skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Go read the actual study rather than a press release about it. It's deeply flawed, both for methodology (it has no control group) and for basic definitions.

Basic definitions: a bankruptcy with $1001 or more in medical spending in the previous 2 years is a "medical bankruptcy". By this criteria, Michael Vick's bankruptcy was medical, even though any sane person would realize there were other causes [1]. Also, "uncontrolled gambling", "drug abuse" and "adoption/birth" are medical causes of bankruptcy, by the definition of that study.

If we adopted the criteria of that study, we would discover that nearly every bankruptcy has "major tax cause", for example.

By the way, a slightly less misleading way to phrase the conclusions of that study would be "medical bankruptcies drop by 33%, even while medical costs increase." Luckily, the language of the study hid that from lazy reporters. See this explanation: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2009/06/elizabet...

Try again.

[1] Getting arrested for dogfighting and losing his job in the NFL, for example. While he certainly spent a few grand on doctors, he also owed about $600k in back taxes.

[edit: oops, linked to the debunking, forgot to link to the actual study. http://pnhp.org/new_bankruptcy_study/ Thanks floor(e x 10^10).]
The difference between idiotic and brilliant is only a pivot away. Of course you still have to execute.
Seeing Peldi succeed makes me very happy and inspires me to do the same. You'd be hard pressed to find a nicer, more honest or open guy.
> The concept of classes is often confusing, but setting aside the code isn't much of a mental challenge for any student I've met.

While I have little formal teaching experience, I hung around in the undergraduate lounge in school, which is where students came for help. I ended up helping a lot of non-majors with their first CS class, which was popular because it filled a general requirement for an Arts and Sciences degree.

These two classes were in Java and in VB6, and they struggled with anything that wasn't near-rote application. They had trouble with the scoping of variables, they didn't know when to use functions appropriately... if you say 'what does x = 5 do?' they can answer, but they can't apply that to writing new programs.

My friends who are TAing courses now have several students who end up turning in homework that doesn't even compile. Maybe students at your school are just smarter than mine, but a lot of people struggle here.

> It just feels like its the wrong place to have the discussion of magic.

It's true, I am conflating 'magic' slightly. I don't mean 'they can't properly metaprogram,' I mean it in the "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" sense. They struggle to apply what they see as magic incantations to new problems, because they don't have a solid foundation to work with.
Especially since the free users are obviously the ones who will complain loudest when you kill the free option.
There's an interesting conversation going on about this article over at RubyFlow:

http://rubyflow.com/items/4657
Same here. Pardon my French (I can say that, I am French ;-) but there is also a lot of bullshit, predictable and lame developer's jobs in the world of hot startups too. How many devs join a young hot startup thinking they are going get a chance to create a great new product or improve on one, and find themselves working out the quirks of old core code, or regressing boring bugs all day long? or worse: find themselves without a job 3 months later because the startup ran out of cash? I think this article is full of "clichés".
Gossip Kills Possibility
"but my life is miserable".

Why are you settling for that?
You may think the easiest option now is to stay where you are. Sure it's stable but this is probably the best time to actually give your entrepreneurial dreams a shot!

Sure you won't be getting that paycheck but you're not needing that much money at the moment anyway. Plus you still live with your parents so you don't have to worry about rent, food etc. You'll still live.

++ You are still young, in your 20's. It's so much harder to make that plunge when you're 30,40 if you have a mortgage to pay off or a family to support.

What's the worst thing that can happen? You build some cool apps, try to make a business out of them but don't get enough traction? So what? You've taken a correct path in your career by doing something you enjoy. You can always go back to corporate. Plus you tend to meet so many more people if you really immerse yourself in the whole entrepreneurship community.

Take a big breath, quit your job and go do the stuff that makes you tick. By the sounds of it, you're in a pretty good situation to do so right now.
I didn't see a word about /what/ you want to build. Most people leave their jobs and pursue startup life, which is not glamorous, because they have a burning, necessary passion to build something and solve a problem. And it's that passion that will get you through the ups and downs of startup life.

That said, if you just want to build cool stuff using new technology, there's always the chance you could just up and move to SFO and get a job /at/ a startup depending on your skill-set.
One supporting example for the article's position is Mint.com

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1791278 (How Mint beat Wesabe from Mint's point of view)

> We spent a ton of time holding online chats, went to events (like twiistup la, finnovate) and connected with the entire personal finance community. Oh yea, this was 9 months before we even launched the product.

Think about this. By the time Mint launched we had more traffic than all the other personal finance sites (buxfer, geezeo, wesabe) combined.
I suspect that Apple's heading down the same road as XNA, because XNA enables a developer to build WPF applications that can run on Windows, XBox, and Zune; presumably also on the latest Windows Mobile as well.

