skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Everybody saying they're going to work forever must be planning to start their own companies. Today, and I imagine tomorrow, it's rather more difficult to get work when you're past 30-35-40. $GOD forbid if you have a spouse, kids or an outside interest, as you're expensive and tend to work fewer hours. I'm a little past 50 and in my second country chasing work...
Your definition of beautiful code and mine differ. I don't care which buzzwords the code is compliant with. I care that it is easy to modify, easy to read, well-documented, and well-maintained. Drupal is most of these things, Joomla is none of them. Wordpress is a mixed bag. OSCommerce has had too many maintainers with too little experience get hands on the codebase over the years.

I agree with you on the insanity of URLs in a lot of applications...but they are an option because many Open Source projects want to run on as many systems as possible, and not all deployments have permissions needed to rewrite URLs or to run standalone application servers and setup proxy rules. Drupal, at least, makes the URL mapping completely painless. Joomla has perhaps the worst native URLs I've ever seen (index.php?option=com_ugly&task=view&id=2985&Itemid=33), and the URL mapping modules do hateful things and end up generating an infinite stream of different URLs depending on how someone got to the page. When we moved from Joomla to Drupal, we literally shed a couple hundred thousand URLs, without losing any content (we actually have about 50,000 individual pages, counting forums, issues, and docs).

But, you're conflating two orthogonal issues by assuming that MVC naturally maps to good URLs while other approaches do not.
The list should be generated and voted-up-on by the community. (y/n)
This is the sort of hack that Feynman himself would have pulled, back when he was an undergraduate.
I have lots of friends that are feeling the pain of a courter life crisis and I sometimes feel a bit of it too. I question myself with things like: Why have I not started my own startup yet? And I am really happy in my life and my job.
I entirely agree with that: the problem is narcissism and self-pity; that has ramifications. Like you, I don't mean in an offensive way. It's fairly tragic and the sadness these people experience is real. People are pitying themselves so highly that they're actively hurting themselves. People are setting unrealistic expectations for themselves and are driving themselves to depression when they don't meet them.

E.g. if someone is unhappy with their job/their significant other, they should either re-asses their expectations/priorities and/or look for another (do you want high pay, or do you want greater flexibility? do you want a greater fulfillment, or do you want a strict 9-5 job with frequent vacations?).

Instead, the people described in their article (as well as many I've known) lament how it's impossible for them to find the perfect job/partner/residence and thus become depressed as they view themselves as not only unhappy in the present, but stuck in a world of perpetual unhappiness.

Just as there are architectural trade offs made when designing a computer system (do you want strong consistency, do you want low latency, do you want scalability? Pick two.), so there are in life.
Some sites like xkcd are already weighted.
Nandan Nilekani: IT icon or rock star?
How do you propose to gain the market's attention when competing (albeit indirectly) against mega corps like GE and McKesson?
Ask HN: Do you "Pricing" for your startup?
Does your startup ask for money? If not, why have you decided to give away your work for free, while it is clear that most startups that do so end up quitting.
i have a project that is free and a project that is freemium.

freemium project is freemium because it is more time and labor intensive, as well as resource-intensive. if i didn't charge, i would be in debt.

the free one is free because it is simple, easy, many times less resource intensive, and i can devote as little time as i want to it while it still generates me some revenue.
Building platform companies
Well hence the question. I am anxious to hear from people better than myself. I tried come off as un-snide as possible.
The disclaimer is about why I think MVC makes code easier to read and why so far all the open source php projects I've come across, have been hard (for me) to understand, digest, and of course, develop for, and it just so happens I see none of the things I deem "simple and clear" as when I do when I'm working with MVC.

I'm obviously drawing conclusions relative to my personal experiences, and I fully acknowledge that those experiences are limited, but what else (aside from posting this thread, which I've done) can I do?
MVC has little to nothing to do with how clearly code is written.

i've seen my fair share of barely readable MVC source.

MVC helps, MVC is a useful tool, but MVC is not the sole reason why good code is good code; MVC is not the Kwisatz Haderach
Can Scoopler (YC S08) be the real-time search king?
good ending :)

He listlessly works through lunch, then goes to the bar after work to meet up with some university friends, where they talk about their jobs and make ironic jokes about other people. Back at home, he wonders why he feels so gross and empty after spending time with them, but it’s mostly better than being alone.

good description of my slightly younger hipster sorta-friends lol
I made an account for those who dont have enough time to create an account...

http://mikesandmegs.com
beta password: goldfish
Login: as toolazy, with the password: hahaha

This will work only for about 12 hours or so, then the data gets wiped and its open for public beta.
For a much more entertaining version, rent "Vicky Christina Barcelona" by Woody Allen.
It says right at the top:

Domain Submissions

1. techcrunch.com 4303
2. nytimes.com 3824
3. wired.com 1474
Chairman Mao once said, "Power comes from the end of a gun."

