skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
VoltDB replicates synchronously.
Mathematician Decries "Internet Thinking" after Math Exam Panic
The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains
Send it to me, I'll take care of it for you ;)

Here is what I would personally suggest, having encountered a similar scenario once a long time ago...

Find a place to park about $4.9M in a CD, Money Market account, or similar ultra low risk location. Don't get too hung up on getting the absolute best interest rate, just find a place that will give you easy liquidity (ie: DON'T make a 5 year investment right now).

Then, buy and read the following books:
"A Random Walk Guide to Investing" - Burton Malkiel
"The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need" - Andrew Tobias

(and/or any equivalent titles that catch your interest).

Then once you have a good/better understanding of financial investments interview some financial advisors and talk to them in depth about how they plan to manage your assets. Ideally you're looking for something more along the lines of a "wealth manager" vs. a financial advisor.

Killing a year finding the right investment approach while your money makes even a very low percentage rate is, for a 20 year old, a better approach than rushing out and making possibly a bad investment that incurs a big loss, or has tax liabilities you don't fully understand.

In the shorter term, you should find a good local CPA-for-hire and make sure you understand any possible income tax issues. In some (many) cases, if you will owe a large income tax return you will need to pre-pay or make estimated payments. Not doing so can take a big bite out of your ass later (ref: portion above about keeping funds semi-liquid).

BTW, congrats on your success. Take it slow and don't be tempted to believe you know what you're doing or can repeat this easily (learned advice ;) ). You have much time and luxury to plan your next move, and no matter what anyone tells you, you are not missing out on the investment opportunity of a lifetime in the next 24 months and do not need to make any rash decisions.

At the same time, you should sort of off-handedly tell family and friends that you locked in to a great investment and in 5 years or so will be able to access some of the funds. This proactive approach is better than having to say no to all the outreaches for "help" and "personal investments" that tend to come with a large chunk o' cash.
I heartily recommend the Agora Financial Group for many of their newsletters.

http://agorafinancial.com

They have about the most realistic view of the world around. (Read: matches my biases. ;-) Seriously, their founder, Bill Bonner (and his main side-kick, Addison Wiggin) have written a couple of NYT best-sellers that were prescient about the current and past crises.

I also like the fact that they mostly hire St. John's grads, people who've actually gotten something close to a real education.

Back a few years ago when I had money to invest ;-), I used a couple of their newsletters (Penny Stock Fortunes and another I forget right now) over the period of a year or so and (though "the plural of anecdote is not data") made about 40% on my medium-sized investments.

These guys are the real deal.
1. don't change anything about your spending habits.

2. hire a pro to manage it

3. travel all aroudn the world (1 year is cool)

4. come to france and invest in our startup. ;)
Most people click. But still, isn't it better than having to figure out characters and typing them?

Of course, there would be alternatives for people with disabilities.
http://www.itransact.com/marketing/referral/S33oOO
Not much experienced with x86 asm, but you don't seem to be incrementing esi anywhere...

What am I missing?
A journey into sound - Building a phonograph
Huh? This is C (well, asm). If you pass in garbage, you get undefined behaviour (a crash by NULL pointer dereference); this is how all str* functions work. Even

assert(str != NULL)

is being overly generous, I think - if only because a debugger would lead you to the source of the crash immediately.
Unsexy css3 and html5
Facebook's Problem Isn't Privacy
I don't know if CloudCourse allows it, but so long as the data is encrypted in transit and at rest, physical security can be overlooked.
Ha, ply people with drugs, awesome! (I am not even sure, exactly how I feel about this.)
It would be quite a slap to Adobe's face to say that ActionScript is not a valid source language, and then embrace C# as one. I don't know if Adobe's face can withstand any more slappin'.
Hmm, I'm dubious. I can see XCode on Windows, as it increases the developer market share and primes people for a move to Mac. I don't know how they'd do it technically, though - most of the good bits of XCode are based on kernel level dtrace support.

