skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In August 1991 during the S&L recession and fresh out of Vocational School, I landed my first CAD jockey job drawing fabrication plans for a precast prestressed concrete manufacturer. The first task, after running Diazos and learning that neckties would become caught in the feed and where the reverse button was by feel as my face was pressed to the top of the machine and my air supply was rapidly constricting was drawing plans for a series of double tee members [TT]. It took a couple of weeks to generate the 100 odd variations and get them through the QA process, but then I moved on to other things.

But come October, they started to roll off the line...20+ kips of concrete a pop and then stacked three high. To this day, the sensation is fresh; "So that's what the fuck it really looks like."

The reason it's fresh is because it returns every time I am in the presence of some lines I put on paper manifested.

The picture of the bridge is not the bridge. The engineer, like the hacker, has better intuitions regarding the way in which the picture will correspond to its instantiation - but it is still no more than a [hopefully] informed intuition.[1]

[1] The idea that there is an Engineer rather than a thousand authors of a successful bridge tends to be a bit absurd in modern construction practice. Such heroics are still far more likely in software development.
This is why I became an attorney.
Rise of the Chromebook indeed. I think we will be seeing A LOT of these being used by software engineers. For $250, you get a very capable Haswell-equipped notebook with 8 hours of battery life and can easily accept a Ubuntu installation (ChromeOS is built on the Ubuntu core, so technically you can dual-boot and never even uninstall ChromeOS.)

In fact, I've done just this with the new Acer C720 machine. While I use a Macbook Air as my main machine, the Acer with Ubuntu fills the "beater" role very nicely and is really more than is needed.

This is a godsend for developing nations.

Also makes you wonder when you hear people talking about "bootstrapping" and you see them using new Macbook Airs...
Seems pretty far behind Java in terms of adoption. By 1999, virtually all new enterprise development was being done on Java. In 1997 Java was already #4 on the TIOBE language popularity index. Go isn't even close.
Obviously if they have access to global communications networks they wouldn't otherwise be able to peer into, they're keeping Amurica safe.
It was specifically the nymwars that drove me out, they wouldn't accept my legal, tax-paying name.

Well, that and it was a pretty vacuous experience.
I remember when HEP invented that WWW technology stuff which turned out to be rather popular outside of HEP as well.
This echoes my experience with myself and acquaintances who learned pickup (though I only read a couple books). My fiancé even respects and uses PUA techniques for gaining social power as a female executive in a male-dominated industry.

The point is that at its best this stuff is about learning to evolve how you handle yourself with others to have more success in social endeavors. Ie. most things that don't involve staring at a screen.
That makes very little sense. I'm not saying all developers are scientists but the length of the feedback loop as absolutely nothing to do with the scientific method, which is the only real defining character of a scientist.
Thats nice man. Nice indeed.
I think it should be restrictive. There's no reason for youtube comments to have the depth of threaded forums. They're comments - they're supposed to refer to the video.
Here's one that is a little under the radar. The Young Entrepreneur's Council theyec.org posts guest blog articles on well known sites like Forbes, Inc, B2C. Those articles are full of "expert" quotes from members of the YEC with paid memberships - all with links to their sites of course. You'll see the same sites linked to in most of these mostly useless articles. You won't be seeing any quotes or links from people who haven't paid the YEC. Nice little link exchange to get links from really prominent sites.
That's a bit too cynical...

I read that more as a "company should seek to provide sustainable financial prosperity for the employees". What's wrong with that? It's hard to provide for your customers if you and your employees are struggling.

> If it does no good to the rest of the world, generating bonuses for its employees is... lame.

I don't know. Not every business produces world-saving value. And that's fine.

You shouldn't need kool-aid level propaganda to validate your business and motivate your employees...

A primary motivation for me and my business, is creating an institution that enriches the lives of those part of it. I want to create the type of company where everyone has some say, where the mission is bigger than any one individual, and whose employees feel empowered and respected. I've worked too many bigco jobs that wore and ground people down. My first job out of school was at a management consultancy. The pay was excellent, the projects were interesting (and truly made an impact), but the culture of the industry/company was such that people were ground down to the point that they became extremely jaded, materialist, negative, etc.

For my older co-workers and bosses that were married and had kids, I always wondered how that impacted their lives at home and how they treated their love ones, and in turn the ripple effect that would have.

From reading your blog, I know you have a similar background, so I think you know what I'm talking about.

