skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Perhaps the article would be more accurately titled "Why do the rich and unhappy keep working?"

I don't think anything in this article contradicts the idea that one would choose to continue working because they find it rewarding.

If we divide the population of people wealthy enough to choose not to work into "those who find work rewarding" and "those who do not find work rewarding", I think this article is exclusively about the latter group.
It would be interesting to compare the results from this poll to the actual browser statistics of the Hacker News site.
Considering reading some philosophy like Ayn Rand or Karl Popper. It's better to learn about which values and ways of thinking are best early in one's life rather than later.
A distant uncle replied to me like this when I, being 9 years old and yet extremely curious, asked: "Why do you keep working everyday, uncle, when you have a gas station, a pharmacy and 4 other businesses?". His terse answer confounded the living hell out me: "Because working is lots of fun, kiddo. I'll keep starting businesses until there's no more fun in doing so."

Memories of our conversation are still vivid. That was 17 years ago. I finally understood what he meant when I got my first job and started making my own money. If you're passionate about your job, money will be nothing but a nice perk instead of being the reason you wake up early every morning.
It's letting consumers resell their bandwidth on-demand to (I suppose) whoever needs extra I/O right now.

Frankly, I love the idea of reselling bandwidth, it's reminiscent of selling power back to the grid.

As for upload speeds/services, I think that's all going to go away pretty soon -- the DSL/FIOS/Cable wars are heating up (at least here in NYC) and they're starting to compete in upload bandwidth. AFAIK, cable-internet systems are usually built with an asymmetric bias for downlink speeds, while the other two aren't.
I read it because I like to read other people stories and like to write my own!

If I was you (ok, I live in a different culture):

Two years ago, I happened to have the same problem as you: I can't concentrate on one language and one platform (always jump from one to another), trying basic, javascript, html, php and many other compilers.
The solution for this is to follow the Microsoft Track: It's cheap now and promising.

Yes, got Dot Net and learn Visual C# with WPF, it's very amazing.

Here's what I'll do, if i was exactly in the same conditions:

- Move to a cool area, where I can meet with other geeks and find meetups and interesting things to have fun and boarden my mind

- As you are geek (i guess so) and have some knowledge in programming, 6 months will be enough to master Visual C# and WPF (Microsoft Expression Blend). I'll buy a new Computer with Windows 7.

- After 6 months, I should be comfortable with Dot Net, I'll take some accelerated courses and read few books and take Microsoft Certificates (MCPD)

- let say 8 months gone... It's time to make something interesting, let say any application that is simple and can scale. And I want to give you an example (Abyss Webserver) it's a tunisian product (I'm tunisian too) and it's a successfull web server although it's very simple and basic against its rival competitors IIS and Apache but it did succeed, so don't be worried of big competitors.

One thing to say: Be careful before you choose the application you are going to build.

Will it take more than 4 months? You can hire few on the Internet to get it done with you, or just get a partner.

- 1 Year collapsed, it's time to publish your application and start marketing it. Now that's the hardest part and you can either succeed or fail, it'll depend if you made the right choice and choose the correct things: There's things that works and things that doesn't and also how many people need your application and how much are they willing to pay for it.

In a matter of 3 months, you should see if this plan did work or not, if your application was sold or not. If your application was priced $20 and sold 5,000 time then you got your $100K!!

In worst cases, you did learn something and you can NOW work on many companies since Dot Net has a high demand and you are able to change your location.

study this plan, one benefit is that you don't loose anything with it.

Hint: You can start a blog while learning and building your application it'll be fun, provide more clients and may be an extra income in the future.
I'm a bookworm, so I sought out well-regarded books on Amazon. I started with 'PHP and MySQL Web Development' by Welling & Thomson, and could not have been happier. It's hefty (nearly 1,000 pages for the latest edition), but was well worth the time. Next up was 'PHP in Action', which is similar to the later chapters in Mark Pilgrim's Dive Into Python (one hell of a book, btw) and was coauthored by Chris Shiflett.

