skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What's the difference between a "Software Engineer", a "Software Engineer/Programmer", and a "Software Developer"?

The BLS has categories of "Computer Software Engineer" and "Computer Programmer" which are fairly well defined[1]. The gist of their definition is that the prior actually works out the design and implementation, whereas the latter would just be converting literal instructions to code without as much thought put into the process. Or at least that's how I interpreted it, see http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos303.htm .

[1] However, even their definition is becoming less clear: "As software design has continued to advance, and some programming functions have become automated, programmers have begun to assume some of the responsibilities that were once performed only by software engineers."
Having worked in television news, I can give testament that these maps are, with no exception that I can think of, generated by a dedicated software package. Graphics people figured out a while ago that everybody needs maps, and reinventing them is completely ineffective.

As an example, weather maps at my station were generated by a relatively standard package running on IRIX. News maps were generated by a Web service, one of my first introductions to SaaS. I believe Chyron bought it. The service was stupidly simple - insert coordinates, draw labels, push Submit, receive pictures. I only saw it used, but I know it did the labeling for you.

I know it's fun to beat up on Fox News, but the likelihood of someone moving Egypt's label over Iraq in Photoshop after the fact is far higher than Fox News actually airing this graphic.
PirateBox - Mobile and Secure File Sharing
"It was from the RAND study that the false rumor started, claiming that the ARPANET was somehow related to building a network resistant to nuclear war. This was never true of the ARPANET, only the unrelated RAND study on secure voice considered nuclear war. However, the later work on Internetting did emphasize robustness and survivability, including the capability to withstand losses of large portions of the underlying networks"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET#Misconceptions_of_desig...
Most products targeted at developers are per-seat priced (or have pricing derived from per-seat pricing); it's how you do value pricing when value scales with the number of developers. Look at how Atlassian does it; that's still effectively per-seat licensing (it requires prospects to think about how many devs they'll have).

You can try to avoid these schemes, but you have to do it and not go out of business.
Land based wireless communications are trivial to track and authoritarian governments already do so. A better solution could be satellite based communications. Or directional microwave/laser.

It's a very hard problem.
I take casual carpool from the east bay into San Francisco on a regular basis (and on the rare occasions I need to drive in, I always pick up carpoolers). What I've observed is that the higher the price of gas, the more riders are available for carpoolers. The win for drivers is clear: a lot of times the morning backup at the Bay Bridge is about 20 minutes, carpoolers can bypass that completely. The other day, I caught a ride with a guy who was going to the same building that I work out of; it was better than getting a cab to work.

Incentivized by time and cost savings, carpooling could be extremely successful. What has failed are the centrally organized carpooling systems operated by governments. And the startups that I've seen that aim to facilitate carpooling have all sucked. I'm certain that carpooling would be more successful here if there were more carpool lanes, like on the hwy 580 and 24 approaches to the Bay Bridge and more carpool lanes in the reverse direction (right now, it's only hwy 80).

While I take mass transit (Muni and BART) on a regular basis, mass transit can't be the only alternative to driving alone. These transit systems are often hamstrung by poor management and drain a lot of tax dollars.

Calling carpooling a crutch and failed urban planning (other comments here) is inaccurate. As a country we pour billions of dollars into bridges, tunnels and highways to keep up with the demand of single occupant cars during commute hours. The lost productivity and the pollution and petroleum dependency growth is an enormous burden on the country. That's a dramatically larger failing than carpooling.
David Frost, while not American, has had a show on Al Jazeera English since 2006:

http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/frostovertheworld/
I'm really lucky to live in Waterloo, Ontario. There's a provider called Yak that offers unlimited bandwidth, non-throttled DSL up to 10MB for $60 a month (comes with non-voip phone line and 5 calling features).

