skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm currently working in Seattle, where this guy was before - I think he was misguided in moving to SF when he couldn't even get a web dev job in Seattle.

Firstly, it sounds like he went to WSU, not UW, which around here certainly is not a well-reputed university. So his degree doesn't earn him any brownie points at any employers.

Secondly, there are a lot of web dev (but we're talking backend code also, not just frontend dev) in the Seattle area, and we are hiring like mad. That being said, the big names around here source from all over the world, not to mention all over the USA - if you do not have a prestigious degree, and/or years of experience and a portfolio that blows people away, you will go nowhere real fast.

At the risk of being presumptuous, but having seen this particular story too many times, it sounds like he had a lot of illusions about what it would take to succeed as a web dev, and expected his education to carry him through his job search, where the reality was that experience trumps almost everything else in this field.

I imagine moving to SF made all of the above worse, not better.
I don't really understand why this is news-worthy - he took a risk and lost. The safer path would have been to keep working as a chef and then mix-in the career change, perhaps by starting a cooking-related website, blog, Facebook app, whatever.

I find it quite difficult to believe that a chef with 10 years of experience could not find a job in Seattle. This beggars belief.

In short, don't tempt economic fate when you have a wife and kid and live in the USA - you should not count on ANY social support in this country.
The use of text is the right thing;

Why? It's genuinely inefficient. This is not academic, as easily illustrated by serializing even a megabyte of binary data in a text-encoded document. Base64+GZIP is not a solution.

... if you really care about performance at a level that naively compressed text formats can't provide ...

Why are we optimizing a transfer serialization for your own readability and not the devices we're actually targeting?

I've wasted days trying to get barely acceptable XML parsing performance on the iPhone, and similar lower-end ARM devices are becoming much more prevalent these days.

... you frankly need to be defining your own wire protocols anyway.

Protocols like XMPP dictate the use of XML. There wouldn't be nearly as many performance issues if they'd used something akin to Thrift, Protobuf, or even the woefully misunderstood ASN.1 DER.

Since XMPP uses XML, they've had to define complex out-of-band protocols for transfering file data, instead of simply sending the data in-line as simple binary XMPP messages.

I could not more strongly disagree with your position. Protocol implementations should use well-defined, efficient binary serialization mechanisms (such as Protobuf or Thrift) wherever possible to maximize performance, and minimize both serialization overhead and implementation complexity.
Effective typing requires good tactile feedback, not being able to see your fingers.
The primary issues with ASN.1 seem to be that the availability libraries are poor and the documentation is both hard to find, and difficult to follow.
Ad hominem was originally a rhetorical technique used to undermine a person's ethos (their moral character).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethos#Rhetoric

It was used to undermine a person's character so the audience was less likely to take what they say seriously (the same technique is used in courts when dodgy witnesses are presented, it's also used everywhere in political/religious arguments, even by the supposed "rationalist" crowd).

Something I hate about the internet is how amateurs "rediscover the wheel" in article after article. This is the difference between professional writers and amateurs. Pros at least sometimes do their research.
"I did this by repurposing the same content I use for my website and slotting it into a landing page template, which gives me about 750 distinct landing pages to work with."

How do you get any statistically significant sampling with this many landing pages. Doesn't this put your required traffic to get a statistically significant result at somewhere around a few hundred thousand page views?
"Motherhood, not sexism, is the issue: in America, childless women earn almost as much as men, but mothers earn significantly less."

There's an easy (cough, cough) solution to that: figure out how to let men have babies. Heck, it could be Arnold Schwarzenegger's new initiative for California. He has prior experience with it, after all. ;-)
"XML is very bad at handling binary data." That is mostly false.

No, it is not. Encode a reasonably sized JPEG (say, 500k-1MB) in an XML document. Try measuring how quickly you can parse that XML document on a lower-end device.

Now try encoding a batch of thumbnails (say, 30k each) in an XML document. Now try seeing how fast you can parse 500 of them on a lower-end device.

There is no obviously winner (widely adopted) standard for binary format XML although there will be some day.

"Some day" doesn't do us any good today.
The author is John Gruber, who has been writing about all things Apple for a while now. Although he claims he doesn't know anything about the tablet, I have a feeling a lot of his information comes directly from inside Apple.
I just want a DRAWING tablet from Apple!!! The smallest Cintiq is a thousand bucks and I have to have a computer attached to it! Give me a drawing tablet that I can also read PDFs on (and wireless on a pricier model) and I'll be all set.

Also, I want color. If it isn't color, I'll just buy a kindle.

I don't care about keyboard. iPhone style is painful, but I'll endure. Bonus points if it can recognize handwriting.
The key element to this story is that we have a person who seemingly has (1) no contacts in the valley, (2) no relevant work experience, apparently (3) no portfolio, in an economy that has (4) north of 10% unemployment.