I just can't see them wanting Visual Studio support. It is, pretty much, just better than XCode. Overnight, the superior development platform for an Apple device would be a Windows machine. Unless they're really planning on EOLing OS X and their non iP* businesses, why would they want the best developer environment to be hosted on a rival platform? Killing or abandoning OS X seems insane - desk/laptops still account for 50% of their income, and currently most OS X developers are also targeting iP* devices in parallel with their desktop work. Moreover, the iPhone halo effect is getting them more Mac sales and Mac developers. Whilst they're not hurting for iPhone apps, why give developers the incentive to stop buying Macs, buy Windows, kill off their OS X development, and throw out a hugely profitable segment of Apple's business to gamble on Android not eating their iPhone lunch?

I suspect this is just an analysts "blue sky" nonsense, or a confusion over e.g. development environments for Office 2011 Mac. For reference, this same guy claimed there would be no Mac updates in 2009, and that they'd release a small OLED laptop by the end of 2009. 0 for 2 so far, and I'm guessing 0 for 3.
How To Create Online Surveys For Free Using Google Docs
I've Changed My Mind About The iPad
Feh, another rent-seeker.

Can any of you cite examples where a "failure" of private sector investment has been redeemed by government?

(Scare quotes for failure because this sort of thing is telling us one or more important things.)
Many thanks to everyone for such great responses.
Questions like this one puzzle me, not least of which because I was recently in a very similar situation, and it never in a million years would have occurred to me to ask HN for advice. I mean, I love you people here, honest I do, but when I need legal advice, I go to my lawyer. When I need medical advice, I go to my doctor. And when I need financial advice, I go to my financial advisor.

You don't have a financial advisor? Well, I assume you have a lawyer, and I assume you have a banker-- ask them for recommendations. You might also ask the pros who were on your board of directors prior to the sale.
I would be miserable making a steady $60,000/year.
I was going to contribute to the list when I saw the call go out. But I didn't know I could make an anonymous contribution. Maybe I'm not yet read to admit the failure is actually a failure all the while the lights are still on.

The main thing to take away is that the formula for success is pretty simple but so many developers ignore it because they think they know better, or are just attracted to the technical challenge like moths to a flame. But if you want to make money with software, you've got to get everything right : the market, the price, the functionality, the presentation, the features. If you do get all this right, well, there's no easier way to make cash if all the skills you have involve using a compiler.
> Ignoring the homeless, or begging off, carries its own problems.

Don't do either, then. If you don't want to give money, just give a polite and firm "no". I can't believe that anybody takes such a response personally.

To be honest, it's no wonder this guy is harassed by the homeless if he is handing out $100 to them inside a week.
Just a little extra bit of history on Aspect.pm: http://hanekomu.at/blog/dev/20100527-1202-aspect_oriented_pr...
stosb = store sequential byte increments the destination pointer, just like lodsb increments the source pointer.
CD rates are at 1% and are only FDIC insured up to $250K. I'm not convinced any bank will let you buy a $4.9 million CD. Although I'm sure brk is as smart as anyone I wouldn't take tips from random people on the internet.

Whenever these types of questions appear I find them a bit hard to believe. The anonymous OP suddenly has $5M in cash? There's just a un-cashed check for $5M hidden in the sock drawer? Where is the money now? As soon as you show up at a bank with more than $100K you're going to be swarmed with people suggesting various things to do with your money. Hasn't the OP already had to deal with all the tax and legal surrounding a transaction like this? He or she should be familiar with a flotilla of financial professionals by now.
Bring back M3 reporting by the Fed. Everyone should be able to get this measure at the same time and for free.

