skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, I would only worry if 20 years from now, you're still solving the same problems but with a cuter UI and a faster machine.

Exactly. You have to constantly reinvest in yourself technically. Learn new languages and platforms, study a new business domain, hack on at least one side project and keep it up on github. There is no such thing as tenure in software.
I'm not at all surprised. Hopefully this is the beginning of the end for Hanzi and Kanji.

The failings of these writing systems are manifold, but perhaps the most pernicious is the effect on education. The countless classroom hours wasted on memorising characters poison the classroom with a culture of rote learning. It should be no surprise that when the fundamental skill of literacy can only be acquired through mindless drill, that will almost inevitably become the default approach to the rest of schooling.

Those of us who work with the Japanese are often amazed at how so much schooling leads to so little learning, but with the millstone that is kanji I am surprised that so much is achieved.
I have this problem in English, and I'm not even young by tech standards. I should probably spend some time re-learning to write, because it's kind of frightening.
Here's the real story:

First, the 'suits' want only 'fungible', 'compliant' workers.

Second, the 'suits' do NOT want any workers who might have some technical qualifications that might be powerful, compete with the suits, and scare the suits.

Third, likely highly experienced, older programmers can get good work via 'body shops' around DC.

Fourth, one common tech personnel policy is to hire people as young as possible, promote 1% into management, and fire the rest by 35. In this case, the person 35 would have been better off starting a grass mowing service at age 18 so that by age 35 they have had 17 years in the business, expanded to landscape architecture, have 12 employees, etc. Or generally a Ph.D. in EE will be better off at age 35 having just gotten an electrician's license and built a nice collection of local customers.

Generally, in a technical field, it's important to need a LICENSE.

Generally the big, secret economic opportunity now in the US is to exploit a 'geographical barrier to entry'. So do well in a Main Street business where anyone more than 100 miles away can't be a competitor and do well.

It can commonly be better for a person 18 just to join McDonald's, work hard, learn the business really well, work up to a manager of one McDonald's, manage also a second McDonald's for the same owner, and then have a heart to heart with a local banker about buying and running their own McDonald's. Build up to 10 McDonald's, run them WELL, and will have a better job than nearly anyone in a company a programmer might work for.

Fifth, a good programmer should start and own their own business. E.g., really good at Web site design and construction? Fine: Do such sites for companies in a radius of 50 miles. There, of course, need to meet face to face with the customer and, thus, have a geographical barrier to entry.

Sixth, have some deep technical qualifications, say, from grad school? Fine: There's nearly NO WAY anyone else will construct a good job for you. So, start and run your own business based on the deep knowledge you have.
Wow, what an ad hominem answer:

shankar.unni

I agree with the Evaluation, completely. This is truly
pointless syntactic sugar, unless you're coming directly
from the C# or Visual Basic world without ever having worked
in any other language, and escape sequences are just too
hard for you to comprehend.. (In which case, many other
Java features would be, too..)

This is sad, some one offers a great language feature that will reduce bugs and save money and people respond with insults.
Observing older programmers within my circle, they tend to master a few specialized skills that's hard to get from the hardcore and enthusiastic 20+.

There are a lot of subdomains within programming. Mastering things like Unix tools, patching certain web servers, knowing the kinks of specific RDBMS and/or filesystem, how to design batch processing, makes you a lot harder to be replaced by those 20+.

Not all 20+ guys are hacking on PyPy or Firefox. Most of them are Rails/PHP warriors. Competing against them is a lot easier if you master skills that can only be obtained by experience.
No - ant is logic programming, not functional programming. Same with make.
Negotiation skill and how desperate you are. Some will do anything to get a foothold in The Land of Opportunity, while others are already there and can afford to wait for a better offer.
I pretty much agree with what you've said.
Although, regarding "I ask them then that by the same logic, out of the billions of species that have existed on this planet there's gotta be more species like us doing the same things that we do?"
My answer would be - sound logic but flawed line of thought. Since all billion species here on earth are confined in this well connected area it means, all billion species pretty much have been and still are competing with each others and amongst themselves.
Meaning there can in the end only be one winner (following some sort of law of the jungle).
The winner gets to type these words.

If we assume "since space is vast, there's gotta be a planet somewhere that has similar environment like Earth and thus similar life forms inhabiting it" we can regard each of those planets as completely separate competitions and thus there can be as many winners as there are "similar environments"
JxLib, a library for creating graphical user interaces based on MooTools
I think a lot of this makes sense when you realize that the typical tech company isn't really trying to do something that's very difficult. The average internet company is chasing some gimmicky take on social marketing or a trivial mobile fad etc and your ability to succeed in that kind of environment is going to depend more on your ability to work corporate politics than your technical skills, unless you're absolutely incompetent.

