skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is something, perhaps, to be said about forced activities and artificially limited choices. There are no doubt people in possession of sufficient motivation, discipline, wisdom and insight that can take the near-infinite list of possibilities that lie before each one of us and choose the happy few which are truly worthwhile.

For the rest of us being forced to sig in one place for an hour a day might give us an opportunity to tend to parts of ourselves that might otherwise be neglected in the rush of life. To a busy person taking 30minutes to sit in the kitchen, read the paper, and sip some coffee would appear as sloth and idleness but doing the same in a train car is nearly as pleasant and gives no opportunity for the evil optimizer in our heads to give us grief about it.
a case of 'wrong place, wrong time,' redigi
I'm sure we will, my man! ;)
Auditor, and very soon to be CPA, here. The author "downloaded quarterly accounting data for all firms in Compustat, the most widely-used dataset in corporate finance that contains data on over 20,000 firms from SEC filings." Quarterly reports are unaudited by an independent CPA firm (most often KPMG, PWC, EY, Deloitte), while annual reports (10-K) are audited. I would be curious if the the sum of squares analysis is as significant in the latter set.
There are some excellent advice in here already - and I won't repeat what has been said before; nor will I go in to the full depth of my story (not because I'm posting non-anonymously, but because I don't have the time to write a novel);

I was homeless - had no roof over my head, literally had to find food to eat (though offering to scrub the toilets at fast food restaurants in exchange for food works since everyone is too lazy to do their own jobs). I was able to get off the streets, but my situation wasn't any better and lived with a handful of people in a 1 bedroom apartment. Then I made the long trek to NYC via Greyhound bus with $60 to my name and a backpack of personal items. I stayed with a friend of a friend of a friend for a few months (which it turns out it wasn't his house, he was just renting a room, and apparently he didn't tell the owners that my intentions were to move in - he figured it would just work out - luckily it did). I worked my ass off to go from literally absolutely nothing up the ranks. I went from homeless to a married man with a great job. It was rough, more than you can possibly imagine, and there were plenty of times where shit hit the fan and it looked like everything would fall apart, but if you persevere you will make it through. We are hackers - not because we are good with computers, but because we are smart people with clever ideas. Put those ideas and analytical thinking to use outside of the computer world and you will find a way to get out of your situation.
Gates vs Jobs
Six weeks is not uncommon in the USA if you are in higher ed.
I've done most of those drives: for several years I've done a one month road trip every summer, and I've been to 47 of the 50 states (next time Vermont, next time).

The most beautiful of all in my opinion are the Route 66, especially the Texas-New Mexico-Arizona part and Highway 1 in California.

I also love Highway 61, the parts bellow Iowa (LA, MS, MO), probably partly because of the blues influence and partly because it feels like another country altogether.

Oh, and surprisingly (to me, a European), Utah is spectacular in the south canyon area.
My month as a single dad
Also important is that they are not describing the effects of high doses of all vitamins. Superfluous amounts of Vitamin E seem to be mainly what they are seeing negative results from, and you'd probably only be getting that much Vitamin E if you were taking Vitamin E-specific supplements on purpose.
Sometimes it doesn't work. That's normal. Pick yourself up and go find a job until you can try again.
I used to commute 2hrs15 mins from Brighton to London, then 2hrs 15mins back again. I took the train, always got a seat at a table (I got on at the first station), had tethering on my iPhone and got an ENORMOUS amount of work done.

I was only working four days a week though, which made it tolerable. Commuting like that five days a week would have driven me mad.
My only bit of advice from all this is to try to get support from your parents. Tell them how you feel. Tell them how they make you feel. Ask them for some support while you try to get back on ur feet.

I don't know where you live, but here in NYC you can spit and it will land on the feet of a guy offering you a job if you are a good programmer. Companies are fighting tooth and nail for good devs. Maybe you live somewhere where jobs are scarce and companies can do this.

meetup.com, look for meetups revolving around programming. I bet you will find work there. People come from other states just to find devs and try to recruit some ppl with relocation or remote work.
Facebook doesn't even come close to eating their own dogfood. They extensively make use of private APIs, and their
commitment to platform developers is legendarily poor. I do agree that Facebook's success going forward will be increasingly dependent on their platform, however.
> What doesn't make it any easier is that I'm 20, I have no college diploma

