skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed. It's not hard to tell how someone is feeling about their position. Your boss probably wants to find something for you that you'll be happy with as much as you do, the pain of losing someone good sucks, but it's worse watching them toil away unhappily for you.
Joshua Davis indirectly pioneered this "design by code" mentality in my opinion.
http://www.joshuadavis.com/

Cool guy, cool work, you should check him out. He's done work for BMW, Kanye West, Motorola, Nike, Volkswagen, HBO, etc.

There's certainly a place in the world for people who design by code. Just don't go too deep before gaining a core, functional skillet.
When I was at Purdue University, Molecular Biology is just as lonely, I joined an International House a fraternity that housed us and non us students in one place with weekly parties.

The weekly parties were set up as cultural exchanges where we had interesting meals, presentations and social gatherings.

If it is a State or non-state USA college I am sure that one of these types of fraternities exists to help the social interaction aspect.
That's amazing! I have a client who runs an acting studio (also an actor himself) and he lives on his boat for most of the year, docked at harbour-front right in Downtown, Toronto.

He tells me the harbour rental is one of best kept secrets. He only pays $100/mnth (a 1bdr studio in the area would go for $2100/mth) and lives in a beautiful yacht, with a master room and guest space, just minutes away from the downtown core and all the essentials. It's the kind of free-spirited lifestyle i'd like to live in the near future.

My question is, how do you deal with icy water? don't you have to pull out the boat when ice starts to form? In Toronto you could pretty much skate out on the lake in winter.
I agree. This is what "time-boxing" and "spikes" are for.

Ultimately it is the product manager that decides when to ship something or how much time should be spent on something.

If a developer is allowed to work and work and work and work on something until something is perfect, then I can only come to the conclusion that the product manager or lead engineer is not doing their job.
How social engineering works
I have had some success in the field, but honestly mostly as a lever to "professional" projects. I started with mathematical imagery and became more conceptual. Very little of my work is public but mostly because it is commission.

It is most certainly not a gimmick if done properly. Fractals and other things are gimmicky but I have moved away from that.

The best way honestly, is find something interesting and profound. Something that blows your mind. Use the maximum resources you have. Do something huge. If it's good you'll get noticed by the right people.
Creative coders belong in the startup world. No two ways about it. Corporate culture can't gain maximum efficiency by leaving people with space to let their minds wander. Startups, however, as based entirely on how good a product is so minds wandering is essential, especially if they wander in herds.

Try starting a company. You'll love the experience of no one telling you what to do.
They probably wouldn't be blowing up merchant vessels like U-Boats, but they certainly would still spend whatever money it takes though: Mark 48 torpedos are a cool $1M to $3.5M.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_48_torpedo

I think the main advantage for rail guns are that they allow a much higher volume of fire and faster time to engage more targets. It just happens to use cheaper ammo - I'm sure the gun will be much more expensive to make than a standard machined barrel.
I did this when I left Apple; it seemed a lot harder until the moment I walked into his office and had the conversation. It helped that I wasn't leaving because of problems with him or the culture, but rather to strike out on my own. He and my grandboss were very understanding. Be prepared to as you say spend the energy bringing someone new up to speed, but don't knock yourself out over it, because a) that's your boss' responsibility and b) you'll never get it 100% right in any reasonable amount of time.

Too, cut the cord. Don't offer to contract or help out on an informal or even formal basis. You are going to need to concentrate 100% on your new gig; they are going to need to get someone up to speed; delaying this process is in nobody's best interest.

Good luck! It sounds like you have the right attitude already, which will go a long way towards smoothing the process.

EDIT: Oh, and be sure to set a definitive end date. That will focus attention on the problem of replacement. Be reasonable (e.g., not so much the "I've already packed and there's a helicopter outside"), but firm.
Getting feedback from technically savvy (or at least interested) people can be very valuable, and you're right, ideas are a dime a dozen.
Indeed! This paper seeems to have been so highly anticipated, it was released by those anticipating it before it was finished.
I think what the author is saying is that having done projects on your own helps your credibility.

I disagree that ML is something that can be picked up through just an OCW site and such. "Real" ML involves way too much mathematics and does not overlap much with programming. ..unless your idea of Software Engineering is writing stuff in MATLAB.

There are so many books and the path to knowledge can be daunting.

In the spirit of the blog-post's advice I was trying to gauge whether to take the author's advice seriously, but after some short searching I could not come up with publications in ML. I definitely found several moderately complex projects with an ML "flavor." And that's already way better than most people who try to get into this by themselves and shows Ravi picked up on a bunch of stuff.

Ravi mentioned 5 years ago that reading the literature felt like banging your head against the wall and I think most of people who attempt the self-taught route are going to feel the same.

