skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I also put in a feature request that would fix this. Allow customer to lock addons and ENV variables and require a unlock password to change them. The same can be applied to app as a whole and then just disallow changing that unlock password from a phones browser...only from a desktop.
We also don't vote directly on particular one off issues like funding items for fire or police departments.

You are nitpicking a minor error in his post, but the fundamental point remains.

We judge the police department on crime stats without being cops ourselves. We judge contractors based on whether the roads they build measure up to DOT standards. This is true even if the DOT officials are not construction workers themselves.

Similarly, we can judge teachers based on education stats without being teachers. This is true even if we vote directly on education priorities, or indirectly vote for a mayor/president/whoever who does.
When I was choosing between Python and Ruby a couple of years ago, I chose Python.

To me it seems to be more universal - Ruby is (IMO) mostly used for web development, and Python is also rather widely used in other areas - in sciences (via NumPy/SciPy), sysadmin work and for various scripting purposes (in gaming, for instance).

By now I also got some experience with Django, and was also picking up Javascript recently. Can't comment on the amount of work available in Python compared to Ruby, just don't know the Ruby market, but for Python/Django there's quite enough freelance work via elance/odesk. Not sure if you'd get to $2-3k per month right away, but that's sure doable once you get some experience.

On the other hand, you have the advantage of being able to look for clients locally, and I only worked remotely - living in Russia now. Seems local rates in Australia (and other first world countries) are higher than in online market.

Seconding the importance of Javascript. I picked it up months after I started with Python, but starting with it earlier would've been a good idea for sure.

Again, most freelance work involves at least some frontend part, and if you're familiar with HTML/CSS/JS, even without Python, there's always something to do. Also there are quite some offers for Google Apps work, scripting GMail/GDocs/GCal - that's Javascript again.

Disagree on PHP requirement - didn't touch it yet, don't want to, have enough work (and some more people to talk to when I have time).

Feel free to drop me an email - egor.ryabkov at gmail - if you'd like to chat. Best of luck!
I know how to code, in the sense that I know how to write computer programs. However, it's certainly not enough to get hired as a computer programmer.

I disagree. In today's job market, if you can code, you can get hired as a computer programmer. Are https://github.com/arn-e and http://a-rne.tumblr.com/ your work? (From your profile.) If so, you should definitely be able to get hired as a programmer. If you don't believe me, contact me at my HN username at gmail, and I can help you out.
A perspective on Programming Problems and Challenges
Thank you for the thoughtful and spot-on response. I completely agree. My draft was nowhere near as well-put, I have discarded it post-haste.
CheatSheet: Every shortcut for every application on your Mac, at your fingertips
As has been mentioned elsewhere, Excel users are programmers, whether they know it or not.

What they need is the discipline of software engineering, a completely separate discipline from programming. If Excel spreadsheets had better encapsulation, internal documentation, automated testing, and the like, the world would be a better place.
Awesome tip. I can't believe I've never heard of that before. Just submitted it to HN, I think a lot of people will like it as much as I do.
Despite that food actually costs money many restaurants do in fact give away a lot of food in hopes of gaining customers.
Yeah, good call. She's 19 and currently in school to be a teacher of little kids. In the meanwhile and even after she graduates she said she wanted to explore startups and finding a role that uses her personality traits that are good with people such as being very empathetic and a good communicator. Blogging, social media, public relations, customer service, organizing, handling and giving feedback, etc are all things I could see her doing.

Edit:
Also I've been seeing people that hire interns that can be users for early stage startups. Stuff like that as well. It wouldn't have to be high wages either for starting out or interning.
but none of the office api
Legally speaking, merely mentioning it to your boss does not necessarily shield you from a lawsuit. It certainly reduces the likeliness though in my opinion (i.e., have no data).

Further, "employer's line of business" is very loosely defined. If you could share the technical skills between your job and the side project, you are most likely in the same line of business.

Here's a book I highly recommend: http://www.amazon.com/Intellectual-Property-Open-Source-Prot...
I use Ruby because it is clear and it is the most practical and effective language I've ever used. I'm glad you like Python. Have fun with it.

For others to compare, here are some examples on the c2 wiki:

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PythonVsRubyCodeExamples

and stackoverflow:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1113611/what-does-ruby-ha...
Amazon seeks permission to flex the Junglee.com arm
NYT Reporter 'Game' for Second Tesla Model S Test Drive
50% is ... way off the curve. 20% is about average in the United States, but it goes down when you exclude roles that tend to be managerial to something like 14%, so your experience seems to to track with statistical norms. Just stay in the field, people need examples and role models... building up a base of role models is a really, really hard problem because it sucks for the first wave.

