skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
IT is mostly rewarded with preserving what is and fighting politics... not delivering new value. This varies from place to place of course, but it's effectively due to the knowledge gap between "the business" and "IT" that leads to a misunderstanding of the vast spectrum (10x or more!) of how well IT organizations perform.

The closest analogy is with auto manufacturing in the 70s having to face the Toyota product development and production system. It was utterly foreign and took decades for the top companies to figure it out. Now look at IT, which is at most organizations only one of many contributing departments like marketing or operations. Is it any wonder CEOs have no idea they could do things differently?

Especially when you have hundreds of thousands of people whose salary DEPENDS on the CEO not figuring this out (I'm looking at the big system integrators, enterprise software vendors, and managed service providers here). True story - If you try to (say) fire IBM out of a data centre, are you prepared for the president of IBM to call the chairman of your board of directors to subtly question the competence of your CIO? Who does your board trust more, a brand with 100+ years of exposure, or John Smith the CIO? You had better have prepped the CEO, CIO, and CFO on your plans and get them on-side, so they understand. Could you imagine doing this with a complex specialized topic like Agile/Lean, Cloud, Open Source, etc? It is like convincing your grandmother to drop AT&T or Bell South for VOIP, or convincing them that AOL actually isn't the internet. Not impossible but requires a lot of patience and trust.
I've dumped the cron job i use for data collection here https://gist.github.com/4477372

My rough approach to post processing this data was to group by 6 minute intervals, and to drop any records where the computer was inactive for more than 120 seconds.
Dude, you've gotta stay away from Kava and Starbucks. You're paying above $5.00 on average per trip!
I'm pretty sure 6.370 was inspired by 6.270. It was intended to be a more "pure" programming competition, without all the intrusions of finicky physical reality.

Similarly, 6.186 (better known now as MASLab) was also inspired by 6.270, but diverged in the opposite direction: more ambitious physical designs (no legos), more computational capacity, richer sensors (it's mostly vision-based), etc.

The three competitions span a pretty nice continuum.
The average is probably a misleading figure here, though.
$400-600/month

This is a pretty successful app by the sounds of it, but it's not even pulling in anywhere near the amount of money it would take to keep an iOS dev paid.. even for supporting 10 of these apps.

From what I've experienced of iOS/Android dev, these kind of numbers are pretty much what to expect. So my question is: why are there so many apps on iOS/Android when it's clear that most of them aren't coming anywhere near to covering the development costs on the free market. Oversupply of iOS devs? Will the growth of new apps shrink rapidly in future as the realities of the market become more clear, or is this a self-perpetuating cycle where new hopefuls constantly enter and try to create 'that one big app'?
Seems like a great idea. I recommend making the "what do you want to do" a bit more explicit (e.g., more multiple choice, asking me to give examples of jobs I'd leave my current position for, etc). When I completed this, I wasn't sure how you'd know what my "dream job" was. I know you're probably trying to keep it short, but I think I'd be more of a believer that this was going to yield good results if I were asking for slightly more info.
Los Zetas Drug Cartel has their own Radio Network
A while back I did some tests to compare the Hadoop Streaming library to the Dumbo library. I have to agree, if your MapReduce jobs are not crazy complicated, and don't require chaining...it's best to just write it using the raw Streaming library.
Thanks for the suggestion. We do have an answer on our FAQ page: https://familyleaf.com/faq but it might be a little too hidden.
It's actually a different answer for C or C++ programmers.

NULL should be defined as ((void * )0) for C always (and you should define your own NULL to enforce that if necessary in varargs functions). This is safe because C allows conversion from void * to other pointer types.

C++ does not allow conversion from void * to other pointer types, so what you were supposed to do was use plain 0, which introduced exactly the issue you mention (and which has bitten me before trying to use a C library from C++, where NULL was defined as plain 0).

