skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Obvious link bait, but they call it bait because it works...

Seriously, fuck these people. Every month it seems that the WSJ or Fortune or Forbes is running some article about how 20-somethings are not willing to give 110% for the company. Well, you know what? Management is the whiniest bunch of entitled pricks to ever walk the Earth.

They feel entitled to developers' labor. They think that we should feel honored for the opportunity to work on their legacy Java in-house apps that have been ravaged by years of turnover, failed projects, arbitrary management requirements, low quality devs, and outsourcing. But it's an insult to their own egos for a lowly developer to ask to be paid as much as them or, quelle horreur, more!

Fun story: first job out of college, I was working in exactly this environment. It was terrible: ridiculous hours, low pay, boring projects, and lack of respect from management. After six months, I got another job offer for a company whose primary product is software, offering twice as much pay and better benefits. I went to HR, asked them to match it if they wanted me to stay, and they pretty much told me to fuck myself. Their counteroffer was a raise of around $5k and tons of opportunities for advancement.

A year later, the senior developer, who had worked for the company for 15 years and was in his 50s with a wife and kids, was fired. Not because of any performance reasons--he was pretty damn good at what he did--but because he was the highest paid person in the department and management wanted to cut costs for some kind of valuation or another. Yeah, he was quite the cost center at $90k a year. They were doing him a favor: now he's freelancing, working less, making more, and far, far happier.

Maybe in a different era it would make sense for a developer to be loyal to the company she works for. But we don't live in that world anymore. Management has done its damnedest to commodify labor and has more or less succeeded. So, let's be commodities! But if management wants to burn us like oil, they should expect to pay the market rate for it.
I've gone a different Route, converting the story to a readable format first: http://thequeue.org/hn
Single page websites have an advantage when considered as web apps. Instead of page loading, directly manipulate the DOM with javascript and fetch content with AJAX or web sockets.

See http://itsnat.sourceforge.net/php/spim/spi_manifesto_en.php
Duolingo is a step in the right direction it seems (though language learning is not "higher ed", it can be used by adults).
It is certainly dumb compared to the movie they ripped off (Carrie).
I don't know much about reverse eng, could someone explain how you can recompile machine code with new compiler flags? And changing getters and setters to be inline?
It's very good competitive differentiation from the pack – hope the users see the value.
The CIO put it in his own words - if people are leaving for other firms, he isn't paying a market wage. You have to earn the loyalty of 20somethings. They've seen large companies lay off hordes of people for dumb reasons. You can't pay someone with short ye time horizons a sub-market wage. Pay up foe your people as they get experience, or pay up to find stable people or pay up to retrain new hires every year.
There is such a difference in coding output. Having had perhaps 50 work for me over the years (and being one myself), the top guys do perhaps 10x the output of the merely "very good" guys. And near infinite with the mediocre ones who on tough projects actually suck more time than they contribute.

The good guys also come in and contribute right off the bat. Like Christophe Balestra, who now is co-president of Naughty Dog. When he arrived on Jak 2 he was pounding out real working stuff the first or second day. By the end of the game (one year later) it was clear he was so kick ass that we promoted him across like 15 others guys to be co-lead with me on Jak 3. And he continues to kick ass to this day. I just site him, but I had the pleasure to work with around half a dozen other totally awesome guys too. Still, the "good" guys will take a system and do a great job with it over weeks. The great guys will knock it out in like 24-48 hours.

Lots of articles on this kind of stuff at my site too:

http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/video-games
I think that, rather than removing software patents altogether, there has to be a rethink of what is 'patentable' (Finger movements? Probably not patentable. An entirely new protocol for transferring data? I'm fine with that being patented.)

Aside from that, I believe that there should be a "6 months to defend" clause attached to software patents (i.e. if you don't file a patent dispute within 6 months of another company publicly releasing something that "infringes" your patent, then you lose the right to defend it). That would solve many of the "patent troll" issues, and to get a large chunk of the rest of them, the laws about acquiring patents in a buy-out/merger should be examined.
Please do not create throwaway accounts to make one-off, potentially controversial comments. It dilutes the quality of the discussion.
"loyalty to the organization" why would anyone be loyal to an organization that is underpaying them? We know from watching the actions of every fortune 500 that the lowest price for labour is what they are after, employees have no loyalty because it is never reciprocal.

If the value walking out the door is so much why not pay more?

He should be congratulated on finding so many smart devs who know their value. Maybe start by thinking of people as people instead of human resources.
Moved all 18 of my domains two years ago after deciding their high pressure check-out page had pissed me off one too many times.

All my normal domains went to www.dyn.com and the few obscure country code ones I had went to www.eurodns.com. I've been happy as larry ever since.
your just the same old stripper. Timeline is straight pimpin' on the street.
nice, very nice!
I'm not noticing it on a VERY large project, but my installed RAM is 12GB. The trade-off between RAM and productivity is in the Reshaper's favour IMO.
My neighbor uses GoDaddy for his domain registrations. Should I move?

