skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This was my first thought as well, but my understanding is that if you are accepted at Harvard they will provide financial aid for 100% of need, which means parents pay what they can afford -- it can actually be cheaper to go to Harvard than a state school that doesn't have the funds to meet 100% need.

Maybe single children have better academic preparation? Should be easy to look at that.
You may find this book, Against Intellectual Monopoly, to be helpful in making your case.

http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstfi...

It is common to argue that intellectual property in the form of copyright and patent is necessary for the innovation and creation of ideas and inventions such as machines, drugs, computer software, books, music, literature and movies. In fact intellectual property is a government grant of a costly and dangerous private monopoly over ideas. We show through theory and example that intellectual monopoly is not necessary for innovation and as a practical matter is damaging to growth, prosperity and liberty. - Michelle Boldrin and David K. Levine in Against Intellectual Monopoly
In the second part I was talking about the split view. In the first part I was talking about what you're describing.
> Second World: politically conservative, high degree of corruption, overt elitism and stark class (and often race) discrepancies. Low degree of political freedom. Lots of poverty and economically-motivated crime. Usually, high economic growth. These are countries that are sacrificing freedom and quality of life in order to increase or maintain relative status.

> (to a large degree) the United States post-Reagan.

Oh really? "high degrees of corruption"? "low degree of political freedom"?

> overt elitism and stark class (and often race) discrepancies.

Name three countries with comparable diversity that doesn't see that.

> Lots of poverty

What standard are we using? As I've pointed out, lots of US poor have a car and multiple TVs. They'd be considered rich anywhere else.
Hi there

I nearly moved in 1999 but because of family I stayed in the UK. Even though I've had success with what I've done, I think I would have found more if I'd been in San Jose (where I'd planned to locate). If you have a business idea maybe it would be enough to go for funding?
You could try Amazon Turk as a side-job. In a few hours you could make 5 to 10 dollars or more..

It wouldn't serve as a main source of income, but at least you'll have money to spend on commodities that you won't have to take out of whatever actual main source you find.

Tip: If you try this, when searching for HITs, only look for 5-cent HITS or above, and don't bother with $5 stuff, which no one ever gets.
Why is this ad "ideal for a budding startup"? I'm sure mixpanel is a nice place to work, but there doesn't seem to be anything unique about this ad, so I'm not sure why it's being held up as a model to emulate.
Yeah, I had to introduce one more scary name to do it, but (>=>) is really a good one to learn. It's monadic composition.

(>=>) :: (Monad m) => (a -> m b) -> (b -> m c) -> (a -> m c)
(>=>) c1 c2 a = (c1 a) >>= c2

It really helps to clean up some names that normally would be carried all throughout do-less monadic code.
It doesn't have to be a linked list though. There are other purely functional sequence data structures which support O(log n) insertion and deletion, e.g. Haskell's Data.Sequence, which is a finger tree of some sort. If you could find a way to do binary search on one of these in better than O(log^2 n) time you'd pretty much have your purely functional skip list.
I recently got embroiled in a dispute over a contract term that I include in all my custom projects. The clause states explicitly that I own any code that I write and am giving the client a royalty free license to use it forever.

This is almost always a sticking point and I explain to them why, which is almost exactly what the linked article states. Only one time has anyone not agreed to the stipulation, but in that one time, the client went elsewhere.

IMO, it's not worth the hassle of going over what I own and what they own and even later when I reuse code from one client's app to another. I don't want to have to think, "Can I legally use this code or do I have to rewrite it?" The headaches, legal troubles and wasted time simply aren't enough to modify what is already codified in U.S. legal statute and supporting court cases.

The irony is, if I hadn't included that clause in the contract, explicitly stating what the law says -- that I own whatever code I write, then the client would never have known and everything would have proceeded exactly the same way as if the client had signed a contract without that clause in it. The clause doesn't change the law, it just says what the law is.

So I am considering taking the clause out. The reason I haven't yet is because I know that if I'm not explicit about it at the beginning, I could have a very angry client on my hands later. It's been argued that it isn't my responsibility to educate my potential clients about the law, but it is my responsibility to create happy clients, or at least not create unhappy clients.
This is not the best place to talk about that but:

As far as I know, HN doesn't have this capability indeed. However the script could scrape a certain number of the pages (it goes up to seven). You can easily match the linked URL with the current URL. I believe a Chrome plugin can have a list of remote sites it can do XmlHttpRequest on, no?
That was a fun watch! I've bookmarked content authority as well. Can you point us to a finished site, so we can see the end result of the process?
There are many obvious problems with this argument:

1. The 80% number seems to be pulled out of the air. It could be a counting error or a statistical aberration of that class, and the real Harvard number could revert to the mean.