With C++11 you should use nullptr, which does the right thing. Some implementations define NULL in C++ to a vendor-provided symbol which emulates nullptr so it might be safe to use NULL. If you have C++98 only and don't want to risk NULL then you should use static_cast<T*>(0) (where T is the actual pointer type), which is admittedly clunky.
I agree their strategy is the best one they could use. I still think they messed up in a big, big way when they announced Google+ but then didn't allow anyone to sign up for it. The hype was a huge: everyone wanted to signup and be part of the next big Google thing. Then one month later when they opened up registration nobody cared anymore. I wonder where it would be today if they had managed that correctly.
Interesting - kind of reminds me of a site a friend built a few years ago. It was a resume site with contact info hidden. In order to contact you the recruiter had to pay you - at whatever price you put on a contact (usually a buck or two). If you didn't respond in a reasonable time the money was refunded. But he was trying to solve the same problem - recruiter spam. Unfortunately he launched right in the deepest pit of the financial meltdown and he was unable to get any traction with the site.
Dave: thanks for taking the time to write this up, and being open about your approach and the issues you foresee.

I am really rooting for Parley here (along with many other HN readers I assume). Moving towards secure communication methods, however small a step Parley might turn out to be, is key for the long-term survival of the internet as we know it (and even more important to those suffering under oppressive or totalitarian governments).
Since when is LOC a valid indicator of hardcoriness?
I disagree. I think the interesting part is in the blanks in most graphics. He does a very good job at keeping his computer use to work hours, so I think it's safe to assume he has a life outside work. He sends a good amount of texts which means he has people in his life. He drinks coffee mostly in the morning which is good.
More than use Gmail -- http://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/will-it-work/email-...
The idea is that you already use what were partitioned services; picassa, gmail, docs, chat, groups, calendar, voice, etc. Thus integrating them is obvious. However, the idea of Google+ gradually tightening the relation of these services separates itself from facebook in terms of how you use your social network.

Facebook is largely an image sharing network to communicate with friends and family, while you use many google services such as a calendar, gmail, docs, and groups for work and networking and not necessarily just friends and family. Facebook will arguably never be something i use professionally (aside from promotions), while Google+ is something i already use professionally and could easily use instead of facebook socially.
Is Self-Employment Risky?
While I'm sure many people would be happy to have Cap's problem, this seems easily fixable from LinkedIn's side. Simply allow people to filter or dial down who can message them. While it might hurt their InMessage product, it seems better to nerf that than to force people like Cap off the platform.
There are multiple people who self-identify as Republicans on HN (contrary to popular belief I am not one of them), but few of them are crazy enough to say so because the spirit of the grandparent comment is correct: HN is very hostile to Republicanism.
Remember, CS2 won't run on OSX Lion and above.
You could use it to test whether or not you really got a class from NSClassFromString(). For instance:

Class _myClass;
// aClassName was previously defined
if((_myClass = NSClassFromString(aClassName)) == Nil)
[NSException raise:@"InvalidClass"
reason:@"Unknown class named %@.", aClassName);

id myObj = [[_myClass alloc] init];
[myObj whatever];
Could you include a beard length index next year? I'm not certain, but it definitely looks like it grew out somewhat over the year.

I'm all for a proper beard!
Just wondering, where did you get the loc count from? To make a statement like this you really have to look at the distribution, rather than the sum.
Have you never heard of the euphemism treadmill?

It doesn't matter what you call it - nothing is going to change the reality. You might as well use the first word that was coined for it and stop. Every new word you find will eventually have the same emotional significance, since the underlying reality isn't going to change.

And calling something by how you're not going to have it is ridiculous - yes, please walk into my charred pieces of wood, while I search for my soon to be lost keys and give you a ride in the crushed metal.
Have you tried Coderwall for connecting professionally? you actually get relevant technical tips from people you connect with so you are technically connected and learn from each other.
There is Pitchbox (trypitchbox) for replacing recruiter spam with more meaningful career opportunity stream.
Ah, the mythical man-month. Or student-month, as the case may be.

