skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This was fairly similar to my experience - 4 months into my time off I received a letter from the government saying that due to a problem with my employer last year I owed them thousands of pounds of tax. I might not be that risk adverse but this shocked me, and as soon as you see the end of your runway it becomes difficult to concentrate on a startup.

Also, London is expensive, remember that.

Edit: I will rinse and repeat but I definitely recommend getting a product to MVP stage before cutting your cord, as well as also having the necessary funds for this funemployment strategy to make sense - are you expecting to immediately start making enough money from the project to bootstrap it or are you going to go and get investment with your team?

Also I recommend getting into the habit of being honest and quantitative with yourself, which means getting into the habit of knocking out an excel document for your own living expenses and the commercial viability of any ideas you have.

Personally, I found myself ultimately fighting far too many battles many of which I was untested in, creating an iOS prototype while: sitting in cafes running customer development (I spoke to at least 50+ people), arranging meetings with people in the industry I wanted to disrupt, trying to attract the attention of Angels that I had connections to, getting my friends to help out with design/tech work, etc. It's a hard game and probably worth it for the experience. Something I realised was that you can't be perfectly self-sufficient - you might be an A player at a couple of things and a quick learner in others (which is how I felt) but you're going to be trying to hold so many things together that you will need a structure that supports you: finance, friendship, focus, partners. I fragilized myself by not being fully prepared for this - and also didn't have the financial situation to bide my time.

There are pools of water in the desert but you need enough water to reach them.
Weird, this isn't something I expected to see on the front page of HN. :P

To clarify, one of our community members (cmr) compiles these posts to summarize all the interesting developments in the language over the course of each week. It's an indispensable resource for those of us who can't devote ourselves full-time to Rust development (really, I'm in the IRC channel every day and I wasn't aware of half of these). It's also probably the best way for casual observers to keep tabs on the progress of the language in general. You can see the full archives here:

http://cmr.github.io/blog/categories/this-week-in-rust/

Thanks again, Corey!
As was AmigaOS in its own way. Is it really accurate to call all these ahead of their time, or rather that what was in common use at the time was behind the times?
What if you generated electricity and stored it into a battery and then the transit system just paid an equivalent amount for the electricity?
Following UX/UI patterns make sense, but not design - especially if you plan to be cross platform.
100% agrees, I didn't say I didn't do engineering, I just don't call myself an engineer. Ironically, I do call myself a programmer though, and I don't need a degree to do that. The state of CS degrees is a whole other topic, which from the sound of it we agree upon so far. Maybe I just can't call myself a scientist ;)
That's the key to the "Robin Hood Morality Test":

http://www.talisman.org/quizzes/robin-hood-morality.shtml

(Read the disclaimer on the website, and also this one here: It's not a real test, it's just a neat idea that sometimes gives insightful answers)
Experience led me to not get a gmail when the service opened, actually I stayed away of anything google (except the search engine while it provided relevant results) since it switched from being a search engine to an ads seller based on profiling of people.

Then being hired to uncover people's identity from their online activity in times before so called "social networks" were coined led me to never register on friendster, myspace or any other followers of this trend.
I failed to see the benefits of linkedin which still spams on a regular basis (if anyone knows how to stop receiving emails from linkedin...) and saw where facebook was headed in their attempt to be the new msn which for those who remember was microsoft attempt to destroy the internet by replacing it with a microsoft owned network which came bundled with windows 95.

I value freedom, therefore privacy, I refuse to be the product being sold and hate with a passion anything ads-based for I have experienced the web before ads which is the vector from which privacy invasion and surveillance came to be.

For some reason people started to offer money to display ads banner on websites but asked for at least a way to count and track clicks on those banners and It's been all downhill from there.
For those who read TAZ by Hakim Bey he put the end of the potential of the web to put the people in power around 1996 when ads came to the web and turned it into a surveillance tool.
I looked into this and it is illegal. Basically the law quite specifically says that while you can start a company, you cannot work for it, because your H1B explicitly prohibits income streams outside of the company that sponsored your visa. So if you start a company, you can only be a completely passive investor (meaning you would need a co-founder to act as managing partner/CEO). At first I thought the "income" part is a potential loophole, but then I asked around and was told that doing the work at no pay (under the guise of "volunteering") is also not allowed.

Trust me, starting a company is my plan when I get my Green Card. Until then, I'm trapped.
Yes it does, the point is "Go's ecosystem has developed really fast" but maybe a (hypothetical) better language developed in this day & age would've reached the same point in 2 years?
When using Go, I sometimes get the same feeling I get when using a well made drill, saw, or other physical tool. I would qualify it as "satisfying" -- the way it feels and how well it accomplishes the task it is designed for.

