skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Trading desk, as a research quant. The office was open-plan, there were constantly people passing behind me, and expletive-laden interruptions related to market conditions were frequent.

For the first 6 months, it was very exciting, but eventually the sensory overload and taxing environment got to me, and I started having health problems. In retrospect, I think the open-plan office was much more of a contributor than the noise, which could be tuned out pretty easily. Open plan => needing to pay constant attention to how one is perceived => anxiety => diminished productivity => more anxiety => immune system fails => very sick.

I think 107 F is worse, though. I stop being productive around 90, and I'm pretty sure I'd die after 8 hours in that heat.
Pales in comparison to your story but I worked in a basement office, with awful fluorescents, no natural light, with 95.5FM a top 50 hits station blaring through the overhead system, in a open space for a man who was a pretty dead on 50/50 mix of Michael Scott from The Office and Buster from Arrested Development whose puppy would love to run around and shit in the back corner of the office near the server room. Other than that, it was a pretty sweet first job :)
Opensource/ free virtualization software?
I would like to know any free/opensource virtualization software that can enable me to run ubuntu on my windows box.
Wrote custom test-set software in a clean-room. Bunny suit, mask and rubber gloves for 8 hours a day. It was a windows box connected to a x-ray diffraction machine so I had to be in the room.
I set that as the default color because of Fight Club quote "Can I get this in Cornflower Blue?" It's mentioned multiple times in Palahniuk's novels.

> http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0137523/quotes
Narrator: [voiceover] It must've been Tuesday. He was wearing his cornflower-blue tie.

If anyone's interested, here is my JS library with the code + color names that is used in this app: http://chir.ag/projects/ntc/
Used Iphones?
Hi all, i am really interested in developing applications for the iPhone, but the snag i have here is that i am a developer living in west africa, where there are no Iphones sold at last legally by Apple or Telco's. I would like to know where an unlocked iPhone can be bought, or if anyone here has a used/ new iphone for sale. I would really appreciate your help.
Thanks.
I agree. There's something very Aleksey Vayner about that blog post.
I worked at home in my living room for the last year. Rented an office again this year. In retrospect working in your living room was very unhealthy for me.
Microsoft VirtualPC is not opensource, but is free. However, it only supports 16-bit color, and has problems with Ubuntu out of the box (you'll have to search the web for non-standard installation instructions). I've used it successfully with Debian and PCBSD.

VirtualBox from Sun is opensource and free. I have not tried it but friends who have like it.
While dealing with a crying baby.
A hot, noisy hotel room, dial-up internet, 4:00am writing in _VB6_ to connect to some weird COM+ service that used VB calling conventions, then a C++ COM wrapper for that, then a C wrapper to connect to a Java JNI service. At 8:00pm I didn't know VB, either. And it had to work by 9:00am when some system it interfaced to started up. Oh - and I couldn't actually test it against anything but stubs.
When I read that sort of news stating Skype shares 8% of global calling, I laugh out loud at it. The truth is that 99% of Skype users are freebie users who don't pay a cent, one of the reason for this is that Skype premium services are drastically overpriced. Those, who really use VoIP for making phone calls daily, do prefer Betamax clones, as they are not only lots cheaper but also give much better voice quality! I believe Betamax makes more in revenue than Skype can ever dream off, while Betamax is still keeping itself in shadow. The thing is that one should not be a publicly known and estabished brand to make big buck. Believe it or not, Betamax and other SIP providers are killing Skype's business!

A good thing about SIP as open standard is competitiveness and ease of enterance into the business. There is huge number of small SIP providers all around the globe which in sum share a very significant amout of paid international calling traffic, whereas most Skype traffic is still and will be unpaid.

Another problem with Skype as a company is their huge expenses on running the business. Their team is overbloated with marketing and PR staff yet they did not show any progress in marketing for years! They run several headquarters in Europe where they are doomed to payout very high salaries with all the social stuff, etc. IMHO, Skype as a business cannot survive without eBay or any other corporation as big to cover them.
Pretty cool, but I would think setting up the vertical stone is the easy part. How do you get the 3rd stone on top?
Bir saat ki TITANIC gəmisindən tikilib
Interesting. Wonder if it was worth the publicity? Just think how many people have heard about StalkDaily because of this.
I hope nothing like this ever becomes a reality. What I was worried was that if such people, popularize these ideas into the poor majority in India, then winning by numbers is not difficult for them.
When we look at the reservation of seats issue (http://in.rediff.com/money/2006/apr/12spec1.htm), such people when in power were actually able to create policies that would harm over-all development.
I wish the well-educated minority here doesn't sit back at home and we all say it our aloud that we can't tolerate such people, by going to vote!
Thanks, it was a pretty nice and optimistic read :)
The subtle gradients on mediatemple.com are good example of gradients done right.
If you are colorblind, you may be interested in the
http://www.colblindor.com/color-name-hue/ app by Daniel Fluck.

