skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've built a similar desk using the same door and a pair of sawhorses. The door bows a bit if you're like me and pile books on your desk. It also feels like it is going to give out if you lean on it. The surface is a wood veneer - not good for writing. You pretty much have to apply the whiteboard type surface to the desk in order to get a smooth writing surface.

I decided that the finished tabletops from IKEA were a better value: the surface is already good for writing and they have more internal reinforcement so they don't bow or feel as flimsy.

My favorite DIY desk was made out of a solid core door from the Door Store[1] in Cambridge, MA and a pair of filing cabinets. However, solid core door prices are much more expensive than hollow core[2].

[1]http://www.doorstorecambridge.com

[2]http://www.doorstorecambridge.com/Pricelist_Tops1.htm
heh...reminds me of the punishment in Neal Stephenson's 'Anathem', where they have to memorize nonsense from a big book for weeks on end!
This looks good. Do you have an account with them and/or want to refer me? I think we can both save some money. Shoot me an email
These libraries may be open source but they're still written/managed by major companies. PHP library is managed by Facebook. The Flash library is managed by Adobe. The .net library? Abandoned at codeplex...

Part of being a platform vendor is releasing libraries. Adobe isn't waiting for a public team to write their product, they just did it themselves because it adds value to the platform.

Writing and maintaining a library for facebook doesn't require that many resources. Now I know you're response is going to be "Then why don't you do it." I wont do it because I can't write every little bit of code.
I'm ridiculously anal retentive about the quasi-ink-dust that comes off the whiteboard on my wall. I think my productivity would dramatically decline if I was faced with the same situation on the surface of my desk.

Neat idea though, for those who are less obsessive-compulsive.
Things I've worked on have been featured in the NYT, TechCrunch(IT), Forbes & Readwriteweb. In my experience - reporters/journalists are often looking for stories, usually on blogs or through search engines.

In one instance - I reached out to a pretty small blog and got put on the map that way (NYT).

In another instance a Forbes writer was searching google and we kept popping up.

Also - I've offered favors to bloggers + try give them "story" flow. I believe this may have had a partial influence on our TechCrunch coverage.

Also - I have a VERY good feeling that bloggers/press check out the front page of Hacker News often...
MS may think sharepoint is an alternative but that is definitely not the case. Many developers work independently and need to offer clients simple solutions when building a website. Sharepoint is not simple or cheap. It's a beast for enterprise systems.

As a programmer dealing with a client, how can I suggest the client use asp.net over php? MS needs to address that question. Enterprise systems aren't the only animals out there.
Github and Heroku (I'm hopeful they will start charging one of these days, because I think they are on to something good. And I'm very new to Rails so it works for me at least here in the beginning).
I get worried when I see this described as "profitable". There is no way that you can describe "I spent $20 and made $6" as profitable in an honest fashion. Trying to do so just makes it sound less like "innovative method at getting new artists some exposure" and more like "pyramid scheme".
Great points!

I agree with you about going offshore. Nothing is smarter than getting your business out of the country that used to be America. If the CC processors and politicians want to slouch towards Soviet Russia, because it's "safer", show them that not only will they not have the efforts of John Galt, they won't have the productive efforts of any online businesses to be profitable. If a salesman lies to you about ANYTHING in the TOS, don't proceed. ...They often think you're a rube who has no better "internet full of options".

The arrogance I've encountered in my search was amazing. Sales people who tried to get me to sign a contract with hidden fees after telling me that "those are the flat rates". ...Circling vultures hoping I'd have no choice but to try to make it to their mudhole.

Authorize.net, PayPal, and Google all have canceled my account (after first telling me there would be no problem, and then commending me on my sales volume and zero chargebacks), refusing to stand up for free speech, and instead falling back on their legal boilerplate when my political enemies (the free-speech-hating DEA) called them and threatened them. So much for free speech in the USA! When it comes to any speech that needs protecting, there is no freedom of speech, because it has to exist in an ocean of extra-constitutional tax-subsidized legal threats. Free speech only means something if there's someone brave enough to speak. In this case, the United States CC processors don't have that bravery. They are virtually all rank cowards. Jefferson, John Locke and Thomas Paine are rolling in their graves. If you get high, or you are a friend of freedom, then please, tell everyone you know to boycott google pay, authorize.net, and paypal. Boycott them, don't pay them, never give them a dime. Seriously. If you do support them, don't come crying to me when they open your records to the DEA or the tax man, or shut you down because somebody doesn't like what you're saying. In this case, my "sour grapes" aren't that I'm losing money, my "sour grapes" are that my beautiful free country was sold down the river for an idle threat. The best revenge you can get is check out my sites anyway, and if you like what you see, order by phone. Or come back when our offshote account is set up. http://www.kopbusters.com http://www.nevergetbusted.com
I don't think the terminology is very much standardized. Our system is not "pure" capitalism, and perhaps it would be better to call it a mixed economy. By using the word capitalism, I mainly meant to contrast it with radically different systems, such as feudalism and central planning (I'm not aware of whether these systems also encountered boom/bust cycles.)
Am I the only one here using AWS-FPS?
You say a lot of things... let me take them a few at a time:

On arbitrage - I don't consider this financial crisis to have much to do with arbitrage. I am not sure you understand what arbitrage is; it isn't ANY money-making activity. It's when a middleman exploits transient differences in prices in markets. In any case, I never said arbitrage was evil. However, if the arbiter makes his money by exploiting an externality, then someone is losing. This is simply a notable side-effect.

