skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
i think that greatly depends on the way you define the word 'programmer'.

If programmer to you means someone that can code php and maybe do a bit of css work to help build web applications then yes, the economy has changed that, there are quite a few people like that looking for work right now so the going rate is down (my estimation about 20..30%).

If by programmer you mean somebody that can take a complex problem or specification and solve it or realize that spec then I think the market is unchanged, mostly because there always was - and probably always will be - a shortage of such people.
Scribd doesn't even have the source to their own Flashizer! It's FlashPaper, which was Macromedia's somewhat lame attempt at competing with PDF pre-buyout.
blogger needs to stop worry about being "great" at something in order for it to be worthwhile.Just the act of learning a new thing should be the joy, not the having of knowledge.
Nocturne uses a feature of Mac OSX to help with the screen inversion. It might be possible on windows but I've not seen it.

You can actually screen invert on Macs without Nocturne using the universal access (accessibility ) preferences, but Nocturne smooths out the rough edges. Accessibility preferences on windows might also have this feature.
In the same direction:

-wrote a script to download daily sales data from iTunes and upload to google docs for charting
-use http://www.moopf.com/appstorereviews/ to keep track of my reviews on iTunes
-automated IIS6 deployment from empty machine
-wrote an admin panel for the web site users
-outsorced hosting
(I was tinking about buying a server to host my ASP.NET app at first).

I think this is all basic stuff. Interested to find what others have.
Google "Video Search" turns into "YouTube Search"
Google's main search used to link to video.google.com, now links to YouTube's search. Pretty sure it happened in the last couple of days, but I've seen no news coverage. Does anyone have a link?
iand it would be interesting if he had developed that. What is this "high school, college, career" paradigm that we are supposed to go through in our formative years? How can we make meaningful decisions about what will make us happy when we haven't even finished developing as a person? later on it is harder and harder to deal with the cost of furthering your education.
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Why use mint? Why not register with yodlee directly?
For a UK view of salaries (based on job postings) look at http://www.jobstats.co.uk/jobstats.d/Rates.html

It indicates that 75% of postings are 23% cheaper than a year ago.

There is a big change in postings, as per the front page of the same site. Down from 18,000 to 5,000.
And? He wrote $40, so that's what they believed. You explained it was paper and they delivered it. Sounds like a success story to me.
I love this as a definition of a strong programmer:
"somebody that can take a complex problem or specification and solve it or realize that spec"
digg -> just some of the articles, not the comments
/. -> articles in some sections, comments in some sections, there is overlap between the two but not everything, for instance, most articles on genetics are way over my head but the comments sometimes explain them
HN -> both articles and comments, but definitely not every article

I'm a bit of a news junkie I guess, it is my source of inspiration and because of the amazing knowledge in the crowd present on those sites I never come away from that without learning something useful.

In an earlier article somebody today compared it to 'watching discovery channel' because it seems like you learn but you really don't. I think that is up to how you use the internet, if you take a subject and then go in depth I think it is very well possible to learn a lot.

I also think that each of the sites above has something going for it, digg because it literally has just about everything on it (even though the crowd there is absolutely terrible), ./ because it has a very easy way of limiting the discussion to just those parts that are somewhat interesting with the capability to 'drill down' in a thread if you want to, HN because of the general quality of the discussion.

However, I doubt HN will be able to preserve its current culture without some major moves.
Just to chime in that's exactly what I was getting at. HN and the community it represents likes to think of itself as a place for rational discussion and inherent in that is accepting the belief that anything could be true. Including your assertion.

My issue with your article was that your justifications were shallow while at the same time being accusatory.
I agree with the arguments below but wanted to add one point. No one is saying the U.S. is ahead in every single industry. There are clearly areas where other countries lead and quite frankly I wouldn't want it any other way.
Maybe it's just me, but this article felt a lot like something I would see on valleywag. Just replace tech companies with tech individuals.

There is, of course, shallow technical discussion about how users are counted; even a comScore chart; but the tone of the article and the ludicrousness of the whole affair felt no less voyeuristic.
I wonder if this was some kind of botched overture for a sort of partnership.
If I remember correctly, Scribd started out using FlashPaper, but they developed their own supposedly superior iPaper to replace it.
Use xbacklight to change brightness, and xgamma to change color. For instance, if you wanted a more "cool night" glow, you might run this:

xbacklight -set 60 ; xgamma -ggamma 0.8 -rgamma 0.8 &> /dev/null

And then for daylight, you might run this:

xbacklight -set 100 ; xgamma -gamma 1.0 &> /dev/null
Paid apps finally infiltrating Android Market?
Does anyone have an idea on how to guess or find out how sales of a subscription based game would be affected by cuts in price, say from a baseline of $10/mo?