There are a good number of groups who control millions of guys with guns. They use currencies as a tool to project their power and increase wealth. If you mess with that tool, they send intimidating messages. If pressed, they send the guys with the guns.

These groups are called governments.
Make that

user: bruce
password: hahaha

someone beat me to it ;)
We based our pricing on a hybrid of cost vs competitors. We want to be an affordable solution, and we know approximately what our competitors unit price is.

Since we are monthly subscription based we figured out a good price point that would make us profitable, yet undercut our competition by a wide margin.
"How can that be? College degrees bring higher income, but at today's cost they can't make up the savings they consume and the debt they add early in the life of a typical student."

That's a very interesting analysis. I've read for a while now that for many young people who pursue college degrees, the economic return of the investment to gain the degree is actually negative. There are some broader societal implications here too, as much of funding for college study is third-party payment funded by taxes on people who never attend college at all. Some economists of education, notably Mark Blaug, point out that public subsidies for college study are massive wealth transfers from the poor to the rich.
No, perhaps unfortunately, suggesting edits to someone else is not a violation of the sock-puppet rule. I don't know what causes you to believe Jimmy made three reverts on the same page within 24 hours; there certainly isn't any evidence for that in the article itself, and actually there's a considerable amount of suggestion that not only didn't he do any reverts to the article himself, he didn't do any edits to the article.

When you are accusing someone of hypocrisy and serious misconduct, it is a good idea to have both a clear idea of the definitions of the kinds of misconduct you are accusing them of, and some iota of evidence that the person in question committed them. It is not generally considered good practice to throw around serious accusations in the complete absence of any incriminating evidence. And that is what you are doing.
I don't agree with that. You pick your customer base when you pick your product. I make something which is, essentially, a teaching supply. It is overwhelmingly bought by honest, fairly-well-off employed professionals. If I had written a fart app for the iPhone or a file sharing program this would not be true.

(I have heard writers of file sharing programs decry excessive piracy of their apps before. What did you THINK your average user would look like?)
By votes list is here: http://top.searchyc.com/domains_by_points
Rails - Thinking Sphinx Search by Location
Point taken. Thank you for your insight. Do you have any projects you'd recommend as good code?
Why would a vegan blog do this in the first place? Presumably the vast majority of vegans are so for ethical reasons; they can't possibly be allergic to anything that has once been part of an animal. In which case, veganism (?) is basically the definition of "what you don't know can't hurt you."

I applaud the blog for their investigative journalism, but all they've really done is taken restaurant choices away from a group that already has a smaller number of places to eat.

Right? Am I missing something?
Building the world's biggest encyclopedia - March 14, 2000
Looks like Technologizer has the worst submissions to points ratio, followed by Infoworld and Valleywag.
This article is the story of my life right now. I am 25. I am living the quarter life crisis. What makes this article hilarious though is that it is so true.

Yes, its a selfish, narcissistic feeling. But in my defense it was how I survived college. Society pressures you to think selfishly because when you are in undergrad all you think about is "I need to get a high GPA to get into a good grad school" or "I need good grades to land a good job" or "I need a good job to pay off my debt" etc etc. It's all me me me!

No one pushes you to think about others. No one forces community service upon you. No one tells you to go serve the homeless. These are all things that are essential to gaining a full perspective of life, yet there is almost no one encouraging you to follow that untraveled path.

My mom recently had good advice for this quarter life crisis, even though we didn't refer to this feeling as such. She said, "Life isn't clean." There is no route to success, no chemistry for happiness, no direct path to relaxation. We are all meant to encounter these feelings because that is just how life is and that is how we learn what we truly want.
Does opening the box kill the cat?
Hey Mel, are you out there somewhere ? Are you here ?!
GE and McKesson's market are hospital corporations. Our customers are small clinics and imaging centers. The minimum price to setup a DICOM compliant archive is about $25k and that is not counting required support personnel. We do it for $99/month, and we are about 10,000x more accessible than either of those companies for customer service and support.

I do worry about marketing, however. I am hoping this is where we can garnish advice from people like PG (et al). How do we penetrate a market that is so difficult to change? I've seen first hand health care facilities choose more expensive solutions that were inferior products.
Since you ask where to start with RoR you should start with the Ruby part of it. Learning Rails with a spotty knowledge of Ruby is much more difficult; Simultaneously figuring out Ruby and Rails makes it all too annoying.

I don't mean you need a high level of Ruby, but you need some. Start here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_(programming_language)

Then you need to start writing some code.. "Ruby in twenty minutes" on ruby-lang.com is not very complete, and I didn't care for it. I found http://www.math.umd.edu/~dcarrera/ruby/0.3/ much more helpful.

