skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Somehow, I'm not too worried.

While I don't doubt for a minute that engineering talent in other parts of the world will continue to improve, the need for engineers will remain until that time when a machine algorithm can take a set of requirements and a 'look' and put together a plan for creating the required product. That too will come about at some point but efforts to date have yet to seriously threaten day to day engineering.

Perhaps the author is just burned out, or perhaps he has lost his sense of wonder which is so vital to engineering things. But I am not convinced by his reasoning that we've hit 'peak engineer' :-)
Sounds like it might be a little more expensive than an arduino kit and some free time.

Yet I remain optimistic that it might eventually only cost the same as a transatlantic flight does today to get a 180lb human into orbit.

PCs were started this way...
http://vimeo.com/25118844 is a really cool video that helps explain a lot of the same information about the virus. Not as technical, but it is still very interesting.
Perhaps the OP was using hyperbole: it does seem more likely for reliance on external infrastructure to be disrupted by something beyond your control than for your own tools to stop functioning in a way that you can't correct.

There are also other effects of externalizing your tools that don't relate to continuity of uptime: levels of complexity, adaptability, security, and manageability of change all have different values for web-based and desktop software.
I don't want to turn this into a game of forum post logical proofs.

I don't advocate "don't hire if no OSS". I work with smart people that get stuff done and don't have a Github account. That's fine, it's a personal choice how you use your time.

What rubs me the wrong way is when people say "It's unfair to look at Github as the new resume because I don't have enough time to do open source". Like I said originally, I'm sure someone is going to come along and post about how every hour of their day is being used for meaningful activities, but for the majority of people I don't think that's true.
Facebook on the wrist: the world’s first Android-based smartphone watch
Christmas in July – 10 Free Startup Ideas
Not in my experience. Most job boards are dominated by technical recruiters so, to get in through them, you play by their rules.

In their world, web presence of projects almost never counts. The rationale is that "anyone can point to my work and claim they did it." The preference for assessment is still resume keywords, good references, and multiple choice tests.
YES! I stopped reading when I hit that slide. It's a bunch of bullshit and handwaving that people do when they don't know what the hell they're talking about.
A big win for 64bit java over 32bit is that the kernel can provide more memory to the 64 bit process. This is because the java heap has to be 'contiguous' memory, and this is difficult to offer when in 32 bit mode due to memory fragmentation. In 64 bit mode the kernel can cobble together disparate blocks of memory and make it appear contiguous to the process.
Good point. I'd hope the regulatory system will require that systems that can make the car move be totally isolated from any other systems, but who knows.
You can get ~1% of public tweets streamed to you at http://stream.twitter.com/1/statuses/sample.json (see docs at https://dev.twitter.com/docs/streaming-api/methods). You could develop a proof-of-concept using that.
CSS3 Isometric Text
He wasn't talking to you. He is talking to the people that would like to quit their jobs. They know who they are. Too many people dream about doing something else but they never do. No need to get offended about this, unless you still have some deep desire to do it and that is why it bothers you?
This is the typical argument favouring patents and more broadly, intellectual property. I'm personally against all form of patentw, and for some severe restriction of copyright and trademarking. You could have a look at the book "against intellectual property" (right wing view :), or "against intellectual monopoly" (different, less liberterian view) they're quite partial but have some compelling arguments.

http://mises.org/books/against.pdf

http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/against.h...
That's exactly my point. It's a major fundamental difference between iOS and Android. The back button in Android can be contextual, while the back button in iOS only moves back between views in the same application. There are many times during a day where I switch between apps by clicking a link only to want to immediately return to the previous app, which is not possible in iOS (I first have to click the 'home' button or double click it to bring up the previously used apps bar and then select the app I want to return to).
I'm surprised they talked about Zynga but didn't touch upon the model of "Free + Microtransactions", which has been all the rage in Korea/China for several years and is definitely on the rise in the United States. That seems to be the real "spend more" part.

The remarkable thing about Farmville isn't merely about people spending more time to play the game once they're time-invested, but more-so about getting people to willingly spend real dollar bills on a game that is free once they are at a certain point of time-investedness.

I hesitate to invoke a comic to illustrate a point, but I think this one fits quite nicely:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2011/6/10/
I think you missed my point. We can handle our business when google drops us, but the volume from google is large enough that it required hiring more people. If that goes away, we'd fire those people.

I agree with your larger point, but let's be honest, when people are shopping for things online they usually type it into a search engine (if they don't go to amazon directly). Depending on the type of product you are selling you may not be able to get around this.
I find it interesting that you presume the hit rate on bringing people in based on resumes would be very low. I can tell a good engineer from a bad one, pretty well, using resumes.

