skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
$5M is surely retirement money at 30. At benchmark inflation that is $1.5M when you are 90 years old.

If you can earn just 1% a year (in real terms) on that cash, you'll be fine. (At $100k annual expenses, you'll drop 1% per year. That'll still last a lifetime.)
Ask and ye shall receive. :-)
I can honestly say that the Microsoft interview was the most difficult, draining 6 hours of my life. And that was for an internship -- basically interviewing to do a 3 month interview. I don't think anyone who's been on the inside would say Microsoft just "throws" developers at their problems.
...except for the multitouch features? It's not that impressive that it supports the standard bluetooth mouse features like pointing clicking.
This means that while android has explosive growth, apple can sell it's new phones to it's existing customers, which is OK, but let's look at RIM and where they are heading.
The article has a serious point (there's no insurance against life, other than your own ability), but I too found the jump from an anecdote to a conclusion (with scenarios mentioned already being unrealistic) distracting.

That being said, I don't think this reflects negatively on Tony. There are many other writers who I respect who show this annoying tendency (somebody has pointed out that Malcolm Gladwell and Thomas Friedman are especially prone to this).
The $1000 prize is not worth it. It's not worth it for an established designer nor a fledgling designer. The time spent on the chance of being selected is far better spent doing one of two things: working on your portfolio presentation or approaching prospective clients. The fact is, designers are regularly under appreciated and their work is misunderstood. These types of projects only amplify that under appreciation and misunderstanding, while placing their work in the hands of a potentially unscrupulous individual with no contract in place.

A comment in the linked article states it plainly: if Kawasaki wished to encourage new, undiscovered designers he could easily have used his large network to identify and review portfolios. That would be either the honest method or the non-naive method of finding the designer that met his criteria. So really the question is, should I assume Kawasaki was naive?
Ah. My bad. Thank you.
http://www.microsoft.com/investor/EarningsAndFinancials/Fina...
Hmm... I assumed it was google-backed because the author has published a few of the algorithms in well-known conferences using his google email, but yes, this code is probably not used extensively, if at all, internally.
> "Unfortunately, I'm not a member of the armed forces, don't qualify for Medicare, and not impoverished enough for Medicaid."

I think you mean, "unfortunately, I don't have insurance."

Getting sick without insurance is a bummer, but if you're trying to get "insurance" after you get sick, that's not "insurance", it's "charity." Not that I know your circumstances or would necessarily mind chipping in my part to your getting the medical help you need.
The problem I see with this entire notion is that groups have to do something to make themselves a political force. AARP is powerful because it has a huge audience of high turnout voters to wield. Likewise for certain unions in particular areas.

Facebook groups have no power because they're full of people who waste their time on social networks playing farmville.

I'm all for getting people to engage in the political process somehow, but I fear the people who would take this seriously and use it to motivate their voting are already voting. Injecting ideas only works if you have a credible (or at least powerful) voice.
Is this a bad thing? Is saying "we'll give you $5000 off your taxes if you buy a hybrid car" worse than saying "we'll throw you in jail unless you buy a hybrid car"? That's the alternative.

(You could argue that we don't need the government because humans are self-organizing and all that, but do we really want to go that far?)

Complicated taxes are a necessary evil. But it would be nice if the government just sent me a bill at the end of the year saying "oh hai, write us a check for $12345" and that was the end of it.
Agree, it feels very disturbing. Although what he is describing is pretty much life in the real world. This is what is called "Playing the game". Idealistic persons will probably have the hardest time with this. To you I tell you to create your own startup. Google is already too big to provide any of the excitement and benefits of when it was just ramping up.
IBM was a damn good company for many years after the industry had effectively left their technology behind. Even today they make serious money; if that satisfies your criteria for doing well.

They just didn't grow in proportion to the industry.
And they've had to cut and refocus on their core products to maintain profitability.

Microsoft is now in a very similar situation.

Fumbled opportunity might not drag down today's numbers, but it's still a problem.
Don't read too much before getting your feet wet.

If you must pick one, Getting Real is all what you need.

http://gettingreal.37signals.com

Quote: "Everyone can read a book. Everyone can come up with an idea. Everyone has a cousin that's a web designer. Everyone can write a blog. Everyone can hire someone to hack together some code.

The difference between you and everyone else will be how well you execute. Success is all about great execution."
I have Android phone just because it has keyboard, and I didn't want to move our family plan to AT&T (I'm with T-Mobile).

I still like the keyboard more, but I wish the phone was more like an iPhone.
I used FreeBSD and OpenBSD for a while, and what drove me back to GNU/Linux was package management. OpenBSD was OK at it even if it had a limited selection, but I never had much luck with FreeBSD ports. Having a nice, stable base system wasn't very useful when ports were always being updated to the latest version; if I wanted a security fix, I had to take all the feature changes and new bugs, too. I tried a bunch of different port upgrading scripts but they always seemed to miss something. And upgrading ports took a long time; I want to be using my computer, not having my work interrupted by compiling in the background and occasional troubleshooting.

