skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So why are they getting this pension before they're 65 (or whatever the retirement age is there) in the first place?
Vaguely related Orwell essay:

http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/essays/james-burnham.htm
Warning: this only works if you are genuinely good at what you do.
Not mine insight but I can't remember where i've read it.
Trolling for Technologies (and a good beer)
I know, eh. Tagging is clearly the way to go.
When I found it, StackOverflow seemed like a good "portfolio" site. The goal wouldn't be to answer the most possible question but answer and ask questions which would give a potential employer some idea concerning my skill, knowledge and preferences. But having at least 1k+ Karma seemed like a reasonable part. I was annoyed with question-Karma reduction since it seemed to cut into that goal, even if my Karma never actually went back below 1k.
Managing Big Data:Architectural Approaches for making batch data avail. online
You're right, I was wrong.
My experience doesn't agree with the OP (though as others have noted, the plural of anecdote isn't data).

From the start in 2008 through now, my reputation curve has been a pretty straight line:

http://stackoverflow.com/users/8912?tab=reputationhistory#ta...

I think it depends on the type of community that you participate in. If you work only in relatively unchanging technologies that everyone else works in (like .NET or Java), the OP is probably right. All of the nooks and crannies are exposed and answered. But if you participate in one of the smaller communities (Groovy, Scala, Clojure, Haskell, Io, etc).

I think the number of "niche communities" in the long tail are much larger and more vibrant than the OP supposes. Chances are that it's just the OPs pet technologies that don't get a lot of traffic.

I follow RSS feeds on a number of tags that I find interesting and answer a few questions every week.
Hacking Chrome Developer Tools Protocol for fun and profit (ok mostly fun)
This is why California is fucked. County sheriffs in places like San Luis Obispo are making over $700K a year with these sorts of schemes.

http://calcoastnews.com/2010/01/two-top-sheriff-officials-do...
I agree, because this kind of thing is very common. I'd have taken it a step further: if you provide an answer to a question, you shouldn't be allowed to downvote other answers to the same question. And if you downvote an answer to a question, you're not allowed to post an answer to that question. So get rid of conflicts of interest, and always allow people to upvote other answers, whether they've provided an answer or not.
I think there's a large number of people, on HN and elsewhere, who just think it's fashionable to rip on Microsoft. Read through a number of posts on this very site about MSFT and that much is abundantly clear.
I think you raise a good point, and you are right one needs to be careful about 'the religion card'.

However, when I perform analysis of a security incident I want to consider both the technical means that was exploited but also an understanding of why it took place in the first place.

Apart from worms/etc, most hack attacks involve human effort, time and skill and so people don't do them without a strong motivation. It might be financial but if it isn't then I want to get into the head of the attacker and understand why.

In conclusion, all I'm saying is that if you are an innocent hostee on Bluehost who is wondering why you got attacked, it might be because some anti-mormon hackers decided to get into their shit. And if you didn't know Bluehost was a super pro-Mormon outfit, you'd have never known or be armed with the information to make an informed choice of where you put your website.
The picture that accompanies the article is ridiculously cute (though totally irrelevant) :)
In the same spirit as his objections to the old style delta (http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/cm.html) he'll be making comments regarding whether we should be writing with $\phi$ or $\varphi$
Not being able to ditch ads is quite disappointing. Especially for $10 a month.
Le Monde Agrees To Takeover To Save It From Bankruptcy
Also, it only applies if you really really want to work for someone else. Most people just want to make 60-120k working 40-hour weeks. If you just want to get a job that has a high pay to work ratio, you should beef up your resume/credentials instead. If you really really want to work hard so you can succeed some day in the future, a startup might be your best bet.
It's bills like these (when passed) that make me laugh in the face of people who tell me we have a free market economy.
If he was actually retiring, he's not the kind of guy to call that an "Earthshaking announcement."

