skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
there's a lot of languages and applications out there. you should spend your spare time researching and investigating.
Chicago has all that. But I wouldn't try to do a startup here - the angel/VC/legal/accounting support structure is atrocious.
I agree Astronomy Cast is awesome.

365 Days of Astronomy is worth a look (10min podcast everyday of 2009, the international year of astronomy)
http://365daysofastronomy.org/

Great podcast about Psychology
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind/default.htm

Starstuff is also pretty good
http://www.abc.net.au/science/starstuff/

Planetary Radio (Planetary Society podcast) is great
http://www.planetary.org/radio/

Science Talk (Scientific American) is pretty decent
http://www.sciam.com/podcast/podcasts.cfm?type=science-talk
I think I wrote this: http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Learning/LEDSensor

The key points are remembering that there is capacitance on the pins of the microcontroller, and that while forcing an electron across from P to N emits a photon, absorbing a photon lets an electron back from N to P if it wants to go.
and that is a good thing. I don't want to have my every purchase collated.
Philadelphia :D
I used nagios (still do) but I found it frustrating and complecated to set up.

I started writing little one-off perl scripts that send an email for the alert.

However, managing and monitoring the email folders is tedious and taking up too much time.
xymon/hobbit (http://sourceforge.net/projects/hobbitmon)

The name change was due to trademark issues (http://www.hswn.dk/hobbiton/2008/11/msg00123.html) ...not sure Gandalf would aprrove, but it keeps lawyers happy.
Wow, a $250 valuation with 6 million users? That's $41.66 per user. It is ridiculously high, especially with no business model in sight.
The problem with Portland, OR is that the tech sector is kind of weak in comparison to other cities. I spent two and half years in portland working full time and spent 6 months looking for a new job. I ended up moving.

Portland has decent public transit, its cheap to live there, and you can find decent jobs. Although you may not find a wide variety of jobs that aren't corporate. On that note I will say there are a couple startup incubators in town but those jobs fill up quick.

I ended up moving to San Francisco. Great city. Expensive, but fantastic public transit and tons of jobs.

Here are my list of cities in no real order:
San Francisco, CA
Portland, OR
Seattle, WA
Boston, MA
New York City, NY

Check them out. If you like a few, spend at least a week exploring and getting to know the city a little bit. Also try and go during the worst weather period so you really know you can live there.
Philthydelphia is inexpensive indeed, but only because no sane person would ever want to live there.

I vote for Portland, OR.
Debugging the Zune blackout bug
Used to use Big Brother.
I actually can't for the life of me figure out why Philly hasn't taken off more for young professionals. Trains direct to NYC, DC, and AC. Great schools between Penn, Princeton, Villanova, and all the others. Great sports town (go to the Palestra before you die if you like basketball). Quizzo. Cheap to live there.
Great advice about checking out at the worst weather period.
San Francisco is an excellent place for a hacker.

1) Plenty of other hackers in close vicinity
2) Lots of startups all over the city
3) Excellent public transportation
4) Awesome bike trails all over the place

Plus, you can walk into pretty much any coffee shop in SF and see at least one or two techies coding away on their macbook :)
No kidding! Take a look at this code I wrote for adding a node onto a binary tree:

http://img301.imageshack.us/my.php?image=addtobinarytreescre...

It is shown compared to the analogous code in C++ and Lisp.

My Factor version could probably be improved. In fact, I just now realized that I could have factored out the two final calls to <node> into a single call.
I don't think a Communist dictatorship is going to be down with a popular movement aimed at supplanting the government. On the other hand, a popular movement of violent fanatics with just a little discrete encouragement from the right people inside the government -- a speech here, a blind eye towards a beating there, a conveniently unlocked weapons locker yonder -- now that has some potential. It could be a very useful tool for increasing social control and dealing with internal enemies of the ruling clique.

One could go as far to say that this new innovation, never before seen in history, would have a revolutionary effect on the nation's culture.
Of course you can get a different job.

