skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It reminds me of my brother's job. He used to work as a bike builder at a local shop here in PA. He used to get paid $10/bike and he would build many bikes per night. They switched it over one day to $11/hour and he then had no incentive to build as many bikes (and he admits didn't doesn't work as hard..because he was going to get paid the same regardless). Most people are like this.

Well, that was dumb.

Ditching commission doesn't mean performance can't be rewarded, via bonuses for good performers, generous raises when merited, etc.
> Realistically, you can't expect a large portion of the population to be capable of programming.

Then you look at the code of the people who are attracted to coding, and 'capable' of it and pale in fear of how bad the code is (even if it works).
The End of the x86 Era
As far as I (and our accountant) understand, the structure we have is not a problem at all from a legal point of view (We're not from the U.S.), so no worries there.
Coding? Maybe. Actually developing new software? No.

What is the difference? "Coding" is applying the tools you have to solve a problem that is in an already solved class of problems. (I.e. use VB to slap a quick UI on a database)

Developing new software often means solving a new class of problem.

There's nothing wrong with that distinction - coding certainly has value. But it's an important one to keep in mind. Both for your career, and for businesses that employ one or the other kind of developer.

But I'd argue that "coding" as outlined above is more the new literacy than the new profession. It is an ability you will need to get any job done well.
Maybe it's just me, but I honestly have trouble taking anyone who uses mustache templates seriously because I automatically assume they've never worked on a large website.
For those without their own hardware, you might want to try this Apple ][ emulator, built using JS / WebGL, http://porkrind.org/a2/ . Don't forget PR#6 to load a floppy image!
Good point. I'll try to add a little qualifier.

I would say that sales is definitely a creative task (but you're right that's the important question w/r/t Ariely). There is a rote aspect to working the phones, or keeping records, but sales is a performance skill that requires a lot of thought about strategy, rhetoric, timing, etc. etc. By no means is it rocket science (I wrote a bit about that here: http://www.fogcreek.com/guide/The-most-basic-things-your-com...), but there is a lot to consider and get good at.
Nice work - you totally owned it.
The underlying problem in tech hiring is that it is difficult to assess candidates in an interview format. Many of the skills and personality factors that make someone a success are dependent on context. Transplanting an engineer to a new context is uncertain, even for putative rock stars.

Many of us have presumably seen our share of brilliant people flame out because they could not adjust to the ambient value system, and figure out how to get the right things done. Often these people flourished in a prior context: school or another company with more or fewer constraints.

Assessing that context match is hard. The most successful way is to have a mutual trial period (ex: internship). Failing that, in interviewing for a full-time position, the closest you can get seems to be by trying to simulate what it'd be like to work together. That's why you try to throw them at coding exercises or difficult problems. "Brain teasers" are silly but coding challenges where you see how far they can go with some direction are actually pretty useful. They give you a large dynamic range within which to quicky hone in on someone's current skill level. More interesting than their current skill level is how quickly you think they can progress, and so that's what you try to simulate in an interview.
Good work :D
People perform differently when they are being watched not to mention interviewed. Some deviate substantially.

Also, that collaborative editor might not fit their fingers due to a habit.

Even more: often people just don't like each other and the interviewees feel that, get nervous and perform poorly. I know someone who was dismissed as completely unqualified on the phone screen interview where I work and then Amazon hired him and he's quite successful there.
Kim Jong Un looking at things. Really.
Even this way, it doesn't repair the last two years, where I've felt like I put it a lot more work, it would only make things fair from now on, which is only a small part of the problem.
Happy to chat further, but would love to focus the next year on building something others can hook into to get their own channels out there.
Mou is a Mac OS X app that allows users to edit Markdown files. http://mouapp.com

Just wanted to leave this here.
I would doubt it:
I think what they're arguing in court is historical, e.g. BigCorporation sold(past-tense) units of our product that infringed(past-tense) our I.P.

[disclaimer: I'm no lawyer]
I'm starting to realize this may be the only way to go for me to feel good about the whole thing. Thanks.
Great thoughts and very well explained also - and neat to see BoardGameGeek get linked on HN - been a BGGer for many years.
Good old story:

A salesman and a programmer go on a bear hunting vacation together. As they arrive at the log cabin in the wood, the salesman tells the programmer: "Ok, why don't you unpack and get everything set up, and in the meantime I'll go find us a nice fat bear."

The sales guy leaves and the programmer start unpacking. An hour later, as he's about half done and taking something out of the car, he hears a loud roar coming from some bushes near the cabin. He looks and sees the salesman shoot out from the bushes, with a huge, snarling, growling, drooling bear charging behind him. The bear is enormous, all jaws and claws and muscle.

