skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Except that all the income the ice cream vendor made was made from giving away the flyers, you've reduced their effectiveness to the point where the flyers no longer bring in the money and he has to close up shop.

Now in the case of google that's a stretch, but this is not 'ok because it is google', neither would it be 'illegal because the party it is done to is small and vulnerable'.

It's either 'ok' or it is 'not ok' not taking in to account the size of the party it is done to.
eTacts us also YC. I believe the timeline went like this:

1. eTacts launched as an email reminder service
2. eTacts gets into YC
3. Rapportive launched as a personal CRM
4. Rapportive gets major traction, eTacts launches their own personal CRM
5. Rapportive gets into YC

So...yes, they're virtually identical right now.

eTacts also does email reminders, but Rapportive has Raplets.
The current code definitely exhibits a phenomena where non technical comments can routinely get a score of ~50. This was cooked up over a couple of days so we havent spent too much time scaling the final scores to have 0 correspond to horridly non-technical and 100 as completely technical.
Just to be clear, finding a different career and starting a software business are two totally different things. Starting a software business does not get you away from coding, you have to do a great deal of coding, and then learn marketing plus a lot of other things on your own. I would say it's like coding++ so if you're looking to get away from coding, don't start a software business.
Valve Confirms: No Steam for Linux
The main problem with the premise of this article is that someone with $4 million is just going to stick it in a money market fund and live off of the pitiful interest. The interest rate in a money market fund is below inflation, so of course your money is going to dwindle.

If you took the same $4 million and invested it wisely, in something like the Permanent Portfolio, which has averaged 9.3% annual returns over the last 40 years and avoids all market timing, you'd probably be fine for the rest of your life.

http://crawlingroad.com/blog/2008/12/22/permanent-portfolio-...
I have not heard of any experiments being carried out in monkeys with bleach which showed positive results.

I do not see what your point is. Is this not something new, hence news, but something well know to the mysterious field of drug researchers?
What I really want to see is a fold up tablet. In fact I'd say the two most important things to improve with iPad is weight and outdoor visibility. I imagine they'll improve that with the next version or at least within the next few years. But for a longterm 10 year target, I think someone will come up with a iPhone sized device that folds out to iPAd size.

See how much better can phones really get? Tablets are a more interesting prospect at least physically. Competition should be more interesting.
> It is worse if you have a family, but then you have two incomes to play with.

Unless of course you have one or more young children in the house, in which case a good bit of time that you could spend on work goes towards taking care of the kids. Effectively that works out to about one full timer.
Thailand has an education visa program - you need to be learning something for a minimum of 4 hours/week to qualify. Technically, it can be pretty much anything, but languages are popular. People do the visa run thing too - every sixty days I think.

Costa Rica sounds like a good destination - I may check that out one day.
On the topic of things being left out - does anyone have ideas on how to automate the process of finding seed terms for a given topic ?
Can we conclude that this is the wistful daydream equivalent of the "Maserati Problem"

I'll go out on a limb and say that even normal retirement planning
(50 years into the future) is a Maserati Problem.

Everybody that makes very long-term projections about money -- whether
it's the gloomy "interest on $4m won't last 40 years" variety to the
rosy "save $300 a month and the compound interest will make you a
millionaire in 50 years" -- commits the same error: They neglect
the fact that wars, revolutions, devaluations, confiscations, and
other economic disasters have wiped out all savings at frequent
points throughout history.

There should be some trillionaires walking around whose ancestors started
saving in the Renaissance when modern banking began -- but there aren't.

So if you're talking time scales of 50 years, there is significant
probability that your carefully calculated spending or savings plan
is self deceit.
I'm a little confused by the scoring; I have two comments at "100.00", and one of them is "http://www.retrologic.com/jargon/H/hacker-humor.htmlNot that I want HN to become a joke-a-day site but accidental-hacker-humor like this is a unusual enough find that I can deal with the rare exception."

The other one is more legitimately geeky, but I'm lost on what 100.00 means exactly.

(Edit: Must be "hacker", but I'm still curious what the 100.00 means.)
Exactly!

Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities" (Going broke on a million a year), p.137
"One breath of scandal, and not only would the Giscard scheme collapse but his very career would be finished! And what would he do then? I’m already going broke on a million a year!
The appalling figures came popping up into his brain. Last year his income had been $980,000. But he had to pay out $21,000 a month for the $1.8 million loan he had to take out to buy the apartment...
Of the $560,000 remaining of his income last year, $44,400 was required for the apartment’s monthly maintenance fee… $18,000 for heat, utilities, insurance and repairs, $6,000 for lawn and hedge cutting, $8,000 for taxes. Entertaining at home and in restaurants had come to $37,000. This was a modest sum compared to what other people spent."
No, by my logic those living in poverty in 2010 will be living a life that the 1970's would describe as middle class.

