skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Usually companies try to evaluate a candidate independently; unless your side project is exactly what the company wants, I'd be surprised if your open source projects are the deciding factor in your getting the job.

But your o-s contribs can get you an _interview_ and indirectly help you in the interview.

Hopefully all practice you've been getting through your side projects would have made you a better developer and that will be apparent in the interviews.

From this point of view, I would say major work building one's own app makes one a better developer than minor work on a major project.

Your skills development is what matters in the end, not the "name recognition" of having contributed to such-and-such project.
He basically says that the UTM cannot run a TM in real time, so that makes it non-universal. It's pretty inane.
Well played, Sir. Well played ;)
Porn is not the kiss of death or the end of a career or something that businesses don't want to see. Okay, sure there are some that will not want to hire me in the future but if they're that prudish (or based in Utah) or care that much about what my previous companies did then I doubt it would be a great match in the first place.

I head up the development group for one of the larger set of adult sites on the web and my LinkedIn profile shows explicitly who my employer is. Before I forgot to turn off "Looking for new opportunities" I was contacted by a couple of top 20 traffic sites and one very large consumer device company about management opportunities there. They cited specific details in my current position as to why they were contacting me.

As some others have said in their posts before we deal with extremely high traffic, low latency sites, we tend to have a lot of integration behind the scenes, we work with extensive traffic affiliation programs and we know exactly how much our downtime costs. We also probably pay more attention to web analytics than most shops do as well.

It tends to be a bit more chaotic that most of my other jobs but I figure it's preparing me quite well for the future and my next employer will reap the benefits of this experience.
The paper was co-authored by David DeWitt, not Microsoft. DeWitt is a well-known database researcher from Wisconsin. And Microsoft, despite their awful history of business practices, pours tons of funding into really good quality research (via MSR).

I'm not saying people aren't biased by their associations -- certainly, the traditional DBMS community feels like they have to defend their research & products against new techniques like MapReduce.. but if you're going to criticize the paper, criticize it because you found flaws in its contents, not because of the organization listed beneath an author.
Integration with other services is what will push the iPhone beyond the paradigm of a cellular phone. Full wireless interaction with any type of device is not that far off, especially with the 3.0 software.

Most of us already have very capable computers in our pockets. The problem is that we're using them wrong.
No harm no foul sir, I don't live/die by karma, I just like the community ;)
I reckon I am about 1 month away from a 'Sandy' type replacement - hopefully by publicly saying this (even if only a few see it), I will actually pull my finger out and get it finished, instead of wasting time on HN!

Hadn't thought of Twitter integration all the same, and I never actually used Sandy (started working on this before I even heard of Sandy, very much a part time project) so I may be in danger of disappointing fans of Sandy!
You're right that new bus routes have a very low marginal cost, and that buses move more people per transportation dollar than other forms of public transportation, but without expensive dedicated lanes they are certain to be slower than cars, and therefore most otherwise merry takers of public transportation avoid using them.

Another unfortunate problem with buses is that changing the bus route is pretty much trivially easy, with the consequence that they do change an awful lot (at least here in Boston), which means that buses generally provide really unreliable transportation.

Montreal has a great bus system, iirc. Dedicated roads, dedicated, clean, underground tunnels. Probably super expensive. Alas.
I just went through this process myself. It can be tempting to structure some kind of part-time agreement, to continue to consult with your old company, but I didn't do it.

It took me 5 months to extract myself from my old company, I planned it out with the CEO and set a date. After that date, all I've done is answer the occasional question. Now I have complete focus on my startup, and it's been wonderful beyond even what I expected. It's unleashed a whole lot of creativity that was squashed at the old company because my ideas didn't really fit in with the company's direction. I'm totally loving it.
Is it bad that I was thinking that Obama had gotten into Ruby? I really need to get out more...
Wegner is not the best example for 'not a crackpot' though.
What does this have to do with software development or startups?
You're comparing buses to current trains, which is a bit of a straw man, as we're talking about high-speed trains.

Additionally, trains are nowhere near as cramped as buses, at least the ones I've ridden. They're considerably roomier in terms of the seats and the areas to walk around in, and often have food and beverage areas as well.
Yeah -- single tasking is probably much, much better than trying to split between two companies at once.

I'd pursue getting the CEO as an angel investor. It provides you with money to build the business but attaches you to only one person instead of an entire company. If you are successful, you can always propose a larger investment or relationship with the existing company as a whole -- and by that point you know the CEO already has a hand in both pots, thus an incentive to facilitate that relationship for you.
How innovative is Facebook?
Just a thought here, but didn't Facebook jump on the 'status updates' well after the success of twitter? Additionally, didn't Facebook Connect evolve from Disqus.

This begs the question, what has Facebook created since the abstraction of the 'Wall'?
Your right, I probably shouldn't be so quick to call someone a crackpot.

