skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are a lot of different things to touch on here, too many to adequately be digested in this thread, but I will try to get you going in the right direction.

I found myself in a similar situation about 6 months ago. I graduated from the University of Michigan three years ago with a degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan and a 3.5 gpa. After college I got an amazing job opportunity in a rotation program at Intel, the mecca for aspiring computer architects and I had the world at my finger tips.

Fast forward two years: the rotation program had come to an end and I had come to the conclusion that working on hardware wasn't what I thought it was and what I really wanted to do is software. I was working in a post silicon validation group writing C++ on a tool used for Random Instruction Testing, but I felt like I wasn't growing. No one that I worked with was a good coder and I felt like I was getting worse and not better.

On the recommendation from a few friends I read The Passionate Programmer (http://www.amazon.com/Passionate-Programmer-Remarkable-Devel...) and it changed a lot of how I thought about my career. I highly recommend it.

I started thinking a lot about what I really wanted to do, what kind of place I wanted to work and what kinds of skills were in demand at those places. I spent every spare minute that I could for several months learning Ruby, Rails and everything I could about web development. I've been going to Meetups, meeting other developers, and making as many connections as I can. I am happy to report that I just quit my job last week and am starting at a startup working on Ruby and Rails full time in a couple weeks.

Find interesting new technologies that you are excited about and start building something outside of work. Look at the job postings for places that you want to work and work towards building those skillsets. Keep at and don't get discouraged. Find other like minded people to work with.

Keep a positive attitude and good things will happen.
I define lean as knowing how to experiment cheaply and have a sense of when you are pissing money away. The idea is to conserve cash long enough to find your business model.
I guess it's good in that we will have something concrete to which one can refer when trying to convince the friends and family to join a credit union.

This is the big lesson of this release: don't buy shady companies, even when they are cheap, because they will ruin your reputation.

Bank of America Home Loans was probably largely above-board with respect to its lending during the mortgage crisis, but then they decided to buy Contrywide, which was ... not so good. Now they get to take all of Countrywide's losses, both financially and in terms of public relationships. Countrywide didn't misbehave, Bank of America Corporation did, because Countrywide is defunct. And then people close their BofA accounts to make a statement, even though there was no relationship between BofA and Countrywide when Countrywide was being bad.

That said, this is all just speculation. Maybe this is actually about BofA. But I kind of doubt it.
Google was not the first search engine. Facebook was not the first social network. Dropbox was not the first cloud file storage system. It wasn't too late for any of those guys to look at established incumbents and just do it better.
Show HN: DemonTunes.com, web based music player.
I've been working on a new project of mine, and it's near completion for release.

You can listen to music for free, streamed via youtube. It's all web based and works via ajax!

It is really easy to share music with your friends, here a few examples:

A playlist of mine:
http://demontunes.com/p/br

Link to a song
http://demontunes.com/s/CCsPt6ZTbIQ

The website is: http://demontunes.com/ or http://demontunes.com/player/

Would like to hear some feedback!
Market researchers delve into subconscious
Marangoni convection in space: Observing wine-glass phenomenon
My point is that once local politics - remember it isn't cops that seize property it's DAs - kicks in then laws which are only for use against terrorists/makejor drugs dealers/organised crime can be used against ordinary people.

And given the population sizes of terrorists/drug dealers/etc compared to ordinary people - they are almsot always used against ordinary people
Besides that, I'm pretty sure the original Greek word was pronounced something like "to fawn." It's only once English speakers bastardized it that it started to resemble the Japanese word.
I think if you want to compare Facebook to something outdated or controlling, I'd try the "portals" of the turn of the millennium. It's a pretty natural extension we see with almost anything which subsists on advertisements: more attention means more views means more ad-clicks means more revenue. Of course Facebook and everything else financed by ads with a brain is moving to push as much of your activity onto its platform as possible.
Articles like this really demonstrate the value of HN as a community.

Most people would never think a relatively obscure software blog would be a source of some of the most reliable information about an event that the entire world is watching. Because we read HN (probably more often than we should), we are more informed than a sizable portion of news consumers.
Slides for the prezo: http://www.slideshare.net/sblank/customer-development-past-p...
I said no such thing. The reason I said these websites are well-established was exactly to highlight that I'd be much less afraid of any new entrants than he likely should be with his app. Even if new competitors took one percent of the market as a result of such a post, then unless you gained enough in publicity, it was a bad post to make.
Poll: Which is more important - the idea or the execution?
Definitely the idea
Probably the idea
Both are equally important
Probably the execution
Definitely the execution
Varies - depends on what you're talking about
Don't know/Don't care
Finally death to ailing Orkut.
Different tools for different scales, and places.