I've since read two of Ullman's books (PHP for the WWW and PHP 5 Advanced), the Powers books (PHP Solutions and PHP Object-Oriented Solutions), and Shiflett's 'Essential PHP Security' (the PHPSec guide is required reading also).

The two Apress Pro books ('PHP Objects, Patterns and Practice' and 'Pro PHP'), 'Essential PHP Tools', 'PHP5 Power Programming' (Andi Gutmans is a coauthor) and 'Advanced PHP Programming' by Schlossnagle are up next, although I'm currently working through SICP.

(Note: I switched to Postgres since reading Welling & Thomson; there are basically 10x as many MySQL books as PostgreSQL ones, unfortunately)
Perhaps where evolution is really happening, then, is in the criteria we use to decide which limited number of books to read.

*

So much important information is being posted outside books: on the web, on kindles, etc. In evolutionary terms this is about as reliable as keeping genes on mitochondrial DNA.
The article includes a good discussion of the governmental issues involved in implementing this plan in India. I'd love to see links to articles about this from the Indian press.
Smartphones are considered subset of cellphones. Probably decreasing sales of cellphones is due to the economy while increasing sales of smartphones are due to a change in behavior.
If life is boring as hell you're doing it wrong.
Yes, all rich people are alcoholics with trophy wives. You've nailed it.
Common Lisp -- because it has begun to change the way I think.
Ha, I just turned 24 and I work on Wall Street. I know more than enough about that lifestyle. You're right, it's definitely a golden cage.

I didn't say I approved of the sentiments in my comment above. It's not a statement of moral correctness. It just seems to be how things work out on practice.
So you don't think it has anything to do with greed? Not even for some? Having more than those around you, "achieving higher status" if you prefer, appears to motivate a shedload of richer people.

"But that implies that work is punishment, a thing you have to do to enjoy the other things in life."

And you assume that if you work it has to be for remuneration. It's possible to work for free in very many beneficial ways. A lot of charities would welcome a highly skilled financier, say, or a world beating programmer who wanted to donate their time. One could also as CEO choose to take the same wage as the cleaner (minimum wage probably).

"Rich people keep working because they know they make a difference."

What, all of them? How about the banking leaders that just destroyed half the worlds major economies between them. They seem still to be "working" and receiving 8 figure bonuses in some cases.

"Knowing that you make a difference trumps almost everything -- because it gives your life meaning."

You sound like a motivational speaker. What difference precisely? Making people happier, more content, healthier, more fulfilled? Any westerner on greater than average pay in their country could choose to make even more of a difference and live comfortably whilst donating all their above-average income to others in need.

If it's all about making a difference then why don't the rich choose to be less rich and make more difference. Your analysis doesn't add up IMO.

Edit:typo.
>And if he's so smart, why didn't he anticipate the Iraq quagmire? Maybe he desired one?

He desired and planned one.
You are correct in that one does not transfer the H1B, one gets a new one. However, if you already hold H1B status then you are generally not subject to the H1B cap. In those times when the cap has been reach this means that you do not need to wait until October 1st to start your new job.
In case you didn't notice, I was referring to Wall Street and corporate America in general, which is what the article is all about. There's an enormous cultural difference between Wall Street and the Silicon Valley.
Ugh, old, old FUD from years back (not you, the article). g++ (the only C++ compiler that's relevant) has been as fast as gcc for years (they use the same back-end).

After this was released: http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/27/21102... (the original link is lost, but I'll summarize below), and the community ignored it, I stopped really respecting the technical merits of the Linux community. It's a hacker's hobby that became good enough in a group of systems that stagnated (see http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utah2000/ ).

