skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is correct. In addition there are a number of other ways that grid operators can displace power. This has happened a few times before in Western Europe, and prices have even gone below zero, incentivizing industrial facilities to do things like turn up their refrigerators to soak power
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Vulnerable to Cross Site Scripting (XSS)
How patients are saving a trip to the doctor's office with online healthcare
Those are not the only choices.
I suspect the article is very US-centric despite giving a little bit of lip service to European devs like yourself. I live in part of the American midwest not known for its tech companies; I work at a startup doing very fulfilling work that fits the definition of "changing the world for the better" (and getting paid for it) very well.

Despite the latter and probably due to the former, it's extremely hard to find the right people.
3.6 million social security numbers exposed in cyber attack.
Why I'm returning my Microsoft Surface RT
The special thing about "solving problems" is you usually create many more problems in the process. That's the definition of a startup: a company, when solving one problem, creates five new problems in the process due to imperfect foresight because everything hasn't been done before. Hence, hiring, growth, jobs, expansion, ....

Startups could be called "things that didn't exist before that are creating more problems to solve than existed before."
Precisely.

The article quotes the average starting salary at google to be $125,000. After converting that into GBP (for the UK where I live) you get to 77,613.

Whenever I look around at local programming jobs, a salary of 77K would be attainable mainly only by people who were project leaders/architects for large corporate systems.

Most entry level jobs are .Net, PHP or Java programming and will net you a salary of 18-25K. A programmer with 4-10 years experience can maybe expect to get paid 30-35K.

Basically a similar payscale to a plant fitter , electrician or teacher and quite a way off what you would expect for a doctor or lawyer.
You generally leave the baseload (coal + nuclear) on, and shut down "peaking" capacity, which is, at least in the US, mainly natural gas. Coal is more expensive to build, more expensive to turn on, and cheaper to operate. Nat Gas is cheaper to build, cheaper to turn on, and more expensive to operate
"A curry is not an idea, even if its creation is the result of one. Meals can evoke emotions, but only very roughly and generally, and only within a very limited range — comfort, delight, perhaps nostalgia, but not anger, say, or sorrow, or a thousand other things. Food is highly developed as a system of sensations, extremely crude as a system of symbols."

I think this is really wrong, but I feel like this is a good pointer to where we are heading in fine cuisine. The false dichotomy in the article is between Old Masters and organic markets/good risotto). But a better apples-to-apples comparison would be between contemporary art and contemporary cuisine. If you compare the emotional experience between an Alinea or El Buli vs. something like Dia:Beacon, it seems like it's getting much closer. I would absolutely describe the experience of eating at Alinea as "emotional" and full of ideas.

The interesting thing is that art isn't just about emotion - it can involve emotion, but it can involve a lot of other things too. What I look forward to is cuisine that can be self-critical, hostile, sarcastic, naive, quiet, empty, etc. What would the Agnes Martin of food look like? The On Kawara? The Merlin Carpenter?

I think we're generally getting more sophisticated in our cultural appreciation for lots of reasons, including the internet allowing much easier dissemination of sophisticated ideas and the flattening of accessibility to good cultural curators. Unlike this author, I don't think food is replacing art: it's just thriving alongside. There's a rising tide that's raising all the cultural boats. I'm really bullish on contemporary art for this reason.
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engineers solve problems too
Radiation update for west coast,japan confirms leak
There was a successful experiment doing something very similar to this - although I can't find the article - with cold storage facilities in the Netherlands.

Cold storage is apparently a pretty big industry there, and all those buildings are designed to be highly thermally-efficient anyways. There's also a huge segment of the cold storage market where the exact temperature of the storage doesn't matter, it just needs to stay within a specific band.

So what happened? The experiment (which was successful) effectively turned the freezers into batteries. The control systems were set to lower the temperature to two or three degrees lower than usual during the night (which made the cooling plants run longer then), and the plants were scaled back to maintenance power-levels during the day, when demand was higher. The grid was happy, since it moved the load to a low-usage time. The storage owners were happy, since they got a deal on the evening electricity. And the things being stored didn't care, since they were all so far frozen anyways. I wonder if you could do a similar program to get them to cool down further when there's excess power on the grid?

Or to solve this at an earlier point, why not just turn off the windmills when the power's not needed. All the windmills in my community have setting that when the wind is too high, the blades on the windmills pivot to the zero lift axis, and they don't spin.
Unused capacity is a market inefficiency. If you've got a jet deadheading somewhere empty, or have extra seats when someone hasn't bought out the whole cabin, that's an opportunity to offset your costs or even profit depending on the situation.

