skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Relentlessly practicing your demo gives you some of these for free.

Bring two of everything. If something is destined to break, you increase your odds that it happens during a dry run, and not during the demo. Bonus points: you already know how your demo behaves when it fails. Avoid the stuttering "oh, it should have done X. This isn't working." Since you already have two of everything, keep practicing and overnight the new replacement.

Reduce the factors you can't control. Since you already found a way to practice with the projector you will use, you already know how it works, and you know how your Demo looks on-screen. Take that time to make adjustments.

Get organized in advance. When doing something over and over again, your natural optimization instincts will kick in. What started as three shells, four open browser windows, and a slideshow will turn into a browser window, and a backup script for running locally.

Also, be familiar with your format, and break these rules as needed. For instance, some demos require assistants who aren't directly running the demo, but act as third parties or perform safety checks (think robotics demos).
Um, depends on how you define making money. Is $60K making money? What if I told you that the author puts in less than 5 hours a month to make $60K a year? Is that making money?

If that is your definition, then the answer is "everything". If your definition is "lots of money" then the answer is, as always, very few things which are a lot of hard work.
Wondering, are there any vertical niches in payment processing? For me, the average customer of a payment processing company is a business owner who is capable of selecting a good provider (paypal for being around for ages or stripe for being loved), so how do other payment processors survive?
I wish I could remember the source... I'd heard a few years ago that an investment company had started a "corporate corruption index" and that "super-fancy new offices" was one of twenty or thirty indicators of corruption. Taken by itself it might not mean much, but taken together with the other items in the index it was a warning flag.
In practice I'm pretty sure it's more about exposure to loud noises than actual age, and these increase as you age. I know I was able to hear 20kHz at 16, but probably down to 17kHz or so now at 25.

In other words, if you've been to a couple of rock concerts with no earplugs then all bets are off.

Also worth noting that most speakers play 0.5dB below the actual signal at 20000Hz, where anything above that usually isn't specified. So you need specialist audio gear or some measuring equipment to actually try to listen to really high frequencies.
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Solve for X: Anthony Sutera on low power wireless everywhere [video]
Classifieds : cars, jobs, houses...
I searched for it quite a long time before answering. It's not their PetMan either, the one I saw was a finer grained, mostly black parts robot that almost had the muscular system shape.
That time is ridiculously tiny compared to the rest of your workday

The project I was working on a few months ago took 40 minutes to build on an i7 with 8 GB of RAM.
I recently attempted such a move, but Google docs held me back. I realize any true paranoia agent would never use Google Docs, but if you ever collaborate on documents it is irreplaceable. Not to mention other people are creating shared documents on Google Docs that I need to use.

True, I could move just migrate the email, contact list, and calendar somewhere else. But then I would have two contact lists that need to be synchronized between my new provider and Google Docs and forward any notifications from Gmail.

Then I realized just how much I rely on Google's email search. Finding an email within tens of thousands is instant on Gmail. It is nearly impossible with anyone else.

In the end, I abandoned trying to move away from Gmail / Google Apps. After all, there is nothing stopping the admin of any email system from casually reading inboxes or being forced to turn over data to a government authority. And Google does have some history of fighting back for information requests, where I can see much smaller providers folding under pressure more quickly due to limited resources.

And the argument against self hosting has been repeated here already, but the risk of loss of service is far, far the worst thing to happen for email. If you don't care if your email becomes undeliverable for hours or days at a time, you really don't need to be paranoid about email.
I think forums are here to stay because they already have the community, i don't know how a newly created forum can evolve like it could have if it has been started several years ago. Although i constantly feel a lack of a dedicated community for several topics...
Drugs are a touchy subject in the US. I imagine nobody in Europe would do a hire/don't-hire decision based on a drug test. In fact everyone I've ever worked for here in Slovenia where weed is illegal were pretty open about their history (or not so much history) of weed use.

It's very culturally accepted in most of Europe that you smoke weed or have at least at some point in your life. If you claim to have gotten through high school and college without at least trying weed ... I don't think anyone will take you seriously. Even less so if it happens to be true.

Why are americans like this when it comes to drugs? I don't know, and I think most noncorporate types aren't like that in the US either.

As for being held accountable for doing nothing wrong ... would you hire somebody who drinks half a bottle of vodka a day? They're doing nothing wrong mind you.
The point is not to admit liars. They genuinely don't want stoners in the service.