I was unable to tell from the story what the individual's actual skill levels were in this field - usually where a portfolio comes in handy.

Any one of those four would be problematic. Put all four together and I'm not sure where the story is. Actually _finding_ a job with all four strikes against you would make for quite a story, actually.

I empathize with the guy though - that has to be an amazingly tough slog, coming to a new city, unable to shelter his family, and then having a family loan fall through at the last moment. The only good news is that it looks like he's found a place to live.

In general though, I don't think we can use it as an anecdote to accurately reflect the opportunities available for the hacker community in the valley. Though there may be some meta story about the importance of creating your own job.
I think it'd be great if YC can go to China. The growing economy and market, the huge talent tool, super low cost of labors and office. It works very well with YC philosophy.

One downside is Chinese government's tight control on internet.
Thanks, Charlie. A better link these days is: https://www.getspringboard.com/

We aren't really going after small business accounts (referring to the main article), at least not yet. I do think banking software has a ton of room to change.
<i>In short, don't tempt economic fate when you have a wife and kid and live in the USA - you should not count on ANY social support in this country.</i>

Or a job in a kitchen here in SF. We have more restaurants per capita than any other city in the world bar Paris. Even if it was just prep or even dish washing - it would have been some $.

It also seems like he didn't have any network here in SF, or try to build one. So many free tech events going on every night that you would think he would attend them to get a network going.

I genuinely feel sorry for this dude but he certainly made a lot of mistakes that don't indicate good judgment (the kind of "non-tech" smarts you look for in a good dev, as it happens)
I don't get it but they seem to be able to get a job without doing much of anything. They're also rarely useful but that's another issue.

It's incredibly strange that you view not twittering, spending time on stackoverflow, or blogging as not doing anything.

By that standard, absolutely all of the best people I've worked with in the past decade are useless, and some of the worst people I've worked with pass your test with flying colors.

I'm not generalizing to the idea that bloggers and stackoverflow users are all useless. I'm taking the far more sane position that blogging, twittering and stockoverflowing are uncorrelated to work ethic and talent.
Here's a question: how many terrorism attempts have there been against US airlines since 9/11? For that matter, what is the total number of US flights that have EVER been attacked by terrorists? I'm including both successful attacks and ones where the attack was foiled.

This is a serious question--perhaps this is a much bigger threat than I'm aware. But according to my risk assessment, airline terrorism is such a low-order threat that it's just not worth getting exercised about. I agree that the TSA accomplishes little or nothing, but I feel perfectly safe--the odds that I will be on a plane that is attacked by a hijacker are almost infinitesimal.
Got any control characters (below 0x10 iirc) inside your CDATA block? So sorry, expat and conforming parsers will die. How to strip those characters out of your input files in PHP is still one of my most popular blog posts.

XML is horrible for binary data, and the pedantry of parsers makes it worse.
If there is one thing I'd tell him, talk more about your comp sci skills than the pity angle which I understand reporters love but it doesn't result in a job as much.

This also made me think about different family cultures. In my immediate as well as extended family, you are almost EXPECTED to help a family member in this position. The downside to it is you have leecher families that don't work. The upside is I have to go back several generations on my family tree to find a family that is homeless and struggling.

Having grown up in the US(I was born in India) I struggle every now and then about this idea of distributed wealth. It often means fewer vacations even if you are making a killing because you always have someone in your extended family who isn't as well off and needs your help. Longterm though there is no doubt I prefer this shared wealth model. If this guy was in our family he would not be homeless. I know this because at any given time we have a family who is in his position. The larger family helps and in most cases they rebound again and no longer need help.

In my immediate family, we all agreed a while ago that any individual venture by my brothers will be equally owned by all three of us. My uncles have a similar agreement.
XML wasn't really ever made to be high performance though. It was made to be easy to read for humans and relatively easy to generate. At those two things it is awesome. If you are sticking binary data in XML and passing it over the wire to someone you are probably 'doing it wrong'. :)

There are obviously much fast formats for that type of thing, but they have their own drawbacks which are significant. Protocol Buffers are crazy fast but aren't self describing or human readable. JSON is really just a different representation of XML on many levels and certainly doesn't deal with binary data any more elegantly. (base64 here we come!)

If you have binary data and plenty of CPU on both ends, then gzipping XML gets you pretty close to the native size actually and can be a good solution. You keep the human readability and the compression can be done on the transport layer if it is HTTP.

If you don't have much CPU and want easy parsing, it is very easy to write a binary format for XML. I've done this for products that are sending down data to cell phones (including images). The native format is XML, because it is easy to author in templates and easy to debug, but with an extra parameter it gets thrown into a denser and very fast to parse format for the other end to deal with. This costs a bit of CPU on the server, but that generally isn't the problem.

