skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article has popped up a few times (I think it's been on HN before) and I've read it each time with increasing disgust. There's a pervasive attitude amoung attendees of elite universities of feigned modesty, mostly it's fairly innocuous and that's fine. In many cases it's genuine. But this is truly a new level of feigned. The "hole" in the writer's education an educational topic, it's a character trait. And this is a flaw he's developed by spending his whole life assuaging his own insecurities by convincing himself it's true. Now there's no doubt that elite universities are breading grounds for this type of thought and students first encountering them must choose whether or not to imbibe in the kool aid. Most do. It takes a very strong 17 year old to walk into this type of society and call bullshit, but it does happen and when it does we got authors who can write genuinely on this topic.

A wonderful example of such a work is J.R. Moerhinger's Tender Bar.
Don't need a website and wasn't looking for anything in return. Any excuse to get creative with the camera is great. I'll definitely get you some glamour shots.
I am in US only for few years (4) and it is hard for me to believe that someone can have such a huge debt. How can you have such huge credit card debt.
All I know is a friend of the family under only Canadian health care was covered for a quadruple bypass surgery something I am told in the US would effectively bankrupt any normal non-insured citizen, and has made a full recovery to the point that he can now go Skiing with us again.

There may be some short comings to our system, and inefficiencies but I will say I am pretty damn happy that I live in a country that provides that level of coverage to any citizen.
Even if it is a prank, it is just awesome :-)

But the subsequent letter (not in the blog post), almost hints that the guy is just a crank.
What language is he speaking? Finnish? Swedish? Also, what is he saying?
I shall re-work my previous comment then... that's the last time I mention something off topic and vague here again. I shall save my nonsense for other forums.
It's a template designed by Khoi Vin, that's why its beautiful and unique. www.subtraction.com
it sounds like you paid him up front... if so, that's probably a lesson as well.
Show HN: How can you make your screencasts, tutorials 'donatable'.
The requirements between most of the engineering roles do not differ that much. A college degree isn't required actually. For engineering, we want somebody that has demonstrated an understanding of CS fundamentals which can be shown through their work at other startups/companies or through their college degree. We've interviewed engineers that do not have a college degree and have actually outperformed others that did possess a college degree. We'll rectify the requirements to reflect this accordingly. Thanks for pointing this out.
Hey Sam, by any chance, were you at UT (University of Texas) last week? I attended a Tech Talk by the Photos team. I believe Makinde was there.
Cryptic Crosswords, unlike other crosswords, have specific structures to their clues. You can't read the clue as its written, you have to 'de-crypt' the clue to understand what it is saying.

My wife bought a short book (probably from Amazon) that explains how these clues work, and that information makes all the difference in how to proceed.

Before I understood this point, these were very frustrating to me.
No idea honestly. Our company has that "gold support" thing, so when something breaks, Dell dispatches a guy within a few hours. We deal only with Dell, not sure what is their employment/subcontracting structure is. I'm in Norway so it might be different anyway.
Isn't this like saying a doctor could make more money if they didn't have to waste years going to medical school?
People who have retired from productive labor are, by definition, not productive.

As for people on welfare wanting to work, that's unclear. Most (about 80%) poor people don't want to work [1] and I expect the ones who do work are less likely to be on welfare (though I don't have stats granular enough to prove this). Do you have a better estimate?

[1] http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2008.pdf
This sounded like a good idea until I saw the example domain names. Horrible-sounding and too long. I would bet on the hot domains to be brand-specific and not containing the word "marijuana".
Yeah. A more detailed post on the same topic for those interested: http://thecleancoder.blogspot.com/2010/08/why-clojure.html
The only good career advice I've ever had is this:

"If you're considering a job as a mechanic, don't ask yourself whether you like cars. Ask yourself whether you like lying on your back undoing bolts."
A bit light on detail?

How is that worth posting?
I can still quite easily pretend to be harj
Words of Wisdom for Writing a Business Plan |
"When you start your company, start it by doing consulting. (See, he already knew I’d caught the Bug.)"

Maybe I watched too much Wire, but when I read "caught the Bug", I assume he means HIV.
Maybe 1 reply in 25 is normal for most people.
Is this in Mountain View?
"21. Work from home as long as you can."

Why? My instinct is to get some sort of office, other than my living room, I can go to asap. I guess the advice this guy is giving us are things that worked from him. It might not work for everyone. Beware.
The lesson is probably that you're not good at hiring and working with contractors yet. If you think the solution is better legal agreements you're in for a very rough ride.
I've got a couple of car related websites that I'm planning to build soon, and having a web dev with some domain knowledge of the car industry in the UK would be really useful. If you're interested pop me an email and we can discuss further.
Thanks guys for the negative reviews :)
disc: www.videolla.com is my startup.

