skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You know, I'm about to rant on an ideal that I hold. So what about money? Money is everything if you think about it. The second you stop having money is the second you are on the street without anything. So money is something.

You can go through and live in a decent house with a decent car and you'll be happy if you make yourself happy but I just don't see how people can argue that money doesn't make you happy or happier. I get that in and of itself if you fuck yourself over and you don't keep your friends or family or kids and you work so much that you will be unhappy even with money, but money can make you happier even if its indirectly. You may be one to sit at home and do nothing on the weekends and I get that, but having money allows you to go out and experience things. It buys experiences that you normally couldn't have.

Having no money does limit what you can do in life. The case can be made that you are happier not doing things but I think if you are the least bit adventurous money can buy you pleasure, joy, experiences shared with loved ones, and in the indirect result happiness. I believe family and friends are more important, but saying money should't be a goal is just silly in my opinion. Why not have both as the girl on the taco shell commercial would say?

With no money there is a slew of problems that come your way..late rent, bills, struggling to always be on top, etc. With a lot of money I'm sure there are issues as well..but I'm pretty positive you can't find anyone that has a lot of money that has good relationships that would trade their large bank account to gain more happiness and be more free. If it's not your personal goal then that's your decision and your life.

I'm NOT saying that chasing money should be your only goal. Working crazy hours in a field you don't like while ruining relationships is not healthy and isn't good. But strategically gaining money by working hard and smart and taking risk isn't such a bad thing. I'm a big believer in doing what you love and being the best at it and getting money that way, I'm not a fan of getting a degree in a field and working your life in that field just because of the money.

Happiness starts with you and ends with you. Whatever you surround yourself with should be things that make you happy. It's also not relative. Having more money shouldn't just make you automatically happier, but it should cut out some stress to let you be free to be happier and enable you to do more things that make you happy.

/rant
Lets get everyone on Fastrak and see how they like it :P
Postcards are the better analogy for SMTP, not "opening postal mail".

With that said, it's actually a Federal crime to remove mail from someone else's mailbox to obstruct or pry into their business (even for postcards), which would seem to support your overall point.

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1702
defining "peers" as "those that I actually work with"
Have either of you witnessed this happening in real life? There's always a comment to this effect in every "raise" question I've ever come across, but never have I seen any proximate information.
Hey, hey, what's with the "..." and cutting out the relevant parts? I explicitly mention SSL and TLS. Those are encryption standards that are designed exclusively for privacy.

If I am using them to communicate with a 3rd party, I have a reasonable expectation of privacy between myself and that 3rd party. You would most certainly need a warrant to turn around and try to get access to a message stored on their servers.

On top of that, quite a bit of email today doesn't even touch SMTP. If I'm sending an email from one GMail user to another GMail user, I'm pretty sure it is just shuffled around on Google's internal servers. And, of course, I'm connecting to Google using SSL, an encrypted connection.

How does that not scream private?
They seem to be doing a really clever thing developing a full scale demo as Kickstarter progresses. They are making a graphics engine for mass scale battles and network/server piece separately. Then they want to put it together and make available probably at the last KS week.
What you're describing is essentially any flavor of Galara Cluster for MySQL. Unfortunately, it comes with its own tradeoffs.

However I do see something a bit... off... about your 2nd concern. Why would you want a database to handle its own monitoring? I'd personally rather just set up a set of MySQL monitoring plugins into Nagios. That way all of my monitoring is one place.

Consistency checking across terabytes of data on multiple servers is a hard problem. It would be great if it could be solved, but I'm not holding my breath for them (well, any DB vendor for that matter) to get it right.
Someone should use this concept to make a browser extension that transforms words in your entire newsfeed into flashcards while you browse.
Didn't you know everyone considers themselves top tier?
Does anybody know what happened with this? I donated to the campaign and just received an email saying that I've been refunded my donation and the page is gone.
First, the word of the powerful is worthless, because power corrupts. People might keep their word because they're honest, or because they're accountable, but the "most powerful organization in the history of civilization" is by definition not accountable, and being an organization, neither is it honest.

Second, the US government doesn't give its word that dollars are usable for anything other than paying dollar-denominated debts to people inside its jurisdiction. If you owe somebody in the US €100, that's currently US$130.50. But if the dollar collapses tomorrow, you might need US$1300 to pay that debt, even to somebody in the US.

