skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think I'm agreeing with that? There are a bunch of negations in the quote, so: I think there is a talent shortage in some domains.

My point was that the major sources of the "no shortage" or particularly "surplus" claims are doing shoddy math that over-represents the labor pool and under-represents demand. Also, more importantly, they're conflating all types of programming.

There are certainly skillsets/interests where there's no shortage, and there are certainly spaces where there is a shortage. People who don't differentiate 'programming' any further aren't saying something useful, and people who do only disagree on the details.

(I realize good studies check for those things, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about people saying "but aren't there lots of spare programmers we don't need?" because some hack with an infographic subtracted two numbers and found a surplus. I've seen this error pattern in respectable news on a bunch of occasions.)
"The rise of communications as a means of linking people together was completely missed"

Not by everyone.

Take a look at "The Machine Stops" by E.M.Forster (of "A Room with a View" and "A Passage to India" fame).[1][2]

In 1909 he predicted something like the internet, chatrooms, internet addiction, and various other things that have since happened.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops

[2] - http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html
Yup. It's frustrating to hear people wailing about how shit everything is when in reality they are living lives of comfort and safety unparalleled in human history.
Wi-Fi Direct?
There are several hardware RNG solutions available now that are truly random (based on physical phenomenon). But, these are older machines and maybe before security was taken so seriously.
Isn't that a pretty good lesson to learn?
> the negativity here really indicates the kind of latent discrimination that so many URMs & women in tech complain about

was with you until this. hn's negativity is across the board, it's very unlikely there's discrimination going on here imo
I considered Perl 6 for a deep dive at the end of 2015...just as it was 'officially released'. The difficulty for me was the state of the documentation ecosystem. No dead-tree books (but for one that was written more than a decade earlier) and a lot of information ad hocked up in blogs and slides. I just felt like I could not really get a handle on it...While googling 'Perl 6' sort of worked, 'Perl 6 how do I <x>' type queries pretty much ignored the "6" and landed me on Perl 5 resources. Perl 6 still only has ~300 StackOverflow questions.

I'm still interested in it, but it just doesn't work for me as an ecosystem yet.
I'd love to have an interview where I got to show off what I know with some whiteboard problems. Every interview I've ever had usually goes like "So tell us about the kind of projects you've done in school or on your own." I don't have any huge personal projects, just a million little ones and for the most part, my school projects have been very uninteresting and not 100% towards the interests I have. I end up sounding pretty dull and lazy. If I was given some whiteboard problems, I would at least be able to show off what I know rather than just talking about it. In interviews, I'm always afraid of sounding like I'm bullshitting something when I'm not an expert in something but know enough to carry a conversation about the subject. The job I got hired for, the skills they were looking for were things I've done as a hobby in my spare time. I was surprised they offered me the job since I figured there had to be a bunch of masters grads out there much more qualified than me. Now I sit here and feel like I'm maybe a bit too underqualified for the job. It's going to take a bit of time just getting up to the knowledge level that I think they were expecting me to have. If I had some whiteboard-style questions during the interview, maybe I would have gotten weeded out. Maybe they really are looking for someone of my experience. I'm really not 100% sure but I'm not about to tip my hand and be branded as a bullshitter. I really do like the job and the projects they already have me working on are way cooler than I'd ever imagine. But I wish I was a bit more prepared for the level of knowledge required before coming in here.
My kid got an ICE (German high speed rail --InterCity Express) train set a few years ago as a present. It came out only at christmas. He was utterly uninterested.

