skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How Much Experience Required Before I Become Self Employed?
I have a dream. I want to work from home and eventually form a partnership with other programmers and have sort of a virtual office where we work on a (one or more) software products, all of us from home.

My question is, how much experience with a 'real' programming job would you expect/want me to have before taking me seriously? At the moment I only have 2 years professional experience, one of those years at one of the biggest tech consultancies in the world (for what it's worth).
Try wanderlust on emacs http://gohome.org/wl/

o Very good IMAP support (Supports pop3,nntp,MH, filesystem too)

o Offline support

o Works perfectly on large (>2gb) imap folders

Use the WL from CVS as the download/documentation on the website is outdated. (http://cvs.m17n.org/viewcvs/root/wanderlust/)

Yet another imapfs implementations: IMUS (http://github.com/rtyler/imuse/tree/master/) and fuse-mail (http://code.google.com/p/fuse-mail/).
Universities are like Y Combinator. You can learn everything you need to start a company on the internet, does that make Y Combinator worthless? You can learn everything you need to be a software engineer on the internet, does that make a degree in computer science worthless?

Universities offer a community of individuals learning together including student organizations, mentorship with faculty, and connections to get jobs later. Sure, if all you are going to do is fill a seat you might as well just do your learning online. But you'd be missing the point of a university education.

On the other hand, do newspapers have a value add to consumers beyond their content which is available for free online now?
Many colleges/universities existed before the Gutenburg printing press (see Oxford, Cambridge,University of Paris). Was there speculation at that time about how the book (the next big thing in information distribution) was going to put them out of business?
i would take you seriously after two things happen:

1) you take yourself seriously, and

2) you can show me examples and proof that you should be taken seriously (i.e., past work, competent answers to questions, etc.)

thats about it.
I should take the time to put it on the web. My degree is in electrical engineering and so I went all out and designed the pcb and all the goodies from scratch. It also has an integrated capacitive touch screen that I integrated into the PCB so that I can change modes by simply pressing on part of the screen. I think it would make for a pretty sweet open source project since the display could be pretty universal and the wireless sensor could monitor lots of things beside temperature. It would make for a wicked seismograph project....
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I don't look at this "sad". If people don't want to pay for it, they don't want to pay for it. If it happen to be that 99% of artists/muscicans/programmers etc can no longer find work in a post-copyright world, so be it.

I don't even believe that there is some sort of moral obligation to pay for copyrighted stuff anyway. Rather, I believe that the copyright system is an artifical insitution that modify the result of the free market. It distort incentive and direct resources to part of the economy where it wouldn't be in the first place.

The fact that the free market is starting to break into and killing all the players is simply reality intruding on people's illusions.

I am not here to suffer for a cause or anything but I want to survive so I can make a living on games, whether or not the market size has drastically shunk or expanded.

The thing that irate me the most is that game developers think that players have a moral obligation to support developers or not do something that percevied to hurt their revenues. We don't even have a moral standing to control what other people can do with their copies of the game. So we used words like "stealing" or "piracy" to justify oursleves as victicms of plunder when in reality, they're just copying stuff.

Yeah. Life is really harsh that way. Sometime we can only blame oursleves for being fools.

(on the other hand, 99% of all pirates are pussycats, losers, and cowards in term of their characters, but that's just another matter entirely)
Either that has not been my experience, or I've lost my mind. Both are possible.
Managing Object Lifetimes
I love the balls of these guys. And they work really, really hard. I don't know how they're both so productive and have the stuff they do be so polished.
Why Being Smart Won't Get You Laid
I, for one, would be safe using e-mail this way: none of my relatives even know where the "Reply" button is (though they long ago located Forward, sadly.) They just create a new message addressed to the original sender when they have something to say.
Damn you for harshing on my flash card app for small business owners.
A previous poster got it right, we all have androids, and the calender program works fine, as does the email alerts. As a side note, the radishes (that's what they were called) we're tied into google calender and worked really well.
Well, I use them for regular browsing while I am on public internet access and I have not found any problems. As for download/uploads - haven't used them for torrents, but Hulu streams just fine. That's from Europe.
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Does the regular Ruby use RubySpec when you run "make test" or such?

Perl 6 does separate the specification from the implementations.
I heard only 2 very short sentences (8時に起こしてください and 8時に犯してください）. Even if it's just accent we are considering, you need longer utterances to be able to accurately assess whether it is passable as native. If you listen to a language learner speaking for a significant amount of time in their target language, you will usually notice certain phrases are (hopefully) dead-on native-sounding, but others can of course use improvement.
> The alternative is what... just not doing package versioning? That seems like a step backwards too.

