skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I tend to disagree. I'm not a twitter user, but one thing they do have is a user base that finds their service essential. This is ripe for income generation. Charge $5-10 a month and viola, revenue. (I think at the moment they look to be exploring other options, but that's a viable fall back from my view.)

I don't think you can say the same for facebook. Very few people will pay for this thing. I'm willing to bet that their own internal research confirms this. Facebook's biggest issue with regards to profitability is not so much that they need to find ways to make money, but that they need to find ways to make enough money to pay back all the money they've already used. They are leveraged to a crazy degree, and seem to spend like drunken sailors. They've got a huge workforce and have innovated little since launching their "platform", which has been all but abandoned - from a user perspective - because of abuse.

They've got a leadership problem in my opinion. And that's a hard problem to solve.
In my experience with WoW (played for 2.5 years, some of that time pretty seriously, just quit a few weeks ago) there are certainly teenagers playing but most people are at in their twenties. Probably more teens than 30-39s though.
I really liked the fact that there were some seriously different people interviewed. For instance, the Excite guy, fresh out of college, compared with the RIM guy, who chose between the Blackberry and some project for the space shuttle. And yet they both got rich out of their respective startups. I liked seeing that variety.
Very fun article, not on GPS units ability to be GPS units, but about their lack of interest in playing nice with 3rd party software / drivers, and the very clever workarounds that can be done to overcome their shortsightedness. Read this article!
People who are good at freelancing structure their practice so they have plenty of "bench time" built into their rates. The freelancers I've known throughout my career tend to be more carefree than the rank-and-file developers.

More importantly, a consulting practice is a much better platform to build a product business on than a full time job. You can carve out plenty of time for your new business (it's just another one of your clients), you can staff up consulting to make time for the product, and if you fail, you don't have to beg for your job back; it's always there.
Yep. "Begs" isn't incorrect anymore. Your pointless battle was lost before you ever started caring.
I agree with you. Whenever I hear someone say the words "best practice" I rewrite that in my head as "average practice". If you have a team full of idiots you probably don't want to use git anyways.
At this point, you definitely can't switch before the 2 years are up (or you've just wasted $270,000 which you will have to explain).

Don't forget the fact that your yearly bonus depends on the fact that you delivered this project successfully.
I do consulting myself, and prefer it to working a 9 to 5, just that I don't see it as a viable long term option.
Coding Horror: Rate Limiting and Velocity Checking
I really want to know why people dislike Rand's work. I read Atlas Shrugged and Anthem a few weeks back, and I really liked both of them. Am I missing something, or is it just a matter of opinion?
John Resig - JavaScript Function Call Profiling
I'm not really talking about immigrants. They can be even worse, if they came here before they were 20-25. Why? Because they pick up the way to act by watching MTV.
Exactly. However, once upon a time, this site also had a tradition of not downvoting people all that much for comments that were simply a bit inane or misguided, rather than actively trolling or flaming.
I agree, but so far I'm completely wrong =)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=328227

Then again, I have until Oct. 2010 for that to play out (and I do have money behind my mouth on that one). 2009 is going to be the year for testing Google and its advertising income. They may gain market share from the little guys getting weeded out, but I'm still keenly interested to see how their income and EPS plays out.

If they're still holding strong into late '09 and pushing $5 EPS per quarter, well I'll be a tad bit poorer and a little bit smarter.
I don't mean this personally, but I'm getting a bit tired of git users pointing to the reflog as protection against data loss. The reflog does serve as a way to access no-longer-extent commits--until those reflog entries expire, at which point they are garbage collected and no longer exist anywhere, period. By default, this expiration time is two weeks.

Yes, the reflog can help recover from certain classes of errors, but its band-aid over git's emphasis on destructive history rewriting is incomplete, and can, and does, crack in real-world cases.

The correct solution, I think--which none of the distributed version systems implement--is to provide a way to group related changesets into an übercommit. This übercommit may still be sliced and diced back down to the buggy micro-commits that detail its dirty development, but, by default, will be presented as a single monolithic changeset to the user. No history is lost, and none is rewritten; you're simply altering its presentation.
Except google isn't going anywhere; it's one of the pinnacles of advertising success
Gmail is likely using a Bayesian classifier for spam detection. So, it adds the characteristics of the spam to the spam filters, not the message itself.

http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html
Yes, but that doesn't mean that the parts come from anywhere or that they can be assembled anywhere for the same amount of money.
Gotta love the inter-tubes
"You have no privacy on the Internet. Get over it."

Scott McNealey, Sun Microsystems
My favorite is Steve Wozniak's interview. I love how he described the pure passion and drive he had for hacking (e.g. he had no money to buy hardware so he had to hack the hardware in his mind)
Never say never...the internet landscape is filled with corpses of websites that people never expected to fail
I beg to disagree.

