skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
IMO you should keep salary/hourly comparisons separate. When you're talking about how much per hour, it's typically a freelance/contract rate. But that is going to be much different than what you would make per hour on salary.

For example a freelancer might charge $100-150 per hour. That's like $200-300k per year on salary (at that rate). But a freelancer at that rate doesn't actually make that amount, because you have to factor in downtime (they don't always have work, and they often have to spend time finding work) and they don't have benefits, etc.
Pure coding is easy to estimate accurately. If you asked a developer to estimate how long it would take to hand write a class for every HTTP status code in v1.1 of the standard (and gave them a copy of the standard), they could probably give you an accurate figure.

Of course, most development projects are not like that. The pure coding part of it is interspersed with countless decisions about how the app should work, with each decision requiring input from lots of people, plus a bit of experimentation and rework. The process of getting to a decision is hard to estimate and the amount of development that each decision will create is impossible to know until the decision has been made.

Estimating a software project is like estimating the length of time it takes to get a law passed. It's not a computer science or even an engineering matter, its a political/ psychological one.
No, I was determining the limits, pointing out that he does care, and that there are many things he would object to finding on those computers.

Churchill: Madam, would you sleep with me for five million pounds?
Woman: My goodness, Mr. Churchill… Well, I suppose… we would have to discuss terms, of course…
Churchill: Would you sleep with me for five pounds?
Woman: Mr. Churchill, what kind of woman do you think I am?!
Churchill: Madam, we’ve already established that. Now we are haggling about the price.
giving your personal karma-score any meaning is just a major headache and best be avoided

Oh, yes, completely agree. It not the karma scoring that hurts, but rather than no discussion is considered acceptable.

it is best to simply accept downvotes without explanation as background noise

Sadly, yes.
Actually I've been hanging out in Chiang Mai for most of the last six months. In February I went to Vietnam, Hanoi, but it was uncomfortable (and surprisingly expensive!) so I came back.

Any idea about good places in China, by the way?

I've been living off of contract work for the past three years, and worked remotely since September, but now I need to find a new gig. But yeah, you wouldn't want to work for a third-world salary.
I think the idea of categorizing comments is good. I would cite as a somewhat-working example Wikipedia's article flags. Wikipedia has a serious problem with deletionism, but they have ways to mark articles in meaningful ways, like too long, or too short, or irrelevant, or excellent, etc. They can also mark individual contributions as "citation needed" (a flag I would really like to have on comments, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2423582 as an example of a citation-needed comment getting, I feel, way too many upvotes).
Paying it forward, a video interview with Matt Lauzon of Gemvara
> Societies in the state of Kerala ...

This is very very interesting because right now, due to a lot of education and a relatively higher standard of living Kerala can boast of a sex ratio of 1084 females/1000 males the only state in India with more females than males.

