skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am not defending the current model but the reality is that there isnt another one for those trying to do a free service. Therefore providing some extra features for those who pay is the way to go if you dont want to depend on ads. Other than that if your web service scope is people who pay only then that means that probably in position to pay for marketting your product.

To even have a chance to grow as big as youtube you have to have the capacity to exist without equal growth in terms of revenue.

Thats the nature of the web services success and I don't see the reason to call it bubble. If it wasn't risky more people would do it. Contrary to that model, you can be one of the many successful sites that are not huge but make money by selling their product or service.

Other than that the article is not dead on because is very generic. Just because not all attempts to create a business succeed doesnt mean there is a bubble.
Adobe has several patents covering various areas of the PDF spec, but they "are licensed on a royalty-free, nonexclusive basis for the term of each patent and for the sole purpose of developing software that produces, consumes, and interprets PDF files that are compliant with the Specification:"

http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/support/topic_leg...

The Adobe PDF specification is also freely available at:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/pdfs/pdf_reference_1-7.p...

Not sure where the $1500 is coming from, but it's certainly not a requirement for any PDF generator.
Make a Presentation Like Al Gore
Upvoted in hope that you were being sarcastic :)
For java development I actually like IntelliJ IDEA (http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/) more than Eclipse as in many ways it is much more productive and puts the fun back in programming.

Its not free, but you get what you pay for.
Department of Declaration Redundancy Department
Rails 2.1 on GlassFish
JsTree: jQuery-based JavaScript tree component
My take on this situation:

At 15, I'd say he should try a few other things he finds interesting or thinks he might find interesting. Pursue them enough to actually get pretty good at them, it's hard to judge early on. When the time comes to choose a university subject/career, he should go wherever his heart lies.

Why?

At school I was (really) good at physics, (I got through to international level at the Physics Olympiad) but I never really fell in love with it, and actually didn't go to the international event a second time, as I hated the people there. (I made a couple of friends on the national level though)

Programming in my spare time was what I loved most. I ended up doing physics at university based on advice from the people around me. About 2-2½ years in, at the stage where I could no longer get away with minimal work and still get decent grades, I first consciously realised that my heart was just not in it. I finished my degree but haven't touched physics since.

Oddly enough, with all my focus being channeled on physics at school and by my parents, I kind of missed out on really getting to know maths beyond what everyone was taught at school. At university it turned out I most enjoyed the maths modules and consistently got the best grades in them, although I unfortunately wasn't permitted to choose many maths electives. Also, my university wouldn't let me switch subjects and carry over any credits, so I didn't.

My girlfriend studied maths so I managed to learn quite a bit from helping her out, although I can't help but think that doing a joint CompSci/Maths degree would have brought me more joy.

I've stopped taking advice from family now by the way, and I'm a lot happier. :)
Links to porn on hacker news, that's not good
I don't know if it would be against HN policy to do so, but I think this is something that should be moderated (i.e. marked as dead).
I suggest making the individual book targets inaccessible when you zoom out. At some levels I can't even read them yet clicking on them brings up a detailed box that covers everything else. You could just do a human readable thumbnail in a corner. Alternatively, you could make a click in certain level zoom into that genre of books.

It would also be nice to have a drop down list of categories that could get me to the correct area quickly. This would me like those signs that some stores have posted on the ceiling in the various sections (i.e. Reference, Fiction, Bestsellers...).

The zoom out/in method is not generally how I browse my local Borders. It makes me think about going to look at one book and then running up the stairs and staring down to find the next book I want to check out :).
1. It's a legitimate business
2. It makes a lot of money and touches a lot of people
3. It solves a problem society either has or thinks it has
4. At some point someone sat down and made a business or is trying to make a business from it so lessons can be learned.

If you don't like it, ignore it, it's your loss.
NewsCred (re)opens popular debates
I am so disappointed to see this on the first page of HN.
Sorry. All I meant was that management has a responsibility to ownership. Having employees looking at ads all day long or having no one to call when your free software breaks are clear examples of violating that responsibility.

