skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With respect to CS in particular, I think it's different from all other school subjects in that it is and has always remained a predominantly self-taught subject. You don't really get "taught" to program.

(I think this may be part of the reason that while there are increasing proportions of women in all the other sciences, the proportion of women in CS is dropping. Girls are statistically better in all school subjects than boys, and tend to be more diligent at homework and so on. Math and science fall neatly into that paradigm; programming doesn't. You get no gold stars from grownups by programming. So a lot of people who have the problem-solving aptitude to be good programmers never actually get started -- because nobody TOLD them to.)
"This is assuming that they are using open source projects internally and that you A. Know what they are using and B. That they care about who maintains them rather than treating them as a black box that does stuff for free"

Then turn it around and look for companies based on the open source products that they use. There are plenty of companies that are heavy users of open source software, and don't hide that fact. You might have to move or something, but that's life.

"Also tech conferences seem to be a pretty expensive way"

There are many cheap conferences, or free exhibit hall passes for early-bird registration (usually allows BoF sessions, as well, and maybe parties); and user groups are ordinarily free (maybe you chip in for dinner or something). There are conferences or user groups in many areas about something, and maybe you can just drive. Often, you can share a room with another attendee (ask on some mailing list related to the conference) to save on lodging. If you have developed something or have some kind of speaking experience, the conference may pay for some or all of the travel expenses, and may waive conference pass. There are even some open source projects that have money waiting for anyone who wants to bootstrap a user group in their town.

And these things are not theory. I have done absolutely everything I have suggested to you here (except trying to bootstrap a local user group): get free conference exhibit pass, drive to conference, share room, get started contributing, get major patches accepted, and get jobs through community connections. And I still do it, and I see many people rising up through very similar means that had little in the way of marketable talents a while ago.

Disclaimer: Nothing about this happens overnight. It takes a long time. There are no magical steps where I can say "do these things and you will get this". You have to look out for the opportunities on your own. Start attacking your own reasons why something can't be done, knocking them down one by one.
Who do you think makes those tools?
Thanks! I noticed others in this thread saying it's better to avoid negatives. For example, "Pursue your dreams" instead of "Don't ignore your dreams". Can you make a positive version of this poster?
This was a clever way of saying "nonprofit". Section 501 of US tax code handles nonprofits.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/501(c)_organization
I still don't quite get it. Presumably the story is more interesting than "we got permission and used lots of wire", but the first couple of pages of google results don't really explain how.
I agree with the concept of a future without cars. However, this is one of these areas where an entire discussion can go on with mostly Americans and our willingness to look at how other nations do things means we do a lot of incredibly stupid stuff.

Look, we need to just do whatever Mexico and a huge number of nations do and allow local collectivos with trucks etc. to give rides around town. It's fine to say we should do this or that in the future but our transportation is laid out like it is. It's freaking difficult to get around the US without a car. We've built nearly all of our cities and towns in a way dominated by cars and roads. So buses and trucks are the way to go.
"Always do the right thing" - I can't think of a more concise definition of a mensch.
So actually, due to disagreements with GEMA, many Youtube videos are already blocked in Germany, even if uploaded by the video clips copyright holders. I was in Stuttgart and couldn’t open a video by SBTRKT that was posted by their own label http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdUINbi4wSY
What UI do you use?

I probably going to use newest Thunderbird when I leave gmail.
I was literally thinking about Valve's organizational structure this week, wondering if it had a classification. Nearly bugged Gabe. Thank you for sharing this.
besides the default theme and the high contrast theme, all others are useless and look like the work of a 5 year old. Design has a function, namely to make things clear and give the user a good experience.
Well then maybe they shouldn't have been using pavement and even more to the point, not packing people into cities. We should spread out and use things like horses because they are an environmental free lunch compared to the insanity of extracting fossil fuels so that fat assholes can sit in traffic for 2 hours a day to go sit in an office.
You can't skip over early adopters
> If you have to hire someone, you're looking at a few hundred dollars minimum in most cases

Find me any business that became successful immediately after a non-technical founder paid a technical contractor less than $500.
MIT Turns the Green Building into a Game of Tetris
From the fine article, it seems that the code in question is timsort, which Bloch wrote after he left Sun. He gave the code to Sun by pushing it into the OpenJDK.
I was a middle-schooler and my parents took me to play. I recall a bug where if you rotated the square quickly enough it would travel upward. Someone (maybe Clara?) whipped out a patch and recompiled.
And then there's those of us who never really had anything resembling a lifelong dream in the first place. Calling it boredom is an understatement, sounds more like acedia.
Without a license, someone who copied the code into their application could then be sued by the original developer.