Also, Kerala is famously a stronghold of a Communist Party (the Communist Party of India (Marxist)).
Beautiful work! I love the arcade cabinet style buttons. What kind of things are you looking to trigger with it? I imagine mashing up breakbeats with those buttons would be really compulsive :)
I have to say that this is nice to see .. normally the Android/Apple discussions are mired in blind fanboy-ism, but people here seem objective and reasonable. Android's lack of polish in areas and Apple lock-in to iTunes, Androids flexibility and Apple's great screen. Myself, I do like the Apple hardware, but can't accept the lock-in and control. Even if iOS it did everything I wanted, I'd probably still go with Android as I think in the long term having Apple get too powerful is bad for the internet and computing in general. I'm probably a statistical outlier though, letting my philosophical beliefs come into play when choosing a smart-phone.
So things like prototyping, UML, use cases, and Agile were not a "serious attempt" to answer that? I think it's also unwise to tell your manager "it'll be done when it's done."
Ask HN: How would you take on Oracle?
In their last quarter Oracle made $8.1 billion in revenue on software. My experience when I run across Oracle software is not one of amazement, elegance, or being impressed. I am more impressed by things I see on Hacker News or in the open source software area. It is almost like there is an arbitrage opportunity to bring the cunning and smarts of the hn/oss to the world of stodgy but lucrative business software. So I ask you, hacker newsers, if you were going to take on one Oracle software segment which would it be? (Some segments include: Fusion Middleware; PeopleSoft, Hyperion, or other Applications; CRM; Enterprise Management). How would you do things differently than Oracle? Corollary question: If Oracle is throwing out $1billion to acquire companies like ATG should we be encouraging each other to build more enterprise-y software as opposed to the next twitter client?
No Interview? Heres a little history of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese
Please review my free iPhone game
After a year of selling less than 20 copies of Mindful (my iPhone game previously price at $0.99), using no marketing whatsoever, I've decided to update it, make it free of charge, and hand it out to the world. You can find it at:
http://halera.tumblr.com/
or you can just search the App Store for "Mindful".
Please let me know if you find it interesting enough to play or not.
Any feedback would be much appreciated.
Thanks!
Is Open Compute A Game-Changer?
I thought maybe Angry Birds was more; tough to say though.
There should be more like you.
Um, given how many sites on the Internet chronicle and reflect "hacker culture", I'd think an interested person could do the research.

And yeah, talk to people. I suspect that priests get a lot of opportunity to do that.
As the guy behind http://langpop.com I wonder too. I don't think my results are perfect, but I think they're a bit better.

In any case though, no survey of this type is going to be entirely 'accurate'. To be 'accurate', you'd have to follow around millions of programmers for a few years and see what they're reading, writing and talking about, at home, at work, and with friends. So I do the best with the data I can get.

Another thing to consider is what 'popular' means. You could consider both 'velocity' (current use) and 'acceleration' (increase in usage). Cobol for instance, is widely used in some environments, but has no acceleration. Java has a lot of the former, and still has quite a bit of use in new projects. Something like Ruby is not widely deployed, but more popular for new web projects.
I'm kind of rooting for him.
Once a developer has done a project, he can give a good estimate of how long it would take for him to do that project again!

Really, it's easy for developers to estimate time much the same way plumbers, carpenters, auto body shop workers, general contractors, dentists, etc. do: When a developer has done a very similar project more than 10 times recently, they can give a good estimate for how long it will take to do the project once more.

This situation is quite general in engineering and other work of wide variety.

Similarly, in general, when some project is being done for the first time, with no prior experience with comparable projects, then time estimates are tough to give.

In particular, for 'developers', now they work heavily with 'parts, pieces, and tools' from others, and working with these for the first time encounters standard problems: (A) How to use the parts, etc., needs good documentation rarely available. (B) Newer parts, etc. commonly have strange behavior or actual bugs that have to be encountered, diagnosed, and worked around. So a developer does not know how much time will be spent mud wrestling with (A) and (B).
Web developer intern - Mertado
A few notes:

Grails db migrations will be bundled as standard in grails 1.4 (hopefully released in next month or so). Currently it's a plugin - grails install-plugin db-migrations.

Reloading - this is something that happens a lot to the Grails' domain reliance on Hibernate. I was told some time ago that it was being worked on to be more seamless, possibly requiring fewer/no restarts. FWIW, in dev mode, controller and view files are automatically reloaded without requiring a restart. Service files with static methods in them seem to require a restart, and domain changes require a restart. If you change a domain, in dev mode, the system will restart automatically, but it'll go through the init process, and your state will be lost.

Testing - conceptually there's a lot of nice stuff in Grails, but Rails is still further ahead here due to speed. Grails unit tests are generally fast, but integration tests require the whole Grails stack to be started, and this generally takes 35-45 seconds on my system (MBP 2.66ghz). You can rewrite a lot of integration tests as unit tests with loads of mocks and such, but it's not elegant. Grails 1.4 is supposed to bring 'improved testing', but I'm not sure what that means.

