skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> whatever income I get from rent+savings will buy food for 2 years.

Most people I know would consider that to be a pretty good financial situation, 'broke' is the opposite of that.

What you should do if you can is as long as you haven't found extra income (though the response in this thread suggests that won't be a problem for long) to cut down any and all expenses that are not an absolute requirement. That way you extend your runway while it still matters, if you do that when the two years of savings are almost up it will be too late. Like that you might be able to stretch two years in to two years and change.

Another thing you could do it to consider to liquidate your asset, the house you've got and are renting out. I realize it is a source of income for you, but it also represents another chunk of savings. Dont do that until you absolutely have to though!

Best of luck with all this, I hope your fortunes will change.
Our mistake - actually the total prize money up for grabs is over $45,000

I'll throw up the updated number after some sleep!
(63) Chattical
reminds me of my own project a while back:
http://askcue.com
feel free to try it.
As a sidenote: if I remember correctly I had the idea around december in 2009.
I guess those people won't be out of work for a long time though. Auctions are booming in China, just not eBay ...
c#/.net is getting very popular too, seems to be almost as common as java (in job postings) these days.
Not over the past 100+ years, no, but between two years ago and two years from now, yes. Further, this isn't a change that is not "optimal for every single [one] of them," this is a change that is significantly suboptimal for the majority of students.
Calling it an “HTML5 website” is a bit of an overreaction IMHO.

Other than the DOCTYPE, there’s not much “HTML5” to it. It’s just good old HTML, JavaScript and CSS, wrapped together in a document that happens to use the HTML5 DOCTYPE.
Cisco announces intent to acquire LineSider
A Study of Trends in Mobile Design
I would point out that the ant is precisely in the middle of the scale between small and large. Think about that, grasshopper.
India gets HP touchscreen Linux PC
(66) Unbrainwash

Isn't this Fox News... Fair and Unbalanced :)

On a more serious note... I wonder if it is possible to measure bias of each news source and use some sort of language processing to combine bias.

Google is certainly thinking about a similar topic... see yesterday's article about sentiment analysis: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/12/being-bad-to-your-cus... (it was on HN too somewhere...)
The Pirate Bay co-founder to launch an open and distributed ICANN alternative
Throw up as in (puke)?

Makes me sound like a hard-ass manager... :(
They're free, if you want fully worked out business plans instead of sketches that's fine too, but I'll have to charge you by the hour or something complicated like that.

Would you consider the 'fun little weekend hack' called 'reddit' a serious business ?

How about optimizely ?

Gazehawk ?

Twitter ?

From tiny start-ups big companies may grow. Which one that's usually the bigger question but all of them started out reasonably small, something that three guys could probably hack out in great detail in a few weeks at best, maybe even just a weekend.
But if the ex-employee had been a net asset, they wouldn't be laying that ex-employee off, unless they were liquidating the entire company.

I've worked as an executive in large organizations and this is flatly untrue. Here's a few situations I've seen or participated in:

- Scrap the project. Get rid of everybody who is assigned to it.

- Not happy with group's performance? Don't fix the group's management, scrap the entire group.

- Product X isn't doing well in the market. Fire everyone who is on the product X team, and acquire the company that makes product Y as a replacement.

- Our access to cash is down, as is our bottom line. Reduce your budget by 20%, again, while maintaining coverage. (read: keep your cheap, shitty people, fire your good ones.)

- We're not starting many new projects. As each existing project comes to a conclusion, get rid of all the resources.

When you're trying to close a large shortfall you just accept that some good people will be let go for stupid reasons, and that's acceptable.

So if you've been laid off, and some ignorant jerk tries to tell you that it means you weren't a net asset, ignore them. Whether it happened during growth, decline or turnaround, it's possible you were let go because you were dead wood; but it's also entirely possibly that you are fantastic but were let go anyway.
If this is the future of the web count me out.
Software to secure your sensitive information on your mobile device from my reading of it. It's obviously aimed at people who aren't interested in implementation details. Wether or not it uses encryption is an implementation detail.
Under construction and AppStore I assume.
You're mixing up two concepts.

By "booted 64-bit", you mean running a 64-bit kernel. It doesn't matter if you're running the 32-bit or 64-bit kernel from a userspace app's point of view - 32-bit and 64-bit userspace apps can run on either kernel. All Apple's apps that ship with Snow Leopard are 64-bit (Safari included). A 64-bit Flash would run in 64-bit on all Intel 64-bit capable systems regardless of kernel - reducing memory footprint, because the 32-bit frameworks, currently loaded to service 32-bit Flash* would not need to be loaded into RAM any more.

If you're interested in which userspace apps you run are 32-bit vs 64-bit, Activity Monitor has a "Kind" column - or in 'top' in the terminal, the 32-bit apps will have a '-' before their name.

