skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most experienced technologists know the real danger in ever claiming to be an expert in anything.

Rarely will two jobs be so similar that the expertise gained from a previous job can guarantee the same level of output in the new job. While its not impossible, its so rare that its not worth the risk in making the claim that you are an expert.

In general, those that ever claim to be experts are using the word to justify a high payrate or lock in an opportunity.

So as business owner, be wary of anyone claiming to be an expert. And as a technologist, be wary of ever claiming to be an expert and risk overselling yourself.
I assume by greatest generation you mean baby boomers. The article doesn't OP doesn't refer to them as the greatest generation. And by given way, I think you mean enabled, because the OP is making the point that Scotts parents have paid his whole way and still pay for him while he declines job offers.

I have issue with calling the baby boomers the greatest generation. They've saddled this country with an unimaginable debt burdon, creating a situation where their kids may be the first American generation who's quality of life may not exceed that of their parents, yet the baby boomers call their kids lazy for not wanting to pick up the tab and pay for their extravagances.

However, Scott from the OP is still a lazy sack of ...
The headline is flamebait, but the content of the interview is quite insightful. I agree completely that serious competition (both in unit sales and user experience) is badly needed, and sorely lacking at the moment. Here's hoping HP is able to bust some moves with the WebOS platform; shake things up a bit.
Thanks for the plug. :-)
First look at Mari, a powerful 3D texture painting tool
The Zugzwang Rule (for Entrepreneurs and VCs)
So the obvious question is, why so few females (or so many males) ?
I would agree the list on the right side is just too long. Maybe tweak the homepage design a bit to scream book keeping software.

I also noticed you didn't mention conversion rate.. traffic is great but if you aren't converting what's the use? Maybe promoting signup might help too and just get more conversions out of your current traffic. Also Signal vs Noise from 37signals has some cool articles on homepage design vs conversion.

My main income is from ecommerce.. if you had an API with Mageno, CREloaded, OSCommerce, ZenCart.. sure some of those might be out dated and old. but they have a heavy user base.. once integrated use that angle to get free traffic as well.

Goodluck!
For those using a windows environment I find TeXworks (http://www.tug.org/texworks/) is an easily installable TeX environment.
"The Greatest Generation" refers to the parents of the baby boomers.
Epigenetics is the modern incarnation of Lamarkism. While epigenetics doesn't affect the underlying genetic code, some forms of it modify the expression patterns of genes (look up heritability of methylation patterns) which often have an environmentally determined component.
Yes, of course I'm aware of it. Just as I'm aware of the simple reason for the attempts on Salman Rushdie's life.

Now read the parent article, which praises an earlier United States - one that had not yet lost its 'moral authority', which primarily consisted of its superior freedom and civil liberties.

If the author's logic is correct, the United States could reduce terrorism by regaining and retaining its moral authority. Yet both the Danish attack and the fatwa against Rushdie were specifically directed against people exercising their civil liberties, the same civil liberties that the author argues were an essential component of the American 'moral authority' that ultimately undermined the USSR.

This is why the author's article is an anti-American screed. However repugnant we might find Abu Ghirab, and whatever our opinions about the war in Iraq, these events are not the root cause of Islamic terrorism in the West.
Boston is probably the closest runner up to the Valley, and it's not even close.

Boston has the brains, but not the culture. It's like a Ferrari motor in a stuffy Mercedes driven by an old blue haired lawyer.

Really the whole East Coast has this problem. If the East Coast had a motto, it would be "it's not what you know, it's who you know." It's anti-meritocratic and very different from the cowboy innovator mentality in the valley.

Make Burning Man attendance compulsory for everyone at Harvard and MIT and maybe you'd get somewhere.

Edit: Boston does have some plusses though. You do not have to own a car for one...
Could be worse. Everyone could refer to it as "Web 3.0" or something similarly inane.
2010 Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing awarded
Great story. Parents encourage son to beat head against the closed doors of corporate america instead of encouraging him to becoming an entrepreneur.

