skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd be curious about City vs Wall Street salaries for engineers. Even in the US they are paid more than the vast majority of other programmers. I wouldn't be so proud of the financial sector paying engineers fair wages, because the bottom line is it's crumbs to them. They are skimming more cream off the economy without producing anything tangible than anyone else, so they can afford to pay above market to the privileged few. It's not a scalable model for increasing average salaries though.

The UK (and Europe) really needs to figure that out. I was able to move to London because I was moving from SV and I got a cost of living increase on top of my US market salary. If I was born here and forced to accept London market salaries I would be looking for my ticket out of here ASAP. As technology and mobility increases it's going to be increasingly important to economies to retain talent, something which I believe is obscured for the super rich who make money by arbitrage highly abstracted from the value in the base economy.
How Ads Could Ruin Zynga and Why They (Probably) Won't
Tracing block device write request sizes in Linux using SystemTap
For most web technologies, this is a decent source:
https://developer.mozilla.org/

For JavaScript: http://eloquentjavascript.net/

For HTML/CSS specifically, use Chrome or Firefox's Inspect Element to take a look at web pages. It's especially instructive to examine things like 1kb grid, where the CSS itself is designed:
http://1kbgrid.com/
Android Tamer : VM for android security professionals
What is Android Tamer?
Android Tamer is a one stop tool required to perform any kind of software operations on Android devices / applications / network. Tools provided by this VM are listed here http://atamer.anantshri.info/tools.html
InspirinInspiring Blogger Of The Week #1:Madhav Tripathi
This is first post in “Inspiring Blogger Of The Week” Series .
As a developer, I find datomic easy to use. The getting started, running examples, tutorial, reference, the in-memory environment, the downloadable appliance - everything is so smooth. Last time I had a similar feeling was when I tried CloudFoundry.

Things should be like this - intuitive, some seed data and kickstart code w/ just enough documentation for when you get stuck.
> People often argue that children don't need to know how to program just as they don't need to be a car mechanic to drive a car. The analogy is useless because a car is a one-use machine (it moves), whereas a computer's very essence is its programmability, its ability to be a universal machine.

Surely a better analogy then would be that kids don't need to learn how to build things out of metal (Unless they particularly want to).

Welding and metalwork is for some people. Just as programming is for some people and not others.

Personally, I don't think we have fallen behind at all. Kids are still learning to program, just as they used to. Being taught in schools is (I guess) a nice to have, but not necessary.

It's easy for programmers to think that programming is the only thing that matters and it's crucial everyone learn it. But it's really not. All that matters is that people who wish to learn it, can.
Good advice. I wondered why/how I got included on Techmeme before. I would assume it is based on "Techmeme can discover stories based on retweet counts,".
Of course. But I'm sure they have thought of that though before lowering their prices and their intention wasn't losing money.
> It didn't get a single upvote.

that is because it is in the spam filter. you need to message the moderators.
Can someone explain how malicious code can be installed without a users permission? Is it possible do it without a user clicking something? By literally just loading the page?
Sorry - but I just used a pre-built theme - because if I didn't do that then I would never get time to actually write any blog posts as my own site takes a very low priority for coding time!
Saying that I do like this theme and think the dev did a good job. I have removed that overflow hidden on the body - thanks for the suggestion - so let's hope it's readable now
9AM-4PM, give or take an hour either way. In other words, guaranteed to be during your working day at your current employer.
Manufacturing actually died in the UK because of the unions. Workers became greedy, and unproductive. They were unable to compete with other countries, and instead staged big endless strikes demanding ever rising salaries, better working conditions etc - which made them even more uncompetitive with emerging countries.

You can either have great working conditions and pay, or a good manufacturing industry. Can't have both. Some other poorer country will just treat their workers worse, and so be more productive.

(I'm reading "Thatcher - the downing street years" at the moment - a great read).
Thanks - I did that quick
It's not "above market"; that's the point. Why shouldn't engineers be paid as well as doctors, lawyers, accountants, etc? What The City pays is what all should pay.

