skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My words probably mislead--I should have said "workplace." I'm a mercenary. ;)

In my market the money's in .NET. The customers are all very nice people who appreciate my efforts, and I work no more than 40 hours per week, leaving me (a little) time for my own projects.

The work isn't especially fun, but that's why they call it "work" and there are times when it's interesting. And, the users _deserve_ attentive and considerate software development.

The main development is in .NET, but I introduce open source alternatives whenever possible (jQuery I love you!). It would be irresponsible, though, for the customers to abandon their massive investment in MS technologies. I believe this to be true of the enterprise in general; at home it was easy to say I'd never use Windows again, but this isn't feasible for a large organization. I think this will eventually change, but over a couple of decades and not years.

That's the reality facing IT executives, and I think it bothers us as developers more than anybody else. Most folks just want to do their jobs, watch a couple of viral videos, and go home.

P.S.: I've enjoyed reading some of your recent comments.
I'd like to see a suite made for a normal, popular interpreted language, like Python. I'd like to see it server side, built in a cloud, to have the computing power I need. Compiling is no longer a problem for me, but boy can a huge matrix routine take a long time. I'd also like subscription AI tools.

There is clearly an opportunity here for a 37Signals style company to provide a Python tool or in browser that connects to the cloud and other services. Someone please make it.
1. Release a new revision of the OS every 24 months.
2. Make a console, like the xbox, but for offices. $1000 for word, excel, outlook and IE, and a box to run it on.
3. Buy EMI (or some other label) and give away a lot of songs with zunes.
I wonder what's gonna happen when Buffet retires.
How Do Images Get Ranked in Image Search?
Channel 4 (UK tv) using twitter
This is pretty intersting since it shows that there is adoption of twitter in the mainstream, will hopefully make comments like this http://tinyurl.com/665p24 a thing of the past
Dr. Edward de Bono on creative thinking
Students getting accustomed to using mathworks is far more valuable than the cost of the student version fee. If he goes on to encourage his future employer to get the business licenses/support then this will absolutely dwarf what a whole school full of paying students would bring in.

Also note that in the majority of schools you have already payed to use mathworks (through tuition) if you are in any engineering program. I don't know why it would be so much more ethical to pay twice...

So, if you want to support mathworks/photoshop/etc then you should encourage broke students to get it on their home computers by any means possible. Many of these companies practice this strategy. Thus ends my pricing hypothesis.
That's the link I submitted. For some reason, when I submit .pdfs to news.YC, I get redirected to Scribd.
So you're saying I shouldn't leave the cushy job I hate to do what I really want with the one live I have because there's a possibility of failure?
"Former coder implies disappointed coder, doesn't it? Or otherwise what could be the reason for giving up coding, aside from illness and death?"

I disagree, being a former coder myself. As time went on, I found I could be much more effective by leading a team (and then a company) where other people would write the code. When you're writing in a high-level language, you've got a compiler that is generating machine instructions based on your high-level code. When you are writing "managed code" in the .NET Framework, there's an additional layer of abstraction-- you are writing (for example) C#, which gets compiled into IL, which gets JIT compiled into you've got a compiler writing Intermediate Language code which is then compiled into machine instructions. Becoming an architect (or product manager, etc.) is adding additional layers of abstraction (and power). Your ideas are still getting transformed into machine instructions-- there's just a few more steps along the way.
I would like to second the call for an immediate stop to elephant groping.

Elephants are a dear and treasured species. This continual assault by blind people and various other gropers have too often left our Loxodonta Africanan friends cowering in terror.

As for RoR, I'll simply quote a good friend of mine. "RoR rocks! Scaling isn't that big a deal. Took us over six months to get the stack just right for a recent customer."

Ugh.
No, I'm saying that when you leave the job you hate, you should consider options other than the one least likely to succeed. And I'm saying "consider", not "do", and I consider that an antidote to your flowery evangelism --- no offense intended, the world needs both flowery evangelists and cynical assholes.
vanguard index fund or fidelity spartan fund (which actually is a money loser for fidelity, but they keep the fees at .1% as a loss-leader to bring in the chumps for the managed mutual funds)

no-load, low-fee index funds, basically.
Curt Schilling probably would have had problems in subsequent years had he pitched in the playoffs in 2004 or not.
refactoring the same poorly written crap for the eighth time

Which part of this is different in a startup? The refactoring, or the quality of the code?

It seems to me that while working at a startup is a good way to guarantee that you'll never have time to refactor your code, it does nothing to ensure that your code -- or that of your cow-orkers -- will be any good.
I need your email address...
You've got to have a little gamble in you.
Singularity Objections
We might live in a computer simulation and it might be too computationally expensive for our simulators to simulate our world post-singularity.

