skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unquiet Earth by Denise Giardenia. I think I may have liked Storming Heaven, which this book is a sequel to a little better, but both are excellent.

They're both historical fiction centered around the coal mining industry in West Virgina. Storming Heaven covers the years during the WV mine wars/Battle of Blair Mountain, and Unquiet Earth spans years beyond that, up into the 1980's.

Another good one along the same vein is Strange as the Weather Has Been by Ann Pancake.
What Developers Think: Then and Now
Making Our Democracy Work, by Justice Stephen Breyer

The Koran (Just five minutes here and there. Honestly, I find it excruciatingly boring.)

The Elements of Statistical Learning (Just started.)

Plus fun stuff. I have a Simenon on my bedside table plus The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Not sure which is next.
Interesting response in the comments section

http://bureau.tsailly.net/2010/11/wow-adobe-is-really-cool.h...
The Federal Reserve Just Slammed Savers, And Gave A Huge Gift To The Banks
New infrastructure of web servers on boo-box social media ad server
In the past few months, boo-box social media ad system has undergone phenomenal growth, ad impressions rose by 85% in the last month alone! To handle this growth, we had to adapt and upgrade our systems.

Before going into further details, let me sum up our strategy: we constantly perform check-ups, use cache as much as possible, and take really good care of our database :)
Steps to happiness

1) Go to college (yet another monthly "should I go to college?" posts on HN sigh). I didn't go until my 20's either, and I've yet to regret going. I certainly regret going that late. The reasons to do it are numerous, but there's one important one that matters above all else, it's an investment that will pay for itself very quickly if you do it right, and will continue to make you money long long after you've finished.

2) Learn to work on stuff you don't want to work on. I know I'll sound old and crotchety, but that's what distinguishes adults from kids, adults spend most of their time doing crap nobody wants to do because it just simply has to get done. It take extraordinary discipline to do this, and you have to work hard at building that kind of discipline. It doesn't mean you spend your life in a joyless and soulless pursuit of meaningless trivia, it means you understand you have to do shit work sometimes in order to get to play on stuff you want.

3) Learn to pace yourself. You aren't burned out yet, trust me. Do what you are doing now, with twice the number of hours, plus a full course load, a mortgage, a couple car payments and a family, and you'll learn what burnout is within 4-5 years. But you should learn the skill, how to pace yourself, because it really is amazing how much stuff people can juggle if you learn to do it the right way. If you run around pumped to max with your brain on fire for everything, you will burn out in a few years.
> It's also a little game theory

There's certainly interesting game theory at work here, the problem is presenting Arrington's "play" as factual news. I would consider grellas' meta-analytical comment here to be HN material, while the TC article actually posted here is just drama.
In the late 90s there was an email service in India that mailed you a check if you logged in a minimum number of times a month (heady dotcom dayz). I received a few $5 checks - in Rupees that was a decent amount of pocket money for a student!

While playing around once, I figured that if you entered the answer to the "Pet's name" security question as "pet's name" verbatim, it gave you the password in plain text! And this for _any_ account.

It was fun hacking into email accounts. I tried to persuade the girl I had a crush on at the time to join the service saying she could get money if she uses the service. She never did. Woman's intuition I guess.
Maybe I shouldn't be so naive, but this whole firesheep release is very shocking to me. Facebook is very insecure, and it is incredibly scary that so many people trust Facebook's privacy and give Facebook so much personal information.
Ask HN: Why is Everyone Leaving Google?
Why is everyone leaving Google?

Google has been rated the #1 place to work for graduating MBA's for the past 5 years. Magazines like Forbes and Fortune talk about how great it is to work at Google. I always hear about their supposedly super perks - free lunches, 20% free time, etc. Yet, people seem in a rush to get out of there. There was a recent stat on HN that said 20% of Facebook employees are former Google employees.

What am I missing?
The situation he describes is a lot more common then you guys probably think.

Amazing things happen in a great partnership, but it's as rare as breakaway success companies, and probably highly correlated.

Get the founder vesting, also forget about 50%/50% it's the dumbest way to start the company.
The meta-analysis here in the comments is interesting. Considering grellas' comment is currently at the top, it seems many would agree with me.
I work in a company like that - and the system sucks - especially now in downturn.

Here's why: 1. Some managers (of sub-par mind you) teams scored whole their team as "excelent" - as to compensate for lack of company success. Then when the MGMT figured that out - they implemented ratio - thus again hitting the team with many excelent overachievers, etc... 2. Myself personally am often transfered from f-ed up project to a f-ed up project (since I have the ability to mostly turn them around or help to mitigate the damage) thus ensuring that I will never be compensated for the level of effort necessary to turn around a f-up.

