skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
<regular posting anonymously>
Through joining a firm at the right time, and paranoid saving thanks to growing up poor, I've ended up with $400k in savings and no plans for kids.

It's way better than being poor, doesn't even compare, but I'm completely unprepared. I left bigco last year and have been self-funding a startup, but the security of having those savings to fall back on has been a curse. I still freak out about not having a salary, even though that's not logical, but at the same time I've been able to procrastinate on compromising my grand vision to achieve revenue without the company dying.

Anyway, world's tiniest violin, most of my life I'd never even have dreamt of having 'problems' this good, but I wish I could get some good advice on how not to screw it up.
For the impatient, the above link is to a paper called "The Brain Is Both Neurocomputer and Quantum Computer," which is a response to the paper linked to in the main post.
How credit cards and default buttons saved the NYC cab industry
And then exports some of that back to sushi restaurants the world over.
I am not a programmer. I just started to learn 16 hours ago, but I built 2 simple simple apps (ok not really app) with a few lines(30 and 140), but they are nonetheless useful to me (as a beginner).
When I read through the documentation, the overwhelming impression I got is that this is a replacement for C in systems programming. It has the advantages of C, but with a lot of warts cleaned up, nice concurrency support, much safer pointers and arrays, and a lot of general pleasantness. I've been doing a lot of programming in C, not by my own choosing, and I would love to be able to do it in Go instead, because Go addressed the most painful aspects of C without losing the efficiency or the simplicity.

Yes, I prefer Python and Lisp and sometimes even weird stuff like Haskell for most programming. But Go has a niche, and in that niche it is a breath of fresh air.
I also recommend this one: http://www.lisperati.com/casting.html
Historic Computer Images
Maybe that's what the problem was, but the refusal from Google is very vague. He has no way to verify and correct problems.

It also gets more confusing when one can find so many sites that are far worse, consistently getting top spots for apparently no reason.
We're also viewing consciousness from WITHIN consciousness, so our views are distorted by filters that we cannot see, and thus we assume that there is something fundamentally special going on, when in fact we're just viewing the system from an angle that makes it very hard to understand.
Agreed Toro is amazing.
All fish are being caught faster than they can reproduce. I've experienced it first hand having fished offshore for 20 years. In those 20 years, I've seen stocks decline drastically across many, many species.

Cut your fish consumption to 1/5 of your current consumption now, or you are the problem.
I could be just a matter of volume. The volume ratio is greater than the concentration ratio. You can say the same thing about espresso vs. soda -- drinking a shot of espresso will probably result in less caffeine than downing a large soda bottle. For example 1oz a espresso would have about 70mg of caffeine, which is less than 20oz of Diet Coke (80mg of caffeine).
It does. Replace "mobile device" with "social network", and any other occurrence of"mobile" with "social" and give it a read. Glass houses and all that.
Apple Looking for iPhone Game Engineer, Risky Move?
What beautiful HTML looks like
Need help
can anyone crack this encrypted code, 869b9347d290a82fbed5c945f21f7582
Nokia Wants Palm?
The title is misleading. 90% of this article is spot on.
Stunning "Hanimals" Hand Painting Illusions
"Handimals" by Guido Daniele are a stunning collection of hand painting illusions that bring a whole new aspect to the definition of body painting. Please enjoy this awe-inspiring collection.
To be honest, I just kind of think I know that there are stream XML parsers? I've used cElementTree when I have small XML documents and written my own regex for larger ones. (cElementTree is definitely not a stream parser)
I have my browser prompt me for all cookies including third-party cookies, which I will never allow.
Law of Minimization of Mystery: consciousness is mysterious and quantum mechanics is mysterious, so maybe the two mysteries have a common source.
It's pronounced "fiddy".
AdMob Said to Talk With Apple Before Google Buyout
Two problems.

