skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Those are two very-selective samples. How much did the S&P return from 2000 to 2011? If you look at a chart of an index fund dating back to the 1970s, they certainly look like things that were following an upward trend, which got goosed steeper a couple of times, until everything blew up in 1998 and now there is chaos and unpredictability. 1998-2011 is over 1/3 of the period from 1971 to 2011 so one can't really regard this as a blip!

Yes, money "can" clearly be made investing, if you time the market and are lucky. I am disputing the idea that stocks will always generally go up. I think this used to be true but may have changed. Much like "housing prices always go up", which was shown to be absurd.
You are admittedly a programmer. That is why you didn't like it. You are not the target audience.

Eh, that's over-generalizing a bit, methinks. I'm also a programmer and I loved the movie. I thought it was easily the best movie of 2010, and I've watched it multiple times already, despite "not being the target audience."

FWIW, I can see what Steve is saying, but none of his complaints kept me from enjoying the movie. Maybe it's just a question of expectations... it was Hollywood entertainment, I didn't expect any deeper analysis of IP issues than "a guy who made a nice chair doesn't owe money to everybody who ever made a chair." In fact, that was probably more than I expected from Hollywood!

At the end though, what made the movie so compelling for me was the "inspiration factor." Yes, I knew you could big money building software... like Steve, I've been around this industry long enough to have watched more than a few companies get founded, grow big and make the founders rich.

But watching it unfold on the screen, seeing things on a more personal level, made it feel more real to me. I finished watching it the first time and - literally - rush home to sit down and start hacking as soon as I could. As an aspiring tech-entrepreneur, I found The Social Network to be a great experience, and I recommend it to anyone who hasn't seen it yet.
> (referring to healthcare) as a concept it enables failure and risk taking.

I cannot agree enough. Sorry for the sidetrack, but I have always thought about the scenario where say a person who is still far away from standard retirement age (maybe by about 20 years till medicare kicks in) has, say, just enough saved up to carry her through the rest of her life. If she doesnt have a working spouse with healthcare, she is forced to take a job. Whereas if healthcare was provided regardless of a job, it frees her from the necessity to work as well as opens up the job to somebody who needs the income as well as the care.
Research: Bad Things Seem Even Worse If People Have To Live Through Them Again
Or build a RIFD_Zapper:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RFID_Zapper
What saving account rates have you been able to find lately? My bank in CA offered a checking account with 5% interest back in 2007, and it's only down now to 3.5%. Most people I talk to say these are very high rates. Can I do better?
It would be cool if you could share screens from two people not in the same room too.
I believe 1Password is just using the Dropbox API, in which case your credentials are indeed needed. I don't think it's possible for 1Password to use the Dropbox App to do the integration with the Dropbox service, at least not at the present time with the way apps are sandboxed.
User acceptance testing: Selenium

Unit testing & load testing: testing framework built into Visual Studio

IE testing: Two or three VMs with different versions of IE installed
Yeah I think you missed the sentence in my original comment about how I found the environment we're talking to on dial-up BBS's --- if you could get that back when you had to tie up the phone line for your family to type a comment, it has to be possible today. ;)
A belt sander is a bit harsh. The micro-fine sandpapers used by plastic model hobbyists work much better, and are much less likely to harm your fingers.

I remember reading this trick in the old spy novels, and being a model hobbyist at the time, I had to try it (on one finger, anyway). It worked -- so far as eliminating fingerprints. Of course, back then biometrics was a rather exotic technology, low res, and not in common use.
Debit cards are 2-factor.
I could work for a company where my reaction to the product was "meh, whatever." But I doubt I'd work for a company whose product is something that I find morally reprehensible or something that I think is just absolute crap.
This is not true for Germany. (Which makes this even more a security theater..)
There's a page on this in the docs:

http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/testing/
ZNC is awesome. I have it setup to retain the last 200 lines of text on each channel and dump them out when I connect to the bouncer.
It's unlikely any of the Android phone OEM's will make the kind of profit margins Apple is making, but they're clearly making a lot more profits selling Android smartphones than they were before Android.

The feature phone market is drying up. All the growth (and the profit margins) is in smartphones. So what is a company like HTC, Motorola, Samsung, etc. to do? Symbian has been on lifesupport for ever. IOS and BlackBerry OS aren't available to them. They could try to build their own smartphone OS... but what are the odds that'll be successful?

Basically they need Android or WP7 to survive. The profits in making Android or WP7 phones may be less than what Apple makes, but it's much better than any other alternatives open to basically every phone maker but Apple and RIM.

