skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a reason why "if x is None" is idiomatic when "if not x" is shorter:

>>> x = ''
>>> if x is None:
... print 'x is None'
...
>>> if not x:
... print 'x is empty'
...
x is empty
Good question.

I was more talking about just the coding part. I agree if it's the whole 9 yards, it ought to be just one project at a time.
I can't remember who said it, but the quote "Fail early and often so you can succeed sooner" comes to mind.
The answer is "everywhere". I don't know the kind of work you do, however if you have not freelanced before, I recommend trying to get work locally, as it may be easier to gain the confidence of your customer if you meet them face to face every so often.
Maybe if you're a humanities major.
It happens with all people who are working for big companies i.e. more no of employees. Key to get out of this is to get selfish.

Work on the things you want even when you are in office. :) Compress regular work in smaller chunks and keep promise to you that I would write atleast 50 lines of good code everyday. Am sure you do this for 7 days and you know what to do next to reach there.

Getting started is the important thing. Get away from HN/programming.redddit; work on small snippet; be happy and then search anybody has done similar thing. Discovering similar/better/quicker approach to your code i.e. whatever would boost your confidance especially when you can write code without google search.

So that helps to get back to books/api documentation. And suddenly you become a programmer you want to be.

I know this sounds pretty simple but that is the key.

google appengine + small JQuery/Prototype project can help anyone to get started
I do freelance work from odesk, its not all bidding though, you can bid on fixed price projects, but you can also find jobs which pay by the hour. Mind you, odesk takes like 10 % of the payment.
I recently read Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart by Gerd Gigerenzer, Peter M. Todd, and the ABC Research Group and The Nothing That Is: A Natural History Of Zero by Robert Kaplan.

Both were great reads and left me energized. Neither had much to do with technology or startups. But I felt more prepared and motivated to solve problems after I read them.
Is it specifically opt-in, or can Getty simply pay some amount to retrieve any photo on Flickr?

I find the latter concept disturbing.
Wow. I forgot to mention Code Complete by Steve McConnell. Don't miss it.
How long will the WSJ keep its pay model?
The Non-Designer's design book has helped me 1 of every 5 days in the past month. I also recommend it.
it depends on your definition of "work on", how you define a "project", and what you need to do to make a living.
Software's Classic Mistakes -- 2008
Don't count on it. This is a country where Bell and Telus just announced that they will now be charging for incoming text. An additional 15 cents for incoming text, even if it was unsolicited.

Ok now let's step back from the initial outrage and think about it. This is supposedly two independent carriers making a joint announcement of a price increase. Now, I have no idea if I just stepped into Wonderland, but in my world that is called price fixing. Where two entities collude to fleece customers even more. Sort of the same idea where local gas stations collude to fix gas prices.

Now that's what I call balls, the monopolistic carriers don't even care about getting caught.
So you are assuming most ppl who live in NYC live in an apartment with an elevator and a security guard, on the upper east side/midtown/chelsea. Unless you are running in finance and high-society circles, no one gives a crap that you live in an apartment that costs over $2500/month.

If one is resourceful(and most starving artists/actors/entrepreneurs are) you can find apartment shares in plenty of neighborhoods for under $800/month. It's not luxurious but living in those circumstances is no less worthwhile.
Key word being successfully.

1.
The World's First Software Engineer (David Caminer) has died
hey signa11, are you a software developer for cellphone networking equipment?
Craigslist -- ok, just kidding.

My advice on how to find a job that energizes you rather than saps your energy? It's similar to advice you've heard before, though in a different context: Keep iterating. Try something new or someplace new, if it turns out that it's not what you thought it would be, move on. At least, that's what has worked for me.

I think all too often we create our own limitations and believe that there's a "career path" that would be dangerous to jump off. Or we worry that we're not qualified to do something different. Or else, we worry that we'll have too many jobs on our resume and no one will want to hire us.

