skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wasn't being ironic, actually. I'm not advocating for or against Coca-Cola; I'm stating how things are. There are many businesses built on secrets, whether it's source code, business practices, pricing deals, secret recipes, etc. And just as with other legacy, semi-functional market practices (stocks, patents, copyright), nobody is going to be willing to erase the value of their "ownership" overnight. And while a world in which everyone can brew and/or sell their own Coca-Cola would be cool, it would also put a lot of employees out of work.

I'm neither defending nor vilifying corporations or other secrets-holders. But secrets are a big piece of the semi-functional market system that allows software engineers to draw a paycheck. If you want to talk about subverting or supplanting that market system, I'm ecstatic to have that conversation. But advocating FOSS without addressing the economic issues is pure dreaming. (Not that I'm knocking dreaming; but it's only useful as Step #0).
I understand the point, but the difference is that enterprises couldn't move away from IE6 for years since that was the latest one. In the meantime, it got so entrenched that it was very hard to move on.

Java 1.6 was released soon after 1.5, so companies that decided to stay with 1.5 are at fault, not Sun (now Oracle), which provided them with the fully compatible upgrade path.
The last point about in-formalisation of the discipline is not incidental. I think that it is sort of specific to the community that Hacker News hosts.
Prices in the UK are super high, and there are some really strange device limitations (e.g. Can view on ipad but not the iphone). The application is really flaky as well. I'm afraid compared to ibooks and Kindle apps it just isn't up to anything much.
IE6 is still a supported product so if there are issues people can get help. Most people in enterprise will choose a supported over unsupported product. Actually, I'm not sure why anyone wouldn't.
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The problem I had with Patrick's essay is how derogatory it is to what we do.

I am a programmer because it's what I like to do. People pay me money to do it. And when I go home I read about it, talk to others about it, and I practice, practice, practice. I think about how I can write better software, reduce the amount of bugs, test better designs, and improve my productivity. I think about programming all of the time.

And like Jacques, I'm not afraid to tell others that I'm a programmer. I think most people understand what that is by now. I write programs for computers. If I say "Systems Analyst," or "Solution Architect," they will probably look at me funny and ask what that means. In an interview... it will probably be passed over without a second thought. So I call myself a programmer.

And I call myself a programmer with a bit of pride. It isn't an easy profession and involves far more than typing in a bunch of things that make computers do stuff. Experienced employers will have realized this before sitting some one such as myself down in an interview. They want someone with enthusiasm for the craft, the experience building many different systems, and the ability to learn. There was a time when I would have accepted any programming job. However there comes a point where talking to yet another company who just wants to replace a cog in their machine becomes a waste of your time. It is hard to be good at this job and experience and ability has a cost associated with them.

So yes, I am a programmer. Thanks Jacques for writing this.
Probably you are outside of the US, like me. In this case search returns only public domain results.
> The futon UI is a pain to use.

Interesting I had quite the opposite experience. It found it quite a bit better than any other NoSQL database UIs. Someone even copied it for MongoDB and stuck it on top of it.

Why do you think it was pain? And what NoSQL DB UIs have you found to be better and why?
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Yes, Rails is now "acceptable" technology at places like banks (to wit: wells fargo). I never thought I'd see the day.

Time to switch frameworks i guess :/
Speaking as someone going through the process of commoditising at a fixed price what is traditionally a very variable price service business, my biggest piece of advice is figure out how to be profitable at one type of job in this space, systemise and do only that, and say not to everything else.

Once you're profitable at that one type of job ("type" here could be size of app, type of client, whatever) you can repeat the process. Rome wasn't built in a day and you don't have to cater to everyone immediately.

Work out how you can automate each step, but most importantly the qualification step that will tell you if the client is a profitable one for your process or not.

Once you've done this, you'll find it easier to outsource each part of the process.
node hash.js – 29.661s
sha256sum – 5.093s
openssl dgst -sha256 – 4.567s

Updated the article as well. I usually post all the output to avoid the appearance that I made up the results. Even though they are fully reproducible up to an extent. Or that I have better things to do that making up horror stories about poor node.js performances in certain areas.
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It was smaller scale but really polished. The content was more complete in NYC where SF was just making announcements of really alpha products. (I spoke at both and can say my own talk got a lot better).
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Should software be patentable? That's the wrong question to ask
Let thy food be thy medicine
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Thank you NYT for this insight.

