skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think there are some fallacious connotations to the word "calling", not unlike those for the word "soulmate". You probably don't have exactly one, unchanging calling; but there are probably some general themes about the world that excite you enough to try your hardest.

If you have identified those themes, you might be able to work at your calling in a large variety of roles. For instance, one theme I've come back to over and over again over many years is what I'll call, for the moment, "universal programmability" -- the ability of people to improve their tools and environment themselves, rather than simply using the tools and spaces that were previously established by a distant authority. I see ways to explore this theme in software, which is how I make a living. But I have also thought a lot about its implications in architecture, and I'm pretty sure that if I had decided to pursue architecture instead of software development, I could have served my calling in that realm. I also think this theme could work in a government career.

So what does that mean? I think it suggests that the meta-challenge in directing your life centers on learning about yourself, and developing an understanding of your own motivations that isn't necessarily framed in typical professional or academic terms.

On the other hand, it seems that some people can be very effectively motivated by fitting in and becoming the next great doctor/lawyer/investment banker. I'm not sure how much those people are motivated by a desire to prove their worth relative to some well-known societal benchmark, or if there are just a lot of people who find their calling in these fields. Articles like this one, however, suggest that many people pursue these widely-respected careers simply because they haven't found something feasible that they care about more. That search can require a lot of courage and passion, and might even be something that is made possible (or impossible) based on early childhood upbringing.

So in short: the balance that's right for you depends on your personality and circumstances. There's no general answer by definition; believing that there's a general answer may be the most widespread fallacy.
*NYT webline in five years.
Is that enough though? I recall all those people being hit by that storing-a-wishlist-in-a-database patent troll felt really screwed. Shouldn't they have been less worried if just had to shut down their LLC?
Whoa. Didn't it just come out?

I'm really, really surprised they haven't pushed out an official Mac version.

Many techheads on the bleeding edge (and the ones that tend to push new technology) use the Macs.
I think their funding is from Bezos, not Amazon, and yeah, they probably talk to them once in a while about what they're up to, but that's sort of different from a business plan. They didn't get any money until well after they were a going concern, either.
"I would have liked to see him address issues like the likely major food shortage (technology will probably not solve this)"

We grow so much food it is absurd. In the 1940's the average yield for corn was 40-50 bushels/acre. Today it is 180, almost all of that increase is simply from better statistics used in breeding practices, an Ag companies have barely scratched the surface when it comes to using genetics to improve yields.

If there is a food crisis, it won't be the lack of food that is the problem, it will be politicians and despots at the root of the problem.
My guess is that whatever system you set up there is going to be a parasitic element. I'm kind of thankful that they no longer burn your village and take your women.

These people still suck. They are big fat minus signs on the tally sheet of humanity. It really is a shame that they are born (from an economic standpoint).

If it makes you feel better. Keep a careful list of those who extort this kind of money from you during your ascent. When you get to be Google, hire a staff attorney who does nothing but file nuisance suits against them for the rest of their lives. (Hint: By that time you won't actually care, but it does make you feel better about the extortion in the short run).
I'm sorry, but unless they had the same equipment in the same places in the 1940s as they do today, these numbers are probably bullshit.
> Does anyone else feel like this?

yes. if only there were an easy answer.

i think the best one is to create a good product for which there is a need, not necessarily an innovative one, and set it up to autopilot mode similar to what was discussed in the 4HWW. except more tech-oriented. as an example, you don't need many customers to pay you for shared hosting to have a decent level of income.

if you don't have much in the way of personal wants/needs, it isn't really that tough to get by in the 20k/yr range.

unfortunately for me, some of my hobbies are expensive, so i have to work a real job. for now, at least.
+1 for mechanize, been doin alot of scraping in Ruby lately and the ruby mechanize ( i'm assuming its a port ? ) is quite nice
Seriously, where is the Mac version? These are all your evangelists Google!
Yes. What you're looking for is a job in enterprise IT.
I find it curious that the menu bar in these patent example images is no longer pinned to an edge of the "screen." The major historical justification for the Mac OS X having a single global menu bar was to exploit Fitt's Law by giving the menu bar an effective "infinite" height. Unless there is a pointing device that handles 3-D positioning or otherwise provides some feedback or scroll dampening when traversing a corner of this "virtual room," Apple may as just as well give up and pin menus with each window like all the more recent GUIs do...
I mean they won't provide you with optimized CSS, you may end up with some extra stuff that could be replaced by 1 or 2 lines.

