skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Have you ever switched roles or industry after establishing a career?
Hey HN,

I'm curious to see how many people here have changed roles or industry after spending years establishing a career. I know that burn out is quite a common occurrence in the tech industry which can lead to quite a few making a switch to work that makes them happier.

It would be really interesting to hear the stories about people's career moves. What did you do? Why did you decide to switch role or industry? How did you make that transition?

Certain events over the past 6 months have started to make me question what I want to do with my life and how the next 10 years will look. I imagine quite a few other people will be in similar situations and may find it extremely helpful to hear stories from members here.
Main features of FEX

file transfer of virtually unlimited file size
recipient and sender only need an e-mail program and a web browser
RESEND and REGET for resuming after link failures at last sent byte
auto-notification of recipient
auto-deletion after download
auto-deletion after expiration date (default: 5 days)
full-users can create one time upload URLs for foreign users
full-users can create sub-users, who can send only to this full-user
full-users can create groups, an analogy to mailing lists, but for files
admin can allow (internal or external) user self-registration
admin can allow upload to public recipients without authentification
maintenance-free: no admin interaction necessary besides creating new F*EX accounts
Sending to multiple recipients needs storage on the server only once
F*EX is a HTTP web-service and needs no firewall-tunnels
support for streams, too
for real UNIX users, there are the shell programs fexsend and fexget to avoid annoying web browser usage
If you need to rely on C libraries, it seems to me the best use of Go is as a coordination language. Use it to distribute tasks that are then executed by isolated, shared-nothing C code.
The USA PATRIOT Act only altered the search and seizure requirements for foreign nationals under FISA. It's not a big deal - these requirements were already in place, they just lessened the legal justification for getting a court order. Personally, the USA PATRIOT Act wouldn't concern me - SOPA style legislation would though.
Those reasons are spot on. Also errors are difficult to track down and spreadsheets have horrible code re-use.
"24. [..] Learned about the Python requests library. I will now judge all libraries based on this work of beauty."

Completely agree. As if you are writing pure HTTP.
See I'm not sure if it draws much from Ethan's colors, the purple maybe, but that green is way different.
I've spent 5 minutes looking around trying to work out what your app does and I still don't really know.
I read this while I was writing my TPS cover sheet.
Help us Fix Product Search at Priceonomics (YC W12)
ABOUT US

Priceonomics is the price guide for everything. We're a team of three who are passionate about reinventing how people search, discover, and purchase products.

We're based in the heart of San Francisco, on the edge of SoMa/Mission. We have great investors like Y Combinator, Andreessen Horowitz, Ron Conway (SV Angel), Crunch Fund and many more.

Salary, equity, benefits, lunch every day and your choice of the best computer equipment all come standard.

ABOUT YOU: Front-end Engineer

We are looking for someone who likes to solve huge front-end problems. You might take a look at Google Shopping and think, "I can do better."

Helping people know how much to pay for something is a big front-end challenge. How do you take our hundreds of millions of data points and convey that to actionable information?

You care deeply about design and creating a beautiful user experience. If you can come up with a wireframe, mock it up, and implement the front-end (from jQuery to Django) then you'll have a blast here.

GET IN TOUCH

Send an email to omar@priceonomics.com with any information you think we should know. We'd love it if you told us one thing you like about the site and one thing you'd like to change.

Also, we love puzzles:

DJkmoljtnJLtrJ91VTEyL29xMFO0nTymYPOyoJScoPOioJSlDUOlnJAyo25ioJywpl5wo20tq2y0nPO0nTHtp3IvnzIwqPOfnJ5yVPqvo29gVTxtq2yhWl4=

Recruiters, rockstars, and ninjas need not apply.
Tried using this just now. Looks really cool!
Thanks - I didn't test Opera, I updated it to show only the color (actual) character in opera and not show the fallback image
Why I left DreamHost for MediaTemple
Didn't do readers any favor by pointing at the title slide, where controls need to be discovered by accident. A better link is the unfestooned

http://concur.rspace.googlecode.com/hg/talk/concur.html
Anyone else type Ctrl-A H in an attempt to leave the page?
WANT.

