skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A couple of questions that come to mind:

1.Is “Computer Science” the same term as “Software Engineering”?
2.Is developing specific applications for clients that ordered them Computer Science?
3.What about the cases when someone writes software for experiments and research in a specific field of science (for example biology)?
4.Is developing large enterprise systems part of the same field as is writing software that controls robots or for example software for optimization based on biological phenomena?

What do you think?
Surprisingly, MANY of the names generated sound like they have potential
Thanks dan, but the language is not the issue, imagine that we have the same level of knowledge in python & ruby.
digg, Myspace
This article is eleven years old. Has the scientific concensus moved on since then?
Using close script tag In A JavaScript Literal
Why not just throw yourself into an open source project? Many pay down the road if you're successful enough, and you get to keep your dignity. More importantly, you'll know you aren't being exploited.
I got "Mouse Aquarium". Genius.
I prefer the title Developer to Engineer because it conveys the iterative work that is a large element of writing most software.
Those that have been around for a while? I got started doing web stuff in 1997, with Perl. We then switched to the up and coming PHP. Later I branched out and did some Tcl and Python and have since pretty much converted to Rails for web stuff. I also know C, Java at least in the context of Java ME for mobile stuff, and a bit of this, that, and the other thing (Erlang, Emacs lisp).

It all depends on what you want, of course, as I'm more of a jack of all trades, master of none kind of guy.

Of course, what the OP probably means is that these sort of random strings of technologies look, at times, a bit dubious.
The MapReduce tasks I run on Hadoop are heavily CPU bound. This would be a dream come true, at least until the light bill arrived. I have to wonder, with so many MR tasks running on a single box, would IO become an issue again? Suppose you have 12 HDDs and 96 tasks running. At some point the tasks are going to fight each other for the needle.
Performance Comparison - C++/Java/Python/Ruby/Jython/JRuby/Groovy (2008)
I know Java, Python, Javascript, Sql, PL/Sql quite well, and have played with a number of others including C#, and other functional language. I have used MySQL, POstgresSQl and Oracle. However, if I were looking for a JOb I will probably only list Python, Django, Mysql and company prominently and list others with a disclaimer: "Lst used 3 years ago".

Listing all of them together without further info doesnot give a good impression (to me at least). This is persional experience, so YMVV of course.
Because they want people to buy their super fancy Windows 7 instead of running XP forever.
I disagree with points of this article, and I'm not sure about the premise. I think Software Engineering is not as well defined as it could be but I think it is getting better. The book Rapid Development by Steve McConnel goes a long way in that regard.

The article states that to spend vast sums of money and end up with nothing, you must be paying for software development. But if you follow the principles laid out in Steve's book (and probably other software engineering books as well), you can't end up with nothing; at every milestone you have something, just like a building.

I also disagree that software either works or doesn't. Most software problems are bugs, and most of the ones that make it through testing are intermittent, seemingly randomly occuring problems. Software with bugs still works, but may not be high enough quality that you would want to use it, similar to how you wouldn't want to live in a house made of shoddy materials, even though it still mostly provides shelter and "works."
Regardless of what you are referring to, you are still using this number as if it were unique visitors. You say "multiply your total audience size by .00124" (total audience size is number of unique visitors). Then you say "That comes to about 8 million people" (people are unique visitors). You're still doing your math based on the assumption that 5 billion unique people visit Wikipedia each year.

Your math as it stands is impossible, and you're still using it to support your argument. Even if you assumed every internet user in the world uses Wikipedia, that means that the average donation per user would be 0.003875, more than 3 times your estimate. With more reasonable math (and taking into account that Wikipedia does not fundraise 24/7 and is not aggressive) you can see that the average visitor is likely to donate an order of magnitude more than you're claiming.
What we call things shapes our preconceptions about how they work. But I agree, it's not very important what we call it. We have to go beyond preconceptions anyway.
> Of course, what the OP probably means is that these sort of random strings of technologies look, at times, a bit dubious.

