skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I tried the game and passed on it when it was released. I can't speak for the general public, but it was not a failure of marketing for me. It just wasn't enough to get me to spend money on it. It was polished, and not bad, just... sort of forgettable and average. It would be a big assumption for me to assume that my experiences are more consistent with what happened to the game in reality, but the article doesn't tell us how many trial downloads went along with the poor sales either.
Irving Kahn, 105-Year-Old Investment Banker: Economic Downturn Just a Blip
I'm not familiar with Ruby projects and there are no install instructions. How do I get this running on OS X?
>Your reply misses the point.

No it doesn't. Capital becomes obsolescent, labor does not.

>What happens when we develop technology which can do 99% of what a human can do better, faster, and cheaper?

During 99% of recorded history, agricultural labor was the prevailing definition of "what a human can do".
I don't have a salary because I'm a freelancer. If you feel you aren't making what you are worth, there is an easy solution. Leave your current job and go with that other gig which is offering you more. If you don't have another offer open to you, then maybe you are lucky just to have a job.
I am nothing
My heart skipped a beat when I saw the headline!
80k is starting to look like it's on the lower side of average.

Out of everyone who submitted so far (13 people), the average for any type of developer is around 85k. For those that consider themselves "lead" or "senior" level, they were pushing about 105-110k on average / median. However, there is a large range. The lowest for a senior level so far is around 70k, whereas the highest is almost near 140k.
No, because that is not necessarily true. The world economy isn't a zero sum game.
Where's WALL-E, or damn, that's a lot of robots
You registered your twitter handle 11 years ago!
Corporations (other than large investment banks) aren't able to force taxpayers at gunpoint to continue to finance them when they are corrupt or incompetent, so it seems like that might be a less severe problem.

ooh, ninja downvotes!
They talk about MDMA tablets though. I guess it's just each generation putting a stamp on it - like I would say "draw" instead of "pot"
Show HN my #whyday project: Rasta.js, backend-less key-value store
I can't think of many examples of corporations in Asia being successfully purchased and operated by non-Asians. Maybe it happens, but it seems like you'd hear about it more if it were practical.
I agree. But you know what they say, the grass is greener on the other side. I love my job. I love my boss, my coworkers, my commute, the culture, everything.

The only thing I don't like is my salary. Now if I were to get 110k at Microsoft and be miserable, is that worth the extra 30k a year? What about job opportunities in this startup and other factors?

I started to realize that I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. I wasn't sure because I didn't have a good grasp of what's out there and how much I should / could be making. Hence the survey :)
Not really.

The ipad sold (as near as I can find) nearly 14.8M first gen and another 10M+ second gen [1]. Thus the ipad market is roughly 100x bigger, which that multiple growing every day. I can't see why you'd possibly choose to develop an app for a market that starts off 100x as small, doesn't have neighboring markets like iphones/ipod touches which use the same api and tooling, and for which the main developer has just bailed.

[1] http://ipod.about.com/od/ipadmodelsandterms/f/ipad-sales-to-...
You're welcome - i really hope you get something out of reading through the source. I used to be a ruby guy before this too, so i think you should find the transition not too difficult. Good luck.
Your account is new so i assume you don't know this, but it's bad form to post shortened links to HN.

Here's the URL: https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey...
Are you sure of that? Even if that's the case, it still goes to show you that there is a huge market for a tablet at that price point, and that HP's previous price point was a deal breaker for the vast majority of people. Maybe it's not yet economically feasible to manufacture a decent tablet of appreciable quality at 100 USD.
The numbers so far make my 40k/year for ~3 years of web maintenance work (albeit outside of a metropolitan city) sound all the worse.
Clearly this type of service isn't going to be the only way developers get jobs, and yes it may be somewhat insulting to people further along their careers to make them do this, but for someone starting out who doesn't have a large portfolio of achievement, or (even more importantly) doesn't have the degrees or college backgrounds that have increasingly become the primary metric for determining who gets entry level software engineering jobs (despite the ample evidence that these metric have minimal to any correlation with programming ability or productivity) this seems like a potentially life changing type of service. Anything that takes steps towards rationalizing the hiring process in our industry should be rejoiced. And if there are other services trying to do similar work too all the better- it's a big problem.

