skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As would I, but I wouldn't get into an argument with someone about cancer research because I have never studied cancer in any depth.

Except I'm not arguing. You've created an argument out of a thought, which is, to strive for stability and equality. All I've stated thus far is that Capitalism is a stepping stone to something better. No matter how many times I repeat this, you are asserting an argument.

That is simply not true. The core principal of capitalism is that people engage in mutually beneficial transactions without the threat of physical harm. This is the core idea of the free market.

Now, here comes the argument.

The core idea of the free market is religion.

I've read a lot about, and at one time considered myself a Libertarian. I've heard about the "promise land" of free markets for some time. For a while I was hypnotized by that ideal, but we humans operate on incentives. Some people call it greed, but I don't want to demonize a population.

Capitalism isn't evil, it's a cloak.

The promise of success keeps us all herding towards the door of opportunity, but only a few pass almost regardless of intelligence, morals, motivations or intentions.

When your insurance refuses coverage, it isn't because there's an evil asshole lurking to ensure you don't get what you deserve.

Company A announces incentives for employers for saving the company money. Those who aren't on-board get reviews, get fired. The workers who respond to incentives deny your claim. You're now fucked, to put it lightly. Company A is now full of incentive-driven bias.

This is just 1 course of Capitalism. You don't need me to dig up research or some book about societal structure and how it applies to Capitalism. You see it everyday.

Please go read some literature on this. And I don't mean that in a negative way. You seem genuinely open to new ideas but you seemingly are not willing to seek those new ideas.

I plan to. And yes, I am very open and very willing to seek new ideas and support those with more knowledge and more ability to drive these efforts. However, I am not willing to listen to steadfast, obstinate reasoning for future consideration.

I appreciate that there are those (like yourself) that don't put up with the hearsay and nonsensical banter, but I'm not your target. I'm just voting for innovation.
Awesome notes here. Have you started with OnSIP? Do you have any questions? Let us know - Tweet @OnSIP or give us a call 1.800.801.3381.
Is this some kind of private feud?
Thanks, that does make a lot clearer.

It seems to me you and i are very comfortably coordinating sharing resources right now. In parallel, a browser is running on my computer, a browser is running on your computer, and an http server is running on the hn server.

But between us we're doing some collaborative. We are both contributing text out of which a single document is synthesized, and we might both have up voted this story, etc.

Our collaboration here is structured in terms of http requests/responses. Does this in itself address issues of "race conditions", "deadlocks", etc?

Can we imagine a future in which computation and memory are so abundant, we can virtualize this client/server paradigm for any collaborating parallel programs?

Or can we imagine a future in which there is no need to parallelize a large class of programs, because they will execute satisfyingly fast in a single thread?
Hah, of course!

Well, ROTing that doesn't yield anything either, and it's too small to analyse character frequency if it's a cipher. I tried using 'thinkcode' as a substitution key, and the end looks a bit like 'thinkcode' itself!
How much information do we consume? (UC San Diego)
Modern steganography
Measured Start to Redbox Game Rentals
What would you think if a prospective hire agreed to accept a position on the condition that he be allowed to make an angel investment in the company?

This is SO not my world, but since comments so far have been on the negative side: I can't actually imagine what the downside is in asking. They will either say yes or no. If they say no, you presumably have the choice of accepting the employment anyway or walking away. Provided all the negotiating is done courteously, I'm not sure what the problem could be.

I guess there is some scenario whether they are so shocked and appalled by you asking (an Oliver Twist moment) that they would withdraw their employment offer completely, but would you want to work for them if they are that touchy?
I downloaded the PDF, also the First Edition and I thought it is time to donate. It was my first PayPal donation and I spent it for something I am passionate about (startups).

Keep up the good work, and check out Monocle - maybe you can get some inspiration how you can build and extend this.
It was a great price, but only available for one day.
This is exactly why there are two DB's at my work.

- Postgres for Django and custom Perl system.

