skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My suggestion is that you go out and figure out for yourself what types of non-coding jobs are available, and then come back and ask for some tips/pointers about the specific position(s) that interest you.

If you're not even sure what the typical org chart looks like, you're not in a very strong position to convince many folks that you're a good fit for the team, and will lend value.

Sorry if my comment seems too harsh, your post just reads to me like you don't even have some of the basic covered yet.
I've just come back from future, there will be no xkcd#368 he will jump directly from 367 to 369.

I could tell you why, but I don't want to spoil the plot... You wouldn't forgive me if I did.
The Best Photographs Ever- You Decide!!
Raganwald: The Optimistic View
Alexis Lemaire, the world's fastest human calculator
Let's have a contest and see who can downmod me the most; I probably have too much karma anyways.
US online spending shows no sign of recession
"You are never tied to a platform in these days, if you decide that you want to change platform then you hire the talent and change."

Surely that's a cost though? Not necessarily a minor for one for a startup.
If only we had down vote for articles.
That $0.14/hour is the amount of processing you do, not the hourly cost to use the service.

$1226.4 is if you're hammering the data-base with intense queries 100% of the time (so it's always being utilised).

In reality (though this depends on how efficient their database is) it'll likely be orders of magnitude smaller.
So $.14/hour is for a full unit of processing for an hour? What's the smallest amount of processing you can get?
I like the focus on simplicity, but I'm not excited about writing a custom framework to handle the new proprietary query language. I was hopeful a service like this would accept standard SQL but this is not the case.

Eventual Consistency will require a complete re-thinking of how traditional web apps persist data. This is a big problem. I'm just hopeful that it will eventually be possible to guarantee that written data is immediately accessible. Maybe by briefly buffering it in an external location until the SimpleDB data is consistent? Yet more custom framework code to write..
"SimpleDB costs 14 cents per machine hour, with no minimum fee."

I guess we won't know the costs in reality until the service is up. It pretty much all depends on how efficient their implementation is.
Stories like this make me want a Bury button.
It's missing a favorite of mine from An Evening (Wasted) with Tom Lehrer: "I thought I would acquaint you with some of the results of my recent researches into the career of the late Doctor Samuel Gall (...) He soon became a specialist, specializing in diseases of the rich. He was therefore able to retire at an early age..."

Is your next start up curing a disease of the rich?
No joins!

I guess you have to take denormalization to heart!
Bill Gates: The skills you need to succeed
Do you ever switch off?
My mind is working 24/7. I just can't switch my mind off of a project(s) I'm working on. It's kinda scary...to spend every waking hour thinking about what needs to be done and where the f* I'm going with this. Few people told me to stop now or even to get a doctor's advice...

I just see opportunities everywhere. I can't rest till the thing gets done. People around me just don't get it how I can sit for hours in front of my keyboard and just working...

Does this sound familiar? How do you guys switch off? Do you?
Human-Order Sorting: Have you ever wanted to more intelligently sort strings that contain digits?
I do use that trick, but when I'm creating stuff for people to put on their site it's a bit of a headache. GIF is much more straightforward, it's just annoying to have to convert transparent PNG icons manually.
It's definitely familiar to me, but I think it's very important that you DO switch off from time to time. For me, I play Wii or read a book for awhile. (Usually I end up reading a technology book though, but it's relaxing for me. YMMV.) If you don't shut off your brain once in awhile, you will eventually burn out.
First thought: yeah, needless drama, blah blah.

Second though: reminds me of what my parents told me in high school... "be nice". Sounds like someone got on someone's bad side. Is business really so stressful that it's impossible for everyone to get along without catfights?
Amazon SimpleDB measures the machine utilization of each request and charges based on the amount of machine capacity used to complete the particular request (QUERY, GET, PUT, etc.), normalized to the hourly capacity of a circa 2007 1.7 GHz Xeon processor.

