skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Happened to me, I ran my own small ventures for about 2 years out of university. They definitely didn't fail, but they didn't make me a millionaire either. I cashed out of one of them with $20,000+ so it wasn't the end of the world.

However, whilst being interviewed over the past month or two I've encountered people who've really disliked the fact that I'd moved around several small entrepreneurial projects and now wanted a job. Some people absolutely loved it, but some people were really quite sceptical and even critical. Just shows you that people can be stupid, you have to keep trying as many as it takes until someone understands your value and doesn't make some retarded judgement based on something that doesn't matter.

As a sidenote, I found that the CEOs and founders that interviewed me were very keen on the entrepreneurial aspect to my cv. The middle management and wage monkeys weren't at all.
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I liked the bit about unspecified failure modes in HTML 4. Very important point, though I feel somewhat sad that such persuasion is necessary.

My way of looking at it is: you're trying to produce a certain kind of output that is externally specified and there are available 3rd party tools that can validate it. Why wouldn't you automate testing?
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This is not unique to your generation. Mine (I'm 49) had different but similar myths -- the rock star, the uber-athlete, the astronaut. This is part of our collective human culture, and to some extent it's sort of a larger extension of what the article is about. It's very difficult to be honest with young people about their odds of making a large-scale difference in a world of six billion people. Even just the opportunity to 'do what you love' is simply not in the cards for the majority. I'm not sure what we can do about that if anything, but it's a fact and it often takes 30+ years before it starts to sink in. Maybe that's evolution's way of keeping us from feeling hopeless before we've had children.

Once you have kids, all that ambition can be transferred to them. That might explain why some parents seem to be completely insane when it comes to their kids.
Are you sure an advanced CS degree will matter as much as they do today in 5 or 10 years time? Then again it's only a 2 year commitment so it's a pretty different level of investment than a PhD.
Did you ever consider that you probably don't want to work somewhere that considers lack of failure (and the opportunity to learn from them) to be a good thing? Of course, if you're just trying to get something to pay the bills for now, I sympathize. Maybe it's an even newer lesson to take from this that applies to interviewing at big organizations.
I always find myself feeling annoyed with whoever uses ##-## as a date format, no matter if it's normal or American style. Of course, I get (slightly) annoyed by forms that ask you to enter dates in dd-mm-yyyy format.

Using formats like dd-mm and mm-dd is something no one who cares even the slightest about his/her international public should do. Even if it's unambiguous (day 13 or up), it still requires someone to compare the numbers and reparse the date.

The ISO datestyle is good for technical people who really should know about these things. It's also very nice because it sorts lexically, which is very nice in computer programs.

For contracts and other places where somebody not accustomed to the ISO date format, writing the month in full or shortening it in letters (like you do), is probably much nicer. Of course, that leaves the added problem of translation, but it's a little better for an international public even if just in English, since there are English-speaking countries that use one and that use the other. Not to mention the whole "English is not my native tongue but I speak it quite well"-crowd.
Oh, you mean they aren't individually designed (without commenting on whether the process that generates them is designed or not); and the variations in each one (that snowflakes are the canonical example of) are just random fluctuations. The beauty comes from the process, not the randomness. I see what you mean.

I think taking a personal God point of view, one would say that those random fluctuations are not random, but designed; just as each individual person is a real textured thing. Every individual is more than a mere variation on a platonic theme. My own tendency is think that when we don't understand something, it's easiest to model it as random; but whether it really is random is something we don't know. So I'm with Einstein in the "god does not play dice with the universe" on this one.

BTW: on a separate note, I'm concerned about you. Having a project canceled is very distressing. The last time I heard someone talking like this (an editor at my publisher, who just had an important proposal knocked back), they committed suicide a couple of weeks later. I sensed something was a little odd, but I didn't do anything. Please, if you are feeling low, ring one of those suicide helplines. I'll be very relieved if you do (or if I'm ridiculously off-base, even more so).
"What chance has she .. in understanding and possibly rejecting religious dogma when she can't do the same with obvious nonsense like tooth fairies"
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Are you reviewing this as a startup idea? Your response seems a bit harsh for an open source educational charity.

One benefit of open source is that Qimo could disappear tomorrow and others could carry the torch and build on anything of value they produced.