You're looking at a year or two of full-time college-like preparation during which you will learn lots of math but little to no ML. Only then can you begin to really learn ML. The books by themselves are simply not enough to learn this stuff. One needs to literally go through as many lectures as possible in the relevant coursework online, and do the labs. Various CS departments that actually have some traction in ML spend a large chunk of time designing the course and labs are incredibly illuminating.

If you just want to learn how to apply an ML algorithm taught in an undergraduate-level course, disregard my post.

Truly understanding anything written by Bishop or even going through ESL completely is something that is going to take an enormous amount of time (on your own easily a year, if you have the background) and mathematical skills that are typically way outside of what a Software Engineer deals with in any of the projects. I mean Bishop introduces hyperpriors in Chapter 1 or 2 for chrissake.

I can see how getting into patricle-filtering based probabilistic robotics can be easier, but try some EKF-based methods and feel the pain, that is, feel the amount of math that you don't know yet.

Extra hint for HN readers: take a look at the CVs of hot-shots in ML. Lots of Math and Physics undergrads, and a PhD in Theoretical Physics or Mathematics is not a rare occurrence by any means.

I'd also take a risk and say that traditional mentor/student relationships in India are quite different from the less formal ones in the West. My experience with colleagues from India is that they are much more likely to observe the authority ladder. Just look up Anil K Bera's interview with C.R.Rao (of Rao-Blackwell theorem) especially w/regards to how things were going at ISI.
You should check out this program at NYU. I have a friend there, its probably a good fit for you: http://itp.nyu.edu/itp/
"Socratic method: Ask leading questions until you have some poor fellow's thoughts so tangled up that he feels like an idiot." - - Not an exact quote, I read it in a book about homeschooling somewhere.
How To Get An iPhone4 For $25? Yep, It’s a Real Deal
> Plus Go has easy concurrency via message passing, which is nice to have these days.

Indeed. I voted Go because learning it made writing concurrent software FUN! (As it should be)
In one of the supporting papers the idea is floated that you could use this to do machine-level process management and message passing. That's cool!
Grand Rapids is like an hour and a half inland from Grand Haven. =)
Be honest. Be polite. That's it.

I quit quite some jobs so far and know the "But the guy's nice" attitude far too good. That doesn't matter here. You're ready to move on and romanticising (is that even a word?) your connection to the boss and trying to spin analogies to splitting up a romantic relationship are not useful. You're a professional. Your boss is. He's seen other people leave - and it's again just a matter of business, nothing personal.

Just remember that you follow the rules in the first sentence. If you explain yourself honestly and do it in a polite way, you've probably a spot to return to, if you should want to in the future..
Yeah, I've always wondered too that we're running servers with the full OS stack (sometimes horrific beast like Solaris) to operate a single simple program.

What a waste. Xen is looking more interesting every day, with stuff like this and HaLVM.
If Frodo had Internet
This is a rather limited poll, but if the choice is between Haskell and Go I'd pick Haskell for a web application, and Go for small things that need to be fast (like receiving and sending messages in a chat application). Go is too low level and generally not a very well designed language. It's a nice improvement over C, but it keeps far too much from C for my tastes.
For me, Go has replaced C++ and Java for systems work. All of my projects at work for the past 6 months have been done in Go. I don't think we'll be going back.

But, really, good systems are based on well-defined protocols, which makes the language choice moot. (If you're passing Java or C++ objects over the wire, shame on you!)
The Power of a CEO 360 Review
Depends a lot on the need.

Haskell has lots of fundamental weaknesses when it comes to long-running real world programs, laziness being the most obvious one.
It's "Tarver".

I'm surprised he's initially targeting JavaScript. I would think the JVM would be a more useful initial target.
I do a lot of what you seem to describe as Creative programming.

.

1) Film Special Effects - Someone has to animate 10K orcs in battle

2) Video Titling / Sweep FX - Someone has to write cool fade in effects

.

3) Straight up hacker style art:

See the inspirational Jürg Lehni:

. http://www.scratchdisk.com/Work/Hektor/Will-Morris.jpg/ - a motorized realtime graffiti plotter, based on robotics and his scriptographer coding

. http://www.scratchdisk.com/Work/ - awesome examples

. http://scriptographer.org/gallery/ - more awesome examples with Jürg's scriptographer plugin

.

There are many more avenues to code with graphics and get paid
I have a very flexible employer who allows me to work from home. So last summer I decided to bike across the US and work while I went. After buying the bike and camping gear my only expenses were internet and food. There's nothing quite like pitching a tent off the side of the road after a long day of cycling and pulling out your laptop to get some work done. However, sometimes after putting in 70+ miles in a day there is not much motivation left to get any work done.
Whenever I feel lonely I review this classic comment from proggit:

http://i909.photobucket.com/albums/ac295/fractastical/ui2ik9...
This looks like yet another Haskell "variant." From what I can tell this sort does not occur in place and thus would not make a particularly good quicksort. Memory use, number of accesses per element, etc. This style of programming is more suitable for heapsort or maybe mergesort.
When coding I usually only listen to music if it's an album that I have listened to at least 5+ times. This works for me in that my brain seems to know exactly what parts/songs are coming next and they are no surprises/distractions.

