skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> But in the end it all comes down to personal preference.

Yep, I have always chuckled when I see someone trying to decide what career field to go in to based on how much money they imagine they will make. In any career where there is oppurtunity to make large sums of money there are 10,000(,000,000) other people, as smart or smarter than you, scrambling to do the same thing. If you get into a profession to make money and not due to a passionate interest in the area, you are unlikely to rise to the top no matter how clever you consider yourself to be. It is one of the great paradoxes. Some of the smartest, most talented people I know in the field (and also very likely to be in the top earning bracket) are MUCH more motivated by passion and interest in the area than paycheck. Conversly most of the people I have met that are motivated primarily by paycheck size are, honestly, a lot less talented than they believe themselves to be and not really the 'in-demand' types that would allow them leverage to get the greater paydays they seek.
From my experience, I'm worth more on Linkedin than either.
The CDMA radio is disabled on iPhones originally sold to GSM providers. Apple's just as complicit in the lockin as everyone else.
My dad is a 60 year old lawyer, working his tail off for 40 years straight in a suit every day, spending his wealth to look as rich as friends. I am looking forward to being unemployed at 60, after working 40 years, on a pile of money saved from a career spent on intellectually interesting work in comfortable class these
One problem is that, yes, "Anyone can interact with anyone else, provided they mutually agree to do so," but they can only interact in the ways that Facebook defines and allows. You can't, for example, easily write your own app to run on whatever platform you happen to use (hell, maybe you want a "green screen" AS/400 app, who knows?) that lets you post to your friends' wall, or read their posts. And you can't easily load the data about your friends into a database that lets you query it... I mean, quick, how do you find "all my friends with birthdays in March" on Facebook? OK, that was a contrived, off-the-cuff example, but it gets to the point of the thing.

Sure I don't have an easy way to export my friends' data, but that is not my data--it's theirs.

That's arguable, IMO. If I have a list of my friends phone numbers and birthdays in a pen and paper address book, would you argue that I don't have the right to copy that book, or remix / reorganize / reuse the data in it, as I want (so long as I'm not violating my friends' rights somehow in the process, like spamming them)?

What we need is for Facebook / G+ etc. to adopt the work being done by the Semantic Web community and the Federated Social Web XG and open the "walled gardens." OR we need new platform(s) to emerge that do so, and for those platforms to supplant Facebook and the other centralized, dictatorial platforms.
It would probably be fine for most businesses, but not for a nightclub or bar -- the SFPD, ABC, and city government have lots more ability to arbitrarily shut the place down (by pulling the liquor license) than they do with other businesses. Read jwz's blog for the entire saga.

Someone (Ron Conway? Mark Pincus? Jack Dorsey? Drew Houston?) should talk to Ed Lee about how the nightclubs and entertainment industry are WHY startups choose to be in SF vs. down in Silicon Valley.
New super-Earth detected, 'best candidate' for supporting life
I'm 36 and after a hiatus and restart (of about 2 1/2 years) I'm just about to really get started again with my programming career. I'm tired of these stories.
I didn't read it that way. It's just stating a couple facts. In 1985, the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse. I don't know about India or healthcare costs (I was 17), but China was recovering from Maoism (and it's fair to call it lunacy) and women who are expected to dress more formally for work still wear sneakers for commutes. Men would too if we had to use high heels. At least I would.

The racism may come from the concept citizens should have privileges and companies should not be able to hire the most effective workers available. I have mixed feelings about that because it can lead to unsustainable situations in either extreme. You have to issue immigrant work visas with care.
Why would you hate your family? It sounds like they treated you as a responsible person. Clearly your parents didn't let you go naked or unfed, they just made sure you were responsible for your fun and well-being to the point you could be, which is what people do.
This analysis is painfully similar to the last (start-up?) company for which I worked.

