skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
a lot of people are talking about "taking time off to think" but not really being more specific than that. This is not just a vacation, this is a vitally important step. Assuming you can make 3-5% off the 2M you are set for life.
Now comes something that few people have ever been able to do: actually decide (with a huge degree of freedom) what your time on this earth means to you.
It may sound silly now, but you have just been reborn. You are no longer subject to the same rules of life that most are. You are literally a different person, though you may not know it yet. Take things slow, like a baby taking first steps.
And don't think that this all involves naval gazing. Look at the other people in your life and what their relationships means to you. They have to start all over with a new You as well. It can be rough on people.

Not taking this seriously is the prime reason new wealth often loses it. Everything else is details.
I may be missing the point but many of the items shouldn't be done on pre-lauch as indicated.
ex : HTML validation, it's not a good time to do it at this time, you can mess up the whole layout because of IE.
Custom 404 : a good page can be a big ammount of work...
Web App Wednesday
Make it rain, then! You have the power to do so...
(not mr endtime - talking about Miss Varney)
I have this book on my desk right now. I read it every year. I also try to keep an extra copy or two at home to give to friends who are serious about blogging/writing well.

Best book on writing. Period.
This rings true, and seems like a theory that fits all the data nicely. Come to think of it, why would they go about it any other way?

I hear it's also a handy way for politicians to authorize torture and crime bosses to knock off their rivals.
I find the browse and search features somewhat lacking.
It would be interesting to browse through the startups by certain criteria - what's the point about this one-by-one view?
I think the prison experiment is a great analogy for the internet. People's behavior is shaped by their surroundings, real or virtual.
Talk to Randy Komisar and ask what to do.
It wouldn't be on an obscure blog, that's for sure. Front page, New York Times, tomorrow. It would be close to the #1 piece of information that people want to know.
"Maybe Adobe is used to Windows users accepting this level of user insult."

Why are mac people always so freakin arrogant?
Hacker pokes third hole in secure sockets layer (SSL)
what I meant was for @newseller to look into the possibility of investing into gold.

Typical "buy low (super low) sell high" strategy is probably making "we buy gold" company a lot of money. They even have the money to buy Super Bowl ads.
Have you considered setting up YCombinator in Canada?
Aren't bigger salaries an offset to the risk?
I mean, startups are riskier than 'solid companies' (well, not that much these days, but that's the premise), so it makes sense to offer more money for someone to 'jump in'...
That or equity - but I suppose with current trend of companies going broke, equity doesn't seem like a good deal for most people...
Even though I wouldn't use the gold to make a front door but if you look at the development of the Gold Price (http://www.google.com/finance?catid=64980108) it doesn't seem that unreasonable of an investment. But I wouldn't put all my money into one thing. Diversifying is key.
Invest against the trend. And don't invest everything into one thing, diversify. As a last piece of advice I would suggest to keep some liquidity.
Surviving hyperinflation is easy, just hedge against all majors.
Guy is the Robert Kiyosaki of IT...
It seems their CEO is doing the "beetlguice" thing on twitter: http://twitter.com/jeremys

basically posting an "official" denial of it (even when you read it, its clear they do basically shake people down).

Unfortunate.
I don't think it has anything to do with economics.

The passages that strike me as somehow right have very little to do with economics, more with ecology and ethics.

What makes the Unabomber a scary individual is that he's a reasonably smart guy.

I don't know if this rings a bell or not but there is a movie called 'falling down', I have the exact same feeling about the main character in that movie. Of course then they have to graft on some typical hollywood ending and spoil it all, but roughly 3/4 of the movie you totally sympathize with the guy. (or at least I did).
It kind of implied to me that they do. Or at least did in the past (ie > 1 day ago !).
Come here in the Philippines. Cost of living is not that expensive -- at least here in Cebu. You can get a house beside a beach and you'll probably live like a king.
And less scary
RMS, is that you?

I came here to say that I really like the design of this web site (despite of what some others say), but the stability seems lacking sometimes. The site is often inaccessible. I was going to suggest reimplementing everything in ASP.NET and VB.NET, but in RMS's presence, I don't dare.
"Microsoft has too many testers."
Really ? Look at the poor finish most MS products have.

However, I agree about office for mac.
I'm pretty sure it is a money sink and is clearly broken anyway.
1. Hulu is where they're testing the waters of Internet distribution; it's still a limited experiment.

2. They're hoping Hulu -because of its requirement of a computer- won't cannibalize their broadcast TV shows. In terms of their bottom line, Hulu > pirated shows on the Internet, but Hulu < TV.

