skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In the US, good software engineers or sysengineers get a "senior" title with 2-4 years experience, and probably closer to the 2. So, it's a "senior" position in title only.
I once worked with a guy who spent an inordinate amount of time working in his text editor... modifying editor settings. He didn't actually produce much code on our project.
A good journalist doesn't let personal politics get in the way of covering news.
It's amusing that people remove this mechanic and manage make the game even duller but my critique is based on playing the game according to the official rules.
Is SQL the x86 of business?
However, beneath the benchmarks it does remind the reader that benchmarks are arbitrary.
Only 2% can figure out how to use a lambda? I guess it all depends on your definition of "programmer".

Note you did not say "already know", but "can actually figure out". I don't want to know what kind of software is being written by someone who, if they tried, could not actually figure out how to pass a lambda.
There's a jury that i'd like to be on!
douglasp, you're saying 13K users and the developer is claiming 100,000 or 3M, can you please clarify which is the right number?
Moving iTunes Backup folder to save GBs of space
I've been using this method and this specific site for a bit over a year now and I'm extremely pleased with the results.

Also I've found that things that I can tick-off every single day get huge, almost never breaking streaks, while things that I need to do 1-2 times per week aren't solved that well by this method.
I disagree. When I enter just a product name, I am looking for the product. When I want reviews, I append 'reviews' to the product name. I would venture to guess that I am not the only one expecting it to work that way if that's the way Google has changed things.
I seriously doubt any exchange is regularly paying developers multi-million dollar bonuses.

Which exchange did you work for, I don't see one on your linkedin profile?
I could use the PROSA versus CSC example (which is actually the IT-workers union against a computer service company) which is going on right now. CSC is trying to get rid of 22-months notices before firing any employee, the union has given notice of strike.

But thats a Danish dispute which I doubt many here is familiar with, hence the Detroit example.

And it is hardly "one specific" example: its multiple agreements with multiple companies.
Plenty of "the elite" find monads quite common place and use them effectively for real mainstream programming every day.

I might say people in the FP world are much more in touch with the future of programming then most. Languages like Haskell are solving problems (elegantly) that many mainstream programmers have not yet come across but they will.
Work rules contribute to quality problems when they eliminate the flexibility to restructure the factory. Further, increased costs also contribute to quality problems. Toyota can pay $1600/car to improve quality, GM needs to pay that $1600 to their workers.

Regarding 3), Wagoner's comp was cut from $14.9M to $3M as a result of his failure. $3M is very little for an executive at his level. Even $14.9M is not that high for a CEO of a company as big as GM. Lady Gaga earned $62M in the same time period.

Regarding 4), GM is saddled with legacy costs of $1600/car. The CEO's pay of $3 million works out to be $8.35/vehicle.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_19/b3932001_...

http://www.gm.com/investors/sales-production/press-release.j...

Suppose the next best alternative available for CEO would only demand $2 million. If Wagoner could increase profits by $2.78/vehicle more than the next best option for CEO, his pay is well worth it. Do you seriously think you can get a competent CEO, capable of running GM, for less than $1 million?
This post has nothing to do with .ly domains. Even the fact that Libya is connected to 'us' doesn't make this relevant, we don't submit nice pictures of the US either right?
LinkedIn hit as China clamps down on dissident talk
Youtube comments have been tricked? All comments show up as spams
Don't travel beyond of reasonable expectations on your dime for a job interview. Request initial interviews to be conducted via video and get the invitation to fly you out...paid. If they're serious about the position and your potential fit, most HR teams have a budget to pay if they're interest lies in the best fit.
Ninite.com (YC W08) has new urls that make sharing multiple apps easy
Using Online Malware Sandboxes
AOL Tech: Opinion, news, and analysis from the best and brightest on the web.
Intifada everywhere. Today there are protests in 8 Arab countries.

