skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree that recent events have caused people to look for alternative fuel sources, but there's no guarantee we'll end up with clean alternative fuel sources. That should be made a priority. Biofuels, for example, have clearly been a disaster in broad terms (food supply and expense, etc) and there's been some doubt about how clean they really are.

Re. your second point: we don't have smogs in most western nations today, but there are other effects specifically from motor fuels, particularly diesel, which creates more particulate matter than petroleum. This has been implicated in the increased incidence of asthma in western nations, and is also thought to exacerbate hay fever.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18280198?dopt=AbstractPlu...
be like MC Hammer: "Break it down!" You have to take things in small chunks for two reasons:

* You can't do it all with a few days of coding
* You need little wins along to way to keep the wind in your sails.

For a website-based project, you want to put pen to paper and come up with a plan for "What Has to Happen For Me to Make My First Sale":

* Demo

* Website

* Marketing

* Processes in place post-sale

Those are easy - so focus on coming up w/ a plan of action and timeline/budget for implementing those. It's amazing just how much the planning process gets you starting to feel energized and, "I'm actually doing it!"

Good luck :)
If leaving Ohio is an option, get yourself out of there and into a major center. Though Columbus is a large place, you won't have nearly as many options as you would in say... Silicon Valley, Boston or New York.

Don't let past experience set your future expectations in terms of being hired. People do hire based on merit, so be persistent.

Lean towards smaller companies without bulky HR depts. HR people are generally looking for degrees, because they do not have any other way of reliably measuring the value of a programmer. With smaller companies, your resume has a better chance of winding up on the desk of someone who knows the difference between C# and C++ or Java and JavaScript.

Be persistent. There is work out there for talented people, regardless of their degree (or lack thereof)
Cute :)

You could use the Web 2.0 Domain Name Generator if you don't want to pay those steep, 4yo consulting rates :)

http://www.dotomator.com/web20.html
You definitely don't need a degree or a cert, that's for sure. Just keep at it and you'll find something. Columbus is no Silicon Valley (althugh it wouldn't hurt to consider relocating to a more geek-friendly city -- we just moved to Seattle and love it), but even Ohio should be able to offer you something. Though you'd probably do a bit better in Cincinnati. =)
I've used Macbook, Dell and Thinkpad keyboards extensively. The Thinkpad is my favorite by a long shot.
This two day old thread about google is somehow related to this article:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=247046
I'll be honest, hopefully you'll appreciate it because you need honest advice.

I read your post and I can already hear the self-pity string quartet playing and a big screen in the background playing images your hard, hard life. Task #1 is to stop whining, not just to other people, mainly to yourself.

What do you mean you could not get any loans? What kind of whiny-ass thing is that? You could not get loans so you dropped off college? Unless you're Bill Gates or Sergey Brin, you did a huge mistake there. Get back into school at any cost. Anyone can get a college loan. There are federally-funded ones, there are guaranteed gov't loans, there are scholarships, in-school jobs, grants, emergency cash crises funds at schools, etc...

To me it sounds like you wanted out of college and you took the first good excuse to get out. You are screwed now because once you get out and get the $9/hour full-time job (oops, you already did), it is REALLY hard to get back into school. Now all you need is get a girlfriend, get her pregnant, and congratulations, you have locked yourself out of school. If you have financial obligations (credit cards), consider filing bankruptcy. Otherwise, you WILL be held prisoner to your monthly payments (been there, done that).

Here's my advice: Get back into college. If you have a car that's all yours, keep it, otherwise sell it and buy a bike. Once you are accepted: Get a job. Any job that is compatible with school hours. If you have potential as a programmer, then get a job/freelance as a programmer while you study. If not, flipping burgers to pay for school is a very dignified thing to do. (It's bailing out of college for whiny reasons that carries no dignity)

Stop whining. It does not get any easier if you whine. Problems do not get solved if you whine.

Consider your own question: "Is there some alternative that would allow me to go back to school?" WTF are you waiting for? For the problem to fix itself?? You are waiting for something to "allow" you to go back to school... I will tell you right now, it's not gonna happen. You have to make it happen. Put your ass back in school first, and THEN figure out how the rest of your life will adapt to school life and priorities.

You are not the first person to have to deal with this, there is a huge mechanism in place already to allow people to stay in school. It just carries a cost (sorry, the new car will probably have to wait till after graduation). All things say you do not want to pay that cost. Snap out of it.
"Method and apparatus for creation and maintenance of database structure."

Clown-shoes. I think they also hold the patent on "process and action of making outlandishly stupid patent claims".

