skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think programming is a necessary skill for Computer Science students. However, that is not the only thing we are required to learn because it only complements knowledge in other areas ranging from theory of programming languages to computer architecture. Students might get to do the occasional programming project or two but usually they will not be involved in anything close to real life software development. I am not trying to discourage you but that is the reality I find myself in.
This is the ConnectU of Kirkand North. Except apparently they know someone at the Times.
Personally I'd much rather work with someone that is smart and never programmed before than someone that is a terrible coder with 5 years of experience in buzzword-of-the-month.

Last time I looked for a job I actually crossed out any place that wanted more than one year experience with anything. I guess I'll never be a Senior Java Engineer or a Senior .NET Architect or a Senior Oracle DBA, but is that really a loss? Asking for five years experience in some technology is like actively seeking out people that are content to actually do the same thing for five years. Any small company that wants that is going to get trounced by a competitor that learns new tricks.
"Jason Garber Finishes SuperRedCloth For Me" -why
This bugs me too. At my current workplace the justification was that it was simpler, and therefore faster. I'm not sure I buy it though. It's still inefficient in multiple ways and not nearly as flexible as one of the loggers based on the popular log4j style.

My own personal preference is to use something which shoves your logging out to syslog. Then you get some pretty fine-grained control over what your logging is doing, and it's easy to say, do all of your logging across the network. Unfortunately, taking advantage of the UNIX concept of many small tools working together hasn't really taken root in many programmers' design approaches.
How about a few emails from us to Brad Stone about Kirkland? Here's his page with a link to email him directly.
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s...
Thus the debit card was invented.
You can also try:

http://jobs.37signals.com/ (usually webapp jobs)

http://jobs.joelonsoftware.com/ (not always small companies)
My motivation has always been family. Making enough money so my dad doesn't have to work any more and can retire comfortably without worrying about bills or medical expenses. Making my parents proud. Helping my extended family and my community, and just having the financial security to support any of my family and friends through an emergency.
Subversion for Designers
> boss who is living a good life while 1 to 5 or so programmers slave over ancient technology and insane customers

I find this is most often the case with small companies that aren't run by programmers or ex-programmers, although that isn't always a hard and fast rule.
I once did some research into this whilst at university. Basically the criminal mindset is often very very close to an entrepreneurial one - if not the same. It comes down to value systems generally with the individual, although entrepreneurs are often found to bend or change the rules to suit themselves. For example Richard Branson, when he first started, ended up in trouble with the law as he exploited what an export-import system for records, ultimately ending up with a heavy fine, though no jail time.
And it's free!
Yeah, but I still use the credit card so I can keep most of my money in savings accounts and time my card payments to my paychecks. Having a balance sitting in my non-interest-bearing checking account seems inefficient.
Life moves in cycles that are at different frequencies. When they all end up on a peak or trough at the same time, it is trying to tell you something. Listen, and then move, based on your own interpretation of what you want to hear.

In this case, it sounds like you have a project you want to get done. Get it done. Then go on to something new. If you have a PHB kill the project, or otherwise remove your delight in it, use that as the catalyst to move on.

Or, if you wake up one morning realizing that you have to do that startup right now then do it.
I typed in "toaster," and it said, "Seems to be a Television..."
Good idea. I just did. The NYT has been completely pwned in this case.

Either Stone didn't ask whether there was anyone else doing this (unlike a NYT reporter) or the GCC founders lied to him, because they certainly know about Kirkland North. After all, KN's founders include the original author of the game at Yale.
"no indication that people with higher IQ are able to reach the top faster"
ASP.NET MVC Source Code Now Available - C# on RAILS?
Could you structure the company (legally) such that each team was an independent company that the parent company holds a majority stake in? This way if an individual team got sued, the parent company's liability would be limited to it's investment in that team, and sibling teams would be isolated completely.

Of course, I have no idea if that is how liability works, and even if it was, the accounting situation for the overall company would be a nightmare.
Howto: Install Safari on Ubuntu with Flash
Oh, this is very clever. I've been an officer in a club that runs online (and offline!) games such as Werewolf, Diplomacy, and Assassin. The appeal of many of our games tends to be restricted to people who, well, take their game-playing seriously. These new games seem to have broken out into the greater population and that really opens up new possibilities.

One aspect I love of online games is that they eliminate many of the social barriers of age, profession, race, and financial status. If a game like this can bring together a local community across those boundaries I think the entire society will be enriched.
I'm 23 and I just left my first job of two years to build a startup about three months ago. I'd like to believe that while you're young (if you are) and/or while you don't have to support anyone (e.g., a family), there's no reason why you shouldn't give it a try. If it doesn't pan out, you can always try again or just go back to having a regular job.

