skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, a lot has changed since 2007. I'd argue that programmers are held in high regard now--witness all of the news articles in the past year about "software engineers taking over the world". Further, the work conditions might be better? Maybe it differs by where you're working, but every hip software company out there touts its awesome facilities and free food and free everything.
wow, this is terrible.

"So what advantage does a 60-year-old .NET programmer have over a 27-year-old .NET programmer when they both have, at most, 5 years of experience doing .NET programming? Absolutely none."

Umm, I would say that 40 years of experience building software applications is a pretty huge advantage. I've been writing iPhone apps longer than most of the older guys I work with, but that doesn't mean that I know more about development than they do.

Languages and technologies may be temporary knowledge capital, but they're also one of the least valuable things a good developer will have.

As far as prestige and foreignization? It's amazing how much things can change in 5 years. Programming is (sorta) becoming cool thanks to things like The Social Network. 2/3 major operating systems are developer almost exclusively in the United States. All major programming languages are in English. Software development isn't going anywhere in the US.
I disagree with many of the points here. First, it sounds like this guy is on the Microsoft Treadmill (TM). It's a widely know fact that MS routinely retires technologies and platforms at a breakneck pace (I mean, really? you're going to retire a whole programming language -- VB 6.0?).

Well, I work in C and C++ on linux/unix platforms. The C programming language has been around for decades and will continue to be around for decades to come.

He keeps saying that old knowledge is worthless. This isn't entirely true, as I believe that this knowledge builds up into a kind of intuition. Intuition gained over several years allows seasoned programmers to very quickly pick up on new concepts, programming languages or platforms.

I still can't get over the fact that MS retires programming languages. It's almost as if they want to squeeze more money out of their customers, so they cook up some new technology that is the must have. Oh, that's what they're really doing? Oh, ok.
Duplicate of earlier submission of the ft.com article

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3551756

following an earlier submission of Wall Street Journal reporting on same issue.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3550074

For either story, the underlying primary source is the registration statement for Facebook's initial public offering of stock.
Other fields certainly are not immune to the declining value of knowledge capital. Ask any older auto mechanic how much his knowledge of carburetors is worth these days, just as one example.

Any profession that works with continually advancing technology is going see this effect. Granted it does seem more pronounced in the computer field... but yet there are some areas where you don't see it so much. If you are a "C" programmer, everything you've learned over the decades is still relevant and useful. Unix system administration is another example. Yes things change, but a lot of the old knowledge, e.g. tools like sed and awk are still plenty relevant.

Also the author doesn't acknowledge that a lot of knowledge transcends language. Knowledge of data structures and algorithms carries over as language fads come and go, and there's a lot of core knowledge you don't lose in the transition from one to the next.

I've been in the software profession for over 20 years, and what I've noticed is that the stuff that fades away quickly is the stuff that sucked from the get-go. COBOL? Sucked, now mostly gone. Mainframes? Sucked, now mostly gone. Visual BASIC? Sucked, now mostly gone. C? Dangerous, but powerful... still around. Unix? Pretty fun, very flexible, still around. SQL? Still one of the best ways to work with data, still around.
Jcpenney's new strategy
I don't get it. Couldn't this scraping be easily done with own Facebook API? Why should you run a scraper to find out all your friends?
It reminds me of the "good to great" book's focus on choosing a metric which represents your economic driver.
Hulk-Hogan ... hogan.js + express
The only successful startups/companies serving local businesses are those that focus on verticals; for example see what Zocdoc is doing.
The opportunity to work by yourself easily, build stuff, travel to any place and usually find a job.. terrible stuff!!

One of the only downsides I find. It can get tiring for your brain (and stressful if you are not working on a project you enjoy).

I guess it's not as fun and exciting as being a Mexican Wrestler.
That's very elegant. It's amazing (and a little terrifying) to think that he may very well have been able to mentally visualize the fluid dynamics to some extent. It's not like he was consciously solving navier-stokes, but it's still incredible what some human minds are capable of.