The 'extensions' you refer to are kernel extensions. By default, Snow Leopard still runs, on all systems, with a 32-bit kernel. A 64-bit kernel is available (and will presumably be the default in the future), but most third-party kernel extensions are shipped only in 32-bit form. Unlike userspace apps, 32-bit kernel extensions can't be run in the 64-bit kernel, so Apple still uses the 32-bit kernel by default so that people's kernel extensions will still work.

* and iTunes if you're running it, but that's another story...
So the fact that people are using HTML5 to do what people were doing with Flash ten years ago is somehow interesting?
I've seen a few things online that sound similar to this idea; http://editthis.info/choose_your_own_adventure/Main_Page is one; they mostly follow the "Choose Your Own Adventure"-meets-Wiki route.
How Facebook’s bots crawl URLs that include a hash fragment
Can't upvote this enough. Somehow our idea of 'wealth' has become very skewed in the West. I see the same with my family in China. They have savings, are able to buy e.g. a house in cash while a lot of my family & friends in Europe are living hand to mouth, practically wage slaces. A stash big enough for 2 years of living is pretty ok in my world. And your stash can probably be explained by exactly the kind of thinking you're doing right now: planning for an emergency 2 years ahead of time. If you continue like this you'll be fine. Best wishes to your family!
How do you master time?
Handy tool rtpaste, Paste to and from Request Tracker tickets
Mixlr Exits Beta – Now Targets Everybody Not Just DJs And Musicians
full text : http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/12/02/mixlr-exits-beta-now-targets-everybody-not-just-djs-and-musicians/
They’re not using any of the new HTML5 features (except the DOCTYPE). It’s all HTML, JavaScript and CSS.
A few recruiters and HR departments, that I've seen, do value technical certifications. Depends on the job.

Personally, I'm not a firm believer in valuing technical certifications as worthless. Overly valued by some, sure, but not worthless.
5 Monkeys
Hrm. I got a 0 but it didn't tell me what that means. Am I neither lowly nor a rockstar?
Ask HN: Ad networks for desktop apps?
Dear HN'ers,

I'm working on a desktop app that I plan to distribute using a freemium model:

- Free version: ad-supported

- Paid version: (small monthly amount), with no ads, and some additional features

But after searching for a while, there seem to be very few ad networks for desktop apps out there. We have ad networks for the web, for mobile apps, but nothing on desktop.

What are your thoughts on this? Any ad network to suggest? Any suggestions on my business model?

Thanks!

greg
How Social Media can Impact your Job Search
Social media has proven to be the Internet trend of the 21st century. From the social sharing of Facebook to the micro-blogging of twitter, to the business network LinkedIn, Social media is vast becoming an integrated part of our lives.
80% of Android phones accessing the Android market, not 80% of phones in use.
That seems a little harsh, he obviously has something interesting as it is on the top spot of HN, although he should have finished the product first.

Coming soon usually elicits the same response,

...yawn... move on.
Ask HN: Review my Startup Shodhel.com (Create and access lists from SearchBox)
http://www.shodhel.com/

Although there are many apps that let you keep list of things (workflowy, thingist, notational velocity for MAC) it lets you access lists right from search box.

With special syntax (<list name>.<item to add>) you can add items to existing list. Or access existing lists with <list name>. This <list name><dot><item> syntax is optional after first use.

Using it as default search engine is privacy safe and doesn't increase search latency.

Hope you like it. Please leave your feedback.

@Workflowy, Notational Velocity users: Why you won't use this?

@Vimperator Users: Would you like to access something like vimperator from search box? It won't need plugin install.
I was expecting a community safety message about the dangers of walking in the middle of the road at night
This is the inherent irony of meta-commenting, and one of the reasons why many online communities try to either discourage or moderate it."Don't X!" "Don't tell me not to X!!" "Will you two stop talking about X!!!" And so forth.
I'm using Posterous for my company blog and Blogger for my personal blogs. I'm happy with both of them.

I've used wordpress and livejournal in the past but wouldn't really use them for a new blog.
Clicky : http://www.shodhel.com/
Isn't it obvious? Drop your iPad on the floor; it won't fall exactly downwards, but will veer ever so slightly off course towards you, and the amount of displacement is proportional to your mass. Done.
thank you for the advice. I sent you an email. take a look when you get time.
sounds exciting! might take a look myself
U-M researchers identify protein essential for cell division in stem cells
I would make the list creation possible without registering, since you're not offering facebook connect or twitter
When a Landfill is Your Livelyhood
One Angry Customer Caused Google To Tweak Their Search Algorithm
I certainly agree that's possible, but not everyone finds the road rosy. See here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1961429. Better to overestimate the difficulty and be pleasantly surprised than vice versa IMO (especially in the context of a 6 month deadline).
I'm just wondering how well this copes with transitive includes, where an included headerfile includes a removed headerfile which then makes the compilation work.

