skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: 3.5 months to make 2,000 USD/month - what should I do?
Hello HN community

Throw-away account here, for privacy reasons. I got expelled from the university due to irreversible actions and I now have about 3.5 months to make 2000 USD/month to live more or less independently. I have no clue how I should make money.

I'm a business guy, but eager to program (few programming classes at university). So what's my best bet here? Learning just as much so that I can launch a SaaS app or try to freelance with my limited knowledge? Should I get into affiliate marketing, just to make money?

I can't see my other skills that worthwhile because sites like Elance have super cheap workers (with whom I can't compete with financially) with similar skills.

Working a "normal" job (waiter etc.) will be an option after 3.5 months, but I want to see whether I can make something work myself.

I appreciate any input!
What about search?
I've used a variant of this successfully when there's a merge coming up. Basically, if I'm in the lane that's disappearing, I slow down as if to merge, matching speed with the car next to me, but then don't merge until the last moment. When I do this I invariably get some hotshot honking behind me who wants to zip up to the merge point and slow down traffic there, but such people are essentially the cause of the problem, so I don't worry too much.

What generally happens is that from the moment I start doing this, overall traffic speeds up just a bit and the lane ahead of me clears fairly quickly. It's win-win for everyone but the hotshot behind me.
Mostly because nothing of what you just mentioned actually plays out as true. Hell, getting MS to give up on things is harder than the obsolescence nonsense you mention.
Thanks, that's exactly the point: not to replace every tool/editor, but to be the best/simplest for a limited set of tasks :)
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As per using amazon to scale, it depends on the services they use. EC2 is expensive, but you don't need that many ec2 instances to handle the streaming, outside of permission handling etc.

As for transcoding videos, they probably have a far more burst-like intake of movies, yet not a very large burst at that. How many tv shows are released per day? How many movies come out per day? Not too many, compared to a service like youtube that has to transcode huge amounts of information all the time. EC2 at least lets them turn on machines until they finish, at which point they can easily scale down after the burst is handled.
Although some parts of the posts are a bit too stereo typed for my me, I really like the general approach. Its an interesting clash of opinions / cultures, catchy to read. I hope to hear more from you guys!
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if ffmpeg worried about patents and licensing, they would have stopped development a long time ago.
To the non-artistic eye I think it's a pretty cool logo
That's if subscribers keep the same level of service. Their subscriber count could stay relatively flat while everyone drops disc delivery service and their revenue wouldn't change by +60%.
As it's been said, it's exactly the point. The current keyboard mappings are required to trigger fullscreen, while (non-alpha & non-beta) browsers don't implement a fullscreen API.
Think of all the steps that go into setting up complex campaigns with proper split testing.

There is lots of hassle, inefficiency and errors that happen along the way.
Trello means crazy in greek.
I agree with some of what you've written, but I have a few nitpicks from the interviews with their CEO that I've seen,

> Hollywood increasingly sees Netflix as a problem rather than an additional avenue for revenue. The studios may be concerned about creating another iTunes (virtual monopoly)

I think they see the NFLX subscriber numbers and are simply looking to get a bigger cut

>There's no offline viewing. IMHO Apple will increasingly address this market. Netflix needs to as well. When people are mobile they usually don't have a sufficient data connection, particularly if on a train or plane.

I don't believe that is how NFLX perceives itself. They seem to understand their market is a niche, and they don't see themselves as the place to go for the latest TV episodes, for example.

>Netflix seems to want to go the HBO route of creating original content.

I believe they see their ability to directly negotiate with studios (i.e. content creators) as a major source of leverage when dealing with the content owners moving forward.

Edit: Fixed horrible formatting. This was a response to cletus that got interrupted by a minor office fire drill :(
Still Javascript transitions only, its better supported only because it is a small subset of SVG which is known to work.

And it has other issues, like the Raphael commands are a separate language, and then the DOM will be different.

For some basic use cases it is a good way to use SVG that gives you IE support (but not eg Android 2.x). It is not a complete answer... also you get to like SVG when you start using it, being able to directly browse the DOM is great, with Raphael it is indirected through a translation layer.
awesome- looks really accessible and user friendly
This is pure win. The screencast on this post shows that with one click you get a deployed app (in the language you choose) that ships with an app template that uses the Facebook APIs to get you started.

We're witnessing a Facebook app that creates real living Facebook apps. Heroku continues to impress with insanely easy onboarding of folks new to deploying web apps, and building features the way things should work.

It must be amazing to start programming in the age of Heroku.
While I fully agree with the losing something in translation. I don't agree that people are trying to skip learning things. It is a do I want to do 100% of my software development 3 times because I need a java version for one platform, Objective-C for the second and C# for the third.

