skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If I had enough money to meet my current goals sorted out I'd study to be an osteopath at a good school. It's a lot like hacking, and it directly helps people who are debilitated in a way with which I identify.
Just noticed this, I don't know how long they've been doing it. But it makes me think (along w/ other of their moves) that they "getting it" as far as bringing news online.
Is it Cryptonomicon that taks about keeping a spreadsheet that actively calculates your FU number based on the current cost of living?

If I can live comfortably on the interest, I'll take it. No need to pry me out of my office chair.
Is there any way to continue on but also take cash off of the table? Maybe sell half of the business to alleviate risk but still have some shot at the upside in the event none of the minor risks pan out.
If you're asking the question then it's quite possible that no amount will ever be enough.
How much money is it worth to you? Consider the value.
For me personally, the goal is close to $4 million after taxes etc. That's a large enough number to be able to live off interest. So you can do nothing while you think about your next idea.
That is exactly how I have approached this issue so far... I researched all the different things that rich people spend their money on (and most of them really bore me).

I'd like a nice house and a workshop, and some extra for non-extravagant travel. None of those cost too much money, but there is one other thing on the list: starting bigger ventures without requiring outside investors. The more money I have, the more ambitious my future endeavors can be.
A Brave New World in China?
"Corollary III: given your abilities, what only matters is time spent on execution"

Wrong. In this model, V = kt where V = value, k = some constant, and t = amount of time spent on execution. Clearly the value of k matters, not just t.
I'd like my to say "Please give VIP treatment"
Not really.
Whole economy is moving into computers and internet. That means that Information Technology would be in a huge demand.
Still that doesn't mean that being in IT guarantees pay off. It's just that there are plenty of amazing opportunities related to software development.
My Windows box already does that.
I think the offers I have received in the past were fairly valued, but it is just hard to sell when I am relatively sure that we can double again in the next 12 months. Our revenues have been very stable and predictable, so it really comes down to deciding when to pull the trigger.
I have already taken large dividends from the corporation and socked that money away, but despite that, more than 80% of my net worth is still tied up in the business itself. So, I still have a lot of risk concentrated in a single asset.
I can think of modulating auto-repeat. But not much more...
for those of us using dynamic languages like ruby, make a habit of hitting Ctrl+Shift+V (Validate Syntax in TextMate) or your editor's equivalent. That will catch the dumbest of all errors (missing parens, block terminators, string terminators, etc). alternatively you can add a validate_syntax step to your deployment strategy and just run something like
>> ruby -c whatever.rb
on files that are part of the most recent commit.
Really? So if you were working on a successful startup, you would sell right when you reached the point that the net proceeds of a sale reached say, $1M?
The Case FOR Apple...There is NO Case Against Them
Vanity TLDs have failed every time. I can't imagine .eco will take off any more than .jobs, .info, .travel, or the myriad of others.
didnt know number portability was available yet...
The sale should be done if it is mutually beneficial.
For example, if the buyer has skills or technology to scale the business up faster than original founder -- then the price might be set in such a way that it would be better for both buyer to buy and for the founder to sell.
Another good reason -- if founder is exhausted.

If the reason is just to eliminate risk, then it might make sense to sell part of the business or simply invest part of the profit into something else.
RIP tr.im (So that's how it ends)
Dear Twitter. Please start shortening URLs yourself. Now would be good.
There’s an App for That. But What About a Revenue Stream?
What the heck is that? Is it an old Halloween "easter egg"?
You're presuming that URL shorteners don't provide any benefits that may justify the cost of a more fragile system. E.g., bit.ly gives you nice analytics, and many links are otherwise impossible to pass via Twitter.

Your argument against shorteners (extra indirection -> more fragile -> bad) works just as well against DNS. The reason why we tolerate the extra indirection of DNS is because there's a substantial benefit to be gained.
It's taken to a conclusion but not a logical one. A further conclusion based on that 'logic' would be that nothing at all should be made as anything might turn up gone in the future heat death of the universe.

Joshua Schachter has a nice summary of the arguments against that you may have seen before:
http://joshua.schachter.org/2009/04/on-url-shorteners.html

Summary of the summary -
URL shorteners have poor usability, providing little, often zero value at the cost of adding further centralized points of fragility.
If the link is missing, the author/website admin should use a 301 code, not 404. See http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html#sec10...
Not surprising -- MG Siegler has definitely earned a reputation as either a poor or lazy thinker.
Yea, that is why (if you took off those numbers they wear) you wouldn't be able to tell marathon runners from random people at walmart...
I really worry about that. I have already taken a lot off the table, and am very comfortable even though I live way below my means. The dilemma is when to cash in when the business keeps growing... Its difficult to decide the right time.

