skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No way, don't quit. All of us go through depressing times.

We can't tell you exactly what to do as we're all different, but it's obvious you need to change something. You could maybe try and move to a different town/city and get work there or maybe start taking a few classes again and build some software that could help you in your class.
Must be the data consumption part. AT&T starter package is 300 MB a month.
I would be wary of romanticizing the past. The 60s were not necessarily a picnic if you were black, a woman, or a poor male.
What do you think the chances are Apple has some "influence" in the FSF?
Not according to this: http://dashes.com/anil/2012/11/facebook-makes-it-official-yo...

Not that users ever had a say in the first place.
Fair point actually - didn't consider that the cost is embedded. That said, How often are those the data hogs? (Anecdotally from myself, I rarely come near the data caps). My assumption is that even today, video apps are the most data intensive - outside of those, are folks hitting their data caps on a regular basis?
Sure there are a lot of FaceTime like apps. But the problem is none of them have done a phenomenal job marketing to their demographic to really take market share.

There are also a great deal of drawbacks to FaceTime which make it expensive. It costs cell data? That's expensive! It takes a lot of bandwidth? Also expensive.

The point is that there are so many rough edges around the product that it makes it a pain in the ass to use. Slow choppy video is also a problem.
Introducing the DIY ISP international mailing list
Hellbann wouldn't make any sense. I also doubt the voted down option for threads/comments. As many suggested i think it's a bug or anything similar. If doesn't happen again i simply won't bother, otherwise i'll investigate.

Most of the time i'm a ghost reader on HN and i don't really pretend to understand all the dynamics on this community. This is why i asked pubblicly what the cause could be as maybe there was some very obvious reason i just wasn't aware of.

Thanks a lot for your help, much appreciated :)
I experience this also. In addition, the UI is kludged into iOS - they just did their best to port the desktop UI. It works, as apps go, but obviously wasn't built from the ground up for mobile.
An era lived by a God in the form of human
Yep, exactly - applications like that are just cool, useful and intuitive all at once.

What's interesting is that for visual displays, we have decades of detailed research into visual perception - we know from experience how to design a graph so that patterns can be quickly extracted and understood. We don't yet have that same level of understanding for sonifications, but once we do, applications like this will be even better
thanks for the detailed response! that clarifies the static wrapper method a bit that I've seen used in the mri source and other places. Yea, I should have just done strncpy but was just typing in a quick example and didn't think buffer overflows would be an issue :)
Anybody have any knowledge of how job prospects compare between Scala, Clojure and Haskell?

The article seems to imply Scala jobs are taking off (19 pages). Are Scala jobs really outpacing Clojure and Haskell?
Says Who | Bizcovering
The new definition of drones
NPR's Planet Money

Lapham's Quarterly
I tried Microsoft Azure for a month because I received free credits via their BizSpark program. I can confidently say their uptime is the worst I have ever seen. Nearly daily servers would loose access to disks and switch to read-only mode. Also, they lack any ability to snapshot backup servers, which is a basic requirement of a cloud platform.

I know its early, and they are just starting, but I just don't have confidence in Azure. Stick with AWS, Linode, Softlayer.
So you don't have any accounts receivable. Then you never have to worry about a client not paying. That link isn't directly to where Brennan talks about it (maybe it was on a podcast?), but read his stuff and you will learn a lot. I know I have.
If this isn't a scientific targeted language, you should change that to "byte code" or better yet, "bytecode"

Code is a mass noun when talking to the computer profession.

The science professions still use the (now thought by the computer professions to be archaic) form "Codes"
I don't think the Facebook issue has anything to do with their brand. I think the attitude that Facebook is addicting actually has more to do with people becoming bored with the service and noticing how much time they actually spend on it.

Edit:

>> "... my friends and I used Myspace in middle school, and we too abandoned it (for Facebook) once we reached high school"

The conclusion drawn here might be incorrect. I'm not sure of the age of the author but could it be that he reached high school at the time when Myspace had fallen out of favour with most people and everyone was beginning to transition to Facebook?

