skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1979
Recruiter: "On a scale of 1 to 10, how's your COBOL?"
edw519: "10."
Recruiter: "Great! I have tons of work for you."

1983
Recruiter: "On a scale of 1 to 10, how's your data base?"
edw519: "4. But I'm a 10 in COBOL."
Recruiter: "No one cares about COBOL. I need data base people."

1987
Recruiter: "On a scale of 1 to 10, how's your Microsoft?"
edw519: "4. But I'm a 10 in data base."
Recruiter: "No one cares about data base. I need Microsoft people."

1992
Recruiter: "On a scale of 1 to 10, how's your Oracle?"
edw519: "4. But I'm a 10 in Microsoft."
Recruiter: "No one cares about Microsoft. I need Oracle people."

1996
Recruiter: "On a scale of 1 to 10, how's your HTML & CSS?"
edw519: "4. But I'm a 10 in Oracle."
Recruiter: "No one cares about Oracle. I need web people."

2001
Recruiter: "On a scale of 1 to 10, how's your Javascript & PHP?"
edw519: "4. But I'm a 10 in HTML & CSS."
Recruiter: "No one cares about HTML & CSS. I need back-end people."

2009
Recruiter: "On a scale of 1 to 10, how's your Ruby & Python?"
edw519: "4. But I'm a 10 in Javascript & PHP."
Recruiter: "No one cares about Javascript & PHP. I need Ruby & Python people."

Number of days without work since 1979: 0.

Lighten up, guys. If you can build stuff, learn, and work well with others, you'll probably always be fine.
I'd be interested to hear from commercial developers of OSS how they chose their license, and about the business reasoning behind preferring copyleft or a permissive license.
Oh I agree entirely. The real problem lies further up the stack - is UNIX the right solution?
>I don't understand why GPL isn't more widespread.

Honestly, for me? Viral nature. I don't want to put off a company using my code (well, for most things I do) because they don't want to be bound by the requirement to give away the source.

That's kind of why I'm a fan of Creative Commons, attribution share-alike, with possibly noncommercial depending on what it is and my mood at the time.

The GPL is just a pain in the ass for all involved. At least that's how I see it.
Article author here. This raises the question of whether we should be facilitating usability testing sessions on our own designs. Generally it's something I try to avoid unless the situation demands it. It takes a lot of discipline to facilitate a session objectively when your own design work is performing poorly and the client is watching it happen live!
Yes, I came in here to comment of this. Let's cure the ills of a device that is massively useful. Sure - cities should look more like NYC and less like Houston - I'll give the car haters that, but I'm with uvdiv, that I'd far prefer fast, clean versions that drove themselves.

The great part of high-speed rail, etc. is that you can relax while they do the driving and you arrive close to your destination. However, driverless cars give you the best of both of those worlds, and other than wind-resistance (which drafting largely solves) you have similar efficiency.

PS - Does anyone find "driverless car" to be the 21st century equivalent of "horseless carriage"?
The median is an average.
Cars are one of the worst inventions by human kind. Aside from the points mentioned in the article there is also many deaths by cars (traffic accidents) and the huge amount of cars now days tend to saturate the roads and make mobilization a really slow process.

My solution would be to get rid of cars all together an use only electrical trains driven by few professionals who are less likely to cause accidents; with fixed schedules (and speed) time management would be easier for everyone. And for short distances encourage the use of bicycles (witch also helps to the obesity issues)
I often wonder why there is such a common city style of dense commercial infrastructure (downtown) surrounded by further and further distant residential infrastructure.

Why don't we construct buildings that have both residential floors and commercial floors, for instance? At least then you'd have more options for living very close to where you work.
In academia my impression is that the decline of the GPL is due to business models more than ideals. There was a period of popularity in the 1990s and 2000s where dual-licensing GPL/commercial was used as an attempt to both open-source the code while still making money from commercial users who would pay for a non-GPL license. The copyleftness in that strategy wasn't really about agreeing with RMS, but about making sure you'd get paid if the next version of Matlab shipped with your code in it. But only a handful of projects that've tried that have been successful at making any money from it (the Stanford Parser is one example that has been).