On incentives - I don't buy the line that regulation caused that many warped incentives. Maybe some, but not all. And this would have happened WITHOUT the regs that might have caused some of the incentive anyway. None of the tax policies shifted behavior that significantly. Being able to deduct mortgage interest does differentially favor homeowners, but it doesn't affect the risks involved in becoming a homeowner. At worst it artificially inflates home prices.

On Glass-Steagall - I don't know it well, but one very useful effect of it was to compartmentalize risk. As anyone on HN should know; isolating risks in independent buckets drastically reduces the chance of major bad things happening. It's the sheer scale of the crisis that makes it bad; most of this stuff was ultimately pushed by a small handful of banks at the top. It also separated different types of investing which prevented oligopoly situations and group-think from having as big of an effect on the market. It put different companies on opposites sides of investments rather than the same side and probably had the effect of improving real-world due diligence. But I am just WAG'ing here on this one.

On bailout - I don't think taxpayers should be subsidizing bond or equity holders in any of these financial companies. Not sure where you got that idea, not from me.

On regulation - it's not ironic at all. You are presenting logical fallacy. Just because reg A is stupid doesn't mean regs B-Z are. They are unrelated. I am all for regs that help prevent massive market failures or allow massive externalities to persist over time. In the end, the citizens pay for it in taxes and instability. It is true that more regs would probably dampen some of the GDP upside, but IMHO that's a fine tradeoff compared to the economic havoc of massive recessions.
Serendipity is your friend. The very first article I had written about my company (Digital Envoy) happened because I randomly met this reporter at an event (Red Herring Venture Market South - that tells you how long ago this was since both the magazine and the event are now defunct). This one story (online only, not even in the magazine) ended up leading our first customer to us and getting them to signup.

So make sure you get out there and network and talk about what you're doing. No one will know what you're working on and, more importantly, they won't be able to talk about it if you just sit at your desk all day slaving away at code.
Philip Greenspun reviews "The Life You Can Save" by Peter Singer
Code Snippet: bit.ly for Twitter Tools Wordpress plugin
it's profitable in the sense that buying music enables you to get more music...
I couldn't find this anywhere, so I hope someone else finds it useful. It's a simple plugin for Wordpress that allows the Twitter Tools plugin to publish URLs using a URL shortening service. I used my favorite, bit.ly in this example. Also, I added in Google Analytics tracking as a bonus.

Hope someone can use it!
I applaud you for your restatement.

It is very surprising to me that scoring well on tests is in an indication of job performance. Maybe it has less to do with intelligence, and more with the desire for conformity. After all people who do well on standardized tests are often driven in a very conventional path.
Become a Web 2.0 Metrics Jedi: Using Product & Marketing Metrics to Optimize Your Business
True, but it is entirely opt-out with a single click. So it doesn't have to be there-- but for your clickers they can decide for themselves what they prefer.
A part of the process that I think everyone is ignoring here is also to pay attention to what your story is. It takes a lot of careful time to think about what makes a great story. Pay attention to what the press writes about and where they see conflict (always a good source for a story). Creating your story around how you are going to be a game changer relative to 4 unknown startups vs how you are going to revolutionize a market dominated by google, microsoft, etc.. journalists and press will obviously write the latter.

why? b/c what they care about is driving page views and readers. some do care about the topic and the story and trade on their reputation for being a deep expert. But remember, they need to make money. help them craft a story that will drive page views (which equals $ / CPM).

Have your collateral (screenshots, product videos, exec summaries) so that they can just clip in your content.

there's some press that will take the time to really understand your story. there's others that fall into the category of, "if i spend 5 minutes writing a story here i can generate tens of thousands of page views which gives me $x".

make it easy for both categories to write their articles.

remember.. it's all about understanding other people's motivations.. not yours.
I think this is a deeper question than the downvoting you're receiving suggests that it is.

There is a certain amount of one's desire to learn that is a matter of personality, and my understanding is that there is some degree of a person's personality that is determined by things other than socialization. Not all of it, but enough to possibly make a difference.