But the truth is, the odds are against you finding a meaningful, energizing job on your first or second try. The system is set up against you, if you will. You do maybe one or two interviews at a place and get a quick look at the office and based on that you're supposed to pick the place where you're going to go spend a huge part of your waking hours -- and somehow it's going to be wonderful? Good luck.

So, to sum up, I'd say you find that job by treating the whole process more like the dating process. You'll date a handful and they won't work out, and eventually, hopefully, you'll find one that does work.
If you are in the mood for something advanced, take a look at Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation by Hopcroft, Motwani, and Ullman.

It has a good amount of proofs and a pretty strong focus on automata thought so that may not be your cup of tea.

Hopcroft won the Turing award in 1986 so he knows what he's talking about.
As E-bay is to auctions, E-Lottery would be to lotteries.
Rowan Trollope, Senior Vice President of Consumer Products at Symantec, shares his E-Lottery idea with Laserlike.
Well, it's sh and perl wrappers around C code, but the important point is that those wrappers don't FFI into the C code, they shell out to it.

So, yes, a hypothetical reimplentation of git in ruby as a C FFI interface would probably be faster than ruby reading the .git files itself; however exactly as demostrated in the blog entry shelling out to perl/sh code shelling out to C is much slower than the ruby program reading the .git files itself.
You can try going to industry events (check upcoming.org for startup related events in your town.) I found my first real contracting gig by meeting and chatting with the CEO of a startup at such an event. I later checked the company's Web site and saw that they were looking for development help.

You can also try asking friends or acquaintances who are contracting if they have any overflow work or need a hand on any current projects. Offer to subcontract at a lower rate than the friend charges his/her client. (Just make sure the friend is allowed to hire subcontractors for the given job.)

Finally, try looking for part-time / contracting gigs on Craigslist.
Microsoft Admits Windows Vista Mistakes, Criticizes Apple Ads
Hmm, and I thought I was clever when I put that my "mother's maiden name" (or whatever asinine question they ask) was a GUID. Apparently there's an easy workaround to my security..
Yahoo: Three Weeks Away From Next Mass Exodus
Before Rogers announced the rates, I'd even deluded myself into believing that maybe the iPhone would usher in somewhat more reasonable data rates here. Fuckers.

Anyone want to start a Canadian mobile WiMAX company with me?
This advice reads like utter insanity, but the even more shocking thing is that there are at least 14 people here who thought positively of it, and a magnitude more that nod in assent but didn't click the up arrow.

I have come to believe this kind of spirit is part of the core of true innovation. If this was posted in another community, I'm fairly sure you would've been treated like a lunatic. How amazing is that!
Hey, it sounds like the OP has lost the passion. If all the fire has gone out of his relationship with programming, how should he get it back?
If someone built this, it would be interesting to see where the ticket prices tend to settle. My guess was going to be that people won't get away with selling them for more than pennies over EV, but then I remembered the existence of casinos and state lotteries.
Virtual Worlds Are So Hot Right Now: $345 Million Invested So Far This Year
This is like the "5 Whys" approach that Toyota developed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys
Meta Tags Optimization Video
New malloc in OpenBSD helps spot 33 year old bug in yacc
Become a morning person (oddly enough, I'm typing this at 12:45 am... but I'm also unemployed right now). Use brainwave entrainment technologies and meditation to get yourself to sleep in the evening, because you probably haven't had a habit of going to bed before midnight since grade school. Most people need less sleep if they go to bed and rise early, so if you're asleep by 10, you can get up around 4:30 easily.

Why are traditional jobs scheduled between 9 and 5? Because despite claims to the contrary, the majority of people are naturally "morning people" and most productive early in the day. The boss wants the workers' best hours, and most people get up around 8. If you get up much earlier, though, you can use your early morning hours for exercise and side projects. This will be a lot more effective than trying to use your burned-out evening hours, and unlike quitting your job, it won't hurt your career. You'll be pretty tired by 5pm, but the effect that this will have on your performance or career is negligible.

