skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: acquiring expertise in a field in order to start a startup?
I started Physics grad school this Fall, but I have recently considered dropping out in order to find a job in industry (I'd like to work at a startup). I know this could look really bad to employers, but I just have no motivation to continue my studies

Recently I've been working on a programming project on my own (a sort of video game), as a way to improve my programming skills, and I've been working on it with alot more motivation than studying for my Physics classes. I'm still fairly new to programming so I can't say I'm committed to programming over Physics yet

Anyways, the semester is almost over and I have to make a decision soon as to whether to move back home (Los Angeles) or stay in Austin to find a job. After reading Paul Graham's essays, I think I'm willing to take the risks involved in running my own business, or at least joining someone else's startup.

But my programming skills aren't that great. Most startups do not interest me (I'm not interested in Iphone apps, social networking, etc). But analytics seems pretty interesting.

Startups are usually done by people who are already very talented in a field of expertise. The problem is that I would like to get that expertise in some business area so I can then start my own business. That is why I would like to get some kind of programming job in a business that I think I would like enough that I can become an expert in it (ie Analytics). Therefore, I see myself as wasting time by staying in grad school.

The question I'm dealing with is whether it really is worth it to stay in Austin to try to find an Analytics startup (however, I haven't seen many job listings online for analytics startups), or just go back to LA and work for an analytics non-startup?
And do remember that the "creation versus consumption" thing is a talking point originally introduced by... Microsoft! People somehow seem to have adopted it as a simple truth, but it's really a piece of marketing.
It is tantamount to "shut up". That's what I said. You dismissed his point of view because of his skin color. You looked up his race and based your opinion on him based on that. Had he been of black or asian descent you wouldn't have made the argument you made. You even acknowledge this. You wanted to make an argument but you quickly had to look up if his race matched your preconceived notions about his race because otherwise your argument wouldn't have been valid. On the internet.

I don't know how to spell this out further. Are you really this obtuse?
IPads in schools: 'The last generation with backpacks'?
Used Cars In Chennai
Used cars search for chennai. With filters based on fueltype, features, transmission, etc..
This is about the article which, if true, is about racism.

If you're alluding that there is no racism, I disagree with you. I will, however, say that there is far less in the tech community than the world at large.

>I have no college education, came from single family home blah blah womp womp.

If you have no college education, I do respect your will power. But just because someone is willing to pay you because your work is superior to others does not mean racism does not exist.

I am OK with what NewME is doing. It is giving young black entrepreneurs a chance that was never afforded to them. There isn't enough coders who're black so I would like them start at a younger age than a mature adult.

As an aside, I grew up being of mixed ethnicity (primarily black/white) while going to an all-boy mostly white Catholic school while living in a mostly black neighborhood, growing up poor, and had racist comments thrown at me constantly from both blacks and whites.
Vienna, VA (DC area). Full time.

LastPass / Xmarks

Want to play with every new toy that comes out and make apps for them?

https://lastpass.com/jobs

Joe@LastPass.com
SEEKING WORK
We're a offering consulting/contract work around Nokia's Qt framework.
We're also interested in doing more general work in the world of open source, desktop, mobile.

If you're interested contact us via http://woboq.com/ We're based in Berlin but look for remote work everywhere.
PHP experience can poison development in other languages.
I really enjoyed Mark Zuckerberg's video: "The biggest risk is to not take any risks."
The "racist" tag has become a contemporary excommunication. That might be good were it always applied accurately. But perhaps the diligence of a Soledad O'Brien, interested more in arresting video than strict fairness to subject, makes the tag something very dangerous.

There was a day when people thought witches necessarily worse than the people who spotted witches. Go look at how that turned out.

But of course you and yours wouldn't be so stupid and unfair.