This system just makes me sick - because I want to compete but I don't want for my collegues to suffer because of it - currently it just encourages teamicide. So this kind of scheme appears to demotivate over-achievers more than it motivates under-achievers.
Facebook is becoming Tecent QQ in US. (If you dont know abt Tecent QQ, please google it). It implements ideas from emerging companies and squeeze them out because they have the most important thing: 500 Million eyeballs.
They have one of the best websites I've seen. Fits 100% with their company self image.
Not sure which you meant, but they're both low. $2000!=£2000

My experience is that fussiness is inversely proportionate to price sensitivity. Now if a prospect tries to dicker over hundreds or tell me they "have a nephew who does this kind of stuff," I end the conversation as quickly as possible.

[edit: I say this as someone who, in the early days of the web, was one of those kids making websites by hand or with pagemill for $2000 a pop. I don't begrudge anyone doing this today.]
Vail (Colorado) is big enough to need an IT department and have a night life. Denver is a fun city but I agree with original reply that you should get into the mountains.

Utah has amazing skiing close to Salt Lake City, check out Backcountry.com: http://www.backcountrycorp.com/corporate/section/2/jobs.html...
The Once and Future King, by T.H. White.
Reading for half an hour before going to sleep really helps me clear my mind after a long day's work. Try to do it every evening.

Currently reading:

Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman - Yvon Chouinard (founder of Patagonia) - traces his journey from lifestyle business to super fast growth. Some excellent thoughts on leadership in there.

Also re-reading The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq. Highly recommended.
Not sure if school is worth the cost right now... but maybe try doing something outside of software development. Have you considered something in the social sector / volunteer work? One of the best ways to get more excited about life is feeling like you're really helping others and making a difference people's lives, especially people less fortunate than yourself.
This is actually how almost every large company works. Scale is 1 to 5, average is a 3, 2 is exceeds expectations, "Nobody ever gets a 1."

The problem is that the grading is done on a curve, so that for every 2 given out, someone else must get a 4. If you get a 4, you are considered below expectations, and must be put on a "personal improvement plan," or managed out of the team.

Because of this pressure, nobody wants to give out anything other than a 3. So they resort to stupid tricks like giving out "high 3s" or "low 3s" instead of 2s or 4s.

The desire to model employee performance with data and manage out the bottom 10% has a crushing effect on the morale of any small technically focused team.
I wouldn't spend too much time looking down your nose at Google's mistakes here, as piaw cautions that they're still a really great company to work for:

-At 1500 people, Google was more agile and less political than most 200 person startups!

- At any given size, Google was the best company in its class to work for.

- At its current size, Google is still more desirable an employer for engineers than Oracle, Cisco, Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, and many other well known names.

I think you'd find many similar stories at other software companies if you applied as focused of a lens at them.
I just read Young Miles. (just as in taking up the last 4 or 5 evenings on the ipad). It's hilarious, chaotic, and sweet.

Check it out: http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/24-CryoburnCD/CryoburnCD/ - Most of the series from the CD that Baen is distributing with the book, free and distributable, in lots of formats.
Is "Politics is reality" really an excuse for such behavior, though?
Co-founding is often spoken of as if it's a binary state as Mark points out, it's not. A cofounder who's not 50% committed is a more expensive and less use than a 100% committed first employee. First employees take salary though which takes investment and investors require co-founders.

It's a shame that the data on this is going to become more and more sparse over the next few years as investors locks in on multiple co-founders and single founders become more and more rare.
Man you must really enjoy paying bills and filling out paperwork and other wonderful, fun, life affirming activities (haggling over a car, getting sick, stuck in traffic, selling stuff). 'cause you can't get through life without that.
This made me realize just how strongly Google is tied to the success of 'the internet' vs the traditional desktop. There isn't much in their strategy that doesn't make sense if you stop trying to figure out how it ties into seach/advertising and if you see how it just enhances the internet as a whole.

edit: of course enhancing the internet increases the number and frequency of people interacting with their search, adwords on pages, and feeling comfortable with web apps (helping create lead for Google Apps B2B)
do you _really_ want to work for those companies, though?
Holy crap. These are the guys who run my driver's testing? I had no idea that the guy checking my eyesight was part of a group that supports the British Armed forces.

Talk about bizarre.
The Big Short - Michael Lewis
I am pretty sure that quite a few of those 20% went to facebook just because of the pre-ipo stock options. Others may look for a better career in this emerging company.
Living vicariously just doesn't cut it. You should seriously do it. We can tailor it so it's not too scary - email me: jasonyshen at gmail
Hm I have to think what kind of community it could be.. it's perhaps easier for sandbox type of games.
BASIC Computer Games Book, published in 1978
I think his point was more that you can't expect anyone to be genuinely enthusiastic and passionate 100% of the time, even if they're doing something they love. There are times when part of the work sucks even if you're working toward something awesome. Sometimes the periods of suck can last much longer than you'd like.

