skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This happened to me many years ago. All of our sites (asp classic) on a single server went down at the same time. We had a library we shared across them all that handled some of the db interactions. We discovered that all of a sudden a sql query had the letter 'a' replaced with a 'q' (ie 01100001, vs 01110001).

I like to think my afternoon was sidetracked by cosmic radiation from millions of years ago :)
I was wondering about that too. Plus the energy required to desalinate the seawater.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_tower (downdraft)

My first thought was that they were building an updraft tower.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_updraft_tower

http://www.livescience.com/2644-giant-solar-tower-power-futu...
Boy, if you start contributing to some open source project at your age, you'll be so ahead of the game. And you can do it from anywhere, for free (well, provided your access to HN is free.) Get yourself early exposure and it will be like a an investment fund that keep on giving compound interest.
With RSS I often get the entire content or at minimum a decent sized summary with lots of photos.

Twitter has none of that.
Based on my friends' experiences, you often have to fight tooth and nail to actually get overtime at some retail or fast food places. In other words, simply working more is not always an option.

If that were to become an obstacle, one solution may be to get a second job.

And yet the OP writes that he's having trouble getting even one of these jobs. It may be hard to believe, but some small towns have a vast, vast excess of people wanting these jobs.
" a company that turns a blind eye to unaccredited investors participating, and as a result captures a huge lead in the market."

There's a profound difference between a copyright violation (for which DMCA gives some cover for the site) and a blatant violation of the securities act of 1933
Wow! Thank you all for reading/responding, I really didn't think I would get any sort of response. I'm very much taking your guys' insight into consideration and will be contacting some of you! I'm feeling beyond motivated right now. Seriously, thank you guy's!!
A Canadian company, AVE Designs, has a similar idea but with an upward moving vortex...

http://vortexengine.ca/index.shtml
An incredible coincidence -- I was starting to look into common lisp web programming just this morning, for a personal project. Do you have any estimate on when the book will be finished?
Let's Say FeedBurner Shuts Down
I almost joined the navy right out of high school. I went through much of the recruiting process, but ultimately decided against it. For me, that was one of the best decisions of my life. For you, you should consider it, but give a lot of thought to it before you even start the recruiting process. Military recruiters will lie to you and your family (maybe not all of them, but it happened to me) to make sure you join and if you don't have a lot of determination to exit the recruiting process, you will likely get sucked in even if you change your mind.
If moving to Spokane is an option, let me know and I can see if I can set you up with some connections.
For some, yes. A single mom with 3 mouths to feed perhaps. A kid with no real responsibilities? As I see it, he (presuming here, I know) has as much as 100 hours of free time per week. As much as he dislikes home, if you're living there rent free (which is a luxury if you're over 18, IMO) then work is pure gravy. You're not entitled to free time to entertain yourself. If you want it, freaking work for it. Or spend your time whining on HN and Reddit about how you have no time.

I'm a developer today, and do ok by industry standards (not great, just okay, for now). However, I grew up in a less than trailer trash home, my dad was a janitor, my mom was nuts (I used to watch her talk to invisible people in a roach infested kitchen), my siblings were sucked into the poverty mindset. I was born with a serious medical condition. I've had some other crap go down that I'll barely tell my close friends, let alone an Internet of strangers, but trust me when I said I've had to rebuild areas of my life more than once. So what. I won't tell I have it all figured out, but I will tell you I will not be defeated. And I have little sympathy for those who tell me the horrible hand they've been dealt.

I realize that we live in a world where only the kids of the rich get to succeed, and the only way to start up your own business is to join an incubator. If you believe that, then you will be taken advantage of. Either push to be successful, or be the kind of person that the successful use to get there. They're more than happy to take your money and your spirit.
Hopefully I'm just being paranoid but on the off chance I'll say this:

You sound pretty depressed - remember the best functional description of depression is an inability to create detailed mental images of the future - Your entire psyche is focussed on trying to solve all the things you've got going on (which is natural because want to fix this) but be careful about it distorting your perspective.

Slow down your thinking and try not to freak out - like others have said you are young and that gives you time to learn new skills. .

If things get bad or you just want to talk email the Samaritans in the UK - http://tinyurl.com/bfghx6q - it's all anonymous and they won't care or even know about the US connection unless you tell them (If anybody knows the US equivalent or one local to the area, post it below).
There are literally hundreds of people out there that want and can help with these situation but you've got to seek them out - Western society is terrible dealing with mental health issues but once you fire up the bat signal decent people come running. Good luck
Thinking about it, that's about right except Blackberry was pretty popular since people liked it for texting.
This is how I got out of a similar situation. I hope it helps:

When I was there, I made a flyer: "Computer Whiz-kid Seeks Work" .. like a news paper headline. Did some bullet points:

* Website design/fixing
* Desktop Publishing
* Data entry
* Virus Removal
* Computer Speedup

then some blurb .. I'm 22 and really good with computers. Give me a call if I can help you out with anything.

