skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They tend to have the same level/track/title/whatever-your-company-calls-it, but produce more output in the same job. Sometimes, they produce so much more output or produce output that none of their peers could produce, that it's as if they have a different job.

Said another way, these are the people that I cannot help but think of when I read Joel's essay on hitting the high notes: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html
weird, I get mail all the time from law firms..."you may already be owed this money!" or "we have records showing you purchased xyz lawnmower from abc, we have a class action suit blah blah if you simply sign and return this form you can join the class..."
I like how the cardflick guy instantly criticizes a YC company as sucking. Nice.
I hope not! Hoping he gets lazy and would rather acqui-hire it!
This is all bullshit. Each company pays what is profitable for its business model. Work in a hedge fund? Your pay is commensurate with the business model. Work in a digital agency, likewise. As far as I can tell a digital agency is a digital agency, is a digital agency. They all work the same market with the same overheads. It doesn't matter that the dev in the hedge fund is doing precisely the same job (in my hypothetical scenario).

"You are paid a little better than someone with your same job in your geographical area."

Of course you are, otherwise your employer wouldn't be in business. The operative word being "little". Substitute "a lot" and either they have a disruptive business model and are willing to pass on the cream to their employees (unlikely), or they are going out of business.

Give me any dev in any city in my country and I will be able to tell you what they are on based on their seniority and sector plus or minus a few grand (and what's a few grand after higher-rate tax?).

Tldr - this policy is moot because salaries are open secrets.

FWIW, if you want to earn more go into contracting (i.e. take on more personal risk), move sector (i.e. go into finance), start your own company, or move into a more traditional profession.
Awesome post. I really liked the instructions about getting inital press.

I'am sure it will help me along the way. Thanks.
What about all those 8-year-olds who are capable of work, but do not? Should we be sending them back into chimneys?
Nov 28, 2010
"success will be limited compared to that person who just focuses on their work"

Exactly. A person pursuing a career that is well laid out (such as medical school and then practicing as a physician) knows what they have to do to succeed. As an entrepreneur there is no road map. You have to have plenty of irons in the fire and will end up wasting time on things that won't pan out. You have to be selfish and put the success of the venture above everything else.
Agreed, and I am sure if I was presenting I would have problems of my own. That doesn't take away from the value (or amusement) you get from seeing other people's problems.
Good feedback, I agree completely. Got some ideas on meaningful ways to curate the data so it can be browsed. Need to get it built!
No, you're not.

I don't know if it's good or bad or if that generality can be made.

It sure can be fun to read at times.
"degree of social ostracism"

because people understand when someone works for someone and has to work but they don't understand when someone works for themselves and chooses to work.
That's interesting, I'll definitely take a look at Raphael. Did you just need the silhouette, or did Raphael let you do the click through thing too?
I've done some of that in my teaching - people get the string addition right away since that's how people write in JS and other languages they already know. I immediately show how string interpolation works (by showing how it automatically calls .to_s to handle type issues.)

When I've tried to jump right into string interpolation, people don't quite get what's going on, which resulted in me having to backtrack and do addition anyway.

But that's just my experience.
There's been a lot of "programming is a creative pursuit" analogies (I'm guilty of blogging about it as well: http://carcaddar.blogspot.com/2011/04/programming-is-creativ...).

The motivational factors and work styles are similar, but I think the arguments for it being like painting or like writing are unconvincing. I've come to the conclusion that what programming is really most like is analytic philosophy.

The key insight that lead to this is thinking about ontologies - basically, naming things, but it also goes deeper to deciding how to map the problem onto data structures/design the class hierarchy. This is the same basic idea Evans had for Domain-Driven Design, although I don't know if he made the connection to the philosophy concept of ontology back then (I don't know if he is interested in philosophy, but I do know someone that worked with him who knew about this stuff).

In short, if you can't think or name what it is you're trying to write about, your writing will not come out clear.
While this sounds really awesome and clean, "just styling the markup you have" can produce horrific results in dynamic design/presentation-heavy sites.
I'll semi repeat a previous answer about this topic:

I look at Techcrunch like this.
TechCrunch is TMZ for our industry.

On one end there is the phenomenal up to the minute, you can't find this anywhere else, everyone will be talking about it nonstop for a week, they scooped everybody stuff. (i.e. TMZ scooped the entire news industry on Michael Jackson's death and TechCrunch routinely scoops other tech blogs on stuff like Google trying to buy path and Color's last funding round)

And then there is the tech/startup industry drama and celebrity gossip.

