skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Though not as powerful on the tool side, I'm working on a project called Colorillo at http://colorillo.com/

Its distinct feature is the real-time display of other people drawing on the same page. You might want to check it out if you like this.
I wonder what the age of the developers is. When I was 15-17 I could do simple development jobs and would have rather taken $100/week doing stuff I enjoyed (and learned from) than minimum wage packing fast food.
Don't feel too sorry: http://aviary.com/
I'm questioning the guys article, I think it's either an anomaly or a fabrication.
> The claim of the PhD and the 2005 paper is that you can verify the integrity of a compiler using another compiler that you do trust, all the way back in history.

Right. I'm wondering how this was sufficiently non-obvious to warrant a PhD dissertation.
this is such broad level claiming bullshit. how is an "article" (stretch) from mariecalire ending up on hacker news? i know we like productivity hacks, but we may as well post the horoscopes, we'd get just as much valuable information.
How willing are the people to disclose the spending authority cut offs?
I live in Argentina, and here companies are crazy about hiring IT people, no matter what your skills are, and most of them do offshore work for the US, paying barely standard fees here and cashing big there.
Don't think have to say who wins and who loses with this practice.
Have been thinking lately about this and believe one solution would be to equalize developer fees 'round the world, rise the bar and compete on performance.
I know it sounds crazy, but have some ideas on things we could try to work this out. I'll post them here if you think it worths anything.
Well, I'm the guy. If it's an anomaly, I don't know, but it's not a fabrication.
HERE HERE, I hate how states do not get that by allowing them they drain us of valuable programmers, who can just move to N. Cal and get jobs we'd otherwise fill here.
How come the blog doesn't have an RSS feed? :(
When asking for fairly straight-forward work, I believe a lot of contractors use generated code or repurposed code from other projects. At least this has been my experience from outsourcing application development.

It became especially apparent when I began requesting daily subversion commits for projects that lasted more than a day.
I have found that the things that have been most helpful as I learn CL are

C-c C-d d ;; Describe symbol that the cursor is on
C-c C-d h ;; Open up the hyperspec entry for the current symbol

and

C-c C-d a ;; Search symbols and documentation

in SLIME.
Why the title change? the article title is more informative, it says 68% Can an editor please fix?
Both mugtug and your project are awesome, grats!
He could be absolutely right, but whether or not he's right, statements like that are likely to be interpreted as being about attitude than circumstance.
Why don't you start such a company then? Seems like an opportunity. You have access to a pool of people who need developers right here on this site.
Before you get too upset, the "popular" languages I'm thinking of are C# and Java. Python is in the "smart people" category :P
Maybe one could create a really cool reading app.
Firebug website just got a super gorgeous facelift
If memory seves me correctly it was in revenge of the nerds.
This line from the article leaves me more than a bit suspicious of the results:

The research was commissioned by Galaxy chocolate to launch a campaign to give away one million books over the next six months.
I tried it when it was first announced, so the experience has probably been smoothed over a lot since then.

It has the steepest learning curve of any nosql database I've tried so far, but perhaps for people with more Map/Reduce familiarity that won't be the case. The biggest hangup was that Map/Reduce queries could only be written in Erlang, but now it seems they can be written in JavaScript too. That'll be a nice improvement.

The installation was a bit less straightforward than I would have liked, but it seemed to work fine after that.

I ended up going back to Redis, because I don't actually own enough hardware to make Riak worth using.
Fundamental attribution error
The article opens up with a debunked denialist canard... but it still makes front page. Why is HN a haven for climate change denialists these days?
Very impressive. Excellent example. Kudos to mugtug.com
Blame the childish American public for our political and economic crisis
Maybe it's something that happens as you get older. The risk / reward trade-offs change. Taking a lower salary in return for a chance of big rewards starts looking less appealing than selling your accumulated skills and experience for the market rate. The breadth of skills and experience are themselves what will help select for interesting work; and if the new place doesn't work out, no big deal, it's easy to move on to somewhere else.
Bay area tech lawyer; one of the people on HN who I read via RSS on their SearchYC comments; invariably awesome.