#1 The biggest developers don't deal with this. You really think EA has to put up with this crap? The Google Voice thing was a highly publicized fiasco, but I'd be willing to bet that sort of treatment of other publicly-traded companies is rare, and even that story probably has much more behind it than we know.

#2. There's so much money to be made that if half the small developers quit, the rest will simply fill the void. It's the same game theory concept that ensures the tuna will be fished into extinction. It would be in everyone's long term best interest to band together and make Apple fix their policies, but in each individual's short term interest to take the money and run.

*Totally did not notice when I said that that the very next article on the list was about the extinction of the Bluefin Tuna. Scary.
Having browsers mean X apps that run other apps, not 1. I think it is sort of a dystopian vision to have the OS be the only party responsible for rendering apps. Having IE, Safari, Firefox & Chrome (and Flock, MobileSafari, Opera, ...) in the mix has really spurred a lot of innovation and there's no reason why the innovation will slow down.
RIM takes smartphone fight to rivals
If you have bucketed tables, you may find the TABLESAMPLE operator useful to iteratively construct complex queries and get query results back sooner: http://wiki.apache.org/hadoop/Hive/LanguageManual/Sampling. Agreed that Hive, and databases in general, could be better in this regard.
Probably not a coincidence. There's noticing, and then there's noticing ;)
A simpler explanation is that the Higgs boson doesn't actually exist. Might want to check that one out before positing chronological paradoxes. This would be a great article for April 1st.

Conservation of energy also seems to operate in surprising, sometimes even magical ways. Physics could easily compensate for a lack of a Higgs boson in a similar way.
The worst things startups do
Ferrari F-50
Hewitt's criticism does not apply directly to Facebook. Facebook does not act as a gatekeeper. Facebook does not require approval or review before launch and operation of an application.
"Welcome to StartupCo. Here, take my old laptop. You can use this until you get your own system. Your budget is $2,000 and that includes any software licenses you'll need this quarter. Go online and order your new system and after that I'll introduce you to Ben who knows all about the code you're picking up. About 20 minutes? Oh, and have it air freighted. I need my laptop back."
You can't parse [X]HTML with regex.
While I don't speak Algol-68, I find the arguments interesting and enlightening... except for this bit: "state-of-the-art in programming languages hasn't moved much in those 41 years." While this is true to some extent, as mainstream dynamically typed languages pick up features from Lisp, I'd say that Haskell has a lot of new ideas. (I haven't yet figured out if those ideas help write better software, but that's more my failing than Haskell's.)
Leap of Confidence - How to grow your skills
"Thirdly am I the only person in the world who looks at the channel mechanism and thinks how naturally it maps onto a capability style security system?"

I'm thinking that "people interested and excited about capabilities" - "people who didn't realize channels can be used that way" is probably a fairly small number. I saw one of your earlier comments to that effect, but it wasn't very surprising to me, for instance.
He traded off his fame in a spectacular way that I don't see the truckloads of other famous people doing.
My Google interviewer had a toothache. I didn't get an offer. Their recruiters are notoriously independent; not sure that's a good thing. I was actively sought out, but had no chance because the interviewer had a bad day.

Question: is it more important to keep out the bad ones but lose some good ones, or vice versa? (ie, what's the correct balance between false positives and false negatives?)
actually $250k is kinda low. a ludicriously talented sales engineer (level 60 of course) can easily make a bajillion dollars a year if not more...
Hickey on Clojure's upcoming polymorphic primitives
It's obvious why developers flock to the iPhone...

Using your analogy, it's better to be a sharecropper making money than a farmer whose crops sell for nothing. The iPhone is a goldmine for developers... in my experience it's much easier to make money selling apps than building a website.

There may be more money total to be made on a big website, but the iPhone makes it pretty easy for one guy to make a living.
A nice link on how to broaden our skillset http://blog.polyglotprogramming.com/2009/11/6/cultivateyourc...
MakeMyTrip.com: Is eCommerce in India Finally Happening?
This is an important concept that is easy to forget. I would be interested to learn about technologies that could address magic cookie privacy concerns without requiring cookies from being periodically deleted.

