skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When non-technical people ask what I do, I say, "I write software."

It's been the most well-received title I've found. "Software Developer" is too technical and euphemistic, and "Programmer" is a little nebulous, and also pretty technical. Most people don't necessarily know what a "program" is.

I think that hearing "I write X" is also a more accessible conversation starter since you aren't saying who you are, but what you do.
Being able to count your own heartbeats correlates with better decision making
The Cambrian Period of Concurrency
Actually, I guess there is Typing of the Dead...

Sadly, it's discontinued, and a used PC version now sells for more than the original price. There's a sequel, but it's unlikely to see a port to English. Kids are doomed to a zombie-free Mavis Beacon typing experience.
This article reads like FUD aimed at private equity.

Private equity bought Simmons and did pretty well. During boom times, their management helped the company increase sales and market share. They funded this with debt at low interest rates. Then the economy tanked and no one buys mattresses.

The private equity fund barely recouped their investment (and probably underperformed the market) and the company is going bankrupt. Bondholders are also screwed, as are employees.

Um, yeah. The economy sucks. Private equity buys companies, some of which do badly. So what?
I thought that myself about 20 times while writing it and submitting. There seems to be plenty of discussion online about the mint post.
Sandwich Price Calculator
Dude. Some of us are at work.
I'll start

* Not surveying and making sure there is a market for it: A cooking recipe site with features allowing for evolving recipes... the market was too small, and after launch realized using a website along with cooking didn't go hand in hand.

* Hiring or bringing in skill over will: A rockstar coder is nothing if their not passionate, that just ended in pure disaster. Getting a passionate and willing person to learn and acquire skills works better than the other.
Not to mention that taking particularly stupid sources of funding can give you a scarlet A if you wise-up further down the line and need to raise more money. It's a bad deal even if you "win".
I'm not sure how hackerish sandwiches are, but the guy definitely took a hacker approach to figuring out how much they cost.
Ask HN: Entrepreneur or Hacker? Or Both
Trying to get a feel of who uses hacker news. So, are you an entrepreneur? A technical hacker? or both?
Deliberately. Please note the links to two existing (and very good) monad tutorials... The last thing the Haskell community needs is another lackluster one.
Give this guy a break. Atleast he's trying to be productive. And we can all check back on him during Thanksgiving if the Einstein theory really worked.
This article reminded me of two things:

1. Bar codes are really, really hard to deal with! The complexity of encoding types, physical representation, and in memory representation rivals that of video. I once had to write a system to handle barcodes which included programming the scanner, interpreting the results, and then generating resulting barcodes of the appropriate encoding, correct length, and right checksum. And that was hard with the old 1-D barcodes!

2. Security deposits suck! I got screwed out of one once (not as much as the guy in this thread, though) because, literally, my move-in inspection noted "spots" on the carpet and on move-out the landlord said, "Those look more like splotches to me." Unfortunately, I was moving 2000 miles away, and the cost of pursuing through small claims court wouldn't have been worth it. That's when an uncle taught me a lesson about security deposits: "You're probably going to get screwed at the end, so negotiate like it's not a deposit but a sunk cost."
You have a point. But I think the sample is biased because of fame. A founder who goes from $0 to $10m is rags-to-riches by most definitions of the term, but goes largely unnoticed unless they seek fame - and many don't.

Conversely, you cannot easily go from nowhere to successful in either politics or entertainment without becoming widely known - almost by definition of success in those industries.

That said - I can think of relatively obscure rags-to-riches stories in entertainment (writers/producers etc. Rod Temperton springs to mind) so you could be right. Would be interesting to see a better data set, as you say.
He has a point. Saying I'm a mathematician never conveys the meaning of what I do. If you practice something long enough it does become an art but getting this sense across to non-practitioners is almost impossible.
"[A]s Elizabeth Warren has argued, the idea that most Americans have been spending frivolously on consumer goods actually isn’t true. Instead, a hefty chunk of the increase in consumption in recent decades has been the result of higher housing prices"

I don't disagree, but past 1-2 decades have seen commoditization of housing, housing and related products started to resemble more and more like consumer goods in the U.S. than in any other country.
We're using Solr as our index, actually. It's fantastic.

