skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hi Christoph! I came here to post the bootstrapped.fm link too, but I think HN is a fine place to post this discussion too. I think the small, bootstrapped company is where it's at for many of us who don't want to or can't do the VC thing in SV. That's probably a large majority even on a site like this.

Rob's book is an obbligatory reference in this space too:

http://www.amazon.com/Start-Small-Stay-Developers-Launching-...

My own thing is not 'successful' in that it's not my main source of income just yet, but it's not too far off, either: http://www.liberwriter.com

One of the key things I've learned from it is to go do something that matters to 'ordinary people', rather than something that's "cool" from a computer guy point of view.
1 World Trade Center Highres Panorama
> Being perplexed/disgusted by the iniquities of the younger generation has been going on for a long time

Well, sure, but there's a difference between the normal run-of-the-mill "kids think they invented sex"-type bitching and this naming-of-the-generations claptrap. Google up some of the old articles, they're the height of verbose, narcissistic inanity. It took a special kind of self-involvement to generate this crap.
1. Levi 511s for slender folks qualify.
This post:

https://www.national-preservation.com/threads/preserved-bars...

doesn't look like anything posted by "satoshi" on bitcointalk.org: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=3;sa=show...

I could never imagine the real Satoshi not capitalizing his I's and the first letter of every sentence. At least I've never seen him do that in other writings, even on forums like bitcointalk.org.
I've never tried their jeans, but while I rather like Uniqlo, their stuff is generally not high quality. I think the appropriate term is "cheap and cheerful."

I actually buy a lot of stuff there, but for anything I really like, I often buy two or three of it because I know from experience that it will wear out rather quickly (and luckily they're so cheap that buying multiple copies is quite practical).
Outrage Porn How the Need For ‘Perpetual Indignation’ Manufactures Phony Offense
"And likewise, they're still shutting down from software, perhaps unaware that the power switch will do the job, and are conditioned to do so after years of operating systems complaining when they weren't shut down properly."

Well, what about stuff like rebooting, switching users and the distinction between the three sleep modes - shutdown, s2disk and s2ram?
I am not quite sure of your definition of 'somewhat' however giving a mild amount of justification for treating others wrongly simply bc they don't confirm to your standards of 'correctness' is not justifiable.
Me, my son and Minecraft
It is this kind of thing that makes me do what I can to avoid working for nontechnical people in a technical capacity.
I don't see why the majority of HN commenters assume that the article has a negative bent. All he did was list the results of the PEW study and briefly discuss political ramifications for the two major US parties. The only fault I can find with this article is the completely erroneous last sentence (and title) which mentions the "selfie" -- this just seems to be a bit of link bait as selfies are a seemingly hot topic lately. Otherwise, I think this is a pretty interesting summary of survey results and downright neutral compared to the vast sea of curmudgeonly articles about Millenials floating around these days.
The problem with this, is that when he enters the workforce a lot of that social awkwardness and bulling problems could come back again. So it's a short lived victory.

In the UK outside of silicon roundabout and a few good companies, programmers are low rung employees and often pushed around and managed by the same sort of people who bullied him school. He won't have any authority to hit back, and if he tried probably would be fired.

The majority of start ups, and tech companies in the UK are run non-technical entrepreneurs, marketeers and so on and not techs. These are normally selected from the type of people who bully at school, not the bullies.

A large part of being programmer in these organisations is learning to identify and tip toe around these people to stop them ruining your career.

School had a lot of bullying for me, university was great, and then at work it was like being thrown back into school.
I live in Austin. I'd say there are at least 36 city blocks, probably more.
> [...] the two things preventing me from cashing out of any portion of it is the likelihood I would be identified and the fact that any sales of it I have to pay taxes on.

Do you think this will change?

If not, then your unspent bitcoins are worth exactly $0 (ie. if you don't spend them they might as well be worth nothing). Or are you waiting for something?

