skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey there! I'm in much the same boat.

I have to admit I'm rather relieved reading your post because at least I'm not the only one who is rapidly developing an inferiority complex here ;)

For my part, I'm 28 with a Philosophy degree and currently in a junior role at a late stage startup. I'm not a developer, more like "guy who hacks together Perl and queries MySQL all day".

So, you at least have an edge on me - for what little that's worth! In fact, stepping back to take stock of what you do in fact have might help. I realize it's not much consolation to know you're neither homeless, politically oppressed or living in a war zone - but keeping that perspective has helped me through some moments of self-doubt and pity.

I totally know what you're saying about having no excuses with all the free and accessible information out there. Believe it or not, I find the plethora of choice a little crippling in its own way. When I spend 5 weeks debating which language to learn, and 5 days actually trying to learn a language - there's clearly something wrong!

I don't know where you are in your life, but it might be worth considering a bold leap. I've seen a few programming boot camps promoted here on HN - one in the Bay Area and the other in Chicago. If you're between jobs, this might be something to consider.

Dev Bootcamp :
http://devbootcamp.com/apply

Code Academy :
http://codeacademy.org/

I know how incredibly difficult it is to find the time and motivation to work on a side project. In fact, if you're looking for a learning partner - I'd certainly welcome it. I'm currenly interested in the following : Python, Perl, Django, Dancer, Ruby, Groovy, Rails/Grails, JS, coffeescript, design principles, NoSQL, Big Data, Hadoop. I can be reached @ esoteric.doktrin at gmail.

Good luck - keep calm and carry on, as they say.
Android, as well as Chrome and Chrome OS for that matter, are not “products” in the classic business sense. They have no plan to become their own “economic castles.” Rather they are very expensive and very aggressive “moats,” funded by the height and magnitude of Google’s castle.

http://abovethecrowd.com/2011/03/24/freight-train-that-is-an...

(Personally I think Android will be more than just a moat for Google. But it will never generate Apple-level profits, and that is just fine for Google.)
When Facebook's down, I use GMail. Or G+. Or LiveJournal. Or my Amherst-only social network. Or text messages. Or call my friends up on the phone, or talk to them at work, or walk over to their apartment and knock on their door.

Do people really only have one communications media? I find that with anyone that I actually talk to on a regular basis, I talk to regularly on at least 3 different communications media, often simultaneously. (I'm pretty fond of taking Facebook conversations offline to text message when I need to say something private, for instance, or to GChat when I want something a little more real-time.)
Having grown up in Silicon Valley, I can honestly say that what people consider to be Silicon Valley today was not anything close to what it was 20 years ago. So I don't take it so seriously anymore.

Since San Jose went from the gateway to Silicon Valley to the Heart of Silicon Valley, I feel like San Francisco, which is actually part of the Peninsula, can be part of SV.
* fear that I am going to fail anyway *

That's a shallow explanation; what does this fear of failure mean, to you personally? Fear that who will say what? Fear that who will think what?

Why is it that you associate failing in these tasks as such a bad thing?
I actually would not know what to do, if Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Wikipedia all blacked out for a day. I just asked myself this, and I came up with several responses which all have problems:

1. I'd go outside and do something -> But I can't use Facebook to coordinate anything.

2. I'd go out and eat -> I can't google places to eat, or google map where they are.

3. I'd just absorb information -> Oh wait... Twitter and Wikipedia are down.

Fml.
Bug report: on inner iframe http://phonnel.com/projects/sopatally.php: Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected token ) (line 23)

data.setValue(3, 1, );

Edit: and we're back!
It's not clear whether by San Francisco this article is referring to Silicon Valley, but assuming that's the case - NYC has nowhere near the tech ecosystem that the Valley has in place. In the Valley you have the full gamut of software and hardware companies and everything in between.
In NYC, you have a mix of pure software startups that have had some success, combined with the typical industries which have deployed technology in a unique way (like Gilt Groupe - where, apparently, only 5% of the employees actually work in tech: http://gigaom.com/2011/11/22/gilt-groupe-ipo/ ), and the majority of software engineers in NYC still work for banks. It's going to take another decade to realize whether or not NYC has any real potential here.
The Fine Art of Baloney Detection
olps, i was thinking about installing color scheme. any idea?
Revenue isn't profitability. Profit is what you have left after you subtract your costs. You could have $100b of revenue and still not have a cent of profit. Or even lose money.

