic overhead inherent in large corporations.
Why do you have to have reach in order to build something big and grand? Your reach has no bearing on the quality of your product! The idea is to build something so great that others will talk favorably about it regardless of what you say.
Paul Carr on Macmillan vs Amazon
Just my personal neuroses. I'm not saying it's a rational thing, but fact is, I don't.
Moments worth pointing out:

1. Early in the interview Daniel admits that he even published his first story without approval from TechCrunch editors.

I spent almost three years writing for The Escapist (http://escapistmagazine) and started when I was 16. When it came to writing and researching, I was given free reign. However, when it came to PUBLISHING, it was made pretty clear that an editor would have to vet the story before it was released. Editors would prefer that I call them on weekends and at least give them a heads up on the situation before releasing a story.

We might've differed from TechCrunch in that we strove for quality as opposed to breaking news. Point being that the Escapist editorial system worked very well, with everyone knowing the content going onto the site.

2. TechCrunch didn't have Daniel sign any paperwork or give him a title when he joined as an intern in June 2009.

3. In general, Daniel does provide a really good insight into how TechCrunch operates: management structure, the editorial process, etc.

4. Admits he doesn't really have any technical background.

5. Says the company involved was one that TechCrunch had covered multiple times before.

6. Says he never received the Macbook Air and the type of post the company requested was never written.

7. Says he has not extorted companies for products, but received products from Intel for an unrelated project he was involved with that he discusses on his blog.

8. The evidence used against him were joking IMs and emails.

9. Received an iMac from a friend who works at a tech company as a thank you for making an introduction to another company, not for TechCrunch posts. Then later wrote about one of the companies that was involved in a big legal discussion with Apple (iPod Rip).

10. Advice Daniel received from Mike Arrington the night before Teens in Tech (Daniel's conference): Neither party wants to have a public fight about this.

This was another quality Mixergy interview revealing Daniel's side of the story and more details about a still mysterious topic. The entire interview is worth viewing.
I took it that the point of the post is that even if you don't have a Facebook account, any one of your friends, co-workers or acquaintances could have imported their contact info into Facebook, you included, like it or not.

So how do you know that your friends have not uploaded your contact info or tagged pics to Facebook?
Opting out in that manner (not existing as far as Facebook is concerned), is effectively flat-out impossible. If other people know you exist, and a HUGE amount of people are on a website, uploading all their info, you can't prevent it. It's entirely out of your control.

As to his fear that they're associating friends by email addresses uploaded, my personal experience implies that they either don't, or it factors in very lightly. A few friends who I email with pretty regularly, and are on Facebook, and uploaded their email lists (which I am most certainly on) didn't come up as possible-friends ever. It seems to be entirely friend-of-a-friend based, and as they were in an entirely separate circle of friends, they never came up. I never bothered adding them, because we already contacted each other as needed through email / IM.

The friends it did suggest to me, though, were almost universally friends of my friends, typically with several connections, but I seriously doubt they ever had my email (or many of the in-between links, if any).
Having finished a degree in Electronics I would recommend the following two books:

* Engineering Maths by K. Stroud
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Engineering-Mathematics-6th-K-Stroud...
to my mind there's no better maths book, very logical step by step approach to improving maths skills by building on previous knowledge

* The Art of Electronics by Horowitz and Hall
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Art-Electronics-Paul-Horowitz/dp/052...
this is often referred to as the bible of electronics and acts as a great reference book (there is a circuit chip designer in my workplace who came from a physics background and taught himself electronics with this book)
Is that a step-up from blogging your progress, or a step down, I wonder?

I like very much it though, and would love to see a Dashboard-able condensed version.

Edit: wait, is this going to be something you can do with Things.app? Along the lines of a public CalDAV availability calendar? Oh boy, oh boy.
I don't; I'm just guessing, I suppose. That's a good enough point that I'm deleting my original post.
This article is a good description of circular references and memory leaks in JS, a pattern which is especially common in IE6 and one which my coworkers have spent a surprising amount of time combatting. Memory leaks border on a special kind of hypochondria, but once you can prove they exist, they're a bear to track down.

The biggest surprise in this article, however, was in the bio:

_"He has worked as a part of the OS/2 IBM Web Browser Support Team for the past three years."_

The OS/2 Web Browser was Mozilla-based, with open development happening in the free WarpZilla project. Apparently WarpZilla, a port of Firefox to OS/2, is still going strong as of version 3.5.4 (with prereleases of Fx3.6 and Fx3.7 still available): http://www.mozilla.org/ports/os2/
How does a lexically scoped variable close the file? I couldn't find any documentation about this while Google searching. Is this a real language feature where you can specify what happens to a variable when it goes out of scope?

