skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unfortunately, the question is harder to answer when put naively. How is a beginner supposed to evaluate what somebody says about closures, lambdas, type checking?

I would recommend learning Python. Python for Windows is a very handy environment; you can fool around with Google App Engine if you care to, or run Django or whatever locally.

I would recommend rephrasing your questions along these lines: I am a beginner interested in starting with web applications. What languages and frameworks do you think most promising to learn on, and where can I find good examples to illustrate the principles?
There's an ancient Excel spreadsheet that lists and categorizes every happy hour here in DC. It gets emailed around like crazy at the start of every intern season.
also you can go to http://www.brokencash.com/
I've considered setting my main focus on graphic programming to combine my love for math and programming. As the author said, they are "puzzles" that are unbelievably rewarding when solved. I could never really see myself going into game programming though just because I typically am not interested in many games with the notable exception of games like Doom. I still plan on making my own version of the Doom engine for Android (as a personal introduction into graphic programming), but have gotten bogged down with other projects.

On the downside, sometimes I feel I learn more from reading things such as this and going off and building my own things than I do from classes. I'm currently trying to solve this by focusing on my math major first then switching focus to my computer science major so I can approach it with a "larger toolset".
مسلسل العشق الممنوع الحلقة 91
It's useful to know eventually, but I think the author is right that, if you want to make games, you should learn how to make pong first. (How many hobbyists would be willing to learn the equivalent of two college courses before they can rotate a circle on screen?)
I've seen various resources around hn for getting familiar with linear algebra (which seems hugely useful) - let's say that I'm not in a position to take an intro to linear algebra cours at a university, what other alternatives are there? Any online courses?

And how much calculus is required to have a chance at understanding the material?

It might be nice to have some study groups in the bay area for people looking to get into this with a regular schedule.
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It is a gray area. A cost of inexperience too--I have learned a lot about partnership contracts and operating agreements. The other party choked off my profit share to the point where a lawyer is a heavy expense for me right now.

Next time they will be settled from the outset :)
Matrix math is actually incredibly easy. I've never really understood why a linear algebra class is considered a difficult class by some. If you were able to handle high school algebra, then the ideas you learn in linear algebra won't be particularly beyond that. At the very least, a simple understanding of basic matrix math will get you pretty far in graphic programming.
Ask HN: Offering Gratis Tax Help for Startups?
I've been reading HN, since last year and I've learned a lot. I'm a tax accountant by day (you can check kpmg and pwc as my references) and I'm working on my own project at night with what little I know.

But, I'd like to just extend an offer to everyone on HN. I'd be willing to help (gratis) anyone that contacts me or replies to this submission with tax planning and general questions.

I’d like to give back to the community and I honestly think that talking about tax is fun because I hate paying taxes and love saving money. But, I admit this isn’t purely selfless. I want to learn lots more about the startup industry in general, especially in technology. So, I think it’s a fair trade and I hope that this thread helps everyone.

If you have a question that you’d like to ask privately, you can reach me at cameronkeng@thekenggroup.com (can you tell I’m humble? Lol)

Thanks!
It takes almost no work at all. If some bean counter at Netflix tells their board next year that they the current cost/benefit ratio for EC2 now makes no sense it would take Netflix less than a month to move to another cloud provider and less than six months to move everything in-house again.

if this were true, netflix would have never moved to the cloud in the first place, because like I said, even right now, at scale that is ridiculously small compared to neflix, it's pretty easy to beat amazon on price.

Now, first, I mostly agree with your assessment, if we limit the field to smaller companies where the people who own it are still involved with running it, and where people in positions of power have experience running cheap data centers.

But, I think the rules are different for "the enterprise." many of the large enterprises I've worked for ended up paying many times over what a company with more data center experience on the board (or in the beancounters) would would pay for compute infrastructure. You've seen the enterprise sales process... the whole system is set up to extract as much money as possible from the enterprise in question.

I saw one company that was paying a thousand bucks a month for mid-spec servers to a well-known infrastructure outsourcing company; servers that would cost me close to $2000 total capital cost, and then $100/month in power/bandwidth. According to this company's bean counters, paying that huge premium was actually cheaper for the company than buying and hosting in-house.

As for moving from amazon to another outsourced infrastructure provider... well, the problem is one of sales. Amazon is the only company in it's space that I know (with the exception of rackspace, maybe?) that has the credibility to be used by the enterprise without sending a sales guy over. This is incredibly valuable.
Find Co-Founders, Don't Get Screwed
hey - can you say more about the IRC bot? I'm working on ohMore.com and the idea is somewhat similar, but with web/mobile interface instead of irc.
It's all about ACCESS. Until recently, we never had the ability to connect with unknown commodities. Twitter is that bridge.

