skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why do people say they got funded as if that's it.

Where did the OP say or imply this? In fact he even says this is only the beginning of the journey.

FWIW, I took his post as an inspirational thing. The demographic of YC applicants seems to skew towards younger people, sometimes with a bit too much pg-love. Getting rejected by your "idol" can be very discouraging, especially to an applicant who may not have gone through such a rejection before (eg: they've been mostly accepted to the schools and colleges of their choice) and/or has not had a lot of other career experience so their "one big dream" was just seemingly crushed.

IMO, I think it would be really cool for pg to create a roster list someplace of YC rejects that got alternate sources of funding and/or went to other ventures deemed successful. It could help some of the rejected applicants understand that YC is one option, not the option.
Fantastic! My wife and I just found out we're expecting and I sent this to her immediately. It looks great, I can't wait to try it out!
My latest sleep hack has been to get a girlfriend who has a "proper job" [1] for which she needs to wake up at the same time every morning.

If I'm woken by an alarm clock when I'm on my own it's very easy for me to hit snooze / turn it off and go back to bed without fully waking up.

When my girlfriend gets up in the morning I'm usually wide awake as I'll have had a conversation etc... and then it's easy to stop myself going back to sleep.

[1] as opposed to working for myself where I can get up any time I please
Do you not see the implicit assumption you are making here? Why should anyone have an automatic right to control something just because it is in their possession at that particular time?

The entire concept of property is an artificial convention, which most societies have decided is beneficial and therefore worthy of respect/legal protection. But physical property is no more "natural" an idea than intellectual property. Both are just social agreements that we choose to value.

As a relevant aside, many societies/cultures throughout history have chosen not to recognise the concept of personal property and instead to hold that everything belongs to the group. In most cases, this has not worked very well on a large scale, which is perhaps why most modern societies have collectively taken the other view.
It is the same rationale.

;)
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A very useful advice from the "40 Sleep Hacks" from Sleepwarrior:

"Whether you wake up from SWS (Slow Wave Sleep, or deep sleep) or just have a hard time getting up, you can’t trust yourself to be rational at this time. Self-discipline does not work in a cognitive fog. If you have the habit of pressing the snooze button in the morning, it’s not because you lack self-discipline. It’s because even if you did have self-discipline, the self-discipline wouldn’t work in your unconscious fog.

Upon waking up you rely heavily on habits and automation. Spend a few minutes during the day to program proper wake-up habits into your psychology’s auto-pilot system. The procedure:

1. Start by following your bedtime routine – brush teeth, put on pajamas, etc.

2. Lay down in bed, set alarm for 5 minutes later.

3. Relax, pretend to fall asleep.

4. When the alarm goes off, immediately sit up, turn it off, take in a deep
breath, then jump out of bed.

5. Walk out of the bedroom.

6. Repeat this a few times for the next few days.

If you do this correctly, you brain will be trained to follow a routine upon hearing the alarm. You’ll wake up on auto pilot, no matter how tired you are. Works eerily well. Kinda scares me to realize our brains thrive on automation, and not so much on things like... you know... free will and self-discipline."

You can find it here, if you are interested: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1953834
But then they're not recoverable, which is what the GP is talking about.
I'm a CS graduate and I think the maths & theory heavy course I did is irrelevant to 98% of development jobs even if it has been pretty useful for me

There are a few tidbits from your education that will save you from serious egg on your face. (See my other post this thread.) This is not just theoretical. I've seen a company suffer major embarrassment because software sold to Fortune 500 companies was written by programmers who thought, "all that poppycock about race conditions/transactions is just academic hot air."
You can probably do rather better than the usual approach of a general purpose hashing algorithm and a salt:

http://codahale.com/how-to-safely-store-a-password/
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This is exactly what happened to me. I find myself being amazingly productive between the hours of 2 - 6AM and then getting up at 2PM or so.

It plays hell with the social life though and I found that it isn't worth it in the long run.
You asked this 16 hours ago:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2176759

Any particular reason for asking it again?
Am I the only person that thinks that as bad as storing a plaintext password is, sending it out in an email (an unprotected communication channel) is about twice as bad of a security problem?
management didn't understand basic automata theory

Do tell more about it; as I feel that's not why they wasted millions.

IMHO management isn't required to understand much about CS, as long as the relationship with the developers is as between a customer and an engineer (i.e. customer asks for stuff, engineer explains what he can and cannot do).