And I'll agree with some of the previous comments that all you really need to worry about is the money. Be sure that you can afford to not have any reliable income for a long while. Otherwise, if you think you have a good enough idea to pursue, just keep your morale up and you'll be fine.
Another important fact, which is politically incorrect to mention.

About 66% of the murders in the US are committed by a demographic group that is unique to the US (1). If you exclude that group, our murder rate is cut in half.

http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2006/offenses/expanded_informatio...

(1) I'm know the racial group exists in both Canada and the UK. The demographic group (race+culture) is uncommon in Canada, and virtually nonexistent in the UK. When looking at the statistics, I'm assuming the 28% of murders with unknown perp are distributed the same as those with a known perp.
Let your employer fund your ideas through your paycheck--they don't own your nights and weekends.

I find the hardest challenge when I start a part-time project is staying motivated at the day job. If you're happy there and can achieve this balance then you have the benefit of both worlds.
The truth is a bit more complicated than that, ownership of IP generated while working for another company can be a very tricky issue, it depends on your local laws, your employment contract and so on... consult a lawyer.
A lot of people these days (myself included) have chronic conditions that require ongoing regular doctor visits and/or medication. Even at a high premium level, insurance is cheaper than paying out of pocket (my maintenance medication costs $48k annually!).

I guess you could argue that that makes me not a good candidate for a startup... which is why I still work for BigCo, and work on my startup at night (N.B not the one currently listed in my profile).
The danger of the debit card is that if there is an unexpected charge or some other banking error, your cash is tied up until the problem is resolved. You can't access your money. With a credit card the tied up money is the credit card company's . My policy is to use credit for anything over $20, and just pay off my balance every month. It's a good compromise between safety and convenience.
We're looking for a 25% partner from North America for Ingolingo
Hi guys, we have this Ingolingo concept as described in the powerpoint presentation above. We are looking for someone from North America who potentially wants to partner with us - sales and marketing rather than technology.

It's a very bootstrapped thing, just launched a few days ago. I'd also appreciate some criticism of the website and app. It's at http://www.ingolingo.com. Thanks!
Read the Wikipedia description:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_coloring_problem

You can't "point" nodes at each other to communicate the directions to the destination. Instead, you must communicate by coloring each edge with one of k colors (k is the out-degree of every node). Then, for any chosen destination node, you give a sequence of colors; the recipient of the directions starts in any node (even the destination node) and simply follows the sequence of colors, ending up at the destination. The fact that such a coloring always exists is somewhat surprising.
In the UK at least, debit cards dont offer the same levels of protection as credit cards if your details are stolen
Wikirandom - Random articles from Wikipedia
Ahhh, very true. I imagine it would be nearly impossible to get a plan outside of a company with $48k guaranteed outlay, since you wouldn't have coworkers helping to even out the cost for the insurance company. I guess there are always government backed plans like COBRA for cases like that.

I think the best candidates for startups are the ones who actually make the leap... everything else is accounting... best of luck to you!
Why OLPC Security Chief just resigned
This entry termed as "traditional" venture capital is accurate as I these SaaS dev environments are still incubators of sorts, and still require a piece of the profit. Problem is, the product is not as free-standing - your product is very derivative and always has a bill to pay.
Multicore programming "remains the province of an elite few"
How Woz, Gil, and Ellen's SPAC went splat
I was actually wondering if there was a page where I could just view the list of jobs being advertised on SnapTalent... seeing as it's a self-selecting group of advertisers, that has very high value to me.

Feature Request: Show me the company, job title, and city, please?
My first major job out of school was with CitiBank. I hated the corporate culture there, and the immense inertia. When I left I had health insurance through the federal COBRA plan, but it cost me $400 monthly. I don't recall the deductible offhand. That was a double-whammy because not only did I no longer have the steady income from that job, but I now had an additional $400/mo expense. Fortunately I had some small savings, but I was almost to the point of going into debt for basic necessities before my next full-time job started. Beyond that, even though I had insurance through my next employer, the insurance company had a policy of denying coverage for any pre-existing conditions for three months. I was fortunate that it was only three months; I believe they can have such policies which last for up to a year.

The only thing worse than paying huge amounts of money for health insurance is not having insurance. My out-of-pocket expenses were about $800-$900 monthly the few months I did not have insurance covering things like prescription medications.

I'm living frugally now and saving funds to begin my own startup. But I now know that my true expenses are much greater than I had imagined as a student due to the high cost of health care.
This doesn't really tell us anything, only that he liked an executive he was working with, and is no longer working with him. There's a bigger backstory here that we're not hearing about.
Sneak peek at OpenOffice.org 3.0 - Download Squad
It sounds like you have capable colleagues who are currently well-paid. That is fertile ground for finding co-founders to implement ideas without assinine obstacles.
The Principle of Least Surprise
What's the point?? Wikipedia already has a "Random Page" feature.
They're not really saying they're going to "lose their shirts", those are the journalist's words.