The only downside of this is the effect it will have on your social life, but that's a lot smaller than you think. You'll still be able to manage the occasional late-night party or code-fest, but you'll find your 2am IM chats no longer occur. Socially, you'll be focusing on quality rather than quantity, which is not necessarily a bad thing.

I had a similar experience to yours in previous jobs. I wish I had taken the advice I'm giving you now, and as soon as I'm in a structured work environment again, I'm going to switch to the early-morning rhythm.
I just like books with post-colonic explanatory subtitles, but it looks like I'll be taken care of as well.

Yes, I made that word up.
I see one project as a luxury. It has to be interesting and you have to have ownership for one project to be the right answer. You also need a way to pay the bills. When working for someone else, my magic number is two so you don't end up getting stuck and waiting.
Definitely. Any more than one and you're setting yourself up to fall.

How I've managed to put dual focus into two projects for a while (startup and my main company) is to focus solely on one for a certain length of time, then switch to the other and give that one 100%. But even that only works so well because a running business has certain day-to-day activities you need to do and can't neglect.

So if you're starting your own projects or startup, choose one and give it 100%, otherwise you're not giving any of your ideas the full shot they deserve.
No, it's bad advice. Without knowing a lot more about this guy, you can't just say, "quit your job" just because it sounds romantic. It's cheap advice. I notice that every time someone complains about his job the advice coming from the internet is always the same, "Quit". The world doesn't work that way for 99 percent of the population. Decent jobs are no one's birthright, and the poster may be an ordinary, mediocre person who will never make a marketable app. If he's capable of great things, he's not going to need prodding from Mr. Anonymous.

In the meantime, keep your job and do what you can after hours. If you get a good idea and a year's worth of savings, then maybe think of quitting...

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/39174
The majority of Michael's teammates hated his guts, he was a huge asshole. However the rings speak for themselves.

Maybe the lesson is be an asshole but make sure you can back it up.
Much appreciated! I just finished moving all of my projects onto GitHub and I couldn't be happier. Of course, I was formerly ball-and-chained to CVS which was just awful, so anything is an improvement. But GitHub really does take things up quite a few notches.
What do you code and where are you?
Run Linux Applications in Windows
Gallery: Japan's Hottest Celebrity Bloggers
My interview with murderer Hans Reiser
Great link. Should be required reading for everyone on HN.
This is clearly illegal in the US, both at the Federal level and probably all 50 states. And if you were going to do an online lottery, you'd be a moron to give away anything but cash. People don't factor in their odds of winning when they decide to buy into a lottery (except the very few people who play lotteries profitably, but that's so rare as to be non-existent).

Also I hate this blog's design. The entries look like block quotes.
Google: We're totally stumped by YouTube. Get ready for pre-roll ads
Ask HN: Is it worth switching to a Dvorak keyboard?
I'm a web developer, so the majority of my typing is PHP code. I've read multiple times that a Dvorak keyboard layout is more efficient than Qwerty. Is it worth making the switch?
Early Mortgage Payoff
Homeowners with a traditional 30-year mortgage were on track to become mortgage free after only 8 to 11 years.
it would have to be opt-in. Flickr does not own the photos, they are merely a service that the owner uses to distribute their photos.

Now getty could distribute some cc-licensed works without payment, although I think they would shy away from that for a number of reasons.
The A-Z of Programming Languages: YACC
This interview is dedicated to the investigation of YACC, and to chatting with AT&T alumni Stephen C. Johnson.
"When YACC first ran, it was very slow - it implemented Knuth's ideas very literally. A grammar with 50 rules took about 20 minutes to run, which made me very unpopular with my co-workers ('Damn, Johnson's running YACC again!'). I set out to improve the size and space characteristics. Over the next several years, I rewrote the program over a dozen times, speeding it up by a factor of 10,000 or so. Many of my speedups involved proving theorems that we could cut this or that corner and still have a valid parser. The introduction of precedence was one example of this."
The only issue I see with that is as the number of projects increases, the total focus decreases. The more projects you have on your plate, the more switching you have to do. So you may lose time getting back into gear and focusing.

