skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some great tips here. I am 30 this month, having been working in industry for the last 6 years. If I were to take this on and were to make good progress, I would consider "retiring" for a year or so to finish things off.

The point you make in 1) and 2) echoes a lot with what others are saying about finding the right adviser. I will certainly pay a lot of attention to this.
stocktwits is looking for a ruby on rails + wordpress guy. Considering your site's down the same vertical, you might want to look into it.
It sounds to me like you need a co-founder, not a PhD.

I've worked from home on my own projects off and on for nearly 20 years and still have some of the problems you describe. Go and do a project on a customer site and they cannot believe how efficient I am. Started a (failed) project with someone, the pressure of having someone else relying on me was great (not that it is the reason it failed, but he didn't quite feel the same way).

Do something at home and hey I'm replying to this on HN :-)

Find someone to team up with and do what you really want to do, don't try and distract yourself with something else you may never finish.
The systems I've worked on are all COTS from the tower on back (but then, they're all custom apps back there too, so it's not like there's a lot of safety to be gained from being on an IP network).

But who cares what they're using at the tower? Breaking into the distribution layer is a vanity attack if you can wreak havoc with 100,000 meters.

People who see "security" as a "component" of a software/hardware solution typically don't actually "get it"; these are the people that just can't get their heads around the fact that attackers will rip meters off walls, crack them open, JTAG them up and use them as modems. It always sounds so self-aggrandizing to say this, but you have to do security pervasively, from design to implementation to testing, to make a dent in the problem.
"women-owned businesses accounted for 21 percent of the entrepreneurs that sought angel-investment capital in 2009, but only 9.4 percent of those females were successful in their quest"

But what percentage of men who seek VC get funded?
Thanks for the tips. I wrote my first vim macro last week so obviously there's a lot more for me to pick up!
Any background on this?
To the extent that a degree doesn't have some kind of return, it's irresponsible to lend people money as if it works as collateral. Imagine someone with an income of $25,000, borrowing $150,000 to buy art.
Say, you were born in a Third World country and have absolutely no chance of going to a top school or going into investment banking.

Does your advice stay the same? Does it look easy?

For me, reading Hacker News and dreaming about a startup is one of the few ways I can envision myself being financially independant.

(I'll move past the "dreaming" and into the "doing" part soon :) - I'm currently shackled with self-inflicted debt)
We did something similar with FacesForce.com and tried a few markets. Video is very tricky. It appears it is best to let users submit a video without being asked, but the issue with this is users do not want to pay. So the HH model will definitely bring in revenue faster.

A few people are worried they may be discriminated against if they send a video, but if someone is going to disqualify you based on what they see, they will do it when you show up for interview. So at least you save time.
Interesting. My bank has lots of different account types that aren't checking or savings, and all of them have different rules (and I use a few of those).

There is a big temptation to assume that banks don't do stuff because they're technologically inept, but I don't think that's the case. The bank I worked for was a subsidiary of the Chase Manhattan bank and as far as the hardware went they were cutting edge at the time.

Software driving products that were the banks income was extremely well documented and extremely well protected in terms of changes to the code and who could do what with it. Security was tighter than a gnats ass, both physical and network wise, with round the clock monitoring and so on.

A banks idea of disruption is not the fear of some new tech, banks know that technology only appears to move fast, they can afford the wait until something has proven itself.

A bank fears things like paypal, that obviate the need for banks and their 'products which are the privilege of accessing your own hard earned money'.

Banks have tons of special products in their inventory, the fact that you don't actually see them in the wild is that you are mostly looking at the consumer side of the operation. On the business side the special products are the majority. Then there is all the regulatory business, that too is responsible for an enormous amount of code.

For a newcomer the barrier to entry is not technology, it is simply the vast headstart that existing banks have in terms of knowledge, marketing power and financial resources.

I'm only aware of one bank that started in recent times that was not tied to another bank, and unfortunately it went bust.

Thanks for the exchange by the way, that was interesting. Who knows, maybe one day you'll found that disruptive bank based on high-technology!
Yes. I do. It isn't QUITE as much effort as you'd think....especially once you've nailed a "system" down.
For a user experience designer I would have a different interview.

