skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was in Toastmasters for many years, and if there were a group in my city whose meeting times fit my schedule, I'd probably still go.

I particularly liked the peer review process (making you both a better speaker and listener, and making you, as a reviewer, pay attention to what makes other people more or less effective speakers), and the well organized manuals. As much as I thought in advance I knew about e.g., humorous speaking, having a topic broken down into individual aspects was a great way to learn.

On the down side, at times some events had the ring of a success cargo cult to it — people thinking that if they learned just the right inflection and hand gestures, they were bound for great things.

Still, I recommend it highly. In most urban areas in the US, there seems to be a large number of clubs to pick from. There is quite a bit of variety between clubs, so it can be a good idea to attend a few different ones before settling down — clubs tend to be welcoming toward guests, and generally don't resort to high pressure tactics to make you sign up.
I'm curious–how old are you? And ... how confident are you that you'll have enough recurring revenue to cover living expenses at your preferred retirement age?

I ask because I'm considering options myself.
Butterflies in My Stomach
"Look at the crews of any really high-end restaurants and you’ll see a group of mostly whippet-thin, under-rested young pups with dark circles under their eyes: they look like escapees from a Japanese prison camp—and are expected to perform like the Green Berets."

At some point in my life, working in a bakery, i - a 19 yr old and very fit back then - still had very hard time to keep the pace with and not fell behind the middle-aged women who'd been working there for years (it was a temporary summer job for me, and in general no man had been able to work there for more than a couple of month in a row)
The kernel of my start-up came when I was working in that incredibly secure, decently rewarding corporate job. I lead a project to help our CEO incentivise the sales force to bring in more profitable clients. During that project, I saw a great opportunity, not just in my company, but in the industry in general. I was not able to work on this idea inside the company but the thought of it still consumed all of my time. So, I decided to start my own business to solve this problem. The reason was that I was going insane from thinking about this all of the time and not being able to act on it. I've got plenty of other problems now that I never had at my safe job, but at least I get to chart a course for my own life now.
I am also a Canuck and luckily bought a 2 bedroom condo in 2004 and have recently started renting it out with a small bit of profit. I know nothing really about being a Land Barron, but hope I can continue doing this and have other people pay off a couple condos/houses for me.
Tool Cracks BitLocker to Go Encryption in 20 Mins
Retiring? Never!
Could you eloborate where you did have problems?
We also plan on using a small number of queues having a high rate of readers and clients (e.g. distributed task execution).
Coming Home to Vim
I think it's just a byproduct of a maturing platform. Apple has nurtured the platform into a certain direction and more or less set a standard for what an iOS app is going to be. (look & feel, stability, security, etc) Now that users also have high expectations the App Store is probably starting to police itself to some degree. I'm guessing they reached a point where only 1-2% of apps had any approval issues so it's becoming more practical to switch to an innocent until proven guilty model.
Google Sites won't forbid you the access once you're not on your university.

For case of stopping providing the services, take as the example Geocites -- it took a decade for them to stop hosting, and the only victim were the long forgotten and deserted pages. On another side, there is still content I uploaded on Tripod at least ten years ago, for which I forgot my passwords years ago.

If years of free hosting are not enough for you, then you have to pay for the hosting and have a bit more control. But even the hosting site to which you pay can go out of business. Nothing is forever, you just have to maintain your online content if you want to have control over it.

I'm still curious to learn about the advantages of scibd. I admit I don't know why most users use it.

With enough ideas or usage scenarios, maybe somebody will make something better!
If nobody likes paying taxes then, why don't we as a society legislate ourselves lower taxes and cuts in defense spending?

I believe there is a famous quote about that.
Reading posts like this always gives me this startling thought: there are way more companies than not where people don't work to work there, devoid of the "fun" you mostly read about on HN. How saddening...
I wasn't aware of this. Thanks for letting me know.
Splitting results over 2 tabs is not a good idea. You're hiding half of your results behind something that most people won't even notice.
using html 5 on your ipad ??? ;-) You don't need Flash to watch video on the web.
The problem is that most flash content out there is designed for big screens and mouse interaction. Therefore the flash experience on mobile devices is far from optimal.
I've had an account for a long time but mostly have been lurking/dormant. Just started submitting more stuff - but yeah, I'm going to carefully read over the guidelines now.
"Because the first person has documented proof of ability"

I think this really depends on the position you are trying to fill. A track record of shipping code to customers counts for a lot more in my eyes than open source code (unless we're talking about something really high profile like Firefox or llvm). A lot of really talented and passionate developers are plenty challenged and stimulated at work that they don't feel the need to work on hobby projects in their spare time. What could these people write in one hour that would be of significance?
I think it was just about "gaming Google" -- at some point the links to pages on scribd had higher ranks than original pdfs. I consider that more like successful spamming of Google search than long-term feature.