Phone screens, however are a waste of time. It is difficult to establish rapport with someone over the phone, for both parties, and I've seen some people actually ask programming questions over the phone.

One very good engineer I hired, back before I was running my own show, did terrible on the phone screen.

I brought her in, though, because I saw something in the resume. She's asian and had a real problem talking on the phone, but eventually got the job and was great.

You are making a decision with an enormous impact. Therefore, it is critical that you do it based on a truthful assessment of the candidate-- not ideological prejudice.
Why Groupon Shouldn't Get Into the Business of Big-Ticket Items
Why would you think it was an iPod unless it said iPod in the description?

Did your nephew's page mention "new in box iPhone"? You left the quote out of the iPhone so I'm wondering if it actually said iPhone in the ad. If it did that's a completely different situation. If it didn't then your nephew would've gotten what he paid for. A "new in box"....something that looks like an iPhone.
I heard about http://www.alice.org as being good for kids.

http://scratch.mit.edu/ is good too, I tried it and it seems to have the basics you need to learn as a kid, you can even use it just like LOGO to draw.

Scratch uses blocks which you can drag and drop to construct your program, some of the blocks are: if, repeat, forever.

You also have blocks for commands, mainly visual ones, moveto, turn, pen up/down (to draw).
Trying to include vegetables in everything? Smart. But in no way are SunChips "eat anytime" food...certainly not healthier than walnuts. You don't see a page like this (http://whfoods.org/genpage.php?tname=foodspice&dbid=99) about SunChips.

If you want sound nutritional advice, I would tweak the Harvard pyramid in two ways: there's nothing you can gain from whole grains that you can't gain from fruits and vegetables. They should generally be regarded as yellow. The other thing is that they feature some really unhealthy fats that they consider to be healthy: soy, canola, sunflower, peanut, and other vegetable oils. Truly healthy fats would be red palm, coconut, olive and macadamia.

And while I applaud the idea of making junk food more expensive, their implementation based on macronutrients is horribly flawed. Sugar (which could include high-fructose corn syrup) is cheaper and offers virtually no benefit unless you are priming for a workout and require the energy and insulin spike. Fat provides satiety and promotes hormonal balance, particularly if the omegas (3,6,9) are balanced. They're off to a good start, but the article did a horrible job of illustrating how healthy they are.
Scala designers: Please don't put unicode operators into the language. APL and every other language that tried that failed miserably. There's a point at which code compactness yields diminishing marginal returns.
A mixture of the two points, perhaps.

I simply found the idea of PuTTY on Unix odd. Like re-inventing the wheel.

If other people like it, like enough to make a port, well good for them.

The port mentioned above though limits itself to Windows. I find that, plus the roadmap, weird & unfortunate to put it politely.

I don't see enough differentiation there replace my use of PuTTY. That it stores values in the registry is enough to sour me on it.

Again, different strokes, different folks.
I really dislike these "what X can teach us about Y" titles, especially when they are misused. Like in this case, where "Google's Famous Cafeteria" has nothing to teach us about health which we did not know. It can make us jealous, though.
I would expect Apple, more than any other tech company, to hold a plethora of design patents.
I'm glad there are about a dozen different file systems that don't suck with VM work and quite relieved BtrFS developers are actively working on improving the case that hurts VM performance.

Having said that, I'd love to know if there are automated tests within the kernel that could verify integrity/correctness/performance of things like filesystem drivers in a simple and automated form. Something like it could prevent surprising developments performance regressions like this and provide better mapping between what you want to do and how you should do it.
Companies: allow your employees to freely work on open-source and it will improve your recruiting.

Apple barely lets their employees blog even, and last I checked they're doing OK by all counts.

Unfortunately, the intersection for people who are passionate about their 9to5 work and those that are passionate about their side-project seems to actually be fairly small.
If we do that then we would be trusting that tool, which doesn't look right to me. (I don't think that SF is 138% more expensive than Miami, FL.) Let's put whatever we make, knowing that it's just an approximation.

By the way, I'd rather live in an expensive city making proportionally more money, because my savings would also be proportionally larger, and when you're buying a plane ticket to Europe online or a pair of shoes at Zappos, they don't check your zip code to give you a price.
Huh, that's funny. I've been running a VM out of a btrfs partition for months and haven't seen these problems. It's not blindingly fast, but (a) the partition is encrypted, and (b) the VM is running Windows with antivirus software, so there are a couple of things other than btrfs slowing down the write path. But I certainly haven't seen freezes such as those described in this post.
That was odd. I found your comment reasonable and helpful.
The author seems to have concluded that engineering will cease to be a competitive advantage. I think that can only be true if engineering can no longer produce things that are truly new or qualitatively different than what could be produced before. And that sounds a little like saying "everything has already been invented".

