skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do whatever you can to move. That's the only thing that will improve your condition, I think. Just get out, go somewhere, anywhere--Portland, Seattle, anywhere with a hot tech scene. You'll be able to find something to do in a city, just get out of Yakima.

Go to any city you have a friend willing to take you in. Jump start from there.

Lastly, it will get better. Life can be hard sometimes, but you can always start over. I promise it will get better for you.
I think it is good advice. The guy is in a rut. Going to Australia will do two things. One, open his eyes to a new part of the world. It's something not many people do and it will be fascinating and exciting. The second thing it will do is get him a high paying job that requires no skill. I think the idea is to try and live on an American cost of living, but in Australia. I don't know if that's possible, but I'd bet it's possible.
The future isn't going to be built by VC-istan, but by a fleet of ~50,000 small-to-medium businesses formerly called "lifestyle" companies,

The problem is that many technology companies have natural economies of scale. It is not realistic to have a world where you have 1,000 mom and pop search engines instead of 1 Google. One search engine becomes a little better, so more people start to use it, it can make more money, invest in more technology, become even better, get even more users, and eventually the top dog becomes a run away success. Since the entire idea of technology is that you research the novel technique once, and then can use the technology over an entire user base at a low marginal cost, there is a natural economy of scale.

There is of course already a very large economy of "lifestyle" businesses. But these businesses are either b) not in the technology business (restaurants, retail, services, etc.) or b) in an extreme niche of technology where there are so few customers the company never grows that big.

I really do not see how you can break a Microsoft or Apple, much less a Google or Facebook, into 50,000 smaller businesses.
I think looks and activities is inextricable with "bro"-ness. You're not slaying the LES bar circuit unless you have a certain look along with a certain behavior and attitude.
Series A crunch
Right, the economy sucks, there's no work, you're at the bottom of a hole, and all the sides are steep, and you're worn out, in trouble, and it's all coming at you at once. :-/ I have that sometimes. Maybe it's all coming down already, but... it's probably not all going to come down at exactly the same time; there's some playroom to juggle with. Take things one at a time, first things first. (And it goes without saying: Make sure you're healthy and sleeping and eating as best you can) . And sometimes something is going to fall over. And sometimes you have to let it, no matter how it hurts, because it's more important that as many of the other dominoes stay upright as possible. If they do, you can probably salvage something or at least use them move on. At some point you'll get a toehold, then a foothold, and you can start climbing out, slowly - 2 steps up, one step down.

tl;dr. Don't overstress. Take problems one at a time. and grimace when some of them asplode anyway.

ps. you're only 22. I know folks in their 40's who still struggle! (but somehow they manage to be happy every day. <scratches head>) . I think you'll figure it out. Either the road to traditional western success... or maybe you'll find your own path. :-)

pps: {{hug}}
Take a look at Akka actors. The JVM offers similar mechanisms, only with finer control over scheduling. But Go is fine and does have some advantages over the JVM (faster startup time) as well as disadvantages (dynamic code loading, runtime instrumentation, monitoring). Use it in good health!
Things tend to exist because they're popular (QWERTY) or good (DVORAK). While there is certainly "evidence" in some form for meditation, it seems to exist mostly because it's popular.

If meditation is actually good, and it eventually permeates society, I'll just be a late adopter. No account I've ever read has pitched it as so wonderful a tool that being a late adopter would be terribly painful for me.

But for now, I'm predicting that meditation will be a fad. I don't expect to see ~5-10 meditation centers in my hometown in 15 years.
Acutually, I have seen a few of those. I might start a newsletter.
Mark Zuckerberg’s Stealth Political PAC Is Reportedly Raising $50 Million
I know a job you can get. Get yourself to Sacramento, California and look up the Fund for Public Interest Research. If you can be personable and articulate they'll hire you. You can make decent money (enough to live on) and learn some sales skills while you're at it.
No you can't. 40 * 8/hour = 320 @ 4 weeks (3) = $3,840.

How in the world could anyone save $5,000 in a summer when they're not even pulling in that amount?