How is it now? Do they still have higher rank? I'd consider than that a bug in Google ranking.
These always seem a little overblown. Jupiter was very nearly as bright last year.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=magnitude+of+jupiter+se...

-2.92

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=magnitude+of+jupiter+au...

-2.86

So the ratio in brightness is

2.512 ^ 0.06 = 1.0567

If wolfram alpha is to be believed, it's going to be just about as bright next year.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=magnitude+of+jupiter+oc...
> But I do think everyone should work at a restaurant at least once in their life. It's a customer-service learning experience and gives you an appreciation for the staff when you patronize restaurants later.

Done that and I agree with you 100%. Also "Kitchen Confidential" is an excellent book and you will enjoy it more if you ever worked in a restaurant.
I put $10K a month into a savings account until it reached the FDIC limit, then I opened another savings account.
How the First Down yellow line works
Foursquare Launching New Must-Have Button for Websites
On the HTC Evo running 2.2, the app loads ok but crashes when I click on an individual story.
In ~/.screenrc:

altscreen on

enables alternate screen, which is disabled by default, but is normally enabled in most terminals. It's the thing which prevents less, vi, etc. from clobbering the screen contents and leaving their gunk behind after exiting.

(A Google search seems to indicate that some people dislike this feature, but I found screen unusable until I discovered this option.)
It's a customer-service learning experience

Maybe if you are part of the waitstaff. If you're a cook, it's mostly a lot of cursing, lewd comments, alcoholism, drug use, etc...
I don't think they can afford to solve those problems in 20 years time. Somebody else will do it instead.
She gripes about the A/R and A/P pains of a small business owner, but has never owned a SMB...I'm rooting for her, but hope she has added people to her team that really know this market.
I think the takeaway is a lot broader: never assume that a company won't do evil things with your data if you don't have a service contract with them saying that they can't. See also: http://xkcd.com/743
I don't think you can remove the whois information. It is a matter of public record, and they can and do archive it.

From what I've seen in the past, domaintools will not be willing to remove this information.
I am 33.

I currently have almost enough passive income to live. My income comes from retail stores. I am not real confident that they will last another 50 years.

What I am able to invest now is my time. So I spend some time on expanding and diversifying the existing business and some time swinging for the fences with technology. So far I have struck out a couple of times :-/

I don't know how confident I am that these stores would last until retirement age. So my focus is on growth and diversification.

Edit: I should say "mostly passive" income. I am still involved.
No inside knowledge, so this is speculation, but it appears that YC focuses more on "lean" startups, while founders fund seems to tend to invest in companies with larger capital requirements.
Thank you. There is a NASA app for iPad that could be useful as a learning aid.
Choosing your Career
"A friend was recently asked the same, also said no, and was declined the interview."

I think that's retarded. There are more effective ways to filter out bad apples. Candidates could be asked to solve a puzzle and attach their solution to their application, for example. Most of the really good developers I know stopped coding in their free time after accumulating about 5-8 years of experience. They have other commitments (wife, kids...) and their day job is challenging enough as it is.
Sounds good in theory, but it's not there right now. I'd work hard on the UI and the content. As per your theory, I would expect to do a search, and then see: "JoeX says 'the burgerbarx is great because of y'." Ie. show the people recommending (the foodies) and show what they say. And make it look less like a databasedump (being harsh again) ;)
Maybe. But on the other hand, they've provided me their service for free for several years now and putting it behind a pay-wall would effectively be holding my social network hostage.

Not only do I value Facebook's service at less than $1/mo, but I'd be highly resentful of the switch, especially if I percieved it as a money grab or network lock-in attempt, instead of a reflection of their increasing costs (which could still be problematic if I knew they were wasting lots of money).
Foursquare 2.0 for the iPhone has arrived
Agreed. Experiencing the "other end" of things provides an appreciation of how it feels to be the one performing the service rather than seeking it. You tend to treat people differently after getting treated like shit a couple of times.
This is an excellent review of the two technologies from the company that created them both. A few times here on HN, I've seen people attempt to argue that ZeroMQ is a better AMQP or vice-versa. Instead, this document explains their differing philosophies and relative strengths and weaknesses.
I think his references to weight are a bit vague. What I get from the piece is that when he says 'fat' he literally means it, not necessarily overweight but with a ludicrous body-fat percentage.

I grew up in England, I visited a lot of bakeries and nearly all of them had several large kids in the back working. Not fat but a sort of padded-muscular. Similarly this is what I've seen in most restaurants since I moved to Canada.

Perhaps his comments hold true to, like he said, really high-end restaurants, but in my experience they don't serve food they're serving a garnish on an inedible ceramic surface. When you're lifting dishes into an oven that only weigh a fraction of a pound, of course you're going to be whippet-thin, you could be the anorexic king and still be able to lift those plates with grace.