Think about 15 years ago. You would have to call the reporters, and there was an enormous wall to get through.

With the emergence of email, that wall dramatically lowered, but writers were still barraged with email so the likelihood of standing out without a prior connection was slim.

Now that Twitter has grown up, anybody can get access to just about any tastemaker (if you think you're a tastemaker, but not yet on Twitter, then you're not a tastemaker).

I use Twitter to establish a rapport. It is the greatest mechanism we have ever had to do just that.

-Adam
The market opportunity is here all the time. It's called qulity content. There are many fields were the only usefull web page is the wikipedia stud. Yes, things like desig, tech or the usual stuff like sports are overrun. But even in sports: there are not many sites with quality content compared to tech. And IRL sports is so much bigger than tech in terms of 'press' in general. If aggregator sites manage to be the top hits in Google, chances are there is no real competitor.
What about benefits? Did you still have them? Billing hourly doesn't usually include benefits like healthcare and thus isn't as profitable as it may appear.

Btw I learned from a high-up exec at a consulting firm that they make a good chunk of their money from the hours you work above 40. In his words: "that is pure profit"...because like you said, you only get paid for 40 as full-time employee. The consulting firm, though, bills by the hour.
Why oh why would you agree to become the technical cofounder for 25% of the company when the other cofounder takes 75%? Was there a bunch of infrastructure, technical or otherwise already in place so that your portion of the work was that negligible? In any case, yeah you still have right with your 25% contact a lawyer.
20 hacks to increase the value of your online website properties
Honestly, I don't find appealing the development of cross-platform web sites. In those cases you have to target the lowest common denominator better known as IE6 and you'll be doing practically the same that you've been doing the last 6+ years.

Besides being a good business opportunity, developing for PadPressed was incredibly fun and challenging in a way that no other website ever was. I got to use the latest technologies that a browser has to offer, like CSS3's transitions and animations and HTML5's new webSQL API (or whatever it's called).

You know? just the opportunity to completely ignore Internet Explorer makes it worthwhile. And the iPad is a very nice device even for non-development related stuff.
> I'm not in a position to take an intro to linear algebra cours at a university

What kind of non-position are you talking about?

At least here in Germany, there's absolutely no problem with attending a linear algebra lecture as a guest. Just ask the lecturer whether it's okay for him/her, and everything is fine.
Hell, sometimes I even love companies.

The insurance company could have said "hey you chose to be rear ended". Instead they paid up without quibbling and called him a hero in the process.
The key point he makes is that you don't _have_ to focus on the hard stuff to be productive and actually make something useful. I think it's an important thing to realize and a great way to learn...build on little personal victories and gain a level of confidence before you take on the really tough challenges.
When locked out of a very used (435,000 eventually miles maxed it out) Toyota pickup I had just bought, I sacrificed a windshield wiper for a thin strip of steel, bent a hook in it and fished my keychain from the driver's seat. Got in, drove to WalMart and got new wiper blades.

Wait a second. This isn't naughty, just sort of boasting.
Why the downvote? Fact is this guy made something that, even if he didn't take into account all the spam controls, tried to better something. Cut him some slack...?
Don’t shy away from essay questions – they’re really easy to cope with
Essay questions need to be understood properly if students wish to be able to write a good essay and obtain a good grade. Many students feel that this is a difficult task. Essay questions are not challenging if you only understood what is being asked of you.
"We got a reasonable amount of sleep." Somebody should suggest that to Mike Arrington and all the other "hack all night" proponents.
The MIT Linear Algebra course by Gilbert Strang is my personal favorite. I don't think calculus is really needed to understand the material. Linear algebra does have a lot of benefits in a multivariable calculus course though.

It can be found here: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-06-linear-algebra-...
Downvotes are often from people who disagree with you, without being able to articulate why.
Acck, pre-nup contracts in many countries can be easily overturned, even if it's done all properly with plenty of time and so on.
Vector, Matrix, Affine transformations, quaternions - this can all be managed in a week or two for solid understanding, even if one's math skill is at advanced arithmetic (pre algebra) level, since it is Linear algebra after all. It really is not that hard, and of utter importance in graphics.

No excuses: http://www.khanacademy.org

There is a book Math for game programmers or something, I forgot, but these are the basic tools you have as a graphics programmer. I'd argue you need to expand knowledge into physics if you want to be a good graphics programmer (optics), and without some calculus, namely integration, forget about advanced graphics programming. You could do it, but you won't understand it - you'll end up waiting for others to code examples and publish non-scientific papers in order to understand what you need to do. Thus, you will always lag behind cutting edge and won't be able to read published papers and implement/expand them.