It's an interesting post, particularly the part about Snapchat. His sister's use of it seems to fit with the way Facebook was advertising Poke (I thought they just had to find another angle besides sexting but it sounds like there are other uses for it). After hearing this description it sounds like something I might use. A lot of the photos I share on Twitter/Instagram and things I find interesting or funny but I never need to see again. I usually have to then go and delete them from my camera roll and occasionally I go back through my Instagram feed and delete them. The idea of Snapchat (expiring images) seems to be what I need.
Patrick, I have been reading your stuff for some time now and it is indeed interesting and useful and worth a lot of money to loads of people I'm sure.

But goddamn man, for the greater good, forget this silly software racket and put out a comic book. Perhaps a live action television show, maybe a movie. Your anecdotes are always my favorite part. :)
Yep. The answer might be in someone who figures out how to optimize video chat for efficiency.
I am much more worried about Facebook, etc, violating my privacy than Washington, for three reasons:

1) A lot of the hand-wringing over Washington's privacy invasions are overblown. A lot of online commentators are playing fast and loose with the contours of the various laws in question. Sometimes the rhetoric is (ironically) downright Orwellian. Laws designed to restrict federal investigative authority are turned around to seem like they are expanding that authority. This is a great post by tptacek answering some of the points in the FISA debate: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4979925. Also, as a lawyer, I have quite a bit more faith and less paranoia about the various legal protections we have against the government.

2) I trust big corporations less than I trust the government, at least the federal government. Through history, the pendulum has swung back and forth on this issue, but I think right now the shoe is on the other foot. Your protections against your government really have never been stronger. Guantanamo has been a huge, wrenching scandal, even though it involves non-Americans captured in Afghanistan that are not even being held in the U.S. It is portrayed as our Soviet Gulags, but the place is literally crawling with attorneys (including many from prominent corporate law firms): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_attorneys. This is not a place where things are happening under the cover of darkness. At the same time, the economic power of corporations, relative to the rest of the economy, hasn't been stronger in generations, and the regulations and laws protecting you from them haven't been weaker in generations. This is not to say that I think corporations are evil. I don't. I think they're great. I also think the government is great. But I'm more wary of the people that have the most power and from whom I have the least protection.

3) It's a rational risk-weighted evaluation of the potential harms. Yes, getting detained indefinitely without trial and access to representation would be much worse than my employer getting a hold of my Facebook information, but I think that as a practical matter the latter is orders of magnitude more likely. Look at the credit reporting services. People these days can be denied jobs because they have bad credit. I think that sort of thing is far more likely to happen with social networking sites, than I am to get disappeared by the government for posting critical comments on online forums. It's totally rational to worry more about the former than the latter.
Forgetting for a second what work someone finds more valuable (or the potential to increase your income or other benefits (social status perhaps) there is one big difference.

A consultant has to constantly come up with new business. Patrick's skills may be in demand now and not in demand 5 years from now (unless he morphs into something else valuable).

One thing I've never liked about consulting (that I like about BCC and AR, in general) is that you are constantly on the hunt for new consulting business. Even if the pipeline is full now you only have so many hours. A missed opportunity to consult (because you don't have the time) can't be fulfilled in the future. It's perishable.

Using the example of a mechanic that earns 200k in which the experience matters and the thing he is useful at doesn't go out of style (2 "ifs") the mechanic doesn't have to wake up in the morning and wonder where the next gig is going to come from.
Before the eBooks I was on track to barely beat my previous year's salary (I probably would have hit $75,000). But I focused a ton of time on the books rather than consulting or promoting my apps, so that decreased the revenue from each of those. So keep in mind that some of the book revenue is in place of consulting revenue.
I was baffled by the "Facetime is expensive" comment. I'm in the UK. Are data plans that limited and WiFi that uncommon? How much data does Facetime use?