IE: Very, very neat.

As a Ruby/Objective-C developer, I've always wanted something like this for my ruby projects. Xcode is awesome, but this level of integration for our distributed projects would make things go so much faster. I cannot wait to use it :)
CPUs and buses have been abstracted away pretty successfully by now, especially if you use a high-level language. But I can't imagine that the same will happen to file systems, at least not in the next 10 years. Too many of our critical tools, like all version control systems, depend on knowing where in the file system hierarchy your stuff is stored. Even if your IDE hides that from you, you'll need to know where to look as soon as something goes wrong. And things go wrong at the file system level a lot more often than they do at the CPU level.
Great Firewall hiccup? China loses Internet connectivity for an hour
You can already do this with barely any effort at all in emacs. M-x customize-faces and then set the method face to be larger or a different family.
Agreed. It happens a lot (in all my previous jobs I had mostly non-technical people as leads), but they have to work 10x harder to be effective. I think that even a limited technical background does a lot of things for you:

1) You can scope your team's features and commitments more effectively if you have some understanding of the technical complexity of each ask.

2) Understanding the technology (and the skills of your people) means you have better intuition about the right people to bring into the room when a problem arises

3) It's easier to be empathetic with your team when you have engineering experience, because you know that many times the spec is just the tip of the iceberg.

4) Credibility. A group of devs will have a lot more respect for you from the start if they know you're not just a bureaucrat and you can code (even if it's not as well as they can)
Actually, the news thing is pretty good point! Didn't notice that. Definitely not very user friendly... Which is a bit of a surprise. I don't agree with everything Neilson says (like this report) but he's actually been pretty good many times. I guess usability is something that's hard to get 100% right all the time.
A System is not a Product
I definitely agree with you. One of the hurdles (from what I can understand) is that not many of the WebGL frameworks support robust physics and collision detection (Fundamental to any 3D game).
This is being addressed however, most recently by the CubicVR WebGL framework, which you can see an example of in their 'Physics Vehicle Truck Heightfield Demo' http://www.webgl.com/2012/03/webgl-game-demo-cubicvr-physics...
Sorry, try http://pubs.vmware.com/vfabric5/topic/com.vmware.ICbase/PDF/...
But you'd need some.
How long did it take you to build this prototype?

I'm interested because when I played with Clojure I didn't feel like you can make quick prototypes with it.
This is completely lame and must surely be unintended by Google. The situation is that increasing adoption of one of their main products (Gmail/Googleapps) directly impacts on users of another major product (Analytics).

If everyone using Google search was signed into a Google account when searching, then there would be no keyword data at all for Google searches in Analytics. Already, keyword "(not provided)" is the second largest category in the organic traffic for my site.

This is a classic sign of a company that is the opposite of lean/nimble, falling over itself to the detriment of its customers...
I just looked at your demo and spend only about a minute but my initial question is how do you diffentiate your company from dropbox?

I do not think the issue is building the code or encrypting the file or sending it out to non users. The issue is why will someone select your service over dropbox?

They have better market penetration and stronger cash position. The barrier to entry comes into play when I have about 1000 GB of my data already hosted on dropbox and now I see your company doing pretty much the same thing. Why would I leave dropbox and migrate my 1000 GB of data to dopdock?
Before you rewrite the code and encrypt the file and perform user authentication scirpts - I think you should answer that question first. If you have a great answer - then it's great. If your answer is will give them more free space i.e. 200 GB to start out with - it's good but I don't think it's going to cut it. So, my thing is answer that first and if you can - you will be golden.
Ask HN: Does this web app already exist?
With the allergy season in full swing, I'm absolutely miserable, but I've realized that I'm not entirely sure what I'm allergic to. Is there a website that I can enter my email address and zip code and let it figure out what I'm allergic to? It could give me an e-mail survey at night, asking me to rate my allergies on a scale from 1 to 10 for the day. It could also ask about other symptoms, such as cough or runny nose. It could then monitor the allergy indexes for me and identify what I'm most likely allergic to.

