skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1. 20 years
2. I was $50k in debt in 2007, now just $35k, so somewhere between 100% and infinity..
3. Depends on the definition of profitable. I probably get about $5,000 in app royalties during a good year. By the time I get the money though, it's already gone to other things.

I'm being facetious but only slightly - it seems to me that a lot of hackers have been doing this their entire lives and it's going to be a while before they are profitable.

I've been bootstrapping since Nov 2010 (repairing old Macs and contracting) and there has been a tidal wave of change washing over the industry with new freelancing matchup services and funding opportunities like kickstarter. I feel like I've been ramen profitable for about a year and really feel close to a breakthrough in the next 3-6 months. If I could just find a nontechnical benefactor, it would sure be a lot easier.

What's kept me going is the thought of working at a day job for years, only to break even (been there, done that). There are more important things in life than money. I garden now and ride my bike instead of drive. I think perhaps society is starting up as well.
Pathetic?

It perfectly accomplishes my goal: you'll remember it.

(Edit: Sigh. Now I remember why I have a rule of not commenting on Hacker News anymore.)
So it's not that something previously illegal was legalized, nor that something previously burdensome become less burdensome. Instead more bureaucratic overhead was added, barriers to entry were raised, and all that with a nice helping of nanny-ism in the form of meagre limits to how much one shall be permitted to invest.

Perhaps this will help "create jobs", but not for those who want to participate in any aspect of providing capital, borrowing capital, or facilitating such an exchange. The only jobs created will be for those who have the skills to navigate bureaucracy in order to lessen the increased deadweight loss this bill will create.

Edit: apparently something was illegal, but the article failed to mention it. Still not sure what that something is.
Studio 54 as applied to a blog. I'm with you, but it tends to work over the short term.
What does HN think of my prediction?

Within the next decade, we will see the rise of the teacher superstar. They will have salaries/compensations comparable to movie stars except their performance will be teaching online to massive amounts of students.

We can already see a beginning of that trend with Salman Khan or Peter Norvig teaching an AI class online.
For reference, the mathematical notation of the hot algorithm is from my master thesis[1].

[1]: http://www.duo.uio.no/sok/work.html?WORKID=81971&lang=en
Is anyone else bothered by the fact that of the 752 comments on this thread at the moment probably >700 were written by men? Isn't it potentially sexist in and of itself to have a large discussion about this subject exclusively between men?
Actually, there is very little criticism in the mercurynews article you cited about the crowdfunding. Most of the criticism is focused on other portions of the bill.

Literally, all content from the article about crowdfunding is: "The crowd funding proposal has some merit. Companies could seek to raise up to $2 million through individual donations up to $10,000 each or 10 percent of a person's income..<snip>.. But in its current form, even the crowd funding piece is problematic because it provides little oversight of the process by letting just about anyone into the fundraising game."

I can understand why it is 'instinctively' bad to not have any oversight into the funding process, but how is letting just about anyone into the game bad? It could even have positive impacts to startups like mine who don't have valley/VC contacts but know individuals who could spare 10k.

Given that the costs of starting up have plummeted, it makes sense to allow crowdfunding while removing the auditing/legal requirements because crowdfunders would be taking lesser risk than investors of yore. Practically a certified investor (1m+) has the capability to invest in 100 startups before (s)he can invest in 1!
It's actually awesome. Invite please....
Human Bird Wings video was indeed a fake
SPDY improves upon keep-alive by reducing the number of connections that need to be created and in eliminating blocking.

SPDY reduces the number of persistent HTTP connections between client and server from around six (depending on browser) to one. High latency connections increase the time required to create these initial connections, and round trip times have not been consistently declining despite bandwidth improvements.

HTTP requests over each keep alive connection are blocking, i.e. the server must response before another request can be made. SPDY addresses this blocking by multiplexing requests and responses. Note that the head-of-line blocking that jganetsk mentioned is a separate issue.
>"Think of it as having poor proxies for quality"

I think of it as good proxies for revenue. It just makes more business sense, and seems more in line with the fiduciary responsibilities of Google's board in regard to Google's stock holders.

