skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You sound like you're centering a big decision in your life around language choice because it sounds like 'interesting technology'. I'd recommend skipping this - the technology isn't the important part, it's what you're doing with it.

Also, 'interesting technology' and '37.5h/week' are often directly at odds, especially in the financial industry. When you're using old, boring technology then you know it's been used to do what you're doing with it 100s of times before. This means no surprises, fairly easy estimations of work length, and most important for a consistent work week - lots of older developers and managers who are more interested in their next golf game than using their weekend to hack in new tech.

Basically what I'm getting at is that you need to decide your priorities - are you looking for an interesting job, or a stable job? Once you decide that, you can do some negotiation in interviews and culture fit to find where you want to work. Trying to optimize two things at once and still get hired is much tougher.
Sounds like he reproduced the college experience without a college. Good for him.

But in general it's probably more efficient to just to go to college and get a degree.
This is great. I've wanted to build a similar tool for a couple of years, the distinction being that I want a structural grep utility. I'd pass in a pattern in the form of a code snippet (with pattern operators), and have the thing search for matching code structures. I suspect that this tool does 95% of what would be needed for that, very nice.
Intel had (and maybe still has) a "no headphones" policy. Even at night, with no one else in the office.

Idiocy.
When I am not feeling design intuitively, I approach it as a problem solving exercise as that's what we do as coders... solve problems.

Ask yourself, what problem is this design solving? Is the goal of the site to get people to buy things? Ok, Problem 1: show them things. Problem 2: Make the user's eyes look at the right elements to get them to buy.

Each design element will either serve of obstruct your problem solving goals. It becomes obvious once you break the problems down into small enough goals.
I see, that makes sense. Any word on how it compares to simply shipping encrypted dumps to S3?
For what it's worth, ToroPHP allows you to do pretty much exactly what he's describing in PHP. But as always, you should use what makes you productive, whether that's Node.js, PHP, Python, Ruby, Perl, COBOL or QuickBASIC. Maybe not the last one. But then again, maybe that too.
Thanks for answering. As much as I'd love to work there, I already applied but after going all the way to on-site interviews, I wasn't hired.

My mistake as I applied to SRE and probably I should have gone for Software Developer instead, but too late for that now.

It has to be London, a pity as I read fantastic things about Red-Gate :)
Good point about user experience. Are there any tools you use specifically to test ux that isn't manual?
Well, then you don't agree to it.

> I cannot modify the software? Why not?

To spare the company supporting randomly modified versions.

Also, the "cannot modify" clause is a weaker version of a universally used "You shall not decompile or reverse-engineerthe software", which is also frequently coupled with "You will not try and defeat, deactivate, bypass, remove or otherwise circumvent any software protection mechanisms". I don't think it makes much practical sense, but this is an industry standard. Virtually every proprietary software license is locked down this way.
These are all things you should be doing anyway, even if you're pursuing a degree, and want to land a good software engineering job. So the "without a degree" caveat doesn't really matter.
Clojure in the Field [video]
Admire. Emulate. Innovate.

ADMIRE

When you're starting off, you're not going to be able to create amazing looking stuff because you don't know how to and you won't necessarily know what is good. The first thing I recommend you do is build up your pallet and figure out what you like. If you don't know what is good, look at work that others say is good and observe what they have in common and how they make you feel.

EMULATE

Once you start to get a sense of what you like, next recommendation is learning the raw skills needed to do what you need. In your case, knowing how to do all the things you'll need to do, such as how to create a box with rounded corners, or gradients. With that knowledge, start trying to recreate work that you admire and try to get as close to it as possible. As you do this repeatedly, you'll start noticing different patterns and choices the "original" designer had utilized. At this stage, you're simply trying to walk a mile in their shoes.

INNOVATE

As you become comfortable at emulating styles and feel a decent level of mastery over the skills required, you'll automatically start to have thoughts about how you might want to try doing things differently. Try it. Most of what you do will be shit. Allow yourself to create shit. Keep trying things and you'll build up your own style, taste and sense of what should take priority.

PS: I am a self-taught designer. I used to feel like I was faking it in a world of real designers but over time, I've looked at my body of work felt proud/happy... and I've become "comfortable in my own skin" as a designer.
you shouldn't use node.js to serve static files
its better to use nginx for that or if you have more resources available serve your files through a content delivery network
Don't rule companies out because they're in the financial space. If you refuse to work for finance in, say, NYC, then you'll be unemployed often because that's a lot of what's out there.

Code quality problems aren't limited to finance and the people in finance are, on average, somewhat better than (at least) the NYC startup crowd. (There are good people in each, of course, and bad.)

