skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I always did IT consulting, when I needed some spare cash.

Serious Linux nerds are in high demand and low availability almost everywhere I've ever lived. But, if you're not well-equipped for IT, that might not be the way to go. Tech support is also the highest stress technical career (there was a study about it a couple of years ago, and if I weren't lazy I'd look it up), so you don't want to do it for long if you haven't the patience of Job. But billing $100/hour is not at all difficult, so you only have to work three or four days a month to scrape by...don't underestimate the time spent on paperwork and such, though...some companies make you work an extra day for every couple of days you work, in dealing with expense forms and other assorted crap. I much preferred working for small companies, where one person made the decisions and when he or she said to the accountant, "Write Joe a check", it would be in my hand before I walked out the door.

But, IT has the advantage that you're generally working on small jobs--things that can be fixed in a few days, or a couple of weeks, tops. They are well-defined, like, "We need to move our web servers to a new data center", or "our mail server isn't filtering spam and it's letting viruses through". You know when you're done with this kind of project, generally.

That said, startups are kinda like a marriage. Having a little something on the side isn't likely to turn out good for the startup. Have you considered raising a little money to get you to launch and revenues?
Yep. It depends on what people are discussing. If it is not interesting or something which i couldn't understand then in that situation I am giving impression that I am introvert. But I am extrovert in other cases because i have common interest or things to discuss...
i don't trust this anymore than i do the articles claiming to have a secret snapshot of the googlephone.

we'll know when google themselves have a press conference.
Heh, from your commend I understand that you find windows obsolete the next product cycle :))
There is always Starbucks.... Work 30hrs/week so you get health insurance and other benefits. The job will be like some brainless activity that programmers really need time to time.

Bonus: You get to meet/interface with lots of people, and maybe you can score some hot chicks on the side.

Sucks: Pay. 8/hr or 10/hr is not really much, but I guess enough to buy lots of ramen noodles for a starving programmer.
Lol....
the comments on that page seem to be more useful than article itself.

---

I'm a web analyst for a major financial services firm. Using state-of-the-art software, provided by the leading web analytics vendor, I monitor traffic flows through several web sites maintained by my company. My goal is to study the online experience, in order to improve it, within the context of our business model and overall company strategies. This is done using quantitative (web analytics) and qualitative analysis (market research, usability testing, etc.).

I've been a web analyst since the late 1990's, and this article seems almost as dated. Web analytics, as a discipline, has evolved several times over, since web server log files were first used to track traffic, in the mid-1990's. The latest technology, commonly called "page tagging," is infinitely more accurate, and is customizable for capturing true business metrics.

Further, there is a Web Analytics Association who is educating organizations in, lobbying for, and standardizing the collection and use of key performance indicators for the web. The most basic metrics are the Unique User, the Visit, and the Page View. No one in this growing industry disputes this, and the data collection methodologies used by the leading web analytics vendors, varies slightly, if at all. The disparities between the vendors' products lie mainly in their delivery methods.

The web world, especially advertisers and those who directly rely on web sites for revenue, would all best be served if they abandoned the arbitrary standard set by the NetRatings and ComScores of the world. Their rating (and business) models are sorely outdated, and do not meet the measurement demands of the "web 2.0," world.
that 'outline view' is a pretty terrible way to view the news, if you ask me.
the other 4/5 are doing just enough to keep their jobs. duh. what's the point in trying if there's really nothing in it for you? everyone knows that if you want a raise, you need to get another job.
Comcast Impersonates Users' Computers To Meddle With Internet Traffic
Illegal Linking, now that's a whole new kind of offense.
Virgin has an option of getting ads via the phone but I don't see it as realistic you would have to view a lot of ads to get a meaningful amount of free airtime.
does this article mean there is no "GPhone" project that aims to produce an OS for mobile devices (to complete with Windows Mobile) or that Google won't be making a hardware phone?
Commercial CAPTCHA breakers for sale
a tabloid Somebody likes my idea, but for URLs:
http://valleywag.com/tech/julia-allison/new-york-nobody-call...

this idea might make women look bad, but i have no problem with that if it also makes some of us rich.
I'd love to know what's written below.
Some of us are introverts both here and in "real life".
It's a silly/simple comment. but I just have to make it.
Not long ago I noticed a student writing their
first LISP program using vim. I don't know why, but the editor was not indicating ballanced parentheses. I was horrified and got this student to give emacs a try.

