skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Recruiters serve a necessary purpose, and it's not the "middleman" role because that's not necessary at all. Their purpose is something else, and I'll explain.

When you join a company, your manager is an advocate for the company's interests. Plenty of managers are decent people and look out for their employees as much as they can, but it's not their job. Their job is to serve the interests of the company. The employee has to be his own lawyer when it comes to negotiating raises and better projects, because no one else is assigned to that role and if the employee doesn't do it, no one will.

Recruiters, when they work well, serve as talent advocates. They help employees use the only bit of leverage (the right to find another job) that they have as best they can by getting them promotions, raises, and better projects at the rate at which they become qualified rather than the much slower rate that companies consider politically convenient.

There are a few problems with this system. One is that the recruiter is paid by the company, not the employee. That's actually a fairly small one, but it does mean that some recruiters will oversell bad positions in order to make quick cash. The second, related, problem is that they're paid for "churn". Most employees would rather get better work at the same company than change companies, but recruiters only get a payout in the latter case. There's no incentive for a recruiter to work toward internal re-placement, and most companies' transfer policies are so broken that the easiest way to get a better job is to change companies. The third problem is that repeated job moves, after a certain threshold, can damage the employee's resume: the "job hopper" stigma. Some recruiters warn people that there are long-term risks of high-frequency job changing (even though there shouldn't be; the "job hopper" stigma was invented to exploit people) but many don't.

There's a legitimate niche yet to be filled for "talent advocates", who can help the most talented people negotiate a fair shake (without necessarily requiring they change jobs in order to do so). The problem is that talent doesn't have any fucking money to finance this sort of thing. Companies have the money, so they make the rules.
most of the highly desirable areas are either fully built or land costs a fortune.

this is exactly the problem for housing prices: supply can't increase while more and more people want to live there(world population keeps growing and migration is at peak levels)

opposed to that there are countries, cities or neighbourhoods where you can buy property cheaper than the price of building it
As a selt-taught developer, I know what Big O notation is and I've worked with many CS grads (including Stanford) who did not take into consideration algorithmic efficiency.

I think these kinds of examples are very anecdotal.
A bar in 2053
Many pre-digital computers are really interesting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVOhYROKeu4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_xhMykK5Hw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&...
Your comment is untrue. As the author of the submitted article notes about a related proposed explanation for autism incidence, "First, in the broadest sense, the epidemiology doesn’t jibe." And that has always been the problem with the lawyer-profit-motivated hypothesis about vaccines and autism: it never matched the epidemiological evidence.

http://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/autism/index.html

http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=10997

http://www.vaccinesafety.edu/cc-mmr.htm

http://briandeer.com/mmr/lancet-summary.htm

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2012/08/04/andrew-wakefiel...

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/jenny-mccarthy...

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/dr-google-and-...

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/an-antivaccine...
Not really described as the future of computing. It's targeted at applications where a few incorrect bits are OK, like image processing on a drone. What if they could add some redundancy or parity though so we could achieve 100% accuracy?
The reason programmers don't get agents while actors do is that an actor's work is mostly visible to those hiring him while a programmers is not.

Thus, agents don't have to convince those hiring how well the actor can do his job (well or poorly). They only have to negotiate compensation and scheduling.

With individual software developers, their skill is not easily visible to those hiring. Thus it is much more difficult for an agent. The agent would need to becomes salesman as well as agent.
Yeah. I'm sorry about the static. It was late when I did it and I didn't notice the problem before uploading it. I'll try to clean it up and upload a better version.
A story on This American Life about a guy who got hookworms intentionally to deal with his immune disorder: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/404/e...
The TL:DR; I get from this is: "we're clean freaks, and thus our immune systems go wonky and start attacking good things because they lack bad things to go after, including unborn children that get autism as a result"

This totally validates my need to go play in the mud and eat sketchy food from carts on the street.
I found this online book about Backbone and Coffeescript really useful http://www.scriptybooks.com/books/backbone-coffeescript
Does anyone have references to studies regarding this? The author has a long history of advocating a link between parasite load and auto-immune disease (c.f. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/magazine/29wwln-essay-t.ht... from 2008), and since the Wakefield scandal I'm generally skeptical of non-journal articles attempting to link autism and inflammation.

The article is advertisement for the author's book, and I can't find any indication that the author has an educational background in biology. Based on his book's Amazon page, he's a journalist.
It looks like Jenny McCarthy owes dead children and grieving parents an apology: http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/08/widespread-vaccine-ex...

See also: http://www.jennymccarthybodycount.com
This comes up every few years. Please, guys, before you conclude that probabilistic computers are the future, think about what it would be like debugging a program running on one. Speaking as someone who has implemented a probabilistic version of 'git bisect'[1], I think it would be hard.

That's not to say that the idea is completely dumb. A probabilistic GPU would be useful, although it would go against the trend of being able to use them for general computation.

