skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
eh, I didn't go to college. of course, when I graduated highschool it was 1997, and I had 2 years of paid experience as a sysadmin, so I was able to jump right into a .com job, and I'm a UNIX SysAdmin- a computer janitor. SysAdmins often have less formal education than Developers, so some of this was just that I 'got lucky' - but I do know many others who have done ok without formal education.

Yeah, if I had stuck it out, I'd probably be earning another 20%-30%, (just looking at what my co-workers make) but I'm still comfortably into the six figure range.

Granted, that's not great for the bay area, average nerd salary around here is north of $140K, and I don't rate that unless I'm contracting, but it's certainly an OK salary for someone who hasn't hit 30 yet.

The key to making decent money without college is to get jobs that count (really, this is good advice regardless of your other educational plans. Most places a year of experience is worth a little less than a year of education. If you can get both, you are golden.) If you want to be a computer guy, don't take a summer job tending a till- if you can't find an internship, pester local offices to see if they need a windows reboot monkey, or see if you can get the local web-design place to give you minimum wage to do basic stuff. Or repair computers for your parent's friends. Charge $5 or $10/hr if you have to... it's experience and reccomendations you are after at that stage.

My first job was at a mom and pop computer repair place... I was paid less than minimum wage, but it was an awesome experience, and it paid off handsomly. Remember that if you don't have education, you need experience. Without education or experience, nobody is going to hire you for a 'real job' (at least for 'real pay') Find someone willing to let you do a 'real job' for next to no pay for a period of time. Remember that at these jobs a good reccomendation from the boss is worth many times over what they are paying you.

Certifications are nice, but with the exception of perhaps, the ccie, none of them can touch a few years experience doing the job you are trying to get.

I wouldn't want to discurage people from getting educated- I think college can be very valuable (look at my grammar.) but not going to college doesn't condemn you to poverity.
I'd like to add that it's important to read different sorts of books, not just many. I know a person who has a very large (300+) collection of harlequin-style novels that she has actually read. Breadth and quality counts more than volume
Simple. They don't let people create terrible 90s-esque designs for a page. Most "amateur content providers" (I remember Geocities mentioning something like that) won't stick around if they can't make it look terrible.
If that was the case, they would probably get a dedicated domain for it instead of using knol.google.com.
Does anybody else think the design looks a bit two-faced?

Serious-looking, authoritative text - and a round, cartoony button asking you to help out.

EDIT: Also, the site can't seem to decide whether it wants to be single-spaced or double-spaced. And it's not certain of what fonts it wants to use, either.
get a degree dude. you'll start off making at least $50K minimum if you do computer science. Build your life financially then do your own thing.
Ah, I had a different view of "walk away" then. I was thinking more of a "hit by a bus" analogy.

Using your definition, I don't think walking away is something anyone on that team is interested in doing. They're already living in their "walk away" phase.
Yeah. As I said elsewhere in the thread - that's weird for them. Possibly a sign of the product's being so new?
It's not just a physical attribute. It's a social and psychological attribute. Whether or not it's relevant for this site is a different issue, but summing it up as a physical attribute is an outright PC falsehood.
One of the favorites in my home as a child was "The Paper-bag Princess." It's a turnabout on that old prince charming tale.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paper_Bag_Princess
Bit of a late follow-up, but - yeah, that's a superb theme.

At the same time, using Firefox doesn't FEEL right. It's not as polished as Safari by a long shot. That and MultiClutch go a long way to fixing the problem, but it's a problem that, as long as Safari is around, doesn't exactly need solving.
So now we are once again making heroes of criminals.

... lame
> However, they tend to close their minds to cool ideas from other schools of thought.

That they definitely do. They reject positivism as an approach to economics on the basis that you can't do repeatable experiments with entire societies, preferring a deductive approach that yields statements that are correct but weak. But as a result, they miss out on theories that aren't quite rigorous but nonetheless have good (but imperfect) predictive value.
higher education in the US is heavily subsidised. The meagre fees that the lower colleges charge are waived if you are poor, and at that point all you need to cover is food/books/rent.
David Pogue - Eye-Fi Review
instead of 1 append init=/bin/sh to the kernel command line.
I mean more subsidization, so that changing careers is a real option for most people.
That was terrible presentation. That would have worked much better as a document than as a slide.

Aesthetic criticism aside, isn't this something that some OSes already have? Mac OS X lets you see all the files you edited yesterday, for instance. Doesn't that negate the need for a journal, or is there something I'm missing?
Meanwhile, I am working on my top 10 list of top 10 lists.
Tip for the author: instead of of typing while [ 1 ]; ..., type while :;
Why - the quality obsessed could just stick to the Apple shop, the existence of other shops doesn't prevent that?
As a counterpoint: wouldn't they have been more functional if they'd been put on one page? And if the examples had been sized a bit smaller so I didn't have to scroll just to see the comments?
How much trash talk is there regarding the OLPC itself? All the criticism I've heard is for the company designing it, not for the computers themselves.
By now she is getting better and better, even googling for solutions to problems ;-)
His analysis doesn't make it clear that Indian R&D has much to teach other nations.

