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jleeson Connecting to the Internet – Finding My 15-Year-Old Website I Built at 16

Thanks for the trip down memory lane, randomdrake. I'm the same age as you, and just found my own 15-year-old page (in my case, a Discworld info compendium with game mods I'd built, and walkthroughs I'd written). Hurrah for Geocities mirrors, and embarrassing teenage selves.

Funnily enough, a HN thread the other day made me revisit my first ever web app as well. 'Tis the season?

It feels like today it's pretty easy to get started building things, certainly a lot easier than the PHP mess I ended up in 10+ years ago. On the other hand I think it can get overwhelming, and the complexity of today's web apps and sites make it hard for a beginner to grok how to replicate them. Plus, the design bar is a lot higher, even though there are plenty of off-the-shelf kits to help. The era of self-expression through hand-tweaked HTML is gone, for the most part; cover photos have replaced MySpace layouts, and who needs a personal domain when you have your @-handle?

jleeson Fake Name Generator

I still fall back on http://www.rinkworks.com/namegen/ occasionally.

jleeson Fake Name Generator

She could be a weightlifting coach.

jleeson Your most important skill: Empathy

Not too surprised, but I think this is just one data point based on the situations and environment you're in.

I can definitely think of places where coming across as too empathetic makes one appear weak, and coming across as an asshole who has a plan and is going to make it happen (regardless of trivialities like feelings) makes one appear like a leader.

On the other hand, I tend to avoid them wherever possible, as I find this setup toxic to my own strengths and empathy.

jleeson Yale censored a student's course catalog site. I made an unblockable replacement

Although it's less applicable to folks not at the university who are talking about it.

Over 10 years ago, I ran a site which collected community anecdotes of the interview process at various universities, mostly focusing on Oxbridge colleges. The aim was to open up information that was often passed down between alumni of private schools where there was a tradition of attending those colleges -- leaving people like me, with no alumni to talk to, in the dark about what the interview process would be like.

I got several threatening letters from deans at the various colleges, and had a long process of trying to decide what to do. I didn't make any money off the site and couldn't afford legal help, so I ended up taking down a couple of the anecdotes when one college was particularly nasty, but for the most part ignored the threats. Ended up handing the site over to someone else as I was focusing on my university work and less involved in the admissions phase of things, and I'm happy to see it's still alive :)

jleeson Ask HN: How to find part-time developer work?

Solid points all. I guess what I didn't say but was trying to get across was: if you are uncomfortable cold-introducing yourself repeatedly at a large gathering of strangers, you don't have to do that.

Does the T-shirt approach work? I've wondered what would happen if I put my details on my laptop skin, as I work from a lot of SF/Valley coffee shops :)

jleeson Introducing our smart contact lens project (for diabetics)

Indeed, I've spent the last few years trying to significantly improve my lifestyle to decrease the chance my maternal line's 100% record of Type II diabetes ends before it gets to me.

jleeson Ask HN: How to find part-time developer work?

I second the network point, but not quite in the same way. I often find meetups and conferences can be hit-and-miss (though a developer conference may be more useful!), but I agree that connecting with people is good.

In the thread on consulting a few days ago a great point came up: if you can translate your skills into value to a business, you might end up having conversations with people they didn't know they wanted to have. An example: you can go to a tech meetup and pitch yourself as a full-stack Rails developer, and try to get work from people who know they need Rails developers -- or you can go to a finance meetup and pitch yourself as a solutions builder, and end up getting 10x the revenue from a project that's turning a spreadsheet pipeline into a CRUD app.

My take on networking, and what's been working for me, is to reach out through people you already know. They might not be hiring your skillset, but they might need a solution to a problem. Almost all of the work I've been doing lately has come through intros, and several of those started off as fairly cold relationships. For example, I applied to a startup incubator, whose founder decided I was smart but too early in my idea, so hooked me up with another founder who needed some heavy lifting done on the Android side. Other projects have come through more direct referrals, but almost all have been for startups who are flexible on parameters (including time, remote, etc) and who don't even have websites, let alone job ads.

jleeson I never finish anyth

I find my side projects can be quite cyclical in nature. I'll have a better idea, or one that has more immediate unsolved problems, and maybe start thinking about that instead. But a week or two later, something will trigger the older idea back to the forefront of my memory, and I'll get excited about it again.

Nobody's forcing you to work on, or finish, a specific project. But if you are always starting new ones and never finishing anything, you have to identify why you don't care about something that seemed like a good idea when you first had it. Did you disprove some of the assumptions? Too lazy to knuckle down and code? Too scared of marketing it and putting your name to it? Not enough time? Prefer sketching wireframes? I've learnt a fair bit about myself from introspection here, especially when I consider the projects I do finish. Often, something I really want to just exist, right now, and without much of the baggage that's around the MVP-prove-iterate-market-blog-build cycle.

jleeson Latest Perk on Google Buses: Security Guards

There are high density developments going up in Mountain View, but not to the extent that they could in SF, because you can't just build a 40-story skyscraper in a 2-story suburb. (I know nothing of zoning, codes, and all that, beyond playing Sim City, so my definition of 'high density' might not be technically correct -- but I've heard enough complaints about the development that is going on in MTV -- 4 building sites within 2 blocks of my house! It isn't all bungalows here any more.)

