skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So the net cost for the tip was about $22k. I paid for the vast majority of
this with one month's consultancy beforehand. That's crazy when you think
about it, one month's consultancy in return for a year traveling.
And I certainly didn't hold back with the budget, I met a lot of people
doing it for much cheaper. Where there's a will, there's a way.

One consulting gig, $22,000. I really need to get on this level! Was a fantastic read, especially since I have a lot of respect for Alex due to some of his great work.

That Mark Twain quote really hit home. I recently decided that I need to do the same thing actually. I'm sick of the USA, of the people here, their attitudes, etc.. (I am in LA). Ready to get out and experience the rest of the world. I leave for Sweden on Feb 24th! My first time out of the country!
I'd like to hear detailed examples of people having problems with OpenJDK. I hear a lot of anecdotal examples, but I've had no problems using it for a wide range of things. The only thing I've heard with enough authority that I buy is that there are problems building Android with the OpenJDK toolset.
We were accepted to Startup Chile and there are two benefits to being in that incubator as I see it. First, the money is a significant one. It adds 6 months to our runway before we need to take outside money, possibly allowing us to never need outside money. Secondly, it gives us some social proof since it is a competitive admission. Hopefully this will help us find advisors (which is what we need right now more than investors.)

I look forward to your follow up post on not taking money. I think for some businesses it is possibly the right path. Or, as an alternative, taking small amounts of money on the order of $100k-$1M investment total rather than the $5M-$20M that seems to be the goal of many startups.
If it is indeed "Garageband for ebooks" I don't think it'll revolutionize the industry.

However, it could start a movement for user-created/edited shared/sold content. If I could create an ebook easily and share it, it may create a cottage industry that then grows.

Regardless, it's a great intention (like Google's App Inventor) - we'll see if it comes to fruition.
I've worked in a global company pushing agile, as well as currently running my own start-up. My problem with Agile (with a capital A) is that it has become something it didn't set out to be.

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Agile has become about processes and tools. Tools for burn rate management, estimation processes, test-driven development is a process.

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Documentation is now done, just in a different place. We seem to document everything but the product. Processes/interactions/estimation accuracy. And then this point is just used to not even produce any helpful/lightweight documentation by the end.

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

BA's and managers speak to customers. They claim to be collaborating, but in reality, it's just a contract negotiation. You want x, we can deliver y, it will cost z. Even within a corporation, it's just contract negotiation. Devs still aren't pushed to talk to customers, and managers still don't understand estimation. Incentives are poorly aligned.

Responding to change over following a plan

People following Agile still have a plan. It just takes into account burn-rate, and a few other metrics. Changes still hurt, because the deadlines don't change. However, customers are now told it's OK "We can respond to change!".

These days, my aim is to get stuff working and maintain motivation. No more, no less.
I’ve played rounders in Nigeria. But it isn’t a cut-down version of Baseball, it’s its own game :-)

As far as the analogy is concerned, I don’t see it suggesting that you can’t cut Baseball or Agile or anything else down. For example, XP started as a bunch of practices cut down to what its proponents felt were the essentials! What I personally read in the story is that if you are given something new, you have to embrace it for what it is and learn to do thing sits way if you want to benefit from it.

If you fight against it at every turn because it feels different or awkward, you are going to end up neutering it, and it will not be a surprise that it doesn’t deliver what you hoped.

I have experienced the exact same thing with programming languages. If you try to write Java programs in Clojure, you will walk away very unsatisfied with the result.
It surprises me Oracle doesn't provide a .deb for their JRE/JDK: they do for Virtualbox (they even have a repo). So why not for the JRE/JDK?
Thanks for this post. I agree wholeheartedly. A lot more effort has to be put into the 'learning your process' part. The problem is that this requires self-reflective and humble individuals who are willing to work on improving their skills. I see far too many who are not willing to improve and learn, and most of these individuals lurk at big companies. Such an individual sees only imposed constraints in the methodology, and no possibilities. Since these passive individuals are easy to control, management has formed as a constraint-imposer and controller above them. Introduce a new methodology, and the workers will only (rightfully) complain while the management translates it into control constraints. So the problem lies not within the process, but the individuals. Start with improving the attitude, then let the team members bring in useful parts from methodologies as tools to reach the goals you have set together.
Doesn't this tell a lot about how much (unit) testing is undergoing in Java-land?