Pick a specific alternative technology and field, and learn that. If you go looking for "anything but SAP" of course you're not going to find it. That's spread too thin. And "I could be productive with any of those languages" is a very bad sales pitch. People don't want a generalist. They want to hire someone who will immediately get to work on their specific problem. Decide to become a Ruby web programmer, or a Java middleware programmer, or an Objective-C iPhone programmer, or (god help you) a C++ game programmer, and focus: Read the books, read the blogs, go to the user group meetings, build a practice site or practice app.

If you want to leverage your SAP experience as you seek another field, you could try sniffing around the edges of the SAP world. For example, there are surely lots and lots of web apps that are compelled to talk to SAP. If you know a little about web apps and a lot about SAP, a team might want to hire you.

The masters' degree might be good for creating a break on your resume, and perhaps for buying you a little time, and it will help you meet other programmers who have nothing to do with SAP. But you're probably right to worry that the degree itself won't help you. You probably need practice, and allies, and networking more than you need formal courses.
Chicago's not a great place to get funding (we have JK&B and... nothing?), but no place is good for funding in '09.

As for legal and accounting, I'm lost: why isn't Chicago the second best city in the country for access to lawyers and accountants?
This is quite confusing: you're talking about using "impressiveness" as a "proxy" to measure intelligence, then you're talking about measuring such impressiveness.

I don't even know what it is to measure impressiveness poorly -- I don't know how to measure it. Nobel-worthy publications are surely impressive, but it still does not measure intelligence. It measures how Nobel-worthy your work is.
Fostering creativity by relinquishing the obvious
Perhaps I'm missing something important here, but how are these companies (Facebook, Twitter, et al) being valued? I know there is "potential" value here, but who comes up with the actual numbers?
Congratulations, Paul & Jessica; Welcome to the world, George
Boulder, CO is pretty much the same. The cost of living here is only overpriced, compared to extremely overpriced in SF. Also, we have better snowboarding here. :-)
Born at 04:44 on Saturday, 1/24. 8lbs. 10oz, according to April.
Did you seriously just suggest that San Francisco has "excellent" public transportation? Because, seriously, it doesn't: the Muni is one of the worst large systems in the country, and a lower percentage of residents use it than any comparable city.

What's worse, most people who work "in San Francisco" don't, and commuting to south bay is untenable without a car (and even with the car, a good half of the market is at least a 90 minute daily commute away from SOMA).
There is a huge difference between startup lawyers and accountants and small business lawyers and accountants. The ones here are all the second and think they can do the first.

Having worked at a VC firm where a deal almost fell apart due to legal oversight, this is a huge, huge hobbyhorse of mine.
Boston/Cambridge. #2 tech hub (behind the Bay Area), and you don't need or want a car in the city. Unlike in Silicon Valley, where you basically need a car.

Neither is exactly inexpensive, though. The problem with living in a tech hub is that tech people tend to make lots of money and bid the price of everything up accordingly.
The Design Recipe from How To Design Programs is very bottom-up based.

Personally, I'm against HtDP because it strips out all of the romance in programming for me, but it does work.
Chicago is a crappy place to start a company if you're hitching your wagon to a VC deal. But VC is a crap shoot anyways. On the other hand, if you want to run a business, Chicago legal and accounting is a win.
Have you written about that anywhere? Would be interesting to read.
Cambridge/Somerville, Berkeley/Oakland, SF, Portland. You can live well without a car in Silicon Valley, though it's not a city. Maybe Austin, but I've never been there, so can't say for sure. Maybe Boulder, if it's over your threshold of urbanness.
Extremely real. The founder posts here occasionally.

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ryanspahn
Also, we should get rolling on a Chicago HN meetup.
I was enamored with Boston as a city until I moved to Palo Alto a couple weeks ago. Already, I can't imagine ever moving back.
"I mean, Dell's fine, but seriously, it's not like they're going to dealcatcher to find the PCs for cheap. They get them cheaper than "official" retail price, at a bulk order price."

I used to know a guy who did IT work, and he explained why his place always bought Dells. If he ordered 100 Dell Foo2000 boxen, he knew they would all have the same video card, same motherboard, same hardware top to bottom.