As to the SF vs suburb debate, it's definitely one of preference, and SF appeals to a lot of people. It's not that the employees are too lazy to drive, it's that the company doesn't want them working for trendy SF startups.

Could Google, FB etc attract the same level of talent if said talent couldn't live in a hip, young city instead of the dreary strip-mall suburbs of Silicon Valley? I doubt it. Also, there are a lot of jobs in SF, and many people might be in families or relationships where one partner works up in the city.

(Aside: As someone who used to commute via Googlebus, moved to MTV, and is now looking for housing in SF while not being at Google, I have to say I'm not quite sure where I stand on the whole issue. It's somewhat bittersweet to get off the Caltrain in the morning and walk straight past a Googlebus, or worse, see an empty one heading back down south in the evening!)

jleeson Show HN: An Open-Source Data Science Curriculum

I think the list is more helpful for someone a step or two beyond beginner. A true beginner is going to look at that and be scared. Once they've read a few introductory things, they'll be able to go back and make better sense of it, for sure. (I showed this to a friend of mine who's interested in learning data science and that was his reaction, so I am generalising, but I think it's a fair generalisation.)

jleeson Announcing The Matasano/Square CTF

Yeah, I think that question should have three options for answers:

   [] Yes
   [] No
   [] I had to look shellcode up on Wikipedia

(I'm with you in that last category.)

jleeson Coding tip: Leave your code in a broken state

I'm more in this latter camp. I'll perhaps leave it completely compilable, but with logic incomplete, e.g. a stub function that always returns true. My task the next day is easy, then; it starts as finishing the stub, and as I do that, the rest starts flowing.

I've had days where I start by just running the code end to end and seeing what's egregiously broken, but I find this puts me in whack-a-mole mode the entire day and it's extremely tiring. Though, I do feel like Sherlock doing it.

jleeson Adventures in Wearable Electronics – Making a Light-up Dress

Have you seen http://www.zackees.com/?

jleeson Show HN: An Open-Source Data Science Curriculum

I feel like lists of resources are OK, but with something like data science, which has its own branches and specialities, it would be good to have some kind of stack ranking of topics and information beyond just 'start here'. That way, a reader gets more and more conversant with the different ideas being thrown around.

Also, I don't have a list of these handy, but I've found long annotated notebooks/blog posts of worked data science examples very helpful for refreshing my memory on applied techniques. http://derandomized.com/ is a great example, maybe other HN readers have some favourites we could add.

jleeson Rails Consulting for Fun and Profit

pricing is 30-50% less than the real cost of similar pre-ACA products.

sure, but for many people who didn't need the full scope of what is now the baseline ACA coverage, our individual health insurance bills are much higher. (mine has gone up nearly 3x.)

you win some, you lose some.

jleeson Show HN: Kimono – Never write a web scraper again

Well. Think about spreadsheets. Think about live spreadsheets powered directly by APIs. Bingo!

I'm doing a couple of data mining projects right now and simply being able to query and look into the API outputs, as well as my local database, without building a custom frontend would've saved me a bunch of time. But I'm thinking more of the knowledge worker, or even the power user who wants to view their Fitbit, Up and Lark data all in the same dashboard. Can't help but thinking this already exists somewhere though.

jleeson Show HN: Kimono – Never write a web scraper again

I like how you've thought through the end to end use case: not just generating an API, but actually making it usable. I've done my fair share of web scraping and it's not an easy task to make accessible and reliable -- good luck!

It makes me wonder if there isn't a whole "API to web/mobile app with custom metadata" product in there somewhere. I can imagine a lot of folks starting to get into data analysis and pipelines having an easier time of it if they could just create a visual frontend in a few clicks.

jleeson Google Shuts Down Schemer

For couples, http://www.howaboutwe.com is actually pretty fun. If you live in SF.

jleeson A Coder, a Programmer, a Hacker, a Developer, and a Computer Scientist

...'walks into a bar. Then she walks out again.'?

jleeson Female Founders

In this instance, the outcome is still desirable. If isolating fairly across all variables (and there are several at play!) means that higher company performance is tightly correlated to having a diverse leadership team, it's a competitive benefit to take advantage of that correlation. I doubt we could ever truly prove causation in this instance.

jleeson Pebble Smartwatch Review: A Useful Dumbwatch

I keep my phone in my bag too, I don't always have pockets and girl pockets are small anyway. Watches definitely help in that case.

