skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Their tools of choice are C, C++, and Java

Definitely, maybe, and absolutely not, respectively.

> They wear ironic t-shirts, and that is the outer limit of their fashion sense

True.

> They’re not hipsters who live in the Mission or even in the city; they live near a CalTrain stop, somewhere on the Peninsula

True.

> They meet for Game Night on Thursdays to play Settlers of Catan

False. SoC is for hipsters. The neck beards are playing something much more obscure, which probably hasn't been translated from German yet.

> They are passive, logical, and Spock-like

Logical, absolutely, but they are anything but passive. It's just that the set of things they really care about has almost zero overlap with the set of things that you really care about, which looks like passivity to you.
I agree with a lot of what you said; but stating that you will under no circumstances work more than 40 hours a week bothers me. I try to get out of the office every day on time - but shit happens, and there are instances where someone needs to fix something or else the company is losing revenue. You want financial stability with a high salary - but aren't willing to help make the company stable. Yes, a healthy work/life ratio is very important to me, but I won't walk out that door in the middle of a crisis.
It kind of works. I didn't really expect it to work for my mamotth 9000 line CSS. Would be perfect for small projects though definitely.

I write in LESS to start with. So I took the compiled CSS from less, then tried to run it through the css2less convertor, then recompile what it generates.

Few things I noticed.

[1] Selectors get rearranged

[2] Cannot correctly handle base64 images

[3] Cannot handle child selectors. ie :child / n-th child.

[4] Comments get mangled (confirmed from another commentor below)

[5] Generates duplicate properties (where the duplicates didn't exist in precompiled). Creating duplication properties is actually correct, such is the case where you would want duplicate background properties (to support IE/FF/Chrome gracefully etc). However, you don't want it to generate identical properties where the values are also the same.

[6] font-faces wrong. (To be fair, this is hard to get right even in normal LESS).

All constructive feedback. I'm still impressed that it did a fairly decent job.
Fab expands across Europe - Now serving 16 countries
Indeed. You want a higher salary, go where the money is.
I'm currently doing contract work for a client in the US and well yeah this is some sort of approach for getting some extra money. Right now I'm studying in Germany and the german tax law applies to me. If the extra money gets over a specific amount per month you'd have to register a traders-license (in case you're selling stuff next to your job, there's the usual income tax and if you get over a even bigger amount you'd have to pay sales tax too) since my passive income approaches didn't pay off a lot yet I'm still in the boundaries where I don't have to worry about that.
I reckon there are about 3-4 general levels of interactivity with a "classical" office suite:

1. Puts data in, and uses little else.

Word is a glorified text editor.

Excel is a table editor with built-in arithmetic.

2. Puts data in, uses slightly more advanced features.

Word documents use some simple styles for consistent formatting. They get spelling checked and word counted. They include the occasional picture, numbered list or table.

Excel spreadsheets use named cells and some basic formatting. They might include a few tabs, perhaps separating multiple input tables and adding some summary tables/charts. Summaries calculate some basic statistics. Charts are formatted to be useful instead of pretty.

3a. Uses "power user" features

Word documents are based on carefully constructed templates with comprehensive sets of styles. Long documents generate tables of contents, indexes and cross-references automatically. Collaborative documents have changes tracked and are passed around for review/annotation.

Excel spreadsheets perform serious calculations, use conditional formatting, etc. They are used to explore scenarios interactively.

3b. Uses automation and integration features

Word documents have custom macros to help when producing specific document types. They might combine data from other sources outside the document into a single place, use mail merge, etc.

Excel spreadsheets have custom macros to handle larger data sets, explore scenarios automatically, etc.

My problem with Google Docs isn't that it doesn't support 3a and 3b, it's that it barely supports level 2. You often can't produce professional-level work with Google Docs, because it lacks even the "slightly more advanced" features, never mind the power user or automation/integration capabilities. And while not everyone is a geek like me who wants to streamline everything and produce perfect results all the time, I can honestly say that in every office I've ever worked in, almost everyone operated on at least level 2.
Anyone else tired of software released with meaningless performance claims? What could it possibly mean to "handle over 1000 emails per second"? Trivial 1-recipient emails?
Celebration, Murder and everything in between written by you
A natural language processing system that intelligently organisers news stories according to what people are talking about and how they are reacting
Because that's how the law works?
Programmers Being Dicks
Www.yaokan8.com
If I remember right there was some kind of security problem that's solved by having you click on sign in rather than automatically logging in.
And this ruling only affects the NY District.
Well jewelrys
Yes, anyone that has gone through lots of courses and STILL keeps looking to learn is pretty dedicated to start with, even before bringing money into it.