If you look at as such you won't be so surprised and offended when you read it.
"and that means at the end of the day some people are unsatisfied" -- exactly! And somehow you think this is awesome? It is, for the bureaucrats. They see the pendulum swing from left to right and back every other decade, collecting their ever-growing cuts along the way, primarily for wearing a special hat.
if you are interested in thinking the company from a 'long view', definitely check out this post: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/06/08/a-brief-history-of-the-...
it was featured on HN a few months back and is definitely a wonderful (if expansive) introduction
Well, I'm generally anti-war, but I recognize the necessity of having a military. If someone joins the military, they agree to follow lawful orders. The commanding officer has the authority to force the person to do things they might not want to do.

Also, I generally agree with the "Good Samaritan" principle. To knowingly allow someone to die or become harmed through willful inaction is a crime. That's a case of the law forcing people to (in essence) do work.
This would have been something like 18 months ago, and was on an older Fedora box. It wasn't quite so trivial as that two-liner.
Http://www.livetvcenter.com/watch_abc_live_stream_1943.asp
No, it is not really. To adapt a related note http://www.hxa.name/notes/note-hxa7241-20101218T2158Z.html from a while ago:

What makes writing writing is what it is used for. Writing is used for communicating between humans. It only works the way it does because of what is on the other end of it -- another person.

And that is why software must be different. Software is different from writing because its (ultimate, essential) purpose is different (and particular): it is not communication, it is (engineering) design. It works the way it does because it is for constructing an artifact.

When you look at software, what you see is not language, it is a machine.

To represent a machine requires a particular kind of structure. A machine has a particular form, and a description or notation that captures it must reflect that form. That form seems to be a recursive, hierarchical regularity -- a nestable scaffolding. And a machine has a core of objective logical rigidity.

Writing lacks this hierarchical logical structure. It communicates illogically, by allusion, impression, etc. Its use meant it never evolved any other way.

Instead, software must have this logical structure. The term 'programming language' is perhaps a source of the confusion, now unfortunately established. Software does not communicate to a machine, it embodies the machine.
What are the use cases for web workers in mobile environments? I can't see any good reasons to be using up the viewers battery and limited prrocessing power that way other than for (maybe) backgrounding some of the processing for a web app.

On a non-mobile note: If you use my computer to run your map-reduce job without asking me first; I don't like you.
Ask HN: How do sites with little unique content get SEO clout?
How do you get search engines to notice you when you are just a portal to other content? Think a service like padmapper.com or hipmunk?
> How do you handle adding the same styles to page elements that aren't siblings/exist in vastly different areas of the dom structure?

That's usually a case for refactoring. Either by pulling styles common to both elements out and up the tree so they apply more widely or creating a class that can modify both. In the latter case we'll usually use a technique like the last example in the article (more of an OOCSS approach) that works independent of the dom structure.
> I and other programmers sometimes alienate people when we speak because we either have to clarify intuitively obvious ambiguity or explain things by decomposing them into such detail that the explanation becomes incomprehensible to others.

Good to know that others struggle with this. However, I wouldn't go so far as to blame it on my programming/engineering background. I should be able to explain concepts without taking unnecessary time to clarify intuitively obvious ambiguity and I should be able to perceive my audiences' level of understanding and avoid oversimplifying things. Programming skills without ability to communicate are severely limiting.
PG and Harg Taggar talking backstage now:

http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/12/watch-tc-disrupt-sf-2011-li...

Really good.
Recursion isn't worthwhile in Java because of 1) a lack of tail-recursion and 2) the clunkiest possible syntax and most restrictive possible semantics for lambdas.
Http://www.lazytechguys.com/news/9370/
If the President is so eager to make the rich pay their "fair share", he should start with his friends at Google, GE, Berskshire Hathaway, etc.
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/17234044
The battle over batching and batch size has been going on for decades in the world of lean manufacturing. An example quote:

"American manufacturing managers traditionally considered setup costs as a necessary evil and made little or no effort to reduce them."

"The lean/JIT philosophy suggests that a firm should eliminate any reliance upon the [Economic Order Quantity] formula and seek the ideal production quantity of one. Of course, a lot size of one is not always feasible, but it is a goal used to focus attention on the concept of rapid adjustments and flexibility. Naturally, a reduction in inventory levels means an increase in setups or orders, so the responsibility rests with production to make every effort to reduce setup time and setup costs."

http://www.enotes.com/management-encyclopedia/lean-manufactu...

The key Lean insight here is to lower setup costs for tasks to as close to zero as possible. An example of that might be working to lower the costs of doing making a build from your source code. If you can get that cost close to zero, then you are much more likely to see regular code check ins.

