skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This issue is dear to my heart, too, as a hobbyist programming language designer myself ;-)

I've never seen it as a route to income in itself - but it can do so indirectly. My project, ARGON (http://www.argon.org.uk/) is all about reinventing the platform we build software on - OS, programming language, libraries, file system, network protocol - purely because the current technologies we use are hampered by backward compatibility and poorly integrated; I think it'd be a good thing for the world to start again from scratch (and deal with compatibility at a higher level).

So I've thought more about how I might possibly make my hobby pay for itself. I think that an entire platform might well be successful as an embedded platform, as there's much less motivation for compatibility and a familiar programming environment in that market. In the workstation and server worlds, however, I think such a platform pretty much has to be open source, or it'll never be adopted by hackers who want something to play with. Then the usual open-source tricks will apply: selling boxed sets with manuals and 'enterprise tools' in, support contracts, commercial redistribution licenses, etc.

Getting rich by writing a book and general fame/glory leading to speaking engagements, however, is right out ;-)
Even then, I'd rather see:

DEBUG = socket.gethostname() == 'developmentcomp'

if DEBUG then...
Ditch IE6 for IE8 and Microsoft will donate 8 meals to charity.
No, I made the account to pst other things. I just havent found anything good. It is awesome software.
IIRC, koala isn't considered endangered, but I think various agencies want to do a current population assessment.
Coding for the unexpected
Strangely, I can see a Bing advertisement on the right on Google when I search for "ascii art". Google is letting Bing buy adwords ? :-/
Their claim about requiring a credit card purchase is bogus because to open up an iTunes account, you need a credit card.
Scaling a Web App (PHP/MySQL)
This is nothing new; Thorstein Veblen more or less went over all of this back in 1899 in "The Theory of the Leisure Class" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_the_Leisure_Class ).
Good observations, but the last two paragraphs fail to convince me. "Normal people" span the gamut of solitary, advice-seeking, etc. I also wouldn't describe the past as "slow and harmonious".
I was thinking of something along the lines of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton but for computer scientists & entrepreneurs.

In short: Interesting things happen when you put smart people in a room without any constraint and a little bit of funding.

Although I freely admit the IAS is fairly controversial and some people hate the model.
You never need a credit card on you to buy an app.
Looks like Ben Mezrich is making stuff up yet once again...
In August of 1999, I visited MIT's Media Lab and saw the future.
Actually, I beg to differ with the author. The problem I've come across with a lot of CMSes is that they have tried to make content so abstract as to make it cumbersome to do anything with it. The only thing that really exists with content is its concrete representation at any given point in time, whether it's HTML, a database table row, or an audio recording. You can't store abstract ideas, but that's precisely what CMSes are trying to do. All the content is broken down into primitive types. Structure and sequence are removed as much as possible. Then more complex content is assembled from these smaller pieces. The problem is, this seems like the right approach but it quickly breaks down.

For instance, I've dealt with CMSes that have tried to remove HTML from their core content only to be forced to store HTML strings in their data stores and use an editor like FCKEdit or TinyMCE in later versions of the product. The problem has never been the extra structure and sequence that HTML lends to the content. The problem has always been that it has been cumbersome to transform this structure and sequence. When someone wants to change their website so an article written on one HTML page is now spread across 5 pages, it shouldn't require them to have to jump through hoops to accomplish this. Or if somebody wants to convert a written article into a spoken recording, a CMS should be able to handle this.

It's alright to store content in its final publishable state of HTML, so long as you make it easy to transform that content into different representations. How you store the intermediary data does not matter. It's the transformations between final content states that are the key. But today's CMSes make it so difficult to transform content. Think about it. How straightforward is it to move a website from one CMS to another let alone from say, a website to a printed book? I honestly think the future of CMSes lies in something that looks a lot like Yahoo Pipes rather than some centralized repository enterprise battleship clunker (can you tell I've had to deal with some crappy CMSes)?
I bought this exact kit earlier this year and I fall firmly in the 'I want more neat stuff' camp.

I want to buy the ARDX kit but it didn't come out until after I had already purchased the starter kit.

http://www.adafruit.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&...

However you can download the PDF's (check the Resources section of the page) so I'm going to buy the missing components.

Edit:

One thing I am sorely missing is a decent sized breadboard for prototyping. The little mini one that comes with the starter kit is nice because it fits on the proto-shield but I want a bigger one for my initial designs.
Extracting fields as opposed to documents is a different kettle of fish, I think.
One thing you could do to smooth the waveform, since you're building the battery pack anyway, wire it for half or 2x the voltage (with corresponding decrease or increase in amperage) and run it through a transformer to the correct voltage. You will lose some power in the transformer, but the waveform will be much smoother.
"No More Smoke and Mirrors": The Internet Isn't for Investing Anymore
tsk, tsk.
Irritating jerks on both sides. Plus, I like the Gruber post from yesterday, wherein Zuckerberg's described as a toejam-picking awkward 20something who is in no way the second coming of Bill Gates.

