skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I had a thought along the following lines: if I have test cases for a feature, it would be really cool if I have an engine which can figure out code to satisfy thoses tests. I.e. I define the contract; the computer figures out how to solve. Kinda like Simonyi's intentional programming. Is anybody working on something in this area?
You forgot the part where you link us to your startup! :)

Context is 80% of any good answer to your inquiry.
No offense, but please don't use this template :)
I'm not that closely in touch with iPhone dev rates, but I pay a bit of attention because I like to track them relative to software security bill rates. My sense of it is that commodity iPhone dev bill rates are between $100-$150/hr. Call it $125.

Multiply by 2 to get a fully utilized rate, subtract 30% for overhead, multiply by 60% real utilization, and that's what an FT senior dev might get.

A scale running from $25,000 all the way to $105,000 seems a little unrealistic.

Ultimately, there's no real "default starting salary". You need to fill in the blanks for:

* What your bill rate is (how much is the role worth to you)

* What your utilization is (ditto)

* How skilled the applicant is (knows C? knows ObjC? knows appkit?)

* How much the candidate is going to cost to train year 1 (in billable hours of senior talent spent actually training, and in reduced utilization for the candidate)

You figure out your negotiating ceiling, and from there work out what you're "comfortable" paying, and then you negotiate.

If you're running a competant, reasonably successful shop, my gut is that you come out somewhere around 60-65k for a junior that you think develops into a solid producer within a year. Someone who won't develop into a producer in a year, you don't hire. Someone who already is a solid producer, you can't apparently afford to hire. (That's not a barb).
Could be powerful using node.js and a server side DOM implementation
It isn't? http://www.scribd.com/doc/31797838/Untitled?secret_password=...

Also seems to have a download link.
Have you tried making commitments with yourself, and putting them where they are always visible?

If not, then maybe you don't need outside forces to make you work, you just aren't good at doing it by yourself (yet).
"The transactional engine can run in distributed systems supporting up to 9.223.372.036 Billions of records"

I don't mean to be snarky or anything, but I fail to see what's so impressive about using 64-bit integers.
I don't think that would work today any more, the amount of hardware that is thrown at this problem because of the publicity involved is immense, so a smaller contender would be outperformed even if they came up with a wild and unanticipated strategy.
I was a studious child and took the examinations that I sat very seriously. As an adult I follow the debate on education reform and I am frequently informed that there is something wrong with those examinations. If teachers took them seriously and modified their teaching with the aim of improving their pupils scores, this would be "teaching to the test" and educational outcomes would suffer.

As a child I took them seriously and modified my learning with the aim of improving my scores. Was I harming my education by taking the examinations seriously? Why do concerns about the quality of the examinations come out now, when teachers' pay is on the line? Why not earlier when children's qualifications were at issue?

The teacher's union party line, that "merit pay leads to teaching to the test and that would be bad" is a slap in the face to studious children who took their examinations seriously. It destroys the credibility of the profession.

Is it possible to construct good tests? http://www.maths.qmul.ac.uk/~fv/books/em/EssentialMaths.pdf is an interesting example of a test aimed at ensuring minimum standards at the start of a university mathematics course.

The usual technique for gaming an examination is to memorise answers to a core set of questions that keep coming up. For example one games a calculus examination by memorising cos 2x => -2 sin 2x and the examiners play along by providing enough easy questions that you can reach the pass mark with doing the hard questions that make the examination look tough.

In the article the examiner, Franco Vivaldi, is refusing to play the game. Instead of designing the test so that it can be broken and students can be passed even though they haven't learned the essential technique, Vivaldi takes the opposite tack and tries to design a test with enough variety that students have to learn the relevant mathematics.

Would teaching to this test do any harm? Drilling the techniques to get faster and more accurate in pursuit of a higher score would be harmful. Vivaldi needs his students to be competent because these techniques occur as basic techniques in the more advanced material that he aims to teach. He needs his students to be fluent enough that difficulties with the basics do not distract them in the course of advanced work, but beyond that their time is better spent on the advanced work, not on acquiring greater fluency with the basics. Knowing this he sets the test as pass/fail.

