skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's my minimalist definition of "top-notch engineer" in regards to Silicon Valley startups:

- has experience working in the early stages of a venture-backed startup

- went to one of the top schools in the world, such as Stanford, MIT, Harvard, etc

- has an extensive personal portfolio of software projects on which they contributed

My point is that Silicon Valley "works" because it has lots of people that meet 2 or 3 of these bullet points. There is no place in the world that really comes close.

Nobody is objecting that you can surely hire people cheaper in other countries, but for small companies the cheapest labor source is almost never the winner. It's far more important to have the very best engineers.
A decent watering schedule is not an overwatering schedule. Watering plants properly is not a difficult activity.

Further even assuming that it is very low power, just the energy and materials used to construct it blow away any notion that it is green.

This is an anti-green product. It is using products made via energy and chemical rich processes, then vampiring power, to solve a complete non-problem. It is novel, and it's right for HN, but the GP's point is completely on the money.
It's very different when you have completely different environments (eg: contexts) to pull your mind into a different mode. Your mind will very quickly switch. Like most starting up multiple startups though you have one space where you work, and therefore you need to figure out other queues to create context for what you're working on - and try to eliminate other distractions from unrelated things. This is very hard for me, which is why the alternative is to work on only 1 project. Of course life itself includes more than 1 project.
I would say schedule some ritual for a specific time each and every day. Under no circumstances deviate from this. I am working a full week and working on a small business evenings and weekends, but no matter what every day at 8 pm I am there to read bedtime stories. I am pretty good at it too. It is my favorite time of the day and I won't give it up no matter what.

I make time for the kids other times too(in fact I am going outside to play soccer with them in about 10 minutes)but having that one special ritual that they always do with you will be very special to them.
No, this assumes that there are not many women (or men for that matter) whose hyper-productivity can make up for a 2-3 year leave of absence.
This kind of reminds me of http://www.pictaculous.com/
Most people can't event do one full-blown start-up at a time.
We did. Age wasn't a factor in the discussion. If you can play, we want you in the game.
New paid software engineering internship opportunity at Twitter posted yesterday. Twitter is looking for Java, Scala, Ruby, and C++ for the backend and Ruby, HTML/CSS, and Javascript if you are doing more on the front end. Good luck!
For the 2nd part, yeah, for the first part Iran's the only place you hear glib talk about how we should bomb it to prove how tough we are in presidential debates.
It's doable, but you need momentum on the first play to even think about executing on the 2nd eventually parallel play. It is very easy to cite the Jack Dorsey example but you must note that Twitter was his PRIMARY focus all they to mass-market adoption. Only THEN did he divert attention to Square and making that baby hum. It is extremely difficult to incept two nascent start-ups and make them both successful simultaneously when you haven't already got a position of power+influence.

Note: building two nascent start-ups is different from the "labs" mentality where you play with a bunch of ideas, execute conceptually on a few and deploy some into the market to see if they work. That's a very different mental model. Even in Labs land you have guys like Kevin Rose deploying one thing at a time into the wild (OINK).
benvanderbeek, I am really sorry to hear this and trust me I was not speaking about situation like yours.

There is huge trend to consume meds when body mostly healthy, or reason why some health issue was caused by neglecting it.

Your situation totally different - I agree. As a comparison: when I had my appendicitis removed I _had_ to get anesthesia, 'cos otherwise it would be too big pain.
I'm all about the don't complain about down votes protocol.

However I am getting massive down votes here, for something that is neither rude, neither false, neither off topic.

I find this kind of attitude (not even bothering to teach me a lesson if I erred) very rude.
some? yes

most? You won't get hired, because you'll be seen as a bad cultural fit for the company.

Only real way to get in as someone that old, is if you are going for the position of a CTO
iStockPhoto already has a "search by color" feature which does pretty much what you're suggesting. http://screensnapr.com/v/gTjWCw.png
Ask HN: What would motivate you to attend a documentation hackathon?
The proposed doc hackathon aims to connect hackers to create tools, books, processes, and more to improve the documentation user experience of a product or a service.
My brain is still trying to recover from that particular experience.
Companies in general rarely hire older employees exclusively for their technical ability.

The typical 50 year old programmer has worked at numerous organizations, with dozens of teams, using at least as many technologies. This directly contributes to the development of non-technical skills such as communication skills, management skills, insight, and stronger perception. They're rarely oblivious to these skills (as demonstrated by the relatively low numbers of older professionals selling themselves as "programmers").
Maybe it's the fault of the game-history widgets on the page. They use left and right arrow keys for game navigation, so it's possible they steal up and down arrows also.
Our society hasn't adapted to the fact that people get less competent and unjustifiably more expensive with age because it isn't true.

