skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I tend to agree with you. I did get that "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" vibe from it, and that was a made up story.
Ask HN:  What would you be doing if you weren't a hacker?
My first and only career (9 years now) has been Internet related in the fields of web design/development and consulting.

Because of this I often think about the professional career I'd pursue if the PC and (more importantly to me) the Internet didn't exist.

For me I have interests in Finance/Investing and possibly Politics (not as a political figure but a behind-the-scenes guy)

If you are a young hacker who has only worked with computers (not counting summer jobs) what is it for you?
professional martial artist. it was my first job.
I down-voted you for the use of the term "death tax". The correct term for it is the "trust fund baby tax". This is not merely a matter of rhetoric, but of accuracy. The dead person isn't being taxed. Being deceased and presumably having no use for wealth past that point, he or she doesn't care. The living heirs are being taxed.

To quote Salute Your Shorts, get it right or pay the price.

It cost you 2 karma points, because I'd otherwise have voted you up for an otherwise high-quality post.
My parents worry about the HVAC in their (more than) 3500 sq ft house. Not worry in the sense that "we might not be able to live" but worry in the sense that "turning down the upstairs thermostat a few degrees sure saves a lot of money."
Browser makers should ban any root CA using MD5 very, very soon.
Paul sees a major trend - the value and meaning of "education" is changing. For too long, it meant getting into a school, going to classes and graduating. That means less today when you can be "educated" on how to learn a new software language, develop a market-driven solution and earn a living from it.

I am one of those who 10 years ago stopped caring about hiring people based on college degrees. I cared more (and still do) about their skills, abilities and what they had created.

I am also a firm disbeliever in having to get software "certifications" - they are meaningless, as Paul proves out, because they have no indication in regards to performance.
Healthy Foods for Under $1
I wrote a minor mode for Emacs a while ago that does something similar to what it looks like CSSEdit does. It uses MozRepl to update the current css of a page in Firefox so you can have a live preview as you work on a css file.

I don't really ever work with CSS these days so it doesn't get much use. It's a little flaky as I've only ever had to get it to work for me. But if anyone is interested I could put it up somewhere.
That was m thought, too, when I saw the headline.

Yet many people still prefer TextMate.

Hey, TextMate fans: What's the appeal of TextMate over vi and emacs?
Discovery is the New Cocaine - deck on engagement and content discovery
And root CA's should stop using MD5 even sooner.
That particular problem is pretty well solved by spray on usability in the form of various configuration GUIs.

Open ID is probably a lot more tricky of course, so your point stands, even if I think your example is a bad one.
I've spent way too much time thinking about this question over the years for my small teams. My conclusion is that neither is perfect, but the best options are:

-- Open work space for 3-6 people, IF everyone is working on the same project, IF everyone is committed to doing good work (and won't be surfing YouTube throughout the day), IF there are quite/private places to retreat to for phone calls and solo problem solving, and IF the configuration doesn't stay the same for years. Many people report being more productive for short periods with this sort of arrangement.

Bonus: pair programming seems to lead to a different sort of "flow" than solo programming, which is more amenable to an open work space.

-- Offices with a door for everything else. The upside of offices with a door: reduced interruptions, which are the bane of complex programming. (Try solving a really really hard problem with the threat of interruptions constantly on your mind. Not actual interruptions - just the threat, or memory, of interruptions.) The downside: teams have to be more deliberate in fostering team communication.

The "cave and commons" (elsewhere in this discussion) seems like a good compromise. Even better, in my opinion, would be a modular space where teams could work together some of the time in an open war room, during some phases of development, and where they could work privately during other phases. But that's not easy to find.
Municipalities open their GIS systems to citizens
The only real reason to sweat something like that is if it's really and truly your biggest impact.