I have high hopes for Debian GNU/kFreeBSD - the FreeBSD kernel with the Debian package management.
Top money manager at major Wall Street firm != random people. It doesn't necessarily mean stocks are about to go down either (Wall Street has certainly been wrong too, eg. 2000 or 2007), but it's a far cry from having a shoe-shine boy tell you to buy stocks.
To a certain extent you have to learn the "Apple" way of doing things. It does result in performance improvements (I think XCode's a pretty nice piece of software). That said, my preferred development environment is a UNIX terminal, vim, and a web browser, so I happen to see OS X as one of the best development platforms ("Get out of my way, don't make me worry about the system, and let me code!").
Windows Live, Bing, Xbox, Servers, Cloud Services

Did you have any examples that contradicted me? All of the above are losing MS money in a BIG way.
To add to what cperciva said, there's also the difference between the base system (/bin and /usr) and the ports subsystem (/usr/local). Most user space software is in /usr/local, which makes is convenient in that you could always solve nasty library/installation problems by removing /usr/local and starting from scratch.

The whole of userland and the kernel can also be built with a single command ("make world"). The code is often beautiful and easy to read (my alma mater taught a graduate OS Case Study class where the textbook was "Design and Implementation of FreeBSD" and assignments involved fixing bugs in the FreeBSD kernel) and you get a chance to play with some interesting things (DTrace and ZFS).

It really depends on what you're looking for. If you're going to deploy a production web app it may or may not be the best choice (I honestly don't see a big advantage). FreeBSD once used to be lauded for network performance and while it's still excellent, Linux has caught up. Depending on what you're doing e.g., a distributed storage or processing cluster, it may well be worse than Linux (but again, benchmark and stability test it yourself before taking my word for it).

If you're curious about operating systems (or are interesting in building your own custom OS without licensing issues e.g., what Juniper did with JunOS), it's perfect.
From the article:

"Perl is forgiving. Biological data is often incomplete, fields can be missing, a field that is expected to be present once occurs several times (because, for example, an experiment was run in triplicate) or the data gets entered by hand and doesn't quite fit the expected format. Perl doesn't particularly mind if a value is empty or contains odd characters. Regular expressions can be written to detect and correct a variety of common errors in data entry. Of course, this flexibility can also be a curse, as I'll discuss in more detail later."

A few words are different. The article says triplicate, and p3ll0n says duplicate, for example. But they are similar enough to use as testing input to a diff algorithm.

EDIT: Also from this guy's comment history:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1456105

Some of the phrasing looks to have been copied and pasted from this article by Jonathan Ellis:

http://www.rackspacecloud.com/blog/2009/11/09/nosql-ecosyste...

I bet if you could make a bot to do this -- go out and find relevant information, and summarize it -- you could actually provide a serious public service. As long as you cited your sources, so it's not a plagiarism-bot.
That was actually supposed to say 'no cuts'
>what benefit would there be to them becoming "ACLU Nation"?

I don't think there is one. The idea is to get far more people to join something similar and get them engaged (which I see as the biggest problem. Shallow engagement requiring no effort is easy, getting people to actually vote is apparently incredibly difficult).
Things being destroyed very slowly
I agree with your larger point, but you may not have the best example. ||= is notoriously obscure in Ruby - in details at least.

http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/151660/
Not sure where you are getting your information from. Travel isn't cheap, food isn't cheap, and rent isn't cheap, if you want to live anywhere near town.

Yes, great place to live or visit, full of life, great people, but not cheap.

Maybe you want to look further east.
T Shirt Packaging inspired by food
I think the more important point here is that mobile app developers are going to want to get the most bang for their buck. If there are more Android phones out there than iPhones, then the decision between preferred platforms swings in favor of Android (disregarding questions of target-market, demographics, ease of development, etc.). It doesn't matter if the OS is on 1 phone or 20 (ok, well sort of; it does make it more difficult to program for Android when you have to account for multiple screen sizes and hardware capabilities).
So I guess that we can say for sure (2009-2010 numbers) that online stuff is now loosing money, windows is now doing better that office, and gaming is quite behind but stable and profitable (albeit a lot less that office or windows). Let's be frank too, were talking about billions here, so those segments are quite big.
Imagine if, as soon as someone started robbing a bank, the police showed up and stopped them.

The second one I like to an extent. Its true if you have a government whose objective is to protect its citizens and nothing else. Democrats want a government that actively helps people. If implemented correctly I'd want that government's attention. As with most things, ideas are easy, good implementation is hard.
I had been dismisising Infiniband out of hand for a few years now, assuming it remained too uncompetitively[1] expensive, much as 10GE has.