My anecdotal impression is that the trend is therefore towards picking either openness or money as the goal, instead of trying the dual strategy. If openness is the goal, you pick MIT/BSD, because they're simpler and you hope lots of people will pick up your code, and maybe you'll get paid in citations and PR. If money is the goal, go for a full commercial licensing strategy, and either don't release the code publicly at all, or release it with a research-use-only/no-commercial-use clause.
Except when you need to sort a big collection of strings and the standard library sort function never returns.

What we need is good vocational education. Polytechnic schools that teach you how to code, be part of a project or lead one, design an application and so on. Then the CS taught in universities can focus on the basics of computing, analysis of algorithms, AI, programming languages, etc without the now mandatory Software Engineering 101.
Have you got the URL of any websites that offer such an alignment tool? Preferably done using PC software and the XA1541 cable.
What we need are electricity powered flying cars. Then we can have green, walk-able cities and can use all that open space above us for transportation. We'll need some new kind of flying technology though, cos nobody wants to hear the loud noise of wind blades or deal with all the air pushing downwards. Perhaps hover "paths" where grass is below and not tarmac?
Human interest stories always makes a good read, but reading it on techcrunch was the actual surprise.

Hope I can apply some of them, when I make my payout
Chumby is gone. But it's lead engineer Bunnie has a new company, BunnieStudios. http://www.bunniestudios.com/

BunnieStudios makes the netv device: it's an HDMI pass-through injector, and it's interface is all web based.
I'm a big fan of Lua, and a big fan of correctness via simplicity, but I worry the author is a little too confident for his own good. Take his sample webserver: http://lua4everything.dyndns.org/ and the accompanying blog post: http://blog.luaos.net/

That particular example is simple and doesn't permit much room for nefarious actions, but as soon as he adds support for a wider selection of files, POST (and other verbs), caching, templating, authentication and access control, etc, the code will grow in complexity and the advantages of Lua will recede.

For instance, remove the line "isin(path, sources)" and there is a arbitrary file read. White lists are more secure, but they don't scale.
Well, I'm a math-y overtrained guy who just loves tech as a passionate hobby, and I found HN. I love the community here, and the new things I learn. I hope to never have to work where only people like me are employed. shudder.
What distinction do you see between CC-SSA and GPL? They say essentially the same thing. CC-SS has the same viral nature as the GPL/LGPL (it's about halfway in between the two).

The GPL has a lot of FUD about it, but there's very little actually offensive about it.
Yes, hindsight is a wonderful thing - I signed this 3.5 years ago fresh out of university and didn't pay enough attention to the small print, I realise that now - I'll contact someone in the legal profession that I know for a more qualified opinion.

As to it being normal, most of the friends of mine who went to work for medium to large enterprises say that they've got the same type of clause in their contracts. From what I've read it appears that employers are typically recommended to make their phrasing as wide-ranged as reasonable.
I found a bug.

A*, Chebyshev, Allow Diagonal:

WWWWWW
GWR
WWWWW

Optimal path should go underneath, but the simulator chooses to go over.
I watched the whole thing and I just can't believe that.
Android Version Market Share History (from 2.0.1 onward)
How about flying carpets (Neil Gershenfeld at MIT is working on making one)
No, it's not fair to say that at all. The website can MITM you at any time, even without changing the crypto code it sends you.

Native crypto clients don't have this particular vulnerability.
Science evolves from funeral to funeral.
There might be, but yeah, that's not the main reason for searching IMO.

See http://primes.utm.edu/notes/faq/why.html, but it boils down to "something really interesting can be found along the way, primes relate to other important topics so learning about them has intrinsic value, there's some money in it (but you have a 99.9% chance of spending more than the prizes in your search... and you still won't win)".
I like trains and commuting by train too. I can't stand traffic either.

