skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Flash provides a PDF viewer component. I'd like to use it because I intend to adorn documents on my pages with additional controls and interactions. I can't inject my own UI and logic into your desktop PDF viewer.

Unfortunately, this Flash component only handles PDFs, not the wide spectrum of document formats. If I could reliably convert Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, etc. server side to PDF, then I would be a very happy boy.

Does anyone know of any such software that can do this? I doubt Scribd would be the one to provide it, but I would really love a simple `anything2pdf` that "just works": `cat foo.doc | anything2pdf > foo.pdf`
Wow, is that creepy.
If you have the market, the money (to survive and pay your bills) and something that people needs, you should go with it. Maybe you could start doing it part time.
I value the pursuit of happiness, individual freedom, human rights, etc

I just apply them to a minority group that you don't recognize as fully human.
I think it depends if you can fund it yourself.

If you're relying on external funding in the near future it might be hard.

If you've got the cash to fund it yourself, then there is a case that it's a great time to start a business.
It's so easy to rationalize not doing it but actually, sooner is always better than later when it comes to making yourself happier - life is short and unpredictable and what we think of as security is often a big joke at our own expense.
"... Since when did javascript become a "language"? Is it even Turing complete? ..."

You're right.

What self respecting Startup would bother with such an obviously deficient language? It's just not up to the job. Just keep using your Turing complete C/C++, Java (or insert your own favourite Turing complete language) and everything will be alright.
If your current job makes you happy, then I think it's crazy, given the 6 figure salary.
Oh, absolutely no offense taken.
You'll do great. How old is she?
Yes, me and my co-founder will be bootstrapping for at least the first year. But our plans are to become cash flow positive in 6 months. I can probably survive for 3-4 years with no job, my partner at least 1 year.
Current job definitely doesn't do that.
If the business is right go for it. I recommend a minimum of two years of personal runway.
The only problem for me is its so complicated; if I found obvious vandalism which hadn't got caught by any of the active members, it'd take me 10 mins to work out how to revert it correctly — it'd not be much harder to use it from the command line!
Newsstand where Paul Allen bought Popular Electronics he showed to Bill Gates may close
My thoughts exactly, this is what I truly believe. It is only Fear Uncertainty and Doubt that make me worry about it.
If you're doing really innovative things, look into an H3 visa (training) as well. They're cheaper for the employer, are issued more than one time of the year, and there isn't a lottery. There is more paperwork required, and you need to be doing something that the person can't learn in their native land. If you're doing something like game design, that'd be an easy one. There's other requirements, but check in with an immigration lawyer if you're an innovative company and hiring. I went through 80% of this process with an international hire.
Take some vacation time to work on the startup and see how it goes.
Monte Carlo simulation of the Monty Hall Problem in Ruby and Python
it depends on the state of your startup. can you get it to cash flow positive before you have to quit your job? etc..

either way, its not crazy. its just a question of what your personal situation and values.
Yes, but how?
I've moved in and out of high-paying consulting jobs and startup work a few times.

If you can afford to take 3-4 years to give yourself some runway, and you're willing to do that, then absolutely, go for it.
Get back to work on your businesses, fools!

Quit circle-jerking on wannabe Entrepreneur feel-good sites.

The most successful programming entrepreneurs I know didn't have time to read news sites. They were too busy getting things done.

quietly closes browser and switches to Xcode
Banach-Tarski

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach%E2%80%93Tarski_paradox

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=411043

Just kidding :)
One word: "Freaking Awesome!"
The US actually adopted fiat currency and abandoned the gold standard in 1913.
He's not arguing that ruby is a Lisp, just that it gives most of the power of Lisp in a syntax closer to what most programmers are familiar with.
Jesus christ! they finally did it!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach%E2%80%93Tarski_paradox
Depends on your savings.
The more fundamental problem was the philosophical shift from holding stock being a means to collect a dividend to expecting the short term ability to purchase stock and sell it for a profit.