However, Solr isn't really built to be a datastore. It's far more effective to have Solr return an OID, and then grab your data out of a database, KVS, or whatever.

So, we're currently querying solr, getting the results, and then querying the database. The advantage of Lucandra would be that we could consolidate that into a single step.
BMW Roadster Z4 Sports Car Coming to India This October
Technical hacker. Maybe eventually the former.
Technical hacker gone entrepreneur (at least attempting to).
Interesting. But shouldn't the title be something like "Those better at counting pulse are better at decision making".
Right now it suggests that if you count before making a decision, it will be a good decision.
Yes, thanks for this post. I'm on the outskirts of the Boston area and this is invaluable moving forward. And thanks for the bootcamp link grinich, one of my partners and I will be attending.
The HTML is autogenerated by my Markdown program. Sorry it looks weird. Anyway, the CSS (in particular, the use of the Hoefler Text font) is what brings Gecko to its knees.
I haven't noticed it being a problem in Haskell. Most of Haskell's weird operators are either uncommon enough so that everybody uses parentheses with them (such as bitwise (.|.) and (.&.) and so on), common enough that you don't forget (but (&&) and (||) are the two I always forget, and occasionally some people don't use parentheses with them), or weird and common but it's very hard to use them incorrectly without getting a compile error ((.) and ($) and (>>=) and (<$>) and (<*>) and (++) and (:) and (&&&) and so on). I don't think most of the operators in the last list would be usable without static type checking.

In particular, operators like ($) and (.) are hugely beneficial and the latter's existence is one of the main reasons people like Haskell's syntax.
Price is determined by willingness to pay, not cost.
The article talks about why costs might be high. But price is determined first and from that acceptable cost levels set.

Software is expensive because people pay it.
Collection of Best Free Open Source Ecommerce Solutions for your business
Is it me or does Ray tend to ramble when being interviewed?
A splash of color to your browser: Artist Themes for Google Chrome
I guess my post was toned incorrectly if it came off as demeaning. My point was that if you have the freedom to work on anything, and its your choice, it's not really worth working on anything that isn't either a means to an end for a higher goal or on that goal itself.

I'm not saying you can't have fun doing other things, or that its not necessary for people to do things like keeping the trains on time. Just saying if you have freedom, you should use it wisely.
You should check out monit ( http://mmonit.com/monit/ ). It does, as the name implies, monitoring of processes.
That's one of my favorite shell techniques.

Still, I think they're doing it wrong. For keeping daemons alive I rely on http://cr.yp.to/daemontools.html .
1. Assuming I know what my users want.
2. Thinking that build-and-they'll-come will work.
3. Thinking that when build-and-they'll-come fails, that my product sucks.
Is it just me or is the audio only on the left channel?
Muay Thai, Jiu Jitsu.

Learning the warrior mindset you need in the ring will change your perspective on a lot of things in life. And it will keep you in excellent shape, minus injuries.
I just call myself a "computer scientist".

I do get funny looks from people not familiar with the term, but it's how I feel, and it also keeps me on the right tracks (gigs diverting into technical support or sysadmin or software development that was boring me out of my skull ... were only temporary because I know what I want to be).
Entrepreneur.
DSLs in Javascript
Rock climbing might be interesting. I'm in Philly, might take you up on that offer sometime.
50% of the time (at least) it doesn't work right. It's an incredibly fickle set up.

For an end point software package it's a little too unreliable for us to, well, rely on :)
'Where the Wild Things Are' fort building contest
Where religious belief and disbelief meet in the brain
Photorealistic image composition from simple sketches [pdf]
Beer, shooting pool, foreign languages, extensive traveling (~30 countries) and just having a good time. Hate to exaggerate this, but I prefer having fun to everything else in life. Anyone else a creature of comfort? At some point I would like to own a blues bar and design my own award winning steaks and burgers (someone, please, clone Madam's Organ.)

