skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sounds more like existential thinking to me. I don't consider that directly related to depression. I have often felt the same way he does in not really knowing what to do with my life, wondering about the meaning of life, etc. I think that's just the human experience rather than depression.
I write mostly PHP and Javascript at work. Given the choice of 1) creating an app in PHP, or 2) creating a simple PHP back end to, for example, add or delete a resource, and creating all the interaction in HTML/Javascript, I always go with #2.

That's because jQuery makes Javascript and Ajax so easy. PHP is painful by comparison. (Of course, many people say PHP is painful inherently...)

More importantly, jQuery is much much faster and less error-prone to develop with that Javascript alone.
Implicit Concurrency
The Kindle DX has rendered all of my PDFs exceptionally well, including graphics. The only issues are that it is only 16 shades of grey-ish and you can't really change the zoom on PDFs (you can rotate the screen to geta little bit of zoom from landscape mode, but that's it)
I'm going to be submitting OtherNum to present! I had a blast last year and saw a lot of great startups. I met pivotal members of the community and got a lot of great ideas. This is going to be an EPIC event.
I've been thinking a bit about this, how about asking your bank to change the name for the account to your legal name until the money can be received, then change it back ?
For the memory allocation problem, do you have any ideas about how other OS's address this problem?

How about ulimit? Could that be useful?
Does A Curveball In Baseball Really Break?
One of these days I'll write a post about how Caltech did prepare me for working on startups. :-P
Hey Matt -- thanks for investigating and replying, much appreciated.

I actually did a search on "recency" first, and Google didn't correct me and the first hits were a couple of dictionary entries, which is why I searched for the longer query. I don't know why, but I guess I figured there might be a blog post perhaps complaining about Word lacking common dictionary words and marking them as misspelled. In hindsight, including "recency" in the query was silly, but I'd prefer to get nothing back instead of Google assuming I want something else, which is the issue I was trying to highlight.

I agree that the suggestion of "red room st lucia" is a good one, and it helped me find what I was looking for! However the problem I was trying to show was Google's new approach at suggesting a first hit without search terms you've entered. As another example, I was trying to find my old (and embarrassing!) Geocities page recently, so I searched for [tim cederman geocities] and the first hit was my own blog.
"exactly the wrong argument to make"

Incidentally, what is the right argument to make in your mind? You say it's "retarded" to talk facts and that you're annoyed that anyone's even talking about this issue in the first place, so what's the tptacek-approved rhetoric, here?
Google Releases Android 2.0
Windows 7 Product Guide
If it's more efficient? Hell yeah.

Also, say you end up with memcached, or redis, why not cache session data in it so you don't need to query the database or the fs, etc..

Usually there are a lot of things to put into a cache. And memory is always faster than disk.

But that's all assuming you really need it. I wouldn't throw anything new at an app when it's not necessary. You need to know that yourself.
The bank account is a private account that needs an ID. I also tried to setup a business account with the legal name, but they did not accept the UK company, as it is not registered in my home country. So I decided to simply setup a new company here, as that seemed (at the time) as the fastest solution.
This issue was something that was above their level.
That is bad advice. You've proven the viability of your app, continue growing sales and take on some debt (friends & family, credit cards, etc).
I would suggest that if he's worried, he's not content.
I moderate a few small google groups, and have been having similar spam problems.
When it comes to support, there is always another supervisor. In your case, it sounds like at least once, you managed to get the attention of someone higher up the tree.

I would immediately follow up with those person(s) again thanking them for their help, but explaining that you need them to clear this transfer with person x.

If I owe someone money, but they give me their banking details wrong, that doesn't mean I don't owe them any more.

Also, a letter from an attorney to the right people might be effective. Not sure where to get someone who will write this for "free" though...
Put linux on it. The "rabbit hole of drivers" doesn't really exist any longer, and a passing familiarity with linux can really be a useful skill to have.
Ask HN: Zealous community member wants to help
A member of my site's community has been asking for a greater role. He wants to write the homepage announcements, send out our email updates, and help liason with bloggers and such.

Considering that we love getting help with the outreach (so we can spend more time on coding), I'm really happy to accept the help. However, I'm worried about what he expects to get out of this, and I'm also worried that he'll be offended if I just come straight out and ask about his motivations.

Anyone have any horror stories or words of warning in this area? What warning signs should I be on the lookout for? Any tips on how to proceed?
It's not that I suspected that specific issue made you guys decide to leave, It's more of I'm somewhat surprised you're leaving at all. Then again, I saw it coming when spez posted "Ask me again in a couple of months".

Anyway, thanks for building an awesome site. Have fun in Armenia, and good luck in whatever you do after that.
Take Startup School. Did you hear anybody mention anything about scarcity?
They for sure know.

