skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hi Patrick,

Good luck. I've been doing app dev since Jan of this year. I blogged about the profits I experienced in the first few months here:

[http://burnsmod.com/business/2012/04/23/My-First-2-Months:-A...]

What you have right, in my opinion:

- you have low expectations to start

- you haven't quit your job

- none of your plans sound crazy

- of your proposed ideas, writing wordpress themes is probably the most potentially lucrative.

What you (may) have wrong:

- passive income in my experience (app development) is constant work. Whether its blogging to keep traffic up, answering customer support requests, to adding features or new revenue-generating products, etc.

- Blogging for ad revenue is not going to be very successful unless you start a porn blog. Blog for SEO gains and to funnel to your product sale pages.

- If you really want passive income, try to come up with something that is a subscription service people will pay you monthly for. It's a lot easier to maintain a service for existing customers than have to bring new customers in the door every month.
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Is this DFW line a run on sentence?
Mobile application consultants - Advertising
I agree with you. They always say there are so much job offers and the industry search developers but with around ~1600 without taxes you don't get enough.
Well sur-frikkin-prise, IE9 is not compatible with XP; never has been and is not planned to be. How in the world would it have any effect? (Or am I misunderstanding the article entirely?)
> you shouldn't really expect it to be as good as hand-written LESS or SASS.

Even without that, I'd have expected it to at least extract repeated color values into variables, and maybe repeated propsets into mixins.

Because really, from a short test it does little more than me changing my file's extension to .less/.scss
This article is bullshit. Money can't buy achievement. Money can't buy competence. Money can't buy respect. Money can't buy love. Money can't buy wisdom. Money can't buy knowledge. Money can't buy creativity.

The things that make people truly happy are internal, and must be constructed by the person experiencing them. Money can remove discomfort or provide passing distraction from existential malaise, but it can never make you truly happy.
How a wifi camera should work
Even for that it is not true. I call the phenomenon the "FPS wall". You cram features into the game, and the engine performs slower and slower. At some point you reach a certain low FPS (something like <20 FPS) and there is no way then to get back to better performance. That also means that you cannot put any new features in, because you would just make the game unplayable. And since the engine is flawed in itself, there is no way to optimize away the slowness.

I don't agree with the author at all. Its much better to have an open source engine. You can customize it to your own needs by stripping out parts you don't need. Thus get performance by dropping features you don't need at all, and thus saving development time by not having to optimize parts you do need, but which take more time than they would be worth.

If you don't care about tailoring the engine to the game you are writing, then the engine will show its restrictions on the game. And that is the road to mediocrity. Its not just the glitter, but engines tend to limit the gameplay too, if you let them.
I know, I just thought the 2.8.0 would be made available at the same time.
> I realize such thoughts are a terrible handicap in networking situations and I'm working on improving that.

There is no magic bullet so that's actually a pretty good approach to improving things. :) It just takes time...

It can seem fake to try to take the positive angle but it's important to try. When you have the choice between choosing to think of yourself as awesome or not, try to always choose the awesome option--even if you don't really believe it...

Also, if someone ever tries to compliment you on something, make sure you don't try to deflect it--just say "Thank you" with a smile.

Yeah, it all sounds a bit wanky but I've found it helpful for me. :)

(Also, check out Bar Camp Auckland http://twitter.com/#!/barcampauckland if you've not been before--there's some good peeps involved.)

Good luck!
If a recruiter goes after you, and didn't bother to Google your name and look at your GitHub/OS contributions etc. he's obviously cold calling and wasting your time. He's the guy who asks DHH how much Rails experience he's got.

But, on the other hand, if you apply to a company, especially one that's more or less famous, puzzles are a very good way of separating the wheat from the chaff on a level playing field. Evaluating a strangers performance based on their solution to a common puzzle is very time efficient and allows the company to process large numbers of applicants fairly.

A common notion here is that great people can just pick up the phone, or will be actively courted by companies, so they don't need puzzles and recruiters. That is great for them (honestly, not a snark), but it's not scalable: Not everyone can know everyone, and there has to be a way for newcomers to enter into the network.

Case in point: Stripe - you want to work for them, but apparently you don't know anyone on the inside that can recommend you. And apparently you're not on their radar already. They do great stuff, they seem like an amazing bunch - so there are likely to be hundreds who want to work for them - and most of them, regrettably, are not qualified enough.