This problem was identified in nursing years ago (inverse). Nursing has great opportunities for growth, pay roughly equivalent to programming and shortages in every state so severe states are starting governmental programs just to get more nurses... yet less than 7% of nurses are men due to a variety of reasons, but the major one is lack of role models. Despite identifying it and trying to offset it, male nurses are still exceptional rare because they never broke critical mass on role models.
Well, shit. A thumbprint is pretty intense, but you haven't really done LSD unless you've done a handprint. With both hands. You pass through death and eternity to become LISP.
Extreme one way: Stop pretending the United States exists. It's an imaginary line in the sand that has changed many times through the years. There is nothing different about the physical land between Mexico and the United States, or the borders between any countries.

Extreme the other way: Cyberspace is a reflection of the world that we live in (kind of like a mirror - it's the same as the 'real' world, but a little bit different). It's real when we want it to be (print out this paragraph, it's now physical), it's a place where thoughts and actions occur, it's the 'coffeehouse' of our generation, where like minded souls can find one another and communicate. I can see pictures and videos of places I've never been to, imagine one day when I get a robot with a holographic camera that I can drive around to places I've never been to - but I might experience it just like I was there. The bridge between 'reality' and 'cyberspace' is strengthening everyday, with more and more people trusting this cyber world. If we all believe hard enough, can we make it just as real as the world we live in?
RROD was much less of a problem than .jp sales, and much more easily fixed.
How Emacs Saved My Startup
It's non-sensical because it conflates two different types of employment contracts: contracts for time and contracts for results. If you're paid by the hour (or by the six minute increment in my case), its absolutely true that you shouldn't be working on a side project when you're charging your employer for time worked. But if you're a salaried employee, you're paid for work product, not for your time. As long as you're within the expected range of work output, it matters fuck-all what you do with your office doors closed.

You can't have your cake and eat it too. If you're not paying your employee extra when a deadline is approaching and he's working 13 hour days cutting into his personal time, you damn well can't complain if he works on personal things on light days when he doesn't have much work.
Dubstep Trailer for State of the Union Speech
See InclinePlane's comment, above - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5210998. (s)he said it better than I was trying to.
The "new" EO is virtually identical to that one, yes.

(I think I got "educational programs", which IIRC was from Rockefeller's draft bill, confused with "outside consultation" from this order.)

I did a clause-by-clause comparison (you're welcome! all part of the service I provide) and while there are minor deltas (like which sentence of a clause the Attorney General appears in, or whether deadlines are 90 days or 120 days) it's the same thing:

* Coordinate better in managing FedGov systems

* Figure out a way to relay threat info from FedGov to private sector

* Inventory the US for computer systems that if disabled could kill people

* Reach out to owners of those systems to help them not be owned up over old dialup modems everyone forgot about
The logotype is set as "XBOX", so yes, writing it as "Xbox" looks uninformed.
EDIT: I kind of hope that the idea of cyberspace doesn't die, because current metaphors for information handling suck. Cyberspace probably isn't the right metaphor to replace them, but something would be good. And I want things like Google Glass, or virtual retinal displays to become more real.

> Let’s start with government and cyberspace. Most Internet activity takes place in particular territories governed by states. The users of the equipment, as well as the infrastructure of servers, wireless towers, and so on, apart from satellites, are physical entities located in sovereign states.

Obviously untrue, since the US will happily claim that a .com can be seized no matter where the servers are; and the US will ask for people to be extradited no matter where those people are (or if they're not breaking any laws in their country) and etc etc.

> Nobody complains that electric utilities are “invading” the Virtual Realm of Electricity by generating and selling power,

I seem to remember plenty of people who were annoyed at Enron for artificially restricting the supply of electricity to create profit - a lot of that criticism fits the "these corrupt profiteers should not raid Electricity" (where electricity was a nebulous concept of generation and delivery).

I also remember a lot of people very annoyed at Russia turning off the natural gas pipes to EU.

One of the reasons that metaphor of "virtual land" isn't as strong for electricity or gas is that those are just much simpler, and people don't do stuff in them, unlike online.
Well, at least it was a commercial success, so he has the opportunity to make more films... :)
This post is so apropos for me (at least the title is) -- I'm perfectly fine with the Git part of github, but was struggling with the other parts of it. For example, trying to figure out how to make a versioned release. The download link they provide gets you the latest version from the repository. Took me a bit of searching and looking at other projects to realize that if you tag a release, it can make that available too.

