skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Almost failed high school (wasn't interested). Never went to college (didn't even apply).

Eventually, after coding through my teens, I founded a web development agency with some friends to build websites for money, while bootstrapping the development of a few web apps. All of them failed. I had severe imposter syndrome. Didn't help that my family had to sell our house while I was bootstrapping a startup, so I was basically homeless for a year.

Ultimately, one day I just realized that through all that hard work, I had somehow already made it, and that I was in fact a real developer, as knowledgeable as even my most CS-pedigreed friends coming out of school. It's about the learning, not the piece of paper.

Once I realized the true value that my skills and experience bring to the table, I began interviewing more confidently and negotiating more aggressively.

Fast-forward a few years, a few positions and companies later, and I am making over six figures with virtually no degrees or certifications, or student debt.

Uncertainty and doubt are not things to be feared; they keep you on your toes, hungry, and constantly learning, and that's how you beat college graduates in the job market. Don't succumb to imposter syndrome.
Maybe it was by virtue of you being his offspring that you could tolerate that, but I can tell you that if I were his kid he'd have been dealing with a seriously exasperated/cranky kid and would've started leaving me at home for his all-day museum visits.

Even now, the idea of spending an entire day at a museum makes my brain's gag reflex fire. Even for cool subjects that naturally interest me (history, engineering), there's only so long I can mill around staring at things in a receptive state before my brain says "ENOUGH".
Two of the categories are interesting choices:

Fruit / Vegetable beer: this is kind of a catch-all category, so I wouldn't be surprised if the data was a bit of a mess. Like you can have pumpkin beers mixed in with strawberry beers.

American Adjunct Lager: this is the category used for American junk beer like Bud Light. I bet most of the reviews are very low rated.
I have to disagree here. Various Council Highways departments are absolutely focused on traffic flow. I would go as far as to say that the two top priorities are traffic flow and not affecting on-street parking.

It's changing. This table comes from the Welsh Active Travel Act Design Guidance https://cyclebath.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/screen-shot-20...

If you have a 30mph road, it needs a protected cycle track. We need space where an 8 year old cycling to school does not have to share road space with HGVs. Where one mistake does not get punished by death.
When did HN turn into reddit? Not just this post but recently a lot
> as if their observations about themselves must be true of the general population.

Worth noting that such attitude extends far beyond just food.
There was this interesting article in Finnish news about a week ago[1 - finnish obviously]. Kela (the Finnish social security agency) conducted a study which showed that underuse of social security costs them more than abuse.

Almost half of the people who would be entitled to some benefits do not apply for them, due to various reasons such as social stigma, lack of knowledge or because they consider all the paperwork too much work. As a result, many people end up with more serious problems (debt, evictions, medical issues, social exclusion) that the state ultimately ends up paying for.

They found that abuse of the benefits exists, but is not very widespread.

[1]: http://yle.fi/uutiset/sosiaaliturvan_alikaytto_tulee_meille_...

Edit: fixed typo
edit2: really fixed typo
Google built (and then canceled) a “Star Trek Communicator” prototype
I made a couple of hundred pounds out of 20 by spotting intra exchange arbitrage opportunities on cryptsy. Just calculated all possible paths through the various coins and waited for a profitable loop to open. It was like riding waves through the markets, but the waves got smaller and smaller as the market became more efficient :( I started thinking about trying to understand if it might be possible to induce resonances within the interconnected markets to create more waves, but it I didn't have the time for such a hairbrained scheme.
I agree that having fewer people being born into poverty is a thing we should strive for, so I am not opposed to it like you claim I am. What I am opposed to is your method and reasoning for that method.

Your method is that poor people should not have kids due to their inability to easily provide for those kids. In not having kids, they bring less people into an impoverished social standing that is hard to break out of. By this reasoning, should people with less desirable traits (history of heart disease, cancer, etc) not have kids to help eradicate those traits? There is a chance their child will not have those specific traits or htey will take, like there is a chance that a child will move out of poverty.

