skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I second both "Richest Man in Babylon" and "Think and Grow Rich." Both were recommended to me by a very successful VC that attributed much of his success to those books. Both are very good. "Babylon" covers many principles of wealth while "Think" is more about the psychology, so they complement each other well.
Feeding Frenzy Saturday – Featured Blog Articles | TechJaws
It is worrisome the first time you're implicated in a highly visible or expensive problem.

We address this partially in on-boarding where we are very clear that our version of this process exists, that we take it very seriously, that we post-mortem every significant issue, but that throughout the process, we are only interested in solving, minimizing, or preventing future problems, not in hand-wringing or otherwise crying over milk already spilt.

Then after that introduction, the chances are great that before it's your turn to be the cause of a big issue, that you've seen the process work several times, seen that experienced, well-regarded senior staffers also make mistakes and they just face up to the process with transparency and without fear and that nothing bad comes of it for them, and that the company gets better by developing a sort of immune response to chronic or substantial issues.

Is that another way of saying "you have to build the right corporate culture"? Perhaps, but it at least gives some of the recipe we followed in this specific case.
The best selling book is Tony Robbins "Unlimited Power" with like 9 million copies sold, but its also about fitness, so its not as targeted as you might like, although I liked it, but I'm not rich.

Another one which I liked was, "Losing My Virginity: How I've Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way" Richard Branson

It's how Branson got rich which is pretty interesting.
Dangers of Cloud Computing Being Ignored?
I've noticed quite a bit of hype regarding cloud computing over the past few years or so. However, what I find slightly unsettling is how, well, the vast majority of intelligent people (in addition to corporations) seem to support the idea even though it seems to signal the end of privacy.

So let's just suppose hypothetically that accessing applications and services from the cloud becomes far more feasible, nicer, and overall an order of magnitude better than running traditional applications. Would people choose to compute over the cloud then?

If it were me having to make the choice, I think in the end I'd choose to completely avoid the entire scenario, even if it meant risking being labeled a technophobe for life.

I just find it interesting, and I'm starting this discussion in hopes of perhaps wondering whether the majority of people consider whether power or freedom is more valuable in the end.
The Mittani is the spymaster of Goonfleet the corporation you are referring to. He writes a weekly article about EVE that you will probably find interesting. http://www.tentonhammer.com/search/node/sins+of+a+solar+spym...
Sweden's lost decade?
Since it will take a while for the 3rd party libraries to be ported to 3.x, start with 2.6. The versions are not different enough for it to be a big problem either way you learn them - but there are more books out for 2.x - like the Python in a Nutshell book, which I find to be the best reference (though not the best book for beginner programmers). Then, you can refer to the "What's New in Version x" entries in the documentation on the Python site to learn the later versions.
"This is what happens when you don’t stigmatize engineers: you get a country full of engineers, self-identifying as engineers, growing up dreaming of being engineers."

Er, no, this is what happens when the rest of the world won't allow you to have an army because of what you did when you had one.

Your engineers have nowhere else to go but into the private sector where they are much more visible.

In the U.S., many of the best and brightest end up in the military or government service. We don't know what many of them do. I guess that's the price we're still paying for winning World War II.
Evolution is not the same as natural selection. The switch is from natural selection to design, they are both methods of evolution.
"Volatile seems to have no meaning, so it is hard to tell if ignoring it is a departure from the
standard."

Try writing a program reading from a memory mapped hardware device. This won't work without volatile.
In a word: Deflation.
If all the libraries you need are already available for Python 3, then use Python 3. Otherwise, fall back to the 2.x series. Be practical. Evaluate your own needs before you listen to somebody else. The 2.x branch is here to stay for quite a long time (I'm guessing 2 to 5 years).

<BEGIN RAMBLING>
If the users don't drive the library authors/maintainers to make their code compatible with Python 3, then we'll have to wait a very very long time for the 2.x branch to go away. I'm not saying Python 2.x is bad in any way. It just takes too much effort to maintain separate codebases for separate versions of the language. Also, I'm sure the language developers could do something much more useful with their time if they focussed on one version of the CPython implementation.
<END RAMBLING>
The negative rate only applies for banks which store their money overnight at the Swedish Central bank (Riksbanken). The interest rate at peoples' bank accounts is stil positive. They do this to force the banks to lend the money they lend from the Riksbank, and not just keep it (to reduce the bank's liquidity risk).

It's stil very low though. Too low if you ask me, solving an economic crisis through inflation is just the same thing as forcing everyone to lower their salaries, but people don't understand that so it's easier to get away with it.
Volatile doesn't do what you think it does.