Imagine that you have lexical scope for changes to global constants. Like Perl's local keyword or Lisp's let. So you can redefine Array and the new definition is only valid within the lexical scope of a block. Code that the block calls does NOT get the new definition, so your code can have one version of Array#sum, my code can have another, and we can freely call each other or call code that doesn't expect Array to have a #sum method.

Now thinking about that solution to the meta-programming collision problem, the solution to the gem version problem is also plain: gems can be scoped too, and if I use version 1 of a gem in a block and you use version 2 in a block, only the code within our blocks see the effects of the gems they include.

So yes, packages have versions, but the same mechanism that applies lexical scope to meta-programming mediates package version conflicts.
It's about making a point in efficiency and releasing, not launching, right. To get a useable prototype up to a level of completion where you can start to get user feedback doesn't take months, or even weeks if you're focused enough. The 77 hours works for the product, as my expectation aren't set as high compared to if he said "...in 3 months". It didn't take a lot of time or money, and he now has user feedback to shape the next iteration, or even decide the project isn't worth pursuing further.
User experience is better.
crackpottery
For large static files you can cache pre-gzipped versions and use content negotiation to serve it to clients that support gzip.
I took the line Hello, core Ruby developers! You've got an awesome language there. Could you start testing, please? Your community seems to do OK. Why not you? to suggest that the author of the post is fully aware that the Ruby Core team and the Community of Ruby Users are two separate things with different attitudes towards testing.
We investigated cholesteric LCD screens when I was with i-conserve. Their energy use wasn't as low as e-inks, if I recall correctly, but you could buy a dev kit, as well as the actual screens, for a much more reasonable price.
I don't think so. Most companies require a university degree to hire someone. The degree shows the firm that you are somewhat competent.
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Programming can exacerbate perfectionism.  Why not intentionally introduce bugs as a cure?
Would something like that work?

The bugs obviously would be relatively harmless ones, perhaps not even noticeable by most users.
Is it time for schools to try to boost kids' emotional intelligence?
I also bought this book on Mann's recommendation. It was very good and thorough. Tharp is a genius and she really helped me focus my creativity more. I highly recommend this book, especially for us who are very left brained.
Well that's not really fair. That was a software bug. It wasn't malware, and it had nothing to do with software installation.
I don't use apache, but apparently it may be a little more complicated than that if you really want it to work: http://www.nerdblog.com/2009/04/my-modgzip-settings-deflatec...
Being smart, pragmatic, and unscrupulous will get you laid quite a bit. I can't, and don't want to, figure out the last part.
I've always been pretty good at reading other people's code. As a developer/consultant I switch codebases often, and I agree with the other poster about reading code making you good at reading code.

My approach is somewhat different than others mentioned here. I do take the top-down approach, but in a limited depth first mode. I will usually start with the code's entry point and drill into each section, one at a time. However, I rarely drill down to the bottom of each section on the first run through. I guess I have an abstraction filter that intuitively stops me when I feel that I'm passing from "what's going on" to the "how it's being done" level.

At certain points during getting to know the code, I will restart from the entry point, drilling deeper into subsections that I now feel are becoming more relevant to my understanding.

After a while I switch from the linear scanning into a mode more like random access, where I pick up classes by name or package depending on what I'm trying to understand better, and working my way up the call stack until I reach parts of code that I've already understood.

All of this is done statically, ie. by walking through the code in an editor. I rarely step through the code in a debugger. This is mostly because two reasons: I have faith that I can hold a large call stack in my head and I believe I can jump around in the call stack in an editor faster than I could with a debugger. My faith in my brains is possibly misplaced, and has at times failed me. My aversion towards debuggers comes pretty much from the early nineties where building/running was often very slow and one had to get a feel for the code before a debugger became really useful.

I'm sure there isn't only one way to do it, this is just how I do it. I hope it helps you in your endeavors!
"In recent years, the results have started to come in, and they suggest that emotional knowledge can indeed be learned in the classroom. Emory University psychologist Stephen Nowicki has found that interventions can teach kids to read faces better. Mark Greenberg of Penn State has found that emotional learning classes can make kids better at controlling themselves when upset. Researchers looking at a curriculum called the Resolving Conflict Creatively Program found that such classes also made children less likely to falsely misread intent - in particular less likely to assume hostility in ambiguous social situations."

I Googled for some scholarly citations before posting this extract of the submitted article. It's interesting to hear that there are possibly some interventions in this area with a research base. The term "emotional intelligence" is almost certainly overbroad in designating a variety of modular abilities not closely related one to another, but some of those abilities appear to be subject to training effects, and most have plenty of real-world usefulness, so this will be an interesting area of research.