It allows you simply monetize your videos by selling/renting and other methods.

Now you can also accept donations and "pay what you want" for your screencasts and videos. I'd love to get some feedback and critics on these features and site in general. Thanks in advance!
DocumentCloud Users Make Ballot Design An Election Issue
Ah -- file-ashring it is, then. :)

Personally, I'm curious to know how many signups you'll get with such a very tight-lipped teaser. I would not have been able to make out the blurred text without the clue above.

Good luck!
Interesting. Thanks for the update. So the news is that they are merely toying with the idea of making $49/mo the new "cheap" plan. That would eliminate the free plan (do they still have that?) as well as the $12 and $24 plans.
Nice to hear that you're giving the matter some serious attention. I suspect you'll need a very good PR guy if you're going to try to build a reputation organically. Best of luck to you, absolutely.
Please, correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think their niche overlaps too much with paypal customers. So why would they market themselves as a direct competitor to paypal? Why would they, given this premise, advertise to paypal customers at all?

If you read the whole story you will get the impression they are paypal competitors - that is, unless you visit their website and read comments here. You will find out they are nothing like paypal and they won't replace it.

They're riding paypal disappointment tide cough diaspora cough yet they don't offer viable replacement.

There's been a lot of negative opinions about paypal coming from this very community but, in my opinion, if they position themselves as paypal competitor a lot of people will be disappointed in their offering right now.

Do you think it's a good way to market themselves? Or should they focus on their core audience via other channels? Or maybe paypal customers are indeed wepay's customers in the making?
Thanks for sharing that.

Out of pure curiosity, and for the betterment of all of us here, would you mind sharing your mistake? I accept, that you've grown for the better of it, and I'll promise not to be judgmental.
Let's make getting out of debt cool and fun to do ;)

I think personally that the biggest part is education. Here in Brazil a lot of people would benefit from such a service as well. If you need help at some point internationalizing it, please get in touch :).
It might be little late to check for affordability at the point of sale. Once your in a store your heart takes over your mind.
Grab a bottle of womens hair dye. The stuff for men leaves too many greys behind.
It sounds like you have learned a valuable lesson. I'm sure you'll do better next time. In general, yes, you write the contract, and pay no more than half up front. But before you get into all these contract details, the area to work on is figuring out who is honest & competent; and who is not. Try to be sure about that before you worry about contracts. Contracts only keep honest people honest; they're not much good when someone is out to rip you off.
Not sure you are aware, but the FTC recently wiped out the whole debt settlement industry by making it such that you can't charge upfront fees for debt settlement programs. Before that, debt settlement was one of the most lucrative verticals on the Internet.
Resolve any Telephone Number to its geographical location
The service enables to resolve any Telephone Number to its geographical location.
XMPP/Gtalk bot to easily access the service.
Browser plugin for easy access.
Yup. For me, a 4 year relationship (out of 13 of off & on + a great friendship) ended in bitterness, in large part due to startup stress.
This is relevant to your interests: http://ask.metafilter.com/55153/Whats-the-middle-ground-betw...

Also, the article didn't seem to suggest pussy-footing to me - rather, it seems to suggest that if you don't know someone very well, it's rude to ask/demand them for a large investment of time in order to help you. Sending a short e-mail vs. asking for a phone call isn't pussy footing around, it actually sounds a lot more direct to me.
How to Make Him Call You
Most people can't successfully do a startup on the side. Are you one of the people that can? Probably not...but maybe.
A really bad idea for a startup
Ubuntu 10.10 Desktop Wallpapers
The idea is intriguing. I have no reason to meet you guys, but hoping some serendipitous goodness will rub off from meeting some very talented hackers. Count me in, if you still have spots open.
Over 70 law professors call for halt of ACTA
Having used PayPal to process thousands of transactions for almost 8 years now, I've never once seen PayPal issue a refund for "no valid reason". You will always receive an email outlining why the funds are being placed on hold pending an investigation. You will also have the opportunity to respond to that investigation by providing whatever correspondence, log files, etc. you feel are pertinent to the investigation.

I Have also worked with many other payment providers (2checkout, authorize.net, AlertPay, WorldPay, FastSpring) and they all do the same thing.
The article is a little sketchy but I can relate to the issue that is being put across here. I work a day job (as a systems analyst) that I'm quite passionate about, and my "side project" is as an artist / illustrator.

To get suitable stretches of uninterrupted time outside of a 9-10 hour day at work, I have to be militant about influence on both time and energy on any given day. The energy one is the hardest one to manage, and it involves cutting a lot of people out of my life, specifically the "draining" ones.