This lean principle is tremendously useful in pushing you towards more agile development. If you can lower the batch size of your feature releases to a much smaller batch size (or even one, i.e. continuous deployment), that can have huge benefits.
i have the same issue on drag dropping with chrome on linux
Computer Tutorials
The alluded to arms-race reminds me of Nicole Sullivan's presentation about CSS best practices: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2439420

A video of the presentation is the first response to the top comment.
Show HN: Help me build a thousand Lan Houses
This is an excellent article, and the phenomenon discussed there is quite widespread beyond CS. It is a part of a wider trend, together with grade inflation and the drive toward an outright elimination of examinations in some schools (e.g. Harvard). In plain language, it is a consequence of extreme leftists expanding their influence in academia.
So apparently the real "exorbitant privilegue" is not being able to print the world's (soon to be ex) reserve currency, but being a poor country (Chindia) with billions of people willing to work their way out. Interesting thought.
Right, it looks like the first report was then, but the next 46 pages of the thread show people complaining about it including Sept. 12, 2011. More info at:
https://www.macworld.com/article/161794/2011/09/the_towson_h...
Has anyone experimented with this frameworks?
I'm curious to know which one is the best in terms of how long will they be supported, adoption, features, and ease of use.

I'm currently experimenting with Backbone.js but I find it a bit hard to adjust to MVC in the browser. Tutorials on the web are also not very helpful and most of them incomplete; but I'm not giving up :)
Programming is not "just like writing" it IS writing (i.e. communication via the written word) but it belongs to a similar genre as technical writing, in that it involves structured instructions for how to make things happen. Rather than telling a person what to do, you're telling a computer what to do. Those instructions are simply written using a language and syntax that the computer understands (along with explanatory comments for the humans). Yes it's "writing" - communication of ideas through the written word - but it's not like writing an essay, poem, short story or screen play.
And then due to some Microsoft court case in 1999, they also did away with permanent contractors as well (now after 1 year, you must be incorporated).

Who did this benefit? Not the government, they lose taxes as now the contractors have to incorporate (filtering your income through an S-corp allows you to deduct all sorts of expenses). Not the contractors who now have to maintain and run a corporation.

It's always the corporations who benefit. Corporations are largely owned by the massively wealthy.
PyCharm & YouTrack up to 50% off during September
Show HN: A simple concert calendar me and eneve made
yes of course.Actually all our costumers are informed about him, but he still have in his info tab our company's name.
It would be unfortunate if everyone thought this way. It will be a sad day when the only innovation in the world is new web apps.
Three New IT Job Titles at Tipping Point
how do people feel about the electric color scheme?
24 Hours of Reality
Makes sense. Do you ever run into specificity collisions when you pull styles out of the main style tree?

I could see whatever you pulled out being clobbered by the huge amount of specificity you have built up by mirroring the dom. Heavy use of the child selector would probably prevent that from happening as much, though.
Great perspective. There are some celebrities who seem to live and die by the hype associated with those sorts of stories. And there are other celebrities who have a distinguished body of work and only incidentally appear in those rags. Which kind of startup would you rather be: the Kardashian or the Helen Miram?
I'd have more faith in Watson than the typical GP. Watson would have no problem remembering all the intricacies of diagnosis (if patient has symptom A, ask about symptom B and order a test for C) etc.
WSJ has taken to calling them a research firm "According to estimates from research firm Yipit Data" in an article about groupon

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190426550457656...
> Gag.

I can't tell if you're objecting to the law or the messenger. The site is obviously trying to drum up business, but their advertizing tactics aren't really germane.
Create original content. Build links. Dominate the social scene.

See http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-i-would-do-seo-for-hipmunkcom for Tom Critchlow's take on it. (Did this post inspire your question? Seems coincidental.)
It will also help massively to "massage" unemployment figures in a positive spin by reclassifying a million or two of them as "entrepreneurs". (And hey, the debt ceiling can be raised indefinitely so no problem re costs. We finally arrived in The Future: the perpetuum mobile exists.)
Structure of emacs text
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MM seek W or M for Back-End Fun, Python
A lot of people bring up the idea of rigor when I compare prose and code, and I think it's really overemphasized. Just think of English as a language with a really flexible type system that lets you duck type the hell out of everything. In Python, I can write a method that expects a file object, and (at least the last time I used urlopen, which was a while ago) you can pass it something you open from across a network, and a lot of it will still work. Accidentally using a network resource instead of a local resource isn't particularly rigorous, but Python makes it work. English is that, but more so.

The key line for me is "... it's hard to use metaphors in writing. It's simply more abstract." I have this working theory that abstraction in programming language is more or less equivalent to metaphor in person language. The core idea behind metaphors is to create a convenient lie that helps expose some aspect of what you're talking about by comparing it to some other domain. Consider my last paragraph. English has no type system. Telling you that it's duck typed is a lie, in the sense that it isn't true. But as a metaphor, it's convenient because lets me unify two ideas (programming languages and regular languages) under one aspect (things that have degrees of rigor). Similarly, having an abstraction over local files and network files lets me take two things that are accessed very differently, and let me pretend they're the same. It's a lie, but it works.

