skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In our industry, it's pretty safe to count the one-person cases as outliers (hit app, etc), however I can attest to a number of people consistently pulling down 7-figure NET incomes from privately-owned small businesses without ever involving VC's or other investors.

If it's a sustainable pace and you don't become so visible as to be a patent or other legal target you can quietly live very well on that or half that, etc.

Bottom line, there are an infinite number of places to end up between being nobody and being a Zuckerberg/Gates/Jobs and really, most of them can provide a good quality of life.
Interesting breakdown, though the title is a bit misleading. The numbers do show a 5% annual increase in single person companies making $1MM+ in 2011, but it's difficult to know whether that reflects a true rise without comparing against historical data.
I disagree. A failing bridge is a major safety problem, while a failing car engine is merely a financial problem.

A bridge should last "forever", which is to say that it will be clear when it needs to be replaced before it actually fails. Car engines are routinely used until they break, then repaired and used until they break again, and this continues until it's no longer financially viable.
It's not really very controversial. If you need your car, and you can't afford to buy a new engine if it breaks, as far as I can tell you'd be certainly well advised not run a modern diesel car without a warranty. I don't know anybody who's owned one who hasn't had various funny problems with it, requiring regular trips to the garage followed by shrugging shoulders all round and a succession of replacement of random electronic parts.

To meet the increasingly stringent emissions controls, and people's desire for a car that is reasonably cheap and accelerates at a decent rate, the cars seem to have become rather complicated, and reliability has been affected.

Common points of failure seem to be:

- dual mass flywheel (presumably the regular swift ramping-up of torque doesn't help)

- turbo charger (obviously spins very quickly and unlike a petrol engine it comes on from about 1500rpm so it's used a lot)

- diesel injectors (high precision components operating under pressure)

- diesel particulate filter (can clog and require expensive replacement if car is not regularly driven hard)

- random engine/ECU "thing" that nobody can figure out (who knows what the root cause of this might be)

You might have better luck with a pre-common rail diesel car, but the fuel economy is unlikely to be very good and the performance - at least by modern standards - looks to be terrible.
By 'nothing between' I meant 'nothing that is worth mentioning in a newspaper article.' But you raise an interesting point, the entire wiretapping needs to handle a similar load as a large datacenter and should not impact the uptime, and therefore it should be quite an engineering challenge. So there should be documentation on the Google side, how to 'plug' it into a data center, which power requirements that stuff has, etc...
I'd drive a diesel if the US didn't have crazy NOx standards; the urea system, etc. is needless complexity. One of my favorite vehicles I've owned was a diesel Toyota Hilux; also loved the Land Cruiser LM78 I borrowed.

The main thing I want is the ability to store 500-1000 gallons of fuel and know it will be viable for a couple years. You can do that with diesel, you can't really do that with gasoline. Being able to share fuel between a generator and a car (and ideally eventually a motorcycle/gator and a plane) would be even better.
IOS internals, reverse engineered
The breadth of this library is really remarkable. It feels slow, though.

I think people underestimate the importance of a snappy fast interface. We use bootstrap + handlebars and get really fast response, at the cost of having to build a lot ourselves.
Faces of Drunk Driving (Texas Department of Transportation)
These are businesses with sales in the low 7 figures. A 1-person contracting firm netting 1MM/yr would be impressive.

Most small construction firms are staffed with 1099s.
How does this go beyond what you can do with mutt? Plus mutt handles IMAP out of the box.
If you can't remember 1 password over 20 characters that you will use a lot with a password manager you probably need to change what kind of passwords you make.

Instead of "E=E<4oc^(z&kj6Snm9uy" do something like "The Brown cow jumps over the m00n!".

Set the password manager to make you enter the password if you haven't used it for 30 seconds (for a few days so you remember your password).

You're using a password manager with a good password that is easy to remember but the you do use the password manager to generate hard to remember passwords like the one above.
The reason they didn't deny "access to user information" is because it was common knowledge before the PRISM leak that they would send user information to the government on request. The only new accusation against these tech companies with the initial PRISM leak is that they were knowingly allowing the government to directly access their servers. That is why they denied direct access, because they were accused of supplying direct access. Just because Google and Facebook didn't deny these new accusation before they were ever levied against them doesn't mean they are automatically guilty of them. Let's wait to see how things play out before we starting making judgements.
It's part of an odd compromise with the private-sector media companies and government reached a few years ago. Within the UK, the BBC is only allowed to show content that is wholly funded by the license fee, and cannot solicit advertising or other external funding for the content. This was insisted on by the private-sector media companies, who don't want the BBC competing with them in the commercial portion of the market.

