skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How is the view from up there ? Are you in the cloud ?
Even in CS in the US it varies a lot by specialty and region. I know some sysadmins in the Midwest who've been having trouble finding work lately. It seems that even if you can do other things, having an N-year CV of doing Unix sysadmin work (and an age >M, for some N,M) puts you into a ghetto which doesn't currently have a lot of jobs. Especially true if you don't have a degree. CS has a reputation of caring less about degrees than many other fields, but the combination of a sysadmin CV and no degree seems to raise the odds that you'll get typecast as "computer janitor".
Pirate Bay Ban Rockets Pirate Party Website Into The Big Time
Show HN: Marketing Automation with Twitter and Klout
> The prosecutors don't think they should be responsible for obtaining and examining the evidence to build their case?

Unless the whole shebang was done for political reasons just to bring Megaupload down. Then they don't actually want to look at the evidence, expect the case to lose, but the end goal of would be achieved, nevertheless.
I read once (can't find the link now) that the feeling of anticipation is stronger then the feeling of happiness, which makes sense to me, because in nature only the adapting species will survive long enough. So having something to strive for might be quite important, maybe even more then feeling happy. And I don't just mean life threatening situations, I mean that we might actually want to "pursue happiness", not "have happiness". Ever thought about that?
Not a very good theory, because I recently left a place with lots of soul-crushing work but where people in the software functional all had two monitors.

I was working mostly as a software engineer, but was actually categorized as a systems engineer; I did not have two monitors. They had people in the electrical and test orgs working effectively as software engineers also, and few of them had two. This (dys)functional organization was not at all apparent to an outside observer, no matter how much research they did, without someone on the inside.

So, while I would certainly be more favorably inclined towards a company that promised two monitors, choice of dev box, or other things, I would not use such things as a primary or secondary filter on where I want to work.
Absolutely true. There is a company here in Charlotte, NC (any dev in Charlotte will know who this is) who puts all the toys on display to attract employees: flat screens on the wall, all the monitors on your desk you can handle, etc. etc. The actual company, though, is a soul-crushing hell hole with more churn than an amish dairy farm. That place is pure evil.
No, you must not lie.

You emphasise all the customer service style jobs you've had; or you say that you want to get customer service experience with a world leader company that takes service seriously.
He missed one step: MOVE. If you're where jobs aren't, don't be there.

The unemployment rate in North Dakota is 3%.
Not putting your college degree on your one page resume is not 'lying', it's eliminating irrelevant information in favor of freeing up space for past service industry jobs and relevant skills.

Tailoring the resume to the position is a best-practice in job applications.
MehdiEG - thanks for all the comments; its all part of the learning experience! I also checked out your business and downloaded your software. Good luck with that.

I will definitely take this all in account and stick to what I know. At the moment I'm just starting out so everything is new to me - but at least now I know that what I am writing is not a) at the quality or b) the quantity enough that people will want. I was going under the impression that you sell what the market can bear - and if you do that wrong, you change your strategy; but you keep trucking along.

Just lastly - I did not think I was lying; I didn't assume anything, and all I thought was that this was going to get lost with the rest of HN posts.
I find it quite ironic that the same site posted this article 2 weeks ago:
http://www.bgr.com/2012/05/04/samsung-galaxy-s-iii-htc-oppor...

Basically saying that the SGS3 looks like a dud and HTC is where it's at. HTC currently isn't able to import phones into the US.
>I think there are plenty of people going through what this 29-yo is going through, and part of that might be because they have degrees in things like English, Art history, Philosophy

This. I have friends who majored in the humanities and are now working retail and restaurants. I feel bad for my friend with an English degree stuck working at Barnes and Noble but I also understand the flipside, which is if you're a Philosophy major right out of college with few or no internships, what precisely _are_ you qualified for?

I know I won the lottery with a CS degree in this economy (god how I hate that phrase) but of what real world use is a philosophy degree?
Not necessarily. There are setups to keep seized hardware powered up during the move. They have it for laptops so I would guess someone sells that for whole racks as well.
ICO: no fines for breaking cookie rules (EU)
IME process doesn't spring fully-formed from the head of Zeus.

You get test plans when somebody goes cowboy on live code and breaks tangentially related processes. You get security reviews when somebody goes cowboy on live code, everything looks great, and then a month down the line you lose days of work when someone changes a password. You get mandates to create parameter files when someone gets burned having to run through this entire process over and over again when business rule changes back and forth.

The reality is that once this change is done the proper way and the business parameter is moved to a file, the company will never lose time over this issue again. It will be configurable just as fast and responsive as we all feel it should be, without any concerns about breaking things down the line.

Is it frustrating? Sure.
But that doesn't mean it's wrong.