They have their own DSL centers and hence aren't going to be affected by this new proposition. I think we might see more companies starting their own DSL centers.
Anonymous: DDoS equals a peaceful demonstration
Of course you can slice the definitions in different ways, but the common definition is that the capitalist ideal of all means of production being in private hands and socialism is the opposite of that - they are all in public hands. Norway is a mixed economy. I think that the USA and Norway are not at the poles of that continuum but much more close together, especially given the Fed's recent acquisitions.
Here is a general observation (not just about Israel).

In places where race is an overt issue, and people at the highest political places earn their votes based on race, and therefore dependent upon people who are conscious of race rights, no amount of laws is going to stop a government from exercising racial preferences in its administration.

Countries like Fiji is an example.
I was thinking about how proxying would work. You could get very cool proxying, similar to the way AptProxy works, where you instead of accessing http://camlistore.org:3179/camli/hash-1, a client would access http://localproxy?url=http://camlistore.org:3179/camli/hash-.... It would parse the URL and see if a blob is being referenced that a local camlistore has cache, and serve out of that.

Then I looked at the camlistore sharing model. The proposal involves storing private data in blobs camlistore, protecting it behind a 401, and requiring the client to append a ?via=hash-2, where hash-2 is a claim that says "ok, let this data through". I'm not a big fan of that, because proxies won't reproduce your security model, and private data is stored in the clear.

What one should do, really, is store private data encrypted. Then, you can reference a "phantom blob", which is not actually an object in storage but represents the cleartext of the private data. Your claim could now be a recipe on how to reconstruct this phantom blob, i.e. get chunk X of ciphertext and decrypt it with this key.

Now, dumb proxies won't just store sensitive stuff in the clear (although, they would store enough data that the plaintext could easily be reconstructed), but at least your security model is preserved.
There are a number of issues here:

1) Does Bell really pay money for their peering arrangements? Is Bell paying for all of the bandwidth between their network and the rest of the Internet? Or are their peering arrangements much like other backbone providers' peering arrangements where it's a handshake and no money changes hands? Is the 'cost' that Bell says that it pays for outside internet access really the cost of maintaining their links to other peers/networks (and not payments made directly to those peers/networks)? If so, then the difference between the outside internet and their internal networks should be minimal. The only real difference would be the most of the bandwidth is leaving the network vs staying inside of the network just due to most of the content that people want being on the wider internet (not because it's somehow 'cheaper' to use the internal network b/c they are paying for bandwidth that leaves the network).

2) As cal5k states, the third-party internet providers that are using Bell's last mile lines are also being forced to pay these usage-based charges, even though they are not using Bell's connections to the internet. These providers have their own peering arrangements to the internet and are just hooking into Bell's last mile infrastructure. So if the real reason for usage-based billing is because Bell needs to recover the costs that it pays for bandwidth that leaves it's network through it's own peering arrangements, then there should be no reason to force third-party providers to be on a usage-based billing model as well.
Why complimenting a woman's writing by referencing her looks is a bad idea
Web apps work offline too, that's the whole point of frameworks like sproutecore, backbone.js and sencha.
I'm sure they exist-- I just haven't crossed paths with any, in 13 years here.
Less to win, maybe, but still you can read from the article: "He bought a Porsche". And I doubt everybody wanted to have one in Norway can do so (and even if it is the case, it would be even greater :P )

No human being needs 1 billion dollar to live correctly, and even in indecent luxury. Some people also value well begin of other and not only their own. (It might still be partly egoistic in a sens that this makes them feels better and it's probably very cool to live in an environment where people are happier, but i don't thing that invalidate the whole idea...)
More likely scenario in the next 10 years would be making purchases with your phone by entering a password or pin on the screen of your phone to confirm.

The Biometric portion is a little bit sensationalist at this point because the less invasive Biometric techniques are not accurate enough to verify with 100% accuracy that you have your phone in your pocket. If I have to take a photo of my eye to complete the purchase using my phone, I think I'd rather enter a password.

