skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Can a very skilled quitter make good money?
Hypothetically ...

Assume a friend of mine has this problem. He's a very fast programmer, according to anyone who has worked with him. It's not because he gradually replaces all code with his own; people notice after a day or two. Actually, I've never met anyone who can write code or debug even nearly as fast. He can deal with almost any programming task, as evidenced by the huge array of problems he's been working on professionally and on his spare time. He thinks programming is trivial, and that the real problem is figuring out what you want. When he's hired to perform a task, he sees it through to completion, and he's never late for work or appointments. Most of his jobs have been console game programming. He's confident and extroverted.

But it seems like these skills count for nothing when he tries to act entrepeneurial. He'll make an impressive demo within a week, before he gets distracted and starts doing something else. Sometimes he decides to really put an effort into making a project into a product, allowing no design changes after a short design phase, except culling unnecessary features. This can give him up to three weeks before he puts the project permanently on hold. In his own words, he seems unable to complete any meaningfully large project if he's not bound by a contract. There has been tens of attempts.

His ambitions aren't unheard of: around 50 USD per day of automated income, in order to get rid of the obligation to perform mundane work for others, leaving him free to travel and make art. If I had a friend like this, what should he be doing to accomplish his goal?
Side note: why is this article (atm, 64 points 2 hours ago) below one on the home page with 22 points submitted 3 hours ago?
Pure gimmick. Universities shouldn't build for proprietary systems. What's wrong with building for a browser with web standards?
The last 3 times I've fiddled with a Nook in B&N, I've been extremely disappointed. "Lame" comes to mind strongly. I've crashed it all 3 times, and the UI is opaque and non-intuitive to say the least. Two Nooks have also had burned-in images from the "screensaver" that took a good 20+ screen changes to completely eliminate.

The Kindle is infinitely better, but it's still laughably far from a product I'd actually buy because of how locked-down it is.
El pato zambrano contra Carlos Miloc Video
En este video se puede ver que tan bajo pueden caer los periodistas en mexico por llamar la atencion
U.S. Declassifies Part of Secret Cybersecurity Plan
I see a white square with nothing in it.
Tell HN: Feature idea... mark the last link I clicked
I often click a story, read it, then come back and read the comments. Or, I will read the comments, click back, and then read the story.

Either way, it often takes me a couple seconds to find the story I was reading. It gets grayed out like all the other links I have read, and there's nothing to mark that was the one I clicked.

So, how about making the last link I clicked orange or something like that? It will save me much time and make the site easier to read.
Of course Gladwell "stole" it from other people before him. It's not a new idea.
Have you had any issues with data loss after a crash? I've seen a few people in the IRC channel saying that they lost tens of millions of records after running a repair after a crash. While replication can help prevent data loss, having to reinsert millions of records really puts a load on the other nodes when you bring one up after a crash.
Top 6 iPhone Apps Every Teaching Major Should Use
There are various iPhone apps out there meant for students pursuing a teaching major. Here we present six of the best iPhone apps that every teaching major should use.
Dr Nic ’s Customized Google Forms
There's a lot more to this game than chinese poker, try it and you'll see. I don't disagree that it has a lot less to it than lowball, it might even be possible to write a program to compute ideal play for it, but doing so is distinctly non-trivial, and it requires some distinct effort to play reasonably on even typical hands, much less the interesting ones.
I've had the same experience. Having the interface split between a color touchscreen and a non-touch e-ink screen is bad enough but did they have to screw up basic navigation on top of that?
This is less true every day. Facebook-specific companies like Zynga, Playdom, etc. have huge ad spends on Facebook.

Facebook ads are also valuable for highly localized companies like Groupon, because you get fine-grained demographic control.

The CPC of Facebook ads has probably risen by 50-60% over the last year, and it's only going up.
For lack of something hilarious I went on to watch this video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Cd7Bsp3dDo
sadly, yes. i used to read his blog when it was good natured poking of fun at the tech industry (arrington, scoble etc) but since he seems to have developed some issue with tech crunch, he has become vindictive, nasty and nothing more than an internet troll.
You may be able to profit from smaller opportunities than they can profitably exploit.
revenue. at&t can charge yahoo/bing as the default browser/search engine on their android handsets
I've designed other games, but not many other good games. Mostly I invent mechanical puzzles.

Ambition and Ludic are oddball concepts which inherently can't ever get mainstream appeal. I try to make things with much more widespread appeal.
The real secret sauce: sleep, variety.
I recently wrote about my experience in transitioning to barefoot running. http://suburbiarebooted.blogspot.com/2010/01/how-i-became-ba... Bonus-- I was doing it before it was cool. :-P
I think Google will do nothing about this. If the Yahoo users are not satisfied jwith the non-google experience they will install apps from then android market that do use Google or whatever they wish to use. It would be interesting to see what happens if the first distributor is closing their Android distribution so this is impossible for users. I hope the OHA forbids labeling such a closed system Android.
From silly to hardcore stuff, like philosophy, sociology and literature critique. From novels to strictly technical books about management.

