skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You know what, the message that I am hearing from you is that you want to be in control of your work, in control of your time and know that what you are doing is meaningful. A person that runs a cleaning service with 5 or 6 employees gets all of that.

The question then may not be so much about having something to be totally in love with. We all have to be practical. As long as you like what you are doing and you are in a position that gives you that control from doing it, that might be enough. I can't say that I'm totally passionate about what I do, but I gave up on finding my "passion". I have marketable skills and I am leveraging it. I was a full time employee of a Fortune 500 software company and then I became a full time contractor. I am loving that aspect of it. I am more in control of my work, I don't fully control my time but if I don't put in a 7.5 hour day or take a day off here or there, no one is on my back. Personally for me the next logical step is to build a business so that I am able to get even more in control (ie move away from having my income depending on hours).

So, what can you do now that can bring you closer to giving you that control? If you are full time, can you go contract? I'm not talking freelancing but instead doing the full 40 hour week but getting paid hourly. If you are already doing that, then the next step is to just save and save money. The way older people can somewhat make up for the advantages of youth is to have a large runway. Having $100K to $200K that you can live on and spend on your business for the next two-three years goes a long way to having a better chance of success. Having a wife and kids and putting the house on the line and worrying about the next mortgage payment or rent payment isn't being an entrepreneur, that is just being plain stupid and selfish.

If you hang around your local startup groups, you will realize that everybody has something to bring to the table no matter how old.

Anyway, I get your frustration. I would not devalue yourself. Don't take any of this seriously. It's just not worth it. One book that I think you would find worth reading is Cal NewPort's book - So Good They Can't Ignore You. His blog is also interesting.

Thanks for letting me share my opinion on this. I don't intend it to sound preachy - it is just my own thoughts.
Saturn and five (out of sixty) of its Moons
1. Compare programming to home DIY. Sure, every year you'll have people who knock down load-bearing walls, get pesticide backwash into the drinking water, or turn a simple de-icing operation into a raging inferno. But people also assemble millions of shelves and beds, unclog millions of drains, and build thousands of greenhouses and planter boxes.

2. Professional programmers create awful messes too. They do it less often, but with greater consequences. Just like the contractors building a bridge are less likely to screw up than some goofball installing a new water heater at home, but a bad bridge is much more dangerous. Give people more training when the potential consequences of bad work are more severe, and less training when it's just not needed.

3. The value of someone with both domain knowledge and programming knowledge is usually immense. You can either teach a programmer about the domain, or you can teach a domain expert how to program. If you have a programmer with a bit of domain knowledge, then they know what kind of questions to ask the domain experts. If you have a domain expert with a bit of programming knowledge, then they know how to communicate technical requirements to a professional programmer.

Let's take your analogy with the publishing house. If the fantastic storyteller can write but has major problems with grammar and continuity, then a good editor can clean things up.
The problem with this argument has always been that the answers are clear to people with some business experience.

"Do you count the full price of the deal as revenue?"

Gross revenue? Sure. Net revenue? Of course not.

"Or do you count only Groupon's cut of the deal as revenue?"

Yes, as net revenue. Of course. Same as any marketing/advertising company.

"How often should they pay out the merchants?"

As slowly as possible, from Groupon's perspective. What was so amazing here was they essentially built an ad network where the inventory suppliers had zero power over the scenario and accepted unfavorable payment terms. Instead of getting paid net 30, they accepted net 90 or worse.

"How do you account for refunds?"

As credits to the expense account where the original purchase was posted, just like with any other business.

"Where do you keep the reserve pools GRoupon needed to pay out all those refunds?"

You don't have to keep it anywhere because they get marked as credits to the expense account. There's no need for a pool or any other sort of artifice. Creating a pool makes sense only to cloud what's going on.

"Are the reserve pools considered an asset?"

Of course not. But why do we have a pool again?

"Or a liability?"

Of course.

-------------------

Groupon did a lot of brilliant things. One of the smartest was realizing that though their model was no different from any other sort of ad network, since it wasn't immediately obvious to outsiders, and since their suppliers had so little power, they could make up new accounting rules and principles to generate favorable cash flows.

I don't write this to say this was wrong. It was brilliant. I want to disagree with the idea that they HAD to do this. They could have paid out net 30 and counted refunds like any other business, but they realized they could get away with not doing this for some time, and ran with it.
I think this story resonates with the HN community because it hinges on a very large leap of faith. The same kind of bold, against all the odds move that starting your own business takes.

It's encouraging to read such actions, even if in this case it's not a technical or business move, can end successfully and happily.
The paparazzi is going to have a field day with these!
That domain must have been pricy, even during the dot-com bust.
I think you misread that.