But still, unless I'm very much mistaken all he's doing is done is to expand the definition of "able to compute a function" to include "able to run fast enough to gather the input data for a function". That might be a useful definition for some things but to use that to claim that "Turing was wrong"?
A thought: If they want you bad enough and you are in the U.S. or similar, make continued healthcare coverage and maybe some other benefits part of the negotiations, even if you go contract. (+)

Sabbatical? Some companies will offer/support that kind of a time off model.

Guard your IP.

+ I'm not certain this is possible, but I've heard sometimes vague descriptions of such arrangements. It seems to me that staying within a larger pool would be preferable to purchasing independently.
This, coming from a blog titled Six Month MBA...
Speed? As in high-speed rail? Also, with a train I'm pretty much guaranteed a seat.
That is some seriously encouraging commentary. Thanks.
May I know what do you have to do to get working visa in the states? I am having the same problem right now. I am currently now in US on student visa.
A single-statement SQL PageRank implementation sounds feasible to me. Most commercial SQL implementations have had hierarchal, ranking, and windowing functions for a while now. They all have XML (maybe HTML?) document parsers in them as well. I think moderately complex hierarchical rankings can be built from those primitives, even as a single SQL statement.

The performance of that code and if/how they are parallelized by the system is really a quality-of-implementation issue. If Oracle, Microsoft, or IBM thinks they can make money by implementing automatically parallelized hierarchical ranking and windowing functions, they will do so; maybe some of them have already done so.

I share Oracle's philosophy about how abstract SQL should be. Oracle says you should be able to write the same SQL against a small single-instance database that you would write against a giant multi-instance database; the database is responsible for optimizing the performance, not the developer. There are a lot of cases where the theory doesn't match practice with Oracle, but every new release gets the two closer. I wouldn't be surprised to see Oracle surpass general-purpose MapReduce-based approaches in terms of performance soon. And, I am expecting Oracle to release a tool to efficiently run MapReduce-style programs against Oracle (converting them to SQL) any time now.
most freelancers include healthcare/insurance/taxes/etc. into their hourly rates by default. not all, but i think its reasonably standard. in the US, that is.
Ning: 1 Million Social Networks Strong
You are not required to add every past experience in your portfolio as far as I know.
Unconscious precedes conscious: How brains decide before their owners
I don't know what concept of time you're using, but if you're traveling from one city to another, I'm 99% sure a train will be faster simply because it doesn't have to deal with traffic. The time it takes isn't as important either. One train can hold many more people than a bus and that's much more important.

Buses cost less at first, but then you need many more of them to accomodate more passengers. Their speed is also limited and varies quite a lot.

Haven't you ever played that game Transport Tycoon Deluxe? You buy one train and it makes waaaaaay more money than 4-10 passenger buses!
The link between autism and extraordinary ability
Interesting, I didn't know that. But I don't think that should stop someone from posting aHhulu video--since it is very rare for a Hulu video to be relevant to HN. In those rare instances I bet it's not hard to find a working link.
If you're going to talk about buses you have to distinguish between intercity travel and innercity travel.
The Importance of Your Local Reputation
Make a high-speed train startup?
Yeah and because they are a "virtual" office, where do they put the ping pong table?

What are they going to do to pass the time!?

Oh wait...
Compared to Canada, the US is more densely populated and high-speed trains could connect many more cities than in Canada.

The airlines are also subsidized and use a lot of fuel and the upkeep costs are high. I think every year there's one airline somewhere in the world that's declaring bankruptcy.
The irony of this being a PowerPoint file is overwhelming.
You'd get less drive-by downvoting if you didn't say stupid things. Who knows, you might get less if you didn't keep complaining about it.

(Trains can be much faster than buses, carry much bigger loads, and use less fuel to do so. They are not useless. If the trains you've got in the US at the moment seem useless, that would be because they've been very poorly invested in over the last several decades. Oh, and that $12.8 trillion, while it's certainly a terrifyingly large figure, is not directly comparable with what's being spent in Iraq, e.g. because much of it is not spending but guarantees of the form "if institution X collapses, you'll get back at least the first $Y it owes you", and much of the rest is loans. Even in the present economic climate, what you lend you're quite likely to get back, not to mention that you get paid interest on it while it's lent.)
"take less time to arrive at their destination."

Paris to Marseille by road: at least 7 hours

Paris to Marseille by TGV: about 3 hours, can arrive in center of city

Paris to Marseille by plane: 1:15 to 1:30 hours + 1 to 2 hours spent at airports and travel time to and from each airport

High speed rail is more comparable to flying but without the hassle, and it's definitely far faster than a bus.
My personal experience is that trains are much quicker, less cramped, much more comfortable, more reliable, and easier to catch. The main downside is they are more expensive and can't offer local services (although trams and the tube are preferable to buses if the option is there).