Going cowboy on live code, even for something as trivial as changing a 3 to a 4, can and has created large problems.
I'm a bit confused. He says he got his undergrad degree around when Lehman collapsed, which was September of 2008. So if he's 29 now, why didn't he graduate until he was 25 or 26?

And if it took that long to graduate, I'd like to think he was doing something worthwhile in those extra years that would have easily turned into a job.

There is no secret sauce. Work begets work. I started working as a [very bad] programmer and [mediocre] sys admin when I was 13. That job got me the job I had throughout college. The job in college got me the job I have now. Six years later and things are good.

My anecdotal observations are that the longer people I know waited to get their first job, the longer they've remained unemployed or stuck in dead end jobs.
Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.

- John Lennon
Welcome, and I believe you are thinking about this:
http://www.deadmansswitch.net/
This is neat.

It would be fantastic if someone did the same thing with the jvm. Then I could use Java or Clojure or whatever JVM-based language I wanted - and make use of tons of pre-existing libraries.

NaCL is the sandbox I want, not the craplet sandbox.
With NaCL I can use C libs and access useful OS services without having to sign the app and ask the user for permission to delete their hard drive.
Disaster-mapping software pings routers to find buildings still standing
GEB sits on my nightstand with too little time to be read. It might have to get bumped up the priority queue a bit.
Come on, as someone who was a teacher for a while, lives with a teacher, and knows lots of teachers this is very atypical. Nobody would be doing all of these things every day, or even once a week. It is also quite common to have a number of free periods each day, one day a week I had 3 hours off.
As somebody squeezing my eyes into a 19 inch with shitty resolution, I see where you are coming from.

Also, I don't have admin access to my computer. I'm forcibly handicapped.
Ask HN: what new user experiences could you offer as a bank startup?
If you wanted to start a new bank (or build on top of a bank, like banksimple), what specific user experiences are broken, and how could you fix them?

What would be AWESOME?
Sprite Packing Algorithm
How to peel off jar labels using a computer?
I have started doing this for my training courses. When I demonstrate live, I commit to git. I use some variation of "FAILING" in the commit messages to call attention to "red" commits, in "violation" of the usual rule that tests pass 100% in all commits.

azundo, I know my examples aren't web apps, but do you have time/energy to explore any of the branches in this code base[1], read the commits, and give me feedback on how easily you follow it?

[1] https://github.com/jbrains/WorldsBestIntroToTdd-Tallinn-Janu...
I didn't know about this part of the conversation. So in that case, where I can find original one? Any mirrors where created, that we know about?
I'll be the first to admit that I don't know how jurisdiction would work in a case like that. But it seems to me that paying taxes on money recovered for you by a legal system is a fair price for the service.

If the legal system was corrupt or inefficient, he'd never have gotten his money. It only seems fair to pay to support it. Particularly given the fairly low tax rate. There are precious few places and ways you can earn hundreds of millions of dollars and only pay 15% on them.

That said, it sounds like he has paid tax once and is possibly trying to avoid paying tax on the appreciation of that property, which I will also admit muddies the waters quite a bit.
It is. I once house-sat for a family with a good memory-foam mattress. Best sleep of my life.
I just got my first Android phone (a 1ghz dual-core 512mb LG) and it its fuckin slow :( (my iPhone 3GS felt way way snappier).
You're right, I don't have a lot of empathy for this guy. If I found myself in this situation -- a not-implausible outcome, given the state of my life at the moment -- I would most definitely not react by mailshotting ~100 law firms every week. Or maybe I would, once, and when it didn't work I'd move on to something different. He's stuck in a rut and he knows it, which is what's so frustrating about this letter. It's not working, dude!

So do something else.
As mentioned in the article, the PCDecrapifier is a really nice bit of (free) software -- I run it on all new Windows PCs (if I don't just format and rebuild from scratch). And the name is brilliant :)
Great idea... same would for FB and G+... great chance to use someones profile to get a plug
Social Followers Don’t Mean Sales
The type of thing OP is talking about is actually quite common in Sweden, but as a non-profit (on the teachers behalf, that is). My mother is a teacher and I've worked in a school, and the use of http://www.lektion.se/ is very widespread. All the class plans there are free (as in money).
I got yelled at once for adding 512meg of ram to my corporate desktop out of my own pocket. Went from either 256 or 512 to 768 or 1gig - can't remember. Either way, I was transitioning in to some Java/Eclipse work, and the current RAM wasn't cutting it, so after waiting for a couple weeks, I just went to the store and bought some. Apparently, that's not good. :/
Deploying is easy.

Using a CDN, sprites, and other details in this blog post are iterative optimizations, not deployment prerequisites. They certainly aren't more trivial to implement if you aren't using Rails.
Subpixel vs. Greyscale Antialiasing
“If a quantum computer existed now, we could solve problems that are exceptionally difficult on current computers, such as cracking codes underlying Internet transactions.”

