skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Recent events in my personal life have led me to believe you can get "dumb money" with reasonable terms in NYC. So if you just need the dough, it's no problem these days... any idea and founders with a pulse will do. Get in on it while it lasts...
More reasons to type on glass :)
If you are able to invest some time I highly recommend you take a look at Haskell or OCaml.

I used to think strong typing was something stupid, inconvenient, etc. Then I started learning Haskell and realized I didn't hate strong typing, I just hated sucky implementations of it (Java, C++, I'm looking at you...).

And Haskell is an eye opener in more ways then just the strong typing. This being said I do agree non-strong typed languages can work perfectly fine, Python is for now still my goto language until I get more Haskell experience.
All in all, the C code looks pretty good. I browsed around in a few files to see whether he used strn* or strl*, but it turns out he uses a proper string library instead.

Very rare, but very nice to see!
We are using this: http://github.com/robey/kestrel

It is written in scala for use at Twitter. It is super simple to getting running and is so far robust. We are using it to pass JSON messages around our system for background processing tasks.
Easy Theming with Compass & Sass [video]
Thank you nkurz, sorry about the excuses about little time, I did not argumented it enough: the fact is that I really love to share what I'm doing using blog posts, so I tend to work hard to achieve something that's worth sharing, but then I'm so excited about sharing it that I write the post as fast as possible!

I should try to resist some more hours in order to obtain a post that is more consistent and easy to follow... instead I tend to push the "publish" button and even when the post is already live I continue fixing it... Thanks for the comment!
Small bug: when you click to fullsize and then exit you lose your scroll position, occasionally putting the video out of sight. Try it on one of the bottom videos on the skins page.

It looks awesome, though. Nice job.
Years ago, I was laid off without any notice or severance pay from a small software company. To add insult to injury, my final paycheck was held up for months.

In the years since, I've had scores of opportunities to refer business to them, and in every case I've steered customers to their competitors. No one is happy about getting laid off, but if you give fair notice and severance, you can at least avoid a situation where you've burned ex-employees so badly that they'll actually go out of their way to cost you sales.

In the end, two of my co-workers from that company (also laid off in the same unceremonious fashion) started a competitive company that eventually put my former employer out of business.
Yes. If you already know someone's email address, you can get all sorts of information about them from twitter, fB, amazon wishlists...anything where the user's account is keyed to an email address.
Yes - but I'm phrasing it differently. Aaron Greenspan sees Mark's immorality as a negative. Society sees it as positive.
Sociopath? Asshole?

Let's at least try and keep the discussion civil.

A lot of what was said was right. Don't buy expensive, name brand cereal...it doesn't matter if you're Bill Gates or Tiny Tim, spending more than you have to on food is just stupid. Now, Bill Gates can afford to be stupid. He can float around on a boat that is made for 200 people, he can drive around in a race car, he can fly around in an airplane made for the same 200 people, and he can spend far, far more than he should be on food.

Don't keep people who would steal from you as friends, spend time reading books instead of watching TV.

This is all good advice.
http://www.acm.org/membership/insurance
How I Write an Article
Just curious, what does "re-launches" mean here ?

It certainly doesn't look like you guys are pivoting away from Zencoder, since the overlap between the two seems minimal.

This is a side-project, correct ?
Reading advice from a guy that quotes Kayne West just can't be healthy.
You may want to look at CrunchBase. You can read through their API here: http://www.crunchbase.com/help/api
Looks cool but the link is broken...
I am more surprised by how much people are trying to reinvent the wheel every day. I think there are enough tools and APIs out there to build small useful products in less than a week.
Apparently 'personality portrait' is what you call a caricature if you want to sell it as high art.
Another item to add to my ongoing list of usability checks (to be published, soon).
A great, funny and handy dictionary of corporate English
Unfortunately your site is down as of this writing, so I didn't read the article yet.

Regardless, for all who are interested in organizing their jQuery click-driven spaghetti-code, I'd recommend checking out JavascriptMVC (at http://v3.javascriptmvc.com/index.html). It's not a stable release yet but it's getting there quickly :)

It provides you with
- a minimalistic MVC framework
- a script loader/dependency/build system
- very intuitive event handling
- testing
- documentation

I'm not affiliated with the project, but I think its worth a try for anyone interested in best-practices for large javascript applications.
Oy, all I can say is that grinding poverty changes your mental state. I've seen both sides: my father grew up middle class and my mother grew up poor. My grandparents were the "frugal poor" that you think about -- my grandfather ended up having a heart attack in his 30s and never quite recovered. The difference is that both of them were intelligent, in spite of not having a high school education, and they lived in an era where you could get a job in that environment. (My grandfather grew up in a farming community where people were taken out of school after the 4th grade to work the fields.)

