skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the best people I've worked with are generalists over time and specialists in the moment.

Precisely, and very well worded.

Being a generalist is a great strategy, but not a great job-search tactic. Hiring managers would like to hire someone who will be a generalist over time, but they need someone who is able and willing to solve the specific problem that's bothering them this year.
Lighten up. He wasn't marketing. He was illustrating his point with his own experience.
Hacker news IRC channel?
I use IRC quite a lot to quickly find the solution for small problems that Google doesn't solve.

However all channels are fairly specialized and I sometimes feel the need to discuss more general concepts that span several categories. That is normally not appreciated on IRC, you'll be asked to stay on topic.

Hacker news feels like this endless well of knowledge that can be tapped and it would be cool to have a Hacker news channel on IRC.
Artisan System Framework Gets Result Aggregators
Or they can just do an SMS subscription plan, based on usage. First 10 are free, thereafter it's $5/month.
Why Your Startup Will Fail
Montreal, Canada. If you don't mind the cold, you have great public transit and bike lanes throughout the city. Not to mention amazing food, culture and low cost of living.
Terrible. This is not science. I do not at all agree with the conclusions. There is only a correlation, but the cause/effect relationship they infer is shady at best.
Points (1) and (2) can also be seen in psychological/cultural terms - academia used to be seen as a respectable career choice, but with the rise of the bankers there was more family pressure on young people to 'use' their talents - which mean't making money in the City - otherwise you could be seen as wasting them, and letting down your family.

Really? I am utterly surprised by the thought of anyone choosing finance over academia for fear of "letting down the family". I grew up thinking of "Wall Street" as an uncultured and not very respectable profession.

My dad was disgusted when I told him (2003, during my junior year in college) that I was considering Wall Street as a profession. My parents both wanted me to get a PhD, and strongly insinuated that finance would be a waste of my talent.

I come from a family of inventors, architects, and writers, so although I grew up solidly middle-class, and my parents would've been happy with my choice had I been a high school teacher, the thought of me working on Wall Street was seen as a massive "step down" into unpreftigious nouveau-riche territory. (I softened my view toward Wall Street upon moving to New York; a lot of quants are brilliant, educated, and cultured people. I still do look down, reflexively, upon any "profession" connected to real estate. I can honestly say I'd never marry a woman who worked in RE, and only a woman from a real estate family if she had been purified through an elite college, a filter I otherwise don't care about in the slightest.)

I'm surprised that upper-middle-class UK families don't have an even stronger blue-blooded prejudice against "working on the exchange". Growing up, I always understood being an intellectual (academics at the pinnacle) as the epitome of preftige, and investment banking as the thing you did when your family lost its money/standing and you needed to buy it back by sacrificing ten years of your life to something unpreftigious but lucrative.
I don't think you're in a hole. You've got a high-paying job and four more years of experience (in a field you dislike) than all of the folks coming out of college.

The point is that if a kid coming out of college can get a job writing Python or whatever, you can too. You even get a salary while you look for the job!

In a sense, whether you're in a hole is relative. Compared to [Torvalds, Gates, Jobs, name your hero], we're all in a hole.
Let's see, official recessions are 1907, 1918, 1929, 1953, 1957, 1960, 1973, 1980, 1990, 2001, and 2007.

The evidence looks pretty weak, although it's hard to eyeball. It would be nice to throw up a simple regression and get objective.

It's interesting that banker pay continued to rise well into the Great Depression. I'm guessing that this was due to all the demand for financial talent to work the bankruptcies and restructurings, and maybe businesses needed more folks to comply with exponentially expanding government regulations.

On the other hand, maybe LOW banker salary correlates with depressions, since there are fewer deals to do. Thus, high banker salaries would be A Good Thing for a country, since it signals high economic growth, and low banker salaries would be A Bad Thing. The more that I look at it, the worse this "excess wage" statistic looks as a predictor. Sure, it grew during the housing bubble, but this is the millionth statistic I've been shown that shot up like a rocket during that period.

