skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Likewise with lurking-until-valuable. If karma were converted to an incentive for daily engagement, that would be a strong disincentive for me to even log in. It changes the relationship from a friendly "it's okay if you contribute, however often you feel like" to "be here and be loud, or be screwed".

(If I were changing HN, I'd love an option to replace the karma score with a reply inbox, so I don't have to poll my threads page. I'm trying to break myself of my post-and-run habits, of my general fear of defending my ideas, and of my overvaluation of karma.)
> A CS degree, which many programmers don't even have, takes 4 years.

I don't know where you can get a good programming job if you don't even have a university degree. You can certainly freelance, but then there are no guarantees.

The more frequently picture is that, to get a really good job (at Google, for example) you frequently need a MSc, and not few software engineers have a PhD too.
For the record the penis jokes in the Google Doc are not from me :) I think that there were a few subtle funny lines in there - but I can see where you're coming from. Incidentally even inserting one joke into the NDA completely invalidates it so this definitely wouldn't be legally binding at all which is another benefit.
The non obfuscated link above:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2828538
Putting Together Your Perfect Seed Round
For a consultant who offers professionalism, experience and a truly in-demand or rare set of skills, 2k / day isn't anything out of the ordinary.
Foot scrub
Can anyone confirm or deny that this is only an issue when authenticating to an OpenLDAP server (i.e. does it also affect authentication against Active Directory?) I will check it when I get to the office and update here. This could potentially be very serious.
I wish people posting pictures would actually look at what they're posting.

The picture in this article looks to be a Broadcom evaulation board for the processor they're using (look at the silkscreen). That ethernet jack with integrated magnetics is $4 alone. There's no way this board is $25.

The actual board looks like this: http://www.geek.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/raspberry2.jp...
Some of the mentioned professions, law, accounting, medicine, legally require a degree, a minimum number of years invested in school, continuing education, and a license. Then there are malpractice suits, longer work hours, doctors being on-call, etc. If you fuck up as a doctor, someone dies. If you fuck up as a programmer, you might cost someone some money. Usually nothing happens, you just fix it.

Computer programming is one of the very, very few fields where you can make a lot of money doing very little work without having even a GED.

Plenty of programmers make 80-100k/yr, and a great number of lawyers make less than that. How many state-level attorneys make <70K? You'd be surprised.

In summary, programmers have other advantages than pay, and still get paid rather well considering the low barrier to entry in that profession. My work situation is pretty plum, and I don't exactly have a formidable resume. I'm grateful. If I were aiming to be a doctor, lawyer, or accountant, I'd still be in school. And in the long term, I'll end up making more than if I pursued one of those paths, I'd wager.
Sales of Samsung Galaxy S, S II banned by Netherlands juge in Apple patent case
The automatic inlining only happens if the inner function is defined in the same file as the outer function, or in a file that is included in it. If the inner function is called in many places, the normal way in C is to put it in just one C file, and have a declaration of it in a header file that is included where the function is called. Then it will NOT be inlined, unless the linker does link-time inlining, or you do some sort of global compile by concatenating all source files before compiling.

You have to put the whole definition of the inner function in the header file. Also it must be static or inline, otherwise the linker will complain about duplicate functions.
You could say the exact same thing and just exchange "German" for "American."
India too. "If you are not an engineer, you are nothing" I was told that by a friend from India once.
Should Marketing Companies Outsource SEO?
How I Learned an Important SEO Lesson Offline
Is Your Company Guilty of These 5 Social Media Mistakes?
Article says: (Windows 7) "the OS knows it’s a SSD and turns off features like defrag"

So you claim to see improvement from something turned off by the OS? How?
I have authentication on after every screensaver and I've never been able to bypass the password. Weird.
Microsoft fires patent missile at Android poster boy Motorola
Is Groupon Getting Desperate?
A member of our team (RHCP) has gone totally apeshit. He wasn’t getting the
publicity he wanted and cried about it. He finally took it a step further
because he STILL wasn’t getting the attention he wanted. He took it upon
himself to make us look like a joke. He deleted our Twitter account, he
destroyed our GitHub Repo, he has threatened ALL of us physically, he has
promised to dox us, he has been STEALING code and taking credit. Help us
take this rat bastard down. If you have any info on him please come forward!
We are no longer working with him but he is a serious threat to us all.