That's an awful lot of "mights".
Censoring because you disagree?
Some editors here are abusing [dead]. Perhaps the editors should be more accountable for censoring. This is the policy on eg. wikipedia.

Side note: I am happy to see now that at least ynews tells you if your comment/link has been censored.

Tip: Turn on "showdead" in your settings.
baaawwwwwwwwww
I would avoid buying a single index fund though. I go with small cap growth funds 50% US, 25% Europe, 25% Asia and rebalance them every 6 months.

PS: Outside of a Roth IRA / 401k rebalancing stocks has some negative tax consequences so it's better to change what your buying than sell off existing stock.
I have written extensively on this topic - What Makes Them Entrepreneurial here - http://www.adeologue.com/adeologue/what_makes_them_entrepren...

One of the traits I have mentioned is this adaptability attribute - http://www.adeologue.com/adeologue/2007/07/what-makes-them.h...

I am still interviewing few successful entrepreneurs and understanding what made them entrepreneurial. It's very important to learn these traits and develop those.
Without coding, or without ever having coded?

I wouldn't hire an architect who had never coded; but, I don't have my architects writing production code.
You obviously don't read Fortune. People who worked under Jack Welch now head lots of the 500.
Cool.

I've been accused of many things, but "flowery evangelism"? lol More data to support the argument that creativity can come from misery. I was using language to try to convey the level of misery I have endured in "cushy" jobs.

You are absolutely right about the odds. But I don't care. I am aware of them, but at a certain point, I just put them in the back of my mind and plow on. In my case, keeping those odds in background just makes me work that much harder.

The world also needs both illogical achievers and comfortable conformists.
That's a great essay. Funny, sad, and true.

"Veteran programmers of many years with obvious ability and talent go down with a fit of the blues. The intelligence is directed inwards in mournful contemplation of the inadequacies of their favourite programming language."

I actually laughed out loud.
A few years ago, I was doing research work with MatLab and there were tons of licensing issues at the university I was working with. I suggested we abandon MatLab and adopt Octave only to receive responses such as:

"It's open source software, which means it's largely unfinished and you can't guarantee that all the math routines are actually doing the right thing."

I eventually had to give in because my advisor was getting annoyed (and his grant was paying my rent), but the point is that it's unfortunate that _more_ really intelligent people don't contribute to Octave, verify it's correctness and talk it up. Please don't misconstrue my statement as saying "the people working on Octave aren't really intelligent," but having the support of _lots_ of really intelligent people is the only way that it's going to make any significant impact on the scientific research community.
If I have to change a diaper, I'd rather have it be my own baby.
It's already been done:

http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/feature-stude...
I don't know about a database, if you find one or make one, please post it here.

But you can often get the information out of DNS. I'm on a Windows machine right now, so for example "ping -a" is your proof of concept. Basically you just want to resolve IP addresses to hostnames.

You're foobarred though if someone works from home or uses the internet away from the office...
I have researched this extensively through blog posts and articles posted here over the last year, and I have come to the conclusion that the #1 most important personality trait of an entrepreneur is the ability to have multiple, unrelated, and sometimes conflicting #1 most important personality traits.
Spammy Facebook Applications Get More Penalties
Hey, I hear you; I'm 3 years into the last company I founded, and the only BigCo I've ever worked for bought the 10 person startup I had been working at. I see the attraction. But startup life has also kicked the shit out of me for almost 15 years.
You do realize that you get paid to change diapers for other people, right?
Recommend Barry Molttz's "You Need to Be a Little Crazy: The Truth about Starting and Growing Your Business":

http://www.amazon.com/You-Need-Be-Little-Crazy/dp/079318018X...

Cheers
Iron Man: Steve Jobs is even tougher than you think
I agree with michael_dorfman's comment below and think it's unfair to call him a troll... Not everyone will be positive and taking that into account is important.
They could license their product to large businesses for more money than you think it's worth. Even if they save users 10 minutes a day, do you know how much an executive is willing to pay to save 10 minutes of frustration?

Any extension to the Microsoft Office suite should just be marketed straight to enterprise customers. More hours are spent looking at Microsoft Office every day than probably any other activity save sleeping. It's a huge market filled with deep-pocketed customers.
> 3) Healthy life: I lost 15 pounds in two months when I returned to Vancouver, without really changing much.

I actually gained 15 kilos in a year after moving here from another country.

> The city is a walking city,

No, of course it's not. Except for some parts of the Downtown and a couple of other (smallish) areas. But restricting your life to just these areas is not really an option on average.

> so we have only used a single tank of gas in th past four months.

I am filling up every few days even though I telecommute and don't drive to/from work every day. The city of course is not a huge metropolis, there's a bit over 1 mil people here. But only a very small fraction of population can actually live comfortably without a car, and even between these people this lifestyle choice still does not really appeal to that many.

