skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And doesn't count the product development sunk costs, either.

By his maths, my first business was profitable in the first week, including my salary.

What makes product businesses unprofitable upfront is not the ongoing costs, it's the development costs.
Good idea. And integrate is as a hosted/managed service similar to discuss.
Great for having revenue after only three weeks. It is fantastic.

I would not call it profitable yet. You are considering your salary $0, but that is not really true. Your time has value.

The idea seems great, It seems useful for my current work. I will look into it.
This looks interesting, but given the amateurish site, lack of contact information, and lack of independent media verification, I'd definitely stay away from them for now. Most of the media coverage I saw was repeating company information.
Technologies behind Google ranking
If some explodes so rarely (like him), at least he has to do it special!

(I liked it.)
Misleading title. The article talks about Linux distros that look like Windows and ends with this:
"Microsoft products will never go open source. The above list is some flavor of Linux distribution targeted at new users with Windows background."
Reality in Sweden: download a HD DVD in two seconds
The secrets:

1. Happiness comes from within: "In my adult business life I have never had to make a choice of trading between professional and personal. I tap-dance to work, and when I get there it’s tremendous fun."

2. Find happiness in simple pleasures: "I have simple pleasures. I play bridge online for 12 hours a week. Bill and I play, he’s “chalengr” and I’m “tbone”."

3. Live a simple life: "I just naturally want to do things that make sense. In my personal life too, I don’t care what other rich people are doing. I don’t want a 405 foot boat just because someone else has a 400 foot boat."

4. Think Simply: "I want to be able to explain my mistakes. This means I do only the things I completely understand."

5. Invest Simply: "The best way to own common stocks is through an index fund."

6. Have a mentor in life: "I was lucky to have the right heroes. Tell me who your heroes are and I’ll tell you how you’ll turn out to be. The qualities of the one you admire are the traits that you, with a little practice, can make your own, and that, if practiced, will become habit-forming."

7. Making money isn’t the backbone of our guiding purpose; making money is the by-product of our guiding purpose: "If you’re doing something you love, you’re more likely to put your all into it, and that generally equates to making money."
I always imagined "underground" stuff like this was on member-only forums...

"They've just started doing this in the computer services section too. I'm seriously freaking out now because I make the majority of my income off that section. I'm a freelance designer.

I don't know how I'm going to pay my bills if I can't find a way around this. Anyone have a suggestion? Please?"

What about finding legitimate work that creates value instead of destroying it?! Fuckwad.

edit: I'm craving for a blockquote feature. Double quotes + italics is a poor substitute and double quotes alone are downright confusing if there's more than one paragraph.

edit2: I note that there's 2 requests for a blockquote feature in the appropriate section and they almost have no upmods. Is that representative of the opinion about the (non-)usefulness of such a feature? (hope you don't mind the offtopicness)
Did he really need to incorporate just to sell a shareware program over the internet? What are the benefits of that?
> My family and I relocated from San Francisco to Bologna, Italy on May 1st

Congratulazioni! Thank you for sharing. Your blog is inspiring. So many people talk about living abroad and working for themselves - you are doing it..

What is it like? (working part-time but full-time on your mISV in a land where they value relaxation and enjoyment of life more)

Balsamiq makes complete sense now!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balsamic_vinegar
I don't think he's exploding at all ('cept for maybe the comments about the OpenBSD crowd).

He has a very valid point: all the boring normal bugs are _way_ more important.

Security bugs are just a special case of normal bugs, a test condition unaddressed.
I am sure Theo will have a subdued, low-key response.
Is it bad this post spurred my interest in Django, precisely because of its good documentation?
Test the Strength of Your Page, Blog or Domain
Great submission!

For me the key take away was that there will always be changes in the competitive landscape and instead of complaining you should accept them and move on. Either figure out how to adapt your business of you think there is no chance of survival just move into something else. They key is to not spend time complaining when you could be working.
I can almost imagine been questioned by the police as to why I'm using a computer that appears to have been ripped out of/ away from another device.
Iranian Fauxtography
Keep wallet out after buying iPhone 3G. You're going to need new accessories, too
That's called "speaking one's own mind" as opposed to corporate doublespeak devoid of any meaningul sense, so common in corporate meeting rooms.

The beauty of not being paid for what you do is the luxury of being able not to bother with bullshit.

And yes, security is overrated. All major "security" problems have always been DOS attacks that have NOTHING to do with "breaking" into anything. The biggest problem with computer "security" is the widespread adoption of "anti-virus" softwares. That plague does more harm than viruses themselves.
Part of the problem is that the term "security" has taken on a very narrow meaning. A bug that crashes a word processor has just as much to do with security as one that allows an escalation of privileges.
Sprint affiliate can proceed with legal action against Sprint/Clearwire deal
I took leave off college...I totally agree, it's really scary.
1) I was a high school teacher, not an english lecturer, and I did try to teach the basics how to write a complete sentence. However, the curiculum I was forced to teach was all this foreshadowing/theme/theory crap.