I think they should be sued for wasting the patent office's and court's time.
Get out of Columbus ASAP. Go to Portland, San Francisco, Raleigh, New York, or leave the USA - we're headed into worse economic times than the early '70s, things may get very grim here. Also if you're into Linux, spring for RedHat or Novell certification. You can hang out in the sysadmin world for a bit while you save up to continue your education, build a track record, and gain valuable practical experience. Learn to present a good resume and keep applying for jobs - the worst that can happen is that you don't get a phone call.
So that's why we pay so much... Once the govt collects the billions in back taxes from these rich people, surely they'll have enough $$ to drop taxes for the rest of us (USAians, at least) and still pay the bills.

Wait, isn't that how it works?
I avoided to mention the "ideas" aspect as it is always met with so little respect on HN ;-) So good to hear that an ideas person can eventually get something done.

I find it hard to work on something else while I am consulting (day job), so maybe for me your scenario is unlikely. On the other hand I need to earn money, so it certainly is a possible road.
Are you saying that those posts wouldn't be made by someone else? I doubt it.
Fun series. I like that last question.
Design costs for portable display electronics
hang out at local user's groups. I've thought of driving down to the Ruby/rails UG, sounds like a really good crew

http://groups.google.com/group/columbusrb?lnk=

(i bet cincinatti has stuff like this too. Cleveland's pretty, uh, quiet).

I'm guessing that there's one job category that there will never be enough people for, anywhere: javascript programmers who thoroughly understand DOM scripting, making things work securely in IE 6-8, safari and firefox. So web app's are a little afield of what you've been doing, ubt if your're good at rails or Django, plus mysql/Postgres tuning, plus some Jquery, sojmebody will hire you. Getting a technical job's like parking your car in a major city. Some people have hummers, other have scooters, but when you get a space, you think, hey, that wasn't bad at all
Who's Making Money From Microcredit? [video]
I found some good recommendations in this tutorial.
Developers no longer need to worry about incurring increasing costs typically associated with adding more advanced, feature-rich user interfaces on electronic devices.
Some people do deny climate change. You will find plenty on the Internet. I for one found one in today's local newspaper, circulation ca. 1 million. The linked article stopped just short of explicitly denying climate change by calling climate change a "myth" and instead calls the consensus on climate change a myth.
That people are skeptical is indeed down to us humans, and especially so to scientists like me who only come to a verdict after performing a lot of observations and pondering. In climate change politics however "climate change skeptic" is a euphemism for denialist.
Oh...and you should probably take gm's tough love to heart - he's on to something there.
I am not aiming for $85k, I'm not aiming for any sum of money. I just want to make a living coding. I'd be happy with $30k if it were matched with a decent work environment.

I have been considering moving to a better IT market, I just felt weak when it came to getting a programming job, so wasn't certain if I'd be able to get one remotely.

Thanks for the tips.
In case you aren't familiar with Seaside, the underlying language is Smalltalk.
Hm, annoying - I live in Munich, and I would have loved to visit the robot fair, but I didn't know about it. What is a good way to not miss interesting conferences and fairs?

Friends of mine recently went to see the guided tour through the BMW factory in Munich and they said it was very impressive.
I'm in Columbus, and if you're good at C#, I may know of a place that is usually hiring good C# devs, I worked IT there for a summer, it's a really good company. e-mail me issac.kelly@gmail.com
From the comments.

> Behavioral economics of this sort only seems interesting when it offers productive tips to rectify the mistake. So how do you get people to weight the commute time appropriately?

Startup idea?
"I find it hard to work on something else while I am consulting"

No ####! Of course it's hard. Do you think I wanted to work 70-80 hour weeks or play with my 2 year old? I wanted to play of course but the long-term vision of creating lifetime security for my family over weighed the short-term work. Read PG's essay "Inequality and Risk" (http://www.paulgraham.com/inequality.html) for more.

I don't know YC's deal but can you tell me whether or not the term sheet they put in front of you is a good one? If you say, "I don't know" or "No" or if you haven't even thought that far, I'd say you are rushing into it. I would guess that, if you have the mindset of, "If I get funded I'll do it", it's gonna be hard to get funded.
I'll second the recommendation of working on open source projects - with many hiring managers, the only way they're not going to care about a degree is you have commercial quality code out there that they can see.

The other thing I would suggest is to do some research on companies and target a few likely ones - watch their jobs pages over time to see how they hire - then look for projects that would be appealing to them. Individuals have to do marketing just like companies.

I know a previous employer of mine recently hired a web designer right out of high school based on the strength of his portfolio.
Instead of trying to coordinate an international machine swap, have you tried installing Ubuntu on your macbook? It works pretty well.