I don't know the UK scene, but if you're certainly moving to London, you shouldn't rule out finance. Even though there are some terrible financial firms out there, I don't think that the whole set of financial companies is, as a category, any worse than other businesses (including startups). Those blue-sky R&D jobs (to which finance might compare poorly) are so rare and inaccessible to our generation that one can assume them not to exist in the corporate world (at least, not in the U.S.).
sorry, I don't know such tools.
> But how come it makes sense for online services then?

Because, as you just said, it's a way to deal with unforseen abuse situations.

But that justification only works for online services (or other situations involving shared or limited resources). It doesn't make sense for standalone software. What does 'abuse' even mean in that situation? Is Excel going to complain to its union rep if I make it work 80 hours a week?
They would know they were in the BCC field if the "To" address was not their correct address.
What out the WHATWG's take on it: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/...

Specifically, they've redefined the format of email addresses in a way that's much simpler and is actually amenable to regular expressions. "This requirement is a willful violation of RFC 5322, which defines a syntax for e-mail addresses that is simultaneously too strict (before the "@" character), too vague (after the "@" character), and too lax (allowing comments, whitespace characters, and quoted strings in manners unfamiliar to most users) to be of practical use here."

The spec even includes a Perl-compatible regex as an example. :)
Sorry, not written...read. I am definitely not the author. Doh!
Even with six figure student loans?
I believe I am a good engineer, I have heard generally positive things about my professional work, have a college degree, etc.

I am however terrified of programming challenges (topcoder, spoj, interview-street, etc.) I have tried solving some problems there using Ruby (back when it was 1.8.x, too slow for these kind of problems) and given up. Maybe I should give it a shot with C. Any ideas how to start, considering these competitive coding websites are quite important when interviewing at certain companies?
Cyphertite may also be of interest: https://www.cyphertite.com/

Client-side encryption and deduplication, with source code. 8GB free, $10/mo for personal unlimited use, 10c/GB/month for business/enterprise. My main reservations are they seem to be based in one datacenter, and don't seem to have support for multiple keyfiles with separate read/write/delete/machine restrictions. Also not in FreeBSD ports :P
If you can work remomtely, sure. Because those interesting projects will certainly not be in Paris.
So what's the take away message from all this?
Work hard and enjoy your work.

I've got a lot of the former and none of the latter. While building websites for random clients and studying at a University, I've discovered my interest in the digital world has waned.
In Media, Big Data Is Booming but Big Results Are Lacking
Google’s new Nexus Q, the H2G2-42
This has happened on a vastly smaller scale at a few places I have worked. Another flaw seems to be that none technical people ask for something to appear in the new system when they have no idea. The system is built, exactly as requested, and it sucks. Having a competent software engineer on staff who understands the field is vastly more handy than a fat wad of cash paid to outsource. I'm sure there is a good middle road, but companies I have worked for haven't found it.
I thought this was clever, just because of how many horrible facebook posts I've seen using this quote.

http://www.womenactionmedia.org/cms/assets/uploads/2013/05/h...

And this is so obviously meant to be humourous and not at all misogynistic that it does kinda discredit the rest of the site.

http://www.womenactionmedia.org/cms/assets/uploads/2013/05/F...
My Google interviewer was a HS-educated guy. My parents couldn't believe it. I tend to think - if he is as good at the job as me, what does his education matter? Why should I be offended that a HS-educated guy is in the same room with me?

Education is meant to produce a difference in job performance; it's good for the worker, not directly to the employer. If I with my college degree can't get a better job than a HS-graduate, it's on me to change.

My parents find my lack of ego around this subject so weird. Also, the world at large is probably more similar to my parents.
Crashplan does that to save you bandwidth and them space but you get unlimited space for the same price.
I guess I just don't know why you made the comment. Neither the OP, nor probably anyone else, has as their sole concern in life "work at Google/other large company." So I made what I thought was a reasonable leap that you were actually disparaging a hypothetical person's current main goal.
Because you might have to discontinue the service for one reason or another. If you sell a standalone, boxed product, why do you need the power to revoke the license?
Yes Fabien, you are happy to come back because you come back for vacation.
If you do a typical 9 to 7 slaving away in Paris you will certainly see none of it.
I think the meaning was fairly obvious at first glance, and it read as a fine way of conjoining expressions, where multiple if statements should be preferred, because it doesn't rely on the arbitrary subexpression evaluation ordering rules of binary operators.

Imagine for a moment that a character ends up deleted at the end of one of those && expressions. I don't care how, perhaps you just dropped your Warby Parkers on your keyboard or something. Not only is the code now broken, but it still compiles. With if(...)s, it would fail to compile and the error would be caught immediately.

The moral of the story is that syntax is your friend, not your enemy. Use syntax as much as possible to catch errors. Especially with strictly-typed languages, you have an incredible tool for automated verification of certain portions of your program. Use it.
It's not that "bad people" are the ones drawn to become cops and prison guards, but the inverse: working as a cop or a prison guard changes you to behave a certain way.