The success of merit pay will depend on improving the tests. It will be an interesting battle to watch.
The applications and review comments are pretty fascinating. You can see them at:

http://www2.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop/phase1-applications...
Wow, yours looks like the quality is much better (especially so considering it just started learning a few hours ago). The OP's is a bunch of meaningless gibberish.
Don't look a gift horse in the mouth.
The general definition I use for 'underwater' is if I were forced to sell my car today would I get enough money for it to pay off the bank? Nowhere did I mention viewing a car as an investment.

There is no rationalization. Of course it's more cost but there is also cost associated with reducing the amount of cash you have on hand. With that said, a car is the second biggest purchase most people make. It would be great if they all had the thousands of dollars to buy a reliable car with cash, but many don't.

Personally the last car I bought was used and I got a 6% 5 year loan. I typically make double payments on cars so the loan is almost over less than 3 years in. I did the math the other day and accounting for interest I've done much better by buying the car on credit and leaving the rest of the money in my various investments. Over 2-3 years 6% isn't much to begin with so it's pretty easy to beat with other various investments.
I second kd-trees. I also only recently learned them, and at first encounter thought that they are in concept similar to binary space partitions used in computer graphics. Nearest neighbor search can be implemented using a pretty simple two-dimensional kd-tree. Useful for things like finding the n closest neighboring points for a given point on a plane (used for mapping applications, etc.)
New programming jargon you coined
honestly this is just frightening.
As a programmer I'm finding out it's best not to code anything immediately. Think [first] about the idea, conceptualize it, let it soak in your brain. Take some time to let it refine itself a bit.

[Next] would be a marketing website. Grab a theme off themeforest.net and work on a one page slideshow explaining your idea. Do this from a marketing perspective: sell it to your customers.

I find this is crucial because it forces you to refine your idea into a marketable idea. If you are taking 3 paragraphs to explain what your app does, what problem it solves, or why people should care, well your idea is probably not that great, much less marketable. What this also does is sell yourself on the idea. Once you've taken the time to craft out some great marketing copy, you begin to think "hey this does sound like a good idea!". You also have an easy way to get initial feedback from your network.

[Finally] after using your marketing site to get inner-circle feedback, you go after some customer development. Customers tend to need to see an actual working something though so it's probably best to code out and MVP. I'd start with modeling the data and then work out the core features and at long last, I get the joy of coding!
Yeah, after you have motion down, you would just need to be able to detect a heat signature and shoot at it. I doubt that's very difficult compared to what they've already done.
1. Depends on what "embedding" means exactly. Are you talking about the same general way that YouTube videos can be embedded, i.e., providing a link and a thumbnail?

2. You might read a July 2007 piece, "Embedded Video and Copyright Infringement," posted by Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society - see http://www.citmedialaw.org/blog/2007/sam-bayard/embedded-vid....

3. If you're linking to pirated copies of videos as opposed to legitimate sites, check out the LimeWire copyright infringement case. In that case, a federal district judge in NYC held that LimeWire was liable for inducing others to commit copyright infringement - see, e.g., http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory?id=10632737.

Judge Kimba Wood's opinion (yes, that Kimba Wood) is at http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/051110limew....

4. Usual disclaimer: I'm a lawyer, but not your lawyer, don't rely on this as a substitute for legal advice, etc.
I'm with Ed on this one, with one small variation, every fifth project or so I start from a blank piece of paper just to get rid of the cruft that will build up otherwise.

That way I still have the 'blank paper elephant' to stare at every now and then but at least not every project and I find that re-writing stuff it usually comes out much better on the next iteration.

It's like remodeling houses, every now and then it pays off to raze the thing to the ground and start over instead of adapting the house to a new occupant.
I always start with design.

