skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wouldn't worry about the language bits (as long as it isn't something entirely brain rotting like ColdFusion, ASP, PHP or COBOL), as much as by the fact they all seem like the usual enterprisey "read text from a database display it on a screen" jobs. A CRUD app in Ruby or Python is certainly a lot more fun to build than in Java (and most importantly, easier to maintain and modify), but it's still a CRUD app.

I'd suggest looking into a different geographic area, joining a technology company (which produces a software product; serious Internet companies fall under that umbrella).

I'd recommend high-traction, well funded start-ups that have been around the block (with serious technical identities); big tech companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft or Yahoo are a good bet too: they solve very interesting problems and are willing to mentor you. Yes, they typically use various forms of blub for production code. However, no one will object to you writing a prototype in Python (or an IDL->code translator in OCaml), and you'll be able to pick up skills that are rare and meet serious hackers.

The reason I don't recommend smaller start-ups is that their goals aren't always aligned with yours: your goal is to build up the skills needed to solve big, interesting problems; depending on the founders, investors and the market the goal of a start-up might be to make any product, even if there isn't much technical skill (for you) to be gained by building that product.

Knowing something others don't know (it could be machine learning, search, compiler construction, systems programming, numerical analysis, etc...) means you're not a commodity. If you're not a commodity, you're much more likely to be allowed to use non-commodity tools (e.g., start a pilot project in Python, Erlang or Haskell instead of Java or C++, or start adding Scala modules to an existing Java application). It also means better pay in the long term, but you should not use pay as a yard-stick when deciding on your first job: an MBA-type "founder" might be really desperate for you to a web app for him, but a software company is making an investment in you.

Edit: see the comment from cperciva -- if you have skills (in his case security and mathematics, from his FreeBSD and academic work) that others don't, you can find ways to use tools that you enjoy using: either by finding a workplace which uses these tools or having enough "clout" to introduce those tools to other companies.
The (ahem) "Art" of Pricing
Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr: iPad ‘will rule the world’
Yes, they sometimes do this during down markets when they realize that they are likely to hold companies longer than their usual burn and flip strategy is appropriate for.

That said, their goal is to establish a stable revenue stream that requires little maintenance. If they achieve that, then expect them to leverage the hell of the company, slash support, extract debt payments, then try to flip the corpse to someone else.
I feel your pain. For my first "big corporate" programming job, I had to do PowerBuilder development. Coming from Java/C++ background, it was like hell on Earth.

I stuck around though, did PB for a while, and 2 months later a Java position opened up, which turned out to be great.

So - I wouldn't get too caught up in that, but YMMV
The Top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaxes of All Time
I type it into the top line of the email, cutting and pasting it to "To" right before I send. Helps prevents those "oops! sorry I sent you the previous email before compelting it because I accidentally hit the Send button."
If you don't like the idea of uprooting yourself to find a job, you'd better move to a big tech area now. Don't put down roots in a place where your every career decision will be compromised by the lack of opportunities. Eventually some local downturn will force you to uproot yourself anyway, and all your career sacrifices will be for nothing. Just move to a huge tech hub right away, and then you can feel (relatively) comfortable putting down roots.
Apple makes decisions based on consumer experience. They made Boot Camp because they wanted the user experience of dual-booting Windows on an Apple computer to be something even grandma could learn to work with. Unless there's some specific, other OS users are demanding to run on the iPad (Android?) Apple won't make the investment to create something Boot Camp-like for it—and that means they won't support it, because they're perfectionists.
Me, too. I've heard them compared to S3 and Heroku. Their pricing plans aren't like either of them.

I think we'll see them get changed big time, perhaps with grandfathering in of the current free plan.
>They'll need to quickly fill in the remaining gaps of functionality before customers have the dreaded "oh it doesn't do that?" experience.