Engineering died in the UK because the management class can't tell the difference between a professional mechanical engineer and a car mechanic (not that the latter isn't a skilled worker). In the rest of the world "Engineer" is a meaningful, exclusive title.
we can get deeper with the ARm processor more easily than with x86. This isn't just about javascript or other High High level languages (although that is important), its about the fundamentals of programming and computer science.
No, this is just not true.

You can only convert the kinetic heat motion of a single molecule to kinetic energy in your target if your target is colder than the source! And there's your cold sink.

The efficiency is not 100% because the target sends energy back to the source since the target is moving (from heat kinetic energy).

If the target was standing still efficiency would be 100% - but that's the same as saying the target is at absolute zero and we already know that Carnot efficiency is 100% if the sink is at absolute zero, so it makes no difference that you are dealing with a single molecule.

To your second point that this is "heat being directly converted to photons" - that's exactly the definition of blackbody radiation. But the blackbody also absorbs radiation from the environment it is in, so it's not perfectly efficient either.
Any decent CS program should contain such a course, sure, but it is probably not in the required curriculum, and it's probably not taken by very many students.

As for names, at SFU (my alma mater) it's called "Formal Languages and Automata". Well, actually, there are actually about half a dozen courses covering parts of this material, but that's the most-perfect match for what you described.
I think the simple answer would be economies of scale. As more and more customers sign up, they can drive their per-server costs down significantly. Their labor cost per customer would also decrease significantly. Meanwhile, your run-of-the-mill VPS provider is sweating decisions like "do I rent another rack" or "can I afford to hire another engineer"...
Ideas are like assholes
Hackers disclose secret Ankara police files password '123456'
But did those "internal docs" take the increasing power of colo machines (or rent) into account? The colo you buy next year probably is more powerful than the one this year. If you take AWS price decreases into account, you'd need to take increasing power (and decreasing prices) for colo into account.

Hetzner where I have servers increases the machine power (and sometimes decreases prices) every year.

http://www.hetzner.de/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-produ...
Amazon lowers price for EC2, RDS and ElasticCache
It's only very recently that I learned how odd the legal status of the City of London is - it's effectively a private corporation that has assumed the functions of a local authority. It is also the only place in the UK where businesses get to vote - businesses have 24,000 votes and actual residents only have 8,000 votes.

The actual amount of money controlled by the City of London Corporation isn't public either - e.g. there is the "City Cash" fund.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London_Corporation

My favourite bit of City trivia is that they have an official representative at Parliament, who gets to sit opposite the speaker - the wonderfully named Remembrancer.

[Edit: For some highly entertaining, if slightly paranoid, ranting about the City and the evils of offshore finance I can recommend "Treasure Islands" by Nicholas Shaxson - http://treasureislands.org/]
CFAT Prep, Preparation, Practice – Canadian Forces Aptitude Test Practice
Canadian Forces - CFAT Prep, CFAT Preparation, Practice – Canadian Forces Aptitude Test Practice, Training - ForcesReady.ca is premier leader in CFAT and eCFAT preparation, study and practice sample exams. We will ensure your success in passing the Canadian Forces Aptitude Test.
Poll: HN Meetup in Munich - date, agenda, etc. (second try)
[NOTE: This is a second try. Hit it up when you see it so it gets on the frontpage and attracts participants.]

Based on the response to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3656646 and the suggestion by kojote (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3658023), I contacted the Couch Club (http://www.couch-club.org/).
I haven't been there myself yet but it is central, looks nice from the outside, plus they have a foosball table. Regular weekday hours are 2000-0100. The proprietor was open to welcoming our group an hour or two in advance if we agree to some "Mindestumsatz" (minimum consumption) as a group. She indicated 100-200 EUR but will come back with a definite number later. Their food offerings are sparse (pizza salami or vegetarian) but if we want, we can order more diverse pizze and other stuff and they'll coordinate with a partner. Internet access is not public but they will give us access if we need it for some presentation or so.

