pincubator

I was the OP who posted the first thread which was linking to his life-threatening tweet minutes after he posted it (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10803924). Unfortunately it got deleted just before reaching to frontpage because "We are not going to have a thread to gawk at a human being saying he might kill himself."

Well, I was thinking exactly the opposite of gawking when I posted it. I wanted the community to pay attention, I wanted thousands of people writing him emails/tweets, supporting his fight against the traumatic experience he encountered with the police. So he could see that ending his life isnt the only way to reach out to people about his cause. I feel like we actually closed our ears to what he was trying to say by deleting that thread. What was so wrong about discussing it here as normal human beings? People in that thread were actually discussing his experience about police brutality. From his Twitter logs, you can see that he was tweeting to some Twitter accounts and was asking for help on his cause :( I just feel like it would be nice for him to see himself on front-page of Hackernews and see that community is also outraged by what happened to him. Instead, he was harassed by several random people on Twitter calling him names and wanting him to broadcast his suicide on twitch :(

I don't mean to hurt/blame anyone or any moderator. Maybe I just feel very emotional since I met with Debian when I was 18 and it completely changed my life. I also met with him at a couple of events and he seemed like a nice guy in person, too. I just feel a little responsible for not being able to do anything after reading his tweets :( I do hope that community doesn't let what happened to him forgotten and fight for his cause.

Apparently Ian Murdock recently faced with police brutality and announces that he will commit suicide. More updates here: https://twitter.com/imurdock

A discussion on "why" this is happening:

"""

The reason older photocopiers don't copy blue is very simply that the drum was activated by reflected light from the scanner. The chemical process that creates the "semiconductor" on the drum surface is sensitive to a fair proportion of the light spectrum, but frequently lost sensitivity t the blue portion of the range. Organic photoconductors had a better response to blues but still cut off a portion of the spectrum. Newer Photocopiers (Digital) operate differently and are dependent on the frequency range of the CCD in the scanner, they are usually pretty good at the blues, and frequently have settings that enable Text enhancement, enabling a setting of a contrast point, anything darker than that point is registered as black anything lighter as white.

"""

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/536535.html

A while ago, someone wrote to Systers (a highly activated women in CS e-mail list) the following, which is highly accurate:

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What a great business model Grace Hopper Academy has.

First, you find women who are very smart and highly motivated. You make sure they are highly motivated by making them take the first part of the course online. (Massive Open Online Courses have a completion rate of 10%, and the vast majority people finishing them already have a Bachelor's degree). The cost to run the online course is very cheap, and now you are guaranteed to have easy students only.

You then teach these easy students Javascript stuff for one semester. (13 weeks).

Then you take 22.5% of their year's paycheck once they have a nice job -- and they will have a nice job because they are very smart and motivated. If they make $70,000, that's $15,750 a pop.

A state university education in Ohio is $12,000 for 15 weeks by the way. Other bootcamps range from free to $21000 with median around $8000. (Grace Hopper Academy is not the only one to get tuition paid via a cut of your pay after graduation either). http://www.skilledup.com/articles/the-ultimate-guide-to-codi...

The Dean of Grace Hopper Academy has no academic credentials listed whatsoever, nor is there any information about the instructors. Do they have academic credentials? Do they have industry experience and teaching experience? Do they have names? Are any of them female?

Buyer beware.

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PS: The exact link to the discussion is somewhere in the Systers archive..

I favor Python as well, but from what I see in industry, Python is best for exploration/initial experiments and Java (and recently, Scala) is for production.

It also makes sense why there are less American PhD students in those kind of locations when you look from their perspective. If I were an American, there was no way for me to spend 5+ years of my life in mid-west with 1500K a month (instead, I could just lend to a top company in a good location with $$$$). But for most of the foreign nationals, such an experience is OK to bear with in return for a better life standard.

I did my PhD in mid-west, and I literally only met 2 American PhD students during my entire PhD (majority was Chinese and Indian students who pursue a PhD as a gateway to a top job). I guess location is a big factor.

I experienced the two sides of the coin first hand. Right after college, I started to work at a start-up; everything was just awesome, people were cool, job was interesting, I was extremely happy. 3 months into the job, after I talked to my colleagues, I realized that I was severely underpaid. I asked for a raise, got something like 5%. After 2 weeks, I switch to a job paying me exactly x 2 of my salary.

Worst decision of my life, and I still regret it to this day. But knowing the fact that my old job was taking advantage of me just because I am a new-graduate, I couldn't return back there. But sometimes money isn't really worth comparing to being absolutely happy at work.

I stopped using a cellphone when I moved to US --it was way more expensive than what I used to have in my home country (so I just simply said "nope."). Now when people ask my phone number, I just give my Google voice (which is free text/talk within US). If I am traveling to a conference, for the sake of emergency, I just use a potato phone with prepaid credit -- which I connect its number to Google Voice, so everyone who calls my Google voice number are automatically being redirected to my temporary phone. So I get that going for me.