My company is flying me most of the way across the continental US next week. While I shouldn't and don't interpret that as a carte blanche to stop caring about the environment, it does make fiddling around the edges rather a waste of my time. I've already plucked the low-hanging fruit (efficient computing with laptops, CFCs in my house, taking care of the insulation).
First of all, congrats to the people who pulled this off. A couple of the authors are friends of mine, and I heard a few weeks ago that they were going to announce something major today, but this is still bigger than I expected.

In a way, I'm very gratified to see this. Let me explain. I used to do hash function research a couple of years ago before I shifted to other things. I've also worked in a team building a security product. When I suggested that they should stop using MD5 to publish hashes of worm binaries, they weren't sure why I wanted them to do that. This was well after MD5 collisions had been widely publicized. I brought it up in a meeting, and they said that other teams also used MD5s, so it would be confusing for users to have two different formats, and so they weren't going to switch "until everyone else did." I was very surprised, but dropped it because I figured I was getting a taste of how things worked in the real world.

In my life as an academic, the one thing I've repeatedly observed is that the disconnect between people doing research and people directly applying that research is huge. Seriously, what does one have to do? It's not like we're trying to educate end-users here -- root CA's are in the business of staying on top of this stuff. Sheesh.

Edit. The talk video is available at http://tinyurl.com/a9754t but it's kinda slow right now.
it's easier to pick up than vi or emacs I guess, while still as powerful
Here's a question for you, and I don't know the answer:

It seems true that everyone has a "writing fingerprint" but is it not the case that it would change over time? For example, is it not likely that my writing style at present is more similar to that of another person on the Internet than it is to my own style 7 years ago? Moving targets would complicate Internet-scale de-anonymization considerably, because you'd have to take "ancient" Usenet posts with a grain of salt. This would be even harder if people learned to mask their writing style, perhaps using "translators" designed to thwart the de-anon technologies.

Note that the amount of information you need is always logarithmic in the potential number of authors, and so if you can do 200 authors you can almost definitely push it to a few tens of thousands of authors.

This makes sense from an information-theoretic, big-picture standpoint, but I'm guessing that the amount of actual data (measured in text, not information content) per candidate required to identify an author among N candidates is somewhere between O(log N) and O(N)-- my bet would be O(N^k) where 0 < k < 1. The reason is that, while your "since/because" example might be a great fingerprinting measure, there are only a small number of great (high information content) measures like this, then there are some few higher-hanging fruit, then a lot of scraps. It seems that any attempt to identify an unknown person among 1M+ candidates is going to require using the scraps, and it's not clear how much information content there is in them.
Waterville, visiting family. We should meet up.
Cave and Commons is the way to go, as several other posters pointed out.

I'd like to add the critical factor: team size. Once team size gets too large (say over 8-10 people) random noise and distractions take over. I've seen teams of 30 try to do collocated, collaborative work environments and it just falls apart. At that size, the best I've seen so far is cubes, "study hall" and private rooms. That is, cubes for \half the day, a group "study hall" type atmosphere for the other half, and easily available small group work rooms. By "study hall", I don't mean a bunch of people being quiet, just a bunch of people in the same area working on group/individual tasks.

There's an interesting phenomenon that goes on in collaborative work spaces. Many times programmers get lots of benefits from working together but still would rather be left alone. So many times the team requires time that it works together, say for a couple of hours every morning, like it or not. Not everybody likes it so much. Many times there's a gap between "the way I like working" and "the way that I work that is the most productive"

Just goes to show that programming is not a technical exercise, as much as we like to talk functional code, security, and all the other bits and bytes bullshit. It's a human activity, and full of the irrational and quirky nuances that comes from working with hominids.
A cartography boom offers new ways to see the world
I would be a university professor, either in mathematics or computer science. Odds are that I'm going to end up there eventually -- just a few years later than if I hadn't taken this detour into industry.
You are most welcome and thanks a lot. Your comment made me so happy :-)
A couple of months ago, my company's software team evaluated FogBugz as a possible replacement for our Trac setup.

