skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've always felt that if I ever cashed out big on something, I'd probably put a good chunk of the money into building a charitable foundation and make the foundation my fulltime job. If you have the money to invest and you've already been successful at founding an organization, why not invest in something that can continue to fund raise and keep giving over the long term?
sounds like 100k is a lot more than you need for a solid version 1 if you cobbled together a tool with no programming skills.

1. write a 1 page summary of the product and feature set, with the requirements above. be detailed enough to cover the requirements; you can still make this document pretty vague if you're worried about disclosure but you're going to have to reveal the product at some point - i wouldn't sweat it too much as you're not going to be posting this around the web.

2. make a list of requirements, one to two sentences for each feature; put requirements into buckets - priority 1,2,3. focus on building the pri 1 features in the first version. _be ruthless about keeping this feature set small_. don't say things like "iphone client" - that's too big - more like "a web client dashboard with my sales funnel, with ability to sort, filter, and query". then describe what type of filtering, querying, etc in separate requirements. then "an iphone view of my sales funnel with a simplified list of fields", "ability to respond to emails via the iphone client", etc.

with this summary and list of high level requirements, you can start soliciting developers and getting feedback on how hard it will be to build; you could try odesk/elance but i'd stay away from those because they're better for finding lone wolves and not cohesive teams. if you do use them, don't pick the cheapest people - there are some other threads on HN about how to do it successfully.

you will learn a LOT by seeing how your potential developers respond to this "RFP" - if they have detailed feedback, ask good clarifying questions, and can point to similar projects and have anecdotes of what made past projects work, then you're on the right track.

i both bid on and subcontract work and i've found that i can tell very quickly by the questions a potential developer asks whether the project will be successful. with this budget you don't want to hire a solo guy but be wary of the teams where the BD/sales guy promises a lot but doesn't seem to be adding a lot of value - it's better to work with teams where all the members are technical and participating in the actual end result.

actually, there are some people i could possibly recommend, email me.
Maybe this becomes more important in the case when you have millions.
I'm upvoting you for asking good questions.

-Not vaporware. I have a prototype I've been using to sell my own products. That's how I make $5k/month right now. The problem is that there's no way anyone other than me could use the code I cobbled together to do what I do. Heck, it's a pain for me for me to do it. I have to edit a few text files and swap some arrays around each time I make a sale.

-Team. This is a good point. Had I applied to something like Y-Combinator they would have said to come back when I have some technical founders. The organization providing this grant does not have that sort of dev-centric culture however, so they did not ask this.

That's really as detailed as I feel comfortable getting. I've changed a few details in my post to further protect folks, but the facts are more or less as they're stated.
Yeh, myself and another guy are writing a 'codesmackdown' site (source code here: http://bitbucket.org/OJ/codesmackdown ) as a side-project, not as a money-maker, entirely for fun. Life keeps getting in the way though.

So far the only good thing to come out of this project is that I wrote a cheatsheet for mercurial, as I'm a noob and keen to help other noobs ;-)
http://www.secretgeek.net/mercurial_flow.asp
Thanks! I'll give it a look.
The comments at that link are beautiful. If you're the sort who likes to skip comments, I encourage you to view them in this case.

I'd like to highlight a point of dissonance between the title ("How mathematicians think...") and the actual request ("anything that makes it easier to see, for example, the linking of spheres") -- emphasis mine.

I find the identification between visualization and intuition revealing. As a rule, mathematicians must be able to reason about things they cannot even begin to visualize -- non-measurable sets, infinities so large they need special names, infinite linear combinations of orthogonal functions.

That's not to devalue attempts at visualization. They're useful for developing intuition. But the original joke works because the mathematician is perfectly happy reasoning in hyperspace even though he cannot see it. The fourth dimension is not particularly harder to describe than the nth.
With limitless resources, how do you determine what is truly worth your time?

When do you think, "okay, this project is worth a chunk of my life," and then stick with it?

And then, once you do finally stick with something, something better will come along eventually. What do you do then? You're not tied to your job like a normal person, so you can't say, "if only I had the freedom, I would do that better thing..."

I had never realized how much meaning the "institution" gives to life.
Let's take Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates. Smart? Yes. Hard working? Yes. But are they 1,000 or 10,000 times harder working and smarter than the average techie? No way.