To answer the question posed by the article title, I would like to see schools do much better at teaching reading and math, supposedly their current job, before investing too much time in trying to teach emotional intelligence, which I think is more a family's job.
I still use mutt. It's not great, but it's better than anything else I've tried. I ssh to my mail server and run mutt in a screen. My mail server has imap and webmail set up too, so it's fairly convenient no matter where I am.

I've wanted Mutt to be properly scriptable; it doesn't have much good in the way of configuration. I've been casually puttering around ideas for a long time about writing my own email client that's much more customizable. Maybe use a database backend?

Edit: looking at Sup, maybe it's what I want.
Like Classmates.com? I still have a couple of messages that I should pay to view. I haven't paid for 4 years and will continue doing so.
When I first started coding, both reading it and writing it, I found that a lot of people wrote code in an unnecessarily complex way. Then I would decide to code it in the much simpler way I saw in my head. As I coded along, trying to add the features I needed, I would see a way to be even more flexible for only a little cost. Frequently I would go back and look at the "ridiculously complex" code, only to find that our implementations were similar after all. My understanding of the problem was much more sophisticated tho.

This happened frequently, but in retrospect, as I practiced this more, I found that I was discovering the similarities between my solution and the already existing code much sooner. Eventually I learned to trust the other developers, that they had a more sophisticated understanding of the problem than I did. I also learned about refactoring and how that affects code shape (going through a similar process to that mentioned above).

Other times when I find reading the code to be a problem, it is due to "future flexibility". Sometimes this is needed, others it is a waste. One thing to keep in mind tho, is that the "future" represented in the code may have already passed. I have some code I am frequently accused of "prematurely future-proofing", however in reality the changes the code was handled to design are now mostly incorporated. At the time the future-proofing was done however, life was hectic and "must do" changes were coming down the pipe daily and the flexibility paid off.

Finally, there is the option that its crap code. I and most others have written plenty of that too. One thing that helps me in that case is to stop trying to figure out the code as a whole. Instead I refactor it as I go, since well factored code can lead to a big decrease in cognitive load.

Best luck.
simply earn a ton of money, and your prospects to get laid will suddenly increase
Suddenly I am in heaven!
I meant the figurative meaning of "Lynch mob"(which perhaps only I hold) I should have used "mob justice".

Amazon is a "virtual" person under US Law. I don't like it but it's the reality of corporatism. Amazon can receive justice or injustice. In this case the mob delivered them a heap of injustice.
Upvotes are probably worthless, depending on how you define 'worth'.
This will not work. As shown by CEO pay, publicizing this data led to people feeling like they were in competition for higher and higher wages.

CEO wages increased massively as a result.
MacBook Air proves its mettle in plane crash | Crave - CNET
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Starting with a simple system + lots of traffic is a good start. They can reiterate until it works.

From my understanding network effects have a positive influence on expert systems.
A good start. Now give me all of Safari Bookshelf on the Kindle.

I've been using my OLPC XO with Firefox and a GreaseMonkey script in the meantime... http://tlrobinson.net/blog/2009/04/06/using-olpc-xo-as-an-eb...
How many people are willing to give up their day job to risk a startup?
GMail devs, your next feature please: Automatic highlighting of emails from recipients whose messages are always opened immediately.
URL Prose
How to find a file in Emacs using Icicles
It also matters how hard they try to make it readable. Here's an example of some tests for an OSS project I'm working on (It's a messaging application).

http://github.com/jcbozonier/alloy/blob/d8dfbd51285c6c83df78...
Because it would intentionally give us more work.

The "perfectionism" does not come from being bug-free, for me. It comes from expressing the solution in the most elegant way. And I don't consider that a bad thing: allowing myself time to refactor as I go along makes the code easier to maintain and extend, saving me time.
The UW's Yoky Matsuoka is leading the quest for robotics that take orders from the brain
Safari shouldn't have DRM in the first place. And its "token" system for downloading PDFs is absurd. I say, either give me unlimited tokens or get rid of watermarks (PDFs are labeled with user info). Having both is logically wrong.
being smart will get you laid, for sure.

being raised in a family/culture that quashes social interaction and activities is the thing that will salt your game.

edit: pulled it back to original version
You could just write a FUSE driver to support this. It would not be very hard.

Since that sounds like what you want, why not do it?
Its all about emotions
Things that do not make sense (2005)
Frankly, there's an opportunity here: make a dating site just for smart people. Don't just ask about people's alma mater, ask for their GPA and major. Don't just let people say what they do, ask what their employer and title is. Ask for SAT, GRE, GMAT, LSAT, whatever other scores.

