skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The best way is to have no fear. Do your best to treat people right and build something with a vision of the future. Figure out what is impossible and do that. People may not want it right away, but concentrate on building something they not only want, but are willing to pay for.

Subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and Financial times. Read as much of them as you can.

As far as books go, I recently put together a business reading list, here are some that you may find interesting:

The E-Myth revisited (note: this is e as in entrepreneur, not e-commerce, basically it's about building a franchise and enabling yourself to focus "on the business," that is, making it better, advertising, managing, rather than "in the business" which for programmers would be programming...)

Built to last : successful habits of visionary companies (note: some of them have failed)

Confronting reality : doing what matters to get things right (haven't started reading this one yet, funny huh)

An empire of wealth : the epic history of American economic power (haven't started)

Good to great : why some companies make the leap--and others don't (some weren't so great)

An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations, by Smith, Adam, 1723-1790. (goodness, this is 300 years old and still dead on and an easy read)

Microtrends : the small forces behind tomorrow's big changes (haven't started reading yet)

Negotiate like the pros : a top sports negotiator's lessons for making deals, building relationships, and getting what you want (good book, especially if you know anything about sports, which I don't, but still enjoy reading)

Who : the A method for hiring (This is a good one for helping to find talented people to join your team, short easy read)

Why we make mistakes : how we look without seeing, forget things in seconds, and are all pretty sure we are way above average (haven't started reading yet)
If we're talking about the same person --- weird that you'd comment about it here --- that wasn't an intern candidate.

The rest of it, well, you're just wrong. At the bill rates on top C/C++ projects, at 80% utilization, President Barack Obama makes significantly less than a pentester. Tell me all you want that Lockheed's beating that.
One thing that I love to do is watch the streaming netflix stuff. Get a roku device and go to town with a $8/mo netflix account. The roku has a great interface and tons of outputs.(hdmi, composite, component, svideo, etc...)

This is not a complete solution because you do not generally get shows or movies until some time has passed. But when they do have it on watch instantly it is great.

MythTV has been going strong in the DVR category for a long while now but I haven't used it since it was an infant so I cannot attest to it's current level of maturity.

If you try MythTV check out this plugin for some help recording: http://www.templetons.com/brad/myth/tvwish.html

You can also try out a liveCD of MythTV+Ubuntu: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythbuntu
It would be very interesting to port the same HN source code to different languages to compare how easy to code, refactor, upgrade and maintain it is.
I'm actually really interested in how sensitive subjects like this are in other parts of the world.
One of my first year Engineering courses, "Engineering, Society, and the Environment", was complete BS and an utter waste of time, but I did end up retaining exactly one thing from it: the course made the distinction between "Knowledge separated from experience" and "Knowledge embedded in experience".

While working on my first startup, I was reminded over and over again of that distinction. Near the beginning, I read - and understood, I thought - many blog posts and comments here about the startup experience. Many times, though, I got to a point where I experienced something I had read about - and found that I understand it on an entirely new level.

What I'm getting at is that you're looking for written resources - "Knowledge separated from experience" - while asking for "The best way to learn", which IMO is to "just do it". You can't learn programming just by reading books, I would be surprised if business skills are any different.

I realize this might not be very helpful, and if there are any good resources I'd love to see them too, but... step 2) really is "keep trying until you succeed and figure it out along the way".
> Ralph Nader was a total badass once upon a time.

