skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I imagine your parents are pretty thrilled that you can pull down 90k so early in your career. It likely took them much longer to get to almost double the average household income of the US.

The thing is, for lots of programmers the peak is early. This is a young man's sector. By the time you are 30 you will need to start thinking about getting into management or some other non-programminng job. Otherwise when the cutbacks come and your get laid off, you will find it much harder to find a job.

It also gets harder to keep up with new technologies as you get older. Partly because your mind starts to slow a little, partly because your learning time gets replaced with family time as you have a wife and kids.

So, you decide to go into management. What are the odds of that? 1 in 10? Not great. Maybe you believe in yourself so much that you know you will be the one out of ten, and then the one out of ten that then make it to some sort of executive tech role. Likewise, I think a lot of people here feel that what about their odds at startups. Neither one is any more or less crazy than the other.

Last week I went into an office supply store to make some copies. The guy behind the counter was one of the first senior programmers I had ever worked with,
Anybody else disturbed by the increasing array of technological options to de-evolve into a passive herd-cow, contributing nothing much more than a moo-tweet here and a moo-facebook update there?

Sure ... some will be quick to say it's optional ... but is it really when everyone from VCs to job-seekers feel obsessively-compulsively compelled to keep every-single-freakin' petty detail of every moment of every day "up-to-date", lest they be seen as "inactive" and therefore, to the superficial-yet-blessed-with-power types that seem to rule the lives of those of us who haven't as yet achieved total financial freedom, "irrelevant?"

I don't know ... I think some public display is necessary to highlight the dangers of this trend, if allowed to continue.

Can something like fb/twitter be hacked in the original sense of the word and played around with for a day, say, parodied?

Can the world log on to facebook for a day and see, say, a picture of a people doing something at a park with a message like, "Stop updating everybody and go out and do something with them before your lives pass you by!"?

I know meetup and stuff exist ... but I feel like the dark side of the mindless internet brain is sucking us all in and reducing us to simple binary micro processors of the "I liked the latest whatever/I didn't like it." type.

Thanks for listening to my rant.
Consultant?
No. No remorse for breaking laws and screwing others in order to make a huge pile of money. That and being a manipulative liar.

Ethics is important. It's worthless to be filthy rich if you can't sleep at night.
Lessons Learned: The visionary’s lament
Hello from the app! Works great, thanks!
I tend to see capitalism as "father" and socialism as "mother"? You need to earn your fathers respect, but mother gives her unconditional love. Every child needs a little bit of both to grow up happily? One can make do without either one, but life is just so much better with both parents.
Thanks!

I really appreciate it, but I can't accept donations for the exact reason I can't put the application in android Market.
My desktop is orange, could you give your icon a solid background colour so that I can see it.
:-)

http://img.thedailywtf.com/images/200902/errord/DSC00669.JPG
Ok, fine, but if it's his job to quickly slough off imperfect candidates using minutia and minor criteria, why's he going to the trouble of looking at code in the first place?

I'd be scared if someone were to look at a codebase of component-type-X codebase with a find-fault-fast attitude, if they didn't have extensive experience in designing and building components-type-X already. It sounds like diving head-first into a Dilbert strip or DailyWTF story.
Varies on person/startup/etc., but 0.25-0.5% is common.
Have you submitted this to the Marketplace for the poor, helpless AT&T customers who cannot side-load apps?

--signed
Poor Helpless AT&T Customer
Quantum Cryptography Breached With Lasers
Now an equivalent one-time passcode mobile app is available as a free open source app:
http://code.google.com/p/google-authenticator/

(Disclaimer: This was my project at Google.)
On a 12 month lease, landlords tend to accept a bank statement showing $18x monthly rent in lieu of good credit/employment. Assuming the Seattle area is just as expensive as the NY area, she would only need to have $18k equity in the house to meet that bar.
If you compare the features of LispWorks or Allegro CL with Clojure you will find that Clojure has a very long way to go to match those offerings. Clojure 1.2 can't even display errors without exposing its Java nature. For a start it lacks the error handling infrastructure of Common Lisp and the tools that implementations provided on top of that.