I was able to fluently speak about postmodernism, and I was a complete imbecile.

If your idea of hardcore is literary critique and postmodernism, perhaps you were reading the wrong (IMHO) books. Have you ever tried "Surely you're joking, Mr Feynman", "Godel, Escher and Bach", or anything by say, Terry* Pratchett?

* whose opinion of literary critique is neatly summed up by this quote:

'I save about twenty drafts -- that's ten meg of disc space -- and the last one contains all the final alterations. Once it has been printed out and received by the publishers, there's a cry here of 'Tough shit, literary researchers of the future, try getting a proper job!' and the rest are wiped.'
The title was more about mirroring the Aqua song, less about me being an actual Barbie Girl. I'm personally a mix of alot of things. More a wannabe 80s rock star than anything else.. if only I could sing. :)
as far as I'm concerned this is exactly how it should be
if windows os's in the EU gives user a choice of browser/search engine and does just push IE. The same should apply to smartphones.
I dislike the fact that google products are so tied in into android. I should have the option to choose the apps I want even if they are from google.
There are a ton of smart people on Wall St who aren't quants. And I personally know startups being started because of exactly what the parent said.

Incidentally based on my experience of NY, a seldom noticed major drag on startups is that by default if you create a startup while working for someone else, your employer can declare it a work for hire and just take all of the associated intellectual property. (Said default is reinforced by the standard employment contracts.) In California your right to own what you do in your own time with your own property is protected by state law. This is huge.

How many startups never happen because people have been burned by this, or know people who have been burned by this?
I also read on my commute. But since I only have to walk eight minutes, I usually get through no more than one article in the Economist --- with all the traffic and that.
I'm a bit confused about your last sentence. Are you saying that the dev OSes will cause more outages, but we can automated that they won't be major?

The first thought that popped into my head while reading this article was how ZFS snapshots would work for versioning system deployments. Though I'm sure that's snapshots at a lower level than most people would actually use.
> If it was clear to both parties that the other did not enjoy the same activities... why would you expect to be invited to those activities? Why would it bother you to not be invited to an activity you probably would not enjoy?

Agreed. The main feel I get from the article seems to be frustration about how she doesn't fit in, but that and it's inevitable result are not her fault, and not the other people's fault. We are more than happy to have diverse people working in our field, and it's totally ok to like different things.
I really don't like get Satisfaction very much at all.

I prefer email support any day.
That's true of any strategy in any situation in which your strategy affects the behavior of whatever system you're interacting with.

i.e. value investing works, but if everyone does it then people will undervalue intangibles. If everyone chooses to be honest, the first fibber will rule the world. If everyone is violent, the first non-violent group will waste fewer resources. Etc.
Apple Goes Offensive On Patents: Sues HTC
Get away from the computer (or internet).
Ask HN: Incentive Mechanisms to Promote User Activity? (karma/badges, etc)
What are you thoughts about various incentive mechanisms to promote users active. There was a interesting talk in #startups last night about this, and I think a bigger audience would find it interesting as well.

For example the most basic method is Karma/Points for submission and getting voted up (such as HN, Reddit).

A variation of the above system is propagating points from child-to-parent. For example voting a child item/comment will also give points to it's parent (or fraction of a point) to the parent. This way items that start active discussions or activity with child submissions are promoted with more points.

Another is a badge/achievement system. StackOverflow is one, where users can collect various type of badges for doing certain things or reaching milestones. (Someone brough up Xbox live as well, where achievements not only for positive aspects, but also for glorious fails... so who knows). A twist on this is not only having badges, but also having badges convert to point values.

Collecting or having points them selves imho is not all that useful other than for bragging and/or pulling rank. I think being able to redeem/trade them in for various features or more leverage on a activity in the site is much more useful. For example in SO's case, you can trade in your points for bounties on questions.

Did I miss any other major point/incentive type systems? So, what are you thoughts/comments/criticisms regarding this?
Ask HN: I created a landing page to find potential customers. Any tips?
Hello HN! I'm working on a startup that sells datasets from ongoing Web crawls. I detailed more of what I'm doing here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1160408

I "tossed together" a landing page [ http://webscaled.com/ ] after reading an article on HN describing how the author met success selling e-books online. I'm trying to find potential customers now, mostly by tracking AdWords campaigns to see who is signing up for the newsletter.