Once you have a design, turn the design into html

Once you have the html, start building out the functions in the design.
This is exactly the way I work - I almost never actually start from scratch.
Sinatra, Haml, Blueprint, Sass, jQ.

I have a template that does login, tabs, and layout.

I sketch in terms of "ghetto REST"; GET /foo, GET/POST /foo/new, GET /foo/1, GET/POST /foo/1/edit, POST /foo/1/delete. I write handlers before I write markup.

I write the same %ul#foos // - @foos.each do |foo| markup for every feature I start. Ditto the edit form.

Prune down, customize, work out page flows (which is easy once I have a base of things that works properly), pick a couple hotspots that want Ajax-y behavior (not because it's hard, but because whenever I start a project Ajax-y, I'm always unhappy with how brittle the result is).

I use Compass for the Blueprint/Sass style, but I don't waste too much time making things look good; my template gets me to about 80% of "competant" and 85-90% of "usable" and then, if I care, I spend money on a designer. I find knowing that I'm going to do this is liberating; means I don't waste a whole lot of time lining up pixels.

I never touch Photoshop. I can't mock up graphically. My brain just doesn't work that way. But then, I came to web dev from 10+ years of Unix commandline dev.
Hiya,

Thanks for the comment, i see your point completely and i agree it depends what hats you a wearing. I think the overal point i am making is that on some projects, for some clients one man band types can tend to loose focus on the end goal and end up building great technical builds, which are not suitible for the end client.

I expect how i see my role and what i do (as both a developer, and designer and with many other hats :D) will evolve as time goes on.

Thanks for your comment and i hope that explains a bit about where i am coming from.

cheers,

Jamie & Lion
There are already robots for that. Not so fancy, but they somewhat work.

I wasn't speaking about "robot world domination". That implies intelligent machines and this is not. But it looks like this one is pretty efficient in recognizing obstacles, and shapes. Once they can recognize targets, humans just need to deploy them and they will be much more efficient, without the need of human pilots. And they can come in different sizes and shapes.

I find it quite scary, and the DARPA logo at the end of the movie does not help.
That's the crux of the problem - that most people's mental model of what's public and private doesn't fit with the way that Facebook is currently arranged. Where there's dissonance people are going to get caught out, embarrassed, outed, sacked, or worse depending upon what sort of regime you're living under. Privacy breeches can be trivial or humorous, but sometimes they can also have much more serious consequences.

If you're a technologist who has followed the development of the web closely, and I suspect that most people on this site fall into that category, then you have a much better understanding of what the risks are when putting information about yourself online, but most ordinary Facebook users aren't technologists or hackers and don't have the same understanding.
This extends far beyond Google. There's this bizarre duality at play where f/oss is positioned as the future but websites/web applications are mysteriously exempt. Even leading sites that tout they're built on f/oss stacks are inherently or most often absolutely closed.
> But then, I came to web dev from 10+ years of Unix commandline dev.

Same here, and I'm beginning to think that that is slowly becoming a handicap rather than an advantage.
I'm having the same problem (server error, but on a Mac) - it's good to know we're not the only ones.

My phone is registered using a custom domain, but I switched the account to a GMail address and ensured I was signed in using a standard Google account when installing the extension. Perhaps it's an issue with phones tied to GAFYD accounts. Is yours?
At the end of the clip, I saw some hackers sleeping too ;-)
The Century Of Self: Happiness Machines.  The Birth of Consumerism [video]
Interesting quote:

"We must shift America from a 'needs' to a 'desires' culture, people must be trained to desire, to want new things even before the old has been completely consumed. We must shape a new mentality in America, man's desires must overshadow his needs."

Paul Mazer, Lehman Brothers (1930)
Sure thing: http://www.fotoblur.com
I don't think you understand what the word slavery entails.

I can stop working any time.

No master tells me what to do or when to do it.

There is no punishment for not being productive.

I am free to go where ever I want.

and so on.