This is much less the case at companies that are tackling hard problems though.
As many commentators note, this is wrong, for he was "kicked out" for gross insubordination:

"For headquarters staff, war consists largely of the endless tinkering with PowerPoint slides to conform with the idiosyncrasies of cognitively challenged generals in order to spoon-feed them information. Even one tiny flaw in a slide can halt a general's thought processes as abruptly as a computer system's blue screen of death."

You just can't say that sort of thing and expect to be retained in an organization. Even if it's true.

For that matter, it's not that he hates PowerPoint but that he perceives it is part of pointless process.
So what does that mean?

OK, here are some terms to simplify. In each case, what is a simpler way to write the expression:

x^3 * x^5

(t^3)^2

u^(3^2)

Expand the following:

(g+2)^2

(z-3)^3

Now, if x=10^y, what does y equal?
MIT Globe Genie (Random Street View)
Did you try this one?

http://www.khanacademy.org/video/introduction-to-logarithms

Or this one:

http://www.khanacademy.org/video/partial-fraction-expansion-...
Salaries don't only compensate for performance, they also compensate for responsibility.

Do you want to be the person that loses the company some amount $x, comparable to your yearly salary, when you make a mistake? Or are you willing to lose the company 100($x) for making the wrong decision, be fired for it, and have your entire team looking for jobs?

I tend to think of it as "how much of the buck are you expected to stop?"

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_passing for non-US HNers)
Today you can download python, run the installer and you get IDLE, and you can start doing some tutorials right away.

You can also download .NET and get started right away. I'm sure there are a lot more examples. It has never been easier to start learning how to program.
Age discrimination is standard: The subordinate is supposed to be younger. Period.
Windows USB Vulnerabilities Reign Supreme
Your comment on #1 above doesn't make sense to me.

Immediately after the sentence you cite, the OP says "Build skills that are more valuable to your company, and take positions that can’t be filled by entry-level workers"

Management roles may be one option. You are correct that technical competence doesn't imply management competence but that can still be learned (over the course of one's career).

I do understand the rest of your points though.

ETA: You say ... can anyone cite me a single source that justifies this position?

Exactly what kind of citation would you need? You can probably look at successful companies and see how they handle the problem.
How do you get started with IRC on a Mac?
Also over the past 10 years, venture capital in Silicon Valley lost money.

Generally the venture partners do not know how to build significant businesses. Look at their backgrounds and see why. Compare with people doing significant work in technology for, say, the US DoD.
Tax Credits For Angel Investors? Yes, a Great Idea
Thanks for the link- I love romantic music especially, and Chopin is the epitome of that...beautiful. The études are also some of my favorite music.
For their benefit i must admit i would have thought ww.com is some parked domain-squatter from a cursory glance if I didn't know better :)

The design looks a bit similar to a lot of these types of parked domains.
No obscure reference. I probably made that joke too hard to get by making it so G-rated. Whoops.

Might sound silly at this point, but I thought there was a serious chance that comment would get down-voted into oblivion. Sure, it's at +64 right now, but what if the OP hadn't responded like he did? Good example of that Derek Sivers guy's "First Follower" principle. I'm not usually a Sivers fan (got nothing against him either) but First Follower is some real-ass shit.
very appropriate!
> Doing them at the level of a service business like, say, a sandwich shop, is easy.

As someone who runs a service business, and who spends a lot of time working closely with a large number of people who also run service businesses ... I'd really like to know if your opinion here is based on any actual facts.

Traditional businesses have to deal with local ordinances and licenses, real estate, advertising & marketing, and one-on-one customer relations, all with higher expenses and lower potential revenues. They are wickedly susceptible to both local and national economic trends; when customers stop spending money or coming in the door, it's very, very hard to get them to come back. "Startup" businesses more often have these wonderful markets of millions of customers; if half of them walk away, you can still have a viable business.

And of course, startups have things like YCombinator (and TechStars, and...) that are putting a lot of effort into helping them be successful. Traditional businesses? Their best bet is their local SBA, and those guys are not helpful at all.

Hell, I just brought on another person to manage my service business so that I can begin to ease out of the nightmare of running that thing and slip into the wonderful world of coding all day.
ya i've tried them
You can’t afford to get signals crossed in the underworld
David Moser's essay Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard [1] has an amusing and enlightening passage about this "character amnesia".

I have seen highly literate Chinese people forget how to write certain characters in common words like "tin can", "knee", "screwdriver", "snap" (as in "to snap one's fingers"), "elbow", "ginger", "cushion", "firecracker", and so on. And when I say "forget", I mean that they often cannot even put the first stroke down on the paper. Can you imagine a well-educated native English speaker totally forgetting how to write a word like "knee" or "tin can"? Or even a rarely-seen word like "scabbard" or "ragamuffin"? I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn't remember how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 "to sneeze". I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the "Harvard of China". Can you imagine three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word "sneeze"??

