skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was working for this little company called Trailworks.com, burning through a mere 25 million dollars in the course of six months.

They hit the ground hard shortly after launch, laid off all their staff, then brought me and one dba back on contract to mothball everything. I quoted an extortionate rate and they gladly jumped on it. For the next 3 months, the phone would ring several times a week with recruiters offering progressively more ludicrous contract rates for new gigs. Times were fat, so I turned them all down.

Mothballing complete, I turned down a new slew of dream gigs and hopped a flight to Thailand and Australia. 5 months later, tanned and grinning, I landed in the 'states and called up my recruiter:

"Hey, remember all those awesome gigs you had for crazy contract rates? I'll take one o' them, thanks."

"Uh... We don't have any more of those. Didn't you hear? We have some regular jobs for regular money, if you'd like."

"oh."

"Yeah. And you might want to check your eTrade account while you're at it..."

Gotta say though, it was a fun ride while it was happening. Everybody knew it was too good to be true, but we were happy to party like it was 1999. Cause, you know, it was.
Metal scrap,rail scrap,HMS 1 and 2,ghana,Mauritius
Principal Software Designer for embedded systems at Simplex Time Recorder, a subsidiary of Tyco International.

The dot-com bubble involved more than Internet companies as Tyco's stock crashed amid scandal involving its CEO. For me this led to downsizing, layoffs, a year of consulting, three of working under lousy conditions and finally a complete career change to teaching.

Lesson learned? The free enterprise system is seriously flawed. I watched a thriving, innovative American business get eaten alive by Tyco. A handful got filthy rich while thousands of workers lost their jobs as production moved overseas. Shameful..
A visit to 'Mos Espa' on 'Tatooine' in Tunisia
Here's a link back to the original: http://jessicahische.com/spendstoomuchtimeinternetting/?p=78...
I think this lays bare the difference between a "LinkedIn recommendation" and an in person recommendation. I have only hired though recommendations from great employees so far (and never regretted it). But I always ask people multiple questions to make sure the employee really knows the person being recommended well. "Is he/she really good? What is he/she good at? What is their favorite language?"
I was living on a tiny platform (Sealand) in the north sea, working on my startup HavenCo (offshore datahaven, hosting a variety of services which were worried about legal and jurisdictional issues), from 2000-2003.

My title was initially CTO, and then "last person left".

Short lessons:

* lots of press coverage can be a pain to manage.

* be careful about plans which depend on a full funding round (make sure you are still able to do at least 1/3 of the work with 1/3 of the money, and get to a viable product

* try to prove concepts cheaply early on

* don't let the company use your personal credit, it might collapse and you'll be >$200k in debt at 21...

I regret not bailing for Google in 2001 when it was an option.
There is a startup that is doing this www.topprospect.com
The easiest way to decline future work is "Thanks, not interested." Consultants don't particularly owe anybody an explanation for saying this -- it is the nature of the beast, just like clients don't particularly need to call you and tell why you they aren't calling you.

Things get trickier if you need to extricate yourself from work you've already agreed to do.
Waking up at 5am, my nearly 1 year review
well, it is not very clever to host the jpg version on dropbox. she is not getting any (back) link juice this way.
Insisting on an all-cash deal doesn't avoid the fact that you've wasted a lot of time if the deal falls through -- and I'm guessing that swindlers like this have an even higher than normal deal-falling-through rate.
Actually no, they do inject code into the login pages. Here is the code injected into the FB login: http://www.hackerzvoice.net/node/105

It is not simply a case of sniffing traffic. They log what users input into the login form, via Javascript injection.
At the risk of sounding like a marketing guy for TopProspect.com (I don't work for them, own any stock etc.), they solve this problem too. You get paid what a head hunter would be paid for recommending a friend who gets hired.
"...and Dennis something or other who just sold a huge Irish telecom company and was worth a random billion or so."

He's talking about Denis O'Brien, a telecoms billionaire:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_OBrien
I thought this too, but if you go look at what was actually done, 'keylogger' is a fairly accurate description.