People who get less competent get less competent; people who demand unjustifiable compensation demand unjustifiable compensation. Some of those people are 50+. Some of them are 25. Some 20-somethings code for 2 years, write an O'Reilly book, and then reposition themselves as "architects". So many young people did this with the title "CTO" that the term "CTO" got tainted.

This is something I was taught in 3rd grade, but apparently hasn't percolated into the public school system, so we're having to teach it to adults at great expense: one needs to be vigilant about prejudice.

Or, in some cases not, because one of the subtexts behind ageism is that talent is getting more and more expensive, and firms want to avoid engaging with that reality. At least 21 year olds come bundled with the pretense of inexperience, so you can pay them 40% of scale.

If I sound self-righteous about this, I apologize; I'm really not upset by it, because it is one of the more easily exploitable market inefficiencies our industry cultivates. You guys pay for the "Rails programmer" who foreaches through N+1 queries because they don't grok SQL joins; I'll pick up the 50 year olds who've shipped Lisp and written RISC assembly.
sorry, that must be new then. It has been a little while since I logged in there.
I concede point one, I guess I didn't completely understand the guys complaint.

As for point two, just because she's more skilled doesn't mean there isn't a productivity loss. It takes a little while to get settled (back) into a job. If the employee on maternity leave has been taking correspondence courses, good for her, but her replacement has spent that time working at the actual job. If the replacement has been doing good work, I would rather keep him/her rather than hire back the original worker, who might be "out of the groove" after a long maternity leave.
Actually agree with you that maybe I shouldn't have gone for capitalism to get my point across. But then again aren't you confusing the concepts of "free market economy" and capitalism with the former just being one possible form of the latter. Another possible form being a "social market" which should allow for some kind of state intervention on a lot of the issues being raised here.

PS A genuine thank you for engaging in discussion as opposed to hit and run downvoting
clickable : http://obaghchal.com
When I've hired people, while working as an engineering lead at a startup, It's never been about age, it's been about skills + personality. Out of a development team of around 10 people, I'd say 2 were >= 50 years old, a few 30 somethings and the rest around 20-25.
Combined with a per ip connection limit, async-IO style server like Node.js would alleviate the problem somehow by using smaller amount of memory per connection.
What is wrong with that statement? Intel is using a new 3D Tri-Gate Transitor tech for 22nm & have plans for 14nm in the future.
The robot looks really awesome but the price looks to be about $16,000.
Not a misrepresentation. "scheduling and managing expectations" is implied in "shipping". "hacking" has absolutely nothing to do with "shipping".
Record-busting motorbike will be jet engine on wheels
MIT sucks and is for losers. Go to Stanford.
I don't work for a startup but just wanted to comment since I work with a lot of older developers, one who must be well into his sixties is rather interesting as, while he does have his spots where he seems a bit stuck in the past, is constantly trying to inject new technologies into the organization. We're a primarily java shop and he writes a lot of scripts in Ruby and always wants to bring more ruby into projects. I also know he has probably more of a passion for developing software (personal projects) than some of the other developers, who are younger (but still much older than me). I think its really just based on the person. If they really love building software they will keep up at any age because they see the benefit in their own projects.
Programming Challenge Starts Feb 2012: Optimise checkout queues
Totally understand the temptation of working on various ideas and solving interesting problems. I dealt with this in my past life. Its hard enough to do 1 start up at a time. Doing 2 or 3 takes a lot. Though i see this with positives and negatives

Pros:
working on multiple ideas will keep your creative flowing. it helps to connect the dots that you may not even realize. Keeps you going on mandane tasks on 1 start up because you may have something interesting going on the other project.

Cons
you cant give your best to any of the ideas. all ideas may suffer from your lack of energy. You may keep working on interesting stuff and put off uninteresting stuff forever. and we know there is plenty of "uninteresting stuff" in any project.

my 2 cents.
The thing I'd like to see - a three way comparison of the alleged "cheating". Rybka and Fruit have some similar parts, but how about Fruit and any other similar program? It might just be that any chess program will have parts that look similar.
Peter H. Coors autographed business card
There's nothing wrong with requireing your employer to do that. To me, it seems like a transition away from being an engineer to an employee. Keeping up with the latest and greatest, learning new stuff keeps you active in your profession. When you're passive about about that stuff, your job hunting prospects decline. In the worst case, you're literally totally dependent on that single employer, because there's nothing else you can do.
What's wrong? I can't see anything except extra dash in "energy efficiency"
yes I'm going to write a blog post about the progress. second startup is not a big idea, it's a ui/ux design bureau. The reason why I get an office and empleyees for that rather than working online, I need professional web design/developer team for my startups. Having a team, made me think why not to open a design studio?! And also sometimes I get big orders like website of State oil company Azerbaijan Republic. They pay for a website 50-120k euros. So I founded A ui/ux design (which I am expert on) bureau. My third startup is a software, which also will need some team to develop it. By starting second and third, I thought that I already automated the first one, which was not true and my Project Manager cannot handle with the issues like I did. Everyday he asks stupid questions and takes my time which make me tired of it.
The wiki article on GPS encryption seems to say that stealing the key for one satellite is possible (720 gigabytes), but the master key at 26 terabytes seems slightly harder to sneak out in an email or USB key. Of course I'm a wiki expert on this, so someone with actual knowledge could probably be more informative.
I always wanted something like this and I even thought of building it, but I didn't have time to learn javascript.
As far as I can tell, the basic facts are:

1. There is damning evidence (probably beyond reasonable doubt) that Rybka contains some copy-pasted code from Fruit (the open source program).

2. The interesting thing about Rybka was that it was dramatically better than any chess engine of its time, due to original improvements.

3. Many people are bitter that Rybka became an extremely successful commercial product, due to being clearly the best chess engine of its time. It also made several formerly viable commercial products non-viable due to being much better.

4. A mass of clones obtained by either disassembly or obtaining source code appeared, which are now equal or slightly superior to Rybka, and this has essentially destroyed its commercial viability.

For people who value the letter of the law, #1 is damning, and Rybka cheated, period. This isn't beyond theoretical doubt, but it's beyond a reasonable one.

But, given that Rajlich could have easily and legally re-implemented the same algorithms in the mudane parts of Fruit that are in question without exact code reuse, and that what is significant about Rybka is actually the original and innovative part, there's a pretty good argument that he's well within his rights to profit from his creation.
What problem are u trying to solve?
You Can't Pick My Brain. It Costs Too Much. [2011]
I can't think of anyone who could do more than one--guys like Jack Dorsey and Steve Jobs might be able to pull off two mature businesses or one mature business and one startup, but I haven't seen anyone do two startups at the same time.
which 3 of them?
Offtopic, but since I see you lean more toward OO - look into perl's Moose. There are few presentation on Moose basics out there. Especially, look for Roles/Traits.
Why quad-core iOS devices could launch within the next year
Because the business will be able to find someone who is willing to learn in their spare time. Besides, the great thing about being a programmer is not that you have to learn new things but that you get to.
Steal a piece of bread from Google's table
Dude, you're arguing from stereotypes. Saying "as people get older they get less competent" is just silly; I can tell there's the same distribution in competence in a set of 25- year-olds that there is in 55-year-olds.

(It is true that the 25-yos haven't had a chance to fall behind yet, and a lot of them will. But those are the same bozos who show up in the DailyWTF today doing dumb stuff with modern tools, and in 30 years nobody will care about their code.)

And "a 50-something should have enough savings to bankroll his own startup" is a close second in silly. Evidently you haven't watched too closely what's happened in finance over the last thirty years. (A few folks have done well, many more have been close to wiped-out. Look up "Pareto distribution".)

Mature engineers are just as capable or running on adrenaline (or just the high of building somthing really great) when needed as younger folks. However, they're more likely to know whether you really have an event calling for adrenaline, or are just looking to get 80 hours of work for 40 hours of salary. (Or are building something truly great as opposed to just a clone of something that's been done and failed six times already, but in node.js this time instead of Rails)

They're also less likely to have the gullibility to buy into the equity compensation fantasies that a lot of startups lean on (while the VC guys stack the deck, and the techs show up here later whining about "those bastards screwed me on my stock options")
The story is actually about the european courts granting the U.S. authority to request information on their citizen. While I don't expect the U.S. courts will put up much of a roadblock (they rarely do), The DoJ will still have to go through the U.S. process to get the desired information.
Google adwords meets Airbnb for property lettings
What comes to mind when you read that one-liner?

More info to follow in these comments.
Probably too late to ask, but how USA enforce this BS?
Since this seems to be aimed (among other things) towards input sanitization, here is a semi-relevant entry that might amuse someone.

https://gist.github.com/1575452

This is a sanitizing HTML "parser" done in roughly 100 lines of PHP code. It does tag and attribute whitelisting, checks for protocols to prevent XSS, deals with unclosed and unopened tags, and does some other things. The biggest issue is that it's not well-factored. However, its shortness is appealing, because I understand how it works. I would have hard time trusting a library with thousands of lines of code to do input validation.
I find this not necessarily true at my company, in fact the oldest people in the engineering department are exclusively developers where the managers tend to be younger or the same age as them. This may depend on region, as well, the area I live in now is rather different than Silicon Valley where I think people wouldn't stick around for years and years as "just a programmer" but in lower-cost, slower-pace areas, I think programming is often just another job to people and its something that people will just continue to do for their entire career.
Could you make it show the RGB of the color of the square color block I'm hovering over in the palette area?
Divorce happens. People remarry. Many people in their 40s and 50s have toddlers or young kids.
Not quite, because not every woman will vanish from work for 2-3 years.