The startupbro culture sneers at these "lifestyle business" sentiments, but there is no shame in a more modest (and I think, balanced) approach.
And you seem to be implying that they're not okay to do. Feel free to substantiate your opinion.
Market price is set by the supply and demand - I wouldn't be surprised if there are actually more qualified people who want to speak at TED for the current price of $0 than the spots for these speakers; so a 'fair market price' might actually involve you paying them...
I agree with you that the author of this article doesn't know much about how engineering projects really get done, but I have to disagree with your claim that software engineering has only been around for "3-4 decades... maybe". In the 1960s, IBM was building its OS/360 operating system, the massive project that inspired Brooks' famous book The Mythical Man Month. The Multics operating system (which inspired Unix with ideas like a hierarchical file system and an OS written a high level language) was started in 1964. Lisp, Algol and Fortran were all implemented in the 1950s. So software engineering has been around for at least 6 decades.
No, stayed in Canada. I do a lot of Skype tutoring now, and sell books to Americans. There would be some advantages to being in Manhattan, but also dramatically higher rent for an equivalent apartment.

I like Neil Gaiman's moving towards the mountain metaphor. I had two objectives: earn recurring revenue, and earn enough in the meantime not to need to take a job. I just kept looking for opportunities that would move me in the direction of those twin goals.

Almost everything good that happened to me in the early (and later) days came as the result of talking to people. I emailed a few of the leading blogs in my niche. I cold-called a small company that taught the LSAT, and offered to help them expand to Montreal.

There were about five people writing explanations for the author of the leading blog. I contacted all of them. One of them founded a startup in the niche. I worked with them for a while, and still have a good relationship with them. That wouldn't have happened if I hadn't said hi. Talk to people.

Always look for opportunities. I got into Reddit early last year. I thought, "too bad there's no LSAT subreddit, I could post my stuff there". Eventually reframed that thought as "why don't I start a subreddit for the LSAT?". That subreddit has now become very popular within the LSAT niche, and it's been very helpful being the moderator there.

Think about what skills would help you towards your goal. "If I could do this, what would I know how to do? How would I do it?". I've learned book publishing, enough html/CSS to run a website on Wordpress, and some basic programming which has really helped speed up web page creation.

Nothing needs to be permanent. Don't say no to an opportunity if it's not what you want to be doing in five years. Is it useful to you today? I also do SAT tutoring. It doesn't hold much interest for me long term, but the money helped me through several rough patches.

Hope that helps. Think about what you want to achieve, and what skills you have to offer that will help you reach those goals.

http://www.uarts.edu/neil-gaiman-keynote-address-2012
>It's very hard for me to imagine someone who wants to try so very hard to maintain a serious public image that they won't be caught liking a silly cat video on YouTube. That seems hilariously self-important.

Eh, I think this idea that we must live our whole life in public (to the /same/ public using the /same/ identity) is a bit insidious. Especially in these days of "cultural fit" - it leads to this idea that you need to spend your private life in service of your professional life.

If you have an unpopular hobby or sexual proclivity, keeping that out of your professional life, in many circles, could be even seen as polite; At the office? nobody wants to know about your love for furry fan-fiction.

Sure, cute cat videos are different from furry fan fiction, but... if I'm "following" you? I will "unfollow" if there are a bunch of cute cat videos. I mean, unless I'm following you for your great taste in cute cat videos. More to the point, if I'm evaluating you and, say, your long screeds advocating a political cause I find particularly distasteful keep coming up, I might have a hard time evaluating you rationally, on your skills. (Also, if I'm hiring you, I want you to be able to leave the bullshit at home. Leaving the bullshit in another identity helps with that sort of thing.)

I really think that multiple identities is the solution. You can have your cute cat picture identity, your furry fan-fiction identity, your radical socialist identity, and your professional programmer identity. I can choose to follow the identity I find interesting. I mean, yeah, if someone /really wants/ to connect your furry fan-fiction identity to your professional programmer identity, they can. However, if you practice proper identity hygiene, it becomes much easier for me (or another third party) to interact with the professional programmer, without dealing with your hobbies I have no interest in, or maybe even find distasteful.

Most of the "real name" folks seem to think that by making everything public, we will see that we are all weirdos, and become more accepting of our differences.

I guess that's my prime problem with the 'real name' folks; I think that it's just fine to do business with, or even relate socially to folks that have hobbies or political views that I believe are downright wrong. I don't think that 'acceptance' is required for that. I think that you can like and trust one facet of a person's personality, without liking other facets of their personality.

I want to be able to say "I think this person is a great programmer" without implying that I also endorse their badly written Spock/Kirk slash fiction, or their half-baked anarcho-capitalist political rants.
My high school teaches programming (Visual Basic and C#), but I started learning before that. I looked at all the possible ways of development (I eventually chose web development) and bought books from them. I tried learning online, but those did not help. Project based learning is really beneficial, so I recommend that. http://oreilly.com/ has really good books. But just getting the top books on amazon for the language is the best way to find good books. This is if she likes to read a lot and spend a lot of time (years of weekends) on it.
As a matter of fact, population growth due to births in developed countries drops very low- IIRC, the U.S. fertility rate is actually below replacement levels, and fertility in Japan is so low that people worry about a majority of Japanese being retirees in coming decades. Furthermore, as still-developing countries catch up, they follow the same pattern. There's every reason to believe that sufficiently advanced human populations do indeed control themselves.