They were injecting a Javascript keylogger, not doing packet sniffing or the like. Not the same as a keylogger actually running on your OS, but I would say still the correct term.

Facebook sends login credentials over HTTPS, they aren't so dumb as to authenticate over HTTP. But they serve their login page over HTTP which is what allowed the Javascript keylogger to be 'installed'.

(edit)

PS Here's a link to the purported exploit:
http://www.hackerzvoice.net/node/105
I should mention two things:
A) every ounce of the story is true. If you read through my blog you'll see there is no fiction. Many people sometimes question the stories but, for better or for worse, I tend to throw myself into various situations.

B) if you have any questions on my bio, feel free to ask me. Or, I would also advise, checking out the rest of jamesaltucher.com for the answers.
Previously submitted and discussed at great length here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2098332
Powerful algorithms too complex to implement
Impact (Javascript Game Engine) Sales Report
I had missed it - my bad.
TELL HN: Will work for a iPhone/MacBook/Macbook Pro/Air
I'm a great designer who has worked for a few YC companies doing design work. Here's the deal, I need another macbook and am wiling to do a project for ya in exchange for a new/used macbook.

How does it work? You leave me a comment underneath(if you can leave your email, that'd be even better) and I'll contact you. We'll talk to get a better understanding of this and so that you can see my portfolio. After this, if we feel this could work out you'd basically send me pictures of your macbook or any of the mentioned Apple products, and give me further details on what needs to be designed. Of course, I'll reveal my true identity to the leads who I consider to be worthwhile and we go on from there.

I'd imagine this could work out much cheaper than if you just paid me as buying an Apple product here, where I am is pretty expensive in comparison with The US. So it's a really good deal.
Thats totally it. "raising money" is a marketing event for many companies. And then the list of investors put you on a status hierarchy so that you become first in line when Google goes shopping. Or so the CEOs think. I'm almost embarassed when any company I invest in announces their funding. Thats not the real world. The real world is buying something low and sell high. I learned this many times over, some times the hard way.
"MM" is even worse than "mm", because "M" is the international standard abbreviation for 10^6, so MM would by extension mean 10^12.
First off, nobody swindled anyone of anything. Ahh, I shouldn't even be responding to you.
I used to just say "2M" for $2 million but an editor I had once at thestreet.com said you have to do "$2mm". I don't know whats right worldwide.
Fake It Till You Make It
What about content duplication?

Excerpt from the Google Webmaster Central Blog[1]:
"There are some penalties that are related to the idea of having the same content as another site—for example, if you're scraping content from other sites and republishing it, or if you republish content without adding any additional value. These tactics are clearly outlined (and discouraged) in our Webmaster Guidelines:"

[1] http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/demystify...
Some in American Right Wing Want 'Holy War' To Convert Everyone to Christianity
I had just started at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeserve
as a developer. And stayed there for a further 4 years. The bubble burst but the number of people wanting to get online to look at boobies was still boooooming.
Great check! Not being an Australian, are the top 3 schools here the top 3 schools in Australia? (No UNSW?)
It's also typically a huge win for the employees: at a pre-IPO company, your stock isn't really worth very much, because it's hard to find somebody to buy it (for most employees). So instead of paying taxes for a highly illiquid asset, you instead get an option (probably with a really nice strike price), and you don't pay taxes until you exercise it.
You should be able to pull the data from their API after registration. You can do the logic checks on that data and present your own HTML form prefilled with the data Facebook sent you if anything needs to be changed.
Great summary of the situation -- did not expect. Thanks!
Quickcheck implementation for Python
> traveling for business almost never generates more revenues

This is not true at all. If you are selling expensive software to enterprises (or organizations of any kind), the only effective way to do it is to travel to their office and give an in person demo.

