skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well the IBM position sounds like it would be kind of an easy transition, that I would not be thrown into anything too tough right away. NOt that there aren't challenges there, but I would be able to ease into it a bit. Bug fix here, documentation there, slowly and steadily work up to more difficult problems. Which is fine by me. But ultimately it sounded like their main stack was windows and java. I'm sure they've got *nix boxes and python doing things, but the main stuff would be in java on windows.

Now this may be stupid, but to me, right now, I would rather learn more about linux and python than java and windows. In 3 - 5 years I would like to be a python wizard, not a java wizard. Is that short-sighted?
Removing The Model-View-Controller Straitjacket
STAR*Lab Function Extraction for Software Assurance
There's a Slideshow Transcript at the bottom of the page. Don't you see it?
"I don't doubt the value of good ideas. But they're pretty cheap. The hard part is testing them for some truth value. Merely writing them down doesn't do that."

Almost all of the most important intellectuals in the history of western civilization have had one thing in common: their ideas were wrong. Plato, Piaget, Copernicus, Einstein, Lamarck, Chomsky, Adam Smith, etc.

If testing ideas for truth value were really the hard part then scientific experiments wouldn't be replicable and science would have no more weight than astrology. Furthermore, scientific beliefs wouldn't run in S-Curves and progress would be linear and continuous.
Although not what you're looking for it reminded me of a great tool I've used and seen a few times.

http://websequencediagrams.com/

Quick and easy sequence diagrams. Love it
Ask HN: What do you consider "making it"?
At what point in your startup adventure would you consider yourself successful?

The point where you can get off the ramen diet and start buying all those toys you promised yourself you'd buy when you "made it"
You wrote: "The margins ranged from 15% to 40% [...] Clients always reserve the right to reject leads and never want to pay in advance."

That sounds like a terrible business to be in.
Does "learn from your mistakes" include not funding a business with credit card debt? To me, that just sounds crazy...
scared me at first
Why not the accountant be a family member? I have one that is good, that I trust, and does not charge too much.
I'll put Godin's fifteen best ideas against the fifteen best ideas of anyone else. Anyone who really believes in judging talent by the high points should agree that this is a better metric than his daily blog posts, which admittedly have mostly sucked for the past year.
Viewing Large Images - OpenLayers, GSIV, ModestMaps, DeepZoom, and Python
Note that Isaac Newton was seriously into alchemy, and that chemistry evolved out of alchemy...
I've learned a lot more from reading Gladwell than Orlowski. In fact, I can't think of anything I've learned from reading Orlowski.
As one data point against your statement, from PG's "Hiring is Obsolete":

I asked managers at Yahoo, Google, Amazon, Cisco and Microsoft how they'd feel about two candidates, both 24, with equal ability, one who'd tried to start a startup that tanked, and another who'd spent the two years since college working as a developer at a big company. Every one responded that they'd prefer the guy who'd tried to start his own company.

http://www.paulgraham.com/hiring.html
Hpricot
PG et al aren't idea spreaders, they're people who actually have good ideas and write them down.

If by "good ideas" you mean "good insights" then I totally agree.

However, very few of the ideas that these people have popularized were truly original (in a sense that I feel a "new" idea should be). My original point was that this doesn't matter anyway - if their good presentation highlights a point, that's awesome. These people all know how to connect dots in an interesting way and then relay these ideas. They are (for the most part) not coming up with wildly new concepts and inventions (pg's founding of Viaweb being a good exception to this, of course!)

For what it's worth, a lot of people have "good ideas" and write them down. Many of these people go unheralded. This makes those I mentioned successful "idea spreaders" in my book.

Which is way more difficult and valuable than being able to work the lab equipment and run statistical tests afterward.

Since the insights people have often depend on the hard and boring science and studies to be completed, that strikes me as an odd (or perhaps it was satirical?) statement. Without the lab equipment and "statistical tests" there would be few new confirmed discoveries for us to make these connective insights about ;-)
Use mnemosyne to remember easily things
In terms of developing products and services, neither would I. I was joining them for the insights and concepts they all come up with (i.e. pg's essays, 37signals methodologies, Godin's marketing concepts).
I don't think you can equate "being able to work the lab equipment and run statistical test afterward" with "making significant scientific discoveries". You're putting any lab tech in the same league with the founders of quantum mechanics, etc here. And for all the good they do I don't think you can put the above-mentioned authors/bloggers anywhere near the people who lay foundations in scientific fields.
that's not short sighted at all - if you want to code python on linux, then position yourself that way. however, i am just wondering if you saw that they ran windows on their desktops and extrapolated that it means they don't do linux. i'd certainly ask if there would be a chance -- perhaps even right away -- to do linux/python there.
The big three fuel an entire ecosystem of companies who would fall like dominos, and if those fall then we suddenly have a good portion of 1.1 million workers on the market for jobs when employment is scarce. Further, those people have mortgages, and seeing 400,000 (wild-ass guess) fail within 2 years as these individuals can't find jobs, much less jobs paying what they were making before.

