skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Looks like it's time to recommend The Millionaire Next Door:

http://www.amazon.com/Millionaire-Next-Door-Thomas-Stanley/d...

Don't bother to buy it: Get it out of the library and skim it. It's not a difficult read and it belabors its own point a bit. My own summary:

The secret to retaining a high net worth is the same as the secret to accumulating it: Control spending. Don't waste money.

Most of the people you know who look like they're wealthy -- fancy cars, country club memberships, stylish clothes -- are actually spending money as fast as they can get it, or faster. They have no savings and are living paycheck to paycheck.

Meanwhile, many of the wealthiest people in your town are wearing four-year-old work clothes and driving ten-year-old trucks that they bought used.

It doesn't do your future any good if you make $300k per year and spend $325k per year. Contrariwise, if you make $75k per year and only spend $50k per year you'll be a millionaire in under forty years.
Great points, thanks.

We'll think some more about how we can communicate the concept better. Furthermore, we might have to delay the request for mic/camera access as it could scare people away (other have pointed this out as well).

I'm not too fond of changing the tagline to something referencing chatroulette, we're kinda hoping people will not directly associate our site with nude guys ;) But rethinking the tagline might be wise still.

Also, I think you're correct in pointing out a non-video way of getting the site explained is necessary. Perhaps just in words, or otherwise using graphics/drawings etc.

And indeed, we figured this will probably be used for dating-purposes a lot; so we'll try to make sure that is possible on BP.

Once more, thanks for your feedback!
Can we conclude that this is the wistful daydream equivalent of the "Maserati Problem"[1]? I can definitely say that if 30 years we're looking at half a million dollars as a "cost of living adjustment", that world will for the people who don't make that kind of money be Thunderdome. I mean wages have barely kept up with inflation. In the last 40 years (between 1967 and 2007), median wages have only gone up US$10000 (from 40k to 50k). How the hell are all of our parents going to fare when you need 500,000 to maintain an upper-middle class lifestyle?

I see the numbers adding up (and it is a nicey-nice spreadsheet), it just doesn't make any kind of a sense. I guess that's why I'm only middle-class. I don't see this heinous future coming for all of us.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1444003
Ask HN: Unique Developer Blogs?
I love a very specific kind of blog/article/post and I'd love to know if more exist. They post 'lessons-learned' and 'process-insight' articles about their large scale development efforts.

Specifically: These are not "how-to" copy/paste script sites, they don't offer a downloadable library at the end, and they are run by legitimate, innovative, startup-like companies. The ideal posts are higher level views of "How did we solve this problem?", where "problem" == something relatively unique and interesting, not "How do I do AJAX in jQuery?".

Examples:
- http://codeascraft.etsy.com/
- http://engineering.twitter.com/
- http://bigbucketsoftware.com/2010/04/02/checkpoints/
- http://sudokugrab.blogspot.com/2009/07/how-does-it-all-work.html

Any and all favorites would be welcome.
A more accurate title would be "No, you can't retire rich at 30 if you sell your startup and not think about money ever again". It's perfectly doable to retire at 30 with $4m just as it's perfectly doable to blow through $100m at 50.
Yes, it's clear that Intel wants to make security a top priority. However, this article still doesn't explain why acquiring McAfee in particular makes any sense, especially at a cost of $7.7 billion.

Yes, it does say that the "McAfee purchase gives Intel an instant foothold on countless PCs," but these are not the PCs that Intel is after. These PCs already have Intel chips on them. Intel presumably wants security as a headlining feature for their next generation chips to entice users to upgrade.

In addition, Intel can gain an even wider-reaching foothold into your PC by bundling a driver and distributing it through Windows Updates, as it does already with its integrated video solutions. They presumably wouldn't need to pay Microsoft $7.7 billion for the priviledge of making Windows more secure.

