skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I feel silly reposting a very recent comment but it's relevant:

Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities" (Going broke on a million a year), p.137

"One breath of scandal, and not only would the Giscard scheme collapse but his very career would be finished! And what would he do then? I’m already going broke on a million a year!

The appalling figures came popping up into his brain. Last year his income had been $980,000. But he had to pay out $21,000 a month for the $1.8 million loan he had to take out to buy the apartment…

Of the $560,000 remaining of his income last year, $44,400 was required for the apartment’s monthly maintenance fee… $18,000 for heat, utilities, insurance and repairs, $6,000 for lawn and hedge cutting, $8,000 for taxes. Entertaining at home and in restaurants had come to $37,000. This was a modest sum compared to what other people spent."

Also UrbanBaby:
UrbanBaby is an anonymous message board frequented by some typical New York UES/UWS mothers. Here they talk about not being afford private school on $400k/yr
(DC = dear child, DH = dear husband)
http://www.urbanbaby.com/talk/posts/50368448
We need to talk. I have been working on a competitor to ratemyprofessor for the past few weeks and I am going to be launching it soon. Email me at the address in my profile.
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/09/indie-developer.html
The next step is to cut off your hands. That way you won't do any unnecessary typing.
Some of them are making a lot of money as is evident from that news article...
Yeah, great advice. Programmers should also stop writing bugs, too. How hard is it to GET IT RIGHT THE FIRST TIME?! All this bug hunting (and fixing) is a time waster.

(Sarcasm alert.)
IMAP has tagging: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3501#section-2.3.2.
Capsule summary: if you know what CPM means (cost per thousand impressions) you can derive cost per visit. Take one guess how. Yep, you were right.

The interesting bit: I get 50 cents per thousand impressions, which could be worse. That means that I am getting 1/160th of what they are. Is my content really so much worse?

This is a fundamental misconception. Nobody cares what your content quality is. They care about the quality of the traffic that you send to them. I spend hundreds of dollars a month paying effective CPMs of $10+ on some sites which are, ahem, total garbage. Because they send me people that convert. (How? They rank highly for search terms that ideally I would rank highly for, but their content is such crap that people are like "Oh noes, I need to actually get this done, oh wait here is an ad which promises pain relief CLICK oh thank God a website which knows what it is doing.")

I don't care if you are John Paul II, Mark Twain, and JRR Tolkien all rolled into one, and if every blog post you write creates a new genre of literature: if the people who read your blog are anti-commercial poor teenagers who have no desire to buy the content from ads you put on there, then your CPM will be crappy.

(Incidentally, if you hide your ads in the corner under a label saying "I sold out" and you are writing to an ad-blind niche, I would not expect $20 CPMs. Hope that helps.)
yeah, though there are some times when you pretty much know you're going on.

For example, if you definitely 100% want to be a psychiatrist, you can't do anything without at least a masters, preferably a PhD.

But in most fields, there are good jobs that don't require masters degrees, and then premature optimization like this is bad.
This is an analysis of various studies that all point in the same direction: demonstrating how minorities' negative expectations can damage their performance and how simple interventions can largely erase that damage.

Of relevance to all of us involved in challenging careers like hacking is the impact that we may have on our own futures when we release ourselves from doubts about our own potentials in demanding, competitive circumstances.
Architecture is still lower on the social ladder than rhetoric; rhetoric is what politicians, CEOs, lawyers, judges, lobbyists, and to a lesser degree, managers, specialize in.
Time to hang up the pajamas
Wake Up Call: Facebook Isn’t A Safe Haven
In defense of bankers
If you sort employees by pay it is the same. But if you sort employees by power it might not be.

For example, some sales people at tech companies make much more money than mid-level managers taking home a couple hundred thousand dollars per year. Some of those sales people will make more than the senior level executives. Which one is more important and is higher rank is up for debate.