And that's why I don't doubt your statements that the algorithm doesn't do this or that. There are proxies. If Billy Beene could do it a decade ago in Oakland, it is hard to see the smart folks in Mountain View depending on dumb luck to generate revenue from search. And that's the only alternative to tweeking the algorithm to generate revenue.

"q=weather" shows an observable point where hand coding for business interests is accessible and the that holes in the wall are deliberately created. It further shows a correlation between the hole and revenue - note that weatherunderground.com generates revenue outside the ad model.

It's difficult to believe that this practice isn't automated.
Well last I checked (which is now quite a while back) it seemed far less polished and stable. However I'd probably have to try it again, according to what I can see on the project's page it seems to have improved a lot.
I believe most of the new-model online/for-profit universities actually had to buy older universities to get their accreditation.

So I doubt that "play[ing] their game better than they do" by pursuing traditional accreditation is really the disruptive strategy here. Blow up the whole rotten credentialist system and replace it with something very different.

(A meta-credentialing service might be a neat startup. With an explosion of non-traditional courses, certifications, and credentials, which actually hold up as meaning something? Communicating something here is a process, trust, and even data/statistics challenge – a nice community/tech opportunity.)
Lately, whenever a startup is acquired, there have been haters that pop up on HN to say "That was actually a failure! A mere talent acquisition!" Even if the company sold for tens of millions of dollars and had millions of users. Usually, some irrelevant and dubiously sourced metrics are included, to demonstrate just how much of a "failure" the commenter thinks the founders are.

I think that's what pg is referencing.
At least it will be obvious when that happens since the startups will start failing.
No, I belive it was previously illegal.

Investors had to be qualified in any number of ways and you couldn't accept money, especially small amounts of money as you would in crowdfunded companies, from anyone less than a sophisticated investor (net worth over $1M).
To be more fair Webkit started as a fork of some of KDE's libraries.
The counterargument is that many legitimate innovations made no money in the first three years. Often when we hear about a "new" thing it's actually years old at that point. For example, RSA didn't take off for 18 years; even with a 17-year patent they only got about four years of licensing revenue (1996-2000).
I think you meant it the other way around?
The "OS X uses a microkernel" myth needs to die. OS X's kernel, XNU, is based on a pre-3.0 version of Mach, which wasn't much of a microkernel to begin with, and neither Apple nor NeXT before it used Mach as a microkernel. You can't even realistically portray it as a hybrid.
P90X Qualification, Finally Here
A Q2 2012 release is what it was on the April 2010 product schedule that was leaked and I suppose a that's not too far off. However, that same schedule had Diablo 3 and the SC2 expansion (Heart of the Swarm) as a Q4 2011 release. While Diablo 3 finally has a release date (6 months late), the SC2 expansion does not.

Having a beta in March is promising - WotLK beta invites went out around July 11th (2008) and Cataclysm beta invites went out on June 30th (2010). Unless they are farther along than usual, maybe we can expect a release in August?
Ask HN/PG
I have my application done for the upcoming ycombinator batch, but I'm not sure if I should apply. My finals are for school are April 26-30, which I wont be able to make up or skip (law school class curved/only 1 exam). IS it worth it for me to apply, is there any way if accepted where a meeting would be possible b4 or after. Thanks
Canon 5D Mark III hits US retailers, available in stores today
Maglev track could launch spacecraft into orbit
I've already forgotten how it's called. Good luck to you though.
"but how is letting just about anyone into the game bad?"

Some params are good, some params are bad.

It's not that letting anyone into the game is bad per se, it's that some params are bad and will try to defraud small unsophisticated investors and it is probably easy to do so.

