donall

Anger is not the only use case for the word "fuck", nor is expressing an emotional state. Really, there's a fuckload of other fucking examples; enough to make one tired as fuck just fucking thinking about them, so I won't enumerate them here (those readers who give a fuck can now exclaim "thank fuck!").

"Respectable" media are beholden to their advertisers, who in turn are concerned that specific demographics might be scandalised by certain words and affect their bottom line. I don't think HN or much of the internet fits into this category.

Academic papers are an interesting case. I suspect their avoidance of the word fuck is a combination of their inherited sense of propriety and the fact that such an ambiguous word as "fuck" rarely has a place in scientific writing.

No it isn't. That may be how you interpret it but it's an incredibly versatile word with semantics that are notoriously hard to pin down.

In this case "what the fuck" is a well-established idiom. Many people don't even notice the vulgarity.

I feel like we're arguing semantics at this point.

If you conceive to build a perpetual motion machine then you will have taken the first step. The second (more difficult) step will be to conceive how a perpetual motion machine might actually work, or to come up with a plausible way of re-writing the laws of thermodynamics.

The point of the quote is not some wishy-washy "you can if you believe you can". Rather, it might be phrased better as "If you have the vision to see how something might be achieved and the drive to actually achieve it, nothing can stop you from achieving it".

They seem to have become more of a data aggregator and provider than a platform.

Does the same apply to Facebook? And if not, is it likely to within the next 12 months?

It seems like a lot of developers/startups put their eggs in the FB basket. I wonder if, from a funding perspective, that behaviour would set off alarm bells today?

The parent has good advice.

Another good way to meet startups is to attend tech events. Go onto meetup.com and search for tech meetups in whatever area you're interested in. Consider favouring topics like Clojure programming seminars over things like "networking and margaritas for SEO rockstars" or whatever. The crowd will be smaller and more personal (and, in my contrived example, probably more technical!) and you will have a better chance of getting recognised as a regular participant in a small community. You get bonus points if you also volunteer to present an interesting project or something.

What do you have to lose by applying too early?

Worst case scenario, they ignore your application and you re-apply close to graduation.

Best case scenario, they offer you some freelancing or part-time work and you graduate with some real experience and, potentially, a guaranteed full-time job.

So the extra $5 just gets you a broader choice of file formats?

I'm interested in buying it, and I'm pretty sure my kindle show be able to handle the format. That said, I think I'd rather buy from your website than from Amazon (assuming more of the money ends up in your pocket) - but not at a markup of 50%!

I doubt there was any sexist intent (regardless of perception). The fact is that there are a limited number of intelligible strings that can be made out of 8 hex chars and this is one of them that brought a smile to somebody's face. If we seriously consider that guy to be some sort of misogynist, then should we also consider OxDEADBEEF to be a radical vegan statement?

The proposed method isn't bookkeeping. It sounds like it's closer to bookmaking!

As a (somewhat off-topic) aside, I notice that every picture in the article seems to be slightly askew, and generally by the same angle. Can anybody tell me if there is a reason for this, or is it just an affectation of the photographer?

The laptop he's talking about is from 2001. It's 11 years old. Of course it can't replace a modern dev machine! However, it still works as a machine and a 4 year old child is using it as an introductory machine. That doesn't sound like dead laptop; it sounds like one that has exceeded expectations and continues to work in a limited capacity (like a Mars rover!).

The linked blog post is a bit of a rant. Sounds like the author really hates hipsters and just wishes to accuse them of being racist without actually providing any substantial evidence to back the claim. If "hipster racism" is a legitimate phenomenon, I'd like to read about it from another source.

On the main point, the Swedish troll isn't really saying anything overtly racist. She is just mentioning a number of things that make people feel uncomfortable and making some questionable remarks that are obviously designed to be incendiary. I'm not sure this fits into the "hipster racism" model, as described in the linked blog.

I'd like to see a credible source for this. There are references to a handful of shady companies misbehaving, but I have yet to see hard facts or credible stats (I'm not saying they don't exist). On the other hand, I have seen a lot of xenophobic hysteria and comments from American "IT professionals" whom I certainly wouldn't want to work with.

In my own experience, my employer is struggling to find qualified people. We are a fast-growing startup in LA and simply cannot scale as fast as we would like (mail me if you want more info). There is no shortage of foreign applicants but, afaik, I am one of only two sponsored H1B employees.

I don't think anything new or especially interesting has been said about comment quality, but the author displays such a wonderful command of swearing that I enjoyed the article immensely. It's refreshing to see such eloquent profanity on the web!

Why are the fruit counts represented as floats?

Can you provide more detail about your source?

I had a similar experience on a US Airways flight last December. The Kindle Fire browser allows the user to choose whether to optimise for mobile or desktop, and this resulted in two different prices.