At least the author acknowledges he didn't deserve to make any money. If he had deployed his deal making skills for a company that actually created value, he would have ended up making a ton of money. This assumes it wasn't just the dot com euphoria driving the deals of course.
Why 3D doesn't work and never will.
The thing is, prison is already a heavy punishment. You don't get to see your family/friends. You can't stay current with your work environment. You don't get to go on holidays. You don't even get to choose meal times, bed time, or when you would like to do sport.

It's already a lousy experience for inmates - they've had a lot of freedoms taken away (note, I don't think this is a bad thing), but from there to denying them anything to distract themselves from their plight is quite cruel.
McDonald's (Back Crew). :)
Great stuff. Reminds me heavily of some time spent at uni studying old Soviet Ternary Computers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun
http://www.computer-museum.ru/english/setun.htm

The high level logic for wanting to build one seems sound, but then when you get into the nuts and bolts of it, binary systems are simpler and use less silicon. However, the kinds of logic gates are really quite fascinating (building the equivalent of a full-adder was really cool if I remember correctly)

Can't seem to find the site that has the logic diagrams, but I recall they were particularly intriguing.
Oracle Wins a Big One
BBC Online to cut 360 jobs - lots of content cut too
What startup names have the highest Scrabble scores?
What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?
It's usually between 15 and 30 people. We book a conference room kind of space, provide some food, drinks, music, etc… and jibber-jabber for 3 hours or so. Some people go home and some go out and grab drinks at a local bar afterward. It's been a different crowd each time: some of the same faces, always some new faces.
The world's worst scam search engine
Considering the cost of living in Japan, how does one live on that? Heck, there are several places in the States were a $30k (USD) salary for a thirty year old would put them in a homeless shelter!
Ooops, second word there is a typo--should be 2000, sigh.
The sweet spot comes from users who have been to the companies during the phases about which the questions are asked. Where else can you find how much serving the Like button costs to Fb. Sure you can do a guess-estimate but how close would that be to the figure quoted by Tweetmeme CEO about their RT buttons.
There are countless such incidents. I think if the user base has some sort of expertise in an area and they "choose" to answer questions about thos domains only, that would be make it a great place for knowledge. I honestly think Quora is the lovechild of Twitter and Wikipedia. You can call it the real time Wikipedia with Questions than topics having info that I do not give a damn about.
Выступление участницы проекта Александра Могилко Юлии Мирошниченко в Женеве
Confidential Google document? Sure , we love them
The megacorps have gotten into the shelter business. Many people who are just starting out live in corporate housing.
I believe they can still raise their prices out of the client's reach.

And, in case the scammer decides to pay, they can always donate that money to a fund set up to help the scammer's clients sue them ;-)

There is beauty in symmetry.
The site is actually a little bloated with AdSense, making it hard to distinguish between content and adverts.
Oh... So that's how stackoverlow works...
Cisco: Puppy cams threaten Internet
Food is, hmm. Well you can eat for really cheap, or you can blow all your dough on one meal. Up to you.

Lunch is usually pretty cheap, dinners are expensive. Also, drinks are very expensive! I drink a lot of water because I refuse to pay ¥600 for my meal and then ¥650 for an iced tea.

For startups, I highly recommend living out of the combini. I would never eat in an American 7-Eleven but here, you can feast.
Japanese Court Says That Place Shifting TV Overseas Is Infringing
HTML5 Is Dead, Long Live HTML
Hey Matt Cutts the open web needs an open algorithm
>If Eric isn't coming to Apple

People keep saying this, but Eric isn't remotely as talented as Jobs. I can't imagine they've given a seconds consideration as having him in the top spot.
Your last statement is very interesting. Frequently, one hears about the divide between academia and the real world, and how much research---even in CS---is unlikely to ever have practical benefits. Could you give an example or two of the ACM subscription being the key element for a step forward in your career?
Universal Studios/Islands of Orlando, Florida And Theme Park Pictures
Even so, with either one at such negligible speeds, that has to be about the worst justification for any language I've heard.
It also kept comics on rather juvenile themes for a very long period by banning depictions of drug addiction/use and many other real life themes.
Apple iOS Security quirks
Now you know you can't claim it does those things elegantly ;)
You phoned 20 companies and said that you wanted to buy them. You promised them ten million dollars which you didn't have. You promised them ten million dollars worth of stock which you knew was worthless (while telling them that it would be worth a hundred million dollars).

