skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Right now CDs are not a great option. Very low yielding.

I would suggest spending a few hours every week studying the stock market so that you can at least understand things that are going on, fluctuations that take place etc. I also recommend (my father pays for) Stock Market Mentor. He is a really brilliant guy and although his service is expensive it will be made up for by the knowledge you gain. That knowledge (both relevant to actually picking stocks AND learning to pick your own) will stay with you forever when you have even more money to invest.

I would suggest spending a few months listening to him and doing your own research. Find some stocks you like (or sectors) and follow them. You could test the waters with ETFs because a lot of the stimulus money will be entering the market soon. Right now the market is quite low by historic levels - that doesn't necessarily mean it will go up, but the chances are better.

The market is extremely volatile now. Just be careful..invest in LEARNING and then test things out. Good luck
Receipts: If I were a VC
Singularity Summit 2011 Summary
Why so Siri-ous?
Both my uncle (a very close uncle) and my mother are living survivors of cancer. My uncle had a tumor in his cerebellum, very near to his brain stem. My mother had melanoma skin cancer on her left shoulder.

I can tell you that the way you deal with cancer (or any high-mortality illness) is an incredibly personal decision. My mother is fortunate that she caught the cancer early. A sub-2mm melanoma left here with a golfball sized scoup of flesh missing from her shoulder.

My uncle has it far worse. The damage to his cerebellum and hippocampus means that A) he can no longer balance using his inner ear mechanism, and B) he has a difficult time developing new long term memories (yes, a lot like Memento).

I love my uncle so much it almost brings me to tears just talking about it, but knowing what I know now, I'd have understood perfectly if he decided to forego the radiation treatments that have literally caused his teeth to rot out of his head. I'd have understood perfectly if he decided to forego the debilitating chemo treatments that felt like (in the doctor's words) "a bad case of heroin withdraw". I'd have understood perfectly if he decided to forego the resulting divorce from his wife.

To say "cancer is a bitch" is a gross understatement. Even when you survive, what lies on the other side is a great amount of uncertainty. My uncle continues to be grateful for every day of his life, but I'd understand perfectly if he weren't.

Our lives are the one thing that remain our own until the end. We all decide how we'll live and die individually, and for our own reasons.
"So if the stuff Siri is doing is old, and if others did do it FIRST, then why is everyone so damn excited about the feature?"

Thoughts?
I remember seeing this game for the first time at my cousin's house, probably around 1990. Jumping, hanging, swinging, creeping, sword-fighting? The animation blew my mind.

/nostalgia
I think you created this problem for yourself starting with your 'polite note'. How would you feel about a polite note from a friend saying that he is now going out with the same girl who dumped you yesterday?

I think you need to think through things before acting on your nice-guy impulses. You have definitely ruined your relationship with your ex-boss for no good reason.

At this point you want to keep your guy and not have your former boss sue you over it (even if you have a strong case he will make you sink money in legal costs, so avoid court if you can). You can do this by convincing your former boss that your new guy did not know about his options until after he quit. Don't get into a wrestling match with him, even if you are right.

Good luck!
the bit about body temperature is really interesting. I'm also much warmer on average when I regularly hit the gym. I thought it was just me.
You're right about the 'use it or lose it', but the damages will likely be set to '0', especially in those cases where the value of the original copyrighted data is minimal (which I think in this case is fairly clear).

As for the question of appropriation, I don't think that that should ever happen, it would basically mean that anything is up for grabs given the right reasoning.

Governments have to jump through some pretty involved hoops in order to seize your property (ok, in some countries the hoops are not that complicated and abuse is rife), for corporations to do the same thing would be a bad development.

Say next year we all decide that the windows source code is something we can't live without any more so hand it over?

That's not a good development, even in those cases where you could make a strong argument for it.

In this particular case, there isn't even a strong argument, all it will take is a little bit of work if they should win their case and then they can keep their database and use it to light the fire after printing it out. It will have lost its value entirely after it gets re-created from original material.
Plumbing is also one of those things that you don't really think about until something goes wrong with it (in my case, a backup ... ugh).
Linux Mint 11 is a fantastic distribution for anyone who isn't into Unity or Gnome 3. I wish I had started using it sooner.
Symmetry would probably make it hard to identify as a cloud. It would look like an inkblot-test picture.

The flat bottoms however, hmm…

[Edit]
Well, wavephorm has a good answer to that elsewhere in the discussion: Because clouds are flat on the bottom and bumpy on top. ;)
This is true. The first thing I would think of would be a round 'cartoony' cloud like the ones shown.

You could do a more stretched or jagged looking cloud, but it could easily end up implying 'danger' or 'bad-weather'.