> you can bend your problem to your language

>The former is epitomized by Java and Python--all Java and Python code looks the same, regardless of what it's actually doing.

He was saying that python and java don't bend as languages towards the domain, that is that they bend the problem towards them.

>or your language to your problem.

>The latter is the domain of Lisp and Haskell and Forth and so on.

And that Lisp, Haskell and Forth are the languages that bend.
Lecture on how to convert Blu-ray to DVD 9 Disc
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At the end of the Western Roman Empire in 300AD they became monotheistic. The interesting piece is, what if they had been able to eliminate all the civil wars? In that case their would have been a unified force to resist the rise and spread of Islam. Islam filled a void left by the collapse of the Roman Empire even though the Western Empire still existed.
Depending on the implementation of the OO system in question it could provide you with relatively limited options for abstraction.

I can only really speak from a Common Lisp point of view and the problem there that I was alluding to is the fact that you are so free to produce your own forms of abstractions whether it be mini DSL macros, dynamic dispatch method combinations, data driven programming using first class functions etc. that if you are not careful you can easily obfuscate the real intention rather than making it clearer.
She mentioned somewhere that she sees India and Japan as good case studies in how modernist polytheistic societies works.

Not exact models of what a modernist Rome would look like, though. For one thing the Roman legal system, in its various forms, was a different creature. They had slavery ... but also very liberal marriage and divorce laws compared to most societies in history.

They're also one of only two legal systems which developed torts -- in Roman law, delicts. As an innovation torts/delicts take a lot of pressure off the state to provide regulation of commercial and personal behaviour, because a lot of it is then handled at the lower level by individuals and companies.
You're misreading. OP is saying that in Java and Python you must bend your problem to the language. So you both agree.
Yes...my apologies, should have been clearer about this.
At McDonald's in Japan, French Fries Are Causing All Sorts of Chaos
You can get hit by a car. Or fall from the stairs. Also, air outside is unhealthy in big cities. And then there're the UV rays.
>Using a programming language is like speaking in common tongue to every other programmer who knows that language

As much as I love DSLs, I Couldn't agree more.

>The problem with writing a DSL for every problem (and every programmer writing different DSLs) is that you end up with all these different languages

When writing in a DSL of my design, it is amazing. It feels like the program models exactly how I am thinking about it.

When modifying/maintaining a DSL made by someone other than me, often this can be horrifying, it feels as though this models my thoughts so poorly (and it does, it was designed to model their thoughts).
Yup, which is why those of us that do care about our health just can't wait to maintain the code of those that feel this way after they either die young or end up feeble and unable to maintain themselves much less their projects!

Your brain and whatever else on your body you're currently using to get code from brain to computer are surrounded by a lot things that are important to keep them running and talking to each other. Forget that, and they'll stop. Quickly, and painfully.
Hackathons to me have almost been about pushing developers to the limits within a 24/36 hour time frame for free, an excuse used by companies to exploit the "hacker" gimmick and keep most of the IP afterwards. Give them some beer, some pizza and energy drinks and make them stare at a screen all night. I often code at night, but I would never code 24 hours straight, let alone 36 hours.

I only ever entered one hackathon and it wasn't as great as some would tell you. The peer pressure you feel to keep going even when you feel like you're going to pass out from exhaustion is immense. Not a great feeling and I wouldn't recommend it, the fun part is overrated.
What about electricity to use these things :) ? A schottky diode works on electricity...
Similar here. It depends on your interests and skills.

For example if you were into statistics you might collect data while you play your game(s) and create something to explain it to others.

As you can see I am not great at finding ideas myself.

Even after you have the topic it's difficult. I am hoping that practice makes it easier.
I am currently facing this where I am trying to write a post but can't figure out who am I writing to?
Before having written anything I thought it would be just fine; I've written essays creating a post should be easy.
The thing is that a lot of what we associate today with Islamism is really a property of monotheistic zealotry in general.

In fact, the very word "Zealot" originally referred to a particular religio-political movement that sometimes dabbled in what we might in today's terms call "terrorism".
I think the word following the TRIGGER WARNING should not be in bold. The way it is written, it practically screams RAPE. At the very least it should be gray. The other thing is perhaps to not spell it out completely, e.g. r*pe.

On to the rest of the statement. In a security conference, the boundaries are rather different. For example, if there is a zero day exploit running around, then it is important for mitigation techniques to be discussed.

