skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure, they could. It would be a worthless case that's not worth the state's money to prosecute, however. Possession is hard to prosecute, and admitting to once using some weed on the Internet is even harder. ("Yeah, I just said I smoked weed so that people would think I was cool." Case dismissed.)

I suppose they could get a search warrant for your place, but this is so exceedingly unlikely that it is not worth worrying about. Pot is technically illegal, but only the most flagrant displays of use are worth the government's time to prosecute. (And, it's decriminalized in many places now. Not everyone is in the US.)
Traditionally, CTO is responsible for eliciting business requirements, designing and developing technical solution and coordinating project activities.

VPE is responsible for deployment, technical support, bug fixing and coordinating marketing activities.
That's what I thought reading that post.

Adsense, as an example, is a real and viable business. I could quit my job on my one Adsense site if I had just 3000 visitors per day (assuming CPC held up).

The model makes money for me, Google, and, I assume, the advertisers. What's not to like?
Dow Jones is running like a horse
Looking for roommate to Share House / Apt Rental (postid:368709)
Grails 1.1 Released
I'm thinking of trying to find consulting work. Extra poll option?
>> "only one that has the guts to shout "but the emperor has no clothes on""

On what point specifically? I really would not trust advice from him on how well advertising models work. Seek out someone who has made a money from advertising and trust them instead.

If you've already decided to offer a paid product, 37signals, fogbugz etc all seem to have good things to say on that model, but taking their advice on which model to choose seems like a very bad idea to me.
I didn't mean it literally, obviously. I meant it in the sense that programming is not generally considered a glamorous job, aspired to by celebrity-conscious kids everywhere. It can be an art, yes, but often it's about rolling up your sleeves and putting in long hours to build something great.

Mike Rowe specifically mentioned the concept of infrastructure; something that societies need to be good places to live but whose construction and upkeep are not occupations encouraged by the media. Well, there is informational infrastructure too, and it's programmers who build it, mostly unsung outside our own narrow circles.

A dirty job, despite your narrow reading of the show's name, does not just mean you literally get dirty doing it. It means an unglamourous job where you just ignore everything else and go in and do what needs to be done. Hyett & co. might be micro-celebrities now, but that came after a long stretch of very unglamorous hacking - sitting on their asses staring at a tiny screen at all hours of the day and night, getting shit done. When was the last time you saw that kind of occupation celebrated in, say, an ad? And yet the product is the infrastructure we all rely on.

That's what I meant, sorry for being ambiguous. And if you still disagree, I'll show you some of the code I just wrote, I promise you'll feel dirty for weeks ; )
You probably shouldn't care about people that care that you smoke once in a while. People like to think that there are millions of dollars sitting around in the hands of conservatives waiting to be handed out to people that don't do drugs, but that's just not true. These people are a tiny majority. Everyone has done some sort of drug.

Anyway, I'm happy to admit to my experience with weed. It makes me sleepy. I haven't really been able to obtain enough to really experiment with it, however... but I hope to rectify this situation in the future.

Wow, even after saying that, I still have a job. Amazing!
We need to define a new milestone before "ramen profitable".

Perhaps we can call it "beer profitable", as in, you can't actually live off your profits but you can buy the occasional beer with them.
VC Investing: Not Dead, Just Different
To many programmers, handling source control is certainly a "dirty" part of the job. If GitHub cleans that up, it's a huge win for everyone.
He does one very dirty job very well: selling Fords.
The Guardian Launches a News API: Why It's much bigger news than the NYT API
Vaporizers are my preferred way of consuming. Ever since I got a good quality vaporizer, I don't smoke anymore. It's a lot cleaner than smoking (though not totally tar-free, but close enough), and it saves you money. In my non-scientific estimation, I think I use about 1/4 of what I would if I was smoking. It also seems like a cleaner high, often times more energetic, and I come down from the high smoother.

