skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I grew up poor: went to school with holes in my clothes, had the electricity turned off, etc. (But because my poor-ness was due to my mother's infelicity with money, not because we didn't have any at all, we also had some finer things like a computer.)

I can tell you that money can't buy you happiness. Money doesn't even buy a sense of security. Your attitudes about money can make or break your happiness.

Example: If you are in the Sustenance Driven mindset defined by Abraham Maslow, you will always be motivated by "getting enough" and "keeping it" - even if you have a comfortable middle class lifestyle, you will be kept awake at night, afraid you will lose it. While most descriptions you find online will equate the feeling of Sustenance with actual Sustenance, you can hold this mindset no matter how much you have.

My (divorced) parents, no matter their earnings, were always in that category.

I was, too, until I actually did lose it all - I got scammed out of 2 months of work, had my car stolen, got mono, couldn't work for months, lost all my other clients, came within a hairs' breadth of being sued by one of them... if not for some guy I was only casually friends with on IRC, who up and gave me my rent one month, I would have been evicted and homeless.

Then I realized: it sucked, but I didn't die, and I recovered, got a job, bought a car, paid off that angry client, paid off my credit card debt.

Now I know exactly what money is worth to me.

That's why I quit a job where I could have stayed forever, never been fired, and got profit sharing that increased every month - by the time I quit, it was already equal to an additional pay check a month, and I was earning over $150,000 a year. Because I was unhappy there and knew what money was worth to me, and it wasn't worth that unhappiness.

So, there you go. Money can't buy you happiness. It can't even buy you the feeling of security, it can't even make you free from worry, because you can have lots of money and still feel insecure and worry about losing it all. It is, literally, all in your head.
Happy Burnout - controlled chaos of entrepreneurship
If they're only disgruntled because of Reddit Gold, and not the content of the site, then they're going to be disappointed. Aside from the format, HN and Reddit are nothing alike.
#3 has been my strategy since childhood, and it works surprisingly well against people who don't know the trick.
Evernote. In a bulleted list, with sub bullets if necessary or as inspiration comes so I can fill out the idea.
Whilst I don't think this is a complete exercise, the coursework for one of my Uni modules is online and focused heavily on cross-browser JavaScript, XML/DOM manipulation and XSL.

http://www.dcs.bbk.ac.uk/~ptw/teaching/IWT/coursework/cw.htm...

It turned out that most of the class found this pretty challenging, and whilst it didn't include server side stuff which I thought should have been covered I also thought it wasn't a bad exercise given the time expectation associated with it (no more than 8 hours is expected for a piece of coursework like that).

My answer to that coursework is online still: http://www.dcs.bbk.ac.uk/~dkitch01/IWT/

As to what I would teach, I would do it in this order:

1) CGI (Server side responding to requests and basic HTTP)

2) PHP (Scripting on the server)

3) Java (Compiled code on the server)

4) HTML

5) JavaScript Validation (Reading the DOM, editing existing elements)

6) JavaScript Manipulation (Writing DOM)

7) AJAX (Conversing with web services)

It should be incremental and accumulative.
How long would we have if the Sun went out?
Find love in Oz land
Australia is one of those countries that boasts of an equal sex ratio. (Is that why they call it God’s own country?) While the Aussies’ love of the outdoors is well known, not to mention their exuberant extroverted natures, many more of them are now fascinated by online activities.
The faintest ink is better than the best memory
--- Chinese saying (allegedly)
This is why the author says that they are dangerous:

> The right questions set you up for real success or failure. You never know whether a clue leads down a bunny trail or to genuine insight.
I sometimes browse the /b/ board on 4chan. I find it a good "shock" to know at what lows human beings can go. But I would not advise it, because it's something for people with a strong stomach.

What I learnt is that they absolutely don't care how lame they look. It's a strange subculture, where everybody insults everyone, hating everything and being as mean as they can be. But still, in cases like this one, they manage to come up as a whole in the name of Anonymous.

I think this is a fertile ground for some psychological and sociological study.
For the minimalists out there:

text files + dropbox
I'd make them build some sort of a web-based adventure/RPG game, for several reasons:

First, writing games is fun. Even the most boring programming task can be enjoyed if it's in the context of writing a game.

Second, RPG / adventure games are inherently stateful which makes using REST / MVC non-trivial. Still, most real world applications are stateful one way or another so it's a good way to get familiarized with these concepts (as well as related ones such as continuations) and the underlying problems.

Third, if you allow interaction between players they can gain some familiarity with social software.
Both of those editors rely on the contentEditable support of the browser to power the actual editing, and browsers have traditionally done a very poor job at producing valid HTML. They make attempts at "post-validation" and "attribute scrubbing", but these are at best makeup on a gorilla. I certainly wouldn't call their solutions elegant.

