skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hi,
It seems like everyone thus far has given good opinions, however they are missing the real point. It is not about what they did or their experiences, it's how school relates to you. With your extra credits and starting in a junior year, that is an awesome advantage. However, you get out of school what you want to put into it.

What are your goals when you get out? Just because someone is interested in start-up culture/hacking doesn't mean they are meant to be an entrepreneur and apply to a startup program. They are completely separate things. If you love to hack, and are good at it, you can get a great job at a top company/consult/join a startup. Maybe joining a startup for 2 years right now would be great. It may take off and you won't need school. If not, you were already two years ahead.

My situation is a little different, I'm 18 and graduated from high school this past June. I chose to forgo university to start a company. I am a non-technical founder and so I don't do the hacking, I do the biz dev. Best decision I have ever made. But that is in my situation. I don't sit around and just do charts. I read 4 books a week, trying to learn as much as I can. For me, I am better at learning from myself than I am under a schedule over 4 years. I can absorb way more info at a faster rate this way.

The decision is completely personal and up to you. Just go with your gut, and don't care about other people. When you are successful, no-one cares if you have the letters beside your name. The better PR story is the kid with no college. The downside is the average job force applications later on. It doesn't sound like you are an average person, so I wouldn't worry about this.

Best of luck!
Let us know after you get everything running. I'm counting on this as an alternative to PSIGate now.
On the plus side, I often find that when I get out of my comfort zone, it can have amazing results.
I love my JQuery
Another thought: Why are degrees of "stealing" okay? Andrew notes that his works are "derivative" of others. How much do you have to change another person's design before it's not considered "stealing"? How "inspired" can something be before it's no longer inspired and simply copied?
Do you find that "find . | xargs grep" is more useful than "grep -HnR" in some way?

I recommend setting up cscope for hacking the kernel. I haven't done any kernel hacking for a while, but when I did I found cscope (and vim+cscope) very helpful. Since it's database-driven and designed to run on systems from the 80s, it's still extremely fast.
They're not. Most of your time is still spent editing text. Or if it isn't, you're not getting enough done. Any deficiencies in semantic understanding (that's what your brain is for, remember?) are made up for by the sheer speed a proficient user (and fast typist) can get out of a good editor. And while you only use one environment at a time, you probably use several over your career. I've used the same environment quite effectively across 4 platform changes. Can the IDE people say that?

Eclipse is a step in the right direction in terms of openness and universality. But the editing experience still sucks. And it's harder to extend and customize than it should be.

There may come a day when there's an IDE that a) has a great editing experience b) is fast, flexible, and universal, and c) offer not just crutches and marginal improvements, but radical, order-of-magnitude improvements to the way we interact with software. It's not today. But the linked research project actually has some promise.
The Canadian bank ones are garbage. Good opportunity for someone to partner with them.
It's just an interesting testament to the irrationality of the human emotional response that we feel sad for an unusual tree, but feel little for the immense magnitude of human loss that occurs constantly.

Brings back memories of people getting upset about the dogs being killed in Wolfenstein 3D, but not the humans.
Thomas Edison's Wax Cylinder EULA
First off, I'm going to disagree with the assumption that knowing you want to sell instantly lowers the price. Businesses get bought and sold every day. There's no shame in wanting to sell a company you've built. As long as you don't come across as desperate to sell (which it doesn't sound like you are), then you'll be able to get a fair price. In fact, you'd face the possibility of getting a better price if there are multiple bidders.

Secondly, you might want to consider selling off the individual applications piecemeal. There's the possibility that you'd get a larger amount of money by splitting them up then by selling the whole company.

There are a couple of other things that will affect the price you receive. Are the apps still in the top 100? Are they paid apps, and if so, what kind of cashflow are you seeing from them. If they're free apps, are they monetized in any way (in-app purchase, advertising, etc.)?

I guess the other question is how much you're looking to get for everything. Hell, depending on your answers to the questions above, I might be willing to buy you.

In any case, I'm curious why you're considering selling everything off. Would you be willing to share with us the reasons?
They're also precisely the foundations of different notions of computation -- what we mean by ';' in an imperative language. So if math is a hack, then yeah. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=116984

Go read Moggi.
From the vantage point of a 20-year marriage: it's always about compromising, about settling. My wife and I had, I suppose, one of those romantic, instant connections. She's from Sweden, my parents are from India and I grew up in the Bronx. We ran into each other at IBM Research, and we moved in together on our second date. Instant chemistry, very romantic.

But during the 20 years of marriage, the way we met didn't matter. Marriage is something else than about that initial burst of lust, or gushing romance or whatever. When you get woken up at 4 in the morning by your soulmate because the dog needs to go outside to pee and she certainly isn't about to leave the warm bed, believe me, romantic love is not what makes you jump out of bed.

