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Title: Hi! I've noticed that I've stopped rapidly expanding my knowledge about the world. I hang out on the same websites(HN, reddit), learn the same topics(programming plus couple of hobbies), hear the same ideas.<p>Nothing has dramatically "expanded my mind" or changed my opinion in the past couple of years. I try to read a lot but it seems like all the books I read are on the same topics, and just repeat the same ideas.<p>How do I fight that?<p>I think there's a lot of great areas of knowledge and new ideas in the world that I have no idea about, but I don't know how to find them.<p>I feel like I've explored pretty much everything that I care to know about the world, and all that is left is to go deeper into the areas I'm already aware of(science, tech, etc), but of course it's probably not true.<p>What do you do about that? And what are some things that you've discovered in the past 5 years that you weren't aware of before?
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Title: Email is probably one of the the oldest (and most used) services of all time. Email killed the Fax and Letter Writing in general. Today, it is the de facto communication tool for businesses.<p>In recent years were born hundreds of services that have tried to make email less painful.<p>In your opinion what will be the future for email?
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Title: 2 people I know and I are in the process of looking for new jobs.<p>My first friend is almost 20 years my junior, but a fantastic coder. He is someone that every company would want. He's smart, curious, has initiative, and has a lot of wisdom behind the way he codes despite his youth. He's fluent in Java, Scala, Python and has built everything from simple web services to entire parsing engines and he does it because he's genuinely interested in the work he does.<p>My other friend is 10 years my junior, but also great. He's an official Apache committer, and has worked on some really great projects for some well-known companies. He also has worked on a lot of side projects that got picked up by his employers in various forms and he works his butt off every day.<p>My two friends are people that any company would be lucky to have. But all three of us are very reluctant to start interviewing because we all know how much interviewing really really SUCKS. Basically we are forced to write whiteboard code for 4-5 hours on topics that we may or may not know. If we don't know it, we're fucked and we might as well give up because everyone appears to want perfection. But the range of questions we can be asked on an interview is so wide, you can't expect someone to know EVERYTHING.<p>It seems to me that interviewing in Silicon Valley is really broken if my friends are reluctant to start interviewing, despite how great they are and how much of an asset they would be to ANY company.<p>Is there a site besides glassdoor that details or rates a company's interview process? It would be sad if we all end up choosing companies based on their interview process, but it's a lot better than wasting our time and PTO days going for interviews and then getting blown out of the water because one interviewer wants us to code a particular dynamic programming question the way they are picturing in their head.
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Title: It's Mother's Day! Remember to look up from your monitor for a bit and thank the person who conceived and gestated you, raised you, or both.
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Title: I'm at a dead end career-wise and the job market I'm at does not offer any better alternatives than my current job. The pay is great but I find the work I do pretty depressing compared to the stuff I know I'm capable of. I've tried to demonstrate and explain the value I could be bring if we were to do things differently but I've lost hope that I'll ever get through to anyone.<p>HN has always been inspiring regarding starting your own business and although that is something I want to try, I'm more curious right now about the feasibility of finding a job outside the country. The question is, I don't know if that's even possible.<p>How would a company even determine if I'm worth hiring and going through all the work to get me a work visa if they can't even interview me in person? Would they tolerate my crappy internet if they try to interview me over Skype? What if the position was for something mid-to-entry level and not some key position. Would it still be worth the hassle to get me on board?<p>I actually got in touch with German company who had a job posting for JS developer and asked them this very question and their reply was encouraging[0] but I wondered if I could get more input from other sources.<p>I guess I ask cause I keep hearing complaints about the lack of talent and it makes me wonder if that's a possible opportunity for me.<p>So what are your thoughts?<p>[0] Sociomantic Labs response to my question[1] "For our team in Berlin we often hire outside of the EU and have lots of experience with this. We have 35 different nationalities in the office and always welcome a new team member outside of the EU."
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Title: I am always intrigued by people who talk smart. This could be James Bond, lead actor in 'the spy' movie ( forgot his name) or Kevin Spacey in HoC and many more...
My current boss has somewhat similar quality about talking.
All these people speak slowly and clearly, feels like they are doing calculated talk but always make lasting impression. Its not about winning or losing argument rather making the point, make other party
think twice before they utter any word.<p>What can i do to aquire smart talk skill?
Any books , podcasts I can listen to?<p>This skill is largely possessed by spys, diplomats,
political leaders, executives but I cant find enough resouces to attain such skill and master it.<p>As always, obligatory thanks in advance for all responses!
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Title: Go 1.4 starts to use comments as directives. I think that is a realy bad path to go on the long run. You see its beginnings in following 3 examples:<p># used to set a canonical import path for a package:
//import "foo"<p># used to generate code:
//go:generate bar<p># used to document the result of a example function:
//Output: foo<p>Comments should not be directives. Comments are free form, they do not have a syntax (as demonstrated in the examples). Comments are for humans - programms should ignore them or threat them as - comments!<p>It is my optinion that if Go needs some kind of annotation, than there should be a new syntax for it.<p>I would propose that directives to the tool chain will be marked with<p>#TAG: DIRECTIVE<p>a tool would be able to register the TAG with the go build environment. If a TAG is found in the code - the tool is called to do what ever needs to be done.
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Title: One could probably find a bunch through a Google search but I couldn't name a startup in the law space off the top of my head. I also don't remember ever seeing one making headlines on HN.<p>With all the enormous fees and the insane amount of paperwork I'd think it's a space that's screaming for new ideas but from an outside perspective it doesn't seem like there has been much innovation since MS Word... Has anyone got some insight?
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Title: I think its good having this kind of thread at some period of time.<p>Previous posts:<p>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8561842
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7957989
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Title: Wordpress released version 4.2.2 a week ago with some important security updates. As someone who owns multiple WP installs, it is critical for me to get these updated asap. I am sure there are quite a few members on HN that fall in this category too.
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Title: I am a long time lurker here, though not a programmer, but a system admin and professional manager, open source enthusiast. A trend which I am seeing is that websites may use latest programming paradigms and designs to make them beautiful and stunning, yet they are so engrossed in javascript and 'awesome' interactive graphics and images, that a website cannot be viewed without javascript and images disabled. To save bandwidth or during slow wireless speeds, it is desirable to run browser without javascript and images disabled but websites don't have any kind of 'text only' versions for such use. In an ideal situation, every website should have 'text only' version which can be opened in CLI browser like Links. As an example, this startup http://qfusionlabs.com/ website looks like blowing a bubble without javascript and images disabled.
Edit: I am glad that Hacker News works perfectly without javascript and images disabled! Why can't all of discrete websites be like this.
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Title: As you might have known through news, my country Nepal has suffered a major natural disaster. I'd like to request hacker news community of readers, contributors to please help us !<p>Would really appreciate your help !<p>Link for contribution to the Prime Minister Relief Fund: http://pmrelief.opmcm.gov.np/<p>Please feel free to use your choice of Charity like UNICEF, UNHCR etc
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Title: As the title says, I want to design an interface that my blind mom can use. I tried JAWS, but as an old woman she finds it too complex. I fear the same will happen with a non-custom emacspeak.<p>I just need to patch together something that reads web pages in Spanish, books, and maybe e-mail. That's it. Has any of you done something similar?
