skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At least in software, I don't think this is nearly as much a problem as in other industries.

I know a lot of very good developers who are in their 30s and 40s (not too many who are in their 50s, although I'm sure they exist and there will be more in the near future!) and have no desire to stop coding and become management. In some cases it's a very conscious lifestyle choice: you can maintain much more flexible hours and even do telework if you are writing code, while someone in a management role has to be physically present more often.

The idea that everyone should move into management is poisonous, both to developers who want to remain developers and feel pushed, and to management, which gets filled with people who don't really want to be there.

Some of the better places I've worked have recognized that some people want to get into project or staff management, and other people would prefer to perfect their craft and work independently. They link salary not to progress along a "ladder," but to actual value to the organization -- which often leads to developers who are making more than their project managers. This strikes me as totally appropriate, and it surprises me sometimes that not all companies are like this.

A company that pushes its best developers into management positions they're not thrilled about (either through 'career planning' or by making that the only way to get raises) is shooting itself in the foot in the long run.
I didn't say YOU should give poor people money, I said the Church should. And I'm not going to tell poor people to steal from you; I'm going to tell them to steal from the Church.
Sorry missed this reply. For those still interested.

The key to keeping down costs is to buy in bulk, something I realize is not feasible to all people because it requires frontloading much of the cost. Scale according to what you can afford.

Breakfast & Dinner Example (I'm using very very generous prices, you can find most of these items for substantially cheaper via weekly sales/coupons or costco)

Breakfast:
2 Slices of Whole Wheat Bread = $0.60 ($3 for 10 slice loaf)
2 Large Eggs = $0.33 ($2 for 1 carton)
1 Tomato = $0.50
1 Banana = $0.50
Incidentals (salt, pepper, butter) = $0.10

Breakfast Total: $2.03

Dinner

Pasta = $0.33 (1 bag of pasta at WF = ~$1 and makes about three man servings)
Can of Tuna = $0.50
Frozen Veggies = $0.50 (1 bag of mixed veggies about $1.50, makes three man servings)
Canned Tomatoes = $0.50 (1 can = ~$1)
Shredded Cheese = $0.40 ($4 bag makes about 10 servings)
Olive Oil, Salt&Pepper, = $0.10
1 clove of Garlic = $0.05

Total: $2.38

Heat oil, sautee garlic, add veggies, add pre-cooked pasta, add tuna, season, add tomatoes, check-seasoning, stir-fry and reduce the water down, throw on the cheese.

Again buy in bulk and these prices go down even more. Canned goods, frozen foods, and carbs (rice & pasta are my favorites) are dirt dirt cheap.

For extra health, replace a few meals each week with fresh produce.
The taking a picture task to could be though of as fun and something different compared to a lot of the jobs on there. So in this case someones motivation might not having anything to do with the dollar on offer.
haha peanut butter and... rice.
The examples you're giving are NOT examples of faith.

But since people keep downvoting me without any reason (you're only supposed to downvote if someone is rude or something, NOT because you disagree with them), I ought to just stop making comments. This is pitiful.
Cliff Click checking in
there's an assumption that the ideal to strive for is to move up the chain into management as quickly as possible

This may have been true at one time, but not so much anymore, especially in IT. I prefer Michael Gerber's (of EMyth fame) description: there are three types of roles in a business, the entrepreneur, the manager, and the technician. If you run your own business, you better be all 3. But if you work for someone else, you can choose your path. Choosing the technician path is perfectly acceptable, and often preferable to the manager path. You get to focus on the critical path, do what you do best, and in many cases, earn more than your boss. Many programmers I know that made the switch to management are sorry they did; they miss the cool work and hate the meetings and bullshit. I made the switch back to technician. No one has ever questioned why.
He doesn't blindly praise Apple. Read DF with less prejudice and you'd spot many posts where he decries Apple.
Your first two premises are wrong. You do NOT need faith to establish reason.
He'd probably rip it apart just as much or even more. You have seen him get pissed off over the app store policies a million times right?
"Sure, if I were a commercial entity coming to you for investment, and I'd made the projections I had in the past, you wouldn't invest again," he says. "But we're not a commercial operation. If we only achieve half of what we're setting out to do, it could have very big consequences."
If you get far enough in the interview process. You might not even make it past HR's "overqualified" screen (that's what that means, has been technical for too long). And then even if the hands-on programmers think you're great, the young hotshot manager might not be comfortable managing someone old enough to be his father, who has likely seen it all before. This is called "not a cultural fit".