If you sit and think about it logically, why does a stock that doesn't pay a dividend have any intrinsic value attached to it? Yet we have built an economic structure that says that it is possible for that piece of paper to gain value.
By jove, that Wikipedia page is accurate and well-written!
I was in your position two years ago but in my case I had a serious health problem. I was scared shitless. I didn't want to give up my job because I needed the health insurance. But my job was making my health worse. I quit and second guessed myself for a long time afterwards. But two years later I am fighting fit again. Thinking back, my only question is, why did I wait so long to do what was in my best interest? Most people who knew me thought I had the best job in the world. But I was miserable. For several years (!) I listened to them instead of myself and made my health even worse. Complete and utter irrationality combined with a lack of self-confidence. In the end I only did it because I had to, not because I am a shining example of courage. I really thought I was throwing everything away and yet I was so wrong. Let my stupidity be your guide. Oh, and the company went under after I quit. So much for throwing away my security. The question is really much simpler than you think.
The question is ill posed, because the anwser is highly dependent on how the couple told you that they have one girl.

If they tell you "we have two kids", you ask them if at least one of them is a girl and they answer "yes", then indeed the probability of the other kid beeing a boy is 2/3.

If they tell you "we have two kids, and one of them is a girl", then by all rules of rational discourse the probability for the other kid being a boy is 1.

Things start to get interesting if the talking member of the couple is a mathematician (so the rules of ordinary discourse do not apply) and he says "We have two kids, and at least one of them is a girl". Now you might say that this is equivalent two the first case. But you could also go bayesian and look at the possible conversations with couples containing at least one mathematician that have two kids. Say you have 100 couples. On average, 25 of these will have two boys and tell you "We have two kids, and at least one of them is a boy", another 25 will have two girls and tell you "We have two kids, and at least one of them is a girl". The remaining 50 couples will have one boy and one girl. Assuming no gender bias on behalf of the speaking mathematician (ha!), 25 of these will tell you "We have two kids, and at least one of them is a boy", while the remaining 25 will say "We have two kids, and at least one of them is a girl." So out of the 50 couples that tell you "We have two kids, and at least one of them is a girl," 25 will have two girls, and 25 will have a boy and a girl. So in this case, the correct answer is 1/2.

(This is essentially the argument from the intro on this page that was linked from the discussion on coding horror: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/10/my-bayesian-enl.html )
bingo.

While I'm sure there are some people running with gmail/ie6 (aside from those at work) - I would be guessing it's in the minority - most of the people I meet with gmail addresses are using another browser. (Most of the people I meet with hotmail addresses are using ie6)
Very clever, except that you miss the point, which is that he has to concoct a bunch of bogus arguments in the process, and those are not so good.
Oh how I wish I could do that. The majority of people (college students) who access my webapp do so on IE6 because:
- They're accessing it during class time or hogging the computer labs/library throughout the day and IE6 is the only browser on the majority of the machines on campus.
- IE7 is on a smaller percentage (a quarter perhaps) of machines within the campus - still a hefty percentage - no alternative browsers anywhere.
- Their home laptops have never been windows-updated and still run IE6, or those that have WU'd run IE7.

The only times Chrome, Safari or FF hit the app is when the computing students use it - and they tend to not be my demographic because they don't store every detail of their life on social networks whereas the IE6 loving social-studies students do.
That's all you need to know.
Oh, that's bad then.
Yeah, I think that MetaWiki is overly complicated and heavily lacking in ease of use.

Maybe someone could treat Wikipedia as a back-end and implement a cleaner, simpler, and more powerful UI on top without having to fork the entire database?
I'd be interested in reading that as well.
How are you a mutt? Think of yourself as multidimensional -- having knowledge of doing more than web app software.

My undergrad is in Electrical Engineering. I designed industrial data monitoring & control equipment for a few years, then started doing embedded software. Got an MS in software engineering. Did more embedded, did some MFC stuff, dabbled in cgi scripts and Zope for a while. Somewhere in there had a small 2-person side business building temperature monitoring equipment for a few years. Now working on movie camera motion control. I'm about as far from Web 2.0 as you're going to get :-)

I like it here and I also hang out on Spolsky's Business of Software forum. In both cases I get more out of the business discussion than the software discussion.