My own business, and many of the YC start-ups, bring products to market for considerably less than $500k. And those products tend to kick ass (well, the YC ones do... I like to think woobius does too).

Perhaps corporations would have better luck by offering $100k each to 5 teams of 2-3 hackers, selecting the winner based on their internal user's feedback after 6 months, and then offering that winner a $200k/year regular income for maintaining the app. (Yeah, I know, I'm dreaming...)
That's some righteous hacking... backing out the vendor from the packet checksum & header... :-)
There is probably a night-and-day difference between consulting by yourself, and staffing an actual consulting practice. Solo freelancing is still probably better for an entrepreneur than a full-time job, but running a multi-person consultancy is running a business, and a big % of the headaches, overheads, and challenges of running a product company carry over.
Obviously! Next time I'll be sure to be more explicit.
Why is this needed? JL just interviewed people, and they subjectively stated their opinions, however true or false. I would think the burden of independently verifying every claim (esp regarding fuzzy details of what people said in private) would be too great.
Mercurial's patch queues ultimately provide very similar benefits and drawbacks to git rebasing, except that:

1. Patch queues may be version indefinitely, since they are their own Mercurial repository, rather than eventually expiring, like rebased commits in the git reflog; but

2. The above requires you maintain discipline in committing the state of your patch repository

Although the second can be trivially automated, the default behavior--rewriting your patch whenever you issue `hg qrefresh`--is far from optimal.
What about those of us with 9-5s?
Churn - Consulting is fine, but if an applicant has moved too quickly between permanent jobs it's a sign that they probably won't be at yours for long. Maybe they have a recruiter friend constantly putting new offers in front of them, or maybe they are outright incompetent and are quickly fired. My hiring team calls them "jumpers", and it's one of our biggest negatives.

If you are working as a consultant, I would suggest listing the consulting company as your main job source, and any specific companies as sub-items beneath it. Make sure you don't get thrown into the jumper pile.
If you go back, get a degree in an industry. Technical aptitude and skills are great and transportable to almost any field. A "proper education" makes you more valuable if you understand the problems to be solved in an industry like biotech, or greentech, etc. (probably not so much financial services these days)
Can you live without Comcast? I'm trying. But cable TV still has its virtues.
yes... sorry!
Asking whether you'll jump or not, is always the wrong question. If you're asking yourself that question, you're probably not an entrepreneur. Most entrepreneurs that are successful have multiple previous startups and have always made the jump early and frequently (Jobs and Wozniak with their illegal long distance calling hack, Zuckerberg with a collaborative fitering music sharing app in high school, Aaron (Mint.com) with his multiple startups back in college, etc). Doing every progressive experience gets you used to doing another startup and making you comfortable for the jump. Doing a startup isn't like rolling the dice and seeing if you can win the lottery, it's more of a compulsion.

There was a blog entry :

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2008/04/ten-questions-a.html
"Is there an ideal age for an entrepreneur? No, although most start at a young age since they don't belong in big companies. But once an entrepreneur always an entrepreneur. We've got one entrepreneur in our portfolio who is approaching 60 and working on his fourth company."
Usually you can easily explain issues such as contracts (you could also put "(Contract)" around that specific entry).

However, the "no churn" requirement bugs me too. In startups, churn of some sort is usually inevitable and healthy: not only do start-ups fail and/or down-size, but there are also changes in direction and culture. Big companies, on the other hand, have frequently changing business objections to and a little flexibility: it's too easy to get stuck in a position where one isn't learning.

Perhaps Google's approach to this is in the right vein: use the hiring process to screen for people who are "smart and get things done" (with a high degree of certainty), yet allow them to change projects/groups at will. Reward accordingly for business priorities.

However: start-ups can't afford the costs of Google's hiring process and many big-companies can't attract the sort of talent where this practice would work. As such, churn (at least for engineering) is inevitable.

On the other hand, doing a background check and actually following up on the references, should filter out the "job hoppers": people going from position to position for a raiser or promotion. In fact an ideal test would be to initially offer someone coming from a short stint a slightly lesser compensation -- and then give them an immediate raise.
It really isn't ... the semantics of infinity are completely different than the semantics of 'really, really, big.'

An infinite data store would, by definition, contain my DNA, correct (and incorrect) predictions about the universe (down to the molecule) for all time, the true value of Pi, and every piece of knowledge that has ever or will ever exist. An actual infinite is just a ludicrous concept.
The problem I always have with my GPS system is that it sucks if you know where you are actually going.

For example if I skip a step to take an exit(because I find it faster by using the next one), it'll spend the rest of the way trying to reroute me to go back to the step that I skipped. So I can be pulling into my driveway, and the system will be trying to send me back 50 miles to take that exit that it wanted me to take.

