skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: General distaste of working in Financial companies?
Yesterday, we had this question "Am i making too much?" -

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1754154

Among the discussions, few mentioned the finance as a no-no. I tend to not think of it as a HN bias(pro startups/boo-java).

to quote a few from the recent post:
" I work in finance.... but I hate it everyday"; "I am avoiding the financial sector as well as larger institutions like the plague"
"I would stay the hell away from them though, personally"
"The jobs that pay significantly more (such as hard core finance) tend to pay a lot more because the work is life-shortening, specialized, and reputation-based"

I have read few comments in the past too which mirror similar emotions.
So my curiosity was piqued..
Honestly, fellow hackers, which would you really prefer,

OP's option:

25 - Levi's from Macy's
89 - shoes from Aldo
25 - hoodie from Macy's
70 - sweater from Nordstrom
59 - shoes from DSW
88 - Lacoste button-down shirt from Nordstrom
48 - button-down shirt from Macy's
169 - Joe's Jeans from Nordstroms
78 - Penguin shoes from DSW
40 - long sleeve v-neck from Macy's
68 - long sleeve button down from Nordstrom
68 - turtleneck pullover from Nordstrom
59 - shoes from DSW
----
$886 - TOTAL

Or mine:

16 - sweatsuit from Target
24 - tennis shoes from Target
499 - iPad from Apple Store
299 - iPhone4 with 32 GB from Apple Store
18 - case of beer from Beer Warehouse
30 - lunch for 6 from Five Guys
----
$886
If you click the last of the weird (and, imo, quite visually displeasing) yellow tab thingies, close to the scribbled-over piece of text, it says "You didn't think we'd give away our teammate's contact info so easily! [...]".

I interpreted this to mean that the guy who wrote the letter got hired by the ones who received it.
Can Microsoft disrupt the mobile phone market?
Clickable link: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tripsplit/id349850196?mt=8
Poetic Licence - BSD
Same for me.

Interestingly, according to downforeveryoneorjustme, scripting.com is down as is dropbox.com. This is a bit odd, as it seems to load and work perfectly for me, albeit with https.
Barriers: The Best Defense Is A Good Offense
It surprised me to see Sam Altman on this list. Where does that money come from? Maybe Loopt is very profitable and he takes a big salary? Or maybe he had cash before Loopt?
The money is nice, and it is a "Sales" job, but their is some creativity to it. You are trying to marry a candidate to a client. They are both moving targets. Its a skill game, more than a "bang the phones" game that a normal sales job is.

There are a number of quants and C++ developers who made the move to recruiting, sometimes after talking to a recruiter and realizing that there is money to be made (usually more than they are making). I related to this: I did a lot of IT and web development work in my youth, and that always entailed being someone's bitch and not getting recognized for the work I did (Only the mess ups get noticed: Like being a goalie in soccer). In recruiting, you see the angles, work your relationships and make money. Its a one person job (mostly) and there is a lot of enjoyment in that aspect. At the end of the day you say "I did X placements, billed Y amount. Thats what I did", which isn't about the money as much as its about having a quantitative score that demonstrates your productivity.
This is a phenomenal introduction to refactoring to clean code. A lot of young developers with whom I interact tend to not understand the importance of cleanly refactored code.

The hacker mentality, furthered perhaps by the prevalence of scripting languages, allows people to think sometimes that "if it passes the test, it's good for production!"

This is how amateur software projects die. I've seen it dozens of times: a young, ambitious programmer starts promising project, creates a sort of mock-up that runs (badly), and then tries to continue adding features and improving upon the already-decaying codebase.

Refactor your code. Make things clean. Even if you never plan on passing your passion project on to another developer, it's important to understand that without clean code even you will be unable to understand and efficiently work with your codebase.

This is one of the better introductory tutorials I've ever read, and the hands-on example is excellent. Great read, and I've bookmarked it to refer people to later.
Another obvious but often overlooked factor that contributed to the decline of IE is the increased number people converting to Mac (anybody have a figure for this?). Because MS discontinued supporting IE on Mac years ago, there's not way to recover users lost to Safari and other browsers on the Mac front.
Works for me, oddly enough.