I wouldn't be a bit surprised if future versions, maybe even the upcoming release, set up an equivalent situation on the mac platform, now that Apple has a new TV device in addition to the iPhone, iPod, and iPad.

Heck, if Apple decided to be aggressive about getting into the living room and entertainment center, they could launch a box that's basically a souped up Apple TV with something close to an order of magnitude higher performance than an XBox 360 simply by building it around a Sandy Bridge, and have a significant contender in the gaming console market.
I might be naive, but to me "connected" to an IRC server implies having an open TCP/IP connection. That means that the server will run out of ports at roughly 65,000 clients.

Of course, you could probably solve that by load-balancing, having multiple parallel ircd instances that share the backend, but then you're not having "an ircd" any longer.
"It is not possible to not end up in super brain mode with some of the problems I deal with."

I'll argue that it is possible, just not necessarily preferable. You could rewrite the whole thing. You could also focus on building a number of small functions which brings the whole interface up to a human-digestible level.

The reality of the matter is not the realm of possibility, but instead that you often just want to get it working by whatever super-herculean effort it takes. People are often very interruptible while fighting hydras or stealing golden fleece.

So it's twofold. Ensure that as often as possible you've got the programmatic infrastructure to only consider human-digestible chunks of complexity at any given time and try not to be interrupted whenever that's not possible.
Ask HN: Low-commitment roll call! Who here sells physical goods?
Hi HN fam.

Two of my current projects are related to retail, physical goods. (One is selling only over the Internet: stickers, t's, buttons, etc. One is storefront-only: bikes.)

I don't want to stalk you for free advice or anything, I merely would love to have your username listed in this thread so I can go back and read all the smart things you've said.

Sidebar: If this thread turns into a bounty of random awesome advice about how selling physical stuff is different than software, who am I to argue?
I tell my wife all of the time, "if I die first, get the cheapest funeral possible. A cardboard box is fine. If you spend too much I will come back and haunt you."
On EFNet:
40416 44108 :Current global users 40416, max 44108

On IRCNEt:
66290 98675 :Current global users 66290, max 98675

Which is probably significantly less than number of twitter users, but IRC is explicitly designed to be scalable.
Keeping context outside of your head is a really good advice. I've been using Google Tasks for that and it works quite well for me. This way I also have the context with me on my phone and I can quickly note down ideas when I am away from my desk.While coding I progress through the list of small tasks and check them away.
Having multiple instances of ircd is the main point of IRC protocol, that is what the R (as in Relay) stands for.
No. TCP connections are identified by a four-tuple of (sender's IP, sender's TCP port, receiver's IP, receiver's port). Thus you are only limited by 65536 connections between a particular server and a particular client.
The first sentence doesn't describe what it does, really.

And the paragraph, while reasonably clear to me and you, probably means nothing to "most people". The idea of "touch controls" was practically unheard-of before the iPhone.
I use my initials, as I'm trying to do for everything these days. I'd be much happier about it if I could get a decent domain name with them (I have the .me version, but that seems useless) -- obviously the .com, .net, .org are all registered.
...especially if you use proper CFLAGS (-Wall -Werror at least, -Wextra if you want to hang with the cool kids).
Maintain context outside of your head at all times

Much of the problem with interruptions is that of losing context. When you’re in that Zone, you’re juggling a whole bunch of context in your head, adjusting it on the fly, and maintaining and tweaking connections between issues constantly.

I find that there's an all-too common hair-shirted developer mentality that glories in the stunt of keeping track of umpteen different entities and variables at once. Mental/conceptual organization is an area where work smarter should definitely trump work harder. I think a part of the problem has to do with the tendency for dramatic fire-fighting to be rewarded in organizations. What results is like an emergency responder TV show. It's exciting to watch the responders rappelling or doing something exciting and unusual every week, but in reality a well run city would strive to make such events as rare as possible and be boring as possible.

Think of it this way, if you ran a trucking company, would you want employees who had a different hair-raising tale to tell on just about every trip? Do you know developers who are full of such tales?
I think the logic is this: Github is popular. Ruby is the most popular language on Github. Therefore Ruby and Git are connected.
oh, to be so lucky...
Very cool to see that sort of effect from this! Let me know if you get it to work, I might have some inventory for you.
I used to work for iRobot. This post is gibberish. The companies he mentions just aren't that interested in robotics. Microsoft has made some progress in robotics development environments, but that isn't a large priority for them. The market there is incredibly small while there is a small developer ecosystem. Apple most especially wouldn't be interested.

More importantly, you probably don't understand this source as well as I do. This blogger has been posting for years about iRobot's stock. It seems he has remained bullish on iRobot the entire time. This is just the latest post saying how awesome iRobot is. The problem is that few others in the market agree. He mentions that their stock is 3X their 2008 low. That's lovely, but my options are still under water from 2006. It's laughable really.