Now, you can argue till you are blue in the face that you will simply get more dishonest members, and this greatly outweighs the benefits of throwing out a few occasional users. But, ultimately speaking, these admission conditions are designed by committees, and there's always someone on the committee who doesn't want stoners at any cost.
Tell us more about that 5 hour per month thing, please. You know, a lot of people from developing countries, including myself, find $60k a very big pile of money.
<div class="extreme_sarcasm">wonderful</div>
This is correct. It's not tagged that stole money from you - tagged is just a merchant that someone purchased gold at with your stolen wallet. You did what you're supposed to do and filed a dispute with your card issuer. Tagged most likely will end up losing the money due to the chargeback, so your anger is being directed at the wrong person.

You should be directing your anger to the individual who stole your Google wallet and made fraudulent charges. Did you turn on 2-factor authentication for your Google account yet? Did you at least change your password?
When making jokes about bureaucracy, or constructing poorly-written fiction about bureaucracy, or - most dangerous of all - attempting to implement a bureaucracy as a computer program, there's a tendency to take the risk of deadlock too seriously. If you get the system into a state of logical contradiction, the theory goes, it will grind to a halt, or possibly explode.

But in the human world deadlocks don't happen, at least not for as long as you think. They resolve - sometimes peacefully, sometimes fitfully, but they resolve. The vast majority resolve so quickly that you barely notice they happened, because once a person has tried a particular deadlock-resolution strategy once or twice, and nothing has blown up as a result, they make a habit of that strategy and get really good at it. Eventually the strategy might even get institutionalized; it becomes part of the on-the-job training that everybody gets but that nobody ever talks about or writes down.

(And, sometimes, eventually something does blow up. But the proximate cause of that explosion won't look like a deadlock. If you investigate it, however, you may find that the root cause was a deadlock, one that got resolved in an unhappy way. So maybe it's wrong to say that the risk of deadlock is less than it appears; instead, we say that deadlocks are very risky, but the risk is not that the system will halt, but rather that it will grind forward in the wrong way.)

There are rules that are on the books that everyone pledges to follow, but that nobody actually follows. There are forms that everyone knows must be filled out a certain way, regardless of the surrounding circumstances. There are signatures that are consistently signed by underlings, but almost never by the person whose name is being signed. There are shortcuts that, if the engineers knew about them, would be cause for suspicion, but they make the job go faster, and the engineers don't know about them, perhaps because whenever they see one in progress they cover their eyes and mutter "oh, wow, I didn't see that", so let me just show you this trick very quietly, and please don't talk too loudly about it.

And obviously this can become pathological - I'm heard that, in particularly corrupt societies, bureaucrats can make a living by explicitly and openly manufacturing deadlocks which they will resolve for you for a fee, and everyone understands this and just travels around with a stack of bills - but it's also the essential lubricant that makes bureaucracy work at all. I'm not sure we have any evidence that, say, an enterprise on the scale of a corporation can work without such quintessentially human intervention.
This is a great point. In most larger office settings, you are expected to wear many hats and respond quickly to issues that arise throughout the day.

When I need to really focus on something, I leave my cubicle and sneak away with a laptop to an empty conference room. This is the only way for me to work uninterrupted.
No. It was mostly on open discussion between Jeff and Joel (There are so many "Let's discuss this after the podcast") about stackoverflow.

It is not going to be. In fact, it has not been ever since Jeff discussed his exit with Joel. (2 months since)
Big Daddy G basically sees most affiliates as bugs which, if fixed, would entitle them to an extra 100%+ on the purchase at issue over what they're getting currently. This results in a frenemy dynamic because affiliates also spend $$$$$$$$ on AdWords.

The space is pretty deep, I suggest reading on it if you care about it. In fact, it is an oversimplification to say there is one affiliate space, because there exist affiliate models which look as different as "startups" or "megacorps" do. Mint is about as different from most CPC arbitrageurs as Heroku is from Airbnb or McDonalds is from IBM.

My accidental knowledge about the space comes from hanging around with SEos for too long. Many of them make their money that way, since it offers a compellign way to monetize marketing skills without needing to have a product/business of one's own to promote.
As he states in the blog post, it's not about this kind of activity being legal or illegal in certain countries, it is obviously about the potential (real or not) threat of a flashback from halucinogene intake.

It's comparable to donating blood. If you had Malaria once, you cannot donate blood anymore (at least in Germany). But getting Malaria is not illegal :)
One of the things that frustrates me the most about AWS is that there are getting to be too many options. Don't get me wrong, love being able to reserve instances, i love being able to size them, but having to also gague if my system is heavy v's light utilization on top of all this gets a little annoying.

Maybe i'm being unreasonable? I would say I am (honestly) if it were not for the fact that if you purchase a 3 year medium utilization instance, and suddenly you want to switch to a heavy...DING there goes your 3 year cost again.

We love AWS, but things like upfront fees that we have to pay, which then have to be re-paid if our business changes really bother me.

