skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think that's even possible in US tech unless you start your own company or hit a startup jackpot. One medical crisis could wipe you out if you didn't have insurance, and getting insurance is more difficult and expensive as you age.
Lastday, Capricorn 29's. Year of the City: 2274. Carousel begins...
You should watch it, this man is a hacker in his field.
He show where and how economics went wrong.
Troublesome that it still is going wrong.
Showing the many political cover ups.
So it didnt look like politicians tax raising the public.
The result :
the class wars have just started...
.
i stopped using ical for this reason. they sacrificed functionality over ugly looks, which makes the whole program feel slow.. just try navigating 6 months ahead..feels weird right?
I've been through several death marches and I still work hard and have "passion". The signs of a death march are different from those who are working hard because they're excited about what they're doing.

Death marches usually happen because shared suffering becomes more important than creativity and insight. You might notice that this is how a lot of organizations run. Poor managerial or group performance leads to more of a sense of urgency, which means that one needs to suffer and sacrifice even more in order to keep up with the group. Eventually, there's a lot of effort but minimal effectiveness and group performance goes from transiently weak to objectively bad.

Some death march signs:

* People feeling they "have to" spend unusually long hours in the office.
* People coming to work when sick.
* Hard deadlines on short timeframes (i.e. the 4:30 work drop).
* Low employee autonomy on what is done and how.
* Full-time workers dedicated to maintenance efforts (instead of maintenance being a minor chore shared by the group).
* Wide disparities in measured performance: one or two people being "manic" and generating 1000 LoC/week, with the rest of the team struggling to keep up with their changes.
* Lots of moving targets, scope and feature creep, and unstable interfaces that come from sudden unnecessary couplings (premature optimization).

Older people (as a group) don't have a "can't do" attitude. They just know the signs of a death march and they know what it's like to burn out, and they're not going to commit 120% until they know their efforts are going to pan out. That said, they shouldn't be required to commit 120 percent. You get 40 hours, minus whatever you take away in meetings and such. If you want them to work more than that on a project, it's your job to motivate them to do it.
You should watch it, this man is a hacker in his field.
He shows where and how economics went wrong.
Troublesome that it still is going wrong.
Showing the many political cover ups.
So it didnt look like politicians tax raising the public.
The result :
the class wars have just started...
.
Not sure if it's their worst design ever, never the less pretty horrific. The color choices on this page make me cringe.
Happy Cog for me is nonfunctional -- it seems that the site has some code to break out of iframes, or some such.
I am not so sure. I too develop in Javascript and it seems to me that most of the patterns used were carried over from the gang of four (with a few updates, since Javascript is nominally a functional programming language) which is well known in the Java community, but was originally written for C++ (or smalltalk).

So sure something have to change, but retooling does not take nearly as long as it took to learn to program in the first place.
This is obviously delegated to somebody else. You cannot go from this http://trailers.apple.com/ to that without having some new faces around.
"Wonga for USA"

googles Wonga

"Welcome to Wonga. We can deposit up to £400 in your bank account by 20:39 today. Representative APR 4214%."

Cost of implementing this idea: your soul, your self-respect. Even if you pour all of the proceeds into "build a holodeck".
I get most of my freelance projects from the different agencies that I signed up with. Sure they take a percentage in provision but the salaries are so high anyway that I don't mind too much.

For the provision they will do all the legal work - which can be considerable. I'm very satisfied with this arrangement.

I would recommend you to get in touch with agencies. Just make sure they don't screw you over - the division should be at least 80/20 in your favor.
Create something that a potential client could actually find useful for his/her projects. If that something solves a problem a decent number of people are facing, quality leads will reach you without you even trying.

I wrote a Ruby gem[1] because it was a fun project. It was in a problem domain that interested me. A developer found the gem, saw that it would be useful for his project, and soon became my first client.

I tried the "MVP for $500" approach a few months back[2]. It generated some solid leads, but none of the projects were remotely as fun or as interesting as my current one. It's certainly doable to compete based on some perfect balance of price vs. quality, but I've found it's much more rewarding (mentally and financially) to compete by being the #1 expert of some piece of software a client wants to use.

Further reading:

Ruby dev Giles Bowkett wrote a pretty good blog post on lead generation for freelancers, http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2010/03/programmers-what-to....

[1] https://github.com/adelevie/parse_resource

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2685010
Www.electronic-gadgets-4u.com : Website Valuation, Adsense Earnings, Inde
I just want people to stop using "theft" when "copyright violation" and "unauthorized usage of resources" (which is closer to theft than copyright infringement, BTW) are the right expressions to describe something. For the pure copying of substantial parts of code from one site to the other, it's not that much different from one musician sampling another one's work. Our HTML, JavaScript and CSS are all out there exposed and readable. I fully expect to find parts of it copied all over the web. It's a fact of life. I don't always like it, but I know better than wasting my time with it.

