skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fix bugs. That's the best way to learn and make friends. It will give you exposure to the code base and existing code conventions.you'll learn much more and get some street cred.
I mostly just have opinion about this so I'll give you my opinion.

From the description of your current situation I'd say it's worth it to go for it (go do your thing). But I think you already know that :)

Don't you think it's worth it to risk a little, put your neck on the line a little, maybe even put yourself in a bad spot for awhile, for a chance to live like you want to? Life is living, live it and make it.
We are very, very hiring: NYC, Chicago, and SFBay.
You can't edit tweets, but you can delete them. Mouse over the tweet in question and you'll see a trashcan icon and a 'delete' link.
I have to upvote that one because it was too damn funny. And unfortunately for me, apparently true...for now.
Policemen get paid a lot of money where I live.

They work in a city where it's difficult to buy a home for less than a million dollars. Contrary to your assertion, further highly specialized education beyond a bachelor's degree is required to be a police officer (hint: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Police_Department... ). Also contrary to your assertion, it appears starting pay is no higher in Oakland than SF (hint: http://www.opdjobs.com/ ). They perform a very important service and risk their lives doing it. They deserve every cent IMO.
haha, I'll keep calling you pussy until you quit too!
Turnover is also a metric most service providers pay close attention to.
I went to Georgia Tech undergrad at about the same time as Dare (I graduated in 2004). If my memory serves, he was using carnage4life handle even back in 2002.
The Last Exorcism Ending
> If they are getting a posh deal I sure as hell don't see it.

We were talking about policemen and road workers, but now that you mention teachers, we can talk about them too. Among other things, it's almost impossible for them to get fired and their raises don't seem to be connected to performance. They also get to take three months off during the summer, bringing their annualized salary up to about 70k. If you throw their pension plans into the mix, it is actually very profitable compared to most employment pursuits available to liberal arts majors.

Also, it's hard to compare the deal they are getting versus the one you are getting, because unlike yours, the price on teachers' labor is not set in a market environment. You might also say that the labor of a construction worker or fast food cook is more back-breaking and intensive than yours, but ultimately that is not the criterion on which wages are decided. The same goes for level of education and experience. None of these are the sole factors that determine what an individual's labor is worth.
From Peru, working in the US :)
I second what has been said already. Pick something you like and really enjoy. That makes it worthwhile.

Look for projects that make it easy to contribute and have reasonable documentation.

Being always on the lookout for great people, I'll toss our project contributor's page here to see if you are interested (hehe) and show what I mean http://wiki.amahi.org/index.php/Contribute :)
I work with someone who has several 6-12 month gaps on his resume. He is amazingly talented, and was taking breaks to travel and enjoy himself. He can work anywhere he likes - it's definitely not a concern to have a gap like this.
One important lesson I learned in getting acquired is that it will dominate at least one of the founders' time. This means that simply going through the negotiation process will put a major dent in your ability to grow your company. Your potential acquirerers, if they're savvy, realize this, and may see this as leverage as the deal goes on. (Your time is much more valuable than theirs, as a small company.)

So, you need to fail fast. If things are looking like they're going to be a long negotiation process to get to a point of agreement on the major terms, you need to realize that to move forward at that point you are likely ending the startup. If you get acquired, you win, if you don't, you'll have a hell of a hole to dig out of and you'll likely not be able to.

This, like anything else, might be worth the risk. But in an ideal scenario you will walk sooner rather than later if you have faith in your business. It's better to walk away quickly, get back to work for 6-9 months, and hopefully have them coming back to you more engaged and potentially with a higher offer that you can close in on quickly after you've solidifed your business and product more.
No, that's related to writing kernel modules. I'm talking about writing propriety apps on a gnu/linux distribution, android in that case. This is totally legal and doesn't depend at all on the kernel license exception. Think skype on ubuntu. However, if the toolkit/sdk you're using on a gnu/linux distribution is GPL, then all your apps will have to be GPL, unless you use a non-gpl sdk or write your own non-gpl sdk as Google did.
"...I figured I should just stick the interview out"

I had that experience at an interview. Among other things, the interviewer was late, I was stuck in a tiny office with three people interviewing me, etc, etc. It was quickly apparent to me that they didn't respect their programmers. I decided half way through the interview that I had no interest in the job, and considered politely departing right then, but I stuck it out. I figured it was good interview practice.
I'm surprised at how many negative replies there are. I know people who have quit to hitchhike across the U.S., bike across Europe, teach music, raise a family, spend time doing construction, try their hand at day trading, get a law degree, and work in marketing, among other things. None of them have had problems coming back to programming.