Granted, I don't know who you are, and how important it is for you not to be identified (by whom?).
The Official Government Website of Durban, South Africa Hacked
Russia Secret defence documents leaked by Anonymous Hackers
It's not Photoshop. It's simply a lot of makeup and the use of out-of-view lighting/diffusers.
Libertarians should find another term for what they mean by 'free market', because as it stands, they're appropriating an existing term, then telling everyone else that they're using it incorrectly.
I run a business selling penetration testing software that I develop. It's completely bootstrapped. I do very little services work (I actively send this type of stuff to friend's companies). Right now, it's just me, although that's probably going to change. By most of my own definitions and the one you posted here... it's successful.

How did I get started on this? Sort of by accident.

I was working for Automattic after an acqui-hire thing. After a year there, I found that I missed working in security. I found a full-scope penetration testing gig three blocks from my apartment.

In my spare time, I started to tinker with a few ideas and released them as an open source project. Said project saw a lot of interest within the hacker community very quickly. I didn't expect this. Folks formed an opinion on it pretty quickly. Some people hate it. Others love it. Of those who know it, very few are in-between.

I left my pen testing job with a decent amount of money saved up. I didn't know exactly what I would go and do afterwards. I spent some time tinkering with Android, just for giggles.

I was very reluctant to start a business that used my "successful?" open source project. Partially because it leverages another open source project owned by another company.

I was at a conference in 2011 and someone from a US government agency asked if I was selling anything. I said no. He said that was too bad, because he had end of year money, and he liked my open source stuff. It was then that I decided to look at expanding my open source kit into a commercial product.

April will mark the two year anniversary of my first customer. My customers are well known organizations and they trust my software to assess how well they protect their networks. I'm constantly in awe of this.
I meant they are somewhat correct in their belief that bullying is a part of our social fabric. But I don't endorse bullying, rather I think that there is something wrong with our society.

It is not an uncommon (again, I don't endorse this viewpoint) for people to say that bullying is a normal part of growing up, and that it helps strengthen people's character, etc. I don't think people who say this are being 100% honest. I think if they were honest they would say that bullying is a way to identify the weakest or least socially capable 10% of people, and that if you don't fall into this category, then it's a great part of the growing process to find out you belong to the 90%.
Hello from Quebec,
I am on Hacker News, as a big reader not commenting. My online business, is profitable, it make all my income, an ok salary for me :-). I have read the book '4 hours week' and work only few hours a week. The business start with a shareware game (1990), quit my day job (2002) to create more sharewares, fail at the first one (the password/unlock was hack the first week). So I come with the idea of having a client/server game (2004) (harder to hack). That work enough to make a small salary. Then I build another client/server game (2011), almost the same as the first one but localized in 3 languages. Then I received a lawyer letter (2011) to close both of my online sites. I did make some modifications, after 2 years they leaves me alone... Being afraid of closing, I was looking for a plan B (2012), I works hard on web sites that have a lot of visitors to make money with AdWords, it works. Now half of the revenue come from the 2 online games, and the other half come from AdWords. The shareware, online games and web sites are all related to a very popular crossword game.
Enzymes vs. Probiotics
I found this interesting, maybe some other health hackers will too?
That is 1 million dollars!
How does one enforce a social structure with no agents to enforce said structure?
They still are for anything but graphical tasks (photo editing, drawing diagrams, etc.)

E.g. what's the fastest way to get a sorted list of all the .jpg files in a directory?
Congratulations on your successful business. Can you share link to your business website please?
30 missing Malaysia Airlines MH370 flight believed to be Freescale employees
Bullshit. It takes hard work, but ordinary people can get out there and do things just fine if they actively work at it rather than just whining on online forums.
Chinese radar expert has doubts that Malaysian airliner simply 'vanished'
Apart from the syntax and our current lack of a REPL outside of Windows, Dylan (http://opendylan.org/) sort of fits in that space. We're a lot like a slimmed down Common Lisp (designed by some of the same people that standardized CL), and bigger than a Scheme.

