kakaylor

I went to a Purdue extension campus, worked out great and was extremely affordable.

Going back to college, in particular for Computer Science, is always an option. There is such a lack of skilled professionals in the field that no one will turn away a competent candidate.

If you choose to go back for Computer Science, I would like to strongly suggest you are always keeping in mind "How am I going to get a job." I don't say this because it is necessarily hard to get a job as a Software Engineer, but rather that many undergraduates ignore their GPA and internships and just assume they will get a job when they graduate. Doing well in your classes and leaving your professors with a favorable impression of you also helps during the job hunt.

Also, make sure you are attending an accredited university with credits that can transfer to other universities. Not that you need to worry about transferring, but make sure you are attending a quality institution with a degree employers will take seriously (e.g. not ITT). Keep in mind that you don't need to pay an arm and a leg for such a degree either.

Finally, on a somewhat unrelated note, have you talked to a doctor about anti-anxiety medication? I know several people who had anxiety problems that manifested as a nervous stomach. They are on anti-anxiety meds now and doing fantastic. I am absolutely not a doctor and this may not be relevant to you, but just thought I'd bring it up.

All of the listed factors also apply to marriage. While I am single, it seems like marriage is HARD all by itself. It takes time, effort, communication, and patience. Adding a start up on top of this is going to make it more difficult (although I would never say impossible).

What's more, running a start up is a formative experience that will likely change you. It would be challenging, though by no means impossible, to have a successful marriage while the character of the two people who form its basis are changing.

From the article (referring to the controller):

"Please understand that it was not designed to be a portable video game machine," Nintendo President Saturo Iwata explained.

Looks like it won't compete against the 3DS.

I agree, I would definitely be interested in a torrent of the data.

I wonder if this is more a symptom of having few women in the field of computer science / software engineering [1] than a lack of women who want to be founders [2]. It isn't too surprising when you consider only a small percentage of people in computer science decide to become founders, and then a small percentage of that pool ends up being women.

[1] I am assuming that most people in startups are computer science types. Which isn't entirely (or very) accurate. Certainly when you add in fields like design and business/marketing this really changes.

[2] Of course, being a founder doesn't require restricting oneself to starting a technical business.

I understand what your saying, but I am not sure I agree (at least from the US perspective) that South America has been written off as a rounding error in the last few decades. I think we have been on a trajectory from the early 1990's (starting with NAFTA) and continuing into the early 2000's (with the start of CAFTA) to today where we are near ratifying CAFTA. The next step is a full South American free trade agreement.

I don't think US industry has ever dismissed South America as a rounding error. They get the huge economic importance it has. Rather, we've had some feet dragging from unions (and to a smaller extent a little xenophobia, but I think this is really really small when it comes to Free Trade Agreements). Give the US another decade or two and there will be a full on American Free Trade Agreement.

Very good point.

I think the point on corruption and the rule of law is really significant. It goes beyond just e-commerce and into a whole economy. A government of men and not of law does not make for a thriving economy. If found these two maps on corruption and governance really interesting. They really speak to they trouble with doing e-commerce in Africa:

Transparency International: http://www.transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/...

Governance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldwide_Governance_Indicators

I wonder how ratings for China / India / Brazil will change in the next few decades as their per-capita GDP increases.

I think the bigger issue is GDP and GDP per capita for both Nigeria and Africa as a whole:

Nigeria GDP (PPP): $170bil

Nigeria GDP per capita: $1754

I can understand why e-commerce companies might just choose to blacklist an entire country. There isn't much of a financial incentive to expend the resources for that small of a market.

I am not trying to comment on whether this is justifiable or not, but that is the reality of the situation.

I was thinking about this at the negotiation stage, before hiring occurs. I can't imagine that an employer would try this after the hiring stage.

As for salary information, there are other ways to know how much someone else is making without accessing "confidential information". You can find out socially (e.g. from them), knowing their performance combined with position, etc.

EDIT: It is worth noting that these are facts I consider when I am interviewing for a new job, not something I put into practice. I wouldn't tell my current employer this information about a perspective hire, nor would I as an employer ask for this information.

Good advice. I wonder about this bit though

>As for them finding out, I don't know where you are at in the world, but in the US their is no way for them to find out unless you provide them with that information.

Professional networking tends to be a big factor when moving from job to job (this may be extremely different in startup communities). This tends to mean that as your career progresses, you have probably worked with 1 or 2 people at a prospective employer. Those people are generally asked about the perspective hire, including their estimates of what that person has made.

Sounds like a great option for students. I think for a lot of companies, however, Matlab has a leg up on Octave. In particular:

-The specific packages offered by Matlab (like the mapping toolbox, simulink, parallel computing, etc..).

-The training support offered to companies (I am not a huge fan of this, but I meet an awful lot of people who are).

-The existing user base.

-Finally, $10K (Matlab + a few packages) annually is not that much if it enhances productivity.

Even for students, I wonder if they would be better served getting used to Matlab because that is what they will end up using in industry.

It makes for a much better joke if you start at one ;-)

It is actually a pretty old joke, there are a few variations on it (one for Computer Scientists, one for Mathematicians, etc...):

http://www.phy.ilstu.edu/~rfm/107F07/EPMjokes.html

The Physicist proof all odd numbers are prime: 1 is prime, 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is experimental error, 11 is prime, 13 is prime...

This is why good internships are so important while your an undergraduate in CS (or many other majors for that matter).