Consumers, with no such responsibility, use all the ad supported apps they want.
although it's very possible I'm mistaken

You are. There is more activity than ever in the enterprise, midlevel, and small business arenas. Just because you haven't heard it around doesn't mean it's not happening.
I think they just liked the picture and they didn't get exclusive rights to it.

http://www.yiyinglu.com/sc/illustration/personal-illustratio...
Oh lighten up. It's a joke for crying out loud.
That would be good advice to your brother. Programming as a career seems like a dead end going forward, for whatever reasons. However, if he is in some other seemingly unrelated occupation (law, medicine, education, etc.), then programming skill could be a competitive advantage.
If the point of the article was business, it wouldn't need to mention the name of the top 20 websites. It would focus on business.
Just a parody of a parody (that probably should have never been voted so high anyway). Sorry you didn't find it funny.

I got so tired of "why did this get voted up?" So I just did something a little different, that's all.
I hear lots of seven-year-olds are accepting exciting opportunities to work now in the garment industry.
Single, right?
Text editing tips from the creator of VIM
Well, I would argue that much of what has emerged on the Internet in the last 15 years has been novel.

And a biochemist can learn the basics of Python about as easily as a programmer can learn how to operate basic lab equipment. A biochemist could no more easily add to human knowledge about compiler optimization than a programmer is likely add anything to protein folding. If anything, I would say the opposite of what you claim is true -- programmers are more likely to be interested in leading-edge science as a hobby than the other way around.
I like it - well done and good luck. I'll never use it but I see the value. If this were part of a site that I already used regularly, I'd use it but TBH I don't need/want another thing to bookmark remember that is so specific that I'll never remember/find it again.
It was the one feature my household used the most, but whatever, I guess we'll just have to manually interleave our movie queues.
I agree with the others posting here and I'll add PPC ad mgmt . Most startups that I personally know/work with are founded by programmers and designers. Their core business requires focus in those areas yet they spend a lot of time working on PPC/marketing (and often inefficiently).
Critical flaw in Firefox 3
"Me, too." I have my all-out-coding periods and my just-can't-get-into-it periods. I've mostly decided to accept that this is my natural rhythm.

However, I have a way to stay productive during the lulls, which has been very effective for me: pair programming. Even if I'm not inspired, or even energetic, if I sit down with someone else to work on a task, pretty soon the conversation gets me focused and triggers ideas.

http://www.wikihow.com/Pair-Program
There used to be a really great Mac text editor called Alpha that was fully scriptable in Tcl. The only annoying thing about it was that after you had paid for it (shareware) the author wouldn't provide a build with the nagging switched off. Maybe that's one reason it seems to have vanished.
Students are using Indian expertise in technology to complete their assignments
News story:

>There is this newfangled phenomenon called social networking. People go to these websites, which track their friends and shows photo. They also have "Buy and Sell your Friends" applications, and the ability to poke people. Some people spent way too much time on these sites.

You don't think a link to facebook, orkut and myspace is appropriate?
Tips on when and how to shard your database for scalability from CTO of Flixster
Going viral without going down - tips on when and how to shard your database for scalability from CTO of Flixster
One of the best decisions I ever made.

Is is "what I thought it would be"? I don't know. Because I had no idea what to expect. (I did my first programming on the job; I started before there was much opportunity to do it on your own.)

I have done projects at over 80 companies. I have gotten involved in almost every aspect of the business. I have travelled all over the country, met many interesting people (and friends for life), and have constantly been learning and doing. Oh, and I have earned far more than most of the people I have ever worked with. It wasn't unusual for me to be earning more than my supervisor and much, much more than my users.

I have done lots of work on my own and have taken lots of time off between gigs.

Sure, there have been lots of negatives. I've even thought of leaving IT and doing something else. I know many who have. But then I think about it and realize that this is what I still really want to do.

