skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Web development (lately?) Affiliate marketing? Sounds like you need some focus, and maybe take some spare moments to relax and re-evaluate. ;)

You can't really compare yourself to your buddy. Maybe you live in Manhattan while your buddy lives with his parents in B.F. Wyoming. Different people have different requirements to "make it."

You also can't compare what you do to your buddy. You both deal with websites but it still might as well be as different as "my construction business hasn't gained any traction but my buddy is doing great with his car dealership." I know a guy who makes thousands / month with Adsense but can't get anywhere with affiliate sales. It's different skill sets.

I also couldn't tell you what to do over the next year anymore than I could tell a high school kid what to major in college or what career to go into. And why would you listen to me?

You say that you are passionate about technology but most of your post is about passion for making money with your business so you can leave your job. That doesn't give us much to work with. And is your job really that bad?

General advice. Narrow your scope and put more concentration into a smaller number of things. Take some time off to enjoy life.

In web development, go more niche so that your skills are more scarce and you can charge more. You don't have as much time as the full timers, so outsource some of your work.

If all else fails, dramatically lower your cost of living by moving to a country where you can live off $500 - $1000 / month of income. ;)
mos1 did a much better job than I did of indicating why the question is unclear.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1109031
I'll take 2,000+ years of recorded human history, across multiple cultures and ethnicities/races, over Buffett's views, thanks.

How about I counter with Bernard Baruch:

"Gold has worked down from Alexander's time ... When something holds good for two thousand years I do not believe it can be so because of prejudice or mistaken theory."
Make Your Own (Paper) iPad
Hear, hear! I did a whole series of posts analyzing a skeptic's claims:

http://matthewmarkus.posterous.com/raw-darwin-airport-temper...
http://matthewmarkus.posterous.com/darwin-airport-temperatur...
http://matthewmarkus.posterous.com/darwin-airport-temperatur...

I found at least one error/discrepancy in each side's output. Of course, neither side released any code. The disclosure of methods is a prerequisite for repeatable experiments, the cornerstone of science.
Cool. Now what?
Http://www.pelaut.go.id
I witnessed this with my younger brother. The last game I played seriously online was Halo 2. I was 26 when it came out an my brother was 11. During the first year I made level 30 on Live. My brother couldn't touch me until he turned 15 and Halo 3 came out. He ended up playing it sooner and more and I just never was able to catch up.

But I believe it's pretty much hours played that makes the difference seem so large. The top pros are probably young because every bit of twitch reflex makes the different at that level, but I think you can still play at quite a high level when you're older (okay I'm only 31 now). PC games might be a good place because having the resources to run a game at max resolution on a very large monitor can make a big difference.
The New Diamond Age (2003)
That's a given, though. I don't know what kind of fun you're after, but everything I can think of won't put much of a dent into a large sum of money.
I think the fact that Google still uses the phrase "anonymizing IP addresses" as opposed to logs or queries speaks for itself. If they spoke of anonymizing logs or queries, that could imply the possibility of deleting IPs. But to "anonymize" an IP implies something weaker than deletion, otherwise they would just use that term.
And that is why single player PC is more compelling to me. I could see left 4 dead being interesting to play with a few friends but us old guys don't have the time anymore. Sigh.
Well there is no good way to compare them by ranking. Here are the public school rankings:

http://www.usnews.com/articles/education/high-schools/2009/1...

But where are the private school rankings? They don't take the accountability tests which are mandatory public schools.

I'm curious where you are getting your facts from. Claiming that private schools consistently outperform public schools suggests you must have some strong facts. So let's see them please.

And while we wait for your facts, consider this. Current private schools don't have to deal with kids that have learning disabilities. Current private schools don't have to deal with as much diversity. Current private schools don't have to deal with underfunding. Current private schools have strong alumni networks. The private schools of today are not your average private school of a 100% private system.
Just discovered this in my reader. Really neat.
This article is quintessential partisan politics of a non-tech nature. I have opinions on it. You probably have opinions on it. If this site were Elephant Donkey Deathmatch 2.0: Now With More Rancor, our opinions might even matter. More business/tech/etc, please. (If you want to discuss the NYT they have really spiffy Rails/Flash visualizations and a dying business model. Bam, on topic, squared.)
Broad summary: an editorial containing one half-hearted effort at a comparison to a historical situation that would probably be interesting if it were developed at all, but which is instead promptly abandoned in favour of whinging about American politics in general, and the author's less favourite political party in particular.

Did I get the gist correctly?
We should dismantle the Department of Education. I suggest waiting until next year on February 6th, which would be fitting.
Apple's Secret Weapon: The iPad
I'm almost positive that LLVM provides both. You always target LLVM bytecode with your frontend, but then you can choose either to:

- run the bytecode using the LLVM with or without JIT.

