skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
cut your living expenses...have a car? sell it for a beater. Have high rent? Move to Bronx or Brooklyn or Queens or Jersey City(if your work is close to penn station). Or if your parents live locally, move in with them(I did this). Switch to a ramen diet....stop going out, stop buying shit. Stretch every penny. You won't believe how little you can live on, if you cut out all the bullshit.

Start working on your contacts...you have 7 months to build connections...so that if shit hits the fan, you have somewhere to go fast.
:(

The link aint working.....
hahahah :)

May be he learned all those ruthless trades of his business in the jail....
The man who invented marketing
Not sure if this is still the case, but McDonalds made more money off real estate than from selling food. Apparently McDonalds franchises don't own the restaurant property they sit on. McDonalds rents it to them -- and that accounts for a significant fraction of McDonalds revenue.

Link: http://www.thegreatloan.com/What_20_the_20_Big_20_Players_20...
but what about various forms of psychological fortitude?

Gahhh, there's so much misinformation here. Most people have this idea of what a poly is thanks to TV and movies.

All I'm going to say is that polys are not fun for people who are insecure, have emotional/anxiety issues, or go in with the mindset that they have to "beat the test" or "outsmart the examiner". It's not a measure of psychological fortitude at all, and anyone who views the test as such will be extremely stressed out by it all.

The only legitimate reasons polys are stressful is because they waste half your day, coop you up in a room and tell you to stay as still as possible for most of the 4 hours. That's not really anybody's idea of fun. For the majority of people who don't let all the silly worries get to their head, you go in, chill out, tell the truth, and leave.
I disagree with your premise that it's absolutism. Rand called herself a capitalist and Atlas Shrugged is simply Rand's argument about the morality of capitalism.

Notably, Atlas Shrugged is more of a treatise against crony capitalism than it is against socialism.
Not to mention sponsoring future Crunchies and other Techcrunch events.
They were probably pretty clear about the fact that this guy is NOT supposed to discuss what happens in a government poly especially on a public forum. There are reasons beyond his career to want to keep that information close. People are constantly trying to beat our system and the more they know about it, the easier it is. If this guy is serious about pursuing a career in the intel world he should respect the rules they lay down. They are bureaucratic and often silly, but they have reasons for them beyond what a young hacker can understand. This guy has shown that he is not responsible or mature enough to handle classified material.
Atlas Wanked: From Fiction to Fraud in 52 Years
Are you sure you are not white? Or at least,...antipc?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=411138

And you and I both know who he really is, don't we, longtimer?

[EDIT: Rechecked your facebook page. Yep, still white.]
My advice is based on my assessment that the economy is at the beginning of a long and deep "downturn" (call it what you will). I don't think people should completely give up on coding or startups. But some of them should become side projects.

How is he supposed to get funding? I am guessing he won't get funding no matter where he is located. Yes, that's a wild guess since I know nothing about his startup. But its the best guess I have.

I do agree with PG's "location matters" advice. But it is also advice based on history. The world is changing and the historical value of certain locations might change with it.
Read it very carefully. This is USA in the future. 800 bilion bail-out - printed, over 1 trillion budget deficit - printed, another 800 billion bail out - printed. Only 5% of all the US dollars ever created is in circulation in the US. Rest of them are deposited in banks of the rest of the world as I.O.U.s... treasuries (us gov debt) that was bought by foreigners. The very moment foreigners realize that Treasuries have negative R.O.I. - as it will become true once treasuries bubble bursts and Fed starts printing to pay them off... well, this is how the whole Communistic Block collapsed in matter of months - hyperinflation due to inability of repaying debts. The exactly same thing will happen with the USA. Nation with no production, no savings and the biggest debt in the history of the man-kind... this country is going bankrupt. Kaput!
Wow. That doesn't sound like it has much to do with reading, specifically. Frankly, it's more like saying "nearly 25% of Americans are well below average intellectually", which doesn't even seem very remarkable if the top of the curve isn't especially flat.
I get the impression a lot of the emigration is pretty permanent. Which means they may never recover, in the sense of recovering the lead they formerly held over other countries in the region.
snap. how long do i have to run my macbook for (say 50% cpu) to boil a pot of tea?
Depends what kind of programming you do, but the standard method is consulting. There are a lot of people and companies with projects they need implemented, and will pay by the hour for someone to build it.
Libertarians and Objectivists are so good at being half-right. Yes, public money should not be used to help mediocre businesses, but the way to prevent that from having to happen is to impose restrictions on company market share in certain industries (Banking, specifically) to make sure that no one is 'too big to fail'. Regulation is a necessary component of any business environment. Businesses need to either follow strict regulations or be limited by size and investors such that their failure would not be acceptable.
I'm worried about that 1-in-20 (?) chance that we don't manage to line up funding in time