If your app knows where people want to go to, knows their location, knows their spend willingness, etc, you can capture that additional revenue you might've never known about.
Recent similar project
https://github.com/hughsk/colony

Posted here but with no comments
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4676314
That's such a double standard. Android is a much more popular smartphone OS than iOS, but Macro wouldn't make an Android version of Instapaper. He said it was because he didn't have time to develop for Android (though we all know the truth is that he just irrationally hates all non-Apple platforms) - perhaps we on HN just don't have the time to wade through useless trollbait posts like this one. And those HN users that agree with him and are upvoting the post (just like Android Instapaper users) aren't important.
I for one love that there's decent competition right now, and not just IE or Netscape. It puzzles me when people are so divisive about iOS, Android, Windows RT, etc. when we have more viable alternatives than we used to. (though we could still use more)
This is also one of the main environmental premises behind electric vehicles. They charge themselves overnight, soaking up excess baseload power that is producing emissions but is not really going to productive uses. That is, the power they consume is not "additional", or just marginally so. Then during the day many of them will also be plugged in and they could serve as a distributed "soak or supply" asset for the grid.
No, this sounds like the "oil fans" "analysis"

Most of them will come with bs excuses for why only oil is the solution and everything else doesn't work.

There is no such thing as "too much energy produced" for a start. As you said, they can brake the blades, or just disconnect the generators, easy.

Storage and variation of power are real problems, but they can be dealt with.
From 2007: Twitter - the next big thing?
Just FYI: since the recent release of Loren Brichter's Letterpress app (wild success), the iOS cognoscenti on Twitter have been doing nothing but bashing Game Center from all directions--performance, reliability, etc.--, including Gruber.
What is your number?
125k/year is pretty standard for a senior programmer who doesn't lead teams, etc. in SF/NYC where I frequent. Bump that up an extra 20k if they are willing to program something undesirable like ads or they have finance experience as well. Other locations will pay less, of course, because they aren't where all the hot tech companies are and they don't have the same cost of living. If you network a lot it is pretty easy to pull in 10k/month contracting, though.
Plus, the amount of things in our world that will be controlled and performed by software is only going to grow.

While more exposure to technology and better education will create more programmers, I think the demand for programmers will always outstrip the supply.
I think the premise that professional salaries are determined entirely or even primarily by supply and demand is weak. When you can't measure a workers quality easily, all sorts of other issues influence salary.

I think the more interesting question is: how much higher can programmer salaries go if they play their cards right? Programmers seem to have positioned themselves as a step above IT. But there is money in perception and the perception you want is to be just a notch below the "real men" (execs). This is particularly true in places that aren't software houses, but have programmers internally. What's important is not just supply and demand, but the perception that quality matters, as well as having easily digestible signals of quality.

Compare programming to accounting. I don't think the intellectual horsepower necessary for the two jobs is that different. But accountants at big companies make more money, and external accountants at accounting firms make even more. Why? The demand is obviously there--everyone needs accountants. Supply is limited--accounting takes some mental horsepower. The same things are true for programming. Do what's different? The difference is that there is a perception that quality matters, and there are proxies for quality (association with a big firm, education, CPA) that are easily digestible by C-suite execs. Companies don't cheap out on their accountants or their lawyers because there is a perception that executives will be held accountable if the company suffers problems related to that choice. But companies aren't afraid to cheap out on programmers. If a project fails or is late, there is a perception that that's just how software goes, no decision they could have made could have changed the outcome.

I think programmer salaries are going to continue to go up. First, Google and Amazon, etc, are creating a perception that quality matters. They aren't hiring the cheapest people they can get. Second, the next generation of F500 execs will have grown up with their friends taking a gig at Facebook instead of going to Barclays or McKinsey. That's extremely important for the profession. Programmers want the industry to be seen as being in competition with banks, consultancies, etc, for "talent." Third, I don't think supply is going to expand, and I feel like industry groups may move to create certifications (rigorous ones like CPA or Series 7) to create indicia of quality.
That's your problem? Too much energy? Why not create some buffers of sorts - wind energy CAN be stored, you can use it to charge battery banks, extract hydrogen, or even compress air or gas for later use. Obviously, it's not that easy, but it's doable.

By the way, all the wind turbines I've seen can rotate their blades 90deg, so they come to an almost full stop if/when necessary.
2011 and 2012 have been watershed years. IBM watson, speech recognition using neural nets beating speech researchers, neural nets on imagenet beating computer vision researchers. The trend is that automated machine learning wins. You can be on the right side of history (automated machine learning) or take opposite side (and be wrong).
They have 3 mechanisms for storage, all can be accessed from an EC2 server: ephemeral disk, EBS, and S3.

That said, I agree with you. I commented similarly during the outage, noting that AWS may have too many interdependencies: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4685571
The Ultimate Guide to Traveling When You Have No Money
Or to solve this at an earlier point, why not just turn off the windmills when the power's not needed.