You lied, many times over. Maybe to you that's just "being a good salesman"; but to me, that's simply unacceptable.
This is why any page that lets you login to a site must also be accessible over HTTPS-only.
I can’t say I’ve got a headache from any of the current crop of 3D films – is my brain doing something different?

Also, regarding: "Nothing will fix it short of producing true "holographic" images." See: http://www.holografika.com/
Betting the Future of Commerce = Apps
5 top Android and iOS tools for the mobile systems administrator
> phoned 20 companies and said that you wanted to buy them

Not a lie. He actually did buy the company which responded. For more than it received from the former bidder.

> You promised them ten million dollars which you didn't have.

Most of the purchases are made without the hard cash in the bank.
Python 2.6, 2.7 and 3.1 with virtualenv.
It might be interesting to you - I played with the representation of that when I posted, but couldn't find anything that was both brief and which looked satisfying so I settled on the same as the original article.
Cisco 2010 Annual Security Report
It's not a contradiction, it's a deadlock.
American Psycho but with lighter humor. There's definitely some similarities. I'd love to read a book lightly based on the author and his adventures during the bubble.
Performance boost in Clojure 1.3 (alpha4)
Bollywood Film Actress Anushka Sharma Hot Wallpapers, Photos, Pics & Images
I was going to quote "Everything that can be invented has been invented", but it turns out it's most likely false:

http://www.myoutbox.net/posass.htm
StackExchange reaches 16 million users, 131% growth
This letter is from Walter Murch, seen at left, the most respected film editor and sound designer in the modern cinema.

I'd hate to be introduced like that.

That said, his points make sense. I don't get a headache from watching 3D movies but it does cause extra strain. It's more tiring than watching a normal movie. I have no intention of buying a 3D TV at any point in the future, and though I'll go to a 3D cinema for the different experience, if the movie is the right kind for 3D (e.g. Avatar), I certainly don't see it as a revolutionary new technology.

Another argument I heard against 3D movies is that apparently our brains use all sorts of cues (about 20, I think) other than differences between what the eyes see, in order to make us see things as 3D (which is why, among other things, the world doesn't suddenly look 2-dimensional if you cover one eye). 3D movies provide only one of those cues, and so naturally causes a strange feeling because the other 19 cues are missing.

Another nail in the coffin of 3DTV: It's been out for years and I don't know a single person who has bought one.
Prediction: Google's coupon deals will not in any way affect their ranking of Adsense and Adwords based on profit (a function of bid price and clickthrough)

FWIW Targeted deal ranking is nevertheless something I'd be interested in exploring.
I have an unreleased/unfinished Scheme to Python interpreter, which is intended to be a full compiler. I'm using trampolining for everything as I wanna be able to support call/cc at some capacity, so there's a factor of slowdown to using it, but it's pretty fun nevertheless.
I don't think you will be disappointed by my other experiences I write about in my blog at jamesaltucher.com
The complexities in designing fully language agnostic software are non-trivial and easily underestimated.

I once had an offer from a large hardware manufacturer to bundle some software with a hardware device they made, the deal fell through when I realized the cost of making the software work in all the languages they supported and providing tech support in all those languages would have to be born by us. There simply was no way we could afford it.

Another problem is that there is no really good guide (there certainly wasn't at the time, but even today this is sorely lacking) on how to make your software truly multi-lingual in a way that leaves absolutely no loose ends.

Even frameworks that are supposedly multi-lingual typically have lots of shortcomings and only work well in the language of the original developers, and maybe one or two others.

