skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I didn't know "cool guys are coding standing these days". I had never even imagined much less heard of someone working in an office in a standing position. So I thought I was just crazy but did this myself some time ago.

I don't know why; I think I wanted to be in a natural, straight stance when coding instead of sitting in some semioptimal position. I'm 196cm tall so I have never really had a table and chair that was made to fit my measures. I've had various ergonomic tables but they just don't cut it for a man with my height.

I work from home and simply upgraded my working table myself. It is a nice wooden table with lathed legs that you could screw into the corners of the table top. I simply went to the hardware store, lost 30 euros and came back with a total of 480cm of lathed wood of the same diameter. And after a bit of sawing and drilling I had four 120cm pieces that I could replace the old legs with: total time one hour, including the trip.

I've adjusted the height a few centimeters since that so as to get the table truly optimal to my personal height and now I'm fine. I must say that was the best 30 euros I've ever spent, I already notice that my abdominal and back muscles are stronger, and I naturally revert to a better stance even when not at my desk.

And I haven't had any back problems from getting stuck in the same position for too long, since I constantly move around when standing at my desk.

It is cool, actually. (The table, not me necessarily.)
There is no control group. Why not pick 40 very bright young people and give half of them $100K to start a company and the other half $100K to stay in school and complete their education?

That would be a really interesting and exciting experiment. I wish someone would do it.
There factor of risk aversion exists, but I'd argue not any more so for women than for men of the same racial groups. This is because the risk really isn't financial - these days everyone knows that there's tons of money to be made in tech. The risk is in prestige - doctors often become known figures in their communities in a way that engineers rarely do. Believe me, this can be a huge factor for people who grew up noticing that they were treated "differently" - minorities, immigrants, women, etc. If you are doing something awesome with your life, you want people to know about it; it can often mean the difference between being shown respect and not.

In response to Shamiq, this could be why most of the "underrepresented minorities" you see in tech are actually women; arguably, they have less to prove.
There's already a timer that determines when a thread gets locked. Perhaps after it's locked, display scores.
The theory isn't about becoming the best in the world. It's about achieving "greatness" or "success." Most people can't even run a marathon, much less do so in under 3 hours. I don't see how you could call someone unsuccessful who can do so.
"Now that people no longer want to own a netbook" -- FTA.

What? That's pretty silly. I don't have any data(n.b.), but my suspicion is that there are many people who still want netbooks. I am one of them. I was just in the Apple store and telling my girlfriend how few use cases I could imagine for myself with an iPad/Tablet. Use in the kitchen as a screen to either read recipes from or watch a show on while cooking was really the only one that came to mind. I imagine iPads lying about on surfaces much more than actively being used. They sacrifice versatility for portability of a certain type. They aren't for instance easier to carry about than a netbook, but since they are all screen they are more ready-to-hand(-and-eyes). On the flip-side, I can't sit in a coffee shop and hack on a tablet. And really almost anytime I'm in front of a computer I might want to do work which means that a tablet is really more restrictive for me than it's worth (for certain values of worth, of course). I understand that there indeed are uses for tablets but those uses aren't totally synonymous with the uses of a netbook.

But this is just me. Has the netbook market really been that devastated by the iPad?
What I find interesting about that is that you can only pursue it if you are really committed in advance. Someone who doesn't know that they are going to stick with it has to try to learn everything at once. Since he "knows" (for some suitable value) that he's sticking with it for 10,000 hours, if the first 1,000 are spent on putting, no problem. I don't know if this is optimal, but it's interesting.
The Death of the Feed (what I read and why)
Shaffer's rounds of spending chapter explains it better than the wikipedia article: http://www.rri.wvu.edu/WebBook/Schaffer/chap05.html (not sure why I jumped to wikipedia first).
I think we need to let it go on for at least a week before drawing any conclusions. People need to integrate this way of displaying posts into their mental model for the site, and that takes time. Before that happens, none of the data will be meaningful.
It was surprisingly easy to write a program in TouchStudio to display the pictures from reddit.com/r/pics!