Because the subsidies in Germany are tied to the amount of
electricity sold. That's why they're selling even at negative market price -- to collect the feed-in tariff.
You are correct, but the problem is tuning the production from wind farms to match demand exactly, in real time, which is what is required to operate the grid. When it comes to renewable energy wind is the hardest in this regard, because production can fluctuate rapidly in very short time scales, especially when there's gusting.
Being an Ubuntu user, and a Nexus 7 owner, I really can't see this particular implementation being of much use – the strengths of the Nexus 7 are things like Google Now, location based stuff, it's speed and ease of use etc etc.

Ubuntu is great for doing computery things, like coding, or setting up servers etc. On a tablet, I'm not coding (too fiddly to type $[]@% etc), and not using it as a server, but I am using it as a map, as a book, as an email machine etc.

To be honest, I'd rather run Android on a laptop, rather than Ubuntu on a tablet.
of some different company.
Uber Co-Founder Garrett Camp Launches BlackJet, The “Uber For Private Jets”
There has to be some server involved - people can send broadcast messages and the fs maintains state between machines.

It looks like a JS console directly onto a server.
Id have to quote the entire post to give you an example. I just found it to be overly smug and condescending, especially regarding Microsoft store employees (attempting to "trap" one of them with the soundcard question? Nerd arrogance at its finest.)

Granted there was a fair amount of valid criticism, but it was mainly the biased tone I was addressing.
Yahoo Dings “Do Not Track” Default (And Search Partner Microsoft)
"C'mon lets be frank not all programmers are well paid, You really have to be working at Google or other big place or make it big in the start up area"

I don't think this is true. I live in Los Angeles and every place I've worked has paid something close to google/facebook dollars, and all the programmers I know have had a similar experience.
...and then some.
It's difficult for Americans to accept working harder (insanely harder) gets you further in life. Intelligence is supposed to be innate, not something you can manipulate by "working harder." Whether you are smart or dumb, you should be happy about it and still be a millionaire.

It seems so unfair painfully studying and drilling makes you seem smarter. Why is it unfair? Because Americans obviously don't want to painfully study and drill math and science and culture when they could be texting or playing video games or drinking diet energy mountain dew xtreme (the dewiest).
Paul Irish talks about his motivation, projects, and front-end dev complexity
Build stuff that is already out there - competition is fine in any marketplace if there are enough consumers for the product. Create a copy of software that is already performing well, tweak a bit of it to give it your own flavour - copying something that already exists will give you the chops to pull off something unique when the inspiration hits you. Kind of like learning to play music - learn some basics, copy the classics/standards in your style, improvise a bit on the classics and eventually, write your own tune.

If you can find it, look up jgc's talk at the last HN London meetup - he gave a talk on "ideas" it was good.
In 1954: Programming bubble will pop. Compilers are taking over. Soon, anyone will be able to control computers using simple English commands.
I fail to see it like that.

It is not listed here:

http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/

These guides are much more than just what gofmt does.

In a Google IO conference talk someone stated that the Google App Engine support was actually made by the Go team.

Not all new APIs released by Google tend to offer Go APIs as well from day 1.

So I miss the official language support that you say already exists.
You cannot just build more pumped-storage hydroelectric power plants, you need mountains or at least hills, that fit certain parameters and in the places you can build them you will already find them.

Northern Germany probably doesn't have a single such plant but Northern Germany also doesn't have a single mountain, hill or anything higher than a tree as far as the eye can see.

You will find those plants in Southern Germany and Austria but then again they do actually have places to put them.

Besides stopping the windmills or installing plants is not the problem. The problem is that the German grid can't deal with the energy produced in Germany and uses neighboring grids that are not designed to handle that much load.
Geography definitely matters. My numbers were based on non-London UK for example. If you were looking at jobs in London you could probably add 5-10K to each of the figures I quoted.

I assume that those 125k/year jobs are for either large companies or profitable/highly financed startups?

I'm guessing that there are lots of startup programmers out there on very low salaries who are working mainly for equity which is a much harder thing to value.
I know people are pointing out the existing easy solutions, but I'm really quite taken by the idea just for the 'Oh gosh, yeah! so simple' moment I had when I saw it.

If I could buy a bag of these I'd happily sew one on to all my shirts in preference to a clippy thing on the cable of which I've used several and kept none.

Although buttons do have very rounded corners.....
Producing electricity from heat is a high loss operation. Storing heat is only logical when the source energy is heat. This is what wikipedia means by 1% loss per year. Meanwhile kinetic storage has no loss over time. As a bonus converting kinetic energy to electricity is rather efficient. So far Pumped-storage hydroelectricity is our best method for large scale electricity-to-electricity storage.
How can I add new navigation elements and pages to my JekyllHub? The UI needs a bit of work, because I've been searching for a while and can't find that setting anywhere. :(

Loving the service though, posting is real simple and the syntax highlighting is amazing!