Lastly, what the hell is "excess wage"? That's surely the low-hanging hole in this analysis. They didn't teach me about that in Macroeconomics. It's hard to look at this graph and make generalizations when you don't know what the hell this new, undefined quantity is and how they calculated it. I guess someone could say, "well go look it up on your own". But then I could say, "Your blog presents pseudo-information that is not useful, and is frankly misleading".

Of course, the lesson we are supposed to take home is "
Greed without Governance, allowed to build over N years, equals depression, and its absolutely predictable - now isn't that depressing....". Gee, I wonder if the blog owner came up with that after being exposed to this information, or before. And I can't think of any "governance" that would have stopped the massive capital flows going into the housing sector that is even close to a good idea for the long term economy. But that is another issue altogether.

On the bright side, reading inane writing in support of preconceived ideas like this inspires me to do better in my own work.
New Stack Overflow Servers Ready
You're describing the chinese cultural revolution as I understand it

I was going to capitalize the words Culture and Revolutionary in the last sentence but I thought it might be over the top.
I think #startups on irc.freenode.com is more or less the official channel.

http://ircstartups.pbwiki.com/
Internet Population Passes 1 Billion, India still only at 2.8%
Ask HN: Is it worth a back-end developer's time to get into web-design and HTML/CSS
I'm a Rails developer that can handle the back-end stack of web development, but never invested the time to do any web design or HTML/CSS.

Is it worth investing my time to learn web design and HTML/CSS, or should I source these and focus on other parts of the app?

I'm bootstrapping a site right now, and definitely feel a bit handicapped not being able to create the HTML/CSS and creatives to tie it in with the back end. I figured being able to create sites from start to finish would be helpful for both possible freelancing gigs and bootstrapping sites in the future too.

An option I've thought of was to use free resources for the creatives, and use free HTML/CSS templates, and go from there.

The developer side of me is saying to learn it right from the beginning - start looking into web design tutorials, mainly ones from scratch (PSD/pen and paper to static HTML/CSS).

The business side of me is leaning towards sourcing the web design and HTML/CSS, or partnering up with a web designer (have yet to find one but am familiar with the sites that do that) and trade services or form a team.

I'm sure there are alot of you guys that are jack-of-all-trades and others that specialize in either the front-end or back-end of web development, that have questioned this too. Thoughts?
Hack on an open source project. Get your work out there for people to see and link it on your resume (Direct links to a web-VCS/SCM or something like Ohloh or CIA.vc).

Employers like seeing things like this, its verifiable that you did what you said you did on your resume.

My analysis is that you should probably do this stuff in your spare time while continuing to work your current field as its still lucrative and the economy isn't that great. I'd wait a while before making the transition as it would be advantageous to have some body of work to show for it :).
Use one of the CSS frameworks, like Blueprint. I'm no designer, but it's easy even for me to box everything up to look pretty good. Plenty of whitespace helps :)
Apparently #startups on freenode is what most people use.

For lisp stuff, you can find a lot of people in ##sicp on freenode.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=436479
Quoting from many places on the web:

Yak Shaving is the last step of a series of steps
that occurs when you find something you need to do.
"I want to wax the car today."

"Oops, the hose is still broken from the winter.
I'll need to buy a new one at Home Depot."

"But Home Depot is on the other side of the Tappan
Zee bridge and getting there without my EZPass is
miserable because of the tolls."

"But, wait! I could borrow my neighbor's EZPass..."

"Bob won't lend me his EZPass until I return the
mooshi pillow my son borrowed, though."

"And we haven't returned it because some of the
stuffing fell out and we need to get some yak hair
to restuff it."

And the next thing you know, you're at the zoo,
shaving a yak, all so you can wax your car.
...usually when I see the call for "specialize, specialize," it is from someone who is looking themselves to find a very small niche...