I think the easiest way around the biometric thing is to put an NFC chip under the skin to handle a public/private key exchange. This is the best way to verify your identity because even a DNA test would not prove that you are present in any way.
Must be different social circles. I don't know any FrP types, but I do know some other Americans, and I've yet to hear any complain.
Dropbox challenge
The global internet is not required to co-ordinate protests. Something country-wide (or nearly country-wide) is.

It wouldn't even need to be fast.
This is what everyone should take away from this. What he is really saying is the diligence and track record of YC is good enough that he doesn't need to do any more diligence himself.

If that isn't the highest level endorsement possible I don't know what is.
There are "regular" OpenWRT Wireless Battle Mesh meetings: http://battlemesh.org/BattleMeshV4
Let's not forget that if it was such a bad deal, they could vote to change things. When's the last time a "slave", using your words, had a vote?

But it takes more than perks to keep a worker motivated in Norway. In a country with low unemployment and generous unemployment benefits, a worker's threat to quit is more credible than it is in the United States, giving workers more leverage over employers. [...] "You can't just treat them like machines," [Bjorn Holte, founder and CEO of bMenu] says. "If you do, they'll be gone."

This is "slavery"?
This is supposed to be funny right?
Tangent:
When I was reading this essay I couldn't help myself from imagining a counter essay (in satire) that argues a reverse valuing of the hierarchy of argument quality indicated by Graham. Additionally the quality of the argument to argue each tier's quality would be made using it's inverse tier's quality.

I.e. For DH0, name calling, a thorough argument would be made that it should in fact be the highest tier of argument DH6. It would be elaborate, with supporting examples and scenarios that would refute the central point of DH0 arguments being ineffective.

Then by the end, DH6's counter argument would be of quality DH0.
The argument would simply be "This is just dumb, Paul Graham is a fag." [disclaimer: inline with the example given in the DH0 tier. Not actually my opinion :)]

On topic:
Arguments that include DH0's tend to invoke a jerk-neck reaction from me, causing me to immediately discredit an entire (possibly well formed) argument. So much so, that even when only affiliated with such behavior good arguments lose all credibility. For example, in the 2008 election, when emails were constantly flying back and forth through the mailing list, I'd see forwarding of articles written in legitimate and well formed manner making valid statements. However, the forwarder would have prefix some DH0 level quip above the quote or article link which immediately made me write off the entire content. I.e "Barack Obama-bin-laden setting up death panels! <insert article link here>". Even if the article was bringing up valid concerns, and itself was well written--it was already sabotaged by being associated with infantile-ness.
There were a few comments when this was submitted a week ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2131105
Is this modeled after any particular Lisp? It looks a little bit like Clojure.
How I Blew Out My Knee & Came Back to Win a National Championship (Part 2 of 3)
It's not a matter of regulations, it's a matter of markets. Some companies such as Bell treat their customers like crap and just want to lock them into a long term contract. So what? There are lots of competitors who will not be doing UBB such as Telus / Shaw / Rogers. Customers on Bell just became the world's biggest internet losers. If people don't like UBB they can always switch carriers unless they were dumb enough to take Bell's crappy long term contract.
He's mad because his comment was hidden through the collaborative organization process.
I would take a broader view of it like so: would not having access to the internet be seriously crippling economically? Are market mechanisms providing service to all Canadians at a reasonable price?

I'm going to argue yes to the first point and no to the second. The internet is absolutely necessary to be competitive. As prices continue to ratchet upwards, even as the number of legitimate uses for large amounts of bandwidth rise, it is fast becoming increasingly more unaffordable.

With those two criteria met, I would say it's time to regulate access to the internet. In particular, I would like to see the last mile and backhaul infrastructure owned independently of any content business and available to any reseller at the same wholesale rates. Content and infrastructure MUST be separated if we are to effectively create fair pricing conditions and net neutrality.
No single US state has a GDP equal to China. You would have to combine multiple states to equal the GDP of China.
Check out http://upstack.com for illustrations, we have some stellar illustrators looking for work. Everything is done without spec work and the designers have to be approved to work so the quality is great.
In the Scott Adams Crazyverse(tm) this is a good-bad idea.
> hit post too early ...