Most problems with management comes from a disconnect with reality. Even when they know CS theory and/or could understand the complexity involved (ex developers); having bikeshed-style opinions and making demands with an iron fist in spite of developers advising otherwise (or the reverse, having developers on the team without an engineering mindset that can't think for themselves) ... that's the real poison.
Happy to send invites. Just email me at Kyle
At forrst .com

I'm still in awe at how well this turned out. Huge kudos to you both. And, made me realize: Clearly we need to do a better job keeping tabs on awesome collabs like this. I'm certain there must be more.
Get an internship, make connections with the IT department, with all of your professors and any alumni you meet. I got a job offer from one of my internships and an alumnus but ended up working at the company that did the back office software for my college (a connection through people in that department).
Ugh. Can we phase out IPv4 first?
Submit feature request.
Thanks for reposting - I hadn't caught it the first time through and thought it was a good read.

Started off easy enough (loved the simplification), but as soon as we got to SHA-1 snapshot names and "Rewriting History" with the redoing of snapshots and then to the staging directory my eyes glazed over.

It dawns on me that:

1. I have been using every SCM since CVS basically like CVS (Subversion and Git specifically).
2. I have a GitHub account I use to host all my open source and commercial code.
3. I got it because it was the "cool thing to do" and I felt left out of the loop ignoring Git for so long.
4. I have no idea how to really use Git in the ways that make Git a powerful thing.
5. The few times I have seen real Git errors like "Snapshot cannot be rebased, please schnoggleford your glerpentrap!", they have freaked me out and never been immediately obvious as to what is wrong; if it weren't for Google search'ing error phrases I would probably be using post-it notes with hand-written source code as my SCM system.
6. I REALLY want an graphic showing these different concepts explained in the article. I am a visual learner and reading (at 6am) through the snapshot re-parenting section without visual indicators of what is actually happening just isn't clicking.

It seems to me a graphic compliment to this article of what situation the main character has every step of the story would make this pretty much the ultimate "get your bearings" resource for new Git users.

At least I think so.

Who knows, I'm still excited when my pull and push commands complete without errors :)
I started using it just to see what was being banned, but keep using because it's not uncommon for an insightful comment or two to show up dead.
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I see what you're saying but I disagree that it's subjective.

I'm saying that the benefit for the user is lower than the loss in security (to the user) with this approach.

You're saying that the benefit to the site owner is greater in this case, and I'm not sure whether it is or not (but if it's a deliberate policy I'm sure PoF would).

What is a benefit to one side is not necessarily a benefit to another.
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One more story: my friend who went to business school (and got a business degree) ended up getting a full time job with the IT department and is still working there today. He started as an entry level programmer and is currently a business analyst.
It just hit me that from last month I am in 26-30. And its scary.
Bar chart of the results:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/58785/2175588.PNG
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I believe that there are two ways to get good at anything, "push" and "pull".

Push: You learn from books, classes, mentors, and studying examples, then apply what you have learned.

Pull: You have a problem that you must solve, then you learn what you need, any way you can, to build the solution.

I suppose there are pros and cons of each method, and I imagine that many people here have used some of both.

For the record, I am 100% Pull. I have absolutely no formal training. It took me 2 years to find my first job and then I was thrown into the deep end. It was simultaneously frustrating and exhilarating. There were so many times I didn't know what to do or didn't have enough "tools" in my box. So I had to figure it out and find sources of learning. But I always did. Any when I got that first thing working and then saw my customer's eyes light up, I was hooked.

Your CS degree may make you think that you're a "push" learner, but may I suggest that you adopt a "pull" approach. Forget what you think you know and find a job or a project or someone who has a real need. Then build what you need. You a several advantages over me: (a) It shouldn't take you long to find that job/demand/customer. Just keep looking. (b) You already have tools in your tool box, maybe not the right ones for the job, but you have something. And (c) It's easier than ever to adopt a "pull" approach. Help is everywhere.

You may feel frustrated, but I don't think you have a problem at all. You're in a great (and very normal) situation. Just adjust you attitude, find something to build, and do it.
A few years ago I was involved in a start up in the medical domain (software, not hardware). My cofounders and I got "funded" by winning business school competitions. Although the amounts are not huge, getting funded was big help for 2 main reasons. First, it's nice to know that you're not the only one who believes in the idea. It, in a way, gives you legitimacy and the power (mentally) to move forward. Second, money is a great motivator because you now have to answer to someone. Anybody giving you money will want to know what you did with it. Some you really need to spend it wisely and make progress.
Do you have links to some of your code?
Absolutely - the course I did in Concurrent Systems as part of my degree was of huge long term value because of the excellent set of mathematical abstractions it made be familiar with (Petri Nets and CSP in particular).