Which seems just about right.

(Also, as far as the local exploits go, San Francisco has a ton of "ambitious" women who are known to party hard. ahem I am Jack's total lack of surprise.)
It’s unclear when Google planted this Easter egg, but it seems many people learned about it for the first time last night after the company’s search czar Marissa Mayer revealed it in a tweet.

They must have released it over the weekend b/c I did a search for "ascii art" on Thursday and Google displayed the regular logo.
Cool, I never heard about this project. It seems like its a Peer2Peer award system, is that right? I considered creating a sort of peer kudos/badge feature as well but there are a lot of issues to overcome with that. Basically the same problems Twitter has. How do I stop people from giving the "free diet pills award!" :) Thoughts?
Doesn't it seem like this is a reason it doesn't matter if you are in Silicon Valley?
I don't think he was being entirely literal, quite to the extreme that would warrant your didactic prescription.
I just finished a project using these exact same parts! After looking at the high prices on the XBee chips I got a few of these same transmitters and receivers from Sparkfun to build a remote control for one of my robots. The chips have a lot of quirks but are not very hard to figure out despite some comments to the contrary on Sparkfun. If you are interested in Arduino I would highly recommend Tom Igoe's book Making Things Talk. The book is filled with a ton of wireless projects and walks you through the Arduino basics. If you are in L.A. and interested in Arduino I recommend checking out the occasional Arduino classes offered at Machine Project (www.machineproject.com).
This actually makes me want to jump in / its a indicator to me that your not that far behind in the game (getting in early, with the android system) -

- I really think it 3-5 years android will be what apple is today; I'm not saying to wait around - but perhaps plan for it.
Hank Paulson's Longest Night
It is actually a kind of interesting stack-based grammar. Silly keywords aside I kind of liked learning about how it works and adding new keywords to it.

The fun part is picking really good variable names that make it even more obfuscated to people who don't recognize it. If you don't find it slightly fun, you may not like the IOCCC either.

Some character even got it working for Counter-Strike: Source addons:
http://forums.eventscripts.com/viewtopic.php?t=27349
> Google is letting Bing buy adwords ?

Perhaps they are worried about some sort of anti-trust suit...?
The free edition is just the base IDE(code editor, debugger, gui designer). Come on this is MS, there are 5 versions of the pay IDE.
Things you need to pay for:

using more than one language(you can download multiple free versions but that means having multiple installs of VS laying around),

3rd party plugins,

profiler,

code test coverage tool,

static analysis tool,

Database tools,

Integration with their team foundation server(source control, bug tracker, project management stuff )
So are children
If you are going to be mostly immobilized the most likely potential problem is gaining weight. Be very careful not to eat more than you need (be especially careful about snacking from boredom). I speak from experience when I say not gaining weight in the first place is a LOT easier than losing it later.
The mobile software market is young (relative to it's tragic past) and we're a small shop of mashups => advertising/web/software engineering. I have roughly 10 years of experience but it's not about me, it's about us and when combined — we have a lot to offer as a young company that's trying to get off the ground.

I'm very transparent when communicating our strengths and weaknesses to make sure the project+expertise = good fit on both ends of the deal. I agree with your point about wisdom, but heart surgery is rather linear and you better be highly specialized in your trade for that line of work. :)

ps. It's not that I disagree with ASmartBear, I just feel the post is a bit generalized in its advice. Selling client services does not benefit from a prebuilt software product that can sell itself.
Software development: It's all about trust ...
Software development is a lot about trust. But It is hard to trust someone, if you really do not understand what he is doing. There are different recent trends in software industry that try to tackle the issue.
It's a petition to the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, so Commonwealth status is unlikely to have any meaning, because he has nothing to do with the Commonwealth (except for happening to be the leader of a member country).

However, writing to the Queen in support of the knighthood would be within your rights as a citizen of a Commonwealth country, I should think.
I think there are a lot of good gems in there. Especially the one on: the minimal viable product concept by Eric Ries.
It's true if you want to make money, develop for the iPhone and not the Android.

But if you want to build neat, useful things I'd say in the long run the Android platform will be better.

I think Android versus iPhone is kind of an Apples to Oranges comparison. It's like comparing the PC with the Xbox. Sure, you can make a ton of money developing games for the Xbox, but that also means you have to develop games.

From what I've read(with some exceptions), the real money made on the iPhone is in developing games.