From here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=342335011
This is when I shout "Noooooooooooooooooooo!" then I look at the hodgepodge of features and realize Google IS a mature company.
I upmod xkcd stories and then click on the comments to watch people complain about them. It makes me smile that people have such wonderful lives that they can worry about such silly things.

That doesn't make me a mean person, does it?
Is there a restriction on what license knowledge will be redistributed with?
I believe something similar came up in an earlier post, and though I am not where you are right now (I was for a while) I have turned to meditation. (Here is the link - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=78472) Some people responded to my comment and had some really good suggestions.

I will admit, its hard to do initially, but once you get the feel for it, you will get a handle on the restlessness of your mind...

Hope this helps. And I agree with nkohari. You should try something that attempts to engage your mind, whether its reading a great book or playing games, or just socializing with (non-techie ;-0) friends. If not, you will burn out.
Arrington responds to BlogNation allegations
Innovation Lessons From 'The Big Apple'
Some nice quotes here, but also lots of crap from people who don't belong on a list of entrepreneurs:

JFK - son of a bootlegger whose 9th birthday present was $1 million. Never did an honest day's work in his life

Eisenhower talking about planning (lol!) - His botching of D-Day sacrificed many American lives unnecessarily and extended WWII by another year. Asleep at the wheel during the start of the cold war.

Robert T. Kiyosaki - liar and showman - stay away from here please.

Donald Trump (lol) - There's 3 ways to have a million dollars: 1. inherit it 2. work for it 3. Be Donald Trump and start out with $2 million.

Shakespeare - Someone given credit for the work of others.

Anonymous, on the other hand, seems really smart and is quoted all over the place. Who is this guy?
Bah. chaos, you usually has some good submits. This one is way off mark. Funny yes. Insight into the hacking, business, or social trends, no. I fail to see the relation to hacker news. :(
Founders at Work: AppJet Takes Off
How to Write an Effective Design Document
Day by day, programmers are able to get more done in less time. With today's high level languages, development environments, tools and the "rapid application development" mindset, both programmers and managers have become accustomed to extremely fast development cycles. Programmers are now more inclined to jump directly into development, fearing that every hour they are not writing code will result in an hour of overtime the weekend before the deadline
Wanna Know How to Get to 2 Million Users on a Facebook App? See How Birthday Calendar Did It.
Great list! The comments contain some great ones as well.
Paul Buchheit: Brilliantly wrong
It happens to me too, for me the only way to switch off my mind from a project is practicing some sports.
I've found that surfing (and I'm NOT talking about the web)is the best thing I can do to relax.

My advice, get out and have fun.
Beta Invite, Anyone?
This is completely off topic, but everything I've read about D-Day has said that as much as can be expected in that kind of massive operation, things went alright.
That works for me too...
Now that's a cool hack!

TCC is a fun toy. There's something to be said for a #! line on a C file.
If only your ability to see the future weren't limited to xkcd
Has CNET Acquired Revision3?
Of course most companies value initiative. Typical corporate culture makes it a scarce resource.
Isn't it interesting that a sweet and innocent comic like xkcd makes such great flame bait on news.yc?

Perhaps it's true that you can catch more flies with honey than with... oops, wait a second...
number 4 is bullshit
Even though there is some good stuff here, I decided to make a new submission with the really good stuff (IMO):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=89556
No, all it may do is change the DBA skill set a little. If your data wasn't important enough for a DBA then you wouldn't have had a DBA anyways and SimpleDB does nothing to change that.

Conversely, if your data matters enough to you then there will be a DBA somewhere who knows the data well enough to ensure it survives.

Who are you going to call when your application corrupts your data? Amazon probably won't lose your data on purpose but they can't prevent mistakes.

However, this could be an opportunity for an startup - outsourced SimpleDB data administration.
sorry everyone - i just thought it was somewhat related to "how to market to women/females"... (I can't reference the YC thread since there's no search)

yeah lately my posting streak has been sucking hard - maybe it's because I've been working more
This is fantastic advice. If a sport you must self-motivate yourself to do gets put off too much consider joining a team. You have no choice but to show up. Also good: back-country camping - anywhere where real work is needed to maintain a basic comfort level.

