skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed. There's a lot of skill in picking a job, much of which isn't indicative of your skills once in the job. IMO this often leads to people getting pigeonholed into specific positions if they don't happen upon the right opportunity or otherwise aren't inclined or encouraged to experiment or take more risks.

It's easier early in your career to try different jobs, and when you're younger the world is generally more accepting of letting you try new things.

What I love about this NYT article is that I imagine 6 years ago how it would have sped my departure (3 years ago) as a programmer on Wall St at a HF / quant fund.
Yes. Colleges are not trade schools. If you want fancy letters after your name, you are going to need to learn all the theoretical stuff about your field, and people are going to ask you about that stuff in interviews. If you just want to write a Ruby on Rails app, you can save yourself the $150,000 and 3 years, 364 days, 21 hours by reading "Teach yourself Ruby on Rails in 3 hours".
One of my favorite short stories is highly related: Printcrime by Cory Doctorow ( http://craphound.com/overclocked/Cory_Doctorow_-_Overclocked... ).
Opened up HN. Saw this headline at #1. Posted this comment. Now I'm closing HN and going back to work.
I have a social science degree from UC Berkeley and am a self-taught programmer / Entrepreneur. I currently work as a Senior Software Developer. The best programmers I have worked with over 7 years have not been comp sci / engineering majors, while most of the mediocre programmers I have worked with have a degree in CS or MIS - totally anecdotal I know, but thats been my experience.

To a certain extent, what you study in college and what you eventually pursue as a career are generally not the same. Anyone with more than a few years in the field will understand that. Experience trumps a degree after 2-3 out in the field and you can set your own course.

Feel free to disagree, just let me know how many years of work experience you have.
He mentions that one shouldn't care much about business cards: I disagree. The small details, after you ship your major product, are the most important. They're what truly delight your users after the first 'wow'.

I would suggest a startup to, yes, first focus on the product. Once the product is done though, they should focus on the small, "trivial", details.
Why should they?

I think these courses are great, but how is Stanford benefiting from them? If Stanford has to expend all this effort without realizing a benefit of some sort, why should they continue? I'm worried they'll stop, so it'd be reassuring to know they benefit somehow.

Self interest aside, this is a winner take all market. The best producers aren't limited to selling their wares to a finite number of customers, as they are with brick and mortar universities. It's like a musician performing live music in local bars, versus selling his album on iTunes - a man can only be in one place at one time, so the demand of local bars can afford several bands play and fame. But for privately listening to music, recordable media means there is no limit to how many fans a superstar can accomodate, lowering the demand for all the runner-ups, to the point where no one but the top stars can stay in business.

But of course, there's still room for several players across subjects, rather than within subjects. Lady Gaga does not threaten Bob Dylan much.

If Stanford successfully finds a way to monetize this model, they will have a large competitive advantage. They will be able to lure the best professors in the world with handsome sums, because they are best placed to sell their lectures to hundreds of thousands. It would take a significant outlay of capital for anyone else to get a start.
Thanks for your advice. I will probably handle this issue in the next few updates.
It's not a matter of keeping tabs on every possible cultural taboo. True outliers aren't the issue here. Be aware of common issues for the audience of the website you're posting on, and label appropriately. Given the audience for HN, nudity of any kind, sexual content (including text), and profanity in audio/video are all issues for a large enough percentage of the audience that they should have the NSFW label. (If you were not previously aware of these taboos, you are now.)

My own "workplace" is home; I'm a full-time parent, and not at all worried about being fired. But I recognize the issues that are common for others, and label my posts appropriately. Please have the courtesy to do the same.
Don't necessarily agree -- How many airlines are there in Kayak?

I've never asked them, but I suspect the Yipit team, in a few years, won't want their revenue dominated by this research business. But it's a hell of a business right now!
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You are suffering from a severe case of ignorance. GNU is an entire OS, including a lot of user space stuff. You can run Linux without using GNU at all, see Busybox for example. You can also run GNU with other kernels, like HURD. Most distros take the Linux kernel, run the GNU OS on it, and then add other programs on top. Debian actually has (had?) a version that ran GNU/Hurd without the Linux kernel at all.
Who here started a company to increase shareholder value?

My cofounders and I did.

A company that exists to fulfil someone's dream is a hobby. Occasionally you can make money from it, but very often not.

In contrast, by building what customers want (rather than what you dream of), you create customer value. In turn, the customers pay you and increase shareholder value.