We're currently working on a lot of stuff, including an Objective C / Dylan bridge, a new build toolchain and an experimental REPL that may work outside of Windows until we can bring over the real one (once our LLVM backend is in place).
Within the EU, there are some fairly favourable (for the customer) return policies mandated by law. Even if you technically extended the time for return (and that you probably aren't covered in the US), most companies here would just err on the side of caution and grant your return in edge cases like this. Esp. large retailers such as ASOS.
That's tptacek's point, though: If Uber wants to have a presence there, they should fight the "shut down" Austin is imposing.
This kind of comment really annoys me.

CLI: You need to memorize at least a basic set of commands. There is contextual help once you know those commands, but there is no help to find out which commands do what in the first place. Clearly intended for what we now call power users.

Win9x/NT4+ GUI: All required operations are discoverable through reading what's on screen and going through the menus. No manual or googling required.

Mac since OS1/.Net GUIs: Even better, hotkey commands can be discovered in the Menus -> users can learn how to become faster while just using the programs.

OSX since 10.5: Any program on your HD, installed or not, and any operation within these programs can be discovered through system wide search, clearly indicated by the search symbol staying in the top right of your screen as well as the Help menu. Typing after clicking on Help will even point out the command's placement in the menu such that you can memorize for next time.

Win8/Ubuntu: Trololo who needs discoverability - let's hide most of the functionality behind non trivial gestures (we heard people like them on Macs[1] so let's go all in on them) => the UI now has similar discoverability properties as a CLI - you need to read the manual or google a tutorial to get started.

[1]Note: There is currently exactly one gesture that is really needed in the default settings on OSX (which I find a bad idea btw.): Two finger scrolling.
What if you got a PhD from Bulgaria in literature, left for the USA in 1991, and are 60 years old?

Are you in the same category as a well connected graduate from a top computer science program.

The lack of analysis and generalizations make this article meaningless. If your title is a question, give me a damn answer.
The dangers of incremental hostnames
I recently replaced Win7 with Win8 on my gaming rig. I get faster boots, and more disk space for games on my SSD. There's a setting for going to desktop instead of Metro when no apps are open. So the only time I use metro is when I mistakenly left click the start button - to shut down, you can _right_ click the start button to get a contextual menu with a shut down option.

Overall, I find Win8 better in every way, it's nothing new that you have to change a few options to make Windows usable :)
Scramjet – The technology powering hypersonic flight
Programs differ. I'm a CS grad student (PhD) and it seems like most people don't even bother registering at all until a month before class or so. No one cares about class all that much and for most courses getting an A or a B (anything else is failing) is the expected course of action, though that isn't to say the coursework is easy. You effectively couldn't graduate with less than a 3.5 anyway, though again, no one cares about GPA. If you elect to do a MS, the comp exams are another matter.

For the PhD, it's all research, research, research. For that same reason, some people try to take classes that are reportedly less work or where active research work can count toward a class project because otherwise, it takes too much away from research time.

It's a very different experience for me than undergraduate because of the low regard for class work (though doing poorly will invite mockery).
Interceptors in AngularJS made easy
LDM Landing Page Impact – Lucid AcademyLucid Academy-bestcbstore.com
I think the idea here is that the system is self-reinforcing. An initially undifferentiated mix of children self-segregates as the children begin to perceive difference, and privileged/norm-conformant children persecute unprivileged/norm-nonconformant children. The persecution has the function of excluding the unlucky children from the social opportunities that come from access to privileged society (both because they are actively blocked by the other children, and because they block themselves by not realising they can seek opportunities or not considering themselves capable or worthwhile). This exclusion compounds as the cohort ages, rapidly becoming total. The result is that only a small selection of the cohort has access to privileged channels of society, maintaining a relatively low degree of competition at that level.
Because they always say that following your own interest is the best way to assure the greater good. AFAIK thieves are excluded because they don't respect private property.
http://www.advancedpentest.com/
My first exposure to this concept was in Eckhart Tolle's "The Power of Now". I look forward to reading Watt as well to gain further insight, thanks for sharing.
Ask HN: is fonts.Googleapis.com really slow or is it just me?
Are there any actual lawyers behind this project? Or is it yet another site where every other guy from the Internet who thinks he knows what some license means decides to tell everyone else about it?
Well for what it's worth, what little time I have spent in win 8 has been infuriating, and apparently it has been because it has never occurred to me to try hitting win-q or win-p. Next time I'm sitting at a windows machine I'll try to remember to give them a try.

