skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Haha, thanks for the advice. Was the learning curve steep? (referring to Dvorak, of course).
Howdy... for what it is worth I have built a consulting business, believe it or not, by answering higher end ads from Craigslists. The "secret" is to use the RSS features of Craigslist and run multiple search feeds in an RSS reader like NetNewsWire that lets you sort and mark them... I run searches like "CSS" "UI design" etc.. Run those same searches all over the country for your area of expertise. Have a kick ass portfolio online, solid references, and send out emails everyday to answer the quality ads... and rock the initial interviews... I have literally been consulting full time doing custom app and drupal theming from Craigslist for two years... my site: www.jeffreydalton.info
If it's just coding (as in a freelance job), I have found 3 to be my magic number. It's just enough I can switch out to another project when I get burned out but I maintain that "new project" burst of activity and the code stays fresh in my head.

A personal project, in which I am doing the design, marketing, monetization, business practices, everything - 1. It's a full-time commitment.
Choosing a web development framework in five easy steps.
All of my work is via word-of-mouth and I would have it no other way. Unintentionally, I have postured myself as an "Expert" within the CodeIgniter community. Frequent posts on the forums, a geniune desire to help people and promote the community, and an active blog in which the community participates are all contributing factors to this status.

Clients come to me for work and all of my clients have come to me for repeat work after the fact. I give them my hourly rate, which is lower than most US-based coders but significantly hire than offshore, and an estimate of the total hours their project will require.

They either take it or leave it - no bidding and worrying about whether I'm going to pick that client up. There's a long line of potential clients behind him if he turns the offer down.

I guess the mentality is a bit different, in the way I freelance. Not to sound prudent, but I envision the relationship as the client competing for me, not I competing for the client. I don't need the money, it's a nicety - if the project doesn't interest me, the client seems like an idiot, or I'm just to busy, I can turn it down with no worries.
The World is Flat
The Post American World

Losing My Virginity - Richard Branson's Autobiography

Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie

The Second Coming of Steve Jobs
Inside Steve's Brain

The Seven Day Weekend- Book by Ricardo Semler of Semco on company organization and management, Semco essentially operates as a socialist enterprise with election of bosses, profit sharing, open information, flex-time, etc, but with the twist that Ricardo is the majority stock owner. Fascinating book and well-written to boot.

Founders at Work should go without saying :)
Ridiculous Small-Business Plan Encouraged By Friends
Why not spend hundreds of millions of dollars on developing usable software and services instead of on ads "selling" us on how usable the software should be... I mean will be... I mean is... I mean.. oh well you get the picture.
But that's not the primary goal. The primary goal is to defuse the situation and avoid seeming hostile or egocentric.

That makes a lot of sense and is really helpful. Hostile and egocentric (or at least defensive) are pretty much how he did come across. Plus incongruent (saying how amused he was when he obviously wasn't, and so on).

There's a huge culture gap between the supercilious Apple snobs, whose haughtiness is a composite of everything bad ever said about Mac users, and the earnest outsider trying to justify himself and not realizing that he's only making things worse. For example, he mentions his years of experience and how many people use his data-entry apps, things that carry credibility in his culture but are just the sort of uncool things that are disdained in theirs. The whole thread is full of these crossed signals.
Bad UX design can't hide behind a good color scheme. The fundamental flaws are still there.
Nice one!

The point the author insists most in the post is: "VCs like numbers, not the usual 'boast-talk' ". It's true. Its always great to show the VCs data, data on how your product/service sells... data on why people like your service... data on what you were, are and going to(or atleast can) be.

There's a video by Guy Kawasaki on http://edcorner.stanford.edu/ and its all about the presentation. He deals with even minute facts about the font size to use, what your slides should contain etc.
Understanding the brains ventral pathway makes for better editing
I did that a few months ago (http://boston.conman.org/2007/11/30.1) and found some surprising results (http://boston.conman.org/2007/12/02.1)which showed that using getpid() wasn't a good test of system call overhead.
"The company says 77,000 devices are compatible with Windows Vista today (double the number when the operating system launched) as well as 99% of the major business applications."

Might be funny to compare that to OSX. I'm curious what the numbers are. For all Apple's ads bash Vista for incompatibilities, the vast majority of software and some huge percentage of hardware is Windows only.

That seems to be the only advantage MS has left, they should use it.
um, shouldn't you just look for your passion and work on it? you could either quit your job or do your stuff in your spare time.

if not, perhaps a girlfriend / wife would work for you ^__^
Naw, it's way wacko different and relatively hard to switch back to a QWERTY when you need to.