I do think iRobot will be acquired within a few years, but the most likely buyer is a defense contractor. Foster Miller went through a similar acquisition with Qinetiq. To stay independent, iRobot would need to make new robots - but they have refused to invest internal research & development dollars in any meaningful way. This is why products like the Warrior take so long for development - the dev is trickled in through contracts depending on the whims of DoD and Congress. None of this is private information by the way: as a public company their are very scrutinized about their iR&D spending.
Just Design It - An Approach To Web App Design (slides)
An excellent set of tips from a YC startup that we've been using for our product. The only thing I didn't see was Aaron's opinion on whether or not comments on Hacker News had helped anyone in his group stand out. I always check the karma score of co-founders to try and figure that one out.
> And never _ever_ make the "pointerness" part of the type. People who
> write
> typedef struct urb_struct * urbp_t;
> (or whatever the name was) should just be shot. I was _soo_ happy to see
> that crap get excised from the kernel USB drivers.

Amen. And people who use ampersand pass-by-reference in C++ ( foo(int &i) ).
The problem I've seen with some junior developers is not that they run to Google it's that they aren't very proficient at using it. On a number of occasions in the last couple of months I've had a junior dev stuck on a problem for hours. On each occasion I sat down with them and once I understood the problem went and did my own googling and cam up with the answer in five minutes.
Right but it's not about being portable in kernel development -- the entire thing you're building is in and of itself nonportable.
What is a "real identity"?
Well, there is also a difference between what should be important to a startup (just get anything out there to get some customers/revenue) versus an establish company like Apple (be perfect with our consumer products).
Same case here. Never found a site which already had someone with my handle.
iRobot has the best roboticists MIT has to offer

Really... they go to iRobot rather than NASA and the Joint propulsion Labratory, Boeing, Honda, Lockheed, DARPA, etc...?

How do you think and iRobot's control system compares to an autonomous predator drone?
$4M Series A: USV (lead), O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. http://blog.wesabe.com/2007/06/20/wesabe-raises-4m-in-series...

$700k seed: O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. http://techcrunch.com/2007/02/28/wesabe-gets-money-from-tim-...
I think the crowdsourcing portion keeps the list updated, but the initial list seems to have rolled out too quickly to have been crowdsourced
You can turn cellular data off on the iPhone and still use the GPS. Airplane mode, however, will shut off the GPS. What really kills you is that visual voicemail runs over the data network, and it's non-trivial to turn that off. I spent last month backpacking through Europe with my iPhone, using GPS every day, without unexpected charges by leaving data off. A friend of mine on the other hand turned data on for 5 minutes to check his email for a phone number. That triggered 10mb voicemail download and a nearly $200 bill for the month.
For 24 hours Greater Manchester Police will be publishing incidents on Twitter
I found Rails-related code much more painful to read than, erm, most other things I read. Smartassery, lack of documentation, and a language that gives you enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot are not a good combination.

Of course, the fact that the only sources of information about a library are “reading the code” and “googling” means that something has gone horribly wrong.
A stack of Post-it notes is amazingly useful! IDEs need something like this. Just a command-key sequence on whatever, and a box pops up for a quick annotation, press return and it's saved. (Cue someone telling me that it's already a plugin in Eclipse.)
That's exactly how I see, the day I have to learn Fortran to read lapack's code base in order to use it is the day I quit programming ;p
In fact you are limited to 2^32 (=65536^2) connections between two hosts, as you can vary both ports. But that is only theory. In practice you will run out of some other system resource (kernel memory, file descriptors, slots in connection table...) before reaching this limit.
Hmm, doesn't seem to recognize codeshares... for example I am on a "United" flight in a few weeks that is operated by US Airways. As such, although most of United's fleet lacks wifi, US Airways has a decent amount of coverage. I don't know the US Airways flight number, however, since I booked it as a UA codeshare.
+1 for Capistrano, we use it to deploy Rails, Sinatra, and PHP apps. gem install capistrano-ext and you can do easy multi-stage deploys (deploy a different branch to your staging/testing/beta server by doing cap staging deploy vs. cap production deploy for example). More details here: http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/2007/7/23/capistrano-multistage
Super lincolnq, that's a really cool list.

The news recommendation one is one that I actually discussed with someone only yesterday, with a very concrete application in mind (finance business).

Calculator sharing: maybe a layer on top of google docs?

minipapers is cool, but lots of science is really hard to get without sufficient background. The jargon alone can make a 1 page summary in to a 10 page explanation.