Udacity gets you thinking on your own. It teaches you principles then presents a blank screen and says 'now make something that does XYZ'

That's a whole world away from a pre populated page of code where you type between the quote marks.

Going from a blank page to something that works - where the steps, logic and reasoning are all your own - THAT's what makes beginners jump around the room with excitement.

Beginners also often need to be reminded that if you get stuck your job is to stop coding and find out.
These are excellent points. A few of them I would have a small bit of disagreement over the perceived negativity, but they are too small to bother with. I would say it's more like there is not enough benefit to outweigh the perceived, possible, and/or actual negatives. But that seems a silly statement to make in of itself.

I think it revolves what your website actually is and how deeply invested you are in your URLs.
So is an Internet Cafe responsible for what all its patrons do? Is Verizon responsible for everyone who buys bandwidth from them?
Yep.

I get paid £18k with 5+ years experience in what we're doing.
You are right. A 1000sqft place in London will cost you at least $3500 a month ($42k a year). In certain locations outside of SV programmers have lower salaries and higher cost of living.

I guess its a supply/demand thing. SV has high demand for engineers and not enough supply of employee talent, therefore salaries increase to compensate. (Although judging from this thread they haven't increased enough..)

Europe does not match the talent demands of SV (maybe because fewer big internet companies based there), therefore salaries don't need to increase as much to attract talent. The demand is a lower proportion of the supply...
I give him 2 months.
Technical Support Staff And Offshore Technical Staff
We have dedicated technical support staff to deal various services like Technical Troubleshooting, 24 Hour Technical Help desk support etc. Live Help India.com provides offshore technical staff whether its for hardware or software. Our staff will work as your virtual employee so you can guide and monitor them as you like. You can hire our technical skilled staff for full-time and part-time as per your requirements.
Loving it, nice job!
I'm a little confused by the question ("up and coming" relates a different meaning to me than "outside silicon valley"), but I wouldn't call Seattle up and coming by my personal definition. Especially since Amazon, Microsoft, Nintendo, et al are there. The existence of smaller companies doesn't negate the fact that there are already huge, established players there and the city is already known to be a huge tech haven.

My opinion would point more towards something like Detroit. A city not well known for tech (and well known for not being an economic powerhouse). But with Dan Gilbert's "Webward Avenue" and Dan Izzo's "Bizdom U" startup accelerator (founded when YCombinator was still a baby), new tech is starting to trickle into Detroit. See also: Detroit Venture Partners, M@dison.

There's a backing of billionaires willing to put as much as they can into Detroit to make it a tech haven, and so far it's showing some progress. I don't live in or even near Detroit, but it's a pretty promising sign for a city (and state) suffering the full brunt of technology's impact on unskilled labor.

[1]http://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/index.ssf/2011/06/transfor...

[2]http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-izzo/go-midwest-young-entr...
Is Andy Rubin trying to reboot the G1?
I disagree completely.

Unlike other jobs, you need to always update your skills, learning new languages.

And there is no safety, since your position can always be outsourced by an MBA who wants to save the company a few bucks.

And thanks to blackberry/remote computing, you are pretty much always connected to your job...and can be called in to work at night, on the weekends...and any time your boss pleases.

And there is a huge age bias...so the longer you work, the worse off you are going to be.

And unlike other jobs, with programming, your salary tends to peak early. 5 years experience? $100,000. 15 years experience? $115,000

So sure...programming pays well...but not really as much as you are worth. There are plenty of jobs that will both pay you more, require less hours, require less commitment, and will be a very safe career(from outsourcing)

I mean sure...programmers make a decent salary...but let's not fool ourselves into thinking we struck some sort of lottery by deciding to go into programming.
While we're on the subject, I found the navigation to be obvious and intuitive, and the site to be beautifully designed. And the portfolio was lovely, too.
Occam's razor it's simply a way to compare two theory's with IDENTICAL results. AKA for all test data A and B produce the same results however A takes 10 days on a supercomputer to compute and B can be done by hand, I will go with B.

It also has a strong theoretical basis. Add enough epicycles and you can smooth out any irregularity's. But, over fit your data and you lose predictive capability.

PS: Preferring the more complex theory is unworkable, because E=mc^2+(10^(-900))m is going to give the same results for any test you could actually carry out. Having no preference has the same basic limitation.
Shown HN: T minus is the best-looking Android countdown app ever made
I think he meant that if there is a serious crisis he might stay. Sure, every once in a while a tornado sweeps through your data center. That happens once every other year. "We need you to stay till midnight because a very serious VC is coming in and this project needs to be done" is not a crisis.