That said it would be great if you all did work on trying to push the meter more towards real world type of challenges as opposed to what do tend to be fairly contrived 'interview' style questions. The benefit of the platform you are building is that you can get people do work on larger scope problems that do a better job approximate the real day work of engineers. See as an example in this direction reddit's challenge to aspiring front end developers to build a reddit clone a couple months back:

http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/11/reddit-programmer/?utm_sour...

Congrats on the launch, good luck
I think you should look into additional graphs; they may help you understand income correlation. And I don't mean to be insulting, but just by looking at the figures, it's clear that the workers in Shenzhen are in the middle of economic growth, while the residents of Youngstown, OH, have ceilinged out at slightly above the poverty level. The income per capita in Shenzhen is ~$14K, growing at +10%. Their per capita income is 200% that of the average rest of China's. Youngstown's per capita is ~$31K and in decline, having never reached higher than ~$32K in 2007. That's 65% of the American average of $47K.

The people of Shenzhen have opportunity on demand. The people of Youngstown have no future. Please explain that to them the next time they max out a warehouse credit card on that 48" plasma they needed to have in order to feel better about themselves.

It's not a political problem, it's an economic crisis and we need those jobs back. Costs will go up and we'll have to hang on to that laptop for a year longer than we planned to, but all boats rise when the tide comes in.
Of course they can. They just have to lobby to remove all the restrictions and oversight that keeps them from being big enough to use themselves as a hostage.
There is a huge need for polished games under the radar. Even the forgettable part is forgivable. Polished is above average.

(I don't mean you should have bought the game. All I say is I don't understand why it didn't generate more sales in the indie community.)
Android messaging and concurrency (for native code development)
I purchased one at 12:40 PM PST today from Amazon, at full retail price. Four hours later, they promised me to issue a refund so the price was the $99 HP price.

It wasn't incredibly difficult to get one, if you really wanted to.
This is one of my favorite bits from my .vimrc. It lets you use !find with location list:

function! g:Find(...)
let subexpr = 'substitute(v:val, ".*", "\"&\" 0: found", "")'
let found = join(map(split(system('find ' . join(a:000, ' ')), '\n'), subexpr), "\n")
exec 'lgete "' fnameescape(found) '" | lop'
endfunction

command! -nargs=+ Find call g:Find(<f-args>)

The :Find command above passes its arguments to `find`.

I use splits heavily, and these mappings for navigating and resizing splits are indispensable:

nnoremap <C-K> <C-W>k
nnoremap <C-J> <C-W>j
nnoremap <C-H> <C-W>h
nnoremap <C-L> <C-W>l
nnoremap _ 3<C-W><LT>
nnoremap + 3<C-W>>
4k is the paging granularity of x86, so if you want to be able to use hardware-assisted guard pages to know when to grow the stack, you have to allocate in multiples of 4k.
Right, it's never been either/or, they can be used to together. Several years ago I implemented libevent support at mysql using a pool of threads, allowing an order of magnitude more client processing. And for many years prior Microsoft had APIs and examples supporting similar operations on Windows.
ZeroGravitas, that is not a small number of addresses: http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01970/London_197... - there is a formidable concentration of addresses in the large areas. The outliers should have been removed, probably.

There is a major correlation between "those arrested" and "those responsible", unless you believe selective arrests by race took place. Indeed, it would have been better if it was possible to discriminate between those who broke in and those who looted.