You're asking if you're going to have problems finding a technical job after quitting so that you can spend time improving your skills. Are you kidding? I can't even imagine this hurting you career, and I wouldn't be surprised if you end up with unsolicited interviews if you write up what you're doing in some way (whether it's on a blog or via something like github or bitbucket). Sure, there are companies that won't hire you after a sabbatical, but do you really want to work for those sorts of places?

P.S. Good luck (not that you'll need it)!
I'm a paranoid sob and hopefully my paranoia can help you.
1. Write down a plan of what you'll be woerking on.
2. Contact companies that work in this field and ask them if they would give you a job if you were an expert in the fields your going to work in.
3. Can u work alone? It gets very lonely. Figure out all the mechanics of how your going to work on your own. You'll be surprised that setting this up to be fun can be a lot of work.
4. Do it!!! at some point you have to make a leap of faith. Just be sure you've covered the worst case scenaios (ie have some back up plan) and then jump!

As long as your skills are valuable to someone you will be able to get a job.
> They work in a city where it's difficult to buy a home for less than a million dollars.

Yet Starbucks baristas still get paid the same as anywhere else (modulo some minor cost of living adjustments) and don't get to retire at 50 with 90% of their last year's income (which should be a good deal more than the starting salary).

> further highly specialized education beyond a bachelor's degree

You should say "separate from," since all that is required to join is a high school diploma: http://sf-police.org/index.aspx?page=1646. Then, I suppose, you must attend police academy, but it's not clear from your links exactly how much time you have to spend there. Given that the mayor cancelled two thirds of their classes, either the force must have cut hiring by 66% or those classes are not required for all kinds of police duty. That "hint" bit was rude, I should know since I troll occasionally too, but you'd be better off avoiding it if you want people to listen to you.

> Also contrary to your assertion, it appears starting pay is no higher in Oakland than SF.

I believe my claim was about overall pay, not starting pay, for Oakland. That said, I don't have numbers to back that up. I can only say, "I heard it from Michael Krasny on Forum." Being that he seems to lean left, I don't see any reason for him to exaggerate the pay of unionized government workers, but it's possible he got it wrong or I am not remembering correctly.

> They perform a very important service and risk their lives doing it. They deserve every cent IMO.

Being a policeman is not really that risky. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_officer#Line_of_duty_dea.... Pizza drivers are at greater risk of death and you don't see them getting paid six figures for their work. Politicians beholden to unions is a much better explanation. I do believe they deserve to get paid something, but I don't think their jobs are so hard that they should have money thrown at them the way they do.

It's fine for you to "feel" the way you do, but to my eyes you haven't provided much rational justification for it.
“Create a window with a table view, and then when someone clicks a button, add an entry to the table view”

You can almost express something like that, in SQL.
I have the same experience as a mathematics grad student. After two or three hours I run out of focus and need to go for a walk + food.
“Create a window with a table view, and then when someone clicks a button, add an entry to the table view”

The thing is, even the above has logic "then when someone clicks". A lot more logic than that is needed to write any reasonably sized program. Many conditions need to be thought of and allowed for. This is even though the above requires the computer to write a lot of code for us - which would have been originally written by humans.
The author, like many people, is conflating two issues that result in complexity in software engineering. (Among many others.)

First, is the fact that we need to tell the computer what to do. This is, I think, what the author thinks of "programming" as. He's right, it's hard, and it's gotten easier as we've improved our tools and languages that enable us to tell the machine what we want it to do.

However, second, is the problem of taking a description of a problem, from another human, and translating it into a piece of software. The source of this information, in the worst case, is a verbal description. At the extreme, it's a written specification (which, as we all know, ultimately ends up in the trash.)

It's this knowledge capture problem that I think has a wide open opportunity. There needs to be a better way for the 3rd party humans to describe their problems in a way programmers can build on top of. It doesn't have to be precise, it doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be better than the status quo of verbal descriptions and .doc files of specs.
Monster & Fantasy
Dropshipping quality china wholesale Monster & Fantasy Mascot Costume at discount price. Wholesale Monster & Fantasy Mascots china at cheap price.
I'm sure you think me crazy, but that's what I was aiming for. I want people to be able to say, like _delirium and wwortiz did, "this is clearly a reasonable price because he's using S3 for backing storage and we know how much S3 costs".

A critical part of trust is transparency, and in the long term I think I'll do better by having transparent and obviously reasonable pricing than by obscuring things and trying to maximize my (short-term) profits.
Another no here, putting the nos up five-zip. This sample might be a bit biased, though. How about asking this question on Quora and seeing if you get a different result?
> Didn't that finally get cracked, though?

Not unless it was done quite recently. The Droid X and Droid 2 are still locked down.

> If carriers really wanted to lock down devices, they would use techniques like the crypto cards ATMs have do.