They were indeed working their asses off in the right place at the right time.
And yet anybody who has spent any time learning about or working with Linux understands how fundamentally important the GNU tools are. If, a long time ago, he had been more gracious and not essentially made a joke out of the fact that the OS is called Linux much more than it's called GNU, I could easily imagine a present where he is seen as one of the fundamental co-creators of the operating system most commonly called 'Linux'—or, to be honest, Ubuntu—rather than a crank who will hunt you down if you don't say the word 'slash' out loud. GNU's mindshare is only so lousy because they're so famous for a silly insistence on an inconvenient and irrelevant nomenclature.
Sounds like a great time to become an angel investor in the market that you're familiar with. Join an angel group, spend 6 months learning your way around before you make an investment. Spend the first five years making small investments, but don't lead rounds, rather find successful angels who you respect and trust, and join rounds that they're funding. At least, that's what I would do.
You may want to post here: http://helpastartupout.com/

Here's a dev looking for a project: http://helpastartupout.com/2010/05/16/tech-team-looking-for-...
I fail to see how saying that I am disappointed that something hasn't been mentioned is saying "most of the adivce in the HN comments is crap" or is imposing my beliefs on others.

Saying people should think about something does neither and makes strong assumptions about what I think without evidence.

And btw -- I have found the advice across the recent threads to be high quality, particularly that relating to the Graham/Buffet value investing.
The original Ask HN post he speaks about is probably a lie anyway. But that doesn't make it a good conversation starter.

"I'm a 20 year old guy who sold his company last month for $5m in cash. I really don't know what to do with the money or how to manage it. I never gave it a thought and now suddenly I have $5m."

You'd think he'd be smart enough, given he's just made $5m at 20. No further comments left by radicaltype either.
I might be willing to help you develop your tool; I'd need to hear more. I'd definitely be willing to help you screen developers, or even help you write your advertisement.

njl@njl.us
From what I read, the plant is practically a self-contained city; most of the workers actually live at the plant.

Obviously that's something that's really hard to adjust for, living at your place of work, but the best start would be to identify if all the people who committed suicide at the plant, also lived at the plant

(I may be grossly incorrect here; I'm about to doze off, and my memory sucks most of the time anyway. If I'm wrong, my apologies.)
Well, if you want it to develop an intuition for mechanical physics, sure. but that doesn't required for intelligence (and even if it were - connect the thing to a Havok-based sim).

You're right that for an intelligence to develop as humans' do, it needs constant feedback. But there are billions (?) of humans on the web...there are ways for an AI to get feedback.

Okay, though. I do see your point...human-like strong AI might grow better in a robot body than as pure software, other things being equal. It's a maybe, for a subset of AIs (those that develop like human intelligences), but fair enough.
A bit offtopic (from thinking about R^n to visualizing it), but I recommend reading about parallel coordinate systems.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_coordinates
i suggest people in a similar circumstance watch LE NOTTI DI CABIRIA. it doesn't seem like it's on topic, but it may be (incidentally, i just saw the film and thought it was pretty good).

anyway, money is such a hard thing for so many people in the world. my biggest advice, if you don't have a lot of ideas for research projects yourself, is probably to put yourself on a path where you can find people who truly need help that you can partly provide. it has to interest you or else it won't be sustainable. but if you can, with patience, find that path, you'll have locally maximized the use of the money just as you've largely maximized making money.
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I saw him talking at Sri Lanka Institute of Technology (SLIIT), Sri Lanka in 1997 and he was a lot different than what you say your experience is. He answered the questions from audience and it was really a fun event. He was steady about his views about "GNU" and "Linux" but he wasn't harsh by any means.

Anyway I always expect him to be the way I saw him because the moment he start to be sloppy about his ideas, the same people who name him as an extremist will say "see, even the president of FSF, the oh-so-holy leader of `free software thing` is sloppy about his own idea".
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We rely on the machines as much as they rely on us.
Wait. You mean people thought they didn't?

I'm not at all experienced in the realm of animal activism as it relates to lobsters and crabs, but did people really think that animals didn't feel something akin to pain if you ripped their limbs off? Pain is a vital mechanism/motivation for survival and thus evolutionarily advantageous. Maybe some complex animals don't have it, but they'd have to be pretty weird (although I admit, lobsters and crabs would be in the right category-- it's not going to be a vertebrate that feels no pain-- they aren't particularly unique in terms of how they grow and die).
Philip Greenspun did address this in an article on a similar subject: http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/early-retirement/ (scroll down to section "Non-profits are NOT the Answer" if you don't want to read the whole thing).
Let me preface by saying that I haven't been in a position to hire someone.