I wouldn't develop for the Android to make money. I would do it to make cool apps that I would use myself and could distribute myself without going through the App store & review process. I think the Android will be the cooler platform to develop for eventually, unless all you care about is making money. In which case make games.
Don't hold me to this, but I think I remember seeing this a while ago. The distinctive ascii google logo, it triggered something in my head...
I must admit, this type of thing as you and dflock have described has always been in the back of my mind. I kept tell the thoughts to go away because thats a pretty big undertaking. Fortunately, I actually have experience building customer facing rule engines.

This is dangerously tempting to work on. Should I go for it? Perhaps I would need to provide both methods of awarding badges. I dont see StackOverflow.com wanting to re-implement their badge system rules in the KaBadge system.
With UUCP, we used to put machine names in the order they were needed for routing, so in effect it was backward compared to today.
I can imagine the campaign stats: O impressions O clicks 0 cost.

Unless you are going to tell people to search for that and click on the ads you don't any coupon to run that one.
Even from a mere statistical point of view it's interesting.

Take bayesian spam analysis for example. When we examine the corpus, the words that we find "interesting" are the ones that appear "less" in the data-set.

Just because I say something's interesting it doesn't mean I'm being sexist - perhaps it's just interesting.

Ok, let's reverse this. Is there any profession or hobby that you would find interesting if a male excelled and generally kicked ass at it?
He did raise two kids, the youngest of which is just about to enter college. Kids aren't cheap, especially if you lavish high quality education and extra curricular activities on them.
Yes, it is. 20x200.com uses Google Checkout, and I've bought through them a few times.
I know! I have 3 (I'm the lone woman in the news.yc survey stats with more than one kid).
Hope to see your results when you finish.
Vint Cerf is an outlier, in many ways.
Apple tends to stay away from half baked ideas. It probably just wasn't ready and the microscopic marketshare of OSX Server would have made a major shift in priorities hard to justify. They never planned to bring ZFS to OSX client in 10.6 so this doesn't really effect many people. I would expect an updated SL compatible ZFS read/write beta on ADC at some point before 10.7
Books like Mezrich's seem to be nothing more than long-form tabloid journalism: certainly not the truth, but carefully avoiding being libelous. A very base way to make money at the expense of famous people you have never met.
"It's true if you want to make money, develop for the iPhone and not the Android."

I would argue that if you want to make money, develop for neither.
Hi, I see this is your first story submission to HN.

It's not really within the community norms, as there is no real content to speak of. In addition, there's nothing of relevance to either hackers or entrepreneurs.
Don't encourage them by linking to them.
Anyone else tired of these business-advice-self-help blog posts? It's all this feel good generalized advice that just seems to reiterate the same points over and over again. Anything with concrete examples (data is even better) is so much more useful than this sort of stuff.
Paid apps aren't available in Canada yet. I can see them if I use a T-mobile SIM card.
So someone stole Goldman Sach's algos - Much ado about nothing
The problem is with the Market application. It's horrible.

That being said, I don't have a top 5 app, not even a top 100 app for that matter, but I do make between 50 and 20 dollars a day from it. Better than nothing, and the trend is upward.
> And yet, still no example of a useful macro.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOS
As Milton said: "Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven."
The rise of a software system that helps teachers track student reading
The problem is that it's very difficult to make badges actually encourage the type of behavior you want, unless that type of behavior is "spend a lot of time doing something meaningless".

For example, HN could have a "1000 Karma" badge, which would be meant to encourage thoughtful, intelligent submissions and posts. People could instead say majority-pleasing things. Even worse, people could collaborate to vote each other's posts up. Get 32 such people together, have each make 32 posts in a topic that left the "New" page without getting any votes, and presto! 1024 Karma for All!

There are many variations on these themes. Badges (in social/multi-user settings) largely fail at getting people to do what you want, unless what you want is for people to waste time getting badges.

Now, in a closed system, this can be minimized: people who would normally read and post on HN are less likely to resort to these shenanagins, and others just wouldn't care. The aggregator gives them a reason to care.
Not to defend the veracity of this book (a hopeless cause for sure), originally this was "a Sun executive" in the cnet article it's become "the CEO of Sun." I find journalists to be the best "telephone" players out there.
A successful advertising sales manager once told me that he always his encouraged his salespeople to buy expensive things - big tvs, fancy cars, nice houses. The more they indulge themselves, the more they have to sell. Sounds like a miserable life to me, but apparently it works.
Android is the linux of the smartphone OSes, and the iPhone OS is the windows.
> Are there PEGs that have unordered choice? (lpeg doesn't)

No, PEGs are defined in terms of ordered choice. All I'm saying is that they are not defined in terms of one particular algorithm that implements ordered choice. That's why I objected to the characterization that PEGs have their ambiguity resolved "by implementation." That's inaccurate; their ambiguity is resolved by definition, not by implementation. PEGs are unambiguous even if there is no parsing implementation.
He didn't deny the story. He only denied that he owned a boat. Perhaps he rented it, or perhaps it was with Scott on someone else's yacht, or perhaps he was confused for another Silicon Valley CEO.
It might be harsh, but I wish someone would have said it to me, just like that, a long time ago. I wonder what percent of that two percent were thinking exactly the same thing as me. ;)
Save the money for food/beer......
Yep. The economics on both platforms are really nasty right now.
Does writing a book seem like a reasonably intelligent reaction to the scenario he finds himself in? What percentage of writers make enough to survive on....my guess would be <1%.