Do you really think it's fair to require Stripe to assign a member of their engineering team (that means you after they hire you) to review every strangers GitHub accounts, when you refuse to invest even a little time in signalling to them that you're the real deal (the puzzles aren't all multi-day endeavours)?
the site is down!
Screenfull.js - Simple cross browser wrapper for Fullscreen API
Other things which would be nice:

* Correctly extract sets of compatibility (prefixed) properties into a mixin

* Extract and fix prefixed properties missing the unprefixed version and/or other prefixes
you need something you can't 'sensibly' afford, what you think are your options ? You have to settle for something less which is in your price range or if you are lucky you can get 25% discount and get real thing either/or it is mutual agreement so if it works for both of you ...
What DrawSomething Lacks Could Be Fixed Overnight
Research: How People Use Mobile Email
Thanks. I had looked at them a long time ago and they either didn't have or I forgot about multivariate testing.

I would still love a plugin or framework for wordpress that allowed multivariate testing native to the CMS, but at the pricing for VWO it's hard to complain.
Running a successful business isn't about knowledge. It's about skill. The first time I started a business, I thought, "Hell, I understand all the technical stuff, and the rest looks simple. How hard could it be?"

The joke was on me, for sure. It turns out it is very hard. Extremely rewarding, certainly, even if not financially: almost every entrepreneur I know could have made much better money in some bullshit corporate job.

But the notion that if "an entry level programmer [...] sits down and starts creating his own software, he will probably earn much more one year later by himself already"? I'm confident saying that's arrogant youthful idiocy, because that's exactly what I was full of when I started out on my own.
I had a similar thing once. A company ripped off one of our landing page designs, even down to copyrighted material, and kept one of the little flash widgets in the footer. I showed the boss that I could take advantage of that by whiting out their page or replacing their content with whatever message we wanted.I wanted rather mean-spirited and rude messaging since it would appear to come from them. The way I remember it I was doing this by injecting javascript into the page from the SWF.

The boss never let me do it, he decided to sic the lawyers on them instead.
Computer Science vs. Software Engineering

Computer Science courses must maintain a strong focus on theory. An entire CS course can be conducted using Knuth's TAOCP, paper and pens only. The reason being that Computer Science is a highly specialised extension of Applied Mathematics into computing environments. These courses produce researchers. Programming, software development and project management are out-of-scope.

Software Engineering courses are meant to cover the real world application of the Computer Science discipline, Project Management discipline and a broad variety of other topics relating to business and management. These courses produce software developers and software project managers that mostly sit in modern interpretations of the cubicle farm developing the 150th interpretation of a business productivity app.

Experience levels

3-5 years at University is not enough time to gain expertise in the wide range of areas that make someone a brilliant hacker. The best hackers graduating from University tend to have 10 or more solid years of diverse and highly creative experience through hobby involvement (open source development), school experiences and perhaps relevant paid work.

Work experience tends to lack the diversity and creativity required to develop and maintain impressive hacking skills. Changing jobs every 2 years or maintaining a strong open source/hobby interest can counteract this problem.

Suggestions for higher education courses

1. Treat Computer Science in the purest form -- an extended Applied Mathematics course.

2. Encourage students to complete a Computer Science and Software Engineering course together. This approach ensures that students graduate with a decent understanding of essential theory: graphs, sets, complexity, algebra, etc and have a job prospect at the end.

3. Replace toy problems and short assignments in Software Engineering courses with longer real world experiences. Open source projects, student-owned start-ups and short stints of relevant paid work experience are a much better environment for applying theory and practising software project management principles.

4. Make it clear to students that learning should be a life-long goal. Diversity of experiences across completely different fields (example: marine biology, tourism and software development) is of particular importance.
Has Kickstarter Just Gone International?
There is an overarching idea that people want to be numbed into a form of happiness (by using their money, but it could equally be something else). People like a challenge too, am i the only one who doesn't want to be happy all the time?
To OP: Your passive income ideas are pretty grandiose. Those are legit startup ideas. For passive income think: solve the smallest problem possible. Simple SaaS software. A lead-gen blog (I know a guy who puts up reviews of expensive niche products and gets hundreds per month in amazon affiliate fees). Simple mobile apps? An ebook with information that people need? Find something that is ALREADY SELLING and do it better/different.

Also, think cheap marketing. SEO? Or is there a product that you could sell whose use would be inherently social? Passive income is barely a software problem-- you shouldn't be building anything super-complex. It's more a marketing problem. How do you talk about it? How do you find customers? If you can solve THAT on paper before you write a line of code, you're way ahead of most people who take a shot at this.
Doctors don't have infinite sick days, many don't have 30 vacation days (I barely take a week off a year), and most don't have 40 hr work weeks.
Another shrouding tactic is to use the search engine
DuckDuckGo, which distinguishes itself with a “We do not
track or bubble you!” policy.

