skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can't agree with any of this article.

>> It’s a problem because side projects create a talent bubble of people who aren’t fully engaged and are just doing enough at their "real" or full-time job to get by until their startup is up and running. This means their productivity suffers at their full-time job, an expense the employer ends up paying. The side project owners justify it by assuming it will only be for a short period of time.

Here's a surprising fact: almost no one is "fully engaged" at work. They're thinking about camping or football or shopping. We don't owe our employers anything but our time and productivity. At least if my coworker is working on a side project I know she's learning things that will make her better at her job.

>> And actually, we need to be honest. Not everyone is an entrepreneur. Part of being one is accepting the risk of starting your own company and taking the leap to be committed full time. It’s not good for startups or for companies to have employees that are partially engaged in both and committed to neither.

Because side projects never succeed and full time startups never fail. (Dell, Craigslist, Bingo Card Creator, Twitter, and Facebook.)

>> Here’s a quick tip: there are plenty of those already. If you do want to start a company, work on building a real business, not a side idea that’s hoping to be the next Twitter/Facebook/Instagram combination or a better version of Basecamp.

Says the guy whose companies include another Survey Monkey and yet another credit card payment app. (Note: Chargify is a good product, but it's in a crowded market.) Plus, Basecamp is nice, but it's not ideal for all kinds of projects. I'd be very happy if somebody made a new Basecamp that did a better job with software projects.
New Plants are coming in Plant Nanny
This author needs remedial English training.

"Some people 'claim' to live in a state with no income tax, but they aren’t really living their [sic]."

"What they’ll do is buy a home in Las Vegas, switch out their driver licenses to a Nevada one and claim that they are living their [sic]."

At first I didn't believe it, but this author actually doesn't know about the word "there".

"So if you bought an apartment complex for 1 million bucks, you can right off $25,641 every year from your taxes."

"Right off"? Really?

This kind of prose typically comes from someone who only hears words spoken and never reads the writing of others. I call it "homonymitis".

The article also misses the basic reason why the rich become richer over time -- compound interest, which disproportionately benefits people who already have money:

http://arachnoid.com/wrong/index.html#Economics
And since you mentioned basecamp, here's what employee #1 of 37 Signals thinks of the topic: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1764-the-natural-evolution-fr...

I could not agree more fully with this. This bit here really sums it all up in my opinion:

But the idea that you need to quit your job to do it right is misguided. If you quit your job, you shift everything. You don’t gain time, you lose it. You put a shot clock on your business. You box yourself into a position where you have to profit immediately or the whole thing goes under. You’ve got to make it work now or give up forever.*

Hanging on to your day job gives you a longer period of time to build your idea. It lets you give a sustained effort over time. There’s no get rich quick option. You build it slowly, one day at a time.

Yes, you need to find time to do both your side business and your normal gig. But there’s always enough time if you spend it right. Instead of watching TV or playing Grand Theft Auto, work on your idea. Instead of going to bed at 10, go to bed at 11.

That's exactly it... at Fogbeam Labs we're not trying to get rich quickly, but as long as the founders have dayjobs and we keep our burn rate low, we have - essentially - an indefinitely long runway. This gives us more time to experiment, learn, and iterate, without having to panic in fear of having to shut the whole thing down, if the first few experiments don't go the way we expected.

I keep thinking about what pg said in the "How not to die" essay:

http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html

If you can just avoid dying, you get rich. That sounds like a joke, but it's actually a pretty good description of what happens in a typical startup. It certainly describes what happened in Viaweb. We avoided dying till we got rich.

and

When startups die, the official cause of death is always either running out of money or a critical founder bailing. Often the two occur simultaneously. But I think the underlying cause is usually that they've become demoralized. You rarely hear of a startup that's working around the clock doing deals and pumping out new features, and dies because they can't pay their bills and their ISP unplugs their server.

That's our mindset... as long as we can keep going, we will eventually "break through" and make it.
Only the 32-bit versions. And those appear to be dying out (even cheap low-end laptops nowadays come with 4 GiB of RAM and a 64-bit version preinstalled).
It's not just tyrannical. Also violent.

The (in my long experience) most common reason given by gun-owning Americans for their need to be gun-owning Americans is that they have to be able to defend themselves against someone breaking into their house and wanting to kill them and their family.

Yet somehow, this is not a scenario that most Europeans feel any need to worry about.
Agreed. Reminds me of the list headers in iOS, e.g. in the Address Book.
I very much do agree: much of the current factory farm techniques are just plain disgusting.