It's one thing when Ben Huh moves 1000 domains off of GoDaddy in protest. It's another thing if you're going to avoid doing business with a company that does $10-$100/year worth of business with a company that supports SOPA.

Here are a two things that should be higher on the list:

* Call your congressperson. It's a lot easier for a lot of us to push a few buttons on a web page than it is to pick up the phone and talk with someone.

* Avoid dealing directly with companies that support SOPA. How many of us are reading this list from a Comcast IP? Those of us that do are giving Comcast 10-100x more money than these YC companies. I'm going to be looking into switching to FiOS after the holidays (unfortunately, I know many don't have that option, but you should at least take a look).

For what it's worth, I moved all my domains to Namecheap after the elephant incident earlier this year.
Me too with the color palette - I figured it out today though! I'll write it up on my blog after xmas.
I get very angry when I read articles on all the heartless injustice people in the USA have to go through with their terrible medical system. Putting patients in deep debt, going uninsured, people dying because they can't pay for treatments, and now this. I won't give you the primal response I wrote here first and just leave it at "I hope things will improve and become humane again."
You have a valid point. Remember: the main supporters of SOPA are the Hollywood bigwigs who want to preserve a flawed business model at any cost. GoDaddy is just side show.
“Shortens life” isn't the same as “doesn't prolong life”, I surmise.
Yes, I'm aware of that feature. And no, it's not good enough. I want to bounce between my shell and my emacs without having to deal with the 11 other shells and 3 other emacs windows present. The idea of app-based navigation is that you'll stay in that "app". I don't, my workspaces are collections of windows.

But the traditional navigation is still present (though still a little buggy -- the MRU order sometimes gets confused, and sometimes the graphical popup of each window gets the wrong location), it's just bound to a different key and can be fixed.
"You guys are supposed to be entrepreneurs" - Although HN started with a mostly entrepreneur crowd I don't believe that is true anymore.
Are you seriously proposing that this will have more impact on the human race than the latest opinionated (read: arrogant) blog from 37 signals or drama from Zed Shaw? There are webapps man, a mission to Mars could set back NoSQL development a long way.

Normally I don't snark on HN except a bit against Apple but I couldn't resist here because the contrast between tech business outside the web bubble and those inside it is so massive.
HN's response so far to this is disappointing.

It's easy to read the first page (or just the headline) and come up with the "you're not paying enough/your problems aren't interesting enough" response. That's what pretty much everyone who's posted here so far has said. (And that's what my initial reaction was, too.)

But that's not a terribly useful reaction, and it's especially not a terribly useful one to be posting here, where pretty much everyone agrees with you already.

First, this guy understands (or at least claims to understand) a lot of the points you're all making already, and describes some of the steps he's taking to address them. (Mostly on pages 2 and 3.) Maybe it'll work for him, maybe it won't; I know far too little about the details to have any idea. In either case though, repeating the same "more money/interesting problems" thing over and over doesn't really have any effect.

Second, some of the problems he's having are actually real problems. Any company that's been around more than a few months is going to have existing systems, and it often doesn't make sense to rewrite the entire thing every time you need a new feature...even if the existing system is a bit ugly. As a programmer, that's an important thing to understand, and it's something people who don't have a lot of practical programming experience aren't necessarily going to understand. Knowing that this is a potential issue is something that can help you both as an employer and as an employee.

edit: I'm not saying that this guy actually knows what he's talking about, and that the things he's doing will actually fix the problems he's having. I'm saying that reactionary "this sucks" responses aren't very useful, especially here.
At the end of the day, I treat entrepreneurship very differently than a day job. When I'm running a business, my goal is to make the absolute most money I can with the minimum of effort; generally that means producing something of high value and getting it into the hands of as many people as possible. When I'm wearing my day job hat, my goal is very different: how do I do cool things while making a sizable chunk of cash? Note the ordering there -- I personally am not (highly) motivated by money in something that I'm doing on a daily basis.

This guy is great for entrepreneurs -- a virtual goldmine ready to be tapped by the first person that figures out how to solve a couple of his issues in a way that can bring in the money; he's terrible for employees who want to have a fun and challenging work environment while making good money. No amount of negotiation is going to fix that, in my opinion.
World's geekiest license plates
Big Brother Blue is growing bigger and we are not humans from their perspective, we are data converted to profit. This was expected, not a surprise.
I switched all my domains. I've been meaning to for a while, but this was the catalyst I needed to stop being lazy.
Actually I feel like people have had a thing against godaddy for a long time, and try to make a big deal about unimportant PR stuff. I don't care about sexy advertisements, I don't care about the CEO shooting elephants. I do care about questionable DNS behavior and SOPA.
How Luther went viral (social media in the sixteenth century)
Opera 11.61 development build is now available for download
A buffer overflow in telnetd that allows arbitrary execution as root from remote TCP connections. It doesn't get much worse than that.