[1] That is, one that looks for probabilistic bugs, not one that runs on a probabilistic CPU. See https://github.com/Ealdwulf/bbchop
Steve Jobs Talk 1983 - Center for Design Innovation (audio)
I found a recruiter that I stayed with for over a decade - he was my agent. He knew my work history, what I had done and he would get me more money before I even walked in the door. Our deal was simple - he sold the prospective client on how good I was (both as a developer and and employee) and I closed the deal. Every time. We made a lot of money together.
The difference is that he's not a technical recruiter. He's an executive recruiter. He places VPs, CEOs, etc. But he also was with those guys on their rise up as well. So often when I took a position, my boss was someone who had the same guy.
Now, when I am looking to hire someone, who do you think I call?
Tech recruiters - the big companies who just try and grab warm bodies, put them in seats and collect commissions, are a blight on the corporate world. Corporations have gotten it in their head that it's better and easier to use them, and developers who need work have to turn to them to pay the bills. But it doesn't work for exceptional programmers.
If the immune-response hypothesis pans out (it's only a correlation at the moment), it would lead to an irony of modern times -- a modern household's level of cleanliness can cause:

* Asthma

* Autism

* Allergies

* Immune system dysfunctions

All these conditions are now "linked" to the "hygiene hypothesis," the idea that we're not doing ourselves any favors by creating near-sterile living environments. A quote from the article:

"Scientists have repeatedly observed that people living in environments that resemble our evolutionary past, full of microbes and parasites, don’t suffer from inflammatory diseases as frequently as we do."

I emphasize about the linked article that it represents a correlation, not a cause-effect relationship. We won't be able to say with any certainly what causes autism until we can trace its evolution step by step, from a specific environmental stimulus to a biological mechanism, with all the steps fully described. We're not yet close to that goal.
The OTS antenna on top of the helmet is clipped. Adding black sky doesn't restore it.
Those studies simply compared rates of autism in vaccinated populations... so if vaccines are merely bringing out the symptoms in people who already have autism then it still makes sense.
My biggest surprise - many developers, even in senior positions, are self-taught and cannot properly implement even basic stuff like binary search, don't understand basic performance considerations around algorithm complexity.

Don't conflate "self-taught" with ignorance. I'm 85% self-taught (I was a math major in college, and I took a few CS courses but not enough to become a serious coder) but I've picked up a lot of that stuff, on account of curiosity, later on. Whether someone learned how to program in school or in the trenches matters a lot less than whether they had the curiosity to actually learn it, whether than a "get 'er done" attitude that leads to no real knowledge.

There are a lot of people who pursued CS majors and evidently did well enough to get good jobs but, when they got out into the real world, turned out a bunch of VisitorFactory enterprise crap. Methinks they should have drunk less in college.
Virtual Hosting With vsftpd And MySQL On Debian Squeeze
Perhaps many hosts have the same security issue, but they haven't been targeted due to having less bitcoins. I suspect instead the Linode incident was an inside job, in which case it could happen anywhere regardless of security. Still, Linode should provide more info about what they did if anything to fix it.
For me, this was the tutorial that finally locked it in: codebyexample.info/2012/03/06/backbone-baby-steps/
Why Arrested Development on Netflix could change everything
>people will abuse it

Then be outraged at the abuse. Just about any tool can be misused, but that doesn't make using that tool wrong.

>so it can be used to show that the walk on the moon was easier or more "piece of cake" than it really was.

I see what you're getting at, but even that seems like a stretch, even in the light of the cold war. "Dumb Americans can't even operate a camera right!"

I see the principle here, I really do, but a principle is not applicable in all cases. Leaving no room for nuance is not an ideal to strive for!
My biggest surprise - The value of modularity is almost always ignored and that ivy-league CS grads can be horrible programmers.
Does anyone have references to studies regarding this?

Thank you for asking that essential follow-up question for most submissions on HN. Some of the references that turn up in a Google Scholar search

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_ylo=2008&q=autism+a...

include free full-text download links, so we can follow up on this.

The author has a long history of advocating a link between parasite load and auto-immune disease

Yes, I also checked out the author as I submitted this article. He has postgraduate training in science writing, has worked for The Christian Science Monitor (a dodgy publication for medical reporting), and has been published in other professionally edited publications for his freelance science reporting. I thought the submitted article had enough caution of statement and names of actual researchers to be worth discussing here. The article is certainly far from the last word on the subject, but may point to a line of research that will be helpful in SOME (but certainly not all) efforts to reduce the incidence of autism in the future and to help children after they develop autism.