Ageism in IT is very real. This is just one of the mechanisms by which it operates. The other side is the (youngest) programmers who haven't yet grown out of language fanboyism and dismiss your experience of last year's technology as irrelevant. Fortunately they're rarely in positions of hiring authority.

The IT industry takes about 10 years to cycle through fads. Someone I consider experienced has been through at least one cycle. I want people who can say XML? Oh yes, well I've never used XML but in the 90s I was doing EDI... (insert tech of choice)
Yes -- though not yet, because they (weirdly) haven't replied to my "you've won the $50 survey prize" email. Either they thought it was spam, or they typed in their email address wrong. I'm guessing the later, and will move onto the next randomly-selected participant in a couple of days.
One obvious application is using MTurk to solve CAPTCHAs.
Opera has Fastest JS Engine
2009 Crunchies Finalists
You get my up-vote. Only a few more days before the SO and I can get out to the theater.

And I'll give you a few more lines so that it'll cover larger screens (i've got 1200 pixels to make up for).
FWIW terrible example, that's why Apache is always blowing up when it gets much load.

I'd much rather a server service all requests properly than fail. Then you can measure the load yourself, and load balance appropriately, knowing that all requests are being serviced properly.
The comments seem to address his concerns, but I just had to call this out:

"As you don't see this hardly anywhere in Python because Pythonistas feel that namespaces are a bad idea..."

From The Zen of Python: "Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!"
I'd say it's still a one-sided sword. The side that crushes real innovation (and brings on crap suits like this) is sharp as hell, the one the 'protects' small startups is pretty blunt.
And the link for those who haven't already seen this:
http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/
San Jose police test head-mounted cameras for officers
This happened in Texas. I don't care what the backstory might be, 110% of the suits that come out of TX are complete BS.
The funny thing is, every single one of those participants thought it was worth their time. They looked for something to earn money, and found this. They clearly thought the time/money tradeoff was sufficient.

If you can earn a buck doing what a lot of (generally wealthier, admittedly) people do for free, why not?
And those menus look a lot like the Office 2007 menus or MS Paint in Windows 7. ;-)
TDD is not finished until the code speaks
Not really. While he's not comically over-the-top pro-Apple like RoughlyDrafted, I haven't really read anything where he says something actually bad about Apple. Usually its something along the lines of "Apple is pretty awesome and better than anyone, but they should tweak this thing a bit".
They're far more often used as bludgeons to drain the defense coffers of small software studios and startups. By the time a patent is granted, that startup has moved on to something better - show me a single software patent that a competent programmer couldn't develop in a few weeks given the description. Not the patented mechanism (that's generally obvious and we all know it), just what the invention is supposed to solve.

Software patents are an abuse of the patent system.
Maybe I missed it, but I didn't see anything in the article about the tablet being "flexible." The photo at the top make it look rigid to me.

Of course, if it's all a dream, then I suppose we can call it whatever we want...
An MBA is a basic business toolkit. It's an opportunity to understand the basics of accounting, finance, management, business law, statistics, communication and marketing, as well as to take a few advanced classes in fields that interest you.

It's also an opportunity to meet people who are sufficiently interested in business, and their careers, to expose themselves to these fundamentals.

As happens with all degrees, some people really seize the opportunity to sharpen their skills for the future, and others simply try to pass the classes. Further, some people are incredibly bright and able to apply the knowledge usefully, whereas others do so clumsily or not at all.