I don't think Curebit has any right to use 37 Signals' work, far from it, but I also think this outcry is a bit of an overreaction to mindboggingly idiotic deeds made even worse by a poorly conducted response.

Once, a friend of mine caught a competitor using their CSSs and images (directly off my friend's servers) on their own site. One morning, the competitor woke up to find their site completely disfigured in randomly clever ways for every IP that wasn't their office's. It was very enjoyable to observe.
Probably an intern project. Who cares? The awful thermal dissipation of my work Macbook is a worse design than this.
Like many my age and younger, I was diagnosed with ADD as a child (I'm 32 now) and went through the entire gamut of meds (stimulants, tricyclics, SSRIs) before discovering that norepinephrine seems to be the culprit for me. I have a very difficult time coding when I'm off the meds (I can do it, it's just difficult to keep the data structures and control flow in my head). I took atomoxetine for several years and it worked wonders, but it caused severe side effects that I wasn't willing to put up with. I've since switched to buproprion, which isn't quite as effective, but otherwise doesn't give me any problems. The most general way I can describe the difference between being medicated and unmedicated is "sharp" and "dull", extremely so.

I have a friend that says if I can't do my job without medication, I'm in the wrong profession. He may be right, but I love working with computers, and I don't have that passion for anything else, so I'll keep taking the meds. I'm no longer interested in debating the ethics, since for me it really is the difference between high performance and average performance, and there is no reward for average.
How for Startups to Leverage Facebook: On-Facebook
The general point I'm making is their personality should be embraced rather than drugged. I had an Adderal prescription for a month in college, its stronger than any other stimulant I've tried and it horrors me they give it to children.

The test they give for an ADHD diagnosis is a joke too. Do have trouble focusing in class? Ah yeah, most of engineering teachers aren't giving daily TED talks... :)
Are you looking for a solution or looking to work on it as a start-up idea? I am interested in this domain and have few ideas.
I think an article named "The ethics of..." is meant to "dabble around ethics" rather than explaining the technology. There must be other articles/papers about that.
At 37 I'm in the transition zone right now, having both management and coding experience (now coding), and have thought about this quite a bit. I'm eager to (and do) maintain my skills, and really don't see myself morphing into the old fuddy-duddy (completely not my nature, and even my youngest colleagues agree).

That said, there are some significant life-style challenges that work against simply keeping one's skills sharp. Out of college I wanted to change the world, had all to gain and nothing to lose, just moved and had no family obligations, was surrounded by likewise eager entrepreneurs who were plugged into technology, and I could spend all day and night burrowing into whatever the latest thing was. In short, I could easily commit the vast amount of my time to tech and was naturally on top of things.

Not so today! Wife, kids, and a mortgage means drastically reduced time for such endeavors, and a much greater responsibility to provide a stable income (hopefully with benefits too). Add to that, I'm not hanging out in bars after work surrounded by other sources of tech insight, which was always a great way to learn of new things and get a feel for where things are heading. Instead, I'm heading home, because there are a lot of non-tech things to take care of.

This doesn't mean I throw in the towel. I carve out time where I can and work my ass off to stay abreast of changing technology, including working on side projects for more real-world practice. I burn some of my much-valued vacation time to get to a conference each year. And I'm cool with the way things are going. But I'm also realistic... Am I going to be burning whole weekends in 48 hour hackathons? Not likely, and least in my situation. I had to come to terms with the fact that I couldn't emulate the behavior of an early 20's developer in Silicon Valley. But I can do things that I think keep me reasonably useful to employers. Most important: this is not at all due to age, but rather due to life circumstances that often come with getting older.

When I'm 45 or 50, I will not be the genius who is cranking out the next Node.js in a weekend, but I highly doubt I'll be sitting at city hall waiting for f*cking Promatch to find me a job either.
Just a random thought, but have you considered doing something like Matygo (http://matygo.com) - I just started teaching a class on there and its pretty cool / interactive with the students. Not sure what type of time commitment you were looking for, but I think they can always use great instructors.
this is interesting. my father was a tech guy that found himself laid-off a few years back when he hit 50. He hung up the tech boots, started importing foods from his home country to sell to local gourmet shops. Not a huge business but it is the thing he is doing since he was too young to retire. He genuinely enjoys doing it, meeting people and delivering products. It was a complete 180 from what he was doing before. Maybe tech is something inherently for younger people/minds? Maybe techies need to become more open minded with career options as time goes on?
In developed countries the birth rate is negative. But you can pick up more relevant skills getting a $35 raspberry pi board and bringing up a Linux kernel on it then building a app for it than taking a "how to market yourself to techies" class.