In my comment above I tried to explain a way to fix the loophole that byrneseyeview listed. Saying nobody makes more than $500k is a way to fix that.
Yes, but who said anything about floating point numbers? I guess I should have explained, but my point was that in "normal" microprocessors the voltage level has nothing to do with the precision of the computation... if it's low enough that errors are introduced the results will be wildly incorrect, not merely imprecise as that statement implies.
can't they already put a link to their resume in the profile?
The Downside for NY Condo Owners
One similarity between grad students and homeless people is that both seem to greatly esteem free food ;-)
"Anyone who’s given Gmail a fair shake will quickly find conversations indispensable. Going back to any other email client is agonizing and disorienting,"

No. It really depends. At work, where for me a thread might last for weeks and have 5-10 participants, the only thing that makes any sense is a hierarchical threaded view where you can see who replied to what (I use Claws Mail).

Gmail conversations cannot contextually distinguish where the tangents are that you must treat as new sub-threads (you cannot just say "rename the subject" because that is not what people do in real life).

(I've been using both claws and gmail for 5+ years)
Do Cloud Operating Systems Deserve To Be Called "Operating Systems"
I have enormous respect for this author.

While I don't know if I'm quite dedicated enough to get on the plane for a customer (especially as I am an ocean away from my customers), I have spent $40 to arrange courier delivery of a replacement CD for a product which costs $25 before. Not their fault my agents at the CD stamping company and/or Post Office screwed up on the first one, after all.

(I use SwiftCD.com, incidentally, if anyone needs a recommendation. I've shipped hundreds of CDs and empirically about 98.5% or so arrive on time with no worries. Given my previous experience with the Post Office I consider that pretty darn good.)
The iPhone actually does notify you (though it's only audio and not visual) if you have a missed call, voice-mail or text. It beeps every 10 (or is it 15) minutes. I would definitely prefer a visual notification. For that matter, how about visual notification for e-mails, tweets, etc?
Steve Wozniak to Compete on 'Dancing with the Stars' TV Show
I've found god to be easier to setup and configure than monit.

http://god.rubyforge.org
Had a little smile on my face reading this line: "If you already know his name, chances are you've been doing something illegal."
Indeed - Mugabe attempted the same in Zimbabwe 18 months ago:
http://www.crikey.com.au/Politics/20070706-Robert-Mugabe-dri...
It did, I'm just assuming Obama was including incentive based compensation or otherwise it's just too trivial to game.
What we implement is much closer to this suggestion. We move the code out to a couple machines from each of our different web frontend servers. After a minute we compare before and after across numerous metrics (load average, cpu, errors, page failures, etc). If the revision passes, we roll it out to 100% of the cluster and do the same monitoring for 5 minutes.

Originally we intended to put business metrics in these tests, but it turns out we regress on them via code changes rarely and it takes a human to figure out what went wrong. Instead we test business metrics (and lots of other stuff) via nagios, which gives us 1-5 minute sampling frequency, good enough for most of our issues.

I did not cover how you would iterate towards the ideal (instant deploy) and what concessions you might have to make. Our 6 minute deploy is actually quite inefficient, but it's not the bottleneck to our deploy system.

(If you're wondering what our bottleneck is, our automated tests take 9 to 12 minutes despite being spread across 40 machines... Selenium in Internet Explorer is slow.)
Well you could always have just used testing like the rest of us. :)
I'm glad to see Zuckerberg called out on this one. Touting one's site as a "safe haven" is dangerous as well as a crock.

The most dangerous site is any site that is approached with one's guard down - with the idea, "it's safe here." Do not manufacturers of alcoholic beverages admonish, "drink responsibly" - rather than "ours is the beverage for safe drinking"?

Social sites need to promote "safe surfing," not promote themselves as safe for surfing.
I lived on $50k/year in SF with no problem. Do people really complain about making less than $90k?
They should just do what Steve Jobs does. Get a wardrobe of nothing but jeans and black turtle necks, and subsist on cancer-fighting carrots and peas.
You really think that macros have almost nothing in common with functions? Granted that the semantics are a little different but, in my mind, macros and functions are just two different tools that serve the same goal: allowing for code reuse.