It is easy to put blame purely at The Banker Bonus. Fixing education and providing equal opportunity plus social mobility is a continous struggle. A lot of complex open issues.
Now that an 800mhz A5 gets better scores than 1.2Ghz chips... are we going back to the PPC vs Intel days?
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Firstly, set a minimum per project. There is a overhead to every project and that needs to be accounted for. Each project needs to make enough profit to buy you lunch.

Secondly, look at any non-key functions that you are performing and see if a Virtual Assistant can help you with.

Thirdly, you have to believe this: people are not that price sensitive. You might be $50 more expensive than other people, but most don't care about that $50, especially if it is paid for by the company, and there are other factors - deadlines, professionalism, etc.

Fourthly, try hard to increase your quotes until 20% of people reject you for being too expensive. If you are in a price competition, you will always invariaribly feel stuck in the future just like you are now.
Django Unchained has a bit of a blip (which you can see in the totals), but I don't think it significantly changes the overall analysis.

http://www.google.com/trends?q=ruby+on+rails%2C+django%2C+dj...
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Please be specific.

In my experience, even if you are building a quick'n'dirty prototype, you'll always need to fire up a terminal or run the GUI to interact/play with the prototype you are building, to see if it "works".

In this case you may apply a --this is my very own definition-- "lightweight TDD approach" just to automate all the procedures that you normally do to test your prototype. Moreover, since you are writing a test for something that does not exist, it may help you defining better what you want from your experimental code, because you are using your prototype before it even exists :)
Well I don't think web browsers are really the same thing as server side code. Even individual pages in a browser are sandboxed from each other. Just like individual request/response cycles for a user session probably should be on the server (unless you go out of your way to break that, ie making some variable "static").
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Your github? https://github.com/jrockway/ says you're in Chicago, IL

Analysis of your comments suggests non-European use of English. "Strong male" whereas European English is usually classified as "Weak male".

And on your Google Places page you list only Chicago as places that you've lived. https://plus.google.com/u/1/105337359554006968707/about

Unless you're trying really hard to consistently give a false impression, I'd bet you were just playing devil's advocate there as you do indeed appear to be from the US.

Oh, and your domain is .us... but we all know that's a weak indicator.
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No, it's just the javascript engine is different (which you would think would make it a pretty bad benchmark by AnandTech's usual standards).

Though the shift from A8 to A9 and single to dual core and the emphasis on GPU means the CPU speed isn't the key metric it might have once been.
Problem is, non-graduates already feel an incredible competition from Asian workers, and this brings the market value of their work way down. Graduates not as much - at least for now.
These self-righteous Hacker News fan boys are ridiculous aren't they?

Look at their dueling blog posts! LOL! Nerds!
Aren't all quants that work as speculators (eg math PhDs at hedge funds and prop trading firms) trying to do exactly this? I would be really surprised if they've found anything novel. Thousands of really smart people have been looking at this exact same data for a long time.
IE6 and JVM5 PWNZ J00!
Ask HN: Where to hire contract electrical engineers?
I am looking to hire an electrical engineer to work on an Arduino/Netduino shield for an open source project.

Is there an oDesk for hardware people?
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Errors in open-source C++ projects which was detected with help static analysis
Yep, hopefully these will be the days where we understand that comparing numbers such as processor speed when literally everything else in the stack, both hardware and software, is different is a completely pointless exercise.

(EDIT: I know that a JavaScript benchmark isn't an example of this, this is more a general comment on people comment on phone specs at the moment).
The article is intended for C/C++ programmers, but developers working with other languages may also find it interesting. The materials collected in this article will be useful for authors of articles, books and blogs. Examples of errors can be used to demonstrate advantages of different programming styles for instance, why you should not try to make your code shorter by writing long expressions.
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Well put.

I would also argue that we need measures of human progress other than productivity per person. For one example, with each generation pay ditch diggers more to do less work, and by that standard we are woefully regressing.

Someone posted this the other day, which I'd never read before but I thought was quite an eloquent argument for the same. Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness: http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html
What? Where in the item is this grey background for Read state? When I toggle the "Keep unread" checkbox, there is no discernible change in the item.
Hi Guys,

Thanks for all the answers so far - much much appreciated. A few points I should clear up.