IMHO Computer Science courses deliver value through proving a knowledge of abstractions of software and hardware systems. These formal abstractions remain applicable pretty much forever whereas knowledge of particular technologies are of passing value.

[NB My hardwired knowledge of vi commands, Unix system calls and C was merely pleasant side effects of my CS degree not an end in itself]
I thought the question was not well formulated. Sorry about that
This doesn't explain how some people get rejected for one idea and get accepted with another one.
Ask HN: Where are all the London hackers working on startups? 
At the London HN meetup last night I was amazed at how few people raised their hands when the group was asked "who is working on, or planning to work on a startup?".

Regardless of how one defines a startup/how the question was phrased/whether people just didn't bother to raise their hands, am I wrong to assume that a room of HN faithful should have more than ~5% of people trying to turn their software in to viable businesses?
Chances are he did find a job in the last 8 months, but here's my input (maybe someone else in a similar situation can use it):
I graduated with a BS in ECE a few months ago, and also felt like I wasted 4 years for a piece of paper, but in those 4 years, I gained a lot of web development experience. While interviewing for the next few months after graduation, I saw that I knew a lot more about web development than EE, and that I was more interested in web development and CS. I landed a programming job where I'm learning more than I've learned during four years of electrical engineering courses.
So my advice is to find what you're more interested in, and maybe you have college work or extra-curricular experience that can help. Engineering and CS share a similar thought process, and employers look for this in their technical interviews - especially if they know you don't come from a formal CS education.
As others have pointed out, you can (and should) work on personal projects and freelance. Besides helping you learn and gain experience, you might even make some money!
Or if the email address in the resume has conversed with .gmail addresses.
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Everybody knows this, it's a matter of whether it's worth it or not; where you draw the line.

POF users did indeed get the convenience of a password reminder in every email. But they also got the inconvenience of having their passwords compromised, the consequences of which could both be catastrophic and go unnoticed for a long time. In summary, not a great user experience at all; thus "user experience" is a bad excuse, especially in this particular case.
The analogy to IE6 is based on both requiring substantial duplication of effort in order to render the page similarly to its appearance in other browsers and to provide like functionality to web sites. It seems to me that in part, Apple's intention is to make it less troublesome to develop and maintain an app than it is to develop and maintain a rich media website which handles iOS gracefully through the deliberate incorporation of incompatibilities in the iOS browser (e.g. no Flash).

[edit] incompatibilities are different from non-compliance with standards.
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Wondering where to submit your tutorials?
Knowing things is better than not knowing things.

Maybe it's good that I don't want to have children.
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Always remember to shave your pubic-facing IP addresses.
Chances are you're not the target audience.
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Domain names cost $7/year. VPS hosting will cost you $20/month (or a bit more depending on tech). That's the only barrier between you and running your own software business.

If you want to learn to build something, build something. Register a domain, build a site and put it live. Iterate until it's something you're actually proud of, then use it as something you can point to and say "I can build sites like this".

That'll get you more credibility in front of a future employer than any number of years experience sitting in a cube doing Enterprise Java stuff.

Pick a tech you want to work in, work in it, then find a way to get paid working in it.
I use it because every once in a while, I see a dead comment that's totally reasonable, and then I go back in that user's history to try and see what it was that got them banned.

I've seen accounts that have been dead for hundreds of days, with pages of comments, all just whispers into the wind...
Yes.

My default for anything: show me everything and give me the opportunity to filter it myself. I do the same thing for my customers in everything I build for them. This does several things:

a. It adds dimension. Whether 5% or 95% of the content is already dead, it's better to see it yourself than have someone give you that percentage.

b. It adds perspective. Actually seeing what content has become dead helps better understand the entire landscape.

c. It adds power. It's always more powerful to know what you're filtering.

d. It adds appreciation. Each tree means more after you've already seen the whole forest.
I learned extremely few industry-applicable skills in a prestigious CS undergrad program. Instead, I picked up 99% of my useful knowledge from a few other places:

- One semester-long software development class, where the teacher did literally nothing while we formed small teams and worked on a project for a real client in or near our university

- Software engineering internship in the industry

- Extremely hard-ass Advanced Placement C.S. teacher in high-school

I learned a lot of cool theoretical stuff in college that is definitely good to know: functional programming, operating systems, machine learning techniques, compilers, graph algorithms, etc., but was never taught any core programming techniques or required to write very extensive code at any level of quality. It's all about real-world experience, if that's what you're shooting for.
The following are books from my student days. These are sources from which I happened to learn the "everything in an hour, but longer to absorb" subject matter. I'd recommend Applied Cryptography as excellent, the other is just good.