The US government has not given its word that you can exchange those US$130.50 for €100 tomorrow, or for anything else, except for debts already denominated in dollars. It doesn't even require that businesses allow you to buy things with any particular currency (this is a FAQ on the Fed's web site) — just that they accept payment for debts already contracted.
It's your attachment to the concept of interest rates that is the source of your suffering.
I'd love to see these startups springing up everywhere solely because of bitcoin :)
I used to compete in TC many years ago... Back in 2005 or so. I was a high-ranked "yellow" coder in division one. I never made it to red.

It's a humbling experience: some of the topcoders there were simply geniuses. One of them red coder had won some US national math contest four times or so. They were making tens of thousands of $$$ by participating in contests.

You're not beating these "red" topcoder guys: you simply are not smarter than them. And I'd say that saying that a guesstime of 90% of the coders here couldn't reach high-ranked yellow either is probably very conservative.

They're not just Mensa and Triple Nine and whatnots: they're also very knowledgable about computer science and both algorithms and "tricks"... And boy do they type fast.

So what's next in typical HN fashion? Criticizing "intelligence" as not being representative of coding skills, criticizing IQ tests as not being representative of intelligence and criticizing top coder as not being "real programming" and hence not representative of coding skills, etc.

What I really liked about TopCoder is that it was (probably still is) a "put up or shut up".

You think you're better than 75% to 100% of coders out there? Go participate to a few TopCoder contests and get your arse handed to you and then we'll talk again.

(I didn't vote btw)
Geo for Bootstrap
I couldn't tell if the pictures and diagrams were about a stone structure or a 2013 Dodge Avenger, Dart, or Challenger. I swear web publishers sometimes pick the worst things to slap ads on...
How Optimizely Is Improving Website Personalization [video]
This sudden drop sounds like an intentional attack on Bitcoin to lower the price. I have heard stories of hackers trying to sabotage the price of Bitcoin by forcing the price lower and then buying a whole heap of Bitcoin, sounds like one of those attacks finally worked. Looks like all of the Bitcoin publicity from the likes of Business Week and The New York Times has attracted some good old fashioned currency manipulators who want a piece of the pie.

Although there is no evidence to suggest this isn't an old fashioned bank-run, there appears to be quite a few reports of mining pools being attacked as well. Something is definitely going on here, but overall it won't stop the remarkable progress Bitcoin has made this year so far.
Sold everything I had yesterday at ~$240

https://twitter.com/nikcub/status/321751009598791682

I was buying and selling BitCoins with a very simple theory. Each time the currency would rally I would check the stories on Google News and check the graph on Google Trends[1].

Other price peaks would correspond with a peak on the trends graph[2], a new peak in new stories (with more stories in more general media publications), and more traffic to the sites that are the top results for "BitCoin" (using Compete etc.)

The peak yesterday had no new interest driving it, and no new buyers coming in. It was clear what was going to happen next.

Previous price peaks would drive new news stories which would drive the next peak. Yesterday I logged into News and Trends and found the trends level at its lowest in 30+ days and no new large items in news and sold.

[1] https://twitter.com/nikcub/status/319427166817357824

[2] https://twitter.com/nikcub/status/315680085468405760
Both of those programs are playing with C's infamously broad undefined behavior rules, the first for a non-terminating loop and the second for using too much stack (when called with a sufficiently large number). -O2 being nice to you is a coincidence, not something you should rely on.

In a language which prefers diagnosing programmer error over punting both should be errors.
>Why are you trying to legislate technology when you could just make the tech work the way you want?

Because I don't want technology to rule us, I want us, humans, to rule technology. We say a lot of times that "technology is a tool". If we have to adopt ourselves and our society to it, instead of adapting it to our preferences, goals and morals, then it's not a tool, it's a ruler.

In this case, cryptography might be a solution. But it's not a perfect solution for me. For one, it's not widespread and it's confusing for most people to integrate to their mailing habits. Second it breaks lots of workflows and conveniences (e.g full text search of emails).

Second, I don't want the government, Google, or anybody else to have it be legal to look into my email if they can break the cryptography or find the key. I want it to be illegal even at that case.

Third, while cryptography might be a case were technology can solve this problem (privacy) there are other issues just piling technology cannot be used to solve them -- where legislation is needed.
Last time it crashed 50% (which I think has only happened once, in 2011) it took more than a few hours.
The problem is, before you had to count lines, then figure out it's an "A" and know which A on your instrument it is.

With this, you have to learn some English associations by heart to decipher hard-to-see dots and/or count lines so you know it's an "A", even if the shortcut to "A" was mildly helpful you STILL got to know which "A" it is.

This is hardly ANY improvement at all.

