skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The secrets through a warren-pass filter:

1. "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. "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. "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. "I want to be able to explain my mistakes. This means I do only the things I completely understand."

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

6. "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. "If you’re doing something you love, you’re more likely to put your all into it, and that generally equates to making money."

Also note that this is just a list of some things that Warren Buffet has said. It's not his list of 7 "secrets".
Annual Fog Creek Open House 2008
How is rails-doc.org coming along?
The Next Great Language
WOW I never thought I'd be on HN twice in 10 days. Should I be proud...or afraid? ;)

Thanks for the kind words everyone, I'll answer questions in-line.
Sorry, it was a general comment - not specific to this situation. I should have articulated that better.

If tax rates went down, people would evade taxes less as they'd have less incentive to do so. Your last sentence exemplifies my first comment.
I agree that not including my time so far is a BIG disclaimer, but isn't every startup a labor of love to some extent? :)

What funded most of the development of Mockups was my day job, as I worked on Balsamiq for many, many nights and week-ends before "making the jump".

Like I said in the post, I am counting as costs only what's in Balsamiq's bank account statement at the moment...I am only just starting after all.
Hey there, thanks for the nice words.
The design of the site is all mine (and sadly it shows), but when I designed it I was at the height of my 37signal fanboy phase, so I'm not surprised you can see an influence there.

Re: trouble with navigating the site: I keep hearing about it, but I haven't been able to find the time (or inspiration) to drastically improve it. I'll keep at it.
Apple's free pass on open source
I used Excel 2008 for Mac.
Unless you just happen to work with, say, Eliezer Yudkowsky; or zombie Phillip K. Dick.
Reporting vulnerabilities to vendor-sec enrolls you in the politics of vendor security, which many reasonable people could make a case for avoiding.

Responsible disclosure, i.e., making sure that fixes are ready before an issue is announced, requires vendor coordination. The politics is unavoidable if you want to do things right -- although, speaking as someone who is on vendor-sec, the politics really is rather minimal these days.

Linus isn't saying "don't tell me about your security problems".

I didn't claim that he was saying that today. I said that in the past he has said that.
Microsoft opens up Live Mesh
I count only four sentences in his last paragraph...
NPR Launches API That Serves Up 13 Years Of Content
You are right, but then one would have to focus on your success stories, which might just a few percent of the students.

By the time people are college aged, they are pretty set in their ways. Educational miracles where whole classes are swept up into success generally happen with younger students.
Well, thats a whole other issue that's much harder to settle :)
I must admit life in Italy is really nice, especially when you have a large extended family around like I do. I'll share more on my blog about it but I am a little ashamed at how good the food is here and at how beautiful the country-side can be... :)

As for "Balsamiq", you got it: scroll to the bottom of http://www.balsamiq.com/company for the full story.
you can always use vumber and tossabledigits
Build relationships with mentors by networking like crazy and showing more senior people in your industry that you have passion for what you're doing, a drive to ask questions, and are placing value on their opinion. Ask a lot of questions and form a mentor relationship with those who are most happy to answer them. Mentorships are informal and are more like a professional friendship than the sort of thing you'd be a part of if you volunteered for Boys and Girls Clubs of America.

Reaching out to family friends and acquaintances whom you admire is a good way to start.
An $800 incorporation fee is a small price to pay to separate your personal liability from your business liability. Especially if you have other assets, like a house or pension.
Good points. I guess it's often short-sighted.
Hey there. The main reason I incorporated is to give my potential customers (I am going after large enterprises) a warm and squishy feeling of being able to trust me. :)

That, and liability, and taxes, and I have big plans for Balsamiq, so I thought I might as well incorporate right away.
How can a barely-count-to-ten-in-python dad help kids with code?
I'm learning to code, slowly (see other posts: http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=niels_olson).

It seems likely my kids (now 3 and 6) will be ready to learn before I can teach. What to do?
This could be the best-written, most well thought out blog in the history of the internet, but I will never know because I can't get bast the title.
Astonishingly accurate--I think programmers self-select that way, I've historically been not quite smart enough to get that next breakthrough before giving up, so I'm not a programmer, despite several attempts.
Future expenses will most likely add up to more than the incorporation fee, so it makes sense. Stuff like traveling, mileage, a new computer, rent if the business expands. As the business grows he will be able to deduct more.
However, I believe you can also deduct as a sole proprietorship, so the tax benefits of an LLC are more about removing the double taxation of corporations than being able to deduct expenses. But an LLC makes things clearer and formally separates your business from your personal life, so you can track exactly how well its doing and what expenses and income are associated with each.
Email opt-out assistance
I've got a small problem, and it seems fairly elementary to solve, but thought you all might be able to help out.