Unfortunately, he was also completely wrong about the Corvair. And he was either dishonest or ignorant. (He claimed to be concerned about auto safety but ignored cars that actually were death-traps by comparison, such as the VW beetle.)
"Polite" is a bit too strong here. "Civil" is closer.
Perl projects and modules exist in CPAN, so the data has very little relevance. Perl developers tend to push FOSS modules, not complete systems.
"Give me six months and I’ll have the following"
"Zed is offering"

yeah, right. he's a talker.
If your girlfriend is chinese, it's the first question her mother will ask you.
you made so many good (written) points, yet accrued so few (karma) points. i know my own vacuous comment will be down-voted, but it's worth it to say Good work.
These questions get asked all the time, aside from maybe the last one. And the NDA thing, nobody says that. This is a silly article. Maybe things are different in Miami.
Yeah, I was about to mention that. 4M a day is about 50/sec; if it's nothing but static pages you could serve that on a Pentium 1 without breaking a sweat. I've been giving away P4s recently, so their value is effectively zero - they can probably do it at under 5% too.

The problem is obviously when you're not serving static pages.
You know, I never would have, except that I wanted to find out what the lowest-ranked pg comment here was (it's -11, BTW) and then I decided to find my lowest-ranked comment, but accidentally got the searchyc query of everybody besides me who had ever used "tptacek" in a post, and found this comment, and now my blood pressure is spiking and it's all your fault.
+1. /me running a business. Have discovered the tough way, there's no alternative to mentors/advisors. Running a business involves too many variables. No book/blog can ever cover the entire gamut of probabilities. The only way is to have ready access to a person already doing/done that and ask.
Cheers and all the best :-)
How Twitter's Top Most-Followed Users Handle their Followers
If someone who is not a programmer looks at your code and pronounces it utterly incomprehensible, does that make it inelegant?

What exactly would "evidence" of something as subjective as "elegance" look like?
Sure he's a talker, but he has a long history of putting his (usually excellent) code where his mouth is.
Anyone who is interested in the debate surrounding Walmart and how it impacts local and global economies should check out this PBS documentary.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/walmart/view/

Of particular interest is the section called "Muscling Manufacturers", which shows how the sheer scale of their operation gives them the power to force local manufacturing jobs overseas, effectively creating these "lower income residents" that natrius mentions above.

Scale is often a topic of discussion for hackers; to see how some of the same principles apply to a huge retail corporation is mind-blowing. Definitely worth a watch, imo.
This was actually common during the last bubble. I've read accounts of people who were grateful they at least got to keep the laptop -- it let them continue freelancing.

On the other hand, laptops in the year 2000/2001 cost a lot more than they do now, and many people had desktop PCs at home.
Don't be so sure you can't do something now. It isn't very hard to set up an LLC or an S-corp, and it costs almost nothing, assuming ~$150 isn't much to you. Save the money you would have used buying a few books and use it to actually set up a company for yourself. Then you can get started with the IRS and an EIN so that you can have a bank account. That's pretty much it at first. Then you can build web products under the LLC and take it from there.
Package Honeymoon
Gifts for bridesmaid, flower girl, groomsmen, maid of honor, bestman, ring bearer, candles, invitations, and package honeymoon. Everything needed for your wedding from the ceremony thru the honeymoon via: package honeymoon deals
#1 Diet Free Healthy Weight Loss Program
thinkthindiet.com provides a 'diet free' eBook on how to lose weight with a revolutionary weight loss program of thinking yourself thin WITHOUT DIETING, an eBook on Healing Foods, and an eBook on Thinking Yourself Young
British Columbia Storage- Providing Space for All Your Storing Needs
People looking for British Columbia storage facilities will have a wide range of options to choose from. They can go for mini-storage facilities, or big storage units.
There's a huge difference between someone who doesn't want govt to succeed and someone who doesn't want your vision of govt to succeed.

> Many view government as competition to private industry and their own freedoms, so a failed government is a good thing.

And then there are the folks who view your vision of govt as a threat to their liberties and so on.

There are two reasons why someone might "confuse" those two groups. I wonder which one applies here?
And why exactly would keeping the settings human readable prevent someone from developing a nice API for managing them?

