skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bike Messenger in DC.

Made great money for a HS student. Got to ride bikes all day and use my middle finger a lot. And my boss was just a voice on a walkie talkie. It was one of the best jobs I've ever had.

Almost everyone I worked with was an ex-con. Crack, stealing assault you name it. I worked for one company where the boss hired me for the summer on the condition that I found him a replacement in the fall. "If you leave without finding one," he yelled, "I'll see you in the street and run you over!" He was quite serious.

I'm a white guy and I worked for an all black company for a summer. My card said, "A black owned and operated company." During my interview there my future boss said, "I'll be damned. I'll be damned! You must be the ONLY white Willy in Washington."

The job was all about having a reliable bike and knowing the micro optimizations. You gained more speed by deftly navigating the buildings than the road. Knowing which buildings had service entrances, which doors had guards who didn't make you sign in and which elevators were fast all saved time and made money. I also got to know the mini subway system that runs between the capital and the senate and house office buildings.

But the government was the best for money. They took so long to do anything that you could charge them a dollar a minute for wait time. I feel like they should rate efficiency of institutions based on how long it takes for them to get a package in the hand of the person they called to pick it up. Like gigaflops for bureaucracies.

In four summers I got hit by about 12 cars. I was never seriously hurt but I did do some substantial damage to cars and went through a few bikes. If you ever get hit, ditch your bike and jump ON the car if you can. If you're flying through the air twist so you roll like a hotdog when you land.

One time I got decked by an SUV on a double rush (guaranteed 20 min delivery = $100 for the customer) to CNN in Rosalyn, VA. I was carrying a reel for the nightly news. It fell out and rolled through the traffic amazingly landing unharmed. I showed up to CNN on time and covered in road rash and blood. The receptionist grabbed the movie reel and didn't even ask me if I was OK.

Such sweaty, gritty, speedy good times.
Correction make that 20 in 4 weeks.

Source: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Features/Indian-techies-...

What is most disturbing is the attackers in atleast three cases have been kids aged about 15.
We are very obsessed with success. We can sacrifice everything in pursuit of an idea, our health, family and friends. But success is empty, we have different ideas of success.
What will be the next sacrifice if you win?
FREE Ipa Wonderland
When I was knocking on doors for a living, rice and beans kept me alive.

Of course you need to eat other ingredients, too. But r&b is a good default, it will keep you from starving, and it costs even less than ramen if you buy in bulk.
I'm not so sure that IE is that important for forward-looking development. It has a rapidly diminishing marketshare on the desktop, and that trend looks likely to continue. Firefox has a staggering amount of momentum right now, and Safari is gaining as well.

Moreover, IE has no presence on the iPhone, Palm, Symbian, or Android. That's tens of millions of new devices that Microsoft has zero leverage over. Unless they pull a real miracle out of their hat with the upcoming Windows Mobile, Microsoft is going to be a bit player in the uber-important mobile market for the foreseeable future.

IE will likely linger for a long time, but at this point it's looking a lot like Novell NetWare ten years ago: still big, but not driving the market.
It's too soon, but I have no doubt that JavaScript improvements and HTML 5 will completely annihilate any need of Flash &co, but it's just intuition :)

JavaFX/Silverlight/Flex are naturally converging to a browser-like structure (a DOM tree with graphical nodes), trying to emulate what the browser yet is. For technically simple - but logically intricate - application (like RIAs!) design tools will matter, not the platform itself (it remembers me how Eclipse saved Java from the decline).
Video Interview: PlanetTutor - Making a world of difference
An interview with the co-founder of Planettutor at Proto, Bangalore, India.
The fact that someone else has it worse doesn't make your feelings any less real.
See The World in HD
Yet Another Company Sues Google For Not Being In Google's Index
Blog Web Hosting
Blog web hosting review at topwebhostingreviews.org. We highly recommend cpanel hosting plan for wordpress blog. Find best blog hosting and cheap blog hosting.
That's because users can't customize yet. So while we can write to our hearts content some of us use it as a microblog that complements are primary blog. I ditched WP a while back cuz Posterous was so easy to use. But now I miss the customization and am thinking of going back but using Posterous to post. Still love you guys tho and can't wait for customization!
Service V-Model
IT organizations need to transition their service designs into operations. Service Transition processes are important to provide companies with information to ensure that their service design solutions will achieve their expectations.
Estimated receipts for fiscal year 2007 were $2.4 trillion.