I think we have unrealistic expectations about romance. Living together is freaking hard; giving up one's independence and having to be ready to compromise about every damned last thing in life (except maybe what you do in the potty) is hard. And once you compromise, if you're smart and want to stay happy, you have to be enthusiastic about the compromise, or you get bitter. Be happy, even when you didn't get what you want.

Still, despite all the compromises, all the things we had to work out, here I am 20 years later, and the love I had for her on that first day we met seems like a pale imitation to what I feel today. You have to work at it, and you end up with something a lot more. I don't know about settling, but instant love connection or not, making the marriage work is the hard part, and the real love in life comes from that work.
I feel like I'm being dragged through this tedious system which will later prepare me for work at a company coding Blub, it's driving me nuts.

To some extent, this is true and will continue to be true. But, as others have no doubt pointed out and will continue to point out, you'll learn more from school than just coding Blub (or lisp, or haskell, or whatever); you'll be learning how to learn, how to get along with others, how to live on your own, and so forth.

The big advantage you'll have at UW is that you'll be hanging around a lot of very smart people, especially in the CS department (I assume you're from Washington; I actually went to Newport HS in Bellevue). The connections you make, whether from demonstrating your skill or just from hanging out, will probably serve you for the rest of your life. If you impress your professors, you'll find research/internship opportunities you wouldn't elsewhere. And don't underestimate the larger social aspect: you'll never be around so many people in your own stage of life again. So go to the occasional party, hook up here and there, and learn how to be a person too, which is more important than you might imagine.

You should at least start college, although it'll be easy to get lost at UW. Still, this advice: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1183085 seems good to me; if this is you, don't go. But the weight should be on going; if you really hate it, you can quit. But try to find challenging classes while not underestimating the social potential. And don't get side-tracked by run-of-the-mill jobs; the only way you should drop out is for a game-changing startup opportunity.

You're probably reading variations on a lot of the advice above because it's pretty good advice. It won't apply to everyone, but it will apply to most—especially people as driven as you. A few more observations: read my post about why laptops in class are often a distraction: http://jseliger.com/2008/12/28/laptops-students-distraction-... and, as soon as you can, get a copy of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience : http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0061339202?ie=UTF8&tag=... as soon as you can. There's another thing you'll find in college: books that are essential but that you don't currently know to read because you don't have people around you who are sufficiently knowledgeable to recommend them.

Anyway, if you have other, specific questions for me, send an e-mail to the link at http://jseliger.com , which is my blog, especially if you by chance are going to Newport.
Like any other data store, MongoDB will do what you need in less than a second... * if the database fits in memory *. Once it's on disk, it doesn't matter as much how little overhead the storage engine has, it's going to be slow.
thanks for the great response
HBase is probably closer to what you're looking for.
Thats exactly why I read the post as well. Heres hoping the metalab guys would respond to it here.
wow, I did not know about the AmEx problem in Canada. Looks like there's more battling to do after setting up my merchant account/payment gateway. Did you guys look at PSIGate at all or did you just go with Beanstream?
It should be possible to add equivalent keyboard shortcuts to Code Bubbles, so that finding a nearby bubble could be accomplished by ESC,/tagname or something.
Once they have the information, any attempt to control it's use will fail. Remember the government is only allowed to use your SS# for things related to social security, and that isn't even close to how it works.
I was about to ask, "Why don't they just run the code, and provide something like reverse debugging or VM state snapshots to explore different code paths?" but it seems that's already been covered.
If he's been at the same job for two decades, and especially if his company doesn't explicitly do work for clients (most programmers work on in-house code, doubly true for those making six figures), most of the people whose lives he's touched are either still at that company or out on their asses as well. And the ones that have found new jobs are probably too new at them to be of much help getting his foot in the door.

Also, there are some severe hiring stigmas against older programmers. Now, early 40s is not what I'd consider "old" by any realistic metric, but I know expert coders in that age bracket that have serious trouble finding jobs because of the overqualification issue (i.e. that a programmer fresh from school can usually meet the company's needs, but the company can pay them half as much because they have no experience), as ~15 years in the biz tends to put one into the senior developer bracket.

Of course, one important question is whether this guy is even considering jobs that pay in the $40-$60k range; I find it hard to believe that there are no medium to low range programming jobs that he can find, at least if he's any good. It's very possible that he's looking in all the wrong places because he considers himself too valuable, having been spoiled by six figure salaries until his laying off...