EDIT: Even working 80 per week only brings in $7,680. Factor in bills and you're still not hitting 5k, guy.
Why does it upset you more that someone tweeted a picture of two conference attendees behaving inappropriately than that an entire horde of people threatened to rape, beat up, decapitate and otherwise murder that person?

http://i.imgur.com/9Jg2brL.png
As far as I know, Postach.io wasn't a bookmarking app. Not one we were running anyway.
I would appreciate any evidence for or against this thesis. Do you believe software is going to eat the government contracting world?
Google bought the technology that would facilitate your volume slider. It was called PostRank: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostRank
They even had a Chrome plugin for Google Reader that enabled just that on the client side.

I for instance, can't be bothered to read all of Hacker News. So I read only the posts that have 150 points or more, via http://hckrnews.com/ (a by-points curator) in the form of an RSS feed.
I've just read through the Persona protocol specification document at https://github.com/mozilla/id-specs/blob/prod/browserid/inde... and was quite disappointed to find RFC5785 in use, in which HTTP is abused as an infrastructure discovery protocol.

This gives a lie to the identity being an "email address". It isn't. Ok, it's structured as a LHS@RHS form but the domain in the RHS isn't an email domain, it's an overloaded website with some problematic assumptions ladled in.

This creates a significant barrier to adoption. Many entities just won't bother: not only does it ask an apex A record to serve actual content (usually a mistake) but it requires the primary web host of a registerable domain, usually a trademark or brand identity, to carry technical material, definitely a clash of concerns.

(Why? In many companies of reasonable size, the website is managed by a completely different group of people - often a marketing team - to the internal identity service. Then, even if one team convinces to the other to install the browserid file, there is a possibility of it being deleted it by mistake during the next site refresh.)

I had hoped to find an intermediate step where a DNS SRV lookup was used to first locate the host delivering the browserid file. This follows the federated structure of email rather more closely and allows the identity service to be independent of the corporate brochureware. Even better - if the SRV lookup could be signed with DNSSEC, the transfer itself can be protected with DANE. The whole thing becomes manageable as a simple, separate unit of technology. It is thus rather more likely to gain the support of system administrators.
I used to work in the canneries in Alaska during the summers off from college. They pay you minimum wage but the long hours means most of your work is at the OT rate. It's crap work, will put some stress on your body but clearing 10k for a couple months work was not impossible and you get to meet a lot of interesting characters. This was 20 years ago though - not sure what things are like now.
Hacker News definitely attracts geniuses these days. You have to work more than 40 hours a week.

Edit: What bills does he have? Food is free, because you work in food service. Rent in a place like Yakima is < $400/m. Summer starts in May. Also, after 40 hours a week you get overtime.
AlloyPhoto:an image processing lib based on html5
I'm reminded of the Dave Matthews Band song lyrics:

Twenty three and so tired of life
Such a shame to throw it all away
The images grow darker still
Could I have been anyone other than me?

You might be feeling down right now, but it is quite likely to be temporary. The future holds promise for you. Whether it is concentrated effort or serendipity or rationalization, you will likely be in a better place before you know it.
A History of Computing Research at Bell Laboratories (1937-1975) [pdf]
The temp should be specified in Fahrenheit or Celsius. The little toggle in the upper right hand corner is not enough.
Medical devices are 1-3 years vs. 5-15 years (orphan drugs are actually pretty fast now), and 1-2 orders of magnitude less capital.

Medical devices would be just on the upper bound of what I think YC could do. The right way is probably to do an unregulated "fitness" or "convenience" product, which later has regulated-medical-device functionality. Defer the compliance parts until the product itself is proven.