This was fine in the demo scene, but if you want to expand FOSS to businesses and paid applications, you need licenses. It wasn't the FSF who introduced that - it's how copyright works.

Maybe using permissive licenses would've been better than introducing the GPL, but you'd still need some license.

EULAs and TOS are completely different issues.
An alien observer might also note that as soon as we discovered what we could do with oil, we busied ourselves with using it up as fast as possible.
Apple's kernel/userland A.K.A Darwin is available from Apple's open source website.

Apple has also contributed a lot that they weren't required to contribute. Sure they are an example, but they are not nearly as cut throat as people like to make them out to be. Look for Apple.com on commits to the FreeBSD source tree...
> I thinks that this shows that gmail is an amazing app that it provides this level of customisation

That made me chuckle, using a desktop email app. Funny/curious/thought-provoking how different standards apply to web apps still.
> However, the positives far outweigh any negatives.

I'm solo-founding my own start-up right now, and I find that I agree with this statement as a general rule, but I find that it is advice that should be given based on personality type.

That said, I think there are ways to minimize the negatives by "out-sourcing" some of the co-founder responsibilities.

A. Motivation

I have a couple of friends who are just curious about the start-up process. They've been involved from day one, if only passively, and are just curious about what I'm building so it gives me someone to share my latest modification/addition with. That way I don't feel like I'm building in a vacuum.

B. Work Sharing

This is, for me, the hardest part of being a solo-founder -- the vague feeling that if I don't do something, it's never ever going to get done. It gets to be an amazing burden. Lately I've taken to using outsourcing sites (like, oDesk) and just assigning small relatively unimportant tasks. ("Design a confirmation email", "Turn this data into a chart using two or three libraries"). It's easy to say "Well I could just do that", but then spending $30-$50 to just not have to worry about it, gives you the feeling of stuff getting done with out you.

C. Idea Evaluation

You can still talk to your friends/peers about any given aspect of your idea, and its execution, and even if they haven't been involved in the ins and outs, it doesn't mean their input is useless. Sometimes, I would imagine, you get more honest feedback from someone who doesn't have a financial stake in what happens. It removes much of the emotional component of an argument and allows you to just talk about it intellectually/theoretically. I find that I'm actually more receptive to feedback when I don't feel any sense of obligation to hear that person out.

D. Accountability

Do what smokers do. Tell your three closest friends that "by this weekend, I'll have [x] working."

Anyway, just rambling. Of course if I had a co-founder they might tell me to stop commenting on HN and get back to work, so maybe I'm invalidating my point as I go.
Whatever you are doing to your site's menu bar, it does not work for me in Safari. It flickers and jumps around while scrolling. (5.2, so might be my fault)

Besides, great work. I just bought an Apple USB keyboard to replace the BT keyboard on my main computer, maybe I'll take the BT one with me for iPad coding now!
The title is extremely misleading - it has nothing to do with SOPA and isn't even close to it.

That said, there are some aspects of CISPA that are indeed alarming.
If you're focused on the inequalities of a business' income structure, you'll surely be disappointed by them all.
Cases where you can get away with paying a technical contractor $300-500 are pretty limited, but they tend to be businesses with small ambition where just having a web presence is the important factor, not implementing any specialized functionality. A student-run startup company selling eco-friendly water bottles, for example, can probably get someone to install and set up a basic landing page with a simple payment gateway for under $500.
For a good API I'd agree with you that it's a difficult skill to learn. In the case of java I would say that "no expression of creativity and it is fairly mechanical" is a fairly apt description.
Ok, I'm going to throw out an open question to the HN community here. I'm a working programmer working mostly on web dev/internal apps for an established company. However I do most of the work on my own rather than in a team and have never worked on a team of more than 5 people (and even that was brief).

I am an OK Java & PHP programmer with some Linux Sysadmin experience (mainly running servers for apps I have built). I have basic CS credentials but am mostly self taught (starting with BASIC -> PHP -> Java) and have messed around with a bit of Game Dev & System programming in my spare time but nothing earth shattering.

I want to take the "next step" but my skills in math and Big Data analysis type stuff are fairly poor by HN standard, I am quickly approaching 30 and have very limited money.

Should I:

A) Take a pure math degree (possibly also with stats) to improve my overall math skill in the hope that this will open more doors for me in stuff like NLP , Big data etc (but also cost significant money+time).