I wouldn't kick somebody out of my office for not having an MBA, nor would I hire them simply because they had one. But that said, I think those disparaging it do so to the detriment of those who listen to them. It's a useful toolkit.

I used to be one of those who disparaged MBAs. Now I have one, and have often been thankful for the breadth of knowledge I was forced to acquire, as well as for the innumerable case studies I read, that really changed the way I consume business news, and the way I think about business strategy.
Congrats guys, looks good. I wonder if any UofC NVC ideas will make use of your API.

Brian
There's very little that apt can do that yum can't these days (obviously this wasn't the case in the late 90s). But the main thing for me is that Debian/Ubuntu has far more packaged apps available.
We link regularly to the original source, I'm sorry if it's not as visible, but I assure you we do regularly. The exception are ones coming in the form of company announcements, but even then we often link back to their blog posts.

I'll try to make it more visible in the future.
A Downside of Organ Donation
Yes, but, unlike some open source projects, Mozilla is out to make money from the project and their income is generated almost exclusively through a search deal with this particular competitor.
If answering that question was necessary to speaking and understanding the language fluently, it wouldn't be so hard to answer the question. Mapping concepts between two languages is much, much harder than simply speaking and understanding both languages.
Research Shows the Importance of Imagination in Children's Cognitive Development
I don’t mind who writes the laws of the future, if I can do the theme music
We took the screen directly from the source - we didn't do the actual comparison.
Yup. It's amazing how uptight some suits can get about cartoon names and other whimsical machine names. At my work I had some lab servers named after Pixar characters. I got seriously chewed out by one C-level exec about the inappropriateness of the hostname "elastigirl". :-(

Even if you want "safe" sanitized names though, I can't understand why people create these elaborate multi-part naming conventions for servers. Seriously, if the hostname is harder to remember and type than the IP address, YOUR NAMING CONVENTION IS BROKEN!
That's not an accurate comparison. That's an improvement to the rendering engine that's shared between them. They all have the feature. It's a different story when you're talking about a feature you're planning to implement and then mention the competitor who already has it. It's just plain stupid.
How about you pay everyone in China to jump up and down until we crash into the moon?
Thanks. Someone either disagrees or had a slip of the finger, because they down-voted it. Perhaps it was deliberate and they want the spoilers to be here. Who knows.

However, if people want to keep the spoiler protector in place, but not give me the karma for it, feel free to upmod the spoiler protector and downmod this comment to balance it.
For me it is easier to understand that line without it wrapping.
I don't think Gruber's upset that Google isn't open about these things — it's more than they claim to be open about everything, but clearly aren't. He's calling Rosenberg out on his propaganda-like march of "Google is always open no matter what"
Dropbox users who want to email their files to Dropbox
Perhaps but it's visually incorrect. If readability was the primary concern then the extending line should have a background, ideally in a way that fits the design (say having the appearance of a tab on the side of a notebook).
Who hasn't been an critic of Apple's app store policies? That's not much of an argument.
AT&T Mulls Plans to Deal with iPhone Data Demand - BusinessWeek
Google's recent post 'defining openness' seems to be drawing a lot of criticism from Hacker News, both directly in comments, and indirectly in the tone of articles that are posted.

First, please recognize that this in an internal memo we are getting a glimpse of. It's a "Hey guys, I know we've been talking a lot about open, here's what I think you should strive to put into a product if you're going to use open to describe the product."

You think it makes Google look perfect? This is an internal memo! He's talking to the troops, have you ever heard a pep talk that started with "We kinda failed on that do no evil thing didn't we?"?

Second, the author specifically mentions why Google doesn't open up certain things, it wouldn't be beneficial. If you don't agree with his reasoning, then fine, but at least we know the reasoning (although it's not hard to figure out on your own).