After you can write some stuff, head over to the Rails books.
Indian IT staff taking British jobs at Lloyds Banking Group
No, they set up the servers for us. Didn't think to ask, "please make sure the servers reboot without someone standing by to push 'enter' if needed". They told me that the server's BIOS was saying something about the RAID battery being charged and required someone to push 'enter' to continue. Thanks for the suggestion.
Posterous vs. Tumblr: A Head to Head
I'm Australian and the last I heard about this story (from radio news yesterday) was that New Delhi sent a group of reporters to Australia to interview the victims, police and the authorities about the situation. The head of this group told Triple-J news that in general there did NOT seem to be racial motivations behind the attacks. Official figures also do not show an abnormally high proportion of Indian students being attacked.

Yes there are some racist and intolerant people around but it's not the endemic situation being portrayed by the Indian students.
Arthur Benjamin's formula for changing math education
See Max Weber's Legitimacy theory (government is about maintaining control of who can use physical force).
I don't think that it has gotten to that point or near it very often.

These guys with guns also use other things like media & information to project their power. There have been many confrontations between governments and emergent media. It has been a very obvious occurrence. Keeping it contained is a constant battle.

It doesn't seem that virtual currency has a very strong urge to be.
Spongebob Games
A collection of fun free Spongebob games to play online.
Nothing of value in what sense? It's clear that there is value to the buyers of the gold, they pay for it. It costs something (player's time & computers) to accumulate, they forgo value to create this.
I agree with this. But look at what Arrington's really saying with this article. He's positioning bit.ly as his new favorite startup to write about and preparing his readers for an avalanche of stories about it. Having Techcrunch blast your marketing message out to the early adopter crowd every day for 6 months will certainly help reposition bit.ly as a destination.
All investment in formal education is a net negative, from pre-k onward. Right now my town spends about 11k per student per year, not including extraordinary expenses. Multiply this by 13 years, and it comes out to 143k.

Let's say that instead of investing 11k in each student every year, my town just put 143k in an account for me on the day I was born. From the town's perspective this is feasible given the current tax structure, since we are doing this for each student instead of spending that money on schools.

Furthermore, let's say that my parents had invested the money they spent on pre-k in that account on the day they would have otherwise paid tuition. This means that we are adding, say, 8k per year at age 3 and 4.

Furthermore, let's say that we add 20k to the account for each of the four years between ages 18 and 22.

Then we invest the whole thing in smallcap stocks. Assuming we can get a 10% return per year, then by my chubby-fingered iPhone math this looks like I'd have had ~1.2m in the bank by age 22.
CSS | Tutorials, Techniques, Hacks, & Resources Huge Collection
This article focuses purely on CSS, and includes a list of articles and links that I’ve discovered over the past year that have been very useful and helpful. These links, in combination with playing around with the Firebug extension for Firefox, will help you master CSS (assuming you’ve already gotten some initial experience with the language).
Or would have no chance of passing without him.

Since it's an open-book exam, it's likely going to take a lot of thoughtful work.
It's funny you say that, because I watched that this weekend, and liked it so much that I got a bunch of his movies. I enjoyed one or two more, then realized that they're all the same: guy gets married, guy is unsatisfied, guy cheats on his wife, guy decides not to leave his wife. That's the way all of his "best" movies go, at least. But you're right, it's the same sort of thing: permanent, vague dissatisfaction with what one has.

I guess I like them because I'm a twentysomething who's coming out of my own quarterlife crisis. It really is pathetic, but the problem is that even though you realize how pathetic it is while you're in it, you don't know what to do about it, so the realization just makes it worse. Being a human being is so fun sometimes. I guess that's why we have comedians like Woody Allen....
Do degree holders earn more or are the kind of people who get degrees the kind of people who tend to earn more?
Most startups end up quitting, period, regardless of whether they charge money or not.

That said, you'll find no argument from me that startups should sell money. Ignore the "you're giving your work away for free" angle -- the world at large and your customers in particular don't give mouse droppings about you, they care about themselves and their life and how your product improves those lives.

Charging money helps your product improve their life. It communicates value -- it automatically sets your product above 99% of the Internet because 99% of the Internet is free and everyone has learned by experience that most things that are free are free because they provide less than one penny of value.

Charging money gives people the confidence that your website is on the level. You have a clear rationale for providing the service and for being around next week. It is amazing any commerce on the Internet happens at all with the pervasive lack of trust people have for new websites. Asking for money (combined with many other things you'll be doing while asking for money) helps to build trust, by giving people a familiar, comfortable role to slide into in their emerging business relationship with you. They figure "Hey, if I pay them money, then I'll be the customer, and customers typically get what they want."

