skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I disagree strongly with this article.

> Even if the market roars, an investor can only make
> so much with only $20,000. Even in a strong bull market,
> they can make 20% to 30% a year, which is insignificant
> to a young person.

Insignificant? I would be out-of-my-mind ecstatic at 20% returns. 20% of $20000 is $4000, which is (for most young adults) equivalent to several months of wages.

However, it's also dishonest to imply that 20% is at all realistic. 3-4% per year is more likely over the long term, and most young adults will see better returns from using the $20000 to pay off credit cards or student loans. Remember: $100 to pay off a 15% credit card is guaranteed 15% returns!

> Putting money in the market means living with uncertainty.
> Young people do not want to deal with that kind of stress.

What uncertainty? I don't care how much my stocks are worth today or tomorrow, because I don't plan to sell them for years (or decades). Some prudence is wise (such as not buying at the top of a bubble), but the only people I've seen get stressed out about the market are usually 1) invested in some dodgy get-rich-quick scheme or 2) planning to retire in a year or two.

> Someone in their twenties should focus on their education
> and other investments that will advance their career.
> Altucher suggests taking classes, brainstorming ideas,
> starting a website and attending networking events.

None of these require $20000, unless "taking classes" means "attending Harvard" or "networking events" means "week-long drug-fueled orgies".

> It is also not a bad idea to have $20,000 cash in the
> bank. It can provide a safety net and peace of mind
> during a time when many are losing their jobs.

$1000? Definitely. $2000? OK, if you live in an expensive area. $20000? Waste of capital. Savings accounts have very low interest rates right now -- better to have your money working for you than being slowly eroded via inflation.

The best time to buy into a market is when the crazies are out in force. With all the goldbugs panting into their paper bags, and old white folks on medicare demonstrating against "socialism", there's probably no better time to buy high-quality stocks. Conversely, anything looking "bubbly" (gold, Apple, salesforce) is not worth touching with a 10-foot pole.
> why, may I ask, do you say "besides starting a company"?

Because I'm looking for options that I'm not aware of. I didn't say I wasn't considering it.
* They performed an experiment that showed that having a single security guard patrol the parking lot at night completely eliminated crime (mugging, car break-ins, etc. that occur with regularity in Wal-Mart parking lots), but they did not put it into effect to save what? $75,000 per year?*

When was this last true? Where is this true? I've been to a half dozen Walmarts in North Texas which, I believe, all have security patrol in golf carts or old sub-compacts. At least the three I frequent do.
I entirely share your view about working with system packagers. The current distutils infrastructure is really hard to work with (and I have considerable experience with it, as the main maintainer of distutils extensions in numpy for the last 2-3 years).

From the start, bento packages can be installed so that they respect the FHS, exactly like autoconf packages. I also hope to make compilation more customizable (which is a real PITA in distutils ATM).
Great observation. That is definitely on our roadmap.

Of course most restaurants already do have websites, so getting them to add a simple redirect to a mobile version might be an easier task than asking them to dump their entire existing website.

But I definitely agree, for new restaurants that don't already have a website, being able to build a desktop + mobile version with the same tool is very compelling.
Young people are precisely those who least need risk-free investments. It's as you get older that you should adjust your investment mix towards more risk adverseness.
Exactly. It would be nice if GWT and PageSpeed took that into account because they're sending mixed messages.
How did you do that?
> I feel like our biggest challenge with this service is getting in touch with restaurant owners and convincing them of the value of having a mobile website, most of them don't seem to be particularly interested in technology.

I could see that being the case. I don't think they understand how infuriating it is on the consumer side.

Maybe publish some success stories citing the amount of increased revenue.

Another idea would be to build your own index/app of restaurants with mobile friendly sites so there's double incentive for them to sign up.

> Unlimited promotions, events and discounts with scheduling

Maybe you have this already, but a local restaurant here has a promotion where you sign up via email/SMS and they raffle a free pizza every weekend. Since they're also a bar, this helps get people in the door and spend more money.
But despite the long term and multi-account relationship we enjoy, they’ve gone so far as to force me to send them copies of my drivers license and social security card to some strange physical address

after what kind of verification?
EMC Acquires Greenplum (MPP data warehouse)
As designer I always love to see the process of thought behind a design.

It kinda made me smile the shameless plug to Draft and Campfire in the second paragraph.
Are "Rails fanboys" really complaining about lack of IDE support? I was under the impression that IDEs weren't especially popular among Rails programmers (as compared to Vim and TextMate).
Cellphone Serves as Learning Platform for the Developing World
Researchers are using the fastest growing technology platform in the developing world -- the cellphone -- to deliver educational content to children in out-of-school settings in rural areas.
> No, it's not. I've lost my password before. I've been able to recover/change it, and reinstall my games.

And just because you have been able to recover your password you cannot fathom that it might be unrecoverable?