The salesman runs straight for the door of the cabin, the bear right behind him. At the last moment, he steps to the side. The bear, carried by its momentum, crashes into the cabin. The salesman quickly closes the door and locks it behind the bear. Loud noises come from inside as the bear trashes the place and tries to find its way out.

The salesman turns to the programmer and says:

"Ok, phew, that's one done. I'll go find another one while you skin this one."
Top TED Talks of 2011 To Inspire Tech Startups
Yes, but if someone offers GPL licensed software to you, they themselves are in violation of the GPL if they don't cough up the source code. I don't see how I as an end user couldn't bring an action against an entity for violating the terms of the agreement.
there exist plenty of roles like this, just the names might be different at different companies. spolsky describes his program manager role at early Microsoft: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html

this person is not a people manager, instead they focus on making sure that everything lines up between teams and other resources. there are other roles that match your technology-but-not-coding-unless-you-really-need-to criterion, such as analysts, who do things like build predictive models to figure out how to price things or how much of something to buy or how well something works.

I imagine that there might be a bit of condescension amongst some for these roles, but talented and hard working PMs and analysts are invaluable. just as you feel about coding, I feel about the more business-oriented aspects of making anything of significance. I get it & could probably do a bit of it, but don't get any "feeling" from it.

I would recommend that you keep up with your CS degree, or at least get a strong minor as the best of these people understand coding quite well. then perhaps take relevant Econ and business courses. go to job fairs and ask about internships for these sorts of roles. ask what sorts of people they are looking for in these roles. an internship would give you the pre-existing structure to do something like this. unlike coding, it's a much more difficult to practice and get good at on your own for this role.
What are pros and cons for url structure of a web-app regarding scalability?
I think social network spamming has become much more popular, I wonder if this also has had an effect as people leave traditional email spam (or don't worry about replacing it when governments shut them down).
Upcoming Film on Sustainability features Wattvision (YC W09)
Just emailed you. I think NewsBlur would be a valuable enough immediate addition that it would be worthwhile. I know I have plenty of demand on my side.
Ask HN: How can I find this thread?
I'm trying to find few old threads where people created Google docs to share of their startup ideas and partner up with each other. Anyone has one of those threads or knows how to search for it?
Mexico City’s Largest Landfill Closes, Creating Jobs & Energy
Mexico City shut down its Bordo Poniente landfill, the capital's largest garbage collection site that over time became a 927 acre heap of trash. Jobs and energy will emerge from the trash.
+1 for Tasker.

And to Locale above, Tasker actually has support for Locale. The things you can do with those two apps combined is absurdly awesome.
Sounds like your CEO has already said to himself, if not yet to you, "how hard can it be?"

The truth is coding is not that hard, coding well, is a different game.

Does he play sport? Explain that knowing how to hit a ball with a racket does not mean you can win the Open, but learning programming as a comparison doesn't stop there.

Imagine all the games in the tournament being played at once, on one court, at the same time. That's how complex applications work, and it's that level of information that programmers routinely have to carry in their heads when they work.

Making one change often leads to a cascade of work because making a change in one part can affect the outcome of many other things.
Sorry but I have to completely disagree that someday all we will need is just coders. Code is just a way of getting a computer to do something specific. So what should a computer do? Usually a computer should do something identified as valuable. So who figures out what is valuable? Typically everyone else... business people, researchers, administrators, doctors, analysts, etc. Having just a bunch of coders would be essentially worthless in that we will always need people in other roles to figure out how different techniques can be applied in different fields. After that is identified, the coders can then get to work on figuring out how to get a computer to do it.
Hacker News worthy?
Farming became obsolete because of economies of scale.

Factory work became obsolete because of economies of scale.

Manufacturing became obsolete because of economies of scale.

What do you think is our generation's economy of scale?

I think the near future will involve making it possible for anyone, even those without a technical background, to quickly build beautiful internet products.