But now trying to get that to show up in the project page (using their auto page generator) -- I ended up having to hand edit the html code, because I wanted the web page to have a list of specific releases. But even their source download link isn't fully intuitive. For example, mine shows up as "https://github.com/derekp7/snebu/archive/1.0.tar.gz, but it downloads a file called "snebu-1.0.tar.gz".

Oh, and to get the readme file to utilize their markdown, you have to call it reamde.md, instead of readme.txt. And I'm looking for where my users can leave feedback or discuss things, other then opening an issue in the issue tracker. But they don't have any mailing lists or forums (I guess most projects set up a separate forum, and link to it from the readme.md file or the gh-pages page).

What I'd like to see is a document going over the entire lifecycle of all the features offered through github, including documenting the standard practices for items that they don't provide (such as the forums thing). Anyone got any pointers?
Does anyone remember the Pirates of Darkwater?
Nope still 404
Since the question is whether it is "cheating" or not, the answer becomes very subjective, and yours cannot be called wrong. The best answer however would be to "Check your employment contract" as Steve also wrote. If you signed such a contract (or are not even aware that you signed one), you "could" be kidding yourself.
Must have been removed:

"

Whoops.
We seem to have missed the gist of that gist you were looking for.

"
A useful explanation from Joel Spolsky on the whole companies-owning-your-hobby-IP thing (it's v. common, they probably do, yes I'm talking to you) - http://answers.onstartups.com/a/20136
Clickable link: http://matchist.com/talent
I'd love to have to deal with some of the earn-out problems discussed in this article... The part about corporate overhead was especially insightful to me, a good watch out. Thanks for posting.
Why phone number is a required field
so datanitro really is the future of excel as described in the blog post. good to know.

I'm still curious as to how putting any "real" programming language behind spreadsheets is supposed to fix the situation that happened last week. the blog wasn't very convincing and it feels like it's just giving a poor disciplined group of people a more powerful tool to screw things up with. That's not a future I look forward to.
I actually lol'd at this. That sums it up very nicely! You forgot to add that you are evil if you're even thinking about it (they have IP rights on your thoughts too)
> Also, what is "impaired cognition"? Compared to what, exactly?

How about this for an operational definition: When you open your eyes and are seeing shit that isn't there, you're suffering from impaired cognition.

It's really not that difficult, unless you want it to be.

Edit: OK Fine. I give up: It's mysterious cosmic stuff that puts you in touch with the everlasting oneness of all humans and the universe. Good luck with the whole enlightenment thing, I'm sure the chemicals will fast-track you to exactly the right path.
Disgusting that the executive branch is sticking it's nose into copyright law and the Supreme Court.

Does anyone care the highest office in the country has been bought?
No it DOES NOT.
For example, delivery to our email is delayed by up to 48 hours and no help from them. The ticket is open for a month and each phone conversation starts from zero (disable filters, clear up cookies, bla bla). There is no follow up, progress, etc.
Get a passport card and stick it in your wallet, next to your drivers license.

http://travel.state.gov/passport/ppt_card/ppt_card_3926.html
Has nobody else noticed that the benchmarks use ext3 for Linode and ext4 for DigitalOcean? Not that the SSD's won't outperform hard drives anyway, but that's one extra variable that will skew results.
Stackoverflow has always been that way, this kind of questions were just more tolerated at the beggining.

But I don't get why is this a problem? Stackoverflow is for pragmatic questions and is great a it. If you want discussion there are other communities in stackexchange, such as 'programmers'.
Can you point to a real world standardized test, and explain how to game it without making students understand the material?

Instead of saying "the good teachers are the ones which get good test results", they could do some deeper analysis. How do the "good" teachers...

How would they know which ones to classify as "good" and "bad" without the test?
> It's not really shocking, is it?

Yes, it is.

I try to keep my consumption in check, and I'm shocked people can be so offended when the next big thing doesn't fit their needs. People are actually upset they can't spend their money on it. Unreal.
You wouldn't be alone in thinking that: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheRenaissanceAge...

With that being said, I feel like animation is following music's lead, in that there's still some fantastic animated shows being produced, but they're not necessarily the most popular ones: My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Dan Vs., Adventure Time, Gravity Falls, (straying into adult) Archer, American Dad!, half of what Adult Swim shows, etc.