But cars remain awesomely effective, because they can go from point to point, and they're so competitive that trains are only really competitive if:
* you're going to be traveling for very long distances (but not long enough for airports to be faster), or
* traffic is going to be utterly miserable, or
* the train is RIGHT THERE and very convenient
or, ideally, some combination of the three. (Driving to the commuter rail and having your office be Right There is an acceptable incarnation of point three).

Notice where trains are most effective: the northeast corridor (really dense population, traffic problems, city centers with workplaces served by train/metro), big cities on the west coast (e.g. SF, Seattle).

There are significant diseconomies involved in making a big dense city. "A future without cars" looks like some of those cities and those city's problems - in particular, really expensive housing, especially if you want to raise a family and have multiple bedrooms (or, God forbid, a yard). Remember that median household income in the US is only $44k. If you're reading Hacker News I'll guesstimate you're probably making double that, maybe triple.

Anyway. Gas prices and the relative prices of train commuting/car commuting/real estate may change the dynamic of transportation in the future, but I don't think the densification that it entails is an unabashed good for the common man or that my preference for trains is a substitute for comprehensive realistic transportation policies. And if we must go down that road (so to speak) we're going to need to do a better job of making effective, useful, cost-efficient transportation projects than we have over the past few years.
Huh. Where is this mystical place where there are lots of qualified candidates competing for jobs?

It's certainly not the Bay Area in California, where there are far more jobs than competent developers. I'm out in Colorado, and I still get constant offers even though I'm not looking for a job.

If you're not able to learn what's required, then maybe you should question whether you're in the right field. I've been keeping on top of HTML, CSS, backend development and server administration, especially high performance servers and NoSQL databases, with a smattering of JavaScript on the side, in my spare time while working on video games as my full time day job. Suddenly I'm finding that I needed all of those skills after all; understanding the whole stack can be quite useful, it turns out.

If you don't even have a day job, then you should have plenty of time to become an expert (or at least competent) in at least one narrow field that people are hiring for. If not, then there's no way you'd be able to handle a serious job if you were hired, since just about any job you take will require that you do a lot of learning on the job.

The key skill to have is how to learn. Unfortunately school (elementary through University) tends to hammer that skill out of people. Try to find it and reclaim it. Then build something that you can show off to prospective companies -- or sell it yourself! Good luck.
Spaghetti Weather - Get real time weather alerts (and share your weather)
Or we just migrate to self-driving electric cars, with the batteries serving as Intergrid energy storage.
Originally subtitled as "from the start", but that was incorrect - this is from 2.0.1 onward.

Easy full-size version link:

http://i.imgur.com/qZy56.png

One interesting observation you can draw from this is that there's generally only two or three versions of Android that are widely used at any time. Another is that the 3.x and 4.x versions of Android have very little uptake.
Another repurposed Linux system. I'd rather like to see a fresh start and some new ideas.
I agree that using third party accounts as part of a service is a bad idea.

But you must be kidding about GitHub signup? There's nothing to install locally for a GitHub signup.

Also, saying the "crypto stuff is scary, I won't do it" is similar to the old "math is hard, lets go shopping."
About a third of my investments are in innovative new ideas in the US.

BTW when you launch a "copy" in an emerging market, it's much more involved than just copying. You obviously need to adapt for the local market place. Most of the products have local sourcing, local logistics — so a concept might be copied, but you need a lot of innovation in the execution of the idea, because it’s fundamentally different. In Russia, you need to deliver the goods and get paid in cash on delivery, and that appealed to a whole bunch of other conclusions and consequences in terms of how to run these businesses. Even though the idea is the same, they actually look very different in terms of execution. If you look at eBay in France, wine is always a big category, where in the US it was practically non-existent. There are cultural differences.