Besides, $830m of revenue isn't significant when you're a $30b+ business, which Google is. And that's my point: whereas iOS has completely remade Apple and overwhelmed its prior businesses, Android hasn't even made a dent in Google's financial statements, and for all we know, may be hurting them, depending on how much Google has invested in developing Android.
Ask HN: "I'm impressed"-style comment spam
I get a lot of sign ups on a drupal site I manage that contain the following:

I am impressed, I have to say. Really rarely do I see a blog thats both informative and entertaining, and let me tell you, you have hit the nail on the head....

The bot seems reasonably sophisticated -- it's capable of scraping arbitrarily defined fields and filling them with junk (or that comment), and it follows signup verification links; however, it doesn't seem to submit any false articles, share any URLs, and the email address often dies quickly.

What is the point of this type of bot? Is it scraping walled data? It seems innocuous -- a minor nuisance at most -- but I doubt that is the case.
We've already got a written statement that exhibits most of the classic warning signs of depression. Does the poor guy need to submit it in triplicate before you'll take him seriously?

The OP should worry about the long run, but only after taking every necessary measure to get through the short run.

Meanwhile, whether or not any course of treatment is a long-term, sustainable, smart solution depends on the patient, of course. Therapy, both short-term and sustained, has markedly improved the lives of multiple friends and relations of mine, and drugs have very definitely saved the lives of a few, and that's just the ones I know about.
It's just one of those things where people not close to the subject get a distorted opinion, sort of like Chinese whispers. Like the (probably totally exaggerated) idea of some Americans thinking that people from the UK are from London. Like when tourists stop you in the streets of Oxford or Cambridge (presumably other places too, I just haven't lived in them..) and ask "excuse me, can you tell me where the University is?".

When I was first aware of Silicon Valley I literally pictured a road running through mountains, with big company X on one side, Y on the other, next door was Z... then after that I just thought of Silicon Valley as the techy nickname for SF. Then when I cared more, I grew to know more about it.
It's essential that startup teams have great chemistry.

If you don't appreciate their sense of humor (or vice versa), it's probably not a good fit. That's fine.

It's better to establish these things sooner versus later in the interview process, so you're not wasting each other's time.

To this end, I think it's productive when startups post job listings like this that genuinely reflect their culture and personality. It can serve as the first of several mutual filters to weed out potential candidates who wouldn't work well with the team.
The latest data available is from 2010-09-25, which seems to be too old to be useful for most things.
Wholesale seatpost
I'm no expert on this subject since I haven't had a Facebook account since a few years ago, but I would imagine there are certainly some people/scenarios where something that Facebook would normally be used for couldn't be done elsewhere. Like uploading some photos. Or looking at old photos. Or messaging someone who you don't know well enough to have ever bothered getting a phone number / email from because Facebook was good enough for talking to them.
Not a "Rails Genius". If I was interested in such a job I would send "something you’ve built in Rails and any other work you’re proud of", but not spend a lot of time on it.
"it's unlikely that it would be used against Wikipedia for fear of backlash – smaller sites have much more to fear"

The threat of use is often significantly worse than the use itself. Realistically, big sites like, say, Google are not going to get shut down for a violation of a silly Internet law; the backlash is too big. That doesn't stop Google from being one of the most zealous enforcers of legislation like COPPA or DMCA, because the cost of a lawsuit, when you have gigantic pockets that can be raided, is simply too large a risk for them to take.

Same with SOPA. No big company will ever be sued under SOPA. They simply won't provide platforms for user-generated content, and then the Internet as we know it ceases to exist.

