skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The history of AOL reads like that of the U.S. auto industry:

• Pick the easy money as fast as you can
• Pick old-school corporate leadership and hope it'll work in a new, highly competitive world.
• Don't worry about looking at the latest innovative directions - or seeking a CEO who can create new ones for your corporation.

There must be some technological/business assets left in AOL. What about finding some leadership that wants to be ahead of the next wave of digital communication?
If there ever was a solution looking for a problem, this is it.

Exactly the opposite of, "Just Do It".
It worked for me so if there was an issue it's fixed.
Given that none of the articles referenced actually give any details about what GPL'd code was improperly used or linked, I'm still skeptical.

Call me a fanboy but I believe in innocent until proven guilty. Show me the offending code.

Don't say "it's open source, see for yourself," because I'm not the one making the claim.
Yes I have tried both, extensively. I use windows primarily, which pretty much eliminates Git. Git's architecture is a big turd as well. Mercurial is the closest contender but it's not there yet with tool support.
Open a used bookstore.
Plumber. My father is one and my grandfather also was one. Modern heaters are incredibly complex. But sadly one's work isn't going to last: modern heaters last only about 10–20 years and plumbing lasts only between 10–50 years.
"but am planning on buying a netbook with Window7 when its available"

Me too, but I plan to rip it out and install a decent OS as soon as I turn it on ;-)
I found this post funny because I was in this situation yesterday. I'm trying to explain that I'm an SEO, and then I have to tell them what SEOs do, then they ask for tips, etc.

Next time I'm playing unemployed.
It's impossible to earn 10 dollars before your opponent with 99% certainty.
This is what's wrong with the news business.
Another example of where they miss the point.
My thoughts and ideas regarding an ideal co-working spot for entrepreneurs. It is a little raw, so please comment on any improvements.
Researcher Condemns Conformity Among His Peers
Speak for yourself, but the internet has made me smarter in many ways, not dumber. This has been my choice, sure. I can tell you however that I would never have read half of the interesting and intellectually stimulating thoughts and ideas without the internet.
Chef!
I've always hoped to open my own restaurant someday.
Thoughts of a sysadmin starting to get old ...
True, I should have toned down the rhetoric. I just get frustrated with how a small minority of people can delay progress in something that, to me, is so fundamental to the advancement of our civilization.
This is actually far more interesting than the article. I tried using Rentacoder for a while, but after getting turned down for ~20 jobs, and seeing what someone the winning bids were, I stopped doing that fairly quickly.
I'd be able to sleep at night.
Shoot myself.
I wonder how much of that is novelty, though. I spent all my elementary and teenage years reading books, and still read anywhere from 50-150/year (more on the 50 side now that I'm working at Google, but in college I hit 150 one year). As a result, when I walk into a library I've found I've already read most of the books that seem interesting to me. A lot of my interests are narrow enough that the Internet's the only place to go for more information on the topic.
So what does an SEO do other than what should be the normal/standard practice of a website designer? :P
Given the diverse range of economical backgrounds coders come from for Rentacoder projects, Making being undercut quite a common occurrence, your looking at $15-20USD per hour on a run of the mill job, Providing you have decent enough ratings and offer a decent comment to show your competence and experience.

Personally I prefer to have no more than 3 projects happening at any one time, But its a risky job to have as your primary income, So you take what you get, when you get.

Its definately a great place for making some quick cash on the side. And I've always enjoyed being able to have a bash at new challenges I might not find elsewhere.
It ain't simple.
If you need 5 steps to explain you job at the pub, then your audience will be having another beer before you reach Step 3.

A pub isn't much different from an elevator, which isn't much different from anyplace else.

The Universal Answer...

People have Problem <X>. My company provides them with Solution <Y>. I do <Z> to help my company do that.
Stonemason, artist, (unemployed) mathematician.
Chef, or table tennis athlete. Yes, I know, random. :)
The beauty of separating the styles into new style sheets is that an non IE user doesn't need to download all that extra IE crap.

It's also much, much easier to maintain and minimizes the code you need to write, allowing for proper style cascades.
The main problem with Rentacoder and like websites, is that you need to find very small projects to work on, and bid some pathetic amount to get some ratings going before you can look at some real money, Or severly undercut yourself, and waste a heap of time for relatively no return.
This is a good article... but it seems incomplete without mentioning the possibility of a graduate degree. After all, and english major with a 3.9 gpa and a 99% lsat might not be in a position to make much money now, but in three years he or she might very well be a lawyer earning twice what his library-dwelling engineering major roomate is earning.

Of course, engineering majors who go on to get law degrees are probably in even greater demand, as they still have a scare skill/knowledge base... Do problem sets on properties of materials prepare you for law exams as well as a semester spent trying to make sense of Ulysses? Actually, hard to say.