At least he's being up-front about it, but I'm a little concerned that this consistently seems to be the most prominent projected use of quantum computers. What else are they good for, besides allowing exceptionally wealthy actors to bypass our privacy protections?
Maybe this: in "draft mode", you automatically commit on all changes in pass/fail state. Then, at some point, you "publish", at which point you squash all the commits from commit X to HEAD whose message matches "[ON RED]".

I imagine git rebase -i X | sed -i "magic happens here" would do the job.
This is bad. Physical objects are a way to permanently an irrevocably establish a position. It is not possible to delete or change a textbook on the fly. This will open up textbooks to instant manipulation for political goals.
Yes that's what I meant :)
How to solve “Msvcr71.dll is missing” error?
I agree with you. I'm not doing Rails anymore, I'm working with Cuba + gs + dep + Ohm + mote, and I find it easier and less bloated than what Rails has become.

Rails 3.x, though with a couple of good ideas, it's not as easy as it used to be to start developing an app, less say deploying it. Too many helpers and technologies to learn, IMO completely unnecessary.
Has BGR ever written an article longer than a few paragraphs? (Edit: huh.. that struck a nerve it would seem).
If someone's complaining about the size of a monitor as a reason for leaving then there's a good chance that it isn't the monitors! People don't like burning bridges when they leave a job, so they are highly unlikely to say the real reason - especially when the person that's asking for the reason is the actual problem.
Likewise. I pulled it off the bookshelf last week and set it on my coffee table, but still haven't had a chance to dive in. This weekend hopefully.
Uber competitor launches in France. Solution: Private Driver Race.
Yet there seem to be people who use their data to make a bit of money on the side.
I haven't had time to do so, but I wanted to ask SO if the translated SO pages on humbug.in/stackoverflow are against any rules.
He punches their pages trough googles translate and stuffs them full with banners.

Nearly drove me nuts because a friend who I was working on a project with kept searching in german. As a result he got the terribly translated pages first followed by the actual SO pages.
Lessons from 2.5yrs running my own company
On the topic of paying for networking (I'm not disagreeing with you), I was thinking that you shouldn't be paying to get into networking events generally. I know I don't. When I was in Boston, there were 10+ good networking events every week, which were almost always free. If they weren't, a few well placed emails got me in the door free. Now I'm in Ohio, and even here I can find free networking events with good people at them.

Even events like SXSWi, which are definitely not free, can be made free. Its simple, just get on a panel or speak there. Before someone says that a 29 year old wouldn't be able to do that, I say look at who is really giving the panels there. About 50% of them are under 30. Every year I have a dozen ~25 year old friends speak there. There's expenses involved in getting there of course, but if you attend SXSWi as a speaker and don't get at least one job offer you've probably done it wrong.
I need to clarify: I feel 100% happy now.

I've got to say, I still don't understand the obsession these days with "happiness". Who sits around reflecting on (and measuring) their happiness, as if it's some numerical, achievable end-goal? Not only that, the most important thing in life is not what you can do, but who you daily choose to be - your character and integrity. Money and things will fade, but character never dies.

Happiness is nice if it comes as a byproduct of life, but if happiness is really the pinnacle of that which we are striving for -- if it's really our greatest purpose in life -- we have a foundation softer than sand, constantly shifting with every direction the wind blows. Martin Luther King hints at his purpose in his "I Have Been to the Mountaintop" speech, noting that he's willing to sacrifice a long life for his purpose:

Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!

It also surprises me that as someone who was a "devoted Christian for 25 years" who would at least have some Biblical knowledge, Ryan doesn't at least acknowledge the inherent spiritual incompleteness of placing his hope in worldly and material things - number six on his list being the exception. (Ecclesiastes, Ryan? Or Job 1:21? Or Phil 4:12?)
They are also good for allowing exceptionally wealthy actors to protect their privacy against other exceptionally wealthy actors who use quantum computers.
What is to keep students from using those existing methods? If you are looking to build a community of just students, I think you are missing an important piece - Advice/mentorship/etc. from those in the "real world".

Maybe as a non-student I don't get it.
For many years I insisted on using the grammatically correct he/she. While I sympathize with they, I cannot bring myself to use it.
I think the relatively recent thing is putting everyone in an open room with nothing really separating you from the person sitting at the long table next to you, as opposed to putting people in cubicles which at least have a tiny suggestion of separation.
> Does coffee benefit productivity? I'd say it certainly does not (contrast to a good nap at the right moment), and probably isn't very good for health.