Here’s more goodies people! We’re not lying to you but he sure as hell is!

http://pastebin.com/7GWTjqLE

11054 Running Ridge Rd
Charlotte, North Carolina 28226

Posted by http://twitter.com/#!/ProTekkFZS/status/106335789713068032
Petrol remote control cars
Samsung Hit with EU-wide Galaxy Smartphone Injunction
Yes, though I think this plays into the poster's point about respect/prestige.

Right or wrong, a popular perception in the USA is that a lawyer wears nice clothes to work, and likes to unwind with a round of golf, fine scotch, and a cigar. Whereas a programmer is an overgrown teenager, wearing ripped jeans, playing video games, and drinking Red Bull. Of course the lawyer should earn more than that guy.
A simplified view is supply and demand. There's only like 600 major league baseball players and their average salary is 4mm. Rare group to get into. There's fewer doctors than engineers or coders. And it's not like you can jump on elance and have someone remove your tonsils. And with greater supply comes greater variability in skill and salary.
I'm not sure if you're serious (Pollan vs. Poe's Law), but local electronics manufacturing doesn't particularly strike me as ecologically and economically sound. Never mind that you could take this ad absurdum and demand local mining, which simply isn't possible (as opposed to e.g. local hops, which is often just bad, but at least feasible).
To be fair, the bug that the post is about has nothing to do with his optimization. That is just context.
Their own site has the same pictures that are on the original post: http://www.raspberrypi.org/?p=78

Looking through the media section says that the picture you have is a prototype board, not the manufactured alpha board they're talking about here.
Journalist vs. microworker: a fair fight?
Active directory works as you'd expect.
How To Sell Dirt
Zuma deluxe online
> However, to equate programmers to (presumably unskilled) assembly-line workers is total nonsense.

Really? Is it so absurd?

Some programming tasks certainly require a lot of skill and insight. Not everyone could be a senior developer on a major software project, or start a successful business making their software from scratch.

On the other hand, many programming tasks today are very much like an assembly line: here are some parts, glue them together like this, make a product. A scary number of "programmers" today lack even basic background knowledge of the theory underlying their work, or a proper understanding of their tools, or any particular training and experience (academic, personal projects/self-study, or otherwise) that qualifies them to work on industrial, commercial projects.

Unsurprisingly, those people produce crap. Their software doesn't do what users need, or loses users' data, or crashes users' computers, or in the Internet age has security problems that let malware onto users' systems. Funnily enough, the people paying for that crap don't much appreciate it, and the software industry generally has a poor reputation for being able to produce good quality work as a result of these fools.

Of course, smart programmers have also built things like the Internet and air traffic control that can co-ordinate landing dozens of planes an hour safely, but people take it for granted that these things work without any understanding of how difficult it is to get such critical software right, and most professional programmers will never work on such important projects anyway.

I don't see how we're going to start distinguishing between software developers who know what they're doing and those who don't until we have some sort of competent and authoritative professional standards body. I don't see how we're going to have one of those until our industry is grown up enough to set useful professional standards. We clearly aren't ready for that today, with widespread ignorance in the industrial community, academics whose theories often don't stand up to practical applications, management who can't even estimate a project within a factor of 5 for time and budget, and consultants who peddle the Next Big Thing as if snake oil was going out of fashion. And thus the vicious cycle goes on, and probably will until our industry is a lot more mature.

