skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As someone who only knows the Roman alphabet, I too think that learning thousands upon thousands of glyphs just to read a newspaper is insane. However, I do think that you underestimate the power of "we've always done it that way" and "it has done me no harm".

I certainly have caught myself defending aspects of my country's culture, which seem weird to others, for exactly that reason.
When I'm struggling with what a programming concept means, I find it helpful to try implementing it in a toy interpreter. Efficiency is irrelevant, it just needs to model the concept correctly.

Many concepts really aren't that complicated if you're not worried about optimization, and getting to a working model tends to shake out the aspects you don't completely understand. (This is also why books have exercises.)
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?

I don't. I just don't assume I'm superior either.
The Federal Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) requires that private employers that offer pensions do pay as they go.

Defined contribution 403(b) and 401(k) programs have to have their deposits made soon after each year end. Defined benefit plans are more complicated, but there are big federal fines for companies that fail to deposit the increase in expected value of future payments each year. There are extensive (but imperfect) actuarial rules in the US Code to make the actual minimum contribution match the needs of the pension fund. Big funds need to buy insurance, too, in case things go wrong.

States and municipalities are immune from the federal standards. That's why they're ignoring the consequences and just promising to pay pensions without depositing enough money according to their own actuarial computations. A private company would have had to cut back on promises or pay the full current cost of future benefits.

Heck, even the Federal Government is keeping up with employee pension planning. The trouble is all in states and municipalities.

The states know they are doing this; actuarial science is not a mystery. But governors and legislators figure that public employee unions must be satisfied. And the problem won't explode until they're out of office and then it's someone else's problem.

And we voters who don't hold them responsible are ultimately at fault. Public employee unions couldn't hold politicians captive if we were willing to vote out pols who kowtow to irresponsible demands.
I've really got to look into learning Korean some time. It seems like a near-ideal written language (albeit at a potential loss to historical documents, because it mirrors the spoken language. But that's what linguists and historians are for, and are needed in every language).
The Big Squeeze: Why Intel acquired McAfee
> The variation in productivity between programmers is somewhere from 1 to 10 to 1 to 100

I agree with your sentiment, but I think you're missing something important: it is possible (and, unfortunately, quite realistic) for a low-level programmer to be "negatively productive". For difficult problems, it may simply not be possible for someone without the required skill and experience to find a solution. Even for easy problems, though, it's possible that the solution found by a weak developer will in the long run cost more than the benefits it offers, for example, because they reduced the overall design quality of the system and later a stronger developer has to spend their valuable time fixing the design to clear the technical debt.
SoCal Entrepreneur Conference
Costly life-saving drugs: you have to draw the line somewhere
How many of them are normal, full time permanent employees vs. contractors? The major issue I perceive here is that things are ugly for people wanting the former and many aren't cut out for doing the latter.
YouTube UK to launch free movie service
Ah, very good. You've gone slightly the long way around, but you've got the right answer.

The first part you go from x=10^y to -10^y=-x to 10^y=x. Is it not clear that if x=10^y then 10^y=x? The point is that any time A=B, then B=A.

Next, you have ended with y=log(x)/log(10). If the logarithms are base 10, what is log(10)? Can you use that to make your result simpler?

Next question: if t=log(u) (where the logarithm is base 10) then what does u equal?
here an idea, hire a very very very good programmer or world-class talent, however you want to name them, and yeah pay them the dough that they deserve.

And have them train/teach those rookies.

that is called: "building a team"

it always amuse me to see some people thinking they can get away having the cream and the butter for a cheap price.
Make sure you know how to use a mainstream version control system, Git is gaining popularity quickly among DVCS' but there are still a lot of projects out there using regular old SVN.
The beauty is that with Haskell's Lazy Evaluation, this is what would end up happening.
What's a Sonic Boom?
The great Gatsby Essay
Writing the Great Gatsby essay is no easy task. However, it is an assignment that needs to be done. Knowing the many ways in which to write the essay will enable them to write their essays in the most effective manner possible. This will help them to get the grade they require.
I remember hearing about a Korean company that changed a CEO for a younger one, and they fired everybody who was older than the new CEO.
Page 4: "Compensation cost levels in State and local government should not be directly compared with levels in private industry. Differences between these sectors stem from factors such as variation in work activities and occupational structures. Manufacturing and sales, for example, make up a large part of private industry work activities but are rare in State and local government. Professional and administrative support occupations (including teachers) account for two-thirds of the State and local government workforce, compared with one-half of private industry."
Promissory estoppel
I've been learning Korean myself. Hangul is actually pretty cool and logical! I particularly like the regular way it has of denoting a 'y' version of a vowel - just adding a little perpendicular stroke to all the vowels. ㅏ (a) and ㅑ (ya), ㅜ (oo) and ㅠ (yoo), etc.
If you want to sample assorted full-length recordings of Chopin's Preludes, do a search on YouTube.
Earlier discussion about Chopin can be found here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1147880

He is clearly a favorite among HNers.
Ok, I wasn't counting holidays for my time off, only vacation days, so the difference is still the same.