I have kind of a bad memory, so I have these two books I find very helpful when I want to refresh my pre-calculus knowledge:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mathematics-Physical-Sciences-Robert... and http://www.amazon.co.uk/Further-Mathematics-Physical-Science...
Oh, right. This post is an example. :)
Flag it if you want. I thought it was an interesting read, even if it's obviously fictional.
http://nextsprocket.com
Pay and get paid to complete open source tasks, bugs, etc. We are having trouble figuring out why the idea is not catching on. Is it fundamentally the idea of paying for open source, the traction or other?
You might like to be a bit more specific than "tax". Income tax? Sales tax? US? EU? California?
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Rain forest was incredible. Howler monkeys put me to sleep every night, and I never had such vivid of dreams as I did when living there.

Motivation for moving there: Just something I felt like I needed to do. I kind of developed my own alternative college course, which consisted of traveling the world a bit and learning a few salable skills along the way.

Do I regret turning down the scholarship: Long story short, no. I knew I wanted to eventually be in business for myself, and I knew the field I was interested in (programming) wasn't being adapted quickly enough by higher education. I figured I'd be much better off coding my own projects and learning from there.

Basically, I had a realization that there were two types of people in the world: those who expected the world to act a certain way, (ie going to school, getting educated == guaranteed success) and those who supposed the world was open to influence (ie create your own reality).

I decided that I would rather take responsibility for creating my own world. It was definitely a painful experience at times, but has been worth it.

Now I'm working at a company I love doing incredibly challenging work with people who are incredible. So no, I don't regret it.
I did something similar - I'd already dropped out of high school, so I went to an adult education high school, told them I was emancipated from my parents and thus legally an adult, and could I get an adult degree? I took some tests, filled out some packets, and got almost a 4.0 GPA in the span of around two months. I then scored in the 1200's on the SAT (near perfect verbal, quite bad math since I never got above algebra before dropping out), and got an almost full ride scholarship to UMass (needed to take some loans).

I dropped out my Sophomore year when I realized college was as lame as high school, and worked full time on entrepreneurship. Luckily I'd met an older guy who thought I was bright and a hard worker, so we business partnered and built a company that went through some iterations, and that paid my way through life. Later I went and paid cash to study business.
Indeed, although I'm not sure if the women would like to use the men's bathrooms. I should compare toilets next time I visit the women's (I mostly only go there to wash my hands).
Imagine what the insurance would have had to pay out if Pace had not been stopped, T-boned a car in an intersection (mentioned in the article) and killed one or more people. The insurance company would be paying out a bit more then a smashed window and bent bumpers. Insurance if anyone understands risk mitigation.

But I agree, they could have been assholes about it, but instead took the honorable route.
thanks! I'll get back to you once it actually works.
While it's a nice thought, it didn't actually close to even attempting to answer the question.
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Aren't those little known tax laws usually easy for them to give you a ton of crap about, disregard and have you go through courts to actually get the benefit?
Was he Dijkstra?
Fixing bugs is a much less glamourous task than implementing features, and people aren't as inclined to take on the dull and frustrating task of fixing other's mistakes.

Beyond payment, how do you build up the pride and reputation of bug-fixers? How do you make them heroes in the community? Or rather, just heroes in general?
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Good story. I had an app out on release day for the iPad and had to do all development without seeing it on a device. Of course so did everyone else, so the users were understanding for a while. Impressive to pull this off now.
recently, I got a ridiculous discount on groceries. the grocery store uses automated checkout machines and frequently gives gigantic discounts on overripe bananas ($0.27 per pound). I actually prefer overripe bananas, so I've bought them enough times to know their numeric code. whoever runs the system took away the entry code for cucumbers for some insane reason, even though they still sell cucumbers, so when I was buying cucumbers, I was like wtf? and I put in the overripe bananas code. then I realized that I could do that for anything, so I bought a round of groceries where I told the automated checkout machine that everything I was buying was a bunch of uber-discounted bananas. I got my whole grocery run for $0.27/pound.

around 2005 I accidentally smuggled a joint through airport security. It was in my shirt front pocket and I stank of weed. I didn't know it was in there at the time, and I didn't realize the odor was on me either. the first searcher guy got a beep off my belt or something and was really nasty about it. he sent me to a second searcher guy, saying (practically yelling), "you don't get a second chance!" I just made an effort to be nice to the second searcher guy. it wasn't hard; this was in an area where people of my ethnicity are usually subtly standoffish/condescending/assholes with people of the second searcher guy's ethnicity, so I was already ahead of the game just by treating him like a regular person. I found a way to make him laugh, he let me on the plane, and an hour or two later, my plane had landed, I was in another airport waiting for my connecting flight, and I discovered the joint in my shirt pocket. I couldn't figure out anywhere to buy a lighter (it was a US airport), and I didn't want to see if I'd get away with smoking it in the smoker's lounge, so I just took it out of my pocket and swallowed it and it got me a little high.
You mean Sun's keyboard business which Oracle acquired? I hate those, at least the "Unix layout" ones. Some of these are installed at some of the workstations at work. I don't mind having the control where the caplocks usually is, but I do mind having thew caplock where the control usually is. Because we have both layouts I have to constantly switch between them all the time and I have to be careful and watch which keyboard I'm typing at or it will screw me up. It's very annoying.
Need some clarification... if your impression is that you could continue to manage the company's technology and team, what would be the purpose/title of the ringer?