I send out a mass email to potential clients once a month. The list is generated using advertising database. There are several recipients that ask to be removed from the list after each mailing, and right now I manually edit the list.

My proposed solution is a link in the email to an opt-out landing page. The opt-outer (new term, courtesy of moi) would enter their email and click "submit" to be removed from future mailings.

For the next email blast, I would export a CSV of potential clients from the advertising database (it's refreshed monthly), and then using a php script, would compare the two tables (opted-out and new addresses), and wherever an entry exists in both tables it would be removed from the mailing list. Then export the remaining list into a CSV for a mail merge.

Does this look like I'm on the right track or is there any easier way? Know of any canned scripts that would execute this?

Thanks in advance.

-Jake Butler (long time reader, first time poster)
Ah, thanks for the clarification.

I read too much into Linus's words.
Can you suggest some resources for playing with lisp in a robotics context?
Hey, great job! I loved those mockups for heavyweight players.
While I would generally agree that his advice is more "common sense" than any amazing "secrets", the issue lies not in knowing what to do, but rather in doing it. Many of us have heard Buffett's rules before in one way or another, and some of us may even preach them to others, but how many of us actually live by them ourselves?
fanboys, don't click it!
I tried the Loopt app the first day of the iphone 2.0 launch. I promptly uninstalled it.

Despite the hype that certain bloggers have ascribed it (ahem.. Techcrunch), I found the actual implementation to be poor. The interface is lacking. The integrated business search is potentially interesting, but there are other apps that do the same thing but better.

The bottom line is that I don't want to join another social network. I was hoping to just turn on the app and find a bunch of other people in the city(San Francisco) to see what hot areas were going on. I can't even do that without inviting a bunch of other people to join Loopt also.

Boo. Fail.
That's great! Thanks for sharing the financial details. It's great to see someone progressing and doing well.
From reading the thread, it seemed that these didn't work, or were not cost-effective.
Number #5 needs some clarification. Apparently he doesn't believe this to apply to himself since he didn't make his riches by investing in an index fund. I don't know in what context he said it, probably he means it's the best strategy for the average investor.
Quoting Buffet again:
"Diversification is a protection against ignorance. It makes very little sense for those who know what they're doing."
It's even better than that, both the sender and receiver pay. So if two iPhone users send a message to each other they either both get billed $.20 or both get 1 message deducted from their bucket for the payment period (unless there is an unlimited messaging plan). Up to $.40 to shuffle 160 characters around your own network is quite a haul.
I think that Linus is speaking out of his ass this time. Probably looks so arrogant because Theo and him don't like each other and the OSS universe is too small to their egos.

OpenBSD mindset is to achieve security through excellence. Everyone can look at their code and perceive its quality: everything follows the same coding guidelines, it's well commented and easy to understand, every important commit in the CVS has to be reviewed by at least another commiter, errors are handled early... after looking at it, Linux looks a mess.

That obsession about security leads to a software product that shows robustness and quality. Yes, Linux outperforms OpenBSD in many areas, it has been ported to more architectures and has more functionalities. But, still, Linux could learn a lot about OpenBSD as a project.
BlogHer Inks Deal With NBC Universal, Raises $5 Million
Amazon & McDonalds - A Lesson in Awful Cross Marketing
Complimenti! Vivere in Italia e` senz'altro bello, but if I may ask, how are you planning on dealing with the weak dollar, and more importantly, getting money from your company in the US to Italy? I mean the legalities of it, obviously, not the actual method. My friend in Padova is an accountant, and he was telling me that having a company in the US is pretty much "worthless". My guess is that many European countries would have similar issues.
The aftermath.
Buy a Turtle and lots of paper :-)
"Responsible disclosure" is a marketing term. Linus may be wrong about the importance of security flaws relative to bugs, but that doesn't validate the self-aggrandizing omerta of security researchers.

Vendor "coordination" of security flaws often works to the detriment of users. For one thing, cliques like vendor-sec gossip and share findings with the "cool kids", ensuring that every interested party but the operators knows what's coming a week before the advisories are published. For another, it substitutes the judgement of people like you --- who, no offense, don't run real world systems or make real world risk assessments about real assets --- for the judgement of the people who are not like you, but who could potentially disable or work around vulnerable systems far in advance of "coordinated patches".

PS: "I said in the past, not today!" --- if you believe in what you're saying, say it and then defend it with evidence. But don't slam competing projects just because you think nobody's going to call you on it, Colin.
Learn faster!

Ok, more seriously, how about this: relax.

Most of us computer nerds learned to program on our own, in middle and high schools, with only our computer and a cheap book (or maybe the internet, today), not from out parents.