I didn't earn 100k a year right out of college, your trying to change the facts of the comparison.

"And yes, most programmers pay is related to their performance."

It really isn't, it's based primarily on years of experience, who you know, and how outspokenly confident you are (regardless of whether the confidence is deserved). Every company I've ever been at has had programmers there were twice as productive as other programmers. They never got paid twice as much, and there was no correlation at all really, even it it isn't linear.

Every programmer I know with 5-10 years experience gets a salary within a narrow range.

"If they suck, they get fired (a concept teachers may find somewhat foreign)."

No they don't. I get the distinct impression that you have an ideal in your head that isn't remotely close to the reality. If you are at a company of any size it's very hard to fire someone.

Just curious, how old are you?
As far as I can tell the drop off starts in the mid-30s and is very strong by 40 (which also just happens to be where one can file an age discrimination lawsuit which is nearly impossible for not being hired but much easier for being fired). And that's what I personally noticed in the D.C. area in the '90s due to fortunate genetics (until about 49 and 1/2 a few months ago when I started to get some gray hairs I was still frequently being mistaken for a lower 20-something college student): at a certain point it became a lot harder to find work until I got a clue and scrubbed my resume of all evidence of how old I was.

(One interview was very amusing where I slipped and started talking about working on PDP-11s and the guy exclaimed "How old are you?!?!!!".)
WINDOWS 8 - ALL ABOUT WINDOWS 8 CONCEPT AND REVIEW
The question I have about these 100x (or 10x) productive programmers is why they wouldn't jump ship on employment and sell their 100x productivity on a project basis? Presumably they would make multiples of their salary if they are really multiply productive.
Hi

To me, it seems that you guys dont really have any serious issue. Its just that you all have freaked out due to huge amount of work you have been doing.

I hope im right and you'll manage to get along and pass this pressure.
Bio battery based on cellular power plant
with great risk comes great reward.
How about these (in four parts) performed by Evgeny Kissin in Tokyo in '98.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BK3xmiBwVSU
Keep in mind that when GNU/FSF say "free software," they really mean it's the software that's free, in an "Information wants to be free" sense. The software's freedom necessarily confers some liberties to you as well, but they still feel that software whose freedom can be taken away has a lesser quality of freedom than software that is guaranteed free forever. (You'd probably say the same about people — if your freedom can easily be abridged, it's worth less than inalienable freedom.)
At some point, the US really needs to get serious about large scale desalination.
While I don't agree with your general point those are things with have always been true. For the last 10 year period I can't exactly blame the venture partners for SarBox ending the IPO exit (as another article has noted, in the last ten years there have been fewer > $100 million exits than there are VC firms). Add in the dot.com crash which started a bit before SarBox and the Great Recession and it's no surprise the industry has lost money. Or that we have every expectation it will continue to as it radically shrinks. The great 1958-2002 VC experiment is over.
Beta of "a startup" I'm working on: Billable. Easy invoicing.
I've still got a ton to implement; but I would love some feedback!
> You know what policemen and highway workers get paid?

$400,000.

Cops and some prison guards and firemen in most of New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, California, and other poorly managed jurisdictions with public unions average $300,000 to $500,000 in total compensation. To be fair, the job does require a bachelor's degree and not just a high school diploma. And you usually need a good friend who can pull strings to get you hired, obviously.

The mid career base salaries are about $150,000 and the pension plan usually are full final-year pay and benefits retirement at 45 or 50. That pension plan costs more in present value than the salary according to sane actuarial assumptions. Furthermore, there are effectively eight weeks of paid vacation, a short work week, generous overtime pay, and pensions are usually calculated based on final year pay including overtime and vacation cash-out so they can be well over official salary.

State highway workers get paid considerably more than the market rate paid by contractors but not as much as cops.
Sonar image of The Titanic
Ask HN: Please review my webapp http://cineight.com
I developed this app so that my friends and I can recommend movies to each other. I have also added movie list management, so one can maintain a list of movies watched, to watch, and filtered. There is a Feedback section in the app too. I would really appreciate if you guys could leave your reviews there also.
Makes you realize how rural the world actually is. You lose sight of that living in a big city.
In 1996 C++ was much more difficult and fragmented, but that quote is from 2003. Today C++ has (much) more abstraction power than Java. On the other hand, almost every programming language has more abstraction power than Java, which knows only about classes, XML and design patterns.
Experience.