Aside from the foothold in your PC, then, what is left of the "long-term, strategic buy"? There might be some patents and some talented developers, but for a company that already spends $5 billion on R&D every year, it's hard to understand why Intel couldn't come up with an in-house solution.

No, the real reason why Intel bought McAfee is probably much more pedestrian: Intel is simply sitting around with too much cash earning too little return.
That's a really good approach.

One particular area where the external program bit is annoying is when you're querying or setting system/package parameters or defaults on a unix machine, there must be 100 incompatible ways of doing that.

Usually the only way to get the job done is to escape to a shell, which really feels kludgy.
I can barely understand what you're saying here, so I won't comment beyond this reply.

The time scale is critical. If you look at any review of numerical weather prediction accuracy, such as the one I linked to above, you will see it's a key parameter. It's why 3-day forecasts are excellent and 7-day forecasts are not very good. Good 3-day predictability does not imply good 7-day predictability.

This is no different than the pictures of the state trajectories of the Lorenz system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenz_attractor) starting from two nearby states, which stay together for a time, and then diverge suddenly.

It's true, the relevant laws are the Navier-Stokes differential equations, not simple laws like F = m a. But, we can observe the boundary conditions and propagate the system state forward in time. These equations do constrain the future dynamics.
Apple would use voice, facial recognition as part of iPhone 'kill switch'
If you're interested in learning more, Ben Webber did a talk on the AIIDE 2010 StarCraft competition at SHDH36 that is worth watching: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbjsL5E1Idw
As would I. Email sent.
most people can live quite richly on around $50k/year, depending on where they live and what they're doing. especially if you're willing to pony up some cash up front to buy your house/car if you want to own one.

but, if your idea of richly is tainted by popular culture, and you want to buy some yachts and collect expensive cars, then yeah, you're going to go broke.
I suspect the only way to get the public's attention on voting machine security would be for a group (Anonymous?) to hack a major election in favor of a joke write-in candidate (Mickey Mouse, "None of the Above", Bill Murray).
> I've been doing startups since I was 31 (22 years ago), and figured that out quickly.

When you are 31 it is easy to figure out you won't retire rich at 30. Just saying.
That would require improving public education first.
The counter-argument is that, based on public gathered figures, YC is doing pretty damn well right now. I say they don't need tweaking because of that. They could tweak and try to scale quickly or get better returns, but they don't need to.
The system itself makes perfect sense and I actually tried it out, unlike chatroulette.

But the design.. it needs some work. For one thing, the flash webcam popup before I've even read the heading, as has been pointed out, appears much too early. Also have some humble doubts about this kind of dark design attracting many girls.
PR2 Robots Will Go On Sale Next Month
I'd say that it also depends on what you mean by "lost interest". Using programming as "a means to an end" only doesn't qualify as having "lost interest in programming" IMO.
I'm not too shocked by the use of the processor, that may very well have something to do with reliability. You'd be surprised how demanding industry is in this respect, and it's not rare at all to find what you'd class as 'ancient' hardware when it comes to doing jobs where you have to make the results reliable. Not saying that was the case here, but it could be, also I'm imagining these boards might be run from a battery backed-up power supply so they may want to have them consume as little power as possible (that's a guess though, but I can imagine that if your election is in an area where there is a power failure you don't want to lose the results).

Compare for instance with avionics and stuff on space flights. If crashing is not an option the rules about hardware change dramatically. It's a pity the article does not say whether the ram was ECC ram or not, that would be a hint that this is not just a way to be 'cheap'.
You are correct.

I was going to include the good and bad parts of FP, but the bad parts really deserve their own posts. Lots of little "gotchas" there.
NYC Should Bus In Hackers from Carnegie Mellon & MIT
I don't know have fun I guess
I think it was Jadakiss who said "Entrepreneurs don't retire, they just get chubby and become angel investors."