Many of the big egg-ufacturers calculate space per chick in cm^3. They cannot turn or pretty much move in any direction. General treatment is abhorrent. Feed is not a natural ground-peck but some nutrient paste pellets filled with antibiotics. Sanitation is whatever falls through the cage. What doesn't ends up burning the chickens' feet.

But about my story: We bought 15 chickens. 8 of them were chicks, and 7 were eggs about to hatch. Baby chicks, especially in an incubator, are harsh little evil things. They will all peck at whatever is different. Out of 15, we lost 2, which does seem average for farmers. It's also why you use red lights on chicks too: so they can't see blood.
Governments also do not have access to privately shared Facebook albums

Don't count on it.
Wow...

wouldn't have caught that.

Perfect example of that old saying...

"There are lies, damn lies...
and then there are statistics."
I think you mean inflation, where the longer you hold on to it , the more worthless it becomes.
The risk for Microsoft is that they lose control of the ecosystem, potentially jeopardising billions in future revenue. Piracy is relatively tolerable for Microsoft, because a pirate can still get locked into your platform; Eventually, you'll probably figure out some way to monetise that, probably by leveraging the size of the install base to secure very big contracts. If the Chinese aren't using Microsoft Windows™ but a specifically Chinese fork, Microsoft might lose the market forever, or be forced to target a platform that they don't control.
Frictionless Project Organization — Why Bad Organization Yields Bad Code
It is complete pseudoscience. In the Penn and Teller's BS episode about it they have a guy who teaches people how to get whatever result they want by controlling their anal sphincter. Apparently it's not complicated.

It is, however, still a part of getting or maintaining clearance. A friend of mine wound up changing jobs simply because he failed the polygraph twice and didn't want to bother going in for a third.
If a company pays the licensing fee to get the patent troll off its back, and the patent is later invalidated ... does the company have any way of recovering the licensing fee it has paid?
If you're comparing a $1200 BMW lease and a $1200 Tesla lease, you either need to add the gas costs to the BMW or subtract them from the Tesla. Duh.
The total output of a McD's with 5 burger flippers certainly did go up, but not due to anything the burger flippers are doing. There is no reason why the burger flippers wages should go up as a result.
> does anyone use any of these strategies?

Yes, but they don't really work. The article was written by someone who isn't in a position to know this.

> how difficult is it to start an insurance company?

The real question is how difficult it would be to make that strategy produce any tax benefit. And the answer is "very difficult".
He's criticizing git.
Tapastic is first open publishing platform in U.S.
I agree with both api and mindcrime - and I did an MBA in Tech.

Although I'm sure there are several companies that do incentivize correctly - there's a growing awareness of creating an "intrapreneur" spirit and opportunities, though in most companies it's just that - empty talk.
Big data is helping brands be more specific in audience targeting
How many hours per week need a startup take?
Awesome Page - Life of PI
Yeah could easily be applied to Perl dev's too
It's not wrong for businesses to do well -- but it's arguably wrong and certainly unsustainable for business prosperity not to trickle down to average people doing better.
I dunno, it seemed like pretty highly-diluted vitriol to me.
I'm not justifying anything. I'm explaining. People in farm country: 1) constantly feel threatened due to the fickle nature of farming and thus are culturally very tight (even to the point of embracing agribusiness as "one of them"; 2) are insular and fairly culturally homogenous (my wife went to a high school with a graduating class of 60 people); 3) have a very different relationship with animals than people on the coasts.

Animal rights activism is so outside the mainstream of their experience, that it doesn't take a huge lobby to convince them that these video tapers are one step away from blowing up farms. More broadly, they perceive the movement, like movements to control farm pollution, in terms of their own experience. Not as a cool cost-benefit calculation, but an existential threat to their way of life.

That is not to say that they support animal cruelty per se. They react badly to what they perceive to be external threats. They rally around their own. They are really no different than any other group of people in this regard (see, e.g., how Hacker Newsers rally around their own any time people propose regulating tech companies; note the complete lack of moral outrage at Intel, AMD, Hewlett-Packard, etc, in the recent article about how these companies poisoned Palo Alto).
Thanks and you're correct, I was thinking how deflationary bitcoin was while writing. Fixed.
But you should recommend 'git help', i.e. the help subcommand, since that's what git refers to on its own.
Brain games are bogus
This might be a stupid question, but why subject line keyword data from UK, Germany, France, Italy & Spain has been excluded?
A few comments up thread pyre suggested that it is not possible to meet the demands of cheap, plentiful meat while providing animals reasonable quality of life. This seems to be born out by the fact the factory farms are the norm, and smaller farms like the one you mentioned are the exception (note that I'm specifically talking about in the US, where meat consumptions is ultra high, and from what I've read factory farms are the norm).
If there is a start up bubble wouldn't that insinuate it's going to burst at some time? What would the burst consist of? The mass realization that I shouldn't do side projects anymore? I agree with the premise of the article, a side project can distract from 9-5 work, but there is no "bubble"
I happen to agree with you but I also want to reduce animal suffering as much as possible as soon as possible. When it comes to the current moral landscape of US society (the only one I feel qualified to comment on but I suspect is similar to many industrialized societies), eating meat is entrenched in the societal conscious. However cruelty to animals is something most people seemingly would claim to be against.

