skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nothing interesting about my first story: I got a boring cubicle job in a large enterprise that needed 12 programmers to do anything, blah, blah, blah. But I did do some good work for a vice president who remembered me when he moved to another company, which leads to my second story, my real story:

He brought me in to his new company to do a consulting job to answer 2 questions, "What do we have to do to get Order Entry, Shop Floor Control, and Standard Costing written and running?" and "How many programmers do I need to hire?"

They had 400 employees, were missing all of these mission critical apps, and had only 1 programmer. But he was all they ever needed. I worked with him for 3 months and he wrote all of the software needed using tools and techniques none of us had ever seen before.

He did instant analysis and design, wrote disposable apps, did rapid prototyping, stepwise refinement, and extreme programming years before anyone ever heard of these things. He never wrote the same line of code twice, writing standard functions and reusable components. If he knew he needed something twice, he wrote a parameter-driven code generator on the fly and had me collect the parameters for him. He even coded in Boolean algebra and had an engine that converted it into production source code. He threw things into production long before anyone else would, figuring it was easier to just keep reworking them instead of waiting until it was perfect.

He was a one man shop in a $150 million company. He was smart, he worked hard, he loved what he did, but most of all, he didn't know that "it couldn't be done", so he just did it.

Three months watching Dick build stuff, and I was hooked for life. I had to do it, too. And I've been doing pretty much the same thing ever since, pausing only long enough to add a few new technologies to my tool box along the way.

Sometimes I wonder what horrible cubicle I'd be wasting away in if I hadn't met Dick and saw what was really possible.
I'm not sure we'll ever find everything he has in mind in one place, but there was an article on CNN recently that talks about a business that's attempting to fill the need of some of what he suggested. It's a place called TechShop, and it aims to provide membership-based access to tools, and other resources necessary to get into product creation.

The article about it is located here:
http://money.cnn.com/2010/09/14/technology/techshop/index.ht...
This is what YouTube was originally. Turns out people just upload clips from film, sports, and television instead.
Better yet, build up a list of quotes organized by the brand. How many taglines can Toyota have? So even if the quoted text is obfuscated differently each time (new font, new noise), you can teach your bot to recognize the company logo and try one of the few taglines they have.
International Internet Treaty proposed by Europe
When someone makes a bad decision I like to encourage them when they do an about-face.
You can't really say that they're brilliant yourself, that's for others to decide.

Here's an idea for you: A service that you have to check in to periodically, you set up a number of actions that need to be done after you haven't checked in for 24 hours, 48 hours, 1 week, 1 month, 1 year and 5 years.

We'll call the thing 'deadmansknob', after the button in the locomotives that a train driver has to keep pressed to activate the system (if they have a heart attack they presumably let go).

Payment is on the signing up end (since obviously you won't be paying on the other end), $1 per action on file per year.
Topology: Metric Spaces
I came to say the same thing - my local library is certainly not dead. Full of both kids and adults - yes, some are playing on the computers, but a ton are also reading and checking out books.
Nothing wrong with 'tooting your own drum' as you put it. If you don't, who will? Well, as you get more exposure more will.
I love how you're being downvoted for pointing to more realistic numbers.
it's not (yet) an obvious place to look.
Ok What happens when the second prize is also upped ? Better performance overall ? People are fighting for the First spot( exempt players) and Second spot ( Non exempt players mostly).
Do the Non tigers in the field feel more competitive against the Vijay Singh(s) and Phil Nicolas ?
This kind of service is just another "Brill's content" type scam.
Mobile web is years away from competing with native
The initial response was to flip out, but once people realized reddit wasn't going to switch to a pay-only site the outrage died down. It might have only worked because reddit users/admins try so hard to foster a sense of community, but it seemed to me like reddit showed how to set up a pay service correctly, and people were just too jaded because of sites like Scribd to realize it.
I'm not saying captchas are a magic one-step solution to end all spam (hence the mention of Akismet). I'm just disputing the idea that they are "nothing more" than illusory security. Sure, they can be turked, and sure, if someone relies only on captchas they'll probably eventually get screwed. But they do provide some benefit as part of a complete approach against spam, in that they raise the cost of a spam attempt up from zero. Unless you have meaningful levels of traffic, the vast majority of spammers aren't going to bother with you if it costs anything at all to hit you.
I agree for the most part, but the expectation of a Library having a CNC mill or a miniature cluster seems a little strange and specific to your personal interests.

Holding reading classes for younger children and poorly literate adults, community events centered on lots of different subjects, art appreciation, reading groups... I think those are all slightly more feasible and in line with what a general public would enjoy in a library.

Now, if we're talking about the concept of a Hacker-centre... I think there are a few of those in the larger cities and some college campuses.
Wow! I can stop converting all my fricking video to H.264 AAC now!
No, you're right. When someone makes a bad decision let's hate on them for life; even if they do an about-face.