No, concurrency is also supported by free CL implementations - like CCL.
For those in the telecom industry, this has been a pervasive fear since the early 2000's. My mother has a Ph.D. from MIT, has worked at Bell Labs, and is generally productive as hell. After the telecom bust, it took her years to find a job. When she did, it was in another country.

She eventually did make it back here and got a job. But only after getting another Master's degree in analytics (her 5th degree!)
He seems to be from Iran and therefore barred from the Marketplace (at least from the Google Marketplace).
Avant-Garte F/W 2011 Shoes by Raphael Young
If it's relative or friend I'll do it.

If it's some random old guy he gets blocked on all communication levels in no time.
Ask HN: European start-ups or How to get started
I'm new around here so if this is inappropriate or has been discussed before please let me know..

My question is this: How can someone in a small European country get some help/assistance/founding in starting a new company or product?

My situation is this:
I live in a small European country where "web applications" (and websites for that matter) are quite a new thing. The market is open for anybody to do just about anything. With a good sales team you can build a company around something that has been done before successfully elsewhere (for example, an invoicing application, a simple project management tool, etc). You may not be as profitable or high-profile as the other guys, but at least you have something concrete, a solid plan. These things can be trivial to build, especially since there are tons of examples out there on how to do it well (freshbooks, basecamp to name a few).

But what about something else? What happens in cases where you want to build the next facebook or reddit (just saying), ie. things that take time to be profitable and where there are no clear revenue channels. What do you do when your day job takes up all your time and your bank account is near-empty? I do have a couple of side projects going on but they can only be just that - I don't expect them to turn a profit.
This is probably a sign to change your situation. Start working 40 hours a week, expect bad reviews short term, build a huge open source portfolio using the extra 10-20 hours/wk you've created for yourself by opting out of the sick system.

Next year, you have a better job elsewhere.
Hospitals are to varying degrees Federally tax exempt, and they of course collect payment from Medicare/Medicaid, but many, many hospitals are primarily supported by local and state governments.

This isn't to say that Federal funding isn't sometimes useful. Federal central planning built the interstate highway system for military purposes, and this had the side effect of making suburban living desirable, draining the tax base from cities and destroying some urban environments, leading to urban crime, poverty, etc.

Nonetheless, the highways have probably been helpful to the economy as a whole even if they did destroy some cities along the way.

My point is mainly to highlight that the primary interface with government services should be the local and state level. That we get so disproportionally excited about Federal laws/elections/officials shows that politics is mostly for entertainment/signaling purposes and that the useful roles of government are unglamorous and are typically accomplished quite effectively by the local municipality.

Incidentally, today is garbage day. I derive tremendously more utility from garbage day than I do (or ever will) from the Iraq war, Afghanistan war or Social Security.
Best comment I've read this month.
Actually, that's not accurate. The motivation for adding closures was to avoid adding those additional interfaces for the ParallelArray abstraction that goes over fork/join. Fork/join has always been planned to go in for JDK 7. AFAIK, ParallelArray will not go into the new JDK 7 plan so the API stuff you mention is not an issue.
Been waiting for this! :) (sent from my phone)
I actually keep some crusty old code on github intentionally. Since github sorts your profile page based on last commit, it shows up near the bottom of the list anyways. By having gross old code, I can show how much I have improved and advanced myself.

Looking at code that I wrote a few years ago (like when I was first learning OO and Python) and comparing it to more recent projects is like night and day. It helps me to not feel so inferior on those days when I read too much HN and get too hard on myself -- and I would think that an employer would be interested in seeing growth and improvement.
Why use hot-standby over streaming replication or visa-versa?
I never agreed with that statement. It makes it seem like startups are a way to get rich quick -- and more often than not, they aren't.
Masons are not exclusive. All that's required to join is to ask.
Learning Clojure with Google App Engine and Emacs
I think this question makes more sense if the implied question

"what does owning a startup have to do with being a hacker?"

is understood, and the original question is thus translated to

"Why do hackers find working at a 9 to 5 so unappealing?"

