skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Whatever, all's fair in love and SEO
Sounds awesome. Sign me up!
...and with only an $800 up front investment I'm sure.

All Ponzi schemes are the same.
While people's portfolio's are hurting right now, for the most part you can make a positive real return on investing in dividend paying stocks or long-term bonds. The only catch is that the rate is really low, so you need to already be very wealthy to make it work.

China, Saudi Arabia, and Japan have political considerations, as well as financial, so they are more likely than an impartial investor to take unnecessary risk or allocate funds poorly.
http://docs.python.org/dev/3.0/library/2to3.html

2to3 will handle that automatically.
I'm hoping that tarsnap (http://www.tarsnap.com/, online backups for the truly paranoid) will end up providing a passive income stream at some point in the future. I'm trying to take myself out of the day-to-day running of the service by automating as much as possible; of course, right now I'm still writing new code to improve tarsnap.

That said, tarsnap isn't profitable yet, so the fact that it can keep itself running without help from me doesn't make it a passive income stream yet. :-/
Developing niche sites about topics that I find interesting.
The residual income is derived from AdSense, affiliate sales, link sales, banner sales, etc.
I focus 80% of my time on new/large projects, the remaining 20% on maintaining older sites.
Here's an example site: http://www.applemacbook.com
I think "Set it and forget it" is an appropriate phrase for what making money passively entails. Unless it's a lucky investment that pays out over time, most people view passive income as working really hard on something, launching, then sitting back and allowing the revenue to come in while doing routine maintenance on whatever the product is.

Good old 4 Hour Work Week
No. First of all, SV doesn't depend only on investors. All the support for startups is here, from lawyers to graphic design to (probably most important) other founders.

Second, not taking VC doesn't mean not taking investment. If startups downshift, the next lower gear is angels.
as someone already commented get aquamacs! I started out programming using emacs because all the cool kids on slashdot did as time moved on I starting using vi/vim as "its everywhere" but I have started used aquamacs at home and I love it! It's like meeting up with an old friend after a few years apart and everything just clicking again (it probably helps I've learned lisp in the interim)
Romania removes theory of evolution from school curriculum
Here is a google query you might consider looking at before you call this topic stupid:
http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Apassive+income

No one said "free" income, no one said "do nothing" income and no one said "quick" income-- they said passive. i.e. spend once (either with time or money) and keep earning.

I get a check every month from a biz I sold-- no effort for the last two years. I rent a house up in Anchorage, Alaska with a property manager-- no effort for the last 3 years. Some passive income is easier than others, but almost none of it is easy.
Yeah. But he didn't get to a 4h work week with a 4h work week.
??
With real estate and investing, a decade of growth can get wiped out in 1 week.

Really? My father has been involved in RE for over 20 yrs, has done great and is doing very well currently. There is much more to RE than just homes: Raw land, commercial properties, multi-unit housing, agriculture land (which is actually appreciating right now).

I mean that 2nd and 3rd you buy, hoping to make a few hundred K in a couple of years.

This is not investment. This is flipping. Something that has got a lot of ignorant people in a whole lot of financial shit now days.

--
With my fathers advisement, we are making great passive income with the four-plexes we own (think small apartments).
I like the design of this blog. Navigation at the end forces you to at least skim the blog post.
What happened to The Economist recently? First, day say that intelligent men have better sperm then stoopidos. Now, they treat Sergey like an example for super-human. A few more articles and they'll be explaining why euthanasia for poor and stupid is a good thing.
No, but in the book he emphasizes how much work you have to do to get to the 4HWW
Music Genres and Programming Languages
Sounds a lot like ruby's hpricot.

Wish I saw this earler - I am already in the middle of a project (screen scraping of course) using hpricot.