Day-to-day, when you are invited to go and do something and you don't feel like doing it, go anyway every once in awhile. Sometimes it is for the best.
Ok, let's all have a debate about neurosurgery!
Why switch off?

I'm a lot like you and I used to worry about it too. Now I don't. I'm glad I'm the way I am. Many people would give anything to be like us.

What do I do? I take care of myself. Just because you're cranking doesn't mean you have to eat junk food. I have lots of fruit on hand and NEVER drink coffee (what goes up must come down). I do some form of exercise every day (and usually design something in my head while I exercise). I sleep when I'm tired and get up when my body tells me to. I'm nice to other people and they understand that I say "no" alot, but to please keep inviting me.

Most of all, when I'm cranking, I don't let anything stop me. No clocks in my office.

My biggest worry? What'll I do when I can't turn in ON?
When you want a really powerful tool, you usually have to accept a tougher learning curve. Yes, most web apps should be immediately understandable, their features laid plain to the first-time user. The problem is, advanced image editing involves a ton of UI moving parts. I think most of what those guys complain about are things where Splashup carefully follows the Photoshop UI. I think these web UI guys aren't approaching Splashup in the right way.
I was interested until I read this: "Query execution time is currently limited to 5 seconds."
$7,775 according to Amazon.com's price.

Wow. One month's salary and benefits. It's not inconceivable that Microsoft's products would save that much or more labor. I use linux because I'm cheap.
Maybe so, but do you really want to take advice about planning from the leader of the group that came up with the acronym "FUBAR"?
Reverse Engineering the Kindle format and Defeating its DRM
Great iphone hack!
Ahem, we are engaging in serious Internet business on this website and it is necessary that we eat, breathe and sleep Michael Arrington's table scraps 24/7. We must remain steeped in the echo chamber at all times. Thank you for understanding.
Ruleby: The Rule Engine for Ruby
Path Intelligence Monitors Foot Traffic in Retail Stores By Pinging People's Phones
Dual Mode (Multi-touch/Pen input) touchscreen in new Dell Laptop. (Video and Apple Rumor included)
Yes, happens the same to me. If I am working om something that is not interesting, my brain is usually occupied by 'the-next-interesting-thing-that-I-will-do-at-work'. The only ways to switch myself off is to play games, or when I read something that is more insteresting than whatever I am working on, not necessarily fiction. I think it is a fate for us thinking people.
Amazon buys JK Rowling's book for $4 million. See review.
The Breakdown of Modern Web Design
I think every person who is driven suffers from this and if you don't want to burn out get it under control. Here are my tools:

- I have a wiki for fast brain dumps

- I play sport at least once a week with a friend who is an accountant, he brings me back down to earth!

- I have children, they are great because there is no compromise and the world looks different when you've been with them for a while, granted this is a drastic 'tool'

- I ALWAYS make lists of things I need to do tomorrow.

- I trust that my ideas are good enough that they (and I) can wait until tomorrow.

- I go to gigs, nothing like live music to wipe your mind of troubles. You also get to meet non tech people which is good.

Good luck
I wouldn't worry about switching off until you find yourself mentally wrestling with problems that cannot be solved like that. Relationship problems are a good example. Usually, no amount of continuous 24/7 thinking is going to bring you to a good answer.

Also if you are tired and can't stop thinking about something, but can't actually solve it without rest, you might want to investigate techniques for clearing your head.

Finally, if you're concerned about negative side-effects of work obsession, like not being able to 'see the forest through the trees' then you might want to as well.
This is cool, basically a Ruby version of Clips. I used that to build an Expert System that dynamically changed the security policy of an SeLinux system depending on the state of the system and its network for my Master's Thesis. You can do some pretty amazing things with Expert Systems if you design them well. PDF link to one of my presentations if anyone is interested. http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=3&url=h...
"In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable"

Seems like good advice to me, and similar to what a lot of other people have said in various ways.