I simply cannot understand the kind of person that gets angry at Google when they open source some products but not others. How many products has Microsoft open sourced? Yes Google's motives are based on profit, all of our motives are. The point is I'm excited for Android, Go, and Chrome. They have raised the bar in quality software and I couldn't care less how ads find their way to my blog or why Wikipedia is the first search result on any topic.
Seven geeky ways to kill time this holiday season
So how about the option of going out for coffee instead of going to breakfast?
why are we even discussing a small rant like this? if we're to discuss rosenberg's note, maybe that should be the link instead.
Mobile Web 2014: No Pinch, No Zoom, Tons of JavaScript
Court orders Microsoft to stop selling Office by January 11th
It's probably the reference to getting Plastic Logic to build the devices. They apparently specialize in flexible circuitry.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_logic
I'd like to see a real low-cost open hardware item that isn't vapor. Even if it's just at the level of a graphing calculator. Start with cheap and extensible and work up from there.
"won by Toronto-based software company i4i in Texas"

Says it all.
How is managing boxes named server001 easier than giving the servers, oh, I don't know.... actual NAMES! Are you seriously gonna tell me you manage the boxes with scripts that iterate through the numeric portion of the server names?!? Because if that's the case, your problems are WAAAYYY bigger than just naming convention problems.

Names like server001 are great and fine for a cluster of more or less identical, interchangable machines (Beowolf cluster, cluster of VMware hosts, etc.). But it sucks ass for most other circumstances. Seriously. Try having discussions about a project involving a dozen servers (out of hundreds in the company mind you), each with names like server3056, server3087, server3109. It sucks, because 5 minutes after talking about it you find yourself wondering: Hmmm... was I supposed to reboot 3087? or 3078? :-)
I wouldn't worry about it for existing sites, but it's a good start for the CSS in a new site.

EDIT: or full overhaul of an existing site.
Crunchie Award Finalists
A more reasonable proposal would be for someone to pull a netflix; $1 million or even a $1o million prize for a significant advance in search relevancy. $10 million would be cheap for MS, Yahoo, ASK, a VC, or even DARPA.
Sorry, I kind of inferred that from the talk of replacing glass with plastic and so forth, and also my prior knowledge about v2.0, slated for delivery next year: http://www.forbes.com/2008/05/20/olpc-laptop-microsoft-tech-...
On "Custom XML" (Microsoft patent lawsuit)
Die troll die.

Seriously that's the lamest sort of reply we see here on Hacker News. Sniping other peoples work is low (this isn't Slashdot).
It depends on the fund. All funds are different so it is tough to generalize, especially since they widely vary in size and responsibility.

I have a good friend that works for a large mutual fund who already pitches stocks to the PMs. Other guys I know are simply excel monkeys.

In investment banking, it is a bit different. Analysts and Associates are excel jockeys with the job translating towards sales/deal sourcing as you climb up the ladder.
Named for the rack it's in??? Oh my god that's stupid! So you seriously thing it's a good idea to have to rename the server if you shuffle around some data center space!?!?
Seems like a misguided way of solving a basic refactoring problem. What he actually wants to pickle is a data structure that the generator depends on. The use of some ALL CAPS magic variable name and global state rings all sorts of warning bells in my head when I look at it.

However, it's hard to tell why he actually needs to pickle generators from looking at his examples. I can think of some good hypothetical reasons, but his examples don't justify it - it looks equivalent to 'I want to pickle a suspended thread' to me.
Me too.

I get a lot more done, and have a lot less stress.
While I don't doubt that everyone has their price... I think you would find it cost-prohibitive to pay enough people to do something like that to have any sort of real-world impact.

People are not going to go out of their way, or risk jail time, for $1.00/task. You'd need to pony up a lot more money (like, I'm guessing, 100's of thousands of dollars) to get enough people to violate basic principles on a large enough scale for this to create some sort of shift.
"We don't necessarily need to build it," Negroponte told Forbes. "We just need to threaten to build it."

...provided we don't reveal the emptiness of our threats in -- for example -- a Forbes interview.
Wouldn't "how are you going to get websites on-board?" be the number one question that any investor or founder would need answered?
I think the reason is so you know where the link goes before clicking, which prevents rickrolling.
> "The question was what rich people should be allowed to do with their money."