The rounded happy-cloud does seem the obvious first choice.
I don't think too many liberal protesters are unaware of the plight of the developing world. It's a requirement for being a Bleeding Heart. :-)
I think you meant to post at: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3118125
Doing something that makes money out of pleasure, when you are otherwise independently wealthy is pretty clearly a fair definition of "retired" even if the census considers him whatever his avocation happens to be.
Generation Unlucky:  Boom to Gloom
Ticks me off, however, that they litter the browser history with a tons of pages, but make it impossible to use them for anything, i.e. pressing the browser back button doesn't do anything (Chrome 14.0.835.202 on Mac OS X).
Animate.css -- Elegant cross-browser CSS animations
No link bait title and a pretty rocking technical achievement. Great submission!
Thank you1 Much appreciated.
Customer control is a difficult issue. Of course everybody likes to pretend that their stuff needs to be done yesterday. But in reality, most things can wait for a day or two, or even longer. Too much of that and you do start to suffer and I think that is what is driving this, the fear to miss the window of opportunity.

I did some contract work and usually the speed with which I could deliver the solution was a key element in getting the contract. Making sure I charged a stiff premium for the work gave me the opportunity to get some 'down time' after completing a job and that helped me in staying balanced.

As long as you are swimming in work you are probably too cheap.
In the meantime, try out this Firefox Extension: http://firefogg.org/
I'd love to see an iOS port of the original Prince of Persia.
What about asking Google Voice Actions to send a text message, read your messages, when the birthday of a contact is, set a timer for you, remind you of something when you leave home, play a track, etc. They compared only questions Google VA could handle and left out 90% of what makes Siri awesome.
Advantages of stateless programming
i actively ignore it because it doesn't give me the nearly full stack integration that GNOME does.
little known fact: robert, one of the founders of Metaweb/Freebase was one of the rotoscoped models for PoP.
I think even "pure" sysadmins will have jobs until the cloud providers figure out how to solve their IO bottlenecks. I keep hearing horror stories about database performance and how people are forced to go back to good ol' dedicated hardware to solve it.
Ask HN: Is it ok to interview with other companies after accepting an offer?
Hello HN,

I'm a college senior who recently accepted a full-time position at a tech company after I graduate, but was interested in interviewing with some of the other companies like Amazon and Google just for the hell of it to see if I can pass. I'm actually interested in moving into these companies in the future, but I was wondering if this is considered to be bad practice or unethical? Thanks.
I used to watch my dad play this when I was a little boy. When the prince landed in the spikes it would make me jump and I had to put my hands over my ears because of the scary sound. :]
I'm impressed that Jordan Mechner himself responds within a number of hours in the comments of the post!
The mind boggles. I know you said that tongue-in-cheek, and that would be an incredibly cool project, but i feel that unless we put this to rest now someone might actually take you seriously.

A huge amount of work has gone into making FFMPEG and x264 as fast as they are today. Not only would you lose performance (and integer types) going from C -> JavaScript, but you also lose all the assembly, handwritten for tens of different architectures (including SIMD like SSE). I would expect at least a 100x slowdown.

For your users' sake, please don't do this ;_;
Preach it brother. I still use Gnome-Do (or Synapse sometimes) to launch apps via text search. I honestly think you could design an entire OS UX around that motif that would end up more efficient and more intuitive, even for new users. If the Start Menu and Google Instant had a baby, that would be the result.
There is a small program for Windows (being developed) to sample and code a screen color sample, but much more could be done. Can you imagine the stress that receiving a corrected document (word processor) in which the sections to correct are red/yellow, to a color blinded secretary? It's real, there are case studies that relate these problems fron kids to grown ups.
There is one: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/prince-of-persia-retro/id3739...

The graphics have been updated though, resembling POP2. I wish there was a version or a mode of POP for iOS where I could put it in a kind of "classic" graphics mode that would resemble what I remember of the DOS version I used to have.

Edit: grammar.
Come on .. not another Unity rant.

All Linux desktops before Unity sucked. Gnome 2.x sucked, big time. It looked ugly, and had only ugly themes. Its applications menu was completely useless. Its panel sucked. Its model for putting and managing launchers/shortcuts on the panel sucked. It was a complete mess.

Most Linux users were using Docky + GNOME Do.

I personally was using XFCE, because at least its panel was prettier and more customizable.
After a couple of months of using Unity and trying to fit in with its way of doing thing I jumped back into classic and was immediately at home.
Overcoming the fear of blogging
Repeating, mutatis mutandis, what I said in an earlier thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2723366) about the C code on which this is based:

It's very nice pattern-matching code, but it isn't a regular expression matcher. The class of patterns it's able to match is much smaller than the class of all regular expressions -- not because of missing "sugar" (character classes, +, non-greedy wildcards, ...) but because it doesn't support groups or the | operator.

As a result, the language supported by this matcher has, e.g., no way to match the pattern (ab)* or the pattern a|b. It's much, much less powerful than an actual regular expression matcher would be, and much of what makes it possible to do it in 19 lines of Clojure is that loss of power.