I use OS X myself and am aware that they have a simplified Finder for kids and old folks, but I see value in having something to put on old junker machines for kids, particularly younger ones that are more likely to spill paint on them or whatever.

You're right that the web is important for accessing the widest range of material. The only real knock that Linux has from the point of view of web kiosk for kids is the lack of shockwave plugin that some older content on e.g. the BBC kids sites uses.

Also, did anyone else think that Qimo sounds too close to Chemo (as in therapy)?
I don't think programming is "fun" per se. It's merely the means to an end for me. It's certainly satisfying and rewarding in numerous ways to create new things, but I just spent 8 hours debugging and refactoring Javascript and let me tell you "fun" is not the first word that springs to mind to describe the experience.

Why does everything have to be "fun"? An activity can be good without being fun. Many of the best things we can do as humans are not fun at all and yet undeniably a good use of our time. I learnt the piano for 20 years and not a single one of the scales I played was "fun". I know an athelete who gets up every morning at 6am to run for an hour, rain or shine. She doesn't do it because it's fun, she does it because she wants something, and that's the way to get it.

The end result is when we receive our deferred payment for our labours, be it being able to play any song we can imagine, run a triathlon, or admire our sparkling new web app. Whether the process was "fun" or not doesn't really enter into it. In fact, wilfully choosing to do things that aren't fun in pursuit of an abstract or distant goal is a hallmark of adulthood, IMO.

I'm not saying I don't try to make the process as enjoyable as possible, of course. Just that I don't think programming is innately fun, nor do I care that it is not - one does what needs to be done.
Laying off people in a large organization is often very expensive, especially if you only think you need to cover a temporary drop in demand.

- Redundancy process fees including consultants.

- Salaries for the length of the consultation period.

- Stress and de-motivation in the retained workforce.

- Severance or early retirement pay.

- Recruitment fees and signing bonuses once/if the staff are needed again.

- Loss of efficiency and experience of new hires compared to old staff.

I can easily see that coming to a lot more than $80k per post.
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Truly inspirational. No complaints (I guess) if you're working in the trenches, it always helps if you're onto something great.
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Sounds like I have been a COBOL programmer for a while, without even knowing.
When I was interviewed for the last job I held, I was asked if I will leave the company and be self employee again. Thing is if I take up a job, I find it hard to sustain interest for more than 2 years.
The same goes for me while I am at work. Debugging sucks the life out of you. I try to compensate by doing my personal side-projects/start-up a few hours a night.
Time is probably your most important resource here. Shaving a few nanoseconds off a query because you compiled your kernel with one different option won't do you much good, whereas an easy to administer OS with readily available binaries will save you a lot of time and headache.

I'd say 64-bit Debian. I have already mentioned my qualms with Ubuntu elsewhere on HN (I don't like upgrading every 6 months, and I don't want to be stuck with old software in case I decide to skip an upgrade).
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No. This is a neat hack but is so narrowly applicable it's not worth bothering about for most folks.

You ask designers for input but I think it's an engineering choice to use simple and straightforward technologies you (and colleagues) fully understand rather than meddling with neat hacks, particularly if you're deploying out to the user browsers, which is a quagmire even if you're not getting too fancy.

Of course if you're in an environment where images are impossible/banned for whatever reason (and you can't use proper CSS gradients) then this technique could make you look like a magician, but I can't think of such a situation off-hand.
Good programmers can get far removed from the tools advocated on hacker news when they work for large companies. They tend to use a lot of internal tools. That doesn't mean they can't pick up external tools later.
Oh please, talk about mixing apples and moons.

(I assume you thought I follow some other stupid ideology when you wrote that post.)

There might be some things I hold for true on an emotional level, like that the sun will rise tomorrow, even if behind clouds. (see Hume and induction proofs, for instance).

The difference is that there are very few, if any, things I really connect to my own self image in a hard way.

This means that I can list facts and possible events that will change my opinion. That is, my opinions are testable.
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This is my side-project >_< and what better way to spend the Easter weekend than converting it to jQuery?

But yes - there are moments of satisfaction! A good problem, within or near to your domain knowledge, where you can fly through it at a rate of knots, get in the groove and get it done - that can be wonderful. But I don't think it's programming per se that's delivering the satisfaction, it's the pleasure of applying your well-honed skills in an efficient and productive fashion.

