skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The reason this comment is so striking for HN is that most people here who would describe themselves as "motivated by money" don't foresee themselves having to do gruntwork such as door-to-door sales, giving the customer what will really appeal to them, to earn that money. They think that it will be easy and hassle-free, somehow.

It's like Puritan Work Ethic porn.

edit: Also, he passed over the easy money (e.g. violating his ethics/the law) which got him fired to begin with.
One thought: fap fap fap.
Methinks somebody has spent too much time reading Shadowrun novelizations.
London's Assistant Commissioner of Police
Assistant Commissioner of Police , usually just Assistant Commissioner (AC), is the third highest rank in London's Metropolitan Police, ranking below Deputy Commissioner and above Deputy Assistant Commissioner.
Dumb? It looks like a 4th grader's homework assignment to identify the 5 regions of the US and he clearly got an F.
Mine are really similar:

- Get Healthier (not just losing weight, but eating better and drinking less soda/sugar drinks)

- Read the piles of books on my desk

- Start blogging

- Learn a new programming language (C/C++/Objective-C, and the OpenGL library)

- Make a decent income online where afford to buy a brand new Macbook Pro without putting it on a card I can't afford to repay...

— Start a totally bootstrapped company
He was successful despite not selling out his principles and succumbing to the motivation of money.
California-based Pastel Bar Furniture
Picking Barstools and other Bar Furniture allows you to create an space that invites your friends and relatives to relax and stay a little while longer. Create a space that reflects your personality and sets the mood you want.
Is there a Mac equivalent for this available? I'd love to get my hands on one. uControl used to have it, but then it was removed because it was threatened with patent infringement. http://www.gnufoo.org/ucontrol/
Remember peeps, good goals are measurable and specific.
Lost World discovered (thanks to Google Earth)
Watch Movies and TV on your iPhone for Free | TechJaws
Plus, don't you pick up things more quickly in programming the longer you are in?
Never heard of HD Net or Microsolutions either (and I'm fairly sure Cuban didn't create the Dallas Mavericks). I'd rather be the guy/gal who created one well loved household name - say lastminute.com - than who made a mint on a lot of not well known known companies.
I really loved this post.

It brings out one of the obvious truths in economics or business if you will.

Customers are not that interested in paying you to help you out. They are interested in getting what they want. Money is just a reward for getting what they want.

Too many businesses focus on getting paid, they lose track of why customers are there in the first place.
Why don't people get offended by usage of a term instead of the term itself?
"To have and to hold, from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part."

I'm from Russia. Don't know about y'all, I wouldn't want to marry someone with a different attitude.
Seems like you have misread. It's 1996 not 1986 :)

But the 1990s were the most intense with OSes getting better GUIs and computers getting cheaper (actually getting more personal) :)
It would be OK if Russia gets Alaska, as long as they take Palin too.
1024x600. Hooray second gen Netbooks!
The WSJ is officially yellow journalism.

This map is a real trip. South Carolina splitting from Georgia? Mexico owning New Mexico but not Arizona? If he's going to prop up ridiculous fantasies, at least he could try harder.

What pains the the Russians to no end is that the very idea of the nation state is disentigrating in the US, Europe, and South America. Only their backward, so-called "democracy" and a handful of nations in east Asia take it very seriously anymore, while the concept is used to pit regions against one another in Africa (see the US interference in Ethiopia and Somalia for a good case study). Make no mistake, "India vs. Pakistan" and "Iran vs. the Middle East" are culture wars with borders providing the necessary tension.
1. Finish writing my current desktop app

2. Incorporate (probably as an LLC)

3. Sell copies of said app to people in exchange for money.

4. Relax more.

5. Exercise more.

6. Visit more places and people.

7. If steps 1-3 work, buy Wil Shipley a drink!

8. Spend next xmas in Munich.
Good point. Don't really have room for anyone else to work here though, unfortunately, so if I add anyone then an office is basically a necessity. I do agree with what you're saying, though.
For those who don't understand the joke, Herring means Computer Resolution.

