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$200k isn't a rock star salary.

You are correct that paying market salaries for competent engineers does not ensure competent engineers.

However it must be noted that not paying market salaries for competent engineers definitely ensures that one employes substandard talent. The market is working well right now and competent engineers have no problem receiving market rate. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever why competent engineers will not find a job paying the market rate for their talent, and that is exactly what happens. As for the companies that can not pay market rate, well they are simply not competitive and will fail. That's how the free market works and it is a very good thing.

Any company that requires being competitive in the tech domain needs to be willing to pay for key talent. Companies like Target definitely need to do everything they can. Arguments that incompetent developers are good enough are absurd. Obviously what they have now is not working.

Building a site that can handle a nationwide retailer the size of Target, second only to WalMart in brick and mortar stores, is completely non-trivial. The top 2 engineers there need to be paid at least $1.5 million annual salary. Sorry. I know many companies don't like this but there it is. Now obviously there are many levels below this, but this requires a pretty large development team and several below this level are going to be getting $200k-$400k. At the bottom, the losers that are just out of college and don't know anything, those guys are going to be making $75k to start. Because that's the starting salary. Companies don't want to hear this. Only the fatuous useless ignorant executives that have run the company into the ground should be paid these salaries, in their opinion. Well, they can keep thinking that and see where it gets them. Many will lobby Congress, that is a popular tactic. Pay a lobbying firm $25 million and maybe you'll be able to flood the market with cheap engineers from overseas who are willing to work for $21 an hour, and are able to do the same things that any other $21 an hour retail employee can do. Because the overseas guys that really know their stuff are not looking for $21 jobs, they are making the same salary as everyone else with their skill level. Because that's how the market works.
I can't believe some of you are saying they should put together a bunch of awesome programmers and rewrite their platform from scratch.

Certainly that is an option. But rarely is it ever the correct one. Your new platform could be as riddled with bugs as the old one.

The truth is that finding good engineers is about knowing the right incentives. Retailers are losing the talent wars because they don't know how to compete. And while salary is one lever Target can fiddle with, it certainly isn't the only one.

Target needs to look at the right incentives for the people they want to hire. Is telecommuting an option? How about direct authority to approve changes? Or the chance to build your own team? These are the incentives that matter to engineers.

The problem is cutting through all the rhetoric in hiring. Target can say "we want to revolutionize the ecommerce industry" but do any engineers actually believe them? That's tough.
I've been using a Micro Instance for almost a year (the free tier) to run http://nsfw.in/ successfully. And the traffic on the site is also not bad at all, with 100,000+ pageviews a month on an average. You've to know the right thing you need for your requirement and tweak it.
The beauty of this whole thing is that we're parsing due process responsibilities over an allegation of plagiarization of an essay on the Magna Carta, one of the founding moments in the history of due process.
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It's great to see a researcher with such passion and love for his subject. I never knew about Oberon -- my only exposure to this side of the universe was programming Pascal in high school. This was a great read.
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Ask HN: What risk are you taking in 2012? (Trigger Pull)
Hi,

What risk will you be taking in 2012?

What are you going to do to grow, to become uncomfortable? What trigger will you be pulling?

For me, it's going to be taking a good chunk of time off work, to let me work on myself (lifestyle changes), work on some business goals, and focus on my love life again.

I'd love to start a few more adventures next year for 2012.

Trigger pulling (taking action) is definitely going to be a priority for me.

What are you going to be doing?
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Dyn.com did this to one of my domains as well. They received a complaint from Amazon about a "phishing" link (which turned out to be a legitimate Amazon affiliate link), and suspended my DNS hosting without any warning.
HN has been methodically stamping out humor recently.

No joke.
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Keep in mind that the essay, as shown in the OP, is not what was finally submitted by Aaron Kerzner to his class. This is: http://dimensionsofhistory.homestead.com/files/2008/londonpr...

For all of you claiming it's unfair to name this chump: he posted the damn thing with his name on it to the public internet. It's even more amusing because what he turned in was even more amateurish than the original. It's titled "Magna Carta's Affect on the Class Structure in London", even though it scarcely discusses the class structure in London; he misspells "dimensions" in the header, even with the aid of a computer; it's white on crimson with gratuitous visual aids; the typesetting changes erratically between double and single spaced; finally, what few sentences of original writing there is to stitch the thing together betrays not so much any actual thought so much as a vague assertion that the plagiarized paper was somehow about the topic he was assigned to write about. That it was even accepted as college level coursework is a stain on the reputation not just of Aaron Kerzner, but of Drs. Michael Swanson and Debra Mulligan (who, even put together, couldn't catch this clown) and Roger Williams University.