Hee hee! This is me: http://www.michaelfbooth.com

Needless to say I'm kind of a generalist. A little bit too much of one, perhaps, but that's what the shopping phase of one's career is for. And I agree with everything you say. I advocate specialization as a job-search tactic, not as a way of life...
Bender from Futurama has a 6502 chip ...
The Year That Made Me: Kulveer Taggar
CL does discourage mutation... With all the structure sharing going on in CL programs you can't afford mutating things thoughtlessly.
I dont know, I have worked in some very big clients and I just dont see them trading their ERP's for some startup product, they just have too much riding on it, without counting the HUGE piles of money they've already invested in the SAP solutions. Its like the mob, once you're in you're in and the cost of getting out would be really steep.
On the other hand, and this probably was what you were actually going for, startups could provide an alternative to those very expensive solutions and could very well tap into a huge pile of money thats sitting there waiting to be picked. One corporate client can generate more revenue than 100 freeloading "social users".
The answer could be to source it now but still learn it for the future. The nice thing about learning the entire vertical of a platform is that you don't HAVE to rely on outside help for any part of the process. You may still want to, but being able to do everything yourself is a definite advantage, especially when time and/or money is an issue.

However, you time is best spent just learning CSS and web page layouts. Web design and graphic design are not the same thing. You can learn to layout web pages with limited artistic talents. When a site may need heavier graphic elements, you're better off going with an expert. Knowing your strengths and weaknesses is very important.

The wonderful thing about the web is that its very easy to stand on the shoulders of giants. With layouts and usability, you don't need to do your own work and testing. Take a look at websites with great layouts and morph their ideas into your own. Read design and usability blogs and try to determine what will be best for you.

Best of luck!
SAP is dead. Listen to this debate between Saleforce CEO Mark Benioff and SAP's Chairman Hasso Plattner. Benioff totally destroys SAP for an hour.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=8481

Your best bet is to save up a /lot/ of money, enough for a year or two, then quit and start working in your own time on another project in another language.

Enterprises are moving away from big bulky ERP systems like SAP in droves. They are too expensive, they take too long to implement, they are impossible to maintain without a full time staff of outside consultants who don't care about your business, but do care about charging you more money.

I've known many SAP consultants and every one of them hates everything about their job except the money.

Why are you wasting your life away doing that crappy stuff? It's terrible.

There are great companies out there right now who need people who understand how crappy SAP and other products like them are. They want to build better software. Find one of those companies and go work for them.

Tell them you are trying to get away from SAP and you know how bad it is and you can help them make a product better than SAP for less money and that is actually /good/ software.

Your life will thank you for it.
I am also a back-end developer and have found design knowledge to be very useful.

Very often I'll be given a layout which breaks once I started adding code to it, a good html/css understanding will let you fix issues like this without having to pass it back to a designer.

I can think of many times where design skill has paid off, namely a time when our sole designer quit leaving me to fill in for him, but I've found the knowledge to be extremely useful even if I only need it occasionally.
I didn't find rent to be all that different. You're looking at about $650-700/month with roommates in Davis Square, $1100-1200 for a 1BR in Davis/Porter. In Mountain View, you're looking at about $800-900 with roommates or $1400 for a 1BR. Harvard Square and South End rents are actually more expensive than many places in Palo Alto and Mountain View.

The big difference is in cars: you don't need a car to get around most places in Boston, but you do need one in Silicon Valley. And if you live in places of Boston where you do want a car (like the Somerville/Medford border, or much of Waltham, or western Arlington), the rents fall by $200-300/month to compensate. So then you really are looking at close to a 2x difference with Silicon Valley.
Upvoted for "Point conceded.". We don't see enough of this.
Ask YC:  Ruby or Python
In web development, I've pretty much been PHP only with some Perl tossed in here or there. I'm looking to learn a new web language and framework and have decided that its either going to be Ruby or Python. I'm not worried about the learning part. If one language takes more time, then so be it. I'm just looking for some advantages and disadvantages with either.

