skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been in a similar situation, and my reaction was to spend several months looking at the science of happiness, and thinking about what really makes me happy.

I came up with some answers (time at home, time with family, a feeling that my work does more than make a few wealthy men slightly wealthier.)

From there, I started working on a business plan, for a startup where the primary goal was to find a way to monetize the activities that bring me happiness.

I can't say that this startup is currently profitable. It's not. But I'm executing on the vision, and so far things are very close to the plan. And I'm much, much happier than I used to be.
Do not work from home, you need social contacts.
" "if what I have said rings true at all in your heart" is an indicator of a respectful and well-intentioned comment.

It doesn't matter. Ultimately this site isn't a venue for religious evangelism, no mattter how "respectful" the build up is. And if it is, evangelizing the FSM makes as much sense as evangelizing Jesus (or Buddha or Allah or the Great BingaBonga of the White Voudoun).

And I've noticed that evangelizers pounce on already depressed people. This seems to fit the pattern.

Anyways I don't want to extend an already useless thread. So I'll stop. Preach away.
His family might disagree.
Check out Eucalyptus [open.eucalyptus.com/] It's compatible with amazon's EC2 and S3. The guide walked me through it. There was a hiccup but the forum helped me out in no time.
How Did Things Ever Get This Good?
And in Canada
It's done in the US as well, though mostly in the East, I think.
A hacker-friendly book on style is _Style: Toward Clarity and Grace_. I picked it up off a recommendation on Richard Gabriel's site. _Style_ breaks down the different aspects of "good" writing as if they were features, and refactors prose to gain those features.
You sound like a smart, capable guy, and I've read a lot of good advice here. I'm a guy in his 40's who had a similar crisis and feel like I came out the other side. Let me say this:

You can do this.

Find a job that lets you work near home. Your kids grow up fast, and frankly, kids are like computers. Garbage in,garbage out. They are your long term project that has the potential to reap some serious happiness and satisfaction. I love my work, but it was easy to loose site of the big picture.

Start exercising, if you're not already. Exercise will help you manage depression and give you new confidence.

Did I mention you can do this? :)

Hang in there brother, you might be in a tunnel now, but it will end.
Two thoughts about this:

1) It seems a little shady to be taking a scrape of another service and putting it up for sale. It may be legal--but shady no less.

2) More data is not always better. Your application has to be perfectly suited for the data set and if it is not, then you run the risk of drawing false conclusions. Things are not always as easy as they may seem.
One interesting exercise you can do is to write down all of the things that you think would make you the person you want to be and then prioritize and set goals to incorporate each into your life. For example, your list might look something like this:

1) Exercise 30 minutes 3 times per week.

2) Spend at least 1 hour per day playing and interacting with each child, individually, without distractions.

3) Work on startup ideas at least 10 hours per week.

4) Spend at least 3 hours per week participating in your favorite hobby.

5) Only say fuck 5 times per day. ;)

6) Meet one new person each week.

7) Don't tell a single lie for one day each week.

etc...

You get the idea. The key is to force yourself to meet your goals, learn which ones are really important to your happiness and then focus on those. Obviously you can't go nuts and try to do everything all at once, but just making small changes and trying to accomplish something every day can make a difference.

For more practical advice, eliminate the things in your life that cause you pain/stress with extreme prejudice. You have to be really honest with yourself and willing to make tough decisions, but this was the thing that has helped me the most. For me, these things were mostly people.
From an SEO perspective subdirectories are considered better than subdomains because subdirectories help the ranking of the primary domain better than subdomains.

If you want the overall ranking of www.example.com to improve, use www.example.com/producta and www.example.com/product, not producta.example.com and productb.example.com.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/subdomains-subfolders-and-topleve...
Train tickets are generally non-transferable so, absent a black market, they are not liquid at all.