Once it has figured this out, it could e-mail me in the morning when the allergy index is high to let me know that I would probably benefit from taking some allergy meds.

Does such a website exist? If so, I would love to use it. If not, I think it may make an interesting weekend project!

edit: fixed a grammar issue.
Kudos on a job well done. I have been thinking about these things, and in case you haven't seen lisping(iPad app), check that out too.

One question though:
Where do you store all your functions? Do you use a db or something like that? Or just one flat file or file/func?
Comments on an earlier submission:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3836683

Meta: OK, I'm finding myself doing the cross-referencing thing again. I'm going to chill and (again) stop doing it. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Pentagon buys contract for dual-focus contact lens for Head-Up Displays
I dislike GPL because it makes business decisions (licensing concerns) get in the way of any and all programming.

Sometimes I make a lib that I want to use for myself, proprietary but not profit making. Sometimes I later want to use that library in a consulting project (now it's profit making). In general, I don't know whether all the desired end uses of my code will be commercial, open source, or just simply code I use personally but don't want to release.

(I believe the GPL triggers upon release/distribution of software, right? If I keep my modified version on my local system and don't sell it or ship it then there's no conflict. However, using it on my personal machine to serve up a publicly accessible website, I believe, also triggers it. Since lots of my "personal" code gets used on my personal, non-commercial, web site, I stay away from GPL even when I think I'm never shipping a piece of code.)
Why would they not want free backups at the NSA? Pay nothing, file a FOIA request for a restore, then wait 50 years.

Real men don't use backups, they post their stuff on a public ftp server and let the rest of the world make copies. - Linus Torvalds
Can you make one for the As? :)
Would you care to elaborate how you'll be able to power a drone for an extended amount of time? I was doing some minor research (I was curious about the pirate bays 'server drone' idea), and the best that I could personally come up with was flight times of about an hour. That doesn't seem all that useful to maintain a constant server, or traffic cam, presence.
Honest question from an aspiring entrepreneur: How do you plan to stay afloat/relevant when Apple has made it clear they are targeting platform integrated notifications in Mountain Lion?
OT: I hate company blogs that don't have links in the top left corner back to the company's actual site.
Have they not improved urllib in 3.x? (I'm still on 2.7.)
5-6 days, most of which had to do with me having to hack around in the compiler a little. That was new for me and the Java there is particularly weird, so that took longer than I would've liked.
Yes, this would be pretty easy to do. Stay tuned!
Simple, but still pretty cool.
I came here to say the same thing. "Shit Umbrella" is a fantastic description.
And how many people would have had a color monitor back then?
@ralphsaunders we really appreciate the honest feedback. Hall is collaboration for your company and team. Our current product is the War Room which enables team collaboration (chat, video, file sharing, rt notes) all in one place.

We hope you'll give us another chance by creating a war room for your team and letting us know what you think. Thanks! brett @ hall-inc.com
A Year with MongoDB
Let Meteor mature until you just ship. At the very least, until the security issues are addressed.

But in the meantime, learn Node, learn Ruby, learn something else.

Don't just sit and spin because the shiniest new thing isn't perfect yet. Experiment.
Good call - we'll work on that today
It's amazing that most bosses don't realize / don't care about the reaction they'll get from sending a meeting invite like that. That's not a sign that you're working for an A player.
Very nice thanks. Will take a look.
Probably the people who mentioned kickstarter tend to think kickstarter for ideas without large profit potential, and unless you also sell a software-deployment platform (like Microsoft and Apple do) tools for programmers does not IMHO have large profit potential.
ibdknox: So this is sweet looking -- of course I want to know: when we can get our hands on a version?
I think there are (at least) two different viewpoints of what is required for people to be able to program (and do it well).