- MySql for all the 3rd party crap WP, forums, Redmine, couple craptistically old Perl help ticket and project management systems.
This formula is for someone who has relatively little money. Don't discount the impact of built-up netegg or trust fund baby. People who have money don't have the financial pressure to hold a job and can pursue things interested them, like starting a company. And older people who have done well tend to have a large netegg to enable them to strike out, which explain the surge of entrepreneurship in 40's.

The formula is simple:
incomings - expenses = netflow;
if netflow > 0, you are good to go,
else if netegg/netflow > years-of-comfortable-living, you are good to go; otherwise get a job.
Foursquare Puts Money Before Privacy
Bolt Bus is on the same level as Megabus. It's cheap, very clean, and has free wifi on board.
Sorry about that. I will contact the OSQA developers upstream.

The software wasn't designed to work out of a subdir, so we're still ironing issues out on that front.

[edit: This happens for reasons that neither I nor the core devs understand: http://jira.osqa.net/browse/OSQA-204 ]
This is being referred to as a knockoff, I assumed this was actually based on stack exchange. Can someone clarify?
Man I love how this guy wrote this letter. Tongue in cheek works perfectly for Woot, and I hope Amazon knows better to keep in the background and let Woot do what Woot does best.

I can't even decide which paragraph I love best.

(edited in an attempt to copy/paste a quote.)
You are right about just asking. Still, I wanted to get a sense of how unreasonable such a thing would be.
I kind of agree with his F recommendation. They have nowhere to go but up, after all.

I was recently looking at my own company's stock price, and considering whether to buy it. 3 years ago, the share price was about $60. Then the finance problem came along, and now it's $15 (up from $4). I don't think it has anywhere to go but up to its original value; after all, the company is bigger and stronger now. And, 1000 shares is actually affordable, and would give me the opportunity to make something like $50,000 if the company recovers. It almost feels like I'm working at a startup, except one that has billions of dollars in capital.

If only we could get some IKEA furniture :)
I agree but charging based on repo count does seem to work for most people. If I'm switching to github for my private repos, I want to be able to put everything in there. Being limited to 10 or even 20 just doesn't cut it for me. I'd have to throw down $200 to get near what I want but my usage might not be greater than someone paying $25 or less.
Well in the DC-NYC-Boston corridor they have a ton of competition. Because all you really need is one bus you can drive yourself (or you and your extended family). Google "Chinatown Bus."
You may be overthinking this. Have you actually tried applying for other jobs? There are many places who will take a really good programmer with the "wrong" resume. If you have a strong resume and great references, why not get in the boat and see what fish you can catch? I'd be surprised if you can't get anything.
To me, part of the appeal of Woot! is its nonchalance and small, independent aesthetic. I hope it doesn't lose this in the process of becoming an Amazon company.
Except it's linux kernal based! Huzzah penguins!
Lift 2.0 released
Hey Lincoln, I'm the guy who made Penumbra. A few thoughts:

1. Frames are not a unit of time. In the :update and :display callbacks you're given both the total elapsed time and elapsed time since the last frame (in seconds); use those to calculate the positions of objects.

2. I think the major confusion you have is what the (anim ...) macro should return. The answer's actually pretty straightforward: a function which takes the current time, and returns the position for that time. That function will be stored in the global state of the application, and sampled every time you draw a frame.

If you want to change an animation, all you need to do is swap out the animation in one of the callbacks. These callbacks don't have to necessarily be in response to user actions; look at how app/periodic-update is used in the Tetris and Asteroids examples.

If you have any further questions, the mailing list is at http://groups.google.com/group/penumbra-lib.
I've been trying to find time to do a more in-depth test with multiple servers and include the scale out part of each system. I plan too soon.
Time OFF?!? HAhahahha!
I have a Woot account but they take forever to ship (I think I waited 3 weeks for three sets of earbuds), so that itself sometimes deters me from buying. Combine the awesome deal on a Roomba with free 2 day shipping and I'm screwed :-)
Just once I'd like to have a discussion on HN about either MySQL or PostgreSQL without having a long thread about why one is more popular/better than the other. Not going to happen.
The site is powered by OSQA (http://osqa.net), a Django/Python Q&A platform. The site is a fork of CNPROG, which was designed to mimic StackExchange.