If I am wrong, I would appreciate correction.
Rescuing Climate Science From Agenda-Driven Politics
I'd rather live by "Be who you want to be".

The title "Be who you are" seems to imply that who you are is an immutable property, presumably defined in your early childhood or something. I don't think that's true.

At age 15, I was as geeky as any kid could be. I frequently skipped school because I studied Mathematics at the University in parallel, didn't care too much about how I looked and didn't like talking with people. Then I decided to change (and I agree with the OP that girls played a big role in this); I started talking to people, went to high school parties (worth it) and took my sisters' fashion advice. Now, 7 years later, I couldn't be happier :) I'm healthy, get to work on awesome difficult problems every day, don't feel like an outcast and picked up some important skills along the way.

Be who you want to be. If you want to be a non-awkward geek, you can even be that :)
We switched from LISP to Lisp shortly after mankind killed the last dinosaurs, btw.
I've had to contact them RE: a domainsbyproxy account. When I had registered my domain using domainsbyproxy, it was done with my GoDaddy username and password. Sometime since then, domainsbyproxy and GoDaddy split(?) and needed separate logins. Aaaaand I didn't have a domainsbyproxy login.

Verifying my identity (thankfully) was a hastle, but it was a hastle I shouldn't have had to go through.
I'd much prefer a basic job guarantee. Instead of just giving out free money, taken from the productive, the government is obligated to give a basic job to all comers.

That job could take many forms - cleaning courthouses and prisons for the unskilled, DMV clerk for the skilled. But it is important that the job be unpleasant and low paid, so that people have an incentive to seek more useful jobs in the private sector.

Basic jobs fulfills the same goals as basic income (no one is destitute) while reducing the disincentives to work that basic income creates.
For what it's worth, it's the same in the US, except from what I understand about UK law, it's much easier to be fired in the US.
Are you talking about Emacs or non-Emacs environments, when you say you prefer Common Lisp's?

I keep trying to tame Emacs enough to use it for Clojure and find I spend too much time on Emacs and not enough on Clojure, which is what motivates me in the first place.
I'm commenting from inside the app. Nice, clean interface. My only suggestion is better error messaging. I tried to post a comment before logging in, but instead of warning me and/or providing the login form, it just looked as though the comment had posted successfully.
I've worked at startups and large companies (post-acquisition). I have also done joint development projects, me at a startup and my counterpart at huge corporations. While my bias is in favor of startups, I have given the other side a shot.

So the big deal with startups is this: If you do love your craft (not your job primarily), then a startup is the best place to apply it. There are a few reasons for this. 1) You get a huge amount of responsibility, assuming you join early. You are working on one of maybe three major components of your company's product, and that's a great opportunity to start with a clean sheet of paper and design and implement your ideas. If you really love what you do, that's a huge attraction. 2) There are politics everywhere, but a startup is really focused and politics are minimal. Idiot, empire-building managers aren't attracted to and don't thrive in startups, so that problem goes away too. (They tend to start showing up as the company matures.) 3) There is a real chance for a nice payout. You have to pick your startup wisely, and if you do it works out well. 4) If you stay on the boundary between far-out ideas and practical software, you will have an interesting, relevant resume, and keep yourself employable. I'm 53 and joined my 5th startup (pre-funding) last year.

The hype that you describe has nothing to do with startup life. There is a certain amount of aspirational nonsense here on HN, and self-actualization via startups tends to be part of it. But behind that, there is something of value. It isn't for everyone. I've interviewed software developers who are terrified by starting with a blank sheet of paper. I've worked with others who just aren't good at it. But if you happen to love what you do, writing software, and want to keep improving, learning, and taking on more, just because it's what you like to do -- if you don't look at it as just a paycheck -- then startups are a great place to work.
It's not a CL rant.
My experience is similar to yours, and your observations are absolutely spot on.

