skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, I'm afraid I'm going to disappoint you all and tell you I run a bakery. I know you guys were expecting a tech company.

I wasn't actually planning on revealing this, but you guys seem to really want to know and the community has been good to me. And maybe you can give me more advice.

I actually have a degree in CS and I love to code, but I tried for a while and never managed to make money on my own with my tech skills before Patrick. I figured (correctly, I think) that my problem was not with my hacking abilities but with my business skills - I had absolutely no good sense of what people would give me money for.

In my mind, I saw myself stumbling around on a seemingly infinite plane while I was trying to follow a hill-climbing algorithm to maximize the amount of money I was making. So I imagined something like a random-restart approach might work: let's jump somewhere totally different and try climbing any hills we find there. Plus, I knew that people were willing to give money for baked goods, so I figured that simplified the business component to an extent.

It turns out I was right - I did find a hill to climb and I've gotten a lot better at business in general.

The dilemma now is I really enjoy coding and actually think I have the skills to run a softare business (which could ultimately be more lucrative), but have a growing food business on my hands. I'm certainly not complaining - really, anything that brings me more money to buy stuff like a dryer makes me happy - but sometimes I feel out of place.

Now that I've hired a manager for the bakery, I have a bit more control of my time and I've recently been able to take on a bit of consulting work, which has turned out well, and I'm pumping the money into growing the bakery.

I think that's the optimal strategy I can follow for now. What do you guys think? I look forward to hearing your thoughts on my relatively twisted path.
Fall 2010 hackNY student hackathon is TOMORROW
There's lots of research in this sort of area through publish/subscribe and knowledge-based networks. Have a look here http://kdeg.cs.tcd.ie/KBN
I'll bite.

I've done a lot of side projects. True to what people have said in here, most of them still exist, but get no attention from me or anyone else. Some I have taken down. I mentioned a few successful ones in the other thread.

http://allyourwords.com, a site that made about $1000 selling word-to-website associations (kind of like million dollar homepage), but then I took it down due to maintenance.

http://ohbigdeal.com, was auto-updating by crawling forums for amazon deals and adding my affiliate code, but I could never get it to take off. Now I haven't touched it in months and the update code appears to have broken.

donotpress.me, donotpressme.com, etc., was a gimmicky attempt at a viral site that went nowhere.
Well, I was 7 back then, so I really said what someone else explained to me. That was my bad.
My girlfriend and I work quite a bit with the homeless and I've noticed that even the most brilliant social work has its limitations. Most homeless people benefit from those social workers, educators, volunteers, etc., but it takes an inordinate amount of energy to reach out to the fringe that seem to lack the motivation to better their own lives.

I think non-profit and for-profit ventures have this in common: they help those that wish to help themselves, help themselves even more.
It seems too eager to go through year and day pages, and doesn't always hit the optimal path:

Mike Godwin -> Godwin's law -> Adolf Hitler

it gives:

Mike Godwin -> 1956 -> 1889 -> Adolf Hitler

Also strange is that the "1956" it follows is in the text of, but not linked from "Mike Godwin".

Either way, I like the Web 2.0-style Hitler drawings :-)
>Their job is not to surveil the citizenry for signs of aberrant behavior.

So practically then you're saying most crime should just be allowed to happen as it can't be detected without taking a proactive approach.

For example, CCTV at a gas station shouldn't be installed until after the place is robbed.

I'm expecting the come back to be "Oh, but that's a private business, it's only bad if government do it?". Why is it bad if the government (ie the people working en masse) try to prevent harm to private citizens but not bad for individual or small groups of citizens?
Also, the integration will require only the copy/pasting of a line of code into a website.
Put a value on the options, then ask yourself the same question: I'll give you $200,000 to work for me for four years. But if we don't go public for eight years, I'll give you $200,000 to work for me for eight years. Doesn't make much sense to me.
I also don't think they would want to encourage their patrons to take their phones out during meals. Think this is still considered poor form, could be wrong though.

Think idea number one is the better one.
Seems like a cool service, do you utilize only the "#" tags or all the words in a tweet?
Spam email autoreplier. I built a toy version in lamson which gave credible (to me) responses - "Yes, I am very interested in earning $1 MILLION ($1,000,000) dollars from your dead Nigerian uncle." I went into my gmail spam folder to look for a training corpus, and found that the Nigerians have given up.

Eigenshare - online document sharing for latex-using scientists. Basically, built in document sharing, version control, etc. Couldn't get anyone to use it.