Work skills are like other possessions though where, when it comes time to sell them, you have to know how valuable they are to the market which may be different than what you think they should be worth.
You can always interpret bad hiring practices as damage and route around them. My wife and I run our own tech business and I don't think any of our customers ever has or ever will care how old we are.
Does the system tell people the kind of things that you've just said? Nope. So while it's not necessarily a failure of the system, the system is complicit in continually trying to convince people that things haven't fundamentally changed. The system is willing to sell people this destructive notion because it really doesn't care about or need the excess humanity that has been made redundant by globalization and mechanization. The system's concern for these people generally runs so far as to the potential political threat they'll create in the future when they organize.
Teens Migrating to Twitter
what do you mean by survive? people want to keep growing and doing bigger and better things. You could save up some money, move to a 3rd world country and hole yourself in a shack for a couple bucks a day to live out the rest of your days if you really wanted to. I believe the question of financial independence is not as important as finding a path and being forced to pivot because of your age.
Is it really so bad? I find the banner at the top to be much too large and ...well...it really is bad in general.

But overall the page seems fine. It's a plain white background with a grid of movie posters organized by month. No frills. Can someone comment, for the design challenged, what exactly makes this so terrible? (aside from the banner)
>With a little grey hair comes the wisdom of what paths NOT to go down, no matter how attractive they are initially.

That's certainly true. After awhile you've been involved in enough projects you can pick out the ones that are in trouble long before the younger guys.

The problem is this kind of experience/wisdom is hard to get across in an interview.
Yes you're right. I'm just tired of sensationalist stories far ahead of real technology. Another tiring example is pretty much any study of human-robot interaction. Mention sex and robots in the same article and you'll instantly get ridiculous attention.
Canadian 17-year-olds launch Lego Man In Space (Video)
In software, yes. In a separate device for $70? not so much.
Like others have said, I would work on building your portfolio. One way to do this is to donate some web development work to a non-profit in your area -- hopefully one that is well-known in the community. Not only will this give you something to add to your portfolio, but it will also give you an idea of any underdeveloped skills that you need to work on.
Ask HN:  Android project for introducing teenagers to programming?
I'm one of the founders of ImagineK12-backed Tutorcloud.com. We've been talking to lots of parents who want their kids to learn a little programming. We'd like to help them, and we need your help.

Specifically....Recommend a project we can use in our Intro to Android Programming workshop.

These kids are 12-16 years old. No programming experience. Eager to learn. Dying to build "cool apps". What could we build with them?

The workshop is only 4 hours long. Can we build something kids will think is cool in that time?

Comment here, or contact me directly. And if you're interested in teaching teenagers in the Bay Area, or online, drop me a line as well. [chris@tutorcloud.com].
Seriously, someone digs up a link to a remnant of an old page on the Apple site, and this ends up on top of HN as a critique of Apple design?

Is this Reddit?
I'm assuming that getting rid of bookstores means getting rid of real books.
I've tried digital books so many times, and I want to like them, it feels like a cool thing to organize all your stuff in one place, but I keep going back to real books, I would only use tablets to read if I had no other choice. For me, the digital pages get lost, I forget about them.
I would definitely spend time building & working on your portfolio. A portfolio is really a business card for any good freelancer. Your portfolio can even be a collection of github projects, there just need to be some real substance there.

Ultimately if you land a job freelancing the client is looking for a few key things, an excellent portfolio, good communications skills, and most of all experience. These qualities take time to develop and allow the client to put more trust in the hands of someone outside the company.

An alternate to freelancing is working for some small startup for a year at a time. You'll get a wealth of experience and also a chance to build your portfolio. Good luck.
Can you comment on the results of using such a home-made device?
I would be very careful about applying generalizations here. This article is very vague about what constitutes an "advanced degree in engineering" and exactly what "a decade of experience in the technology sector" means.

Not all employees are created equal and this type of study smacks of a certain statistical bias- ie, only the least qualified workers (those lacking the desired skillsets and experience, preferred degrees, etc.) will be the one's out of work. Therefore, to take those who are struggling to find work and project that onto the industry as a whole is to take a fairly protracted view of a complex situation. I'm not saying that the author's proposed explanation is impossible, just that it is only one of many plausible explanations, and without more information it would be a mistake to take any firm conclusions from this.
Awesome man, thanks for doing this. I've been meaning to start watching the Stanford iOS class lectures [1], so I will probably have some questions for you.

[1] - http://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/ipad-iphone-application-...
@silverstorm, if you you do it purely from saving, it will be a hard slog, but if you look at typical salaries thrown around, you can save most of your salary and get to your 1.5 to 2 mil at 35, or 40, or 45 or 50.

If you invest aggressively and carefully, you might make it sooner.

If you change your mindset so that your real job is to use the resources that your day job gives you, to achieve the goals of your real job (farming your resources to become financially independent), you have a better chance.