2. The type of parents who could send a child to Harvard is a biased sample of the general population. It will mostly tend towards rich, white (or asian) families, who generally will have less children.

There's definitely not enough information to infer that first-borns are any different.
The server-side Javascript meme
Why does everyone figure business software needs to be a success in the enterprise (mega corps with 5 layers of IT that veto shit for kicks)? There are tons of small - medium sized businesses that they can profit off of and win. They're already doing that quite well. Of course you have the venture return problem: They've taken ten million or so, need to be looking towards a 100 mil exit. Can they do that without going after scary enterprises? I think so.

Ps- Yes I know small and medium sized businesses have their own problems, but they have the path of least resistance.
" I can give you the site for $500... (I typically charged them around $800 for the site)."

How did this work? Was the final price after upselling on other services?
That was released 20 years ago (1990), the licensing situation for Tetris has changed a lot since then. There's actually a specific set of guidelines The Tetris Company enforces for a game to carry the Tetris name. They dictate everything from the piece colors to the playfield size:

http://tetris.wikia.com/wiki/Tetris_Guideline

Aside from that, if they were using it under license, there would be a licensing blurb, similar to what you see in the footer of tetris.com.
I'll wait till I make $2 million. I figure it will be an easier problem to solve then.
I agree. I even have a bookmark:
http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=patio11
I think you were downmodded because you were consistently arguing against points I explicitly told you I wasn't making. You are not some sort of martyr for truth.

You also tried to use the model of class to prove that people with vastly different incomes behave the same. You cannot prove with a model without proving that the model is accurate. The model you're using is wrong.

As I said before, I was never trying to appeal to the model of class anywhere in this discussion. I asked you to pretend I said socioeconomic status instead so we could stop arguing points I never made, but you wouldn't do me that favor.
You can also middle-click on a tab to close it. Works in both Chrome and Firefox.
Thanks, the housing wanted is indeed the concept I was looking at. Somehow I had missed it on Craigslist.
Why do you think you need to move to SF? If it's a software startup couldn't you just do that now (on the side) instead of moving?
Possibly better way to do it is to make a content script (or a greasemonkey script - same thing?) that rewrites links in HN's page such that when you open them in a new tab, you can keep track of the corresponding comments link, and then provide a Page Action that shows up in the location bar, clicking on which, will open up the comments page for the link.

This won't work where you directly happen to go to a site that was also on HN, but will work for the 80% use-case where you are going to a site from the HN front page itself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctuary_city

Just come illegally. If you're white, you can probably get away with it for a long while, especially if you freelance.
Um, yeah. Technorati has been essentially an undead company for years. When your CTO resigns along with a good deal of the founding staff, that's never a good sign.

Offhand, barring lack of infrastructure (e.g. money) to support a public API, it's sheer insanity NOT to use a slow deprecation & migration strategy for versioning.

Offline for months and no updates--deadpool indeed.
Need is a hazy thing. They will meet all of what they define as your need, but what you "can pay" often means a substantial sacrifice when it comes to standard of living. This is especially bad if your parents have been paying what they "can pay" for the last 4 years for an older sibling.

Also, it's gotten a lot better in the last few years, which is after he moved through Harvard.

About 3(?) years ago, they, along with a few other upper-echelon colleges (I know Stanford did) moved to a much more liberal definition of need and totally got rid of loans from financial aid programs. Now, theoretically, if your family makes <$60k, you pay nothing, and <$100k you pay no tuition, but pay room & board and such. There's more variables than just family income, and you always have to add to the "nothing" or the "no tuition" a reasonable figure for the student to make from having a part-time job during the year and full-time over the summer, but it's still substantially more generous than it was.

It would be interesting to see if those policies changed the percentage that are only children.
Or maybe if they're not rich, they can't afford to send child #2 there.
> The question of data privacy and ownership comes up over and over in our Yammer discussions.

We use Yammer enterprise wide. It is wildly successful. Even if a lot of the information shared is publicly available, that by itself is ground-breaking, as we have so many business units that knowing who just released a new product based on X is enlightening. As for sharing proprietary information, it's a a common sense filter that is easily applied whether it is ok to redistribute something from a Yammer update. If in doubt, don't.

You might dismiss Yammer as a Twitter clone but Yammer was smart enough to realize the Fortune 500/Enterprise market wanted a hosted, secure solution.
If your English is as good as your post seems and you've got any web development/coding experience at all I could easily find $400/month worth of things for you to do, probably more. My Skype name is the same as my username here, if you're interested.
Voting is perhaps the most important thing, because it is voting that determines what people see. If voting is horribly flawed, then the right submissions won't get seen.
To finish the story, I was pissed for about ten minutes. Not a huge deal but perhaps not something people would want in an app either.