- compile the LLVM bytecode into x86 bytecode.

This is what clang does (afaik) and is a reasonably nice use case because you write a static language that targets LLVM bytecode and end with a fast program because LLVM will output optimized x86 binaries.

However, I'm pretty sure that the efforts like unladen swallow attempt to use the LLVM's virtual machine in the hope that it will become very fast as they optimize it (especially the JIT part).
Tell HN: Official "Clone" Thread.
This is a thread to call out the all too similar websites/web apps.

Add your own look-a-likes.
Increasing productivity on your mac
Blogging: a great pastime for the elderly
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?t=2y&s=BRK-A&l=on&...

Gold doesn't buy derivatives it doesn't understand. Gold doesn't depend upon AAA ratings from government-sponsored cartels; gold can't be destroyed by gamblers or liars or cheats. 2000 years from now, it is highly unlikely that Buffet's empire will still exist in any form. Gold, however, will exist 2 billion years from now, just as it is today.

I have no positions one way or the other. Mainly because I don't plan on living 2 billion years. If I did though...
My current model M is going to turn 23 in April...I suspect that it will live to see 45.
http://www.geticeberg.com/

http://www.icebrrg.com/public/howto.aspx

http://www.readwhale.com/

Coincidences in name, color scheme, graphics and even functionality.
Top 5-10 what? Browsers? Because if Quirksmode is right, the fact that most mobile users of your site are iPhone users is a result of your decision only to do your mobile webdev for the iPhone, not a cause of it. As for sticking to it until someone complains - that's exactly what this article does.

But in the end, the loser is you, the web developer, because you're pushing potential visitors away from your site.
I like reddit. In fact, it is in my rotation of sites I check at least once daily.

I visit HN mainly for the technical/startup articles. I would prefer, personally, for general interest items to remain on reddit, since I check both. It's not good vs. evil! We can have both.
There is no magic, there is only awesome (Part 1)
There is no magic, there is only awesome (Part 2)
I also strongly recommend Quicksilver (blacktree.com).
There is no magic, there is only awesome (Part 4)
Interesting. I recently saw an ad for cosmetics made with "Diamond Dust".

Hopefully diamond processors means cooler computers ^_^. My MacBook Pro gets hot so fast :(.
Changing the education system will inevitably have a tiny effect on the people who can already throw as much money as they want at education. They have choices. Poor people don't. Giving them choices will likely improve their educations.

My school district spends ~$7000 per student. I'd say I got a pretty good education. Vouchers would not have to be ridiculously high to provide a quality education as you imply. Not everyone is going to get a gold-plated education, but the minimum could be far higher than it currently is at the same price.

It seems like you just don't like profit-seeking entities. This concern could be accommodated just fine in a voucher system: choose a non-profit school. Profit isn't necessary for privatization to improve quality. Competition is what creates the incentive to improve.

I think the lack of direct incentives for public schools and their employees to improve is a greater negative than any corrupting influence of profit would be.
You can't have a large enough sample size, because an external variable could be causing both boredom and death. Say, a hormonal imbalance that leads to heart failure. Boredom doesn't have to have anything to do with being a cause of death to have a 100% correlation in such a situation. Studies along these lines necessarily ignore external variables, because you can't account for them all.
The list I had in my original comment (which news.YC ate):

1. Software projects have increasingly moved from the desktop (where having a complicated runtime is a non-starter) to the server (where you can control everything).

2. Failover and hot swap capabilities are increasingly demanded for consumer apps.

3. It's now viable, from an efficiency standpoint, to have a language that copies data structures around instead of mutating them.

4. There's been a groundswell of interest in new programming languages, probably mostly because of #1. This has opened the door for old languages that previously lacked mainstream acceptance. (See also Python for an example.)
I think that you've missed the point. Knowing that the Pilgrims landed in America in 1620 is very important! You have to memorize dates in order to place events in their proper context. I suggest you reread the article and then read his more detailed explanation here: http://www.secular-homeschooling.com/008/powell.html
The Importance of Memorizing History
I think it was the animation of the word cloud. I found it really distracting.
Virtual Goods Revenue Models
If you don't care too much about the theory and just want to get up and running, you should read:

http://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~cjlin/papers/guide/guide.pdf

And libsvm is probably the most widely used svm library:

http://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~cjlin/libsvm/

The author of the above paper and library is the same one giving the lecture in the OP's third link.
That's true, as well. But I think it would be worse under a voucher system. Private providers would be a lot quicker to race to the bottom of "teaching the test" if the voucher system included bonuses for good test performance.
My school district spends ~$7000 per student. I'd say I got a pretty good education. Vouchers would not have to be ridiculously high to provide a quality education as you imply. Not everyone is going to get a gold-plated education, but the minimum could be far higher than it currently is at the same price.