I tried to figure out what he means for at least 5 seconds and I admitted that I laughed.
Why wait until the new year?

Why not push away from the keyboard right now and go spend 15 minutes on something that will move you closer to one of your goals?

You'll feel a lot better, and you'll be 3 days ahead of the game. :)
Note to self re HN:

* dhh is actually DHH

* rms is not actually RMS
HD Net was the first all high definition television network, and is what helped spur all the mainstream networks (due to competition and audience response) to go HD. Cuban was on the HD bandwagon when it was empty. Haha he certainly didn't invent the Mavericks, but he completely transformed them & more importantly, made them a contender - much to the admiration of hundreds of thousands of Dallas Mavericks fans.

MicroSolutions was bought by CompuServe who you may or may not be familiar with. Have you heard the movies titled: The Smartest Guys in The Room or Good Night, and Good Luck? He was behind them.

I certainly get what you're saying, it's just that sometimes Cuban is wrongly portrayed as a one-trick pony. Also of note, I had never heard of lastminute.com until today. And even if i had, I doubt I'd know the person behind it.
10,000 hours
I'm curious about what exactly "get out" means. Can anyone elaborate?
Aren't they shutting down the analog TV network in the US and re-using the spectrum elsewhere, per the rest of the world? And aren't most networks happy with more channels and more chances to grab ad-revenue? Surely that would spurn the adoption of HD more than a particular competitor being first of the boat.

But I have heard of Good Night, and Good Luck, and perhaps the other film, if you mean the Enron documentary (The Smartest Guys in the Room). Those, and reinventing a sports team would be achievements of which I would be very proud.
Ask HN: Recommend a CMS for a Review Site?
I am using Wordpress for a Movie Review site, it has been online for almost a year and I was hoping to make some changes that will make it more attractive/useful to my audience. Is there any CMS that has been specifically designed for a Review site? I am looking for something that is easy to use and which enables me to display reviews, photos and related news items for a particular Movie.
Thanks.
The Morrison’s profit process 
The Profit Process a key to build wealth. Morrison’s system increases the profitability way for CEOs to discover the successive value of their businesses.
Well, I think it would be less controversial to grow organs in pigs or just on their own. If you grow an actual human, he will probably want a say in the matter.
Top 10 Data Center Stories of 2008
Collection Organizer Software
The Clash of Civilizations?
Digital broadcast has a shorter range and is more finicky. If an analog signal is not the clearest, you just see or hear a slight interference, but you can still follow the program continuously. I watch the digital broadcast now, and it is common for it to drop out when I move around the room. The digital mandate was a ploy for the cable providers to grab more market share.

But I'll be glad when the freed up bandwidth can be used for internet.
quote:
But it's his bleak forecast for the U.S. that is music to the ears of the Kremlin, which in recent years has blamed Washington for everything from instability in the Middle East to the global financial crisis.
EOQ

I agree that the article is more 'fun' than 'news', but is the WSJ implying in the sentence above that USA has nothing to see with the mentioned issues?
Top underreported tech stories of 2008
Excellent point. I'd rather work all day for myself... actually, I do that now - and I wouldn't change it(unless I had no choice) for some 9-5'er. :)
What future is in store for Microsoft? Five paths the software giant may take
Are operating systems doomed?
More details of Sony's new Vaio laptop revealed
There are surveys for these kind of things http://www.theacsi.org/ seems to not work, but you can read http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10019711-37.html for example.

"The ACSI scores measure a consumer's overall satisfaction with a company, which includes product quality, value, customer service, and essentially anything else that impresses or annoys a customer of a particular company. Apple scored an 85 on the index, its highest score ever and a full ten points higher than second place finisher Dell."
DIY net gun
Best Data Visualization Projects of the Year
Make any money off that?

http://www.cafepress.com/tclwear

I've got something like 10$ of profits off that over the last four years. Granted, it was easy to set up, but 10$ is pretty pathetic.
Gah. :) But the going's been good since 1996 too.
Some things get easier, but that particular hill is as high and as steep as you want it to be.