I would describe FogBugz as ugly by modern standards, because it appears to have been written a little under ten years ago. And I would describe it as difficult to use partially for the same reason, and partially because some very simple features are missing, e.g. cc'ing people on tickets and bidirectional integration with SCM repositories. The "special" features, like integration with customer email, are not important to us.

Yet what it does is not very difficult, and many other options exist -- free, for pay, hosted, or any combination thereof. I now wonder why people listen to Joel on software.
And all the customers that bought certificates from these CA's? Let 'em hang?

Who cares that these customers business reputations depends on the SSL certificates validity.

I agree with you that certificates made with the MD5 hash should be phased out gradually by the CAs, but you can't just do a sweeping revocation without ruining businesses.
when I'm editing a file server-side I usually use nano.

I did that yesterday -- my sysadmin flipped.
Best and worst places to work
Agreed -- I might be a fancy typist when you get right down to it, but that doesn't mean I want to work in a typing pool.
Bend Over Shareholders, Here Comes The Dilution
Which would you prefer to have: Customers complaining that your SSL certificate is invalid until you spend the a few minutes to get an updated certificate; or customers complaining that you're a fraud because they gave you (well, really just someone pretending to be you) money and you haven't delivered the product/service they ordered?
Rare disease social network claims 35%-50% monthly growth since launch
Where do you work in Western MA? I'm a software CEO as well and do a lot of work out there. We should get together sometime.
IMO, the reason that successful businesses like Club Penguin don't get TechCrunch coverage is this:

TechCrunch isn't aimed at successful, profitable businesses.

TechCrunch is essentially a brothel; Arrington fancies himself a pimp. So it is populated by whores, and patronized mainly by people who want to pay for sex.

TechCrunch is about VC, it's about the dream of the big cashout, it's about perpetuating the startup mythos.

Those other businesses simply don't fit that agenda.
Google Solicits User Input On Product Priorities
Why we are, as we are
> Customers complaining that your SSL certificate is invalid

Most customers will shrug their shoulders and try another site that doesn't throw a scary warning. Normal people don't report bugs.

> customers complaining that you're a fraud

You're right, this is a real problem. But blocking certificates outright isn't less of a problem.
How Rent Control Drives Out Affordable Housing
based on the NYT's inability to print solid reports on what's really going on in the world over the last decade, I would say their share price reflects their value.
Ariely is an impressive writer and speaker; I saw him in Seattle and wrote about it here:
http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2008/03/04/dan-ariely-in-seatt...

Check out in particular the link the ball video. His book also pairs well with Tim Harford's <i>The Logic of Life</i>:
http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2008/02/06/the-logic-of-life-a...
Hmm. It's kind of hard for me to reconcile those stats with my personal experience. Growing up in the 80's and 90's, there were hardly any divorced couples in Russia. A number close to half seems completely off. I have to question where they got their numbers... although the more current numbers are probably more on target.

What's also interesting though is who initiates divorce. I believe in the US, roughly 70% of divorces are initiated by women, while in Russia the opposite is true.
DHH uses so many sentence fragments that their frequent preaching about "hiring wordsmiths" really rings hollow. I realize he speaks English infinitely better than I speak Danish.
I don't understand your logic. Revoking certificates will cause unpleasant SSL errors. Not revoking certificates will negate all the security of SSL. How could those two problems be comparable?
Here's the thing: talented song writing very rarely matters in terms of sales. There've been a ton of studies that look at how songs become popular. To some degree it's a matter of being in the right place at the right time.

If Miley Cyrus wasn't part of the Disney machine, she would not have sold millions of albums. She probably would not have gotten a record deal with anybody but Disney. If she did, she'd fizzle out pretty quickly. I've listened to her stuff: it's incredibly bland.

Yeah, props to her for actually releasing an album at 16 - though, again, with Billy Ray Cyrus as a father and Disney as a corporate overlord that's far less impressive than her doing it with no roots at all. But don't mistake that for songwriting talent in the larger sense. Look at the history of young songwriters who made an impact in the past, and you'll see there's a radical difference. They innovated. They made something new. Miley is just recycling old things.