By the way, this guy is in our industry: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/aaron-kerzner/1a/b96/3b0. And he majored in history.
Completely off-topic, but if you ever get the chance to indulge in Bell's Oberon, please do. Just the smell of this beer takes me back to spring/summertime in Ann Arbor.
In politics it's called the Overton Window...I wonder if there's a similar name for this in corporate terms?
Do they really differ from the titles we use in the USA? "Senator" Bush. "Mr. President" (every president past and present)

"Sir" is no more a title of nobility (today) than any of those.
Find a meetup group (http://www.meetup.com) in your area. I did this a couple of years ago and made tons of new friends and brought myself out of my comfort zone.

I've met such a diverse group of people over the years that small talk has become much easier. This was always a problem for me in the past. I'm much more relaxed now when confronted with situations where I have to interact with people I don't know.

Like anything, it's just going to take practice. You can't read it in a book. You just need to go out there and do it.
Rewriting a major ecommerce site in parallel with maintaining the current one, while ensuring that all functionality stays exactly the same, that all cross-pollination between systems stays exactly the same... you make it sound like it would be easy.

The stakes would be incredibly high, you would need extremely skilled, experienced and passionate engineers and a management environment that would give them enough breathing space to be successful. Everyone's careers would be on the line. Besides the fact that no one is going to want to stick their necks out for Target.com (whereas someone might consider it for a site that improves lives in a meaningful way), that's going to be a lot more difficult than you're making it sound.
Err... government props up your life as you know it. You drive on public roads. You engage in an entire economy stabilized by FDIC backing and various other tactics. You are kept safe by public employees- policemen, firemen, et al.

Yet you say we should find government no more credible than Scientology?
I must be living in some parallel universe. My resume just sits up on dice and monster and the only hits I get every day are from the same useless headhunters about exciting "6 month" ruby or perl gigs. Sure, I'm not the best at selling myself, and I'm terrible at networking, but you'd think if all this press is true about a dev talent shortage, I'd be seeing some more outreach, even though I'd probably not be interested.
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Eh I work at a place that is arguably "boring" (we're not in the buy-a-mop business, but it's definitely not sexy) but the culture & freedom I have to operate make it exciting. I get to call some shots on what I make, which is a huge perk for me.
>I'm not the best at selling myself, and I'm terrible at networking

Yeah if you want a cool job, or however you define the job you feel you deserve, you need to sell yourself and network. Period.
It doesn't "break"...you just have to think about what you're doing. Which, again, is the point.

If some external code is passing you pointers, then using shared_ptr is exactly the wrong thing to do, because you (presumably) don't own the memory. And if you do own the memory, there's no problem putting it in a shared_ptr. The fact that you can't blindly stuff everything into a shared_ptr is a feature, not a bug.
It's confusing that you would direct posters to the guidelines while willfully disregarding the guidelines yourself, and call the guidelines "stupid."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3405357
The point here is the removal of due process. His DNS was shut off by Bluehost without any warning -- in this case there was actually abuse, but what if it were a false positive?
$200 K might not sound like much in Silicon Valley (although I suspect it's a good deal more than FaceBook and Google are paying people who don't have PhDs or IPOs), but it's quite a bit more than I've ever seen out here in the Sacramento area (and one can find a house for a family in a safe neighborhood for less than $500 K instead of over $1000 K).

The number was just a straw man to get the discussion going. Find some value that attracts talent, perhaps between my wild guess and your numbers.
Spamhaus is not as bad as some other blacklists have been, certainly. Nor do I think they started out as bad people, though you have to admit that running a blacklist might tend to attract a certain type of person. Nor do I think they're stupid, or that their lists are ineffective (at the times when they're not deliberately blacklisting innocent people). But like others who've gone into the blacklist business, they do seem to have lost their way morally. I wrote about an example here: http://paulgraham.com/spamhausblacklist.html
You can always cheat by referring to him indirectly ("design chief has been knighted") or simply claim that you are addressing him informally. The Sir is formal, I do not believe you are required to use it in casual conversation?