However, 2-4x the bandwidth (and lower latency) than 10GE, for the same price, could make it compelling. Does the price you quote include all of host adapters, cables, and switch ports?

How is Infiniband not commodity?

How many suppliers are there for the critical components? There may be more than one vendor for adapters, but if they all use the same HBA-on-a-chip, the market hasn't yet been commoditized.

[1] Since my POV is centered around disk I/O, it would compete against SAS. Per 8-lane bundle, it's 24x the bandwidth at about $400 at the host and $100 at the expander, as of the previous generation. The current generation doubles the bandwidth, though I don't have reliable "street" prices yet.
I had the same dilemma when looking for virutal hosting-I ended up at rootbsd.net because running FreeBSD was important to me. Not as cheap/featureful as linode, but its good enough for rsync.net its good enough for me.
I can't tell you specifics but I can tell you that Microsoft knows the cloud is losing money for now.
Though remember, this post was aimed at Google employees, who should know what these are.
The UFC has contracts in place with their PPV partners. They aren't legally able to undercut them by running cheap streams.
I think there are interesting, challenging problems to solve at any and every funded startup (why else would they have been able to receive funding?).

I'm far more interested in working on The Next Big Thing—especially if it's a big challenge—than I am in a specific problem domain. Maybe it's just the way I'm wired; maybe it's a reflection of my skillset.

My guess is that the kind of person who would be attracted to the idea of working at any and all YC-backed startups is the same kind of person who is more interested in tackling big, challenging problems than any particular problem domain. Maybe I'm wrong and just projecting. What do you think?
I didn't get sick. I was born sick. Unfortunately, I inherited my father's genetics which have already resulted in one tumor being removed from my spine (I was 21).

I had insurance, since my father worked for the city. However, once I turned 24, that was all over. I'm a co-founder of a startup, as such it would be cost prohibitive to insure me, and incur undue charges on every other member and employee. As we grow, I'm sure we'll have enough employees at some point to offset my genetics, until then the recently passed health reform law is my only salvo.
To me Emacs feels like a text editor.

I used to use vim for coding before switching to Emacs (well, TextMate and then Emacs). I still use vim for editing on remote machines and quick local edits. There certainly are people who edit everything in Emacs though, I'm just not one of them.
If a company goes under the founder may have ended up living frugally as possible for a long period of time for no end reward. The employee has been there with them, faced the same challenging work but has had a comfortable wage the whole time and are just out of a job.

That being said may people would much prefer to take the risk as founder, there are plenty of other people out there though happy with the employee role at a startup for the time being or may have already tried the founder path.
Nope. Data centers are really easy to shut off.

Emergency Power Off buttons are often required by code to shut down breakers and UPS.

I've heard that this is to prevent loss of life if a tech grabs a livewire and/or let the fire department know that power is removed before they start spraying water.
I believe him.

Few weeks ago, I had a client send me an email that I couldn't find anywhere in my inbox, trash or spam folders. I apologized to him and told him to send it again. Still, nothing. This is a client I have been speaking with over Skype and via emails, but he became agitated when I told him to send through Skype or upload the document to google docs.

I use gmail through IMAP, so I decided to log into my Gmail account and see if I can find any messages before this guy is pissed. And lo and behold, my "scumbag" folder is emboldened, full of new messages.

You see, few years ago some client defrauded me and after a nasty email fight I put his name into an "scumbag" filter. This guy was one of the assholes who gave me a hard time early in my freelancing career and I didn't recognize him at all. Nor did he.

My experience is <4 years old. This guy is going by a 7 year old memory. I know friends of mine who commission tens of web projects and work with tens of developers offshore (yes, normal everyday people who somehow have a bunch of programmers, mostly in India)
I'm from Copenhagen, a rather expensive city, so maybe I'm biased.
Mozilla’s new (internal) JavaScript value representation
The big red buttons are often there as a safety measure in case someone starts getting electrocuted. At very least, though, these very tempting buttons should be labeled in very dire language that they're not to be pressed unless either a) someone is about to die or b) you actually know what you're doing.
I listen to his tech5 and crankygeeks podcast, but don't bother with the link above. It brings up a page about half obscured with what is probably a black TV. Why bother putting up a website where the content is obscured? Maybe the slow people who browse with javascript on see something else.
Emergent Ventures ... spreading the Silicon Valley to the rest of the world
Is there any reason the government couldn't just put a direct $5,000 subsidy on hybrid cars? Or, even better, redesign its infrastructure policy to favor energy efficiency? (Considering all the things the federal government does to encourage cheap gasoline, a $5k tax credit for cars that use slightly less gasoline is nothing.)
Http://mp3.hotvip9x.com/
Because it just works. Uptimes are counted in years. Low loads. Great memory management. Ports are compiled for your system from source pretty easily. It always seems able to stretch your hardware's potential. I'd never use it for a Desktop, but as a server, and a dev server especially, it rocks.
Been doing that already for 2.5 years now. Figured there would be some places we hadn't thought of as tech centers and might be one of them is worth the immigration hassles to stick around for a couple years. Turns out there are several good suggestions in this thread that we'd hadn't heard about.
Prey Fish Turns Predator
Any large megacorp with distracting fun mailing lists and talks to avoid (tip #2). Also 20% time and mentoring (tip #1). Definitely the part about performance reviews (tip #3) and having a good manager (tip #4) is applicable to any company, though the part where you should make sure you choose a good manager might not be.
It's hard to describe exactly what PyPy does, but it's more of a JIT / interpreter generator.
You write a language using RPython (which is more static than regular python), and PyPy makes a VM for it, or can turn it into C, or CIL, or...
Python on PyPy is the same way.

