skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Cambridge is an amazing place to live and it's full of interesting people. But salaries are quite low there.
seeing all those impressive html5 tetrises, i hope soon valve will release steam for html5 :)
They actively prohibit their screeners (that work next to the machines all day) from wearing dosimeters.
Java is a too verbose language, and it will eventually be replaced by something else.
But the JVM will stay for long (it is the actual runtime standard for the enterprise).
So now, you'll have to bet on the next JVM language:
- Groovy ?
- Kotlin ?
- Ceylon ?
- Scala ?
- Other ?

I actually take a bet on Scala and its functional approach.
The Google Long Term Game Is Brilliant
It also breaks incentives in the other direction - as a candidate you're interviewing for "a job" but not "a particular job", so you're taking it on faith that it'll align with your interests. If you're considering other offers as well, you're weighing a known quantity against a pure ethos play.
Vindictive would be halting the interview immediately because the candidate made the (egregious) mistake. She's playing this part of the story for humor, but one imagines that a non-brain-damaged candidate could immediately correct for that boneheaded move. "Wow. I'm so embarrassed. I must sound like a complete tool. It's been a rough couple weeks dealing with HR teams. I'm very sorry, can we start over?" And, what she's saying is, predictably enough, most nerd candidates don't do this.
Yea I feel for the OP, basically what I'm saying is about all the other people in her story. The people in recruiting should have been doing a better job on quality. The other team members should realize how important it is to do the screening instead of pretending working on code was more important.

My gut tells me that most likely the lack of quality coming out of the recruiting team was burning people out on teams. If an engineer thinks there is a 1:100 chance the person will get hired and they have to invest 2 hours in each person they'll never bother. If the recruiting focuses on quality and gets it down to less time and higher acceptance rates the engineers might (reluctantly) be more comfortable "spending 2 hours" on a screen rather then "wasting 2 hours".
I'm not so sure, a woman desiring a strong man to protect them sounds pretty evolutionary. Isn't the whole pick up artist thing based on exploiting such?
> When the computer is affective, I assume the programmer is talking to me.

It's interesting that you mention this, and the researchers thought that the same effect might be happening. So they controlled for this, but I don't remember the experimental details. It turned out, however, that the majority of participants were __not__ treating the software messages as a proxy for the programmer who developed that software.

I actually feel the same way you do to some extent, especially as a computer programmer, but they have data, and I have only anecdotes.
Planning Is Just Guessing. But With More Pie Charts and Stuff.
"Just a little heads up. In the long run there is no money in 3D printing."

It's a basic principle of economics that all mature, competitive market segments have 0 profit. I thought this was common knowledge.

The generalized nature of 3D printing is what can/will make it so competitive, as opposed to manufacturing equipment which is very specialized to a specific industry, and therefore much more likely to be monopolized by a single company.
Moderation on the basis of ideological purity does not produce "quality content," just an artificial ideological uniformity.
Nice! No-one I knew then had the cash for that then :) I have one of those here now but not with the 768k extension.
It's their right to make their own site and run it as they please, but that doesn't mean it's a good way to design a site like Reddit.

SA moderation works because of the cost of admission
You don't sound like you know enough to even know what you don't know. That's really unfortunate.
I still like my iPhone and iPad, but I could see moving to Android in 1-2 generations. Apple's first-party software quality is declining, and not being able to override it is grating and limiting improvements.

The two things which keep me from moving to Android are:
1) My ~$500 or so in purchased applications. Vendors should allow a one-time return of purchased apps on one platform to get them for the other, or just give both iOS and Android licenses for the same price if there's a way to prove the phone belongs to the same human. Admittedly 99% of what I really care about is free or <$100 total (Kindle, 1Password, Facebook, web, email, ssh pretty much cover my use).

2) Lack of hardware platform security features on most Android devices (semi-supported on the S3, apparently, but I'd only ever buy a Nexus device). If Google developed a Nexus 4+, 7+, 10+ with apple or blackberry level hw security, I'd probably switch, particularly if there were a way for an enterprise to essentially replicate the Google Apps management of devices with a simple self-hosted server (i.e. root of trust being enterprise, vs. Google or Apple).
> The best candidates light up when they have a chance to explain something cool, no matter who is listening and get even more excited when you ask a question about a detail.

I agree this is true in a general human-conversation sense: many good engineers like discussing things with non-engineers if the latter show any interest, and the best can actually explain things in understandable ways. But I think in the context of Corporate Bureaucracy things can be a bit different: I can forgive somebody who's normally a patient explainer being frustrated if they feel their time is being wasted by endless HR bureaucracy. In particular, there's a difference between someone asking you about a detail because they're actually interested in it, and someone asking about it even though they don't care at all, because it's on a checklist and their job is to plow through the checklist.