Timeserieszen - scrape a lot of timeseries data from various government agencies, and make a nice display for it (answers questions: "how have annual working hours evolved since 1960"). Never really followed through on it.

Quite a few more.
Boxed-product computer games (Xbox, PS3, Wii, PC): C++ with some C hold-outs. Python and C# are common in the pipeline and tools, but not common in the shipped product.
If someone works for the chance to earn money, how can that be fair in _any_ sense?
Not exactly what I was expecting, but interesting nonetheless. Do you feel that the hacker business approach articles featured here helped your bakery succeed, or did they just give you impetus you needed to get started launching your own business? Just wondering.

Edit: Why not build a web app for your bakery? Allow customers to order via the web. If you provide some sort of customization so that customers can request custom cakes and confections it could turn into an interesting internet aided brick and mortar business. Whatever you do don't downplay the value of having a business that makes real money selling real things.
Art or Sport?
its because its using an older record of Godwin's law:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Godwins_law&ol...

where it actually doesn't actually link to hitler. I would like to update the records but it takes forever to upload 5gb of entries into app engine :)
This is sad because this is one of the only technologies my mom is comfortable with using. She uses this service on almost a daily basis. When I called her and told her about this story, she asked if there was some way to call them up and complain about it. I know Google is notorious for not having very good customer service, but does anyone know if there is a number she could call?
Health care: Microsoft ending 100% coverage for employees
Having root allows you to install and run anything you'd like on the box. Hosted solutions will almost assuredly constrain you to PHP plus one or two other languages of the hosting company's choosing.
Because Firefox is reaching 50% of the browser market (I recently read that somewhere on HN) and if they make it IE-only, content producers are going to stop using flash.
I don't think trivializing the combinations with Python's builtins, looking up the fib primes with OEIS, or computing factors with Alpha is cheating. I hope, in fact, it's the whole point of the exercise: choose the right tools for the job. If you're writing code to test primeness or generate Fibonacci numbers, I sure as hell don't want to hire you.
I think the author has some good points about working your idea even if you don't make YC, though he seems to be making the argument that shooting for YC at all is a bad idea.

"A lot of people who applied to YCombinator are probably hacks with derivative ideas and little ability to actually accomplish things. You are probably one of them. A dreamer who sees external capital as a shortcut towards making money without actually working for it."

But contrary to the author's view, YC is also very good at analyzing startup potential. That's how it works -- the business model depends on it. If you don't get accepted to YC, chances are, there's a problem. Of course, they can't accept everyone, and presumably the number of applications is increasing with time, so that problem may be that there are just too many applicants with good ideas. But rejection from YC is a perfect opportunity to reevaluate your idea and your potential. The fact is that there are good startup ideas and bad ones, and being rejected from YC is a hint that you may have a bad one.

If you're still confident and passionate after reevaluating, _that_ is when you run with your idea anyway.
Thanks, I did it.

But I do have software (e.g. Memeo AutoSync, UltraMon, Phone Remote Control, Airytech Switch Odd) that I wish to shutdown automatically when on battery power, as I don't necessarily need it then, and they use some CPU power.

However closing each separately takes some time and work (+later I have to restart them when I plug in), is there no software that can manage that? No software developer got this idea?
A Rubyist’s Beautiful Mistress: method_missing
Of course those digits are random, they're straight out of pi!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feynman_point
Mixpanel was some kind of side project.

When I left Slide, I was initially going to build a gaming company 6 months before gaming blew up. Unfortunately, I couldn't find myself building games because I wasn't staying up till 3-4 AM excited.

One night I scrapped it and started building Mixpanel strictly to learn how to scale systems since that was interesting to me. What better project to learn about it fastest then doing analytics?

Ever since then I've consistently been up past 1 AM =). Still excited. Still learning.

This was all still being in school so I couldn't focus on it full-time.
I don't think they discriminate based on colleges but obviously it'll be harder for you (for instance they probably won't visit your campus for recruitment). You've to work extra hard to make a mark there. Also use innovative ways to get in touch with people at these companies (usually HR might not be able to tell you're a great hacker unless they see certain keywords like IIT in your resume). Go to BarCamps, DevCamps like others suggested. Yahoo! has Open Hack Days (this is a great way to meet some employees). I've a few other suggestions:

1) Start working on interesting opensource projects. Get your code up on GitHub.