You know you can edit for up to 2 hours ...
I couldn't disagree more with you. Sure, Eisenberg being hired by Facebook would be completely ridiculous, and was clearly written as a joke, not as a serious suggestion.

But as to Sorkin's writing, he's always written that way, right back to fairly unsuccessful TV writing in the 90s. Personally I love it, and have loved everything he's done, he is in my view the best TV/film writer currently working - and I know I'm not alone in that view.

Obviously, his quality is subjective and therefore debatable, but having watched The Social Network a few times, I haven't seen anything that strikes me as anything but classic Sorkin.

The reason he's "wedged in as one of the stars of the movie" is partly because the writing was so good that he's winning awards for it, and partly because many critics share my view of him, so they rave about him. To give some context, before Studio 60 On The Sunset strip aired (in 2005, I think), critics hyped it up SO much, simply because it was created by Sorkin. (And I think that was one of the reasons it was cancelled after one season - it wasn't too bad, but compared to expectations, and his normal work, it just wasn't good enough.)

So, nothing new to how he writes, or to the fact that people pay a fair bit more attention to him than to the average screenplay writer.
Not the same thing at all. Most funds just follow the stock market's performance. They are at the mercy of the market fluctuations. What this investment is saying is that Yuri believes strongly that YC has the ability to pick winners more often then not. And they do it often enough that it's not even worth his time to do anymore diligence.

He is saying that if he spent a bunch of time on each company the odds of him doing better then YC has already done is not worth the extra effort. He is betting he can get a good return by just trusting PG and company's judgment. Pretty awesome endorsement, imo.
Lots of conjecture and black helicopter wackiness in this piece. I also don't think the author successfully made his point.

To me, this technology is exciting and useful. Besides, we all knew it was coming.
Feels like the guy doesn't like RoR, but doesn't really convince me of anything beyond that. The "... I prefer active code generation [11], or even better, no code generation at all." quote then using Eclipse or what have you to spit out a bunch of boilerplate code is a bit rich.

Also, he's talking about doing java a non-javaonic way. I present to you Sean Kelly's (of JPL) reason why that doesn't work: http://www.archive.org/details/SeanKellyRecoveryfromAddictio... (at 6:25 or so)
If only it was that simple.

Another thread on this subject:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2158111
@Id @GeneratedValue @Hidden
private Integer id;

Am I the only one cringing? I haven't seen Java code in a while but that is a lot of decorators (or annotations). I don't even remember what they are called anymore.
To be honest, I wouldn't trust any of this data at all. 45,000$ for a Software Engineer in the UK... wtf? This was my salary as a web developer in Canada out of high school. I'd be extremely surprised that we have higher IT salaries than in the UK...
This article is old (from 2009).

The guy needs to read the first chapter in the Ruby on Rails tutorial where it goes over generating models and creating database migrations. There's a very nice api for it.
Send Free Online Fax from Mobile using ScanR
ScanR is a digital scanner which can be used scanning, printing sending online fax. It converts converts our phone into a complete business center. If anyone wants to send a fax while he is out of the office or traveling: using ScanR it is very simple to that.
Lots of great (consulting) advice in the "Why I bill hourly" thread.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1880096
It should have been 'no' too when the government wanted unlimited tapping abilities of internet traffic, instead the answer was 'how much?'.
That's exactly why I support having a draft. If everyone of military age had to worry about being drafted, we'd be much less likely to go to war. As it is, the burden of war falls on the backs of the poor and uneducated because it's the best job opportunity they have.
I just Googled "Fox News Egypt map" and it looks like this is something dredged up from 2009.. It sad that so much of the political dialog in this country is petty gotchas and bickering, instead about issues and governance.
I'm sure we're all guilty of that. X idea gets in our head. What a silly idea!. X idea sticks around. X idea still sticking around. Maybe X idea isn't so bad...
I once paid Inkd.com for logos, and they did a great job, so I hired them for a 3rd. The person responsible for making my logo good in the past, had left to go solo, and I ended up with shitty logos that I had to send back.