Apple is a corporation, and isn't human. Don't be fooled; they are only responding to market pressure.
Really? Why the downvote? It's a cool utility!
Dangerous: no, but he said interesting, so perhaps. The advantage of using little known features, for rootkits, is that people are less likely to look for them.
And yet, I am confused. I read lots of right-wing op-eds and left-wing op-eds. Why would this particular more-left-than-right op-ed deserve to be treated differently?
Well, it's "not much of a response" since it doesn't respond to his concerns. Inviting him to give further feedback is great and all, but while it acknowledged his issues with the Archive paywall (just by saying they could tune it -- not with a concrete solution), it completely ignored his privacy complaint about broadcasting reading activity.

Basically, it was a response, but "not much" of one.
Agreed, the Mountain View library is always packed. I mostly go with my daughter because it's a great place for kids. But I also like to be able to read books without having to buy them.
That's a remarkably uncharitable response.

I agree that asking HNers for psychological advice is not a great idea, and that's why my advice was basically "Stick with your psychologist."

However: the symptoms described were not at all like a rejected PKD story, but rather, were quite exemplary for OCD. The OP is obviously troubled; treating him glibly ("send yourr story to Malcolm Gladwell...") when he is crying out for help, even in the wrong place, just seems cruel.
Watch this vide: "Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

Most programmers prefer to work on a fun project even if it pays less. Hackers don't do startups because they want to get rich; they do it for the same reason they do open-source: they like having autonomy and mastery, and working towards a goal.

It's just that when you do a startup, there's a good chance of generating revenue, so that you can quit your day job (because it sucks) and focus on your own business.

If you have to choose between getting a job vs. working on an open source project, it's a tough call (developers need to eat). If you choose between a job and startup, it's easier, because you can get money by starting your own startup.

I don't agree with PG's idea of "getting paid more will motivate you more". What you get in a startup is not "more money", what you get is "more autonomy". In fact, in s a startup you probably "complete autonomy" and "complete mastery"; these are way more valuable for programmers than "getting paid 10 times more".
20+ Brilliant and Advanced jQuery Effects
Summary:

[...] we are closing the Node.js experimental release to new users. All existing users will continue to have access to the Node.js experimental release.

[...] For those on the waiting list, you’ll be first on the list for the next version next year.
That's an interesting question. I wonder how they decide which ads to show on a given site (imagine seeing a competitors ad on your sites CAPTCHA!)
Iron Chef does a decent job of this. I wish they offered different "cuts" of episodes - I don't care about anything the judges have to say until they're chewing.
The saying you're looking for it "tooting my own horn".

I really like the concept!
The question is whether those statistics are indicators of success or do they hold true for ALL t-shirts of threadless.

57% of the success may have had humor because 57% of all tshirts submitted had humor.
Your entire question seems to be predicated on the idea that if you're loyal and hard-working, you'll keep your job and be paid well for it. That was kind of true in your father's day, but nowadays it's patently false, so the question itself is wrong. There is no security.

What about an opinion by a 90k-salaried .NET developer who just bought a three-bedroom condo last week and came into work this morning to discover his job would now be performed by a 30k-salaried Indian?

My father tried going the route of hard-working company man three times, once at a large government contractor, once at a real estate company and once at a large consulting firm. He got screwed by incompetent management at the government contractor, by natural disasters at the real estate company and by greedy management at the consulting firm.
20/09/2010 18:52:45H

HTTP filter	file

hxxp://replicatorinc.com/blog/wp-content/themes/thesis_151/images/dot-ddd.gif

HTML/ScrInject.B.Gen virus

connection terminated - quarantined

#####

Check/change the file above.
Its copying itself to cookies as well.

But it maybe just Nod32 antivirus being "stupid".

#####

20/09/2010 18:54:01	Real-time file system protection	file	C:\Documents and Settings\xxxxx\Local Settings\Application Data\Opera\Opera\cache\sesn\opr04LRH.tmp

HTML/ScrInject.B.Gen virus

deleted - quarantined
> twitter is a failed idea

Nobody cares about Twitter-the-idea, and that's never what anyone means any more when they use the term. What everyone loves is Twitter-the-platform, which is a huge success.

> This idea will also fail; you can't tell people how to use a service.

Yes, you can. When the site is small, you can manually moderate all submissions, literally telling people how they may use it. After the site grows, the "base" will continue to obey the site's culture. As long as the base has more power (in some metric or another) the site will continue in that direction without further work. (This is basically how HN has been set up.)

Note that this might keep the site small—like HN, and unlike Twitter. But that's still entirely monetizable, especially if you have a much larger viewing population than submitting population.
Ours was "Sitaker". What was yours?
I've often had similar thoughts about how men and women initially got involved in programming... why do you personally think that is? (I will look into the book.)
turn it off = on demand
Early Scribd broke the web by taking open format documents, putting them in a proprietary wrapper, and calling it a "service".