If you don't work toward financial independence on purpose, it's not going to happen. Ever. But it could. If you would.

Disclaimer: I didn't figure this out until it's probably too late.
These are more similar than you have presented. Athletes compete for contracts at the highest levels. If some athletes use performance enhancing drugs, they will have an edge and pressure will be put on those who do not want to use performance enhancing drugs, for any number of reasons.

On the intellectual side of things, you have students competing for scholarships, grants, and research placements. You have people competing for jobs in high-tech industries, and then competing with their colleagues for promotions, pay raises, and bonuses. I'm sure you can come up with more examples. The same problem then exists with devices or drugs which purport to improve learning ability. I could take dextroamphetamine every day. My productivity could go through the roof and I could soak up information like a sponge, easily putting within my grasp that which I strive to accomplish every day. Yet I do not want to do this, for many reasons.

Maybe the device in the article lacks the side effects of regular amphetamine use. It therefore would not be on the same level as nootropic drugs, but saying we should 'throw ethics out the door' is quite a leap.
Well DSLs aren't very feasible in Java due to the language, so they came up with HQL instead - the goal is the same, a rapid way to describe SQL statements in terms of objects. In my view, there's not a huge difference between parsing HQL into a tokenized structure, versus building the tokenized structure directly using a generative system like `query(class).filter(class.foo=='bar')`. They do also have a slightly more DSL-like thing called "criteria" queries, which are of the "criteria.add(Restrictions.like("name", "ed"))" variety, a far cry from linq though.

But an ORM is about a lot more than just building SELECT queries. Hibernate has a Session (SQLAlchemy copied this name from Hibernate), built on top of similar unit of work/identity map patterns - it also uses pretty much the same notion of transaction integration (that is, flush() any number of times in a transaction, including before queries, then commit() at the end). SQLAlchemy originally copied the name for their "save_or_update()" method, until taking a cue from Storm and renaming it to "add()". The merge() method in SQLAlchemy is directly from Hibernate, to the point where I read its source to determine its exact behavior in some edge cases.

The notion of "cascades" and the options it accepts are almost identical to Hibernate. There's the fact that collections are represented persistently in memory once loaded, rather than doing a "load on every iteration" kind of pattern that it appears all the other Python ORMs do, as this was the pattern that seemed more familiar to me as well as a lot more efficient in a majority of cases.

Collection loading via joins or a second query that loads for a full set of parent objects at once is pretty much inspired from Hibernate, though I sought to dramatically improve Hibernate's behavior here by getting "joined eager loading" to work totally transparently, including if the parent query had LIMIT/OFFSET on it.

Originally we had also copied this Hibernate concept called "entity name mappings" until realizing it was a terrible idea not at all relevant to Python. The horizontal sharding extension, which I've always viewed as just a proof of concept/experimental thing, was designed pretty much verbatim from Hibernate's similarly little-used API...people were really bugging me for a transparent, horizontal sharding system for awhile, even though they still seem unwise to me, so I figured copying their idea was better than just totally guessing how to do it.

Overall, SQLAlchemy can be seen as a product largely derived from Hibernate in Java and SQLObject in Python, rounded out with various patterns in "Patterns of Enterprise Architecture", and later on from the Storm ORM as well.
The reasons GPUs aren't yet used much in the VFX industry, are:

GPUs are currently limited by what they can do - they're fast in terms of float throughput in a simple loop, but as soon as you introduce a lot of branching (for things like global illumination - path tracing), their throughput falls off a lot. The Fermis are better, but Intel's branch predictors are very good.

SSE and AVX can also more than quadruple the throughput of CPUs in the best of cases.

Also, a typical VFX feature film scene can have up to 200GB of geometry and 100 GB of textures, and this is before acceleration structures, deformation motion blur caches and texture mip-maps have been created.

Transferring that amount of data through the PCI-E bus isn't worth it at the moment, especially given the limit of 6GB of onboard VRAM that would mean huge amounts of swapping.

Also, GPUs use even more power and produce even more heat than CPUs, so you don't save anything here.
I'm not sure that "lean start-up" and "self-replicating, consuming machines" go well together. I mean, the competition has had a 3.9 billion year[1] head-start. Considering the number of algorithmic mistakes[2] made specifically involving consume + replicate features of products purchased from the current leader in the industry, I'd prefer to see that done on a slower timeline. Perhaps some careful decades of engineering are called for. Same goes for "making and inserting DNA sequences at your desk for under $1,000."

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/05/20/us-asteroids-idUST...
[2] for example: http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=10...
It'd be pretty easy to have the thing speak bluetooth and write software to communicate with any phone or computer. I imagine the choice to make it an iphone accessory was a marketing-based one, what with the name and all.