But not everyone is lucky like that. Poor people often grow up malnourished, and their IQ suffers. Everyone here is blessed with above average intelligence, but many don't have the educational foundation to develop the skills to make the right choices, and we don't exactly have frugality shows on TV to explain how to be an informed consumer.

Being poor is having the nearest grocery store a 30 minute bus ride and walk away from you and your kid. http://www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/news/grocery_gap.html

The thing is, everyone agrees that poor people should do all those things. But, like most things in life, the reality is harder than the ideal. My grandparents were able to do it.

In IT, we talk about stupid users. Many of the people we complain about are IQ 100, and many of the poor we're talking about are as close to them in intelligence as the average IT worker to the clueless worker.

How do you teach an 80 IQ mother the skills necessary? (Remember, the malnourishment throughout her own childhood, combined with the poor decisions of her parents, contributed to this problem - it's environmental, not genetic.)

That's the rationale behind spending money on WIC programs - if you can get the children proper nourishment, they can be attentive enough in their education that they can escape the problem.
Nokia set to strike back at Android
Is this really the case? I recently purchased insurance for myself in the US and it was less than $200/month. I know families are significantly more, but it couldn't be much more than $1,000 a month could it?
That is a pretty wild example, but it is common in software today.

Microsoft does stuff like this all the time, deprecating good .NET libraries for stupid ones just because of God knows what reasons (none of them intelligible to non-political folk).
I don't mind kookiness. I like kookiness. What I don't like is having that kookiness presented to me as the only way to go. Either 1) the guy's marketing something or 2) he's that much a zealot. Personally I'd imagine that #1 is the more likely, but if you insist it's number 2 then so be it.
The difference with test-driven development and continuous integration
is that everyone relies very heavily on the tests. So, there is no
necessity to check the tests, you start from a position of knowing that
the tests are complete.

The NASA issue could equally have been caught by better testing. It's
hard to debate that point, because we don't know the strength of the
testing in that case. Other than it was clearly not adequate.

Regarding your last point: I find that having excellent unit tests and
coverage means that I can concentrate singularly on the design problem
at hand and experiment very broadly without any fear of regression.
That's an enormously liberating place to be.
The UX Design Process for the Boxee Beta
It's a complimentary project. Most people who need video encoding also need a video player.

The headline is a little ambiguous; it is VideoJS that is relaunching (new version, new site), not Zencoder relaunching as VideoJS. :)
Thank goodness some dumb-ass got a job at the web-hosting company where his blog resides. And thanks be to g-d someone got a job building the computer upon which he typed it. I am pleased that some poor fool is in servitude to a farm so he could gain strength from the nourishment they provide to write this prescient piece. I could go on, but I have to go vomit now.
Work, work and work. I sucked at design for years (though I thought I was good), and now I think I'm better (though I may not actually be very good). Find someone honest about your designs and ask him. It's hard to be objective about your own designs, even if you want to be.

Visit CSS galleries. Emulate specific elements. Combine them. Create your first site (when I started I pretended I was hired to do the marketing page for Dropbox). Then another. One day you'll be good.

Just keep at it. Good luck! Also, email me if you want more info and my old designs (they suck so it shows how far I've come).
I don't use Python at all. Despite that, I still somehow have Python 2.6.4 installed on my RHEL4 box at work. (Incidentally, the Linux version number is only slightly higher -- 2.6.9!!!)

So it seems like it's possible to get 2.6 on RHEL. I did it, and I hate Python.
Sorry. Indeed.
Confirmed - the only thing he sells directly is a weekend workshop (http://www.stevepavlina.com/conscious-growth-workshop/), which I've personally been to and recommend.
Thinking about the product before actually working on it. Normally this meant the product wasn't good enough to work on, anyways.
Great video player. I will be pushing clients to use this instead of flash-only players for sure.
The biggest problem with getting money isn't getting the money; it's what strings are attached to the money.

People think this is an abstraction. My VC-funded company hired a CEO (who I like) who decided our A-round-funded company was optimally positioned to go head-to-head with Akamai. I saw a board at another company wage a guerilla war against its management team. The threat here is not abstract.
Wow. Never will I resort to Flash again!
But with more moderate values, it's really anyone's guess as to whether it will hold or not.

I recently read a discussion about this in the NY Times in which economists tried to pinpoint the inflection point of the Laffer curve. Most put it between 30-60%, and iirc, the majority were on the 60% side of things. I can't find that discussion now, however.
> Many employees believe getting a job is the safest and most secure way to support themselves. Morons. Social conditioning is amazing. It’s so good it can even make people believe the exact opposite of the truth.

Is this guy trying to start a cult?
Please do a step-by-step write up, it would mean a lot to me to help me get started.
I'm sure older machines are out there and are doing fine for their purpose. But are you planning to install Mongrel2 on them?
Without turning this into "37signals vs. Y Combinator", let's just say there are pros and cons to each approach.