> There's lots of cheap transit.

$5 a pop hardly qualifies as a cheap transit.
Indifference to lists describing the most important traits.
Blatantly copied from the macforums for tweaking safari to use "iphone" user agents:

"to make the develop menu show up, you have to go to:

preferences>advanced tab>check "Show develop menu in toolbar"

then go to Develop>User Agent>Mobile Safari iphone 1.1.3"
I don't have an answer and I also don't think this problem will ever go away. Humans will always expand right up to the limit of whatever is currently supportable. If we're right at the limit all the time that means fluctuations will sometimes take us above that limit.
In my case, you missed the part where my employer's stock value dropped to $2 and the whole company was sold at wholesale to a group across the street.

If I gotta be connected to those kinds of risks, I want more control and more freedom.
Rackspace Stock Sale Could Be Bellwether
That looks insanely conservative. I would basically drop Large Cap, Cash, and bond from any long term investment strategy. I would bump Emerging Mark's and US Small cap stocks to 25% each and spread the rest over Mid Cap, Commodities, Real Estate, and International Equities.
Some great answers here, and mine is not going to be an answer to you specifically, but might open some minds nonetheless.

I try to invest in "myself." Rather than supporting those producing, innovating, and providing value to the economy, I try to be a producer, innovator, and value provider myself.

This attitude works well in your 20s, at least, but might not seem so alluring when closer to retirement.

It is not uncommon, however, to see or hear about situations where someone has started a business with a reasonably small amount of money (<$50k) and even if they're not worth mega-millions, their business can grow to the point where it provides the owner with a high income and can effectively manage itself (if you get the right people). This technique makes you a producer rather than an investor in the long run.
A Rackspace redo: Hoster eyes IPO (again)
At least he was careful to use "might." They are soothsaying, after all.

Luckily, he won't be able to say "I told you so" when our universe runs out of memory.
I see it like this: I can always go and work for a big company and make good money. But right now, that's not what I want to do. I want to explore, I want to take risks, I want to be a little crazy. I am not really afraid since the worst that can happen is gaining experience.
I am so incredibly valuable and smart and strong and [...] that I will get a high-paid job anytime I want. It's there, I just need to collect it. But I don't want to. Not yet.

So I guess the most valuable personality trait must be self-confidence (read: overconfidence).
Because it will make you happier, if the cushy job is not making you happy that you are seriously thinking about leaving for a start up then you probably should. Note if the start up will put you in REAL poverty, not decreased living standard, but serious poverty or risk (i.e. lack of health insurance, something catastrophic happens).

Studies show that material gains beyond a certain point do make much difference in happiness. Note that diminished relative status can contribute to decline in happiness, so take the ego comment seriously too. You better have one if you go startup.
Shh...Wouldn't want the word to get out.

"Irresponsibility isn't a sickness - it's an art."

- Remington Steele
I hope not. It seemed to me that they're doing it to get liquid fast before cloud computing technology makes traditional hosting companies obsolete.
Some people suck at doing even the easiest of things when they are told what to do. They tend to do much better when they can choose what to do to solve a problem or create a solution.

If you are in a corp environment doing things the way you'd like or want means you have to be a senior level IC or some sort of a team leader. But getting to that in the best of corporate cultures would mean you have you 'do' what you are told for 3-5 years - the same thing that you hate and would like to stop doing.

You would have 2 primary options#.

Go through the motions for abt 3 years and then hope you can get in to a meaningful position and do things the way you'd like...

Or, join a startup that works on something that thrills you and instantly start doing things the way you'd envision it. (You have the added incentive of having a shot at becoming really rich through a buyout or an IPO)

# - Other factors like family, current financial condition, the "real" scenario at your current place of work etc, are likely to add weights to the 2 options
Yeah, but it got too expensive for them once they started letting us riffraff in.
And then you missed the part where your years of career development enabled you to walk the other direction down the street and pick up a job almost immediately making approximately the same amount of money, continuing to contribute to your IRAs.

BigCo's fail too, but no amount of dissembling is going to make BigCo tech careers as risky as startup tech careers.
Extrapolation of graphs doesn’t prove anything.

The induction fallacy is what allows humans to get up in the morning and make decisions with incomplete data i guess.
You know, I always figured that a computer-simulated world would have smart compression techniques. Thus, the massive quantity of electrons flying around necessary for a brain impulse, for instance, only "exists" when someone does an MRI (or whatever tool they use for that sort of thing). Otherwise, a reference to "pleasure" or "pain" is passed into the perceptions.
What do you have to do besides escaping special characters in input fields?
http://whitepapers.zdnet.co.uk/0,1000000651,260137938p,00.ht...
I'm starting to get the feeling that there's a big jealousy factor developing here. The formula is simple: find something that's getting traction and getting talked about, and then bash it. This bashing is very appealing to people whose own efforts are less successful (or more likely have never started), because it reassures them that the other people's efforts and success aren't "real" or legitimate. The same thing can be seen in the comments on TechCrunch (along with the jealousy of failed competitors).
If you want a friend, buy a dog. If you want creative freedom and enjoyment, start an open source project on the side.