This meant one could roll out new software or upgrades and not be stymied when this machine behaved differently from that because of weird subtle driver issues on different hardware.

I don't know if this is still true (or really if it was ever true) but it seemed a good way to reduce overall maintenance issues.
I (note: not the original commenter you are responding to) would say that "something to show" equals experience, but with more solid evidence. You could learn a lot and gain some experience and network and have fun just by participating in some open source project that interests you (or that uses some of the technologies that interest you). You can do that on the weekends or evenings while you keep your day job, it won't cost you anything, and in the worst case it is just good karma. ;-)
Twitter has got some pretty impressive growth right now. I'm sure they are pitching reasonable plans to their investors for how they are going to make money. However, Twitter does seem overly cautious with rolling out any attempts to generate revenue.

I honestly think that Twitter could become The Next Big Thing(TM), so I don't think the investors are crazy for investing at a high valuation.
Make it something like $400/user. Having been an insider of 3 "Internet startups" in the past, I am assuming a 1:10 ratio of real active users vs total number of accounts in the database. BTW investors always asked us about the number of active users, followed by a question of "how do you define active"? Something like "logged into his account at least once within last week" is considered a very good measure of an active user.
It isn't a question of "only top-down" or "only bottom-up". Of course, some thinking will have to go in from both directions. This is why, personally, I think the directed-tree metaphors don't really work.

A much better way of thinking about "bottom-up design" is exploratory programming - where one decides what to write by writing it [1]. This means you start by discovering and solving sub-problems, by creating components which work in their own right, documenting and unit testing them (if you're working in an environment that needs it), and moving on to solving bigger problems using said components.

On the other hand is the "architecture approach" - where you measure twice and cut once. By "measure", I mean decide what all of your components will be, write out UML diagrams for them, figure out your types, your interfaces, and the contracts between them, write unit tests, and only then begin to write run-time code.

There are much more experience programmers than me who advocate both ways, so it's hard for me to make a call [2].

Another great metaphor I find analogous is "Mozart vs. Beethoven" style programming: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/292682/understanding-dijk...

I like this one because suggests that you can make "great" programs either way. I use the quotes, because obviously, music is a matter of taste, as is the quality of software we develop. This is important to remember - for some people, Windows is the perfect OS out there (for example, those concerned with Microsoft's profits over the OS's usability).

1. http://arclanguage.org/

2. Although the ones who advocate exploratory design seem more well-rouded: Alan Kay, Paul Graham, and the 37signals guys come to mind. Since I want to be well-rounded and not a specialist, I try to follow in their example. Obviously, this is a subjective judgment.
It seems to be fashionable to rag on Muni these days, but after living in two other urban cities, Muni is the best public transportation I've seen. It runs practically everywhere and is quite affordable and prompt.

Muni cars run on clean electric lines, and their busses are now electric hybrids. Each is outfitted with a GPS that updates boards at each stop to let you know in real-time how long before the next bus arrives. They have a phone number and a website that has this real-time info too. Hell, that website even has an iPhone version!

It costs 45 bucks a month to go anywhere you want. It runs 24 hours a day with plenty of frequency and services pretty much every inch of the city. What more can you ask for?

Ever checked out Atlanta's MARTA system? The bus service is random and wait times are often 30 minutes to 2 hours. Without a car, you're basically screwed.
Duck 1.0: Has a beak, which can open and close, but only eats green bugs. If you attempt to use it on a blue bug it crashes. Unfortunately, no eyes.

Duck 1.2: Eyes.

Duck 1.21: Eyes now see color.

Duck 1.22: Eyes now see colors including black. Apparently, some bugs are black. Damn users and their damn uncolored colored bugs.

Duck 1.5: Realized eyes and mouth both share a lot of code. Refactored as "nerves". Allowed consumption of turquoise bugs -- not exactly sure why they're safe when blue bugs are not, oh well. Added quack just for fun. Spent 2 weeks getting the quack to sound exactly right.

Duck 2.0: Now with feet and wings! Turns out to have feet you really need muscle tissue. Refactored again, stealing code from Mouth. Supported modes of operation include walking, running, and swimming. Option in menu entry for flying but if you push it the duck dies.