No sympathy for this guy, or others of his ilk. There are so many middle aged, baby boomer, middle management people that have been way overpaid, promoted for no good reason, and pissed all of their ill-gotten gains away who are now complaining that they are hard done by in the financial crisis. I would counter that no, they aren't hard done by, they are now actually getting what they deserve, it certainly must feel like they are hard done by compared to the decades of being massively overpaid.
Test Scores and Biological Father's Income
It is abysmal but isn't it a bit early in the game to call Android out?

Multiple companies are involved in getting these things out and it takes longer to set up than having one company control everything.

There's a lot of marketing dollars at work with android and the network effects of the users will ramp up. The first generation of androids were ugly and inelegant compared to the iphone but the next gen looks better thought out and prettier inside and out.

Like Wayne Gretsky said, "Skate to where the puck will be"
I don't know about community norms, but it's sure hilarious.
You, however, do not address either what makes you think that or where would Apple be in you scenario.

As thing are today, there is nothing to suggest that Apple are losing steam or that Android is gaining such at a higher rate. It is true in probably every respect of the two platforms, but it is especially true when it comes to the respective app stores. So in that case my prognosmification would be that, even if you're right and Android is where the iPhone is today in a few years, Apple's platform would have grown too by then, maybe even proportionally to Android.

Which does not mean one should not develop applications for Android or that they shouldn't "plan for it". But expecting that there is explosive growth just around the corner is absolutely unrealistic.
Although I agree that the jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none personality type doesn't make a good hire, the corollary to this is that you need to watch out for people with advanced not-my-job-syndrome. Over the years I've worked with designers who consider any mention of production of their work "techie speak", developers who think design is just "making things pretty", Flash guys who get the creepy-crawlies if they have to interface with Javascript, marketing drones who completely lack any understanding of how a web application is built, etc. Claiming to be a "specialist" is often just cover for a lack of intellectual curiosity.

People should of course always excel at a few specific things, and play off each others' strengths, but remember: specialization is for insects.
The wireless modules in this article are pretty weak sauce (In fact they make me cringe)

If you're going to do anything that requires reliable data transfer or data rates higher than a few k, consider the following:

http://www.microchip.com/wwwproducts/Devices.aspx?dDocName=e...

These only cost 10 bucks in single quantities and include a tuned pcb antenna.

These modules are MUCH, MUCH, MUCH better...
On the other hand, and much more pragmatically, better $3000 a day than $60 a day.
Kinda wondering, but doesn't a question like this belong on stack overflow?
I don't agree with the common diagnosis of what ails the newspaper industry. If newspapers focused primarily on their online products, people would probably enjoy them more.

What would that cause? Existing online readers would generate more page views. Many print readers would switch to the digital version. Attracting new readers is unlikely. Local publications have about as much market share as they could ever hope to have[1]. The rest of the market probably just doesn't want their news via text, or doesn't care about news at all.

If most of the effects from improving online content are from moving readers from print to online and increasing page views from existing users, you've just lost money. Print ads are more profitable than online ads, so losing a print reader to the online version is a loss. More page views from existing readers isn't much of a gain. Newspapers rarely sell out their online ad inventory. From my understanding, that gives us two scenarios for advertisers:

1) The advertiser has bought as many ads as they can afford.

2) The advertiser has bought ads for their entire desired audience, and would buy more if it were available.

Advertisers in group 1 can't afford more ads at all, so there's no hope there. In group 2, increasing page views of existing readers accomplishes little to nothing. The advertisers already advertise to those readers, and are unlikely to want to show more ads to them.

That leaves us with few significant avenues for increasing revenue. You can try to kill Craigslist, or increase ad yield by targeting and delivering ads more effectively, both of which seem rather difficult.

Improving the online news experience would be cool, but it's not profitable enough to save the industry as so many claim.

[1] For example, http://www.statesman.com/search/content/advertising/media_ki...
The Value of Game Ideas
These kids today; they can't even come up with good scandals. It was rumored that Hearst killed someone on his yacht -- at his birthday party. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_H._Ince#Murder_or_natura...