This doesn't seem like a winning UI paradigm, however.
The boys in the bunkhouse
On thing is true: the site only begins and users can make it whatever they want. However, since you start by giving more karma to people in the Bitcoin community, you already drive the website to focus heavily on Bitcoin (also, look at the "library" page https://cryptanalys.is/library.php it is only Bitcoin related). Which is entirely okay! There are many people interested by that (and if it could relieve HN from the contant Bitcoin noise that would be awesome). You even say so in your FAQ: "Fellow Redditors and HNers may think of us as the cryptocurrency subreddit of Hacker News". That is a valid choice, and I think you should present your site like this rather than "Hacker News for crypto, security, and privacy".

> you have to admit the cryptography sphere has been dominated by the recent Satoshi Nakamoto debacle

No, I don't agree. I'm doing a PhD in the field of crypto, follow multiple mailing lists related to my field, watch for the new papers arriving on the IACR ePrint [1], follow many blogs and subreddits… and I can assure you the real crypto sphere don't give a damn about "the recent Satoshi Nakamoto debacle". Bitcoin enthusiasts do, however.

[1] http://eprint.iacr.org/ (btw, this is a very good source of security related original content).

PS: in your "what is this" at the top of the page you are not consistent with "r/subreddit" and "/r/subreddit" (leading '/'), you should fix that.
I have both of your books: math&physics and linear algebra. Keep up a great job!
Do you have examples of citizen-campaigning that has caused law changes?

I don't disagree with you, but I tend to think that politicans will use citizen campaigns if they're useful and ignore them otherwise.
He didn't "invent" JSON.

JSON is a subset of javascript which already existed. He just coined the phrases 'json' and wrote it down.
How to use toggle button in android
Non-static variable cannot be referenced from a static context
right! maybe they should "fight" it by serving people around the absurd rules during a popular tech-related event (a space in which Austin claims to compete) and forcing the local authority figures to put their corruption on full display...

But its cool, I'm sure tptacek has full view of their internal strategies and knows, for sure, that Uber hasn't tried at all to operate within Austin
> The person in question probably comes from the mindset that setting an unachievable bar forces quality.

Funnily enough, today's Dilbert is about this. See http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2014-03-09/
"About 100 partners had guarantees totaling about $100 million a year".

There's half of their problem right there.
Self-Publishers should not be called Real Authors
Google Picasa Download link is broken.
On Android, though, app developers just have to register open intents for their urls, and Android takes care of the rest. No special schemes necessary, and falls back to the browser if the user doesn't have an app installed to handle it. What exactly is wrong with that setup that necessitates a whole new set of schemas that will result in urls that can only be handled if you already have the app installed?
I live in a draconian tax country. How can I open a online international business and receive money from anywhere in the world? Do I need to move to a tax heaven?
Yes avg drivers gross billings are north of $100k. Issue is Uber needs to quality check drivers are legit, registered and qualified. There isn't a HUGE amount of drivers who are actually able to fit into this profile.

Uber are taking more measures to get more drivers on the system esp with the recent JV financing deal with Toyota to create 100,000 more uber/self-employed drivers.
When I say "social structure" I mean the idea that people should feel compelled to follow societal norms. Even though school bullies don't enforce the same norms as society at large, they do enforce the norms of their peer group.

