skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> That's a 6,000x return on his capital in 5 years.
> I'll put it this way--if you made a $250 IRA contribution in 2005, it would have to be worth $1,500,000 today to match that return.

If you invested one penny that investment would now need to be worth $60 to match that return. Maybe it is just me, but $250 to $1.5M doesn't help me visualize a 6000x return at all. This analogy reminds me of an old Dennis Miller bit from Saturday Night Live where to illustrate the size of the national debt he takes out a dollar bill and says "it would take stack of these 3 trillion high to pay it back".
I read in my hammock. http://Eaglesnestoutfittersinc.com has the worlds best hammock. Bought one in 2002 and might say it's the best thing I've ever purchased. I can toss it up almost anywhere in a matter of seconds, kick back and read, take a nap, and then get back to work.
What They’ll Never Teach You at Business School
Quote from his comment on his site:

"For 95% percent of projects that come in the door, using a framework vs. using a CMS (Drupal specifically) is a waste of time/money."

This isn't a trend, this is simply your market. Other web dev shops are in a different market and seeing different numbers. There are plenty of cases where a CMS (or even many frameworks) is such a bad fit that it wouldn't make sense to even try. If you spend your days building sites which aren't far evolved from brochure sites, then sure, a CMS makes great sense.
Well that really depends on your product and other factors...

are you running lots of advertising like banners that people might see and then later search on to find out more? i've seen that push bounce rates up to 90% in the past.
More top execs to depart Yahoo
broadcast.com?
Well...Apart from reading fiction/non fiction, ( I usually alternate between them ), I've taken up painting, and it's soothing to say the least. Put on some light music and let the brush follow it's will :)
I was just surprised they didn't tuck a keyboard in the Playbook somewhere. That would actually be a differentiator.
A lot of people say "I use Yahoo!" Yahoo also has a ton of partner traffic that represents a major chunk of their revenue which is never under the Yahoo! name.

You can have a strategy that doesn't care if people use you as a verb or think of you as a search engine, but you still need to have a strategy. Yahoo! has none.
I'm not really picking up why it's so reprehensible for someone to jokingly pluralize Pentiums as Pentia. Can you explain?
It wasn't a joke.
Bootstrapping a startup
These days I hear a lot about starting your own company after you graduate. It doesn't use to be same 2-3 yrs back.

I too like the idea of having my own business but I don't believe in approaching VCs for money and giving away share of your company. But I would definitely like to give share for being a Mentor.

Just want to know experience of HN readers who have bootstrapped their company.
Agree, I have been there when Yahoo! executed time and time again, it was impressive, exciting and encouraging. They need leadership and it just hasn't been there for quite some time.

I'm also sorry to see David Ko go, he seemed like a really good guy.
It's not organized crime, more like a national past-time in certain geographic regions. I used to frequent the same internet cafes where these guys stay up late; they look a lot like problem gamblers. Tens of men huddled over CRTs, chain smoking and no one talking to each other. You can see people bringing in "evidence", photos in USBs to send over to marks, multi-tasking in IMs and chats and romancing webcam girls on the side.

I haven't seen any money while there. Whoever comes there spends their disposable cash to surf, most of the day they just play games or facebook.

I found the scammers to be pretty polite and "brotherly". There is a lot of empty bragging and people will pretend to be big-shot mafiosi, but it's all a con aimed at you. The programmer in me wanted to inquire about bot-nets: everyone claimed to have "one", but the responses were confused at best.

In cities where bonafide scammers are present, there will also be the "runners". But just like in border towns or trafficking areas, it's best to walk out of the venue when in comes a guy followed by a crowd. A solitary quiet man, behind whom walks a group: biggest tell-tale of a made man, and if you look foreign or moneyed, it's best to get up and walk away without making eye contact, but while also not looking scared or nerved. (The one time I came very close to this I put my beers next to the computer and yelled to the attendant "I will be back for this". Never did.)