First, an explosion in the power of the hardware being programmed on has made people think less of the efficiency that coding once required and more about getting something done. This feels sloppy, but can be a good starting point for iteration (+1 buzzword).

Similarly, the number of tools out there to get someone (like me) started on programming has EXPLODED in recent years. This results in a lot more people at least starting to code in whatever limited way.

I think it's naïve to think that people who start to code "the simple way" will always code that way. If they're actually pursuing as a career, they will always be digging more and trying to find out why something works a particular way.

Not seeing the filesystem/structure at first glance also isn't necessarily the same as NEVER looking at it or being interested in how the pieces all fit together. it simply means you don't have to worry about it RIGHT NOW.
The Inconvenient Astrologer Of MI5
Performance Testing Rails with BlitzIO
okay - thanks :)
The screeching sound gave me goosebumps! :)
Oh yeah. I knew there was one I forgot.

You get compiler errors about as helpful as trying to debug C++ macros -- namely, something is wrong with this big glob of code, but it ain't gonna tell you what or where.
I agree with this, though it is not a popular opinion. There are many issues with the site. You have to read the entire site to find whatever you are looking for. Under news is listed news, then courses, then more news. While visual design is a different discipline as others have pointed out, this design is so bad that it impairs usability simply by being hard to read. It's just a really bad site, and I think it's fair for the op to put a serious questionmark to Jakob Nielsens authority on the subject, based on it.
All the references to lexical scope but one are annotations added decades later. The one early reference said "dynamic scope harder than lexical scope."

In any case, the claim that fexprs make compilation challenging for large software systems is much more nuanced than what you were implying earlier, that Kernel's no different from "the 1960s".

Now that compilation is less challenging thanks to lexical scope, and with computers being so much faster, it's worth considering whether fexprs can be compiled to be fast enough (say to ruby levels for a start). That would still be valuable. Right?

I think it's very superficial to claim that only 'two sentences' of Shutt's thesis were about 'Pitman'. He mentioned the concerns in the abstract[1], for crying out loud. He's addressing the issues throughout even if he isn't constantly paying homage to some sort of Pitman deity.

[1] http://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/ETD/Available/etd-090110-124904
There's a simple reason that Twitter always pushes link through their shortener - it means that if a link is deemed hazardous to your health, they can kill it.

This happens all the time with spam accounts, but I've seen it happen on real accounts as well. Twitter takes exception to something you've lunk to and "Bam!" - the link doesn't work any more.

Good practice? Or simply evil. You decide.
For the traffic cam application, where people aren't trying to shoot it down, it would be pretty simple to switch it out regularly with one from a nearby charging station. You might even be able to use a balloon to take off a lot of the weight, so you can just use the rotors for altitude adjustment. You'd be slower, but would probably last a lot longer.
Show HN: SpaceMagic, a real-time node.js framework
Suns Fortress language was kinda interesting experiment in that direction: http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/first-impressions-o...
I was also a bit confused as to why the "The Hall.com Blog" and "Home" both took you to blog.hall.com.
The same way they do satellite coverage at non-geostationary orbits: You have a group of drones that swap in and out. Depending on how far/how long it takes to refuel and get a drone back into the air, you could provide continuous coverage of a single area with as little as 2-3 drones.
Am i the only one for who this video is broken in 3 different browsers?

Other video: http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/diy-drones-take-on-silic...
Create a cgroup hierarchy with the CPU subsystem attached, then put each JVM in its own cgroup in that hierarchy. By default, each JVM will get an equal amount of CPU time. A JVM can be given relatively more CPU time by increasing cpu.shares for its cgroup. You can similarly manage memory and i/o with the memory and blkio subsystems.

http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6...
Kickstarter let's you basically preorder a product that lacks investors.