Having worked on numerous content management systems in the past, one of our biggest issues was trying to "lock down" the WYSIWYG editor so as to minimize the chances that clients could inadvertently break the layout when editing. It was a huge pain point for us, and I lost count of the number of times I had to go in and fix broken pages.

I'm very glad to see that the state of the art in HTML editing is moving forward, and it's well past time for CKEditor and TinyMCE to be put to pasture, IMHO.
It's (probably) a Red Dwarf reference.
The call I am missing is canvas.putImageData(); and that seems like one of those HTML5 features that works in theory, but hardly in practice.
Where is the new Hacker News?
How to win rock-paper-scissors... I see from this type of submission or from the [pic] frontpage elements that the HN user base is growing. This is not meant as a criticism, as I know it's probably the fate of all good social news portals, but can anyone point to a fresh community oriented towards [technological] innovation, star-ups, etc?
This is the kind of rage that overexposure to Monads can lead to and I quote:

"If you like this style, that’s cool, but if you want to tell me that I should like it as well, be prepared to get punched in the face."

;-)

Edit: on a serious note, this is a really good post.
I noticed that you guys have a free plan. Is that a significant percentage of your user base?

It's a little bit hidden and I didn't see it at first (which I guess is the point).
I use a bulleted list first, add sub bullets as ideas come, and when I'm ready to work on it, I make it into a full blown note with all my details in it.
Your more than welcome to come and visit us anytime Peter... there are technically two web apps and a startup in our house :)
I wouldn't trust anything coming out of Vegas.
E-books outsell hardbacks on Amazon
I guess the bottom line is not to put too much stake in what everyone else says meditation is or isn't and focus on the practice of just taking time to be alone with your thoughts long enough to organize them in such a way that makes sense for you.

This brings up the interesting and valuable question of what meditation is and isn't. Buddhist meditation is a skill that concerns itself with two activities. I've provided a link at the end of this reply that you can use to learn Mindfulness (as taught by a monk who is also a Stanford Ph.D in Buddhist Studies).

So what are the activities that comprise meditation?

The first activity is to willfully concentrate the mind in an effort to calm it. This is done by focusing strictly on the sensation of the breath in order to restrict the mind from wandering off. The name of this activity in Pali is called "samatha", which means "calm" or "tranquility".

The second activity is to see the processes by which the mind runs off into orthogonal thought and unhelpful states of mind. Once you see these processes happening, you intervene in them to stop them from happening in order to bring your mind into a strong state of calm awareness. This activity is called "vipassana" in Pali. It means "insight" in English.

Samatha and vipassana are two sides of the same coin. They are a process broken into two supporting functions to achieve the goal. When people are introduced to meditation, they are being introduced to the encompassing practice of samatha-vipassana, otherwise referred to as Mindfulness Meditation.

One of the most thorough and accessible sources of instruction on Mindfulness is Gil Fronsdal. You can find an entire course, along with everything else on this site, for free here:

http://www.audiodharma.org/series/1/talk/1762/
Well specifically, he's the maintainer of INTERCAL[1], an esoteric/outright evil programming language that, from his request (if I'm not being too credulous; it's at least plausible), Knuth must find amusing. Of course he's not a Computer Scientist on the level of Knuth, but my awareness of him, at least, is as an important cultural figure in computer-aware politics (from back when this was a distinguishable perspective), and a curator of a significant chunk of the culture of hackers from a formative era, which they were both a part of, that might otherwise be left abandoned. I'd hesitate to frame him as appreciable as a philosopher to Knuth's scientist, because he's a hacker who's also made real contributions to code that is still in use today; but his essay 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar'[2], at the very least, was an important text in laying down, and communicating to those who may not have previously understood, an open source philosophy that we take as a given position today.

I dunno, I'm just surprised to see the lack of recognition apparent in a thread on Hacker News about someone who I think of as a notably important figure, a hacker elder. I'm not from that era, maybe I just read too much Slashdot back in the day.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INTERCAL

[2] http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral...
Also, for those who feel that standard RPS-3 is not challenging, there is always RPS-101 (of which RPS-3 is a mere subset)

http://www.umop.com/rps101.htm
As stated in the other comments, there's really not enough information. I would lean towards #2 because of what Mark Suster calls, learn before you earn.

#1 you're going to have to figure out a lot of things on your own. Now that's not a bad thing, but the experience may come quicker if you have some more senior people to watch and learn from.

