skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Pretty much anywhere people use Excel. Any job where people use spreadsheets and their output is quantified and measured against their peers is ripe for automation by enterprising individuals. Why not be the fastest, most accurate analyst on your team?

From pg: "To get rich you need to get yourself in a situation with two things, measurement and leverage. You need to be in a position where your performance can be measured, or there is no way to get paid more by doing more. And you have to have leverage, in the sense that the decisions you make have a big effect."

And also from Zed Shaw: "Programming as a profession is only moderately interesting. It can be a good job, but you could make about the same money and be happier running a fast food joint. You're much better off using code as your secret weapon in another profession.

People who can code in the world of technology companies are a dime a dozen and get no respect. People who can code in biology, medicine, government, sociology, physics, history, and mathematics are respected and can do amazing things to advance those disciplines."

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html

[2] http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/advice.html
What about Groupon paying 10k/month for data on what other deal sites are doing? How much interest there is in, say, food+bar deals would seem to be fairly valuable to their sales force...
The grammar is wrong on a lot of your blurbs
I rue the day when "tech company" came to equal "software company"... there are so many other kinds of tech, too.
As a developer of iOS frameworks and libraries, I will vouch for cocoacontrols as a solid site. It's easy to add a new entry and search for existing controls by license.
Mine is to do freelance job in between to support myself in building my own ideas. If you are good and find the appropriate clients, freelancing can give you a good amount of money to have some runway before getting anther contract.
Could be useful for complex cases, but "pointer-events: none" CSS usually does the trick just fine.
History of the Ouija Board
Isn't a libertopia (reading as a libertarian utopia) a place where griefing and scams are able to run rampant, the thought being that the free market will sort out the issues in the long run? Of course people get hurt in the short term, but that's just natural selection at work...

At least, that's my understanding of a pure libertarian philosophy - still not sure how the philosophy gets around the people at the bottom of the social pile getting crushed, or even that it tries to.

Running a virtual investment vehicle (legit or scam) actually sounds quite fun for a certain type of person. I find the mechanics of scams, cracking, social engineering etc. quite fascinating but have no desire to actually con people out of money. Running a ponzi scheme in a virtual game world sounds like a fascinating way to see the mechanisms at work - same with the whole virtual currency space in general.

Seems like it would also be of interest to economists and social scientists - previously it's only been possible to do postmortems or theoretical discussions of certain economic issues (truly libertarian societies, ponzi schemes, etc.) but being able to watch them form in such a simple world must be quite exciting for researchers in that area.
It's somewhat amusing to read this essay while sitting in Yale's CS 323 class.

I do wonder, though, how much of this essay is Spolsky's investment bias (Ie, It must be worthwhile, because if not I suffered for nothing.)
The point of a major bump is to say to the ops team/sysadmin "HEY! We actually changed some stuff. You probably want to check with your programmers to see if any of these changes will effect our client code".
thanks, jeff. glad you like it! :) also, thanks for submitting nimbus just now!
Google Chrome Hits 25% Market Share
Defects that are 100% predictable do not fail arbitrarily, they fail predictably.

I suppose you've never used a fixed size data type (eg. int) as a primary key right?
Les Beatles - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
Great post Vin! A great story and inspiration for everyone who is grinding hard in the startup life. We all need a little reminder that its a slogfest before you make it.
That's really cool, I didn't know about that. Thanks!

The difference here is that with alphaPun.ch you're only clicking through the transparent parts of the image; the opaque parts still block clicks. If I understand that document correctly, pointer-events would only allow you to click through the whole image. (Except with SVG?) Is that right?
> despite the fact that I legally COULD, I don't really see any value in discussing my pay with a coworker.

It depends on your goals. If your main goal is negotiating more money for yourself, and it's true that you're already at the high end, then yes, not much motivation. If you're interested in seeing a more equitable distribution among your coworkers, letting them know your salary can help them negotiate a better salary.

Other reasons to publicise your salary include helping to recruit people to your field (if you're paid a lot) or debunking the idea that you're well-paid (if you're not).

For instance: I teach college, and I'm happy to do so, but I'm not in it for the money. I discovered that my students often think that us professors make a lot more than we actually do, and I decided to start telling them: in my seventh year as an assistant professor (in my previous job) I made $52k/yr, and was (I think) the highest-paid member of the junior faculty. Many of my students made more than that as starting salary. It was enough for me, but the students were shocked, and came out with a better understanding of where graduate school might lead them. Knowing my salary also helped some of my colleagues negotiate a better salary for themselves.
This post reminds me of a philosophy held by Seymour Schulich, Canadian businessman and philanthropist. His philosophy:

"Your twenties are not a time to make money, they are a time to build your foundation; your thirties are when you make money."

The exact ages are peripheral, but the idea is sound: incur personal strength and experience and external success will (be more likely to) follow.