Take the fact that he was impressed by the # of hours of training each employee received.

Even if the number of hours of training per employee changed the quality of R&D, I'd want to know what the training consisted of. The large company I work at offers tons of training, but almost all of it is brain-dead.

R&D should be judged by its results, not by the number of hours of training given to employees. With this in mind, one would might be more inclined to draw the lines by company instead of country. For example, an answer to 'What companies can learn from Apple's R&D' would be much more interesting.

Basically, I think that the author was biased towards showing India in a positive light, and only looked at data in a way that supported his bias.
If it had a 4 GB compact-flash card for storage, it wouldn't even have any moving parts.

It seems like the main computer size limitation these days (at least for low-powered computers) is IO hardware. Keyboards and monitors need to be large, flat surfaces...unless people significantly improve projector keyboards, for example.
That's a great fg quote. Thanks for the inspiration, I'm outta (where I work at the moment) here as soon as I can.

Not an on-the-spot decision, but another nail to confirm my plan to leave the borg in a few months.
VCs Have It Wrong: No Elevator Pitch? No Problem
From the article:

We are happy to announce an agreement with the New Yorker magazine which allows any author to add one cartoon per knol from the New Yorker's extensive cartoon repository. Cartoons are an effective (and fun) way to make your point, even on the most serious topics.

Is today April 1? Does adding a pseudo-intellectual New Yorker cartoon to every page really make the information seem more useful to people?
Why would you memorize poetry? Just curious.

One of my favorites: http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/57.html
The most successful VCs probably live on top of the biggest buildings, meaning they have a very long elevator ride.

Also, these days you could pull your iPhone out of your pocket and show a small demo on the spot.
Great, another Google service I am forced to use to increase the search rank of my web site :-(

Edit: done entering a knol about "Mondkalender" (moon calendars). I really have mixed feelings about this... What would people's incentive be to write on knol rather than on their own blog? Presumably Knol articles will be rated higher, so Google's power forces people to use Knol (certainly no SEO will skip knolling). On the other hand with the rating and personal credibility effect, it could yield some interesting results.
He also ignores the fact that aside from hours of shooting, the wedding photographer also has to process the photos and create the albums, all told its many more hours of work. It's a grind.
Medpedia announced: collaborative online encyclopedia of medicine and health
Net firms in music pirates deal
And, as other people have noted, hours upon hours of photo processing, consultations and contracts, and dealing with potentially high-string couples and their families.

My fiancee did a wedding and it was probably about three weeks of work, overall, along with several meetings beforehand. (That was as a freelance wedding videographer, not photographer, though. A photographer would probably have less editing time, but not significantly less.)
Inbox Zen with the three folder email system
Family lose Narnia web name fight
Far too many people go to college. Most of you went to decent schools, so you're probably not aware that US state schools are literally inundated by federally-subsidized mouth-breathers, who are doomed to drop out and work at Burger King, or get communications degrees and work at Burger King.

A high school graduate in the 1960s could earn a middle class income through unskilled labor. This was an historical anomaly, and there's no reason to compare wage data today with that of the past. As soon as non-Western manufacturing labor entered the market, the price was driven down. Anomaly over.
We intend it to.

Or, given the timescale, run HTTP::Engine, which is an extraction of the Catalyst::Engine system that's designed to be used by any framework - i.e. to become a perl equivalent to WSGI - and which Catalyst is going to port to once it's baked.
The big deal with military experience is that it's just about the only way to rack up a lot of flight time on commercial-grade gear without having a money tree growing in the back yard.

I don't think airlines necessary value "combat pilot", but that a larger percentage of people with the required amount of flight time tend to have logged that time in the military.
Interesting.. actually, that's my website. One day while bored I fished out some of the best startup links from my Delicious bookmarks and put them on there. When I went to put an introduction to it that quote popped into my head. Hope you don't mind.
Very true. Normalization is nice, but it usually won't improve performance. If it does, you should fire the guy that designed the previous database ;-)
I miss my days of bare metal programming. I heard those things even have multitasking OSs these days.
That is an interesting point - implied in that statement is lifestyle businesses are crowding out cashout businesses. That may be true, but it is very debatable and speculative (so a reasonable commentary about the dearth of IPOs wouldn't have to talk about it).
Looks like an About.com clone, to me. There's no "wiki" involved here...the point of a wiki is "anyone can edit it", not what data the wiki happens to contain. WikiPedia is first, and foremost, a wiki. (Secondly, it's a culture. The data it contains only comes in a distant third, I think.)
The Secret Coach
That's a pretty interesting idea - public disclosure of health seems very wrong (where every investor could read the doctor's annual report on Jobs's health), but something in the direction of what pilots do seems quite reasonable. The pilot is checked by a doctor, and the only information publicized is a "pass/fail". Any conditions remain between the pilot and the doctor, and in particular any conditions which are irrelevant to the task at hand. (If Jobs has erectile dysfunction, no one would ever know)