Yes. If you were looking for a webdev position, you probably will not list your Perl and Rails experience with same prominance as your Tcl and C experience.
" One of my reject criteria was "having more than 3 unconnected technologies". Even with >10 yrs exp, listing all the technologies you might be connected with doesnt look nice at all."

WHile it is your privilege to use whatever criteria to reject people, this is complete nonsense.

I know many excellent developers from my days at ThoughtWorks who are experts in and move seamlessly between the java/j2ee, dotNet and RoR stacks. If you understand the fundamentals behind one web stack you can shift trivially into another. Many have contributed code to both j2ee and RoR (say).

If you really understand http (and associated bits like sessions, caching etc), sql (and associated bits like database scaling/sharding etc) , an ORM, Javscript (maybe a framework like JQuery) and have worked on some large web apps for a few years, switching to "unconnected" stacks is the least of your worries. Web dev doesn't change all that much over the years.

The only significant change I see is the rise of NoSQL/"BigData" and really how much time does it take for a talented developer to come up to speed on these things especially if he is working with people experienced on the "new stuff" (for whatever values of "new stuff")? Web Dev is hardly rocket science stuff taking decades ot master.

The rest of your post though , this bit

""I am willing to work for free on interesting projects", as that just leads to wrong people and wrong expectations, who dont value your work or time.

Also if you want this ad to be effective, a newly created account with no credentials like a Github account, a blog or your site doesnt help."

is very much on the dot. Let me add to the chorus of voices here advising you to actually build something/write some open source sw so people can judge how good you are. "Free" is hardly the criterion one use when bringing on a new dev onto a critical project (All startup projects are critical projects)
He lives in India. A programmer there makes 350,000 Rs a year. All these responses are so discouraging.

"That long list makes you look unfocused and implies that you probably suck at a lot of technologies rather than being very good at a few."

In my startup, we have everyone doing everything. If all someone knows is java, they are useless to us. Each of us had to learn 3 different new languages each just to get our product to launch. We do not have the luxury of having someone with 10 years experience who only knows Java. If something needed to be done, someone had to do it. If we did not have the skills in the group, we had to learn them.

The critical factor for success in a startup is not 10 year of experience in one narrowly defined technical specialty. Specialization is for insects. The most important characteristics for effectiveness in a startup is the ability to learn and the capacity for getting things done. This is one of the key differences between working in a startup and working in a larger company. In a startup you have to do your own marketing, sales, programming, interface design... Everything needs to be done and it is an expensive luxury to have a person specialized in each area that is required.

" That long list makes you look unfocused and implies that you probably suck at a lot of technologies rather than being very good at a few."

"That's one way to work for free that will greatly enhance your value to potential employers. Start a blog, talk about your experiences with Rails, promote your open-source projects, etc. You'll soon find paid work coming your way."

If you want to be poor for the rest of your life and at the mercy of an employer, this is probably a good strategy. Instead of attempting to make yourself more appealing for sale to your bourgeoisie overloads you would achieve greater success and freedom by focusing your efforts on creating something that has value and which people are willing to pay for.
Seriously, what kind of consequences are you afraid of when logging in with your Facebook account?

Have you looked at the Facebook API? I've produced a website where you can either create a "normal" account by supplying your email address, or you can use Facebook Connect.

What I know about our users with "normal" accounts: their name and their email address.

What I know about our users with Facebook connect accounts: their name. No email and no means by which to contact them. And if I wanted to do anything else, like post on their wall, I'd have to ask them explicit permission first.
Related audio podcast: http://www.se-radio.net/podcast/2010-01/episode-154-ola-bini...

"This is a conversation with Ola Bini on his experimental language Ioke. We cover the idea behind the Ioke experiment as well as important language concepts and the thinking behind them."
"He lives in India. A programmer there makes $1200 a year. All these responses are so discouraging."

Rubbish. The average annual pay for someone just out of school with zero experience in Bangalore is about 10,000 $.
(I live in India fwiw).