Daniel is colorblind and contacted me to help him build an app that would let colorblind users identify the base hue for any RGB color. While my app gives fancy names like "Amethyst Smoke" and "Cobalt" it isn't helpful to users with colorblindness. Daniel's app says the base hue is "Violet" and "Blue." What I learnt about colorblindness is that it's not always absolute. You can have Tritanomaly (blue-weakness) where everything looks just a bit off, not completely red/green. See here: http://www.colblindor.com/coblis-color-blindness-simulator/
IIT Foundation did respond to Arjun Singh's decision on quota - http://www.iitfoundation.org/?p=83
could we also have such activities for these kind of situations.
When I started programming I used to work taking care of paralysed people. This was a night job, and you had to stay awake for the entire night and listen in case any noise came from the bedroom, in which case I had to go check to see that the person had not moved to a position that could be dangerous for him.

Since there was nothing else to do apart from listen, I wrote code the entire night. The problem was that writing code can get very mentally taxing after a few hours in the night, and combined with the thought that spacing out can result in a persons death, it was a very demanding task, particularly in the period from 4am to 6am.
Ooh, and it insulted you ! And in French, too (I presume). Total burn.
No wonder we're experiencing a brain drain, and the articles about US Immigrations usually feature a smart Indian trying to live his dream.
If your app is not GPS-related, you can try getting an iPod Touch, which is like iPhone minus the phone and GPS hardware.

I had also read that in HongKong you can get an unlocked iPhone, but for $700.

You will need a Mac for the SDK. First, get the Mac, download the free SDK, and get your app working in the Simulator (part of SDK). THEN, get the iPod Touch.

Code first. Buy hardware as late as possible.
"When we look at the reservation of seats issue "

reservation (kinda sorta affirmative action based solely on caste for any non Indian readers )uses an "economic progress" bait to line people up behind it. Whether the purported benefits actually manifest, one can debate about.

Removing English Education and computers has economics working against it. Your kids won't be taught English or computers because we... errr ... want them to remain peasants forever?

Besides , this move if ever attempted (it won't be . No one will be able to get it through parliament) pisses off the teachers, the urban population, students, the business folks, the bureaucrats, illiterate/poor people who want their kids to get the best education ... just about anyone who is not some kind of local language fanatic. There aren't enough of the latter around (except in small pockets) to change the last few decades of history and economics in India (though the few who do exist are very voluble).

At best they are able to shift the primary language of education in middle/high school to the local language alongside English (and there is a good case to be made for that). There's simply no way this can be done at the undergrad level and above. The logistical comlexity of textbooks preparation for a few hundred branches of science, engineering etc (for e.g) would kill any initiative like this.

but it won't get this far. As I said above no one will get it through parliament.

As I said, just posturing :-)

[ Ok I am sick of discussing politics here. Iam not sure this is an appropriate forum for this. I am signing off from this thread. ]
"could we also have such activities for these kind of situations."

the reccomended "activity" for "these kind of situations" involves going to your polling station and voting ;-)
Maybe raising a horizontal stone just the way he did raise the one on the video, by inserting wood underneath, a little at a time. Then, having raised it 3 meters high (Yeah I know this is a lot) he could use his technique to roll it on the side to get on top of the two others. Just a guess.
You Can't Solve Problems With Money
With Finance Disgraced, Which Career Will Be King?
Jet lag to be history
I think this is largely an idiosyncrasy of American prohibitionist / Protestant culture.

When I was in college, we had a college bar on campus (something that I guess is rare for US colleges, given later drinking ages). It can add considerably to camaraderie and community feeling, and for college in particular, it's safer too.

While churches may have been the nominal backbone of the old village life, the public house is where everybody meets.
Fred Wilson's story of his early career
Repost from comment by Tom Hume (mobile developer from UK)

> Whilst I don’t believe that you’re blinded by iPhone-lurve, it’s not the only game in town. There are profitable businesses running across other devices, and have been for years....

I think it's a bit of a USA vs Rest of the World thing. For the US (and specifically Silicon Valley) to suddenly wake up to the potential of mobile and then decide that they are the only game in town and nothing else of value exists is a bit off.
Consumer frugality could become a habit
Invest in necessities: Air, trash and H20
Not so bad compared to the rest of the stories, but I still work as a developer/tech support. I have to drop whatever I'm doing to troubleshoot student tech problems, so the interruptions are frequent.
I agree - deadline stress works best at the end of a project where you already know what to do and how to do it, and you just need a kick up the rear to get things moving rapidly.
That thought scared me - are most people in office jobs stressed out all the time? Does fear really drive our society?
We'll see if the collapse of the financial industry encourages more young Americans into engineering.