The author's conclusion:

"I'm not here offering a solution for the 45 year old guy with three kids. I am offering encouragement to a crop of college kids infantilized by terrible advice from parents and TV who have the freedom and opportunity to try something; while simultaneously describing the only long term solution to America's economic problems: more businesses. Jobs programs and stimulus packages are debatably good or bad, but assuredly temporary. Remember "the children are or future?" How about encouraging them a little? Maybe someday they'll pay for your social security."
I go to a state funded college. This is my last semester and was lucky enough to get a great internship. I wanted to start early, however, I live pretty far away. I decided I would just live in the dorms.

I started negotiations and was surprised at how much it would cost me to stay there for 20 days- 1/2 of what it cost me to live there for a whole semester! After some digging- first they told me that it was not allowed(rooming early)- I find out that they do this on purpose to keep kids from bunking early.

Normally I wouldn't have a problem with this but, I am a senior meaning I've spent a ton of money at that school. I have also served on the housing board for the dorms I was going to live in- volunteer work for the school. They were also very rigid and would not really help me- a future alum.

Needless to say I couldn't afford the amount and as a result I start my internship later which makes my schedule even more cramped. I know what I will be doing when they start soliciting money.
I think the real point here is that each choice has an associated cost. With Linux, it's the extra time necessary to do this sort of research and configuration. You can reduce the headaches associated, but the Linux community doesn't always make that as clear as possible to the customer.

With Apple, instead of the extra time/thought, it's a bit more money to make the purchase. It also doesn't hurt having a single entity doing most of the communication and making sure the customer is happy, by making choices/support relatively simple.

The problem here is that they aren't easy costs to compare, since they are listed in different resources. I think this is why a lot of Apple users say things like "You just need to use it.", since quantifying all the little user experience gains doesn't lend it self well to a comparison of technical specs.
The goal, the scarce resource one optimize for, tend to be different. (To use the language from http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/30/know-your-s..., posted here earlier ).

Control-driven concurrency tends to be io-bound if being bound at all, and the major issue tends to be dealing with the complexity of the rules. I.e. if-that-happens then-start-that-thing which-tells-that-system and-then-continues-with-that-task which-notices-the-registered-plugins. These rules should not block for other concurrent but independent sessions. Scalability tends to be an issue here. A relevant scalability example for Erlang would be a telecom system where each machine-added make you able to handle X number of more subscribers.

Data-driven concurrency tends to be more about making use of the concurrency available in the current hardware generation to speed up very cpu-bound computations. Using more threads than cores available just mean more context-switches and less performance. These are problems that likely also want to make use of SIMD instructions.
N <= 38
Nonlinear people and catastrophe theory
Tipping the Balance: Dissecting the Athlete Advantage in Schools
A really well-known old attack, far more painfully expressed in internationalized domain names (IDN), where attackers can create pixel-perfect DNS clones of "paypal.com".

Notable also as an example of an attack that the DNSSEC security model does little to combat.

One of the biggest security weaknesses on the Internet is in browser UI (something Aza Raskin should be shouting from the rooftops). Right now, users are "trained" (to dignify what's happening) to look at the browser URL bar for a name and a lock icon.

We don't need new protocols or even changes in old ones so much as we need Mozilla, Microsoft, Google, and Apple to sit down and come up with a standard set of UI idioms that will allow users to quickly and visually "authenticate" a domain name from the cues made available to the browser.
Ouch, that hurts for those of us who're in NYC and have real reasons why we can't/won't leave.
Ruby Is Scary
it would cost about $100/week. Shipping might add $20, but consider $100/week a ballpark.

Way too expensive, considering that there is wifi everywhere and easy tethering with most phones. Sprint lets you tether (usb or bluetooth) on any phone with a data plan for free, and you can get wifi hotspot apps for most smartphones for a small fee or even free.