B) Hack on existing open source projects to increase my knowledge of working on large & complex code bases (significant time cost buy little money cost).Possibly compliment this by working on the free online courses from Stanford etc.

C) Work on my own projects in the hope that I can build something cool that will get me recognition in some way.

D) Try to improve other skills outside programming/math and become more "well rounded".

Discuss.
Great power comes with new languages
sigh, recurring email of a cs student at a major university that offers an MBA program.

Hi [tango],

I'm [zebra] and I am a student at the [bravo] business school. I found you through [school-directory] and I am contacting you because I have a promising opportunity in the [social|shopping|vanity-business] space, already receiving attention from potential investors. Not being technical myself, I could use some help from an [awesome|master-hacker|wizard] technical guy in order to build a [platform|app|buzz-word-flavor-of-the-week]. I was wondering if you'd be interested to chat over coffee sometime this week.

best,
[zebra]
Hmm... I might be able to us this for doing programming structure charts. I've unfortunately yet to find a program or app that has all the things I want with WYSWYG, much less groups them, but this has most of them.

Would love the ability to upload my own vectors for use, and to create a custom group of vectors.
(Every usage of "WebKit" in this comment that was not "lower-level than WebKit" and "unlike WebKit" should have been "WebCore". I wish I had noticed that mistake earlier. ;P)
I HATE HATE HATE the new design! I was dreading the day they took away the old look, but these tips go a long way to making gmail usable for me again. Thanks!
Not sure if you've looked at TextExpander but I find it to be a nice compliment to Textastic. I created some Django shortcuts that seem to work nicely. %%ifeq turns into {% ifequal %}{% endifequal %}
I ended up leaving Gmail a few months ago (knowing this was coming). The new design works really poorly with browser zoom. I need to view the page zoomed in to 300% or so most of the time (I don't have good vision). Zooming really worked pretty well on all of the past iterations, up until this one. There are a number of panes that stay visible when scrolling, so the content area on the web page becomes really really small. (I'm not usually one to complain just because things changed, I didn't like the mystery meat icons either, but I can get over something trivial like that.) It just doesn't work.

I couldn't really figure out where else to go, but OWA 2010 doesn't have these problems, so I went to Office 365 for my own domain (and forwarded Gmail). I never thought I'd pay for email but considering how vital mail is, having real support is a nice piece of mind.

I remember how awesome webmail seemed in 2003 (when I switched from Outlook to Gmail), but now that I've gone back to Outlook, I see all the awesome stuff that I was missing. This is really not to credit Outlook though, I'm sure Gmail (threading) influenced them greatly in the past 8 years. I know you can just use Outlook+Gmail, but sadly IMAP isn't nearly as good as Exchange.
Don’t Be Evil but Don’t Miss the Tech Train
No idea who'd have done the patch, it was really a team effort. I forget the exact number, but there were 20+ contributors over the course of the project. And by the time it was up and running a lot of us were crashing due to the long hours. I only vaguely remember the first night it fired up, since I had gone home to sleep after a long shift and someone came back to tell me that it was finally working.

Awesome to hear from someone who got to play it!
Sure, but there were a lot of other things that remained stable/stagnant as well as prices. Like most measurements of progress or quality of life.

Your view isn't irrational, but if it's not based on ideology and it's not based on evidence then what is it based on? (hint: its actually ideology, it just doesn't feel that way because it's not an insane belief and it's a popular one)
I prefer open source to free

The approaches are different, but in terms of licenses and rights, Open Source and Free Software are mostly the same. MIT and BSD are Free Software too.
Here's another true one:

"Do you have experience with APIs?"

"Uh...Yeah. Yeah, I do."
Well, the problem that I mentioned is that you no longer have the opportunity to actually set your goal to 100% language awareness if your startup had made it BIG.

But that's not true. You're buying into limiting beliefs. You need to widen your frame.

For example, if your startup is successful (enough) you can hire a CEO or COO or whatever, let them manage the day to day stuff, appoint yourself "Chief Scientist" (or even CTO, whatever) and go back to focusing on coding.

Besides, at the end of the day, you can set your goals to anything you want. There are no limits. As the man said Surprise me, challenge me, defy me.[1]

[1]; http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0218817/
US woman becomes hero for battered wives in China
Be sure to not miss the final Appendix section, even if his Voronoi approach might not be the best approach for your particular map-generation needs (it really depends on your game IMO), there's a TON of links to great resources on various map-building topics: Technical things on Voronoi/Delaunay comp.geometry, general map building stuff for RPG/geofiction, Biological tables for determining plausible biomes, Geology references for plausible terrains and even a site on how to do pretty relief shading like is done on classic topographical maps!
> As a former analyst at an investment bank, I can say with 100% confidence that we have way too many people from the finance industry working in advertising right now. The flow of quants who were once seeking positive alphas that are now building agency trading desks...