I'd say take interest, give them the tools, and let them explore. Just don't turn it into the equivalent of "piano lessons" or else they'll end up hating it :P
Heidi, Geek Girl Detective
Hey Davidw, good questions. For both, my answer for now is "ride it out and continue to live off of my Italian savings". When there'll be enough money in the US account to make it worth it, or when the money here runs out (whichever comes first), I'll cross the painful bridge of becoming a one-person multi-national. :( I am NOT looking forward to it and I expect to get a sour deal on taxes.

It's also not a given that we'll stay in Italy long-term, we are giving it a try for a year or two.
Blockquoting is on my list to add soon.
But three rights make a left... chirping
I too have perceived the excellence of OpenBSD. For instance, at Arbor Networks, I had the distinct pleasure of using OpenBSD to manage traffic flows from ISP backbones. When processes malloc'd over 64 megs of data, UVM deadlocked. After writing a passive kernel debugger using KVM to produce repro steps and diag dumps for their team, I was informed that Theo didn't really understand how Cranor's UVM worked, that it was crappy code from Cranor's thesis and all Cranor's fault, and that there was no way I would find anyone who could fix it.

There is indeed a lot Linux can learn from OpenBSD, but imitation is probably not the right way to go about it.

OpenBSD's track record on security is not unblemished.
Announcing FundingSleuth.com
Okay, then.

A monad is fundamentally a data structure -- an abstract data structure, with a known set of operations. With the State monad above, the data structure is a tuple (s, v) -- the 's' is the state, and the 'v' is the value. The whole thing is what the monadic function returns. The set of operations includes 'bind', which defines the sequencing logic, and 'return', which defines how to insert a value into the data structure (for State, 'return' just leaves the state untouched and puts the value into the monad).

One could think of some different data structures, and see whether they lead themselves to interesting monads. I like the Maybe data type. If you're used to OCaml, this is called Option. It is a variant type: either it contains a value (Just v) or it doesn't (Nothing). So how can this be thought of as a monad?

Here's one proposal: if the previous function returned a value, execute the next function. If it returned Nothing, then return Nothing. (i.e., don't execute the next function at all.)

Is this useful? Potentially. Let's say we want to look up a value in a map, and if it is found, then take some action. If it wasn't found, then don't take any action. The lookup function returns a Maybe value, which you can then sequence (using monadic bind) to the rest of the actions -- the sequencing operation takes care of the "did it succeed?" logic. If the next action doesn't return a Maybe value, then our code must use 'return' to insert its value back into the monad.

There's more. The List monad sequences by passing EACH value in the list to the next operation, and concatenating the results into a new list. The Continuation monad sequences just by executing the next operation, but it provides 'callcc,' which passes the given operation a closure which, when executed, executes the operation following 'callcc'.

Sorry for the brief explanation, I have to run. Ask me questions if you want more.

Lincoln
She would have to find a server that could serve her the DVD in two seconds. And I'd hazard to guess that most servers could only serve a few people (or fewer) at a time at those speeds, so it would quickly devolve into asking people to wait for an hour in an online queue in order to have the privilege of downloading a DVD in two seconds. ;-)
>Regardless, at the end of the day, you're asking me to assume that founders who either don't make the cut for YC or whom didn't apply in the first place are either inferior entrepreneurs or are pushing a bad idea. This is simply not true.

No, I'm not. I'm saying Techcrunch doesn't cover startups anymore.

>In light of this, my conclusion that YC and Arrington have some sort of friendly or financial relationship leading to a lowered-barrier-to-article for YC-funded startups is sound if not altogether true.

No, they don't. Techcrunch covers YC startups out of laziness and journalistic inadequacy. They want to give the appearance that they still cover early stage startups, but they don't. They only cover YC startups. YC offers an easy filter for TC to have some stories to give the outward appearance that their blog hasn't changed over time.
Um, WebKit?

Granted they forked and renamed KHTML, and take maybe a little too much credit because of it, but they really propelled KHTML/WebKit to the top in the last couple of years. IMHO, WebKit is the premiere browser engine at this point, and I doubt it would be without Apple's involvement.
Incidentally, believing that live models would be titillating is a classic sign of a noob. That idea is left over from Victorian times, when the mere idea of a naked woman was exciting. In actual fact, live models are generally pretty unattractive. Someone who wanted to stare at women would do way better, nowadays, at any beach.
Tweets Made Easier
Not THAT discussion again. If open source developers give away their code for free, it is free. They shouldn't come around a couple of months later and say "we do want something back after all".
Sister's doing a PhD here (or there rather, from your POV). Back of the envelope calculation, she'd be earning roughly 10% more than the minimum wage if you view a PhD as a 36 hours/week job (I wouldn't).

Pretty sure that that's close to the norm for PhD pay though.