The "Stanford Prison Experiment" is a good example of this phenomenon: http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/career-advice/
> It DOES fucking matter if "the philosophy by which you design a product is friendly or not" when you're trying to build that product in a community (as is the case with Gnome 3). He specifically mentions Gnome 3 as his example, and in the dynamics of Open Source communities friendly DOES matter. A lot.

Ah the whine of the open source developer who wonders why the average joe finds OSS unusable and impregnable. It doesn't matter if there's a great product at the end of it. If the product is suboptimal then we can all moan about the reasons why.

Also worth pointing out that you're misrepresenting his article. He says:

> It’s a problem that doesn’t just apply to Gnome 3—though Gnome 3 certainly suffers from it. It’s the problem of the Cult of Design Dictatorship.

So either you don't understand his article, or he's applying a generalisation drawn from Gnome3 and then deliberately applying it to the wider world. Which?

> Perhaps you could spend "fainting" (sic)

I'm obliged to point out, with a sense of delicious irony, that you are using sic incorrectly ;)

> and more time in reading and understanding where TFA comes from.

I read it and understood it. It's horseshit.

> It's not like most designers working in web/software startups are trained professionals,

What? Yes, they are.

> profficient in the history of design, psychological and cognitive issues, HCI principles and user testing methodologies. A lot are just glorified graphic designers, if that.

A lot, or most?

> Especially the ones TFA article describes, and which we've all met, are the "I know better" BS types.

I guess there's an inherent risk with drawing _massive, sweeping generalisations_ from "I've met some of these".

> Also your whole argument is based on the premise of: "if the designer is doing their job properly and working with and for users".

Actually my argument is better summarised as:

1. If a designer is doing their job properly, then the characteristics described in the original article all hold true, but the outcome is successful so nobody cares.
2. The point laboured in the article is, essentially, that design is not a democracy and you should "go home" if you don't like a product. I counter that this is a platitude: it could be true of any product ever made.

> Just another pedantic correction of a comment made in jest that was not supposed to be taken literally. Not to mention he doesn't say he's retired at all.

"spends his days". It's an unfair characterisation made in support of a tawdry argument which boils down to a bunch of plattitudes

> He talks of the same "FUCK" (sic) that 37 Signals themselves admit (and are proud of). That they make opinionated products, and that if somebody isn't pleased with them, so be it.

My point was: But so what? Every single piece of software is made with opinion behind it. If you don't like it you can choose another piece of software. That's true of everything from bottled water to delivery pizza. Who gives a shit? It's not worth pointing out.
How about Palantir? They've got a London office, do interesting work (and would value your Java experience), and definitely pay well. They tend to work with government or financial clients; I'm not sure which the London folks focus on. Also, they have a pretty interesting mix of 'boring' (Java desktop apps & server infrastructure) and more modern (HTML5 & mobile clients) technologies. And they work with some clients that have...interesting problems.
I've noticed the same pattern as my access to technology has expanded. Initially, I was completely unconcerned with my online presence, but, as the years wore on, it became less of a relief to be away from everything and more of an impatience to get back and check Twitter, email, news, etc. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that there's a way to go back, either for myself or for society as a whole.
There are many, many solid schools you can go to that would not require six-figure loans. Alternately, if you can be in the top 1% of kids, the best schools, like Stanford, are starting to only charge those who can afford it.
Taking Career Risks in Your Twenties
Ubuntu, here. I use it for software development, so I'm not much of a Linux connoisseur. I have used it for developing J2ME apps, developing a Linux-based OS for VoIP phones, and for several years now, Android development.

I started using Ubuntu back when the quip was that it's the Swahili word for "Can't install Debian." I used LXDE for a while while Unity was in its bumptious youth, but I like Unity now.

BUT if I know I won't have to use an IDE for a meeting, I'll take only an Android tablet. With the latest updates it is within spitting distance of being a complete office work machine. Offline editing of Drive documents would complete the picture.
Clause 1 is a standard DISCLAIMER in many O/S licenses. That's the source of it.

Clause 2 - Correct. This is a straight-forward translation of the legal speak. Again, fairly standard, you've just not been paying attention :)

Clause 4 - As I explained in another comment, this yet again appears to be a standard way to protect against unforeseen abuse. For example, someone's using the software to facilitate phishing ops or something to that end.

Clause 5 - The lease/rent/lend is a standard clause in many licenses, e.g. [1]. The "sell" clause also made an appearance in several I looked at, so it only seemed reasonable to combine these two.

[1] http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb469936.asp...
You mention Ruby on your "become fluent" list, but I get the impression that Google doesn't use much ruby. Is the feeling there that skills in ruby can transfer, or is it more important to focus on Java, C++ or Python?
Thanks for your suggestion, i agree with you on that, the server side validation is _necessary_ .
As over 90% of road traffic accidents are the result of human error, I strongly disagree with your conclusion -- otherwise we wouldn't need third-party insurance for cars, either.