While on tour, Damon Albarn created an entire Gorillaz album on his iPad: http://thefall.gorillaz.com/

For a lot of people, the iPad has ended up being an awesome platform for $2 games. And that's valid too. We like to play. Sometimes we play by making cool stuff. It's not as if the iPad is the first general-purpose computing device to have a mix of "useful" stuff and games; how many Apple IIs were bought with the intent of balancing one's budget?
I'm a single founder with no investment working on mobile apps for daily deals. I've been working on my mobile apps (iOS and Android) for longer and I'm not getting anywhere near that kind of revenue. I would love to talk to you about marketing. I'm very inspired by your post. Any chance you have time for a chat?
This is possibly the most poorly written article I have ever read on HN.
That's cool. I'm glad to hear Dvorak's opinion. Here's mine:

Quit whining about Facebook. It's opt-in. People like it, so they opt in. Believe it or not, AOL was actually relevant and somewhat useful to people over a decade ago. Was it the best? No. Did it help people? Yes.

I hate to say this, but people do need training wheels with tech. Facebook makes things simple. I no longer have to sign up for 20 different accounts, figure out which friends use which services, remember different passwords, or have to learn 20 different interfaces -- I can now message, chat, organize, collaborate, send pictures, share links, and do a bunch of stuff at once. It's called having a broad set of features. Facebook is "training wheels" the same way something like the Windows OS is "training wheels." Internet Explorer is bundled, but you are free to download Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Flock, Opera, Seamonkey, etc. It bundles Windows Media Player, but you can download VLC, Miro, iTunes, Foobar2000, MediaMonkey, WinAmp, or hundreds of other things.

Facebook didn't magically kill Wikipedia, Craigslist, Hacker News, Instapaper, or the thousands of other companies and products available. It's called choice. People have choices. They have a lot of choices. Let them decide. If a product is easier to use, by all means use it.

(end of rant)
Ah, if i could only down vote. Come on folks, you discover something which was created eons ago and think it's new.
Wait...Red Hat provides support for MySQL? The same Red Hat that is upset that Oracle (owner of MySQL) provides support for Red Hat (or a minor variant of Red Hat)? Interesting.
To my untrained eye, it seems like "raise lots of money, buy many, many patents, build nothing so the target can't bargain with their patent portfolio, and then start negotiating". Once you have that machine working you can iron out the details. It's like domainers - get there first, buy everything that looks vaguely useful and extract rents.

What's the hard part?
Hmpf, I suppose this is a misunderstanding. I was just "playing" with your last sentence. I did not get that impression and certainly didn't (intend to) put words in your mouth.
I still don't understand why if this is srsly damning evidence that WikiLeaks, who hypothetically had it first, didn't lead with that before pissing off every government that can read English. If they'd led with bank fraud they'd be held as heroes by the government/ press, all the more hilarious when they later bite those same hands. Running things in this order means the last leak wasn't nearly as effective and this one is likely to be tarred by the reputation of those who brought it to light.

There has to be some bit of the story we don't have here to make a bunch of very smart people act this way.
One of the bi-products of unionized teachers. It also makes it impossible for parents to go to another school (the school is funded through taxes no matter, even if they do decide to send their kids to a private school). Crappy teachers also get to stay and are defended by the unions.

People wonder why the schools are so terrible in the US, but refuse to think that it could have anything to do with the stranglehold the unions have on our education system.
Where does the tritium come from? As I recall tritium is one proton and two neutrons. So, you are saying that one hydrogen, that is, one proton, from the water captures a neutron and becomes deuturium and then later the deuturium captures another neutron and becomes tritium? Is that correct? Net, to those two reactions have a signficant reaction rate in the context?
Yeah, this is a fairly common snowclone (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowclone) that is often false, or when true transmits very little information at all: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3001

Just because someone doesn't have a word for something doesn't mean they have a concept for it; they might express it in two words instead of one. Also, most of the time you hear the claim that a language doesn't have a word for something, the claim is wrong, and the language actually does have such a word, while the person in question is ignorant of the language they are talking about (I presume that patio11 is not ignorant of Japanese, but may just be making a sloppy generalization).

It's used as a way of demonstrating that some entire culture thinks or acts in some particular way, which is usually a poor approximation of reality. While there are distinct cultures that have distinct practices, cultures are generally not so homogenous as to not even have a way to express a particular concept that goes against cultural norms.
For the absolute clueless about configuring MySQL, there's a nice script that provides some guidelines on what to do based on your server config. Check out "tuning primer" <http://www.day32.com/MySQL/>;
If Google is going to be launching a social network called "Circles" in the near future, I think they would launch it tomorrow, because tomorrow is Pi Day. (This is meant in all seriousness, Google seems to enjoy small flourishes like that in general, and it would fit with their company culture.)
No one uses Google Reader? Is that in general, or among people who understand and use RSS?
This article completely disregards reality to make a fantasy point that flies in the face of the well-known startup wisdom: Ideas are much less important than execution. Does it use real examples from entrepreneurship to make that hugely controversial point? No. The examples have nothing to do with entrepreneurship.

