skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you're overlooking the work and talent that goes into producing this (Emmy Award-winning) show. Here is an excerpt from an article that takes a look at the behind-the-scenes routine to making a typical episode:

For the next hour, Stewart paces diagonally across a windowless eight-by-eight-foot room, sucking on an iced coffee and grabbing handfuls of candy. Projected in front of him on one wall is the current script; beneath it, at two keyboards, sit Kristen Everman, a production assistant, and Kira Klang Hopf, an indefatigable senior producer. Head writer Steve Bodow and executive producers Josh Lieb and Rory Albanese perch on small couches. As the studio audience files into its seats down the hall and tonight’s musical guests, Arcade Fire, tune their guitars in the greenroom, Stewart and his team go on a nonstop, rapid-fire jag that tears up and rewrites nearly three-quarters of the script. The typist transcribes, cuts, and pastes; as visual gags pop feverishly into Stewart’s brain, Hopf calls down to the art department, ordering up new video montages and a collage of an “Anchor-Me Terror Baby” to go with a reference to the “birthright citizenship” debate. Many of the new ideas will be scrapped only moments later. ... As Stewart speeds along, hours of work by writers and producers are cut, replaced by improvised digressions.

http://nymag.com/arts/tv/profiles/68086/index4.html
Seems to me like the quality of search results is declining too; the SEOs are winning.
Node.js versus Lua "Hello World" - Postmortem
I'm toying with a gmail chat backup/offline sync tool, calling it Gattic - gmail chats attic. PoC is ready, yet to glue it to the gui and resolve some issues with UI. http://appstokill.com
If you do iphone programming, the xcode update downloads are over a gig. For example.
Ask HN: Is the Mac App Store the Death of Homebrew?
Homebrew is wonderful, as we all know, but it calls itself the missing package manager for OSX, referring to the wonderful Linux package manager. And I agree, that is pretty much what it is. However, won't the Mac App Store do the same thing in GUI form? Will there be apps you can install with homebrew (or other pm's like it) that you can't install with the app store, or vise versa? Is the Lion eventually going to eat homebrew?
I'd say the harder you think, the harder it gets.
Depends on where you are (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_hour#Backlash)

Happy hour has been illegal in Massachusetts since 1984.
This is potentially a step backward for security. Apple had the right idea of providing Flash and Java through the System Updates mechanism. They have just historically failed to be timely with security updates.

Putting security updates in the hands of users is a recipe for no security.
Is Mark Twain's 100-year-old+ autobiography covered by copyright?
Tell HN: Fun side project pebkac-stories
I've been a long time lurker on HN, though, not giving my value in comments but I visit the site on a daily basis. I plan to share all my upcoming sideprojects with the community.

This one might get my karma further down but we needed a perspective on site we started for people to share their day-to-day pebkac stories: http://www.pebkac-stories.com

Site is just on a simple wordpress template...we'd like your feedback.
I'm not a "successful entrepreneur", but I have failed quite a bit.

Your biggest problem: taking eight months to "launch". If it's not sellable after a week, why spend eight months on it? You should start making money as soon as possible.

That means making the simplest, fastest-to-develop product and putting it out there. Don't change a thing until you have paying customers giving you feedback. If that day never comes, move on, and take your savings with you.
Are you under the impression that a random key fits a random lock?
Pinkyslang, like urban dictionary for hand gestures
One word: simplify.

Once you've got that in mind I recommend using Fireworks for mockup. It has easy to use vector tools for creating layouts, trying different colors, manipulating fonts, etc.
Maps for iOS has a native implementation of Google Street View. It's much better than the desktop version, so I don't even use Flash for that.
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1807381
While friendship is nice, I don't think it's necessary. More important, IMO, is respect.
In over a decade of public speaking experience, the biggest bang for the buck I've ever gotten was about eye contact. First, do it. Second, pick three people in the audience (left, center, right) to do it with. Speak individually to each one, rotating to the next after about a paragraph, cycling as many times as required. While you're speaking to someone, they are your proxy for the audience: if she nods the audience is nodding, if she laughs the audience is laughing, if she looks confused the audience is confused. Adjust as required.