Serious stuff happens, it does not happen every other week.
The problem with rejecting mail as spam explicitly rather than silently dropping it into the spam bin is that it makes it really easy to tune spam so that it gets past your filter. Maybe it doesn't matter so much if it's just for a few people, but if something like that was popular there would be people figuring out how to work around it.
Well now, it depends. If I let someone use something of mine that is licensed and restricted by the government because of the potential for misuse, such as a gun or prescription medication, then I am responsible inasmuch as I helped them circumvent government licensing.

If I lend someone an easily obtainable item such as a pencil sharpener or a cat, and they commit a crime using it, I don't see how I'm responsible.

The question is which of those categories Internet access falls into.
I wouldn't compare European salaries with US so quickly.
I have a cautionary tale to tell: when in 1990 the USSR collapsed, many Russian physicists decided to move abroad, some to western Europe, some to the USA. At first the European ones were complaining about their lower salaries, but once they started having kids and needing more medical care, they realized that they were actually much better off than their American counterparts.
The lesson here is: you might even make much less, but in Europe there are much much better public schools which are free, hospitals are (mostly) free and in general Universities are either free or at least one order of magnitude less expensive than in the US. Should I go on? Most contracts in the US do not have unlimited sick leave, whereas in Europe we get that and 20 days of holiday; the US are one of the four countries in the world with no national law on maternity leave (who are the other three is left as an exercise to the reader…).
But I agree with the general point that salaries of developers should not be so low compared to managerial positions.
Hmm, i see your point. Yet, I don't think "user experience" and the article's "experience" are at all the same thing. They're related, but only very remotely, IMHO. Therefore I misunderstood your comment.
Wouldn't that be redundant?
In the light of recent UK news, I suspect someone could make good money by selling a user-friendly browser plugin that proxies connections to blocked sites like the pirate bay. Of course, you probably don't want to be living in the UK whilst doing that.
I obviously didn't spend enough time to think about it hard enough and wasn't able explore the good sides of advertising. I had a web app and placed a big banner over it, the banner often seemed to show confusing buttons like "SHOW" or "DOWNLOAD" and I guess the users then accidentially clicked it. I think the main problem was that there were no ads that fit to the app (it was a QR encoder/decoder) so I wasn't able to provide a positive ux. Do you have any tips on how to find the best fitting ads for (sometimes very technical related) specific sites/apps?
You don't need to be in the profit center of the company, but, and this is a big but, when you are not in the profit center of the company you, your colleagues and your department are seen by the CFO and accounting side as an expense and not a cost.

Being seen as an expense in many companies means that there are budgets and less perceived room for negotiating by those deciding your salary. They have a budget to meet. It's not like they can easily go to their superior and say "Hey, if you increase my budget for salaries X, I can reduce the company's expenditures by 2X". Unfortunately budgets for most non-core departments only go down, unless the demand for the service that non-core department by the core departments go up, i.e. "In order to offer 2X capacity, I need 2X the budget"

Plus, you generally never want to be in the non-core part of any company/industry because the quality/talent of the people you work with in the profit center of a company/industry. It's simply much harder to surround yourself with good people.
You aren't actually paid based on cost of living, per se, but as that factors in so heavily, it can swing the value proportionally.

If I move back to Memphis, TN, I can make approximately half of what I make now in the DC area to live as comfortably as I do. Does that mean I'm worth half as much? No. Does it mean I should expect to make half as much? Pretty much, yeah.

Beyond meeting my basic needs (rent, food, whatever) then it's just a matter of how much expendable income does that salary leave me. I don't know if 'percentage of salary' is the best way to measure it, but it factors in.

Paying me 'market rate' in a place where a 3 bedroom 3 bath house can be had for $150k is a vastly different proposal when that same house is $450k in a different place. That is the 'cost-of-living' difference. Sure, I might add the same x amount of dollars of value to the company in both locations, but if I can't live comfortably in my market, then it doesn't matter.

Note, this argument ignores the competitiveness of the markets as well. There are naturally more potential developers in silicon valley than there are in Bumfuck, Nowhere. Supply and demand does factor here.

Lastly, except in situations of outsourcing, you're generally not paid based on where YOU are, but based on where the company (or the location you report to) is. If you're working remotely from Timbuktu while reporting to an office in Silicon Valley, you should expect SV (or near-to) rates. If you're telecommuting to the midwest, you should expect midwest pay.

The big difference there is in what it costs to replace you. If you're Linus Torvalds, that cost probably goes way up. If you're like most of us, that cost is probably a close approximation to 'whatever they can hire a local developer for', assuming there are local developers in the area with the skills you possess.
University-level education is still free here in Uruguay.