For the unscrupulous among you, you could even buy a mifi from Sprint and return it within 30 days and only have to pay the one month of service ($59).
How I, as low-ranking employee, am going to change Yahoo
um not quite so black & white. Scott isn't trying to become an entrepreneur right now...he's not doing shit. He either needs to get a job (40k whatever, it pays the bills) or start a damn company.

edit: Or as one commenter said, get a corp job to save some $$$ while you work on something else on the side.
Except that, in the united States at least, it doesn't work that way. Public works are significantly less efficient than private works. It is very common in the US for a public entity to spend many times as much on a work as a private company. The incentive systems in the private sector are just that much much better. This is in fact one of the arguments for a capitalist society.

If a command economy were capable of producing on the same level of efficiency as a private one, then Stalin's various five year plans would not have starved millions and the collective farms might have actually worked. As it is, they didn't and Soviet Communism just wasn't very efficient.
I do that, but that's annoying.

I also want to merge accounts, which in my minds means that there really is just one account with several names--emails to all of them go to that one gmail (and it lets me choose which to send from), I can sign into all google services with any of those accounts, etc.

It would be pretty complicated though. I've only used gmail on my secondary accounts, but some people have probably used docs, voice, etc on multiple accounts, in which case all of those need some kind of merging strategy.
I get where your coming from. I think a lot of people find it therapeutic to write some form of journal. It's probably the number one thing any psychiatrist/psychologist will ask a patient to start doing.

That has moved to the web, where everyone has a "journal", only they call em blogs now; and there is no "psychological trouble" requirement to write a blog.

In this case, I think much of the same is happening. An individual is writing in his/her journal. Hundreds of thousands of people do so so every day.

The only difference here is this blogger/journal writer happens to have an audience. I suspect he would have written it anyway, sans the audience, sitting on a failed startup, and without a known name in the industry.

So I see where you are coming from, though I do think it's a lot less calculated or routine or par for the course as you feel.

The only difference here is the audience. Somewhere out there, there is a guy like me, wanting a startup, without a name for himself, who has been through a bit more in regards to some struggles of life/human condition.

Do I blog about it? Yup. Does anyone read it? Nope. Would I continue to blog about it were I a publicly known figure? Perhaps.

Some stuff is private to a point, where I do desire others to read it in hopes it may help them. However, put me in a position of notoriety and my opinion may change.

Right now, I like knowing that those very few who read my stuff don't know me, and I don't know them. It's a nice unspoken agreement of my blog and my position in this field.

Give me success and a little fame, and you may be right; less appropriate a forum to be talking about those things. At the sane time, if that blog post helps only one person gain perspective and get through another single day of personal anguish, all the downsides are irrelevant to me, and I'm sticking with it being a good thing, as it helped one single person get through their own personal hell for that day.

Commiseration can be your best friend in tough times. Just because you happen to have become noteworthy doesn't negate the power and value in knowing you are not alone.

It's funny, we all know how non-unique our situations are. Everyone has been there, or similar. Yet as much as we know that, the second something goes wrong, we feel alone and unique in our situation. Blogs seem to help get our brains out of self pity and loathing and more in tune with the fact none of us are alone, and someone else has been there already, more than likely under worse circumstances. That can be very powerful medicine.
Are you suggesting that we've been using tools so long that our teeth have evolved to account for this adaptation?

In other words, are you suggesting that there was a human at one time that had a more canine like mouth?
I thought Alexis hit the nail squarely on the head with that paragraph actually. Helplessness really is poisonous.
So, the first invocation is similar to calling `Foo.search(&:bar)`, right?
> Not perfect, but I find it's more natural to write in org-mode

Do you have any specifics on the problems you faced? I produced my master thesis entirely using orgmode without any problem. (defined custom latex class, with different kind of ToC etc, not that difficult)
I spoke recently to a friend of mine who had moved back from NYC to SF, and he told me that when you tell people in a bar you're a software engineer, they get this condescending look and say, "oh, IT..." (as in, the people who fix the computers). This article basically confirms what he was telling me.
> Edit: found the HN FAQ entry on formatting comments, finally.