Mark Suster's post about a time to learn and a time to earn hints at this same idea: http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2009/11/04/is-it-time-for...
I agree with you, that was sloppy writing on my part.
I suspect your parent was simply mocking philosophers.
This breaks once the first editor with proportional width font support becomes popular in Ruby land:

kind = case year
when 1850..1889 then "Blues"
...

I also have a question that I have always wanted to ask. I am not a native speaker of English. Are "if not" and "unless" really the same thing?

Does this:

def foo(x, y, z)
destroy_universe unless all_arguments_valid?
# more code...

and this:

def foo(x, y, z)
destroy_universe if not all_arguments_valid?
# more code...

really have the same implications? "unless" makes it sound a tiny bit as if "all_arguments_valid?" was the exception - to me at least. Does anyone else use "if not" based on this gut feeling sometimes?
Posterous Is Now 'Spaces,' A Photo-Focused App For Private Sharing
Suppose you're working on a product that is time sensitive. In other words, if you don't start full time on it three months ago, you'll be too late to market. Also suppose that you see this opportunity while you're a student. Finally, consider that skilled programmers tend to be concentrated in high cost of living areas. In that case, you never had the opportunity to save up and you probably need to be where the potential cofounders and employees are, so you've no choice but to look for funding.
This law will be written in a week by Whitehouse interns without any experience running a business or employing individuals. And it will be constructed to be applicable across vast swaths of the US economy, or else it would not be "stimulative". And this administration's previous attempts to meddle in business resulted in the largest VC loss in history, namely Solyndra.

What could possibly go wrong?
Exactly. This is my biggest problem with the "earning versus learning" philosophy. Both times I was employee #1 the founders had no interest in sharing any aspect of the business side of the company. I was there to build the product; anything else was a distraction.
Ways that Higher Sales Goals Lead to Lower Sales
Go ahead and delete mine too please!
The Yes You Can doesn't do it for me. It is confusing as for the first two blocks 'yes' and 'you' are/can be used to start the sentence of, while the third one isn't. Also when glancing at the page the slogan doesn't give you any information of what I can do. I suggest making informative headings. Also spelling events with a capitalized E is a bit weird to me -- try to emphasize it in a different way. Also - I don't know how this is for an english native american - but for me 'yes you can' makes me think of the Obama yes we can slogan, which might be a turnoff for republican visitors of your website. Furthermore, the horizontal alignment is off for those three words and text, that makes it look messy (and maybe don't center-align it, but left-align it to increase readability).

Additionally, personally I prefer social media logo's to be their original logo's so they stand out more from you design.

On the whole, I don't really like the blue color in combination with the grey/white elements, it looks kinda 2004ish or something. Lastly, I think the email signup is below the fold for 1280 resolutions, you might wanna make sure it is visible immediately for those resolutions as well.
Sorry to be somewhat flip, but starting a tech company isn't complex, it's just difficult.

I think you're over-generalizing here. There's a big difference between a "tech company" that's an online TODO list monetized with Google Adwords, and a "tech company" that's selling enterprise knowledge management software to Fortune 2000 companies.

These start-up costs are the easy part

For some classes of startups, that's probably true. I argue that it's not true for all of them.

and if you can't solve them on your own, then a 10K infusion from the government isn't going to help you solve the actually difficult problems down the road.

Money is money for a startup... I don't see how it matters where founders "self funding" money comes from... stored savings, or this program. If you're self-funding / bootstrapping, you're self-funding/bootstrapping, full-stop.

I have my own issues with this program, being a libertarian who believes that the proper roles of government should be very limited... but within the context of the system we have, I can see this being very beneficial to certain would-be entrepreneurs.
CouchDB is better'ish for larger datasets, but not for arbitrary scaling. MapReduce in CouchDB requires dumb full-scans if you're not just refreshing an existing view.

Arbitrarily large data is the exclusive domain of hadoop/hypertable/cassandra AFAIK atm.
Redditors will like what happens when they view the page without javascript enabled. It made me laugh.
How to download files from web directly to your Dropbox
This list appears to be lifted directly from Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Google
We've explored using his mathematic side in the private sector, but transitioning is non-trivial (a biology degree evidently makes one a pretty strong statistician). It's still on the table, but the sad truth is that it would probably involve going back for another degree.

We've gone through a tremendous amount of "certificatization" in the past decades, to the point where simply having chops is not sufficient. So while he's a pretty damn good statistician, he would have trouble getting this acknowledged without getting a degree that is more in line with the field he's trying to break into.

The plus side is that he lives in Canada, so going back to school, while burning time, would not be financially disastrous.
'Angry Birds' adapted for political satire
It's either WAY more advanced than anything I've seen, or I don't understand what it's doing.
Arrington leaving will create a void in technology news-covering. Say what you want, but he's had terrific scoops, amazing interviews, and elevated the status of startups in the press.