Granted I have the cheap $150 system, since I barely use it, so maybe the more expensive systems are smarter
Have a look at the revamped Monster.com IE6 is not supported at all by the job search!
Which is strange, because the whole concept behind the British invention of the "corporation" is to address a group of people as a singular entity.
Why Web radio faces another crisis
Ah, sorry. School options here are 4-year degree programs at a university. College has a bad connotation up here in canada.
The other option is a 1 year, or 2 years programmes at a "provincial/state institute of technology" generally thought of as career prep type programme, or where University grads go to actually be useful on the job.

I tried the former, and did not finsih. I completed the latter, liked it. Sorry about the confusion.
IPod Safety: Preventing Hearing Loss in Teens
Inspirational advice from Paul Graham yet again! Reading his essays is what truly inspired me to start my own company. I think this type of essay still gets me psyched up. I'm definitely trying to follow rule #11 right now and not get demoralized as we start to hit our first few obstacles as a real company.
Apple to allow Verizon connections
It's kind of hard to pick an industry based on "what I think will be awesome 4 years later." Also I have no confidence in being able to do school for a subject I don't care about.

Hence CS is probably the only degree I'll be going back for. I would really like to learn assembly and proper C and C++. as well as algorithms and data structures....
Oh thank god, I hate dealing with AT&T. In the ridiculously incompetent universe of cell phone providers, Verizon has been my least horrible experience.
I live in NJ, so you being from New York can probably attest to the low quality of marriage material in the area.

No. New York is very diverse. This city's so big that I don't even know what the average quality is, but it doesn't matter; you can definitely find good women here-- including women who've never been corrupted by mainstream American culture, on account of having grown up elsewhere. Of course, there are also the disgusting, materialistic Sex and the City sluts, but if you're not an idiot, you can avoid them.

Not that it doesn't exist, but its more of a needle in a haystack problem.

If you know what you're doing, you can get the low-quality women to reject you pretty quickly. (You'll get rejected a lot.) Don't try to impress them by playing the infantile games that attract low-quality women (e.g. pretending to be aloof to project high status) and don't buy them shit.

The strategy a lot of men use to get laid is to play to the lowest common denominator. It works for racking up a lot of casual sex. It sucks for finding a marriage partner. It's like trying to make an ice sculpture using a battle axe. Keep your sets of habits separate and, if you can't do that, then play it straight and don't fuck around.
who knows if that really happened, or if Arrington was just linkbaiting to make money
so who is the new techcrunch?
You're completely spot on. I talked to a couple people in difference industries, and they're all receiving tonnes of resumes from big name companies with degrees. Everyone's getting laid off here....

The portfolio idea sounds good. I do have a small set of hobby programming projects that aren't marketable, but at least I will have something to show in lieu of a degree.
I was just going to say, "enterprise software sucks because the people who approve its purchase dont use them". This is a great elaboration of that point.
This would be great if it came true. I have an iPhone and a VZW phone. I travel frequently for work, and VZW's coverage trumps ATTs in most places (or at least in the places I seem to go).

I've been using my iPhone mostly for email/data and the VZW phone for my actual voice calls. I would love to dump ATT and just port my Verizon number to a VZW-enabled iPhone.
Your post is making the site difficult to read (horizontal scrolling). Can you reformat the bullet points to not be in a code block?

Edit: thank you :)
I believe your somewhat right with your first point. The friends he knows are two unlucky, weak personality males who were too blind or too stupid to realise the inherent problems in getting into a relationship with a dominant woman.

I'm married and extremely happy. My wife has a dominant personality and I have a comparatively relaxed personality, I take things much easier yet I learnt from an early age (with help from my father) that you have to establish your boundaries. When my wife is being snappy or pushy I simply say "do not talk to me like that, I do not appreciate it" and I rarely have a problem beyond that.

I know how I should be treated, I know exactly how much respect I should be getting from my spouse and despite being an easy going person I know I have to stand up for myself because if I don't I'll end up a pathetic divorced loser like so many people do.

Edit: I'd also like to add that most of my friends are in stable happy relationships. In fact I'd probably say my friends in relationships are happier than those who aren't, and I simply don't buy the whole 'getting married makes you unhappy' BS people purport.
Dear HN, I have a charitable proposition for you, but I need your help
Dear HN,

I normally wouldn't submit this here, but I'm kind of desperate. I tried to submit on Reddit and was immediately downmodded by trolls and /b/-tard types who disparaged me. I enjoy hacker news because everyone here is helpful and intelligent and never unnecessarily mean. To get to the point...

I have a way to make a sizeable donation to several charities, but I need your help. I'll explain, so please bear with me.

The tourism board of Queensland, Australia is holding a contest for what they are calling "The Best Job in the World." You get to live on the islands of the Great Barrier reef and work for 6 months, while collecting the equivalent of $100,000 USD.