The flip-side of this is that if there are people who, due to some or another in-born trait, are unable to cultivate an attitude of continued hunger for knowledge, that is something they need to deal with by not entering into a profession that demands it. And programming is definitely one of those fields.

EDIT: silencing my own inner grammar nazi
branching out from the Lisp world often feels like branching out on a random path from Rome in its glory days might have felt like - filthy, stinking barbarians abound in all directions

A rather apt analogy, as it was those filthy, stinking barbarians (and their descendants) who were mostly responsible for the renaissance, the enlightenment, and modern western society. If biology has taught us nothing else, it's that a monoculture is always at risk.
I think this is an acceptable use of the word. This particular account may not have turned a profit, but it might over time. And even if it doesn't this is certainly more revenue than you would receive with iTunes.
Like above I didn't make myself clear at all. Let me try again, by your leave.

I wasn't claiming you can't tack feature X onto lisp, of course you can, you can implement anything in anything. The point I wanted to make was that "power" is not just some object feature bullet points, it's about ease of use and syntax and libraries as well.

"If you add Traits (library for Mixins) to Smalltalk, it is equivalent to Ruby in power. (1)"

Only for your definition of "power".

Yes, everyone loves Ruby's super-flexible objects and mixins etc but that is only the start of the story. Its syntax is terse, intuitive and good-looking. The rubygems packaging system is effective and ubiquitous. Irb is excellent and "live coding" techniques are invaluable. To me, these are very much part of the real "power" and the main reason I prefer it over, say, Python. You might be able to emulate the object behaviour but it's still "incomprehensible mess of brackets" Lisp.

You might be able to claim that Lisp is 90% "homomorphically equivalent", a phrase I don't think I've heard since Mathematics 2, but who gives a shit? Go ahead and add the last 10% of whatever it is that Ruby has and Lisp doesn't. Now you have just as much power as Ruby? So go ahead and type "require activerecord" (don't forget to compile!) and just try to tap into that power. Oops.

"Language power" is not just some reductive theoretical idea of what features a language has, or could implement. It's the whole package, and how you use it. Sure you can add Ruby's features to C. But a better way is to implement Ruby in it.

Lisp might well be the infinitely flexible meta-language which can be used to describe all others, but that isn't actually useful in itself, as used today. Lisp may be an incredibly powerful tool for something, but it has little advantage for conventional end-user code, not any more anyway. It's pretty exciting to think where it might end up, though.

"And one could probably take just about any Lisp and give it the power of the other 10% (like Erlang) with moderate effort."

Again, only for your definition of "power", which is not what the average programmer who is just interested in getting stuff done is thinking about.
I thought this was going to be about Zuckerberg admitting that he beat out far superior products in the early stages for no other reason than starting at Harvard, and having a couple journalists in his pocket. Then I read the title more closely and realized I'd missed the word you.
First public release of MorphAdorner
This is possibly the lamest idea I've ever seen. Why would I give someone else credits? The only point is to trade them in for gifts, so I might as well just spend the points to buy gifts directly. Or, even better, just buy real gifts in the real world.

Is this Facebook's monetization strategy - turning the news feed into a pachinko parlor where a few content producers get worthless facebook currency (and facebook makes money on purchases of said worthless currency)?
I wrote shorty (http://github.com/bradgessler/shorty/tree/master), installed it on heroku.com, and hooked my own URL up to it so I could enter concise, descriptive shortened URLs. Its not for Joe Shmoe but if you're a geek, check it out.
> I think this is a deeper question than the downvoting your receiving suggests that it is.

Yes, I agree. (I upvoted the comment.)

A full response to this will take longer than I have right now (maybe I'll work on a blog entry later tonight). But for now, just for the record, my problem was definitely not that I was unwilling to learn new things. I love learning new things, and always have.
Karma comes to facebook, society crumbles, film at eleven.
This particular account may not have turned a profit, but it might over time.

Setting aside the top earner on the service (because they're a record label), the second highest earner has earned $29 by buying $70 worth of songs. Third highest: $28 for $64. 4th highest: $24 for $66.

I have absolutely no doubt that with access to their database and a quick query you'd find out exactly what you find out in any MLM: the overwhelming majority of the people lose money. And I have a profound, abiding disrespect for something which is a business model when it is profitable and a consumption expense when it is not -- its not like Mary Kay recruits people with promises of access to wonderful new cosmetics.
Call it a waste of money, but I really enjoyed the height-adjustable desk I had at my last company. You'd turn a crank and could set the surface to any height. It probably cost a fortune, but was ergonomically awesome.
I feel like Lisp's big win over C, Java, etc. is its support for aesthetically pleasing functional programming. Much more of the difference between Lisp and Blub comes from functional programming than from user-defined macros.

Macros are cool, but I don't write my own macros very often, especially when working in Clojure, which has great built-in ones. Most of the general-purpose macros implemented in, say, On Lisp have decent analogues built into Clojure or Clojure.Contrib.