Oddly enough it seems like C++ is the only language all three platforms support natively.
You can take Jira from "www.atlassian.com" to a fully running instance with a baseline Software Development Issue tracking Project in 15 minutes.

I will give you this - _should you chose to_ fully mastering it's screens, issue types, screen schemes, issue type screen schemes will take the better part of few hours to completely map in your head. Jira gives you amazing flexibility to do almost anything you want on the issue type level, but with that flexibility, comes an very complex model.

When I first encountered it, I was exasperated that I had to take those couple hours to draw the hierarchy and map it out in my head - but now that I know It, I'm happy it's there.
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UI looks inconsistent, but I see a lot there to be excited about. If they are taking cues from the phone OS, then that's a very good thing IMO. I've always felt that was one of the nicer mobile UI's.
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For hosting, isn't bandwidth for movies delivery their biggest cost? I would imagine the servers and storage are relatively cheap. If they struck a low cost bandwidth deal with Amazon, hosting in AWS won't be too bad.
Most google products are too beta to be really used. I really think and insist here that the "ship as soon as possible" is not a magic recipe, it's a good card which have to be played at the right moment for the right thing. Some product need a pretty good polishing (like video games) at the first public release. A facebook competitor has to be really polished as soon as possible and nothing else I would say.
Google could have its social network, it's just organic. But they still can mess it up. Don't know if it's the case but... they can.
Miguel is a pretty l33t developer, so he glosses over a lot of the details.

I suspect that code is contained in a class library project. Aka, generates a DLL. So no, not all sealed classes will be components.

The second method is there to illustrate what asynchronous programming will look like in C# 5. Native support for async is THE big feature in C# 5. The "await" allows you to call slow blocking code without a thorny nest of callbacks. There's some magic behind await. You can find out more on Google. Miguel could've definitely left out the SubAsync method in this example for clarity.

A component that adds 2 means a DLL that exposes the methods Add and SubAsync. In WinRT, you can code libraries in C# and use them in C++. Or Javascript.
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This first Windows 8 development release is really to get people working on Metro apps. It's tablet-centric and desktop and laptop use (without a touch screen) is a very clear afterthought. There will be major changes to the way this all works over the coming months. There have to be for Windows 8 to be a viable desktop OS.
Personally I've wondered if the Gross National Happiness wouldn't be a better indicator. See, I was going to argue that an indicator of poverty is the stress of making enough money for basic survival. But then I remembered reading that middle-class and rich people have the same stress; people making $1 million per year worry that they don't make enough.
off topic. I am the author. I am wondering if this submission had been flagged. Fogscreek's post about Trello http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3001173 has 7 votes, but it's on the front page ranked 19.

This was submitted at roughly the same time, and has 13 votes. But it's ranked ~50 on the second page.

I just want to know if I unknowingly violated some rules. I'd want to avoid that next time.

Anybody knows?
ahh, they are working again, maybe it was just me :)
My girlfriend and I weren't living in the same city when met, so we started our relationship over gchat and text message. We're both pretty glued to our iPhones, so large parts of our relationship are chronicled in digital form. We sometimes find ourselves resolving the "honey I definitely said that" tiffs of daily life with a quick search of our chat logs.

The internet is often accused of putting barriers between couples, but this article gives a sweet example of how it can contribute to relationships as well.
Reminds me of the Saturday Night Live game show parody "Jew, Not a Jew". The host would name a celebrity, and the contestant would have to answer "Jew" or "not a Jew".
Micromax X222 Launched in India at just Rs 1990
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Is this actually a victory for Juniper as Cisco acknowledges Juniper as a threat? Or will this FUD campaign have a real impact on Juniper sales?
ClojureScript adopts some of JS semantics like the numbers. Like with Java you can use nativ arrays if you really need to. ClojureScript has an implementation of Clojures immutable Data Structurs this are slower then nativ objects but should not be the bottleneck in most applications.

The great thing about ClojureScript and performace is that ClojureScript get piped threw the google closure compiler with does dead-code elimination and some other optimizations.

I have not written any big enought app in ClojureScript that I could really tell but if you look at the compiler output you'll be surpised how little there is.
That's horrible. This article did also remind me to cancel my streaming (but now I'll wait until the end of the month ;-). I'm going the surprising route of doubling down on DVDs now.
Still using G+, no longer using Facebook.
Name a single product that works better for software development organizations as a generic issue tracker?

What I'm finding about the hate-on I'm seeing from some people about Jira, is that they CLEARLY have never, ever been forced to deal with the pain that is remedy as an issue tracker. Jira is like a breath of fresh air, a touch of heaven, compared to that product. I have a 50 bullet-point list of unresolved issues with Remedy. My issues with Jira are tiny-corner cases problems that 99% of users wouldn't even notice.
I'd like to respond to a few of the comments here.