Really? Where?
Sounds like the author never explored the outer boroughs.

Come to Brooklyn, it's nicer here.
Looking at the price, you might be under pricing your offering. Quickbooks goes from between $160 and $320 and intuit does force after a few years. I would add a third more expensive plan if I were you.

Also you should talk about benefits, not features. Technical people like features (we implemented them after all) but most users want to know about the benefits. It is easier to sell how the software will benefit them vs how cool a feature is has.

If CPC is working great and you are gaining paying customers, I'd keep doing more of that. As long as your customer acquisition cost is low, then keep pumping money into CPC for the time being.

You seem to have a lot of good content. I'm surprised that you are struggling with organic traffic. I just checked out the customer list you have, very impressive. It would appear that you are doing quite well. Perhaps you just need to add another plan and get more revenue per client?
I do not have any reports to back this up as the transcript from the meeting is yet to be released. I've been curious to dig into the distinctions and locations used for the selection populations.

The discussion I paraphrased was made at an AACRO tech conference during a talk about the creation of a federal student tracking database - the speaker was Barmak Nassirian who is a lobbyist in DC for higher ed. I'm going off of the data presented in that talk.

On the same note, I've never used payscale.com for more than a glance. Their methodology sounds valid, but I don't know how they make their money.
What's scary here is that PHP returns 0 (meaning no match found) rather than FALSE, which is the error return value of preg_match. It's this attitude of failing silently that makes PHP feel like a dangerous language.

Granted, it's smart that PHP does have a default backtrack limit. I believe this would have prevented errors like the django forms DoS vulnerability from a while back.
GitHub Jobs Pre-Launch
Another interesting German translation is "gift", which in English means "poison".
Man that hurts, it reminds me of 'The Boxer' by Simon and Garfunkel. Much respect for hanging in there, and just when I was thinking you should post a picture of your mom you did.

Thanks.
"In our collective male defense: Even the best males have been struggling with the "How do women work?" question since the dawn of time, so you can imagine it is magnified when you introduce that topic to a group of males that disproportionately answer that question incorrectly."

In the words of one of my advisors - "among one the first things that was ever painted on the wall of some damp cave during the dawn of humanity was, I'm sure, a question that amounted to 'what the hell do women want?'"

It's not sexism so much as it is confusion that emerges from the fact that men and women are wired very differently, think differently, are socially coniditioned differently, and most importantly - communicate differently. Naturally a community with so many men is going have some who are prone to wonder and ask outloud.
Lawrence Lessig's new TED talk
Yeah, how 'bout them apples? And that sort of attitude doesn't change on less-than-geological time scales.
Alexis, I always felt that even though you weren't the coder, your personality was critical to Reddit's success and is indelibly stamped all over the site's comments and their sense of humour. Just as PG formed the soul of news.YC, so you and Steve formed the soul of Reddit.

To know that you managed to imprint the humour and affection that I see there now through all of this only makes me more impressed.
your comment is confusing. Where's the bar? I thought at first, SF, but the last sentence implies it's in NYC.
This can be summed up to the following "Be proactive, happen to life or life won't happen to you" .
Cliche as hell but, "everything happens for a reason", or at least, it tends to work out that way.

I'm truly sorry for the troubles you experienced; I'm truly jealous of the positive aspects that resulted from your troubles.

I have a feeling you wouldn't change a thing given the opportunity. I don't sense much regret in your post; that's an amazing position to have been able to get to.

Good luck with everything you embark on in the future.
> No. Nuking 2 cities was more a weapons test than a way to shorten a war.

You'd think nuking one city would have been enough for that...