Then again, it's also possible that his specialty was too niche for him to be highly employable outside his company, like if he was primarily maintaining some legacy system written in Cobol? (which would be a dealbreaker on a resume at plenty of places...) Some of the coders doing that type of stuff make tons of money when they work because nobody programs goddamn Cobol anymore, but they have a hell of a time finding new jobs when the old ones disappear.

Edit: nevermind, just saw a tweet of his: "Anyone looking for a Sr Financial Analyst/Corp Dev/Planning person in OC or Bay Area please let me know." This guy's not looking for programming work at all, so everything I said is mostly irrelevant...
I spend too much time on the internet — I immediately recognized the both the paraphilia (http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Plushie) and the object with the dick in it (Pocahontas's pet raccoon).
Congrats on the many years together. It sounds like you (and presumably your wife) have a great attitude. Reminds me of the dialogue from Good Will Hunting where Robbin Williams explains what he misses most about his wife (she died of cancer).

> and the love I had for her on that first day we met seems like a pale imitation to what I feel today

It's only people who realize that compromise, distance, and honesty are some of the ingredients required to bring two people together (happily) for life.
I'm currently a junior at UW, studying computer engineering. I don't know too many fellow HNers from school, but there's definitely plenty of opportunities here for a budding hacker. Feel free to email me if you ever want advice or info on the CSE department: meagher@cs.washington.edu
I question the assumption that there is, in fact, any depth involved in arguments over the merits of socialism-in-general. Or most discussions of economic systems, for that matter.
There's another option. He was worth 6 figures if he was making sales of, say, twice his salary. If fewer companies are buying, there are fewer 6 figure salespeople that Oracle can keep. Doesn't mean he was never worth his former salary. Doesn't even mean only the good salespeople are left. Perhaps his particular area was hit harder.
Risk = reward. You're not taking much. A CTO that works part-time at only 15 hours a week? That's hardly a commitment worthy of a significant percentage.

Be prepared for the possibility that his offer will be 0%.
Philip K Dick's Hollywood
This is true but if you use Recurly you can swap merchant accounts as you need as they store your CC numbers. That plus TransFS is a powerful combination.
My first consideration was paypal, but after doing the same thing you doing, i came up with 2checkout.com
We use Moneris. The product that covers what you want is eselectplus. You can get info on their API here http://www.eselectplus.ca/en/downloadable-content. They are pretty clueless. We went with them because at the time (2006) they were the only company we could find that would support Canadians that had recurring billing. Their API isn't complete. We actually have to do screen scraping against their virtual terminal to compensate for missing APIs.
You're right – this is an error. We divided the average monthly bill by the number of people in the average household, which we needed to do; really the average is a little more than $100/month. Thank you for catching it!
I think your duck's bow tie is adorable and it always makes me smile.
Yep. The '?phrase=ycombinator' appended to the URL makes Hacker News think a different page is being submitted than last time. It's a way the algorithm can be tricked to allow more than one shot at the front page. In this case it was not deliberate, it seems.
I'm curious about what exactly didn't you like about moving between files in vim?

CTRL-^ just toggles back and forth, with ctags you get one-keystroke movement up and down the function call stack, and you can jump to various buffers with ":b partial_filename", or ":b<number>" if you remember the specific number, or ":blast".
Google's latest invention: Google Reader Play
OK Go Leaves EMI, Starts Their Own Record Label
As per http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/chatroulettes-found... :

"Network throughput is 7 gigabits a second." which would sort of line up with ~20K users at ~50K video streams.
Perhaps none as unique as that tree.
Yeah, it's just like that reality show where there are cameras so you can see people inside their house.
Solutions like CIM only simplify PCI compliance. You're still handling the card info, just not storing it. To completely get away from handling card data you have to send your customer over to another site like PayPal to enter their payment info. A sub-optimal user experience.

That being said, it's less likely for someone to sniff the info as it passes through your server's RAM than if it was stored on disk.
Ok, I'm a little intrigued.

Does pg still think that way about Java today ?
Or does he think Java proved him wrong and turned out to be more successful (different?) ?

What about all the other hackers here?

I, for one, have used Java extensively. And, lately I am back in last couple of months, in using Java.
I am actually thinking about taking it more seriously this time. (Although last time I used it for around 2 years on and off alongside Prolog and C#).
But more and more it feels like, it might be worth it to go back to Java, instead of doing everything in PHP/HTML/CSS way.

Now, mind it, I realise there's always a lot of learning curve in Java towards the beginning, and I am not the best guy in Java web programming still, but I am pleasantly surprised the way people have used it.

Also, it seems like it might be a good investment of time, since everything is so Object Oriented, and once you get the basics covered, you can use Java pretty much on anything now.

To make an android app,
to make blazing fast, best practices driven Google Web toolkit apps,
to use the vast majority of libraries and snippets available,
and to use the Best design patterns.