Which brings me to the next point: My own preference is that this not become too complicated. From my view, the primary goal is to meet new people with overlapping interests and let it roll from there. Talks and such, if demand and supply balance, can be organized later. Since we can have the place to ourselves for 1-2 hours, depending on what we decide, I suggest this "program":

1) meet and order food
2) while we wait for food, brief self-introductions
3) while we eat, max. 1-2 people can give a short talk
4) bar opens to the general public -> mingle/drink/foosball

Please indicate your preferred date below. If you send me an email at meetup@haija.net, I take that as indicating higher probability of attendance and your voice counts twice. If there is a sponsor among you who, just in case, can underwrite the shortfall to the minimum consumption (if any), please send me a mail too.

For suggestions and discussion, please leave a comment.

Thx.
Certainly, but it's a little more nuanced. If the uncertainty is on your end (the decision making part), then it's fixable.

If, on the other hand it's something completely out of your control (waiting to see if you were accepted into college), then the uncertainty is of a different nature.
Hetzner also has 10TB per month.
Project manager PMP
Clifton R. Hargrove - Senior Project Manager PMP: An innovative thought leader that will bring order out of chaos.
Veterinary Schools
Find complete information about top veterinary schools which are offering degree courses in veterinarian technician training programs. Choose the best veterinary school and program for you and start your veterinary career in the preferred location.
Sony confirms: "hacked discography of Michael Jackson"
> Either that or there's something very seriously wrong with CS programs

I've been involved in hiring. I've seen top uni CS grads fail (not borderline - train wreck) a programming exercise not much more complicated than fizzbuzz. And a variation: cheat on the exercise. I've interviewed people who clearly were not the authors of the code sample they'd submitted.

We administer the test online and the candidate can take it on their own time. A decent programmer can easily complete it in less than 20 minutes, a good one in five, and judging from the proportion of people who get it wrong, I'd argue it's a good filter to make sure we're not wasting each others time. And I think it goes both ways: It costs us very little to evaluate a response, so we can filter very lightly at the top of the funnel. The first round of interviews are much more costly, so if they were the first point of contact, we'd have to filter much harder on CVs, which isn't always fair to candidates who didn't take the beaten path (and excessively fair to candidate with good degrees).

It should be mentioned that we skip the programming exercise if a candidate come through a personal recommendation.
> Ubuntu got in touch with us to say ‘how can we stop you saying that Ubuntu runs on Raspberry Pi?’ Which I thought was pretty brutal, actually. So, yeah: they don’t support our chip, they’re not interested in supporting our chip, they’ve been quite vocal about trying to stop us from saying Ubuntu, so we stopped saying Ubuntu.

Way to go, Canonical...

You want to make Ubuntu the Linux desktop, yet you can't be arsed to support one of the cheapest and easiest solutions to run it on?
The Raspberry Pi is a brilliant way to introduce children and adults alike to linux, and Ubuntu doesn't deem it worthy of supporting that effort...
Naw, I'm paid hourly. Also, I'm not that important. If the job was stressful I'd probably put more effort back into finding a start-up job.
Though I'm not saying there aren't good points here, there are many, I think it's interesting to consider the usual impact of discussions on this subject - typically a great deal of insecurity/defensiveness (I feel it too), which I don't mean to say in a negative light, in fact I think it's quite natural.

It's worth quoting Steve Yegge's fantastic 'get that job at google' [1]:-

'Me: blah blah blah, I like asking question X in interviews, blah blah blah...

You: Question X? Oh man, I haven't heard about X since college! I've never needed it for my job! He asks that in interviews? But that means someone out there thinks it's important to know, and, and... I don't know it! If they detect my ignorance, not only will I be summarily fired for incompetence without so much as a thank-you, I will also be unemployable by people who ask question X! If people listen to Stevey, that will be everyone! I will become homeless and destitute! For not knowing something I've never needed before! This is horrible! I would attack X itself, except that I do not want to pick up a book and figure enough out about it to discredit it. Clearly I must yell a lot about how stupid Stevey is so that nobody will listen to him!'