The lowest salary I've heard of is about 500$/a month and this is for a "walking dead" warm body who couldn't code to save his life outsourced to dumb Western companies to pad team size. You can just about survive and live very frugally in Bangalore on this.

"you would achieve greater success and freedom by focusing your efforts on creating something that has value and which people are willing to pay for."

This is excellent advice (just discount the "burgeoise" anti employer ranty bit).
You say reference counting is far more expensive, but that's only in CPU cycles. Compare Python (reference-counted) and Java (garbage collected), and Java's memory use is 3x greater for similar programs, at least in my experience (also in the computer language benchmark game). Reference counting is a form of garbage collection, it's just eager rather than lazy, and that eagerness pays off in predictably lower memory usage.
I believe he's referring to privacy concerns.
Prostate Cancer - 5 Foods That Can Help Prevent the Disease | Prostate Cancer
Right, and I'm wondering which ones.

My view of the Facebook API is that it isn't exactly a gold mine of personal information. I'm wondering what part of it is it that freaks people out.
> A programmer there makes $1200 a year.

Pretty sure you missed a zero there. :)
Have you ever noticed how when this happens, it's practically always MySQL? (And when people complain about how badly relational databases perform and it turns out they don't know about indexes, transactions, or stored procedures, it's always MySQL...)
"How long will people continue believing in the myth of the 15-year-old hacker genius while simultaneously decrying the unreliability of software before the cognitive dissonance finally cracks?" - Dave Herman (http://calculist.blogspot.com/2005/12/12-weeks-with-geeks.ht...)
> at every milestone you have something, just like a building.

What? When you're building a building, you don't have something usable at each milestone.
Have you considered the possibility that the privacy considerations may be in regards to Facebook itself?
Millennium Secrets: Emerald Curse
That's one of those little things that really annoy me- not because they are important, but because it's so easy to get right!

Hell, most IDEs would indent your code correctly for you, I'd have to actually work to override eclipse's auto-indentation!
You are sorely mistaken. With the Facebook API, you're granted CIA level information on any person that allows you (most). I should know, I've been using the api for games and other apps since its inception. As for privacy, I'm convinced people can afford to give some up, in exchange for more civility, if that's what they want. If not, they can continue to enjoy the Smörgåsbord over at CR.
Ali G Harvard commencement speech
Toyota Recall Videos - Stopping Procedure
Java Clojure Interop: Integrating Clojure into Your Java Project
The average for a well paid programmer is Rb 350,000 from what I have read. At current conversion rates that would be about 4472.51 pounds and 7695.70 USD. At current exchange rates. The salary seems to be higher in Bangalore than elsewhere.
Can anyone compare this to Clojure?
In my startup, we have everyone doing everything. If all someone knows is java, they are useless to us. Each of us had to learn 3 different new languages each just to get our product to launch. We do not have the luxury of having someone with 10 years experience who only knows Java. If something needed to be done, someone had to do it. If we did not have the skills in the group, we had to learn them.

Specialising in something doesn't mean you can't do other stuff. I have done, in my time, Java, PHP, C, ActionScript, Ajax, Ruby/Rails.. hell even Basic and Pascal while I'm at it (and that's just the ones I actually built functioning software with...). But I wouldn't list those on my CV. At this point in my life, I'm primarily focused on the Rails + Flex stack, and I would be lying if I claimed that I'm proficient at all the technologies that I once was proficient at. You NEED to be able to pick up any technology required along the way, of course, but you can't be proficient in all those technologies at the same time.

I do not believe for one minute that this guy is proficient at all those technologies. It's a full time job just to keep up to date on Rails, let alone on Java and C# as well! The obvious conclusion from that list is that they're just technologies he's familiar with, rather than technologies he's good at. Therefore, the obvious conclusion from this "CV" is that he's not good at any of those technologies (or at least there's no hint as to which he might be good at), and just listed them all in a shotgun approach. That is NOT a good hiring signal.

