skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let's also address the issue of interviewing. Most people can't tell a good programmer from a bad one (which is sad, really). There are also a ton of people out there that mistake higher percentile technical competence with software development competence. This recently got posted to HN and sums up the overall situation nicely:

http://www.rethinkdb.com/blog/2010/06/will-the-real-programm...

Pay is but one factor, and resume (or job description) plus salary requirements aren't going to communicate what you really need to know. More than 90% of the jobs I've interviewed for had laughable interview processes. I've asked harder questions of my interviewers than they've ever asked of me. Most people just don't get it.

A "competent" developer needs to be hard working, interested in your particular problem set, and like the work environment you've created. You need to dig in and find out what this person is really about. Even if they're competent they may not like your company, idea, or even you. These are things you, and they, need to find out before the hire.

You/They aren't finding competence because you/they aren't looking for it.
Moving Cash Into & Out Of Your Bootstrapped Startup
If I name the company, it makes the post sound like "investment advice" rather than "random thought going through my head".
The best way to hire good programmers is by tapping into the network of the good programmers you already have. Everyone with a few years of experience has a short list of developers they'd like to work with again.

EDIT: sponsoring hackathons may be another way of finding great programmers. And don't forget the colleges in your area: if you have an interesting piece of technology you can show off, you can present a talk and hopefully get a handful of resumes.
That article is fantastic. Although it may seem obvious and pedantic, I am always amazed at how many people get this stuff wrong.

Everyone spends all their time worrying about object oriented this and design pattern that and test driven agile the other thing, yet they don't grok the basics of procedural programming.
Investment advisers who can't do the simple maths required for deciphering mobile pricing schemes? Next...

Keep in mind that these are the same people that gave the subprime CDOs AAA ratings.
You may attract more qualified people, but the number of unqualified people may increase as well. Put another way, you may get more qualified people in absolute numbers, but the signal-to-noise ratio could go up, too.
If you've been around yc for more than a month, you've doubtless seen a number of links to articles on motivation as it pertains to creative activities like software development. The consensus is pretty clear. Incentives hurt productivity in creative activities.

This seems to have something to do with the relationship between creative effort and intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation. The prospect of an incentive seems to gum up the creative works.

When you compound that with how difficult it is to recognize, let alone find good talent, especially with an interview process, you have a real conundrum.

Real conundrums are rarely solved by naive one-dimensional solutions like "offer more money." An actual solution would have to solve the dual problems of finding good help and not spoiling it with overt incentives.

Clearly there is a real problem here. Perversely, if you could solve it, you could make a lot of money!
Awesome! And it's in 3D (looks great in glasses).
Research 2000 Stats Called into Question; C&Ds start arriving
You left out part of it:

"Notwithstanding the foregoing, an Application may use embedded interpreted code in a limited way if such use is solely for providing minor features or functionality that are consistent with the intended and advertised purpose of the Application."

You might argue that executing JavaScript is a "minor feature" of a web browser. Then maybe Chrome would be allowed. But almost of Firefox's frontend is also written in JavaScript and tied to Mozilla's JavaScript engine. So there's no way that we (mobile Firefox) fall within the "in a limited way..." allowance.
Might just be my opinion, but I think we should get over the "shame" in self-submitting.

Ideally I think the author SHOULD self-submit. I find it odd that another person can gain karma for the actual author's work.
I understand what you're saying. I read your reply after I had already posted. But Honestly iBooks is doing it wrong anyway.. It seems like it was put in as a hack, because it changes the systems brightness permanently whereas instapaper and kindle seem to be based on a percentage of the current system brightness. Which would make sense if it's a layer that they're changing the transparency of. I don't, however, think this is malicious in its intent, though it is a bit unfair. Same with the lock screen stuff. It is probably safe to say that this is something Apple will open to developers eventually... after they're done playing.

Apple should just flag apps that use private API's and call them out for it when the user upgrades the OS in an alert dialogue-like fashion when they launch the app (or on the applications iTunes page). "This app is using private API's and may not function properly with your current firmware." Instead of rejection. But it's probably easier to reject than to publish a "purchase at your own risk" disclaimer. All that's going to do is get a lot of people to not purchase your application.

The AppStore acceptance and rejection policys, though, should get fully investigated. I would like to get into iOS development, but trusting my livelihood on such a seemingly fickle process makes me really nervous.
I just wanted to express my gratitude for putting this together. Hopefully I can get my product out the door and buy some space in this sooner rather than later!
"You may attract more qualified people, but the number of unqualified people may increase as well."

...which is why you have a screening process.

When people are complaining that there are no good programmers (and this is a common complaint on HN; it's not just a straw man), there's at least one of two things going on:

1) Their screening process sucks.

2) They aren't attracting good programmers.