2) I quit to write software.

3) I would have been overjoyed had my students made the kind of grammar mistake (student's) I made in my off the cuff remark. In fact, my experience doing this has made me incredibly forgiving for this kind of thing, I guess in my own writing as well as that of others. Basically, if the meaning is clear and obvious I don't really consider it a mistake, just being a pedantic snob. The problem you get with people who really don't know how to write is the meaning isn't clear, I mean really not clear. You get, like, word salad, metaphors so brutally mixed that who knows what point was trying to be made, a level of incoherence that truly impedes what is trying to be communicated -- it can range from severe annoyance to total incomprehension. Grammar is for pedeants, get your point across and I'm your friend. Unfortunately many people can't.
Good quote:

Our theory was: If you're caught between speed and perfection, always choose speed, and perfection will follow. You never wait for perfect positioning, because in business you don't have the time; especially if you're small, you can't do it.
To me, this seemed like the major logical disconnect in the article. There's obviously still money in web companies, but the "next Google" is much more likely to be acquired by the current Google than ever realizing that potential, which means the next big Google-sized investment is pretty much guaranteed to be anything but a web company.

The people acting like KP is insulting their mother by ignoring Web 2.0 companies are playing around with a lot less money (I'd guess by at least an order of magnitude), and the author is doing a disservice to the readers by conflating them.
Taxes and liability.
The fundamental dispute here is that security researchers want Linus to take a vow of silence on any bug they report to him, which vow extends all the way into how Linus manages the git repositories.

Look, there are two ways to read this comment from Linus.

On the one hand, there's the batshit crazy read, which sincerely believes that data theft, fraud, and privacy violations are on equal footing with performance, reliability, or even data corruption problems. The difference between security flaws and bugs is that bugs don't have adversaries behind them.

But all that really tells us is that Linus has never talked to anybody who worked for a bank.

On the other hand, there's the weary pragmatist's read, which understands what 15 years of withering pompousness from security experts takes out of a development team. These are people who not only want their bugs at the front of the line, but have talking points for Linus to adhere to at the same time.

It's refreshing to see him tell my industry to fuck off. We deserve it.

T'so has the final, true, correct read on this. It's not Linus' job to manage Linux security. There are hundreds of people better situated to do that job. If you don't want Linus spilling the beans on your press release advisory, don't let Linus find out about it. Problem solved.
this looks pretty much like it http://www.phoneconfirm.com/
That's not a very valid point. None of the boring normal bugs cost my mom her credit score or, for the months it takes to resolve the problem, her savings account balance. There has also never ever ever been an X11 bug that took down the Internet.

There is also a CS-theoretic difference between "all the boring normal bugs" that emerge during variations of normal use cases, and the much larger, much harder to model class of byzantine failures that occur only when components of the system are forced to operate at odds with the the system as a whole. Security failures are byzantine failures. They are, at the very least, extremely difficult to predict and plan for.
Exactly how is it that you figure that a Word'07 crasher is "just as bad" as Word'07 remote code execution? Losing my most important document is still far less damaging to me than losing all my browser cookies, which is what the attacker in the latter scenario wins.
Enron was more about maximizing the share price, not profit. Exagerrating profit was a part of this, but not as much as bamboozling people about the company's future prospects (e.g. Enron Broadband).

This is still a problem in our economy. There's too much pressure to "beat the Street". I worry what effect this will have on Google over the next 5-20 years.
First two grafs: dead on. Amen.

Last graf, first thr---two sentences: crazy talk.

Last graf, last 2 sentences: dead on. Amen.
Thank God! Craig's List is a cesspool for BS Ads - hopefully this will cut the craptacular of manipulative ads that have been on there traditionally.

It is f'n funny to see the low-life, scumbag, POS, donkey-raping, child molestering, masturbating monkeys(wait, Linus reserved that one for the OpenBSD community) that make up the "professional spammer community" whining about loosing their free ride. Boo-hoo. Maybe CraigsList will be worth a crap now.
From what I've seen, most security bugs chain a few normal bugs together. One oversight here, another there, combine them and you have an exploit.

The valid point I think Linus is getting at (perhaps I'm reading too much into it) is that if you solve normal, boring bugs, you prevent the much trumpeted security bugs from ever coming out. By heaping praise on the security team and ignoring the careful programmer who writes good code and eliminates bugs before they exist, Linus sees the community move towards a crisis-solving mode rather than a crisis-prevention mode. His view is that it's far better to focus on writing good, solid code that tests robustly rather than hyper-focusing on security at the cost of everything else. This is not to dismiss the importance of security; instead, it is a fundamental focus shift -- thus the example of OpenBSD, where Linus sees security paranoia has subsumed everything else.
If you don't want Linus spilling the beans on your press release advisory, don't let Linus find out about it. Problem solved.