A huge chunk of my time in client acquisition was first dedicated to education. Things like impressions, clicks, CTR, and god forbid CPM are all jargon to most small business owners. Further, the concepts of geo-targeting or limiting delivery rates while possibly advantageous just make this first step a problem of too many choices. They wanted to be able to open the site (like opening a newspaper) and know they would see their ad and pay a fixed amount.

The second problem was then the same that we consistently see on Hacker News about pricing. Because it is a digital medium, shop owners expect the price to be much cheaper than that brick called the yellow pages.

Looking back, I can't blame the SmB owners for their resistance to give me their money. If I owned a small business, I would much rather use the money to help fund some community event or provide discounts to loyal customers. I personally believe that SmB owners are better served avoiding most traditional advertising and instead creating ways to better interact on a personal level with their community/city.

The only exception I can think of are artists. It would be really beautiful if all the medium rectangles and half-pages were tasteful ads for galleries. If that were the case, I would definitely turn off Adblock again.
I often wonder if I'm "wrong" to think we should be putting so much more into raw exploration and colonization. Or at least experimenting with engines and probes. Sigh.
Did you read the whole article? The author himself is around 60
Move to San francisco as soon as possible and go to all kinds of networking events. Make new friends and find someone there. You should be able to find someone if you try, especially if you already have been accepted to an incubator.

And from what you've written it seems that you don't have a working product and you aren't able to build it yourself. your mindset shouldn't be "I could give you some equity in exchange". You should be willing to bring that person on as an equal status co-founder.
Hotel Murah di Yogyakarta 
Hotel Murah di Yogyakarta Via KlikHotel.com
He's british though, movement of college educated professionals from london to new york creates very little (if any) downward pressure on wages, working conditions etc. Movement from Bangalore to New york, on the other hand, might.
Keytar.
There have also been many studies that show that the idea that alcohol makes you agressive or dangerous are, to a large part, placebos (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3035442.stm). It seems that when people behave like dicks "due to alcohol", they're probably using the alcohol as an excuse just to behave like a dick. Getting rid of alcohol would likely force something else to be the socially-acceptable reason for being a dick - "The devil made me do it!"
I as I understood the history, wasn't the regulatory response after the company settled with families?
People like Nye Lavalle (no relation that I know of) are the unsung heroes of our time. While his efforts did not seem to change the course of these institutions, it offers a poignant counter to the constant refrain of "no one could have foreseen this!" that we seem to be fed.

I have a friend that is currently perusing a similar path; He discovered a billing discrepancy on some medical tests. He was refunded promptly (as was his insurance) but the circumstances did not sit well with him so he investigated. He has spent a year and a half and a lot of favors from lawyer friends chasing down that rabbit hole with no expectation of any kind of personal gain. At last report there are active investigations by DAs in at least three different states, a complete dismantling of a case that the company was in danger of winning but has since settled since information he provided showed they committed perjury, an active investigation into kickbacks from the company to doctors in our home state etc. etc. He was told by one attorney "I have never had an unrelated third party do research on active cases and step in with relevant evidence like this."

I hope if I am ever confronted with that uneasy tickle in the back of my mind that I could find the fortitude to follow it to its conclusion.
I don't understand where the assumption that the 60 year old is getting paid less than the 27 year old comes from. Maybe this was written by a 27 year old?

The reason to hire younger people is that they're theoretically cheaper if you assume their output is the same as a more experienced person.
I helped a buddy of mine open a retail shop a few years ago. The inspections were ridiculous.

The building inspector would show up, find one thing wrong, leave without looking at anything else and tell us to reschedule.

Then another building inspector would show up, find a different problem that the previous inspector thought was fine, leave and tell us to reschedule.

The violations seemed completely arbitrary. Each inspector had a different pet problem. We had one inspector who failed us because the restroom sign was too small. Wouldn't even wait 5 minutes for us to run across the street to grab another one from Staples.

After a few weeks we finally got the original inspector back. We fixed the single original problem he had, and he passed us. For a while I wondered if they expected us to slip them a few hundred dollars.
If you’re on FB and you friend me and you allow me to see your name and phone number, I can copy and paste it manually. What exactly are FB protecting you from? The people you’ve already trusted with your name and phone number?