In relation to the legal questions raised elsewhere on this thread, I'm guessing that it's a non-issue when it's a built-in feature of the device. I think the argument could be logically extended to using plug-ins that switch user agent strings?

I agree that the download was a particularly bad example, but I think the same argument can apply to any progress bar. As a programmer, I always measure progress as the percentage of tasks completed, whether that is bit downloaded, modules installed, mappers finished mapping, etc.

The mapper example is actually particularly pertinent. Hadoop's GUI shows me the progress of my M/R jobs with a bar, but it is as dependent on the amount of other tasks running on the cluster as downloading a file is dependent on the traffic in the network. There is no sane way to accurately estimate the amount of time a M/R job is going to take a priori, as far as I know. A stochastic method would be too variable and a method playing clever tricks with psychology seems especially insidious, from an engineer's perspective. You might as well replace it with an "Are we there yet?" button that responds to you in a soothing voice "Not much longer now".

A minor point: when filling out my political orientation, I noticed that "socialist/fascist" was an option. I really don't want to start a debate, but I think these should be separate. It seems in the US they are often both considered equally dangerous extremes, but in the rest of the world, there is a pretty significant distinction between the two camps.

Not meaning to be the nitpicking guy, but there's a typo in the title. It should read "EFF", not "EEF".

I actually have a pretty similar situation. I am Irish, living in California after just finishing up in Dublin City University (I was probably one of Mervyn's lab tutors at some point!) and I'm also on the J1 visa.

The difference is that I found a job before I left Ireland (made the visa application a lot easier). I responded to a post on the "Who's Hiring?" thread here on HN a few months back and landed a gig in an awesome startup in Los Angeles called Factual.

HN is a truly invaluable resource for job hunting.

In my research group (in the School of Computing at Dublin City University), we publish all our papers to our web site and to the university's own research portal (doras.dcu.ie). They are free for anybody to access.

The version we publish is the "camera ready", which is to say the last version we submit for actual publication. It is not, however, the final published version (so, for example, they don't include an Elsevier logo or conference proceedings page numbers). I believe this is legal in our jurisdiction, or at least nobody has called us on it!

I think the author is right about the use of emoticons and I think they're an underused and misunderstood form of communication. I similarly used to avoid them, but I also used to get into a lot of misunderstandings in long e-mail exchanges. People would misinterpret my concise and direct messages as being brusque, impatient, etc.

In my experience, throwing in an occasional light-hearted remark accompanied by a smiley face actually makes a huge difference. Obviously it's not always appropriate and, like many textspeak artifacts, they're open to abuse, LOL :). But, in general, I think emoticons put a human slant on what is an otherwise very impersonal communication medium. I would equate their use with the use of small-talk in face-to-face conversations - it doesn't contribute anything meaningful to the discussion, but it often puts people at ease.

It was actually the YC NYC announcement that triggered this question.

I thoroughly enjoyed the experience last year. I met some interesting people and made some useful contacts. I think it should become an annual tradition at Y Combinator like all the others.

I don't think the validity of the policeman example should taint the "factual veracity" of the entire article. The sociolinguistic ramifications of the Norman invasion are well established and there are a great many examples of synonymous words with class-based connotations.

As for the specific policeman example, you are probably right to say that "individual" is used because it is a useful non-offensive abstraction for the various sub-classes of human, but policeman-speak is still well-known for being unnecessarily verbose (from our biased anti-latin perspective as English speakers). Perhaps a better example would be choosing to use verbs like "locate" rather than "find".

I was just reminded of that xkcd comic and thought I would share. I wasn't actually trying to start an argument about the usage of the term "literally" (which is why I'm not continuing it!). In any case, I would have thought the comic portrays the person doing the correcting in a crazy enough light to show disdain for the practice...

"Literally" mad elephants? ;) http://xkcd.com/725/

If you're fresh out of college (even with an advanced degree, i.e. PhD) and don't have much in terms of industry experience, you might find that some employers are not willing to go to the effort of sponsoring you for a H1-B.

An alternative, short-term solution, is to apply for a J1 internship visa. If you are a student or if you graduated in the last 12 months, you are eligible to work as an intern for up to 12 months, after which you must return to your home country.

It's worth noting that you would have to work as an intern, so you might not get paid as much as a full employee, but it is possible to change your visa status at the end of your internship if your home country states that it doesn't require you to return.

This means that if a company isn't willing to sponsor you for a H1-B because you're unproven, you can do an internship for a trial period and if you make yourself indispensable, they might be more willing to sponsor you afterwards.

It's a bit of an ugly workaround, but in theory it works! (Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, but this is an avenue I have been researching a lot recently and I believe that what I have said is true. Do your own research before committing to anything)