Like many well designed and well engineered things, I think familiarity and time cause that satisfying feeling to blend into the background and become the norm. You only realize the difference again when you have cause to use some other tool laying around (I just need to pound this nail I will just grab this random hammer laying here) and it "feels" different -- the weight is wrong or the grip is weird.

I by no means claim Go is perfect, but it seems to a great match for the kinds of things I tend to work on, and it "fits in my hand" rather well these days.
Unless one actually needs the corporate structure to distribute equity or hire, why start a company when you can just start a side project, and convert it into a company if it happens to take off?
"Real" engineering has the commonality with software engineering that many projects are quite similar to previous projects and are thus fairly predictable. (This is true also of safety factors; I read a good book on it not too long ago[0]).

A bog ordinary 12 story building will probably come in close to schedule and budget because it's a well-understood problem domain and there is a large pool of existing examples to draw data from.

But the Burj Khalifa required solving some genuinely novel problems, of the sort which only turn up at that scale. When a project involves substantial R&D, schedules become much less certain.

If my business is churning out Wordpress brochureware, I can give a pretty good estimate of how long a given job will take and how much it costs.

If on the other hand my customers require me to develop novel, publishable algorithms, then any estimate I give will need to have very wide bands.

[0] http://chester.id.au/2013/07/07/review-to-engineer-is-human-...
Even if the laptop & desktop PC markets are not growing as fast as in past years...it still is a very large market. There is far less incentive for most people to buy newer or higher-end hardware for the PC than smartphones.

Mobile devices (tablets, smartphones...and even chromebooks or lightweight notebooks) are competing against the sales of higher-end laptops or desktops.

I think there may be a resurgence of laptop sales (and desktop sales) after a few more years of intense innovation.
Chart: Privacy perceptions vary wildly by country
Well, Martin is more like a great PL designer and coding machine (most of the core scalac is his code) who also just happens to be a professor in his spare time (when he isn't working on Scala).
I had a software internship after my freshman year of college that lead in to working remotely while at school for the next 9 months.

I learned as much from that as I have from any internship, and it allowed me to optimize my time. I would go whole weeks without working, and then spend an entire weekend moving my project forward.

I completely agree that our generation will change the way we think about the structure of our "work week."
Any chance we'll see Android support Go officially in the next 2-3 years?
I was thinking of Charlie Brooker's version from Black Mirror.
"A better language might do better" is not a very interesting point to make.
Spectacular con job ? Are you joking ?

There was and continues to remain NOTHING that compares to the Java platform.
WARNING: Do not read this article if you haven't watched the end of Breaking Bad. (This post is safe though)

I, like the author, am very sensitive to spoilers and completely agree that people for whom spoilers ruin the enjoyment of a work should still be able to reap the benefits of an encyclopedia for the work's "metadata" -- information about the cast, running time, season and episode count, production, etc. However, the article, ironically and much to my horror (Edit: actually the author has a warning at the top of the page, which I missed), spoils the end of Breaking Bad, one of television's most popular shows, a show that is/was still on my to watch list.
I envision people standing there doing squats all day churning out tickets and selling them/asking for change.
So give the disabled people a free ride (which, YMMV, they should be getting anyway and actually are already in Germany)

As for the men-only part... enhance the system to not use a fixed number but have that number depend on the applicant's estimated gender, age, weight etc.

You could even gamify this, gain money from selling people's user statistics (ugh!) etc.
Like in most professions, there are multiple feedback loops of varying length. A lot of the accidental complexity in each profession arises from the shearing effect between the different loops.
Isn't that just a subset of Common Lisp? It doesn't support runtime compilation, right?
Taiwan’s ‘White Shirt Army,’ spurred by Facebook, takes on political parties
You've responded to the second part of: "able to respond to low-energy deposits (information) with high-energy reactions (e.g., movement)"

How does your comment about sparks address the alternatively stated requirement: "because it perceives more fuel in that direction"
Solaris used to market this concept quite a bit, they called it "Live Upgrade"
it's simply the case that my “personal” preferences correspond with reality and safety more closely than do theirs.

A priori, it would be better if they conformed to my expectations; anything less than awareness and deference to the last 40 years in PL research is uninteresting and unhelpful.

Amazing. Are you a solipsist or just incapable of perceiving outside of your little bubble? Do you even understand what the Kotlin devs are trying to accomplish? Hint, they're not trying to develop the next dependent type theory implementation on the JVM. They're implementing a language so that Java developers can be a bit more productive than they are now.
You are correct, but I would point out that this does not detract from the argument considering the time scale. Software engineering could be 150 years old, and still not have the close to the history of traditional engineering.
Their fund has a termination date. They don't want to be forced to sell on that date.
That's why I added at the top of the post a WARNING line! Actually, just the Wikipedia screenshots I added are enough to spoil, thus the reason of this article!
Ask HN: What are the pros and cons of joining Groupon's engineering team?
This would be my first full-time software engineering job.