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Title: I got $100k in AWS Credits, with a 1-year time limit. I built a scrapy-powered image crawler that crawls over 300 art sites and finds the most popular posts with clustering algorithms and perceptual hashing (www.arthunted.com), but in the end it takes at most a few hours of a high CPU-instance per day to scrape and process (at most several dollars per day). At a year it'd barely make a dent.<p>I'm looking to build something that would make a splash, that would otherwise be constrained by budget, and that would have long-term self-sustaining value after the $100k runs out.<p>So no arbitrage, reselling, bitcoin mining, etc.<p>What type of project would require high-storage or high-amounts of processing? What can I build that would only be possible with that much money in infrastructure or compute power? Preferably the monthly budget would be about $10-20k.<p>Also I have a 40-instance limit on EC2 (which I may be able to raise).
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Title: Some of my friends are Reddit addicts. As a Software Developer, how do you use Reddit?
What subreddits do you check? Any other useful tips?
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Title: We're in the early stages of planning a hackathon with Heavybit (http://www.heavybit.com/) but haven't had much experience running an event like this.<p>What do you think makes a successful and enjoyable hackathon? Is it the prizes? Is it the theme? Would you prefer it on a weekend or a weekday? Anything else, big or little, that makes for a good hackathon?
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Title: I propose a "reason for down vote" feature to be added to hn.<p>It should be optional.<p>The reason won't be part of the discussion thread. A small button close to the comment can link to the for the down vote.<p>Why add this?<p>People who get down voted (esp noobs to the community) have no idea why they were. As a result can't figure out how to change our avoid such in the future.<p>Also trigger happy down voters might get to think carefully about WHY before they do.<p>Punishment without reason in real life is known as wickedness, cruelty, bullying...<p>This would be better for not just community but for the internet as a whole.
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Title: I think I just down-voted someone by mistake, I think. It was by mistake - a misclick. I didn't mean to downvote or upvote the entry. Surely I'm not the only one.<p>It'd be nice if voting was un-doable.
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Title: Have you read a comment here that influenced you significantly, had some great ideas in it, was memorable for some reason, or was just fun to read? Share the link here.
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Title: I've mulled over this question for some time now. I've kept watching startups (both funded, and bootstrapped) that never generate a profit (not even close), don't get much traction, and then get acquired by some bigger name company. The founders celebrate the success of their venture and add it to their successful entrepreneurial resume.<p>But does it really count as a success? Is there something about economics that I'm missing? Is it only about how much money you get back into your (or your investors) pockets? Does the term acquisition actually mean more than "rescued from drowning"?<p>I don't want this to come off sounding negative. I just want to understand what I'm not getting. Thanks in advance.
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Title: I saw this highly-upvoted submission earlier today and was blown away; in which the author explains sophisticated data mining techniques in ways even a non-technical individual could understand on first read.<p>http://rayli.net/blog/data/top-10-data-mining-algorithms-in-plain-english/<p>I never understood k-means before nor cared to. I don't see posts of this quality very often, that make complex topics accessible and interesting to outsiders of that field.<p>There are a lot of very skilled people here on HN, and I want to ask you all to think, "what do I understand very well that many others don't?"<p>Even if it's just a really clear explanation of a single algorithm, security technique, hardware component, equation, biological phenomena, what have you-- share your knowledge!<p>And if English is not your first language, please don't let that stop you! I have read many articles with imperfect English that were nonetheless EXTREMELY interesting and informative. And there are also many of us willing to translate articles if necessary and worthwhile!
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Title: I want to do some contracting the next few months but I'll be honest, I have no idea how to go about starting. How do people find their first client?
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Title: I'm a serial bootstrapper/software engineer that has been consulting remotely for clients in between trying to start different lifestyle businesses.<p>I'm living in a small town away from any tech hubs, I feel like I have access to the best of whats happening in tech via the web but sometimes feel like my career is being hurt by not being in sillicon valley.<p>The lifestyle is laid back here, and things are cheap. I'm not in any kind of rat race. But am I just staying in my comfort zone and missing out?<p>I would be very interested to hear thoughts of devs who have lived in sillicon valley and whether or not they find it worth the high rents.
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Title: Hey all,<p>The recent HN post on the "$10 super computer" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9575683) was actually very timely, as I am working at a client in the financial space who is evaluating various IaaS providers (up until now they have been using a small on-site data center). There is plenty information out there about which services are available, but less about why one should choose any particular provider over another. I'm curious to hear about the experiences of the HN community on this, and especially from those who have used several different services. What sealed the deal for you? Was it the price? Ecosystem of services? Ease of use? Was it the only thing available at the time? etc. Would also love to hear about any other factors one should take into account when making this kind of decision.
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Title: With Microsoft's improvements in how they do business and greatly improved understanding of open source I'm really starting to think more seriously about heading back into their technology realm for some years and see how it works out.
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Title: So I have a software company that is generating a good amount of cash. I'd like to buy another small software company and (ideally) optimize it and make some more money.<p>Problem - most of the sites, like flippa, have crap businesses for sale. Is there a real place that one can find $50k - $500k software businesses for sale? Side projects that people make money from but don't have the time for?
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Title: I had to implement a chat server for a project I'm working on and since I had never done this before, I used Slack's documentation as a roadmap and ended up re-implementing pretty much their whole API (I went a bit overboard I know).<p>I would like to open source this code but was wondering if it was legal for me to do so or would I be infringing on Slack's IP.
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Title: Worth remembering and reading!
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Title: It seems like with all this amazing stuff going on in the world (surging web 2.0 valuations, people becoming instantly rich & famous in tech, booming stocks & home prices, new discoveries in physics, twitter debates, viral content and insta-fame) does it ever feel like you're missing out, like there is a big party going and you're watching from the sidelines.
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Title: I read a lot about remote work - either sourcing from Hacker News and other media. However, what I see in practice, at least in Benelux Area, is that companies are far more interest in on-site positions than remote positions.<p>Why is it so? If the advantages of remote working are so clear - why companies still hire only on-site positions?
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Title: I am from Brazil, that is having a economic hard time right now, also I don't have a regular income for almost an year (and my last real job was many years ago).<p>I got some small freelancing work to do, I was going to deliver a milestone tomorrow, I was using my startup old workstation that was left on my house (after the startup ran out of rent money) to work on that, but the HDD failed about one hour and a half ago, and the diagnostic tools that come with OSX say that it is impossible to salvage.<p>I am broke, almost literally, in Brazil you cannot ask for bankruptcy as individual, if I could I would ask, I am in debt, have no income and I am struggling to pay rent and food.<p>And the work I had to do requires an OSX, I also own a laptop in its last throes (several parts of it already failed or are randomly working only sometimes) but it is one of those that came with a stupid bios locked to Windows 8, I tried very hard to install Linux on it and failed, I doubt I can install OSX (Hackintosh) on it.<p>Also my personal health is failing too and interfering with my work.<p>I am very, very unsure of what to do now... I feel like if I was cornered and physically threatened, if I fail to deliver tomorrow probably the contract will be cancelled (my health already me deliver some earlier milestones late and the client is already upset with me), but even if I DO deliver this milestone and the next ones, the payment won't be enough to repay my most urgent debts (like late rent payments) and replace the failing laptop, much less an OSX machine (beside being already expensive in US, in Brazil they are outrageously expensive, because of excessive taxation and currently unfavourable currency exchange rate)
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Title: I am sure many of us would like to know about what happens when you lose a software job. Is it easy to find another job? How long did you stay unemployed? What technologies were you using when you were fired? Did you have to learn new stuff to get hired again? When did this happen? Dot Com burst? 2008? Would like to hear from experienced devs.