I hope a major privacy violation will not be necessary to bring mainstream attention to this issue.
Man that would be so annoying.
I wish there was an easy way to whitelist which cookies I accept, kind of like noscript.
8 Steps to Success In Your MLM Business Opportunity
Are you tired of failing in your MLM business opportunity? Are you not sure how to be successful in your MLM business opportunity? Do not worry, here are 8 easy steps to success in your MLM business opportunity.Step 1
The first and the most important aspect that you should take into consideration with regard to your MLM business opportunity is your budget.Before approaching any MLM company, you must be clear about your budget.
Hewitt is dead wrong on his definition of middle men. They are there to facilitate and earn a profit. Nothing to do with lowering cost. They increase cost. Period.

Frankly, I think he's being a bit of a whiner about the whole thing. There are what, 100k apps in the store? If they weren't QCing it would be 1,000,000 and the percentage of shit apps would be MUCH higher than it is now (and it is through the roof right now).
I did it! I quit my day job!
Hi all, long-time reader, occasional poster here. You may remember me as this guy:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=653655

Just wanted to let you know that in big part thanks to some ideas I've got here, my last day at Big Soul Sucking Corp. is next week, and then I'm jumping into my own business full time :))

I still don't have a hot billion dollar idea, but I've decided to open a software development company (don't want to self-promote, if you're interested, there's a link in my profile). I've got some clients already, been working on it 4-5 hours every day for the last 4 months, and now actually making enough money to survive without a day job (ramen-survive, but still).

I also started another business, it has nothing to do with computers/technology, but it is bringing in an income stream too, and has potential to grow (international wholesale trading, if you're interested).

So, just wanted to say a big THANK YOU to everyone on this board, who provided an inspiration for me over the years to finally "make a leap". Thank you!
More oceans should get their own domains.
I agree. I had it ask me every time for a while but it was too frustrating. Many sites ask to set five or more cookies because of the different ad providers they use.

Now I just clear the cache and cookies every time after I am done browsing.
Is Bernie Madoff Time's 'Person Of The Year'?
I made a Multitouch table once which uses pymt library (thanks to http://www.nuigroup.com/ ). It can be operated on linux but needed a custom-made multitouch table. The effort of synchronizing synaptic touchpad,which is most widespread touchpad with multitouch gestures is a worthy effort. Will be keeping tab on its progress.
While it makes sense that our brains could be structured in such a way that some things are easier to understand than others, I think it would be remarkable that it somehow filters out our understanding of the process of consciousness in particular.

I think that particular criticism is vague and ill-formed, but oft-repeated because it sounds good. After all, having a brain hasn't stopped us from learning about the brain, even though one might think it would be hard to learn about brains with brains.
"... 'I'm pleased to note that a lot of people have realized that taking part in the iPhone (and other locked down mobile devices) ecosystem is sharecropping': please do tell. what are the 'other ways'? ..."

Games: In the days prior to consoles, the Web the only way you could get games was by going to the store and buying them in a box. But some smart folks worked out a way to by-pass the stores and go direct. Id software teaming up with Apogee to avoid sharecropping their product on the shelves of computer stores.

Web: When the web came along it was difficult to set up a web server, web page or forum for most in the early days. Geeky types could sidestep places like geocities for web-pages and AOL for access by getting their own machines, building their own Linux stacks connecting to ISPs and hosting their own web services.

Blog: If you don't want to be reliant on commercial services like MT or even the free ones like Wordpress there is nothing stopping you getting your own machine with a full stack of software using your own software. Dave Winer does this at http://scriping.com

You don't need to be in the system to use it. For each example I've given above users had the choice to work entirely within the restricted stack and somehow subvert it. The big problem here is while the Internet is open the telephone/wireless system is not. But if enough people. companies build systems with a workaround even this won't be as much a problem at some time in the future. In the case of the iPhone you can just as easily create a iPhone interface via open technologies and you are not locked into Apple. A combination of technology problems and mindset.
Govt is the biggest Middle Men between Tax Payers & Consumers.
Congrats and Good Luck :)
That's 3-5 minutes per letter.