I'm glad to see DuckDuckGo get some positive publicity!
I believe that common carriers are forced to comply with certain rules, so in a sense yes.
Yes - doesn't really make sense, guessing them meant to say: While the silent updates have little affect on ie6 and 7 usage on XP.

The problem is - many many many offices are stuck with computers running XP (or even older OS) as they are stuck using business software that will not run on later OS's.

We launched a clickable flash video player and found many offices were still running flash 8 or 9. Our dev tried to tell us they would all migrate soon, but the thing is they have never worked in the corporate world, so don't know how slow internal IT teams are to update, for a whole host of reasons.
RegexPlanet: Regular Expression Testing in the Browser
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No, its different there since you enter into a contract with your telephone provider where you agree to pay for them.
Virgin becomes first UK service provider to block The Pirate Bay
Yes, I pay for the Pro version of ActiveInbox http://www.activeinboxhq.com/
At that point isn't it more of a concern that the supposed completely random person driving your car isn't insured? Personal responsibility rules kick in before then.
I think companies forget the concept of compensation and its relation to attracting talent. You don't pay a person necessarily what they deserve because you'll often fall short. You pay what is necessary to secure the talent you require.

I'm from the Canadian Prairies; a lot of our industry here is oil. Rig workers don't require much skill, the job is physically demanding yes but almost anyone can pick it up and do it should they wish to do so. This is a low skilled labour job but its extremely high demand because oil is a massive industry. Guess what? They earn $75,000+ per year in some cases. That's more than entry level programmers who require degrees. I don't think its unfair as a programmer because their jobs are in demand. If you want me to work as a programmer in the area then you better make it worth my while. Shortage of programmers? Attract them with incentives!
:( seems so!
Ah, your problem is you haven't yet bought my book on passive income success.
Thanks for your answer!

It's probably a country specific thing, but I looks like you're usually allowed to have some income that is tax free (up to a limit; ie UK income tax personal allowance is £8,105 for 2012 - as long as you total income is less than £100k).
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I couldn't tell what it is, anybody knows?
Nobody can change the past. Pictures of faces are good in articles about people and events since humans are wired to respond to faces so I don't see that it didn't add anything. Therefore I'm not sure that it was out of line. But it's possible that I'm just tone deaf to to the polite/compassionate thing here.
I agree with you that cute puzzles are annoying and unnecessary, but if you look at the puzzles Stripe has on that page, you'll see that they are anything but cute puzzles. Something like the CTF that they built is an awesome and fun way to see if a developer has the chops to run with the big dogs. These are cool real-world problems. They're not sitting you down in front of a whiteboard and forcing you to complete esoteric puzzles in a limited amount of time, yet they're giving you a few different ideas as to how to impress them. You have all the time in the world and it's up to you to prove it. Stripe, to me, seems like an amazing company with some of the best talent out there. Just my two cents.
Maybe the article was written by somebody who doesn't know the simple fact you've pointed to? Surprisingly, even here such a non-story can become "news."
Apple Mistakenly Reveals iPhone4n Via Domain Registration?
I love the stack exchange sites, but I find they can be very hostile to newcomers.
Joining a paramilitary strike force taking back the woods from pot growers
Money can't buy achievement. Money can't buy competence. Money can't buy respect. Money can't buy love. Money can't buy wisdom. Money can't buy knowledge. Money can't buy creativity.

Of course they don't sell these things in shops, but with money, you can create really good environment for yourself to pursue them.

Oh, and money sure can buy achievement and respect. You can enroll in best schools or hire best teachers with money to get knowledge and competence. It's easier to find love if you have money, for a wealthy man seem to be more attractive for women. I could go on, but the point is, don't downplay the value of money.
Some parody of "Game of thrones"?
Beyond that I have no idea?
> What if you don't know who drove it? (you might have borrowed it to a few friends but don't know who drove it when)

As someone else touched on: in most states of Australia, the owner of the vehicle (as per the registration) is responsible. If you "don't know" who was driving your car it doesn't matter-you are responsible for the vehicle unless you have reported it stolen. Which I think is fair: if you're going to lend your car out, make sure you trust the person driving it.
25 costliest tech screw-ups of all time
"There are plenty of jobs that will both pay you more, require less hours, require less commitment, and will be a very safe career(from outsourcing)."