Middle Scribd fixed their own brokenness by moving to HTML 5 (which is sometimes more convenient than a PDF, and is certainly "open" and accessible).

Late Scribd is again breaking the web by moving documents behind a paywall. Some qualities are just baked into a company's DNA.
http://www.learningwebgl.com is an incredible site for learning about webgl. Here is a list of WebGL frameworks listed on their wiki: http://learningwebgl.com/cookbook/index.php/Main_Page
(scroll to the bottom)

I'm personally using O3D right now. I've heard good things about the others such as GLGE
No idea what the spec says or if their is one that pertains to this.

But if I reference a file multiple times I want the browser to load it that many times otherwise I shouldn't be referencing it multiple times. I understand his issue but it sounds like the code should be checking to see if the library has loaded and not requesting it if it already has. And IE has the correct behavior.
Tabs, on terminals?

If I understand correctly, a tiling window manager combined with a shell script is basically the same thing?
Be Your Own Advocate
That's a pathological hiring mentality, it's not a contest, it's an attempt to make your company better by adding new talent. Good interviewers / recruiters use every trick possible to make sure they hire the best candidate.
Indeed, and a public miniature cluster is just a tragedy of the commons waiting to happen. Either it gets monopolised by one person, or nobody gets more than a tiny fraction of a CPU-day per day making it less useful than your own laptop.
More specifically, Hex Editor, finding character info in the save files and bumping all your stats up to FF.

Then finding the maps and going nuts adding things and creating entire new cities.

Then playing around with other pieces of various files, and finding yourself being attacked by chests, blocks of water, and the letter W.
Jacksonville traffic ticket
Before you pay any traffic ticket, contact the traffic ticket attorneys at FIX MY DL in Jacksonville, Florida.for details visit http://fixmydl.com/
Why Google went instant
You should watch the demo of their product. This is like the future Cory Doctorow spoke about in "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom." Augmented Reality overlays business cards, presentations, twitter and facebook feeds, last.fm playlists, and other data around people's faces.

Combine this future with the eyePhone episode of Futurama and pretty soon you have "whuffie" numbers showing up in augmented reality next to people in the real world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingd... for more details.
Market pressure? Apple acted the same way for two years until this recent change in policy, and they were doing swimmingly.

No need to call out the man, just applaud a company for taking a step in the right direction.
Does it support .rmvb format?
I'm so happy that we don't live in the same worlds.
given a metric like `50% use 2 colors or less`, this by itself doesn't mean much to me because in the general population 70% may use 2 colors or less. Or 50%. or 10%. I don't know the general trend, so I don't know whether using 2 colors or less is a good idea or a bad one.

I'm not knocking your study, personally I found it really interesting.
Krugman makes me so angry, not as someone who is rich, but as someone who understands the difference between earned and entitled:

"... consisting of people who feel that things to which they are entitled are being taken away."

If I am rich in America, chances are that either I, or my family before me, earned the money in the most effective free market known. I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's the best we've got. The assertion that I should be able to keep what I have earned is not entitlement. Entitlement is the assertion that I have a right to something, without regard for effort or trade.

I am entitled to keep what I have earned. Taking my earnings is a moral wrong. There is no two ways about it. It is no more right to take a dollar from a man who has a hundred of them than it is to take a dollar from a man who has one.
This is a good case-study of what to do when building a home page for your project.

1) State what your project is about using language that a reasonably savvy (technology-wise) user can understand, even if unfamiliar with the problem domain. (this site would be better if they linked on "message queue" for those people that don't know what that is.)

2) Eye-catching call to action icons

3) Brief list of most important features

4) Brief high-level view

5) Brief low-level view

6) Some clean and minimalist stats on why you might want to use it

7) Easy to understand links to more info.

I don't know if I will ever need this product... but I'm bookmarking it anyway as an outstanding example of how to introduce people to it. (Except for the swear word. The word "Fucking" is really out of place)

Nice job guys.
One of my favorite hobbies is Lucha Libre (mexican wrestling) and it's awesome because dudes have their face covered in bright color masks.
Just ask your teenage sister. She knows the answer.
I thought I had to convert the videos to get them on the device at all? This is awesome.
Still doesn't make sense.

If you display 10 random animals (or shapes), and ask a user to pick the right one, a dumb spam script would have a 10% success rate.

If you display one image of an animal and give 10 possible answers, a dumb spam script would have a 10% success rate.
Ok Go's New Music Video: White Knuckles
Don't be fooled; they are only responding to market pressure.

Sure. But market pressure, when examined through a powerful microscope, turns out to be composed of thousands of individual atoms of customer feedback. Like the one above.
Yes, before you invest, just think of the chances of becoming an owner of the 10-second version of ChatRoulette.
(Double-edited: really, HN?)

