skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's the same here in Belgium. I'm a dropout but some of my friends are currently getting their CS degree and the majority of them couldn't write code, even if their life depended on it. They see it more as a job then something they like doing.

When I was still attending school I also noticed that the majority of the people really didn't care; it was just a small percentage of the group that loved CS & programming. But I guess that is something you see everywhere in life.
Where are the good CS jobs in VT? I'm from the NEK and in college now, but I had resigned myself to not being able to afford living in VT for a long time (got some serious college loan debt coming up)

I had an NYC internship this past summer that was awesome, but if there are good jobs in VT, I would be very interested.
Iridium never identified a customer need, they just ploughed ahead and built the biggest, shiniest system and hoped that it would pay off. Global coverage just isn't that useful to all but a tiny number of users.

The obvious customers were seafarers, but they had been using Inmarsat for years. Their network achieved near-global coverage using four geosynchronous satellites. You needed a big antenna and a powerful transmitter, but that was no problem on an ocean-going vessel. The same went for fixed installations in remote areas on land. Inmarsat was at the time a UN-backed nonprofit established to improve safety of life at sea and was under no particular commercial pressures.

GSM took off in a huge way in the early nineties, so by the time Iridium launched most of the developed world was blanketed in GSM coverage. Multi-band handsets and roaming agreements meant that most travelling business customers already had a handset that worked just about everywhere at relatively low cost.

There was still a gap in the market for portable communications in less developed and more sparsely populated areas, particularly Africa and the Middle East. The later network Thuraya solved that problem cheaply and elegantly by putting a geostationary satellite over Ethiopia and covering most of the market for handheld satellite phones after just one launch. They now cover 70% of the world's land mass with just two satellites and are far more profitable than the revived Iridium.

Iridium could have pivoted. They had a lot of sunk R&D costs, but the initial 66 satellites were built and launched in an enormous binge between 1997 and 1998. They had a gap of at least six years between conceiving the idea and building the first piece of hardware. I believe that they failed to do so because they were preoccupied with the idea of providing truly global handheld telephony, rather than the more mundane task of making a product that people want. Iridium brilliantly solved the technical problem of providing telephone coverage to parts of the world with very few people, but failed to realise the basic flaw in that business model.

Iridium turned out to be a wonderful gift to humanity, but it was a bloody awful business decision.
I think it is highly likely that next year I will hire a front-end developer...

Why not just use a contractor instead of hiring?
Joe Average allows SO to set a cookie so that it won't ask you more than once...
This is exactly how I feel, but am not sure that's a developed enough thought yet. I think discrete 'club' separation is a powerful force for social organization, especially if there is a tangible benefit for inclusion. I also think that median comment score probably isn't completely tracking the kind of behavior that should earn entrance into such clubs.

Both thoughts depend on figuring out more completely what club membership means; it's something I can't flesh out well despite having a feeling it might be beneficial.
TBH, I was hoping to hear about Minecraft's release yesterday. Someone get Notch on HN...
Personally I don't think a student who knows only C++ because he was force to use it in school is going to be much (or any) better than a student who knows only Java for that reason. The problem isn't that the language is Java, the problem is that it's a student who never cared enough to learn something else than what was expected she learn and use for classes. I am, however, quite shocked that operating systems classes are being taught in Java. At my university few classes actually required C++ (usually you could use it or Java) and the OS class was certainly one of them.

His concern that students don't have to take hard classes is pretty valid though. If the curriculum changes he described are really that bad I think that is tragic.
The real difference is that they aren't going to keep the same phones numbers forever. With FB, and whatever eventually replaces it, they have a shot at keeping in touch all their lives.
What really comes out in the interview is his focus on not only the details, but the important details, while avoiding anything that will add friction to his processes, like dealing with cumbersome content agreements or VC funding.

"Those small details and experiences are the reason why people like luxury cars. They are full of those little delights. You can do the same thing with any business. With a Web and iPhone app, I try to find new and tiny ways to delight my customers."

Simple delights indeed.
Do you have a staging environment where you can test changes like your SSL change? Is there a way you can incorporate a QA cycle into your larger changes? Waiting for lower sales and traffic months is one way but it seems like you want an environment that mimics your production environment as closely as possible to work out issues like this.
I definitely agree with some teachers being totally clueless. Some of them seem to have absolutely no experience nor interest in the industry. To illustrate, I am currently enrolled in a User Interface class and one of our main reference is this website from the 90s: http://www.usask.ca/education/coursework/skaalid/theory/theo.... Ok, some principles never change but come on, how do you expect us to take this seriously when most of us could design better websites at 12 years old.
What I can say, from personal experience, is that the last time I interviewed college students for a programming job (this was five years ago), we had quite a few applicants, but only one that had done anything on their own with their personal computer other than play games.

