skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Technological progress has always been inherently deflationary.

Remember, the vast majority of the world's people used to work directly in food production as a matter of necessity. Technology has allowed most of us to get off the farm, and pursue other activities.

Whereas a day's work once bought a day's food and not much more, a human worker (using the machines that serve him) is now able to produce a huge surplus of wealth. This means that there's time for leisure, and that our leisure can be much more enjoyable than our grandparents'.

The tragedy of this seems to be that we're running out of stuff for people to do. A dystopian version of the future this could lead to is recounted in 'Manna,' by Marshall Brain: http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

For my part, I'm hopeful. I believe that our current plight is the same sort of growing pains we've experienced in the past. The invention of the automobile made it tough to find work shoeing horses, for instance, or manufacturing buggy whips. Just because we don't need to spend our time making stuff any more doesn't mean we won't be able to find other ways to occupy our time.
The PS1/PS2 had dual analog sticks, but I'm interested in the proper position part. Maybe it is a preference thing, as I went straight from the SNES to the first Xbox in console games, but the Xbox layout of dual sticks and d-pad seems better.

Your hands want to be vertically aligned, and with the PlayStation's left analog stick being lower, it makes FPS games and platformers more awkward to play. Even racing games feel harder on Sony platforms. The only games where their layout is superior are the Katamari Damacy games, where you only use the dual sticks.

Would love to see some research on this.
Isn't the appeal of Google's app store that it isn't curated?

That's the appeal for some developers, but probably not for most users.
Mojang is printing money so fast I'd be terrified if they tried to apply even a modest fraction of it at the game. Scaling a team like that is a great way to ruin a functional forumla.
Google Chrome removes ‘http://Facebook.com/’ from URL bar
Revive Your Resume: Part 2: Order Up
subjects asked to move their eyes in a specific pattern while puzzling through a brainteaser were twice as likely to solve it.

What?!
"JoinTechno" is ready for launch
Why aren't they streaming it?
And the page doesn't include a search bar?
Hackers needed to save the world or at least America
Smartest post on this entire thread.

They clearly analyze the APK before uploading and look at the Manifest, etc, so why not do a rootkit scan of some kind.
Velocity Sensitive Hardware Based Piano
Infographic: If Social Media Were a High School
Welp, it wouldn't be a hot grits comment if it didn't get modded into oblivion :P
I'm mainly comparing people of comparable age, and including all the possible "scientist" career paths (not just the very successful paths). I'll use NYC salary schedules for concrete numbers.

http://schools.nyc.gov/NR/rdonlyres/72DE1FF1-EDFC-40D7-9D61-...

22. (fresh out of college). Teacher gets $45k (for working 9 months/year) with great benefits + defined benefit pension. The scientist (grad student, working 12 months/year) gets about $20k. With some luck, the grad student gets health care.

27. (PhD granted). Teacher is up to about $50k, maybe more, and has tenure. Scientist will, with luck, get a job as a postdoc. Pay will range from $30-60k, and his contract is up after 3 years. Many scientists will fail to get a postdoc, and will either work at a low end teaching college (pay ~ $30-45k), become an adjunct (usually with pay < $20k) or leave the field entirely.

30. Teacher is up to $60k, maybe $70k if they got a masters. If the scientist gets a tenure track job, his salary is up to maybe $80k (if he works at a Research 1), or considerably less if he doesn't. He might instead be working on his second postdoc (pay $30-60k). Or he might be working at a low end teaching college (pay perhaps up to 50-60k), or still an adjunct (pay < $20k).

In some cases, scientists in this age range might go to work at the corporate "Research Scientist" jobs you described. In that case, they might be getting around $50k, perhaps up to $120k in hot fields.

35. Teacher, if I'm reading the NYC chart right, is between 70 and 85k. The scientist might have gotten tenure, in which case he is probably making close to $100k. He might not get promoted, in which case he is back to $80k (assuming he finds another tenure track job). He might be working on his third/fourth postdoc, where he is still in the $30-60k range. Or he might be an adjunct, pay < $20k.

The top scientists are certainly paid better than teachers. But most scientists are not. And adjusting for time worked (teachers don't work very hard, scientists do) and 3 months of vacation, scientists are definitely paid worse.
10,000 hours. From Outliers and others as the number of hours you have to do something to be proficient at it. The common thread for most hacker coder types is that they just really really liked the "power" associated with writing code that could do anything, and so they started spending all of their time writing code doing all sorts of things.

All night debug sessions? Check. Several complete rewrites from scratch? Check. Using a language feature considered "unsafe" because it was the only way to get done what one needed? Check. Figuring out what "unsafe" meant? Check.