What would you do if you were charged with preventing someone from smuggling a weapon onto an airplane, while at the same not not inconveniencing people, and also while being denied, as illegal, the only tool that actually works (profiling)?

They are being given an impossible job. Not hard. Impossible. They don't have a choice except to do security theater.
Various comments on whether or not we evolved for long distance running, rock climbing, swimming, whatever.

It seems likely that, just as we are omnivores, we evolved to dominate the niche called "generalist," and that's what makes us the baddest mo'fo in the valley.
That sounds pretty unlikely. Why would they respond to a an issue that's already public with a move that would generate even more bad press? You know that right after that, you would see "Apple to Dev: All your revenues are belong to us" as the first item on the HN front page.
Right. The guy needs to eat, it could be months before this is solved, all his savings are gone.

He is no longer in the position he was in when he quit his job (savings in the bank, alternative income stream).

He needs a source of income, and he needs it yesterday.

Will you tide him over if Apple does not pay in time ?
I disagree. If you've already e-mailed, called, and otherwise attempted to cajole Apple through the usual channels, try the last option left to you before you put hat in hand and go back to your former employer -- go public.

The only thing that breaks down Apple's bureaucratic walls is bad press. Create some now -- and hopefully get access to a real human to resolve your issues. Once you've put this out there, then consider going back to work to tide yourself over.

Sit down -- today -- and write a blog post. Be clear, be concise, and make sure the chronology is clear. Focus on the excitement of making your money, and your difficulties in dealing with Apple's faceless bureaucracy. Whatever you do, don't rage at Apple, use profanity, or write anything that would be construed as blatantly unprofessional.

Once you've written it, ask some (native English speaking) friends to review it. Once you get their sign-off, submit (or ask them to submit) to reddit, ycombinator, etc. If you have any friends in the Apple-related press, mention it to them too.
I feel if everyone took that last bit of advice to heart, no one would ever start a startup.
That's bizarre- we had some issues with bank account info and Apple emailed back within an hour and a half.

Are you messaging ITSPayments@apple.com? I found them really helpful and responsive. I went through the contact form in iTunes Connect from Financial Reports. Key phrase is Missing Developer Payment in the subject line, along with your company name.
You would think that, but in my experience they laugh harder than anyone else. They know the policy is stupid, they just aren't supposed to admit it.

However I'd avoid saying it to them when they are busy or distracted, because then they can't enjoy the humor.
Workstation 7 and Player 3 are out too.

/waiting for the mail with instructions to download...
This book has a permanent place on my bathroom bookshelf-- each "law" can be a quick read and they aren't sequential.

Any practical use should be taken with a grain of salt. The book itself is more a great study of history and humanities than it is a guide to power.

Of course, I could be saying that to deceive you so I may gain power. Or something like that.
I suspect that the money is effectively lost to you. and that you should withdraw the app (if you can) and re-register honestly and clearly as yourself.

Are you seriously claiming that -- if they were so inclined -- Apple couldn't safely resolve this issue within an hour or two?
Let me see if I understand what's happening.

-------------

You live somewhere not in England.

Apple has a bank account SWIFT Code and International Wire Address (thingy?) for you with:

1) Your personal account number

2) Your Fake Business Name

in their database.

The account is with an English Bank.

They will not send a wire to any account but your personal account, and they will not send the wire to any name but your business name for the money already accrued to this account.

---------

If all this is true, this is not Apple's fault. The only people who can help you are your bankers, at least in the near term.

You should change your account now so that at least new payments can go to the proper place. (Did I understand that part of your story correctly?)

Again, if I understand your story correctly, I think your only solution is to sit down with at least a medium-level banker from the bank in question, explain the situation, and get them to add the Fake Business Name to your account for the purposes of this wire.

You might reasonably be expected to register such a business name in England first, and prove that you are in control of the company. You might also need to sign affidavits or pay some sort of withholding tax.

If you're not in England, this is going to be an expensive process, as you will likely have to travel. I know this from reading your e-mail and evaluating your English skills: what you need done is so close to fraud and so sketchy sounding that only if you present well in person and can find someone helpful are you going to get this done.

The other, longer, solution is to send Apple a signed affidavit explaining the situation and demanding that they release the money to another account. You'll probably have to take them to court to get someone to ignore the internal controls rules they have in place.

In the great scheme of business costs, this would usually be considered a write-off, meaning you're likely going to spend many months and many thousands of dollars to get your $11k back. You'll need to decide if it's worth pursuing; in the interim, make sure you get some cash in the bank and don't let the rest of your financial world fall apart!
The question is where worry comes from. Sometimes there's an external force contributing to worry, like having to pay rent or living in an apartment with a rabid bulldog. Other times, the worry comes from something inside, like wondering why you don't go out as much as other people or why your house isn't bigger. The internal worries are ones you can fight without necessarily changing your life, because they're fictions in some way.

