skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's also one small funny bit about it I forgot to include in the previous post.

Currently my girlfriend studies philosopy. Don't know how in other countries, but in Poland, philosophy undergrands have to master the logic. Nothing fancy, basically the easiest elementary logic. And you know what? According to her, a lot of people have problems with it. I've had very similar experiences before with friends studying liberal arts and science that were required to learn logic.
Ask news.YC: Good "day jobs" for hackers?
This question is for those of us who aren't wealthy and need a stable income to support a family while we conquer the world:

What jobs give you the most freedom to do cool things and build new companies while giving you enough money to stay alive?
So far, the best one I've been able to come up with is firefighting. It provides enough money to survive, and requires 10 days of work per month (and my firefighter friend tells me station life is often quiet enough that you can often work on other things while on duty).

It doesn't provide much opportunity for networking or solving interesting problems on the job, but the job security, reasonable pay, benefits, and low hours seem like a great deal.

Any other ideas?
waiting tables!

you work a 5 hour shift. you make about $20/hour (including tips). your schedule is extremely flexible. it takes zero experience to get in the door.

being a firefighter is a career. it takes a lot of education/certification and to actually get paid as a firefighter takes years of effort and dedication.
Don't do any of them, and instead learn how to do things faster and learn faster.

Then get bored a lot... ;)
Pretty close to all the gold medalists at last year's ACM competition were regular competitors on TopCoder, including the majority of the MIT team (and the coach).

The role of culture can't be underestimated: in some places academic competitions are a really big deal. There are major centers for it: St. Peterburg in Russia, Waterloo in Canada, Zhejiang University and Shanghai Jiao Tong in China, and especially Warsaw University in Poland.

Just competing in TopCoder over the past year or so, I've solved literally hundreds of tricky algorithmic problems, under heavy time pressure, exactly. The best competitors have solved literally thousands of difficult challenges. It's really no wonder that they do so well. However, I don't think it's unfathomable discipline: I think it's an environment that encourages it.
I'm freelancing as a software consultant/contractor and living like a college student.
He advised parents to lie to their children about hugs :(

Someone should tell him (and the rest of the world) that immortality is coming.

It's sort of funny that he says these gifted children will question traditions, and then wants to help them via the rather arbitrary touch=comfort tradition.

He also says essentially: they don't fit in, but help them feel like they do. Why not tell them that fitting in isn't such a great thing anyway, and they shouldn't feel bad about being better?
heh, am i the only one that thinks this a good idea? they're buying the infrastructure, who cares if sprint isn't competing very well with other carriers, i'd bet good money (say, $550/share) that google would turn that company around on a dime.
not caffeine
"It's sort of funny that he says these gifted children will question traditions, and then wants to help them via the rather arbitrary touch=comfort tradition."

I doubt it's arbitrary. It seems to be, as the article said, "a fundamental and instinctual aspect of existence". A lot of stuff is just built into us, and touch=comfort is a prime candidate for one of those things that's hard-wired into us. I doubt it's a culturally acquired/transmitted trait.
Yoga, tai-chi, kung-fu, swimming, water polo, running, skating, skiing, snowboard, surfing, windsurfing, kite-surfing, dancing, push-ups, sit-ups, breathing exercises, shower (especially cold one) are all things that I personally try to do as often as my time allows. I start my day with yoga and try to do at least one other of the above mentioned activities during the day. Any of these will do. Even just getting off the computer for a while will also help a little.

Alcohol, coffee, online porn, energy drinks, drugs, cigarettes are all bad ideas.

If you choose to believe ayurveda (the ancient Indian medicine) you need to have equal amounts of "Sun" and "Moon" activities during the day. Sleep, computer usage, reading are all Moon activities. All of us here do way too much of them. To stay in shape we need to counter-balance them with some team sports, interacting with people, running, jumping, playing, etc. BTW, meditation, although it's very effective, is also a Moon activity.
Recommend YiQuan. It is a set of Chinese standing exercise similar to Taiji and Yoga,that uses a simple visualization approach.

http://jadedragon.com/archives/martarts/yiquan01.html

Good luck.
High level human personalities aren't hardwired. They are many layers of interpretation above any hardwiring. It's like imagining that which assembly language is under your Ruby makes a difference to which programs you can write.
Does it seem to anybody else that we've actually stagnated instead of moved the field of computing forward during the last 10 years? Sure, machines are faster, we've got more bandwitdth, etc., but we're still "automating" stuff, rather than transcending the "pink plane".