I am sorry about what happened to you guys. We're a small-ish firm too and I can only imagine how pissed I'd be if our name got Smashlabbed.
"make rel", HTTP REST interface, and JS map-reduce fixed the learning curve for me.

Even if you don't have the hardware I recommend trying it again.
Yeah, I'm 20 now but learned a ton doing crappy freelance work (not saying the stuff you need done is crappy max :P). I probably made less than minimum wage frequently, but I remember the first time I could charge $500 for a website (when I was like 15 or so - it was a huge amount for me at the time). It took about a week of work, but for a 15 year old $500 (or even $200) for a week of work is quite a lot of money.
Very willing, especially when it's in their own best interest to make a deal. Remember, these are people trying to solve their problems without going up a level for permission.

Of course, any good salesperson will find this out on Day 1.
In the case with user created content, all companies in some domain could fail because they have split the community for that domain too much.
One wonders if you had been around in 1972 and heard about some arrests at the Watergate hotel if you'd have said the same thing.

Perhaps it's a minor incident with no relation to anything. Or it could be the tip of the iceberg.
Agreed. I teach 60-minute classes using both a chalkboard and 15/20 slides prepared with Latex and Beamer -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beamer_(LaTeX) -- which I post on my course page in advance for to the students to print and use in class.

Slides are useful for many reasons (diagrams that need many colors, animations, etc.) and the chalkboard is useful for answering students' questions and giving more examples if needed. I don't think I could teach well without either of them.
I see the logic in taking a small job just to keep busy. I did the same thing right after the dot com bust 8 years ago: I took a task from an Indian company to do a Sharepoint clone in Java at a fairly low rate with the understanding that I could set their work aside for a few days at a time when better paying work came along. I never regretted that decision, partially because the guy who hired me was a one time McKinsey manager and he was cool to work with. I live in the mountains in Arizona, BTW, so I do a lot of remote work.
Now I have to ask, what exactly makes a framework a rails framework?
These people should just move to the countries they are pretending to be from then. $200 goes a lot farther in the Philippines than it does in the U.S.
Where is that South America CIA hit squad when you need it?

I kid.
MightyBrand's design sucks, agreed. I'm not a designer, nor is my cofounder, and we haven't finished our redesign. Doing a startup is hard work, as I'm sure you know. We're just taking it one day at a time and doing the best we can with what we have. Obviously some people will find that as contemptible as you obviously do, but that's ok. Enough people love us to keep the lights on, and most days that's enough :)

Since you've seen fit to make this personal, care to drop the shroud of anonymity and tell us about all the deep, intensely meaningful things you've created or given the world? Otherwise, it would seem that you're just another cowardly troll who creates a throwaway account to sling shit. And how meaningful is that?
Street-Fighting Mathematics (or how to guess results) [MIT]
With respect, you're making huge assumptions. What proportion of the increase[1] in unemployment is composed of competent software engineers? How difficult do you think it would be for a decent software engineer to change jobs tomorrow?

If I had to bet, I'd say a fair chunk of those people were involved in construction, one way or another, since the boom was largely in housing and construction is very labour intensive.
Do people who work in software startups generally take Physics, Chemistry, Calc 1-4, Diff Eq, Statics, Dynamics and so on while at University?

As a Ph.D. in EE, who did indeed take all of these things before becoming a software engineer [1], I feel eminently qualified to say:

Engineering is a thing you do. It is not the name of a course, a piece of paper, or a certification exam. Don't let the maturity and professionalization of other forms of engineering blind you to the real meaning of the word. I believe there was a time, in the 18th and 19th centuries, when there were significant numbers of engineers who were "practical men" and didn't go to college. They were engineers, and so are we.

