skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are you sure you're not overestimating how easily you could land a lucrative job like the guys on the stage? Lots of occupations have very attractive jobs at the top of the field while the masses at the bottom do much less attractive, lower paying work.

Funny what you say about your parents. Mine will be disappointed to know that I'm "just" doing programming.

Rest of your life in front of the computer? What will happen when you get too old for your performance arts career? You won't just be able to sit around doing nothing while you rake in the cash as with a programming/engineering/science career.

And are you sure that doing the same performance over and over wouldn't get extremely dull?

Also, don't underestimate how much a lack of money can cause problems once you find your girl.
What do you call a professional sax player? -- Homeless.
This American Life did a great segment on some dancers from one of the Riverdance companies, and how their job was coveted (it was incredibly stable income for a dancer) but also tedious and repetitive. Every show, they were basically mailing in their performances, full of faked energy and enthusiasm.

One week, they purchased a large number of lottery tickets as a group, and found that their excitement for winning the lottery (and therefore quitting Riverdance) was more than their excitement for the job itself.

Here's the link -- act two is the one that you want:

http://thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=306
Coding Horror: CAPTCHA is Dead, Long Live CAPTCHA!
Boo Radley
Ask YC: Help Please What i should learn in order to Design and Analyisi of Algorithm
i wanted to learn design of algorithms so wht math i shd learn in order to get hands on with algo design.

Is it to get hands on first on Math ? If so which math book i shd use.

I am crazy to learn algo and math.

Please Help.
If we keep increasing energy consumption then it is possible that we could make ourselves extinct. There was an article in the New Scientist about the WBE equation ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metabolic_theory_of_ecology ). Essentially, increased energy consumption increases lifespan and delays lifestyle choices but doesn't increase fertility. An example is that the birth rate of industrialised countries is vastly lower than unindustrialised countries. In North America, it has reached a situation where the population doesn't sustain itself. In parts of Europe where the population is not sustaining, some governments offer financial incentives in a futile attempt to fix the situation.

Shell geologist, M King Hubbert's originial 1956 paper on peak oil ( http://www.hubbertpeak.com/hubbert/1956/1956.pdf ) foresaw a bootstrap from fossil fuel to uranium reactors to thorium breeder reactors. However, it doesn't offer any help regarding energy consumption per head or the dissipation of that energy.
One more thing: my advice? Decompose your needs. Break down the big, intractable life problem into the smallest questions that you can, and answer each question as honestly as you can:

Do you want to be "creative"? What does that mean to you?

Do you need to be an actor/dancer/singer/whatever to be creative? Why?

Do you like programming? When?

Do you like where you currently work? When?

If you were unsuccessful as an actor/dancer/singer/whatever, would you be happy? Why?

If you were in your ideal programming job, would you be happy? Why?

etc.

If you do this carefully, you might be surprised by what you find. Not all of our needs are self-consistent or rational.
That's a really good idea - although it may take a while to come up with all the questions, and probably a while longer to answer them. Thanks for the breakdown strategy though.
This seems to be the most practical solution right now, however i'm worried about the time crunch that working at a startup will have on me.
I thought about this, and I have ventured into graphic design stuff before - however the use of the computer as a medium just doesn't compare to a canvas or stage as one.
> make it my primary passion in life

In my experience, if you already had a primary passion you wouldn't care if it offered a "career path". At a minimum you'd be trying to reconcile it with a "real job" and would eventually stumble onto a crossroads.

If you're just unhappy tro to desocialize. Change your environment, your media and your perspective. At an extreme you could move to another country and try learning the language while getting by. Switching cities or jobs is also good, as is picking up a new hobby and meeting new people.

Do your best to kill the expectations that other people place on you and live for yourself.
Sure, I'll say it: If you're saying that publicity is free, you're still wrong.

This isn't even a very new model. People have been getting music for free through radio for a long time. What labels have done so far is little more than changing the transport from radio to web.
I voted you both down to zero! What now?
If you don't mind living over seas, you can have a pretty high standard of living for much less. Based on my off the cuff calculations, I think a person with a decent programming job could save enough in 5 or so years (with frugal living) that they could live overseas off the interest. If true, this is much more guaranteed path to financial freedom than a startup. Just an option to consider.