Tell me more!
It's a play on Game of Thrones...just a fun jest using well-known designers.
The word you're looking for is "motherfucking".
In my CS program they taught debugging, but the majority of what I learned about debugging happened in the lab. Working on the problem sets was a microcosm of debugging that transferred quite well to the professional world, but I suspect not all CS curriculums have as rigorous a programming practice as mine (University of Minnesota, based on the MIT curriculum: scheme, c, java, c++, perl).
Why does it merit thoughtful critique? Sometimes a slap is the correct response.
Who said anything about not checking insurance? I can loan a car out to two or more trusted, verified friends in the same month and then be unable to specify who had it at a specific hour.
I think you might have got to the the main issue.

It is not like there is a cultural pressure to keep the pay for a programmer down, because that would break down quickly if there are a lot of positions not being filled.

I somehow doubt that the value earned by hiring a programmer is much less than elsewhere.

So really that leaves only some other operator that is messing up smooth market operations, and that is the extra costs in hiring.

Your last point is the strongest. Would you hiring a programmer if it was impossible to fire them. If you were a programmer that knew he couldn't be fired, what would your output look like.
Thank you both for helpful answers.
News from the Oil Patch
I totally agree with b. I made approximately $2000 from ad supported sites over a 3 year period. The site wasn't particularly unique (a wiki) and I did very little to contribute to it. I was part of a community, noticed a need for somewhere for people to share information about a particular piece of hardware, and introduced the solution at the right time.

I think with most of these things the ability to make money is largely related to timing and luck. If you get a large community behind you, people will promote your site with very little effort on your part.
From the comments of that Cracked article:

"We had a similar problem at work, but we figured out the IP of the person doing the direct linking and dished out the images they expected to that IP, but the rest of the world saw an ad for our site."

One to consider for next time?
Inkscape is excellent for drawing shapes though. You can add bitmaps and using non-destructive filters too.

Edit: downvotes, huzzah ... it's what I use for website design, only really turn to Gimp for more complex bitmap changes, cutouts and photo touchup. I cant imagine trying to do web UI in Gimp alone, hence the suggestion.
> If that’s what you’re looking for, we recommend Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup, a must-read in our opinion.

There are better books, I think. I've just read Nail It Then Scale It, which is mostly better than Ries' book. Steve Blank's new book also comes to mind, and Running Lean also comes highly recommended from others I know. Ries' book is too generic and leaves you without much of substance once you're done with it.
Well, my friend, money can't buy happiness, but a lack of money will sure as hell buy you a lot of misery. Have you ever experienced struggle paying for rent and basic medical care (and living in pain, or with someone in pain, while scrambling to afford it)?

As the article says "Money allows people to live longer and
healthier lives, to buffer themselves against worry and harm, to have leisure time to spend with friends and family, and to control the nature of their daily activities". These are very much necessary preconditions to be happy.
Not necessarily, this is the heart of the supply-vs-demand concept.

If there are a hundred other people that can do what you do for cheaper? Of course you wont find a job. But if you're the only one? Well after all the companies tell you take a hike, and then find they can't hire anyone else - they'll come back. If the cost of paying you is less than the value you add, and they can't find any cheaper alternatives, it's in their interest to hire you.

As usual, Patio11 is the best voice on this subject - read some of his posts about salary negotiation.
"under no circumstances do I work more than 40 hours a week."

Should we take him at his word or assume that he isn't precise when speaking? Both are bad signs.
passive income in my experience (app development) is constant work. Whether its blogging to keep traffic up, answering customer support requests, to adding features or new revenue-generating products, etc.

I sell a WordPress plugin and I can agree 100% with this. "Passive" income isn't for selling software.
I wouldn't call a group of friends a random person...

Sure, I could ask who was driving but I wouldn't know if they for some reason were lying.

And wait, what? Why should the owner care if the driver is insured? The vehicle is insured by the owner, as required by the law.
(Infographic) Startups exposed: What does the typical startup look like?
Underlying technology of Kinect came from a different research lab.
we still found Eric Ries' very good. I have read 4 steps to Epiphany and Steve's new book is beside my bed waiting to be read!
Hi folks,

First thing, Css2less is hosted on our small server by home, so it's kind of hard to handle the amount of today visits :)

Please be patient if server goes down for a few minutes...!

Second thing, I see a lot of good ideas here ! You should definitely propose them on the Github page so it's not lost :

https://github.com/nicooprat/Css2Less

There's still a lot of work to accomplish as you expected it, so it's also the occasion for me to make a call for ruby gurus who could helps us to add this awesome features :

https://github.com/thomaspierson/libcss2less

Thanks all guys for your feedback, much appreciated.
Nico