The one guy who I know makes a decent living at this plays the big leagues. He is in the scrap-metal business and has a physical office. Former diplomat from a central Africa country. His business, however, is strictly document forgery, insurance fraud and shipment theft. He was a real gentleman, an avid tennis and muay thai fan, but the people competing for his attention were thugs and would do anything for him.

TL;DR, the guys who pull out guns have more at stake; usually drug money, or theft of their stolen properties. 419ers are bored nerds; natural born Office jockeys who would have been employed in administrative positions if there were jobs available to them.
You’re implying that...

... if you have multiple developers who cannot or will not find some way to write maintainable code, you have a problem independent of language.

I've maintained some hideous code written by people who had no business being professional programmers. In every case, adhering to a handful of very simple rules would have improved their code dramatically. Only one case needed a language change, and that one was away from a proprietary 4GL.
Yoga.

Cook (then eat).
Sure, hindsight is 20/20. But that same CEO of Excite also paid close to $1B for Blue Mountain.
I curse pretty freely on HN. Boned is just such a great word.

Say it out loud. That deep "own" sound. It's rich, like a chocolate bar. You use "fuck" when your pacing places you in a real hurry, like a using an unstable old log for balance while you cross a brook.

So if you say "Digg is fucked" you end on this gaspy note, waiting for more, which sucks. The quick "kt" sound at the end is most suitable for connection, maybe to say "up its own ass." But that's just crass, and not what I was going for.

On the other hand, if you say "Digg is boned" you can just let it sit there for a moment, sinking in. You've planted the sound of the word firmly. Fuck is for urgency. I wished to convey finality.

It's a Twain thing - "The difference between the right word and almost the right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug."
Tuning Canabalt (explaining all the basic systems)
Of course Facebook is not worth $33bil. Fact: The Facebook engagement numbers for users suck. The data is inflated. That all is fact BUT forget that. Apple shares cost $6 per dollar of revenue. At the same valuation Facebook is worth $9bil. Would you really pay $25 per dollar of Facebook revenue knowing in 2-3 years they could be the next Myspace? They sell nothing. They are actually the Seinfeld of Networks. No loyalty. Nothing preventing anyone from jumping ship. If you think I am wrong people invested way more in their Myspace experience...photos, blogs, video, tricked out pages etc. And then just left. Gone. Bye. See ya.

Remember a sucker is born every min and Elevation Partners has been a sucker over and over in many investments. Would you spend $6 per dollar of Apple revenue or $25 for a dollar of Facebook? Case closed.
Linkbait existed before the Internet (*)
I feel I am reading a lot more link-baitish content on the web these days, from the obvious to the not-so-obvious and I've seen it before offline:

"Coke will cure baldness"*

* Notice: Coke may or may not cure baldness

This little * is the real-world implementation of link-bait. Seems obvious to me now, and now I realise why I hate link-bait so much.
We'd be going after different markets. The shops trying to beat a price by a mile are in a lower tier.
It's not the best investment in history: there are people who have won more than $100,000,000 on a single $1 lottery ticket.
"Time dilation would make it possible for passengers in a fast-moving vehicle to travel further into the future while aging very little, in that their great speed slows down the rate of passage of on-board time. That is, the ship's clock (and according to relativity, any human travelling with it) shows less elapsed time than the clocks of observers on Earth. For sufficiently high speeds the effect is dramatic. For example, one year of travel might correspond to ten years at home. Indeed, a constant 1 g acceleration would permit humans to travel as far as light has been able to travel since the big bang (some 13.7 billion light years) in one human lifetime. The space travellers could return to Earth billions of years in the future. A scenario based on this idea was presented in the novel Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation#Time_dilation_and...
So will there be a programming language with human powered functions?
I thought it would be fun to judge along with the real judges and this was my winner too, although it was tough. The strongest companies for me at first were pinger, cloudflare, and badgeville. I thought those companies just had tons of potential -- actually do have it -- but qwiki was stuck in the back of my mind. To force out a winner I asked which would be the one company, if none could exist except for choosing one, to win. I felt I could find alternatives/workarounds to all except qwiki, which was the one I still really wanted to exist (the morning automated info stream is compelling). All finalists were strong to tell the truth, a really impressive, disruptive field.
How do we know that if he got very lucky or that he's very good at what he do?
Doctor here. Best things you can do are, in order: work out 4 to 5 times a week, eat real food (not to much, mostly plants), and get a standing desk. If you like massage, have at it. Brazilians, well, I don't know. The only Brazilian I know well is an art dealer who advocates Coca Cola as tanning lotion and has a 30' snake skin on the wall.
> 90% of Java's libraries are very, erm, "enterprise."