(On an semi-related note, I do feel that nostalgia is the main factor in what time period of animation people feel is best: I mostly associate good animation with late-90s/early-00s Cartoon Network shows, but I know quite a few people who do the same with 80s cartoons.)
A better question might be: What would you pay someone a thousand dollars a month or less to do for you that would allieve some headaches that you have that are fairly straightforward?
I can't see any reason why age wouldn't be useful information for a VC. As for refusing to use age as a signal on principle, I'm not sure that it helps anyone. At the end of the day that means that time, effort, and money are being invested into companies that VCs could've known would have a lower likelihood of success.
These are unconscious social biases. Men are not evil for not hiring women when they don't understand the style of communication being used. When women are hesitant explaining the gaps in their resumes from childcare, or don't have any confidence answering questions, it's hard to blame men for going with someone they see as confident.
This is awesome. Such a great idea!
Ah yes, more "cars are evil" claptrap. Some people like dense urban living, some don't. Cars offer that option. The author is one of those who wants to remove that option.
Along the same lines, I find there there is an implicit though process around going into major debt and having your company know about it.

"Why don't you go ahead and get the biggest mortgage you can on a house. Please come and tell me how big your mortgage is and how much you need to work for me for the rest of your life. Now that you have told me, I will make sure to use this information to subjugate you even further."
"There. No drugs, just reflection, same result."

It's one thing to talk about oneness and accept it on an intellectual level, quite another thing to experience it.

Houston Smith, one of the greatest religious scholars, had already had a whole career writing and talking about religion, but when he finally took a psychedelic he said that he finally got to experience what he was writing about.

There have been studies that have shown that most people who take psychedelics in a therapeutic context consider their trips to be some of the most important experiences of their lives, some consider them to be the single most important experience in their life.

These experiences are not equivalent to what you'd get from reading a bumper sticker or an Einstein quote.

Most people who are condescending towards psychedelic experiences don't know what the hell they're talking about. They're like little kids laughing at the thought of having sex without ever having any.
Is anybody against women in tech? Serious question, I'm all for anyone who wants to learn how to program, regardless of gender or age, and I can't imagine anyone not supporting it.

Also: Hey Tarah! Just saw this was you. Great job with LadyCoders, I hope it gets even better.
Just in case anyone was not aware (or is shocked by this), the Obama administration has very close ties to the copyright industry: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/04/obama-taps-fift/

It is entirely unsurprising they would react in this way
Steal This Idea: Experiential Amusement Park
> "It seems to basically be the hosting ground for answers to hard factual questions answered in most documentation/materials elsewhere"

That's exactly what StackOverflow is meant to be.

I feel like I'm the only one who appreciates what StackOverflow is trying to achieve here - to be the place to document hard, solid facts - nothing more. If I wanted to read commentary and opinions on programming, there's always HN or Slashdot.
Brian Wilson explains rather well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9d45F7PqxxY
These experiences are not equivalent to what you'd get from reading a bumper sticker or an Einstein quote.

Where did I say they are? When I said "same result" I was referring to Einstein (assuming the reader would get the point, not exactly equating that either), not to reading that quote.
You want cyberspace? It looks like this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-Hg2Ft0Vtc
I have always thought LSD works in this way:

Your brain gets data, and has models of how all the data fits together. For example, if you look at someone you don't know, your brain will get the data "appearance" and plug it into the model "assorted stereotypes" and get out some expectations about who that stranger is.

What LSD does is perturb those models of how data fits together. If your models are in line with reality, you don't have much to worry about. After your trip, everything will settle back to about where it was before. If, however, your models are out of whack (e.g. you blame others for failures that are your own fault) then you run the risk of having some really really unpleasant realizations while you're looking at the data without your old model mucking things up.
HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2208056
While recreational drug enthusiasts are often boring (especially cannabis enthusiasts), your post is misleading -- it overlooks the fact that psychedelics such as LSD and psilocybin cause an extraordinary change in cognition when compared to the rather mundane effects of alcohol, cannabis, coke etc.

At the end of the day, the state of one's cognition is rather important to one's perception of life. It is extremely memorable to alter your cognition in such a dramatic way, and to experience the temporary loss of the personality that you are accustomed to waking up with, and it's fair enough that people should want to talk about it. And it seems very likely that understanding the effects of those drugs on the brain will be helpful in understanding the construction of consciousness by the brain. For what it's worth, the stuff about death definitely chimed with me; I've been sure I wasn't coming back.

So yes, some druggy people are definitely pretentious, and the crap about "evolved people" would make anyone cringe, but those observations do absolutely nothing to diminish the significance of psychedelics as substances providing a unique and extremely dramatic perturbation of our perception of reality which will presumably be scientifically important.
So you're saying that age can be a contra-indicator of success.