Fun fact: the bottom 11% in 1970 didn't have flush toilets.

http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/database/article_display.cf...

In 2001, the bottom 7-8% don't have dishwashers, which were generally considered a luxury item in the 1970's. Go read this article, describing the material conditions of the poor (circa 2001):

http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2004/01/understandi...

Tell me, what items did the middle class of 1970 have that the poor of 2001 lack?
"Work For Free, Or For Full Price. Never For Cheap."
Even better is to use `git commit -v`--it'll have a complete diff that you can review while writing your commit message
Re: Cobb only spends a brief amount of time there to find Saito, as evidenced by his relative lack of aging.

one explanation i've found online is that since Cobb's mind is more aware of limbo, it's better able to handle the time he spends there, so he doesn't age nearly as much as Saito
GTK+ gets CSS style theming
We're going to monetise by building useful tools people want to pay for. We're not yet ready to publicly discuss exactly what those are, but selling data is definitely not it.

Thanks for linking to our privacy policy. From that document (under "Sharing with third parties"):

> We will never sell, rent or give away private data about you or your contacts. Our business is in making your inbox more powerful, not in selling databases.
Well yeah...

You could pretty well describe the software methodologies of the last twenty years as being over-generalizations of basically good ideas. Once a given reasonable idea has pushed beyond its usefulness, the opposite good idea appears and ... is pushed beyond its usefulness.

Tossing out understanding and just having tests and code can easily result in disaster in many cases (compilers, sudoku solvers, etc) while over-designing can result in the opposite disaster in other cases.
Good luck with that. Barriers to professions - which includes access to research - is what keeps the professionals well paid and thus perhaps allow them to fund more research.

Isn't that infringement of copyrights by the way? Do you think it is fine too if I start distributing freely an application for which you have worked for years and decided to charge for?
Malware Implicated in Fatal SpanAir Plane Crash
Somewhat different from the commuter-oriented topic of the article, I've seen attempts by truckers to enforce a similar pattern in construction zones (traffic reduced by one or more lanes) on long stretches of highway: In a situation where one lane has to merge because it is closed in the distance, the "nice" drivers all merge far ahead of time, while the aggressive drivers attempt to go all the way to the end of the lane and then merge ahead of everyone, causing the kind of grinding gears described in the article. To combat this, a couple of big rigs driven in parallel in the open lane and the lane that is closed ahead block all traffic from passing. This prevents the aggressive drivers from attempting to merge at the last second, smoothing out the wave. I've seen this happen several times on cross-country trips; I wonder if the truckers coordinate over radio or just choose to do it independently.

On a related note, I wonder if "lane closed ahead" signs placed too far ahead actually make this problem worse, since many drivers will immediately merge out of the closing lane far ahead of time, causing a wall of traffic if the front of the line has to slow down for aggressive last-second merges.
Hmm. I have really complicated itineraries and so far it looks like ITA's matrix search only not as flexible/powerful. It has potential, though.
Be an active user, passionate about your product.

If you don't use it - you lose a ton of effectiveness. If you don't love it, well that's the first thing you need to change.
The real problem is a non-subsidized phone costs you more on most carriers than the subsidized version. Even if bringing your own phone gets you out of having to have a contract, you don't save anything in the process. You pay the same monthly fee as someone that got a "free" phone. So why give that up? It's a tough sell.
Sweet, part of my (somewhat obvious) prediction came true - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1599858, now WePay needs to get the big payout next :)
Some Yale engineering students created a "spoke-less" bicycle for a class recently. I thought it was pretty cool.

http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/b2g91/spokeless_...
Do you blur the video prior to publishing, on a server or on the receiving side?

I like the idea a lot, agree on most previous points about the presentation though!
Best thing about org files is they are just plain text so they work perfectly for this.
Online PC Support
You can also get your FU money playing the lottery. It's probably a better deal overall, since the odds are about the same and you don't have to pull any all-nighters to win the lotto.
Because we have not heard of a $225K microscope before - thus the microscope must be well good - but have heard of $10M research building and actually expect the latter.
Berkeley - The Future of Robotics (Sexy)
yes, but I live in L.A. and I'm sure it's different in most parts of the country. I make way more money than my parents or grandparents, even when adjusted for inflation, but I live in a much smaller place than they did.
> I would be seriously annoyed if someone wrote a plugin that replaced my stories on Xconomy with, say, TechCrunch stories. But that's the risk of publishing on the Web

How would you feel about someone writing a plug-in that left your content in one piece, removed the ads and used your site with all the associated expenses as a way to launch their product?

And if google did decide to provide 'more relevant ads' how do you propose those will reach their viewer after rapportive has 'claimed' the space?