AFTER EDIT:

Some readers here may be interested in looking at the original case report by Leo Kanner that first described autism.

http://www.neurodiversity.com/library_kanner_1943.html

An author who I think provides a helpful intercultural perspective on autism and its diagnosis is Roy Grinker,

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/health/jan-june11/grinkerext_...

who has studied autism in cultural contexts outside the United States.
I'm merely arguing that vaccines could possibly bring out or affect the severity of the symptoms of autism. None of the studies seem to study the severeness of autisms... just the rates, which would be unaffected if autism is already determined by a different factor (apparently age of the father may be one).

It's so scary to see how many people refuse to open their minds to possibilities outside their preconceived notions. The responses in this thread are a prime example.
> If this is true, then it makes sense that vaccines could trigger the symptoms of autism.

No, that is false. That theory has been demolished by the many studies designed to compare outcomes between those who do, and do not, receive modern vaccinations:

http://www.autismsciencefoundation.org/autismandvaccines.htm...

The one study that claimed a link has been exposed as a fraud and its author has been sanctioned:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/glenn-d-braunstein-md/andrew-w...

A quote: "In early January, the British Medical Journal called the 1998 study by Andrew Wakefield, which proposed a link between the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine, gastrointestinal problems and autism, 'an elaborate fraud.' According to Fiona Godlee, the journal's editor-in-chief, 'It's one thing to have a bad study... In this case we have a very different picture of what seems to be a deliberate attempt to create an impression that there was a link by falsifying the data.'"

I ask you to educate yourself on this issue before posting discredited claims in a public forum.
Pricing is def a dark art but this seems like the exact opposite of what to do.

Asking people who are not your target customers what the price should be should get you an answer to price it to be free. These people will not think it is worth more or less than you're thinking as they dont need it. If they offer a price, they're guessing since what you have is not something that solves a pain for them.

Instead, talk to customers early and saying "we are doing x to solve y pain and are thinking of charging $z. What do you think?". If they vomit all over the price, then you know you're too high. If they don't get into price cuz they don't get the product, then you got different problems to solve before pricing.

In general, for these convos, I think going higher with this initial pricing is better as it has price anchoring benefits and it's much easier to go down then up in subsequent convos.
"Just to drive the point home: a device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious.."

I still don't buy it. This still misses the mark - it wasn't about a 'few' buttons, the iPhone was about none. All those pda's in the picture don't really mean anything to me. Sure, some of them had cell networking and a lot (most? all?) had wifi. But I would never consider the old pda's a mobile device. 'Mobile' to me comes from the term 'mobile phone', not 'mobile pda'.

To me, this article is typical of OSNews - if it's not Linux or open source, it bad/wrong/etc.

Anyway, Dan Frakes tweet wasn't talking about 'a few buttons being obvious' he said 'having no buttons/keys'. And like he said, if this was so obvious, then why wasn't everyone doing it in 2006? Howcome pda's didn't do this in the early 2000's? Because it took a visionary team of designers and execs (or just Jobs) that appreciates minimalism. No one at Compaq, HP, Microsoft's many pda OEMs would, no, could have done something like this. And don't forget the require stylus..
>NOWHERE did I implied that what NASA did is equally morally outrageous as the second.

No, but you compared something completely innocuous with something completely evil. I sincerely don't believe even did it on purpose, but it reads like a cheap appeal to emotion.. probably an implication you weren't trying to give off.
Well, no. You can look at an LCD monitor and say "look, prior art for a tablet" but that doesn't meet the legal meaning and requirements, and nor does this for the purposes of this case. Stop making the argument about Apple vs Google. This is about patents and commercialism. So many fan comments we can't see the forest through the trees.
I don't really have a problem with the photo as long as the caption doesn't say it's Neil. It's a historic moment that everybody should recognize. He is known for this event and even took the photo.

As for the doctoring, I don't find it unethical. I don't have a problem straitening a crooked photo, adjusting the contrast, etc to make the photo visually appealing. That's not the same as adding a person. I understand journalists want "the truth" but with film there are so many artistic decisions made when processing a photo anyway. Maybe the truth is that is was very dark or bright. Should darkroom manipulation be skipped and the photo be blown out or solid black because that's the real truth? If there was a scratch on the negative I don't mind if it's repaired as long as it isn't maliciously trying to trick us.
In my work, I shoot a lot of photographs when I visit a project site during design and construction. My priority is not composition or aesthetics, it's documentation so that I can answer questions which I didn't know I would have when I went so that I can avoid another trip.

They sent pilots, to the moon. They had a couple of hours. That's all. Film allowed them to collect a large amount of data which hundreds or thousands of scientists could later analyze.

Some rocks are more interesting than others. But it's better to have the scientists decide which to take a closer look at on the next landing.
> I'm merely arguing that vaccines could possibly bring out the symptoms of autism.

That possibility has been studied very extensively, and the science is in -- there is no link.

> It's so scary to see how many people refuse to open their minds to possibilities outside their preconceived notions.