Duck 2.1: It glides!

Duck 2.11: So it turns out that to utilize the gliding feature users were driving ducks off of tall cliffs. This resulted in downward acceleration being sufficient at end of glide to overly stress feet muscles, causing critical duck failure. Added in Bones. Damn users and their damn cliffs. As long as I had Bones I implemented them in the Mouth too, can finally eat blue bugs.

Duck 2.12: Some blue bugs are poisonous?! WTF kind of bugs do you have in Australia. Added in Tongue. Borrows heavily from existing Nerve classes. More refactoring.

...
Sounds awesome. Last experience I had with the Muni involved buses skipping stops, lines being shut down with minimal notice, and busloads full of sweatshop textile workers. Maybe it's improved since then. But news.google.com doesn't think indicate that.

But then, GPS or no GPS, it's going to be hard to impress people from cities with real public transit systems with a bus; there's nowhere in NYC or Chicago you'd reasonably want to go that you can't get to on a train that runs every 5-15 minutes.

I agree with you, I wouldn't put Atlanta on my list of awesome public transit cities either.
Remember that job ads don't sample the market for programmers evenly. People often complain that there are no ads asking for programmers with 0-6 months of experience. But that's not necessarily because those positions don't exist: It's because advertising for them is a no-win proposition. Think of it from the employer's perspective: If you put up such a job ad you will receive an absolute flood of responses, which you will not be able to screen accurately, because how the hell can you tell the difference between two programmers who have never worked in your field? It's hard enough to judge experienced programmers based on resumes and interviews alone.

So if you need someone with less than a boatload of experience (perhaps because the experienced ones are too expensive, or perhaps because you can't find them...) the most reliable method is word-of-mouth recommendation, also known as networking. You ask your friends and your friends' friends if they know any smart but disgruntled SAP programmers who need a better gig.

So, write some code and use it as a networking tool. If you write a sample app that works decently well and show it to a pro, that pro might put you on his list of people who have at least some clue and who might need a job, and eventually someone will ask him to do a project that he doesn't have time for and he will give them your name...
Champaign/Urbana, IL. Cheap cost of living. Lots of good engineering students on tap. Great community. Great bus service, especially around campus town. Get from any point A to any point B in town in less than 10 minutes. Plenty of events (athletics, theatre, parties, etc.) due to being a university town.

Negatives...corn fields galore. And flatness. And long winters.

(This is not a joke. But most will think that it is.)
You cant beat Los Angeles.

If you want great Metro Transit, this is it, and each city within LA has its own metro line. like the blue bus in santa monica/venice. south bay transit in the south bay.

Plus tons of employment opportunities in the IT field with great pay. i make 90K as a front end developer.

No doubt LA is the greatest
And if you think that is at all unrealistic, you're talking to the guy who wrote a program to print bingo cards whose 1.0 version, among numerous other faults, could not accommodate any printer but the default one ;)
congrats pg and jessica! start teaching him python :)
MARTA is pretty good compared to where I'm living currently (I've been to Atlanta a fair bit). I really wanted to use the buses here, but the third time a scheduled bus just never came, I gave up. And that's hardly the only issue.
And, what, 2 places to work if you need to eat?

Forget Champaign. Go to Ann Arbor, MI. You have all the same benefits as Champaign --- a walkable/bikeable city, a huge reservoir of engineering talent, a reasonable cost of living --- but you also have Detroit Metro if you need to pick up freelancing work. Detroit Metro has plenty of BigCo employers outside the big 3.

I lived in A2 for 4 years, and while I think Chicago is a better place to start a company, I have lots of good things to say about the place. I have almost nothing good to say about Champaign, which is a bleak, depressing place vindicated only by its proximity to Chicago.
Oy! enough with the neural networks already.

Look, a neural network is not some magic machine that can solve all your classification problems. A good 90% of applications of ANNs I've seen could (read: should) have been replaced with a support vector machine, or a Bayesian classifier, or some other proper statistically principled model.