From what I've read the Droid X's bootloader is quite a bit like that.
I use both. Quora is better for talking to entrepreneurs who've creTed million dollar companies and lawyers and understanding startup funding.
IMHO I get a feeling of what it's like to live in a place SV - ie everyone is an entrepreneur. Of course I'm talking about the startup part of quora. Very informative.
Http://www.yahooscan.com/
> If that doesn't make you want to take to the streets
> with a molotov, then nothing will.

Precisely that. Western people had been fed into obedience, they've got to much to lose to react anymore.

> If this belief makes me a radical socialist, so fucking
> be it!

So we're at least two on HN among the crowd of free-market believers :)
There's nothing to stop you building services on top of Tarsnap. In fact, I've deliberately arranged things (e.g., the flexible and easily scripted tar interface, and CSV format downloads of usage data) to make it possible to do this.

If you want to build a service on top of Tarsnap, please let me know and I'll do my best to provide you with whatever interfaces you need.
Ladies, look at your code. Now back to mine.
Eucalyptus and Amazon - A Twist Forms in the Open Cloud - ReadWriteCloud
Life is too short to be stuck doing things that do not make you happy. I was once told that life is filled with ladders. You approach a ladder, climb it, and when you get to the top where your skills have seemingly peaked you need to think about jumping on to another ladder. How do you know it's time to jump? Once you stop learning you know it's time to go.

I'm sure you will be just fine after 6 months.
Perhaps. That said, even a SHA-512 sum on my computer seems to take a little less than a CPU-second per hundred megabytes. Odds are you're not going to be uploading that fast, so you should be able to do that work "online" and not have a noticeable impact on either upload throughput or user-visible impact. This is doubly true on a multi-core device, since the sha sum I quoted was single-threaded. I would think the more important thing to minimize is user-impacting disk latency from the backup scan.
The key thing will be that YOU feel the time was spent on worthwhile pursuits, and that you convey that when a prospective employer asks about the gap. No waffling, no hemming and hawing, no apologizing. Great people with cool stuff to work on appreciate having great people who've done cool stuff along side them. Step right up!
Top Proxy Sites to access blocked sites
It is a bit hard to answer the questions you're asking without knowing what languages you know (or what languages you feel vaguely comfortable with the syntax of).

In any case, one bit of advice that I'd like to throw out there that isn't usually suggested: Follow up on the patch. After sending it in, check up on it. Make sure the folks behind the project are happy with it (else it might sit and gather bitrot while waiting for someone to fix it up). If/when it is committed, look the commit over. Is it an exact commit, or did the developer who committed it modify it somehow (formatting, to use a different method, etc)?

This way, if (or likely, "when," if you're serious about this) you submit a second patch, it'll be slightly better -- slightly more likely to be committed, slightly less effort for the dev to review, etc.
I quit my job in November '09. My intent at the time was to spend 3-6 months developing new skills and reading about/learning all the cool things I'd seen on HN and pushed off until "when I have time."

Midway through, an idea that began as a learner project turned into a startup, 3-6 months turned into 9+, and I'm learning more than I ever have, and about more than just the programming topics I'd planned on.

Meanwhile, I've gone to meetups and startup events (like the Work at a Startup Day), and my personal projects -and my commitment to developing the skills to build them on my own- have been the starting points of lots of conversations with cool people from cool companies, opening doors to opportunities I'd have never had if I'd still been working at a full time gig that my heart wasn't into.

The most important thing for me has been making sure to use my time well. It's easy to squander the time, so it's paramount to have a plan and stick to it. That said, the plan can be pretty flexible since you set the schedule (assuming you don't have dependents limiting that).

My biggest concern is whether I'll be able to go back to a "regular job" after the freedom of working on my own projects on my own schedule. But I'm hoping that I won't have to find out.

Do it!
Well, the main problem I have with this idea is the assumption that all Programming is equal! Which is not.

It is easy to write a simple program that concatenate 2 files for examples, it is also easy to create a CRUD database application

Systems programming on the other hand is hard, because to be good at it, you need to understand how the systems work, which is hard, and by hard I mean you need to do a lot of reading and remember many details

I believe Programming is as hard & complex as the Programming Problem domain.

Programming itself is not hard, because concepts like Iteration, functions, conditional branching, recursion, OOP (Inheritance, encapsulation, polymorphism ), etc ... are not that complex, are they?
More people on the internet both

- write software, and
- don't stand to benefit directly from software patents.

Kind of troll, kind of serious. Consider the source and all that. I also think software patents are dumb, but then again I also don't stand to benefit from them and I write software.
> If human would not know what style of window do you want then he would ask or assume something and allowed for your comments. "Programming" humans is much more conversational. Your workers know what to assume and when to ask.

Whenever I think about how programming should work, I think about the interactions Star Trek characters have with the Holodeck in its design mode. For example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SI0wqTsIq3Q#t=3m40s (Star Trek TNG, "Schism") — a conversation of iterated constraint-satisfaction through property alteration and library retrieval.