Of course, that still wouldn't justify being a condescending ass, and certainly wouldn't justify giving wrong answers! If I felt the other person was uninterested and operating by rote, I would probably just recite correct, by-the-book answers.
This seems like a long way of saying that you don't like Objective-C because it's not cross platform, and that you've decided instead to write all your mobile code in Lua and to maintain your own abstraction layer onto MacOSX, Linux, Windows, iOS, and Android.

The question I was responding to was simply whether there are compelling reasons for Apple to use Objective-C.

Supporting cross platform native development is clearly not a strategic goal for them.

I think I'd add another reason - which is that they are in control of the evolution of Objective-C.
There is a very important concept in software called "good enough". Sure, there are language that could be better than C/C++, but 90% of what see in a desktop is written in C or C++. For a bad language, this is good enough, I would say.

It would be different if we had a language with the same performance characteristics and dramatically better high level features, but to this point we still don't have it. That is why software developers are in no rush to move from C to another of the languages that have been discussed lately.
You need a graduated system of interviewing.

Start with quick-screening questions online, then a phone interview, then more in-depth online testing (nothing too burdensome on the candidate, say an hour's worth), then several hours of interviews (perhaps all on one day) by various interviewers.

You should also gather candidate's expectations/requirements in compensation, corporate culture, etc as early in the process as possible, to avoid disappointment.

At any point in the process you should be willing to stop, politely but decisively, whether for jerkiness or for technical incompetence.
> ... because the notation system changes from there: instead of gaining points when giving the right answer,
> you lose points for every wrong one ...

This is not a general rule, where I was it was still "positive scoring" (get points for what you solve). But I agree with the rest: the notation gets much harsher and it's a way to toughen up previously top of the class students who were used to have a rather easy time before.

The regular oral tests ("colles") are also part of that...
@ScottBurson

>The problem I have with this is that in real life, it doesn't matter how hard you work on something; what matters is the quality of the result.

What makes you think the two are unrelated? If one is hopelessly incopetent maybe, but for most people hard work equals better results.

It's something that has been stated time and again regarding geniuses / very productive people et al, in the form of, say, the "10,000 hour rule", or the "99 perspiration, 1% inspiration".
I know some people like that. But to be honest, I know a lot more couples where the guy just kicks the can down the road, paralyzed at the thought of sleeping with the same woman forever. Which is fine, except when they deflect instead of being forthright about their feelings and letting the woman decide whether to keep going.
Sure, and the fact that many, MANY people have experienced this height-bias, and women openly admit to preferring it is entirely my imagination.

I think this 'think positively and it will be' stuff is more than a little wishful thinking.

It reminds me of the 'love yourself and then they will love you' bullshit. I know somebody who has a great job, is good looking and tall, but utterly depressed so clearly doesn't love himself, yet he constantly pulls a stream of model-quality beautiful women. Shall we neglect that case?

I am happy to admit I'm wrong. But are you? I especially recommend this video:-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LwRe6tyqY8

Don't tell me, they were finding excuses not to change into the better version of themselves? Give me a break.
The SaaS Fiscal Cliff
It's fine mathematics too, it's just like the chain rule (or interpreting the d notation via infinitesimals/limits)
java is still the biggest demand out there

just note that sponsoring an H1B is a complicated and at least reasonably costly and ask yourself, who is going to be willing to do that? Probably a more established company vs a startup, so checkout crunchbase for Series C funding and checkout the large software companies based in silicon valley.

otherwise just do the normal stuff check SF craigslist to start, dice.com and find speciality boards in your areas of interest (e.g. kdnuggets board for ML)
I don't know if Scala is a good programing language, but it makes me a better programer.
The second statement seems obvious to me looking at the design goals, since the goals are mainly expressed in terms of compatibility with Java.

From that I'd conclude that these are not really 'design goals', but rather requirements.

As a C# developer it looks like the main design goals should have been formulated in terms of C#'s design goals (insofar as those differ from Java). Because it looks like this project is about porting C# language features not found in Java to a language that otherwise looks more or less like Java (to my untrained eye).

Many of the features listed are implemented by C# in the compiler (and some library code), not the runtime. So that makes it seem like a perfectly reasonable project to me.
...well, did you read the "design goals"? I'm sure he had other design goals than those, otherwise he wouldn't have created the language, so those bullet points are definitely not the "design goals". But I'm sure he's a much better programmer than copywriter.

To the language creator: please write a more informative description of the language's goals, because the whole point of something that's not just a research/toy language is to get people using it!
One a related note: Aaron Swartz wrote an article series he calls "raw nerve". One of those articles expands on Carol Dweck's work: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/dweck
Thanks! I added you on linked in.