If anyone's watched any of Gordon Ramsey's shows, you see him truly move with things a lot of the lean-contestants struggle like hell with. Why? Because he's 210lbs, he's well built. He's literally ran around the kitchen doing everyone's job when it's an emergency. He also serves dishes that the plate doesn't weigh more than the food.
It's interesting that Jessica didn't distinguish between revenue and income when she talked about the problem she ran into with the business she started. "We thought we had lots of revenue but it turned out our margins weren't that great." Revenue = money in. Income = Money in minus money out.

Revenue != Income.
That's promising :)
DomainTools does have customer service. Their not very secretive, so you could concievably just drop by their offices. They're located in downtown seattle, so not that far from you.

They may have a policy against it, in which case you may need to find a legal way to exert pressure, and get something written up by a lawyer in the form of a cease & desist.

But before going that route, I'd try contacting the founder directly. (His name escapes me, but try checking their blog...)
Yes, though no retirement accounts yet.

- Deposited to a high interest savings account until FDIC limit

- 8% of savings held in physical gold and silver

- Rest of savings invested in large, old companies that issue good dividends (DuPont, Johnson & Johnson, Excelon, GE...). Many of them bought at very low points, making the dividend yields over 5% per year.

I've only had an income since 2004 (25 y/o), but I lived frugally and used what I made to pay for college and save rather than buy fancy cars, a big house, etc. I have a savings target I'd like to reach, before swit
No.

I put as much money as I possibly can into my student loans, and I leave everything else in my checking account. If I carry a balance from one month to the other, then I win. If not, then I try again next month.

Eventually, I'll dump my excess income into my savings account, and once I'm done with paying off my loans, I'll start dumping the money I used to dump into my loans back into my savings.
Swedish Pirate Party Runs Aground in Election
I'm twenty-nine, and regret doing this when I was younger. I spent far more than I earned up until I turned 21 or so, and it took me a few years to pay things off.

What are you spending money on? If you're buying experiences and knowledge, through travel, education, and maybe your own startup, then you're doing it (mostly) right.

If you drive a Mercedes and have a 60" TV, you're doing it wrong.

Even if you're spending wisely, you really want to be stashing money aside in a rainy day fund. Aim for about $10k USD in liquid cash that you can tap at any time. It's enough to cover your car suddenly exploding, or an unexpected medical expense, or even to just support yourself for a year if you have to, as long as you're frugal.
Facebook Search acting like a link farm
Look at the crews of any really high-end restaurants and you’ll see a group of mostly whippet-thin, under-rested young pups with dark circles under their eyes.

That's because they work 10-16 hours a day, during the times when most people...eat. That, and all the cocaine.
That's humanity for you.
Online PR for benefit of SEO
Just guessing but I'd assume that only applies to the standard set of Apple approved codecs.
Looks like it's working too. Currently it's the top result on http://www.google.com/search?q=publishing+feed+to+facebook
I used to work as both a line cook and a pantry "chef." The pantry person is the guy who puts the scoop of ice cream on the baker's pies. Thus, I am familiar with bakers. The bakers usually start out small but end up ENORMOUS.
Good. Washington state, during the boom of the 1990s, grew state expenditures as if they expected no end to the good times. When the dotcom crash happened, they started raising taxes to keep spending at the bubble levels.

They could have put aside money for a rainy day, or kept services at the level that they were so that when things went back to normal, they wouldn't be so stretched.

But this is not how government works.

Since taxes are set at a percentage, it would seem that they should never need to be raised, right? If it costs 1/10th or 1% of GDP to keep roads in repair, when the economy is booming, there may be more roads but that percentage is more dollars in real terms.

But what governments often do, and what Washington has done here, is just spend money on other things, let the roads get bad, and then claim that they aren't getting enough money to keep the roads up to justify raising the road taxes.

It is a simple game of bait-n-switch.

The big money is in getting people to sell future economic growth to resolve a short term artificial pain-- which is what they're trying to do now. Sure the state income tax will be a "tiny tax only on the rich".... but the federal income tax started out that way, and look what it has become.

Washington state has spent money irresponsibly. They should be forced into financial prudence.

Glad to see some entrepreneurs understand enough economics to oppose these kinds of power grabs and bait-n-switch tactics.
I think you're talking about http://thewildernessdowntown.com/ - which is offtopic.
Show me the honey
They can be, although in my experience, you can't put low-confidence people in roles that require a lot of self-direction. Low-confidence people are less likely to branch out and learn new techniques, as they prefer to play it safe with what they already know.