Until then, many so-called professional programmers are pretty close to unskilled assembly line workers, and it is a strange idea that they should earn 10x the wage of someone working an eight-hour shift under far less pleasant conditions in a factory to produce goods that you and I rely on every day.
My understanding is that it would be on the high end up not unheard of for various security-related services, too. What are you going to do next time you lose a database, say "Oops, sorry, we were going to use the best available firm but we decided to save 5k quid and then..."
Crazy. Original post on FOSS Patents: http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/08/dutch-court-orders-e...
Lessons Learned from a Software Developer’s First Attempt at Launching a Startup
This is a great list.

I would probably put number 4 "Learn everything you can about vectors and matrices" right at the top though. That stuff really is the foundation of most of what you do in 3D programming.

Trying to implement a camera viewport without some significant investment in vector & matrix math is a recipe for disappointment & throbbing temples ;)
I don't think that optimization helps when you have a spare register to use as a temp value.
Original FOSS article: http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/08/dutch-court-orders-e...
"I hope they go the Double Recall route. I'd rather type in two words once a day and have an advertiser pay for my content than pull out my credit card to hop over a paywall."

Well, that depends on the price of the paywall, the quality of the content and how much you value your time, right?
In house IT staff are getting made redundant while this is going on. Contractors deserve to get what the market will pay - but it doesn't say much about planning and skills development at RBS does it.
There is a big confusion here between personal credit and objective physical properties.

Software is 'eating the world' because it is the most super-efficient building material ever invented.

You could say the wheel 'ate the world', but not because each person making each wheel is a genius, but because of the general physical properties and value of roundness. The overall benefit is not a matter of individual credit or respect, it is a matter of physics.

We should be paying the total programming workforce for the total (personal) effort required, not the absolute (objective) 'value' returned. The excess of value is gain: you do not need to pay anyone, it is a free gift from physical reality.

Now, whether programmers' pay compares 'fairly' with anyone else is still an open question, but the physical facts of software being great stuff does not (or should not) seem to justify one side or the other.
Earthquake In Virginia 2011
It's more complicated than that. Specifically, on NTFS there's that thing called MFT which stores the file information and even the whole file if it's small. You can even get MFT fragmented if you write files from folders A B C D like A1 B1 C1 D1 instead of A1 A2 A3 ... If you copy for example 3 folders with a lot of files (no matter of file sizes) without the queue you made disc reading three times more data and skipping them in the case when you do a simple dir for one folder (before it's cached in memory file cache, of course). Queues are important thing, ignoring them is still bad. Even on SSD -- you reduced the throughput rate even there by not caring.
Should Symbian be ashamed of its "new" Symbian OS version (aka Belle)?
This is not about being the market leader or not. It's only pityful to carbon-copy a succesfull OS like Android only because you're sinking as a rock in Mariana Trench.IMHO Symbian (or Nokia as the main responsible for this) should simply go and hide in a bunker where there's no coverage.What do you think about this? Am I the only one who laughed out as hell and then felt a little offended by the new Nokia/Symbian OS images/videos?BTW I'm an happy Android user.. so I need nothing from Nokia, it's only offensive for every intelligent being in general.
High quality, contentious comments should be front and center in the discussion. People also seem to like expressing their opinion by clicking, which acts counter to this goal.

I find myself wishing there were two values: agree/disagree and valuable/useless. Not because I think we particularly care about the agree/disagree ratio (we can form our own opinions, and comments are always more interesting valuable in this regard anyways), but because then it would absorb opinion votes, removing them from the valuable/useless score that helps determine where a comment is located and how it is colored.
Say hello to node.x - polyglot async on the JVM
Got sick of auto-linked README.md, did something about it
JQuery source viewer
sorry guys... we got sick of it getting auto-linked in IRC and chat all the time and thought it'd be better if it pointed to the thing we were talking about!

http://blog.echonest.com/post/9332881544/new-pyechonest-on-g...
The Cloud and The Consumer: The Impact on Bandwidth and Broadband
Evidence? Evidence for what? Perhaps it was unclear, but I was suggesting that the people who have been defending Google over this, on HN and elsewhere, have been putting forth a lot of misinformation, so that is what I provided evidence of.