I met the founder of a website that sold to Demand Media, that has since blown up into a large property. Of course, Demand probably grew it faster than the founder could have on his own, but nonetheless, the founder was noticeably distressed that he sold too early.
Measuring "glory days" by total spending is a red herring. I can think of a lot of places where spending is going down, but opportunities are going up, as value is taken away from the big dogs by entrepreneurs. Imagine all of Microsoft Office installations were replaced by software-as-a-service startups at 1/3d the cost. Microsoft would lose $15 billion a year, but a bunch of startups would make $5 billion/yr between them.
> Ask yourself how much you need to live the rest of your life the way you want.

Speaking from an experience - "the way you want" criteria will change immediately after you start living the way you (currently) want. It doesn't mean that a kilo of caviar will suddenly become a desirable breakfast item, but things like a custom-designed home in a great location will pop up on a wanted list, or an expensive hobby, or an intention to provide similar lifestyle to the parents and relatives, etc.

The more you have, the bigger the dream is.
I can't decide if the uber drama queens or the Apple apologistas are more annoying right now. I think I'm leaning towards apologistas, though.
As per Donald Trump - $12 million will get you comfortably set for the rest of your life and provide with lots of spare cash to do stuff that you can't even think of now.

I.e. aim for twelve ;-)
Are you serious? I don't think he's a racist, I don't think he had racist intent, but I think he accidentally used a racist phrasing, and that he should be more careful in the future. That's really a difficult concept for you to grasp?
On your last point, I think you're perhaps being a little greedy (not in a terrible way).

Let's say your firm is worth $2mm now and you forsee it doubling and maintaining 100% growth rate next year, so it will be worth roughly $4mm. Even if it doubles several more times, you still don't have enough to launch a very ambitious future endeavor but all along you're risking a random decline in a huge, valuable, and concentrated asset.

Assuming your goals include having a family and secure financial life for yourself and them, I would be inclined to start taking money off the table as soon as I could be taking it off in $250m to $500m chunks. Not to say you need to sell it all, or even a controlling interest, but having had experiences of deep 6-figure losses in my trading account (which is extremely liquid 12 hours of every day with very low slippage), I know that I'd sleep a lot better with $300-500m off the table, and then get back to work growing the remaining 75% of the company into your multi-million.

I would seriously consider though still taking on your second big endeavor with outside investors. They have a way of keeping you honest and realistic, and if you can't convince outside investors, I wonder if it's prudent to wager your whole nut anyway.
Ask HN: When did you take greater control over your life?
Share your story about the time you took greater control over your life.
[Hi, Billy Mays here for..] TheRealUrl does it too, with JSON/P support and returning page titles as well! ;)

http://therealurl.appspot.com/

(it runs on Google App Engine, so I expect to keep it up as long as GAE exists. I didn't get TLD for it, to keep maintainance/costs at zero. And it memcaches everything, so feel free to query it as much as you like)
I think this [edited to add: meaning Air New Zealand's marketing team thinking that previous customers would care to receive a mail saying they updated their website] is a consequence of certain people involved in the creative process wanting to know that what they do matters. However, since many of them are fundamentally old-school marketers, their metric for matters is Successful Product Launch and to do a Successful Product Launch you have to make a lot of noise. Indeed, absence of noise means a failure.

Six weeks later it isn't their problem anymore.

This is not how I would suggest thinking about web design for most people here. Web design supports business goals. Redesigns support business goals. You measure business goals, when they go up as a result of a redesign, you bust out the freaking party hats. When your talented design firm goes off and produces a heartbreaking work of staggering genius that succeeds in reducing conversion by 23%, you thank them for their time, exchange a firm handshake, and do the next project better.

Now, as a fact of life, you are probably going to learn that "pretty" and "converts well" have very little to do with each other, and that a lot of iterative improvement beats the everloving stuffing out of big-bang redesigns. (Don't take my word for it. Collect data and run the numbers. I'm right, but your designers won't believe me until they see the numbers. They probably won't believe me after they see the numbers, either. That is when you fire them.)

I know a lot of designers chafe under the notion that the best possible use of their time is probably creating 96 different versions of the signup button in slightly different shades of red to test against each other. Yeah, life sucks that way -- I didn't get into CS to do SQL optimization for CRUD reports, either. I suggest taking up a hobby. When you're on the clock, do productive work.
Okay, so first, I'm certainly not saying every sedentary person should hop up and run for an hour tomorrow. I'm saying you can get there in a month or two of reasonable effort.