You should be worried -- and if I were you I'd re-evaluate your odds. My guess is that a startup which would print money would still have more than a 1-in-20 chance of failing to get funding at the moment.

Assuming you definitely want to continue with this startup (and think about that carefully -- sometimes there's a reason why startups don't get funded), I recommend doing everything you can to lower your costs. Yes, including moving out of NYC: While gravitycop makes a good point about location being important for getting funding, it sounds like you're not the person who is going after the funding right now (based on the comment about having 'no control')... and while VCs care where a company is based, they aren't going to care much if a few employees live in the suburbs.
I may have something for you here in NYC. Shoot me an email.
Here's one translation, circa 1901: http://bit.ly/z30d
not so surprising, but an interesting comparison:

> "A recent report by Gartner, the industry analysts, said the global IT industry generated as much greenhouse gas as the world’s airlines - about 2% of global CO2 emissions."

also, to answer my other question:

> opportunity cost is an interesting point. kind of connects with the 'living in space' submission, not that space can support the life we can't support on earth.

> "Wissner-Gross has also calculated the CO2 emissions caused by individual use of the internet. His research indicates that viewing a simple web page generates about 0.02g of CO2 per second. This rises tenfold to about 0.2g of CO2 a second when viewing a website with complex images, animations or videos.

> "A separate estimate from John Buckley, managing director of carbonfootprint.com, a British environmental consultancy, puts the CO2 emissions of a Google search at between 1g and 10g, depending on whether you have to start your PC or not. Simply running a PC generates between 40g and 80g per hour, he says. of CO2 Chris Goodall, author of Ten Technologies to Save the Planet, estimates the carbon emissions of a Google search at 7g to 10g (assuming 15 minutes’ computer use). "
We could probably telecommute from LEO, but anything further out starts to become annoying if you need anything in real time.

There is excessive latency with satellite internet, which uses GEO satellites. However, satellite internet requires 4 hops. Telecommuting from GEO only requires 2 hops = half the latency. ~23,000 miles x 2 = 46,000 miles. 46,000 miles / 186,000 miles/second = 247 milliseconds of latency (about a quarter of a second).
The Rise and Fall of Chinese Gold Farmers Industry
Interesting look inside the Chinese gold farmer industry and how it all began (from Wired Magazine).
Ask HN: Computing/Biology Resources?
I never took the opportunity to learn much biology in college, but now as I see computing and biology having increasing impact on each other, I'd love to learn more biology. Anyone have preferences on a good freshman-level biology overview text? Upper-division/graduate level molecular bio? Any potential ideas for opportunites to use programming, data mining, and algorithms experience to break into a hybrid career?
Yah right,

Say you are boiling .5 liter of water, or 500 grams of water. It takes 1 calorie to raise 1g of water 1 degree. So 20 degrees to 100 * 500 g = 40,000 calories = .05 kW/h * 14c per kW/h = .7 cents.

Can it really cost google .7 cents to do a search? I don't see how that can possibly be. I can't find hard data on how many searches are done on google, but it's about 1 to 2 billion per day. 1.5 billion * .7 cents = $1 billion per DAY - there is simply no way google is spending $300 billion for energy.

Even if you assume they are paying a lot less per kW/H it still makes no sense.