But then, he was thinking a lot about electron flow and built up a good intuition that had wider application. That doesn't make it any less amazing to me though. I'd like to be able to do that.
Mediocre people will have mediocre lives. This is true for programming and (not surprisingly) any other career.

If after 40 years of programming all you have is temporary knowledge then you were a lousy programmer your whole life and still are.
Understanding Japanese App Store Withholding
On a different note, false has possibly the best man page of any command.
My first thought, as suggested by some on the list, was modularization. Redstone's response (that the 1.3 million files are essentially all interdependent) terrifies me.
Walking the talk is a big thing with RMS.
Sounds to me like the boss is an idiot. Did they really need to screw around with a web conference just to demonstrate that there was a bug in the sales history display?

He should have had Sue just paste a couple of before/after screenshots into a doc file with a sentence or two of explanation and send it to Ed.

"Here's the sales history for R27-93 (screenshot)... I hit F5, F3, F7 and the part number now incorrectly shows GT548 (screenshot)..."
This is basically nonsense.

I'm over 35. I work at Google. I got my job when I was over 35. I've interviewed people over 35. Very few of the applicants I've met and/or interviewed have been extended an offer. None of it has anything to do with age. It all comes down to one thing:

There are a shocking number of people who work as programmers who cannot actually program.

The industry as a whole is crying out for people who can get shit done. If you can do that age is no barrier. Ageism, at least as far as programmers go, seems to be used as an excuse by those unable or unwilling to get a job as to why they can't get a job.

EDIT: the fact that this is Google I think makes my point rather than detracts from it. If at 35 with no particularly amazing background I can get hired at a top-tier employer, why not any employer?

You can argue that lower-tier employers are more biased but in my experience they're also less selective (or at least they select for different traits).
How fun would it be if you could program it with facial recognition and replace con attendants with their fursonas? :D
I find the length field redundant. Two character emotions could be null padded, making three the standard length. This would save a byte for angry and evil. If evil and angry were removed (merged with sneaky and frustrated), emotions could be two bytes. Better yet, a lookup table could be used with a single byte. One other idea, which applies to all cases where 7bit ASCII is packed into 8bit bytes, is to have the eigth bit aroused on the last character
HN style is to go really light on joking and really heavy on information. It can make for some dry reading sometimes, but it's better than Reddit where informative discussion can get drowned out by jokes, pun threads and snark.

So people tend to downvote witty comments unless they find them very funny.
Seems like this article has made the rounds here a few times already.
Why is this 5-year old article submitted?

It's not that well-reasoned either. It's written by someone that does not have that much knowledge in the field, and his reasoning is amateurish.

Nothing interesting to see here.
The gain in offering up data to Google is free use of a number of services I find useful. Gmail, Google Docs, Google Chrome, Google Search and YouTube are just a handful of the services I enjoy using free of charge. In exchange, I have little to no problem with Google tracking my behavior to target advertisements at me.
Neat. I don't know if I'd ever use this, but, its a cool hack.

Random thoughts off the top of my head, re: making it faster:

- Can you can decode into an ARGB buffer, instead of an RGBA buffer? iOS uses ARGB as its native bitmap format, so, there will probably be a bit of a speed bump if you can avoid shuffling bits around as much.

- I wonder if using CGDataProviderCreateWithCFData() and passing in a data blob created with CFDataCreateWithBytesNoCopy() to see if any copying bytes around can be reduced.

- Maybe cache CGColorSpaceCreateDeviceRGB() somewhere (either just make it static, or in NSThread's threadDictionary). Release on memory warnings and such.

- UIImage does a bunch of caching internally. You could mimic it and cache images that have been created, to make it really cheap to re-query for an image/reuse an already-existing image. Again, release on memory warnings and such.
I actually wrote about this a couple of days ago. Winer even responded to me on twitter. I think we need to change the premise of the conversation. That might help inspire a new generation of young startups.

http://www.rumproarious.com/2012/01/31/rss-needs-a-new-pr-te...
"the key to marketing is to make something people want"
>I know about SkypeConnect, and it's only usable for particular types of businesses.

