skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Of course I totally missed the point of the question. It strikes me as just a matter of personal temperament. I, personally, have no interest in jobs that involve going into battle againt other people every day. But if that sounds appealing to you then I think you should go for it, even if probability says you won't succeed. Passion > reason.
Right -- I'll give you one guess what happens when narcoleptics try to meditate.
I exchanged the situation for one that involved telling fewer lies and doing less of what I hate.
It isn't zero sum, any more than manufacturing is zero sum because all you did was expend energy rearranging the same old atoms.

Trading well requires you to synthesize information that other people will act on. If oil is too cheap, you buy oil, this raises the price and alleviates the problem. The fact that this causes some people to lose money is material, but it just means that trading is a way to redistribute wealth from people who are usually wrong to people who are usually right. I do not see how anyone could believe that this isn't socially useful.
One of the few people I have respect for in my career had a phase for this regarding the progress of projects, and I think it applies to start-ups in the sense that sometimes people are blinkered about what they are doing and that is this:

"Disappoint early"

In other words, as soon as you are aware of a problem - Raise it. And then discuss it and work it out.
Good call. My roommate and I are about to start an econ discussion site. Shoot me an email if you're interested in helping us get conversation started or just have any suggestions for us.
Nice Framework, Easy, Comfortable, No Fuss... Thanks, This makes life much easier...
Robotic Exoskeleton turns grunts into Super Soldiers
The Real Yahoo! Board Members
Does that mean you still tell lies and sometimes do things you hate? :)
Laws and taxes are two areas where everyone is afraid to give any actual advice because of the liability it can cause.
Trading long is positive sum.
jsjenkins, in software a framework is usually defined as (From Wikipedia):

"...a re-usable design for a software system"

This "framework" encapsulates a lot of iPhone-ish style attributes (like buttons, toolbars, lists, sliding/animation & icons) as well as a good number of webkit's(and mobile safari's) new css / js functions.

Additionally we plan to support:

Gesture Events (this should be iPhone specific enough for you)

& Mobile Safari's Offline Database API
That doesn't really handle data access / storage bottlenecks, unless I'm missing something.
All 3 of you are right.
See profile, forgot that it doesn't show.
This is exactly what I meant. I didn't mean to imply that I was somehow too good to pursue an idea, just that it's hard to stay motivated once you've cracked the interesting problems.
I hear what you are saying. It is starting to happen in the UK as well.

What frustrates me is not advice, but actual facts.

e.g. If my employer wants to change my job title and description, what are the standard rules/laws regarding this sort of change?
New Facebook Chat Feature Scales to 70 Million Users Using Erlang
Ideas vs Execution
An interesting take on a familiar problem.
Why Crunch Mode Doesn't Work
Sorry, was just a bit confused when I saw iPhone web application framework because I usually think of involving server-side when I see that term, and from that perspective there is little difference between the iPhone browser and others.

Being able to easily stylize your pages to achieve iPhone-like appearance is definitely very useful.
For stocks, yes, but not for options/futures.
Sleep less (with no performance hit)
Well, it's like when people ask medical questions online or write into newspapers - most of the time the correct answer is 'go and see your doctor'.

Having said that, have you looked at the direct.gov.uk site? It seems about as straightforward as goverment information gets:

http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Employment/Employees/EmploymentC...
I don't know what you mean by "getting off on" other than the fact that it's fun to solve problems. It's not like I'm gloating about what I do. Most of the little things I work on are completely private endeavors that I never even talk to anyone about.

Knowledge is worth pursuing for its own sake; not everything is a competition.
this is a good thread for me to read. i have found it difficult just to realize what i need to know to start working on projects that i have in mind. i have so far been working with html css and some java script to design static web-sites but am really unsure as to where to go to make a simple web-app with a database to store user information that produces a dhtml page.

i was thinking of picking up a mysql book for dummies yesterday but decided to put it off till i finish the one on javascript. though even then im not sure if that's what i need to know or if its the right choice

with so much buzz about rails everywhere i was contemplating picking up something on that but then there is python too, and i havent a clue what exactly they do. then there is the new google app engine. will that help me? i signed up, but am yet to fully delve into exactly what it does for a developer. i guess there is alot of ways to cook an egg. but this forum really helps alot.
You're spot on that the market is a means of both creating information and disseminating information. Information is key to game theory. That's where sigma algebras and filtrations start to creep into theory.
you set your limits on your own mind, just be equally idealistic as realistic.
and probably the hardest step for a newb. no-one likes the new-fish.
Perhaps a new saying should be posed, "You get what you and your environment put in."
Yes - I did. What was your Google query? - assuming you used Google.

The reason I ask, and the reason behind the post, was that it is actually quite difficult for people to ask real questions of a search engine and get decent results. I know, I tried. Yes I hit the Uk Gov site - but to say it is vague is being kind.