Which incidentally, like you noted is a lot like the situation has always been between Apple and everyone else in the PC market.
But Astia does not give you money. Y Combinator does, on top of offering everything Astia has to offer. Oh, and YC also pays (a part of) your ticket to the US.
I dread the day I cannot get into my favourite restaurant because there is a line of Grouponies around the block . . .
Checkout flask-mail http://flask.pocoo.org/extensions/
This is a good example of why technical people need to learn how to write.

I made it through that entire paper, looking at all the diagrams, and nowhere could I find an answer to whether the system they're proposing is supposed to beam power from space to the ground, or from the ground up into space.

That's something they need to put in the first paragraph.

"The Big Confusing Acronym (BCM) project is a proposal to do [seven word description of what your thing does]." Make sure your reader is on the same page, Then tell him about your progress in putting together a working committee and how many MW you'll generate in phase 2.
Wow, that is incredibly dishonest - to lie about a UPS package. That kind of false pretense would ruin any setting for a job offer conversation.
Have you tried asking them why they are leaving? If you try to make it clear that you are seeking honest feedback (and not just asking as a formality, or with preconceptions), I suspect they will tell you.
Textmate-like editor inside Chrome
Best city still doesn't make it terribly easy always. Some times of year like the winter are outright unfun much of the time and meeting people online is still easier occasionally.
Are there really any zero risk vehicles that guarantee more than a 4.85% return?

In other words, show me a zero risk 5% vehicle and I'll stop trying to pay off my mortgage immediately.

edited for a dumb mistake....
The Noob Guide to Online Marketing [Infographic]
I've heard of people doing this before, removing their fingerprints with a sander..

But I believe the fingerprints will grow back after a while. Couldn't you get into more trouble if they grow back and you are carrying around a passport with no fingerprints in it? Or do you plan to keep sanding them off for the rest of your life? (or the life of the passport)
This is an article about men buying overpriced scraps of cloth in China. As I said in both of my comments, the people who do this kind of "signaling" in ANY culture are idiots.

Racism? I've traveled through China, alone, stayed in local hotels, bought my own train tickets, and eaten at the night markets. And, yes, I will criticize middle-class people who care more about having shiny rocks, or designer handbags, than demanding things like clean water, or unpolluted air, let alone a more equitable society.

This happens to be an article on China, but it could've been anywhere else in the world. The fact that you (and a lot of other people, judging by votes) seem to consider this racism says something about you.
I know. It's some great hair. It reminds me of the photos of Scott Meyers in the Effective C++ books, another classic both in terms of content and hairstyle.
Periodically somebody spams as many @cpan.org addresses as possible.

When I get recruiter spam to my CPAN address, I ask the nearest other CPAN contrib if they got it as well.

If yes, we and every other contrib we know then killfiles them.

Perhaps a hashtag system - #githubrecruiterspam or something - would allow other communities to do that efficiently?
After a certain age, yes, I know I appreciated the freedom of BBS's when I was a teenager as well.

But up to around 13, building your social network around your classmates makes sense. And the ability to exclude older children, and non-students, as well as be able to monitor their activity also makes sense. There isn't the strong need for privacy when you're nine than there is when you're 14.
that's because 'online' doesn't do much selective filtering. Lets say you go the symphony (of the orchestral type, not the framework) and meet some boys. You are selecting, let's say you go a coffee shop in the Mission, or Lower Haight, again you are selecting. Sitting in Dolores park on a sunny sunday afternoon automatically selects certain demographics. When you look for boys or girls online you use primitive criteria for selection which results in poor matching. Facebook is a much better dating site because groups are more organic, formed by real people coming together around common values.

I am rather surprised that Julia has any problems meeting boys, I'm sure she could just sit in a coffee shop in the Mission with a laptop (preferably with a few stickers, including the obligatory CC) and be approached by decent young men all day.
My gf just got a Chrome OS notebook from Google - that is probably the best use case for it.
Ask HN: Anyone else understand a language but not able to speak it?
I can understand hindi, but not for the life of me be able to speak it.

Little background: My parents are from india, I grew up in the US. Both my parents do speak english very well. I never grew up with any friends who spoke hindi, or had relatives my age who spoke it, so I guess because I never needed to try to speak it I never learned how to, and I find it extremely hard to speak it now(im 26)

Anyone else have something similar?
Looks great to me - I'm excited to see you're covering replication. Have you considered covering some of the more useful PostgreSQL extensions, like geospatial or tsearch2?
In fact, there has already been legal drama with schools objecting to what students write about their classes and teachers and seeking to punish them for it. I agree, affiliation with the school system is a liability, not a benefit.
Thanks, great advice.
I actually do have a 401k (as well as an additional retirement fund), but I only have those things because I have surplus money sitting around. The problem with something like a 401k is that there is a heavy opportunity cost: you don't get to use that money, ever, until you retire. If there were something productive you could have done with the money instead, that were still relatively safe, maybe you should have done that! (Especially in the current climate of seemingly-perpetually-low interest rates).