I didn't mention skype connect.

>the win/win for sype/sip providers is only when the calls go through PSTN beween them.

Do you really think the operators of skype or the sip providers cut the PSTN people in for anything when they don't have to? The only direct through pstn as a last resort.

I have called peoples skype-in numbers from my skype account. I do get charged for this. I am certain it goes through no pstn network.
The USA ranks #10 in the Heritage Foundation's Index of Economic Freedom. (I think their methodology is more accurate) http://www.heritage.org/index/default
I have trouble thinking this 60 year old programmer exists. There were only 2000 computers in existence in 1960. Today a 60 year old programmer that spent a career in computer science is a very small group of people.

I'm going to wait and see how this really turns out.
These Are Not Your Father’s Internships
here: http://youtu.be/9W63RzhO-J0 hope we are even now.
Stores are a marriage of a logistics business and a marketing business. The split is about 75%/25%. That marketing component is ripe for disruption that directly connects the original sellers (brand, manufacturers, authors) to their end users (consumers, readers).

Letting the stores control the decisions about how that connection gets made is not in the entrepreneur's best interest. Making that connection efficient by using your great idea is not in their best interest. That's disruption for you.

The winners will figure out how to separate the logistics of local availability from mobile/local marketing.
From Google's privacy policy, they anonymize IP addresses after 9 months, and strip out any cookie information after 18 months. So I don't think many of the author's claims actually stand up.

http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/faq/#toc-store
Tesla was an amazing man. Though our tools are impressive, I am still far more impressed by the human mind. A good use of tools relies on the exploration of consciousness. If both are not in harmony, we get mediocre results.
This is surprisingly true. I saw your product description, was interested, and left. You can the best product in the world but if the design is pretty poor, then you can't really incentivize me to take the time to create an account. Basically: The design of the site does not inspire confidence in your product, even as good as it may be.
Please explain your last sentence.
Could you be more specific? Is the whole design offputting or certain aspects? Any suggestions would be appreciated
Ok..from my anecdotal evidence as much i like red wine, i don't like what seems to do to my liver. (am not referring to study but the feeling of nausea/acidity it causes). I have found that grape juice is a good source of antioxidants..
1960? If one's career is considered to start at age 22, a 60-year-old would have started in 1974.
> [P]eople born in this country have more rights to the money being created here than foreigners. Asian countries feel the same way about foreigners. Asian countries are, typically, a lot less open to foreign worker immigrants than is the U.S.

I would like to know why being born in a given country should entitle you to more or less opportunity than anyone else who wants to do business in that country.

I would settle for an explanation of how bad immigration policies can be justified by pointing to states with worse ones.
Ask HN: Is there a Photoshop rental service?
Is there a service where I could remote to a server (either Mac or Windows) with Photoshop installed where I could use it for an hour or two for several dollars or euros per hour?
Well. Describing our ideas without a diagram breaks down rapidly. I imagined a valve bobbing in the water, slowly elevating the water in a reservoir with each wave undulation. Thinking about it more, the problem would be an eventual equalization in pressure. But of course, I read this paragraph again and there all ways of imagining what the words are saying. If we were to really understand each other, we'd need to whiteboard.

I'm not sure that a Tesla Valve would be all that useful for tapping wave motion now that I think of it. It might not work. One way to think of it is to imagine using a one way ball valve. That has helped me in the past from ascribing too much magic or revolutionary nature to the Tesla Valve.
Not moving water, but the potential for moving water, a pressure gradient.
CricVid - Watch Cricket Live Streaming and CricVid Highlights
Ultraxproject
I think you're being too quick to dismiss the article because of your Google experience. Google may be one of the few enlightened companies which doesn't think this way.