And if he is including the cost of my computer in his numbers (as he seems to imply, but doesn't say), then that's simply dishonest.

Edit: OOPS! Big messup on the final bit of math :( OK, I guess it's a lot more reasonable now. It's ~$3 billion per year, not 300. That's still a lot, but at least possible.

Any chance any of their financials with the SEC could shed light on how much they pay for energy?
Fair, but maybe some class renames wouldn't be a bad idea for the v2 to v3 switch over. I don't know what the priorities are or what the bar is for changes that make the cut, so don't quote me on this :-)
Ok, let's put it this way, would you want the playbook for your favorite football team to be public? You may be a fan, and you may be paying for the team but you'll loose if their secrets become public. The same goes for the intel world. Part of being on that team is keeping the playbook to yourself.
TrueMotion's amazing 3D game controller makes the Wii look like a toy
Yes. GAE is hardly Django. It's still a cognitive leap from PHP to MVC, but I recommend doing it outside of GAE.
Mark Twain's "Roughing It" is available here: http://www.mtwain.com/Roughing_It/index.html
If your current startup is 5-7 months away from a funding event (which may get less and less likely as the recession grinds on), consider that you may just be in the wrong startup: 3 months could be enough time to jump start something else that could actually be cash flow positive.

The standard answer, to consult, is probably the right one, and you are being wildly pessimistic about your chances of finding a sustaining consulting project. But once you start down that road, your current startup will suffer for it.
This is a well known thing and pretty much everybody on HN is probably aware of this.
I really enjoyed Guyton:

http://www.amazon.com/Textbook-Medical-Physiology-Arthur-Guy...

I wasn't a biology major, but from what I understand, this is a standard in the field.
What will you do after 5-7 months? If your money did actually run out what would you do?

Whatever that is - do it now, not in 5-7 months.

For example: say you'd stop paying rent, and get evicted, where would you go? Whereever that is - go there now. What else would you stop paying for? Phone? Cable? Pretend you have no money, and act that way.

As a side suggestion to where to live, see if you can live in the startups building (do they have an office they can give you?), and put your stuff in storage.
Cool! I am in.
Well, the marginal environmental cost of me doing another Google search is pretty close to zero -- those servers are already running anyway.

How many requests/sec per server do you think Google handles? Then we can try to guess how many additional queries we would need to make for them to buy an additional server (causing higher power consumption).
war is the broken window fallacy writ large.
You could have written your CGI scripts in Tcl too --- it was also dynamic, interpreted, and widely available. But Perl was better.
Well, given that the parent comment is "Why don't you find a place where you don't have to pay taxes? Would it be as nice to live in as the US?", it seems a tad disingenuous to use people who don't pay taxes in a country where everyone else does as an example...they are still recieving the benefits (if any) of taxation.
...at least now they are.
Could 2009 finally be … http://www.google.com/search?q=%22year+of+the+linux+desktop%... ??
Do you mean, "was not as unambiguous"?
Take a deep breath and relax. You've chosen to be an entrepreneur because you can't stand working in the 9-5 slave trade. Good choice. You are taking a big risk. It's exciting, it's scary, it makes you feel alive! What a great feeling.

Let's take a worst case scenario. The company fails, you lose your apartment and car and are unemployed with no money. What then?

Well, you have a million choices. You are young, smart and live in America. You wake up the next morning at your parents house and go get a job at Home Depot or 7-11 to make ends meet (or back to wall street if you can stomach it), you start saving and planning your next venture and work your way from there. You've gained valuable experience and you are living your dream, something that most people never do.

In the mean time, enjoy yourself. Feel the fear, which you will, and forge ahead. In your spare time keep working on improving your skills. Listen to CDs by Anthony Robbins for encouragement and strength. It sounds like you are doing great and remember, the bigger the risk, the bigger the reward. Don't fear failure, that's just part of the ride.
Is it just me, or is a lot more fluff getting to the front page of Hacker News these days?
I'm not interested in "learning how to beat the test". I'm interested in understanding the experience of an interrogation, from both the perspective of the interrogator and the person being questioned. And I'm wondering if a form of role play would be a feasible way of exploring that experience, without going to the trouble or risk of committing a crime or becoming a police detective.