If a Ruby VM were to change its behaviour so to cause crashes, dozens of project will start to see red in one or two test cases. From that, it is easy to pin down the problem to 10 lines of code and report it upstream. In Java-land (and, sadly, many other lands) applications suddenly crash and nobody knows why.
No, the kinds of people that go to google.com are the kinds of people who would assume "the internet broke" if google.com looked dramatically different when they loaded it. They may even need someone to point out to them that Google is actively taking a stance on it, despite having seen the page.
Some feedback: This is a nice addition to a mail-provider API service, but the way it works is way too complicated. All email I want to parse needs to be forwarded to my special postmark inbound email address? This might be nice for people that have their email setup through google apps (which kindly forwards on all headers, etc when an email is auto-forwarded with a filter), but for other mail systems they might not play so nice with forwarding headers, etc (I know this from running my own email servers for Notifo and dealing with incoming and outgoing email on my own).

With this solution I still have to setup an intermediate mail server solution to first receive the emails from users, and then forward it along. Can't you take that step away from me?

Other providers (mailgun, sendgrid, etc) let me do that and let users send emails directly to my inbound mailboxes (which are then POSTed to my endpoint).

Also, this excerpt from the documentation lowers my confidence that you know what you're doing:

"Rather than leaving this information in plaintext, we recommend using SHA1 or MD5 to encrypt the information after the + sign and include the encrypted value after the +. This will avoid unintentionally exposing any sensitive information."
Solving Coding Problems
Perhaps if one could calculate altitude variance it would be helpful. It take a pretty fanatical cyclist to take a fixie up some of the routes from Boulder.
We're such an example (3+ years). Of course we haven't got massive lift off yet - but indications thereof.
The "our customers" quote is overlapping the text above it at the bottom of the page for me. Firefox 9.01 on Vista. Its fine on Chrome though.

Great design by the way. I would play up the alerts a bit more in your marketing copy. Companies would pay to immediately know their site has been defaced/hacked/down instead of waking up in the morning to a barrage of angry emails. Especially people with online stores. That's money in the bank right there.
Older reports are in the git commit history on the GitHub project for domain-profiler.
I'd love for someone smarter than me to compare Zurb Foundation and this. It seems like Twitter has a few except things (pill-button callouts, etc), but Foundation seems VERY responsive-focused whereas Twitter Bootstrap seems to have added responsiveness in.
Indeed. The PR outlook for SOPA is grim and as more individuals contemplate the efficacy of attempting to regulate the reproduction of bits, the MPAA can only rely on shallow populist rhetoric to win minds.
What I find most interesting is the line about knowing when to switch to black: "You can also just watch CNN; they'll announce the signing of the bill."

When was the last time you saw CNN covering bill signings?
This, ideally, shouldn't cause an issue. The cars shouldn't start to decelerate until they are already out of the flow of the thru traffic. Of course, you have the people who decide they want to be on that exit at the last possible second, which is what you might be referring to.

Now I have seen some exists where the light at the bottom is really poorly timed, causing traffic to backup unto the interstate, which causes backups even for the thru traffic…

A commenter on the article does bring up an interesting topic, that I've noticed in my rare times driving on the interstate, that people don't use the cruise control. This annoys the heck out of me.
Contorted Equations
SOPA not Dead. Hearings to Resume in Feb.
Even better, after you consider paying tax on the original amount.
"Darnit, googles down. Should we try yahoo to look up pa's symptoms?"