Here's the "source": http://screencast.com/t/EMHLAcLVC

And here's what it looks like after running and scrolling a bit: http://screencast.com/t/W57MX2xcCZ
There hasn't been a massive wage gap in the software engineering field since at least 1995.

http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/issuebrf/sib99352.htm

If you combine the premise of this WSJ article with the above data from the NSF, can we say that men now make less than women?
Yep, getting into the hosting business is a smart move. Games are bigger files, so even something like AppEngine can be expensive to host if you have a lot of users. There's definitely going to be a market for dedicated HTML5 game hosting environments, and by open-sourcing the libraries your platform is going to be very attractive to developers.
I'd still like to see an experiment where the up and down arrows (generally interpreted to mean "agree/disagree") are replaced with "| interesting | spam" before the present "|link" in the comment header.

Or any two words that intellectually interrupt the "vote up / vote down" reflex to vote down unpopular or dissenting points of view no matter how well thought out.
This is a very big problem: the constant focus on tools and specific technologies instead of looking at the people and their abilities.

A great developer will always be able to pick up a new language/framework/paradigm quickly. So if you plan to have a longer relationship with your hire, you can by all means afford not to check every bullet point regarding technologies. By strictly requiring explicit experience in the fields you are working in, the only thing you really accomplish is to drastically reduce the number of possible applicants.

For example, since Django is still a lot less common than Rails, if you need a Django developer and specifically require Django experience, you will not have an awful lot of candidates. If you broaden your search to anyone with experience with a web framework, you are almost guaranteed to attract some more good candidates. Once you screen those, you pick the best. Best case: he/she was already familiar with Django, congrats to you. Worst case: the dev was not familiar with Django, but still a better fit than ALL the candidates with Django experience. Sounds like win-win for me...
The primary alternatives to handing someone $100,000 is to teach them how to bootstrap, which contradicts Thiel's pet libertarian anti-educational theories or dependence on luck. There is patent absurdity in considering Thiel's approach as a viable alternative to education at any sort of scale comparable even to Ivy League admissions never mind offering such an alternative to the millions of college students under 20 or the 20,000,000+ residents between 15-19 (that works out to $2 trillion at $100,000 apiece with approximately $500,000,000,000 additional per year).
How have you strengthened your feet?
So is the syntax going to be @-moz-keyframes?
Tom Katsouleas "It is during one’s undergraduate years that one discovers oneself, where one fits into the world and what it means to be human."*

Four years and $200,000 for a piece of paper and a false understanding of where you fit into the world.
Of course engineering school deans are going to think dropping out is a bad idea. The guy at Best Buy will also try to convince you to buy a warranty on your flat screen T.V.

There are definitely some good reasons to stay in school, but this article rubbed me the wrong way. Take for example, a couple of the arguments presented:

Argument: You get a lot of valuable social connections from being in school.
Counterargument: You will meet others and learn from your peers by surrounding yourself by smart interesting people, but this doesn't have to be at a university. Why not connect with smart ambitious people of all ages that are working in your field? If the main value of elite colleges is that they screen bright students and bring them together for 40K a year, the students are getting ripped off.

Argument: Mark Zuckerberg was successful because he was vetted and educated by Harvard.
Counterargument: This seems highly unlikely. No one used Facebook because they knew the developer was Harvard educated. And, Zuckerberg was an accomplished hacker before he came to Harvard.

Argument: Most successful entrepreneurs are not drop outs.
Counterargument: That is because most people who try entrepreneurship are not drop outs. A better question is whether drop outs who start businesses are more or less likely to succeed. An even better question, is whether the same person is more likely to succeed if he/she drops out. Unfortunately, the last question is impossible to answer.
YC Alumnus Matt Brezina (Xobni) Talks Startups Part 1 of 3
Matt is the founder of Xobni and launched his newest startup today - Sincerely.com. He shares his experiences as a budding CEO and what he learned in the trenches while at Xobni.
An Opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal isn't worth the electrons used to produce it. The Wall Street Journal specifically disclaims the truthfulness and factuality of anything in its Opinion section, and we ought to take them at their word - this is a propaganda piece, not intended to inform but to disinform.