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Title: I recently interviewed for a company called Rxdata.net here in New York.<p>The task was a data ETL problem transforming natural language text into specific parts of data. I opted to use pyparse to create a working recursive descent parser to pick out the relevant bits of text.<p>At this point I was wary of completing the parser for all cases found in the database table, so I decided to build it only for a few base cases which I threw in to a unit test. I reasoned I could still demonstrate my skills without giving them much free work.<p>The solution worked well, and I submitted it to Joe, the CTO, for review. A few hours later Joe contacted me complaining that the code crapped out after trying to run the code against their database table. He then offered me a github branch to continue work on the problem. I sent them the nicest e-mail I could muster explaining that I felt the code adequately demonstrated my skills and that the error is due to the parser not handling all cases of the problem text.<p>Joe's responded with "I am only trying to evaluate your work, not on just how the code looks, which is clean and well organized, but that it works correctly on the data as well. I asked advice since the program crashed on the 5th package, which didn't give me enough data to verify, and I wasn't sure if it was just a system-related issue or something quickly fixed."<p>Lastly I responded with "Sorry for any confusion, I was just giving you a sample of my work. The system error you mentioned is a result of the code being a sample. The cases that do work are found in the test."<p>Naturally they haven't gotten back to me, even though my code more than adequately met the challenge. Perhaps Joe the CTO did not understand that the other cases would be trivial to implement. In that case, perhaps I've dodged a bullet. A CTO should know better.<p>I'm wondering if anyone else has had similar experiences. How did you handle it? How did the interviewers respond?
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Title: I'm a PHP developer with about 3-4 years experience , living and working in UK,
About 2 months ago i had to move to Manchester, because of a personal situation, so i had to leave my job ( which i regret now ), I was the lead developer of a high exposure web application and i enjoyed what i was doing over there , architecture design, coding, testing, monitoring ..., I was really motivated, keep myself updated everyday, learning new things everyweek and use them in projects right away.
Anyway when i moved to Manchester i had many job offers ( hard to find developers in UK i guess ) but i accepted a digital agency offer ( without actually knowing what i have to do everyday ) , Salary is about average ( £26k ) but i don't like my job at all, creating pointless websites for clients, jumping from Magento to Wordpress to Drupal and now, I'm not only developer, I have to do some designing ( which isn't my thing ) and integrate them into CMSes.
I'm doing the junior developer's job now and its hurting me, I feel pain everyday i want to go to work, and i just want to kill time to finish the day and count the days waiting for weekend to come ...
I know I should have done more research before joining this company, its my own fault to put myself in misery, I feel bad for this guys , They have probably spent a few grand for recruitment agencies fees to hire me and if I want to leave them and it takes them another month or two to find a replacement for me.
I have good amount of job offers , But I don't know what do to now, I hate my job and I feel bad to leave them, What would you do if you were in my place ?
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Title: I recently stumbled across a link in another thread to "Economics in One Lesson" and thought it was incredibly interesting.
https://mises.org/sites/default/files/Economics%20in%20One%20Lesson_2.pdf<p>What are some other interesting reads—whether PDF, website, doc, etc—that are freely available?<p>One of my favorites that I find thought-provoking is the "Procedural Content Generation in Games" book (http://pcgbook.com/).
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Title: Would you? Have we reached a saturation point for bootcamp graduates? Has the bootcamp experiment failed, or succeeded?<p>About two years ago, the concept of a dev bootcamp was still relatively uncommon, with a competitive admissions process and a good reputation. Now, it seems like there's more than I can keep track of. I also want to know if graduates who don't have much luck finding work after their program just decide to do something else?
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Title: I have been trying to see if I could find any Google Chrome extension that were either profitable or at least created revenue so far without any luck.
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Title: I am a Python enthusiast, picked up the language a year and a half ago by self tutoring and also took the Udacity Introduction to Data Science course with a keystone Project.I also picked up learning the Flask Web framework, in order to deliver web applications using Python.
I am really struggling with getting my foot through the door, as there is the typical catch 22 scenario, "We can't take you on board as you do not have Production centric experience" Well i need to work on a real project, in order to gain Production experience. I'm even willing to work Pro bono, in order to gain experience under my belt. Are there any suggestions as to how to break through? anybody out there with a project needing help?
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Title: I just left my engineering job at a medium-large employer to join an 18-person startup. I am set to start the new gig late next week.<p>I found a marble-sized lump under my armpit a few days ago. I quickly got it checked out, and the preliminary report just came back that it's probably cancerous.<p>What the hell should I do?<p>I'm 25, and otherwise healthy, so was not expecting this.<p>I really care about this new team and was excited to work with them. I feel horrible about joining a young business as an albatross instead of an asset.<p>I left my old job on good terms but have no idea how they could justify re-hiring an employee who left and may not be productive / able to work.<p>If I start at my new job I'm afraid I will endanger the business and raise everybody's premiums. I think they have a fairly generic group plan.<p>If I don't start my new job, how will I support myself?<p>My fiancé also works at a small startup so if I joined her insurance the same issues would apply.<p>I think I can still purchase my old insurance through Cobra, but I don't know how long that will last.<p>Thanks.
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Title: I was wondering if there are "forgotten" servers out there. No longer doing anything, but still up and running.<p>Is there any way to even know?
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Title: I'm working on a spam control plugin and I need to test it. Ideally, I need hundreds to thousands of emails, from different senders, delivered to my test email account.<p>Are there any tools or methods available for this? I haven't found anything, I imagine because such a tool would be rife for abuse.
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Title: Most of the courses I've looked at for learning css are either too theoretical or aimed at beginners.<p>I feel as though I have a decent theoretical understanding of CSS but I want something that is just drilling home stuff like creating great looking buttons, panels and input fields.<p>Any suggestions are much appreciated!
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Title: Back in 2011, an HN user volunteered to consolidate the scattered "who is hiring" posts that were popping up and post one automatically at the start of each month. This not only worked well, it became an HN institution.<p>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2391828<p>Four years of yeoman service later, our mysterious benefactor has gotten a lot busier and arranged with us to take over the account. I asked if we could thank him publicly and he said sure. So thank you, Matthew Walsh-Cloonagh! You've helped a ton of people get jobs, and made Hacker News a better place. We're all much obliged.<p>Any thoughts about "Who is Hiring" and related threads that any of you want to share? Fire away.<p>Edits, based on the discussion below:<p>I think we'll change the time of these postings to 11 AM Eastern time. This balances east and west a bit better, and has the practical advantage that when something goes haywire with one of them, the problem won't languish for hours before we fix it. (If anybody posts before 11 AM Eastern tomorrow morning wondering where the thread is, or tries to make one, please refer them here.)<p>We'll also make the posts show up on the first weekday of each month, instead of each day—but that won't make a difference until August.<p>Finally, we'll make it more explicit that to post a job in the thread you need to personally be part of the hiring company, not a recruiter or third party.
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553
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Title: Please lead with either SEEKING WORK or SEEKING FREELANCER, your location and whether remote work is a possibility.
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Title: Please lead with the location of the position and include the keywords
REMOTE, INTERNS and/or VISA when the corresponding sort of candidate is welcome.
When remote work is not an option, please include ONSITE.<p>Feel free to post any job that may interest HN readers from executive assistant to
machine learning expert to CTO.<p>Please only post if you personally are part of the hiring company, and
don't post recruiting firms or job boards.