> * Innovation means coming up with something useful that others have not yet thought of.*

No, innovation means applying an idea whose time has come, which probably has been tried by others before unsuccessfully, in such a way that it works. This involves great execution far more than great ideas.

Skip this article. Not worth your time.
Partitioning my digital life into security domains
To be fair he never said anything about positive cash flow. $100,000 in revenue when your business model is paying your users can easily not be profitable.
slides are here: http://db.tt/ZWBTfdl
For starters, it doesn't have anything to do with preparation
Post it to HN and link the HN link here so we can find and upvote it.
Cite evidence for that last sentence. It is an extraordinary claim: that law enforcement is in fact a massive criminal conspiracy used to defraud ordinary people of their lawful property.
Unfortunately, not yet at my school :(
Hackers, is publicly viewable code good or bad in terms of employment?
Maybe somebody has written quite a few programs that work great, but they were just hacked together. The code may not be the prettiest, it may not have proper comments and it may not be robust capable of handling everything thrown at it. It may have a few known bugs, it may not even be fully complete. In such a case is it still good to put these products up in public view even though they are not of amazing quality(maybe not even your best work)? or is it better to keep them private? I ask because I see it both ways. Employers would likely want to know you have done something, but then once they see that they can read your code, see you didn't handle every exception to perfection and write you off as a lazy idiot.
Principles about what? Maybe her philosophical views are too complex to be distilled down to a few simple phrases. You sound like one of those people who just discovered a new religion and is going about judging everybody else. I suggest you call your friend up and apologize for your histrionics, which sound rooted in economic insecurity.
I'd agree, but with two caveats:

1. I still dont like laptops that much either

2. iPad makes a great productivity device in a supplementary role. It substitutes for reference books and documentation. And it's better to switch to the iPad if you want to read a long article. And there's those little single-purpose apps for doing things like regular expressions, drawings, recordings.
You switch and some other day you hear google abandon it.

Edit: too soon, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2320224
You forgot the alien invasion!
What I consider ideal is a multi-layered structure where a "graphic shell" (Gnome-shell or Unity) sits on top of "agnostic" windows manager code.

The current version of Gnome actually seems "good enough" to do this. My main concern is that it stay that way. To consider an opposite pole, KDE is certainly open source too. But, for example, to use the KDE code to parse the gnome/kde panels start menu you need to import the entire KDE virtual file system. IE, KDE has a monolithic structure in that regard. Uh, it's open and you could rip out this piece of the code but it would be a mess. Gnome isn't that bad... yet.
Anecdotal evidence: the iPad has completely replaced the laptop for my girlfriend. She hasn't opened up her laptop in months. She uses it mostly for email, for editing and sending presentations and documents via Keynote/Numbers/Pages/Dropbox, and for interacting with the numerous websites which she needs to deal with.

Since she spends a lot of her days on the move and doesn't like to work at a desk, the iPad has been a godsend for her. Before, she used to have to carry her craptop around and plug it in all the time to get power. Now, she just carries her iPad, and usually doesn't even bother to take the power supply with her, because the battery lasts so long. And she can use it on the bus, on the tube, etc.
What about getting QR codes into something more traditional, like Excel?
False Alarm: Google Circles Not Coming Now, And Probably Not Ever
I think as long as you contextualize what the goal of the project was, then it can only be a strength (it shows that you're not afraid to have some of your uglier code glimpsed by the world). We all write ugly code now and then.

My biggest fear when hiring someone is that they're so image conscious that every commit must look perfect... I know this ads about a 20% time overhead onto everything and not only is it extremely vane, is typically part of a quest to get job offers, etc. In general not things that are valuable to the current employer at all.
Ask HN: Rate my startup - Simple security risk assessment
The problem
The security professional: I need to do a security risk assessment to comply with policy or regulation (e.g. FFIEC). The organization has no risk assessment methodology and I am going to get buried in Excel.
The pen tester: I need to explain the business impact of the technical vulnerabilities I have found.
The cloud vendor: I need to pass a customer security review to get their business.
The small business: I need a risk assessment process to comply with PCI-DSS: Includes an annual process: “12.1.2 identifies threats, and vulnerabilities, and results in a formal risk assessment”.

How are customers solving the problem today?
The security professional: Write a new methodology based on OCTAVE, OWASP, ISO27005 etc. Develop a complicated set of spreadsheets.
The pen tester: Use a simple high, medium, low risk rating or let the customer security department explain the risk to the business.
The cloud vendor: Complete a spreadsheet and provide the same information in so many slightly different forms for every customer.
The small business: hire a contractor or consultant.