In other words, is it a baked-in convenience or a real extensible abstraction?
If you write software to move 1 copy per month then you'll be writing software to move 25 copies during the lifetime of that version. It'd be very hard to even support your users.
The transcript is now about 95% so I posted it.
Review: Twitter Reactions Extension
The only problem then is you learn what they know and you don't learn what they don't know which is usually equally important.
I really want to make one myself. My idea is to have the terminal screen as a vim-editable 2-D ASCII environment, which you manipulate with vim commands.

The goal can be anything. Say a plane or something going straight through a cave and you have to use vim commands to move the cursor to and clear ASCII obstacles before the plane hits them (and you can't use 'dd', just to make it harder).

Or a game where you have to fill in blank spaces randomly strewn around for some purpose, and also make it time-based. Or any other kind of game you can think of; I think it has a lot of potential for fun + vim-training.
In ruby you can create a file pointer as a lexically scoped object:

def write(something)
f = File.open("/path/to/somewhere", "w+")
f << something
end

The variable f is local to the write method. Without explicitly closing the file, it may not be flushed to disk until the ojbect is garbage collected (I think).
The main thing the browser has to offer for applications over any binary is a broader set of API functionality. With a binary you have a nasty OS-and-library-dependency rigmarole to go through - with additional hairiness when you're talking about cross-platform applications - and you have to spend more effort to maintain it because every OS changes over time. If it can be built in JS and HTML, you gain a powerful amount of portability, even if you've only written to support only a subset of browsers, and you have some assurance that the code will remain backwards compatible for a very long time to come. Those are both huge wins, and they trump most other concerns for content applications, even if the browser paradigms cause some amount of hoop-jumping to take place.

If you're talking about "infrastructure," of course - compilers, databases, servers - those are reflective of the system internals, so the lower level environment is necessary.

But outside of that domain, browser-apps are the lowest-risk platform available. That's good engineering and good business.
Ah, I see.

MIT's EECS department was first just plain EE, so they rather naturally combined the two as computers came of age (there was much less division between the two in the '50s and early '60s).

As of the '80s, it had the opinion that "no MIT EECS graduate should be completely at sea if he had to do some programming or had some weird electrical problem to deal with" as I said in another reply to this thread.

There really aren't many if any EE disciplines today that have no programming component. The reverse isn't so true, but a whole lot of programmers/CS types will be faced with EE problems they should at least have some understanding of. Plus the abstractions are hardly opaque; a minimal understanding of EE will help a lot in understanding what's going on with the beasts we program, where they're going, etc.

WRT to the former, at my 2001 job at Lucent we had the strangest transmission line problem on a big PC board. It wasn't fully diagnosed until the lead EE for it got really desperate and put his scope probes at every point he could, upon which he found the signal was messed up in middle of a line ... but not at the end (which he had of course already checked).

I don't have to know too much EE to know I can't blame him for taking so long to find it.
Understanding Clojure’s PersistentVector implementation
Common Errors in College Math
For non Google Chrome users checkout TBUZZ http://tbuzz.arc90.com/
Ask HN: Steady 4-5% on $5 million?
I recently inherited a little over $5 million. I don't have exorbitant dreams of penthouses or private planes so I'm not looking to turn this amount into $50 million or anything. Instead, I'm looking for ways to generate a steady 4-5% annual return. I have meetings set up with tax/financial advisors later this month, but I wanted to ask the smart people on HN -

What would you do to generate a steady 4-5% annual return from $5 million?
I think he considers it a way to make money.
One more way of avoiding memory leaks is event delegation - here's quite good article about it: http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/07/23/javascript-event-d...
In the process of becoming a REAL MAN
$(window).width() will display the viewable width of the client in jQuery. and onResize will fire on <body> when the window is resized. (food for thought)

I think this is a pretty neat idea. Often a coworker is working remotely and our boss has been begging for some code review. This could have some use.
So it's not really 400 projects, it's maybe 20 projects optimized in 20 different ways each.

That's a whole different way to look at it.
You didn't buy the app store, just the phone.
Like whom besides searchyc
In Paris, the customer is not always right
A friend had a similar experience, except that he didn't even try to sign up for Facebook. His email is first name + last name. @ gmail and apparently someone signed up with his email on accident. After that my friend started getting lots of automatic friend requests from people he knew. He was able get the password sent to him, since it was his email afterall, and canceled the account. Like the OP he was pretty freaked out about how much Facebook seemed to know based solely on his email.
He is the author of the post.
Microsoft dropping FAST search for Linux, Unix
The 2010 products will be the last to include a search core that runs on Linux and UNIX.
XSS open. http://github.com/ninjagod/patchbin/issues#issue/1
IMHO, getting root on Android is worth it if only for gaining USB/Bluetooh/WiFi tethering.
Apart from the fact that then, you're not visiting them all on a single trip, so by the time you get to the 5th or so, you can't remember the 1st any more (If you don't pay projects attention, they die).
care to tell us what kind of projects those are?
Good point, I just switched recently to 64-bit OS and looks like we have a long way to go . . . anybody know where to find stats on 64 bit adoption?