Try throwing right-to-left fonts at them, the installer is available in only one language (even if the software is multi-lingual), fonts will be missing and so on.
There were complaints about nausea from Cloverfield's filming technique, despite this technique being used many times before without nearly as much camera control (Blare Witch project had some awful shaky scenes far worse than Cloverfield).

I don't buy any of these articles. Yes some people won't respond well to 3D, but the vast majority does and has in every implementation. This is as absurd as saying when the Model T was released, that because of a minority of the population having motion sickness that the automobile is destined to fail.

I don't know a single person who has a problem with 3D. Well technically that's a lie, I know someone who's blind in one eye, so with the glasses they're just watching an over expensive 2D movie and without they're just watching a very fuzzy movie.
Yeah, too bad didn't tell Google about that one a few years ago.
ah the items a through e indicate before any research that its illegal at least in the US..most US states require that any firm asking for payment before giving out employment information be licensed as a employment firm.

Send a letter and walk away..

From experience..

Recently I was scammed by a felon:

The basic scam was we have a gig for you that will turn into employment completing a web portal/ecommerce social site for private investors and private companies. Was told during interview that $100,000 funding through loan was secured and $700,000 loan was being processed. During first 30 days found out that business owner was a drug dealer felon and that his name was not on bank accounts which also means that funding loan game was a con.

I sent a letter and walked away.

You are not responsible for what client did to job seekers your only concern is get away from that relationship before you get burned.
I have a degenerative eye condition (keratoconus) which affects one eye more severely than the other, this makes me hesitant to pay extra to watch a film in 3D. I've actually not watched any under the fear that I'd have to walk out of a film that my friends are enjoying.

I might head down to an electronics store and give on the 3D televisions a try, that way I'll know if my condition will negatively affect the experience as much as I expect.
Except it doesn't. The metric system doesn't work that way.

M is not the international standard abbreviation for 10^6. M is the SI system for 10^6, which is not the same thing - SI has some extra rules.

If you write MM you are clearly not using SI (since it makes no sense in SI), so it's not that hard to figure out.

M has meant 1000 for a lot longer than it's meant 10^6.

And BTW, lowercase m means milli, so by your logic mm should mean 1/1000000 - so tell me again why MM is worse?
Library of structured thinking guides
I have keratoconus as well and haven’t had any problems, but then I’m guessing mine isn’t as bad as your: my glasses correct my sight well enough that it’s fine to just wear the cinema-supplied glasses over the top.
New media open-access academic journals
My own prejudices go along with this completely, but ...

(Arthur C) Clarke's First Law: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; when he states that something is impossible, he is probably wrong."

... has turned out to be correct often enough that I wouldn't want to place large bets on this.

(Digression: there's an obvious difficulty in assessing Clarke's First Law. When someone says something is impossible and is wrong, we can tell because, lo, someone else does it. But when someone says something is impossible and is right, we'll never really know for sure; the most we can say is that no one has done it yet. So: time travel? teleportation? faster than light travel? Plenty of eminent (and in some cases elderly) scientists have said, and doubtless will continue to say, that these things are impossible; for all we know they really are; but even if they are we'll never know for sure that Clarke's First Law is wrong for them.)

[EDITED in response to two comments: If the claim is "3D done just like it is now will never work" then I agree that CFL isn't very relevant. If it's "3D movies will never work", which is what I think "3D doesn't work and never will" ought to mean, then I think CFL applies. So maybe I'm really only criticizing Ebert and not Murch, who does embed into his comments the sentence 'Nothing will fix it short of producing true "holographic" images.'. I do wonder whether the quotes around "holographic" are trying to define it to mean "anything that fixes this problem" rather than strictly "something close to full-wavefront reconstruction using coherent light", in which case I guess he's right by definition and therefore vacuously. I would certainly not want to bet that actual literal holograms are the only way to solve the problem.]
You can - the data gets POSTed to a URL of your choosing, signed with your secret key.

But I don't like the interruption in flow that I have to force on the user in order to present a second (nearly identical) registration form just because the validation on the first is rubbish - especially for a field as important as email address.