However, I think switching jobs a fair amount can even be a benefit. It depends on what your references say. If they really think highly of you, it's not only a good reference, but also says that you really impressed someone in a short amount of time. In other words, you learned what was needed and were productive very quickly.

Now, you can certainly argue, "why would I hire someone who will only be here a year and half?", but if that person is a great person, they're going to produce more than a lot of people would be in 2 or 3 years.

Maybe, I'm just biased and think that the best people like to change it up a lot to keep things interesting.
Should Open Web Advocates Remain Independent?
Thanks for the reminder Alex.

Maybe I'll catch you at the next Sproutup, good to see locals here.
I know, but lacking a how or why, I thought perhaps there was another explanation :)
Could also be that employees took advantage of the situation, laying off people and working the remaining ones harder, who couldn't just quit because their prospects elsewhere weren't much better.
I don't know of any hosting company that in case of downtime will give you anything more than the money back (prorated for the duration of the downtime for example); basically their liability is limited to the fee in their ToS.
Yeah, the latest round of patches was pretty big, and it's nice they keep doing it. But it's also kinda sad they didn't make some of the critical changes earlier / yet. I have a feeling a lot of the motivation behind the updates was to get people to buy them before SC2/D3 comes out.
Except in the "I can make it myself" survivalist way. ;)
Book Short: There is No Blueprint to $1B
A great read from David Foster Wallace, "Consider the Lobster" from Gourmet magazine

http://www.gourmet.com/magazine/2000s/2004/08/consider_the_l...
Like most other attributes, attitude and intelligence need to be considered with the whole. You can have a great attitude and no intelligence, but that won't get you anywhere, and neither will extreme intelligence and a bad attitude.

Of course, every programmer needs a mix of attitude and intelligence to be effective. For my part, I'd rather hire an average programmer with a good attitude than an excellent programmer with a bad attitude; clock cycles are much cheaper than the friction caused by a rogue developer.
That sounds impressive and popular with all the 'the market doesn't work/they're all corrupt' type of outrage currently doing the rounds, but the failures of ratings companies to correctly rate highly complex debt instruments doesn't make them all useless.

The fact remains there are a lot of simple, understandable securities which the ratings companies are across and have a long history of payments to look back on. I'm talking about corporate bonds where you can assess the creditworthiness of the company, government (non-US) bonds of stable and credit-worthy nations that pay much more than 0-1%
And even we privileged techies sometimes have to take our phones into the subway or onto a plane.
Ditto on FUSE. I use fusecompress to store a lot of CSV data on my SSD. It was a solution borne of necessity -- I skimped on capacity when buying the SSD -- but it worked very well.

http://code.google.com/p/fusecompress/
Yahoo still exists? How quaint.
You'd have to think there would be a lot more freedom on something relatively new and moving as fast as android. It may not always be that way though.
Er, I do think this particular Emperor is wearing clothes...
Top 1000 sites by uniques
With analytics from Google's adplanner. via @ptorrone. Oh, skipped to the end and saw dropbox categorized as myth and folklore, hah.
That's a pretty difficult topic of its own. Philanthropy is like investing, except much more difficult. The good news is, like investing, you have time to think and learn.

Philip Greenspun has some interesting thoughts: http://philip.greenspun.com/non-profit/ and http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/early-retirement/
That applies to anyone with enough savings to sustain a reasonable period of unemployment and enough skills that a variety of organizations would want to have you. In the computer field, that should be most decent programmers that have been out of college for more than 18 months or so.

I don't really understand this idea of being tied to a job. I'm not wealthy, I'm not financially independent. But if something better comes along, I do have the freedom to go do that instead. It doesn't really take all that much - a few years living expenses and a few marketable skills give you all the cushion you need.

And then, of course, you're faced with the "what do I do with my life" question. But I thought all 20-somethings (well, all middle-class 20-somethings in developed nations) faced that.
I wouldn't call it limitless.. Having a few million in the bank just allows you to better utilize the 60-70 years you have on the planet.
I've built a few sites that aren't huge but definitely pass the 1 million unique user/month mark. Most were content sites, ad-supported. The only time a privacy policy was ever brought up was when Remnant Ad providers required them.

As suggested in other comments, I'd say put up a generic ToS, apologize for anything that comes in, and pay for a lawyer to analyze it when you really have the money to do it.

