skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just wrote a blog post on "theming" bootstrap by overriding CSS (as opposed to using Less, since I use SaSS). Might be useful for people interested in customizing their Bootstrap:
http://blog.pamelafox.org/2012/02/theming-twitter-bootstrap-...
Work full time on data platforms for science
Education and Health.

I love electric cars and rocket ships. But my god there are some big ass problems I want to solve for my future children...
How would the kickstarter for scholarships work? Sounds interesting
I'm probably cheating myself here, because what I want to do should be possible right now. If 'money was no concern' I'd finally lose all arguments against

.. learning system level C (embedded kernel/driver stuff)

.. commit full-time on open-source projects that I love

I know, I know.. I should just start!
People should anwer the question asked and not go tangential to the question.
I think T-Mobile has been hacked with some data leaked
I think T-Mobile has been hacked with some data leaked
How could an entrepreneur possibly answer this question?? You've already quit your job and work on a "project" full time.
There's a bit more going on here.

Some companies give "honesty-integrity assessments" to predict whether candidates may steal from the company, sexually harass employees, etc. How do they predict whether someone would do that?

They simply ask.

People who steal gratuitously will often rationalize the behavior by convincing themselves that "everyone steals something." When they see the questions, they'll think that, if they mark that they would never steal anything, they'll be flagged as a liar. And then they're caught.

The drug questionnaire presumably acts under similar principles. The people who mark "Hallucinogens -- once in my life" tend to be the people who pop a pill every week.
Be the first that supports multiple devices (PITA) and multiple browsers (except IE7 and before?).

Beautiful design (niche for those who marvelled at apps by their design).

Figure out SEO.

I think Amy and her husband are quite popular internet celebrity among bloggers. Turn these into your customers. This is important: if you have quite a few readers, think of how to turn them into money (let's not go into argument about purity, don't be evil, and that kind of bull-shitake).

On the flip side: whether her number is for real or not, I cannot say until I see the accounting by my own eyes. When it comes to money, pageviews and whatnot, I don't believe 100% as-presented. I might believe 95%, but definitely not 100%.
"What I'm working on now."
Technology to enhance democracy through easier organization and participation.
Ask HN: What are the best online resume sites?
I want to create a product in this market. Basically it's an online resume generator with some value added features. So far I could not find a good alternative. What are some of the services/sites you know and use?
>"Suppose you could quit your job right now, and work on any project full time."

Well, I just did the former though I can't really justify the latter. :) However, I mostly quit because my work was again taking over my personal life, so the intention now is the find something a bit more humdrum than yet another poorly managed startup so I have the energy at the end of the day to work on the side project.

Similar to Ivan, games. I want to make a Dwarf Fortress-like game for iPad, with a top-down 2.5D perspective, sprite graphics in a cel-shaded style, and culled down to the core elements I find to be most entertaining (with influences from other games I enjoy). It's a game I want to play, but I'm probably the only person on the planet willing to make it. However I'd also like to raise Dwarf Fortresses's visibility through my work, and get it some additional exposure to ensure DF development can continue. I've also a few concepts for iPhone games that scratch some other itches of mine, but the iPad game I at least have written a basic rendering and pathfinding engine already.

However I need to line up other work for the time being (should only take a few weeks). I'm a perfectionist that prefers the "when it's done" release cycle.
That also was the most interesting part of the article for me. I would really like to hear more about that.
I'd go back to school and get a BFA in Graphic Design and an MS in Human-Computer Interaction. (I have a BSBA in Information Systems.)
I would make videos that fused extreme sports with special effects. Think Downhill Mountain Biker vs Dire wolf. Or Snow Boarder vs Dragon.
AWS is a distraction for startups. The free tier is just bait.
I'm not a js guy at all... can anyone explain why this doesn't work for the guest challenge? I googled a bit and it seems like it should have.

function guestChallenge() {
// code goes here
var num = 0;
for (var i = 1; i< 1001; i++) {
if (i.toSring(10).match(/7/));
else num+=i;
}
return num;
}

Edit: I really should have added more context! The challenge was:

Using the JavaScript language, have the function guestChallenge() add up all of the numbers from 1 to 1000. But everytime a number that contains a 7 is reached, don't add that number to the others (ie. exclude 7, 17, 370, etc). Do not put any code outside of the function and use the return keyword to return your answer from within the function.

And my program didn't generate any output at all, which leads me to believe I made a syntax error as opposed to just a logic error.

Edit again: Yes. I just had to fix my typing error ("toSring"), and then it passed. Thanks, guys!
It takes a hell of a lot of $50 websites to pay an average programmer's salary
Funny enough, I've had a similar idea in my notes.txt for a few months.