(Sorry, no hard figures to compare, due to a feeling that I shouldn't discuss someone else's financial situation candidly online, even if details probably just a google away).
Toshiba Launches First Cell CPU-based laptop
Poll: Do you use your Blackberry/iPhone in the bathroom?
LOL! Actually it seems to be an amazingly good match. After all, if you bought a book to help you get away from bad fast food, you probably eat loads of the stuff on a regular basis.

Or maybe they thought buyers would like a last dose of fast food before saying good bye to it forever.
"Windows Vista Annoyances" O'Reilly book
664 pages!
If you don't already know how to program, there's no reason that you can't learn along with them. Make it a joint experience; you can help each other out when you get stuck. They will look up to you when you help them with that thing that they just can't figure out, and they get to feel good about themselves when they teach you something. Win-win situation.
"Do the arithmetic" is standard American.
Technical co-founder needed for Studeous
We're looking for a co-founder for Studeous, a web start-up.

Studeous is the SalesForce.com of the e-learning industry--we provide an easy way for teachers to manage their classes online on our web platform, as opposed to typical enterprise e-learning systems. We're looking to commodify e-learning.

We have users, we've already made sales, and we're in the process of raising capital.

We're looking for a super hacker who is an expert at:

MySQL

System/Server Administration

Scaling/Optimization

CSS

Coldfusion experience would be preferred, but is not completely necessary

Overall great product dev skills

We launched in private beta last March, and we need more hands on deck.

We are located in the Dallas/Austin, Texas area.

You can contact Jeff West at jwest@studeous.com for more information.
Lulu.com Teams Up With Scribd to Offer Most Popular Free Content via iPaper
I wonder if gas2.org is being paid per view... I cancelled the page load after the first 120 ads were loaded from adjuggler.com. Never did get to see the content.
How Not To Approach the Blog-O-Verse
Given that both Myoplex and McDonalds appear to be artificial substitutes for real food, it does seems a good match.
Isn't this just a huge load of crap? I thought every time one of these got posted, 5 people from open source projects Apple basically funds chimed in and said, "just because Apple didn't rename it Apple KHTML doesn't mean they aren't key contributors".

You know what else isn't open source? PageRank. Shut up, CNet.
The WebKit team is fantastic. Their code is clean, well-organized, fast, and their output prolific—every morning when I do update, there are at least 50 individual commits.

They also beat all of the big-name players to Acid 3 compliance.
Don't make your potential client enter his email address to opt out, pass it in as a parameter. If you demand more than one click from him to opt out, then you are asking too much, it is after all your rudeness that has interrupted his day and is causing him to take action in the first place.

In broader terms, there are companies that will handle this for you for a small fee. They also have fancy tricks to get through the bulk mail filters. If you send enough messages to get tagged as a bulk mailer you will probably have to change your domain name to get through in the future.
There are very few people who have done better than the market over a long period of time. So unless you are as skilled as Buffett, you are better off with low cost index funds.
(I work at Craigslist)

It's surprising that most of those spammers forums are totally open although there are some attacks not described or discused in any of them. Spammers, as individuals, are far less technical that we think (most of them are just users and costumers of a limited set of programs) and need those forums to contact to each other and solve their problems and technical doubts.

It was known beforehand that there would be a phone number and verified account black market. It's possible to block most of them (most) as there are federal databases that can be queried for the origin of a given number (whether is voip,cell or home line).

Making them pay for the priviledge to autopost can lead to interesting spamming blocking techniques as we just try to increase their cost per post beyond profit (which is very low for a single post). This is not the only cost increasing technique we are using but sadly it is impossible to share or discuss or ask for feedback of any of them on an open forum.
Thanks :-)

I'm going to have to do a bit more reading on this and try some experiments I think. Can't wait for Real World Haskell to ship!
Yahoo Hires Former Twitter Chief Architect Blaine Cook
I agree with Linus here. My first foray into the world of real software was a computer security class I took in college (taught by DJB, not known for being kind and polite about security problems). Basically, I thought that if I found a minor security problem in some unimportant app, I was God because I was so much smarter than whoever wrote that app. This is the kind of attitude you're encouraged to have by the community.

Then I started writing my own software. I try to write things securely as possible (security is usually == to correctness, which I always want), but if I miss something, I don't really care. If you are using my code, you should read it and make sure I didn't fuck up something stupid. If you are a "security researcher", I definitely want your patches... but if you are going to call me names for writing free software that you find useful... I just don't care. Sure, the bug will be fixed... but security bugs are just like any other bugs. All bugs need to be fixed. To do that, you need to send a patch.

So I get exactly what Linus is saying here. If you want to be respected in the open source community, write code, and patch existing code. Everyone has egos, but ignore don't let that distract you from what matters -- code. (Hey, I even have a tshirt that says "Code Matters" on it, so it must be true!)
PageRank is an algorithm. (Although it does piss me off that it's patented)