Wouldn't it have been better to add the rapportive feature to the page somehow instead of removing a feature (ads) they deemed superfluous?
I think it needs a bit of work. Here's pg's highest-scoring comment from the past month: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1606788 (score: 81.91). It's entirely non-technical, but outranks many highly technical comments, like this one from jacquesm: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1574015
I would suggest that you read the beginner's guide first, then John Levine's Linkers and Loaders book, and how to write shared libraries. The last one is really comprehensive and can seem complex at first. You might want to see big picture first :)
Question: Are you a startup founder? Have you had trouble finding talent in NYC? Have you thought that maybe the problem was not NYC but you?

There are people looking for work specifically in the startup space in NYC, I was one of them about 3 years ago. When I found companies it was immediately clear which founders were good to work for and which were not. Just becuase you have a "startup" doesn't mean you are a going to attract talent. It has to be a good startup. The bar of what is an attractive startup for employees might be lower in Silicon Valley because so many people are there for "startup culture" above all else. In NYC there are other options that are good and a startup isn't better simply becuase it is a startup, it has to be better on its own merits.
I like the comment on the original site:

"God damn it, this is not OCD. Being anal has nothing to do with OCD and vice versa"

I don't see OCD behaviour in the design either - they are not tweaks, they are quite different iterations. I'm not sure it's even anal as such - more like experimental (and if they don't settle soon, indecisive).
PNG uses a predictor tuned to image data, though, so it's a bit tricker than that. But it's good enough for this purpose.
Totally agree with it needing more work. This is about a week old at this point and were working hard to make it better.
I don't want to be rich, for me being free on my (an my family's) current standard of living is enough. I live in Eastern Europe (Hungary) and my current net income is $24000 per year. $30000 per year would be enough. (It is a very strong middle-class level here, maybe I can say upper-middle class especially if you don't have debts and already have a reasonable house.) I am 35 years old and let's say I want this money to last until I am 80.
So I need $1.350.000. Provided that I will most probably always be a single founder and most probably will always bootstrap because no one will want to give me money, it will be enough to sell my company at $1.350.000, which I think would be more than doable if I would succeed with my current idea.

Edit: and also it is hard to imagine that I would absolutely not make any income with the lots of fun-projects I would do after my 'retirement'.
Ohh right cool, geeks feeling awkward when sex is compared to pleasure?

Dude, sex is pleasure, indeed it is one of the highest pleasure!

It is not just poor African orphans who get aids. In fact the reason why so much effort is put into it is because it is not just poor African orphans in a far away land. It is you and me and anyone else who could potentially get aids in a drunken night in a club, or park, or maybe even after weeks of flirting with a girl and in a fit of a moment stuff happen.

I suppose however you can not beat crying, but think of the children.

I say it again, what on earth is wrong with HN. Actually, I'll do an Ask HN.
Check out startuply, union square venture's portfolio of companies, new york tech meetup, and nextNY.

I asked the question you are asking on HN about 3 years ago, someone gave me the answer above (thought startuply didn't exist at the time), and ended up at a startup I wound up loving to work for not 2 months later, so good luck and maybe the kharma will be passed on.
Right. People are going crazy over the $500k number 40 years out but, in real dollars, that could easily convert to a middle-class wage today.
"hacker" and also "exception" scores really well

There aren't any words like "war" or "contrary" that are far way from the seed, and would indicate that some non-technical meaning should be inferred for "exception"

On the "100" ... that is just a z-score scaled to a 0-100 range, with capping at 100 rather than making it approach asymptotically.
Am I the only one to think this won't fly? People probably won't wait longer than a few seconds to see whom they're chatting with. The internet and chatroulette have made everyone pretty ADD about waiting.. Prepare for lot's of "Ciao's".
It's true. My own mom decided to be a stay-at-home one, and it certainly caused financial hardship.

But, at the risk of sounding callous... that's what happens when you make those choices.
you concluded you have no overconfidence problem

No, you concluded that. I concluded that the article wasn't worth reading (largely because the author chose a bad example).
"I'll leave predicting the future to you and Ray Kurzweil."

Except that you did try to predict the future earlier. Energy prices haven't risen much yet. You have an odd pattern of dodging my main point, and picking at tangential details.

Btw, I put a caveat on the house thing, I live in a major city and I'm sure it's different in most parts of the country. I'll bet this changes when driving long distances to work becomes much more expensive.
Cute, but one way of thinking of it is that "the human version doesn't kill HIV". The other way of thinking about it is, "HIV has already evolved to avoid it".
$900 p/m. Easy to cut back to $500 a month for a smaller place, or $300 to lose the view too, or $200 to lose the location too. You wouldn't want to go any lower than that though.
If both Rapportive and Google are grown ups chances are that Google will make a "plug-in" column if Rapportive starts getting big. Rapportives objective isn't blocking ads but enhancing the GMail experience, and Google should be all for that.
I don't always commit as often as I should, but ever since reading Ryan Tomayko's "The thing about git"[1], I use git add --patch/-p to solve the problem of overlarge or mixed commits. It allows you to snip out pieces of the changed files to add, rather than adding the entire file at once. (Perhaps everyone already knows this, but I used git for months without knowing it. So maybe I'll save someone else.)