Check out the Kinesis Ergo Contoured keyboard instead, http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/. While it looks daunting, it's easy to pick up and it's surprisingly easy to switch back and forth to a normal QWERTY keyboard.
same here. fulltime and i still do freelance. i have friends who are doing fulltime on freelance projects. we rent a room and hack everynight... this guy should get more people around him. talking and laughing helps a lot. :)
A yurt with a brain
Fuck the NSA.
yup yup...

I prefer the shotgun approach. In the last 6 months: 22 releases across 8 projects (with differing levels of inter-relatedness). I've worked on 19 other projects in that period of time (this number might be low as I polled the filesystem, not perforce).
Very interesting. I'm curious to know whether you maintain these projects long-term, or do you hand off your work and have done with it?
The one place that I don't follow the guideline (unless it's the guideline and I just don't know it... it rarely comes up, so I haven't bothered to check) is on array indices. I do write:

a[i+1]
The game need not be dictated by chance - you could make the players answer a _really_ simple question, and only tickets with the right answer could win.

Your tax problem still stands though, but the diminished value just as much a problem with cash winning.
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Are you saving money to start a company?
That is a really nice catch.
Making division in Python faster
Always use 4 spaces as indent

My god how I wish everyone did this... would make life so much easier.
Introducing Mobile SEO Services to You
The Term Mobile SEO services is quite difficult to understand even today. There have been quite a few cases where his term has been tried and explained but to no success. Lets just get an idea about it now.
If given a choice, I prefer to work on one thing to the exclusion of all other things.

It takes me a day or two to really get into a project. Once I'm there, I find that I naturally cycle my focus between projects every three to four weeks. My biggest challenge to getting things done is the day when I finish off a project cycle and try to figure out what to work on next. If I don't have a clear idea, I flit between a half dozen or so potential projects until I dig my teeth into one.

I also to have 'little projects' on the side burner to work on for a couple hours if I'm feeling the need for a break without full-on switching into another project. These little projects tend to be things like 'learn how to do this in framework X' or 'write up a blog entry for sample code Y'.

It's worth noting that I work predominantly on desktop software, so I'm used to a longer release cycle than a lot of people here.
Why? I regret never having worked at a coffee shop. Now I am over 30 it doesn't feel so appropriate anymore, and I am spoiled by the IT money. But sometimes I still feel like just working in a coffee shop. Only for a while of course, the money just isn't good enough. But if it leaves you with enough energy to code on the side, it might be OK.

Also, the experience might come in handy if you ever want to open your own cafe later in life...
I think the premise of the article is misguided. If they need time tracking with accounting software integration, have they tried Harvest?

Linda sounds like the problem not basecamp. If Linda was doing a good job she would have researched problem and turned up Harvest-- at least as an option to try.

Instead she fell into the 'this is the way it's been done before mindset', that doesn't recognize the benefits of collaboration or web services.

In my experience, Linda's approach may make her feel like every penny is accounted for, but that will only be true in her books. Everyone else will be left with a print out of a week old, outdated gantt chart, and less certainty about what to do.
This is journalism so bad it makes me sympathize with Reiser. No, you don't lie to the people you interview, and no, the fact that someone murdered his wife does not make it okay to lie to them, either. And when people "read what was written and their reflection punches them in the face", most of the time it isn't "their reflection" that punches them in the face so much as the journalist's bad work. Which is exactly why every interviewee should ask to see the manuscript before it's published, and if the journalist tells you "it doesn't work that way", don't consent to the interview.
It's trendy to bash Long Tail, but doesn't your comment imply that it's prevalent enough that a entrepreneur should read, disagree or agree with it?
1. Because they are a business and there is also profit in exploiting existing markets.

2. Even if you ask an engineer what his or her dream product is, it's often something like "(existing thing) done right".

3. How do you know that your other examples won't turn out to be as innovative? It took Google years to figure out search advertising. You just think that Google miraculously produced perfect software the first time around, because you weren't paying as much attention before.

But I will grant you one point. The old Google had a rule that they wouldn't get into a market unless they thought they had a chance of being 10x better than anyone else. It's hard to believe that Lively is going to be 10x better than the other social MMOs.
Good point. I was only thinking of sequence types, and failed to see that it would break with strings. I also somehow forgot to include "not" in the if statements! Pretty sad for a first post...
Durch Internet-Marketing mehr Spendengelder für Kinderpatenschaften | tefly.net
Merriam-Webster finds new words in geek culture
I was studying marketing when the 'super premium pet food' segment was invented. The idea that dog and cat were prepared to paid $US 3 per 4oz can of food was amazing.