I've had a laptop sent to me via Israeli post before, and I got popped with a hefty import bill. I don't know if those rules have changed in the past 8 years or not, but it's something to be aware of.
There are small companies who've realised that most graduates lack the skills they need and have to be trained in house. Find one of these and I'm sure they'll take you on after you've explained your situation. Best place to look would be local user group meetings. Also keep an eye on those companies that advertise positions on Joel on Software and the like.
FundingSleuth.com
gm is a bit harsh here, but he's on the right track. I have my parents co-signing my loans (thank god) but thats all that they've done for me. Everything else I've done on my own and I'm paying for most of my college as I go and from summer jobs. I know if I needed to I could easilly get my own loans (it's not that hard... you just have to deal with higher rates). Also, a friend of mine is in the same boat as you and depending on where you go you may qualify as a 'non-traditional' student since you're older than the average freshman and in that case you will qualify for extra financial aid. Also, file FAFSA without your parents (which you can do so long as they haven't claimed you on their taxes for the previous year) and you'll probably get close to a free ride to school.

College is important, and you really will gain a lot just by getting the degree.
Biggest mistake you could make | MAKE MONEY ONLINE WITH HARRY
As a general rule, if working as an employee, try to avoid large corporations. Working there sucks anyways, and they won't hire you (and pay you good money) without a degree. Look for small companies that are looking for sharp individuals. Anything under 5-10 ppl is good, if they are more than 15-20 they're probably already loose the edge.

You could also be bold and be independentish, but that's much riskier, and is hard without some family background.

The best thing to do at this age, if possible is to go to a regular University and get a degree. Even if you go to school, get a job for the experience. The best way to learn programming is to learn from other experienced programmers who review your code, you review their code, ask them what they think of technology-X, etc. You don't get that at school. While at H.S. I took some courses (e.g. UNIX, C) at the local comm. college, and it retrospect they were pretty low-level, so as a rule of thumb don't count on getting anything worthwhile out of there.
No worries, my desire to do my own startup is independent of YC. I just think it would be fantastic to get into the program.

"Hard" - maybe that sounds silly in that context, and lazyness is my only problem, but I don't think so. Even while consulting I dream of working on my projects on the side. From experience I just wouldn't plan for it to succeed. Also, my health is very important to me, also in terms of longterm security for the (prospective) family.
This is actually not a bad suggestion. If you file for emancipation, you can then file your own FAFSA. Once you do that, if you have no source of income, you'll qualify for all sorts of government grants and loans.

Look into it. Filing for emancipation requires some paperwork but shouldn't be terrible.
Some of the point here is that the "college" section on your resume represents not just education, but evidence that you're not a total flake. An employer is going to look at your story and wonder why you couldn't, at the very least, get through a few community college courses or an associates degree. As someone who went to a "top" university and received a ton of financial aid, the money excuse doesn't really hold water.

You can make this work if you try. Since you haven't made it work, one tends to worry that you aren't really trying. Someone who isn't going to work hard isn't likely going to be a good employee.
In technology era, rogue IT threatens governments
Has Twitter been hacked, or is it just broken again?
Everything depends on the use case. We use Ruby on Rails for prototyping. Thus we are not interested in high throughput, but in easy setup.
Wikipedia Tries Approval System to Reduce Vandalism on Pages
Five things that matter when you raise money
The tradeoff I have seen is more extreme - it's more like tiny one-bedroom or studio with no outside space (balcony or deck) in the city vs. McMansion with an hour commute. I think that sellers/landlords,etc completely understand the "weighting" and have largely arbitraged away any advantage that city centers offer.
With all due respect, you're exhibiting signs of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Degrees matter, sure. But there's definitely a way you can demonstrate knowledge without having one. Here is a good read:

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-goog...

Definitely get some F/OSS projects under your belt. It's a great way to show what you can do, and you can work on them completely on your own schedule. To show that you know compilers, help out with code optimization in Rhino. To show you know networking, help out fixing an IM client's file transfer. To show that you know web programming, rewrite phpMyAdmin as a webapp, or make a web-based learning tool for kids like Karel The Robot (Google that).

At least for me, I don't think it was the degree that helped with jobs, it was the side projects I worked on in the 4 years of (what I realize now were) oceans of free time.
Venture Capital Loves Virtual
i think if googles 39 percent growth was a shortfall, its funny, how many businesses as old as google has investors wanting more than 39 percent yoy growth?
Looking back, do you think sacrificing time with your kid was worth it for lifetime security? Like, do you guys have a good relationship now, or did all the work do any damage?

Just wondering -- I don't have kids yet, but I'd be worried that all that money/security may not be enjoyable if I hadn't built my relationships with my kids when they were young.

[edit: sorry for the offtopic, BTW.]
No One's Paying For Google Apps, But That's Okay
Build your market first is a really hard act to follow.
I wish there was one near Boston.
All (mostly) true. I don't think any sensible person could deny that we need to be finding better alternatives to fossil fuels as soon as as possible.