Of course not, that's absurd.

Other than the self regulation of impoverished people to not have kids to help eradicate poverty, which is what you are describing, I would rather see social means to help those people escape poverty.
Dell PCs and Laptops are shipping with rogue root level CA
Somewhat old fashioned.

I'm in my third semester of university (Philosophy and CS) and I applied for a job in customer support over their website with CV and cover letter.

Since my technical skills are quite solid I actually got hired as a support engineer and it has been a pretty good decision so far.
It's not as if these places are impossible to access. The existing bus routes are just not well planned for this trip. These journeys are both less than 15 minutes by bike.

http://www.openstreetmap.org/directions?engine=mapzen_bicycl...

http://www.openstreetmap.org/directions?engine=mapzen_bicycl...

Not only can you carry more food on a bike than you can on the bus, but it's good exercise too.
You'll learn more about networking from using Nmap than from looking at the source. Always use -v and maybe even -d, then investigate what the output is telling you. And read the book: https://nmap.org/book/
So without signing up...what is it?
Home for Sale – Smokers Paradise?
Sprawl isn't simply because of subsidies, a lot of it has to with people changing jobs and ending up further from work or having work relocate and doing the same. Throw in trying to live closer to work in many towns is impractical because of cost.

When it comes to mass transit in cities, quit blowing money on trains. For some odd reason politicians and many people are hung up on light rail and it has the worst cost structure of all mass transit options. It isn't flexible and its cost per mile is staggering let alone the cost of maintenance.

we have no hole dug on our dependence on cars. The only hole is that a lot of road building and maintenance is politically driven as does not fix a problem but instead buy votes in politically sensitive areas.
I worked with a medium-sized analog computer in the mid 1970s. It may have had around 20 op-amps, covered a desktop, and used an HP XY-plotter for output. I could set up different models of differential equations. I remember simple harmonic oscillators and predator-prey models [0]. I was studying physics rather than computer science and didn't then know about Turing computability. I found the GE BASIC timesharing system easier to program and use than the analog computer, but the graphical output of the analog system was much nicer.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka%E2%80%93Volterra_equatio...
Posted with the intention of a focused discussion that's relevant to hackers.
Went to Dartmouth College, double majored in Mechanical Engineering and Economics, wrote my Masters thesis on mechanisms for creating uniformally distributed bi-disperse emulsions, was a mechanical engineer for a year, then applied for a job at a software company after realizing that's really my passion (friend of a friend worked there). Worked for them for almost 3 years. Now I've moved to Denver, started my own consultancy and my previous employer has hired me back as a remote contractor. I'm also working in the evenings on my own startup and hoping to launch a beta group in the next 6 months to a year.
Where to hate daylight saving time and where to love it
7 Criteria for Selecting an Entrepreneur-Confidant
That wouldn't fit in a nice acronym
I know this is not new but I sow it yesterday on a spanish finance show, so coincidence the same day it was shown in both countries.

An article from 2014 at bloomberg talking about it:

http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-06-05/safaricoms-m...
> "Fixed" and "broken" are defined how the person wants to use his body, not by natural order of things.

That's an interesting idea, but one which I have to disagree with. A person who wishes to be an amputee does not have a broken body because he has two arms and two legs, nor is his body fixed by severing one or more of them; rather, he has healthy limbs and a broken brain or mind, which may be fixable with particular forms of therapy, or not, but certainly not by destroying his healthy limbs.

> Otherwise, reaching immortality could be viewed as "breaking" perfectly functioning death mechanism.