I've seen no official statement from Google saying that other services aren't affected, and clearly they are as this latest statement confirms. Yet just a few days ago people who had had their G+ accounts closed were told on this site that they were wrong to spread the "vicious rumour" that other services were affected. I was baffled by the level of aggression shown towards those who were critical of the policy and those who related their personal experiences (words like "obnoxious entitlement" and so on being used).

My comment was not about contradictions in Google's public statements (which I'm not aware of, except at a broader policy level, for example their statements about Korea's real-name policy [1]), but about the attitudes of those who defend Google on this site and elsewhere.

[1] http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2009/04/goog...
Bedook
Indeed, I bet RBS don't get many lawyers charging them as little as £2000 a day.
Could that be because they don't have to win a media driven popularity contest to 'win' office?
That article makes the interesting point (which I'll repeat here for those who can't be bothered to read it) that Samsung logistics use the Netherlands as a hub for Europe.

While the ban doesn't stretch across Europe, they would have to change that to get devices into other European countries.
But you are profoundly fooling yourself if you believe that that is what Facebook is. If all you want to do is CC a list of people some photos, there are way better tools out there.

You are profoundly fooling yourself if you think that most Facebook users aren't using it as a way to CC a list of people some photos. I don't know anyone outside of the tech/blog scene who uses Facebook to manage a public persona. It's just a different way to communicate with people.
Wow, I haven't tried either but not using the tab key in a code editer is kind of silly.
DST buys Russian social network Odnoklassniki.ru
Can anyone speculate on the likelyhood of Apple getting such a ban enacted in the US? If it looks impending I want to order one before it happens.
The Model B ($35), which they refer to in the post, does have an ethernet jack with magnetics.
What's 6 Feet Tall and Weighs 1,500 Pounds? A Minicomputer
Make sure to check out the readme details: https://github.com/purplefox/node.x/blob/master/README.md
Spy on web spies with Ghostery
This is the sort of stuff that's great to read because you can't help but learn something.

I'd never never heard of sorting networks or oblivious sorting before, and it's good to see some answers other than "Quicksort!"
Likr-button for tumblr
meet my mom, she wants a decent solitaire game.
Vitamins For Eyes
I assumed they'd handle this and tried it. From the FAQ: up to 16 processes can be created, maximum execution time is 5 seconds.

http://ideone.com/F3GBH shows the output from a fork bomb. Basically nothing goes wrong, as I'd expect.
OWASP is a good place to start that covers most everything

https://www.owasp.org

Specifically the development guide:
https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_Guide_Project
Given that the ban starts only on October 13 and Android 3.0 does not violate the relevant patents (according to Dutch news sites). Couldn't Samsung just update the firmware in the meanwhile to change the behavior of touch-based photo browsing to whatever Android 3.0 uses?

Edit: according to the judgment summary the Galaxy Tab does not violate said patents.
Advanced Persistent Deterministic Defense
What is fairly amusing is that this is much more true for the FORTRAN(64) that was current when the statement was first made. More current versions(anything since 95) are much closer in features and facilities than good old (very) 64 and it is much easier to write FORTRAN in C++. Useful if you are translating Math/Science libraries but still something to re-factor at a later date (should such a time ever come)
Contracting staff don't tend to cost companies much more than direct employee staff (the difference is typically <20%) - the big difference is that companies have to provide employees benefits,national insurance, pensions, holidays, sick pay, bonuses etc whereas for contractors they just get the monetary equivalent.

At RBS this is particularly significant as they have some of the best non-financial employee benefits in the financial sector.