It was startling. Only one had taken any initiative to write a single program that was not assigned homework. But, they could tell me quite a bit of details about the games they had played. Sad.
I would absolutely be in favor of prisoners (sentenced via due process) earning their own board. E.g., washing government vehicles, cleaning highways, hauling landscaping materials for erosion control projects at state parks, etc. etc.
Employees would typically only be given options, not actual stock. I might be wrong, but I think they can give as many options as they want. And as anyone who has been granted options knows, options usually end up being worthless.
Yes, though there's actually a lot of "do all the shitty jobs that nobody else wants to do because you are free labor"-type work in software, where you can learn lots exactly because you are getting your hands dirty. E.g. bug fixing.
Reviving Caslon
A Computer Science or Programming job is not the same as an IT job. There is a shortage of Computer Scientists and good Programmers everywhere. In contrast IT jobs (think The IT Crowd) are completely over-saturated. Having a bunch of certifications that say you know where to put a ram stick or connect a hard drive will only get you so far. IT jobs are more akin to mid point in between the 'real' computer geeks and 'normal' human beings.

In any case, there's plenty jobs for Programmers and holders of a CS degree. And off course, this fields prefer proven experience, so that might be another reason why people find it hard. Here's a tip though, proven experience doesn't mean proven experience in another company. Build something and prove yourself and it will be easy as pie to get a job.
> Most (maybe all?) US universities will make similar allowances for students with mental illness. The student and teacher usually work out alternatives for assignments if necessary.

Sure, I'd expect this when the student has been diagnosed with an illness. I'm mostly curious if exam anxiety is an illness that most US universities would recognize. I suppose I should really be asking if this is something that is commonly diagnosed in the US. I've never heard of it until today.

> Unless it's different in Canada, who cares if this kid didn't take an exam? If he has done some research, published something, and written a thesis, I'm pretty okay with him having earned a PhD.

I thought the same thing. My impression is that most US math PhD programs would require original research of some magnitude in order to be awarded the degree. If the student in this case did research of significant merit, then I think the university was right in awarding the degree.
Optical would have all the problems the current RF (Iridium) solution has plus more...

* Clouds are a killer.

* Laser is highly focused - downlink would be tricky to support more than a couple of ground stations. Uplink would be extremely difficult because the uplink would have to track a (relatively) fast moving LEO satellite. Neither would lend themselves to a handheld ground station ("phone").

* Non-laser solutions likely don't have the bandwidth or the power to be effective.
JSii - full text search in 100% javascript
Nah, copy it instead. You want to copy objects that you don't want changed behind your back. Like, for instance, the email address you'd mail your resume to.
I dunno, maybe I'm being naive. It seem pretty obvious where Apple is going, too: whatever makes computers easier to use. Flash on mobile is total trash, from what I've read (I have yet to try it on my Nexus One, I don't visit sites with Flash). They've been working on making the music industry a nicer entity to interact with for years. They've been relentlessly simplifying product lines. The Mac App store is obviously geared toward making it even easier for people to install applications. They basically invented the modern smartphone market, and haven't let AT&T call the shots, to the benefit of consumers.

Is my fanboy showing? :/
Part of this is the employers fault - they don't want CS grads they want specific start-on-monday skills. It's no more reasonable to want a CS grad that knows VB than it is to hire a Mech-Eng and expect that they know how to change the fanbelt on a 1987 ford.

The mean reason behind the article is that 'CS' grads covers a wide range of courses, a lot of which allow anyone to walk in off the street and start doing CS.

Imagine if the headline said, "50% of MBAs can't find jobs" - but in the small print they admitted that they included all business-type courses, including learning to type for beginners.
Well, that's true and not true. On the ladder, where every game is (sort of) a one-off, you want to have a solid game, and it doesn't matter so much if it's a predictable "standard" game as long as you play better than your opponent.

But if you're a known player playing against other known players, or if you're playing best-of-N matches, it's valuable to have demonstrated flexibility in your play and a willingness to perform individually suboptimal strategies like early all-ins. If your opponent believes that you're capable of many different things, they will feel compelled to scout earlier and more carefully, and their options will be restricted slightly until they feel they can pin down exactly what you're up to.
We need these studies to verify these assertions.

Does the average user of page X feel reassured by the stock photos? By demographic? By other categorizations? (web literacy, education level, income, whatever).

What works for some might not work for others.
Sure, JSON seems to have lots of uses.

I know a few people who've been working on a JSON Schema for the more formal datasets. I worked on an Internet Draft for this for a while, before the effort crumbled. Like most of the Web though, JSON really tends to shine when it is semi-structured — with any additional structure applied to it, post-hoc, by the consumer. CouchDB is a good example of a system that embraces this property.
But how exactly do you know for certain that a problem is transitory without the benefit of hindsight?

