skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>the average unionized worker is not very kind: lazy, non-productive, selfish, self-important, over-paid, unfairly protected, de-humanized, and more.

I could not agree more. Unionized workers make my life hell anytime I'm in Vegas or Philly -- With Philly being an order of magnitude worse.

The first time I worked in Philly was a rage-inducing experience. We were forced to pay an "A/V" guy $40 an hour to sit in a room all day and do absolutely nothing. I set everything that needed setup the night before the conference, but because we were filming in one of 'their' rooms, we were legally obligated to hire a local guy. And since there was nothing for him to do, that fucker would show up in the morning with his laptop, sit down in a corner, and play fucking games all day.

For the full 5 days of shooting, we only asked him to do one thing -- one -- and that was to bring us a handheld recorder we left in one of the rooms. Could he? "No, I technically can't because it's the end of the day".

Though, over the years I've learned that sending them to a corner all day is ultimately the best option. The are lazy, unreliable, and FAR too technically incompetent to perform the work asked of them.

We are often tasked with recording entire conferences. For really large events, in the area of 25-30 concurrent sessions per hour, it is generally expected that out of the hundreds of final sessions, one or two will be lost due to gear failures or non-compliant speakers. 2 out of 400 is not bad. However, using local union help? That number balloons to unreasonable. We've at times lost upwards of 30% of the sessions slated to be recorded. Which of course makes us look incapable of doing our job, which affects repeat business. It sucks.

It's infuriating as a small business to be forced to hire people that will only damage our business. It's completely anti-competitive.
I'm not super familiar with compiler internals, but wouldn't it be possible to push the exception-handling frame as an additional frame to the top of the stack instead of unwinding? This way the stack would be preserved. In addition, if the local symbols are kept around and the optimising compiler doesn't reuse stack space for multiple variables, wouldn't that allow binding the symbols of the exception throwing stack frame to either local variables in the exception handling scope or some sort of a dictionary?
I disagree. Generally you are right, and discussions should be civil and measured, but some things are beyond the pale and deserve a proportionate response. XML is one of these. Obviously Naggum has written a rant rather than a technical explication, but he makes his point better than any white paper possibly could.

I find this to be one of the best pieces of polemic writing that I have ever seen. It's technically accurate, concentrates the abuse on the technology rather than the submitter, and is hilarious to read. It also perfectly captures my sentiments regarding XML.

I loved it when it was written, and I love it now. I'm sorry that it offends you, but if it gets even one more person to sit up and ask themselves whether they should choose XML for a new project they are writing, I feel it has served its purpose and justified the offense.
The attack on attributes was my favorite parts. Attributes are indeed a moronic mess.

Too bad he neglected to similarly attack namespaces.
... how the hell do you do that? Not that I want to, just interested how those domains show up when you do a whois search.
In the video we see the lamp being connected to the power. But the text says "Calleja has developed a lighting system that requires no electricity for power."... confusing.
At that point it's not really a question, just a tautology. My apologies for trying to interpret the question more generously.
No of course. And it should be enought to realize how non sense is a Record Label to have the privilege to determine what you can do or not about something they already sold.
We had a team of about 10-15 in Romania.

The long and short of it was that it was nice to put in requirements late in the day and have them done in the morning but overall the code quality was terrible.

We had a Romanian developer here in the States and he was great. He was in charge of the Romanian contingent so he could have been a bit better on the code quality control side but corralling 15 coders is not an easy task so I don't blame him.

I am sure there are a lot of talent around the world but a lot of them make their way to the States or other higher paying Western countries under visas and leave the average back home a bit depleted.

I've seen the same phenomena in Pakistan and India as well. Great Pakistani and Indian devs here in the States and mediocre coders back home.
Facebook is keeping you from being an asshat in comments
I agree completely.

But just to let you in on where I'm coming from:

* Git is not part of my main-line toolkit. I just dabble in it. (out of curiosity!)

* I have limited time and energy to pursue my curiosity. My goal is to focus that on a manageable number of things. Writing fun code projects is my primary goal, git is a means to that end. Since this is mostly solo coding, I don't often have the need for the advanced distributed features.

* I visted the site from a link on HN on a Friday evening, not as someone seeking information about git.
There isn't a talent shortage. There's a shortage of courage to hire anyone with less then a Google-level CV and of will/ability to mentor them.

The 4 * 2 hour reviews + coding test + references + logic questions + firewalking culture is ridiculous. It might make sense in places where firing employees is extremely difficult, but not in NYC or SF.

%99 of the jobs supposedly in "shortage" could be filled by anyone with an attitude for programming, self motivation and a good mentor. Look at the current products of Silicon Valley - how many of these require much more than basic web development skills?
Startup Weekend team needs your help
Using gist indices for exclusion constraints (added in pg 9.0) can be pretty useful also.