> No, the question was, what people should be allowed to do with their money.

You are correct, of course.
Something not mentioned that Eric Meyers and others have noticed about his CSS reset script - style your a:focus, which it completely hides. Without a:focus styling, someone using the keyboard can't tell what link s/he's tabbed to.
Reading through that documentation page I must say I'm extremely underwhelmed.

Is that doc-page outdated/incomplete or did it really take them 4 years and a 21kloc patch to tie a model to a database instance?
I mean, I don't see anything about proper partitioning/sharding, not a glimpse of cross-db queries. Is this a joke?

SqlAlchemy has had proper multi-db support (vertical and horizontal) since around 2007. Perhaps the time would be better spent porting django to a real ORM?

http://www.sqlalchemy.org/docs/06/session.html#partitioning-...
Sigh.

The entire modus operandi of philosophical discourse since Descartes has been the seeking of a basis for human thought that didn't depend on assumptions. Heretofore, it has failed utterly in this task, and modern philosophy has increasingly accepted the notion that nothing can be proved absolutely. In retrospect, this makes perfect sense: Why should the human mind be capable of absolute knowledge?

Slowly we are realizing again what the ancients took for granted, that to reason, one must first assume that one is capable of it.

So, seeing as your statement controverts over 3000 years of experience, you'll need to proved an example of a belief that doesn't rely on assumptions.
I wonder if "bumping money" would be possible with this API. I think that could be huge.
Loved it and found myself nodding along.

Anyone else catch the irony that this essay was really long?
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1010803

See also: http://searchyc.com/microsoft+word?sort=by_date
Why is the skill-building suspect? What part of the content do you find so worthless?

At least provide some examples or references to go along with your comment.

B
> "legitimate software patents"

I think the issue here is a lot of people don't think there is such a thing.
See also:

http://searchyc.com/microsoft+word?sort=by_date

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1010543
The joy of dirt
Predictions 2010: Venkatesh Rao’s List
Protection results in a racket as its ultimate end. I see small studios and startups doing just fine right now without patents, which are expensive and require a lot of specialized knowledge to apply for. Who is being protected from what by patents, exactly?
I wish I knew more about this such as:

* what affect on the data would there be if, rather than taking "scores" that are presumably an SAT Verbal, SAT Writing, and SAT Math one took an SAT Verbal, SAT Math, and an SAT II Science.

* what portion of this might be attributable to differences in adolescent development? Female puberty usually starts between 9 and 14. Male puberty usually starts between 10 and 17. That means that males are more likely to be dealing with puberty during the period that their marks and scores are being taken for college admission.

* what portion of this is cultural? Is it more socially acceptable for females to excel academically than males? I'm usually not into the idea that males and females learn differently, but I am not an adolescent development psychologist and therefore am just spouting nonsense.

The one thing that I really love about this article is that it addresses something really important: no one is willing to talk about it.
So what did Microsoft do? Violate a patent for a "program which let's users type and format text"?
I'm sad to say I'm not very surprised by this. The problems involved in this kind of start-up are not technical, and this was a mostly technical solution.
They might be an honest, hard-working group of good people who got tricked and steamrolled by their business partner (Microsoft).

But their patent is still crap.

The first claim of the '449 patent covers essentially any code that maps external XML data into a document. There is simply too much existing art in the file manipulation and database domains for this to be anything but obvious.
I play this on CrossOver osx all the time, and have seen people play it on wine. Works great.
Cherry Pal is in theory shipping a $99 7" netbook now:

http://www.cherrypal.com/products.php

Also, the Gecko Surboard keyboard computer will in theory retail for $99:

http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/NorhTec-Gecko-Surfbo...
From my take on the article, he did that _and_ his regular work.

"It took only a few minutes, so it didn't keep him from his other work"
Patent in question -

http://www.google.com/patents?id=y8UkAAAAEBAJ&dq=5787449