Congress and the SEC presumably would like to gain the advantages of crowdsourcing but also want to protect the small time $10, $50, $100, $1000, $10,000 investor.
I'm curious though -- for a while now I've been seeing the svbtle style as synonymous with you & your brand, and I'm having trouble shaking that even though it's now open to other bloggers. Was this side-effect another one of your goals?
CrowdFlower Co-Founder Lukas Biewald Becomes CEO (Again)
From the article it looks like he wants to maintain the "branding" of his blog so people recognise it as having a consistent quality - which I think is totally ridiculous as it's way too minimal to stand out. A good designer could clone the style in minutes. So what sets it apart? The way the editor promotes capturing ideas? This part isn't open to the public. Seems a bit odd.

It's working I suppose. And the "invite only" system sure helps drive desire.
You choose the platform you publish on, though.

I always browse without javascript enabled. Sites that load, and/or warn me correctly get a subtle mental nod and (maybe) even an addition to my safe-list. Obviously a blank white page isn't going to bring anyone back a second time...
I like it even with doubts whether it will come to pass.

I can buy the fame for sure; the salary is harder: movie stars may be able to more effectively withhold their appearances/endorsement. Educators have more constraints on their withholding/spinning/endorsing behavior. But maybe!
What are brogrammers afraid of?
They could be throwing out all previously collected data and now just using new data collected after the warrant was obtained. As far as I know, the FBI takes pretty seriously collecting evidence outside the scope of warrants.
I don't think even the most hardcore TDD zealots would come anywhere close to claiming that testing is a silver bullet. There will always be cases where you didn't think of a particular edge case, or when some environment-based issue makes covering something in a test impossible. That doesn't negate it's benefits in preventing the 99% percent of bugs that aren't an insanely rare edge case.
I'd actually focus more on reputation for delivering results than accreditation. Accreditation is a massive bureaucratic nightmare and I'm not sure it's worth it. For access to Title IV, maybe, but it's going to seriously cost you in other ways, slowing you down on a 1000 fronts.

I don't think you can beat the current universities by playing the game by the rules they've set up to manage their competition. Just seems like you've lost before you've even started.
I wonder how many people gave kudos to the post by mistake? I know I did and there's no way to remove the kudos you gave afterwards. User actions should be a click not a hover.
Important Messages
Yeah, it's pretty thin. The title could be changed to, "Toms Hardware writer reads a Wired article from two days ago". There's no new content of substance, and even the link to the interview is difficult to find. Just terrible.
TriggerHappy Lets You Use Your Android or iOS Device as a DSLR Remote
Which the prosecution used against Lori Drew, and ultimately failed. The hysteria about it being illegal to violate TOS was a feature of the original verdict against her, which was set aside on acquittal. It's a (now) non-story.
The Great Crowdfunding Train Wreck of 2013
You could get a bunch of qwerty users/untrained typists and then train them to use randomly assigned keyboard layouts. Once training is complete, you have them type some long piece of text, and then fill out a questionnaire rating various qualitative points like tiredness.

Finally, you do a statistical analysis to determine if layouts with more of Dvorak's purportedly beneficial features are correlated with higher comfort ratings. Of course, those features must be rigorously defined beforehand, and you must properly blind yourself when doing the analysis.
I am not trying to invoke Godwin's Law, but in the 1930s, somehow millions of Germans were convinced that Hitler was a good idea. In retrospect, he clearly wasn't.

Whenever a lot of people start getting really excited by someone or something, I think that there is a certain subset of people, myself included, that react by getting overly skeptical, by looking for the problems. Personally, I try to be thoughtful and present any negatives I find in a polite and well reasoned manner, but I am sure that there are others who simply have a knee-jerk reaction of the sort: "I can't believe you're drinking the Kool-Aid, you idiot."
I don't have a problem with the menu being responsive. It's just poorly designed and doesn't contribute very much.
I think a more subtle approach might work better, like promising a distributed social network written in Rails.
Police shouldn't need a warrant to observe people from public property (or in any situation where you don't have an expectation of privacy), in the same way that citizens don't violate the law by observing people or places from public property (barring stalking laws).
The remarkable thing about this story to me isn't that Linus turned this down - that seems like an obvious move, frankly, considering Linus' goals and aspirations and the kind of work he's sought out in the past.