That affects consumer confidence, and other industries struggle further.

It's possible to argue that the entire US economy needs restructuring and a depression is the necessary medicine, but you're looking at a lot of heartache when it happens, on the order of post-WWI Germany.
You can park for free in downtown LA, or even for paid parking.. $8 for the day in Pershing Square, and similar $5-$10 amounts all over the place.

I know this is a somewhat unfair comparison, but if the parking prices in Detroit had crashed I'd say there's something in it, but not in comparing to another city with different dynamics.
I recently moved from Arlington ($1200 a month for a huge two-bedroom, off-street parking, back yard, etc.) to a place in NH for $300 a month. In Arlington, I was 15 min walk from Alewife and then 10 min subway ride to my office in Central Square (or a 15 minutes total if I drove).

I had planned on taking the Lowell train to Boston after I moved to NH, but that was when gas was $3.50+ a gal and it would have cost me $25 for gas round-trip. Commuting on the train would have added about 2 hours a day to my commute vs driving in.

My work allows me to be very flexible with my schedule, so I've been driving in later to avoid rush hour and leaving work after 8pm. With gas less than $2, it costs me less to drive in than it does to take public transportation, plus saves me 2 hours a day.

Time = Money (or sanity, at least).
For taking up space on HN with nothing.
You can tune a filesystem, but you can't tuna fish...
Dutch government introduces a custom typeface: Rijksoverheid
You can still view documentation online and code in your favorite editor (90% of my code is really done in TextMate, not Xcode). The only thing you need the Mac for is the final compilation.
I don't doubt the value of good ideas. But they're pretty cheap. The hard part is testing them for some truth value.

Really? Would you say this is true for Newton's work, or Einstein's?

I find that new ideas in the sense of new insights about how the world works are extremely rare, and that having them is much harder than testing them, because having them requires you to change the way you think.

Perhaps you are influenced here by the situation with startups, where ideas are cheap and execution tends to count for more. But this is a different kind of idea.
The reason startup ideas are cheap is that they tend not to be discoveries, but merely hunches about where to look for discoveries. E.g. the startup idea equivalent of Newton's work would be "Explain mathematically why planetary orbits have the shape they do."
I think you've made it long before you are buying all those toys you promised yourself. That is, assuming you promised yourself any toys. Me? I just promised myself that I would be my own boss, have fun, and make just enough money to not have to argue over who pays the left over dollar after dinner.
Worked fine for me in Safari; very cool.
She must be the author of wornoutgrandmaporn.com. I love that site!
Having the site/business pretty much run itself and grow slowly but surely. I don't care about the toys - if I could have 100k a year in passive income I'd be set. "Making it" for me has much more to do with disposable free time than disposable income.

Edit: Issuing dividends to our investors would be great, but probably isn't a requirement.
Would you mind sharing his best 15 here, succintly, for us?I haven't read his books; from the blog posts I haven't distilled anything earthshattering.
Open Source Commercialisation models
5 Great Productivity Apps For Your T-Mobile G1
10 Dirty Little Web Development Tricks
Well, it has sensible elements. The Netflix contest algorithms, for example, aren't helped at all by throwing in demographic data about the users or their tastes, because that information can apparently be "derived" from their movie ratings. Assuming you only own music you like (and throwing in your star ratings for good measure), I bet Apple's iTunes Genius department could tell you just as much about yourself. A single playlist probably won't tell you much, though, unless the library it was built from contains remarkably little variety, such that it can reliably be expressed with 25 samplings.
Swimlanes for UX
I have good news for you! You can easily live on $15,000 a year in many areas of the United States and you would have all the disposable free time you wanted (if that income was passive, like the $100k you mention).
What he's saying is that Americans whine a lot about how expensive things are.
Thanks for the chart, I learned something new today.

Looking at the five year chart I wouldn't call today's situation normal. TED spread is at 2 now and it's been at 4.5 at the peak of the crisis, at 1 throughout last year and at 0.5 before that. Better than worst, but worse than any other recent time since 1987.