There is a lot of innovation going on in emerging markets — it’s just that I choose not to invest in innovation on principle. In the US if you have a new idea, and your idea ends up being smaller or failing, the market is so big that you may still do okay with your investment. Whereas if you invest in a new idea where the concept is not proven, then in emerging markets, you’re probably going to be wiped out. So in the US I’m willing to take idea-risk, but I will not take market-risk, because the market is very big. So I’ll do innovative stuff in the US — in fact all my US investments are innovative — but in the emerging world, I intentionally avoid innovation because I don’t want to take idea-risk and market-risk. So in the emerging world I’ll take market-risk but then I won’t take the idea-risk.
>He said that dot org was interesting because it captures the fact that you know that any website with that suffix is a non-profit.

This is simply false. There is no requirement whatsoever for .org domains and there are countless examples of .org domains owned by for-profit companies.
" Correlation between having a degree and being a successful developer, after the first few years in industry, basically zero."

In my experience it's even negative. Almost every person without degree that I worked with was much better at their job than the rest. They were more driven and that's probably how they got the job too. On the other hand the code written by phds... Often I regret looking. It's not that it's not correct (usually), it's just barely usable and disconnected from reality of how/where it needs to run.
My impression is that by numbers, we're moving from big projects -- like Linux, LibreOffice, Gnome, KDE, Gimp, gcc, etc. -- to smaller projects -- small JavaScript libraries on github that people fork, merge, etc.

GPL makes a lot of sense for the former. If you write the Linux kernel, a ton of companies would take it, enhance it, and not contribute back without GPL. That's a big part of what killed BSD. On the other hand, almost no one is going to reimplement Linux just to get around the GPL -- it's cheaper and easier to just give back.

For the little libraries, permissive makes more sense. If your JavaScript control has a license that isn't permitted in my project, I'll just write my own in a day or two. If I enhance it, that's not a core advantage to my business, so I'll likely contribute it back.
You know that Herman Cain was widely ridiculed for exactly this line of thought? The tax code is certainly too complicated, but why should it be simple? It should be complicated to reflect the complications and nuances of our societies. Enough of us obviously think that there should be special cases for certain situations that special cases will arise. And democracy will see to that. Which I guess is why you'd have to be King to make it stick. But even then

And why set the threshold to 3rd graders? They aren't the ones filling out taxes. Maybe high school seniors would be a more nonsensical threshold.
Fireside Chat with Peter Thiel
I should have been more clear. The neat thing about the entire CC class of licenses is that it's easy to pick from what you want to do based on what you're doing. A license framework if you will.

The GPL doesn't have that - and as you said, CC-BY-SA is probably the closest - but I don't have to use CC-BY-SA if I don't want to. Maybe I don't care as long as my name's on it. Then I can just use CC-BY.

The FUD you speak of is another reason I tend to shy away from GPL - both in terms of enforcement (shown to be tricky, thought the SA CC license would have the same issue), and it's association with RMS and the culture and FUD surrounding it.

Another thing is that CC lends itself better to things that aren't computer code.
If you can go from 4 to 10 in something new every few years, that's amazing in itself. (although maybe we're using different 1-10 scale here; mine is probably log and I'm probably and 8.x at my strongest skill, and 4-6 for secondary skills after some solid effort.
>If you register a .com, you have to be safe and pick up the .net, .org, .info, .biz, etc.

This is a rookie mistake. Nobody in the history of the internet has accidentally typed ".biz" instead of ".com" and gotten to the wrong website as a result.
That's what I recalled from when I read through it before signing (evidently not in close enough detail...)

However, the phrasing is: "any invention wholly or partially made by the Employee at any time during the course of his employment with the Company (whether or not during working hours or using Company premises or resources, and whether or not recorded in material form)."

Which does seem pretty open-ended :(
A lot of picasa style picture editing can now be done in G+ while you post picture.