And, if you'd prefer, get on a bike for an hour instead. It's lower impact, and you'll burn at least as many calories as running.
Apple lost the personal computer war (EDIT: of the 1980's) because of its proprietary hardware created under the leadership of Steve Jobs. Not letting anyone else make a computer that would run MacOS was a big mistake for them.

I don't see anything new or shocking in the behavior with the iPhone or ipod, either from Apple, or the user community who has purchased them.

Same song, new day...
DNS servers co-operate and the system has lots of built-in redundancy, whereas URL shortners have none of these properties. It's not just the indirection that makes them fragile.
You don't want your outside sales person doing lead generation.

Buy quality lists and then have an inside sales person qualify them and setup the appointments for the outside sales rep.

The good inside sales reps have different skills than the outside ones.
Yeah, people with opinions are just really annoying.
There are sure to be some private (unpublished) URIs in there, some of which may contain sensitive information. (Users shouldn't submit such URIs to third-party shorteners, but of course they do anyway.)

Edited to add: Of course, those would also be picked up by groups like archiveteam.org that are brute-force crawling the shortener URI space.
I really want to play a game of Thief: The Dark Project with this setup!

I love that game.
How to enhance your flickr account using various tools
Do you just automatically submit every TechCrunch article?

I'm assuming 2 other people on here does the auto-submit-for-karma-whoring-game as well since almost every TechCrunch article I see on the front page start with just 3 points.

What does this 136 word article with some text excerpted and a screenshot add to the discussion of the current top link with 76 comments?
yawn, I don't want to be the guy complaining about how relevant an article is to hacker news but this piece is just really devoid of content...
No one cares that you think no one cares.

I'm so tired of the ego-busters. These kinds of generalizations are so 2001. Look, some people do care. The people promoting it.

In this community, the same population of people are promoting blog posts that say no one cares about your website while also promoting blog posts that say, "Code doesn't matter, you have to market your website!"

Well, seriously. Which is it? Do you want people to market their website or keep their traps shut?

My opinion, I love hearing about people's creations. I love hearing about things that are new and vibrant and created by passionate people.
Marco is by no means an apologist for Apple -- he's written a bunch of posts about the hideously stupid shit they keep pulling with the app store: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amarco.org+app+store
May I ask what exactly the business is? I would love to hear more about your story.
That doesn't work so well if the server/author/company goes away altogether.
If you remove the statistics and the url submission form, so that only the redirection is kept alive (= no broken links) I think a $10/mo account should be sufficient.
this is by far the worst blog post to have made it onto ycombinator ever... i mean "i didnt bother reading it so you should"? and alluding to the fact that all engineers are unhappy?

what bullshit. where's that downvote button??!
I flagged this too. We shouldn't be posting "replies" to statements when the person replying is openly admitting he didn't read the statement.

Also, the flip-flopping between Apple isn't this, but if they were well who cares anyway was really annoying. Classic useless fanboyism.
With over 120 million shipped installations since 2004, Opera Mobile is the proven solution for full Web browsing on mobile devices.

http://www.opera.com/mobile/

It runs on multiple devices, like the Nintendo DS, and other non-smartphone mobile devices.
Why Scooters and Mopeds Are Great For the Environment
Yes, but they used the term "fuck-you money". Excerpt: http://www.cryptonomicon.com/text.html
Everyone's going to say "test driven development" or "think before you write" but honestly, the only thing that has ever truly worked for me is pair coding. Just have a buddy sit over your shoulder and watch you work.

It's a bit like the integrity mechanism of developing two copies of the same software, done by totally separate teams. You and your friend are both thinking about how to solve the problem, but separately, which means the likelihood that both of you make the same dumb mistake is fairly low.
Howard Lindzon and Jason Calacanis hate each other, for real. This is more just a passive aggressive stab.
> At the true elite level Michael Phelps is fueled by 12,000 calorie a day diet, eating that much food just hard. Think 60 Twinkies a day plus a 3000 calorie diet.

Even at much less intense levels, it's challenging to eat as much as necessary to maintain weight if you have a healthy diet. When I was training 100 miles a week (not all that much for a serious cyclist) I ate around 3300 calories a day. If my diet included stuff like Big Macs and triple mochas with a muffin, that would be easy. But if you aren't in the habit of eating lots of processed and fast foods, it's actually quick a bit of work to eat that much.
> That said, does the Google Talk client in the sidebar of my GMail client speak XMPP? Of course not...it's a web app,[...]