Yes, true, but it's not too late for you to do just that -- read the science, and stop posting uninformed opinions.
Why are PDAs suddenly that weird uncle you never talk about and only see at birthdays?

Because they ultimately failed in the market. There was a reason that the Blackberry and Treo type devices became popular. They worked better than the early touchscreen devices.

Those early deficiencies left manufacturers gunshy about creating more touchscreen devices. It was combination of hardware issues (resistive, single touch) and also software (graffiti, interface).

It was not obvious in 2007 that such a device (full touchscreen, no physical keyboard) would succeed. The early iPhone reviews specifically addressed the keyboard issue, since this was a Blackberry world. Practically all Blackberry fans at the time were saying that the device would fail because you need a physical keyboard.

(2007) http://allthingsd.com/20070626/the-iphone-is-breakthrough-ha...

The iPhone’s most controversial feature, the omission of a physical keyboard in favor of a virtual keyboard on the screen, turned out in our tests to be a nonissue, despite our deep initial skepticism. After five days of use, Walt — who did most of the testing for this review — was able to type on it as quickly and accurately as he could on the Palm Treo he has used for years. This was partly because of smart software that corrects typing errors on the fly.
Fog of World - Remember everywhere you have been in your whole life time
As someone who has owned a pre-iPhone phone with a touchscreen, and seen another one in the hand of a friend, no, what made the iPhone the iPhone is NOT obvious.

For the love of god, my LG Prada was so shitty I had to hit a 2px scrollbar with my thumb to scroll in the contact list. I can't contain the nervous laugh whenever some ignorant who never touched the device link to wikipedia proud of their attempt at mocking Apple.
Web browsing on a touchscreen is a real PITA without something like the double tap making a paragraph fit the whole screen automatically too.

Like it or not but the iPhone, as a whole package, without just singling out a feature here and there, was a real innovation, a breath of fresh air that opened a new market and has been copied to death by some companies like Samsung. I hated my LG Prada but instantly loved my iPhone the day I bought one and I wasn't anything like an Apple fanboy.
>This is a very common trend in this entire debate that saddens me to no end: the iPhone is being compared to simple feature phones, while in fact, it should be compared to its true predecessor: the PDA. PDAs have always done with few buttons.

So,

1) having "few" buttons + stylus 2) in a different product category 3) in devices that very few people bought or cared about, means, in Thom's reasoning, that the iPhone was obvious.

Meanwhile, let's see the OSNEWS first review of the device, back in the day: (...) And it's innovative too. Everything seems to work via multi-touch, a touchscreen-based input method (...)

Searching for the review, I found this gem:

>This may seem like a bold statement. Apple's just released iPhone is not only very attractive as we would expect from an Apple product, but includes some impressive features and specifications. It's probably unrealistic to claim that anything currently available on the market competes with this offering. However, is it really a revolution in mobile communication devices? Maybe not if there still is something that can overshadow it, and do it very soon.

The thing that would overshadow the iPhone "very soon" was OpenMoko.
I have nothing against singletons! (I'm referring to your somewhat defensive "I think it was an appropriate solution, especially since this singleton class is used internally,...")

I was just curious about what 'singleton method' meant, as opposed to 'singleton object'. Sadly, it seems that it would be very hard to implement something similar in Python (my main language at the moment) without creating a metaclass. But I certainly saw this pattern in Smalltalk before, just didn't know how it's called.
When exactly are four levels or more of nesting appropriate? This has nothing to do with functional programming, it's a matter of readability. I mean, Linux is a completely procedural codebase (with some manual OO), but even its style guide says

If you need more than 3 levels of indentation, you're screwed anyway,
and should fix your program.
Picture of Don Walsh or Jacques Piccard, first to descend into the Mariana Trench?
It's interesting that all of the devices that are pictured are turned off.

I remember using PDAs back in the day, and they tended to be fiddly affairs with styluses. Sure, you could use touch inputs, but touch input tended to be quite impractical, as the OS on the phone invariably tended to be a modified version of a desktop OS. [1]

Ever since the mobile phone was invented, there has been experimentation with form factors. Not all PDAs looked like iPaq's or XDA's. Nokia's Communicator [2] had an iPhone esque interface, but Nokia didn't consider making it touchscreen until well after the release of the iPhone.

Surely Apple's innovation - and the one which Samsung has copied - is combining the grid-based icon system (making tap targets much larger), with the few-button-large screen form factor. Because I don't remember PDAs being anywhere near as useful or usable as an iPhone.

[1] http://www.uspree.com/reviews/images/stories/hp-ipaq-214-ent...
[2] http://cdn101.iofferphoto.com/img3/item/116/916/389/nokia-e9...
Is CoffeeScript better than Ruby?
Seemed to me that the Bush administration beat the drums hard for an invasion of Iran, but with war already on 2 fronts it wasn't politically feasible.