Let freedom ring!
Actually a decent dashboard to view all the feeds from AOL-owned technology websites.
That option not on the Mac version, inexplicably. People have been asking for toolbar customization for ages!
Why A New Startup Shouldn’t Have a Marketing Budget
I spent a couple of weeks in Japan last summer and spent a lot of time thinking in the context of Japan being a lens through which we can divine insight towards where we are headed as a country in the future.

There are two major issues facing the Japanese economy. Nepotism of the old (there is a much more succinct word for this, but it escapes me) and the incredibly long life expectancy of the population. The nepotism of the old (someone please tell me the name for this) is causing issues in a few different ways.

The older government officials are notorious for taking private sector positions in the very industries they previously regulated. This happens so frequently there is actually a Japanese phrase to describe it (again I can't remember for the life of me what this phrase is). In America this happens, but isn't nearly as blatant or widespread. It Japan it is a near guarantee.

The older population in Japan has a stranglehold on influencing public policy. They are a huge block of voters who actually turn out for elections. They consistently vote for, or force politicians to push for, unsustainable short-term solutions to problems. Japan has a pension crisis similar to our social security problem. Everyone knows it is unsustainable, yet the older people vote for it and push the burden onto the young.

The young people entering the economy don't have the job availability they need. Old people aren't retiring as early as they once were and basically aren't getting out of the way for the young. People are living longer and need to work longer. As a result, young workers are forced to be underemployed and struggle to become part of the economy.

There is also the issue of failure being viewed as shameful. There is very little entrepreneurial activity going on in the country so they don't have this potential of creating jobs for the economy.

The long life expectancy is exacerbating all of the above issues. That said, Japan is a fascinating place, the projections towards the strain social security and medicare taking on our economy in the future are good proof that Japan may still offer insight towards our own future.
Kudos for discovering something important about yourself.

Your path forward probably should be determined by the kind of work you want to do, but I think you know this.

Certainly don't be sucked into the new technologies because they're cool. Nor should you necessarily get a CS degree, depending on the work you want to do. You sound like you want to learn everything ever about computing, but that's a recipe for frustration and won't necessarily help you.

But anyway, good luck.
yeah right, "you can never leave" :D
That's the sensible behavior if you plan on reading local documentation.

I can't say I've ever used ri, although I do browse local rdoc, sometimes. I know plenty of developers that hadn't heard of "gem server" until I mentioned it. And this is completely discounting production environments, where the documentation is almost certainly a waste of deploy time.
It's a great resource, but for the casual player, there's plenty of room for improvement (startup opportunity? :) ).

I wanted to find some kind of summary for each game - I bought Puerto Rico as it is one of the top rated games there, and it was far too boring for my playgroup (mostly casual and looking for shortish games).
For what it's worth, the only way I've ever learnt anything significant relating to programming was getting a job that demanded it. Want to learn Linux? Install it on your primary laptop and get a job that uses it. Same for Python or Ruby and Rails or whatever.

So, I think your feeling of incompetence may be just a feeling of being totally bored by doing the same thing for five years. If you got a job that, say, demanded you immediately learn how to make feature changes on a PHP site, I expect you could do it fine.

This doesn't cover everything in your post, though -- you're right, it does take years to become a kernel or compiler hacker. There's plenty of work to be done with fewer prerequisites than those two.
Doesn't salting and iterative hashing pretty much stop rainbow tables? Didn't they find the passwords via a rainbow table?
Right next to my monitor in plain sight is my dedicated low tech $8.95 yearly wall calendar like this one

http://www.sears.com/shc/s/p_10153_12605_05083134000P?sid=ID...

I color every day either black (1 or more things completed) or red (0 things completed). Then I have to look at it all day every day for the rest of the year. Very humbling.

[EDIT: A monthly calendar doesn't work as well. Redemption comes too soon. I need to suffer much longer to affect my long term work habits.]
>scrolling now works as it does on iOS devices--drag up on the trackpad to scroll down, drag down to scroll up--complete with "rubber-band" effects at the end of scrollable areas.