The ability to hire/fire contractors at will makes the 20% premium well worth it for companies, especially when those skills are only need for a short time period or for particular projects.
If there was really that vibrant of a bricklayer startup industry, then, due to agglomeration, you would expect there to be at least a few geographical areas where there was a high concentration of bricklaying startup business being conducted (think something like Wall Street). Wait, think about that for a second.

There is a concentration of tech startups in SV because the internet lets them sell to the rest of the country without issue. Brick layers / construction are far less mobile because you need to be at the construction site to build a brick wall. Now nationwide startups represent a fairly small percentage of successful small businesses their advantage is how quickly they can go from multimillion dollar companies to multibillion dollar companies.

PS: Read the millionaire next door and you find a lot of people in the use that made a few million from those bricklaying startups. The main difference is it often took them 20 years to get where software companies got in 5.
Please change the title to give at least some information as to what this is - thanks.

ADDED IN EDIT:

OK, you've changed it, but it still tells me nothing about WTF this is. Do you choose your variable names like this in your code?

So unhelpful.

</rant>
"With medical and legal professions, the licensing/regulation creates a large barrier to entry"

This is the heart of the differences in pay. Expensive certifications keep the supply of doctors and lawyers artificially low and thus their average salaries higher. Meanwhile, anyone with a computer can start programming software.
BSON and Data Interchange
Oh yikes. This deserves an update... yesterday. How can it be discovered and discussed only a month later?
I don't want to come off as arrogant but I should say this. People generally do not select engineering as a profession in India- it's one of the default professions for most of the middle class.

I have been involved with computers since I was 6, so for me it was a pure choice. But most of my friends, some of them working for big name SV places don't really love or care about software or technology. In fact, some of them actively hate their jobs. Unlike in America, where people actually go to computer science because they love it. In India it's just the default way for a better life.
... and this link doesn't work for me.
My first thought is how many people were abandoned because of a reliance on the incomplete picture that the old tech bundle provided.
You can do the same with Virgin Mobile (which uses Sprint's network) and probably Sprint also.

VMobile's plan is $25 for 300 minutes, unlimited data/text, throttled after hitting a similar cap.

Depending on where you travel, coverage may be better or worse than TMobile.
Ask HN: How much server space does a startup need?
I have been wondering how much server space a successful startup like Codecademy needs. We've read that they had ~200,000 unique visitors in three days, and that those visitors spent a long time on the site and completed ~2,000,000 lessons.

How much server space is required for this kind of volume? Is it just a couple dedicated servers at a hosting company, or is it something more complicated than that?
Beaver Falls Season 1 Episode 5
Kimberley realises the truth about Jake, Rachael is struggling to deal with the events of last week and Pam's indiscretions finally push Bobby over the edge. When Bobby loses it, he really loses it as the Brits and the Chunk Bunk find out when he sends them on the day trip from hell.
Seems like the violations are software-only (slide to unlock for example), so an Android update by October 13 should solve their problem...or am I missing something?
Twitter Gallery Feature Now Live
The real reason Scoble didn’t take 500K to start a company
I think that if they don't generate the sales from that hub and only from the subsidiaries on each country then they can still use it...
If that is true, than most games in production and pre-production now are using ray-tracing based engines.

Can you cite examples of major studios using ray tracing engines today?
There were the violations by Samsung of the Apple patent:

EP 2,058,868 - method of scrolling / browsing gallery;

EP 2098948 - recording a "flag" in connection with multiple screen taps, of which Samsung would use the system by using Android 2.3 or later version;

EP 1,964,022 - method of "unlocking" of a portable device through the touch screen an "unlock image" in a way to drag.

Patenting phone unlock and how to browse through pictures is a douche move.
I once had the displeasure of trying to program for a Symbian device. I couldn't believe how difficult it was to just get text to appear on the screen. Like harkening back to Petzold's HelloWorld. I am paraphrasing but the documentation said something like "we acknowledge how difficult and complex these API's are but once you grasp how powerful they are you will learn to accept it."