Algorithms: Introduction to Algorithms (Cormen, Leiserson, & Rivest)
http://amzn.com/0262033844

Security: Applied Cryptography (Schneier)
http://amzn.com/0471117099

I cannot find my automata book just now. It's down in the garage, and I want to stay inside where it is warm now. As for concurrency, I got part of that from the Tannenbaum OS book:

http://amzn.com/0131429388

But the rest, I actually got from a coworker on the job! We did cover databases and ACID transactions in school, but that wasn't taught very well and I didn't really get it until I was doing real work.

Do some assembly language. It will give you a key advantage over everyone who is too scared to touch it.

Write a compiler and/or interpreter. This can actually be pretty small, and it will also give you an advantage over those too scared of something so seemingly "esoteric."
I started using it about a few months back. Then I realized that a couple of what seem to be sane/useful comments are banned, I started thinking twice every time my mouse pointer hovers over the "add comment" button.

The really disturbing thing is that some people don't seem to realize that they have been hellbanned for whatever reason.
6 months or so ago I started a thread whose contents aren't relevant now, but that gained steam very rapidly and then suddenly disappeared. Then other threads got started about the "disappeared" thread (which subsequently disappeared too). That's when I learned about showdead and since then I've had it on.
"Guided practice would be much better". Totally agree.

That's why I help my co-workes with something they don't know and encourage them to do the same with others.
Is that security practice widespread? Seems over the top, I mean a big company like Google would have as much to loose as anyone by breaches of business docs and gmail accounts and you couldn't imagine them having to be at the physical data center to deploy.
I've never been more thankful for the 2-3kb/s upstream bandwidth of my childhood. No way we were swapping naked photos of each other.
A recent interview of Martin Odersky on SE-Radio introduces this and other nice features that are in the works for Scala:
http://www.se-radio.net/2011/02/episode-171-scala-update-wit...
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I used to be in your situation. It isn't worth using git if you don't have time to learn the really powerful things you can do with it. git can increase your productivity by leaps and bounds - but you have to learn more than the basics.

I recommend reading the tutorials on gitready.com. For example, http://www.gitready.com/intermediate/2009/01/31/intro-to-reb...
That really surprised me too. In my experience there certainly isn't any shortage of web startups in London, so I have to wonder why so few of them come to an HN event.

Off the top of my head, possible options:

1. Startups don't engage on HN, or don't feel part of the community. This seems pretty unlikely.

2. (London) HN readers are predominantly people in full time jobs, or just not entrepreneurial.

3. Startups are too busy working.

But none of those seem particularly probable. Maybe it is a cultural difference?

Or maybe it was just a bad night for startups :)
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Show HN the updated version of too-long-didnt-read.com
Hi again!

In this thread http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2171135 I was lucky to have interesting feedbacks. I incorporated some of them this morning, I think you will like it:

* No more need to sign in with a Twitter account to create a summary

* The latest summaries are on the homepage

* All summaries are accessible, with a pagination

Edit:

A summary I like: http://www.too-long-didnt-read.com/ropcyu#summary_4
The process may suck for the developers but I agree with the article that it creates benefits for the end users. It's a core part of Apple's philosophy to cater to their customers at all cost. I am certain that apple pushes its own staff very hard to produce the quality of work they do, and when you sign up to become an Mac or iOS developer you become essentially an apple employee or contractor and as such you have to follow the company culture and philosophy just like the internal staff. It has been working for them, the company is thriving so why change course?

I think there may be merits in the arguments made for third party app repositories for iOS but I believe that there is some value, real or imagined in knowing that an application has the stamp of approval of the company that created the platform.
I don't consider this a problem.

The internet has changed our social dynamic, sure. It's given people anonymity, it's enabled them to be either exceptionally private or to effectively broadcast themselves (and sometimes they lose control over this, if they are not careful: a problem definitely heightened by the internet). It's removed entry barriers to conversation and enabled people to connect to others a lot easier. In my mind this has just meant that the value of (online) communication has decreased.

This might have a few effects. I know it makes people feel safer about exploring their sexuality (instead of having to find somebody they trust, they can instead experiment relatively safely with nobody watching them and just cut off the other person if they've had enough.) I guess this makes people act more cloak and dagger about the people they talk to, but that's surely just how life is when you're young and at school? Maybe people will trust each other less now. This isn't bad; it'll just make those real trust-based relationships that you find so much more meaningful. And, of course, pornography can make us a little more sexually violent but assuming we're not raping people is that really such a bad thing...

I think as long as it doesn't all become a game and people learn to love each other it'll all be okay.