What GM actually says is that the Volt won't be profitable for the first few years, which is no surprise to anybody, and no different from what Toyota did with the Prius.

If you really want an electric car you can go buy a Zap Xebra for ten grand right now, but don't be surprised if it sucks. (http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2008-zap-xebra-review/)
That's only true if your terms of employment are written with a clause like that. Even if it is, it's possible to become the owner of ideas formed while employed. Woz, for instance, went to HP and said, "I've been working on a computer and would like to start selling it." HP didn't care about it and gave him free reign.

Other companies and organizations only care about the work you do while on the job (9-5 or whatever) and theoretically have no legal ground to claim ownership on outside projects provided you never do work on those projects while "on the job." Obviously the word "work" in this context could have many different meanings... (I am not a lawyer)
Facebook Toast? Hot Today, Dead Tomorrow--Like AOL?
Let me see...

- You like your work.

- You are making good money.

- You like your co-workers.

If I were in your position, I'd get part of the money you are making in the day job and use to invest in the ideas you're thinking about. You could easily hire someone (or could even be a co-founder) to work full-time on these ideas and keep that as a side business.
There is a lot of confusion around logging because software developers use it to debug code whereas IT people use it to manage alarms in systems.

Call me an idiot but I did write custom loggers multiple times in the past.

I did that because I use a lot of trace messages for debugging and that is so unusual that it kills the existing loggers big way.

Nowadays I don't do that anymore, I use the system logger. I do that because I managed to find a way to factorize the logging logic out from the filtering logic.

For example in JavaScript I do

var de = isEnabledTraceXXXXX();
xxx
de&&bug( "Tracing YYYY");

This is ultra efficient and readable thanks to the && progressive operator. For those interested, I described that trick there: http://virteal.com/DebugDarling
In certain situations where an anticompetitive monopoly exists, the government does and should regulate. Take, for example, the birth of cable tv in the US. The cable companies were granted monopoly in regions because otherwise it was senseless to commit the funds to build the infrastructure necessary to develop the industry. In this case, the trade-off is; yes, you get a monopoly but we're going to regulate the prices.

Same with utilities (water, sewer, electric,...).

Many times, however, the regulation is a farce (the regulators and the regulated are all friends). In some cases, the government steps in to see what the shenanigans are.

Usually the defending companies argue that their increased margin is needed for "future investment costs," or something. Sometimes the regulators agree, sometimes not.

So, yes, in certain cases where a few tightly-knit companies are committed to control essential resources, they are "forced" to sell at "reasonable" prices.

Interesting that you bring up software companies. In the 1992 presidential election, the deciding issue to me was the building of the internet. Bush (41) wanted to let the private companies do it all a la cable, sewer, etc. Clinton said, no, it was to be a vital infrastructure to our country and the government should build it (a la our interstate highway system).

I voted for Clinton.
Make sure work is NOT done on company issued comps
I suspect this has something to do with OLPC switching from Linux to XP.
Facebook is rapidly growing abroad. I think the $15 billion dollar valuation is silly, but Facebook is not a textiles company. Optimism is not unreasonable, however it is -- of course -- speculative.
I suppose one way to end up working at a small company is to start by working at a large company that is shrinking. :)
Nice -- one of those "wtf...oooooh!" hacks. :)
America was conned - who will pay?
Yes, they will make it up by increasing volume. They are spending the money on employees (to grow traffic) and servers (to accommodate traffic). They aren't spending it on hookers and private jets like Enron.

The servers are one-time expenses. I don't know how Facebook is booking them because the company is private so I can't read its quarterly statement. But, if we could I bet they would be a special expense. They are buying the capacity to support their userbase. You simply don't need to do that every year.

They are also spending a lot on engineers. I think they spent this money wisely. The Facebook application system generates a lot of free attention.
Authorities avert run on HBOS caused by false rumours
Yes, I would trust my friends more than the credit card companies. The former would like to see you succeed, the latter would just like to see your money.
Well, since I shouldn't defend my own site, I won't defend it: Wikirandom is "basically useless". But I'm going to add random search by category and more complex – and always basically useless – stuff.
Article thesis: though Facebook exceeds expectations on the only established empirical metric for its success, it fails all the author's subjective metrics, like "thrilling older people".

Eagerly awaiting news of Google's imminent demise as well; yes, it makes huge amounts of money, but the graphic design minimalism so crucial to its success has been slipping.
Being from the defense sector, I'd love to know what companies you're talking about. Although I bet you don't want to get into that. Anyway, in a week I'll be leaving my 1000+ people company for a 5 people startup! Interesting times ahead...
Right, lets take violent criminals and place them in upper management. I can see it now:

"I used to be a drug dealer; now I'm your boss. Now get to work bitch before I cap, I mean, fire your ass!"