Then let your users screen on the stuff that they use as a proxy for smart. We all have different definitions for smart; just try to accommodate as many of them as possible. Women complain all the time about having to act dumber to find a man because the dumb men are the ones who ask them out.
Being smart won't get you a lot of things.

OTOH, being smart at getting yourself laid will almost certainly get you laid.
The title infuriates me. Such arrogant, clueless, priveleged, rich-kid bullshit. He's not talking about smart people - he's talking about academic overachievers. Going to Harvard isn't the same thing as being smart. I knew plenty of kids in my high school who went on to Ivy League schools. Very few of them were remarkably intelligent. All were remarkably dilligent and remarkably obedient. Dilligence is a wonderful quality; obedience I personally do not find very useful.

Anyway, the rest of the article is beneath criticism, just wanted to object to the sloppy logic in the title.
The problem is that perfectionism can turn into paralysis, which is much worse than having an app with some relatively harmless bugs and/or design flaws.
Then why did Charlie Sheen keep buying hookers from Heidi Fleiss? He wasn't just rich, he was famous too.
yeah, if you're looking for hookers
while i think this is true (have not experienced this myself), earning a ton of money does not necessarily automatically put you above the "getting laid" bar, it might just move you from -50 to -20.

it seems to be somewhat faulty logic to use "but when i do x, y will be better", both in the realm of getting laid, enjoying life, etc.

why not act now instead?
unscrupulous my ass! get therapy
Last I checked, "buying hookers" counts as getting laid.
Ask HN: Best Slidehow Making Tool?
My girlfriend is graduating from college in June and her family wants me to put together a slideshow of images and music that's about 7-10 minutes long to play at a party for her. I want to be able to have a nice backdrop/theme of some sort with some basic transitions and maybe some titles every few pictures, nothing crazy fancy though.

I also want to convert and burn the final slideshow to DVD to make sure things work as easily as possible the day we show it.

I was playing around with Animoto.com and it seems pretty cool but I was wondering if anyone had other solutions out there for this type of project?

Thanks
Touche. The article was about dating, so that was the context there. That said, I think we all agree that buying hookers is suboptimal at best.
> Is it time for schools to try to boost kids' emotional intelligence?

Please no. They will only do harm.
Indie iPhone App Developers Rallying Around OpenFeint
Later on I actually did what I should have done in the first place -- actually read the thingy the police filed to get approved to search the guy's place. As others have pointed out before me, the police indeed _has_ a point here. The guy fiddled with the students' marks system of the school, and that imho really is something the police should deal with.

On the other hand, the quuotes on the eff.org page didn't state that issue at all and instead preferred to point out some exaggerately abstruse line of argue, like: the guy was using a shell and therefore he got searched.

I think, the intend of that indeed was to manipulate the readers of that "report", and to get that "report" re-told.

So, for me the lesson learned from this incident are actually two:
1) If there's a report of an obviously abstruse reasoning, have a second look and dig into it yourself (unless you're really not interested in it).
2) Never trust a press release, not even if it gets released by some of the good guys, i.e. not even the eff.

I think, by accidents like this one, even "the good ones" of organizations loose credibility.
Brings to mind a quote from Minsky on his preference for sloppy, corrective programming:

"Don't try to fix the bug, just put in some code that notices when it's about to happen, and heads it off."

(From Stewart Brand's The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT.)
Before I got into programming, I made several graduation/wedding/memorial videos for people. It was an incredible mess. I had to scan each photo into a [slow, old] flatbed scanner, manually rotate them, and save them. Then, I would tediously add each photo to a slide in Corel's presentation software (the WordPerfect company). But it wouldn't enter the photos fullscreen, so I had to drag each individual photo to fill the entire slide's area.

Then I had to try to sync the music with it. I had to sit there with a CD player, run it direct-line to VCR, and manually move the volume/tracks on the CD to match with the video that was playing onto the VCR. Augh. Thank god for iMovie and the like nowadays.

Not sure how to address your question now though... iMovie/iPhoto might do it but I don't know if you're on a mac.
It's a great question that we should all be thinking about, especially the entrepreneurial among us. But -- even given my short time here -- I'm surprised it didn't get killed due to the liberally editorial headline.

As for "Make Me Dinner" I read recently about doing on one of the "frugal" blogs that Lifehacker quotes from a lot about doing something like that. I can't recall if there was a website for it.

When looking for the actual post, I didn't find it, but I did find another one that I thought might make a nice website, (and which I was going to look for next), along the same lines of your question: the Swapluck (instead of pot-luck) http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2009/04/04/start-a-swapluc...
The classic answer (I don't know if Charlie actually said this, or some other wit came up with it): "I don't pay them to have sex with me, I pay them to leave afterward."