(Same with startups: would you start a company to fill that void if you knew that the first thing that'd happen if you became popular was that you'd be sued for a potentially dream-ending sum of money?)
Many sites have a comment approval policy that only hold the first comment by a user for approval. Once that user has had one comment approved manually, future comments will be automatically approved.

Spambots attempt to exploit this by creating likely-sounding content for a first comment, getting it approved and then spamming.
Facebook end on 15 March 2012? WTF?
is this some kind of joke or what ?
We use them to manage all of the planning for freight car classification and switching in our train yards - I think we use the ILOG embedded Gantt chart in a .NET application.

MS Project is also very, very popular in businesses - project managers seem to love to graphically see dependencies (even if it's subject to garbage-in/garbage-out).
"iOS has completely overwhelmed Apple’s prior businesses, while Android contributes next to nothing to Google’s revenue. You decide who’s winning."

Google's strategy is so fundamentally different from Apple's that this kind of comparison is ridiculous. Neither company has to outright "win" game in order for its endeavors to be successful.
I didn't find it that arrogant, but I think it's possible to get a glimpse of a company's culture through their job ad. If you felt their approach was a turn-off, it's likely you'd feel the same way about their culture & team as well.

So for better or worse (they could argue better, you could argue worse), their job ad is filtering for people that would fit them.
This is a quick experiment to see what the AddThis sharing bar does with duplicates.
You sound like me two years ago -- just replace "people on HN" with "classmates". I had clinical depression.

It had very little to do with my ability and everything to do with stress levels, brain chemistry and horrible feedback loops.

My advise for you: You need to stop beating yourself up. You're not worthless. You're not inadequate. Stop saying you'll "never" get there. Don't let that inner voice tell you anything you wouldn't tell your wife/child/best friend. I'm not saying it's an easy thing to do, but it's worth the trouble.
As a New Yorker looking longingly westward, I have a question. Is the Valley the only place it makes sense to be, or is it feasible to live in the East Bay?

I know the real answer is that it doesn't matter where you are if you're the right person working on the right project.

That said, I want to be somewhere that the social environment is a positive one for someone living off his savings while trying to build a product and a company. Things like a good coworking space and people who keep you motivated and inspired can help a lot, in my opinion.

The only thing is, I want to move west for a nicer home life and standard of living, I just don't want to leave city life altogether. That's why I'm thinking of living in Oakland or Berkeley, and working in SF.

Bay Area residents, what do you think?
Lost friends
When a friend is lost to you, it is something that is very sad. Friends are awesome and friendship is a beautiful thing.
Python HTTP REPL with multiple sessions
Oh, whew, thank Jeebus, because we all know that Congress would never do anything that would violate the Bill of Rights. :-|
Yep, I'm seeing that too, and a blank chart.
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lingerie, hot lingerie, lingerie wholesale
Having grown up in the midwest, now living in SF, and commuting daily to SV, yeah, most of the world thinks it's the same thing. SF is just a suburb of SV.
add a counter to show no. of people added?
It's also very much for the 99%--not the best example for this post.
Yeah, I'd call it "ingratiation," submitting comments just generic enough to pass muster. I also think it's a Mechanical Turk type thing, where the comments can just be pasted in reply to almost any blog post. "Yeah dude, you're the king!" Regardless of "rel=nofollow," there will be an URL to Ugg boots or NFL Jerseys or whatever.
I went through something very much like you're going through several years ago. Over the course of about six months: Fiance left me. Lost my job. Relative died. Family dog died the next week. It was a mind-numbing, spirit crushing year of defeat. Eventually I decided to return to school with the intention of going to medical school, which for the next couple of years got my back on my feet. I learned that despite an abysmal first attempt at a CS degree (abysmal because of an utter lack of effort on my part) I was actually a much better student than pretty much any of my classmates. I regained my mojo, so to speak, leading up to a semester I took off in order to go code for a friend's company on a short-term contract that was supposed to give me enough cash to pay off some bills and finish my last semester. That was five years ago this month, and I still haven't finished that last semester.