I thought it was important to write down what I was thinking at the time, not only in terms of HN but also for other people writing web apps.

Interesting that it got the attention that it did.
Page Flips are Better than Infinite Scroll
People have different idea about the validity of patents, the benefit of patents, what should be granted patents, or whether or not it should exists in the first place.

Unless there is a majority consenus(66% agree on course of action for example), we wouldn't be able to act as a force for patent reform or even abolishment!
Ask HN: Competing with Google while running on Google App Engine
Google App Engine is a perfect deployment environment for my product. However, this product will directly compete with one of Google's own existing services.

Given this conflict I feel uneasy to deploy on my competitor's infrastructure. On the other hand, I really want to believe in Google's "Do no evil" motto and hope that they will not use this situation to their advantage if my product is successful. Am I naive to believe in this?

Fundamentally, do you think that Google can be trusted to be an impartial infrastructure provider for services that compete with their own?

Many thanks in advance,

TY
There really isn't a straight answer to this. I can tell you the typical is $0.25-$1.50/page rate for ebooks. I see some 100~ page ebooks from past affiliates that go for 50cents/page, but then some diet book sneaks in at $1.25/pg with 40 pages.

Its really not quantity! This is a market of quality. Just look through clickbank's affiliates for ideas for crap landing pages and crap ebooks (for the most part, spare maybe ~10).

Good sample pages, good outline, no boring plain black and white text, and connect with what your clients really need. Create a wiki/forum or something for registered users to access. The book isn't the only part... you want to build a community (elo adsense!)
I'm confused why downvoting for comments matters. Or upvoting. It doesn't bury comments. It doesn't really change the conversation that happened. It doesn't really do much but give a bigger useless number to people you agree with and a smaller useless number to people you disagree with.

News.ycomb could get rid of all comment moderation and it would probably be at least as good. Maybe better. Suddenly what "Karma" means would become clear. It isn't some mixture of popularity poll and story contributor, it's just a measure of how popular the stories you've contributed would be.

My karma is over 2000, and it's almost all from comments. Maybe 100 of this karma is from stories. I consider it to be very artificial and meaningless, because most comment voting is basically "I AGREE!" or "I DISAGREE!". I wish I had karma from contributing stories that people wanted to share.
The difference in appearence is because it's based on what was going to be ES4, you can actually write it like Javascript for the most part if you want to.
Really? Because it's also a notorious way to distort data. It sounds like you have more experience with this than I do, but I'm puzzled by the contradiction here. When is it a normal, even required scientific technique and when is it the oldest "how to lie with statistics" trick in the book?
No, Redis is single-threaded so they sidestep all concurrency issues. This and persisting the data in a forked process are my favorite parts of Redis' architecture.
Back when I took calculus in high school, the instructor asked for a show of hands for first-borns. All hands but one went up--well above 80%. I've wondered why that was so ever since. Why weren't middle and younger children pushing themselves to get into the "advanced" math classes?
Selling Copies in a World of Hyperdistribution
Any concrete example of one of those adsense niche sites ? I have a hard time picturing what you're talking about.
Can haz broadband? FCC wants to transfer universal services fund to broadband
"However, most criminals avoid murder - it's messy, people get all upset."

Hum... "Oh no, you killed my friend! Now I'm all upset!! So very upset INDEED!!!"
MIT Algorithms Video Lecture on skip lists:

http://www.catonmat.net/blog/mit-introduction-to-algorithms-...
I tend to agree with other commenters. I think this is a really good piece, but I don't think these issues are lost on Yammer.

The most interesting thing here for me is the articulation of the difference between the buyer (IT guys) and the users (employees). This is the central problem with enterprise software I think, and the reason that the field lags behind consumer software in innovation.
Reconsider.

Why move when you can just startup something wherever you like?
I posted an article from SAI the other day. Only 25% of local businesses are advertising online. Mostly because it's complicated and scary as shit to them. Of those 25%, 60-80% churn. That's because the companies doing this are so bloated that they only spend 50-60% on the actual ad buy and the rest on admin expenses. So yeah, the performance sucks.

I also read 91% of local businesses are unhappy with their online marketing efforts (i NEED to find the link for this again). If 91% of a population is unhappy with something, you probably have an opportunity. Go fuck shit up. You can do it, and you'll make your money.
Your best bet is to get a job at big software company. I know that my employer, Microsoft, has a legal department JUST for this problem. If you can get an in with a company like Google, Microsoft, or etc., then you can get into the area.

After that, I think you could find a native co-founder and then rig it so your company employs you after you leave the big company. Set up the contract of the company so that you cannot easily be terminated (otherwise you'd lose your visa if there is a falling-out between you and your co-founder).