I used to be the kind of person that would invest a lot of energy in trying to get other people motivated or help them through hard times, then I realised I had nothing left to keep my own life moving forward.

I stagnated for a period of about 2 years then drew the line and cut off anyone that I found repeatedly crashing in on my life looking for support without doing a damned thing to help themselves.

At this point in life, professionally I'm achieving about 2x-3x what I used to but my personal life is abhorrent. It's a trade I'm willing to make but something that will need to be balanced out as I get older, as I'm already in a circumstance where I have few non-professional peers what so ever.
This is both a) ballsy and b) going to buy DHH another few sportscars.

People should A/B test more, including consequential tests like product mix and pricing.
physical exercise (I swim a lot) and good fresh food is a great way to balance things out if you hack a lot.

Not saying it will stop the greying, but it will help you feel great.
Your comment reads like breathless Ayn Rand fan fiction.
I think a pod is a host, like wordpress.com is a host of WP blogs, hence a database per pod. A seed is an individual user account. The way I understand it, each seed can be encrypted so that even the pod owner can just look in the database.

The really interesting bit comes from key and information exchange between seeds. I agree it's going to be hard to explain all this succinctly to users. Theoretically, the goal is secure and decentralized social networking. One use case would say, a friend on another host can see your photos, but no one else on that other host. Can this ever be done in a foolproof and secure way? I can think of a lot of different things that can fail - malicious impostors, users setting the loosest security, revocation, but it might be good enough for a vast majority of users.
All that was not funded with money that appeared out of nothing. It was paid with money taken from people, and which would have been spent in even more productive things from their owner's judgement.
Which country is that supposed to be?

"However, the rest are long term scammers who build up reputation and than cheat over us."

Well you have that in the rest of the world too -- only they go by nobler-sounding titles of government agents, bureaucrats, commissioners...

"Reputation is VERY IMPORTANT in an economy with no court and police."

What's the problem here -- reputation can be earned, through quality, and should. The stronger it is, the less it can be shattered by drive-by morons who haven't built it for themselves yet (and if they had, they wouldn't need to).

"They also cause bank runs as people transfer their worthless money into something more valuable."

The corrective invisible hand at work, it sounds to me. Again, what's the issue?

"Contracts are entirely based on reputation and trust. Nobody want to go to a state court and waste lot of money on lawyer."

I think the western world will be moving to that direction as public services keep increasing prices and decreasing quality, as every coercive monopoly must, especially a high-deficit one.

Contracts in the end are always primarily based on reputation and trust, aren't they? And shouldn't they?
Yep, the software is generally terrible. Even the expensive stuff is laughably bad software. There could definitely be a market here.

I'm currently using SignCut. It might be called SignCut Productivity Pro - they seem to change the name when they release a new version. It's a pretty lightweight program and relatively easy to use. The difference between myself and most vinyl guys is that I create my eps files in illustrator while they generally rely on the vinyl software for both design and plotting. If the vinyl software stuck exclusively to plotting it would probably be of much higher quality.
Wonderful cause. I'd love to read about the tensions between your goal and the various business models that suggest themselves. You will succeed at your mission precisely to the extent that your users reduce their spending relative to their income. How will you create a mechanism that flows money to you and your users at the same time? Who pays (net) and why?
It's nice that you want to redefine elite, perhaps to include yourself. But I think he was quite clear he meant the ivy universities such as Harvard and Yale.
Lessons from Nokia: The idea of users as designers is a catastrophe
It depends. If he writes and supports all of his own programs and has success doing so it very well could be. Computers don't care, just as long as it compiles down or uses standardized interfaces.

If he plans to live a lot longer, hire a lot of employees, or collaborate with others on code, then your statement could be valid.
I think the phrase should be: "The last programming language I will ever learn - until the next one comes along."
Cool, I'll have to check this out too. I had no idea fellow UIUC students were hanging out on HN. I'm not particularly fond of the startup culture here (and Midwest in general) but I haven't given up yet!
Or a cathedral ... it all depends on your perspective.
MIT students meet with Boston area developers for code reviews
"In an innovative software-engineering class, students meet for regular “code reviews” with senior programmers from Boston-area companies."

I can't think of a better way for students to hone their development skills. It's also a nice way to create collaborations between the university and Boston's tech companies.
I've no idea on numbers, it was never quantified to my knowledge (and I don't think it really could be). However....

My former organisation had a collection of MI reports in their core application to let them track any number of sales metrics. These were all decidedly hard-coded and a pain to change; manually added to the menu screen via source code and linked in with Crystal Reports templates. Frankly I don't think anyone in the IT team liked using Crystal, particularly as the reports were largely just straight results tables.