Here's how the audience perceives what you're doing: everyone will think you spent roughly one third of the speech talking to them, specifically, which is enough to be flattering but not enough to be creepy. The constant movement of attention means you keep moving [+] and don't stare at one person for the entire speech. Your audience will come away with a feeling of closeness and emotional rapport because you were "listening" to them during the speech via your proxies.

+ Don't give a speech seated or standing behind a podium/lectern: weak speakers have a tendency to hide, and the body language tends to come across as fidgeting even when it isn't.
Clickable: http://www.pebkac-stories.com
the fancy boarding school i went to had a monopoly on book-selling. Every year students would pay full price for textbooks in the fall and sell them back to the bookstore for a fraction of the cost at the end of the year.

I decided this was retarded and made a riskless market in textbooks at the end of my senior year by matching buyers and sellers and pocketing the spread (often >50%). I think I made like $800.
I've thought about this idea and 3 things should help:

1. we'll have a min. hourly rate of $40/hr.

2. by making it phone-based, we will be filtering out most non-US programmers

3. we intend to charge $2-5/lead once we get traction. This will probably make it unaffordable for folks that only compete on price.

I really don't want to attract elance/rentacoder-type audience which only cares about cost. My experience as a freelancer AND client has shown that you get what you pay for. I'd like higher end clients to match with higher quality coders.
Why I Deleted My Foursquare Account
10% is a considerable chunk. This is especially true for someone straight out of college who doesn't have a high income to begin with. You could argue that his/her expenses are lower than someone with a family, but the counter to that again is the income. Someone with a family isn't making a starting salary anymore.

Another problem I have with the 401k is that "most" people leave it in the hands of fund managers who we're told know what they're doing. I'm one of those that leaves it to a fund manager as well. The biggest argument for the 401k is that the market will perform X% by the time you retire based on historical data. This assumes that trend will continue and that you don't unexpectedly lose a chunk of it as many retirees did in 2008.

Another problem I have with the 401k is that it's incredibly illiquid. If you take money out before you retire you're strictly penalized.

I'm not saying don't invest in the 401k. I invest in it, but only enough to get my employer's full match. If someone is offering you free money, you take it. I'm suggesting that it's better to take control of your own finances and earn enough passive income to live on. The 401k money should be a bonus, not the salary.
Not sure if you're asking about indexing speed/size, precision/recall and the 2 or 3 dozen config options (separator/tokenizers/analyzers, stopword, index to ASCII or Latin-1, AND/OR search terms), etc.

What I recommend for precision/recall /config options is that your platform (rails, django, java, PHP) probably has plugin for SOLR and sphinx. Set up 2-4 indexes using the config options that matter most to you (for me they're AND-OR of search terms, and stopwords, which i use in lists of 0, 50, 100, 150). Then do a (sort of) A-B test where you see which records one index picks up that the other misses. (Most people
recommend not using any stopwords if you're only using one index, but i never got decent results using only one index)

P.S. Solr is the 800-pound gorilla, has the terrific Manning book, zillions of docs, etc. Sphinx probably covers most people's needs config-option wise(at least for European languages) lightning fast to index, and runs in 256M VPS, no tomcat/jetty.
Can you take the create table sql statements and create a complete web application? I.e. sql queries ( if there are foreign key relationships - automatically construct the inner joins ?) to insert, view, update then expose the SQL queries in the target language (my target language is C++) as an API which can be called from the Business layer, automatically construct the User interface ( for example - Web UI/ Text UI (ncurses ui) / GUI ) and retarget it for any database ? If you marked the fields in the create table statements as "search_key" can you automatically add the search facility in the sql stored procedure all the way up to the UI.