If creative endeavors are profitable, you can use the resulting money to fuel more creative endeavors, thus making the world a better place. Keeping money in a bank account or publicly-traded stock does not particularly make the world a better place.

Once I got approximately into the f-you money level of income, it became crystal clear how fictitious money is in the first place. I wake up one morning, and bam, I am wealthy! Why? Because someone said so and typed a number into a computer. Okay... that's kind of weird.

Given that money is so fictitious and somewhat meaningless, it is a shame to give into primal hoarding impulses, just so one can see the number in one's bank account go up like a high score in a video game. It's much better to make like Elon Musk and use your money for what it is: a way to wield influence to make the world more like you would like it to be.
http://twitter.com/#!/vicgundotra/status/35182523650801664

Looks like Nokia is going with Windows Phone 7
That's part of my plan for Appleseed. Which is more than a little ironic, considering how Facebook got it's start.
note that nyc is number 1 for "online dating." there is a reason for that. nyc has a lot of people in it. sifting through those people is hard.
My saving/investing strategy is governed by a few guidelines and realities:

1. I have a family (meaning I have more costs and more immediate investments I need to make, for example in the education of my children)

2. I believe that investing in my own company where I control the money and the effort involved has a vastly superior return than investing in a company that already had an IPO. There's no way those companies do the return on my funds, like my company does, if for no other reason than that they are already through their major growth phase (they already IPO'd). Add to that the level of control I have in my own thing, and it's clearly advantageous to invest there.

3. I believe stock purchases are akin to gambling. This expands my universe of possibly investments to other forms of gambling. It turns out that with some knowledge and practice it's possible to tilt the odds in your favor.

Given these rules and considerations I have a threefold investment strategy:

Cash is king. I keep large cash deposits available at all times, both in actual cash and in the bank. I invest a regular amount of my earnings from my job into my side business and my side business provides excellent returns and I've developed a way to scale those returns that I'll be testing this month (the ability to use in a leveraged way the money I invest into my side business, but with a higher maximum cap than I could reasonably put into the business). For my high risk, high reward "investment" I cut out the stock market altogether and literally go to a casino.

I suppose the final part of my portfolio might be the most surprising to HN. I can report that I've had excellent results in the casino. Sustainable advantage playing is possible. In 2009, I bought a vehicle outright with the proceeds from this portion of my portfolio.

If I didn't have a family, I'd be doing a more aggressive version of this where I'd have larger cash holdings (no family = way more money left over every month), I'd invest more in my side business, and I'd risk more at the casino.

Your goal should be to produce a machine that makes you money without your involvement, normally this is called a business, but if you have enough money, then the money itself can be this machine (through interest). To have that amount of money where it is sustainable requires roughly $4 million in cash (I've seen this number other places, the fabled "FU" money). It my belief that it's much easier to build a business that produces say $100k a year with minimal involvement on your part than it is to produce $4 million in cash (though it should be noted that if you produce a business that produces that much profit you're on your way to being able to trade it for $4 million in cash).
tsearch2 would be easy to add to the intro course. Thanks for the suggestion!

PostGIS may be an advanced topic, but you're right that it should be mentioned. I'll think about whether I can come up with a concise way to cover it, with an eye toward more indepth coverage in another course.
I wish they had gone with a different name to distinguish itself more from the iPad. It's like when the rumors started coming out that Apple was going to call their tablet a 'slate'. Even Ballmer stood on stage to show off the 'Slate PC'. Instead Apple went with iPad, and everyone has a 'pad' device now.
My personal theory? There's a lot of jealousy in HN users WRT groupon because they didn't start it. It's not an unbelievably complex idea -- I'd wager that many Groupon-hating HN users probably think that their current startup is much more complex/important/awesome. They're bothered by something so simple making so much money.

At least that's how I initially felt about Groupon.

At the same time, my attitude seriously limited my business. I'm trying to build a b2b marketplace, and wanted to build my "marketplace of dreams" (if I built it, they will come). I didn't address SEO or getting initial traffic because that was low brow, and would take care of itself if I built a cool enough product.