From what I know of how people age and die it appears that death is the failure and that immortality, were it achievable, is the proper state.
Also check out "Minecraft: Pi edition" for the Raspberry Pi. It comes with embedded python support and is free: http://pi.minecraft.net/

Somewhat unfortunately, it hasn't been updated since 2012 and lacks a lot of features of the Pocket or PC version.
Just curious, how old were you when you hit the 6 figure salary and which city was that in?
The difference is that Uber provides a service that actually works.
$3 Million raised from 16K backers, wow

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tiko3d/tiko-the-unibody...

looks kinda small though
The Asian American Man Survey
Show HN: Cloud based recruitment and candidate management
> Lab tested you say... not convenient as in I can't just go to a lab and tell them "hey I need to be trippin so can you check these blotters"?

You're right, but it's probably much easier than you think[1].

You can also send anything into ecstasydata[2] and it will be tested a posted to the site. Unfortunately under US law they can't tell you purity or dosage, but can at least tell you if it's legit.

[1] http://energycontrol.org/
[2] http://www.ecstasydata.org/view.php?id=3897
Posted with the intention of a focused discussion that's relevant to hackers.

BTW, I read your "about" section. Looks like you might genuinely benefit from this discussion :)
Show HN: Swimat – XCode plugin to format Swift code
Sorry for the delay in replying.

I get paid more than most developers in Toronto, afaik. I get paid less than developers of the same level as me in the Seattle office. I moved back from Seattle, knowing that.

It always comes down to income vs cost of living ratios and differences. I've heard the best one within Amazon is the Bangalore office.
OK. I guess I shouldn't have talked about instruments I don't know well.
> Anyhow. If you just want to see quickly if CF fits your needs, the place to go is Lattice[1], explicitly designed to be installable on a laptop.

The issue is not whether or not CF can meet my needs, but that it is crazily complex. That it is complex enough that there's a need for a separat setup "explicily designed to be installable on a laptop" is to me an admission that CF is flawed from the outset. I don't care if it's' installable on a laptop, incidentally, I do all my development and testing and experimentations on setups that matches (in architecture anyway) the environments I'll deploy to. Exactly because I refuse to follow a setup built to be easy to get up on a dev machine only to find out that the full production deployment ends up being totally different (a lot of software fails here).

> In the meantime, you can let Pivotal host you on Pivotal Web Services[2].

No, I can't. It's not remotely cost effective for the types of things I do. E.g. for one client I currently part-time manage a private cloud environment with abou 150 containers. Firstly, none of Pivotals options offer enough CPU or memory for us to be able to run it on 150 of the 2GB container options (it'd be more like 500+ at that size), but even if 150 was enough, the estimated cost for that would be substantially more than what it costs to lease racks + power + bandwidth + leasing costs on all the hardware + charging the cost of hardware upgrades/maintainenance and the cost of server admin. With more realistic container counts, it'd bankrupt the company in question.

> and deploy it to you own OpenStack or vSphere environment. Or on AWS. Or on Azure. Or some mixture of the above.

The complexity and/or cost of these options makes CF massive unattractive for me. I'm just in the process of cutting a clients hosting costs by about 80% by ditching AWS for a setup on managed servers, for example, and the full deployment of all the infrastructure we need is substantially simpler than just deploying a "bare" OpenStack deployment, and certainly nothing like putting CF on top. They can afford an awful lot of my time to help implement additional functionality for what they save by that move.
I don't view 3D printers as a money saving device -- they're still too inaccurate, which means you can waste a lot of material (read: $$$) on misprints. For anything a normal consumer would buy, it would be cheaper to make 100 injection-molded parts than a single 3D printed one. They save money for engineering firms; but the money they save is the time spent waiting for a part to be delivered.

They're invaluable for people who are already "makers" though. Let's say you built an Arduino/RPi weather sensor (lame use case, but insert any use case here) and you need a way to mount it on a pole on the outside of your house. You can either find something on Amazon you think might work and go the trial-and-error route, or you can design a simple bracket in a CAD app and 3D print it.
How does this help with words, for example substantives, that can have completely different meanings depending on the context? Ex:

The ball is bouncing on the floor

The ball takes place in the hotel
Need a a special mount for your camera? Did that weird part in your car break? ...