Candidates need to submit a video, and then get voted up or selected by a panel.

I submitted my video several days ago, but unfortunately, I'm way over my head in this virtual popularity contest that's kind of beginning to remind me of what goes on in high school! I have a group of maybe 250 friends on facebook I can directly reach, but some of these people have over 30,000 views! How can I compete?

HN - I desperately need your help!

I wanted to be different and stand out when I made this video, so I spent 4 days locked in my room, animating my video, which is in the link above. Please visit it and give it the highest rating you can. I hope you enjoy it!

But Why should you do this? Because with my acceptance to this job, I will give a sizeable donation to several charities. You can help me help other people in need. I'm thinking at least 10 percent of what I make, and hopefully more. To any who would scoff at this proposition, note, this is not a small number in the least. You vote can help make a real difference here.

Some history about me - I'm a 22 year old who had the great misfortune of graduating this past May in this horrid economic climate that only seems to be getting worse in the foreseeable future.. I've been getting by by doing freelance video work, which I only got by providing 3 months of free internship work at a studio, post-graduation. This job could literally start me off in my life on the right foot and be a tremendous boon to some deserving charities.

Some of the charities I want to give to/am considering: Doctors Without Borders, Make a Wish Foundation, Ronald McDonald House, St. Jude's...

And please, I would love to hear suggestions of any particular charities you would like to see helped - I don't know enough and will consider everything I hear.

So, just to review - please watch and rate my video 5 stars, spread the word, upmod this story; this will help me get the job worth 100,000. I will then be able to give at least 10 percent to various charities.

Thanks for your help!!
Dear HN,

I normally wouldn't submit this here, but I'm kind of desperate. I tried to submit on Reddit and was immediately downmodded by trolls and /b/-tard types who disparaged me. I enjoy hacker news because everyone here is helpful and intelligent and never unnecessarily mean. To get to the point...

I have a way to make a sizeable donation to several charities, but I need your help. I'll explain, so please bear with me.

The tourism board of Queensland, Australia is holding a contest for what they are calling "The Best Job in the World." You get to live on the islands of the Great Barrier reef and work for 6 months, while collecting the equivalent of $100,000 USD.

Candidates need to submit a video, and then get voted up or selected by a panel.

I submitted my video several days ago, but unfortunately, I'm way over my head in this virtual popularity contest that's kind of beginning to remind me of what goes on in high school! I have a group of maybe 250 friends on facebook I can directly reach, but some of these people have over 30,000 views! How can I compete?

HN - I desperately need your help!

I wanted to be different and stand out when I made this video, so I spent 4 days locked in my room, animating my video, which is in the link above. Please visit it and give it the highest rating you can. I hope you enjoy it!

But Why should you do this? Because with my acceptance to this job, I will give a sizeable donation to several charities. You can help me help other people in need. I'm thinking at least 10 percent of what I make, and hopefully more. To any who would scoff at this proposition, note, this is not a small number in the least. You vote can help make a real difference here.

Some history about me - I'm a 22 year old who had the great misfortune of graduating this past May in this horrid economic climate that only seems to be getting worse in the foreseeable future.. I've been getting by by doing freelance video work, which I only got by providing 3 months of free internship work at a studio, post-graduation. This job could literally start me off in my life on the right foot and be a tremendous boon to some deserving charities.

Some of the charities I want to give to/am considering: Doctors Without Borders, Make a Wish Foundation, Ronald McDonald House, St. Jude's...

And please, I would love to hear suggestions of any particular charities you would like to see helped - I don't know enough and will consider everything I hear.

So, just to review - please watch and rate my video 5 stars, spread the word, upmod this story; this will help me get the job worth 100,000. I will then be able to give at least 10 percent to various charities.

Thanks for your help!!
Slightly OT here, but F@W is one of my all-time favorites. I found it very inspiring and informative.

I remember reading somewhere that Jessica Livingston might be working on a sequel. Does anyone know if there's any truth to this?
It's more like criticizing a file system for lacking journaling, and then having its users respond that it does so because it gives you extra power to do things that a journaling file system would stop you from doing--or to implement your own if you see fit.
Thank you for the encouragement. I will spend more time on my hobby projects.

I have a lot of useful knowledge that I gained from my time in the technical trades school, as well as on the job. But sometimes I feel like I've hit a brick wall as well. For example the MSDN will tell me that it's more efficient to use class A rather than class B. Why? I don't know, I can't even begin to device tests for myself to find out if, where and when this is true. I just have to take whatever I find on the Internet as true. Sometimes it's frustrating. But then I still get the job done, so maybe it doesn't matter...?

Also, congrats your going back for religious studies. I did a 1 year theology certificate program between dropping out and programming. Really taught me lots I'll be thankful for all my life.
Thanks for the reminder - I'll try to make it this week. See you there!
MOTOROLA E680I