What do you think is the next big leap? What would make coding obsolete?
obviously off-topic, but could you please clarify (and may be post some links?). Does this means, that if I now cancel my greencard and leave usa back to my home country, up to 2022 usa irs will have some rights on my income?
Depends on what the job is though, if your building web apps and your unlikely to ever need to even use a built in sqrt function I don't think it's a good question. A good question would be one the candidate doesn't know but can think their way through. For a lot if candidates I'd imagine this question wouldn't let you learn to much about their problem solving.
My personal experience with amazon recruiters has been poor. At a college career fair they basically shoved off anyone who was looking at internships (while treating full time like they were gold). I've never interviewed with them because I really don't care about a company that won't give me the time of day if it isn't aligned with their immediate needs.
How AllFacebook sold for millions (& didn't get a trademark suit from Facebook)
How long did it take to hear back from USCIS about changing your E3 to a new employer? I've heard it can take months in the worst case, or weeks in the best case. I long thought that bouncing out of the country and getting a new visa would be easier and I've heard of people doing that when changing employers. I'm guessing you either had a flexible new employer who was prepared to wait for you, or that waiting to hear back from USCIS isn't even necessary - you're actually allowed to start work for your new employer as soon as the LCA is approved?
I'm the co-author of Matador. I worked on Twitter.com - which is a relatively sized website - and we used Mustache... so there's that.
The cars they hire are still regulated as non-street-hail transportation--a livery cab in NYC, for example.
The H1B visa is designed to provide foreign workers to a business in instances where doing so does not affect American workers. When the visa is denied, don't jump to the conclusion that the bureaucracy failed. The more likely result is that the bureaucracy worked because the company was either trying to hire a foreign worker for a job that many unemployed Americans could do or that they were trying to undercut currently-employed Americans' wages.
I love how everyone keeps asking where is the compromise from the tech industry. This bill is like someone saying "Hi Bob, this store you have here is great, but sometimes someone comes in and steals one of my products off your shelves and since you can't guarantee me that I will get paid for every one of my products that walks out the door I'm going to have to shut down your store until you can."

But, to answer your question; great job. Did you get the sense that she truly had any idea what would happen if SOPA/PIPA pass as they are written today?
883 reasons to become an Objective-C developer in 2012
I couldn't experiment with his advice with my current business model. Working on a longer time interval (daily, weekly) when you want to deal with multiple clients during a single interval is a recipe for unhappy clients and potentially legal fees.

If I am billing weekly, but in practice I do 2.5 days of work for each of two clients, do I bill both for the entire week? Most of Thomas's arguments for rounding up in these longer increments on the basis of opportunity cost demonstrably don't apply in this context, because clearly I can use the other time to work for another client. The best outcome I see if someone I'm working for finds out is that I have an unhappy client and probably lose the contract -- which is fair enough, frankly, if I'm billing for a week but only actually working for them for half of that time.

For the avoidance of doubt, I'm not arguing against having a reasonable minimum billing period so clients don't mess you around and so you can manage your time sensibly. I'm just challenging the notion that "hourly" is not a reasonable period for some of us, and pointing out that "daily" or "weekly" can have serious drawbacks too.
I used to go to Starbucks every morning. But they got too expensive. Their product always has had a ridiculously high profit margin, with the cost of preparing a cup being under 10 cents and selling for $1.49, then $1.59, then $1.79, now it is $2.19. Starbucks price should not have been raised in this economy just because raw inputs went from 10 cents to 13 cents. Finally the customers, well myself at least, said this is absurd I am being ripped off here, and I bought a good espresso machine for home. Come to think of it though, this is all pretty irrelevant since it seems they are still packed with enthusiastic customers most of whom are renting wifi for the price of coffee. Hey, if the market can bear it, jacking up your prices continually is not the worst plan.
Startup Stories: Healthcare Insurance for your startup
> Why are you blogging about upgrading to Rails 3.0.x when the current stable Rails has been 3.1.x for over 4 months?

Like mentioned in another comment, upgrading from 2.3.x to 3.0.x is a feat in itself. Upgrading from 2.3 to 3.1 might be doable on a smaller project, but with code written in several versions of Rails we decided to go 2.3 > 3.0 > 3.1.

> Also, shouldn't these simple bugs be quickly and fully discovered by automated tests?

There was plenty of HTML inside Ruby statements in our templates that started being escaped. Something like:

<p><% (price > 10) ? '<strong>Expensive!</strong>' : 'Cheap' %></p>

while ugly was not wrong. This is a very simple version of some of the problems we saw, and there were typically several per template. Writing tests that check the HTML output of template files would be unmaintainable.

> If the upgrade is done on a branch, why must the work be completed during the weekend?

To avoid a big merge. We changed a lot of files and didn't want to have to re-check our work after letting Git auto-merge our changes.
"Better, because writing code is a creative act which can be done with or without a traditional (antiquated?) office-based job, and can create enormous personal and economic value."

This article emphasizes making, which I think is important. It reminds me of my great-grandfather, who came to the US from Poland and started a clothing manufacturing business (that still exists to this day). I learned to make custom-tailored clothing by being in the business.

There was an opportunity back then for anyone willing to learn to make something and sell it. There simply aren't too many of these kind of opportunities today. Coding is definitely one of them. All I have learned from tailoring- the act of making something from scratch- has helped me as a developer. And vice versa.

"Most academic training is focused on teaching students theory, not practice."

The maker type of entrepreneurship requires a practical, work-based education, and college doesn't always provide for that. You learn to make by doing. It's circular: You learn to make by making. The resources for learning to code are readily available, and anyone willing to start making their own projects can teach themselves.