I would rather be at one of more interesting 'startups'. But feel as if I need to improve a bit more before applying.

I've read they have a great engineering team. But is this still the case?

The plan would be to spend a year learning as much as possible on and off the job before moving on to something more interesting.

Thanks in advance for the helpful comments.
Heres something related that I found http://users.tpg.com.au/users/horsts/transpermia.html
Thanks for pointing that out. So "synthetic" is the wrong word. Maybe "industrially produced"?

Anyway, if it's made by bacteria, that suggests that it's enantiopure, so there goes one of my hypotheses about the cause of the problem. The ones I'm left with are:

- it's something else entirely that's making me ill

- the naturally-occurring MSG is bound up with other substances in some way that makes it safe for me to consume

I guess there's nothing for it other than for me to pick a weekend when I'm not busy, swallow a teaspoon of the stuff, and see what happens.
As Russian I want to share my first association:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5C-jcCWu31s

Westerners could try to understand it by watching entire movie:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kin-dza-dza

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I47CNxwlt9U

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eti9Qn4bZDg
Redditor's four rule plan to have a better and more productive life
My workplace is kind of a weird fusion between old and new; Our development side basically functions like a start-up, but development isn't our core business.

While our office does allow things like remote work, my manager is definitely has the mentality that if I'm not at work by 9AM sharp, I'm slacking off and unprepared. I've also caught a decent amount of flack for not always bring a pen and paper to meetings, as a lot of people seem dumbfounded that there's other ways of taking notes.

I guess my main point is that traditional businesses still have a ton of tradition and norms pressed against them by older generations. Sometimes I have to keep up an absurd charade to keep clients or managers happy, even though they provide no value, and sometimes even waste my time.
The millennial thing might be a distraction from the main point about the benefits of remote work. Some of the biggest taskmaster startup CEOs I've worked for were twenty somethings, whereas I have other friends in their 30's that have been working remotely for years. YMMV.

The best part about working remote is that it requires good teamwork because nothing will get done without solid communication, whereas colocated teams often skimp on process because they assume they'll make it up via adhoc meetings instead.
For Google, AdSense solved the problem of limited inventory, i.e. there were just that many searches for "digital camera" and AdSense provided an opportunity to boost the inventory of potential ad venues to people who don't actively search.

What value would a third-party ad placement program provide to Facebook, who's already sitting on trillion+ ad displays per day, and has no shortage of inventory?
Granted, most engineers are not exactly employing quantum physics to parking lot design. Most people, in general, work on gluing together pre-built parts that they do not understand all of the fundamentals of.
Fun idea. Also kudos for using OSX (or rather a Unix shell) as your reference. Although you should introduce the user to how to install cygwin given that Window's what most teens/people are using these days.

Why Cygwin (or a Unix shell in general)?

Sadly, we're no longer starting win 3.1 via DOS (which was a great way to learn your way around the command line as a child!). On Windows, the built-in CMD these days isn't nearly as powerful as it was (in relation to the rest of the OS) in the past, so having a proper shell around allows for so much more fun (and who wants to do Batch scripting anymore anyway... there're easier tools to automate the specific jobs for you on Windows these days)
That's actually a really good idea, automating data science. Currently it takes a lot of technical knowledge and time/skill. There are a lot of even everyday things where just putting your data into a spreadsheet and asking it for predictions would be useful.
The fact that the parallel is not exact does not mean that it is not illuminating.
It's been a while since youtube started restricting access to video that have been flagged. I don't remember when exactly but in 2009 there were already videos explaining how to circumvent this "feature": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUkrX7PZNok

Then there are the video you can't watch from third party websites and from certain regions and so on.

It is an improbable possibility that google will require to be logged in to watch youtube videos, but it's still could happen one day.
> If large scale civil engineering projects were not muddled by politics, contracts, and bidding wars, I imagine that wouldn't be the case.

And software development is never involved in any of that?

While I suspect software is more often plagued by problems I do not see that it is another kind of problems than other forms of engineering.
Looks like Go is succeeding more in the space where scripting languages like Python and Ruby are dominant and less in it's original intended space (systems programming). Rob Pike has written about it too. I wonder if they see this as an opportunity missed or unexpected boon.
You obviously have more concrete experience here than I do, but my instincts say there's a vast gap between "working on a side project you hope to eventually work on full-time" and "form an official registered company with the IRS".