There have been horrible working conditions (cubicles), unreasonable people (let's just leave it at that), terrible projects, long commutes, and worst of all, boredom and disapproval on someone else's project. But instead of whining (present post excluded), I always did something about it. I either fixed what was broken for me or moved on.

Because of modern technology and lifestyle, I am more excited about being a programmer than ever before. I don't want to sound like an old timer (I know, too late), but I clearly remember how hard it used to be to get good. I had to go to expensive seminars or to one of the half dozen good technical bookstores in the U.S. My first computer cost $6000 (double that today). Now with cheap hardware, google, downloadable environments, boards like this, and Borders around the corner, everything is so easy! I just can't get enough.

For someone even mildly interested in programming, I would say, "Go for it!" Get a job and play around on your own. Learn as much as you can, technical and business, and if you don't like where it's heading, find a way to make it work for you. Give it a chance. I'm sure glad that I did.
dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=217682
Mass. shines in tech study, Calif. loses luster
"Drawing upon a complex index that analyzes a variety of factors" -> "Based on a set of weightings they assigned arbitrarily, and have no way of calibrating"
In this age of false hero worship, glad to see a more balanced treatment. Nice to see the point of view of those with the "other side of the story". You used to be able to read about that all the time, not so much these days. This is good for those who haven't been around long enough to remember how Microsoft actually managed to do what they did.
Yeah I was being sarcastic and I 100% agree with the celebrity comment, even if it is a sad reality. Mars reporting via twitter isn't going to entice Joe Public to sign up for twitter. Real time reporting on celebrity nip slips and Brad and Angelina's children will.
CMU, General Motors partner on 'vehicle of future'
The more links like this I see on the front page, the less likely I will return to HN. It is inappropriate in my opinion, and worse than simply being off-topic.
This guy sounds like a nerd, as Paul Graham describes nerds: oblivious to the social strategies that normal people use to become popular.

Nearly everything posted on Myspace is meaningless fluff. You'll notice that most conversations at bars are meaningless fluff. It's just a way to plug in socially. Most important is displaying how many friends you have, both at singles bars and on Myspace. The more friends you have, the more popular you are, and therefore the more people want to be friends with you.

A T-shirt that came out a few years ago: "Tom is my only friend." This is a way of saying "loser" in the mindset of the socially savvy.
Drupal’s Creator Envisions Web Publishing’s Plug-and-Play Future
A Microsoft-Made Death Spiral for Yahoo?
EBay Expands PayPal Protections
Hi, I'm the creator of Zoomii. I've been (mostly) lurking on Hacker News for some time now.

Thanks for the feedback. It is very slow on FF3 right now, due I think to its slow scaled-image rendering and tossing of uncompressed image data whenever leaving the tab. But it looks like using a CANVAS will actually make FF3 the fastest browser for Zoomii. Working on it. Hope to deploy that today.
I'm confused - what is it I should be seeing?
I thought this might catch your eye. Tell me, do you have some kind of notification system that alerts you to topics of interest as soon as they are posted, or just all posts, or you are just on news.yc as much as i am?
Yes, the zoomed-out behaviour isn't quite right yet. I'm thinking of doing overlays which show you the category areas when more zoomed-out.

There is a category navigation panel, actually. The link to it is at the top-left.

And you can get from shelf to shelf very smoothly by clicking on the arrows just below the individual shelf titles.
I too had such an idea. Nursed it for a while, then did some research...there were several failed companies that did this back in the late 1990s. (Didn't call them wikis, and I think the point was to annotate, or vandalize, more than edit.) I'll post some citations if I think of the names...
"years after these sites have become the leading destinations on the Web, I still don't get it. I don't have that visceral, gut understanding of the attraction and benefits of these services"

Same thing here; I just don't get it. But my theory is this: I have friends I see regularly and we keep in touch, talk about the big things in life and (for a few of these guys) they're basically like brothers to me. I have maybe a dozen other people I like to keep in touch with, and a dozen others who I get on with but rarely see.