Are there other ways that I can try to locate potential customers during this brief "landing page" period? Should I even attempt to contact other bloggers about my startup, or should I wait until the product is online?
Living in Seattle was the same thing. Tons of people who had a chip on their shoulders about the Bay Areas's startup scene. It was a constant onslaught of locals trying to prove that Seattle's was just as vibrant.
Yeah, that's a good point.

I guess I think that I would have enjoyed some of the activities (e.g. I do watch some Sci-fi flicks), but as they had a perception of me not being like them, they assumed I wouldn't like anything at all.

But, right, ultimately, its about realizing that I am not as interested in most of the things that my colleagues were interested in, and I am hoping that the diversity of my colleagues increases so that would not be the case.

I seek out other stuff like dance lessons, art classes, etc, but it does take time to meet the strangers at those activities. I still prefer that stuff (even if its by myself) to going to the pub, which is the defacto activity around here.
Farmville accused of mishandling Haiti donation campaign
What if Blackwater mercenaries had killed your 9 year old in a public square?
I'm sorry but you lost me at 'BDUF', what does it mean? (Google results seems to agree on "Big Design Up Front" but I still do not understand)
Apple Sues HTC
An Ad hominem attack is an attack which cites an irrelevant quality of a person to discredit them. Citing a relevant behavior of someone is well within acceptable discourse.

Suppose a famous scientist is exposed as having faked a well-know result. Does that make you go back and look at his or her other results? Well, yes.

Someone tells you to put health first while selling a product widely disparaged as destroying people health? Relevant, I'd believe so.
DRM? The consumer says no and he always wins So give him what he wants.
Apple sues HTC for iPhone patent infringement
Apple sues HTC
It lags a lot. That's really the only problem I see with it. A share link would be cool so it could be like tokbox.
As someone who's never really been able to break into coding my biggest problem with most of the learning material is it does not tackle a broader perspective on problem solving. Learning syntax and libraries is easy. Knowing where to apply them and how to architect your program is the really hard part. I'm not sure how you learn that other than experience and for a novice that means countless hours of work before they can produce anything unique and useful.
Did you really need to post this story 5 times from 5 different sources?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1162941
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1162940
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1162937
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1162936
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1162930

Edit: make that 6. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1162925
Edit: 7: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1162947

Anyone moderating this: is there even a rule against this?
G.ho.st’s Web-Based Operating System To Shut Down March 15
The Drunk Test for Your Product
Here is a very easy, one-minute way to evaluate your product:

Go out drinking with a bunch of people. When you’re all hammered in a crowded and noisy bar together, explain what your product does to them.

If they get what you’re doing, you are onto something.

If they don’t or lose interest (or vomit) you have some work to do.
Apple sues HTC for infringing 20 iPhone patents
Campus wisdom states: At MIT, you can have enough sleep, good grades, or a social life. Pick two.

The monthly three-day weekends are nice though.
FYI -

The Barbie lets the girl unlock extra content online related to the career, so presumably its programming related stuff.

Its also covered in binary code, which may get some girls curious about that. Binary math is a good gateway drug for engineering. :)
what does this mean for the adoption of cloud-based operating systems?

Is it really a marketplace adaption problem or an execution problem?
Note: This is "dev" release. 1.2.x is the current production release.
America needs more software experts, Defense Department says
He watched Alien with his smallish kids?
They killed so many civilians without any apparent reason with such brutality and impunity including this 9 year old whose brain came out and fell between his father's feet as he watched him die.

Worst of all they denied it all and told the congress they were defending themselves. They were acquitted in the court for all counts and I would not be surprised if they were acquitted for killing this young innocent child.

This is not an isolated incident and these were not the only rogue mercenaries in Iraq. It seems we have forgotten our values of liberty and justice for all.
Site Maps, An Important Part of a Website’s Diet
Hello world for bare metal ARM using QEMU
Learning a language vs. learning a culture
CheckMyCode Fail
Thanks very much. I look forward to trying out a Zune.
Carsonified - How to choose a business model
NYC here, and I am really sick of hearing about this.

I just don't care anymore.
If your license won't hold up in court, then you might as well not bother with one. You really can't be cavalier about the langauge in your contracts.

Take the recent landmark case of Jacobsen v. Katzer -- Jacobsen nearly lost because he was using a slightly oddball open source license (the Artistic License) that was not written by a lawyer, had some ambiguous passages, and didn't quite say what he intended.

Sure, it's less of an issue with an extremely permissive license like this one, but let's imagine you aren't around any more and some company wants to use your code... but they can't because their legal department doesn't trust the license.
Anyone know what tool is used to draw the graph in the post? Is that an open javascript library?
“It turns out”
Ballmer: Google leads because 'they did it right first'
No.