Well, we could put this another way and say that his name has not changed, in the same way as you might address me as Mr. John Doe OR John Doe OR Mr. Doe. Mr, Mrs, Miss, are all (classically) forms of minor titles.
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You are correct - this is different since they were only providing DNS, too many hours had passed when I replied that I forgot that part of the story.
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Fwiw, ETH Zurich (where Oberon was developed) ships emulated versions of the Project Oberon operating system that can run under various modern platforms: http://www.oberon.ethz.ch/

Wirth and his collaborator Jürg Gutknecht also wrote a book about the project: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0201544288/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...
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My gut tells there should be a method of defining data and transactions to benchmark and allowing a DAL that is excluded from the benchmark that enables them to be translated as appropriate for each DB

The cynic in me tells me there it will be extremely-hard/impossible to make it meaningful with the different CAP theorem compromises the different databases make.
Well said.

Debugging, instrumentation, refactoring and understanding "system integration" are going to be big skills in an environment like this. Making a whiz-bang social-media site on a clean slate is a valuable skill, but it's not what this problem needs solved.

Compensation can be non monetary as well. I telecommute a few days a week at my current position, and the hours are reasonable (important when you have a family!). My compensation is probably quite meager by Bay Area standards, but things are cheap in the Sacramento area.
The auto-page-refreshing is annoying!
"Business Objects" -- <<shudder>>

"What is this ''diff'' you speak of?"
Target is the third largest brick and mortar retailer in the US. Running a computer network nationally for Target is not a solved problem. Sure, it's a solved problem for #1 WalMart, using entirely custom software that WalMart developed in house. But it's not like WalMart is selling that software to Target.
C++ code isn't inherently complicated. The people who write C++ code might make their programs unnecessarily complicated. I've read at least one program that was written that way. A web application written over 12 years ago without the aid of standard libraries or common sense. However, I've also read some really great code in C++. It seems to me to be very polarizing because it lets you do what you want without forcing any conventions on you, the programmer who knows what they're doing.

I suspect the reason why people who make programs with C++ make those programs unnecessarily complex may have more to do with their psychological makeup than the limitations of the language (which I believe to be rather few).
"because they already did." -- good point.

I guess that's one way to solve the idiot-rejection-filter problem.
Next time, hopefully you'll watch as he systematically adds leads and contacts to your company's Salesforce account. You can't control what knowledge he gains on the job, but you can establish proper procedures for recording on-the-job data which could include a prohibition on recording that data into personally owned systems, perhaps through trade secrets claims.

Thus, future employees are free to take themselves and their knowledge to their next employment but (enforeceability issues aside) they can't take the company's data.
You can't go faster than c from anyone's reference frame (that's why space and time contract, to prevent that).

"I understand that Earth will just see the ship time flow more slowly."

You have that reversed: Earth will see time same as usual, but time for you will slow down.
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That's actually not a bad answer, I think. Along with david927's comment this could be setting someone down the right path.

I think it's a good answer because understanding what they are and how they relate to each other through the stack is good knowledge to have. They're the building blocks of everything that gets done. Not understanding that, at minimum, is no different than having a CFO of a manufacturing company that has no idea what SolidWorks is or why things need to be welded together (or even what a weld is!).

I wouldn't guide people away from learning to code, unless they didn't really want to do it. Unless you really, really want to learn, don't. You'll waste your time and the result won't be nearly as good as spending time on something that would be more useful.
Ever since the "Slay Dragon" requirement has been removed, the honour seems a bit shallow.
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I'll grant you the larger point that inferring relationships by template value type can be a pain. But this example is kind of bad. First off, I assume you meant to derive SharedBFactory from SharedAFactory? Otherwise, it works fine.

If not, the only problem here is that C++ won't let you have a virtual function override that only differs by return type. And since it can't tell that shared_ptr<A> and shared_ptr<B> are related by value_type, it complains (this is the larger point that I granted you earlier). But the type theatrics are hiding a bigger problem....

In this example, you can either fix the type error by making makeOne() return a boost::shared_ptr<A> in all factories (in which case, you really do want a polymorphic interface), or you can make a new function that returns a different pointer type (in which case, you don't). The type system here is doing you a favor, and telling you that your design is bogus -- you shouldn't be creating a polymorphic factory interface that returns different types (because that isn't actually polymorphic, is it?)

This isn't totally academic: I find that in nearly all type-error situations like this one, the real problem can be traced back to sloppy coding.