The Facetime/iMessage slant is interesting. Do any of her peers have Android phones? Do platform choices follow class/ethnicity/age/region patterns to the extent where it's not even on her radar?
Your great success is very encouraging! I'm not sure if I could write a book, but the results from consulting and programming are very impressive for a first attempt.

I'm in the middle of making the jump myself, and am currently paying that $4000/mo for our family of two. Did you simply save up enough to live on that for a few months to make more of it? How did that work?

Thanks for the inspiration and congratulations again on your successful year!
When was it? We actually have great experience and great uptime with Azure. It's a very unique case for us.
Guesses won't make any difference. File a rdar or open tickets instead ;)
Snapchat?

Edit: I mean to suggest that photos might be the optimization.
We travel quite a bit.
Why "patio11"? Always curious about nicks.

edit (to avoid comment spam): Thanks for the info!
A fair number of schools still use C and C++ as the language of instruction.
I believe that you are massively over-estimating the value of detailed sports knowledge for this question. If someone claimed that they knew nothing, I'd give something like the following hint. The main things that you need to know is that there are teams, with players, who play games with each other. During the games the players do things we want to track. And each game belongs to a season. When you need to know more than that, we'll tell you more.

Was it gender biased? I don't think so. I never saw that detailed sports knowledge was a significant advantage. Furthermore in my time interviewing at that company, we had a total of 2 women in that interview. Neither had trouble on understanding the problem domain sufficiently well for modeling purposes. We hired one of them. We were on the fence about the other and decided not to. That was better than the average for men who reached that stage of the interview process. However the sample size is sufficiently small that it is not really evidence of a difference.

So both on first principles, and from the limited direct data that I have, the question does not appear to be gender biased.
very good points. While I agree with your initial post's synopsis (stay away from consulting) I also heavily agree that you might NEED it for starters. Thanks for the tips!
Are you running Linux or Windows? This was June/July.
Hipsters on Food Stamps
None of those things are even remotely true, but I don't see how pointing out the facts is going to dissuade you from believing conspiracy theories.
I wouldn't try to do as many things as possible. Work on one till it is making money (or needs to be shut down because it is failing) then move on to the next thing. Be careful not to spread yourself to thin. That said, get another income source (besides consulting) before you quit your job.
What part of my comment blames one side? I fully agree that democrats are to be blamed for FISA and NDAA just as much as republicans, if not more. If and when Obama signs them into law, he will share the blame as well. He has been consistently missing in action or on the wrong side on these issues.
But my main point is not the congress but the public, media, etc. there is very strong defense of second amendment yet fourth and fifth gets dumped on and it's hardly noticed. I consider these changes as much bigger threats to liberty than ability to have guns, and perplexed that this view is not more widely shared.
It sounds like the author isn't really interested in named branches, but rather postpone the push of his work-in-progress that's on the default branch. You don't need anything fancy for that, and certainly not rebase.

Mercurial has so-called anonymous branches, so all he needs to do is 'hg update' to the commit preceding his work on feature A, start work on feature B (will result in two heads on the default branch) and then push only those changes by specifying the -r flag to push.
Actually, I do know what exponential means.

Faster-than-exponential means the rate of growth increases as time progresses, e.g. e^(e^t).

By "the overarching story is still faster-than-exponential", what I mean is that the rate of economic growth itself is growing-- taking the long (hundreds of years) view. In agrarian times, 0.1% per year was typical. By the 1700s, we were up to 0.3-0.5% per year. By 1825, 1% per year was typical. Now, global economic growth is about 4% per year.

If we started out with a GDP 1% a year in 1950, and say GDP advanced .5% per year after that, we'd currently be experiencing 31% economic growth per year.