OSQA is supported by DZone, and the pace of development has been rapid. The core developers have stated on many occasions that they are moving in independent direction from StackExchange.

In particular, because the site is open-source, I can experiment with adding NLP to it. I can improve the Related Questions, I can automatically infer tags, and I can implement techniques for helping you organize and navigate information.
I wouldn't consider EmacsLisp a real Lisp any longer. At least by modern standards. But anyway, I agree.
I'm also pushing 40, and part of my hesitation is the opportunity cost. Will I seriously regret foregoing a year of market rate salary during my peak earning years, when I only recently got a clue and started saving? I'm also less blasé about doing without group health insurance than I used to be, just from watching people age (and CORBA only lasts so long).
As a rule, technology startups don't distribute profits till they approach senescence and investors no longer trust them to invest their profits in their own expansion. E.g. Microsoft, which was founded in 1975, didn't pay dividends till 2003.

YC companies usually hire accountants when they raise enough money to. Before that the founders keep track of finances themselves using Quickbooks (or a shoebox full of receipts).
bearwithclaws (the curator) reaches out to the authors [1]

1: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1261522
I swear I thought those words would get edited out by someone else at Cloudkick. I wrote that half jokingly and I guess it made into the actual blog post. :P
only shipping to the us, ca and uk? arrr :(
>It is unlikely that the Berkeley people would've pushed for a completely free (software) kernel without the Stallman influence:

<sarcasm>And no one else would of ever gotten to the task of creating a BSD/MIT licensed kernel since everyone would of thought "if Berkeley people didn't do it why should we?".<sarcasm>
Apple's has a minority share of the mobile device market. You are drastically overestimating the importance of a vocal minority. iOS already doesn't support Flash; won't support Flash; can't support Flash because that would threaten the closed App Store. And the rest of the world has gotten along just fine. Indeed, the only people Apple's refusal to support Flash hurts, are Apple users.
"the project was under significant attack"

Could you be a little more specific about this? E.g. perhaps who, or at least how and who it effected how.

And, yep, a good user space of the sort you've described would be great (and is in fact something I'm trying to get myself jump started working on, in a FoNC style: http://vpri.org/html/work/ifnct.htm)
Technically you are right, everything has a price. Except when that price is way too high. So if you think a share is worth between say, $5 and $10, they can either say (nicely) "we're not selling shares right now", or say (rightly and rudely) "we can only sell YOU shares for $1000/share". And that may really be a fair price from their point of view, since having you (a nobody in the VC world) as an investor is really detrimental to their image.
It is verbose, but that makes it readable. I don't really type that much more, I just use tab completion in vim.
> This author, like the founder of the failed YC company, is selfish

Everyone is selfish.
I am quite involved with virtualization. The interesting thing is, that some people are now running their software on the virtualized bare metal--i.e. using the hypervisor but without an operating system.

This is essentially treating the hypervisor as an exokernel operating system. And it seems to become more common.

Perhaps we are really coming to exokernels in a very roundabout way.
Movies shouldn't have better science, because science is complicated
haha - the entire letter is hilarious. Woot sounds like another good company with a strong culture.

The big question is why did they sell? Tony Hsieh and Zappos had investor pressure+needed the cash, what was Woot's reason? Maybe the carrot (cash?) Amazon dangled was a really big amount?
That's such a cool statement. If I can't be a CEO like that, I hope I have one like that as my boss some day.
It just depends. If the profit towards the end of the year isn't too bad, it's possible to pay as much of that out as possible as a bonus to founders and/or employees. Obviously, the company pays taxes on the wages (state/federal/medicare/etc) and you personally pay income taxes, too. In some cases, this may be a lower, overall tax hit than paying the same amount out to founders as dividends only. It certainly depends on the total amount in question, too.