It's very simple: lose access to contact email address, be fucked.
none of the tools you quote work well for the scipy community (where I am coming from). There are several reasons for that:

- complex compilation is a drag with distutils
- virtualenv is not very useful as usually advocated, because you do not want separate environment. You want everything in the same python.
- generally, working with distutils code is just a big pain. I have dealt for years with it, and from my experience, anything short of a rewrite from scratch won't solve our issues.
What every end-user needs to know about "public" data and privacy: Regardless your "privacy" settings, you shouldn't put something on the Internet that you would be ashamed to be made public, either now or in the foreseeable future.
While it seems snide, snarky, or possibly juvenile to suggest it... "Two chicks at the same time" or alternate versions of blow it all in a glorious escapade is actually a valid suggestion.

Money means fuck all if it isn't spent. Liquid assets are liquid. They can disappear to economic eddies and flows, or simply be squandered on poor planning. If you are young you are in a pretty agile financial situation.

Honestly, I'd say screw off to the idea of the mutual fund. Every engineer I went to school with ( as well as me ) got taken in by our differential equations classes. We lost most of our early investments in our 401ks.

If you are young you have the option to invest that money in a fun amazing experience. If that means a start up for you, do it. If it means moving out to some other city and finding a life there, do that. If it means hookers and blow... I suggest joining the republican party first you might be able to parlay it into a career.

Seriously though, if you are young you have the option of throwing responsibility to the wind, and you really don't get to have a second chance at it. Memories, experiences, they live in you forever. They make you a better person. And all the economic recession on earth won't effect the value of that.
ZeroCater is an amazing service. I recommend it for any startup.
HTML5 Programming with F#
If anything I'd like to see fewer packages provided as part of the distros and a cleaner system for installing them separately. I practically never use any of the installed versions of languages in Ubuntu. They're usually out of date, broken down into too many sub-packages, over-specified on dependencies, and unable to play nicely with packages you install yourself via gems/easy_install/whatever.
37Signals Redesigns Basecamp's Homepage
I love the idea and I actually have a beta account that they sent me a few months ago, but it looks like everything on the site is in German, hm.
The perfect pyramid scheme - require all the marks to pay to get paid, and promise them other mugs will keep paying in.

Of course no-one outside the pyramid will pay (we've proved paywalls always fail and donate buttons won't pay for their pixels), and the lot will collapse when the marks realise they've lost their audience for a few cents.

Not as evil as those "pay to bid" auction scams, but it has promise.
I think the most important advice they could get at this stage is to take control of their environment, and if something isn't the way they like it they should fight until it is.

It's easy to think that school is like a railroad, that the course is set and cannot be changed, but really it is just that there's only a few paved roads, and people will complain that they are stuck in traffic. If you have the inclination, you can go off-roading and have a blast. It just takes a little effort to get started.
My Knight News challenge entry last year was essentially this. I think it's a great idea: abstracting away the actual cash and making more concretely about rewards for creators.
Yeah, but after leaving Georgia Tech, who would still want to remember such an awkward email handle? I wonder if they are still using the lame randomly generated prism account handles for email these days, I don't think the average student actually needs terminal access in acme anymore.
Key phrase from article: Program both client and server in one great language...The F# code is executed as Javascript on the client side.

Now available as a free download
Yes, Linking the TechCrunch article here was unnecessary. Saying they are unnecessary, though? People follow them because of the stories they bring in, wether interesting commentary was added or not. How else would someone who doesn't read the Woot blog on a regular basis find out about this?
I don't think you should use just now (it is marked as experimental quick clearly :) ). As for the advantages:
- support for arbitrary installation scheme, like autoconf (e.g. you don't have to hardcode installation path to install data as with distutils)
- data files are easier to deal with
- even though it is really raw, the internal tool to build C extensions has automatic dependency handling, md5-based coutent change detection, and supports parallel builds.
- it is designed to be hackable. I want to be able to use scons or waf to build complex extensions (I am coming from numpy/scipy, which has particularly strong needs for building C extensions compared to the average python library)
I'm not sure I follow you? This app doesn't have any ability to "record" (especially not click coordinates). Rather, you assemble your actions by drag-and-drop only. Selinium is far more full featured browser automator. However, this power comes at the cost of simplicity. Selinium is broken up in to three separate components that must be installed and work together in order to function. This isn't a bad thing. It's just far more complicated than Fake.
The site is nice and clean looking, but I agree with Scott that it lacks a bit of energy,vibrancy & passion.

I'd hope that with the market you are going after, you may be able to inject some of that trendyness into your site's look.

best of luck
AP Not Amused By The Woot Story, Tries To Play The Oil Spill Card
If you're smart and motivated you're likely to find that your most precious resource is time, particularly that portion of time in your life when you're healthy and free of serious obligations.