But what do you expect from Arianna and AOL?

He'll have a pretty personal personal blog - something like AVC - and I look forward to him bringing his expertise and style to investing. Good times.
I worked at Stanford, UC-Berkeley, UW-Madison (across UW-System) on enterprise student systems. Typically, professors have little say on the technology that gets used in the schools. It is mostly the IT department that makes most of the calls. Easiest would be to get someone at the top interested. You can email me (in profile) and if I like the idea, I can put you in touch with the CIO at one of the universities that I had worked at before.

Be warned that the sales process is pretty long at universities (especially the public ones) and everything has to go through an RFP.
Nearly all of the introductory PHP tutorials use MySQL, so many beginning web developers automatically go to MySQL because it is the only thing they have played around with.
An interesting semi-related follow up from the former Fog Creek VP of Eng (now at Khan Academy): http://bjk5.com/post/3340326040/in-any-language-you-want-kha...

Not understanding the underlying fundamentals when programming in high level languages can be really dangerous, but generally it's not. I kind of view the ongoing development of Compilers, VMs, JITs, etc. as being somewhat parallel to that of processors. At one point, optimizing with machine code was crucial to obtain performant code, but with crazy-ridiculous superscalar processors and all of the things that come with it, all you can really do is code C, compile with -O2, and then guess and check on optimizations. I wouldn't be surprised if this was the case in most high-level languages before long.

Don't get me wrong, I first read this in High School and this was the essay that made me love C, and made me want to try to get an internship at Fog Creek. I just think it's starting to show its age.
Ask HN: Media Queries vs. JS Font Adjustment in Responsive Design
Media Queries are great, but I find that sometimes I need to control the height of my elements and my text spills out. Aside from JS blocked browsers, what do you see as the downsides to using a function that checks to see if there is overflow and resizes fonts to fit?

This is assuming that the plugin wouldn't weigh down the browser.
Video looked promising. Can't wait to try it out.
How many people have you already interviewed?
This is true for some startup ideas, but not others. By saying "think of another idea" you eliminate many useful types of startups.

I see your point, which is that you don't need a fancy office and an HR staff to get a company off the ground, but that doesn't mean every company can get to profitability on a laptop and cheap hosting.
Umm, yes. I've seen electrical rates cited on more than one occasion as the sole reason why they are not making snow 24/7 during the pre-season when they don't even have customers on the mountain. But don't take my word for it, it's published on the power company website.

NY:
http://www.nyseg.com/YourHome/pricingandrates/daynighrate.ht...

VT:
https://www.burlingtonelectric.com/page.php?pid=49&name=...

The difference is almost 30%.

And that's only the tip of the iceberg. When you look at the area around most ski hills, the mountain is sucking more electricity during snowmaking season than everyone else in the area combined. When you are that big, the power company shows up and negotiates everything. Rates, times, usage caps, etc. The mountain can afford to buy its own generators (or diesel powered pumps/compressors) so the power company has a good reason to cut them a deal, but like every negotiation both sides want something and the power company is looking for someone to buy its excess constant capacity.

The relationship is so tight that the power company will call up the mountain and offer a lower daily rate based on usage elsewhere and the mountain will make snow accordingly.

http://www.usatoday.com/weather/news/2006-12-10-vermont-snow...
Making money building your foundation is usually better than not making money doing so.
I hear ya! I have lots of ideas that are collecting dust. I found that having a partner helps. Not only to bounce around ideas and build the product with but also for mutual dependence. Just like the author stated he didn't want to give up because of his loyalty to his co-founder, I find the same loyalty to my co-founder is what keeps me working nights and weekends... even when I'm exhausted from working all day and putting my 4 kids to sleep in the evenings. It's definitely difficult but rewarding.
This is a very good insight. I wonder how often the figures that get flashed around about how much money Hollywood is losing due to piracy are drawn directly from these fictionalizations created for an entirely separate purpose.
Andy Whitfield The Spartacus Star Dies at 39 | NEWS 365
Interesting! Thanks for pointing out screen-size media selectors.
Given how on top of CSS quirksmode usually is, I wonder if there is some problem with using screen-size media selectors on mobile devices.
The empty space between the logo on the left and the social icons on the right is a little awkward. Maybe you could pull the email text field and your 'get notified' button to that space. Hope that helps. Goodluck! :)
Thingiverse is an online maker community for printing 3D objects
I like the little robotic guy as your logo. However, that empty space between the logo and 'Follow us' section is distracting. Maybe put your tagline or some brief info about your service there.

The 'Yes,' 'You,' 'Can' sections are a bit disjointed. I didn't understand that it was supposed to be a phrase. I took it as blocks of information.

Also, do you take my Events from different services (i.e. Google Calendar, iCal, Outlook)? What do the different service icons mean under 'You'?