In this case, he's been told that he isn't happy unless he's feeling a certain way, and now that he's not feeling that certain way, he decides he must be unhappy. The problem's circular.
I thought it was common knowledge that Google uses p4 for practically everything.
"1.) What is the likelihood that a potential terrorist will use this means of smuggling weapons on board?"

Indeed, someone apparently did try just this in August of 2006 in the UK- http://www.tsa.gov/press/happenings/311_intl_acceptance.shtm
That depends on how you are looking at it. From Apples point of view this might look a bit shady, corporate account, private name, lots of changes. The app may be great but on Apples financial screens it's a mere blip.

If the OP had done his homework a bit better this whole issue would have never existed in the first place.

He's only acting like this now because his savings have run out.

BigCo (including Apple) eventually will pay, I'm sure they will. But if you start to make waves then all bets are off, it might work to your advantage, it might not. I would not go that route until I had tried a bunch of others, such as trying to get someone a bit higher up in the pecking order to look at it and break the gridlock.
Because wisdom (and, more to the point, advice and mentoring) is highly context-dependent. It depends not only on your current understanding of the material, which software has trouble measuring anyway, but also on the way you are thinking about the particular problem and the types of related subjects you have worked with. Not to mention your life situation and overall attitude at the time. A good teacher can take all these into account, deciding when to challenge a student versus focus on reinforcement, pulling in examples from related material with which the student might be familiar, etc.

Software-based learning might work for the subset of people and subjects which can be commonly learned from textbooks by self-motivated individuals now: things like programming, math, some science. But many people require the social interaction, and many topics cannot be easily managed in a purely information-dump approach.
The good stuff - the learning that, I think, matters and helps you actually grow - happens when you get past the easy beginnings and push into the hard stuff.
Twitcher: tiny JS Library for Twitter Search
I think they're more closely aligned with psychopathy/sociopathy (the actual disorders) than outright "evil".

(Of course, psychopathy/sociopathy is probably the closest thing to a medical description of "evil" that there is...)
I'm actually excited about that book. I saw an interview with 50-cent on CNBC and he know's what he's talking about.

Before you scoff, remember that he was a seed-stage investor in Vitamin Water. Survivorship bias, but still an interesting point.
When it comes to support, there is always another supervisor.

You've clearly never dealt with Apple or the AppStore ;)
Bring potassium chlorate (an oxidizer), and a strong jar with you and you could probably make the butter explode (although not detonate).

With a little work you could turn the butter into a fuel-air bomb. A flour bomb would probably be even easier.
Even if the whole thing gets resolved in the next 30 days (which could happen, but I wouldn't bet on it) then he would still need an additional source of income to live of until then.
No, it's just using an .exe as a CGI, instead of (say) PHP.
Well, I don't know the author, but from what he wrote I don't think there's too much blame-throwing going on. What I do know is that it's wrong to smirk at somebody who tells you what they want, or to flat-out tell them they're wrong without backing yourself up. Sure, you have a right to tell somebody their life is meaningless if they aren't saving lives, but it's a dick move to do so and all it does it hurt.
If you don't take that bit of advice to heart your first startup will be your last.
The computer in question was pretty much the first personal computer. The correct assumption about the amount of experience of the user with a personal computer was zero.
Ask HN: How to Hire an Econometrician?
Our startup would like to hire an econometrician. Resources abound for people who want to hire developers, but there seem to be few venues for hiring mathematicians and statisticians.

We're looking for someone with an statistics or econometrics masters degree, so we are contacting the appropriate departments in certain schools

Beyond contacting schools, can the HN community suggest how we can go about finding an econometrician?
I completely agree with your description of the problem, it's an organizational dilemma, and not much can be done about it.

At the same time, reasonable people need to speak up about and work on important issues, because it affects the opportunity cost of those in power. If there is zero (perceived) opposition, it becomes cheaper to create more restrictions.
News cycles move quickly, and companies like to be able to defuse negative stories by making steps towards resolving an issue before more reporters pile on -- even if it means PR promising something on behalf of the organization. Since it only takes a few hours to put together a post, why not start there?

See what happens, then think about employment. If he goes back to his previous employment (or a new employer), is he simply going to quit again in 30 days when the issue is resolved?
Good points.

You're right that many github-hosted projects suffer from overly-brief documentation. Perhaps Github attracts a certain type of project maintainer at the moment..
I don't have any advice, but good luck to you. I've already had problems with verification, and I haven't even started submitting applications yet.
Eating binges and weird physical symptoms made me realize something was likely wrong, that started me into research about hypoglycemia, and tracking symptoms.

