skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Alright, this post convinced me! I'm going to start learning this weekend!

I did some searching around and found these classes:

https://www.udacity.com/course/cs253
http://www.codeschool.com/paths/ruby
http://ureddit.com/class/40250/web-programming-with-ruby-on-...

My goal is to learn web development, preferably Ruby but I'll make an exception for the Udacity course because I like Udacity.

Of the above courses, which one would you recommend and why? Or is there a better one? I am a C# and ASP.NET developer.
Ok, so tell that to the folk upthread who started using exactly that set of semantics as part of their attack on Adria. ("The joke was not sexist in any way".)
You don’t want jacks-of-all-trades. You want experts.
Even sadder is that you feel the need to take ownership on behalf of someone else. Ultimately, it simply doesn't matter.
The most meaningful vote you can cast is with your money. Nothing for EA.
Wow, how quickly people forget :D In 2010, Nokia was the 3rd ranked company in the world with regards to R&D spending ($8.2B). They hold more than 50% of the patents for 3G, and close to that for LTE. They also hold patents for thousands of other technologies. Nokia used to be a innovation powerhouse. They still try, just at a lower level. Look at their PureView technologies for example. Some of those billions need to come back somehow :) (Sued Apple, etc)

Super bad management drove such a great company to its knees. It makes me sad. 7 years before Apple, Nokia shows off a color touch screen phone with one button, with more amazing features for its time--Management shuts the idea down. Here is a cool article worth a read of how things went sour at Nokia: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230438800457753...
> Is pair programming really something that programmers find useful?

Some do. Some people swear by it.

> Should I develop this skill more?

Yes, definitely. Think of it as being a more social version of learning a new programming language or systems architecture.

> [I]t was difficult for me because I couldn't get into my usual flow. Even with an extra pair of eyes and hands, I felt like I was working at 50% efficiency.

It's definitely an acquired skill. If you think about it, though, if you're spending most of your time while programming engaged in typing, odds are you're probably doing something wrong (or working in a ridiculously verbose language ;)
One more data point - whaling industry was once fifth largest industry in the US and employed 1% of all workforce (auto industry, for comparison, employs about 0.5% of workforce, 1% would be around 1.5 mln jobs). Could you imagine fifth largest industry now almost completely disappearing? They probably couldn't either.
A decade ago when I first released my shareware app for users of eBay, I actively participated in a video game forum. Why a game forum? I wanted my software to feel fun and exciting to use, and in 2003, nearly all software I could think of had a crappy user interface and user experience.

Cas complained in many forum threads about about how hard and unprofitable it was to finish a game. I remember writing a particularly long post about how he should just work on his game and everything will work out. Also, I repeated advice many gave that he should use existing game libraries and engines, and focus on finishing the game. Also, that he should create casual games rather than retro arcade games.

Knowing nothing about him, except how much he stood out trying to do things his way, it's amazing how determined he's been.

I realized only recently that Minecraft was created using the lwjgl (http://www.lwjgl.org/), the lightweight Java Game Library that Cas created as a result of writing his own games in Java (how crazy!) instead of using existing open-source and closed-source game frameworks.

Not many people have the drive to create exactly the kind of games they want to play, as well as their own developer tools, for over ten years.

There was nobody there to tell him that he needs to quit his day job and join a startup accelerator, as well as find a co-founder first.

The idea that you will eventually realize some financial gains if you keep releasing quality games or apps is common wisdom. But to actually realize, ten years later, just how rare it is for a developer to continue to make and polish stuff for themselves, regardless of what other people think? Or to have created something that enabled a massively popular video game to be created?

That's truly awesome, and I'm cheering for him.
This is really cool, I was unaware of it prior to this article. For those like me who were hoping for more info about the project, the wikipedia entry is pretty good:

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

Update:
Just found weekly photo status updates too -- wish all the larger government projects did something like this!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mtacc-esa
Andrew--

We use Django and South in our projects, and really appreciate the work you have done. I just contributed, and am excited about this project.

My one suggestion/request: Please make it an emphasis to create awesome documentation. I am familiar with South now at this point but often find myself wishing more use cases and more examples were documented. I can usually "figure it out," but great documentation saves everyone time. This seems like a great project, so make the documentation great too!
Is there really a need for a phone interview?

I mean, you could just look at their github, and the writing on their blog, to determine if there's a baseline of competence.
> If you think about it, though, if you're spending most of your time while programming engaged in typing, odds are you're probably doing something wrong.

He didn't say anything about typing. Pair programming is meant to be slower than alone programming, the extra eyes and ears actually slow you down because you have to reach consensus so often.