(I've written extremely similar code before: this level of functionality -- basically, glob or DOS wildcards -- is pretty useful. I'm not Rob Pike, and my code for similar functionality would probably be longer than his. But my code, or even Rob Pike's code, for even the simplest thing that could honestly be called a regular expression matcher, would be longer than this by a bigger factor.)
Radio free python - interview with Alex Martelli
Here in Australia, the commonwealth bank provided a guideline on how much super you needed to retire on to main various life styles, and what struck me as scary was how much you needed at retirement age 65, to survive for 20 years, if you wanted such first world pleasures as running a dishwasher, going out to dinner once a week, and so on. 800k was not anywhere near the amount needed.

I'm not calling this guy out, but you would be living a minimalist lifestyle in order to make 800k last you 40 years..

If you had it all in a 6% long-term savings account, you're barely making 50k pa before tax, for two people to live on. Sure, you have no mortgage, but you still have all the other costs of life involved. They'd be able to do it, but they certainly wouldn't be living the high life.
Quora still exists?
Because it's Apple pushing it out, and they usually have a lot of reach, a big user base. I think people were this excited about 3D movies and 3D TV's at first, too, but in the end it will probably end up just a gimmick. Time will tell.

It's still a week into the purchase and people are excited about their new purchase. Give it a month or two, and we'll see if people still talk about it. Do people still use Facetime?
Understanding Monads Via Python List Comprehensions
I wouldn't have sent the letter. The old boss knows you are testing the waters and he is giving you what you asked for. I would probably hire the guy and not contact the old boss under any circumstance, expect if he sues you.
Seems like the most common occurrence of the fibonacci series in nature is in bad programming language benchmark code.
You can send text messages, set alarms, and play music via Voice Actions, but it's not as polished as the Siri experience. I can't get it to read emails or SMS for me, and geofencing is nonexistent.
According to the comments on the post, he'll be putting up chunks of annotated assembly. This is a seriously, seriously impressive effort.
Oh and yeah, you could go for high risk/return investments, but your investments could get wiped out, and the taxes you paid go to paying bonuses to banking execs requiring bailouts.
Totally agree, both with the poster's very valid complaints about Unity and Gnome 3 and with the best alternative being Linux Mint. I lost so much time dealing with this terrible "upgrade." I will never again trust Canonical.
I think you could have easily assumed any word starting with @ is a twitter profile, especially if it does in fact correspond to an existing twitter profile.

Also, I feel left out. :P
> Stocks (or any other investment vehicle) are not an automatic win.

And if something would be an automatic win it wouldn't take long before everybody would be doing it, killing the economy (and whatever it was that was an automatic win) in the process.
Will this do anything that http://transloadit.com/ doesn't?
It jumps from 6284 to 5914. I'm 6258 and am on Twitter too.
The absence of taxation is not a prerequisite for prosperity.

Government is the only institution that we, as citizens of secular democracies, have to protect us from undue influence from theocracy and plutocracy - and taxation is the most efficient way to fund this. Most governments are failing at exacting their democratic duties, however, because over the last 50 years, through incredibly effective lobbying, they have allowed themselves to be captured by special interests and the actual rules and accountability frameworks that governments operate within have been distorted and perverted. This has happened to the point that most western nations may still have 1 person == 1 vote, but they barely have representative democracy.

We need to reform government and strengthen its ability to act as the trusted protector of its people against unhealthy factional interests, not destroy it.
Generally speaking, you should stop interviewing once you have accepted an offer. Your soon-to-be employer has moved from decided to give you job to planning how you will contribute to the company. It is extremely poor form to back out post offer acceptance (exceptions would be some kind significant life event). On the flip side, if you are planning to interview with no intention of accepting a job from a company then you are wasting their time and potentially depriving a viable candidate of an opportunity to interview. If you get a call from a Google or an Amazon, explain your situation, and use it as opportunity to cultivate a network. They will appreciate your ethics, and if you don't like your job, you can reconnect in 6 months or a year. The bottom line is that you have accepted a job -- relax and enjoy your remaining months of little to no responsibility.
Wow, that is a nice tuba.
You could use a pseudonym. ;)

Pseudonyms are not to be relied upon too heavily as a means of safeguarding your identity, particularly if you want to use them now and then in real life (which is why I don't bother to keep my pen name a secret) but they still have their uses. Overtly playing a character is an age-old trick for getting over one's stage fright. And it's helpful if you find that more than one of your public personae would like to use the internet now and then. (Yes, people have more than one public persona. Even those of us who aren't teachers or psychologists.)