Your invention sounds like the perfect kind of thing to submit to the Halfbakery: http://www.halfbakery.com/

The difference between "this should be a blog post" and "this seems like something for people to use to amuse themselves with over lunch," I think, is that the blog-post kind of idea requires very little investment in time and labor to determine profitability. The kinds of things you see on the Halfbakery (and your idea) usually require large HR-investments, with employees either manufacturing the product, or directly serving the customer (or making sure that all the stuff you want to happen after your "death" actually happens.) You can't just sit down at your terminal and see if it's a great idea by morning, so it just becomes "something nice to think about" rather than "something nice to try out."
ok, but how many comments are you losing because people don't want to fill out a captcha?

i've used defensio.com for filtering comments on my site with no captcha and rarely ever get a false positive or negative. false negatives are easy to spot, and users can manually override false positives by supplying an email address to get a confirmation link (which gets fed back to defensio as a false positive once clicked).
Krugman is such a hack. He never acknowledges the good arguments of the other side. Always makes it seem like the other side is full of drooling selfish evil idiots. Can't stand reading the man's columns.
I looked in that folder and there was nothing strange, that file referenced wasn't even in there. Sorry for the inconvenience though!
I say I am a "geek" and ask for a ridiculous fee.
Free tool that rates the reputation of hyperlinks posted on your site
Why run a marathon when you could climb a mountain? Why climb a mountain when you can write a novel? Why write a novel when you can compose a symphony? Why compose a symphony when you can run a marathon?
Oh, so it is ok to take away what someone else's earnings because you know better than they do?
He's not wrong any more than you aren't wrong. He's just living a different life than you are because you are both very different people, and what works for one does not work for the other.

You've taken the 'Be many different people over the course of your life.' to it's literal extreme where you left behind your old self like a butterfly leaves behind the caterpillar, but that does not mean that that is for everybody.
Visual 6502 in JavaScript
Ask HN: Hours of flow per week?
Having moved from free lance to a full time 9-5, I have struggled with getting 'in the zone.' I used to do virtually all of my hacking in the evening to the wee hours of the morning. I have had to supplement my 'regular hours' with late-night sessions more akin to the free lance days to keep up production.

It got me wondering how productive some people are, and what you have done to increase the amount of flow you can achieve in a given week.
Funny you should say that. I'm currently at a mid sized (10k employees worldwide) consultancy, and one of the reasons I'm still there rather than having run with one of my startup ideas is that there I get a chance to "make huge differences in society, touch the lives of more people than you will ever meet in person". I get to be involved in huge projects with real visible impact on peoples lives. At a small company (my own or someone else's) I'd with all likelihood be working on much smaller problems with much smaller impact.
An open source initiative to build a low-cost 3D scanner
Sweet CSS3 Checkboxes - Safari Only
how are you going about learning o3d? it seems like the documentation effort stopped when they switched to webgl.
Ubuntu prototype uses face recognition to intelligently move UI elements (video)
Entitletarditis: The journalist’s disease
Guest blogging: Spreading out vs Focusing strategy?
No, his books hammered this in my head. I don't want to be a chef.

I read Kitchen Confidential and loved it. Is there a similar non-technical book I could read on another line of profession that would be just as interesting?
Ask HN: Health insurance plans for startups?
What subsidies do startups provide typically, and what do the employees usually use?
You forgot "Yay Apple for allowing it on OSX"

Also, can't wait to use VLC on Windows Phone 7!
Napster Changes its Tune on an iPhone App, and Joins the Crowd
It's a separate question from what the OP asked, which is more about the individual motivation behind being an entrepreneur, but it is good for the OP to at least appreciate the fact that such people exist, for the sake of the economy.

Even putting job creation statistics aside, entrepreneurship is essential to any economy. There would be no such thing as your stable job if not for an entrepreneur 10 years ago. Job stability doesn't exist in nature. Somebody had to create it, and somebody has to be out there continuing to create new things or the stability will fall apart, or become a stagnant organization that doesn't exist for any good reason. Major improvements come in the form of entrepreneurs, or at least by established companies being checked by entrepreneurs.
Interactive web based enterprise scheduling tool
Agreed, but the GP has a point, you should keep perspective and realize that they can make the about-face because they were f'ing up earlier.

So we should encourage them not to make the same mistakes again, but it's not a reason to sing their praise.
I either say "No" or I quote them my usual consulting rate, usually the topic of conversation changes pretty quickly thereafter.
I had a similar idea a few years ago. I thought my idea was original but when I did my research, several companies have already thought of it.

Microsoft
http://www.internetnews.com/webcontent/article.php/3836421/M...

Yahoo
http://www.faqs.org/patents/app/20090012855

Ad Captcher
http://adcaptcher.com/
Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Christmas 1982.

Shiny.