I'm Gen X and my dad wanted me to be into trains, but honestly I never cared much either. His toy steam engine was cool, and powered many inventions, but all the screwing around with train sets to end up with just making it go around and around...yawn.
This chart (1/2 through article): https://www.ft.com/content/acd3f2fc-084a-11e6-876d-b823056b2... suggests a disorderly adjustment for China if its economy is not rebalanced soon. With this adjustment will come much social unrest and with that always comes scapegoats and calls for war. So, its no the United States that concerns me.
No, since the inauguration in January the FCC has been essentially sold (perhaps given) to Verizon and is now doing exactly as Verizon wants. Similar things are happening to every regulatory body in the federal government; we are entering a dark era of zero consumer protection, zero labor rights, zero work done by the federal government to help the country/citizens in all spheres of industry. It's a great time to be a CEO of a large company, a bad time to be just about anyone else.

The outcry worked when Wheeler was chairman of the FCC -- he cared/listened. The current chair takes calls from big telecoms, not from you.
My grandma weaved, on a non-mechanical loom, and sewed a light jacket for herself (one that was not even slightly water resistant). She estimated that it took 200 hours, but she also pointed out something else: she was the only one in her weaving group who could make one, and the group has been weaving for years.

So you are not even looking for minimum-wage-dollars. You are looking for semi-skilled labour; and those 200 hours didn't include making and dying the yarn, growing and harvesting the plants, etc (she purchased or were given the yarn).

I love my dishwasher, but that doesn't even come close to reducing the cost of a light jacket by a factor of 100-1000. My washing machine is of much more utility since I spend only maybe ten minutes a week washing vs an entire days worth of labour.
The problem is NOT that SIMPLE. We go out with friends drink beer / eat pizza, who does not like pizza! we grow up with this stuff. Not so easy to just give up carbs, it's everywhere. Takes a LOT of mental effort , actually you may need to stop hanging with friends who eat to many carbs! lol
Gary Taubes wrote this, can't find the source.
Far from being an inert dumping ground for excess calories, fat tissue operates as a reserve energy supply for the body. Its calories are called upon when glucose is running low – that is, between meals, or during fasts and famines. Fat takes instruction from insulin, the hormone responsible for regulating blood sugar. Refined carbohydrates break down at speed into glucose in the blood, prompting the pancreas to produce insulin. When insulin levels rise, fat tissue gets a signal to suck energy out of the blood, and to stop releasing it. So when insulin stays high for unnaturally long, a person gains weight, gets hungrier, and feels fatigued. Then we blame them for it. But, as Gary Taubes puts it, obese people are not fat because they are overeating and sedentary – they are overeating and sedentary because they are fat, or getting fatter.
Biased core dev here...

I've used Perl 6 for IRC bots. The ease of writing parallel code, nice OO model, multi dispatch, and subsets make it very pleasant to do them in Perl 6. Here's a bot I wrote that listens for GitHub webhooks and reports new commits and PRs: https://github.com/perl6/geth and here's another one that's just a bunch of random features: https://github.com/zoffixznet/perl6-buggable/

I also heard people say grammars are the most note-worthy feature of Perl 6 and people basically use them to quickly hack up a nice little micro-language in which they then attack their problem. Before I came to Perl 6 I was dumb as shoe when it came to writing parsers, but I find it trivial to do with Perl 6 grammars.

Do I like it? Although I'm obviously biased, I love the language. It lets you write beautifully concise, yet still readable, code. It even lets you use much more readable syntax for regexes. Somewhat regretfully, it made it very difficult for me to learn other languages, as in them I end up writing 3x, 4x, 6x the amount of code and I keep getting reminded of Larry Wall saying Perl 6 would be the last language you'd learn. In Perl 6 I can "talk"; in other languages, I write "code".

However, while the language is fantastic, the implementation still has a lot of work to be done to polish it off. It's basically a 1.0 release. Unlike Go, Rust, or Swift, there isn't a giant corporation behind Perl 6 that can just throw money at problems until they disappear. Compared to other languages, some things are still unoptimized and are much slower. I spotted some leakage that makes it problematic for very-long-running (months) programs. About 65 new bug tickets are opened per month. The test suite is pretty sparse in some areas (which is the likely reason for many of the new bug tickets). But... three new core developers joined this January, so hopefully all that will get improved pretty fast.