An engineer is someone who designs and builds machines that do work. [2] And software engineers design and build machines -- some of the most complex machines ever built by conscious mind. We count.

---

[1] I highly recommend studying all of these things, by the way. They are not just useful subjects, but very beautiful ones. Don't neglect biology, either.

[2] People who build machines that look pretty are artists. People who understand why the computing machines work are computer scientists. Nothing stops one from being all of these things at the same time -- indeed, many people, including myself, think that it helps a lot -- but neither art nor science are synonymous with engineering.
> I wouldn't be surprised if it were possible to construct an especially pathological bit of perl that couldn't be lexically analyzed without running the program.

Yes and no. It's trivial to construct a pathological Perl 5 program which has indeterminate parsing without running... but in those cases where it's possible, you have only one of two or three possible interpretations for a specific sequence of tokens.

As well, no one would write code that indeterminate by accident. It's always malicious.
Placebo effect?

The nurses are aware that the vest wearing policy is introduced to reduce medication errors. Wouldn't the nurses just be extra cautious while wearing these vests (not because there are fewer distractions around them but because they know they are been observed)?
I have to disagree about it being 'gorgeous'. I think it could use more layers. It feels very flat to me, and it doesn't direct my eye to any one thing in particular
Out of curiosity, what is your definition of a "real" engineer.

Or to put it another way, why isn't someone who writes software worthy of the title "Engineer"?

> Do people who work in software startups generally take Physics, Chemistry, Calc 1-4, Diff Eq, Statics, Dynamics and so on while at University?

That is kind of a broad question. But I can tell you that at Berkeley, everyone in the School of Engineering takes those classes, whether you are going to be a materials engineer or a software engineer.

Edit: I'll throw this out here too:

Definition of Engineering: The application of scientific and mathematical principles to practical ends such as the design, manufacture, and operation of efficient and economical structures, machines, processes, and systems.

I would posit that someone writing software uses scientific (debugging) and mathematical (algorithms) principles to practical ends.
Economists are not scientists.

Economists create models of the world and attempt to test those models against reality. Isn't that what makes someone a scientist?

Why do you feel economists are not scientists?

Was 'eugenics' ever an agreed-upon scientific consensus?

Eugenics was and still is part of the agreed-upon scientific consensus.

It has even had some practical success, most notably the creation of very tall athletes (including Yao Ming) and the elimination of Tay-Sachs disease among Ashkenazi Jews.
U.S. Wage Growth: The Downward Spiral
Yup, but not for clojure-mode. That is the "necessary innovation".
As far as I can tell the iPhone/iPod Touch don't use subpixel rendering, just antialiasing. The display is dense enough that (to my eyes at least) it really doesn't matter. Likely this will carry forward to the iPad, which has a slightly less-dense display -- ~130dpi vs. ~160dpi -- but which will also be viewed from a little farther away.
Can you elaborate? Is it just the CSS that makes it look parked/shady?
Windows Phone 7 details emerge from the depths
The social graph of the whole US
If you can't find a job that pays your normal salary, don't work at all? So, homelessness?

Come on, this a total false dichotomy. There is a range between an $80k / yr salary and $200 for a 2-week development project. I wouldn't blink if this story said that junior developers were taking gigs for $10 - 30 / hr. But $2 / hr? You either are a really poor developer or you have no idea how to find work.

In fact, I'll put my money where my mouth is. If anyone out there who can code well wants to make $5 / hr, email me and I'll give you all the work you can handle.

ryan at mightybrand dot com
It's nothing personal. Or nothing offensively personal, anyway. I don't think you're a bad or evil or stupid person. I just disagree with your outlook on this, which happens to factor in with how you work right now.

I mean, I'm in the minority here. I don't get along with the startup culture at all; I don't even feel comfortable with the concept of making a living offering a service per se to somebody. I think that my opinions have a certain merit, but they're opinions based on a shitload of varying philosophies and ideas and talents which don't translate well for everybody. But I like to offer them because I know there're certain people here who might benefit either from the ideas or from the resulting debate.