"Some dodgy interpretation" is a dodgy criticism itself. What evidence is contradicted?
I agree with everything you said. It is scary that somebody believes something like what Jeff Atwood said. It is actually very toxic thinking. Don't know what more to say other than experience and observation of a lot of people has taught me that what Jeff Atwood says is false. On the other hand, if you believe it is true, then it will just become a self fullfiling prophecy.
People go "threads are evil" with vague rationales about getting locks right and such, and insist we all use separate heavyweight processes. It's ridiculous.

Nevermind the fact that (almost) all the things that (supposedly) make threads evil are still there when you use heavyweight processes.
As well as Twitter are there any other services that should be signed up for ASAP to avoid problems like this? Facebook, Youtube, Tumblr?
I'm a unix sysadmin and I took a "junior" position because I couldn't find much around where I live (Australia) around here when I lost my job due to the financial crisis.

I'm on 57k, I could probably get 80-100k if I did a 2 hour commute each way every day, but it's not worth it. I can ride my bicycle 30 mins to work where I am, I'm 5 minutes from the beach and my mortgage is as much as people pay for rent in the bigger city area which have the higher paying jobs. It's all about balance and what makes you happy.
The story is not done, seems it will have a happy ending IF he ports it to Steam. Whats another 1-2 months doing that and getting some more multiple? But something tells me the contracts he's done restricts what he can do with the IP.
That's a theory I see a lot of people having but I'm not sure it will happen. Africa does not have the stable governance of Asia nor the infrastructure to support the rapid industrialization that China went through.

When it comes to transportation cost it would depend on oil prices going forward.
Would you co-found a company without the full force of a modern judiciary system?
Russ is pretty much describing Go as it existed in its developer's minds in 2007. He even explains nearly all of Go's (future) interesting features - with nearly identical syntax - before he even gets to an example.
But he's not suffering from G-MAE here. G-MAE is about forgetting how factually wrong journalism is almost all of time vs. when it is wrong in relation to your specialty. Pointing out the errors when you can is part of the solution, not a continuation of the effect. The continuation occurs when one assumes generally that those errors aren't rampant in cases unrelated to what one already knows.
Spotted that, fingers crossed!

Still worth being aware of if your case isn't quite open-and-shut, or you're planning a quick launch. I feel quite an eejit for letting it happen.
Yes, they are good business partners (and from your link, it appears that China's favourite nation ever is San Marino - a nation of 30k landlocked by Italy).

If Japan remilitarised they would be a credible threat to China and it would be difficult to maintain 'exceedingly good relations'. If Japan remilitarises, the question of any military is "who are our credible threats?", and the answer is "China, predominantly, then Korea". So Japanese remilitarisation would necessarily focus on countering China. The fact it could also fight in Korea would add tension to China's pawn in North Korea.

and more presidents to be former servicemen too?

I don't have numbers for congress, but do for presidents. In the last two presidential elections, 50% of the candidates have been former active servicemen. In one case, the serviceman was defeated by a former National Guardsman, the incumbent who had initiated two wars while in office. This same former active servicemen suffered a significant PR loss due to a character assassination campaign where his wounds in action were deemed "not heavy enough to earn a medal, the guy's a fake".

I'm not sure how your highly selective example of 'decreasing militarism' is satisfied here.

Remember that before WWII, the US had a small military. Since WWII it's been kept large and expanded - the cold war, for example, was brought to an end by the US out-producing it's opponent - and the world is constantly reminded that the US has an army and actively uses it, anywhere, any time.

The US is a much more military-oriented society than it's colleagues. What you're doing is taking the wide outlier (the US) and then saying "it's not highly militarised - see it's not increasing", despite the point that it's already way out there.
Looks to me less like pseudo-science and more like open speculation. Nothing wrong with that.
/me squats @glimcat
I just used CTRL-F to search this whole thread for keywords. I can't believe that no one has mentioned comparative advantage yet.

http://www.wto.org/english/res_e/reser_e/cadv_e.htm

http://www.econlib.org/library/Topics/Details/comparativeadv...

http://iang.org/free_banking/david.html

http://www.unc.edu/depts/econ/byrns_web/Economicae/Essays/AB...

http://www.commonsenseeconomics.com/Readings/Comparative%20A...