* $1.1 trillion - Individual income tax
* $884.1 billion - Social Security and other payroll taxes
* $260.6 billion - Corporate income tax
* $74.6 billion - Excise taxes
* $28.1 billion - Customs duties
* $23.7 billion - Estate and gift taxes
* $48.4 billion - Other

The IRS estimated that there were about $345 billion in uncollected taxes.

TOTAL SPENDING

The President's budget for 2007 totals $2.8 trillion. Percentages in parentheses indicate percentage change compared to 2006.
This budget request is broken down by the following expenditures:

* $699.0 billion (+4.0%) - Defense
* $586.1 billion (+7.0%) - Social Security
* $394.5 billion (+12.4%) - Medicare
* $367.0 billion (+2.0%) - Unemployment and welfare
* $276.4 billion (+2.9%) - Medicaid and other health related
* $243.7 billion (+13.4%) - Interest on debt
* $89.9 billion (+1.3%) - Education and training
* $76.9 billion (+8.1%) - Transportation
* $72.6 billion (+5.8%) - Veterans' benefits
* $43.5 billion (+9.2%) - Administration of justice
* $33.1 billion (+5.7%) - Natural resources and environment
* $32.5 billion (+15.4%) - Foreign affairs
* $27.0 billion (+3.7%) - Agriculture
* $26.8 billion (+28.7%) - Community and regional development
* $25.0 billion (+4.0%) - Science and technology
* $23.5 billion (+0.0%) - Energy
* $20.1 billion (+11.4%) - General government
"BillG" has such a bad vibe from being associated with Microsoft. Every time you hear some personal story of him he's an awesome guy.
Airbus 310, carrying 153 people, crashes into Indian Ocean
But it's still owned by Microsoft, which isn't okay in my experience. ;)
Wow, Ezra Roizen really shows he doesn't get it in that interview. He thinks he's boiled down realtime search to merely an abstraction of existing search. Scoopler (and the entire space) is not a mere rehash of Google and/or Technorati. A) there's core tech here that is fundamentally more difficult than non-realtime search indexing, and B) Twitter Search is only the first example of how realtime search can be valuable.

Jeff Smith of Smule did an admirable job of smacking Ezra down, however. This interview was watchable if only because Jeff made some really salient points about getting to revenue, iterating on products, and not sweating that you don't have absolutely everything figured out.

The key point here is that AJ and team have a product, and they're scrappy, and they're going to do whatever it takes to understand the space and win.
Google Voice was originally GrandCentral so its founders Walker and Paquet would seem more deserving of your award of partial credit.

Google has added some features but I think their main contribution can come from popularizing voip and forcing the mobile networks to accept reality.
Encrypt data in Linux/Unix
First "job"? Hmm, probably one of those phone book delivery schemes at the age of 13 in rural Virginia. Paid $7/hr, all said. I split the take with a few car-owning friends and paid them less of the commission than I got ($5/hr, maybe?)

First business venture was selling polished salt crystals (that I'd found at the beaches of Dubrovnik pre-war, say 1990) to the parents of my classmates at a craft fair. I was 8 or so, and used an overhead projector covered with hole-punched mylar to illuminate them. Made a few Austrian Schilling that way.

First Real Job was at 17 as a programmer/security analyst for a sleazy pay-per-click search engine in Thousand Oaks, CA. I got a $70k/yr salary and stock options, which I was slightly amused with at the time (having prefigured the dot-com phenomenon for a crash) and parlayed my low-paying position into a neat title.

Of course, this did nothing to stop me from squandering the majority of my 20s on sex, drugs and very loud music.
My first real job was as a telemarketer/telephone salesman at age 16.
> having employees leave for vacation individually is disruptive.

Yes, but less so than closing the company down for a month.
The fair comparison would be 12 months of ~1/12th of the company team not being there, or 1 month of the entire team not being there.