As for the anonymity: I don't feel comfortable being a known contributor to this place, for a variety of reasons. I read the stories here and I join in the discussions where I think my words might mean something, but I'm critical of the community and I don't want to be the person who spends his time fighting to change it. So, if it's all the same to you, I'll keep my name unspoken, and hope that I'm contributing enough that my writing here is seen as a valuable offering and not, as you'd claim, a cowardly troll.

(When things by me are posted here, plenty of anonymous users see fit to address me by name. So if that's what you're worried about, I'm sure you'll get your chance.)
I dunno. It's pretty busy and confusing. I like the bug, but not the design.
On a tangent, Powerpoint is seriously painful for a distance learning class. To be fair, a person standing at a podium or sitting at a desk and talking into the camera is painful too. The lack of movement is a killer. Think "worst TV program I ever had to watch".

I was filling in at a community college for one of the techs who was running the distance learning classroom for a biology lecture. The person teaching it had the camera pointed at his face while he went on in a monotone lecture voice with small breaks of drawing on an overhead. Everyone in the classroom fell asleep. When he called us asking for questions, I had to mute our mikes and wake people up. I taped the lecture, but would have hated to watch it again.
Creating and/or Removing a Login Item Mac OS X
This article accomplishes nothing more than saying "Hey guys, I understand both viewpoints." I wish I had my two minutes back.
Real Estate Updates – Reasons For Canadians to Be Upbeat
I have a PAM non-stick cooking spray that says '0g of fat' and has something like 430 servings, a serving is a 1/3second spray, something tells me that 1/3 second spray is what has less than 0.5g of fat and hence why they used that number.

EDIT: As someone mentioned below, wolfram alpha has a good database. According to that the can (5oz) has 112g of fat. By my math 112g/430servings = 0.26g/serving =/= 0g/serv

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=pam+cooking+spray+5oz
I have met a few people who use Keynote (PowerPoint eqv for OS X) who spend a lot of time refining their slides, animations, and embedded multimedia to get the perfect lecture. I would imagine they would do fine at the chalkboard, but seem to want to be in a "perfect message" kick.
The 10% figure may be a bit of a red-herring as it applies to programmers. If you look at the data[1], people with college degrees are only at about ~4.5% unemployment.

Even if the intersection of the programmer set and college degree set isn't complete, it does hint that the nature of this recession has been affecting one class of worker a lot harder, namely, the unskilled & assembly-line workers.

So while Ryan's point may have seemed a little unsympathetic, I think there's probably _some_ truth to it.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/11/06/business/econo...
Presumably they won't all fail at exactly the same time, so whoever hangs on long enough wins in that case.
The Secret Life of Data
Actually, I never applied for a job there. A good friend of mine who works for Microsoft scheduled an appointment in my behalf for a job opening he thought I would be interested, but I guess that, by that time, I was not as enthusiastic about the job as my interviewer expected and as other candidates were. I was contacted a couple times in the following years (the last one was about 2001 or 2002) but I have declined interviews since then.

I use to joke that my friend is jeopardizing his own job there every time he recommends me for job openings.
How was that debunked? From my understanding the actual handling of it was almost as bad as it's original inclusion.

From my understanding, which may be wrong, is that the number was pulled out of thin air. Later when this came to light I saw a lot of articles throw out the fact that other research showed that the glaciers may melt in 2350, which seemed disingenuous because it implies that the number was a typo and not just a complete fabrication.

The majority of what constitutes "climate science" is not science, a scientist must bend over backwards to show the ways in which they may be wrong because they are after the truth. Climate science makes lots of claims that it cannot back up. How anyone thinks that they can understand multiple systems interacting that have different and extremely long and unobserved cycles is ridiculous. The data is not there for the claims that are being made, a lot of the claims are so general and into the future that their is no way to accurately test them. So what we have are a lot of people making predictions (this is good), from incomplete data (it's the best we have, this is also good), using models and simulations (good), but they do not disclose how fraught with errors everything is.

