skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you're missing an important point. In order to make that $100k by working, you have to, y'know, work.

While the $2M doesn't buy you any more "stuff" than your job, it gives you the freedom to do what you want. I'd consider that a cruicialy important "quality of life" metric, no?
The fruit, rice and pasta are pretty high up on the glycemic index.
A few thoughts:

1. The rule of thumb I've always heard is that $2 million in the bank lets you live off the interest with a salary of $50k/year. Which is all that anyone really needs. $4 million for $100k/year, etc. These are the standard "I'm set for life" numbers, as long as you don't do silly things with your money. Which many many people do (trust fund kids, professional athletes).

2. Just because you can retire doesn't mean that you're going to retire. One of the ways I like to think about it is that an extra $50k/year from my investments can turn a $20k/year job into a $70k/year job. So now all of the sudden I can take all kinds of jobs that I wouldn't have considered doing in the past due to low salary. Plus you don't need the job, so you can walk away from stressful or unpleasant situations much more easily.

3. Personally, I think the remorse that I would feel if I had lost it all due a rogue wave would outweigh the remorse that I'd feel if I had sold the business "too early" and missed out on doubling my money.
"I may not agree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it!"

I took the tone of the article as quasi-facetious, but there is a kernel of truth to it. The fact is that for the most part visitors don't really care how a website looks as much as we care about the content on it. People usually get to sites from Google search results, and Google only sees content, not fancy graphics, transparency, and rounded corners.

The company I work for (to remain nameless) makes millions from generic community forums and website acquisitions that haven't been redesigned since the first internet boom. When we redesign them it is mainly to convert them to vBulletin for forums or a cms for other sites, or Windows/ColdFusion/ASP to LAMP. Updating the look of a site is a byproduct of improving the user experience and maximizing revenue, never an end in itself.
The studies he's referring to don't suggest that going from "extremely broke" to "making money" won't increase your happiness.

What they do say is that after a certain point -- when most needs and some comforts are met -- adding money does not increase happiness.

Also, just in general, your life experience is not a substitute for data.
I think the face of IT is changing in a way that most established companies just can't grasp. Hardware has gotten incredibly cheap, as has software. Current and future generations of workers and managers grew up being comfortable with computers.

IT departments don't need to worry anywhere near as much about building and setting up workstations and servers anymore, because it's all easily automated, freeing up the talent pool to focus on more strategic business needs -- security, performance, monitoring, and so on.

Plenty of opportunity.
1000 calories for toast with Nutella!?

I assume by calories you mean kilocalories in which case you are probably looking around 1000 KJ (kilojoules) for two slices of toast with Nutella. That's around 239 (kilo)calories.
You might also consider one of the no-income-tax states like Texas, Florida or Nevada in case your startup starts to make some money. Moving out of Silicon Valley (with the top state tax rate over 9%) can be a big money-saver.
Expiring shortened URLs shouldn't be used to implement "business logic" or security. The first person might just share the unshortened link with others; you might even inspire a cottage industry of "expiring URL expander and archiver" utility, in much the same way BugMeNot exists because of stupid "free signups".
But identical twins are very different people despite the same DNA.
Agreed. Theme Forest is awesome for admin skins and so much more...
More drivel. Maybe you can show us two huge competitors, where one has started using the other software? You can not, because it hasn't happened before. Palm have a lot of options, there are lots of free music organisers they can use, they have chosen to use iTunes, which they know they are not allowed to do.
Not essential, but does not hurt to know common phrases
Ha, yeah. In a way it has already begun: the revival of Java in the browser is GWT, obfuscated Javascript is the new bytecode, and canvas is the new Java2D.
What does 3 1/2 mean?
i greatly appreciate your point #3.. thank you.
Nice one :) I was thinking of adding a downloadable list too - how did you get so many archived URLs? Do you have a cron running on Twitter/etc?
Well, the fact is that Apples browser does show up in a significant portion of mobile sites. The stats have been posted all over the place, including here. Can look it up for you if you really don't believe this.
An elevator to space? NASA urged to explore advanced tech
From pg:
http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=117171
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=392347
Newspapers: Shut up and charge already
What about one with the binding up top?
Santo Petrus Balsamus
Try using them upside down, spirals on the right.
Wait, why do bigger ventures without requiring outside investors? If you want to do bigger things, you'll have to put more in, and you're going to end up in a situation where the same percentage of your net worth is tied up.