In fact, Linus has specifically said in the past that he does not want to be told about security issues. If you find a security issue in the linux kernel, report it to vendor-sec.
FYI, you can defer the $800 california minimum tax for two years if you request to be taxed as a corporation when you file your taxes.
Security has it's place. There are certainly gobs of value to having a security focused platform, that benefits even those who view it as a bunch of "masturbating monkeys".

But in Linus' defense, it's not like the Linux platform has ever benefited from anything OpenBSD did. Like OpenSSH, which the OpenBSD team developed and pretty much every Linux distribution takes advantage of...
That's not true. Reporting vulnerabilities to vendor-sec enrolls you in the politics of vendor security, which many reasonable people could make a case for avoiding. Linus isn't saying "don't tell me about your security problems". He's saying "take your talking points and shove them up your ass". On that one single point, he's absolutely right.
Off-topic but honest question: Why does everyone say "maths" instead of "math" these days? Is it a European thing, an academic thing, or just a meme among hackers?

I never once heard it or saw it written like that before Hacker News / proggit.

I cringed when someone on proggit recently said "Do the maths!" I don't think that's a saying anywhere.
I have very mixed emotions on this. The guy shouldn't have stolen the records let alone sell them. The "super rich" obviously shouldn't have evaded taxes. And the government shouldn't be wasting so much of the tax payers' dollars. If effective tax rates were 20% instead of 40-60%, I wonder what impact that would have on tax evasion.
Twitter: Made in the USA, growing faster overseas
Thanks for the link. I think there is room to improve on the pricing. I wonder if there are other outfits that do this.
But that essay style, say the most truth with least number of words, also incites people to disagree. The way they do may not always add valuable information, but it is still fun to read. You can not tell me you did not enjoy:

Also remark that in painting, many of the women whose pants you are trying to get into aren’t even wearing pants to begin with. Your job as a painter consists of staring at naked women, for as long as you wish, and this day in and day out through the course of a many-decades-long career. Not even rock musicians have been as successful in reducing the process to its fundamental, exhilirating essence.

Just the fact that PG provoked the above is wonderful.
I have to say, I was partly inspired to attend art school (and study painting) by 'Hackers and Painters'. After all, it's an O'Reilly book.
I am an archetypal hacker personality even if my achievements are modest. Computer architecture is as natural to me as breathing, whereas I could barely draw a crude stick figure. I realise MBTI has limitations but I am solidly in the realm of INTP/INTJ.

Anecdotes are not data, but let me tell you - by any measure of personality types I have ever seen, hackers and painters are as close to different species as you can get that can still produce offspring. 'Painters' thought processes and modes of creativity are so alien to those of a 'hacker' that I have no idea how the world does not descend into chaos with so many of those types populating it. I say this after spending many endless days in the company of 'painters' (especially if you include the tutors, many of whom had painting careers).

In fact the experience was shaking enough to make me reconsider my once strongly-held belief in universal suffrage. I gave it a year of full time effort and then threw in the towel. Of course, I am assuming that 'painting students' don't change dramatically by the time they become 'painters'.

Also, regarding the marvellous statement about spending all day with women who aren't wearing any pants - I'll leave what that en'tails' every 28 days up to you to figure out - if that doesn't get through to you then let's just say the novelty wears off.

Paul, if you are reading this, your thesis is bollocks. Thanks for nothing.
That may be the best quote I've read in awhile. I've convinced that profit is a function of creating happiness, both with your customers and within your company.

Thanks for sharing that.
The valid point you're making is not Linus', it's Theo's.

It's OpenBSD's approach --- and they pioneered it --- that "all bugs are eventually exploitable". That dogma, which some people say has served them well, contributes to the impression that OpenBSD is (1) fascistic about technical matters that at first glance seem more about vanity than about security, and (2) hypocritical in the extreme about what actually happens in their codebase.

What Linus is saying really doesn't have anything to do with security. What he's saying is, "my job is to improve Linux, and if you give me a valid bugfix, I will treat it the same way I treat any other important bug".
By the end of the thread there is price competition for batches of 100s of verified accounts. I'm not terribly optimistic in how successful this will be.
It's too bad, because we'd benefit from another well-maintained implementation of SSH. OpenSSH has had its problems.
UK "maths" = USA "math"
Or it could just be more cost effective way to get piece and quiet, Mr. pragmatic.
Can we stop calling things "The Ultimate X" or "Coolest Y Ever"?

Also, can we stop being subconciously tricked by said headlines into thinking that they're more interesting than they actually are?

