skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I agree that programmers don't ask for more money often enough, this is overly simplified and doesn't account for a lot of cases that are important to a lot of programmers.

Firstly, a lot of work that programmers like to work on really is invisible to pointy-haired types. I run an infrastructure group, and when I do my job well the CEO hears less about my work because there are no problems. It's much more difficult to sell the benefits of never hearing about my code than pointing to changes I made to a website that directly affects conversion rates, or something similar.

On a related note, your point 3 assumes that a) the developer wants to change roles and b) that change is going to be to something that can be justified through revenue. Again, there is a lot of work that is interesting to programmers and very valuable to a tech company that doesn't directly drive revenue. These changes are very difficult to sell unless the CEO understands the benefits of these sorts of changes, in which case you probably don't have to sell them anyway.

In my personal case, I've gone as far as pointing out that every single thing that our company builds, when deployed, is critically dependent on my code and the code that I am responsible for working - and it does work, every time. It's still amazingly hard to get sales people to value that.
Why not just use Javascript sprintf?

http://www.diveintojavascript.com/projects/javascript-sprint...
Quote from part 3:

Our motto was “bite off more than we could chew, then figure out some crazy complicated way to make it work.”

What a great motto to have for anything you're working on, clearly it paid off.
how come more of these companies don't hire remote devs? Are they scared of lack of control?

Yep. I've managed many programmers, both in-office and remote, and let me tell you, the communication challenges with remote workers are enormous. That doesn't mean that I'd rule it out under any circumstances-- as I said, I've done it before-- but it would not be an attractive option for me as an employer under normal circumstances.

You say you've managed remote teams-- what's your experience been?
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My experience - at the moment - is specifically with jQTouch and iPhones. I've found that it performs well for simple views, but haven't tried anything complex.

In general, PhoneGap's going to perform the same as if you tried it in the phone's browser. From some stuff I tried before, Android browser performance was noticeably slower than iPhone browser performance, but not so much as to make it unusable.

I suspect it'll depend heavily on the device you're testing.
I don't know what the chances are that Barr's actually that stupid/crazy, but Citricsquid is saying there's a reasonable chance the IRC admin Barr "tracked down the real identity of" was actually a bot.
Dualist priors have not yet been shown to be useful.
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I use Authorize.net with CIM, but handle the recurring billing piece myself.
The xbox/zune/netflix combo is really amazing. And the kinect is poised to create a different revolution in a different space. Tablets are not the whole future of computing, not by a long shot.
come at me again bro
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Don't lose everybody not on a modern browser! A library already exists for this with every fallback imaginable implemented: WebSockets, FlashSocket, Long Polling, ...
http://socket.io
> W.B. Yeats describes mankind's fleshly predicament as a soul fastened to a dying animal.

This is an old, tired, dualist judeo-christian view. And it's totally false; there isn't any thing called "soul" that could be separated from the body. It's part of it, a secretion of sort of the whole brain and body.

Even a real brain kept in a bottle wouldn't properly behave like a real human, IMO. This is all quite ridiculous, really.
I've invited you to read my comment again because I felt you were mis-representing my point. Regarding the rest,

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_on_mars#Liquid_water

Considering that there have been very severe extinction events in the past; that the best evidence we have for Mars indicates it sustained life in the past, and then lost it; it is special pleading to argue that life on Earth, or at least multi-cellular life, has some hypothetical property that will make it go on forever. On the contrary, the multitude of documented dangers, the suddenness and magnitude of shifts in the paleobiological record indicate that life on Earth may yet go completely extinct within a relatively short geological time span, even were all humans to commit suicide today.
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It like most such things virtual or otherwise, needs a real curator. Shouldn't be any broken links in such an offering, but it only took two to 404 out :( Good news is that just the title of the link was enough to find the paper in question: "PRIMES is in P - Agarwal, Saxena, Kayal", just a click Google away :)
Gives one pause to think about the attractiveness of the career "witch-hunter" when the witches actually do have magic powers.
Well you could complete the quote for fairness: "I just called people advocating freespeech, nutjobs - I threw up in my mouth a little."
As a Project Manager who has worked in Investment Banking for most of their career, I would say the risk is greater for a project manager.

I have quite often seen Project Managers "let go" when a project fails, but rarely do the developers on the team suffer the same fate.

Ultimately, in a corporate environment, the buck stops with the Project Manager.

Having said that, for esoteric technical skills (quant level programming, advanced risk stuff) the pay is probably higher for a developer.
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In your ~/.npmrc:

root = ~/.node_libraries
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LetsLunch is looking for a php developer
I'm reposting this based on the feedback from my unfortunate first attempt (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2199669).