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429
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Title: Share your information if you are looking for work. Please use this format<p><pre><code> Location:
Remote:
Willing to relocate:
Technologies:
Résumé/CV:
Email:</code></pre>
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Title: A bit of background, I built the app because I was running an old Nexus One and the Facebook app was too large to install alongside my other "essential" apps (15mb at the time, its now 38mb!). So I spend about an hour or so and cobbled together the app.<p>For almost a year and a half it had less than 1000 installs and then in Feb this year it started to rapidly gain installs. It is currently sitting at 241,000 installs (with 55,000 active users).<p>I figure I should take advantage of this and figure out some way to monetize the app.<p>Unfortunately the app is all about size and trust (as it sandboxes the FB web app) so most of the ideas I've come up with don't seem to be in the spirit of the app.<p>Some of the ideas I've had:<p>* Put in ads and add an in-app purchase to turn them off
* Put in a "donation" in-app purchase
* Add support for other social networks but only enable them after an in-app purchase<p>The app also has some pretty interesting demographics. Most users are from non-English speaking countries: Turkey 18.14%, Philippines 8.38%, Mexico 7.46%, Morocco 6.52%, India 5.27%, Indonesia 4.10%, Brazil 4.04%, Thailand 2.72%, United States 2.59%, Colombia 2.44%, Others 38.33%<p>The app is called "Social Lite" see here for more info https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rabidgremlin.sociallite<p>My current go-forward plan is put a survey in place and poll the users on what they want and what they would pay for
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Title: I am currently working for a big company doing somewhat very technical work as a developer,and currently trying to formulate a strategy for building a reasonable amount of wealth that would allow me retire early ( and probably return to school yey:) ).<p>It seems that all the success story are related to start-ups;Looking at my situation, i am not sure that this would be my best options. First my area of interrest/expertise (compiler and dev tools) doesn't seems amendable for a start-up; and beside the somewhat rigid structure,low pay and boring meetings i still enjoy the "big company" setting : working with so many smart people with so much experience really turn every interaction into a teachable moment and has allowed me ( and continue to do so) to grow as dev at an incredible rate.<p>I am sure other dev/people are facing the same dilemma, so it would be nice to hear from other people :<p>1 - are start-up the only way to significant wealth for a dev(while still doing dev work) ?
2 - i read on-line stories about dev making north of 1 million a years; is that really possible ?
3 - what are the other way to wealth for a dev (investing, consulting, part time startup etc...) ?
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Title: Hi, I usually read about devs making 110-130k in the West Coast, and generally less in other states... But I'm curious about how much on average do they end up saving at the end of the month.<p>I know it differs a lot depending on the lifestyle, but how much is the norm? (For a single, with no kids, to simplify things)
A simple breakdown of the main expenses would be greatly appreciated, i.e. taxes, rent, food, health, services, leisure, rest=savings.<p>What percentage of your salary do you end up saving? Thanks!<p>(Answers from other countries would be interesting too, for a richer comparison!!)
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40
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Title: I'm a self taught full stack developer who's flunk out of high school and did not have the chance to study "advanced" maths such as calculus, statistics and probability.<p>In 10 years of experience I never felt the need for any of it, and a recent contract requires, for a simple feature, the basic knowledge of derivatives (given a polynomial curve, graph it in a dotted line when it falls off from the local maxima).<p>I've started catching up on courses on Khan Academy and having a great time. My question is, which math (or physics) knowledge have you actually used in your programming career, and think it's mandatory for software engineers to know?<p>PS: If anyone from Khan Academy is reading this, thank you for your project, you're doing a great service for humanity.
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59
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Title: Last week, 1 or more parties hacked my Equifax account, set up an account at TransUnion, and ran up charges on a cloned credit card in Brazil. To resolve this, I’ve interacted with the FTC, police, card issuer, and credit bureaus. Here’s what I learned about the credit bureaus:<p>1. Equifax has no escalation path for security breaches on weekends.
Even if a breach potentially affects millions of accounts, there is no way to report it until Monday.<p>2. TransUnion has no ability to investigate hacks or security breaches.
They can only generate a reference number for the customer to file a police report with. (Note that their top product category is Credit Management & Protection.)<p>3. TransUnion and Equifax do not cooperate on investigations.
Despite evidence that suggests the same hacker was at work, neither credit union indicated any interest in even talking with the other.<p>4. If your TransUnion account is hacked, you will lose online access for life.
You will never be able to download your credit report from TransUnion again, and can only get it via mail. For life.<p>5. Experian displays your mother’s maiden name on your profile page.
There is no way to hide this, obscure your mother’s maiden name, or select a different security question.<p>6. Experian agents cannot view support ticket numbers or track tickets.
Only a supervisor can access ticket numbers. Of course, that means you need to talk to a supervisor…<p>7. Equifax and Experian are extremely reluctant to generate a ticket or escalate to a supervisor.
At Equifax, I requested to speak to a supervisor 7 times. At Experian, the agent awkwardly tried to resolve a CloudFlare server error by asking if I was using Internet Explorer. It felt endemic. I did not sense this at TransUnion.<p>This experience has eroded my naive confidence in the consumer credit system. The burden for prevention, monitoring, and remediation is borne almost entirely by the customer. This doesn’t seem right.
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114
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Title: I'm at a crossroad. I either kill myself or I find some kind of way out of here. No matter the choice, thank you HN. So far, you've been the cornerstone of my life.
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245
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Title: When I got into the web development business there were no college degrees for it, just CS at the time. Times have changed and if someone were to get into the business right now, straight out of high school, with a strong portfolio of work would they have a better shot at a job than a college grad with only the examples that they did in class?
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45
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Title: I want to find the absolutely crazy-to-grasp book of all times.<p>Most articles related to this topic suggest something like the Fight Club. Even though, there are some good twists to the story, I feel like my mind could be blown away way more than that.<p>Needless to say that we are talking about a book for the HN audience.
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122
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Title: I haven’t seen a great solution to this problem - have you? Many thought leaders have weighed in from Drew Houston who summarizes the dilemma well (http://www.quora.com/How-do-I-find-good-technical-co-founders) to Jason Freedman who gives great advice from the perspective of a non-technical person (http://humbledmba.com/please-please-please-stop-asking-how-to-find). The reality is that entrepreneurs come from a range of backgrounds across all sectors and finding someone you know well, trust, and is fully committed launching a biz (especially an unproven concept) is really hard. The advice many people offer is to use your network, go to meetups, and try online tools like http://founderdating.com. I have tried this, but frankly it’s not a quick process unless you are willing to pick someone you barely know (this works sometimes a la Kevin Rose).<p>So what’s the solution? My process is to put myself around the “type” of people I need to meet (this could be technical, a specific skill, etc). For me, I want to meet a CTO. However, instead of rushing the process I am simply looking to meet people as determined to build a company as myself. If they are technical or non-technical it doesn’t matter, but I believe opportunities will come from simply getting to know like-minded people. In the meantime I am following this approach:
1) Learning to code (at least the basics)
2) Do as much as possible to validate your idea (talk to customers/users, presell, etc)
3) Find a technical adviser that you trust (help with finding the right person)
4) Paying someone to prototype ($1-5K isn’t a lot to test a business)
5) Get to know potential Co-Founders<p>What do you think of this approach? Would a private facebook group an interesting ice-breaker to show what you are working on, get feedback, and make friendships - with the goal of helping and getting to people rather than solely finding a co-founder. If so, I made this: https://www.facebook.com/groups/842762052466224/. What's your solution to this problem? I am open to any and all ideas.