If you're doing groovy or grails, you owe it to yourself to use http://kobo.github.com/groovyserv/ which starts a daemon. Running groovy normally invokes a JVM on each command - groovyserv eliminates that entirely.

Finally - gentle plug - if you're in to groovy/grails tech and haven't checked out groovymag.com PDFs, please check it out. Ping me for coupon codes if you want. :)
Interesting perspectives. I was there in 2006-2007 when they made the decision to throw resources at the problem and challenge Google head-on in algorithmic search. The strategy at the time was to become #2 in a duopoly by investing at a level that Yahoo! couldn't compete with, and focus on the most valuable searches (travel, shopping, etc.), and leverage Microsoft Research a lot more.

From an abstract business perspective it's worked remarkably well. But if so many motivated and talented people are leaving, then there's something fundamentally flawed. And there were a lot of other much-less-expensive approaches they could have taken instead (or in addition, if they wanted to shoot for the moon) that would have also created a lot more opportunities for growth and excitement for younger engineers in particular. Ah well.
The Role of a Manager
Josh, why would you wish that - is my site that bad? Cheers, Ralf
Ask HN: Would auto-increment rejection numbers improve YC rejection letters?
I've often seen other applicants wish YC rejection letters came with feedback. Clearly writing such feedback would well surpass the pervasive constraints of YC, but could revealing the order in which rejection were made be helpful feedback to applicants?

From the YC Why Not page:

"We can only interview the top 70-80 groups, no matter how many good ones apply. From that cutoff down to about 350 or 400, the applications are pretty good."

So what do you think HN?

Would a rejection letter numbered 2530 of 2755 be cause to celebrate?

And likewise, would a rejection letter numbered 250 help push you to redefine your product?
Corollary question: If Oracle is throwing out $1billion to acquire companies like ATG should we be encouraging each other to build more enterprise-y software as opposed to the next twitter client?

No, don't be silly. The last thing the world needs is more startups producing enterprise software. The future is Social Media and real-time geo-located, location-aware activity-stream checkins with gamification and photo-sharing, plus Q+A, and a AJAX enabled TODO list. So, yeah, everybody should be working on building something like that, not enterprise crap.

/me whistles quietly to himself, and goes back to building enterprise software that he can sell for money, secure in the knowledge that the threat of additional competitors has now been abated.
You need a chinese magical hard drive (http://blog.jitbit.com/2011/04/chinese-magic-drive.html)
Zune Phone would have been better than that horrible WP7 name.
What's the problem, exactly? It's a rare (and usually unprofitable) niche that has no competition, and if you don't have competition when you start, you'll likely run into it later.

You already say that your solution will be a better fit for your customers; if that's the case, it should be simple for you to draw up a mental list of differentiators that can constitute your "unique value proposition", and pull these out when a prospect asks why they should choose you. (Hint: price is not always a great differentiator.)

If you run into prospects who are already using the competing solution, ask them how it's working out for them, and what kind of things they wish it did differently.
Ask HN: please review my app/site: cardealerquotes.org
Hi,

Here is my baby. I would appreciate any feedback. It is a lead generation site to get quotes for folks that are looking to buy a car. It is targeted to men in their 35-50s who are going through a midlife crisis.

Thank you taking the time to help me understand if I am doing this right.
Whow, 10,000 SEASONS! That's sure a lot ;)
Again, aren't these just the people promoted? This isn't all of the org heads. There's still Location (Marissa Mayer), Google Apps, and others. I find it hard to believe that Page has no interest in Apps succeeding.
I should note that I'm mostly referring to the parent, which was referencing passenger standalone, which runs like a classic thin or mongrel.
They have separate divisions, this is a list of people promoted this week. Which might mean that Apps is less important to Page or maybe not.
I disagree. I remembered Bing's decision engine commercials when looking for a plane ticket. Turns out that Bing is way better for flights than Google is, by far. Just try typing New York City to Los Angeles into both search engines. Bing finds what you are after and Google does not.
>To compare the state we're in to those periods in time is very misleading. We have one of the highest qualities of life and some of the strongest freedoms than at any other point in time. Let's not lose perspective.