Should Apple have never started with iphone development because Nokia/Ericson were rapidly innovating in the phone space? Iridium back in 1990 thought they had the equivalent of an Apple iphone in their solution.

I don't actually think the article contributed much in the way of insight. Without trying to be rude, your last sentence not to bet a business on a transitory problem is fairly self evident - the real value is if you can outline how to avoid stepping into such a situation without the value of hindsight (which the article fails to do).
By 'High-level play' he is most likely referring to tournaments and the e-sports scene, which is almost entirely 1v1 and plays very differently from 4v4.
I've been working remotely for going on 3 years.

Successfully working remotely, with a team, is more effort. The barrier to communication is higher; there is more inertia to overcome. When collocated, you can just shout out to the room, "Hey, does someone know about X?". When remote, it's often a chat room of some form instead. There's a little more effort required.

In my book, one requirement of a remote (team) worker is that he be at least a bit extroverted. My experience has been that less extroverted developers find themselves quickly out of the loop. I believe this is because they don't seek out interaction with other team members and so fall out of sync with the team.

The lack of physical presence can put a strain on relationships. Sight unseen, it is so easy to project unintended meaning onto the text, or speech of colleagues (granted, we do this in-person as well but to a lesser degree).

Body language provides real cues that are missing from remote communication. I try to resolve this by meeting colleagues/clients early in the process to help build that relationship.

When you put the communication part aside, there is the question of motivation. I've also found that some people, when working remotely, tend to backslide and become less productive. I believe this to be due to the lack of implicit peer pressure of seeing your colleagues working. Or, to put it bluntly, a lack of solid work ethic.

When remote working, there is less (micro-)management. No one is looking over your shoulder. For some people, remote pairing can help here.

Ultimately, there is no substitute for a deeply engrained need to ship. Either you've got it or you don't. If you don't, you're probably not going to be a good remote worker.
Re: Startups - I wish someone would have told me
C# 5 Async Exception Handling
Malware intelligence - el negocio de las botnets
"recent IT graduates" != "decent developer"

Based on the evidence from my own school, I'd be inclined to state that recent IT graduates are unlikely to be developers at all, and if they are developers it is unlikely that they are decent yet.
Ugly to one is attractive to another, in many cases.

For example, fat women have the whole BBW (Big, Beautiful Women) movement and guys who love that. Same with gay men and the 'bear community'.

Even geeks get to take advantage of being 'adorkable'.

Having a huge birthmark, or cross-eyes, or something else that sets you apart from the 'average' person may be considered ugly, or just strange. I don't see any people on that home page that I would call ugly.

Also, I think that people who believe themselves to be less attractive generally try harder. :)
BCC doesn't have a staging environment, owing largely to being cobbled together with bubblegum from back when HTML written in Notepad was cutting edge web technology for me. I also use a lot less testing than is considered ideal in the Rails community. Getting a staging environment is probably worth doing, but the level of coverage with Selenium tests I would need to catch things as obscure as "had an image delivered over HTTP on the landing page" strikes me as not likely to have the highest ROI of all things I could be doing.

(I've been interviewed about what I do for reliability before. The short version is checklists and automated warnings when stuff goes wrong. I've set up some automated things to catch issues spiritually similar to the ones described in this post already.)
I think what Jakob misses in his critique is the relationship of images and their context. Of course people spend more time looking at product photography and even avatars on a Facebook page -- it's because the images have a direct relationship with the textual content the viewer is reading. One is directly related to the other.

Does that mean photos without a direct relationship to textual information are somehow bad? I hardly think so. A well positioned, sized and selected photo contributes to the tone and message of a site. A user may not spend a lot of time looking at a decorative photo (which is a good thing) but the time they do spend looking at one (even for a split second) helps quietly generate an overall impression of quality, mood and professionalism.

Of course I don't have a paid usability consultancy business or any hard data to back that up, but that's my impression.
In what country? Also, does your school require students who claim this disability to be diagnosed by a doctor?
I hope so too. Regarding halloween though, I'd wager that people who bought Minecraft over the weekend probably did it because of word-of-mouth excitement over the halloween update (in other words, they bought it because they heard about it from other people who were excited about the halloween update, and not because they were waiting for the halloween update themselves).
I have always been hesitant to utilize email campaigns, mostly because I (like Patrick) consider myself an email newsletter hater, and I don't want people to hate me too. But I think Patrick brings up a good point, that people will be less likely to hate you for emailing them if they remember who you are and why you're bothering them. I get a newsletter every month from Dreamhost, so I'm never surprised or irritated when it shows up, because I expect it, and they're usually at least a little funny.
IButterfly: Catch Augmented Reality Butterflies with your iPhone
He said he wants to do UX or PM work, not programming. This will be a bit tougher to find.
Awesome - hope you enjoy it. Email me if you have any questions.
Do Apple ship every other item of Mac software on their platform? They don’t? Then why are they obligated to ship with Flash preinstalled?

