skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A London company I consult with is currently looking for junior staff and having a nightmare finding anyone. I don't think you would like the work, you wouldn't learn anything, and they are not the sort of company to take the risk on you - so I can't help you there. But there is a massive lack of candidates in London at the moment, so you are probably picking a good time to come.

In terms of finding a position I think you've got two real options. 1. Hope that there is someone that is willing to spot your potential and train you up. I think this is a risky strategy because the majority of recruitment goes through recruitment agencies and/or HR departments - unless your CV says 2 years doing C++ development they aren't even going to look at you for C++ development. Personally I always think skills can be learnt, it is the candidates fit for the team/environment that is important - sadly a lot of people like to check boxes.

Your second option is to basically take the hit and try and go in as a grad - as you suggest. You wont get paid much, but you can be honest on your CV and say you got stuck in the wrong job, didn't learn new skills etc. If you get into a good company you can then start building your career. I think you'd be surprised just how much you have learnt in the past few years, coding is only a small part of a job, so you'll be miles ahead of other grads in other areas. A small step backwards can often result in a big step forwards. Obviously some companies will be hesitant as you are not a recent grad, but really they are getting more for their money because of your other experience.

Alternatively of course you could try your hand at your own startup (or try interning at another - depends if you can afford to live in London without a real income)!
Seems like an ideal - if unrefined - technology for internet connected TVs, provided it's switched off by default.

Sigh. I bet it is abused by commercial TV for contextual advertising - making TV even more annoying to watch.
It would be more interesting to look at inflation-adjusted growth per capita. The US still has a growing population, and has to grow its GDP just to stay even.
It seems to work well as a decision matrix. Try using it to choose your next car.
standard offers i've come across in contracts is 2 free days per working month here, however 20 days is minimum by law not counting holidays. i've lived both in the US and EU, and while i feel there is more freedom in the US, the problem is as soon as you start working you can't enjoy them cause you're working 40+ hours per week and barely have any vacation.
that hurts.
Let's limit the "April's Fools" stories to one day a year-- max.
Umm defensive, just like these ones?

http://i.engadget.com/2010/03/02/apple-vs-htc-a-patent-break...

Unless you meant out of defence of the right to make more profit, in which case yes I totally agree, completely defensive.
Still funny but seriously needs to be revised. For example: Haskell (off to the side unattached to anything because it is its own little world), Groovy (just above Java), Scala (above Perl), Obj-C (diagonally above C), Erlang (*-Ruby developers consider it better than Ruby, but Erlang developers are humble enough to place it below Ruby, but not humble enough to place it any lower), Eiffel (somewhere between Groovy and OCaml), OCaml (off to the side above Perl, perhaps above everything, but Ruby, Scala, Erlang would be above it).
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Really nice work, bookmarked for future use.

One addition that may be worth adding is being able to create a swatch based on colours selected.
Only working 10/11 days per month - 8 in February? Where is this?
From the artice: "Germany has the highest degree of worker control on the planet since the collapse of the Soviet Union." As if the Soviet union was a workers' paradise. There was lots of party control, but certainly not worker control.
I think the point isn't that they didn't think it should be patented, more that they really weren't interested in that level of detail generally.

It is trivial but lots of trivial things put together can make for the improved user experience that distinguishes products you can charge top dollar for from the sort of mass market machines Dell turn out.
Great people management is like great parenting.
It is about creating a nourishing environment.

That's something I realized when reading an article on being a nourishing parent in a parenting magazine, years ago.(nope, i am not a parent, it just interests me) Having had the chance to observe different managers before and since, in a small company, a fortune 500 company and scores of small businesses, I strongly believe that now.

I think, being a great manager is about letting and helping the people under you develop to the best of their abilities,help them develop new abilities and be confident about those abilities. (all of that does translate into productivity and profits)

Its just like providing a nourishing environment for kids, so that they develop to the best of their abilities and are confident about their abilities.

Both involve a varying mix of nudging, standing back, holding the back, lending a hand, letting go off the hand, push, pull, positive and negative but constructive feedback, setting the limits, a bit of rewards, a bit of punishment, giving guidance and giving freedom to explore, to mention a few.

Yep, i do think its very possible to be like that even in a very profit minded company too, provided there is top down support.
My usual approach for detecting technology fanboys is to ask them to name scenarios where their "enemy" technology would be appropriate to use - can be very very funny.
I believe the author is wrong about GDP contribution of free tuition:

"You know, it’s 50,000 dollars for tuition at NYU and it’s zero at Humboldt University in Berlin. So NYU adds catastrophic amounts of GDP per capita and Humboldt adds nothing."