Not to say I agree with marincounty's vehemence on the issue, either. The key is to give everyone the opportunity and environment that allows sustainable reproduction levels, not to browbeat them into doing so.
The fact that the feedback loop of a software engineering process is much tighter and cheaper than that of civil engineering does not mean that it is not engineering - that's a fallacy.

Perhaps it's less applicable to civil engineers, because of the scale and safety requirements of their profession, but let's look at electrical engineering. An electrical engineer will build prototypes; they will build models; they will use computer simulations to predict how systems will behave; they will build testing and QA infrastructure. It's definitely harder to iterate—once you've built a million widgets, shifting circuits around is going to be expensive—but it's not qualitatively different to developing a software product.

As in any engineering discipline, software engineers must optimise for a system's required qualities. In some cases, reliability might not be that high up the list. In others—let's say medical systems, or those used in space travel—software engineers have rigorous systems in place to ensure quality, and in many cases substantial up-front planning and certification will be involved.

Ultimately this seems to say that software engineering is different from (specifically) civil engineering. I think that's broadly rather true – the nature of civil is such that generally there are stringent safety requirements, and indeed massive costs involved in making subsequent changes. The majority of software does not have the same requirements, and so it's no surprise that the process is somewhat different. And I agree that not all development is engineering, of course, but to dismiss the entire field is a bit of a shallow argument.
Hmm, is there any reason to use Siri over Google's own voice recognition/text to speech stacks? I really doubt there's any significant difference between them in that regard at this point.

I don't think this is a problem worth attempting for anyone except Google at this point - they're pretty much there. Translate has a conversation mode, you choose the languages, and tap which language you're speaking in, it translates to + speaks in the other pretty much instantly. They've just added always listening to the Nexus 5's home screen and to Google Now.

Putting those two together, they pretty much have this working - 'just' add always listening to conversation mode for hardware that will support it (Siri can't do this by the way as far as I know), and then detect which language is being spoken (I suspect Google already have algorithms to get a language for webpages) and translate+speak back as normal.
First of all, whether you are at Uni or Hallam, from a University of Sheffield Alumnus: Congratulations, it sounds like you're doing well :)

It's hard to say, really. If the university lets you take a bit of time out after January, that seems like the best thing to do - less risk, and you can still finish your degree if it doesn't work out there. It would be a shame to have to wait until summer, but on the other hand, if that is the only thing you can do it would be a real shame to pass up your degree after going so far, unless you are completely sure that this is what you want.

Ultimately, that's what it is about: if you want to finish your degree, you finish it and let your friends go over there somehow for three months, while you help them out remotely. If at the end of that, there's potential for more than just mentorship and free accommodation, then reconsider.

But, if this product you've developed is something you are really, really keen on and think has a very bright future it could be the right thing to do.

Finally, make sure that whatever you do, you're doing it for the right reasons. Giving up your degree in the UK is a big sacrifice to go to SF for three months just to have fun and experience life in Silicon Valley. Going to London may not be as glamorous but I assure you, there's plenty of fun stuff to do down here and lots of clever people who you could work with.

Best of luck with your decision. Please, tell us more about the product as soon as you can :)
The image on that article really confused me.
how about a humblebundle/indieroyale/indiegala/gog Haiyan bundle?
I also get a lot of value out of youtube videos. I am pretty careful about never being logged in to google except to do occasional maintenance/checking on my legacy email addres, so I don't worry too much about being tracked beyond my IP, and I never need to leave comments anyway.

I'm learning a few instruments, and I find a lot of instructors use youtube for that. (Although I'm finding I prefer instructors' vimeo videos when they do it that way.) Some of them are very good. As long as youtube lets me view without logging in, I'm happy. I'll react in some rational way if they change that.
> sewage monitoring shows that polio is present asymptomatically in the Middle East. It's pure luck that there haven't been active cases.

Do you also consider leaf-shaped insects to have gotten that way by "pure luck"?
Cool! I'll be interested in seeing how you get on with Snake Hill Games. My guess is most artists want a UI friendly app where they can quickly make assets.
> This is for mobile HTML 5 development.

This isn't for mobile HTML5 development.
"And we're still hitting up against major unknowns all the time at every level of the practice, big and small."

