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jjson Ask HN: What unlocks with karma, and when?

gaius is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.

jjson Nerd Merit Badges: 01 - Contribute to an Open Source Project

You've overlooked an important detail: how will I manage to look nerdy while wearing a sash?

jjson Ask HN: What unlocks with karma, and when?

Could the time to downvote have already passed? (i.e. you downvoted on a stale page)

jjson Belkin caught using Amazon Mechanical Turk to post fake reviews for its products

Why, palish, I recall a thread from yesterday in which you complained that you lacked the stuff to be a genius.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=436390

I demand you recant, you evil genius, you. ;-)

jjson Apple: Jobs to Take Medical Leave of Absence

Where is Porsche when you need them?

jjson Post a possibly good app idea that you have no intention of doing yourself.

Visual dictionaries (including online ones) already exist, although according to one ( http://visual.merriam-webster.com/ ), the aglet is actually called a "tag".

jjson Post a possibly good app idea that you have no intention of doing yourself.

If you trust your local transit authority's posted timetables, then you could gather GPS coordinates for bus stops and write an app that correlates the two with your current location and time.

jjson Wow, check out this guy's comment

Perhaps I'm not following you completely. Please give an example where that could happen, given the scenario I outlined above.

jjson Time management tricks I learned from years of hating Tim Ferris (of the 4 hour work week)

> It's general knowledge now that The 4 Hour Work Week is a farce

The book should be read as follows (not listed in chapter order):

1) how to build a business that scales in output in a more than linear proportion to the time you put into it. [and how to avoid nonlucrative or time-intensive businesses].

2) suggestions of how to spend your time and money in a way that makes the most of both, in terms of quality [assumes you enjoy travel]

3) various useful companies and resources, some specific to US-based businesses that need to drop-ship physical goods

4) stupid chapter on how to skip out on work if you're an employee [with potentially useful tips on how NOT to do it]

5) various inspiration to get off your duff and do things (both in terms of starting your own business, and in traveling and doing things you've always wanted to).

The most useful pieces are (1) and (5), followed by (2) and (3) if they apply to you. (4) is the only part that I'd consider farcical, but the rest of the book was interesting enough that I don't sit around wishing for my $20 back.

There seems to be a decent contingent of people who hate the book, but I'm more interested in hearing from people who actually tried out the recommendations in the book and failed, especially if they're willing to go into the details of what went wrong.

jjson Wow, check out this guy's comment

Not so: In my scenario, the labor for any job would eat the entire voucher. (I'm assuming he's got a "limit 1 per customer" clause in the small print).

jjson Wow, check out this guy's comment

If he charges x dollars for "up to the first hour", and y dollars for every hour thereafter, where x >= 50, then there's no problem.

jjson Ask HN: New Years Resolution(s)?

Thanks for the tip. I plan on incorporating after I've finished the app and am ready to sell it.

jjson Ask HN: New Years Resolution(s)?

1. Finish writing my current desktop app

2. Incorporate (probably as an LLC)

3. Sell copies of said app to people in exchange for money.

4. Relax more.

5. Exercise more.

6. Visit more places and people.

7. If steps 1-3 work, buy Wil Shipley a drink!

8. Spend next xmas in Munich.

jjson Something I've noticed about the rich and powerful

Solving the money problem will keep you warm at night, assuming you pay your heating bill...

(And if you've got a messed-up family situation, money can put some serious (geographical) distance between you. :)

jjson Ask HN: How do big web sites roll out new versions?

If the upgrade is expected to change the user experience, this is also a great time to do some A/B testing across versions.

jjson Everybody is faking it.

In many fields, there is a growing mismatch (in terms of time, effort, and expense) between securing credentials and securing an education.

jjson Is programming really appropriate for a seven-year-old?

I would have done anything to program at seven. I knew that computer games were made by people (and sometimes, by a single person), and I was determined to do it, but nobody around knew how to get me started.

It wasn't till I was ten or eleven that a friend announced to me that he had found a program on his computer that would allow us to make video games (qbasic).

I think the thing I missed out on most is having a few more years of wildly creative programming without being encumbered by any ideas about the right way to program.

jjson GitHub's new Fork Queue

You know the github guys named that feature for maximum effect...

jjson Ask HN: you're rich, now what?

Definitely one. If your bank account is full of zeroes, then you're not rich, but with a lot of ones, you are (as long as none of them is a sign bit....)

jjson Ask HN: you're rich, now what?

Chalk poisoning. ;)

jjson GitHub's new Fork Queue

"Fork queue?"

Same to you, buddy!

jjson Advice to Incoming Freshmen in Computer Science

> I'd argue that parallelism and functional programming are topics far more vital to an aspiring computer scientist than things like web frameworks and SQL.

Hell, they're even important for the aspiring web developer: being intimately aware of the flow of state will make any centralized, stateful bottlenecks in your application painfully obvious.

jjson Links between Paul Graham's essays - revisited

Not sure if it will work, but try:

1) Rendering an undirected graph via graphviz's neato tool.

2) Rendering to svg, which might let graphviz not have to keep as much rendering information in memory at any one time.

3) Asking about it on the grapviz-interest mailing list. https://mailman.research.att.com/mailman/listinfo/graphviz-i...

jjson Ask HN: Has your handwriting suffered from years on the keyboard?

My handwriting was always bad, and deserved to suffer. :P

jjson Links between Paul Graham's essays - revisited

Yes, it's called python.

Write a crawler that examines all local links, and builds a graph (it needn't be anything fancy; a collection of nodes and edges is enough, but you'll have to detect cycles when building the graph), and then print it out in graphviz .dot language.

Then you can feed it into neato [either through a command-line pipe, or construct one using Python's subprocess module], et voilà, instant pagemap! :)

You can also use some of the rendering modes and scrape position data for the rendered nodes, if you want to generate a clickable imagemap.

jjson 46% Percent of Women Say They Would Give Up Sex for the Internet

How about, "Given the choice between only having sex for procreation, or only using the Internet for productive activities, which would you choose?"

jjson [dead]

> "Legal use will be possible after buying an annual license from us," he was quoted by Kommersant as saying. "It won't cost that much — tens of thousands of dollars."

I will trademark all variants of "LOL", and collect every time he tries to...

jjson Why port your Firefox add-on to Internet Explorer? Because your competitors won't

Firefox plugins are easy to write if you know where to scrounge for documentation. :P

jjson A list of 1 way to get rich in the construction industry

Another way: own your own heavy equipment, and charge an hourly rental fee.

jjson The $2 million penalty clause

On top of that, it's cheaper to fight it in court than to settle! :)