I distributed 100 fliers in a trading estate and a shopping mall, and got 3 job offers. One turned sour and the guy tried to sue me, one was a one off, and the last one got me a job converting .eps and .ai files for a sign writing plotter machine.

This company had associations with gangs and a drug using boss, who sometimes slapped me on the back of the head and called me a fing idot. However that job set me up for my next job and following career.

At that time, I was 13k in debt, and had no degrees. To get off the street, I bought a car for $150 to live in. The Methodist city mission was very helpful to me, giving me free, or $2 meals once a day. Also the Hari Krishna restaurant had good cheap food.

From the car, I moved in to a friend's part-under-the-house where the supports and dirt is, and lived rent free in exchange for doing chores.

That's when I managed to get that job controlling a sign writing plotter. Also I had to go through 6 months of being sued and had a bit of a breakdown, but it's all good now.

At that time I was 20/21. Now I am 38.

I hope it works out. Just keep sowing seeds, and soon enough some will start to sprout. I think the best place to get work and help is the larger cities.
You're not alone in being alone, and there are people worse off, I assure you.
I am guessing that *.itch.io points to some IP and that subdomains are resolved on the app level. Many services do that (my god forgotten app does, Tumblr does, I am sure others must, too)
I really like the idea of solar updraft tower, where air moves the other way: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_updraft_tower

It's disadvantage is that it requires much more land, but it doesn't require water on the other hand. As someone noticed, the water-powered downdraft version requires pumping water from 46 miles away and then 2000+ ft up.
I really like FlightCar in theory, but I'd never actually allow my car to be rented to someone I don't know (and even to some people I DO know). I realize they provide wear/tear and mechanical insurance, but I don't think $10/day in gas money is worth the hassle of potentially having to have my clutch repaired or new brake rotors installed for someone who rides both my clutch and brakes. But maybe this is geared more for someone who buys an econobox and doesn't care?
djb has been preaching this for a while. It's amazing to me how much computer hardware trusts itself:

http://cr.yp.to/hardware/ecc.html
AT&T also ticked off a lot of people during the switch by double billing them and cutting off others. Lot of switching to Verizon and Walmart.
He was just making a point that authentication protocol is a domain choice (from 2-digit passwords to retinal scan).

It's up to the users to trust the domain he is going to use as identity. Just like many people trust Facebook Connect.
What's actually good about Summly's purchase?
The one wrinkle I can see is that a lot of podcasts (including my own) use Feedburner. While shutting down Reader directly affects the people who chose to use it, shutting down Feedburner would disrupt a millions of innocent users. The end user just sees a great podcast go offline and subsequent firestorm of blaming Google. They'd be shutting down the customers of their customers, which seems a little more evil.
I can believe it. I'm from somewhere which is in many ways worse off than Yakima. That's just the best idea I have. If he can't make any money at all, I don't know what to suggest other than join the military. But I'm not a military guy, so I wouldn't feel comfortable suggesting that.

I could also suggest he goes off to western north dakota to work in the oil field, but I don't know if that's such a great idea. I have some friends that have done that. It sounds horrible, and they look like they are about 15 years older than they actually are. Plus you need the money to get there, and need a car, all of which is probably $5K+ anyway.
Hate to be pedantic, but "kbps" is actually kiloBITS per second, and including packet headers, it would take closer to 10 seconds on an ISDN line.
Go anywhere else. Hike somewhere. Getting out of the rut and mindset is one step of many.

I do second the concern that Australia is expensive though. But there's no language barrier, work around and lots to see.
you don't need money to start a company. However he may lack credit
People don't really realize it, but the mid 1950's through mid 1970's, besides being the golden age of the American economy, was also the golden age of American innovation, and much of it was bankrolled by DOD money (SRI is, of course, a major defense contractor). Not only was the infrastructure around us mostly built during that time (the highways, power plants, etc) but most concepts in computing: programming languages, AI, GUIs, databases, etc.

Over time I become more and more convinced that the market doesn't produce (much) real innovation. If you look at the stuff that really matters, it's come from one of three sources:

1) Government research labs (NASA) or government funded defense contractors (Lockeed-Martin, SRI, BBN, etc)

2) Government funded universities (MIT and its $1 billion in defense contracts each year)

3) Private companies that have either monopolies (AT&T Bell Labs) or massive market power with entrenched cash-cow products (IBM, Xerox PARC).

Look at innovation that's happening now. Where is it happening? Self-driving cars got a big boost from DARPA in the early 2000's (DARPA Grand Challenge), and is now being funded by Google (which has a ton of cash from its deeply entrenched position in search).
The dark side of the beloved Python: The schism between Python 2.x and 3.x
not different from someone stealing your cookies.
Nobody should be downvoted for simply asking a question so I upvoted you.