If you want to be poor for the rest of your life and at the mercy of an employer, this is probably a good strategy. Instead of attempting to make yourself more appealing for sale to your bourgeoisie overloads you would achieve greater success and freedom by focusing your efforts on creating something that has value and which people are willing to pay for.

Bullshit. That strategy (blogging/being active in the community + copious open source contributions) will soon have you connected with more freelance work than you know what to do with. Beyond starting a start-up (which this guy is clearly not ready for yet), it's pretty much as close to freedom as you're gonna get as a programmer.

Working for YOUR start-up? That's not HIS freedom, dude, that's just slavery in service of YOUR freedom.
did it with a dummy facebook.
what the heck tho? no other videos.. just me... beautiful beautiful me...
I'd love to just take your word for it, but for the sake of the discussion, would you please expand a bit on what "CIA level" information you can retrieve using the Facebook API?

To begin with, what can you find out about a person after they've logged in with Facebook Connect, without explicitly asking for additional permissions?
I don't know how your grocers work, but mine just scan the UPC that comes as part of the product's packaging—and that's the same no matter which aisle you picked it up in. (You could just as easily bring something in you bought outside the store and "buy" it again.) Or do you just mean that the aisle section has larger bulk versions of the same gums?
Well... what I do to not sound like I'm just listing every technology there is, is to split them into `expert`, `good`, `ok` levels of experience. So that even if I list 10+ languages I can comfortably use, it still seems fairly obvious which are the important ones (2 on expert, 2-3 on good, rest on ok).
A start-up is any business that some douche-bag VC doesn't call a "lifestyle business".
"The average for a well paid programmer is Rb 350,000 from what I have read. At current conversion rates that would be about 4472.51 pounds and 7695.70 USD."

You read stuff about Bangalore. I live here. Big difference.

Even if true, 7695$ is much more than the 1200$ you claimed people were getting in your original post. That is a multiplier of 6. Exaggerate much for effect?

10k$ is an average salary for a person out of school. I guarantee you won't get a decent experienced programmer with a good degree in CS for anywhere near that amount. As a data point, my last salary (in Bangalore) was 120,000 US$ (then, I could get more today if I were to return to a 9 to 5 job) and I know many people who earn that much and more, doing technical work). Yes this is skewed towards the high end but by no means unusual, especially in product companies (vs el cheapo bodyshoppers)
For a company in Google's position the line between policy and politics is a fine one. Their business depends on being the middleman between users and content. Censorship isn't an abstract ideal or a cultural artefact in that situation - it's a key factor in every decision they make, in China and everywhere else.
I loved the interview, and I agree with most of DHH's comments, but I think that being absolute on the correctness of a number of opinions (like, "all VC powered companies are flawed" etc) is fundamentally wrong, absoluteness is not the case when you talk about people and their actions.
Even if true, 7695 $$ is much lesser than the 1200$ you claimed people were getting. Exaggerate much?

You mean "much more".
"You mean "much more"."

Correct. Edited. thanks!
If I was a programmer today, I would want to be working in the mobile space. I would do anything that was necessary to associate with people in that area and to gain expertise.

He said that he is willing to work for free for a couple of months and hopes to be paid eventually. I am assuming that he wants to learn some new technologies and find opportunities. An employer is taking on a large risk by having someone with no commitment on a project when it will take them several months to get up to speed and learn the required languages.

If he spends a few months in his spare time learning a project's technology and become effective at contributing and is eventually paid for his continued work on the project, I think that it is a good position to be in.

It reduces the risk to the employer and gives him some opportunity to learn a new technology platform. If he contributes significantly to a project, any employer would be more than happy to pay him at least twice what he is earning now. Even at $25,000 a year, he would cost less than a 1/3rd of the cost of a very competent American programmer.
Why do education and accredidation have to go together? I'd much rather learn on my own (through these online courses), then take a one-month intensive series of accredited projects and tests (a bit like a Google interview) to get a diploma.
Ioke has lots of mutable state (rather than Clojure's strict lockdown on mutable state). Ioke isn't concerned at all with concurrency (which Clojure is).