Typical tab-focused players want an extremely clear and simple instruction while typical sheet-music players want the full musical information. This satisfies neither camp.
Hanoi 3D Street View of Vietnamese startup CocCoc
A piece of string is precisely 1.2cm long.
Good Ideas Are Worth Chasing
The idea is not to reduce cab counts to the point where people call towncars instead; that's likely a worse outcome, because the towncar spends only ~1/3 of it's time full: the other 2/3rds are spent driving to and from the towncar's parking space.

Ideally cabs would spend near zero time driving around empty. Today this is solved by medallions, imperfectly, but tomorrow this can be solved by technology.

What can't be solved by technology is the number of cabs trolling around. You can have perfect GPS based dispatch, with your next fare always ready to get in your cab just as you're dropping off the last fare, and there would still be huge problems, because there's nothing to stop this ideal set of 100% in-use cabs from being diluted into five times as many 20% in use cabs. People will take the closest cab and drivers will drive around to make sure they're the closest cab.

You can charge a per-mile tax on empty taxis, but that just raises cab fares for citizens (or forces caps) for no good reason. Just set the optimal number of cabs by fiat.

In some respects, this is a natural monopoly.
Why not? An ellipsis isn't an argument.
American Foods Chockfull of Ingredients Banned in Other Countries
Would love to hear more details on this; why can't the 21m limit be changed?
Money might not buy happiness, but poverty sure buys a ton of unhappiness.
no it doesn't? it is a common colloquialism.
Bitcoin Suffers A Correction Amid Apparent DDOS Attacks On Some Exchanges
c) Twice half it's length.
I really like the idea of using the lock screen as more than just a simple way to get into the phone. I would love to use something like this to force me to spend a few seconds learning something every time I want to get into my phone.
Dropbox Can Find Your Stolen Computer
Not to mention that within the tradition of the profession, "coder" is a disparaging term, often followed by the word, "monkey."
FWIW, I don't consider "all coders" to be "my peers". I am 100% certain I'm "better than 75% of coders". At the same time I'm surrounded by friends and colleagues where that's clearly not the case.
Reminds me about one stat I heard a few days ago: 90% of the drivers consider themselves better at driving than the 50% of drivers.

See the oxymoron?

I think it's the same in the programming land.
If you can put "just" before "lie" then you're not taking this seriously, you've never found yourself really, badly lied to, or you have a serious dearth of ethics.

Don't lie. Deflect, even if it's bluntly. Saying "I don't believe that's relevant, but I will tell you how much I'd like to make" pretty much says "I'm underpaid" but also says "I know I'm underpaid and I expect better," which tells them something useful about you that you actually want them to know.
Why would you go to the trouble of designing a new music notation and not make it based on relative pitches? What are the tradeoffs?
How can you quantify something like this?

Software engineering has so many different specializations that it's possible that everyone is better in different ways. I might not be the best at solving problems such as the ones on TopCoder, or probably not the best at working with hardware, but if you ask me something specific about bioinformatics, I know that domain fairly well.

I think it's strange to say you're better than 75% - 100% of all coders when you can't possibly have the knowledge about every field and every domain. All things considered, I'm definitely in the 0 - 25%.
"They don't, but that's because Euros/Yens are backed by foreign governments".

No, that is not the reason. Replace "Euros/Yens" with "gold" in my sentence, and my point stands with gold being backed by nothing. Basically the US government is totally fine with side markets that they cannot control directly and that exist in parallel with the USD (whether it is EUR, gold, Bitcoin, whatever).

Your other argument also fails to convince me that the government would want to declare Bitcoin illegal. You say it can be used for money laundering, but gold and cash can already be used for money laundering (and even more discreetly since trading gold or cash does not leave a trail like in the Bitcoin blockchain). The US govt does not make gold and cash illegal because they realize it is silly/unenforcable/pointless and would hurt the economy more than it would manage reducing illegal activity. Case in point: the US did attempt to criminalize possession of gold in 1933, but they eventually realized how silly and stupid this was, so they decriminalized it!

When the Internet was being developed throughout the world, were you the kind of person who looked at it and envisioned that its censorship-resistant decentralized aspect could be used to facilitate the transmission of potentially illegal information (software, data, child porn, ideas, etc, especially in countries with no freedom of speech) and said "geesh I bet governments are going to make Internet illegal"?

"For one, the government doesn't care for 'startups springing up everywhere'"

I think my point was clear that these startups are potentially the start of a big new economy complementing the current one that could financially benefit the government with revenues from taxes. So, yes, the government would love to see a big economy pop up.