This is what I've found so far along with the mentioned calculations:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=122341
I voted you up to 2. That's what! Bitch.
Yes, I thought mixmax's writings were pretty good.
Try finding things that you can do. Out of those, try finding things that you want to do do. Out of those, try finding things that you really really want to do.
-Happier(book, by Tal Ben Sahar)

This way you can zoom in on the problem. HTH.
"... i'm a self-taught programmer. I've taken a job as a developer for a start-up in Waltham after college ... but i don't think i'm going to be happy in the long run ... Then it occurred to me that since i've been going to business school and programming, i've practically lost all touch with my artistic side (I used to paint, draw, act, etc..) and that I really regret it ..."

make things that artists like :)

The trick is don't think and/or. There are factors that will work against you though. I noticed after switching from the visual side of my brain used in fine-arts to the predominantly textual side used in programming, it pretty much killed my drawing instinct. The instictive need to draw and scribble. I've only just lately tried to balance the two. Not easy since each require different ways of thinking & looking at things.
There are eerie similarities between the US now and Japan in the 1990s
Inciting the user to check for words that do not exist.
Jobs laughs off shareholders' vote on salary
Ask YC: Recommendation on a chat service/software
Anyone got any experience using things like LivePerson so add chat capabilities to a web site. Looking for something so that I can add live customer service to a web site.
Really cool. Well done!
You mean it could be as much as 60% more awful?
Upcoming Fvrit.com features announcement for bloggers and Social Users
I have a better rule.

People with pictures can see other profiles pictures otherwise they get a message explaining the rule.
To me it sounds like you really want to do something artistic. I'd say don't think about it too much. Just do it. It might not work out but you're fortunate to live in the western civilization (I'm assuming) so you won't starve if things go wrong and it's likely that you can always get another programming job. I think you have a duty to yourself to try this out. Just imagine what you'll wish you would have done in 30 - 40 years time.
Ten Rules of Programming
I like having a job, though, cuz then I don't feel guilty about not spending all my time saving the world. I'd love to, but I have work to do!
If the point is that you can be as productive working a four day week with a 3 day break I would ask why work a five day week?

Startups need productivity not man hours. If you're happy you might make a 'happier' product, be more likely to succeed with business partners, more charming to angels and VC's, more friendly with your friends and even a better lover with your lover.

Each person only has so much to give.. you can squeeze a lot at the beginning and loose later or take a steady pace and reach the goal with a lot less stress.
I don't think anyone on here would mistake you for curt kobain
This is a continuation of my yesterday's question: What software makes you happy? (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=128714). Given the number and breadth of comments, I certainly think there's a pattern to be discovered here.

Your opinion is valued!
I have issues with Ubuntu. When I switched to a Unix based environment 12 years ago, I did what was expected of anyone at that time. I read up and learned about my environment. It seems that users (end users that is) simply do not think that these things should be their concern. That Linux should just do everything out of the box. While I am all for the simplification of Linux for the masses, understanding that software patents, copyrights, and intellectual property (in the US mind you) is being infringed upon by following guides like these is important.

Ubuntu is basically encouraging such acts by offering these "solutions" in their repositories. There are commercial solutions that could be explored which would provide legal solutions. I understand that they are trying to "grow their brand", but it seems a rather unethical way to do it.
Was nobody here in the late 90's?

Every company did crap like this, and well, it didn't stick and it didn't stick for a reason.

I remember when agencies had masseuses, on-site yoga, almost every agency paid for "self-improvement" and most had half-day fridays. Not to mention all the free food, traveling expenses, etc.

It's cool they're doing it, but it's been done before and it didn't really work out the first time around so I'm not holding my breath expecting success this time around.

Mod me down if you want, but that was a big thing back in the day and how you picked which agency you went to work for.
Well I do recall something to the effect of not being so quick to drop out of school / quit work and starting a startup without giving thought to the overall state of the economy because it was being artificially propped up by various methods. Now the economy's screwed up for, apparently, precisely that. I don't know how you define trolling or whackjob, but I think that was just common sense. People can't be whackjobs if they make unpopular predictions that wind up coming true.
Microsoft develops new O.S. from scratch
I'd be great if flickr would offer the ability to watermark all your photos. I'm still waiting for that...
Memory trick breaks PC encryption
I don't think this is really something to worry about but is probably worth knowing.
Backing buddypress
Google provides many of the services that you mentioned and they seem to be doing fine. 37signals only has 9 employees, they're very profitable for their size so I don't see it being a problem.

The key is to hire rockstars-- they produce more value in four days than a mediocre employee does given weeks. If you gave the typical person free food and time off. They'd stuff themselves until they got diabetes and spend the rest of their time watching reruns of 'Room Raiders' on MTV.
If you haven't already, please read this: http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/000932.html
But if you don't sit down to learn, you will never learn. You will fall into a chicken - egg trap. You will not use a new tool because you don't know if it is any better, and you will not know if it is any better because you did not use it. How to break the cycle?