As I said: it's totally fine that you like her. She seems like a sweet and nice girl, unlike, say, Katy Perry, who's worse and more calculating. But don't let your like for something elevate it above what it actually is, which in her case is pretty bland pop music.
Most people think they know how to type, but actually don't.

For that vast bulk of the population, a few hundred drills in gtypist are going to be more valuable than any number of hours spent ruminating on statistics:

http://www.gnu.org/software/gtypist/

Learning to touch type on text specifically designed to drill you is more important than worrying about your "problem trigrams" in project gutenburg text.
Ask HN: Do I need T&C for side projects
Hi,

I have developed a small side project which I will post on here when it's ready to go.

It's not meant to make any money and I only store a very small amount of info - it uses OpenID only to login/register.

Do I need a T&C / privacy policy?

If so, is there a template for one lying around?
I don't want to spend much time on this - I want to launch the project and move on to the next one.

Cheers

kev_the_dev
That was an odd thing to do... If he had used your "correct" term in his post, it would not have been a good indicator of Republican behavior and would therefore ruin the example. His post uses the term in a description of other posts -- just as your post does.
I will keep an eye on Espresso. At the moment, however, I don't think Textmate has anything to worry about. Will see if sugars will change that. Also, if Textmate becomes so stale as to push to find other solutions (Textmate developers: hint. hint.)
Are you kidding? Disney very frequently makes kids this huge. When the kid's a singer/actress, especially so: they've done a good job of marketing her in both directions.

If you write a show entirely around one person, then yeah. You'll put the show on hold to wait for them. That doesn't mean she's particularly brilliant. Just that she's not entirely awful.
> Revoking certificates will cause unpleasant SSL errors.

Unpleasant errors scares away buyers. That is, Error + Credit Card = No Purchase

> Not revoking certificates will negate all the security of SSL.

Not true. The encryption part of the certificate is still there. However, the added assurance that you're really on the site you think is compromised.

But has the assurance part of SSL certificates actually reduced phishing? Stupid people will still put all their money in BankOfShmamerica.com as long as it looks sort of like the BankOfAmerica.com site and doesn't throw any errors.
But it's not. You don't gain anything from being watched 500,000 times.

Smosh has been seen millions of times for acting like dicks and whipping Pikachu. There are funnier things on YouTube. There are cleverer, better things. Smosh is seen because they're bland enough to get spread around. That's not a virtue. They will never do anything outside of YouTube and I doubt they'd want to. They know they're just kids who got lucky.

It's like wanting to be popular in school. Why bother? You get nothing out of it but the knowledge that other people think a certain thing about you. Better spend your time working towards quality.
An IDE is not an editor. Don't be confused.
Ask HN: How do you find the local nerd community?
My background is unrelated to technology, and most of my friends tend to roll their eyes when I describe my project, but I've been tinkering on a web app over the past few months that I'd like to begin building into a startup. I know the likely hood of my project succeeding as a mono-founder is poor, so I'd like to meet up with a group of people that are technology-oriented and (maybe) recruit a co-founder. Unfortunately, I'm a relatively recent transplant to New York and have no idea how to do this. Has remote-conferencing and telecommuting made local usergroups obsolete? How have other mono-founders done it?
Human environments have changed significantly faster than the genetics that determine our behavior. We're still predisposed to value immediate over delayed gratification, even though modern societies highly reward those who can delay it.
Am I the only one who bought a netbook, realized it was so small that I couldn't fit a complete thought on the screen and had problems trying to type with it, so decided it was of more use to me as a paperweight than a portable computing device? (Kidding about the paperweight bit -- it'll be going to my nephew).
Do you consider brand markup to be an edge case? If not, how would you explain it?
I think that we all sound alike.... at least compared to the rest of the web.