1) I do outsource translation. I work closely with a group of freelance translators who I interviewed back in January when I started up. I wish I could speak 20 languages, but I don't ;-)

2) Running a business unfortunately isn't just Project Management and Project QA. There's also finances, marketing, the website to maintain. Certain things can be outsourced, and I have for the smaller jobs.

3) I am happy to make some investments to improve long term returns. Indeed, I didn't pay myself last month to pay for a few improvements. Not ideal when you have rent, but sometimes sacrifices have to be made and I'm ok with that.

4) After reading your comments I'm a little less nervous about increasing prices. I worry, of course I do, that'll I'll be too expensive. Pricing is definitely something I am learning, it isn't easy.

What do you guys think about partnering with someone? Perhaps taking on a junior partner so we can work together towards common aim of Applingua… Is this ever a good idea?
In seriousness, the only real solution appears to be cognitive enhancement: cybernetic, genetic, and/or pharmacological. The Singularity may or may not be near, but till we get AI we need to increase human intelligence.
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Google does do stuff that makes it harder for other companies to compete. bundling many search services and information gathering services(which by their nature help search and the ad ecosystem) might be better for the consumer(and sometimes worse, i.e., privacy, market concentration) but becomes a huge competitive barrier because a competitor has to offer all those services , not part of them.

Are all those bundling moves are best for the consumer ? maybe not.

Is google buying ITA - the flight comparison service gives value to people, instead of google recommending you a great flight search when you search for a flight , and letting providers compete among themselves ? or even showing data from flight search providers directly on the page? i'm not sure it's helpful for the consumer, and it would probably decrease competition in the flight comparison services, or maybe even kill the competition totally.

Is it a legal monopoly, and break anti-trust laws ? i dunno. But don't mistake the law with the reality.
You just don't know about the other side of the coin -- no durability to start with. You'll be flying fast, until one day you realize your data is corrupted.

Not saying it is bad thing to optimize for speed, it is just a bit dishonest to downplay the negative effects especially after calling a product a DATA-base.

http://nosql.mypopescu.com/post/392868405/mongodb-durability...

http://blog.boxedice.com/2010/02/28/notes-from-a-production-...
still need to wait a couple of hours...
It's not about evaluation. It's about ensuring standards, as I said. Yelp reviews are irrelevant.

Quality: I'm not talking about star ratings. I'm talking about ensuring hygiene and safety (see below).

Safety: I was referring to the need for an authority to ensure that the building is safe for use as accommodation. Are its stairs adequate? Is the wood stable? Are the windows high enough? Is its balcony safe? (for children?) Are there any open boilers or pipes? Is there proper air ventilation? Are there mats in its bathrooms?

These are all questions that pertain to the safety of people staying at the venue. It doesn't matter that you or someone else might be willing to take the risk to save a couple of dollars. That's not how the law works.

Accessibility: accommodation venues should provide facilities for disabled persons as is required by the law. The fact that you run your business on Airbnb should not exclude you from those requirements.

>Government agencies can't go out of business (no downside) and have zero incentive to do an amazing job (no upside). It is no surprise that this produces DMV/TSA style mediocrity.

Yep, I'm not going to start an argument about the merits of the government as a concept. I would, however, ask you to compare the state of countries that have a functioning, democratic government, and the countries that don't.
Maybe a language where variables are global by default and there are no concurrency semantics at all isn't so great for serving up web apps to concurrent users?
How out of touch is Google? From: http://books.google.com/help/ebooks/ios.html

"Recommended for iPhones with 256MB memory or above"

That's an easy way to confuse a set of customers that either don't know or don't care about how much RAM their iPhone has. Why couldn't Google just list the models that are compatible? Maybe their Android world of specs has clouded their judgement.
The Next Software Revolution
I use MongoB much more often than CouchDB, but I think that Cloudant's BigCouch open source project is great: easy to set up and a lot of scaling headroom. A nice auto sharding and replication layer on top of CouchDB.
Job security, job satisfaction, good pay. Pick any two.

This statement doesn't make much sense when you think about it. It seems to be a lazy riff off of:

"Fast, cheap, quality: Pick any two"

Each of those characteristics are in competition with each other. Doing something fast often hurts quality and/or cheapness. Doing something cheaply may take longer and may harm quality.

Job security vs. job satisfaction don't really compete with each other. In fact, being more satisfied (i.e. happy) at your job may lead to better security indirectly, as a happy worker is a more productive, engaged, and charismatic worker.