This doesn't make sense to me from a design sense. With an iPhone or iPad, your finger was touching the screen, so it emulated real "dragging" content down to where you could see it. With a computer however, there's a disconnect between the screen and your fingers, which makes it not as intuitive. Combine this with a few years of two finger scrolling being the exact opposite, and I feel like this will kind of be a pain to get used to.
One-third of Students get Little from U.S. Colleges
My chain of thought while reading this article:

1. "It would be cool if I had a web app for this."

2. "Hey, I can build a web app for this."

3. "There must already be an app like this"

4. "In fact, I bet someone has already commented on HN about having built an app inspired by this."

I couldn't have been the only one with similar chain of thoughts, right?
If you are confused about the title, I stole the title from the Harvard Business Review Daily stat: http://web.hbr.org/email/archive/dailystat.php?date=022511

But, I thought it would make more sense to link to the article detailing the actual study.
This is a classic case of fixing the wrong problem.

The real problem is that installing the documentation is slow. If it was fast, nobody would suggest leaving it out.

Either precompile it, or make the compiler faster.
I was pretty much on his side until this:

> Mr. Heicklen has sued the government and various hospitals to which he was taken after being issued citations and falling to the ground.

He sued the hospitals? What did they do wrong?
Yup - consistently. I now never bother with hash-bang URLs. It's helping reduce my tendency to procrastinate which, ironically in this case, is helping to improve my productivity.
One math problem solved, another created: The Erdos guy who created the challenge set the prize at $500. After Erdos died, the challenge holder reduced the prize to $250.
Technically you are right, however only very few exercise that heavy, that they would have to re-feed on carb heavy food. Marathon runners come to mind.

The human body is pretty good at transforming fat into glucose, so the average exerciser won't have problems on a low-medium carb diet. It's a nice excuse for an occasional pizza though. ;)

And yes, grains like wheat are worse than potatoes or grains like rice because additionally to the insulin issues they share with all carbs, they are also rich at anti-nutrients like gluten, phytatic acid or lectins. There is really absolutely no reason to eat grains (thus men didn't do so until like 10k years ago).
Ruby is nice in it's own right, it doesn't need to be an acceptable Lisp or an adequate Smalltalk.

If anything, Ruby teaches programmers to enjoy making software. It's awesome to see so much attention going into detail, and improving aesthetics. That's a good attitude to encourage.

Plus it's a bloody useful language to know.
It seems absolutely absurd to me that --no-ri --no-rdoc isn't the default. But it also doesn't hurt me much since my brain is hardwired to always turn off rdoc and ri on every machine I install ruby on. Not having to do that anymore would take away a little part of my soul.

The Rubygems project has been extremely poorly maintained over the years despite having one of the largest user bases of the Ruby ecosystem. Reminds me of northern africa. That github pull request might as well be the streets of Libya.
The American 15-20% is less common, but I think 5-10% is becoming increasingly common in Europe. It partly depends on whether the restaurant explicitly lists a "service charge" on the bill; if they do, no tip is expected, but if they don't, in many countries it's customary to leave 5-10%. At least, that seems to be the case in Italy, Germany, and the UK. Nobody in Denmark really tips, except perhaps by rounding up. Sweden seems to tip around 5%? But Swedes I know seem to disagree on the question.
"The future will now be produced by cheap and abundant labour, not by mysterious oriental tech-wizardry (NB I am trying to describe an imaginary, not a reality!). "

This is an artefact of today, not the future. As has happened in the developed world the developing world will eventually see automation and robotics become cheaper than human labour. Possibly within the next decade or two. Once this point is reached and those countries haven't lifted themselves up they're screwed. They'll have a massive number of undereducated, illiterate and underemployed people.