Very interesting that quants moved from finance to advertising, but not surprising to me after I heard the term "click arbitrage" a while ago.
I don't even think they should be excluded because they're important, but simply because they are required for interoperability, which can never be made illegal anyway.
Thanks for the advice.

I do in theory like the idea of speaking a tech conference. I am just worried about the level of experience that would be required to do so.

I don't want to stand up in front of X number of people and tell them stuff they already know.

I live in a place that is very very far from being a "tech center" in the way that SV is but there are a few user groups around (mainly PHP groups, LUGs etc). I should probably check them out.

I did go to a local LUG once but that was about 5 years ago and mostly consisted of unemployed neck beards grumbling into their pints of bitter. Hopefully things have changed since.
Have I learned more due to my failed startup than if I were to make it BIG? Let me know your thoughts

If you did a failed startup, I'm sure you learned a lot of valuable lessons. If your startup had succeeded and you were still working on it, and we were still conversing today, would it not still be true that you "learned a lot of valuable lessons from being involved in a startup the past X years/months/whatever?" Sure the lessons would probably be different, but to say you learned more or less in one scenario or the other seems impossible to me.

Anyway, what has happened is what has happened, you can't change it; so I'd encourage you to spend less time worrying about the past and hypothetical alternate scenarios and more time worrying about what comes next.
The Stanford videos are great. Another good resource for screencasts is http://nsscreencast.com/

Also if you're looking for a good book about iOS http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1430236051/ref=redir_mdp_mobil...

For learning the ins and out of objective c I've heard this is a good book: http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0321706285

Good luck!
A worldwide campaign in help of Repsol is in act, and this article is just one example of misinformation. It's a pretty bad article if you really want to know what is going on. The truth from the argentinian side goes completely missing, and after reading it, the idea you get is very very wrong about what the problem is about, the why and the how.
The truth is that the company Repsol was using YPF for milking its money and transfer it abroad, without taking any care about sustaining or increasing production. ALL the other companies with any percentage in YPF will be not bought out, and all of them were voting against the Repsol plan to not do maintenance on the oil wells. Repsol just wanted to move the money, speculate and eventually sell its participation (there were ongoing talks with China). All of that was against the law, they bought under certain responsibilities and they were not fulfilling them. The well were not maintained, there was not prospective works, many many cases of ecological problems, and many WORKING wells were closed for speculative purposes.
But the real reason for the takeover was that Argentina has being growing a LOT these last years, and they will keep on growing, so they need a good and cheap supply of oil. But mostly a SECURE energy supply. And Repsol was using YPF just for moving money, speculation, and was ruining the many different assets the corporation had. Repsol was opposed by all the other shareholders within YPF, but having 51% they were just doing anything they wanted. Well, in a very reasonable move, the country in need of a stable oil production took again control of their own oil.
Sad to see this type of "journalism" as news in HN.
It's slow because all the UI elements in the new themes have alpha transparency and rounded corners. It increases the amount of work your browser has to do to paint it tremendously (though GPU acceleration will help).
Were the building administrators in on this? Or was it really a "hack"?

I'm assuming there must be some central computer controlling the lights, either than or they attached something to / modified each light switch?
Sorry, but how don't see how the GPL forces anything nor does it "infect" anything. That kind of loaded terminology is just BS.

The GPL offers you a deal that you can accept or refuse, just like any other license. The terms are definitively more onerous than permissive OSS licenses, but that's it.
> Also, you get more CPU bang for your buck.

I'm not sure this is necessarily true. We did a recent study and found RAX costs almost double for our example web app: http://blog.shopforcloud.com/2012/02/holy-cow-rackspace-uk-c...
It sounds like you're essentially talking about caching proxies, since if the data only lived on NYT's server, it wouldn't matter whether you were looking it up by "data ID" or IP address. Don't we have that already? Is there some significant difference I'm missing?
Then why mention it in the context of this discussion?
odds are nothing will happen. just give adequate notice, as professional courtesy. it happens ALL the time. i've done it a couple times when projects go awry and never gave it a second thought.

if you want to waste time and money over a trivial issue? then talk to a lawyer.