....."Well, it's like when people ask medical questions online or write into newspapers - most of the time the correct answer is 'go and see your doctor'."

In the UK going to see the doctor is free....Not so for legal advice.
I'm guilty of not creating a distinction between speculation and investing. Technically, investing done right consists of creating knowledge about what resources will be in what demand in the future. A speculator plays a mere hunch. The distinction lies in the amount of information processed in the decision formulation. A good discussion of the dichotomy between a speculator and an investor can be found in Graham and Dodd's Security Analysis.
Thanks for this. It turned out to be much easier than anticipated to get up and running on EC2!
As nice as it would be to hang on to the word "hacker", it's devalued by everyone; from the 14 year old who can point-and-click through sub7 to the 25 year old hipster who wants to give his web startup (and, invariably, his blog) an air of in-crowd chic.
I know I'm in the bottom 50% of drivers: I only have a G1 license (i.e, Ontario's "learner's permit"). ;-)
It's not uniformly irrational or unprofitable to enter a zero sum game. I made a great living for over 5 years playing a zero sum game, and know lots of people who have done it for far longer. Not options trading though. That one in particular I can't speak to.

It's often not that hard to prove within a reasonable certainty that you are a winner (or at least were one), depending on the variance. I haven't looked into the coefficient of variation of options trading though. I might one day.

Also, whether or not something is competitive has nothing to do with whether or not it is a zero sum game. It is generally just a factor of how much money can be made. The software industry is not zero sum, but is highly competitive. Low stakes poker tables are zero sum, but are not competitive at all.
Just how much ecstasy and LSD does a typical lion take?
I can only talk about my own experience, hoping that it can be useful to someone and I try hard not to generalize. And my own experience with negotiation (with VC's) is that it is not one-to-one but one-to-many. My best experience was when I had three termsheets on the table and I went to one VC and said, "I like the price on A, I like the terms on B, but I like you". The end result is that I get to work with the VC that I like and I get the pricing and terms that I can live with. So by negotiation power, I don't mean negotiation skills. The only true power you have as an entrepreneur is when you don't need their money. But if you need their money, then you have no power and you are "meat on the chopping board". In that case, liquidation preference is the least of your problems.
No problem, I probably didn't pick the best description for it anyway.
That's something pretty different, then. TortoiseGit is—or would be—a UI for git. Same idea as Tortoise SVN. The OP was talking about something quite different.
Aren't options zero sum? I don't think anyone would suggest the entire stock market is. But every penny you make from an option is a penny someone else loses, unless I'm missing something.
It's still zero sum. Just one of the winners is the guy charging the commission. Every dollar in commission is a dollar someone else has to lose.
Was the acting as bad?
Right. I guess the real step one is to find out if you even enjoy programming. You're correct that it's much easier to determine this realistically if you start by playing with one of the higher-level languages you will eventually end up using.

Good call.
That doesn't make sense. Manufacturing is not zero sum because you're taking things people don't want (raw materials) and turning them into things they do. It's a zero sum game at the atomic level, but not at the wealth level.

Options trading is zero sum because every dollar made by one options trader is lost to another (or to a commission). There's no net wealth generation.
As a start-upper with wife and kids I have some perspective to add. Our startup essentially began on the day my first child was born. I was running back and forth between the hospital and a pair of sales offices arranging a demo for our first large corporate client. We did land the contract, I was there for the birth of my son. It was the most stressful day I've ever had.

Here's the advice: Its not just you starting the startup.

If I had a different kind of wife, someone timid, fearful or unwilling to adjust from a standard of living to which she had become accustomed, my startup would have been impossible.

Your wife has to have the bug as well even if shes not directly involved. If instead you get a "whatever you want dear as long as we still have enough money for X (soccer, preschool, shoe-shopping, cabletv... whatever), you are already done.

The two of you can do it together. You can't do it alone. The bright side? You've already got your co-founder. That might also be the downside.
It would be hilarious if all Ask PGs just got the reply "make something people want."
No, the broker is an externality--his strategy is fixed before the game even starts.
Where did we get the name Xobni?
Throwing together a bunch of libraries and gluing them together with "surprisingly few" lines of Python code isn't exploratory programming.

It's hardly programming at all.
I nearly spit out my pacifier and fell out of my high chair when I saw PG modded below zero several times in one thread -- about Arc of all things.

It seems to be seasonal. Around YC application deadlines, even his offhand comments get praised as fonts of celestial wisdom.