Rolling blackouts, eh?
scripting.com is down
That doesn't really answer the point above.

Did the merchant have a program in place to turn the one-time customers into continuing customers?

If they did, more customers would have cost them more in the short run but helped them more in the long run. If they didn't, one would assume it was a failure regardless of the numbers.

And did school waste the time they could have spent talking themselves up with talking Groupon down?
I agree, the site is sharp and has a lot of potential places to expand to (with seemingly no other good competition). I think it could be big.
What's wrong with 2006 programming?
How do BSD ports differ from apt/yum?
I am big fan of hipmunk as well. However as a product point of view I am afraid other folks(kayak/bing-travel) can easily copy/tweak their front end to match. I couldn't find stickiness in their business model.
They're asking you to invest your valuable ttime into developing a product when they cannot tell you how much it will cost.

What happens if you develop a product and then you find out that the hardware cost pushes it out of the price point for your target demograpic?
Ad-soaked bully? Like who?

I'm still a fan of Adioso.com's UI (another YC alum), and the TripAdvisor/Bing/Kayak experiences, from memory, are fairly subtle with their advertising.
Google's Algorithms Control Instant's Blacklist; Includes "Latina," "Lesbian"
I think a recruiting firm with no technical skills should contract out preliminary interview process to actual software developers. Their task should be weed out any fakers and improve quality.

The paid compensation on a part time basis would attract developers to get involved. It would be one or two interviews per day which would not steal time from their day job and put some extra dough into their pockets.

Win-Win for both.
Actually I had some of those tell me to put the number of lines of code I've written on my resume "...because tech guys like that stuff." Honestly, it was a great ice-breaker when I said "The recruiters added that. I think it's a total shit metric." However, in hindsight, I wonder why. Was it just to get past HR or was it to impress the hiring managers. Over at the I-banks, the guys near the trading desks actually know quite a lot. The further you get away...
Formal Methods Application: An Empirical Tale of Software Development [pdf]
I have seen a few YC folks, currently running their own successful company (Loopt is one example, HeyZap is another) investing in new YC companies. I'm also interested in the rationale.
Rate my startup: PocketPro for iOS
copied the link from my inbox, had no idea about the ref link
Can't comment for some reason, but I had no idea there was/is a referrer link, I just copied the link from my inbox (message sent by cheng.soon@hackermonthly.com)
I'm not surprised. What does surprise me is how lonely my laptop has gotten since I grabbed an iPad.

A significant chunk of my computer time belongs to reading, research, and light communication via email or Twitter. For these tasks, the iPad is infinitely better than my laptop. It generates no heat, which is huge for comfort. Its form factor works in bed, in a comfy chair, on the couch, even in the tub (with a ziplock bag, natch).

The battery life is excellent, and would be extraordinary if not for the weight it adds (edit: turns out this is bullshit, see below). I'm most excited to ditch my laptop during travel. There's nothing I need from a computer that my iPad can't do during travel.

It's best to see the iPad as an application console, the way a DS is a portable game console. Sure, there's a bunch of stuff it can't do relative to an honest-to-god computer. But that doesn't really matter, since its portability and form factor make using it for the things it's great at doing so much fun.
Tangent and secant converge to the same [point] but as far as I understand this is not a statement about the equivalence of the curved and straight lines. By this I mean something like Archimedes's method of exhaustion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_exhaustion#Use_by_Arc... when he approximated a circle (curved line) with a polygon (straight line).

I would think that there would be a theorem in mathematics generalizing this fact; something like; "curved line is equivalent to straight line." It depends on how we divide (or scale) a line that gives it its "curvature." Or "there is no curve but curvature." Something like that?
buildr is actually an extension of rake. It essentially adds tasks for building Java projects (classpaths, libraries, etc) and for packing standard formats (jar, war, ear, etc). I've been using it for a while now and it's great.
Plus, if we were living in a world where "most people" did play WoW, Blizzard would be ignoring a market opportunity not to make an iPad client.
I've used both Pages and Numbers (but not Keynote) on iPad, and those are poor excuses for productivity apps. They remind me of circa 2002 web apps (or worse, circa 2010 versions of Google Apps).