The Postgres docs show a simple example that enforces the constraint "no two rows in the table contain overlapping circles" (&& is the overlaps operator for geometric types):

CREATE TABLE circles (
c circle,
EXCLUDE USING gist (c WITH &&)
);

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/ddl-constraints.ht...
Perl 5 has completely supplanted Perl 4 by now.
But it's not just "the Supreme Court decided it and thus it is so" (although when push comes to shove...). It's also that the SCOTUS decisions are a hint book to arguments like this.

So, I don't have to reason from first principles to arrive at the conclusion that the 14th Amendment makes "separate but equal" unconstitutional. Brown v. Board lays out the argument that it does. I can't best the argument here in a message board post.

Do you think Brown v. Board is one of the cases SCOTUS got wrong? Genuinely curious.
How about continuable exceptions with a Catch block that just applies to anything that follows in the current scope? Better yet, have this be implemented as a system-level function, so one could store a block of code or an object implementing the correct protocol and have code reuse for exception handling. (In Smalltalk, you have access to the stack frame where the exception was thrown from the exception itself.)

At least one Smalltalk had a "top level" exception handler that just acted as the handler of last resort for everything currently running. (And it should be possible to construct one for any Smalltalk whose event dispatch is implemented as Smalltalk.)
I'd be willing to bet they subsidize their data pricing with that text messaging revenue. How many of AT&T's iPhone activations come with a fat text-messaging plan? Data plans are low-margin; text messaging is high-margin.

AT&T, along with most other carriers, made a tremendous amount of capital investment in the last few years to improve the service they provide to smartphone owners. iMessage is a threat to their margin-stealing model.

If they made text-messaging free—or just counted its data use against your data plan—but raised the price of your data plan by $15/mo, how would you feel?
"Why am I required to finance an entire degree only to be forced to take courses that I do not value?"

Maybe a kid just out of high school isn't the best judge of what forms of knowledge have "value"?

That's not to say that higher education doesn't need reform (or quite possibly wholesale replacement). It does, desperately. I just question whether a person who (by definition) doesn't possess a certain piece of knowledge is a good judge of the value of that knowledge.

I'm put in mind of my undergrad CS degree -- lots of bitching about how the courses weren't taught in C++ (the "hot" language of the day). Some of the professors even used weird stuff like Lisp! Of course, the professors had been around long enough to see "hot" languages come and go, and were choosing a language thatillustrated the concept under discussion well (which could be Lisp, could be C, could be assembly language, depending on what it was).

Of the classmates with whom I'm still in contact, I can't think of many whose primary language for employment is C++.
Is not immune, but you have an explicit contract in the form of a XML Schema Definition (XSD).
Plea for help, I need people to fill out a short survey for school
To be fair, the rant was written in 2002. While namespaces existed as a W3C REC as of 1999, I don't recall them being used much in practice until significantly later than that (as is usual for anything going from committee spec to the real world). Had he written it later, he may very well have ripped on namespaces.
does itunes have an affiliate program? if so you could get some money out of this.
Student forgotten in cell for 5 days will sue DEA
Doubtful. I think both are too expensive, but both data and SMS plans are only able to be priced where they are because of breakage[1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakage
I agree that tc is not a very good user interface, but I'm not sure I agree with you that IPTables is. Consider http://www.openbsd.org/faq/pf/example1.html#allrules - a nice configuration language does look better than a shell script.
I got almost halfway through this before realising that it was a press release rather than a techcrunch "news" item.

Which shows how little critical thought goes into the majority of techcrunch articles rather than this being remotely modest.

Any independent user assessments or at least a distillation of what the product does?
Romania has some pretty smart people and their best do well in western environments.

However, I am reminded that when Sacha Baron Cohen needed to pick a country to film his movie Borat's scenes of a mock-Kazakhistan, something even more impoverished and backwards looking than the real Kazakhstan, he picked Romania.

Why is there not already a large number of Romanian startups producing high quality engineering? Well, as part of the EU since 2007, the most talented Romanians now move to Germany and the UK for software work.

The same principles are at work in the American Union as that of the European Union. There are many intelligent English speaking people in Alabama who have been to excellent schools established during the space program, and many parts of areas have very low wages. However, we do not see much outsourcing to Alabama because the talented tech people (aside from Marshall Space Center) are not actually telecommuting in tech work from those remote areas, accepting those low wages. They instead move to California and New York when they graduate college. This happens because in both the EU and US there is freedom of movement between member states.

