skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ahh, I see the disconnect, based on your last sentence. I basically don't think it's a mistake to improve corporate software from within. It's not going away. And there are many decent programmers who will work in that environment because of a lifestyle choice.

I also think you have an incorrect interpretation of history: the folks who did XP were contractors on a _project_, and actually writing _code_. Yes, they published books afterwards, but continued running _projects_ and writing _code_ afterwards.

Finally, I think the culture and practice of software has a lot to do with those who write cheques, since that's in the end what funds it, like any engineering endeavour. Unless you're speaking of software-as-a-hobby.
Contact me -- my info is in my profile.
Move to NYC. The companies there are desperate and will hire anyone.
Great points. From lean startups & cust dev principles, I think you should start charging from day one.

Well, the margins would come from venture backed startups looking for high growth.

I am also a huge fan of lean, so personally, I'd also like to hook up very small newsletters (less than 5,000 subscribers) with bootstrapped startups. I also think these newsletters would be easier to start with - since many aren't monetized yet.

I already have one newsletter signed up for this. This idea came from when I pitched a different startup to them and they thought I was talking about this idea. They said "if you do this, I'll be your biggest advocate". So that's why I'm considering the idea.
From what I'm aware of a lost of private schools work in a similar way with respect to extra curricular activities, to the point where they expect you to take on extra duties like coaching sporting teams and so on.

My problem with this is that people feel they have to do it to have a job, and it then takes time away from their actual job which is teaching students. I have no problem with the performance review aspect of it though, as long as it used correctly (administrators are people too, and just as capable of doing a bad job, pushing a personal agenda, etc).
How else do you make `curly quotes' with ASCII?
You do realize Kiva is never mentioned here. I suggest getting more informed on the issue. Would be glad to talk about it further if interested.
Looking at the way you describe yourself, a big problem is that the description is inconsistent. What are you: an entrepreneur, a project manager, or a developer? If you're a developer, then what is your speciality: architecture, database, middle-tier, UI? You presented a list of technologies, but did not indicate your level of experience in each or how they tie together. It's a laundry list, not a picture of the man behind the qualifications.

You are too self-deprecating about your startup experience. Even if it didn't pan out, you must have learnt a lot, both on the technical and on the business side. You really have to reconnect with your passions and your strengths; if you are aware of your value, it is fairly easy to get the message across to others. What was driving you for so long when working on your startup? What was the vision? That's where your value is.
It's still crap. The french lab tcts[1] a few years ago had a speech engine which added tongue flicks, breathing and lip noises (Don't know the technical name for these) as well as using multiple forms of a sound to generate words. IE: match up the correct version of each letter to say "match" rather than force one form to work.

This is still short trousers for text to speech. But then text to speech isn't a big selling feature for computers - yet. Think mini, data specific watsons on your iphone. Pretty soon we'll have HAL-9000's in our pockets.

1. http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/
I guess it come from reading investor's startup blogs. I'm going to do the 37 signals thing and try to do as much as I can until it's not physically possible.

If I was raising investment (plan Z), I'd try to find a team member with ad sales experience (or maybe an advisor).
Apples and oranges.

Google is a search site and purports to have close to every publicly available(i.e not banned in robots.txt) page indexed. Delisting a very popular site(will be doing that for the first time) will get it into the news for the wrong reasons. And how much will it hurt Facebook? Barely. How many people signup for Facebook that searched "Best social networking site" ? It will actually hurt them monetarily so it will be hard to sell to stockholders. I see almost zero chance of this happening.

On the other hand, Facebook's value is not in showing ads, it's about social networking. How will removing Google ads hurt it? Will it kill off enough FB applications for people to take notice and leave FB for... what? Orkut? Google Go? Myspace?

After all, the FB applications use Facebook's resources, so they want to indirectly charge them for it while making money.
Personas 101 - Create your customer
Stumbled across this useful guide to increasing conversion rates through persona creation. From 2008 but still very valid I think.
What a joke. Doesn't work on Windows. Fine, I'll buy that. Doesn't support IE. How hard is it to just use a good CSS Reset these days? We knew this wasn't going to kill Facebook, but it's not even going to get laughed at if only 2 people can use it.
I have no idea.

But you might try selling your abilities. Can you demonstrate your failed startup's code?
Great points.

1.) It gave me a realization that I may not be the best person to execute this, but I can sure as hell give it a shot.

2.) I can do this in the short term to prove there's an issue, but it's not scalable.

With that being said, I'm still going to pursue this in order to prove concept and make some cash.
What an improvement over the tedious Java version which would run with "java -jar diaspora.jar" (or a double click on Mac/Windows)!
It's not the same. Facebook is a social networking site. Google advertises to be a single stop indexer of all web sites.
size/tag queries always return the same image. It might be useful to have size/tag/_offset_ type of a query, to diversify the placeholder images that appear on a page.
Edit: As previously posted on hacker news (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2291558), this has a lot of problems.
I'm sorry but i can't. Only web apps.
Because... we all know Windows Python users are stylin with the Windows command shell.