FB are protecting you from your friends migrating away from FB. Right now that phone book and those pictures and those birthdays all act as a barrier to leaving FB. If it was easy for someone—who you have already trusted, remember—to download your name and phone number and birthday, they might leave and just call you on your birthday. Or send you an email.

FB has protected themselves. Which is their right, but given that the people you’ve trusted with your phone number can already copy and paste it, FB’s road blocks aren’t about your privacy, they’re about creating friction.
I purchased a SheevaPlug[1] a couple years ago. It's a plug sized ARM server consuming 5W max. It's been great for a low-power, always-on debian server. For the lazy or not capable user, there is the Pogo Plug[2], which was prototyped using the Sheeva. You plug in ethernet and a usb hard drive, and it gives you access from the PogoPlug site.

[1]: http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/p-22-sheevaplug-dev-k...
[2]: https://pogoplug.com/devices
whole lifetime of programming (assuming you start late in your early 20s) that gives you 35+ years of programming things that 5 year experience can't even scratch. Most of programming is not about programming language that easy part. My explanation to non techies is we all can read and write but how many of us are writers ?
The reality is that advertisers have a lot more money than writers... unfortunately.
twitter/goog/facebook will, at some point, create a social CRM, or general PRM (personal relationship manager) with real, actionable, detailed functionality, but it will be enterprisey at a cost level, at least at first. Yes, total guess here on my part but...

When you've got detailed stats on hundreds of millions of users, and how they relate, yes, making money from ads is one revenue stream. The next will be selling that data back to us via nice database interfaces.

select * from followers_of_my_followers where birthday=today and interested in ('fashion','shoes','puppies');
followers.each {
follower.message("Happy Birthday from frobozzco! click here for 20% off our new hushpuppies in neon green!");
}

We could pretty easily do that sort of stuff today if there was more of an opportunity for extraction/scraping/mining, but that's generally discouraged by the big players, because, I think, they're going to sell it back to us on a per-use or monthly fee.
I started with - don't laugh - a TI-55 calculator. It had no conditional jumps (that would be the TI-57) or jumps other than to step 0. It also had, IIRC, 32 steps. I managed to program it to solve second-degree equations.

Then I moved on, briefly, to a Sinclair ZX-81 clone and then stayed with an Apple II until the late-80s. I rented an MSX from the phone company as a videotext terminal. It was a steal at about US$ 7/month.
But I don't think it's fair for anyone else to grab all that data and use it for other purposes.

Why not? Wouldn't the exact purpose be a determining criteria in that judgment? What if, for example, I use a smartphone that doesn't have an official Facebook app for it, and I want convenient access to my friends' phone numbers and emails from my phone, so I can call and email them. Assuming they actually are my friends in the first place, calling and emailing them is a perfectly normal thing to do. But why should I be limited by Facebook's constraints in terms of how I can access their contact info?

Use your imagination, and I'm sure you can come up with plenty of our perfectly valid reasons why somebody would want to use info about their Facebook friends, outside of Facebook's insidious walled garden.
Do people become nonfunctional via HN / FB over Pornography? Sex addicts ~3-5% of populace, harder to narrow down to nonfunctional stats. "There are plenty of HN / FB users but few are addicts (in the sense that they can't function correctly without it not in the sense that they keep using it regularly because they enjoy it). "Far more addictive" is a strong and weird statement.

GOOG search:3-6% social media.
http://cybercrimenews.norton.com/articles/social_media_addic...

Higher % to support your statement:
"Is Generation Y Addicted to Social Media?"
https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:IWRpW7Mg81gJ:...

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ix=...

http://www.myaddiction.com/education/articles/sex_statistics...
To your point about MBA curriculum not having a component on selling - not true.