LISP is my favorite language, but if you use the wrong editor, it can be hell on earth. If you want to turn someone on to LISP, don't forget to point this obvious fact out!
I wonder how many novices get turned off to LISP because of this.
test projects to outsource
i'm starting a social venture to outsource work to africa (kenya and ghana). i need test projects to give my developers there -- right now, all we have are some fb apps. does anyone have any other work they'd like to get done for free, while we're testing the concept?
Why are men so scared of successful, attractive, single women?
That's really not "on the side." That's just about full time.

Plus, rigid hours?
Alzheimer's robs memory faster in the educated
The big ones all come through "anonymous" recruiters. It started with Jobserve and Gulp, but now so many recruiters seem to have me on file that I don't have to do anything. That is maybe also a problem: I don't really know how to actively look for interesting projects. Even my personal homepage has been offline for three years now. I think I'll to relaunch it, start a blog about things that interest me, and try to find some more interesting contracts.

Smaller projects also come through recommendations, but not the big fish - most of them also have a policy to not work with individuals.
Way to dodge the question. You provided this guy with no realistic answer.
we would love to discuss this with you.

drop me a line at:

joe dot guilmette at gmail dot com
I would actually be interested in working in a cafe for a while, just for the social experience. But I just can't justify it economically. Except perhaps when thinking it gives me a minimum income for peace of mind. Then again, consulting for the same amount of time would buy much more time.
You're supposed to sleep with your facebook friends, not make business deals with them. Understand the difference now?
I'm an introvert when I'm alone and an extrovert when I'm around other people. This post reads stupid, but it's true.
Ask YC: Health insurance options while bootstrapping
Hi folks, looking for options for health insurance while starting-up.

Since all of us are young, just looking for high-deductible, low cost health insurance options to hold us over during the initial months.

What options are you using/explored?

Any suggestions/help would be great!

Thanks.
Ask YC: Tell us how to improve VentureBeat!
Hi, Eric Eldon here with VentureBeat. I'd like to get feedback from everyone on what we could do better. And, of course, what we're doing well. Please leave comments here (and take the survey on the site, linked, if you consider yourself a regular reader).
Please let us know where we can improve (and what we're already doing well). Feel free to leave comments here, or take the survey linked to, above.
That's not necessarily true - I've worked harder on volunteer projects than on fairly well-paying professional jobs.

I think it's more that when there's very little in it for you, your tolerance for bullshit is fairly low. So when there's little bullshit, you keep working hard even if salaries are fairly low. As soon as you start hitting bullshit, you give up and either find a new job or slack off.

This is probably why the study found that the organization has more of an effect on motivation than any personal or work-experience factors - good organizations keep bullshit to a minimum even if they don't pay their people all that much. Like Google.

It also explains why the documentation on nearly every open-source project sucks.
What if you're a prostitute?
Startups On Steroids
Then you should probably just stick to Craigslist
Great, I hope this works out for you.

I'm curious, how did your developers get their development skills? I don't know anything about professional education in Africa.
"as long as they are not...fun" Man you are the definition of introvert. Selective. Extrovert will kick it with anyone and make them "not boring'. I am not getting at you though. I am a introvert.
Do efforts to save Lisp just detract from the growth of functional programming in general?
Obviously an abundance of NTs here, but Myers-Briggs ENTP seems the archetypal entrepreneur.
If I'm going to be doing chemically enhanced social interaction, my substance of choice is kratom. It's well suited to truly enhanced discussion, not just the louder discussion that alcohol helps with or the disjointed, randomly connected conversations you have on weed. Unfortunately, the only drugs I can buy in public places intended for shared social experiences are alcohol and caffeine. I'd love to start a legal drug cafe but that will have to wait.