I think it's pretty obvious that in a workplace where each member adds more than a constant value, the latter is favorable.

Edit: woah, I can't respond to your post, probably to prevent those back-and-forth chains. But you're right, it's only obvious in a simplified model of a workplace I had in my head when writing it. In real life, nothing is obvious :)
Maybe that proves it has nothing to do with "You're special" meme OR debt.

I'm 26 year old from central Europe. And these feelings are all to familiar with me - especially from observing what's going on with my peers.

What I see is that generation of our parents - the boomers took all and everything they could - it feels like they didn't leave anything to us. Except the task of cleaning up leftovers of their broken dreams. Picking up their debts - their broken pension system, etc.

It seems to me that boomers are "the entitled generation" and our generation will be know as - the useless generation. In my country the unemployment amongst young 20 - 30 is 30% of all unemployed - quite a lot well educated. Why? Because you can't get job without experience and vice versa. While boomers created system that educated us and hold positions of power while bitching how unfair the system is to their children.

To say I'm a computer engineer without debt and with good career prospects. But not enough income to support family solo - my GF is one of those educated young people who cant get work. Meaning we obviously aren't going to do anything about improving our demographic situation anytime soon.

So we either have the option of living blue collar class lifestyle (thus negating our effort in education) OR screwing over the society.

:)
Bagger at Safeway ("courtesy clerk") at $3.26 an hour, during high school. Management considered this above-average pay, since it was above minumum wage (which was $3.25/hr).
Ask HN: opensource solution for URL shorter?
I always want to know what's the challenge of shorting long URL.
on 32-bit win7 it was "did not automatically install packet capture driver". I downloaded winpcap 4.1 beta5 seperately, set the compatibility mode to WinXP SP3 and it installed. Doesn't install cleanly for RAS/VPN network connections but wired and wireless adapters work.
I don't think it's "obvious". If the company's completely closed, nothing at all is happening, no work is getting done, no one is available to cover emergencies. A better comparison might be to look at 1/3 of the company being gone in July, August and September, which, if you work with people to plan things just a bit, means that things keep running during those months. Also, what starts to happen here (Italy) in practice, is that in July not a lot gets done because everything is going to shut down soon, so no one starts anything new (no new projects, no hires). Things already start to slow down in June. September is reasonably productive, but it takes a bit to get things turning over again.

Staying open conserves momentum and provides some continuity.
Please review: iTunes-ish app for online games
I am about to launch my site - http://www.gambolio.com - as public beta. Any comments would be much appreciated.
Here's the link: http://www.gambolio.com
Video Game Reviews
The word is out. The latest military-styled combat scenario for PC aficionado‘s is back with a vengeance. During the last week of June 2009, the first person shooter game Armed Assault 2 will hit PC screens worldwide with die-hard gamers waiting to get their hands on it.
Maturity of DSLs as a concept
Some disillusioned quotes about the recent DSL-hype.
Same for me. I'm pointing out that there are some things that you don't have to ask, you can tell by looking.
Transparency would be great, instead of back-room dealings.

One of the reasons why I like sites like http://thefunded.com

For too long, bad behavior has been allowed as long as it stayed hidden from public view.
Reminds me of this story: http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idUSN26324168...
(Where two teenage girls found out that Ribena (Blackcurrent) Juice didn't contain any Vitamin C - despite advertisements to the contrary. GSK eventually admitted 15 breaches of the NZ Fair Trading Act.
A nice use of data visualizations to get the point across (repeatedly). It's easy to cherry-pick the data and graph-type to demonstrate your point on one graph-- but to show the same trend on a number of different graph types, with a number of different data sources, over a variety of different periods-- well, that's harder to argue with.
Comcast to offer wireless Internet service
Introduction to Valgrind
HTML5 and JS, as-is, don't quite match all the capabilities of Flash(perhaps Silverlight too, but I have less familiarity there). This is not to belittle the fact that the feature gap is definitely narrowing, but as long as the incumbent Adobe can continue adding strong reasons to stay on Flash and Flash supports "the majority" of client platforms, support isn't going to completely crumble.