Instead, if you have a profitable exit, it will be much easier for you to raise more with giving up less from professional investors for your next, bigger project. Then you'll be able to do something big and awesome, maintain control, and still have more cash in the bank.
I believe he means three and a half bedroom, though normally they also give the number of bathrooms too. Eg: 3 bedroom, 2 1/2 bathroom apartment.
It's Montreal for 1 bedroom, 1 kitchen, 1 livingroom and a bathroom.
You're right - Opera is objectively good, but WebKit is objectively great
Correction: No, not essential but someone will eventually treat you like shit because you don't speak french, and it's going to be offensive and feel like overt racism, but it'll happen rarely. </rant>
This is a cool idea. There is a feature I've been looking for in a url shortening service. Vapurl is half way there with the expiration after a certain amount of time or number of visits, but what I'm looking for is to change the url after those conditions are met.

Say, for a user-contributed coupon/deal site, I want to give users an incentive to post, so I'll let them put in a shortened url redirect to their affiliate links in the post, but after x numbers of clicks or a set amount of time, I want to switch the redirect to my own affiliate link.
In comparison to urban BC, where a studio costs $850 (in a nice building in a nice suburb), and $15 electric. I just checked craiglist, and it seems like your rent is at least $200 cheaper than everywhere else. Rent has gone up by several hundred dollars everywhere in canada it seems.
Yes. I moved to Goa to prototype a process-flow document organization system for attorneys, for my first startup. The plan was to... get clients and then build the full deal in Bagnalore. I talked about it... here: http://www.hackerne.ws/item?id=518075 The 'paper' on the product is here: http://lucision.com/legal/Hammurabi_Writeup.pdf It never took off.

The short version is: you can't ALL leave. Someone needs to be near your market, whatever that is. You've got to be iterating products. Even for an internet company, I am skeptical that this can be done in isolation.

That being said, Costa Rica or some place cheap to get to/from is probably a better idea than... India :)

All in all, it was a great experience. I... learned Java, did a lot of catching up on things like design patterns to be able to work in Eclipse, etc. I learned... those startup things you learn the first time round. But being stuck in India when my attorney friend stopped answering my emails meant I was SOL on that product concept, and I could not iterate from India. I ended up doing something entirely different, but I couldn't even get to another product idea from there. I had to come home.
Is it just me or has Hacker News started to become an echo chamber for debating internet meme's that are largely pointless and contain nothing of substance?
Tell them to use the python plugin to SPSS to analyze things they already know. Use it to learn to do things like pull data off websites, etc.

(SPSS is a statistical package used highly in economics and biological sciences)
Rands: The Book Stalker
EDIT: The original thread title was: When did you switch to stick shift?

The title was metaphorical. I meant to get people to share their coming of age stories; when they decided to take more control over their life: switch from automatic to stick shift, so to speak.

Well, when did you?
Flash for pocketpc seems to work OK. Shouldn't the user be able to decide if they can spare the battery power. Most people would have a charger handy at work so I don't see what the problem is if you do need to recharge anyway.
I would like to look back on the sale of our startup with the feeling that the buyer and I could sit on a entrepreneurial conference panel together and talk in a warm, genuine way about having come to terms that were fair to both of us. So for me, "n" would depend to some extent on who the acquirer was (and where I thought they could take "our" business.)