Yes, I am shilling my own business, no that doesn't mean you need to mod me down (I seem to always get modded down when I talk about the benefits of kratom. But it is a medicinal herb with enormously untapped potential as a legal pharmaceutical. Another thing to work for, eventually.)
Yeah... I'm an ENTP on the Myers-Briggs but just barely am an E/P whereas I am solidly an NT.
It seems that real-time code update is one of Lisp's biggest selling points. Any idea how this is done in a distributed environment with multiple Lisp instances sharing the same code?
Yup, here's another inspiring one: http://bnoopy.typepad.com/bnoopy/2004/09/always_take_a_c.htm...

Joe Kraus' story of how Excite got funded.

Take the cookie!
hi leila+c > this may be a little off topic. But why/how did you pick Kenya? The reason I ask is because I grew up there and I am curious how Kenya factored into your decision to outsource..

Having said that - good luck with the project. I know Kenya has a great entrepreneurial spirit & I am sure the developers will be a great asset to your startup.'
Perhaps.. but doubtful.
I'm pretty extroverted in real life, it helps if the people I'm with are interesting, but not a requirement. I'm probably more introverted online, oddly enough.
I'm basically a loner who likes being in a crowd when I have to do it. I find that I'm at my most productive on narrowly focused technical projects when people leave me alone, but I'm happiest and the most balanced and effective on a broad spectrum of issues when I'm "plugged in" to a larger group. Having said that, I find the transition between the two to be tough.
That site could theoretically make money through the affiliate links. We didn't put other ads on it yet, because we don't want the typical hardcore porn advertisements. Perhaps we can find a suitable advertising agency - I think adwords are out, because they don't do erotica.
Cool, we use that plugin. The only thing that annoys me is that when you're merging branches with svnmerge, it includes a copy of the log messages for all the merged revisions -- which is then processed by subversion, and has the effect of re-closing or annotating any Trac tickets mentioned in those commit messages.
I'd go for a layout re-design. There's simply too much unrelated content on each page. Instead, have a layout that focuses on your daily posts - the heart of venturebeat!

More specifically, reduce the number of columns of content. With four columns it's almost impossible to scan for interesting stories.

-Zaid
Could you elaborate on what you mean by "serious Linux nerds" in this case? Do you mean someone who uses Linux every day or a system administrator in a former life?
We are all naturally introverts. The question isn't are you and introvert or extrovert, the question is do you have the balls to overcome your fear and get out there and make cold intros.
Is it Christmas? - A shining example of simple, elegant design
Xobni's: hiring hackers for email app (free food, benefits, equity)
The RSS feed is the really useful part.
Songkick: Live Music Lovers Will Love This (from YC summer '07)
brilliant! well done guys.
I've had great luck with Unfuddle:
http://unfuddle.com/

They also offer svn hosting, but that is optional. (you can simply use them as a bug tracking system)

They've been very responsive to feature requests and have fixed several bugs/issues that we complained about, when they were still in their early days.
Trac is sweet but is simply a royal pain to setup.

Anyone offer an outsourced, hosted version of Trac? =)
good work guys, glad to see you up on tc.
Congrats Songkick!
Dear College Students: Intern at a Startup
I can't read Chinese, but I've read some English discussion about how that's done. You know how spam filters 'learn' what is spam and what isn't, this is the same idea. It first splits each letter from the image. Then you create an algorithm that compares the current letter it has to process versus what it has learned. The hard part is that algorithm. You can technically do it with just image matching, but it's far better to programmically teach it rules like "B" has two holes, "7" has two lines, etc. And then you feed the program the first 1000 with proper answers and then you check and see if it's guessing correctly.

Notice how images without proper 'rectangle-size letters' like the Google ones are hard to crack because it's hard for a simple line searching algorithm to find a rectangle box to split the letter. Random lines through the letters, like in Yahoo's also mess with it.