There is, however, room for some disagreement on exactly how large and how urgent the problem is. If the only problems are as you suggest, then we can pretty much afford to sit back and let research progress as normal, safe in the knowledge that market forces and the natural advancement of technology will mean that renewable CO2-neutral energy sources will become economical in the coming decades.

On the other hand if, as some of the more alarmist global warming advocates would have us believe, a few more years of current CO2 emissions will suddenly put us over some kind of tipping point causing the melting of Antarctica, the stopping of the gulf stream, a neverending drought and the end of all life on Earth (and I'm only exaggerating their predictions slightly) then we'd need to take more severe actions -- like severely cutting energy consumption right now instead of waiting to develop better energy sources.

Right now we have all sorts of people using scenarios on the Al Gore doomsday end of the scale in order to justify policies such as cap-and-trade and carbon taxes. In the end these sorts of policies, as well as causing hardship to everybody, might wind up being counterproductive, since they'd slow down the economy and hold up the development of the alternative energy sources which are the real long-term solution.

It doesn't help that most of the people who are pushing for, say, increasing taxes on CO2 are exactly the same sort of people who are always calling for increasing taxes on something.

Like I've been saying for years, global warming is a technological problem, and we should always beware of people trying to push sociological solutions to technological problems.
No doubt their mothers are hamsters and their fathers smell of elderberries.
You should also look at the XSS cheat sheet

http://ha.ckers.org/xss.html
I still don't see why you needed to talk about his views on AIDS though.
> The additional bathroom is a completely superfluous asset for at least 362 or 363 days each year, whereas a long commute does become a burden after a while.

Not to mention that a 45 minute commute for 200 working days a year would cost you about $1800 in gas a year. You can get a damn fine hotel room for Grandma and Grandpa when Christmas rolls around for $1800.
Merlin Mann on personal branding
'According to Dijksterhuis, these people are making themselves miserable because they failed to properly "weigh" the relevant variables when they were choosing where to live.'

Just because this person has a particular set of priorities, doesn't mean I have the same ones. I don't mind commuting, but I do dislike cramped living space.

Also, this has nothing much to do with the mortgage crisis. That was caused by people who probably shouldn't have been borrowing any money, borrowing a shed-load and then defaulting. I bet most of them would still have been out of their depth if they'd only borrowed half as much.
The trouble with the word "denialist" is that it's not clear exactly what the denialist is denying. There are a bunch of different things which one could deny, ranging from the sensible-to-deny to the silly-to-deny.
"Microsoft posted a 42-per-cent rise in profit" (globe&mail)

"Google's net income for the quarter was $1.25B, up from $925M" (Techcrunch)

I wouldn't call that bleak.

The Silicon Valley leaders may not be able to maintain their high growth rates but I doubt they would be affected in the same way other industries have been.

I'd like to see the impact its having on the smaller players and not just the big advertising companies.

Is this directly affecting the publishers at the bottom of the pyramid?
++1 for Joel's job board. I just started an awesome job I found there. 10 people, I'm the 4th programmer, great environment, best coworkers yet.
Get the degree. I've dealt with people who failed to get the degree and found it a problem later in life. It's easier now than when you're 40ish and have a family. And believe me, it will come back to haunt you at some point when you're older and you find that perfect position and they require a degree.

As far as moving out of Columbus, I can't really say that would be necessary, and don't do it without a job lined up. There's a lot of experienced programmers on the street now, and you'll never know if you're going to the wrong market at the wrong time.

Finally, Network, Network, Network. The user group suggestion above was a good one.
That was one I idea I had, wanted to work on, procrastinated it, and now I'm waiting for someone else to build the conference reminder.
The primary reason given by the small sample of empty-nesters I know who have moved into the city was not: for the restaurants, for the food, for the culture, or for the night life. The reason they decided to move into the city was because their children were living there and they could walk over and see their grandkids.
The you that wrote this won't make it. Cleanse yourself of doubt and fill it with (false if it has to be) confidence. You have 2 months to do a project you are proud of and do complete.

Take a deep breath. Zoom out and for the next 2 months do nothing else but focus on yourself. When you leave work don't have the idle thoughts about what to eat for dinner and such. Cut the AC cord off your TV (or whatever usually distracts you). Focus on doing only 1 thing, improving your self. Start and finish a project that makes you proud. It doesn't have to be the most original thought in the world, so don't waste time coming up with the 'big idea' - in a way, it doesn't really matter what it is.

Just make sure you know 1 person who's life will improve because of it.

If you really want to change your life and put your stamp on something meaningful, you have to dig deep. You are totally capable of this!
Macbook Pros have excellent keyboard and Apple of course now sell the one from the Macbook as a separate desk keyboard which is also excellent.