Things I hate. Video games, television, nightclubs with loud "divas" and greasy men (the type where they vomit on each other's fake Luis Vuittons after 2AM; we go to gay clubs just because the crowd is both so much more civil, and far happier and fun, plus the music is so much better), IT books, things marketed at me, hyper-excited "startup" people.
I wouldn't endorse that.

A lot of successful partnerships had clear division of responsibility - often an "inside man" and an "outside man".

The inside man handles the employees, bookkeeping and systems. The outside man handles sales.

When two cooks are responsible for the same pot, there's trouble. And unwatched pots.

There are many variations on the good pattern - take McDonald's. Ray Kroc handled the franchisees and systems, while CEO Harry Sonneborn handled the money, real estata and investors.
I play Warhammer, ride bikes, and code things that are totally different than what my startup does.
If you're looking for a Python CMS you might want to check out http://django-cms.com/

I'm sure it's not for everything but for me it's worked really well. It handles all the CMS bits in a nice way and you can still write custom Django bits when you need to.

Seems to be pretty popular with clients so far (out of a sample size of 2 for me)
Cooking. I mostly suck at it, but that's part of why I like it. I'm doing a lot of charcuterie-style stuff lately, and a lot of playing with sous vide.
> waiting generally means relaxing

I guess you've never been to the DMV.
Miniature Wargaming. Jazz Guitar.
Housing is a necessity. A given house is not. I find this article hard to wrap my head around, as it really seems to be based on slipping in the idea that it is impossible to cut your housing costs and then going from there to "panic!", but that's not true. You can cut housing costs. You can control the costs of quite a few "necessities" nowadays; very, very few Americans are truly buying the absolute minimum "necessities". My wife and I have managed to cut quite a bit of "necessity" out over the past few years, and economized on several other "necessities".
I also type quite fast too, and I get that amazed glance from my peers or just strangers close-by ... next thing I know I get the typical ... "You know, I have a Windows PC, and I think I caught a virus".

I just answer them "Sorry, that's not my expertise" ... but one of these days I'll just get one of those "I WON'T FIX YOUR COMPUTER" teeshirts, because nothing can suck the life out of you faster.
Mountain biking :)

Trying to train 3-4 times per week (after work) for races coming up in the spring. Getting hard without daylight on my side. Gonna have to buy a light soon. Or adjust my work hours.
It is. The final interview is stereo and you can feel the difference.
Full Flash Player 10 for Q2 2010 on every major smartphone except iPhone
I listen to excessive amounts of music. Just today I've gone through an old dreampop favorite ("Treasure" by the Cocteau Twins), gave a neoclassical album a try, listened to both an intense breakcore album and a darker classical album by a guy called Venetian Snares, and now I'm listening to the Kronos Quartet playing African pieces. There's a chance I'll be writing music with a few people in the near future, and I hate songwriting with a fixed genre in mind, so right now I'm browsing furiously.

I also read and watch movies and TV when I can find things I enjoy. I'm rewatching The Wire right now, since it's hard to find new enjoyable shows. I'm trying to get into cooking and fashion: That's my goal for this year. And I'm thinking about giving a rave or two a try later this month.
If I was trying to disrupt the media industry, I would probably keep it a secret for awhile too.
12-29 is still a pretty big range for "young users." Those apps that attract 14 year olds are sure to not be the same as those that attract 25 year olds. It would be interesting to see that broken down further to see what the most profitable demographic really is. Young vs old doesn't quite cut it. It mentions 16 & 17 vs 20 through 29, not too much difference, $0.49 average per paying user. This also seems a bit low ($3.07 average revenue per paying user), but then most apps are advertising funded. In the micro-transaction backed browser gaming field that I'm coming from, we were seeing a long term average over $5 per paying user, occasional short-term near $10.
If you don't know what Shibari is, don't try looking it up on Wikipedia at work. Do it when you get home.
I feel that Kevin Rose has a mixed-reputation in some circles. But I thought his advice was interesting and he has some good credentials in terms of building community-centered sites (Digg, Revision3, WeFollow (Pownce, not so much)), that can't be denied.
Eric Schmidt is no longer on Apple's board, for exactly the same reason.