That's what my application is trying to do: Target language=C++, target UI = Web UI using wt, target database = postgres

git://github.com/neilxdsouza/codehelper.git

Currently it generates a makefile in the output directory which compiles with a Wt (witty) UI which can be run as a standalone web server. Still a work in progress - I've done it in C++ - but you need not be restricted to C++ (You should be able to emit code in any language once you have parsed the modified sql grammar which my parser already does). Sample inputs available in the inputs folder. To see the Web UI working you need wt (http://www.webtoolkit.eu/wt) and the extjs-2.1 library
How not to Pitch To Y Combinator (2006)
iPhone app design for a startup. They don't have a full time designer, so outsourcing it all to me has been working good for them.
It's not a losing game if you don't use your money to play (the coupons dageroth referred to), and you get to keep any money you win. (The 'hack' is you weren't supposed have ~€800 worth of coupons.)
Ask HN: Questions for a physical product startup?
We've been working on a physical product for a few months now and we're approaching our launch. I'm writing some articles about starting a PPS (physical product startup) and I'd like to include any questions you might have.
The Higher Education Bubble: Are Foreign Students the Answer?
And what is the marginal cost of printing a book? The difference between burning a CD or printing a book and sending a digital file is often overblown. If it costs $1 to burn a CD that sells for $10 or $2 to print a book that sells for $25, 90%+ of the money is still paying for other things.

Publishers are not as dumb as the pirates think. The publishers just actually have seen the numbers and know that if you take out the cost of printing, you really haven't lowered the cost of the book very much. If you take out the cost of burning the CD, you really haven't lowered the cost to the record label very much. So why should they be expected to now evaporate 100% of their revenue becuase their cost drop 10 or 20 or 30 percent? That is nuts.
Ha, I know that guy. He is completely awesome.
I touch type and I want as little "action" in the keys as possible as it allows me to type faster. But I'm the same with guitar too..
Social media packages
It would have been better to submit the demandprogress link a few weeks ago. The OP, however, is more recent, from a reputable organization most of HN already knows, and puts the issue in context with the upcoming election. I'm not sure if a link to demandprogress would have gotten as many upvotes, or a donation out of me, to be honest.
That's nice, but you're ignoring the rest of my post.

What if Gretzky never got better? What if no matter how much pushing and training and practice he never scored a goal? I'm sure there are many people out there like that. I happen to be one of them.
Essentially they were converting the euro coupons which they got for free to cash with the expected value of a bet on the roulette wheel (which is slightly negative giving the house an edge over time). For example, if the avergage expected value of the bet is -5% (the house edge), then for a single bet, on average, you would expect to get 95% back of your original bet amount. Since they got 10 euros each time for free they would expect to get back 9.5 euros on average over all their bets, given this house edge (which I made up).
Well...not everyone can grow up to be a 3 or 4 star general, either.
Windows 8 will be Microsoft's 'riskiest product bet'
I got a loan ($38k, 0% interest, 25-year term) from the Spanish government to pay for my master's in the US - after I graduated and had already paid for it (50%-off scholarship made it easier). I'm using this money to bootstrap.

Did a three-day cruise in the Baltic sea with my girlfriend for free after applying social engineering to a Swedish-only rewards program.

I love this stuff :)
i think at this point we need someone to build a site that aggregates all these cofounder finding sites.
http://beta621.com/projects/dayinpictures/
Dont' be ridiculous. For 3 of the last 4 years my sole income was from doing free software.

This is 100% spot on:

"In other words, your previous answer was a cutesy lie. You do not, in fact, earn a living giving away software. You earn a living getting people to pay you to to write software."

How can an author do that? There is absolutely no equivalence between the economic model around free software and the economic model around music and books. Free software makes money by giving it away to a lot of people, and getting money from the few people that need extra. Some people will pay for you to add a feature or provide support or make a change or put it under a different license or gaurentee uptime. Maybe the project matters so much to a person or group that they will pay someone to work full time on it. This is what makes FOSS go economically.

A book is a book for everyone. Once you have the book, what else could you need?