The process of becoming an American sucks right now; everyone who is not a fear-mongering cave dweller knows this. It is especially irritating to us in the Valley as we Just Don't Care about nationality and it can be so difficult to find a qualified candidate. Good luck.
Apple's taking a real gamble these days.

On one hand, I'm sure they understand well the market that doesn't want to deal with customization. Ever since the iMac and maybe even before then, Apple has catered to people who want their computer to just work (for Apple's definition of "just work") with no hard thinking on the buyer's part.

As Apple now continues this philosophy into devices over which it has even greater control (a Mac is, after all, a Unix box, if you need one), we see the other side of Apple philosophy more clearly. Techies don't like it when a device has been locked down to reduce its functionality. It feels arbitrary to prevent use of technology that could trivially work. The app store really draws this into the open. No porn, no hacks, no Macs, no mention of competing platforms... the list goes on. Arbitrary restrictions - we'll see just how much developers will put up with.
If you know that you are going to be directly competing with a corporation, it is incumbent on you to minimize the risk said corporation can interfere with your business. A motto is not a promise or corporate conduct.
http://www.mesotheliomalawyerssandiego.org/

First result in google for some micro niche. Notice how the articles are over on the right, the page is filled with content relating to the keyword, and adsense is splattered everywhere.

It is a generic site, probably spun articles (used a program to rewrite someone else's articles), but its still in the top of the search engine.

Once I got into SEO, I realized that 90% of the sites I access from random google searches are just there to make adsense money. No upkeep is involved. None of the content is original.

I was searching for "Ford Escort ZX2 2002 install intake" and the first 3 links were all spun articles... BUT I actually found the information I needed in these spun articles. So, how evil is this? Iono.
Maybe simpler, but better? Probably not so much. I wanted red-blacks on a project that couldn't use STL, and found that porting STLPort's <map> red-black to C-with-void*'s was pretty straightforward. Didn't even have to write and debug a red-black tree: <map> is bulletproof.
http://esc.frozeninflames.net/ is a fairly successful scheduler from my university, it is very nice, you might want to look at it for ideas.
There's a lot in what you say about comment voting. It used to be useful, or at least harmless. But now HN has grown so large it has become an injection of dumbness (and often ill will) into the conversation. I plan to try to some design changes to deal with this when I have time, maybe in April. I'll probably get rid of the display of point numbers on comments.
Nitpick: Site needs to add style="outline-style:none;" to the flash players.
These debt graphs are notoriously variable. Google "debt as a percent of GDP" and you will find all sorts of diagrams each showing a different percentage.

Some show the U.S.A. at 98% of GDP, others show it at 60%, and still others fall somewhere in between.

There is "what is owed" versus "what is obligated" versus "what is projected."

No wonder I'm the first to comment in over an hour.
Be-Ware Of Predators
People who are nothing but Demons are trying to exploit this economy situation. In this country the recruiters business has become a laughing thing. I have been asked by a few recruiters for the social security number. Since I am looking for a job I politely told them let the interview be over and a if the job is offered and I get an appointment order I will then furnish all the required personal information. The recruiters say that the clients, they take all big clients' names want this number.I said you tell the client that the candidate is not wiling to give it till the interview is over. Actually no client asks for your SSN until a job offer is made. If you go on C2C you need only an EIN. With the facility of internet available I think all clients should do away with these recruiters/vendors. Let candidates apply on the company web site. They can screen the resumes and interview a few. They are not employing rocket scientists or looking for Einsteins.Many of the recruiters have zero technical knowledge and they call themselves technical recruiters. The system has been spoiled beyond repair.
Worry only if you get successful ... It going to take a while. Make sure your code is easily portable in a hosting env.
Cross compile your games to Windows, Xbox 360 and Windows Phone 7
Information Architects Needs Help Mapping the Social Graph
Like the OP, I'm also interested in building up a modest income with a side project. I have a question about it that you seem particularly likely to be able to answer:

How do you go about setting up an LLC from abroad (like you in Japan), and was it the sort of thing that could be done on a shoestring budget?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1161997
Simply, I hold it as a good example because I'm working on my own startup and the Ad does a good job of summarising what a software engineering role should be advertised as.

No false promises of using technology X or Y, and no over inflated expectations of the kind of knowledge expected from a candidate. A startup is all about learning and using the best tool for the right job with a hands on approach.
Interesting that although I am the second of two, the "Only Child" description matches me much, much more accurately than the others.

It's always the way that statistics are fine in aggregate, but for the exception, it's 100%. For me, the descriptions of the characteristics of the "child-by-place" are simply all wrong.
on the other hand there are a few advantages from it.

1. if Google ever decides to acquire you, for them it'll be as easy as flipping a switch.

2. if Google ever screws with you...think of all the press you'll get