skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Me: 30 year old ex-Physics/Astronomy student who worked a variety of 'jobs', e.g. a content developer, technical writer, and a radio show host.

Previous programming/development experience: a couple of self-hosted WordPress blogs - one of them, a short-story magazine called d.ustb.in.

Currently: Learning Python, Django and applying every bit of new knowledge into executing the million ideas that keep bouncing around in my head.

I started seriously learning programming with Python last November because I wanted to scratch an itch. There was this idea for an Android app that I had - a food-related Android app - that did not exist in the market. There had been a few attempts but nobody had done anything concrete in the direction that I was thinking of taking. I pitched the idea to a few developer friends and found that the idea seemed to excite almost ALL of them. Unfortunately, none of them could spare me the bandwidth. Frustrated, I finally decided to take the plunge myself and created a prototype using Google AppInventor to knock up a very shoddy-looking app that was served with a Django-Python -TastyPie backend running on a free Heroku instance.

Since then, I have gone on to indulge myself with a few other projects:

1. Hashpix - http://hashpix.herokuapp.com

2. @updt_me - http://update-me.herokuapp.com

...and a few more in the pipeline.

Now, we come to the most important question: Do I have offers related to my programming 'expertise'? Well, no. Seeing as how my experience in the field is next to none, I find that my skill set has few or no takers. Does it make me happy? Hell, yes! Does it scratch my entrepreneurial itch? Well, somewhat. None of these ideas are making me any money, you see. Does it put food on the table for my family? Abso-fucking-lutely not. I'm pretty sure it won't put any food on the table until I reach a good enough level of expertise - something that I am sure is (at least) another few hundred thousand lines of code away.

Long story short? If you have the bandwidth, the energy, the ideas, the time, the inclination, the burning desire and MOST IMPORTANTLY, the savings in your bank account to scratch your entrepreneurial itch, go ahead and take the plunge. Otherwise, wait for a while, build up those zeros that follow the $ sign and THEN take the plunge.

Of course, the standard universal disclaimer applies: YMMV.
You think a large portion of the people that buy SUV's use them for anything besides driving to work and the grocery store and home?
Why is the idea that app.net is a paid version
of twitter so pervasive?

Because this is exactly what it was laid out to be when it was first announced.

http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/12/app-net-reaches-its-500k-fu...
Many of us get educated plenty about nutrition in school. (I say many of us because standards are extremely variable within and between states, and recalcitrant people are fighting tooth and nail to keep it that way.) But the handful of millions of dollars devoted to nutrition education campaigns and interventions absolutely pales in comparison to the billions of dollars spent on ad and marketing campaigns by the glorified drug dealers that are our food companies, not to mention the money they spend lobbying to contain education campaigns and develop yet more addictive food items.
Only if you have a Facebook account too.

And even if you can turn off the link between the photo and your FB account, your name (suitable for text mining) and your face (suitable for facial recognition) are both still in there.
Redis: How to install for production
how would they enforce it? not hire him? send him a naughty letter?
That he thinks of "hiring" a "co-founder" is perhaps telling.

ADDED: On the flip side, us techies shouldn't co-found a company unless we're willing to pitch in when "[...] we found sales in other channels that required late nights of packaging (and lots of manly muscles)" (or, I'd add, womanly muscles, women have their place in this sort of work too). As I like to say, "You shouldn't be too proud to sweep a floor."
Not sure how I got those so thoroughly mixed up, thanks for the clarification.
I was surprised to read that this configuration uses DSPAM rather than SpamAssassin. Can anyone here compare these two, or point to a recent comparison?
Yes, but some interview questions are more important than others. I was asked this question before. I didn't know the answer. I still got the job.

A year later, I'm asking the question. I obviously don't hold it against interviewees if they don't know the answer. I see it is a "bonus points" question, not one that will make/break my opinion of a candidate.

Asking about cycle detection in linked lists can be informational even if the candidate doesn't know Floyd's algorithm. Like simpler questions, often the interviewee's thought process is more important than their final answer.
I don't care about open, I care about good.
Maybe so, but then why take so long to get around to this? GCHQ knew that the Guardian had these files all summer long. If this were a cover-your-ass move would they not have done this back in May or June?