One thing that is true is that you need at least 10 years of full-time experience to become competent at the design and architecture of large systems.
Ask HN:Your best 2008 tip
Share the best tip you learn in 2008.

Mine is from Charles Atlas book, shower like this: with cold water in the morning no need to use soap or shampoo, letting the cold water hit you between your legs since you have a lot of nerves there. At night just before sleep have a regular shower with warm water and soap and shampoo.This will help you sleep better at nights and relax in the mornings.
The move to shut down analog TV was made well after the networks had already began deploying it. Initially, there was actually a big opposition to HD TV (very costly, have to using separate cables, etc) that many people forget. And yes I meant the Enron documentary; I added an "s".
A lot of people don't get this. When I was failing at running a small business in semi-rural Alabama, nearly everyone around me told me I should just get a job at walmart or a convenience store, even though that wouldn't have been enough to live on. For many people, a job seems to be something of a talisman, rather than a source of a certain amount of money.
101. Write a stupid list with no original ideas and post it on News.YC.

Quoth the article:

# Do a press release.
# Direct (snail) mail.
# Run ads in print magazines.
# Improve the usability of your software.
# Fix bugs in your software.

Seriously?
I'm well into my 30s as well and I am currently learning faster than ever. At some point I went from believing that I knew everything about programming to realizing that I actually know almost nothing. That's when the real learning process begins.
so if he had said 'whiny emo boys' that would have also been sexist right?

I guess he should have stuck with 'whiny emo carbon-based lifeforms'
I don't do new years resolutions, and it has been my policy since I was a kid.

My rationale: if you want to change your life or do something, don't procrastinate - start right then. Putting an arbitrary date on things you want to do never made sense to me. You just have to write it down and then follow through.
I am looking for some community action for scrapy. It looks useful for a project I'm working on currently using BeautifulSoup but not digging the sluggish performance.

I am having trouble resolving the docs to the code. Is there an IRC, mailing list or forum?
"'lame' is at worst light namecalling (and at best it is just funny jabbing; verbal teasing is a fine part of socializing)."

So... the handicapped are fair game, but certain other groups shouldn't ever be used as pejoratives? :) Lots of words we use to show disapproval used to be merely descriptive, but became slurs, like "moron"; that might be a reason not to use them, for you, but at least be consistent.
I have a similar experience. Every mac I've had has died (basically my last 4 computers). 2 screen deaths, one overheat, and one coffee incident.

I blame all of these on myself. Even paying 3k for a top of the line laptop, I really dont expect the computer to last more than 1.5 years at the way I use the computer. Pounding away on the computer for 60 hours a week on average, and working out of lots of coffee shops, I'm hardly the typical use case for a computer user.

Just like a consumer coffee machine cant be expected to stay functional for long if it were in use in a restaurant, I dont expect my consumer laptop to work for the same time period as an average consumer would.

However, if you're using a laptop for commercial purposes, and at such a high capacity, you should probably expect to be investing at least yearly in your equipment.
There are themes of what you're looking for in http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html
I'm certainly going to try to make an OS X equivalent. I just need to haul my ass to the other computer :-)
The 4 Types Of Exits: IPO
For some reason ex-Sovient Union population still thinks US is out to get them.

I know because I grew up there and still talk to old friends.

Wake up, Cold War ended decades ago and we live in a global economy now. No matter what you see in movies you don't know anything about this country. You need to live here for at least, I would say, 3 years to understand it.

The article is silly.
Last I checked, I got some support tickets for the iPhone whenever I paid my $99. Why don't use use one of them to ask?
"the very idea of the nation state is disentigrating in the US, Europe, and South America."

I'd love for that to be so, but it sounds like wish-fulfillment, to me. Care to provide links to more about that?
Wanted: More science and math teachers in the US
Will Work for Praise: The Web's Free-Labor Economy
I greatly prefer shopping online for those things I'm just going to buy all the time anyway (groceries, etc), but strongly prefer shopping in person for things that I buy rarely, or when I'm shopping to have fun.
Important and evocative patent drawings of electronic games from the 60s, 70s, and 80s
I agree, neither would I.