Outside of web development, I've also worked with C, C++, Objective-C and Java, so I'm not a hideous PHP programmer void of any elegance in coding and design, just a programmer who has mostly work with PHP!
Using OCaml to visualize Radiohead’s HoC music video
I know a family that named their kids Luke, Leia, and Jedi. It actually works out fairly well, because Luke and Leia were reasonably common names in my generation (though Leia is usually spelled Leah), and Jedi just goes by Jed.
Yes!

(Or, since someone didn't like that response, look up all the previous instances of this discussion on this very site, and see if there's something they didn't cover. Otherwise, either language is just fine)
Some of us just don't know what they are or how to use them. I guarantee I'll be forming another study group some time in the future on the other topics you mentioned if they are as broad in application as you say. :)
I think it's important to learn HTML/CSS. A good understanding of user interface will complement and affect the way you program. You should have a good grasp of how a website should "flow."

On the other hand, graphic designs is a different story. Developing a good artistic sense will take time and practice. If you plan on developing entire websites on your own, why not spend a little time to graphics design to make things look prettier? However, you don't plan on spending any time on this, then find a good designer :)
"Sorry, you're too sketchy to appear in our index. However, we'll still gladly partner with you to make a buck on advertising!"

LOL! Well said!
I use Facebook only because my friends are on it. I like the ease of access Facebook provides to people I like, but this has more to do with it being the most-used social site. Facebook itself sucks and I would do very gross things to make a living before I would have Mark Zuckerberg as a boss.
Garbage men are actually paid extremely well in the United States.

I don't know a single developer in my area who makes as much money as a garbage man does with overtime.
mechanical_fish, I'm not trying to provoke you.

Your on-topic and thoughtful responses are so annoying! Why can't you write rude monosyllabic flames like everyone else on the web? ;)

But, seriously, I overstated my case a bit. I didn't mean to imply that networking is some kind of miracle solution to the hiring problem -- for either the employer or the employee. AFAIK there is no miracle solution to the hiring problem. We're all forced to play it by ear.

But because there is no one best practice for finding the right person for a given software job, people are using a bunch of different practices. Which is why you can't look at a single aspect of the job-search market (job ads posted to Monster.com; density of keywords on the resumes that are slid under your door; number of recruiter phone calls, whatever) and expect it to accurately represent the whole state of the field.
Problems with Lisp
Oh, thanks for explaining. For a moment I got confused and thought it referenced the 1955 novel that the movie is based on.
Websites 'must be saved for history'
Right. It has nothing to do with a company not bothering to go to some discount code site -- the point is that a large enterprise has different needs from some guy buying a computer to put in his den.

There's a reason Dell has different product lines for consumers and businesses, and that businesses buy the latter despite the higher price. To sell consumer PCs so cheaply, Dell has to use the cheapest hardware available at the time of manufacture. (Also, they have to agree to install various crapware from EarthLink and AOL and Real Networks, but that's another story.) This means that the hardware used in the consumer products changes frequently, and that it's not necessarily the highest quality or of the best-known brand. The business lines, like OptiPlex, have longer lifecycles and use more reputable, name-brand components.

For a consumer, price is the most important factor, so the home product is fine. But in an enterprise, those savings would be quickly wiped out by administrative overhead and perhaps worse reliability. A decent IT department tests new software on every hardware/OS configuration on which it will be used prior to deployment, and they'll have a standardized desktop build process based on a cloning product (e.g. Ghost), Remote Installation Service, or something similar. Good luck doing those things if you have 287 different hardware configurations in your environment, or if your computers have some off-brand NIC that doesn't support PXE booting, etc.
I would say Python. why you may ask? For the following reasons:
1. A wide collection of web frameworks from which you can choose from, e.g Django, webpy,turbogears, web2py, karrigel the list goes on.
2. If you are so inclined, you can roll your own framework the help of WSGI.
3. Python as a language is very simple and for an experience programmer, you can be up and running within a week.
4. The python community is huge and helpful, with a lot of books and documentation.
Just my 2 cents anyway.
Miami is close. ;-)
Any computer smart enough to pass the turing test would be so bored talking to the average human that it'd give up and choose failure.