It won't grow that fast. My guess is that the growth rate's own doubling rate is about once every 150 years or so (with noise) meaning we'll see 9-10% growth as the norm in the mid-22nd century. Obviously, there's some limit to this, but once humanity is post-scarcity (ca. 2120) who cares?
I want to double on kirinan's question. I'm not quite in his shoes; I've had a few clients, I've got a couple theoretically lined up but the answers I keep hearing are "we really want to hire you but we have to get the funding approved", which in the cases I fully pursue mainly seem to be some guy holding the purse strings and not caring if the project gets done or not.

This just happens to be my current hurdle. I really wish there was a lot more written from the perspective of "I am trying to make it" than the perspective of "so now you are rich and famous and are looking for how to make a few more dollars...."
> Your protections against your government really have never been stronger.

Assuming you're talking about the USA, that is one of the more ludicrous claims I have read in a long time.
I think you should look into www.supportbee.com, it's like a smart shared Gmail account (even has the same shortcuts) and it allows for template responses and if you want you can connect with your other systems using their API.

Disclosure: It's run by friends of mine but I use it myself as well.
Spending time helping folks / mentoring great people to do awesome things... Always worth doing. Who cares if its tied to a startup or not! (Also a fun way to get to know interesting smart folks. )
I certainly didn't pull off $145k after quitting my job either. :(

It's not that easy and for those of us who are trying, are there pointers? Make everything snazzy, yes, but some days I spend so much time on polish it seems like it is for nothing! (disclaimer: some things I've done are very nonpolished.)
The Young Engineer
Revealed: how the FBI coordinated the crackdown on Occupy
Facebook makes it way too easy to compare your behind-the-scenes footage against someone else's highlight reel.
Who Is On The First Page Of Google For New Years?
Well said. I'm nowhere near the success level of Nathan, but do see each year's hard work translating into incremental increases in quality of life every year (I'm a self employed consultant).

I lend an ear to freelancers and consultants quite a bit and a lot of the focus is on how hard they're having to work, and how surprising that is to them. The first thing I say is that yes, it's an incredible amount of work. You can ease the pain a bit here and there, but in general there are absolutely no short cuts.

To "make it" being self employed, or selling products, or both, takes an incredible amount of desire and persistence. So much that you really have to enjoy the process, otherwise most quit before they reach any reward simply b/c it's too much work combined with too much risk.
Good idea; but maybe only the ones with a title and description; to index the ones that have a clear purpose and not some random code without any idea how to use it or what is for.
Why do you suppose that special interest groups lobby the federal government, rather than lobbying large corporations? It has nothing to do with accountability to citizens.
Wounded Knee 122 Years Later
This diverse view is very good. It's always promising to pay attention outside of your generation and use-case. Family and friends are a great starter, but try different neighborhoods , cities, or even countries - there are a LOT more opportunities out there.

Sadly, one thing I've found with people's suggestions (and I've heard a lot of "next hot app" suggestions as I'm sure you have as well) already exist. They just don't know that they do. Maybe there's a job for bringing those apps to those people? How meta.
"We believe that 2013 is going to be a great year for startups."

Could anyone elaborate on why?
> Or a huge money seeking corporation selling sugar water.

If you remove the word 'sugar' from this sentence, it will still be true and also the problem of value arbitrage will be mostly gone. Bottled water is a worldwide scam.
We're running on their table storage from web roles and worker roles (their platform-as-a-service)
I am having fun with it, and it doesn't seem to be devolving.