Or, is it just that I've spent too much time at the dayjob, hacking Java together to make the customer happy?
Up to now, I trusted my guts and went without much thought to the path with the best profits/effort ratio (that is, I usually chose the easiest, satisfying enough path). The good thing is that you avoid analysis paralysis (by not thinking too much) and prevent a lot of effort (as a kid, I used to be guilty of being lazy but today I understand that hard work is overrated anyway). On the other hand, you can end up in a dead end. So, from now, I continue to move through small steps (I don't believe in bold moves) but I also "look deeper in the tree"; I think about the next step as well when I look at a path, to avoid being trapped in a dead end (of course, I learned to do this because I ended up in a dead end recently). I have a vague idea of a few ultimate goals I'd like to achieve, but not a crystal clear vision so they're rather irrelevant to my small steps. But it's OK as long as the decisions I make lead to better opportunities.
Well, whatever happens when a population is more educated. So a slightly better economy, I guess.
But now India is at a turning point. It's getting to be a leader

A leader at what? I can't offhand think of any software that I use that comes from India or China. I can think off a couple of things from Eastern Europe. Not much.

Programming contests? Eh. Programming by itself is completely worthless. It has to be matched with some problem...and such problems are not found in front of a monitor.
Why is this article focusing on Duke?
I did IT Consulting for 3 years while I figured things out and funded my company, pay in Southern California was like $25 - $35/hour and really easy work.
(I would ask why curi's comment was down voted, but I'm afraid of my karma, so I won't do so)
Meditation & Clubbing
A perfect Yin Yang of chaotic movement and stillness.

Also a nice scotch with some Miles Davis in the background works great.
Here is a little song I wrote:

You might want to sing it note for note

Don't worry... Be happy

In every life we have some trouble

When you worry you make it double

Don't worry... Be happy...
This isn't a question of a high-level personality trait, but a question about the low-level firmware in our heads. The standard myth that we all grow up with is that everyone is born as a blank slate, and the child's environment shapes the person from scratch. This is only partially true, there's a whole lot about our nature that is simply fixed in stone (ok, neurons really) before we even take our first breath. Two obvious examples are the innate human calls of crying and laughter. The weird thing is that most of the rest of our minds are pre-determined by biological evolution too.

<insert shock, awe, indignation, cries of "What, I'm not even at all like my identical twin brother!", etc here>

There's far less variation between people than we normally think; a whole lot of us is dictated by the low-level firmware we're born with. We're just acutely sensitive to the relatively minor differences between us, just like you can tell faces apart even though they're all basically the same.

If you're saying is that the relative weights vary between people, so while one person might be very comforted by touch another wouldn't care for it much, I agree with that. But this is just the small amount of variation between different people, the small amount that isn't fixed and can vary person-to-person. This is just a difference-in-degree, not a difference-in-kind. I doubt you can find someone who reacts to touch by immediately beginning to juggle knives or by sneezing. Now that would provide some evidence for the whole blank-slate hypothesis.

Evolutionary Psychology is fascinating stuff. As I said in another thread: "EvPsych basically makes one important observation and asks the natural question leading from it: Just like our eyes and hands, our minds have also been developed in response to evolutionary pressures. What were these pressures and how do they account for the features we see in ourselves, like language, love, laughter, crying, etc?" A good pop-sci book on the subject is The Moral Animal by Robert Wright: http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Animal-Science-Evolutionary-Psyc...
How people interpret touch is definitely a high level personality trait that we can control. People often do. Some people associate touch with something bad and recoil from it. People also have cultural ideas about appropriate and inappropriate touching, and react accordingly. That reaction isn't firmware.

A second problem with the "Genes Rule The World" hypothesis (if you get to name my position, I get to name yours ;p) is that no one ever actually explains how they do this (while allowing vast room for conscious control, reinterpretation, etc)
Start-up working on organizing biological information
Our startup, built on Rails, is working at the intersection of biomedical research and search, with the ultimate goal of organizing biomedical information. We're looking for great hackers to join us.

We've built a web platform that is meant to help scientists find each other, share information, and search the literature. This is meant as a spring
board for organizing the world's biological information. We've received funding from a cofounder of PayPal and people from Google and Amazon. We're looking to work with people who want to solve interesting engineering and algorithmic problems that are fundamental to the way biomedical research is done. Anyone interested should get in touch:
mark.kaganovich@gmail.com.
We're based in Palo Alto, CA.
Has anyone tried Transcendental Meditation? I'm really interested in learning meditation, but if I have to buy into some spiritual or New Agey mumbo-jumbo it'd kill the mood for me and I won't be able to get into it. I basically want some kind of relaxing empirical approach to studying one's own consciousness, awareness, etc.
Waiting tables seems like a great one -- not a lot of "job security", but plenty of demand, so it should be fairly easy to match your amount of work to the amount of money you need to get back to work on more interesting things.

Firefighting seems to vary from city to city, but in many cities, it appears you can start as a firefighter with 6 mos. training, and the starting pay is decent ($55k in seattle, for example).