There are clearly lots of aspects of interrogation that are difficult in uninteresting ways, like sitting still for many hours. But the reason TV/movie interrogations are so intriguing to watch (and, I imagine, to act) is that they represent an unusual and intense interaction between people. People who are trying to manipulate each other in real time in pursuit of some valuable information, and willing to break a lot of normal social boundaries in that pursuit.

That certainly sounds like it entails some interesting psychological challenges. If I think I'm secure, relatively free of anxiety, and willing to engage in those challenges, maybe it would be a revealing and worthwhile endeavor?
ITable - Amazing new multi-touch table that's better than Surface
Dijkstra also used to talk about how computing science was a particularly difficult branch of mathematics, basically for the same reason that Vanier is asserting; he recommended that only particularly good mathematicians should switch to computing science, leaving the mediocre mathematicians to what they were already doing.
If only Autodesk products ran on Linux! (I think they made a pact with MS years ago to be exclusive on MS though)
great... another game, another distraction... but looks fun :-)
I can't seem to locate a source now, but a few years ago I recall reading that McDonald's was either the #1 or #2 land owner in the world. The other? The Catholic Church.
Yes. But what amused me wat the others who were also put in jail. Didn't know about them.
Based on the fact that we haven't seen any aliens, and assuming that we're not the first intelligent species in the universe for roughly the same reason I assume I'm not the first person to have some bright idea for a web app, I'm going to guess no, or at least that it's not cost effective. Otherwise we'd probably have seen von Neumann probes or something like that by now (or more likely, we wouldn't be here).
The Wii is a toy
It's likely he doesn't have a car, most New Yorkers don't. I'd also recommend switching to a fruits and vegetables diet, instead of ramen. There are enough dedicated fruit stores in New York that make fruits and vegetables cheaper and healthier than ramen. In New York, an example of this kind of store would be "Three Guys From Brooklyn", or "Circus Fruits". With these sorts of stores you can easily bring your food expenses below $60 a month while maintaining a healthy diet.
Apparently, it's just you. PG comes around every once in a while when people ask this and says that the spam filters (or whatever they are) he trained on the original HN data set haven't started drifting toward the positive yet.
Sometimes you just Gotta laugh - The Richter Scales
As seen on TechCrunch...
this is why HN should allow people one down vote each week, or month.
The Federal Fair Housing Act (which you linked to) isn't meant to force bad loans, but that is an inevitable consequence. Briefly, the Act has provisions such as the following (http://www.hud.gov/offices/fheo/lending/index.cfm):

The Fair Housing Act makes it unlawful to engage in the following practices based on race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status or handicap (disability):

- Refuse to make a mortgage loan
- Refuse to provide information regarding loans
- Impose different terms or conditions on a loan, such as different interest rates, points, or fees
- Discriminate in appraising property
- Refuse to purchase a loan or set different terms or conditions for purchasing a loan

The problem is that creditworthiness is correlated with some of the forbidden factors. For example, a bank denying loans to applicants with low incomes will, as a side-effect, disproportionately deny loans to African-American applicants, simply because African Americans have lower incomes on average than other ethnic groups. In order to avoid penalties for discrimination, banks must therefore lend to people whose credit doesn't justify the loan. (Of course, this was never the intent of the Act, but it's called the Law of Unintended Consequences for a reason.)
Hawaii has nice weather and beaches. What does Earth orbit have?
I too want to be in. Have been hanging around in chapter 2 for a very long time. But don't want to start on a new thing now. Have been working on many things lately and want to finish it off.
I can't find hard data on how many searches are done on google

It's hinted in the article.

with more than 200m internet searches estimated globally daily

Google has an 81% market share. Let's call it 170 million searches per day. 49 grams of CO2 are released per kWh. http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?q=Alex+Wissner-Gross... The article said that Google releases 7 grams per search, so that would be 1/7th of a kWh ~= 0.14 kWh.