That said, I actually went to law school (Columbia) for one semester before dropping out and enrolling in a PhD program in engineering (at Berkeley). The law school is, of course, about 95% American, whereas in the Engineering school, I became very accustomed to being the only person in the room who spoke English as a first language.

I think it's great that Engineering is a profession where you are likely to work alongside people from all over the world. But I think it's bad that it's become(ing?) a profession where you're unusual if you're a native Californian in graduate programs with names like "The University of California".

I'll say this - in spite of all the hand-wringing, I don't see even the slightest commitment from Berkeley to bringing in more Americans. And as long as they can wave the magic wand and get more students from overseas, neither they or the employers who want to keep this pipeline will ever bother finding ways to get more Americans into the field.

As for law: yeah, they may be unhappy, but I earned 75K/year my first year out of Berkeley at Sun Micro. Kids from the law school were starting at $125-150K/yr.

I actually disagree that the Americans you mentioned can't learn math. I didn't take my first calculus class until I was 24 years old, and I got A's all the way through. The incentives just aren't there relative to other fields. And as long as we import hundreds of thousands of H1B workers ever decade, it won't be.

Now, we're getting a good sense of what happens when you destroy a homegrown profession and replace it with foreign nationals.
> Is the Nokia store supposed to challenge Apple? Or Microsoft supposed to? Or RIM?

Yes, Nokia, MS and RIM I can be sure, are trying and will continue to try to challenge the iPhone.
I personally work for a large company that standardized on windows mobile for the sales team.
I am also sure that in time Android will be a strong competitor.

I also know many people who picked a Nokia Eseries because it's cheaper. I know for sure that my next phone won't be an iPhone. So in many way I am almost sure that Nokia is well positioned to compete with the iPhone. And that the iPhone dominance wont last for long
his demonstrations clearly prove he a scientist in the broadest sense

Absolutely. And it's possible that the news just called him a "non-scientist" to play up the "random Michigan guy in his backyard" angle.

Or, he may be a person who takes pride in the non-scientist label. It's a class thing. Not every practitioner of the Useful Arts thinks that it's a particularly great honor to be deemed a scientist. Some of them would rather take the opportunity to point out that construction workers, machinists, and technicians are pretty smart and have been doing this sort of thing, quietly but relentlessly, since the time of Stonehenge.

This guy reminds me of one of my favorite engineers, Tim Hunkin:

http://www.timhunkin.com/90_useful_arts.htm
I am a contract Oracle DBA. One month long project I spent working in a gutted out strip mall that had card tables and Ethernet cable strung about.

There was free coffee though.
Why Does Religion Still Exist?
The Education Visa: It’s Everywhere We Need It To Be
Company-sponsored pubs have an interesting history -- I'd love to see somebody do a blog entry on them.

I worked at a couple startups (after they grew large) where there was a "beer day" on Fridays. Usually they just brought beer trucks in around 3:30 or 4:00.

It was a hoot, at least until somebody wrecked their car on the way home from work. At that point, the company I was with decided to give out no-questions-asked taxi cards, which could be used to get a ride if you needed one.

But I could see the same company just making the decision to cancel it. After all, who wants to be the guy who helped set something up that ended up getting one of your people killed?

There was also problems with idle chat -- it's one thing to go out with your friends to an outside pub after work and trash talk your job and coworkers. It's called blowing off steam. You can't do that with all of those folks sitting right next to you! And of course, with more beer comes more blowing off steam. When size is small, people just get used to one another -- if you say something dumb on Friday afternoon, we're going to see you everyday next week, so we'll have to work things out. But in companies that are just a little bit larger, you don't have that family-type constant-interaction. Telling somebody over in purchasing that they have the heart of Satan might cause permanent damage.

And let's not even start talking about the significant percentage of the population with drinking or drug problems. Having a pub on-site is not exactly helping them out.

So even when it works, it's just not the same. Maybe when the company is small, like 50 or fewer, it has a real capability to bind everybody together. I'm not sure that the idea would scale to places the size of Microsoft, however.

And -- this is the kind of idea that gives corporate lawyers fits.

Having said all of that, I'm in favor of it. I just think it's a lot more complicated than some folks realize at first glance.
I was a grad student who worked in a fab. I found that after a couple of years wearing that bunny suit, mask, and rubber gloves for 6-8 hours per day (or, more likely, per night) I was completely used to it.

I used to catch myself surfing the web in the clean room after hours. "Wait!" I would say to myself, "I could be doing this outside the clean room, where I could take off this silly suit!"