High salaries help with #2.
Very cool Adam! Ive always wanted a site like this. Definitely keep it focused exclusively on start-ups and never touch the Monsters of the world.
Steve Jobs on blu-ray and what made mp3 take off
I think this would be more accurately titled "My NYC/Chicago Bus Thought Experiment". You haven't actually ventured anything other than a little time and a few bucks for market research.
State budget crisis - Will it impact the recovery?
Opportunity to transform healthcare--engineering talent needed
Elation is an early-stage, angel-funded healthcare technology company dedicated to improving the clinical encounter. Today's rapid advances in web technology and urgent demands for change in our healthcare system create a rare opportunity to dramatically reshape the practice of medicine. Almost every healthcare dollar stems from the interaction between a physician and a patient -- we strive to be a welcome participant in that trusted relationship. Come join us in transforming healthcare at its source.

We are funded by the creators and backers of some of the world's largest and most innovative web companies. We are a sharp, highly motivated and extremely passionate team with years of health IT and healthcare industry experience.

In the near term, we are tackling one of the most vexing issues ailing our healthcare system: getting physicians to adopt information technology. We are focused on building an innovative web-based electronic medical record for physician practices, and our alpha product is in live use.

We are currently seeking extraordinary engineering talent to form the core of our technical team.

Desired Qualifications

-B.S., M.S., or Ph.D. in Computer Science or equivalent
-Ability to contribute immediately to building a complex, highly-responsive web application
-Substantial experience navigating and optimizing server-browser boundaries
-Fascination with making things fast
-Experience building robust applications demanding minimal downtime a plus
-Proficiency programming in Python required; experience with Django a plus
-Expert skills in Javascript (especially jQuery) a plus

-Ability to pound out code while paying meticulous attention to detail
-Product-minded with a keen eye for usability, style and design
-Natural knack for stepping into users' shoes, and sees extraordinary value in doing so
-Extremely fast learner with no qualms diving outside comfort zones to do whatever needs to be done
-Gets excited about building technology that has the potential to deeply impact people's lives.
-No healthcare experience needed but ready to become passionate about improving it
-Loads of energy and not afraid of late (but fun!) nights

If you fit the bill and are excited, or if you don't fit the bill but still feel you could be a tremendous asset to our team, please email us at jobs@elationemr.com.
Can you just trade in hundreds of millions of dollars willy nilly like that? Don't they have access controls in place and tighter regulation? I have seen even crappy mid-sized corps require hardware dongles, physically being on the corporate network and restricting remote access by time frames. Looks like the markets are a trojan horse away from being taken for a ride, if they're not already.
Yeah nice layman's description of the technical stuff without too many drastic oversimplifications or misrepresentations.
Hey, you rationalize your pay grade anyway you want buddy, but speak for yourself.

I do what I do because I enjoy it, but I never take my eye off the bottom line - and either should you.
A 3rd-party rendering engine is a security liability that Apple cannot control, therefore they won't allow it.
Hackathons Around the World and on the Web
Ah OK. I believe redis persists automatically when it can, from the memory, though I haven't actually used it. With a MySQL memory table, if you want to write to the memory table AND have it persist, you have to keep track of what has changed yourself, and handle writing those things to disk.
Although procedurally generated music videos are common, the twitter integration is novel.
Ratatouille - The words of chef Gusteau inspires me to code.
My favorite "code music video" is still Grandaddy's Beautiful Ground, written in BASIC for the Apple ][:

http://stewdio.org/jed/
Older adults watch the most TV, enjoy it least
"But why should I care?"

If you know ahead of time they're only interviewing for a position that tops out at $35k and you don't want anything less than $60k, it's better to not waste everyone's time.
Has nothing on Autechre - Gantz Graf
If you want to guess the price a few months out, though, you can just buy options. If you think Tesla will be $35 by mid-January, you could buy a $30 call option for something like $2 a contract. If the stock hits $35 before expiration, you'll sell the option for $500 a contract. The downside is $2, the upside is $500.

I don't see any options chains for TSLA yet, though, so I am just making the first number up. But that's the idea behind options -- if you want to speculate instead of have equity in the company, buy or sell options. Much cheaper.
Stop in Cleveland as a halfway point and you add in at least a few more potential customers without losing the basic "express" nature of the bus.
Do you need to rely on field testing to discover a problem that apparently causes a 50-75dB signal degradation? The antenna itself would have been designed by a group of RF engineers who would have also realized they were designing an external antenna so the issue must have come up at some point. Whatever the issue is I don't think secrecy plays a big role. Inexperience and naivety? Yeah. Maybe they just didn't realize that out of millions of units a good number of people were going to hold them the "wrong way" and have issues. Short of handing out thousands of test units I'm not sure they could have uncovered this. That's the risk of doing something different.
"Rare commodities are expensive."
I do agree on this one. However, money is not always the primary motivation/reason for people to join you.
My friend once told me about how he asked his team, what is the reason for them to join a company. From tens of reasons, they finally come out with two only: FUN and TEAM.
Primer; both its content and the fact that the entire movie was made on a budget of $6000. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Primer_(film)
The rationale for the Kin would have been compelling up until the end of 2006. But that was an eon ago.