Once people are writing all of this code many want to know exactly how their code gets translated into what the computer does and they go off into their 'compiler' stage (some stay there for ever :-). This is where folks write their own compilers, by first writing their own lexical analyzers, then needing to parse those, and then needing to take those parse trees and generate new code with them.

There is a lot of exploration to do in 10,000 hrs. That's coding 6 hrs a day (and by that I mean coding, not checking Facebook or reading HN :-) for 5 years. There aren't a lot of short cuts. Sure there are CS programs which will show you what other people learned in their 10K hrs and help distill the concepts down for you but, like playing Piano, its not "known" until its in your finger bones.

Mentors are great for helping you get unstuck (since being stuck means you aren't coding which means you're not clocking your 10K hrs) and they can sometimes give you a heads up on road your travelling down, but mostly I think they are best for just sharing your enthusiasm and adding energy.
One iPad Per Child
Last I heard, he's a project/product manager. :)
Your point is well taken that it tends to deaden one to looking for solutions - but that does not, in any way shape or form, invalidate the author's arguments.
Except the older ipods make great external storage devices. Or you can hack on them with custom firmware which can be fun.
I think the title of that article should be "I'm giving my life to my employer"
Apple announces the new iPad 2
Ask HN: Disqus down?
IPad 2 Announced - Gizmodo
Free Desktop Tokyo Sky Tree Tallest Artificial Structure Symbolic In The World
To the disapproving downvoter:

And why not?? These people deserve to be celebrated; the print form of a calendar is perfect for display throughout the year, in a classroom, for instance.

I'd hope the list could be expanded to cover more than 15 women. How about Jeri Ellsworth (mentioned just under an hour ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2280297). And Wendy Carlos, with her pioneering work on synthesizers and electronic music.

Calendars aren't ALL about himbos and bimbos...
Apple announces iPad 2
GREAT! This site is amazing!
Apple Now Has 200 Million iTunes Accounts, Biggest Credit Card Hub On Web
Apple Announces The iPad 2: A5 Processor, Front And Back Cameras
Started 1 year ago, but more seriously last August and did a handful of projects from the ground up to learn. http://democratic.ly, http://contexium.com. I think my most interesting work is an email based knowledge base app which I haven't released. I also did 2 other email based group communication applications.

Overall I doubt I will ever be a programmer, but at least now when I think of an idea, I do not think "Who can build this? For how much?", i think "Do I like this idea enough to build a working prototype?".

And the best part about being a newbie is not knowing your limitations.
Infographic of working of Wordpress theme
I think people will HAVE to work, for some very hard years, on achieving sustainability. Only then will we truly be on autopilot, and will humanity be able to focus its time on other things. Until then, all we're doing is tricking ourselves into thinking life will keep getting easier. Major conflict over resources is coming...
John Gruber’s off-target Apple rant
" then you have the option to build something that does pay you what you are worth."

It's just that simple then? Starting a business is a risky and difficult proposition, and few people are cut out for it - and of those, even fewer realistically have the option to do so. Not everyone can build their way out of a problem, and it has little to do with their free will. If that's the case you can't argue that it's their "choice."

There seems to be this ever present assumption on the Hacker News forums that if you don't like your job, why, it's just as easy as putting together a CRUD app and iterating until you get customers.

It's not. Plenty of people try the "build something" option and never get anywhere close to being paid what they're worth. You just don't hear about them because no one wants to hear about someone who tried and didn't make it.

"It's not up to me, as a boss, to take care of someone."

No one is implying that it is - but they are implying that that's part of the problem right there - a system where no one has to care about anyone else, only exploit them.
Hates...

The argument isn't really about "long copy".

What you need to do is display all the benefits your product offers, show how YOUR web apps are different, exploit your USP and tell the world about it... and debunk all objections.

That could take 500 words... it could take 2,000 words... or it could take 10,000 words.

It all depends. Long copy isn't long because people "want" it to be long. It's long because it takes that long to tell people how awesome the product is, as well as get in touch with them emotionally.

Jeremy
Well, for whatever it's worth, when they're at the negotiating table, the 2nd most important issue (after comp of course) to the teacher's unions tends to be "assorted protections against a psycho principal". So there's a lot of cruft in the typical collective bargaining agreement that was initially aimed at taking personalities out of the evaluation process but then turns into it's own monster.
I'm taking a wild guess here, but I suspect there are many people who need that entry level/internship opportunity to cement some concepts while working on a team.

The problem is, like the rest of America, junior positions seem to have vanished. At least on job boards and hiring pages.

Can anyone point us to a good resource to find junior positions or even internships in front-end coding or UX design?