Oh... It wouldn't
I think an acceptable twitter strategy is to read your tweets once or twice a day. Perhaps it defeats the point of it but it's a way to manage the tweet-overflow.
It looked like a nice idea, back in 92 or so.
Lake County Attorneys
Illinois family lawyer, business attorney, and criminal lawyer, Ronald L. Bell offers legal representation in divorce matters, child support, medical malpractice, and criminal defense.
As someone who does this for a living it is not that it wasn't being taken advantage of but that the technology to do it at scale easily was not there -- and still isn't really.

Think about this -- you run an online campaign, serving hundreds of millions to billions of impressions, with different levels of users creating different interactions with your ads, website, etc and a certain percent "converting" to the action you want. How do you reliably process hundreds of millions to billions of rows of data and tie it together? What factors are reliable predictors of future actions? If you increase one aspect does it correlate with other efforts increasing? If there is a flaw in the data collection, how do you spot it?

What about offline behavior? Can you correlate interaction with a widget with store purchase behavior? A lot of activity happens that can never be tracked and it needs to be factored into the models.

So the point being when you dig deep it is not as simple as it seems and there is still a long way to go for all of the technology to work well together and provide the analysis needed to react in real time and change human behavior for the desired result.
Have you written anything for Symbian? How difficult is it, compared to e.g. iPhone or Windows Mobile?
It worked for shrinkwrap software when they had an OS monopoly they could abuse to drive their competition out of business, and likewise it worked for their OS business when they could negotiate illegal anti-competitive terms and conditions with their licensees.

I'm sure they have done some great work, but it is hard to look at their track record and figure out how much of their success was earned on the merits of their products and how much was earned on the "merits" of their business practices.
"Twitter is a mullet". Just checked on google and that is the first use of that phrase on the internet. I'm proud to have been here to see because that is going to stick.
True, but you can just write a non-anyonymous function in the current scope, which can be passed as boo or called as boo():

def test():
def boo(x):
x += 2
x += 3
return x
something_else(boo, 33, "hi")

test()

This is equivalent to how procs are often used in Ruby...
Illinois Criminal Lawyers
Criminal lawyers and criminal attorneys can be found at the Lincoln law group of Salvatore C. Miglore and Associates, providing criminal defense lawyers and offering divorce law representation.
Emergent Public Goods, Intellectual Property and the Rhetoric of Remix
> Articles and reports like these should not be made.

What was the author's opinion of such articles in 2007 and early 2008?
Evolution does not write code.

'Code' created by a long series of chaotic events manages to survive or not survive.

The research is rewarding because it is challenging. Both the discover of the raw data and the interpretation of said data is dumbfoundingly complex, to the point where any tiny amount of comprehension is the result of more work than you can possibly imagine.

In short, it's hard, and success is uncommon and amazing.
Find a good accountant - s/he will take care of your tax issues. Accountants also see businesses come and go in large numbers so if you find one who chats up his clients you will have access to interesting pool of information.
It would also be interesting to see how long they turned out to be. News.arc is 1990 LOC.
I use a Mac Mini connected to a large LCD TV and use a wireless hand held mouse(gyration) as a remote. Works great to enjoy Internet TV sites (Hulu, Fancast, CBsNews/video, etc..), as well it allows me to read the net from 10 feet away via Fire Gestures (firefox plug in).

At one time I used Windows Media Center when I had cable TV. That worked well and recorded the shows I wanted; thankfully those same shows are now online to stream.

Overall I prefer my current solution as it's cheaper and allows me to enjoy the entire Internet on my TV.
Pretty big news for Arc-ers.

Still a pretty spartan distribution. Still no docs dir or even a README, which seems a bit strange.
I think I answered this about 2 weeks ago.
It's definitely a cultural thing, and one that I don't really understand in North America. The only advantage of not openly discussing salaries is in the favor of hiring companies, and I'm always a bit amazed when employees embrace it to their detriment. It's a taboo I follow, but disagree with.