Is it useful? Definitely.

Do you need one at your home? Most likely no.
I got my current job through Stack Overflow. I answered a bunch of C++ questions on there, which I used as my "portfolio" when I applied to companies that list on SO Careers.

As for my resume, I have a PhD in computer science from Oxford. I also spent a year in Australia on a fellowship. Since I'm American, I came back to the US to work in quantitative finance, which is the field I've been in for almost nine years now---four at my current place.

So that sounds impressive. Now I'm going to explain how close all of this came to not happening...

I grew-up in the rural deep South. My parents were extremely well educated and well traveled, but they had careers that didn't make any money. So I basically put myself through school. I got some scholarships and I taught part-time, but I had to take-out a lot of loans in the end. By the time I returned to the US, I had over $100K in debt from students loans and credit cards.

I didn't manage to get a job when I first got back to the States. I moved to NYC anyway and couch-surfed with every friend I could think of. (I ran-out of people I know, so I ended-up in a hostel for a few weeks.) I'm a fencer, so I refereed college fencing tournaments for enough money to eat.

It took five months to get my first quant job. The job I have now is the fourth such role because the first three trading desks I worked for all ran into the ground one way or another.

Along the way I had a big healthcare issue that resulted in surgery. That took years to prepare for and to heal from.

And since you ask about failing a class, I never made below a B- in a course, but I did fail my thesis defense the first time around. I had to resubmit my dissertation with a ton of changes to pass. (By the way, I got rejected from every grad school I applied to except for Oxford.)

So when you think that your current path is difficult, just know that I have survived two recessions (dot-com and financial crisis) and been turned-down from most jobs I've applied to.

I have three pieces of advice for you. Firstly, always be frugal. Despite my heavy debt when I returned to the US, I actually have flawless credit since I've never paid a bill late. That kind of history comes in handy a lot.

Secondly, always keep learning. Especially in my field, I have to keep-up constantly, which means following Hacker News, reading ACM/IEEE, taking MOOCs, etc.

And third, make friends. Help-out other people as often as you can. You will need them in the future.
Did you ever really fare well in Mechanical Engineering?
Should we be focused on traffic--i.e. the density of vehicles on the road--or throughput of travelers? Because if you don't build roads, and let traffic build too high, there is a point where congestion becomes a major impediment and throughput plummets.
I cycle all over London and I don't feel safe a lot of the time. Big roads have inconsistent cycle lanes that start and stop at random or are ignored by drivers. Side roads have people who think 35mph is a reasonable speed to go on a road that doesn't even have space for two cars to pass side by side.
The UK needs a lot more investment in cycle infrastructure before it could be considered safe.
“History is written by the victors.” Walter Benjamin

Thought this was an appropriate quote.
Because there are alternatives that also increase people's mobility, as 'hammock' wrote below: "the alternative to falling into the induced demand trap by building more roads, is to improve public transportation infrastructure. Such improvement has been shown, perhaps counterintuitively, to have the biggest effect on road traffic."
This one is actually kind-of, sort-of obvious. For NaNoGenMo this year I smushed together word2vec and a POS tagger. What the authors have done here is really cool and goes miles beyond my hacks, but the kernel of the idea should be obvious to anyone familiar with word2vec.
Want Innovation? Try Raising Minimum Wages
"Did anyone actually expect that building more roads would lead to no increase in road usage?"

I think that's exactly it.

Perhaps all road building initiatives should be publicised as short term congestion relief and long term preference of cars over other forms of transport.
Suppose you want to build a railway from TownA to TownB. It's ten miles and you can prove in every conceivable way that it will be profitable for both you and the two towns.

You still can't, because in a society with strong property rights, all the land is owned by somebody, and unless you're out west where one person might own the vast majority of the requisite right-of-way, you have basically no chance of every acquiring all the rights at any reasonable price. Geometry is conspiring to incentivize people in the middle of any given path to hold out for more money by holding the prospect of failure over your head. Reality has even shown that many people irrationally overestimate how much they can squeeze from you, so you realistically face the prospect of many people believing they are the last holdout and trying to squeeze you for so much that it renders the entire project economical.