Multiplying that by 170m searches/day = 24m kWh/day. At $0.10/kWh, that would be $2.4 million/day, or $886 million/year.

You figured $1 billion/day, but, besides using different assumptions, you incorrectly calculated 1.5 billion searches/day * .7 cents/search/day. It actually equals only $10.5 million/day.

[EDIT] walterk beat me by a minute to that final math correction.
Your math is a bit off.

1.5 billion * .7 cents = 1 billion cents not 1 billion dollars.
While the possibilities are definitely interesting, ultimately I think this will be not much more than a gimmicky toy - kind of like VR Helmets for PC's.
Ted Nelson was a part of the orthodoxy in proscribing rich tightly-bound hypertext. There were dozens of projects, but none of them were anything but sandboxes at best.

The web succeded only because it was nothing like Xanadu, and Ted still can't get over that.

Self-contained systems like wikis would be a great place for rich Xanadu-like features, but MediaWiki hopelessly squandered that possibility. There are a few systems that approach it (tiddlywiki does some cool shit), but for most people Wikipedia's decrepit software has grounded their conception of what wikis can be in mediocrity.
As long as we are debating the quality of submissions...

I have seen much worse posted on here. I mean, I guess I could have submitted a post about how long I wear my contact lenses or something...not my style though.
I learned from the third edition of this textbook, and it was excellent; maybe others can confirm this for the most recent edition:

Molecular Biology of the Cell - Fifth Edition
http://www.garlandscience.com/textbooks/0815341059.asp

You can get a feel for lots of textbooks here, by searching within them for things you're interested in:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=books
Ask HN: Musicians?
What instrument(s) do you play, and what's your level of involvement?

The Jargon File's entry on music (http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/M/music.html) suggests that music is a "common extracurricular" among hackers. Is this still true?
Relax. I have no problem living in New York on $3K/month gross pay. That's 36K/year. Since you are working at this startup for essentially free, you should be able to convince them that you actually can only afford to work there 3-4 days/week as opposed to 5-7 which is what you are probably doing right now. If you free up some time, you will be able to find some temporary/part-time consulting work doing database admin and website updates. Meeting people that need this type of work need is relatively easy - craigslist, twitter, meetup, etc. as other posters have indicated. The only thing that you might compromise on is how much sleep you are getting, but from the sound of it, that's not a major issue for you right now.
I have played violin since I was very young, and more recently viola. I've been interested recently in electric violin/viola, but I haven't gotten to try them yet.
I've had a few dropped calls (the display on my iPhone froze, so I suspect something on the phone had crashed), I've had it not pick up calls (unlock to answer the phone -> the phone won't unlock) and calls where I can hear the other party but they can't hear me.

iPhone: great internet device, questionable phone.
The product from this company that is analogous to Surface is cheaper by about 2500 but how is it better if it does not even have an SDK yet?
Live Gaza Cam - They are being bombed right now (slow load, be patient)
Let me get this straight - the company that wants me to run my business on their infrastructure, postpones the introduction of their most important product due to lack of infrastructure?

Yeah, I think I'll pass on that.
Supercomputers and clusters are pretty different. For commercial applications, it's much more common to form clusters out of many commodity parts. Any large and complicated web site probably has clusters backing it up. Things like web search, mapping websites, anything hosting a large amount of data like Youtube or Flickr. In fact basically anything that comes from Yahoo, Amazon, Google, etc probably runs on a cluster.

Open source cluster software seems a lot less common than other open source stuff... the problem is, it takes a lot of work to keep a cluster running, and that work ends up being very specific to the details of cluster setup. It's too bad there aren't clusters available in general for people to play with, although with things like the Amazon services you can get close.
Ask HN: Has Anyone Installed Pligg? 
Thoughts? How hard to install for a non-engineer with some basic coding ability?
Poetically Version Controlled: Go Git
http://xkcd.com/359/