By the way, it DOES take a long time to deeply learn your tools, but it takes a very short time to learn them enough to reach the same level of productivity than the older one, unless it is a complete shift of paradigm. This is specially true when you are moving to newer versions of the same programs, as long as some backward compatibility is kept, you will be not starting from scratch.
Someone may still like a monkey, but no one would like Cheney.
You can be an artist and a excellent programmer without problem. Check this website. http://www.cybergrain.com/ . He is both an artist and an excellent programmer and a real person that I know. He even wrote an small essay to defend dualist because we have problem to imagine a person to be computer scientist and artist at the same time.
What copyright is being infringed by something that is in the ubuntu repositories?

Perhaps they are just mainly providing their solutions to people like me who don't live in countries with ass-backwards IP laws? You cannot seriously expect that a company that isn't based in the US and isn't hosting their stuff in US is going to have to follow US patent law for products offered to people out of US?

As far as I know, any potentially patent-infringing stuff is kept very far from US-based servers.
There's a lot of good food for thought here. I can empathise; I had similar thoughts in college that I wouldn't stick it. I love programming, sometimes even the Blub code I work on day to day, however I don't like sitting at a desk all day, so I'm thinking of a career change. Something in sports or perhaps physiotherapy, things like that.

Anyway, I will say that when it comes to making a go out of arts as a career, I'm watching a lot of my friends and acquaintances struggle hard. They're art students, musicians, actors and comedians, circus performers (my housemate; the place is littered with stilts and facepaint and whatnot) and despite some fantastic dedication to it they struggle to make a go of it. All work day jobs, some of the more talented and dedicated are in low paid arts-related jobs - administration, promotion etc. Most, now pushing into their late twenties and early thirties are starting to think about settling more permanently into the day jobs. Of course, north-west Ireland isn't Boston, so YMMV...

As to having your cake etc, do you do any such activities currently? If you're currently performing in plays etc or gathering the work needed for a gallery show and you can deal with the grind that entails, then I'd be more inclined to say go for it. If not, do so; I'd guess the best barometer of whether you'll have made the right decision is if you can cheerfully dedicate a few evenings a week over the course of the months to years it can take to get something into production.
1, You're not screwing anything up. You're creating some new product from scratch, and resources spent learning a new tool will be resources saved in future projects that use the same tool.

2, And old releases have bugs that will hardly be fixed because the support has been dropped. Follow the six month rule, and then, if you find more bugs, report. It is a lot more likely that the bugs in a new version will be fixed, and quickly, than in an old version.

3, The amount of resources the change will save due to its improvements. I am not saying it will always net positive, but it will also not net negativly always, so it is worth a study. Dismissing because "We don't know" is not a valid excuse, or should not be.

4, Once more, use the six months rule. Anything that is still a hype after six months in a fast paced market like IT is worth a look only for this merit.

5, Again, it depends on how much time the change will save BOTH in the current project and in future ones. A mistake always made is to consider only the current project as time spent. This is unfair and will lead to biased results that will cause the change to be refused nearly always.

6, You talk like my manager. Are you him?

I know you are not making any judgement. You are telling me what you have heard before, probably when faced with the same situation. Problem is, when faced with counter arguments the final answer is "We don't know" or "We don't want to". It is a lose lose situation.
Ask YC : How to jump in the video games development?
I am interested to learn video games development. Where would you start? I am thinking to try to do some homebrew on my Nintendo DS. I am experienced in embedded software development in C. What would you do next? Is it worth looking for a specific degree? As anyone experienced an online degree? Or is it better to invest time to learn by myself?
One thing I've always been curious about is why the same people (not referring specifically to you, illicium) who decry the use of tables for layout use unordered lists (ul) and definition lists (dl) for their forms. If a table should only be used for data, then so should an unordered or definition list.

It's as if they still need a tag for layout, but just can't bring themselves to use the table tag and resort to other markup to accomplish essentially the same thing.

It seems like it's a matter of fashion over function (and reminds me somewhat of the "cool kids" dynamic in music, clothing, gadgets, etc.).

Disclaimer: Yeah, so I'm using divs for mostly everything now, too.
I've gone back and forth between working in the arts and working in software, and now work at the line between the two.

The thing is, usually making ends meet working in the arts isn't very sexy. I taught bass, played at business parties, and did studio work for a while. It paid well, but I was teaching 14 year olds to play Limp Bizket songs and playing cheesy bass lines for TV commercials. There were definitely moments of coolness, but most of it isn't.

As a day job, programming was more engaging and laid back, and has a more flexible schedule. The stuff that I really liked in music I could do anyway.