HELLO DOWN-VOTERS. Why bother framing a response when you can just misuse a forum moderation tool? It's intelligence of a kind . . .
One of the signs of a non-functioning and/or non-democratic government is the wish to centralize everything, all in the name of "ensuring hygiene and safety" (or whatever their subjects will buy).
The point of Patrick's essay isn't "Programming is lame" or "you shouldn't be proud of your programming accomplishments." How did anyone take that away?

> It isn't an easy profession and involves far more than typing in a bunch of things that make computers do stuff.

This is true. Nobody said that wasn't the case.

> I'm not afraid to tell others that I'm a programmer. I
> think most people understand what that is by now. I write
> programs for computers.

Look, I love writing code. I <3 proper testing. I take pride in my work and try to provide the best code I can possibly write.

That said, coding is what we do to achieve something. Maybe you're trying to make it easier for your support team to track tickets, or helping your client's customers save the most money.

I get that you're proud of your development skills, but at some point your software has to solve a business need, and you need to understand what the need is and how your software is solving it. All the unit tests and properly factored code won't mean anything if you don't. You'll write unnecessary features, or miss writing necessary ones.

Patrick's point as far as I understood it was that we all understand this but we're not billing ourselves that way. If I'm in an interview, or discussing my work with a non-technical associate, I emphasize my ability to understand business needs and write software to meet them. When I talk to technical folks, I emphasize that I unit- and integration-test all of my code and that I understand why DRY code is great.

> The problem I had with Patrick's essay is how derogatory
> it is to what we do.

On the contrary, I think it celebrated what we do. Not the technical aspects -- squeezing performance out of underpowered machines or designing remarkably simple architectures -- but the final outcomes. This app saved us millions per year. These new dashboard reports helped us earn 20% than expected this quarter.
Ask HN: Using Odesk/Elance etc. to scale workforce
Just wondering if anyone else has hired from Odesk/Elance/freelancer to shore up your startup's workforce temporarily. We're way too overwhelmed with work (a lot of it is housekeeping type work), but we don't have enough business to hire more perm devs/administrators. Please share experience/advice if you've done this before or avoided going this route.
Cyrus Innovation. NYC. Full time.

Cyrus Innovation (www.cyrusinnovation.com) is a small (~40 people) NYC-based Agile development consulting firm. As pioneers in Agile methodology, we pride ourselves on being named one of Inc 5000’s fastest growing companies for three consecutive years. We embrace the latest Agile practices, open source tools, and strive for continuous process improvement. We provide XP teams on demand to both start-ups and enterprise organizations. We are looking for creative individuals to join our community who value team work and strive to work with a company that values quality software as much as you.

What you can enjoy at Cyrus:

- A true 40 hour work week. Period.

- Health, Dental, Vision, 401(k)

- An annual personal budget and paid time off for professional development

- Experience working with languages including Java, Ruby, Groovy, Scala, and Javascript

At Cyrus, we strive to continuously enhance our day-to-day methods that keep us at the top of our game and help everyone improve on what they already do so well. We care more about your desire for clean code than your years of experience. If you’re a talented and hard-working developer who is as enthusiastic about Agile as we are, we would love to hear from you. We are serious about our commitment to our employees and invite you to join our team.

If you think Cyrus might be a good fit for you, feel free to send me a message or shoot me an email at mrosenberg@cyrusinnovation.com to set up a time to talk further.
I think you're not considering that some businesses regularly use the API to spin up new nodes and then shut them down to handle shifting load. I wouldn't know if a node didn't delete until I got billed for it.
There's always the possibility you increase your price and no one leaves. Companies do this all the time.
Don't really follow, what makes you say it was not working in practice?
Dudu Osun Black Soap
And you can usually pull in a signal from Old Pro...
When I started programming 27 years ago it was uncivil to call yourself a hacker, even if you were. After having dealt with 50 programming and script languages, having dealt with 30 different operating systems and an endless number of idiots, now some kid comes along and tells me that calling yourself a porgrammer in the industry would be uncivil and bad for your career. I just want to thank Jacques for his essay, it has much more common sense in it than the one Patrick wrote. Hey Patrick, I'm a programmer, I'm a hacker, and I'm rich. And you are none of these, don't give advice to people ..
I feel that is the wrong way to approach things. Your job as a programmer was to provide that deliverable as set out by your position. You programmed it and it went along. The outcome of that deliverable was the improvement but your job was to construct it.