They're good, they deliver cross-compatible xhtml+css.

But is it the smallest size possible? probably not.
Self Rechargeable Cell Phones
Great news for mobile users .
Where are they now: Furniture.com
Any chance that the Blackberry Bold could be given an Android personality?

I've had a chance to play with the device itself. But RIM's software is kind of, less than thrilling.
re: #1, "Common Vision": You don't need to write a plan to have a clear/common vision. A conversation and a short written paragraph or two does the trick. I agree that written documents can provide some clarity.

re: #2, "Ensures token thought to key elements of a business": If you need artificial structures to ensure that you think about something important, you're in trouble. Sure, whip up a spreadsheet with some prices and churn numbers to get a sense of the scale you'll need for a SaaS offering. Sure, poke around at ad rates in your vertical if you're going ad-supported. But the key is thinking about it and learning about some of the realities-- not a formal document.

re: #4 "a management/coordination tool" - Huh? In a 4 person business, people are going to refer to the business plan to know what they should be doing? Naw, they should be referring to customer feedback, 1-page feature summaries, visual prototypes, notecard stories, and app/biz analytics....

The point of their gripe is that things change. Dramatically. You'll look back at the assumptions that are core to your business plan and laugh about how stupid you were (I know I would if I'd written one). Some of the exercise is valuable-- to stretch muscles you're going to need (thinking about monetization, distribution, etc)...

But at the end of the day, it's usually akin to a virgin trying to write a sex manual-- no amount of research/planning is going to make it a good/accurate plan.
All that must need a lot of synergy, huh?
The article isn't really about SVN vs all DCVSs, though, it's specifally about subversion's interface vs. git's.

There's no reason a DCVS can't have a clean, easily usable interface (darcs's is better than git's, for example), but the git developers have focused on features and raw power over usability.
Top 10 Gadgets and everything else
And yet gmail is still in beta?
Mac users don't need to be saved from IE.
How To Invent: Tips on Global Technology from Patrick Ennis of Intellectual Ventures
This is a terrible argument.

Easy when it comes at the cost of features is another way to say it's OK to be ignorant.

It's one thing to make things as easy as they can be.

It's one thing to not complicate things unnecessarily.

But it's a whole'nother thing to make things easy at the cost of features and power.

Anyone can make anything easy if they are allowed to cut enough features.
I think Stevie King is different.

Tommyknockers, which he wrote when going through one of the worst addictive periods, is horrible in my opinion. I suspect it's better if you're snorting.

Obviously though, other stuff from the early years is universally regarded (by fans I mean!) as quite good.

He writes a lot about the effect of being a junkie on art during the semi-autobiographical parts of the last volumes in the dark tower series.

I like both stevie kings, but I'm glad he sobered up, or the king we have now might have ceased to be with us long ago.
I have several times been unable to reach Google but have been able to reach my own site.

It did not happen for very long (a few minutes each time), and not often, but it has happened.
On a related point, I'd like some warning that the linked page relies on Flash. Relying on Flash is a very good predictor that the page is not worth dealing with.
We got lots coming in the pipe. Thanks for the feedback -- had a great discussion here a few weeks ago with unalone about the social aspect of reblogging. I think that will move the needle.
Is declining to use something significantly complicated by features you know you will never need ignorant?
In this case, however, when they say "even X can use it", they definitely mean "X is stupid". From earlier in the article:

But, this growth industry of training doesn't reach designers, clients, and other non-programmers, because this stuff is just too complicated for them.
But at the end of the day, it's usually akin to a virgin trying to write a sex manual-- no amount of research/planning is going to make it a good/accurate plan.