A time like ours, in which there's a massive societal shift (the rapid shrinking of the middle class as a result of globalization) accompanied by a financial crisis, is actually quite comparable to the environments that fostered the American and French revolutions.

The French revolution was preceded by a financial crisis and enlarged public debt due to foreign wars. Back then it was nobility and the clergy that managed to avoid taxation and whose interests were overrepresented by the state. In our times the wealthy and corporations have gained this favor.

>That's a great sign that it is. Reminds me of the quote: "You know it's a great deal when both sides feel screwed."

Ah. So by this logic revolutionary America and France also had "working" systems.
Pardon the meme, but here is an instructive example of both sides: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndX2RFHmMNg (HOW CAN SHE SLAP)
On the bright site, budgets for support are much higher, because application is in production and generates real money. So even though it's hard to support messy code, there is no risk that all these efforts will be wasted on something useless.
Hah, that figure is ofcourse not accurate!, was just a random number that popped into my head.
Interesting. I've noticed on reccr ( http://reccr.com ), my own recommendation project, that the recommendations for 4 and 5 star ratings are much more accurate than those for 2 and 3 star ratings. I had initially thought that it was simply that there were more 4 and 5 star ratings in the system, and thus more data to base recommendations on, but the "larger perceived gap" between 2 and 3 versus 4 and 5 makes a lot of sense and is probably also a major contributing factor.
I don't know your level of experience, and don't take this as rude, but in the DC area, which isn't as expensive as SF I believe, seasoned developers are getting GS13s and 14s here.

I was recently offered a GS14 step 8 (which I think is around $110k or so) for Python development.
I'm always mystified by the fuss around these issues - after all, Pandora's not a charity.

Can anyone show me a concrete example of actual harm resulting from ad targeting? I get that you don't like it, but how are you hurt by it?
Fly From San Francisco to Paris in Two Minutes
Color seperate the pictures and project them onto black and white negative film. Develop the film, put it in a vault. This might be overkill.
The AppStore is banned at my job, so a few pictures on your tumblr would be awesome.
Is Digital Inclusion A Good Thing? How Can We Make Sure It Is?
As such, it's his job to invest based on fundamentals and deliver solid returns for his portfolio. Apple not being forward with investors about Jobs turned out to not be a good reason to dump the stock.

That's only true if you think fundamentals are only about short term return on investment. But if you think fundamentals include risk-adjusted returns, then his decision may be perfectly sound. Dishonest companies are risky investments; even if they have great returns, they may have awful returns after adjusting for the increased risks associated with an untrustworthy company.
Want a return on open data? Commit to it.
Not for free. ;)

http://www.digitalrune.com/Products/Physics/Overview.aspx

(Also unsure if actual source is available as part of the license or not.)

(EDIT: source is available at an unspecified additional cost if you really want it.)
CIS Speaker Series - Richard Stallman
Fighting to Shut Out the Real India
A New Perk At Google: Run Your Own Startup Within The Company
When you say "near" can you choose the radius? Also does their API return a value such as "total results"?

If the answer to both are yes then you can be quite strategic in how you make your calls and depending on the max distance could cover North America in under 10K calls which would take less than 2 hours to process.

It would also make for a pretty bitchin visualization.
Maps is (was?) the domain of Marissa Mayer. Interesting she wasn't mentioned here.
she genuinely believes that it can be done in 2 weeks

This is where having good historical records is useful. If I have done 2 similar tasks before and they took a month each, then a 2-week estimate has no validity.

As far as general code estimation goes, lines of code and complexity taken together form a pretty good metric. If I estimate I have to write 50 lines of high-performance multithreading code, I might say it will take 8 hours. If it's 50 lines of fizzbuzz, estimate drops to 1 hour.