Someone in the comments also mentioned the baby-sized ecosystem... Since Perl 6 lets you use C libraries without needing to compile anything, people wrote stuff like Inline::Perl5 and Inline::Python that let you import and even subclass stuff from Perl 5 and Python. And that's a bit of a double-edge sword: yes, it's trivial to use libraries from Perl 5 and Python, but it also stunts the ecosystem; no one has enough motivation to re-invent the wheel in Perl 6 when the wheels from other languages are reasonably usable.
This requires that you actually want to lose weight and do something about it.

Obese people often have a low socio-economic status [1]. If you are marginalized, eating may be an outlet for frustration. You won't buy special stuff to lose weight.

Everyone here was surprised when Trump got elected (except Peter Thiel). "Nerd nation" [2] is a huge bubble -- the majority of our society is different. The won't buy any drugs or apps.

[1] http://www.noo.org.uk/uploads/doc/vid_7929_Adult%20Socioeco%...
[2] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/18/tomorrows-advan...
IIRC, it was bought by the BitTorrent team itself and there eventually was little difference between the spyware of the "main" BitTorrent client and uTorrent.
As a remote worker based in Thailand had worked with guys in CA (14 hrs difference) for almost 2 years. It is true that life style and physical body got seriously affected.

My regular meeting time is 1-2am, paring with designers at 5-6am sometimes. Always not sure when to sleep during daylight, eating time messed up. Biological cells never get used to it. Anyway, I love my team.
In what particular fashion is that? Nixing a deal you don't agree with? That's just a failure of negotiation, not a power play.
there's always next year
Windows GUI vs Linux Commandline
The flu also killed more people than the Jews killed by Hitler during that time. High blood pressure killed more than the two combined. Nice logic you've got here.
URMs?
1.5 petabytes of savings in data usage per day is not HN worthy? I've seen far less significant improvements get voted to the front page with hundreds of comments. This is more than a small tweak to the Play store.

Agreed on the high level of cynicism here -- we've also come to expect that. Moreover I never come to HN (my account is five years old) to point out sexism/racism -- it's just too sensitive and difficult of a subject and to be honest I'd rather just read/talk about topical things without getting political. But again, what I pointed out is stark and I have no other explanation for it (believe me, I want one).

Let me point out the title of the blog: "Google Student Blog: Google news and updates especially for students". Of course there is PR going on, and of course the achievements of an intern will often be on a smaller scale. But this particular achievement is high-impact and the intern deserves credit on that blog for her work. If you're not impressed, then just move on.
Down for me.
Ask HN: Are exceptional programmers highly opinionated?
It seems to me that many respected programmers are highly opinionated, often imposing (implicitly or explicitly) their dogmatic view on how they and those around them write code.

I've seen "best practices" lauded then discarded and paradigms go in and out of vogue. Between these exceptional programmers, even opinions differ.

How and why can those (or any) programmers be so absolute?
Does there exist any exceptional level-headed developers?
To any person skilled in critical thinking it should be clear that the whole is very unlikely to be fair. Luckily for the casinos, many people are not skilled in critical thinking and analysis.
That just shows that any time you open stuff to participation by the general population and lift it out of obscurity, it turns to shit. Just look at our elections. We'd be better off just having a monarch.
Realistically, the only thing in support of a ridiculous statement like "most of our 7 million unemployed are unemployed by choice" is that one article, where a person, for multiple reasons not explicitly stated in the article might not want to take a certain demanding manual labor job.

I would suggest coming up with better arguments for the debunked supply side economics you're trying to push.
A cautionary tale about the promises of modern brain science
just make the H1-B visa transportable (not tied to an employer) and the problem fixes itself.
thats like 50 million dollars a year (in egress cost)
This is a good point. Lots of these 'calculations' neglect bootcamp or self-taught programmers, electrical/computer engineers who end up in software, and a lot of other grey-area work like embedded systems programming. The calculations are sloppy enough that I ignore them, but I'm not sure what the total weight of the errors ends up being.
That's the point - the government doesn't give you a license for discoveries, only for creative work. The EFF et all weren't trying to rename the term, they were claiming that these standards were merely uncreative "discoveries", unlike every other copyrightable work.
This is Cards Against Humanity we're talking about here.