What I have done, however, is rediscover how I enjoyed development. For me it was a combination of Ruby, the Ruby community, and the problems I worked on that did it, along with a healthy dose of perspective and maturity. For other people it might be python, javascript, or any other platform that became enjoyable, and some probably discover that they're happier not being developers at all. I still have a bit of Imposter Syndrome to deal with, but I cope. Today I recognize there are things I'm good at, things I'm bad at, and a lot of in-between. The things I'm bad at I make myself do more often so I can get better at them. The things I'm good at I teach to others to help them along.

I'm not dumping this out there as some sort of victory—more that you need to know that you're not the first to deal with problems like this, and you can come back from them.

If you want to be a hacker, for gods sake find some to hang out with. The best thing you can do for yourself when you're in a rut is have someone pull you out—offer yourself up as a free pair for someone doing what you want to learn to do. You're not getting paid anyway right now, so use the time to learn something. Go to language groups—preferably one with a large community friendly to new developers. Make friends in the tech community around you, and you are all but guaranteed that one of them will eventually have a job for you. In the meantime, work on OSS projects, and if you don't feel confident about your coding skills, help write tests or documentation. (BTW, its a poorly-kept secret that tons of OSS code is written by people who don't really know what they're doing—they just figure it out the hard way. So don't be shy about contributing.)

Get some exercise. Stop trying to work your way through SCIP and read something interesting. Most of all stop beating yourself up. Everyone deals with motivation problems at one point or another. And turn on the no-procrast feature of your HN profile.
No, I think it was a private chef search engine.
yeah, but then that's classist!
Me too -- maybe he's protesting SOPA? :)
So it's better that you get your hand in their pocket before someone smarter comes along the relieve them of that burdensome wad of seed capital?
Bottlenose Intelligent Social Dashboard Launches Private Beta
This article is silly. Of course there are massively overhyped startups in Silicon Valley that don't deserve their funding or attention. I won't comment whether Groupon is one, but certainly startups like Cuil come to mind.

However, there are also amazing, world-changing technology companies that DO come out of the Valley with semi-regularity, which are NOT coming out of other places. Google, Facebook, Paypal, YouTube, LinkedIn, Yelp, Dropbox... this list continues. These are companies that may initially serve the 1%, but also grow to serve the 99%, because they are useful, simple, powerful ideas.

This is not to say that innovation doesn't come from other places as well -- it clearly does. However, the Valley produces a vastly disproportionate amount of innovation in Internet technology considering its size, and justly deserves a disproportionate amount of attention. A Wordpress theming company is not going to change the world; I guarantee at least 1 company started in the Valley this year will. Yes, there are a lot of overhyped startups, but there are also a lot of appropriately hyped ones.
Every few months for the past decade or so I've seen articles like this comparing the bay area to New York or Seattle. It seems that the New York and Seattle companies all fall off the face of the earth a few minutes after I read the article, never to be heard from again. I think that Seattle just isn't large enough to really matter in the start-up world, and New York has too many bankers and too few engineers. Bankers don't create value or innovate, they just arbitrage. How can you innovate in a culture filled with young, aggressive alpha male frat-boys entirely lacking in empathy who would rather snort coke and go to strip clubs than stay up all night brainstorming or .. working with hackers?
I agree with your sentiment, but I just don't see how this particular ad would make anyone say "Yes! That's the company culture for me".

I guess that's what I am asking here though... does it inspire you to apply (or would it if you were looking)?
If you are playing a valuable role to investors by providing them access to interesting new startups then they should be the ones paying you, not the startups.
but 0.999... /is/ 1. That is, they are equal (this still sounds like a lie to me and I constantly think about "what if our numbers are wrong".)
Pretty much everything sucks when you start it. Its only by working on something sucky that you figure out A) this sucks and B) how to fix it. I've got a couple of gems that are embarrassingly bad in spots—they (mostly) get better over time.