I know this isn't the point of your comment, but I had to point out this recent study that begs to differ.

http://healthland.time.com/2012/05/17/coffee-drink-more-live...
How much did people pay for Facebook on SecondMarket?
Google docs (drive?) spreadsheets also have this capability, right? On desktop at least. Makes work on an 11" screen much nicer. I've used Foundation for a couple of projects and I'm really starting to appreciate how lean it is in comparison to Bootstrap.
Why don’t you use adblock?
Boy does this hit close to home. I was almost exactly in the same place 2 years back. Dropped out of PhD, start looking around for a gig, then promptly rejected by almost every top IT/telco related Japanese companies.
My solution was similar to @patio11's advice: a) iterate and refine your process, b) hack something on something, anything, on the side, and c) go to the events where networking actually takes place.
All of these will give you both tangible and social proof to bring to table once you eventually get through to the interview round.
There have been entitled office workers for a very long time, regardless of how well the office might be doing.
Maybe it's the version of Android? I just got the HTC One X and everything flies on that phone. No delays or lag on anything. Best phone I've used to date (and I've had all iPhones except the 4s).
That's because in iOS the UI has maximum priority. It can even pause the app so the UI keeps a high framerate.
I agree that CS majors/professionals aren't representative of the rest of the economy.

But this guy also isn't representative of the rest of the economy.

My brother has an architecture degree. He graduated college in 2008. That is about the worst major you can have right now, and the unemployement rate for that degree is very high right now. To add insult to injury, architecture is a 5 year degree so he gave up 1 year of earning potential and tacked on more debt.

He was interning at an architecture firm before graduation, and started working there full time after graduation. About 6 months later, they went bankrupt and he was unemployed.

He got another job tangentially related to architecture and construction for the last 3 years, but wasn't very happy with the salary.

Meanwhile he has been applying for better jobs. Not 100+ like the author of this article, but networking through people at school and work. He interviewed with 3 or 4 major companies that would have been 'good' jobs. They all basically said, we are impressed with your resume and you personally, but we have a glut of people applying with 10 years of experience and you effectively have 0.

Finally in the last two weeks, one of those interviews came through. He was given an offer at a salary far lower than he would like, but it's in the industry he wants to work in. He took the job, at least he will now build experience.

It's a long freaking road sometimes, but throwing your hands up and saying 'my life is over' at age 29 won't get you anywhere.

And even with all the trials and tribulations - a 5 year degree and 3.5 years of work experience, my brother is only 27. So he still has 2 years before he turns into this guy. What the heck are you doing looking for your first job at 29?
I don't know for sure what real world use a Philosophy degree provides, but I'm pretty sure there are a couple of people working where I am now who majored in Philosophy, and there are definitely a few english majors. They are working as product managers, programmers, and operations/sys admin roles.

My point was that, if you're going to indulge yourself by spending 4 years studying something like Philosophy or english, be realistic and realize that there are few places out there ready to hand you a cushy job "in your field" just because you have the degree.

We've (relatively privileged Americans) gotten ourselves into a bit of trouble by telling kids that they can grow up to be whatever they want and that they should follow their dreams, along with sending most of the off to universities without a clue as to what they will study there or do when they finish.

FWIW I have almost no idea what I'm talking about. I haven't seen studies about who among my cohort of "millenials" has been affected most by long term unemployment, etc, is it really the newly minted philosophy majors? Or are these stories just gobbled up by the press and the sense that there are hordes of humanities grads working as waiters and waitresses somewhat of a myth? Likely the real story is something in the middle and more complicated.
>Other bits of Usenet would tolerate carefully munged From headers

before 1994?
Rails provides great performance and when coupled with Apache/Nginx delivering Assets is not that big of a deal.

But as Heroku doesn't provide any proxying it is upon every developer to implement something like this. Though doing it takes probably less than an hour, so compared to earlier times it is incredibly easy.

And someone else already mentioned that this is not something you would do from day one. The first deployment (especially with Heroku) is incredibly easy, but there is a lot to build upon once you have that application up and running.
Now this is quite amazing . Has Samsung also started to attract an albeit smaller apple like following .. ?
"I have friends who majored in the humanities and are now working retail and restaurants."

The problem is that this isn't just the case in a bad economy, it's the case always. People that major in the humanities generally don't have a lot of job prospects..they never did.
Thanks for alerting me, indirectly, to the Spival pronouns. I think they're a good, minimalist approach to a fix, but agree they will look distracting until or unless they become commonplace.

I guessed - correctly - it would be the same Spivak who wrote the excellent Calculus textbook.
Came out with an idea then realise that people are already working on that
Guys, I am wondering about this question. This is not the first time already, an exciting idea to share files across mobile devices pops in my brain. I was excited that I spend one or two hours fine tuning the idea thinking its implementation in my head before I get home.

And guess what, an app called bump is already doing exactly the same for quite some time, even they way the do it technologically, is 95% of my idea.

Have you guys come across with this kind of situation before? Please share your story.

Sent on the go
Sheau Jye
Twitter @sheaujye