If you go to the IRS / your state's department of commerce and say "hey, we JUST TODAY started a BRAND NEW COMPANY that happens to already have X million users and we want to incorporate", do you know if they'd snoop around and accuse you of having "started" it prior to talking to them?
Chrome Remote Desktop means I can access my Desktop computer anywhere in my house that I want to.
Waterfall software design would also probably work if it was not for changing requirements, limited budgets, optimistic estimate push, etc.
Facts About the Military Empire of Switzerland
> and therefore no one (meaning the author) does X

Quite the contrary. I (the author) have done a lot of asynchronous Java development using promises and other asynchronous constructs. The boilerplate is a cost that I'm willing to accept.

However, in my experience, working with other Java developers as well as consulting and providing support to quite a number of enterprise companies full of Java developers, I find time and time again that it is not a cost that other Java developers are willing to accept. You provide them with fluent async libraries, you educate them again and again why they shouldn't block on calls to remote clients, you provide sample code, and they ignore your advice because the code is too hard to read. I'm not saying that all Java developers are like this, I'm just saying that from my observations working across many enterprise companies, most are like this.
but then why do you "like" or "+1" the cat videos in the first place, if not to make it known to the world that you liked them?
Functional programming usually leans towards composition, and OO programming towards inheritance. "Hybrid" functional languages, like F# and Scala, allow you to use both styles, mixing them in whatever way is most useful for the particular problem you're solving; "pure" functional languages, like Haskell don't offer OO-style inheritance, since composition is a better fit for combining side-effect free ("pure") functions.

tl;dr -- Composition is to functional programming as inheritance is to OO programming.
I've seen a lot of talk about ECC on hacker news in the last few weeks and people seem really interested. My question is why? Are you guys about to roll out ECC as your crypto-solution?

Nobody really encrypts large amounts of data RSA/ECC, so the benefits of ECC aren't even THAT big since at best, these are used for a key agreement.

Aren't I better just using RSA/DH for my key agreement, algorithms that are safe that I fully understand, than ECC?
Do you plan to add macros or some other kind of compile-time metaprogramming? I think it's important to have that, since reflection is at odds with obfuscation and also introduces runtime overhead compared to compile-time code generation.
If one is going to compare a language to Go, I would go with C#, since it's only slightly older (2001 or so) and also backed by a major corporation.
I think we are rediscovering civilization :) Before long, people would realize - hey! cattle are even stronger than humans. We will have horse-drawn carriages in the near future. :)
> Also makes you wonder when you hear people talking about "bootstrapping" and you see them using new Macbook Airs...

It's a matter of how much you value general purpose capabilities. When you'll desperately need Photoshop for some unpredicted task, will you pay 5$ a month for Adobe cloud and just do it, or hassle to find a way around you ubuntu ? Won't you miss a specification sent by a client because LibreOffice parsed the docx formatting of a paragraph as striked through instead of highlighted? If you have four or five "crisis" like that while struggling to make a product, is the extra 900$ for a Macbook Air unjustified ?
Takes me about 10-20% longer to do trivial things in go than ruby, but the results are much faster and bigger refactorings are also much faster to complete (nice type system). The ability to really max your perf out in short amount of time is also delightful
One of the things I'm wary about, as someone who has a first-world standard of living, is that if my employers think my job can be done over the internet from 50 miles away, they think it can be done over the internet from 5,000 miles away in some country with lower costs of living.

Those of you who work remotely: How do you differentiate yourself, in the employment market, from people in asia, eastern europe etc?
> I can't even favourite nor like a video on YouTube anymore without being subjected to the whole carrousel of signing up for G+.

But you can bookmark. Or does that not make sense on a phone? My galaxy has been in my sock drawer for a couple years now, I forget.
Looks like I know what I'll be doing with my evening.
I assume you mean in terms of hype?

Java can do stuff and people use it which is fine. The con was that it was inherently portable and secure and can be used for client software. None of that is true. Today if someone told me that our new client interface was going to be java that person would be reassigned to a role where their awful judgement would not resurface.

Java today is basically the slower edition of C++ which isn't that amazing of a niche.
Disabled have a free ride in Moscow metro.
Elders have a free ride if they are registered in Moscow.
anonymous named?

We really need to refactor our terminology. :)
But if they don't have the capability to modify packets, wouldn't the original LinkedIn packet get through as well? Perhaps the OS might ignore it, but it seems like it would show up in some cases.
So, a dumb question, If a code unit is the minimal bit length for encoding a character: why would you need more than one to encode a character?

Is this just a way of saying "variable bit length character encoding?"
The Xerox Alto had a start button back twenty years before Windows 95!

http://toastytech.com/guis/altoboot1.gif
Highly recommend everyone gets a copy of Kin-dza-dza (with subtitles, if necessary) and watch it. Very quirky and amusing sci-fi. Apocalyptic/alien exploration crossed with Les Visiteurs.