Granted, there are several approaches to calculating GDP but none of them ignores the government spending.
Some general introduction for those, who really interested in such topics. http://oyc.yale.edu/ecology-and-evolutionary-biology/princip...

btw, you may skip hardcore genetics in lectures from 2 till 8. ^_^
This got me thinking that the thinkpad is the only true polar opposite of the macbook from the aesthetic/usability/functionality point of view...
this seems a clever move, but as I understand it it's something for content providers, not users. As such, it would appear issues from content consumers such as mozilla still stand, or am I misunderstanding?
http://www.threadthat.com/FAQ.aspx#QB57

It's linked from the front page.
There is a slow down when dragging on left side on the grey, unlike on the right side. Weird performance glitch.
My palm pré plus does this too. However the music player app lacks on other points...
I've worked in both countries and I noticed at least one explanation for the productivity difference that isn't mentioned in the article. If a German is at risk of missing a deadline on a project he will put in a lot of extra hours to avoid that. An American who already puts in way more hours has much less time and energy left to make up for unforeseen circumstances. So the increase in flexibility pays off by avoiding rescheduling dependent projects. Perhaps this flexibility may have other benefits too, such as that people have more time to intellectually enrich themselves in ways that benefit the company.
Vacations norm is more 5 to 6 weeks with 38h to 41h work week. That is, for all the people I know in Germany. (I know nobody with only 4 weeks). Please note that these are paid holidays, you have a lot of days off too (Christmas, etc.)

The University tuition is about €500/year.

Nursing/Day care for the kids (we have 3.5 and 1.5 year old kids) is from free to €200/€500 per month for both of them (it depends of your income and where you live).

For the title "minister" or alike, this is always a translation issue, it is always hard to map the name from one country to another because the same name may mean something different (Prime Minister in UK and France for example).
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There are a social and economical constraints, not a biological ones.
Very nice but it would be more usable if the cross pointer would completely replace the arrow pointer.
Or the other way round?

Anyway, reproductive success (or just the chances of getting a wive) are even more skewed in polygamous societies, than in monogamous ones. It's an alpha-males paradies, and a loser's hell.
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Update: It might not be ready by the end of August. I just returned from a week-long trip, and I'm now busy rewriting the whole Fexl interpreter in terms of pure combinatorics (see http://fexl.com/#combinatorics ).

The interpreter understands only the two fundamental combinators S and C. Although it is possible to define high-order combinators in the interpreter using function pointers, I am limiting myself to S and C to minimize the code size and illustrate the principle that all computable functions can be defined as applications of only S and C.

So, for example, even the Y combinator itself is defined in terms of S and C as:

\I = (S C C)
\Q = (S (S (C S) C) (C (S I I)))
\Y = (S Q Q)

I'm now doing some bootstrapping, eliminating code formerly written in Perl. I'm writing the Fexl parser in Fexl, and manually converting it to S and C. I can then eliminate the parser written in Perl.
Update: It might not be ready by the end of August. I just returned from a week-long trip, and I'm now busy rewriting the whole Fexl interpreter in terms of pure combinatorics (see http://fexl.com/#combinatorics ).

The interpreter understands only the two fundamental combinators S and C. Although it is possible to define high-order combinators in the interpreter using function pointers, I am limiting myself to S and C to minimize the code size and illustrate the principle that all computable functions can be defined as applications of only S and C.

For example, even the Y combinator itself is defined in terms of S and C as:

\I = (S C C)
\Q = (S (S (C S) C) (C (S I I)))
\Y = (S Q Q)

I'm now doing some bootstrapping, eliminating code formerly written in Perl. I'm writing the Fexl parser in Fexl, and manually converting it to S and C. I can then eliminate the parser written in Perl.

Manually abstracting Fexl code into S and C is not as hard as it may seem. I can take a piece of Fexl code and, using a very simple and mechanical method, systematically transform it into S and C. The Fexl parser itself employs this same method automatically using these functions:

# Basic parse tree forms (sym name) and (app fun arg).

\sym = (\name \sym\app sym name)
\app = (\fun\arg \sym\app app fun arg)

# Lambda abstraction of a parameter from a form. Note
# that a symbol name in Fexl source code cannot start with
# "=". We use this fact to introduce symbols with fixed
# definitions, e.g. "=C", "=S", and "=I".

\lam = (\param\form
form
(\name string:eq param name (sym "=I") (app (sym "=C") (sym name)))
(\fun\arg app (app (sym "=S") (lam param fun)) (lam param arg))
)

# We then resolve externally defined symbols with the
# resolve function. The context parameter is an arbitrary
# function which maps symbol names to functional values.