What's important for me is to see if some understand what is happening behind the scenes. There are so many people who apply a clearfix but do not understand the principles of block contexts.
iirc: O'Reilly stopped maintaining perl.com content around that time and finally handed the domain over to the perl foundation a few weeks ago…

http://www.perl.com/pub/2010/07/relaunching-perlcom.html
I use this a lot. I dislike side effects in the subject clause of an if statement, so I used to rewrite:

if user = User.find(...)
...
end

as:

user = User.find(...)
if user
...
end

I then got into the habit of using and:

user = User.find(...) and begin
...
end

It just seems to resemble something I'd say to a colleague: "user becomes blah blah blah and then we do this with it..." Likewise:

user = User.find(...) or begin
user = User.create(...)
SecurityTheatre.starring(user)
end

This looks to me like it says "find the user or create the user." The precedence of the words "or" and "and" seems obvious when you think of them as words rather than as operators, while the precedence of operators naturally seems higher/tighter.

JM2C...
I think Pragmatic Software (one of their other departments, apparently) would have been much better, but that's just me. "Pragmatic" sounds good and has an appropriate meaning, plus the "Software" part means you actually know what they do--beats some "MonkeyCheeseSpoon"/"PirateNinjaRobots" company name.
My theory was that you should go cheap on the undergrad, if the name of the school matters so much, just go there for graduate school. I'd hire a guy with a grad degree and a state school over a really top shelf undergrad&

In technical fields, I agree with you. Having a degree often matters to get in the door and avoid hitting ceilings, as you pointed out. But skill in your actual job and (for better or worse) skill in networking and relationships will win out over pedigree in the long run without problem.

It seemst that the situation is different in liberal arts fields though. My wife is a history major and because of her I have many acquantances in the liberal arts. They are all very worried about pedigree, and it sounds like employers looking for that type of employee is also very worried about pedigree. I suspect this is because it is harder (not impossible but harder) to measure productivity and skill in liberal arts than it is in engineering and related technical fields.
I think it all comes down to the lingering issue of how much of ourselves are we willing to record for all to see. Another issue that video resume may raise is what I will call, remote discrimination; how good your video is may decide whether you get a call for in-house interview or not.
Oops... Solaris has a somewhat sane package manager.
Important related question I don't see in the article: what percentage of men who apply for VC get it?
What Americans Do Online: Social Media And Games Dominate Activity
There are professional accreditations that work something like that. e.g. the CPA, CFA, bar exam, etc. Those tests usually require you to get some kind of education before you take them, but the actual qualification is granted based on test scores.
I don't think so. First of all, a Frontend Hero needs to have design sense, ability to learn quickly, empathy with users, trustworthiness to "fill in the blanks", and the balls to say no to designs or features that are unnecessary, impractical, and time-consuming. What Sebastian Deutsch described is a CSS / Javascript quirks specialist.

Additionally, the article never really touched on how to recruit these people - it just lists screening questions to ask during an interview. To recruit a Frontend Hero, you need to hire great designers and create a culture that treats front end engineers as first class citizens.

Incidentally, we're doing that at Airbnb right now.
http://www.airbnb.com/jobs/show/8
Yes, you're right; I misread it. Thanks!
Maybe I'm just paranoid and have low expectations for humanity, but I think the main demand for video interviews would be to do racial/ethnic/attractiveness discrimination on candidates. Early in the process, it would be a lot easier to discard all people of [unfavored group] without any allegations of unfairness.
The best way to do ‘lean’
My two cents (take with salt, as I'm a math Phd student, not CS):

A grad program absolutely CAN motivate you, IF you are motivated by failure and feelings of inadequacy. In math there is a real divide between being book smart and being able to do research (to put it mildly, it's more like a chasm). Most students have been validated their whole lives by being better than the rest, and finally coming to an obstacle that doesn't yield can be life changing.

For me, my self identity was absolutely tied up in proving myself as a mathematician, and my first few years of research were HELL. Total self sacrifice, total commitment. I came out the other side of the blaze a new person, and better for it, I think. I've lost the desire to do math, but I've gained the self confidence and mental integrity to disappear into a cave for years to work on a project with no sense of validation from others.

There were other motivating factors: wanting to compete with other students, wanting to impress my advisor, etc. NONE of those motivations survived the pain of research. And, to be honest, now that I've proven myself, not even that desire exists anymore. As of now, I can't fathom doing a PhD again. The only thing that can motivate me now is working on a really interesting problem, and to be honest academia ISN'T necessarily the place for this. At least in math, there really isn't that much freedom in what you can research.

If you can find a good research project that involves enough people to keep you motivated from social pressure, I say go for it, as it sounds like you're really jonesing for interesting work and simply need the motivational factor. Otherwise, if you can find some other way to stay motivated, I'd say do research on your own.