That brings up an interesting question, though: if you can make $55k/yr working 10 days out of every 30 in job x, are you less likely to succeed in your startup? How much of entrepreneurial success is motivated by need? (The existence of serial entrepreneurs would seem to indicate "not much".)
"Some people associate touch with something bad and recoil from it. People also have cultural ideas about appropriate and inappropriate touching, and react accordingly. That reaction isn't firmware."

Yes, this is all stuff that can be layered on top of the basic firmware. But wouldn't you say that when you hug someone you love in a time of distress, you're feeling something innate and at your core? I'm not saying we're simple or whatnot, there's definitely many facets to our cognition that are all in there rumbling around. But we sure aren't blank slates that are programmed by the environment. I think a better analogy is that we have a bunch of knobs with certain ranges, and the environment & genetic variation together dial in these knobs to make us who we are. This provides plenty of room for the complex interplay between the different emotions, like the example you cite where someone is generally distrusting of people and dislikes touch. I bet even that distrusting person could feel close to someone who put in a lot of effort to build a friendship to overcome their initial hesitance, and feel comforted by this closeness. Again, it's a difference-in-degree and not a difference-in-kind.

"A second problem with the "Genes Rule The World" hypothesis (if you get to name my position, I get to name yours ;p) is that no one ever actually explains how they do this (while allowing vast room for conscious control, reinterpretation, etc)"

That's what the fields of Genetics, Evolutionary Psychology and Evolutionary Biology are about. :-) Check out that book I referenced in the parent post, it's pretty interesting.

If it's not genes that determine what we are, then what? Or at least, even if there isn't an alternative better answer yet, why aren't genes a suitable answer?
The strategy I was taught was to be completely relaxed, yet I was not able to do that until as recently as six months ago. This is after four years of training. I've finally figured out how to inflict damage while being relaxed even during the point of impact and following through. I'm still not completely relaxed

I've made it a point to never train when I'm angry or distressed. (People get the wrong idea when they see bruises on my fists and I mention they are from working out on my punching bag). Anger is my default coping mechanism for stress. It is foolish, yet that is what it is. I once did a 3-mile repetition of kata while I was angry, and it destroyed my skills. It took three months to rebuild it back up from the basics.

I did finally find an effective technique for dealing with anger. It requires me to drop everything else in the world and immediately deal with the anger -- that nothing in my life is more important than dealing with it right at the moment. That's a huge investment of time, though it was eventually worth it when I got less angry and required less interventions.

I can see how, if you're deliberately training yourself to relax during martial arts training, you de-stress yourself during training. You also learn how to stay relaxed while stress is applied to you (during free-sparring). And in fact, for this person who asked the question ... the skill in being able to drop into being physically calm and centered would let him unclench his teeth and keep going.

However, as I mentioned in the other reply about meditation -- there are people who dedicated their whole lives to just meditation and relaxation. It is difficult enough to continue training wen you're exclusively dedicated to martial arts, let alone dedicating yourself exclusively to a startup and you happen to use martial arts with the expectation that it will de-stress you ... so that you can continue the startup, rather than developing martial prowess.

I will say this though. I might have learned how to relax from meditation practice, but I learned how to persevere from martial arts. "Keep going, keep playing." That was definitely worth the price.
Very true. I experienced the same thing when I first practiced.

I didn't want to discourage anyone from picking up the practice, though. I wanted to point out it isn't a magic pill with an insta-cure, and it will take some time with daily effort before it starts working. Besides, the very first time, I had trouble sitting still for even five minutes.
I guess that would be ajaxterm + vi for me. Cool.

If it is anything like the Slicehost console though, the latency on it drives me nuts.
Quitting Microsoft for Google? You'll be escorted off campus immediately!
a nice thought, but mit's actually put most if not all of its classes online through opencourseware (http://ocw.mit.edu ).

and (not to belabor the obvious) the learning doesn't come from reading one page cribsheets -- it's from writing them and fighting problem sets till sunrise :P
BBC - Horizon - Richard Feynman interview [video]
Why Are Founders and Execs Leaving Second Tier Social Networks?
Unless I misunderstand the question, I'd say Scalable Vector Graphics. A pretty decent format that's very badly supported in out-of-the-box browsers even though it's been in existance for several years. Consistent SVG support would allow a lot of server work to be shifted to the client.
Those things are useful. :)
Completely stagnated. In another great quote from Alan Kay he says, "Java and C++ make you think that the new ideas are like the old ones. Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS."

I think it was the demand/money. Once the PC revolution hit, there was so much to do just to automate current processes that we got lost in the workload. It doesn't help that our industry is both woefully ignorant of its past and horribly dogmatic about its present.