My point wasn't that none of these (in my last bunch) was unavailable, but using them all at once, is not reasonable in my use with the iPad (hence the use of the term "swap between"). For example I'm using GoTo Meeting right now, on this web browser, have Word, and VS open right now, with 18 open tabs. Most people probably don't have 18 tabs open nor VS, but what I described in my original post is pretty common. On the iPad it is just completely unreasonable to work this way, and you're left with a much less productive environment.

The end result isn't a bad product, but one different than a laptop.
The difference between us and real, honest to god users is that they don't really care. They care about benefits and outcomes. As long as they can do the bulk of what they care about (communication, content, entertainment), they're happy because overall the iPad is very convenient, never nags you about software updates, and generally stays the hell out of your way.

There's nothing scary about using an iPad. It does what you tell it, doesn't try to bully you, and uses an interaction paradigm that anyone can instantly grasp. Users will happily trade a straightforward, non-intimidating experience for a little power or flexibility.
You should re-read what I wrote more carefully. Telecommute was grouped together with local jobs in the acceptable 5%.
One thing I've noticed is if when I go shopping for clothes I buy one complete setup at once I usually end up with on average better clothes.

It's as if when I can see the full picture in my head I select better parts.

There's probably some web site design insight hidden there...
Proven team + big market = competitive round of funding.

Interestingly, it seems like they went with a lot of investors with experience as a founder.
That's $99/year and Apple really doesn't see this as a way to install programs that aren't on AppStore.

It's really just meant to compile locally, deploy locally to your devices or submit to AppStore.

Even the number of devices you can support per year in your profiles is limited to 100, probably because they don't want you to use it as a distribution mechanism, just a temporary testing mechanism. 100 devices per year is actually rather limited if you do custom work and each client comes with his own list of 5-20 devices they want to test onto.
You're right about this. Kayk et al aren't saturated with ads, but they don't feel nearly as...something as hipmunk.

Clean? Maybe? Shiny? I don't know but every time I've shown the site to any of my friends or coworkers they remark that it's pretty.

Hipmunk vs Kayak or bing is the difference between a cheap casio watch and a nice, heavy, automatic winding watch with a pretty window on the back of the dial. They both tell the time, they both sit on your wrist, but the latter just...feels nicer.
"Most people" in the world isn't the right metric. Most people in the world probably don't use the web once a week. The real question is what is the market opportunity. After the Sims, WoW is the best selling PC game of all time. It's pretty popular.
I did change as described. I don't game personality tests.
I think geeks dress poorly because they don't care what other people think and/or don't care to impress with clothing.

Plus, geeks don't have time to wander around malls when there is hacking to be done.

If it wasn't for my wife, I would own only t-shirts and would likely wear my Akira shirt to work everyday.
I know recruiters that do this.

You don't maintain constant contact, but you avoid burning bridges and keep the name in your contacts or linkedIn or whatever. When the right position comes up, you re-establish contact.
He is not comparing FOSS databases with Commercial databases.
Another merchant strategy: introduce a high margin product/service to your line for the sole purpose of selling it on Groupon.
Anyone have the original job ad? I'm curious.
Use this link to keep an eye on things: http://status.dropbox.com/
Seems to me the sweatsuit is pushing it a bit far. Appearance makes a difference to all sorts of things in life, from communication effectiveness to general well-being. Try making yourself look good - you'll feel better on the inside too.

However, it's definitely possible to go a fair bit cheaper than all this branded trash. Then again, the clothing industry has done a good job of making it hard to buy good-looking clothes for cheap.

PS: Also worth pointing out that the sense of style of the poster is somewhat dubious.
Were I the random developer chosen, the experience would be a good way of getting me to quit.
You're welcome for the layup opportunity to score some easy points.