This sounds like it could introduce some pretty tight and confusing coupling between modules due to such transitive includes.
I'm skeptical of this. I see no evidence that the statement "10,000 hours of practice is the minimum necessary to achieve expertise" is anything but a tautology.

Excellence is vaguely defined at best. Perhaps the people that dedicated 10,000 hours to developing a skill are sufficiently rare that we recognise them as experts simply because few other people have put in so much effort.

xiaoma mentions Phelps as an example of someone who has a biological advantage over other swimmers, even though they must put in comparable effort/hours of practice. I imagine that if Phelps had been an amateur swimmer, racking up only 1000 hours of practice, his biology would put him at a considerable advantage over similar amateurs. If an objective definition of an "expert swimmer" existed, I imagine Phelps would have obtained that level with significantly fewer hours of practice that any others. I think the biological/mental differences will dominate at every stage, not just at the top level.

The article mentions "scientific research", but does not cite any.
sent you a mail. please check when you get free time.
Interestingly, since the API costs money to use, they could actually make a killing from this. looking forward to the end of this.
personally I found it really crappy user experience.

I'm on FIOS, and it loaded extremely slow. So for 20 seconds I was staring at just the top image and the person's icon...and wondering how crappy they are to have so much black space.
Ignoring the quality of the original question ("Could you have passed?"), an equally good follow up would be:

Could someone from 1895 have passed an 8th grade test today?
Milestones to Startup Success
Customer Development is Not a Focus Group
Another link bait headline from Wired. Recall "The Web Is Dead"? http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/all/1
Happens to the best of them. What really matters is how deep the attackers got beyond the FTP server, how quickly they can recover, and how quickly they can get patches out to all users / versions affected.
To be honest this sounds like a pretty typical gig. When you're rushing to get code together short cuts get made - paths get hard-coded, documentation doesn't get written.

Your gripes seem fairly minor. Not sure how something compiles in eclipse but not outside it (env variables, classpath, VM args?). And spending a day getting set up seems pretty rapid.

1) I don't think the business is going to crumble as a result of these issues. In fact it sounds quite the reverse, what with the investment and sales the business is making. If you quit they'll hire someone else who's maybe a bit more realistic about what real-world code bases look like.

2) You don't want to starting whining too early. Go with the flow, make incremental improvements as you go forward.

3) No. This will be a big job, and many things will have been doen the way they are for a reason. You risk annoying all your colleagues this way, and potentially creating more work when stuff breaks.

4) As I said above, this sounds pretty typical. Knuckle down. You are after all moving to a new language, it will take some time to get up to speed.
LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman: Five Lessons for Entrepreneurs
Might want to start it scrolling automatically, or otherwise do a better job of communicating that there's anything to see on the page.

I got all the way back here thinking it was just a pretty splash screen, after trying for 30 seconds to click on things above the fold with no success.

Only after reading comments did I go back to see if there was anything I had missed. I suspect a lot of people clicking through will simply hit the back button and remember nothing but having seen a slow-loading picture of a face.
Edinburgh outsourcing firm helps with everything from tweets to Christmas greets
Your Idea Isn't Good Enough
As stated it's not really using features of HTML5. I'm curious though, what do you want to see in HTML5 that would actually impress you?
I wouldn't want to visit that site regularly. It looks nice, but it isn't easy to navigate.
Your Roger Corman Future
I don't know about now, but my father spent Y2K in an AT&T bunker as "essential personnel." So my guess is they are probably still in use. Not necessarily because of the nuke resistant part so much as self contained with generators and on-site security measures.
True. It seems HTML5 is the new way of saying "Not using Flash".
Myths of Starting Up, Busted here
Music piracy is not over.[1]

[1] http://thepiratebay.org/top/101
MOJO Cyber Bundle – $579 Worth of Items for ONLY $30
Do you remember our friends from MOJO themes? Yep, the first digital marketplace to launch a collaboration tool for designers and developers to share work and revenue. Well, this time they launched a super Cyber Bundle!! So we invite you to head on over the official Cyber Bundle page to checkout all 18 of the items included.
Wow, I had no idea these were available to be purchased as private homes/land. I now have my new f-you money goal! :)
The Technical Debt of Hiring
Optimize Your Website Sooner Than Later
Advanced A/B Testing Tactics That You Should Know
In that case, I'd highly suggest learning the ins and outs of ruby or python. I'm sure you could get an offshore job with a company for that sort of compensation, or do freelance work to get in that range. Good luck!
I find the mix of languages found in the top 100 interesting. Smart is obviously a big factor in determining the winners. Speed was a factor in the contest as well, with a 1 second per move time limit. Based on that, I'd expect to see the faster of what Paul Graham calls "languages for smart people" near the top. Lisp, Haskell, ML and Lua come to mind. That didn't happen. What follows are observations about things I found interesting, with no specific conclusion:

Popularity in industry seemed to be a big factor, with Java, C++, C# and Python making up most of the entries in the top 100.