Live a little. You can always make money.
We have been contemplating adding ordering for a while now. To do it well, it's a non trivial problem with a lot of different challenges.

Restaurant online ordering providers usually fall into two camps:

1) Simple ordering that goes to email, fax, or phone. There is no integration with the kitchen and restaurants have to reconcile their reporting at the end of the day.

2) Online ordering website integration directly with the restaurant's point of sale system. This works better for the restaurant cause the orders can go straight to the kitchen printers, the sales reports are all in the same place, and the orders pop up in the point of sale system that the restaurant is already using. This is a lot more work (and a lot more expensive), and first you have to convince the POS manufacturers to give you access to their APIs.

Additionally, not all restaurants are interested in doing online ordering (it affects the workflow of the kitchen to have orders coming in 'out of band').

I wouldn't want to limit our service to only folks interested doing online ordering, but it might be an interesting add-on for us down the road.
Strange isn't it. And the crew can read that statement for 15 years while they "pay their debt to society".

I don't think this law has been used yet, at least it didn't make any news that I've seen. I expect there to be challenges and appeals the first time someone gets defended in court. Hopefully it will gut the law.

In case the back story is missing, the law was passed in reaction to semi-submersible smuggling boats that would travel in deep water and if confronted by US forces, the crew would just scuttle the boat and then wait for the coast guard or navy to rescue them. No evidence, no crime, plus now the task force has to return the crew they just rescued.
Silicon Valley: D.C. doesn't get tech
Ask HN: Effectively improving your writing ability
I learned to write from English literature classes and lab reports, but haven't had any additional formal training in several years.

I am planning on spending some focused time improving my writing over the next few months. Besides frequent practice, are there any techniques/books/exercises/etc that you have used to improve your writing?
From reading many of these stories, it's clear that PayPal wants to cap their risk.

From reading this story, there are two possibilities:

1. A Paypal employee is just being petty and vindictive, or

2. Paypal simply wanted to get rid of OpenCamp's account and used ongoing harassment through (re-re-re-re-)verification as a means to goad OpenCamp into giving cause for freezing/closing the account.

If it's (1), the employee in question should be terminated and OpenCamp's account restored. If it's (2), Paypal should be on the wrong end of a lawsuit.
Slavoj Zizek: the world’s hippest philosopher
It seems to be really taking off in Germany, probably after a talk at the re:publica conference in Berlin by Peter Sunde [1]

Nearly all German blogs I’m reading now have a flattr button (and nearly everything that can be flattred is in German which could be a problem for international adaption. Or not.)

[1] http://re-publica.de/10/event-list/flattr-social-micro-donat...
I wished I could have taken exactly the same format, but unfortunately, the cabal format was not defined (no formal grammar) when I started this, and I needed reST support for some fields, which makes it a bit difficult. This also explains why the format is not exactly YAML.
Cambridge, MA

We're building a social network for communities and neighborhoods and ooking for Rails developers.

Contact maxtilford@gmail.com if you're interested.
Given how flippant Woot is about this, and how hard the AP would fight if this actually went to court (since having to pay every source would damage its business model way more than people copy-pasting does), the bottom-right quadrant may as well not exist. The AP wants that outcome even less than we or Woot do.
http://www.fliptext.org/ would be one approach. (or something like http://pypi.python.org/pypi/upsidedown for the semi-hardcore)
if this means the end of restaurant web sites that are built entirely in flash or have PDF-only menus, I'm all for it.
I think Altucher was under the assumption that high-interest loans and other debt were already taken care of, since he was talking about investing in the market vs investing in yourself.

I don't think it's a bad idea to have an emergency fund of up to 6-8 months of living expenses, especially in this economy. Once that's taken care of, I don't agree that the capital left over should be put in the market vs in yourself. $20,000 is not a lot of capital, and taking classes, building a web site, marketing it, etc will quickly use that up, but the upside and benefits are much higher.

Even you said it yourself, at 2-3% realistic (and 20-30% at the highest level), investing in the market is not really worth it.
I'm trying to avoid constructing the school-time/video-game-time dichotomy because to do so would just mean I was a missionary for consumerism. Think about it: Why should I reinforce to my children, from an early age, that videos and such are fun and learning is not fun; consuming entertainment is what you want to do, and productive work is what you don't want to do, but rather have to do so you then can consume entertainment. That's just the type of people who the captains of industry hope I will introduce into the world: people who will obediently go work for them, only to turn around and consume their products.
But if they're meaningless anyway, what does it matter if they change them?
I've never heard of this before, so forgive me if I'm restating the obvious, but this appears to be getting in the face of Microsoft's MSRC: http://www.microsoft.com/security/msrc/ (Microsoft Security Response Center).

edit: Does anyone know more about the hostility they're referring to and what their objectives are? Presumably Microsoft was being less-than-cooperative?
Interesting observation. Do you have any examples of this?