I think some people like to think they have hundreds of friends, but it's a different definition of "friend" -- more like my category of "people I get on with but rarely see". Emailing, phoning or (heaven forfend) going out places with those people probably won't happen too often, but keeping a page on a social networking site allows you to keep in touch without too much effort or appearing a bit creepy by emailing or phoning too often. I still don't "get it" on a visceral level but I can see why some people want to do that.

Summary: if you have loose connections to many people, use Facebook or MySpace. If you have more intense relationships with a few people, don't.
Actually, there is just that. :) Arrows below the titles on the individual shelves will take you to the next and previous shelves.

It seems they're not quite obvious enough yet, though. Maybe it's time to make them uglier.
FreeRingtones365
Hello! This is cool site http://freeringtones365.net/ ! You can free download ringtones from out site! Come and enjoy yourself ! Here are only free ringtones!
What about a Netflix-style pop-up for the books, instead of that big window? You can really fit all the info you need in one of those, and it would interrupt the browsing experience less.
I like your suggestion of making the nav box minimizable. That could reduce the actions to just icons, taking up very little space. A bar across the top would be nice too, but I have other plans for that space... :)
I was thinking get rid of them and make it automatic. As your mouse gets over near the side of the screen, the bookcase start scrolling sideways, like you've started walking down the aisle.
programming is the best thing ever. i got hooked as soon as i wrote the first line of code. i have never looked back. programming is the best thing ever!
Yahoo! Top Employees Exiting | Tech Jaws
Firefox 3 Exploit Minimal | Tech Jaws
Ditto. I get about 100,000 spams a month, and on average one spam gets through every other month. Roughly six to eight spams per day go to a borderline folder that I glance at to re-convince myself I'm not missing any false positives. I find spam more amusing than bothersome.

All my legitimate advertising mail gets automatically filtered into a "Commercial" inbox, and mailing lists go to "Lists", both based on the recipient addresses. Companies that send me annoying commercial email get booted to the Spam folder permanently with a single drag-and-drop. All I get in my main inbox is one-to-one mail from real people, notices from my bank, invoices, shipment notifications -- basically only the things I've chosen to receive. My classifier learned very quickly how to identify them, and it rarely needs reeducation.

I have a script that converts all incoming emails to txtspk and sends them as SMSes to my phone within seconds of their being sent to me, in addition to sending the original text to a separate IMAP folder that my phone periodically downloads.

I love my email. I wouldn't mind getting more of it.
Hello! This is cool site http://freeringtones365.net/ ! You can free download ringtones from out site! Come and enjoy yourself ! Here are only free ringtones!
Apple iTunes Music Store Busts 5 Billion Downloads | Tech Jaws
Where To Go For Inspiration?
To answer the original question: I have been a programmer for 11 years and love it. There are ups and downs, but mostly ups.

Also being a corporate developer is not awful at all. It is great. It might depend on the environment and the corp that you are talking about.

The big factor that I have noticed in my enjoyment is working in an Extreme Programming environment, specifically pair-programming.
Yeah... why can't pi be 22/7 ?
How to Become and Entrepreneur - wikiHow
Security Alert: Ubuntu Linux kernel vulnerabilities
The best countries for conducting electronic business
No worries. The advice is appreciated.
Find each other on Twitter? Oh Jesus... Have you looked for each other on Grand Theft Auto?
I don't know what's worse: people upvoting the story, or defending it.
Virtual tour of the awesome Cisco campus at Banglore
From my own experience 40GB and 8GB RAM is very good it should be enough for better performance. I don’t think you need more servers at this time.

Think about it in order for you guys to have a meaningful search engine you will need data in the TB range how many servers will you need then? Spend more time fine tuning your search algorithm and processing you should get better performance out of what you have now. Then your repository will grow proportionally to your resources and you should be fine.