Also, I wouldn't say anyone is a climate change denialist -- everyone knows the climate changes and continues to change. I'd say that those who truly have some understanding of complex systems respect how hard it is to understand them let alone predict their future states. Perhaps a lot of people on HN don't necessarily buy into the story because programmers create and work with complex systems on daily basis and realize how hard even their simple ones are. I also think skepticism is healthy.
You evidently didn't read the article, then. Nowhere does it try to deny climate change. It's about the IPCC and politics.
But do the publishers really not make a penny off of printing? In the music business, the labels often own the manufacturing plants as well...is that not the case in print publishing?
> "Hacker" folks need to understand that software is just a tool for business and consumers to use to get shit done

Interesting. I was under the impression businesses and customers were only the tools we use to finance the software we want to build. ;-)
Wow, three strikes on first contact. I'm becoming less and less enthused:

- Your browser is not supported (Safari or Chrome)

Uhm, seriously? We're still doing that? I mean, I get it for IE 6, sort of, but it's not like there was some huge complex app hiding behind there; it was a text form.

- We'll get back to you

Wait, wasn't that what this was? I needed to to sign up and fill out questions, just like last time, so that I could still not download anything?

- Space is limited

Amazon might run out of interwebs? "The interenet is not a big truck..."
Some climate scientists are on trial. It's just the weakest link of the chain and big interests against global control of pollution abuses are throwing all their PR propaganda resources at it. These groups include governments and corporations from US, China, EU, and Russia. The hacking attacks on those scientists were not performed by some loner script kiddie. And the story got pushed strongly by media groups related to interests all too timely.

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2008/08/evidence-mounts-...

Over 90 percent of large predatory fish have been wiped out, the coral
reefs that are home to areas of biodiversity that rivals the Amazon
are dying, and the North Sea has been practically denuded of life.
Shellfish populations that were already heavily fished have been
unable to recover thanks to eutrophication and the spread of dead
zones, not to mention seabed trawling.

Those are hard facts. Since the biosphere is a very complex system it's impossible to prove without doubt any theory of causes. But you have to be incredibly insane to deny it's related to humanity's irresponsible pollution.

[I expect, yet again, a rain of down-votes of disagreement from HN's army of right-wingers who cant write a good argument. Go ahead.]
I was also wondering why I can read so much climate denialism bullshit on HN. It really beats me.
The vast majority of products (and web products) do not meet number 1. Appealing to a billion is not a prerequisite to being valuable or/and successful.
I don't even like the bug. I feel like the bug should be a stinging bug.

My bugs aren't friendly lady bugs with fire shells. They are savage robotic hornets sent from the past to destroy my future.
I went to a CS theory class this semester which was taught in a computer lab by a teacher drawing notes into Photoshop with a Wacom tablet. I ended up switching into a compilers class, which is taught by a professor writing notes on a blackboard, and I can already tell it will work out so much better. It's surprising, but it seems the old fashioned way is the best way to learn concepts, even in the high tech field of computer science.
and what exactly do you think "testing" involves for the economics?

we don't have a control china. all economic models are guilty of over fitting.
Here's a datapoint for you: http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=programmer,+developer&...
That's one of the reasons I'm moving to southwestern China this fall. Making freelance/telecommute USD will enable me to live quite nicely in Kunming.

(PS if anyone needs an experienced Rails/Java/Python/whatever-you-need-me-to-learn coder and can deal with a 9-12hr time difference, my contact info is in my profile)
One interesting point a proffessor of mine once made on the topic: The phrase "If I were them, I would.." is meaningless. If you were them, if you had an identical upbringing and identical genetic material, you would behave exactly as they do.
again: the skeptics bible.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
Very cool! Works fine in Opera.
Follow changes to any website:

http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2010/01/follow-changes-to-a...