...

In all seriousness, I see a danger in using people who have a demonstrated disregard for the lives and property of others. At least with the current individuals we have reasonable doubt as to whether they would kill or steal to get their way. In highering ex-conns we know.
I tried out a couple different sites. twitter, pownce, evite.

It seems like it was somewhat on spot, twitter having about 75% favorable reviews, rest due to downtimes. However, pownce had 100%, which seems like it probably didn't trawl the web for enough mentions of it.

Evite, had about 20% hates. I had expected it to be higher. I too hate eVite.

I remember this sort of thing before at another startup, and its processing was faster, but I don't know where they disappeared to.
Steve Jobs changing tune on music subscriptions?
OK, so the ideal microwave has just 1 nob. You turn it, and that gives you the time. And as soon as you let go, it starts up. Can't get simpler or easier to use than that.

For the nob, I would want some type of exponential scale for time. Most people care about the difference between two and three minutes, but the difference between 20 and 21 minutes is inconsequential. Would that be confusing though?
I keep my eye on the job boards for most of the major tech blogs and sites, but even there it tends to be larger organizations.

The other issue would be the mass amounts of jobs posted for work in CA. I would really like to stay here in the east (Boston) as oppose to moving halfway across the country for a job that very well may exist where I'm located already.

I think CA would be a great place to live, however it just doesn't fit into my current situation at the moment.

Are there any other resources out there for startup type jobs other than the major players (TechCruch, GigaOm, 37Signals, etc)?
The OLPC is not switching from Linux to XP. Microsoft (and many other corporations and universities) were provided with prototype machines, and Microsoft decided to try porting Windows to it. OLPC did not discourage this, but all of OLPC's software to date runs solely on Linux.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_myths#The_laptop_will_run_a_M...

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Main_Page/Archive_2#Open_source.3F
The Hugo Sci-Fi Award nominees for 2008 have been announced
[Sunspots] The noodle edition
I meant it as a critique of OPEC in general. They will control production to get the most money per barrel because when its gone, its gone. Exxon is the largest publicly traded energy company in the world (from tfa). They do better when prices stay high. While they may not be the biggest player in the whole oil game, they do play a significant role in oil's path to the end consumer. Lets just say they have a lot more to gain form $200/barrel oil than from $50/barrel oil and leave it at that.
IAAL, and I second this. Even if you do everything right and would win in the courtroom, megacorp can make it into a Pyhrric victory by consuming vast amounts of time and money (if you have the resources to get that far, even).
Economic Jargon.
There. Everwhere. But Here.
You're thoroughly missing my point. PG's argument is that man was designed, via evolution, to live relatively autonomously. My point is that even a casual glance at history disproves that. The German and Swiss states, for all their autonomy, couldn't stand up to Napoleon's hierarchical tyranny. In fact, it took a far more tyrannical society, Russia, to put Napoleon in his place. Hierarchy is sometimes necessary for survival, and is thus favored by evolution.

When we seek freedom, it is not because it is the evolutionarily superior state. It is because their is a conflict between individual advantage and collective advantage. When evaluating life decisions, you have to account for both.
I raised enough to last me for years. You should too. Now. If you can.
In this context they're mostly log file generators and one for outputting system log messages.

Still, there is no reason I have ever seen for having more than one or wasting time rolling your own unless you need platform independence.
Bravo man ... bravo... I am now going to consume your entire blog from now on.
Let's assume humans are indeed "designed" to work in small groups of only 10 people, then at the bottom level of the company tree groups should only consist of 10 people each. So far so good.

But why has a company of 1000 a three-level tree structure with 10 groups of 10 groups of 10 each rather than a two-level structure with 100 groups of 10 each? You assert the reason is the 100 bosses couldn't work together as that group size would be too big. But the bosses don't form a "workgroup" in this sense anyway. They may meet occasionally but spend most of their time with their own groups. The reason for the additional tree level seems more that the supreme leader of the company wouldn't be able to oversee all 100 groups himself.

The distinction matters because for the purpose of being overseen, groups can be represented by their bosses without having to act as one person (as they might have to if their bosses formed a workgroup subject to size limitation due to humans' innate design), so the inverse relationship between freedom of the leaves and company size can't be deduced.
I agree that you did not explicitly say that it's negative, but the scenario you're referring to obviously has a seriously negative connotation in today's zeitgeist, so you should have been clearer if you wanted to evoke something other than the default connotations. As your comment stands it seems like you're saying "ohnoes humans will be gone!".