This is just laughable:

http://www.iwf.org/about/

What that says, in disambiguated English, is that it's a propaganda house funded primarily by the Scaife and Olin foundations.
I agree, I stand all day as well. My choice of footwear is a pair of Vivo Barefoot shoes (http://www.vivobarefoot.com).

On a side note for my standup desk I built a plywood and 2x4 surface that sits on top of my desk -- it looks a lot like a coffee table on the desk. The materials were all of $15.

Edit: Here is a pic of my desk http://imgur.com/1woBL
Of course Dropbox knows the keys. If they didn’t, you wouldn’t be able to access your files on so many platforms (web, desktop, iPhone) and you wouldn’t be able to easily share folders with others.

Even though it isn’t spelled out, I’ve always suspected that many actual backup services such as Backblaze don’t know the key if I decide to encrypt my backups.
The post I replied to has been edited since I made my comment. It previous had a much stronger false dichotomy where the only entrepreneurs were those in Thiel's selected group. I still think the false dichotomy offered is too strong, but it's less pronounced than it was.
I'd be curious to know if Flow or Twitter or big webapps take advantage of this.
Usually when they meet you at the gate instead of at the customs checkpoint the random screening isn't so random.
So because there are more unemployed single or married men who have less education than single women with education the wage gap is closed? This is nonsensical.

The most laughable part of this is when they just throw out that single women make more than males. You might as well say "The cost of oranges and apples are relatively different if you compare orange juice to apple seeds"

Why'd they go with single women? Because married women, specifically those with kids, make a lot less money. I'd imagine if they only used black men without a high school education, there'd be an even greater pro-male wage gap.

Here's some good data to illustrate how complicated the wage gap and employment gap issues are and why overly simplistic stories like that are, well, embarrassing:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/11/06/business/econo...
This is a great point, and one of the many reasons I have a blog. I'm always left rather bemused when I do a google search for someone and come up with nothing. If the person had put up a blog (or really, I suppose, a public web presence of any kind), then we might have mutually benefitted from an interaction.

It's the same reason I share all of my (non-proprietary) code on github, even the "useless" stuff. You just never know what might serve as the focal point of a valuable connection.
I think that calling Gladwell's suggestion that 10,000 hours is the magic number to become an expert bogus based on your single data point is a bit hasty. Gladwell didn't say that everybody who puts in 10,000 hours of band lessons becomes the Beatles. The way I interpreted the book was that the 10,000 hours of practice was simply a prerequisite to becoming the Beatles. There were numerous other factors outside of this practice time requirement that lifted the Beatles to fame. Many of those factors were luck-driven, including but not limited to inherent talent that they were born with.

In fact, my interpretation of Outliers was that being good is simply a prerequisite - the rest is heavily luck-driven even though nobody really likes to talk about it.
This is the setup I have right now:

i.imgur.com/GY4vR.jpg

It is just some boxes, but it works reasonably well. Having the screen and keyboard at different heights is key for me.

What I'd really like is a portable, ergonomic standing desk. I've been designing something that can be ratcheted between a couple of trees and provide two stable, adjustable platforms, one for the laptop and one for a keyboard.
eh, the "Lows" across the street and the "home depot" down the way both cut far more precisely than I can manage on my own. It's not going to be to micrometer precision, but when working with the mostly green wood those places sell, nothing ever is. The stuff changes shape as it ages anyhow.