#3 sounds like a consulting company so the things you learn will be around how to run a consulting company

Now of course the big assumptions I have made are:

You interested in product oriented startups vs consulting

You are pretty confident in your ability to pick up technology. You are more interested in learning the process, etc

You're not in it for the money but the chance for eventual glory

If any of these assumptions are wrong then the answer of course changes
Yeah, I think that might actually be the definition now that I think of it. I do think there are some cases where that inversion of control makes sense, but it really has to be cases where there's no sensible way to proceed with anything other than total buy-in to a particular way of doing things. For example, it's fine that something like the Unreal Tournament engine is a framework. If you're going to write your game in the UT engine, you're really going to have to write it in the UT engine, and commit to doing things the way it does things; there's no sensible way for you to just use the UT engine as a library subordinate to your game. But I don't want to do that sort of thing very often or lightly.
Well, Mozilla just raised their reward from $500.00 to $3,000.00 (http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/Mozilla-offers-3-...). Also, while Google's offering up to $1,337 (http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Google-invites-attack...), they've actually awarded $2,000 on one occasion (http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/Google-pays-2-000...)...
The Voice of Israel
the game bundle selection was OK

At least 2 of the games (world of goo and braid) were some of the best known and most highly acclaimed indie games of the past 5 years.

4 of the games (Aquaria, Gish, World of Goo & Braid) were IGF winners.

These were not your run-of-the-mill indies, they were already profitable and well known games before it.
Viswanathan Anand: Listen to Yourself and Everything Else Will Follow
I can assure you they were not the first people to dream up the concept of superconductivity. (In fact Heike Onnes first observed superconductivity in frozen mercury in 1911). And even if they were, as an idea it's still worthless. My idea for a product is an anti-gravity machine. So what? Unless I can figure out how to do it, the idea is worthless. It's discovering how do it that counts.
And middle management meetings.
Odd thing to say. Birdhouse app is Adam's app btw. He made it with Cameron Hunt.
Global Visas Fraud Complaints Unfounded
Global visas fraud, Global visas Review, Global visas complaint, travelpeopleforum
It's rather annoying to give to your friends though, as you have to re-sign the code once a month and dish out binaries to everyone again. Plus, you'll run out of device codes quickly if you use your dev account to build apps for clients (whose devices you need to register too).
Seems like backwards thinking to me. You'll gladly "help out" a billion-dollar corporation, but won't pay for some genuine extra services?

I'm seriously thinking I should ask for donations for LangPop.com - people like it but don't click on the ads. Maybe I could have a donate-o-meter for different languages.
I wasn't explicit enough about the fact that the article originally attributed the term to Grice, and then an anonymous editor changed it to this scholar who isn't mentioned anywhere else on the Web.

Also, in many cases the hypothesis that Wikipedia is correct isn't /very/ likely.
I'm seriously considering moving our personal accounts to the Co-Op bank here in the UK http://www.co-operativebank.co.uk from HBOS.

I want to open a new business bank account for a new venture and that will be with them.
I think there's a good correlation, though. High profit margins are a big flashing red light that consumers could be getting something better or cheaper or both, since in competitive markets, high profit margins don't persist. So they're a decent way of identifying where disruptive opportunities lie: figure out why these high profit margins are persisting, and how your startup can move in on that territory.
Hmm. Not particularly impressive thus far. Here were my first two impressions:

- Tried the link last night several times, and the server never responded.

- Tried again today, it came up, I selected some text and clicked "Heading". The whole document turned bold. Hit Ctrl+Z and nothing happened.

Left.

Stuff like this is all about first impressions. These guys managed to screw that up for me twice. It's like Joel Spolsky said about premature exposure: "Now you've got two problems: your thing sucks, and everybody knows it."
Ask HN: Web Hosting and Payments in Japan?
One of my customers who has a small business in Japan wants to setup a website, and a small online shop. Which makes me wonder :
- what are the good web hosting services in Japan ? (and cheap, Amazon EC2 in Singapore would be too expensive, at least to begin with)
- what are the good web payments services in Japan ? One that could handle cash payments in combini would be completely awesome.

So if there are some people with some insights on the Japanese web market, I'm sure that I'm not the only one interested !
Dell Releases Locked-Down Firefox
I believe HN original goal was to be what reddit was years ago. Since then the content on reddit has changed a lot.
I really do not understand the uproar about this?

Who gives a shit? What's the insinuation: that the whole thing is make believe and they're just sitting around twiddling their thumbs?
> unfortunately, they are largely copying the iPhone with just a different graphic design theme.

