skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like living in the US.

We bought our home in cash. Our home is currently an RV---bear with me here. The cost of it was $16k. We pay a combined $6000/year in rent (half of which is my half). You need $200k in investments to support such a cash flow (which I have). So the total cost or asset base or our current living situation is about $216,000 (not counting repairs which I can mostly do myself). We're seriously thinking of moving to Oregon (away from California) buying a house in cash for around $125,000. If real estate taxes are $1,500, this requires 50,000 in investments. Thus the cost of living of switching over to a house would be $175,000. Again, a lot of the maintenance I can do myself. It would be cheaper to not live in an RV, but it was a fun experiment.
Thanks a lot. Now I'm going to spend half the evening writing a script to grab random spam out of my gmail and using this API to try and automatically turn spam into ham.

I bet siri can already do this.
According to this (http://earlyretirementextreme.com/we-are-going-to-cut-our-ex...) he's living in an RV.
Configuration Using Cable Select
The First Law of Being a Kid states;

"If you can't break it, try harder. If that doesn't work, whack the shit out of it."

You are 100% correct in your observation that tinkering leads to innovation. I think that just means that we're going to see different kinds of tinkering in the future.

When I was growing up, that meant overclocking chips because you didn't like the speed of your machine. Today that means jailbreaking an iPhone because you don't like Apple's rules.

I would have much rather been breaking iPhones than XTs when I was growing up :)
I posted regarding the volunteers requiring additional management, since I felt this comment was downvoted for presuming volunteers == travel expenses greater than the travel expenses caused by the Board.
All it takes is for some of them to be out of work and be willing to work for the offered amount. It's like Huffington Post firing everyone, getting people to write for free, and offering to let old writers interview for their old jobs at no pay.

Your product doesn't have to be good, just good enough. The viewers will follow, and soon a new standard is set for wages.

I'm reminded of video game programming, which has lower wages than other fields for programmers. Why? More people want to do it. They're willing to work for less. Now consider how many people want to be famous actors and directors.
I am aware of inflation. I did not intentionally imply anything about CPI. I was referring to the old generations attitude of "make it do or do without" compared to the current attitude of "just charge it on the card".
That's my point. If a VC can't even be bothered to look through or respond to opportunites that show up on their doorstep, how exactly can they be in a position to find or help startups? There wasn't even anything in the article about helping or working with startups. It's ONLY about getting the foot in the door and just letting YC do the filtering.
my only question is why do this in the US? on $7k a year you can live like a king in other parts of the world...

That was the strategy I was expecting to see (the other low-budget living strategy I've seen promoted a couple times pretty much amounts to subsistence farming).

I was a bit surprised to see his total rent/utilities given as $270. I've lived in a pretty cheap area, and rent alone was that much. Of course, living there, $7,000/yr wasn't out of the ordinary for living expenses and some entertainment (though calling a car "optional" there is a stretch).
Fantastical: A Fun Way to Manage Your Calendar
Apple iPhone 4S introduced
Foundation: Rapid Prototyping and Building Framework from ZURB
Basic economics tells you that this is not a good growth strategy to adopt especially if you have a consumption-based economy, and not savings-based one (aka China, India). In short population is going to increase over time, resources are going to decrease over time, in order to keep GDP per capita in line with an increasing population, you cannot just decrease your spending (or tighten your belt). You have to grow by increasing income levels, and thereby increasing aggregate demand.

If we only increase incomes, and dont spend, then aggregate demand goes down, leading to less consumption, less investment, which leads to lower employment opportunities, which leads to even lesser consumption, and so on so forth until we get to a severely regressive cycle, where our industries shut down.

Point is, more power to you if you want to spend less, but making everyone else adopt your way of life because it works for you, does not mean it will work for them, and in entirety would not promote greater economic growth.

PS for those arguing 'well it works for China'; well the USA is not China, and they are big structural differences which make it unnecessary and useless to adopt that model.
New Tools to Optimize App Authentication
Yeah, it's not rocket science. The biggest money losers are too much house and too much car and all the interest payments that go towards it. Even by eliminating the interest by paying in cash you're already cut your expenses on those items by 50%. The rest is just details, but most importantly. Don't buy ANYTHING on credit.
Probably the results at the time of processing, mainly for the purpose of sharing. Any further processing makes sense to re-run with a new email. That also holds true to the fact you dont store the email contents. Agreed with pastebin, just as easy to email the results as well, however might be a nice feature that comes with some value to the site's purpose.

Enjoying the api, I may work on a little tool using it similar to the feature request. thanks for sharing this with us.
Code Search allows using regexps for searching, which is one of the things that made it super awesome.
In the presence of each and every person living in an industrialized society are multiple devices running embedded software that is difficult to modify. Those devices are programmed using more flexible systems which to this very second are programmable any way you like. Where is the outrage over the hacker unfriendliness of my refrigerator? The iPad, iPhone, Android, and comparable devices are a hybrid of PC-like and embedded systems. The tradeoffs were made for reasons outside of anyone's programming/hacking needs. Should you want jailbreak a locked down device much of the work has already been done for you.