I'm not asking for any company to completely teach me stuff. The ideal position would require a portfolio but maybe one that isn't completely cross-browser, production-quality code.
I agree. I rather learn by turning my own ideas into products and asking experienced friends to look at my code for feedback.
Yep here's what I see on our IE6 death machine:

http://i.imgur.com/bTXtn.png
Toothpaste Magnate Finds an Eco-Friendly Encore
I built some WebSocket code that calls back to the server. I can't hardcode the "server" ip address because I want to deploy it to different places at different times. Sometimes I'm working on my laptop, sometimes its running on Amazon EC2, etc. So, with something like this I am able to build my Javascript so it always knows how to get back to the server.

<yea, I know there are lots of ways to do this, but this is the one I chose. :) sue me. >
And thanks for the link, btw = )
I'm on .ie and I have it:

http://i52.tinypic.com/2cf8kdh.jpg

I only noticed a friend with it on his account last week. The next time I singed into my account it came up, and it's been there ever since.
I like Yahoo's better:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jkenning/464845773/
Well if my experience is of any use... Keep at it! I didn't graduate from a top tier college or have been creating game engines since 9 years old, so I had to start at the ground floor like most people. It was extremely difficult at the beginning. From what I noticed, cold emailing rarely works. I had the most feedback/interviews/responses from either recruiters, networking and actually moving to tech hubs like Silicon Valley.

From the code perspective, a lot of companies noticed my open source contributions. Granted they were mostly minor utility code, there's always that little spark of joy from their voices whenever we go over that topic.

So go join an open source project! I know it's reiterated over and over again, but a good project can act as proxy real-world experience in helping you discover what it takes to write production quality code.

I guess if there was a single tip I could give, just be highly visible in committed code, web presence (as a programmer, not as a party animal) in websites and social networks, and face-to-face networking. That would raise your chances of being noticed.
"It's not just you! http://disqus.com looks down from here."
http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/disqus.com

As well as this, they've just updated their website informing users they're undergoing maintenance - http://status.disqus.com/
Official: Apple Unveils Thinner, Faster iPad 2
The article starts off well, but ends with the wrong conclusion :)

A better conclusion would be: "I'm giving my life to my employer, I don't like that, I better change something in my life."
The Beauty of a Lisp Macro
No mention (yet) of changes to iOS. Clearly they haven't changed the home screen or added widgets, only the hardware seems to have significant upgrades.

If Honeycomb is going to excel this year, it will be because they can surpass Apple in the UI. We'll see...

(posting this mid-presentation, it's possible iOS changes will come soon)
Arguably one card (and then more cards in their joke sets) that doesn't actually randomly choose, which they won't reprint [1], and which they've banned because of the way it works [2].

And the cards that force reshuffling do require time and effort, but not in a way that breaks the game. They wouldn't make a card that required you to shuffle your deck five times a turn, but they could do so online. [3]

[1]It's on the Restricted List -- cards that won't ever be reprinted, but not because of power; to let the cards keep their value. http://www.wizards.com/Magic/TCG/Article.aspx?x=magic/produc...

[2]http://www.wizards.com/Magic/TCG/Article.aspx?x=magic/faq/un...

[3]What would that card be, you ask? I have no idea. It doesn't matter for the sake of this discussion.
.ie has google instant, but not the new statusbar. I've got it from Ireland on google.com though.
The question is why do we currently occupy this very rich and priveleged perioud of history - because we took Michael Ventura's advice 20 years ago and abandoned capitalism?
There shouldn't be IPv6 NATs, but I expect there will be once it actually gets deployed.
Lisp. Dijkstra was the original Smug Lisp Weenie.

> Lisp has jokingly been called "the most intelligent way to misuse a computer". I think that description is a great compliment because it transmits the full flavor of liberation: it has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts.
The decline of the dollar is a choice that we are making by spending with wild abandon with no heed to the consequences (and indeed, somehow managing to convince quite a lot of us that we have some sort of moral imperative to bankrupt ourselves because not spending like drunken sailors is somehow morally wrong... to be honest I have a hard time following this argument, it's long since become unmoored from even Keynesian economic theory which at least had some basis in reality and is now just some vaguely moral imperative to spend spend spend). If we, you know, stop that, there isn't really a credible competitor on the horizon that could dethrone the dollar for quite a while. We're not talking about competition because the other currencies are really all that strong, we're talking about the end of the dollar as a reserve currency because we are behaving like idiots.
Or it could just be that they're collecting them because they can? It's a nice unique identifier they could use.
The article properly points out that a company cannot do its business without employees. Certainly: employees have the skill to actually perform the tasks the company was founded upon to provide. What the article fails to recognize the power in that relationship.
As much as employees rely on companies for employment, the company relies on skilled workers and low turn-around for continuity and to keep costs low. Re-training and the administration of recruiting/hiring new employees are huge expenses. In my experience, you (as an employee) weild immense power. By having options on the table (other employment choices, or even offers), one can easily negotiate for higher wage/more vacation/etc.
The auto-refresh on this page is rather annoying. I was attempting to skim the whole thing, and in the middle, the entire page was replaced by a connection-refused error (I imagine they're getting some heavy load, but I don't know why they wouldn't use some sort of AJAX refresh). Here's a link with that parameter removed:

http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/02/live-from-apples-ipad-2-e...
Apple iPad 2 announced - with all the details
wow, what a misleading headline. My take on the situation is that Nokia just said that their customers don't rely on press releases, but instead have loyalty to the brand.