Life being risky if you're over 35 is a regular topic of conversation in my circles. Vivek Wadhwa (IIRC) even had data showing that salary plateaus and then drops after 40.
Yet as another anecdote, even when watching Netflix streaming basically every night, and downloading the occasional Steam game, I have never once passed my 250 GB Comcast limit. Much as I dislike these kind of caps, it is pretty damn hard to go over 250 GB. That's, what, 200 hours of reasonably high-quality streaming video? 300+ Linux ISOs (the only reason you run bittorrent, right?)?

Sadly, I don't think "unlimited" internet is a sustainable model, because generally speaking every bit you send costs the provider money, and the rise of things like Youtube mean that people actually use more bandwidth. However, 250 GB plus a reasonable per-GB charge after that should be reasonable for a very larger percentage of users.
I believe you can only make an 83b election on restricted stock, not stock option.
Most email clients won't take kindly to CSS that isn't inline. I also tried data URLs and inline attachments before going the table route.
Kohana is cool. It basically tries to be the PHP equivalent of Ruby on Rails.

http://kohanaframework.org
Also the author doesn't acknowledge that a lot of knowledge transcends language.

In my experience, employers don't know that, either. Neither did college admissions, come to think of it.
My understanding of his position is that he does not consider firmware to be independent software. The arguments by which he came to be in favor of free software do not apply to firmware.

The reason that he promotes free software is because software is capable of being free, that is, it is logistically realistic that people freely copy, modify, and distribute it. From this, he extrapolates that there is a right to copy, modify, and distribute software. If would be physically capable of modifying the code, but is legally prevented, then that is a restriction on his rights.

Under his reasoning, it also does not apply to firmware. Because it is so tied to the underlying hardware, it's not really possible to copy or modify it in any useful way. It is certainly free, in the monetary sense, but there are no useful results of doing so. Therefore, closed software does not restrict your rights in a meaningful or non-trivial sense.

Note that this is just my interpretation of what I've read of him, and I don't follow the Free Software thing that closely so I could be mis-interpreting key points.
I trid out CloudFlare for a few months for a couple of my sites. I was primarily interested in their 'no downtime' feature but could never get it to work for me. I ended up swtiching to S3 and CloudFront, paying a little each month but it actually works.
It's cool, but curious why it shows nothing on our website! http://colrgrabr.swissamigos.com/#http://www.scirra.com
Umm, I would say that 40 years of experience building software applications is a pretty huge advantage.

I have to admit, I don't see a whole lot of gain after about five years. As everyone is saying, CS knowledge is timeless, but aside from the basics, it's really not that useful outside of research positions. Most of software development is making CRUD apps, integrating APIs, and other tedious but non-complex stuff like that.

Regarding prestige, most of the time when I'm at a non-techie party, when asked what I do, people have nooo idea what "software engineer" means. :-)
Whatever people may say, I run my own mail server on my DSL line at home (static ip), on a regular cheap PC. It's also the gateway, web server and a few things like that - since 2000.

It's currently running Dovecot, Postfixc, Roundcube, MySQL (even thus I plan to switch to PostgreSQL since, 10 years, but I'm lazy :P), amavisd-new, spamassassin.
It's setup with SPF records and DKIM. I used to have grey listing as well, but I turned that off a year ago.

I have several emails, and friends, family also, hosted there.

* Spam:
The "spam advantage" from Google's gmail makes me smile. I get less spam on my accounts, even the ones for which I post my email everywhere, than on my gmail account (which I never use anywhere, or even use for mail - its just my Google account - so its been guessed or used through OpenID, or Google leaked it somehow).
Even with grey listing off.