That's 0 seconds per letter, if you're calling out to an existing API, which would be the only way I'd even consider getting into this business. You just take the difference between your marked up rates and the underlying service provider's bulk rates.

Any defensible value in this service is in the marketing/app design, after all. Printing, stuffing envelopes, and dropping them in a bin is always going to be a commodity service.
True, although I have to wonder if she couldn't have figured it out easily under less stressful circumstances. What's baffling to me is how anyone could think interviews are a good technique for identifying job talent. Many, many (most?) people perform FAR below peak under pressure and that sort of pressure is almost non-existent in most jobs. This isn't pro basketball here.
Dangerous Cocoa Calls
Wayne Rooney still hasn't changed son's nappy
Perhaps it's time to invest in an automatic letter folder?
http://techkousa.com/letterfolders/

Perhaps a postage meter that prints postage on the envelope?
http://www.pitneyworks.com/postagemeters/

Who's going to step up to hack a letter folder so it inserts the letter in an envelope?

With $40k of automation, I bet you could hit 20 letters per minute. You'd make your investment back in just a few short decades!
In short, the mobile web needs better tools, better standards, and better browsers

Agreed.

and it needs them fast, before the only technologies that matter are the ones controlled by the gatekeepers.

This is what I don't understand. Why is there a time limit? Why wouldn't we expect things to play out in mobile just as they did on the desktop, with web apps moving from nonexistent to peripheral to ubiquitous over many years? Web developers were able to work around the limitations of Internet Explorer -- not without pain and suffering, but well enough. So why wouldn't we expect them to work around the limitations of mobile browsers?
Online auction site launches for rich and famous
If he could move a few packs, he could get a hat, and that'd be dope.
Extended Cookie Manager does this.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1243

Beware, it apparently doesn't work well (or at all) on windows.
Congragulations !!
"... it's better to be a sharecropper making money than a farmer whose crops sell for nothing. The iPhone is a goldmine for developers... in my experience it's much easier to make money selling apps than building a website. ..."

You are both right and wrong. An alternative way of looking at it: 'find a problem, take a risk and look for alternatives which have a much higher potential payoff'. Having said that you have to choose your battles carefully. But I wonder in Apples search for "purity"[0] there is a lot of "muck" that could be made money finding alternatives for disgruntled developers.

[0] As a side note there was a gallery of images of Jobs floating around of un-released images. One particular image stuck out more than any other that might help explain why the iPhone distribution platform is broken for developers. I looked at one image of Jobs in this house with no furniture save for a very expensive looking sound system. Could jobs aesthetic and psychology for pure look & sound be behind the approval process?
Aspen Mountain skiing areas
If you wanted to list Colorado ski resorts in order of fame, it would probably have to be Aspen at the top. It is a name that is well known as being one of the best ski resorts in the world and has some stunning scenery with lodges set right next to wonderful slopes. It has skiing for every level and makes a superb family holiday resort.
The article says "Revised (lightly) July 2003" but it seems nearly identical to what I remember reading in the book in his 1999. For me, the thing I took away from it, back in 1999, was that privacy on the Internet was limited - it belonged only to those who were willing to jump through considerable hoops to get it. A few things, which Greenspun almost accidentally mentions in another of his essays, aided privacy in some contexts, especially multiple people getting grouped behind one IP address, via NAT or many other gateway interfaces. But the overall trend has been toward less privacy, since the mid 90s.

