skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know anyone who's slaving away with the expectation of retiring to a permanent vacation. If that was a pervasive mentality, it must have been a regional, industry, or generational thing, because I've never even encountered it.

In fact, when my peers/friends/colleagues do talk about retirement, that conversation usually begins and ends with a quip along the lines of "what retirement?".

There's 1. almost no expectation that any of us will be able to stop working until we're physically sidelined, short of making 'fuck you' money. And 2. almost no desire to stop building things, even if we get 'fuck you' money.

After all, it's not like we're retiring from the factory floor. We might not be mountain biking on the weekends during retirement, but it'd take teams of orderlies to keep us from writing software.

I sometimes wonder about the first wave of digerati that hit 'retirement'. Things like a World of Warcraft for the fixed income set seem guaranteed.

But what about the code they write? Will the elderly coders follow tradition and dismiss new technology and just support "old school" projects to the end? Will they keep on the edge but churn out solutions more geared to their current situation (less motor control, less faculty to waste on cryptic commands, etc)? Or will their code and goals not be notably different than the new generation at all?
Anything that can be learned via talking to people can be learned via Stack Overflow assuming you can communicate well using text (although it may get tagged with the feared Subjective tag).
Interesting to read that. I thought it is only Paypal Germany whose customer service is bad.
My experience with Paypal is, that they deliberately freeze my account and ask for private information and business details, that you really don't want to distribute. If I don't send them, the account remains frozen - well, I may upload money any time ;o).

And indeed, Paypal also doesn't talk to me anymore. They don't close my account on request, they don't respond to any kind of mails. Only the list of problems to resolve gets longer and longer.

Please read their terms and conditions. It is one document with numerous extensions, 48 pages as I counted them the last time! The way it is done looks to me like they want to make it impossible to understand (my personal interpretation). Try to find out under which circumstances Paypal may freeze your account or under which circumstances they transfer your money , as you request: It is their personal decision. There are no clear criteria given. It is a matter how much they think you can be trusted. Check it yourself.

Sorry for the rant. Hearing the name of Paypal really makes me angry.

Steve Jobs once said: I don't sign a contract that is longer than 1 page. Good advice.
I can't imagine what would be inappropriate about this question? It seems relevant to the article and within hacker interests.

Any feedback for me?
http://wonko.com/post/sanitize
Sanitize, a whitelist-based HTML sanitizer written in Ruby. Given a list of acceptable elements and attributes, Sanitize will remove all unacceptable HTML from a string.
You have to take the much longer view when you talk about the merits of investing pensions or SS in stocks. The compounding affects of a broad S&P portfolio will destroy an all bond portfolio in a 20-30 time frame.

And now that we are printing all this money and have massive unfunded liabilities, there will be serious inflation in the next 20 years - I have no idea when, but bond yields will drop or become negative at some point while equities will perform much better. And this is Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett's view as well.
$100K in 4 months: A niche app’s path to App Store success
Yet that seems to produce much better software than Google or Microsoft

Not really. Please do not confuse Apple's successful products with anything else. Microsoft still delivers on software products in a way (admittedly a hardware company)Apple never could. Oh and as for comparisons with Google, thats even more ludicrous.
I was referring more to the boom in 2000 when we thought the stock market could do no wrong, and we were all stupid for putting our savings into things like money market accounts when the Dow was outperforming everything in sight.
The 'Acts of God' Algorithm
Tell HN: Looking for Alpha/Beta Testers for Traveloot (A Passive Facebook Game)
I'm looking for HNers who are interested/into passive Facebook games to be alpha/beta tester for my game, Traveloot. There are two of us working on this, me on the code part and my partner on the artwork.

Traveloot a little different from the typical killing/attacking/violence rpg-like game. Traveloot focuses on fun and doing good (no killing/attacking/violence)

It is still very much in pre-alpha mode (3 months) and who ever interested can join the alpha/beta list. Any suggestions or comments are most welcomed. Feel free to contact me: matt (at) cataflip.com if you need more information.