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45
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Title: To clarify more the question:
How do you see the programmer in the future?
Some people are talking about scientific programmer. This seems like a trend now. But is is the only perspective?
For example I'm thinking what will a programmer do in a world where there are a lot of AIs and some of them are writing code already?
Or what does a programmer need to know/to be in order to program AIs?
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40
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Title: Zenefits sent us an email on Friday which seems to have attracted no attention.<p><i>When you originally set up Zenefits, you created an Zenefits admin user in your ADP RUN payroll account to let Zenefits manage your payroll—set up new employees, manage deductions, remove departing employees—on your behalf.<p>Yesterday, without your permission, ADP systematically deactivated these accounts—accounts that you set up, in your payroll system, to allow Zenefits to work on your behalf. The reason for this is that ADP believes it can one day build software to compete with Zenefits, and in the meantime they would like to do anything they can to impede Zenefits.<p>ADP is claiming that they are taking this action for "security" reasons—but this is clearly not true. For years, ADP has let customers add third parties—a bookkeeper or an accounting firm, for example—to their payroll system to manage payroll on a company's behalf. What Zenefits does is no different. In fact, even today, ADP will let you add a third-party administrator to your payroll system unless they have a Zenefits.com email address.</i><p>To avoid the Intuit upsell quagmire, we're hoping to switch to ZenPayroll for Q3. But the Zenefits automatic quote builder doesn't seem to know that ZenPayroll is nationwide now, so down the support rabbit hole I go. Payroll sucks.
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306
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Title: I am making a good living with a niche skillset. It's a fairly old technology and there's less and less work in that area.
I'd like to move to another technology stack - it's not too hard for me - different keywords etc and I've actually done some hobby projects already.
I think if I applied for a job I'd get rejected as there is no track record of being able to work with that tech.
Best get case I could probably apply for a junior job which would pay well below my current. It will probably take years to get to the same level of pay, assuming that particualr tech stack takes off.
Is there any eascape from this?
Are there any companies that would be willing to hire a grumpy 30-something and recognise his/her experience as something reusable?
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197
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Title: Disclosure: I work at a competitor to both - posting this because I find it generally interesting from a data security and integrations perspective.
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175
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Title: Most notable is /r/fatpeoplehate, which had become an extremely popular "fat-shaming" community.
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256
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Title: When working on a project consisting of a large number of microservices, what solutions do you employ for controlling the composition of specific versions of each microservice.<p>I currently use git submodules to track the application as a whole, with commit refs for each "green" version of microservice. This "master" repository is then tested with consumer driven contracts for each of the referenced submodules, with subsequent "green" masters for deployment to staging.<p>This submodule approach requires a lot of discipline for small teams, and on more than one occasion we have encountered the usual submodule concerns. I'm concerned that this will only become more problematic as the team grows.<p>What are your thoughts for a replacement process?
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75
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Title: 'git inject' is a git alias (see code at the bottom). It is similar to 'git
commit --amend', but it allows you to 'inject' your changes into commits further back in history (using 'rebase').<p>If you're as pedantic as I am about the git history you're about to push into master (as far as I can control it, I strive to keep each commit conceptually coherent), you'll often come to a situation where you have a modification that really belongs in an older commit. It takes a few git commands to stash other changes away, commit the modification, then interactively rebase over some previous commit, move your commit into place, change to 'fixup', save, exit, and then unstash whatever else you had lying around. Not fun.<p>Here's how 'git inject' makes it fun:<p>>> git inject <commit-ref> <patch-ref><p>>> git inject HEAD^^ -a # inject all work-dir modifications<p>>> git inject a28kd8 -p # interactively select patches to inject<p>>> git inject HEAD~4 file1 # inject the modifications in file1<p>Just put this into your .gitconfig under 'aliases':<p>inject = "!f() { set -e; HASH=`git show $1 --pretty=format:\"%H\" -q`; shift; git commit -m \"fixup! $HASH\" $*; [ -n \"$(git diff-files)\" ] && git stash && DIRTY=1; git rebase $HASH^^ -i --autosquash; [ -n \"$DIRTY\" ] && git stash pop;}; f"
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71
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Title: I'm just gathering opinions, do you think we are in a tech bubble, and why?
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42
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Title: In 2007, many people knew housing prices were out of control. But they didn't fully realize how exposed the financial system was and that banks would fail on a massive scale.<p>Today, there is a debate about a startup-SV-VC bubble but I don't have a sense for who is exposed and what the greater ramifications would be, if any.
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52
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Title: I don't want a dedicated client, I want to go back to the old ways of modem to modem over VT100 links and chatting that way. How can I ssh to another machine, or they to me, and we run a cli app that allows us to chat, something basic like `wall` I think would work, but I have never been able to get that to work.<p>I am on Mac OS X, and ideally I could do this without installing other software, using something built in.
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327
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Title: I think the new MacBook is a super beautiful computer and would love to get one. My only tradeoff is if its good for running Xcode.
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41
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Title: I remember reading an article a year or so ago about (the NSA) identifying users based on how they write: vocabulary, spelling mistakes, grammar, dialect, and so on.<p>This is interesting to me because it is extremely difficult to change the vocabulary I use in writing and speaking. Being able to estimate the amount of similarity between two pieces of text would be useful.<p>The closest I can think of right now would be the proprietary algorithms used to check for plagiarism (for schools and universities, for instance).<p>Are there any publicly available algorithms for this? Where can I go to learn more? (Academic journals?) Am I just DDGing the wrong search terms?
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92
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Title: I think it's time for a follow up / new thread. Previous threads:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8629919
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4467603
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2567487
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66
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Title: I studied math in college. I've been working in Tech ever since. I am always careful not to argue for/against something unless I am absolutely certain.<p>Most of my career has been spent in developing software for Sales Ops departments of large companies and start ups. Personalities in this space (sales) tend to be the boisterous, loud, outspoken type. Even when they aren't sure, they speak so assertively that they easily sway other people's opinion, sometimes even my own.<p>Often, however, it turns out they were wrong, and without coming across as boastful that I was actually right or at least on the right path.<p>The problem is I never know this at the moment the conversation is taking place, it's usually after I take more time to think about it. How do you deal with this? Do I just have to turn it up a notch? Do I call them out and tell them to revisit the subject?<p>Curious to see how other engineer/tech peeps deal with this situation.
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73
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Title: I've been a long-time user of KeePass. I inspected its 2.x .NET source code today and quickly noticed the following issues which I find quite concerning:<p>The kdbx database is encrypted with AES in CBC/PKCS7 mode <i>without</i> proper authentication. HMAC is nowhere to be found in the code, other than when used for sha1-totp. There are SHA2 hashes that seem to guard the integrity of ciphertext, while these might catch a typical file corruption they will not prevent malicious tampering. Even if the hashes are used prior to encryption, that's still MtE - not EtM.<p>KeePass likely does not have an online threat model, so attacks like Padding-Oracle might not be applicable, but a lack of AEAD is IMHO highly concerning because it indicates that the author(s) are winging it when it comes to doing crypto right.<p>Byte array comparisons are done with this function from MemUtil.cs:<p><pre><code> public static bool ArraysEqual(byte[] x, byte[] y)
{
// Return false if one of them is null (not comparable)!
if((x == null) || (y == null)) { Debug.Assert(false); return false; }
if(x.Length != y.Length) return false;
for(int i = 0; i < x.Length; ++i)
{
if(x[i] != y[i]) return false;
}
return true;
}
</code></pre>
There are many other questionable patterns, code smells, and "I-invented-it" approaches that indicate a non-expert .NET programming skill. They can't even implement a Singleton correctly (see CryptoRandom.cs).<p>Has anyone ever done a security audit of KeePass 2.x or does everyone just believe that it's "good enough"?<p>P.S. None of this detracts from the fact that KeePass is a very useful, free utility with a lot of effort put into it. I thank all contributors for making/improving it over the years.