That experience means you don't have to pay for your worker to be spending half the day trawling google or api documentation to learn how to do x when they could be writing code.

You also pay for the code to be maintainable, well written, flexible, robust. An inexperienced programmer will write shitty code, no matter how good they think they are, regardless of the number of books they've read.

Finally you pay for experience within the same domain as your company's problems. I don't care if a guy's been programming since 12, there's a 99% chance they've never touched business software. They will not know the right questions to ask.

As for the 60% discount, if that's what gets you gigs, fair play.

But to offer it on principle? That's just bad business.
'Dry water' could make a big splash commercially
So if I want to buy a nice cappuccino machine for the office to congratulate some hard work, 1099? A few chairs for the office, 1099? License an application for better productivity, 1099? An order of printer paper, pens, pencils, staples, paper clips, and pads, 1099?

Stupid bean counters. I bet you're still using SLOC to measure productivity...
No Idea What To Do With Your Life? Rejuvenate Your Brain
Colloquy's an open source IRC client for Mac/iPhone/iPad!

(Disclaimer: I happen to contribute to Colloquy. In this case, it just means that I'd be delighted to look over any patches that anyone has. :)
Actually, in a place with a good internal network and a lower speed external connection, it makes Chrome very bad. Taking up bandwidth downloading the same thing for multiple computers is bad. Windows and OS X allow one download to be propagated to multiple machines. This is an efficient model that allows reporting on which machines didn't get the update (thus making it a lot more likely all machines will be updated).

We all don't have the same internet connections that Mountain View has.
Other than a short sentence on the homepage, there's no information about the site that you can access before signing up. The fact that you have to register before knowing anything will, I imagine, put off many potential users. They (and I) wanna know what they're agreeing to!

Edit: I think you should add some more info (maybe some screenshots, a lengthier description and some privacy stuff?), basically!
No insult meant, but you lsot me at the home screen. The first thing you do is ask for sign up or login.... I have no idea how your app works whether ill want to visit it again or whether I even trust you, so I'm not going to start my experience by giving you info.

I see a lot of sites make this mistake. If you can't put people right into the functionality of the app so that they can play with it themselves, then give them a search box or at least tour of the app, epmhasising that it is free, to entice them to create an account.
>The reason this feature was included was to fix the latency of chatting.

Gnu talk does this.
If I wanted typed data, I would be more inclined to use RelaxNG than XML Schema. In some situations, XML might not be so advantageous. JSON is quite convenient for JavaScript applications. Protocol Buffers have an efficient wire representation.

I think his point of JSON vs. XML is that JSON is simpler because it is designed specifically for representing structured data exchanged among JavaScript programs. Sure, it can be used from other languages and read by humans, but the design goal was much more narrowly circumscribed than the design goals of SGML, XML, and XML-Schema.

The argument about SOAP vs. REST is not as well-developed, but I think he's saying that SOAP was doomed by its attempt to stretch XML to serve one too many masters.

Personally though I see REST as a set of principles more than an RPC standard. It seems to me that REST's success is due both to the evolutionary manner in which it developed, and the relatively simple architectural form it takes compared to the SOAP/WS-* protocol specifications.
Maybe it's that subset. Windows 3.0 was released in the middle of 1990 and it took a while for it to get red hot. Lots of programmers "in their 40s" should have "learned most of their skills" on earlier technology, e.g. UNIX and MS-DOS. Or mainframes.

I'm something of an extreme in that I was forced by finances to quit college after my freshman year and am about to turn 50, so it was a dozen years into my career before I started programming Windows (Charles Petzold C SDK level ... which I suspect is also not the sort of Windows programming you're talking about).
This article fails to mention the most important factor, even more important than the money. Often people who advance to the management rank have the political skill or fund raising skill superior to their technical expertise. They simply don't what experienced engineers around who can see right through their bluff.

For the same reason the executives advocate immigration, they want ever greater supply of slaves to be discarded just when they start to understand the real game.
Is your website a vacuum cleaner or a fishing net to catch leads?
Halliburton specifically disclaimed any intent of actually using the patent against anyone but trolls - see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1608302
> It seems like a near-ideal written language (albeit at a potential loss to historical documents, because it mirrors the spoken language.

Actually, it's not ideal anymore. Hangul perfectly mirrored the spoken Korean language when it was originally created in 1440s by King Sejong's Hall of Worthies (a group of scholars). But like any other phonetic writing system, it stayed constant as the spoken language changed (a problem we have much experience with in English). This is obvious in something as basic as the word "Korea" in Korean. It is romanized as "Hanguk", but written in Hangul as "한국". As you can tell, the 4th and 6th letters are the same (a "ㄱ") even though they are pronounced differently in modern Korean.