Are they? Apache's Commons collection of libraries such as ArrayUtils, StringUtils, IO, and the like, along with JSON-Simple/jvYAML, the servlet API, any database driver, Log4J, and just about every other library I use on a daily basis has a clean, focused, well-designed, and impeccably well-documented API.

I'm sure there are no shortage of "enterprise-y" libraries and APIs, but could you offer a few examples of common, popular libraries used in a large portion of J2SE (not EE) projects whose APIs are poor on a level beyond that which may offend your aesthetic sensibilities? Some that come to mind for me might be Swing (I don't write GUI apps), but am curious to hear what you've encountered.
You should have let marketing take over and built up unsustainable hype and corporate endorsement instead ;)
Some snippets of interest.

Control maximum speed:

/js/Tadpole.js line 12: this.maxMomentum = 3;

Send a message: app.sendMessage(string)

Message length: /js/WebSocketService.js line 113
Come to Cartier jewelry online store
I don't know the exact equation, but accelerating any mass beyond that of a single particle or perhaps molecule to that large a fraction of the speed of light borders on impossible. The energy required to accelerate a mass increases exponentially, so getting any appreciable mass to .999c is pretty much out of the question. Again, no equation (if someone has it I'd love to plug in some numbers) but I'm guessing it would require on the order of the total energy output of the sun to get even a modest spacecraft to that velocity.

"The Physics of Star Trek" by Lawrence Krauss had the equation I believe, but I can't find it!
So you're taking a risk -- you should just recognize that and admit to it. I'm not sure why you're qualifying. I may have a laptop from 1997 that can only run Windows 98 comfortably but that doesn't make it secure or a good choice for security in 2010. Sometimes you just have to spend money and upgrade.

By the way, a newish 2.6 Linux kernel with WINE should do most of what you want and approximately the same system requirements. Your mileage may vary if you have an obscure Windows-only program.
Discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1741330
By 99 the market was beginning to turn, the acquisition period was behind most companies and it was beginning to look like a duck and cover environment. I would imagine that this is why they decided to pass on the purchase. It was the beginning of the end by that point.

While stocks where still climbing into 2000, I remember venture money becoming very scare in 99. In mid 99 there was a brief downturn and then stock rallied to astronomical levels through the end of 99 into 2000. I remember that brief blip as serving as a writing on the wall that the party was almost over. Things tightened up at a lot of places right after that event.

So while valuations where up, acquisitions and new ventures where down significantly. That was an strange time to be in the industry, because it seemed like everyone knew it was coming, but no one wanted to dare utter it.
The field was good this year. The only company I didn't really like/get out of the finalists was Badgeville.

My favorite was Cloudflare because I had a similar idea years ago that I was going to do as a startup, but chose another idea instead.

The tl;dr version of it is a forwarding proxy for your website that speeds up page delivery (gzip, etag etc), filters out vulnerability and exploit attempts, filters out spammers, filters out mis-behaving bots etc.

I am not sure if Cloudflare is application aware. The way that I was going to do it was to build modules for popular web applications and optimize based on that (eg. it would recognize Wordpress and compress the JS/CSS, sideload images, etc.)

Clickable link: https://www.cloudflare.com/

That is an impressive website (even with flash disabled) and a welcome change to the standard screenshot/header/sub-menus/links in footer boilerplate that we see too often.