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366
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Title: The company I work for (software engineer, advertising industry) was recently acquired by a larger company.<p>The new employment contract stipulates the usual oppressive confidential information and IP assignment things, detailing how the company owns anything I come up with. The state I'm in specifically protects my rights to things I create entirely independently (outside company time and equipment) but the contract also has a clause that says I must disclose any existing inventions or ideas to the company now and that anything not enumerated belongs to them and that by not listing I am acknowledging that the invention idea was not developed or conceived before the commencement of employment.<p>Assuming I were to sign and return without enumerating any specifics they would own the IP to anything I've done previous to this?<p>I'd love any advice anyone here has, but perhaps a better question would be-- Are there any "uber for lawyers" services online where I can pay to have someone with bonafides read through this for me?
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165
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Title: I'm a researcher in the social sciences, working on a project that requires me to scrape a large amount of text and then use NLP to determine things like sentiment analysis, LSM compatibility, and other linguistic metrics for different subsections of that content.<p>The issue: After weeks of work, I've scraped all this information (a few GB's worth) and begun to analyze it using a mixture of Node, Python and bash scripts. In order to generate all of the necessary permutations of this data (looking at Groups A, B, and C together, A & C, A & B, etc), I've generated an unwieldy number of text files (the script generated > 50 GB before filling up my pitiful MBP hard drive), which I understand is no longer sustainable.<p>The easiest way forward is loading this all into a database I can query to analyze different permutations of populations. I don't have much experience with SQL, but it seems to fit here.<p>So how do I put all these .txt files into a SQL or NoSQL database? Are there any tools I could use to visualize this data (IntelliJ, my editor, keeps breaking). And where should I do all this work? I'm thinking now either an external hard drive, or on a VPS I can just tunnel into.<p>Thanks in advance for your advice HN!
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83
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Title: Last week, Kevin Hale, YC partner, Wufoo founder, and general secret weapon of design, took a notion to comment on a bunch of Show HNs. We thought that was great and asked him to do it again. This time we have a bit of advance notice to share: he'll be in the threads this Friday (June 19). So if you have a Show HN in the pipe and were thinking of posting it soon, Friday is your chance to maybe get feedback from Kevin!<p>You can see the previous threads at https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=kevin.
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68
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Title: I'm about to launch our site for my funded startup.<p>I've worked with a senior lawyer on a previous project. Now he's asking for 5% and $1k per month retainer. We need some facilitation in negotiating with the investor, shareholder agreement, founder agreement, site terms, site privacy policy, single contract for all suppliers. He's also offered to give off the cuff thoughts on matters as they arise. We don't need per-supplier or per-client contracts.<p>He's indicated he's open to a lower %. What's fair? What do other startups give and what do they get in return?
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44
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Title: Dear HN,<p>I am only writing this post because Stripe are not responding to my emails.<p>I started using Stripe last month and everything was going smoothly. However, this week they sent me an email saying:<p>"Stripe provides a service between banks and our users. In order to provide service to our users, we are urged by our banking partners to keep an eye on all accounts that sign up for our services. We've noticed that you have processed charges that seem to be unauthorized--in order to make charges with credit and debit cards, the owner of the card must consent to the charge. Charges on your account do seem to lack this consent, which unfortunately means that we will no longer be able to offer service"<p>This makes no sense as I have had hundreds of payments and not a single payment has been disputed. So how could it be true that the payments are unauthorised? I have sent Stripe emails explaining this and they will not respond.<p>I am very disappointed. As a member of this community I assumed Stripe would treat developers making a living online with a little more respect. I plan to write a lengthy blog post explaining this in more depth.<p><i>Update: I am currently in contact with Stripe CEO over email. He is dealing with the issue. I will keep everyone updated.</i>
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679
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Title: …better than you think you can build it?
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58
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Title: For those of you who didn't know, I reviewed a bunch of Show HNs today. Many thanks to everyone who submitted Show HNs. I’m really sorry if I didn’t make it to your post. Some posts were beyond me to review…like that 99 Haskell project…well, I did like your quote even though I don’t know enough (any) Haskell to get the joke.<p>I’m always trying to get better at giving feedback. Please do let me know if there’s ways I / we (at HN) can do this better. I have no doubts I probably misunderstood things or am completely off the mark. Hopefully, it’s still useful to the creators. What I’d love is for others to do similar approaches so we can compare.<p>Thanks again!
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75
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Title: Even if you personally disable it on your own computer, anyone else connecting to your network (example: non-technical friend) will leak your password to all of _their_ facebook friends.<p>The only way to opt out of this "feature" is to change the name of your SSID to include _optout at the end -- or force EVERY SINGLE PERSON connecting to your network to disable the feature on their PC before connecting.<p>There is no other way to opt out.<p>https://www.windowsphone.com/en-gb/how-to/wp8/connectivity/use-wi-fi-sense-to-get-connected<p>https://www.windowsphone.com/en-gb/how-to/wp8/connectivity/how-do-i-opt-my-network-out-of-wi-fi-sense<p>https://www.windowsphone.com/en-gb/how-to/wp8/connectivity/wi-fi-sense-faq<p>http://www.howtogeek.com/219700/what-is-wi-fi-sense-and-why-does-it-want-your-facebook-account/
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204
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Title: Hi HN, I left a job at a respectable corporation to join a YC startup that had raised capital to build out the team and execute their vision. The lead founder of the company sends emails at all hours of the night, even 3 or 4AM and talks about how little sleep he is getting like it is a badge of honor. I have worked at several other companies with extremely effective coworkers, and have never seen this type of behavior before.<p>I am concerned that he is too tired to make decisions effectively and may be making cognitive errors. I have no evidence that this is taking place so far, except some small errors here and there, but where there is smoke there is fire right? I’m usually a pretty direct guy, but I have ruled out talking to him about it because I do not think there is a way to make the conversation productive.<p>What I am asking is:<p>Is it normal for founders to send emails at random times all night to the team (most nights)? If it is not normal, have others experience founders that did that and am I overreacting? Are there any examples of people who are successful who exhibit this behavior and are those simply antidotes? Is anyone aware of whether this is a good or bad sign?
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45
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Title: Just started working on a small node.js based personal project and would like to hear opinions regarding the general situation in the ReactJS environment from people who use it now or used it in the past but stopped for some reason(s).<p>If you do use it - are you happy with it? Maybe there are some things that you wish were different about it?<p>If you did use it, but not any more - what are the reasons you've stopped?
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79
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Title: I'm a CS student. Recently I have been battling with self-doubt a lot. I'm super self-conscious when I'm coding as well as when I'm speaking English--my 3rd language.
As a result, I avoid trying to solve hard coding problems. I freak out when I have to pair program with someone or when someone else is reviewing my code. And I tend to make a lot of syntax errors. I also tend to rely on documentation a lot.