And I would add that the Plan 9 kernel and all its drivers do just fine without it.
Biographies of the very rich and successful who started with nothing are usually very good. I look for common themes and key points in their lives. A few of my favorites:

Carnegie by Peter Krass, http://www.amazon.com/Carnegie-Peter-Krass/dp/0471468835/ref...

"Titan, The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr." by Ron Chernow, http://www.amazon.com/Titan-Life-John-Rockefeller-Sr/dp/1400...

"iWoz", by Steve Wozniak, http://www.amazon.com/iWoz-Computer-Invented-Personal-Co-Fou...
What's the context?

For financial transactions or security concerns? Not so much. For creating work product I can evaluate and decide whether to use? Sure. Can I get my information back out, so that I've not lost all my time putting it into the product?

How easy is bug reporting?

Can I document and submit bugs quickly? I mean, I will put in the effort to be thorough, accurate, and concise in my descriptions. But can I do so without fighting the tracking software interface (and/or its host)? Can I easily and quickly track my issues, with update notifications so I don't have to remember to check status manually?

So, is the risk manageable, the effort streamlined, and the feedback responsive?

And, of course, does the product offer compelling features.

Making bug reporting easy seems under-rated to me. Many times, I've found a bug, to give up on reporting it because the process is too cumbersome. And response to submitted bugs motivates me, as well. I appreciate being able to help a communal effort. I don't expect a lot of time and effort returned unless I've found something significant; a status change in the tracker may be sufficient. But shoving bug reports into a black hole of status quickly becomes demotivating.
As explained by one of my always-been-popular friends, sports in America is more about getting the guys over and hanging out. Yes, women watch sports but for many guys who aren't hackers - watching sports and having beers may be the male gender equivalent of shopping for women. Socially-accepted ways to bond.
You can use a lot Python 3 features in 2.6 and later. This document, http://docs.python.org/3.0/whatsnew/3.0.html describes the difference between the two. So while I agree with the other posters that it it would be better to start with 2.6 I also think you could minimize your upgrade pain by knowing the differences and doing as many things as you can in the Python 3 style.
Here is an extract of it: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/article1084093.ece?pri...

and the review of the book here at HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=283983.
I'll second this recommendation. Very good for young single people. It's not a get rich quick book. It's a get rich slow the old fashion way book. What it does best is provides a framework for budgeting and saving that's easy to follow.
Hack your own fireworks for the 4th of July
Tell HN: Happy Fourth
Happy 4th of July everyone. Hopefully you're all enjoying the long weekend or maybe even taking a vacation this week.
Work and Meaning: View from a Senior HP Manager
Yeah, real estate is no longer a good investment...people still need a place to live, and rents aren't really down much, and values are WAY down, which would seem to imply that this is a once-in-a-lifetime market opportunity for buyers, but it just seems so risky when you watch the news. Oh, and the overall population of the US continues to grow rapidly, plus the increasing urbanization means that more and more people are living in cities, but that whole real estate things is a house of cards, right? Hmm...and real estate has been making people rich for hundreds of years, but everything has changed now. Right?

Stuff like this is why I'm a contrarian investor.
That's useful, thanks.

Also thanks for this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=134834

It's a wonderfully useful statement, and gets at what I was trying to get at much better than I could.

I stand by SMC being a better fit for simple finite state machines (eg: the kind best specified using state charts); typical uses I've put SMC towards are for ensuring consistency of internal state in complicated UI elements and similar tasks...for which there's no real 'regular language' that needs parsing (or, at least: no real gain to be had in setting up a regular language of input-events when state charts will do).

I'm guessing you're the thurston behind ragel: thank you for making ragel, for making it available, and for making it so well; it is an extremely high-quality piece of work.
Twitter URLs and Limitations
Go with 3.

Being a trailblazer can reap rewards in the long run.
What a load of bull. This comment is slander against the article because there's no substance there to even refute. Just nonsensical social and economic claims.

You should be better than to vote up any article which has "nerds" in the title, YC.
Question: does the nerd vs. jock divide seriously exist?

I live in India, and back here being a nerd means you're a sort of minor celebrity. Doing well in school? You're the talk of the neighborhood. Doing well in school and captain of the school Cricket/Football/Foo team? You're a minor god. Doing all this and not aspiring to be an engineer? O NOES THE WORLD IZ ENDING!!1! U HAZ TO B ENGINEER!!1!

Of course, being a hacker does not count for much. People understand a perfect marksheet. Nobody understands elegant Python. One of the reasons I'm "good at computers, but needs to work harder on academics".
I really enjoyed The Dream by Gurbaksh Chahal. He founded BlueLithium, which was acquired by Yahoo. The book goes into detail about the attitudes required to get rich and manage wealth. Here are a bunch of other books written by rich people as well: http://www.bigwinner.org/books
I would start with 2.6. The changes are not all that drastic between the two, and there's almost no software available for python 3.
For devices with read side-effects, how do you tell the compiler to forgo all optimizations, reordering, etc.?