How are the current solutions deficient?
The security professional: Re-inventing the wheel in every company. Spreadsheets are hard to manage, have no version control and are hard to collaborate on. Current security risk assessment tools are difficult to use and tailored for operational or enterprise risk rather than security risk.
The pen tester: Not actually rating the risk to the. business, passes the buck to the internal security team and reduces the chance of getting more business.
The cloud vendor: Takes time and man power, treated as a compliance exercise, does not convince the customer their risks are mitigated and therefore loses the business.
The small business: expensive.

Can you provide a solution to this problem that is a ‘need to have’ vs a nice to have?
The security professional: Software as a service, no need to re-invent a methodology, easy to use, share and report on
The pen tester: Simple web or mobile based way to turn technical security vulnerabilities to business risks. Enables focus on core competency (breaking things) while speaking the business language and winning more work.
The cloud vendor: Assess the risks once. Easily adjust for each customer. Shows the customer how their risks are mitigated rather than filling in a compliance list. Saves time and money.
The small business: Simple process that can cut down consulting costs eventually eliminating them while still meeting the regulatory requirement.

Application in beta: link in first comment

Would really appreciate any thoughts and feedback
Among my friends who work at Google and are avid consumers of RSS feeds, all hate Google Reader. In fact, I heard murmurs about how incompetent the Reader team is/was and how it's not up to snuff compared to other products.

I use it, but I hate it. I'm just too lazy to find something better and port my feeds over.
OOS is a multi-billion dollar business.

Solr and Lucene are the largest search-related software today and Lucid Imagination provides services around it.

Redhat, IBM, Oracle, and even Facebook regularly release OSS and it's certainly related to huge profits it makes as well.

Don't forget SuSE, github, collabnet, wordpress, sonatype, sourceforge, and TONS more..

The list goes on and on, but yes, it's a different demographic and the economics work different - BUT there is TONS of money to be made in OSS.
Elevator Pitches by 20 SXSW Startups
Link: http://www.simplesecurityra.com
The article doesn't go far enough: the iPad is the temporary hack bridge between technologies. The major function of the iPad I have seen among people who are not making hardware accessories has been as a social bridge so they can get work done in a place/time when pulling out a whole laptop would be weird, awkward or rude. For example: if you're having a lunch meeting and the other person is late, pulling out a whole laptop rubs in how late they were because you had time to "set up and settle into a device" instead of "messing about on your iPad" which is socially closer to messing about on your phone, and we hold no stigma against for a waiting person.

Having a sister 10 years younger than me (14) has taught me that younger generations are not use to our protocols and therefore hold no squeamishness about breaking the conventions of them. For example, if you have her (or her peer's) attention you know this because she has removed one phone(MP3 player) earbud to listen to you. She doesn't see continuing to use the technology as a potential distraction/rudeness, and in many senses resents the older generations (teachers/parents) for demanding her absolute attention for every trivial thing.

The iPad is our bridge from dropping in and out of the internet in the real world all the time, because a full drop is seen as rude, but her generation won't really care about that. They'll just drop in and out as they please, which is why I suspect that they'll have little use for the iPad, except as the training bridge for dinosaurs like us.
I'm looking forward to the further convergence of iOS and OS X.

As the owner of a mid-2010 Macbook Pro and a first-gen iPad, I think the new Macbook Air, which is a significant step in that direction, could replace both devices for me.

The iPad cannot be used for productivity work (coding, writing, even longer emails), but my 15" MBP is relatively clunky, especially for the type of consumption activities that the iPad excels at (i.e. reading on the couch, watching a TV episode, etc.) I wish I could have the best of both worlds.

The new iPad version of Garage Band really captures this: in some ways it's better than the Logic Pro I have on my laptop; I can play keys on it, I can trigger drums with my fingers, etc., but it's painfully underpowered (in terms of CPU, memory, I/O, etc.) to comfortably record a serious track on it (despite what Gorillaz accomplished).

I'm waiting for a Macbook Air with a full touch screen, and a new OS that fully combines the simplicity and interactivity of iOS with the power and breadth of OSX.
As a linguist? I agree, I don't like it, and literally that post went through my head when I was re-reading prior to hitting publish. As a writer? It is zippy and communicative, more than "The nation of Japan has chosen, through its political process, to invest a large amount of its resource surplus into disaster preparedness even though some observers believe it has long-since passed the point of diminishing returns."
Yup, that's what I said in another comment. Sadly no one else here seems to care about product but only about revenue, however it is achieved.
YouPivot - Search your history by what you were doing at the same time