Both states are part of a union with freedom of movement between states. Both unions have poor areas. In neither case can you rely on finding high skill talent and expect to pay low wages as the article suggests, because the talent moves from the poor regions to the areas that pay market wages.
Anonymous to Launch TYLER, WikiLeaks on Steroids
It's not like more than 0.1% of people visiting the page will see the noscript version

What makes you say this? Of the folks I know who might like to use a site about git, most of them use Firefox with Noscript. I'm sure my sample is biased, but I don't think you can assume it will never be more than 0.1%.
Can the user kill a tag? Do they have the ability to screen tags? For example, I can review a recommendation on LinkedIn before it's posted to my profile.
What exactly is the use case here? I think this is trying to hard to be a new network of sorts without adding significant or desirable value. Below are some examples of online profiles that add value (outside of FB, Twitter, LinkedIn)

About.me provided a nice professional landing page for me.
Coderwall falls under a good niche to get actually valuable information
Threewords.me was super simple providing a throwaway fun.

GiveBrand.to requires an education system and is too professional to be like threewords. In other words, I still don't get why I should sign up for givebrand.
Google Code Jam 2012 Round 1B
I'm sorry, but everyone expects 'smart & gets things done' not poets with cultural confluence of whatever.

What does matter is expertise, skills and learning, all other staff is completely irrelevant. (See http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/TSE.2009...)
"can't seriously pursue a career in law without a law degree"

It depends on what you mean by a career. There are still a few states that let you sit for the bar exam without going to law school (California is one, IIRC). That actually makes a certain degree of sense, since it's widely accepted that passing the bar exam is a MUCH more difficult hurdle than completing law school.

If you just want a career as a family lawyer, that'd certainly be a low-debt option.
Maybe a kid just out of high school isn't the best judge of what forms of knowledge have "value"?

Perhaps, but he's certainly a better judge than academics who's continued employment depends on getting him to pay for their services. At least his incentives are properly aligned.

When I was in college, my judgement was that the humanities and literature would be useless while advanced math would come in handy. Nothing has happened in the past 10 years to convince me this was incorrect.
Yeah, but when someone gets shot with a gun you can't prosecute the manufacturer, so long as they put warning labels on their guns and sell them according to the laws regulating the sale of guns. The person responsible is the person who pulled the trigger, which in this case would be the Feds.

The key is to make sure that they get access to the backdoor directly.

At the end of the day you can always code loopholes around the law, which will work until they legislate the loopholes away with more legislation. Almost every industry has been doing this since the beginning of government.

One of the best ways to code this into the system is to provide security measures that allow you to prevent what machines can access your account and notify you if machines not your own try to access your account.

"You recently tried to access your account from the IP address X.X.X.X located in Quantico, Virginia. If this was not you, please report this to customer service."

Customer service can then legitimately comply with the gag order by admitting nothing and say they'll look into it.
I don't understand the purpose of this article. The article itself is very, very shallow, it lacks substance, and there's nothing specific to Romanians in it. When you have a pool of 20 million people to chose from, you will find experts in every field imaginable with any skill set you need.
Wow: New Aggregation framework for MongoDB [Webinar]
It sounds like your problem is less about what skills you have, and more about how you're positioning yourself.

Try billing yourself as an "X" who differentiates himself by being good at "Y". For example, my skills are psychology, math, data, and some programming. This sounds like a disparate skillset which could be completely useless. But I position myself as "An Analyst who understands the business from both the technical side and people side.", and follow it up with examples of how the synergy between my different skillsets has helped me contribute massive value to the companies I've worked for.
it is under used because most of the time, you just don't have to care. and when it matters it lack the depth you need, like layer 7 detection.

it is almost always better to just pay for bigger pipes.
For HN: Hacker News Enhancement Suite (Chrome extension)
Noam Chomsky on America's Economic Suicide
> Yeah, but when someone gets shot with a gun you can't prosecute the manufacturer

Right, so you can't prosecute Google if I use gmail to send something that violates a gag order. If Google violate a gag order through their source code they are entirely liable for it.
This is what I imagine is actually going on.

I also imagine there's plenty of talent in places in the US besides SV and NYC.
But "Not your parents' version control" could be taken to imply that my parents used version control collectively.

My parents divorced before version control was commonplace, how dare you imply such a thing!
I suspect that 1NF or 2NF are the most commonly used forms, simply because most database schemas are made by people who don't really know or care, and are satisfied when it works.
»The stronger forces that became intertwined with the protests — such as Google and Wikipedia — provided more of a nudge rather than direct leadership.

This may be fitting facts to the hypothesis. The difference between the flailing Occupy and successful anti-SOPA movements was that the former behaves like a "starfish" while the latter had a brain. Anti-SOPA probably didn't succeed because of people writing to their representatives - it had bang because Google and Wikipedia gave it front page priority.
I think the idea is that someone could say they're great at writing grant proposals, but it carries a lot more weight when it's confirmed by others. Seems like it would be a nice simple way to confirm your talents to prospective employers and other professional connections.
Hit edit profile and delete the tag. We don't have moderated tagging yet. It's in the next release.
This is the key point of The Innovator's Dilemma. On the one hand, disrupting yourself means cannibalization and strategies that almost certainly seem unprofitable on paper. On the other hand, if you don't disrupt yourself someone will do it for you.