That said, I'd find it almost impossible to conceal my glee and satisfaction with anything north of $2M.
My startup was based around Flash-gaming, and our traffic numbers (to the extent that we had traffic, which wasn't enough to keep going but was enough to see some patterns) showed that the vast majority of hits occurred between 9 AM - 6 PM Eastern, Mon-Fri. Tailed off until about 8 PM (my guess is those were the west-coasters), then we'd have very few hits at night or on the weekend. Funny how that works. ;-)
2-bedroom apartments near the University of Michigan's North Campus in Ann Arbor can also be had for ~$800-1000/mo, if you're willing to put up with apartments that have had a series of students (i.e., people who are probably less likely than average to take good care of their residence) living in them. We have an emerging tech startup scene, but you'll have to budget some extra for heat. I don't know how much for heat because I am very rarely home, so I don't turn the heat above 60.
OK some games, but I am yet to see anyone playing Civ 2 during work hours, or Alpha Centauri. That would sure make me laugh.
Hmm... I'm upset they forgot the PCP again. It's something people think the computer should be able to do (quickly?).
Hear, hear. I live the Bay Area, am in my 20s, have a ton of programming experience and also a strong math background. The temptation to play startup roulette is high. But at the end of the day I can't shake the feeling that spending the healthy & free years of my life working 90hrs a week on something that no one will even remember in ten years is a fool's errand. Yes, there is a small chance that I could get rich and never have to work again. But the far greater likelihood is I'll just wind up in my mid-30s doing the same thing and wondering what happened to the last decade.

So I work 20hrs a week consulting and spend the rest of my day reading, studying (I'm getting a masters in my spare time), cooking or playing music. There are definitely days when I am envious at my friends who work in tech, what with their fat 401ks and rockin health care and 4x income. But usually not. I'm in way better shape, have read 10x as many books in the past year, traveled more, etc. Most importantly, every time we hang out I just sense that they are unhappy and bored.

I realize most of the people reading this are going to be a lot more like aforementioned friends than like me so I hope this doesn't come off as insulting. When I think of my friends I really wonder what makes it worthwhile for them--but of course I could never ask that without sounding like a jerk. So if anyone is reading this I'd love to hear. Is it just the $$? Because I feel like you need so much less of that than you think to be really happy.
No, the half is the bathroom. So 3 1/2 is 3 rooms and a bathroom. The three rooms could be 2 bedrooms and a kitchen but it's more likely a bedroom, a living room and a kitchen.
> [Mobile Safari] totally dominates all other mobile browsers in real-world stats -- people actually use it.

Saying that Mobile Safari dominates mobile browsing seems a bit self-defeating -- of course Safari is going to dominate if the iPhone is the crowd favourite for mobile web browsing and Apple only allows one browser on the iPhone.

My question is whether or not those mobile-browser statistics would change very much if Apple allowed 3rd-party browsers on the iPhone.* Then we'd get a good idea of how good Mobile Safari is.

* Let's get this out of the way straight-up: Apple doesn't have to allow another browser into the store, but I'm proposing a hypothetical scenario in which they do.
I think it's important to note that the major reason for Palm to use iTunes is not because Palm didn't want to build their own music organizer, but because most people already use iTunes to organize their music, and it's a huge pain in the ass to switch or worse use multiple organizers.
I would sprite each set of tiles, based on the dimensions. So you'd have one image for all the terrain tiles, one for all the terrain decorations (grains/shields/whales/fish/game/etc.), one for all the improvements, one for city styles at each game era, one for units (again based on game era - put your phalanxes/warriors/settlers in one sprite, your battleships/airplanes/carriers in another), etc.

This also avoids some nasty binpacking problems around combining sprites of different sizes.

When the game starts up, you only need to preload the terrain, terrain decoration, and initial unit sprites - that's probably a couple dozen, no more than you'd need to draw the page as an image. Less, actually, since you can re-use your terrain sprites.

You should then be preloading the other sprites as the game goes on. If the user isn't doing anything, use that network connection to download the next spriteset the game will need.
I use github for hosting all of my projects right now, but I've been writing my own software in my spare time and I can't wait to migrate, doing everything for yourself brings some really nice advantages.
Texas doesn't have a state income tax?
We've been out in the valley for the summer, certainly living on less than $1000 per person. You just need roommates and a willingness to live in the cheap part of town. My share of the rent is $400.

