skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the wording of the parent is more telling of his, dare I say it, jealousy, than your "conceitedness". If you weren't as successful I doubt people would come out of the woodwork to question your motives.

Really appreciate all of these breakdowns. I'm a young 20-something trying to prepare myself for essentially exactly what you're currently doing and these posts are invaluable- not just for my domain knowledge, but my nerves as well (Now I can show my Mom people can make money doing this!).
Lisp-ish way of type-tagging the data for efficient binary encoding? Heresy! Not a J* way.)
Michigan: now illegal to ask employees/students for their Facebook credentials
The word Amazon appears in this article 34 times. The actual article is the same "zen fluff" of "I need less consumer goods" and "I was suddenly realizing I was buying useless crap".
I just don't like people flaunting their success. Even if other do enjoy it as some sort of aspirational motivation, the sentiment is understandable, I think.

The sardonicism and patronization isn't necessary.
With $4000 monthly expenses, you should have about 100k left in savings or some non-monthly expenses and probably a bunch of taxes, what do you do with your excess?

Is it something mundane like saving for a bigger house, or your pension, or are you reinvesting?
"We have strong protections (constitution)"

Which history has shown can be ignored, chipped away, sidestepped, circumvented, reinterpreted, and otherwise abused when it is convenient to do so.

"recourse (elections) against the government"

Except that in America, the elections are a choice between one set of fascists and another set of fascists. Voting third party is the only real recourse in America, but the major parties have set things up so that third party candidates are marginalized and remain obscure.

"While not perfect by any stretch they are far better than what we have against Corporations."

Better? Corporations cannot send paramilitary teams to invade your home. Corporations cannot punish you at the airport. Corporations cannot hold in against your will. You are free to ignore Facebook; you are not free to ignore the government.

"Facebook and other Corporations "watch" much more of us than government does"

The real problem with corporations is that they become a tool used by the government to circumvent the constitution:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1475524
> "The specification is a copy of the proprietary vendor's e-mail and office software."

I wonder who could have written the spec.
You keep using this word, "strawmen". I don't think it means what you think it means.

The thing is, we're describing historical figures. Our "subjective opinions" are not really helpful guides. Or, to be more accurate, they don't matter at all.

You keep repeating it's your "subjective opinion" as if that somehow makes it OK. A subjective opinion can be wrong. It's not like one can get away with saying "In my subjective opinion gravity doesn't exist".

Or, to be more accurate, it's one thing to say that you find what Hitler DID was evil or that he was an evil-doer (as a substitute for "bad") and leave it at that.

And it's totally another thing to say "Hitler was evil", as if that is some kind of explanation of his actions.

The first is mighty fine. The second is not. And I'm concerned with the latter mistake here which is a BS non explanation, analogous to "cargo cult programming", and it doesn't matter if one means it as his subjective opinion or as an objective observation.

In both cases, it hinders further and real understanding.

To get to why Hitler was like that and why he did what he did you go for the underlying causes. For the person it's his history, his ideological influences, experiences, mental issues, abuses, etc. For the German society in general the causes are historical, sociological, economical, cultural, etc.

Nowhere in those cases does "evil" come into play at all.
I think one of the reasons people are a bit reluctant to come forward with such info is that it can easily be interpreted as bragging. Personal finances are not something that people usually put out for the world to digest.
Scientists Move Magnets with Light
Clients being unable to pay has been frustrating and made me want to do less consulting... That’s why I love selling products, I get paid up front and don’t have to worry about collecting payments.

This is exactly why I left the consulting biz too. I had a web development agency with a bunch of friends & ex-colleagues that was about to make $1M in profits after 3 years. That number would be much higher, had it not been for clients (mostly startups and small businesses) that weren't able to pay (so they claimed) or went out of business. This is despite collecting a deposit of 50% of the estimated costs up-front.

Before we broke $1M, I saw a great opportunity to develop a product, so I shifted my focus and have been doing that ever since.

Consulting is good for getting (relative) immediate cash up-front, while products can take a long time to begin earning that same amount of cash. However, if done well, products can scale and earn much more revenue in the long run.

Nathan is definitely taking the right approach for an individual entrepreneur. He's diversifying his income (consulting, apps, books) while presumably moving his focus away from consulting as his income from apps and books increases.

Good luck man!
That comment is for a totally different study. The study only includes users with an age in their stack exchange profile. It is not related in any way to if they have a social media account.
What about taxes and health insurance?
Complete if complete = booting to a BSD command line. Otherwise, not even remotely complete. No Core services. No Finder. No DiskUtility or any number of other core OS binaries.
Ask HN: Should i give up?
Hi hacker people I am a 27 year old guy done computer science engineering from india. My percentage is very low and i have completed it in 5 years instead of 4 and that too in the year 2009! Since then i got no job offers and depression caused me to forget reality and learn no skill. I have got no girlfriend. My childhood too was bad since my dad left me when i was 2. Now my mom has obvious expectations from me. I have nothing left. Have any one got up from such kind of situation or should i just quit! Please help !
There is a surprisingly large amount of bookwarez out there. I pretty much buy on amazon (kindle), but if it isn't available on kindle, bookwarez seems the easiest way to get an ebook.