The key is to make letters human readable, but not completely obvious to a captcha reader where one letter ends and one letter begins.
Sheesh, the article's only taking into account development time... I'm sure there was plenty of branstorming/planning time before actual implementation.
intro-extra vert. somewhere in the midle.
Which P?

For php lookup Ed Tanguay.
Programmers and Bees
It's a huge development aid - if you're running emacs and slime, you can reload individual functions or files with a quick key combo, and if you want code reload over multiple files, a reload function is easy to write - check times and you're off. You can also do that with compiled code, too - instead of (load "filename"), use (load (compile "filename")) and it'll be compiled. The next time the functions are called, they'll use the new ones.

The tricky part is macros and inline functions. Any time you change a macro or a function you want to inline (CL compilers can't do that automatically because of the language spec), you need to recompile all the functions that use that macro/inlined function. ASDF has some dependency-tracking functionality, but I haven't used it.
Coming soon - arewethereyet?
This sounds a little too good to be true - I would be a little careful in pursuing something like this.

Especially with no link to a website about the project, no details whatsoever, lookout for a "they will do this whole project for you, you just need to send them 2000$ to buy a server"
An open letter from the founders of Scribd to those of you who didn't get into YC
Isn't the best way to break captchas to offer "free porn"? Offer free porn, ask them to send you their email, respond to a captcha... send out spam about this free porn and bam...

millions of example images solved.
A Day in the Life: Reporter goes Undercover as an Apple Employee
Culture Bytes: Virtually Losing Your Reputation
Stealth Startup Wix To Help Users Build Flash Websites
funny, but this was marked dead the last time it was submitted
I liked zombo much better. more colours :P
Needs a menu bar.
You already occupy a place on my iGoogle page, so I definitely like the site.

My suggestion: VentureBeat podcasts.

Long in depth interviews with entrepreneurs and investors. No one has filled the gap that VentureVoice left in my iPod. Text is okay, but it's not nearly as good for interviews.
I'll admit upfront that I only skimmed the article. But it seems like CondeNast's counts based on (presumably) server logs don't mesh with what a 3rd party is quite frankly GUESSING at?

And this is news?
I think this proves it doesn't matter where you are. The Reddit guys would have done just as well if they were based in Missouri.
Ask YC: Rejected and planning for next round.
Anybody here who got rejected and planning to apply for next round?
I am rejected for this round and already started planning for next round. Few things I noticed which I could do better next time.

1. Get ready to move to SV with full team - not just partial team.
2. Get ready with better demo
3. Keep in touch with YC news everyday so that we don't get demotivated for any reason :)
If you think networking is something you have to do instead of something you want to do, maybe you should be doing something else entirely.
Because even millionaire bombshells need something to get upset about, and complaining about anything else would have been utterly ridiculous.
Is that price in Yuan?
Static Websites, the Ruby Way
This reminds me of www.archub.org
I thought it proved the opposite. What are the chances you'll meet the girlfriend of a conde naste bizdev executive at a party in St. Louis?
Amazon Adds New Book Statistics - Words/$, Words/Sentence ...
What System Do You Use to Manage Your Life?
Specifically, I am posing this question to tech entrepreneurs who have one or more early stage companies to manage and demanding personal responsibilities. Following is a description of the current system I am using.
I used to think introvert was a bad thing. But I think most people understand the word wrongly.

Introvert = you get your motivation and energy from your own creativity and thoughts.

Extrovert = you get your motivation and energy from the people around you.

They're both good things.

Introvert != Troll.
good lord that process is so complicated.

i use gcal and rainlendar's todo list.
Thanks for sharing that.

I have similar experiences that saved myself (more than once) by patching 3rd party libraries. In our case, they were proprietary and we didn't have the source. Sometime it was an apparent bug in the library, sometimes it was that the library functionality came short to cover the cases we wanted to handle.