Also, I had an app which forwarded all phone notifications to the Pebble and it certainly helps you realise just how spammy the phone is. But it was useful for capturing things like bank app alerts, TripIt, Google Now, etc.

jleeson Pebble Smartwatch Review: A Useful Dumbwatch

I don't pay much attention to the exact degree weather outside. I guess if it was on the cusp of freezing it might be interesting, but generally.. it's cold, I'm not going to change my behaviour as a result. Is the quantifiable degree increment interesting to other people?

jleeson My Amazon interview experience

Especially if you have had a bunch of individual interviewers, who are all conducting multiple interviews per week and trying to ship product, the delay may be down to waiting for one or more of them to submit their feedback about you. I've definitely been terrible about that when we had some product fires going on, and got in the habit of trying to write up immediately after the interview, but sometimes with back-to-back meetings all day it fell off the stack. Knowing someone out there is waiting to hear back is a horrible thing though, and usually spurred me to try and be super-fast -- but you only need one overworked, or sick, interviewer to fall behind with feedback and you might be waiting weeks for the full interview report to be ready for hiring review.

jleeson Female Founders

I linked some mentoring resources further down, specific to connecting high schoolers with female role models. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7039716)

RailsBridge (http://www.railsbridge.org) is aimed at adult women beginners too.

Technovation Challenge (http://iridescentlearning.org/programs/technovation-challeng...) is a worldwide program for high school girls to develop engineering and entrepreneurship skills. I was a mentor for this locally and it was great fun. Super smart girls.

Little Miss Geek (http://littlemissgeek.org/) runs great workshops in London high schools. A 14 year old girl built an app thanks to inspiration at this workshop and now speaks out publicly about how fun it was. Fantastic role model. (http://www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/2013/oct/15/b...)

Edit: Also, if you're searching for this topic, "girls in STEM" (or SET, SETI, SEAT, etc) is another great source of resources aimed at encouraging girls in science.

I'm not a parent or teacher, so I'm not in touch with what high schoolers find interesting these days. But imagine if there were a program backed by top VCs getting startup engineers, especially ensuring visible minorities among the bunch, into high schools to break down how their popular apps or games du jour work. Rather than "I want to learn to program, ok, let's print out 'Hello World'", outline the systems thinking behind the apps and services that the audience uses every day. Maybe it could even be effective as an online video series. Maybe it already exists.

Still: There are things we all can do if we actually care about helping change mindsets early on. Even many smart teenage boys (so I am told, see disclaimer above) don't want to go into engineering because it's nerdy and unpopular. We need diversity on the inside, not just on the outside.

jleeson Female Founders

Not all women-led companies were started by women, too.

jleeson Female Founders

Funny you should say that. I got my first real programming job from a puzzle in MENSA magazine.

jleeson Female Founders

Lemma: Women-led companies are desirable.

Vivek Wadhwa is doing a bunch of research into the data. I don't have his report at my fingertips but fundamentally, not investing in women is not a rational move. Here's the media headline version:

"Women-led private technology companies are more capital-efficient, achieve 35 percent higher return on investment, and, when venture-backed, bring in 12 percent higher revenue than male-owned tech companies."

Source: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-02-20/women-who-ru...

Conclusion: Women earn over 50% of degrees but start fewer than 3% of companies. If we accept that women-led companies do well, as per the data -- and yes, there are certainly caveats -- then this gap clearly shows there is a problem, in terms of inefficient use of investment if nothing else.

jleeson Female Founders

The SWE K-12 outreach (http://aspire.swe.org/) is probably close to what you're thinking of, though if you meant more of a peer-to-peer "dial a mentor" service I don't think I've seen one. Not that it couldn't exist.

Some other great organizations helping set examples and mentor high schoolers:

She++: http://sheplusplus.stanford.edu/

MentorNet: http://www.mentornet.net/

MentorSET: http://www.mentorset.org.uk/

Technovation: http://iridescentlearning.org/programs/technovation-challeng...

MIT: http://swe.mit.edu/outreach/

There are also several great organizations for women working in computing, who you could reach out to for mentors. PyLadies, DevChix, Systers, Anita Borg, etc... And local tech companies, at Google there were several folks working with local high schools who would put out internal calls for people to go and speak about the cool stuff they worked on.

Speaking of which, Google's Women Techmakers is also shaping up to be a great collection of women doing cool stuff in tech: https://developers.google.com/women-techmakers and https://plus.google.com/communities/100202454944694552166

jleeson Female Founders

There are also recent studies that confirm different manifestations of it, for example [1]. I tend to agree with Wikipedia on the publication bias aspect, but I don't think you can sweep away the impact of stereotypes at all. I also think working to change tech stereotyping (in general) as one of the things that will actually make a difference, so I guess I'm biased too.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23713580