Pair programming is about quality, not productivity.
Seems like this issue with the first job is you just weren't that passionate about the company.

The worst thing you can do is trick people into hiring you. You'll waste precious months/years of your life.
Why wouldn't they try to do it again?

Indeed, but it still makes me wish I were born on Mars or something.
Sitting a whole day with headphones...
Yeah, you're entirely missing the point. I haven't rendered any opinions regarding current laws other than to say that they are not relevant in this particular issue. I'm saying that the concern is the culture, not the law. The reason I'm talking about sexism as opposed to discrimination regarding race, color, religion, national origin, et cetera is that the jokes in question were clearly not discriminatory in those areas. Nobody has claimed that the joke was racist. That would be ridiculous. Many people have claimed that the joke was sexist, and that is the claim that I am taking issue with.

I'm talking about ignoring the law because culture is more important than law. Yes, there is plenty of interesting case law, and that case law is interesting when discussing the issue in a legal context. I'm saying that the cultural context is more important than the legal context, and therefore the case law is a complete non sequitur.

I would strongly assert that laws do not influence culture, and that rather the exact opposite is true. Laws reflect culture. Laws enforce the norms of the culture in which they are written. When the culture changes, the laws change. The reverse is not true.

I have not been arguing for change. I do think that some changes to tech culture should happen, because though the actual incident was not discriminatory, the internet reaction clearly was. That is a much broader issue, because internet reactions are always disproportionate and discriminatory. That is a standing issue that must be solved. What I'm asserting is that the joke was not discriminatory, and that the conference was not a discriminatory environment. Though I was not there, from everything I have heard from people who were, the conference was a very positive environment. This is good, and I take issue with people who would cast aspersions on the conference and the community as a whole because of a 'discriminatory' joke that was not in fact discriminatory at all.
I dislike like the "why do you want this job?" question because, unless I'm unemployed and really needing a job, the fact of the matter is that I don't know if I want the job. Interviews go both ways. I'll need time after the interview to consider the experience and try to predict whether I'd be happy working there.

Unless your company is doing something extraordinarily cool, chances are your product is not enough in and of itself to attract many if any developers on that basis alone. What will attract people is the quality of the work environment, the quality of the people, and the amount of money you can offer them. That's really the gist of it, and during the interview the candidate won't have exact knowledge of any of those factors.
Guilty pleasure?
If disability is masking unemployment, we should expect anomalies in other labor statistics, like labor force participation rate, or per capita employment.

Labor force participation has been declining the last few years, but at least some of that is aging population and massive recession. And despite the decline, the rate remains well within historical bounds. I'm glancing at Bureau of Labor Statistics charts, not seeing a massive hidden class of people that are somehow staying off all the books.

On the other hand, there's an MIT economist that totally disagrees with me, claims that disability DOES explain trends in other labor statistics, like participation rate: http://economics.mit.edu/faculty/dautor/papers/disability

Full disclosure: I am most definitely not nor have ever been "an MIT economist."

His paper from 2006 depicts some interesting trends.

(Wait, 2006? This guy has been forecasting disability armageddon for seven fucking years, when the real threat back then was the imminent housing bubble!? Now I'm skeptical again...)

====================

Data:

UPDATE Neat labor data infographic: http://newyorkfed.org/employment/

Scary labor force participation chart (with really narrow scale to heighten the effect): http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000

A million Census charts:
http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/cats/labor_force_empl...

Employment status, 1970+:
http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s0586.p...

A long article on unemployment rate, participation rate, etc., with some brilliant charts:
http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2012/02/graphs-unemploymen...

Autor and Duggan's 2006 piece I reference above:
http://economics.mit.edu/files/597 [PDF]
Test coverage is near worthless as a metric. I'm trying to write programs with countless possible states consisting of thousands of attributes, and gain high confidence my program performs correctly in every single one. Coverage states that I should focus on a single one: the program counter. I don't know about you, but there's a lot more to my program that the address of the instruction currently executing. If I keep a list of the streets I've driven on, that might give me a list of new places to visit, but it's not going to tell me how well my car's working.

So, if not coverage, what should we use? I like mutation analysis. How do you know if your image recognition algorithm works? You run it on new images. How do you tell if your tests are catching bugs? You add bugs and see if it catches them. It's simpler than coverage in some ways -- you need no instrumentation.

And yet somehow, every test infrastructure can measure coverage, with mutation analysis nowhere to be found. We have a huge literature on testing (mutation analysis is over 40 (!) years old), and yet developers simply choose to ignore it.
No. Consumption is in fact a form of labor. One that in some manifestations is employed in support of natural hedonism; but often has little or no relation other than that hedonism is used to propagandize the consumption.