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2009/08/03bod.html
Just because we spent as much yesterday as 20 years ago on consumer goods doesn't mean that our spending wasn't frivolous. Our essential costs skyrocketed. We should've cut back.
This list is worth more than spending $5K with these folks (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=861767). Seriously.

I'm pretty tapped into the Boston scene and I had no idea there were this many great opportunities.

Thanks Don!
Rugby. Any adversity you encounter in day-to-day startup operations doesn't seem as bad as when it's compared with getting pummeled by Aussie and UK ex-pats.
The World is Digital
Not again! Google never asked anyone twice before. This guy must be very important.
There are adaptive filters that more readily allow posts from users or E-mail addresses that have had previous good posts.

That is, a first post is more carefully filtered.
I volunteer with my local fire dept.

Also, I keep fish (both fresh and salt), and practice Tae Kwon Do.
Interesting perspective, but don't you think it takes two parties to establish a real price? If you want to pay $5 and I want to provide the service for $100, then no price is set.

To say that it's only the buyer's perspective seems to be ignoring the other side (as you correctly point out the OP did).
Part of the challenge here is that you'd like to say to people, "people like you tried and liked X activity." So you'll need to collect a lot of data on what people tried and liked.

More specifically, you probably need people to enter that data for you. So you might want to combine this with some other business/site/something. For instance, travel ideas would go well with a travel web site, Amazon already does a bit of this for books and so on.

Though that's just basic recommendations. Part of the problem is that "out of their comfort zone" implies a significant likelihood of not liking the activity or object. Part of the problem is distinguishing risky attempts ("I didn't expect to like this, but it was awesome!") from plain old bad ideas ("yeah, this sucks. I kind of expected it to.")

It'd probably be hard to get people to keep coming back to an "expand your horizons" web site that did nothing but collect data and recommend stepping outside their comfort zone -- most people don't want to spend all their time outside their comfort zone, and most people only do a few things that are particularly hard for them, so they don't have a lot of data to give you offhand.

It seems like there must be somewhere that people are already collecting this data, I just don't know where it is, or what gimmick you could use to get it from people. I think just asking them will give you pretty noisy results, though.
The brutalist architecture can be grating after a while. And the lack of dual-tracking makes a breakdown anywhere in the system a minor catastrophe.

It also seems a hair expensive compared to other municiple transit systems in other cities, and the service outside of D.C. should have grown much faster, a long time ago.

But the stations are very well maintained, very safe, and the system is free of trash, graffiti, beggers (for the most part) and other annoyances and safety issues.
Learning, teaching, writing, bicycling, amateurish photography (snapshots, honestly), dorking with Lego stuff, cooking, camping.

Of course, I got to do almost all of that at once this summer, when I led a group of 11 cyclists to a lake about 30 miles outside of town. All of us had packed up with our camping gear on our bicycles, and very few the participants had done anything like it before. I taught them about what kinds of stuff to bring, and all that. I cooked on a makeshift camp stove. We all camped overnight and rode home the next morning after cooking our various breakfast items. I took lots of photos and wrote about it. As it was only my second time "backpacking with my bicycle" I also learned a few things myself.

Basically, it was everything that I love doing that doesn't directly involve programming, soldering or Lego.
If a new account submits 20 stories, it's probably spam.

If an account that's been around a month and has 3 submissions that weren't flagged starts to submit one story a week... is it spam? Maybe. Maybe not.
Question: Is October 5th the equivalent of April 1st in Australia? Because, honestly, this is so ludicrous that I was sure it was a joke.
My contact's in my info page. The Philly gyms I've been to are a bit subpar, but should be alright as an introduction.
I totally agree with you about the potential for noise and I very much take on board your issues with getting competing philosophical entities, not simply conflicting things within the same sphere (you actually articulated the issue that was hazy but apparent in my head perfectly).