More info & Signup: http://playtraveloot.com

Side note: I take this as my first venture into the startup world and part of my knowledge seeking adventure. I'm learning new language/ framework/DB (Python/Django/MongoDB) and lots of startup related stuff along the way.

matt
Twitter track on steroids - announced by TweetMeme founder
The larger point is that people are trying to legislate a solution to a problem that we don't even have. The few times that the potential for network abuse has even dared to raise its head, it was quickly defeated by public outcry and market pressure. Network neutrality proponents love to prophesy about the gloomy scenarios that will play out unless we have network neutrality codified - except we don't have it now and it turns out it's not really a problem.

That said, I completely understand the point of the network neutrality advocates. Wouldn't it be nice if we could just write some laws and make sure we don't have to worry about our ISPs shafting us? Sure, but it never works out that way. Industries have a long history of squirming out of the grip of their regulatory bodies until they're using (and writing) the regulations themselves. That is a problem that we have now.

Look at how agribusiness controls the USDA. Or big pharma controls health care legislation. Or Wall Street's influence on economic policy. What do you think will happen when Verizon, Google, AT&T, etc. are pumping millions into Capitol Hill and their ex VPs are heading up various FCC committees...

And that doesn't even touch on the inevitable unintended consequences. Perhaps the darkest side of network neutrality legislation.
I do, but I rarely receive phone calls.
What is HyperGraphDB?
Another vote for Happiest Baby on the Block (Harvey Karp), probably can't rate it highly enough! The "jiggle" trick worked like absolute magic.

BTW the late Tracy Hogg (Baby Whisperer) is also highly recommended; she was also a big proponent of swaddling.
Ask HN: Google Analytics or Omniture Site Catalyst?
Any thoughts on the Pros and Cons of those products?
Can you include Omniture pricing? ease of use.

I am trying to decide which one to use for a small-medium site, but also want to be able to scale the site and the analytics along with it.

Thanx

Let me know
According to Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS

The key idea for SMS was to use this telephony-optimized system, and to transport messages on the signaling paths needed to control the telephony traffic during time periods when no signaling traffic existed. In this way, unused resources in the system could be used to transport messages at minimal cost.

So, in a sense sending SMS doesn't have to be so costly.
Not many, but I do know lots of people that didn't start saving for retirement until 30 or later.
The whole point of lisp is that it rolls around picking up new ideas. Haskell was originally implemented in lisp.

Examples:
Lexical scoping (ALGOL)

The 'format' macro(I believe Fortran)

The 'loop' macro (COBOL? Pascal? not sure?)

Type systems ala Qi and Haskell (ML and typed lambda calculus influenced)

Optional type declaration are probably to approximate C.

You can implement prolog it...

I believe lisp machines even had GC'd versions of C, Pascal, and other languages written for them.

Personally, when I read "all roads lead to lisp," it is taken with tongue firmly in cheek.
Lisp isn't really the 'best' language, it just ends up being able to subsume all of the ideas from them. In RPG terms, Lisp is the red mage.

This is why I like it a lot; given a certain problem domain, you can approximate the global optima that is reached in another language.
Al gore invented the Web Site.

In all seriousness, Where the wizards stay up late (http://www.amazon.com/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up-Late/dp/06848326...) gives a good account of the beginning of the net. For the web there is How the web was born (http://www.amazon.com/How-Web-was-Born-Story/dp/0192862073/r...)
these are important

1. use hyperlinks and link relations i.e. <link href="/people/bob" rel="friend" />

2. don't bother with multiple media types (unless /absolutely/ necessary) . If appropriate try to use/extend an established type such as Atom/AtomPub

3. make sure you set your cache control headers appropriately
Sales for Startups 101: 3 Rules to Success
> The thing is, the feature isn't dead simple. Implementing it would
> completely break a solid rule of the HIG of the iPhone. The
> quality of the UX on the iPhone exists because of those rules