"microscholarships, crowdsourced, donorschoose for people"

I suppose students would have a page about themselves and donors would pick students to support based on their circumstances, talents, grades, and personality.
Buying and selling goods and arbitrage still make money. It's not easy and takes awhile to figure it out, but it's not a bad way to make money.

This is what I'm doing while building my startup. I arbitrage web services on Craigslist and other marketplaces. The difficult part is figuring out what makes money and finding reliable service providers.

It took me over a year of trial and error to finally settle on what I have now. It will never make me a million dollars. But I have more than enough time to work on my startup and I don't have to work a FTJ or consult (which I've tried and really don't like).
Yes, sorry, I meant for ASIC design of consumer chips.
This is one example. There is one example of almost every niche that is really successful.
It is possible here in Denmark. There is a very safe and unique ID for everyone, the kicker is that it costs $0.60 per user/year to utilize.
Matteo, big thanks for the write up! Glad you like our service, as you so accurately write we've put a lot of time into making it friggin awesome instead of just nice. We are convinced that people care for great design, and the amazing response we've received seems to prove us right. If anyone has any questions or comments, just AMAA!
/Peter Blom, co-founder SpotON Radio
Is Yao Ming the best comparison though? He's 7'6", something that sets him apart more than ethnicity would. I wouldn't be surprised if Lin's did play a part, maybe not overtly, just because Asians in the NBA are fairly underrepresented.
Don't say you weren't warned
I'd like to create a sprite-based 2D rpg, also heavily influenced by Dwarf Fortress, where terrain, cities, forests, rivers, people, monsters, quests, dialogue, groups, and stories are all generated procedurally. Push a button and an interesting game comes out. That'd be cool.
On a related note, does anyone have any recommended d3.js tutorials for going from advanced beginner to intermediate level?
I specifically see "games" a lot from developers and I always wonder if they have all 5 or 6 talents necessary to pull it off.

I think most developers are interested in the engine development (a known quantity) but when it comes to the art assets (3D models, animations, textures, level design) that seems like a giant unknown to me.

I would enjoy working on a rendering engine, but if I had to model characters and animate them, I think I'd release the game 6 weeks before my 97th birthday.

If you have talent in all the required spots to do this, I'd agree with the other poster... so 2 or 3 proof of concepts in the app store to hone your skills.

1. Game 1, simple terrain traversal game. Get used to open-world rendering.
2. Game 2, character-focused game with stats. Get used to modeling and animation.
3. <some more stuff>
4. Game 4, Skyrim for iOS

Step #3 is critical; don't skip that :)
people search

huge market and growing (growing with every new person which gets online, with every new person which gets into employment ready age)

dominated by a few big players, just waiting for smaller niche players.

the only downside is, that you get about 5 "i will sue you" emails per day if you reach a certain size (just ignore them,....)

said that: www.facesaerch.com is for sale
Confirmed. I make $100 per month with this exact formula on my blog, which I update about once every 2 months.
SendHub (YC W12) Lets Businesses Text Their Customers, Teachers Text For Free
I don't know. That one Chinese player was highly sought after in the last decade in the NBA does not convince me that unconscious racial bias hasn't played a role here, not that I think malice has either.

It seems obvious that Lin's Chinese descent is at least still a novelty in the NBA
I agree. I don't like it when some random blogger talks with fake authority on an issue and boils it down to some black-and-white binary comparison.

That being said, one thing I realized last week is that I distract myself way too much while I'm supposed to be working. Starting tomorrow (I don't plan on working today), I'm closing my e-mail, IM, Facebook, Words with Friends and stock charts and hope that increases my overall productivity, which has been extremely, extremely poor over the last 6 weeks.
The problem is not that the argument is mutable, it's that the default argument creation is run at definition time. Mutable arguments are quite useful, and it's consistent to be able to use default arguments in this way; the argument shouldn't outlive the function execution, is all.
Thank you Mike for taking the time to write this beautiful explanation (and idan for posting :)).

I was completely mystified on seeing the D3.js code examples, and didn't really grok what was going on behind the scenes. This helps, a LOT !
Just wait till you find http://edcforums.com - dedicated to the things you carry on your keys, more or less.
Here I'll share what I’ve learned researching online TV, movies + documentaries
The specialty procs also tend to run at full speed where IBM usually caps the general processors. My workplace recently upgraded from two Z9's to two Z196's and the difference is astounding.
On a related note, do you ever wonder how strong the passwords the authors of the Chrome extensions you use are?
I have successfully left Google and Gmail. I began to worry about the amount of information Google had of mine (about 8gb worth of email). I now pay for email. I have thought about setting up a mail server - perhaps that will come in the future.

I have also installed tiny tiny rss (because I used Google Reader) on a server. I also installed Coppermine to host photos. So far, I am very pleased with my shift away from Google. I also try to use duckduckgo and scroogle as much as possible. I will say that I believe Google does have the best search engine. Google search has been the hardest habit to break. Perhaps there is another search engine that respects its users privacy?