Conservatives (not all, but many) consider the principal that social convention be backed by actual violence, to be sufficiently important that establishing it at young age is worth some suffering or unfairness.
Well, 100% isn't reachable. But a high confidence is reachable. The thing though is, your PM isn't asking you for 100% confidence. He's asking you to make every single 2 hour tasks into a weeklong research and engineering project.

So sure, tell him everytime he asks this, it'll take you a week to make sure.
I had a Commodore 64, but my best friend (we were 10 yo) got an MSX. I still remember how he repeated the sales pitch that "it was far superior to the Commodore 64". It's the first time I remember questioning a computer salesman pitch. But it was just the start of a long career helping friends to defuse all their bullshit.
Nope, technically it has to be an infinite machine, otherwise it's just an over complicated finite state machine and proving termination in those is trivial.

I/O (except to bounded sources like disks) could probably save you, but the proof will be harder.
I run http://officesnapshots.com which publishes photos of office design projects from around the world.

I started it in 2007 as a gin side project to teaching history. I'm no longer teaching and it is the majority of my income.
Why is this called "deep" linking? What makes it deep?
http://www.robots-everywhere.com I used to employ two people, but I automated them away. I am successful in the sense that I have clear title to my home at age 33, if that counts.
A little bit off-topic, but I find it really interesting how some American webpages have a look and feel that is recognizable in a fraction of second. The website https://www.appointmentreminder.org/ is one of these, the second you enter, the second you know it is a US American page.
In what way is Windows 8 amazing?
Not him, but I use a Yoga 1 as my main laptop (CS undergrad) and I run ubuntu 13.10 on it. Getting wifi working takes a bit of work, and I don't have full functionality (though you can get it working with some scripts, I just don't care) in terms of screen rotation, but the laptop is pretty great.

Pluses:
The touchscreen works and support multitouch
its a very solid laptop
Wifi and bluetooth drivers are available
Installation was pretty painless, it took me some research to get around the shenanigans that are UEFI, but there are guides on the web

Minuses:
automatic screen rotation is apparently impossible
making wifi work is a struggle and it occasionally needs to have the drivers recompiled after updates, I simply have the file in my main directory and do so as needed
There's almost no linux stuff that makes use of multitouch, so the point is moot
I have two friends who work for the Austin Police Department; both are black, both are male, both are less than 40 years of age, and both are sworn officers. Your broad brush is neither warranted nor appreciated.
Haha oh lord. Wikipedia is dangerous enough as it is without lists of related topics.
Hard work and a lot of time. Ordinary people putting in large numbers of unpaid hours of work competing against highly paid lobbyists that wine and dine with the elite.
I'd add in Spelunky, FTL, Binding of Isaac, though some of those are from the year before.
It's amazing that Windows 8 was released like this when it seems like a basic amount of user testing would show that people are not going to be happy about having to learn a new interface.

It's not that surprising when you consider all of the egos and politics going on at Microsoft during the run-up to release. A lot of these decisions were a matter of pride.
Tanzania to Uganda via a cargo ship
My family was awesome in that sense.

Here is a slightly fictionalized version of what happened to me:

http://spiritplumber.deviantart.com/art/Zero-Tolerance-42710...
I'm Dan's manager and tech lead at the company. We're going to look after Dan as best we can.
EPIC (2004)
I can't help but feel that no matter what I offer up as Windows 8 being amazing, you won't agree.
FIDM website down
Apparently that quote's disputed -- while there's another one that seems less so:

"We live in a decaying age. Young people no longer respect their parents. They are rude and impatient. They frequently inhabit taverns and have no self control." -- attributed to an inscription in an Ancient Egyptian tomb, quoted in Buckminster Fuller's I Seem To Be a Verb.
Interesting. You make a living from this? Is it all SEO driven?
I'm curious, how many of them were snatched?
https://github.com/danielamitay/iHasApp