I agree with the grandparent, this decision was political.
> ...it would have been unthinkably brutish for them to disallow another browser.

You mean like how they printed an error message if you were running another DOS?

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

(They did disable the error message in the final release, though.)
Free.
Quick setup.
Great point. It'll be a solid way for me to gain some domain expertise at the same time.
I would say some alternatives might be: CPC/CPM advertising, getting articles written about your site, lead generation, social sharing, social promotions (think Dropbox), affiliate programs, or just making a product that is so awesome people tell their friends/coworkers about it
I don't think 6 years "trying to do a startup" is the same as a complete lack of work experience, unless you spent the entire 6 years trying to raise money and making powerpoint slides. If you did any real programming work during that time, it still counts. I've seen plenty of resumes with "sole proprietor" type jobs. Maybe you don't get a job with a large company, but someone who is versatile and used to doing whatever it takes is perfect for someone else's startup.

I don't think it is wise pitching yourselves to companies who are hiring 100K+ engineers saying you are willing to work for minimum wage. It shows a lack of confidence that you are selling yourself so far under market. Pricing is often a signal for quality. More importantly, the cost of a bad engineering hire is far greater than the salary you're being paid -- a bad engineering hire takes time to get rid of, and often produces negative work output. People end up cleaning up a mess, opportunities are lost while a bad engineer flails at what should be simple code, etc. A bad engineer could work for free and still be a worse value for a company than an engineer making market rate. This is the signal you're sending when working for minimum wage.
I'm involved in two companies in the bay area that are hiring Java and Python web programmers respectively. They pay very competitive SV salaries. Contact me (email in profile) and I'll get you started!
Some information on how it works and what exactly it does would go a long way.
Is it really that easy to charge $50-75/hr without being recognized as a decent developer?
Gnome removes maximize and minimize buttons from program windows.
I had exactly the same article in mind when reading the OP one.

Exactly the opposite message. Who to believe?
The water-from-a-faucet thing he mentioned was mildly fun, too, and a lot easier.
Are you guys going to be at SXSW by any chance? Love to buy you a beer and convince you to get started on a native Android version. ;)
> He gave FoxNews.com early access to the out-of-this-world research, published late Friday evening in the March edition of the Journal of Cosmology.

This just screams credibility.
There are actually several shell script relational databases. If I remember correctly one of them was even a successful commercial venture.
free = volunteer :) is volunteer work illegal?
This.

Also, FOSS is a big deal. Got spare time? Do FOSS, more FOSS, more FOSS. From my personal and anecdotal experience, after your first job it's gonna be so much easier, if you manage to deliver and make some connections, and participating in open-source projects will make you a better programmer and hopefully help you land a job.
This is a huge change and whether it is better or not, it won't overcome the aversion to such a dramatic change in something most people find so fundamental.

Regardless, I'm glad to see innovation in linux gui and expect it will be disableable through some hack or another.
It created "Aspects", or groups of friends, and you post things to specific aspects or to all aspects. Only the people in that aspect will see updates.
Wait a minute, are you implying that Fox News uses juxtaposed or even wrong imagery to try to mislead people?!
Yes we are, we're launching at SXSW. Shoot me an email - felix@view.io
PHP developers can probably take comfort in the fact that much like Java, Perl, C, Snooki, and others, even though PHP is long past its "sexy" stage, it's well into its "many billion-dollar companies are built on this" stage.

SVN users, well, they probably just don't know any better. :)
The problem is that if there's a high barrier to entry there might be a "Google Wave" effect - people joining, finding out they have no friends on the service, and never using it. What the distributed social network market needs is a network that has an actual launch with a product, and get as much press as Diaspora did when they announced, but have an actual product.
I think the idea is volunteer work at a for profit company.
Glad to hear of market validation you've done.

I'd caution against small newsletters which may have low-value audiences. The "CPM" you'll get will be low and so $20 CPM on a 5k newsletter is $100 and if $80 goes to newsletter, that gives you $20. (And $20 CPM may be very aggressive)

You have to find and get an absolute cr^pload of those newsletters on board to make any amount of real cashish.

And bootstrapped startups as advertisers strikes me as a terrible segment as they have little to no money and may often be PITAs.
They've tried to solve the blurring social contexts problem of facebook with something called 'aspects.' Aspects are user defined sets based on social context, eg 'work', 'school'. You can choose to make any activity on diaspora visible to certain aspects, and defining aspects is supposed to be pretty central to the diaspora interface—although I haven't ever used it so I can't really say for sure.