(As an aside, the winner, Qwiki, is co-founded by Louis Monier - link for those who don't know him or don't recognize the name: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Monier)
Why can’t everyone accept credit cards? Chargebacks.

It's huge evolution, but receiving money by credit card still has potential complications.
The way I see it, a tidally locked planet is an easier find, because of the high variance in surface temperatures. Relatively rotating planets will have far narrow variances, making most of them uninhabitable based on temperature.
You really gave us no information at all to justify your decision. For all we know you were running a 5.0 build on a 7200rpm disk with the default my.cnf settings.
Slow Fade-Out for Video Stores
From a technical standpoint, the primary domain of subject matter must be limited, the problems faced by individual community members must be deemed meaningful and there must be experts who are actively giving advice. Finally, the pipeline of new members must be filled due to events external to the online community…e.g. a person enters the pipeline for a Camry enthusiast forum when they purchase any Camry.

Of course that only gets you a help desk. For a real community, pathos is critical. The problems need to play out over time and entail setbacks as well as accomplishments. e.g. special order Camry is delayed three weeks. Helpful expertise needs to be provided even in the face of obvious tragedy, e.g. adding a Nitrous Oxide system to a 1989 Camry. Finally, there must be an outlet for off topic expression…no one but a fanatic can be all Camry all the time.

One attribute I have noticed about the sites to which I have been attracted is that they tend to be non-commercial and express the vision of a single person (though others certainly help realize the vision). A pattern I have observed is the migration of a community to a new site when a corporate controlled site radically changes the ground rules under which the community exists.
And indepth analysis and reality checks by Phil Plait http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/09/29/po...
My girlfriend and I like to roleplay as Atlas Shrugged characters.

She dresses up as Dagny Taggart.
Here is the timeline:

http://www.emery.com/1e/pentium.htm

USENET grew one pant-size that autumn.
Google has an office in Manhattan, 15th street and 8th avenue if I'm notmistaken. I haven't personally been to any other google office, but it doesn't look different than the pictures of any of them; All the perks, sleeping pods and cafeteria stuff seems to be there.
Hot shower (as hot as you can tolerate) for 30 minutes.
Last time I was in Oregon I was shocked at the deforestation along the coast. It was really sad.
> And then there is stuff like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-of-life_index.

Wow, that article looks pretty bogus. Here are their factors:

2. Family life: Divorce rate. My parents are divorced and they both seem pretty happy. This metric seems very biased and not clearly beneficial. Is it better to keep an unhappy marriage together or to create two new happier marriages?

3. Community life: country has either high rate of church attendance or trade-union membership. Seriously? Apparently freelancing atheists are miserable.

6. Climate and geography: Latitude, to distinguish between warmer and colder climates. It's ridiculous to claim that latitude is a prime determiner of quality-of-life. Some people prefer tropical beaches, but others love changing seasons and still others like ice fishing. As far as climate and geography are concerned, would you rather live in a Saharan desert or Crete? Places with similar latitudes can have vastly different climates, anyways.

7. Job security: Unemployment rate. Fair enough, but low unemployment rate isn't necessarily an indicator of job security: there could still be high churn. Also, a nation that provides a sufficient level of services means that the unemployed are never too badly off, while a country that provides none could see its few unemployed living in misery. Serious question: would a country with single-worker households have an unemployment rate near 50%?

9. Gender equality: Measured using ratio of average male and female earnings. Terrible. Does this even factor in number of hours worked? It certainly doesn't account for differences in the work being performed or for cultural differences.

By my count, about half of those metrics are crap. Creating an index from that is basically hokum. Anyone could tweak the metrics to almost arbitrarily reorder the rankings.
I am a big cyclist (it's my business), and I don't know what other large cities are like, but Portland's bike scene is a disaster. I can't believe the animosity that's been fostered between drivers and bikers, but I went from easily doing 100 miles a week to not wanting to ever get on my bike in about two months. At least a quarter the rides I do involve pretty frightening/stressful situations like being swerved/swore/honked at. Call me thin skinned, but damn these people are nuts.