Since I don't drive I've been on plenty of coach/bus and train journeys, both long and short, and I can assure you given the choice I'd always choose train. This is particularly true for long-distance journeys: I wouldn't want to take the journey from London-Paris by coach again, but I've only had positive experiences taking the Eurostar and the TGV.
Ok, you're correct on that point. Now here's what I want you to do...

Go on to Amtrak.com and configure a trip for yourself. You'll notice that riding on Amtrak costs MORE than a plane ticket. For a round-trip from Philadelphia to Austin, TX it's $500. I can go on Southwest.com right now and book the exact same trip for the exact same price. The difference? With Amtrak you're riding in a train for 56 hours.

Now tell me exactly how a high-speed train (one with advanced infrastructure) is going to be cheaper than Amtrak?

Trains are a lose-lose compromise between buses and planes. They cost way more than buses and for the price range you might as well use air travel which saves 2 days of seat time.
I used to travel by bus instead of train all the time when I was in Thailand because the bus was always faster and cheaper than the trains. The only way trains are better is if they are much faster than buses.
I think your definition of lying is a little more broad than mine. I would consider lying a deliberate effort to mislead someone from the truth or your actual opinion.

For example, if said person had a very beautiful daughter, and asked me for my opinion on it, I would have no problem telling him that she was indeed, beautiful.

Why would he need more information? If he's pressing for more details on a persons lust for his daughter, he has more problems than me answering him honestly (though with tact).

Likewise, if he mentioned how beautiful his daughter was and I went into vulgar or even vague detail about what I thought of her and her attributes, then I stepped out of line.

If the topic is never brought up, and I don't say anything, I am not in fact lying, there is nothing to be misleading to him.

On another note, if he asked where I saw myself in 5 years, I would answer honestly and suffer the consequences, if I did hope to start my business, I would mention that as an ultimate goal. Generally that will hurt your career opportunities with the current employer, but honestly, contract work might be the better option for you anyway if you're only after starting your own business.

I have through freelance work built up quite a relationship with a client who I wouldn't mind working full time for. And I would/do consider going contract full time occasionally, but I really have no plans to (I'm just not closed off to future opportunities, and I grew up in entrepreneurial house, so it's always going to be a desire to do my own thing). Should I tell my employer that if a great opportunity arises I would take it? Not at all, they know they have the power to negotiate situations like that, and they arn't unfamiliar with them either.

I do see your point though, if you're misleading someone who asked a direct question through inaction, it could be considered lying, though I try my hardest to avoid this.
I have a friend who two years ago got a summer internship at Microsoft because his work in Open Source had made a reputation that preceded him. Mind, MS is hardly the most OSS-friendly company out there, but they at least recognize that work on it is well worth paying attention to.
IQ is very important, or at least intelligence is and IQ is the best way we have of trying to measure it. The Bell Curve is a pretty interesting book and it talks about all the things that IQ is correlated with.
Actually, railways in USA already has much higher portion in freight transport than in EU (40% to 10%). It is not that big surprise, as big parts of the rail system are almost freight-only.

High speed rail might work to connect nearby metro areas, but almost certainly, trains across half or whole US will not work. It's simply too far away, and it wouldn't be any competition to airplanes. Even EU high speed rail are mostly, in their current state, few scattered islands connecting large cities within a single country.
Chances are you will fail. Even if you do the right things.

Don't mean to be harsh but that's the statistical reality.

Cheers
Read the stories
http://www.electronista.com/articles/09/03/03/gigabyte.debut...

I'm waiting for something like this to mature.
If you fail even by doing the right things, you are tragic, and I wouldn't call that a failure because I believe in rebirth.

Off-topic: what's your measure of success?
Which is what we're talking about here. High speed trains. It's like half the people commenting here haven't read the article or something.
That is something that I would probably buy. I've been thinking about living on a boat for about a year now and I haven't really done any research. I'm sure there would be tons of information you could provide that would help.
Health care robots: "We obviously need to think about our human-robot interactions."
Ready to Pay? Internet Providers want to meter Usage
If Internet service providers' current experiments succeed, subscribers may end up paying for high-speed Internet based on how much material they download. Trials with such metered access, rather than the traditional monthly flat fee for unlimited connection time, offer enough bandwidth that they won't affect many consumers — yet.

But as more people use the Internet to watch TV and stream movies, they could bump up against the metered rates' caps, paying expensive over-use fees. Watching a movie may then require paying two fees: one for the movie, another to the cable company.

More and more television programming and movies are available online, through sites including Hulu, Netflix Watch Instantly, YouTube and Amazon.com's Video on Demand.

"This time there is a real, viable alternative" to cable, said Bobby Tulsiani, a senior analyst at Forrester Research.