I have bought a bunch of Audible audiobooks too, but their DRM is so annoying that I rip them to mp3, and if I can bookwarez the audiobook, would just do that to avoid wasting 3h running the conversion and encoding.
When I quit my job last year I had a couple things going for me:

1. I had freelanced before in college, so that life wasn't totally new.

2. I had a lot of connections so finding work was never a problem.

3. I had almost $30,000 in savings to even out the slow months.

4. I had iPhone apps that I had built in my free time while I was employed that were making $2k+ a month.

So quitting my job was not risky at all. In fact, I really dislike risk.

All that said, I did come fairly close to running out of money this last August when I had put all my time into the first book and a consulting client didn't pay a rather large sum of money. Now had I not been working on the first book, I never would have used up my reserve cash.
"What I don't want, though, is to end up wondering where I put my stylus all the time."

Sounds like an app in the making: stylus finder. Have it draw a big arrow on the screen to point you in the direction of the stylus.
But what practical purpose does breaking down your income serve to readers? Will it help them increase conversions, save time, or increase efficiency?

It's true that there is sometimes an irritating level of "hero worship" around these parts, but as another HNer running multiple small businesses, I appreciate Patrick's contributions. Some of his ideas and experiments are relevant to other fields as well. For example, his results from switching to Stripe are very interesting to those of us outside the US, where accepting card payments directly is a much bigger deal (typically a multi-week application process and a lot more tedious integration work). Having some idea of the potential gains over the easy option of using Paypal/Google/etc. is interesting when deciding if and when it's worth spending that time.
Fine, then don't.

(These words were just about as enlightening as the article.)
> I'm not a big fan of the "it's compatible with Java" hype around these VM languages.

The fact is Java interop is a fundamental feature providing great pragmatic utility as well as an absolute prerequisite for any kind of adoption of these languages. It's basically the opposite of "hype."
The highs and lows of startup life
Perhaps the US constitution isn't the be-all-and-end-all of political thought, and people have valid disagreements on which parts of it are important?
Congrats Nathan - really appreciate the openness & honesty :)
I may take Brennan Dunn's (http://planscope.io) approach of getting paid 100% up front. I still have a lot to learn doing consulting.

Like you said, a balance of consulting and products is a good way to go.
>Also you are now claiming the exact opposite of what you said earlier:
"Evil is a BS theological notion". But now you want to tell me what is objectively wrong? I dare you go ahead and try, haha..

For one, I fail to see where I claim the "exact opposite". Throughout the discourse I maintain that "evil is a theological notion" and one that doesn't describe reality (the two go hand in hand).

I also fail to see the "dare" in wanting me to say what is "objectively wrong".

That the Earth is flat is "objectively wrong" for example.

That Cleopatra was in fact a guy from Bronx is "objectively wrong".

And that theological terms such as "evil" explain what people are in objective reality is "objectively wrong".
It is extremely inconsistent. The config file is a list of Scala expressions, however it is not a valid Scala code as a whole. And when you want subprojects, then suddenly the config file is not able to do that, you need to setup another directory with a totally different style of config to do that. On the other hand the interactive console is a killer feature, agreed.
Any DRM by definition tries to keep a general purpose computer from being general (i.e. performing any task).

There's not much more piracy on Android than iOS, and it doesn't matter anyway.
Someone made a comment to me last year about a blog post I made "bragging about how much money I made." :( That's really not my intention at all. Just trying to be open and honest. So I'm glad this post didn't come across as bragging.
"Not possible to have made in C." -- Is it really true ?? I don't need the answer. You need to answer yourself.

"one guy (or a small team), properly trained and experienced, can move mountains with a high-leverage language." -- But if guy is not properly trained he can create a mess which is hell to clean also.

"1000 monkeys on 1000 typewriters can make something large in C" -- Every time you are using an STL container, that container has already been written by someone else. Every template you use, compiler generates the actual code for it. Every time you include a library , it was written in actual C/C++ code by someone else. Use g++ -E option to compare the "pre processed" code and compare the things.
I have the same homegrown bookkeeping software which I've used for forever. (Don't do this folks. Use Quickbooks. The only reason I use the homegrown stuff is because it publishes stats direct to my website.) I have a VA in the Philippines who I hired through Pepper. Every month or two, I take all of my credit card statements, zip them up, and send them to her. We have a standing orders document (terribly out of date -- should fix that) of what expenses count as business expenses and how to categorize them in the bookkeeping software. (Expenses are the only part which requires manual entry -- my sites do their own revenue tracking.)