They both have macros, and ioke's syntax looks nicer to non-lispers than clojure's. Ioke (iirc) is considerably slower than clojure, and kinda difficult to optimize.
duplicate rows may get inserted

Make that duplicate rows WILL get inserted -- even if only due to network glitches causing connections to die after the database adds the row but before the client receives the acknowledgement resulting in the client retrying the request. Unless you don't retry failures, in which case you lose rows instead, of course.
In general? No. No to tue, no to mostly true, no to BS. Programmers are not necessarily good coders, and sysadmins aren't necessarily good administrators. Instead of worry about that validity of the generalization, what do you want out of your CTO? What unfilled role in the team are you trying to fill?
That's a good warning sign that the data isn't relational in the first place. An RDBMS would probably be a good fit for the analyzed data (which is likely to have explicit relations), though.
"Ioke" != "Clojure"
=> true

(not (= "Ioke" "Clojure"))
=> true
To start with: http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/User_(FQL)

If that isn't everything you need, you could use that information as foreign keys to other databases in other places, to easily fill in the blanks, if you wished to dampen the shade of your hat. As far as "CIA level", I'll admit that was sensationalist just for the sake of writing, but it is damn scary nonetheless.
The 5 Best Ebook Search Engines
I am looking for someone to port our Skype recording plugin to MAC. Can definitely pay later on.
Do you have any idea why it's hard to optimize Ioke?
Err... actually I would:-)

http://tcl.apache.org/rivet/

Point taken though.
> Ioke (iirc) is considerably slower than clojure, and kinda difficult to optimize.

Throughout last year Ola mentioned many times in his blog, that he's not concerned with speed optimisation at this point, but mainly features. I'm not sure about the "hard to optimise" part... Also if you look at the Ioke manifesto[1]:

> This is really the full manifesto of Ioke, if you ever had to choose just one. In any situation where I have to choose between expressiveness or performance, expressiveness is always the answer.

Don't remember him mentioning anything about concurrency though.

[1] http://olabini.com/blog/2009/05/the-ioke-philosophy/
Yes, that's what I'm complaining about.
Ask HN: Good UML tutorial through examples
Can anyone suggest me a good UML tutorial online ? Also suggest some online tests where I can test my UML knowledge
"Allergic to Facebook". I like that. Maybe I should start telling people that instead of my standard explanation ( http://everything2.com/title/Facebook+destroys+real+relation... ). Have you had success with it? What I typically get as a response when I show them the above link is either tl;dr or "You're just using it wrong!" which I'm not, I'm not using it.
This might be a bit related: http://olabini.com/blog/2009/01/ioke-is-not-a-lisp/ - Ioke -vs- Lisp post by Ioke's author.
Right. But, if you are sensitive to privacy issues (which seems sound), you're not likely to have an exhaustively filled out Facebook profile either way.

So, if you have a sparingly filled out Facebook profile, what is the risk involved using Facebook Connect?

That API list kind of looks like a CIA-like dossier of information, I agree, but that's worth nothing if the values are mostly: "", drivel, some inside joke, or whatever.
I always just assumed 'engineer' was an Americanization of the word 'programmer'/'developer'. Maybe that's just my British perspective. It's also down to my belief in some of the principles in the OP. I'd never heard 'software engineer' used outside of an academic discipline, until I got in to startups and listened to lots of US tech podcasts and read lots of US tech blogs.
Back in those days I was running infrastructure for a failed small business leasing market place startup called elease. Our cage was right behind one of Google's. I think it was Globalcenter's Sunnyvale datacenter. Google's cage (the one with the warping mother boards) would exhaust this wall of heat into our cold aisle, which I felt attributed to the 15% failure rate we were getting on our VAlinux servers. VALinux .. Those were the days.