I have the HerbalAIRE Vaporizer H2.1 (http://www.gotvape.com/store/herbalaire.vaporizer.php). You can set the temperature for (which it regulates), and it fills up a bag. It's not a Volcano, but its good enough (costed $250 vs the ~$600 Volcano). I built my own from a soldering iron before, but it just doesn't work as well as it took 10-15 minutes before it was ready, whereas this one takes about 3-5 minutes. Buying a good quality vaporizer is well worth the money vs making your own, unless you are skilled enough to make your own quality vaporizer (with proper temperature control).

Also, cooking it in oil/butter is also a healthier alternative (the healthiest alternative probably). I do that as well, but that's more for when I will be out in public where I can't use my vaporizer (really great for concerts for example). I generally cook the oil or butter into baked goods (brownies or chocolate chip cookies), or sometimes take spoonfuls of the oil straight.

The only problem with both of these methods is that you are committing to using a certain amount and its harder to regulate how high you get. With eating it, you don't feel it for an hour or so, so its sometimes hard to judge how much you need unless you've already tried a batch. With vaporizers, whatever you put into the vaporizer gets used up, and you can either waste it by not inhaling it all, or inhale it all which could lead to getting higher than you wanted to. With smoking its easier to regulate as you can just put it out or not toke again; or take your time between tokes.

As for actually using when coding, I do occasionally work on my personal projects after getting high; but this is more because I'm obsessed with coding and working on these projects more than purposefully getting high with the intentions of sitting down and coding.

I don't know if it improves my abilities, really, but it does make doing mundane tasks more tolerable. It allows me to focus and get lost in the problem. And also I sometimes do brainstorming and come up with ideas which I quickly note down before I forget. It makes my imagination start to think about the problems I am working on, which leads to actually having the motivation to try out what I'm imagining, hence why I often end up coding after I get high (though generally after I've come down a bit). The idea that pot de-motivates you is a myth in my opinion.

And yes, I created this account just to post in thread, and have a separate HN account for non-incriminating conversations :)
Can anyone comment on whether this app can be configured to use non-US sites (by default or otherwise)? Being in Canada, I'd much prefer to search amazon.ca or bestbuy.ca rather than the US-centric .com variants.
Just my business, trying to find consulting work
I wonder why shorter methods would be inversely correlate with errors. Maybe it's, to some extent, similar to why so many people get confused by pointers: they lose track of where they are in the program.
$1 per tweet is a little cheap. $1 per character would be better
Yikes... didn't mean to make you so defensive! Let me retort and clarify (hopefully with understanding that this is not meant as criticism) :-)

First, I know people doing rails+slony; I think the most common way is by piping the sql to a file and then to slonik, but there are other methods too. Granted, it's not awesome. For a new rails/postgres shop, I'd look at pgpool (provided you really needed replication, which is dubious for a lot of people)

Second, this wasn't really about postgres/mysql. If you had told me you went from MySQL->Oracle 2 days before launch, I'd have concerns. Heck, even going from Postgres 8.2 -> 8.3, I'd want to make sure you had good test plans (which it sounds like you did).

As a general rule, swapping out your database infrastructure is not something I recommend people take lightly. Yes, rails shops have already decided that the application code is more important than the data, so it's a lot easier to do, but given subtle differences in SQL implementations, people still get bitten by it.

Please note, I never said you did anything wrong. You did something risky. Most people don't succeed with risky (which is why it doesn't sound like a good idea to me), but since you did I have to give you credit (again) for making a ballsy call and pulling it off. But I think even you realize that you probably would do things different if you had to do it over again.
Should Google be added to the DOW ?
Netbooks way to Windows alternative
Legacy Locker preserves digital assets for posterity
You have to give DHH, Jason and others at 37signals credit for not just having decent business ideas and executing on them but also developing a brand and image. It doesn't hurt that DHH is stylish and can deliver humorous, slightly self deprecating lines like “We don’t have 200k RSS subscribers because of my deliciously swirly hair”. It also doesn't hurt that 37signals doesn't lock DHH into the code monkey box and instead lets him travel around giving talks and promoting that image. I've seen him talk in person and have to admit that he is a great presenter, even on topics unrelated to code.
I heard the same thing at FOWA in Miami this year from Gary Vaynerchuk (and have heard it from him before at other conferences). He said, paraphrasing: If you can't quit your job to follow your dream and build your startup because you have to take care of your family, then work 9-5 at the job you hate to pay the bills, then work 6-3am on the startup.