1. They planned from Day 1 to film a potato for 30s. Or, had a bunch of "what is the worst possible Superbowl ad you could think of" ideas, and picked this one.

2. I would be surprised if they really hired an ad agency.

3. CAH has realized that if they do wacky stuff, like dig a giant hole, they will get a ton of publicity. This is no exception.

4. #winning, by spending less on a 30s spot in a single market and getting nationwide coverage via social media.

Edit: if it's not clear, I think it is smart. And their card game is fun.
Some ideas:

1) Post-quantum encryption.

2) Desalination.

3) Storing kynetic energy.

4) Echo/acoustic mapping (inspired in bats) system for blind people.

5) Quantum computer chips operating at room temperature.

Thoughts?
I did provide it, attempting to kill an industry that is already dying is hardly acting tough on that industry
That really is the worst possible way to put it.

Why not express it in nanobytes?

PB is a unit everyone is more familiar with than MGB.
For an intern, that is insanely good.

edit: In fact, for a lot of people, that is insanely good! Apologies if I came across as an asshole when I said "for an intern".
OT: Man, that font is way too thin and hard to read... really wish the weight were closer to 500 instead of 300 (injected a style into head to make more readable for me).

At least they only specified the one font-family and fallback (without helvetica/arial, like a sane person)
wasn't google helpouts something like that?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/amitchowdhry/2015/02/16/google-h...

they shut it down.
To everyone panicking in this sub, please remember that the communication from washington is that they want this to be fought at the state and local level. So, please engage your representatives about this.
The "depressing wages" point is dumb. These engineers will still be part of the labor pool, they'll just be doing work for our foreign competitors. And HP can still hire them, do you want them to just open up more space in Bangalore, or would you rather those wages go to US based locations?

And it's not a zero sum game. One of my H!B hires had unduplicatable skills and created about 20 high paid jobs in our company. Other H1B hires enabled a contracting firm I worked for to get a large contract that kept 7 other people employed.
Historically, $20 is the price of something that gives you $1/year. This, like, goes back to the medieval era.
The Bowling Green Massacre: The Data Behind a Tragedy
Except this offer goes against what I was saying is the "x factor" in the customer deciding to hire the contractor directly instead of using the service; they find a contractor they trust more than the service, or they find this contractor does better work, offers lower rates off the service, etc. The customer has multiple incentives to leave (keep the same worker that they like, pay less) and the contractor has them too (less overhead, makes more because the service isn't taking a cut, maintains own relationship with customer).

The basic result is, while these services are good for helping customers -find- contractors, it's much harder to maintain that value gain once the contractor has been -found-. Most customers aren't going to perceive it as stealing from their employer, because they aren't employees, they are contractors, and because of the low value gain by using the service. The service is in effect getting paid to continuously provide contractors, and if the customer likes the contractor they have, they have no reason to continue using the service.

See what I mean?
How Often Should You Replace Your Pillows – My Pillow Time Change
While they're at it, they might also make milk not burn-prone.

I've read there's a single base that makes cow's milk to behave like that.
I suspect this is exactly correct. First, it plays to a lot of colleges who are having career fairs this month as their seniors consider what to do after graduation. Second it plays to what has been the biggest job selector for new graduates over the last 5 years, "Will I be able to make an impact?". The number one way to discourage people from going to BigCo is to point out that they are going to spend 3 - 5 years just getting enough of a political network developed in order to be given a chance at an assignment that might move the needle slightly.