Speed wasn't that important: Python made up 20% of the top 100.

Some popular languages, such as Javascript, PHP, Ruby and Perl did quite poorly. I'd blame it on speed, but Python did quite well.

New and exciting languages I'd expect the sort of people who enter programming contests for fun to like were underrepresented. Only 6 people used Go, and 4 used Scala.

Unless I'm mistaken, the contest was limited to supported languages. F#, Clojure, Lua and Scheme don't appear because they weren't supported, not because nobody wanted to use them.
The needs for good software testers are greater now than they've ever been. There's more software, there's higher demand for fast turnaround and agile production code. Big companies still don't devote enough resources to testing so anyone who can make a lot out of a little is highly valued.

If you enjoy software testing (and not everyone does), but if you really do enjoy it, become more technical. Read books - anything by James Whittaker, for example. If you want to focus on web applications: learn Selenium in-and-out (it's the best around for testing webapps); learn Ruby to drive Selenium (Java also works, but for speedier scripting and turnaround, I think Ruby is better); learn how the web works (HTTP and what goes on under the hood) and understand web services (RESTful architecture versus SOAP versus RPC) and how to test web services (easier than applications, really).

If you're not into web applications, follow the same pattern: testing tools, language to automate those tools, domain knowledge.
> By default, Snow Leopard still runs, on all systems, with a 32-bit kernel.

The 2010 Mac Pros boot in 64-bit mode by default.
Title is a little silly. What FTP server did you EXPECT them to be running?
The scrollbar on the right wasn't a bit of a give-away?
While this statement is in alignment with conventional wisdom, I think things are changing (or should). Corporations are legal entities and can/should have a voice just like any other person. When folks start watering down the corporate voice to "only be positive" or "not admit fault", they are aggravating the problem that this blog post is illustrating. There are enough faceless corporations with thousands of powerless minions doing the work of "corporate".
Understanding the Transformation Matrix in Flash 8
CBO = Govt's Auditer, That graph = range of outlays they predict (best/worst), if CBO is unbiased OR biased towards govt AND best_case_outlays > revenue -> social security will blow up under current laws. $: True
I think a good improvement to address this problem would be to split up the background image so that the top can be shown while the bottoms bits are still loading. A 3MB single background image is not a great experience.
Twitter like Search with jQuery and Ajax.
Shouldn't you be able to use a web-view inside your application where you display web-ads? Essentially your desktop-apps are web-apps anyway, as the target will (in most cases) be to open a browser-window and display a landing page.

As for your business model I think I'd prefer a free version with less features rather than an ad-supported version. Or a web-app in the first place.
It seems to me that there is a huge way to go in the development of mobile/tablet applications.

So far, there are a few handy bits and pieces, and some solid games. The, current, real value is in the access to content and ease of consumption. I guess, to me, the pace of evolution on these devices seems slow. This could be due to the replication of effort needed to cover all platforms, or just developers getting used to the potential.

I'd love to know of a boundary breaking app that really does replace something physical that I carry with me. So far I still have to carry a notepad and pencil, for example.
Is it for Diaspora? :)
Exactly -- for me it's all about transcoding and not locking myself into a lossy format. This is why I rip all of my CDs to flac and not AAC/MP3.
The API itself doesn't cost money to use but the translation service does though. Devs can charge a small overhead fee to their clients and profit themselves.
'Openness and choice' for Big Blue mainframe shops
History Sniffing: How YouPorn Checks What Other Porn Sites You’ve Visited
I watched a Never Ending Story play out long ago (possibly it was on a Lulu.com forum?). Absolutely horrible. You mix in bad writers with worse writers, and just when you come across a half-decent page some other author whisks the story off in a totally different direction.
Safari(MAC) Tip - open links in new tabs
Companies Die without Enduring Corporate Kernels
I wonder if that will do anything funny with the referring URLs for the banners- but otherwise it should work I'd imagine.

Moreso, I wonder if the ad companies have any issue with it overall.
the government can't have an opinion. corporations? thats a whole different thing. Apple can do whatever they'd like with their app store. judging by how much money they're making, I'd bet most people either don't care, or approve.
Common Security Mistakes in Web Applications
Any companies you'd like to see on wovox? Perhaps your own?
Send me a mail on arjen.hoekstra@wovox.com
BulletsPassView - View the passwords stored behind the bullets in Windows / IE
Google changes Algorithm, Bad companies do really well under the old one