What you get, in these cases, is entirely dependent on the amount of context-sensitive and "common sense" knowledge the Holodeck has access to. The Enterprise on TNG was able to create a sentient being, Moriarty, from a single command, because it had access to a huge database of information about human behavior, game theory, psychology, etc. and also the complete texts of the Sherlock Holmes novels to constraint-match against.

However, Dr. Zimmerman, the programmer responsible for Voyager's EMH program, had to spend years making intricately-detailed assertions about each aspect of EMH operation—because, I imagine, the default human behaviors were no good in a medical context. Given the show's base of theory, this should have been able to be short-circuited by constraint-satisfying against a large database of holographic recordings of the performance of medical procedures, similar to the Sherlock Holmes corpus. The rest (prescribing medicine, etc.) would simply be a "friendly bedside manner" on top of the already-helpful expert system built into the computer (and it is a chronic question of why the ship as a whole doesn't just come with such a "personality subroutine" already installed—probably simply because of the show's chronic bio-centricity.)
The author doesn't touch on it much, but part of the added complexity is each person thinks differently too.

“Create a window with a table view, and then when someone clicks a button, add an entry to the table view”

If you asked a room of 30 people to draw you a picture of exactly what that sentence means, you will get 30 different results. Building on your comment, I'm not sure the actual act of programming would be hard if you had to take only 1 person's viewpoint into account and work off that.
Exactly what does your cost of storage have to do with the value of the service you provide?
Even marketing a product (or service) employing the patent I would be happy with.

Fuck, even implementing the patent I would be happy with.

Requiring some minimum revenue before the patent counts for you is a great way to have your patents wantonly violated by larger firms before you can get started. Software startups are too agile for patents to matter much, but that's not as true for other industries.
Why waiting so long ? There should be a prescription on this type of claims. This technology is used in a very visible way for years now. So they could not ignore it and thus implicitly permitted to use it.

If they didn't knew they had these patents, how could the other company know ?

This type of pattent 'mines' will have the consequence to scare to death companies. Foreign companies will stay away of US just to avoid the risk to step on such mine. And US companies may move their business in countries with much less risks (i.e. europe, Asia).
Start reading the code, write patches, send them to the author/make a pull request.
Yeah, it is at a turning point, it's about to become plugin-less using Native Client.

http://blogs.unity3d.com/2010/05/19/google-android-and-the-f...
Programming might never be easy, but interfacing with technology will become increasingly easy. Additionally, building simple applications will, as well; there's already a trend in that direction.

For instance, telling a server you want a blog with a theme is fairly easy.

Telling a website you want a gallery of images themed a certain way is fairly easy.

Programming might never be easy, but building simple applications -- like the one in his example -- is already easy.
Twitter Apps Development Company
There's an element of symantic imprecision at play here. Software engineering is not the same thing as programming. Much the same way that furniture making is not identical to woodworking. I know my way around a wood shop well enough but I wouldn't trust myself to make a high quality wooden table or chair, as I lack the necessary expertise.

It takes a great deal of expertise to translate problems, requirements, or "stories" from user space into a design that is not only implementable but represents a good balance of optimizations and tradeoffs. This is a different skill than that needed to create the end product, a running application.

P.S. Consider: the fundamental tools make it easier than ever to be a graphic artist, or a film director. Does the fact that GIMP is free and photoshop is widely available make producing art "easy"? Easier perhaps, but there will never be a replacement for expertise.
Found this in the comments to that prof's blog post:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/36538677/1004-Bbg-Professors-and-P...

Basically, yes - pensions are a problem. But the graph on the number of California gov't employees that lost their jobs vs. private sector employees may be misleading because we _need_ the public sector employees to service basic needs in the state, and California employs one of the lowest number of public sector employees per capita of any state.
Microsoft won't stop .Net on Android
Check first who is on the administrative board of his company or who are the big share holders. Mr Allen may just be the visible tip of the iceberg.
My wife kept urging me to take the 6 months sabbatical (she was even asking for 1 year), we even had a big argument about that. In the end I chickened out.

Instead, we came up with a compromise, I quit my job and start working as a contractor while she continue doing awesome at her job.

The compromise should give me the time and mental energy to find awesomeness.

To really answer your question, my path is easier, I could just find a "safe" job later when things get tough.

To answer the last paragraph, I just love programming so much. After a stressful day at work, I need my Python as bad as I need a cigarette. I don't need a break to seek that mythical awesomeness (My definition of awesome is to finally launch a useful service for real people). I need a break to ran away from those pesky Employee Agreement contract, crappy boss, and mental drain caused by him/her.

My life at home is not different at all nowadays. Just a lot less stress.

PS: Future boss might ask, why there's a gap in your resume? I know my old one would.