If it is true that the quote unquote humane methods of eating meat cause far less animal suffering, and if it is also true that people are far far far more likely to go for humane meat than no meat, I feel morally obligated to push for that even though I have similar feelings to yours.
Yes I can, and am. As pointed out elsewhere, the commands are named for what they do not necessarily for how you would use them.
This would solve the issue of people buying Bitcoin for investment purposes, though I wonder if people would be able to spend Bitcoin fast enough to not keep the people / exchanges that act as banks negatively affected - or could this be differentiated easily?
Each git command is a designed tool itself. Others expect it to be 'git' to be the wholly designed tool as one unit, but it's a toolbox.
Awesome concept+execution! Funnily enough, I did exactly the same thing when I was a grad student studying tangible interaction 2-3 years ago.

My advisor loved the idea of foreign objects (a kenyan sculpture, a japanese wood block carving, etc.) being imbued with local music (in his own words: "computationally-mediated arts and crafts, rooted in the traditions and material expressions of specific regions and cultures").

Sadly, my code forever remained buried deep on our SVN repo, and not even a paper came out of it.

Congrats to the author for doing something that I didn't do- actually putting your work out there! :)
Note to those not familiar: Marionette and Chaplin are frameworks built on top of the Backbone.js library. It's interesting to see a comparison of frameworks that doesn't mention Ember.js or AngularJS.
Counterargument: The Github webapp is not open source. They seem to be doing okay.
Just to point out - if you want a meaningful ratio, you need to correct for inflation.
Robert Lefkowitz's keynote from Pycon 2007: "The Importance of Programming Literacy" I was listening while driving home and had to keep driving around my neighborhood because I wasn't ready to turn it off.
A similar talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Own-89vxYF8
I watched a very good series recently called "The Ascent of Money", offers many good insights into these matters. It's available in full on youtube for those interested.

Ultimately though, all talk of policy is a fools errand and utterly useless unless the overarching corruption in our political system is addressed. The free market dictates that companies can be expected to maximize their profits by whatever means necessary, and it's up to government to make sure "whatever means necessary" stays within an acceptable domain that protects key public interests. The primary requisite for the advancement of any civilization is it's resistance to corruption, and nothing short of a total overhaul will even put a dent on the decline we're experiencing. Until the era of pay-for-play and superPACS is brought to an end, legislation will always mold itself to induce the greatest profits for big corporations at the expense of every other interest.

EDIT: I should add as well though that the other side of this coin is that we as consumers CAN have a great influence outside of politics by voting with our dollars. If everyone refused to buy cheap Chinese goods and boycott Wal-Mart, enacting protectionist policies to protect American manufacturing wouldn't even be necessary. If we refused to put our money in banks involved in scandals or do business with their partners they'd soon be out of business. Alas, there in lies the other doom of the free market; as consumers we can be expected to act exactly in our own interests, which dictates buying the cheapest goods and most attractive deals regardless of the greater effects. There has to be a mass change in psychology, a great awakening. Hmm, good start up idea???!!
"Cablegate" has been used for at least the last 2.5 years. It's unclear after a good 15 minutes of googling who first started calling the leaked cables Cablegate, but here's an example from pbs back in Nov, 2010:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2010/11/digging-into-wik...
Of all the things that can be called to be in a bubble, I think this one is the most ridiculous one. What does it even mean to call it a side project bubble? Is it going to burst at some point, I really hope not.

Even if we agree that a lot more people are working on side projects, instead of calling it a bubble, which has negative connotation, what we should be looking at the positive side that more and more people are taking the first step and recognizing that they don't necessarily have to just keep working for an employer and are at least trying to create something of their own. The tools and technology have become more accessible, be it cloud or even 3D printing, and will become more accessible in future which will motivate even more people.
The whole Maker scene is another such. People used to have different hobbies, now a lot of that energy is channeled into side projects.