I was with you until you got to this line. Let's be brutally honest: the limiting factor for most of today's software projects (i.e. CRUD websites and iPhone apps) is not technology. It's developer competency, experience and self-discipline. I'd go so far to say that most working software developers don't even understand the fundamentals of the technologies they're using -- it's why you see people replacing their relational databases for key-value stores, then trying to re-invent database join algorithms from scratch in the application layer. Or why every new generation of "engineers" re-discovers asynchronous programming in a new language (then promptly writes a framework in Blub...because Blub is so much better than last year's Blub.)

Truthfully, it's pretty damned hard to find gigs working on the frontier of technology. Most projects are predictable, tedious slogs to fit together well-understood technologies without shooting yourself in the foot. And yes, requirements shift and clients get fussy, but that's true of any engineering discipline. You learn to pad the schedule to compensate for the shifts. It's part of being a professional.

As far as I can see, commercial software isn't limited by "major unknowns", so much as an industry-wide unwillingness to learn from experience. But hey...that tends to happen in industries when you're considered "old" at 30....
TIL subdomains redirect to subreddits. Neat.
I've been wanting to give Flask a trial. This just wraps this up in goodness that I'd also like to try :-)

Thanks for posting.
But this couldn't be introduced in the US, and maybe not even in Europe. In the US you would definitely get instantly sued (and lose) for discrimination on physical fitness.
I think you can have both, something that rewards founders for their risk while also providing for your employees.

Remember that it's a bit of catch-22 in the sense that you need your employees in order to make your company into a big success. Rewarding your employees and creating a culture that's awesome incentivizes loyalty, hard work, etc.

Be careful of this founder-before-all mentality... no one wants to work in a fiefdom...
Ten tips from a top author for writing your first book
Do you have any more specific resources on the matter? I've got a lot of hearsay from researching but it's quite hard to know exactly what's wrong and what's not - it seems like there are more speculation than advices from people who have actually done it. And why would it be a problem with the IRS? I would have thought the main road block would be from USCIS.
The Future of Passwords
I'd be interested in any kind of study that demonstrated that rigorously, but I'm pretty skeptical by default. Most consumer brands I can think of are completely meaningless taken on their own, and to the extent they mean anything, it's not even the right thing. What does a "Wal" Mart sell? What do I buy at a "McDonald's"? IKEA?! Is "Siemens" a German condom company? Is a "Safeway" a shelter for victims of violence?
In the city you can get fiber in some places, 100Mbit. In other places mostly 10Mbit. I live outside of town and got 3Mbit, which is on the low end. Usually very reliable.
This misses my point completely. My point is that the term 'software engineering' is not meant to denote a type of engineering. It may include engineering as a loose metaphor, but the term 'software engineering' stands alone as a word in itself, with its own meaning, and that meaning is obvious to anyone who is or works with software engineers.

More analogies: Should we not have software architecture, because it isn't real architecture? Should we not refer to systems programming, unless the practitioner has studied systems theory? Should we not have windowing systems, because no real windows are involved? Almost everything in computing is termed by metaphor with 'real' things.
It's closer to the British use of the word engineer, which can mean anything from the civil engineer who designed the Channel Tunnel, to the mechanic who repairs the trains. I think I prefer the prescriptive definition, though, it's useful to have a word for someone expected to work with that level of planning and rigour.
Congratulations! I made a similar jump about 20 months ago.

My only advice to you is to keep doing the freelance gig thing on the side, as I see you are doing based on your comments.

The things I've learned about surviving:

1) As one commenter said, 6 months is basically no time at all. It will FLY by. Launching your side project to a state where you are comfortable with the project or can at least try it out in the market will take about 6 months.

2) For Freelance gigs - People will only pay you for what you're good at and you have experience in. It's no different than finding a real job. No one will pay you for what you think you are good at, if you don't have proven experience in it. This is good to know if you get in a money crunch. Always go back to your real strengths and the money will follow.

3) Always plan for Plan B. Build your professional network weekly if not daily in the industry where companies are willing to hire you if this venture doesn't work out for you.

4) It will take you at least 3 months to find a job once you start looking, assuming you have the right marketable skills. It shouldn't take that long, but it does. Plan accordingly.

5) You will need help about 3 months from now. You'll be lost as you try to find yourself. Don't be afraid to ask someone for guidance. You could be asking someone you met in Austin or someone you met recently. You never know.

6) Start a personal / professional mailing list. Allow people to have an insight into what you are doing. People like this kind of stuff. This allows you to stay in touch with lots of people fairly easily.

7) You never know. Jason fried wrote an inc article I believe about how he ended up writing for inc through a series of events & connections. Keep an open mind as I think you are doing now, and keep your relationships up to date.