It doesn't need to be accurate. Even a virgin can benefit from thinking about what he's going to be doing once it all starts happening. I'll also add that running a business is a lot less instinct-driven than sex (well, for most people... I know some exceptions!).

rere: #1 - it's quite possible that a short paragraph is not enough to set out all the key elements of a multi-year venture. In my experience, in fact, that's pretty much always the case.

rere: #2 - Not everyone has been running businesses since they were born. Artifical structures help in running a business just as they help in many other things.

rere: #4 - you don't need to refer them back to the plan all the time, but it helps split up all the stuff that needs to get done so that it's easier to assign ownership for chunks of it. Of course in a start-up everyone does a bit of everything, but that doesn't mean everyone should step on each other's feet constantly.
The come in early, leave late tip is stupid.

Sure, your stupid manager could be impressed by it.
Your smart manager will not be.

If you find yourself working long hours for a stupid boss, perhaps getting fired is not the worst thing that could happen to you.
I've been on both sides of the interview table. I've always particpated as part of a team when interviewing, and I've asked the technical questions while others threw the "soft" questions ("What is your biggest flaw?", etc.) I've cared less about what they said but rather how they said it. Did they come across as arrogant, thoughtful, easily flustered, etc.? How they responded was more useful that what they responded.
I remember they had a piece talking about this. Something about beta meaning they would continue to add new features to it.

So I'm guessing that Chrome will not see additional functionality.

EDIT:
Like he said...RTFA...
RTFA:

"We have removed the beta label as our goals for stability and performance have been met but our work is far from done. We are working to add some common browser features such as form autofill and RSS support in the near future. We are also developing an extensions platform along with support for Mac and Linux."
Growth is part of your business plan.
I've been thinking about checking out Mechanize, but I've been using BeautifulSoup and a small library of helper functions for a while and haven't found time to familiarize myself with Mechanize.

BeautifulSoup is lacking easy form-filling functions, but they're pretty easy to write, assuming that the site doesn't do really funky stuff with their parameters. Basically, just grab all the input and select elements from a given form and put them in a dict, update values, and urlencode.
<fanboy>

This is why I love APPLE!!!!!!!!

</fanboy>

But seriously, so impressive... I can't wait. This type of innovation and Apple's ability to bring it to the consumer market justifies a closed hardware platform, IMO. We don't need 30 million configurations, we're over that period as hardware is now a commodity.

"If you want to build great software, control the hardware."
If I was a betting person I would bet against this interface becoming commonplace as it is shown right now. It seems driven by appearance and not functionality.

You don't gain much from this that you don't get from having a MDI window tiled against a bunch of toolbars. The idea of having toolbar items pinned to the "wall" is interesting, but in general I'd think it would just perspective-distort the icons used on the boxes/buttons.

Despite the obvious/intuitive feeling that if 2D is good, 3D is better, I think as long as we're viewing the desktop through a single 2D viewport there's really very little advantage to this.

On the other hand, as multiple displays are becoming more common, there might be an advantage to building an internal 3d model of a desktop and creating multiple viewports into this space with the LCDs. I don't think the Apple model shown in the link really aligns with that at this point, however.
So mention other sites instead - the BBC iPlayer website, vox.com, etc.

Or you just say "two sites in the alexa top 100 that we know about"

It's not rocket science.
I skimmed over that until I thought "Coelho" is a strange name. Then I realized he wrote The Alchemist, which I read at the behest of a girl that pretty much fits that description.
Layoffs At Last.FM Confirmed. Where Else Are Heads Rolling At CBS?
My friend's 30+ person company is developing desktop software exclusively on AIR.
How can it be out of beta when there is still no Mac or Linux version? Will those versions spend any time in a beta state?