It's probably better than what you can do as an amateur with cheap tools, and it's probably good enough for a project such as this. Of course, if you actually know what you are doing and have reasonably good tools, you can do better, but for those of us who just want to knock something together, my experience has been that the lumberyard cutting services are just fine.
"Minority" is a code word for "Black/Hispanic". Asians don't count.
If you wear shoes without arch support and have flexible soles (or go barefoot) your feet with strengthen themselves by having to work just to keep you upright.
Commodore 64 hottest trend on eBay Any one actually buys that?
This article is about someone committing to practicing "six hours a day, six days a week, for six years". Are you sure your "guy in UK" story is analogous? He actually committed 10,000 hours to the mission not once but twice?
I think there is a limit that motivation and hard work can only push that far. Beyond that, it's basically gift or talent rules the game. That may sound bitter when you realize it, but it's a fact of truth. That's especially the case in Math and competitive sports.
That's not all. Stop sitting on your ass 8 hours a day now and you'll also receive:

48% less chance of dying of a heart attack!

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/07/100722102039.ht...
I always figured you would assume the market is in equilibrium, unless you can prove it isn't by e.g. evidence of intentional discrimination, that sort of thing. In an efficient market -- a market in equilibrium (I took economics a long time ago) -- everyone earns what their labor is worth. Any wage gap in such a situation is by definition still fair: everyone is getting what they earn.
Hm. I got mine working out of the box. Which URI are you trying to visit? Have you tried http://<your-domain>.iriscouch.com/_utils/?

You can create a database from that interface. (Futon, it's called)
Is there anything as good as Braid in this bundle? I bought the last Humble Indie Bundle and nothing really struck my fancy as much as Braid. The game play is truly innovative and the difficulty on par with Apple II and Amiga games of my youth.
Oh, and if you want to see what TouchStudio looks like "in action", you can see the authors of TouchStudio using it here: http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Peli/TouchStudio-Script-Your-...
Hah. That's great. Soldering is easy. And, a soldering iron is almost as versatile as a Swiss Army knife[1]. You can use it for soldering, wood burning, spot retouching a hot-glue job, boiling water, opening those pesky Costco clamshell packages without slicing an artery, shaping open or closed-cell foam, giving toy soldiers horrific battle wounds, rosin-based aromatherapy, a(u)nt punishment, and general hole-melting. It's the lightsaber of our millennium.

And finally, to make this comment more useful, so I don't hemorrhage my 33 points of karma: If you've ever wanted to gracefully rework SOICs, QFPs, etc., invest in a good hot air system with appropriately-shaped spreading tips. Amazon has a basic kit for $139: http://www.amazon.com/X-TRONIC-Digital-Rework-Soldering-Stat...

Do not use ChipQuik. It's expensive, unnecessary, and messy.

[1] Metcal enthusiasts, before you have a heart attack, recall that Radio Shack sells disposable lightsabers for $7.99.
Certainly one can expect their responses to be pro-higher-education. However, I feel like their justification for their responses is the enlightening part. I believe they are correct to point out that Thiel is relying on anecdotal evidence and to criticize his conclusions based on said evidence. They also acknowledge that, in some cases, there are people who do not need higher education.
So, while their overall viewpoints are not unexpected, there is plenty to be gained from their support of their viewpoints.

As to whether it is an unbiased article, I don't think it ever claimed to be. It seemed to me to be clearly the author stating his opinion and presenting the opinions of some engineering school dean.
To summarize in English: Stewart started an unnamed firm, and tried to exit mid-bubble four years later; his partners didn't want to buy his equity, so he sued them. By the time he got his shares bought three years later the firm had imploded.

http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2006/05/12/the_myth_of_the...

Here's a previous discussion with comments
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=581487
Automatically checking if Domains and Usernames are available
A simple google spreadsheet which allows for Twitter & Facebook username checking.
There's an unstated assumption that excellence equals pro in this article.