Can't attest to the vegan thing - I am a reformed vegetarian who enjoys a tasty 5th quadrant burger here and there :) Oh, there we go, the beer! I knew I was forgetting my favorite thing about Portland.
Thank you, that was splendid!
because it's Peter frickin' Thiel - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel
Great recommendation. Thanks a lot.
I completely agree with you and dasil003 about there being a better dichotomy than material vs. tool. I was making an attempt to organize my thoughts in a structured way so I could better understand my own learning process. Too often I come across articles that say DO NOT USE X or YOU MUST USE Y. I can't use node.js, clojure, erlang, web sockets, and seaside while doing AOP, 10 must todos for startups, and learn what convertible notes mean. I come here everyday and I learn more about what I still don't know than I can keep up with. So I try to absorb what I can and write my understand of it all.

The module paper looks brilliant, partly why I love compsci - in 1970s they were writing about what I am slowly learning now. Thanks for the wonderful feedback.
Well Google truly is a garage story. Google the search engine existed before Google the company. If my memory servers me correctly there new found success caught them off guard, it happened faster than they expected. They had to incorporate and scramble for funds just to keep up with the volume that was increasing day by day. I would imagine that a sale would net them the infrastructure they desperately needed.
If you get the ball rolling on a crossplatform game project and don't want to go public, private gitfarm it and I'm sure you could find some HNers to join in.
I was going to say StarCraft II, but then I remembered that it actually causes me stress.
Here is the link to the page from google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sourceid=navcli...
I don't think there is another language out there that could have given Minecraft the kind of success that it's had (The same applies to Runescape). Many Windows users have a JVM + the Java plugin installed already, and the only other widely-known plugin that gives the kind of 3D performance that you can extract out of Java is Unity3D. While Unity is easy enough to install, it's been around for a lot less long and it's less widely known and developed for. Most users would have experienced a jarring "please install this plugin" moment before they got to play, and I'm pretty sure that the immediacy with which players have been able to get into Minecraft has been a big part of its success.

Contrary to what you repeatedly hear about Java, it actually has very decent performance. Sure, the ME edition is horrible (if that was somebody's only exposure to Java game programming I'd forgive them for never wanting to touch the language again), and some years ago applet performance was awful (which seems to have left a bad taste in the mouths of a significant number of hackers), but these days if you avoid Swing (and why would you want such a toolkit for a 3D game like Minecraft anyway?) and use a library like LWJGL then you can produce a game with decent performance and graphics. Minecraft is a bit of a mixed bag when it comes to scaling down to older machines, but it still runs reasonably well on quite a lot of older hardware (up to about 5 yrs old, or thereabouts). That leaves you with a very large potential userbase.

Also contrary to what you might hear, Java's actually not that shabby of a language either. Sure, you sacrifice some of the features and syntactic sugar found in higher-level languages like Python & Ruby (in return for performance), but garbage collection and higher-level features like reflection that are not found in C/C++ mean that development speed is still pretty good. There are a wide variety of available libraries to help you out too.

Lastly, much of Java's reputation for verbosity doesn't apply to games development. You don't have to use any of the libraries that require XML-heavy configuration like Spring or Hibernate, nor any of horrifyingly verbose stuff like EJBs or JDBC (actually there's nothing forcing you to use those for enterprise stuff either). Once you've taken care of the performance-intensive graphics stuff, you're "only" left with the core game logic. While a higher-level language like Python, Ruby or Lua could reduce the amount of code you need to write by a certain amount, the difference is not as pronounced as it is between, say, C++ and Lua, due to Java's automatic memory management.

And seriously, who gives a toss about whether something's dorky and uncool? I didn't care back in high school that people thought I was a dork for programming or even just for using computers (this was before the internet and Apple made computers cool!) and nobody should have to give a shit what programming language snobs think of their choice of language either, as long as they're getting the job done.