I for one welcome someone with wider scope of experience who can bring something new to the discussions.
In that case you are well placed to give it a shot. There are few certainties in life, but you are not in a bad position.

A few months ago I was in the same position as you, was procrastinating about quitting, and ended up getting made redundant as a complete suprise. Personally I haven't looked back. Nothing is guaranteed, you need to personally decide more which you will regret most: quitting now, taking the risk and going for it, or waiting till till later when the economy might be better, but then you're personal circumstances might have changed. At the end of the day - it has to be your decision, but if you do genuinely have 3-4 years of cash, then go for it!
My understanding is that 85% of international trade is settled or conducted in USD.

If the Euro is on track to replace the US Dollar, then surely there are stats showing that use of the Euro to conduct international trade is growing, in areas where USD was formerly used.

Since this is after all Time, it is no surprise that no such stats are quoted and instead we get News McNuggets.
shouldn't the month days link to the github page for the commit that warranted it having an x on it?
The perfect troll is the one where you're laughing so hard that you can't decide whether to ignore it, rebut it, downmod it, congratulate the author for writing something so perfectly ironic, or preserve it in a zoo so that future generations will know that such things once walked the earth.
Is it possible to build a proof of concept in your spare time? If so, that might be better than outright quitting. Then again, it depends on what kind of person you are. For some, having the fear of failure makes them more motivated...
He is saying something. Something false, I believe, but not meaningless. There is a certain style of programming that was once only possible in Lisp. The author is claiming that you can program that way in Ruby, or close enough.
Why I Hate Touch Screens
How much do you need to know about the person to know which child is which?

I don't quite understand it, but apparently anything which can be used to distinguish the children will do.

Possibilities with two children:

Gg, Bg, Gb, Bb

If one of them has a distinguishing mark, they have an apostrophe: (in jail, has red hair, or born first)

G'g, B'g, G'b, B'b, Gg', Bg', Gb', Bb'

Then note that the marked one is a girl:

G'g, G'b, Gg', Bg'

So, there is a 50% change that the children are a boy and a girl. Only if there is no way to distinguish them, do you get the 66% behaviour, where the set is:

Gg, Bg, Gb
On Basketball and Science Camps
The Codex of Alchemical Engineering (game)
My cofounder did it. We shall see :-/

To be honest, the ideal would have been to keep the six figure job and use it to fund us, but Midway games was/is going down like a sinking ship.
Cool. I've been doing it for over a year now and it's a lot of fun and very helpful.
It works both ways. Don't you like Ruby? You don't like Ruby. Don't read articles about Ruby!

I for one may use Ruby as a scripting language for my next project, I want to see more articles like this.
Hmm.. interesting predictions. :-)

I'd actually expect open source to gain more contributors if there's a whole bunch of unemployed software developers.

If you're looking for work, you're still going to have a lot of free time.

On the other hand, perhaps we'll just see an increase in users at sites like reddit and News.YC instead.

The thing I find most impressive about these sites is how they have managed to harness the power of people's free time. With more unemployment, I'd expect these sites to see some growth.

So I'm going to predict that we'll see more of these kinds of sites which are designed to harness the power of people who are bored... that's basically what web 2.0 is all about right? ;-)
Technical:
1. Chalk up one more for SICP. I got started via the ebook. I'll probably shoot for 80% coverage of the exercises.
2. Also I'm hoping to get through the mathematical preliminaries section in TAOCP.
3. The "Great Algorithms" course that was posted here seems like particularly ripe fruit.

Non-technical:
1. Set better goals. I'm am freaking awful at setting goals. Need to focus on and experiment with setting goals.
Don't read articles about Ruby!

I usually don't! This is an article about Ruby and "LISP". I read articles about Lisp. This one is mistaken, I think, mostly because the author hasn't used Lisp to do much, but writes about it anyway.