I'd say excellence is a necessary precursor to going pro, but is itself not sufficent. That extra push is some magic combination of genetics, upbringing and opportunity (nature and nurture coming together just so) - all along with the drive and experience to become excellent.
Co-Founder Wanted:   Disrupt Online Dating
Technical co-founder wanted to disrupt the online dating industry.
Interesting piece of trivia: Tucows, parent company of Hover, went public by buying the remains of the first start-up I was involved with, Infonautics, and doing a reverse merger. We went public as part of the craziness of '95—we were on of the few stocks that didn't, if I recall correctly, gain any ground in the first day of trading. (Oops!) I left in autumn of '96 and watched to cash on hand shrink with each successive quarterly report until Tucows stepped in.

Those were the days…
I'm in a slightly similar situation; Delaware C-corp, but we don't do business there. Our bank account is in NYC with Citibank, merchant account with First Data. We are an online SaaS business.

IANAL etc but I thought it was best not to do any business in Delaware directly, so not sure why/if it matters which banks in Delaware would deal with you. In any event, I think you really just need an EIN to open a bank account.

The whole subject of where an Internet business has "nexus" is apparently quite a complicated one.

Not sure if the above is of any help, hopefully it is.
I'm a biracial Software Engineer that grew up 'poor'. I think the single biggest reason I went into technology is because my parents, through some sort of time bending super sight, saw fit to save scrape, and scrimp so that I could have a computer at a very young age (9 years old started with Apple IIe in 92ish, it was already outdated and we quickly bought a nicer computer).

This happened right before my fifth grade teacher sat me in the back of the class and let me play with the 1 classroom computer with the BASIC manual because I was 'gifted' and always finished my work early. These two events provided tools and a framework for learning that many minority students probably didn't have.
I agree. I feel like I need to get used to it first before I can decide whether or not I like it. Besides- maybe more change trials are coming? I'm actually curious as to how pg (and others?) is /are going to evaluate the changes. Monitor chatter? Randomly distributed survey? I'm curious because I'm not sure how much thought/effort it's really worth, and I wonder how much pg &co think it's worth.
I will update the site then to clarify! But for now it's only a big-picture thing pending a more detailed fee announcement.
NASA Names The Space Shuttle’s Final Resting Places
This is actually an ongoing discussion. Weigh in and vote here: http://nerdcollider.com/challenges/3/
Logos can be fun to make, so maybe have a competition and the winner gets a year free services from your startup and credit on the about us page.

I'd design for that.. But I'd have to know more about the startup to make something relevant.
There's a lot of armchair speculating going on about this.

What I love about this guy's mission (and why I'm rooting for him) is because he is simply and intensely applying a theory. Succeed or fail, he won't prove (or disprove) the theory, but it will be a fascinating data point for us all.
"The primary alternatives to handing someone $100,000 is to teach them how to bootstrap,"

What? Just, what? I have no idea where you get this limited universe of options from. You are aware of the enormous industry dedicated to funding entrepreneurs that aren't this program, right? And how you leap from that to straight-out linear projection of funding all high school students I have no idea, since I do not see anywhere where this is presented as the only possible path (or even the only desirable path), a further strawman you seem to have simply added to the pile. You seem to be just making things up wholesale, then getting upset with those things.
He is not being unbiased, and does not even claim to. He is presenting his own views on education, which are contradictory to peter thiel's, and using education experts' opinions (and other anecdotal evidences) to back them up.
I don't blame them for trying to kill it off. Truly. It's been long enough, especially now that 7 is actually a solid upgrade for nearly every use.

But I do blame them for all the under-handed, customer-spiteful tactics they've used. DirectX 10 on Vista only, though it's almost 100% compatible with DX9 (having 9 report version 10 allows many DX10 games to run). IE9+ on Vista/7 only. It's complete bullshit, through and through, and I see no reason to defend their methods.
Foreign company financing US company 
How foreign company can finance all operating expenses of US company before taxes and US corp still owns all intellectual property it creates? Thanks!
We do have some interesting customers paying; so your point is well taken. We need to write these up and make the successes more accessible.

Thanks for your feedback.