I've had problems before with a programmer who was terrified to do testing, because he didn't have the confidence that he could learn something new. He was otherwise a bright guy, but his lack of confidence severely hurt both himself, the team, and the company.
There's no tactful way to say this, so I'll just say it directly: what you're saying isn't very far from "I only hire people who aren't confident and assertive enough to demand the salary that they're worth". It might not be that bad (you might be afraid that a prospective employee who was more confident than you would negotiate out of you a higher salary than he was worth) but it's an ethical hazard to think in that way.
Ask HN: Financial modeling quants at this site?
My first post here - so apologies if I break any protocols inadvertently.

Are there any financial modeling quantitative types over here? I am working on an idea (at a very early stage - hence nothing substantial to post) and was wondering if folks who model investment decisions based on analysis of historical data visit this forum. I am a novice in this area as well :)
I was a dishwasher for about a year in highschool. I never did drugs, but I threw away leftover food for 10-12 hour shifts (usually one to three 55gal trash cans of waste food). Working in a restaurant was the most unappetizing thing ever, even in the slow periods, I just never really got hungry,
Looks...kind of unpolished ;) I understand that getting it to work is the hard part, but adding a little style can't hurt.

Requested access to the beta, I have a couple of django projects that would be nice to run on such a service.
Jess being in for the long haul doesn't necessarily mean investors are in for the long haul. They can get bought out in subsequent rounds and there's always the option of an IPO. Intuit is itself a nearly 30 year company (1983) and I highly doubt the original investors are still around.
I ask this question out of ignorance. An angel investment in a startup would seem to me like a very illiquid asset. Do they just go down to a cocktail party and sell away their "angel shares" or is there some sort of structured market for this sort of thing?
Thank God for Readability: http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

Doesn't fix everything, but it sure helps.
Python logbook 0.2 released
If you could come up with a weekend project idea, it can save you the trouble.

Develop a small utility product over a weekend. Something that people will want to use and pay $10-$20 per month. Get few hundred users, and you will be able to make some regular cash to pay the bills.

It won't make a multi-million dollar company, but you can make a few thousand dollars per month.

I know several developers making $10,000 to $50,000 per month with such products.
i too believe company culture is extremely important.

after contemplation i've requested that the 'company' i'm starting a friend will be a vegetarian company, in a sense that the company will never pay for taking sentient beings.

i'm consciously extending personal culture (i'm veg), to company culture.

anyone who thinks this is a good/bad thing for a founder to do?
It's highly scalable in which sense?

Their index was very large, but their traffic was not. I think I've run websites that handled as much traffic as Cuil did on a good day.
The point really is that "risking your capital" is not in and of itself a productive activity -- making stuff is. I work as an investment analyst myself which is good in both the "fun" and "profit" departments, but I'm not about to pretend that I'm creating value for the world in any but the most indirect of ways.
Disclaimer: VLC dev and VideoLAN Chairman

Truth be told, it is a grey area.
The AppStore is clearly not compatible with the GPLv3.
About the GPLv2 it is more complex, because what matters is if the AppStore terms are stronger than the Application License. And noone except a judge can tell...

Therefore, we release on our website, videolan.org, both the source and the binary so that the GPL spirit is kept intact. People can modify their VLC, patch it, modify it and put on their iOS devices as they wish.
You should really set up an account and get an automatic transfer going, even if it's only $50 a month. While the amount isn't important, the habit is vitally important now while you're still young.

Believe it or not, the period of life you're in right now is when you have the most surplus income. Things will get a lot tougher at some point.

Everyone can take a 10% trim on their disposable income without too much pain, and it's a good habit to get into. Just make sure you can't get at the money without having to go in somewhere and fill out forms. Otherwise it will get spent on something you have to do or have. And in ten years you'll regret both the wasted money and failure to build a habit.
One of the things I love about Vim is that every time I read though a post like this or look at someone's .vimrc I learn something new about what it can do or get another insight about how its features can make my life easier.

My (semi-commented) .vimrc is on GitHub if anyone wants another example: http://github.com/samdk/vimconf/blob/master/dotvimrc

I've also found StackOverflow's list of most-voted questions tagged vim to be a very useful source of little tidbits: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/vim?sort=votes&...

And there've been several HN .vimrc posts that I also found very useful. This is one of the best: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=856051

This is another excellently commented and extensive .vimrc that (I think) is mentioned in one of the above links, but deserves its own specific mention here: http://www.vi-improved.org/vimrc.php

And this is another I found completely by accident a while ago that includes some excellent examples of vimscript macros: http://fingelrest.silent-blade.org/uploads/Main/vimrc.html
Yeah, so... if you put your code out there as open source, under your own name, a prospective employer might read it. Quite an insight.
Not that I really know either, but I found this useful:

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/09/02/new-trends-in-startup-in...

“You owe me $20, with interest. Don’t worry about paying me back right now. Instead, next time you raise money or sell the company, we’re going to pretend that I’m either investing with the other guy or selling with you."

So if indinero takes more money, the early investors could sell their hypothetical convertible notes to the new investors.