Inspecting their library internals with "apropos", "describe" and other means, and defining "around" method on their internal generic functions, we could just inject our fix or enhancement to the libraries. I admit it was nasty; however, if it weren't Lisp, we had to file a bug report or a feature request to the vendor and wait for them, or to find alternative libraries, or to reimplement things by ourselves. (Open source advocates may say it was our fault to use proprietary library, but proprietary libraries exist for reason; besides, inspecting and modifying things without recompiling the entire library is very useful even you have the source.)

Such emergency patching is like a safety net. In the end you may not have needed it if everything goes smoothly as planned, but it is good to know it exists, and even good if it saves you from disaster.
I've heard somewhere that PG uses vi. Is that true?

Besides, there are some nice Lisp modes for vim, which not only shows matching parens but indents, autocompletes, and does a lot more (or so I heard; I'm a emacs user).
Microsoft Wants 100 Companies, but to What End?
Because a man's genes have a better chance of carrying on when the mother of his children is primarily focused on his children and not on her business. Duh.

A better question, with a less obvious answer: why is an article from Daily Mail on news.yc front page?
4. Get a better idea

-- or --

4. If you believe in your idea, forget the demo and build the software!
It might be better just to plan your product and business and begin executing right away. If the stars line up and you can apply to YC next time, go for it. But I wouldn't go planning my business around YC's schedule. Seems to me like that's backwards. YC should be an enhancer of your business opportunities, not a driver.
That's not true at all. Introverts are generally drained by social interaction and need serious alone time to recharge. Extroverts are the opposite and need the social interaction to recharge, being alone tends to bother them.
This has bounced between 0 and 1 points a couple times now... I realize this isn't about me promoting my own business, because that is something that definitely allowed and encouraged on this site. I would really like to engage in a discussion with whoever thinks that posts about drugs deserve to be modded down.
Why don't you do a "Ask YC" post. Ask folks if they think it's okay to have a startup business where you sell plants that have psychoactive agents yet are still legal.

I like to hear the discussion on that one! (Still thinking it through myself)
Buy them, give them 6 months, then redirect them to MSN.com (Steve Balmer starts uncontrollable laughing here).
Ask YC: is it wrong to have a business where you sell legal, psychoactive plants?
Edit for disclosure: I sell kratom at a website linked in my profile. Ingenium is in on the venture with me.

People seem to have real problems with this. I always get modded down when I talk about kratom and people never give a reason.

Would kratom be ok if I was a pharmaceutical company and I told you that Kratom could help you lose weight, be happy, and be more productive? It is an incredibly viable alternative to oxycontin for pain management. How about as an alternative to SSRIs/Benzodiazepines as an anti-depressant/anti-anxiety medication? How about that kratom can seriously enhance productivity, more so than caffeine but less so than amphetamine and with fewer side effects than either?

Disclaimer: Kratom can cause nausea, itching, and constipation, just like other opiates. Like other opiates, it can seriously potentiate other pharmaceuticals and you should ask your doctor if kratom is right for you.

A synthesis for 7-hydroxy-mitragynine has been developed, which would allow kratom to be packaged as a true pharmaceutical. It would probably have to packaged as an extended release formulation so it could be patented.
could you please stop advertising (albeit usually indirectly or offhand) this shit on here?
:) ok
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=71371

My viewpoint is that all anti-kratom arguments boil down to pro-pharmaceutical company unlogic. In my opinion, to be against what I am doing without hypocrisy, you have to be against the drug-pushing of the US pharmaceutical industry as well.
Why? And why do you have such a hostile response? I usually mention Kratom whenever other drugs like alcohol or caffeine come up.

This specific submission was in response to this. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=71368
But WHY do you seem to find this offensive? No one has any problems when other people advertise their startup; that's an accepted use of this site.
that is one slick site, awesome :)
well, for one, it's disingenuous for someone who sells it to couch its benefits in an "ask yc" post without any kind of disclosure (you'll probably edit your post now, but that's where the hostility came from)