Comparing taxes to slavery is pure hyperbole and whatever cause it is that you are promoting here you are harming it by association.
Unlike the A-bomb which is lovely.

Or the decidedly low-tech genocide in Sudan. Or the genocides and crimes against humanity in all the other places.

Bottom line is Homo homini lupus. It's not like the risk of US soldier casualties is that much of deterrent.

Bombs, A-bombs, robots, not that different, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
A-ha! Somehow, this link seems to fix the problem: http://twitter.com/c99koder/status/14529776311
What would be awesome is to be able to revert your UI from HTC Sense to the stock Android that is easily upgradeable to new versions of Android.

I got the Evo and I'm not keeping it mainly because I won't get the latest and greatest version of Android right away.
How Israel offered to sell South Africa nuclear weapons
Where are you banking that your used car loan is 13%?! The one I have now is 6% and bank rate lists current used car loans for 48 months at 6.38%. You need to find a new bank :) I really hope you're not using dealer financing...ugh.

I agree that buying a used car does take a bit of leg work. The last one I bought took me almost 3 months of looking. At the time I bought my last car the dealership wanted $33k for the base trim new. I bought the 1 year old version with 12k miles and higher trim level for 24k. The car was a 4-Runner, not exactly luxury, but a nice reliable car. I'm looking at Range Rovers now and the price difference between new and 1-3 years old is amazing.

I also get a mechanic to check out any car before I buy it. Luckily I have multiple mechanics in my family.

Oddly enough I have bought 1 new car in my life and it was the car that gave me the most problems. I had it in the shop every other week because of some computer/vapor exhaust issue. When I finally sold it, the engine light had been on for about 3 of the years I owned it.
I use a Rails scaffold for a certain feature of the app (usually the simplest) and I build off of it. The generated code may change completely, but that's the point; it's just a scaffold to get me started so I can write the real code. If your framework of choice doesn't have that feature, you could try writing something similar yourself.
Actually you can identify something with Google by just using a picture Mr. Hacker-in-the-video-who-said-you-couldn't guy:

http://www.google.com/mobile/goggles/#text
I'm an undergrad student, and I make close to 8k a month freelancing when I'm working full time (like right now).

Don't settle for entry level if you're good and can reliably delver great code. You'd have to pay me competitively with my freelancing gig to even think about hiring me.

Other grads aren't as self motivated tho and don't know what's out there. Good luck snagging one!
This is a really insightful post. When viewed in this way there are two interpretations:

1) The world is a scary place full of insecurity and instability

2) The world is wide open and full of opportunity to those who have the flexibility to survive

Eitherway I don't think that there's any doubt that massive change is upon us, and many older structures and ways of thinking are being replaced.

I'm thankful that my parents are old enough to be unaffected by it and that I'm young enough to be equipped to deal with it. Some others aren't so lucky.
I'm surprised nobody in the hacking community has figured out a way to completely replace the HTC Sense/Motoblur/Samsung TouchWiz UI to the default Android UI.
but then there aren't many places where you can basically work whatever you want to on. Take Allard example, he has worked on TCP/IP protocol in Windows, Internet explorer, Xbox, Zune, and now courier.
I usually begin with the database as well. I start creating tables for the basics of whatever I'm building and it's here that I think of new tables to complement the main ones. After that, it's mostly CRUD with some logic.
6pm.com's 1.6 million dollar pricing mistake
Meh. I feel like I get shit done. I've seen a lot of very "professional" web code (note "day job"), and I think my stuff stands up OK.

If I was 22 years old and trying to impress YC with a demo, or launching in front of the mass market with only my own design skills and no cash for designers, I'd be worried that my front-end skills were hurting me. But after a couple years of contact with customers and prospects: front-end is definitely not what's hurting us.

There are 3 other devs on my team, and while I've been convicted for a while of the idea that we need to hire someone crazy excellent with jQ, we're all former backend people. I think we get things done just fine.