I swear, I get the impression that people keep coming back to ANNs just because the goddamn name sounds cool.
You can just beg for good.

On a more serious note, I am not basing my opinion on employer choices...even though I argue that there are plenty.
Name 4.
You're the one with the readership, and you mentioned it, so I volunteer you, Brad. :)
via searchyc.com: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=244156
Your deal almost fell apart because it involved an LLC?

You do an LLC because it has no overhead and pass-through taxes; an S-Corp to issue employee equity and keep pass-through taxes, and a C-corp when you have to. That's not idiotic advice.

Although I've been through the funding process more than once, you really sound like you know it more than I do. But your take seems really biased towards term sheet negotiation. I'm not sure how relevant that is to most entrepreneurs.
I'll second Oakland. The cost of living is lower in terms of rent/housing and you can still be close to BART and lots of great parks, trails, and culture. From Oakland, you can work anywhere (just about) from Fremont to SF.
What! He should learn Arc. It is for the next 100 years designed by daddy.
No, it was a C-corp. (Again, we were a VC and needed the different classes of stock.) The example is that merely being a C-corp wasn't sufficient.

Again, experienced startup lawyers would have alerted us to this. Mere corporate attorneys would not, and did not, contemplate the edge case I outlined.

Look, if you're happy to bootstrap forever, Chicago's great. But if you even have an eye on VC at any point, GTFO and go to the coasts.
Intel, Yahoo, Qualcomm, Byte Mobile, Riverbed, Rigerglass, Australian Semiconductor (Motorola spin off), Amdocs, NCSA, Pattern Insight (UIUC research startup), Cazoodle (UIUC research startup), tons of other start ups (Snap and Buy, oneLLama, etc.), at the Univeristy of Illinois itself in IT or research programmer positions.

This is just off the top of my head.

Anyway, I do not want to enter a piss fight with you. I like C-U. If you don't, great. No one is forcing you to live here. I was merely suggesting it.
you pretty much need a car in Austin. best public transit in Texas, but that's not saying much.
how about starting with English?
Once they start cranking out new features and hire some competent people who know how to _properly_ run a website with an accompanying API then I'll believe a 250m valuation.
I was going to suggest Salt Lake City, and you don't absolutely need a car here, but you're much better off with one. It meets all of your other criteria finely, though. There's a very large group of IT companies here, especially in Utah County, 15-30 miles south of Salt Lake. Predominantly, Novell (as well as the SCO Group) and other things.

It's a relatively low-profile area, very clean, very safe, very nice people, and modern infrastructure and appliances. A great place to live and work, though I wouldn't want to raise children here.
It's a nice enough place. And i'm sorry, I didn't know this was a POLL. I thought we were just suggesting places that might be good for hackers and with it's cheap living, excellent transport links and communications, not to mention center city phildelphia having numerous nice co-location facilities..
Ha. Well, I'm happy to oblige then. I just went to another weird local blogger meetup and it got me pining for something a bit more interesting.
Neither Intel, nor Yahoo, nor Qualcomm appear to be hiring FTE's in Champaign (although I found an Intel temp position). Obviously, I didn't look very hard though.

I don't doubt that there's a small constellation of UIUC-affiliated tech startups around Champaign, though the same thing exists in A2, in Austin, and in RTP. The benefit of A2 over Champaign is that you are almost guaranteed freelance (or FTE) work outside the school. I don't think Champaign is a safe career choice compared to A2, RTP, or even Pittsburgh.

Sorry, it's a message board, I didn't mean to piss at you.
That's a cool shift: asked his native language, he might have to think for a second between English vs Arc/CL/Python/so on for a second.
LA greater metropolitan area is by far NOT the "greatest." BUT, live in the right place and you definitely don't need a car for your everyday life -- i.e. West Hollywood, Pasadena, Santa Monica. You may, however, be inconvenienced without a car if you want to attend tech/entrepreneurship networking events (which tend to be in West LA, Santa Monica, and WeHo).

I agree that Metro is actually good, but LA is huge and so the coverage isn't as tight as more condensed cities. There is also a heavy car "culture" here, so socially-speaking you won't meet many others without cars.