skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
90 Million? The entire US? That's way off. I haven't seen the numbers, but that's like saying a car engine can get 1500% efficiency, or that a ten-year-old neighbor can bench-press 2000 pounds. It's just not in the cards.
Thank you for helping me come closer to a decision on whether or not SEO consulting is valuable for me.
So if we take a range of estimates for total amount of lithium in the world (4.4M - 165M tons) and "a rule of thumb" of 124 pounds for one vehicle, there is enough lithium in the world for concurrently active 78M - 2.9B vehicles.

By some quick googling there is around 600M-700M cars in the world today.
I second the Hillegass recommendation. Between that and example code and a lot of head scratching i think i finally understand the iPhone dev framework. I just put out my first app (iGo) and things are promising. We'll see but my hope its enough to cover rent (in SF mind you) and tacos.
There are both kinds of developers. I always thought Oliver Steele did a good job of explaining this here:

http://osteele.com/archives/2004/11/ides

Here's my take:

The ability to write in a language that doesn't require excessive amounts of boilerplate code means I'm much more likely to refactor as the code evolves. Seeing an algorithm on one page, localizing and separating the logic cleanly with higher level constructs, easily translating the intuitions in my head to a coded solution, being able to dive into any part of the code without getting lost in the redundancy and residue of IDE vomit, etc... is all really valuable. Getters and setters that take up more than one very short annotation are eyesores, and the mere act of coughing them up into the code was never a bottleneck to programming speed no matter how bloated they get.

The act of automatically renaming classes or variables, along with all the other code-shoveling refactoring support that IDEs provide is a miniscule subset of what refactoring is really about. The real refactoring work is done in your head. You need to look at the code and comprehend it in ways that aren't obvious, so that you can reorganize it to be simpler or maybe extendable. This kind of work cannot be done by an IDE; however, it can be aided by using a nice expressive language that gets to the point and doesn't distract you from the problem.

When it comes down to building, deploying, and automation of other menial tasks, I'm not stuck with what the IDE developers give me. A good language is like putty in my hands. An IDE locks me down and cumbers me, giving me little in return other than a graphical debugger and quick syntax help. Once you have mastered the command line, it becomes painfully obvious what the IDE cannot do. An IDE is a static cockpit with lots of cool doodads and buttons. I can make my own doodads and buttons and they will do exactly what I wish and they will do it exactly how I wish.

I am a language maven.
Roboat - A Robotic Sailboat Powered by Linux
I think you need to read some books on balanced investing. Making money on stocks is easy, keeping it takes self control. You have to take some percentage of your gains out of equity and put it in bonds or cash on a regular basis or at a time like this you can lose everything. If you had been regularly rebalancing your portfolio on the upswing in the last 6 years, you would be sitting on a pile of cash that you would now use to reinvest during the turn, again rebalancing the portfolio.
Prezzle.com still generates payments from Cambrian House.
It's a way to send gift-cards without the user just getting an unthoughtful email or to send a message for free that can't be opened until a specific time.
I wrote a few (new editions of existing) books:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/103-3188...
Five years ago I opened a retail clothing franchise with my father and wife. It took a long time to get here, but now we have two stores and I spend little time on them (10 hours a month maybe?).

It is hard to have true passive income, but this is pretty close. Owner involvement is definitely key to the success of a small business, but we have a managing partner which reduces the time I spend on that business.

The great thing about passive income is that it affords me the opportunity to try and create additional revenue streams. Right now I am launching http://statzen.com. I assume that will also take several years of hard work, but it is enjoyable work.
Stanford have a full course online for free:

http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs193p/cgi-bin/index.php

You should also look at these tutorials:

http://icodeblog.com/category/iphone-programming-tutorials/
http://www.webresourcesdepot.com/iphone-application-and-webs...
"second-system syndrome" sounds like exactly the opposite of what I think about py3k. (Pythonista with more than 10kloc, rubyist at my day job, many less).