To me, volatile means that if I read a pointer twice, the compiler has to make accesses both times to the memory. It can't assume that since no other function was called in between, it can safely ignore the second read and use the previous value.

On ther other hand, you want your compiler to perform such optimizations 99% of the time. So just saying that Plan 9 accesses are all treated as if they were volatile (I googled quickly the topic) doesn't make sense to me. But I confess some ignorance :-)
How to Become More Successful
His 60% has got to be untrue. Much more likely it's 60% of the people he is actually exposed to.

While reading, I was expecting the 60% to be the salt of the earth, the nameless drones who did the unsexy work that no one else wanted to do, the professional service workers, the documentation workers, the QA folks, etc.
Human Printers: Recreating Photos Dot by Dot with full CMYK Separations
Why is this comment downvotted so much? I happen to believe that it's the key to the question. People just don't realize the buying power of Apple.

If you can build the CrunchPad for $200, you'd have a huge success. If you build it for $500, it's dead on arrival. If it has the next gen CPU, it's a success. If it runs with last year low power CPU, it's dead.

Plus you need great software on top of course, but the hardware can kill you.
Neetu Chandra Hot and Sexy Photos, Wallpapers, Picture Gallery
Now if only they could dump XML and concentrate on JSON, that would be great progress indeed...
I actually find it interesting that among geek circles, invoking obscure knowledge, including obscure 'celebrities', can build one's credibility. Hence, aren't you more likely to encounter stuff (and people) you didn't know beforehand when talking to hackers - and pretend you knew it all along? It's also a meritocracy, generally smart hackers get famous because they do smart things, not because they release a sex tape.
Actually there is nothing you can do, which is the whole point of Tor.
Also, may just mean 60% of the managerial class.
> does the nerd vs. jock divide seriously exist?

Well, most of us, when answering that question, end up generalizing from one example. Either: "at my school, everyone was either a nerd or a jock; therefore, at all American schools, everyone is either a nerd or a jock." Or: "at my school, there was no divide between nerds and jocks; therefore, at all American schools, there is no divide between nerds and jocks."

In reality, who knows.
What’s Right and Wrong with Media Now
Surf wear online and gym wear online
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Flights of fancy - why airborne automobiles will never take off
Plan 9 definitely has some interesting ideas but I think there are some hidden pitfalls in the "everything is a file" paradigm.

The first is that it's not strictly accurate - some things like network devices are actually collections of artificial files which need to be manipulated in strict ways. In my opinion it would be better to say that in Plan 9, "everything has a file-like protocol". Unfortunately most programmers aren't taught to think this way and are unable to extend this philosophy. They don't know how to apply the "everything has a file-like protocol" idea to their own projects and aren't given sufficient time to learn so they just go back to writing the same kinds of stuff they already know. Pretty quickly they tire of making simple protocol mistakes and start doing things like wrapping the protocols in frameworks of objects and using those to build their applications without realizing the additional complexity they've reintroduced since the paradigm effectively becomes "lower level things have file-like protocols, but other things are objects".

The second problem is that the classic open/read/write/seek/tell/close interface isn't always the most obvious way to manipulate data. Editors would be much simpler with primitives like insert/delete, job processing is simpler with things like enqueue/dequeue, and so on. The plan 9 "systems" viewpoint is that developers should construct the appropriate protocols: editors should send insert/delete primitives to a document's "control" file, batch systems send enqueue/dequeue requests to queue control files, etc. But application developers generally don't want to think this way - they want paradigms which directly fit their model.

This can become particularly challenging when the application wants to deal with more complex structures such as hierarchies or graphs.

However I think Plan 9 did get a few things right here. The idea of per-process namespaces is very powerful, even when "everything is a file" doesn't hold true. More recent things like FUSE are still playing catch up.

Protocols, API's and objects all have their problems. If I were ever to do this kind of research, I would try to come up with new ways to express and implement the essential state models of a system that would make retargeting software easier. Over the years it seems like I've had to write and rewrite several of the same basic state management schemes to suit the requirements of whatever platform or service is in fashion.
That was my impression. It's an obnoxious perspective.
This reminds me of the story about China banning gold farming. It's such a gray area because you have this virtual play money affecting the real money supply. It's almost like counterfeiting because of it's potential deflationary effects, but it doesn't fall under the law as such yet. I wonder how this will play out in years to come.
I'm wondering if it's time for a revival of the capability-based OS's of the 70's, such as Hydra/C.mmp, CMU's flagship OS of the time.