Most people in my college class joined at age 20...
What exactly makes them incomparable? I think it is fairly apt. They were both the "one more thing", both were Apple versions of existing technologies that some people are claiming will succeed mostly cause they are Apple versions, they are really power user features that lack mass adoption currently, both face social mores that make their use somewhat awkward and so on. I think all signs point to Facetime the sequel. A damn good product that is used once or twice to test, a lot by a couple of people, and is mostly inconsequential.
Your honesty is commendable. And of value, to yourself and others. Take it from someone who has been in your shoes - it gets better. I promise. Falling off the horse is not the problem: it's the standing back up (ouch that hurt!), dusting yourself off, catching that horse, and getting back on that is the challenge. This is the challenge of life, and business. Setbacks are challenges that teach us that we can cope and overcome adversity. And as you have enough of these setbacks, you get better at handling future setbacks. And your confidence grows. Do everything you can to overcome this point. You will make it back onto the horse, and you will be better for it. I promise. I did, and you will, too.
Matt Cutts Provides Support For Banned Site at HackerNews
I think the difficulty in evaluating programming is its often subjective nature. Your article talks about avoidable and unavoidable delays and some of their causes, and while I think you're right, it's only half a picture, and incomplete on its own. Yes, you mention that some perceived delays (e.g., TDD) are actually long-term time-savers (and I agree), but, as one example of how I thought the article might be improved, there's little guidance on differentiating the two.

The important questions, including whether the delay is reasonable, and how can unreasonable delays can be identified and avoided, are the things keeping development managers up at night. Knowing what some delays might be is a first step, but I suspect managers who deal with these delays already know they exist. They'll read, nod and say, "Yup", and continue on their way.

I'm in early discussions with a company that wants to apply better measurement to its agile processes. Its a seeming contradiction to some of the principles of agile, but without knowing how productive teams are, even relative to each other, they can't know if a team is improving or stagnating, except by gut feel. You don't offer any heuristic to improve managers' already subjective instincts.

I feel like an article like this requires a call to action, or at the very least series of specific steps that worked for you in separating the wheat from the chaff. Sharing your experiences on how you handled unnecessary delays would be doubly useful.

--------
Aside: As a specific example of an unhelpful solution in the article: "Start looking for delays in your ... process. [H]ere are some examples: ... * learning to look for delays." Finding ways to trim text enhances its readability. (Something I'm still working on, I think you'll agree.)
Check out http://billflagg.blogspot.com

It can be done, you just have to ignore a lot of the buzz since it wont apply to you.
The application here is write once, read rarely. Would it be possible to unpower drives once they are full (until needed)?
Texas Killing Fields - Trailer
Texas Killing Fields - Trailer
his police procedural radio grew to dominate the adult in the world in recent years
That is possibly the worst idea I've heard this week... On top of the fact that it uses expensive ink, just imagine the environmental cost of all that wasted paper...
Dude, don't harm yourself, it's just no worth it. Even living on welfare is better than giving up life entirely. I have struggled with thoughts like that for years myself, and I've been graced enough to know it's never worth it. My company, Bloomberg, is hiring a lot right now. Email me (http://scr.im/daveslab) at any time if you're looking for a nice place to work, even if it's just to get back on your feet again.
What?! No, certainly not. When FaceTime gets adaption you will not know whether Siri will also be able to get adaption. The reverse is also true. They are completely different features.
Garmin are mentioned twice in the post, and they really have screwed up. 5yrs ago the GPS market was exploding but even then the writing was on the wall. Unfortunately, Garmin is such a conservative, engineering-led, company that it didn't, and apparently still doesn't, see that their future is doomed. No one actually loves their Nuvi, certainly not after using an iPhone - the devices feel like they come from different decades!

In fact, Garmin with their experience in aviation and marine navigation systems could have easily pivoted into the automotive systems space. Or they could have innovated with maps, navigation, routing, traffic, and so on. But they lack the design-led management to truly succeed as a consumer products company. It's a shame.
What I like: it detects your browser and only sets the needed prefixes.

What I don't like: it depends on JS.

Using LESS or SASS avoids most of the problem this article talks about it, although the generated CSS will contain every vendor prefix. I'm not sure the difference in CSS filesize is worth using this solution.

Does anyone know of a server-side solution like this? Wouldn't be hard to vary the CSS output based on user-agent. Although you'd lose some caching benefits.
How hot is fast casual dining? [Infographic]
> In both these cases, after gzip, the presence of the functions is almost certainly negligible.

and

> In any case, optimizing the cases above prior to output is low-hanging fruit that the team probably just haven't gotten around to yet.

Are both huge assumptions. What you're not considering is that as the complexity of the program grows beyond a 'Hello World' to a complex web app, the runtime of 17K lines may balloon further. You have no idea what efficiency they already built in.

What is more telling is that the non-runtime code was much more verbose. If you have a complex app that is already 17K lines, you might see that balloon to 100K lines.