Oh, a game for iPhone. How exciting.
I wasn't so much talking about us, but about developing countries. More educated, empowered women tend to have fewer children, and take a greater role in managing their families' finances. All this supposedly leads to fewer angry young men in the world.
No more so than for any other job.

(Do you think soldiers, chefs, car salespeople, and senators talk especially differently, when they're not in the limelight?)

If anything, this little statement has entirely too few four-letter words to be a really believeable engineer rant.

Of course, if you want to see someone as immature it always helps to rip a single statement entirely out of its conversational context. I frankly have no idea whether Torvalds is being sensible or stupid, brilliant or childish here. It depends on who is asking what.
but isnt the tax benefit of a single person LLC just the ability to deduct expenses? Besides forming an LLC he had almost no expenses.

And I highly doubt his desktop gui is going to be liable for anything right?
Hooray for context!
I think this falls under the category of "Two wrongs don't make a right".
"Maths" is the standard term outside of North America, as far as I know. I'm Irish, and "math" has always sounded odd.

It seems that "maths" is the semantically correct option. To take your quote, "do the math" expands to "do the mathematic" - which is surely wrong.
"I have often thought of volunteering my time to a college or tech school locally to teach computer-illiterate people the basics of computer use. It would be such a simple thing for me and judging by Ms. L's plight, it could make all the difference in the world to some people."

If you do this enough, you will inevitably come up against a real challenge. One of my students could not even double-click. She would raise her hand to hover a couple of inches above the mouse, then stab down with her finger twice. Not only was this too slow to register as a double click, she invariably moved the mouse. with each downward stab of her finger. I would show her the right way to do it, but she would always devolve to her old behavior.
Sweet, good work! Being able to get the top google results for "faces" might not mean much in reality, but those are some of the first things people will throw at the demo.
Microsoft's search traffic spikes: Cashback gimmick a (temporary) success?
Stock Screeners have been around for a while, The one that I like (not necessarily for aesthetics but for data quality and quantity)

http://www.marketwatch.com/tools/stockresearch/screener/
How To Write An Ebook Today
Many individuals have caught onto the ebook frenzy which is going on these days. No matter what topic you search online, you are sure to find an ebook which describes your desired subject matter in detail. For the web content writers out there, producing ebooks is something which may have caught their interest as well.
* 2.0 = --marketing
Although the title is cheesy, these are really great points. I wouldn't call them "secrets" as much as common sense and great advice.

While I respect him as a businessman and as a person, it kind of surprised me when he gave all of his money to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. You'd think that someone as opinionated as Buffett would have some ideas about how to apply billions of dollars to make the world a better place.

My favorite is number 4: "I want to be able to explain my mistakes. This means I do only the things I completely understand."
Agreed, but it's 3 wrongs.
Ask HN: Finding a Mentor
In many advice articles I've read, one point that most authors try to get across is the importance of finding good mentors. Every time I read a writer's take on that subject, I think to myself 'Yeah, that sounds great, but how the hell do you find one?' If any of you out there have mentors, how did you go about approaching them? In what situation were you in that allowed for that sort of relationship to develop? How were you originally connected, and how did your relationship evolve to a state of mentorship? Also, was there a time in which you realized that the person you were shadowing wasn't the best mentor? How did you move on?

Thanks.
This publicity stunt has nothing to do with reality.
Thanks. Now I know.
How Your Color Printer and Little Yellow Dots May Ruin Your Privacy
Six Ways to Style Blockquotes
Wufoo On Asking Users for Their Feelings
Documentation is not a problem limited to just Rails. Quite a few open (and closed) source projects have only minimal if any documentation. Its good to see this issue being brought up.
It is possible to speak your mind without being crude and callow, actually.
O'Reilly Ebook Bundles Now Available
And the government shouldn't be wasting so much of the tax payers' dollars.

Wasting how exactly? Purchasing these CDs? The windfall for the governments of the World that have purchased this data and are prosecuting the people on the list is twofold:

a) they'll recoup all the money they're spending on this data and prosecution through the settlements with tax evaders (I don't see any lawyer recommending their client to fight this.. best is to settle and pay the gov what it thinks it's due and hope to somehow avoid jail)

b) it will have a huge effect as a deterrent and a tax windfall will be pretty big over the coming years.

Looks like an excellent investment to me (and I don't remember last time I've seen gov invest wisely).
There's listening, then there's listening. When someone is really learning, you are dealing with the edges of their model of the world and their conscious perception. When you are really teaching, you are playing in this dangerous interstice. Sometimes, the best way of teaching people is tricking them. Sometimes, if you just tell them, they'll just rationalize what you have to tell them away.

This is more apt to apply to classes in history than to computers, however. Even then, there are popular misconceptions to deal with.