I've always thought that $10 is so little that the biggest barrier to paying is just the reluctance of getting out the credit card or the idea of paying at all, but maybe that's wrong.
My previous job was at a company that ended recently, with the last paychecks in Dec. It's not yet the end of February, and three out of the four programmers employed there are working elsewhere, for the same or higher pay. Everyone keeps talking about the economy, but here in the metro DC area there hasn't been much effect.
You can do similar things in Ubuntu, see my post above about using xbacklight and xgamma

I'm an Ubuntu man myself :)
Oops, typo. In the last paragraph I intended to say,

"Probably the strategy is to keep your passion [for multiple interests], but to take ..."

I don't know where the "not" came from; maybe editing error.
Mint is lightweight and has a nicer UI, but Yodlee has more features and can track more types of accounts. I have both set up and find myself using Mint more often.
Mint's user data is sharded across multiple DB's. So if you're the first user on a fresh DB, your bank account will have ID 1. Also, users usually have multiple bank accounts as well, so accountId isn't a good indicator of # of users.
Except that company that went out of business of course...
There are enough unethical scientists out there that it is a distinct possibility, the problems that still need to be overcome according to literature are 'doable'.

That said, I would also bank on the ego of those scientists to attract attention to the fact that they 'did it' as soon as such as human was carried to term.

So, on balance, can it be done ? Yes, probably. Has it been done ? Probably not.

The age of the individual would not really factor in to the equation at all imo.
Not sure about the identity bit, been very sure of who I am since I was a small boy and so not interested in what others presume. I don’t get caught up in arguing anything that is based only on belief or opinion. Believe whatever you like.

In your definition of ‘scientist’ do you include medical doctors?

During a period of seriously ill health I saw a clutter of ‘ highly respected specialists ‘ — by some! In the course of which I was told with varying degrees of anger and arrogance that: acupuncture; chiropractic treatment and hypnosis did not work, could not work and that those who believed in them were either idiots or delusional.

Interestingly the attempts, by those who bothered, to explain results obtained were so far off the planet that tooth fairies, father christmas and honest politicians were decidedly ordinary every day events.

Then there is a book, forbidden science where people like the Wright Brothers, Thomas Edison and a host of others were written off as either delusional or charlatans, perhaps both, or worse by the scientists of their day.

(Everybody knew that heavier than air machines could not fly! )
Top Activities of the Product Owner | Agile Software Development
I too just tried it. The default night setting is way too orange, but I adjusted it a bit and then got interrupted by an instant message. About 5 minutes later I went to play with the settings again, the daytime setting (my monitor's default) was blinding! I've been running it for 15 minutes now, the orange tint is barely noticeable. I think I really like this, will try it for a few days.
No, and only occasionally. For the approximately 2 years that I used ma.gnolia it ran ads for less than half of the time.
In the plane, I met a woman who'd been there before.

The monastery is "not open for business", as one of the monks reminded me. Normally only practitioners can stay. But I also had the goal of teaching science and computers to whoever was interested, and there are 500 children and teenagers here.

I'm sure you could find a monastery to stay in. For all the rigidity of the core monastic rules, I have found them to be remarkably flexible and pragmatic about daily life. If you're interested, email me. There are some wonderful places in the Himalayas.
Firstly and probably most obviously, their business is based almost in its entirity around a single third party open source tool, without which they would have nothing at all, and yet their site is not open source. I know they have every right, legally, to do this, but to me it seems .. exploitative.

they saw a market nobody was catering to, and despite being based around a free tool, they're not just exploiting the community. they provide a lot of free git hosting for a lot of projects, and you have to give them some credit for that.

and as far as i'm aware, most of their site is based upon a ruby re-implementation of the git tools that can manipulate the git meta files. that was written by someone involved with the site and is open source, so they are also contributing back to the git/ruby community that way.
Do you mean programming language or native language of the programmer ?
This discussion is about "the going rate for programmers", so...
RRW's Feature Requests for Google
http://www.somethingtoputhere.com/commentdemo/gallery.php?pi...

it seems like the widget already allows for people without facebook accounts to comment
I love mint. I actually caught fraud on my credit card while checking my balances on my iPhone through mint's app while at work. I was thinking of writing them a thank you letter.

I would have been tempted to reply something like this:

"At Mint, we have an algorithm to calculate the number of users we have. This function is defined as follows:

mint users = (average logins during the past 7 business days / (registrations - closed accounts)^last business day's S&P 500 closing price - average rainfall of the Amazon basin during the past 6 months[in inches]) * 0 + number of Intuit customers ^ 2

As you can see, here at Mint we may have even underestimated the number of users we have"
Tumblr builds post-by-phone feature in only 3 hours w/ Twilio
I had to agree with you on the patent pending statement and made a comment to that effect.