Considering Apple's success I'm inclined to say that disrupting yourself before anyone else has the chance to is the right long-term move, but I haven't studied the topic in enough detail to be sure.
"Yes, it's a rant. Why? Because probably the author is tired of explaining the same things over and over to the XML defenders"

If one is tired of talking, one's best option is to shut up.

Even better, if one's arguments are not being found persuasive, perhaps one should come up with better arguments, or reconsider their position...
Oh god. I'm doing the job search song-and-dance right now and you wouldn't believe how many interviewers have asked me "So..... you do design, and you also code. Which do you like more?" Which to me is a completely nonsensical question. It's like asking if I prefer spreading peanut butter or spreading jam. No, I like making PB&Js (or web apps). Why is that hard to understand?

Well, some of these interviewers are recruiters, and they have to put me in a well-defined box in order to match me to a position. I have some sympathy there. But the others... are more disappointing.

But: I've found that the people and companies that "get it", really get it, and will reward you for it. Instead of asking about the "design" and "code" boxes, we can have actually useful conversations about subsets of skills within them (user experience research! graphics! Javascript! Python! databases!) What with my technical inferiority complex and such, such people value me even more than I value myself.

And for those that don't, well, when you create your own company down the road, it will build things that are neither vaporware mockups nor asstastic apps, and have a culture of "getting it" from the start, so you can eat their lunch. :)
Oracle Seeks to Muzzle Jonathan Schwartz in Patent Phase
Windows XP Professional SP3 v2 SP3 AHCI (x86/2012/RUS)
College is absolutely an intelligence test and screening tool, and people are naive to believe that it isn't.

If correct, college is merely a wasteful arms race - many people wasting resources to outcompete others in a zero-sum competition for a fixed set of jobs.

Thus, we should tax colleges and education in order to discourage people from attending, as well as construct cheaper screening mechanisms and encourage their use. For example, we could scrap subsidies for education (e.g., state colleges) and replace them with standardized testing centers.

If far fewer people went to college, it would be much more costly for employers to reward wasteful signalling.
amazon.com isn't under this switch.

Some local services: yandex.com, mail.ru, vk.com, ozon.ru, rutracker.org, lenta.ru, ok.ru - are all unaffected. I bet Chinese resources are unaffected too.
Or Scala
The GPL Does Not Depend on the Copyrightability of APIs
Indeed, all the people I know who DJ, produce or play in bands also have day jobs. Not a single one makes enough money from music to live off it.
Full article on one page - http://www.alternet.org/economy/155281/noam_chomsky_on_ameri...
Great feedback Martin. The site is a great way to show off your personal brand and build credibility for your skills. Takes away the self reporting bias.
The other company mentioned, Blinklist, is being sold here : https://flippa.com/2729396-blinklist-com-pr-7-173k-incoming-... currently at 26k
Your musical identity - Sworly
Discover, listen to and share music while defining your musical identity.
I feel weird using this as an individual, but I think it would be awesome to use for a business. I'm sure that's on the roadmap though ;-)
I can see this paving the way for a generation of engineers. I meet so many people who would love to hack and also enroll in a CS degree but the barriers to entry are way to high, this is a great bridge.
Judging by what electives students choose when they have the option, anything with the word "math" anywhere in the vicinity is the first thing most students would skip if they didn't have to take it! If many CS students I've known had their way, all mathematical and theoretical content would be removed from the CS curriculum, and replaced with "real-world" programming classes. Less statistics, discrete math, and computability theory; more node.js, Ruby, and advanced git.

Separately from that, on your other comment, I've run into a surprisingly large number of people whose non-technical curricula have had a strong positive impact on their technical jobs. For example, Richard Evans, the AI lead on Black & White, Sims 3, and now a new startup recently acquired by Linden Labs, has a philosophy B.A., and credits it with being core to much of his AI design (his current system is based on a logic modeled on Wittgenstein's view of social interactions).
Others do find value in those things, you know. Maybe drawing conclusions from a sample of one isn't a good idea, either? :-)
Normalize 'til it hurts, denormalize 'til it works.
You should connect with LinkedIn and Facebook to pull interests from those sites to prepopulate the page.
The brightest and the best selling ads while very little programming talent goes towards combating ignored problems like teen homelessness, and other under represented issues is bad in my book. But, I'm a bleeding heart idealist, and possible dinosaur.
Facebook Stops You From Posting ‘Irrelevant Or Inappropriate’ Comments
Can I ask the stupid question... where does the carbon go?