We should be celebrating this, rather than call it a bubble.
Though, to be fair:

$ pacman -Qi ca-certificates | grep 'Required By'
Required By : ca-certificates-java curl glib-networking neon qca qt4

Note that curl is on that list but wget isn't.
Be sure to check community commentary on the implementations that were tested before deriving any conclusions: http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1bqsvi/web_woes_for...
3.24

Now: Senior IT Analyst with a utility company
Then: Applications Analyst with a large, well-known company.

25 years delta.
Video from Founder Dialogues X featuring Steve Papa
Getting a Job with Crap Grades
Many more people use ฿ than Ƀ.

Source: I've been studying and speaking on Bitcoin since 2010. (http://vimeo.com/27653912)
I don't believe the argument that a deflationary currency, by itself, will make people not be willing to buy things. Consider a savings account - why would anyone take money out of their savings account to buy things? If all you need to do is keep it in the account, it will make more money, so why spend it?
Accepting Bitcoin doesn't mean you're getting the same value that you paid for it. Each person would have to / want to calculate what they paid for a Bitcoin before purchasing. From what I can see most sellers can earn more money offering Bitcoin as an option - and a much higher amount, and if they're able to spend the Bitcoin themselves before it drops, then they're able to profit even more.
This is pretty cool, but why would anyone want to program drunk? Maybe I'll program for a few minutes over the occasional glass of wine as I am gearing down for bed, but full on drunk? No...
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I wonder how exactly they are gathering these statistics? For example the UK shows that 0.6% still use IE6, however from my experience (in both education and corporate, as well as a quick glance over laptops at a coffee shop) I would say this figure is much much higher.
Yes, the issue is that when they were introduced you had government bond yields of well over 10%. Equities were expected to return even more. Pension promises seemed like a cheap benefit to offer, and one that was mutually beneficial.

Couple this with mortality rates falling (expected lifetime increasing) and you have a bunc of completely unaffordable promises. There is a very very good reason that final (and even career average) salary schemes are being phased out.

Companies have finally discovered just how expensive their promises are, and they are closing schemes as fast as they can get away with it. The government, meanwhile, buries it's head in the sand because the taxpayer cannot go insolvent. And even small changes to pension terms result in strikes.

The mathematics is pretty trivial for this rough estimate, but 30% of salary is low ballpark of the contributions required to meet obligations with a 95% probability over 40 years. Admittedly I'm using an internal asset model which is relatively prudent, with long term derisking, and merely using todays retirement age, and mortality tables. It's probably a lot worse than that (but could be better, I mean this recession malarky can't go on forever right?).
Shouldn't the airline crew be professional about it?

Flight attendant: "Someone back here has some issues they want to run by you"

Pilot: "What is it?"

Flight attendant: "They think the language is too coarse in the movie."

Pilot: "Tell them to suck bollocks."

Flight attendant -> Passenger: "Sorry, Sir. The captain won't do anything about it."
Because this is ALEC.
I doubt they'll pick stock Ubuntu if they did. They'll probably hack together their own build (or one based on Mint) with added state-monitoring goodness and force their people to use that instead. But I don't think they'll go to that extreme. New China, while retaining some of the old traits, is somewhat more sensitive to social media than Old China. They know people are not as willing to shut up and accept what's given to them these days.

Incidentally, I wonder if someone has put together an upgrade message that we could all use on our sites in the interim to visitors from China (preferably in simplified Chinese). It certainly wouldn't hurt for them to know there are other choices available besides IE or Maxthon.
Value Add
storing money in the bank means it's not flowing in the economy

Money in the bank is flowing through the economy, since the bank has lent it out to others.

You can have issues with partial-reserve banking, or not. But keeping a bunch of dollars or Euros in the bank is not hoarding them. They are active in the economy.
I do not see my side project as a distraction from my day job (it only distracts me from my other, non-commercial side projects).

Stuff I learn at work is often applicable in my side project as well - and vice versa. I can re-use the code (as most of the work-code is open source) and use the project as a testing / learning opportunity for things I may use at work.

The things which do reduce my motivation is the projects legal side (having signed a disadvantageous contract...) and not knowing if there really is a market for the kind of application I write ("$megaCorp can do this probably sooo much better.").
> Reporting bias can be effectively eliminated by collecting your data from multiple sources, i.e. visiting different web pages.

Not when there is a systematic "newsworthiness bias" that all of the suffer from. People just doing their job never gets reported. People doing their job exceptionally well gets rarerly reported, but horror stories of incompetence and corruption are certain to make the headlines.