Actually, the tickets are refundable. There are restrictions which vary according to each train company (you might have to pay a small fee, etc), but still the tickets aren't completely illiquid.
What Did You Do During the 2000s?
There are other forms of risk mitigation that apply strictly to the rich, such as umbrella policies, media insurance policies, etc etc etc. I'm not familiar with very many of them, but they can often be costly.

These are needs that the poor will never have, because no one will ever imagine suing them (as they don't have anything worth the effort and cost).
Valuation calculator: When to cut founders' stake for larger Series A
Facebook coming to Sony PS3 next? Say it ain't so
You're certainly lost if you're turning to a bunch of (however well-intentioned) strangers for help with a problem they're very unlikely to be able to help you with - they have no idea who you are, your situation, your history, your personality nor do they have much of a stake in your sorting things out. The best you can hope for is some well-meaning platitudes and interesting-but-likely-inapplicable personal anecdotes.
The accepted cliché is that recognizing you have a problem is the most difficult step. Since you've got that covered, you're probably best off moving on to the (supposedly) easier bits like where to look for help - the standard list includes things like family, friends, mental health-care professionals, etc. Usually not 'web forums', mostly for a good reason.
Is it just me, or is it becoming fashionable to criticize google's code? This one is a few days old:

http://webreflection.blogspot.com/2009/11/google-closure-im-...
I love the fact one of the brothers complains about other clone makers ripping them off, letting them do all the legal hard work.

Sucks when people sell your efforts as their own, huh?
Ditch your security awareness program
Yup. Their standard "Embrace, extend, and extinguish" routine.
Microsoft patents sudo
I don't see how that follows. The amount of sugar produced is roughly equal to the demand for sugar -- and as sugar is eaten it immediately decomposes and ceases to be sugar.

So there is a fixed surplus of sugar in the world, and that's the only relevant amount. Production and consumption cancel each other out.

Assuming the average person weighs 50kg, there has to be a 5 year surplus in order for the surplus per person to be heavier than the person. I consider it highly unlikely we stockpile a 5 year supply of sugar (200+ billion kg) -- especially since there is no incentive to do so.
Find a hot 18-year-old who will bang you silly, and do her at least three times a week. Pay for this if you have to.

I'm telling you, it will change your life.

Craigslist is a good place to start.
From the comments:

> The biggest issue I have is that model syncing fails

> silently (it's as if the app doesn't exist) if an

> import in the app models file dies with an exception

> (for instance, not found).

I've wasted hours trying to figure out those kinds of silent failures... it's not much fun. Another one that stopped me in my tracks for about an hour is that an app must have a models.py file to run unit tests, even if your application doesn't have any models. If it's not there, instead of just saying 'models.py not found' it says something like 'application <your app name> could not be found'. As others have said though, I guess that's the price you pay for the luxury of having a framework to do the low-level dirty work for you.
A novel with a twist - it's all on Twitter
SitePoint swallowed my comment, so I'll just post it here:

I found some of your claims questionable, so I cherry-picked one to test for myself.

This code converts arguments[i] to a string object using the
String conversion function. This is possibly the slowest way to
perform such a conversion, although it would be the most
obvious to many developers coming from other languages.

Much quicker is to add an empty string ("") to the value you
wish to convert:

I compared the time it took to run 100,000 of each of String(fn) and fn + "", and found that the results were more ambiguous and less definitive than your assertion. In fact, fn + "" was 6.6% faster on Firefox 3.5, but 15.8% slower on a recent Chromium build. In any case, the difference was, even over 100,000 runs, a few milliseconds, so it hardly seems like this particular case would be an area to focus on for optimization.

I wonder how many of your other strong claims would stand up to similar testing.

Test code and results: http://gist.github.com/232944
Slightly different... Apple still get the cost of the licence for OS X, so they still get revenue from every PsyStar sold. PsyStar are not imitating the Apple hardware design, they are not copying the Apple look and feel and cloning everything - they are simply shipping a PC with OS X installed.
Few tens of strings? I'll give it a try. Just pass over the first, let's say, twenty strings in a follow-up comment. German native speaker here.
A few thoughts.