In the United States this is particularly and sometimes painfully obvious, when people who do not wish participate in certain forms of consumption are sanctioned in various forms. This sanctioning can be overt "You'll need to wear a suit and tie if you're you want this job." or covert, "That guy rides a bike to work, wonder if he got a DUII?" Keeping up with the Joneses is the job you have when you aren't at work.

One of the surprising things about social status in America is how often certain forms of consumption are effectively mandatory to signal ones class membership. Go looking for a CEO of a publicly traded company who chooses not to own a car for instance. Or a partner at a major law firm who does not have more than one residence. Those are only gross examples, one that is more familiar is the prevalence of electronic gadgets, especially those by Apple as symbols of membership in the digital worker class.

The truth is that our choices in those matters are socially constructed, and that social construction happens in response to needs that are historically contingent rather than deterministic in nature. True a certain amount of consumption, of food, shelter and medical care is biologically determined; the rest is cultural.
Everyone is bitter about their previous employers. If they wouldn't be bitter they probably wouldn't have left (except in odd case of, starting your own company,academics, research). What you are missing is - people generally have good time in companies but they leave when things go south.

For example, the startup I left - I slogged there for 4 years and I left because of some leadership changes(pressure from VCs), heck I had to leave without taking the stock options because of some technicality. Yes, I am bitter about them but out of those 4 years, 3.5 Years were incredibly fun and I learnt quite a bit. I think story repeats everywhere.
We should be sceptic, of course, but I don't think that coal extraction process uses pure aluminum.
> Does being smart comes with bigger responsibility and do you feel stressful of being really smart (as a developer maybe)?

Views differ. There are as many views on this topic as there are smart people. John von Neumann took the position that being in the world didn't necessarily mean being of the world:

"You don't have to be responsible for the world that you're in." --
Advice given by von Neumann to Richard Feynman as quoted in "Los Alamos from Below" in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985)

I happen to agree with that sentiment.

Also, when smart people decide to engage with the world's problems, they often get it spectacularly wrong -- example Nobel Prizewinner Bill Shockley's brainless campaign to make people aware of the imagined inferiority of black people.

Albert Einstein famously turned down the presidency of Israel on the ground that he didn't feel that he had a head for the world's problems. In my book, that demonstrated his genius.

I think smart people don't necessarily know how to competently deal with everyday problems, and very high skill in one area doesn't necessarily translate to even average abilities in any other.
In the US, the top 1% own 35% of the country's total wealth.
"Capture everything" need not imply "measure everything." It should imply "measure anything you need to, immediately and retroactively".
Same here. My interview for my current job lasted about 7 hours.
Good observation. I went back and checked the list again, and see my own country (ZA) in amongst the listed patents - a country where software patents are explicitly /forbidden/ in law... something awfully smelly about this.
How errors should be handled in node.js
ArchiveTeam + Yahoo Messages Shuttering + EC2 Spot Instances = MegaCrawl
It's kind of an odd little game, but I thought it was fun and that it looked nice.

Wish I had read the help screen the first time through, but oh well.
I'm going to reply to this thread against my better judgement because I'm afraid of getting trolled. I am on SSI, I have Autism as well as severe longterm depression and PTSD. I get about $700 a month to live off from. In my area you can't find housing under $450. Then I have to pay someone to pay my bills for me at $39 a month because social security somehow deems I can't spend my own money. My point is after necessary things (electric, transportation, gas, water) I struggle for toilet paper at times.

I have tried jobs before, got fired in a manufacturing job getting overwhelmed by the process - got fired in another job because i could not understand "shop talk". I don't like living off the system and one of the main reasons I'm really pursuing entrepreneurship is I see it as the only way I can get off the system.
VP8 was developed as patented proprietary technology by On2, and the only innovation since Google purchased the company has been picking a container format.

It might be solid gold in every other respect, but it's not a very good example of open source innovation or of patents harming innovation.
Thankyou so much! I've been waiting for this release in order to get Twitter bootstrap for a project that I'll just have to get out the door! Give me a bitcoin address and I'll tip you one. :)
Just another poor implementation of tech into enterprise really. Why not vet employees rather than chastise them? The top down approach is a failure at all levels.
It doesn't need one. Leave the password field empty when logging in. This is a site whose user base is very technical. Figuring out password resets is not really big of a deal.
>>> The costs they induce are a rounding error.

Did you read the article?

People at the Social Security Administration, which runs the federal disability programs, say we cannot afford this. The reserves in the disability insurance program are on track to run out in 2016, Steve Goss, the chief actuary at Social Security, told me.