Obviously, though, HN and Twitter are mass media and if you actually want your writing to remain a secret you have to avoid putting it up on here. There's nothing wrong with that. Private diaries are still legal and everything.
Fuck ethics between employers about this issue. Poaching is a great thing for employees. If you successfully poach someone it's normally because they were being underpaid and/or wanted to leave anyway on account of their job sucking. It benefits your company, it benefits the employee you poached, and it generally benefits the remaining employees of the company you poached from. It only hurts the stakeholders of the company you poached from.

Take pride in poaching, it's a net gain for society. However, try not to poach too many employees from the same company or you might really screw them (and their employees) over.
The way you put it (and that's an important condition!), I wouldn't call it unethical. However, if you go to an interview knowing you won't accept the offer even if you get it, you're effectively wasting the interviewer's time (and there may be more than one person involved in assessing your skills). I was in a similar situation about 3.5 years ago when I scheduled interviews with three different companies, and I accepted the offer after the first one. I called and canceled the other two interviews for the same reason: I'd rather have those interviewers working with other prospects.
Seeing clearly through windshield scams may not be as simple as it seems
In this article we will show you some of the typical ways scammers approach drivers in an attempt to make money off your insurance policy, and subsequently, from the increase in your premiums. Also discussed is what has been happening to some of the people who have run such scams.
Why'd you notify your ex-boss? That was a dumb move. What did you hope to accomplish?

Is it okay to bring ex-coworkers to your startup? Yes, but as long as you tell the absolute truth. Don't lie to them and don't sugar-coat, and make sure you're operating in their interests, not yours.

Extending an offer is not the same thing as "poaching". You're not doing anything unethical as long as you don't lie about your company, its prospects, or your friend's role in it.

Remember though that your job (ethically speaking) is not to sell the position to your friend. It's to extend another option so your friend can make the best decision for him (which may or may not be to join you).
Open-source components used in learn.knockoutjs.com
Does anyone have the article talking about Jordan and the development of this game? I was really inspired by it!
Read the award winning Babel-17 by Delany for a bit of science fiction that explores this idea that language and particularly the notation of the language affects one's perception of the world.
This game really did pioneer great animation in video games (wasn't it the first one to use rotoscoping?), but damn was it punishingly hard.

I still have a phobic reaction seeing screenshots of this game :)
On dtrace.org, huh? I didn't realize dtrace as a project has fall so low as to poo-poo the competition.
Seriously, what is with Ubuntu and locked down panels? Would it be so hard to set up a user default in the home directory and then let me edit?
The Red iPhone 4S (aka conspicuous consumption)
Discovered http://amplifyjs.com
The major cities of the Pacific Northwest actually have at least one serious problem that stems from making the homeless lifestyle too easy: too many runaway teens. One of my sisters lives in Portland, and for several years she worked as a social worker for teenage girls. The network of shelters, kitchens, and other services for the homeless is so extensive there that a lot of teens choose to leave home and just live on the streets. It is (or was, at least) so pervasive that there was actually some name for the phenomenon (can't remember what it was, off the top of my head), and it was a major concern to the organizations my sister worked with. Part of the problem is that there are policies in place that made it extremely difficult for parents to find their kids and bring them home. These policies exist for good reasons (e.g. abused children who shouldn't be found and brought home), but they are so one-sided that kids can just choose to run away because they feel like it, and their parents have no recourse if the kids are in the city's shelter system.
1473 karma in 396 days but no Twitter profile

:(
You have to make sure you use the right tools. If you re-invent the wheel a dozen times, managing cloud deployments will be a nightmare. Tools such as Rightscale or Scalr.net are well with the money.

I manage 2 dozen Ec2 instances of various types as a side task to my regular development job. I script everything. When things are scripted they are consistently reproducible and fast. Humans make mistakes (including me).

I would prefer there to be a dedicated SysAdmin but there just wouldn't be a full time job for him to fill.
I'm just saying that events may be evil as a general purpose mechanism. But they are useful at the implementation layer of the less "evil" general purpose mechanisms.

And when I write performance-oriented C code, I use events, because great tight resource control is facilitated by that style.
Google Wallet - A Missed Opportunity?
Heres Exactly Why Seo Hosting Is The Perfect Means To Starting Numerous Sites
No, it's perfectly fine.

If you're doing a startup you're in a competitive environment where you need to do whatever you can to get the best people aboard. People are what make or break startups. You're committed to your startup, not your former employer - rest assured that he if he is any good at what he does he would have done the same thing.

And good luck with your new venture :-)
Detailed blog written during development starts here: http://jordanmechner.com/old-journals/

I've read it end to end. Expect it to take a day. Very inspiring.
The striking thing about this is not just that it works but that it works so well. That I did not expect.
Some employers do have clauses in their employment contracts saying that you cannot invite your former co-workers to leave and come work with/for you for a certain amount of time after you leave. However, it sounds like your employer didn't do that

But as numerous people have said, you probably shouldn't have sent the mail you did, and certainly not in the form you did.
Cancellation of Memphis Beat- Voice Opinion