Sounds weird, but the only reaason to pick ruby for me was hpricot and not RoR :)
Nope, I know exactly what this topic is about. I read 4 Hour Workweek too.
Control4 Home Automation and Home Control
Crack cocaine, my friend. Not passive, but lucrative. I kid. I kid.
Ask HN: Do you think primarily in English?
Rather, do you think primarily in your native language, or more in terms of abstract imagery?

I've noticed that rather than forming images in my head to represent ideas, I will instead often think in English. For example, if I'm working through a logic problem, I will repeat the various elements of the problem in my head in English repeatedly until I solve it.

I'm unfortunately unilingual. English is the only human language I have ever learned. I've noticed that when I speak phrases in Spanish, I'm actually speaking English in my head. It's like a lookup table. By that I mean, let's say I want to communicate "How are you?". Rather than attempting to reason through this task in Spanish (by trying to communicate the individual elements "how", 'in what way', "are", 'your state of being', and "you" 'the person I am communicating with'), I try to remember the phrase in Spanish that corresponds to the ordered set of words "How are you?". So it is rote memorization -- I'm not thinking in Spanish, I'm translating from English to Spanish, speaking it, then hearing a response and translating that back into English. No wonder I was never able to learn another language. There's always this complicated layer of indirection.

Anyway, back to the topic: do you find that you think more in terms of words or of images?

Here's one reason I can't imagine thinking through a problem without reciting it to myself in English several times. Let's say for example I need to describe the concept 'empathy', which is to say, understanding another person's situation by virtue of having been in a similar one yourself. I'd imagine it would be very difficult to conjure up an image which succinctly describes empathy. It seems like the verbal encoding "empathy" is probably the most succinct way to describe it. So why try to think in terms of images when our native languages are so very precise?

And yet, "thinking in English" can be a burden. I can feel how it limits me to thinking through problems in certain predefined ways, just as a given editor forces you to edit text in certain predefined ways. I would imagine that most extremely creative people (such as DaVinci, Tesla, etc) probably don't have this limitation imposed on their neocortex.

More importantly, my reading speed is significantly degraded. I tend to recite each sentence to myself as I read it. I've been unable to find much information about how to break this limitation, so any references would be very appreciated.

Thoughts?
I still get allowance
MLM. Run! Ruuuuuuuun!
Heh, that was the first thing that came to mind too.
GaryV definitely has that kinda thing down packed.

Shortened version for people too lazy to watch video, Type in keywords appropriate to your site in Google etc, look at the ads in the sidebar and approach those companies directly.
Clean code is easier to understand, maintain and keep working. Dirty code is harder to change and eventually gets thrown out and rewritten.
You are not doing it justice. MLM is a much better, evolved variant of ponzi scheme compared to the garden variety.
Vaynerchuck ROCKS. Love this guy.
If we do the math, it appears that Chile stands to make a substantial amount of money. I only hope that the country learned its lesson from the copper boom and bust.
Nokia n70 72 Mic Microphone Ways
n70 mic problem, n70 mic ways, n70 microphone problem, n70 microphone ways, n72 mic jumpers, n72 mic ways, n72 microphone jumpers, n72 microphone ways, Nokia, nokia n70, nokia n72
The Drudge Report established itself as a player early on by breaking major stories like the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal. I think Drudge's success has more to do with the fact that they are a tier one news source versus the simplicity of their design. Also, keep in mind that Drudge built that audience over a period of nearly 15 years.
C/C++ as Jazz? I'm no musician, but I fail to see how a compiled language with static type-checking can be compared to a form of music known for its improvisational style.

And one minor pedantic detail - Ruby on Rails and .NET are frameworks, not languages :)
ruby gets more and more hard core every day... this is awesome.
One might submit that if you were to learn a single editor and use it for all your tasks, you might not only be more productive at each of them but your answer to an editor for Javascript might be something other than "ggrrrrr".
Developer Android Phones Now Available
I think in 6502 op-codes. That's probably why many people think I'm 'emotionally distant'.
Yikes.