I'm always a little suspicious of anyone who has the job title "Project Manager".
Chalk that up to the age of the stuff that I've been reading recently (LISP 1 and LISP 1.5 manuals).
The latest scoop on Android phones and Froyo
I totally missed that, thanks.
How long before someone implements this? one day? two days?
In a work context, helping people with their computer problems isn't a bad thing. If it sounds like something easy, help them fix it. If it sounds hard, refer them to tech support.

Also, if someone walks by struggling to carry a heavy package, offer to help them with it. Helping is good, as long as you keep it under control.

Helping people with little things is one of the best ways to build a network.
Works great here too, thanks!
Yeah, the dinosaurs were still alive, then.
How to boost your income-producing ability by growing your human capital
More importantly, I say live without regrets. You'll never make the right choices 100% of the time, and the mistakes you think you made are as much a part of who you are now as the things you got right. You never really know what the outcome would have been had you chosen the opposite: Maybe you wouldn't have had the social skills to get that job, maybe you wouldn't have met that friend of a friend of your new popular friend who introduced you to your future wife, etc.

Reflection and maturity is healthy, but harboring regrets and second-guessing past decisions just isn't worth it.
Unrelated protip: Steam is what causes the blades to degrade so quickly. If you leave your blades outside of the bathroom, they last for a long time. I've used the same blade for about six months so far.
Complete Conference Management Systemm (runs on GAE too)
Single- vs Co-Founders: it's like Star Wars
It's interesting that your other posts are so libertarian but here you're essentially proposing what the USSR promised its citizens.

http://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/77cons02.h... (Article 40)
So you replace the hard to read CAPTCHAs with easy to read ads. Of which presumably there will be a limited number in circulation at any one time. Sounds kinda easy to circumvent...
The Secret Ninja Cucumber Scrolls (free eBook)
What you call "bullshit rules" most people call "antitrust law". These specific laws are there to prevent customers from being harmed by companies that detain excessive power in the market. The fact they didn't work and failed to protect the competitive market that existed before Microsoft's monopoly abuse thus harming the consumers they were intended to protect is a bit frustrating, but I wouldn't call them "bullshit rules".

And yes. When "bullshit rules" become law, they have to be followed.
Great app. Can you please add a "Read later button", that will save it to Instapaper/ Read it later/ Delicious/ download to SD. (the option of where to save could be configurable). Thanks.
My bash configuration is pretty simple. ... It also sets my PS1 which only puts out the current directory. I figured that I already know my username, and hostname.

Haven't been using *nix for very long? Just a guess.
Any chance of getting the source into a public repo? I'd be happy to add it to the market...
Absolutely great idea. There can be some technical difficulties, like not enough different ads in case of bigger popularity, but I think they can be overcome.
Skywriter is no longer based on SproutCore. We simplified down to just jQuery.
I figured 'go to the source' is the best way to really understand what's going on, and it's been quite the eye opener to see 'simple' lisp next to all the superstructure that has been placed on top of it since then.

I'm not sure if I should recommend anybody to go the same route (since I'm still very much a FP/Lisp newbie, so my words carry little to no weight at all) but it worked well enough for me that stuff made more sense after doing that.
Samsung Drops Telephony from US Galaxy Tab
> This article makes it seem like Lisp is in a state of continuous evolution. In which case I don't see a good enough argument why Clojure isn't part of that.