Food shopping suggestion: a simple checklist of the stuff that you normally would buy, then try to anticipate the frequency with which you order things to preset the checked items.
No, Vancouver.
I think you're right, it does seem like a cultural thing. If you find something that's easy for you, you can choose to either stick with that one thing, or you can push your comfort zone and grow. Most americans these days are trained early on to stay in their comfort zone rather than growing, and it's getting ingrained into them.
+1 for these comments as well. Better to do something crazy now, knowing you can always fall back and recoup your losses, rather than finding yourself down the road with more serious responsibilities you can't ignore at the same job hating yourself/wondering what could have been.
I recommend Camtasia, great product. http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia/

In regards to editing, Craigslist always works.
What Are The Best Numbers of Labels? 
There are many unique numbers of labels out there but the most effective ones are fabulously known as paper labels, color labels, packaging, and adhesive labels. That is why online label printing company offers the best paper label printing solutions for you all business needs.
As widely as possible. My real name is accessible from my profile. My handle is my most widely used internet handle in non-gaming contexts; using it is a means to recognition, not anonymity.

My reasons:

(A) When I was 14, I embraced anonymity online out of a (perhaps justifiable) fear of internet stalkers. Now that I am an adult, sound of body and mind, I'm not so worried about that. I use my real name almost everywhere online.

(B) This particular community is about real life things like jobs and businesses. There's a strong possibility I'll someday get a job / start a business / join some serious real-world undertaking based discussion and contacts here. If that's the case, I'd rather be "Catherine Darrow from Seattle" than "Dove from the internet".

(C) I think it is wrong to judge people in one context based on controversial opinions held in another. I don't vote for politicians based on religion; I don't ignore the technical opinions of programmers with wacky political views; I don't disrespect the high level manager who likes to live it up on weekends. Not everyone holds this view, and aliases are a way to defend yourself against people who don't. But I would rather that tolerance became common courtesy, and "don't judge people in a professional context based on random forum comments" became simple common sense. By establishing a gentle tie between some of my more controversial views and my real identity, I take a small risk to make a small point.
I do this as well, for 5 websites based on a custom PHP microframework. Git kicks ass!
I was one of a million other teenagers who learnt it trying to write an IRC client in VB5/6.
I agree with lemming: That comment should be in your job posting text.
Ask HN: How to legally obtain sports data for commercial use?
This is a long standing question of mine reignited by bignoggins post at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1772224 where he described the success of http://www.fantasymonsterapp.com.

I've often thought of building sports related apps (esp. pertaining to fantasy sports) but I've always struggled with how to legally obtain the necessary data (scheduling, statistics, player images, team logos, etc.) such that I can pursue it as a commercial venture. An obvious solution is to simply scrape the info but I'd assume you'd get shut down or blocked rather quickly. Yahoo offers a Fantasy Sports API but it's to be used for non-commercial purposes only.

Can anyone shed light on where/how to obtain current and past sports data that is available for commercial use? (I'm most interested in NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL data)

Thanks!
from earlier today:

"The decision was the first step in a months-long process at the FCC that will ultimately result in another vote on whether carriers should be forced to alert consumers when they near their allotted limits for voice, text and data services. Carriers would be told through text and voice alerts before reaching their limits and they would be similarly warned when their carrier charges the user for international roaming fees."

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/posttech/2010/10/fcc_votes_...
Tesla's Open House
I had the Sprint version last year and it did the exact same thing. I figured it was overheating or something.
An interesting perspective, esp actually studying Italian cars.

BTW: Edison also worked in terms of systems (electric power + grid + lights), as did Mr. Birdseye (refrigerated supermarkets + trucks + frozen food). Yah, that was his actual name: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_Birdseye
Work: rdist over ssh
Personal projects: rsync over ssh

In both cases I use a wrapper script to make the push as simple as possible. At work I push from the dev server to prod, at home I push from my desktop to either dev or (dev and prod).

In both case I use RCS for version control.
So are you using Google Alerts under the hood or your own custom crawler? Are you basically a management tool for Google Alert Power users?
I don't want to design algorithms for targetting adverts, either. That's why I think job postings should include such information -- so that people can say "nope, not interested" without going through a lengthy interview process.
The biggest advantage MS has over OO is Excel vs the Open Office spreadsheet, it's not even close.

Hear. Hear. The OpenOffice spreadsheet is very much of a kludge.

In spite of all that I don't use Microsoft stuff any more.

And despite of what you correctly said above, that is also my experience. I have been able to run OpenOffice for years now, and since it was updated to open .docx files and similar files from the newer generation of Microsoft products, I can get my work done with OpenOffice.

Personally I think that the microsoft office suite has more to fear from things like Google Docs than from Open Office in the longer term.

Yes, my collaborators and I are finding more users for Google Docs and related products from Google every day.

P.S. I expect to switch to Linux on my next personal computer, as my son the computer science major has long urged. All the younger generation in my household use various distributions of GNU/Linux.
The arguments are all very good, but I think I prefer Scheme as a first programming language just because the syntax is easy to teach and you can get to the good stuff much more quickly. Doesn't meet your 'real world' requirement though - although, I think a few months spent learning the basics in Scheme would make it easier to pick up subsequent languages rather than vice versa.