We are a startup which just launched a week ago and we really could use some help. We help you network with your peers by scheduling relevant lunches. Right now, we operate in Silicon Valley with entrepreneurs, but we want to expand.
It is more expensive because you'd have to license both, but you can also use MonoTouch and MonoDroid, and your core libraries (i.e. the .NET Framework) would be the same
It's widely held that the best programmers are orders of magnitude better than the worst ones. [1] This also goes for you x years ago versus you now. Why this isn't reflected in pay everywhere is beyond me. While people exploit these inefficiencies (exhibit A:startups) I'm surprised that the market still allows things like this to exist. Perhaps it's because there isn't such a large disparity for the vast majority of other professions?

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html
I haven't been as productive with mail for about 10 years, as I was in the 90's with elm. Damn, I miss elm.
I think this might be what you are remembering - cool project.

http://www.catonmat.net/blog/i-am-doing-a-startup.
I use Spreedly on TweetSaver.com ... like patio says, it works great and is easy to integrate... main downside is their reporting sucks really bad and they haven't added any new features in a really long time.
The updated version (from 1.3.0) of the library uses a thread-pool, and yields between 50.000-100.000 events/second. While I apprechiate your focus on performance, for most actual use this would be academic. In most cases, even 10.000 events per second would be sufficient.
I've found, in the small startup I'm working with right now, that those of us with more of a marketing and sales background think seals and stamps and certifications are the cat's meow, and those of us with more of an engineering background think they're just noise, and make our websites ugly.

I wouldn't trust data from the agency selling the certification - but it'd probably cost more than the certification cost to setup, gather, and analyze your own collection of data.

Our group expects to have a mutually beneficial relationship with certain industry groups - we've gone to the trouble of creating our own custom designs that contain the name of the external group to serve the place of a seal that link to the appropriate spots on the websites of those other industry groups. These fit the look of our site better, making our design guys happy, and kept the marketing guys happy because they can display our relationship. Our engineering guys still think they're mostly noise, but grudgingly admit they probably do get peripherally noticed the same way one notices the hash marks in a crosswalk.
They were acquired by SCE. The mandate to use C++ came from above, most likely.

They are using Racket to generate C++ code.
Seriously, you shouldn't have posted this. My weekends are busy enough without building gambling bots too ;)
Thanks for the input - I hear you that it can be a challenge. I have actually had pretty good experiences managing remote devs. One team had a guy in NY, 2 in AZ, 1 in WA, and 1 in CO. The guy in NY did not last long, just b/c he went MIA a lot. However, with the others I made it very clear that during "normal" work hours they had to be online and ready to do video chat at anytime. The amazing thing was that these guys appreciated it so much, I couldn't get them to STOP working sometimes!! It would be 11pm CST and everyone was cranking on late night sessions. I am sure their wives did not appreciate it - ha, but from what I can tell, they loved it.
Bundling (and the like) is a necessary evil of ecosystems riding hard on the bleeding edge, like node.js...

... and I would say Ruby/Rails, but they ought to be growing up by now, and integrating sensibly with platform package management. :-)

The difference between Python and Ruby on Debian/Ubuntu systems is astounding, and as the node.js ecosystem matures I dearly hope it will look more like the Python world than the unending adolescence of Ruby/Rails.
Exactly. The answer offered here is surprisingly ignorant and one-dimensional. The reality is that there aren't two types of software development companies, there are a spectrum of them.

At our company, because we don't sell products, client interaction, requirements gathering, coaching, politicking, etc. are all extremely important functions. It's really, really hard to find people who get our industry and can do this well. Often because of this they command a high salary.

On the flip side, we pay our developers above-market rates, and again it depends on their skill level and interaction with our clients and even with each other. Scrum Masters will earn more than developers (in most cases, not all). Senior developers will earn good money too. An entry-level developer will earn about the same as an "analyst" or product manager.
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Great idea. I don't have an Iphone, so can't use it, but thought of the benefits of such a concept before. Consider marketing it as a web app, monthly fee, to coffee houses/bars/restaurants.

And, more efficient would be to tie into a Pandora/Music Genome system, where patrons can vote on genre. The more songs available, the less likely you'll have even two people vote for any one song. But if you link each song to genre...
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I think Cheddargetter is friendly to bootstrappers - they have a free plan for up to 20 customers.
It's a retail business - they are inevitably tied to the price they get from the manufacturer, and compete extremely strongly with a million other places, big and small. That really limits the margins they can make. Some retail businesses can get slightly higher margins due to exclusivity or just general scarcity, but overall the vast majority of profit is probably due to either 1. Cost Savings or 2. Economies of Scale such that you can eek some additional padding out of your vendors (WalMart is notoriously aggressive with vendors).
This may be too techie for what you're looking for, but if you fry it, there's only $30 at stake, not 300:
http://timeline-inc.com/hacker.html#mini

It's a 1.4cm full color LCD display. It needs an NTSC composite signal.
Here's a much more robust number formatter for JavaScript, written as a jQuery plugin.

http://code.google.com/p/jquery-numberformatter/
It's really quite a horrible concept - not knowing that you aren't yourself. But if you hot-swap one 'unit' of the brain at a time, so that you gradually go from 100% brainware to 100% software - perhaps that would help.
+1. At all of the companies I've worked (where I've been privy to compensation numbers), the PMs consistently earn less than the engineers.