A hacker's "freedom" to poke around in the system has been traded for the freedom of an average person to use the damn thing without worry. This argument about post-PC devices and whether or not they're good for hackers is tired. Be thankful that powerful, accessible devices are being put in the hands of millions of enthusiastic people that you have a chance to influence and affect through software and services.

Finally, let's address the specter of censorship. This is brilliantly simple (in the United States at least). Address the entity censoring you. If it's a private entity then accept that they have no legal, ethical, or moral obligation to give you any access to their customers (much less complete access). Roll up your sleeves and compete. Should you be dealing with government censorship then pursue justice in whatever way your heart guides you.

But please stop whining.
Part of our motto is "Experiment with friends!" :-)

Yes, very tongue-in-cheek. If I remember correctly, in one of the videos Eri says something like "I experimented a little in college, but it never really went anywhere". :-D
Science can progress even without software

Okay well, I don't know what field of science you work in, but where I am sitting, we can't make progress without fourier-transforming millions of samples for tens of thousands of detectors three times an hour. Try doing that without software.

Science rests on the ability of others to reproduce and finesse your work. Releasing your code makes this much easier, partly because a lot of code does "boring" stuff like deal with data formats and basic calibrations before it gets to the "interesting" stuff. So giving somebody the "boring" part helps them enormously.

The reason people don't do it: they don't get personal benefit for it, and the journals and funding agencies don't make them. The latter CAN change.

[Edit - also: the way of funding scientific computing is somewhat broken, but that's another story].
He refuses to highlight the Highway robbery of both tax payers and students by the Banking Elite.

Guess what folks the K12 budgets have not alarmingly increased over the past 12 years, just colleges. We have a system where elite bankers get to rob tax payers and students with Loans that defy the uniform commercial code with on term limits and other somewhat illegal terms.

Than we allow that banking elite class to stack the trustees that are elected at state colleges so that there will always be a raise in budgets and rates every year.

Here is the difference...30 years ago a student could pay for college tuition from a job right out of high school.

Are we really gaining something when we allow colleges to enact unfunded liabilities such as retirement to those who only put in 10 years and a sports program that basically is a farm team for professional sports without professional sports paying for the that farm team?
AT&T Blames Apple
Interesting concept. I started in the SF bay area in the US, and did not see anything. Then I zoomed out all the way, and Australia lit up with notes :-)

Do you plan to add a timeline? It can be interesting to see opinions about a place over a time period.
Thanks for the link. Very educational.
I see it was discussed on HN long time ago.

However Audion story is quite different from Google Buzz / Code Search story. Apple didn't kill iTunes. Audion would have died anyway, because they didn't find free business model for their MP3 player.

Audion story is educational in terms of missing key business opportunities.
Tell that to Samsung and HTC. Microsoft's patent position was strong enough that it managed to force each of them to pay Microsoft a license fee for every Android device they sell.

Fact is Android is anything but free, except it's Microsoft, not Google, who's collecting on every incremental Android sale.
Sure, but desktops and laptops are starting to become more and more like tablets and smartphones. Look at the changes that started in Lion, especially the Sandboxes. Look at what is in store for us with Windows 8. It seems to me that if things keep heading in the same direction, laptops will end up just as locked-down as tablets.

If you think that the market will never let it happen, realize that at least 80% of consumers only really use their computers for the web and/or for games. What do you use your smartphone for?
Announcing pytest.el
oh! neat! some friends of mine live in a van (it's a big van but not quite an RV), it's a pretty sweet deal.

I think you have a good thing going on for yourself. if you can save that kind of money it definitely changes how you interact with the world. I only had 1/10th of what you have in investments and it definitely made me bolder in the world.

I wasn't being hyperbolic about insurance carriers though, and I'm sure you already know about this but I'd really caution you (and others) on this. As a small (10 person) company, we had a health insurance policy that was dropped without cause by the carrier. They told us to our face, "sue us". They know we won't, because what would it accomplish? We'd lose (burn) money, they have money to burn, it makes no sense.

When you're small (an individual or a small company), they can get away with doing that to you. So, you're making payments on a policy, but I'd wager that when you need it, is when you'll be getting a letter in the mail saying "after we received your letter telling us to terminate your policy, we did"...
Even if others did it before, it is still an annoying line noise.
Well, not to worry, most people won't make "the sacrifice".

Maybe if we transitioned to a production based economy but producing only quality items we needed. That way we wouldn't have to work so much. Unemployment would go down because people weren't scrambling for the the ability to consume. Concepts like planned obsolescence would go away.