I don't know of many people in this business who actually plan on being utterly retired while they blow hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Most just want to not be obligated to work on things that don't interest them.
The government never pays back the borrowed money, it just prints money. When it does this it dilutes the total number of dollars out there, which is called inflation. This means that every business then has to spend more to buy the goods and services they need and pay their employees more. Thus, even if the stimulus were perfectly spent, the cost of the stimulus does more damage to the economy than the stimulus could try to fix.

To compare it to a a business taking out a loan is nonsensical. Businesses repay loans, and those loans are backed by assets (such as the business or the plant being built)

You represent exactly the problem I'm talking about. You know nothing about economics and you can't even make an economic argument (re: your assertion about the gold standard) yet you are totally convinced that I said something wrong. You have been taught to believe junk science and not only to believe it, but to believe that anyone who speaks differently is somehow wrong and not worth arguing with. This is ideological conditioning, and politicians use it effectively to be able to put one over on you, and others like you. Since much of the population was educated in government run schools to engage in non-think this way, I will never convince you.

And that is why this countries economy is going to continue to crater, until we have a major political upheaval.
I've worked with OOP a lot and I've also used FP, although less than OOP. In my experience, what you're saying is both right and wrong.

It's right, because FP really is fun and it really is just the way you describe it. But it's also wrong, because you believe that OOP can't be like that. It can.

Aggressive, continuous refactoring as a coding "process" (I hate using such an overloaded, overused word) is not exclusive to FP. Nowadays, I do my best OOP coding just like that, whenever I have the luxury.

And it really is a luxury. As soon as your code is "out there", available for the rest of the team to use and rely on, your days of aggressive, continuous refactoring are numbered. Unless you want to be known as "that guy who keeps yanking the rug from under our feet all the time", you have to settle down into the boring old routine of "I know this might not be the best way to do it, but I can't touch that other thing right now". Show me a team with two or more members and I'll show you bits of code left as a "compromise".
A coder's website
Do you like my website. do you think its tacky. I updated it fairly recently and haven't gotten an opinion on it yet.
Possible, perhaps encouraged by iAds, but it's not like they couldn't do that with Hulu.
Currently I've been catching up to old episodes of Radiolab. I've had a hard time finding tech-related podcasts that are enjoyable to listen to. Currently what I listen to are:

* NPR: Car Talk

* NPR: Planet Money

* PRI: Selected Shorts

* PRI: To the Best of Our Knowledge

* Stuff You Should Know

* This American Life

* WNYC's Radiolab

* Xbox Live's Major Nelson Radio

That's usually more than enough new content to last me through a week (1.5 hrs per day in the car). Sometimes TAL has re-runs that I've already listened to, or SYSK has a not-so-interesting topic, but it's usually not a problem.

I really miss the Stack Overflow podcasts, but I suspect they just ran out of material.

I've tried listening to Software Engineering Radio, but I'm practically ADD when it comes to podcast hosts, and it's difficult to pay attention to this sort of podcast (others seem to love it, but it's not for me). This is one of the reasons why I love Planet Money and Radiolab. Both usually talk about topics that aren't in my field, and usually do so in a very interesting manner.
Hell, I'm getting by on $15,000 a year right now, and could make do with a lot less if I was living some place cheap. I eat well, sleep well, and live well. I don't fly first class, but it's not exactly killing me.
No telling; worth considering.
Interesting article, this point jumped out at me though:

"Since ditching free, 35,000 Ning networks have signed up for paid plans. . . those numbers mean Ning wooed nearly 12% . . . more than double its previous conversion rate."

This isn't an accurate assesment.

That 12% uptick rate was one time, and based on Ning forcing the hand of their communities.

I'm curious to see how Ning markets themselves in the future, if nothing I'm sure lots of those communities that paid the uptick realized how beholden they were to Ning . . .
You can make them do less, but you can also make them spend less time doing nothing at all. Concurrency optimizations and prefetching fall into this category.
He's right that you won't get rich as an early stage employee unless you worked somewhere like Google. I learned that the hard way.