If the Mac and Linux versions are initially released as beta, it seems odd to me to have one product in differing states of 'completeness' on different platforms.

However, I can't imagine that Google would give the Mac or Linux versions the gold star seal of approval right off the bat.

Does anyone know about the status of the non-Windows versions of Chrome? It'd really be nice to use it, but I use a MacBook Pro at work and Ubuntu on my dsktop at home.
Poll: Does your startup try to write secure software?
I would like to capture the general perception about secure development in startups.

Please, also keep in mind that even if your startup doesn't process users' private information (such as financial data or email), your website/application could still be hacked to distribute malware, either exploiting users' browsers or inserting trojans to be downloaded.

For instance, I browse sites I trust with javascript and flash enabled in Noscript, increasing the surface attack.

Also, users are taught to avoid only untrusted websites/applications - and they could blindly trust your startup downloading trojans.
Yes. We have a formal security process, which includes threat modeling, secure programming and core reviews. We also use metrics to evaluate performance.
Yes, but we don't have a process. We are security wizards and we write secure code even sleeping.
Yes. We don't understand much about security, but we have an "ad hoc process", which means we try to avoid a few bad practices if time permits.
No, but it will certainly hurt in the future. The code base is plagued with flaws and some bad security architecture decisions are being done. It will be very difficult to modify later. I wish we would care more about it.
No, who has time? Security is not a priority. If someone discover a flaw that puts our costumers at risk we can correct it as soon as possible. And with a good crisis management we can avoid a PR nightmare if any user was affected.
No. Our users don't care and nor do I.
Hey! easy there fella.... we had screaming wifi and internet at www.techcrunch50.com !!! (for 2.5 out of three days that is!).

Note: I've figured out how to get wifi to work at a conference.... run ethernet cables to everyone's seat.

Seriously, that's how we've solved the problem. I've told the tech people every year that wifi sucks for large groups, it doesn't handle 1-3k connections in a 30,000 square foot room and that ethernet cables are rock solid.

every time the techs fight me, every time I force them to run ethernet and every time i'm right.

very frustrating... i will NEVER use wifi as anything other than a backup at a conference. Run ethernet cables people... it's really that simple. also, get three different connections and run three separate networks for each 1/3rd of the conference. then if things go down at least 2/3rd of the people are up.
shouldn't be, oooh how cool is this micro service...

http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/popling.net

Got the right url?

http://www.popling.net
I still don't follow. Wouldn't the NFL get more money if Fox shows two games in my local market instead of one? I guess the obvious answer is no, they would not. But it's not clear to me why not. And I'm not picking a fight here-- I really don't understand it.
I haven't been enterprise IT, but I have been an enterprise dev. That was the place I got away with 2h per week.

The problem is that not all my hobbies are digital, so I couldn't pursue them while 'at work'. And I just grew to resent the 38h sitting and 15h commuting per week.
Google desperately wants browser marketshare. My guess is that by taking it out of beta and announcing an official version 1.x as stable, they'll be able to finalize few distribution deals with PC OEMs. OEMs don't like shipping beta stuff (even though some stuff they ship is worse than most betas you'd try from MS or Google) so this will pacify them. In short, this is just a marketing move on their part... don't read much into tech side of things at all.
Yeah, my current expenses are a little under 20k/y. It's how I affored the idleness between jobs, and I've stretched it as long as I can.
Loic is actually a really great guy who works very hard. I wouldn't pass judgement on him without getting to know him. All entrepreneurs share the common struggle, and it's very easy to attack people you don't know in forums, blogs and on twitter.