I look forward to hearing from you.
lesson 24: Don't go on Shark Tank in the first place. ABC takes 5-7% if your company, even if you don't get a deal.

Don't get me wrong. I love the show, but the majority of the people on the show that do get deals get screwed out of a very large percentage of their company.
Thanks, very thoughtful post, indeed I think it is a market.

My point is that there are attributes of mine which rule out women who I find at least vaguely attractive (and I'm not being picky, honestly), so perhaps I'm simply not able to compete in this market.

I wish the physical factors such as height weren't such a big factor, as that is obviously impossible to change. If I believed I could eliminate it, I'd gladly start hitting the gym hard right now. But I am so convinced that it's such a huge thing that I find it very hard to believe that'll make all that much difference.
Another problem is the disconnect between "recruiting is extremely important to the company" and "the interview process should be as thorough and regimented as possible", as if the latter followed from the former.

Everyone in software management is familiar with the concept that good employees are worth Nx more than average developers. But a good chunk of them have also attached themselves to the idea that employee quality scales continuously from average to good, and so there's significant incremental value to sussing out everything you can about a candidate.

I don't believe this is true. I believe there are "average" (meaning, in reality, "bad") candidates and there are "good" candidates, and you need to find out which of those two buckets people are in, do some extra checking for culture/work habits/communications skills, and then stop.

Instead, the formal interview processes I've seen are gauntlets of trivia and case studies and successive whiteboarding exercises that exhaust everybody. They don't generate value proportional to their cost. And they're unsustainable, so that whatever marginal effectiveness they have is compromised totally within a year when everyone who participates gets sick of it and starts phoning things in.

Tangential point: some people just can't interview effectively, and you need to keep them away from your interviewing process. You're probably not going to be able to perfectly balance the recruiting load across your team.
I thought the remark about Mexicans was rather tasteless.
Bloomberg is mostly a C/C++ shop (terminal side, not web) and we both hire H1s and relocate. My address is in my profile if you want to talk.
Polyamorous relationships are on the rise due to the age of self-centered and narcissistic people. Don't get me wrong, I don't like the nuclear family for everyone credo. But let's not fool ourselves about being more open minded. It's just the basic irrational impulse, now unrestrained.
I would just like to point out one issue with these discrepancies in grading.

In this exceedingly global economy, where one might want to apply for college or grad school in a foreign country, this type of "grading gap" can severely limit ones chances.

If the institution to which you are applying is not fully aware of your regional grading tradition, being "toughened up" with a hard earned B or C average, could block you from being accepted at your preferred Universities.
Rotation is how I like it, but I'm used to down arrow moving the piece down a little bit, and space dropping the piece.
I've built many BOM/costing tools for one of my clients who is in the pharmaceutical manufacturing industry and it is absolutely the most complicated part of any new product development. The BOM is an all encompassing contract that should cover not only the parts, specs, and design process but also the routings, requisition/sourcing schedule, equipment/change-parts, and internal lead-times. If you have something that is built over three phases, you have to schedule the material, equipment, and labor precisely to avoid delays or over-stocking. On top of this, you have to factor in multiple levels of internal/outsourced testing, warehousing, shipping/distribution, cost of capital, and account for overhead.

Every time I see a hardware Kickstarter campaign, I wonder if the designers are familiar with the typical supply-chain-order process. Putting logos on t-shirts and coffee mugs is very different from contract manufacturing custom hardware, even if you are outsourcing 100% of the manufacturing and distribution process.
Probably this also have to do with the quality of the enginner.. im sure companies have a hard time trying to hire C/C++ class of enginners (and java at some extent).

Im sure nature+culture+education also have a hard time to produce this sort of profile.. so the market have to fit, to get its work done (spending more in hardware to compensate maybe?)..

But as a contradictory example, see facebook.. started with the easy (and spaguetti) PHP.. and now that things get really complicated.. they have to turn out to C++

You dont see this sort of infrastructure problem on google, that has started with c++ right away..

And also twitter, started with ruby, and ended on Scala
(im sure it cost a lot to buy the ammount of memory JVM requires, but is pretty fast)

But of course, the majority of jobs come from mid to small sized shops.. (and startups) that like their precedents before them.. are starting the easy and productive way..
with things like node.js .. nothing against that , but if they get really big as the examples i´ve gave, they will start to feel the heat :)
Gonna go with Bill Gates and Warren Buffet on that one.
Removing the Apple-centric cruft, the article is right about price perspective for win8 consumer laptops.