From my experience - I'm basing this on approximately 80 positions at 4 different companies - PMs are paid $55k - $80k while engineers/developers are paid $75k - $140k.
one option would be to let your early users help you test things out for free.. with chargify, you can set up your site and everything in test mode, without paying for anything (I believe) as you work out the kinks. then you flip the switch to go from test to "live" when you feel you'll be able to cover the monthly fees.

Alternatively, you could do this, but charge your early customers via a simple Paypal recurring invoice until you're ready to turn on chargify.
We use PayPal. The solution we found was to cancel the subscription and create a new one. Sure this isn't atomic but we haven't had anyone drop mid flow yet.

It looks and feels atomic to the user.

PayPal could go a long way to document their API better. The number of customers with PayPal accounts is large enough that we're willing to deal, especially since setup is a one time cost.

PayPal does not support monthly recurring billing between Germany and United States. Thats no good.

I think someone can displace PayPal but not enough payers are comfortable using services other than PayPal, especially on a startup site.

Hope this helps someone.
You don't have to be exceptionally smart, only persistent and willing to eschew the trappings of leadership in favor of playing the "Anonymous has no leaders" game. Anonymous craves leadership but resents authority, so it's crucial to appear indistinct from the super- or trans-human whole while prodding the herd in your desired direction lest you pop the illusory bubble that gives it strength. This is not unlike what Jaron Lanier calls the "oracle illusion", by which something like Wikipedia gets much of it's percieved authoritativeness by scrubbing out any trace of individual authorship. Anonymous tells Anonymous what to do and Anonymous generally does it.

For instance, the most interesting thing about a thread like this[1] is the timestamps, because they give you a rough idea of how many Anons are actually participating. Two and three minute gaps between posts is an eternity on /b/, the kind of thing you see when a thread hasn't gotten much attention and is likely to die. What I am saying is that many (perhaps most) of the posts (even apparently dissenting ones) in the above thread are likely to have been the same person, persistently bumping an overlooked thread, waiting for it to gain traction.

Of course there is no way to prove this, and one can more easily perceive this is a vibrant conversation between a much larger group of people (which also can't be proved). Whether this was intentional or not, it is an easy way for a vocal minority to recruit from the largely apathetic majority. The perception of being part of a group has an enormous impact on getting people to participate[1].

Not only does anonymity amplify the power of "leaders" in this way it also reflects the yearning of the "followers" to be relieved of the burden of an individual identity or responsibility. As Eric Hoffer describes in The True Believer:"Those who see their lives as spoiled and wasted crave equality and fraternity more than they do freedom. If they clamor for freedom, it is but freedom to establish equality and uniformity. The passion for equality is partly a passion for anonymity: to be one thread of the many which make up a tunic; one thread not distinguishable from the others. No one can then point us out, measure us against others and expose our inferiority."

That isn't to say that Anonymous consists uniformly of maladjusted poltroons--it doesn't, by a long shot, nor are they generally fanatics in any but the most temporary sense--but it's not controversial to say that it harbors a large population of disaffected youth and misfits of every stripe. Some eager to "do something", others just bored, but all by definition willing to disappear into a crowd.

[1]:http://images.encyclopediadramatica.com/images/a/a4/Chanolog...

[2]:I think this is a pretty uncontroversial point, too, but Bill Wasik's "flash mob" work is particularly relevant http://www.harpers.org/archive/2006/03/0080963 "Q. Why would I want to join an inexplicable mob? A. Tons of other people are doing it."
Guess he got what he wanted - there's no such thing as bad publicity.
At the moment, they're significantly more expensive and less compatible. They're also, by virtue of design, far easier to steal / lose and we've had quite enough (UK) stories about laptops being left on trains by mistake or stolen from homes and critical data being leaked as a consequence. Also, I can't see many people wanting a 10" desktop monitor or a 17", let alone 22", tablet.

I don't dispute it could happen, but I'd be surprised.
Jekyll (http://jekyllrb.com) is a "blog aware static site generator." I use it to power my blog and I love it. You write your layouts in HTML or HAML using the Liquid templating language and then your posts can be in markdown/textile/whatever and you run Jekyll - it generates static HTML files and publishing is just a SCP away.
I will agree with you, and amend my position to coincide with zeynel1.