Perhaps JMJ is trying to appeal to the commonly-held notion that fulfilling, satisfying jobs are ones that don't pay well - teaching, research, social work, etc. OK, it applies to certain sectors. But not across all sectors. A failure to recognize the inherent structural differences and opportunities between job fields (and public vs. private) hurts whatever rhetorical argument he's trying to make here.
I bought a book, Neil DeGrasse Tyson's Death by Black Hole, from Google Books when it launched a year ago.
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You would think so, wouldn't you?

This is a bigger discussion than I have time to do justice, but there's an entire field of business books around the "valley of death" -- this huge hole that businesses go into and never come out. It's not a linear-scaling thing. 10 people aren't just 10 times harder to manage than 1. The reason you see lots of 20-50 person IT shops is that they never made it out of the valley. There's this huge consulting field dedicated to helping businesses who get stuck here. (Whether they actually help or not is up for debate). For instance, if you have 500 people, you'll have a full HR staff full of people becoming experts in various areas of corporate staffing law that affect you directly. If you have 100, you don't have the funds for those guys yet you are still affected by the same laws. It's that way for a hundred things -- the overhead is okay if you are big but unmanageable if you are crossing the line between small and medium.

If you have enough acceleration, yes, you can bulldoze your way through. Just start writing checks. Google and others did this. But it's not like server scaling where for each bit you grow you can just add more management. Wish that it were so simple! Instead there are these regulatory plateaus you reach where it's an entirely different world past that. Then there's just the issue of scaling a lot of people working together, which gets harder in an exponential fashion. None of this is fun -- and what it does is stifle all the companies without the huge accelerations.
Phishing, spoofing and trojans... oh my
Dean Baker has a good response to this article with actual data. http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/david-bro...
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Of course you can attach files, but you need to do it from the app that contains the file.
Autodesk Shifts R&D Budget Toward the Cloud
MyGengo doesn't scale very well when you have large catalogs of strings. Their frontend interface is nice but is missing a useful search and it has lots of little bugs.

If anyone has an alternative for a translations editor that works well with PO files, let me know.
I'm not interested in gaming the system - I'll see what happens. This isn't a fair test either - the title has changed a little. I'll also go and re-analyse some old data I have.

I'm still interested in the data that forms basis of your claim, if you have any.

EDIT: Actually, it made it to the front page, and now has vanished again. I suspect it's been flagged, so will never see the light of day again. <shrug>
You answered your own question.

"I don't charge enough."

Tada. Fix that.
Discusses changes over the past few years in several large corporate R&D budgets.
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Funny how "convention", "tradition", "standard terms", and "the way things have always been done" invariably break in VCs' favor. $10k of legal fees is small potatoes but I hate the unbridled arrogance that says taking note of that is somehow being greedy but insisting on its presence is simply being a gentleman.
Cripes. It's not a closed system. The Send To functionality will work with ANYTHING. That's about as open as you get without going open source.
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Do these petitions do any good? That is, is it even worthwhile to sign it? Or is our time better spent elsewhere.
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No, it is not. Yet not knowing what the alternative is like gives us that delusion.

http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html
No, it doesn't. It's still mostly a software issue. As you can see a dual core 1.2 Ghz GS 2 gets 3300 ms, while a dual core 1.2 Ghz Droid RAZR gets 2000 ms. And that's just the stock browser. It can even get 1300 ms in Firefox.

The A5 still uses 2 Cortex A9 cores. Whatever optimizations Apple has done to it will have a minimal impact on performance. The biggest gains will still be obtained on the software side.
Patrick's essay is for people who want more pay, recognition, and authority in a company that is not primarily a software company. If you aren't facing that particular problem, you don't need his solution. Hopefully you found it interesting anyway.
> synch is not the killer feature it once was

I disagree. Mobile connectivity is going to continue being spotty for the foreseeable future and Couch's "store locally, sync whenever" paradigm is perfect for any application that needs to remain functional when not connected.
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I agree "Programmer" is a sufficient job title, but my favourite "alternate" title I've seen anyone use is "Technical Enabler". It says "I use technology to solve problems and create value", which I think is very apt most of the time. You might be programming or you might simply be sharing/applying knowledge about computers, software, the web etc. that most people don't have. At least that's what I feel it's like most days.