Being a startup investor has become the game rich people love to play. There are people who'll fund anything in return for a small percentage of the company in the hopes it might be the next Google/Facebook/Paypal ...

Billionaires don't want to be in the smallprinted section of the forbes-list, they want to be "legends" like Peter Thiel or Andy Bechtolsheim and want their name in the history books
I'm sure there's some element of not wanting to pay money in the original comment, but the commenter clearly stated that one viable option is to make the pricing explicit.

I agree (almost) completely. When the pricing is obfuscated you can't take the risk of building software without knowing how much the license is going to cost you. Where I don't agree is that you can probably talk about pricing before you start coding, while developing your business plan. Hopefully they are flexible enough to have reasonable negotiations even though your business plan is not yet fixed in stone. Ideally the negotiations would simply be them stating a fixed price and a bit of haggling. It's complicated if they want a percentage of profits. But you don't know until you ask.
Beautifully simple. Really nice work Dom. I love the animation on the close button after clicking the "G" logo.
Filed under "Flori-duh"

God I hate that state. The most idiots per capita I've ever encountered.
On the "Goroutines are not threads" slide, it says, "When a goroutine blocks, that THREAD blocks but no other goroutine blocks."

I hope that's a typo. A thread is blocked when a goroutine blocks would exhaust the worker thread pool pretty fast. Can an GO expert clarify on that?
I'm not sure I agree. Textmate made a crap ton of money, companies like JetBrains and DevExpress have made very successful businesses building dev tools.

And while you mention MSFT as building a platform, if VS alone can make a billion, even without a platform I suspect you could do quite well.
Instagram’s User Count Now At 40 Million, 10 Million New Users In 10 Days
Wow, this article couldn't have come at a better time for me. Recently, I jumped from being a lead developer to being an architect and manager. Benjamin articulates exactly what I'm going through. Unfortunately, I don't think going backwards is an option for me.
Maybe that is a good thing? If programmers have no assumptions or presumptions about files and filesystems, then they are open for innovating new stuff without the burden of legacy.
I think it would depend on the language to a certain extent. For example, good luck writing anything complicated in Python without touching files and directories, because every file is a module and every directory is a namespace.

A programmer obviously can't be expected to know how everything works, which is why we have abstractions. But I think abstractions need to be leak-proof to a certain extent before you can justify not knowing what lies below. The current state of file system abstractions is nowhere near that. They leak all over the place.
Simple and fun, but why would someone use something like this vs visiting mlb.com?
Glad to see someone else enjoyed this! I made the video, let me know if you have any questions!
The ability to solve problems that fall outside the envelope of your harvested and processed data?
Thanks, looking...
API question answered here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3826814
Many people had color monitors in the 1980s. For values of "monitors" that include television sets. The Commodore 64 and Vic 20 were color, as was the Tandy CoCo. Lots of others as well.
I'm guessing there's a cost to getting that additional data (in the form of scraping resources)
What is your social network usage? [Survey]
I don't like GPL. GPL is a religion about how all the software in the world should be free. That's not my religion. Open source is totally different, like the MPL. I am very thankful for all open source projects, but I'm not sure any of them need to be GPL. (could be wrong.)
Keep it up. Great work.
As a non-sports person just being able to know if SOMA will be a mess or not is perfect.
Ask HN: why no bookmarking on HN?
So I'm relatively new to HN. But it has become my number one information site. I love kicking back on my couch and absorb all these collective knowledge via my iPad (so no plugins option) what my experience is missing is an easy way to bookmark stuff. I know I can interact with a thread and use the "thread" link to see them, but that's not really a solution for me.
I'm sure this is not a new topic. So how come such an obvious feature has never been implemented?
Also I like to know if there are others who are interested.
Starship Enterprise, relative to the Empire State Building
So, the founders of the company want to make sure they maintain control over it?

Why is this evil again?