At face value, that's great advice. But I don't think it is that black and white for everyone. I don't know if DHH or Garyvee have kids, but for many people, if you really do need to support a family, then working 9am-3am every day is a pretty bad way to do it. Yeah, you might come out the other end running a business you love that's making you rich, but you'll probably be divorced and have kids that resent you. Or be sick and run down from all that lack of sleep.

If you have diapers to buy, ramen profitability might take longer to achieve. Or might not be an option at all. If you have personal relationships you value, working 18 hours per day might not be the best idea (if you can avoid it).

It really depends on your priorities. If supporting your family and spending time with them is important to you, then yeah, lack of time might really be a problem on the road to starting up. DHH is right that complaining about it isn't productive, but he comes across sounding arrogant when he writes it off as a non-issue.
No, currently we only hook into the US versions of sites, but we hope to let people customize this in future releases.
One of the things I thought was interesting about this post was when he said "And what they find there is someone who doesn't seem to get it" (regarding Linus speaking on Subversion in his talk at google: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8 ).

When I watched the talk initially, I had the impression that what made Linus' talk tip from "I don't think this is the right way of doing things" to "I think SVN is a pile of crap" wasn't so much on the history model (DAG vs line), but SVN's implementation. Specifically, I was thinking about how the base revisions are stored locally (with the .svn folders in each versioned control folder, which git resolves much more efficiently), the poor rename support etc. It's been a while since I saw that talk though, so it may well be that he was indeed criticising the Line model in general (and I can see how the line model doesn't fit in with his workflow at all.)
Which means WebKit wordwraps it. So Steve Jobs will have no problem, assuming he's been using the Safari Beta/Developer Preview for months now.
* WARNING: Heavy drug material and offtopic both in one message. Don't complain if your Internet etiquette sensors blow up. *

I've never smoked marijuana but I did take DXM (~1.5-2.0mg/lb) several times. Certainly, during DXM trip I would have absolutely no concentration or creativity. However, after it I found that the after-effect effectively destroys two of the great challenges to thinking:

- Fear

- Close-mindness

I might not have been able to go through a chapter of Intro to Algorithms because I was scared, or concentrate on a bug for five hours because of fear but after DXM I could. I guess it increased my attention span. I remember I was learning about RBT tress and noticing how I am not freaking out because I don't understand stuff at first and how my mind was a blank piece of paper where anything complex could be written.

There was no frustration that usually comes when I meet a problem in the thinking process, only curiosity. That helps.

Oh, and it also healed my suicidal depression so I guess not being dead helps concentration and creativity a lot.
That's a bit callous. There really are thousands of kids kidnapped every year in America. And as someone who has been to Africa to help out with Engineers without Borders, I still feel like fighting kidnapping here is a worthwhile cause.
seems like a fire hazard
Oh, absolutely! I think that that's worth fighting for. But write an article about that, not about an application being rejected from the app store.
I can feel the motivation flowing through my arteries.
>Never let your schooling interfere with your education, someone clever once said. Being willing to sacrifice at the edges is one of the most important skills you’ll ever learn.

I completely agree. You'll find in school that there are a few subjects you really enjoy, but there's a limited number of classes offered (unless you're in grad school). But you're forced by the curriculum to take a lot of other classes that may be irrelevant to you. The best way to learn something is by just doing it. The more comfortable you become at an earlier age at taking calculated risks (such as getting a lower grade in a class you don't care about to learn/create something more valuable), the easier it will be to "launch your dream" when you're ready to.
Tried posting a comment on Simon's blog but it wasn't working. So here you go Simon:

This is an amazing product - not just because of the technology, but the implications for the future of news. In fact, I think this is much bigger than the NYT API launch that some people are comparing it to. Just wanted to say congratulations!