It will drive a few publishers out of business, but that trend has been going on for years.
IPhone app review shakedown
From http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1112881

What's usually the biggest mental hurdle for hackers to transition into entrepreneurs?

pg: Coming to terms with the effort required.
Ah well that's just sloppy or shady. No excuse for that.
Your Username Does Not Belong To You
On the other hand, there's a good chance that the opinions of the people in their test groups are completely arbitrary, and will change once they hear the opinion of their early-adopting designer friends. Also, the UI looks like it was designed for (and/or by) marketing people, not designers.
Actually, that's another problem with a lot of martial arts that teach particular actions for particular situations. One's ability to remember an complex technique or even a simple move in the middle of a conflict somewhat ... hampered.

Of course, any serious martial art is going to teach stance, balance, "flow", and state of mind as well as particular techniques. The applies to all the arts I've had minimal exposure to: BJJ, Muy Thai, Tai Chi, Aikido. I don't know if this applies to Krav Maga or not - I can only know what the KM people talk about. I'm skeptical of any "too deadly except for da streets" rhetoric from anyone.
brandonkm,

Nice to know that I'm not the only Android user with a Zune. ;-)
Was it a game? I don't know anyone who actually played it, we just built the trap and set it off. :)
Its actually amCharts a flash graphing tool.

http://amcharts.com/
Ten years to become an expert, five years to become... an exp?
Evidence?

I'm on Linix,

I've tried the default readers and they are all horrific.

What would you recommend, seriously. I have never found a pleasant PDF reader on any platform but I'm open to the idea they might exist.
I do not get this stuff about women feeling lonely or ignored in CS. I studied computer engineering (which had even more skewed gender ratios than CS), and there the few women that we had had absolutely no problems being part of our group. In fact if they had any issues, it was getting too much attention.

Of course everybody liked to be friends with the few girls in our classes. Even if we were not attracted to them, it was nice to actually chat with a girl once in a while.
First Look: How Penguin Will Reinvent Books With iPad:UK
Unfortunately, that does seem to be the case at this point, although if anyone has any good references for novices, I'd certainly love to see them. So far, the best I've ever seen the situation summed up has been in the top comment on http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=90782 .
This seems like a bit of divide between 20-somethings and 40-somethings.

I played the original D & D at a kid but there was no crowd for which this meant fitting-in.

The idea of conformist geek culture is something that I've gradually become aware of - just as, I think, geek culture seems to have become more conformist.

Funny...
Ok, but your look is classic geek. Short hair, dyed, eyebrow piercings, barcode shirt? It's totally cute, I'm just saying that you don't seem to be as far away from the stereotypical look as that the slideshow suggests.

Of course, you're welcome to camouflage as much as you like, I'm just sayin'

I think a better example of someone who's like that is Isis (she's in research- but the same sort of thing applies in science too http://scienceblogs.com/isisthescientist/ Exhibit A: http://scienceblogs.com/isisthescientist/weekly_shoe/ Exhibit B: http://scienceblogs.com/isisthescientist/2008/11/on_the_need... )
The question to ask yourself is what exactly were you trying to learn from philosophy, sociology and literature critique? And why did you think such books would benefit you?

If you read the wrong types of books, the ones that do not resonate with your goals, then you will gain nothing. Reading Tolstoy, when your goals are in physics, will seem like a waste of time, a mere pleasure, sort of like watching a movie or taking a walk. But when your goal is to become a good writer, a better teller of stories, then reading Tolstoy can be an epiphany of sorts. You see how his stylistic effects can be applied to your own writing; how a novel can capture the spirit of the times much more effectively than any historian could, and so on and so forth.

Knowledge is only good when applicable, otherwise it is useless.
Business error leads entrepreneur in new direction
Found it: http://www.ocregister.com/articles/gala-24486-software-resta...
Why not use .json/.csv instead of embedding it midway through the URL?
So you wanna build a javascript widget for your app?
Don't look now, but what's going to be the must-have educational toy for next holiday season?
Similarities Between New Ventures and Hot Women
Mantella Venture Partners Launches in Toronto
A broken link seems, to me, to be far more jarring than omitting the apostrophe entirely.

Incidentally, I doubt it's a bug in HN, merely a lack of feature:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School%27s_Out_%28song%29
They're not really operating systems and they don't do anything that people want.
You could take turns getting rid of people intruding. Division of labour should give you more time to read.
The sex-ratio and geekiness ratio might not be exactly correlated.

Engineering has always been male dominated, for whatever reason. What disturbing about CS is that it has become more male dominated over time.
It's broken for Firefox on Ubuntu too.
I've lost a lot of money chasing women, but few women chasing money. Stick to the cash, the rest will follow.
Worth noting to outsiders that the monthly three-day weekends are colloquially referred to as "suicide-prevention days".