At the time the best steak or fish was about $7 /lb

This could be a multimillion dollar company.
Researcher offers insight into DNS flaw
I voted the article up, not because I found the subject matter all that interesting, but I loved how thoroughly cited it was, especially the notes on the various sources.
I think this could actually work. I'd say it would most probably work.
"Everything Hans said reinforced the image I already had of him. He wasn't interested in what was true, only in whether or not he had been treated fairly."

I think that being treated fairly is a pretty important point. It's pretty obvious now that he was guilty; but, from what I've read, at the time of the trial the prosecution didn't come close to meeting their burden.

I would prefer to have a system where everyone is treated fairly, and some guilty men go free.

Robert Nozick raised an interesting question about this problem. Any system of determining guilt has some false positive rate (let's call it X). You can trivially cut X in half by flipping a coin after determining a person's guilt and only actually considering them guilty if the coin is heads.

I've always heard that it's better to let 10 guilty men go than let one innocent man go to jail. What about 11? 15? 100? 1000? Assuming we can accurately gauge our current jury system's effectiveness (and we can at least come up with a reasonable lower bound using appeal data), it would be trivial to achieve whatever ratio we desired using a simple RNG. So, what's the magic number (1:10, etc.)? And should we do so?

And yes, the reporter was being a total asshole.
it's a funny headline, but the business idea seems completely plausible.
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Anton: a new supercomputer for molecular simulation
I'd say the sort of people likely to be interested in playing with virtual avatars are likely to be running Windows.

Maybe that's a generalization too far, but it seems like it should be so.
There's a huge untapped market for high-end dog treats made with natural ingredients, and I'm getting in on the ground floor. If you don't believe me, ask my friend Angie

http://www.doghousebagels.com/
When something is a god awful as Overture though, it makes a great deal of sense to copy parts of the model, but do it properly.
This is a great quote "every penny is accounted for, but that will only be true in her books." One of the strengths of a collaboration app, in particular if you grant customers acces to the workspace, is that you are better able to focus on the value that you are delivering, not the hours you are working. Clients pay for results not hours: I question why the strict focus on hours. We use CentralDesktop and are happy with it, but I would never confuse it with a time tracking system.
>from what I've read, at the time of the trial the prosecution didn't come close to meeting their burden.

Sure they did. It was circumstantial evidence, but when you put it together it seems rather overwhelming.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=176098
She needs 4000% growth in sales by year end to remain in business. And I wouldn't be surprised if it grows by 8000%. God! Look at the way Karen Sabin speaks. The love and passion for her dream is clear in her statements. This woman is going to make it big. And I'm sure she's soon going to be the poster-woman of every business magazine very soon. Enormous passion! I bet she'll even easily crush Google if there's something called Google Pet Food.

Its a treat to aspiring entrepreneurial minds to read stories of such people with unique ideas.

Go Sabin! go!
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Lead junction provides Sample Mortgage Lead.
A low carb diet for dogs - that is just sick...
SMS GupShup
As I read this article, I couldn't help but think of the earlier submission on improving writing style: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=239147
it's depressing that the onion correlates with reality to a higher degree than mainstream media.
I used to use Basecamp as part of an eight-member team for web projects. After a few weeks, it had so many rabbit holes of data in it (each one created by different users who created different organization systems) that I stopped using it because I had no idea where to look any more.

But that's not really a fault with Basecamp itself - it's just as much of a problem with any system that allows users to create their own categories or folders, like SharePoint.

It was doubly annoying that I was forced to use two systems for communication - Outlook and Basecamp. First someone would go into Basecamp and write a message - and because they had subscribed me to it, I'd get an email with their note included.

To reply to it - instead of using Outlook, which normally would be dead easy since I could just click "reply all," I'd have to figure out where to go in Basecamp to reply to it - which was so difficult to do that I never did. Instead, I'd typically just reply to the message using Outlook, which of course defeated the purpose of Basecamp.
It wasn't very much about Microsoft admitting Vista is shit, it was more about promising a rosy future.
forget the bayesian probability, I'd be happy with a house that was just linked to my iphone.
from what I've read, at the time of the trial the prosecution didn't come close to meeting their burden

I think the only people qualified to decide that were the members of the jury. The vast majority of the rest of us had only hearsay to go on.
Great work Onion, brilliant parody. But the business idea itself is not that bad.
I change my hosts file for this purpose. It works when I actually feel bad when I'm on a site but go to it anyways. It takes some effort to change the hosts file, and I tell myself that I shouldn't do it.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the major evidence was:

1. He had taken out the front seat of his car

2. He had hosed down the interior

3. He had his passport and several thousand dollars in cash
on him.

4. He kept removing the battery from his cellphone, after he was interrogated by police.

5. He bought a few books on homicide investigation, after his wifes homicide investigation began.

6. He lawyered up quickly.

Numbers 1-3 seem very reasonable for someone living in their car. 4-5 make sense for someone who has just been interrogated by the police. And 6 is always a good idea - for anybody - before talking to the police.