There's a workflow hack or two to ensure that novel transactions get checked by me, eventually. (e.g. I have a personal credit card in the mix, for those rare times when both business cards fail, which means she sees a lot of transactions which aren't business related and should filter them all out. It wasn't obvious from the one-line description that e.g. my wedding venue is probably not appropriate for deduction, but since it was marked as novel (and ginormous relative to my expected expenses for that month), I caught it prior to doing the year in review numbers.

I do a more in-deoth review of the big expense categories (AdWords and travel) prior to doing my taxes and spot-check everything else. If e.g. a $60 software purchase ends up getting missed that's unfortunate, but it is only about ~$20 of unfortunate, and a few slip-ups are substantially cheaper in opportunity cost (and sanity) that having me do line-by-line review of all ~500 entries.

For general advice on how to work with VAs, I strongly recommend Rob Walling's book and have heard good things about the 4 Hour Work Week (but have never read it).
Different tools for different jobs. I don't want to browse the web using a stylus, it's just too awkward. I don't want to compose an essay using a touchscreen keyboard.
Facebook we feel like we've got influence. Does anyone still believe that they have ANY say in what happens in the government?
I use my smartphone as a super-PDA. I have had PDAs for 15 or more years (Palm Pilots of various flavors followed by an Nokia n800). The Nokia n800 was great having a full linux computer in my pocket, but was bulky.

I now carry a Nexus One (going on three years) and it is nearly perfect:

* Excellent size and weight (similar to the Palm Pilot Vx, which was my previous ideal form factor)

* Super PDA that also has good data connectivity over the cell network (T-Mobile sucks outside of major cities).

* Excellent functionality: nice color display for its size. Between Google Docs (problematic if no data coverage) and Dropbox (works great detached for the internet), I can organize my life via text files in Dropbox or spreadsheets in GDocs as well as the calendar app for reminders.

* Being able to access the internet for Google and Wikipedia for general information and RSS feeds (and Google News) for keeping up with news is tremendously useful.

* Can even be used as a phone! ;-)

The only part I miss with my Nexus One is that Android mostly buries linux, especially with it missing X11, a terminal window, and Bluetooth HID (the n800 had X11 quirks, but it was there as well as xterm, and BT HID for a real keyboard).
If true, that would change very quickly. The Open Source software movement would get behind any country that decided they were going to use it exclusively.
Instagram Says 25% User Exodus Is Bullshit
Death March
>Or how about we have it secure by default

If the private key is public, it's not secure, there's barely a point, hence my question... That's why I find this all so amusing.
Monte Carlo Pi 
http://math.fullerton.edu/mathews/n2003/montecarlopimod.html
Yes and no, depending on how you define privacy. The accidental privacy of the past, is dead and gone. Secrecy is the new privacy.
You don't have to use the sbt script provided here.

It's just for convenience: it will automatically install Java, Scala and dependencies. Run it and you don't have to hunt down anything from the web.

If you have SBT already installed (with homebrew, MSI, apt-get etc), you don't need that file at all.

Main.scala is a "println", Build.scala sets some compiler flags and project name - this is all.

About "Unit": Scala is strongly typed. In exchange you will not have run-time type errors and also you don't need type checking unit tests.
I don't like this, because then it means I have to change my repo to make a Github feature work, when Github has whole configuration UIs on their site for both my account and my repos.

Also I don't see the problem with opt-in. If your bot/plugin/service is worth its salt you'll be putting some effort into marketing it (which includes explaining how to use it).

The alternative is Github marketing the opt-out, which seems a bit strange if they're launching a feature and advising users how to not use it so they don't get spammed.
thanks! liked that one.
Currently I have about $85,000 in the bank. Most of that showed up in the last couple months. Another $15,000 has been earned, but not transfered over to my account yet. The trip to Europe took quite a bit of money, so I didn't have much around July or August of this year.

I'm not sure what I'm saving for, but the more money I have, the more reluctant I am to purchase things. For example, I have wanted to buy a Lotus Elise for a long time. My theory was I would get a used one for about $30,000. I convinced my wife that I could buy one when we had $100k in the bank. Now that we are close to that number, I don't want to spend it on something so frivolous.

We'll probably continue saving for a house. For now I am going to do some more traveling and continue to live as inexpensively as possible. For example, my current rent is $650 a month.
Please come to the rescue of a Star Trek fan
A lot. I don't know exactly how much, but it will be far more than any other year.
"There's no difference between this and designing the classes first."

Databases are designed to be shared structures accessible from many applications, so it's not a 100% direct comparison. When focusing on a single process of a single application, of course that leads to some simplifications (no IPC, all datatypes match up perfectly, no concurrency problems).