And to answer your question, $1.5-2k is fairly standard for a document like this.
It floats.

Until it forms into little tarballs, and then sinks below the surface of the water. Combined with the "safe" dispersant BP is using to thin the oil, it helps the whole sinking process go faster.

The size of this overlay is more so a depiction of the "core" spill. The slick above and below water extends to a much larger area, and also moves around daily.
Were all 10 of these suicides from FoxConn's Shenzhen plant (population 330,000)?

If so, perhaps a fair basis of comparison would be the suicide rate at other manufacturing plants, along with the general suicide rate for working employees.

I imagine anyone with work and employment is less likely to commit suicide than the general population (though I haven't seen the statistics). The question is, is working at FoxConn more stressful than other comparable employers?
The Mother of All Investing Evils
Is Google Fracturing Java?
You don't need pain if you can't learn from it. If your environment is stable enough that you can operate entirely by innate reflex, there's no reason to waste genetic selection pressure on crafting sensations for the benefit of some passive, ineffectual observer inside the lobster. Or the observer itself, for that matter. Its almost certainly true that lobsters feel pain (response to analgesics is damn convincing), but it isn't obviously true without evidence like this study.
People there take social internet sites waaay too seriously.
Their article on the reddit post talking about models without makeup (http://jezebel.com/5526597/ridiculous-men-slam-models-withou...) was one of the dumbest things Ive read in a while. Getting all butthurt because women who are essentially paid because they look attractive get judged on their attractiveness? Grow up please. Not to mention people on reddit, as well as most of the internet in general, are sarcastic assholes to everyone, not just makeup-free models.

Btw did you notice the "digg this" next to the article? cute
Yeah, that didn't come out like I wanted it to and I didn't really mean to say anything about your article, but rather the comment... I was going to edit it, but I guess I just deleted it, so either way never mind.
email me: hndevel@gmail.com

I'm an experienced Rails developer in the Bay Area.
Haven't heard of that particular case, but the Therac-25 caused six people to receive 100 times the amount of radiation intended, killing three of them.

There were a number of issues, many UI-related, but what I found most interesting was that the prior Therac machines, which ran the same software, had hardware interlocks that allowed them to operate safely, masking software bugs. When the hardware interlocks were removed in the Therac-25, the buggy software was able to make the machine misbehave dangerously.

Citation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
I know this goes against common sentiment. But I am going to disagree with the notion of going on your own and just investing in index funds.

It's not as easy as it sounds to stay consistent with it over time (years, decades). I did all the research, read a bunch of books, and used up a lot of my time when I was looking into investing. I picked an asset allocation strategy, and planned to contribute regularly and rebalance annually.

That just didn't happen. Rebalancing annually didn't. Contributing in a timely fashion didn't. My income goes up and down, I have to pay quarterly estimates, so I do keep some degree of excess cash. invariably, I forget to invest the difference for long periods of time.

In the end I hired a financial person to just handle it and manage my money. Yes, there is a drag on returns because of it. But the alternative was being out of the market for periods of time, or off balance. Anyway, just another opinion.
Not too much slower (well, you're bringing Ruby into the picture, so maybe it is after all ;).

According to [1], NTFS-3G (FUSE) is basically on par with XFS (native), only slightly slower on rewriting. ZFS on FUSE reads almost as fast and lacks in write speed, which is reasonable---it's not optimised in the slightest and ZFS has a reputation for being somewhat slow even on Solaris, where it is native. Not too shabby, I think. (It's a benchmark, though. Your mileage may vary.)

1: http://www.csamuel.org/2007/04/25/comparing-ntfs-3g-to-zfs-f...
quick byte:
-(37signals before DH) During a job interview in which JF wasnt very serious about landing the job, he randomly met an acquaintance. This person agreed to work for 37signals as a designer. This person brought a former client with him to 37signals. This client spent atleast 200,000 in services from 37signals.

Who knows how 37signals would have turned out without that 200k during its early years.
This was 37signals big break, not saying it "made" 37signals, just saying that 200k obviously helps and luck was a factor.
Source: a mixergy interview with JF.
There were two great quotes from the math book i used last semester.

The first was the most mathematicians equate geometry with understanding. In otherwords, if you can describe (draw) a picture that represents what you are talking about, then you really understand it.

The second was that not all math is something you can visualize. In that some of the beauty of math is that it can describe things beyond humans abilities of perception, and that it is precisely in these cases that math is its most useful.