(I do understand the difference, for what it's worth. I worked as a professional Common Lisp coder for a while.)
linking funding to performance? I seriously doubt a government agency will consider such a wildly logical suggestion.
If you're having problems building it on Darwin, try this one: http://github.com/isaacs/k7

(Pull request sent.)
This group http://groups.google.com/group/serverjs (kicked off by this post: http://www.blueskyonmars.com/2009/01/29/what-server-side-jav... ) is working on a cross-interpreter standard library, a module system, etc. It just started last week, but people from many of the major server side (and some client side) JavaScript projects are already involved. If you're interested in helping out, take a look.
The use of www is incongruous with the idea that the text before your domain name is a subdomain. The URL format I expect is (protocol)://[credentials@][subdomain].(domain) and www breaks this.
You can put a URL, I don't believe it automatically links.
OLPC's Hidden Killer App: Ultimate E-Book Reader
Does removing "override" on noprocrast increase HN's market share?
I wonder if he would write the same article twenty years after receiving his last degree.
If programmers are leaving VB and aren't going to C#, where are they going?
The edit button is gone, so I feel bad about this. The President is pretty highly paid. According to his book, he hasn't be getting high since his 20's.
Write object oriented JavaScript Code
Friendfeed's User and Usability Problem
Wow! I know that over-the-top customer care is a recommended strategy for all kinds of service and product industries, but...

who ever heard such a response from an author!
Phonak Hearing Aids
Phonak Hearing Aids by David Mason offering the best digital hearing aids in the business.
I wouldn't. I like minimal profiles. I like seeing what other people link to. I like that here, conversation is all about intelligent conversation and not about the people. I love that people address me as "unalone" rather than by name because that's the handle I use.
"Fortunately, stereotype threat for blacks and other minorities can be reduced in many ways. Just telling students that their intelligence is under their own control improves their effort on school work and performance."

More generally, teaching children about "growth mindset" rather than "fixed mindset" significantly improves their performance.

http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2007/marapr/feat...
It's much healthier for you vaporized, or so I've read. Less lung damage, anyway.
That would be great. I'm looking for an internship this summer, and linking my name to my resume would be great. What's the general standard for using HN for finding internships/work anyway? I've only seen one thread for an internship, and while it seemed successful, I'm not wanting troll the very community I'm looking for a job from.
You're right. If everyone behaves the way they do with larger deploy cycles even after moving to an extremely short deploy cycle then you would have lots of downtime.

The point wasn't that it solves downtime, but that it causes you to more readily understand sources of downtime. You then have to use that information to make your development and deploy process resilient to those classes of failures. Rinse. Repeat.

For example, at my company we would spin up a new engineer and within about a month they would take out a database (or worse) with a query that would be extremely slow. What did we do to fix the problem? We capped all queries to 20 seconds, after which we would fail the page request. In the best case, a developer pushes a page with a slow query in it, and the page fails enough to cause the revision to roll back. In the worst case, the feature the developer was working on would be broken but the rest of the website would continue functioning.

And yes. yes. yes! You should be catching your problems before they go live. The list of techniques is staggering: unit testing, regression testing, functional testing, fuzz testing, exploratory testing... but those methodologies only go so far. Continuous Deploy goes further.
What is a co-op maintenance fee and why does it equal the mortgage payment?

(sorry, I'm from Oregon, never heard of a 96k co-op)
Google Quietly Laying Off Engineers
"In late 2005 a columnist who writes for the ABC News Web site predicted that by 2010 the blogosphere would create 'a whole new group of major corporations and media stars" and that 'billions of dollars will be made by those prescient enough to either get onboard or invest in these companies.'"