Last year I was walking around a recruiting event at CU and just listening to the pitches being made by companies Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and LinkedIn (and in full disclosure was making the same sort of pitches for IBM with "Hey its the Watson group, its the most important company project and we're building one of the most important projects in it!" all to counter the fact that it was hundreds of thousands of employees, most of which were not having much impact at all.

You need stories where you can pitch them "if you're brilliant enough and work hard enough you can be the person who changes the world." otherwise the siren song of startups of "You will probably eat lunch with the CEO at least once a month, and everything you do will be really impactful." will carry the day.
The phrasing makes it clear that this is not intended to wow a tech audience. It's a Google ad to parents, or something.
> 60% of poor adults choose not to work. I'm sorry you consider reality to be "disgusting".

Which is not evidence of them being lazy. They could be acting in their own economic best interest by being in a welfare trap.

Not sure what your point is here, other than some welfare programs are poorly structured.
I guess I remain critical of my efforts. For example, I would not call my sneaky effort to use old veggies and other food items in refrigerator as massive cooking innovation to keep the planet green.
Rooftop solar is already oversubsidized by net metering in many places. I would be much more for it if rooftop solar could guarantee capacity (and therefore actually reduce infrastructure costs on the grid) and was paid the wholesale instead of retail costs for electricity but as it is the utility companies are losing money for all the power that goes on the grid and that money is only going to people rich enough to buy dollar panels. I haven't talked to someone recently but last time I checked residential solar was often inefficient compared to commercial solar and a subsidy for the rich
Tech Cos' Amicus Brief in Support of State of Washington
This exactly.

Right now I would love to be working on amazing challenging stuff for these companies. Instead I have to decide if i want to go gungho studying my ass off for whiteboard interviews...and if I am insanely lucky I will get offered a salary already in line with my current one at a company that doesn't have billions in the bank...like all these SV companies that are so convinced there is some shortage.
Show HN: Community is what every on-demand delivery startup should leverage
As someone who still occasionally has to write Perl 5 for a living, Perl 6 really is a new language. And because Perl 6 isn't as mainstream as Ruby or Python, there is a bigger culture shock when trying to find resources or figure out the "right way" to do things (I know, I know, There Is More Than One Day To Do It). There are big changes to the syntax too that make it feel like less of a successor and more of a new language inspired by an old one.
Russia has pretty much always desired to control the Baltic states for the same reason: having them as proxy states create important buffer zones to a country that has otherwise weak borders protecting it's population centers. Historically most of Russia's geopolitical actions can be explained by Russian border protectionism. If Russia didn't have the Caucuses mountains to rely on I'd be willing to bet you'd see them laying pressure in that border region to capture them too.
Maybe the solution should start with GoodReader? I don't have syncing issues with the core app.
I stayed away from Rethink in the past few years due to its uncertain future. Now I'm seriously interested. Looking forward to the next chapter of RethinkDB.
"Perl devs are probably 2x the price of a JS guy..."
Funny that here in France it is quite the contrary which leads me and others Perl dev friends accepting JS work as Perl5 and even more Perl6 work are harder and harder to find.
This is surely a great resume item for her, it's a direct benefit to the place she interned, which is pretty awesome. But I think people are quite well attuned to Google's marketing/recruiting efforts these days, and how they compare to the average example. (It's like when such-and-such for profit school brags about how it's graduates work for companies A, B, and C, but more than likely, that's a very small percentage, and the results for the average graduate are lower.)

So yeah, it's awesome she did this, but most interns should not expect this out of their Google internship.
Already on the Go channel on Youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tY4UKkgb5IY
> Or the U.S. could stop locating its biggest software shops in the most expensive zip codes in the country.

The U.S. isn't a person that decides to put software shops in locations.

Entrepreneurs setup shop in locations where they are more likely to succeed, and for startups, it's where they can find high quality talent and get funding. It's a bit of a chicken and egg problem.
Why don't we just allow more of them to become Americans?
A new website for QEMU