Taken with the fact that his wife was dating (and recently broke up with) a confessed serial killer I'd say we have reasonable doubt.

He was, of course, guilty - I just don't think you could reasonably conclude it from the evidence presented at the trial. I think Plato said that knowledge must be "justified true belief." I don't think the jury could have known that he was guilty at the time they convicted him, because such a belief wasn't justified.

It's kind of like a broken clock that just blinks '12:00.' By looking at that clock you can't know that it's noon, even if it incidentally is at that moment.
Personally, I found when Slashdot went over to sans-serif fonts I read a lot less of the comments than when they had a serif font. My eyes just seemed to get tired more quickly.

Having done some fiddling around with fonts after noticing this effect I've found that I prefer serif fonts for large / long lumps of text. However, I'm sure if you ask around you'll find lots of people who prefer it the other way around. I've been thinking of adding a little control panel to some of my sites to let people easily switch between the two. It's probably not worth it for short pieces, but for articles it could be worthwhile.
Gumbaby - Cataloging Online Confusion
awesome blog. thanks.
I just don't think you could reasonably conclude it from the evidence presented at the trial.

smanek, I'm guessing you weren't in the courtroom to observe Hans during the proceedings. Judging from what I've read I think Hans's courtroom behavior and crazy explanations led the jury to find him guilty. I'm glad he didn't take his lawyers' advice to keep his mouth shut.
bool(x) may sometimes do more than x is None. If x is not None, then truth value is determined by calling __nonzero__ or __len__. For an ordinary sequence type that's fine, but some years ago I had code like this:

if not self.db: self.db = bsddb.hashopen(...).

I just couldn't find out why my process spent valuable seconds apparently reading in the entire bsddb database into memory at random times -- but that's because bool(self.db) above turned into len(self.db.keys()) != 0
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More importantly property getters will silently do nothing in old-style classes and just let the attribute setting through without calling the setter, while getters work fine.
Don't know much about it, but perhaps speeding up shell calls would have been another possible approach? Something akin to fast_cgi for shells, I suppose?
The idea seems plausible, but is it something that some random person at home can execute on? The numbers didn't look good.
Using defence in depth to produce high-quality software
Applying a military strategy to bug-handling! 12 layers of defense that help to reduce problems your users experience.
Second Life in the browser by Google
One can add rooms to once website as widgets - dammn that was my idea :(
> Microsoft advertised Vista to small businesses in The Wall Street Journal and USA Today the last two weeks, and plans a much larger wave of ads under the tagline "Free the People."

War is peace. Ignorance is strength. Proprietary is free.
Yeah Microsoft is losing the backward compatibility religion that was critical to past success, but where would people go instead of Windows? Mac? Linux? Detroit?

Apple and Linux can't handle a billion people who want to buy a $300 computer once every 5-10 years and never installl, configure, or fix anything on it (it comes with Internet Explorer 6 -- isn't that fine?).
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Is this some kind of onion-esque joke?

I don't even know how to respond to this... some sort of personal stack overflow.

The more I think about it, the worse it gets.
#1 would be true if Google actually made money from anything other than their advertising products.
If you are good with javascript (prototype) + html + css, The startup I work for may have some freelance contract work for you to do. Anyone looking for some work email me at nate@quub.com
What matters is what does your inner self want. If you want to be secure and have fun with your friends and need weekends off, You should stick to your job and keep cursing your boss or company. If you want to build something neat and want to be free, you should quit your job and concentrate 110% on your vision. We humans were not born to work in cubicles for 40-50 years of our lives doing something lame.
Never, Never, Never ...Give Up - Winston Churchill.
Has anyone here done an NSA math program, like the one that happens over summer?
SQLite manager as Firefox add-in
Some of the puzzles on the brainteasers page are are fun - http://www.nsa.gov/kids/games/games00001.cfm
10+ Motivating Ingredients for Strengthening Your Value Proposition Today
As I was reading this article, it reminded me so much of a bakery specifically for dogs I'd heard about.

http://www.threedog.com/ - Three Dog Bakery... 47 stores worldwide wtf?

It just goes to show, that with some niches, you can sell people pretty much anything.
Extracting a single-use function can get in the way of future refactorings that cross the function's boundary. I inline single-use functions whenever I see them, and almost always after that, other, more useful possible refactorings become visible. This can happen with multiple-use functions too, but much less often.
Why? If kamme heeds the advice without thinking, it would be bad. But not because working in a coffee shop is bad.

A mini breakdown caused by soul-grating work convinced me to stop wasting my life. Not everyone needs the same amount of money and security to be happy.