As Dr. Watts cut, Dr. Freeman put questions to Rosemary. For example, he asked her to recite the Lord's Prayer or sing "God Bless America" or count backwards. ... "We made an estimate on how far to cut based on how she responded." ... When she began to become incoherent, they stopped.

Talk about hard science.
You stole my heart.
Great idea, mate. Enabling people to embed the upload form into their site is awesome.

I have one suggestion. I watched the "How It Works" video, which was informative, though a bit slow-paced. However, the soundtrack could really be improved. That looping Windows chime forced me to mute the video =P
http://ampmnotebook.com. I resell the Chronotebook from Muji. I basically order in bulk from Muji to resell individually. Set up the site, strap adwords on it and get emails from PayPal saying "You've got cash!" Then I have to order the books, package them, and run them to the post office. Not exactly passive income but most of the hard work is automated.
The 4HWW is not about working 4 hours a week, it's about designing your lifestyle to be as enjoyable as possible. The way the title was decided upon was via a Google AdWords campaign (4HWW performed best). The original title was Selling Drugs for Fun and Profit (or something like that).
I'm a big user of a site called irc-urls.net (sporadically NSFW), which tries to find mentions of images on IRC and show thumbnails for them automatically. I tried to think of other such sources for images, and thought Twitter would be an even better source. It took 4 days to create this from idea to current state.
README.Debian in /usr/share/doc/PACKAGE-NAME usually has this information. Of course, some package maintainers aren't as nice as others in this regard.

The problem is much simpler with Ruby packages since they have only one interface. Debian packages have many interfaces, and so it can never be as easy as that. I'll note that Debian/Ubuntu python packages work just as you expect: apt-get install python-twisted, then import twisted in your code.
I'd noticed this sometimes too, but I think it's something that you can change if you want to. When I was learning german, after a couple years of high school classes I went to a month long full immersion program. When I finished that, I was thinking entirely in german. This stopped over time as I went back to English, but I can still make myself do it sometimes. So with practice/time, you could probably teach yourself to think in something besides English. Though English seems like it might be the most efficient mode for a native speaker.
Technical debt, this is called.
If this blog post were a type of music, it would be a Brittany Spears song.
I too think is English. It's the only language I'm fluent in so that much is natural. One interesting thing I've noticed is that when I'm conceptualizing something, I will have an idea in my head, but out of some bizarre habit I will think the words through.

My point is that I already know what I'm going to say in my mind, but there is no reason to actually hear my brain think them. Basically I go through 3 steps in my thought process:

1. Think or conceptualize,

2. recite what I've thought to myself (in my mind, in English of course),

3. process what I've just heard myself think and act on it.

My question is this: why is step 2 necessary? It would be faster just going from conceptualization to processing, wouldn't it? Maybe it's a habit from reading at a young age when I sound the words out in my mind as I read.
Hiring for Emotional Intelligence (Havard Business School)
Thats not being unilingual, that's just not being fluent. The whole definition of fluent, is that you can speak both languages w/o translating it in your head.

As far as the whole needing to describe empathy, thats just a lack of vocabulary...you don't know the word for empathy, so you try to describe it with other words.

As far as thinking in one language, that's not that uncommon, I'm fluent in 3 languages, and know 2 so-so, but the voice in my head is set to the language I use most in my day to day life. Sure I can switch to another language on a whim, but it takes an extra effort.
JavaScript Language Abstractions
010011100110111101110000011001010010110000100000
010010010010000001110100011010000110100101101110
011010110010000001101001011011100010000001100010
0110100101101110011000010111001001111001
Have you accomplished anything reading this book?
Finally a good RSS feed of the Drudge Report
Someone has finally cooked up a proper RSS feed of the Drudge Report. I'm really loving this. It's got images, styling, related stories and where the headline appears on drudgereport.com. Pure awesomeness!!!
Yeah but if you join today I'll let you in for $750.
Born in China, with my native language being Mandarin. Moved to USA at 4 years old. I think in English, though–I rarely use Mandarin day-to-day.
Whenever there is a hard problem, I try to visualize it and form a mental movie out of it. For example, if it is some sort of algorithm or optimization problem, I like to ride through the function/algorithm landscape. Visualization really helps in clearing thought.