I don't pretend that my past jobs were "automating IPTV interface interactions" or "enabling alternative business transaction venues"... I was programming what was needed. Its a white lie the industry has gotten comfortable with and I think we'd be better off if this path was never went down in the first place. People prettying up their titles have essentially "robbed" honest ones ("I'm a f*king programmer") from being treated in the same regard.
The Heyday of Software Easter Eggs Has Passed.
If Stephen King were still self-publishing, Under the Dome would have been 500 pages longer than it already is. Thank God there's an editor to tell him to keep it "short".

Also, there were speculations a few months ago that J.K. Rowling was planning to do something interesting with electronic versions of her books. [1] I can't find any follow-up on this, but this could be worth watching out for. Perhaps nobody cared when King played with self-publishing many years ago, but these days people might pay attention to a well-known author doing self- something.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2693384
Boston, MA and the greater Boston area

http://getzazu.com

We're looking for developers, both engineer-ey and research-ey, who want to help us build the other (more proactive) half of siri. If siri is pull, we're push (read: we tell you what you need to know before you need to know it).

If you're interested, ping me at marc@getzazu.com
As a white person in the US, I'll tell you true: my opinion on racism is much less well informed than the average non-white person. Because a) I almost never experience it, b) I am less inclined to notice it, and c) non-white people are very unlikely to talk to me about their experiences and thoughts on the topic.

So yes, a person's race is entirely relevant to considering the quality of their opinions on racism. For basically the same reason that I will happily weight a person's opinions on software development based on whether they're an experienced coder or a non-technical manager. Experience matters.
Why "ATTN: LEGAL" in a draft email could have saved Google big-time grief
Sure, I did get a new capacitor each time. I got the diagnosis from Sprow: http://www.sprow.co.uk/

And last year I managed to get some new drives attached:
http://alquerubim.blogspot.com/2010/07/upgrade-historico.htm... (Portuguese only, sorry).
My take:

- Ruby:http://programmingzen.com/ruby-and-rails-recommended-books/

- Rails: http://programmingzen.com/rails-books/
Also seems relevant to mention my site to help people track job applications, Job-Buddy.com. All feedback is welcome.
except Google and Apple don't make money off of an OS. For MS Windows is the product. For Apple it's the experience, and for Google the OS is a means to get you to their website/services without interference.
What the ... what kind of site is that, actually? One of the "job postings" is a Biblical quote. (http://www.tweetdeck.com/twitter/SHoffman9213/~fRy55)

Seriously, that's just irritating.
A good strategy for pricing in this situation is with an "express service." This allows you to keep your existing "list price" but of course the delivery time for that will go up by days/weeks/etc. Your express service has a guaranteed quick delivery at a much higher price. You now have a way to capture a premium for customers that are in a rush. It's a win-win with no risk of downside due to a complete price change.
Small correction, rpm can be complex, but a basic package is really easy. A few lines of package.spec file an a tarball of the package source. rpmbuild or mock handle all the grunt work of building the actual package and making a repo is as simple as running createrepo.
SEEKING WORK - Remote

I'm a bit of unicorn: a designer and a developer[0].

I practice responsive front-end design and implementation and enjoy using Sass, Coffeescript, and Mustache. I have a graduate design degree in architecture.

I have over four years Ruby on Rails experience; I enjoy Sinatra and have developed my own miniature Ruby web application library[1]. I have an undergraduate degree in physics.

[0]: http://kimble.co/web
[1]: https://github.com/tedkimble/bruter

Email in profile
What is the state of Incantr (or something like that was the name)? A Scientific Computing framework for Clojure.
I think you might stare at it some more. You can puzzle out L1 size, L1 associativity, L1, L2, main memory latency, the cost of a TLB miss and probably a bunch of other stuff I've forgotten.
When's the last time a dual-UI delivered a good experience?