Remember that software development is much much a procedural skill than a memorized skill. You have to do it, and you have to do it a lot, before you'll be great at it. Get started making the mistakes you need to make, and don't let them get you down. We've all got projects we didn't really get off the ground.
The most apparent thing from this was the author and I are not in the same business at all. I work for startups, technology and all that. But without a doubt all the big stuff happens in a small part of the world. Unique and important major technology innovations. Not just more social media apps. Social media apps are the applications the Internet was built for. They are more akin to HTML websites circa 1996.
The 1st Amendment was enough for the Supreme Court to knock down 1989's Flag Desecration Act (US vs. Eichman, 1990), parts of 1994's Communications Decency Act (Reno vs. ACLU, 1997), 1998's COPA (Mukasey vs. ACLU, through 2009) and 2002's McCain-Feingold (Citizens United, through 2010) as unfairly restrictive of free speech. Congress passes lots of dumb speech-restricting laws that eventually get knocked down.

When these DNS-delisting enforcement operations – those from either before or hypothetically after SOPA might pass – finally get real, full-stack court review, they could very well wind up judicially prohibited as unconstitutional. It just takes a while.
Not sure about Berkeley, but when I moved out here I was told one consistent thing about housing, "don't live in Oakland"
The Basic and Fundamental Elements of Success of Car Logo Images
The message that any automobile manufacturer car logos pictures would like to communicate to its clients is one of swiftness, reliability, power and fashion.
This is not normal for computer science academia, at least in my current department or my alma mater's. I've only met one professor who doesn't seem to work more than an average software developer.
ember -- flame that burns bugs
I've always thought about stuff like this; a numerals system based upon quantities appearing in nature. 3.1415... is silly. Make that 1 or 4, and see where everything else "fits", or something similar based on a universal constant as the base.
I completely forgot about the YQL rate limits and was being capped by YQL servers. I have brought the service back-up and am currently implementing cache to minimize YQL calls.
TextMate was just a one hit wonder...
Agreed. Google makes money mostly from advertising. Apple makes money mostly from selling gadgets. Both use mobile as a way of expanding their primary markets. They aren't playing the game, although there are of course superficial similarities.
Humanhash in Coffeescript: Human-readable representations of digests
How to Open Your Third Eye (Open Portal Technique)
I've only been here six years, and truth be told I avoid SF at all costs, but all I have to do is look at the job listings. SF listings are full of every Social Web Media Infinity-point-Fad known to man.

South Bay -- Platforms, infrastructure, embedded systems, established technologies, emphasis on availability and reliability. This is what the San Francisco startups rely on to make sure their new web startup doesn't fall over at the first sign of traffic.

One might see this as the traditional Silicon Valley maturing and even stagnating in comparison to San Francisco's young, hip, fast-moving culture, but I don't think it's reasonable to treat them as a unified entity.
What company is this? I cant seem to find it.
what is a "registered internet website"? Is that just their long winded term for website or do crowdfunding sites need to register with some government agency?
Financial Hack: Square Watermelons
A1 tough book (Tablet ) of Panasonic features and its review.
I think most would view this as some kind of joke or scam. Knowing that anyone can create a line graph and a gmail account I would have no reason at all to think this is a real company.

Anyone growing that fast shouldn't be afraid to post a real email address, just doesn't add up for me.

If this is some kind of style or joke I think it is better served to save that for when your having coffee. As laid back as our industry is, most would like to consider themselves professionals. This job posting doesn't seem very professional on any level.
New Form of Loans and the future of Debt
Cambridge University releases digital copies of Isaac Newton's works
Aquamacs has fullscreen support and for homebrew there are a few patches out that will enable fullscreen for vanilla emacs.
I agree completely and such chilling effects are more reasons why SOPA is bad for the web. But I was only listing why it's not, realistically, an existential threat for Wikipedia.
I think you meant constitution.