"Plus, if bitcoin is banned, its economic activity will just migrate to conventional money again, it wont be lost."

No. The world economy is not a zero-sum game. It is possible to create wealth (wealth is stuff we want, not money, see http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html ) and Bitcoin and its economy would certainly create extra wealth. Another example showing how silly your assumption that the economy is a zero-sum game is: since the start of e-commerce, do you think that it has stolen commerce from or mostly added to the brick-and-mortar industry? Obviously, sometimes stolen (journals, etc) but e-commerce has mostly added wealth and economic activity on top of the brick-and-mortar one. In other word the size and richness and wealth of the current economy far surpases the one of the economy pre-Internet.
Generally speaking, if I say that and you take me to court to get my car, the court will award you damages, which I can pay with some cash. The alternative, where the court orders me to give you my car, is called "specific performance" and is very rare.
The scratch-off card is a poor man's one-time password generator. In fact, it's remarkably effective at preventing scammers from draining people's accounts, as long as you're not stupid enough to take a photo of your card and post it online (yeah, people do that). That little card is what prevents the whole ActiveX fiasco from crumbling down like a house of cards, precisely because it's so low-tech (i.e. requires physical access).

A lot of the other crap is understandable when you take into account the fact that online banking was first introduced to Korea in the mid-1990s. HTTPS was useless at the time because of U.S. export restrictions limiting it to 40 bits. Home-brewed ActiveX controls were used to implement 128-bit encryption. Korea also decided to use public keys and X.509 client certificates to identify people, way ahead of the rest of the world, but of course no browser supported them so someone had to write custom software. After that, inertia and regulatory capture allowed what was supposed to be a stopgap measure to continue for another 15+ years, long after proper HTTPS became available in every browser.

The only benefit I can think of is that Koreans don't have to worry about those stupid password restrictions that a lot of American banks impose on their customers :)
Having interviewed about a hundred programmers who responded to a job search specifying that we're looking for "brilliant coders", I can objectively say that 90% are below average...

Seriously though, your perception depends very much on the quality of your peers. I'm lucky enough to be immersed among the very best, so the average developers I regularly interview seem - to me - incapable of programming their way out of a paper bag, even though they hold normal positions in normal companies, presumably successfully.
I think OP you are on the right track trying to leverage your skills in one area by applying them to another.

I'm in the process of transitioning from IT to Law. This obviously takes longer than a year and it's certainly not for everyone. However I expect to be able to use my technical background (though not expertise per se) in legal work.
Let me put your point in plain words:

Consulting currently pays a lot of money. You can make 6 figures without much hassles. Don't quit your job to start consulting without having a group of prospect to sell to. Build your prospects list first, by doing content marketing and networking in site like linkedin.

If you want to take the business route, you can make that amount of money by automating tasks and selling the software. What should you automate? Everything that has to do with lead capturing is worth its zeroes and ones in gold. Start there.

Anything else?

Yes! Start blogging. About your skills. About your projects. Get people reading about you. Even if you don't have an idea at the moment, people will gravitate towards you and give you good ideas.

Whatever you do, realize that this will take time. At the very least, two months of work. Worth it? You bet!

Good luck.
Stopping after the first sentence, you have a point: This is not what I'd call a well-considered goal. It's just a number... unless there's more to it than "I like 90 more than 60," it's lacking any kind of reason or direction, which might explain why he's having such a hard time figuring out how to attain it. A goal that you'll be able to reach comes from a need or desire you can feel and likely articulate.

As for the rest... "money isn't everything" is such a situational and personal sentiment as to be worthless, especially in the context of someone who expressly states that more money is one of his goals.
The Dunning Kruger effect would describe the outcome of this poll quite nicely I expect.
In this poll we're going to see a lot of bias introduced from both the Dunning-Kruger effect and Imposter syndrome...
mendeley has always been closed source for-profit. They may have gotten a new owner but it isn't like they were ever doing it for altruistic reasons.

Hopefully this will be good news for zotero which is open source.

And hopefully it will be really bad news for endnote which is one of the worst commercial programs I've ever tried to use.
Codassium Combines Collaborative Code Editing And Video Chat Into One Web App
I do not know about legal issues (you should probably ask your lawyer), but as an American who does not speak Portuguese, I would be extremely hesitant to sign up for your service if I could neither read the privacy policy nor the terms of service.
Erlang uses mutual TCO everywhere. All actors/processes are state machines with the function they're in being their current state. To switch states, you just tail-call a new function (which doesn't have to be from the same module you were in.)