Mainly, I see this release as cleaning up the warts that python had accumulated. {imap, ifilter, izip, iterkeys, itervalues, iteritems, xrange} all becoming default and their non-stream counterparts ceasing to exist is a huge upgrade.

Unifying new-style and old-style classes is a huge cleanup and upgrade. (Which simplifies code for newbies quite a bit, too).

The move to default unicode strings is a huge upgrade.

The library cleanup is a huge upgrade.

The inclusion of multiprocessing (actually 2.6, but who uses that?) is a huge upgrade.

I don't see any of this as "breaking random bits of code", but rather as stepping back to regroup the language into a much more coherent whole.

But then, I'm in the tank for python, I freely admit.
Yes. It comes in waves, I find. Sometimes pages rank well in Google, sometimes not. Lately, however, it seems to be more a case of getting less per click - but I put this down to the economic situation leading people to bid less.
I like how you brand yourself; reminds me of something like http://wufoo.com/.
ha, yeah. gotta love a 'thingy'. Already working on new thingys - too bad the building part isn't passive.
I guess "sponsorship" is really a nice word for "self-managed brand advertising." It's semi-popular in the development blogging world. For example, you'll see Peepcode banners on many Ruby blogs.

Let's say you run a .Net blog and a .Net tools vendor wants their logo on the sidebar of your blog. You say, sure, it costs $500 per month (or whatever) and that's it. If you've got the readership, fame, or whatever, it's reasonably easy. You won't get an awesome CPM but it's nice to have known companies supporting you.
The history was interesting, but it seems they threw up a lot of stuff of no substance to pad it out:

Sergey Brin, one of the founders of Google, believes knowledge is always a good thing—and that more of it should be shared

Like.. for real? :)
How did you sell your webapps? I mean how and where did you find willing buyers?
There are a billion and a half different "upload" sites out there. How do you market?
Ars discussion: "Is MySQL really this bad?"
I'm sorry, but this topic is stupid. And I don't know why everyone upvoted it.

Do you honestly think you can get money passively? As in by doing nothing? Downvote me all you want, but I'm actually disappointed to see a thread like this on the home page of hacker news.

You guys should know that there is no such thing as "passive income" and anything worth doing is going to be difficult. You are wasting your time trying to find these "do nothing and make money" or "get rich quick" schemes.
What made you want to go into retail?
Seems a bit late in the conversation to mention this but there is no need to rewrite code to port from python 2.x to 3.0.

Basically, move to python 2.6 -- largely an incremental change. Then use the -3 switch to find all the warnings and then incrementally get rid of them. Then the 2to3 tool should take care of most of the grunt work.

Switching will be hard (all switches are) but it will not be as all-encompassing as a complete rewrite.
very slooowly. lots of patience. adwords to be exact. and yes, there are a million upload sites - but hardly any embeddable ones. a niche within a niche. and people love it.
An IDE does a great job at helping you generate and manage repetitive code. The problem is that it doesn't help you read and understand repetitive code.

The fact that a repetitive and error prone task needs to be done at all is sometimes (not always, I acknowledge) a sign that your code is redundant and, well, crappy. I think it's a good idea to step back and decide whether the redundancy is legitimate. An IDE doesn't encourage that kind of thinking. Remember, someone after you has to go and read that code, and the IDE is not going to hide the redundancy from him or her. At the end of the day someone is scratching their head and staring at a whole lot of text.
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Want a little color on your leg? From cozy warm to sleek sheer, HUE sets the pace on tights!
> The act of automatically renaming classes or variables, along with all the other code-shoveling refactoring support that IDEs provide is a miniscule subset of what refactoring is really about.

I've heard this argument many times and I can't quite understand it. Even if the few supported operations like rename/pull up/inline/extract are only a subset of all possible refactorings, I still do these things multiple times an hour. I want them to be automated.
I hate bloated IDEs just as much as the next guy, but I do miss automated refactorings when in vim or emacs.
You make the rest of us who actually do the job look bad. Thanks a lot for upholding the image and the standards of SEO.
Hopefully, if the library designers are doing their jobs, you aren't hunting through class hierarchies. Instead, you should be falling into a pit of success.