I love my job, and I'm quite enthusiastic about it most of the time. But on some days I just don't feel good, and sometimes things like meetings can get annoying. Just because I don't enjoy it 100% of the time, all day every day doesn't mean I'm pitiful or that I'm wasting my life.
Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb - Rhodes

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness - Thaler & Sunstein

Factorization Methods for Discrete Sequential Estimation - Bierman
I probably have bookmarks in 20+ books but these are at the top of the pile:

The Art Of Probability , Richard Hamming. I find prob/stat frustratingly hard to master. This book is clearing up my confusion chapter by chapter. As an engineer this book appears to be written for someone with exactly my level of knowledge which helps a lot.

Conspiracy of Fools , Kurt Eichenwald. Very entertaining ... shining examples of what not to do.

Security Analysis, 1934 Edition, Graham and Dodd. They authors are exquisitely clear thinkers. I don't know how useful the financial information is because it is 80 years old.
A Step toward Holographic Videoconferencing
A word of advice from a gamer and a marketer...don't start building the hype machine until you have something to show and hook people with.
Where's the "meets Groupon" part? Look exactly like just Foursquare to me...
Thats right, the least we can do is figure out, what to do once its out. A development-blog can't hurt either I guess. Perhaps for some people it's interesting "how games are made", perhaps targeting a more non-techie crowd.
Why would google hire lots of MBA's?
Seems like an MBA wouldn't count for much at google.
Digg brings back the bury button
:( No hyphenation, kerning or leading. Knuth and Liang solved this problem decades ago. I dislike like having to hack it with Javascript. That lack is what makes web typography ugly, even in this demo.
Just like Microsoft and Yahoo, the perception that "everyone is leaving Google" is wholly out of line with reality. A few big names do not everyone make. Don't worry about it.
Vermont. But I'm biased.

http://burlington.craigslist.org/wri/1989157735.html
http://www.smuggs.com/pages/universal/jobs/current.php
etc...
You're more likely to remember friend's birthday if it's close to your own
The high-school I went to served pizza and french fries regularly. The food was extremely unhealthy and to my knowledge that hasn't changed much. It's far easier to deep fry a few hundred pounds of tater tots than to make a few thousand sandwiches and sliced apples.

I doubt either option was fairly healthy for the students, but I wouldn't use a high-school cafeteria as the epitome of healthy living.

Also for some reason the rich kids at my school typically brought their own lunch and ate more natural food than the middle-class or the poor kids. Anecdotal at best, but that was my experience.
Here are some links. I don't have a rock solid answer regarding Google's TOS for this, my apologies.

Async Adsense:
http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/2506/is-it-pos...

Async Analytics:
http://www.ditii.com/2009/12/01/google-analytics-asynchronou...
PS - IMHO, I don't think collapsible comments are needed in your app -- hacker news threads rarely get to the size/nested-ness of reddit threads.
Is "close to 50%" the going marginal tax rate in general? I calculate ~30% federal + ~10% California + possibly ~6% social security & Medicare to get that number; did I miss anything? (current grad student with a marginal rate a lot closer to 20%, haven't had the joy of full-on taxes yet)
Things to Remember while Buying Term Papers
As preparing a term paper takes much time away from the busy student, he or she will opt to buy term papers. Although this task is easier than that of writing the term paper, students should be aware of the things they should remember while buying term papers.
Metaprogramming Ruby, by Paolo Perrotta
The Girl on the Boat, by PG Wodehouse
Would love something like this for nginx - Apache's just using too much memory.
The search engines will spider/cache the resized version, so people looking for a higher resolution version, may skip over your site?
I read 2-3 dissertations per week, and just as many research papers daily.
Plan to get this next time I go to the library. Good?
Easy.

Carwoo for a Civic. Woops, wasn't happy, refund me.

Carwoo for a Carolla. Compare prices, get Carolla if you want, or get a refund and repeat step 1.
I'm having trouble getting any work done knowing it's waiting for me in my backpack.
Facebook, practically by definition, is for the advertisers. Advertisers pay their salaries, after all, and the users are the product that Facebook is selling them.
What you're selling is essentially the illusion of uncertainty.

Let's assume for the moment your target market exists, and there are a significant number of people trying to convey a message to a particular person whilst leaving them free to act as if they hadn't received it.

There are various ways people can do this already with varying degrees of subtlety/anonymity/probability, from leaving a note somewhere the intended recipient might look before someone throws it away to "accidentally" copying them into an email about them to having a very loud conversation just outside their office. Or you could type "there's a 10% chance that you will receive this email" at the bottom of an email.

The only situation in which the latter approach is more likely to convince the target that you're unsure if they got the message is if they believe the words "there's a 10% chance that you will receive this email" actually means there's a 10% chance they received this email. Most sane people won't believe it just because it's written down.