It is interesting to think of the degree to which privacy has survived in some contexts, since its funeral ode was written 10 years ago.
i don't think anyone here minds self promotion, so here is your site:

http://www.loginaut.com
I like the dual screen setup, but I would say no laptops because backing up a take-home laptop won’t happen on a set schedule with the rest of the workstations overnight. Plus if someone takes one of the laptops to Starbucks and gets a virus online, when the machine comes back on your LAN it can create some real headaches for everyone else. I know people love laptops but that is my opinion on them, plus I think they run hotter than a box machine meaning more frequent disk errors.

I would recommend letting your people check personal e-mail, IM, etc..., from the work machines. It really won’t hurt anything and it will make for a happier employee. I would also not want personal laptops on the company LAN because of the chance of spreading viruses or stealing IP.

As far as software, any e-mail client that downloads a copy of the email to the employee’s machine as well as leaves a copy on the server would be my recommendation. If the person wants to use the client for personal mail too, split the mailbox inbox folders based on xxx@personal.com and xxx@company.com. I would also add MS Word and MS One-Note which a lot of people seem to like.

Personally I like Windows Live Messenger because it can send and receive free SMS (personally I use it a lot). Also if you’re not backing up in-house add a backup client like Mozy.com and your all set.

You might also want to put a policy in place that the employee cannot self install any software without your approval. Basically, if someone wants to add Trillion, or their favorite development workbench they must ask because the hardware does not belong to them and you will know what’s on the machine if it fails and must be restored.
If the middleman brings more value to the end-customer than he increases the cost, then (s)he is a net win, and cutting the middleman out reduces the value to the end customer.

Note how that doesn't contradict what you say, which is still literally true; the question is whether your literal truth actually matters.

The Internet makes some of the old "easy" ways of being a middleman irrelevant and open the field wide open in a lot of ways, but it will never make it impossible for a middleman to bring more value to the customer than they cost. It's just that competing with "customer goes direct to the source" just got a lot harder.
Sure, I clear the cookies every time close the browser. But can't they just store everything as a session on the server?
The point about too many choices is just not true. I have a few online stores I purchase from. And eBay. Sometimes Amazon, but me living in Canada means that it's mostly restricted to books.

The average online store is so badly put together that it is the equivalent of shopping in a dirty dark alley in terms of confidence :) So, I don't. I find I keep going back to the same stores over and over. eBay wins because there is a buyer protection scheme in place.

The the point about thousands of stores to purchase from only holds for items costing less than I'd care about losing.
A little honest feedback: your site was painfully slow to load (8+ seconds?).

If you weren't a HN'er I never would have stuck around and let it load.
Yes but they can't correlate sessions with any reliability because of dynamic IPs and such.
Unfortunately it's only an imitation of multitouch - http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/news/item/9051_Multi-touch_on... is IMHO much more impressive.
It took me nearly a minute on a 10Mbit connection. So yah, I agree with the above poster. Congratulations though!
Congratulations, but—please don't a) use flash websites for a software dev firm and b) use a purchased template like that one. If you're going to use a purchased template, at least go for something better.
The refusal is vague because if they were specific, people would find ways to follow the letter but the spirit of the regulations.
Excellent point. To extend it slightly, you can similarly list all possible patent applications alphabetically, this means that the patents at least are discovered in precisely the same sense that programs are, if you tak that point of view.
Rao is proving to be a treasure of a mind. I hope this new fame doesn't make him churn out wisdom for the blog-post assembly line.
CookieSafe or CS-lite: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5207
The nice thing is that browsers provide good control for managing one's cookies, and browsers like Safari ship with pretty sensible, user-friendly defaults (block cookies from 3rd party sites).

The current privacy Valdez is flash cookies, which are shockingly ubiquitous. You can't clear them easily (clearing browser cookies won't work) and they bypass browser cookie defaults. I polled a lot of developers and just about every single one of them had no idea about them -- and if that demographic is oblivious to them, imagine the rest of the population.

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/08/you-deleted-your-cook...
If I may go off on a slight tangent, I am currently a DBA/Developer considering law school. Would you have any advice?