I'm sorry, but if the HIG is Apple's 'ten commandments,' then they are guilty of multiple mortal sins. I can't comment much on the iPhone, but Apple has consistently (since the inception of OSX at least) broken their own HIG in their own applications. If Apple can't even play by their own rules, then why should everyone else?
Yes! I mainly use my credit card for everything online, including paypal, and that trick does get me on some occasions when I'm not paying close attention. It's probably a cost saving measure as credit cards most likely cost more to transact with than bank accounts.
It was a general statement. Apple makes profits off of developer sales, Apple should not be making developers' lives unnecessarily difficult.

Though I suppose yes, I would say that regulation based on sales is a much better metric than the capricious whimsy that currently governs the Apple approval process. (And yes, I'd call the HID standards whimsical, and although they specifically are not capricious, I'm again speaking in general.)
"I don't know anyone who's slaving away with the expectation of retiring to a permanent vacation."

I know quite a few people like that. However, they are all in "traditional" professions (law, medicine, accounting) or executives/fund-manager types working for huge organizations.

It's not something that appeals to me.
Linkbait article is linkbait.
"The whole point of lisp is that it rolls around picking up new ideas."

Kind of like the Katamari Damacy of programming languages... :-)
Yup, I confused the two. But I still think it's a misuse of the word cliche to characterize a common life-experience as one. It's a word best suited to creative attempts.
Anyone got good introductory recommendations to learn fractal math?
The largest difference between Code Anthem and TopCoder is that Code Anthem ranks you between 0-10 compared to other programmers, whereas TopCoder is a never-ending point system that rewards average programmers for spending more time on the site.

While certainly TopCoder is used by a fair number of people, I've never met a professional programmer "in the wild" that used it. The dollar prizes are actually a disincentive to well-paid programmers who can make that money guaranteed doing consulting, rather than throw their name in the hat in a contest.
People who save nothing until 30 likely have poor money management habits, and are in for a rough ride no matter what the expected return of the stock market is.
from leaf patterns to stock market fluctuations to the frequency of earthquakes — suggests some sort of common underlying laws, but these remain speculative.

Thats misleading, just because same type of fractal exists does not mean that there is an underlying "universal" law which is followed by stock market as well as atoms in a semiconductor.

The sentence gives an idea as if stock market can be predicted [horror] or follows similar law, which is clearly not the case.

E.g. Benford's law is observed in many diverse domains, but this does not means that knowledge learnt in one domain can be used for learning in another domains. i.e. just because voter counts in Iranian election and first digit of the prices of products at Walmart have same distribution does not implies that one can be used to predict other quantity.

The interesting point of that paper is that, it goes against our understanding of fluids, we assume the spatial distribution of the oxygen atoms should be random due to Brownian motion, yet there appears some kind of fractal pattern in it and that it is related to the temperature of loss of superconductivity.

edit: I have access to the paper from Cornell university library, I read it, nothing is mentioned about stock markets, its pure speculation by the journalist, just to end the article on some philosophical note.

edit 2: I am sure variation in Stock Market is NOT a fractal! The variation in stock market is Scale Free, [which isn't exactly same as being a fractal]. The journalist seems to be confused between the two terms
Twitter takes the tweet button from tweetmeme
"The Apple of today is basically NeXT, plus the branding and whatever other assets NeXT could salvage from Apple."

Basically, they merged the branch back into the trunk.
Accumulation period is distinct from employment period.

How many people do you know under 35 who were seriously saving 10% toward retirement?
No, they freeze accounts when their automated system flags them. Things like you had more sales this week than normal. Then they won't talk to you or the people who will talk to you are so brain dead that they actually don't seem to understand what Paypal has already done or don't realise when they're asking you to do impossible things.