That is, some path to your solution should always be immediately obvious and that simplest path should always be the correct one. Clearly an unachievable goal in the general sense, but surprisingly doable overall in statically typed languages. One example: I know I have to call A.F(B), so I know that I need to construct B, which offers B.ctor(X) and B.ctor(Y), but I don't have an X, so clearly I need B.ctor(Y) ... etc. IntelliSense would have pointed you right to it!

I used to have a tendency to thumb through IntelliSense (and sometimes I still do!), but have taken to reading the docs before starting because most of the libraries I interact with are just too complex! The real problem is, that the majority of code that I consume isn't documented at all anyway, so hunting through the class hierarchies (or code directly) is all I've got.

For the record, my tools are: C/C++ = Visual Studio and Source Insight; C# = Visual Studio with Resharper; Java = IntelliJ IDEA; Python = Wing; Javascript = gggrrrrrrrr; XML, HTML = Notepad2; Other text files = Notepad2 or Visual Studio; whichever has the focus :-)
It does in major versions of programming languages that are largely against having "dirty" code, at least in my book.
Hopefully my little site I just launched, http://allblogjobs.com , will earn me a few bucks (at least enough to cover my diet dr. pepper addiction)
False dilemmas are highly overrated.
You're right and wrong. Because yes, making money from doing nothing won't work. But making (quasi) passive money off of something that you've built might. Yep. That's the trick I say. Don't just say something is stupid. It makes sense to think about this stuff.
There are some things I could never do. I mean, running drugs I'd do if things got tough. Being a pimp, yeah, I could do that. Burglary...sure, everybody's got insurance, so it's really a victimless crime. Even murder for hire if things got really bad (no women, no kids).

But SEO consulting, that's just sick, man.
Selling Vitamins! Here's the thing: you get 3 people under you selling vitamins, and you make money off of their sales! Then each of them gets 3 people, and now you're making money off of 9 people! And so on and so forth.

Our program pays you for 3 levels below you in our sales matrix, so if you have 5 people per level you can be receiving profits from 125 people selling vitamins!
I found writing to pay too little for too much effort. But, then, I only have the one book published. And, to be fair, I do still get a few hundred dollars in royalties every quarter five years later. So, I guess if I were to write a stable of books over the span of a few years, it could probably turn out to be a reasonable income. But then, it wouldn't be very passive, would it?

New editions of existing books is an interesting twist, though. Did you write the originals? If not, how did you end up doing the updates for later editions? (I'd be kinda ticked if my publisher didn't come to me first for a new edition of my book, for example...and it's one reason I didn't write a second book...the apress contract actually had a weird provision about not needing any permission from the original author to release new editions, and granted them the ability to do odd things to the royalty structure for subsequent editions.)
a friend and I are doing it through http://www.smbzen.com it's not exactly passive income - we've been writing blog posts (http://bizjournal.smbzen.com) to attract the target audience through long tail searches, but it's been working so for, plus, the blog is nice way to pick up some business material to compliment the tech background.
Referrals - http://djangohosting.org, it's very passive =]

I also make desktop software, but I think that's very active - http://gearsquare.com/actiongear/
Sadly, I've come to realize this is true. On a positive note, I've also come to realize that you can get enjoyment from gardening your projects.

I had a Facebook app which was basically working well, generating thousands a month. I thought it was on autopilot. But always stuff would go wrong. An ad network would start paying less after they realize I'm not trying the competition, so I have to try to negotiate. Facebook would change their API in seemingly compatible ways, but necessitate changes if you want to stay in the game. Disk space would run out. Increasing popularity would require optimizing stuff and so on and so on.
World's first personal supercomputer unveiled
I think you might have a different idea of "passive income" than the rest of us here.