For orporate/enterprise use, the story is albeit different, Win8 is too novel for the ITs to start migrating when everybody already -unwillingly- upgraded to win7 from winxp. In 2 years, Windows 9, will have a better corporate chance. The underdogs such as business tablets, ChromeOS and Linux based PCs have a small chance in corporate area too.
> It has gotten so bad that there are literally thousands of employers moving to Europe to in order to get hold of programmers who develop code for these native languages.

Care to elaborate? How did you arrive to this conclusion?
I believe paid accounts can customize the challenge page, but moreover even free accounts can turn the security completely off so no one ever sees it.
I work in the EMS industry and would be happy to answer any questions about how we do things.
What, in a somewhat geeky analytical way? No, I don't :-)
> "Many Asian parents praise their children's effort, rather than the outcome of that effort."

As an Asian who knows many other Asians, I found it to be the opposite. Effort was only a necessary component of outcome - and outcome is the ultimate goal. Regardless of how much (or little) effort you put in, negative outcomes are unacceptable.

That more or less reflects my world view now - it's not about working hard, it's more often about working smart. If we make it about effort we leave out of the box solutions on the table. Optimize for outcome.
Even if you buy into it from a business perspective, putting 10(+)% of your time into interviewing is quite a change of role. It must really bite when you're busy, especially if, as in the article, your team-mates aren't doing interviews.
"The temperature scale from cold to hot runs:

+0 K, … , +300 K, … , +∞ K, −∞ K, … , −300 K, … , −0 K."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_temperature

1/T makes more sense
The money made to be made (and saved) is based off the prototypes of products created using 3D printing that are mocked up and tweaked, before the designs are handed over to a production line to mass produce.

3D printing has created a useful and affordable process for engineers/creatives/etc to mock up products that would've otherwise been very expensive to outsource, especially with the back and forth between vendors to modify designs.
Raw materials would still cost something, or at the very least electricity would cost something. Services would still cost something, and you can't print an internet.
I don't think anyone knows what they really like when they're young, and I believe even more firmly that parents are usually a better source of influence than peers. These are obviously generalizations, but I think Mike Rowe explains it best: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRVdiHu1VCc
Also that r/atheism keeps up-voting itself. As a Atheist from birth I find them obnoxious and repetitive.
Rather silly article on many fronts.
Not everyone has enough cash to get the machine. Those who do, can profit off their downpayment by renting or selling the goods it makes.

To say that model wont turn a profit is silly. Its a rather old business model...

(landlords, rentacenter, new car leasing, etc..)
I've got a lot of experience doing web development, but it's mainly concentrated in one particular area - javascript apps that run on a single page and use a streaming connection to get all their data. I've been doing this kind of thing on and off for 10 years now, and the ecosystem has changed massively in the last 2 years, so a lot of problems I'm used to solving by myself (e.g. MVC, unit testing) are now more sensibly solved by some of the newer libraries.

While I have to be competent in server side programming, I find it a bit of a chore, and believe that increasingly for hobbyist work, using other peoples more general servers is the way forward - e.g. I recently wrote a program that can run from a basic http server and uses google doc spreadsheets for all its back end storage and OAuth2 for all the user authentication.

You didn't mention if there's a server side technology you're particularly interested in, since obviously there's a lot of choice in that area.

Anyway, given all that, I think I'm probably the wrong guy for you, but if you don't get any better offers within a week or so, contact me on kybernetikos@gmail.com.
People who play a lot of computer games tend to eighter bore themself and move to different occupations or branch into game testing, game journalism, game translation and ultimately game development.

But yes, if all what 90% people want is playing computer games, that's what they should do. I just think you're off by an order of magnitude.
What do you put at the beginning of your resume?
You know, that first section that says "Career Objective" or something like that.

Full disclosure - if someone posts a pretty good one, I might steal it.
+1 for networking firmware - like the one that goes into routers, firewalls, load-balancers and some such. So I'd try places like Juniper, Cisco, Redback, etc.
The author of the piece still doesn't get it. He blames other people for his belief that nothing is his fault, oblivious to the irony of that logic. His twitter bio starts with the words "Trying to figure myself out". He looks inside himself and sees nothing; His reaction to that void is to just keep looking.

He wants more than anything in the world to be a game journalist, or a story writer, or an animator, or a game designer, or whatever, which is fine if you're a freshman, but seriously fucked up if you're several years out of college. He hasn't realised that you don't need anyone's permission to write games reviews or make short films or put together a little indie game, you just fucking do it. He is sufficiently preoccupied with the question of identity that he fails to understand that "doing x" precedes "being x".

He uses the world "passion" more than anyone who understands the meaning of that word. Put bluntly, he's a pathological narcissist. I feel desperately sorry for the guy, but not as much as I feel sorry for the people who live with him.