[1] http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
Their argument against the CP is a tough one to swallow. Which is basically that MS needs to effectively give rights to its whole patent portfolio if you implement one of these standards (unless they are talking less broadly that MS should specifically look at the Mono implementation, and give the promise to those patents which Mono uses "today").

The problem is, what if I decide that I'm going to do C# that lives in a Virtual Machine with real time interaction using the XBox Live protocol. At that point can I say, "I'm just doing the standard, but in a different environment, I need to be covered?"

I think MS's position seems fine. You have a promise for all patents necessary to implement the standard. If you have questions, I'd just contact them directly. But unlike Java/Oracle they would have three things they'd have to deal with, (1) Did you actually infringe and (2) Is what you've done not necessary for the specification. (3) And of course they put the promise at jeopardy if they do so. Oracle never had to consider the last two. That makes it a lot easier for them to sue.
Go find a better company to work for.

All of those issues are company-specific. Sadly, most companies have at least some of the problems.

And I find your McDonald's story insulting: talk to me after you run one a single McD's by yourself and then you'll be able to convince me that a programmer should get paid more.

Dealing with people is hard. Dealing with short term employees is harder. Dealing with people who don't have skills to work higher up the employment chain is even harder. Doing it through two levels of surly middle management would give me an ulcer.

So are there multi-McD's owning entrepreneurs who make more money than me? Hell yes. And they deserve every penny. It's a harder than sitting down in an Aeron chair, staring at 30" monitor and trying not to drip the condensation from your iced coffee on your MacBook Pro.
The advantage of Hanzi is that it can be used for any dialect of spoken Chinese(or any spoken language), of which, in China there are hundreds. China is really 30 countries bound together by a unified writing system.

The tradeoff is that it's difficult to learn.

If you want a totally phonetic alphabet then look at Hangul(Korean characters). Beautiful in it's simplicity and how it mirrors the spoken language. But Korea would only be a small province in China, and Hangul would be useless to those who spoke a different dialect.

Hanzi will be around for quite some time, so few Chinese are immersed in technology to the point they forget how to write, in fact the majority of Chinese are peasants and don't even have an email.
Textual is a very good IRC client for the Mac.
DM-FILEMANAGER 3.9.6-9 MULTIPLE VULNERABILITIES
> Immediately after the sentence you cite, the OP says "Build skills that are more valuable to your company, and take positions that can’t be filled by entry-level workers"

It is the implication that newly learned management skills are "more valuable" than high-level technical skills that I question. I'm not saying a good manager isn't valuable; on the contrary, I think good management is essential. I'm just saying it's a different, parallel track to technical work, but a lot of people (particularly not very good managers) seem to see it as a technical track that stops at about the level where the management track starts.
Sorry but there has been a typewriter that supports this since the 40's, invented by the author of 'A moment in Peking'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ming_Kwai

And a Japanese typewriter since 1929

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_typewriter
x^3+5=x^8

t^3 * t^3 = t^6

i guess it's u^6

g^2+4g+4

not sure abt (z-3)^3

expanding (z-3)^3

could it be:
(z-3).(z+3)^2 ??

=>(z-3) (z^2+3z+9)
The automatic and frequent update system is one thing which makes Chrome very good. It can pretty much be assumed that all users connected to the internet would be atleast on the latest stable version.
Take your not-so-much-of-a-troll company and allow them to hire not only researcher-employees, but also researcher-independent-contractors. Are they more trollish now? If not, what if some of their researchers band together to lower their insurance costs and improve their tax situation; they establish their own contracting firm which the not-a-troll company pays to supply researchers. Finally, what if this contracting firm works on a part-time or short-term basis with many companies who want research done?

The problem with trolling is not that properties that can be sold and monetized by the new owner. It is that ideas are being treated as (material) property. Ideas can be formed by multiple persons independently, and any given idea can be shared among any number of thinkers without diminishing the strength of the thought. In particular, you can have submarine patents that nobody realizes they're infringing until the day the troll emerges from under his bridge to tell the whole world to pay up. Or, one can be granted a patent on an idea that's actually quite common and obvious, and this patent can back up a threat of costly and risky litigation, effecting the coercive transfer of money from productive members of society to patent-system-abusers.

Innovators need access to scarce material goods and they have limited lifetimes, but extending our effective scheme for managing scarce resources to the ideas they develop is not working so well.
Sri Lanka Won the Tri Series
While LLVM isn't a fork and doesn't quite fit the model of the gnumacs/xemacs, gcc/egcs, glibc/linuxlibc &c. from years gone by, I do hope the new competition in the free compiler space will spur improvement and innovation in both projects. I would almost expect not only the state of free compilers, but the health of GCC itself, to be better with a viable competitor in LLVM and clang than without.
Interesting... Dropbox apparently does this.