Luckily, there are many developers who have a lot of financial incentive to do just that. I'm really looking forward to seeing what they come up with.
I'd like alternate lines in the list to be slightly lighter, like (very) old-school computer paper, so it's easier to see the grouping.
Pretend you could have as many of them as you wanted—10 to run 10 apps at once. Would that make it less of a toy?
I'm very confused... who are the users of your site? Actual politicians? When I click on "Backpedal", nothing happens... Are you expecting Bush/Clinton/Gore/Kerry to actually come to your site and use it?
What should we call the class of devices that help normal people manage their Amazon wish list?

Momputers?
A similar thing was done on SciFi Channels Eureka a while back where the storyline involve a brand of deodorant. It fitted in well with the storyline and wasn't annoying or overly blatant. I'm fine with shows doing thing kind of thing when they don't break the forth wall while doing it. As long as they don't go over board cough Die Another Day cough
My first programming job was in VB 3.0. It was a horrible and awful experience at a churn and burn consultancy, but it was a job and gave me a chance to make connections, learn Perl, and get a better job that I liked much more.

If you don't have any experience you should accept that your first job is going to suck in some ways. I would suggest not worrying about the quality of the company or environment so much as the presence of opportunities to do different things, grow, and move on. Which you will do at some point.

And in this market, being picky is particularly unadviseable. :-(
Mine wants to be fed, which is quite impressive as I don't have a cat. but now I am going to get one, so I can feed it.
that phrasing just sounds wrong to me.
I am impressed and dismayed by your experience. My 2 year old MBP (pre-unibody) gets only 45-60 minutes of battery time. Did the unibody MBP's see that much of a boost in battery performance?
You can try this using the native OS DNS lookup tools as well -

Linux: dig hacker.wp.dg.cx TXT
Windows: nslookup -type=TXT hacker.wp.dg.cx
Improving Ruby
Yes, but they make good money licensing those databases for managed use to nice companies like:

http://www.semaphorecorp.com/
"The bottom line is that the iPad has been designed and built by a bunch of perfectionists. If you like the concept, you’ll love the machine. The only question is: Do you like the concept?"

Love the concept- But I'll wait until HTC/Google come along and give it some missing features (webcam, expandable storage) and the extra oomph that the geek in me appreciates (multi tasking, maybe a keyboard (maybe a sliding one like the HTC Tilt?))
Fixed it. Thanks.

For some reason, this doesn't work:
<h2>The FULL program</h2>
<a name="audio"></a><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-4094" title="Audio Version" src="http://mixergy.com/wp-content/uploads/Audio-Version.png alt="Audio Version" width="26" height="21" /> Prefer audio? Great! <a href="http://mixergy.com/wp-content/audio/Mixergy-REWORK-Jason-Fri... click" here for the MP3 format</a>.

But this does work:
<a name="audio"></a><h2>The FULL program</h2>
<img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-4094" title="Audio Version" src="http://mixergy.com/wp-content/uploads/Audio-Version.png alt="Audio Version" width="26" height="21" /> Prefer audio? Great! <a href="http://mixergy.com/wp-content/audio/Mixergy-REWORK-Jason-Fri... click" here for the MP3 format</a>.
Well, I do understand that. However, if a job actively sucking your energy instead of giving you the occasional good-feeling of going somewhere, something is wrong.

If the job is not providing enough fodder for your mind to stay alert, it shouldn't actively drain you / make you feel listsless.
It is an April Fools joke site linking to their Backupify service, cute...
Funny, that was almost exactly what I was going to write in reply to potatolicious' comment above.