Microsoft's been down this road a few times and it hasn't worked yet. Just look at Tablet XP. How many great tablet apps are there? Ones that really leverage the stylus or were written to run efficiently and intelligently to start quickly, resume sessions, auto-save documents and preserve precious battery life?

And how many were lazy ports with, maybe, enlarged controls and piles of inefficient legacy code lurking within? Code that just didn't map well to actual mobile use, where every second of delay feels like an age, and add up very quickly to a complete waste of time (compared to just walking over to a desktop).

The only way I can see Windows 8's metro interface really working, is if the mode shift to classic Windows UI and apps is tied to a 'docking' situation. So, metro on the go, classic windows when you dock it into a proper display, keyboard, mouse and external power. That would give developers the right incentive to ensure they have something that works great while the user is out and about, designed specifically for that use case, while still keeping the full flexibility of legacy apps when the necessary peripherals (and plenty of electricity) are available.
Consider that the Blackberry tablets are a completely different OS than Blackberry phones. Not having email on a BB is just another example of RIM making RIM-like-decisions
My answer to this question is transparency. At my company Brighter Planet we write all of our scientific/methodological code in Ruby so that people with basic technical skill can understand what's going on. The ability to create expressive DSLs is really crucial.
This whole thing is very screwed up. For once I am glad that I don't live in US.
Great intro / cheat sheet to unix file permissions
vvsv
Kim Kardashian for Divorce ten days after their spectacular wedding
Samsung asks Apple to hand over iPhone 4S baseband source code.
Matplotlib is ok for a first plot during exploratory analysis, but is a far, far cry from the facilities available in R through base graphics, grid graphics, trellis graphics, or ggplot2.

Protovis/d3 take a different approach, also focused on a similar Grammar of Graphics like ggplot but primarily concerned about the tooling, instead of the application.

Tooling level libraries are nice because they tend to be flexible enough for high data ink ratios, unlike highcharts, which turns me away with every example.
Rumor: Apple Mulling the Phase-Out of Mac Pros
Greek surprise sends shock waves through Europe
Dear Google,

here is what my screen looks like after the redesign: http://imgur.com/ppg4o

Notice that about a third of it is used up by various chrome.

Now, I realize that every Google employee is issued two wall-sized hi-res screens the moment they step up to their desk, and quickly forgets what it was like to work using mere 21st-century technology. And if they ever use a laptop, it is always a sleek Chromebook which shows you a full-screen view of the web and a tiny, exquisitely designed window titlebar in a tasteful shade of blue.

But for those of us still stuck outside the bubble, it sure would be nice to have a way to collapse some of that whitespace....
In a way, Apple didn't target or tailor their device at all, cleverly allowing the vagueness to guarantee multiple uses. Remember the 2010 keynote?

>Do we have what it takes to establish a 3rd category of products? An awesome product between the laptop and the smartphone?

I think the iPad is used creatively by quite a few people, although possibly not as high a percentage as Macs and PCs. But then, what about all those PCs in banks and call centres ?... :)
For those wondering what this game is all about, this is the interesting part:

"Voxatron is based on a virtual 128x128x64 display. It's a buffer of 3d video memory that is rendered out to the screen at the end of each frame, much as an old-school 2d display is. You can POKE bytes into the virtual memory, and they come out as voxels. I don't compromise on this -- even the menus are drawn into the voxel display. Hopefully one day I can get hold of a real physical 128x128x64 display and play Voxatron on it with almost no modification."

The game is a top-down shooter in the vein of Robotron, but with 3D environments. It features volumetric equivalents to many basic 2D graphics operations: a scrolling background, sprites, animations, particle systems, physics, etc.

Everything is destructable too. If you shoot enough holes in an object, it will collapse in a heap of voxels.

It even includes a level editor.