Python, Ruby, et al haven't necessarily gotten as good as Lisp, academically speaking, but for a lot of purposes, they're good enough.

I think that anyone who wants to consider himself a serious hacker needs to learn Ocaml or Haskell, though, in order to gain exposure to what a good static-typing system has to offer.
Close:

Gerald M. Bradshaw of Crown Point consults with students on how to gain admission to selective colleges, universities and law schools. Contact him at www.bradshawcollegeconsulting.com or call 663-3041. His email is gerald_ bradshaw@post.harvard.edu.

It's in this guy's best interest to make people think the SATs are important, and getting into elite colleges is important. I put no value in this column.
I would tend to agree. Unfortunately, the one thing that is somewhat above this discussion is the idea of assessing job performance itself.

The research I'm referencing links hiring metrics to performance reviews. Clearly, there is something to be said that the items measured in performance reviews might be highly suspect as well, and prone to many forms of bias -- so earlier methods that predict these could actually be just self-fulfilling, not actually a good way to find awesome employees in any particular situation. Again, unfortunately, thats a little beyond the scope here, clearly.

In addition, I think that people that did well on standardized tests tend to be for their usage in hiring metrics, and those who didnt but consider themselves successful do not. Bias at work.
Wikia Death Proves Google Is Search-Startup Killer
> so I would say that the crisis was not "caused" by either greed or stupidity, but is a naturally emergent behavior of the capitalist system.

But greed and stupidity are "natural" forces at work within the capitalist system. Asserting that crises are cyclical and "naturally emergent" doesn't rule out greed and stupidity as causes. It actually doesn't say anything about causes at all.

I'd also be wary of concluding that because certain phenomena appear to be cyclical, any similar phenomena must necessarily be an expression of that cycle.
But did you not even notice the bit at the end? Halfway through, I figured this guy was selling services, and went to the bottom to find out what his affiliation was.
japan sure, india no.
Yeah. I think maybe it might seem less seedy if you earned karma instead of cash.
Is anyone tired of titles that are "edgy," "controversial," and link bait? It's become a bit passe.
You've obviously never met me.
No that is incorrect. If you are not being paid then you are volunteering your time, minimum wage laws only apply when you are being paid.
I took the general GRE; I didn't take the CS GRE, in fact, I was told not to by my advisor. The general GRE is usually a graduate school requirement rather than a department requirement.
Yep, Linkrot is right up there.
The leverage is a magnitude or two greater than possible defaults covered by Fannie and Freddie. At least when you talk about home mortgages, you still have a tangible asset behind it. The many layer of leverage on top of this provided phantom value and is where most of the horror is in the big numbers.
somehow, you make money out of spending money. Of course the revenue is smaller than the expense, otherwise it wouldn't make sense.
Mike Arrington's talk from startup school on dealing with press is quite good:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbUnatPfSgg

It's not really geared towards the mainstream press, but a good watch nonetheless.
This is not a new thing that google invented (although, its possible they did it much better). According to some of the things I've read today, one of the benefits of using intelligence tests is that they tend to be valid across industries and positions, which means that unlike many other forms of hiring selection, you do not need to do an internal HR audit for applicability. This makes them convenient for enterprises of all sizes.

However, in the past, and currently for items like psychological / social fit / performance metrics, etc, it was usually necessary for a company to find their good hiring metrics by doing an audit of previous 'successful' vs ' unsuccessful' employees, and compare attributes. The successful employees made up the desirable attributes, as you might expect, and this is what HR looked for. There are many, MANY problems with this way of thinking, but it did work fairly well, I think. This has been done for a long time, and the army started it.

It seems likely the one thing google could apply to the process is its significant algorithmic capabilities.
What services do you pay for that are non-technical? Lawyers, Accountants, Copywriters, Consultants of various stripes? Anything recurring?
Do the math on how much it's going to cost you -- I would not want to get near 160k worth of debt, which is what it sounds like you're proposing. Also, you can take your summers, or even semesters to work in the bay area if you want. Hell for a few thousand dollars a year you can probably fly out there every weekend and work with your friends if you really wanted to.

Personally, I think anyone going over 50k of debt for an undergrad should really think it through, there may be cases where it makes sense but that is a lot of money. Also, having a significant debt load will limit your choices when you graduate from college -- the minimum salary that you'll need to live and pay your loans will be quite high.

Best of luck.
Ditto. I'm interested as well. I gather that existing customers can send a referral code that, when used, gives the referrer and the referee each a $25 credit (which negates the activation fee). Please be in touch if you're willing/able to refer me. Thanks.
Ask HN: Domain name searching
Is there anyway I can specify a regex and get back results for domain names that match the regex?

Say I want to know what has been taken for nano*.com, I'd prefer to not have to manually try them out.

Thanks!