There are plenty of "small business" ($1-5mm in personal-recourse debt) type medical device entrepreneurs. US and Israel seem to be the two big markets for developing them. Surprisingly, a lot come from people outside the medical professions.
Do you seriously get surplus energy despite pumping water from 46 miles away and then 2000+ ft up in the air?
<shameless plug>
That's why I came up with http://www.instahero.com, so there can be one tool to answer every question well.
</plug>
Where do you get these tomato picking jobs? Seriously, though. I'm moving to Oz in three months and I've been craigslisting and gumtree'ing like crazy, but I have not had any replies. Can you give me the name of some farms to call about harvesting jobs?
Let's Say FeedBurner Shuts Down...
Interviewers know that one

Well, I guess it's just a difference in philosophy. The question is more of a trap than a constructive tool. When I was trained, it was taught to me as a way to weed out people who slip up and say something stupid .. or worse.
Does Appacademy offer housing? If not, attending the program would be near impossible, as rents in NYC and SF are exorbitant, and would necessitate working another part-time job just for the luxury of sharing a room with several other people.
Plugging my own thing again, I built http://www.instahero.com to solve this exact problem. It has many pre-made metrics where you just select your inputs and it gives you the metrics on a dashboard/report.
That was my initial thought too. We're a cynical pair.
If you are in the Melbourne/Geelong area try Bellarine Hydroponics.
If two of the three would have to disappear tomorrow, which one would you pick to be left?
As far as I know the definition of osmosis is a movement of solvent across a membrane, without extra energy input, so I don't think "salt osmotes into the cells" makes sense. It would be diffusing along the gradient or undergoing active transport. I'm not a chemist, though.
Another idea once you've saved up a couple grand is to outsource yourself while you continue learning and improving as a developer. Move somewhere with rock-bottom cost of living (southeast Asia? Boliva? ...you get the idea) while you do freelance coding online and build up a portfolio. Earn in dollars, live on pesos.

By moving to a lower cost area than Australia you still get a little of the "awesome, I'm traveling!" thing with low enough costs that you can try to do work that is relevant to your ultimate goal of getting a career in technology.
I am a huge proponent of this -- I rarely start a project without sketching something out on paper first. It helps me get my thoughts straight.

In a similar vein, I was reading an interview with Donald Knuth the other day, and while I can't find that exact instance, he was quoted saying:

> "The
speed at which I write by hand is almost perfectly synchronized with the speed at which
I think. I type faster than I think so I have to stop, and that interrupts the ﬂow."

-- from (PDF warning) http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/reviewing-papers/knuth_mathematica...
I'm not sure printing data is as cheep as you think it is. I did a quick back of the envelope calculation:
From [1] I got an upper bound of 1,800 DPI in printers
From [2] I got that ink costs 0.0062 $/in^2

Using those numbers, the cost of ink comes out to be about $5.83 per megabyte.

On the other hand, a quick Google search for "hard drive" got a sponsored result for $80 1-terabyte drive from Newegg, comming out to $0.0000762 per megabyte.
I would be interested to see how TCs top startups from demo day have actually fared over time.
I don't buy it.

I will have to read the details very closely but on principle this reeks of monopolistic practices. Doesn't matter it's Bram Cohen.
Alright this is getting ridiculous, we aren't living in the 90s anymore and we should be encouraging healthy competition. We now have better alternatives like Macbooks, Chromebooks etc. I can't buy into the reason that Microsoft issued secure boot only to undermine Linux. Infact, Microsoft requires all x86 Windows 8 machines to be able to turn off secure boot and/or add their own keys. This also applies for their own manufactured Surface x86 tablets.

I am really looking forward to something like secure boot. Why? Imagine using Truecrypt to encrypt your entire hard drive with 3 layers encryption, and only to defeated by a pesky 10kb keylogging bootloader malware. So unless someone has an alternative solution to this, I am sticking up for secure boot and the ability to add my own keys.
Paper might not distract me, but paper and a pencil can keep me distracted for hours.
I'm sure a lot of people are resentful or disgusted that a 17-year-old was acquired for $30 million. I just find it fucking hilarious. It's awesome, not in some dipshit "American Dream" sort of way, but in the "holy shit, this world is on crack" sense of it. I say, go him!