It makes experimenting with new ideas and languages very easy, and (IMO) that is the primary reason for PyPy's existence; faster Python execution is a side benefit.
If you are using an Apple Mac, then you are using BSD (with bits of Mach and a sprinkling of Apple fairy dust) !

I'm over simplifying, but with Linux or BSD it's really only about the kernel. They both use the same collection of GNU tools and open sourced programs like FireFox, Python, etc. Package management is more a distro issue, than a Linux vs. BSD issue.

If you want to customize your kernel for a specific server configuration, then one of the BSD's might be more optimal. However, if you just want something that works with most devices, especially notebooks, then Linux has a larger collection of drivers.
That's very surprising! Housing prices obviously went up, so how did this not show up in a higher cost of living?
JavaScript hack
That's Warren Buffet's philosophy.

"Be Fearful When Others Are Greedy and Greedy When Others Are Fearful"
People who think 6-10% returns are unrealistic are sheep, and know nothing about real estate.

A friend of mine, a complete novice, was able to buy a multifamily unit in downtown San Jose for 500K and rent it out for 5000 a month. His down payment is 100K. His expenses(400K mortgage, insurance, taxes, etc) is 2500 a month. His rate of return is (5000-2500)x12/100K = 30% or so.

He did this while violating the #1 rule of real estate investing: you never buy at market price. You pay 70% of what stuff are going for on the MLS.

I invest in courthouse foreclosure auctions, and manage about 40% cash on cash returns.

Investing in real estate is a skill, just like building companies or coding. Imagine how much a typical person know about building web apps. That is how much a typical person know about real estate investment.
<neutral question> What is the reasoning behind your comment?
I think the original quote is attributed to Eugene McCarthy: "The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty."
First of all, they only happen on Windows boxes and...
You can run FreeBSD on Linode as of FreeBSD 8.*. It can run in domU now.
It seems like, in my opinion that the online services are really the front facing side of the company and they are really trying to work their image through those services, not their core revenue streams. Appearing too bad on this segment might mean mid-term losses on the other streams, lobbying might be affected, etc. So losing or making money might not be too important (for the online services), as long as they keep their presence.
I don't quite understand what these three big companies did that was beyond what Haskell already offers their sparks and STM implementations.

I am all for inventing new stuff but perhaps they would have been better served by contributing to Haskell anything that they invented that was novel.
Deliberately didn't mention where we were from because didn't want to debate the merits of that location, so much as hear people's thoughts about other locations.

Dont' really want to talk about the company either because we're still in what I consider the early stages, and things might change.

Sorry to be mysterious. I really should make a blog and start writing posts.... will definitely have to do that as we travel.

I'm sure we'll be visiting a number of the places mentioned in this thread over the next year.
Not at all. If you shift all the risk from the client to the supplier then the price will go up. There's no free lunch.

Of course you could be the client who strikes the jackpot because the supplier underestimated the job - in which case you probably won't get a great result.
Call me crazy, but I think he's jumping to conclusions. There's no way Android grew that fast.

Check out this recent report from Nielsen:
http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/iphone-vs-...

It stakes Android at 9%, iPhone at 28%, WinMo at 19%, RIM at 35%.

I can't imagine that Android has surged ahead so soon, doubly so since RIM's still leading in sales numbers.
I think what matters most to developers is the number of customers who are buying apps, and how much they are willing to spend. Right now, the ratio free/paid apps in the Android Marketplace is a lot higher than in the App Store. There is one way to pay for paid apps in the Marketplace, and that's through the tedious Google Checkout. Quite a contrast with the iTunes Store, which already has 100 million credit cards on file.

Even when there are more Android devices than there are iOS devices (which will take a little while, there are 100 million iDevices out there), I doubt Android will be more profitable for developers than iOS (not even counting the inroads Apple is making with iAds). I think Android will have to outnumber iDevices by a factor 2 or 3 before that happens.