It could be that GCHQ is so bureaucratic that they need three months to figure out what to do with an information leak. On the other hand, the UK government did just intimidate Greenwald's partner for no apparent reason. This sounds more like retaliation at this point; the only bureaucratic inefficiency to it is the amount of time it took for the government to decide to retaliate.
Sorry. Does google do something like a 6mo probationary period? Did yo have to return things like signing bonus or relocation expenses provided by google? Did they offer some settlement?
If he has the money to hire someone on a trial basis to test out the relationship before jumping into the whole commitment/be my technical co-founder deal, then yes, I think it makes sense. I'm sure there are many potential technical cofounders who would rather than just simply work for free without even knowing what they're getting themselves into, considering the company seems like it's already going.
Yeah I was surprised he was advocating a walk-through. To me, the web design is a failure if you need a walk-through for the most basic interaction.
Work on developing solid technical skills. This is necessary condition but not sufficient. So, when the time comes, you can take responsibility and people will notice that you are good. If you can combine this with good personality, social skills and integrity, then you will definitely be appreciated. Almost always there will be some smart people around to notice you. And after enough time doing this, you will be the one who appreciate other people's efforts as well. Avoid empty politics at all costs, but own your work and present your value in a decent way. Don't wait silently, show your contribution, but don't overdo it. Job security is an illusion, don't go after it. You will probably receive fair compensation eventually. Focus on the things you can do passionately, and then happiness will follow. If you don't enjoy what you do or the people around you, you cannot force yourself to do it for long anyways, so change your position until it feels right. No-one can tell you when and where, but you'll notice it when you have it
Why do I have to read this comment every time App.net gets brought up? Is every conversation about App.net doomed to turn into a debate about whether it will succeed, and if not why?
hire and co-founder is a contradiction
A lot of negativity here, I find this quite beautiful and useful for some cases where the UI allows it.
I ment the black belt but turns out its also a minecart

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dan#English
No, there isn't. Convicts are one of the last remaining class of people not protected by law. Every time any effort begins to make convicted folks a protected class, it makes politicians appear weak on crime and is quickly silenced.
3D Systems Acquires UK-Based Rapid Prototyping Firm CRDM
I converted 4000 loc of coffeescript to typescript and I liked it
Ungit - a new UI approach for newbies learning git.
22% still have a life then.
No, you are a full-time employee from day one. I received neither, and no, I was not offered any severance, concession, or consideration, though I asked.
He didn't use the pure responsive grid functionality for the sidebar. The sidebar examples on the pure site all collapse to corner menus.
Actually, I think I understand what the root issue of this semantic disparity may be. Some dictionary definitions of politics relegate it to government / state organization.

Others, particularly political scientists, view it as the universal process of resolving power interrelationships among individuals.

To an anarcho-capitalist, most (all?) individual interactions that involve transfer of power are voluntary market exchanges. That implies a social structure that is non-political in the sense that no state need be involved in society. But to a political scientist it is just one of many potential political systems to be debated and evaluated, with its own power structures, etc.

Communists didn't feel their preferred system was political either but rather a scientific inevitability. This is often why some half-joke that Libertarianism is the Marxism of the rich...
Firefox takes top marks in browser stability tests
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#En...

pages-articles.xml.bz2 – Current revisions only, no talk or user pages. (This is probably the one you want. The size of the 4 April 2013 dump is approximately 9.06 GB compressed, 42 GB uncompressed)

bzip can be decompressed in chunks, can't it? I wonder if there's an app to read a compressed wikipedia xml archive on an ios or android tablet. Even better would be if it fetches missing resources (like embedded images) from the real wikipedia if there's internet access.
Every single thing that the USG has said since I have been paying attention - starting in 1986 - every single thing has been a lie.

Sure it has. Every last little thing.

Now if you said that there always seems to be some scandal going on, then guess what, I agree with you. And guess what, that sort of shit has been going on since the founding of the Republic. And guess what, you can find shenanigans in the history of every monarchic, theocratic and republican government all the way back to ancient Rome and beyond. There is no Garden of Eden from which we've been expelled or Golden Age that we've lost, there's only your personal loss of innocence about how flawed humans are.
managing a bunch of programmers

The OP says his friend was interviewing for "product manager", which is not that. Product management is basically coming up with ideas for new products and seeing them through to the end. That includes helping design the actual computer program, which is why they ask software engineering questions.

(There are a ton of jobs called "PM", but they're all very different. None of them manage engineers, though, that's just "Manager" or "TLM".)
No, Javascript has no notion of threads. Rather than true concurrency and a synchronization mechanism, it has callbacks (upon callbacks upon callbacks).
Every time I drive an American car it puts American automakers to shame.
Nobody's attempted to build a fully automated, general purpose(ish) factory yet. I'm sure there'll be plenty of complexities and limitations, but there are limits and complexities with existing systems that we've just accepted as "the way things are".

I'm fairly confident that general purpose automated manufacturing will become a reality and will be transformative, but I doubt it will completely take over the market. I'm pretty sure there'll be room for both.
What is new in Mono (slides)
> With the NASA style devel­op­ment process, they can deliver very very low bug rates, but it’s at a very very low pro­duc­tiv­ity rate

There's some more, somewhat old and non-technical, information about NASA's software development efforts here [1].