But in everyday thought process, I do think in Hindi or English.
Einstein famously thought in pictures, but very few humans do.
I'm all for it. It would also be cool if there were a reciprocating API that web developers could use to identify visitors, instead of having to implement some complicated OpenID implementation.
I'm similar, except I moved to US at 6. When I'm around English speakers, I think in English. When I'm around Mandarin speakers, I think in Mandarin. The funny thing is when I'm around a localized Chinese dialect, say Taiwanese speakers, the voice in my head adopts that accent too. It's probably because I don't usually think in Chinese.
This advice is almost entirely useless if your startup doesn't appeal to the tech crowd.
I don't think people are capable of introspecting with enough accuracy to tell if they think in English. When you try to describe how you think, you might say you think in English, but perhaps you just don't have words accurate enough to explain how thought really works.
Interview: Damien Katz Relaxing on CouchDB
context: Most educated Indians are trilingual (the provincial language - there are more than 20 of these, with a few hundred distinct dialects- , Hindi (the national language), and English. I can read and write French and German but I don't really think in these.

I find that the "voice in my head" speaks different languages at different points in time. While programming I use mostly English. I find that sometimes when stuck on some programming problem, trying to explain/talk about it in another language often "unsticks" it. No idea why, really.
Would you expand on this?
I'm fluent in two languages and know a minimal conversational-level with three more (and enough that I "think" in those languages, as opposed to a "lookup table" of sorts). What happens is I usually think in English (most used, maybe first (still disputed by parents, heh), most knowledgeable in), but once in a while I'll think in whatever language has a word I know that seems to match whatever it is best. There's also those loan words in every language that for whatever reason might seem to fit. I unfortunately can't think of great examples right now, but one would be schadenfreude (although I don't know German at all, quite possibly my favorite word ever, although rarely actually used). It isn't necessarily because I don't know the appropriate vocabulary in the language, just that whatever word seemed to have the right definitions and connotations for me to want to use it. Perhaps those word-equivalents in a different language were extraordinarily obscure, and I don't know of it.

In addition to the above, which is typically my "average" thinking, if I'm talking to someone in a different language, I don't really "think" in English until I reach the point I made above, if I come across an English word that made more sense. I don't know if it takes extra effort, but the language used to think does seem to change.

Once in a while I'll think of images instead of words. One example are those..cough..shock sites out there.
My understanding (1yr old) is that MySQL is frequently preferred to Postgres in startup-land because the replication story is much better. I'd love to hear if this is no longer true.
I'm Dutch and I often find myself thinking in English. If I work in English all day I context switch and English becomes my "default" language. When I wake up the next day my first thoughts will then be in English. Until I consciously switch back I'll continue to function in en_us mode.

It can be really annoying at times. I constantly mix up proverbs and language constructs when I'm context switching, I often know a word in only one of the two languages and can't think of a good translation, and so forth. And more often than not there is no 1-to-1 correspondence between English and Dutch words, so it's easy to get frustrated knowing exactly what you want to say, but being unable to say it because the words don't exist in your native language.

I don't think it matters much whether you think only in English, in several languages, or in pictures/emotions. A game I sometimes played as a kid was to take a concept and repeatedly think of more succinct definitions for it with a friend. And the cool thing is that despite getting the original definition wrong, in the end you always end up with a definition both parties agree on. People rarely think about the exact definition of any every-day word, and yet people are capable of intuitively picking the "right" definition from a list.

To completely derail this thread I'll challenge you to define the word "chair". It's not "something you sit on", because you can side on a couch and a couch is not a chair. Nor is it "something you sit on with legs", because then it could be either a stool or a bench.