Furthermore, I tend to make a lot of stupid mistakes when I'm speaking English even though I have been living and attending college in an English-speaking country for the past three years.<p>Could you guys please give me some advices on how to deal with that issue? Thanks lot!
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44
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Title: I'm talking about all these firms that specialise in security for companies. If I wanted to work at one of these, what programming language would I need to know?<p>I assume it would be something like C++, but I don't know.<p>On another note, how many programming languages (and what programming languages) do you think someone would need to know to have a successful career in that field?
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65
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Title: After four years, I left my first team in March to join a new team at the same company. Now it's performance review season, so my old manager forwarded some notes to my current manager about my prior work. Basically it said that I had solid results, wrote some really stable code, "championed" testing and testability for the team, and that people liked working with me. I haven't seen it yet, but apparently it was a lengthy essay.<p>But he also added that the one thing that had been keeping me from moving from SDE I to SDE II was my velocity at turning out deliverables. I'm basically the last one of my peers who hasn't made the jump, and that was the ongoing reason from my old manager. I'm getting passed by newer engineers pretty regularly now, and I've been at my current level for about three years.<p>In the last couple weeks since my new manager got that letter, she's seemed really concerned about my velocity. It wasn't until this Friday that she had read anything about it.
Yet in the same time span, the new-guy-on-a-new-team feeling was pretty much gone, and productivity was up. I got put on a pretty high-visibility, high-impact feature for this month. Before, I think my manager saw me as ready. Now I think she sees me as a liability.<p>I was starting to get worried that I'd never meet this speed expectation at my old job; but now I'm extra nervous that if I slip on any deadline even a little bit, I'll seal this reputation with my new team and make it my label from here on out. The Slow Guy. Sure he's nice, and he writes maintainable, reliable code... but if we need it done soon, might as well give it to an intern!<p>Q: Did anyone else shake a reputation for being slow? Is there any hope I can do to put this velocity thing to rest and catch up with my peers? Or am I just a B engineer who peaked right out of college?<p>PS: I'm getting married next month. Will I have to choose between my marriage and permanent 12 hour days?
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46
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Title: Small background: We are the team that founded by ex-Telegram developer and we try to create something like "Slack". When we started, Slack wasn't so cool and only last 2-3 months people started to ask us "how you differ from Slack?".<p>We created the high-performance platform that could deliver messages at worst networks fast. We can handle the good amount of simultaneous connections at once (sorry no numbers) and deliver messages at very high rate. We don't solve any specific problem; this is just good messaging platform that works on Android, iOS, and Web. Platform means that we can easily integrate, customize systems.<p>For now we burn all our money (~100k$), and we are even not started to sell something. We are tech guys, and we can't do sales for now and we don't have money for this. This strategy is my (as CEO) huge mistake, of course.<p>We think that we can:
1) Raise more money. But without any traction? We have just good dev team in Russia (and we want to leave this country).
2) Fire all team and start selling by founders and make some basic traction.
3) Wait for luck.<p>All this cases seems to be unreal; no one gives us money for now, and I can't give something to investors. It is hard to sale in our domestic market because of business culture and current economic situation (during winter we lose 50% of our money just because of currency exchange rate changing).<p>What can we do in this situation?<p>P.S.: Right now we are preparing our sources to release, and they will be available in a week or two.<p>P.S.S.: Anyone can join experimental chat by opening URL: https://quit.email/join/a8086c23dbaf9f0f7c5003844774e61dfef6d571dd37baa0c28d48fe5012171a
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48
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Title: I recently read Russ Olsen's Eloquent Ruby and I loved it.<p>It is incredibly readable; the code and the stories mixing amazingly with real world examples and what not.<p>What are some of yours?
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57
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Title: Hello, Hacker News!<p>My name is Lillian (see: http://about.lillian.link/), and I just released version 0.2 of my MIT-licensed game engine, Hypatia(http://lillian-lemmer.github.io/hypatia/).<p>Hypatia is a game engine for single player 2D action adventure games. You can use it to make a game like Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons. Hypatia is aimed at non-programmers and programmers alike.<p>I'm seeking any sort of feedback.<p>Hypatia supports FreeBSD first, but has great support for just about any platform (https://github.com/lillian-lemmer/hypatia/wiki/Platform-Support). Maybe that fact should be more front-and-center? I'm not too worried.<p>Hypatia is currently in alpha. Though, the wiki does elaborate on how nonprogrammers can use Hypatia to make a game (https://github.com/lillian-lemmer/hypatia/wiki/Nonprogramer-Guide).<p>If you're interested in contributing, I could really use people testing it out, making their own scenes, tilemaps, and such, proofreading documentation. Here's a list of ways you can support/contribute to/help Hypatia (includes donations): https://github.com/lillian-lemmer/hypatia/wiki/Support-the-Project.<p>Website: http://lillian-lemmer.github.io/hypatia/<p>GitHub: https://github.com/lillian-lemmer/hypatia<p>Wiki: https://github.com/lillian-lemmer/hypatia/wiki<p>My major contact methods:<p>@LilyLemmer on twitter<p>[email protected]<p>There are tons of ways to get in contact with me, see what I'm up to, or just get personal with me. Here's a list of pretty much every online account I own for Hypatia or otherwise: https://github.com/lillian-lemmer/hypatia/wiki/Profiles.<p>Thank you for your time!
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191
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Title: An irritating notice that websites keep telling me because of some European law I have no interest in.<p>It's like saying "this website uses HTTP, we do it to get data to and from your browser, click to agree".<p>Maybe the major web browsers should built a standard warning Javascript alert API in that can be globally turned off.
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160
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Title: Kevin and I are going to try doing online office hours on HN this Friday.<p>We'll create a thread at 9 am PDT, and interested companies (or people) can submit a top-level comment with a brief overview of what they're working on and a first question. Then we'll let HN vote on the projects, and do office hours via back-and-forth comments with the top 5 companies as of 11 am.<p>You can ask about anything you want related to your startup, but the way office hours work at YC is we try to identify the biggest problem you're currently facing and then brainstorm things you can try.
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143
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Title: Presentation slides: http://j00ru.vexillium.org/dump/recon2015.pdf
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63
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Title: Does anyone have a recommendation for a good character recognition library? I'm trying to pull text out of images. I tried ocrad.js but haven't had much success with it.
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264
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Title: I started working in programming 3 years ago. Ever since I got into 8h/days programming, I feel really tired after I come home.<p>I'm not able to do the meaningless task, and sometimes I just get into bed at 7 and sleep.<p>I suppose that the nature of our jobs depletes our will and maybe that's why I'm like this. I tried doing some push-ups, going by bike to work, quitting smoking, but didn't solve much.<p>So if anyone was in the same position and found a way to get by, I would really appreciate some advices. I feel I live only during the week-ends.
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Title: I've read a lot about the APL languages, but never used them because I felt they were too specialized. Recently, I've been roped into some projects using R. I fully understand why R is so popular in statistics departments, but programming in R has been the most migraine inducing experience I've ever had with a language.<p>Since R is an array language, I though maybe an APL family language would work as a replacement. It wouldn't have the multitude of libraries that R has, but would have a clean design. Note that I am not thinking of this as an alternative for the typical R user, who is a non-programmer and for whom R is their first and possibly last language. I'm thinking of a moderatly experienced programmer who is faced with a data analysis task.<p>Some APL derivatives, like J and Dyalog APL, have had their capabilities extended well beyond simple array juggling. How are they, compared to R, as data analysis environments?