Mixes and things like last.fm are no good because I always have to stop to see what is playing.
Could you possibly share a little bit more about the kind of work you do and why Go has become the clear winner over C++/Java?

I, for one, would really love to learn more about Go.
Strange, I get 3 profiles in the Netherlands that all registered a few days ago. Maybe there is a bug there?

EDIT: I guess our musical tastes differ by too much. Maybe it's better to show bad matches then no matches at all?
> To show off your technical accomplishments to other techies even if that means handing your idea on a silver platter to other capable would-be entrepreneurs to work on?

This line of reasoning is horribly flawed. And besides, if someone other than you can take your idea, copy it, and eat your lunch... then they kind of deserve their success. At the "Show HN" stage, you already have something built, right? That means that even assuming that the mysterious "badass-hacker just sitting on HN waiting for an idea to copy" even exists, you should be far enough ahead that it doesn't matter.
Very interesting experiment, but somewhat this is the proof that Redis and any other memory intensive application where memory bandwidth can be one of the most important factors (MySQL is another example, and in general most database systems) are penalized running inside VMs compared to real hardware. 10-20% improvements are small compared to the order of magnitude of difference between real hardware and virtualized hardware.

This does not mean virtualization is in general not a good fit for Redis and other DBs. Actually it is already and with the introduction of Redis Cluster to take many small VMs with 1 or 2 GB each and running a cluster will be the way to go for most users probably (every instance will serve a subset of the queries, and there are cheap VMs with a good amount of memory).

But still, Redis in the most basic of the real-hardware Linux boxes will deliver 100k operations per second per core, while with a small virtualized instance it is an order of magnitude slower. Something to take in mind for deployments.
This is a really great set of articles, top notch overview along with practical advice on idiomatic VimScript and examples that you're not likely to find anywhere else. I find something new almost every time I refer back to these. Just now in scanning through the article on Vim dictionaries I noticed the section on using dictionaries to pass optional arguments. I hadn't written much code using optional arguments last time I read it and probably didn't even notice this section. But lately I've been using optional arguments, wasted time dealing with exactly the problems the author points out, and see the appropriateness of his advice to use dictionaries to pass optional args. This is one example among several where these articles provide excellent advice about good coding practices in VimScript that I haven't seen anywhere else.
Given that Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga are constant trending topics, it's safe to assume that teens do use twitter, lots of them.
Personally, my friends and I have started listing to Dubstep. Just few enough vocals to be distracting, but still interesting.
Comparing News Site Reading Levels: USA Today vs NYT
For internal company moves, you just apply for the position, and respect the corporate structure to handle the swapover from departments to departments.

Your current boss will say something like "I'm hurt you didn't come to me" etc possibly, but you can't risk talking with him about it, as he may feel you're going to leave the company if you don't get the internal position.

Sucks that things have to be this way, but it works out fine and if you're boss is older than 24, he's done it before.
I'm skeptical when anyone says a upcoming product is going to make running a fault-tolerant scalable environment "trivial".
طريقة حفظ مقطع من اليوتيوب
I was hoping this was going to be an analysis of how listening habits correlate with productivity. I'm sure it comes down to personal preference and a host of other factors, but it'd still be interesting to see if there's a statistical difference between different genres or no music at all.
It is not a significant improvement, but demonstrates the performance tax of the conventional operating system layer.

How does it demonstrate that, if the improvement isn't significant?
Summer usually falls on a Tuesday in July here, plan accordingly.
Sounds dreamy. I'd love to see some pics of your boat and / or the view.
The C64 Motherlode - Everything you need to learn how to code on the C64
What exactly is the bad idea here? Having more than one method in a duck-type?
Sweet idea. Glad I was able to grab one of the 500 invites, I usually lose out on these kinds of things so thanks!

Although there might be similar ideas such as Dipity and Allofme as mentioned in the link, this has the best UI/UX in my opinion. Love their minimalism and the fact they use Tumblr as their blogging platform (for some reason I love when companies/startups use things I use on a daily bases).
The emacs 30 Day Challenge: Using 'gnus' to read mail
Yeah, I've always wondered too that we're running servers with the full OS stack (sometimes horrific beast like Solaris) to operate a single simple program.

Because there is more to running an application than just running the application. You need disks, network configuration, somewhere to send your log messages, etc., etc.

By the time you've implemented all that, congratulations, you have an OS.

In the case of this Redis example, they dispensed with all of that and used the host OS's TCP stack via Xen. If you were running on the bare metal, you wouldn't even have that.
Nooo... ;)

Imho, it's about learning how to follow a line of enquiry to a useful conclusion.