I would just add a bit: she seems to be saying "I'd never date anyone who would want to meet me in a dating website". The thing is, some people do think that dating websites are for losers, and this includes people who go to dating websites.
I'm not expecting it to be anywhere near a real physical keyboard in terms of speed but one of the interesting things about adapting to the iPhone keyboard is accepting accuracy isn't all that important. It decodes my crazy gibberish into the correct words most of the time. The trick of auto-correction is it punishes you for stopping to correct typos. It rewards you for completing your gibberish word. I would guess the process of tapping out the rest of the word is where all the computational multi-touch magic is happening to make a good auto-correct judgement. For speed the auto-suggest feature is also very effective. If I only have to type "qu" to make the word "question" that's 3 screen taps versus the potential for at least 8 key presses on a physical keyboard. Another side effect of mastering multi-touch typing is learning the value of brevity. Obviously this post is not typed on an iPhone. You learn to compose text in a straight forward way and do more of the compositional process in your head before you start typing. In this way it reminds me of writing short notes. So multi-touch keyboards won't replace physical keyboards but I really believe they are good enough and perhaps even better than a real keyboard sometimes. For example, if you are spelling challenged you're probably familiar with the type, type, type, mouse - click - click - correct, type type type proces. On a multi-touch keyboard it either fixes your spelling as you go or you tap once to auto-correct as you type. That's actually a more intuitive process.
There is a demo video! Hilarious.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3I24bSteJpw
my advice would be to simply apply to any job that you think you might be interested in, regardless of the language. most entry level positions have an expectation of a learning curve.

submit a cover letter that states how quick you are at learning new things and how you're willing to put time into learning their chosen language before you arrive.

for most companies, entry level hires are about picking up the talent, not the experience. demonstrate your talent and drive and you'll have a decent chance.

thats how i got my job, at least.
Its apparently a silly april fools PR stunt to get exposure for a company (see excerpt from the website blow). Is HN going to be swamped with april fools nonsense?

"Backpedalify is, of course, an April Fool’s Joke. But backing up your online data is no laughing matter. Secure you online data stored in Twitter, Facebook, Gmail and more with --redacted--. Learn more about how it works."
The halflife is between 4-5 hours for a healthy adult not on oral contraceptives and not pregnant. You're significantly overstating (by 33-50%) the halflife and very vastly throwing off the amount that is still in your system after doing the decay function with your 6 hour figure.

http://www.webmd.com/balance/caffeine-myths-and-facts
And (Deadtree):
Barone, J.J. and Roberts, H.R. Food and Chemical Toxicology, 34, 119-129, 1996.

It is commonly suggested to avoid caffeine 8 hours before bed to be able to sleep well.

--

If it lasts that long for you (and you're not on birth control or pregnant), you may wish to get liver function tests done with your doctor to make sure you're okay in that department.

Or you may just need to do other steps to put you into deeper sleep. Cold rooms with warm blankets, nothing but sex and sleep in bed (no reading, no talking, no snoozing), no spicy or sweet foods within a few hours before bed and block out all/most light to help.
I care about comfort, durability, price and aesthetics

With the exception of price, these are all metrics of the shoe's performance. I chose the word "performance" deliberately because it is very general and can be measured differently by different customers.
This is similar to the velocity channel in digital music, which is how hard the note is struck (possibly changing the quality of the note), which can be separate from the volume.
That is a classic pickup line, you know? Walk up to a girl and compliment another equally beautiful girl. This usually triggers a bit of jealousy and the guy seems increasingly attractive out of competition with the other girl.

Anyway, as a guy I don't see any reason for you to respond if you are not interested. Your response will result in iPhone push notifications and emails that will trigger positive emotions only to be swept away the moment the message is read. It's really not constructive or beneficial to either party.
TEXTp saves YouTube bandwidth, money
Internet Banca
I'm sorry, I inadvertently downvoted you.

I actually agree completely with what you said, especially after reading the thread he cited.
Somewhat arbitrarily this brings LOLCODE to mind.

http://lolcode.com/examples/hai-world
Yeah me too.. I get XML parsing errors because there are a couple of extra bytes of garbage at the beginning of the file, things like: "1caaa" on http://sivers.org/real and "df9c" on http://sivers.org/ff2
Let's assume her womanly duty obligates her to go out with one new guy from the dating site per week. To accomplish that, she'll have to respond to approximately... one guy per week. Heck, let's be generous and say two. That's eight guys per month out of three hundred emails. Even assuming she never responds to two guys on the same day, she'll delete every single email over 70% percent of the time.