The game looks fantastic and I've never heard of anything like it. If you are even remotely interested in games or realtime graphics, you need to see this.
I would have been equally offended had he been black or asian. I didn't look at his profile until after my first response to him, and I looked because I was curious if I really was interacting with someone who was simply trolling for fun.
Too bad Mark Pincus' talk is not there.
I said if.

Microsoft killing it is only a problem if it was turning into a great device. Which we don't know any more than we know whether it was turning into a bad one.
You'd be shocked with how much we paid for batch.com.

We'll likely write up a blog post in the near future disclosing this along with some additional information.
Adknowledge acquires leading Facebook Ads management platform AdParlor
Take a trip through lmbench results, it's worthwhile. You'll get bandwidth and latency of disks, file systems, network, memory, as well as context switch costs.

It's a tiny set of tests and if you memorize the results you can sit in any design session, decompose a problem into the basic events, and prove that the design can or can not work in short order.
SEEKING WORK - Remote/Full Time

Preferred work : LAMP Stack / AJAX Apps.

Can lead a team, work on both frontend & backend development.
I don't do designs.

You can find contact info in my profile.
SEEKING WORK - Remote (Cleveland, USA based)

Experienced Webapp dev: Java, Wicket, Lucene/SOLR, Hibernate, Google App Engine, etc.

I built http://appgravity.com, a search engine for Android Apps that currently gets ~65K pageviews/day.

Other work samples & contact info available at http://armhold.com/portfolio.
Washington DC Metro - http://www.sawbuck.com/about/jobs

VC-backed and thriving real estate website Sawbuck.com is seeking a back-end engineer with c#, xml, sql experience.

If you are interested, email me directly if you'd like... lmintzer at sawbuck dot com
Ashton Kutcher's was good. He had an interesting and motivational story about Carl Fisher and he gave some insight into how he perceives founders.
Ask HN: Allow weighting users to create personalized front page?
For some time I've been pondering that the front page might be more useful to me if I had the ability to weight the votes made by individual users -- by making the votes of users whose interests I share count n times as much, for example, I could essentially let them pre-screen content for me and thus get a more personally relevant mix.

I can think of two ways to expose this on the site:

a) Have the regular and personalized front pages be separate pages the user can jump between at will.

b) Keep showing the same front page content to everyone, but visually indicate items that trusted users have voted on.

The obvious consideration with either scheme is that they give the most popular (or for a more positive spin: the most trusted) users on the platform, i.e. those that the largest amount of users have chosen to weight above average, a significant amount of control over how content is perceived on Hacker News. One might argue that is a natural extension of what's already there, though - content by trusted authors already has a higher chance of making it to the front page. In any case, it's why I think it would be important to preserve the ability to look at the unfiltered front page.

Another consideration is privacy. The 'b' scheme is meant to have less of an effect on the content users get to see by keeping the list of items on the front page the same for everyone, but it gives up the votes of others in a very direct way. The 'a' scheme might avoid that, at least if changing your weighting preferences were rate-limited (i.e. if you can only change weights once per day, then the regular movement on the front page would make it fairly hard to deduce votes by comparing to the unfiltered page).

What do you think? Would you like to have the ability to weight users' votes? Would you exercise it? Would it affect the HN formula positively or negatively in your eyes?
As a computer engineer, with an iron ring and a bachelor's of applied science, I feel your pain. In Canada, there seems to be some respect given to the title, although it seems to be waning. In the UK, an engineer is someone who fixes your car or appliances. In the USA, an engineer is someone who writes PHP.
If, after several hundred years of trying, we haven't yet found the mythical race of "uncorruptible politician", it might be time for a plan B, like systemic changes to reduce the effects of corruption on the very-human politicians we do have (and are likely to continue having). That's essentially the campaign-finance-reform argument, that the problem isn't going to be solved by hoping that the next crop of politicians, unlike just about every crop throughout human history, will be selfless saints who don't respond to incentives; rather, the solution is to change the incentives.
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