This serves as a good reminder that you will be swiftly punished on HN for making a comment that doesn't add value.

In my defense, I didn't miss the trees and the forest. I was merely pointing out that the story was dumbed down, as you put it, "as simply as possible." And replying to a post pointing out their overly simplified math. Seriously, implying that 1 x 1.8 = 2 isn't even back-of-the-envelop close.

However I did enjoy learning about how the Real came to be.
Like the incumbent travel sites that everyone's mom uses: Travelocity, Orbitz, Expedia, Hotwire, Priceline.

http://blog.danilocampos.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Hipm...

Here's Travelocity, for example.

Bing's flight search isn't bad, in that it's minimalist, but they're not doing anything terribly exciting beyond the Farecast action they acquired.

TripAdvisor can die in a fire. I'm never, ever using any of their products again, thanks to the constant (user-hostile!) "book a flight to this place right now damn you!" pop-ups they used to do on the browser and, worse, on the iPhone. They would try to get me to book a flight to a place where I already was, searching for things to do or places to stay.

It's just asinine, jackass behavior and representative of everything that's wrong with online travel sites.
I work in python all the time, kind dude.

And, are you suggesting legalese to lawyers is like python to us?

Even if it was: I can't execute a python module in my head!

I can read it several times and I might have a guess at what it does, but I can never execute it as well as a machine does. Also, I would invariable end up with bugs that I can only fix by inspecting how the machine executes the code, for example by stepping it through a debugger, or running portions of it in an interactive interpreter (aka REPL).
The team are proven entrepreneurs, but it's not like other travel start-ups like Kayak and Tripit where the founders all have proven domain expertise, Steve and Adam are hardly travel industry veterans.
Govt is not smart enough to monitor day-to-day illegal & immoral activities of big corporations.
It is better to breakup these corporations into smaller entities to promote competition and solve unemployment crisis.
> Steve and Adam are hardly travel industry veterans.

Not for long!
Your comment and the replies are basically just disagreeing about semantics. In basically any use of the word "physics" for organizations (like "physics departments", "Nobel prize in physics", the "American Physical Society"), "physics" is a discipline which is much broader than simply the search for new fundamental physical laws. It basically includes any field that uses the training and techniques useful for searching for new fundamental physical laws. For example: condensed matter, optics, astronomy, astrophysics, quantum computing. That is, physics organizations (like most academic organizations) are united by a common set of training and techniques, not a common objective. This is just a fact about the useful way to organize human beings.

But, if you are defining "physics" to mean "fundamental physics"---i.e. new laws of nature--then...

(1) There hasn't been a confirmed theoretical physics discovery since 1967 when the Higgs mechanisms completed the Standard Model (although some might argue that the profoundly new understanding of existing fundamental physical law provided by asymptotic freedom, in 1973, qualifies as fundamental physics even if no fundamental laws were discovered per se).

(2) There hasn't been a non-trivial (in the sense of being both not-easily-predicted by theory, like the top quark, and not trivially incorporated into existing theory, like neutrino masses) discovery in experimental physics since 1973-4, when the electroweak and strong theories were more or less confirmed. (It doesn't qualify as "easily predicted" since there were serious doubts beforehand.)

There are possible exceptions to (2), depending on which experiments you consider to be most important for dark energy, dark matter, and cosmology/CMB. There haven't really been any decisive experiments---only a steady accumulation of evidence. I wouldn't consider any theory related to these three as confirmed.

So yes, the field of fundamental physics is profoundly stagnant.