[1]:http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-goog...
for what it's worth, I found the parallax effect on the background image rather annoying.

Every time I scrolled every single visual reference point of where I was reading changed.
grep me$ /usr/share/dict/words | wc -l
1699

(WolframAlpha: 210)
Just like the computers of yore, the screen is the family TV. And USB keyboard/mouse are a couple of dollars second hand - I'd bet if UK school districts are anything like the ones I worked with in my youth, they have rooms filled with peripherals waiting to be recycled.
TM takes hints from a lot of sources - including HN. It has 30k+ sources that it directly crawls itself as well, and uses a lot of different hints to work out what is popular. The biggest hint to a big story is inbound links from other blogs that are also sources, and from there things like popularity on social media
Yes it was a combination of factors, but most of them were class-based.
I hope you realise that regurgitating from what's obviously going to be a right-wing book is only half the story.

For example there was a discussion that I half caught on Radio 4 this very morning that claimed the death of manufacturing in the UK is mainly due to the government totally failing to invest in R&D for the last 15 years or so.

I think the truth is probably somewhat more complex and a combination of a lot of factors.

Also find people who were around in the Thatcher days, you'll find a lot of people who either despise her or love her, the book will be biased.
Where's the hockey stick ?
Mobile commerce
Mobile commerce applications allows mobile users to shop at their favorite store browsing their mobile phones and ordering their needed products to avail delivery at spot or shop. The app features geo-based listing of shops with the convenience of multiple payment mode which includes Paypal, credit card, cash-on-delivery, or Pay-in-shop option. It also allows for easy checkout of product availability.
Well, she was. She was deemed too old to receive the organ transplant, and the fact that she was willing to pay extra didn't matter. She is now 95.
The manufacturing problem in any first world country has the same problem, if anything USA has been the last to have the problem because they kept cheap workers cheaper for longer.

Look at Germany, they have both but that's partly the vertical companies being ethical and patriotic.
This is beautifully put.
What's Canonical playing at? Surely the Raspberry Pi represents a golden opportunity to steal massive amounts of mind share. They could establish themselves as the computing environment amongst the next generation of computer users.
Just to clear this up, there is nothing at all about the 'recent things from apple' that prevents kids using them to make software, except for price.

In fact I'd say that Apple's stack is outstanding for this purpose because it goes all the way from the very top (high level support for multi-touch) all the way to the very bottom (arm assembly), with an IDE and remote debugging at every level.

I think there is also a psychological advantage to the Apple stack for passionate young programmers - they aren't programming a toy.

For this purpose though, it is vastly more expensive than the alternatives.
"You can either have great working conditions and pay, or a good manufacturing industry."

Someone needs to explain this to the Germans then.
How is a consumer web product any more tangible than a financial services web product ?
Union Sq. Ventures Fred Wilson Interviews Carlota Perez at Web 2 Expo 2011
Great comment - such experimentation is what creates the best tech and giving kids the ability to try ideas in their head is invaluable
Pixel Qi Screen In Another Tablet We’ll Never Buy
It's not about access to a generic computer - it's access to a computer that positively invites tinkering.
Ask PG: Please allow us to report incorrectly dead accounts
I come across accounts that are incorrectly dead all the time. For example there are two at the bottom here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3669688

Both are dead and should not be.

Please add a flag link to posts from dead accounts that would report the account to moderators to double check that it really should be dead.

I come across dead accounts in virtually every story and almost all of them should not be dead. Whatever moderation you have going on is far too strict.

I also think you should require at least one flagged post before killing an account for having too low of a karma.
How to Divide any number By 9, 90, 900 and so on in just 5 seconds
You originally said 'the majority should choose period', not 'the majority should choose only in cases where you can't have it both ways'.