I'm not really sure how the abstraction==metaphor relation holds under closer scrutiny. I'm also not certain that it's particularly useful in terms of helping me make better programs, but I like it.
Apparently yipit is now "yipit data" a research firm.
The first guy had a business with millions of users, a partnership with Apple, and 20% monthly growth rate. He seems to have gone on stage just to show off!
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I apologize in advance if this opinion offends anyone, but every HTML UI kit that I've seen simply can't hold a candle to native kits such as WinForms, WPF or even Cocoa. I would really love a write-once browser based solution, but I just can't see that type of solution ever catching up to native tech.

How long do we have to wait before the browser can catch up? Do you think it will ever happen?

The closest thing that I've ever seen is Silverlight. With it I've been able to make some very excellent front-ends, with EASE, that look and behave identically between Mac and Windows. EDIT: The only challenge with Silverlight has been wheel-scrolling, which works fine on Windows but only works in Out-Of-Browser on the Mac.
"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

It has been a while since I read it, but I had always imagined the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" as a large function in which you input syntactically-correct sentences and it returns the truth-value, which can then be used to determine the clarity of the "picture" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tractatus_Logico-Philosophicus#...). Truly fascinating. I should re-read it sometime. I feel like it has some parallels with the work I am doing in my "Design of Programming Languages" course.

If you have a background in analytic philosophy, you may find this of interest: http://www.hxa.name/notes/note-hxa7241-20110219T1113Z.html [Wittgenstein for Programmers]

edit: well I'll be, hxa7241 himself just posted the link. Great minds think alike perhaps? ;)
The comparison would be more apt if abolishing slavery just meant that you couldn't employ black people on plantations. But those people were given rights to work for a wage, buy property with their earnings, or run businesses. What you have right now is that people in the developing world voluntarily entering employment contracts because they are the best available so far. Simply ending those contracts does not do any service. If those contracts are not "fair", we have to ask why that is. Perhaps it is because of protectionist policies in the developed and developing world?
Ask HN: How important is progressive enhancement for websites? 
I'm building something that uses a lot of javascript on the client (backbone, GClosure, etc)... Making sure the content is accessible without JS has turned into a big time sink.

How important is progressive enhancement today? Is it a "must-do" item, or can it be relegated as a to-do item for a later date?
Bank of America cutting 30,000 jobs
It's like unsuspecting developers are walking down Developer Lane and see a candy bar sitting there that says "FAST, ASYNCHRONOUS WRITES." So they pick it up, bite into it, and then the candy bar grows a giant mutant global lock head that eats their face.
String#omnomnom
Stalled Web Dynos on Heroku
While some say that TechCrunch is the TMZ of our industry, some days it seems like Hacker News is the TMZ of TechCrunch. I don't care what anyone says, we're all eating up the TC drama over here.
Warco : The news Game and why it could fail spectacularly
It's a bit dated now, but I think this is still the best take on why Tumblr did better than Posterous:
Where's the compiler and git?
David Karp discusses Tumblr’s growing pains
In Study, Fatherhood Leads to Drop in Testosterone
I was able to do the click through using the invisible path. The project was a kind of weird puzzle, so the click through was a must.

I upped my prototype here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/491131/puzzle/puzzle.html You can only drag the camel.

Eventually I gave up because I wasn't able to drag the piece correctly if it was rotated.
"So you would be OK with requiring everyone to use Windows as their operating system, in perpetuity?"

Of course I don't think that. I meant by "ubiquitous" to imply the opposite. I fear we're talking past each other.

The risks of Google behaving like a Microsoft-style monopolist here are low because (a) they have no monopoly in browsers, VMs, or OSes to abuse, (b) their culture is the most hacker-driven of any large company, (c) their interests are aligned with what is good for the web, and (d) the industry has changed since the bad old days.

Given this, and because the potential value of this project is so high, I'm willing to give them a chance.

Since making my original post, I've read a bit more about Bracha and Newspeak. Assume for the time being that Dart is an evolution of this work. We're talking about a fast, small, even-more-dynamic Smalltalk augmented with ideas from Self and E, designed for the web and multicore. That's mind-blowing. Now throw in the implementation prowess of a Bak and the institutional support of a Google, and we're talking about something potentially game-changing. To judge by their track records (e.g. the Resilient embedded Smalltalk that Bak worked on), these guys are out to correct not only the mistakes of Javascript but of Java as well. Historic stuff, which they have as good a shot at pulling off as anybody ever has.

I admit the odds are against it turning out so well. But this is the rare case where at least some optimism is well-grounded. If what they release does turn out to be an attempt at the above, it will be exciting.
I was on stage (testranking.com) I completely froze when PG started to fire questions at me.
It is amazing how fast he got to the core points.

It was my first time on stage, it is really hard to prepare for this kind of experience.