(On the other hand, if you're as sensible as you say, I have three words for you: no claims discount.)
> "felt that he didn't have enough knowledge of Ruby", he would be able to sue you if he found out you hired someone who supposedly has the same level of knowledge of ruby as him.

Except that you felt it because the other candidate interviewed and sold himself better.

The way it is being presented here you could always sue if you're black and the person they hired wasn't. It doesn't really work that way. They do have to provide proof of their claim of racism/sexism or whatnot. They didn't hire me isn't proof.
GitHub is more likely to pass the "dumb HR" test. "Oh a GitHub profile. I have heard of that."
Because, insane as it sounds, I'm better at talking face to face, than typing over IRC. I just want it not so loud and obnoxious. Also, Doritos and Mountain Dew taste awful and are bad for you. I'd rather have a salad.
I had end-to-end encrypted video chat bodged together using libvlc and SRTP streams at one point, but it was incredibly user-unfriendly and getting latency down below 1 second was easier said than done. VLC really wasn't designed for this kind of application.
I'd say that in Paris, a referral is necessary and often sufficient. Le "piston".

In SF, it's often necessary and hardly ever sufficient.
PyGreen – The Simplest Static Web Site Generator Ever For Python Programmers
Yeah, sounds like a "how to win at being between the ages of 18 and 30".
I have an impression, the more senior you are the harder is to get hired by companies testing how good you remember some intricate [implementation] details from your CS courses.

Not to mention people who are self-taught...
"I don't think that my own government poses such a threat to me."

The stakes, for you and yours, are terribly high if you're wrong, now or in the future.

Our government was explicitly designed to be "inefficient" at doing anything internally (externally the President/Executive has a much freer hand), but I do believe that we armed citizens can stop it from mass murder (I am making certain assumptions about the culture of the military and who goes into it WRT to nuclear weapons, of course). If you aren't familiar with the maxim "Amateurs discuss tactics, professionals logistics", you should check that out before seriously considering the overall issue. Or just note that all those 20th century mass murders were preceded by disarming the targets, those governments certainly thought guns made a difference.

But it's undeniable that governments are an existential threat to their peoples; if you learn nothing else from 20th century history you should learn that. And to take my country as an example (are you one of the few foreigners who has a benign view of it???), our current President launched his political career in the house of two '70s "revolutionaries" who, while fecklessly bombing and killing people, estimated that they'd have to kill around 10% of the population after they succeeded, that many would be totally resistant to reeducation.

I'm not trying to say so much about Obama above as I am about our ruling class, which celebrates such figures, rewards them with professorships in higher education instead of reading them out of polite society, or in one very special case, the man (Bill Ayers) with a big picture of him stomping on an American flag on 9/11/2001 in our preeminent "paper of record" newspaper (!!!; a singularly ill timed article in the New York Times).

We know what such people would try to do if they gained enough power, and we have throughout this nation's history made very sure they wouldn't get very far. Heck, do you believe in insurance? I didn't expect to make a big claim when it first started paying renters insurance decades ago, and even if I hadn't (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Joplin_tornado) I'd still be paying.

And, BTW, rifles are the alpha and omega here, handguns have never made much of a difference unless that's all you had and you needed them to procure better arms.
Indeed - there seems to only be two very polar groups in this discussion. Those that are adamant guns are a good thing, and those that are adamant that guns are a bad thing. I'm somewhere in the middle - I'd love to know which is really the right answer - does having a gun really make violent crime less likely? Does everyone carrying a gun make people more likely and more quickly to resort to violence to solve problems?
I'm getting a policy denied on that (they must have a set referrer), however I assume it's the custom yacht. I have to say for a man involved with so many brilliant, beautiful things, that yacht is truly the ugliest yacht I've ever seen.
The ideal for me would be to maintain the accounts, but use them less. I'm worried that being completely without any social networking presence could hurt me down the road with companies being reluctant to hire someone who seems like they might have something to hide. In my opinion, at least, this attitude is ridiculous, but I've already had people look at me strangely about it.
I would be happy to - my email is my HN nickname at gmail - get in touch, ask anything, I had great times at Camino and I love to talk about it. If you want to see some pictures check out http://www.honzzz.uphero.com - I am afraid the rest of the site will be useless to you unless you speak Czech but a picture is worth a thousand words anyway.
It's probably for the network itself, not just the communications.
For the web/mobile one of the most fundamental aspects of design is typography, study it, I recommend this book. Also it will teach you to diagram and grids, your design will improve a lot with that.

http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Type-2nd-revised-expanded/dp/...
A software being used to facilitate the spread of malware.

Or being used as a part of a scam operation.

Or being used by an entity that creates a negative impact on the company's brand.