But you have to consider the other perspective; they have 2 kids to support and his business hasn't received any custom for weeks. I think the statement "get a job or leave" is more of a generic "something has to change" statement not something completely literal.
Hello world in Kawa Scheme for Android
Scene stealer: The aXXo files
Musicians Radio - Radio for musicians, by musicians
Musicians Radio is a weekly show that goes behind-the-scenes with in-depth podcast interviews, features and stories about your favorite musicians.
http://www.musiciansradio.com/
do you not believe that derogatory words exist?

maybe you see no reason to be angered or annoyed when someone calls you names, but handling words maturely does not mean that you haven't been insulted.

let's suppose there is an objective truth out there. some people are lame and some people are not. calling someone "lame" who is not lame is wrong as in false. stereotypes allow for such falsehoods.

the world is also more complicated than this simple logic. beyond (mythical) objective truth are the social interactions and even economic, political and medical disparities that are wrong and result from seeing only one's own perspective and whatever culture/habits/stereotypes we end up believing.

in the case of "whining like emo girls" the goal was likely entertainment. was that worth the small but nonetheless derogatory slight against emo girls* ? we call our own shots.

the rest of the article is somewhat angsty and desperate itself. joel tends towards entertainment and one-sidedness rather than well spoken and well thought out ideas. that's fine. i'm standing by my argument out of some larger principle.

* funny, but "girls" probably means "non-macho guys".

[edit: fixed formatting so footnote didn't italicize everything]
"Just looking for something that will have the best chance of keeping steady employment until retirement (in my early 30s now)"

That's a pretty lame depressing question to ask though. IMHO he should try and find some ounce of passion in himself, and find something he enjoys, or ideally loves.
Separate from the collective mind of Americans is the status of the US Dollar as a "reserve currency", i.e. one that people are happy to hold in times of trouble. If that goes then, given the USA is bankrupt, it'll be in trouble. It's only because it's a reserve currency that the USA can afford to chuck bills from helicopters; elsewhere, doing that has caused the currency to fall dramatically, e.g. that idiot Gordon Brown in the UK.

China holds quite a few dollars and is wary of the USA's plans on trying to spend its way out of this recession in case their value slumps. There's an argument that all these rescue plans are just prolonging the inevitable, just as the boom was stretched by Greenspan's actions making it a huge bust to mirror the huge boom. What's needed is a hard crash in asset prices, houses, stocks, commodities, etc., until buyers are convinced that a hard bottom has been found. Then they'll be interested in buying again. And companies going to the wall in that time is a good thing; it culls the weak. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction

There's still worried talk of deflation. I think they're over concerned. There's some things I must buy, even if they're a bit cheaper tomorrow, e.g. food, and if my TV breaks, I'll replace it. By over-compensating for fear of deflation, we're facing high double-digit inflation in a year or so.

Reminds me of that old matra: For deflation, hold cash. For inflation, hold gold. For hyper-inflation, hold guns.
[Ask YC] - Good company mottos?
What are good motto/taglines(possibly offbeat) which you like in a company. One I liked recently was "Make Mistakes"

http://www.truesparrow.com/joinus-user-experience-designer
Ask HN: Hiring a contractor.
I'm currently inundated with work, and I'm looking to hire a part-time contractor.

What things do I need to do, legal and otherwise, to protect me and my work, and my clients? The current position is a non-technical one, with software testing, and HTML or administrative type work being included.
Well, I always liked "Don't be evil" but since it was never really clearly defined, it wasn't as good as it could have been.
The site seems to be choking; you can catch a syndicated copy over on http://scheme.dk/planet/.