Lesson learned: use them, and sometimes you'll have success and the name of a designer that you can count on. In most other cases, you'll be wasting your cash.

There's a lot of talent to be found on freelance sites like Elance or oDesk if you know how to look.
MasterCard paypass does a great job so far for paying fast
Ranks right up there with zero-point-energy on the believability scale.
If just being wealthy is not enough, then you probably want to live somewhere to become super rich.

I would still prefer to live here in Norway.
[2009]

You're doing it wrong.

> Ruby is a dynamically typed [7] language, as Smalltalk [8]. I prefer statically typed [9] languages.

Without getting into a religious battle, I believe that Ruby is a better (web) language than Java. He later concedes the point that "productivity in Java world is a cultural problem." Culture, for better or worse, is part of a language.

> Scaffolding is passive code generation, as IDE wizards or AppFuse [10]. I prefer active code generation [11], or even better, no code generation at all.

Scaffolding is a tutorial only experience. There were definitely some awkwardness in how scaffolding was presented but it is definitely not the Rails Way anymore. (edit: And never really was.)

> Relational database centric: the code generators and ActiveRecord promote think first in tables after in classes. I prefer a more pure OO, as Hibernate [12], JPA [4] or even ODBMS [13].

At the time, I probably would have agreed. ActiveRecord in 2.3 was a bit archaic and the whole database layer got much improved in 3. I use Mongoid.

> MVC [14]: I'm looking for something newer and better that an old MVC framework.

Why?

I understand his point. He is arguing that the language doesn't much matter and that the 10x productivity is a myth of Rails. While I think the productivity is a bit exaggerated, you really need to get into long projects on both before making a judgement call. Java Spring applications with nHibernate are usually encumbered by Java 'best practices' and not the language. Culture is everything.
There are black people all over Latin America. During the slave trade, about 60% of slaves wound up in Portuguese and Spanish America.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade#New_World_...
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2155956
Perhaps this is why startups are always filled with 20-somethings. Imagine how much would be done if those who happened to have families could also easily make the leap.
I actually agree with metering; I think it's the only fair measure. Granted, the metering you describe sounds atrocious, and there'll probably be a long messy transition to the point where our internet bill is more like our electric bill.

But imagine this: on mobile networks, instead of voice minutes, text messages, data caps, fees for tethering, and every other scheme the Telcos are concocting right now (with regard to charging for individual services), we instead have a single measure of our usage — data — and our bill starts at something reasonable like $5 or $10 a month.

The problem with "unlimited" in my view is that it conditions us to think that said resource really is unlimited, versus, say, electricity where we are incentivized to be aware of our usage. Now, if they're going to charge $2 per GB above some arbitrary cap — that's clearly absurd. But to start the bill very low (for the basic connection), and then charge, say, 10¢ or 15¢ per GB? Sign me up.
wow, what an irresponsible proposal. corporations already have free speech, now they need to get government paid healthcare also? why should US taxpayers reimburse those entrepreneur's health care costs if most of them will fail to produce any jobs at all? looks like a great way to create even more moral hazard in US companies.

health care of work force should be shared between employers and society as a whole, not offloaded back and forth from one to the other.
ASK HN: Is it time to move from JAVA/Struts2 to Scala/Lift?
Hi folks,
we're currently running a company that is builded in JAVA, about 50,000 loc. What do you think about moving to a more modern language? Especially to scale easier and hire better developers.

Thanks
Same carrot, with less stick.
AJE is headquartered in Doha with broadcasting centers in Doha, London, and Washington.