So you are basically ignoring the market failure I point out then? Take your pick of any celebrity clothing line to see first hand evidence of this market failure.

It seems like you just don't like profit-seeking entities.

I love profit seeking entities, but different contexts require different definitions of profit. Your average business person lacks an investment in society and in the long term that is necessary to define profit in education.

EDIT: Anyway... I've entertained the idea of education being delivered as a private good for long enough. Truly it's my belief that it's a public good, but I'm forced to argue as if it were a private one in order to make any progress. I'll read your next reply, but cramming education into the context of a private good has worn me out.
he had right of way, supposedly when entering the cross walk, so it should be the driver's obligation to wait for him to pass before continuing.
What Nassim Taleb, Marc Faber, Hugh Hendry & Others Would Invest in
I'm not arguing it was illegal, merely that it wasn't utility-maximizing. I'm not sure it's even legal though; surely having right of way when entering a cross-walk doesn't give you justification to spend unlimited time in the crosswalk, even deliberately stalling there?
Demetri Martin: If this guy wasn't a standup comedian, he'd be on Hacker News
Demetri Martin's standup routine, If I

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKnzPHtf9u4
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98RECgRc5HA
Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hUHDIOazIU
Part 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzsEtafv-FA
Part 5: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyfipbbArq0
Part 6: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjlkfl9i-lA
As jrockway says in this thread. The REPL is most useful for exploratory coding, which a unit test is not good for.

Why write a unit test for a feature of the language? The Language designer probably already did that and all you need to do is write unit tests for your own code. I do a fair amount of clojure code now and find it highly useful for just running java code to see how it behaves. Which then helps me figure out how to code my actual code, which then will pass the test that I've already written.
I particularly liked this heart-felt comment/feedback in the original thread

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/azgs6/iama_guy_who_sol...
A lot of people who hang around affiliate marketers bounce around between 150 different ideas, expect the world handed to them on a silver platter, and then wonder why they aren't successful. This is exploited by the information providers in the space, who like having plentiful newbies interested in Making Money Online (TM) because newbies will buy their ebooks, training programs, etc. Those are mostly scams to separate the desperate and unhappy from their money. People get a high off buying them and come back for more despite their failure to make substantial progress.

You can code. Good. Start making value for people. Charge money for it. There it is, the hidden secret to making money on the Internet.

You say you've worked every spare moment building one idea or another. I know this feeling. My guess is that few of your ideas see it to the "finish line" (let's pick launch and a paying customer, that's a pretty major milestone), and then even fewer see the kind of sustained, focused, gradual improvement that separates a website thrown up in a darkened corner of the Internet and a business. That is improvement in product, improvement in marketing, and improvement in the process of both product development and marketing so you're doing less firing blindly into the Internet and more devoting your limited resources to satisfying the measurable preferences of the people who pay you money.

I would suggest improving your PHP or related web development skills until you can transition from custom development to a product business. For example, right now you have a day job and then afterward spend time chasing down clients, chasing invoices, etc etc etc. (And you're probably undercharging, too.) This wastes huge amounts of your very limited supply of waking hours that are non-spoken for. If you were to instead take those web development skills and make a product, subscription service, or what have you, then the website could handle a portion of marketing and most of fulfillment quite literally while you sleep.

Then you can use your time on scalable activities, like thinking up better ways to market your product, rather than activities which give capped and linear payouts (like doing client work for clients who undervalue you). That also lets you start to accumulate capital in the business.

Capital is really simple: stuff you can keep. A freelance website designer accumulates rather little intellectual capital: you get a portfolio (good!) and client contacts (good!) and a reputation (good!) but you have to spend more time to monetize any of this. Product businesses accumulate more capital better, and faster, and many of the assets they build can monetize waaaaay out of proportion to ongoing time expenditures. That is important because, as it stands currently, if you have a bad week at the day job or life gets in the way, the business stops. Product businesses tolerate those little hiccups better.
Scott Powell, the guy who wrote this article, recorded a set of lectures covering the history of Western Civilization. They're available for purchase on his website here: http://www.powellhistory.com/1hfa.html. I'm too poor to purchase them, so I can't give a first-hand account, but I've heard good things.

Teller, from Penn & Teller, had good things to say: http://www.powellhistory.com/teller/
I bet people buy crappy foods (chips and soft-drinks) for the children when they use food stamps. So there is some similarity.

The difference? People have a fair idea as what good food is.