That also assumes that she chooses her dates exclusively from the guys who contact her, forgoing her right to contact any men proactively.
My expertise is in computational algorithms, cryptography, and security; I sometimes wander into numerical analysis or data compression. I don't do programming per se; but it's a tool at my disposal when a research or design problem requires it.

I'm not looking for a full-time job right now (I'm working on Tarsnap) but I do occasional consulting in the areas which interest me.
I highly recommend watching it in TEXTp.
I can try - any way you could toss up links to the international listings?
Email Marketing Basics
RDBMSes, of course, don't have hierarchically-organized "resources." That's the whole point of the "R" in there.

Databases contain schemas contain tables contain columns. The hierarchy is just fixed types and of limited depth.

And then there's S3, which names a resource but doesn't imply any hierarchy, since the namespace is actually flat, even though it looks like a hierarchical path with / as a separator.
The thing that most troubled my grandmother when she got her computer wasn't the filesystem or the mouse/keyboard combination; it was the fact that the computer knew which emails she had looked at and which she hadn't. She found it very unnerving.

Apologies if I've drifted off topic.
"Who are you? Do you have food?" -- Sounds like a pretty accurate translation to me.
"Nothing at all?"
Get a job somewhere with cooler jobs? Like the SF Bay? Seems like the obvious fix.
based on your figures, hell yes. I know three people with the unibody 15" MBP, and all get 6+ hours life
So there is this character, the BOM, which is explicitly allowed by UTF-8 standard. And while it is not really necessary, nor recommended, you are still allowed to put it in your UTF-8 text files to signal that this text file is encoded in UTF-8.
Then there are all of these *nix programs, which don't know how to deal with these BOM's, simply because the first character in the file they're reading from isn't the shebang or <?php or something like that, but is instead this completely allowable BOM. and everybody believes MS should be fixing their product? am i missing something?
Chris McCann (StartupDigest) launches Help A Startup Out
> Hating the sort of work a language is usually used for is something different, however.

Right on the mark. My day job involves working on a very interesting Java project (which actually doesn't hurt much by being in Java; C++ is the typically used languages for these sorts of projects). All else being equal, however, I'd stay away from job listings that only require Java (or that mention J2EE), as they typically imply "write web applications". Now a job listing that asks for domain specific knowledge (e.g., search algorithms) and asks for "Java, C# or C++ knowledge" (i.e., whoever wrote it is clued enough to know to that learn one of these, you know the other two) is different matter. That being said, I'd rather these listings say "Knowledge of C and any OO language" instead: Java and C# programmers who don't know C#, don't know those languages are doing behind the scenes (and would be out of clues as to why their application leaks memory despite running in a VM with a GC, or why the GC is causing their app to stop for whole seconds).

> Perl is the one exception, of course. All right-thinking humans hate perl.

For an alternative opinion on Perl, I'd suggest looking at "Non-Lisp languages to learn" Chapter in Doug Hoyte's "Let Over Lambda". He makes a very compelling point of Perl being a "beautiful blub": UNIX ideology taken to the logical extreme, but giving a developer lot of freedom as a result (see Class::Mop or Moose for example).

That being said, I completely understand you. There's some languages I can't stand. In my case that would be ASP, PHP and Visual Basic. These languages (and the code bases written in them) tend to reduce one's power to that of a fourteen year old with no computer science background. They took 90s/early 2000s Java/.NET anti-pattern of "re-usable commodity developer component" model () to the logical extreme: these languages don't offer any* tools that enable one skilled developer to compete with many (cheaper) unskilled coders. Whereas Java suffers from typically being used for very uninteresting tasks, these languages can only be used for very uninteresting tasks.

(*) Of course, since it's Java it would be "IReusableCommodityDeveloperComponent developer = ReusableCommodityDeveloperComponentFactory.getReusableCommodityDeveloperComponentInstance()", with bunch of XML files binding that factory to a university or even a trade school.
D'oh! This is what I get for coding 12 hours in a row.
Yes. Apple completely changed battery designs between the removable and the non-removable versions. The latter will last significantly longer.
While good for a "lol", doesn't anyone else hate April Fools day on the internet? It's nearly impossible to find a serious post. I can't take anything seriously on the internet for the next day or two.