I wonder when shareholders will start to demand that MS stop throwing huge amounts of money away on foolish endeavors just increase the stock dividend.
I’ve heard that as soon as you start paying for quota, the datastore gets way snappier. I can’t confirm this though.
As someone who's experienced depression, I still don't see the connection between depression and any of the things you listed.
Tesla invented the AND logic gate
Thomas Sabo Charm Carriers, mythomassabo.net online sale
Knuth's Earthshattering announcement: A successor to TeX
Great intentions - completely wrong way to make it happen.

Regulating the broadband internet market will just make people in metropolitan areas subsidize the cost for people in rural areas. If it ended there...sure it wouldn't be fair, but at least it would be a zero sum game (some win, some equally lose). But with regulation that's never the case because:

1. you introduce additional costs for government oversight

2. you discourage new entrants to the market, thereby reducing competition

As Milton Friedman said, you can never judge a government program by it's intentions, only the results it gets.

Free markets and unbridled competition have a much better track record of driving prices down, making new technologies available to the masses.

Cost of flat panel TV's (unregulated) have cut in half every 18 months since they came out. What was once a toy for the rich is now available even to poor people.

Cost of health care (regulated, and increasingly a technology product) has steadily increased each year.
MagCloud said it was in fact shipped, but they are sending me a new one anyway--expedited shipping, at their expense. So assuming I do receive the mag soon, it was a well-handled issue.
I keep telling people it's my legal right to have a spaceship, but noone seems to believe me. :(
Is there a cell phone manufacturer that doesn't test unreleased models in secret? It's an extremely common practice.
Emacs rainbow-mode
The Perils of Parfit 1: Credible Commitments
Microsoft puts brakes on Kin mobile phone effort
You'd imagine that, but you'd be wrong - there are a great many technical employees who don't realize they are way out of their league and will apply anyway.
The Verdict
Apollo 13
The Dish
Please tell me that I'm not missing something... None of the links on that page seem to work at all. This seems like an interesting topic, but there doesn't appear to be anything there at all.
Harvard Study: Waterboarding in the media [pdf]
I'm pretty sure that Apple would love to have profits and market share over profits alone.
A relative of mine works as a database administrator making $120k/year and lacks fluency in HTML/CSS. By contrast, Google regularly comes under fire for underpaying their employees, and their average employees are more talented than those of perhaps any other large corporation in the world.

It's not about money.
Interesting. I wonder if every Finn has the right to food, clothing and shelter.
post hoc ergo propter hoc
BuddyPoke and NetworkedBlogs are using it in Production. Both are highly-trafficked sites.
Well, in this case we are beginning to treat broadband as a need for a person, so you can think of it as a market similar to the electricity or water market, where regulation makes perfect sense, and it actually favors competition by preventing "price abuse" from big established companies.
I don't think that's necessarily the case. If you're looking for very talented programming, chances are they'll already have a somewhat decent job. To pull them from that job to yours, you'll have to offer at least as much as they're already making. Sure, 60,000 USD a year may be plenty, but someone making 65k will probably immediately subconsciously ignore the ad (unless of course they're very displeased with their current job and desperate for another, which probably is also rare for very talented programmers).
Apple is on target to become #3 and quite possibly #4 in the next couple of years, with Nokia #1, Android #2 and #3 unclear, but one of RIM, Microsoft or Apple.

Either way, the iPhone will soon be as marginal a phone as Macs are to personal computers.
PlayStation 3 Is Now Profitable
They've approved interpreters for games for code that was written by the developers. I can't see them allowing an app that has a custom interpreter that users can use to run arbitrary code.
Free markets and unbridled competition have a much better track record of driving prices down, making new technologies available to the masses.

In industries with a high barrier to entry, the market naturally tends away from competition. Broadband is one such industry, due to the enormous initial infrastructure costs.
Flip side: How many startups ask for a solution that will scale to millions of users per day once their app goes live?
He was top 3 for me, definitely.
Scott, excellent feedback -- that is why I posted this here -- so thank you.

We allow you (the company) to export all affiliate information.

Affiliates would log in via the Company White-Labeled Panel (such as http://partners.zferral.com or http://theory11.zferral.com -- they can create an account OR login via facebook, twitter, yahoo or gmail.

I guess I can create a demo site, do you think it is necessary if it is 100% free to start?