I don't know many humanities or social science majors who just plan to stop there. We need to track a bit further, especially if we're trying to gauge the prospects of the "best and brightest..."
Yeah. They do that to me also.
Auto Mechanic
This was probably the best post I've read all week, IMO.
Pilot.
Well, it's not quite that black-and-white. DRM and copy protection has always been broken and copyright laws have always been hard to enforce, so people have always been able to get what they want for less than the asking price. Every IP-based enterprise's business model has been broken for years; Bill Gates' Open Letter to Hobbyists shows his company's model was broken even before it started.

If people had no internal motivation to pay for something freely sharable, all these companies should be begging on streetcorners. And yet Microsoft, Disney, and Warner Bros. are far from charity cases.

I think that while people are aware that copying is not the same as stealing a physical object, they are also somewhat aware that it deprives the creator. In this sense, it's not unlike how people guiltily shuffle off as a street performer passes the hat around: they are aware of the expectation of payment, of the social obligation to reciprocate when someone gives you something of value, even if that thing is intangible and cost little to produce. This social obligation is enough to cause some people to pay.

Software benefits from other unwritten social rules as well. For example, it is less socially acceptable to pirate software that you use to make money. Likewise, it's less acceptable to give pirated software as a gift. I think the strength of these social rules varies among cultures, which would explain why piracy is more popular in some countries than others, even when the goods are affordable.

And software further benefits from the unknowable costs associated with piracy. If a pirated product doesn't run, has a bug, or installs malware, you have no recompense. And, of course, there's the fact that piracy is illegal... If someone can prove you pirated software, it will cost you (it's admittedly hard to prove for individuals, but easy for corporations with disgruntled employees).

So the software business model is tenuous in that it relies mostly on social norms, but it is viable.
Not really a horror story as a sysasdmin, but I figured that completely removing Python and all of its dependencies might be a good way to fix some conflicts I was having with a few programs.

Needless to say, results were disappointing.
Interesting ideas, I work at Station-C.com in Montreal. The main issue I see with your ideas are cost - building something like what you are saying would be very expensive and tough to sell. We have one shower at our place, but I have heard of much larger co-working spaces in Europe and Berlin in particular.
"The edge Java has is that it makes writing the bugs much harder."

well said!
Dramatic Price Fluctuations of House in Palm Springs
This a very thoughtful discussion of publishing, scientific publishing in particular, and disruptive technologies and why the incumbents fail. His basic premise is that the incumbents are at a local optimum and cannot move off it without seriously damaging their existing businesses. For (my) example, the NYT cannot move completely on line without antagonizing their print customers, liquidating print facilities, busting unions, and on an on, probably going bankrupt in the process.

As a bonus he offers several good suggestions for entrepreneurs in the scientific publishing business.

On a sad note, the post opens with a mention of the demise of Kongo Gumi founded in 578. It makes one feel that there should be a means of preserving historical companies jast as there are for historical landmarks, perhaps by repurposing them as museums.
The Official Curriculum for Your Degree in Startups
Nothing stopping you from doing professional flying in a small aircraft. There are a few communities on the west coast of BC that are a pain to get to by land or sea, but a 4-6 seater seaplane convertable for cargo is something I'd enjoy doing.
Longshoreman
if u have a registered trade mark you use the (r) if you just want to have a tm next to your name you can... it really doesn't mean much, if someone steals ur mark and you can show u have proper rights to the look/feel of the (graphic) you can make a case... not an issue otherwise.

@ www.tapinko.com we have a registered trademark with the USPTO so hence we put up the (r). It also helps with international law, etc... but proof it is on record.
I would be a police then.
Delicious. Toss on some cheese and hot sauce and bring them to me.
As a followup question: "Why aren't you?" Is it just that the computer gigs are better paying, or is the listed profession only a second love?
Thank you. My point entirely. Whilst working, my mind dissolves into the concepts being represented on the screen, not what is around it.
Hmm. What kind of place can you get coffee, shower, go to bed, take calls in a private room, eat, do laundry, and not have to waste time going home and back again? I think once those requirements are met you might as well live there. Sounds like a hacker house to me. So it would be a better value-add if you just built a walkable, high-density residential community around this theme, since then you wouldn't have to have a residence and a 1 hour commute to worry about. Which is exactly what students and entrepreneurs traditionally do: dorms and garages rather than 1 hour commutes in and out of the suburbs. If it wasn't for brain-dead American urban planning and suburban sprawl this would be more obvious, but the on-campus dorm is closer to what you want to replicate than the coffee shop/sleep tube 1-hour-away-from-home concept.