<rant ignore="recommended">
Frankly the quick reason is that the kernel is a hobby for many, and a fetish for some. Engineering decisions are made at the geek level, not a management level, e.g., "This cool hack will make it faster for the $250k big-iron box I got on eBay" vs "We should put together a unified infrastructure for making 802.11 easy to use."
</rant>

<sidebar title="Linux on C++ Patch">
The work I mentioned above (to the side?) was an effort to make the kernel compile on g++. They also made exception handling faster than printk(). Like it or not, a lot of techniques used in a "modern" unix kernel are language features in C++, e.g., vnodes/vtables. On top of that, exceptions provide a much more structured way to describe (via an entire type system, not just error codes!) and handle (catch what's relevant to you, pass on what's not) errors, with the ability to automatically clean up resources and state along the way (local variable destructors, the 'operate-and-swap' idiom for stl containers).

But no, all we have is ~15 yr old FUD quoted over and over, ironically similar to the windows users they love to complain about.
</sidebar>
"If you're passionate about your job, money will be nothing but a nice perk instead of being the reason you wake up early every morning."

I'm passionate about my job. Money is the only way my family can live, we need to eat, drink, have shelter at least.

Your statement should be "If you're passionate about your _well_paid_ job, you won't need to think about money, it won't seem like a reason to do anything ...".

A dose of poverty would see you right.
I agree with your first comment. If you absolutely despise your work, that will show and hinder your career prospects. No one likes to work with a bitter passive-aggressive.
what I meant, is that there is only so many things you can do
Python, Processing & Java. And HTML, CSS etc.....

All of them, really, for pleasure. Python because I want to learn to program, Processing for image processing, Java to bypass CS 101 requirements, and HTML & CSS for web design.
Self Study Course In Block Cipher Cryptoanalysis
>Nerds just need to figure out that the jock personality is actually useful, and figure out how to use it.

I think that some people with tons of booksmarts don't see the value of streetsmarts. It is almost ironic, as one would think that all those booksmarts would lead to such a realization.
On a sidebar (I'm doing that a lot today on HN), pure savings are pretty unproductive, they'll lose value against inflation.
i think there's a difference between not making your job your number one priority and actively impeding the people you work with. you are talking about the former, the author of the blog article is talking about the latter.
I have a Macbook that runs Leopard and my desktop runs WinXP Pro. I prefer the Mac OS to Windows, but the Windows PC has more powerful hardware for running the graphics apps and my little white Macbook just can't keep up.It also has a 24in display and a full-size keyboard, which makes it a little more practicle to use for long periods of time. Some day, when I can justify the expense of a 24in iMac, I'll switch entirely to Mac. In the mean time, I use them both about equally. The Mac is far superior as a dev environment.
I would second the people saying to live cheaply for some time. In 4-5 years, you could become highly skilled in any one thing that you're passionate about. Often times you miss pursuing certain interests in your early years; simultaneously society forces you around in disagreeable ways. This is a chance to "correct everything wrong with your life," as much as that's feasible.

The obvious alternatives - blindly go work in some fashion, or spend your money funding a startup - are likely to leave you burnt out, because you don't have a good motivation yet. Once you've figured out your biggest passions, then work will be easy and you'll have no trouble feeling productive.
Erlang uber alles. i love it. it just works. when i'm done and my project works, i keep wondering where all the code went.
There's a lot of reznor-sound in 'they don't care about us also', at least to my ears.
It sounds like they took someone's patch, which renamed some identifiers to not conflict with the handful of new keywords added in C++, and ignored it.

Then they bragged about it.

That seems to be more political than technical.
Haskell. Don't waste your time with Erlang.
Merge vs. Rebase - A deep dive into the mysteries of revision control
Phones don't get the url, just the LINK placeholder, you can not navigate on a cellphone.

Now, smartphones, they use browsers, browsers can read html, then they get the url under the LINK placeholder.
You wouldn’t be thinking of “Why the Japanese Hate the iPhone”, would you? That story happens to be linked in the second paragraph of this article.
Actually, this is not entirely true. If you use a program called PAX, which is like unix tar, you can get two files with the same case-independent name with different capitalization. This is necessary for posix.