In Flash 10 the features have included optimizations in the form of typed arrays, some 3D+shader support, and fully client-side file save and load operations. These things are all missing in our present-to-near-future HTML/JS platform, so I think Adobe knows the plot here quite well.
Crowdsourcing Experiment at the NY Times
is it something interesting to do for a hacker?

who pays the bandwidth bills?

what do you get out of it?
Try ruby - http://tryruby.hobix.com/ is a really wonderful resource
The Pirate Bay Has Been Bought By A Public Company?
In Socialist Australia, here's what we do:

- Most Uni places are sponsored by the Govt.

- A proportion of the cost (4000-9000/year - only for tuition) is given to the student in the form of a loan (HECS, FEE_HELP, whatever the acronym is now)

- Interest is charged at the official CPI rate (so I think mine had 3.6% interest charges this year)

- The loan must be repaid once a students income is over a certain level. ($41,595 The required rate of payment goes up with income - about 4% for $42K, up to 8% for >$77K)

Wikipedia have a reasonable summary:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tertiary_education_fees_in_Aust...
That actually seems to be just what I envisioned. I notice that the PDF files get added as data to a custom PDF viewer which gets in the way of between the viewer and the system. This is pretty much how I would have implemented it except that the error messages are not handled correctly. It stops you printing by making the viewer think that the printer is not connected, the error message is misleading in that it claims that the printer is not available when it really means that you are not allowed to print the document.

However without having one of those to hand I don't know how hackable they are. I am mildly curious as to how this is implemented and wouldn't mind trying to hack one. But I note that they don't publish their prices so I suspect that it is beyond my budget.
The Manhattan Project of Marijuana: Lab Testing and Standardization
Oh? In the mail I got, they said the construction would be near their IAD data center which is outside of the Washington Dulles airport (which looking at the map is actually in VA).

> Beginning Thursday June 25, 2009, heavy duty excavation work on the property adjacent to Rackspace's IAD Data Center will commence. This project includes excavation work and quarrying of subsurface rock to lay a sewer line to serve a new development.
We're also missing an IDE as "good" (relatively) as Flash, because at the moment there's no end to end production tools that can produce the rich experiences users can expect from Flash.
I thought it was amusing that they predicted terabyte hard disks using holography, but we got there with the same basic technology (magnetism) we were using back then.
True, but it was very fortunate that his wife already had professional experience dealing with Asperger's Syndrome. I was a little surprised that she didn't diagnose him earlier in their marriage.
90 Minutes on The Pitch
A premiership news blog with recent happenings in the world of English Football.Results,Previews,Reviews,Transfer gossip we've got it all.Also covers multimedia aspect of the game.
I gave up after the 3rd paragraph. So much anger. It just sets the reader up to expect that the rest of the article will be biased.

Why write an article this way? If the data is really on your side, just present it.
There are plenty of companies, here in Italy, at least, that shut down in August, at least for the first two weeks.
See, this is the big difference between Dare and me. If I got an email saying "this is Bill Gates's office, Bill wants to know if your father is the President of Nigeria", I'd write back: "Sure he is. And I'd like Bill's help in getting some of his money out of Nigeria. Naturally, I'll pay a 10% finder's fee. Just give me Bill's bank account number...."

Actually, I suppose the fact that Dare's father actually is the President of Nigeria is another difference.
Twilio is possibly a more ground-breaking service, or at least it will be when they finally support international calls properly.
Swedish Software Firm Acquires The Pirate Bay For $7.7 Million
Global Gaming Factory X (GGF) aquires The Pirate Bay for $7,8 Million. 
Global Gaming Factory claims to buy thepiratebay.org and peerialism.com. Press briefing at 11.00 GMT +1 (Stockholm time).
Offline programming: teaching children computer science
I noticed that there was a nice discount for large bundles of pencils, so I bought one and then went door to door selling them. Not sure how old I was, but this was during elementary school. I think one pencil cost 2 cents, and I would sell them for 16 cents. Then a friend came along, and I hired him to join me for 8 cents a pencil. My father was later telling me I shouldn't have paid him so much, so I got discouraged and didn't continue the "business".
Spokesperson Peter Sunde confirms this to Swedish IDG.

http://www.idg.se/2.1085/1.237985/the-pirate-bay-bekraftar-a...
I'm glad that others feel they benefit from this article, but somehow it rings false to me. It feels like a parody rather than the confession it purports to be. Here are a few of the wrong-notes for me:

* He's obsessed with cleaning-product slogans and cattle behaviour?
* He's working as a __marketing__ engineer?
* Standing alone at parties 'kind of dancing'?
* Calling 'methylchloroisothiazolinone' unpronounceable
* Being self-consciously self-centered?