One of the cons of contracting is can be really hard to divide your attention in a startup. If there is any possible way you can devote 100% of your attention to a startup, then by all means, do it. I'm 10x more productive when I put 100% of my time into a startup instead of 50%. 10x, not 2x. Just my experience.

On the other hand, contracting is a great backup plan. It kept Zencoder alive in the early days, and we still do some video-related consulting work to reduce our burn and compliment our encoding service.

There's no points for effort, only for execution.

Well said. Mind if I use that? :)
He makes a living from his blog. Of course he is marketing something. He is very proud of it and he mentions it often. He is not hiding it.

Is this your first encounter with his blog?
Want To Go To TechCrunch Disrupt Next Week For Free?
California Pot Initiative Opposed By Beer Industry
If C++ and Java are your chosen models of "strongly statically typed" languages, it would only be fair to use PHP or Visual Basic as the contrasting language, in particular if a big chunk of your essay will discard the actual issues at hand and instead focus on unrelated topics like brevity. (all of the above are on my personal, subjective, "list of languages that are painful to work in.")

That aside, "strong typing" and "strong testing" are absolutely not on some sort of axis where you have to choose one or the other, and it's absolutely ridiculous to pretend that it's some sort of trade-off.

... It re-occurs to me that this particular issue is flamebait of high pedigree and ancient origins, so that's all from me on this.
How much time was spent working on the project afterwards though? I built an app "in a week" (http://oneweekapp.com/) which went on to generate a decent passive income for me, but since then I've spent far far more than a week on it.

I'd be really curious to know more details, specifically on the payment end (doesn't that take more than 3 hours by itself to set up?).
I think that's another side effect of poverty: not seeing ways out. (Although I don't know what kind of programs Duke had decades ago.)
Is bringing spouse and kid along an option at all? Also if you are from overseas - is it possible with visa?
Why thinking of nothing can be so tiring
If someone in the subway is REALLY hungry they'd probably pay $15 for a sandwich - especially if they know there's a two hour ride home.

Also, someone coming out of a bar or club after last call might pay $20 or more for one.

Running his service at those hours is more consistent with the drug-dealer analogy, too.
Read a bunch of his other stuff. It's not a crazy question to ask.
Maybe it was in the past, but these days Debian stable is fresh by comparison.
Crunchbase is quite useful and the APIs are nice (although sometimes flaky), but it only covers a small subset of the companies out there. I was looking for something more general - eg. find all auto-repair shops within 50 miles of location x.
"Only in New York!", as they say.
The Laffer curve isn't really relevant here. Pretty much every economist in the country agrees that we're left of the max on the curve.
Looking for the number as well.

Sort of an interesting exercise... Can you find it? If that piece of information is available online somewhere, how would you get it (calling all of your stoner friends is probably the fastest way, but disallowed for this exercise).

I couldn't find it, so I called AMEX concierge service to see if they could.

edit: boo, i suck. was easy to find, but i missed it the first time.
Then you probably have a high deductible plan (as I do), which means if you have medical procedures, they will be thousands out of pocket.
You can at least control the degree of blocking in the latest Webkit: http://webkit.org/blog/1395/running-scripts-in-webkit/
Paywall... anyone got the article without it?
You don't need money to put into savings.

I was with you except for that; having savings is important, especially if the company fails.
The title is misleading. It's not thinking of nothing that is tiring but getting to that state by stopping thoughts already in progress. If their models are accurate this is pretty good evidence for why meditation practitioners let thoughts pass without actively diverting or stopping them.
It's supposed to showcase the hardware acceleration in the new version of IE.

Still usable for me in Firefox, though.
I think people started using 'my' because 'Go to my profile' sounds more friendly than 'Go to your profile' as links. When you say 'you' the person is automatically distanced from you. When helping a customer face-to-face, you can say 'we' and 'our', but that makes even less sense than 'my' on a webpage.
As Chess Olympiad Begins, No Surprises, but More Controversy
"The CDN itself being slowly-down is vanishingly rare."

Based on...?

It happened to me once a few months ago. It was down for hours. The negative impact was very real and painful and in my opinion outweighed the other advantages of hosting using Google's CDN.
The app looks cool. Looks like you deserve more than 3 stars (as of 2010-09-21)
I should be clearer. Tests are great. Static strong typing is a built-in automatic test that hits all my code at compile time with known semantics. I like that testing also.
Nokia reminds me of Nortel as it was imploding in the early 2000s. Nortel also had tens of thousands of employees and huge market share, albeit in a shrinking market. They were both technology standard-bearers in countries not normally known for tech, and a source of national pride.