David Ricardo made an underappreciated contribution to the prosperity of all humankind when he developed the explanation of the law of comparative advantage not quite 200 years ago. As long as manufacturers want to have large markets, they will sell to people who desire manufactured goods. And as long as we (whoever "we" are) have something to trade with the manufacturers, we will not lack for any manufactured good that has been invented. The United States of America is full of affordable Kindles, and people with all kinds of occupations can afford to buy Kindles if they like Kindles.
Ok, I've been a procedural programmer for years. I struggle even with OO. Where's my easy bridge to Functional? Where's the killer "here's the trick, the secret, the leap"?

Because I have to say, for all the "functional will save you" mantras, I keep finding a procedural approach gets the problem solved. Are my problems too simple? Not scale issues? Perhaps. And clearly, I am not trained in anything other than intro Lisp and Hadoop, so I haven't had the deep dive indoctrination others appear to have had.

But as each new computing metaphor comes, we find ways to make it easy for folks trained in older metaphors to come over. Other than Scala, I've found few bridges that are trying to help procedural and OO lang folks adopt functional. It's no-one's fault, I guess, other than new folks are trained in it, and older folks aren't.

But I'll keep looking for that bridge, that shining one thing that will make me go "aahhha, I see" and not "one of these books will explain how passing this function through this multi-nested other function is better than just making a loop".

Because after all these articles, I know functional is great. I just feel bad that I haven't been able to make it great for me... yet.
Funding isn't a problem, there has never been a better time to raise money than right now. If WebOS could become the premier development platform (develop on WebOS, deploy to the web and others platforms via Phonegap) you could gain a following.
83 percent of Google+ users are inactive  — Tech News and Analysis
I'm not sure I see what the trendlines have to do with quality of life in either locale. Either Chinese factory workers are better off now than autoworkers in Youngstown, or they're not. Either Chinese factory workers are better of than Chinese subsistence farmers, or they're not.

Similarly, I understand the psychological importance of one's income relative to the community median, but I don't see how being worse off than the average American makes a Youngstown factory worker worse off than the average Chinese person.

You seem to think I'm saying "auto workers in Youngstown will be fine". I don't think that.

We can't just make up new facts to make political priorities we both hold more compelling.

Finally, by making the cost of laptops increase to create what are, in effect, make-work jobs in on-shore technology manufacturing, we also depress demand and penetration of laptops everywhere. Who's better off in this scenario? If we're going to pay a subsidy to people who would otherwise be assembling our laptops in (say) Youngstown, we should do it directly; taking it out of the entire market for laptops is regressive.
6 years is the answer to my rhetorical question, if you're curious. Groupon is less than halfway to that point, and has much higher gross margins than Amazon did at the time (and about 2x what Amazon has right now).
Orson Wells came up with that line in the motion picture _The Third Man_. The screenwriters didn't come up with it. The author of the original novel didn't come up with it either (though he liked it). There was a space of time in the film that needed to be filled, so Orson Wells filled it.

The full quote is:

Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love — they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
How much damage can one bad hire cause?

Not much directly. Even in engineering, entry-level work is usually scutwork, so they probably won't get the chance to break anything important.

But hiring a flake can cause a lot of damage indirectly. If they lose an important document or attach the wrong appendix to the marketing proposal, you could lose a lot of money.

So if you're a big company with complicated procedures and a lot to lose -- what if that lost document is important because of a lawsuit? -- hiring dependable people trumps almost everything else. Bachelor's degrees are a great way to certify that someone can show up on time, follow directions, meet deadlines, and pay attention to one thing for four years at a time.
Thanks for pointing that out. I have updated my post.
It'd be a lot easier to find your buddy if he went by the handle Rogue7777 than his real name, Fred Jones.
Labor has not yet become obsolete. That doesn't mean it can't.