I guess the first step is probably to try and articulate a few appropriate 'spheres' for people to register an interest in and then try and figure out what opposing sphere would consist of.
Does Gentoo really have this level of penetration?

How did you get python on the machine in the first place? Any distribution worth using for LAMP already provides everything you need for a base install for this already compiled and packaged.

Pure <your favorite language> implementations are useful from a portability, testing/verification, and avoiding vendor lock-in perspective, but the problem of "How do I get the libraries I need on all the machines" has long since been solved. In fact, using a packaging system like dpkg or rpm will make it easy to determine if you're missing anything, since they can list everything that is installed via packages.
Drupy? And I thought Drupal was a bad name for a CMS. Can't wait to tell the boss that we are switching to Drupy. On the plus side, if somebody converts it back to PHP, they can call it Poopy.
Productivity boosts with Growl
It opens up Google for a lawsuit from Microsoft -
(1) Microsoft and Google create competing projects in parallel
(2) Microsoft discloses project to MVP under NDA
(3) Project is released, Microsoft sues Google for reverse engineering, and can prove that MVP had access to the beta project.
(4) Lawsuit takes years and is eventually settled just to put it out of its misery.
Bridge, boggle, and foosball. Things that are both hacker and beer friendly.
Check out Candlepower forums. There are guys there inspiring me to built an LED kilo-lumen beast for my winter commuter bike. I'm sure you could build something to suit your singletrack fetish. :)
Apparently, tweeting police scanner data is a no-no.
Upvoted for beer & foreign languages, but at the risk of starting One Of Those Debates; why the video game hate?
It might be there, but it won't necessarily be good.

Flash still stutters on Atom-based devices.
For my local 7/11 or gas station, I 'repair computers'.
For my relatives who are not into software, I am an 'Engineer'.
Working on 'open source enterprise service bus' was the most nebulous thing to explain, even to programmers who were doing SAP implementation or web design.
Wow, cool. What sorts of work do you do as a volunteer? How much time do you usually dedicate?
I like most of those things too: beer, shooting pool and traveling adventures.

I also hate most of the same things: television, loud nightclubs, rude people.

I still like video games too though. They can be like a quick adventure in the middle of my stressed out every day life.
True - thanks. I've modified it by parsing the first sentence in his post.
I don't understand what advantages there are to this. Why not a Python CMS from the ground up?
Three Americans Share Nobel Prize for Medicine (for the discovery of telomerase)
Software is so unbelievably cheap to mass produce. So, "custom-made" anything in software is just dumb business.

And, as your fixed costs (hardware, hosting, etc.) gets cheaper over time, but the people remain just as expensive, why do so many companies aim at "getting big", and don't really do anything about talent dilution?
http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll

both.
Brewing beer and working on sub-$1000 BMWs and Porsches.
As someone who was basically live-blogging the protests via Twitter, I'll admit that this story hits pretty close to home. I'm definatly still following this guy on Twitter, and I re-tweeted several people who were tweeting scanner information.

Kinda sucks. Public information is public, I'm interested to see how they plan on proving the charges.
Mix and match Web browsers are a bad idea
I cannot wait for the day Amazon gets in the business of mobile app downloads and sales. Announcements like this make me think that this day may be coming soon.
I realized I slightly butchered the title (to get a date in and fit to length).

Adobe's plans are that there will be Flash 10 on some devices in the first half of 2010 - all other major platforms (excl. iPhone) are planned, but perhaps not for the first half of 2010.
It is strange that people who work with an entirely logical medium -- software developers -- continually want to pretend they are 'artists', 'craftspeople', 'artisans', 'writers', 'performers' even. It is some kind of delusion. If you design systems by some logical understanding of their component properties, and some experiment where things are incompletely known, then you are doing engineering. And there is nothing wrong with that! It does not mean the job is automatable or predictable -- engineering requires insight, judgement, and creativity.