On the other hand, insights from one project might help out another.
I would like to refer everyone to this study for a minute --> http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/abstract/323/7327/1450?maxtos...

Yes that is a serious experiment.

As I understand it, when the original article was published there was a huge uproar in the academic community about the findings and intentions of the study. Those concerns were addressed in a reply from the author:

"The purpose of the article was to ask the following question: Would you believe in a study that looks methodologically correct but tests something that is completely out of people's frame (or model) of the physical world---for example, retroactive intervention or badly distilled water for asthma?

There are three ways to deal with this question:

(1) To answer in the affirmative. But this leads to such paradoxes (some described by those who responded to this article1) that it is incompatible with scientific work or even daily life.

(2) To look for methodological or statistical faults. Here an obvious one was that the duration of fever and the duration of hospital stay are related. But what if the next study sports perfect methodology and statistics?

(3) To deny from the beginning that empirical methods can be applied to questions that are completely outside the scientific model of the physical world. Or in a more formal way, if the pre-trial probability is infinitesimally low, the results of the trial will not really change it, and the trial should not be performed. This, to my mind, turns the article into a non-study, although the details provided in the publication (randomisation done only once, statement of a wish, analysis, etc) are correct.

The article has nothing to do with religion. I believe that prayer is a real comfort and help to a believer. I do not believe it should be tested in controlled trials."

"Evidence based" has recently become a popular ideology/buzzword in the medical community. Although it is always comforting to have a tangible set of numbers to reference, "evidence-based" findings are often adopted without legitimate consideration of experience-based/anecdotal data.

It is the current culture to accept anything with the label of science as indisputable truth. As a rule, I don't think it is ever a good idea to blindly follow. Even the most well designed studies are worth debating. The more you question, the more you discover.
V.S. Ramachandran's Phantoms in the Brain changed my life.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat by Oliver Sacks solidified my interest in neuroscience

And The Three Pound Enigma solidified my fascination with medicine in general.

If you only read one, read Phantoms in the Brain. It's like the bible of science, providing the crumbs for future research into the deeply interesting and previously philosophical realms of the human brain and who we are.
edit: microsoft 1994
The purpose of a sabbatical need not be to create a marketable app, nor perform any great deed. In the corporate world it is literally a career break.
Web framework on the go with iPhone
Do you mean a metaverse in a singularity?
>I'd consider this the first significant step (by Google) in doing away with physical co-location of office workers.

You mean starting with themselves? Google are very much old school in terms of making people work in regular (ish) offices, partly through culture and partly through the need for hush hush security.
Hacker artists in Australia looking for arts grants?
SMSGupShup is no Twitter
For future hackers
Interesting that Microsoft is playing the "why is everyone bullying us" card. Of course Apple has hard hitting ad campaigns, they are in direct competition with a company that has insane market share.

They mention XP had a rocky start. So did Windows Me, but that one ended up being pretty accurate. Maybe Windows can only pull it off every other time?
I'm appalled that someone with a HBS MBA and so many claimed executive positions held would dismiss something as important as the legality of this business model with something so cavalier as, "I would point out here that I have not looked at the gambling aspects of this."

Perhaps he should have. The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 would make paying with credit cards nearly impossible since this would clearly be defined as illegal gambling (a game whose outcome is dictated by chance). Especially because you are dealing with physical goods/services that have to be delivered on US soil, this bill makes this business model nearly impossible to do.

In addition, because you are dealing with physical goods, you are leaving the winner with a tax burden (that can't be paid by a portion of the winnings when dealing with non-cash). So that Ferrari F430 Spider becomes a $30,000 tax bill. So long as the winnings are taxed, a bettor's expected value will always be diminished significantly.
Dedicated Hosting, Dedicated Server, Dedicated Web Hosting
Nethosting.com offer the best dedicated hosting and managed server hosting on the web.
I do all of these (even in interactive shell) except I have a weak spot for this sort of notation:

i+=2
What is mystery ingredient X?
I used to be a frequent bidder on getafreelancer but quickly noticed the pattern. Only the premium members or those with reputation get hired. And there's a bidding war. And most of the times the project listing is cancelled during the end bidding date(!). Now since everyone's talking about elance and odesk, they must be crowded too.