This explains why adding the ubuntu netbook iso image to the Dropbox folder, synced in milliseconds.

My friend was going a little nuts wondering if Dropbox choked.
How Entire Industries Become Unethical
yeah, sorry. entered from my "auto-correcting" android phone. too lazy to fix.
Location Based reminder
OK, in the first one you need brackets : x^3+5 is not usually understood to be the same as x^(3+5), but the answer is right, and the process is right. The others are right too.

So (g+2)^2 is equal to g^2+4g+4, but it's also equal to (g+2).(g+2) [where I've used the dot for multiplication]

Does that help you for (z-3)^3 ??
In NYC, teachers get july, august, 1 week of september, the week after christmas and a week of spring break. That's 2 months 3 weeks, though obviously this varies from place to place.

I'm not sure why you think teachers take a loss of 60k right now - most teachers are low human capital individuals and would not be earning $100k/year right out of college.

And yes, most programmers pay is related to their performance. Rock stars quickly get paid more, either at their current job or they quit and move on. If they suck, they get fired (a concept teachers may find somewhat foreign). That's what "market factors" means. In contrast, teacher pay is set by politics and longevity.

Also, most teachers get early retirement (at 55, vs 65 for the programmer) on a defined benefit pension. Maybe it's insolvent, but most likely the rest of us will be forced to pay. In contrast, if my 401k tanks, I'm fucked.
I think the Camera+ authors have seen iOS4

Sure, but it doesn't mean they had time time update to use every of the 1000's of feature changes that came with it. This is why Flash as a competing platform is a terrible idea - it adds another stage of "rolling out <some feature> is blocked by <someone in another organization>".
Do you have any idea as to why it would be illegal? In my country it's not at all unusual to see a product in a supermarket being sold at a discount price in a display at the front of the store, but at the usual price on the usual shelf.
Let's go much simpler, right back to logs basics.

If y=log(x) (with 10 as the base of the logarithms) then what does x equal in terms of y?
When I was an MBA prof, one of my students was running a Wendy's, in Columbus! He explained some of the opportunity: Watch staffing CAREFULLY. To do this, more than once a day, watch the weather, various public events, say, a high school football game, or anything and everything else that can affect traffic, Then staff accordingly.

If are one person short on a shift, then lose revenue. One person long, then waste money. Getting the staffing right, for each shift, for the year, is a LOT of money -- add it up yourself.

Net, there's a LOT of difference between running a good fast food restaurant and not. So, someone who knows how to run 10 such restaurants can be getting annual cash income over $1 million a year, with a VERY stable job, where they can't be fired and where they can bring their children into the business. Go to a yacht club, and it is mostly such people you will find.

The blunt point is, in the US, some of the best opportunities remain just doing well in a Main Street business.

Then, if some computing expertise can help, still better. But, generally in the US, getting away from just owning a Main Street business is a risky career direction.
The variation in productivity between programmers is somewhere from 1 to 10 to 1 to 100 (although I like to point that for a certain level of problem difficulty there's a cutoff below which productivity is 0 (ADDED:) ... and then there are those who's contribution to the organization is negative, but that's a different problem...).

If it were the case that "salaries reflect the value you provide to your employe" we'd see some people making 10, 25, 50 times as much as "average" or below programmers. And I'm sure you can figure out a bunch of reasons why that would never fly in addition to the other replies to your query.
> That sounds nice on paper, but there are a lot of extremely talented and productive young programmers on the market now.

Really? There are certainly a lot of young programmers who think they are extremely talented and productive, but 'twas ever thus. I'm still waiting to meet the 20-year-old who is as smart as I'm sure I was when I was 20. :-)

> The kind of education you can provide yourself if you really dive into the open-source world and things like github simply wasn't available even ten years ago.

And why would you assume that people who have access to that and ten years' extra experience would be somehow inferior to those who have access to that without the extra experience? The availability of open source code to explore is a potentially useful resource, but it's only one resource. Reading is still no substitute for doing, and it's not like many of the older programmers today never worked on hobby projects before the Internet came along.
[http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Isaac_Bashevis_Singer]
now i have the solution for y in x=10^y

here it is:x=10^y

subtract 10^y from both the sides

x-10^y=0

now subtract x from both the sides

-10^y = -x

divide by -1

-10^y/-1 = -x/-1

= 10^y = x

take log base 10 both sides

log10^y = logx

= ylog10=logx

y = logx/log10
Please read the other thread. I already dispensed with this idiocy regarding teachers and I'm not going to address it again.