Much of the interbank trust sits on the health of the mortgages, and whether the worst in there is priced in or not is unclear. I have couple of arguments towards the worst being still ahead - a) while subprime ARMs are over, option ARMs have not begun to reset yet[1] b) mortgages issued later in the bubble were of lower quality than early mortgages(accroding to my common sense) c) it's unclear when synthetic mortgages come due - it's possible that they have already fallen apart (hence the acute crisis of trust) or they might be the last shoe to drop.

And treasuries are only secure if dollar is secure. The recen run-up in dollar has no fundamnetals behind it other than delveraging, so once that's over it's bound to tank pulverising the real wealth stored in the treasuries. It's a fun time - I can't think of any safe assets right now.

[1] see chart in here: http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article5047.html
Let's be more precise: the article speaks about bluefin tuna, one of the many tuna species, the high-end expensive one used for sushi.

Other tuna species (that are usually sold in cans) seem to be doing ok.

Just to get the perspective - three bluefin species all together make just over 1% of all tuna catches:

http://www.fao.org/fishery/statistics/tuna-catches/en
Many Eyes on Rails
... Yet another reason why I wonder by Seth Godin gets on HN so often. I think I've only ever read a single post by him that's been insightful in a significant way.

And it also goes to show that anybody can think of a good idea - it takes someone with real talent to execute it in a successful way.

I too have many good ideas. Wouldn't the world be better off if we could just, like, replicate our food? Starvation would become nonexistent! Quick! Somebody give me all the credit and post my blog everywhere!
Worked fine, but this is at least three years old.
Well, there are opinions and then there are opinions.

I'm trying to differentiate opinions of different kinds: 1) "there is data which I analyzed into an opinion" 2) "there is an anecdote which I analyzed into an opinion" and 3) "there is my wish which I turned into opinion".
http://web.archive.org/web/19980206223552/http://www.norvig....
free time isn't all its made out to be. Boredom sets in after about a week.
For me it's about making something a success in the eyes of the users. Built something people love using. Then make it a business that maximizes it's profits. Then move on to the next venture. I don't want any toy's and I don't need any recognition but what I do want is the sense of achievement once you've built a profitable business. Hence I hope to one day have created a million dollar company not for the money but for having overcome another challenge.
I think it's because you can easily make your own object system in a functional language.

Make yourself a function (representing an object) that takes in a parameter that it uses to dispatch a function contained in it. Return the function, and the user can then call that with their args. And you still maintain encapsulation, too, because the returned function may access stuff that was only available inside the containing closure (where it was dispatched).

Put all of this together in a nice "class" macro, and bam, you've got objects.

Though, yeah, I guess this would be really tedious if your functional language didn't have good macros.
I won't dispute that in many situations owning machines is the most economical way to go. But keep in mind:

* EC2 servers can be deployed quickly and cheaply - you don't have to overspend on hardware to meet an upper bound of predicted demand. The original poster needed between 10 and 20 machines - if he only needs 10 but purchases 20 he wastes $25k.

* Co-location fees are included

* Features like elastic IPs, elastic block storage, and security groups make managing machines easier.
Implications of Fast Rising, Falling Gas Prices
At the point where the only thing to describe your feelings is "Content."
MyQuire Gets Acquired, Won’t Tell Us By Whom
Black Friday E-Commerce Sales Up 1%
I want something passively uploading my GPS data. What should I get?
Maybe we don't need anymore advices. Advices are what got us in this position in the first; "How to invest for the long term", "How to get the right mortgage", "10 steps to build a web company"......Seriously, let's take a break from this type of advices.
Feedback on website comparing salaries
I think what Bart means is that you should not let a friend or family member do it for free. There is no official business agreement then which makes it difficult to get things done. You can't complain if you are not paying for the service. It might also get personal.
Spelling correction: "inefficient" := "efficient".
A while ago on HN, someone posted a link to the Data Disclosure site. After surfing through it for a while, we thought it would be interesting to provide a simpler view to it. Hence this webapp. Do let us know your thoughts.
Hacking GoDaddy application hosting
It depends if you define "free time" to be "time you don't have to do anything" or "time you don't do anything".
No, I asked. I told them my experience was mainly with Linux and C++, and asked what sort of environment I would be working in for them, and they said most of the projects are on windows and use java. :(
In my experience family members give overwhelmingly conservative business advice because there's a deeper sense of guilt if things go amiss.
Note: I mostly wrote the following before I had my coffee. Consider yourself warned :)

your observations probably aren't even about OO

I programmed professionally in OO for years, have trained many people in OO design and domain modeling, and know what the fuck I am talking about. I know what Smalltalk blocks are, I know what Smalltalk "if" is, and I happen to have read Alan Kay, which you might have seen had you read my post properly instead of just dumping out a pile of predigested tutorial boilerplate.