In terms of self-led teaching, this is useful because it places the responsibility of learning on the student (i.e. it equips the student with the skills necessarily to learn independently).

If we are able to question _why_ we're doing things a certain way, we can work out whether our reasoning is watertight .. or whether it needs to be revised (because it has 'leaks').

The truly beautiful thing about this style of educating, is that the path of inquiry is dictated by necessity - that is; there's not a teacher prescribing what to learn.. the student is learning the subject matter because it's relevant to the task at hand.

I think this helps to reinforce what's being learnt, and also helps to create passionate learners.
And the first thing that popped into my head was: I wonder if AskPatio11.com is available? Throw up these instructions and a webform and voilá. And then, if we hook it into Pat's email, we can get real time stats on his response and acceptance rates. For paying customers maybe we can offer access to stats on what the best time of day to email is and what help requests/idea critques are trending.

On a more serious note, thanks for writing this, Patrick. I had an idea a few days ago--more precisely a new permutation on an idea I've been banging on for over a year now--and my goal is to launch on Jan 1. I would really like to have your input on some of the details. I had decided to not email you--you are busy and right now I can't afford to pay for your time--but I'll take 60% odds. So you'll be hearing from me as soon as I launch, hopefully 21 days from today.
You're right - bad choice of words. I can only hope that salvatore's implementation does make it trivial. I have spoken to him about it and seen him present about it and do feel confident at this point. It's obviously a little soon to say it'll make it trivial - I like the thinking behind it, that is all.
Ugh - the OS update mess is the main reason why I don't have an Android phone and why I don't recommend them to my non-tech friends (with the exception of stock Android phones).

If there was a serious security vulnerability in one version of the software, would users be stuck waiting six months (or possibly forever) to get a patch?
Ask HN: Please review my web app TheShyBot.com
I went out on a limb and made http://www.theshybot.com/
Is it fun?
I've met brilliant 30+ year olds who were still on the 8 year old level you describe.

You need to adjust your value system until you don't feel like you've been wasting time by working on yourself rather than your software project.

Be prepared for horrible failures in the same fashion that you expect segfaults the first few hundred times you code in assembly. Segfaults wouldn't shake your confidence, neither should a girl who is either not interested or openly annoyed by you.

Take a lot more risk and be prepared to fail hard and make a total moron out of yourself. You will still feel better than just cocooning yourself.

Listen. Don't judge the cool, preppy, jock, whatever guys, observe what they do and how they talk, dress, etc. You're not trying to be like them, but you're just learning like you are when you are reading source code or reference manuals.

Do not intellectually dominate. You will draw attention to yourself and lose all the opportunity to learn. Observe other people's sense of humor. Is yours too confined to stuff only the reddit crowd would laugh at?

Read bullshit magazines like Maxim. There is so much crap in there, but there's some truth too and they are very direct about it.

Ideally, try to get a good friend who is a girl and not a geek. Forget about ever hooking up with this girl, she is there just to give you feedback on how you look like when you say or do some things and how your appearance/dress affects others. If you have a sister/cousin, even better, ask for feedback.
Agreed.

But would you want to hire a mobile HCI specialist? Or someone who is great at consumer HCI and will apply that understand to mobile within mobile design constraints?

My personal bias would be to hire the consumer HCI specialist and have them work on / learn mobile.
I thought I'd post this as the C64 was one of the most popular 8 bits of all time. No doubt many HN'ers are familiar with it, perhaps a few aren't. The site linked is fairlight, an awesome old school demo group from back in the c64's (and Amiga's) heyday. The documents on the site are pretty much everything you need to get started, and the examples (last link at the bottom) are great at getting you up to speed on some common effects.

The best thing about this is that in learning how to code on the 64 you'll learn MOS 6502 assembly, which also enables you to get a head start on programming the Atari 8-bit computers and the consoles (2600 etc.) and the Apple I & II.

If you're looking for a weekend (or two) project, then you could do a lot worse than this.

So HN, what can you do with 64k of RAM and 1 Mhz CPU?
Tim Ferris: 3 More Case Studies of Successful Cash-Flow Businesses
I find it very hard to concentrate while listening to music, but even harder while overhearing other people's conversations, so occasionally the headphones must go on.

Of course, headphones also mildly discourage others from interrupting, but that's no way to live your life.
Trying out Google Prediction API from R
>"Two weeks ago the manager of another department came to me and said he's interested in bringing me onboard his team."

People move around in big companies all the time. It's a great way of building inter-department relationships, giving people a sense of the bigger picture, and providing opportunities for growth.

Everyone affected is probably aware of what is going on. It may even be that the offer is to keep you from doing something desperate...like real-estate. If your old boss is going to hold moving on against you, it was time to go anyway.