However, it is indeed probably the closest one can get to perfection with a phonetic writing system.
They're mainly contractors, by choice it seems. But as far as I'm able to tell, things are ugly for anyone who wants to be a perm employee these days.
Another reason to add to the pool for why programming is hard:

People don't actually know what the want, nor do they know how to communicate it accurately to another person.

The day that changes, it becomes possible for programming to be easy because there will be an actual translation between our language and machine code. Until then, programmers are the translators, dreamers, and engineers all rolled into one. Not easy.
I agree with much of what you're saying, but I don't think the "typical" tech company is anything close to the HN stereotype web start-up. Most tech companies -- and almost all successful tech companies -- are not just implementing some obvious, trivial web/social/mobile service and hoping to luck out on a quick acquisition.
I'm not knocking Google in any way. It's just that, as the article says, Google seems to be developing their new products because thee engineers think they're cool, regardless of whether they're actually commercial. In this way, Google is the Bell Labs of the 21st century.
I use it to communicate with other software devs pretty regularly. It gives me quick instant access to experts in different areas. It has been most useful for me in that way.
Thanks for the link!

Chopin's preludes are just staggeringly beautiful.
How can it be the end of, for instance, Kanji if the whole language relies on it?

You probably know that when a Kanji character is written in hiragana or katakana, you have no clue of the true meaning, it can be many different things. So how can it end without disrupting the whole language?
And in clojure it would be

(filter :part-time? employees)
Seems to have missed 'sell your lifestyle to impressionable kids'
That's probably true. I think what I'm saying holds to a large degree within companies too. For instance, you're probably going to have fewer opportunities to distinguish yourself by ability if you're administering mail servers at Intel than you are if you're doing chip design.
i'll be back in 45 min
In here you have a very interesting video about Kanji I saw some months ago:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WxihOeMPBg#t=4m10

(I put the flag to skip to the moment he speaks about this issue).
And yet still worth less than Manhattan.
I've nerver worn a suit to an interview either (I'm based in London so it's not really ingrained in the culture),
but I do not think at all that people wearing suits try to hide anything.

I don't like suit for myself, it make me feel I wear a uniform.

And yeah, if an interview require to wear a suit, I kindly inform them that I will not take the interview for that very reason.

As a side note, the wearing/not-wearing a suit can be a good test of how a company interviewing you is "intelligent" or "retarded".

[edit: I'm not in my 20s, suit even for the first interview is just not in my culture]
Present a Wonderful Term Paper Cover Page and Impress your Professor
The cover page of a term paper is the first item noted in your term paper. Therefore, it needs to be presented in the proper manner. Having an understanding of what makes the cover page presentable will enable students to impress their professor.
Thanks for the advice. We do have a GetSatisfaction page setup but alot of our user base refuse to use it (I don't want to pay the extra monthly fee to integrate with our login system).

I think it boils down to a communication problem, support / request are fragmented between phone, get satisfaction and our own support ticket system. We also don't have a good way of sending out information.

Perhaps if we had a regularly updated blog and a single support and feature reqeusts system it would eliminate the cause of the problem.

But that's more coding for me!
Ben Huh can has reddit? I respond entirely in LOLcat photos - Alexis Ohanian
> as flown of a cliff

> I makes it more difficult

I suppose you inadvertently illustrated the problem...
It's clear that'd tom works differently than you two, so if you can, you should offer to buy him out. Or allow him to leave, but owning chunk of the company commensurate with getting it off of thebp ground.

If these seem untenable, then you need to reach an agreement for working style that let's Tom feel coopmfortable. I believe the problem at it's core is trust. Tom wants to be able to plan ahead, and by not letting him do so, he is frustrated. He might be amendable to go with an agile process where you only plan ahead incept cycle, but he can't be expected to change during that cycle.

But you can't take this casually. You need to make an agreement among the three of you how your going to resolve this conflict. It is a legitimate conflict, and the art of management is working out agreements that take business reality into account.
A lot of us including myself just don't have what it takes to work on a multi-client consulting basis. Plus at least back before the net became really big Gerald Wienberg said that the correct hourly basis to set is 5-6 times what you want to earn because of all the overhead and downtime that comes with this business model. That's still a factor if you're charging on a project basis, which is extraordinarily dangerous in our field due to the inability of our customers and ourselves to correctly scope a project before it starts.
I personally found some of his previous articles on TC better than this one:
http://techcrunch.com/author/tcvivek/
Fair point. I will add some more info.
I've occasionally wished that we could all just write in IPA.

Then I come to my senses and realize that it's overly complicated, and would simply push the troubles of a spoken language into the written language verbatim, and that may not be what a writing system needs.