But they are stressful places to work. The noise is quite troublesome and the ergonomics are generally awful.
What they really should have done is check whether the user is an existing logged in Digg user, and only displayed the bar to those users. The bar is utterly irrelevant and intrusive for every other Internet user (this is without going into the ethics of what they're doing--just the interface/design decision they made).
Can we have a tighter criteria for voting up posts that are just lists please.

There's actually a sentence in there where he describes a blog as "very financially, technically."
I shouldn't say we evolved to be perfectly rational of course. it's more that we evolved to approximate rationality in a manner more efficient than actually calculating everything. see "how outfielders catch fly balls" as an example of a rationality shortcut.
It'd be best not to have any single industry be "king". The power careers tend to suck in a lot of people with bad motivations and, when talent is difficult to measure, such as corporate management, starkly insufficient ability.

Also, it's not the case that the most talented undergraduates pursue careers in finance. It's more accurate to note that finance is a backup plan for the most talented people, because it's available and pays well. Only the douches specifically tailor their college experience to getting an investment banking job. So to the extent that there are a lot of talented people in finance, it's because a lot of smart people end up falling back on plan B, usually because of the intractable systemic problems and corruption within academia and the sciences.
It's pretty hard to do something like getting a job setting up new quant models for Soros unless you've specifically tailored your college experience to learning how to do that. The interesting jobs in finance are pretty hard to stumble across as a backup plan.
In christ alone lyrics by Brian Littrell
Nice. As an aside, would it be possible to share your thoughts about the performance of CouchDB when loaded-up with that much data?
Making Yourself Likable
GarmentValet.com - successful execution than radical reinvention
s/fault/problem
No, I would call this a news aggregator. The two-way communication that characterize blogs is a big improvement over traditional media. But blogs still have two classes of participants: a few people with permissions to post and comment, and everybody else who can only comment. This site is more of a small-d-democratic facilitator.
"Of course they'd agree, because of the benefits for the home country (sending money home, etc.)."

Sounds a bit like your first thought was along the line of "visa == immigrant == [name your third world country]". There are (still) many people in old Europe or Japan who think that US is a hotter place than home for a startup... and I'm part of them.

It's slowly changing though, I feel it around me : patents and costs of litigation, Sarbanes Oxley (IPO exit... gone ?), visa problems (the lottery thing with H1-B visa). It did hit quite a lot the American dream.

Specially when it comes to opening a branch in the US for small businesses : insurance costs literally explodes, it's harder to send employees to the newly created branch (H1-B is not the only solution, but it was the one that scaled the best), so it's harder to control it.

I used to work in New York City, with an H1-B. When I decided to create a startup I eventually trashed my H1-B and went back home. I didn't want to, but between keeping a day job and doing a startup part-time in the US, or doing a startup full time home, I choosed the latter.

I still think that US would have been much better, and I liked the life there quite a lot too (much more than horrid Paris), but well, my cofounder was in France and could not come... had there been a startup Visa, he/we would have applied, and we would have moved to SF.

Incidentally my former NY employer opened a branch in Switzerland, which is slowly becoming the main office... one of the reasons is the visa issue : it's much easier to move a US citizen to Geneva, than a European citizen to US... So in the end there might be just one marketer remaining in NYC, while it was supposed to be the opposite at first !

(For people wondering my first startup attempt did fail quite miserably... second attempt is faring pretty well so far)
Ask HN: Review Startup, jobmigo.com - Real Time Job Finder, Powered By Twitter
Please review my friend's startup jobmigo.com

About jobmigo:
JobMigo is an application created to help people find and sort jobs using twitter. So what does Twitter have to do with finding a job? Twitter has also become a place where users have begun to post listings for job openings. There are many ways in which this is done in the “Twitterverse”. Some users are actually job portals, “tweeting” posts from their website for the benefit of anyone who is receiving the tweets.
*and who choose to have that feature enabled like the reddit toolbar which I find extremely useful and can't use reddit without.
roughly how does the assumption help?
http://jobmigo.com

I think this is a good idea (had something similar floating around in my head) and it looks like you guys have executed really well.

- There is a number (most always 1) next to each post title, it's not totally obvious what this is for...(especially if you're not a twitter pro)

- It would be nice to view all tags without leaving the main page

Looking forward to watching your app as Twitter continues its crazy growth.
There are one very simple answer - screen size along with ARM arch is what matters.

Or just simply - if you cannot watch ordinary porn clips on certain mobile device (small screen, slow cpu) this device worthless for developer. =)

iPhone simply outnumbered Nokia N-series and E-series handsets which are worth of development.
Why wouldn't it? It has been around for thousands of years, and we still have no objective answer to certain fundamental questions about why we exist, how consciousness came about, and what happens after we die.