Such laws make an employer indifferent between a man of quality Q and a woman of quality Q + P(taking leave) x (cost of leave). Whether or not hyper-productivity is required depends strongly on P(taking leave) and the cost of leave.
> It's only Hungary that is so fucked up

That's because you're only looking at Europe. Come to Brazil for a show (minus the huge maternity leave).
http://angel.co/wigwamm
I think if the users can copy the Hex codes by clicking on individual colors, it can be a useful service.
Ramalan Cinta Bintang Terbaru Desember 2011
Ramalan Cinta Bintang Terbaru Desember 2011 merupakan sarana dan prasarana guna mencari jati diri anda tentang cinta yang selama ini mengambang cari tahu bagai mana langkah anda tentang perasaan cinta yang anda alami yang selama ini masih terasa galau dalam lubuk sanubari anda selama ini,
Also, it's not just the owners; employees acting as agents are typically protected by the corporate veil,

That's not true at all. The corporate veil exists solely to protect investors' investment in a corporate entity. It does not extend to any other persons. Employees can and have been held civilly and criminally liable for their negligence.
An implication of the parent comment is that hiring at 50+ incurs adverse selection, because 50+ developers that are on the market for full time work have demonstrated inability to succeed in startups.

This sentiment misunderstands startups as well as software development careers.

Most people will not succeed with startups.

Most people who start companies fail.

Most professional developers will opt not to start companies because the (low) success rate is obvious.

The people who succeed with startups are not particularly likely to be amazing software developers. In fact, the impedance mismatch between raw programming talent and software startup success is one of the more irritating things about working in startups.

There's no statistical observation to be made from someone's lack of success building companies.
"As part of the company registration process, you might be tempted to come up with a lofty valuation for your shares. Don't. You'll only cause yourself hassle. Create 100 shares of £1 each and assign 1 share to each equal cofounder. You can change those numbers to reflect however you decided to set up the company. If you want to implement vesting, close this web page and get in touch with a solicitor."

This isn't the case if you register through Companies House - you have to allocate all share capital.

I found this out when using their online registration service recently - according to my accountant it's a change from the Companies Act 2006.

The Companies House registration service is definitely worth using - you'll probably get your company set up within an hour or two of filing the form. Unless you have a complicated shareholder agreement (in which case you really should get yourself a good lawyer if you don't already have one) the default Articles of Association will be fine for you.
i think if you're a 50+ year old tenured professor, your skills are probably not in line with what a start-up needs; you've spent 25+ years of your life optimizing for doing academic research and teaching, not sweating out the details of making product X work seamlessly on platform Y with quirk Z.

some 50+ year old tenured professors co-found companies and serve in advisory roles, but i highly doubt that they're staying up late setting watchpoints in gdb and punching their monitors.
"But for society as a whole, these things are good."

Then why not triple the existing benefits? Why not multiply them by 10 even? If it's an unalloyed good, then why are we being so stingy with the good stuff?

If you account for only one side of the ledger, you can make anything look good. (Or bad.) Unfortunately, reality checks both sides. Wrapping it in a social justice narrative may make it easier to obscure the ledger to other humans but it doesn't fool reality for one Plank instant.
Ubuntu-powered Internet TV to be Revealed at CES
You know what would be really cool is a few basic graphic illustrations of the pinch/rotate/pan gestures.

So that in your app, you could show the gesture icon and describe what it does.
As zerostar07 said, the bureaucracy alone makes it a nonstarter. In the UK I get my personal HMRC contact, whereas in Greece you have to get up at 7 am and only hope you will get whatever you want done that day.

Also, Greece doesn't generally encourage entrepreneurship that much. For example, I can't email an invoice, I have to actually mail the actual physical copy, which I have to write by hand, because I have a book of invoices stamped by the Eforia (the Greek revenue service).

Plus, setting up the UK company took 15 minutes and as many pounds, whereas I have no idea how much it costs in Greece. Friends who've done it told me to stay away.
There are two main advantages to buying an off the shelf company:

1. Having a company that appears to have been around for longer than it actually has (although it's pretty easy to find out it's history - e.g. when directors changed).

2. Getting the company name that you want. There are a number of people that form companies and register them as dormant just to squat on the name - just like people do with domain names.

Edit: forgot to add:

I'd recommend registering a fresh company. It's quick and easy. Buying a company, changing directors, making sure there's no awful legal history with it etc probably isn't worth the extra cost or effort. It's nice to have a clean slate to start with.