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Title: Being an entrepreneur is one of the toughest of challenges.<p>One of the main reasons it is hard is because whether or not you succeed is not directly related to the amount of work you put in. You can work every available minute and still not succeed.<p>So for your mental health, to be able to do it in the long term, you need some definite wins happening in your life. Without any definite wins, if your business is not succeeding then you risk surveying your life and seeing nothing but failure. That's bad.<p>Fortunately there are things you can do in life where there is a direct relationship between effort and win. This means that if you put time in then you get a guaranteed win.<p>Take some time to do these things so that you definitely have a life that is at least partially winning. Make sure you are getting in some of those guaranteed wins. The price will be that you need to take time away from the business in order to get guaranteed wins. See this not as time away from your business but simply part of the time you are putting into your business. Your business success requires investment of your time not only directly, but indirectly by investing in yourself - this is essential.<p>The easiest guaranteed win I can think of (and Jeff Atwood pointed this out to me in a post sometime) is to become fit. If you put time in one hour a day, five days a week, you are guaranteed to win. Fitness has a direct relationship between time and effort and result. Unlike your business, if you put in time and effort then you are guaranteed the outcome.<p>When business is hard, when things are dark, when there are huge problems, you will be propped up strongly by the win you have put in the bag by committing time to your guaranteed wins.<p>One final thing - take the daily decision making process out of the equation - just stop that daily question "Do I want to commit today's hour to my guaranteed win? The business is so busy, it needs me." Make an up front decision that daily wins get priority over the business time and never again ask yourself "Should I do this today or not?" The question will come up every single day. The answer is "I already decided what the answer is.".<p>What other guaranteed wins are there in life where time committed = success? Keep an eye out for them.
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266
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Title: My question is pretty straightforward: how do you, hacker news enthusiast, familiarize yourself with a new codebase? Obviously your answer is going to be contingent on the kind of work that you do.<p>Some background: What's motivating me to ask is that I am flirting with the idea of trying to add a couple of features to SlickGrid (https://github.com/mleibman/SlickGrid), Michael Leibman's phenomenal javascript grid widget. Unfortunately Leibman got busy and isn't actively supporting it anymore.<p>The codebase is something like 8k lines of javascript, so it's not ludicrously big, but I'm kind of intimidated thinking about trying to make sense of it. My first strategy is just to open up important-looking javascript files (slick.core.js, slick.grid.js) and read through for comprehension. This seems like a pretty slow way to build a mental model of the code, though. Some features I want to implement are 1. an ajax data source that doesn't require paging, and 2. frozen columns. Someone else has implemented a buggy version of frozen columns (and since abandoned the project), and I might like to use it, but I can't tell if it's buggy because it's a hard problem, or because their implementation strategy was poor (or both!). So at the moment I can't evaluate if I should implement my own, or try to fix the issues with theirs.<p>Picking up other people's code seems to be one of the harder tasks developers face, as evidenced by how much code gets abandoned, so I wondered if the voices of experience on here could point me in the right direction, either by talking about this problem in particular, or more generally, how you build knowledge about a new codebase.<p>Thanks!
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407
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Title: Starting at 11 am PDT today, Kevin Hale and I are going to try online office hours. If you'd like help with your startup, please post a top-level comment with one or two sentence description of what you do and the first thing you'd like to talk about. We'll let the community vote, and talk to the top 5 companies.<p>Unless you're one of the companies we're having office hours with, please don't comment otherwise on this thread until we're done at 1 pm PDT so that we can keep a clear flow in the conversations.<p>UPDATE: We're going to do office hours with ismail, trsohmers, ljd, ph0rque, and dzine.<p>UPDATE 2: Ok, have to sign off and go do office hours with YC companies. Thanks everyone!
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191
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Title: Specifically, about how many "stars" on Github would such an open source project need to start realistically thinking about turning it into a lifestyle business, since GH stars are probably the most prominent quantitative indicator I know of in this area.<p>I've got an open source project that has grown fast with relatively little promotion. I know that a good number of companies are using it in production. I also know of a good way to monetize it, while keeping the existing software exactly like it is (not "open core" but somewhat related).<p>Is this a pipe dream, or do I have a realistic chance into making this a lifestyle business that -- with hard work -- can start providing a reasonable income (say $100,000/yr) within a year or two?
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Title: Hi folks!<p>Let me introduce myself.
I am CEO/CTO/CIO/etc of russian SmartVPN.biz VPN service.<p>I couple years ago I got an idea to create my own startup - VPN service.
It was quite sudden idea, when a couple of friends asked me to give them access to my personal VPN server.
Of course I did not study the market, didn’t check how many such services are already exists. I’ve just started coding.
A little bit later I made working prototype and pushed it to production.<p>There were not so many expenses, only my free time and 20$/month for low-end vps.<p>A year and a half the project was in production. Lots of things changed meanwhile.
Internet in russia became very limited and censored.
I’m glad that I helped people to bypass stupid internet limitations in our country.
I’ve also experienced DDoS attacks twice, it is really exciting feeling, when you understand, that your service is real, and someone wants to get it down.<p>But the time is passing, my interests and priorities changed too. That is why I decided to shutdown my startup.
I don’t want to hide my sources on hard drive, so I’ve decided to make them opensource. Totally.
I published them on github https://github.com/smartvpnbiz with MIT license.
So anyone can fork it, use anyway you want. You can try yourself in this hard business.<p>This is not an ads, I just want to help someone, who may need my experience.
So I’ll be glad if my service will help anyone.
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151
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Title: I turn thirty in a couple months. At this stage in my life, when looking back on my 20s, it's been very disappointing. Sure, there are plenty of good things, but my career hasn't panned out as hoped, was convicted of a felony sex offense, have had to move pack in with parents, and so forth. What can I do at this stage in my life to improve things and make my thirties a fruitful decade where I'm employed, doing interesting things, and feeling useful.<p>Good things in my life, to date:<p>- Finished my bachelors and masters degree from a good university.<p>- Was employed as a statistician in the online marketing industry for four years.<p>Bad things in my life, to date:<p>- Committed a felony sex offense while I was an undergraduate at university (ended up serving three years of probation).<p>- Lost my job several months ago and can't find new work as a result of not being able to pass background checks.<p>- Moved back in with my parents.<p>- Never had a girlfriend.<p>- Degenerative neurological disorder that's slowly taking over my life (a big reason for I have been lonely and likely contributed to my improprieties).<p>So here I am. I want to turn things around, have a good career as a statistician, and make a descent salary. What can I do to turn things around and improve my life so that when I'm 40, I'm not looking back on my 30's and thinking that it's been disappointing.<p>To be honest, I'm more interested in having a good job/salary than anything else. If I never have a girlfriend, that's fine, I'm "broken goods" so I understand why I'm less appealing to women.Good things in my life, to date:
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102
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Title: About 3 minutes in the vehicle appeared to explode. At the time it was ~15km downrange, going 1km/s and around 35km up in the atmosphere.<p>UPDATE: Contingency press conference scheduled for 12:30pm EST- NASA TV said they wouldn't have much to update before then.
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381
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Title: I just stumbled upon an old Ask HN with the same topic from 2010 and I thought this could be useful to resurrect.<p>You should probably mention what you are working on, where you are located, what stage you are in, who you are looking for, what you can bring to the table and a way to contact you.
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104
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