Perhaps state in bold words what you state at the end of your page: 'We believe that everyone should have a virtual assistant to which they can delegate their tasks.'
My husband was an early employee at a company that was acquired in a mid-nine-figure deal. The founders walked away with at least a hundred million each. Employee #1 got a low seven-figure payout, after about ten years of grueling overtime. Keep in mind this was actually a company that is IMO unusually fair and considerate toward employees.

You really need billions of dollars coming into a company before non-founders have a chance to make fuck-you money.
I finally created a HackerNews account just to say how much I love this comment. Hopefully, the piece doesn't come off as anti-Fred. I'm a huge Fred fan.
To preface my comment, my background is not in CS. I majored in biomedical engineering at UT Austin, where I chose a track that required a fair amount of programming.

In my curriculum, I was required to first take 2 courses using assembly language, then another course in C, and then a data structures course using Java. Is the growing standard nowadays to teach with Java from the get-go?
Interesting. I had a similar idea a couple months ago, but was more focused on being the Yelp for apartments/buildings/etc.

There's a huge opportunity for disruption here, and I think there's a good revenue model as leads are valuable to the people who lease the apartments and thus the commissions could be pretty good.
Yeah. I built the first version using Django but my code has been re-written by our engineers. I'll have our CTO chime-in on the stack.
pageview++;
Got Stress? Join Cash Gifting
https://github.com/binaryage/asepsis

Asepsis enables you to redirect creation of .DS_Store files into a special, dedicated folder. With redirection, Finder works the same way but .DS_Store files are isolated in the dedicated folder /usr/local/.dscache.
You must mean that Technicolor pays the studio first, then overcharges later.
Google devalues web design
I remember a very nice 2d chart of success vs time with an exponential curve, with a vertical line near the high rise, showing what people see vs what really happens.

Can anyone find it?
Singapore? Hong Kong?

Your underlying assumption is that the US can increase taxes and regulations indefinitely without consequence. But capital and talent are more mobile than ever before.

Record numbers have been renouncing citizenship in recent years (Google it). Most likely when the current flow of expatriation becomes a flood, though, there will suddenly be restrictions imposed on exit: an asset tax, a waiting period, anything to stop the talented from leaving. We've seen this movie before in East Germany, 1961. Remains to be seen whether the US government will do more than expropriate 50% of your assets (2008's exit tax) to deter you from leaving.
So a laid off programmer could be penalized for working on an open source project to keep their skills current? Incredibly idiotic if true, but it wouldn't be the first time we've created screwed up incentives for the lower end of the income scale. I'm becoming more and more convinced that we should replace most of the welfare bureaucracy with a negative income tax.
I just set up a Posterous account for my startup a few weeks ago because I heard lots of praise and recommendations about its simplicity and ease of use. While I haven't posted much up til now I was just about to get serious with it, then I saw this article and the changes.

At first glance things look quite a few of the options and features were stripped out and the whole experience has now become more complicated...

I understand the need to pivot and change their business model, but moves like this make me wonder if it was a good idea for them to do something this drastic (only because from all I've heard about the services it was primarily about its blogging features and its ability to share via other social networks) and if I should consider looking for alternatives to what was (and may still be?) a simple blog...
The ultimate lesson has always been that we can never put all of our eggs in one basket. But lately, the lesson has evolved to suggest that even if you put some of the eggs in a basket, you are actually gambling.in this time of social-Internet. I don't mind gambling my time and efforts with new and/or struggling products, but the risk is when you gamble your friends, connections and audience. It just becomes ugly when the platform plays around and literally pulls the rug under your feet. But anyway, that's a reality of changing social-Internet landscape.
I've seen this article before, and on one hand, I get it. On the other, I think it's a dangerous trap to automatically think that people (in any profession) should know how to build something in detail from the ground up just to make it work.

Let's take a really great, experienced physician. Does he need to know how to make an X-Ray machine in order to perform neurosurgery? At what point does something, once required, become commonplace so that technology and expertise can evolve?
Arrington Plays His Nuclear Option Against the NY Times
a) It'd be nice to see something besides the profile view.

b) It'd be nice to know if it easily allows installation of a different OS (nothing against MeeGo, but I like my Crunchbang).

c) It's a shame that the screen resolution is so low (although I guess that's a general netbook problem...)

d) I'm really excited to see something emerge in the intersection of "stylish" and "cheap".
Lovely! Is there a site for comparing implementations of "things"/methods in different languages/frameoworks in similar fashion? That would have been really neat to learn new languages - instead of reading books (not the best noob move).
I know of trading firms who will sue to try to enforce a mostly unenforceable non-compete agreement on a trader who leaves just to piss them off and waste their time and money to protect themselves (and try to scare others from leaving in the future). But...this is the exception. No one said hedge funds were rational!