It’s up to Adobe to make their own future, not Apple. Perhaps that’s why Adobe recently unveiled Adobe Edge, and a Flash-to-HTML5 conversion tool.
I would say start applying 2 to 3 weeks before you move to SF. Most companies want their employees to start immediately - but realise that most have a 2 to 4 week "notice period" for their previous employer.

Apply more than 4 weeks in advance will just be a waste of time, most companies wont wait that long (unless your REALLY something special).
I remember on an initial phone interview about 7-8 years ago at a job, first the owner apologized for asking such a stupid question, then asked "what is a pointer?" After hearing an acceptable answer, he said that you wouldn't believe how many supposed CS graduates couldn't even answer.
8pen reinvents mobile keyboard
This would have been better asked on Quora, imo, so the best answers rise to the top. Sorting comments by date is a very old way of thinking, and really doesn't organize the information in any meaningful way at all.

With that rant aside, it is an interesting question and I look forward to reading them, despite how much I don't feel like sifting through them.
Why doesn't the clickthrough data in Webmaster Tools match Google Analytics?
Does anyone know where that would place it in terms of all operating systems? It seems like the number of mobile and non-mobile devices should be converging pretty quickly (for consumers, at least).
Exactly. And the average web user does not have the aversion that we (techies) do for email. Most people don't use RSS or Twitter so email is their primary medium for online communication.
Twitter Search Prototype Jetwick
Let me know what you think about our service http://jetwick.com/

Built on open source search engine Apache Lucene/Solr provides a lot of features which are descibed here (+ video):
http://www.pannous.info/products/jetwick-twitter-search/

Also let me know if you have an idea and what could be improved
They cite the references:

http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5745a3.htm

Do you want to say it's a conspiracy?
Marijuana is safer than alcohol or tobacco, and it's certainly safer than whatever recreational substance some guy is cooking up in his lab. Why is it illegal? Have you seen "Reefer Madness"? Scientific piece of work, that.

Meanwhile, some kids at Georgetown University face 20 years in prison for making an illegal but less intense version of a drug which is legal in 47 states: http://reason.com/blog/2010/10/26/the-georgetown-drug-lab-bu....

A huge short-term risk from most recreational drugs is simply not knowing what is in them, especially if they come in a pill, powder, or liquid form. And that is an effect of prohibition, not the drugs themselves. Of course government officials will pontificate on the horrors of drugs every time prohibition kills another kid that doesn't know what is in his ecstasy.
I'm dissapointed its been increased. I try and only speak when I have something especially interesting to say. But I regularly vote and in my opinion, vote sensibly. Its a shame to be penalised for quietness.
He may be right to contest that the student got the degree, but he certainly was not right to air the students private health problems in the public arena.
The thing about Java is that it's a managed language with little insight into lower-level concepts. This isn't a problem in itself, but when students indicate that they only ever learned Java and that they like it because it's easy, it's usually an indicator that they have no idea what's going on behind the curtain. In my experience, these kinds of students are very reliant on tools that provide a garden path to walk down, become very confused the second that something appears to stop working right, and they tend to approach problems with a very "code-first" mindset - given a problem, they will sit in front of a screen and think that if they can just find the right code to type in, the problem will be solved.

A student in a C++ class at least has a chance at being exposed to something lower level.
I think anyone in an unusual location having trouble hiring should definitely reconsider hiring remote (or at least partially remote workers.)

I put up a job ad and forgot to specify the location so everyone figured it was remote. I got 20+ highly qualified people applying every day.

I noticed the mistake and fixed it to say local only and I haven't gotten an application since. If I were in charge of hiring I'd definitely find a good remote person.
Real World server room nightmares
> They see it more as a job then something they like doing.

I still don't see why this is a bad thing. A plumber who didn't grow up dreaming of pipe repair can still fix things. You don't have to love a job to at least be minimally competent at it.

Just because they don't love their jobs is no excuse to be unable to do it. But I guess they're unemployed, so the problem fixes itself :)
Cheezburger Network doesn't show new hires the bathroom until they check in code
Free code hosting for all development projects
Sayre's Law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_Law
Ask HN: Who Is Hiring Remote Workers? (First Edition, November 2010)
Similar to the "Who is Hiring" thread but, please, remote positions only.

Remote and co-lo'd work posts should be kept separate. Many of us who work remotely tend to work exclusively remotely.