\resolve = (\context\form
form
context
(\fun\arg (resolve context fun) (resolve context arg))
)
>I think monogamy spread because St. Augustine made it
> part of the Roman Catholic dogma that became the
> foundation for all Christian dogma

Hum, monogamy was the norm in the Roman and greek world anyway. And wasn't monogamy the common jewish habit, too? It predates christianity by centuries, anyway.
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Yes, comparing European 'socialism' to Soviet/Chinese style socialism ('communism') is so myopic that it has become a litmus test to detect writers who have at least a basic understanding of American/European system comparisons. Someone who sees 'socialism' and interprets it American-style, and thinks that Europe is that, starts out so wrong that anything based on those assumptions is tainted.
Reddit opened its code. However we didn't see a swarm of reddit clones taking over, so it must be pretty safe after all. That, and I'm a perl hacker :)
Are there state-provided student loans in Germany? Here in the Netherlands there have been for years (decades maybe? - I'm an immigrant here, my knowledge only goes back 15 years or so ;) )
http://www.johntreed.com/Kiyosaki.html

Kiyosaki might have some good nuggets of general wisdom in his book, but he is one of those whose actual success is based on book sales, not other business(real estate, investing, etc.).
Moreover, there's scientific evidence against it [..]

No, there isn't. All the interpretations of the results of the experiments since Libet make one crucial unsupported assumption: that rationality and free will must always be exercised by the conscious mind.

This assumption is unwarranted and a gross underestimation of the importance and abilities of our subconsciousness. There is no reason to suppose that your subconscious mind can't make a score of rational, and free, decisions, upon which your conscious mind gets to reflect only some time later. The fact that your mind came upon a conclusion in a subconscious manner does not mean it is irrational or 'unfree': it just means you didn't get the time to reflect on it, before it was acted upon.
this is pretty cool , like inkscape in the browser .
I can see both sides of this. Everyone arguing that your schedule is flexible has a point...

But I also know what happens when you have a schedule like that: Everyone around you treats you like you have a flexible schedule and asks you to do things during it... And then on their downtime they expect you to join them. In other words, your flexible schedule isn't really flexible because theirs isn't.

If you try to tell them to keep the house quiet so you can work, you get a lecture about how they need to rest after work, as if you don't need to and they didn't take part of your day.

It's the kind of thing that always happens when you aren't on the same schedule as the rest of the world.
Looks like you need a co-founder!
Dating & Shaadi Online • Dating & Shaadi Online
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As a London based person, the 'suddeness' of the interest in Deutsche strategy is palpable.

Last years 'sick man' is now the healthiest man on the block:: IF the Keynsian stimulation favoured by America does not work.

Further, there are mounting concerns (valid or not) that China may not be the saviour some hoped. If that transpires, the situation will be bleak indeed for the indebted US and good for the 'austere' Germans. This may feel like being the 'best' survivors of a nuclear war however.

I think people are gently probing which entities will be the big players in the next few years and are trying to copy plays from their playbook.
I'll add that for each rich person there must be an army of people working to feed this rich, clean his toilets, repair his cars, tend his gardens, so there is a definitive limit to the number of rich lazy bastards the society can support.

Then you may realize that you don't really want to be even more exploitative towards other people by being living a more wasteful way-of-life than you already do.
Ouch. Strawman attack. I want to get rich for several reasons.

* I don't want to think about money

* I want to be able to chose stuff to work on

* I want some expensive things, like learning to fly and moving out of my country

To get rich, I'm trying to create value by writing useful/entertaining software.

Is there something wrong with me? It's not that HN is full of lazy wishful thinkers who just want to get rich so that they can go insane with a new Maserati every week. We just want to get some more freedom and a safety net, and are willing to work hard and create value.

This particular article is more of a thought experiment than a pratical investment advice. Very few if any startup-culture people will spend their money this way. Most will spend it to pay off debts, start new companies, maybe invest in others' startups, buy a new car.
> “There is no wrong way to hold it”
As opposed to some other Apple products.
My site is going to have specific tags, somewhat like Stack Overflow. I see Trafficspaces has the ability to support contextual ads but there's not a lot of info. Ideally I'd like advertisers to be able to bid on a set of tags--is this possible?
That is not a patent at all. That is simply a WIPO publication of a PCT filing. No patent rights at all anywhere are granted apple by that document. Please be precise in your description of these things, the meanings are subtle, but extremely important.
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This day and age, "social mobility" is mostly a function of the dysfunction and inequality of the society in question.

The <Nationality>-American angle is horribly overplayed. With some highly insulated exceptions, very few people actually have anything more than a thin veneer of rituals - if that - linking them to the "old country". There are some genetic personality traits but even those are more often shared with other Americans than people from the "old country" (stubbornness, distrust of authority, tendency toward religion etc.).

Oversimplified, for purposes of inspecting e.g. "work ethic", a person is the product of the country in which they lived their formative years. A second-generation immigrant will get some heritance from their parents but at that point the effect starts wearing off.