It doesn't, but it should. This is something we’ve been trying to address with the Orbited and JS.IO projects (links below). Building in-browser clients on a JavaScript XMPP client saves developer effort and aids interop, because each web client isn't inventing its own ad-hoc buggy mutated version of the protocol, based essentially on the same semantics, but with arbitrary changes to syntax.

http://orbited.org/

http://js.io/
Five years ago. Incidentally, almost exactly five years before "Ask HN random crap" started getting old.
Biggie was right. Mo' money, mo' problems. I'm sticking with a slightly below-average income, and living simply.

Happiness is elusive, and in no way linked to money.

(I think I might be the most un-YCHN person on YCHN)
This is about 9 years out of date. Its interesting from an early history perspective, but the state of the art with DDoS has changed drastically since then.
Um, they haven't bought Disqus yet?
Nobody cares about Volume 14 Number 26 of your weekly ego-list. You are not kragen.

Is the 1:1 ratio of body text to repetitive footer supposed to be ironic?
I post here because I hang out here, talk about my startup with the folks here and like to let them know how it's going. If no one votes up my stuff, that's fine. I contribute to 10 threads for every one I submit.

You post here because you want to make money off their clicks.

And WC ain't examiner. It's hacker news for Chicago. We've got some local examiners starting to post their stuff over there. I just hope it doesn't get out of hand like it has over on reddit.
30 lbs in 45 days. Impressive. I've dropped about 30 lbs in the last year and need to drop the last 10 lbs or so. I would love to know how your exercise and diet look like today.
$10 million after taxes and I never work again. Invest half in various ventures and live comfortably off the interest from the other half.
I would not call making record profits in the same quarter when others report loses the lost war. Unless you are talking about market share. Apple indeed does sing the same song, only it is: "we choose profits over market share".
"Happiness is elusive, and in no way linked to money".

Yeah. Ok. Tell that to a starving person.
So if there existed some sort of federated url shortening protocol, all the complaints about shorteners would go away?
I don't see anything new in the behavior with the iPhone.

Modifying hardware on a desktop is much easier then on a phone. That the hardware is proprietary isn't nearly as big of a deal here. Its all embedded, can't really be upgraded anyway.

Using a different OS isn't that big of a deal either. PreOS won't run on it, Android won't fully support iPhone's features, and why should Apple waste resources making their OS run on hardware they don't support?

Now, if you wanted to complain about the App Store policies being bad, thats a valid complaint. But not proprietary hardware.
Greed is relative.
This article sounds like the hypey eBay articles which always focused on the people making a lot of money and not on the people making below the minimum wage after postage, eBay fees, and time were taken into account. The second group was always the majority.

The difference between eBay and Taobao is that sellers on eBay did not really have to compete with unemployed Chinese people on price.
Mobile Safari has shipped on over 40 million devices since mid-2007

It totally dominates all other mobile browsers in real-world stats -- people actually use it, and that's what's important. Opera's piddling marketshare in terms of actual usage (along with their historically odd JS engine, and mobile reformatting proxy) has meant that major players (like Google) totally ignored their browsers for years.
Lefties like me can't use spiral notebooks as they hurt the wrist.
I almost linked blueprints or specs instead. I've been thinking about this sort of hardware emulation since PixelVision cameras came up elsewhere months ago - they recorded black & white video on audiocassettes.
I edited my post to clarify. I was talking about the PC war of the 80's. Apple nearly ceased to exist as a company and Microsoft even gave them some money to keep them alive...
It should be fairly straight forward to dump these "lookup table" databases to Appengine, in which case, it wouldn't really cost anything.

With many of these url shortners going out of business pretty soon now, anybody willing to try and make this a business opportunity?
Ask HN: Anyone moved outside of the US to bootstrap your business?
I'm curious if anyone here has moved from an expensive city in the U.S. to a city in Panama, Costa Rica, or somewhere else with a lower cost of living. What was your experience like? Is it worthwhile? What are your rent/internet costs? Are there any sites dedicated to starting up this way?
Incidentally HN is less than 3 years old, meaning that it was never not old :-P.
Panoramic Photographs vs. Short Focal Length lenses
To Queue or not to Queue: Equilibrium Behavior in Queueing Systems
Before you hit compile, look at the key lines of code that you just wrote and think about exactly what you expect them to do. Then compile and run the code. Don't rush to compile. It'll take longer in the long run. Also, it's less enjoyable to program that way. I prefer a careful, focused style where every line is carefully written.

I know what you mean about hitting F5 all the time. I usually program that way when I don't feel like thinking. I want to cross my fingers and hope that it works. When I notice I'm doing this, I need to stop and think about what it is that I'm doing. I'll often write down in text what I'm trying to do. Or I'll turn off the computer and think about it.
How many RSS updates per second?
Also, Java applets are due for a revival.