Boy was I wrong. That was a long (2+ year) lesson to learn.
18 Talented Illustrators To Keep An Eye On
Time for an inspirational round-up for you! You have below 54 pieces of illustration selected from 18 extremely talented illustrators from around the world. As you can see, their work feature different techniques and styles (from retro to 3D, black & white, fashion, typography etc.). Please share with us which are your favorite pieces by leaving a comment. Enjoy!
Big companies are notorious for their low tolerance for failure, but I've been surprised to discover that many research institutions are maybe even worse. An academician needs a steady stream of hi-quality publications, i.e. stuff that people generally agree are worthwhile contributions. Truly new ideas are easily buried, because they don't provide a steady stream of results, and there is no time to pursue them. I wonder if there are any labs that actively try to fix this somehow.
Why would there be any hurdles for a Woman-led startup? As a website user, how would you even go about finding out if the site you're viewing is run by a woman? How would you know you were supposed to discriminate against it?

You can run a successful tech business for years and never speak to a human being on the phone or in person. Gender, race, religion, disability, appearance, and pretty much any other factor that can hold you back in this unfair world simply don't apply to a business running behind a web facade.
I use it to allow me to simultaneously run a persistent Irssi session and connect from AndChat on my phone, and they share a single IRC presence on the servers I use. It's a fantastic way to seamless move discussions between clients so that users on the other end don't have to deal with multiple nicks or interruptions as I move about.

With my ZNC module for Notifo, I have the client_count_less_than condition set to 2. This means that it will only send notifications if my phone isn't connected, even though my Irssi client always is. I haven't found any other method that's smart enough to allow me to do this.
Okay, but I never said anything about default, so I don't know what this has to do with anything! As you know, when the government prints more money, it dilutes the value of the existing money. So then, when you buy Treasurys and they get paid back, you made your money by silently leaching it out of the pockets of all other Americans, with the government as intermediary. What a great financial model!
Older students would have their school profile, and their non-school profile, just like they have their school email address, and their non-school one. It's really not much different.

As to the litigiousness of school administrators around free speech issues, that's something that will have to be worked out with social networking whether schools run their own networks or not.

But when you're dealing with the pre-teenager crowd, I don't think it's as much of a legal issue.
This. Subverbal thinking IS the switch. When you start to think in a language, or even dream in a language, that's when you know the switch has flipped.
I'm angry at myself for not thinking about the Dropbox portion of the application. I had already thought that a TextMate-like editor for Chrome would be really nice to have, but I couldn't think of a solution for. If I used traditional saving methods, I couldn't figure out why I wouldn't just use emacs, coda, textmate, etc. The Dropbox portion is what makes this app for me.

That
Exclusive interview with Meebo Founder Seth Sternberg
WordPress Google maps shortcode
Actually, I like your post better. Its a quick summary. The original was more of an essay, dense and long-winded, ending with "I guess you can't explain it". You just did explain it.
There's a whole mess of stuff out there that might be really interesting but that you'll never 'use' personally. Math geeks might love working in a derivatives company, working on software and algorithmic stuff all day long. Not one of those geeks might ever deal with derivatives outside their day job, ever.

While having a belief in the company you're working for and what they're doing is valuable, I don't think you need to be a 'user' of a company's services or products to work somewhere.

Perhaps that's not what you're asking, or perhaps you're only looking to work at consumer-facing public web service companies?
Eh, I haven't found it to be a major problem. I speak fluent oral Greek (learned it when I was a kid to talk to my grandparents/cousins), and can read some Greek, but nobody really expects me to be able to read formal Greek. It's slightly diglossic in that formal Greek is substantially different than the spoken language, partly a relic of the days when it was an actually different language: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katharevousa
Fingerprints will grow back unless you get down to dermal layers of skin and that will hurt quite a bit. Permanently removing your prints is a more involved process than this, but it's certainly a cute idea.
I'm surprised bullying hasn't been mentioned in this discussion. That's one of the main reason I plan to keep my unborn children off the internet as long as possible.

It's interesting though, when I was 13 my parents took TV away from me during the weekdays, but I still got to use my computer and AOL account. I think I'll be limiting my kids use of the internet for non-school purposes. This reminded me of the chinese-mother article from the other day--sometimes we know what's best for our kids before they do. Getting on facebook at age 13 is not good for kids in a society filled with obesity and online bullying. If anything severely restrict and monitor. I intend on requiring the password to all my kids social networking profiles--there is no way a 13 year old can have a reasonable expectation of privacy from their parents!
Interesting implications for UX design. A few choice quotes...

"A new study in the journal Cognition overturns a decades-old theory about the nature of attention and demonstrates that even brief diversions from a task can dramatically improve one's ability to focus on that task for prolonged periods."

"As expected, most participants' performance declined significantly over the course of the task. But most critically, Lleras said, those in the switch group saw no drop in their performance over time. Simply having them take two brief breaks from their main task (to respond to the digits) allowed them to stay focused during the entire experiment."