(This is just the best historical understanding of a myself, a grad student, so I could be wrong or disagreed with by more prestigious physicists. Take it with a grain of salt.)
They could, but they'll be playing catch-up. Hipmunk has the merit of, pro-actively, knowing the value of user focus. If they stick with that theme, there are innumerable places in the travel purchase experience that can be polished and made less miserable. You can copy ideas after the fact, but not the active brains that drive them. The brains are Hipmunk's greatest asset.
What is politics about?
I don't like Apple. But I agree with you. When I don't like a company it's because of specific behaviors of the the company that I turn against them, and not at all related to size or level of success. I don't like facebook because they have a long history of playing fast and loose with customer privacy, as well as turning a blind eye to out-and-out fraudulent and manipulative facebook apps (Zynga, for instance).
Expressive C++: A Lambda Library in 30 Lines (Part 1 of 2)
The Dream Is Over: Music Labels Have Killed Their Digital Future
via reddit
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/dmnr7/expressiv...
A little tangential but why would the author be spending $1500 a year to host a blog. Is IBM also his hosting provider?
SpiderOak for Android available today
Multivitamins: Most we tested were fine, so select by price
The iPad [1] is showing up in surprising places. I first started to suspect that it might substantially change how we use and perceive computers after my sister told me that instead of magazines the hairdresser recently offered her an iPad. This is not some trendy big-town hairdresser [2], this happened in a small town in Germany. My sister loved being able to check Facebook [3] while her hair were cut.
There is just something different about the iPad [1], it has qualities which make it ideal for certain uses, uses for which laptops or netbooks are just not right.

[1] It’s only the iPad now but I’m sure there will be many similar devices in the future.

[2] Ok, maybe somewhat trendy: http://www.projecth.net/

[3] The privacy implications make me cringe. I suspect that many customers forget to log out, but that’s just a software problem and doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things.

(This comment is a re-run: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1732887)
John Kotter on How to Sell Your Vision
The single biggest problem in trying to make big changes is simply getting people's attention.
Are 36 companies too many for Y Combinator?
I feel worse on the inside when situations call for a suit.

The best I've felt "on the inside" was back in college, when my wardrobe was a t-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops. I do not feel better inside now that my dress code has been forced up to business casual.
> Since I have Android 1.6 and live in Japan, this announcement destroyed the little hope I had for using Skype on my phone in the near future

Welcome to the wonderful world of proprietary software.
Thoughtful. I think what you're grasping for is thoughtful.

Hipmunk is very v1, but nonetheless you can tell how much thought has gone into the presentation of flight data. The agony sort, for example, is so blindingly obvious once you see it in practice, but no one bothered to give it any thought until now.

Simplicity is actually really hard. They got it to work.
1and1.com is down today http://twitter.com/#search?q=1and1
It wasn't exclusivity as much as an optimized network effect that benefited Facebook. The same thing happened with MySpace initially.

Smaller networks generate a network effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect) more quickly because it takes fewer joiners to reach a critical mass of community. That's how exclusivity benefited Facebook—once several dozen people from a university are on the same network, it begins to be beneficial for others to join.

MySpace rolled over some of the network of a previously existing group of music lovers. Essentially, they started with a critical mass of community. Unless your app adds multi-player options, or you have some kind of reward marketing scheme that benefits referrals or community, this wouldn't really apply to your marketing.

If you want to create a kind of brand exclusivity and assist your marketing, try some kind of scarcity marketing. For example, give early adopters some kind of additional benefits, and then advertise that only a limited number of additional memberships for those benefits are available.

That doesn't mean you have a unworkable idea. If you create a good PR hook for your limited strategy rollout, you could attention from it. But you need a strong PR layer on top of the concept.
I have been doing Transcendental Meditation (TM) twice a day for 38 years. I am not suggesting that you do TM. But I have some practical guidelines:

Be regular. Absolutely do not miss sessions. Regularity establishes a base line to your day.

Find some group or guru who can help you discuss your experiences. Over time you will need to talk about what occurs during your meditations.

Meditation is a different way of thinking not non-thinking.

Meditation is the high point of my day. If you are not enjoying it or fulfilled by it, you are doing something else.
So in the first picture, in his nerduniform, he's got a cooler full of (most likely) beer and is hanging out with some girls. Final picture, he's alone at work looking like a generic hipster douchebag. I'm not sure this is an improvement.