Agree 100% about Kiyosaki - that guys seems pretty dubious to me:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiyosaki#Criticism_and_controve...
How To Tell Stuff To A Computer: The Enigmatic Art of Knowledge Representation
Was it just me, or did anyone else expect to find a search engine implemented in Icon (http://www.cs.arizona.edu/icon/) ?
You're on news.YC, are you not?
Nice link.

In Washington they call a lie "misinformation".

Here they call it a "literary device". lol
Wow! Judging by those credentials, maybe VCs are the easier route to funding for hackers! Very impressive team and product.
Hammer Time! The MC-turned-founder "breaks it down" anew.
"This is cute, but doesn't really do anything which isn't already possible with EC2 and S3."

EC2 doesn't give you durability, and S3 doesn't give you speed. SimpleDB gives you both.
really!

somewhat disappointing but I suppose there's a reason for this
so if you get one hit to the db per hour then you are going to end up paying for it big time.
HereaEURXs to YOU Sam Sethi, Goodbye and Good Luck as an EMPLOYEE

If you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.

Its yet another sour grapes tale of an employee trying to be a smart-ass with his ex-employer and getting creamed in the process...are you kidding me: 'Well the matter has now been reported to Scotland YardaEURXs Internet Crime Unit : Case Number: LC986409807 and the IC3.'

But agreed:
Soap Opera value +1
News.YC -1 ( But I can't vote it down... )
yeah very true, but I would hope that this would not be at startup stage but serveral years down the line when you can afford it.
A minor nit. The 6.270 content is only partly a programming contest: the contest has students design, build and program LEGO based robots.

Way cooler than just programming.

As a bonus it is organized and run entirely by students.

I took the class in '93 and helped teach it a couple of years after that; it was a fantastic experience from both sides.
Wow, I am surprised I did not get downvoted into oblivion for my previous post. However, I am convinced that you're missing a point by a mile.

Nobody has committed their photo collections to flickr, because it is insane: people generate gigabytes of images with their cameras and upload only a tiny fraction of what they have, most of the time downsampled to a manageable size. Moreover, the sizes of image files (JPEGs) keep growing, while uploading speeds have stuck at 20-60kb/sec for 95% users.

This pattern is true not only for images, it's true for everything: the speed at which people generate data is only accelerating - from simple text documents we've moved to music, images, video and god knows what else. Sticking everything into the "cloud" will not work. Even today an average PC has tens of gigabytes of data. Soon that number will reach terabytes. Think about X-megapixel cameras, recorded TV shows, HD-movies, etc. The size of the backup drives will keep growing, while the speeds of internet connections will not.

Internet is a distributed computing platform with very powerful computing nodes (your computers). The opportunities of exploiting this are fascinating. SETI is a great example of using Internet right. Skype and torrents are another ones.

What these cloud companies are doing, however, is plain stupid in comparison: they're sucking in the computational complexity from "powerful nodes" only to re-distribute the load on their end onto their own nodes without any hope to keep up. What for?

I know that Microsoft is out of fashion today, but Ray Ozzie is absolutely right when he is talking about maintaining a reasonable (sane!) balance between client machines and "clouds". This point of view is not terribly popular among some YC readers, who are too fascinated and tempted by a slight chance of getting rich by re-implementing 2% of some perfectly fine desktop software in 2 months with a handful of python scripts running on cheap Amazon servers.
Don't worry, you're doing it right. I've felt like that every single day for the last 8 months.
The article doesn't mention the biggest problem with this industry: it's built on a mistake. Software development isn't manufacturing and programmers are not factory workers. The "hire hundreds of cheap programmers" story was good for a first round of sales, but it doesn't work, and that's not good for long-term business.

I've talked to people involved in half a dozen such projects and they all said the same thing: the overhead of coordination was greater than the cost savings, and the quality of the work was low.