Separately, the BBC overseas service is required to solicit external funding for its content, and not to cross-subsidize it with the license fee. This was insisted on by the government, which did not want license-fee revenues subsidizing international content, but still did want international content to exist as part of the UK's global cultural export/image. But due to the previous agreement this content then can't be shown in the UK, because it's commercially-funded content.
What is diesel? Chemically its nothing at all. You can slap a label with "diesel" written on seemingly anything that burns. Gasoline is somewhat better defined.

You can read an interesting wiki article about ultra low sulfur diesel and the transition issues etc.

The short version is there is no "diesel atom or molecule" its a mixture of vaguely burnable substances. Some of which are compatible with some or another engines but not all. For example ULSD diesel is more or less incompatible with certain fuel pump seals sold up to less than 4 years ago.

Its hard to stomach buying something you may need to scrap or repair/replace in such a short term.

This is the era of indecisiveness for diesel. Gasoline had a similar one decades ago during the leaded to unleaded transition... that would have been the ideal time to roll diesel into the market.

Another problem is ignoring progress. "Those 1970's diesels really sucked compared to 1970s gas engines". "Oh thats OK 2010 diesels are better than 1970s diesels." "Sorry dude I'm comparing a 2010 diesel with a 2010 gas engine, not a 1970 gas engine." "Oh... in that case I guess a gas engine is better".
I think if you'd had that before, I never would have left (and I think many other people would be happy with that).
You're right, I need to adapt it to handle any feed, stay tuned ;-)

Edit : I fix an error which crashed the application with a bad feed (without all the fields required) but I still need to adapt it to ATOM feeds
I personally believe that diesels have helped bring some great technologies to gasoline engines:

- Making turbo charging more popular
- Direct injection
And I think one day we'll do away with spark plugs and have compression based ignition in gasoline engines. Combine that with hybrid technologies and we could have some pretty dang efficient vehicles.

less efficient than a bicycle though :P
And sending the whole file over the wire is preferable?

What if the document contains sensitive or privileged data?
Yeah there were a lot of broad categories that I really wish gave more specifics on the types of companies within them.
Looking at the current VW passat the diesel version is rated more than 10MPG over the gas version. So I wouldn't say gas has caught up quite yet.
Amazing Deals Tickets - Eventbrite
Can such kind of reply put your secret key in the risk? For example, it gives attacker enough information to deduce the key within reasonable time?
Not exactly - the BBC often serves the same content without displaying ads in the UK.

I'm not clear what's going on in this case, but it's more likely that this is out of its public remit - as a funded public service, they're not to compete with commercial companies in sensitive industries/they're not allowed to use public money on content irrelevant to their remit and so BBC Worldwide has to be somewhat carefully separated.

e.g. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4058031.stm

This may be down to Rupert Murdoch's lobbying pressure.
Good to hear - I’ve definitely visited gem dependency hell, and been to companies where you had to fight for a staging server. We hope to make Kite a great way to both host your work but also test & stage it in a linux box to avoid any gotchas from developing on a different environment than your prod machines.
Ecuador and Hong Kong are pissed off...

Ironic given that in both of these countries, warrantless wiretapping is legal and routine.
SmallTalk80: The language and its implementatin [book]
No. And actually my tinfoil theory is, that the federal prosecution is handling this, so that they can take anything PRISM related from local prosecutions, to bundle and bury it as one large package.
You can look at the YUI User Guides[1] for more in depth documentation of the components that AlloyUI shares with YUI.

[1] http://yuilibrary.com/yui/docs/guides/
If you consume HN feeds all day, you starve? Is that it? I opened it and cannot follow what's going on.
This used to be true but I do not think it still is. SWIFT opened a data center in Switzerland for the express purpose of not having to send internal European transactions to the US. They could be lying of course and still be doing it.
Having a general interest in languages, I've tried many things to improve my language learning. The thing I was probably most impressed with though is the Michael Thomas method.
Nope. Solitude is "the #1 habit of highly creative people". http://zenhabits.net/creative-habit/

Big cities are full of noise and distractions.
Depends on the market segment. I love my 2005 diesel work truck, and get asked several times a week by drivers of gasoline trucks whether I'll sell it.

Used, it commands a significant premium over the used gasoline trucks. In the work truck market at least, it seems many buyers of new gas powered trucks come to regret that purchase and look for a diesel instead.
This is neat! I appreciate using something like hashtags in an unexpected, but useful way. And as for the comments saying the example should just be put in a shell script, that's not really relevant at all. The article has nothing to do with the merits of simple shell scripts versus a fun and useful hack.
"What If"
E-gads, an article that is trying to convince me that adding a good person to a totally screwed up system is a good move.

Some context the article overlooks. Number of CIOs in the federal government: over 250. Number of agencies keeping private or sensitive data on citizens: well over 200. Procedure to change policy on privacy or anonymity: byzantine at best, impossible for most mortals. Who is actually in charge of privacy policy: that's a good one. I'd go with Congress instead of some executive-branch person, but you'd probably need participation of both in each agency to make a difference.