As for whether all companies exist to increase shareholder value, clearly they do not. The Gates Foundation, any church, or the Committee to Elect Hillary Clinton are obvious counterexamples. I was discussing the companies who do have increasing shareholder value as their goal.
Great article. The other most important thing which should be avoided in the startups is "Premature Optimization"
Thanks for your opinion. It will be handled better in the next few updates :)
Ask HN: How do I ask a company why they are taking so long to get back to me?
I interviewed with a company about 3 weeks ago and at the time they told me they would respond in roughly 1-2 weeks. These were on campus interviews and there were two interviewers, A and B. Half the people had A, the other half had B. I was in B's group. After about two weeks I started talking to people if they had gotten a response back. Everyone in A's group go a response. No one from B's group go a response.<p>tl;dr Its been 3 weeks how do I ask them when I can expect to hear from them.
Though I agree that it doesn't make logical sense, there is a perception that self-censoring in that manner makes the word more socially palatable. The reality, of course, is that everyone who reads it knows what word you mean and thinks it to themselves as they read it, defeating the point of the censorship to begin with. It's not as if the 'u' is the letter that carries the bulk of the offensiveness, and by omitting it one can make the word less taboo.

The only legitimate reason I can think of to do that is when writing in a forum which imposes automatic censorship, i.e. your post will be rejected if it contains that particular sequence of characters. If you're writing for that kind of audience, though, you're probably better off just avoiding the word entirely.
I have the book, and it is fantastically well written and easy to follow. I just signed up -- does anyone know if they send an email or something?
We get it! Emacs is god. Or Vim is god. Whatever. Why do we keep having to be subjected to Emacs/Vi love letters on the front page of HN? Then someone says "but Emacs can't do this!" then the other guy says "well vi cant do that!" then we talk about key bindings and it becomes the same post with the same comments and then everyone downvoteed the guy who called it out. Next story!
I personally find man and info very cumbersome and hard to read. I usually google for things even when I know full well that its covered by man and where, because the google results are normally a lot easier for me to read and figure out than it is for me to read the manpages.
I am trying to make the service more reliable. Thanks for your opinion :)
Because WebKit is such an obviously successful project, is what I read out of that.
I am also thinking about the possibilities of the service. Do you have any idea? :)
In fairness, Apple took the KHTML ball and ran it pretty freaking far down the field; not only that, but they structured their involvement in a way that allowed most of their fiercest competitors to benefit from their work.

It's not like Webkit is simply a rebranded KHTML.
The one that starts the system up - still forget what it is - but I know it lives in /boot.
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This is argument shows up in most threads on Emacs - "sure, it's powerful, but that is actually a flaw since it takes such a long time to master". The problem with this position is that you don't need to master Emacs to make productive use of it. No-one has mastered all of Emacs. That's not the point.

The basic text-editing functionality in Emacs is completely discoverable via the menus. If it takes you 30 seconds to learn how to use Notepad, it will take you 60 seconds to learn how to do all of the same things in Emacs. At that point, your productivity on Notepad has plateaued, but you've just scratched the surface with Emacs.

After that point, Emacs rewards careful study. It may be faster to find a quick fix to a specific question with Google, but investing 30 minutes with the built-in tutorial will bump you up from Notepad-like productivity that will pay off the time invested in a few days.

Most proficient Emacs users don't get that way from devoting weeks of study before they start actually using it. It's an incremental process. You (quickly) get to basic familiarity. After a while, you notice some tedious thing you'd like to automate. So you find the next trick or tool to add to your repertoire, and now you're a little bit more efficient in your coding. Repeat the process over a few years, and slowly you 'discover' more of the power that's available to you.

It's true you often get the "I didn't even know you could do that" response in this process. But after you've run into that a few times, you internalize a more powerful idea: "I know I can do this, and now I will find out how".
I'm new to GA. I started using it last week in my new blog.

I saw this feature, and found it amazing. It's really good to make A/B tests, and to see the effectiveness of your about page or home page. As my users grow, I think I'll use it more and more.
Some threshold has been passed when there is a startup for creating launch pages
Dude, a word of advice: don't knock vim or Emacs around here EVER! You're likely to start a holy war. Just stay out of it and let the religious war ensue without becoming a casualty.
From the very start he shows he thinks programming requires godlike mastery of the universe:

> people who are in the top 2.5% in mathematical ability alone, i.e. people with the capability to be decent programmers

Decent? Top 2.5% in mathematical ability can be "decent" programmers? Most programmers don't do rocket science. You don't need to be a world-class software engineer to make most of the web apps that come out each day. CRUD operations on a database, ETL code, implementing someone else's graph algorithm... these do not require over 2 sigmas in raw math skill to do. A "decent" programmer can do these things just fine.