In my experience, most restaurant menus do fit into a simple database format. After all, most major point of sale systems do use relational databases to store and track menu items. The menu item databases are usually highly configurable but I've usually seen them break down into:

1) Major categories: Entrees, Appetizers
2) Menu items: Cheeseburger, Grilled Salmon
3) Modifier categories: Steak Temperature, Salad Dressing
4) Modifiers: Rare, Medium, Well-Done, etc.

Of course you usually don't display the modifiers on the menu itself, that is a back end implementation detail. :)
I believe this is a consequence of using the CoreData defaults. I hope the author leaves it this way. That would allow me to output automated tests from scripts.
Not sure why you were taught that. If you walk into any financial planner's office and tell them you're in your 20's, they will set up your investment portfolio to be almost 100% stocks. They will then tell you that as you get older, they will scale back the % held in stocks and replace it with bonds (which are safer). As you near retirement, your portfolio will mostly be bonds/other safe vehicles, and very small % of stocks.
Diigo V5.0: Collect, Highlight and Remember
Design for the Coder’s Mind: Reverse-Engineering Visual Design
Habits, Leverage, and Trees
I don't think strlen is being accurate by saying its "Ruby fanboys" who are the source of a lot of criticism. Clojure does have a lot of former Java developers who aren't used to non-IDE development on the JVM. Others don't like the apparent complexity Emacs comes with (Emacs, Slime, Swank, Paredit? All I want to do is enter some ascii characters and run a compiler!) That said, I think Clojure is improving in those fronts with broader editor support, guides to getting Emacs set up, and a growing list of libraries.
Hacker News isn't non-anonymous. If someone gives out their real name on HN it's because they want to.

There is no substantial difference between the level of anonymity of HN and that of 4chan as far as real life identity is concerned.
fallout? ejecta?
Replace the burger with a menu (keep the bite).
Bummer, your demo requires Flash which means I can't view it on my iPad. Shouldn't your site be mobile friendly?
The Ten Commandments of Open Source
For example, you can't re-use the same image in other CSS files without duplicating the image's download cost as it's the surrounding CSS file that's cached, not the image itself. At the same time, you download all the data URL images with the CSS, regardless of whether the user ever gets to see them on the current page. Fine in some cases, not so much in others.
Most of them DO provide a way to do this. For example, Ruby is array based but provides a way to do this through enum. The lispish way is first/rest. Clojure, a lisp with very novel data structures, does this just fine even with associative arrays and vectors. It introduces a seq abstraction to support it.

It's important when you need to write your own iteration primitives. Map, fold, etc are all well and good, but sometimes they won't do because the iteration may require some unusual steps.

In your particular dialect of lisp, what does the code for writing map or fold look like? The one that doesn't copy memory egregiously, that is. And how bad must the performance of javascript linked lists be to scare you away from them so damn hard, anyways?

Or perhaps, what you're supporting is a "lispish" language that isn't really something we should directly compare to lisp, in the vein of Nu?
Regarding Unicomp's current crop: "These aren't "copies" of a Model M; these are Model Ms"

I'd have to disagree. The key action is similar enough. but the keys don't have separate caps and the whole keyboard case is plastic, not solid battleship steel. (At least for my Customizer 104)

I'd actually pay money for a deluxe version, as proper USB (without ps2/usb connector glitches) and the Windows/Mac keys are pretty essential to me nowadays.
Does anyone know more about the hostility they're referring to and what their objectives are? Presumably Microsoft was being less-than-cooperative?

Yes, the posting refers to Tavis Ormandy, a Google security researcher, who released his advisory after 5 days of initial communication with Microsoft. The story is he wasn't happy with the timetable that Microsoft would resovle the issue in. The story got bigger as it seemed to pit Google vs. Microsoft.

more: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1421980
$20000 is a lot of capital; I could probably live for a year on that, and I don't live in a cheap location. A young adult (low medical expenses, no children, no mortgage) living in a less-populated area (north pacific, midwest, south) could probably stretch that to two or even three years, if they find a decent deal on an apartment.

Classes at the local community college run about $50 per quarter, plus books. Building a website is free, and hosting it nearly so. Marketing doesn't have to mean full-page ads in the New York Times -- a few humble links on popular community sites can go a long way.

I think there's a certain group mentality on News.YC which builds up the idea of startups as hugely capital-intensive operations, requiring hundreds of thousands in capital and slick marketing campaigns across the web. This mentality is harmful. Every startup I've ever heard of has either 1) started small and built slowly or 2) flamed out in a hissing ball of comedy. There's no doubt thousands I've not heard of, which quietly curled up in a corner and died after spending all their investments on fancy chairs and television commercials.
Forget online ordering, just sell lead generation. I could sell your service to my local clients but not easily for 15/month. If you tracked leads you could easily sell your service on commissions alone.