So the constituency of the community here tends to whip around randomly like a man in a nude suit riding a dangling firehose, spraying mud and rocks everywhere.
Screwed by Sprint for $50,000.00 - The Full Story
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/main.jhtml?xml=/health/200... is one of the best articles I've ever read on modafinil and a much more enjoyable comprehensive read on the same topic than the submitted article IMO.
Reminds me of a scifi short story I read years ago, I forgot the author's name. But, the story was set in a future US where all people were create equal and should be equal and people who were really good at something had to have some hindrance to make them averagely equal. One line I remember was:

"the ballerina must have been exceptionally beautiful and gifted good due to mask and the number of weights weighting her down"
CouchDB Incremental Reduce
Ask YC: Best HTML Prototyper?
So I have a new startup idea, and instead of looking at the technical details (which I always can work out anyway) I thought I would start looking at the User Interface. What's the best HTML prototyping tool?

Some people say Adobe Photoshop, but I don't understand how a painting and image tool would be useful. Also note that I am _not_ talking about development environments! I simply want the best tool -- easiest to use and full of great graphics design ideas -- to markup a dummy HTML page.
Amazon EC2 Latency
I've heard that EC2 isn't really suitable for serving website pages because it has a lot of latency. I haven't tested this myself but I did notice that x forwarding from amazon machine images is pretty slow--I suppose these are the same thing. Any thoughts?
I am in the same boat. This year I will turn 35 and have not yet started anything. I think fear has something to do with it and the other is finding the technical talent to help bring ideas to fruition. I am pretty sure that having had work experience will definitely be beneficial.

As far as having a family to support goes, I have 2 kids and I am pretty sure I can't leave my job even though my wife works. That just means I would have to do something part time, which in the end may be better. I read an article where an entrepreneur spoke about the fact that founders will put a lot of energy into their startup and not develop a balanced life from the outset. That only puts you in a mode where work will always consume a lot of your time and you will not be able to break that cycle. At least if you work 2 jobs for a short period of time, you know at some point you will quit one of them.
As a person that has been on both the positive and the negative side of the sum, I can tell you that most people don't really think about this when they get into the speculation.

1) Serious quant trader types are rarely good at anything other than mathematics. Even if they are, if they are getting $500k+/yr it would be hard to start as an entry-level engineer for $60k. So most people don't really have an option once they get started in trading.

2) It's addictive. The top hedge fund manager in the US is paid to the tune of $1.7 BILLION per year. On January 2nd the next year, he's back in the office. Once you get in the quickpaced environment of trading everything else looks very boring.

3) It's usually a collective game, so your particular performance is not as important as the performance of the firm. You could do excellent, but somebody else could tank the whole bank. Similarly, you could have a bad year, but if the company is doing OK you'll still get a decent bonus.

After all, the same applies for startups. If you don't assume that you are better than most people at what you do, there's hardly a point in doing it.
I don't really find that people get burned out working on their own thing. It instead seems to be when trying to do what other people think they should.
I love Axure for prototyping. I'm a mac user and it's windows only, and it's the only reason I have VMWare installed. Once you get it set up properly, the fact that it's running in windows doesn't even get in the way.
Mass. Lawmakers seek to tax $1b endowments - 9 institutions
A good friend of mine did a successful startup (acquired by AOL for about $50MM a couple of years back) when he was 40, with a wife and two kids. Go for it.

Here's a video of him giving us some startup advice at justin.tv: http://www.justin.tv/hackertv/58652/Tech_Talk__3_Adam_Beguel...
I am talking about stocks.
Nowadays it seems to be closer to "programmer"

Actually, that's the original meaning:
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html
notepad and a knowledge of html and css
I think what he meant by hacker was "coder" or "programmer": someone witht the ability to turn a concept/idea into a working web/desktop/mobile application. Therefore in this case "hacking" is a skill that can be learned just as martial arts or cooking.

Edit:Hacking does not start or even end with coding skills. Hacking is so much more than software that the YC app asks you what have you hacked that is not related to software. Chefs are hackers, so are youngsters who pimp they ride. Hacking is what happens to us when we start asking ourselves too many times "what if?". It just happens that here we answer those questions using ruby/lamp/.net/ajax......
Ask YC: Transition from College to Work Advice
I have plenty of questions for you all, mostly because the backgrounds and positions that many of the users hold are similar the direction I would like to take.

A little info on me: I am currently a college student with roughly one year of school left. My major is Information Systems with a focus on web development. My language experience is heavy in Java and C++, but have worked with COBOL, PHP, CSS, HTML, and some database work. I am also about to begin to teach myself Ruby on Rails and then convert and move a side project of mine from PHP to RoR.

The problem I see, particularly when looking online for future jobs, is that most require a substantial amount of real world work experience, which I obviously lack. Considering I attend a midwestern state school, I could imagine that an org. like Google is not going to hire me right out of college like they would a graduate from say, Stanford.

Ideally, I would like to be able to have one of my personal projects take off by that time so I could generate income from it, but the chance of having that happen when they are not even ready to launch yet is slim. I really feel confused as to where I should look once graduation time comes around. What suggestions do you guys have as to things I could do to improve my standing or the view employers have of me? If it were up to me, I would like to work in a small up-and-comming organization rather than just be another cog in the machine and would rather code than do other types of work.