But I really don't mean to carp about the article. Ruby makes him happy, that's great.
You're lucky that:
a) You have enough runway to do this;
b) You have a co-founder.

I'm struggling with the same choice, but I have neither a nor b.
Considering that a major demographic of iphone users are highschool/college students, I'd say the fart/entertainment apps are just catering to demands, not idiocracy.
I would ask my self, if my startup fails, can I find a similar job again? If so, why think about it?..
Scientific knowledge is a public good. That's exactly the kind of thing government should be subsidizing.
Oh, I don't think it's meaningless, just that the arguments are bad, and seem to have been invented in order to justify something that doesn't really need justifying.

Now I suppose someone is going to ask me what arguments are bad. Two examples: 1. "The most common use of LISP macros is to avoid typing lambda quite so much" - obviously false; 2. Using Lisp to model a Ruby example of "mini-language" demonstrates Lisp's power, not Ruby's.
I'm just starting to learn about web development with Clojure. Even though I'm barely beyond the "hello world" stage, I've put my app on Slicehost at http://ericlavigne.net and I'm documenting the learning process on my blog at http://ericlavigne.wordpress.com
I'm in the same boat. I want to learn to think of ideas for apps that would create real value that either consumers or businesses would be willing to pay for.
My preferences --> gadgets --> editing gadgets.

Between the various gadgets there, I'm sure you can find what you want. And you can write your own too. There are a variety of user-contributed stylesheets and scripts listed elsewhere on the site.

Unless you're trying to do admin tasks, I'm not sure what you mean ease of use. Just click the edit button and start typing. If the formatting is wrong, someone will clean up after you.
The newsworthiness of this seems a bit of a stretch.

Should we preserve the store who sold Bill Gates his first keyboard? Where did google's founders get their ideas? Was it in a pizzeria? A bus station? Should we mourn their loss, if they go?
LG KF900 Prada2 UNLOCKED 
LG and Prada have announced their second jointly developed cell phone, the LG KF900 Prada II. This cell phone sports a large touchscreen display, and features a 5 megapixel camera with an autofocus Schneider-Kreuznach lens. WiFi is also on board for high-speed data transfers.
The narrative of the slow downward spiral of printed news is generally of interest here.
"We rarely regret the things we do in life, we almost always regret what we don't do in life." - my next door neighbor...he said this to me when I told him I was quiting my job to work on a personal project that was certain to fail. It doesn't matter how the project turned out, but he was right.
Llamas Are Cool (API Contest)
Submit a patch? http://github.com/technoweenie/seinfeld/tree/master
LOL, I suppose Lisp is not Turing complete either. JavaScript happens to be one of the most elegant languages (sans the DOM and browser stuff that is tightly coupled with the language)
Other than office 2007 design, the only good thing to come outa ms in a long time
> 1) SAAS will continue to grow and 2009
> 3) Startups will stop focusing on B2C markets and move into the B2B market

Tightly coupled, IMO.

> 2) Jquery will beat the other javascript frameworks and become the de facto standard for doing javascript.

I hope not. Love jQuery. Hate monopolies. This is in much the same way that Rails defines Ruby to some people - I hope jQuery doesn't define JavaScript in the future.
It's always been crazy to quit your job for a startup. But craziness and brilliance are only separated by success.
Javascript is good enough for your blog.
If you measure the strength of the USD not in relation to other currencies, but what you can buy, either in gold, silver, or a basket of goods (since after all, money is a means to exchange things); then it is reasonable to point out that over the last 100 years, the purchasing power of $1 USD in 1910 has collapsed to about 4 cents today.

In 1910, $20 would get you 0.96 ounces of gold (the $20 gold coin), or 15.4 ounces of silver (20 of the $1 Morgan Dollar), or about 600 loaves of bread (bread was about 3 cents a loaf), or over 360 bottles of beer (36 bottles was $1.75).

Savers have been punished severely, spenders rewarded as over time, inflation reduced the bite of the debt they took on (they could pay back a mortgage with greatly-inflated dollars).