But for now we can use: http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/money-supply-chart...
Actually, I believe Hawaii is homeless heaven:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1266759...
Although I have only 50K that I want to set to work, I'm facing the same basic question. However, given the current economic climate, I think sound advice is impossible. The usual safe advice, park it somewhere 'low risk', is virtually useless, as nothing is 'low risk' at the moment. Banks and complete countries are on the verge of collapse, which makes savings accounts, deposits and bonds risky. Something reasonably stable, like gold, also has problems: unless you have the stuff physically in your posession, the investment may turn out to be worthless, as the one that owes you the stuff can't deliver. And should the worst happen, than even gold physically in your possession may be worthless, because: who will take it, when its value is unclear and everyone wants food and fuel? The nutritional value of gold is pretty low.
How many HNers do you think know x86 assembly so well that simply seeing the structure of the code gives away the answer? :)
Your analogy fails miserably.

If your grocery store fails to refrigerate otherwise perfectly good milk, the analogy to the App Store would be that Apple injected GPL code into the app.

No, if Nabisco violates a copyright agreement with the box design of some cookies, and your grocery store sells them (unknowingly), the grocery store is not at fault.
I already do have an alternative resume. It's my blog. Recruiters and HR people usually end up on it and many have written me personally to comment on something I wrote long ago. It works just like you describe but it is more descriptive of my true self than some quirks or characteristics. People remember me, but not because I passingly mentioned that I was training for an ultramarathon but because I wrote a 4 page blog entry sharing my experience as a first-time runner.

Also, there could be legal ramifications for companies who read things like skin color on alt. resumes. A hiring manager would rather not know your race or age till after they've selected or dropped your resume for the phone interview round.
For an example of healing, from wikipedia:

"The adoption of Christianity as the state religion of the Roman Empire drove an expansion of the provision of care. The First Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. urged the church to provide for the poor, sick, widows, and strangers. It ordered the construction of a hospital in every cathedral town. Among the earliest were those built by the physician Saint Sampson in Constantinople and by Basil, bishop of Caesarea. The latter was attached to a monastery and provided lodgings for poor and travelers, as well as treating the sick and infirm. There was a separate section for lepers.[15]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospital
What was your company called?
Given the state of things right now, I'd park your money somewhere secure and live off the interest. Then learn two disciplines : real estate investing and stock market.

Don't turn your money over to a financial advisor, unless they are personally referred by someone with a lot more cash than you. Any advisor you can afford is no good to you because you probably have more cash than them. By all means take advice, but don't blindly follow it and don't turn over control of your cash.

Learn a specific part of the real estate business that attracts you, and steer clear of single family residence homes. With that sort of cash you should be in multiple dwelling properties, or commercial retail, industrial or office buildings. The real estate market is dead and dying a bit more, so in the next couple of years that plum bargain is going to turn up, and you can be johnny on the spot, if you have done the study and learnt what is what. One good commercial property investment and you and your future family could be set for life with a healthy tax advantaged income and growing asset base.

With the stock market, I see a lot of advice here to approach the market, I would do so with a very limited amount of cash, certainly less than $50,000. If you lose that consider it a quality education on the perils of the market.

Learning to be an investor is like any other field and just because you win big in business doesn't make you an automatic whiz at investing. Capital protection is now your number 1 priority.

Oh, and if you're single, don't tell prospective girlfriends about it. You want to know which ones like you for who you are, not your bank account.
No Huh, really.

You have not received any specification about the context in which the code operates, therefore the correct course of action is to assume the worse and produce bullet proof code.

If you were operating under constraints in terms of speed that would warrant a more cavalier attitude towards input checking then that would be another thing but since that wasn't specified and there is no context, 'safety first' is the way to approach the issue.

Your assertion would have done the job just fine.
> So far they have always turned out to be spectacularly wrong.

So far, there weren't 7 billions humans neither.

> Nuclear power, both fission and fusion, is currently in a renaissance

Absolutely not. This is GE and AREVA PR, but doesn't reflect the truth. We aren't building enough nuclear plants now to compensate for the future closing of the old ones. The numbers aren't even ramping up fast enough. As time goes by, there will be less and less active nuclear plants.