Edit: nikblack explains it more eloquently in this comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=486620
It's a shameless plug, but come check out our site http://clusterify.com. We organize meetups for small coding projects, and you might find an interesting project, or someone interesting to work with.
They sure are good at violating their own rule #4, having way too much crap on the top of the page.
I remember reading about a study where people who are below average at a task tended to rate themselves as competent (or better than average) for that task, while more competent people wold under-rate themselves.

There are all sorts of possible explanations (don't know enough to know you suck, pride, etc) and I don't think the study really looked at causality at all, but yes, I think the phenomenon is well known.
Vector Graphics Flash Animation Movies.
Ask NH: What online game is suitable for contests?
I am going to start a web startup, it needs an online game that users can play, and thousands of them can be ranked according to their scores. I have done quit a lot research about this, but failed to find a suitable one.

I thought about all kinds of puzzle games like sudoku, people can be ranked by the time they use to solve, but the problem is it's easy to cheat with a sudoku solver program.

I thought about tetris, but the game is everywhere and too easy.

What I need is a culture-neutral game that's basically fun (kind of addictive), and can give every player a score, hard to cheat, and can be implemented in the browser preferably using Javascript. Any idea?
Unfortunately, such despicable behavior can be found more often than one would think. In fact, this is not a problem only on internet. When I ran a small business, a serious newspaper(part of a major chain) offered to write favorable article, if I started advertising with them.

Let's just hope it doesn't end like this: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075865/
According to the following quote, the problem seems avoidable if you have an https login page to begin with (happily something I was planning on):

"Marlinspike said SSLstrip is able to work because the vast majority of sites that use SSL begin by showing visitors an unencrypted page"
"the tool uses a proxy on the local area network that contains a valid SSL certificate, causing the browser to display an "https" in the address bar."

Needing a local LAN is another restriction on the attack. I usually VPN to a server when on wireless, seems that will still be OK if I put high trust in that endpoint.

Well, we need a lot more details here, obviously.
Take your time, don't spend what you don't have to, stay away from people giving you 'good advice' (including this one), everything comes to those who wait.

The only concrete advice I'd have for you is spread your money around different banks and currencies so that if something takes a hit you don't lose it all in one go. 2M is way above the usual insured amount.

Oh, and keep quiet about it!
blow it back into another startup
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It's comments from users like mechanical_fish that make Hacker News so interesting. Looking through your comment history I don't see anything massively interesting.

It worries me that your comment has been voted up.
It occured in Poland not that long ago, and there is a chance it will happen in other countries, if oil transactions would switch to another currency I wouldn't be surprised to see such a thing happen to the US dollar. There are some people out there that say that the Iraq war was to stop the US dollar from crashing because Saddam was going to switch to the euro for his oil transactions.

I know that's typical conspiracy nut fodder, but it may have a kernel of truth.
Beer No Longer Recession-Proof
Reminds me of the lawyer firm that stated that reading the html code of their web site was copyright infringement.
On collaboration between projects
1. The world is a virtual blizzard of jurisdictions. Almost all of them regulate banking rather severely. Their requirements are often mutually unsatisfiable, and when they are not they are merely onerous. (Data privacy in Switzerland + Know Your Customer in US = Infinite Fun!)

2. Banks would rather strongly prefer not being disintermediated and will work to stop you from doing it.

3. If you have any issues in your model at all, you will be turned into an infinitely scalable money tree, if for no other reason than you are now the weakest link in the international system which has, after all, had since feudal times to learn (ineffectively, inefficiently, imperfectly, and a hundred thousand times better than you) how to deal with fraud.

4. Oh, massive incentive to fraud plus strict anonymity go together like puppies and blenders.

5. The banking system, which IS ancient and IS decrepit and IS frequently inept, is also getting better. I can move money from any ATM in Japan to my account in the United States in under four hours for $50. [Edit to add: and if I were a Mexican immigrant in the US this would be $3.] That is fifty times more than it should be, but it is also absolutely amazing, isn't it? Paypal is similarly a really long way from perfect but it is a short step from Good Enough For Most Purposes.

6. Micropayments are a solution in desperate search of a problem they solve well.
I saw you on Channel 4 a few years ago when you started Boso at Oxford... Congrats on the Auctomatic sale!
right now is just about the worst time in the last 3 decades to invest in real estate, everybody that I know (including people in Canada) that are heavily into real estate are trying to unload.

Wait until the market bottoms out, then maybe if a deal is just too good to pass up invest in some real estate. And only then if you have good indications that the market not only bottomed out but will rise in the foreseeable future.
> 2. Consider buying a place to live outright. Saving rent or mortgage interest is better than earning the equivalent in interest because it's tax free.

In the US at least this isn't always the case. Most joint filers can deduct interest expense on mortgages up to $1MM in value.
For the company I'm starting, I registered the domain for ten years because I had read something about this before.

Am I dumb? Not a huge loss if this higher trust thing is not true, but I'd like to think the extra money did something.
1. Make a program that solves a problem.