"you're not constrained by relational requirements"

I don't see relational as more constrained or less constrained than OO. It's different. For instance, in OOP I often feel like it's forcing a hierarchical structure upon the design. Inheritance feels very constraining to me in comparison to the free joining of one table to another based on the values inside (not necessarily based on explicit connections in the design).
No doubt.

Years ago, a buddy hosted corporate email, dns, etc. Racks of servers. He added ambient audio to everything he monitored. Nature sounds, weather, birds, insects, etc. The volume, samples, and tempo would change dynamically. Happy soothing sounds when all was well. Disruptive sounds when bad stuff happened.

(I don't know if you'd classify that as sonification.)

Walking around, visiting with guests, talking on the phone, his crew always knew the health of their systems.

It was awesome.
You are comparing Patrick's income to those of auto mechanics and custodians as if that could be instructive.
Ask HN: Best podcasts in 2012?
I'm thinking of getting into a few more podcasts in the new year. What were some of your favorites in 2012?
How much help should you give during technical interviews?
A light switch that fits in a normal plate that can be remotely "switched". One can pick up a SPST switch for a buck at the local home improvement center -- $10 for this feature would make it easier to buy without hesitation.
I still waste a lot of time when I should be working. Especially on sites like Hacker News. ;)

Generally I work about 40-50 hours a week, spread out throughout the day, 7 days a week. Most of that time is spent designing or writing.
Nice to know that you write million lines of code.

I worked for one founder once. He earned $137 million by selling his products. He had worked on similar products for 15 years in his previous companies, primarily in C++. But when he started on his own - he chose C. He chose C for its own qualities and I am sure he would have missed some good qualities of C++ but then that is a compromise that come with early decision.
Pretty similar hours (40-50 a week), I just get to pick what I work on now.
Quit ? Never ever.

Use your spare time for building your skills (make sure you learn what your future employer needs).
Try to get a foot in the door by any means. What do your former student friends do for their living ? Could they help ?

Good luck.

PS: You need to show commitment. Employers won't employ you because of a bad situation.
Question out of curiosity: did you notice any performance improvements from using DataView and ArrayBuffer?
The cheap argument is totally valid, 433Mhz plugs are an order of magnitude cheaper! I've seen some on on-off sockets as low as $3.

Even the more expensive models are half the price of the Zigbee devices!
so much more is communicated in person--facial expressions, tone, body language. Can make a real difference...
Most of my consulting comes from people I've met locally. I have a pretty good reputation from speaking at user groups and code camps, so a lot of people know me. Age hasn't really been an issue (I'm 22).

When I first did freelancing I was 15 and 16, so it was much more difficult then.
These are some really key points that deserve some highlight. Thank you, Nathan. Cheers!
Interesting commentary. However, a sample size on one doesn't yield a substantive-enough dataset to draw conclusions. As a high schooler, I can tell you that service use varies wildly based on location and demographic.

Moreover, Josh's sister didn't really differentiate between her preferences and the preferences of her cohort in general. She may have very idiosyncratic social media use-cases. I know the way in which I use social media is very different from the way in which some of my friends use it, which in turn differs from the way many others use it. People are different, and they use services differently.

I would take any assertion of how people use social media with a big grain of salt.
That's a great point. I probably wouldn't do it with a HTML5 shooter with hundreds of projectiles though... what I mean is, those engines still have to check "what shape is it, oh, it's a circle, so now check what I am colliding with..", while you e.g. know the projectiles are circles and the walls are orthogonal planes. This may not always apply, of course, and I agree that as soon as you enter more complex territory you can save yourself a lot of pain by using a "proper physics engine".
Generate better reports using MySQL Join statements
The evolution of the API: A future beyond mobile and embedded systems
LCHF has a transition period and it's strongly discouraged to engage in exercise during this period as your digestive system is undergoing drastic changes.

This is an excellent resource on transitioning and coping: http://www.ketogenic-diet-resource.com/low-carb-diet-side-ef...

Heed warning, two weeks is the minimum length for the transition.
You absolutely could. The Ninja platform is protocol agnostic.
What I'm more interested in is why the most passionate defenders of the second amendment never seem interested in government power grabs like this.

Because many defenders of the second amendment aren't actually defenders of personal freedom, but are merely defenders of their cultural expressions (one of which is gun ownership).

See also the people who passionately defend the right of two consenting adults to do whatever they want in the privacy of their own bedroom, but then object if I want to pay someone $2 an hour to clean the bedroom. Or the people who defend the free speech of the New York Times Corp., but not the free speech of Citizens United, Inc.

Most people are merely supporting their tribe and don't actually buy into the principles they appeal to when making arguments.
The CIA has a backdoor into Facebook's data anyway.

I think people are (or should be) more concerned about collusion between corrupt corporate and governmental entities than they are when either one is corrupt because they are stronger and less easy to take down when they are actually working together. Makes people realize the fact that the reality of the society is actually very gloomy.