2) Try Google Summer of Code (GSoC) - prepare well in advance for this, become friends with the project leads on IRC, ask them for interesting projects to propose, and show initiative.
Yes, I'd read that was the case. But how do we know this is not simply PR/spin on behalf of the accused?

If I was shopped for a inflammatory post suggesting terrorist activity and wished to win public support, eg to allow by supporters to riot and be supported by public opinion should I be detained. Then I'd whip down that post and put up something inane to point at and say what idiots the FBI are. (I'm not saying this is the case, just that there is very real doubt as to the true story).

Timeline on all this is presumably only attainable from the FBI and/or the accused.
I really think they did a fantastic job here. They made the best of the medium, too: They used a narrow column for text (which, being a news company, they write for — this is part of why newspapers often have 1-sentence paragraphs). The narrow column makes it easier to quickly read and skim. Then this frees up a lot of space for a photo, much bigger than they could afford in print. The way you can filter categories, and the colors (no b&w print here) used to identify them are really playing to the strengths of the web format, too. A+
I'm usually pretty bad at these kind of challenges (lately I tried registering at one mind-challenges site, but I couldn't even get past the five entry-level questions, which would have allowed me to even register), but this was surprisingly easy. Simple brute-force methods worked for each of the three tasks. I was totally surprised that the first time I entered the answer for each of the tasks, it was indeed the correct one.

But then again... these are all pretty standard computer science problems, nothing that I hadn't in some way done before.

On a side-note: Interestingly I used recursion for each of the three problems. Well... actually for the primes-problem I got stack overflow and rewrote it to not use recursion, but still, at least in principle :=)
It's weird how most people seem to be mistaking CSS3 and mobile browser extensions as part of the HTML5 proposal.
Good questions! Awaiting answers myself!
SBS Protects Beaches with HESCO Units
To quote a great philosopher:

"Programming as a profession is only moderately interesting. It can be a good job, but if you want to make about the same money and be happier you could actually just go run a fast food joint. You are much better off using code as your secret weapon in another profession.

People who can code in the world of technology companies are a dime a dozen and get no respect. People who can code in biology, medicine, government, sociology, physics, history, and mathematics are respected and can do amazing things to advance these discipline."

Your application of programming in such an area makes you more interesting and creative - not less.
Damn, I have to go in to work early today or I could continue this. The first one only took a minute or two of coding to solve in Perl. The search string was several times longer than my code, even with use warnings & use strict in there.

I'd write a bit of code to memoize the function before I'd do the Fibonacci numbers, though, and I just don't have time to continue right now, even though it's pretty easy. Are the rest of the tests like that? Do they force you to use more efficient code, rather than simpler brute force tests so that your code has a decent runtime?
Yeah. Everything is "HTML5" – which seems to be the successor of Web 2.0
Android is Google's Agent Smith
Much of China, I believe.
If the connection goes away and your master is unplugged, you will need to run a repair on the master and then bring the slave back into sync. If both are unplugged, you will have to run the repair on both. This obviously isn't ideal, and that's probably why single server durability is the biggest priority for the next release.
Jason Fried: Education As A Customer Acquisition Strategy
> but had fun doing it

Well, that's more than a lot of people can say about certain projects!

Want to give us a run-down of how you put it together?
Code to generate fibs is literally one line. Remember eigenvalues :)?
I don't care one bit how many books your s.o. has written and how often she's on TV

I just wanted to say I think you got the wrong end of the stick on why I wrote that... The gist of what I was trying to communicate is that we don't need to use this "15 minutes of fame" (as you put it) to further ourselves or our projects.

The point I was trying to make (which respectfully I don't think you got) is that instead, I'm trying to use the attention to highlight the wider issues of the .ly domain space for those who already own .ly domains, might register one in the future or simply rely on .ly domains such as for url shortening.

In other words, this isn't about us. It's about the wider issue of .ly domains in general. I'm sorry that this didn't come across to you from my previous reply.
erldocs is my favorite docs site - it's a success in my book!
Interesting result for "Facebook":

Facebook -> April 30 -> Adolf Hitler
Typo: "Another method might include putting together infographics and white papers that also educate your prospective customers with education."
Found via: http://jasonlbaptiste.com/startups/distribution-distribution...
mileguru.com - frequent flyer mile aggregator. it just never got finished and fell by the wayside due to other partnerships and projects...
AirBNB is expensive for a month. Post in "housing wanted" on Craigslist and look for sublets on there, it will be relatively easy to find a great place.