In the case of attacks on women, spiked drinks and other threats have to be brought up and discussed. My feeling is Ada Initiative's actions in this particular matter represents a disservice to the female community. As some one who have a teenage daughter, I'd have liked to see the issue discussed in a level headed manner so that the information can be used for good.

In any case, while I share much of Ada Initiatives goals to open technology conferences to women, the group needs to understand how much power it potentially asserts over people like conference organizers who don't want any more headaches. I think the power equation is wrong. In this particular context, the Initiative has caused one woman to be shut out.
Isn't this really describing what it means to write a program? Assembler is really just mov, add, branch, etc.. but some really complex and useful programs have been written in assembler. Or am I missing something? I had to squint to read the text.
If the first priority is good code, the author's point still stands. He's saying that you'll produce better code if you have a healthy lifestyle.
"how would an industrialised, polytheistic society cope with monotheistic terrorism?"

Add to this a side plot about creating sentient machines and you basically summed up the storyline of Caprica, Battlestar Galactica's prequel.
philosophical (or philological question): is having a word for 'nothing' the same as having a number 'zero'? my answer would be no. when zero entered western civilization from the east, my understanding is that it triggered profound changes. yet indo-european languages have probably pretty much always had a word for 'nothing'.
Turing equivalence means that computers hundreds of years from now may be quantitatively vastly more powerful, but they still won't be capable of computing anything that today's computers can't given sufficient time. The same is not true of today's computers vs. special-purpose computation devices, like chronometers.
I'm not sure I understand. Which part of that RFC are you responding to?
If you scrub packets where the TTL changes, what happens to a connection where the route changes and the TTL has a valid reason for changing?
The Language of the System - Rich Hickey
clark-kent is right. Hindsight is 20/20. I'm sure we all know Tom Brady shouldn't have made that pass that caused the game losing interception, but its hard to say if you were in his shoes at that point, that you would have done it any differently/better.
Maybe this is overly-cliche, but I would pick the answer "I write for myself". My writing is a representation of how I feel, I do it for me.
"Welcome to our team, here's the spec for our project, and here's the spec for our DSL. See you in a month."
I was just talking about this with some other Firefox developers today, actually. So...yes, there's a chance. Not a very big one, mind you. But a guy can dream!
And not just fired from some place he worked at. Fired from a company he put more thought and time into over the past 5 years than anyone even puts into raising their own children.
Isn't that what Battestar Galactica and especially Caprica detail? Not that they're a research or high-brow look at that question, but all the same.
Old link, still really weird.
Thanks a lot. I'm still reluctant to use LinkedIn since much of it feels like extortion to me.

Btw. I'm surprised that you've found the ü character. Not even US customs/border protection let me enter my German name in the ESTA form.
Continue With My API Service As A Guest
The energy, collaboration, exposure to new technology, people, ideas, creativity … far outweighs the cons here. No one’s forcing you to stay until 5AM and eat nothing but skittles and trail mix.
A good five years ago I got two phishing emails to two unique addresses that I had used to contact a local bank. They also refused to believe me, and it was basically my fault for not securing my computer. Somehow.
It seems like a lot of companies reach a nice stable point of development, but then get lost when they have to keep stockholders happy with short term month-to-month gains.

Is there some way for a company to amicably go private and delist when they no longer need investment? The only example I know of recently is Dell, but that was an unsuccessful company with a low value.
I did that at some point but this is more convenient. My Facebook browser has me logged in all the time, I just need to launch it to check Facebook.
Wait is ng-change doing something und the hood other than using $watch?
I think you may be wrong. To be parents as a gay couple (particularly if male) there often has to be considerably more effort to get there. This would generally mean that the parents really strongly wanted to be parents. This fact alone surely makes for a better environment for kids than one where the child could be an accident.
All of these are valid criticisms, but in my mind a hackathon is a treat: pizza, soda and staying up all night is fun sometimes, regardless of whether you play Halo, watch movies, or write a cool app. I agree with a lot of the comments that say you can't get much done; it's mostly a case of connecting existing libraries and data sources to create a sort of 'mash-up'.

That said, being able to prototype quickly is an awesome skill, and it completely exercises different parts of my skillset than my normal job. Going from coding a large C application, to hacking together a Ruby app is a very refreshing experience. Maybe if you spend your whole day working on the same stack in the same domain, it's less fun.

Finally, it's a good way to get something you've had in mind done. If your whole life isn't made of crunches, the occasional high-stress, urgent deadline situation is (once again) a welcome change. For people who work under these conditions all the time, yeah, it's probably not fun.
...said by someone that is no good at hackathons. :)

Honestly though, hack on something you can finish in a few hours and go home and come back the next day to tell people about it. I'm still running twickery.com from the last F8 opengraph hackathon I went to. Spent a few hours and still use it now.