Being in the Blue Man Group would probably suck. You'd have next to no artistic freedom, do the same stuff over and over again, and all of your evenings where you'd want to meet with other artists would be taken up.
Django. You won't regret it! The url mapping, the views and escpecially the template engine is fantastic. Almost every element of Django behaves as it should be. Strict separation from code and layout for example.
Apple shareholders OK 'Say on Pay'
I've used TurboGears around 2006 and moved away because it lacked pylons/django/weby like url dispatching, and I found it too hard/impossible to customize the widgets. Also, the main developers droped it in favor of pylons or something else, so, I thought it was pretty much the end of the project. I am suprised that it is still around.
Two things.

First, doing a startup is a really enjoyable form of technical work. You're working on what you want to, and that is fun in itself. It's also multi-disciplinary and thus you get variety and some quite arty bits of work. For example, How can we ask a question that will get us honest, interesting, succinct information about a user's personality?

Second, if your passion can't be your job (for whatever reason), make fucking sure you indulge your passion in your free time. I found that working a job that sucked hard to be an excellent motivation for making full use of my spare time by throwing myself into playing in a band, political activism, squash and programming my own stuff. If you don't get similarly motivated, perhaps forcing yourself to work on your passion will help.
I'm no expert on this at all but basically I would answer yes to most of your questions. Start trying to teach yourself. A games related degree is valued by the community but not necessary. If you can create a few demos yourself or with some friends this can demonstrate a great deal to prospective employers. You already know one of the key technologies. Just get started and get what ever you do in front of as many eyeballs as possible.
Turning TinyURL into a Distributed File Sharing System
www.gamedev.net
Yes!
No!
I don't care!

I love that you can vote for all three.
"You talk like my manager. Are you him?"

No. Just someone who has learned how to listen instead of whine.
I'm in Russia, answered "Europe", is it correct?
Want a peek at a non-Windows operating system from Microsoft?
Zuckerberg: New Facebook COO will be organization czar
Vatican recants with a statue of Galileo
I second gamedev its been around for a long time and has some decent helpful people on their forums. I used to use it a lot when I used to do game dev for my own projects.

also checkout garagegames.com great community over there based around their engines which are cheap and easy to use.

As for online degrees I wouldn't bother, most game dev employers are looking for killer demos and knowledge. If you are of an age that you are about to go to college/uni then I would do a game programming related degree for sure.

You could also checkout MS's XNA platform, its in .net but easy to get up and running and also with the creators club you can get stuff running on your xbox 360 if you have one.
geordi: the backend of codepad
I don't necessarily want to join the blue man group, but have rather have the creative freedom of something as subjective as acting and yet still being able to provide a need in peoples lives (entertainment).
good read, thanks for the article!
No, CSS tables are not meant for tabular data. The fact that something is tabular data is semantic information, not style information. Markup should denote tabular data. CSS should denote display style. There is nothing wrong with having CSS that says "lay this out in the style of a table" while the markup shows that it isn't semantically a table.
Lua would be a nice and easy addition. in particular WoW uses it for its UI mods
I already passed the college age. I am 30 years old and I have a familly to support. So if I can avoid investing time and money for a degree, I would prefer. But if someone knows a good online degree, maybe I would consider it. I don't have a xbox 360. I have a nintendo DS and a Wii. But thanks for your informations, I will check them. What I wonder is the time to get killer demos by learning alone...
Good post from wheels of the "been there, done that" variety (actually I hate that expression).

Chris: Let's go with green tonight!
Phil: Chris, we've been over this before.
Chris (mopey): But I like green. C'mon, if the fans really love us, they'll be okay with that.
Phil (exasperated): Chris, we're Blue Man Group--we wear f'ing blue. Does Beyonce wake up one morning and say "I think I'll wear a nice, tasteful navy blue dress today with flowers"? No, she puts on the sl'ttiest thing she's got, goes out there and shakes that a'', because she's Beyonce and that's what she does. And that's why we're not gonna go out there and be some kind of Green Man Group.
What do you do? I'm in New York, have a technically simple (not discounting the effort into building it or saying it's easy) idea, and have some contacts in the financial world that can put money into something tangible. My shortcomings are that I don't code, and NYC is full of programmers who are either poseurs and keep coming to "I want to start something" Meetups again and again but never seem to "take that first step" or people rushing to try to get a job at Google or Facebook's NYC offices. So, in conclusion, I'd take "long distance" over face-to-face with people who for whatever reason never seem to understand that "3-5 guys working together without corporate direction from the boss" thing that happens in Silicon Valley on a daily basis.

I think goals and attitudes and personality and a willingness to be flexible are much more important then being close enough to someone to smell them and see their acne.