Seems like the raw performance is there, and the CPU parallelism is there. Certainly the time is ripe for a more secure basis for operating systems, and capabilities still seem like one of the best theoretical foundations around.
More direct link:

http://www.zerobeat.net/qrp/powradio.html
The above. Also Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
> do you skip the mental overhead of unlearning some things that'll get baked in by using 2.6

You're thinking that this is a significant thing. It isn't, at least not if you become a somewhat competent programmer.

Programming has very little to do with programming language details.

In fact, there's a reasonable argument that the more languages you know, the better programmer you're likely to be. Unfortunately, the difference between 2.6 and 3.1 probably isn't enough to help you in this regard. It is, however, enough to help you see some issues wrt language design.
> Success implies goals and evolution has no goals.

I agree, but evolution does have results. The one that drives everything is survives.
Others have already suggested the best overall books I'd recommend in terms of philosophy, but in terms of the nitty gritty details of actually doing it, I'd recommend Ready, Fire, Aim: Zero to $100 Million in No Time Flat by Michael Masterson.

Not everything will be applicable to your situation but it's a pretty detailed guide to taking an idea, launching it, and building the company around it up to a multi million dollar company.
I don't know. Have you ever worked in a large IT department or large organization? It can be very, very painful when 10% of the people are working their ass off and the rest are kind of skating. Even worse the 80% can make projects harder than they need to be by layering on meeting after meeting because they approach all projects with the same techniques - large or small.
The same thing will happen in the United States. It's only a matter of time. It has been talked about plenty of times. It's interesting to see Sweden is actually being a leader in the financial markets.
I actually think it goes back to the War of 1812, when a handful of mechanized British troops very nearly retook the US capitol. It really put the lie to Thomas Jefferson's ideal agricultural society (the pirates at Trinidad didn't seem to wake people up the same way).
The official guideline (http://python.org/download/) is fine:

Note that both Python 2.6 and 3.1 are considered stable production releases, but if you don't know which version to use, start with Python 2.6 since more existing third party software is compatible with Python 2 than Python 3 right now.

If you're just learning to program now, you'll have an easier time if you stick to the officially sanctioned features of Python, rather picking up bad habits from deprecated back roads. There aren't many of them in Python 2 compared to some other languages, but if you want to be safe, Python 3 was meant to eliminate as many of those as possible. You'll get a similar benefit if you follow the official Python 2.6 tutorial first, before reading introductory Python books that were written before Python 2.6 was released.

To be super specific, these are the things that you should try to stay up to date on:

1. Unicode support in strings

2. "New-style" versus "old-style" classes

3. The "with" statement, and context managers

4. Generator functions and expressions, versus list comprehensions and plain ol' for loops

If you watch out for these, and read the "What's New in Python X.Y" documents for each version between the one you started on and the newest release, the transition shouldn't be too hard.

The projects you're depending on may also offer some hints about when they'll do the 3.X transition. SciPy depends on Numpy, which depends heavily on the Python 2.X C extension API and will take a long time to convert. Django is basically pure Python and can probably convert sooner. GAE is Google's infrastructure and will probably be 2.X for years.
The pointer optimization you're talking about is possible in C, because of potential pointer aliasing. Say you have the following sequence:

val = [asterix]p1

[asterix]p2 = 1

val = [asterix]p1

p2 might actually point to the same location as p1, so you can't avoid fetching from memory the second time.

IIRC volatile means that a variable cannot be optimized away completely, or moved to a register. This is necessary for memory-mapped architectures when you must access memory to communicate with the hardware (as opposed to storing values).

EDIT: trying to get the asterisks to work in this post...
Her comments about media are shallow, and the main point of this post is to plug her book.

I am surprised TechCrunch prints this kind of thing. No value-add, IMHO.
This is true. I would have said 2.6, because library support for 3.0 is quite wanting. But you're absolutely right: without demand it will never get there.
I agree. There is also a bigger issue that concerns me. Clouding is not any different than having a single server from the user perspective. The data still is centralized, as one central entity owns your data, even though they organized the back-end as a cloud.

Regarding the privacy issues- as long as one such entity hold/maintains your data, they dictate you what you can and can't do, what you can say or not, share or see, thus what is legal or illegal.

China and Iran - cut services, while the US (and Europe in somewhat) try to protect conservative methods so that their backers (read companies) can earn more money. Copyrights are coming to their dead end, while new business models are emerging. What you do with your data is your own business, and laws need to be rethought as gravity laws do not apply to electrical current - the forces that pull are different.

We need democratization, decentralization and de-copyright of the Internet, where we own a slice of the global cloud and data can be shared over it no matter what its contents are.

I'll soon post an open source project I am working on to tackle these issues. Hope to hear more comments.
PHP Template Engines
Patrick Collison Puts the Squeeze on Wikipedia
i've read both and imo they are just what you're lookig for, especially How to get rich by Dennis Felix.