Wish it was broken down here . . . http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp
I don't think he's sad. He caters to a smaller (and I think more influential) audience than TechCrunch/Mashable. His site produces really awesome content with deep/thoughtful analysis. He seems to really enjoy life.

The way to win in the TechCrunch war isn't something that Om wanted to engage in, I think. He doesn't do linkbait, doesn't stir controversy, doesn't declare crusades.

Did he miss a financial opportunity? Maybe. Should you be sad about missing a financial opportunity? Nope. Having met and talked to both of them for a while, Mike Arrington seems more sad than Om does. Money/success, beyond a certain level, ceases to correlate with happiness.

Oh, Om was also asked to be a partner in one of the best/most active early stage VC firms in the Valley (True Ventures-- full disclosure, they participated in our Series A).
Yes, you can absolutely specify a destructor which will be called when a lexical / local variable goes out of scope in Perl or C++ (just to name the most well-known languages with this feature).
That site looks like a shady search engine spam site. I could never earn money like that and feel good about myself.
I'd add something else.

It's all so very easy to say that you can quickly make a buck a day on the internet. "Sure, just throw together some videos of puppies and put some adsense on there" but that's not the reality of the net today.

People and companies are heavily competing on every freaking keyword that anybody might be interested in. That doesn't mean there isn't opportunities, but it's a much longer haul than just brainstorming an idea and creating a simple web site.
Yelp Walked Away From $700 Million Microsoft Offer
Without realizing the dreams of a penthouse or private planes in the immediate future, I would suggest you act like a 20 year old making their initial 401k contributions. Invest aggressively. Investments regularly hit 10-15% annual return. The downside is your investments are almost entirely tied to the unpredictable stock market. But in 10-15 years, you can cash out larger portions without touching the principle.

If you want to play it safer with the 4-5% return, there are safer mutual funds to invest with. Less risk and less returns. But for arguments sake, will 4-5% cover the inflation you experience as you grow older?
Funny Vacation Rental Commercial
Homepage A/B Testing Lessons from the Olympic Store
HTML5 doesn't really have good software developer support in the way Flash does. I am waiting for some small software company to do a designer's tool for HTML5.
That delay until the next garbage collection is a big caveat. While you might get away with this for file handles in some situations (honestly, I'm not sure that File#close really guarantees a write to disk anyway), it makes this technique essentially useless for mutexes.

(Edit: I should also point out that that's a function-scoped variable, not a lexically-scoped variable. Ruby doesn't have lexically-scoped variables.)
The information density of video is generally too low for me. I wish there was a text-based version of this.
One way of asking this more gently is to ask about the balance between family life and business life and make sure the person understands the sacrifices behind starting a company (and doesn't believe there will be no sacrifice).
You're absolutely correct.

Note that in that list there are several sites that have millions of pageviews per month (a success by most standards), and in spite of that the monetization simply sucks.

If you were to spread those millions of pageviews across many smaller sites the maintenance headache would be a multiple of what it is right now and you'd still not make more than roughly $1000 / month.

If I lost all the $1 per day sites from the list (or lower) there would be only 5 sites left.
I disabled escaping because it had trouble rendering XML code. I thought it was safe but I was wrong.

Fixing now. Thanks!
[edit] fixed
They are legitimate in the sense that the answer affects the probability of success of the investment. The legality of similar questions in the context of a job interview is an irrelevant red herring, not sure why you brought it up.

To see why this is a problem, think about the questions in the equally-valid context of a man. Are you planning to have kids? What if your wife has to move for work one day? Will go you with him?

They are perfectly legitimate questions for a man as well. The only reason they aren't asked is because the probability of a negative answer is lower for a man than for a woman.

Similarly, I'm often asked (on job interviews) "do you plan to return to academia?" You are probably not asked this (unless you are a former academic), since the odds of you pursuing an academic career are much lower than mine.

Incidentally, if you were a new stay at home daddy, I probably wouldn't give you VC either.
Yes, if you're going to try to get into adsense or adwords at this point in time you are really behind the curve. The game has moved on - offer something people want. Use your hobby or pick something you can research and offer good info.