Guess my productivity is going to go up.
Recession Effect, More Prepaid customers
Wolfram Alpha's iPhone app now only costs $1.99
Los Cabos hotels in Los Cabos budget accommodation BOOKING
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How is "Level 9 Student" different than an "'A' student" or a 3.8 GPA?
I think the idea is that the individuals in your family already own iPod Touches or iPhones (we do), so as soon as someone has a iPad, you're set.
point : in your enterprisey java/.NET shop, you can play with clojure, scala, F#, groovy, j/iron Ruby/python, axum. Fun stuff. Write tests, build tools, analytics. if you get called on it, you can argue it takes less time to write support structure code in __, and you're a busy guy.
Or Seattle, WA or Boston, MA. Additionally Austin, TX and Portland, OR.

Honestly, Bay Area (and especially San Francisco proper, rather than Silicon Valley) do suffer from too many "widget" start-ups, which should be viewed as media companies, solving social problems -- not technology companies. New York and LA start-ups tend to be even worse in that respect.

When I visited Boston, I noticed the start-up scene had a more of a "hard-core tech" feel to it. I saw purely technology start-ups. The people calling themselves entrepreneurs were _engineers_, not marketers and project/product managers (as is often the case in Bay Area; note: that's not to say PMs and markets aren't important!). There was more "ZFS vs. btrfs" talk and less "agile lean customer development start-up" talk.
How can you hate any language until you have spent the time to learn and understand it?
Australia's filter-mad communications minister says the Internet "isn't special"
Glad this idea of mine is getting well received :) I was getting bombarded with emails of startups asking me for help and I was trying to find a mechanism for the community to help themselves.

Interested to see where this goes..
Thanks. I own the 20th anniversary edition and while I knew it had some extra content, including an update to the No Silver Bullet essay, I didn't realise NSB wasn't part of the original edition.
Of course it does! All our experiences have an effect on our DNA, how else does evolution happen!?
Agreed. It's not even like it's hard. Most CMS's now will let you set the post time. That's just sloppy and detracts slightly from the joke.
Well, I don't know about ruling the world, but I really look forward to testing the iPad. Both Mossberg's and Pogue's review were interesting, and so far most people that have tried it seem to agree that it is something special about the iPad. Looking at the few apps shown so far, it's obvious that it's not just a larger iPhone. The larger screen enables a whole new set of possibilities.
The distinction is the expected ratio of US customers to international ones. A significant inconvenience for a select few customers is nowhere near as bad as a small inconvenience for every customer.

Also, shipping is _important_. Definitely agree with that point - if you spend all your time making the checkout form internationally friendly, you've already run out of time for your product. You're either irrelevant, hopelessly behind the competition, or completely out of money.

Might be viable at a large company, though, where you've got people who are already doing nothing useful.
WooThemes is apparently pulling in $2+ mil per year according to the Mixergy interview. (http://mixergy.com/woothemes-adriaan-pienaar/)

The market is quickly getting very crowded but I'm currently in the process of selling premium WordPress themes myself, mainly at the request of clients who prefer a cheaper solution that is easier for them to customize. If there's interest I could blog about it or provide some insight into my research (and development) so far.
I'd love to see Perl6 released. By incorporating first order content free grammers, it could the same for CFGS that Perl did for regexes. That would be world changing.

As for PHP: structured, clean PHP (written by people with an education and development experience in other languages) looks like Java. So why not just use Java: you get better performance (without having to compile it to C++) and access to great libraries. Of course, now that you're on the JVM you might as well start using better languages (Scala, Clojure, JRuby), which to operations look like just another jar/war file.
This is really helpful. I was looking for a job at a startup for a couple months and there was really no good places to go. It seems this "Help A Startup Out" has quality jobs all in one place in a simple format. Thanks!