Anyhow: The way Apple works today, there is little reason the SEC should be involved. Everybody knows that Jobs kept a life-threatening illness from investors until the last minute, and everybody knows that the company would be in deep shit if he had died. Hence, the risk of him keeping any current serious condition secret is known to investors and the share price reflects this. This is also why a (minor?) issue such as this one causes so much noise. Speculators are speculating.
That's a lot more descriptive of objectivism than of libertarianism, yet it seems like a rather small minority of hackers are objectivists.
"A high school graduate in the 1960s could earn a middle class income through unskilled labor. This was an historical anomaly, and there's no reason to compare wage data today with that of the past."

Interesting response.

One can also consider the shift toward the "service economy," which in many cases is lower-paying and even easier to outsource than unskilled physical labor like manufacturing and construction.
To Have and Own. Portability and the future of the Web.
True ease of writing comes from art, not chance;
As he moves best who learns the steps of dance;
'Tis not enough no harshness cause offence;
The sound must seem an echo of the sense.
Alexander Pope, early hacker & investor (in the south sea bubble)
Is there a role/need for a "Bill Campbell" type in a startup? Perhaps as an early employee/team member?
Hopefully software patents will be emasculated and stop being a 'big stick' for companies like that to carry around.
>Thus we assume that people are rational, will act rationally and by extension, live peacefully with their neighbors.

If libertarianism was contingent on people acting rationally and peacefully, then I wouldn't be a libertarian. Rather, I assume that people respond to incentives. When people have incentive to live peaceful and orderly lives, they tend to do it more than when those incentives are lacking.

I find it mystifying that the "progressive" type assumes that citizens will behave stupidly and violently but that they will somehow elect smart, saintly public servants to guide them.

I accept the Public Choice critique of government. I believe that government actors are just ordinary people like you and me and that they also respond to incentives. Disturbingly, they often have only very weak incentives to act for the public good, but strong incentives to SAY they are working for the public good, which I think explains much of what we see in politics. I don't think giving someone power will instantly make them a selfless angel.

Libertarianism is a realist philosophy, and it outperforms other philosophies in addressing the real world.
Hmmm - perhaps the best advice to anyone getting married might be: buy a dozen digital camers and give them to friends and family to use at the wedding and have a good chance of getting more good photos than the median wedding photographer.
Xobni VP Engineering leaves for own startup
The articles, even those by MDs, read like the sort of padded, plodding writing-for-hire crap used to manipulate Google's rankings.

Google should be fighting "MFA" (Made-For-Adsense) content, not joining the party.
Well, you're gonna laugh, but... I usually don't know what day of the week it is. I stopped observing weekends a long time ago, so everything's kinda lost in time.

Besides, with the things I do, I have to keep careful records for a long time, and be able to find anything really quick. Right now I organize things by theme (project, topic, etc...). An alternate organization scheme that does not get in the way would be cool.

For me organizing anything by exact date is overkill. I need to be able to organize by day, month, week, or year (all at the same time).
God forbid that anyone should be in a union, or organize to demand decent pay and benefits. Why, they might go on strike!

What a load of right-wing garbage.
yep, hackers in the old sense of the word
I bet those crippled R2D2's start flying off the shelf. (I also went to knol.com first). Could they become the next utube.com?
It's a loss for net neutrality. But not a win for the war against piracy.

Things will be so nice once the music industry accepts this truth: recorded music is no longer a product, it's a marketing tool. It's time to start monetizing live concerts on a web scale. It will be the only way to keep the cash flowing. People are becoming more and more accustomed to getting their music for free, and through more and more legitimate channels (e.g. snuzu.com)
Also, the disease he had wouldn't kill him immediately. Even if he had disclosed earlier, the only purpose it would have served would have been to make the stock more volatile for a longer period of time. It's reasonable to argue that keeping the disease secret was a responsible decision.
On the subject of scrolling, using the middle mouse button to scroll will scroll both the page and the map, which makes it a little annoying to use. The easiest way I can think of to fix this offhand would be to scale to the window size better (I am currently running 1024x768).

Also, I agree with the others who have suggested placing shows on the map immediately after a search.
Google definitely views Wiipedia as a potential threat. Just look at their SERPs... Wikipedia links are usually in the top 5 on pretty much every factual term.
I've noticed there's a difference in how people who label themselves "religious" and people who choose the label "spiritual" act (at least in the Bible Belt). Most of the people in my hometown who chose religious would beat you over the head with how good of a Christian they are and criticize you for not following what was clearly the One True Way. My father-in-law is proud of being a religious man and it's frustrating that he's unwilling to accept other's beliefs.