Also, education is vulnerable to getting derailed by optimization for tests. And the testing will most likely be controlled by the state. I would worry that big mass-market voucher schools will specialize in marketing, cutting costs, and gaming the state-run tests.
Google doesn't allow porno apps in the Market

Yes, that's the point. DHH isn't recommending removing all rules; he's recommending eliminating the approval process to get apps/updates into the Store. Apple would still, of course, have the ability to remove apps that violated the TOS.

The Android Market is run in just this manner, and it isn't overrun with pornography. So having rules and enforcing them but not having to pre-approve every release seems to work.

Gratuitous updates are a problem on Android.

While there do appear to be some developers pushing fake updates, I'm not sure that exactly constitutes a problem. If it ever gets out of hand, there are a lot of ways this could be managed that don't involve pre-approval.
Fail more. Fail better.
A voucher system doesn't need bonuses. If a school improves its reputation in the eyes of the public, it will be able to charge more money. Allowing customer choice lets people take into account less concrete metrics of school performance instead of the government punishing and rewarding schools. If customers don't want schools that teach to the test, they'll actively observe other metrics to come to their decisions.

Customers who don't put in as much effort into picking schools will be no worse off than they are today. Schools already teach to the test, especially schools in poor areas that are trying to raise their test scores. However, a functioning market allows them to benefit from the choices their more responsible peers make. Fewer underperforming schools will survive.
If he wasn't dead.
I think tilt-scrolling would be quite unusable, albeit a nice optional feature - would be nice to play with it to see if it really works. There is definitely a problem with scrolling on the iPhone when it comes to long pages - making scrolling to the bottom of a page pracically impossible in some scenarios. There is this bias towards scrolling to the top, but not the bottom embedded into iPhone's design. That's why I made the End Of Page app for Safari on the iPhone - it lets you scroll to the bottom of very long pages without having to flick forever. It is free - I am releasing it in the hope that others find it useful. I should be on the App Store on Friday, provided all goes well with the approval process.
Window Washing Robots Take Over Dubai (video)
1. Selective admissions

2. Self-selected applicant pool

3. Easier time removing disruptive students

In short, private schools have better students.
I believe this was the company - http://www.diamondnexuslabs.com/
<rant>

What does being 88 years old have to do with anything? The title could've been "White Mayor Gets City Debt-free..." or "Female Mayor Gets City Debt-free..."

One thing that annoys me is that for anyone over 80 years old, the first (and often only) thing that people notice is their age. When I get that old, I want people to see me first and my age second, not the other way around.

</rant>
Couldn't handle it? Where the fuck do you get off?

We have this vision, we goddamned assholes, of _why as an entity that existed entirely online. He was TryRuby and Shoooes and the Poignant Guide and his Twitter account and his URLs and his Wikipedia page. Then one day he disappears and we treat him like he's a dead man or a ghost, never to appear again. That's pathetic enough without us actively treating it like some kind of tragic event.

Here's what happened with _why. He realized that his persona was limiting him in some ways. He was busy working to help people he never met who weren't grateful for his work, who expected him to remain some static unchanging persona. And _why, bless him, is a stable man with some reason about him, and he decided that all he'd amassed — all the fame, all the reputation, all the fans — wasn't worth it to him anymore. So he deliberately disappeared himself, so thoroughly that all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't even figure out amongst themselves if they'd found the right name to call him by. Now he can do whatever the hell he wants, and none of it ever gets tied down to him. He's a free man. Still got the wit, the talent, the verbal alacrity, the art and the music and the smile, but now he can have an off day without the world knowing.

I'd call that pretty fucking handled. Much more handled than the guy that slowly crushes himself maintaining images and aspects that he personally can't be bothered with. When he left we saw so many people ranting and hailing him as if he were some sort of mystical, incomprehensible being, and nobody whatsoever saying that perhaps he'd quit his job like anybody else working long hours for no pay. For _why, leaving a job meant killing your alias. Nothing incomprehensible there.

But, Mr. Human, you've got to have some nerve to accuse somebody else of something just because he stopped working very, very hard in the public eye for little reward.
Good point. I suppose I just find it encouraging. Point taken though.
The vast majority of the benefits of an education accrue to the person who gets the education. That makes it a private good in the economic sense, but that doesn't necessarily mean it should be provided privately.

I had already replied to the "teaching to the test" issue in the thread you linked to. Public schools already do this, yet somehow that's what we should fear private schools doing? From the very beginning, I've stated that these schools should be certified by the government in some form, so if you're satisfied with the public schools the government deems acceptable, I don't see why you'd have an issue with similar private schools.

I don't understand how you can think you're doing poor people a favor by forcing them to attend their crappy neighborhood schools instead of giving them choices.