A lot of what we refer to as "growth" is just an indicator that the volume of economic transactions is going up. However, just because the economy is getting bigger doesn't necessarily mean it's getting better. Breaking windows and replacing them creates economic growth, but it doesn't make the house better.
Stanford's Entrepreneurship Corner: Phil Libin, Evernote [video]
Come check us out this Sunday at the East Bay Mini Maker Faire, if you get a chance:

http://www.meetup.com/BioCurious/events/34349702/
https://ebmakerfaire.wordpress.com

We'll be issuing and stamping our own version of Mitch Altman's Hackerspace Passports as well.
He lives in a trailer at an RV park also... that right there cuts your rent significantly. Hey, if you want to live in a trailer at an RV park for $400 a month, barbecue with charcoal because it costs less than propane, and grow a few vegetables by the side of your trailer in a makeshift garden, more power to you.

Unfortunately, I prefer living in a solid structure made of wood and bricks that doesn't wash away in a flood or blow away in a storm.
I am not sure if VC firms doing seed investing have done it in such large numbers and if not (which I think is the case), are they setup to manage 100 startups a year versus 15.

Also I am wondering if this approach will have to be the new approach or the one that Khosla, Benchmark, Sequoia (I understand they are indirectly in YC companies) and similar ones have had for long, of identifying big trends, finding the right company and going big behind it, is still better. I have seen the latter fail as well as succeed. I think we have very little data on the former but there is bound to be a limited set of companies that a VC partnership can optimally support / manage and this new approach may put a strain on it. I guess we have to wait and see. Thanks much for replying, pg.
Wow, thanks for listing all those interesting channels. I've been looking at some of them and they're great! One I'd add is called "Smarter Every Day" by a destinws2. He's an aeronautics engineer, I think, but mostly shoots guns with a high speed camera. He always includes interesting science, though, too.
I've been living on $6000 a year for the past five years. Next year, I intend to spend 10 months in New Zealand on <$8000, including travel, room, and board.

It's very doable. I rent a very nice room in a pleasant suburb. I eat well, if repetitively. I have enough pocket money to go out somewhere nice with friends now and again. I don't make much more than I spend --- product, in part, of a BFA --- and sure, an extra few thousand would improve my lifestyle considerably. But I don't need much more, and I've been very happy and very comfortable.
Ahh, good old St Louis, Missouri, where everyone has so much money that they're willing to invest in pretty much any random jibber-jabber.

Ha. There I go again, pretending I live around stuff-that-matters. Never come here.
Obviously the author doesn't have kids.
I don't think anything can prevent them from breaking and changing things. Maybe they won't do it with iPad (although I doubt it), but they'll still do it. Part of being a human child and all.
Why does auditability scare you? Besides, it is a requirement of many laws and industry regulations. Especially the log-to-syslog capability which enables centralized logging of sessions.

--
Dan McDougall - Author of Gate One
I think you're missing the point entirely. Yes, there's a chance that one of the people who cold emails them is good - but really, what are the odds?

With introductions, the referrer stakes his or her reputation on the referee. Make too many bad recommendations, and that cuts out a bad lead. The most successful organizations I know recruit through internal contacts - and it just makes sense from a VC's perspective to do the same.

It's about the best allocation of time vs good finds, rather than just finding every good opportunity.
I'd expect her to answer with "I'm afraid I can't do that, Oren" - but give it a try and good luck :)
Inside Rounds & Macro Conditions with Brad Feld, Sabet, Hippeau & Kopelman
Great, 25 more channels of the like that makes up 90% of cable television.

Please, Google, give us ESPN. People will literally throw money at you.
Chinese Trolls and Privateers (Live From Patent Defense 2.0)
The Class-Domination Theory of Power [2005]
No, I'm not joking. I guess I'm just really dense. I've also tried passing -L 100 in addition to -I, but the result is the same.
the post-PC era does not mean that nobody has a PC, it means that people don’t have to buy PCs to do non-PC things.

Fewer people needing to buy PCs to do non-PC things means fewer people buying PCs. Fewer people buying PCs means fewer people exposed to the PC things early on. Fewer people who are familiar with the things that you use to make things.

Seems reasonably lamentable to me.
Google is like a big oil company that can afford to build a gas station right beside the mom & pop station, and undercut them until they go out of business.
SRI is a great organization. They make the best language modeling tool srilm that is available to developers http://www.speech.sri.com/projects/srilm/

I am curious if, and what its role in SIRI was.?
Don't quit this business because you can declare it "failed" .. quit it because you aren't having fun at it (based on your comment)
> And how do you believe you'll accomplish this? The second, third, etc. companies are not going to sign up for this responsibility for free.

Yes it costs more money and it has to be done in advance.

> Nor is there any guarantee that they won't also fail, or be merged into one conglomerate that fails.

You could put it in the bylaws that they cannot merge into a conglomerate, or mandate that they split every so often.