The remarkable thing is - why would Steve Jobs offer Linus Torvalds a job? I mean, Steve Jobs was highly intelligent, and he clearly knew that Linus is a top-notch computing mind. But I feel like Steve has a much more focused idea of what he wants from Apple than that. He never ran Apple like it was Google; it never seemed to be his goal to gather an amalgamation of really intelligent people and encourage them to pursue their interests in the hopes of seeing what came out. Apple is a much more focused company than that, isn't it? I mean, Apple seems to have very high standards for who they hire - but those standards include more than just intelligence. It's a company that works toward fixed conceptual goals.

It just doesn't seem like Linus could ever have fit in with Apple culture, and I have a hard time believing that Steve didn't realize that. Maybe it wasn't as well-known yet how irascible Linus can be; or maybe Steve's notion of the culture of Apple hadn't really become as focused and solidified yet, since he'd only returned to Apple three years before.

Either way, as a die-hard Linux guy (albeit one with an iPhone and an iPad) I have to say that I cannot for the life of me imagine Linus Torvalds hacking away at a super-secret iOS subsystem or realigning the internals of the Lion OS or anything like that. I think we know now that Steve Jobs already knew by 2000 that those things were to come - so I wonder how he felt about Linus being part of that.
He's already received complaints and sort of laughed them away:
http://dcurt.is/unkudo

Personally I think it's bad UX, but what do I know; I'm not Dustin Curtis.
If you read the book called 'Just for fun' by torvalds, you will find some details of this conversation.

Jobs had to replace the notoriously old Mac OS design, with a new kernel. He had linux and BSD as the base kernels in mind. He offered the job to Torvalds to base the new OS on Linux. Linus, though did not want to build a closed source system, no matter what was offered. So he declined. Then Jobs had to base the new OS on BSD and hired a large group of FreeBSD developers.

The kernel was just 'one' of the many parts that Jobs needed, albeit a complex one. He was more focusing on creating something 'greater than the sum of its parts'.
I winced at their label for the same reason as I winced at your comment. It was the one false note I got from svbtle.
True. There will be losers in this equation, but equally, there will be winners (the SW economy, at large). In that particular example, they came into the market before the SW side of the economy had matured as much as it has today. At present it's a much more mature and dynamic economy. Given the rate of change, 3 or even 5 years, night be a viable compromise.
I love the idea and hope it happens. Day[9] springs to mind, he's a former pro starcraft player who teaches the high levels of the game to other players in a weekly stream. He appears to be at least ramen profitable. I wonder if he serves as a model for this kind of approach. It would be great to see a Day[9] for every subject, even something as far flung as tennis instruction. Access to coaches is limited to highschoolers or those with gobs of money.
If your other goals were to be arrogant and elitist, you've accomplished them as well.
Is your definition of usable inversely proportional with the number of features and their associated buttons? Yet you're upset by the lack of features in Tumblr?
Tacocopter - Flying Robots Deliver Tacos To You
That could definitely be one way to go.

I'm not sure why you'd want to put effort into branding twice, though. Consulting is about a clear image and track record, it's hard enough to build and keep.
Thanks for the feedback on the copy. It's always hard to find that balance between being informal and jokingly reference overused terms like "rockstar", and being unnecessarily stuffy. We'll definitely take your comments to heart though as we refine the general descriptions.

The whole concept of being able to mix real world (trade school) courses with heavy theory is a tricky question. We have traditional theory heavy courses in the pipeline, but realistically, it is extremely difficult to bootstrap with theoretical courses. It's been tried before and typically fails quickly. Oddly enough, you can give away theoretical classes, and you can charge $10,000 a class for them, but you can't really sell enough at our $200-$400 price point to pay for the cost of developing the class. We believe you can teach both, and should teach both, but I'm well aware that we'll always have people saying you can't or shouldn't even attempt to do so.

Oh, one note on the textbooks for the course. Of course there is an image issue when you use Oreilly and Apress texts, but honestly, for that subject there just aren't any traditional texts that come anywhere near the level needed to teach the subject. Even those three have serious holes that Dr. Ostrowski has worked with the authors to plug in this course. If you know of a better text that we somehow overlooked, please drop me a note and we'll see if we can integrate it as we create V2 of the course.
credentials....