2. Charge money for it.

3. Get a headstart on learning all the stuff that takes place outside of the IDE.

($1,000 is way past what is needed for this these days, if you do your own coding and fill in gaps in your skills with open source. Open source web design, etc...)
100% agree with this, it's the easiest trap to fall in to.

If you have to start another company, use your reputation (one company sold successfully) to leverage a little bit of your capital (less than 50K) to do it again, never commit more than you can afford to lose without batting an eye.
right now is just about the worst time in the last 3 decades to invest in real estate

Why, prices are down after all?
Ofcourse one could wait for bottom out but if you judge your object by market value instead of by common sense then you can pretty much wait and gamble on lower prices for ever. An interesting object may just not be available anymore when the market shows indication for recovery...
As a very helpful comment once put it:

On HN, dhh is DHH but rms is not RMS.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=412440
If learning game programming interests you, you may want to try coding a 2d rectangle collision system. Not just intersection tests(that is the easy part) but also a collision response that can either cleanly separate intersections or prevent them from occurring, the kind of thing you want for actor-environment collision.

It's actually a really hard problem to solve in both an accurate and fast manner without making major design assumptions. How wrong have people gotten it?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hgd3YcmIvYE
http://tasvideos.org/RockmanTricks.html

Mega Man's collision was above-average for its time, and holds up to normal play, yet it is full of exploitable bugs. If you can make a system that works well enough, you are most of the way to having a game, and the next most helpful thing to learn would be finite state machines and variants.
Evolutionary System Development (pdf)
Since this is a PDF, I will put abstract here:

Large systems projects are failing at an alarming rate. It's time to take evolutionary design methods off the shelf.

Many critical large systems are failing. The replacement FAA air traffic control system, the FBI virtual case file, and the Navy Marine Corps Internet (NMCI), are a few of the many billion-dollar systems that could not deliver the functions needed. In stark contrast, the Boeing 777 aircraft, the Global Positioning System (GPS), and the U.S. Census database system have been outstanding successes. Why do some systems fail and others succeed?
When I signed my contract with O'Reilly to work on The Geek Atlas they sent me a copy of this book as part of my 'welcome to the O'Reilly family' pack.

It's excellent. I'd recommend reading it and Strunk and White for anyone who needs to write non-fiction.
Four Virtualization Security Companies To Watch
Few reports have surfaced of security breaches in virtual-server environments, but the potential looms large. "Every single platform we have had in IT eventually gets compromised. There is no reason for us to think that the hypervisor is going to be any different," says Pete Lindstrom, a senior analyst with Burton Group. "While hypervisors seem to pose a fairly small attack-surface, as they multiply across a network, so do the attack surfaces. It is a huge unknown." That's why companies widely adopting virtualization today must have a solid strategy for securing these environments, industry watchers say.
"Having a smaller screen allows us to have a narrower device"

Well, that's one way to look at it.
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It's amusing to see how you think that the bottom has already been reached.

From what I can see the stream of bad news is far from ending, there will be a lot more unemployment before this is over and that means that real estate prices - including those in Canada, which were, especially around the bigger cities somewhat inflated - are going to fall further.

The American auto industry is far from 'rescued', it remains to be seen if all of the big three are going to come through at all. This will have a tremendous impact in all the supplying industries, and quite a bit of that mess will trickle down to Canada. Another potential problem is that the US, Canada's biggest partner in trade has a tendency of using NAFTA to protect American interests in times of trouble, one more reason to be very careful where and when you invest your money.

If you are putting your own money where your advice is, in other words you are right now borrowing every penny you can get to sink it in the Canadian real estate market then I still have two properties there that are pretty much unsellable that might interest you.

Seriously, imho it's harsh and the bottom has not been reached by a long shot.
I noticed that you used the word "agile" in On Lisp, which can hardly have been a word to be expected in a book about hacking. By the time I read it, though, the agile software movement existed, so it leapt out at me.

"Refactoring" is a particularly strange word. It's as if people were talking about "exhaling" as a distinct and even controversial practice. How can anyone breathe without exhaling? Yet articles and books would be written about it: "Should Breathers Exhale?" "When Is An Appropriate Time To Exhale?" "Exhaling: For And Against". People would ask their managers for approval to exhale and the managers would say no we can't afford it, and eventually they'd either just do it anyway on the sly or else turn blue and keel over.
multi player 'snake'
Developer Todo List
Dev Todo is small command line application for maintaining lists of tasks. It stores tasks hierarchically, with each task given one of five priority levels. Data is stored as XML, so various XSLT templates can be executed on the XML to convert it into different formats (eg. HTML).

Data is stored in a file named .todo in the current directory. Depending on the setting of backup in your configuration file, there may also be files named .todo.1, .todo.2, etc.