He's wrong about not being in it for the money. I've known about 10 serial entrepreneurs in Boston and Silicon Valley who were in it for the money, and they were all focused and successful at it. The key is to have a clear idea and a clear exit plan, and adjust to the market as quickly as possible. These guys were all like minor versions of Mike Cassidy. 3+ successful exits, each more money than the previous. All doing stuff you've probably used as a part of another product, but you've never heard of the original company or the founders.

A lot of guys know can't decide whether they are in it for the money, or the love, or to be famous on Hacker News, so they fail. Lack of focus and not knowing why they were in it is why they failed. Guys who know they are in it for the money and can execute often win. If you're really in it for the money and lose, you might just suck. That's just the way it works. YMMV.

The other thing he's wrong about is living to 90. Working at a desk 16 hours a day, living on soda and junk food, no exercise, estranged from families and friends... most hackers are going to need a lot of luck or serious medical breakthroughs if they want to make it to 70.
Did the OGB ever govern anything? I don't understand why it was formed in the first place.
It's impossible to know what you'll need in the future, and you can't effectively go back and look for tags, though.

My approach is to add silly things in as fluff, not as the message itself.

The frobnicator now frobnicates.

becomes

The frobnicator now frobnicates, omgh4x!!!11

or whatever. Make sure you've got enough _real_ information there, and some light extra whatever is fine.

Then again, sometimes, you really need good commit messages: http://github.com/shoes/shoes/commit/95fed5e6310cb0174ba80b8...
You can't block Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook
Out of curiosity, why would one set window.location.hash?
The price of SSDs has come down sufficiently that you probably could say that having lots of memory is a stupid way to emulate having an SSD ;)
Rebase is a tool to rewrite history. This is just one small part of the things you can do when messing around with your history.
Here's a good Wikipedia article on the protein. The gene for this protein is in humans, it just doesn't target HIV in humans. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM5alpha
Tell HN: Editors should post a comment explaining *why* a post is being killed.
I am seeing a trend: posted stories killed without explanation or obvious reason. I just saw this story killed in the 'New' feed: http://www.christine.net/2010/08/who-moved-my-cheese-building-the-nextgen-incubator.html

I have no idea why someone would kill a potentially useful story like that. There is no explanation. Seems awfully unfair to me. If you're going to kill a story, please have the courtesy to explain why you're doing it.
It's obviously not a formal distinction. Algorithmic means "spends a lot of time running loops doing something interesting" as opposed to "copies data back and forth between the UI and the DB". Or CPU intensive versus IO intensive.

[Edit] And just to be completely clear and also reap all the downvotes that I can get from disgruntled web devs: Python and Ruby are indeed totally unsuitable for writing CPU intensive, complex algorithms. If you write Ruby or Python code, avoid loops! Try to be declarative so all the loops stay in the C code.
Data Security Breaches Wreak Havoc
I'm not convinced that any method will ever be 100% foolproof, but I think it can be improved immensely, and if we could limit the inaccuracies/fraud to always be less than those incurred by a traditional paper ballot[1], I think I'd approve.

In regards to your comment regarding untrusted parties handling the hardware, here are a few counterpoints:

- We already trust polling place workers with paper ballots, the possibility for fraud already exists.

- The potential for fraud from any one polling place can be limited by implementing a system which makes it impossible (or very very difficult) to spoof the location from which a vote was cast, and ensuring that the number of votes cast per polling place is within an expected range.

- Such a system could also include a paper receipt with an ID number on it. A voter could plug this "tracking number" in on a trusted website (ie. vote.gov) and confirm that their name is associated with their preferred candidates, but not allow them to change these choices. This would go a long way towards identifying fraudulent activity when/if it occurs.