[1] http://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff
The supply of electricity however, is apparently limitless!!!
The container is abstracted, so it can receive whatever type of js the server wants to send. Specifically, the js that we will use will not be compiled so that it can be verified (and it will also be open source). The main problem with this is that it wastes bandwidth which shouldnt be a problem for two reasons: the architecture can cache the js intelligently and the extension will have a lot of the crypto stuff embedded meaning that it wont need to be redistributed per access.
Deezer was originally a blog called Blogmusik. It was streaming music illegally and was shut down following a trial by the French equivalent of RIAA, then re-launched as Deezer.

EDIT: I realized that Deezer is not well-known in the US. It is a major music startup competing with the likes of Spotify and rdio in the rest of the world.
Google Maps Integration Leaves Out Waze’s Speed Trap Alerts
I'm thinking on forking this to remove the jQuery dependency. Would somebody be interested in this?
Good point. In the last App.net thread I said they'll probably need a killer app to get people to sign up. But if people are mostly in it for one app, why should that app settle for a slice of referral revenue? More likely the killer app would prefer to own the customer billing relationship and send a slice of revenue to App.net.

I don't see why we should criticize them too much if they change business models, though. If this was so easy that you could get it right on the first try, it would have been done already.
This is a great tool for other startups, funds, and companies. Just clone these companies in that order, they're already pre-vetted by good VC's like PG and also somewhat market tested.

A smart VC could just send of them as a spec to dev team in Russia/India, and hire mechanical turkers to blitz forums. Even hire a few good writers to create blogs and post to HN.
I think the Android stock browser has the same blue progress bar - or at least my phone running CyanogenMod has.
Rather my car take the impact than myself.
Hard AI -> Strong AI. Brain not firing on all four cylinders.
Animated Explainer Videos For Startups
The "mistake" is at the end...

'There are no breakout apps. There is no WhatsApp or DrawSomething. App.net remains a plaything for developers...'

...it certainly took them long enough to get to it.
I've never been in the GP's position, but my thoughts on such things have always been that there's usually not much point in suing your current or former employer, barring something really extreme that somehow cost you 6 figures or more. The only real upside to it is a one-time payment of a few tens of thousands, which sounds like a few months of salary at any company in the industry. Why spend the time with lawyers and courts and risk possible future issues with then and other companies for that? You're probably better off in the long run to just forget about it and spend your time getting a job at a more sane company.
Anyone know of a PHP version of this? Would make my life so much easier.
I run the Web Engineering team at Mozilla, which is responsible for our crash reporting infrastructure. I was pretty happy to see this outcome from Sauce Labs :) Stability is something we take very seriously.

If you have questions I'm happy to try and answer them.
I seriously doubt it could be. With the same battery packs and similar size adding in four wheel drive it might even reach prices as high as the performance version of the S.

I am disappointed in that prospect as it makes a sub 40k car even less likely. It is one thing to make profitable vehicles at the price point he is at; its easy; its another to get the pieces to work in the 40k down market. If the X was going to be in the 40K, with 60k well equipped I would be impressed.

When he gets there, and its a big when, he will be up against a whole slew of similar and possibly better vehicles than he is facing now. Simply put, while he brought electric to a mass produced car he still isn't making enough to matter. Put it this way, Subaru sells more in a month than he sells in a year and Subaru is a small player. Even 2014 goals won't exceed Porsche's same year sales let alone the dogs like Mitsubishi.
In a discussion about an article written about whether App.net will succeed, that seems like a pretty logical thing to be talking about, no? It's not like he hijacked something completely unrelated and changed the topic.
haha, that's awesome
That's cute but totally nonsensical. Logical fallacies are incorrect modes of inference in logical arguments. It's the people who are doing the arguing that must be logical, not the subject matter of the argument.
Get Paid to Exploit Google Services
London, Two Years Later
There are at least some cases in modern client-side programming that you have access to progress information, and would therefore want a progress meter rather than a progress indicator. "Use spinners for everything" strikes me as short-sighted and reactionary advice.
Don't you think it would be a bit weird to give the guy a subscription to Anal Magazine? Give him money, even if he can't get it physically, he can still use it online.
Join Exec as a Product Manager of Growth
Exec makes the world efficient. We’re a YC company founded by one of the YC part time partners, Justin Kan (founder of Justin.tv). We’re starting by building the world’s most convenient cleaning service and growing quickly.

About The Job

Exec is looking for a junior product manager who loves turning data - both qualitative and quantitative - into actionable ways to drive growth. The ideal candidate is an engineer who is looking to transition from an engineering role into a product role with a marketing/business focus.

About You

- You’re passionate about analytics and using engineering to solve marketing problems.

- You have a strong understanding of existing online marketing channels.