And yes, this is very odd, and apparently not well known. Just as is the fact that from the C-level api, you can use forward slash instead of backslash to separate file name and directory name.
I remember mentioning to my friend in 2000 that you could "Mine gold in an imaginary world" [Ultima Online] and he said it was the best job title ever.

Then history caught up with me in about 2003 and suddenly it was big news.
I use Linux (major parts of the workhorses) open BSD (routers) Mac (for video conferences and development support). There is a freebsd there for good measure.
Wow, they are going to be the first country to self-consciously grapple with all kinds of fascinating privacy issues that emerge from this kind of system. In most countries, as far as I know, privacy depends on the crappiness of government IT and the difficulty of systems integration. It's mostly accidental. In a powerful, well-designed system, you have to decide to have privacy. This is an exciting prospect -- India is by far not the worst country to be investigating these issues. They are democratic and are familiar with the problems of corrupt officials. I think people in countries where corruption is not a problem are too willing to trust the good intentions of their government officials. It's very educational to see how ruthless and venal people are when systems are not in place to stop them.
I'll stick to private trackers. They are like governments - they work better when in smaller communities.
I think it would be more interesting to do it in D.
I would not advise this style of programming, because it creates a very tight binding between the application logic and the interface. In fact, it's exactly the problematic style caused by GUI builders that generate event handlers and ask you to fill them in.
Ocaml isn't too pure. It's just weaker in libraries (and has no threading). It's faster than Scala in my experience, but not by more than 50%.

I like Scala quite a lot so far. The main pleasure of Haskell or Ocaml over Scala is that they can deduce all your types (even function arguments), whereas Scala supports overloading and can't.
It takes nine months to produce a baby and only a few minutes to sign up for a Facebook account.

To be fair, shouldn't we compare today's birth rate to Facebook's new account signup rate nine months ago?
Scala. Because it's the right combination of fun and pain. =)
If Chris Anderson accomplishes nothing else by releasing "Free", he will have at least started a really good debate.
I don't wish any dose of poverty on anyone. Money is important and necessary, but I think the point was that the will to do a great job (better than required) is unrelated to money, it's to do with how passionate you are about it.
Got around to profiling it last night. My code is faster, if you accept the cost of mystery.

http://lambdajones.com/b52why
I feel the same way about window managers. For some reason, the less user friendly they get, the more usable they are.
Guess their growth won't last forever then.
I don't disagree. I tried to tell the product people that on several occasions, but it fell on deaf ears. So might as well do it right, eh?
Work - Linux

Home - OSX
> making me a better Python programmer in my real work.

I found this too. Once I started reasoning with lazyness, Python's generators felt a lot more natural. The itertools module is very useful.
You're missing the point entirely. I'm not questioning money's importance. We all have families and responsibilities. Money is the only way in which we can provide for our loved ones. However, if the first thing on your mind every morning is money, well, I don't envy you.

Also, I'm not rich by any stretch of the imagination. I've been working nonstop since I was 17 years old. I've never stressed about money though. Maybe I'm just lucky I guess.
Shameless self promotion. http://realjobdescriptions.com/ceo.html
Got it figured out (went with php), my bigger problem is getting scala to be compiling within Netbeans (works fine within lift, but can't get a lib/package to build, hangs up on scalac).

installed the latest Netbeans IDE, lift, maven, scala plugins

Went through the standard manual setting fun set SCALA_HOME, the path (SCALA_HOME\bin), in netbeans.conf passed in -JDscala.home=%SCALA_HOME% (this installation is screaming, "Mark automate me and make everyone happy!")
Thanks for the information. These numbers seem more plausible given my own anecdotal evidence. Now compare this to the poll percentages:

21.37% Windows (199)
40.28% Mac (375)
35.12% Linux (327)

My conclusion is that a Linux user is far more motivated than a Mac or Windows user to respond to this poll, making the results interesting, but not accurate.
That makes sense. A quagmire would provide the U.S. Military an excuse to stay in Iraq for years and control the Middle East's oil fields.