Fusion research is blooming, but it didn't make much progress, particularly compared to the huge effort (see ITER).

> There's a lot of solar power in space. A lot. And literal mountains of metal, richer than the best terrestrial ores and pre-smelted too. At some point technology will tip the profit margin positive on exploiting it.

This is science-fiction. I'm pretty close to say this is complete BS. "Space ore" simply can't happen unless you find the way to harvest the power from some magic ponies yet to discover.
Redis does not support partitioning so it is even more apples to oranges then VoltDB vs. Cassandra. Both VoltDB and Cassandra rely on adding nodes to scale.
If you enter the Konami code during startup, you get the iPhone dev tools.
One word: plastics.
"the app is making about $1000/day"

Revenue, not earnings?
Even if you didn't know x86 at all you should still be able to figure out what it does by looking at it given the fact that the specification of what it does is only one sentence long.
This is just crazy enough, and written with just enough of a sense of world-weary authenticity, that I think I may just be convinced to try it.
If the world turns into a mad max apocalypse, we're all fucked anyway so why care where your money is? 50K is barely anything, just leave it in a bank account. (or buy a cabin far away from everyone, if you really think society is going to collapse)
it's a classic business move: you don't price based on your cost, you price based on what the market will pay. Since the iPhones with more memory costs more, it follows that the people who buy it have more and are willing to pay more (they picked the more expensive iPhone after all) - and so you charge more.

n.b. I'm not saying I agree with everything AAPL does.
I'm with you about it smelling a bit fishy, but on this site I take people at face value.

That said, there's plenty of places you can invest in AAA securities that pay much more than 1%. Split across several of these the capital should be safe until he finds a better place for it.
FIA to reinvestigate BoP scam
Cultivate a solid understanding of the exponential function?

In all seriousness, congratulations. Seems like a good problem to have. I don't have a lot of advice, but if it were me, I would avoid trying to leverage the money too much. It might be a good way to turn $5MM into $50MM, but it's also the best way to turn it into $0.

The utility of a lot of extra money is likely to be low for you.
A very simple strategy will go very far:

Put 30% in VTI - the Vanguard Total Market Index (basically all US stocks).

Put 30% in EFA - the Europe, Australasia, Far East first world country index.

Put 10% in RWR - an index of U.S. real estate.

Put 10% in RWX - an index of international real estate.

Put 15% in Treasury Inflation Protected Securities.

Leave 5% highly liquid.

Minor variations on this are fine. The key is invest in broad market indices, diversified among stocks and real estate, domestic and internationally, with a bit of cash set aside for rainy days. Any other strategy involves speculation (trying to be smarter than the market), and unless you think you really know what you're doing, you shouldn't speculate.
How we reduced page load time by 4 seconds on our startup
Profiles in Entrepreneurial Courage (2): A Family Affair
I recently had the pleasure of getting to know a remarkable entrepreneur by the name of Jules Lambert, President of PROBAR. Jules was telling the story of his entrepreneurial journey, which, as is the case with most “natural born-entrepreneurs”, was essentially one and the same with his personal journey.
Ask HN: Web App Launcher?
There was a post a ways back about a startup offering a launcher/dashboard that lets a company list all of the web applications they use on a single page that their employees could bookmark. Does anyone remember the name of the product?
>But of course, the point of an interview is to identify the good, not the bad, so harder problems would do just fine as well in ruling out the bad.

Yes, and no. Hard problems, being hard, mean that you don't expect all the good programmers to pass them, but to see how they think around them. And some people are able to talk the talk without walking the walk.

It's better to have an easy problem and a hard one. The easy one weeds awfully bad people, the hard one helps you find the good among the rest.
Visual Studio 2010 Keybinding Cards
New king of tech: Apple overtakes Microsoft 
Wall Street has called the end of an era and the beginning of the next one: The most important technology product no longer sits on your desk but rather fits in your hand. The moment came on Wednesday when Apple, the maker of iPods, iPhones and iPads, shot past Microsoft, the computer software giant, to become the world's most valuable technology company.
It was dead easy and I'm seriously surprised that anybody on HN that's here not for the 'startup' angle would have a problem implementing this quickly and correctly.