I think someone could make some serious money betting in the market against the prediction coming true.
Quick Compare-and-Contrast of the Y Combinator and TechStars Series AA Documents
I've watched this thread with puzzlement because it was almost immediately a dead link. ...and I couldn't readily find it at sciencedaily.com Now that it's a Phoenix from its ashes I understand its death: the article is from April 2007.

Unfortunately, mj research seems to produce "discussions" that combine the fervor of religious + political topics. The cited study is just one more study in the mj research legacy that shows lots of possible damages and several possible benefits of cannabis depending on the application and the population concerned. Recommendation: cool heads, please (not for the pun).
I've met a couple of techstars companies in the last year and haven't heard any negatives yet - are you being intentionally vague to cover up for a friend or can you get more specific with your complaints?
You're kidding right? It's pretty simple to write small methods from the start, trivial in fact. If you think small methods come from lot's of cutting up of larger methods then you're doing it wrong. Writing well factored code isn't some magic trick that requires doing it wrong first and then refactoring to get it right.

Your sarcasm is misplaced and presumes bad code always comes before good code, it doesn't.
In short: "I used to open up another browser to bypass my Firefox anti-procrastination software, Leechblock, so that I could override noprocrast and read HN. This usually led to me reading other, less interesting sites like Reddit. Now that I can't override noprocrast, I decided to use it exclusively and removed HN from my Leechblock blocked list. Now I don't end up reading Reddit afterwards. Thanks!"

Moderately interesting, but the linkbait title was unnecessary.
> co-op maintenance fee of $8,000 a month

seriously, how on earth can co-op maintenance for apartment amount to 8k a month unless you are building it from scratch?
I dont own a review site or a product I am selling right now but I have studied business and read a lot of books and articles and I have concluded that business in general is dirty and because you are not doing business in isolation you have to look at what your competitors are doing to succeed .. One of the books that I read was ALL MARKETERS ARE LIARS .. Read it .. but first see this

http://www.moveahead1.com/articles/article_details.asp?id=33
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/all_marketers_are_liars/

There is too much stuff to learn in business but creating a product is one thing and Marketing a product is a totally different ball game ..
So you don't have the self discipline to just not waste a bunch of time here, but you do have the discipline to not just find a workaround for the noprocrast feature that you yourself set? Might I recommend the services of a good therapist?
My school does not supply a school email address. I also remember an article posted here a couple months ago that described Boston College not going to supply students with email addresses any longer. Their reason cited is that students have an online identity prior to college. Perhaps more and more schools will follow the same path.

My point is that requiring a .edu address is artificially restricting your potential, and most certainly legitimate, users.

I read RateMyProfessors and the information given is less detailed than the information I get talking to people in the halls of my school. The site definitely has a use, but a professor rating himself artificially high will probably contradict the actual widely held student view that the reader already knows.
The End of Alone
We just had a discussion on PR firms that pretty much settles it in my opinion (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=462493). How can I include it in this thread? Hyperlinks are just not as efficient as some cute Ajax inlining...
Never forget Humans are just a kind of Ape with a whole bunch of particular traits.
Is this modded up to #1 so we can all feel good about ourselves? "Everyone on HN is so interesting I just can't get enough!!11"? Puh-lease.

Anyway, I used to be really bad about reading social news sites. The good news is that programming Reddit eventually scared me away because people are so willfully ignorant, and don't want to hear anything they don't already like. Think religious fundamentalists, but even worse.

This has given me a lot of free time. Now when I feel like reading Reddit, I instead open up my TODO list (a plain text file), and pick one thing to do. While I'm there, I also add two more things. I'm not missing anything on Reddit (if there's something really cool, it will be here), and I'm getting real work done instead of wasting my life. (And not getting mad at 13 year old kids that think they're programmers.)