Sure, the consumer doesn't care about the difference between 2.8 and 3.2 GHz. But the difference between 1 MHz and 1GHz is so huge that it's a qualitative difference -- you can apply it in ways that just wouldn't be practical otherwise.

I find it strange that he cites Apple, because they are a prime example of the success of engineering and design excellence. They take existing technology, imagine what can be done if they push it to the limits, and design products that deliver a lot of value (I don't happen to like Apple products much, but a lot of people do -- and not just because they look nice).

But pushing the technology to the limits is a crucial aspect. Why do you think they care so much about their sources of technology? Sure, it's outsourced, but Apple always makes sure they get better products than their competitors can. If the iPhone were just a little bigger when it was launched, it would have failed -- because that's the difference between all your customers always carrying it around, and being happy about it; and them leaving it in their car or at their desk when they go to lunch.
Why Netflix Raised Its Prices
There is a previous discussion about this from last night here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2761427
Uruguay vs Mexico
Ver Uruguay vs Mexico en vivo online
Yeah, I almost always bring leftovers from our dinners as lunch. I only buy lunch when we for whatever reason don't have any leftovers.
I care about my profession. I go the extra mile. Last year, I read Programming Language Pragmatics and the Dragon book because the semester I wanted to take programming languages, the course was offered when I had to work and I never got a formal background. Last month I read 22 research papers in ad-hoc mobile networking in an effort to broaden my horizons beyond what I'm currently working on. Sure, I could write ns-2 simulations (and I did plenty of them as part of my MS) but once I understand what I've read, writing the simulation doesn't hold much benefit for me, does it?

None of the work I invest in myself will be available in any form on github because it simply doesn't fit there in any meaningful sense (unless you want me to upload some sort of .txt book report). I spend my "self-improvement" time on conceptual problems that don't map to github or other repositories in any way. If I want to solve a trivial problem, I assume someone else already has (it's probably on github) and there's no point in me reinventing the wheel. What does me writing another ORM tool tell you except that I'm able to copy someone else's ideas?
How a Google doc joined the battle to save lives during the mumbai blasts
Poll: Are you using the G+ circles feature when posting?
When you make some post on Google+, do you actually use the circles and select only certain circles for sharing?
I do that in less than 10% of the cases
> 10%, < 20%
It is an obviously unsound practice because at its core is an ideological prejudice: We're going to judge you, not on the quality of your skills, but on whether you contribute to open source software or not.

Candidate are better off working for companies that are interested in getting to know them in order to make hiring decisions, rather than running them thru a political correctness filter.

I don't really care whether I convince you or not. I believe the basis for wanting someone's github id is a prejudice, and I've not had luck convincing prejudiced people that they shouldn't discriminate.
How to Use Press Releases in Today's World
Getting ready to create my own Private PaaS with the Stackato Beta this morning, looking forward to testing out the postgres support
Supply and Demand: Why marketing matters
> 20%, < 30%
Thanks for the tips - quite useful! However, I think that this reliance on gestures means that the usability gap will widen between those who are "in the know" and those who aren't. If iOS developers only use the shortcuts, they may not notice the annoyances of the default experience.
But, it is the home button! It always takes you to a variant of the home screen, and a given app can't change it's behavior. If you click a link out of an email, it doesn't take you back to email, it takes you to the home screen. Just, some random folder on some random page.
You might be interested in this HN comment thread about methods of anonymously sharing salary information between coworkers:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2439443
You could have clicked the "Previous message" link and viewed the original message without quotes: http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2011-July/154...
> 30%, < 40%
I'm unable to reproduce this bug. I clicked a link from an email message and the browser opened the link in a new tab (several tabs are open). I clicked back and it took me to the email message.
I don't see why trading under the same name would be an issue. Not that I'm educated in the area. But just because some lawyer told him he couldn't, doesn't mean it is fact. I think he should have kept going with the usb drives. And even if he did feel he needed to change names, he could've ....changed names! And still kept up with the import and sale of the usb drives. The article doesn't really explain why there was a complete halt to the business.
40 - 50 %
I've thought this would be a great idea for a long time. Glad to see the technology is catching up and being implemented. My only concern would be that someone forgets a crucial angle or some level of detail is missed and then someone ends up blaming the new technology. Honestly you can miss information whether you're doing it the old way or with a scanner like this, but whenever you change processes, it's easy to blame the new technology.
I also upvoted you for the helpful post. However, you aren't supposed to use caps for emphasis on HN. That could be the reason.
Yep, that would be octopart.
Depends on where you live in NYC. Average salary in Manhattan is $120k.
Jack LaLanne made two relevant comments (http://www.jacklalanne.com/jacks-adventures/lalanneisms.php):

>If man makes it, don’t eat it.