At least telnetd is disabled by default so most installs won't be vulnerable.
But in this analogy, the witch is guilty of pouring her toxic brew in the water supply poisoning the commons. And instead of hanging the witch, we simply stop buying her services. Bad anology fails on all counts.

Its more like a really really watered down catholic banishment via money deprivation.
For the poor performers they may be nothing you can do. But for the merely "very good" are there practices that Balestra can teach them?

For example, one thing I've seen that can increase productivity by a factor of ten is good debugging skills -- which are generally teachable. The other thing is to get people on things they're excited about. Mentally checking out is another area I've seen strong people lose time.
Webfaction (http://www.webfaction.com) is a pretty good hosting company. They're developer-focused as you can pretty much use whatever stack you want (and if it's not on their list there's probably a way to get it to work anyways, they'll work with you). They have great service and, at least in my opinion, are one of the most hacker-friendly hosting companies out there (at least for personal use).
well, if someone can handle this part, I've got the email scraping part down :) I don't have access to a lot of proxies to do this
If you don't like Fedora switching away from it will be more productive then fighting it on every change for all eternity.
> Musk seems to be ignoring the fact that getting there is the easy part.

I saw a talk given by a NASA program manager in DC. She said that whenever this topic comes up, there's always somebody who starts seriously considering one-way missions to Mars. The next thing that gets considered is who would volunteer for such a mission, which is immediately followed by who the NASA program managers would volunteer to send.

Those guys have such fun at their jobs.
You missed:

Energiya: 100 metric tons (retired)

Ariane V ES: 21 metric tons (in operation)

Ariane V EAP: 27 metric tons (in development)

... And I'm not sure what the Chinese have got, but it's certainly man-rated and they're planning a manned space station mission early next year, so it's unlikely to be less than 10 metric tons to LEO and could well be a lot more.
Andraji TV Streaming
Most commonly I get: "So could you build me this iphone app? I have a really great idea!" followed by a partial thought and no research into the market.

But then, I guess everyone here probably gets that.
Dec 23rd, 2011– Kim Jong-un Promises Re-release of Father’s Pioneering Rap Album
Combination of your `queue' and `hn reader' would be the best news site ever.
It's also the default registrar for SSL certificates on Windows Server 2011. :/
Anyone else find it strange that halfway through the video one of the lyrics is "We should not be afraid to die"?

>_>
You may not realize it, but you're basically doing what's recommended in the Lean Startup book. Congrats - I wish you much success in the future.
Whenever I read some of my old code, I am always surprised at how although my code was more simplistic than what I write now, there is a certain amount of elegance and efficiency that I have lost over time. Almost like, in an effort to become a better programmer, I now waste too much time trying to be "fancy".
neg away. this is the blunt truth, not a coincidence that these 'innovations' are unveiled this close to the IPO. they want to cash in before while they can. the greater the rise, the greater the fall, gravity is not sentimental.
Kudos to him for redistributing his own wealth the way he deems fit. I admire that. But let's not try to push this way of thinking on everyone else (not saying that's what you're doing here) - for any given person the potential for abundance and wealth is so damn near infinite let's just call it that.

Edit - meaning to say there is no proverbial "pie" that you can only have a small slice of. Your pie is as big as you make it.
I'm amazed that telnet still lives after all these years.

I wonder if anybody has audited telnetd implementations on other systems for the same problem?
> getting to Mars using mostly Apollo-era technology has always been possible

It's not (yet) possible to shield astronauts from enough space radiation to keep them alive during the 9-month trip to Mars.
The most useful (and troubling) realization I've had was that there pretty much wasn't any amount of money my company could give me that wouldn't immediately be earmarked for my own startup warchest.

When your company fails to give you something interesting to work on, welp, that's how things will go down. If I wanted to make big bucks being a soulless drone I'd see who was hiring for sales or quants.
A great tool I use for these kinds of annoyances is bugmenot.com.

Type in newscientist.com and find "bmn@mailinator.com", password "bugmenot". 4 days left to read the article!
Lack of purpose|mastery|autonomy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc , also low salaries and being treated like a commodity in this case probably.
This is awesome. Not because he will put people on Mars in 10 years for $5B (because he won't - it's way harder than that) - but because he can say that, and people listen (and discuss on HN).
I omitted Northrop Grumman intentionally; they seem to still value engineering prowess.