As code challenges come I don't think I've ever seen a more trivial example.
stuck it your ass motherfucker
U.S. Cyber Command has no idea why it exists
I am curious to what the Python solution was, since the C requirement was to do it "in place".
I'd be interested in learning what brand of cigarettes are available in SF for $5. Certainly not the American Spirits displayed at the top of the article.
I wouldn't call them a patent troll, but their patent's claims (http://mfeldstein.com/images/uploads/Blackboard_Patent_Claim... via Wikipedia) are on the level of Amazon's one-click patent. And Blackboard HAS used them offensively (unsuccessfully, I might add).

The patent was eventually overturned, but at non-insignificant cost to all parties involved. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_Inc.#Blackboard_lega...)

As business, the choice to use your patent offensively to go after a competitor may come at the expense of, y'know, actually improving your product,which it seems Blackboard has chosen to do.
Ah, thanks.

Also, eww. It decrements or increments dependent upon a flag. Not nice.
It's not always vast emptiness beyond the flagpole. In level A-3 of Super Mario Bros. "Lost Levels", there is a strategically placed spring board and red koopa that you can use to jump over the flagpole and warp to world C.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYkucsrbF8w
Buy Muni bonds from states with a good record of paying..NOT CA
Buy Treasuries.
Buy Stock

keep a few years of spending money in cash
You can split the risk based on your risk appetite
30% muni
50% treasury
10% stock

I would recommend more stocks at this point as we've had a market reversal recently. Also many stocks pay dividends much higher than treasuries and have the chance for capital appreciation.

If you want to land lord you can buy a building 1 million cash could get you a nice rental property...depending on the area

Diversify.....!!!!!!
Have you got a view of what you want to do next with your life? Do you have goals/activites you want to achieve/do?

I think these are important questions that you need to consider first. They will shape your investment strategy.
4G phone will quickly change things
Ask HN: Front Pager, or New reader?
My HN behaviour has changed in recent times, from purely a submitter of content, to following the front page articles only, to now hitting the "New" section only.

I've come round to to the fact that whilst "new" has some drivvle in it, it's an opportunity for me to see content I may be interested in that sometimes gets ignored by the masses. For sure, this site wouldn't work with people like me who look at new submissions, I do wonder though how many people completely ignore it, and just follow the front page?

It's an interesting question, understanding something like Digg and HN's usage... I'm sure most just read the front page. I'd love to see the user ration on front page Vs new page for example. Some do both too I guess.

Any thoughts?
Start your next company.
This is a difficult decision that can take a while to sort out. Even consulting professional can take a while. So my simple rule is this.

Take 10% of the money and put it into an easily accessible account you can use day-to-day. The other 90% put in a high-interest account and forget about for 12 months.

You can then use that 12-month period to decide what you want to do, but safe in the knowledge, in this case, you have enough money readily available to live and not worry about bills. You also have the bonus of a nice lot of interest added to your sum next year.
Only because it lacks a stylus.

In at least a few places in Aus (Canberra Centre, Melb Airport, Elizabeth St Melb) I've seen ipod touch sized PDA's being used to take down orders at McDonalds.. (including special orders - they got my mcflurry + caramel topping down fine).

Maccas may have a slightly limited menu - but it's still pretty large compared to some restaurants.
I'm surprised that the ultra conservative advice got voted up on a start up geared website. I would have thought I'd see more risk taking from the users
This is a nice validation of Steve Blank's customer-focused model for creating start-ups. It's the kind of article I want to see more often on HN.

I would like to see more detail about what was done in terms of customer and market research for the more successful efforts though. I'm sure there's some valuable lessons to be drawn from that experience.
Old News. That was the first thing anyone did when they got the game genie.