When you're coming from such a warped worldview, it's not too surprising that he thinks only 1 in 1000 people have the math skills alone to write code for a Y Combinator startup and that successful applicants are literally 1 in a million.

Dunning-Kruger strikes again.
There's a nice article about transitioning to .on() and .off(), including the changes and benefits, at:

http://www.andismith.com/blog/2011/11/on-and-off/
Ah, so I used a 2-degree heuristic to come to that conclusion--I haven't had any first hand experience with her, nor do I have contact with her former students. A few stats professors independently recommended her to me as a supervisor, her students seem to do well, and her research page is more welcoming than most (versus, say Ullman's page: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~ullman/ or say, read Brian Ripley's posts on the R mailing list). The one thing I'd add: my experience has been that academics generally have less empathy than others; I'd be interested to hear from old students how she compares to other faculty.
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How did you get into the business?

While people with degrees/diplomas may not be good at programming, they at least have something tangible to show potential employers, while people without one need to be more ... creative.

It reminds me on the focus on grades - ALONE - in my country. An absolutely atrocious metric, but a metric the institutions can understand, at least.
I think of it as the same sort of drive that gets people to add "(NSFW)" to links and such. A common courtesy to the minority of people for whom the word itself is jarring, as well as those who are behind filters that actually scan page content for keywords and then block.
To be fair, there never were nor should have been ENIACs in homes. I don't think he's saying a future 3d printer shouldn't be a real consumer model.
The other classes sent an email when registration opened; I think it's safe to assume PGMs will be similar.
Until they graduate into adulthood when suddenly this knowledge is bestowed upon them!
[Show HN] My weekend project - An unfriendly programming toy
"SeeMeCNC - uses software to drive stepper drivers via a parallel port"

Parallel port? Isn't that an anachronism, or are these still popular in the 'hobby' world?
Man up and phone them. From the sounds of it, however, it appears that you didn't get the job.
thanks, will do so.

the world would be a better place, if like for photographers and writers, a logo designer would have been getting a credit line at /about or such.
As a resident of Central Texas there are 3 privately owned toll roads within 5 miles of my house, all built in the past 10 years.
"GDP by activity (2010): Oil and gas 22%; general government 16%; manufacturing, mining, electricity, building and construction 15%; value added tax (VAT), etc. 11%; commodities, vehicle repairs, etc. 7%; communication and transport 4%; agriculture, forestry, and fishing 1%; other services (commercial, housing, financial, private health/education, hotel and catering, etc.) 24%."

http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/3421.htm

So while manufacturing is smaller sector than services in Norway, it's not negligible at all.
Why not? I've learned several languages to varying degrees as an adult, and only had classroom instruction for three of them. I haven't used this method, but I have gotten a great deal out of Chinese video games and I do know a Finnish girl who has learned Japanese to a functional level almost entirely through watching TV. She did some self study on the writing, but nothing beyond what can be (and in fact is!) done in some children's edu games in Japan.

Similarly, I have multiple friends who have learned Cantonese with no classroom time at all.
>those who are behind filters that actually scan page content for keywords and then block.

That actually makes sense.

>the minority of people for whom the word itself is jarring

Are these people so upset by the word that their brains fail to parse it when one vowel is obscured? Everyone else seems to know immediately what it means without any extra cognitive effort. If they actually can't parse it, what happens then? Do they just internally shout "LALALALALALA I'M NOT READING!" and quickly carry on with the sentence before they second-guess their own sense of shame? As I said, I really get twisted up trying to imagine it.

We've all seen that thing where you can still read sentences with jumbled words as long as the first and last letters remain the same. Plus, the set of words taboo enough to censor in this way is so small that you could blank out all of the letters and I'd still be able to immediately know what was said just by the context.

EDIT: I've just realised, there is a precedent that long predates the internet: the jewish(?) practice of writing g-d instead of god. This is obviously associated with the general abrahamic thing about the name of god being forbidden which is present in islam as well.
So does Google.
After college I started doing some web development on the side, which really took off. I spent like 100's of late nights hacking and learning. I think there is really no other way to get good or learn things but through hard work. You can either be forced to do it (like via a degree or taking classes etc) or just force yourself on your own. I started doing simple thing than got excited to do more and more complex features, apps, systems etc. Now I do lots of System Admin and DBA, product management etc. I know many people that have followed the same path: studied X but now do Y.