A title of Director of Technology should not worry you at all. To the majority of the companies it is a managerial level title and can be used to move to higher management level titles/responsibilities. In this case it is also responsible for protecting revenues, etc.

The Principle/Principal Engineer is usually given out to someone who has advanced the field in their discipline. The title progression usually goes to Distinguished Engineer/Scientist after that. I am not sure how often a Principal Engineer gets to switch to the management path.

So, given your liking of management, I would go with the Director Of Technology.
I would love to have a climate controlled aerodynamic motorcycle (which is what he 1L car is

You have either never driven a motorcycle or never driven a car with a 1L engine.

Even a 'slow' motorcycle beats ridiculous sports cars in 0-60 times. the suzuki sv650 I rode a while back? it's not a particular sporty bike, but it's rated at 0-60 in 3.7 seconds. You are competing with the tesla at that point, in a vehicle that was less than $6K out the door, brand new.

the geo metro that was my first car? (1 liter, 3 cylinder) it was approaching a 13 second 0-60. It's a completely different experience than a motorcycle. (and costs significantly more if you buy it new.)
I do think this is a valid. I am doing this in my spare time, so I develop for the things that give me the best return and are what I want. I started with iPhone and then moved to iPad. I don't really want to buy another phone to develop with or another tablet, so I won't. I would be better served I think to build another app for iOS than to port an app to a store in an ecosystem that I'm not personally active in.
Hmm given all the discussion about friendship being of utmost importance for cofounders (particularly in the case of YC), do people think this would work?
HN would disagree with the one rant the author spent the longest time on.
I don't think the typing speed is so important for a programmer as a quality itself. Ok there is all the "interface with the computer" business, but in my opinion here the point is, it's strange that you managed to be a good programmer and not a good typist, because getting good at programming requires typing a lot of programs.

So either you are simply genetically not good typing, so even if you typed a lot, and you are a good programmer, you are still a bad typist, or you did not typed enough and perhaps did not programmed enough to be a good programmer.

Exceptions exist but I think the final possibility of being very good at programming with little programming activity is very unusual and strange.
That's the thing, though...on a mobile device (even as big as the iPad), who can use all the bells and whistles? This isn't supposed to be a huge effort.

Take PowerPoint, for example. It would be a step forward to be able to view any presentation file, but only edit certain things (like adding or editing titles and bullets). And have something like a template importer so that new presentations aren't completely plain. This would be worth downloading for a few bucks, and it wouldn't have 99% of the features of the original. Microsoft has to look beyond the, er, list of bullet points enumerating features, and focus on what's actually needed.
That retired guy who got saved sure is a great volunteer - folks like him are the foundation of a great community.

He manages harvesting and marketing for the Mercer Slough Blueberry Farm, which is run by the city of Bellevue, and he fills the rest of his schedule volunteering for Special Olympics events, teaching for the Kiwanis Educated Youth Club and organizing donation drives from local grocery stores.
Thanks for pointing that out. I'm actually uniquely familiar with federal 1065 partnership,1120 corporate, 1040 personal income, and all state and local taxes generally because I specialized in federal taxation at pwc and state and local tax for KPMG. I've dealt with sales tax audits, income/franchise tax, unclaimed property or the Delaware tax lol,some vat and etc.

In regards to software I've dealt with a lot of state tax situations related to software and informational repor sales. It's a growing area of tax that's really jut developing because the people making the laws predate the modern computer.
This is a great article. However, at the point where he suggests that the two choices for graphics programming are DirectX or OpenGL, I would point out that there are other options if you are pursuing anything other than graphics programming. If you're still on python at that point, there's PyGame, or SDL for C/C++.

Maybe it's because Im older and there wasn't as much need for 3D graphics when I was starting out, but I'd argue that for most people, focusing on a 2D API first will be much more rewarding.

On his mentioned other paths, I would fall squarely in the "texted based MMO => Network programmer path", except I did write plenty of graphical games along the way, just never with a 3D API of any sort.

I do think I will just link this article next time someone asks me that question though, he said it all better than me.

(Credentials: World of Warcraft was the first 3D game I worked on)