Anyways, I would agree that the main author's points are pretty ridiculous. They either point to him not really understanding XML or never really considering the pros and cons of the alternatives. XML is great for what it is, and it has its drawbacks, but as a universal transport it is pretty rad.
Perhaps fatherhood, not motherhood, is the issue. Fathers need to be going on paternity leave at the same rates as mothers.
I'd love to see those ruby benchmarks in jruby, since it's usually at least 50% faster than MRI
Well, it's not trying to be a "tablet", so it's not lying around the living room. 95% of the time it's sitting in your pocket when not in use, very safe and comfortable.
This is one of the most confusing articles I've ever read. One of the first things that it points out is that in many ways women are not becoming equal in certain workplaces, theyre becoming significant majorities. It then proceeds to state certain deficencies and propose possible broad reaching social programs as reform. Wait-- go back. There will soon be 2 million more women in higher education than men? How does the author just skip over that? It seems like placing your fingers in your ears and going "Na na na na." I'm not saying there weren't good points brought up and maybe decent solutions but I felt like there was some deliberate cognitive dissonance going on there.
XML is an extensible framework starting with two main things: a data model (very good) and a text-based surface syntax that is portable across a great many character set encodings.

Encoding binary data (as, say, CDATA) and then shipping or storing it in the text-based syntax is every bit the lose you suggest it is. Binary XML formats, however, can answer your objection - the main problem being that no good binary XML format is yet widely adopted.

You say "`Some day' doesn't do us any good today." I half agree. It is true that, today, if you want to use XML for large binary data you have to place your bet on a suitable binary format and you face a rocky road. XML "sucks" in that sense. On the other hand, if you can possibly - for the problem you are trying to solve - make a good bet on a binary format for XML, then it is a fine choice because the data model for XML as interchange format is excellent. So using it for binary today is not an option in many cases and has an element of risk on other cases - but longer term is a winning bet. Your benefit for considering it today is that longer term pay-off. "Go long" on XML.
"I think that semantically, they are a wonderful, powerful, useful idea;" I agree.

"but syntactically they are awful, confusing, unusable crap." Pretty much the opposite of my experience, and I seem to not be alone. Anecdotally, it's interesting to look at the cat fighting between Dave Winer and the Pubsubhub folks about RSS v. Atom and the constant calls for Winer to sort out his namespace issues. A lot of people seem to find them quite useful and not confusing but, yes, there are people like Winer who (in his case) don't seem to care or (in general) Just Don't Get It. (See my initial comments about the poor state of freely available XML documentation. Someone needs to write the nice 30 page thorough intro to XML concepts and essential details.
Sure ... but I think Apple has a way of redefining the "high end". Smart phones were already considered expensive when Apple launched the iPhone.
And this is the crux of it right here. The author is confusing the two goals of making a point, and having that point heard. Surely there are better ways to market yourself than by spewing ad hominems, which just go to diminish your supposedly more important goal of actually making a solid point.
Looking back at 2009, looking forward to 2010
Whoever used a bunch of accounts to vote some of my comments down, here and elsewhere: fuck you
I'm not sure that merely apologizing is good enough. The TSA needs to explain how they're going to ensure that these sort of heavy handed tactics won't be used again and what disciplinary actions the agents involved will be facing.
I'd recommend you to start with data visualization, intute how mean, median, variation don't capture the data, then move onto normal distribution approximation of dataset, then linear regression and finally bayesian classification/probability models.

Only after you get a good grasp on basics should you move to advanced topics such as neural networks, SVMs, etc.
Computer Science Education: It’s Not Shop Class
Maira Kalman's final "And the Pursuit of Happiness": By George
>> There will soon be 2 million more women in higher education than men?

That's simply a factual statement. You seem to think getting a college degree automatically makes someone hire-able. The problem is that for many women who have college degrees they still aren't as well off in the workplace as they could be. Also, engineering orientated degrees are more valuable, but these are exactly the degrees women are under-represented in.
Start-up Metrics that Matter
In the USA, a (somewhat) free country where open debate and some level of government transparency is maintained, the "official" government numbers are 10% unemployment.

Actual unemployment is closer to 22% (according to shadowstats.com, using the pre-Clinton Administration formula).

Aside from this article referencing their own "Economist Intelligence Unit" - how do we know the numbers are not similarly fudged by the Chinese government? Are there not billions of dollars of loans marked as "good" on state-run banks that are in fact, never going to be repaid?
"If that means massive intervention, in the shape of affirmative-action programmes and across-the-board benefits for parents of all sorts, the answer is no. To begin with, promoting people on the basis of their sex is illiberal and unfair, and stigmatises its beneficiaries."