Incidentally, I went to his last Stanford lecture, the lecture hall with maybe ~400 seats was totally full, and there were exactly 3 women in the audience.
Food grade caffeine granules are both diluted and granulated to prevent machine material handling errors from becoming deadly at food packaging plants. The powdered stuff is quite dangerous.
My intuition about slogans is that I shouldn't have to read over them several times to make sure I'm reading/parsing them correctly.
What is so good about this? It's straight out of the getting hired 101 stuff that most folks heard in college.

What about spending your time becoming someone worth hiring? Then moving to an area where they are hiring folks who do what you do? I could see the advice in the article working for a non-technical person, like a sales guy, but who is that passionate about working? "My dream is to come into your office five days a week and sit at one of your desks and work!"

This is just more propaganda from hiring managers with a financial stake in the hire. How are you going to negotiate salary after begging for a job for three months?

My advice: do what you love doing, whether in your current company, or in your copious unemployed time, then present yourself as someone who is very good at X; don't beg.
Seriously? Anyone have a counter argument to go with those downvotes? I'll even take a "rtfa where they mentioned important evidence you ignored, jerk"
Management, Organizing, Mobilizing
I think this is a pretty good article on the topic:

http://theholdfast.com/journal/entry/make-time-for-your-pass...
The people who sell illegal drugs don't advertise the fact on the web, at least not for very long.
Traveling Faster Than Sound... Underwater
StackOverflow comes to mind.
Have you been to craigslist? Seriously, go take a look.
I've read this before, and I sympathize with his gripes, but it strikes me as a UX minefield to abandon the conceit now. If for no other reason, it's very useful to see the "box filter" effect when magnifying images when doing pixel art manipulation (still relevant for most cellphones and portable devices) as well as examining image compression quality. If most image viewers default to an interpolated view for magnification, I can see many graphics professionals' jobs get worse as it becomes even harder to convince to clients provide vector image files or raster images of sufficiently high resolution, since end users wouldn't see such an obvious distinction anymore.
Another riddle where the math is easy, but translating the riddle into math is hard. Which is to say, it's not really a math riddle at all. In fact, the riddle is complicated by the fact that it's posed as a riddle -- if you had to answer the question "in real life," you would probably know how you came about the information, so the problem would be straightforward.
Reread the paragraph before the one you reference: "Vary your message"

Don't matter. Still annoying if you are doing it every week.

In other words, don't be a stalker, but do be persistent, helpful, and interesting.

Most people overrate their ability to be interesting or helpful, and "persistent" is just too annoying. And cold-calling multiple times is so beyond rude, I can't even begin to grasp why anyone would advise it.

The idea that I would not have an open job call just because some dude has been pestering us every week for the last year... I find this baffling.

Perhaps things are different in SV.

Edit: I just remembered where I'd found this better phrased:

http://www.cluewagon.com/2009/09/calling-to-follow-up-hand-m...

Quote: "It’s not about being the most attention-seeking candidate. It’s about being the most qualified candidate. If it’s not, you’re applying to the wrong company."
The dangers of relying on 3rd party APIs
At least one really huge software
company has made the bulk of its earnings on its ability to demonstrate
to other people that the real users what they could do.

From the Latin word "imponere", base of the obsolete English "impone" and
translated as "impress" in modern English, Nordic hackers have coined the
terms "imponator" (a device that does nothing but impress bystanders,
referred to as the "imponator effect") and "imponade" (that "goo" that
fills you as you get impressed with something -- from "marmelade", often
referred as "full of imponade", always ironic).

Erik Naggum ... the best troll ever :)
I dunno why you got a downmod, this site is downmod happy sometimes.
Your video is private though, stupid default vimeo setting.
I've been using ffmpeg on ubuntu with x264 encoding and I feel pretty good about the quality of the output : http://www.vimeo.com/12740202

that video is some crude thing showing how I did my portfolio in couchdb... maybe a crappy video like that does not deserve center placement, but if it's on there somewhere then screencast whores like me will be more likely to get involved :)
Hmm. So for $10/mo. you get... ad interrupted shows, buuut you can see entire seasons of ad interrupted shows on all your iDevices.