Doesn't the same apply to Android as well?
This completely gels with my experience. I like having enough money to live on comfortably: have a place that's just big enough, have money to eat out (not too expensively) when I feel like it, have enough to do something special occasionally, have enough to buy the sorts of foods I like (slightly more expensive locally produced foods, I'm a big fan of local production), have enough to buy some gadget or other if I save up for a bit. For me it's partly the saving up and appreciation of the expensive things that gives me happiness :)

I make about 55k a year, and it's enough for me. Any more and I'd stop appreciating what now takes a bit of time to save up for. :) (though I wouldn't say no to a one off cash injection for a really nice sporty weekender car ;)
I was not aware he had an account. hm. he also looks like he's interested in MySQL NDB cluster, a really promising technology that it seems people are ignoring.
I recommend reading Don't Just Roll The Dice, by Neil Davidson. http://scr.bi/c9n8Gu (via Scribd) Great content, and gives insight to the understanding of customer perceptions in pricing decisions. I found it useful for non-software products as well. Also, can you share what type of business the freemium model would be used for?
This is app. not really 'bad' or evil as such. It's not like he is breaking into computers, stealing money or defrauding people. All the app. does is something other phones can do like Nokias and Android phones, but Apple or AT&T don't want you too.

In a few years this tethering will free on the iPhone (think competition) and common place or obsolete (multiple SIMs, same contract) and no one will care.
I actually tried to submit this as well before seeing it was already submitted.

My reason to submit it was that I thought it would be a interesting entry to a discussion about the current state of Ruby and to be specific 1.9.2/Rails3.
I think you may have misunderstood the term "petty." Even the rejections people don't make a fuss about are fairly petty for the most part (dictionary definition: "of little importance; trivial"). They're mostly things like "You forgot this one guideline" or "You have a small bug in this part of the app."
From the guidelines:

If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying
that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)

Granted, yours is 391 days old, but your participation is pretty low, so you should wonder whether you are actually in any position to make this complaint.
Perhaps. But, effective ad copy is also valuable. Negotiation is negotiation...though it does take a whole different set of skills to negotiate face to face.

That said, I suspect he did deal in person quite a bit, even if the meeting was made on craigslist. I've sold tons of stuff on craigslist, and there's often a bit of back and forth, either on the phone or when the person comes to look at the item. All things are negotiable.
I wonder when Apple will take a higher share in the enterprise market, i.e. when the "halo effect" from use of iphones, later maybe ipads, in big corp.s will lead to increased use of macs/os x there too. if it happens, i.e. when os x reaches a certain threshold of trust or viability in enterprise systems, it will probably be something that happens quite fast. in a sense, there'll be a network or lemming effect where you'd just need one big firm to switch to make it "acceptable" for other "orifices" to do so too.
That makes sense, but I'd like to see some more transparent feedback with regards to my privacy then.

Something like: "We need to send your Twitter/Facebook stream to our servers to work our magic and present you only the signal instead of the noise"
Design of a TakeDown API (e.g. for Blogetery-type issues)
I would not pursue your opportunity with Company X. Perhaps they will let you start and then give you notice a week later with some excuse like "poor fit". Perhaps not.

If you aren't happy in your current role then see what other companies can offer. If Company X can see your talent, then so can others.

Don't be lazy.
Soil Remediation Treatment
Pure Effect provides environmental solutions for pollution prevention. It specializes in ground water treatment, soil remediation and air quality management. It also provides dewatering treatment solutions with required support from project planning to NPDES Permitting to execution.
One thing to consider. Some people will be relatively price-insensitive and will buy the most expensive option regardless just to ensure they get all the features. So, make your top price point higher than you might initially think.
The programming subreddit is sorta similar: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming

I haven't found anything really comparable to HN. IMO, the quality of submissions and comments has gone downhill. It's a common problem of fast growth in a forum: Too many newbies show up, outnumbering the old members. The newbies don't learn the old culture/mannerisms/whatever. Bam, endless September.
It wasn't a complaint, it was an inquiry. And it seems like a legitimate one to me. It's well established that every online community, no matter how well guarded, will find that as it becomes more successful, it has a wider base of users, and so the tight focus of the smaller initial base will inevitably be broadened. Some people want the smaller user base with the tighter focus: asking where else that can be found seems a lot more constructive than complaining about how this one has changed and trying to persuade people to revert it.
The Secrets Next Door
Speaking as a donor who isn't considering "subscribing", others probably felt as I did, that we were donating to help out the reddit team rather than Conde Nast.

I have no interest in paying for reddit on a regular basis and cannot imagine any feature or service they could add that would make me change my mind. A donation to give the reddit team an opportunity to get their heads above water and start making positive progress was what I signed up for.

The last 6 months to a year, reddit has had regular scaling/feature/etc. problems and the communication from the admins and devs has always had the same tone of overwhelm. I'd love to see a site I use so often and enjoy so much get out of that hole and though I don't see this as being the way I wish them the best of luck.

(A bit off-topic but EC2 sticks out as the big money sink they need to fix, the last number I remember them quoting was $200,000 a year for their EC2/S3 usage. I would have loved to hear the money was going to outfitting a few racks and moving things back out of the cloud.)
I've been here three years, and I remember seeing this kind of allegation all the time.

This time, it's true. In the last three or four months the quality of HN has dropped dramatically. I think some point soon, sadly, we can call it: HN has jumped the shark.