Hackathons give you an excuse to scratch an itch, learn something new and challenge yourself.
It seems the HW-lead was fired according to this:

http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/13/3983348/valve-fires-jeri-e...
I would disagree with that point then. Staying up most of the night and therefore sleep depriving yourself will make you less cognitively able the next morning compared to if you slept 8 hours, but the amount you are able to write in the time you chose to stay up outweighs the slight increase in productivity you would have the next morning from sleeping all night.
The Awesomeness of Stem Cells
The best piece of advice that no one ever seems to give about hackathons:

--

Hackathons may or may not be for you. Try it once. Don't stay the whole time if you don't want. If they aren't for you, don't go again. If they are, great, have an awesome time.

--

For some reason, they're touted as this end-all be-all social event that if you don't go to YOU ARE MISSING OUT AND YOU WILL NEVER RECOVER. As many people posted here, the situation's combination of adrenaline and seratonin depletion gets people into some pretty seriously fucked mental states that causes odd group dynamics. Some will thrive on this. Some hate it.

Case in point: I grew up in the rural midwest, but had computers. So computers are something I deal best with in situations with little to no people around. Hackathons are the opposite of that. Took me like, 2 attendances to realize that, and now I just avoid them. Hell, I even avoid career situations that put me in that environment, because I don't work well there.

Not to say I haven't pulled some insanely stupid hours in my time, but I still even did most of those alone, and I'll continue to do so.
Uh, in hindsight is so simple! Duh! Those lazy Romans.
I honestly don't know, I never watched BSG.

Was it set in early imperial Rome with particular reference to a fairly famous Jewish rabbi?
The company could, technically and if allowed, buy back its shared from the shareholders, but don't quote me on this. I suspect there are lots of rules and regulations on how it's done, as well as it would require the company to pay a few multiples of the current share price, to convince investors to sell. I remember seing a post someone before, talking about what it would take for Apple to go private again. Can't find the exacts atm.
Well that was interesting. Started reading the readme formatted on the page.. Well commented as usual, nice little snippets to demonstrate..

About half way through realized it was the actual source file.
Keep Tweeting from the Afterlife
It's a hackathon. The whole point is to push yourself.
Yeah, I think this is an interesting idea, but it sort of inverts causality in a way. Could we have gone to the moon without a computer? To what extent are our advances since the advent of computation a result of computation itself?

Put another way, if the Romans had invented a computer, would they have had our level of technology maybe just 100-200 years later?
I'm not sure that would have helped that much really. The Eastern Empire had been propping up the West for years with trade and money. By splitting off, the East was able to keep all that funding for itself. However, internal/external struggles, the Forth Crusade[1] and political intrigue ended up being the downfalls. I do think there is some "what if?" factor in all that. Such as what if the unified empire had not wasted all those resources on the civil wars.

In some ways, the Western Empire was sort of doomed from the time of Augustus onward when their embedded fear of the German tribes was established[0]. The defeat at Teutoburg Forest and the loss of around 20,000 Roman legionaries stopped all expansion into Germany and most likely lead the the eventual confrontation with the Goths. There's also a "what if" due to the Huns and pushing the Goths across the Danube, but if it were not the Huns, it could have been other factors as well (famines or another barbarian tribe).

The Eastern Empire almost reconquered the Western half in the 6th century under Justinian[2] and Belisarius[3]. However, internal bickering and mistrust led to squandering much of the gains that were won.

The Islamic forces were also able to capitalize on the chaos brought on by the perpetual wars between the Eastern Empire and the Sassanids[4] as well as the various barbarian tribes (such as the Bulgars and the various Gothic tribes that filled the vacuum of the former Western Empire) that still preyed on the Constantinople and other areas. There was just too many fires to contain them all at once and when one was put out, another was started in another region.

Honestly, I think it was for the best the Roman Empire ended for the sake of renewal (as much as I love Roman History). It had started to stagnate by the forth century and the more Greek side in the Eastern Empire was far from being the intellectual and cultural epicenter that it was during Classical Greek times. Sure, they built great things such as the Hippodrome and the Hagia Sofia, but those were just reincarnations of similar things done under the unified empire.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Teutoburg_Forest

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Crusade

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belisarius

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justinian

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sassanid_Empire
I totally agree with that, 100%.

I just wish I didn't have to get up again in the morning.
I'm wondering how many upvoted because they found the article worthwhile versus upvoting because they noticed the author is not a women and that's what's expected. I say this because to me it looks like it's something that's off-topic judging by the guidelines.