How does this function?
Well... My old cd burner was a tau/pi. Does that count?

ObOntopic: it most lilkely is him declaring version pi.
Tesla IPO Opens Higher.com
HP is working on memristors - http://www.hpl.hp.com/news/2008/apr-jun/engineering_memristo....
According to wikipedia they already created such a prototype - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor#Potential_application....
Bruce Tognazzini on first principles of interaction design
It's natural to be paranoid about such things, but you can overcome it. It is extremely unlikely that someone is just waiting for a good idea to copy (and that yours is the one they will pounce on). And even if you don't tell people, they'll find out when you go live. So all you get is a bit of a headstart.

Really it's worth far more to get a wide variety of opinion and critique, and potentially a cofounder, than it is to guard the idea for fear of having it stolen.
I'm honestly surprised at the downvotes here. Even including people who went back to download older comments on totally different threads. Interesitng.

In any case, I simply stated the pattern. Everyone else added a value judgment into it, apparently.

And no, I did not misrepresent those in Step 2. There is a huge difference between saying, "That is impossible.", and saying, "Interesting idea. Your implementation is wrong, but we will see what we can do with the idea."

Most of the time, I see the "impossible" reaction.

Of course people in Step 1 and 4 are different. And of course real research is done on it. That is exactly the point. It is the pattern that is interesting, and the talk of who the players are is exactly why it is interesting
That's no text editor - it's a space station!
Hah, I might have to if our product tanks upon launch. ;-) (also SSD related, but workstation/laptop-based, not DB/Server)
Yes, it leads to better results than using the Stack Overflow search.
And definitely don't start losing the arguments.
[lunchbreak] Office: A very short story.
That was the only thing I wanted out of Hulu Plus to be honest - I just want an uninterrupted viewing experience. Up the damn thing to $30 a month and I'll pay for it if I never have to see that 5 hour energy ad on Hulu again.
I think this is Hulu's attempt to make even more money on the iDevices.

I wonder if the iDevice had Flash, would they be able to do this?
has to work for all three of our customers, and those are our end users, our advertisers, and our content suppliers

I'm not sure how I feel about end users not being their primary customer... I can't see the split in effort working well in the future (too much of a difference between end users and content suppliers). However, it's nice to see them being upfront about it.
These guys are great. They keep innovating even while they are in the drivers seat in their field. Thats the way to do it.

Kinda reminds me of how WoW evolved over time to have better guild features. Perhaps the engineering resources weren't available to implement them, but more likely they learned what their audience wanted from watching their audience actually use the system.
F*ck blogging: my last blog post
I think this is the best content on Quora to date.
biggest question is whether there's a price point missing - $100 for lowest-priced organization support is pretty high.
Google changes China access after Beijing objects
Tesla IPO raises $226 million
My wife's studying for her PhD at UPenn in music composition, and she's not paying a dime. Scholarship pays for her tuition as well as a monthly stipend. She's actually being put through school on a fund that Ben Franklin started way back in the day.

She attended one of the best private schools in Australia - also paid 100% through scholarship.

The money is out there, some people are just more tenacious at looking for it.
How do you know if / where you'll have scalability problems

You won't.

Just code it for the best model for your data. 95% of the time a RDBMS will work just fine for your data. If you have scaling issues down the road, chances are you'll be working on this full-time and will have the energy to devote to properly thinking about scaling. You aren't Google or Facebook (yet). Until you are, just work with what best fits your data or is fastest to code.
Wave is no mistake (yet), it's still under construction.
Also, it's a protocol, not that much a product. Also, the client-server protocol isn't even finished.
I started using Ventrilo while playing mmorpg's and ended up using it in my business for realtime voice collaboration among team members. More personal and more efficient than IM, it's like a group walkie talkie through your computer. Or a VOIP conference call that's always on.
[ventrilo.com]
Maybe. It seems to be a "how to get hired" article that only takes into account the company's interests though. Specifically, focusing all your effort on one company is ridiculous.