Here are a few courses at Chicago Booth that are all about selling (for entrepreneurs):

Entrepreneurial Selling by Craig Wortmann
Commercializing Innovation by Scott Meadow

And to a certain extent,

Building the New Venture by Waverly Deutsch and Craig Wortmann.
Referential Transperancy
"The primary issue in spam filtering is not that we don't have training corpora, it's that spammers are very efficient at finding holes in your system."

Finding holes on sites like gmail and hotmail is actually much easier than on private sites, because the spammers no doubt have accounts on gmail and hotmail and can test what gets through and what fails and tweak their algorithms until their spam gets through.

Spammers don't have that luxury on private servers, so they have to spam blindly. So in this respect private servers have an advantage over gmail and hotmail.

On the other hand (as has been pointed out many times in this thread), gmail and hotmail have the advantage of advanced spam detection algorithms and virtually instantaneous feedback from millions of users.
That's a perfect example of how spam detection is harder for a centralized server operator like Hotmail or Gmail than for somebody who's running their own server: if I were to add a delete-HTML-comment-tag preprocessing phase to my own copy of SpamAssassin, spammers would have a difficult time detecting that, and so would not be able to adapt. (Because none of the dozen or so people who can get mail on the server are spammers.)
But, no one is forcing you to take and use my tools. You can take it or leave it – that's your choice. I grabbed this open source code and made some changes to it. I can give (or sell) you my modifications if you want. If you don't want, then you can reverse-engineer my implementation and use that (just like what GNU/Linux guys did). I'm not taking your freedom away – I'm giving you a choice.
What Is Facebook Afraid Of?
nice. thanks!
The thing about age is, when you're 25 and you look at 35 and 45 year olds, you're amazed at how much they don't know. But when you're 45, and you look back on when you were 35, or 25, you're amazed at how much you didn't know.

The software profession is plagued by HR practices formulated by people who have zero understanding of software production. They think hiring 25 year olds is cheaper than hiring 45 year olds because they assume the output is the same while the cost is less.

Reality is a lot more complicated by that, and in terms of factors that determine the return for a given dollar in salary, age is is a complete wash. I don't think you can generalize on age at all.

As for H1B visas, we should get rid of the quotas. I've worked with 20-something Indian programmers. All have been good people. If they beat me out for a job, then so be it. I think companies that don't recognize the value of older engineers are shooting themselves in the foot, but that's their right to do so.
I think Linux is a much richer development environment than OSX and much easier to manage through package managers like apt or yum. Sorry, but nothing on OSX comes close. Plus, you get an insanely rich collection of interpreters, compilers and assorted tools and it runs on just about any computer you already have.

Cygwin can make life under Windows bearable, but there is a long list of confusing things people have to deal with such as the /cygdrive tree and executables always having the .exe extension. "ls" autocompleting to "ls.exe"?
* Politicians in Sacramento,California’s state capital, are arguing over how to spend the tax windfall expected from Facebook’s IPO*

I hope they treat it like it's the last windfall they'll see for a long time
Earle/django-bootstrap - GitHub
"70's wunderkind"

It's obvious he hasn't updated the technology in his house since the 70s. I still can't believe how he is browsing the web.

"simple, clear belief about what computing should be"

He pushes his own version of freedom upon the world at the expense of their freedom.

"uncompromising in his determination to control his environment"

Exactly. Personally, I'm glad he is becoming less and less relevant. Stallman is nothing more than a software dictator.
SOX affecting programmer compensation?! I don't follow.