So ultimately, what people are paying for is the credibility of "there is a 10% chance that you will receive this email". Unfortunately if your business model revolves around this statement often being a lie, the key feature of your email has no credibility and therefore no value.

It might be an interesting psychology experiment, but it isn't a business.
I am in the same boat. Not sure what to make of it. Good, bad, or neither.
Before trying to read Infinite Jest, try to read all his other essays (and short stories). This is really helpful.

Be OK with the fact that you really aren't going to understand what happens the first time though, like at all. The book -must- be read twice, the first time in a bit of a haze, since even basic acronyms aren't expanded till 200 pages after they are first used. Its enjoyable the second time because there are hundreds of references you'll get from events that are expanded upon much later.

It really is a fantastic book, and its not nearly as confusing as most people think when read twice. :)
What I love about your comment is that it has an actual speed.

The answer on this is simple. Take random groups people. Give group swype, give another group this. Train them for 10 minutes and test them. Report speed and error rate, bindfolded and normal. The train them for another 20 minutes, retest, then 30 minutes a day for 5 days and retest.

I doubt any group will get to 30wpm blindfolded.
The question is, is it really worth 2000 dollars? Hell is it even worth the 700?
Even if they didn't need that much money, I would say offering prizes for merit-based performance was a nice side-effect. The amount that they needed was the amount required for N chess sets, while the amount that they were able to put to good use was significantly greater. And even if* they were essentially taking money from other clubs, who's to say that those other clubs would have used the money as effectively?

*My reading of the article agrees with the other commenters that this is not the case.
I don't think it's really like groupon. The core of groupon isn't a deal, it's a surge of attention pushed out to a large group of subscribers.

Your point about assimilation deserves some discussion though. I don't think facebook wants to buy any location based companies, it's in a good position now to just be the underlying platform. They don't have a whole lot to gain by buying these companies anymore.

But deals and offers is mostly a sales and support problem, and that's the kind of thing facebook /might/ build through an acquisition.
the choice of some of these benchmarks is weird. they have a bunch of cpu-bound benchmarks. why exactly would you expect these to change as the kernel changed?

Scheduling is a non-trivial task, and the kernel scheduler underwent significant work during 2.4 and early 2.6. I think the reason those graphs are so boring is because the tests involve single process/single thread benchmarking.
LYAH is great. For those who are interested, there is a library, 'syz' (Scrap Your Zippers), which provides a generic zipper for any data type, even mutually-recursive types:

http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/syz/0.2.0.0/doc/...

Its internals are pretty interesting if you've ever thought about implementing a generic zipper structure. For example it uses Typeable to reify the focus type.

I'm finishing up my own generic zipper library which I hope will be simpler and more useful than syz.
So basically, you can apply if you're an existing startup, but if you are, you need to be launching a new feature.

Special favor is given to new companies with 2 customers or less who want to launch at SuperConf.
I remember typing in some of these on my Commodore 64. Those were fun days!
Ask PG: PG would you consider a 10 minute phone call for a $100 donation of the charity of your choice? I can't fly out to Palo Alto.
For reference, I'm 19 and a freshman in college.

From my perspective, college has a lot to offer. Research, the chance to meet important people in the field, the chance to meet interesting people out of the field. These influenced my decision to be here (though I hadn't actually considered the possibility that college wasn't a requirement).

If you know your interests, I think going to college (for a degree) is a great way to go, because you can learn cool stuff full-time and meet people like you. Clearly you thought you did know -- but it turns out that working as a webdev wasn't the answer.

Given that, you probably need to talk to people who aren't the people you identify with. My vote is to take some time to find your interests, by traveling or being a bum on the streets of New York. Talk to everyone you meet about their interests. (Make a point, of course, to meet anyone and everyone you possibly can.) Hopefully you'll find that someone will infect you with their own passion.

If none of those float your boat, then get a part time job (one that you won't tie to your identity -- it's hard to get burnt out from being a waiter, even if it sucks to do) and make enough to pay your living expenses while you take classes in any subject you can think of at a community college. (Not for a degree, but to see if anything catches your interest.)

Whatever path you need to take, find _something_ that interests you. And then do it.

If it turns out later that web development (but only cool projects) is really what you want to do, then do it. If you still can't do it as a salaried position, other HNers have recommended going freelance. I'd say either that or keep your non-identity day job while you build shit on the side -- just make sure that one of your projects is making you enough money to put something away, because you won't be able to live forever on next to nothing.
One more powerful combo is R+Java+C. UI, integration and massive data processing in Java, R for prototyping, plotting and model fitting, and C if you have numerical simulations.
I'm still leery of location checkins. It'd have to be a pretty good deal to be worth it.