(As a side note, I have a Mech Eng friend that just got his PhD. He released much of his research as an open source library which apparently has attracted a pretty substantial user/contributor group. So it is possible to write quality code in an academic setting, especially if you've already have commercial experience and a desire to hold yourself to that level. Most academics have simply never been in a position where they Needed to write commercial quality code).
Multiple submissions after some period of time
I just tried to submit this article which I found interesting:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_instruction_set_computer

HN informed me that the article had been previously submitted (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=222861), which is useful and nice, but it was submitted over two years ago. Should it not be allowed to knowingly resubmit previously posted materials after such a long time?
One of our goals is to help people feel more comfortable recording short videos. We don't see HireHive has a "video resume" (i.e. something you agonize over carefully crafting long answers to) so much as a lightweight way to answer questions off-the-cuff.

One of the challenges we face is to figure out how to set the tone so people can relax and be themselves. Is there anything that you think would help you feel more comfortable?

Thanks for the feedback :)
My initial response is definitely skeptical. If I'm asked to record a video for an interview question, I'm going to write down my answer first, and then read it in a casual way.

You're going to be judging my skill at speaking into a little square at the top of a computer. I hope this isn't treated as a tool to judge interpersonal skills.

What value is added, beyond making it easier to dismiss people based on appearance and personal preferences? I guess judging based on a perceived personality is kosher, but let's be realistic about the purpose here.

I think a live video-call is totally fair-game, but something about this definitely rubs me the wrong way.
Ask HN: What are the biggest (simple) ideas in recent history of computing?
I'm curious which ideas you would consider the most original, creative, important, influential, etc. in recent history of IT, computer science, but to keep it still a bit focused, let's restrict examples to the web.

I'm thinking especially of those ideas which don't need technical jargon to explain and are easily understood by everyone. Ideas that were under everyone's nose for a long time and in retrospect they are totally obvious if you ask the right question, but still they seemed like magic when they first appeared.

To get it started, here are three that I can randomly think of: CAPTCHAs, tags, torrents.
Wow another overwhelming "no don't do it"! From someone who's been there and done it.

So, genuine questions: why did you do it? and what were your reasons? And finally if you could go back in time, would you decide to do it again?
> After the f(, you probably want h to move the cursor left onto the space before the (.

Or just use t( to automatically move to the preceding space. ;)

The best part about Vim is that you can ask 50 people about shotcuts and get 50 distinct answers, and each person can learn something new from each other. :)
So um, what 67,000 dollars actually do?
Can I build a Craigslist crawler?
8 Management Lessons I Learned Working At Apple
My point, which downmodders seem to be missing, is that you don't have to rely on the language's magic operator precedence rules in lisp do this kind of thing. The syntax is yours to command.
well i just use google, and maybe you can let me know.. why I would choose your solution vs google
And even on that page, half of the product shots are still of Apple hardware!

It may be telling that www.qingting.biz is hosted off of a Taiwanese DSL IP...
White male? Last I checked, Yellow made more money on average than all the other colors in the crayon box, kiddo.

Check your facts for stale stats.
@euroclydon oh yes minifying, I gonna add that to the list good point.
Microsoft should starve on radical penguin diet.
I think realtime interaction is the key element missing from most early-stage screenings, not video. I'd rather have an IM/irc/voice chat with someone, propose problems, and observe how he tries to solve the problem, than canned and rehearsed video clips. The only job for which I'd consider a canned video clip to be really useful is a job which requires producing canned video clips.
Some portion of this is culture, but some portion is definitely biology as well. Men, across different cultures, are consistently more prone to risk taking, and show higher variance in ability. (Interestingly women have higher average IQs than men in our culture, but men have higher variance and are a majority of people with very high IQs.) There is an evolutionary rationale for this, but what is important is that this has been observed.

Therefore when you look at a high-risk activity that is very ability driven, such as startups, there is no surprise that men are over-represented. This is probably not all of it. But even in a perfect world, there would be a clear bias.

That said, there are many areas where women have a natural advantage over men. Many markets exist where the majority of likely consumers are women. (For random examples women are more likely to do shopping, organize weddings, and sustain stronger social networks.) Any startup that wishes to succeed in such an area would be well-advised to have a lot of female input. And a female co-founder could be a significant asset in such a situation.
That implies that startups charge money for their product/service. More often than not, sites that need to scale for millions of users are "free to use".
To me this looks like an endless series of 'gotcha' questions that for the most part are either in the totally obvious or terribly obscure category.
I don't disagree, I just meant it from a realistic/pessimistic point of view.
Well made points and they make sense.