I'm not talking about the prevailing definition of what a human can do. I'm talking about the actual fact of what a human can do.

You still haven't addressed the question of what will happen when nearly everything which a human being is capable of can be done better by a machine.
By the way :X is encrypt. Now guess how I know that... :)
You raise a good point, and I have commented in other forums on the strangeness of the US currently fighting large distant wars with a peacetime economy, which is very expensive.

But if that's the case, isn't the argument then an oxymoron? Total war is a total realignment of society - the society is necessarily broken down and forged afresh. Engaging in total war 'to save a society' necessarily changes that society, often quite profoundly. The total war of WWII made massive social changes when comparing pre- and post-war societies (two big ones were end of colonialism and rising equality of women in developed nations). The society you get at the end of total war is different from the one you may have been trying to preserve.
New Photos of Vanessa Hudgens in 2011
Functional programming isn't just "no effects." There are many parts to functional programming: there's the idea of functions as the primary means of expressing data/information (as opposed to e.g. objects in OOP), the idea of functional purity (which is obligatory in Haskell but merely preferred in ML or Scheme), the various degrees of static type-safety, expressivity and power (e.g. Haskell with extensions is powerful but not always safe, Coq is safe and expressive but necessarily limited in power, Scheme is dynamically typed), as well as a handful of other concepts which appear from time to time. Even OOP isn't necessarily a conflicting paradigm, see OCaml or Common Lisp's CLOS system for the intersection of objects and functional programming. For more radical ideas, look at e.g. Functional Reactive Programming for functional data-flow programming.

w/r/t the specific side-effects in pure-functional programming: in Haskell, functions which perform effects are specially marked in the type system, so a function which performs side effects can call another one which performs side effects, but non-effectful functions can't unexpectedly induce effects. You end up writing programs with an effectful core for e.g. the manipulation of the db, and non-effectful functions for whatever processing you need to do with the data, with compile-time guarantees that the processing functions can be tested in isolation and won't cause exceptions or do unexpected IO.

Of course, you can write imperative code in a functional setting, and you can write functional code in an imperative setting. There's an old saying that bad programmers can write FORTRAN in any language; you can also write Lisp in any language, or Haskell in any language, with varying degrees of effectiveness or utility. Functional programming partisans—myself included—assert that functional techniques, correctly applied, can reduce errors (c.f. the Compcert C compiler) and simplify writing good code (c.f. the functional implementations of the Actor model of concurrency, parser combinators). I don't personally believe it to be a panacea, but it puts another tool in the toolbox for whenever your existing hammers aren't solving your problem.
$42,000/year - PHP/mySQL/Web Applications developer out in southern California - 2 years experience

Anyone else get bummed reading these threads and seeing other people make 2-3 times what they make? Guess I got to pay my dues for now
So... that's a job that could be done by robots. Some day soon it will be.

The robots will be paid the same thing whether they run in Japan, Vietnam, Toledo, or downtown Manhattan.

Call me crazy, but why are we arguing about "manufacturing jobs" instead of building robots?
Also speculating, but I would hazard a guess that a lot of that was due to the fact that the library ecosystem was much smaller then, which means people would be implementing things that you don't have to think too hard about now.
As for C++, it's domain shrinks every year.

Mobile seems to be generating a resurgence of interest in C++. Squeezing every last bit of performance out of tightly constrained CPU and RAM matters again.
Twitter is Starting to Charge
Threads tend to be event driven anyway. If one used, say ObjecTime back in the Olden Days, one could actually configure which FSMs had their own O/S thread and which were shared on a single thread.

This being said, event-driven as a design choice has much to recommend it.
It is easily the worst legal job I've heard of in a first-world nation. That doesn't sound so bad. You should see the hell that is a tire factory in the US. Minimal automation, lots of poor work environment.