You can't measure productivity in klocs, and you're also not taking into account the distribution of effort across those 350 contestants. Plenty of people sign up, poke around with the API for a bit, and submit a half-assed bot (or none at all)... but those who do well? They're spending quite a bit of time on this. I think it's safe to call them "hardcore."
Ask HN: What do you listen to while coding?
What kind of Music? Or do you listen to anything at all?
Even with a positive naming convention, you will have conditionals for the negative case, e.g. if (![str isEqualToString:@"myvalue"]) and falling into its block is not desirable when str is nil. Personally I have had plenty of bugs around things being unexpectedly nil, but I can't think of a case like this where I executed a block unexpectedly.
alex, I've been working in music-tech now for a few years now, and I've been wanting this exact service for as long as I can remember. You really nailed it on the MVP. I've thought about this idea now for a while, would love to see where you're going with this. Also, with the right angle, I just know artists can get on board with this (especially since Youtube is the one of the only revenue sources that's actually growing for artists, across the board). Maybe that's thinking a few steps too far ahead, but this is really cool stuff and I can't help but to think of the possibilities for you :-)
At 6 months, literally "fired" is unlikely because most companies don't act fast enough. But the assumption people make based on a lot of short job tenures is that the person was unsuccessful at all of them. Most unsuccessful people don't stick around long enough to get fired, but that's irrelevant.

It's somewhat self-reinforcing, I'd imagine. Because of the stigma, people are less inclined to leave jobs, and therefore a higher percentage of departures are negative.

There's also a "can't win" dynamic from short job tenures. If you're obviously moving up, you're a mercenary. If you have a lot of lateral moves, you're unsuccessful.

Additionally, I think few people actually want to be job hoppers. I'd love to find a 10-year fit. On the other hand, it's uncommon that a I find an environment where I keep learning for long enough to justify more than a year or two.
Thx for sharing. For a newbie in web dev (like me), it is a great resource. Bookmarked.
I can attest that it is indeed the 'scummy side of the internet'.

I'm developing a real online business in Medellin (mentioned in the article as one place becoming popular) - and have run across a bunch of Timothy Ferriss groupies that spend their days perfecting the art of SEO, for businesses that they fully know bring in cero value to society.

They consider the internet a fool's playground, and their mission seems to be that of profitting from its fools.
> Mindstorms has been around for almost 14 years now, but Mindstorms EV3 marks the first time that users can program directly onto the brand-new EV3 Intelligent Brick. In past iterations, users were only allowed to program their robots from the computer

This isn't correct at all. I've had a MINDSTORMS kit for several years now, and I've been able to program on-brick since the beginning.
This has little to do with Google+ itself and more to do with Google becoming ubiquitous and + riding along
Just an FYI, your layout seems broken [1] on the FAQ page. I'm on Windows XP, Firefox 14.0.1.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/4gGz2.png

--edit: I just tested it on Firefox 17 and I'm seeing the same thing.
My pleasure :) And thank you for your input and kind words. The excitement around the project in the last couple of weeks has been really encouraging; now it's time to put our money where our mouth is and crank out a really stellar product. I would love nothing more than to be a small drop in a big wave.
The only framework I've used of the ones discussed is Hadoop Streaming with Python. For our use case (rapid prototyping of statistical analytics on several-terabyte structured data), it worked perfectly and was almost frictionless.

As the article calls out, we had to detect the boundaries between keys manually, but that didn't add much complexity. We called into Python through Hive scripts. Our group had little prior experience; some had used Python before, no one had used Hive/Hadoop much or at all, but we were all productive within a day of ramp-up time. I'm positive we were more productive than if we'd implemented everything in Java, even for the people more experienced in Java than Python.

If I have any future projects requiring similar analysis, I'd like to use Hive with Hadoop Streaming and Python again.
Is that supposed to be terrible or awesome? Because it sounds sort of awesome.
You might find interesting to read:

"Syntax and Semantics of Programming Languages"

http://homepage.cs.uiowa.edu/~slonnegr/plf/Book/

this is a free version of:

http://www.amazon.com/Formal-Syntax-Semantics-Programming-La...

the implementations are in Prolog.
Interesting. Gotta try it some time.
http://www.noob.us/humor/the-office-dwight-faces-nerd-tortur...