That's my experience with them anyway. Eventually got it all sorted out but at the cost of not being able to get at my money for about a month.

Just having friendly helpful customer support who can explain what's going on would make a huge difference.
Introducing the Tweet Button
Stuff i've learned from having (two) kids:

i) Take photos. Its amazing how much your child will change and how things that are front and centre in their/your life will fade when day-day life demands attention. Take as many pictures as you can so that you can look back in a couple of years' time and remember those things (and get a good backup plan in place NOW).

ii) All children develop at their own pace. Children pick up skills only on a very rough timescale: our eldest could do jigsaws when he was a year old but couldn't jump till he was nearly two. Our friend's daughter could draw recognisable pictures staggeringly early but didn't know where to start with a jigsaw puzzle. Now they're 3.5 and both of them can do all of those things perfectly well. Praise them for trying things not just for being good at them.

iii) try not to assume the worst. Its easy - especially with your first child - to get sucked into thinking that your child must have some uniquely awful illness or impediment to a normal life because they 'still' aren't sleeping/they have a cold that hasn't cleared up/they haven't fed well that day etc etc. Whilst these things can happen, and you should obviously watch out for signs of serious problems, chances are nothing sinister is behind it. Accept that this is a phase and that in a few days or weeks it will have passed and you'll get through the rough times much easier.

iv) share the sleepless nights the lack of sleep is tough. Try and agree a rota with your partner as to who will be 'point-man/woman' each night and let the other sleep (ideally in a spare room). The key word is agree - do your 'night-shifts' dilligently and don't be tempted to start comparing the difficulty of the shifts you've already done (i.e., a night where the child slept through doesn't mean your partner is on-shift the following night). These things will balance out.
We've added First Prize to comments on Pikk
Except that's probably is most of the story. Seriously, PayPal do this kind of thing. I'm sure they do it to loads and loads of scammers (who presumably set up a whole lot of accounts) but they also do it to normal people just trying to use the service.
You'll probably want to read this:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-...
the real news is tweetmeme shifting to @datasift http://blog.datasift.net/
Sigh. I can taste the Koelsch now.
Or perhaps a command to re-flow document invoked by the user?
New bill imposes higher visa fees on Indian tech companies operating in the US
Glad to hear its being used successfully. I'm betting things improved greatly in the last couple of years. Thanks for sharing this. :)
Grab Your Educational Objectives Through A4 Custom, 
If you want to grab your educational objectives, you will barley need to implement a4 folder printing so as to get your job done perfectly. Company offers cheap folders printing service to its valued customers worldwide.
I got my first VPS with them too, and the articles there have been really useful and straight-forward. Once you've completed all the steps you're pretty much able to build up a functional webserver. Their chatroom is really useful too, if you have any question there's always somebody to help you out. Generally speaking, this is my favourite approch, Do lots of stuff, and learn to do only what you need to do.
Define build script.

I definitely shouldn't have to check out my source to a specific path like /home/coworker/projA in order to compile it. That's just wrong. But the contained output, a .rpm or .deb puts libs in /usr/lib, binaries in /usr/bin; some path that's hard coded, and totally should be.
Something appears to be broken with HN
Terence Tao summarizing current status of P!=NP paper.
As a former yahoo I can relate.
I'm going to venture to guess someone simply came across it and had never heard of it before. Then it was upvoted by someone else who had never heard of it. If enough people haven't heard of it, it goes to the front page. Otherwise it gets buried. It's how the site works ;-)
Are there hedge funds or investment banks who treat quants/software engineers equally to the traders?
Seeing it in Safari as well. Strange because each link appears to be to the same article, but the votes are all different, but not by much.
Dude. Your dad stands the chance to make a killing. All those guys -- small businessmen -- he knows in the industry? With a little bit of web programming and SEO skills, the gumption to knock on some doors, and the fearlessness to set rates, he'll rock.

I think the switch is fine, especially if he is technically-minded.