"they at least have something tangible to show potential employers"

Maybe, depends on the organization. I worked for a startup where we passed over a lot of CS resume's b/c they had no tangible experience, no interesting side project, nothing they were hacking on, nothing that stood out, including people with Ivy league CS degrees.
She sounds like a bright, reasonable young lady. I wish her success. I'm wondering though if maybe they'd get more votes if they didn't call themselves the Pirate Party. I mean, they can talk about their various political positions all they want but their name will make them seem like a single issue party. Their electorate care about the same things any electorate cares about. Health care, the economy, and just putting food on the table. I think that's pretty universal. The Pirate Party needs to broaden its audience if they'd like to gain more seats faster and change that name. It comes off as a gimmick.
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Somehow I think it's more likely that they'll get a flawed product and will have to buy a replacement from a store.
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"No, I did not. I didn't consent to any such agreement creating the State."

You do every moment you live in civilized society.

What is the alternative? Ask people when they reach the age of majority to sign an agreement to follow the laws of the land? What if they refuse?
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You don't. You ring them and say you had an interview with B (plus date, location etc.). Say you understand that it takes time to reach the right decision but that you wonder if there is anything you can contribute or expand upon that would help them make up their mind in your case.

Cant hurt and might tip the balance.
> It's not as if the 'u' is the letter that carries the bulk of the offensiveness, and by omitting it one can make the word less taboo.

I believe the letter 'u' is particularly selected for omission, because, as the only vowel of the word 'fuck,' it is considered to be its "core" sound.
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You probably should read the paper ;) I guess if one writes f*ck, one does not technically break the taboo, while feeling ‘the thrill of doing something that is forbidden’—observing that taboo.

That's how the taboo word is perpetuated through its use (see p. 1724).
It's possible the company is going through A's group first, then will get to B's group later. Some companies, and teams, unfortunately get so busy that they aren't able to respond in a timely manner.

The other scenario is probably one you're worried about - that B dropped the ball somehow and none of his interviews are being considered.

You can try emailing B with a generic probe, then emailing another person within this company's recruiting team a few days later (assuming you have the contact info of another person).

A generic probe:

"It was a pleasure speaking with you on $INTERVIEW_DATE. I'm excited about the possibility of being a part of $COMPANY_NAME and eagerly await your response. If you have any additional questions, please don't hesitate to ask. Thanks."
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A home-made 3D laser scanner would complement this nicely.
It seems like this is also overlapping with Craigslist then?

If you want to advertise anything based on location, Craiglist is free and widely used.

If you can really provide something uniquely useful to bring members then people will come. I just don't know how much local neighborhoods care. You could target neighborhood watchs, get-togethers, clubs, and, as you said, advertising.

The thing is... all of those things are available in different forms (meetup.com, craigslist, etc.).

I suppose bringing them together isn't a bad idea though. Surely if meetup, craigslist, and other location-based services work, then there is a market for this.
so you're admitting you're writing an incompatible dialect of python in python?

that was my point. if you think it is worthwhile, well - enjoy :-)

if you want to write in something with a uniform syntax, use scheme or clojure. python things look different for a reason.
I would use a modeler that uses solids, like Vellum Cobalt or SolidWorks (both on the list). However, those aren't free or even low-cost. However, they make creating objects like coffee cups a lot easier and they're a lot more precise.

Edit: The post was removed, but the question was: which program to use to design coffee cups with for ordering with Shapeways.
I'm not sure why you accuse me of having a fake account?

Re-inventing a uniform syntax for python is the least pythonic thing you can do.
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I have read the paper. That section of the paper dealt with using euphemisms such as the f-word and so on, which is a different thing. While it may be similar to f%ck in that we all know what is meant, it is different in that f§ck is literally the same word as fuck.

His other discussions about self-censorship relate to people choosing to not say fuck at all, in any form. This again is a very different question.

At no point does he address the seeming cognitive dissonance inherent in typing f*ck in written dialog.
I think he means the entire article to apply mainly to pre-product startups. He would probably agree that after that is the time to work on business cards and stuff.
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This is very similar to Richard Feynmann's thought process.

"Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say: 'How did he
do it? He must be a genius!'"

(from http://www.amazon.com/Indiscrete-Thoughts-Gian-Carlo-Rota/dp...)
writing your own dialect of the language can be fun, but he is presenting his own style as 'pythonic' as opposed to the actual pythonic style built from functional composition - rather than method chaining.

I am banging on about a lot of the points because it seems very hard to explain to him that using clojure/arc/jquery styles is very very unpythonic.