Years of CIA interrogation and you're still in denial on Mr. God.

God says...

melted furnace exaltedness hurts_my_head SUCH starting-place
Willing Eternity stages revolved Jesus fixed injure bewailed
disalloweth glided befalls Glad stories departed fuller
do_not_disturb slumin prepare all-sufficient Lo variance
weak men's woman's softened knocked showing sighs renew
Ireland surveyed saw nourished Jacob once_upon_a_time
endures daughter-in-law Arians seventh Because boiled
tune hi six Light looked growth reigning along foreshow
Unless expends thing gnawed muddy won allowances Libya
That's_my_favorite listening outward subjoins perfect
prove forget comfort arguments director appeared Shine
reports formest marking for greeted treasured miserably
fake grasps Being happeneth thither urge unwholesome wove
Etexts lest recognise brother acute objected extended
dragons auditor complaints moveth soever

----

Don't tell me. Tell God. You're in denial. Randomly crack-open a book.

God says...
his daughter to wife also.

29:29 And Laban gave to Rachel his daughter Bilhah his handmaid to be
her maid.

29:30 And he went in also unto Rachel, and he loved also Rachel more
than Leah, and served with him yet seven other years.

29:31 And when the LORD saw that Leah was hated, he opened her womb:
but Rachel was barren.

29:32 And Leah conceived, and bare a son, and she called his name
Reuben: for she said, Surely the LORD hath looked upon my affliction;
now therefore my husband will love me.

29:33 And she conceived again, and bare a son; and said, Because the
LORD hath heard I was hated, he hath therefore given me this son also:
and she called his name Simeon.
These guys have their heads screwed on right. Best of luck to them.
Nietzsche and Philosophy it is. I'm quite partial to Friedrich, particularly The Gay Science -- had a huge impact on me.
Airbnb’s growing pains: half of its NYC listings are illegal rentals
By "no difficulty ramp" I mean it throws you into the deep end right away. But you're right - it does have a difficulty ramp, an insane one. It actively deceives you as to the rules of the game before dumping you in the hardest part.
Really awesome post. I'd also strongly recommend 6.470 (Web Design) to any current MIT undergrads. I competed in both 6.370 and 6.470 and had a different take than the author of this piece -- I found that 6.470 was a much more startup-y experience, although the emphasis is much more on product rather than pure software development. That said, both are excellent.

Additionally, the ratio of number of teams to prize money was (historically) more favorable for the Web Design competition, although my information is out of date and things have likely changed.
But once all that’s done, there’s the promise of being able to own your movie forevermore without ever having to buy it again.

Forever, aka until Walmart decides the program is unprofitable and shuts down the DRM servers.
This. There are a variety of different backgrounds regarding programming experience in Battlecode, and just as varied levels of commitment to the competition. There are those teams just looking to play around with the game and possibly try their hand at beating the reference player. Still other teams have their eyes set on the eternal glory of winning first place.

I was on Cory's (the author of the post) team last year and, as he alluded to in the article, we were a team of 4 bro-coding it up in my dorm room with practically nothing else on our mind during the month (we tried to eat and bathe occasionally). Though it was a lot of fun (some of the most fun I've had during my time at MIT), it was pretty intense.
In other words, video on demand saves the grid.
Former[1] primary mrjob maintainer here, thanks for the shout-out! I'd like to make a couple of notes and corrections. In particular, I thank you for recommending mrjob for EMR usage, as it's something we've made a point of trying to be the best at.

First of all, all of these frameworks use Hadoop Streaming. As mentioned in the mrjob 0.4-dev docs [2] (pardon the run-on sentence):

"Although Hadoop is primarly designed to work with JVM code, it supports other languages via Hadoop Streaming, a special jar which calls an arbitrary program as a subprocess, passing input via stdin and gathering results via stdout."

mrjob's role is to give you a structured way to write Hadoop Streaming jobs in Python (or, recently, any language). When your task runs, it's taking input and output the same way as your raw Python example does, except mrjob is passing it through to the methods you've defined after running each line through a deserialization function. It picks the code to run based on command line arguments such as --mapper, --reducer, etc. The output of the code is again serialized. The methods of [de]serialization are defined declaritively in your class, as you showed.