Jeremy imagines correctly. This blog post was essentially a continuation of the subject on the node mailing list, and particularly the assumption that if you feel you shouldn't compile to JS, then you should just write in Assembly, or that JavaScript is only worth using if you want to be "closer to the metal". I believe that these points of view are wrong.

Yes, of course I'm aware that C++ was originally cross-compiled to C. That's why I chose it for the analogy, like Lassie on display in the Louvre. People tend to take comparison that as either a compliment to CoffeeScript, or an insult, depending on their feelings about C++ vs C. I consider both interpretations to be correct.

I have no problem with people compiling to JavaScript, though I personally prefer dealing with JavaScript directly. I like stack traces with line numbers that correspond to the line numbers in my editor, and it's not such a bad language. One of the biggest things I've found lacking with both Node and Browser JS is post-hoc debugging. Syntax sugar doesn't help with that. I'd be much more excited about efforts to produce state-capturing crash dumps that would let a developer revisit an error condition and investigate it after the fact. Other language have this, and it makes me very envious.

"Expressiveness" is a measure of how many tokens are required to write programs. Read some of pg's essays about arc and blub. A less than 10x increase would still be relevant, but.. well... meh. It's not a major leap in power that Assembly to C is, or C to JavaScript is.

Increases in expressiveness often come at the cost of also increasing the difficulty of reasoning about programs' precise behavior, but increase the ability to reason about their intent. Reading assembly isn't exactly fun (in my opinion), but it's also quite clear exactly what the computer is doing -- so much so that it can be tricky to figure out exactly what the human was trying to accomplish.

C is much more humane, and still pretty clear what's going on. It's an obvious sweet spot for many tasks. JavaScript, on the other hand, runs on this huge black box, but it's much more expressive than C (and thus, much easier to write), and it runs in web browsers (which makes it inescapable), doesn't require a compilation step, and is quite fast for a lot of tasks. I've yet to see any similar leap from a to-JS language. They're just other high level languages that all have pretty much the same basic set of features. A lot of them are a bit nicer than JS, but they lack JavaScript's relevance factor.

I must not be a very good writer, because people often read things I write, and seem to come away with the impression that I have these strong prescriptive views about syntax and coding style. I don't. The reason I'm so unenthused is because most high level languages don't really seem to differ all that much. Coding style doesn't solve very many problems, and the problems it does solve aren't particularly hard.
>>If Clojure takes off on other runtimes, it will have this issue too. The JVM is it's "home" platform, and most Clojure software depends on JVM libraries, like how the vast majority of the C# software written thus far depends on Microsoft (and therefore Windows) libraries.

There is a small difference.

The Clojure/JVM runtime is ported to quite a lot of operating systems, where it runs quite well.
many did not have good parents or parents that cared.

A great point and I imagine that plays a huge role on disabling people from learning how to learn at a young age. I was very fortunate to have parents who enabled me to explore and become passionate about learning, well before Kindergarten age.

But does pushing those unfortunate kids through a system that only emphasizes the regurgitation of information do them any good? When the teacher is gone, they are on their own. Teach a man to fish and all that...

Most of my friends, which came from the now defunct Jackson H.S. in Queens, have become drug dealers, ended up in jail, died or never went to college.

Quite literally almost everyone whom I still keep in touch with from high school is now a teacher themselves. Being a teacher may be more respectable then a drug dealer for sure, but I'm not sure it shows a success of the system. What do we gain from producing a society of teachers? A strong economy requires people creating products of value. Education itself has no intrinsic value.
The source code for the ranking algorithm should be visible to anyone who can read news.arc source code. I haven't read the source code myself, but I get the impression that comments to threads matter for ranking as well as upvotes. Flags (which wouldn't be visible) also matter for ranking.
Maybe. I'm sure a lot of people also downgraded but didn't quit completely. I know I did.
Here's a Registry hack to get it back: http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-pick/how-to-get-a-windows-...
When I go to write a letter, I use some software that allows me to put together words on a semblance of a page and then print it. The tool is called a "word processor"

When we live our lives, we leave all these digital footprints and clues all over the web. It seems to me that somebody should invent a "life processor" that would collect these traces of our former selves and allow us, after death, to somehow more actively participate than we've ever done before.

If nothing else, it would be a central repository of things that we left behind -- words, images, songs, memories, etc. Yes, I know GMail and Facebook do some of that, but a lot is in chat, on blogs, in comments (like this one), and spread all over the place. After all, they're my thoughts. Shouldn't my descendants be able to easily browse and use them? I would think that with a bit of computational magic, there could be all sorts of new things coming out of our thoughts after we pass on -- if only there was a central repository of data to start with.