Hope it helps a bit.

EDIT: And somebody downvoted this comment. Oh no, I lost 1 HN point! What . will . I . ever . do?
They barely care about FeedBurner as it is. They've discontinued all of the advertising intergration, not updated the blog in any amount of time nor do you really get that much of the product itself. There's some pretty basic Google Analytics connection, but the main data we get out of it is download numbers for our podcast (http://76streetpod.com) and podcast network (http://76streetnetwork.com). It seems like every couple weeks the statistics stop for unexplained reasons only to have the Google group light up with nary an explanation. Along with mostly useless developer documentation for how the product outputs what it does or how it changes entries in a feed, FeedBurner is a useless hunk of crap that is almost certain to shutdown. An recent gripe is that when you use it as a feed proxy it doesn't pass along subscriber numbers like any other good feed parser, so a FeedBurner feed of a FeedBurner feed doesn't pass long info to the original FeedBurner feed or feed (but will pass along downloads, though it's only because FeedBurner is just a glorified Location header then.) I originally only went with FeedBurner over an open solution for expediency, but I've never liked giving Google more information on our users or giving up my control of our feeds to a product that has been limping along for years. It wouldn't take much effort to replicate FeedBurner. Maybe it's time I hunker down and do it. I've been planning for a FeedBurner switch since the beginning by using its "branded" feed feature and using a subdomain of ours for feed hosting. I hope everyone else has been wise enough to do so, as well, though looking at our network membership feeds, I know they haven't.
If you depend on high-grade investigative reporting to weed out the most obvious, ridiculous rent seeking, you've already lost.
My first chief, who is a great inspiration in my life, was once a recruiter. I asked him how he felt about recruiting, and if he had to lie to get people to join. His response was this:

"I never had to lie to anyone about joining the military. The secret is that no one walks into my office if everything is going right in their life. I just find what that problem is, and figure out how the military can solve it."

Recruiters can't effectively tell you lies if you know everything you need to know. In my case, my father had been a sonar tech and had told me what to expect like what I posted up there -- I already knew what I was getting into when I walked into that office. Don't go to a recruiter (and potentially waste their time) if you haven't done the due diligence to research a very life-changing decision.
If I knew your email, I could make an account on a website in your name without you knowing.
It sounds like you are also depressed, which is not all surprising, given your situation. While you are following through on the work/training/career suggestions posted here, also try to hook up with some free counseling resources. If there aren't any readily available in Yakima (which is likely) see what's available online. The suggestions here are great and just starting on some of those may help peel away the depression, but just in case, reach out to other resources focused on emotional well-being, in addition to networking, training, etc.
Cookies can be invalidated. Signatures, not so much.
Freelance. Join enough online meetups, Linked In lists, etc. Start a website where you blog about topics you're an expert in. (I'd lean more heavy on the programming thing than the audio stuff - not as fun, but you can program from anywhere)

Or: do some overseas mission stuff. I don't mean church stuff, where you pay to go, and are in an isolated bubble of service. No, I mean give up your life, go somewhere for a year or two. You can live on dollars a day (and still live better than the natives), and I think it will greatly benefit your worldview.

Join the military. Regardless of the politics of it, I think most will agree it's an opportunity to learn, grow, and get away.
Great post. People should stop and read this.
A little too focused on raw dollars and not other factors. For instance, how does quality of these services relate to the prices?
It's expensive but it's workable, and you can still save money. The minimum wage is federal, so you get paid the same as a barista in Sydney as you do in regional Australia. Also, I suggested it because the working holiday visa is available. I'm not sure if there any other countries which even offer such an option to Americans.
Those graphs are terrible. Why bother comparing the USA's 95th-percentile prices to the average price of other countries? And why refuse to show any countries that are more expensive than the USA in any category? Very ham-fisted.
Sacramento is also a great place to get some tech connections. The city itself has a great tech community, and you're only ~1.5h from San Francisco.
Insights into Church-Rosser
> Throw a pregenerated cert into localStorage and sync across browsers.

Browser extensions use their own secure storage mechanisms, not the localStorage used by sites, but yeah.

> Where I'm still fuzzy is if the site performs local verification, or login.persona.org does it, it might contact your server to grab its pubkey over SSL, requiring you to host something on your email domain.

Ignoring the workflow for domains without native identity providers (for which persona.org does its own mail-you-a-link validation), only one thing happens on the server accepting Persona: it requests the public key from the email domain. The site then expects to receive a message from the browser that chains back to that public key. So, you'd have to post some static files to /.well-known/ on your email domain, but the browser extension would construct the signed messages because it has the private key.