You can't tell until you try and my intuition tells me that my app based on MooTools or JQuery is going to be much leaner, faster, just as easy to maintain, and I don't have to compile anything.
Ah brother. You have only begun to understand the pain of entrepreneurialism. This is what separates Those who eventually find success and those who give up and go back to a corporate job.

We have to stand up to depression, zero support, family abuse, eating crackers...and gut-wrenching despair.

All because we believe in ourselves.

Stand up brother. Your path has not ended. It has only begun. Learn. Live. Try again.

David C.
Facebook has had a Notes feature for just about forever. Most people ignore it, but I know a few people who use it as a sort of blog platform.
So...you're "punishing" Apple by giving them your money next year instead of this year? I bet that will really teach them a lesson.
Keep up the good work. Thank you for reaching out and shining the light,
It wasn't really the features I was commenting on, it's the marketing hype and the reactions to it that are predictable and repetitive.
That doesn't mean you should, though. Anything that requires concentration should probably not be happening while you are driving.
You can't set the DPI in Chrome. I'm guessing its what they wanted to mean there.
When you need a non-standard DPI you just can't read Chrome's fonts. If you boost the font size other elements are not properly proportioned.
Sometimes you'll see "pre-funded" loans where the person has approved the partner, the partner funded them and then Kiva is used to reimburse the partner.

You're not entirely accurate when you write "sometimes". According to the process on the Kiva website http://www.kiva.org/about/how/even-more all loans are pre-disbursed, and in 5 minutes clicking around earlier, I couldn't find a single one which wasn't.

With pre-disbursed loans, as you say, Kiva is used to reimburse the partner, not the person behind the picture on the website (because those people already have their money.) So I stand behind what I said: Kiva users are making zero-interest, low-risk, short-term loans to micro-finance institutions.

The difference between $100 in the bank and $100 in Kiva is that Kiva pretends to put a face on the person this $100 is being lent back out to. They even give an illusion of choice, they appear to let you pick and choose who gets funded! Meanwhile my bank doesn't pretend to tell me who "my" $100 is lent back out to, and they certainly don't pretend to let me choose whose mortgage application gets funded, and whose doesn't.
Go works on windows.
Ironically, the CV has no dates!
Which features would an iPhone 5 have? What would make it distinct from the iPhone 4S?
What I don't get about that rule is what prevents A players from hiring B and C players, and what prevents B players from hiring A players.

I'm more than capable of recognizing someone who is smarter than I am, and as a rule of thumb I prefer to work with people who are smarter than I am.
Mr. Victor's personal site is one of the most impressive I've come across. It's borderline magical.

Hate that he broke my back-button, though.
SEO 101: Keywords, Ranking, Links and Analytics
A cracking good read: personal cloud computing.
For HN: Chrome extension for marking read comments or hiding them
The title is trolling. The press release describes a service where people can subscribe to Wired (and other publications) and have them printed in home rather than receive them by mail.

At first brush I agree that this sounds like a terrible idea, but it isn't what the headline makes it out to be.
Basic Information on LBOs
I know the internet discourages "me too" responses, but...

This is awesome. Thanks for sharing it.
http://Everything2.com is a great community of writers; kind of an alternate reality, perspective-based wikipedia with a mix of fact, fiction, essays, drivel, and close-nit culture of folks who regularly meet up together.
I'm not sure I understand - the submission title makes it seem like this is some kind of mandatory thing, but the article makes it sound like it's an optional service for Conde Nast subscribers?
The Importance of Moving Forward
That'll make me use it in public more. Genius move.

I'm just too shy to walk down the street and talk to my phone without it looking like I'm talking to someone.
That Time Noah Wyle Helped Steve Jobs Invent the iPad in 1999
There is phone support for everyone who uses AdWords now. I don't know the support situation for AdSense though.
Rim BBM still down
That's incredibly cool, but I think Gruber's point about the problems of third party integration will prove to be crucial.

Me: "Set my facebook status to getting ready to ride the roller coaster at Six Flags."

Siri: ...

Me: "Are there any headlines about my startup on the front page of Hacker News?"

Siri: ...

Me: "What Kindle books do I have on HTML 5?"

Siri: ...

Me: "Play me the latest episode of Glee on Netflix."

Siri: ...

Some of these, like Facebook, could be handled by smart first-party integration by Apple. But in general, any time a new use case comes along, first party integration is going to lag way behind, if it's implemented at all.