So why did you find mrjob to be slower than bare Hadoop Streaming? I don't know! In theory, you're running approximately the same code between the mrjob and the bare Python versions of your script. If anyone has time to dig into this and find out where that time is being spent, I would be grateful. Results should be sent to the issue tracker on the Github page [3].

Feel free to ask clarifying questions. I realize I may not be explaining this effectively to people unfamiliar with the ins and outs of Python MapReduce frameworks.

I'm thinking of organizing the 2nd "mrjob hackathon" in the near future, so please ping me if you're interested in contributing to an easy-to-handle lots-of-low-hanging-fruit OSS project. (Particularly if you're a Rubyist, because we have an experimental way to use Ruby with it.)

[1] mrjob is maintained by Yelp, where I worked until recently. It's still
under active development, though it's slowed somewhat since Dave and I
moved on.

[2] http://mrjob.readthedocs.org/en/latest/guides/concepts.html#...

[3] http://www.github.com/yelp/mrjob/issues/new
Wow Thomas, thank you. I think I might have to frame this.
I hear what you are saying as a former gamer up to mid 20's. Around that point I lost interest in playing games. It became a routine chore without the feeling of gratification or accomplishment. The reason is simple - I started to have other goals in life (of course, after realizing the normal route is shit, as you say.

I think it's natural that people like to play games. Our mind is wired for it, which is a whole subject in itself. We want to feel the things that games provide, like the classic purpose, mastery, and autonomy. It's just that games provide a much easier way to get there than modern America does. Our primal mind is geared towards daily survival tribal life, not long term investment.

That said, what was said about the rock concert in real life vs YouTube is true. That's what gets me to play the game of life instead, even if I have to delay gratification. I've got a taste of the good stuff (money, girlfriend, etc.) and I'm not going back.

To me the solution for young people is to help them to taste the same gratification, the feeling that life can be fun and promising. And that could mean something as simple as introducing them to a sport, a path outside of school, or just getting them to a place where they can meet new people.
Rejection Therapy Saved My Soul
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=cs2_dow... Download link, adobe website.
> They are being understated about it but doing exactly what business strategists talk about when they describe the long game as the one to play.

I had a hard time reading past that line since Google is literally ramming G+ down everyone's throats at every possible opportunity. It's almost impossible to use their services without being forced into a G+ account nowadays.

It's not that they're being understated, it's just that people aren't noticing because G+ is that boring to everyone.

Edit: And as I write this comment, I'm once again reminded of how idiotic the name 'Google+' is. Do I call it GPlus? G+? Google Plus? Google+? Should I put a space between them? How do you search for a plus sign? Oh, that's right... Google didn't realize they had to completely break that operator until AFTER they named their social network. How's that for a brilliant strategy?
Other good idea is to pick up the Big Nerd Ranch Guide and just sit down and walk thru it. It's really all you need.
My guess it has something to do with the paradox of choice. Seeing more options makes it harder to decide what to look at more closely, let alone to make decision to buy.

Infinite scroll is a good solution, if you are building lobster traps - sites where you want people to spend endless amounts of time. (http://gizmodo.com/5586337/pandas-and-lobsters-why-google-ca...). It clearly works for Facebook, Twitter and Quora.

Although Etsy has some aspects of lobster trap, it still is more transactional than FB and other social time killers.
That makes sense, and now I am curious about trying it out.

As an aside: I think that is an interesting analysis of the Panopticon (which I hadn't heard of before) but I think that writing is needlessly wordy.
My take is that the Republican party is a lot more pro-big business than they are anti-hollywood.
Do a lot of people click the lower "what do you want to make?" options?