Facebook kind of solved this problem in the meantime by making facebook groups more intuitive. When diaspora was first announced, this social context issue was perceived as a bigger problem with facebook than it is now.
Command-C / Command-V is copy-paste. Also I do use TotalFinder as a finder replacement. :)
I think Thoreau said it best: "The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run."
Sorry, I did not realize you are just a troll. Here though for anyone else's reference, you know those that actually like to go research instead of just spouting off.

I worked in the desert through Student Conservation Corps in their Desert Restoration Corps, working on saving the desert tortoise among other things. I didn't go there to commune with nature. http://www.thesca.org/

You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about in terms of Goodwill either. Goodwill provides jobs for those who otherwise could not get them specifically by selling clothes that would otherwise end up in landfills. http://eartheasy.com/blog/2010/05/lets-keep-clothing-out-of-...

Finally, saying Kiva causes suicide is plain false. This would be akin to saying that Apple causes suicide because someone's World of Warcraft account got cut off so they killed themselves. It's so much apples and oranges that it begs the question if you researched anything at all before making that statement. Just to reiterate, no one involved in Kiva loans has committed suicide, I'm guessing you grabbed some random article about microfinance and then associated the two with absolutely no diligence at all. Don't take my word for it, go inform yourself: http://ask.metafilter.com/125386/Help-me-avoid-being-a-loan-... or from a Fellow http://fellowsblog.kiva.org/2010/01/07/bad-roads-interest-ra... or straight from Kiva http://www.kiva.org/updates/kiva/2010/04/15/new-york-times-a...

And no, your comment does not get any point across other than to say that you like to make flippant comments without any objective facts, the very thing you supposedly argue against. If you had done even 10 minutes of research on anything you just spouted off about you would have realized you made absolutely no sense.
I'm not going to give you access to my facebook info without knowing more about the website.
Thanks for the link. I just visited and toyed around. I hate to be "that guy", but I didn't really love it. Does anyone here use Hey Amigo? What do you think? Good results?
thanks I forgot about that. updated my hn profile with an email
In the last few years , there was in the legal industry for fixed-fee arrangements(probably because of the financial crisis).

Does a similar business model change happens in the defense part?
Conrad Barski, M.D. (Land Of Lisp, FringeDC) is Congregating Us
Have you experienced their weird interview?

I bet it started off like this:

"We're using memcached. Ever heard of it?"

A: "Yes. I've heard about it" [but never use it]

"Ok, since we used it for internet scale, the standard memcached isn't good enough for us. So tell me, how would you improve memcached for internet scale?"

A: "Umm..."

Real story.

[The answer is to switch memcached from TCP to UDP implementation, but then you need to know first how memcached work internally and probably intimately]

The problem is that most of these companies ask specific questions regarding the weird libraries or esoteric programming languages that they specifically use to solve a very specific problems.

Might as well go and hire the contributors of those libraries/languages really.
I didn't mean it as a pejorative. I've been living out of a backpack and travelling (adventuring?) for the last two plus years (well, until very recently), and I've grown something of a thin skin for when people vilify the US without much travel experience of their own.

> Yes you can say that, say, an Iraqi citizen will have a hard time getting in to any country, not just the US; but when we're talking people from England, Europe, China, hell, even Mexico and Canada

England and most western European countries don't require visas to enter the US at all, since they qualify under the VWP. Mexico and Canada only recently required a passport to entry, and at most high-volume crossings you can use a special state/federal ID instead.

Harrowing, I think, is too strong of a word. Several years ago I was stopped at the Canadian border on I5 (between Seattle and Vancouver) and had my car searched. I had to sit in an immigration office for an hour and answer a ton of questions. That's about as bad as it can get between NAFTA countries and it's hardly what I'd call harrowing.

All of that having been said: You're preaching to the choir. I'm 100% in favor of relaxing entry and work requirements for foreigners into the US. I think that people overreact about the US requirements when for most first world citizens it's not that big of a deal, and for the rest of the world it's complicated just about everywhere else too.

> 20-something backpackers who get hassled crossing into America today, or who choose to go to a different country for 6 months instead of face American border bureaucracy, will take those experiences with them when they enter industry and leadership positions in the future.

Agreed, but this has more to do with foreign policy and international PR rather than just border security and hassle.

> Edit: another anecdote--on entering New Zealand I was asked for proof of onward travel (as I later found out, a requirement to enter the country). I didn't have any; I had planned on staying a few months then carrying on to Australia when I felt like it. When I told the agent this, she laughed and waved me on. Can you imagine a US border agent doing that?