With NATO in Afghanistan and closer ties with the former Soviet republics in Eurasia, the U.S. could deny China land access to energy resources. The icing on the cake would be a major war against Iran. That would allow the U.S. to effectively control the world's energy resources.
First, the specifics of the company profiled in the beginning. Someone is spending at least 5-10k a month on PR for what is a glorified dictionary with some wiki aspects to it? Utterly ridiculous. PR firms can be a necessary evil at some point in a startup's life, but this is being wasteful. http://www.wordnik.com/words/fail

Now onto the general theme of the article. It makes our industry look like a bunch of circle jerking asshats. Basically silly product gets built, silly product goes to silly bloggers, and spammy retweets/reblogs get made. How is that building any value besides getting someone to try your service then leave it? People overdo this launch concept. They get one day of blanketed coverage and think that they have made themselves into a huge brand that the PR Gods love. Um, what happens a week later when your traffic dives off?

Get a simple product out there, come to a niche community to get some basic users to kick the tires, and then just have a final release version. Build a good product, iterate, build more value, charge, and these amazing things will happen:

a) People will pay you
b) People will talk about you
c) Press will talk about you

Pay all the press, bloggers, or God knows what to tweetlogzinepaper it up, and with utter shit you'll just have wasted bandwidth and a depressing retention rate. Like I said, not all PR firms/people are bad, it's just what's emphasized in this article. We've all busted our ass to make this industry what it is. Articles like this just belittle that work. </end rant>
In Java. Not the language, but the VM, that would be interesting.
I worked in an office with a bell and the rules were similar. You really, really wanted to ring the bell - it was both a motivator and a celebration.
Considering how many people there on the earth, factoring in the number of those with computers and sufficient internet access, I'd say new Facebook users per day is rather low.
Interesting to see those and grandparents numbers and compare them with the poll.

Seems like there's a discrepancy somewhere, and I would say that it's users voting for the OS they would like to use as their main OS and not the one they actually use.

The little tricks that psychology plays on us...
I got the opposite impression, I think their numbers are incorrect in the other direction. According to their numbers 5% of the global population is a member which IMO is insane. But, with a growth rate of 7mill members every day that would more than double by the end of the year.

My guess, is they count many people several times to inflate their numbers. After all how can they tell a fake user from a real one on a free site.
I don't like that the permanence of the link relies on the continued existence of a third-party service.
Haxe - compiles to ActionScript, JavaScript, PHP et al. Strongly typed (with type inference) and creates faster code than Adobe's AS3 compiler.

F#
I really enjoyed that article. Thanks for the link.
So about 78% use a Unix based system and 22% use something else.
nope, check put the ieee spectrum mars issue
Colonizing moon before mars is not a perquisite. Although it can teach us how to cope with complex engineering problems, still I believe we have already have the capability to colonize mars.
"The thought of having to sit still [and deal with] their inner demons is terrifying,"

Reminds me of the time when I went on a Tony Robbins retreat in Hawaii with 800 other people, including several Fortune 500 CEOs. Our team had 39 people including 1 of the CEOs. We did quite a few "physical games" to build team skills, trust, and overcome personal barriers, including firewalking. One of the games was climbing a 50 foot ladder and jumping off (tethered, of course) to catch a trapeze. 38 people did it. The CEO could not. He climbed halfway up the ladder, started crying, and climbed down.

It was stunning and a little embarrassing. We had been deferring to this guy for 4 days and there he was in front of us, totally exposed, probably for the first time in years.

There were many guesses about what had happened; I never really found out. But one thing was sure in my mind; he would have never let something like that happen at work.
Flights of fancy - Why airborne automobiles will never take off
All of the above: at work I have a Windows desktop and several servers running Linux and Solaris, at home I use a Mac OSX laptop along with a colocated FreeBSD server.
I'm curious which countries your are thinking of where government corruption is not a problem?
I find this discussion of great interest. For those suggestion he goes traveling, taking some time off, what destiny would you recommend?

Be specific please.

Personally, I can't get satisfied with landscape/water, so its hard to find cool places :D