There are ways to mitigate all the BigCo problems without gambling 2-5 years of your life on a longshot.
For me, it was getting sick of this cycle:

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Up-or-Out-Solving-the-IT-Tur...
The next challenge for Entrepreneurs is to build Uber brands without seeking investment!
YC auto-scribds PDFs, there was an Ask YC poll about it last week. I guess the result was to leave it the way it was. The problem with your link wasn't that it was to scribd, but that scribd couldn't import it as a PDF.
They are trying to keep the site from becoming the next reddit.
Blu-Ray: the HDCD (or is it DVD-Audio?) of video
I think there's a simple answer to this: the product doesn't suite you.

That's OK -- I'm sure Xobni's not crying about it.

Somehow you've translated Xobni not suiting you to Xobni not being worth $20 million.

That's OK too, but at the end of the day, there are a lot of start-ups following these threads, and I wouldn't expect any coming your way.
+1 for Perseverence. Definitely a necessary trait, more important than any other that comes to mind.
And H-1Bs are discriminatory anyway. They define a "specialist" occupation as one that requires a degree. This might have been true in 1958, but not in 2008. Further, they're just for employees and not for people who can actually add significant value to the economy by building businesses rather than warming chairs.
The Future of the Internet - And How to Stop It (CC-licensed book)
I note with amusement that Blu-Ray is meeting all my expectations: It's cruising toward market failure, because consumers value convenience and selection over picture quality.

The audiophiles have been waiting for this to happen.

I would note, for the record, that I own some very nice HDCD disks and one DVD-Audio disk. They sounded great, back when I could play them. Unfortunately my expensive high-quality CD/DVD player bit the dust and, with all of my other music being stored on a server in FLAC format (and the original CDs in boxes in the basement) I just couldn't bring myself to spend hundreds of dollars on a disk player just to play back a handful of annoying physical disks at slightly higher quality...
People are not logic-driven automatons. We do things because feel it "from the gut" or simply because we like the sound of something. We don't make all of our decisions in a calculated, mathematical way.

Humanity would not be as advanced as it is if people worked in the way you suggest. We wouldn't have landed on the moon, made it to the South Pole and, I suspect, have barely made it out of the cave..
That's what Marty Roesch was thinking when he started the Snort IDS project, as an open source project, on the side, with no real hope of turning it into a company.

SourceFire went public with Snort last year.

There are ways to do this without going for broke.
IBM, Microsoft & Google Eras of Computing
I will not tell you the user agent that your iPhone uses

Why do people do stuff like this? Why should a zdnet columnist care about AT&Ts image?
Two recommendations for reading: A Random Walk Down Wall Street (mentioned in another post, long, detailed, and entertaining), and The Coffeehouse Investor (short and funny). Both lay out the principles behind the theory of efficient markets, and make a great case for it.

In a nutshell: buy the cheapest unmanaged index funds you can find. Come up with an allocation you're comfortable with (e.g., 50% large cap, 20% mid-cap, 20% small-cap, 10% international equity). Reallocate once a year so that your investments still follow the same rough percentages; that way you won't have more risk exposure to any particular asset class just because it happened to have done well or poorly in any given year. That's it. You will not outperform the market by picking your own investments or playing hedging games with derivatives, and, over the medium-to-long term, neither will any fund manager. Since you're in this for the long term, have fun in life and don't bother checking your balances except when you get your quarterly statements.
I think the "never have started" is probably the crux of the matter. People who don't actually build things tend to look at the world from a very different perspective. The focus is more on "how is this thing different from anything else I have seen" and not on "is this thing actually useful to a non-trivial set of people out there". When they focus on the first part, it is very easy to bash almost all things out there. Google? That's just search. Gmail? That's just webmail. IPhone? Just a smartphone - doesn't even have 3G and GPS!
What does this even mean? Plenty of advancements have come from large companies, well-run and not.
If this sentence is true, then Santa Claus exists.

Basically assume A is true then the non existence of Santa Clause is a contradiction so A is false.

If (A then B) says nothing if A is false so your done.
Except becoming a "pure" architect exactly means to give up coding. Drawing diagrams on the whiteboard or any kind of an UML editor - and only doing that is not programming. It's probably called "drawing diagrams", but never "coding". So I suppose what I said about disappointment is still true.