Nortel's size and market share were always held up to justify why they remained relevant, and to argue that a recovery was perpetually just around the corner. It was hard to believe that a company which was enormously profitable just a few years back could be driven to bankruptcy so quickly through poor products and abysmal management.
SLIME autocompletion for Lisp works beautifully, and that language is about as dynamic as they come. What's the problem here?
Massively disagree: once I get to a certain level, there's no way in hell I want to waste my time implementing all of (java) commons-lang, or my own sqlite bindings, etc.

When the languages ecosystem is flourishing, I am productive. When it's not, I'm shaving yaks that prefer not to be shaved.
Sorry about being down, it's all back up now

The great thing about widgets is that they act as OO Classes on top of a DOM object. So you can say 'make this DOM object act like an XYZ'. Sometimes the XYZ is a very visible thing (checkbox, draggable, etc), but other times, we have pure code widgets that do internal routing, or traditional "controller" type activities.

For instance, each <li> may be a widget that does... whatever, but then the <ul> may be a widget that listens for events, and adds/removes <li>s from underneath it as appropriate.
we got him to cater a lunch at our start-up... i think most of us weren't very keen on the sandwiches, though we thought it was great in the abstract.
I was looking for something more general - eg. find all auto-repair shops within 50 miles of location x

Try contacting a Yellow Pages company to see if they have an API. They probably only make these available to select partners, though.
So... isn't there something in user agreements that avoids this sort of thing? Maybe I should read it closer, but I would expect "will not sell my email address to third parties" would be a common clause. And if it wasn't, I'd expect some sort of consumer backlash.

Sorry for the line of questions, this is sortof a jolt to my view of reality.
Thanks for everyone's feedback. I've closed the service.
Ah, totally. "Full window" mode sets overflow:hidden on the document to get rid of any scroll bar. Which then resets the page to the top. I could probably restore the scroll position afterwards. Thanks!
The problem with his ideas isn't that they're 'kooky.' The most immediate problem I can see is that he doesn't share your maturity at all. He spends most of this article telling us we're 'morons' and 'stupid' and 'dummies' and so on and so on. He's exceedingly judgmental. That alone is a sign that he's not a person of understanding or perception.

It's fine to be open-minded. I sure am. That doesn't prevent this from being an essay that's not only false but openly hostile and derisive in the interest of making the author a buck.
Or read the nonfiction book "The Corner." David Simon, one of the authors, went on to create The Wire.
There is a very big difference. It's that when I write code I need to use your types. If I'm getting a BigBallOfStuff I instantly know that your type checking is constrained based on the types.

With virtually any external testing (unit, integration, UI, or most other) working with the product code is not sufficient to determine the quality of the testing. The tests must be looked at specifically.

Type checking and other forms of static analysis run on the code themself, which means that I only need to inspect the product code -- which I pretty much have to do to write any code with it.
No one should get a Job! Instead everyone should make money by running blogs where they tell each other not to get a Job! It's genius!
I think he meant that you don't need to be putting current income into savings.
His blog has gone seriously downhill in recent years. It went from serious personal development to new-age psychobabble.
Contracting is very distracting. But it's distracting in a different way than a full-time job. And I think it's game-changing for lean startups in a way that may moot some of the concern about concentration.

First, contracting requires hustle just like moving a product does. It's an investment decision (of time, rather than money) in a way that a 9-5 job can't be. It involves company building and has knock-on effects (recruiting, applications for IP) that can help the product business. And it is flexible.

And this whole notion that you need unbreakable concentration to start a company seems like an extension of the idea that there's a runway, launch, and hockey-stick curve to all product businesses. But those things that yo' liable to read in de blog posts, they ain't necessarily so. Particularly if you have a functioning consulting engine.

I'm less familiar with direct-to-consumer products than most people on HN are; I sell to businesses. The overlap between selling services to companies and selling products to companies is significant. Maybe you should consider something businesses want, so you have options besides getting shot out of the VC cannon.
OnStartups - Stack Exchange
Sigh... Flagged for being inane bullshit.
Looks pretty similar to the Four Hour Work Week muse model touted by Tim Ferris and co. Attractive product page (Wordpress theme), informational product (software templates), outsourced commerce pipeline (e-junkie). Only thing is that he didn't need to use paid ads to drive traffic, since he led with a blog post that led to subscriptions, which meant he already had a customer base. Cool stuff.
I view having a job as outsourcing all of the stuff I don't want to care about to my employers.

They find things to do that will raise money, they work out a (reasonably good) way to use my time in order to make a profit, they manage payroll, they organise a pension, they sort out private healthcare (not that I need it, as I've outsourced most of my healthcare to my government through the marvel of the NHS), and they organise project management for me.

Basically, I've outsourced all of the bits that are just too much of a pain to deal with, and I'm happy to do so.

I'm also happy that I can stop thinking about work when I clock out, and go spend my evenings thinking about something else. Because my work is not my life, and I do not want it to be.