That said, there are some very good people currently working in this space -- looking for the "pink plane". I'm very optimistic about this area actually.
Uhh is it just me, or does the ballerina switch her direction of spin every now and then... it starts off clock-wise, then after a while it changes direction, and then back again...
Would I have gotten modded up if I had said yes?
Wow, he took pretty detailed notes in some classes (and strangely very little in others). For the past ~2 years I haven't even carried a pencil to lecture; usually professors have PPT slides that they put online, so listening works better than writing a lot down.

It's also really amazing to see how many courses he took in four years, and most of them must have been pretty tough.
The best way to help people is not to give them money, but to use that money to build businesses, either by investing in them directly, or via public markets, etc.

You just give it away and it becomes a curse... for instance, a lot of the poverty in africa is due to aid killing local businesses-- there are no tailors anymore because the western world ships them shirts en masse, and so they just sell those...

Frankly, I'm of the opinion that the number one cause of poverty, world wide, are misdirected and ignorant attempts to "help people".

Certainly, social security, for instance, is the number one cause of poverty among the elderly in the US.
No, he doesn't. He generally reports on things in a pretty factual way... the only politics is in his choice of topics to cover. He's a libertarian.
Here is what I wrote on the subject a few weeks ago:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/488229/Untitled

(it's from email, the quoting got lost. the first 2 paragraphs had quoting)
A software / internet company doesn't have to build factories, doesn't have to build hardware, doesn't have to coordinate nearly as complex a marketing campaign, doesn't have to raise as much money, and doesn't have to have as many engineering disciplines on staff.

Thus, where Apple neede hardware and software and marketing guys (really three founders, though Woz should count double)... plentyoffish.com only needs one guy. And when Apple was at the revenue level pof is at now, I think they probably had a thousand employees, probably at least hundreds.

so, the requirement for multiple founders (if it ever existed) is now less likely.

I know I'm not answering your question because its an academic question for me-- I've chosen my path already.

I think really, at the end of the day, number of founders has no factor on the success of startups, but founder fights are a significant factor in startup failure.

So, whether you are solo, or you have 5 other founders, you need harmony between you and your other founders and/or you and your other employees, to have success.
Right, but were they founding employees (with one clear leader) or were they all founders who had equal say?

PG advocates consensus management, and that's the real sticky wicket.
And are they really even called founders when you can only name one?
The new courses that are designed to apply programming to real-world problems seem really promising.

In my opinion, giving up concerts, outdoor parties, and sunbathing - in order to have students practice programming for 3 hours a day so they can compete in a contest - would be a real shame.
But wouldn't you say that when you hug someone you love in a time of distress, you're feeling something innate and at your core?

If I thought I was feeling something innate that would not be valid evidence I actually was, just a self-reported anecdote.

If it's not genes that determine what we are, then what? Or at least, even if there isn't an alternative better answer yet, why aren't genes a suitable answer?

The answer is memes. And the short reason why is: memes evolve much, much faster than genes, so once they existed, they got to do everything mind-related, and biological evolution no longer got to do anything. This also explains why genes aren't a suitable answer :)
Games that can educate: SimCity donated to OLPC project
Good consulting gigs can give you insights into problems that people face in the 'real world', some of which might make good startup ideas.
I just donated/ordered my OLPC! http://www.laptopgiving.org/

I loved Sim City! I wonder though, how useful is a game that's centered around American type cities to kids in developing countries?
Right place, right time.
There was the need for an article to describe that???
The poor showings should serve as a wake-up call for government, industry, and educators.

The poor showings should serve as an indication of how artificial such contests are.
This is a straight PR move on EAs part. I haven't seen anyone from OLPC actually say that Sim City is included. I suspect it is accessible to OLPC children the same way it is accessible free to us -- http://simcity.ea.com/play/simcity_classic.php, because I sincerely doubt that OLPC would install non-free software on every laptop they distribute.
JavaScript, at least up until recently.

It definitely got a bad reputation due to it's inappropriate name (trying to jump on the Java bandwagon, nothing to with Java whatsoever), copy/paste JavaScript snippets of the late 90s (giving us exciting features like blinking/scrolling text, fun cursors, etc), ginormous browser inconsistencies, and the use of prototypal inheritance instead of classical inheritance.
Cellphone Straitjacket Is Inspiring a Rebellion
Intel Working on Chips for Improving Video Quality on the Web
The Next Google? How About Del.icio.us?
Do you have some kind of subject area around which you'd like to do a startup? If so, find work where you can meet people with problems in that subject area.

If you want to do consumer-based software, work somewhere where you can hear a lot about what consumers want in software -- perhaps a Best Buy? If you want to do medical-based software, find a job helping install computer systems for doctors. For large subject areas, there are all sorts of entry-level jobs.

I've found that the more people I meet with and interact with, the more I think up solutions for those people. So if possible, surround yourself with your future market.