> I don't understand how this is at all relevant. I see no compelling reason to believe that the US will not experience natural disasters, wars, failed companies, or any number of other incidents that could cause cryo-failure.

Sure those are a constant risk. The solution is to put money and resources towards reducing the risks, starting with the worst ones and/or the cheapest to fix. This likely has enormous positive externalities for the population as a whole.

> The fact that the population is fairly educated is almost completely irrelevant.

Are you sure? Education is an important element of what sustains civilization.

> Frozen people are not in a position to promote anything.

They are now when they aren't frozen yet.

> And the people keeping them frozen don't have an incentive to do anything except collect paychecks.

They do if they a) expect to be frozen themselves, b) see the patients as fellow humans, or c) see the patients as priceless historical artifacts. But yes they are also motivated by whatever keeps getting them their paychecks -- obviously it is best to stack things so that the paychecks are dependent on things that are desirable for the patients.
I think the author's point is that the post-PC era implies that the golden age you're describing is dying, replaced with a clean future, wherein people don't have computers with text editors and that can run interpreters and compilers etc.

The children of the post-PC future will only have access to iPads. Or Kindle Fires, as pure a consumption device as I can imagine.
> Okay well, I don't know what field of science you work in, but where I am sitting, we can't make progress without fourier-transforming millions of samples for tens of thousands of detectors three times an hour. Try doing that without software.

It's possible - you can make hardware circuit that does exactly this :)

> Science rests on the ability of others to reproduce and finesse your work. Releasing your code makes this much easier, partly because a lot of code does "boring" stuff like deal with data formats and basic calibrations before it gets to the "interesting" stuff. So giving somebody the "boring" part helps them enormously.

What if this "boring" part in others code contains bug ? There's less chance to reproduce it, if you had to write it yourself :)
Living in an RV is like living in a tiny tiny shitty studio, plus you have to pump your own shit and piss regularly.

Yeah, I can live in a tent and hunt for food. Zero dollars per year.

Sorry, but fuck that. None of these stories are inspiring.
It's been my experience too that the majority don't give a second thought to what money represents. To most people money is something that comes out of a slit in the wall when they insert their plastic card. Some realize that this only keeps working as long as they maintain their job and don't get fired, but some don't consider that possibility either. Money really is life. Most people are born without things to sell, so they can really only procure money by renting out their mind or labor for others to use. One can always make more money but nobody can make more life. Hence, it's somewhat of an optimization problem: How much life to give up to procure enough money in order to make money with money instead of selling one's labor or thoughts.

PS: I'm jealous of your liveaboard experience. That's what I originally wanted to do but wifey wasn't prepared for the possibility of having our home sinking for whatever reason and to be honest neither was I (I hadn't taken up sailing at that time so I was clueless). Thus we settled on the RV.
Kevin Rose interviews Leah Busque (TaskRabbit)
Don't charge. In products with network effects, you want as little friction as possible.

This is why about.me demolished flavors.me, even though flavors.me came first.

Since your product is built around doing things with other people, there's a natural advertising angle, viz., suggesting things for people to do.
مشاهدة مباراة الترجي التونسي والهلال السوداني بث مباشر  15/10/2011
I would say that the OP understands that a growth economy is not the end-all be-all of human progress, and in the end may not be ideal.

Maybe it's not about imposing a way of life on other people, but realizing that the underlying philosophy of a growth economy is flawed- it's inherently true that limitless growth is impossible, so in some sense we are all just waiting until we either slide over the top of that curve naturally, or people realize that there are other dimensions to the problem than just the x and y plot of that graph.
That sounds like a laugh - would love to help out if poss, let's talk it out!
This guy needs a better metaphor. Imagine a world where Legos didn't exist? But Legos do exist. It has probably never been easier to be a Lego hobbyist.

What this guy should do is come up with an actual example of a hobby that has died out because the parts are no longer available. Used Model-T Fords. Urban horse infrastructure. Manual typewriters. Dial telephones.

What one realizes is that actual extinct things are only extinct because the demand is gone. They are still making vacuum tubes somewhere, for god's sake - audiophiles can have passionate debates about how much better the tubes were back in 1967, but apart from such quibbling 2011 is still a pretty good time to build a tube amplifier. There are lots of plans on the Internet!

So I wouldn't count the PC out yet. Aren't they just about to release a tiny PC for $25? It has never been cheaper or easier to be a PC electronics hobbyist.
I don't think your comment to "roll up your sleeves and compete" makes sense. It may well be that it is in the interest of the majority of people to not allow people to modify the software on their devices and therefore companies might not decide to let people do so. However, it may still be valuable to let people install their own OS's on their computers, etc. The point would be that we need to correct the market to support hacker's needs since each hacker might not individually have enough market influence to do so.
You get better by working on projects. You don't get good at making sand castles unless you make them.