Passive income is money generated without requiring you to go to work, trading a set amount of hours for steady cash. Instead, it's spending the effort on building something (whether it be a book for royalties, a website for subscription payments, investments for interest / asset worth increase, or real estate for rental money) that generates a cash flow without requiring the 40 hour work week.

Granted, it's not "passive" in that you still need to spend the time and effort to get it up and running, but once your system in place there's usually much less time involved to keep it operating, which is why this type of income is much more attractive - you can scale this system to make much more money than you ever could through salary.

However, the risk is correspondingly higher; if your product doesn't do well, you don't get money, whereas you can get away with a reasonable amount of subpar performance at larger companies without too much problem.
Landing Larger Web Projects
From the original article:

I think Python 3.0 is and will be a good thing even though it’ll create a staggering amount of work for me, my co-workers and my friends and colleagues (since I deal with two large Python 2.x codebases on a daily basis, the migration is not going to be simple or short for me).

So. Not a complete rewrite, but merely "a staggering amount of work"?
I didn't. I was approached in each case. I wasn't planning to sell. Unfortunately this doesn't help me give you any advice ;-)
www.kallow.com
Gvke - Off-song New Zealand revamped for West Indies series
Be happy to if you send me a private email.
Is the revenue substantial for something semi-passive?
Productivity is a difficult thing to measure, because the units people use aren't consistent. I'm going to try to respond using the metric of productivity I've become most comfortable with, which is quanta of robust functionality per unit time. By robust, I mean it is not fragile or rigid to future changes within both itself and dependencies.

In this sense of productive, IDEs can be quite detrimental in careless hands. IDE can make developers more prolific, generating very quickly blocks of code that perform particular tasks, but I've also found that it can cultivate a more manufacturing method of coding, where developers just bounce on the '.' and tab keys and glue bits of 'sensed' method calls together. It makes development fast, and that means any productivity metric based on providing code meeting specified requirements is satisfied swiftly. It also means that the developer spends far less time thinking about individual blocks of code; this can have very deleterious effects. A single line might consist of 12 method calls strung together, because the developer didn't take the time to go back and assess things like readability. A particular method might calculate the incorrect result when passed data it wasn't originally designed for, rather that throwing an exception or gracefully degrading its functionality. A method or class definition might likewise make unreasonable assumptions about dependencies, requiring a large amount of rewriting; rewriting which could have been avoided if the developer had taken a few minutes to step back and examine the implications of their work, and how the design could change to make the code clearer and simpler.

To be clear, I am not blaming IDEs for careless, fragile code. What I am saying is that IDEs can be a magnifier for carelessness, allowing a developer with a proclivity for banging out code as fast as possible without regard for quality to do so much faster. What time they spend reaching for the documentation for a particular class or framework would give their mind a chance to think about what they are working on, and possibly come up with a more long-term workable solution to what they are building. I'm not saying it's a panacea; I guess what I'm saying is that I'm not totally opposed to artificially slowing down developers who would otherwise write code faster than they can reason about it. I suppose the other solution is just to identify them as careless, and remove them from the project.

I also worry about your dismissive stance toward the “core stuff of programming.” I’ve found it is this core stuff that makes for the simpliest, future-proof code, because the core stuff allows for reasoning about design, not just about functionality.
It's about trying to find the best trade-off. Certainly automated rename/pull up/inline/extract operations help, but I've found that the navigation and text-editing power of vim outweighs the benefits coming from those IDE operations.

Vim is kind of like an IDE in some respects. I like it because it focuses on text editing and doesn't stick its nose into the actual programming decisions where it doesn't belong. If I wanted my editor to interfere with my programming logic then I'd probably take the jump to emacs, where I know it will obey me rather than forcing me to obey it, the latter accurately describing the experiences I've had with Visual Studio.