Wong is probably a great person, and I congratulate her willingness to sacrifice her time for the public good, but the problems we face are not due to the lack of some special position or magic person coming into office. At best, this is a fluff piece on Wong, which is fine. At worst, it's propaganda. It eliminates important context and supports a narrative that's terribly unrealistic. Farcical even.
For people already running I2P, does it exist as I2P plugins? I doesn't seem to be on http://plugins.i2p/.
I agree with you about computer science not being so much like art.

I think programming is very much an art and that the ideal forum for teaching people to program looks a lot like an art studio.

Manifesto: Take the computers out of the lab and put them into the programming studio.
So do I, but it would be nice to do it right.
Yup, our Seat Leon TDI is still going strong at 300,000 kms. It's an amazing car, we'll almost certainly be getting the same model when (if?) this one ever breaks.
Jerry Colonna's Psychological Insights For The Entrepreneurial
Correcting common misrepresentations of evolution
Which technology business model scales that way? Back in the days you could probably keep a 1-person business with shareware or packaged software sales, today with SaaS model one would be pushed into hiring support people rather soon.
Attempting to refute an article about a scientific study by linking to a collection of quotes from Felicia Day and Franz Kafka doesn't seem like a very solid methodology...
Are they mostly B2B? Or do they sell directly to retail consumers?
By using RISD (nb: where "d" stands for design) as an example... :/
Three Introductory Textbooks I Hope to Read Someday
Surprising Pollution Problem: Too Many Trees
It's interesting that many of these businesses are basically real estate holding companies. I wonder how many of these businesses are just tax-minimization or financing schemes used by larger companies for things like deferred compensation?
> Obama being a gay (!) Kenyan citizen.

I don't know about his sexual proclivities but Obama was born a dual American/Kenyan citizen. He was also born a British subject by virtue of his father's status.
The FBI's Data Intercept Technology Unit is a group of people. See, e.g., this memo.[1] Does the Washington Post have some other information that the FBI's "interception unit" is technology on the premises of the private companies?

[1]https://www.eff.org/files/FBI_CIPAV-08-p9.pdf
Apparently, somebody else is continuing sup development.

It used to be that William Morgan was the BDFL, and he started working on heliotrope/turnsole (a successor), which, AFAICT, never got anywhere serious.

I long since switched from sup to notmuch, which makes me much happier in terms of performance, documentation and stability.
No, but that's not a bad idea. I'm not familiar with their plugin system, so I'll have to figure out if it's technically possible. Nightweb currently bundles I2P, but I didn't make any changes to the core or router code; I only modified the bittorrent client.
It mimics the gmail look & feel, i.e. one line of text represents one thread in your inbox, and when you open it, you get all the messages of the thread (with read messages collapsed), instead of precisely one message.

Edit: also fast (!) full-text search thanks to Xapian, tags instead of folders
Promo: AlphaSSL Wild Card SSL certificate for just $2 a Year
For cloud services I'd recommend Lastpass (works with Yubikey 2 factor) for password management and Tarsnap for backups.
I know I'm rather late but I just wanted to point out that this number is likely an exaggeration. See this: http://fistfulofeuros.net/afoe/more-like-colmar-on-thames/
Legos used to be building blocks, now they are "Lego People" that can be collected, and the blocks themselves are the accessories.
Biodiesel is "dirtier" in some aspects (nitric oxides, particulate matter) than gasoline. It's not "sustainable" due to the qty that we demand (and hence the required amount of land for vegetable oil production) .

this site is crappy, but I checked the numbers years ago and he didnt seem to be way off on anything. http://home.comcast.net/~russ676/biodiesel/index.html
I currently use mbsync to backup my all mail folder on gmail. There is a way to set it to never delete on your local side, turning it more into a backup than a sync.

I run that daily, and Crashplan takes care of the rest. Sure it doesn't save the folder structure and what not, but I'm ok with that.
The details behind the article show a less appealing reality than what we might hope for. Yeoman capitalism hasn't killed off VC-istan just yet. A lot of these $1M/year businesses are for, say, independent real estate brokers. Yes, there are people who get very rich in that game. There are others who fail horribly. I think we're quite a way from a society where talented people can find their way to, if not $1M per year, a reasonable approximation of their actual worth to society. (Fuck, I'd be happy with a regular upper-middle-class income if freed from subordination and its attendant mind-rot.)

Let's stop talking about revenues and figures of "$1 million per year" (because there are a variety of context factors-- geography, profit vs. revenue-- that make us question what that really means) and instead talk about growth. This is where it gets interesting. We can look at the growth/risk spectrum between gambler's ruin (take all nonnegative-expectancy risks; thus take over the world economy or die) and non-participation (take no risks; no growth above the risk-free rate-- minus management fees, of course). Most business activity is between those two extremes, but the very middle of that spectrum is underfunded and undersubscribed.