Another thing school can't teach you is what to make. This is where learning to code comes in: if you have experience with something else, you can code tools for that something else.
It's not a contract, so you can't use contract law against them. You're not a copyright holder, so you can't use copyright law against them. What kind of action are you expecting?

Edited to add: I guess if they sold it to you as a GPLed work then you might have some recourse under advertising law, but even then I think you'd probably be limited to getting your money back - there's no way you can compel them to give you the source code.
I'm not a good designer but i've been improving for years mostly by putting in my hours. Aside from learning some basic photoshop skills, the best piece of advice I can give you is to read and re-read this article: http://flyosity.com/tutorial/crafting-subtle-realistic-user-...

Note the word subtle. That's the key.
Contrary to the bloggers report, there is more info and source available:

http://ftm.ircam.fr/index.php/A_brief_introduction_to_FTM

http://imtr.ircam.fr/imtr/Gesture_Follower
[dystopia]Imagine a starving person from Ethopia being sold on ebay and then destroyed because the buyer said the bought good actually had the Somalian nationality[/dystopia]
You can allocate the string with one malloc:

RString *s = malloc(sizeof(RString) + length); /* allocate 'length' bytes extra memory past the end of 's' */
s->data = s + 1; /* to the extra memory past the start of the string struct */
"When I step out of my bubble I realize that its really difficult to find cultural-personality fits for what building software requires."

I absolutely agree with this statement. When programming, you'll always hit brick walls; times when you're stuck and feel like there's nothing you can do about it. That's when your genuine interest in programming and serious attention to detail must get you past the hurdles. It's not something you can just learn in an Apress book or nettut.
Forget Lean Forward and Lean Back -- It's Curl Up
Looking sharp. We're lucky to have a charismatic figure from our demographic who can articulate the issues that matter to us.

- From the outside-in perspective, you carry the impression of being a young, successful, and likable Silicon Valley entrepreneur.

- From the inside-out, you have the ultimate cred, not just for starting one of the most influential online communities but imbuing it with your distinctive ethos of caring, humor and nerd.

With these two identities, you're in the position to really help influence how the future is shaped.
Long term vision > short term gains.
Exactly. I think that metalsmithing in the past would be a better analog for programming today. It is difficult, takes years of apprenticeship to do well, but it still provides a valuable service (horseshoes among many other things).

Not everybody back then were smiths though, just like not everyone today will be programmers. Programming definitely has a great impact on society (like smithing did), but if you consider the incredibly important impact that farmers have, they hardly even compare.
Many people who work with me got their first contact with a computer in the ADSL age and never even heard a modem handshake. Two people here used cassette tapes for storing programs, I for my Apple II, the other guy with his Sinclair and, later, his MSX. Some time later I wrote a program that dumped a floppy into a cassette tape for backup.

In case you wonder what are you hearing, it's the audio modulation of a memory dump. If you pay close attention, you can distinguish between program (noise-like) strings (less noisy) and graphics (more rhythmic sounds). Try the lo-fi link for maximum vintage feel.
My guess is that in the next few decades, not knowing how to code will be equivalent to being illiterate. This doesn't mean everyone will get paid to write code, but I suspect there will be far more programmers in the future than now.

Of course, coding in and of itself is likely to change dramatically, as languages will gradually support higher and higher levels of abstraction, making programming more and more approachable for the average person. But no matter what the code looks like, a strong grasp of logic, problem solving, and how software works will probably become a fundamental skill in society.

http://www.quora.com/Does-the-computer-programming-professio...
Didn't get that impression at all from watching so well done
Actually law and medicine would be interesting to me if it wasn't for all the hazing rituals and the down right sociopathic evil of the entire justice system. Law and accounting reminded me of learning a codebase when I took a few classes in them at university.
You Don’t Have To Support Piracy To Hate Bullying & Extortion
Sales only directly links to the bottom line in the vary short term. If SAM up sells a customer on something they regret buying then the company can easily lose out on 20x sales for that short term bump. More importantly if Sally answers a phone call from SAM's client who want's some info but is not buying anything that day then it's hard to structure things she is interested in providing info vs trying to promote an instant sale.
"Most people are just not like 'us' for better or worse. Most people don't get giddy over running implementing a new algorithm or building an elegant framework, etc..."

The question is if commodity software development -- you know, yet another 'book keeping' CRUD app -- requires any serious algorithm much less "new" ones. Serious creative mind workers are generally outliers, regardless of the field.

Programmers: http://atomictoasters.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Telepho...
I, for example, am a regular telecommuting employee of a large company in San Jose. Nominally, I'm in San Jose for one week every quarter, though it has been less than that lately. I spend a lot of time on the phone and on video conferences.

PS: Nit. It's about 650 miles from Portland to SJ.
Maybe he did? Maybe he has been enjoying the sea for the past 12 hours? Jesus, you really don't have better things to do than making assumptions and sharing them with people?