If you're genuinely good at what you do, you should try hard to get at least two offers. Not so that you can ping pong back and forth between companies and try to eek out the most money possible, rather just hinting to companies that other companies are interested in you is usually good enough to get a decent offer without any hassle.
My current employer once interviewed someone who brought in public photos of the departmental director and printed out webpages relating to stuff he did at previous jobs, I guess to prove that she was interested in what we do. She also made weird comments about visible personal possessions lying around in cubicles. Super creepy.

She didn't get the job.
A Good Exit: Isn't That an Oxymoron? Do We Need a New Way to Think About...
Meditation is learned skill in a way that "running" in your example doesn't seem to be. Ten days of practice is more than just "ten more days of meditation in my life"; it's a hundred hours of improvement. A more reasonable comparison would be to say that a meditation retreat is like going off and doing math for ten days straight. (I've actually done the latter, and it's shocking how much you can learn and improve in a week and a half if you completely dedicate yourself to something. Total immersion really is very very powerful.)
You will find many, many people in the industry who will try to suck your soul dry if you let them. VC's, angels, cofounders, coworkers, customers. You will, of course, have time for hobbies. But there may be some social consequences at work if your hobbies keep you from meeting someone else's definition of "committed". It's a stubborn form of machismo that needs to be purged from society, but it's real, especially with the "go big or go home" crowd.

Personally, hobbies take a back seat for me. Not because I don't have time, but because I don't have energy. Even a modest business requires quite a bit of effort.
I think a $50 plan would be perfect. It's hard to justify the $80 jump from the medium plan for a small company that doesn't need a lot of the features (teams and permissions, for example), but would like the convenience of allowing everyone to administer the organization.

That being said, it looks like a great addition to the site, and I think charging extra is definitely warranted--I just wish there were a better priced plan to bridge the gap between $22 and $100.
I have been waiting for Hulu to gain a more Netflix like mentality to get their service onto everything. Ten dollars a month isn't bad either especially when stacked up to cable and satellite.

Hopefully in the future they will add more tiers of service like premium movie channels and sports.
A variant of this question was asked in "Sacrifice Your Health For Your Startup" at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=679045 referring to http://blog.asmartbear.com/blog/sacrifice-your-health-for-yo...

pg had a good answer at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=679278

I disagree with this. It's a net win to exercise. You're repaid for the couple
hours a week you lose with greater productivity during the remaining hours.
This is the crucial mistake:
"How much time does a bootstrapped company take? All of it."
That's not true. What a startup (bootstrapped or not) takes is 100% of
your performance, not 100% of your time. And optimizing for performance
means spending some time on maintenance.

I look at hobbies as maintenance for your mental and emotional health.
I just wonder if they'll be able to do it at all. Part of making advertising work is maximizing audience. Charging $120 for something I'm already paying for elsewhere (through my cable, Tivo and Netflix subscriptions) seems like a stretch. There's only so much I'm willing to spend to watch television, and my cable/cable internet/netflix bill pretty much maxes that out. Especially when there is still advertising involved.

Maybe if this was more along the lines of a $36 annual fee, similar to Pandora, I would give it more thought.
I don't see what this has to do with Apple vs. Flash; maybe you can elaborate.
3 Bosses Who "Get" Social Media
Yeah, that was the gist of what I said.
What matters is the union of the monopolizations of the various parts of the software stack you depend on; parts with no monopolization can be ignored. "Open Core" is irrelevant and neither bad nor good, what matters is the required non-open part on top.

Now it might be good for the vendor by letting them and their competitors avoid some duplication of work, but this isn't about the vendors...
It looks like Hulu Plus is intended to replace cable, and from that perspective it's cheaper.
For me it is kind of a toss up. FBI warnings on DVDs from Netflix or adds on Hulu. Though Netflix streaming is blessedly free of both.
So true. A price point is definitely missing there. I'm thinking something in the $35-$40 range.
You don't need to be rich or a prodigy, you just have to be good.
R.I.P. Chatroulette, 2009-2010
Ah, thanks, fixed the privacy settings.