Now I need a few dollars to bootstrap my startup.
So I started looking for mashup and web development contests. Ofcourse, you make money only if you win. But if you are dedicated you will win. The most important thing in contests is the idea and the way you present the idea as a working app.

You can't depend on contests if are looking for a way to feed yourself. I am just depending on them for that extra cash I need to bootstrap my idea into company.

http://programmableweb.com/contests lists mashup contests. http://99designs.com list webdesign contests
(if anyone knows more just pour them in)

If you have chosen to do freelance work as your mainstream profession and looking for your first set of clients, then why don't build a portfolio first? Build an app that helps your kid brother in his geometry homework or build a webapp that does event management for locality... Just build anything to show-off your skills. And then show people your work, so when they look at your work, they 'must' feel that they have found a guy who can do it (you proved it with samples).

I have a question too. Does anyone know any agencies that deal with outsourcing freelance work? What are these agencies called?
VERY COOL! http://psyco.sourceforge.net/introduction.html
Not exactly. It makes more bubbles, but it doesn't make it more efficient.
Wetpaint reaches 1 million wiki’s
Perl is not hard to learn because it is "powerful" but because it is gratuitously obscure. Perl culture and the language itself rewards those who use arcane features to accomplish straightforward tasks. Words like "wizard", "magic", "incantation" are slung about willy-nilly, even in the "official " documentation.

Python (culture and language) value complex ideas expressed as simple code.
SitePen's Dojo Toolbox
The Dojo Toolbox helps you get more out of Dojo. From the offline API Viewer to the Builder for optimizing application performance, the Dojo Toolbox improves and simplifies development using the Dojo Toolkit.
Ultimate Handyman Directory
This is the link directory where you can submit your business to the ultimate handyman directory. The Ultimate handyman website has something for everyone. Find tradesmen or services in the directory, learn new diy skills on the main site, ask questions in the forum, watch or upload diy videos or simply play in the arcade.
On my desk:
Getting Real (37Signals),
Hardball (Chris Mathews),
Prioritizing Web Usability (Jakob Nielsen)

Nearby shelf:
The Design of Everyday Things,
Maverick,
Founders at work,
A Brief History of Time,
A Pattern Language,
Peopleware,
Made to stick,
Web Standards Solutions,
Designing Interactions,
The Pragmatic Programmer,
The Mythical Man-Month,
Oh, the Places You'll Go!

Other good reads:
Blink,
Tipping Point,
Long Tail,
Freakonomics
Web development is best practiced in the Python framework Django, on an Apple MacBook Pro with the Dvorak keyboard using the TextMate editor. Left-handed, of course. (Just kidding about Django, Rails will do as well.)
Depends on the cost to context switch vs. other factors. For example, two similar projects might have enough overlap that the cost of switching contexts is outweighed by the benefit of not having to (re)learn the solution or part thereof.
Sitepoint marketplace: http://marketplace.sitepoint.com/
Sorry...Wasn't really meaning that he was fighting-- just that this thread might get ugly.
I have to say I agree with Tim. The hypocrisy of this is staggering. How can one justify allowing billions of dollars of ineffective homeopathic remedies and potentially dangerous "natural" medicines to remain on the market with no regulation whatsoever, while jumping all over 23andme and others who simply give people information about their genomes and make no claims or guarantees about what the information can be used for?
It might be 'perfectly idiomatic' but jrockway's code is much more typical of what a Perl programmer who wished to communicate clear ideas would write.
DNS Checker: Are your nameservers patched for the July 8 cache-poisoning vulnerability?
God, I read all your examples and think "how could it be any other way?"!
The number has always been 2 for me. Maybe my brain is hyperthreaded. Maybe different for you.