(And I'm assuming by SOX you mean Sarbanes-Oxley.)
Web Design 101: Get Your Color Contrasts Right
To be fair, the previous generations (of Americans) did not start those wars, but actually fought to prevent murderous dictators from taking over the world.
I just think you should differentiate between 'fighting' in a war and 'starting one'.
Is It Ethical to Own an iPhone?
Or the article:

> Even the planning department itself is calling for reform. "Hello City Planner," an animated cartoon produced by the department and posted on its Web site, depicts a litany of farcical city hassles faced by a woman applying to sell ice cream.
Fixing “Previous Track”
I didn't get very defensive here, you and I probably understand(even more considering it's 2012 and there's a lot of different stuff now) that a lot of this things are not 100% certain...but you gotta admit a lot of things are true of the profession and yes they will get to hit a lot of people(and us, maybe) with their pants down...
Did you know that Tesla created the equivalent of a waterwheel that tapped the energy of Earth's motion through the coelestial aether? Unfortunately, the resulting drag force was larger than he'd predicted, and after his experiments introduced a full extra day in 1893 (February 31, 1893 - google it), he was forced to stop his experiments. The original wheel is still on display in his home town of Smiljan. On special occasions, it is started up and let spin freely, without a load attached.

To fix the mess he made, Tesla had to use the energy he'd stored up from the wheel (in a huge bank of capacitors - creating this was such a feat that the unit for capacitance is now named in his honor) to actually drive the wheel and restore the Earth's proper rotational period.

Of course, the transfer wasn't without loss, which is why years divisible by 100 do not have leap days any longer.
This is why I would never start a business in this space. You're saying $10/month is too much to protect the privacy of your email.
Man, I agree. We should have a lot more talk about selling here on HN. It is much more relevant than politics. Isn't the essence of a business- and all startups are young business-- the mechanism that generates revenue? And isn't selling a primary method of it? Sales so often seems focused on selling the product that is your stock, not the product that is your business's purpose.

He talks about finding that feeling that your product gives.

I've heard this called: "Made, Laid or Paid". How does your product do one of those three?

I also heard that Sequoia wants a 7 deadly sins slide- how your product enables one or more of those seven deadly sins.

Also, I think that revenue is important. I think too many startups maybe get easy money or seek investment as their goal, and thus vanity metrics hold sway... when the better choice is revenue or ramen profitability. When your profitable, you no longer have that clock ticking, you're a lot harder to bend over the barrel and you can be a lot more selective about from whom and under what terms you take investment.

Everywhere else in life, being in that position means that people want to do business with you more than they do when you need them.

I've spent too much time at too many startups where the CEO & CFO and usually one more key person were MIA for quarters, if not years at a time because they were always chasing money.
European Commission Slip Reveals Censorship In ACTA
I hope all your email is encrypted, because otherwise every hop the email traveling to/from your server takes has access to all the data you hold so dear.
A career in doing stuff you don't like sucks. If you like programming, then you're not going to mind spending time to brush up on your skills. You just see it as shiny new technology & toys to mess around with :)
PHP has a MySQL class built in (PDO, which has bindings for MySQL and just about everything else). If you mean an ORM, then you could consider using something like Doctrine.

Alternatively, consider becoming familiar with one of the major PHP frameworks. Obviously getting started will take some effort, but then you'll have its entire toolkit at the ready when you move on to prototyping your second, third, and Nth project.

Below I'll list some PHP frameworks and feedback about them--not from experience working with them necessarily, but instead based on their support lifetimes.

Yii: Support for version 1.x ends on Dec 31, 2012. Version 2.x is not yet out of beta. http://www.yiiframework.com/

Zend: ZF 1.x is the current version. ZF 2 is supposed to be around the corner, but that was also true last summer so the timing on this is a bit unclear (2.0.0 beta1 is the latest beta). http://framework.zend.com/

CodeIgniter: CodeIgniter 2 was released in 2011, so it's less likely to have its API change on you substantially in the near term. http://codeigniter.com/

Symfony: Symfony2 was released in 2011, so like CI, it's less likely to have its API change on you substantially in the near term. http://symfony.com/

CakePHP: CakePHP 2 came out in 2011, so same thing applies here. http://cakephp.org/

AuraPHP: The first PHP 5.4 framework. Less developed than the others at this point. Not on the same scale of popularity as the others, but it merits a mention as the first PHP 5.4 framework. http://auraphp.github.com/