The two are separate, in my opinion. Playing Half-life is "fun". Creating things is good and satisfying but the actual process is often anything but fun. We still do it, of course.

Then again, perhaps there's a type of person who really does think typing obscure commands into computers to try to make them do what you want is "fun" in and of itself, but that person is not me. I tell the computer to do things because I want them done, not because I find it fascinating to talk to the computer.

Guess I'm outing myself as a bad programmer here, but hey, I would have told you that anyway.
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"...we would never hire people with a failed startup on their resume"

"In my experience within the UK graduate market..."

So was this job in the UK? If so, was the recruiter American?
Not to be a grammar nazi, but I think you mean 'flesh'. "Flushing" something out sounds toilet-related. Gross.
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You've never had the pleasure of doing an undergraduate physics lab project then... We were generally pretty limited in the devices we could use.
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Among other things I think it's the huge rush I get when I figure out something hard. Can't be beat :)

Then there's the satisfaction of imagining a system and slowly putting it together. The exhilaration of a new program. Problem solving at different scales. The anticipation of a finished application. All good.

Not to say it's all fun all the time, but I don't need to be paid to want to do it :p
In fact, wilfully choosing to do things that aren't fun in pursuit of an abstract or distant goal is a hallmark of adulthood, IMO.

This is agreeable, but then one could say FUN is what makes your childhood so great.

For me personally, I am obsessed with being responsible and becoming a Man, so that I can be a kid forever.

Then you get into that whole zen mode thing. Pain is necessary for pleasure, hard work is really the root of fun, etc.
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I bet the pleasure in finding a new way of looking at a problem or a solution, applying an old solution in a novel way to a new problem, or learning to understand new concepts - recursion, tail-call-optimization, metaprogramming, (or whatever cool thing your next language does) - is neurologically similar to what happens when we "get" a joke. New paths are traversed in your brain and you giggle like you did when you first figured out how to put two lego bricks together. For me, anyway, programming is just a grown-up version of playing with lego.

It's true though that in a corporate context, you are dealing with other people's bugs, policies, procedures, documentation, specifications. Most of that isn't programming, even though non-programmers can't always tell the difference.

Even after an attack of debugging, when I've figured out what the problem was, and reconstructed the thought process that led to the code that led to the bug, there's a spark of delight when my brain creates this structure. The debugging may be joyless, but not the fixing.
I totally agree with your final point. If there's an audience things change completely. :-D
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"Do they experiment and analyze and try out alternative procedures in some sort of planned sequence? The author of one important study finds that few of them seem to reason at all, and that reflective thought is not evoked. 'Instead, many of them appear to perform almost random calculations upon the numbers given. Where they do solve a problem correctly the response seems to be determined largely by habit.'"

Having known many mathematicians, I can confirm that they too solve problems this way ;)
That was your situation in one job interview. To repost: "Sampling size error"

It is dangerous to assume that "One size fits all" in this situation, for both you and OP. A better answer might be to read the interviewer/company and make the best decision at the time given all the info (on whether to "fudge" or not about whether you'd do it again). It also, I suppose, depends on your financial situation.
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WSJ, CNBC, Entreprenuer, ComputerWorld, CNN, Inc, ... How could they get so many coverages?

I've written a similar algorithm and sold it to a few companies, which you could find at http://purifyr.com/. I've also emailed all relevant bloggers for review. But I just couldn't imagine getting so many positive coverages.

How did they make it?

Ideas?
* It really depends on what the employer wants out of filling the position, I think.*

Exactly. It appears that, out of 3 interviews, those three companies were looking for that type of person. It could be that those were exactly the types of companies you were looking for as well. That doesn't mean that if you interviewed for 500 jobs at a wide spectrum of companies (with sizing from 10-250,000 people) that you would fare as well.
Also there are smart people who haven't achieved much in their life. Sometimes I think I'm one of them.

Ultimately one's achievements mean more than their mental capacity.
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In my personal experience, if you want press to write about you/your startup, you'll have to give them interesting stories that their readers like to read.

They don't have too much attention span. They don't care about how hard/easy it is do, or even if it is true or not. They just care about interesting stories...