The Americans didn't have to nuke any cities to test the nuclear bomb, they had already measured it's destructive capacity in the dessert. There is a belief among some historians that dropping the bomb was a way to impress the USSR and this idea does have merit.

As for the second bomb, the US only dropped the second one when the first one failed to elicit the response they desired. Japanese scientists were actually further along in designing their own weapon than the Nazi's were. They had a notion that the bomb was incredibly expensive to make and were gambling that the US couldn't make another.
You are completely correct. One criticism I'd level at myself is that I use the terms 'New York' and 'Manhattan' synonymously, when they're really not. I should note, Manhattanites commit that same sin all the time.

I like Brooklyn. If I were a Brooklynite though, I'd resent all the Manhattanites who've been invading it recently. Oh, sweet joys of tribalism....
Everybody's submitted solutions to this seemed to have an RMSE of 0.794 to 0.808 which seemed a bit odd to all converge in such a narrow range.

I don't think my solution is that clever, but it's gone straight to the top of the leader-board with a 0.70 RMSE.
The problem is that people under this system are not motivated to do things efficiently. Competition itself is responsible for reducing expenses, because companies compete to lower them. Without the competition, there's no reason to.

Prices in a capitalist system are information signals that inform the system how to allocate resources. If you do away with the pricing information (by setting mandatory prices, for example), you break this and usually end up with large surpluses or shortages. Getting other people to inspect the system for inefficiency and remove it is less efficient than using prices for the same purpose.
Why dont they just take a string as the argument to search() and parse it? They could use a very SQL like Syntax:

$collection = Braintree_Transaction::search("
orderId LIKE 'a2d%'
AND customerWebsite LIKE '%.com'
AND billingFirstName='John'
AND status() IN ('AUTHORIZED','SETTLED')
AND amount>=10
AND amount<=20.00)
");
"Three years in New York, and I went north of 14th St maybe three times. Trips to the Met excepted, of course"

I'm supposed to believe this guy knows anything about New York when his definition of New York is "Manhattan south of 14th st."? Believe it or not there are people who manage to live in NYC without hemorrhaging money, who know where and how to eat and don't hang out in the financial industry social scene.

I don't doubt that NY's tech scene is no where near Silicon Valley but he has a pretty skewed view of this city.
But then again, even here in SF, angels and VCs won't take a meeting w/ you unless you get an intro. In that sense, it is who you know. (Though I've found people more than willing to help each other here in Bay Area).

Is there a different sense of "who you know" that you're talking about in Boston? The only thing I can imagine is something like when people use to talk about your breeding.
He's right about a lot of things. The cafe scene in NYC isn't as good as the west coast. Apartments are very expensive. Debutantes from Bryn Mawr want to date successful traders. And the startup scene in SF/SV is slowly but surely turning into a bunch of ex-banker foodie cocks from NYC.
Swell! Would you happen to know how to format quotations?
yeah, he ignores the money growing on its own.
http://www.workingpoint.com
Using a desktop email client makes this pretty simple- thunderbird, outlook, ect. You can have all emails download into a single folder and reply with whatever email address it was sent to, or you could sent it up so that only one email is used for replies. You can also encrypt the folder that the emails are then stored in- locally.

I personally like this option as I can download and delete all emails off google's servers. My passwords are pretty good, but not great, and if a hacker was able to download ever message I ever sent. :(
In this case the domain name is legitimate; the homoglyph is in the query string instead. In fact, you can copy "tianаnmen square massacre" from this HN comment and paste it into any search engine to get the same result.

Recent browsers do protect against character spoofing in IDNs, and provide various UI features to make it easy to authenticate the domain name and identity. The same protection isn't applied to the rest of the URI, however.

Mozilla's Jesse Ruderman gave an interesting talk at the SOUPS conference on a similar class of attacks, some of which do not even require special characters - they are like SQL injection for the English language: http://www.squarefree.com/2010/07/14/untrusted-text-in-secur...