1) I like the visualization. Its a key part of understanding SQL.

2) However, I don't see this as taking advantage of a user's excel knowledge. Why not make an analogy they will understand? Join is similar to vlookup! Try to do something in excel first and then do it SQL. That will be tough for advanced SQL, but should be (sort of) doable early on. So far, someone with advanced knowledge of excel wouldn't be much better off than someone just getting started.

3) Someone might ask the question: "Why have the from clause? Why not always do "select person.first_name where....?" I don't know how your will answer this...

4) In your explanation of having the same column name in two places, why not use email address? People have email addresses as well as companies. You mention a customer table but the student can't see one, so it could be confusing.

I think there is the possibility of doing some great stuff with the excel SQL analogy...

As for future topics: Keep in mind what you can do with excel and go from there. Sums, products, etc... can all be done. Inserts are tougher to explain, I'd keep it for later when you have people thinking in SQL and not excel.
From my reading of the V8 docs, the hidden class climbing is done when properties are added to the class. Each added property causes a transition to the next hidden class. The final hidden class has all the properties as offsets and a failed lookup might chain through prototypes (not sure there) but does not work though the other hidden classes.
If you can tell this to your wife, and she's supportive and will accept a lower standard of living in exchange for a happier family, then you're an extremely lucky man. AFAICT, many wives will just run you until you're nothing more than a burnt out husk.
This is a stunningly bad article. The author is a faker.

> If the Sun were made of bananas, it would be just as hot

Maybe, maybe not. The heat from the sun comes from fusion of hydrogen into helium. If it were mostly helium, it would be much much hotter. (That's a red giant.) With the carbon, oxygen, and whatever else in bananas, who knows.

> Events in the future can affect what happened in the past

Affect is an absolutely terrible choice of words for this. Events at a distance can be set up to be correlated in strange, "spooky" ways, but this in no way can be used to communicate back in time or faster than light. So "affect" is a tragically ill-chosen verb.

> Things can travel faster than light; and light doesn’t always travel very fast

I think a real physicist would weep at this faker's explanation here.

> There are an infinite number of mes writing this, and an infinite number of yous reading it

> According to the current standard model of cosmology,

There are wild theories (some may even be testable someday, some may not), but this is no "standard" model of cosmology.
I have to second the "tell your wife" part. If she is supportive, you two can find a solution that makes your whole family happy in the long run.

And for the lost sheep, it sound like you really need a different job. I have a job with a long commute, but a great boss and that's hard enough. In my opinion, it's just not worth the stress.

I'm not sure how to answer the money part. At least you've recognized there is a problem and can now try to address it through savings, lifestyle change, etc.
Hector: A Literate Haskell Implementation of ELIZA
ALIBI: Facebook Status Update Saves Teen from Jail
Right, if someone were trying to use this information to, say, cut down on their news.yc surfing, they'd probably be better off not worrying about dopamine and just focusing on the actual net-addiction behaviors and feelings they are actually experiencing.

Thinking "I should do X, because the dopamine levels in my brain are changing" is probably going to be less effective and more ambiguous to you compared to thinking "When I click a link on news.yc I feel X, when I tell myself maybe I should stop ycing and work on something else I feel y, so maybe I could try z".
This cannot be legal if Twitter had a half decent lawyer write their TOS.
The project is open source and patches can be submitted.
I think both the article and your reply are a bit misleading because you talk of both "gold" and "gold jewelry", which aren't the same thing.

While gold is not exactly equivalent to paper money, it is a currency. Only it's not as used as before, and of course not as liquid as US dollars nowadays. It is certainly more liquid than other currencies though: most people would prefer to be paid in gold than in Zimbabwean dollars.

But of course gold and "gold watch" are different stuff. Plain "gold" usually means coins and bars, which are pretty much liquid. The spread can be as low as 2.5%, not much different from retail foreign exchange. Definitely not like any other second hand good.
Go Have a Look at D
New impressive about USB Corsair Survivor GT 32 and 64GB
Great for the duopoly.