It is possible to also retain most, or all, of the profits at the end of the year within the company. As was stated, though, corporate income taxes must be paid on that. Up to about $75,000, the tax rate is pretty low and not a huge deal but after that, corporate income taxes are pretty steep and as a young business, it's definitely good practice not to give Uncle Sam a dime more than you have to so if you have a huge windfall of profits, you might reconsider whether to retain it all or not.

Another option is to report as much expense as possible so as to have deductions against the corporation's income. Naturally, this means spending actual money and giving it to someone else but it also means avoiding tax. So if you can do this with things the business needs (or even paying for some things way in advance and up-front), the loss in the time value of $ is still far less than the tax consequence that otherwise would have been incurred (example: pay for all of your hosting needs 6 months in advance before Dec 31st, provided you are on a cash accounting basis and a calendar fiscal year)
Web Applications Q&A in Beta
> Knowing the basics of operator precedence should be expected. If you don't know it, you don't really know the language.

What are "the basics of operator precedence" for C++?

Yes, I'm serious. I don't think that there's any agreement on that. At best, there are a bunch of answers with significant overlap, and each non-trivial organization has at least two answers.

That's why every non-trivial organization produces software which uses multiple definitions with blurs between them for interfaces and common code. And bugs.

C++ has almost 30 precedence levels and yet folks think that lisp is unnatural.
But you're saying the guys are leaving, they're not fired. Maybe after the talk they realise that their life is more important than being loyal to a company that won't let them take a little time off.
There is just something about Android I can’t put my finger on
Ask HN: Estimate Market Size
When you are creating a new product, how do you know if your target market is big enough?

How big do you think it needs to be before creating the idea?
You have a good point. some skills are more monitizable than others, and some skills are almost required for your other skills to be useful.

I'm actually one of those people who has had a hard time 'managing to complete tasks you start' (and while i still have that problem sometimes, I think i have accomplished more than the average bear.) - now, I do fight that directly some; you are right, it's too much in the way of everything else for me to ignore it because it's hard, like handwriting. They make some /really effective/ drugs for that these days, amongst other things, but as for 'hacks' to avoid that weakness? becoming a SysAdmin is one. If you can perform well in emergency situations, where you /can't/ drop things on the floor, lots of half-finished projects get forgiven. (and really, in SysAdmin work, if you don't take care of something when it's not an emergency, you take care of it when it /is/) I mean, it's bad to not complete things in non-emergency situations, maybe even worse than being a less productive programmer. But if you can 'hero' it out, even if that is the sub-optimal solution, you usually don't get fired for it. Management forgets that you only notice your sysadmin if he's not doing his job.

But, I find even the threat of an emergency motivates me to fix things, so I don't think add sysadmins need to remain in the less-useful 'hero' role forever... but being a sysadmin does mean that our failure mode usually doesn't get us fired.

If you can manage to hold down a job long enough to get some good experience, hiring other people can also be a way to get around this. I can start something and have someone else come along and clean up behind me. Also, just working with other people, I find, helps keep me on task.

but really, if I didn't have a skill that was relatively hard to find, well, for most of my life, I'd have had a hard time holding down a job at McDonalds. Nobody is going to deal with a fry cook who keeps Engineering hours.
Things will start going wrong with your body in your late 30s. I wasn't expecting to be immortal, but I was expecting it to happen a bit later than that.

Don't ever move from a place that you like to a place that you don't, because circumstances will change and you will find yourself stuck there.
It may sound kumbaya to you, but it makes sense to me. I wish every hiring manager were so sensible.
Is "Woot Prime" shipping possible now instead of $5 shipping on $10 items?
Amazon has been making some interesting moves lately; attempting to change their internal culture through acquisition, perhaps? (See Zappos.)
Try http://uva.onlinejudge.org/index.php?option=com_onlinejudge&... (UVa Online Problem Set Judge). That used to be the ACM Valladolid Online Judge, but at some point they changed servers.