Another thing I can't find it how to enable comments. I'd be fine with Disqus or any other 3rd party comment provider.

How about Google Analytics as well? How can I see which posts are being viewed?
I dont think we can compare salaries in Silicon Valley and UK like that. In the end its about how much you have after you pay all your basic expenses and I think the person with GBP 77K has much more left than the person with $125K in California.

Edit: Apparently living in the UK aint too cheap either. Did not know that!
Checking golang a bit, I didn't feel it was "aiming for the path of least resistance". For instance, blocking compilation if any imported module is unused or forbidding circular dependencies, is going against the "let's let the coders do what they want".

I am currently involved in refactoring a big Python code base and I oh-so regret Python (which I like very much) is so easy-going on these issues.
10k/month contracting isn't that much if you aren't taking into account taxes, insurance, being on the beach, etc...you'd have to pull in around 20k/month to match a 120k salary.
Maslow's hierarchy of needs!
That kind of happened if you frame it in their era - HTML, CSS, PHP, SQL.
Don't you mean the other way around???? I mean, the UK aint a cheap place to live!
Apparently, the author doesn't really has an overview, how the programmers are paid outside of Google and Facebook. Lets take a look on Germany. Lots of lots of IT companies here. I was looking for a development position one year ago and got about 7 offers. Basically, I wasn't rejected even once. But the problem was, that the offered salaries were not even close to those in Silicon Valley. The salaries are not significantly different from other (non-IT) engineering positions here. And it's not a matter of being A or B player. All interviews were so ridiculously easy and non technical, that the companies aren't even able to distinct between bad and good programmers. There is no notion of A or B players here. A software developer here is basically the lowest level of the hierarchy of the R&D department and are merely considered as code generators.

A new tendency here -- to hire remote "code generators" in India or East Europe and to manage them having only managers or architects on site. So, this transition of development jobs to East the author doesn't see, has already started here in Germany. And as a programmer you never get rich in Germany, you have to move to management.
But good engineers don't memorize formulas. They understand them.
I think you underestimated the cost of major cities in UK.
Why not just tie an overhand knot on a bight of the cord, and then slip the resulting loop over a button on any shirt you happen to be wearing?
> I am one of the Go readability reviewers, and I review thousands of lines of Go code each week.

If you're on the Go readability team, you are going to see thousands of lines of Go code each week, as a simple consequence of selection bias. Your observation doesn't invalidate my friend's claim.

Something that would invalidate that claim would be how many lines of Go are submitted into the Google code base every week compared to Java and C++. My friend is simply saying that this ratio is minuscule.
Are you in the Minneapolis, MN area? Do you have a technical degree (CS, CE, or other science or engineering degree?) Are you a skilled developer? Not just a coder who can patch together bits of code and read an API, but someone who can take a requirement and talk to the users and understand what it is they really want, then architect, design, code and test a subsystem that is not allowed to fail in its operating environment. I don't much care what languages you know, although knowledge of C++ would be nice.
Can you demonstrate to me in a 1 hour interview that you are good at what you do? I'm not going to read your github code, but if you can demo a working application you wrote on your own I will look at it and ask design & implementation questions.

That's basically what we look for, and trust me, it's very difficult to find someone who comes close. Code monkeys, OTOH, are easy to find.
please stop posting this.
Framous 3.0.1 - Mustaches, Google Fonts and more insane javascript
Challenges of Chinese NLP in Social Media
He may have accomplished something impressive, but I had trouble appreciating it because the article seemed so pretentious, and I found that distracting.
I think we're on different pages of the same book. The current stuff is all well and good, but it's the Penn & Teller phase of AI/ML/GMs. We'll dispense with the façade of ability and instill actual ability eventually. I'm just not overly rah-rah about the recent incremental developments. I don't mean to overly pooh-pooh your rah-rah, but my brain is telling my fingers someone is wrong on the internet!
Not sure what tax rates are like in San Francisco however if you that kind of money in the UK you are going to be paying 40% income tax on a pretty large chunk of it. So after income tax you are left with maybe 50K.

We also have council tax which in some places will make your eyes pop out. Not to mention VAT which is going to be 20% of pretty much everything you buy. On top of that house prices can be very high here for a family sized home even in a modest area so you're going to be paying a lot for your mortgage.

Plus we have a huge amount of tax on stuff like fuel and anything to do with cars, not to mention that food prices are generally higher here than in the USA.

OTOH medical insurance isn't really an issue as well as other things like more help available from govt to cover higher education.
Java Is No Longer Needed. Pull The Plug-In
Maybe Facebook should consult someone experienced:
https://www.facebook.com/barbrastreisand