Some guys seems happy with their 2 spam a month on Gmail. Well I get zero spam a month. And I almost never have false positive either (happened maybe 5 times in 12 years? and those were very spam-looking emails from automated services which i actually wanted to read)

* Maintenance:
That makes me smile as well. Sure, I update the server every month or so. It's a 10min task. Stuff don't break. And yes, I know my stuff also, which helps. Backups are done via duplicity to a friend's system, and to a separate drive (had to switch the drives once)

Mail stay alive 5 days if box goes down. 12 years, did get network outages sometimes, never lost a mail. Not one. Sometimes, Ive friends with similar servers and we MX each others for safety, but that was not necessary up to now, because its never been down longer than a day (again its always "network outage" or "power outage" kind of issues).

* Interface. Well, I can understand it, but I don't care. Why? Because I very rarely use the web interface. I use IMAP clients and ssh+IMAP (mutt).
Sometimes, I do use the web interface, and RoundCube is actually very decently good, even if its not super complete. It's fast and enjoyable at least.

* Domains refusing to talk to me
Well, this has happened sometimes in the past. I sent requests for white list, and it got granted 99% of the time (in fact, its been only denied by trendnet). When denied I set the transport to use my ISP's SMTP. I haven't had to change those settings or make request in the last past 5 years or so. Again, its a much smaller deal than what you're lead to think.
Compensation includes equity. One of the primary ways that programmers become millionaires is by gaining lots of stock grants and options by being early employees at quickly growing companies that go public. That whole system has been curtailed somewhat in recent years by SOX.
Actually most SMTP now talk SSL to each others, so while the hops (generally, just 2: sender and receiver) could also be compromised, the attack surface is smaller than one would think.
I would be curious if one could quantify this by perhaps traveling on several domestic flights in the US and in France of similar lengths and record how often a child cries to see if there is a statistically significant difference between the two countries.
If you don't want people to log on a box in anyway, don't have the account. I don't see what's so strange or complex about that.

/bin/false has never been security. It's just good behavior for users that aren't supposed to get a shell. And that's that, they dont get a shell. They get everything else. Generally, those are daemons !
Google Summer of Code 2012 announced
Easy: the government of any given nation exists to promote the well-being of its citizens and absolutely nobody else.
Sounds like the confident words of someone who hasn't experienced much yet.
phantom.js can do this, and the bonus is that it's already written in javascript. :) It depends on QT for it's webkit component but that's it... Doing a screenshot with it is pretty much a one liner:

page.open(address, function() { page.render(path); });

http://www.phantomjs.org/
Could you explain how Stallman is a "software dictator", or how his own version of freedom comes at the "expense of their freedom"?
Awesome. Works great on my site. I'm gonna use this all the time, thanks!
Open markdown files in your browser
Unfortunately, your lifestyle can't work for all of us.

I currently freelancing my way through school. Not as a developer, but as a stagehand. The way I get work is through email. At any given moment, one of any number of production managers, lighting supervisors, technical directors, or production supervisors might be sending me an email. This email will say when and what types of laborers they are looking for. They may need labor tomorrow or 4 months from now. Usually, these positions are booked on a first come first serve basis.

I need my email. If my email went away or didn't go to my phone reliably and on time for an hour, I could miss an opportunity for hundreds of dollars. If it didn't go to my phone for a week, I wouldn't make rent that month.

Yea, it sucks that my life is driven by email, but this is so much better than the way things used to be for stagehands.
Probably not. I said "not entirely unreasonable" rather than "reasonable" for a reason.

Anyway, my main point was that if the US is really in the top four countries for ease of doing business, we have a major problem.
A unit test is a way to automate the diagnosis of your website. For example, let's say your website allows people to create a user profile. You could (A), verify that you can successfully create a profile by opening your web browser, navigating to your site, creating a profile, and making sure you get a successful response. That's fine and relatively quick to do. However, as your code base grows in size, you don't want to have to redo this test manually every time you add a new feature that could potentially break your user-profile feature. Thus, and (B), comes in unit testing (or integration tests, or simply tests), that automates the process for you. Every time you add a new feature, you can run tests to verify that this new feature didn't break something else in your code base.