Some thoughts on my blog: http://blog.newscred.com/?p=179
Great piece. I am going to suggest a simplification of relentlessly resourceful to simply "relentless."

Startups all share that they some sort of end vision of meeting some unmet market need - e,g, the destination.

But to get to the destination you have to navigate through an infinately complex obstacle course. The obstacles takes the names of: resource constraints, technology limitations, getting distribution, competitors, alternatives, usability, [add 1,000 more items here].

Any one of these obstacles can stop a start-up dead on it's wheels. DOA. Thanks for playing.

So you're right - an entrepreneur does need to be relentlessly resourceful to solve many of these obstacles, and you only get a prize completing the obstacle course and reaching the destination. Second prize gets the set of Ginsu knives.

However, these aren't really all resource problems. Many of them are business design problems, strategy problems or partnership problems (and more).

Don't get me wrong - I love being resourceful, I love being scrappy and am a huge subscriber to the simply economics of a penny saved is a penny earned (note: you also can't save your way to greatness).

I think of the journey like water flowing down a river. It goes around obstacles, it dissolves obstacles, It changes course. When it gets dammed, it find tiny cracks naked to the eye, wedges in, and gets through. It never sleeps, it never debates, it never gives up. It simply seeks the path to the destination.

In a word: relentless.

Cheers,

Mark Rose
Co-Founder
Spare Change
This post totally made my day, until you actually implied that An Rand is awesome.
As for scared: A lot of companies are scared that people won't pay for their product at all, and if they make something great but charge, someone will swoop in underneath and make the same thing for free with ads. People just default to making their site an ad-supported business - its a race to the bottom in everybody's mind even if there are no competitors waiting in the wings.
At my CSR job the rule was Track The Right Amount. In my case, that used to involve me splitting the emails up by cause. These days the coarse count is enough.

I've never spent any engineering resources on tracking people around the site, with one exception: I pipe unsuccessful requests to the Find Registration Key function to my dashboard. That is less for my benefit and more for allowing manual follow-up for folks who are having trouble.
27 Huge Publishers Join To Replace The Banner
We're pretty distributed. 2 people in Geneva (Switzerland), 1 in NYC, and 4 in Dhaka, Bangladesh. My cofounder just moved their from Sweden to start up our office there and take advantage of cost efficiencies.
Finally a reason to speak:) Yes, I too am an avid chess player and find weed aids my focus a lot. I'm by far a master, but weed helps me build a greater general sense of game as a kind of mental landscape. It's interesting. Coding too is a lot easier to get into and it helps me be more creative with the solutions I choose,more experimental.

I've heard about that weed book before - do you actually own a copy yourself? Any good? Or the other book on that link you gave, about meditation and creativity?

Lurkio
More: http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/200...
Angels Are No Longer Angels... so what are angels now?
Angels are now acting as VC's...VC's are acting as even harder VC's... so 2 questions:

1) Who/What are the new angels?

2) Where do early stage pre-revenue startups get money now?
See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=509614
Yeah, and more importantly, can't you just sign up your phone (you know, with a phone number) for TXT or SMS alerts from the AMBER ALERT folks? I'm certain some of my family members have gotten AMBER ALERT TXTs before.

And then, you know, since your phone has internet access you could just pull up their webpage or local news through safari.
I agree with him 100%. This is a bit of a disappointment. Hacker News is very slowly going the way of reddit. Very slowly.

I hope we can eventually keep this in check.
I disagree about his choice in link aggregation sites. HN rarely has any good programming articles. Programming Reddit is all programming articles, but they are usually so stupid that it's not even worth checking out. (And God help you if you accidentally start reading the comments.)