"If you like this post, please upvote it on hacker news"
If it's anything like the usual proceedings, the lawyers involved would probably prefer if they had several copies of the data, too.

I'm sure most of these drives were arrayed in such a fashion where they're unreadable unless in the proper equipment. It's not like you can just buy a pile of off-the-shelf external drives and start copying, either, as the contents might be unreadable unless the proper software is installed and configured correctly.
Shoot, you've gone ahead and skipped ahead to phase two of our master plan. Try not to tell our competitors...
The Pirate Bay: LOSS(Low Orbit Server Station) DESIGN
Just a simple thought for the ages. Please, modify & spread the designs. This is a simple concept with extreme potential.

Freedom of the internet, and ALL information.

;-)
Kickstarter is not crowdfunding, it's pre-orders and donations. No equity changes hands.

The new thing here is that soon it will be legal to do just what Kickstarter is doing today but also add the option for supporters to purchase equity in a venture. Think: micro-IPOs. So instead of just pre-ordering the Double Fine game or getting a sweet poster or lunch with the team you could also maybe invest in, say, 2% of a company set up for the project which might net you a fincancial return if they make a profit.

That sort of thing will now soon be legal. It's still limited due to the weight of excess regulation but it's a step in the right direction.
Show HN: Logo Turtle in JS and Canvas
Anyone know if this is a thorium-based Molten Salt Reactor?

If so, why is the now quite well-known MSR advocate Kirk Sorensen not involved in this project, but instead started his own company (Flibe Energy) to design and produce a thorium MSR?

Still, I have a feeling that two US private startups is no match vs Chinese government MSR let alone other nuclear energy technology spending.
PicMonkey Was Created by The Picnik Team And It's Awesome
"When I'm writing, I want to have no distractions, so I removed all of them."

When I'm reading it is the same damn thing. You have TWO flashing beacons.
ahh, cool. will have to try that on a future project, love how clean it is
HP Creates Pop-Open Computer For Tinkerers
Netflix To Make Own Horror Show -- and Pick Up Terra Nova, The River?
They can wait and shoot them mid-air.
You are not the typical user that Google is aiming for. I find the unasked for word substitutions and stemming and "corrections" and the bubble frustrating, but I recognise that I'm an edge case. Google really should have some kind of "what you type is what you get" mode, with user-definable stemming and word substitution and bubbles and etc.

(http://insidesearch.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/search-using-your...)

> we found that users typed the “+” operator in less than half a percent of all searches, and two thirds of the time, it was used incorrectly.

Check my arithmetic but that means only 1 in 600 searches used + correctly; 2 in 600 used it wrong, and the other 597 searches didn't use it at all.

0.5% == 3 in 600
2/3 == 66% = 2 in 3 are wrong
Hrm, I thought it was actually kind of nice. Soft, non-obtrusive and gave a lovely "alive" feel an otherwise cold page. In fact, does anyone know of any tutorials on how to do this?
Please, seems simple and useful.
Can the NSA Break AES?
So You Think You Have What it Takes to Start a Business? (Engineer's POV)
Joining a large tech company today, one can get hired for $1 million on a four year schedule, after incredibly higher odds of payout than a startup. The expected value of income is not the reason to found a startup.
I just hovered it, damn you dcurtis!
Sounds great. Good Luck!!
How do we report that to google? Interestingly, I googled that, but couldn't find it :S
Apparently this article rips off the Wired article and that's the unfortunate trend in reporting these days.
Study Finds Twitter Chatter Can Predict Stock Prices
Be creative, intelligent, and witty. And a person.
That font is unreadable
Yeah, that Guy Kawasaki person, never heard of him. Who's Jean Louis Gassée? Jonathan Ive? All just faceless employees.
Best practices dictate that you either use toplevel or www, but not both.

W3Schools is definitely doing something scuzzy here.