You could do this in two ways. For domains completely owned by the user, you could let the browsers hold the domain private key, and mint arbitrary identities on that domain on demand. For domains with multiple users but still wanting to statically manage identities, you could statically generate public/private keys for users and sign them with the domain key, then let the browsers hold onto the email keypairs only.
Don't solve the solved problems
Of course our prices are ridiculous. We have a horrible hybrid government-market system that has completely divorced consumers from providers in terms of pricing.

Consumers buy flat rate plans through their employers. They make use of services without much thought or knowledge of costs since they don't see bills.

Doctors over-test and over-treat because it makes them money, patients don't protest the cost, and they're covered better legally.

Insurance companies don't really care because they pass on their costs by increasing premiums.

Employers don't care since they write off the benefit to their employees and pass on much of the costs through premiums.

The entire mess is a runaway train with no brakes.
I had the same feeling. A pretty typical case of data being carefully selected and presented to fit the argument, rather than presenting an objective view of things.
Did you listen to his other talk where he mentioned that he felt like anyone should be able just publish a game on Steam using their APIs without approval?
Did you read the article? In paragraph 4 he specifically tells us he takes the founders age off the table.
Add a red equals sign filter to your Facebook profile pic in 2 clicks
Yes, I absolutely agree with this. Too many people rush into life-changing decisions like this. It's also nice to hear another perspective on recruiters. Mine really did lie to my parents, however. We met with my parents, he told them one thing, then we left to go back to the recruiting office and he said "what I told your parents wasn't true, I just didn't think they would say yes otherwise".
EmberJS: http://emberjs.com/

It's primarily author is Yehuda Katz, the man behind (much of) Rails 3
> "attended tech / startup community events (meetups, hack days, etc)"

This really is the key to doing what you love. "Hanging around" leads to opportunities, whether it's through open source contributions to a project you like, pestering people at meetups, being a particularly keen and vocal user of a product you love.
I think that some of these comparisons may be a bit unfair. All of the dollar amounts are expressed in USD, but cost of living is different in different parts of the world. It would be like comparing housing prices in the Bay Area to housing prices in Argentina just on dollar amounts in USD, without taking other factors into account.

For instance, Argentina has $10 for an office visit. I'm not sure that a doctor would be able to make any kind of decent salary if they were only making $10/patient in the US. It would definitely incentivize the impersonal, "get done as fast as possible, don't spend a microsecond more," style of visit to the doctor.
I don't see how that would cause a problem. If the website ever sent an email to me, I would know about it and just be able to do password recovery and delete the account. If the website never sends an email, it's of no inconvenience to me.

In that case is this not just functionally equivalent to sending a validation email upon account creation, as many sites do already?
I'm pretty sure that a Swiss or UK physician does equally good job as his counterpart in the US.
Yeah, man, that's such a great point. I look around and see all the GREAT things the government does for me. I mean, who else but the federal government would put a massive army in the Middle East to blow up swarthy people that might think bad thoughts about me. I sure as hell can't afford that! So when I see thousands go each month to feed our democratically elected government, I smile -- because they're blowing up the darkies that none of us could afford individually to blow up.

Same thing with drug prohibition. I mean, my friends and I are clever and all, but there's no way in hell we could ever scrape together the money, material, and manpower to lock up a bunch of darkies for putting the wrong chemicals in their bodies. I mean, SOMEONE has to keep them off the job market and from providing for their families, and we can't trust them to just go attempt rape on a white woman anymore. That's lots of prisons we've got to put up and manage.

Golly gee, I'm just ECSTATIC to pay for these things.
What's funny about health care and to some extent education in the U.S is that the solution is NOT to spend more money. This is fundamentally at odds with the political ideology prevalent in this country which seems to think more money is the universally applicable and most effective solution to social problems.
You can see in the picture that besides the Bitcoin ATM, there are ATMs of banks from Thailand. I doubt this is in Cyprus.
Yup, last week I made sure all my sites were broadcasting a direct RSS URL. One would hope they would at least give plenty of warning before actually pulling the plug, but who knows.
When I was diagnosed with a melanoma last year and had to go for my second operation someone proposed I went to this specialist.

For reasons that are still unclear to me my insurance didn't cover it and I was told that if I did it out of pocket I would have to pay 3000USD for an initial meeting.

I was also sent the price for my uncomplicated operation which was between 30.000USD and 150.000USD. This is for a stage 1 removal.

Stage 2. started at 250.000USD and ended at 450.000USD

Stage 3. and stage 4. well lets just say i stopped reading after stage 2.

Now I am well aware that no one ever pay the list price, but it is to me (I am originally from Denmark) completely absurd the way the healthcare system is constructed.

I also recognize that there are no easy solutions here. You can never spend enough money on healthcare.

But you can certainly construct it differently than we have here in the US.