The next time I am looking for work I am seriously considering getting rid of the resume and coming up with a bullshit startup name. It's pretty ridiculous that my "acq-hire" value in a startup with a bullshit product would be about 50 times the market salary for someone at my level of skill. (I've seen enough inside numbers to know that this is not an exaggeration. Acq-hire values are $2-4M for mediocre engineers and $4-10M for good ones.)

One could do major social-proof arbitrage by offering cuts (of future acq-hires) to people in the tech press. I am dead-fucking-sure this is already happening. It must be. The stakes are too high, and the players too degenerate.

On to the main point: yeah, it is terrifying that large corporate cultures are that desperate for innovation. I feel like they suffer the same problem as command economies. The natural information-theoretic incompetence of central authorities makes them slow to respond to anything (including especially their own creeping obsolescence, for which they compensate by purchasing external talent at extreme prices) but overreactive once they do.
How can you be reached? I'd like to help some how, possibly offer you a free place to stay in the Bay Area (Talk it over with my room mates) and pay for your flight. Please leave your contact info
Same here, it's so useful to know, especially in FL ;)
> I know you want to believe that it costs Apple $559 to make that $600 phone, but it doesn't.

Did you miss the part where i mentioned iPhone margins are over 50%? I know that margins over 50% means it costs apple less than $300 to make an iPhone, not $559.

Or something in that ballpark. Margins are lower on the smallest iPhones and go up a great deal on the ones with higher capacity. Putting in a little more flash storage costs apple very little compared to the extra $100-200 they charge for it, the margins on that are much higher than on the base phone.

All I was saying is that i think iPhone components and manufacturing labor genuinely do cost more than for iPad mini, and retina costs more than non-retina. Here are some rough guesses, I think they are in the right ballpark:

>> 260 / (1 - 0.6)
=> 650.0
>> 230 / (1 - 0.33)
=> 343.283582089552

Maybe iPhone costs 260 to make and has 60% margins, and iPad mini costs 230 to make and has 33% margins. The results are in the right area for the average selling price of the devices.

This would put the cost of materials $30 apart. If the retina screen costs an extra $15, it actually accounts for half the difference in component costs, it's significant. (higher margins are more significant, of course)

Or maybe non-retina screens are $20, and retina are $30. Then the retina ones cost 50% more, that's significant (and still 1/3 of the component cost differences).
I was in your situation about three years ago, and I'll tell you what I did.
I found a startup company that was willing to hire me for $15/hour as a low level computer tech. A computer janitor, essentially. I worked "in the field". My job roles consisted of configuring hundreds of computers by hand, performing keyboard and screen replacements, and occasionally having to physically deliver dozens of computers to our clients' office locations.
My fellow techs had never progressed beyond high school, and I had just graduated a liberal arts college with a CS degree. I felt a little ashamed.
To get attention from management, I started writing software to automate a large portion of my job. Surprisingly, and fortunately for me, no one had thought to do this before. The company's sysadmin was excellent, but he lacked a flair for programming. Management soon moved me into a sysadmin role, and I became the company's go-to guy for writing programs that would make configuration changes to our thousands of client machines in the field. My pay was increased and I got a desk. It helped greatly that I was the only person in our company's US office that had any programming ability.
I guess my advice to you is to first get your foot in the door doing the most trivial work they'll give you, and then show them what you're really capable of.
However the candidates know up front that we are a TDD shop, so for us, a big part of knowing that a program is behaving correctly is having passing unit tests.
I won't get bored at demo day because I'll be playing with my big dongle.
10 Routine Blog Maintenance Checklists
Assuming, of course, that you can actually get 40 hours...
I really like this, but in absolute honesty, I am not the biggest Lua fan. I would prefer if it were Ruby or JavaScript, but I am guessing Ruby/JavaScript is a lot heavier (not counting in mruby) than Lua and hard to implement (well, implementing rbx would be very possible), but V8 would be easy to implement.