It's kind of the anti-Apple. Their big announcements are HUGE and people follow them because they are an event, not because they are "informing customers".
Steve Jobs Takes The Stage At iPad 2 Event
The Font-Face Rule and Useful Web Font Tricks
No, just came across it around the same time as your thread, that's all.
No, teachers tend to oppose having an evaluation process of any sort. They are just as hostile to objective measures of their performance (standardized testing) as they are to subjective ones.
I don't know why there's such a focus on getting scientists into education. Scientists are often born with it, get it from their parents or peers, from the environment, wait till college, etc. Sure, some of them need the teacher to help them, but it's not as big an issue as they make it out to be.
It's only going to get worse. Just look at all the efforts to stop evolution from being taught in schools, and, in at least one state, to make it illegal for teachers to grade answers as incorrect if the answer is supported by the religious beliefs of the student.
Good brands tell you which last they use for the specific pair of shoes, so you'll know how they'll fit in advance. New Balance does this, anyway.
I too have been working with the USRP lately for doing underwater freespace communication - basically shooting lasers through water to communicate. It's a very neat system and I was able to get a streaming video system up and running within 30 minutes. Very cool.
He's talking about 4.3 now. No apparent huge updates, but things like making the mute/rotation lock switch a preference will be appreciated. Improved AirPlay support (can work with websites now), shared hotspot on iPhone, etc etc.

Probably the biggest news for this crowd is Safari's JS boost with the Nitro Javascript Engine.
I think you are redefining poverty here.
Why they aren't using custom minimally impacting XHR reloads: Automated ad impression inflation.
The American Express gift card doesn't get you a discount and (as you pointed out) skims some credit card fees from the top.
I wasn't going to say anything... but I find the straight-up 4th grade grammatical issues (eg. "Google want's") to be far more annoying than the proper name misspellings.
I think I'll replace whatsmyip.com for this: alias whatsmyip="curl -s http://jsonip.com | grep '[0-9]\{1,3\}\.[0-9]\{1,3\}\.[0-9]\{1,3\}\.[0-9]\{1,3\}' -o"

A simple way of accessing your public IP from bash (for some reason I need to do that a lot!)
There were some good responses to yesterday's iteration of "How to find a co-founder." You might find some useful info there:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2272866
You can watch it on delay http://edition.cnn.com/video/flashLive/live.html?stream=stre...
I'll probably start using this one. Nice short domain name.
The aren't using an AJAX refresh because this way they can pretend they got xx pageviews/visit.
Google Game Developer Cental
"We designed the case right along side the product. It's not a case -- it's a cover."

Reality Distortion Field Enabled.

http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2011/03/201103...
This is perfect. I've been looking for an easy way to find user location (city, state) based on IP address, without having to scrape a IP lookup service for it.

Great find!
"hey! you got a hosted CMS system on my rapid prototyping tool!"

"hey! you got a rapid prototying tool on my hosted CMS system!"

cue music ... "two great tastes, that taste great together ..."
I agree with your point, but doesn't this analogy extend to the states too? I don't know which states import more than they export, but should they be saying "Where's the handout?"

Ironically the states most in need of help have been saying "Nope, don't give me any stimulus money. Don't give me money for high speed rail"
Finding a great startup idea and detecting malicious software are vastly different things.

Oh, you think so? Both are a function of skill, heuristics, sweat - and a great deal of luck.

If inserting malware into iOS is simple...

I'm not sure how I could make it any clearer, perhaps look at some of the other threads on this article?

So I'll just repeat:

iOS is not different to Android with regard to malware.

Long version: The difference is so small as to be negligible.

I'm not sure I understand why that is such a bitter pill to swallow for some people.
A lot of VCs/angel investors are willing to help smart hackers find co-founders or even interesting projects.

Good point. I had never really considered VCs being willing to assist a company unless they had already invested (money) in the company, but just Monday I happened to have a chance to chat with some local VCs and they made that same point.

And in hindsight it makes total sense... if they invest a little time helping a company in some small way (finding a co-founder, finding a beta customer, whatever) and then the company grows to the point of wanting outside investment, they already have an established relationship with the company and are probably in a good position to be part of the funding round. So it's a potential win-win scenario, for a fairly small expenditure.

So yeah, talk to VCs, angels, etc. and see what they might be able and willing to do for ya, even if you're not asking for a monetary investment.