I hate seeing things like this when it comes to software. Give it another ten years and I'm not going to be able to code a damn thing without violating a stack of patents.
The mood at the game industry’s Oscar awards: happy but cautious
Why would Mint even respond to a letter like that? I could understand if, say, it were a reporter asking, but what right does a competitor have to demand such figures? Let alone so rudely.

Though I suppose if the competition is determined to make themselves look like assholes, furnishing a polite reply and then leaking the whole thing isn't a bad way to help them out.
I think your comment score is a typical illustration of people misunderstanding the use of the 'down' arrow.
Marketing is a core competency that most OSS products which lack corporate backing fail at, in spades.

What makes you think they want marketing? Do you realize that most upstream developers are scratching their own itches, they don't give a shit about end-users, and that the lack of marketing asshats pushing them around is what distinguishes their hobby from their day job?

Take your marketing bullshit, shove it back up Mark Shuttleworth's ass, and leave us the hell alone. Please.
Is this the right decade for this? I mean, there was a flying car in production in 1929, but that didn't go so well.
The internet is already changing that market by putting retailers out of business and increasing liquidity. Specialized stores are moving online and freeing up real estate at the same time as Redfin and such sites are making purchasing a house slightly cheaper. Redfin charges a 3% comission, half the going rate, and thereby increases liquidity. This makes the number of empty houses at a given time (usually ~1.2 M, now ~2.2 M) fall because it's easier and cheaper to move in and out of them.
The Pursuit of Knowledge - in reply to The Paradox of Self-Education
This is essentially data Mint publishes on its front page, and has mentioned in press releases before. I don't think that really qualifies as proprietary.
That is the worse advice I have ever heard. To the original poster- Nobody will care more about your own money, than you. Take responsibility for your wealth and enjoy it. Getting ahead and staying ahead involves responsibility and confidence in yourself. You will learn from mistakes and will be better for it. Personal finances and money management are important skills that are always overlooked. Based on your initial question, you already seem to have the right attitude. You will see fears of hyperinflation and fears of massive deflation in credit. There are some good economic blogs out there such as Mish's (http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com). Read a few highly rated books from Amazon. Personally, if I had $2m I would buy land, physical gold, and hold on to my currency in various banks (and physically). Remember, $2m in the bank means that your bank probably is loaning out $1.8m of it (fractional reserve banking).
The Latest Thing They're Smoking in Pipes on College Campuses: Tobacco
Multitasking is bad?

Aaron Swartz disagrees: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/productivity
Patrick, you've also mentioned this dashboard on JBoS. I would be interested in licensing the script(s) from you. Contact info in my profile.
Nouncer post-mortem
I actually caught fraud on my credit card while checking my balances on my iPhone through mint's app while at work.

Don't you read the charges on your statement before you pay it?
The Top 21 Twitter Clients (According To TwitStat)
How to build a Facebook app in Django
How about letting me comment on any URL with whatever social network I choose, without forcing the site to integrate anything?
reddit was the beginning. it was seeded by the ycombinator crowd, and it was cool. then the number of users increased, and the noise was gaining on the signal. being a for-profit company, they valued new users more than civility.

realizing that the writing was on the wall, pg created hacker news. it started off just like reddit, but with different priorities.

it's sad that reddit has become what it has, but it's run by a company with profit motives. most of us would have probably done the same thing, had we been in their shoes.
Hmm, I suppose if someone wanted to be truly a dick to quicken, they could have the publicly available figures printed onto a large billboard (the ones that go on the back of trucks) and park it in front of intuit's HQ.

That's one way to present the info :)
We're always looking for good interns at NewsCred, although summer is a long ways away for us. Drop me a line and we'll keep in touch (shafqat at newscred dot com). We're launching a lot of new products in the next few months, so should be an exciting time.
Being smart is not an excuse to be lazy. Also, don't be stupid.
Sure, but nobody said you had to say what the other 90 doctors you asked thought.
Miserable Economy Makes For Happier Customers
The reason Mint is doing so well is quite simple: it's so damn easy to use.

I just signed up now, and I was expecting to have to go through a number of loops to get it to grab the data from my multiple bank accounts, but it was a breeze. Just another step in the sign-on procedure - truly great work on minimizing the number of people that default from linking their bank accounts.

And the UI is goal-oriented with a deep understanding of common tasks people want. I saw my transactions and renamed one of them..... and was about to groan how stupid this going to be, renaming everything else to match, when I saw the "rename all other instances of xxx always" option. I was floored.

Great work, Mint!
Non-google sites send cookie requests through google search
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=370399

It's not mine, I don't know how it works, sometimes it goes wrong, but I think it's worth investigating. It seem to be a problem several people have had a go at solving.