Depending on the university you go to, CS != Software Engineering. You don't encounter, and may not be even aware, of concepts like code reviews, build systems, or version control. By participating in an internship you are forced to address these gaps in your knowledge.

That being said, I don't think I would take away a single CS course I took as an undergrad and replace it with a course on software engineering practices. There is just too much strictly CS knowledge that is necessary for an undergraduate to learn.

This is pure speculation, but I wonder if production cost is the driving factor. Rather, I think it is a question of what a potential buyer is willing to pay. If a person with a Kindle is looking to read, say, Atlas Shrugged ($19 Kindle, $10 Paperback) I don't think they are going to buy the paperback just to save money. They are probably willing to eat the extra $9 for the immediate gratification. Amazon knows that, so they'll charge more.

Also, its interesting to note (from an unscientific random survey) that they are charging less for the Kindle Edition when it comes to bestsellers (which are probably in hardback). I wonder if this is in an effort to hook potential buyers and then increase margins when Kindle owners buy older titles?

This essay does assume, of course, that you can find enough developers in your locality that can write software competently in Python.

A few years ago I developed software (engine diagnostic/programming) for a large semi-truck manufacture in the Midwest. Our primary concern when selecting a language for a new product/project was whether or not we could find developers who were competent in that language. That almost always meant we chose Java because that is what our local developer pool was competent in.

We implicitly "vote" in real life through our verbal and nonverbal reactions to the comments of others.

I use contacts (same brand, Acuvue Oasys) + glasses.

I wear contacts much more than glasses, and have some trouble when I put on my glasses. In particular the loss of peripheral vision (I have extremely bad eyesight) when I put on glasses is tough to get used to.

The U.S. Department of Health & Human Services has links to each state's Department of Health [1]. They will follow up on reports of food poisoning and take necessary action.

[1] http://www.foodsafety.gov/about/state/index.html

>I have a 17-year-old daughter who went to a private school...It was judged one of the 100 best schools in America. It was phenomenal. The tuition was $5,500 a year, which is a lot of money for most parents. But the teachers were paid less than public school teachers - so it's not about money at the teacher level.

In response to Steve Jobs:

I agree, quality of education isn't necessarily about pay at the teacher level, but this isn't the best argument about why. The students attending this school necessarily have parents who put a high priority on education; at the very least, they are willing to pay $5,500 to a top 100 school. I think those parents are making a huge impact. If you move that exact same school with those exact same teachers into a less affluent environment with a $150 tuition I don't think you would see the same phenomenal results.

On the flip side, I have had some positive experiences doing some casual (non-malicious) hacking on some tech-blogs \ websites I frequent. Nothing too fancy, just simple SQL injection for privilege escalation and the like.

Any time I find something I immediately follow up with an email to the owner/administrator with all of the relevant information (including my IP address and contact information). The reactions have generally been quite positive (I've even gotten some complementary swag out of it).

It is worth emphasizing that what the author is talking about is more akin to screen scraping than web crawling. Both tasks have their challenges, but screen scraping has several that are inherently difficult to overcome.

In particular, with screen scraping, you are trying to extract structured data from a markup language (in this case HTML) that simply doesn't guarantee the structure your looking for. With web crawling you only need the structural guarantees offered by the HTML markup (not even that, with the quality of libraries such as TagSoup or Neko).

Now, that isn't to say web crawling doesn't have its own challenges (URL canonicalization anyone?).

I am in a similar situation.

I started working full time after completing undergrad a year ago, and am working on side projects more to learn than for entrepreneurship. They have been a great low cost way to continue my undergraduate math + cs education.

I certainly wouldn't mind if a project really took off and allowed me to work on it full time, but I understand that I would have to make a significant commitment (time + money) to really have any of them gain traction. Just look at http://signal.am . It is absolutely begging for someone with more UI/UX skill than I personally have -- but it has been priceless in advancing my personal skill set (outside UI/UX).

Some items are displayed multiple times in the "ask" section. For example:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1748045

appears 3 times on the front page of the "ask" section (at least at the time this comment was posted).

The site guidelines are a good resource if you are new:

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Pretty cool site.

You might want to look into TF-IDF (term frequency-inverse document frequency) weighting as an alternative to filtering for common English words.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tf%E2%80%93idf

Thanks for the great feedback.

Your spot on about the UI/UE, it is a serious weak point. It is a pretty big gap in my own skill set (which by iterating on this site, I am hoping to improve).

I think the core competency of the site is meme tracking for a given vertical category. Given that, the thought is additional features can be added that leverage the memes.

Some examples I am thinking of short term:

-Which memes are having the biggest impact on social networks (in terms of "tweets", "likes", "diggs", etc..).

-What media, such as videos and images, are associated with a particular meme.

Longer term:

-Given a list of sites and article I track on say, Google Reader, only show me the entries which are part of significant memes.

-What memes are my friends "liking", "tweeting", or "digging", etc...

-Topic search which returns memes rather than single articles.

The overarching plan is to release early, and often -- and hopefully to update the folks here at Hacker News to make a good feedback loop.

Right. The automation versus editing is the key difference between techofnow and techmeme. Techmeme has several editors that will promote stories, or alter conversation grouping, based on an editor's discretion.

I think your right. techofnow is too mobile heavy right now.

Google will also detect hAtom for syndicated content: http://microformats.org/wiki/hatom