[1] Though figuring out how to quantify this is anybody's guess.
I have similar ideas. I've gathered that Buenos Aires is nice, incidentally.
I rather enjoyed Mike's comment on the blog itself
I couldn't, I didn't have control over the file.
I thought the most precious bit was when he imagined the author of grep as basking in the glow of a dozen xterms. Maybe the author of gnu grep, but not the author of the True Grep. At least he said vi rather than vim. But, you see, in the age of 18 year old hackers running Ubuntu and Compiz, such minor distinctions are just not worth making.

Edit: I'll give the author this much, it was a cute exposition style.
Looks like they were correct about the iPhone.
Sure, it's a different story if you have a server farm and need a client farm to test it. But in his scenario you could use an off-the-shelf laptop to saturate the local link with requests...

Even if it's not easy to tell the min/max bounds in high scale deployments, it's possible to give an approximate value by measuring elements. You have load balancers that don't do more than X req/s, servers that take X ms/req, databases which can do X q/s, caches with delay X ms in X% of request. That gives you an rough estimate - then it's about locating bottlenecks which prevent you from reaching those numbers. (simplified model)
I always remap Caps Lock to be a Ctrl key. Using the lower-left Ctrl key would just be... weird :).

With Caps Lock as control, and using the Alt key closest to the spacebar as Meta, the key-chords in Emacs are comfortable for me (I just spread out my left hand a little over home-row and I can reach them all w/o moving my hand).

I was a vim user long ago (I learned to program in vim) and constantly hitting esc bothered me more than Emacs Ctrl key gymnastics.
My co-founder brought up the same objection when considering joining AngelPad. I responded with the following:

Two of the seven partners are currently running their own startups -- Vibhu Mittal is the founder of Root-X Research (dedicated to improving learning online, etc.) and Gokul Rajaram is the founder of Chai Labs (acquired by Facebook last week).

David Scacco (though not a founder) is one of only 4 people at MyLikes, a very new startup with seed funding. He's already shown his ability to execute by bringing in early revenue from advertisers and securing multiple partner commitments to grow their company.

Keval Desai co-founded Achex (a la PayPal) with Michael Arrington over 10 years ago, which was acquired in 2001 by FirstData for $32M. That's in addition to him being the pioneer of Google TV Ads and currently working with Kevin Rose in a leadership function to re-launch Digg.

Deep Nishar founded Patkai Networks (a B2B online services provider) 10 years ago before moving to Google and now is essentially the #2 guy at LinkedIn (granted, a good-sized company now).

Rich Chen is an accomplished angel investor with multiple successful exits in his portfolio companies in recent years, but he too founded his own company in Japan called OptoMail 10 years ago, which was a B2B email marketing startup.

Thomas Korte is a founder in his own right by being the lead in launching AngelPad. However, he too has startup experience (though not a founder) at an enterprise news startup a decade ago called Moreover Technologies.

So whether prior to or after Google, every one of the partners has significant early startup experience to complement their leading roles at Google. Just wanted to make the clarification.
I use this http://www.focusboosterapp.com/ stops me from spending hours in email.
I quit my day job last year and began my ISV/web startup after I calculated I could live very comfortably in Costa Rica on $20,000 per year. I haven't made a full time move there quite yet though, I go there for the winter to surf and code.
Those can all be fixed easily enough. When (not if) facebook finally launches a full-featured email service, it will probably dominate gmail/yahoo/microsoft. You would get a address @fbmail.com or whatever so you could still use it as your "normal" free email client. But you then also get easy communication with all your friends, since facebook already knows how to contact them and can do so bypassing traditional email alltogether (since the messages stay entirely within facebook's data centers). Not to mention tying in to their existing products-If you got an event invitation (sent to your fbmail since you no longer check your gmail) it could show you all the details (no reason it couldn't do that right now) and which of your friends are going etc right in the email.
Have incubators worked out somewhere? I thought all the empirical evidence has shown they are a waste of effort.
Agreed. while exiting one startup may not be enough to retire, its a pretty good start for plowing it into your next one.