Noprocrast is nice, but it's even better if you convince yourself to not even want to waste time.
yeah whats up with going through all these hoops to get around it. if you are going to cheat it, just disable it.
Polls originally started this way, and did crystallize, specifically, I think, because they went against the whole "comment karma is a real, useful measure of participation" idea. Likewise, just restating the article-but-shorter shouldn't be rewarded--pretend we're all in a sixth-grade English class: "Talk about the assigned reading; don't just say what happens."
I agree. For years I coded in tiny, non-anti-aliased fonts. Recently I switched to an anti-aliased font at a larger size and the difference is definitely real and positive. Less headaches, easier readability, more distance between my eyes and the screen. Also, make your fonts brighter but maintain a medium level of contrast with the background.

I heavily disagree though that larger fonts cause you to write shorter methods. That's kind of ridiculous.
I don't think it breaks the URL format. In your domain, you could presumably have plenty of services, one of them being a web server, handled by a machine on the "www" subdomain. In practice, the only service anyone cares about is the web and so "www." has become redundant.

I'm all for getting rid of the "www" prefix. But I'm sure someone at Google researched it and found that 1% of older consumers are scared when they don't see the magic three letters. 1% means $100M in lost revenue, so the www stays.

For now.
Well, it's certainly not "no customers"... Timothy is referring to IMVU. Whether the customers are understanding or not is another issue. However, when we implemented this "cluster immune system", we had outages all of the time. But every single time, we took steps to prevent that class of failure from happening again, and now we deploy code to the cluster twenty times a day.
Agreed. I think this post proves that people are voting up stories before reading them.. not that that's a big surprise, but it's more associated with Digg and Reddit :(
Really, it's a short step from "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him" to "if you meet some dude on the road...."
I honestly can't tell if you're complimenting me or calling me crazy.
Having some more detailed profile is not the main point. What would be great is if people in need of a job could add a little symbol ("*" or whatever else you want) that appears next to my name on each of my posts.

If I'm currently laid off and looking for a job, someone may read a smart comment I make, then notice: "hey, this guy is smart, and he is looking for a job? Let me check his profile".

If you just have the profile part, it's inefficient. When I want to hire someone, I'll keep looking at profiles of plenty of people not looking for jobs, and I'll miss the ones who could use the help. And if I browse resumes, it's not connected to their comments (at least not in context of a thread), so I don't have the impulse to like them.

An alternative would be to sort resumes by karma, but it's kind of orwellian...
A co-op is (usually) a non-profit that owns an operates a building. When you buy a co-op apartment you effectively buy a share(s) in the co-op which entitles you to occupy a particular apartment. As a shareholder in the co-op you are required to pay maintenance to cover your share of the operating costs of the building: energy and utilities, maintenance, doorman etc. Some co-ops also generate revenue from flip taxes.

Maintenance doesn't have to equal the mortgage payment - our Brooklyn co-op costs around $650pcm in mortgage, and $800 in maintenance.
What about the practicality of holding strong beliefs? Is it not thebest way for you to achieve something to be imbued of the "true spirit" of that thing. Even if it is "wrong".

Nietzsche talked about a pessimism of strengh related with the Will to Power where he says that holding something true is important to achieve a certain purpose. He distinguished that from the pessimism of weakness where beliefs are hold not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself.

Having strong convictions is important, because it focus all your being in achieving this purpose that you've created for yourself.

I would rather phrase the main idea in Mr. Graham's essay not as

"keep your identity small."

but rather

"keep your identity flexible."

What you believe today might not be what you'll need to believe in order to reach a certain goal in the future.

Yes it's a form of relativism, and it requires a lot of self
discipline to avoid falling in to a kind of "it's no use", pessimistic stance, that nothing really matters. It means holding something true, even if you know it isn't true. Just make it so. Because that's the efficient and
practical thing to do.
Trackmate : an easy to build tangible user interface
The point is specifically that he doesn't cheat noprocrast. I use the setting as well, and it works for me. Sure I could easily hit the site not being logged in, but it's a subtle reminder that you set for yourself that you are spending too much time browsing. YMMV, but for me it works. I agree with this article, pg, thanks for the feature.