Going to another country is sexier, but also more distracting.
Are you deliberately trying to be a wanker?
Canvas is also too slow on FF/Linux. Actually, for much of the Canvas stuff I've done, the bottleneck has been Firefox, not IE. excanvas.js and VRML isn't that slow; it's no speed demon, but Canvas is just about as slow on FF/Win and much slower on FF/Linux.
I really think there is some room here for blogs and news sites to provide their own short urls that people can use to link to them. They might be able to reap the benefits of a higher page rank.

Another good side affect is that urls might get cleaned up a bit in hopes that they will get copied straight into a tweet. I would love a web with short copy and pastable urls.
Do you know any U.S. tech types who've made the move up there, and what their experience has been like?

I spent a week in Montréal for the 2001 Yet Another Perl Conference (YAPC) followed by some sightseeing, and while it was sweltering and they had us stuffed in the McGill dorms (no A/C; needed to keep the window open) while Katie Holmes' latest movie was filming night scenes all night long outside (wishing I could close the window), it was still a great week and a wonderful city experience.

I was a bit clueless, and I really owe it to the local Perl community for being gracious enough to put up with me. If any of you are on here, cheers!

Edit: More than a bit, really.
I second this. I'd have been better off in a piece of crap apartment in an undesirable area, rice and beans and a motorcycle, plus access to brain power in the bay area.
As someone who's been trying to lose weight for a while, I have to say that trying to control your diet without working out is hard. Ever since I started working out and playing squash (for the last 2 months) I have significantly reduced my daily calorie intake (from ~3500 calories to between 1200 - 1500 calories). I tried this in the past but could never keep it going beyond a couple of weeks.

I think the reason working out has helped me is 'cause in the back of my head, I'm thinking about all the work I'd have to put in at the gym to make up for those 1000 extra calories I had. So, while controlling your diet is essential, doing some physical exercise to support that is just as important IMHO.
Poll: Do you Usenet?
Use-a-what?
What would you end up drawing on the canvas, if the images are drawn with sprites? I can't think of anything else in Civilization that gets drawn, other than text for city names (which should probably be done as absolutely-positioned spans).
How to Find the Cheapest Promotional Products?
There are number of challenges in finding the right promotional products and promotional gifts. One of the biggest challenges is finding the cheapest promotional products. While promotional products are the best way to market your products and to create brand identity, you need to make sure that the promotional items that you choose will not shoot up your overall promotional budget.
Copy shop?
My bookshelf has (apart from books) scale models of the Thunderbirds on it (http://is.gd/29V4K). I'm not sure what that says about me.

Rands is so right though. You can tell a lot about someone from their bookshelf (arrangement, order, placement, etc).
The balsamiq guy did; he went back to Italy, but he's a native Italian, so ymmv
Completely tangential, but how did you get into consulting? I'm also in my 20s, in a tech-heavy area (RTP, NC), and have been considering doing something like that on the side, but have no good idea where to start.
We're by Tufts in Somerville, MA. You can get a pretty reasonable place for 600-700, assuming roommates aren't an issue. About a 5 minute walk to Davis Square and then a hop and a skip to either Harvard or MIT.
Add Washington to that list as well.
The identical twins I know are very similar to each other. Just my two cents of a data point.
I think that'd actually be slower if it means you have to do the drawing on JavaScript (vs. the browser's native rendering engine). As a rule of thumb, anything on an interpreted JS engine (not Chrome or FF3.5) runs about 1000 times slower than the equivalent C.

The way I'd do it is create a bunch of large tiles (like the size of Google Maps) and pre-draw all the sprites onto a single tile. Put those tiles into a single container div that is bigger than its container, positioned absolutely, and clipped with overflow:hidden. When the world scrolls, simply change the positioning of the container. If it scrolls far enough that you need to render another tile, drop the one off-screen and pre-render its replacement on the other side, so if the user scrolls even more, the images are waiting for them. Much like how G!Maps does it.

