sixtofour

"if you're working outside the job, then you're not fully committed to me".

And if you're not working outside the job, then you're not fully committed to your career.

And for that matter, why should anyone be fully committed to a job? Life is more than a job, and most lives last longer than most jobs.

"if the name is an acronym, you should spell out the acronym"

(I did not downvote you BTW)

Someone else replied that the project is now just referred to as LLVM. That's fine, but people expect acronyms to stand for something, and the definition or lack of should be way at the top of any project. Lots of people come to a project for the first time and aren't in the know.

I can think of a couple ways to approach this.

1. Pick a very small project, something useful to you but borderline under-ambitious. Anything that bugs you. Nothing that you would necessarily point proudly to on github; don't be thinking about github. I'm talking small, maybe even just a simple command line utility, or not much more. Implement it. Don't give up, learn it. Improve it. Pick another small project. Another. A slightly bigger one. What you're trying to do here is to get a giant heavy flywheel moving, but it's going to take some time before it's really spinning. Once it's spinning fast it will almost sustain itself and you won't have enough time in the day to implement all your ideas.

2. If you can't think of any small thing to build (hard to believe, but OK), then poke around for some technology that you'd like to learn, that has good documentation, and start going through its tutorials and documentation. Learn as much as you can about it. At some point you'll start to get ideas about things you can build. Start building them. It doesn't have to be an OSS project, it can just be your own if you want. At this stage it's more important that you get that flywheel spinning any way you can.

N. Don't give up.

Exactly. It's like asking Smith & Wesson to explain itself after an armed robbery.

Make an RSS feed for the discussions (what you're reading right now), not the articles. You can always get to the articles from the discussions.

If the RSS feed linked to the discussions I would almost never go to the HN front or new pages, and nothing would ever drop out of site (for people who use a feed reader).

As it is, I don't bother with the article feed, because the value is in the discussions as much as the articles.

The ONLY reason I still use Firefox is tagged bookmarks. Every time I use Chrome to test something I'm reminded how much of a turtle-pig is Firefox. Despite claimed improvements in Firefox's use of memory and processor, Chrome is noticeably better in both these areas. I still have to restart Firefox to reclaim leaked memory; after the restart, with the same tabs open, I've reclaimed gobs of memory.

I would move instantly to Chrome if the company that gave us tags in gmail would just do the same for bookmarks in Chrome.

It is to some, and it's not to others, and either attitude is fine if mutually agreed to. Spying and control is a big deal.

"Andrew: What you were doing was, you were buying ads online and running affiliate advertising against them. The profit was the revenue that you were making from the affiliate programs, what they were paying you every time they got a new order or lead, minus what you were paying for your ads, right."

For the hard-of-money-making, what does this mean, how does it work functionally (black box inputs and outputs), and why is it profitable?

I'm guessing that where you post has a lot to do with what gets posted, for example my guess would be that if you could do this on IRC you'd get C and Perl higher up.

Good suggestions for any career, not just design. Even the first suggestion, "Learn your graphic design theory and history," when translated to your specialty is valuable. There are a lot of giants' shoulders to stand on, and all you have to do is see them and step up.

1. "Since term limits seem to be a sticking point (how can you get someone to vote for firing themselves?) ..."

Indeed.

2. "... I think that we should have a mandatory retirement age, 65, just like the rest of working class america."

Who's going to be doing all that mandating? As far as I know the only body that could do that is Congress; see your point 1.

And, mandatory retirement "just like the rest of working class America?" Except for regulated safety environments like airline pilot, I'm not aware of any mandate to retire at 65.