That's because the author isn't saying that. The point is more like this: Clojure is a series of new mutations, and they haven't been around long enough yet to tell whether any of them will survive natural selection. We can't tell Clojure's good ideas from its merely new ideas at this stage; we have to wait for evolution to take place. That doesn't mean Clojure is doing something wrong (after all, "Everyone should be writing new Lisps!"). I think the author is just saying it's not worth getting too excited about until we know what it's doing right.
Access Main Computer File - A visual study of internet use in cinema
Google bringing doc editing to Android & iPad.
The upside of profanity
I use Emacs for both.
Freakonomics: Things to Know About Cars
My bad, as you see in Main activity you can't upvote when you're not logged in. I had to do this for Comments activity too (disabling Comment menu, and reply/upvote context menu).
Indeed, there is no Lisp community. The fragmentation was enough for me to lose interest in the language and several of its dialects (heavily influenced my switch from emacs to vim, too :(), as well as functional programming in general. I wish the Lisp crowd (?) would seriously reconsider their views on matters like this.
Convert Windows XP into a Windows 7 Virtual Machine
I fully admit that Clojure tooling isn't where it should be, yet. But it will be.

But the fact is that despite its lack of mature tools, Clojure is more newbie-friendly than CL. That should give CL advocates pause.

As for running on Java, yeah, that's part of what it (currently) is. It's a strength and a weakness at the same time.

Once Clojure becomes self-compiling, we might see that change. I'm actually working on a toy Clojure->LLVM compiler for my own education. There are enough people who love Clojure but have a distaste for Java that I expect we'll see a native version of Clojure in the next few years.
Try hours.
Same feelings. Looks like a not very advanced user trying to show off. Too bad there is no useful information in this text.
I just noticed the karma widget. I laughed at first and then found myself adding it. What have you done?!

I now have a screen on my phone with a handful of karma widgets. Its like a HN leaderboard that will continuously taunt me.
Haha, yes. I've seen such a sign ("Emergency stairs, don't use!") but well.. it was soo crowded and so many people took the stairs i thought it may be a good idea (at first) :)
"Standard Edition customers will be able to access it in the months ahead"

(disclaimer: I work on the project.)
Deleting vs. "deactivating" information?
Consider a typical social networking situation: John, a member of Site X, invites Mary to become a member. In doing so, Site X sends Mary an e-mail containing the invitation, some of whose content is provided by John.

Question 1: Should Site X retain a copy of the email's contents, particularly the part from John?

Question 2 (extra credit): Before Mary can accept John's invitation, John retracts it through some standard feature offered by Site X. Should Site X mark that invitation as "retracted", but, in doing so, retain the information that John had sent and retracted the invitation? Or should it delete all traces of the invitation ever having been sent?

Assume that Site X's actions are consistent with the site's terms and conditions, to which John and Mary agree upon joining.

When I put my privacy hat on, I know how the site should behave: keep as little as possible, and delete as much as possible. But, as the site founder/developer/whatever, I'd think that having records of the interaction between John and Mary to be legally comforting (e.g., Mary sues John for harassment, and sues Site X along the way). Or, again from that legal perspective, would I actually be better off having no record of the interaction at all? IANAL, obviously.

Thoughts?
The article isn't totally accurate, I tried it out and got a trailer for Devil.

I would probably use this for media views or file downloads, but I wouldn't use it for signups because I think it would decrease conversions.
The problem with user-generated video is that YouTube has a huge network effects advantage. This may not be a bad way of trying to finesse that, especially if it's combined with an attempt to do a really good job recommending clips, since the training period would pass quickly in clock time (30 votes in 5 minutes).
I'll be happy with anything other than today's captcha solution. These are some captchas from my hall of fame:

http://www.twitpic.com/2qbv0e/full
I like helping people and I almost always learn something interesting. I'm also personally embarrassed at how hard the we in the computer industry makes things. Grandparents want to look at pictures of their grand kids, everyone wants email and it's nice to buy things online. No one should have to know what DNS means, what an SPF record is or worry about scammers stealing their credit cards and who ever makes these things better will probably get rich as well.
So you lost interest in Linux as well? There are probably more different Linux distributions than Lisp dialects. Which shell do you use? How about a C like language? C? Why not C++? Or D? ATS? You've decided on a scripting language? TCL? Perl? Rebol? Python? Ruby?