And to say that a side project and full time are the same thing is also ridiculous. I did a lot more coding on FOSS when I didn't have a 40-50 hour a week comittment to my FT job going on.
Just The best in socila media management
Your local community college probably offers linear algebra and may offer them at more convenient times. I only offer that if you haven't considered it.

Assuming no class is available, depending on how deeply you want to learn the subject, linear algebra is fairly accessible. It sounds like the introductory level stuff (University 200 level) is what is recommended in that article, so the good news is you don't need a class to learn it.

I don't think not having calculus would prevent learning it at this level. Personally I'd just look at reviews for linear algebra textbooks on Amazon and buy the best one. One thing I often do when trying to learn a subject on my own is a go to the University bookstore to figure out what materials I should start with.

Then just read the chapters and work the sample problems. When doing any matrix manipulation by hand (boring, but good to verify and help internalize understanding) it's easy to use that software to check results.

Basic linear algebra is one of the easier mathematics to teach one's self.
Accidental downmod; your post was at 2, wanted to upmod it to 3. Sorry.
Proggit has a mini-challenge up: Word ladders
I submitted a very nice article about PG by forbes,
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1820805 which went unnoticed. That tells much.
IronRuby and IronPython Opportunities
Ugh man I wish I did it this year! I really need to bring up my RoR chops...
Let x = cost of tax lawyer; y = money saved by utilizing little known tax law. If X is less than Y....
Kid actors have specific exceptions to the laws in almost all cases.
Put another way, Amazon also sells market space.
I'd like to have seen /usr/sbin/python (this is the one the OS uses itself) and /usr/bin/python (this one's for users). So you could patch them independently without straying outside of "official" RPMs.
You sound like a lovely person.
Yeah nice, but "cloud OS", what does that even mean? Syncing all your data with a remote server isn't really that new. I'm a Unix nerd and have been doing it with scripts for more than a decade. Sure, OS integration could always be better, but who wants to be locked in to a specific provider with all their data for an outrageous monthly sum?
In the same vein, you could use NX to do this with a remote X server, so you still have a GUI browser. I know I'm personally not very comfortable in a text browser.

I think this would result in reduced bandwidth usage, seeing as NX is designed to be usable over a dial-up connection and uses a number of compression techniques.
These taxes aren't on the commerce in the items. Rather, they are written as taxes on using the items in the state. The courts (including the Supreme Court) have decided that this is OK under the interstate commerce clause as long as the tax doesn't make goods from out of state cost more than goods from in state.

So, if a state were to try to enforce a tax on mail-order goods from out of state, but did not tax those goods when bought in state, then they would be in for a Constitutional smack down.

This gets interesting when a tax was also collected by the state the goods came from. What the courts have decided is that the destination state can only collect the difference between what the receiver paid to the origin state and what the tax would have been for a local purchase. Thus, if you buy a car in a state with a 4% tax, and then take it to a state with a 6% tax and try to register it there, they can collect 2%.

None of this, though, is the issue in this case. No one seriously disputes that Texas can make Texas residents pay this tax. The issue is whether Texas can make Amazon collect the tax at time of purchase for Texas. If not, Texas will have to ask its residents to track their Amazon purchases themselves and remit the tax they owe. That's what most states do now--and it is widely ignored. Most people, in fact, have no idea that they are supposed to keep track of the out of state purchases and pay state tax on them.
The iPad/Arduino powered Kegmate at Yelp[1] is the result of a Hackathon, which are regularly scheduled. The most recent one was expanded to two days because we found that one day just wasn't enough. It's a lot of fun and many people work straight through to power through implementing their ideas. A lot of interesting, good things have come out of these events. You can work on anything, you need to present it to all the other engineers at the end, and we encourage you to work with people from other teams that you might not normally get a chance to work with. For weeks before hand, people are coming up with ideas, drumming up support/finding other people who are interested in the same idea to work with, and judging effort to make sure they are working on something can be demoable at the end. I got a chance to get involved with doing some embedded development, which I'm interested in but don't normally get a chance to work on.