Maybe not so great for companies getting locked out of the market (like Nvidia).
Ask HN: Why aren't any of the new datastores written in Scala or Clojure?
As I was looking at Cassandra, which is written in Java, I was wondering why none of the new data stores are written in either Scala or Clojure?
Visit India, Nepal or any other developing countries which really needs contribution from skilled people like You.

Eventually You will feel that You are among friends, that they glad to see You each time they meet You, and finally You will feel that money is not everything.

This is a difficult decision, but You can always come back after year or two.
Put yourself in his shoes: work that needed to be done wasn't done at the time it should have been (due to your mistake), and he had no way to get in touch with you (due to your leaving your mobile at home while you went out for dinner.)

And at point, most of us who manage people and have some self control would realize that yelling and cussing on a phone message would do nothing to resolve the problem quicker, and start thinking about how to fix the problem with the resources available at the time.

There is always plenty of time after the disaster/problem/inconvenience is averted, when the pressure is reduced, to address the mistakes an employee made.
See, this is what I find a bit unclear. The concept is that presentation is distinct from content. But if we say that the semantics of the em tag are to effect the presentation, they seem to be not be separated anymore, right?
Ask HN: What tool makes you most productitive?
I believe that learning certain tools can make a programmer much more productive. What knowledge about tools do you have that makes you more productive?

Aim your advice toward a competent *nix user who knows a little about everything, but doesn't know anything in any real depth.
That money will be redirected to investors. Btw, AMD holds a debt of comparable size.
By mass, mostly oxygen and carbon (googling around, ~70+% water, ~20+% carbohydrates). Compared to the sun (~70+% hydrogen, almost all of the rest is helium), the amount of hydrogen is tiny . The density of the sun is substantially higher than its banana-replacement as well - 1.4 g/cm^3 vs a bit over 1 g/cm^3. It seems like you end up with a star that would fuse the limited amounts of hydrogen and resulting helium but is too small to get any further. The 'would be just as hot' thing seems like a bit of newspapery oversimplification - at solar masses (and below) bananium doesn't appear to be very good stellar fuel.
"We used OS X for a day."
I did the same exact thing, or left fingers stuck in all the choice pages. Maybe that's why recursion came easy to me years later in my early programming classes.
Also Via is probably left out in the cold.

Good news for AMD stockholders(stock is already up 20%+).
Nah, Barron Hilton gave away like $500 million, else they might still be incredibly wealthy.
Alpha is really struggling to find a successful use-case for its technology. It has a ridiculously powerful math engine behind a semi-working ontology (not saying that theirs is bad, just that all general ontologies are "semi-working") that's driving a rather poor natural language parser (again, pretty much all NLP's are "poor"). In effect they are trying to use the ontology as a poor AI to "understand" the NL.

People who want to use Alpha have to deal with it through the NLP window. And since it pretty much spends most of its time screwing up their input upon interpretation and not giving them what they want for even fairly simple cases, it tends not to get used except for very few areas of trivial encyclopedic fact comparison (population of Borneo and the population of Hawaii). In effect turning Alpha into a "comparison engine" not a "computation engine" using facts and data anybody could find just as quickly using Google.

For people that have the knowledge to query non-NLP systems, the power of Alpha is locked away behind the sucky NLP interface with no recourse. In effect, it's like putting a Ferrari engine in a combine harvester with a broken steering wheel.

So now, the idea is to stick Bing's query engine on top of Alpha's NLP engine, which is on top of their ontology?

That's like taking our franken harvester and putting a good car audio system in it as well.
I once went to a management seminar (I know, I know, please forgive me) and the only valuable thing I remember from it is: "People don't quit jobs, they quit their boss".