Thus, the only conceivably private public transport must run on the roads anyhow. Anything else is going to be created by some form of government action; in some sense calling it "subsidized" is almost misleading in that it's entirely created by the government in the first place, even if half-privatized after the fact.

All the instances you name are situations in which one singular entity owns all the land, and thus doesn't have the problem of having to coordinate with dozens of irrational people all trying to squeeze you for cash.
The problem is you get into an endless cycle of adding more and more road capacity and still ending up with the same amount of congestion. If you invest that money in public transport or cycle infrastructure you end up lowering congestion and speeding up everyone's movement including those that still want to drive.
Left school at 16, did some early "new media" Web design related jobs (1998-1999), realized working for other people wasn't my bag and became a very poorly paid freelance developer and designer for several years (through the dotcom boom) mostly as I had no idea what to charge.

Throughout this time I kept playing with things I liked the look of, blogged a lot, generally spent a lot of time online. I picked up Ruby and Rails and a publisher who saw my blog wanted me to write a book. I did, launched a blog to promote the book, the blog became the most popular Ruby blog for several years and a business in its own right. I then branched it out into email and now run an email newsletter business with 5 employees. (Most of this last paragraph has taken 11 years - I first picked up Ruby in November 2004.)
BA: history & religious studies from top 25 school.

First career: got in the door (F250 high-tech) via Manpower and worked my way up over 14 years (reporting to CIO for last four years).

MEng: industrial engineering ten years after graduating uni.

Current job: used credibility gained from first career and emailed president of business division. Now running innovation lab at one of the best companies in the world.

ymmv.
Prototyping. Even for hobbyist builders, it's super useful to be able to 3d print something before committing it to metal, wood, etc.

Outside of that, they're basically good for party tricks ("Everyone gets their own customized shotglass!").

If you're genetically required to jerry-rig your own whatsits rather than buy them ("$3.50 for THAT?? I could make that in an hour with a coat hanger and rare-earth magnet!!") you may also enjoy it as it provides another way to stick it to the Homo Economicus dullards.
This would make a good Show HN submission. Editing the title to start with "Show HN: " will move it to that page.
>I’ve often wondered why the so-called Masters of the Universe, those C.E.O.s with multimillion-dollar monthly paychecks, keep working. Why, once they have earned enough money to live comfortably forever, do they still drag themselves to the office? The easy answer, the one I had always settled on, was greed.

>But as I watched the hours slowly drip by in my cubicle, an alternative reason came into view. Without a sense of purpose beyond the rent money, malaise sets in almost immediately. We all need a reason to get up in the morning

I enjoyed the article, but this is painful. Is it really that hard to imagine why someone with a lot of money would want to keep doing what they do, or that it might not be primarily about the money?
I think there's a touch of "my adversary is a super-villain" paranoia to the anti-tracking sentiments. I mean Facebook or Amazon get talked about occasionally for being able to predict pregnancies or breakups an monetizing that. But, IMO, it's much overblown. Predctive analytics are not at that point, if they ever will be. The vast majority of ad targeting is a lot simpler than that. It's either common sense understandable (advertise nanny services to people who read parenting magazines) or trial and error. Trial and error is still the more powerful of the two.

FB & Google have the option to scan your site, pick audiences and advertising strategies and run everything on autopilot. it doesn't work very well.

If your strategy is to collect toilet break statistics, user listening habits or some other bit of "data" for a large number of free users than monetize it somehow, good luck.
I backed Peachy printer https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-peachy-printer-the-fi... Delivery was estimated July 2014, and I'm still getting emails from them about how they're getting ready to begin production.
Painless timelapsing to show off your productivity
Media people ruined the internet.