There's been a lot of fun things, and a lot of productive things. From Kegmate to a MUD that simulated the office environment to unexpected reporting tools that help out other departments.

[1] http://engineeringblog.yelp.com/2010/08/yelp-makes-beer-more... (previously posted on hacker news)
I met a guy who had a double digit Microsoft employee number. He ended up taking another job for like a $5k/year pay raise in the mid 80's.
MY ORIGINAL POST: "It's theft to get paid for one's work?"

UPDATE: wr1472 explains the situation below. Sorry for the confusion.
RedHat clearly needs better developers.
I LOVE this idea. Do any mainstream distros do this now?
Hosts Finder
Come on. The risk was very low.

1. Drive infront
2. Match the speed
3. Slowly reduce speed so that the car behind knocks
into your back bumper at a relative speed of like
1 mph. Maybe you feel a tiny bump.
4. Apply brakes

Yes it's impressive, but I'd be willing to bet it's not that dangerous at all. The very very worst case scenario is that you don't match the speed very well and get rear ended, which is pretty much the best type of crash you can have.
On the other hand, python, at it's very basic level, gets the syntactic mess that you or I are very familiar with, and removes all of it for first-timer's. There are no classes, no functions, just statements.

Also, for the "enter a name" and "guess a number" programs, for the beginner, everything I can think of will look effectively the same between the two languages. Furthermore, you can see the results right then and there when you're programming, rather than compiling, running, and repeatedly earning segfaults.

That said, the moment they begin to understand the flow of logic, they should move away from that language, so they can comprehend pointers/etc. This is, of course, all my opinion. Dijkstra would disagree with me, and so would many hackers, I'm sure, but wouldn't it be advisable for them to first begin to think in the minuscule steps, like a programmer does, before they have to deal with some of the stresses of C, and, even more so, classes?
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1823405
That was a dupe though:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1813445

You have to be fast if you want to submit anything PG says. It kind of reminds me of XKCD on digg a couple years ago.
Couches are standard issue in women's bathrooms. They're pretty darn handy if you're breastfeeding.
There are a few conclusions that we can draw.

Red hat engineers suck (I know this isn't true)

I'm a genius (this isn't true either)

Different types of software have different needs and we shouldn't generalize about all software development based on our particular niche. Writing code that runs on other peoples systems is much harder than writing code that will run on servers I control. Python and ruby are great for the latter. I've never done the former at the scale of redhat.
Writing code with a lot of collaborators is harder than writing it with a few collaborators.

What language do you prefer for your type of work?
1. How do you decide if it's worth it to file for a patent?

2. How do you find manufacturers?
i'm curious if there are any good examples of cofounders who worked well together and met through one of the third party founder dating approaches? or do most founders meet each other serendipitously (e.g. randomly at a coffee shop, some common interest group at school, dorm roommates, etc)?
Fitness Age Compared to Your Real Age
What about your next job? As long as education is done at the start of one's life, we can't look at its manifested usefulness for "young" people. You can maybe make preliminary tallies at 45-50, at which point I would expect the course of their life is better defined and the contribution of various periods can start being evaluated.
Any 'desktop' style keyboard with big fat keys that travel down more than a few mm.

I want as little key travel as possible. Typing on a desktop keyboard is slow and tiring.
2. by making it phone-based, we will be filtering out most non-US programmers

I think you underestimate the capacities of non-US programmers. The international shops (ie. the coders from India and Singapore who can charge a fraction of what a US programmer would need to) usually have access to great VOIP and 24/7 availability.
I think a lot of the HN crowd identify less with Tony Stark as an ass-kicker, but more because he's one of the few superheroes that you can truly say is a "self-made man" (pun unintended, but apt). He's amazing not because of some genetic accident, but because of his own intelligence.

I don't remember the character being as much of a jerk as RDJ plays him, but admittedly I only ever watched the cartoons as a kid, not read the comic books.