>If it tastes good, spit it out.
50 - 60 %
I wonder why they use survey-style standing scanners. I'd put a standard reference marker on the ground and then fly a small quadrocopter UAV around the scene - for about $10-15,000 you can get pro ones designed to handle the weight of a pro camcorder and which are robust enough to operate in wind or rain.

The problem with the laser scanner on survey sticks is that you've got to do at least 3 scans and even then you're likely to have a lot of 'holes'. If there's a steep drop at the side of the road then too bad, you're not going to be able to take any readings from that side. Also, the height from which the readings are taken would be a limiting factor. It seems to me that a quality optical camera + laser scanner in the air could quickly deliver 360 degree coverage of the scene, followed by a zig-zag scan over the top. It wouldn't take any longer and could give you a much better model of an accident scene. The significant extra DSP required for all the image processing can be done on a computer in a police van or back at the station - it need not be realtime, because you can tell from looking at the stills/video whether you have good coverage or not.
Though I'm not really a programmer but a researcher, I voted anyway since, in practice, most of my work is programming. It probably just makes me an underpaid programmer... ;-)
60 - 70 %
70 - 80 %
I can tell a good engineer from a bad one, pretty well, using resumes.

I am reminded of a cartoon I once saw. It showed a businessperson meeting another in a typical office. The caption read "We really liked your resume and would be interested in meeting the person it describes."

Obviously you can select the good engineers a resume describes from the bad engineers a resume describes. What you cannot do from the resume alone is deal with false positives in the form of misrepresentations, nor with false negatives from people who are better at programming than they are at writing resumes.

You already know this, that's why you still have interviews. But I hope you can appreciate that additional information can help you pick out some red flags for the "good" resumes, thing you will want to ask about in an interview, and likewise a resume that doesn't seem all that great but is associated with good work on github.... Maybe that's a false negative and you want to interview them anyways to see if they simply suck at resume-writing.
80 - 90 %
absolutely!!
Ask HN: How does HN's auth system work?
The only cookie saved for Hacker News is the "user" cookie, which supposedly is a token that refers to my user in HN's database. The only time this token is regenerated is when I logout, I'm not even sure it expires on the server. I wanted to ask, how is this token generated? Just randomly? Is there a best practice for generating this sort of token? Is it even called a "token"?
90 - 100 %
What if you're a salaried contractor? Meaning you work at a contracting firm as a salaried employee, but go to clients?
Haha: "Housing is 581% more expensive in San Francisco."

And I live in the Northeast!

I mean, I guess they would need to pay me a lot more, because I literally could not spend 6x my current rent, because that would be all of my income.
As others have pointed at, location is a big factor here. The issue I have is that it is US-centric. Has there been a poll or is there any data regarding the HN demographics (including region)?
Want To Build A Movement, Not A Company
Here is the "scorched earth" post: http://abovethecrowd.com/2011/03/24/freight-train-that-is-an...

I agree with it regarding Android & Chrome OS, but I'm not sure that it applies to web apps like G+, gmail since those have per user costs.
But doesn't that render the function of the back button ambiguous? Task switching is not the same thing as navigating a stack of views.

EDIT (more): I can also imagine many situations in which I want to disallow a back button (like in my own application for example), or in which the back button could be expected to perform, but actually doesn't. Say I'm in a game and have navigated to a level, start the level, but then decide I want to exit. It isn't clear that the programmer has implemented the back function, or what level of destruction the back button will perform. I'm going to have to test the back button every time I press it to see what it even does, or what the implementation is. This is poor UI. In iOS, the developer is free to label the back button or to disable it entirely to remove ambiguity. I would say that this is far more powerful than occasionally switching to the previous app if I haven't navigated at all yet in the stack of the new app.
I agree with you that it is another facet. The point I was trying to make is that there is a pretty low barrier to entry to get yourself into that facet. An attitude I see online a lot is that "If I don't do it, it's not valuable" - though this goes hand-in-hand with "I do it, if you don't you are wrong".

I am biased because I do have a github account and work on side projects for fun, but I think it is worthwhile to point out that if time is what you think your limiting factor is (which was the point that cletus made that I was directly addressing), then maybe you aren't really looking hard enough into how you are using your time.