Reference: https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=86667
My own pet project is a browsergame: 2 years in I still don't have anything playable because I start over all the time.
It began with Ruby, Sinatra and MongoDB; the last version before I deleted it was with Rails, Haml and ActiveRecord.
Next time I'll go with Rails, Slim and Sequel.

I don't think I'll ever release anything, but it's fun to work on it and learn new tech!
First, I do not consider munching my data algorithmically to serve me ads is any more a breach of privacy than SpamAssassin feeding my email into a Bayesian corpus of "ham".

Many people seem to have a problem with the outcome of the process being ad revenue rather than spam suppression, I emphatically do not share that concern.

> But still, I don't completely buy the notion that as long as Google doesn't resell my data to some "unscrupulous" marketer they are respecting my privacy. If at some point in the future they buy-in to Zuckerbergs "everyone should be open about everything" philosophy

My argument centres around the fact that they already have a very profitable business model based on this data and thus they are unlikely to "pull a Facebook".

If they start changing direction on the business model, chances are that it will be foreshadowed some time in advance, and luckily it's downright trivial to switch mail providers as opposed to "switching" away from Facebook.
These are good filters to run. Everyone talks up the positives of startups but it is important to look out for the negatives as well (and the negatives were in my experience far nastier than the negatives of working for a big company). I have seen two types of startups: (1) the type started by people who have a very strong vision of the future and need to have the creative freedom to make their vision a reality; (2) those started by control freaks who want their own company because they can't stand to work with other people unless they are calling all the shots. These two archetypes often overlap but ultimately you want to be working for someone whose primary motivation is their vision for the future and not their need to control everything. Of course the real assholes typically won't come right out and tell you that they're assholes but that is what you have to tease out.

One red flag that I overlooked, to my dismay: make sure the founders / executives have a consistent vision about where they want the company to be and how they think they'll get there. If management is not on the same page you are probably walking into a clusterfuck that you'll regret.

Often startups have a sort of script they read from when interviewing employees to give the impression that everything is fantastic. On the surface it will appear that everything is harmonious but you absolutely need to see through the smoke and mirrors to make an informed decision.
Privacy and free don't work well together; a free provider has to support itself somehow, and most of the ways it could do so inherently reduce your privacy.

Personally, I'd suggest going to gandi.net and getting a domain name from them for $15/year, which comes with email: 5 real accounts, umpteen forwarding accounts, IMAP, SMTP, and a decent webmail client (roundcube). Plus, you get an email address at your own domain, not tied to any one email provider, making it easy to switch later if you want.
I agree with almost all of what you said. But, I can't believe that time tracking is really that lucrative. Before I was on HN, I was on the JoS boards (I know you were also there).

I can remember a time when someone would debut a new time tracking app every week. I feel like this market is more than saturated.
It varies widely in the US depending on where you are and what kind of work you're doing. Many Silicon Valley tech companies don't give a shit, but try working for Federal contractors (many of which are required by law to drug test their employees) and you'll get a completely different experience.
Someone seems to think nandemo is joking, so to clarify, there exists at least one HNer whose business does sell pet food over the Internet. They tried to hire me at one point.

Yeah yeah, pets.com blew up. Banks have gone bankrupt before, too: that doesn't mean banking can't make money.
Talk to Amy Hoy - her time tracking app grosses more than all three of my businesses combined and is growing like something growing very fast.
I highly recommend Tuffmail. They are awesome. I am a longtime customer:

http://www.tuffmail.com/

Edit: It's not free. It costs like 2 dollars a month for the smallest account.
AWS is great for start-ups, specially with the one year free tier. Anyone else giving away a free server, with a load balancer these days?
What's happening with WebKit? by Peter Beverloo
Some tips on how to write Backbone app using CoffeeScript and make. With source.
Ask HN: What are the best books on leadership?
I want to learn how to be a great leader in order to take my business to the next level. What are the best books or resources that will help me learn?

Also, do you think great leaders are born, or can anyone learn to be one?
i, too, used fastmail for years. these days i do everything through gmail, which i switched to because i needed the larger quota it provided and had no money at the time to pay fastmail for it. Fastmail offers a free 'guest' account, which is what I had, and should totally suffice to give you an idea of the service, which I would definitely recommend.
Comments are not actually commands, but... yes, you can't just do something like

# if { $foo } { ...

Because the open brace will cause problems.
Peter's blog is just plain awesome: a weekly recap of everything significant that's going on with the WebKit/Chrome/Chromium projects.