You may find it taking longer to find more permanent housing than you think. I moved to SF in late August, and I'm still looking for an apartment. It's fiercely competitive.
Interesting. Can I see your figures? As far as I know Amazon has never released any, only to say that it is be best selling SKU on Amazon. And they are selling it in Target stores now as well...
I created www.socialadmanager.com as a side project. It has not gone "big" yet but it is profitable which i think is pretty cool.
Run different versions of IE on a Windows machine
The Degree of Hitler for Kevin Bacon is: 2

The Path:
Great Depression
Adolf Hitler
I always love a TANSTAAFL reference
Thanks, hearing this said out loud (so to speak) is good motivation to get the web site sorted with something proper.
I've been playing with the beta and I love it. Cool idea.
Wow. You just invalidated startups (among other things) in a single sentence. Nice.
That sounds like an awesome Bushism:

"Educate your customers with education."

Changed. Thank you.
http://www.celebtwits.com/ - Got no traction. Been dead since twitter auth change.
Good Old Games, a stormy relaunch
In many countries and cultures, "staying at home" till quite late is the norm (Italy, for example) with few or heavily shared expenses beyond personal possessions. Sometimes, the family home houses multiple generations and is merely passed down without everyone moving out.

I'm married with a kid and own a home now, but back in the days when I lived with my parents, even paying them a modest rent and share of utilities I could have "lived" on $500 a month without causing them much/any expense. Just. :)
400$ a month is doable in China but forget about nightlife or cockroach-free apartments. Disclaimer: I lived a few months in Shenzhen.
I've killed off a fair number of them over the years, mostly because I feel that if someone doesn't develop any traction at all I might as well pull the plug on it. Some were just ways to try out some new technology (ok, make that 'excuses', not 'ways'), others were done purely for fun.

If something did develop traction I would support it for years and years even if it ended up having very few members (livelog was one of those).

I find it difficult to kill off projects that have a few dedicated users, usually I contact them to find a way in which I can let the project go away without hurting their feelings.

Right now the biggest one that is on my 'deadpooled' list is the free drupal hosting site that I started a few years ago. At some point it had a few thousand domains on it, right now I think we're down to below 50, and every month one or two make the move to another hosting provider. Another three years and I can kill it.

Websites are like children, five minutes of work to launch them and you must support them the rest of your life ;)
Baidu also has search results relating to the subject:

http://www.baidu.com/s?wd=Liu+Xiaobo&n=2
Berkeley Bionics presents first Consumer Exoskeleton
Leaked report: worker abuse at Foxconn
I just bought it as well. Fantastic piece of software.
Thanks for posting, I was waiting for your 2010 version to be done, and now you remind me that it is :)
> there is no transfer of ownership

This is true, but if someone places something on your car, I'm not sure they can have a reasonable expectation that they will receive it back in one piece. It is reasonable that if someone found a GPS device attached to their car that they would want to remove it.

If I placed something under your car, why would I assume that I'd be able to retrieve it back again? It could become dislodged. You could have hit a bad pot hole and it fell out. It could have been disabled by going through a car wash.

It would still be the agency's property; however, I wouldn't be liable for anything that happened to it.
I think it's worth pointing out here that NIC.ly != Libyan Government.

Yes, it's part of Libyan Telecom (which maybe government owned, I don't know) - but in all of my writing on the subject at least I've been careful to separate the two.

Clearly the decision making process around all this is being done by a few individuals at NIC.ly, not the Libyan Government.
For anything they think might be a bomb, they don't try to disarm it or anything like you've seen on the movies. They do a controlled demolition of the object.

I don't think you want them attempting a controlled demolition of your car, especially if you know that it's really a tracking device.
Kinda.

VS2010 has a new, WPF-based shell/editor. That brings along many new .NET-based integration points and mostly obsoletes the old editor APIs. They've also improved the plugin-loading architecture and several other things. However, do do any meaningful integration, you still need to code to the poorly documented COM APIs. The project system, for example, hasn't changed much at all since VS 6.
More actual, real, impressive Duke Nukem Forever footage
I was in the middle of thinking through the algorithm when I looked at it and saw the password in the text --- the password worked but I still want to code the algorithm later to confirm.
...and you're providing employment, the highest form of charity.
If they haven't raised prices in 6 years, that probably means that they thought customers would switch to Oracle if they did. MySQL didn't want that to happen; Oracle probably does.
only do it if you think you can do significantly better, and in a way that is noticeable to your audience.

if you can differentiate yourself no market is ever saturated.