For example, I suddenly need to know a lot about tax because with my sudden increase in income I don't know what to do. I would easily pay $50 for a tax-for-dummies who make above $10k a month book. It's a small niche, but it is valuable.

Or healthcare. For sick people, this topic is very important. If there is something that offers me good value for this, I will pay for it.

I am asthmatic, for example. There are very few software out there to help asthmatics.

Don't do the adworse nonsense of years ago. Do tiny projects that help people or solve peoples problems and it will be easy to make your dollar.
File.open('path', 'w') do |f|
f << something
end

will do what you want
Not really. "Social" is a word, the entire article is about a social network, and it's seen probably a hundred times a day. "SoCal", especially when not internally capitalized, is not something most people encounter every day.

We see it more because we see it more, and "li" in a sans seriffed font is very difficult to correctly parse, so we read it as we see it at a glance, which defaults to a word we know.

edit: socali socali social socali social social socali social (read it as quickly as you read this, and tell me which there were more of)
relatively small change in the sex ratio (m:w) from 50:50 to say 40:60 should make such a big difference

That would be a relatively very large change. Of course that would have massive implications for the dating pool. Small would be from 50:50 to 49.99:50.01.
So how are you monetizing if not via adsense?
If you make a throwaway app every 2 days, that's 400 apps in a little over 2 years. That's far less time than it takes to go to college and get a bachelor's degree. When you're done, you've got enough income to live off of, and you can work on anything you damned well please.

I don't know that I necessarily agree with Max's premise, but I don't think timing is that big an issue (assuming everything else works out).
Is Blogging on the Decline?
You misunderstand the optimisation principle. A project that makes $1 a day but is impossible to modify to make new projects is not a valid project. A project that requires an hour of maintainance everyday is not a valid project.

The point of my approach is TIME optimisation. For this, you have to automate - it is the first step of time optimisation. If you are not automating, or automation was not built into your plan before you started, you are doing it wrong.

What you have is the first iteration - my method would take all the ones above $1, then optimise the time spent maintaining it till it became minimal. If it were not possible to optimise it in that method, then someone external can be brought in, who maintains it for half the income, giving you absolute free time to make the next project.

I did not speak about bad performers yet - the projects who do not make the required $1. It's not possible to follow this system without hitting some duds. You spend a reasonable amount of time trying to bring it up, if it does not work, you have to get rid of it. You are optimising your time, so you cannot afford to do something that does not warrant the time spent on it.
There's a contradiction in there somewhere.

The reason I said maintenance is important is because the game is 'moving on' all the time. So, whatever you make today that will make you your $1/day will not continue to do so for a long time. You'll be in a new ratrace, but one of your own making. The one where you will have to replace old stuff with new stuff fast enough to make up for the churn.

The $50 tax-for-dummies book sounds like a great plan, but it would take a man-year or more to write that book before you'd pay $50 for it.

It had better not be a small niche then!

How could software help asthmatics ?

The 'adworse nonsense' is still the easiest way to monetize 'tiny' things.
I'd use Harry Browne's "Permanent Portfolio" allocation - it performs as well or better than other passive portfolios while experiencing far less volatility. Here's a detailed analysis of historical returns: http://crawlingroad.com/blog/2008/12/22/permanent-portfolio-...

It's also simple enough that you don't have to pay a tax/financial advisor exorbitant fees to manage your money - you can do it yourself, saving a lot of money in "wealth management services" you don't really need. Remember, you're a financial advisor's dream come true, and they'll try to sell you everything they can.

Here's a review I wrote of "Fail Safe Investing," Browne's book: http://personalmba.com/review/fail-safe-investing/

Here's more solid supporting information:
http://crawlingroad.com/blog/2010/02/06/permanent-portfolio-...

Hope this helps!
It's about what it says. The thesis of the article seems to be that the sexual revolution has created the Tucker Max culture. Essentially, women actively go after and sleep with alpha males. The issue that arises is that alpha males won't commit because they don't need to in order to sleep with attractive women, and attractive women are essentially disposable to them.

Unfortunately for women, as time goes on they become less attractive, and the guys that used to be interested in them are now only interested in younger, prettier girls. While men tend to become more physically attractive and develop in their careers as they age, the exact opposite happens for women. Because of all this, men try to become alpha males and don't treat women well if they are, because they don't need to.

In my own experience, this is all essentially true. A friend of mine was recently given an ultimatum, by one of the several women he's been sleeping with. He could care less, she's easily replaceable. And he doesn't care because attractive women wouldn't pay attention to him a few years ago. Looks like women created a cycle that men are abusing.