Capital gains taxes did not allow you to adjust for inflation (e.g. if you were given something worth $20 in 1920 as a baby gift and sold it when you were 80 for $900 you didn't really make anything on it).

... it may be quite painful for those of us in the USA over the next few years.
Technology Thresholds
"Fear, I've come to believe, keeps more people from starting businesses than any other single factor. You hear about other obstacles--lack of money, inadequate support, bad advice--but they pale in comparison with the fear most people have that their new venture will fail."

-Norm Brodsky
http://www.inc.com/magazine/19991001/13574.html
Disney Vice President provides 114 leadership insights
Beer used to come in cases of 36?
I see your point. But, please, let's encourage people to write more articles about what they think is right. Even if the article is wrong it's still good that it was written.
It's great for math.
If you love Windows XP, you’ll hate Windows 7
You talk like a fag and your shits all retarded.
I would advise on getting some traction before quitting your job. It can be arbitrary - a few thousand users or uniques/month. If the idea is good you should be able to manage that.

Although if you build something impressive enough it's worth it. Even if things don't pan out, you can use the experience to find a better job.
funny shit = money; I would be proud if I built any app making that kind of money..
I predict that...

1. Around 2009 Q3, the tech industry will be the first to recover from the downturn (before real-estate or auto).

2. Twitter will show dramatic growth, and it will be acquired by Google

3. Google Chrome will show growth, and scare the shit out of Firefox and IE

4. A new product/service will be release by Sun or IBM, that will gain major traction among the hacker community

5. Paris Hilton will get hitched
Do the startup but keep your dayjob. Work 80 hours per week. It's the American way!
OK so look up income-insensitive goods.
> Love jQuery. Hate monopolies.

What's the meeaning of the word "monopoly" in a situation where breaking the monopoly means switching to another library? A library which, by the way, won't exist unless someone sees significant enough failings in the existing one to create an alternative, from scratch or through a fork.

Barrier to entry is the property which enables abusive monopolies, and in the open source world, is there such a thing?
Unfortunately if you are like me and develop products used by the military, you'll have to continue supporting IE6.
Could Life Evolve on the Internet?
I don't know if it came in cases, but the only price reference I was able to find was a price per 36 bottles.
It doesn't have anything to do with Java. They just added that to increase the Netscape stock ticker.
js itself isn't so important.

already the desktop UI approach (think Java AWT/Swing) is gaining traction, eg GWT.

nonetheless, if using js directly, the js itself isn't so important:
* use a good js library with helpful abstractions for DOM traversal, manipulation, etc
* use good js frameworks, eg for compiling data plus templates into html
* use ajax to get html
Useful Rails Routing tips
That's a strawman argument. Not all the subsidized positions have to do with science anyways.
What? This is totally false. Windows 7 is a great step forward from Vista. They have removed all of the crap that was bloating the OS and pissing off people who like XP. It's the XPificiation of Vista, and they managed to pull it off.

They made changes to the UI that I think, after using Beta 1 for a few days, are in the right direction. It's still Windows, of course, and it has some weird quirks, but it's still beta.
That's a great runway.. you have enough time to fail a couple of times!
Little bit of a misleading title.
Monopoly is probably the wrong word, but open source projects often do hit a local maxima which is far from optimal.

Consider emacs, for instance. Elisp sucks in many ways, and we could probably build a better emacs if we started from scratch. But it will be very tough to get from here to there.
A Conversation With Elon Musk
Dr. Foster: Would you please tell your son to stop?

Ned's Dad: We can't do it, man! That's discipline! That's like
tellin' Gene Krupa not to go [starts banging on the desk]
"boom boom bam bam bam, boom boom bam bam bam, boom boom
boom bam ba ba ba ba, da boo boo tss!"

Ned's Dad: We don't believe in rules, like, we gave them up when we
started livin' like freaky beatniks!

Dr. Foster: You don't believe in rules, yet you want to control Ned's
anger.

Ned's Mom: Yeah. You gotta help us, Doc. We've tried nothin' and
we're all out of ideas.