[1] http://tomayko.com/writings/the-thing-about-git
While the many points of this article are true...I would like to point out that an SLA provides a means to punish the service provider...in hopes of better behavior.

I run an IT department with a massive MPLS network from ATT. When a circuit goes down - it is true that I don't regain MY costs by enforcing the terms of the SLA and collecting the remuneration that is due. However, I do many times collect a significant amount of credits at times...and that causes regional managers at ATT to take notice and start making infrastructure improvements to improve actual up time...which is what I want - and then that allows me to actually pay them for their circuit - which is what they want.
Ask HN: What on Earth is Wrong With HN
Ok, there is some hyperbole there, but this is a competitive time :)

PG talks in some of his articles, well almost expects, that one day will come when the quality of HN dilutes slightly. I am not in any way suggesting that it has, but I am wondering if the rate of expansion is too fast for the "natives" to "assimilate" the new comers.

You might see this in the up voting and down voting of comments, which really is the currency of this place, not in the way that money is, but in the way that wrongly upvoted comments tend to attract more upvotes due to crowd behaviour and the opositive for downvotes.

The quality of submissions has remained intact however. The best do get upvoted. Some which perhaps should do not, but the difference is minimal. With comments however, maybe I am alone in thinking so, but, the atmosphere seems to be much different than it was a year ago.

Maybe this is the newbie delusion which PG talks about, but I am not a newbie. Maybe this is instead what PG follows after talking about the newbie delusion, that is, the real thing.

First of all, is that so?

Second of all, can anything be done about it, or should we just accept that so is the way we are?
40Gbps throughput router using commodity hardware + software
Celebrities Before and After Photoshop
This is an interesting look at celebrities photos before and after photoshop. These images are mostly used in magazines, posters and given the photoshop treatment from their original source
- they accumulate Google juice over time, overpowering advice for newer versions of your framework.
Philadelphia 'blogger fee' turns into blog fodder
Salary isn't everything, the I-bank guys can be miserable. I know a guy who just backed out of his offer from JP Morgan for less money at a smaller firm that did something entirely. It is less money and the same hours, but the project is more fun. Milage may vary but I know that for me +/- 10k is about what I call equal offers.

I was just in a position picking between two offers. One paid about $8k more than the other in salary, but the lower offer sounded more fun. I took the lower offer. Promptly after my start date they told me about a bonus I'd be getting that I didn't know about that comes to about 10k, so I ended up coming out ahead, but even if that hadn't happened I'd be OK with my decision.
Well firstly these machines should have been riveted shut, leaving the only way to access the machine is by breaking the tamper-seals. (This at least eliminates everyone in the country without corresponding replacement tamper-seals from screwing around inside the machines)

Secondly, the OS on these devices should have been stored into ROM; not only is this a bastard way of ensuring people have to use the manufacturer to upgrade the systems, but it also makes tampering that much more of a pain in the ass.

Thirdly a proprietary data storage should have been used. Preferably one designed so that the voting machines only ever contain a write-only drive, in that it either cannot edit the data, or preferably doesn't even have the necessary hardware to read the data it writes (this would be complicated to get working right, but would be well worth it). This means only the manufacturer would have access to the edit/read connections.

I mean come on, compact flash, seriously. My phone can read flash drives, what were the designers thinking!
Jinx 1.0 Released -- Quickly find concurrency errors in your multithread code
Today, Corensic announced general availability of Jinx 1.0, a software quality tool for Linux and Windows that will help developers, testers, and IT organizations improve the reliability of their applications when they are running in a multi-core environment. Multi-core processors enjoy significant usage in enterprise desktops and datacenters, and many software developers are only just beginning to realize the full potential of these powerful processors. But developers still find it challenging to build high quality multi-core applications and avoid concurrency bugs. Such bugs are enormously difficult to prevent, and once introduced, even more difficult to find, sometimes taking large development projects weeks and months to discover and resolve. Jinx makes applications “unlucky” by forcing hard-to-find concurrency bugs to occur more frequently and then pointing out the location of the bugs to software developers. With Jinx, organizations can ship software faster and at significantly less cost.<p>Mark Oskin
CTO Corensic
Ten things I know about the mosque
Most researchers haven't really chosen to charge for their papers. It's the only way to get published in the journals, and it's based on an old scarcity where the distribution of quality journals was a difficult task. Now a social network of scientists could handle it for almost nothing. Barriers to research do nothing but make life difficult for poor college students.

See http://arxiv.org.