Also:

Do certifications help or matter when applying for jobs?

For web based orgs., what language has the most demand? (Also, what would an employer ask of to prove that the developer is proficient in the language?)

What would be considered a "quality" portfolio?

What path or things you did after college would be helpful as well. I would also consider freelance work, so anyone that took that direction, please say how you got started. Thanks all!
i wish i read that when i was younger. bravo pg for being frank.
I had trouble with them too. I wanted to use mod_python, which they have installed, but they have their settings all jacked up where you can't really use it. I've switched the project over to EC2 and was up and running with mod_python (properly configured) in less than an hour.
From the OP:

2) as an extension to 1) above it is amazing to discover how simply firmware can be updated over the wire on specific NICs,
If you were on Linux, maybe you could do something with FUSE. Your FUSE driver could present the repository as a file system, with .commit_id directories for historical data.
If you lack real world experience, start building real world projects. If your projects are not ready to launch, start working on them - pick the best one, finish it, and start working hard on promoting it, monetizing it, etc. - that is a) real world experience and b) the best chance for it to make money. You kill two birds with one stone.
But wouldn't the lose leave the game, leaving the previous winners to battle amongst themselves?
I personally think that someone who has a hacker inside them trying to get out is intrinsically curious and focused enough to obtain the answers on his or her own . . . if you need to ask around you don't really have it in you . . .
I came from a windows background and had never used linux but need mod_python for a project. I was up and running with EC2 (configured they way I wanted it, installing the packages I needed and pulling my custom scripts off of s3) in about an hour. It really wasn't all that hard. I'm now looking at porting all of my stuff as EC2 instances sure are cheaper than my dedicated windows boxes.
I've actually found Excel very useful for knocking-up a site layout enough to get a designer onto it...

For getting something graphical, I've used SiteSpinner. It gives PowerPoint-style WYSIWYG editing, and produces pretty good HTML code. The pages look exactly like they did when you drew the page. Cheap but has a lot of design functions.
I'm sure it's an eye-opener just as browsing with Netscape 4 would be, but I don't think it really means anything.

I gave up on caring about what a site does without JS a long time ago. It's not worth my time to do it just like it's not worth designing cars for people without legs.
Poor Children Of The World No Longer Will Have To Struggle With Linux
Ask YC: How do you achieve laser focus and concentration?
Reading the news.yc item about Provigil and reading more about it, I'm convinced that it's the kind of thing that gives you laser focus and concentration. Silver bullet drug, really (see http://www.erowid.org/experiences/exp.php?ID=62958)

Since it has strange side effects and U.S. restrictions (requires prescriptions), I'm wondering how you achieve concentration and focus when doing work.

I'm interested in this in the context of concentrating in class, doing schoolwork, and hacking.

Thanks.
He Said, She Said In Google v. Facebook
Cognitive Fun: Jaeggi/Buschkuehl dual n-back task
Ask YC: Workplace experiments?
37 Signals, those blogging wunderkind, have been posting about <a href="http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/893-workplace-experiments">various workplace experiments</a>.

I especially like the unconventional hours bit, but it got me thinking-- what other workplace experiments are worth doing?

Office vs. open is pretty tough, since that requires changing your actual workspace, but many other things would be testable.

What ideas do you have on this?
Right. Assuming the Wikipedia article is to be believed, the results relative to some of the effects he claimed were unsubstantial. A dramatic overall effect on cognitive function was not found. In the article, he talked about studying a textbook for hours straight, where he hadn't been able to do that before. My accusation of placebo effect is not to say the drug is useless, it's more against the specific claims such as that one in the article and "worked for me" claims made in other comments on this thread.

In general, if do something expecting some effect, and you get that effect, it's not something to talk about.
i use adobe fireworks for drawing ideas out of my head and textmate text editor to actually code the page
Right now I'm actually focusing on getting a new job (laid off just recently). I have a potential partner (same age/situation) who is not a hacker but would be a good compliment to my skillset.

I have a vision for a product that would hopefully rock the project management landscape. If only I had 6 months locked with a fellow coder... I'll have to settle for a couple hours a day trying to make a convincing demo to sell the dream.
FWIW, we have 3 devs, and are discussion 4 10-hour days vs. 2 16-hour days with each person staggering 1 extra work day.

Another thing is to specifically avoid interrupting each other except at times-- like, on the hour or something. Right now, it's very easy to interrupt every 5 minutes all day.

More?
Believe me I am trying but the time that is usually devoted to those projects is only enough to allow for a balance between school/work/fitness/personal as well. Lately though that personal time has been non-existent. Luckily, I only have a few summer classes so I am hoping to complete the project which I think will have the highest success rate this summer.
Certifications are useless.