No idea what terms to search for to find previous discussions on it, though. Perhaps bookmarklet and greasemonkey.

http://searchyc.com/bookmarklet+greasemonkey

Some of the results seem relevant.
What about those boxes of Quicken rotting in the shelves of resellers/customers - doesn't Intuit count them as sold copies even if the software was never used?
Bigger image:

http://inertcom.com/goog_cookie.png
Should scientists study race and IQ?
Not really. If your dad doesn't know about Mint, chances are he definitely doesn't know TechCrunch either.

Intuit's charade was only seen by a certain demography of users, that by and large does not include Quicken-only users.

Nevertheless, silly move by Intuit, I agree.
In Chinese?
I love how Mint's reply to Intuit says "Hey, we're actually growing faster than you think" and ends with an overt advertisement of Mint's services.
No, they're not doing that, it's Firefox's pre-fetching that does that. It's fetching parts of the linked sites, and in doing so, the site is trying to set a cookie.

Google has nothing to do with this.
Dear unalone,

It's nice on a social networking site to use your real name, but do people really want to use them on random blogs and news sites (like this), etc.?
For HN: GM to add discussion visited freshness
This isn't news. Google will add a link tag and prefetch directive to links that it's confident you'll click on. There's a greasemonkey script that will identify prefetched resources:

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/38841
Handling Intermittence: How to Survive Test Driven Development
I'm trying this now and really liking it. Simple idea, and my eyes don't feel as fatigued as they normally would now.

The odd thing about the Windows implementation (Vista at least) is that the mouse cursor isn't affect by whatever filter's being applied. So as the screen gets dimmer the little white arrow becomes a progressively brighter beacon contrasted against the rest of the screen. It makes it hard to lose.
No, Google is directing your browser to prefetch the linked site by inserting

<link rel="prefetch" href="http://example.com">

for links they think you'll visit.

http://tr.ashcan.org/2008/12/keeping-tabs-on-googles-confide...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_prefetching
Every morning I wake up and read all the latest Chicago news, looking for stuff to submit to my social news site or pass along to other users to check out.

This was taking a long time and wasn't very fun.

So I created my own private alltop/tinyURLs for every mainstream media RSS feed, local blog and the search results for "Chicago" for all the big social media sites.

It's saved me great big gads of time. At some point I will possibly open this up to others.
Sprockets: Build time JavaScript dependancy management
This was just cool to read on a personal level. I always enjoy reading about people with interesting backgrounds, which you certainly have. Best of luck in both worlds. :-)
When is a market too crowded? Basic market research?
No offence intended to the author of this article (Jason), but this video that he authored talks about how basecamp does time tracking and to do lists, and how you can add additional time to tasks, which as far as I can tell is all for multitasking.

http://www.basecamphq.com/demos/time

So I guess using that feature of basecamp is the fastest way to mediocrity.
The contents were clearly labeled, and it took more than a week to deliver something that was sent via Fedex's express service - it should have been there in a matter of days, so I didn't get what I paid for in any case. I had to argue with them (it actually took more than one phone call) that there was no resale value. I've used Fedex a lot in the US, and here in Austria, too. Compared to their usual service, this was no success story.
Here's how to build a chain of technology retail stores I'd be gaga over
I notice comments are better on most sites late at night.
Chemists create two-armed nanorobotic device to maneuver world's tiniest particles
Scientists isolate genes that made 1918 flu lethal
That happens more frequently than you think. I was once 'sued' by a F500 company for exactly that purpose, a 'softening up' round before negotiations.
Does your language of choice have a Google Chart integration? Rails has a couple options, and I have never found anything that gets "quick and dirty chart" done as fast or easily. I currently use it for most of my dashboard charts. While it has some annoying limitations it frees you from server-side dependencies on image modification libraries and the resulting charts (static images) can be accessed from a cell phone. (Some of the Javascript and Flash solutions I've used don't handle that so well.)

This lets you ignore the whole annoying step of logging into Google Docs to review the data -- just spit the URL for the chart directly into an image tag on your panel, problem solved. It also greatly simplifies any sort of "manipulate Google Docs' interface" step you might have, since you can just write arbitrary parsing code in your language of choice and then spit the numbers into the chart.

For additional sexy you can add any lightbox script you want and then have, essentially, a Javascript zoom button for any of them in about 4 marginal lines of code.
This app isnt meant to dim the screen. It changes the color temperature of the monitor to a warmer setting. Its like the difference between a fluorescent and a regular incandescent light.
Everyone, pay attention here. Mint doesn't have any technology. They're just an unbelievably well-designed front end for Yodlee.

"[T]he UI is goal-oriented with a deep understanding of common tasks people want". Is your site doing the same?
If you've used both Quickbooks Online and Mint, it's no surprise at all that Mint is doing so well. Mint just blows it out of the water in terms of UI, features, and ease of use.