Thanks again Scott.
If they're surprised that I expect more than they were planning to offer, they might also ask themselves why the difference would be so drastic. Maybe they compare their experience interviewing me, with others who seemed to want less, and make a connection. Or maybe that's wishful thinking. :)
I listened to the 2004 intro to Psych lectures by professor Wolfe at MIT. I thought it interesting that he pointed out that depressives have a more accurate portrayal of reality and how thing really are than "normal" people.
>Apple doesn't have a monopoly on smartphones, mobile OS's or app stores

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/01/apple-responsible-...

Really?

While there are alternatives, their usage is infinitesimal in comparison to the % sold through apple.
Btw, Apple is not "sponsoring" MacRuby. Apple is developing MacRuby, it's an Apple project. Will it replace Obj-C? Probably not. Will it become a blessed alternative? Everything seems to point in that direction.
I'm curious why you would make that analogy. Differences between the TV and health care markets aside, last time I checked, the US has perhaps both the least-regulated and most expensive health care system in the industrialized world.
The standard chargeback fee for a merchant is $25 per disputed transaction, regardless of if the customer's dispute is valid or not.

AMEX not only provides the best interface to manage chargebacks, but they also don't charge a chargeback fee at all.
Nissan Leaf misses its delivery deadline
Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance is awesome. I love Alchemist too.
Yes, I took compiler design in college, and even in the real world I've had lex and yacc coming out my ears.

But specifically, I'm never going to add new statements to the python interpreter.
I think it's wishful thinking. Most companies (large and small) I've worked at or known about (via friends) have ranges for particular positions. It doesn't really matter what you want if you're vastly outside of what they've been allocated to pay. Yes, occasionally orgs will bend the position to fit you and modify pay accordingly, but it's rare enough to be the 'exception that proves the rule' when it does happen.
Blow, because it reminds me about the spirit of entrepreneurship and making big things happen fast, which we all desire.
This thread has too many one-line jokes like reddit.
Movie piracy crackdown: Feds shut down nine websites
I have a simple theory. Most managers are still educated according to Taylor's Scientific Theory of Management, where the managers are more intelligent than the "factors of production," and their role is to "scientifically" direct their work so that they create additional value (which is multiplied by how many workers they have reporting to them). Their salaries reflect that model, and thus is proportional to the salaries of their direct reports times the number of direct reports they have. This is well-ingrained in the workplace, and in society.

Unfortunately programming is really the first discipline where the primary determinant of the "factor's" productivity is not the manager's skill but actually the intelligence of each individual. There's huge conflicts created, not just about salaries, but job roles, and really the structure of society (which is really built around an educated managerial class overseeing (and living apart from) a less educated working class.

The primary issue with paying programmers more is that they're butting up against those managerial salaries and life roles. Programming doesn't fit Taylor's theory. To change that isn't just about micro changes in business, it's about macro-changes in society.
But there's a perverse side to this. By offering MORE compensation, it would seem likely that MORE unqualified people will apply. For your logic to work, we'd need to show that making a skill more expensive would automatically cause inept people to stop applying. If that doesn't hold true, you could be throwing away 999 out of 1000 candidates instead of 199 out of 200.
I offer both Paypal and Google. There are people who are funny about paypal - they use Google. Others are funny about Google - they use paypal. It covers a very wide range of people without being too much of a hassle.

FWIW, I started with just Paypal, and noticed a bump in paid users when I added Google checkout. I hope you notice the same bump when you go with paypal :)
A fine list to be sure, but any attempt to set up a new canon is going to fail like all the other canons have. There is no one list we should read to be cultured.
She can really play those drums-WOW (YouTube)
I don't see 1) how I was "rationalizing [my] pay grade," nor 2) what the remark about not taking one's eye off the bottom line has to do with anything.

The idea that the OP put forward was that simply offering more will solve the problem of finding competent programmers. My comment was related to recent and compelling research into motivation in creative work. It seemed related. I'm not sure I mentioned my pay grade.

Having one's eye on the bottom line is different from being subject to an incentive program, and different still from being competent. The latter is the more to the point. Anyone can be greedy. Even the incompetent. In fact, due to the Dunning-Kruger effect, it might even be suspected that the incompetent are likely to feel more entitled to a higher wage than the competent.

I am not your buddy. However, I will offer the following friendly advice: You might enjoy the level of discourse on Reddit or Digg more than that on YC.
It's Firefox Home, not Sync, that's been submitted to App Store. The release FAQ explains the difference:

"What is the difference between Firefox Sync and Firefox Home?

Firefox Home is a native iPhone application that does a one-way data refresh of your Firefox history, bookmarks and open tabs to your iPhone, whereas Firefox Sync is an add-on for Firefox that does a two-way sync of a user’s Firefox history, bookmarks, open tabs and saved passwords between their desktop and Firefox mobile-enabled devices."

https://www.mozilla.com/en-US/mobile/home/1.0/releasenotes/
If the number of qualified applicants increases from zero to more than zero, it will be worth the noise.