I liked this article a lot. It reminded me how important the traces of our digital lives are. Or rather, how important those traces can be.
NASA spots Star Wars-like "Tatooine" planet orbiting two stars
I think people underestimate the value of this material being stored in a searchable, historical database. Whether it's Gmail, Facebook or some other service, it's subsequently one of the best and scariest aspects of all these services. It can lead to horror stories, but it can also lead to automated memories and materials such as the above.

What an interesting world we live in.
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In this case you might have had a out if you could have convinced a judge/jury that their lateness made it from a real contract, "you sign away these rights in return for a job" to "... in return for keeping your job" which doesn't count.

Iffy in your case, but it's not uncommon for companies to e.g. get new financing from not so clue-full investors who want to [ fill in the blank ] the employees.

Of course, if you sign it anyway under those conditions the mere threat of a lawsuit can prevent you from getting hired (keeping a low profile helps a lot there) or starting up a new business.

Or you could just move to California.
If it were up to Netflix they would give customers the content they want for the price that they want. Hollywood obviously wasn't going to let this slide and I fear streaming services will soon hike to cable-like prices.

Also, people paid for separate Netflix accounts because they each wanted their own accounts for DVDs. Now that Netflix upped their device count to a whopping 50 and split DVDs and Streams, I wouldn't be surprised if everyone went Stream only and shared their account with 10 other friends. That's certainly what I'm doing. As for DVD's? Well, piracy has become what's convenient, and I now have no ethical issues with it.
Agreed. The barriers to start developing a web app now are incredibly low. You've got a server backend in Heroku, wand Facebook's gazillions of users right out of the gate.
Awesome. It's amazingly simple.

However, Facebook should improve their app ecosystem by changing their attitude and support for developers before adding new features.

Deployment and hosting of FB apps can be a problem. But compared with having your app with thousands of satisfied users be disabled without warning or explanation, it's not a big problem.
Does this then make the case for the "yet-another-photo-sharing-site"?
Structured loan settlement
What was your percentage of Opera users, if you don't mind me asking? If it's only a very small percentage, was the increase in resource usage really that significant?
No Xbox 360 app.
It's certainly a win for both companies involved. I've thought about using Heroku, and making a Facebook app, and the 2 of them together now makes it a lot more likely that both will happen.
Is there a good reason to paginate anything these days? The fact that publishers make people click on a 12pt link to read the next "page", and thus view more ads, is pretty insane.

If you aren't using infinite scrolling, chances are you're doing it wrong.
Oh, you know how to program? Ok, great, that's the minimum you need to get a job. I hope you can read too.

But what do you know about the clients? Who at Company B needs to be handled with kid gloves? Who likes it when you're pushy? How much can you negotiate with Company C on the timeline? What are the strengths of the other developers both in house and at other firms?

That's the stuff you can only learn by working in the industry. That's what makes an employee valuable. That's the real skills, the stuff you won't learn in school.
On top of solid TV shows, I've been able to find amazing and very recently released foreign films on Netflix.

Their anime library also seems to be improving so for me it's become a more valuable alternative than an HBO/Cinemax/Showtime/TMC subscription.
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I think you mean "τρελός" :)

From the look of it, there's only one L.
That was incredibly beautiful and arresting. Thank you for sharing.
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Ask HN: Why don't more developers use topic maps to organize their knowledge?
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Thanks for the note and feedback, James.

One - I must admit my own ignorance on the many options. I thought of it as a direct Disqus vs Facebook choice.

Two - I agree there's a lot more to developing a community. Here however, the focus was just on the commenting bit. It wasn't meant to be comprehensive.

And three - I had a posts a few days ago on the approach of copying the best out there and then developing your own style. Here, the best examples taken were Fred Wilson and Mark Suster. My opinion, of course.

:)
it was a small percentage, but the pages being requested were accessing external resources that i had to pay for on a per-view basis. paying for those views without actually showing anything to the user was wasteful.
CountEveryBitByHand() is a function which returns a promise. (I don't know if that's what they call it in C# 5.)

The await keyword is a new one in C# 5 which halts execution until the promise is fulfilled. Then execution is resumed from that point, and the expression can be evaluated and the function returns.

It's similar to how inlineCallbacks in Twisted work, if you're familiar with those.
Apple's brand value rises to No. 2 in the world, after Google
Life is a game, really.. How often do we choose to play and have some fun?
PayPal’s Strategy for Challenging Visa and MasterCard at the Register
I think CNN is being hyperbolic because Time Warner (CNN's parent company) sees them as a threat.
This is rock solid advice. Thanks, and I wish I could upvote you twice.
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If it was immaterial, why quibble with me on the facts?

It's not though. The whole article presents her as unemployed because of the NCA. That's inaccurate. She can and did work in her field.