Perhaps, if the OP does not already have one, a Master's Program is a good way to start? Is does not require a dissertation and many have a non-thesis option if you do not want to do original research.

Of course, you do need a fair degree of motivation to finish even a masters, but it is a much lower bar than a PHD. While your direct advisor may or may not pay you much attention, most masters programs are centered around a series of classes that are like a harder extension of your undergrad education.

Also, if you are doing this for career purposes, a masters is a "sweet spot" in terms of return on investment in education. It is much less costly than a PHD, and does not run the risk of intimidating potential employeers in the way that a PHD might. But at the same time, it sets you apart from people holding only a bachelors.

(For full disclosure: I am currently in a masters of math program while working full time.)
I really like that find and/or begin pattern. The if user= User.find never really felt right to me either.
To do it 'right' is more effort than most people can expend. Being someone who also is a 'DIY' approach, I don't disbelieve you, but I often realize just how much I have to know to do things right, and how much value some of the other services provide for the less technically-inclined.
So you're telling HN people to give up their time programming or doing startups to volunteer time for government planning, politicking against adversaries, and the like.
Since about 2005 most large banks have started deploying on Linux for most new projects. The place I'm at now, which is one of the most conservative environments - NIS, heaps of Sol 8 under Vintage support, 15 year old home grown perl scripts for config management, etc - has a minimal amount of Linux skills amongst the day to day support staff, just declared Solaris a non-strategic platform.
That was back in 1995, and hedonic adjustmens are now included in CPI.

Do note that COLA for Social Security is based off CPI. So the Boskin commission had a significant conflict of interest as they looked for ways to keep CPI lower.

Here's a much better explanation: http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/01/economists-serving-thei...
The way someone looks on video is always so different from a face to face contact, discrimination most of the time has to do with perception more than anything. By talking to someone you get a better sense and generally throw off initial perception.
The Droid's screen is apparently Gorilla Glass and it's been "confirmed" by somebody that the iPhone 4 uses it too.
Absolutely. Frontend is far more about design and usability than it is about whether or not you can remember vendor-specific hacks for CSS columns.

I figure if I ever need to hire a "frontend hero" my checklist will be very short. Do you have a sizable portfolio, and does your stuff look like the stuff I want? If so, you're in the running.
The "blog" or perhaps "blog-inspired" things. tags are one you mentioned - trackbacks and pingbacks are two more.

"friending" as a verb/process might be another.
Discrimination is a serious problem with all hiring -- people discriminate when they read names on resumes, speak with people on the phone, and when people come in for interviews. Like most tools, HireHive could be misused. We hope though that it will overall help people shine through who don't look super impressive on paper but are in fact awesome.
I think it's a lot easier for one interviewer in a team of a few, going over a big pool of applicants, to reject people for personal/stupid/illegal reasons if he can do so anonymously. Say there are 20 women applying out of 100; if only 5 people are brought in for in-person interviews, and 0 are women, it's a lot easier and less open to potential liability than if 5 candidates include one perfect female candidate and 4 objectively-lesser male candidates, and the female still doesn't get the job.
I think that while there seems to be a very active startup community in and around Tel Aviv, I think it could only be considered a real option to people of Jewish decent (who can prove it and are willing to go through the "Aliyah" immigration process) or if you are married to an Israeli. With those barriers for entry, Tel Aviv (Israel) pretty much drops off the list. I must say, though, that there is definitely no shortage of talent in Israel, with fresh and eager graduates from Israels Technion, Tel Aviv University and the University of Be'er Sheva.
It doesn't matter whether this is based on pre-iPhone4 data or not. Trend is quite clear and there's simple logic behind it.

Apple has quite narrow market segment. They are making more money with less customers which is exactly the right thing to do from company perspective. However Android is gaining new markets with new form factors, different pricing points etc. That's why it is inevitable.
First off these people need to change their passwords for their email accounts, I don't really know what virus it is but this would be the most likely culprit is a hacked email account (by bruteforce or maybe a virus as you say).

Second of all the only real way, that I can think of, to solve the spam problem (as spammers are perpetually one step ahead) would be a limited web of trust which isn't really a useful way to do email.
so basically it's the same as any large megacorp?
Agreed on the branding. When I saw your post I knew it had been done before but didn't know how to do it, so I threw the link into a bare HTML page to see what it would look like.

What about doing your own form and data store, via Heroku or something similar?

Good luck with your launch!
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I momentarily misread "Noogler" as "Nuclear".

Alas. I had hoped for another nuclear engineer HN reader.