My old breakfasts: coffee, sometimes a sweet. Result: by noon, I thought I was starving, but it was really just extremely low blood sugar, sort of like a diabetic would feel after the insulin injection. Moody, Shaky hands, etc. Especially if I had sugar in the coffee or a second one at 10:30.

Result would be sugary lunch to spike bloodsugar back up, and similar problems at dinner.

Solution: More fiber at breakfast, less sweets, decaf coffee or green tea. Interestingly, I can now live through a breakfast like that with significantly better results, partly because I know how to get back on track, and perhaps because my bodies not in such a yo-yo type situation any more.
That the explicit goal of terrorism is to coerce us into punishing ourselves with inane security measures, which allows 1-2 people to wreak billions of dollars of damage on society? That it doesn't matter if there's some combination of innocuous-looking liquids that will detonate an airliner?
I don't think Wave will replace it, it's different purposes.

They have switched their own support forums from Google Groups to a much more usable classical forum : http://www.google.com/support/forum

Google Groups was such a mess, I never understood what was really going on.
The TSA has a blog where they reference Ars Technica and XKCD? I am forced to acknowledge that they are slightly more enlightened than I thought.

Having said that, the arguments in that post are bullshit (as evidenced by several comments before this one)
Sorry, don't follow why you cannot set up a bank account in your (original) company name. Easy to do with your company registration documents.
As it turns out, if you have a webview in your app that gives access to like wikipedia or google, you have to have this rating.

We found this out the hard way when version 4 of our first app got rejected, after being accepted with the same stuff for several versions.
Ok, some alternative to a job that you intend to hold for years then.

Immediate needs need an immediate solution, not one that may or may not happen.

The OP sketches a situation that - if I were Apple - I would approach with some caution.

Technically it sounds like he is trying to evade income tax or something like that (because of all the shenanigans with a foreign company when he could have simply be paid at home).

So they will take this one step at the time. Also, going 'public' on a company for a mess of your own making isn't very nice.
Just a friend on IM. A bit overzealous :)
Its time to say "Hello World".
The problem is that this issue is indistinguishable from the following scenario from Apple's point of view:

Corporation Makes Application

Programmer has control of communication with Apple Store

Programmer leaves Corporation aggrieved

Programmer asks Apple to personally wire him the Corporation's Money

Corporation is f-ed.

That is the fundamental problem he has getting this issue solved, and I'm guessing that from his story that his communication skills aren't helping people at Apple get in a place to help him.
I disagree. While sometimes you might not be willing to get into the good stuff, other times you're absolutely in that mood and get into it without breaking a sweat. I see nothing wrong in going with the flow most of the time.

For the last while, I've been going at things at my own pace. I try, hard as possible, not to let myself get into anything I don't want to do. The result, I find, is that while I'm not as überproductive as I was last year, when I was in a bad place and trying hard to get out, I still generate a lot of work without seeming to have to make an effort. What's more, I'm growing in a lot of ways at once because I don't have the slight resentment against the work I used to force myself to do.

I find as I look at great works of art, regardless of the genre, that with the greatest masterpieces there comes a sense of relaxation. The people who made them weren't obsessing over them any more than they wanted to. They'd just taken themselves down a path in which what they were making was exactly what they wanted to make, and they made it. I find the same thing about Internet startups, actually: My favorite start-ups tend to defy a lot of the conventional rules, work at a relaxed pace, and then explode and grow huge.
I didn't make my decision to do a startup expecting money from it to end up in my back account in the near future, nor would I if Apple (a company notorious for payout problems) owed it to me.
Actually the human body is quite good at muffling explosions and would require a substantial amount of explosives to cause large damage outside of ones body.

edit: Here's a Schneier post on such a bomber: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/09/ass_bomber.htm...
I'm sure they can't, actually.

As long as you stick to the form and procedure in place things will run smoothly and you'll be fine.

If you start making exceptions people higher up will have to get involved to authorize the exception, that will take a lot of time because they really won't want to do that without making sure they're not setting themselves up for a problem.

OP was doing something not 100% on the up-and-up imho and that is the prime cause of all this trouble.
For a percentage of his future income stream, I absolutely would. (That means that he probably has a better option, but in the event he doesn't, he can feel free to contact me. I'll do some diligence and if it checks out, I may make an investment...)
Immediate needs need an immediate solution, not one that may or may not happen.

I'm not sure I see the problem in starting with the step that costs very little (a few hours of time) and could potentially immediately resolve the situation?

There's nothing to stop you from looking into job alternatives, borrowing money from family, etc, in the meantime.

So they will take this one step at the time. Also, going 'public' on a company for a mess of your own making isn't very nice.

Apple isn't very nice. Sometimes you have to play hardball to get the necessary things done.