Charging money tells people that if something breaks (and something always breaks) that you'll be around to fix it.

Charging money says this product will merit future investment. Charging money says this product has a future.
That's not even remotely price feasible. Also, lower power requirements does not necessarily mean efficient. In terms of power/watt, they have inefficient power conversion and are particularly difficult to cool. Trust me, rackspace knows what they're doing.
Historically, have laws to protect workers been instituted before or after big gains in wage rates or social wealth?
Wikipedia link missing an apostrophe: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Men_Don%27t_Eat_Quiche
Depends on the field. According to the American Chemical Society, starting salary for BS Chemical Engineers is 58K in 2007. This is higher that the numbers mentioned in the article, and I suspect the oil biz is a reasonable gig. I think everybody's in agreement that the starting salary for, say, orthopedic surgeons is a little bit higher than this. And Wall Street paid those MBA's quite a lot up until recently.

So, maybe SOME degrees are worth the hassle. Others, less so unless you're really turned on by the subject - I really love history, but I'm not going to try to get degrees in the subject.

As buugs said, don't get one if it's not what you want. Get one if it's what you need...
Author Alice Hoffman Apologizes for Twitter Outburst About a Bad Review
I debated whether or not to respond since you just sound like flame bait, but I guess I'll respond...

Vegan/vegetarian is a description of a diet, _NOT_ a philosophy. People can go vegan or vegetarian for a number of reasons:
1. boycott poor treatment of animals in the livestock industry
2. health concerns and/or allergies
3. dieting/losing weight
4. ethical concerns (not wanting to kill things)
5. religious practices

I'm sure there are many more. Pro-choice does not necessarily run counter to any/all of those. But even if you don't agree with someone's decision you can agree that they had a right to make it, no?

Edit: Just to add that years ago 'vegetarian' used to describe what 'vegan' now describes. But there are a lot of people nowadays that have given up meat, but not eggs/dairy so 'vegetarian' as a term has grown to largely describe those people.
"Photuris kills other fireflies only to retrieve bad-tasting chemicals from their bodies, which it uses to protect itself from predators."

Sometimes big companies eat smaller ones to reuse the bitter patents they contain, too.
A good review, other than the fact that the article incorrectly places Posterous in the same [manufactured] niche as Tumblr.

Posterous is just a blogging platform that lets you use existing technologies to author and publish posts (to various locations). I routinely publish hundreds of words to my Posterous blog, and nobody has reprimanded me thus far.
Ask HN: What was your first job?
The end of retirement article made me wonder about this. What was your first job, how old were you, and how much were you paid?

My first job was stacking bricks from an old building they tore down behind my house. I was about 10 years old and got paid a dollar or two, can't remember exactly, for a stack of 1,000 bricks, 10 by 10 by 10.
always great to hear your thoughts all over a newspaper article...
Hot trends on twitter
Yeah, i'm not happy when people think Posterous is microblogging or Tumbleblogging. There's no limit to what you can send us, and that's the beauty of email.

Oh well, people can use us however they want, compare us to whatever they see fit. When people say they use Tumblr, I ask them how they post 3 photos, and they are stumped :)
Why does one have to win?
Goldman Sachs: Engineering Every Market Manipulation Since The Great Depression
Google actually implements batteries on their servers individually rather than as a UPS for many. The problem with "lower power requirements" is that it normally coincides with slower speeds/less efficiency in some fashion.
No, but it gets you more serious users.
16, martial arts instructor.
Thank you for articulating my complaint with this article more clearly than I could.
What about people that are vegan/vegetarian for ethical and/or religious reasons? While it won't 'kill' them, people are making money by lying about a product to their customers (fraud). Is this a good thing?

Wouldn't you feel pretty violated if you thought that you were making an ethical choice, only to have the person helping turn out to be a cheat? (e.g. killing someone to put them out of the misery only to find out that they still had a desire/will to live)

An even better example would be if you were boycotting the RIAA by buying music from an independent label that claimed they weren't part of the RIAA. Only to find out that .5% of their profits really were going to the RIAA. Wouldn't you feel violated if all that time you thought that you were doing a good thing boycotting the industry, but you weren't entirely? Obviously it's better than if you were buying directly from big name labels like Sony,etc but you're still going to be pissed off at being misled.
I'm pretty sure it's impossible for bit.ly to set the referer since it is supplied by the browser. If you could actually spoof the referer that would have fairly serious security consequences.
Yup. For some reason, I can't see a non-college grad doing research in high-energy particle physics. Importantly though, a whole lot of people aren't doing research in high-energy particle physics. If you're really good at fixing cars and like it, don't go to college to get a degree in psychology.