Actually, I think if someone really tried to do what the original question asked, then it would end up with under 100 different "people" who all seemed to cluster together. All of HN would be something like 2 or 3 different clusters.
Motorola MOTORIZR/ROKR Z6 Mandarin
Motorola Motorizr Rokr Z6 always been on the cutting edge of cell phone design. The Z6 is fully compatible with Windows Media Player 11, the newest incantation of one of the most popular media players online. Unlimited space to store.
I'm currently reading The Knack. It is a great book on how to actually build a business instead of a get-rich-quick, build-to-flip scheme.

Talks about important things like cash flow. Ironically I don't know of many startup/business books that talk about such important practical stuff.

Highly recommended!
Doing it right
or "my primer on studying computer science the right way"
If all 6 impacted CAs stop signing MD5 signed certs today and no new CAs started, is the risk reduced to the possibility of prior discovery?
I wrote a program to list out relevant entries from my Firefox 3.0.4 trusted CAs, the list is here:

http://www.gridvm.org/rogue-root-cas-because-of-md5-collisio...
Another important lesson is that successful people don't have much higher batting averages than everyone else, they simply try to hit more balls, and eventually one will be a strike.

Hewlett and Packard started a number of unsuccessful companies before they started HP, Seth Godin invented the first fax board for the Mac, invented a version of the wireless music player and much more before he became successful.

This seems to be a common trait among a lot of serial entrepreneurs. Get them drunk, ask them about their previous attempts and prepare for a lot of great stories.
Untold when applied to large sums of money actually means uncounted, not untalked-about. It's a variant of untallied. But it would have been a clever pun if they'd done it intentionally.
Researchers devise undetectable phishing attack
Your Google Docs May Be Open to Hijacking
Microsoft refutes Windows Media Player vulnerability
Does Glassfloor only survey white-collar jobs?
Yeah. To be fair to the poor guy, he's gone through a pretty miserable last few years. Lost his voice, disfigured his face, saw the most hated movie critic in the nation replace him at his flagship show. I'm guessing it's not easy.
astrophysicist

or swashbuckler...
ninja / pirate
I think such nitty-gritty comments about karma aren't very insightful. But while we're in those nitty-gritty details, I'll say there could very well be some people who upvote him just to counterbalance your downvote; he might even make a profit.
It's much better for PHP and HTML/CSS. It's geared towards that. For other languages it's just as powerful, but it doesn't have the same one-window-does-everything aspect to it.
http://nyc.startupdrinks.com/

http://barcamp.org/BarCampNYC4

http://coworking.pbwiki.com/CoworkingNewYorkCity

i'm sure there are others, too, i'm just not from NY so i can't comment in depth
Microsoft files pay-per-use PC patent
For your protection, you should always have one - liability can be a bitch.

As for a template? Scribd is always a good place to look.
WordPress released theirs under creative commons and encourages others to use it. I'd recommend borrowing theirs.
Iphone's Golden Touch (Time to quit your day job?)
Let's turn to someone with (possibly) more credibility than Roger Ebert. Michael Hayden, the director of the CIA, thinks number one issue facing us on this time scale is population growth:

https://www.cia.gov/news-information/speeches-testimony/land...

"Today what I’d like to do is spend a little time with you not on the close fight, but on the deep fight, and to look at three global trends that point to a 21st century that will undoubtedly be quite different from the century just ended. ... In thinking about the future, one of the most important things that our analysts brought to ... my attention was world demographics. ... Today, there are 6.7 billion people sharing the planet. By mid-century—by mid-century, the best estimates point to a world population of more than 9 billion. That’s a 40 to 45 percent increase—striking enough—but most of that growth is almost certain to occur in countries least able to sustain it, and that will create a situation that will likely fuel instability and extremism—not just in those areas, but beyond them as well."

He goes on to talk about demographics in different regions of the world and how this will affect Americans.

I kind of buy it.