But like you say, that's just coding (and unit test). The full task probably requires (1) getting or understanding requirements, (2) at least some cursory thought about design and (2a) having a hallway review with somene if you're not sure. Then when we're done with code, unit test (don't forget to estimate how long it will take to create, debug and run the tests) and Code Review (how many reviewers do you need, how long will it take them to get around to inspecting your code, etc), someone has to estimate (4) how long the test team will take to write test cases and do the system test of the new feature, (5) tech docs has to update the user manuals, (6) sysadmin or the Release Master estimates how long deployment will take.

In short, at least in the environment I work in, that 50 lines of code that took eight hours to write, will easily require an entire week before any customer can see it. In my experience, it's often not so much that the developer didn't estimate accurately how long coding would take, it's that the developer never thought about all the ancillary tasks that have to be done (code review, unit test, documenting the design changes, etc), so they were not in the estimate.
http://giveforward.com We're in the Loop now but moving to Wicker Park next month. We launched in 2008. Raised a round in 2011. Things are bueno.
Which is interesting and helpful, but I'd like to have seen a comparison: showing the before and the after, not just the after.
When did we become superstars?
http://dis.4chan.org/read/prog/ ?

irc?
"Probably a bad one from reading your comments." Well if it works for you, don't change. I will be the last one to call you a bad developer. But in my experience e-mails can be very distractive because people ask for a solution, not just a simple reply.

"checking my emails only twice a day would mean I'd miss many opportunities" I'm hearing this a lot, but it's it's a false assumption. Real opportunities can wait 4 hours (do you also check your e-mail when you sleep?). It's just that you think you will miss something.
Alternatively: http://code.google.com/p/microbridge/, http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10585, http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10331, http://robots-everywhere.com/re_wiki/index.php?title=PropBri...
Returning meaningful results is progress.

Why would you want a predictably wrong answer, you must be a manager.
That is hard to say and it would be a book worthy to explain what could come next. All I know is that it is unsustainable.

The complexity is simply too high and it's not getting better. One of the reasons I think why you see the fail fast movement be so successful.

Once you accept that failure is part of the process, once you abandon the "zero mistake" policy that many large organizations instill internally and externally you will begin to approach projects differently.

The truth is that "zero mistake" organizations make as many mistakes as everyone else, they just have the financial strength to ignore them as long as economy of scale works in their favor.

I could write forever about projects that went wrong not because the developers where bad but because the premise that fuels product development is broken.

I blame primarily business schools and large parts of academia for this. But it could extend all the way into the way the stock market is structured.

If you buy my premise that post-industrial is different than industrial age. That project definition is primary and time is secondary today. Then it does put some doubt at least in me about whether the stock markets focus on growth and Q's is sustainable.

Nature seems to be doing a good job as pacing various processes. It takes nine months to give birth to a child. One cell at a time. But the process is ongoing.

Nature is the ultimate continues deployment strategy.

Edit: Fixed lame false modesty in the end!
Didn't make the YC11 cut? Quotes to the rescue...
'Success is going from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.'
Winston Churchill

'There are no short cuts to any place worth going.'
Beverly Sills

'If everything seems under control you're not going fast enough.'
Mario Andrretti

'To become a champion, fight one more round.'
James Corbett

via It's not how good you are, it's how good you want to be
by Paul Arden
This attitude that everyone should be a programmer bothers me. The designer's job is to design, and it's the programmer's job to integrate the designs.

Why don't you learn photoshop and how to do basic design? That way you don't need to ask the designer to do minor tweaks.

It doesn't work. If you've never used version control, "just learn git" can be a multi-week project. If you've never done design, "just learn photoshop" is the same.

Each person is on a team to do a specific job, let them do their jobs.
Making usable software is extremely difficult, and I don't think Microsoft has been much worse at it than any of the other big companies. They have both well-designed products and poorly-designed products.

It's such a huge company with so many different development teams of varying quality that it's silly to attribute the behavior of Entourage to all of Microsoft, as in, "Really, Microsoft?"