The ones who chose spiritual were much more pleasant to be around. My spiritual friends usually let me know what time their churches' main events kick off and that I have a standing invite if I decide I'm interested. Most of the time I forget they go to church X until I ask them to do something and they have prior plans involving their church. They also don't brag about their work within the community. They tend to be the type who will say "Glad I could help" and really mean it when someone thanks them. In contrast, my father-in-law is proud of how religious he is and gets upset if he feels he wasn't properly recognized for his good works.

I've noticed that certain types of communities (usually the mainstream ones aimed at moms) tend to also be more religious than not. They're ok communities until something that has a religious aspect comes up and then it's witch hunting time. I've also run across a few niche Christian sites when looking for things related to my hobbies. They don't seem to have flame war issues, but they have closed forums for the main discussions and public forums to vet new members.
After the second world war, the GI Bill heavily subsidized tuition for many American veterans.* This led to a huge surge in college enrollment, which persisted through the decade. Greater exposure to higher education led to more interest among the general population. Furthermore, students could avoid being drafted for the Vietnam war.

The long-term increase in enrollment raised the bar for expected education in potential employees, and that has in turn perpetuated itself. The employability gap between the college-educated and those with high school diplomas or less has continued to widen, and may now be escalating to a split in the college-educated.

* These benefits were realistically only accessible to white veterans, though. Most universities were still segregated.
> Libertarianism is probably the most "black and white" of the political ideaologies

I think Marxism and radical environmentalism (Earth First, Human Extinction Project) are equally so.
Zimbabweans play the zero game - daily expenses in the trillions
After the absolute DESTRUCTION i've taken over the design here - which is GREAT, i don't want design holding this back.
I've updated the look - actually reverted to an old look with some of the input changes made from recommendations here.

I hope this one is better recieved :)
Still has some tweaking to be done, but a few simple changes give it a whole new look.
Hope you like this one better.
Hyperinflation like this presents interesting problems as a hacker. Heck they have a 100 billion Zimbabwe dollar note. Forty times the size of a 32 bit word.
Post: some products don't have a elevator pitch that can describe them completely and accurately, you need the experience to fully understand the product.

Me: The nature of the VC game is funding unproven things. If the experience is the differentiator than that is what is unproven and in the risk lies the reward. Basically, if the product.

This argument may seem tangential, but I think its important. Innovating an experience is the same as innovating a technology, in the beginning is may not be as explainable (or the market size may not be known) because it hasn't yet been experienced.
Preferably as a block quote? =P
Hope you don't mind.

Not at all. Finding this and getting nice feedback here certainly made my day. I love any opportunity to add value. Thanks to all of you.

Nice little site. You should build it up and add an "About Me" link.
heaven forbid anyone get paid the fair market value of their labor. instead lets have a bunch of thugs threaten to go on strike and prevent anyone else from working to artificially drive up their wages.
Except for areas with a particularly high number of venues, (downtown, college campus, etc), the shows should turn up in groups based on where they're playing.

Actually, once you get going and have time to start adding features, I'd recommend trying to run some analysis on venues within the search range, and have places that typically fit the search pattern show up on the initial search. Searching for particular shows is certainly useful, but there would also be a lot of times when I'd like to just check out what type of music a place regularly plays. At any rate, it's just something to think about when you get a chance.
Running Catalyst is a goal. If it turns out that we have some time to really make it nice, I'd prefer to support any framework that uses HTTP::Engine. Right now, that's nothing, but since HTTP::Engine is basically extracted from Catalyst, getting Catalyst to run will be easy. But it also means that we'll get other Perl frameworks like CGI::App (they've indicated interest, anyway), Continuity, Jifty (perhaps), etc.

The Python guys may be happy with one framework... but this is Perl. There's more than one way to do it :)

BTW, I'm a Catalyst core developer, so I'll certainly do everything I can to make working with Catalyst on GAE enjoyable. That's what I want for my applications. But really, getting the web framework to work is the easy part. Getting a Perl that meets Google's requirements is the hard part.
I don't think HN is for you.
Do you believe that no one would have seen the potential for networking computers without government funding?

Just because government funding was central to developing large section of the internet does not mean some similar system would not have developed anyway.
Twitter Bug Exposes Private Updates
Word. I'm getting sick of Google's lack of design sense. Either stick with the spartan, or hire some good designers. I'm sure that horrendous 'write something' button was the result of an A-B test, but the knol logo is an embarrassment.
It could end up being like google where there are 2 or 3 with complementary skills that lead. Ive would probably be one of them.