Neat stuff!
More often abbreviated TAOCP. But you're right; programmer culture recognizes acronyms like this and SICP, even if they fall under Mark Twain's classic definition: "Books that everyone wants to have read, but nobody wants to read."

http://www.google.com/search?q=taocp+site%3Anews.ycombinator... is one good way to compile a list of references with similar cachet.
TyphoGraphic: Authoring CSS Transform Animations for iPhone Declaratively
Apart from the second to last mine are almost identical :)

- Get Healthy (there is even a gym at work.. which is a measure of my laziness :()

- Read the backlog of books & journals

- Learn a new language (Japanese I think)

- Learn a new programming language (Probably Ruby)

- Start blogging again

- Actually get my company off the ground to the point I can quit my day job

:)
>> "some people are lame and some people are not. calling someone "lame" who is not lame is wrong as in false. stereotypes allow for such falsehoods."

It's false,..... which makes it funny....
Next you'll be analyzing why drag queens are funny :/

I don't believe that derogatory words exist, no. I get offended by actions, not words. It's also in the context. If someone calls me a "crazy brain dead retard" that's fine if I already know them, but if it's a stranger, I'd think them rude. I wouldn't be offended though... just surprised.
Thanks for the article, we haven't had any climate change denial for almost two weeks now.
Oh yeah, forgot one:

— Get dressed most days; when working from home, its so easy not to get dressed until the
late afternoon or even not at all, but doing so limits my productivity substantially!
This is why you hire a professional.
Ask this girl out.
US Army & ASU Create Flexible Displays
I tend to think the same way and will add that NYRs are similarly useless in that many peoples goals change during the course of the year. This leaves them stuck feeling guilty about not accomplishing a bunch of stuff on a list that they don't want to do anymore.
I believe that in an interview (http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=1567 , maybe), Zuckerberg said that they were profitable very early on, but decided to go for more growth.
"We do stuff instead of screwing around thinking up mottos" ?:-)
This is true... if you make it true.

My time as a consultant included the most challenging stuff I've probably worked on; but it was also some of the most rewarding work I've done. Consulting is a pretty vast world; you can be a glorified contractor or you can go help companies actually solve some of their deep problems. If you have a good customer-base, you can be up to your ears in interesting work and get paid incredibly well for it.

The downside is that you're a bit of a ronin, and you have to be ruthless with the customers you keep as well as the new customers you bring on.

I don't think I have the energy to do it full time any more, because it is incredibly time consuming; but I am definitely glad I did it for as long as I did.
Apple's Tipping Point: Macs for the Masses
You're jumping to a conclusion. I think its fair to say that the the point the anti-"we are all equal" camp is trying to make is that men have higer representation on the ends of the bell curve. People at both ends (the truly brilliant and truly unable) of the bell curve are largely skewed towards men. Not entirely, but highly disproportionately. This is a perfectly viable explanation for the lack of female leaders in most any field. And freedom of academic choice and opportunities for several decades now, at least in the west, hasn't seemed to change the result, which would seem to reinforce this theory, whereas it would seem to discount the environment argument, in my opinion.

I don't think any of us have asserted that women can't be brilliant and compete head to head with men, but if you are looking at any field of expertise, with equal numbers of male and female participants, the top one to five percent of people will almost always be disproportionately men, consistently across fields, over time, and it seems to continue despite changing social and cultural norms.

I think the comment above calls into question the merit of your friends achievement, which will always be the result of affirmative action programs. It is well documented that affirmative action often (but not always) results in lesser skilled candidates from preferred disadvantaged classes (race, gender, etc) earning admission or appointments.
Wasn't this a Choose Your Own Adventure novel in the 80s?
So you've inspired my New Years Resolution - no more New Years Resolutions. ;-)
I'm French and I know Todd, the title sounds correct to me. Todd predicted the collapse of USSR (when it was a minority position among intellectuals), and it has been several years he is "predicting" the collapse of the U.S (way before the current crisis). His main prediction is the collapse of the U.S dollar.

A very important thing to note is that he believes the U.S is gone as the sole superpower. What he really means by collapse is about the same fate that endured the British Empire.
> The Founding Fathers did not approve of expeditionary warfare.

I don't know that that's necessarily the case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Barbary_War