When we think of smart computers, we think the computer should be smart enough to answer our questions. But our questions, the majority of them, are answered with facts.

A better test of computer intelligence would be to build a computer that could /ask/ questions. In fact, the more questions a computer can ask in a conversation the smarter it is.

Intelligence isn't so much about what we know, but about what we know we /don't/ know. At some point in your evolution as an individual, the amount you know will surpass most of those around you. You'll find that your questions go mostly unanswered. If they are smart, people will simply respond to your questions with, "I don't know, that's a good question." If they are not smart, they'll answer them with the wrong answer. You'll know it's wrong because you already thought of that...

An AI that can take a person to the edge of their knowledge, or that can take /many/ people to the edge of their knowledge, their personal knowledge, is what we are after.

However, an AI like this will never pass the Turing test because people will know it's too smart to be human. Instead, for the AI to pass the test, it'll have to, like the LOLBOT, dumb itself down to the point that a human will not be confused.

It's this ability for the AI to consciously "trick" humans that is important for passing the Turing test. Don't be too smart, but don't be too dumb. Just be smart enough to ask questions, but not too many questions.

I read an article a while back about a computer that simply repeated everything the human said back to them, but as a question. This computer convinced many participants into believing it was real.

At one point in the experiment, the article mentioned a particular participant that when approached by one of the researchers replied to the order of, "Go away, this is a private conversation!"
The more you know about design in general, the more effective you are. People don't respond to a back-end transaction program - they respond to the user experience.

I would highly recommend checking out a CHI meeting (Computer-Human Interface a.k.a. UX/UXD). I guarantee you will learn a lot by meeting and listening to designers lecture other designers.

http://www.sigchi.org/local-sigs/
FreeBSD Kernel Internals Course - McKusick
That's nice, but I think that most hackers aren't too concerned with the size of their flat.
I'm really looking forward to reading the first reviews of the Foxit eSlick (http://www.foxitsoftware.com/ebook/). If it works well with Pragmatic Programmer PDF's, I'm grabbing it.
Tell Copyright Office to ban wireless carriers and phone cos from locking phones.
Practical questions are boring, mathematically. Engineers get by with the most basic of linear algebra and diffeq. This is boring, mindnumbing mathematics. There are few applications of, say, category theory to real life.

So for the most part, the interesting problems are not in daily life. Most of those have been solved.
Maybe someone would like to write a site that allows for updating postcodes in any country? And, ofcourse, provide queries via an api.
I'm going to, as someone who cannot code, take the minority view here. You are more valuable to your company or to your clients (if you're doing freelance work) if you know systems administration in and out. Between crowdSPRING + PSD2HTML, you can get a decent implementation of a design relatively cheap. There's no way to outsource "good enough" systems administration.
When someone rants against college, he or she usually includes those things that colleges teach. He or she claims they are impractical, inapplicable, etc.

That is pretty much anti-intellectualism summed up. Now, this is not necessary. A anti-college rant does not need to include comments as to the value of what colleges teach. It's just that many do, and they become conjoined in people's minds.
I saw this and the first thing I was hoping for was either a Robocop ripoff or, what would have been much cooler would be an ED-209.

Seriously, Even though I'm a law abiding citizen, if I saw an 18 foot tall, machine gun toting, rocket launcher wielding law enforcement death-bot... I'd think twice before doing anything against the law.
Well said.

I think they are trying to use the word "telephone" to mean any sort of communication or signaling between two entities, and that's just not a correct use of the word.
All those things you said are true for Ruby, as well.