Sounds like you're more experienced than me, but FWIW, in your place, I would start by looking for another job, closer to home.
Google Go started in 1972
Steve Blank: “Lessons Learned” – A New Type of Venture Capital Pitch
There is a tremendous gulf between popularity and quality. If you'd like an illustration, go turn on a radio.
maybe www.cucumis.org
Yeah its one thing to deprive yourself of things, but when you start depriving your offspring of things, that's tough.

Having a family changes all the goalposts.
I shudder at the thought of HN turning into Slashdot, where know-it-alls feel the need to hijack any genuine religious feeling or discussion by injecting the latest anti-religion meme picked up from the intertubes.

As of this writing the grandparent is voted down, so maybe the change is already happening. But I felt the grandparent was at least a good faith attempt toward something readable and interesting, whereas the parent is the sort of post that made me stop reading Slashdot threads about religion: insulting and meaningless.
10 Blue Links (and a Bunch of Other Stuff)
"Robert says he found his own way around Apple's built-in security devices. The breakthrough meant that, among other things, the cheap machines were virtually immune to viruses and hackers."

what a bizarre article.
Exactly, the stack frame needs to survive with the Closure.
Is bounce rate and conversion rate related? Short answer: No
Toronto Airport Limousine
We at Toronto airport limousine.ca, have only one product to offer you, excellent Airport limo taxi service. We are committed to providing outstanding chauffeured airport transportation and limousine rental services and have been doing so for more than a decade
Wow, beyond the dorms, I would love this in my bldg.
If the network effect alone was enough, we'd have never left Geocities, or Angelfire, or Hotmail, or ICQ, or MySpace... the network effect explains growth curves, little more.

The rest of your points were part of my point.
"Real Names" vs "usernames" is a temporary inefficiency in the early services. It's a typical programmer's solution causing normal person frustration. No-one's making that mistake again. No-one's going to roll out, say, an email service without a profile page for each account or a White Pages feature. No-one's leaving out simple photo/file sharing, tweeting or blogging as an integrated service.

And everyone who isn't FaceBook has a huge incentive to support the first federated protocol that enables all that. (So they stand some chance at capturing internet traffic again)

Say, Google's Wave.

Does anyone think it won't roll out with support for a profile page, some sort of White Pages feature, simple blogging, twitter-esque status updates, etc? It's already got email/chat integration and simple photo sharing this early. Why in the world would they be testing photo sharing if they weren't looking to do much more than 'Email 2.0'?
Of course it hurts to lose any business just because some of your potential customers think your company is too small.

Serve the customers you can get now well. Not only does “many a mickle makes a muckle” (a Scottish saying that reflects pretty well a saying we have in Swiss-German) but also the concentration of risk is much lower.

And don’t forget: most companies/customers are (too) small by themselves and many of them prefer suppliers that make them feel more like VIPs than like numbers (we don’t care about you - you’re too small for us).

It’s not only a disadvantage to be small. And after you have proven that you have come to stay, bigger companies will notice it one day.
This made me smile. I love when HNers help out other fellow HNers. Thanks.
I have a semi-repl with autotest + ruby-debug and it's done wonders for my productivity; I can't imagine going back to alert/printf style debugging/development...
There is also the other side of the story. Read a few stories on Steve Jobs (just google) and how he behaves with Apple Engineers and Designers (hint: worse than what one guesses) and how they ultimately turn that in into profit (better product).
I'm in my 20s and am single so I cannot even relate to your situation.

However you mention you don't have lots of savings but you want to stop working and work on something for yourself. You might want to research moving out of the country for a year or two with your family. I've lived in a few countries where $500 a month goes a long way for one person. You might be able to rent out your home as well to get income.

Moving to a place with a low cost of living would give you time to build a business or work on an idea that interests you. When I was living in China, I started doing freelance work through oDesk. I only needed to work 30 hours per MONTH to cover my expenses because I was earning US dollars.

On the other hand, if you are 40 and haven't saved much, you might want to look into budgetting and personal finance first to control your expenses. While the cost of living is cheaper, if you want to live the American lifestyle overseas abroad you will definitely pay for it.