As to your dissection of "social democracy"...well. Suffice to say Europe is, from experience with both, much more democratic than the U.S.
I am not a lawyer, but I think you're worrying about a "maserati problem." Many conditions need to be satisfied for this to become a concern. You'd also have to become successful and very visible. Remember that, as with any ventures, there's always a high chance that your venture will fail. Definitely do your due diligence on issues like this -- but really, focus on making your venture better and better and grow it.

It takes many years (say, 5) for a patent to be granted. The application won't show up on the USPTO website for at least a year. Also, it's unknown what the exact claims of their patent are at this moment. The patent may not be granted. It may even be that they filed the patent application months ago (before your idea.) It might even be that another, unknown firm, already has a patent for the same technology, although presumably this co. did their due diligence first.

A number of things can happen in a few years. I'm speaking completely hypothetically here, but, suppose, 6 years later their patent is actually granted. Again, it's unknown what the claims of their patent are. Even if your tech. exactly matches theirs, they may not sue. And if by that point your venture fails or is a small fry, it's a moot point. If your venture IS wildly successful and you're highly visible, you could see a lawsuit. But by then you're wildly successful and your efforts paid off.

If you're that visible, you'll presumably have significant funds for a legal defense. You might see a request for an injunction to stop producing X. You might end up settling and pay licensing fees. To me this scenario is very similar to Android: Google side-steps some potential issues when building the Android platform, Sun does not sue, Oracle acquires their IP, "waits" until Android is prominent, and then sues. Did this outcome (now known to us) stop Google?

Many big firms (say, RIM or HTC) have been sued by competitors for allegedly infringing on their patents. Did the threat of the potential future lawsuit stop them from building this tech?

I would consult with a patent lawyer (don't rely on HN for legal advice!) but don't spend a fortune. A lawyer will typically give you 30 minutes or so of consultation for free. In the meantime, you should be focused on building your tech.

Also, your website/app look great. Best of luck!
20 (work-) days per year, not month.
IEBlog: Interoperability Means More Than Just Standards
Its 2010 and your browser has an assembler
Why didn't they think of other way to represent a sleeping state but resembling Apple's blinking light?
I wonder whether this means Mozilla will include a H.264 decoder for Firefox' HTML video support. Seems a little unclear to me. The patents remain and there are still cases in which licensing fees and restrictions would apply, but is that also true for codec implementations?

It would be good if Mozilla could do this, as it would be a major boon to the standards situation on the HTML5 web, imho.
Yes it's just a tactical retreat, like Microsoft offering XP cheap to fend off Linux-based netbooks but only if they conformed to certain hardware limitations, not a complete capitulation by any means.

Mozilla is still on the hook for £5 million a year (and rising) to provide H.264 in their own binaries, but that right doesn't cascade to open source derivatives, if they decide to stop fighting for web standards that meet the W3C definition.

It's interesting that these victories are often viewed as defeats for the technologies that forced their competitors hands and saved consumers large amounts of money.
First off, if you aren't moving away from a skill-set into another skill-set, you aren't 'changing careers'. Get that out of your head.

Second, technology is technology. Yes, it would be nicer to have newer languages on your resume, but any language is a language and having old languages on your resume is better than none.

Third, if you give up after only 6 months, it'll look really, really bad on your resume.

And finally, I have a feeling English isn't your first language. You made quite a few grammar mistakes. This wouldn't be such a problem if the rest of your text didn't seem English-native. It makes you sound uneducated, when the opposite is probably true. If you intend to work in an English-speaking company, or heavily interact with English speaking techs on the internet, brush up on your English.

As for the advice...

Keep your job. Use your free time to learn 'newer' languages. Contribute to open source projects, or start a project of your own. (Contributing is significantly easier because it has built-in direction: Just look at the bugs list and start fixing them.)

Don't rely on other people to teach you. This is a really bad lesson that school teaches and it makes improving your skills a lot harder. That's not to say you can't learn from others, just that you shouldn't be relying on it. Teach yourself and take advantage of mentors as you find them.
They also had some female soldiers. But probably not enough to be relevant for the argument.
Did I miss something, or was that awkward way the interviewer was interrupting pg real? At one point pg is saying something, and the interviewer interrupts him (while he's explaining) with some unintelligible thing, and pg goes "... <rage face> <swig>"
instead of /proc/PID/fd/XX you can simply use /proc/self/fd/XX if PID is simply the pid of the current process.

standard input/output/error are not necessarily character devices (as stated in the article). they can be anything (sockets, files, etc).
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Want to get people's opinion on it
About the minimum wage: Even without a government mandated minimum, there's always a floor of zero. (Unless you count losses, say from your own business.)