- You have strong analytical ability. You're not afraid of diving into SQL, Excel, or the Ruby console to answer whatever question you might have.

- You are empathetic. You can put yourself in the users mindset. If you don't understand the user you dig into the data until you do.

- You have a strong product sense, you can easily place yourself in the user's mindset and make decisions accordingly.

Requirements:

* 2+ years of engineering experience.

* A passion for analytics and applying an engineering mindset to growth.

* Strong knowledge of existing online marketing channels.

Bonus

* Experience running online marketing campaigns across multiple channels.

* Product management experience.

Email coreteam@iamexec.com to apply.
If you are blacklisted, then someone needs to check the blacklist just once for your process to get terminated.

If you are scheduled, many people must refrain from screwing up.

It even took them months to figure out that they hired an ex convict, after he personally disclosed the fact multiple times.

I had great hopes for Google to innovate in sense of culture. I saw Larry Page and Sergey Brin as intellectuals. Turns out they just went and built a high school elite club, for geeks. Another bloated company ran by a corps of smug geeks that like to claim how they are holier than thou.

I am really sad about it.
I like it, looks good.
I would say that nowhere in America would a "non-Anglo-American" surname be remarkable. In some areas the distribution of "non-Anglo-American" names and "Anglo-American" names may be considered remarkable though. Basically, I think he is seeing a trend that he finds interesting, which is a different than finding a particular instance interesting.

Put it this way, if I ran into somebody named "Lutz", I wouldn't think anything of it. If I ran across many people with Germanic names though, I might wonder if I were in somewhere like south-central PA (an area notable for a large number of German descendants: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_Dutch). The distribution would catch my eye, not the particular name itself.

(Personally, I'm not really seeing any interesting trends with those names.)
Palestinian Facebook flaw-finder getting $10,000 payday in online appeal
At the very least it will demonstrate that leaks of secret government information will not be pursued vigorously by the administration when it helps rather than hurts them.
I would love to but also don't have the bandwidth.

By the way, thank you for all your work. It took me quite a while to wrap my head around the template craziness you use in cvv8 but it turns out being pretty awesome. We have a huge API surface we're using cvv8 on and so far it's working great.

IMHO probably the best approach that I haven't seen anyone but the chromium project use would be a bindings compiler that takes WebIDL and generates wrapper code. I started down that path before diving into cvv8, but didn't understand well enough what my compiler should output. May have to revisit that project at some point if we want to upgrade beyond node 0.10.
I am requesting this with the companies currently courting me for employment, and have made clear what happened at Google to each of them. I have found other companies' recruiters to be extremely sympathetic and willing to adopt a nontraditional "let's get the legal review out of the way first" hiring approach with me.
Docker seems like it could be a nice alternative to Ansible here. I'd love to see something as easy to use as an "app store" for "personal cloud" servers. One click to install servers for email, contacts, calendar, dropbox, backups, etc.
When the US Government Destroyed Hard Drives with Classified Information
The Surprising Complexity of Lobster Prices
There are certain advantages to custom hardware. For example, the OS could be flashed onto a tamper-resistant ROM to prevent it from being surreptitiously altered. The device could include a smart card slot used on boot to decrypt the storage mechanism. And the device itself could be very small, light, low-power, and fanless, perfect for stashing out of the way next to your modem.

There's also advantage in offering up a single appliance for people that don't have the technical expertise to set up the necessary services on their own, who don't have a spare i386 they can use, or even people who just want something to work without spending too much time on it.

Secure communication requires parties on both sides to be capable of it, and it stands to reason that more people would buy into a system that provides the capability if you make it really easy to use. Of course, the communication network itself should be fully interoperable with whatever hardware you want to use to connect to it.
I think they'd have to, once they set up Supercharger stations and go for the European market.
From a pure learning the mechanics point of view, yes what you have read might be encouraging. However, think of it in the longer term. Do you feel like you have the patience and aptitude to grow yourself and become better at it over time. Also, technology changes faster than law does. So how comfortable are you with change?
You will be starting at the ground floor and working your way up and while it might be faster rise than say in law, it can be frustrating and tedious. Finally, there are long hours in front of the computer which behaves the way you tell it too. There will be days when you will spend hours on end trying to figure out why the code is not working as you want it to. Those days will make you think dealing with unreasonable clients, difficult witness and opposing counsel was easier. If you think you can handle those days, then yes , by all means, jump in with two feet.

By no means, I am trying to paint a negative picture here. I used to be a developer that still codes and works in technical field. But, I think it is important that you go in with a good idea of what to expect.

Maybe a better way would be to start learning coding and developing one or two applications for yourself while still doing your day job to see how you like it. Then once you have a portfolio, you can migrate to doing freelance projects or look for full time opportunities.

All the best.