The point is that this approach doesn't do any better there than it does here. The grass just seemed greener on the other side of the fence. As one executive put it, "Why should I pay $20 million for nothing here when I can buy it from India for 15?"
I'm extremely envious (in a good way) that Aaron and David were friends since grades school and were at the same time brilliant people at similar calibers, and went to the same college and studied programming together! Having a friend like that is better than winning the lottery.
Other than avoiding coffee this exactly describes my life too.
Congratulations! You're officially a geek :)

I second the recommendations to just get out and do something active. For me it used to be swimming but more recently has been cycling and running. Just try concentrating on your idea at 80% of your max heart rate.

Social time with family and friends is also a great way to set down your projects.

It's important to take breaks from thinking. Anecdotally, the fresh perspective you have coming back is often more effective than hours staring at your monitor.
Bravo, man. I always wanted to be able to articulate what you just said.
Perhaps web developers should stage a strike. Have a day (or more) where everyone participating turns off there work arounds for IE (and perhaps put up a link to their favorite browsers).
This appears to be a real advertisement for that book halfway down the page.

Also, there are a bunch of parody sites at the bottom, like Crackbook.
Steve Jobs At Home in 1982
How to offend people with your surveys
Really a what not to do when putting a survey together. Come to think of it, I've been put off by survey questions in the past. And if you really want to see how big companies can piss off bloggers, check out the Oracle survey...
New ASP.NET Dynamic Data Support (Scaffolding)
Amazon Takes on Oracle and IBM With SimpleDB
How exactly?

If a query takes 1ms, you're going to pay for one sixty-thousanth of $0.14 . I fail to see what you're doing? Or am I missing something?
A New PickAxe Book (featuring Ruby 1.9)
Interestingly, no mention of Agile Web Dev with Rails 2.0...
The pings happen "every few minutes" according to snopes.

http://www.snopes.com/crime/prevent/cellping.asp

I think that limits the amount of useful information that can be gathered.
Success [pic]
"While an Undo feature could be useful, isn't this just coddling people who should otherwise be paying closer attention to what they are doing?"

While a parachute could be useful, isn't this just coddling skydivers who should otherwise be paying closer attention to where they are falling?
It reads just like English!

v[:m].status = :GOODBYE
e.modify v[:m]
Maybe she meant 6.370 (http://battlecode.mit.edu/2008/)?
The funny thing is, your skydiver statement could be argued true more effectively than the original quote.
Ask YC: Interview at Startup -- What to expect?
Hello,

I'm a 20 year-old web developer with a wife and a baby on the way. I have an interview at a startup on Monday, Dec 17, and have a few questions for the startup community.

First, the position is for a PHP developer. While I started out in PHP and worked in it for several years, I haven't touched it since March when I switched to Python, and I've grown a bit rusty. Can you recommend any specific area that I should brush up on?

Secondly, what sort of questions should I expect to be thrown at me? I'm not really expecting too much about programming in general, as they're going to have me write some code, but what other kinds of questions might I get asked?

Finally, what questions should I throw back at them? I've read that interviews are just as much for the potential employee as the company, and there's the obvious asking about salary, benefits, programming environment, desktop setup... But is there anything I should make sure to ask?

A bit about the company: "Galaxy IT, Inc. is working on a web application that will take your current addiction of wasting time online, and your real-world need to get things done, and make it possible for you to do both at once."

Their website is http://www.galaxyit.com

I apologize for the short time-frame between this post and my interview date. They asked me to interview on Tuesday, and since then I've frantically been trying to get things prepared. I only just now thought about asking news.YC. If you can't tell, I'm quite nervous about the interview. What they're working on sounds really neat, and the pay is much more than I'm making now (and with the baby coming, it'll really help). I really want to make a good impression on them.

Thank you.
2008. Which startups will be drafted?
Several companies have been acquired in 2007. Which one do you believe will be next year?
Yes. To switch off, I like to watch nature shows on Discovery HD (though they're sadly getting harder to find as Watch These Rednecks Build A [insert vehicle here] Shows are taking over). Or just stare at a candle and meditate.

Working out is a great help too.