"Nah he just has a pain in his shoulder and shortness of breath, he'll be fine, lets play some games on facebook"
The "validate your ideas" advice is sound, yet throwing up fake landing pages, day in day out, until I hit gold, is just something I can't get excited about

Desperately trying out different ideas with fake landing pages is something that MVP/lean movement added later, but it wasn't described by either Steve Blank or Eric Ries in their early texts. As far as I've understood Blank's customer development model, it can be described as below.

Founders have a strong vision of a problem and product, but they don't necessarily know who are their best customers. Basically, they are unsure of their business model and target market. They get some funding and start developing the product (traditional 90s bubble model) but at the same time they start visiting and talking to customers, showing mockups, trying out different price points etc. (Blank's customer development model). There is parallel tech & customer development going on.

Note that under Blank's model pivoting doesn't mean that you start to execute on a totally different product, but that you adjust your product vision when you learn more about customers and possible target markets.

As an example, you start with a vision of cashflow estimation software for small 10-employee consulting companies (founders' vision, a self-identified need), but when you start selling and learning about markets, you noticed that bigger companies (let's say 100 employees or so) have similar problem. But what those bigger companies need from user interface and database integration are quite different than needs of small companies. However, this new target market is more profitable, so you adjust your product vision and business model to serve it instead of the original vision.

This is how I've understood customer development model.

Founders have a vision, start building product and finding a target market and scalable business model for that vision. It doesn't mean desperate random attempts in totally different products.
Thanks, it was kind of confusing before.

A lot of great stuff going on in the 2.0 version. Excited for it's release.
Google Joining Tomorrow's SOPA Protest
> Regarding the "facilitating" part, notice it is just one of three items in a definition. ALL of these items have to be satisfied

Yes, you are correct. I didn't mean to suggest otherwise.
i simply would not buy them, not where i need a general purpose computer. but when i bought my ipad, iphon, etc, i was fully aware of what i was getting for my money, so i cant whine about it.

i am no fan of lockdown, but im also capable of making decisions about how i spend my money. i bought the gizmos because i like how they work. if someone wants something not on the market ..... gobuild it and sell it,right?
So after thousands of small sites and a few big sites promised to protest on Jan. 18, what are they supposed to do? Just call it off, leaving people who didn't hear about SOPA being shelved to wonder why?
As a "me too" account...

I spent 2 years driving from Alaska to Argentina, working on freelance websites and programming on the side.

Total trip cost (yes, including gas) was $27k.

Full story at http://theroadchoseme.com

Anyone interested in a similar experience should checkout http://wikioverland.org , the encyclopedia of Overland Travel
I'm glad you mention this because that was the basically the motivation for me to build this tool in the first place. I was selecting a DNS host for the startup I was at and was wondering: "what DNS host do all my friends use?". I found myself doing a lot of dig commands, so I wrote what became domain-profiler.

I don't think you should spend a lot of time selecting hosting, but I do think you should put in a little bit of research into what you pick. It really sucks when your website is unavailable for an hour due to issues with your DNS provider - especially when your TTL's are set to an hour.
On the other hand, Los Angeles is ten times bigger in terms of total area, and has less than half the population density of San Francisco. That makes it more practical to have a fixie in SF, where you're generally traveling shorter distances.
I built https://www.becouplydates.com/ on the 2.0-wip branch. We've been very pleased with it.
It's an interesting service, however, I feel like this would create apps that don't native on the intended operating system and are kind of bland.

iOS's native functions and hardware operate much differently from Android's, which is completely different from Windows Phone. Android has an hardware based back button, and the iPhone doesn't, which means you'd have a different UI for the iPhone and Android version (back button in top left on iPhone, no back button on Android). The iPhone has front facing camera which can be incorporated into apps, where as most Android phones don't have a front cam yet.