I worry about OAuth. I think we should battle to end OAuth - forcing users to be part of a social network/service to use their service is a horrible practice.
I'm neither type of person: However I wouldn't boohoo this weakening of copyright.
Well, Dwarf Fortress's scope is... impossible to match. I struggle to think of any game with even similar complexity. Making a Dwarf Fortress clone would take many years, however culling down the feature set (and the depth of each features) to the actual "fun bits" at least makes it possible. So it's not even cutting the breadth of features, but also their depth. No need for complex climate or economy simulations, etc. No need for insane descriptiveness of objects (save for artifacts). It's a lot of complexity that reduces its appeal to a lot of folks (though caters very well to a specific targeted audience). Dwarf Fortress with a touch interface and cute graphics won't magically broaden it's appeal -- the core game needs to be streamlined and no longer be daunting to newcomers.

For example, no massive world at worldgen with full history and legends. Most people don't want to deal with complexity, they just want an embark site to start in and get to work on. It takes a lot of time to create those things that the majority of folks would never notice or appreciate.

There's a lot of satisfaction with gathering/growing food, building basic shops and homes, defending against threats, creating a trade industry, and a bit of dungeoneering. However one of Dwarf Fortress's strength is it presents a lot of competing interests -- where you need to weigh building defenses with industry, etc. Plus the occasional "oh shit" moment where the game attempts to stomp on your sand castle.
On Fitness
First, my idealistic and self-indulgent project, and second, the project that would assure me I was actually providing value to the world.

1. My self-indulgent dream: an IDE built around text editor integration. Think Eclipse, but constructed as an exoskeleton that Emacs and Vim could slip into and become real IDEs.

Of course my priorities would come to the fore. The core would be written in a concise but statically typed language, plugins could be written in the same language or in a clean, concise scripting language. It would be trivial to run code from within the editor. And it would be nice if one day it generalized into an application framework like Eclipse.

2. My actually socially productive work: interactive educational software. I would construct interactive software specialized for very small units of learning. An app to teach French verb conjugations, an app to teach the concept of electron valence, an app students could use to interact with a writing coach, an app to teach basic programming, and so on. I would try to implement what had been learned from studies about learning, and it would be awesome if I could provide a research platform for education research.

In the end, I hope that the software work on teaching individual subjects would generalize to a set of templates for interactive learning that would let people construct reasonably effective interactive learning tools for many different subjects, with a reasonable investment of effort. Just as a software engineer would look at a problem and construct a solution out of well-known systems, an educator could look at the material and skills they want to teach in a class and construct an interactive course from different parts: spaced repetition to teach certain information, an interactive coaching module and a drill module for medium-complexity skills involving several steps, a submit/teacher review/revision module for writing tasks, and a portfolio module for the semester project. Those are the kinds of general modules that come to mind now, but the aim of constructing completely ad hoc software for a variety of subjects would be to discover novel design patterns for interactive learning.

Custom modules created by teachers, researchers, and hackers could be trivially published, for free or for sale, and incorporated into course-specific modules or explored by self-guiding students. Utopia! (Whew.)

P.S. If I had to show ads to cover support and operations costs, I would only show them to adults, and I would let people pay to turn them off. (Nobody should have to feel guilty for running AdBlock, so I think it's important to let AdBlock users pay extra to turn off the ads they would see.)
What I have found helps me get over these "I know what I SHOULD do..." humps? If I pick up a book or find a good source of information on the subject and start reading it, I find that it lowers the barrier to entry for me just enough and starts filling my head with enough good ideas that I have to move forward.

You might pick up a good Kernel beginners book (do you know C? If not, start there.) and just start reading it... thumb through it... start seeing some of the API calls and comitting them to memory so the next time you see them you think "Oh yea, I remember that from Chapter 1..."

Don't worry about coding, which IDE to use, which build system to use, installing Ubuntu on your laptop or moving in with Linus... just get that book and start reading before you go to bed at night.

It'll either break down the barrier to entry for you, or make you realize it isn't what you thought and you can focus on something else.

Absolute worse case scenario? You learn a few cool tricks and put the book on your shelf to collect dust. No biggie.

Might I suggest starting here? http://goo.gl/YBoJ0
Bingo. The problem of office interruptions reduces down to priorities and having a boss that understands your work.

Interruptions don't have to be inevitable - there is almost always something you can do to cut yourself off. For me, I could book myself solo into a conference room for 90 minutes, block the time on my calendar, turn off my IM and mail toast, put earphones in and work.