What about pictures that won't get posted?
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The real problem with cars is they directly kill 100's of thousand people and people waste 100's thousand lifetimes worth of mindlessly driving them around EVERY single year world wide. They also cost of resources and environmental costs to build, fuel, maintain, and create roads, but so do all their replacements. We can have different trade-offs when it comes to those costs but massive transportation networks are always going to be expensive.

I have always thought the future would have personalized self driving subway cars. But, it's all about what you value.
You'd think so, but if you look at both the comments and submissions of "sdtransfer," the poster of this article, they don't seem like they'd be terribly hope-y.
The software industry today is where the medical industry was 200 years ago. We still have a long way to go and a lot of movements to look forward to.
Review: Kooky, Humble Bundle's First Movie
"We think Steve Jobs would have either killed Siri or fixed her."
This isn't about running out of bits. The primary reason for creating Stack Overflow was to increase the signal/noise ratio for programming information on the Web. If we don't reduce the noise, then search engines have a harder time trying to find the signal. So in this sense, the metaphor of messiness does apply to the Web.

Also, this particular post is locked, not deleted. Google will still find it.
I usually run a random name generator at domainhole.com and pick a few that sound nice to my ear (and that are free). then i try to reference my product by that name for a few days and see if it sticks.
Wake me when it's Scheme OS (and not run by some cheerleading brogrammer).
Sure it does, just join Valve and do it yourself.
> Firstly a tiny amount of people know C, C++, Java, Python & Ruby. If you found someone with that lot I'd probably hire them on the spot.

I fit your description in full. What is your offer? You can find my contact information in my hacker news profile.
GPL is like donating a loaf of bread, but saying you can't make a ham sandwich with it (because you just hate them pigs).

You either want gift the code to the world or you want to do it conditionally. Do tell me which one comes across as a more genuine gesture.
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Socialcam programming challenge on Interviewstreet
Attack? No! "Digital equivalent of a sit-in"!
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Also gets 0 wrong. It should be a FizzBuzz.
"When I told him I was running linux I was offered a $40K/yr job on the spot - just for getting linux installed on a computer and understanding the basics (quote "we can teach you anything else you need to know, you got the spark")."

Yeah, my technical screen for an 8-year career in Schlumberger was exactly this.
Need to draw someone to the Sign Up with a more distinct colour.
There are also a lot of people at Google who aren't OS experts.
That would require more data to conclude. The GPL is declining as a percentage of open-source licenses, but is that because more people are BSD/MIT-licensing their code, or because people who previously GPL'd their code (perhaps as part of a GPL/proprietary dual-licensing strategy) are just keeping it proprietary now?
> Don't know how anyone can do development solely on a laptop.

Mmmm... I work exclusively on an 11" MacBook Air with no external display. My coworkers think I'm a crazy person, but the constraints work for me. I stay focussed on the one thing that's on screen.
>> What does it mean to "know" a language?

My definition is that it is a language you would be willing to start a new project on, given a tight deadline.
Thanks. Presumably if we're talking about 1 CL / month this is more like a feature checkin to the release branch, rather than individual working commits given the context?

(1 local WIP commit per month really would be slacking off!)
This is a cool handbook. I wonder what the frustrations are that come with this? As the book says, Valve sucks at disseminating information. It'd be interesting to see if there is some sort of pervasive feeling of "why didn't I know about that project? I wanted to work on that."
I thought Cain was ridiculed largely because his tax plan a) would substantially shift the burden of taxation to the poor and b) sounded like something that came out of SimCity. The idea of a simplified tax code in itself doesn't get ridiculed, only ridiculous ideas for how.
I was thinking along the same lines. What happened to Guile ( http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/ )? Maybe the developer(s) were not aware of it's purpose?

Substitute Lua with Tcl and it would still be underwhelming.
I think that it is mostly personal judgement. Which one of the projects would you deem the most successful. If you have any questions you can ask www.twitter.com/59daysofcode