So let's take this residential concept. You could have private kitchens (as well as a public cafeteria) and resell tons of cheap bulk foods as well. Less Starbucks, more Costco. The idea is to encourage frugality, but not at the expense of community. The revenue model is easy--charge rent (and if people who don't live there wanna hang out, that's cool too). Starbucks? That's a money drain.
Philip Greenspun explains California fiscal crisis
I noticed. My last 4 posts have been a semi-trolling attempt to see how people react. It's a good indicator on if I can be bothered to read the comments in future.
+1 for chef. I just love to cook, but it is definitely a manual job!
By the way, have you noticed the keys at the 6th and 9th positions on the top row of your keyboard?
Firefighter
There is a problem with maintaining standards. No matter how advanced your application, you have to rely on a tool over 30 years old (make). I think it would be insane to believe that the efforts of a single individual 30 years ago produced the best possible build system for modern software.
Open a bar/restaurant which would not allow use of electronics by its customers.
The find 'bar' does change the behavior. I've learned to keep it closed when not using it (hitting cmd-f then esc has become a habit).
Everyone probably has their own set of tools, but the tools can be used for both LARGE and small projects. Usually using popular frameworks for web, or just doing quick and easy adobe AIR projects would be fairly quick as well.

Web applications could be faster to build, mainly because there is probably a ton of community support and plugins.

I'm thinking of either using PHP and Smarty Templates, or Ruby on Rail.
i feel dumb now - still looks like they are under using that domain name,
Hockey Training For Early Teens
we will definitely do this again, and in a more organized manner. This one will probably all virtual for this round. We will organize some venue and such in the future.
Elsevier's Digital Doc Prototype: Is This The Scientific Article of the Future?
I can assure you that what Joel is talking about is not only correct, it applies to pretty much every industry.
By coincidence, I just watched this lecture by David Simon on the same topic. David Simon is the creator of the TV series The Wire and a former print journalist.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8E8xBXFLKE

He discusses a recurring theme on The Wire about the decline of a town's main newspaper, and how this results in blatant corruption going unnoticed. Simon doesn't think bloggers offer a true replacement. Personally I'm more optimistic about the Internet, but his opinion is worth your time.
It's neat that I can find someone else who has the same answer as me for something that's mildly obscure, and that this answer has 3 upvotes already. Hackers and stonemasonry, who knew? Makes sense, though.
What's the best first language for a programmer?
You were doing so well until you decided to trail off on a completely unrelated racist (nationalist?) hate-fest against Americans...

To address the rest of your comment though: things aren't not as easy as and black and white as they seem. MS isn't a gigantic living organism with a single brain - there are a lot of teams in a company the size of Microsoft, each with different leadership and goals. Some will be friendly to open source, others will not.

It's easy to paint an entire group of people with a broad brush and see the world as black and white, but then you'd also be wrong.
This recalls to mind what I think is a very compelling argument found at the beginning of "Freakonomics." Namely that people are not stupid, and they know that if they stop paying for the bagels, the bagels will dissapper. In the book, they examine the pay-rates and stealing rates of a service operated by a guy who just left a can for people to put their payment in and collected it each day when he dropped off the fresh bagels. This was in an office environment.
In the book it is very clear that most people, most of the time, will pay if you make it easy for them to.
Essentially, isn't that the insight behind I-Tunes? Just enable people to pay, and voila! They pay.
I suggest (to the OP) that maybe a better way of thinking of the way forward is to see people as people and make paying you as easy as possible. I definitely applaud your principled stand on DRM and open standards. Bravo.
Yeah, I'd agree that there's a lot of validity to the comparison.

Two business models that rested on laurels: never looking at the innovation strategies of Steve Jobs-type CEOs.
I had this problem for a long time too, and part of it was that as an entrepreneur it might come up that you run your own company, but saying "I'm a CTO" translates from geek to human as "I'm a self-important and probably delusional douchebag."

So my solution is saying "I work with technology startups." I let them tailor the interaction by leaving it open. They are free to say "Oh... cool," or to ask variously detailed questions, which I'm happy to answer. Takes the guess work out of the whole interaction.
Too complicated. When someone asks me what I do, I've found that 'I program computers' works for virtually any development job. If you give anything more specific, they probably don't care and wouldn't know what the difference is anyway. If they want to know more specifics, then they'll ask and you can nerd it up.
I kept reading wanting this to be interesting, but it's the same tired Unix incompatibility rant we've all been reading for 20 years now. First it was Sun needlessly extending Unix to the point where good software assumed 68k and wouldn't run on a VAX. Then it was AT&T needlessly reimplementing stuff like STREAMS instead of just using BSD sockets like everyone else did. Then it was Sun unbundling the compiler and forcing everyone to use proprietary/incompatible development environments. The list goes on and on.

Eventually everyone decided to sit down and write POSIX and X/Open and SUS, which was good. But development didn't stop when the standards were finished, and people again wanted to use tools and features on their platforms that weren't "standard" (GNU Make being a really good example from the article here -- no one who knows what they're talking about would serious consider using anything else. Even Sun ships it, for crying out loud). And history moved on, and platforms that didn't evolve in the direction the market wanted started to have trouble. OSF/1 (Digital Unix) and IRIX are dead now. HP/UX is on life support. AIX lives on as IBM's internal toy for tuning benchmarks on their big POWER6 boxes, but doesn't actually sell much.