If you want something passive to do, I recommend reading the blog aggregator for your favorite programming language (Planet Perl, Planet Haskell, etc.). There is obviously some junk in there too (the Perl people get to read all my Lisp articles), but the articles are generally "primary sources" describing new projects and techniques. (That is to say, the author of new module foo is the one talking about it. It's not some pundit that thinks it's cool.)

Anyway, read social news sites if you want, but remember that they are mostly entertainment, not work. If you want to be a better programmer, the most important thing to do is to program and be aware of other ways of doing things. Read the source code to your libraries. Read the academic papers that the documentation links to. Experiment with new ideas and techniques. Those things will actually make you a better programmer. Reading blogs, not so much.
The Guardian just made journalism available to fix the UGC web
Test Center Preview: Windows Server 2008 R2
Totally off-topic, that picture of the "Cemetery for soldiers' dogs" is from the Edinburgh castle right? It gave me a weird childhood flashback
"There really are thousands of kids kidnapped every year in America."

[Citation Needed]
I haven't read the studies referenced here, but I'd be concerned about mistaking correlation for causation here. Long methods may or may not be bad, but the temptation to write them usually arises when the programming task is already complex. The error rate may reflect the complexity of the task, rather than the approach (long methods vs short ones).
Bernanke Says Financial Rules Need an Overhaul
well... the video made me feel the urge to replicate the findings. At least to some scale.

So they may have sold an SSD or two.

But then again, I'd probably go Intel and not Samsung.

Still. They got people talking and the video probably wasn't all to expensive to produce, so they got at least SOME value for their money.
He's what Joe the Plumber should have been.
I'm not sure you're with me on this one but allow me to elaborate:

4. Concentration: distraction and lack of focus is the #1 killer of all good software projects. And I have seen that programmers, in my experience, have a natural talent to be distracted and lose focus. Who never lost a day on a combination of Reddit, Bloglines and Hacker News? I know I did. Of course you don't need marijuana to force yourself to attain focus, but the forces that drive me to work are usually negative ("If I don't deliver this, I won't get paid", "My rent is overdue", "I'll just finish Y so I'll have time to do work on X which is more interesting").

The state of mind marijuana gives me is the one of calmness and extreme relaxation, and as it's been observed, "Relaxation precedes perfect concentration" (http://tinyurl.com/6c632t). It's the bizarre kind of relaxation that you get when it's past midnight, you have to wake up early, and yet you can be completely focused at your code editor without worrying about ANYTHING, not worrying about the things you have to do before you go to bed, not worrying about the things you have to do the next day, not worrying about anything. That kind of focus is GOLDEN, and it has helped me write huge pieces of well written code in very little time.
if your intent is to learn the inner workings of the LAMP stack, there's no reason not go after php first.
LOL!

btw python is so much better than java, took me a day to get into it, no braces no garbage...

also i have a smoke every so often. preferably after work. and yes, people who think it makes you stupid have no clue what they are talking about. it really makes me more creative an HUNGRY
This makes a lot of sense. I would certainly rather run something lightweight like Linux on a netbook than Windows. I use Vista on my desktop computer, but I could never stand it on something with lower end hardware.
I suggest critics grow up and stop looking down upon every "bad word" with perspective of a kindergarden teacher.

People will say brilliant things and a bunch of total complete bullshit both using "bad words" and not.

Again, I suggest going after the idea rather than attacking individual words -- it's a signal of inability to criticize everything else.
The head winds of being a first time entrepreneur combined with the economy... not helping. Any thoughts? Venting due to similar feelings?
Maybe that's just the way you grew used to smoking, just sit down and relax. If you try doing other activities while high you'll probably see some interesting results.
Only yesterday, Jeff was agreeing with someone on reddit that HN is "sterile"; that people here are "on their best behaviour", and yet now he's recommending HN like he's used it for years?

I don't 'get' the backtracking.
Answer Engines vs. Search Engines
Update on Securing the Python Interpreter (Capabilities)