And yep, it makes perfect sense for me to keep the text + screenshot approach of the current tour (for those who hate watching videos, can't watch at work, etc.) but to also couple it with a video for those who aren't in the mood to read/click. Thanks again.
I'm assuming from that sentence that the treatment will be costly. Though, honestly, for a tooth regeneration treatment you'd not need high margins for profitability.
The info I have is that the granules are mainly to ease mechanical processing. Given that ld50 of anhydrous caffeine USP is above 100mg per kilo of body weight, I do not think a few grams, especially through skin, would be much risk. The msds advises gloves, due to it being a skin irritant, but that is for constant exposure.

Fine powders are a fire safety and explosion risk, of course, especially in automated storage and processing environments....flour, non dairy creamer, aluminum powder, etc are great fun.

If there is any info to the contrary I would be very interested.
isn't this the same kind of "intuitive" reasoning that fails at simpson's paradox?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpsons_paradox

conditioning upon more events can lead to a higher probability.
p(boy = 2 | boy >= 1) < p(boy = 2 | boy >= 1, tuesday)
(or more precisely, conditioning upon more events can yield a distribution with less entropy)
> This is just more propaganda from hiring managers with a financial stake in the hire. How are you going to negotiate salary after begging for a job for three months?

Agree. Derek Sivers normally has good advice but this is biased. This benefits the advisor more than the advisee.
Meh. Kind of a content-free article. And it repeats the old saw about entrepreneurs being risk-takers. The evolving wisdom seems to be that successful entrepreneurs are actually risk-averse. They just happen to be people who can effectively analyze, manage and minize risk.
The answer is yes. Hulu has regularly blocked Flash-enabled devices through various (often circumventable, but still) means. It's just that you never hear about them.
That's it? They lasted 2 months? Did they get bored?
If I cared most about reputation, I wouldn't have been asking questions in the Emacs Lisp and Common Lisp groups, for example. As you can see, you don't necessarily get a lot of points for asking or answering questions in an esoteric section.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2264267/generating-a-quiz...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2264286/generating-a-quiz...

I had around 90 questions when I quit. The way the game was set up, you always got a lot more points for answering questions, then getting them upvoted. In general, you are going to get more votes in the most popular topics.

Reputation is also a currency. You can spend it to get better answers to your questions, 50 points minimum. My reputation was probably between 2300-2500 before the devaluation. I guess I would have lost half? Not sure. At any rate, where StackOverFlow could have been really interesting is moving beyond the simple questions and solving specific, but a more complicated, questions. If you don't take the time to be specific, someone will just give you a link to another site. That gets upvoted a few times and your question is done.

Hopefully, someone will come up with a better model. I'd do it without rep, but I like the economy aspect. I think it draws in people. People will game it, so design the model to get the desired results: Great questions and great answers.
http://www.statesman.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/aust...

The "not for very long" part still stands.
Thoughs on Simple Living
I'd hire someone who took this approach (assuming he/she was qualified). They're motivated and enthusiastic. Which can be hard to find.
Don't think I've heard of that one. Any great loss?
For some reason, this reminds me of Philip K Dick's book "The Simulacra".

If I recall well, the guy is trying to escape advertising bots of some kind.

There's a trend toward "paid + ads". It may soon become the norm to pay premium plans only to get rid of ads, in the OS, on your phone (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/27/windows_phone_7_ads/).
Black Swan Magnet
This just plain isn't good enough. Nobody is going to look at Netflix ($9/month) and Hulu Plus and pick the latter. They're being way too stingy with content. Give it all up, or go home.
Was a YC W10 company
Do you still use Facebook or is there something else out there that teenagers are using?
Observation on hiring from open source