This is not China's century as many people are saying. Robotics will turn vast numbers of people in to a liability, not an asset.
Is ZipCar really environmentally friendly?
Take a crack at Python and Ruby (or another language if you prefer) just to widen your experience, even if you stick to Java it will be good for you as a developer. I did the migration from Java to Python a few years back and I'm still learning and unlearning, so don't get discouraged.

One bit of advice: Try to learn a bit about proper testing as you are learning your new language, it will be easier than trying to do it after you've learned and testing will help you build confidence in your abilities in the new language.

Two good books:

"Learn Python the Hard Way" by Zed Shaw
http://learnpythonthehardway.org/static/LearnPythonTheHardWa...

and/or

"Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby" by _why
http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/

Most non-rockstars forget Unix commands, it's not a big deal and you can help yourself by writing up a cheatsheet or googling for one. Practice and muscle memory helps.

I haven't had a chance to check it out but there is a PacktPub book on Python algorithms which looks interesting: "Python Algorithms: Mastering Basic Algorithms in the Python Language" by Magnus Lie Hetland

Good luck!
100ms is an eternity. You can do GC with 1ms pauses.

http://www.infoq.com/articles/azul_gc_in_detail, for one example.
I have twitter/facebook buttons to make it easy to sign in, on the dashboard it has facebook/twitter share buttons that lets them post a message to the service and the same system on the results page. I tried to make it so whenever there's something that could or would be wanted to share, I made it available at the click of a button.

I like your idea on entering the 5 facts and it'll definitely be something I'll look into. Thanks for the advice.
Consider factors like student movement between classes, courses and programs designed to move students to the workforce rather than complete school, parental pressure on students and teachers to place students into unrealistic pathways, and so on.

This would only matter in the event it did not average out over a teacher's entire cohort of students. I.e., you would need to get a situation where all the students who wanted to move into the workforce were taught by teacher A, and all the students who wanted to complete school were taught by teacher B.

The law of large numbers helps here.

Also, this would only matter insofar as this factor is uncorrelated with the things you do use as predictors - parental income, race, prior grades, etc. If all the low income students want a job, and all the high income students want to complete school, the predictor already incorporates this factor.

I meant classes with students with serious behavioral issues, students with learning disabilities and so on. These will very often negatively impact the learning outcomes of the entire class, and is something you very rarely if ever have to deal with in top end classes.

If this factor is strongly correlated with income (as you suggest), the predictor will already incorporate it.
It's not only despicable, it's exactly what some people in the U.S. want the country to become. An impoverished working class to do the bidding of a few wealthy individuals.
For what it's worth, http://screencast.com/t/s8okyRVDbaT8 the back icon doesn't render properly using Chrome 9.0.597.102 on OSX 10.5.8. I also tried incognito mode, with no luck. It does render properly in Firefox 3.6.13 on the same system, for what it's worth.

Also, there's a FB "like" icon on the landing page, but once I've logged in, it's gone. I don't know about others, but I'm more likely to like it once I've tried it! This is true both in Firefox and Chrome.
Google Ogling Rollout of YouTube Movie Subscription Service in UK
In the US, registering a trademark (which you can easily do yourself - no need to pay a $300/hour lawyer) costs $75, or at least used to last time I needed to. How much is it in the UK that you're saving that money?
I'm a firm believer in the same education being available to everyone (freely, if possible, and cheaply if not).

A popular conservative position is to give all students the same educational opportunity by allowing parents to take their children's education dollars to private schools.
i re-carb on light food after my 2-3 hour workouts. it just leaves me less run-down the next day.

but heavy grain diets are a stable of the modern way of life because its really cheap and easy to produce huge volumes of food for it.
There's an often-discussed (hypothetical) extension to Haskell's list comprehensions called Monad comprehensions. I suppose that would be similar to Scala's "'for' loop".

But really, the difference between 'do' notation and a syntax based on list comprehensions is not that big.