I don't mean to rag on Siri -- it's an incredibly cool technology even today, and it apparently works amazingly well. But the more things you can do by picking up the phone and using the touch interfsce that you simply can't do at all with the voice interface, the less I think it will slot right into people's lives and become how they interface with their phone.
If I told you I'm more productive in the office than I am at home you'd probably tell me that's a fairly common reaction from those of us who have been on either side of that fence. This guy tells you he's more productive on his commute than at home and he's "...the type of person who can't do anything productive or healthy unless forced into it." I find that thinking unsound.
I just want to let you know, people are here to help you out.

Start-up people (from my experience anyway) are the outcasts, but being different is what liberates us.

We stick together, help out in any way we can, and share in our successes AND failures.

I commend you for not only getting over the fear of taking the start-up leap, but also being honest with everyone on Hacker News.

There are VERY few people I know with that amount of bravery, and it is something you should be proud of.

You are not an idiot, and your father probably just doesn't fully understand what happened.

Everyone has problems, but often hide behind a false mask of growth and prosperity. Things are not always what they seem.

I'm sure the people here on HN would be happy to help you out in any way possible, including myself.

We need to stick together in the good times and the bad.

Things will get better. They will.
Honey badger is Naste, so Naste
Mr. Macintosh begs to differ:
http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Mister_Macintosh.txt

I also really like that the story proves you to be thoroughly correct about Apple trying to establish emotional ties. Here's hoping that they made that a part of their "corporate DNA".
After the prior breach every had to update their password. The real question is if checks were in place to prevent reusing old passwords.
Steve Jobs' Farewell Note to His Wife
For once it would probably be ten times faster and probably be ten times more concise.
Fecal Impaction leads to Death
GolfGearX: Golf Clubs Collection
I haven't read the original study, but might they not be mixing together cause and effect here? Instead of taking vitamins causing people to get sick, it might be people with riskier genetics/lifestyles are more likely to take vitamins to hedge against that?

Reminds me of a news article that interpreted statistics to say "People who drink low fat milk are fatter! Clearly this means that low fat milk makes you fat!" instead of the obvious conclusion that people who are fat would drink low fat milk to try to get slimmer.
like a managed fax machine?
INoobs – Growing Your Personal Brand
Help needed, how do you publish a webapp?
hi there,

as probably happened to many of you, some time ago I've got an idea for a webapp I would have liked to build.

Months have passed and it is almost ready, I would publish it on the internet.

I don't think it'll get me rich, but it would be nice to see how good or bad it performs and if mine was actually a good idea or not.

I worked on it on my own and I'm looking for a nice and cheap hosting company.

But now what I'd like to ask you is the following: which are the steps you think I should take to get the most out of this experience?

What would you suggest me to do or not to do? What did you do wrong? Who would you contact for funding, testing or market it?

I live in Italy and we don't get many networking events here, but I'd be definitively available to spend some money if it's worth it.

Thanks in advance for any hint you'll want to provide.

--- update ---

Actually, my very first mistake was not to notice this: http://ycombinator.com/lib.html

now I have and I'm going through some of the links, they're great.

Still, I'm open to any hint you may also have.
About 8 years ago I quit my job at a great company to start a business. I had no idea what I was doing. About 2 years later, my co-founder had quit, I had not seen a drop of income from the business, I had burned through a good chunk of savings, and I felt like a failure. I was living in a studio apartment in san francisco, using my closet as an office (the desk fit in there, but I didn't when seated at it). I was so upset about the whole thing that I would wake up in the morning at 5AM, be nauseous, then be so miserable that I would go back to sleep. There was a 3-4 year period where I was working so hard, and then so ashamed, that I turned away dates because I didn't want to answer the 'what do you do' question. It was definitely the lowest point of my life.

I decided to apply to law school, and I had just missed the cycle, so it was going to be another year before I got a response. I kept working on the business because I couldn't think of anything else to do. In the next year, the business improved enough that I decided not to go to law school. It kept getting better and better. About 3.5 years in, I stopped telling people it was a failure. The truth was that by that time, it was a very good deal and I could no longer deny it.

My point is not that you should keep doing what you are doing (or that you should apply to law school). Its just that bad times get better. I think the number one thing you can do for yourself is keep moving forward. It doesn't have to be big, just a small step each day in a positive direction. One great thing you can do, in my opinion, is work out. Even if you are unemployed for the next year, at least you will be fit and trim at the end of it. You can jog for free.

Mostly, I wanted to communicate that things will get better, just keep moving forward...
How Steve Jobs Unwittingly Changed Mobile Development
I agree with this 100%. I feel guilty staring out a window - that's wasteful - but I don't feel guilty spending an extra half hour with my girlfriend or investing the time preparing myself a nicer dinner.
The poster has treated as trivial the most crucial shift in the described circumstance. (And thereby answered his/her own question)