If the concern is that you can't do this - that you'll get in trouble or won't be meeting expectations - either your priorities are out of order relative to what your boss/organization thinks they should be, or your boss/organization isn't convinced that cutting yourself off to do solitary work adds any value. One could argue that a really good boss would understand it already, but we don't always get really good bosses - if your boss isn't already convinced and you don't want to do the work to convince them, I suppose the answer is to either put up with it or leave.
There are a lot of todos apps out there from Thing to RememberTheMilk to Trello (list of lists? more like todos of todos :))

It's a saturated market so you better have some sort of other advantages before marketing such product.
Scott Murray has been developing a wonderful series of tutorials: http://alignedleft.com/tutorials/d3/

I expect he'll tackle more advanced topics as the series continues.
Shameless plug: Our company is currently reworking our UI Application Framework to use Bootstrap 2.0 and we're going to document the process in a series of video lessons. Sign up here: http://appframework.bigbangtechnology.com/
Out of curiosity, why? The prestige (completely legit answer) or are there topics you want to cover in depth that the PhD program will provide?

If so, which topics do you want to deep-dive on?
About a month ago I did a bit of pricing for having a permanently-on dedicated virtual server through Amazon:

Micro - $105.80/yr (reserved instance)

Bandwidth - $0.00/mo (light transfer usage)

S3 - $0.20/mo (combining storage and transfer)

CloudFront - $0.20/mo (combining requests and transfer)

After a quick glance around I found that it was going to be impossible to beat that price, most especially for the services gained by using AWS (CloudFront, S3, CLI interface + tools, ability to spin up an instance behind the scenes and swap over to it once properly configured...)

The moral of this story is to make sure that you price out the cost of using any platform for your particular usage profile.
And how do you tell someone who is actually reporting a legitimate issue, versus someone who's trying to piss off one of your users?
Why do people want a 'people search' in the world of google & facebook? Also what's the business model?
Bootstrapping: Building an Application Framework using Twitter Bootstrap 2.0
I would continue to do what I already do on the side: teaching my girlfriend how to do qa/support/product/design/engineering while working on our side project (dynamic documentation). She gets to learn some marketable skills and understand what my job is like, and I get to spend more time with her.
How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy - Parasites
Why would you choose to run Exchange?
How long for an incremental change to the code? Say, if you touched only one source file?
Without thinking twice, I would commit myself to working on projects that tackle the main sociopolitical issues that humanity faces today and will face in the long-term future.
FFUNR - Jokes for Programmers
> Lying to a federal agent is a serious felony.

Not legal advice or anything but lying to protect one's own ass is a very special case of lying and gets much more protection than plain vanilla lying.
Startup formula:

1) Identify a place where a middleman is taking a cut.

2) Find a way to disrupt or go around the middleman.

3) Profit.
People don't always use their legal name on facebook and not everyone has enough online presence to show up on google. Peoplesearch pulls data from many sources e.g. your electric/water/broadband company.
For me it feels like a beta app. Things works in a strange, kinda buggy way of an unfinished product.
Hey folks, Cameron from Big Bang Technology here. A little background:

We're fed up with Flash/Flex on the Front End and we're working on redesigning our flagship application Woople (http://www.woople.com) to use a responsive mobile friendly design. We have a lot of friends in the Toronto area who stop in by our office and see what's happening and when they saw the process that we were using they got excited and really wanted us to share with them how exactly we were doing the conversion.

So we figured other people would be interested as well. Here are some things you'll learn:

* Performing a component inventory on your existing application
* Editing and sorting the component inventory
* Creating a set of categories for your design framework
* Building your framework website to help communicate with your stakeholders
* Customizing Bootstrap 2.0
* Building your framework as re-usable Rails Engine / ruby gem so all your applications can leverage it.
* Working with your development team to upgrade and version each component so you can smoothly roll out upgrades.

Plus a lot more...

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. Obviously there isn't a lot to see yet but I expect the first episode to be released soon as well as an introduction video.
Nice question, some answer are pretty sad though. Particularly the one of binarymax ("PhD in Computer Science"). Money shouldn't be an issue to learn.

If I have a lot of time (not only money). I would certainly work in Artificial Intelligence or Artificial Life. I believe this is where I would be the most efficient in discovering something useful for the rest of the Humanity.

Sadly, even with a PhD in Machine Learning, I lose most of time resolving trivial issues or making trivial softwares.
I've been working on a variant of the latter idea on and off for about 4 years now. We got some funding (through an NSF grant) but I couldn't maintain full-time development on it. I'm presently working on a project that sprang up after I identified problems in the original design.

I'd love to hear more about your ideas; ping me @gmail if you want to chat.
Patrick, let's fund the 21st century blend of the Rotary Club/Skull and Bones/freemasons/"secret society" just so we can wear robes :)

I nominate thee honorary head, benevolent tyrant for lyfe.
Personally, I would work on creating a school/open location that trains students to make fun things with code... games, simulations, or anything else that draws people in. I want it to be a place that is interesting so it may spark that fire that leads them to a life of programming.
Alas, no response :-(