However, it has several big downsides, which result on artificial barriers like absurdly difficult exams (a calculus exam I took had only 2 people out of 1200 passing), quotas on classes or specializations (sometimes decided by scolarship and other times just by random drawings), and some really bad teachers and overcrowded classes (there are good teachers too, and things pick up after 2nd or 3rd year when most people have dropped).

I ended up getting a degree from a private university.

Having all of these online courses and virtual university education does sound really great :)
I like the aesthetic, but I found the navigation to be confusing. It gives the impression that you're simply navigating a 2D grid because there's no indication that the rows slide independently of each other (and reset after switching to another row). So it was pretty disorienting to get to the end of the top row, go down, and then not be able to go left.

I know you just said it doesn't really matter, but I thought I'd offer something a little more constructive than "it's too flashy".
Is the code meant to have entity characters encodings showing through? Love the post though - very thought provoking!
I agree with what you're saying. Does my point make sense?

some clarification here:

I'm saying copyright the entire item, which to me means the syntax. The implementation ought not to be patentable due to prior art. I mean, Lovelace, Church, Turing, Gauss and Euclid have never been paid royalties for building the foundation on which computing lies. Why should Oracle be thus complicated.
Rule 34 there?
I'd rather suggest that we point fingers at an industry and employers that don't pay overtime for such scenarios before pointing fingers at each other.
Studies show that sleeping pills are Not the best approach to sleeping problems
Persisting data on Android using SQLite
Mobile Browser Testing: Just how many devices do you need?
I'm sorry, but that's a seriously hilarious statement to me. Sad that you're right, but funny all the same.
Out of curiosity why would you rather be a garbage man than write Python for a living?
Scalarm: A Simple Alarm That Does Not Block
<p><pre><code> val alarm = timeOut( 8, TimeUnit.HOURS )

while ( ( alarm.didNotGoOff ) && ( developer.pocket < 800 ) ) {
developer.deliverFeature()
}</code></pre>
TheVerge writing content for HN is not a good sign.
-I'll download it and give Gimp another go.-

I'd like everyone to do this but this just isn't going to convert you to GIMP overnight. If you are as invested into the Photoshop tools as you say you are you will just get frustrated at the UI differences and give up within a few days. After all why should anyone struggle with a free software if you've already paid a thousand bucks for Photoshop and memorized all the shortcuts that make you a Photoshop machine.

Having said that, if you were ever in a bind and you had to give GIMP a try for a prolonged period of time, it would be capable of everything you ever wanted to do in Photoshop.
Physic Abilities
Fuck Yea is a series of four-pane cartoon strips featuring a stick figure looking rather self-complacent and quite frankly, for all the right reasons.
IDEE PER LA FESTA DELLA MAMMA
Yahoo has more pressing issues than research. A shift of focus away from research was to be expected after the last reorg.
How will we build an artificial human brain?
Internet Explorer 'silent' upgrades help push IE9, but show little effect on XP
What if you don't know who drove it? (you might have borrowed it to a few friends but don't know who drove it when)

In Sweden a clear photo of the driver is required for anyone to be fined.
The function color is (probably a pretty poor) way of describing a color I often see in UIs that prompts for a "secondary" action - examples would be a Close or Cancel button, or administrative functions like "Edit your account", etc. The action color, on the other hand, is something that the app or site's creator wants to the user to do - "Sign up now!", etc.
That's an overly simplistic way to look at it.

There's a reason jobs in Timbuktu don't pay the same as jobs in NYC for any job type - all jobs from janitor to CEO. This is not unique to IT. You have to start by paying people a FAIR wage to cover their living expenses, and it goes up from there based on skills and experience.

If you flatly reject a job that doesn't pay you based on some mythical calculation of "value added" whatever that means, you'll be unemployed a long long time. (Unless you want to be a commission only sales person.)
Show HN: Boost your productivity with Trello, Hipchat and Github
stereotypes FTW!
In Australia (well, the state of Queensland where I am at least) I'm pretty sure you can sign a statutory declaration to say that it was somebody else driving (I think you probably have to say who it is and they cop the fine and the points, unless the car was reported stolen).
Yes.

First of all, where are you getting this $120k number for entry level people from? Very few actually get $120k right out of school. According to WSJ we just surpassed $100k as average, and remember that includes senior people making $200-400k at Google et al. Top companies who are selecting the cream of the crop can afford to pay this because they know how to get great talent and make the most of it.

If startups are paying $100k+ to people straight out of school (mine certainly isn't) then it's an unfortunate symptom of easy money and does not bode well on the fiscal responsibility of founders which is key to early-stage success. Bubble or not, money will not stay this easy indefinitely and that will have a direct impact on low-end salaries.

Finally, European benefits are not to be underestimated when put up against US salaries. 2-3x vacation, free healthcare, inability to be fired, cheaper education, etc, etc.