It isn't that paywalls are bad -- good content should be paid for. I just don't think it makes sense to submit a link to a site when only a subset of that site's users can see it. Ruins the fun...
Cue the Dr. Strangelove jokes.
Ok, so your saying that Kurzweil's prediction is simply that exponential growth will continue until beyond the singularity?

If that is the case I don't really see how there is any logic in his claims. I understand that he has extrapolated an exponential curve, and I can see the potential of future tech if that exponential growth was to continue, but I don't really see what basis he has to claim that the exponential curve will not end tomorrow. I'm not saying that it will end tomorrow, I'm just saying that you can't base a prediction on the idea that exponential growth will continue because you have absolutely zero data about when it's likely end is.
I have 10+ Gmail accounts loaded into Apple Mail, I feel like I grow old launching Mail.app vs Sparrow. I won't go back.
I don't think he predicts exponential growth will continue indefinitely. Where did you get that from?
In the case of currency, it is better to use decimal arithmetic because if you use float numbers the rounding behaves different than doing the same operations by hand or in a calculator. Another option is to use integers (to represent number of cents) and just print the decimal point when displaying the number.
I use Devanagari script extensively and have never faced the problem on other sites (FB, GMail etc). I changed the default encoding to UTF-8 but no avail.

Can you pls tell me what I doing wrong?
"I guess read ebooks"

Ebooks outsell paperback and hardcover novels (not combined) on the internet's biggest bookseller - we can safely say that many people definitely read ebooks on tablets (assuming we're including Kindle).

When reputable manufacturers bring mainstream tablets (i.e. Android pads that support the Market) to the $300-400 range, I believe that mainstream consumers will give them at least equal consideration with laptops in the same price range.
It means you think you just spent $500m on your 'upload' when in reality you just committed some elaborate suicide, launching some other (very similar) chap into immortality.

Selfless, but unintentional.
I'm happy to refund the purchase price out of my own pocket to anyone who's not happy with what they're getting. So far, plenty of sales and no takers, but I'm pete@petewarden.com if anyone does want to get in touch.
I've been struggling with this for a little bit. I have a web application that I'm developing that needs to support keyboard shortcuts. It's basically a giant SVG element on the page with a toolbar at the top, and some popup windows. The problem seems to be always capturing the keys. As long as the user interacts with the SVG element, everything is fine. However, if they move their mouse over the navigation bar (for instance) absentmindedly, then press "Delete", there seems to be a good chance they will end up "going back" instead of me having a chance to see that keypress and intercept it.

Is there any reliable way that works in modern browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Safari) of capturing all the key events on a page, outside of using something like jquery.hotkeys and just doing:

$(document).bind("keyup", "delete", function() { });

Is $(window) better? Some other element I'm not thinking of?
Or make it like a jukebox and take micro-payments to have your choice of song played. Want your song higher up in the queue, pay a little more. Not sure how this works in a commercial environment though (royalties??).

Nice idea.
Who will ever press the brake pedal with their left foot? That sounds like remixing all the routes of neural impulses for braking/accelerating.

I sometimes do it consciously on a parking lot after a good car wash during winter to slightly warm and dry the brake pads to prevent them from getting frozen, and I have to carefully think my foot-pedalling logic twice--no, three times!--to only apply a slight pressure on the brakes while my right foot keeps pushing the accelerator.

If I did that during driving in the traffic, I'd probably alternate between jumping to a 100% halt and rear-ending somebody with screaming tyres.
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Just use PayPal, especially if you bootstrap.

Set up a recurring payments button and drop the HTML into a page. The IPN does the rest. Its simpler than you think:

http://blog.awarelabs.com/2008/paypal-ipn-python-code/

If within your first month of operation you have customers changing subscription plans then worry about how to deal with it.

Don't solve problems you dont have yet. If you don't have customers yet you've got more pressing concerns.

Having gone through this recently, Im hoping to save you pain.
Yes, but my biggest question is, why will anyone start using it?

Gold was valuable before it was money. Bitcoin is not.

These first movers that are paying real money for bitcoin, seem to only be doing so because they think other people will use it in the future. There's a name for that, it's called a bubble.

To have a sustainable currency, the medium of exchange should be valuable, even if no one else is using it as money.
My read:

1) Your post is pure gold.

2) You are probably such a transitory leader on /b/ or reddit.

A cryptic tl;dr would be: Lots of people want to be a superhero. Given the choice, most would opt for the power of invisibility.
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I wonder, it's not because of no rooms but simply because Japanese people have more books?

http://www.worldmapper.org/display.php?selected=343
Why the downvote? Was the last sentence considered rude? I can only hope I wasn't downvoted for 'lack of IQ' in not understanding a hint...
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design looks nice, it'll be interesting to see how the site progresses
I think you're taking bootstrapping to an extreme.

You should have at least a little bit of cash to burn (let's say $100 per month) until you get enough users to cover your costs.