Reminds me when I was an instructor for a grad course and showed up in a very trendy outfit to the first lecture (nothing weird or revealing, but nothing you would often see in a campus either -- full make up, high heels, ripped jeans etc.) and I can't forget the look in the student's faces. I was trying to explain an algorithm on the board, and all students had a look in their faces like "you can't possibly know about this". When the class is over and the professor of the next class showed up, he had a grin on his face like "you can't possibly teach a class". Fast forward to 2 weeks later, when I was overwhelmed with the exams and didn't give a single damn anymore, I just showed up with my sweatpants, a hoodie, and no makeup. Students were listening the class with full focus and I was well respected. Not sure what to make out of this..

The funny thing is: I am programming since I was 17, and spent most of my youth in full-geeky and nerdy outfits (aka, in "programmer" style). But after I come to my mid-20s I started to feel like "Oh, I didn't even wear a dress or a high-heel in my entire life!!!11". That's when I started to dress like a woman, and that's what happens :')

Surely, I am serious. I can't see any other difference that can affect the choice of career path between men and women.

My wife is a nurse. A female dominated field. I also own a construction company. A male dominated field. In neither field would you see a company or an organization suggest hiring one gender over the other to satisfy a ratio.

The only difference between men and women is their physical power. Yes, construction company is a male dominated field, because men are more suitable for doing that kind of job because of their body strength.

On the other hand.. in computer science, there is no difference between men and women, everything runs on brain power. So I find it very weird that there is very few women in computer science.

what kind of information you can pull? is it possible to pull content of the comics?

maybe i didn't get it but: why this is a physical card instead of an app on a smartphone? what's its advantage?

I think most of the CS programs will just waste your time --unless you attend to a very good university. Given that best hackers I've met are self-taught programmers, you can definitely work it out yourself. I think these are amazing times; there are many pretty good online courses & materials, places to get help, etc.

I recommend Programming Languages course on Coursera. But if you are impatient, you can start from learning Python (it has a very low learning curve): learnpythonthehardway.org/book/

Also can someone suggest what is the best way to approach code reading? When I open a library in Python, I am not sure where to start reading, just a bunch of files. Should I randomly pick one file and start reading from there? Is there any common strategy?

I think the best way to learn a programming language is to learn it yourself. Imho, these kind of things don't work well with courses; they often restrict the way you think.

For Python, you can start from Learn Python the Hard Way (free) http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/

After you finish this, start working on a small project and learn other things on the way.

For mentor support; I think Stackoverflow is the perfect source to ask questions and get feedback (but remember to search before asking a question).

We all know that it's almost impossible to provide custom feedback to those who are not selected. But is it also impossible to point out what portion of our application went wrong?

E.g. there might be 4-5 checkboxes for reviewers:

- Ideas are not clear

- Ideas are not profound/original

- Not profitable

- No demo

...

So at least we could know what went wrong. As most of the applicants, I think my idea was pretty cool and I am not sure what part I screwed up.

no, i just used streaming api to gather the data. you can crawl surprisingly more data with streaming api as opposed to regular api.

I guess that makes Twitter data cheaper than before? Last time when I contacted them for one week of worth tweets (with some filters on top) they wanted me to pay tens of thousands dollars. I ended up crawling the data myself.

> I couldn't find this 6-months clause anywhere ..

Actually if you try to add a *.cat domain through gandi.net, they included this clause as a tip-text encoded in the little warning image: "Warning: the registration contract for domain names in this extension require that you publish at least one page in Catalan within 6 months."

It is interesting to see big companies like LinkedIn, Twitter, HP showed some interest in hiring remotely. Not sure if they would consider hiring a regular software developer remotely. Their answer mostly make me think of "Well, in case there is an extraordinary hacker that we can benefit, we might think of offering a remote job".

You should also keep in mind that most of those companies expect applicants to practice that kind of puzzles/code challenges before. A couple of years ago, I was also in a similar state-of-mind with you, but when I get to know people who got good developer jobs at top companies, they all suggested me to study code challenges/puzzles that can be found online. So imho, you should do more research on what type of questions people get to asked in the companies you are looking for, and just practice.

Here is the source code: http://svn.python.org/view/python/trunk/Lib/antigravity.py?v...

That's why whenever I get a neat idea (after "Oh, I can't believe I've never seen this kind of app around, it would be awesome to build it!" moments) I always do an extensive market research. It helps with two things:

1) You don't get disappointed that much to see others also have thought of it before (comparing to the shocking moment of discovering that someone else has already done it better by the time you are almost finishing your product). 2) It helps me to look/analyze what my kind of different ideas my competitors have thought about the product. If they have a crappier version of what I have in mind, then I am happy to see that there is an actual potential to beat them. If they are in a far better condition, then I force myself to think "what else could be added to this". If there is not much idea I can extent the product into, usually I give up since there is not much point of wasting time.