Side note: I really want an iPad version. The interface doesn't even need to change at all, with the possible exception of making the airplanes a little bigger. I run it in 2x mode, but font rendering is massively ugly.
Can't play the audio today because of the snow - I use a satellite internet, so I can't comment on the music, sorry. I trade though, and I also compose, so this project got my attention. What I'd like to add is this: My focus on trade in this period is penny stocks. From my own experiences and what others say, I can say Apple and other blue chips usually don't move as "dramatically" as much cheaper penny stocks. It's in the math. If a current price is in the $500 range, like Apple, changes of a few $s only represent less than 1%, whereas in penny or sub- penny stocks, a single trade can move the price up or down a few pennies or less that can easily amount to 10, 30 or bigger % change. Movements like that going back and forth within very short period sometimes resemble needle-sharp alien teeth, it's funny to watch. Price % changes are that much crazier, and likewise the volumes when a stock suddenly gets attentions etc. I'd imagine that music generated off that kind of data can present different kinds of compositional experiences.
I have a couple long term, open-ended contracts right now that I'm consulting on, billing out anywhere from 10-40 hours per week on each. The deliverables are frequent, communication is open, I invoice every two weeks with detailed line items, and get paid within 7 days. There are no up front deposits - honestly, it goes against my own values, I'm uncomfortable getting paid for work I have yet to do. The terms are clear in the contracts with work stoppage clauses and all. It's worked well going on about 6 months of doing this. Maybe I'm lucky, and maybe this is the nature of doing long-term gigs or just having clients you mesh well with, but is this really all that unusual?
Doesn't look like something I would like to write me code in frankly. It does say it is for 'industrial' application whatever that means. I would think this would be for robots, but then why javascript?

Obviously I am not target group.
Good job Nathan, following the right path to being a successful solopreneur.

Do you use a publisher for your books and/or do marketing yourself to sell them?

Also, you should have visited Glasgow instead of Edinburgh, we are a much friendlier place :-P
Make sense, thanks. Yes.. I admittedly had the question "Why trying to sell bingo cards rather than going after a more lucrative products" but thought you had your own personal reasons for doing so.
It depends on what you need. sqlite if you need SQL queries /indexes,etc, try leveldb if key/value store will work, its fast and micro.
Daily, fresh art for the SOUL
great summary of the process, very helpful / educational. also interesting to hear about AngelList / SecondMarket opportunity.
Agreed. Even Box2D is overkill most of the time (if we're talking about 2D games).
In first grade, we were given a pointless busywork assignment to test our handwriting skills. I hated writing (I did not have good physical control of the pencil) so I wrote the shortest possible answer to all of the pointless questions. The first question was "What is your favorite number?" I answered "1" My teacher, looking at answers like "1", "red", "a dog", "No.", etc, said "1 can't be your favorite number. Pick a harder number to write." I spitefully picked "11". (Too bad I couldn't write Japanese at the time -- for the same amount of work I could have picked 10.)

In middle school, right when I was first getting involved with online services, my best friend was a Puerto Rican. He hated the hard "k" sound in Patrick and called me "pato" for about a day, but laughed at his oh-so-clever joke, so I asked him to change it. I can't stand "Pat." (There was a movie about a gender-ambiguous character named Pat that year. It was middle school and I was a geek, you can do the math.) He then proposed "Patio." We paled around often enough that it stuck with my family. When I needed a disambiguating number for e.g. AOL email addresses or Warcraft 2 handles, I naturally went with my favorite number, 11.

I'm patio11 on just about every service that I use which I don't mind associated with my real name.
Very true! Mentoring is great in every area of life and is always worth doing.
One that I would recommend is What Every BODY is Saying: An Ex-FBI Agent's Guide to Speed-Reading People
http://www.amazon.com/What-Every-BODY-Saying-Speed-Reading/d...
Book Excerpt From Sell More Software
> The only times guns were seriously used in an anti-federal-government uprising was during the civil war...

Like many people, you are missing the role that personal firearms play in resisting tyranny. No one is claiming that a firearm can do anything against artillery, tanks, and fighter jets (much less chemical and nuclear weapons). The armed populace obviously cannot hope to mount an offensive coup. The point is that an armed populace cannot be occupied by a tyrannical government. Look at how difficult the occupation of Iraq has proved, and imagine how much more difficult it would be in a country with ten times the population, 20 times the land area, and nearly 30 times the number of small arms.