My critique of OO comes from struggling to build serious production systems with it, not from programming language parlor games.

exempting Smalltalk from your generalizations about OO ... [is] like exempting Haskell from generalizations about functional programming

No, it's not. Kay coined the term OO, but it hasn't meant what he meant by it for a long time. I'm talking about OO in the sense that the overwhelming majority of people now understand it: roughly, the organization of programs into classes that bundle state and behavior in ways that attempt to model the problem domain. Whatever makes Smalltalk great, it isn't this, as the subsequent history of OO makes clear. People thought that this was the contribution of Smalltalk and they tried to abstract the paradigm out and improve on it - but what really happened is they threw the baby out with the bathwater, and now we have static bathwater. I have a hunch this is because they paid too much attention to the Simula strain in Smalltalk and not enough to the Lisp one (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=288786). Had they listened to Alan Kay they wouldn't have made this mistake; there's no question which he emphasizes more.

OO systems can be simple and incredibly useful when solving some problems (without needing tremendous amounts of boilerplate code)

Anything is simple and useful when you're working on a simple problem. What matters is how it works on complex problems. The claim made about OO for a generation now is that it helps to build complex systems, and this mantra has been repeated and taught so often that most people just believe it. It's not true. In my experience, you do typically end up needing tremendous amounts of boilerplate code when working that way (whether or not you see it as such is a different matter). Worse, your system starts to fight itself because the way you need to organize it over here doesn't work over there, and so on; time to factor out the code you need into a static "utility" class - poof, there just went your OO paradigm.

Ultimately, I'm exempting Smalltalk from my critique because of the respect I have for the Smalltalk programmers I know, who can't possibly only be doing OO in the majoritarian sense. I haven't used Smalltalk enough myself to have a clear idea of what they're really doing, and Bob Dylan said not to criticize what you don't understand.

I'm not, however, exempting CLOS, which I have used enough to experience several of the limitations I'm talking about, enough so that I don't bother with it anymore. Perhaps that will persuade you that I'm talking about more than C++ and Java?
I'm actually living on 15k per year right now.

Free time + stuff to do + safety net + support family = ~100k per year. YMMV.

But thanks for the good news anyway. :)
Rogers launches the BlackBerry Curve 8900
Thanks Paul - that's how I was defining it. I'm not going to just sit on my ass and watch Southpark. I have a whole list of projects I want to work on, places I want to go, hobbies I want to try.
maybe a better test is whether you'll do it for free (no incentives, moral/material/etc) just for the fun of it

to me, hacking > sales (no, charity/non-profit/giving away money doesn't count -> there's moral incentive there)
Heartily agree. Godin has made me pause and think which is more than I can say for most people
I'm not a typical HN reader/user. I'm a one-man consultancy outfit, helping businesses sort out how best to use Internet technologies for internal and external collaboration. I also help untangle knotty workflow problems, you get the picture.

"Making it", as far as I am concerned is having a steady stream of people coming through my door through personal recommendation with really interesting problems - enough in fact that I can turn the less interesting ones away to other people.

I get to make money, I get to help people (I know it sounds sappy, but I love it) and I get to think about interesting problems.

It doesn't get much better than that for me, it really doesn't.

No. I haven't quite "made it" yet, I only started out as an independent a few months ago, but I've had enough of a taste of it to make me a very happy bunny.
I think it's when you are doing it for the love, and it's also successful. The convergence of pleasure and productivity (in an economic sense).

By this logic, as a founder you may realize you've created something successful and fun but it's time to bring in different people to do things that you are no longer economically optimal to do.

Jeff Bezos is a great example of someone who clearly has a fun time every single day and whose creativity is still vital to Amazon's performance.
Google's IPhone App Sets Trend Rebelling Against Apple's Rules
Yes, we use blastwave packages for the Solaris version of our products. It's an admirable effort, but it leaves a lot to be desired.
Don't believe the OP was starting a company, he's coming in as an employee. Big difference.
i know this is a terrible thing to say... but...

I love bluefin tuna. its delicious. knowing that i might not be able to eat it in a few years leaves me conflicted between increasing consumption for my personal enjoyment (at the cost of the burden of knowing that I'm accelerating bluefin toward its extinction) and decreasing personal consumption for the small moral victory that I at least tried to help keep a species on earth (at the cost of decreased sushi enjoyment).

If God wanted bluefin to survive, maybe He should have made them less tasty.