Counter anecdote: I once flew back from Mexico without a passport or any identification other than a driver's license (this was right after the passport requirements for flight went into effect -- Mexico didn't require a US passport for entry, but the US required a passport for re-entry) and had to convince the CBP agent that I was an American. He asked me a couple questions and ended with "Who was your freshman English teacher?" which I laughed at and said: "Are you serious?! Does anyone remember that?" and he laughed and let me in. Took just about as long as a normal border crossing.
Someone stick it on the EC2 public instances list... There's your 3-step setup...
1).Go to some meetups and start talking to people. At the last couple python meetups I went to here in SF, several companies announced they were looking for developers. You're more likely to get past HR if you can connect with an employee who can refer you. 2). In the meantime make some iPhone or Android apps and try and sell them and/or do some projects where you can show off your code.

Don't discount the experience you gained trying to do your startup. As others have said, you weren't unemployed but self-employed.
I can't help but feel like HN is getting trolled here. There is simply no way someone who has done a startup and has experience in all the listed technologies cannot find any job in the Bay Area. Spend a couple days at the Hacker Dojo in Mountain View or go to an event like the 500startups one at House of Air last month and you'll meet dozens of people looking for talent.

I'm not just being cynical here-- I have lived in Palo Alto for just under 6 weeks and my RoR skills are subpar at best. Nevertheless I've been offered multiple jobs, co-founder opportunities, etc. And I'm not even that likable. If you're a nice guy, the opportunities are endless!

That being said, on the off chance that this isn't a troll and you don't have any luck with the replies here that are offering assistance: contact me (see my profile for info) and I'll throw some contracting work your way.
I'd also like to add that well targeted magazine ads can even ad value. Who is to see this can't translate to email newsletters?
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/awkbook/ has a 1-page relational query program called qawk. Awk-based syntax, not SQL.
I guessed that from the format of the article and from its original title, which as I pointed out is unusually accurate: the person being interviewed is secondary, after the lunch.

It's a strange argument, though, to say that criticism must be less valid because they do this every week.
I think I am going to echo most of the other commentators.

I am working with a couple of startups and everyone is desparate for talent. I know many that would give a week or two with some small jobs to try you out.

That being said. Get some code samples out somewhere. Post a link to your failed startup. There may be another startup working on a similar or related idea who could integrate parts of your code and give you a job.

It is cool that you have a BS in CompSci but to me that means nothing. I know many people who have one but cant code for shit.

Let us know you can actually code.

Contact me and I will see what I can do to help you out.
This sounds like a one-sided personal feature request list. I don't think these feature ideas are even insightful. Last.fm's killer feature is scrobbling. It's almost a diary of my life through music. I'd continue to use Last.fm even if all it did was provide stats.
Yup. Appleseed is LAMP and built to work on shared hosts, and it installs in a few minutes.

That was by design from the beginning. I considered using Python or Ruby at points, but PHP was the easiest way to satisfy those requirements
Fair enough. I obviously only ever experience it from the perspective of an American, and theoretical knowledge doesn't hold a candle to experience.

As a deal: You tell your guys stop being dicks to me when I fly to London, and I'll tell my guys to stop being dicks to you when you fly to [US city of choice] :-D
I hope that if my startup doesn't take off that I'll be able get back in to a job. Though with 7yrs of actual corp. gig developing I might have a better chance.

Here some cool things you could do (some of which i'll have to do myself):

1.) Put your resume on Google docs NOW. Repost it from here.
Make it a living document.

2.) Get a Google sites account. Possibly put up examples of your programming knowledge (essays?). Point your name.com to it if you can, otherwise make sure the site is sites.google.com/yourname

3.) Get a github account. Push your work up (even if it is only examples of your knowledge)

4.) Contribute to FOSS projects, get to know the committers and make contacts.

5.) Check out some freelance sites and as I understand it you could probably undercut a lot of these people. This might be some added experience you'll be able to add to your resume. After several jobs your resume should look a bit better.

6.) Good luck chap! Give me your twitter account so I can follow and RT. :-)
Have to agree here, I just got done hiring a bunch of student assistants, then got hired myself at a new job at a company that is hiring another dozen people over the next year. Every month at our SF Drupal User Groups, there are usually around half a dozen people hiring. No esoteric programming skills needed for any of this, just some work in FOSS, especially on Drupal, could easily land you a job. Not to mention I just had two students graduate who both got good jobs, one at Sybase.
Thieving garden midgets...
In a recent job search I've found a github profile full of interesting projects to attract far more attention than job history and education. From my perspective employers really do seem to have a problem finding people that can actually write code and solve problems. A github page (or website with demos) just makes it so much easier for interested potential employers to quickly get a sense of your style and skill level. In design, architecture and other similar fields a portfolio is standard, it's actually somewhat surprising that this hasn't taken over in software.
The idea is simple. As you can see on the landing page: "tag your facebook friends anonymously!"
I think this can be funny. You can tag your friends anonymously, and you can see tags about yourself, and also you can comment and vote the tags.
Ask HN: How to place Amazon.com orders from code?
How would you go about programmatically buying from Amazon?