Please don't misunderstand me - there are awesome opportunities working for a US government contractor. However, the "golden days" of the cold war are long gone.
مشاهدة مباراة الاهلى ومصر المقاصة
مشاهدة مباراة الاهلى ومصر المقاصة
http://arab-timess.blogspot.com/2011/12/23-12-2011.html
I've found their recruiters to be polite, but they don't seem to do their research before contacting you. Explaining the "no, I do not want to live in London" angle to a US recruiter is also a bit tricky. :)
To all the Merry Christmas Wishers on Facebook
Are people who are voting 'yes' also closing their accounts?
This is a real problem. My Nexus One did not even get 3.0. Its really disappointing. Why spend on the phone when its not even supported for a year.
> Well that is exactly what I meant. Compiler optimizations by themselves do not cause bugs - they reveal bugs.

Compilers are programs too. They have bugs. In an ideal world, they do not generate broken code. In the real world, they do.
Companies really like things that limit their liability. SOPA/PIPA is one of the largest, federally-mandated wavers of liability we're likely to see in the next little bit.

These companies want to process payments and collect their fees. The transactions in question are minuscule compared to their overall market. Someone comes along and tells them: Just do it this way, and you'll never end up in court. What do you think they are going to do/support?

(Plus, they / senior management are "in bed with" and/or effectively the same as senior management of many of the other SOPA/PIPA supporters.)
'Good' is not good enough
The response is right to correct various errors in the original article. But it also misses the point.

Yes, JRuby is fast in comparison to other Ruby implementations. But this says nothing, because in general "normal" C and C++ code can be converted to run on the JVM with similar speed to the original: The JVM (the standard one) is very good at that sort of thing.

But, there are kinds of code that do not run fast on the JVM. Examples of that are self-modifying code. Ruby implementations happen to not rely heavily on that, so running them on the JVM is fast. However, other dynamic languages that are much faster than Ruby do rely on those techniques, critically so.

There has been a lot of effort to bring those advanced techniques to managed runtimes like the JVM, with the goal of running dynamic languages on them quickly. But overall, native implementations are still far faster. For that reason, Microsoft didn't implement a new JS engine on .NET, it wrote a native one, and for the same reason Google is developing a new Dart VM instead of reusing an existing VM (although, that isn't completely true because Dart also compiles to JavaScript, so it can reuse existing VMs, presumably efficiently because the language design clearly shows signs of being optimized to run fast when compiled to JS).
That single box is made of replaceable cheap parts. Only a fire can take it completely out.
I'm interested in a collaboration

Edit: You could use my API (http://thequeue.org/r?id=URL&title=Title)
My advice would be to use this app as your 'portfolio' for building other people's ideas on a contract basis. ODesk or Guru.com are decent places to start, although here in Chicago Craigslist has a suprising number of iOS contracts.

You will likely find people to partner with that have more niche markets to go after. One of your problems, IMO, is that you're product is very general and therefore has lots of competition. Once you are familiar with a smaller (but not too small) market, you will likely end up with many more ideas for products people will pay money for.

Contracting is underrated in the startup world, IMO. You can spend 6 months out of the year building other people's ideas, and the rest of the time building your own until your own products can support you.
You're both wrong. iso-8859-1 is wrong that it's not inherently faster. Individual SSE instructions are not necessarily faster (in a latency sense) than the x87 equivalents, but the cleaner register architecture (no stack) means that they can be parallel-issued better by the CPU, and code generated to use them does less spilling and filling to memory. SSE is just plain better, though not overwhelmingly so.

And angersock is missing the point: you can't take scalar code and rebuild it into SIMD (except in the very limited, never-works-as-well-as-you-think-it-should auto vectorization features in modern compilers), the parallelism needs to be designed in. That's not possible here without a rewrite of the game engine.
I've already talked about the things in here that were directly contradictory with what I personally want in a job (not interesting, low pay, etc), so I'll ignore those. Here's a huge, huge problem with his mindset:

> Secondly, we're working more closely with folks to determine their strengths and desires and align them to the right systems. Third, as new developers come in, we are teaming them with a business partner to help them understand the impact of their system on the business. We're trying to get them more invested in the strategy. We're trying to engage them in where the company is going.

This sort of reality distortion -- changing the developer's frame of reference as to what is interesting or not -- is one of the absolute key problems this company will have with retention. First year developer: Great, I'm working on this app with does X for the business, which causes us to save $Y on Z; I'm psyched. Second year developer: Wait, I don't see X or Z, and whether or not we save $Y or $Y * W, it's all the same to me; why am I doing this again?

You have to adapt to the developer, not adapt the developer to the business. There are simply too many great opportunities for a developer to expect them to put up with this.

Edit with one more thing: One of the huge underlying things that I saw in just about every part of the article was that developers weren't to be agents of their own destiny. They were to be told what to do, how to do it, and when to do it. Unless you give people some degree of power over the things they do, then 1) they're not connected or invested, and 2) they feel like a rat in a maze. Now, it seems that he has recognized this as a problem -- e.g. "They've got to take something that exists, but they don't have to live with it the way it exists." -- but it seems like a proper solution is a bit away.