Goss is confident that Congress will act to keep disability payments flowing, probably by taking money from the Social Security retirement fund. Of course, the retirement fund itself is on track to run out of money by 2035.

Goss and his colleagues have worked out a temporary fix under which the retirement and disability funds will both run out of money by 2033. He says he hopes the country will have come up with a better plan by then.

Does it sound like a rounding error to you? It doesn't to me.
its always amusing to read articles from respected sources about beliefs one has held for a long time. it feels mostly obvious to me that underexposure to germs can lead to more problems than fix. i guess a lot of my beliefs could come from visiting india and less developed countries.

its quite scary how many daily/regular routines come from people with ulterior motives. reminds me of the diamond article recent published by pricenomics. most people are ok with conforming to the norm without question.

anti-bacterial soap? really? im pretty sure all bacteria is not bad, and some actually quite helpful. regular shampoo? makeup constantly blocking the pours, not allowing the skin on the face to breath? deodorant?? i wonder how the toilet paper companies convinced the entire western culture that washing their bum with their hands was disgusting. isn't it more disgusting to have a bum thats not washed?? ah the magic of the marketing department.
You’ve never really seen a virus until you see this
Interview is a two way street, they interview you, you interview them. Basically, you just didn't like the first company and clicked with the second. Don't put too much weight on the interview style. If they didn't extend you an offer, chances are it would be even more frustrating - it's harder to figure out what went wrong with the second interview as they are relying more on the "gut feeling". The first one is a bit more systematic. Both styles can work fine.
Only if you define innovation narrowly. Would you say x264 has no "video codec innovation"? If so you can conclude that VP8 innovation stopped when the spec was frozen. (And that's not even counting VP9 which builds on the foundation of VP8, or the Hantro VP8 hardware development).
I found myself talking to a co-worker about this being a problem last week.

We found that having this functionality as part of the core is something that makes a framework feel significantly more agile. Virtually nobody gets their schema exactly right the first time. Asking developers to to learn about and use 3rd party software (if it even exists) adds a very real friction to migrations. Altering your data model from time to time is a natural operation that occurs during application development and should not seem out of place.

I'm very excited for this, thanks Andrew!
Indeed, but On2's patents on what they invented are not shielding Google from the expropriation of their work by Nokia, using other patents. It seems to me that, while patents are perhaps intended to secure your ownership of your invention, in this case they are calling On2's ownership of On2's invention into question, and the patents On2 filed are not helping at all. If patent offices had simply rejected all the related patent applications out of hand, Google would now be in a much better position.
Sorry for the multiple posts. I didn't expect that when the page returned Link Expired. Consider this a bug report.
I was hoping the changes would include a commitment to him keeping to discussing things he knows about, rather than having the expert's problem of talking about things outside his domain knowledge and being considered an expert for it regardless.
Has any party actually proposed h.264 being made mandatory to implement for WebRTC?
Well, yes and no. I write everything either in LaTeX or markdown these days, but its ridiculously simple to output either of these formats to docx, so normally that's what I do. I'll always send them the PDF version of my resume first though, as good typography can make you look better.

If a job requires me to write in Word throughout the day, that's a job I don't want (in fact, writing grant proposals in Word was one of the most frustrating things about working in adeademia).
Click the buy button then come back and rant some more.
Set it up to boot into a web page on startup and refresh every ten minute.

In theory, I'll have useful information on the webpage. Right now I have a picture of a cat.
It's regularly available. Like now, if you click the link.
I would assume that it's the same patents registered in multiple countries so it's mostly legal boilerplate. There appear to be twelve in the US which I'm guessing are just then repeated in other nations.

Note that there's absolutely no downside for Nokia to declare irrelevant patents against an IETF spec. Some of the other big companies do it just out of habit, on the basis that it's all upside for them.

See the recent Opus patent rebuttal:

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/02/defending-opus/
These days when I see a project with the word "Kickstarter", it gives me an immediate understanding of the basic funding model and the mechanics of it. I'd be less likely to donate if it were just a "donate with paypal" link on some blogpost.

I don't know whether that sentiment scales to a broader audience, but I strongly suspect it does.
Love your work. Had to work on a video capturing project 18 months ago that nearly killed me. Zencoder reduced some of the pain but we still blew months on the project.
Makes me wonder when web fora will go all the way and simply recapitulate everything Usenet has allowed since the 1980s, by pushing all the complexity involved in threading and filtering into the clients and making servers just big, dumb message storage bases.

That way, all of these discussions would be rendered moot because threading/no threading and subreddits/no subreddits and troll filtering/no filtering and so on would be under the individual's control, as it should be.
Which pieces by Schneier were not well-informed, or in which ones was he talking about something outside of his domain?