I realize that there is a lot of variation within Asperger's, but this piece doesn't line up for me. It feels to me like a talented MFA student writing a credible impersonation of Mark Leyner or David Sedaris based around a caricature of Asperger's. Does anyone here know and vouch for the author? Does his description ring true to anyone's sense of self, or only of their perception of others with some similar characteristics?
Dean Kamen's Newest Invention: A Stirling Hybrid Scooter
Amazing. I did not know that. And apologies for implying Italy is a backwater country, it certainly isn't!
Sulumits Retsambew - Do Not Follow SEO Bad Techniques
Not my primary account. I got a score of 140. Any suggestions on what I should do?
I'm honestly not familiar with Silverlight and JavaFX, but matching AS3's capabilities of OOP...

Um, Silverlight and JavaFX have .Net and Java inside, respectively. They don't have to work to "match" OOP, they bring pre-existing OOP to the party. With extensive general-purpose class libraries.

I don't know anything about JavaFX, but Silverlight also brings pre-existing XAML, which already has drawing and animation classes. And possibly "loader classes" and "filters", I'm not sure what you mean by those).
More correctly I think that 20-somethings with ambition, but no passion, will eventually realize they have no passion and will get sad.

I know lots of fellow recent-grads who are ambitious (in the "I want to be successful!" sense), but have no idea what success really entails for them personally. I've been blessed with a love for hacking, and I don't think what I want to be good at was ever a really big question. For many people, though, it is.

I know fellows who've graduated from engineering or computer science, yet despise code. These are the guys who are truly stuck in a quarter-life crisis: a job they don't care for, and lack of passion to succeed. For most of them their only direction is to try and make management - they don't care about the code anyways, and the financial success will numb their sadness a little bit. I don't think they will find the solution to their "quarterlife crisis" there though.
Seduction and deceit in humans.
It had to happen eventually. I'd like to know how successful they'll be monetizing a site people visit specifically because they don't want to pay anything.
Infant mortality hasn't changed a lot in Western countries since the 1960's. In 1960 it used to be 25 deaths/1000 live births, now it is around 10 but this is nothing compared to 100 in 1915; see http://www.marchofdimes.com/images/ihs_img017.gif
Well, at least now they can pay the fine
Imagine Caddyshack minus all of the hilarity and sex, just the dragging golf clubs around for rich people part.

Pay always depended on how well the golfer did (better score, better tip) but it was normally around $25 for about 4 hours of work. I did that for a couple of years starting around 14.

It was a good job for developing a solid work ethic and realizing that computers were worth pursuing.
10 ways to best enjoy a vacation after a project completion
Unfortunately The Economist is not some noname pageview hunting crystal ball blog; they have a surprisingly good history of hitting the nail on the head with their analyses and predicting the future. This article is a part of a series about old age and pensions (you can find all of them in this week's printed edition) and after reading through all of them, I'm afraid to say, it makes a lot of sense.
I don't think it is that disruptive, in my company each team agrees when people will take their vacations so there's always a minimum of junior/senior people working in all depts.
Give punypng a try as well... and make the world more puny.

http://www.gracepointafterfive.com/punypng
Ooc programming language 0.2.1 is out
ooc is an object-oriented programming language which is implemented with a source-to-source translator to pure C99. It supports classes, abstract functions, foreach, ranges, etc. It intends to be modern, modular, extensible, yet simple and fast. [...]
I'd never heard of Global Gaming Factory X before, but apparently they own both Smartlaunch and CyberCafePro, which are both major products for managing "cyber cafés".
In Spain there are still some companies that do the same, but this a less common practice each day. I guess it's because the shift from a industrial economy to a services one.