I have news for the Economist: in the US, the "win" came from doing exactly what they think is illiberal and unfair. Nearly every major US company makes an explicit, systematic effort to increase female representation in the workplace.

Is that "illiberal" and wrong? I don't know. I like having a balanced workplace, and I think that certain fields (hello, CS!) need more women. But when I look around and see men doing the vast majority of the blue-collar work (which is why they're being laid off in the "mancession"), while women make up an ever-increasing proportion of college graduates and the white-collar labor force, I have to wonder when we'll have to start giving men the affirmative action.
How to hack a stupid tourist.
or a truly innovative way to stop the dollar carry trade. Nepali banker's way.

First of all! I love Nepal and especially Nepali people. That's why I live here instead of my doomed home. And I have some little understanding of local economy, so I'm easily pay extra for fruits and vegetables I brought from some street vendor and other Tourist prices. But not to bankers.

Now how it works here. You got to Nabil Bank or Nepal Investment Bank ATMs in Thamel (tourist crowded area). Put your VISA cars in and check the balance. Everything is seem as you expected - your account converted to NPR in case of NIB, or displayed in your account's currency in case of Nabil. Then on NIB's ATM you have two choices - Fast Cash and Withdraw money, but oops, second one is disabled. So, you press Fast Cash, press 10000 and got the money and receipt. Everything seems fine, unless one small thing - it didn't print a remaining balance on the receipt.

So, just wondering, you're requested your balance and wow - you 14xxx NRS gone. 12xxx remain. Just in stupid rush you're trying to get another 10000 (yes I'm got blank and stupid) but to no avail. It says 'Transaction declined', not 'Insufficient funds' as it should. So you press 8000, got it, check account again, and got 3xx.

Ok. I'm agree, some times it is even good to cheat a little some self-centered and too-proud-of-himself western tourist, but selling a cash for 40% without any notice (actually 45% with fees) - that's seems to much. (In case of Nabil Bank they just got only one menu item CASH and also didn't print remaining amount on receipts - there are a lot of them in a dustbins.)

So, just by altering a little ATM's software they got a very good business. Last winter (2008) they didn't have that Fast Cash thing and you were able to choice exact amount you want via old Withdrawn menu item. I know that because I have been here last winter.

btw, NIB's ATMs in a tourist-free areas of the city were just refused to accept my VISA card. As expected.

Now staring at kismet's output of busy Thamel area I'm thinking should I be a stupid tourist or what?
Ok, it's just after midnight, I've had a lot to drink, and http://xkcd.com/386/ someone is wrong on the internet.

in many ways women are not becoming equal in certain workplaces, theyre becoming significant majorities.

Actually, the reason for the article, as stated in the first sentance, is that women will be 50% of the American workforce overall. No just certain workplaces, but over the entire workforce. That really is a moment to pause for reflection.

It then proceeds to state certain deficencies

Right. When the average of a bunch of things is 50%, then some of them are lower than 50% and some of them are higher. (Or they're all exactly 50%, but in super complex situations like human behavior that never actually happens.)

Wait-- go back. There will soon be 2 million more women in higher education than men? How does the author just skip over that?

The author doesn't. The author says that there will be more middle class women with jobs, but fewer poor women with jobs. He/she wants to help the poor ones.

He/she also points out that, while they're in the work force, they make less money, and provides evidence that this is because they take time off to raise children. He/she thinks its a detriment to society overall when a woman, who is equally capable as a man, makes less money just because she has a gap in her resume. That's not inconsistent.

It seems like placing your fingers in your ears and going "Na na na na."

Restating your point with a visceral image doesn't make it any more true.

I felt like there was some deliberate cognitive dissonance going on there.

You mean because being "significant majorities" in "certain workplaces" is happening at the same time as "certain deficiencies"? As explained above, I don't see how that's a contradiction or requires congitive dissonace.
Beyond being in Portland (lovely place), this startup has green appeal. Moreover, since I've gotten to know JD, I can vouch that he'd be a cool guy to work with.
the DRM naturally flows from its purpose and structure.

To me that's just a fancy way of saying, it's on their server, they get their way. Not a problem, so long as I can do it my way on my machine. Therein is the big difference.
This is a pipe dream until we either get a better input device than the keyboard

Misreading here. You can have something with the same display/input form factor as a laptop. That doesn't mean that it has to contain all of the computing, data, and display resources.
After they imaged the blogger's hard drive in its entirety and also downloaded the contents of both his phones?

And then intimidated the other by claiming they would get him fired from KLM?

Each of these guys should go after the goons, attaching their personal assets if he wins, using a "Bivens" claim.