I don't have a "methodology" so much as I have a semiconscious bias towards a process that keeps me typing and doesn't give me a lot of opportunities to stop and noodle --- at least not until I have so much traction that dropping things would be painful.

I know (especially from reading the threads here) that most front-end people have a definite preferencing for designing and wireframing up front. They're probably right. But I don't find refactoring and redesigning to be so painful that it outweighs the inertia I'm fighting when I first start a project. I need to fight past the inertia before I can profitably spend energy on design.
Mathematics writer Martin Gardner has died
I want one of these to walk my dog at 6am on Sunday when it's raining.
s/convicted/convinced/g ;)
Google indexed all the sites on the web when they started out, even though this was against 'the rules'. According to the book "The Google Story", this can be compared to knocking on everyone's door - bound to piss off more than a few people, but ultimately everyone benefited (well maybe not Yahoo and MSN search).

Recently Wired liked to a Pirate Bay torrent for a movie that got buried in some studio vault because a legal dispute - "Hackers Wanted". I guess they wanted people to experience that movie whether it's makers could agree or not.

To be an entrepreneur means breaking the rules, and stepping on toes. There's a bigger chance that your friend's app won't get noticed than it is that he'll get sued. When you get successful, that's when you get sued. Getting your content to a receptive audience is a bigger problem IMO than jealously hoarding up content.

All the same, you should probably consult a copyright lawyer.
This is a research platform, not a consumer product! We'll learn to walk first, and then we'll make it look pretty.
my favorite data point on the issue of education reform is that of Washington DC a year ago. The new district leader offered a renegotiation of the teacher's contract in which they would give up their tenure rights in exchange for raises of the average teachers salary so that the bottom would be 70000 and the top would be 120000. The union was flatly against this renegotiation plainly stating that they would rather have security to be mediocre than have the opportunity to earn up to 3 times what they were currently earning.

completely ridicules. to my mind a district that pays their top teachers 120000 solves the entire problem. Imagine the competition for teaching positions in a district in which you start at 70000 at after 7 year you can be making up to 120000. What young ambitious twenty something wouldn't want a job were you could make 120000 a year a have three months guaranteed vacation time in a field in which you can feel confident that you are making a difference and there is clear tangible progress from your work.
They have - there are ROMs to do that, I've used them on my Hero. They're not very popular though as most people prefer Sense to stock Android.
I'd say an ugly robot that stays upright and does the job is better than a nice looking robot on its side...
walk before you can run. run before you can fly.
In terms of starting actual development, rather than the whole process from conception onwards:

1. Define DB schema

2. Define URLs. I find this is the best way to figure out what bits I actually need to write

3. Solve any difficult/tricky bits first, even if just as a proof of concept

4. Implement the rest
Google Pacman
Learning Jason and David's hiring philosophy at 37signals was worth the price of admission to #LessConf 3010.
Ok. Can you rephrase your sentence then because I don't see how one can be convicted of an idea, what does that mean?
Well, I just started MS, four years after my undergraduate. Last semester, I just took one course and didn't do good because it was really hard for me to find nice work-study balance. Anyway, lessons learned and am right now thinking what courses should I take?
On a side note, I just finished reading "High Performance JavaScript" that I bought during Oreilly's $9 sale and it was money well spent. And I'm also thinking what Oreilly title should I buy next?
I did a thesis that explored aspects of generating code that passed tests, but it was limited to deriving adequate structural representations based on behavioural specifications.

Two approaches were shown: changing data structure representations to meet requirements and generating class structure/hierarchy. The thesis showed that it is possible to do this and how to do it, but it is a huge topic.

If you're interested, I'll put more effort into making my thesis available online in HTML format. In the meantime, you can get it in a variety of places.

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=Structuring%20Data%20via%20Behaviou...

Incidentally, generating behavioural elements (like entire functions) to pass tests would be very difficult although I have been toying with ways to try it out.