This offloads the graphics work onto the C++ rendering engine, which has been tuned for this sort of stuff. Doing it in JS is just asking for trouble.
One good case for paying a fair salary to yourself as a founder is when all of the founders are not participants in the day-to-day operation of the business. If one of the founders is a "silent partner," for example someone who helped hatch the original concept but only comes in a few days a month to help out, then the operating partners can effectively increase their ownership share of the company over time by paying themselves for their management work.

If cash flow is a problem, then all or part of the salary could be deferred. In the event that the company becomes profitable, or is sold, then those IOU's become payable before the shareholders get dividends or a payout.

This is perhaps not the most efficient path for the company as a whole, and if all founders are working side-by-side, then it all comes out in the wash.
I am not a big fan of taking outside investors. I have been a self-funded entrepreneur for my entire career and it has worked very well for me.

The proceeds of a sale would allow me to have ample money in the bank and plenty left over for other endeavors. My issue is that the longer I wait (as long as everything continues apace), the more that "plenty" becomes.
10 million. i can easily get a 10% return investing every year and 10% return on 10 million is more than enough to live on every year.
Flash for desktop windows is ok, too. Maybe Adobe's problem is that they won't allocate the necessary talent to get OSX right. One thing is for certain: if they can't make it fast on desktop OSX they'll not likely deliver on mobile OSX. If I were Apple I'd make Adobe fix their desktop version before I'd let them near my phone.

About giving users enough rope to hang themselves: for every one user like you that could make a conscious tradeoff there are thousands who would never connect the dots between Adobe and battery life.

That's not a business risk I would take if I were Apple. I can take a few ubernerds whining about flash off in some remote corner of the web. I couldn't take Jay Leno making battery jokes in his monologue.
The central Thesis of MC Siegler is that one of the key arguments against Apple, that they prevent you from using their platform freely, is actually an Argument FOR Apple - that Apple attempts to maintain a "great" user experience by enforcing consistency of standards, etc... Flash (and any other VM platform) would bypass those controls.

I think that within 2 years, maybe 18 months, we'll look back at this time with amusement, as mobile platforms (MacTablets, descendants of the iPhone, Android) become feature/Power compatible with products like todays NetBooks, and the though of the OS/Cell Provider telling you what application you can or cannot run on your system will seem silly.

And that's because it is.
I'm in Beijing to cut costs and recruit team members. Ditto on both points a and b.
Pasta isn't a high GI food.

"Q: Why does pasta have a low GI?

A: Pasta has a low GI because of the physical entrapment of ungelatinised starch granules in a sponge-like network of protein (gluten) molecules in the pasta dough. Pasta is unique in this regard. As a result, pastas of any shape and size have a fairly low GI (30 to 60). Asian noodles such as hokkein, udon and rice vermicelli also have low to intermediate GI values."

from http://www.glycemicindex.com/faqprint.htm

As a reference for anyone unfamiliar with the glycemic index, a piece of white bread is typically set to be at 100, and lower is better.
The states with no income tax are in red on the following map:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_income_tax
Writing interpreters using functional programming.

I'm actually doing this now -- writing interpreters for DSLs using Clojure at my current job at Health Market Science. Even though it blends in with all the other companies as another lame Java shop, I have actually had the opportunity to work on very interesting problems, and I have had enough freedom to use cutting-edge tools. I even prototyped a JRuby on Rails frontend that called into one of my interpreters written in Clojure. For some reason, I have always loved writing interpreters.
The Future of Man--How Will Evolution Change Humans?
Ok, I'll speak as someone who has actually lost 70 pounds without diet pills, surgery or anything unhealthy. I had to change how I thought about food, eat stuff thats less processed, and find things that I really liked to do for exercise.

I love to bicycle and some days I will be on the trails for 3 hours. I burn 1000 calories per hour while exercising. Also by exercising more and eating better I actually started eating less.