Truth is he is a serial entrepreneur who's had great success, who works hard and makes a ton of mistakes like all of us do. No one is perfect, and trust me layoffs SUCK for everyone including the person who has to do them. I've had to do layoffs at two of my four startups and those days were the worst days of my professional life.

give the man a break... he created an event for startups to come together and the wifi didn't work.... and it was cold.... and maybe it was a little boring. however, i'm sure the parties and networking were great... and it's Paris.

i mean, come on... it's paris! (note: i canceled my trip because i've got project A launching on Monday and i needed to be focused. )
I'm sorry, who writes a business plan these days? Just find a great market, build a great team and relentlessly build your product.

Business plans are for suckers.
Did Accel Just Raise Money For A Facebook Bailout?
It's not bad, lots of reading though.
Puzzles from Microsoft's Puzzle Hunt 2000
Calm down. :) I never said that subversion's interface is great(?!), I just said that designers often find some tools programmers use ridiculously ugly and unnecessarily complicated. I think they have a valid point, and when programmers write them off, they often lose valuable feedback. (If a relatively simple tool is as annoying to configure as procmail, for example, somebody screwed up badly. IMHO.)

I use Mercurial, but I don't have any grand illusions about its interface being ideal. It works well enough for me, though. (I don't like svn either; tracking changes on a file-by-file basis isn't usually the right abstraction for the way I work.) DCVSs are relatively new, as somebody else pointed out, and in time they will probably have better interfaces.
Brain-Enhancing Drugs: Legalize 'Em, Scientists Say
Apple has been working on the Chrome code base* for a long time :P

*) The WebKit part
RFTA?
Exactly. I love chrome and can't wait for the plugins, scripts and Linux ports.

Minimalist: Check
Fast: Check
Secure: Check

Its a win for me, Firefox is great and I will always love it but I could never get a good theme for Firefox that would return my screen and I never liked the download manager, and the bloat.

Chrome was a dream come true.
Soon we will see Twitter for Porn.
"@exgrilfriend Having fun with your best friend."
Read the F*n Article.
Facebook Shuts Down "Pro-Genocide" Group
I think that a Business Plan is a working document that needs to change and evolve with the environment that your business is in. What I like about a business plan is the fact that it helps you to think about how you are going to run/operate your business and to put in down in writing forces you to think about it.
If you need artificial structures to ensure that you think about something important, you're in trouble.

Perhaps. But the majority of new companies are in trouble. Most of them just don't know it yet. ;)
I should perhaps clarify. "It" is having Subversion, CVS and no distributed VCS. I didn't mean "It" to refer to Subversion.
Is this yc.news or a general American phenomena? How come stories about food and fat routinely get voted up? Hey, there are plenty of other, more interesting organs in your bodies, stop being obsessed with your digestive tracts - that's disgusting. BTW is that true that in California they're starting to do butt-hole bleaching? I am tired of waiting for a yc.news article confirming this...
The major difference between hollywood vs youtube and san fernando vs porntube: $500 million movie may actually be better than some guy in his garage with a video camera. A $50,000 porn movie however, is almost certainly less interesting than a video of two people having real sex.
Apparently David Packard of HP did:
"During my sophomore year at Stanford, I remember lamenting that I had been born one hundred years too late, that all the frontiers had been conquered and that my generation would be deprived of the pioneering opportunities offered to our forebears. But in fact, we went on to make breathtaking advances in the twentieth century."

I also read in "A Team of Rivals" that President Lincoln wrote a letter as a young man lamenting the fact that he has 'missed' his opportunity to make a mark on the nation, as the "Founder Fathers had done it all" or some such.

I do think it is a common refrain of the young.
The way I look at it is as follows: The set of all ideas that haven't been invented yet is infinite.
Marry a doctor or lawyer.
designers often find some tools programmers use ridiculously ugly and unnecessarily complicated

Yeah, that must be why so many of them use no version control at all...

I agree that the VCS to use is the one that your designer is willing to use. I just think that there's no reason why designers should necessarily want to use Subversion over a DVCS... except that, as a more mature tool, Subversion has a better selection of interface alternatives and a larger installed base.