Most consumers probably don't realize how much bandwidth their Internet usage consumes, because they've never had to care. Time Warner, the nation's third-largest Internet service provider, in its five experimental markets if offering five gigabytes of downloaded Internet content for $29.95 per month. That translates to 15 hours of viewing standard-definition video, or 350,000 e-mails, or 170 hours of online gaming, or some combination of those activities, according to the company. A high-definition movie consumes about 7 GB of bandwidth.
socially repugnant has nothing to do with science. the data says parent IQ is highly correlated with offspring IQ.
The point he's making is salient enough if you've worked with sensor networks, specifically if you're trying to track physical objects and predict what it will do next. You run up against a sort of computational corollary to Nyquist-Shannon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_samplin...).

In real life, we just sample data as fast as the computation will allow and accept that a large fraction of the world's information will not be part of our computation and that the computation is imperfect. For example: I'm sensing some time-varying function, perhaps an unpredictable aircraft, and it takes 10 sensor sampling cycles to compute my approximation of speed/velocity/turn rate/etc; I'm not going to compute every sample and watch my picture of the world lag behind by 10n (for n samples) -- I'm only going to run the computation on every 10th sample. It doesn't make Turing wrong, it just makes [sequential] sampling and computation of multiple unpredictable inputs slower than the rate at which the unpredictable inputs appear.
Finally. I was wary of moving back to apache to use Passenger because I had nginx configured to work perfectly with my app. Now its just a matter replacing mongrel.
Should Twitter remove its follower count?
"This is a fairly established startup with a few million unique users"

I cannot understand what is holding you back.
Quit your job. No strings attached. Just go for it.

If you have a startup with a few million users and you don't quit your job, who will? This is a no-brainer. Take your chances. Take the plunge. It will turn out good.
Trains can have stops at smaller cities along the way making them more accessible to people who don't live in major cities. Case in point. My mother-in-law lives in Klamath Falls, OR. The planes costs more than the train if you do the regular train fare or about the same if you get the small sleeper. There are no direct flights from SF to KFalls, so that means I usually have to fly to Seattle or Portland and then transfer to a smaller commuter which can make trip time almost as long. With the train, I get on at 9pm, go to sleep and wake up in Klamath Falls the next morning.
Aye, I thought the Engine Yard was up for a TARP injection.
Like everything, its all about tradeoffs: upfront costs, ongoing costs vs profit, time, environmental impact, convenience and capacity. All the transportation systems we should invest in (and all of them are somewhat subsidized by the government) should be the ideal balance of these tradeoffs for that particular distance range.

I believe there is a sweet spot in travel distance where high speed trains are the optimal solution over cars in the smaller distance range and planes in the longer distance range. Few would think to travel from LA to NY on a train but when you are talking about LA to SF, it makes a lot of sense. Time and destination wise it's more convenient, the environmental impact is less, frees up plane capacity at LAX and SFO for long distance flights, ongoing costs are similar, and the only question remaining is do these benefits outweigh the very large upfront cost? Would love to see how much these costs compare (a new high speed train route vs a hypothetical new airport + enough planes to service the route)
Review: Phusion Passenger 2.2.0 support for Nginx
Are you implying that by giving up 20 hrs to your current employer, you'll only have 20 left for your startup? If you really think that your startup is going to be successful with you only committing to it 40 hours/wk (in the absence of contracting back to your current employer), you should reconsider your startup.
I think he was being sarcastic/rhetorical.
Interactive map of vanishing employment across the country
It happens. I always use http://searchyc.com/ before submitting. I'll delete my comment(s) in a few hours (if I can.)
"How do you raise your IQ? For some, standing on a soap box is the only way."
That is... utterly ridiculous. Not the article itself, but what it covers.
Is the correlation more father --> son than father -->daughter? Is there a mean effect between parents? Which sex is the most dominant in passing along this trait? Are there any instances of the child having a greater than the average or either parent? That would be very interesting data.
It's missing a couple of big ones.

1. Atomico: Skype founders VC
2. ASI (Ambient Sound Investments): The early engineers of Skype (btw: check out their portfolio, interesting companies)
Did you read that article at all?

First, there is no point looking at current prices, because it is a service running on relatively unsubsidised ifrastructure. The point here is to subsidise infrastructure.

Secondly and even more importantly, yeah dude, if I want to go Paris to Shanghai I am better off flying than taking a train. Does that mean there is no point in building a high speed rail network in France? It's not Philadelphia to Austin that is the aim here, it is journeys at the 300 mile sweetspot where a high speed train is a more optimal solution than either car or plane.

I am really sorry but I am starting to think that anybody who doesn't see the benefits of a high-speed rail network has simply not been on one. And that's even before you throw in the environmental cost.
Yes, exactly! Except with telephony and 3G support. :)
Taste the Rainbow
Not sure, but this meme has certainly entered senescence.