Highly informative and recommended.
For me this has been one of the hardest stepping stones to being productive with D3. Its been a real mind bending experience creating elements in this way. I'm still not as productive as I'd like to be, but thats okay cause I'm learning.
You're right, it's illegal to ask any of those personal questions. Although if she did make a big deal about the hours during the interview then it would be okay to reject over concern about "failing to meet required schedule" or something like that.
Selling things (e.g. Amazon).
And how is that still possible? If there is huge a variety of time-tracking apps, how can you possible acquire a decent amount of customers? Verticals?
It is a shame that America sets the tone for much of the world when it comes to drugs.
"What is Big Data? A meme and marketing term" for analytics. In some ways a distraction from established, proven techniques.
As another Gabfest fan, I'll add:
- Community involvement. Live shows and a facebook fan page which they stay active on, and refer to during the show.
- Good mix of regulars, semi-regulars (usually other Slate people), and occasional guests.
I've had two non-profit ideas I've wanted to work on for a couple of years now but haven't had the opportunity to because of financial obligations:

- Kickstarter for scholarships

- A cheaper, more effective means of transportation for third world countries (essentially creating a better bicycle)
One thing I've always thought about the three-year reserved instance is what happens if AWS lowers the price on the configuration, you've already lock in on the higher price. Three years is a lot of time, technology advances quickly and prices decrease, but if you lock in on the three-year contract, you won't see the benefits of lower costs. Actually, now that I write this, maybe this is how Amazon justifies the lower price for longer contracts.
Digital River, who basically consolidated nearly every payment processor for shareware devs, has revenues revenues in the nine figures. (Oh, by the way, shareware the word is pretty much dead but selling software on the Internet makes more money every year.)
Facebook is way more powerful for surveillance because it's a centralized network of people you are connected to and information about yourself. Connections are explicit and easier to track and store and once it's in Facebook it's in forever. While similar surveillance is possible with the other technologies, they aren't in an easily accessible database that can allow extraction of data by interested parties. And it doesn't help that the very company holding all of the data has had a lot of privacy issues in the past.

Plus just because surveillance is possible by other means does not make Facebook ok, it's just the scariest for some people at this point.
Not trying to be snarky at all, but can you cite a reference re: SystemVerilog = 90% of the US market? Very curious as I would consider myself to be a pretty experienced HDL user and have never seen SystemVerilog in the wild. I am guessing this is a FPGA vs. ASIC thing.
Most expensive very fancy restaurant in the heart of Manhattan.

If only money was of no concern!
> If you claim to have gotten through high school and college without at least trying weed ... I don't think anyone will take you seriously.

Interestingly, I know a lot of people in The Netherlands who have not and will never smoke weed, whereas in the USA I had the feeling that nearly everyone (especially the college crowd) was a stoner. If I were to give my non-expert experience, I would guess that about 50% of the people I met in the USA had ever smoked weed, compared to 25-30% in the NL.

> As for being held accountable for doing nothing wrong ... would you hire somebody who drinks half a bottle of vodka a day? They're doing nothing wrong mind you.

Someone who drinks half a bottle of wodka a day is doing something wrong. They are alcoholic and probably not able to function in any job, let alone a job that expects someone to behave responsibly. Wrong <> illegal.
These people are well over $80k in debt, have defaulted on their debt once in the past and could probably be featured on the "Hoarders" show.

No, they were ripped off. They walked into a dealer and bought an overpriced car with no haggling.

To make the story even better, the car had illegally tinted windows (driver's windows were tinted past what my state allowed). After getting pulled over and a ticket, they paid out of pocket themselves to get the windows fixed...instead of demanding the dealer does it.

Some people are just horrible with money.
Oracle is entrenched far too deeply within the inner workings of IT operations of corporations worldwide to ever truly be doomed.
You have to be honest because you want to be. Because you dont want to project what you're not, and because you dont want to remember for the rest of the life the lie you said in order to be consistent.

Honesty is for yourself, and not for other people. In my opinion, it was right that you said the truth, and that you failed. You should argue that you shouldn't have failed, not that you dont need to tell the truth.

IMHO, and probably the contrarian view. But the contrarian view is of value because it makes you think. Please think of that before you downvote/upvote the comment.
I feel a lot of the pain he mentions. I remember designing a SOA system many years ago where transaction sharing across web services would save a ton of effort writing the rollback logic that would be needed otherwise. Went to the Oracle web site and saw it supports WS-*, awesome! That must include WS-AtomicTransaction and whatnot. Went to a solution specialist and he said sure you can do transaction sharing! Just export your EJB as a web service and use JTA! Fire up the technology and get things running - not supported at all. Research a bit more - more technical Oracle employees on official forums pointing out it isn't working either. Ugh. They wasted so much of my time by lying and saying they supported something they didn't back then. Definitely not happy with those old crappy systems the article makes fun of every couple paragraphs, nor the whole sales culture where they try to sell me something that doesn't actually fit my needs.
Designing, building, and maintaining websites for businesses.