"locking the memory bus to do atomic operations on a shared_ptr totally blows when you're expected to turn a request around in a few microseconds."

There's always a cost to reference counting, and therefore, it's not always appropriate. That said, the only time you should be triggering atomic operations are on pointer copies and allocations. If you're doing allocations per request, kiss your microsecond response time goodbye -- the reference count overhead is the least of your worries. And you can avoid unnecessary pointer copies by passing shared_ptr<> objects by reference. With a small amount of care, it's possible to reduce shared_ptr<> overhead to essentially zero.
Yea, but understand that is not my point, and I'm not asking for your Tony Robbins like advice. If there was such a desperate market for talent out there, I should be seeing it, regardless of whether I was selling myself or not. Either their talent searches are incompetent or this is just manufactured news for somebodies agenda.
Mom and pop music stores (if they even exist anymore) now have to compete globally because of the Internet.

Just like when the horse and buggy was phased out by the automobile, industries have been changed forever by the Internet.

Smart companies have adapted and are still around. Others have been destroyed by these changes (Blockbuster is a recent example).

The same thing applies to offshoring. Depending on your industry, you may be competing with $8 Mexican and Chinese workers. The solution is to adapt and make yourself worth the extra money. If you can't, it's time to spend your free time learning a new skill set.
The presence of "octonions" in the boost library kept me from seriously considering it for like 2 years. I understand the rationale--that by making it monolithic they're getting more libraries installed on more developer's machines--but come on. If I need threads, filesystem, date_time, foreach, etc. don't make me install wave, spirit, proto, phoenix, fusion, fucking octonions.
I hope this doesn't come out ignorant, but how often does someone possess a phenomenal level of spatial intelligence, yet very little verbal/mathematical intelligence?

I'm not arguing that there isn't something wrong with current education, but I feel the point here may be misrepresented.
CTY was the first thing that came to my mind when I saw this article submission. I took the spatial test back in middle school and it was fairly difficult, but that's what's to love about CTY - they make everything challenging to get a true understanding of your strengths and weaknesses. K-12 and higher education could do worse than to mirror some of the aspects of CTY.
In defining who merits respect? You're damned right it is no more credible than Scientology.

What you're describing is a proper non-sequitur, why would a government's utility inform its credibility as an arbiter of respectability?
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> Anything that increases build times is inherently a bad idea. Iteration time has been THE major issue on every project I've worked on. Sucks up man-hours like nobody's business.

I'd say this is only true part of the time. Optimizing for developers' time (thus, payroll cost) is a good idea, but not to the exclusion of other costs. For instance, if you're building a web app that's grown to the point where the business's primary cost is the hardware on which the software runs, it makes sense to make technology decisions with that in mind. Trading some developer efficiency for lower data center costs is perfectly reasonable.
The problem is that it is currently easier to measure math and language skills. It would also be difficult to teach because it is less mechanical. But I believe advances in CAD's and user interfaces would eventually help in creating a curriculum for developing spatial intelligence.
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Most programmers aren't social. It's why we get into programming in the first place (writing code for 8 hours a day instead of talking to people). If we were, we would have gotten into sales or marketing.
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Learn C - become a punter in C.

The hardest part is learning Pointers. It will take lot of time to become a punter in c.

With C you understand the inner details and working of programs and memory. Learning C is a fun ride - you play with Pointers.

Get involved with some Open Source projects that's built around C and heavily on Low level programming.
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> For starters, the standard C++ string type is reference-counted,

The GNU implementation of it is reference counted. I don't think every implementation is.
But somehow those bottom feeding headhunters can find me and send me about 20 emails a day all for the same job.
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Right. Even without link cycles, any link would have to contain (nearly) the whole internet.
In fact, should he even end up a British citizen (dual-citizenship, give up his US citizenship, or whatever else), he would automatically become a full knight.
"Almost every modern invention is heavily math driven" - citation?

Anyway, no one is advocating the building of bridges by school kids who can build things without math. The article advocates giving school kids who have great spacial skills, but not apparently great math or written skills, a chance to participate in technical greatness.
You can just use a website mirroring tool like wget, they've been around for ages. I've done just that with plenty of reference websites.

Don't forget to set an acceptable delay to ensure you don't overload the servers, though. Mine usually run all night.
some observations:
1. when content changes every hyperlink to that content must change along with it.
2. pass by reference (url) is no longer possible.