I'm sure they'll figure out the issues pretty quickly though.
Google will fold. They folded to the Chinese for years, and they will fold for SOPA.
Ubuntu has two levels of updates. Security updates and just updates. The former is just that, security fixes. I'm not even sure what the hell the latter is supposed to be. "Random upgrades to versions of random things we think you should be running?" That's like taking a Windows server and randomly pulling installers from Microsoft's site and installing them willy-nilly. Of course bad things will happen.

I never use the latter, ever.
Awesome, sounds like a great match: Sign up and give us a try!

Most of us develop on Linux, so our support there is pretty mature.
You are literally the opposite of me - I've travelled all over the place, and if my job wasn't keeping me tied in the UK right now I'd move to LA tomorrow.

Have fun in Sweden, be prepared for a high prices though!
Deutsche Bank's Mistake - What if We Count the IPad as a Computer?
How I am learning it...

For install I found this..
http://www.pmamediagroup.com/2009/04/set-up-ruby-on-rails-an...

To get familiar with the terminal...
http://vimeo.com/33631836

And for actual Rails learning...
http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ruby-on-rails-tutorial-book

I went through a little bit of Rails For Zombies but I stopped because I wanted to learn on a project. Once I started working on a beginner project that is when Rails For Zombies clicked. I think it would be a good idea to follow Learn Rails By Example in conjunction with Rails For Zombies.

Also this guy is good too follow to once you have a strong foot hold...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQ8_VOGj5H8
Why shouldn't that cause an issue? If you have 1,000 cars all making the same trip from the suburbs to downtown, and 90% of the trip is on a 4 lane road, but the last 10% is on a 2 lane road, then the 2 lanes are your bottleneck, and assuming the speed limit is constant, the total trip time of all 1,000 cars will be the same as if the entire trip was on a 2 lane road.

Obviously, real road systems are more complicated, with more cars merging onto the main road along the way, others exiting at different times, etc. But I think the general idea holds true: when thousands of cars are all going from suburban areas into a downtown area, there will inevitably be a bottleneck close to the downtown area.
What are you waiting for to write those posts? I'd love to read how you manage to change your country of residence, and about all the small things that you have to consider.
I predict Amazon's real move is to compete against Google Commerce Search.
Interesting... what sort of thing are you thinking of: the ability to easily manage subscriptions from within an app, or view content, all of the above?
There's an interesting discontinuity in where it's optimal to aim here; excellent players should aim at the top-centre "triple 20". Pretty much everyone else should aim below-left of the bulls-eye or thereabouts.
yet somehow, despite the hacker-unfriendlyness, the iphone and whatnot have been a huge success.....

jailbreaking atv2 units seems tobe pretty dead simple compared to the rest....

a weird one is remote hd sold for iphone ipad........ but requires a jailbroken atv to use with the atv, yet its sold in the app store. go figure.
> I leave for Sweden on Feb 24th!

You could have picked a good time to visit, but you just had to pick the coldest month? Why? :-)
People still aren't buying/selling bikes in the Winter in Chicago while they are in warmer places, so I think it's still a valid point.
Look at http://bootstrap.io/Demo/BaseCss in FF (PC) -- anyone else see anything odd?
It's got nothing to do with your thoughts as much as the fact that you're blatantly spamming.
I'm leaving for Berlin on Feb. 11 to start doing exactly this. This is great.
Religious nuts and herbal quacks get listed on Google too. As do anti-vax, homeopathy, and other non-scientific crap.
way to bury the lede
If I had one tiny criticism about the site it's that the menu bar, once it detaches and scrolls with the user, is a bit hard to make out because of its transparent background.
I'd like to know how you made $22k, after taxes, in one month. Can you elaborate on your consulting?
I don't think that's fair. He's targeting every single developer who uses HTML 5 and doesn't do any mobile development at all but could use a wrapper; some of his target is with the competition, some isn't using anything but knows about his competition, and some isn't using anything and DOESN'T know about the competition. You can pick up any of your target from the second two groups with ease, and possibly some of the first category. Think back to the introduction of the iPhone and the smart phone genre. blackberry users would have been the first group.
Microsoft introduces new robust "Resilient File System" for Windows Server 8
How is this any better than other website monitors? Others have alerts, and regular checks too
With the information you have provided (your 32, two masters degrees, traveled the world) it sounds like you haven't had much opportunity to build real world working experience?? I am trying to be helpful (not critical) and point out that you have had much of a career yet (Hacker community really wouldn't put much stock in the two masters degrees)

I also am early thirties have lived in three countries, but worked for three startups for 2,2, and 5 years (no masters).