Myself and a colleague were less than fond of this system to put it mildly. I had new business area I was supporting and they needed reports. So, we talked to them about what they wanted and how they'd use them. Discovered Crystal was just being used to export to Excel, so....

One database table was set up to let us bang in new reports without code changes. One class was added to format results sets from the database into a relatively tidy file in Excel.

Total time to do those two changes was, I reckon, less than the total time to add a couple of reports the old way, and gave much faster deployment of new reports. On top of this, over the next few months this business area gained more MI reports than the entire rest of the business put together because they were now so quick to produce. If they needed a new stat and we weren't backed up on something else they could normally get it that day.

Cost savings? New area, new function, almost impossible to quantify. But I'm sure we saved development cost just on the initial set they'd requested, I know we were this way able to automate some reports they were having to do laboriously by hand before and if they couldn't get more sales off the back of the increased range of stats they asked for and got then I'd be disappointed in the sales & marketing team.
The grass is always greener on the other side.

Of course "quitting your terrible cubicle job to start a business" is dangerous. It's a drastic, life-altering decision that could affect the people around you and/or your dependents. You also need to accept that you may not be happy chasing your dream of starting a company because there will certainly be more disappointments and more challenges along the way.

Find out what's important to you. For me, it's working on problems that I'm interested in and learning more than I could at my current job rather than a steady paycheck. I'm not willing to live with any regrets for not even attempting to do what I want to.

"I was struck by the normalcy of the respondent's jobs"

What job wouldn't be normal? If you're going to sample the general population, you're going to get normal jobs. Was he expecting everyone to be a CEO?

I recently quit my job to dedicate my time to building things I want to build and find out if the grass really is greener on the other side. I have a plan and a backup plan. I'll be satisfied knowing that I tried, and I'll learn a lot from it.
Yep, I'm a student here - for another few weeks ahhh!

Weird - according to what I'm seeing my email should definitely be in my HN profile... Can anybody else see it? Anyway, I'll shoot you an email.
Everyone who talks about the death of Microsoft and their lack of innovation has never met any Microsoft engineers.

The culture may be suffering a malaise right now, but they have a lot of money, and a lot of talented people. And they seem to be making many violent changes as we move away from the Windows/Office hegemony years, which is clearly the right strategy.

They may never have the robot-cars culture of Google, but they will always have a great-software culture.
I feel like the author tries to make an argument against an elite paradigm while still having trouble getting outside of it.

"Graduates of elite schools are not more valuable than stupid people, or talentless people, or even lazy people."

He would be better off saying that Graduates of elite schools can also be stupid, lazy and talentless. Instead he still reinforces the distinction that you're elite, or one of those three. Either way he comes out and says just that before or after the above quote.
Ask HN: What to do in Portland?
I'm going to be in Portland, OR for about 10 days or so, starting on 11/3.

I'd love to meet up with any hackers in the area. If you're thinking about applying (or have applied) to YC, I'm also happy to answer any questions / share my experience. (I'll buy the beer.)

Also looking for recommendations of things to do, groups to check out, etc.
isn't this what Nessus does?

also, i think there are lots of players in this area.
Top 16 Celebrities Before and Ater Plastic Surgery
Maybe they are pretty women, but as surely did not born with that pretty nose. Plastic surgery is becoming increasingly popular and easy way to stay young...
Lorendburton at gmail
> Because, you see, as soon as I saw Java, I knew I hated it. I have never written even a single line of Java code, not for money, and definitely not for fun. I think that I already knew, deep down, that it would change me, as a coder. For the worse.

That's just like how I've never been to Argentina, but I saw a picture of it in a magazine and knew for sure that I would hate the country. I had a feeling deep down.

/sarcasm
You can probably use a website such as http://bizfilings.com to incorporate Delaware C-Corp. No affiliation.
Depends on historians interpretations mostly -- as in any case there are instances that support your point and those that refute it, and there are historians who come to your conclusions and those that come to the opposite ones.

By necessity, local landlords and smaller communities were in a much stronger "competition of sorts" with their neighboring "jurisdictions", more effective than our grand nation states with their inter-national tax agreements. Some of them were nasty bastards, but the next one presumably less so. They seriously couldn't indebt themselves and keep raising taxes quite as abusively as today's nation governments do, the world over, and didn't. You do realize than sub-10% taxes were the default scenario in these times long past, and in many European provinces they were in fact paid voluntarily, for real armed protection services that could be denied if you chose not to pay them, but weren't forced to.

References / citations? Read Hans Hermann Hoppe's Democracy book, it's full of them.
Flockall Social Marketplace Branding