This one's more intended for high school folks (hadn't touched them since then), but try out USACO's training website. Anybody can sign up and do problems. http://train.usaco.org/usacogate

Both of these sites test your algorithmic knowledge, too, but that's always nice to brush up on anyway.
Find designs you like, then try to imitate them. Look at common elements among them and implement them into your own design.
This one made me laugh out loud:

Other than that, we plan to continue to run Woot the way we have always run Woot, with a wall of ideas and a dartboard. From a practical point of view, it will be as if we are simply adding one person to the organizational hierarchy, except that one person will just happen to be a billion-dollar company that could buy and sell each and every one of you like you were office furniture.
hmm. 0.10x50x$23 = $115

Given those probabilities it seem like a good investment.
Or for the less risky version, dollar cost averaging.

You use something like share builder:
Every month invest $100.

1month - $100 price of stock 25.0 Stock own:- 4

2month - $200 price of stock 20.0 Stock own:- 9

3month - $300 price of stock 20.0 Stock own:- 14

4month - $400 price of stock 10.0 Stock own:- 24

5month - $500 price of stock 10.0 Stock own:- 34

6month - $600 price of stock 5.0 Stock own:- 54

7month - $700 price of stock 5.0 stock own:- 74

8month - $800 price of stock 5.0 stock own:- 94

9month - $900 price of stock 10.0 stock own:- 104

10month -$1000 price of stock 20.0 stock own:- 109

Overall value of stock own is 109*20 = 2180.
Profit:= $2180-$1000 = $1180

This is an exaggerated example and I only have knowledge of dollar cost average in theory, so anybody have real world experience, jump into the conversation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_cost_averaging
Good point. Some people want money, some people want time and freedom (especially once their monetary needs are covered). There are other ways companies can compensate people beyond their salary.
weak passwords? 8 characters ought to be enough for anybody.
Do you have dysgraphia?? I had same and used a writer for most of my important tests and it has helped me a lot. I dont care about my handwriting and it has helped me focus on other things and have been quite successful in them.
> It's not particularly easy, but I think they could improve things to stop gaming of the system.

Or put another way, they just change the mechanics, so that the gaming the system means doing the right thing.
I am a close personal friend of datawalke. I consider myself a capable (just capable) programmer and my abilities pale in comparison to his.

My primary knowledge is of philosophy. What this has allowed me to do is come to the conclusion that programming is an extension of datawalke's very being. He doesn't just work as an IT guy. His very existence guarantees both his programming ability and its perpetual growth.

I know for a fact that he is grossly underpaid and devalued. What he hasn't mentioned is that even on top of this job he works frequently on side projects for clients who have never been dissatisfied (to my knowledge). I honestly believe that he simply sleeps less than everyone else as a solution to his lack of time.
gut; talk to other people; reports/trends; inspect companies in your space.

the potential market should be at least 1 :) it depends what kind of company you're building.

If you're building a really large consumer business you want a product that can have over 50M users. If you're after a tidy lifestyle company you can dominate a small niche and thrive.
Interesting. I would like to know more about your accomplishments.
I am pretty sure others here would agree.
It's not every day that we find successful examples,and the general consensus has been that people over 40 are "not stupid enough".
You can be a role model for us.
At least to immigrants, it should be pretty comforting, considering the fact that it takes almost 10 years fo asians (esp Chinese and Indians, I am not sure what the numbers are like for others.) before they get a green card, and are free enough to move from one company/ city to another, without risking getting deported from US.

I am 26, and my professor was quite clear. He said you have maybe a couple of years when you can take all the risks and pursue your startup dream.
(Yes, my score is 1 and I am still close to failing. How about that...)

Would really appreciate sharing your accomplishments to inspire and give hope to people, telling youngsters they have more time than they think they do, and more experienced ones the push they might need to make that jump.