It seems like a good choice that way.

Also, it helps in being organised, and so the transition of people joining might be easier.

On other hand, younger developers, especially web developers kinda seem to like the whole <insert your favourite scripting language here> (PHP, Ruby) world better,
my guess is because deploying is so much easier and the learning curve is much smaller in the beginning. I wonder how bad the learning curve is for bigger PHP projects, when you bring in new developers to the team, since there is no particular pattern and people design the app according to their coding style too much. Again, I am quite ignorant here, and would love to know about some organised ways to PHP, pretty much OOP programming in PHP :) , that sounds weird though. That's like saying I want to do procedural programming in Prolog/ LISP.

Now, just like pg was in 2001, I am not used to programming in PHP and the likes....although I have made my basic web app in that (click here for a crappy looking demo www.skejulers.com/demoing)

would love to know other's perspectives on this.
Controversial Amazon 1-Click patent survives review
This is an interesting read. What happens when you're raising angel money but don't actually expect to need additional rounds of capital?
If you find one out let me know, looking for gateways that will deal with banks in Nepal and India.
"Go to definition" is 'gd' in vim. If vim has it, emacs certainly does.

Perhaps vim and emacs don't do everything you want. But also, perhaps you don't know their capabilities as well as you think you do?
My apologies. I didn't mean to imply that getting rich and helping the world are mutually exclusive.

By "social-justice related field," I meant I do not want to work in a job where the ultimate purpose is power, profit, or "customer satisfaction." Rather, I would like to work where I am in some way (hopefully more direct than indirect) helping people exit the poverty cycle, helping to survive diseases which are already a non-issue in developed countries, helping to end human trafficking, etc. Obviously, some of these tie more closely to Computer Science than others.

You were on the same page as me when you thought of resource/aid distribution systems. That's the only idea I've come up with for relating social justice to this field.
For those who may have missed this a couple weeks ago, Twitter also considering Cassandra - http://nosql.mypopescu.com/post/407159447/cassandra-twitter-...
I posted a comment to this effect here about 3 weeks ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1128322

I can confirm that the UDP stream is not always available and that I was behind a NAT during my testing.
It basically depends on 2 things:

1) What kind of API do you need? It'll have to be simpler than SQL, likely key-value with secondary indices managed at either the API layer or application layer.

2) Which 2 of Consistency, Availability and Partition Tolerance do you need? Is "gets there eventually" enough or do you need "can read it right after I write it" guarantees?
Thanks for sharing this. I'm about to hit my one year anniversary and it's advice like yours that I'm keeping in mind for the long run.
oops, meant to say OSX
Youtube's new UI design (link is to the Tron trailer)
Did you have something particular in mind when you said that "finding out why they suck may not be a pleasant experience" for me? Or, did you simply mean that such work would not be easy, ie. because of human factors: "This is how we do things here! Why do you want to do everything with computers?"
This is news.yc... unqualified opinions are a dime a dozen.

The best part of owning a business is getting to handle situations like this however you want, and living with the consequences on your own terms.

I think that brandon272 has a point, but he didn't articulate it very well. MetaLab has been successful, but I don't think that stunts like this have caused them to be successful.
ZOMBO
If you think he's not making any sense, You're halfway to understanding. He's not making any sense.

The author doesn't seem to understand the causal link between intelligence, brain size, and body size. Smaller bodies don't make things smarter. Heavy organs have a survival cost. Animals with bigger brains only do better if the brains pay for themselves with survival-related intelligence. In species that don't generally get a payoff for figuring things out, the lighter and faster dummies breed better.

If you want to think clearly about AI, read Lesswrong.
Their letter from January explaining why their record label won't let them embed videos is a fascinating explanation of exactly how overwhelming the sea change swamping the music industry is.

http://okgo.forumsunlimited.com/index.php?showtopic=4169
> Since Authorize.Net require you to have a merchant account in US, we, Canadians, can't use it.

Actually we can. The do however require that you open an account with Global Payments Inc and these guys have seriously sleazy sales tactics. They break down their fees into a multitude of categories and groups, and it is fairly unobvious what combination of these fees you are going to hit most frequently. It took me literally a week of back and forth emails with them to get an idea of what the average transaction fee would look like. It was really like pulling a tooth.

I have also dealt with Moneris. Extremely arrogant. They are really big and they basically do not care. They are also the most expensive of all that I have talked to.

Lastly I spoke with VersaPay and they first quoted me fees that were frankly exorbitant. Only after I told them the Global Payments fee level, they brought theirs to the comparable level.

In the end I haven't gone through with any of these, but if I were to pick one now I would probably give VP a try.

YMMV, etc.