For one of my stories I told them that we did some survey and just made up the findings. They loved it and published it next day without looking at my data or even asking me methodology of survey/research
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Thanks for sharing, R is really a great tool. Using it as well for my PhD thesis because I needed survival/ hazard rate models, which I couldn't find in Eviews, SPSS et al.

And btw: If you need good alternative to R's native plotting, try http://had.co.nz/ggplot/ - it's awesome.
That's at present. But while there'll only ever be one iPhone, probably stuck on one network, Android has the potential to be available on devices of all shapes, sizes and price points.

And while at present, Android is exclusive to (the pretty poor in the UK) T-Mobile, any network can commission some Far East handset maker (HTC, Huawei etc) to make them an Android device.

Potentially, we have the situation we've had in desktop computing for years; anyone can put together a PC and stick Windows or Linux on it, only Apple can make a Mac. It'll be interesting to see which strategy wins out in mobile.

(I had a Symbian device for years. Never again. I'm waiting for Android-powered phones to become widespread then switching.)
Stress makes programmers dumber?
keep in mind that a lot of lawyers work 60-80 hour weeks.
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That is an example of "actively changing students", rather then "passing information". It is of course much more effective, but it is also more expensive. It requires better teachers and intimate knowledge of the students in regard to what you are about to teach.

Unfortunately education (public or private) is still a Second Wave enterprise, made for scale and not performance. After all, you're not talking about teaching a class of kids, but all the kids in a country. And that is still not feasible with anything else then "passing information".
exactly, I believe this is still done. I'm just jumping into the middle of these threads and perhaps this has already been said but I believe that the H1-B program is all about importing cheap labor, period. In other words, reducing costs. In many areas programmers are in high demand, so much so that it is worth it for many programmers to constantly learn new skills to stay in the game. The H1-B is all about getting a steady supply of 3-5 year programmers at 50-75K rather than paying citizens 75-100K.

I'm not sure how the hefty requirements of the investor visa fits the Y Combinator model. It could create exploitation issues if not handled properly. One could imagine the investors putting the money up but that changes the dynamic of ownership. I believe the investor visa can be satisfied with job creation or money but then there's the issue of minimum wage laws, founders typically work at a loss since they own the company.

I've always felt our immigration law is absurd with respect to graduate students. I think a green card ought to be attached to an advanced degree so that these folks will stay here, enter the work force unencumbered in order to compete fully and start paying taxes immediately, raising families, etc.. Instead we try to keep them out whilst encouraging small businesses to hire illegal immigrants with poor skills thereby creating resentment over access to public services.

Sorry to rant, it's a touchy subject.
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Sing the first few words of your opening sentence. It really grabs attention, and usually shuts everyone up in confusion. While it is not overtly offensive, you will piss-off the usual alphas by grabbing focus from them, so expect some backlash.
I would say that is very unethical. A lot of people rely on media to stay informed about the latest and they assume what they are reading is true. How can you cheat people in order to get publicity. And remember, a lot of times this strategy can backfire.
great idea! reminds me a bit about the olpc-approach to design ui's especially for children and exploring new concepts.

i couldn't find out too much about qimo on the homepage though... i think it would be a good idea to write how qimo differentiates from other distros. and link in the screenshots! :D

Keep up the good work -- We need more projects dedicated to children!
For the 31 emails I sent out to the bloggers, 4 replies and only 2 really spent time looking into it. Only 1 blogged about it.

So how did you get hold of them in the first place?
Why won't they simply ignore you?
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$80,000 X 3 = $240k/year

At an industry standard 80 hours/week, that works out to $60/hr. I don't know any good developers that would take a contract for only $60/hr. Do you?
I'm not a expert, but, I'll would suggest a few things:

printgreener.com has a lot of information describing what they do and why. They play on green card a lot which is bound to generate interest from mainstream media where as you hardly tell the user why they would want to do this.

Also a free account allows you to view one page/30 seconds and the only version that fixes this costs $299/month where as printgreener.com costs $29 which is a one off - I don't understand the massive difference in price. Who is the target market that would actually pay $299/month for this. You need to explain this better or drop the price. To me this is the type of thing that could tend towards $0 with open source and/or a firefox plugin.

Some of their coverage goes back to 2006, so they have a first mover advantage over you.