The more interesting question is: why isn't he doing that well? I know folks blame the economy, but are there _no_ construction jobs at all? I have family who are contractors and are still working. So the question isn't technical in nature, it's much more about business chops.
I really feel that the article missed the biggest reason why "the stock market may never recover", i.e. accounting fraud.

Today's case in point, Cisco (CSCO).

First, this early morning post from a respected financial/economic blog:

Reading headlines alone, one might wonder if two headlines from today on Cisco were from the same quarter. Bloomberg reports Cisco Misses Estimates on Sluggish Corporate Spending. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports Cisco Profit Jumps 79%.

Sounds like a great opportunity to go long Cisco, right? It's trading down 9% on the missed estimates news while in reality, having your profits up 79% and same-quarter sales up 20% over last year, especially in this economy, is not a bad thing.

But wait, here is a later post from another equally respected blog:

The book cooking continues. CISCO comes out with "great" earnings but hidden in there is the fact that they're writing their own financing - and holding it off-book. Better hope $21 holds, because if it doesn't it's a LONG way down.

Wait a second - so those supposedly realized profits are really just an I-owe-you note from Cisco to itself? Ok then.

Here is my point. Almost every company out there is hiding assets and liabilities off balance sheet where nobody can see them. It's fun to talk about complex economic theories but come on, the biggest reason the average investor can't get performance out of the stock market is the book cooking. Had the banking industry not held all that subprime risk off their books, the market would not have seen all that volatility, and we would have seen real Dow growth.

As things stand, value investors short of a team of private investigator-style analysts simply cannot afford to trust their own judgement. When the SEC stops focusing on Martha Stuart's insider trading and start going after the real issues, the stock market will recover, democratization or not.
Alikewise learnings #1: Do-it-yourself PR
From my personal observations, I'd say the 2x number is BS anyway. Yeah, there might be a few contractors really raking it in. And I don't exactly sit around comparing tax returns with my friends and acquaintances. But, I certainly get the impression that I'm making more as a FTE than most contractors around here. (To be fair, I'm also making more than most salaried employees as well.) The guys I know who contract never seem to have as much work as they want. They're always juggling a couple gigs to make ends meet. Their wives are constantly bugging them to just get a "real job" so they can pay the bills. So, I think the idea that you could quit your job and just step into contracting and double your pay is misleading.
How I Sold a Blog for $20,000 in 8 Months
Okay, I get the point. Trying to write regular expressions instead of using a real XML parser is a bad idea.
Unfortunately, outwitting evolution by natural selection over the long run isn't something I'd bet on.
Google and the Open Internet (Crazy like a fox?)
My company would be lost without institutional knowledge because it (unfortunately) doesn't document things very well and the problem solving methods rely on "tell x to fix it". Somehow we manage to survive when developers start to leave, though, but only after a lot of setbacks and arguing about who the new maintainer is.

I used to work in a situation that couldn't maintain much institutional knowledge: a college IT department with student employees. The students wouldn't work for more than 4 years and buggy or inadequate applications were more often redone entirely in different languages rather than given new maintainers.
Inside Google Translate
Courtesy of Google Translate:

http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&h...
I like the idea of using this niche to market your contracting services. However, I have one small nag. Building an MVP is not simply about cranking something out as quickly as possible. It's about not wasting time where it's not needed. But that means if your MVP proves successful, you better be ready to continue building it. And I'm guessing a lot of people won't want their MVP to be some 3-hour one-off built in PHP. I hope you have more than that to offer.
What's interesting is that Apple's App Review process clearly did not know that that functionality is in the programme. I thought they were supposed to be evaulating and testing apps to ensure they are high quality?
make this into a marketplace which connects technical people with your target, instead of what it is currently which is a glorified "hey I'm a freelancer please hire me" page. Then you have a product. Screen applicants on both ends to ensure quality.
Right now their top purchase/rental resolution is 720p.