The point is, when you think of the word "chair", you're not thinking in English. You're thinking about the concept chair, and that's one you can't define without some effort. And defining it in words is completely unnecessary because you know what a chair is. It's no different for the word "empathy".

ps: Your definition empathy doesn't pass the sociopath test. A sociopath notices somebody else is hurting, and knows what pain feels like, which is for your definition sufficient. But textbook sociopaths lack empathy. So empathy must be more than mere recognition of an emotion. Yes, this is nitpicking, but that's kind of the point.
(We used to sort of have a tradition of not voting people down that much for comments that were just "wrong", rather than actively offensive or something)
The only big thing I got out of the book was the idea of generating passive income any which way how. Otherwise, it read like a long self-aggrandizing pat on the back. But I gotta give him kudos for at least getting me to take the bait.

edit: the chapter on virtual assistants was also interesting, but if I recall, he didn't write that chapter.
I associate certain activities with certain languages. Food -> Chinese. Programming -> English.

At least for me, the language that people usually speak to me in when I do that task or learn that task is usually what sets the language I think in. I have somewhat similar experiences with music (certain music makes me want to code), and even handedness (I yo-yo left-handed because thats how I learnt it)
In my experience I think in English 90% of the time. When working problems requiring a lot of spatial insight, I pretty easily switch to something more visual and visceral. This also happens when I'm drawing and sometimes when I'm playing music.

I'm also learning Chinese. It is anything but an easy language to learn, I'll say, and I don't feel like I'll be thinking fluently in it anytime soon. That being said, if I concentrate and force myself to think in Chinese I can get by with a huge hit to rate of thought. It's something I practice from time to time despite the frustration.
http://www.gnu.org/software/stow/ is meant to provide some of what you want there. Unfortunately, it seems to be abandoned, but it looks like http://xstow.sourceforge.net/ might be picking up the torch.
Sure, ask this while I'm sitting here with a Linguistics text studying for a final. This post is going to be a bit long.

Empathy is a hard word to bring up an image of because it's meaning is largely connotative rather than denotative. On the other hand, there are many words ('Book', 'Clarinet', 'Web Browser', and all the other things I can see from where I'm sitting) for which it's simple to form an image. The words are largely symbols which denote an entity.

Now to drift from the topic:

I think in either my native language (English), or in images. Flashes of insight tend to come as images. Generally the hardest problems I work on are design situations rather than algorithmic, so I think images are the best way for fully formed answers to pop into my brain.

I'm also unilingual. Canadian English is the only natural language where I regard myself as being fluent. I speak some French (Quebecois), but by and large it's parroting full phrases when I speak. My reading comprehension is sufficient that I can interpret arbitrary French when the vocabulary is in my limited lexicon, however my grammar is quite weak when it comes to forming new phrases. My formal education in French was poor, as I was taught essentially arbitrary vocabulary by non-fluent teachers. All through high school I read French in much the same way as you speak Spanish, by treating another language as something that I was just lacking the mental dictionary for.

I lived in southern Quebec for a couple of years while attending University. Though it was an English town and school, a fantastic amount of the signage was in French.

Some time ago a friend and I were driving through Montreal. More accurately he was driving and freaking out about the traffic, I was navigating and translating the road signs for him. Having been exposed to French road signs for a couple years I'm competent in that area. I realized that I wasn't translating into English in my head when I started getting frustrated at how _slow_ it was to translate the signs to him. I would read them, have to find the equivalent concept in English, and then say it. In the end I just started directing him where to turn instead of reading him individual signs. The layer of indirection doesn't last forever. One day I'd like to be able to speak the language like I can read the road signs.
Or, if you're in Terminal.app and want to browse your current directory in the Finder, just type "open ." (or any path instead of ".")

(I have a summary of other useful OS X commands on my blog: http://tlrobinson.net/blog/2008/07/25/useful-mac-os-x-specif...)