If you want to push for 150-percent-annual-growth-or-sudden-death outcomes like a sociopath gambling with others' money, ambitions, careers and dreams, then there are VCs will fund you, your pathological gambling, and (in most cases) your shitty personality cult. (That's the high-risk, high-growth route.)

If you want to work for some horrible, authoritarian corporation doing shit-ass-boring mediocre work and growing your salary at 7% per year (mostly, a reward for getting older because you're so disconnected from the real work that no one knows what you're worth) then... good news, that is available too. (That's the low-risk, low-growth route... except the long-term existential risks are pretty disgusting because a career of mediocrity, coupled with age, makes one untouchable. See: what fucking academia does to those who don't make it.)

What no one is talking about is the mid-risk/mid-growth range... 20 to 40 percent annual growth with some volatility, but not likely to ruin lives en masse. (You might have a thin year, but your average outcome is strong if you work hard, have the talent, and do the right thing. You just need discipline in your strong years.) The problem is that no one is funding that region of the spectrum. But that's the natural home for technology, research, science, as well as the yeoman capitalism that most of us would find much more rewarding (and scalable, and beneficial to society) than this VC-istan, Hollywood-for-ugly-people, bullshit.

You can get jobs at stagnant corporations and jobs (probably not founder jobs, unless you have the connections to partake in Stanford Welfare, but jobs with "equity") in the high-risk VC-istan space. No one seems to have any clue how to fund the mid-risk/mid-growth space, but that's where the future actually lives. See: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/03/26/gervais-macle...
Diesel is considered as a carcinogen anyway due to the emission of nanoparticules. Good on them.

See http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/13/health/diesel-fumes-cause-... for example.
Love it, this is great. I'd definitely use it for quick prototypes and hackatons.

It says "No setup, No configuration". But what if I want to configure stuff? For instance, there's a lot of things going on in settings.py.. to name a few:
- setting up the DB
- email config
- celery (tasks and stuff)
- Caching

How much control do I have on the "cloud"? I.e. if I want to create a folder to put the files uploaded by users? If I want to run background tasks?

Also: How does one switch from dev to production? Does Kite plan to offer a robust solution for production down the road? I'm not overly concerned because since I have a local folder, I can easily deploy it to any vps.

I have dozen of django projects and I'd gladly give it a fair try, let me know: phzbox at gmail.
Twitter's iOS Developers are better than others
YUI and Alloy actually have a few tools that help you write snappy interfaces.

1) The loader[1]. The ability to load modules on demand help a lot with reducing the initial kweight of your page. The loader supports very easily concatenation of scripts which has a huge impact in perceived performance. It also does conditional loading, which means that it doesn't load compatibility code for old browsers when it isn't necessary.

2) You also get the flavor of templates you like. They come bundled with Handlebars and Template.Micro[2], a very light and fast template engine similar to Underscore templates.

[1] http://yuilibrary.com/yui/docs/yui/#dynamic-loading-with-use

[2] http://yuilibrary.com/yui/docs/template/#using-templatemicro
Extrapolating the behaviour of two nutters is a dangerous thing to do - every comment I heard from those who represent the Muslim community in the UK sounded as horrified as everyone else by what those guys did:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/may/26/muslim-community-re...
As a percentage of the US GDP, small tech businesses aren't much of a blip. Just think of all of those real estate brokers and investors, day traders, hair salon owners, construction contractors that churn through 1M annually in revenue. Every small town across the US has a pile of millionaires like this.
The App Engine Way
Word 2013 natively supports opening Word Docs, including some advanced features like tables, bookmarks, etc.
Looks slick, but how is this different from just running "django-admin.py startproject mysite"?

When developing something serious, you typically want to match the stack you will be deploying on. So far, the two easiest (not necessarily wisest) options have been Google App Engine and Heroku, with latter being my choice of late due it running on AWS and "closeness" to S3 and DynamoDB.
Read in a literal sense, that is true, but the NSA has sufficient influence to exercise an effective veto over mass-market crypto just by saying they don't believe it's secure (whether that is true or not). If the NSA said "don't use AES", most people wouldn't use AES. They also could have easily spooked everyone off Rijndael during the AES selection process.

For that reason, I don't generally find it useful to argue the point of exactly where Rijndael actually came from.
FWIW, I never considered that a serious limitation. On my phone, I don’t want to read email. It’s a sub-par experience, especially if you’re used to Sup/Gmail/Notmuch. You can’t just go back to “regular” email clients anymore :).

As for using multiple computers: with sup I used to run it in screen and attach that screen session whenever I needed it. With notmuch, I can just tell it to run notmuch(1) on a remote machine and even use a local UI.
I'm quite happy with rosetta stone.
do you have any particular reason not to like it? (beside paying?)