If democracy somehow limited itself to cases where you can't have it both ways, that would be great.

It doesn't.
I just love the fact that the Raspberry Pi isn't about money at this stage - it's a philanthropic initiative designed to help the world progress. Ultimately it gives computer access to far more people who will benefit economically in the long run
JavaScript's a byzantine language on its own.

jQuery's a great choice for beginners learning to program for the first time. Two related frameworks, underscore and d3, both have jQuery-inspired APIs and use higher-order functions extensively. These frameworks teach lessons in functional programming that transfer easily to Python, Lisp, Haskell, and even mathematics.
Thy Towing Wrecker Svc.
Yes, a sucrose molecule can be broken down. But the full sucrose molecule still behaves differently from the glucose/fructose mix that it was being compared to. Even if the glucose/fructose mix was exactly 50%/50%, that mixture of glucose and fructose molecules would still behave differently from a pure sucrose solution.
A Linkbuilder's Gmail Productivity Setup
Have you read "The myth of Britain's manufacturing decline"?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/22/manufacturing_figure...
> And FizzBuzz (linked in #1): yes I get it, it's easy and it filters out 199 out of 200 candidates, but what about those 199 other candidates? Is it not possible that among them, you might have missed other candidates whose broader set of experiences would have taught you something that you didn't know, something more important than the fact they failed FizzBuzz, for whatever inconsequential reasons?

No, absolutely not. If you cannot code fizzbuzz or find the largest int in an array, you will not succeed in a job where you have to program computers (regardless of whether "programmer" is the job title).

It should be mentioned that fizzbuzz is not about your ability to write perfect code down to every last semi-colon in the first pass on the whiteboard or your ability to navigate a maze of secret trap-doors, it's about checking that you know and understand "for" and "if". That's all. Really. I'd be happy to explain modulo to you if that's the problem. If you have a bug in your code, I'll give you hints, not do my evil cackle and fail you.
Koreans as well
I think you may be confused - what in your view constitutes a dead account?
This is why I wrote my own datapoint gathering script (I started it while at Techcrunch, curious about who scrolls down to comments, etc.).

It measures body focus, number of times unfocused, total focus time, scroll position, scroll rate and a bunch of other things.

It isn't completely working cross-browser yet, but it is close and useful enough where for Safari and Chrome visitors I can see how far down the page they are scrolling and how long the page is in focus for.
Something PG predicted some time ago, at least the part with the cost-per-start-up thing. It almost looks like we've got a social media bubble, and not a internet-bubble in general like in the 90s. Strange enough the seemingly unlimited flow of yc-like incubators wasn't mentioned. Interessting we live in, don't we?
These for example:

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=generators

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=donnawarellp

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=zzz90210

They have negative karma (which is why they were killed), but they are not spammers.
Wow, the things must be pretty bad if UK's (software) engineering future depends so badly on this piece of hardware. Personally I doubt that RPi will change anything.RPi is just a bigger and more powerful Arduino. If you wanted to do embedded devices experimentation, you would have done it by now with Arduino. Basic programming can be done on any netbook and I refuse to believe that even the poorest kids in UK can't afford a cheap netbook. Is there anything else revolutionary about RPi other than the price ?
Maybe not particularly well known:

Walmart Labs: http://www.walmartlabs.com/

New York Times Labs: http://nytlabs.com/
Rest api in struts 1.x
Interesting that there is a dip in the graph around the time I graduated!

But, are these engineers being paid proportionally to the value they create? That is the acid test. The class system works both ways; people being held down are ingrained to believe that that is their station in life.
Running Roundcube 0.7.1 On Nginx (LEMP) On Debian Squeeze/Ubuntu 11.10
Next will be a "Page my waiter" button. That could be a win for diners in a restaurant with busy wait staff. Perhaps the tablet already has one; I couldn't tell from the article.
How to move your business forward with mobile marketing - with Wen Tian
15 Mar 2012.
And nice to see HN has members from Munich!