Edit: key word in that article is "friends". I have no problems discussing any of these with my friends. Acquaintances, not so much.
I used to use blosxom for my blog, and the one thing that drove me away was comment handling. The comment plugin that was available (at the time) stored all comments concatenated together into one file, which meant that if you wanted to take out one spam comment, you had to open that file and snip something out of the middle. And when I was on blosxom I attracted a lot of spam. I eventually gave up and moved to textpattern (http://textpattern.com/), which has also occasionally irritated me, but not enough to switch a second time. (At least, not until I write my own damn blog-serving software, like a true ubernerd...)
What is H1B for an employer: a young cheap worker putting long-hours for a company he can't leave for a few years in most cases.

It was true in 1998, it is true now.
There's pyblosxom for python and _why's hobix for ruby (which is dead). There's also http://www.jekyllrb.com/ for ruby now which is very advanced and very active.

I started my own static blogging system written in python sort of copying what jekyll was at the beginning: http://github.com/mapleoin/pyblee/tree/master
It's really much better than any other dynamic blogging system out there. I have: code syntax highlighting, textile markup, tags, RSS, comments via disqus, my favourite templating engine etc.
He seems to be trying to become a "center of gravity" in python-land by being controversial. Why not just work with the community in a productive non-confrontational way?

Lots of opportunity for pop-psychology here... but best to let it pass...
Installation instructions and a tutorial are on http://arclanguage.org.

(The installation instructions currently refer to the last release, because this one isn't official yet. The tutorial seems to be current, though, because nothing that basic changed.)
It's news page seems to be down, and the mailing list looks to be mostly overrun with spam. :(
The officers of the company are astronomically unlikely to personally bear any contractual liability at all, that being the one of the points of incorporating in the first place.
I don't know what's scarier: this "update" from Microsoft or the Washington Post reporting on technology.
> "Who is regular and why is he releasing matter?"

No, "Why" is the Ruby guy. Regular Why (not any newer or improved Why) is releasing matter. And at an alarming rate! :)
If it was an LLC, any form of Corporation (like the C Corp it almost certainly is), or an LLP, there is no liability. The "LL" in "LLC" sets LLC's apart from Companies that are not formally Corporations.
Erlang people can remain as a cool underground movement

Really, it's quite enviable. Enjoy it while it lasts.
Correct, that's why I'm making a distinction between them. How do you deal with the people who don't want government to succeed? I'm not asking how do you deal with people who may have a different vision for how government can be successful.
Good, old languages are like good, old comic book characters. They might be declared dead, but someone's always going to bring them back.
In a major pharmaceutical breakthrough, a one-two punch to stop HIV
Try http://top.searchyc.com/
Tcl is still great when you need to whip up a testing wrapper for a C/C++ library but I think these days Lua is doing a better job at the original goal Tcl set out to accomplish.
When was this piece written? I feel like the writer didn't include enough cliches.
Some files (besides INSTALL and TUTORIAL) you might consider including with the distribution:

* README: what it is and why

* ChangeLog

* LICENSE

* HACKING: instructions for users who might like to contribute to Arc

* FAQ: answers to questions that users keep asking about

* TODO: what you plan on working on next
Rikaichan -- remarkably detailed Japanese - English dictionary (hover over words to show definitions) http://www.polarcloud.com/rikaichan/
I think the del statement as in "get rid of this" is perfectly fine. There is no need to pollute the namespace of lists (or anything, BTW) with a method to duplicate an already existing, and very fundamental, language feature.
I've been a contract software developer (in Australia) for a few years now and have been doing this via a company that I set up. Creating a company to contract through certainly creates work and (in Australia at least) there is no tax advantage in doing so - but a lot of the basics of running a company (particularly tax, insurance, accounting and director obligations) are now second nature to me. I've found this a great way to learn.
I concur. I feel like jlb's attitudes toward his company and friends are unproductive and far uglier than anything his friends have shown in their questions.
Lawyers Lake County
Illinois family lawyer, business attorney, and criminal lawyer, Ronald L. Bell offers legal representation in divorce matters, child support, medical malpractice, and criminal defense.
That baffled me as well. The advertising industry has been crunching numbers from day one.
You can only "go into debt" if people are willing to extend you credit.
AdWords brought this kind of statistical rigor to affiliate marketing quite a while back. What you're describing sounds like the bread and butter of that field. The fact that it is only now catching on in the advertising world seems like an indication of just how behind the times the advertising industry really is. They're a little late to the party if they're only now starting to hire people with statistical expertise to help out with these problems. But from what I know of the ad industry being an East Coast old boy's network, this doesn't surprise me too much.
Blood, sweat, and tears.
Of course I did. Everybody did. It is what made school fun to go to. The entire class had people specialize in different areas, for example I was in charge of CS and English, my best friend of Chemistry and so on. Then we would get together before school and copy each other assignments before class started. Therefore the entire class worked together in order for everybody to earn higher grades, pass the class and spend as little time as possible on homework. In exams we would make students good in that subject sit close to those who are not and help them out.
You can always go into Second Life, there are a bunch of cartoon avatar shapes you can start with then customize..and then take high res screenshots to process in GIMP or other
Published: May 30, 2009
The fact that somebody is denied academic opportunity is not the fault of the person who cheats but of the social/economic system that does not allow everybody to have academic opportunities.
isn't that part of regular XMPP?
And honestly, Zed's revolutionary replacement isn't that great (http://lamsonproject.org/docs/api/, see lamson.args/lamson.commands).
Actually, you are quite wrong about that... many states have exactly those provisions, e.g. Colorado

http://www.allbusiness.com/human-resources/compensation-sala...

20 seconds of google would have shown you that ...

(BTW if your claim of shielding from liability were absolute, then directors and officers wouldn't need D&O insurance now, would they? )
'Same thing over & over again' is a growing trend in HN lately.
SQL and COBOL were designed so that managers could write them. Same thing; didn't work out.
On the subject of Mathematica vs Lisp, I found this[1] thread interesting especially as it contains a lengthy review[2] by Fateman. While my own personal experience with it is limited, I have to say its rules for evaluating expressions are quite tricky to master compared to Lisp.

1- http://coding.derkeiler.com/Archive/Lisp/comp.lang.lisp/2004...

2- http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~fateman/papers/mma.review.pdf
Ask HN: Plain English ToS - Is This Legal?
Dear HN,

My website is now getting enough traffic that my lawyer encouraged me to draft Terms of Service. I'm loathe to make one of those legalese laden nonsense pages, so I tried to point out the dangers and restrictions of using TrailBehind.com in plain English.

Does this document provide me any legal cover from the types of dangers it intends to protect against? Like a guy getting lost because my map data was wrong?

http://www.andrewljohnson.com/article/Plain%20English%20Terms%20of%20Service
just do it, one man show -> you take all responsibility, if it fails, it's all yours.

btw, don't confuse MBA with actual business experience.
Canon Employees Are Forbidden to Sit Down, Walk Slowly
No. Your article is from 2002 and, at the end, refers to a case then before the Colorado Supreme Court. Here's the outcome (2003):

"After finding a lack of precedent from the Colorado Supreme Court construing individual officer liability under the Wage Claim Act, we certified the following determinative questions...

1. Are officers of a now-bankrupt corporation individually liable for the wages of the corporation's former employees under the Colorado Wage Claim Act? ...

2. If so, are all officers individually liable due to mere status as officers or must the officers have been high ranking or active decision-makers? ...

The Colorado Supreme Court then answered the first reframed question, holding "under Colorado's Wage Claim Act, the officers and agents of a corporation are not jointly and severally liable for payment of employee wages and other compensation the corporation owes to its employees under the employment contract and the Colorado Wage Claim Act." Id. (emphasis added). This response clearly answers the first question certified by this court and moots our second question. We REVERSE the district court's summary judgment order..."

http://ca10.washburnlaw.edu/cases/2003/02/00-1324.htm