And, like I said, the act of performing the textual refactoring isn't where I spend most of my time anyway. Most of my programming time is spent thinking about how to proceed, placing those thoughts into the context of my program, and translating those thoughts into whatever language I'm using. The more I can speed up those bottlenecks the better.
Well, let me say that it's profitable. Can't live off of it 100% yet, but it looks like I will be able to soon. And I'm already building the next thingy. So again - it sure as heck isn't passive while you're building it - and only semi-passive while acquiring new users - but the churn is surprisingly low - so even though it probably wont ever turn into something that's 100% passive (gotta make sure those servers are happy!) - I'm pretty sure it'll get darn close.
Building brand equity with an accessible logo
A simple post about easy things you can do to make it easy for people to spread the love towards your company.
A number of smallish changes, applied across multiple large codebases? Yeah, that's a lot of work. Our software won't have to be completely scrapped and started over, but we will have to spend quite a lot of time porting.

In other words, if you have five hundred instances of `print "foo"` which all need to change to `print("foo")`, it's not that you have to "completely rewrite", but you _do_ have five hundred changes to make. And since applying a change is almost never as simple as a single search/replace/rename, it means work.
>The real refactoring work is done in your head.

This has totally been my experience. Moving a method or variable up or down in the inheritance tree, extracting part of a method, inlining method calls: all of this is architectural refactoring. I've found the much of my refactoring time isn't spent in moving methods around and modifying signatures; it is spent in modifying the algorithms and data organization. Not organization in the sense of whether variable belongs in sub- or super-class, but in the sense of whether some subset of data should belong in a particular class, or some new delegate class I construct. That new delegate class might not be a subset of the class I'm splitting apart, so requires more than just some automated extraction process. I can't help but create a mental picture of all of this as a sort of architectural autopilot -- it can handle making minor course and altitude corrections, but still expects you to have thought about things before pressing the 'engage' button.
From the 4 Hour Work Week:
* Create a product worth $50-150
* Advertise online and in niche magazines
* Sell product online
* Outsource order fulfillment (delivery)
* Outsource customer support

Really, you want to read the 4 Hour Work Week. It goes through how to do this step by step.
Interesting that it doesn't have a stopwatch mode.
This is so obvious. I think it has been for a few years now. I would push it one step further: if you need to borrow money, you are not efficient enough.
i'm pointing to something deeper, because of high level abstractions, FP codes tend to be short -> can fit in one head; thus, IDE is less essential

no amount of popularity can change that
If Gary Vaynerchuk doesn't answer this question perfectly, and in video form, I don't know who does. Check it.

http://tinyurl.com/6lpckv
I guess the question I have to ask -- is this just people with no job prospects looking for a job? $1500 a month for 2 months is probably reasonably attractive right now, even if you just walk away at the end of it. As compared, to, oh, starving.
yes, i use vim and vi text editors for lisp
paren matching is essential

it's not like i'm advocating writing code using cli or sed
There was a problem with this at an Apple World-Wide Developer Conference a few years ago (2001?). Most people had the titanium (e.g Faraday Cage) powerbooks, and had terrible problems with the wireless.

So, when people couldn't connect to the wireless network, they would try to connect "manually," which sometimes meant they'd accidentally create a new network with the same name. The ad-hoc network grew pretty quickly from there.
In Arizona, if we depended on Vc, we'd be dead. We have a very vibrant startup community that works by collaboration,mentoring, and whatever it can scrape together. Do we start Google? no. Do we innovate? yes.
It's no different from any other consulting business. If the client is aware of market prices, they are less likely to be ripped off.
"If Apple is suggesting that the DMCA reaches people merely talking about technical protection measures, then they've got a serious First Amendment problem."

The DMCA conflicting with the First Amendment? No!
Dividend yielding stocks generate passive income. Some of the stocks which have been hit hard because of the downturn, IBM, for example, have more attractive dividend yields than before. So, sure, you may not become wealthy, but you can generate passive income. Building wealth is different then generate income from zero to very few hours of work.