So anyway, now the crisis du jour is Linux folks assuming they're building on Linux using the GNU tools instead of Solaris. Cry me a river. Sun is (well, was) as bad an offender in this space as anyone else. To the extent they supported anything "standard", it was because they wrote the standards around their own products post-hoc. But now they're a legacy platform, and their fans need to get used to living like the rest of us did for decades.
The part of this article that concerned me is the rapid bid/cancel scheme. Traditionally, the cost of finding out about price elasticity in the market is that you have to sell/buy some product and see how the market responds.

This kind of rapid bid/cancel would be the equivalent of placing a bid on Ebay to see if your competitor's max auto-bid will top it, then retracting your bid. Do this on a regular basis, and you can figure out exactly how much you'd have to bid to beat out your opponents, without putting a cent at risk.

A policy that any order must remain in force for at least one full second (long enough for standard electronic trading services to act on it) would probably limit this behavior.
One person's detailed account of a month as a Raw Foodist
I find this particularly interesting because I run a golf handicap site with a free account that lets you enter up to 5 rounds worth of scores. At that point, the demo shuts down and you need to upgrade to lift the barrier.

The limit of 5 was chosen because it's the bare minimum needed to build a handicap (an inaccurate one, but nonetheless). But it turns out, as I've noticed over the course of the last two summers, most people upgrade when they hit the 5 round limit and then go bananas with it. I have one user who just passed the 150 round mark and most upgraded accounts have 35+ rounds.

On the other hand, a lot of the accounts that I term "dead" are demos with one or two rounds in them entered in over the course of a few weeks. They eventually never come back to even finish the demo either: because they think my site sucks or it's just not something they're motivated to keep updated.
Carpentry. I love woodwork, am not very good, but think I would take that up.
Are you rich already? These are even less viable than regular bookstores today. I've had a few conversations with people that own such shops and they always seem to be bleeding out the family trust, year by year.
There's an argument in there somewhere, behind the repetition of anecdotes, but I'm damned if I can figure out what it is. The idea that somehow people developing on laptops is bad because now the server has to support that development environment is absurd on its face, particularly given the amount of sheer crap that comes in a modern e.g. NetBeans install so that you can simulate the Java environment on your J2EE box on your workstation.

He rants about GNU make a lot, but there's a very simple reason why I, for example, write GNU makefiles and not standardized ones; GNU make is more useful.
+1 for doing it in person vs chat. much more impact to meet people as far as future connection.

also - is it one single app being created or everyone teaming up in small groups or?
While it's true that the article perhaps goes a bit too far without knowing much, I can't think of many other reasons other than that Apple is screwing Google because it is planning to integrate this feature into its own software. As a web app, Google Latitude is essentially useless.

On the other hand, this and the lack of an official google voice app (which, anyways, probably won't be able to fully integrate into the phone unlike on the Android) is giving Google plenty of opportunity to tout the benefits of competing phones.
There is something very satisfying about construction. Being able to stand back and look at the finished project is something you don't get to do with computers very much, and being able to then walk inside it is just an amazing feeling.

Really makes me wish I had more time to work with Habitat for Humanity.
Interesting angle (it certainly makes a slight difference if you walk away at exactly $10 up), but the question asked gets the majority interpretation from me.
It would likewise be interesting to hear what are your thoughts about anonymity and freedom in general.

Should we publicize a list of people who voted for the Canadian Lobster Party

Hey, if the numbers were interesting, why not? I'm INTP; I love looking for patterns in things, especially numbers. Social media is almost like poker in that it has a psychology issue.

But that said, I don't really downmod people very often (inadvertently sometimes, since the up and downmod arrows are so close together). My upmod/downmod ratio is probably something like 79 to 1. I'm curious about others'.

Yeah, sometimes certain people irk me, but usually do I respond to them before downmodding. And I usually attempt to befriend them after an apology, or at least an attempt for a truce on a subject we might disagree about. But some people are just vindictive, or extreme cynics.

As a result of this, I have a lot of one or two-point comments. This doesn't bother me; I'm not here to karma whore. I like the articles and the discussions, and tend to lurk most of the time anyway, posting only in spurts.

P.S. Why did you say that you're "attempting to be downmodded"?
Wind turbines scalability limited by roads and underpasses
We go to Border's or Barnes & Noble once a week, have coffee and dessert and bring a pile of books into the cafe. I read Chapter One of each book. If I like it, I buy it. If not, I put it back.
You do understand that it wasn't my assumption, don't you? It's what ced assumes, I'm just exposing some errors in his calculations.