Compare:

[(x, y) | x <- [1 .. 10], y <- [1 .. 10]]

vs

do { x <- [1 .. 10]; y <- [1 .. 10]; return (x,y) }

The main difference is that it uses return (which is implicit in the comprehension syntax), and the final element in the do syntax is pushed into the first position in comprehension syntax.

(Another alternative would be liftA2 (,) [1 .. 10] [1 .. 10].)
Thank you for the links I will check them out!
I agree. Specialize in working on one aspect, starting from the most rudimentary "get sh*t running" and working your way up. Rails has been great for me as I've learned to poke around along the entire LAMP stack.

At most you'll need 3-4 books on computing math, sorts, data storage, etc for reference only. Slowly, one will need to start understanding more and more complicated aspects of CS, just to make stuff work. With the introduction of Github & other open source examples of coding, learning by example and trial is easy. During this time, I'd also grab a good book on database design & architecture.
As one who has dabbled with Haskell a bit here and there, "programmable semicolon" is the most apt metaphor I've seen.

Every time I have to break up a chain of method calls in Java with several lines of ternary null checks, I think about the Maybe monad.
Designing for fault tolerance and scaling out instead of individual node durability and scaling up is, in most cases, a sounder approach. Since the vast majority of applications map well to this case, it makes sense for Amazon to focus on features that assume/assist scale-out.

It's easier to design for scale-out than one might think; a great resource to get started is http://highscalability.com.

Regarding EBS, I haven't seen the hangup issue you've described. Any data?

As for low inter-node latencies, Amazon has an offering that specifically addresses that need:
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/hpc-applications/

Overall, I think Amazon is making a lot of inroads in areas with specific hardware demands. They just launched GPU compute options, and I expect we'll even see SSDs soon.
Thank you for your answer.

I have already installed linux as my primary OS at home, I still have to stick to windows in my job though.
More info here . . .
http://tyrannyfighters.com/progress-report-2010-12-20/

The purpose of the hospital visits is to perform what is euphemistically referred to as extraordinary rendition. In each incident, the hospitals, ambulance personnel and the police knew that I had no medical problem. The hospitals are in collusion with the police to perform torture. At the hospitals, I have been sodomized, had a plug driven up my left nostril (extremely painful), had my corneas “dusted” with a brush, beaten black and blue on my chest, and forcefully injected with thorazine on two occasions against my expressed wishes. Two days after one of these hospital visits, I saw my physician, who looked at my chest and exclaimed: “Did the police do that to you?” I answered: “No, it was not the police. It was the hospital personnel.”
If you examine a school in terms of those who teach and those who don't excluding service personnel then you should quickly be able to understand who catches the money when they 'throw money' at the problem. In the long ago, even the principle taught classes--- same boat, everybody rows. Now the less useful (useless?) level of bureaucracy begins well down from the top of your typical school and extends all of the way up. Since demonization has already been going on for years, instead of attending to the real problem, Union busting (note that no one calls it that) is being pushed as the necessary silver bullet without regard to other problems (maybe even the real problem...) Now that many school systems can't afford textbooks (at least not one per student) removing teachers doesn't seem like a useful addition to the solution set.
But on the other hand, it does work as a move by Intel...
If he shares it freely with people he barely knows, it's not a secret. It's dishonest to call it a "secret" just to bait the headline.
To add to this, just simply choose to actively get more out of your university. If you want it, and you're really putting in the effort to search out more from it, you can usually find it. Join a CS or entrepreneurship club, e-mail cool professors in the CS department and ask to buy them coffee to chat with them. Being in school can be so much more than class if you make it that way. You only get undergrad once (alright, unless you go back for more).
It's worse than that. One finger dragged up moves the cursor up, two fingers dragged up scrolls the window... down? Is it really sensible to be internally inconsistent?

It also runs counter to scroll wheels on mice, which has a physical reason for the direction too.
Some like `Concrete Mathematics' come with solutions to nearly all the exercises anyway.