When I said the search for 'test' did not return good result I meant you should do more work on relevancy.
This sounds more like a press announcement or a tooting of a company's own horn more than anything informational. I'd like to have seen some discussion of their implementation or design other than "we used erlang and we rocked."
Ok, we won't be burning gasoline in a vehicle, we'll be burning it to compress air when refueling.

For similar reasons I don't get the fuss about electric "zero-emission" cars. Zero? Like electricity just magically comes out of nowhere...
Yellow Drum Machine
How to Pickup a VC
Maths could help cure blood cancer
There is no silver bullet.

Caching is hot and database scaling architecture is very specific to your application.

"Feature based partitioning" sounds cool but does the data access layer do the cross database joins??

"Vertical partioning" again the data access layer can get complicated. I wish this was available as a piece of technology or service.
I'm reminded of: http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the_pmarca_guid.html
Rack, and Why It Matters (to Rubyists)
Compared to other professions, I think the average hacker's social skills are worse, and I am a hacker. Hacking requires high intelligence which is correlated with introversion. Introversion, by it's nature means less time and practice socializing. Before everyone gets offended, I'm only talking about averages, not you or your buddy.
Someone has, however, set up a GitHub mirror of the Reddit code. It's not official, but at least it's there. I understood their position, which could be boiled down to "Seriously, we don't have the time right this minute." As with anything that is new, it _would_ take time to understand what GitHub is, and what it does, if you had never looked into it before.

A lot of people are saying, "Oh, but it's so easy." The Reddit boys' point is that it may be easy, but it still takes greater than 0 time and effort. They either can't or do not want to, dedicate more than zero time and effort at this time. Their prerogative.
Just seems a little full of himself to me. Dude, you started a photo-sharing site. You didn't invent internal combustion.
Yahoo Doomed del.icio.us
Please do a cursory search at SearchYC.com before you post. :)
I was wrong about this; a patent is the right to _exclude others_ from making, building, using or otherwise developing an invention.

Subtle but important difference.
Most likely we wouldn't be burning gasoline to compress air for these cars: gas is expensive. Instead, we'd probably use electricity derived from coal, natural gas, or nuclear, with the possibility of better sources in the future.

"Zero-emission" is a reasonable description, as the car itself doesn't give off emissions while running. If you're going to include the emissions given off in the process of producing the fuel, a gasoline-based solution is suddenly much worse, as you need to include the emission costs of finding, extracting, refining, and transporting the gas.
Heavyweight physics prof weighs into climate/energy scrap
Selling big business on the iPhone
It's like software. If you cleanly separate the front-end and back-end it's very easy to tune and swap out the back-end without the user noticing.
New eBay strategy angers small sellers
This is the thing that throws me. At some point, good social skills came to mean "extrovert". I don't accept that definition. I'd much rather spend my time in deep conversation with one or two people than flitting around like a social butterfly having silly micro-conversations with total strangers. I don't think this makes me anti-social, just more selective.
"tubular chassis that is glued not welded"

Oh yeah I feel safe already. I wonder what its crash rating will be?
Are Two CEOs Better Than One?
This confuses me. Why is it free?

Here they have a transaction and thus an obvious way to monetarize.

Why not charge a fee per SMS? Will everyone run to a different service?
If Second Life is over, someone needs to tell Cisco
Seth's Blog: No such thing as price pressure
Sixty years ago the modern computer was born in a lab in Manchester.
2 School Entrepreneurs Lead the Way on Change
He co-founded the BEST photo-sharing site, back when people didn't even realize the uses of photo-sharing online.

While some of what they did was RPRT, I give them a lot of credit for scrapping the game they were originally working on when they realized Flickr was Something People Wanted. They also scaled Flickr fantastically when it grew to enormous proportions, which I think deserves kudos as well.
How to make home made Nutella
Sorry to all offended. We published because we thought it was interesting, and I promoted here for same reason.
SymbolicWeb: Common Lisp GUI using AJAX and Comet
Preloading Images with jQuery