Enjoy it, hackers ;)
"I really like the fact that its save file is PostScript."

Yes - it creates larger postscript files.

"non-obvious UI is actually pretty quick to use once you get used to it."

For some reason xcircuit adds extra pages without any warning - which forces you to edit the .ps file by hand.

The wires also does not "connect" (i.e. when you move a component).

The best would be Orcad with ps export.
Congratulations. It was just this new year that I lucked into HN - and it has made a huge difference to this tech-retread (me) as I seek to play catch-up in my hacking education. A great community you've catalyzed!
Terminology, start-up vs project
Does anybody else have this feeling:

I see the words 'start-up' and 'project' as being used interchangeably on HN, and it doesn't ring true to me.

If you're going to put together some website in a couple of days with a couple of guys then it's not a start-up, it's a project.

If you all cancel your jobs, pool your resources and set up an office in your garage, then it's a start-up.

To use the word start-up for every tiny little project that gets started devaluates the amount of risk taken and dedication given to 'real' start-ups.
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Thanks for your idea. It's worth a try, but I'm partial to this niche because it's easier to defend.
714 days here, karma 117 and I couldn't be happier: this place is special, let's keep it that way, happy birthday to us! wiiiii ! what kind of birthday gift do you give to a website?
Richard St. John's 8 secrets of success (video)
On the flip side, the site doesn't need to make so much money because the cost of living in Nigeria is relatively low.
I tried using SVG many years ago - but had to give up due to its lack of adoption and support by browsers.
What finally killed it for me was Adobe announcing they were dropping development and support for their (aging) SVG viewer.

So I looked around - and turned to Silverlight, which is unusual for me as I normally avoid Microsoft technology on the philosphical principle that it will be closed, proprietary, idiosyncratic, designed for someone with a very strange view of reality and incredibly inconsistent from one version to the next.
But
- Silverlight is XML - no nasty binary objects in the nackground,
- it implements .NET - which is close to a language standard and could easily become one
- it looks like the sort of thing that wold not be too hard for other platforms to implement
- and Microsoft might out their resources behind making it a wide-support platform
- and did I mention that it's pure XML. How cool is that!

SVG is ok, but very awkward to use in applications,
and it was designed in a world where the verb 'to gooogle' did not exist.
Agreed. It's a lovely little oasis of healthy conversation, and friendly help/advice.

Long may it continue :)
The central line is, "Does it immediately interest our most likely customers? And if it doesn’t, there’s a problem. And it might not be worth working on it at all, or starting again."

But "starting again," isn't exactly "giving up." You don't always know your most likely customers (look at boomers on Facebook), or what your product is going to be (consider Google's humble origins).

And just because you're not on a trajectory to be the next Facebook or Google (or even Dogster) doesn't mean you don't have a potent service for an important niche market.

At each level of your StartUp's development feedback is important - but feedback is just for steering.
It sounds like you are wanting to have your startup be built around a single game. If you are wanting to do that, you probably shouldn't use a casual game. Games with persistent worlds seem to be popular. Also, text based mmorpgs can attract a fair amount of people.

http://Travian.com

http://Kingdomofloathing.com

If you want a casual game, why have only one? There is one huge problem with casual games. You will have to code the game in such a way that it will be hard for the average person to find the memory address for the game variables.

Cheat Engine is an easy to use memory scanner that allows people to easily cheat at games. It will index all addresses for a program, for example firefox, and then let you search for them. So I can start out by indexing all addresses while playing a game, then increase a variable. Then I can search that index for all memory addresses whose values have increased. So basically I can edit almost any value in the game as it's easily observable So if you want to make the game hard to cheat, it's going to be somewhat difficult. What you need to do is to keep track track of the variables and check to see if they have suddenly changed.Maybe map x to y using a non linear transformation, and if there is ever a time where x does not map to y, you know the player is cheating. Or you could just accept input from the player and do the calculations concerning the score on your server.

http://cheatengine.org/aboutce.php
Cheat Engine in use:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zd4kf6ID1Hc&feature=relat...
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"everybody that I know (including people in Canada) that are heavily into real estate are trying to unload."

That would seem to me to be the textbook definition of "the right time to buy".

I still have two properties there that are pretty much unsellable

By unsellable you mean "priced too high"?

Just remember that somewhere down there is the perfect time to do the opposite of everyone else and make a killing. I wouldn't run out and invest 100% of your assets in real estate because you think you've found the magic moment, but in a diversified investment strategy, don't ignore it altogether.
I strongly object to 2:

If I was in OP's position, the last thing I wanted would be carve up a hole in any part of the world and settle there for the rest of my life. Real estate is big investment; while investing in it may be an ok choice for a wage slave, it is not so for those who are eraching financial independence.