The single best piece of advice that anyone could give you...MOVE TO SILICON VALLEY TODAY.

Hope that helps
Confessions of a Publisher
What build information is missing? The README.txt describes how to build the compiler; it's a fairly typical cmake setup.
I always have the impression that Agile is sort of like the True Scotsman or the Communist Manifesto

"If it didn't work, it's because it isn't really agile."
Paper: Feeding Frenzy: Selectively Materializing Users’ Event Feeds
Building Windows 8: ReFS, Resilient File System
Thanks Andy - yep, we're constantly balancing two desires: the desire to expose every last shiny detail of the native platform on one hand, and the desire for consistency across platforms on the other.

The list of amazing, engaging, good-looking apps implemented in HTML5 is long, and growing. Personally, I think performance was the biggest hurdle in the race to make HTML5 look "as good as native", and rendering and JS execution speed is incredible now - and getting even better!
Simplicity is not so useful in operating systems or filesystems though. There are enough "simple" filesystems out there -- the useful filesystems are the ones that aren't so simple. There's lots of great educational "simple" OSes, but nobody uses them for real work.
It is unfortunate that those of us who are not US citizens are going to be negatively affected by the blackout but are unable to take any effective action against SOPA/PIPA.
"...neither of these bills implicate free expression but focus solely on illegal conduct, which is not free speech."

So basically, they support free speech, as long as they approve of it?
Thieves is a strong word for copyright infrigiment.

MPAA is representing global thieves, they steal opportunities, expression and free culture from everyone who doesnt own intellectual property. They deprive all independent artists from mixing and contributing to society. MPAA is victimizing itself on a daily basis, while oppressing all independent producers, oppressing all small job-creators.
Thanks for the feedback, Chad.

Regarding forwarding: that step is already being taken away - it's in beta for a number of our customers, and we'll be adjusting workflow then releasing to everyone.

There's lots of people who don't have access to their DNS records but still want a tool like this. We want this utility to be simple for more them, too!

As far as SHA1/MD5 encryption - we know better than to use weak encryption on any TRULY sensitive information. In the context of the walkthrough, we're talking about internal IDs and other things that you might want to be obvious to your customers, not things that pose a security risk to you or them. If you even thought about using something like that as part of a unique identifier in your email replies - I think there would be bigger problems at hand than choosing SHA1 or MD5 to obfuscate that information. :)
Jobs that make people money aren’t the jobs that make people happy
Playing ice hockey with a Psion PDA for a puck (video)
Microsoft offers some competition to ZFS, Btrfs
hmm... i think by the timie my kids are old enough to start hacking in daddys lab, whenever that is, lets say thats 10 years from now, we will be able to build today,s iphone for fun, it will be old news. witness arduino, the cool rise of homebrewed gizmos out there.... software And hardware are out there to cheaply make all kinds of cool stuff. my kids should have no problem hacking away, probably on stuff i wont even understand at some point. if they end up interested, of course.
is there any changelog for 2.0?
do you think of yourself as an average computer user?
almost everyone i know use google's homepage as their personal homepage.

Of course it will have an impact, just like a normal doodle
"Index" also means something specific.
Thanks for the kudos, Jeremy. If you can share where you're using the inbound API, I'd love to see it in action!
New issue of Mashed Code Magazine available for free download.
Why you should work for a startup
This is a cool idea, we'll keep it in mind!