I did embed Ruby into C++ once, but it was rather clumsy and it would sometimes cause a segmentation fault (my C++ was beginner level at best then, so I just abandoned ship without trying to fix it, since I wouldn't know where to look). I wish someone smart does this successfully. Daydreams
Sorry about that, I didn't recognize her name as a woman's name and just added her when she let me know.
domainsbot has a great API for this - it's what all the big registrars use
In my experience, other sources tend to have significantly better caching (google's don't even have images), (archive.org) multiple versions, but way way slower to pick up new content.
This was my first thought as well when they announced the death of Reader. I don't see why they'd keep feedburner running. If they're going to kill it, they should just announce it now, rather than prolonging the pain.
The parts that apply to accredited investors (like hedge funds advertising) are supposed to be in effect come summer, but the parts pertaining to crowdfunding won't be in effect until early 2014

To explain why, Mary Shapiro has left and the new SEC chairwoman Elisse Walter has yet to join the spot. Once she does, SEC has 270 days, which puts us in early 2014.
I'm not saying it's mutually exclusive, and having a CS or other engineering degree is neither necessary nor sufficient to create a company.
I might be willing to overlook the lack of test for an intern or very junior person, but not above that level.

Writing the code in an "unusual" language, would net big bonus points, though. I get tired of seeing the same solutions in Java and Python.
The 4 Elements of Physical Energy, and How to Master Them
Made me wonder if there are sites for kids that introduce and explain cool new advances in technology? Safe and without off-site links so parents feel safe letting their kids browse it?
JOBS Act won’t go into effect at least until 2014
> Of course, in the long term, Persona is meant to be distributed: alice@example.com should be verified and certified by the administrators of example.com. If example.com wants to use 2-digit passwords, they can. If they want to use retinal scans powered by your webcam, they can. It’s up to them. With each domain able to customize its authentication protocol with its users, the Web becomes more secure.

How would a 2-digit password make the web more secure?

Let's say I allow users to authenticate into my website with Persona, and I accept alice@example.com--whose 2 digit password is brute-forced the next day. Now whoever got into Alice's account has elevated permissions in my web app too. Great. If I had just stuck with my own authentication scheme at least I could have enforced some minimum complexity.
Understand where you are coming from but this is an overreaction. An HN where you have to wrap a plain, absolutely neutral question like this in a bunch of false praise or meaningless filler words is a much much worse place than the HN that might be overly critical/negative by default (and this perception is partly false, reinforced by the cultural belief that questions are attacks).
Welcome to the next generation of Flipboard
Follow up: http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidferris/2013/03/26/your-ener...
Thanks linking IUS. Having a repo of recent application packages for CentOS will probably make it my go-to server distro.
"I would love to see the monetization of more of my unused resources in the future."

AirBnB for storage of furniture and household goods?
So if I'm reading this right:
Act like I'm a pro and can solve all their problems.

My biggest issue is with confidence. It probably shows in interviews.
I know that given the chance I can do just about any work (some might take more time but I am willing to put the effort in).

One of the other threads recently was about questions during interviews. I learned that there are a lot more things I should be asking about that I wasn't.
Several people i know run ZFS very successfully on Funtoo Linux. Funtoo being a Gentoo-Fork lead by Daniel Robbins himself.

--- http://www.funtoo.org/ZFS_Fun

--- http://www.funtoo.org/wiki/ZFS_Install_Guide

I personally haven't used it so far, but i hear good things :)

I agree with your statement though: ZFS + Jails is a killer pro-BSD argument when it comes to servers.
Probably meant "about the pope"?
What to say when a colleague or friend experiences a tragedy
Here in the state of Virginia, we never had return-free filing for state taxes. But we did have free online filing of state tax returns. It was cheaper for the state to process the online returns rather than paper forms. However, the legislature decided that it wasn't proper for the state government to provide for free a service that should be provided by private enterprise. So now your choices are to file paper forms (which costs the state more to process) or file electronically, which, of course, costs you, the taxpaer, money. . .but is quite a boon for private enterprise.
As an example of an excellent C# program that's pretty widely accepted in Linux/Gnome, why not take a look at Tomboy Notes? http://projects.gnome.org/tomboy/

There are lots of opportunities for addons/etc, and it's reasonably extensible. Could be a great first project.